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+Project Gutenberg’s Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret
+       A Romance
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Editor: Julian Hawthorne
+
+
+Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7183]
+This file was first posted on March 24, 2003
+Last Updated: December 14, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE’S SECRET ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Michelle Shephard, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                        DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE’S SECRET
+
+
+
+                               A ROMANCE
+
+                                  BY
+                          NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
+
+                    EDITED, WITH PREFACE AND NOTES
+
+                         BY JULIAN HAWTHORNE
+
+
+
+                                  TO
+                MR. AND MRS. GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP,
+                    The Son-in-Law and Daughter
+                                  OF
+                        NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE,
+                     THIS ROMANCE IS DEDICATED
+                                  BY
+                             THE EDITOR.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+A preface generally begins with a truism; and I may set out with
+the admission that it is not always expedient to bring to light the
+posthumous work of great writers. A man generally contrives to publish,
+during his lifetime, quite as much as the public has time or inclination
+to read; and his surviving friends are apt to show more zeal than
+discretion in dragging forth from his closed desk such undeveloped
+offspring of his mind as he himself had left to silence. Literature has
+never been redundant with authors who sincerely undervalue their own
+productions; and the sagacious critics who maintain that what of his own
+an author condemns must be doubly damnable, are, to say the least of it,
+as often likely to be right as wrong.
+
+Beyond these general remarks, however, it does not seem necessary to
+adopt an apologetic attitude. There is nothing in the present volume
+which any one possessed of brains and cultivation will not be thankful
+to read. The appreciation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writings is
+more intelligent and wide-spread than it used to be; and the later
+development of our national literature has not, perhaps, so entirely
+exhausted our resources of admiration as to leave no welcome for even
+the less elaborate work of a contemporary of Dickens and Thackeray. As
+regards “Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret,”--the title which, for lack of a
+better, has been given to this Romance,--it can scarcely be pronounced
+deficient in either elaboration or profundity. Had Mr. Hawthorne written
+out the story in every part to its full dimensions, it could not have
+failed to rank among the greatest of his productions. He had looked
+forward to it as to the crowning achievement of his literary career. In
+the Preface to “Our Old Home” he alludes to it as a work into which he
+proposed to convey more of various modes of truth than he could have
+grasped by a direct effort. But circumstances prevented him from
+perfecting the design which had been before his mind for seven years,
+and upon the shaping of which he bestowed more thought and labor than
+upon anything else he had undertaken. The successive and consecutive
+series of notes or studies [Footnote: These studies, extracts from which
+will be published in one of our magazines, are hereafter to be added, in
+their complete form, to the Appendix of this volume.] which he wrote
+for this Romance would of themselves make a small volume, and one
+of autobiographical as well as literary interest. There is no other
+instance, that I happen to have met with, in which a writer’s thought
+reflects itself upon paper so immediately and sensitively as in these
+studies. To read them is to look into the man’s mind, and see its
+quality and action. The penetration, the subtlety, the tenacity; the
+stubborn gripe which he lays upon his subject, like that of Hercules
+upon the slippery Old Man of the Sea; the clear and cool common-sense,
+controlling the audacity of a rich and ardent imagination; the humorous
+gibes and strange expletives wherewith he ridicules, to himself, his own
+failure to reach his goal; the immense patience with which--again and
+again, and yet again--he “tries back,” throwing the topic into fresh
+attitudes, and searching it to the marrow with a gaze so piercing as
+to be terrible;--all this gives an impression of power, of resource,
+of energy, of mastery, that exhilarates the reader. So many inspired
+prophets of Hawthorne have arisen of late, that the present writer,
+whose relation to the great Romancer is a filial one merely, may
+be excused for feeling some embarrassment in submitting his own
+uninstructed judgments to competition with theirs. It has occurred
+to him, however, that these undress rehearsals of the author of “The
+Scarlet Letter” might afford entertaining and even profitable reading
+to the later generation of writers whose pleasant fortune it is to charm
+one another and the public. It would appear that this author, in his
+preparatory work at least, has ventured in some manner to disregard the
+modern canons which debar writers from betraying towards their creations
+any warmer feeling than a cultured and critical indifference: nor was
+his interest in human nature such as to confine him to the dissection of
+the moral epidermis of shop-girls and hotel-boarders. On the contrary,
+we are presented with the spectacle of a Titan, baring his arms and
+plunging heart and soul into the arena, there to struggle for death or
+victory with the superb phantoms summoned to the conflict by his own
+genius. The men of new times and new conditions will achieve their
+triumphs in new ways; but it may still be worth while to consider the
+methods and materials of one who also, in his own fashion, won and wore
+the laurel of those who know and can portray the human heart.
+
+But let us return to the Romance, in whose clear though shadowy
+atmosphere the thunders and throes of the preparatory struggle are
+inaudible and invisible, save as they are implied in the fineness of
+substance and beauty of form of the artistic structure. The story is
+divided into two parts, the scene of the first being laid in America;
+that of the second, in England. Internal evidence of various kinds goes
+to show that the second part was the first written; or, in other words,
+that the present first part is a rewriting of an original first part,
+afterwards discarded, and of which the existing second part is the
+continuation. The two parts overlap, and it shall be left to the
+ingenuity of critics to detect the precise point of junction. In
+rewriting the first part, the author made sundry minor alterations in
+the plot and characters of the story, which alterations were not carried
+into the second part. It results from this that the manuscript presents
+various apparent inconsistencies. In transcribing the work for the
+press, these inconsistent sentences and passages have been withdrawn
+from the text and inserted in the Appendix; or, in a few unimportant
+instances, omitted altogether. In other respects, the text is printed as
+the author left it, with the exception of the names of the characters.
+In the manuscript each personage figures in the course of the narrative
+under from three to six different names. This difficulty has been met
+by bestowing upon each of the _dramatis personæ_ the name which last
+identified him to the author’s mind, and keeping him to it throughout
+the volume.
+
+The story, as a story, is complete as it stands; it has a beginning,
+a middle, and an end. There is no break in the narrative, and the
+legitimate conclusion is reached. To say that the story is complete as
+a work of art, would be quite another matter. It lacks balance and
+proportion. Some characters and incidents are portrayed with minute
+elaboration; others, perhaps not less important, are merely sketched
+in outline. Beyond a doubt it was the author’s purpose to rewrite the
+entire work from the first page to the last, enlarging it, deepening
+it, adorning it with every kind of spiritual and physical beauty, and
+rounding out a moral worthy of the noble materials. But these last
+transfiguring touches to Aladdin’s Tower were never to be given; and he
+has departed, taking with him his Wonderful Lamp. Nevertheless there is
+great splendor in the structure as we behold it. The character of
+old Doctor Grimshawe, and the picture of his surroundings, are hardly
+surpassed in vigor by anything their author has produced; and the dusky
+vision of the secret chamber, which sends a mysterious shiver through
+the tale, seems to be unique even in Hawthorne.
+
+There have been included in this volume photographic reproductions of
+certain pages of the original manuscript of Doctor Grimshawe, selected
+at random, upon which those ingenious persons whose convictions are in
+advance of their instruction are cordially invited to try their
+teeth; for it has been maintained that Mr. Hawthorne’s handwriting
+was singularly legible. The present writer possesses specimens of Mr.
+Hawthorne’s chirography at various ages, from boyhood until a day or two
+before his death. Like the handwriting of most men, it was at its best
+between the twenty-fifth and the fortieth years of life; and in some
+instances it is a remarkably beautiful type of penmanship. But as time
+went on it deteriorated, and, while of course retaining its elementary
+characteristics, it became less and less easy to read, especially in
+those writings which were intended solely for his own perusal. As with
+other men of sensitive organization, the mood of the hour, a good or
+a bad pen, a ready or an obstructed flow of thought, would all be
+reflected in the formation of the written letters and words. In the
+manuscript of the fragmentary sketch which has just been published in a
+magazine, which is written in an ordinary commonplace-book, with ruled
+pages, and in which the author had not yet become possessed with the
+spirit of the story and characters, the handwriting is deliberate and
+clear. In the manuscript of “Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret,” on the other
+hand, which was written almost immediately after the other, but on
+unruled paper, and when the writer’s imagination was warm and eager,
+the chirography is for the most part a compact mass of minute cramped
+hieroglyphics, hardly to be deciphered save by flashes of inspiration.
+The matter is not, in itself, of importance, and is alluded to here only
+as having been brought forward in connection with other insinuations,
+with the notice of which it seems unnecessary to soil these pages.
+Indeed, were I otherwise disposed, Doctor Grimshawe himself would take
+the words out of my mouth; his speech is far more poignant and eloquent
+than mine. In dismissing this episode, I will take the liberty to
+observe that it appears to indicate a spirit in our age less sceptical
+than is commonly supposed,--belief in miracles being still possible,
+provided only the miracle be a scandalous one.
+
+It remains to tell how this Romance came to be published. It came into
+my possession (in the ordinary course of events) about eight years ago.
+I had at that time no intention of publishing it; and when, soon after,
+I left England to travel on the Continent, the manuscript, together with
+the bulk of my library, was packed and stored at a London repository,
+and was not again seen by me until last summer, when I unpacked it in
+this city. I then finished the perusal of it, and, finding it to be
+practically complete, I re-resolved to print it in connection with a
+biography of Mr. Hawthorne which I had in preparation. But upon further
+consideration it was decided to publish the Romance separately; and
+I herewith present it to the public, with my best wishes for their
+edification.
+
+                                                JULIAN HAWTHORNE.
+NEW YORK, November 21, 1882.
+
+
+
+
+DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE’S SECRET
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+A long time ago, [Endnote: 1] in a town with which I used to be
+familiarly acquainted, there dwelt an elderly person of grim aspect,
+known by the name and title of Doctor Grimshawe,[Endnote: 2] whose
+household consisted of a remarkably pretty and vivacious boy, and a
+perfect rosebud of a girl, two or three years younger than he, and an
+old maid-of-all-work, of strangely mixed breed, crusty in temper and
+wonderfully sluttish in attire. [Endnote: 3] It might be partly owing to
+this handmaiden’s characteristic lack of neatness (though primarily,
+no doubt, to the grim Doctor’s antipathy to broom, brush, and
+dusting-cloths) that the house--at least in such portions of it as any
+casual visitor caught a glimpse of--was so overlaid with dust, that, in
+lack of a visiting card, you might write your name with your forefinger
+upon the tables; and so hung with cobwebs that they assumed the
+appearance of dusky upholstery.
+
+It grieves me to add an additional touch or two to the reader’s
+disagreeable impression of Doctor Grimshawe’s residence, by confessing
+that it stood in a shabby by-street, and cornered on a graveyard, with
+which the house communicated by a back door; so that with a hop, skip,
+and jump from the threshold, across a flat tombstone, the two children
+[Endnote: 4] were in the daily habit of using the dismal cemetery as
+their playground. In their graver moods they spelled out the names and
+learned by heart doleful verses on the headstones; and in their merrier
+ones (which were much the more frequent) they chased butterflies and
+gathered dandelions, played hide-and-seek among the slate and marble,
+and tumbled laughing over the grassy mounds which were too eminent for
+the short legs to bestride. On the whole, they were the better for the
+graveyard, and its legitimate inmates slept none the worse for the two
+children’s gambols and shrill merriment overhead. Here were old brick
+tombs with curious sculptures on them, and quaint gravestones, some of
+which bore puffy little cherubs, and one or two others the effigies of
+eminent Puritans, wrought out to a button, a fold of the ruff, and a
+wrinkle of the skull-cap; and these frowned upon the two children as if
+death had not made them a whit more genial than they were in life. But
+the children were of a temper to be more encouraged by the good-natured
+smiles of the puffy cherubs, than frightened or disturbed by the sour
+Puritans.
+
+This graveyard (about which we shall say not a word more than may sooner
+or later be needful) was the most ancient in the town. The clay of the
+original settlers had been incorporated with the soil; those stalwart
+Englishmen of the Puritan epoch, whose immediate ancestors had been
+planted forth with succulent grass and daisies for the sustenance of
+the parson’s cow, round the low-battlemented Norman church towers in the
+villages of the fatherland, had here contributed their rich Saxon mould
+to tame and Christianize the wild forest earth of the new world. In
+this point of view--as holding the bones and dust of the primeval
+ancestor--the cemetery was more English than anything else in the
+neighborhood, and might probably have nourished English oaks and English
+elms, and whatever else is of English growth, without that tendency to
+spindle upwards and lose their sturdy breadth, which is said to be the
+ordinary characteristic both of human and vegetable productions when
+transplanted hither. Here, at all events, used to be some specimens
+of common English garden flowers, which could not be accounted
+for,--unless, perhaps, they had sprung from some English maiden’s heart,
+where the intense love of those homely things, and regret of them in the
+foreign land, had conspired together to keep their vivifying principle,
+and cause its growth after the poor girl was buried. Be that as it
+might, in this grave had been hidden from sight many a broad, bluff
+visage of husbandman, who had been taught to plough among the hereditary
+furrows that had been ameliorated by the crumble of ages: much had these
+sturdy laborers grumbled at the great roots that obstructed their toil
+in these fresh acres. Here, too, the sods had covered the faces of men
+known to history, and reverenced when not a piece of distinguishable
+dust remained of them; personages whom tradition told about; and here,
+mixed up with successive crops of native-born Americans, had been
+ministers, captains, matrons, virgins good and evil, tough and tender,
+turned up and battened down by the sexton’s spade, over and over again;
+until every blade of grass had its relations with the human brotherhood
+of the old town. A hundred and fifty years was sufficient to do this;
+and so much time, at least, had elapsed since the first hole was dug
+among the difficult roots of the forest trees, and the first little
+hillock of all these green beds was piled up.
+
+Thus rippled and surged, with its hundreds of little billows, the old
+graveyard about the house which cornered upon it; it made the street
+gloomy, so that people did not altogether like to pass along the high
+wooden fence that shut it in; and the old house itself, covering ground
+which else had been sown thickly with buried bodies, partook of its
+dreariness, because it seemed hardly possible that the dead people
+should not get up out of their graves and steal in to warm themselves at
+this convenient fireside. But I never heard that any of them did so;
+nor were the children ever startled by spectacles of dim horror in the
+night-time, but were as cheerful and fearless as if no grave had ever
+been dug. They were of that class of children whose material seems
+fresh, not taken at second hand, full of disease, conceits, whims,
+and weaknesses, that have already served many people’s turns, and been
+moulded up, with some little change of combination, to serve the turn of
+some poor spirit that could not get a better case.
+
+So far as ever came to the present writer’s knowledge, there was no
+whisper of Doctor Grimshawe’s house being haunted; a fact on which both
+writer and reader may congratulate themselves, the ghostly chord
+having been played upon in these days until it has become wearisome
+and nauseous as the familiar tune of a barrel-organ. The house itself,
+moreover, except for the convenience of its position close to the
+seldom-disturbed cemetery, was hardly worthy to be haunted. As I
+remember it, (and for aught I know it still exists in the same guise,)
+it did not appear to be an ancient structure, nor one that would
+ever have been the abode of a very wealthy or prominent family;--a
+three-story wooden house, perhaps a century old, low-studded, with
+a square front, standing right upon the street, and a small enclosed
+porch, containing the main entrance, affording a glimpse up and down
+the street through an oval window on each side, its characteristic was
+decent respectability, not sinking below the boundary of the genteel. It
+has often perplexed my mind to conjecture what sort of man he could have
+been who, having the means to build a pretty, spacious, and comfortable
+residence, should have chosen to lay its foundation on the brink of so
+many graves; each tenant of these narrow houses crying out, as it were,
+against the absurdity of bestowing much time or pains in preparing any
+earthly tabernacle save such as theirs. But deceased people see matters
+from an erroneous--at least too exclusive--point of view; a comfortable
+grave is an excellent possession for those who need it, but a
+comfortable house has likewise its merits and temporary advantages.
+[Endnote: 5.]
+
+The founder of the house in question seemed sensible of this truth, and
+had therefore been careful to lay out a sufficient number of rooms and
+chambers, low, ill-lighted, ugly, but not unsusceptible of warmth and
+comfort; the sunniest and cheerfulest of which were on the side
+that looked into the graveyard. Of these, the one most spacious and
+convenient had been selected by Doctor Grimshawe as a study, and fitted
+up with bookshelves, and various machines and contrivances, electrical,
+chemical, and distillatory, wherewith he might pursue such researches as
+were wont to engage his attention. The great result of the grim Doctor’s
+labors, so far as known to the public, was a certain preparation or
+extract of cobwebs, which, out of a great abundance of material, he was
+able to produce in any desirable quantity, and by the administration of
+which he professed to cure diseases of the inflammatory class, and to
+work very wonderful effects upon the human system. It is a great pity,
+for the good of mankind and the advantage of his own fortunes, that he
+did not put forth this medicine in pill-boxes or bottles, and then,
+as it were, by some captivating title, inveigle the public into his
+spider’s web, and suck out its gold substance, and himself wax fat as he
+sat in the central intricacy.
+
+But grim Doctor Grimshawe, though his aim in life might be no very
+exalted one, seemed singularly destitute of the impulse to better his
+fortunes by the exercise of his wits: it might even have been
+supposed, indeed, that he had a conscientious principle or religious
+scruple--only, he was by no means a religious man--against reaping
+profit from this particular nostrum which he was said to have invented.
+He never sold it; never prescribed it, unless in cases selected on some
+principle that nobody could detect or explain. The grim Doctor, it must
+be observed, was not generally acknowledged by the profession, with
+whom, in truth, he had never claimed a fellowship; nor had he ever
+assumed, of his own accord the medical title by which the public chose
+to know him. His professional practice seemed, in a sort, forced upon
+him; it grew pretty extensive, partly because it was understood to be
+a matter of favor and difficulty, dependent on a capricious will, to
+obtain his services at all. There was unquestionably an odor of quackery
+about him; but by no means of an ordinary kind. A sort of mystery--yet
+which, perhaps, need not have been a mystery, had any one thought it
+worth while to make systematic inquiry in reference to his previous
+life, his education, even his native land--assisted the impression
+which his peculiarities were calculated to make. He was evidently not
+a New-Englander, nor a native of any part of these Western shores.
+His speech was apt to be oddly and uncouthly idiomatic, and even
+when classical in its form was emitted with a strange, rough depth of
+utterance, that came from recesses of the lungs which we Yankees seldom
+put to any use. In person, he did not look like one of us; a broad,
+rather short personage, with a projecting forehead, a red, irregular
+face, and a squab nose; eyes that looked dull enough in their ordinary
+state, but had a faculty, in conjunction with the other features, which
+those who had ever seen it described as especially ugly and awful. As
+regarded dress, Doctor Grimshawe had a rough and careless exterior,
+and altogether a shaggy kind of aspect, the effect of which was much
+increased by a reddish beard, which, contrary to the usual custom of
+the day, he allowed to grow profusely; and the wiry perversity of which
+seemed to know as little of the comb as of the razor.
+
+We began with calling the grim Doctor an elderly personage; but in so
+doing we looked at him through the eyes of the two children, who were
+his intimates, and who had not learnt to decipher the purport and value
+of his wrinkles and furrows and corrugations, whether as indicating age,
+or a different kind of wear and tear. Possibly--he seemed so aggressive
+and had such latent heat and force to throw out when occasion called--he
+might scarcely have seemed middle-aged; though here again we hesitate,
+finding him so stiffened in his own way, so little fluid, so encrusted
+with passions and humors, that he must have left his youth very far
+behind him; if indeed he ever had any.
+
+The patients, or whatever other visitors were ever admitted into the
+Doctor’s study, carried abroad strange accounts of the squalor of dust
+and cobwebs in which the learned and scientific person lived; and the
+dust, they averred, was all the more disagreeable, because it could not
+well be other than dead men’s almost intangible atoms, resurrected
+from the adjoining graveyard. As for the cobwebs, they were no signs of
+housewifely neglect on the part of crusty Hannah, the handmaiden; but
+the Doctor’s scientific material, carefully encouraged and preserved,
+each filmy thread more valuable to him than so much golden wire. Of all
+barbarous haunts in Christendom or elsewhere, this study was the one
+most overrun with spiders. They dangled from the ceiling, crept upon
+the tables, lurked in the corners, and wove the intricacy of their
+webs wherever they could hitch the end from point to point across the
+window-panes, and even across the upper part of the doorway, and in the
+chimney-place. It seemed impossible to move without breaking some of
+these mystic threads. Spiders crept familiarly towards you and walked
+leisurely across your hands: these were their precincts, and you only an
+intruder. If you had none about your person, yet you had an odious sense
+of one crawling up your spine, or spinning cobwebs in your brain,--so
+pervaded was the atmosphere of the place with spider-life. What they fed
+upon (for all the flies for miles about would not have sufficed them)
+was a secret known only to the Doctor. Whence they came was another
+riddle; though, from certain inquiries and transactions of Doctor
+Grimshawe’s with some of the shipmasters of the port, who followed the
+East and West Indian, the African and the South American trade, it was
+supposed that this odd philosopher was in the habit of importing
+choice monstrosities in the spider kind from all those tropic regions.
+[Endnote: 6.]
+
+All the above description, exaggerated as it may seem, is merely
+preliminary to the introduction of one single enormous spider, the
+biggest and ugliest ever seen, the pride of the grim Doctor’s heart, his
+treasure, his glory, the pearl of his soul, and, as many people said,
+the demon to whom he had sold his salvation, on condition of possessing
+the web of the foul creature for a certain number of years. The grim
+Doctor, according to this theory, was but a great fly which this
+spider had subtly entangled in his web. But, in truth, naturalists are
+acquainted with this spider, though it is a rare one; the British
+Museum has a specimen, and, doubtless, so have many other scientific
+institutions. It is found in South America; its most hideous spread of
+legs covers a space nearly as large as a dinner-plate, and radiates from
+a body as big as a door-knob, which one conceives to be an agglomeration
+of sucked-up poison which the creature treasures through life; probably
+to expend it all, and life itself, on some worthy foe. Its colors,
+variegated in a sort of ugly and inauspicious splendor, were distributed
+over its vast bulb in great spots, some of which glistened like gems. It
+was a horror to think of this thing living; still more horrible to think
+of the foul catastrophe, the crushed-out and wasted poison, that would
+follow the casual setting foot upon it.
+
+No doubt, the lapse of time since the Doctor and his spider lived has
+already been sufficient to cause a traditionary wonderment to gather
+over them both; and, especially, this image of the spider dangles down
+to us from the dusky ceiling of the Past, swollen into somewhat uglier
+and huger monstrosity than he actually possessed. Nevertheless, the
+creature had a real existence, and has left kindred like himself; but
+as for the Doctor, nothing could exceed the value which he seemed to put
+upon him, the sacrifices he made for the creature’s convenience, or the
+readiness with which he adapted his whole mode of life, apparently, so
+that the spider might enjoy the conditions best suited to his tastes,
+habits, and health. And yet there were sometimes tokens that made people
+imagine that he hated the infernal creature as much as everybody else
+who caught a glimpse of him. [Endnote: 7.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+Considering that Doctor Grimshawe, when we first look upon him, had
+dwelt only a few years in the house by the graveyard, it is wonderful
+what an appearance he, and his furniture, and his cobwebs, and
+their unweariable spinners, and crusty old Hannah, all had of having
+permanently attached themselves to the locality. For a century, at
+least, it might be fancied that the study in particular had existed just
+as it was now; with those dusky festoons of spider-silk hanging along
+the walls, those book-cases with volumes turning their parchment or
+black-leather backs upon you, those machines and engines, that table,
+and at it the Doctor, in a very faded and shabby dressing-gown, smoking
+a long clay pipe, the powerful fumes of which dwelt continually in his
+reddish and grisly beard, and made him fragrant wherever he went. This
+sense of fixedness--stony intractability--seems to belong to people
+who, instead of hope, which exalts everything into an airy, gaseous
+exhilaration, have a fixed and dogged purpose, around which everything
+congeals and crystallizes. [Endnote: 1] Even the sunshine, dim through
+the dustiness of the two casements that looked upon the graveyard,
+and the smoke, as it came warm out of Doctor Grimshawe’s mouth, seemed
+already stale. But if the two children, or either of them, happened to
+be in the study,--if they ran to open the door at the knock, if they
+came scampering and peeped down over the banisters,--the sordid and
+rusty gloom was apt to vanish quite away. The sunbeam itself looked like
+a golden rule, that had been flung down long ago, and had lain there
+till it was dusty and tarnished. They were cheery little imps, who
+sucked up fragrance and pleasantness out of their surroundings, dreary
+as these looked; even as a flower can find its proper perfume in any
+soil where its seed happens to fall. The great spider, hanging by his
+cordage over the Doctor’s head, and waving slowly, like a pendulum, in
+a blast from the crack of the door, must have made millions and millions
+of precisely such vibrations as these; but the children were new, and
+made over every day, with yesterday’s weariness left out.
+
+The little girl, however, was the merrier of the two. It was quite
+unintelligible, in view of the little care that crusty Hannah took
+of her, and, moreover, since she was none of your prim, fastidious
+children, how daintily she kept herself amid all this dust; how
+the spider’s webs never clung to her, and how, when--without being
+solicited--she clambered into the Doctor’s arms and kissed him, she bore
+away no smoky reminiscences of the pipe that he kissed continually. She
+had a free, mellow, natural laughter, that seemed the ripened fruit of
+the smile that was generally on her little face, to be shaken off
+and scattered abroad by any breeze that came along. Little Elsie made
+playthings of everything, even of the grim Doctor, though against his
+will, and though, moreover, there were tokens now and then that the
+sight of this bright little creature was not a pleasure to him, but,
+on the contrary, a positive pain; a pain, nevertheless, indicating
+a profound interest, hardly less deep than though Elsie had been his
+daughter.
+
+Elsie did not play with the great spider, but she moved among the whole
+brood of spiders as if she saw them not, and, being endowed with other
+senses than those allied to these things, might coexist with them and
+not be sensible of their presence. Yet the child, I suppose, had her
+crying fits, and her pouting fits, and naughtiness enough to entitle her
+to live on earth; at least crusty Hannah often said so, and often made
+grievous complaint of disobedience, mischief, or breakage, attributable
+to little Elsie; to which the grim Doctor seldom responded by anything
+more intelligible than a puff of tobacco-smoke, and, sometimes, an
+imprecation; which, however, hit crusty Hannah instead of the child.
+Where the child got the tenderness that a child needs to live upon, is a
+mystery to me; perhaps from some aged or dead mother, or in her dreams;
+perhaps from some small modicum of it, such as boys have, from the
+little boy; or perhaps it was from a Persian kitten, which had grown to
+be a cat in her arms, and slept in her little bed, and now assumed grave
+and protective airs towards her former playmate. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+The boy, [Endnote: 3] as we have said, was two or three years Elsie’s
+elder, and might now be about six years old. He was a healthy and
+cheerful child, yet of a graver mood than the little girl, appearing to
+lay a more forcible grasp on the circumstances about him, and to tread
+with a heavier footstep on the solid earth; yet perhaps not more so than
+was the necessary difference between a man-blossom, dimly conscious of
+coming things, and a mere baby, with whom there was neither past nor
+future. Ned, as he was named, was subject very early to fits of musing,
+the subject of which--if they had any definite subject, or were more
+than vague reveries--it was impossible to guess. They were of those
+states of mind, probably, which are beyond the sphere of human language,
+and would necessarily lose their essence in the attempt to communicate
+or record them. The little girl, perhaps, had some mode of sympathy with
+these unuttered thoughts or reveries, which grown people had ceased to
+have; at all events, she early learned to respect them, and, at other
+times as free and playful as her Persian kitten, she never in such
+circumstances ventured on any greater freedom than to sit down quietly
+beside him, and endeavor to look as thoughtful as the boy himself.
+
+Once, slowly emerging from one of these waking reveries, little Ned
+gazed about him, and saw Elsie sitting with this pretty pretence of
+thoughtfulness and dreaminess in her little chair, close beside him;
+now and then peeping under her eyelashes to note what changes might come
+over his face. After looking at her a moment or two, he quietly took her
+willing and warm little hand in his own, and led her up to the Doctor.
+
+The group, methinks, must have been a picturesque one, made up as it was
+of several apparently discordant elements, each of which happened to be
+so combined as to make a more effective whole. The beautiful grave boy,
+with a little sword by his side and a feather in his hat, of a brown
+complexion, slender, with his white brow and dark, thoughtful eyes, so
+earnest upon some mysterious theme; the prettier little girl, a blonde,
+round, rosy, so truly sympathetic with her companion’s mood, yet
+unconsciously turning all to sport by her attempt to assume one
+similar;--these two standing at the grim Doctor’s footstool; he
+meanwhile, black, wild-bearded, heavy-browed, red-eyed, wrapped in his
+faded dressing-gown, puffing out volumes of vapor from his long pipe,
+and making, just at that instant, application to a tumbler, which,
+we regret to say, was generally at his elbow, with some dark-colored
+potation in it that required to be frequently replenished from a
+neighboring black bottle. Half, at least, of the fluids in the grim
+Doctor’s system must have been derived from that same black bottle, so
+constant was his familiarity with its contents; and yet his eyes were
+never redder at one time than another, nor his utterance thicker,
+nor his mood perceptibly the brighter or the duller for all his
+conviviality. It is true, when, once, the bottle happened to be empty
+for a whole day together, Doctor Grimshawe was observed by crusty Hannah
+and by the children to be considerably fiercer than usual: so that
+probably, by some maladjustment of consequences, his intemperance was
+only to be found in refraining from brandy.
+
+Nor must we forget--in attempting to conceive the effect of these two
+beautiful children in such a sombre room, looking on the graveyard,
+and contrasted with the grim Doctor’s aspect of heavy and smouldering
+fierceness--that over his head, at this very moment, dangled the
+portentous spider, who seemed to have come down from his web aloft for
+the purpose of hearing what the two young people could have to say
+to his patron, and what reference it might have to certain mysterious
+documents which the Doctor kept locked up in a secret cupboard behind
+the door.
+
+“Grim Doctor,” said Ned, after looking up into the Doctor’s face, as
+a sensitive child inevitably does, to see whether the occasion was
+favorable, yet determined to proceed with his purpose whether so or
+not,--“Grim Doctor, I want you to answer me a question.”
+
+“Here’s to your good health, Ned!” quoth the Doctor, eying the pair
+intently, as he often did, when they were unconscious. “So you want to
+ask me a question? As many as you please, my fine fellow; and I shall
+answer as many, and as much, and as truly, as may please myself!”
+
+“Ah, grim Doctor!” said the little girl, now letting go of Ned’s hand,
+and climbing upon the Doctor’s knee, “‘ou shall answer as many as Ned
+please to ask, because to please him and me!”
+
+“Well, child,” said Doctor Grimshawe, “little Ned will have his rights
+at least, at my hands, if not other people’s rights likewise; and, if it
+be right, I shall answer his question. Only, let him ask it at once; for
+I want to be busy thinking about something else.”
+
+“Then, Doctor Grim,” said little Ned, “tell me, in the first place,
+where I came from, and how you came to have me?”
+
+The Doctor looked at the little man, so seriously and earnestly putting
+this demand, with a perplexed, and at first it might almost seem a
+startled aspect.
+
+“That is a question, indeed, my friend Ned!” ejaculated he, putting
+forth a whiff of smoke and imbibing a nip from his tumbler before he
+spoke; and perhaps framing his answer, as many thoughtful and secret
+people do, in such a way as to let out his secret mood to the child,
+because knowing he could not understand it: “Whence did you come? Whence
+did any of us come? Out of the darkness and mystery; out of nothingness;
+out of a kingdom of shadows; out of dust, clay, mud, I think, and to
+return to it again. Out of a former state of being, whence we have
+brought a good many shadowy revelations, purporting that it was no very
+pleasant one. Out of a former life, of which the present one is the
+hell!--And why are you come? Faith, Ned, he must be a wiser man than
+Doctor Grim who can tell why you or any other mortal came hither; only
+one thing I am well aware of,--it was not to be happy. To toil and moil
+and hope and fear; and to love in a shadowy, doubtful sort of way, and
+to hate in bitter earnest,--that is what you came for!”
+
+“Ah, Doctor Grim! this is very naughty,” said little Elsie. “You are
+making fun of little Ned, when he is in earnest.”
+
+“Fun!” quoth Doctor Grim, bursting into a laugh peculiar to him, very
+loud and obstreperous. “I am glad you find it so, my little woman. Well,
+and so you bid me tell absolutely where he came from?”
+
+Elsie nodded her bright little head.
+
+“And you, friend Ned, insist upon knowing?”
+
+“That I do, Doctor Grim!” answered Ned. His white, childish brow had
+gathered into a frown, such was the earnestness of his determination;
+and he stamped his foot on the floor, as if ready to follow up his
+demand by an appeal to the little tin sword which hung by his side. The
+Doctor looked at him with a kind of smile,--not a very pleasant one;
+for it was an unamiable characteristic of his temper that a display of
+spirit, even in a child, was apt to arouse his immense combativeness,
+and make him aim a blow without much consideration how heavily it might
+fall, or on how unequal an antagonist.
+
+“If you insist upon an answer, Master Ned, you shall have it,” replied
+he. “You were taken by me, boy, a foundling from an almshouse; and
+if ever hereafter you desire to know your kindred, you must take your
+chance of the first man you meet. He is as likely to be your father as
+another!”
+
+The child’s eyes flashed, and his brow grew as red as fire. It was but
+a momentary fierceness; the next instant he clasped his hands over his
+face, and wept in a violent convulsion of grief and shame. Little Elsie
+clasped her arms about him, kissing his brow and chin, which were all
+that her lips could touch, under his clasped hands; but Ned turned away
+uncomforted, and was blindly making his way towards the door.
+
+“Ned, my little fellow, come back!” said Doctor Grim, who had very
+attentively watched the cruel effect of his communication.
+
+As the boy did not reply, and was still tending towards the door, the
+grim Doctor vouchsafed to lay aside his pipe, get up from his arm-chair
+(a thing he seldom did between supper and bedtime), and shuffle after
+the two children in his slippers. He caught them on the threshold,
+brought little Ned back by main force,--for he was a rough man even in
+his tenderness,--and, sitting down again and taking him on his knee,
+pulled away his hands from before his face. Never was a more pitiful
+sight than that pale countenance, so infantile still, yet looking old
+and experienced already, with a sense of disgrace, with a feeling of
+loneliness; so beautiful, nevertheless, that it seemed to possess all
+the characteristics which fine hereditary traits and culture, or many
+forefathers, could do in refining a human stock. And this was a nameless
+weed, sprouting from some chance seed by the dusty wayside!
+
+“Ned, my dear old boy,” said Doctor Grim,--and he kissed that pale,
+tearful face,--the first and last time, to the best of my belief, that
+he was ever betrayed into that tenderness; “forget what I have said!
+Yes, remember, if you like, that you came from an almshouse; but
+remember, too,--what your friend Doctor Grim is ready to affirm and make
+oath of,--that he can trace your kindred and race through that sordid
+experience, and back, back, for a hundred and fifty years, into an old
+English line. Come, little Ned, and look at this picture.”
+
+He led the boy by the hand to a corner of the room, where hung upon the
+wall a portrait which Ned had often looked at. It seemed an old picture;
+but the Doctor had had it cleaned and varnished, so that it looked dim
+and dark, and yet it seemed to be the representation of a man of no
+mark; not at least of such mark as would naturally leave his features to
+be transmitted for the interest of another generation. For he was
+clad in a mean dress of old fashion,--a leather jerkin it appeared to
+be,--and round his neck, moreover, was a noose of rope, as if he might
+have been on the point of being hanged. But the face of the portrait,
+nevertheless, was beautiful, noble, though sad; with a great development
+of sensibility, a look of suffering and endurance amounting to
+triumph,--a peace through all.
+
+“Look at this,” continued the Doctor, “if you must go on dreaming about
+your race. Dream that you are of the blood of this being; for, mean as
+his station looks, he comes of an ancient and noble race, and was the
+noblest of them all! Let me alone, Ned, and I shall spin out the web
+that shall link you to that man. The grim Doctor can do it!”
+
+The grim Doctor’s face looked fierce with the earnestness with which
+he said these words. You would have said that he was taking an oath to
+overthrow and annihilate a race, rather than to build one up by
+bringing forward the infant heir out of obscurity, and making plain the
+links--the filaments--which cemented this feeble childish life, in a far
+country, with the great tide of a noble life, which had come down like a
+chain from antiquity, in old England.
+
+Having said the words, however, the grim Doctor appeared ashamed both of
+the heat and of the tenderness into which he had been betrayed; for rude
+and rough as his nature was, there was a kind of decorum in it, too,
+that kept him within limits of his own. So he went back to his chair,
+his pipe, and his tumbler, and was gruffer and more taciturn than ever
+for the rest of the evening. And after the children went to bed, he
+leaned back in his chair and looked up at the vast tropic spider, who
+was particularly busy in adding to the intricacies of his web; until he
+fell asleep with his eyes fixed in that direction, and the extinguished
+pipe in one hand and the empty tumbler in the other.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+Doctor Grimshawe, after the foregone scene, began a practice of
+conversing more with the children than formerly; directing his discourse
+chiefly to Ned, although Elsie’s vivacity and more outspoken and
+demonstrative character made her take quite as large a share in the
+conversation as he.
+
+The Doctor’s communications referred chiefly to a village, or
+neighborhood, or locality in England, which he chose to call Newnham;
+although he told the children that this was not the real name, which,
+for reasons best known to himself, he wished to conceal. Whatever the
+name were, he seemed to know the place so intimately, that the
+children, as a matter of course, adopted the conclusion that it was his
+birthplace, and the spot where he had spent his schoolboy days, and
+had lived until some inscrutable reason had impelled him to quit its
+ivy-grown antiquity, and all the aged beauty and strength that he spoke
+of, and to cross the sea.
+
+He used to tell of an old church, far unlike the brick and pine-built
+meeting-houses with which the children were familiar; a church, the
+stones of which were laid, every one of them, before the world knew of
+the country in which he was then speaking: and how it had a spire, the
+lower part of which was mantled with ivy, and up which, towards its very
+spire, the ivy was still creeping; and how there was a tradition, that,
+if the ivy ever reached the top, the spire would fall upon the roof
+of the old gray church, and crush it all down among its surrounding
+tombstones. [Endnote: 1] And so, as this misfortune would be so heavy
+a one, there seemed to be a miracle wrought from year to year, by which
+the ivy, though always flourishing, could never grow beyond a certain
+point; so that the spire and church had stood unharmed for thirty years;
+though the wise old people were constantly foretelling that the passing
+year must be the very last one that it could stand.
+
+He told, too, of a place that made little Ned blush and cast down his
+eyes to hide the tears of anger and shame at he knew not what, which
+would irresistibly spring into them; for it reminded him of the
+almshouse where, as the cruel Doctor said, Ned himself had had his
+earliest home. And yet, after all, it had scarcely a feature of
+resemblance; and there was this great point of difference,--that
+whereas, in Ned’s wretched abode (a large, unsightly brick house), there
+were many wretched infants like himself, as well as helpless people
+of all ages, widows, decayed drunkards, people of feeble wits, and all
+kinds of imbecility; it being a haven for those who could not contend
+in the hard, eager, pitiless struggle of life; in the place the Doctor
+spoke of, a noble, Gothic, mossy structure, there were none but aged
+men, who had drifted into this quiet harbor to end their days in a sort
+of humble yet stately ease and decorous abundance. And this shelter,
+the grim Doctor said, was the gift of a man who had died ages ago; and
+having been a great sinner in his lifetime, and having drawn lands,
+manors, and a great mass of wealth into his clutches, by violent and
+unfair means, had thought to get his pardon by founding this Hospital,
+as it was called, in which thirteen old men should always reside; and he
+hoped that they would spend their time in praying for the welfare of his
+soul. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+Said little Elsie, “I am glad he did it, and I hope the poor old men
+never forgot to pray for him, and that it did good to the poor wicked
+man’s soul.”
+
+“Well, child,” said Doctor Grimshawe, with a scowl into vacancy, and a
+sort of wicked leer of merriment at the same time, as if he saw before
+him the face of the dead man of past centuries, “I happen to be no
+lover of this man’s race, and I hate him for the sake of one of his
+descendants. I don’t think he succeeded in bribing the Devil to let him
+go, or God to save him!”
+
+“Doctor Grim, you are very naughty!” said Elsie, looking shocked.
+
+“It is fair enough,” said Ned, “to hate your enemies to the very brink
+of the grave, but then to leave him to get what mercy he can.”
+
+“After shoving him in!” quoth the Doctor; and made no further response
+to either of these criticisms, which seemed indeed to affect him very
+little--if he even listened to them. For he was a man of singularly
+imperfect moral culture; insomuch that nothing else was so remarkable
+about him as that--possessing a good deal of intellectual ability, made
+available by much reading and experience--he was so very dark on the
+moral side; as if he needed the natural perceptions that should have
+enabled him to acquire that better wisdom. Such a phenomenon often
+meets us in life; oftener than we recognize, because a certain tact and
+exterior decency generally hide the moral deficiency. But often there is
+a mind well polished, married to a conscience and natural impulses left
+as they were in childhood, except that they have sprouted up into evil
+and poisonous weeds, richly blossoming with strong-smelling flowers, or
+seeds which the plant scatters by a sort of impulse; even as the Doctor
+was now half-consciously throwing seeds of his evil passions into the
+minds of these children. He was himself a grown-up child, without tact,
+simplicity, and innocence, and with ripened evil, all the ranker for a
+native heat that was in him and still active, which might have nourished
+good things as well as evil. Indeed, it did cherish by chance a root or
+two of good, the fragrance of which was sometimes perceptible among all
+this rank growth of poisonous weeds. A grown-up child he was,--that was
+all.
+
+The Doctor now went on to describe an old country-seat, which stood near
+this village and the ancient Hospital that he had been telling about,
+and which was formerly the residence of the wicked man (a knight and
+a brave one, well known in the Lancastrian wars) who had founded the
+latter. It was a venerable old mansion, which a Saxon Thane had begun to
+build more than a thousand years ago, the old English oak that he built
+into the frame being still visible in the ancient skeleton of its roof,
+sturdy and strong as if put up yesterday. And the descendants of the
+man who built it, through the French line (for a Norman baron wedded the
+daughter and heiress of the Saxon), dwelt there yet; and in each century
+they had done something for the old Hall,--building a tower, adding
+a suite of rooms, strengthening what was already built, putting in a
+painted window, making it more spacious and convenient,--till it seemed
+as if Time employed himself in thinking what could be done for the old
+house. As fast as any part decayed, it was renewed, with such simple
+art that the new completed, as it were, and fitted itself to the old. So
+that it seemed as if the house never had been finished, until just that
+thing was added. For many an age, the possessors had gone on adding
+strength to strength, digging out the moat to a greater depth, piercing
+the walls with holes for archers to shoot through, or building a turret
+to keep watch upon. But at last all necessity for these precautions
+passed away, and then they thought of convenience and comfort, adding
+something in every generation to these. And by and by they thought of
+beauty too; and in this time helped them with its weather-stains, and
+the ivy that grew over the walls, and the grassy depth of the dried-up
+moat, and the abundant shade that grew up everywhere, where naked
+strength would have been ugly.
+
+“One curious thing in the house,” said the Doctor, lowering his voice,
+but with a mysterious look of triumph, and that old scowl, too, at the
+children, “was that they built a secret chamber,--a very secret one!”
+
+“A secret chamber!” cried little Ned; “who lived in it? A ghost?”
+
+“There was often use for it,” said Doctor Grim; “hiding people who
+had fought on the wrong side, or Catholic priests, or criminals,
+or perhaps--who knows?--enemies that they wanted put out of the
+way,--troublesome folks. Ah! it was often of use, that secret chamber:
+and is so still!”
+
+Here the Doctor paused a long while, and leaned back in his chair,
+slowly puffing long whiffs from his pipe, looking up at the great
+spider-demon that hung over his head, and, as it seemed to the children
+by the expression of his face, looking into the dim secret chamber which
+he had spoken of, and which, by something in his mode of alluding to it,
+assumed such a weird, spectral aspect to their imaginations that they
+never wished to hear of it again. Coming back at length out of his
+reverie,--returning, perhaps, out of some weird, ghostly, secret
+chamber of his memory, whereof the one in the old house was but the less
+horrible emblem,--he resumed his tale. He said that, a long time ago,
+a war broke out in the old country between King and Parliament. At that
+period there were several brothers of the old family (which had adhered
+to the Catholic religion), and these chose the side of the King instead
+of that of the Puritan Parliament: all but one, whom the family hated
+because he took the Parliament side; and he became a soldier, and fought
+against his own brothers; and it was said among them that, so inveterate
+was he, he went on the scaffold, masked, and was the very man who struck
+off the King’s head, and that his foot trod in the King’s blood, and
+that always afterwards he made a bloody track wherever he went. And
+there was a legend that his brethren once caught the renegade and
+imprisoned him in his own birthplace--
+
+“In the secret chamber?” interrupted Ned.
+
+“No doubt!” said the Doctor, nodding, “though I never heard so.”
+
+They imprisoned him, but he made his escape and fled, and in the morning
+his prison-place, wherever it was, was empty. But on the threshold
+of the door of the old manor-house there was the print of a bloody
+footstep; and no trouble that the housemaids took, no rain of all the
+years that have since passed, no sunshine, has made it fade: nor have
+all the wear and tramp of feet passing over it since then availed to
+erase it.
+
+“I have seen it myself,” quoth the Doctor, “and know this to be true.”
+
+“Doctor Grim, now you are laughing at us,” said Ned, trying to look
+grave. But Elsie hid her face on the Doctor’s knee; there being
+something that affected the vivid little girl with peculiar horror in
+the idea of this red footstep always glistening on the doorstep, and
+wetting, as she fancied, every innocent foot of child or grown person
+that had since passed over it. [Endnote: 3.]
+
+“It is true!” reiterated the grim Doctor; “for, man and boy, I have seen
+it a thousand times.”
+
+He continued the family history, or tradition, or fantastic legend,
+whichever it might be; telling his young auditors that the Puritan, the
+renegade son of the family, was afterwards, by the contrivances of his
+brethren, sent to Virginia and sold as a bond slave; and how he had
+vanished from that quarter and come to New England, where he was
+supposed to have left children. And by and by two elder brothers died,
+and this missing brother became the heir to the old estate and to a
+title. Then the family tried to track his bloody footstep, and sought
+it far and near, through green country paths, and old streets of London;
+but in vain. Then they sent messengers to see whether any traces of one
+stepping in blood could be found on the forest leaves of America; but
+still in vain. The idea nevertheless prevailed that he would come back,
+and it was said they kept a bedchamber ready for him yet in the old
+house. But much as they pretended to regret the loss of him and his
+children, it would make them curse their stars were a descendant of his
+to return now. For the child of a younger son was in possession of the
+old estate, and was doing as much evil as his forefathers did; and if
+the true heir were to appear on the threshold, he would (if he might but
+do it secretly) stain the whole doorstep as red as the Bloody Footstep
+had stained one little portion of it.
+
+“Do you think he will ever come back?” asked little Ned.
+
+“Stranger things have happened, my little man!” said Doctor Grimshawe,
+“than that the posterity of this man should come back and turn these
+usurpers out of his rightful inheritance. And sometimes, as I sit here
+smoking my pipe and drinking my glass, and looking up at the cunning
+plot that the spider is weaving yonder above my head, and thinking of
+this fine old family and some little matters that have been between them
+and me, I fancy that it may be so! We shall see! Stranger things have
+happened.”
+
+And Doctor Grimshawe drank off his tumbler, winking at little Ned in a
+strange way, that seemed to be a kind of playfulness, but which did not
+affect the children pleasantly; insomuch that little Elsie put both
+her hands on Doctor Grim’s knees, and begged him not to do so any more.
+[Endnote: 4.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. [Endnote: 1]
+
+
+The children, after this conversation, often introduced the old English
+mansion into their dreams and little romances, which all imaginative
+children are continually mixing up with their lives, making the
+commonplace day of grown people a rich, misty, glancing orb of
+fairy-land to themselves. Ned, forgetting or not realizing the long
+lapse of time, used to fancy the true heir wandering all this while in
+America, and leaving a long track of bloody footsteps behind him; until
+the period when, his sins being expiated (whatever they might be), he
+should turn back upon his steps and return to his old native home. And
+sometimes the child used to look along the streets of the town where he
+dwelt, bending his thoughtful eyes on the ground, and think that perhaps
+some time he should see the bloody footsteps there, betraying that the
+wanderer had just gone that way.
+
+As for little Elsie, it was her fancy that the hero of the legend still
+remained imprisoned in that dreadful secret chamber, which had made a
+most dread impression on her mind; and that there he was, forgotten all
+this time, waiting, like a naughty child shut up in a closet, until
+some one should come to unlock the door. In the pitifulness of her
+disposition, she once proposed to little Ned that, as soon as they grew
+big enough, they should set out in quest of the old house, and find
+their way into it, and find the secret chamber, and let the poor
+prisoner out. So they lived a good deal of the time in a half-waking
+dream, partly conscious of the fantastic nature of their ideas, yet with
+these ideas almost as real to them as the facts of the natural world,
+which, to children, are at first transparent and unsubstantial.
+
+The Doctor appeared to have a pleasure, or a purpose, in keeping his
+legend forcibly in their memories; he often recurred to the subject of
+the old English family, and was continually giving new details about
+its history, the scenery in its neighborhood, the aspect of the
+mansion-house; indicating a very intense interest in the subject on his
+own part, of which this much talk seemed the involuntary overflowing.
+
+There was, however, an affection mingled with this sentiment. It
+appeared to be his unfortunate necessity to let his thoughts dwell very
+constantly upon a subject that was hateful to him, with which this old
+English estate and manor-house and family were somehow connected; and,
+moreover, had he spoken thus to older and more experienced auditors,
+they might have detected in the manner and matter of his talk, a certain
+hereditary reverence and awe, the growth of ages, mixed up with a newer
+hatred, impelling him to deface and destroy what, at the same time, it
+was his deepest impulse to bow before. The love belonged to his race;
+the hatred, to himself individually. It was the feeling of a man lowly
+born, when he contracts a hostility to his hereditary superior. In
+one way, being of a powerful, passionate nature, gifted with force and
+ability far superior to that of the aristocrat, he might scorn him and
+feel able to trample on him; in another, he had the same awe that a
+country boy feels of the magistrate who flings him a sixpence and shakes
+his horsewhip at him.
+
+Had the grim Doctor been an American, he might have had the vast
+antipathy to rank, without the trace of awe that made it so much more
+malignant: it required a low-born Englishman to feel the two together.
+What made the hatred so fiendish was a something that, in the natural
+course of things, would have been loyalty, inherited affection, devoted
+self-sacrifice to a superior. Whatever it might be, it seemed at times
+(when his potations took deeper effect than ordinary) almost to drive
+the grim Doctor mad; for he would burst forth in wild diatribes and
+anathemas, having a strange, rough force of expression and a depth of
+utterance, as if his words came from a bottomless pit within himself,
+where burned an everlasting fire, and where the furies had their home;
+and plans of dire revenge were welded into shape as in the heat of a
+furnace. After the two poor children had been affrighted by paroxysms
+of this kind, the strange being would break out into one of his roars of
+laughter, that seemed to shake the house, and, at all events, caused
+the cobwebs and spiders suspended from the ceiling, to swing and vibrate
+with the motion of the volumes of reverberating breath which he thus
+expelled from his capacious lungs. Then, catching up little Elsie upon
+one knee and Ned upon the other, he would become gentler than in his
+usual moods, and, by the powerful magnetism of his character, cause them
+to think him as tender and sweet an old fellow as a child could desire
+for a playmate. Upon the whole, strange as it may appear, they loved
+the grim Doctor dearly; there was a loadstone within him that drew them
+close to him and kept them there, in spite of the horror of many things
+that he said and did. One thing that, slight as it seemed, wrought
+mightily towards their mutually petting each other, was that no amount
+of racket, hubbub, shouting, laughter, or noisy mischief which the
+two children could perpetrate, ever disturbed the Doctor’s studies,
+meditations, or employments of whatever kind. He had a hardy set of
+nerves, not refined by careful treatment in himself or his ancestors,
+but probably accustomed from of old to be drummed on by harsh voices,
+rude sounds, and the clatter and clamor of household life among homely,
+uncultivated, strongly animal people.
+
+As the two children grew apace, it behooved their strange guardian to
+take some thought for their instruction. So far as little Elsie was
+concerned, however, he seemed utterly indifferent to her having
+any cultivation: having imbibed no modern ideas respecting feminine
+capacities and privileges, but regarding woman, whether in the bud or
+in the blossom, as the plaything of man’s idler moments, and the
+helpmeet--but in a humble capacity--of his daily life. He sometimes bade
+her go to the kitchen and take lessons of crusty Hannah in bread-making,
+sweeping, dusting, washing, the coarser needlework, and such other
+things as she would require to know when she came to be a woman; but
+carelessly allowed her to gather up the crumbs of such instruction as he
+bestowed on her playmate Ned, and thus learn to read, write, and cipher;
+which, to say the truth, was about as far in the way of scholarship as
+little Elsie cared to go.
+
+But towards little Ned the grim Doctor adopted a far different system.
+No sooner had he reached the age when the soft and tender intellect
+of the child became capable of retaining impressions, than he took him
+vigorously in hand, assigning him such tasks as were fit for him, and
+curiously investigating what were the force and character of the powers
+with which the child grasped them. Not that the Doctor pressed him
+forward unduly; indeed, there was no need of it; for the boy manifested
+a remarkable docility for instruction, and a singular quickness
+in mastering the preliminary steps which lead to science: a subtle
+instinct, indeed, which it seemed wonderful a child should possess
+for anything as artificial as systems of grammar and arithmetic. A
+remarkable boy, in truth, he was, to have been found by chance in an
+almshouse; except that, such being his origin, we are at liberty to
+suppose for him whatever long cultivation and gentility we may think
+necessary, in his parentage of either side,--such as was indicated also
+by his graceful and refined beauty of person. He showed, indeed, even
+before he began to read at all, an instinctive attraction towards books,
+and a love for and interest in even the material form of knowledge,--the
+plates, the print, the binding of the Doctor’s volumes, and even in
+a bookworm which he once found in an old volume, where it had eaten a
+circular furrow. But the little boy had too quick a spirit of life to
+be in danger of becoming a bookworm himself. He had this side of the
+intellect, but his impulse would be to mix with men, and catch something
+from their intercourse fresher than books could give him; though these
+would give him what they might.
+
+In the grim Doctor, rough and uncultivated as he seemed, this budding
+intelligence found no inadequate instructor. Doctor Grimshawe proved
+himself a far more thorough scholar, in the classics and mathematics,
+than could easily have been found in our country. He himself must have
+had rigid and faithful instruction at an early period of life, though
+probably not in his boyhood. For, though the culture had been bestowed,
+his mind had been left in so singularly rough a state that it seemed
+as if the refinement of classical study could not have been begun very
+early. Or possibly the mind and nature were incapable of polish; or he
+may have had a coarse and sordid domestic life around him in his infancy
+and youth. He was a gem of coarse texture, just hewn out. An American
+with a like education would more likely have gained a certain fineness
+and grace, and it would have been difficult to distinguish him from one
+who had been born to culture and refinement. This sturdy Englishman,
+after all that had been done for his mind, and though it had been well
+done, was still but another ploughman, of a long race of such, with a
+few scratchings of refinement on his hard exterior. His son, if he left
+one, might be a little less of the ploughman; his grandson, provided
+the female element were well chosen, might approach to refinement; three
+generations--a century at least--would be required for the slow toil
+of hewing, chiselling, and polishing a gentleman out of this ponderous
+block, now rough from the quarry of human nature. But, in the mean time,
+he evidently possessed in an unusual degree the sort of learning that
+refines other minds,--the critical acquaintance with the great poets and
+historians of antiquity, and apparently an appreciation of their merits,
+and power to teach their beauty. So the boy had an able tutor, capable,
+it would seem, of showing him the way to the graces he did not himself
+possess; besides helping the growth of the strength without which
+refinement is but sickly and disgusting.
+
+Another sort of culture, which it seemed odd that this rude man should
+undertake, was that of manners; but, in fact, rude as the grim Doctor’s
+own manners were, he was one of the nicest and severest censors in that
+department that was ever known. It is difficult to account for this;
+although it is almost invariably found that persons in a low rank of
+life, such as servants and laborers, will detect the false pretender to
+the character of a gentleman, with at least as sure an instinct as the
+class into which they seek to thrust themselves. Perhaps they recognize
+something akin to their own vulgarity, rather than appreciate what is
+unlike themselves. The Doctor possessed a peculiar power of rich rough
+humor on this subject, and used to deliver lectures, as it were, to
+little Ned, illustrated with sketches of living individuals in the town
+where they dwelt; by an unscrupulous use of whom he sought to teach the
+boy what to avoid in manners, if he sought to be a gentleman. But it
+must be confessed he spared himself as little as other people, and
+often wound up with this compendious injunction,--“Be everything in your
+behavior that Doctor Grim is not!”
+
+His pupil, very probably, profited somewhat by these instructions; for
+there are specialties and arbitrary rules of behavior which do not come
+by nature. But these are few; and beautiful, noble, and genial manners
+may almost be called a natural gift; and these, however he inherited
+them, soon proved to be an inherent possession of little Ned. He had a
+kind of natural refinement, which nothing could ever soil or offend;
+it seemed, by some magic or other, absolutely to keep him from the
+knowledge of much of the grim Doctor’s rude and sordid exterior, and
+to render what was around him beautiful by a sort of affiliation, or
+reflection from that quality in himself, glancing its white light upon
+it. The Doctor himself was puzzled, and apparently both startled and
+delighted at the perception of these characteristics. Sometimes he
+would make a low, uncouth bow, after his fashion, to the little fellow,
+saying, “Allow me to kiss your hand, my lord!” and little Ned, not quite
+knowing what the grim Doctor meant, yet allowed the favor he asked,
+with a grave and gracious condescension that seemed much to delight the
+suitor. This refusal to recognize or to suspect that the Doctor might be
+laughing at him was a sure token, at any rate, of the lack of one vulgar
+characteristic in little Ned.
+
+In order to afford little Ned every advantage to these natural gifts,
+Doctor Grim nevertheless failed not to provide the best attainable
+instructor for such positive points of a polite education as his own
+fierce criticism, being destructive rather than generative, would not
+suffice for. There was a Frenchman in the town--a M. Le Grand, secretly
+calling himself a Count--who taught the little people, and, indeed, some
+of their elders, the Parisian pronunciation of his own language; and
+likewise dancing (in which he was more of an adept and more successful
+than in the former branch) and fencing: in which, after looking at a
+lesson or two, the grim Doctor was satisfied of his skill. Under his
+instruction, with the stimulus of the Doctor’s praise and criticism, Ned
+soon grew to be the pride of the Frenchman’s school, in both the
+active departments; and the Doctor himself added a further gymnastic
+acquirement (not absolutely necessary, he said, to a gentleman’s
+education, but very desirable to a man perfect at all points) by
+teaching him cudgel-playing and pugilism. In short, in everything that
+related to accomplishments, whether of mind or body, no pains were
+spared with little Ned; but of the utilitarian line of education, then
+almost exclusively adopted, and especially desirable for a fortuneless
+boy like Ned, dependent on a man not wealthy, there was little given.
+
+At first, too, the Doctor paid little attention to the moral and
+religious culture of his pupil; nor did he ever make a system of it. But
+by and by, though with a singular reluctance and kind of bashfulness,
+he began to extend his care to these matters; being drawn into them
+unawares, and possibly perceiving and learning what he taught as he went
+along. One evening, I know not how, he was betrayed into speaking on
+this point, and a sort of inspiration seized him. A vista opened before
+him: handling an immortal spirit, he began to know its requisitions, in
+a degree far beyond what he had conceived them to be when his great
+task was undertaken. His voice grew deep, and had a strange, impressive
+pathos in it; his talk became eloquent with depth of meaning and
+feeling, as he told the boy of the moral dangers of the world, for which
+he was seeking to educate him; and which, he said, presented what looked
+like great triumphs, and yet were the greatest and saddest of defeats.
+He told him that many things that seemed nearest and dearest to the
+heart of man were destructive, eating and gnawing away and corroding
+what was best in him; and what a high, noble, re-creating triumph it
+was when these dark impulses were resisted and overthrown; and how, from
+that epoch, the soul took a new start. He denounced the selfish greed of
+gold, lawless passion, revenge,--and here the grim Doctor broke out into
+a strange passion and zeal of anathema against this deadly sin, making
+a dreadful picture of the ruin that it creates in the heart where it
+establishes itself, and how it makes a corrosive acid of those genial
+juices. Then he told the boy that the condition of all good was, in the
+first place, truth; then, courage; then, justice; then, mercy; out of
+which principles operating upon one another would come all brave, noble,
+high, unselfish actions, and the scorn of all mean ones; and how that
+from such a nature all hatred would fall away, and all good affections
+would be ennobled.
+
+I know not at what point it was, precisely, in these ethical
+instructions that an insight seemed to strike the grim Doctor that
+something more--vastly more--was needed than all he had said; and he
+began, doubtfully, to speak of man’s spiritual nature and its demands,
+and the emptiness of everything which a sense of these demands did not
+pervade, and condense, and weighten into realities. And going on in this
+strain, he soared out of himself and astonished the two children,
+who stood gazing at him, wondering whether it were the Doctor who was
+speaking thus; until some interrupting circumstance seemed to bring him
+back to himself, and he burst into one of his great roars of laughter.
+The inspiration, the strange light whereby he had been transfigured,
+passed out of his face; and there was the uncouth, wild-bearded, rough,
+earthy, passionate man, whom they called Doctor Grim, looking ashamed of
+himself, and trying to turn the whole matter into a jest. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+It was a sad pity that he should have been interrupted, and brought
+into this mocking mood, just when he seemed to have broken away from
+the sinfulness of his hot, evil nature, and to have soared into a region
+where, with all his native characteristics transfigured, he seemed to
+have become an angel in his own likeness. Crusty Hannah, who had been
+drawn to the door of the study by the unusual tones of his voice,--a
+kind of piercing sweetness in it,--always averred that she saw the
+gigantic spider swooping round his head in great crafty circles, and
+clutching, as it were, at his brain with its great claws. But it was the
+old woman’s absurd idea that this hideous insect was the Devil, in that
+ugly guise,--a superstition which deserves absolutely no countenance.
+Nevertheless, though this paroxysm of devotional feeling and insight
+returned no more to the grim Doctor, it was ever after a memorable
+occasion to the two children. It touched that religious chord, in both
+their hearts, which there was no mother to touch; but now it
+vibrated long, and never ceased to vibrate so long as they remained
+together,--nor, perhaps, after they were parted from each other and from
+the grim Doctor. And even then, in those after years, the strange music
+that had been awakened was continued, as it were the echo from harps on
+high. Now, at all events, they made little prayers for themselves, and
+said them at bedtime, generally in secret, sometimes in unison; and they
+read in an old dusty Bible which lay among the grim Doctor’s books; and
+from little heathens, they became Christian children. Doctor Grimshawe
+was perhaps conscious of this result of his involuntary preachment, but
+he never directly noticed it, and did nothing either to efface or deepen
+the impression.
+
+It was singular, however, that, in both the children’s minds, this
+one gush of irresistible religious sentiment, breaking out of the grim
+Doctor’s inner depths, like a sort of holy lava from a volcano that
+usually emitted quite other matter, (such as hot, melted wrath and
+hate,) quite threw out of sight, then and always afterwards, his
+darker characteristics. They remembered him, with faith and love, as a
+religious man, and forgot--what perhaps had made no impression on their
+innocent hearts--all the traits that other people might have called
+devilish. To them the grim Doctor was a saint, even during his lifetime
+and constant intercourse with them, and canonized forever afterwards.
+There is almost always, to be sure, this profound faith, with regard
+to those they love, in childhood; but perhaps, in this instance, the
+children really had a depth of insight that grown people lacked; a
+profound recognition of the bottom of this strange man’s nature, which
+was of such stuff as martyrs and heroic saints might have been made of,
+though here it had been wrought miserably amiss. At any rate, his face
+with the holy awe upon it was what they saw and remembered, when they
+thought of their friend Doctor Grim.
+
+One effect of his zealous and analytic instruction of the boy was very
+perceptible. Heretofore, though enduring him, and occasionally making a
+plaything of him, it may be doubted whether the grim Doctor had really
+any strong affection for the child: it rather seemed as if his strong
+will were forcing him to undertake, and carry sedulously forward, a
+self-imposed task. All that he had done--his redeeming the bright child
+from poverty and nameless degradation, ignorance, and a sordid life
+hopeless of better fortune, and opening to him the whole realm of mighty
+possibilities in an American life--did not imply any love for the little
+individual whom he thus benefited. It had some other motive.
+
+But now, approaching the child in this close, intimate, and helpful way,
+it was very evident that his interest took a tenderer character.
+There was everything in the boy, that a boy could possess, to attract
+affection; he would have been a father’s pride and joy. Doctor
+Grimshawe, indeed, was not his father; but to a person of his character
+this was perhaps no cause of lesser love than if there had been the
+whole of that holy claim of kindred between them. We speak of the
+natural force of blood; we speak of the paternal relation as if it were
+productive of more earnest affection than can exist between two persons,
+one of whom is protective, but unrelated. But there are wild, forcible,
+unrestricted characters, on whom the necessity and even duty of loving
+their own child is a sort of barrier to love. They perhaps do not love
+their own traits, which they recognize in their children; they shrink
+from their own features in the reflection presented by these little
+mirrors. A certain strangeness and unlikeness (such as gives poignancy
+to the love between the sexes) would excite a livelier affection. Be
+this as it may, it is not probable that Doctor Grimshawe would have
+loved a child of his own blood, with the coarse characteristics that
+he knew both in his race and himself, with nearly such fervor as this
+beautiful, slender, yet strenuous, intelligent, refined boy,--with such
+a high-bred air, handling common things with so refined a touch, yet
+grasping them so firmly; throwing a natural grace on all he did. Was he
+not his father,--he that took this fair blossom out of the sordid mud
+in which he must soon have withered and perished? Was not this beautiful
+strangeness, which he so wondered at, the result of his care?
+
+And little Elsie? did the grim Doctor love her as well? Perhaps not,
+for, in the first place, there was a natural tie, though not the
+nearest, between her and Doctor Grimshawe, which made him feel that she
+was cast upon his love: a burden which he acknowledged himself bound to
+undertake. Then, too, there were unutterably painful reminiscences and
+thoughts, that made him gasp for breath, that turned his blood sour,
+that tormented his dreams with nightmares and hellish phantoms; all
+of which were connected with this innocent and happy child; so that,
+cheerful and pleasant as she was, there was to the grim Doctor a little
+fiend playing about his floor and throwing a lurid light on the wall,
+as the shadow of this sun-flickering child. It is certain that there was
+always a pain and horror mixed with his feelings towards Elsie; he
+had to forget himself, as it were, and all that was connected with the
+causes why she came to be, before he could love her. Amid his fondness,
+when he was caressing her upon his knee, pressing her to his rough
+bosom, as he never took the freedom to press Ned, came these hateful
+reminiscences, compelling him to set her down, and corrugating his heavy
+brows as with a pang of fiercely resented, strongly borne pain. Still,
+the child had no doubt contrived to make her way into the great gloomy
+cavern of the grim Doctor’s heart, and stole constantly further and
+further in, carrying a ray of sunshine in her hand as a taper to light
+her way, and illuminate the rude dark pit into which she so fearlessly
+went.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+Doctor Grim [Endnote: 1] had the English faith in open air and daily
+acquaintance with the weather, whatever it might be; and it was his
+habit, not only to send the two children to play, for lack of a better
+place, in the graveyard, but to take them himself on long rambles, of
+which the vicinity of the town afforded a rich variety. It may be that
+the Doctor’s excursions had the wider scope, because both he and the
+children were objects of curiosity in the town, and very much the
+subject of its gossip: so that always, in its streets and lanes, the
+people turned to gaze, and came to their windows and to the doors of
+shops to see this grim, bearded figure, leading along the beautiful
+children each by a hand, with a surly aspect like a bulldog. Their
+remarks were possibly not intended to reach the ears of the party, but
+certainly were not so cautiously whispered but they occasionally did do
+so. The male remarks, indeed, generally died away in the throats that
+uttered them; a circumstance that doubtless saved the utterer from some
+very rough rejoinder at the hands of the Doctor, who had grown up in the
+habit of a very ready and free recourse to his fists, which had a way
+of doubling themselves up seemingly of their own accord. But the shrill
+feminine voices sometimes sent their observations from window to window
+without dread of any such repartee on the part of the subject of them.
+
+“There he goes, the old Spider-witch!” quoth one shrill woman, “with
+those two poor babes that he has caught in his cobweb, and is going to
+feed upon, poor little tender things! The bloody Englishman makes
+free with the dead bodies of our friends and the living ones of our
+children!”
+
+“How red his nose is!” quoth another; “he has pulled at the
+brandy-bottle pretty stoutly to-day, early as it is! Pretty habits those
+children will learn, between the Devil in the shape of a great spider,
+and this devilish fellow in his own shape! It were well that our
+townsmen tarred and feathered the old British wizard!”
+
+And, as he got further off, two or three little blackguard barefoot boys
+shouted shrilly after him,--
+
+                      “Doctor Grim, Doctor Grim,
+                       The Devil wove a web for him!”
+
+being a nonsensical couplet that had been made for the grim Doctor’s
+benefit, and was hooted in the streets, and under his own windows.
+Hearing such remarks and insults, the Doctor would glare round at them
+with red eyes, especially if the brandy-bottle had happened to be much
+in request that day.
+
+Indeed, poor Doctor Grim had met with a fortune which befalls many a
+man with less cause than drew the public attention on this odd humorist;
+for, dwelling in a town which was as yet but a larger village, where
+everybody knew everybody, and claimed the privilege to know and discuss
+their characters, and where there were few topics of public interest to
+take off their attention, a very considerable portion of town talk and
+criticism fell upon him. The old town had a certain provincialism,
+which is less the characteristic of towns in these days, when society
+circulates so freely, than then: besides, it was a very rude epoch, just
+when the country had come through the war of the Revolution, and while
+the surges of that commotion were still seething and swelling, and while
+the habits and morals of every individual in the community still
+felt its influence; and especially the contest was too recent for
+an Englishman to be in very good odor, unless he should cease to be
+English, and become more American than the Americans themselves in
+repudiating British prejudices or principles, habits, mode of thought,
+and everything that distinguishes Britons at home or abroad. As Doctor
+Grim did not see fit to do this, and as, moreover, he was a very
+doubtful, questionable, morose, unamiable old fellow, not seeking to
+make himself liked nor deserving to be so, he was a very unpopular
+person in the town where he had chosen to reside. Nobody thought
+very well of him; the respectable people had heard of his pipe and
+brandy-bottle; the religious community knew that he never showed himself
+at church or meeting; so that he had not that very desirable strength
+(in a society split up into many sects) of being able to rely upon the
+party sympathies of any one of them. The mob hated him with the blind
+sentiment that makes one surly cur hostile to another surly cur. He
+was the most isolated individual to be found anywhere; and, being so
+unsupported, everybody was his enemy.
+
+The town, as it happened, had been pleased to interest itself much in
+this matter of Doctor Grim and the two children, insomuch as he never
+sent them to school, nor came with them to meeting of any kind, but
+was bringing them up ignorant heathen to all appearances, and, as many
+believed, was devoting them in some way to the great spider, to which he
+had bartered his own soul. It had been mooted among the selectmen, the
+fathers of the town, whether their duty did not require them to put the
+children under more suitable guardianship; a measure which, it may be,
+was chiefly hindered by the consideration that, in that case, the cost
+of supporting them would probably be transferred from the grim Doctor’s
+shoulders to those of the community. Nevertheless, they did what they
+could. Maidenly ladies, prim and starched, in one or two instances
+called upon the Doctor--the two children meanwhile being in the
+graveyard at play--to give him Christian advice as to the management of
+his charge. But, to confess the truth, the Doctor’s reception of these
+fair missionaries was not extremely courteous. They were, perhaps,
+partly instigated by a natural feminine desire to see the interior of
+a place about which they had heard much, with its spiders’ webs, its
+strange machines and confusing tools; so, much contrary to crusty
+Hannah’s advice, they persisted in entering. Crusty Hannah listened at
+the door; and it was curious to see the delighted smile which came
+over her dry old visage as the Doctor’s growling, rough voice, after an
+abrupt question or two, and a reply in a thin voice on the part of the
+maiden ladies, grew louder and louder, till the door opened, and forth
+came the benevolent pair in great discomposure. Crusty Hannah averred
+that their caps were much rumpled; but this view of the thing was
+questioned; though it were certain that the Doctor called after them
+downstairs, that, had they been younger and prettier, they would have
+fared worse. A male emissary, who was admitted on the supposition of
+his being a patient, did fare worse; for (the grim Doctor having been
+particularly intimate with the black bottle that afternoon) there
+was, about ten minutes after the visitor’s entrance, a sudden fierce
+upraising of the Doctor’s growl; then a struggle that shook the house;
+and, finally, a terrible rumbling down the stairs, which proved to be
+caused by the precipitate descent of the hapless visitor; who, if he
+needed no assistance of the grim Doctor on his entrance, certainly would
+have been the better for a plaster or two after his departure.
+
+Such were the terms on which Doctor Grimshawe now stood with his adopted
+townspeople; and if we consider the dull little town to be full of
+exaggerated stories about the Doctor’s oddities, many of them forged,
+all retailed in an unfriendly spirit; misconceptions of a character
+which, in its best and most candidly interpreted aspects, was
+sufficiently amenable to censure; surmises taken for certainties;
+superstitions--the genuine hereditary offspring of the frame of public
+mind which produced the witchcraft delusion--all fermenting together;
+and all this evil and uncharitableness taking the delusive hue of
+benevolent interest in two helpless children;--we may partly judge what
+was the odium in which the grim Doctor dwelt, and amid which he walked.
+The horrid suspicion, too, countenanced by his abode in the corner of
+the graveyard, affording the terrible Doctor such facilities for making
+free, like a ghoul as he was, with the relics of mortality from the
+earliest progenitor to the man killed yesterday by the Doctor’s own
+drugs, was not likely to improve his reputation.
+
+He had heretofore contented himself with, at most, occasionally shaking
+his stick at his assailants; but this day the black bottle had imparted,
+it may be, a little more fire than ordinary to his blood; and besides,
+an unlucky urchin happened to take particularly good aim with a mud
+ball, which took effect right in the midst of the Doctor’s bushy beard,
+and, being of a soft consistency, forthwith became incorporated with
+it. At this intolerable provocation the grim Doctor pursued the little
+villain, amid a shower of similar missiles from the boy’s playmates,
+caught him as he was escaping into a back yard, dragged him into the
+middle of the street, and, with his stick, proceeded to give him his
+merited chastisement.
+
+But, hereupon, it was astonishing how sudden commotion flashed up like
+gunpowder along the street, which, except for the petty shrieks and
+laughter of a few children, was just before so quiet. Forth out of every
+window in those dusky, mean wooden houses were thrust heads of women
+old and young; forth out of every door and other avenue, and as if
+they started up from the middle of the street, or out of the unpaved
+sidewalks, rushed fierce avenging forms, threatening at full yell to
+take vengeance on the grim Doctor; who still, with that fierce dark
+face of his,--his muddy beard all flying abroad, dirty and foul, his hat
+fallen off, his red eyes flashing fire,--was belaboring the poor hinder
+end of the unhappy urchin, paying off upon that one part of the boy’s
+frame the whole score which he had to settle with the rude boys of the
+town; giving him at once the whole whipping which he had deserved every
+day of his life, and not a stroke of which he had yet received. Need
+enough there was, no doubt, that somebody should interfere with such
+grim and immitigable justice; and certainly the interference was prompt,
+and promised to be effectual.
+
+“Down with the old tyrant! Thrash him! Hang him! Tar and feather the
+viper’s fry! the wizard! the body-snatcher!” bellowed the mob, one
+member of which was raving with delirium tremens, and another was a
+madman just escaped from bedlam.
+
+It is unaccountable where all this mischievous, bloodthirsty multitude
+came from,--how they were born into that quietness in such a moment
+of time! What had they been about heretofore? Were they waiting in
+readiness for this crisis, and keeping themselves free from other
+employment till it should come to pass? Had they been created for
+the moment, or were they fiends sent by Satan in the likeness of a
+blackguard population? There you might see the offscourings of the
+recently finished war,--old soldiers, rusty, wooden-legged: there,
+sailors, ripe for any kind of mischief; there, the drunken population
+of a neighboring grogshop, staggering helter-skelter to the scene, and
+tumbling over one another at the Doctor’s feet. There came the father
+of the punished urchin, who had never shown heretofore any care for his
+street-bred progeny, but who now came pale with rage, armed with a pair
+of tongs; and with him the mother, flying like a fury, with her cap
+awry, and clutching a broomstick, as if she were a witch just alighted.
+Up they rushed from cellar doors, and dropped down from chamber windows;
+all rushing upon the Doctor, but overturning and thwarting themselves by
+their very multitude. For, as good Doctor Grim levelled the first that
+came within reach of his fist, two or three of the others tumbled
+over him and lay grovelling at his feet; the Doctor meanwhile having
+retreated into the angle between two houses. Little Ned, with a valor
+which did him the more credit inasmuch as it was exercised in spite of
+a good deal of childish trepidation, as his pale face indicated,
+brandished his fists by the Doctor’s side; and little Elsie did what any
+woman may,--that is, screeched in Doctor Grim’s behalf with full stretch
+of lungs. Meanwhile the street boys kept up a shower of mud balls,
+many of which hit the Doctor, while the rest were distributed upon his
+assailants, heightening their ferocity.
+
+“Seize the old scoundrel! the villain! the Tory! the dastardly
+Englishman! Hang him in the web of his own devilish spider,--‘t is long
+enough! Tar and feather him! tar and feather him!”
+
+It was certainly one of those crises that show a man how few real
+friends he has, and the tendency of mankind to stand aside, at least,
+and let a poor devil fight his own troubles, if not assist them in
+their attack. Here you might have seen a brother physician of the
+grim Doctor’s greatly tickled at his plight: or a decorous, powdered,
+ruffle-shirted dignitary, one of the weighty men of the town, standing
+at a neighbor’s corner to see what would come of it.
+
+“He is not a respectable man, I understand, this Grimshawe,--a quack,
+intemperate, always in these scuffles: let him get out as he may!”
+
+And then comes a deacon of one of the churches, and several
+church-members, who, hearing a noise, set out gravely and decorously to
+see what was going forward in a Christian community.
+
+“Ah! it is that irreligious and profane Grimshawe, who never goes to
+meeting. We wash our hands of him!”
+
+And one of the selectmen said,--
+
+“Surely this common brawler ought not to have the care of these nice,
+sweet children; something must be done about it; and when the man is
+sober, he must be talked to!”
+
+Alas! it is a hard case with a man who lives upon his own bottom and
+responsibility, making himself no allies, sewing himself on to nobody’s
+skirts, insulating himself,--hard, when his trouble comes; and so poor
+Doctor Grimshawe was like to find it.
+
+He had succeeded by dint of good skill, and some previous practice at
+quarter-staff, in keeping his assailants at bay, though not without some
+danger on his own part; but their number, their fierceness, and the more
+skilled assault of some among them must almost immediately have been
+successful, when the Doctor’s part was strengthened by an unexpected
+ally. This was a person [Endnote: 2] of tall, slight figure, who,
+without lifting his hands to take part in the conflict, thrust himself
+before the Doctor, and turned towards the assailants, crying,--
+
+“Christian men, what would you do? Peace,--peace!”
+
+His so well intended exhortation took effect, indeed, in a certain way,
+but not precisely as might have been wished: for a blow, aimed at Doctor
+Grim, took effect on the head of this man, who seemed to have no sort
+of skill or alacrity at defending himself, any more than at making
+an assault; for he never lifted his hands, but took the blow as
+unresistingly as if it had been kindly meant, and it levelled him
+senseless on the ground.
+
+Had the mob really been enraged for any strenuous cause, this incident
+would have operated merely as a preliminary whet to stimulate them to
+further bloodshed. But, as they were mostly actuated only by a natural
+desire for mischief, they were about as well satisfied with what had
+been done as if the Doctor himself were the victim. And besides, the
+fathers and respectabilities of the town, who had seen this mishap from
+afar, now began to put forward, crying out, “Keep the peace! keep the
+peace! A riot! a riot!” and other such cries as suited the emergency;
+and the crowd vanished more speedily than it had congregated, leaving
+the Doctor and the two children alone beside the fallen victim of a
+quarrel not his own. Not to dwell too long on this incident, the Doctor,
+laying hold of the last of his enemies, after the rest had taken to
+their heels, ordered him sternly to stay and help him bear the man, whom
+he had helped to murder, to his house.
+
+“It concerns you, friend; for, if he dies, you hang to a dead
+certainty!”
+
+And this was done accordingly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+About an hour thereafter there lay on a couch that had been hastily
+prepared in the study a person of singularly impressive presence: a
+thin, mild-looking man, with a peculiar look of delicacy and natural
+refinement about him, although he scarcely appeared to be technically
+and as to worldly position what we call a gentleman; plain in dress and
+simple in manner, not giving the idea of remarkable intellectual gifts,
+but with a kind of spiritual aspect, fair, clear complexion, gentle
+eyes, still somewhat clouded and obscured by the syncope into which a
+blow on the head had thrown him. He looked middle-aged, and yet there
+was a kind of childlike, simple expression, which, unless you looked
+at him with the very purpose of seeing the traces of time in his face,
+would make you suppose him much younger.
+
+“And how do you find yourself now, my good fellow?” asked Doctor
+Grimshawe, putting forth his hand to grasp that of the stranger, and
+giving it a good, warm shake. “None the worse, I should hope?” [Endnote:
+1.]
+
+“Not much the worse,” answered the stranger: “not at all, it may be.
+There is a pleasant dimness and uncertainty in my mode of being. I am
+taken off my feet, as it were, and float in air, with a faint delight in
+my sensations. The grossness, the roughness, the too great angularity of
+the actual, is removed from me. It is a state that I like well. It may
+be, this is the way that the dead feel when they awake in another state
+of being, with a dim pleasure, after passing through the brief darkness
+of death. It is very pleasant.”
+
+He answered dreamily, and sluggishly, reluctantly, as if there were a
+sense of repose in him which he disliked to break by putting any of
+his sensations into words. His voice had a remarkable sweetness and
+gentleness, though lacking in depth of melody.
+
+“Here, take this,” said the Doctor, who had been preparing some kind of
+potion in a teaspoon: it may have been a dose of his famous preparation
+of spider’s web, for aught I know, the operation of which was said to
+be of a soothing influence, causing a delightful silkiness of sensation;
+but I know not whether it was considered good for concussions of the
+brain, such as it is to be supposed the present patient had undergone.
+“Take this: it will do you good; and here I drink your very good health
+in something that will do me good.”
+
+So saying, the grim Doctor quaffed off a tumbler of brandy and water.
+
+“How sweet a contrast,” murmured the stranger, “between that scene of
+violence and this great peace that has come over me! It is as when one
+can say, I have fought the good fight.”
+
+“You are right,” said the Doctor, with what would have been one of his
+deep laughs, but which he modified in consideration of his patient’s
+tenderness of brain. “We both of us fought a good fight; for though you
+struck no actual stroke, you took them as unflinchingly as ever I saw
+a man, and so turned the fortune of the battle better than if you smote
+with a sledge-hammer. Two things puzzle me in the affair. First, whence
+came my assailants, all in that moment of time, unless Satan let loose
+out of the infernal regions a synod of fiends, hoping thus to get a
+triumph over me. And secondly, whence came you, my preserver, unless you
+are an angel, and dropped down from the sky.”
+
+“No,” answered the stranger, with quiet simplicity. “I was passing
+through the street to my little school, when I saw your peril, and felt
+it my duty to expostulate with the people.”
+
+“Well,” said the grim Doctor, “come whence you will, you did an angel’s
+office for me, and I shall do what an earthly man may to requite it.
+There, we will talk no more for the present.”
+
+He hushed up the children, who were already, of their own accord,
+walking on tiptoe and whispering, and he himself even went so far as
+to refrain from the usual incense of his pipe, having observed that the
+stranger, who seemed to be of a very delicate organization, had seemed
+sensible of the disagreeable effect on the atmosphere of the room. The
+restraint lasted, however, only till (in the course of the day) crusty
+Hannah had fitted up a little bedroom on the opposite side of the entry,
+to which she and the grim Doctor moved the stranger, who, though tall,
+they observed was of no great weight and substance,--the lightest man,
+the Doctor averred, for his size, that ever he had handled.
+
+Every possible care was taken of him, and in a day or two he was able
+to walk into the study again, where he sat gazing at the sordidness
+and unneatness of the apartment, the strange festoons and drapery of
+spiders’ webs, the gigantic spider himself, and at the grim Doctor, so
+shaggy, grizzly, and uncouth, in the midst of these surroundings, with a
+perceptible sense of something very strange in it all. His mild, gentle
+regard dwelt too on the two beautiful children, evidently with a sense
+of quiet wonder how they should be here, and altogether a sense of
+their unfitness; they, meanwhile, stood a little apart, looking at him,
+somewhat disturbed and awed, as children usually are, by a sense that
+the stranger was not perfectly well, that he had been injured, and so
+set apart from the rest of the world.
+
+“Will you come to me, little one?” said he, holding out a delicate hand
+to Elsie.
+
+Elsie came to his side without any hesitation, though without any of the
+rush that accompanied her advent to those whom she affected. “And you,
+my little man,” added the stranger, quietly, and looking to Ned, who
+likewise willingly approached, and, shaking him by the offered hand, let
+it go again, but continued standing by his side.
+
+“Do you know, my little friends,” said the stranger, “that it is my
+business in life to instruct such little people as you?”
+
+“Do they obey you well, sir?” asked Ned, perhaps conscious of a want of
+force in the person whom he addressed.
+
+The stranger smiled faintly. “Not too well,” said he. “That has been my
+difficulty; for I have moral and religious objections, and also a great
+horror, to the use of the rod, and I have not been gifted with a
+harsh voice and a stern brow; so that, after a while, my little people
+sometimes get the better of me. The present generation of men is too
+gross for gentle treatment.”
+
+“You are quite right,” quoth Doctor Grimshawe, who had been observing
+this little scene, and trying to make out, from the mutual deportment
+of the stranger and the two children, what sort of man this fair, quiet
+stranger was, with his gentleness and weakness,--characteristics that
+were not attractive to himself, yet in which he acknowledged, as he
+saw them here, a certain charm; nor did he know, scarcely, whether to
+despise the one in whom he saw them, or to yield to a strange sense of
+reverence. So he watched the children, with an indistinct idea of being
+guided by them. “You are quite right: the world now--and always before,
+as far as I ever heard--requires a great deal of brute force, a great
+deal of animal food and brandy in the man that is to make an impression
+on it.”
+
+The convalescence of the stranger--he gave his name as
+Colcord--proceeded favorably; for the Doctor remarked that, delicate as
+his system was, it had a certain purity,--a simple healthfulness that
+did not run into disease as stronger constitutions might. It did not
+apparently require much to crush down such a being as this,--not much
+unkindly breath to blow out the taper of his life,--and yet, if not
+absolutely killed, there was a certain aptness to keep alive in him not
+readily to be overcome.
+
+No sooner was he in a condition so to do, than he went forth to look
+after the little school that he had spoken of, but soon came back,
+announcing in a very quiet and undisturbed way that, during his
+withdrawal from duty, the scholars had been distributed to other
+instructors, and consequently he was without place or occupation
+[Endnotes: 2, 3, 4.]
+
+“A hard case,” said the Doctor, flinging a gruff curse at those who had
+so readily deserted the poor schoolmaster.
+
+“Not so hard,” replied Colcord. “These little fellows are an unruly set,
+born of parents who have led rough lives,--here in battle time, too,
+with the spirit of battle in them,--therefore rude and contentious
+beyond my power to cope with them. I have been taught, long ago,” he
+added, with a peaceful smile, “that my business in life does not lie
+with grown-up and consolidated men and women; and so, not to be useless
+in my day, and to gain the little that my sustenance requires, I have
+thought to deal with children. But even for this I lack force.”
+
+“I dare say,” said the Doctor, with a modified laugh. “Little devils
+they are, harder to deal with than men. Well, I am glad of your failure
+for one reason, and of your being thrown out of business; because
+we shall have the benefit of you the longer. Here is this boy to be
+instructed. I have made some attempts myself; but having no art of
+instructing, no skill, no temper I suppose, I make but an indifferent
+hand at it: and besides I have other business that occupies my thoughts.
+Take him in hand, if you like, and the girl for company. No matter
+whether you teach her anything, unless you happen to be acquainted with
+needlework.”
+
+“I will talk with the children,” said Colcord, “and see if I am
+likely to do good with them. The lad, I see, has a singular spirit of
+aspiration and pride,--no ungentle pride,--but still hard to cope with.
+I will see. The little girl is a most comfortable child.”
+
+“You have read the boy as if you had his heart in your hand,” said
+the Doctor, rather surprised. “I could not have done it better myself,
+though I have known him all but from the egg.”
+
+Accordingly, the stranger, who had been thrust so providentially into
+this odd and insulated little community, abode with them, without more
+words being spoken on the subject: for it seemed to all concerned
+a natural arrangement, although, on both parts, they were mutually
+sensible of something strange in the companionship thus brought about.
+To say the truth, it was not easy to imagine two persons apparently less
+adapted to each other’s society than the rough, uncouth, animal Doctor,
+whose faith was in his own right arm, so full of the old Adam as he was,
+so sturdily a hater, so hotly impulsive, so deep, subtle, and crooked,
+so obstructed by his animal nature, so given to his pipe and black
+bottle, so wrathful and pugnacious and wicked,--and this mild spiritual
+creature, so milky, with so unforceful a grasp; and it was singular to
+see how they stood apart and eyed each other, each tacitly acknowledging
+a certain merit and kind of power, though not well able to appreciate
+its value. The grim Doctor’s kindness, however, and gratitude, had
+been so thoroughly awakened, that he did not feel the disgust that he
+probably otherwise might at what seemed the mawkishness of Colcord’s
+character; his want, morally speaking, of bone and muscle; his
+fastidiousness of character, the essence of which it seemed to be to
+bear no stain upon it; otherwise it must die.
+
+On Colcord’s part there was a good deal of evidence to be detected, by
+a nice observer, that he found it difficult to put up with the Doctor’s
+coarse peculiarities, whether physical or moral. His animal indulgences
+of appetite struck him with wonder and horror; his coarse expressions,
+his free indulgence of wrath, his sordid and unclean habits; the dust,
+the cobwebs, the monster that dangled from the ceiling; his pipe,
+diffusing its fragrance through the house, and showing, by the plainest
+and simplest proof, how we all breathe one another’s breath, nice and
+proud as we may be, kings and daintiest ladies breathing the air that
+has already served to inflate a beggar’s lungs. He shrank, too, from
+the rude manhood of the Doctor’s character, with its human warmth,--an
+element which he seemed not to possess in his own character. He was
+capable only of gentle and mild regard,--that was his warmest affection;
+and the warmest, too, that he was capable of exciting in others. So that
+he was doomed as much apparently as the Doctor himself to be a lonely
+creature, without any very deep companionship in the world, though not
+incapable, when he, by some rare chance, met a soul distantly akin, of
+holding a certain high spiritual communion. With the children, however,
+he succeeded in establishing some good and available relations; his
+simple and passionless character coincided with their simplicity, and
+their as yet unawakened passions: they appeared to understand him better
+than the Doctor ever succeeded in doing. He touched springs and elements
+in the nature of both that had never been touched till now, and that
+sometimes made a sweet, high music. But this was rarely; and as far as
+the general duties of an instructor went, they did not seem to be very
+successfully performed. Something was cultivated; the spiritual
+germ grew, it might be; but the children, and especially Ned,
+were intuitively conscious of a certain want of substance in the
+instructor,--a something of earthly bulk; a too etherealness. But his
+connection with our story does not lie in any excellence, or lack of
+excellence, that he showed as an instructor, and we merely mention these
+things as illustrating more or less his characteristics.
+
+The grim Doctor’s curiosity was somewhat piqued by what he could see of
+the schoolmaster’s character, and he was desirous of finding out what
+sort of a life such a man could have led in a world which he himself had
+found so rough a one; through what difficulties he had reached middle
+age without absolutely vanishing away in his contact with more positive
+substances than himself; how the world had given him a subsistence, if
+indeed he recognized anything more dense than fragrance, like a certain
+people whom Pliny mentioned in Africa,--a point, in fact, which the
+grim Doctor denied, his performance at table being inappreciable, and
+confined, at least almost entirely, to a dish of boiled rice, which
+crusty Hannah set before him, preparing it, it might be, with a sympathy
+of her East Indian part towards him.
+
+Well, Doctor Grimshawe easily got at what seemed to be all of the facts
+of Colcord’s life; how that he was a New-Englander, the descendant of an
+ancient race of settlers, the last of them; for, once pretty numerous
+in their quarter of the country, they seemed to have been dying
+out,--exhaling from the earth, and passing to some other region.
+
+“No wonder,” said the Doctor bluffly. “You have been letting slip the
+vital principle, if you are a fair specimen of the race. You do not
+clothe yourself in substance. Your souls are not coated sufficiently.
+Beef and brandy would have saved you. You have exhaled for lack of
+them.”
+
+The schoolmaster shook his head, and probably thought his earthly
+salvation and sustenance not worth buying at such a cost. The remainder
+of his history was not tangible enough to afford a narrative. There
+seemed, from what he said, to have always been a certain kind of
+refinement in his race, a nicety of conscience, a nicety of habit, which
+either was in itself a want of force, or was necessarily connected with
+it, and which, the Doctor silently thought, had culminated in the person
+before him.
+
+“It was always in us,” continued Colcord, with a certain pride which
+people generally feel in their ancestral characteristics, be they good
+or evil. “We had a tradition among us of our first emigrant, and the
+causes that brought him to the New World; and it was said that he had
+suffered so much, before quitting his native shores, so painful had been
+his track, that always afterwards on the forest leaves of this land his
+foot left a print of blood wherever he trod.” [Endnote: 5.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+“A print of blood!” said the grim Doctor, breaking his pipe-stem by some
+sudden spasm in his gripe of it. “Pooh! the devil take the pipe! A very
+strange story that! Pray how was it?” [Endnote: 1.]
+
+“Nay, it is but a very dim legend,” answered the schoolmaster: “although
+there are old yellow papers and parchments, I remember, in my father’s
+possession, that had some reference to this man, too, though there was
+nothing in them about the bloody footprints. But our family legend is,
+that this man was of a good race, in the time of Charles the First,
+originally Papists, but one of them--the second you, our legend
+says--was of a milder, sweeter cast than the rest, who were fierce
+and bloody men, of a hard, strong nature; but he partook most of his
+mother’s character. This son had been one of the earliest Quakers,
+converted by George Fox; and moreover there had been love between him
+and a young lady of great beauty and an heiress, whom likewise the
+eldest son of the house had designed to make his wife. And these
+brothers, cruel men, caught their innocent brother and kept him in
+confinement long in his own native home--”
+
+“How?” asked the Doctor. “Why did not he appeal to the laws?”
+
+“Our legend says,” replied the schoolmaster, “only that he was kept in a
+chamber that was forgotten.” [Endnote: 2.]
+
+“Very strange that!” quoth the Doctor. “He was sold by his brethren.”
+
+The schoolmaster went on to tell, with much shuddering, how a Jesuit
+priest had been mixed up with this wretched business, and there had been
+a scheme at once religious and political to wrest the estate and the
+lovely lady from the fortunate heir; and how this grim Italian priest
+had instigated them to use a certain kind of torture with the poor heir,
+and how he had suffered from this; but one night, when they left
+him senseless, he contrived to make his escape from that cruel home,
+bleeding as he went; and how, by some action of his imagination,--his
+sense of the cruelty and hideousness of such treatment at his brethren’s
+hands, and in the holy name of his religion,--his foot, which had been
+crushed by their cruelty, bled as he went, and that blood had never been
+stanched. And thus he had come to America, and after many wanderings,
+and much track of blood along rough ways, to New England. [Endnote: 3.]
+
+“And what became of his beloved?” asked the grim Doctor, who was puffing
+away at a fresh pipe with a very queer aspect.
+
+“She died in England,” replied the schoolmaster. “And before her death,
+by some means or other, they say that she found means to send him a
+child, the offspring of their marriage, and from that child our race
+descended. And they say, too, that she sent him a key to a coffin, in
+which was locked up a great treasure. But we have not the key. But he
+never went back to his own country; and being heart-broken, and sick
+and weary of the world and its pomps and vanities, he died here, after
+suffering much persecution likewise from the Puritans. For his peaceful
+religion was accepted nowhere.”
+
+“Of all legends,--all foolish legends,” quoth the Doctor, wrathfully,
+with a face of a dark blood-red color, so much was his anger and
+contempt excited, “and of all absurd heroes of a legend, I never heard
+the like of this! Have you the key?”
+
+“No; nor have I ever heard of it,” answered the schoolmaster.
+
+“But you have some papers?”
+
+“They existed once: perhaps are still recoverable by search,” said the
+schoolmaster. “My father knew of them.”
+
+“A foolish legend,” reiterated the Doctor. “It is strange how human
+folly strings itself on to human folly, as a story originally false and
+foolish grows older.”
+
+He got up and walked about the room, with hasty and irregular strides
+and a prodigious swinging of his ragged dressing-gown, which swept away
+as many cobwebs as it would take a week to reproduce. After a few turns,
+as if to change the subject, the Doctor asked the schoolmaster if he had
+any taste for pictures, and drew his attention to the portrait which
+has been already mentioned,--the figure in antique sordid garb, with a
+halter round his neck, and the expression in his face which the Doctor
+and the two children had interpreted so differently. Colcord, who
+probably knew nothing about pictures, looked at it at first merely from
+the gentle and cool complaisance of his character; but becoming absorbed
+in the contemplation, stood long without speaking; until the Doctor,
+looking in his face, perceived his eyes were streaming with tears.
+
+“What are you crying about?” said he, gruffly.
+
+“I don’t know,” said the schoolmaster quietly. “But there is something
+in this picture that affects me inexpressibly; so that, not being a man
+passionate by nature, I have hardly ever been so moved as now!”
+
+“Very foolish,” muttered the Doctor, resuming his strides about the
+room. “I am ashamed of a grown man that can cry at a picture, and can’t
+tell the reason why.”
+
+After a few more turns he resumed his easy-chair and his tumbler,
+and, looking upward, beckoned to his pet spider, which came dangling
+downward, great parti-colored monster that he was, and swung about
+his master’s head in hideous conference as it seemed; a sight that so
+distressed the schoolmaster, or shocked his delicate taste, that he
+went out, and called the two children to take a walk with him, with
+the purpose of breathing air that was neither infected with spiders nor
+graves.
+
+After his departure, Doctor Grimshawe seemed even more disturbed than
+during his presence: again he strode about the study; then sat down with
+his hands on his knees, looking straight into the fire, as if it imaged
+the seething element of his inner man, where burned hot projects, smoke,
+heat, blackness, ashes, a smouldering of old thoughts, a blazing up
+of new; casting in the gold of his mind, as Aaron did that of the
+Israelites, and waiting to see what sort of a thing would come out of
+the furnace. The children coming in from their play, he spoke harshly to
+them, and eyed little Ned with a sort of savageness, as if he meant to
+eat him up, or do some other dreadful deed: and when little Elsie came
+with her usual frankness to his knee, he repelled her in such a way that
+she shook her little hand at him, saying, “Naughty Doctor Grim, what has
+come to you?”
+
+Through all that day, by some subtle means or other, the whole household
+knew that something was amiss; and nobody in it was comfortable. It was
+like a spell of weather; like the east wind; like an epidemic in the
+air, that would not let anything be comfortable or contented,--this
+pervading temper of the Doctor. Crusty Hannah knew it in the kitchen:
+even those who passed the house must have known it somehow or other, and
+have felt a chill, an irritation, an influence on the nerves, as they
+passed. The spiders knew it, and acted as they were wont to do in
+stormy weather. The schoolmaster, when he returned from his walk, seemed
+likewise to know it, and made himself secure and secret, keeping in his
+own room, except at dinner, when he ate his rice in silence, without
+looking towards the Doctor, and appeared before him no more till
+evening, when the grim Doctor summoned him into the study, after sending
+the two children to bed.
+
+“Sir,” began the Doctor, “you have spoken of some old documents in your
+possession relating to the English descent of your ancestors. I have a
+curiosity to see these documents. Where are they?” [Endnote: 4.]
+
+“I have them about my person,” said the schoolmaster; and he produced
+from his pocket a bundle of old yellow papers done up in a parchment
+cover, tied with a piece of white cord, and presented them to Doctor
+Grimshawe, who looked over them with interest. They seemed to consist of
+letters, genealogical lists, certified copies of entries in registers,
+things which must have been made out by somebody who knew more of
+business than this ethereal person in whose possession they now were.
+The Doctor looked at them with considerable attention, and at last did
+them hastily up in the bundle again, and returned them to the owner.
+
+“Have you any idea what is now the condition of the family to whom these
+papers refer?” asked he.
+
+“None whatever,--none for almost a hundred years,” said the
+schoolmaster. “About that time ago, I have heard a vague story that one
+of my ancestors went to the old country and saw the place. But, you see,
+the change of name has effectually covered us from view; and I feel that
+our true name is that which my ancestor assumed when he was driven forth
+from the home of his fathers, and that I have nothing to do with any
+other. I have no views on the estate,--none whatever. I am not so
+foolish and dreamy.”
+
+“Very right,” said the Doctor. “Nothing is more foolish than to follow
+up such a pursuit as this, against all the vested interests of two
+hundred years, which of themselves have built up an impenetrably strong
+allegation against you. They harden into stone, in England, these years,
+and become indestructible, instead of melting away as they do in this
+happy country.”
+
+“It is not a matter of interest with me,” replied the schoolmaster.
+
+“Very right,--very right!” repeated the grim Doctor.
+
+But something was evidently amiss with him this evening. It was
+impossible to feel easy and comfortable in contact with him: if you
+looked in his face, there was the red, lurid glare of his eyes; meeting
+you fiercely and craftily as ever: sometimes he bit his lip and frowned
+in an awful manner. Once, he burst out into an awful fit of swearing,
+for no good reason, or any reason whatever that he explained, or that
+anybody could tell. Again, for no more suitable reason, he uplifted his
+stalwart arm, and smote a heavy blow with his fist upon the oak table,
+making the tumbler and black bottle leap up, and damaging, one would
+think, his own knuckles. Then he rose up, and resumed his strides about
+the room. He paused before the portrait before mentioned; then resumed
+his heavy, quick, irregular tread, swearing under his breath; and
+you would imagine, from what you heard, that all his thoughts and the
+movement of his mind were a blasphemy. Then again--but this was only
+once--he heaved a deep, ponderous sigh, that seemed to come up in spite
+of him, out of his depths, an exhalation of deep suffering, as if some
+convulsion had given it a passage to upper air, instead of its being
+hidden, as it generally was, by accumulated rubbish of later time heaped
+above it.
+
+This latter sound appealed to something within the simple schoolmaster,
+who had been witnessing the demeanor of the Doctor, like a being
+looking from another sphere into the trouble of the mortal one; a being
+incapable of passion, observing the mute, hard struggle of one in its
+grasp.
+
+“Friend,” said he at length, “thou hast something on thy mind.”
+
+“Aye,” said the grim Doctor, coming to a stand before his chair. “You
+see that? Can you see as well what it is?”
+
+“Some stir and writhe of something in the past that troubles you, as if
+you had kept a snake for many years in your bosom, and stupefied it
+with brandy, and now it awakes again, and troubles you with bites and
+stings.”
+
+“What sort of a man do you think me?” asked the Doctor.
+
+“I cannot tell,” said the schoolmaster. “The sympathies of my nature are
+not those that should give me knowledge of such men.”
+
+“Am I, think you,” continued the grim Doctor, “a man capable of great
+crime?”
+
+“A great one, if any,” said Colcord; “a great good, likewise, it might
+be.”
+
+“What would I be likely to do,” asked Doctor Grim, “supposing I had
+a darling purpose, to the accomplishment of which I had given my
+soul,--yes, my soul,--my success in life, my days and nights of thought,
+my years of time, dwelling upon it, pledging myself to it, until at
+last I had grown to love the burden of it, and not to regret my own
+degradation? I, a man of strongest will. What would I do, if this were
+to be resisted?”
+
+“I do not conceive of the force of will shaping out my ways,” said the
+schoolmaster. “I walk gently along and take the path that opens before
+me.”
+
+“Ha! ha! ha!” shouted the grim Doctor, with one of his portentous
+laughs. “So do we all, in spite of ourselves; and sometimes the path
+comes to a sudden ending!” And he resumed his drinking.
+
+The schoolmaster looked at him with wonder, and a kind of shuddering, at
+something so unlike himself; but probably he very imperfectly estimated
+the forces that were at work within this strange being, and how
+dangerous they made him. He imputed it, a great deal, to the brandy,
+which he had kept drinking in such inordinate quantities; whereas it is
+probable that this had a soothing, emollient effect, as far as it went,
+on the Doctor’s emotions; a sort of like to like, that he instinctively
+felt to be a remedy, But in truth it was difficult to see these two
+human creatures together, without feeling their incompatibility; without
+having a sense that one must be hostile to the other. The schoolmaster,
+through his fine instincts, doubtless had a sense of this, and sat
+gazing at the lurid, wrathful figure of the Doctor, in a sort of trance
+and fascination: not able to stir; bewildered by the sight of the great
+spider and other surroundings; and this strange, uncouth fiend, who had
+always been abhorrent to him,--he had a kind of curiosity in it, waited
+to see what would come of it, but felt it to be an unnatural state to
+him. And again the grim Doctor came and stood before him, prepared to
+make another of those strange utterances with which he had already so
+perplexed him.
+
+That night--that midnight--it was rumored through the town that one
+of the inhabitants, going home late along the street that led by the
+graveyard, saw the grim Doctor standing by the open window of the study
+behind the elm tree, in his old dressing-gown, chill as was the night,
+and flinging his arms abroad wildly into the darkness, and muttering
+like the growling of a tempest, with occasional vociferations that grew
+even shrill with passion. The listener, though affrighted, could not
+resist an impulse to pause, and attempt overhearing something that might
+let him into the secret counsels of this strange wild man, whom the town
+held in such awe and antipathy; to learn, perhaps, what was the great
+spider, and whether he were summoning the dead out of their graves.
+However, he could make nothing out of what he overheard, except it were
+fragmentary curses, of a dreadful character, which the Doctor brought up
+with might and main out of the depths of his soul, and flung them forth,
+burning hot, aimed at what, and why, and to what practical end, it
+was impossible to say; but as necessarily as a volcano, in a state of
+eruption, sends forth boiling lava, sparkling and scintillating stones,
+and a sulphurous atmosphere, indicative of its inward state. [Endnote:
+5.]
+
+Dreading lest some one of these ponderous anathemas should alight,
+reason or none, on his own head, the man crept away, and whispered the
+thing to his cronies, from whom it was communicated to the townspeople
+at large, and so became one of many stories circulating with reference
+to our grim hero, which, if not true to the fact, had undoubtedly
+a degree of appositeness to his character, of which they were the
+legitimate flowers and symbols. If the anathemas took no other effect,
+they seemed to have produced a very remarkable one on the unfortunate
+elm tree, through the naked branches of which the Doctor discharged this
+fiendish shot. For, the next spring, when April came, no tender leaves
+budded forth, no life awakened there; and never again, on that old elm,
+widely as its roots were imbedded among the dead of many years, was
+there rustling bough in the summer time, or the elm’s early golden
+boughs in September; and after waiting till another spring to give it
+a fair chance of reviving, it was cut down and made into coffins, and
+burnt on the sexton’s hearth. The general opinion was that the grim
+Doctor’s awful profanity had blasted that tree, fostered, as it had
+been, on grave-mould of Puritans. In Lancashire they tell of a similar
+anathema. It had a very frightful effect, it must be owned, this idea of
+a man cherishing emotions in his breast of so horrible a nature that
+he could neither tell them to any human being, nor keep them in their
+plenitude and intensity within the breast where they had their germ,
+and so was forced to fling them forth upon the night, to pollute and put
+fear into the atmosphere, and that people should breathe-in somewhat
+of horror from an unknown source, and be affected with nightmare, and
+dreams in which they were startled at their own wickedness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+At the breakfast-table the next morning, however, appeared Doctor
+Grimshawe, wearing very much the same aspect of an uncombed, unshorn,
+unbrushed, odd sort of a pagan as at other times, and making no
+difference in his breakfast, except that he poured a pretty large dose
+of brandy into his cup of tea; a thing, however, by no means unexampled
+or very unusual in his history. There were also the two children,
+fresher than the morning itself, rosy creatures, with newly scrubbed
+cheeks, made over again for the new day, though the old one had left no
+dust upon them;[Endnote: 1] laughing with one another, flinging their
+little jokes about the table, and expecting that the Doctor might, as
+was often his wont, set some ponderous old English joke trundling round
+among the breakfast cups; eating the corn-cakes which crusty Hannah,
+with the aboriginal part of her, had a knack of making in a peculiar and
+exquisite fashion. But there was an empty chair at table; one cup, one
+little jug of milk, and another of pure water, with no guest to partake
+of them.
+
+“Where is the schoolmaster?” said Ned, pausing as he was going to take
+his seat.
+
+“Yes, Doctor Grim?” said little Elsie.
+
+“He has overslept himself for once,” quoth Doctor Grim gruffly; “a
+strange thing, too, for a man whose victuals and drink are so light as
+the schoolmaster’s. The fiend take me if I thought he had mortal mould
+enough in him ever to go to sleep at all; though he is but a kind of
+dream-stuff in his widest-awake state. Hannah, you bronze jade, call the
+schoolmaster to come to breakfast.”
+
+Hannah departed on her errand, and was heard knocking at the door of
+the schoolmaster’s chamber several times, till the Doctor shouted to
+her wrathfully to cease her clatter and open the door at once, which she
+appeared to do, and speedily came back.
+
+“He no there, massa. Schoolmaster melted away!”
+
+“Vanished like a bubble!” quoth the Doctor.
+
+“The great spider caught him like a fly,” quoth crusty Hannah, chuckling
+with a sense of mischief that seemed very pleasant to her strange
+combination.
+
+“He has taken a morning walk,” said little Ned; “don’t you think so,
+Doctor Grim?”
+
+“Yes,” said the grim Doctor. “Go on with your breakfast, little monkey;
+the walk may be a long one, or he is so slight a weight that the wind
+may blow him overboard.”
+
+A very long walk it proved; or it might be that some wind, whether evil
+or good, had blown him, as the Doctor suggested, into parts unknown;
+for, from that time forth, the Yankee schoolmaster returned no more. It
+was a singular disappearance.
+
+The bed did not appear to have been slept in; there was a bundle, in a
+clean handkerchief, containing two shirts, two pocket handkerchiefs, two
+pairs of cotton socks, a Testament, and that was all. Had he intended to
+go away, why did he not take this little luggage in his hand, being all
+he had, and of a kind not easily dispensed with? The Doctor made small
+question about it, however; he had seemed surprised, at first, yet gave
+certainly no energetic token of it; and when Ned, who began to have
+notions of things, proposed to advertise him in the newspapers, or send
+the town crier round, the Doctor ridiculed the idea unmercifully.
+
+“Lost, a lank Yankee schoolmaster,” quoth he, uplifting his voice after
+the manner of the town crier; “supposed to have been blown out of Doctor
+Grim’s window, or perhaps have ridden off astride of a humble-bee.”
+
+“It is not pretty to laugh in that way, Doctor Grim,” said little Elsie,
+looking into his face, with a grave shake of her head.
+
+“And why not, you saucy little witch?” said the Doctor.
+
+“It is not the way to laugh, Doctor Grim,” persisted the child, but
+either could not or would not assign any reason for her disapprobation,
+although what she said appeared to produce a noticeable effect on Doctor
+Grimshawe, who lapsed into a rough, harsh manner, that seemed to satisfy
+Elsie better. Crusty Hannah, meanwhile, seemed to dance about the house
+with a certain singular alacrity, a wonderful friskiness, indeed, as
+if the diabolical result of the mixture in her nature was particularly
+pleased with something; so she went, with queer gesticulations,
+crossings, contortions, friskings, evidently in a very mirthful state;
+until, being asked by her master what was the matter, she replied,
+“Massa, me know what became of the schoolmaster. Great spider catch in
+his web and eat him!”
+
+Whether that was the mode of his disappearance, or some other,
+certainly the schoolmaster was gone; and the children were left in great
+bewilderment at the sudden vacancy in his place. They had not contracted
+a very yearning affection for him, and yet his impression had been
+individual and real, and they felt that something was gone out of their
+lives, now that he was no longer there. Something strange in their
+circumstances made itself felt by them; they were more sensible of the
+grim Doctor’s uncouthness, his strange, reprehensible habits, his dark,
+mysterious life,--in looking at these things, and the spiders, and the
+graveyard, and their insulation from the world, through the crystal
+medium of this stranger’s character. In remembering him in connection
+with these things, a certain seemly beauty in him showed strikingly the
+unfitness, the sombre and tarnished color, the outréness, of the rest
+of their lot. Little Elsie perhaps felt the loss of him more than her
+playmate, although both had been interested by him. But now things
+returned pretty much to their old fashion; although, as is inevitably
+the case, whenever persons or things have been taken suddenly or
+unaccountably out of our sphere, without telling us whither and why
+they have disappeared, the children could not, for a long while, bring
+themselves to feel that he had really gone. Perhaps, in imitation of
+the custom in that old English house, of which the Doctor had told them,
+little Elsie insisted that his place should still be kept at the table;
+and so, whenever crusty Hannah neglected to do so, she herself would
+fetch a plate, and a little pitcher of water, and set it beside a vacant
+chair; and sometimes, so like a shadow had he been, this pale, slender
+creature, it almost might have been thought that he was sitting with
+them. But crusty Hannah shook her head, and grinned. “The spider know
+where he is. We never see him more!”
+
+His abode in the house had been of only two or three weeks; and in the
+natural course of things, had he come and gone in an ordinary way, his
+recollection would have grown dim and faded out in two or three weeks
+more; but the speculations, the expectations, the watchings for his
+reappearance, served to cut and grave the recollection of him into the
+children’s hearts, so that it remained a life-long thing with them,--a
+sense that he was something that had been lost out of their life too
+soon, and that was bound, sooner or later, to reappear, and finish what
+business he had with them. Sometimes they prattled around the Doctor’s
+chair about him, and they could perceive sometimes that he appeared
+to be listening, and would chime in with some remark; but he never
+expressed either wonder or regret; only telling Ned, once, that he had
+no reason to be sorry for his disappearance.
+
+“Why, Doctor Grim?” asked the boy.
+
+The Doctor mused, and smoked his pipe, as if he himself were thinking
+why, and at last he answered, “He was a dangerous fellow, my old boy.”
+
+“Why?” said Ned again.
+
+“He would have taken the beef out of you,” said the Doctor.
+
+I know not how long it was before any other visitor (except such as
+brought their shattered constitutions there in hopes that the Doctor
+would make the worn-out machinery as good as new) came to the lonely
+little household on the corner of the graveyard. The intercourse between
+themselves and the rest of the town remained as scanty as ever. Still,
+the grim, shaggy Doctor was seen setting doggedly forth, in all seasons
+and all weathers, at a certain hour of the day, with the two children,
+going for long walks on the sea-shore, or into the country, miles
+away, and coming back, hours afterwards, with plants and herbs that had
+perhaps virtue in them, or flowers that had certainly beauty; even, in
+their season, the fragrant magnolias, leaving a trail of fragrance after
+them, that grow only in spots, the seeds having been apparently
+dropped by some happy accident when those proper to the climate were
+distributed. Shells there were, also, in the baskets that they carried,
+minerals, rare things, that a magic touch seemed to have created out
+of the rude and common things that others find in a homely and ordinary
+region. The boy was growing tall, and had got out of the merely
+infantile age; agile he was, bright, but still with a remarkable
+thoughtfulness, or gravity, or I know not what to call it; but it was a
+shadow, no doubt, falling upon him from something sombre in his warp of
+life, which the impressibility of his age and nature so far acknowledged
+as to be a little pale and grave, without positive unhappiness; and when
+a playful moment came, as they often did to these two healthy children,
+it seemed all a mistake that you had ever thought either of them too
+grave for their age. But little Elsie was still the merrier. They were
+still children, although they quarrelled seldomer than of yore, and
+kissed seldomer, and had ceased altogether to complain of one another
+to the Doctor; perhaps the time when Nature saw these bickerings to be
+necessary to the growth of some of their faculties was nearly gone. When
+they did have a quarrel, the boy stood upon his dignity, and visited
+Elsie with a whole day, sometimes, of silent and stately displeasure,
+which she was accustomed to bear, sometimes with an assumption of cold
+indifference, sometimes with liveliness, mirth in double quantity,
+laughter almost as good as real,--little arts which showed themselves
+in her as naturally as the gift of tears and smiles. In fact, having
+no advantage of female intercourse, she could not well have learnt them
+unless from crusty Hannah, who was such an anomaly of a creature, with
+all her mixtures of race, that she struck you as having lost all sex as
+one result of it. Yet this little girl was truly feminine, and had all
+the manners and pre-eminently uncriticisable tenets proper to women at
+her early age.
+
+She had made respectable advancement in study; that is, she had taught
+herself to write, with even greater mechanical facility than Ned; and
+other knowledge had fallen upon her, as it were, by a reflected light
+from him; or, to use another simile, had been spattered upon her by
+the full stream which the Doctor poured into the vessel of the boy’s
+intellect. So that she had even some knowledge of the rudiments of
+Latin, and geometry, and algebra; inaccurate enough, but yet with such a
+briskness that she was sometimes able to assist Ned in studies in which
+he was far more deeply grounded than herself. All this, however, was
+more by sympathy than by any natural taste for such things; being
+kindly, and sympathetic, and impressible, she took the color of what was
+nearest to her, and especially when it came from a beloved object, so
+that it was difficult to discover that it was not really one of her
+native tastes. The only thing, perhaps, altogether suited to her
+idiosyncrasy (because it was truly feminine, calculated for dainty
+fingers, and a nice little subtlety) was that kind of embroidery,
+twisting, needle-work, on textile fabric, which, as we have before said,
+she learnt from crusty Hannah, and which was emblematic perhaps of that
+creature’s strange mixture of races.
+
+Elsie seemed not only to have caught this art in its original spirit,
+but to have improved upon it, creating strange, fanciful, and graceful
+devices, which grew beneath her finger as naturally as the variegated
+hues grow in a flower as it opens; so that the homeliest material
+assumed a grace and strangeness as she wove it, whether it were grass,
+twigs, shells, or what not. Never was anything seen, that so combined
+a wild, barbarian freedom with cultivated grace; and the grim Doctor
+himself, little open to the impressions of the beautiful, used to
+hold some of her productions in his hand, gazing at them with deep
+intentness, and at last, perhaps, breaking out into one of his deep
+roars of laughter; for it seemed to suggest thoughts to him that the
+children could not penetrate. This one feature of strangeness and wild
+faculty in the otherwise sweet and natural and homely character of Elsie
+had a singular effect; it was like a wreath of wild-flowers in her hair,
+like something that set her a little way apart from the rest of the
+world, and had an even more striking effect than if she were altogether
+strange.
+
+Thus were the little family going on; the Doctor, I regret to say,
+growing more morose, self-involved, and unattainable since the
+disappearance of the schoolmaster than before; more given up to his one
+plaything, the great spider; less frequently even than before coming
+out of the grim seclusion of his moodiness, to play with the children,
+though they would often be sensible of his fierce eyes fixed upon them,
+and start and feel incommoded by the intensity of his regard;--thus
+things were going on, when one day there was really again a visitor,
+and not a dilapidated patient, to the grim Doctor’s study. Crusty
+Hannah brought up his name as Mr. Hammond, and the Doctor--filling his
+everlasting pipe, meanwhile, and ordering Hannah to give him a coal
+(perhaps this was the circumstance that made people say he had imps to
+bring him coals from Tophet)--ordered him to be shown up. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+A fresh-colored, rather young man [Endnote: 3] entered the study, a
+person of rather cold and ungraceful manners, yet genial-looking enough;
+at least, not repulsive. He was dressed in rather a rough, serviceable
+travelling-dress, and except for a nicely brushed hat, and unmistakably
+white linen, was rather careless in attire. You would have thought
+twice, perhaps, before deciding him to be a gentleman, but finally
+would have decided that he was; one great token being, that the singular
+aspect of the room into which he was ushered, the spider festoonery, and
+other strange accompaniments, the grim aspect of the Doctor himself,
+and the beauty and intelligence of his two companions, and even that
+horrific weaver, the great dangling spider,--neither one nor all of
+these called any expression of surprise to the stranger’s face.
+
+“Your name is Hammond?” begins the Doctor, with his usual sparseness of
+ornamental courtesy. [Endnote: 4.]
+
+The stranger bowed.
+
+“An Englishman, I perceive,” continued the Doctor, but nowise intimating
+that the fact of being a countryman was any recommendation in his eyes.
+
+“Yes, an Englishman,” replied Hammond; “a briefless barrister, [Endnote:
+5] in fact, of Lincoln’s Inn, who, having little or nothing to detain
+him at home, has come to spend a few idle months in seeing the new
+republic which has been made out of English substance.”
+
+“And what,” continued Doctor Grim, not a whit relaxing the repulsiveness
+of his manner, and scowling askance at the stranger,--“what may have
+drawn on me the good fortune of being compelled to make my time idle,
+because yours is so?”
+
+The stranger’s cheek flushed a little; but he smiled to himself, as if
+saying that here was a grim, rude kind of humorist, who had lost the
+sense of his own peculiarity, and had no idea that he was rude at all.
+“I came to America, as I told you,” said he, “chiefly because I was
+idle, and wanted to turn my enforced idleness to what profit I could, in
+the way of seeing men, manners, governments, and problems, which I hope
+to have no time to study by and by. But I also had an errand intrusted
+to me, and of a singular nature; and making inquiry in this little town
+(where my mission must be performed, if at all), I have been directed
+to you, by your townspeople, as to a person not unlikely to be able to
+assist me in it.”
+
+“My townspeople, since you choose to call them so,” answered the grim
+Doctor, “ought to know, by this time, that I am not the sort of man
+likely to assist any person, in any way.”
+
+“Yet this is so singular an affair,” said the stranger, still with mild
+courtesy, “that at least it may excite your curiosity. I have come here
+to find a grave.”
+
+“To find a grave!” said Doctor Grim, giving way to a grim sense of
+humor, and relaxing just enough to let out a joke, the tameness of which
+was a little redeemed, to his taste, by its grimness. “I might help you
+there, to be sure, since it is all in the way of business. Like others
+of my profession, I have helped many people to find their graves, no
+doubt, and shall be happy to do the same for you. You have hit upon the
+one thing in which my services are ready.”
+
+“I thank you, my dear sir,” said the young stranger, having tact enough
+to laugh at Dr. Grim’s joke, and thereby mollifying him a little; “but
+as far as I am personally concerned, I prefer to wait a while before
+making the discovery of that little spot in Mother Earth which I am
+destined to occupy. It is a grave which has been occupied as such for
+at least a century and a half which I am in quest of; and it is as an
+antiquarian, a genealogist, a person who has had dealings with the
+dead of long ago, not as a professional man engaged in adding to their
+number, that I ask your aid.”
+
+“Ah, ahah!” said the Doctor, laying down his pipe, and looking earnestly
+at the stranger; not kindly nor genially, but rather with a lurid glance
+of suspicion out of those red eyes of his, but no longer with a desire
+to escape an intruder; rather as one who meant to clutch him. “Explain
+your meaning, sir, at once.”
+
+“Then here it is,” said Mr. Hammond. “There is an old English family,
+one of the members of which, very long ago, emigrated to this part of
+America, then a wilderness, and long afterwards a British colony. He was
+on ill terms with his family. There is reason to believe that documents,
+deeds, titular proofs, or some other thing valuable to the family,
+were buried in the grave of this emigrant; and there have been various
+attempts, within a century, to find this grave, and if possible some
+living descendant of the man, or both, under the idea that either of
+these cases might influence the disputed descent of the property, and
+enable the family to prove its claims to an ancient title. Now, rather
+as a matter of curiosity, than with any real hope of success,--and being
+slightly connected with the family,--I have taken what seems to myself a
+wild-goose chase; making it merely incidental, you well understand, not
+by any means the main purpose of my voyage to America.”
+
+“What is the name of this family?” asked the Doctor, abruptly.
+
+“The man whose grave I seek,” said the stranger, “lived and died, in
+this country, under the assumed name of Colcord.”
+
+“How do you expect to succeed in this ridiculous quest?” asked the
+Doctor, “and what marks, signs, directions, have you to guide your
+search? And moreover, how have you come to any knowledge whatever about
+the matter, even that the emigrant ever assumed this name of Colcord,
+and that he was buried anywhere, and that his place of burial, after
+more than a century, is of the slightest importance?”
+
+“All this was ascertained by a messenger on a similar errand with my
+own, only undertaken nearly a century ago, and more in earnest than I
+can pretend to be,” replied the Englishman. “At that period, however,
+there was probably a desire to find nothing that might take the
+hereditary possessions of the family out of the branch which still
+held them; and there is strong reason to suspect that the information
+acquired was purposely kept secret by the person in England into whose
+hands it came. The thing is differently situated now; the possessor of
+the estate is recently dead; and the discovery of an American heir would
+not be unacceptable to many. At all events, any knowledge gained here
+would throw light on a somewhat doubtful matter.”
+
+“Where, as nearly as you can judge,” said the Doctor, after a turn or
+two through the study, “was this man buried?”
+
+“He spent the last years of his life, certainly, in this town,” said
+Hammond, “and may be found, if at all, among the dead of that period.”
+
+“And they--their miserable dust, at least, which is all that still
+exists of them--were buried in the graveyard under these windows,” said
+the Doctor. “What marks, I say,--for you might as well seek a vanished
+wave of the sea, as a grave that surged upward so long ago.”
+
+“On the gravestone,” said Hammond, “a slate one, there was rudely
+sculptured the impress of a foot. What it signifies I cannot conjecture,
+except it had some reference to a certain legend of a bloody footstep,
+which is currently told, and some token of which yet remains on one of
+the thresholds of the ancient mansion-house.”
+
+Ned and Elsie had withdrawn themselves from the immediate vicinity of
+the fireside, and were playing at fox and geese in a corner near the
+window. But little Elsie, having very quick ears, and a faculty of
+attending to more affairs than one, now called out, “Doctor Grim, Ned
+and I know where that gravestone is.”
+
+“Hush, Elsie,” whispered Ned, earnestly.
+
+“Come forward here, both of you,” said Doctor Grimshawe.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+The two children approached, and stood before the Doctor and his guest,
+the latter of whom had not hitherto taken particular notice of them. He
+now looked from one to the other, with the pleasant, genial expression
+of a person gifted with a natural liking for children, and the
+freemasonry requisite to bring him acquainted with them; and it lighted
+up his face with a pleasant surprise to see two such beautiful specimens
+of boyhood and girlhood in this dismal, spider-haunted house, and under
+the guardianship of such a savage lout as the grim Doctor. He seemed
+particularly struck by the intelligence and sensibility of Ned’s face,
+and met his eyes with a glance that Ned long afterwards remembered; but
+yet he seemed quite as much interested by Elsie, and gazed at her face
+with a perplexed, inquiring glance.
+
+“These are fine children,” said he. “May I ask if they are your
+own?--Pardon me if I ask amiss,” added he, seeing a frown on the
+Doctor’s brow.
+
+“Ask nothing about the brats,” replied he grimly. “Thank Heaven, they
+are not my children; so your question is answered.”
+
+“I again ask pardon,” said Mr. Hammond. “I am fond of children; and the
+boy has a singularly fine countenance; not in the least English.
+The true American face, no doubt. As to this sweet little girl, she
+impresses me with a vague resemblance to some person I have seen. Hers I
+should deem an English face.”
+
+“These children are not our topic,” said the grim Doctor, with gruff
+impatience. “If they are to be so, our conversation is ended. Ned, what
+do you know of this gravestone with the bloody foot on it?”
+
+“It is not a bloody foot, Doctor Grim,” said Ned, “and I am not sure
+that it is a foot at all; only Elsie and I chose to fancy so, because
+of a story that we used to play at. But we were children then. The
+gravestone lies on the ground, within a little bit of a walk of our
+door; but this snow has covered it all over; else we might go out and
+see it.”
+
+“We will go out at any rate,” said the Doctor, “and if the Englishman
+chooses to come to America, he must take our snows as he finds them.
+Take your shovel, Ned, and if necessary we will uncover the gravestone.”
+
+They accordingly muffled themselves in their warmest, and plunged forth
+through a back door into Ned and Elsie’s playground, as the grim Doctor
+was wont to call it. The snow, except in one spot close at hand, lay
+deep, like cold oblivion, over the surging graves, and piled itself in
+drifted heaps against every stone that raised itself above the level;
+it filled enviously the letters of the inscriptions, enveloping all the
+dead in one great winding-sheet, whiter and colder than those which they
+had individually worn. The dreary space was pathless; not a footstep
+had tracked through the heavy snow; for it must be warm affection indeed
+that could so melt this wintry impression as to penetrate through the
+snow and frozen earth, and establish any warm thrills with the dead
+beneath: daisies, grass, genial earth, these allow of the magnetism of
+such sentiments; but winter sends them shivering back to the baffled
+heart.
+
+“Well, Ned,” said the Doctor, impatiently.
+
+Ned looked about him somewhat bewildered, and then pointed to a spot
+within not more than ten paces of the threshold which they had just
+crossed; and there appeared, not a gravestone, but a new grave (if
+any grave could be called new in that often-dug soil, made up of old
+mortality), an open hole, with the freshly-dug earth piled up beside it.
+A little snow (for there had been a gust or two since morning) appeared,
+as they peeped over the edge, to have fallen into it; but not enough to
+prevent a coffin from finding fit room and accommodation in it. But it
+was evident that the grave had been dug that very day.
+
+“The headstone, with the foot on it, was just here,” said Ned, in much
+perplexity, “and, as far as I can judge, the old sunken grave exactly
+marked out the space of this new one.” [Endnote: 1.]
+
+“It is a shame,” said Elsie, much shocked at the indecorum, “that the
+new person should be thrust in here; for the old one was a friend of
+ours.”
+
+“But what has become of the headstone!” exclaimed the young English
+stranger.
+
+During their perplexity, a person had approached the group, wading
+through the snow from the gateway giving entrance from the street; a
+gaunt figure, with stooping shoulders, over one of which was a spade and
+some other tool fit for delving in the earth; and in his face there was
+the sort of keen, humorous twinkle that grave-diggers somehow seem
+to get, as if the dolorous character of their business necessitated
+something unlike itself by an inevitable reaction.
+
+“Well, Doctor,” said he, with a shrewd wink in his face, “are you
+looking for one of your patients? The man who is to be put to bed here
+was never caught in your spider’s web.”
+
+“No,” said Doctor Grimshawe; “when my patients have done with me, I
+leave them to you and the old Nick, and never trouble myself about them
+more. What I want to know is, why you have taken upon you to steal a
+man’s grave, after he has had immemorial possession of it. By what right
+have you dug up this bed, undoing the work of a predecessor of yours,
+who has long since slept in one of his own furrows?”
+
+“Why, Doctor,” said the grave-digger, looking quietly into the cavernous
+pit which he had hollowed, “it is against common sense that a dead man
+should think to keep a grave to himself longer than till you can take up
+his substance in a shovel. It would be a strange thing enough, if,
+when living families are turned out of their homes twice or thrice in a
+generation, (as they are likely to be in our new government,) a dead
+man should think he must sleep in one spot till the day of judgment. No;
+turn about, I say, to these old fellows. As long as they can decently be
+called dead men, I let them lie; when they are nothing but dust, I just
+take leave to stir them on occasion. This is the way we do things under
+the republic, whatever your customs be in the old country.”
+
+“Matters are very much the same in any old English churchyard,” said
+the English stranger. “But, my good friend, I have come three thousand
+miles, partly to find this grave, and am a little disappointed to find
+my labor lost.”
+
+“Ah! and you are the man my father was looking for,” said the
+grave-digger, nodding his head at Mr. Hammond. “My father, who was a
+grave-digger afore me, died four and thirty years ago, when we were
+under the King; and says he, ‘Ebenezer, do not you turn up a sod in this
+spot, till you have turned up every other in the ground.’ And I have
+always obeyed him.”
+
+“And what was the reason of such a singular prohibition?” asked Hammond.
+
+“My father knew,” said the grave-digger, “and he told me the reason too;
+but since we are under the republic, we have given up remembering those
+old-world legends, as we used to. The newspapers keep us from talking in
+the chimney-corner; and so things go out of our minds. An old man, with
+his stories of what he has seen, and what his great-grandfather saw
+before him, is of little account since newspapers came up. Stop--I
+remember--no, I forget,--it was something about the grave holding a
+witness, who had been sought before and might be again.”
+
+“And that is all you know about it?” said Hammond.
+
+“All,--every mite,” said the old grave-digger. “But my father knew, and
+would have been glad to tell you the whole story. There was a great
+deal of wisdom and knowledge, about graves especially, buried out yonder
+where my old father was put away, before the Stamp Act was thought of.
+But it is no great matter, I suppose. People don’t care about old graves
+in these times. They just live, and put the dead out of sight and out of
+mind.”
+
+“Well; but what have you done with the headstone?” said the Doctor. “You
+can’t have eaten it up.”
+
+“No, no, Doctor,” said the grave-digger, laughing; “it would crack
+better teeth than mine, old and crumbly as it is. And yet I meant to do
+something with it that is akin to eating; for my oven needs a new floor,
+and I thought to take this stone, which would stand the fire well. But
+here,” continued he, scraping away the snow with his shovel, a task in
+which little Ned gave his assistance,--“here is the headstone, just as I
+have always seen it, and as my father saw it before me.”
+
+The ancient memorial, being cleared of snow, proved to be a slab of
+freestone, with some rude traces of carving in bas-relief around the
+border, now much effaced, and an impression, which seemed to be as much
+like a human foot as anything else, sunk into the slab; but this device
+was wrought in a much more clumsy way than the ornamented border, and
+evidently by an unskilful hand. Beneath was an inscription, over which
+the hard, flat lichens had grown, and done their best to obliterate it,
+although the following words might be written [Endnote: 2] or guessed:--
+
+“Here lyeth the mortal part of Thomas Colcord, an upright man, of
+tender and devout soul, who departed this troublous life September ye
+nineteenth, 1667, aged 57 years and nine months. Happier in his death
+than in his lifetime. Let his bones be.”
+
+The name, Colcord, was somewhat defaced; it was impossible, in the
+general disintegration of the stone, to tell whether wantonly, or with
+a purpose of altering and correcting some error in the spelling, or, as
+occurred to Hammond, to change the name entirely.
+
+“This is very unsatisfactory,” said Hammond, “but very curious, too. But
+this certainly is the impress of what was meant for a human foot, and
+coincides strangely with the legend of the Bloody Footstep,--the mark of
+the foot that trod in the blessed King Charles’s blood.”
+
+“For that matter,” said the grave-digger, “it comes into my mind that my
+father used to call it the stamp of Satan’s foot, because he claimed
+the dead man for his own. It is plain to see that there was a deep deft
+between two of the toes.”
+
+“There are two ways of telling that legend,” remarked the Doctor. “But
+did you find nothing in the grave, Hewen?”
+
+“O, yes,--a bone or two,--as much as could be expected after above a
+hundred years,” said the grave-digger. “I tossed them aside; and if you
+are curious about them, you will find them when the snow melts. That was
+all; and it would have been unreasonable in old Colcord--especially in
+these republican times--to have wanted to keep his grave any longer,
+when there was so little of him left.”
+
+“I must drop the matter here, then,” said Hammond, with a sigh. “Here,
+my friend, is a trifle for your trouble.”
+
+“No trouble,” said the grave-digger, “and in these republican times we
+can’t take anything for nothing, because it won’t do for a poor man to
+take off his hat and say thank you.”
+
+Nevertheless, he did take the silver, and winked a sort of
+acknowledgment.
+
+The Doctor, with unwonted hospitality, invited the English stranger to
+dine in his house; and though there was no pretence of cordiality in
+the invitation, Mr. Hammond accepted it, being probably influenced by
+curiosity to make out some definite idea of the strange household in
+which he found himself. Doctor Grimshawe having taken it upon him to
+be host,--for, up to this time, the stranger stood upon his own
+responsibility, and, having voluntarily presented himself to the Doctor,
+had only himself to thank for any scant courtesy he might meet,--but
+now the grim Doctor became genial after his own fashion. At dinner he
+produced a bottle of port, which made the young Englishman almost
+fancy himself on the other side of the water; and he entered into a
+conversation, which I fancy was the chief object which the grim Doctor
+had in view in showing himself in so amiable a light, [Endnote: 3] for
+in the course of it the stranger was insensibly led to disclose many
+things, as it were of his own accord, relating to the part of England
+whence he came, and especially to the estate and family which have been
+before mentioned,--the present state of that family, together with other
+things that he seemed to himself to pour out naturally,--for, at last,
+he drew himself up, and attempted an excuse.
+
+“Your good wine,” said he, “or the unexpected accident of meeting a
+countryman, has made me unusually talkative, and on subjects, I fear,
+which have not a particular interest for you.”
+
+“I have not quite succeeded in shaking off my country, as you see,”
+ said Doctor Grimshawe, “though I neither expect nor wish ever to see it
+again.”
+
+There was something rather ungracious in the grim Doctor’s response, and
+as they now adjourned to his study, and the Doctor betook himself to
+his pipe and tumbler, the young Englishman sought to increase his
+acquaintance with the two children, both of whom showed themselves
+graciously inclined towards him; more warmly so than they had been to
+the schoolmaster, as he was the only other guest whom they had ever met.
+
+“Would you like to see England, my little fellow?” he inquired of Ned.
+
+“Oh, very much! more than anything else in the world,” replied the boy,
+his eyes gleaming and his cheeks flushing with the earnestness of
+his response; for, indeed, the question stirred up all the dreams and
+reveries which the child had cherished, far back into the dim regions
+of his memory. After what the Doctor had told him of his origin, he had
+never felt any home feeling here; it seemed to him that he was wandering
+Ned, whom the wind had blown from afar. Somehow or other, from many
+circumstances which he put together and seethed in his own childish
+imagination, it seemed to him that he was to go back to that far old
+country, and there wander among the green, ivy-grown, venerable scenes;
+the older he grew, the more his mind took depth, the stronger was this
+fancy in him; though even to Elsie he had scarcely breathed it.
+
+“So strong a desire,” said the stranger, smiling at his earnestness,
+“will be sure to work out its own accomplishment. I shall meet you in
+England, my young friend, one day or another. And you, my little girl,
+are you as anxious to see England as your brother?”
+
+“Ned is not my brother,” said little Elsie.
+
+The Doctor here interposed some remark on a different subject; for it
+was observable that he never liked to have the conversation turn on
+these children, their parentage, or relations to each other or himself.
+
+The children were sent to bed; and the young Englishman, finding the
+conversation lag, and his host becoming gruffer and less communicative
+than he thought quite courteous, retired. But before he went, however,
+he could not refrain from making a remark on the gigantic spider, which
+was swinging like a pendulum above the Doctor’s head.
+
+“What a singular pet!” said he; for the nervous part of him had latterly
+been getting uppermost, so that it disturbed him; in fact, the
+spider above and the grim man below equally disturbed him. “Are you a
+naturalist? Have you noted his habits?”
+
+“Yes,” said the Doctor, “I have learned from his web how to weave a
+plot, and how to catch my victim and devour him!”
+
+“Thank God,” said the Englishman, as he issued forth into the cold gray
+night, “I have escaped the grim fellow’s web, at all events. How strange
+a group,--those two sweet children, that grim old man!”
+
+As regards this matter of the ancient grave, it remains to be recorded,
+that, when the snow melted, little Ned and Elsie went to look at the
+spot, where, by this time, there was a little hillock with the brown
+sods laid duly upon it, which the coming spring would make green. By
+the side of it they saw, with more curiosity than repugnance, a few
+fragments of crumbly bones, which they plausibly conjectured to have
+appertained to some part of the framework of the ancient Colcord,
+wherewith he had walked through the troublous life of which his
+gravestone spoke. And little Elsie, whose eyes were very sharp, and her
+observant qualities of the quickest, found something which Ned at first
+pronounced to be only a bit of old iron, incrusted with earth; but Elsie
+persisted to knock off some of the earth that seemed to have incrusted
+it, and discovered a key. The children ran with their prize to the grim
+Doctor, who took it between his thumb and finger, turned it over and
+over, and then proceeded to rub it with a chemical substance which soon
+made it bright. It proved to be a silver key, of antique and curious
+workmanship.
+
+“Perhaps this is what Mr. Hammond was in search of,” said Ned. “What a
+pity he is gone! Perhaps we can send it after him.”
+
+“Nonsense,” said the gruff Doctor.
+
+And attaching the key to a chain, which he took from a drawer, and which
+seemed to be gold, he hung it round Ned’s neck.
+
+“When you find a lock for this key,” said he, “open it, and consider
+yourself heir of whatever treasure is revealed there!”
+
+Ned continued that sad, fatal habit of growing out of childhood, as boys
+will, until he was now about ten years old, and little Elsie as much as
+six or seven. He looked healthy, but pale; something there was in the
+character and influences of his life that made him look as if he were
+growing up in a shadow, with less sunshine than he needed for a robust
+and exuberant development, though enough to make his intellectual growth
+tend towards a little luxuriance, in some directions. He was likely to
+turn out a fanciful, perhaps a poetic youth; young as he was, there had
+been already discoveries, on the grim Doctor’s part, of certain blotted
+and clumsily scrawled scraps of paper, the chirography on which was
+arrayed in marshalled lines of unequal length, and each commanded by a
+capital letter and marching on from six to ten lame feet. Doctor Grim
+inspected these things curiously, and to say the truth most scornfully,
+before he took them to light his pipe withal; but they told him little
+as regarded this boy’s internal state, being mere echoes, and very
+lugubrious ones, of poetic strains that were floating about in the
+atmosphere of that day, long before any now remembered bard had begun
+to sing. But there were the rudiments of a poetic and imaginative mind
+within the boy, if its subsequent culture should be such as the growth
+of that delicate flower requires; a brooding habit taking outward things
+into itself and imbuing them with its own essence until, after they had
+lain there awhile, they assumed a relation both to truth and to himself,
+and became mediums to affect other minds with the magnetism of his own.
+He lived far too much an inward life for healthfulness, at his age; the
+peculiarity of his situation, a child of mystery, with certain reaches
+and vistas that seemed to promise a bright solution of his mystery,
+keeping his imagination always awake and strong. That castle in the
+air,--so much more vivid than other castles, because it had perhaps
+a real substance of ancient, ivy-grown, hewn stone somewhere,--that
+visionary hall in England, with its surrounding woods and fine lawns,
+and the beckoning shadows at the ancient windows, and that fearful
+threshold, with the blood still glistening on it,--he dwelt and wandered
+so much there, that he had no real life in the sombre house on the
+corner of the graveyard; except that the loneliness of the latter, and
+the grim Doctor with his grotesque surroundings, and then the great ugly
+spider, and that odd, inhuman mixture of crusty Hannah, all served to
+remove him out of the influences of common life. Little Elsie was all
+that he had to keep life real, and substantial; and she, a child so much
+younger than he, was influenced by the same circumstances, and still
+more by himself, so that, as far as he could impart himself to her,
+he led her hand in hand through the same dream-scenery amid which he
+strayed himself. They knew not another child in town; the grim Doctor
+was their only friend. As for Ned, this seclusion had its customary and
+normal effect upon him; it had made him think ridiculously high of his
+own gifts, powers, attainments, and at the same time doubt whether they
+would pass with those of others; it made him despise all flesh, as if he
+were of a superior race, and yet have an idle and weak fear of coming in
+contact with them, from a dread of his incompetency to cope with them;
+so he at once depreciated and exalted, to an absurd degree, both himself
+and others.
+
+“Ned,” said the Doctor to him one day, in his gruffest tone, “you are
+not turning out to be the boy I looked for and meant to make. I have
+given you sturdy English instruction, and solidly grounded you in
+matters that the poor superficial people and time merely skim over; I
+looked to see the rudiments of a man in you, by this time; and you begin
+to mope and pule as if your babyhood were coming back on you. You seem
+to think more than a boy of your years should; and yet it is not manly
+thought, nor ever will be so. What do you mean, boy, by making all my
+care of you come to nothing, in this way?”
+
+“I do my best, Doctor Grim,” said Ned, with sullen dignity. “What you
+teach me, I learn. What more can I do?”
+
+“I’ll tell you what, my fine fellow,” quoth Doctor Grim, getting rude,
+as was his habit. “You disappoint me, and I’ll not bear it. I want you
+to be a man; and I’ll have you a man or nothing. If I had foreboded such
+a fellow as you turn out to be, I never would have taken you from the
+place where, as I once told you, I found you,--the almshouse!”
+
+“O, Doctor Grim, Doctor Grim!” cried little Elsie, in a tone of grief
+and bitter reproach.
+
+Ned had risen slowly, as the Doctor uttered those last words, turning
+as white as a sheet, and stood gazing at him, with large eyes, in which
+there was a calm upbraiding; a strange dignity was in his childish
+aspect, which was no longer childish, but seemed to have grown older all
+in a moment.
+
+“Sir,” added the Doctor, incensed at the boy’s aspect, “there is
+nonsense that ought to be whipt out of you.”
+
+“You have said enough, sir,” said the boy. “Would to God you had left
+me where you found me![Endnote: 4] It was not my fault that you took me
+from the alms-house. But it will be my fault if I ever eat another bit
+of your bread, or stay under your roof an hour longer.”
+
+He was moving towards the door, but little Elsie sprung upon him and
+caught him round the neck, although he repelled her with severe dignity;
+and Doctor Grimshawe, after a look at the group in which a bitter sort
+of mirth and mischief struggled with a better and kindlier sentiment, at
+last flung his pipe into the chimney, hastily quaffed the remnant of
+a tumbler, and shuffled after Ned, kicking off his old slippers in his
+hurry. He caught the boy just by the door.
+
+“Ned, Ned, my boy, I’m sorry for what I said,” cried he. “I am a
+guzzling old blockhead, and don’t know how to treat a gentleman when he
+honors me with his company. It is not in my blood nor breeding to
+have such knowledge. Ned, you will make a man, and I lied if I said
+otherwise. Come, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
+
+The boy was easily touched, at these years, as a boy ought to be;
+and though he had not yet forgiven the grim Doctor, the tears, to his
+especial shame, gushed out of his eyes in a torrent, and his whole frame
+shook with sobs. The Doctor caught him in his arms, and hugged him to
+his old tobacco-fragrant dressing-gown, hugged him like a bear, as he
+was; so that poor Ned hardly knew whether he was embracing him with his
+love, or squeezing him to death in his wrath.
+
+“Ned,” said he, “I’m not going to live a great while longer; I seem an
+eternal nuisance to you, I know; but it’s not so, I’m mortal and I feel
+myself breaking up. Let us be friends while I live; for believe me, Ned,
+I’ve done as well by you as I knew, and care for nothing, love nothing,
+so much as you. Little Elsie here, yes. I love her too. But that’s
+different. You are a boy, and will be a man; and a man whom I destine to
+do for me what it has been the object of my life to achieve. Let us
+be friends. We will--we must be friends; and when old Doctor Grim,
+worthless wretch that he is, sleeps in his grave, you shall not have the
+pang of having parted from him in unkindness. Forgive me, Ned; and not
+only that, but love me better than ever; for though I am a hasty old
+wretch, I am not altogether evil as regards you.”
+
+I know not whether the Doctor would have said all this, if the day had
+not been pretty well advanced, and if his potations had not been many;
+but, at any rate, he spoke no more than he felt, and his emotions
+thrilled through the sensitive system of the boy, and quite melted him
+down. He forgave Doctor Grim, and, as he asked, loved him better than
+ever; and so did Elsie. Then it was so sweet, so good, to have had this
+one outgush of affection,--he, poor child, who had no memory of mother’s
+kisses, or of being cared for out of tenderness, and whose heart had
+been hungry, all his life, for some such thing; and probably Doctor
+Grim, in his way, had the same kind of enjoyment of this passionate
+crisis; so that though, the next day, they all three looked at one
+another a little ashamed, yet it had some remote analogy to that
+delicious embarrassment of two lovers, at their first meeting after they
+know all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+It is very remarkable that Ned had so much good in him as we find there;
+in the first place, born as he seemed to be of a wild, vagrant stock, a
+seedling sown by the breezes, and falling among the rocks and sands; the
+growing up without a mother to cultivate his tenderness with kisses
+and the inestimable, inevitable love of love breaking out on all little
+occasions, without reference to merit or demerit, unfailing whether or
+no; mother’s faith in excellences, the buds which were yet invisible
+to all other eyes, but to which her warm faith was the genial sunshine
+necessary to their growth; mother’s generous interpretation of all that
+was doubtful in him, and which might turn out good or bad, according
+as should be believed of it; mother’s pride in whatever the boy
+accomplished, and unfailing excuses, explanations, apologies, so
+satisfactory, for all his failures; mother’s deep intuitive insight,
+which should see the permanent good beneath all the appearance of
+temporary evil, being wiser through her love than the wisest sage could
+be,--the dullest, homeliest mother than the wisest sage. The Creator,
+apparently, has set a little of his own infinite wisdom and love (which
+are one) in a mother’s heart, so that no child, in the common course of
+things, should grow up without some heavenly instruction. Instead of
+all this, and the vast deal more that mothers do for children, there had
+been only the gruff, passionate Doctor, without sense of religion,
+with only a fitful tenderness, with years’ length between the fits, so
+fiercely critical, so wholly unradiant of hope, misanthropic, savagely
+morbid. Yes; there was little Elsie too; it must have been that she was
+the boy’s preserver, being childhood, sisterhood, womanhood, all that
+there had been for him of human life, and enough--he being naturally of
+such good stuff--to keep him good. He had lost much, but not all: he
+was not nearly what he might have been under better auspices; flaws and
+imperfections there were, in abundance, great uncultivated wastes and
+wildernesses in his moral nature, tangled wilds where there might have
+been stately, venerable religious groves; but there was no rank growth
+of evil. That unknown mother, that had no opportunity to nurse her boy,
+must have had gentle and noblest qualities to endow him with; a noble
+father, too, a long, unstained descent, one would have thought. Was this
+an almshouse child?
+
+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.
+
+What is the furniture? An antique chair,--one chair, no more. A table,
+many-footed, of dark wood; it holds writing-materials, a book, too, on
+its face, with the dust gathered on its back. There is, moreover, a sort
+of antique box, or coffer, of some dark wood, that seems to have been
+wrought or carved with skill, wondrous skill, of some period when the
+art of carving wainscot with arms and devices was much practised;
+so that on this coffer--some six feet long it is, and two or three
+broad--most richly wrought, you see faces in relief of knight and dame,
+lords, heraldic animals; some story, very likely, told, almost revelling
+in Gothic sculpture of wood, like what we have seen on the marble
+sarcophagus of the old Greeks. It has, too, a lock, elaborately
+ornamented and inlaid with silver.
+
+What else; only the spider’s webs spinning strangely over everything;
+over that light which comes into the room through the stone; over
+everything. And now we see, in a corner, a strange great spider
+curiously variegated. The ugly, terrible, seemingly poisonous thing
+makes us shudder. [Endnote: 3.]
+
+What, else? There are pistols; they lie on the coffer! There is a
+curiously shaped Italian dagger, of the kind which in a groove has
+poison that makes its wound mortal. On the old mantel-piece, over the
+fireplace, there is a vial in which are kept certain poisons. It would
+seem as if some one had meditated suicide; or else that the foul fiend
+had put all sorts of implements of self-destruction in his way; so that,
+in some frenzied moment, he might kill himself.
+
+But the inmate! There he is; but the frenzied alarm in which we last saw
+him seems to have changed its character. No throb, now; no passion; no
+frenzy of fear or despair. He sits dull and motionless. See; his cheek
+is very pale; his hair long and dishevelled. His beard has grown, and
+curls round his face. He has on a sleeping-gown, a long robe as of one
+who abides within doors, and has nothing to do with outward elements;
+a pair of slippers. A dull, dreamy reverie seems to have possessed him.
+Hark! there is again a stealthy step on the floor, and the serving-man
+is here again. There is a peering, anxious curiosity in his face, as he
+struts towards him, a sort of enjoyment, one would say, in the way in
+which he looks at the strange case.
+
+“I am here, you know,” he says, at length, after feasting his eyes for
+some time on the spectacle.
+
+“I hear you!” says the young man, in a dull, indifferent tone.
+
+“Will not your honor walk out to-day?” says the man. “It is long now
+since your honor has taken the air.”
+
+“Very long,” says the master, “but I will not go out to-day. What
+weather is it?”
+
+“Sunny, bright, a summer day,” says the man. “But you would never know
+it in these damp walls. The last winter’s chill is here yet. Had not
+your honor better go forth?”
+
+It might seem that there was a sort of sneer, deeply hidden under
+respect and obeisance, in the man’s words and craftily respectful tone;
+deeply hidden, but conveying a more subtile power on that account.
+At all events, the master seemed aroused from his state of dull
+indifference, and writhed as with poignant anguish--an infused poison in
+his veins--as the man spoke.
+
+“Have you procured me that new drug I spoke of?” asked the master.
+
+“Here it is,” said the man, putting a small package on the table.
+
+“Is it effectual?”
+
+“So said the apothecary,” answered the man; “and I tried it on a dog. He
+sat quietly a quarter of an hour; then had a spasm or two, and was dead.
+But, your honor, the dead carcass swelled horribly.”
+
+“Hush, villain! Have there--have there been inquiries for me,--mention
+of me?”
+
+“O, none, sir,--none, sir. Affairs go on bravely,--the new live. The
+world fills up. The gap is not vacant. There is no mention of you.
+Marry, at the alehouse I heard some idle topers talking of a murder
+that took place some few years since, and saying that Heaven’s vengeance
+would come for it yet.”
+
+“Silence, villain, there is no such thing,” said the young man; and,
+with a laugh that seemed like scorn, he relapsed into his state of
+sullen indifference; during which the servant stole away, after looking
+at him some time, as if to take all possible note of his aspect. The man
+did not seem so much to enjoy it himself, as he did to do these things
+in a kind of formal and matter-of-course way, as if he were performing a
+set duty; as if he were a subordinate fiend, and were doing the duty
+of a superior one, without any individual malice of his own, though a
+general satisfaction in doing what would accrue to the agglomeration of
+deadly mischief. He stole away, and the master was left to himself.
+
+By and by, by what impulse or cause it is impossible to say, he started
+upon his feet in a sudden frenzy of rage and despair. It seemed as if a
+consciousness of some strange, wild miserable fate that had befallen him
+had come upon him all at once; how that he was a prisoner to a devilish
+influence, to some wizard might, that bound him hand and foot with
+spider’s web. So he stamped; so he half shrieked, yet stopped himself in
+the midst, so that his cry was stifled and smothered. Then he snatched
+up the poisoned dagger and looked at it; the noose, and put it about his
+neck,--evil instrument of death,--but laid it down again. And then was
+a voice at the door: “Quietly, quietly you know, or they will hear you.”
+ And at that voice he sank into sullen indifference again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+A traveller with a knapsack on his shoulders comes out of the duskiness
+of vague, unchronicled times, throwing his shadow before him in the
+morning sunshine along a well-trodden, though solitary path.
+
+It was early summer, or perhaps latter spring, and the most genial
+weather that either spring or summer ever brought, possessing a
+character, indeed, as if both seasons had done their utmost to create an
+atmosphere and temperature most suitable for the enjoyment and exercise
+of life. To one accustomed to a climate where there is seldom a medium
+between heat too fierce and cold too deadly, it was a new development
+in the nature of weather. So genial it was, so full of all comfortable
+influences, and yet, somehow or other, void of the torrid characteristic
+that inevitably burns in our full sun-bursts. The traveller thought, in
+fact, that the sun was at less than his brightest glow; for though it
+was bright,--though the day seemed cloudless,--though it appeared to be
+the clear, transparent morning that precedes an unshadowed noon,--still
+there was a mild and softened character, not so perceptible when he
+directly sought to see it, but as if some veil were interposed between
+the earth and sun, absorbing all the passionate qualities out of the
+latter, and leaving only the kindly ones. Warmth was in abundance,
+and, yet, all through it, and strangely akin to it, there was a
+half-suspected coolness that gave the atmosphere its most thrilling
+and delicious charm. It was good for human life, as the traveller, felt
+throughout all his being; good, likewise, for vegetable life, as was
+seen in the depth and richness of verdure over the gently undulating
+landscape, and the luxuriance of foliage, wherever there was tree or
+shrub to put forth leaves.
+
+The path along which the traveller was passing deserved at least a word
+or two of description: it was a well-trodden footpath, running just here
+along the edge of a field of grass, and bordered on one side by a hedge
+which contained materials within itself for varied and minute researches
+in natural history; so richly luxuriant was it with its diverse
+vegetable life, such a green intricacy did it form, so impenetrable and
+so beautiful, and such a Paradise it was for the birds that built
+their nests there in a labyrinth of little boughs and twigs, unseen and
+inaccessible, while close beside the human race to which they attach
+themselves, that they must have felt themselves as safe as when they
+sung to Eve. Homely flowers likewise grew in it, and many creeping and
+twining plants, that were an original part of the hedge, had come of
+their own accord and dwelt here, beautifying and enriching the verdant
+fence by way of repayment for the shelter and support which it afforded
+them. At intervals, trees of vast trunk and mighty spread of foliage,
+whether elms or oaks, grew in the line of the hedge, and the bark of
+those gigantic, age-long patriarchs was not gray and naked, like the
+trees which the traveller had been accustomed to see, but verdant with
+moss, or in many cases richly enwreathed with a network of creeping
+plants, and oftenest the ivy of old growth, clambering upward, and
+making its own twisted stem almost of one substance with the supporting
+tree. On one venerable oak there was a plant of mystic leaf, which the
+traveller knew by instinct, and plucked a bough of it with a certain
+reverence for the sake of the Druids and Christmas kisses and of the
+pasty in which it was rooted from of old.
+
+The path in which he walked, rustic as it was and made merely by the
+feet that pressed it down, was one of the ancientest of ways; older than
+the oak that bore the mistletoe, older than the villages between which
+it passed, older perhaps than the common road which the traveller
+had crossed that morning; old as the times when people first debarred
+themselves from wandering freely and widely wherever a vagrant
+impulse led them. The footpath, therefore, still retains some of the
+characteristics of a woodland walk, taken at random, by a lover of
+nature not pressed for time nor restrained by artificial barriers; it
+sweeps and lingers along, and finds pretty little dells and nooks of
+delightful scenery, and picturesque glimpses of halls or cottages, in
+the same neighborhood where a highroad would disclose only a tiresome
+blank. They run into one another for miles and miles together, and
+traverse rigidly guarded parks and domains, not as a matter of favor,
+but as a right; so that the poorest man thus retains a kind of property
+and privilege in the oldest inheritance of the richest. The highroad
+sees only the outside; the footpath leads down into the heart of the
+country.
+
+A pleasant feature of the footpath was the stile, between two fields;
+no frail and temporary structure, but betokening the permanence of this
+rustic way; the ancient solidity of the stone steps, worn into cavities
+by the hobnailed shoes that had pressed upon them: here not only the
+climbing foot had passed for ages, but here had sat the maiden with her
+milk-pail, the rustic on his way afield or homeward; here had been
+lover meetings, cheerful chance chats, song as natural as bird note, a
+thousand pretty scenes of rustic manners.
+
+It was curious to see the traveller pause, to contemplate so simple a
+thing as this old stile of a few stone steps; antique as an old castle;
+simple and rustic as the gap in a rail fence; and while he sat on one
+of the steps, making himself pleasantly sensible of his whereabout, like
+one who should handle a dream and find it tangible and real, he heard a
+sound that bewitched him with still another dreamy delight. A bird rose
+out of the grassy field, and, still soaring aloft, made a cheery melody
+that was like a spire of audible flame,--rapturous music, as if the
+whole soul and substance of the winged creature had been distilled into
+this melody, as it vanished skyward.
+
+“The lark! the lark!” exclaimed the traveller, recognizing the note
+(though never heard before) as if his childhood had known it.
+
+A moment afterwards another bird was heard in the shadow of a
+neighboring wood, or some other inscrutable hiding-place, singing
+softly in a flute-like note, as if blown through an instrument of
+wood,--“Cuckoo! Cuckoo!”--only twice, and then a stillness.
+
+“How familiar these rustic sounds!” he exclaimed. “Surely I was born
+here!”
+
+The person who thus enjoyed these sounds, as if they were at once
+familiar and strange, was a young man, tall and rather slenderly built,
+and though we have called him young, there were the traces of thought,
+struggle, and even of experience in his marked brow and somewhat pale
+face; but the spirit within him was evidently still that of a youth,
+lithe and active, gazing out of his dark eyes and taking note of things
+about him, with an eager, centring interest, that seemed to be unusually
+awake at the present moment.
+
+It could be but a few years since he first called himself a man; but
+they must have been thickly studded with events, turbulent with action,
+spent amidst circumstances that called for resources of energy not often
+so early developed; and thus his youth might have been kept in abeyance
+until now, when in this simple rural scene he grew almost a boy again.
+As for his station in life, his coarse gray suit and the knapsack on
+his shoulders did not indicate a very high one; yet it was such as a
+gentleman might wear of a morning, or on a pedestrian ramble, and was
+worn in a way that made it seem of a better fashion than it really was,
+as it enabled him to find a rare enjoyment, as we have seen, in by-path,
+hedge-row, rustic stile, lark, and cuckoo, and even the familiar grass
+and clover blossom. It was as if he had long been shut in a sick-chamber
+or a prison; or, at least, within the iron cage of busy life, that had
+given him but few glimpses of natural things through its bars; or else
+this was another kind of nature than he had heretofore known.
+
+As he walked along (through a kind of dream, though he seemed so
+sensibly observant of trifling things around him,) he failed to notice
+that the path grew somewhat less distinctly marked, more infringed upon
+by grass, more shut in by shrubbery; he had deviated into a side track,
+and, in fact, a certain printed board nailed against a tree had
+escaped his notice, warning off intruders with inhospitable threats of
+prosecution. He began to suspect that he must have gone astray when
+the path led over plashy ground with a still fainter trail of preceding
+footsteps, and plunged into shrubbery, and seemed on the point of
+deserting him altogether, after having beguiled him thus far. The spot
+was an entanglement of boughs, and yet did not give one the impression
+of wildness; for it was the stranger’s idea that everything in this long
+cultivated region had been touched and influenced by man’s care, every
+oak, every bush, every sod,--that man knew them all, and that they knew
+him, and by that mutual knowledge had become far other than they were in
+the first freedom of growth, such as may be found in an American forest.
+Nay, the wildest denizens of this sylvan neighborhood were removed in
+the same degree from their primeval character; for hares sat on their
+hind legs to gaze at the approaching traveller, and hardly thought it
+worth their while to leap away among some ferns, as he drew near;
+two pheasants looked at him from a bough, a little inward among the
+shrubbery; and, to complete the wonder, he became aware of the antlers
+and brown muzzle of a deer protruding among the boughs, and though
+immediately there ensued a great rush and rustling of the herd, it
+seemed evidently to come from a certain lingering shyness, an instinct
+that had lost its purpose and object, and only mimicked a dread of man,
+whose neighborhood and familiarity had tamed the wild deer almost into a
+domestic creature. Remembering his experience of true woodland life,
+the traveller fancied that it might be possible to want freer air, less
+often used for human breath, than was to be found anywhere among these
+woods.
+
+But then the sweet, calm sense of safety that was here: the certainty
+that with the wild element that centuries ago had passed out of this
+scene had gone all the perils of wild men and savage beasts, dwarfs,
+witches, leaving nature, not effete, but only disarmed of those rougher,
+deadlier characteristics, that cruel rawness, which make primeval
+Nature the deadly enemy even of her own children. Here was consolation,
+doubtless; so we sit down on the stone step of the last stile that
+he had crossed, and listen to the footsteps of the traveller, and the
+distant rustle among the shrubbery, as he goes deeper and deeper into
+the seclusion, having by this time lost the deceitful track. No matter
+if he go astray; even were it after nightfall instead of noontime, a
+will-o’-the-wisp, or Puck himself, would not lead him into worse harm
+than to delude him into some mossy pool, the depths of which the truant
+schoolboys had known for ages. Nevertheless, some little time after
+his disappearance, there was the report of a shot that echoed sharp and
+loud, startling the pheasants from their boughs, and sending the hares
+and deer a-scampering in good earnest.
+
+We next find our friend, from whom we parted on the footpath, in a
+situation of which he then was but very imperfectly aware; for, indeed,
+he had been in a state of unconsciousness, lasting until it was now
+late towards the sunset of that same day. He was endeavoring to make out
+where he was, and how he came thither, or what had happened; or whether,
+indeed, anything had happened, unless to have fallen asleep, and to
+be still enveloped in the fragments of some vivid and almost tangible
+dream, the more confused because so vivid. His wits did not come so
+readily about him as usual; there may have been a slight delusion,
+which mingled itself with his sober perceptions, and by its leaven
+of extravagance made the whole substance of the scene untrue. Thus it
+happened that, as it were at the same instant, he fancied himself years
+back in life, thousands of miles away, in a gloomy cobwebbed room,
+looking out upon a graveyard, while yet, neither more nor less
+distinctly, he was conscious of being in a small chamber, panelled with
+oak, and furnished in an antique style. He was doubtful, too, whether or
+no there was a grim feudal figure, in a shabby dressing-gown and an
+old velvet cap, sitting in the dusk of the room, smoking a pipe that
+diffused a scent of tobacco,--quaffing a deep-hued liquor out of a
+tumbler,--looking upwards at a spider that hung above. “Was there, too,
+a child sitting in a little chair at his footstool?” In his earnestness
+to see this apparition more distinctly, he opened his eyes wider and
+stirred, and ceased to see it at all.
+
+But though that other dusty, squalid, cobwebbed scene quite vanished,
+and along with it the two figures, old and young, grim and childish, of
+whose portraits it had been the framework, still there were features
+in the old, oaken-panelled chamber that seemed to belong rather to his
+dream. The panels were ornamented, here and there, with antique carving,
+representing over and over again an identical device, being a bare arm,
+holding the torn-off head of some savage beast, which the stranger could
+not know by species, any more than Agassiz himself could have assigned
+its type or kindred; because it was that kind of natural history of
+which heraldry alone keeps the menagerie. But it was just as familiar
+to his recollection as that of the cat which he had fondled in his
+childhood.
+
+There was likewise a mantelpiece, heavily wrought of oak, quite
+black with smoke and age, in the centre of which, more prominent than
+elsewhere, was that same leopard’s head that seemed to thrust itself
+everywhere into sight, as if typifying some great mystery which human
+nature would never be at rest till it had solved; and below, in a
+cavernous hollow, there was a smouldering fire of coals; for the genial
+day had suddenly grown chill, and a shower of rain spattered against
+the small window-panes, almost at the same time with the struggling
+sunshine. And over the mantelpiece, where the light of the declining
+day came strongest from the window, there was a larger and more highly
+relieved carving of this same device, and underneath it a legend, in Old
+English letters, which, though his eyes could not precisely trace it at
+that distance, he knew to be this:--
+
+                      “Hold hard the Head.”
+
+Otherwise the aspect of the room bewildered him by not being known,
+since these details were so familiar; a narrow precinct it was, with
+one window full of old-fashioned, diamond-shaped panes of glass, a small
+desk table, standing on clawed feet; two or three high-backed chairs,
+on the top of each of which was carved that same crest of the fabulous
+brute’s head, which the carver’s fancy seemed to have clutched so
+strongly that he could not let it go; in another part of the room a very
+old engraving, rude and strong, representing some ruffled personage,
+which the stranger only tried to make out with a sort of idle curiosity,
+because it was strange he should dream so distinctly.
+
+Very soon it became intolerably irritating that these two dreams, both
+purposeless, should have mingled and entangled themselves in his mind.
+He made a nervous and petulant motion, intending to rouse himself fully;
+and immediately a sharp pang of physical pain took him by surprise, and
+made him groan aloud.
+
+Immediately there was an almost noiseless step on the floor; and a
+figure emerged from a deep niche, that looked as if it might once have
+been an oratory, in ancient times; and the figure, too, might have been
+supposed to possess the devout and sanctified character of such as knelt
+in the oratories of ancient times. It was an elderly man, tall, thin,
+and pale, and wearing a long, dark tunic, and in a peculiar fashion,
+which--like almost everything else about him--the stranger seemed to
+have a confused remembrance of; this venerable person had a benign
+and pitiful aspect, and approached the bedside with such good will and
+evident desire to do the sufferer good, that the latter felt soothed,
+at least, by his very presence. He lay, a moment, gazing up at the
+old man’s face, without being able to exert himself to say a word, but
+sensible, as it were, of a mild, soft influence from him, cooling the
+fever which seemed to burn in his veins.
+
+“Do you suffer much pain?” asked the old man, gently.
+
+“None at all,” said the stranger; but again a slight motion caused him
+to feel a burning twinge in his shoulder. “Yes; there was a throb of
+strange anguish. Why should I feel pain? Where am I?”
+
+“In safety, and with those who desire to be your friends,” said the old
+man. “You have met with an accident; but do not inquire about it now.
+Quiet is what you need.”
+
+Still the traveller gazed at him; and the old man’s figure seemed to
+enter into his dream, or delirium, whichever it might be, as if his
+peaceful presence were but a shadow, so quaint was his address, so
+unlike real life, in that dark robe, with a velvet skullcap on his head,
+beneath which his hair made a silvery border; and looking more closely,
+the stranger saw embroidered on the breast of the tunic that same
+device, the arm and the leopard’s head, which was visible in the carving
+of the room. Yes; this must still be a dream, which, under the unknown
+laws which govern such psychical states, had brought out thus vividly
+figures, devices, words, forgotten since his boyish days. Though of an
+imaginative tendency, the stranger was nevertheless strongly tenacious
+of the actual, and had a natural horror at the idea of being seriously
+at odds, in beliefs, perceptions, conclusions, with the real world about
+him; so that a tremor ran through him, as if he felt the substance of
+the world shimmering before his eyes like a mere vaporous consistency.
+
+“Are you real?” said he to the antique presence; “or a spirit? or a
+fantasy?”
+
+The old man laid his thin, cool palm on the stranger’s burning forehead,
+and smiled benignantly, keeping it there an instant.
+
+“If flesh and blood are real, I am so,” said he; “a spirit, too, I may
+claim to be, made thin by fantasy. Again, do not perplex yourself with
+such things. To-morrow you may find denser substance in me. Drink this
+composing draught, and close your eyes to those things that disturb
+you.”
+
+“Your features, too, and your voice,” said the stranger, in a resigned
+tone, as if he were giving up a riddle, the solution of which he could
+not find, “have an image and echo somewhere in my memory. It is all an
+entanglement. I will drink, and shut my eyes.”
+
+He drank from a little old-fashioned silver cup, which his venerable
+guardian presented to his lips; but in so doing he was still perplexed
+and tremulously disturbed with seeing that same weary old device, the
+leopard’s head, engraved on the side; and shut his eyes to escape it,
+for it irritated a certain portion of his brain with vague, fanciful,
+elusive ideas. So he sighed and spoke no more. The medicine, whatever
+it might be, had the merit, rare in doctor’s stuff, of being pleasant
+to take, assuasive of thirst, and imbued with a hardly perceptible
+fragrance, that was so ethereal that it also seemed to enter into his
+dream and modify it. He kept his eyes closed, and fell into a misty
+state, in which he wondered whether this could be the panacea or
+medicament which old Doctor Grimshawe used to distil from cobwebs, and
+of which the fragrance seemed to breathe through all the waste of years
+since then. He wondered, too, who was this benign, saint-like old man,
+and where, in what former state of being, he could have known him; to
+have him thus, as no strange thing, and yet so strange, be attending at
+his bedside, with all this ancient garniture. But it was best to dismiss
+all things, he being so weak; to resign himself; all this had happened
+before, and had passed away, prosperously or unprosperously; it would
+pass away in this case, likewise; and in the morning whatever might be
+delusive would have disappeared.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+The patient [Endnote: 1] had a favorable night, and awoke with a much
+clearer head, though still considerably feverish and in a state of great
+exhaustion from loss of blood, which kept down the fever. The events
+of the preceding day shimmered as it were and shifted illusively in his
+recollection; nor could he yet account for the situation in which he
+found himself, the antique chamber, the old man of mediæval garb, nor
+even for the wound which seemed to have been the occasion of bringing
+him thither. One moment, so far as he remembered, he had been straying
+along a solitary footpath, through rich shrubbery, with the antlered
+deer peeping at him, listening to the lark and the cuckoo; the next, he
+lay helpless in this oak-panelled chamber, surrounded with objects that
+appealed to some fantastic shadow of recollection, which could have had
+no reality. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+To say the truth, the traveller perhaps wilfully kept hold of this
+strange illusiveness, and kept his thoughts from too harshly analyzing
+his situation, and solving the riddle in which he found himself
+involved. In his present weakness, his mind sympathizing with the
+sinking down of his physical powers, it was delightful to let all go;
+to relinquish all control, and let himself drift vaguely into whatever
+region of improbabilities there exists apart from the dull, common plane
+of life. Weak, stricken down, given over to influences which had taken
+possession of him during an interval of insensibility, he was no longer
+responsible; let these delusions, if they were such, linger as long as
+they would, and depart of their own accord at last. He, meanwhile, would
+willingly accept the idea that some spell had transported him out of an
+epoch in which he had led a brief, troubled existence of battle, mental
+strife, success, failure, all equally feverish and unsatisfactory, into
+some past century, where the business was to rest,--to drag on dreamy
+days, looking at things through half-shut eyes; into a limbo where
+things were put away, shows of what had once been, now somehow fainted,
+and still maintaining a sort of half-existence, a serious mockery; a
+state likely enough to exist just a little apart from the actual world,
+if we only know how to find our way into it. Scenes and events that had
+once stained themselves, in deep colors, on the curtain that Time hangs
+around us, to shut us in from eternity, cannot be quite effaced by the
+succeeding phantasmagoria, and sometimes, by a palimpsest, show more
+strongly than they. [Endnote: 3.]
+
+In the course of the morning, however, he was a little too feelingly
+made sensible of realities by the visit of a surgeon, who proceeded
+to examine the wound in his shoulder, removing the bandages which he
+himself seemed to have put upon this mysterious hurt. The traveller
+closed his eyes, and submitted to the manipulations of the professional
+person, painful as they were, assisted by the gentle touch of the old
+palmer; and there was something in the way in which he resigned himself
+that met the approbation of the surgeon, in spite of a little fever, and
+slight delirium too, to judge by his eye.
+
+“A very quiet and well-behaved patient,” said he to the palmer. “Unless
+I greatly mistake, he has been under the surgeon’s hand for a similar
+hurt ere now. He has learned under good discipline how to take such a
+thing easily. Yes, yes; just here is a mark where a bullet went in some
+time ago,--three or four years since, when he could have been little
+more than a boy. A wild fellow this, I doubt.”
+
+“It was an Indian bullet,” said the patient, still fancying himself gone
+astray into the past, “shot at me in battle; ‘twas three hundred years
+hereafter.”
+
+“Ah! he has served in the East Indies,” said the surgeon. “I thought
+this sun-burned cheek had taken its hue elsewhere than in England.”
+
+The patient did not care to take the trouble which would have been
+involved in correcting the surgeon’s surmise; so he let it pass, and
+patiently awaited the end of the examination, with only a moan or
+two, which seemed rather pleasing and desirable than otherwise to the
+surgeon’s ear.
+
+“He has vitality enough for his needs,” said he, nodding to the palmer.
+“These groans betoken a good degree of pain; though the young fellow is
+evidently a self-contained sort of nature, and does not let us know
+all he feels. It promises well, however; keep him in bed and quiet, and
+within a day or two we shall see.”
+
+He wrote a recipe, or two or three, perhaps, (for in those days the
+medical fraternity had faith in their own art,) and took his leave.
+
+The white-bearded palmer withdrew into the half concealment of the
+oratory which we have already mentioned, and then, putting on a pair of
+spectacles, betook himself to the perusal of an old folio volume, the
+leaves of which he turned over so gently that not the slightest sound
+could possibly disturb the patient. All his manifestations were gentle
+and soft, but of a simplicity most unlike the feline softness which we
+are apt to associate with a noiseless tread and movement in the male
+sex. The sunshine came through the ivy and glimmered upon his great
+book, however, with an effect which a little disturbed the patient’s
+nerves; besides, he desired to have a fuller view of his benign
+guardian.
+
+“Will you sit nearer the bedside?” said he. “I wish to look at you.”
+
+Weakness, the relaxation of nerves, and the state of dependence on
+another’s care--very long unfelt--had made him betray what we must call
+childishness; and it was perceptible in the low half-complaining tone in
+which he spoke, indicating a consciousness of kindness in the other, a
+little plaintiveness in himself; of which, the next instant, weak
+and wandering as he was, he was ashamed, and essayed to express it.
+[Endnote: 4.]
+
+“You must deem me very poor-spirited,” said he, “not to bear this
+trifling hurt with a firmer mind. But perhaps it is not entirely that I
+am so weak, but I feel you to be so benign.”
+
+“Be weak, and be the stronger for it,” said the old man, with a grave
+smile. “It is not in the pride of our strength that we are best or
+wisest. To be made anew, we even must be again a little child, and
+consent to be enwrapt quietly in the arms of Providence, as a child in
+its mother’s arms.”
+
+“I never knew a mother’s care,” replied the traveller, in a low,
+regretful tone, being weak to the incoming of all soft feelings, in his
+present state. “Since my boyhood, I have lived among men,--a life of
+struggle and hard rivalry. It is good to find myself here in the long
+past, and in a sheltered harbor.”
+
+And here he smiled, by way of showing to this old palmer that he saw
+through the slight infirmity of mind that impelled him to say such
+things as the above; that he was not its dupe, though he had not
+strength, just now, to resist its impulse. After this he dozed off
+softly, and felt through all his sleep some twinges of his wound,
+bringing him back, as it were, to the conscious surface of the great
+deep of slumber, into which he might otherwise have sunk. At all such
+brief intervals, half unclosing his eyes, (like a child, when the mother
+sits by its bed and he fears that she will steal away if he falls
+quite asleep, and leave him in the dark solitude,) he still beheld the
+white-bearded, kindly old man, of saintly aspect, sitting near him,
+and turning over the pages of his folio volume so softly that not the
+faintest rustle did it make; the picture at length got so fully into his
+idea, that he seemed to see it even through his closed eyelids. After
+a while, however, the slumberous tendency left him more entirely, and,
+without having been consciously awake, he found himself contemplating
+the old man, with wide-open eyes. The venerable personage seemed soon
+to feel his gaze, and, ceasing to look at the folio, he turned his eyes
+with quiet inquiry to meet those of the stranger. [Endnote: 5.]
+
+“What great volume is that?” asked the latter. [Endnote: 6.]
+
+“It is a book of English chronicles,” said the old man, “mostly relating
+to the part of the island where you now are, and to times previous to
+the Stuarts.”
+
+“Ah! it is to you, a contemporary, what reading the newspaper is to
+other men,” said the stranger; then, with a smile of self-reproach, “I
+shall conquer this idle mood. I’m not so imbecile as you must think me.
+But there is something that strangely haunts me,--where, in what state
+of being, can I have seen your face before. There is nothing in it I
+distinctly remember; but some impression, some characteristic, some
+look, with which I have been long ago familiar haunts me and brings back
+all old scenes. Do you know me?”
+
+The old man smiled. “I knew, long ago, a bright and impressible boy,”
+ said he.
+
+“And his name?” said the stranger.
+
+“It was Edward Redclyffe,” said the old man.
+
+“Ah, I see who you are,” said the traveller, not too earnestly, but with
+a soft, gratified feeling, as the riddle thus far solved itself. “You
+are my old kindly instructor. You are Colcord! That is it. I remember
+you disappeared. You shall tell me, when I am quite myself, what was
+that mystery,--and whether it is your real self, or only a part of my
+dream, and going to vanish when I quite awake. Now I shall sleep and
+dream more of it.”
+
+One more waking interval he had that day, and again essayed to enter
+into conversation with the old man, who had thus strangely again become
+connected with his life, after having so long vanished from his path.
+
+“Where am I?” asked Edward Redclyffe.
+
+“In the home of misfortune,” said Colcord.
+
+“Ah! then I have a right to be here!” said he. “I was born in such a
+home. Do you remember it?”
+
+“I know your story,” said Colcord.
+
+“Yes; from Doctor Grim,” said Edward. “People whispered he had made away
+with you. I never believed it; but finding you here in this strange way,
+and myself having been shot, perhaps to death, it seems not so strange.
+Pooh! I wander again, and ought to sleep a little more. And this is
+the home of misfortune, but not like the squalid place of rage, idiocy,
+imbecility, drunkenness, where I was born. How many times I have blushed
+to remember that native home! But not of late! I have struggled; I
+have fought; I have triumphed. The unknown boy has come to be no
+undistinguished man! His ancestry, should he ever reveal himself to
+them, need not blush for the poor foundling.”
+
+“Hush!” said the quiet watcher. “Your fever burns you. Take this
+draught, and sleep a little longer.” [Endnote: 7.]
+
+Another day or two found Edward Redclyffe almost a convalescent. The
+singular lack of impatience that characterized his present mood--the
+repose of spirit into which he had lapsed--had much to do with the
+favorable progress of his cure. After strife, anxiety, great mental
+exertion, and excitement of various kinds, which had harassed him
+ever since he grew to be a man, had come this opportunity of perfect
+rest;--this dream in the midst of which he lay, while its magic
+boundaries involved him, and kept far off the contact of actual life, so
+that its sounds and tumults seemed remote; its cares could not fret
+him; its ambitions, objects good or evil, were shut out from him; the
+electric wires that had connected him with the battery of life were
+broken for the time, and he did not feel the unquiet influence that kept
+everybody else in galvanic motion. So, under the benign influence of
+the old palmer, he lay in slumberous luxury, undisturbed save by some
+twinges of no intolerable pain; which, however, he almost was glad
+of, because it made him sensible that this deep luxury of quiet was
+essential to his cure, however idle it might seem. For the first time
+since he was a child, he resigned himself not to put a finger to the
+evolution of his fortune; he determined to accept all things that might
+happen, good or evil; he would not imagine an event beyond to-day, but
+would let one spontaneous and half-defined thought loiter after another,
+through his mind; listen to the spattering shower,--the puffs of
+shut-out wind; and look with half-shut eyes at the sunshine glimmering
+through the ivy-twigs, and illuminating those old devices on the wall;
+at the gathering twilight; at the dim lamp; at the creeping upward of
+another day, and with it the lark singing so far away that the thrill of
+its delicious song could not disturb him with an impulse to awake. Sweet
+as its carol was, he could almost have been content to miss the lark;
+sweet and clear, it was too like a fairy trumpet-call, summoning him to
+awake and struggle again with eager combatants for new victories, the
+best of which were not worth this deep repose.
+
+The old palmer did his best to prolong a mood so beneficial to the
+wounded young man. The surgeon also nodded approval, and attributed
+this happy state of the patient’s mind, and all the physical advantages
+growing out of it, to his own consummate skill; nor, indeed, was he
+undeserving of credit, not often to be awarded to medical men, for
+having done nothing to impede the good which kind Nature was willing to
+bring about. She was doing the patient more good, indeed, than
+either the surgeon or the palmer could fully estimate, in taking
+this opportunity to recreate a mind that had too early known stirring
+impulse, and that had been worked to a degree beyond what its
+organization (in some respects singularly delicate) ought to have borne.
+Once in a long while the weary actors in the headlong drama of life must
+have such repose or else go mad or die. When the machinery of human life
+has once been stopped by sickness or other impediment, it often needs an
+impulse to set it going again, even after it is nearly wound up.
+
+But it could not last forever. The influx of new life into his being
+began to have a poignancy that would not let him lie so quietly, lapped
+in the past, in gone by centuries, and waited on by quiet Age, in the
+person of the old palmer; he began to feel again that he was young, and
+must live in the time when his lot was cast. He began to say to himself,
+that it was not well to be any longer passive, but that he must again
+take the troublesome burden of his own life on his own shoulders. He
+thought of this necessity, this duty, throughout one whole day, and
+determined that on the morrow he would make the first step towards
+terminating his inaction, which he now began to be half impatient of,
+at the same time that he clutched it still, for the sake of the
+deliciousness that it had had.
+
+“To-morrow, I hope to be clothed and in my right mind,” said he to the
+old palmer, “and very soon I must thank you, with my whole heart, for
+your kind care, and go. It is a shame that I burden the hospitality of
+this house so long.”
+
+“No shame whatever,” replied the old man, “but, on the contrary, the
+fittest thing that could have chanced. You are dependent on no private
+benevolence, nor on the good offices of any man now living, or who has
+lived these last three hundred years. This ancient establishment is for
+the support of poverty, misfortune, and age, and, according to the word
+of the founder, it serves him:--he was indebted to the beneficiaries,
+not they to him, for, in return for his temporal bequests, he asked
+their prayers for his soul’s welfare. He needed them, could they avail
+him; for this ponderous structure was built upon the founder’s mortal
+transgressions, and even, I may say, out of the actual substance of
+them. Sir Edward Redclyffe was a fierce fighter in the Wars of the
+Roses, and amassed much wealth by spoil, rapine, confiscation, and all
+violent and evil ways that those disturbed times opened to him; and on
+his death-bed he founded this Hospital for twelve men, who should be
+able to prove kindred with his race, to dwell here with a stipend,
+and pray for him; and likewise provision for a sick stranger, until he
+should be able to go on his way again.”
+
+“I shall pray for him willingly,” said Edward, moved by the pity which
+awaits any softened state of our natures to steal into our hearts.
+“Though no Catholic, I will pray for his soul. And that is his crest
+which you wear embroidered on his garment?”
+
+“It is,” said the old man. “You will see it carved, painted,
+embroidered, everywhere about the establishment; but let us give it
+the better and more reasonable interpretation;--not that he sought to
+proclaim his own pride of ancestry and race, but to acknowledge his
+sins the more manifestly, by stamping the emblem of his race on this
+structure of his penitence.”
+
+“And are you,” said Redclyffe, impressed anew by the quiet dignity of
+the venerable speaker, “in authority in the establishment?”
+
+“A simple beneficiary of the charity,” said the palmer; “one of the
+twelve poor brethren and kinsmen of the founder. Slighter proofs of
+kindred are now of necessity received, since, in the natural course of
+things, the race has long been growing scarce. But I had it in my power
+to make out a sufficient claim.”
+
+“Singular,” exclaimed Redclyffe, “you being an American!” [Endnote: 8.]
+
+“You remember me, then,” said the old man, quietly.
+
+“From the first,” said Edward, “although your image took the fantastic
+aspect of the bewilderment in which I then was; and now that I am in
+clearer state of mind, it seems yet stranger that you should be here. We
+two children thought you translated, and people, I remember, whispered
+dark hints about your fate.”
+
+“There was nothing wonderful in my disappearance,” said the old man.
+“There were causes, an impulse, an intuition, that made me feel, one
+particular night, that I might meet harm, whether from myself or others,
+by remaining in a place with which I had the most casual connection. But
+I never, so long as I remained in America, quite lost sight of you; and
+Doctor Grimshawe, before his death, had knowledge of where I was, and
+gave me in charge a duty which I faithfully endeavored to perform.
+Singular man that he was! much evil, much good in him. Both, it may be,
+will live after him!”
+
+Redclyffe, when the conversation had reached this point, felt a vast
+desire to reveal to the old man all that the grim Doctor had instilled
+into his childish mind, all that he himself, in subsequent years,
+had wrought more definitely out of it, all his accompanying doubts
+respecting the secret of his birth and some supposed claims which
+he might assert, and which, only half acknowledging the purpose, had
+availed to bring him, a republican, hither as to an ancestral centre. He
+even fancied that the benign old man seemed to expect and await such a
+confidence; but that very idea contributed to make it impossible for him
+to speak.
+
+“Another time,” he said to himself. “Perhaps never. It is a fantastic
+folly; and with what the workhouse foundling has since achieved, he
+would give up too many hopes to take the representation of a mouldy old
+English family.”
+
+“I find my head still very weak,” said he, by way of cutting short the
+conversation. “I must try to sleep again.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+The next day he called for his clothes, and, with the assistance of
+the pensioner, managed to be dressed, and awaited the arrival of the
+surgeon, sitting in a great easy-chair, with not much except his pale,
+thin cheeks, dark, thoughtful eyes, and his arm in a sling, to show the
+pain and danger through which he had passed. Soon after the departure
+of the professional gentleman, a step somewhat louder than ordinary was
+heard on the staircase, and in the corridor leading to the sick-chamber;
+the step (as Redclyffe’s perceptions, nicely attempered by his weakness,
+assured him) of a man in perfect and robust health, and of station and
+authority. A moment afterwards, a gentleman of middle age, or a little
+beyond, appeared in the doorway, in a dress that seemed clerical,
+yet not very decidedly so; he had a frank, kindly, yet authoritative
+bearing, and a face that might almost be said to beam with geniality,
+when, as now, the benevolence of his nature was aroused and ready to
+express itself.
+
+“My friend,” said he, “Doctor Portingale tells me you are much better;
+and I am most happy to hear it.”
+
+There was something brusque and unceremonious in his manner, that a
+little jarred against Redclyffe’s sensitiveness, which had become
+morbid in sympathy with his weakness. He felt that the new-comer had
+not probably the right idea as to his own position in life; he was
+addressing him most kindly, indeed, but as an inferior.
+
+“I am much better, sir,” he replied, gravely, and with reserve; “so
+nearly well, that I shall very soon be able to bid farewell to my kind
+nurse here, and to this ancient establishment, to which I owe so much.”
+
+The visitor seemed struck by Mr. Redclyffe’s tone, and finely modulated
+voice, and glanced at his face, and then over his dress and figure, as
+if to gather from them some reliable data as to his station.
+
+“I am the Warden of this Hospital,” said he, with not less benignity
+than heretofore, and greater courtesy; “and, in that capacity, must
+consider you under my care,--as my guest, in fact,--although, owing to
+my casual absence, one of the brethren of the house has been the
+active instrument in attending you. I am most happy to find you so far
+recovered. Do you feel yourself in a condition to give any account of
+the accident which has befallen you?”
+
+“It will be a very unsatisfactory one, at best,” said Redclyffe, trying
+to discover some definite point in his misty reminiscences. “I am a
+stranger to this country, and was on a pedestrian tour with the purpose
+of making myself acquainted with the aspects of English scenery and
+life. I had turned into a footpath, being told that it would lead me
+within view of an old Hall, which, from certain early associations, I
+was very desirous of seeing. I think I went astray; at all events,
+the path became indistinct; and, so far as I can recollect, I had just
+turned to retrace my steps,--in fact, that is the last thing in my
+memory.”
+
+“You had almost fallen a sacrifice,” said the Warden, “to the old
+preference which our English gentry have inherited from their Norman
+ancestry, of game to man. You had come unintentionally as an intruder
+into a rich preserve much haunted by poachers, and exposed yourself to
+the deadly mark of a spring-gun, which had not the wit to distinguish
+between a harmless traveller and a poacher. At least, such is our
+conclusion; for our old friend here, (who luckily for you is a great
+rambler in the woods,) when the report drew him to the spot, found you
+insensible, and the gun discharged.”
+
+“A gun has so little discretion,” said Redclyffe, smiling, “that it
+seems a pity to trust entirely to its judgment, in a matter of life
+and death. But, to confess the truth, I had come this morning to the
+suspicion that there was a direct human agency in the matter; for I find
+missing a little pocket-book which I carried.”
+
+“Then,” said the Warden, “that certainly gives a new aspect to the
+affair. Was it of value?”
+
+“Of none whatever,” said Redclyffe, “merely containing pencil memoranda,
+and notes of a traveller’s little expenses. I had papers about me of far
+more value, and a moderate sum of money, a letter of credit, which have
+escaped. I do not, however, feel inclined, on such grounds, to transfer
+the guilt decidedly from the spring-gun to any more responsible
+criminal; for it is very possible that the pocket-book, being carelessly
+carried, might have been lost on the way. I had not used it since the
+preceding day.”
+
+“Much more probable, indeed,” said the Warden. “The discharged gun is
+strong evidence against itself. Mr. Colcord,” continued he, raising his
+voice, “how long was the interval between the discharge of the gun and
+your arrival on the spot.”
+
+“Five minutes, or less,” said the old man, “for I was not far off, and
+made what haste I could, it being borne in on my spirit that mischief
+was abroad.”
+
+“Did you hear two reports?” asked the Warden.
+
+“Only one,” replied Colcord.
+
+“It is a plain case against the spring-gun,” said the Warden; “and, as
+you tell me you are a stranger, I trust you will not suppose that our
+peaceful English woods and parks are the haunt of banditti. We must try
+to give you a better idea of us. May I ask, are you an American, and
+recently come among us?”
+
+“I believe a letter of credit is considered as decisive as most modes of
+introduction,” said Redclyffe, feeling that the good Warden was desirous
+of knowing with some precision who and what he was, and that, in the
+circumstances, he had a right to such knowledge. “Here is mine, on a
+respectable house in London.”
+
+The Warden took it, and glanced it over with a slight apologetic bow;
+it was a credit for a handsome amount in favor of the Honorable Edward
+Redclyffe, a title that did not fail to impress the Englishman rather
+favorably towards his new acquaintance, although he happened to know
+something of their abundance, even so early in the republic, among the
+men branded sons of equality. But, at all events, it showed no ordinary
+ability and energy for so young a man to have held such position as this
+title denoted in the fiercely contested political struggles of the new
+democracy.
+
+“Do you know, Mr. Redclyffe, that this name is familiar to us,
+hereabouts?” asked he, with a kindly bow and recognition,--“that it is
+in fact the principal name in this neighborhood,--that a family of your
+name still possesses Braithwaite Hall, and that this very Hospital,
+where you have happily found shelter, was founded by former
+representatives of your name? Perhaps you count yourself among their
+kindred.”
+
+“My countrymen are apt to advance claims to kinship with distinguished
+English families on such slight grounds as to make it ridiculous,”
+ said Redclyffe, coloring. “I should not choose to follow so absurd an
+example.”
+
+“Well, well, perhaps not,” said the Warden, laughing frankly. “I have
+been amongst your republicans myself, a long while ago, and saw that
+your countrymen have no adequate idea of the sacredness of pedigrees,
+and heraldic distinctions, and would change their own names at pleasure,
+and vaunt kindred with an English duke on the strength of the assumed
+one. But I am happy to meet an American gentleman who looks upon this
+matter as Englishmen necessarily must. I met with great kindness in your
+country, Mr. Redclyffe, and shall be truly happy if you will allow me an
+opportunity of returning some small part of the obligation. You are now
+in a condition for removal to my own quarters, across the quadrangle. I
+will give orders to prepare an apartment, and you must transfer yourself
+there by dinner-time.”
+
+With this hospitable proposal, so decisively expressed, the Warden took
+his leave; and Edward Redclyffe had hardly yet recovered sufficient
+independent force to reject an invitation so put, even were he inclined;
+but, in truth, the proposal suited well with his wishes, such as they
+were, and was, moreover, backed, it is singular to say, by another of
+those dreamlike recognitions which had so perplexed him ever since he
+found himself in the Hospital. In some previous state of being, the
+Warden and he had talked together before.
+
+“What is the Warden’s name?” he inquired of the old pensioner.
+
+“Hammond,” said the old man; “he is a kinsman of the Redclyffe family
+himself, a man of fortune, and spends more than the income of his
+wardenship in beautifying and keeping up the glory of the establishment.
+He takes great pride in it.”
+
+“And he has been in America,” said Redclyffe. “How strange! I knew
+him there. Never was anything so singular as the discovery of old
+acquaintances where I had reason to suppose myself unknowing and
+unknown. Unless dear Doctor Grim, or dear little Elsie, were to start up
+and greet me, I know not what may chance next.”
+
+Redclyffe took up his quarters in the Warden’s house the next day, and
+was installed in an apartment that made a picture, such as he had not
+before seen, of English household comfort. He was thus established under
+the good Warden’s roof, and, being very attractive of most people’s
+sympathies, soon began to grow greatly in favor with that kindly
+personage.
+
+When Edward Redclyffe removed from the old pensioner’s narrow quarters
+to the far ampler accommodations of the Warden’s house, the latter
+gentleman was taking his morning exercise on horseback. A servant,
+however, in a grave livery, ushered him to an apartment, where the new
+guest was surprised to see some luggage which two or three days before
+Edward had ordered from London, on finding that his stay in this part
+of the country was likely to be much longer than he had originally
+contemplated. The sight of these things--the sense which they conveyed
+that he was an expected and welcome guest--tended to raise the spirits
+of the solitary wanderer, and made him.... [Endnote: 1.]
+
+The Warden’s abode was an original part of the ancient establishment,
+being an entire side of the quadrangle which the whole edifice
+surrounded; and for the establishment of a bachelor (which was his new
+friend’s condition), it seemed to Edward Redclyffe abundantly spacious
+and enviably comfortable. His own chamber had a grave, rich depth, as
+it were, of serene and time-long garniture, for purposes of repose,
+convenience, daily and nightly comfort, that it was soothing even to
+look at. Long accustomed, as Redclyffe had been, to the hardy and rude
+accommodations, if so they were to be called, of log huts and hasty,
+mud-built houses in the Western States of America, life, its daily
+habits, its passing accommodations, seemed to assume an importance,
+under these aspects, which it had not worn before; those deep downy
+beds, those antique chairs, the heavy carpet, the tester and curtains,
+the stateliness of the old room,--they had a charm as compared with
+the thin preparation of a forester’s bedchamber, such as Redclyffe
+had chiefly known them, in the ruder parts of the country, that really
+seemed to give a more substantial value to life; so much pains had been
+taken with its modes and appliances, that it looked more solid than
+before. Nevertheless, there was something ghostly in that stately
+curtained bed, with the deep gloom within its drapery, so ancient as
+it was; and suggestive of slumberers there who had long since slumbered
+elsewhere.
+
+The old servant, whose grave, circumspect courtesy was a matter quite
+beyond Redclyffe’s experience, soon knocked at the chamber door, and
+suggested that the guest might desire to await the Warden’s arrival in
+the library, which was the customary sitting-room. Redclyffe assenting,
+he was ushered into a spacious apartment, lighted by various Gothic
+windows, surrounded with old oaken cases, in which were ranged volumes,
+most or many of which seemed to be coeval with the foundation of the
+hospital; and opening one of them, Redclyffe saw for the first time in
+his life [Endnote: 2] a genuine book-worm, that ancient form of creature
+living upon literature; it had gnawed a circular hole, penetrating
+through perhaps a score of pages of the seldom opened volume, and was
+still at his musty feast. There was a fragrance of old learning in
+this ancient library; a soothing influence, as the American felt,
+of time-honored ideas, where the strife, novelties, uneasy agitating
+conflict, attrition of unsettled theories, fresh-springing thought, did
+not attain a foothold; a good place to spend a life which should not be
+agitated with the disturbing element; so quiet, so peaceful; how slowly,
+with how little wear, would the years pass here! How unlike what he had
+hitherto known, and was destined to know,--the quick, violent struggle
+of his mother country, which had traced lines in his young brow already.
+How much would be saved by taking his former existence, not as dealing
+with things yet malleable, but with fossils, things that had had their
+life, and now were unchangeable, and revered, here!
+
+At one end of this large room there was a bowed window, the space near
+which was curtained off from the rest of the library, and, the window
+being filled with painted glass (most of which seemed old, though there
+were insertions evidently of modern and much inferior handiwork), there
+was a rich gloom of light, or you might call it a rich glow, according
+to your mood of mind. Redclyffe soon perceived that this curtained
+recess was the especial study of his friend, the Warden, and as such
+was provided with all that modern times had contrived for making an
+enjoyment out of the perusal of old books; a study table, with every
+convenience of multifarious devices, a great inkstand, pens; a luxurious
+study chair, where thought [Endnote: 3] upon. To say the truth, there
+was not, in this retired and thoughtful nook, anything that indicated to
+Redclyffe that the Warden had been recently engaged in consultation of
+learned authorities,--or in abstract labor, whether moral, metaphysical
+or historic; there was a volume of translations of Mother Goose’s
+Melodies into Greek and Latin, printed for private circulation, and with
+the Warden’s name on the title-page; a London newspaper of the preceding
+day; Lillebullero, Chevy Chase, and the old political ballads; and,
+what a little amused Redclyffe, the three volumes of a novel from a
+circulating library; so that Redclyffe came to the conclusion that the
+good Warden, like many educated men, whose early scholastic propensities
+are backed up by the best of opportunities, and all desirable facilities
+and surroundings, still contented himself with gathering a flower or
+two, instead of attempting the hard toil requisite to raise a crop.
+
+It must not be omitted, that there was a fragrance in the room, which,
+unlike as the scene was, brought back, through so many years, to
+Redclyffe’s mind a most vivid remembrance of poor old Doctor Grim’s
+squalid chamber, with his wild, bearded presence in the midst of it,
+puffing his everlasting cloud; for here was the same smell of tobacco,
+and on the mantel-piece of a chimney lay a German pipe, and an old
+silver tobacco-box into which was wrought the leopard’s head and the
+inscription in black letter. The Warden had evidently availed himself of
+one of the chief bachelor sources of comfort. Redclyffe, whose destiny
+had hitherto, and up to a very recent period, been to pass a feverishly
+active life, was greatly impressed by all these tokens of learned
+ease,--a degree of self-indulgence combined with duties enough to
+quiet an otherwise uneasy conscience,--by the consideration that this
+pensioner acted a good part in a world where no one is entitled to be an
+unprofitable laborer. He thought within himself, that his prospects in
+his own galvanized country, that seemed to him, a few years since, to
+offer such a career for an adventurous young man, conscious of motive
+power, had nothing so enticing as such a nook as this,--a quiet recess
+of unchangeable old time, around which the turbulent tide now eddied
+and rushed, but could not disturb it. Here, to be sure, hope, love,
+ambition, came not, progress came not; but here was what, just now, the
+early wearied American could appreciate better than aught else,--here
+was rest.
+
+The fantasy took Edward to imitate the useful labors of the learned
+Warden, and to make trial whether his own classical condition--the
+results of Doctor Grim’s tuition, and subsequently that of an American
+College--had utterly deserted him, by attempting a translation of a few
+verses of Yankee Doodle; and he was making hopeful progress when the
+Warden came in fresh and rosy from a morning’s ride in a keen east wind.
+He shook hands heartily with his guest, and, though by no means frigid
+at their former interview, seemed to have developed at once into
+a kindlier man, now that he had suffered the stranger to cross his
+threshold, and had thus made himself responsible for his comfort.
+
+“I shall take it greatly amiss,” said he, “if you do not pick up fast
+under my roof, and gather a little English ruddiness, moreover, in the
+walks and rides that I mean to take you. Your countrymen, as I saw them,
+are a sallow set; but I think you must have English blood enough in your
+veins to eke out a ruddy tint, with the help of good English beef and
+ale, and daily draughts of wholesome light and air.”
+
+“My cheeks would not have been so very pale,” said Edward, laughing,
+“if an English shot had not deprived me of a good deal of my American
+blood.”
+
+“Only follow my guidance,” said the Warden, “and I assure you you shall
+have back whatever blood we have deprived you of, together with an
+addition. It is now luncheon-time, and we will begin the process of
+replenishing your veins.”
+
+So they went into a refectory, where were spread upon the board what
+might have seemed a goodly dinner to most Americans; though for this
+Englishman it was but a by-incident, a slight refreshment, to enable him
+to pass the midway stage of life. It is an excellent thing to see the
+faith of a hearty Englishman in his own stomach, and how well that
+kindly organ repays his trust; with what devout assimilation he takes to
+himself his kindred beef, loving it, believing in it, making a good
+use of it, and without any qualms of conscience or prescience as to the
+result. They surely eat twice as much as we; and probably because of
+their undoubted faith it never does them any harm. Dyspepsia is merely a
+superstition with us. If we could cease to believe in its existence,
+it would exist no more. Redclyffe, eating little himself, his wound
+compelling him to be cautious as to his diet, was secretly delighted to
+see what sweets the Warden found in a cold round of beef, in a pigeon
+pie, and a cut or two of Yorkshire ham; not that he was ravenous, but
+that his stomach was so healthy.
+
+“You eat little, my friend,” said the Warden, pouring out a glass of
+sherry for Redclyffe, and another for himself. “But you are right, in
+such a predicament as yours. Spare your stomach while you are weakly,
+and it will help you when you are strong This, now, is the most
+enjoyable meal of the day with me. You will not see me play such a knife
+and fork at dinner; though there too, especially if I have ridden out
+in the afternoon, I do pretty well. But, come now, if (like most of your
+countrymen, as I have heard) you are a lover of the weed, I can offer
+you some as delicate Latakia as you are likely to find in England.”
+
+“I lack that claim upon your kindness, I am sorry to say,” replied
+Redclyffe. “I am not a good smoker, though I have occasionally taken a
+cigar at need.”
+
+“Well, when you find yourself growing old, and especially if you chance
+to be a bachelor, I advise you to cultivate the habit,” said the Warden.
+“A wife is the only real obstacle or objection to a pipe; they can
+seldom be thoroughly reconciled, and therefore it is well for a man to
+consider, beforehand, which of the two he can best dispense with. I know
+not how it might have been once, had the conflicting claim of these two
+rivals ever been fairly presented to me; but I now should be at no loss
+to choose the pipe.”
+
+They returned to the study; and while the Warden took his pipe,
+Redclyffe, considering that, as the guest of this hospitable Englishman,
+he had no right to continue a stranger, thought it fit to make known to
+him who he was, and his condition, plans, and purposes. He represented
+himself as having been liberally educated, bred to the law, but (to
+his misfortune) having turned aside from that profession to engage
+in politics. In this pursuit, indeed, his success wore a flattering
+outside; for he had become distinguished, and, though so young, a
+leader, locally at least, in the party which he had adopted. He had
+been, for a biennial term, a member of Congress, after winning some
+distinction in the legislature of his native State; but some one of
+those fitful changes to which American politics are peculiarly liable
+had thrown him out, in his candidacy for his second term; and the
+virulence of party animosity, the abusiveness of the press, had acted so
+much upon a disposition naturally somewhat too sensitive for the career
+which he had undertaken, that he had resolved, being now freed from
+legislative cares, to seize the opportunity for a visit to England,
+whither he was drawn by feelings which every educated and impressible
+American feels, in a degree scarcely conceivable by the English
+themselves. And being here (but he had already too much experience of
+English self-sufficiency to confess so much) he began to feel the deep
+yearning which a sensitive American--his mind full of English thoughts,
+his imagination of English poetry, his heart of English character and
+sentiment--cannot fail to be influenced by,--the yearning of the
+blood within his veins for that from which it has been estranged; the
+half-fanciful regret that he should ever have been separated from these
+woods, these fields, these natural features of scenery, to which his
+nature was moulded, from the men who are still so like himself, from
+these habits of life and thought which (though he may not have known
+them for two centuries) he still perceives to have remained in some
+mysterious way latent in the depths of his character, and soon to be
+reassumed, not as a foreigner would do it, but like habits native to
+him, and only suspended for a season.
+
+This had been Redclyffe’s state of feeling ever since he landed in
+England, and every day seemed to make him more at home; so that it
+seemed as if he were gradually awakening to a former reality.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+After lunch, the Warden showed a good degree of kind anxiety about his
+guest, and ensconced him in a most comfortable chair in his study, where
+he gave him his choice of books old and new, and was somewhat surprised,
+as well as amused, to see that Redclyffe seemed most attracted towards a
+department of the library filled with books of English antiquities, and
+genealogies, and heraldry; the two latter, indeed, having the preference
+over the others.
+
+“This is very remarkable,” said he, smiling. “By what right or reason,
+by what logic of character, can you, a democrat, renouncing all
+advantages of birth,--neither priding yourself on family, nor seeking
+to found one,--how therefore can you care for genealogies, or for this
+fantastic science of heraldry? Having no antiquities, being a people
+just made, how can you care for them?”
+
+“My dear sir,” said Redclyffe, “I doubt whether the most devoted
+antiquarian in England ever cares to search for an old thing merely
+because it is old, as any American just landed on your shores would do.
+Age is our novelty; therefore it attracts and absorbs us. And as for
+genealogies, I know not what necessary repulsion there may be between
+it and democracy. A line of respectable connections, being the harder to
+preserve where there is nothing in the laws to defend it, is therefore
+the more precious when we have it really to boast of.”
+
+“True,” said the Warden, “when a race keeps itself distinguished among
+the grimy order of your commonalty, all with equal legal rights to place
+and eminence as itself, it must needs be because there is a force and
+efficacy in the blood. I doubt not,” he said, looking with the free
+approval of an elder man at the young man’s finely developed face and
+graceful form,--“I doubt not that you can look back upon a line of
+ancestry, always shining out from the surrounding obscurity of the mob.”
+
+Redclyffe, though ashamed of himself, could not but feel a paltry
+confusion and embarrassment, as he thought of his unknown origin, and
+his advent from the almshouse; coming out of that squalid darkness as
+if he were a thing that had had a spontaneous birth out of poverty,
+meanness, petty crime; and here in ancestral England, he felt more
+keenly than ever before what was his misfortune.
+
+“I must not let you lie under this impression,” said he manfully to the
+Warden. “I have no ancestry; at the very first step my origin is lost
+in impenetrable obscurity. I only know that but for the aid of a kind
+friend--on whose benevolence I seem to have had no claim whatever--my
+life would probably have been poor, mean, unenlightened.”
+
+“Well, well,” said the kind Warden,--hardly quite feeling, however, the
+noble sentiment which he expressed,--“it is better to be the first noble
+illustrator of a name than even the worthy heir of a name that has been
+noble and famous for a thousand years. The highest pride of some of our
+peers, who have won their rank by their own force, has been to point to
+the cottage whence they sprung. Your posterity, at all events, will have
+the advantage of you,--they will know their ancestor.”
+
+Redclyffe sighed, for there was truly a great deal of the foolish
+yearning for a connection with the past about him; his imagination had
+taken this turn, and the very circumstances of his obscure birth gave it
+a field to exercise itself.
+
+“I advise you,” said the Warden, by way of changing the conversation,
+“to look over the excellent history of the county which you are now in.
+There is no reading better, to my mind, than these country histories;
+though doubtless a stranger would hardly feel so much interest in them
+as one whose progenitors, male or female, have strewn their dust over
+the whole field of which the history treats. This history is a fine
+specimen of the kind.”
+
+The work to which Redclyffe’s attention was thus drawn was in two large
+folio volumes, published about thirty years before, bound in calf by
+some famous artist in that line, illustrated with portraits and views of
+ruined castles, churches, cathedrals, the seats of nobility and gentry;
+Roman, British, and Saxon remains, painted windows, oak carvings, and so
+forth.
+
+And as for its contents the author ascended for the history of the
+county as far as into the pre-Roman ages, before Caesar had ever heard
+of Britain; and brought it down, an ever swelling and increasing tale,
+to his own days; inclusive of the separate histories, and pedigrees,
+and hereditary legends, and incidents, of all the principal families. In
+this latter branch of information, indeed, the work seemed particularly
+full, and contained every incident that would have worked well into
+historical romance.
+
+“Aye, aye,” said the Warden, laughing at some strange incident of this
+sort which Redclyffe read out to him. “My old friend Gibber, the learned
+author of this work, (he has been dead this score of years, so he will
+not mind my saying it,) had a little too much the habit of seeking his
+authorities in the cottage chimney-corners. I mean that an old woman’s
+tale was just about as acceptable to him as a recorded fact; and to say
+the truth, they are really apt to have ten times the life in them.”
+
+Redclyffe saw in the volume a full account of the founding of the
+Hospital, its regulations and purposes, its edifices; all of which he
+reserved for future reading, being for the present more attracted by
+the mouldy gossip of family anecdotes which we have alluded to. Some of
+these, and not the least singular, referred to the ancient family which
+had founded the Hospital; and he was attracted by seeing a mention of a
+Bloody Footstep, which reminded him of the strange old story which
+good Doctor Grimshawe had related by his New England fireside, in those
+childish days when Edward dwelt with him by the graveyard, On reading
+it, however, he found that the English legend, if such it could be
+called, was far less full and explicit than that of New England. Indeed,
+it assigned various origins to the Bloody Footstep;--one being, that
+it was the stamp of the foot of the Saxon thane, who fought at his
+own threshold against the assault of the Norman baron, who seized his
+mansion at the Conquest; another, that it was the imprint of a fugitive
+who had sought shelter from the lady of the house during the Wars of the
+Roses, and was dragged out by her husband, and slain on the door-step;
+still another, that it was the footstep of a Protestant in Bloody Mary’s
+days, who, being sent to prison by the squire of that epoch, had lifted
+his hands to Heaven, and stamped his foot, in appeal as against the
+unjust violence with which he was treated, and stamping his foot, it had
+left the bloody mark. It was hinted too, however, that another version,
+which out of delicacy to the family the author was reluctant to state,
+assigned the origin of the Bloody Footstep to so late a period as the
+wars of the Parliament. And, finally, there was an odious rumor that
+what was called the Bloody Footstep was nothing miraculous, after all,
+but most probably a natural reddish stain in the stone door-step; but
+against this heresy the excellent Dr. Gibber set his face most sturdily.
+
+The original legend had made such an impression on Redclyffe’s childish
+fancy, that he became strangely interested in thus discovering it,
+or something remotely like it, in England, and being brought by such
+unsought means to reside so near it. Curious about the family to which
+it had occurred, he proceeded to examine its records, as given in the
+County History. The name was Redclyffe. Like most English pedigrees,
+there was an obscurity about a good many of the earlier links; but the
+line was traced out with reasonable definiteness from the days of Coeur
+de Lion, and there was said to be a cross-legged ancestor in the
+village church, who (but the inscription was obliterated) was probably
+a Redclyffe, and had fought either under the Lion Heart or in the
+Crusades. It was, in subsequent ages, one of the most distinguished
+families, though there had been turbulent men in all those turbulent
+times, hard fighters. In one age, a barony of early creation seemed to
+have come into the family, and had been, as it were, playing bo-peep
+with the race for several centuries. Some of them had actually assumed
+the title; others had given it up for lack of sufficient proof; but
+still there was such a claim, and up to the time at which this County
+History was written, it had neither been made out, nor had the hope of
+doing so been relinquished.
+
+“Have the family,” asked Redclyffe of his host, “ever yet made out their
+claim to this title, which has so long been playing the will-of-the-wisp
+with them?”
+
+“No, not yet,” said the Warden, puffing out a volume of smoke from his
+meerschaum, and making it curl up to the ceiling. “Their claim has as
+little substance, in my belief, as yonder vanishing vapor from my pipe.
+But they still keep up their delusion. I had supposed that the claim
+would perish with the last squire, who was a childless man,--at least,
+without legitimate heirs; but this estate passed to one whom we can
+scarcely call an Englishman, he being a Catholic, the descendant of
+forefathers who have lived in Italy since the time of George II., and
+who is, moreover, a Catholic. We English would not willingly see an
+ancestral honor in the possession of such a man!”
+
+“Is there, do you think, a prospect of his success?”
+
+“I have heard so, but hardly believe it,” replied the Warden. “I
+remember, some dozen or fifteen years ago, it was given out that some
+clue had been found to the only piece of evidence that was wanting. It
+had been said that there was an emigration to your own country, above a
+hundred years ago, and on account of some family feud; the true heir
+had gone thither and never returned. Now, the point was to prove the
+extinction of this branch of the family. But, excuse me, I must pay an
+official visit to my charge here. Will you accompany me, or continue to
+pore over the County History?”
+
+Redclyffe felt enough of the elasticity of convalescence to be desirous
+of accompanying the Warden; and they accordingly crossed the enclosed
+quadrangle to the entrance of the Hospital portion of the large and
+intricate structure. It was a building of the early Elizabethan age, a
+plaster and timber structure, like many houses of that period and much
+earlier. [Endnote: 1] Around this court stood the building, with the
+date 1437 cut on the front. On each side, a row of gables looked upon
+the enclosed space, most venerable old gables, with heavy mullioned
+windows filled with little diamond panes of glass, and opening on
+lattices. On two sides there was a cloistered walk, under echoing
+arches, and in the midst a spacious lawn of the greenest and loveliest
+grass, such as England only can show, and which, there, is of perennial
+verdure and beauty. In the midst stood a stone statue of a venerable
+man, wrought in the best of mediæval sculpture, with robe and ruff, and
+tunic and venerable beard, resting on a staff, and holding what looked
+like a clasped book in his hand. The English atmosphere, together
+with the coal smoke, settling down in the space of centuries from the
+chimneys of the Hospital, had roughened and blackened this venerable
+piece of sculpture, enclosing it as it were in a superficies of decay;
+but still (and perhaps the more from these tokens of having stood so
+long among men) the statue had an aspect of venerable life, and of
+connection with human life, that made it strongly impressive.
+
+“This is the effigy of Sir Edward Redclyffe, the founder of the
+Hospital,” said the Warden. “He is a most peaceful and venerable old
+gentleman in his attire and aspect, as you see; but he was a fierce old
+fellow in his day, and is said to have founded the Hospital as a means
+of appeasing Heaven for some particular deed of blood, which he had
+imposed upon his conscience in the War of the Roses.”
+
+“Yes,” said Redclyffe, “I have just read in the County History that the
+Bloody Footstep was said to have been imprinted in his time. But what is
+that thing which he holds in his hand?”
+
+“It is a famous heirloom of the Redclyffes,” said the Warden, “on
+the possession of which (as long as they did possess it) they prided
+themselves, it is said, more than on their ancient manor-house. It was
+a Saxon ornament, which a certain ancestor was said to have had from
+Harold, the old Saxon king; but if there ever was any such article, it
+has been missing from the family mansion for two or three hundred years.
+There is not known to be an antique relic of that description now in
+existence.”
+
+“I remember having seen such an article,--yes, precisely of that shape,”
+ observed Redclyffe, “in the possession of a very dear old friend of
+mine, when I was a boy.”
+
+“What, in America?” exclaimed the Warden. “That is very remarkable. The
+time of its being missed coincides well enough with that of the early
+settlement of New England. Some Puritan, before his departure, may have
+thought himself doing God service by filching the old golden gewgaw from
+the Cavalier; for it was said to be fine, ductile gold.”
+
+The circumstances struck Redclyffe with a pleasant wonder; for, indeed,
+the old statue held the closest possible imitation, in marble, of that
+strange old glitter of gold which he himself had so often played with
+in the Doctor’s study; [Endnote: 2] so identical, that he could have
+fancied that he saw the very thing, changed from metal into stone, even
+with its bruises and other casual marks in it. As he looked at the
+old statue, his imagination played with it, and his naturally great
+impressibility half made him imagine that the old face looked at him
+with a keen, subtile, wary glance, as if acknowledging that it held some
+secret, but at the same time defying him to find it out. And then again
+came that visionary feeling that had so often swept over him since he
+had been an inmate of the Hospital.
+
+All over the interior part of the building was carved in stone the
+leopard’s head, with wearisome iteration; as if the founder were anxious
+to imprint his device so numerously, lest--when he produced this edifice
+as his remuneration to Eternal Justice for many sins--the Omniscient Eye
+should fail to be reminded that Sir Edward Redclyffe had done it.
+But, at all events, it seemed to Redclyffe that the ancient knight had
+purposed a good thing, and in a measurable degree had effected it; for
+here stood the venerable edifice securely founded, bearing the moss of
+four hundred years upon it; and though wars, and change of dynasties,
+and religious change, had swept around it, with seemingly destructive
+potency, yet here had the lodging, the food, the monastic privileges of
+the brethren been held secure, and were unchanged by all the altering
+mariners of the age. The old fellow, somehow or other, seemed to have
+struck upon an everlasting rock, and founded his pompous charity there.
+
+They entered an arched door on the left of the quadrangle, and found
+themselves hi a dark old hall with oaken beams; to say the truth, it
+was a barn-like sort of enclosure, and was now used as a sort of
+rubbish-place for the Hospital, where they stored away old furniture,
+and where carpenter’s work might be done. And yet, as the Warden assured
+Redclyffe, it was once a hall of state, hung with tapestry, carpeted,
+for aught he knew, with cloth of gold, and set with rich furniture,
+and a groaning board in the midst. Here, the hereditary patron of the
+Hospital had once entertained King James the First, who made a Latin
+speech on the occasion, a copy of which was still preserved in the
+archives. On the rafters of this old hall there were cobwebs in such
+abundance that Redclyffe could not but reflect on the joy which old
+Doctor Grimshawe would have had in seeing them, and the health to the
+human race which he would have hoped to collect and distil from them.
+
+From this great, antique room they crossed the quadrangle and entered
+the kitchen of the establishment. A hospitable fire was burning there,
+and there seemed to be a great variety of messes cooking; and the Warden
+explained to Redclyffe that there was no general table in the Hospital;
+but the brethren, at their own will and pleasure, either formed
+themselves into companies or messes, of any convenient size, or enjoyed
+a solitary meal by themselves, each in their own apartments. There was
+a goodly choice of simple, but good and enjoyable food, and a sufficient
+supply of potent ale, brewed in the vats of the Hospital, which, among
+its other praiseworthy characteristics, was famous for this; having at
+some epoch presumed to vie with the famous ale of Trinity, in Cambridge,
+and the Archdeacon of Oxford,--these having come down to the hospital
+from a private receipt of Sir Edward’s butler, which was now lost in the
+Redclyffe family; nor would the ungrateful Hospital give up its secret
+even out of loyalty to its founder.
+
+“I would use my influence with the brewer,” said the Warden, on
+communicating this little fact to Redclyffe; “but the present man--now
+owner of the estate--is not worthy to have good ale brewed in his house;
+having himself no taste for anything but Italian wines, wretched
+fellow that he is! He might make himself an Englishman if he would take
+heartily to our ale; and with that end in view, I should be glad to give
+it him.”
+
+The kitchen fire blazed warmly, as we have said, and roast and stewed
+and boiled were in process of cooking, producing a pleasant fume, while
+great heaps of wheaten loaves were smoking hot from the ovens, and the
+master cook and his subordinates were in fume and hiss, like beings that
+were of a fiery element, and, though irritable and scorching, yet were
+happier here than they could have been in any other situation.
+The Warden seemed to have an especial interest and delight in this
+department of the Hospital, and spoke apart to the head cook on the
+subject (as Redclyffe surmised from what he overheard) of some especial
+delicacy for his own table that day.
+
+“This kitchen is a genial place,” said he to Redclyffe, as they retired.
+“In the evening, after the cooks have done their work, the brethren have
+liberty to use it as a sort of common room, and to sit here over their
+ale till a reasonable bedtime. It would interest you much to make one
+at such a party; for they have had a varied experience in life, each one
+for himself, and it would be strange to hear the varied roads by which
+they have come hither.”
+
+“Yes,” replied Redclyffe, “and, I presume, not one of them ever dreamed
+of coming hither when he started in life. The only one with whom I am
+acquainted could hardly have expected it, at all events.”
+
+“He is a remarkable man, more so than you may have had an opportunity
+of knowing,” said the Warden. “I know not his history, for he is not
+communicative on that subject, and it was only necessary for him to
+make out his proofs of claim to the charity to the satisfaction of the
+Curators. But it has often struck me that there must have been strange
+and striking events in his life,--though how it could have been without
+his attracting attention and being known, I cannot say. I have myself
+often received good counsel from him in the conduct of the Hospital, and
+the present owner of the Hall seems to have taken him for his counsellor
+and confidant, being himself strange to English affairs and life.”
+
+“I should like to call on him, as a matter of course rather than
+courtesy,” observed Redclyffe, “and thank him for his great kindness.”
+
+They accordingly ascended the dark oaken staircase with its black
+balustrade, and approached the old man’s chamber, the door of which they
+found open, and in the blurred looking-glass which hung deep within the
+room Redclyffe was surprised to perceive the young face of a woman, who
+seemed to be arranging her head-gear, as women are always doing. It was
+but a moment, and then it vanished like a vision.
+
+“I was not aware,” he said, turning to the Warden, “that there was a
+feminine side to this establishment.”
+
+“Nor is there,” said the old bachelor, “else it would not have held
+together so many ages as it has. The establishment has its own wise,
+monkish regulations; but we cannot prevent the fact, that some of the
+brethren may have had foolish relations with the other sex at some
+previous period of their lives. This seems to be the case with our wise
+old friend of whom we have been speaking,--whereby he doubtless became
+both wiser and sadder. If you have seen a female face here, it is that
+of a relative who resides out of the hospital,--an excellent young lady,
+I believe, who has charge of a school.”
+
+While he was speaking, the young lady in question passed out, greeting
+the Warden in a cheerful, respectful way, in which deference to him was
+well combined with a sense of what was due to herself.
+
+“That,” observed the Warden, who had returned her courtesy, with
+a kindly air betwixt that of gentlemanly courtesy and a superior’s
+acknowledgment,--“that is the relative of our old friend; a young
+person--a gentlewoman, I may almost call her--who teaches a little
+school in the village here, and keeps her guardian’s heart warm, no
+doubt, with her presence. An excellent young woman, I do believe, and
+very useful and faithful in her station.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+
+On entering the old palmer’s apartment, they found him looking over some
+ancient papers, yellow and crabbedly written, and on one of them a large
+old seal, all of which he did up in a bundle and enclosed in a parchment
+cover, so that, before they were well in the room, the documents were
+removed from view.
+
+“Those papers and parchments have a fine old yellow tint, Colcord,” said
+the Warden, “very satisfactory to an antiquary.”
+
+“There is nothing in them,” said the old man, “of general interest. Some
+old papers they are, which came into my possession by inheritance, and
+some of them relating to the affairs of a friend of my youth;--a long
+past time, and a long past friend,” added he, sighing.
+
+“Here is a new friend, at all events,” said the kindly Warden, wishing
+to cheer the old man, “who feels himself greatly indebted to you for
+your care.” [Endnote: 1.]
+
+There now ensued a conversation between the three, in the course of
+which reference was made to America, and the Warden’s visit there.
+
+“You are so mobile,” he said, “you change so speedily, that I suppose
+there are few external things now that I should recognize. The face of
+your country changes like one of your own sheets of water, under the
+influence of sun, cloud, and wind; but I suppose there is a depth below
+that is seldom effectually stirred. It is a great fault of the country
+that its sons find it impossible to feel any patriotism for it.”
+
+“I do not by any means acknowledge that impossibility,” responded
+Redclyffe, with a smile. “I certainly feel that sentiment very strongly
+in my own breast, more especially since I have left America three
+thousand miles behind me.”
+
+“Yes, it is only the feeling of self-assertion that rises against the
+self-complacency of the English,” said the Warden. “Nothing else;
+for what else have you become the subject of this noble weakness of
+patriotism? You cannot love anything beyond the soil of your own estate;
+or in your case, if your heart is very large, you may possibly take in,
+in a quiet sort of way, the whole of New England. What more is possible?
+How can you feel a heart’s love for a mere political arrangement, like
+your Union? How can you be loyal, where personal attachment--the lofty
+and noble and unselfish attachment of a subject to his prince--is out
+of the question? where your sovereign is felt to be a mere man like
+yourselves, whose petty struggles, whose ambition--mean before it grew
+to be audacious--you have watched, and know him to be just the same now
+as yesterday, and that to-morrow he will be walking unhonored amongst
+you again? Your system is too bare and meagre for human nature to love,
+or to endure it long. These stately degrees of society, that have
+so strong a hold upon us in England, are not to be done away with so
+lightly as you think. Your experiment is not yet a success by any means;
+and you will live to see it result otherwise than you think!”
+
+“It is natural for you Englishmen to feel thus,” said Redclyffe;
+“although, ever since I set my foot on your shores,--forgive me, but
+you set me the example of free speech,--I have had a feeling of coming
+change among all that you look upon as so permanent, so everlasting; and
+though your thoughts dwell fondly on things as they are and have
+been, there is a deep destruction somewhere in this country, that is
+inevitably impelling it in the path of my own. But I care not for this.
+I do aver that I love my country, that I am proud of its institutions,
+that I have a feeling unknown, probably, to any but a republican, but
+which is the proudest thing in me, that there is no man above me,--for
+my ruler is only myself, in the person of another, whose office I impose
+upon him,--nor any below me. If you would understand me, I would tell
+you of the shame I felt when first, on setting foot in this country,
+I heard a man speaking of his birth as giving him privileges; saw him
+looking down on laboring men, as of an inferior race. And what I can
+never understand, is the pride which you positively seem to feel in
+having men and classes of men above you, born to privileges which you
+can never hope to share. It may be a thing to be endured, but surely not
+one to be absolutely proud of. And yet an Englishman is so.”
+
+“Ah! I see we lack a ground to meet upon,” said the Warden. “We can
+never truly understand each other. What you have last mentioned is one
+of our inner mysteries. It is not a thing to be reasoned about, but
+to be felt,--to be born within one; and I uphold it to be a generous
+sentiment, and good for the human heart.”
+
+“Forgive me, sir,” said Redclyffe, “but I would rather be the poorest
+and lowest man in America than have that sentiment.”
+
+“But it might change your feeling, perhaps,” suggested the Warden, “if
+you were one of the privileged class.”
+
+“I dare not say that it would not,” said Redclyffe, “for I know I have
+a thousand weaknesses, and have doubtless as many more that I never
+suspected myself of. But it seems to me at this moment impossible that I
+should ever have such an ambition, because I have a sense of meanness
+in not starting fair, in beginning the world with advantages that my
+fellows have not.”
+
+“Really this is not wise,” said the Warden, bluntly, “How can the start
+in life be fair for all? Providence arranges it otherwise. Did you
+yourself,--a gentleman evidently by birth and education,--did you start
+fair in the race of life?”
+
+Redclyffe remembered what his birth, or rather what his first
+recollected place had been, and reddened.
+
+“In birth, certainly, I had no advantages,” said he, and would have
+explained further but was kept back by invincible reluctance; feeling
+that the bare fact of his origin in an almshouse would be accepted,
+while all the inward assurances and imaginations that had reconciled
+himself to the ugly fact would go for nothing. “But there were
+advantages, very early in life,” added he, smiling, “which perhaps I
+ought to have been ashamed to avail myself of.”
+
+“An old cobwebby library,--an old dwelling by a graveyard,--an old
+Doctor, busied with his own fantasies, and entangled in his own
+cobwebs,--and a little girl for a playmate: these were things that you
+might lawfully avail yourself of,” said Colcord, unheard by the Warden,
+who, thinking the conversation had lasted long enough, had paid a slight
+passing courtesy to the old man, and was now leaving the room. “Do you
+remain here long?” he added.
+
+“If the Warden’s hospitality holds out,” said the American, “I shall be
+glad; for the place interests me greatly.”
+
+“No wonder,” replied Colcord.
+
+“And wherefore no wonder?” said Redclyffe, impressed with the idea that
+there was something peculiar in the tone of the old man’s remark.
+
+“Because,” returned the other quietly, “it must be to you especially
+interesting to see an institution of this kind, whereby one man’s
+benevolence or penitence is made to take the substance and durability of
+stone, and last for centuries; whereas, in America, the solemn decrees
+and resolutions of millions melt away like vapor, and everything shifts
+like the pomp of sunset clouds; though it may be as pompous as they.
+Heaven intended the past as a foundation for the present, to keep it
+from vibrating and being blown away with every breeze.”
+
+“But,” said Redclyffe, “I would not see in my country what I see
+elsewhere,--the Past hanging like a mill-stone round a country’s neck,
+or encrusted in stony layers over the living form; so that, to all
+intents and purposes, it is dead.”
+
+“Well,” said Colcord, “we are only talking of the Hospital. You will
+find no more interesting place anywhere. Stay amongst us; this is the
+very heart of England, and if you wish to know the fatherland,--the
+place whence you sprung,--this is the very spot!”
+
+Again Redclyffe was struck with the impression that there was something
+marked, something individually addressed to himself, in the old man’s
+words; at any rate, it appealed to that primal imaginative vein in him
+which had so often, in his own country, allowed itself to dream over
+the possibilities of his birth. He knew that the feeling was a vague and
+idle one; but yet, just at this time, a convalescent, with a little
+play moment in what had heretofore been a turbulent life, he felt an
+inclination to follow out this dream, and let it sport with him, and by
+and by to awake to realities, refreshed by a season of unreality. At
+a firmer and stronger period of his life, though Redclyffe might have
+indulged his imagination with these dreams, yet he would not have let
+them interfere with his course of action; but having come hither in
+utter weariness of active life, it seemed just the thing for him to
+do,--just the fool’s paradise for him to be in.
+
+“Yes,” repeated the old man, looking keenly in his face, “you will not
+leave us yet.”
+
+Redclyffe returned through the quadrangle to the Warden’s house; and
+there were the brethren, sitting on benches, loitering in the sun,
+which, though warm for England, seemed scarcely enough to keep these old
+people warm, even with their cloth robes. They did not seem unhappy; nor
+yet happy; if they were so, it must be with the mere bliss of existence,
+a sleepy sense of comfort, and quiet dreaminess about things past,
+leaving out the things to come,--of which there was nothing, indeed, in
+their future, save one day after another, just like this, with loaf and
+ale, and such substantial comforts, and prayers, and idle days again,
+gathering by the great kitchen fire, and at last a day when they should
+not be there, but some other old men in their stead. And Redclyffe
+wondered whether, in the extremity of age, he himself would like to be
+one of the brethren of the Leopard’s Head. The old men, he was sorry
+to see, did not seem very genial towards one another; in fact, there
+appeared to be a secret enjoyment of one another’s infirmities,
+wherefore it was hard to tell, unless that each individual might fancy
+himself to possess an advantage over his fellow, which he mistook for a
+positive strength; and so there was sometimes a sardonic smile, when,
+on rising from his seat, the rheumatism was a little evident in an old
+fellow’s joints; or when the palsy shook another’s fingers so that he
+could barely fill his pipe; or when a cough, the gathered spasmodic
+trouble of thirty years, fairly convulsed another. Then, any two that
+happened to be sitting near one another looked into each other’s cold
+eyes, and whispered, or suggested merely by a look (for they were bright
+to such perceptions), “The old fellow will not outlast another winter.”
+
+Methinks it is not good for old men to be much together. An old man is
+a beautiful object in his own place, in the midst of a circle of young
+people, going down in various gradations to infancy, and all looking up
+to the patriarch with filial reverence, keeping him warm by their own
+burning youth; giving him the freshness of their thought and feeling,
+with such natural influx that it seems as if it grew within his heart;
+while on them he reacts with an influence that sobers, tempers, keeps
+them down. His wisdom, very probably, is of no great account,--he cannot
+fit to any new state of things; but, nevertheless, it works its effect.
+In such a situation, the old man is kind and genial, mellow, more gentle
+and generous, and wider-minded than ever before. But if left to himself,
+or wholly to the society of his contemporaries, the ice gathers about
+his heart, his hope grows torpid, his love--having nothing of his own
+blood to develop it--grows cold; he becomes selfish, when he has nothing
+in the present or the future worth caring about in himself; so that,
+instead of a beautiful object, he is an ugly one, little, mean, and
+torpid. I suppose one chief reason to be, that unless he has his own
+race about him he doubts of anybody’s love, he feels himself a stranger
+in the world, and so becomes unamiable.
+
+A very few days in the Warden’s hospitable mansion produced an excellent
+effect on Redclyffe’s frame; his constitution being naturally excellent,
+and a flow of cheerful spirits contributing much to restore him to
+health, especially as the abode in this old place, which would probably
+have been intolerably dull to most young Englishmen, had for this young
+American a charm like the freshness of Paradise. In truth it had that
+charm, and besides it another intangible, evanescent, perplexing charm,
+full of an airy enjoyment, as if he had been here before. What could it
+be? It could be only the old, very deepest, inherent nature, which the
+Englishman, his progenitor, carried over the sea with him, nearly two
+hundred years before, and which had lain buried all that time under
+heaps of new things, new customs, new institutions, new snows of winter,
+new layers of forest leaves, until it seemed dead, and was altogether
+forgotten as if it had never been; but, now, his return had seemed to
+dissolve or dig away all this incrustation, and the old English nature
+awoke all fresh, so that he saw the green grass, the hedgerows, the old
+structures and old manners, the old clouds, the old raindrops, with
+a recognition, and yet a newness. Redclyffe had never been so quietly
+happy as now. He had, as it were, the quietude of the old man about him,
+and the freshness of his own still youthful years.
+
+The Warden was evidently very favorably impressed with his Transatlantic
+guest, and he seemed to be in a constant state of surprise to find an
+American so agreeable a kind of person.
+
+“You are just like an Englishman,” he sometimes said. “Are you quite
+sure that you were not born on this side of the water?”
+
+This is said to be the highest compliment that an Englishman can pay
+to an American; and doubtless he intends it as such. All the praise
+and good will that an Englishman ever awards to an American is so far
+gratifying to the recipient, that it is meant for him individually, and
+is not to be put down in the slightest degree to the score of any regard
+to his countrymen generally. So far from this, if an Englishman were to
+meet the whole thirty millions of Americans, and find each individual
+of them a pleasant, amiable, well-meaning, and well-mannered sort of
+fellow, he would acknowledge this honestly in each individual case, but
+still would speak of the whole nation as a disagreeable people.
+
+As regards Redclyffe being precisely like an Englishman, we cannot but
+think that the good Warden was mistaken. No doubt, there was a common
+ground; the old progenitor (whose blood, moreover, was mixed with a
+hundred other streams equally English) was still there, under this young
+man’s shape, but with a vast difference. Climate, sun, cold, heat, soil,
+institutions, had made a change in him before he was born, and all the
+life that he had lived since (so unlike any that he could have lived
+in England) had developed it more strikingly. In manners, I cannot
+but think that he was better than the generality of Englishmen, and
+different from the highest-mannered men, though most resembling them.
+His natural sensitiveness, a tincture of reserve, had been counteracted
+by the frank mixture with men which his political course had made
+necessary; he was quicker to feel what was right at the moment, than
+the Englishman; more alive; he had a finer grain; his look was more
+aristocratic than that of a thousand Englishmen of good birth and
+breeding; he had a faculty of assimilating himself to new manners,
+which, being his most un-English trait, was what perhaps chiefly made
+the Warden think him so like an Englishman. When an Englishman is a
+gentleman, to be sure, it is as deep in him as the marrow of his bones,
+and the deeper you know him, the more you are aware of it, and that
+generation after generation has contributed to develop and perfect these
+unpretending manners, which, at first, may have failed to impress you,
+under his plain, almost homely exterior. An American often gets as good
+a surface of manners, in his own progress from youth, through the wear
+and attrition of a successful life, to some high station in middle age;
+whereas a plebeian Englishman, who rises to eminent station, never
+does credit to it by his manners. Often you would not know the American
+ambassador from a duke. This is often merely external; but in Redclyffe,
+having delicate original traits in his character, it was something more;
+and, we are bold to say, when our countrymen are developed, or any one
+class of them, as they ought to be, they will show finer traits than
+have yet been seen. We have more delicate and quicker sensibilities;
+nerves more easily impressed; and these are surely requisites for
+perfect manners; and, moreover, the courtesy that proceeds on the
+ground of perfect equality is better than that which is a gracious
+and benignant condescension,--as is the case with the manners of the
+aristocracy of England.
+
+An American, be it said, seldom turns his best side outermost abroad;
+and an observer, who has had much opportunity of seeing the figure which
+they make, in a foreign country, does not so much wonder that there
+should be severe criticism on their manners as a people. I know not
+exactly why, but all our imputed peculiarities--our nasal pronunciation,
+our ungraceful idioms, our forthputtingness, our uncouth lack of
+courtesy--do really seem to exist on a foreign shore; and even, perhaps,
+to be heightened of malice prepense. The cold, unbelieving eye of
+Englishmen, expectant of solecisms in manners, contributes to produce
+the result which it looks for. Then the feeling of hostility and
+defiance in the American must be allowed for; and partly, too, the real
+existence of a different code of manners, founded on, and arising from,
+different institutions; and also certain national peculiarities,
+which may be intrinsically as good as English peculiarities; but being
+different, and yet the whole result being just too nearly alike, and,
+moreover, the English manners having the prestige of long establishment,
+and furthermore our own manners being in a transition state between
+those of old monarchies and what is proper to a new republic,--it
+necessarily followed that the American, though really a man of
+refinement and delicacy, is not just the kind of gentleman that the
+English can fully appreciate. In cases where they do so, their
+standard being different from ours, they do not always select for their
+approbation the kind of man or manners whom we should judge the best;
+we are perhaps apt to be a little too fine, a little too sedulously
+polished, and of course too conscious of it,--a deadly social crime,
+certainly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+
+To return from this long discussion, the Warden took kindly, as we have
+said, to Redclyffe, and thought him a miraculously good fellow, to have
+come from the rude American republic. Hitherto, in the little time
+that he had been in England, Redclyffe had received civil and even kind
+treatment from the English with whom he had come casually in contact;
+but still--perhaps partly from our Yankee narrowness and reserve--he
+had felt, in the closest coming together, as if there were a naked sword
+between the Englishman and him, as between the Arabian prince in the
+tale and the princess whom he wedded; he felt as if that would be the
+case even if he should love an Englishwoman; to such a distance, into
+such an attitude of self-defence, does English self-complacency and
+belief in England’s superiority throw the stranger. In fact, in a
+good-natured way, John Bull is always doubling his fist in a stranger’s
+face, and though it be good-natured, it does not always produce the most
+amiable feeling.
+
+The worthy Warden, being an Englishman, had doubtless the same kind of
+feeling; doubtless, too, he thought ours a poor, distracted country,
+perhaps prosperous for the moment, but as likely as not to be the scene
+of anarchy five minutes hence; but being of so genial a nature, when he
+came to see the amiableness of his young guest, and how deeply he was
+impressed with England, all prejudice died away, and he loved him like a
+treasure that he had found for himself, and valued him as if there were
+something of his own in him. And so the old Warden’s residence had never
+before been so cheery as it was now; his bachelor life passed the more
+pleasantly with this quiet, vivacious, yet not troublesomely restless
+spirit beside him,--this eager, almost childish interest in everything
+English, and yet this capacity to take independent views of things,
+and sometimes, it might be, to throw a gleam of light even on things
+appertaining to England. And so, the better they came to know one
+another, the greater was their mutual liking.
+
+“I fear I am getting too strong to burden you much longer,” said
+Redclyffe, this morning. “I have no pretence to be a patient now.”
+
+“Pooh! nonsense!” ejaculated the Warden. “It will not be safe to leave
+you to yourself for at least a month to come. And I have half a dozen
+excursions in a neighborhood of twenty miles, in which I mean to show
+you what old England is, in a way that you would never find out for
+yourself. Do not speak of going. This day, if you find yourself strong
+enough, you shall go and look at an old village church.”
+
+“With all my heart,” said Redclyffe.
+
+They went, accordingly, walking slowly, in consequence of Redclyffe’s
+yet imperfect strength, along the highroad, which was overshadowed
+with elms, that grew in beautiful shape and luxuriance in that part
+of England, not with the slender, drooping, picturesque grace of a New
+England elm, but more luxuriant, fuller of leaves, sturdier in limb. It
+was a day which the Warden called fine, and which Redclyffe, at home,
+would have thought to bode rain; though here he had learned that such
+weather might continue for weeks together, with only a few raindrops all
+the time. The road was in the finest condition, hard and dry.
+
+They had not long emerged from the gateway of the Hospital,--at the
+venerable front and gables of which Redclyffe turned to look with a
+feeling as if it were his home,--when they heard the clatter of hoofs
+behind them, and a gentleman on horseback rode by, paying a courteous
+salute to the Warden as he passed. A groom in livery followed at a
+little distance, and both rode roundly towards the village, whither the
+Warden and his friend were going.
+
+“Did you observe that man?” asked the Warden.
+
+“Yes,” said Redclyffe. “Is he an Englishman?”
+
+“That is a pertinent question,” replied the Warden, “but I scarcely know
+how to answer it.”
+
+In truth, Redclyffe’s question had been suggested by the appearance of
+the mounted gentleman, who was a dark, thin man, with black hair, and a
+black moustache and pointed beard setting off his sallow face, in
+which the eyes had a certain pointed steeliness, which did not look
+English,--whose eyes, methinks, are usually not so hard as those of
+Americans or foreigners. Redclyffe, somehow or other, had fancied that
+these not very pleasant eyes had been fixed in a marked way on himself,
+a stranger, while at the same time his salute was evidently directed
+towards the Warden.
+
+“An Englishman,--why, no,” continued the latter. “If you observe, he
+does not even sit his horse like an Englishman, but in that absurd,
+stiff continental way, as if a poker should get on horseback. Neither
+has he an English face, English manners, nor English religion, nor
+an English heart; nor, to sum up the whole, had he English birth.
+Nevertheless, as fate would have it, he is the inheritor of a good old
+English name, a fine patrimonial estate, and a very probable claim to an
+old English title. This is Lord Braithwaite of Braithwaite Hall, who if
+he can make his case good (and they say there is good prospect of it)
+will soon be Lord Hinchbrooke.”
+
+“I hardly know why, but I should be sorry for it,” said Redclyffe. “He
+certainly is not English; and I have an odd sort of sympathy, which
+makes me unwilling that English honors should be enjoyed by foreigners.
+This, then, is the gentleman of Italian birth whom you have mentioned to
+me, and of whom there is a slight mention in the County History.”
+
+“Yes,” said the Warden. “There have been three descents of this
+man’s branch in Italy, and only one English mother in all that time.
+Positively, I do not see an English trait in his face, and as little
+in his manner. His civility is Italian, such as oftentimes, among his
+countrymen, has offered a cup of poison to a guest, or insinuated the
+stab of a stiletto into his heart.”
+
+“You are particularly bitter against this poor man,” said Redclyffe,
+laughing at the Warden’s vehemence. “His appearance--and yet he is
+a handsome man--is certainly not prepossessing; but unless it be
+countersigned by something in his actual life, I should hardly think it
+worth while to condemn him utterly.”
+
+“Well, well; you can forgive a little English prejudice,” said the
+Warden, a little ashamed. “But, in good earnest, the man has few or no
+good traits, takes no interest in the country, dislikes our sky, our
+earth, our people, is close and inhospitable, a hard landlord, and
+whatever may be his good qualities, they are not such as flourish in
+this soil and climate, or can be appreciated here.” [Endnote: 1.]
+
+“Has he children?” asked Redclyffe.
+
+“They say so,--a family by an Italian wife, whom some, on the other
+hand, pronounce to be no wife at all. His son is at a Catholic college
+in France; his daughter in a convent there.”
+
+In talk like this they were drawing near the little rustic village
+of Braithwaite, and saw, above a cloud of foliage, the small, low,
+battlemented tower, the gray stones of which had probably been laid
+a little after the Norman conquest. Approaching nearer, they passed
+a thatched cottage or two, very plain and simple edifices, though
+interesting to Redclyffe from their antique aspect, which denoted that
+they were probably older than the settlement of his own country, and
+might very likely have nursed children who had gone, more than two
+centuries ago, to found the commonwealth of which he was a citizen. If
+you considered them in one way, prosaically, they were ugly enough; but
+then there were the old latticed windows, and there the thatch, which
+was verdant with leek, and strange weeds, possessing a whole botanical
+growth. And birds flew in and out, as if they had their homes there.
+Then came a row of similar cottages, all joined on together, and each
+with a little garden before it divided from its neighbors by a hedge,
+now in full verdure. Redclyffe was glad to see some symptoms of natural
+love of beauty here, for there were plants of box, cut into queer
+shapes of birds, peacocks, etc., as if year after year had been spent
+in bringing these vegetable sculptures to perfection. In one of the
+gardens, moreover, the ingenious inhabitant had spent his leisure in
+building grotto-work, of which the English are rather ludicrously fond,
+on their little bits of lawn, and in building a miniature castle of
+oyster-shells, where were seen turrets, ramparts, a frowning arched
+gateway, and miniature cannon looking from the embrasures. A pleasanter
+and better adornment were the homely household flowers, and a pleasant
+sound, too, was the hum of bees, who had their home in several beehives,
+and were making their honey among the flowers of the garden, or come
+from afar, buzzing dreamily through the air, laden with honey that they
+had found elsewhere. Fruit trees stood erect, or, in some instances,
+were flattened out against the walls of cottages, looking somewhat like
+hawks nailed _in terrorem_ against a barn door. The male members of this
+little community were probably afield, with the exception of one or two
+half-torpid great-grandsires, who [were] moving rheumatically about the
+gardens, and some children not yet in breeches, who stared with stolid
+eyes at the passers-by; but the good dames were busy within doors, where
+Redclyffe had glimpses of their interior with its pavement of stone
+flags. Altogether it seemed a comfortable settlement enough.
+
+“Do you see that child yonder,” observed the Warden, “creeping away from
+the door, and displaying a vista of his petticoats as he does so? That
+sturdy boy is the lineal heir of one of the oldest families in this part
+of England,--though now decayed and fallen, as you may judge. So, you
+see, with all our contrivances to keep up an aristocracy, there still is
+change forever going on.”
+
+“There is something not agreeable, and something otherwise, in the
+thought,” replied Redclyffe. “What is the name of the old family, whose
+representative is in such a case?”
+
+“Moseby,” said the Warden. “Their family residence stood within three
+miles of Braithwaite Hall, but was taken down in the last century,
+and its place supplied by a grand show-place, built by a Birmingham
+manufacturer, who also originated here.”
+
+They kept onward from this outskirt of the village, and soon, passing
+over a little rising ground, and descending now into a hollow came to
+the new portion of it, clustered around its gray Norman church, one side
+of the tower of which was covered with ivy, that was carefully kept, the
+Warden said, from climbing to the battlements, on account of some
+old prophecy that foretold that the tower would fall, if ever the ivy
+mantled over its top. Certainly, however, there seemed little likelihood
+that the square, low mass would fall, unless by external violence, in
+less than as many ages as it had already stood.
+
+Redclyffe looked at the old tower and little adjoining edifice with an
+interest that attached itself to every separate, moss-grown stone; but
+the Warden, like most Englishmen, was at once amazed and wearied with
+the American’s enthusiasm for this spot, which to him was uninteresting
+for the very reason that made it most interesting to Redclyffe, because
+it had stood there such a weary while. It was too common an object to
+excite in his mind, as it did in Redclyffe’s, visions of the long
+ago time when it was founded, when mass was first said there, and the
+glimmer of torches at the altar was seen through the vista of that
+broad-browed porch; and of all the procession of villagers that had
+since gone in and come out during nine hundred years, in their varying
+costume and fashion, but yet--and this was the strongest and most
+thrilling part of the idea--all, the very oldest of them, bearing a
+resemblance of feature, the kindred, the family likeness, to those who
+died yesterday,--to those who still went thither to worship; and that
+all the grassy and half-obliterated graves around had held those who
+bore the same traits.
+
+In front of the church was a little green, on which stood a very ancient
+yew tree, [Endnote: 2] all the heart of which seemed to have been eaten
+away by time, so that a man could now creep into the trunk, through a
+wide opening, and, looking upward, see another opening to the sky.
+
+“That tree,” observed the Warden, “is well worth the notice of such an
+enthusiastic lover of old things; though I suppose aged trees may be
+the one antiquity that you do not value, having them by myriads in your
+primeval forests. But then the interest of this tree consists greatly
+in what your trees have not,--in its long connection with men and the
+goings of men. Some of its companions were made into bows for Harold’s
+archers. This tree is of unreckonable antiquity; so old, that in
+a record of the time of Edward IV. it is styled the yew tree of
+Braithwaite Green. That carries it back to Norman times, truly. It was
+in comparatively modern times when it served as a gallows for one of
+James II.’s bloodthirsty judges to hang his victims on after Monmouth’s
+rebellion.”
+
+On one side of this yew was a certain structure which Redclyffe did
+not recognize as anything that he had before seen, but soon guessed
+its purpose; though, from appearances, it seemed to have been very
+long since it had served that purpose. It was a ponderous old oaken
+framework, six or seven feet high, so contrived that a heavy cross-piece
+shut down over another, leaving two round holes; in short, it was a pair
+of stocks, in which, I suppose, hundreds of vagrants and petty criminals
+had sat of old, but which now appeared to be merely a matter of
+curiosity.
+
+“This excellent old machine,” said the Warden, “had been lying in a
+rubbish chamber of the church tower for at least a century; when the
+clerk, who is a little of an antiquarian, unearthed it, and I advised
+him to set it here, where it used to stand;--not with any idea of its
+being used (though there is as much need of it now as ever), but that
+the present age may see what comforts it has lost.”
+
+They sat down a few moments on the circular seat, and looked at the
+pretty scene of this quiet little village, clustered round the old
+church as a centre; a collection of houses, mostly thatched, though
+there were one or two, with rather more pretension, that had roofs of
+red tiles. Some of them were stone cottages, whitewashed, but the larger
+edifices had timber frames, filled in with brick and plaster, which
+seemed to have been renewed in patches, and to be a frailer and less
+durable material than the old oak of their skeletons. They were gabled,
+with lattice windows, and picturesquely set off with projecting
+stones, and many little patchwork additions, such as, in the course of
+generations, the inhabitants had found themselves to need. There was not
+much commerce, apparently, in this little village, there seeming to be
+only one shop, with some gingerbread, penny whistles, ballads, and such
+matters, displayed in the window; and there, too, across the little
+green, opposite the church, was the village alehouse, with its bench
+under the low projecting eaves, with a Teniers scene of two wayfaring
+yeomen drinking a pot of beer and smoking their pipes.
+
+With Redclyffe’s Yankee feelings, there was something sad to think how
+the generations had succeeded one another, over and over, in innumerable
+succession, in this little spot, being born here, living, dying, lying
+down among their fathers’ dust, and forthwith getting up again, as it
+were, and recommencing the same meaningless round, and really bringing
+nothing to pass; for probably the generation of to-day, in so secluded
+and motionless a place as this, had few or no ideas in advance of their
+ancestors of five centuries ago. It seems not worth while that more than
+one generation of them should have existed. Even in dress, with their
+smock frocks and breeches, they were just like their fathers. The
+stirring blood of the new land,--where no man dwells in his father’s
+house,--where no man thinks of dying in his birthplace,--awoke within
+him, and revolted at the thought; and, as connected with it, revolted at
+all the hereditary pretensions which, since his stay here, had exercised
+such an influence over the fanciful part of his nature. In another mood,
+the village might have seemed a picture of rural peace, which it would
+have been worth while to give up ambition to enjoy; now, as his warmer
+impulse stirred, it was a weariness to think of. The new American was
+stronger in him than the hereditary Englishman.
+
+“I should go mad of it!” exclaimed he aloud.
+
+He started up impulsively, to the amazement of his companion, who of
+course could not comprehend what seemed so to have stung his American
+friend. As they passed the tree, on the other side of its huge trunk,
+they saw a young woman, sitting on that side of it, and sketching,
+apparently, the church tower, with the old Elizabethan vicarage that
+stood near it, with a gate opening into the churchyard, and much
+embowered and ivy-hung.
+
+“Ah, Miss Cheltenham,” said the Warden. “I am glad to see that you have
+taken the old church in hand, for it is one of the prettiest rustic
+churches in England, and as well worthy as any to be engraved on a sheet
+of note-paper or put into a portfolio. Will you let my friend and me see
+your sketch?”
+
+The Warden had made his request with rather more freedom than perhaps he
+would to a lady whom he considered on a level with himself, though with
+perfect respect, that being considered; and Redclyffe, looking at the
+person, saw that it was the same of whose face he had had a glimpse in
+the looking-glass, in the old palmer’s chamber.
+
+“No, Doctor Hammond,” said the young lady, with a respectful sort of
+frankness, “you must excuse me. I am no good artist, and am but jotting
+down the old church because I like it.”
+
+“Well, well, as you please,” said the Warden; and whispered aside to
+Redclyffe, “A girl’s sketchbook is seldom worth looking at. But now,
+Miss Cheltenham, I am about to give my American friend here a lecture on
+gargoyles, and other peculiarities of sacred Gothic architecture; and
+if you will honor me with your attention, I should be glad to find my
+audience increased by one.”
+
+So the young lady arose, and Redclyffe, considering the Warden’s
+allusion to him as a sort of partial introduction, bowed to her, and she
+responded with a cold, reserved, yet not unpleasant sort of courtesy.
+They went towards the church porch, and, looking in at the old stone
+bench on each side of the interior, the Warden showed them the hacks
+of the swords of the Roundheads, when they took it by storm. Redclyffe,
+mindful of the old graveyard on the edge of which he had spent his
+childhood, began to look at this far more antique receptacle, expecting
+to find there many ancient tombstones, perhaps of contemporaries or
+predecessors of the founders of his country. In this, however, he was
+disappointed, at least in a great measure; for the persons buried in the
+churchyard were probably, for the most part, of a humble rank in life,
+such as were not so ambitious as to desire a monument of any kind, but
+were content to let their low earth-mounds subside into the level, where
+their memory had waxed so faint that none among the survivors could
+point out the spot, or cared any longer about knowing it; while in other
+cases, where a monument of red freestone, or even of hewn granite, had
+been erected, the English climate had forthwith set to work to gnaw away
+the inscriptions; so that in fifty years--in a time that would have left
+an American tombstone as fresh as if just cut--it was quite impossible
+to make out the record. Their superiors, meanwhile, were sleeping
+less enviably in dismal mouldy and dusty vaults, instead of under the
+daisies. Thus Redclyffe really found less antiquity here, than in the
+graveyard which might almost be called his natal spot.
+
+When he said something to this effect, the Warden nodded.
+
+“Yes,” said he, “and, in truth, we have not much need of inscriptions
+for these poor people. All good families--every one almost, with
+any pretensions to respectable station, has his family or individual
+recognition within the church, or upon its walls; or some of them you
+see on tombs on the outside. As for our poorer friends here, they are
+content, as they may well be, to swell and subside, like little billows
+of mortality, here on the outside.”
+
+“And for my part,” said Redclyffe, “if there were anything particularly
+desirable on either side, I should like best to sleep under this lovely
+green turf, with the daisies strewn over me by Nature herself, and
+whatever other homely flowers any friend might choose to add.”
+
+“And, Doctor Hammond,” said the young woman, “we see by this gravestone
+that sometimes a person of humble rank may happen to be commemorated,
+and that Nature--in this instance at least--seems to take especial pains
+and pleasure to preserve the record.”
+
+She indicated a flat gravestone, near the porch, which time had indeed
+beautified in a singular way, for there was cut deep into it a name and
+date, in old English characters, very deep it must originally have been;
+and as if in despair of obliterating it, Time had taken the kindlier
+method of filling up the letters with moss; so that now, high embossed
+in loveliest green, was seen the name “Richard Oglethorpe 1613”;--green,
+and flourishing, and beautiful, like the memory of a good man. The
+inscription originally seemed to have contained some twenty lines, which
+might have been poetry, or perhaps a prose eulogy, or perhaps the simple
+record of the buried person’s life; but all this, having been done
+in fainter and smaller letters, was now so far worn away as to be
+illegible; nor had they ever been deep enough to be made living in moss,
+like the rest of the inscription.
+
+“How tantalizing,” remarked Redclyffe, “to see the verdant shine of this
+name, impressed upon us as something remarkable--and nothing else. I
+cannot but think that there must be something worth remembering about
+a man thus distinguished. When two hundred years have taken all these
+natural pains to illustrate and emblazon ‘Richard Oglethorpe 1613.’ Ha!
+I surely recollect that name. It haunts me somehow, as if it had been
+familiar of old.”
+
+“And me,” said the young lady.
+
+“It was an old name, hereabouts,” observed the Warden, “but has been
+long extinct,--a cottage name, not a gentleman’s. I doubt not that
+Oglethorpes sleep in many of these undistinguished graves.”
+
+Redclyffe did not much attend to what his friend said, his attention
+being attracted to the tone--to something in the tone of the young lady,
+and also to her coincidence in his remark that the name appealed to some
+early recollection. He had been taxing his memory, to tell him when and
+how the name had become familiar to him; and he now remembered that it
+had occurred in the old Doctor’s story of the Bloody Footstep, told to
+him and Elsie, so long ago. [Endnote: 3] To him and Elsie! It struck
+him--what if it were possible?--but he knew it was not--that the young
+lady had a remembrance also of the fact, and that she, after so many
+years, were mingling her thoughts with his. As this fancy recurred to
+him, he endeavored to get a glimpse of her face, and while he did so she
+turned it upon him. It was a quick, sensitive face, that did not seem
+altogether English; he would rather have imagined it American; but at
+all events he could not recognize it as one that he had seen before,
+and a thousand fantasies died within him as, in his momentary glance, he
+took in the volume of its contour.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+
+After the two friends had parted from the young lady, they passed
+through the village, and entered the park gate of Braithwaite Hall,
+pursuing a winding road through its beautiful scenery, which realized
+all that Redclyffe had read or dreamed about the perfect beauty of
+these sylvan creations, with the clumps of trees, or sylvan oaks,
+picturesquely disposed. To heighten the charm, they saw a herd of deer
+reposing, who, on their appearance, rose from their recumbent position,
+and began to gaze warily at the strangers; then, tossing their horns,
+they set off on a stampede, but only swept round, and settled down not
+far from where they were. Redclyffe looked with great interest at these
+deer, who were at once wild and civilized; retaining a kind of free
+forest citizenship, while yet they were in some sense subject to man. It
+seemed as if they were a link between wild nature and tame; as if they
+could look back, in their long recollections, through a vista, into the
+times when England’s forests were as wild as those of America, though
+now they were but a degree more removed from domesticity than cattle,
+and took their food in winter from the hand of man, and in summer
+reposed upon his lawns. This seemed the last touch of that delightful
+conquered and regulated wildness, which English art has laid upon the
+whole growth of English nature, animal or vegetable.
+
+“There is nothing really wild in your whole island,” he observed to the
+Warden. “I have a sensation as if somebody knew, and had cultivated and
+fostered, and set out in its proper place, every tree that grows; as if
+somebody had patted the heads of your wildest animals and played with
+them. It is very delightful to me, for the present; and yet, I think, in
+the course of time, I should feel the need for something genuine, as
+it were,--something that had not the touch and breath of man upon it. I
+suppose even your skies are modified by the modes of human life that are
+going on beneath it. London skies, of course, are so; but the breath of
+a great people, to say nothing of its furnace vapors and hearth-smokes,
+make the sky other than it was a thousand years ago.”
+
+“I believe we English have a feeling like this occasionally,” replied
+the Warden, “and it is from that, partly, that we must account for our
+adventurousness into other regions, especially for our interest in what
+is wild and new. In your own forests, now, and prairies, I fancy we find
+a charm that Americans do not. In the sea, too, and therefore we are
+yachters. For my part, however, I have grown to like Nature a little
+smoothed down, and enriched; less gaunt and wolfish than she would be if
+left to herself.”
+
+“Yes; I feel that charm too,” said Redclyffe. “But yet life would be
+slow and heavy, methinks, to see nothing but English parks.”
+
+Continuing their course through the noble clumps of oaks, they by and
+by had a vista of the distant hall itself. It was one of the old English
+timber and plaster houses, many of which are of unknown antiquity; as
+was the case with a portion of this house, although other portions had
+been renewed, repaired, or added, within a century. It had, originally,
+the Warden said, stood all round an enclosed courtyard, like the great
+houses of the Continent; but now one side of the quadrangle had long
+been removed, and there was only a front, with two wings; the beams of
+old oak being picked out with black, and three or four gables in a line
+forming the front, while the wings seemed to be stone. It was the timber
+portion that was most ancient. A clock was on the midmost gable, and
+pointed now towards one o’clock. The whole scene impressed Redclyffe,
+not as striking, but as an abode of ancient peace, where generation
+after generation of the same family had lived, each making the most of
+life, because the life of each successive dweller there was eked out
+with the lives of all who had hitherto lived there, and had in it
+equally those lives which were to come afterwards; so that there was
+a rare and successful contrivance for giving length, fulness, body,
+substance, to this thin and frail matter of human life. And, as life was
+so rich in comprehensiveness, the dwellers there made the most of it for
+the present and future, each generation contriving what it could to add
+to the cosiness, the comfortableness, the grave, solid respectability,
+the sylvan beauty, of the house with which they seemed to be connected
+both before and after death. The family had its home there; not merely
+the individual. Ancient shapes, that had apparently gone to the family
+tomb, had yet a right by family hearth and in family hall; nor did they
+come thither cold and shivering, and diffusing dim ghostly terrors, and
+repulsive shrinkings, and death in life; but in warm, genial attributes,
+making this life now passing more dense as it were, by adding all the
+substance of their own to it. Redclyffe could not compare this abode,
+and the feelings that it aroused, to the houses of his own country; poor
+tents of a day, inns of a night, where nothing was certain, save that
+the family of him who built it would not dwell here, even if he himself
+should have the bliss to die under the roof, which, with absurdest
+anticipations, he had built for his posterity. Posterity! An American
+can have none.
+
+“All this sort of thing is beautiful; the family institution was
+beautiful in its day,” ejaculated he, aloud, to himself, not to his
+companion; “but it is a thing of the past. It is dying out in England;
+and as for ourselves, we never had it. Something better will come up;
+but as for this, it is past.”
+
+“That is a sad thing to say,” observed the Warden, by no means
+comprehending what was passing in his friend’s mind. “But if you wish
+to view the interior of the Hall, we will go thither; for, harshly as
+I have spoken of the owner, I suppose he has English feeling enough to
+give us lunch and show us the old house of his forefathers.”
+
+“Not at present, if you please,” replied Redclyffe. “I am afraid of
+destroying my delightful visionary idea of the house by coming too near
+it. Before I leave this part of the country, I should be glad to ramble
+over the whole of it, but not just now.”
+
+While Redclyffe was still enjoying the frank hospitality of his new
+friend, a rather marked event occurred in his life; yet not so important
+in reality as it seemed to his English friend.
+
+A large letter was delivered to him, bearing the official seal of the
+United States, and the indorsement of the State Department; a very
+important-looking document, which could not but add to the importance of
+the recipient in the eyes of any Englishman, accustomed as they are
+to bow down before any seal of government. Redclyffe opened it rather
+coolly, being rather loath to renew any of his political remembrances,
+now that he was in peace; or to think of the turmoil of modern and
+democratic politics, here in this quietude of gone-by ages and customs.
+The contents, however, took him by surprise; nor did he know whether to
+be pleased or not.
+
+The official package, in short, contained an announcement that he had
+been appointed by the President, by and with the advice of the Senate,
+to one of the Continental missions, usually esteemed an object of
+considerable ambition to any young man in politics; so that, if
+consistent with his own pleasure, he was now one of the Diplomatic
+Corps, a Minister, and representative of his country. On first
+considering the matter, Redclyffe was inclined to doubt whether this
+honor had been obtained for him altogether by friendly aid, though it
+did happen to have much in it that might suit his half-formed purpose of
+remaining long abroad; but with an eye already rendered somewhat oblique
+by political practice, he suspected that a political rival--a rival,
+though of his own party--had been exerting himself to provide an
+inducement for Redclyffe to leave the local field to him; while he
+himself should take advantage of the vacant field, and his rival be thus
+insidiously, though honorably, laid on the shelf, whence if he should
+try to remove himself a few years hence the shifting influences of
+American politics would be likely enough to thwart him; so that, for the
+sake of being a few years nominally somebody, he might in fine come back
+to his own country and find himself permanently nobody. But Redclyffe
+had already sufficiently begun to suspect that he lacked some qualities
+that a politician ought to have, and without which a political life,
+whether successful or otherwise, is sure to be a most irksome one: some
+qualities he lacked, others he had, both almost equally an obstacle.
+When he communicated the offer, therefore, to his friend, the Warden, it
+was with the remark that he believed he should accept it.
+
+“Accept it?” cried the Warden, opening his eyes. “I should think so,
+indeed! Why, it puts you above the level of the highest nobility of
+the Court to which you are accredited; simple republican as you are, it
+gives you rank with the old blood and birth of Europe. Accept it? By all
+means; and I will come and see you at your court.”
+
+“Nothing is more different between England and America,” said Redclyffe,
+“than the different way in which the citizen of either country looks
+at official station. To an Englishman, a commission, of whatever kind,
+emanating from his sovereign, brings apparently a gratifying sense of
+honor; to an American, on the contrary, it offers really nothing of
+the kind. He ceases to be a sovereign,--an atom of sovereignty, at all
+events,--and stoops to be a servant. If I accept this mission, honorable
+as you think it, I assure you I shall not feel myself quite the man I
+have hitherto been; although there is no obstacle in the way of party
+obligations or connections to my taking it, if I please.”
+
+“I do not well understand this,” quoth the good Warden. “It is one of
+the promises of Scripture to the wise man, that he shall stand before
+kings, and that this embassy will enable you to do. No man--no man of
+your country surely--is more worthy to do so; so pray accept.”
+
+“I think I shall,” said Redclyffe.
+
+Much as the Warden had seemed to affectionize Redclyffe hitherto, the
+latter could not but be sensible, thereafter, of a certain deference in
+his friend towards him, which he would fain have got rid of, had it been
+in his power. However, there was still the same heartiness under it all;
+and after a little he seemed, in some degree, to take Redclyffe’s
+own view of the matter;--namely, that, being so temporary as these
+republican distinctions are, they really do not go skin deep, have no
+reality in them, and that the sterling quality of the man, be it higher
+or lower, is nowise altered by it;--an apothegm that is true even of
+an hereditary nobility, and still more so of our own Honorables and
+Excellencies. However, the good Warden was glad of his friend’s dignity,
+and perhaps, too, a little glad that this high fortune had befallen one
+whom he chanced to be entertaining under his roof. As it happened, there
+was an opportunity which might be taken advantage of to celebrate the
+occasion; at least, to make it known to the English world so far as the
+extent of the county. [Endnote: 1.]
+
+It was an hereditary custom for the warden of Braithwaite Hospital,
+once a year, to give a grand dinner to the nobility and gentry of the
+neighborhood; and to this end a bequest had been made by one of the
+former squires or lords of Braithwaite which would of itself suffice
+to feed forty or fifty Englishmen with reasonable sumptuousness. The
+present Warden, being a gentleman of private fortune, was accustomed to
+eke the limited income, devoted for this purpose, with such additions
+from his own resources as brought the rude and hearty hospitality
+contemplated by the first founder on a par with modern refinements of
+gourmandism. The banquet was annually given in the fine old hall where
+James II. had feasted; and on some of these occasions the Warden’s table
+had been honored with illustrious guests; especially when any of them
+happened to be wanting an opportunity to come before the public in an
+after-dinner speech. Just at present there was no occasion of that sort;
+and the good Warden fancied that he might give considerable _éclat_ to
+his hereditary feast by bringing forward the young American envoy, a
+distinguished and eloquent man, to speak on the well-worn topic of the
+necessity of friendly relations between England and America.
+
+“You are eloquent, I doubt not, my young friend?” inquired he.
+
+“Why, no,” answered Redclyffe, modestly.
+
+“Ah, yes, I know it,” returned the Warden. “If one have all the natural
+prerequisites of eloquence; a quick sensibility, ready thought, apt
+expression, a good voice--and not making its way into the world through
+your nose either, as they say most of your countrymen’s voices do. You
+shall make the crack speech at my dinner; and so strengthen the bonds
+of good fellowship between our two countries, that there shall be no
+question of war for at least six months to come.”
+
+Accordingly, the preparations for this stately banquet went on with
+great spirit; and the Warden exhorted Redclyffe to be thinking of some
+good topics for his international speech; but the young man laughed it
+off, and told his friend that he thought the inspiration of the moment,
+aided by the good old wine which the Warden had told him of, as among
+the treasures of the Hospital, would perhaps serve him better than any
+elaborate preparation.
+
+Redclyffe, being not even yet strong, used to spend much time, when the
+day chanced to be pleasant, (which was oftener than his preconceptions
+of English weather led him to expect,) in the garden behind the Warden’s
+house. It was an extensive one, and apparently as antique as the
+foundation of the establishment; and during all these years it had
+probably been growing richer and richer. Here were flowers of ancient
+race, and some that had been merely field or wayside flowers when first
+they came into the garden; but by long cultivation and hereditary care,
+instead of dying out, they had acquired a new richness and beauty, so
+that you would scarcely recognize the daisy or the violet. Roses too,
+there were, which Doctor Hammond said had been taken from those white
+and red rose-trees in the Temple Gardens, whence the partisans of York
+and Lancaster had plucked their fatal badges. With these, there were
+all the modern and far-fetched flowers from America, the East, and
+elsewhere; even the prairie flowers and the California blossoms were
+represented here; for one of the brethren had horticultural tastes, and
+was permitted freely to exercise them there. The antique character of
+the garden was preserved, likewise, by the alleys of box, a part of
+which had been suffered to remain, and was now grown to a great height
+and density, so as to make impervious green walls. There were also
+yew trees clipped into strange shapes of bird and beast, and uncouth
+heraldic figures, among which of course the leopard’s head grinned
+triumphant; and as for fruit, the high garden wall was lined with pear
+trees, spread out flat against it, where they managed to produce a cold,
+flavorless fruit, a good deal akin to cucumbers.
+
+Here, in these genial old arbors, Redclyffe used to recline in the
+sweet, mild summer weather, basking in the sun, which was seldom too
+warm to make its full embrace uncomfortable; and it seemed to him, with
+its fertility, with its marks everywhere of the quiet long-bestowed care
+of man, the sweetest and cosiest seclusion he had ever known; and two
+or three times a day, when he heard the screech of the railway train,
+rushing on towards distant London, it impressed him still more with a
+sense of safe repose here.
+
+Not unfrequently he here met the white-bearded palmer in whose chamber
+he had found himself, as if conveyed thither by enchantment, when he
+first came to the Hospital. The old man was not by any means of
+the garrulous order; and yet he seemed full of thoughts, full of
+reminiscences, and not disinclined to the company of Redclyffe. In fact,
+the latter sometimes flattered himself that a tendency for his society
+was one of the motives that brought him to the garden; though the amount
+of their intercourse, after all, was not so great as to warrant the
+idea of any settled purpose in so doing. Nevertheless, they talked
+considerably; and Redclyffe could easily see that the old man had
+been an extensive traveller, and had perhaps occupied situations far
+different from his present one, and had perhaps been a struggler
+in troubled waters before he was drifted into the retirement where
+Redclyffe found him. He was fond of talking about the unsuspected
+relationship that must now be existing between many families in England
+and unknown consanguinity in the new world, where, perhaps, really the
+main stock of the family tree was now existing, and with a new spirit
+and life, which the representative growth here in England had lost by
+too long continuance in one air and one mode of life. For history and
+observation proved that all people--and the English people by no means
+less than others--needed to be transplanted, or somehow renewed, every
+few generations; so that, according to this ancient philosopher’s
+theory, it would be good for the whole people of England now, if
+it could at once be transported to America, where its fatness, its
+sleepiness, its too great beefiness, its preponderant animal character,
+would be rectified by a different air and soil; and equally good, on the
+other hand, for the whole American people to be transplanted back to the
+original island, where their nervousness might be weighted with heavier
+influences, where their little women might grow bigger, where their
+thin, dry men might get a burden of flesh and good stomachs, where their
+children might, with the air, draw in a reverence for age, forms, and
+usage.
+
+Redclyffe listened with complacency to these speculations, smiling at
+the thought of such an exodus as would take place, and the reciprocal
+dissatisfaction which would probably be the result. But he had greater
+pleasure in drawing out some of the old gentleman’s legendary lore, some
+of which, whether true or not, was very curious. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+As Redclyffe sat one day watching the old man in the garden, he could
+not help being struck by the scrupulous care with which he attended
+to the plants; it seemed to him that there was a sense of justice,--of
+desiring to do exactly what was right in the matter, not favoring one
+plant more than another, and doing all he could for each. His progress,
+in consequence, was so slow, that in an hour, while Redclyffe was off
+and on looking at him, he had scarcely done anything perceptible. Then
+he was so minute; and often, when he was on the point of leaving one
+thing to take up another, some small neglect that he saw or fancied
+called him back again, to spend other minutes on the same task. He
+was so full of scruples. It struck Redclyffe that this was conscience,
+morbid, sick, a despot in trifles, looking so closely into life that it
+permitted nothing to be done. The man might once have been strong and
+able, but by some unhealthy process of his life he had ceased to be so
+now. Nor did any happy or satisfactory result appear to come from these
+painfully wrought efforts; he still seemed to know that he had left
+something undone in doing too much in another direction. Here was a lily
+that had been neglected, while he paid too much attention to a rose; he
+had set his foot on a violet; he had grubbed up, in his haste, a little
+plant that he mistook for a weed, but that he now suspected was an herb
+of grace. Grieved by such reflections as these, he heaved a deep sigh,
+almost amounting to a groan, and sat down on the little stool that he
+carried with him in his weeding, resting his face in his hands.
+
+Redclyffe deemed that he might be doing the old man a good service by
+interrupting his melancholy labors; so he emerged from the opposite door
+of the summer-house, and came along the adjoining walk with somewhat
+heavy footsteps, in order that the palmer might have warning of his
+approach without any grounds to suppose that he had been watched
+hitherto. Accordingly, when he turned into the other alley, he found the
+old man sitting erect on his stool, looking composed, but still sad, as
+was his general custom.
+
+“After all your wanderings and experience,” said he, “I observe that
+you come back to the original occupation of cultivating a garden,--the
+innocentest of all.”
+
+“Yes, so it would seem,” said the old man; “but somehow or other I do
+not find peace in this.”
+
+“These plants and shrubs,” returned Redclyffe, “seem at all events to
+recognize the goodness of your rule, so far as it has extended over
+them. See how joyfully they take the sun; how clear [they are] from all
+these vices that lie scattered round, in the shape of weeds. It is a
+lovely sight, and I could almost fancy a quiet enjoyment in the plants
+themselves, which they have no way of making us aware of, except by
+giving out a fragrance.”
+
+“Ah! how infinitely would that idea increase man’s responsibility,” said
+the old palmer, “if, besides man and beast, we should find it necessary
+to believe that there is also another set of beings dependent for their
+happiness on our doing, or leaving undone, what might have effect on
+them!”
+
+“I question,” said Redclyffe, smiling, “whether their pleasurable or
+painful experiences can be so keen, that we need trouble our consciences
+much with regard to what we do, merely as it affects them. So highly
+cultivated a conscience as that would be a nuisance to one’s self and
+one’s fellows.”
+
+“You say a terrible thing,” rejoined the old man. “Can conscience be too
+much alive in us? is not everything however trifling it seems, an item
+in the great account, which it is of infinite importance therefore to
+have right? A terrible thing is that you have said.”
+
+“That may be,” said Redclyffe; “but it is none the less certain to me,
+that the efficient actors--those who mould the world--are the persons
+in whom something else is developed more strongly than conscience. There
+must be an invincible determination to effect something; it may be
+set to work in the right direction, but after that it must go onward,
+trampling down small obstacles--small considerations of right and
+wrong--as a great rock, thundering down a hillside, crushes a thousand
+sweet flowers, and ploughs deep furrows in the innocent hillside.”
+
+As Redclyffe gave vent to this doctrine, which was not naturally his,
+but which had been the inculcation of a life, hitherto devoted to
+politics, he was surprised to find how strongly sensible he became of
+the ugliness and indefensibleness of what he said. He felt as if he were
+speaking under the eye of Omniscience, and as if every word he said were
+weighed, and its emptiness detected, by an unfailing intelligence. He
+had thought that he had volumes to say about the necessity of consenting
+not to do right in all matters minutely, for the sake of getting out an
+available and valuable right as the whole; but there was something that
+seemed to tie his tongue. Could it be the quiet gaze of this old man,
+so unpretending, so humble, so simple in aspect? He could not tell, only
+that he faltered, and finally left his speech in the midst.
+
+But he was surprised to find how he had to struggle against a certain
+repulsion within himself to the old man. He seemed so nonsensical,
+interfering with everybody’s right in the world; so mischievous,
+standing there and shutting out the possibility of action. It seemed
+well to trample him down; to put him out of the way--no matter
+how--somehow. It gave him, he thought, an inkling of the way in which
+this poor old man had made himself odious to his kind, by opposing
+himself, inevitably, to what was bad in man, chiding it by his very
+presence, accepting nothing false. You must either love him utterly,
+or hate him utterly; for he could not let you alone. Redclyffe, being a
+susceptible man, felt this influence in the strongest way; for it was
+as if there was a battle within him, one party pulling, wrenching him
+towards the old man, another wrenching him away, so that, by the agony
+of the contest, he felt disposed to end it by taking flight, and never
+seeing the strange individual again. He could well enough conceive how a
+brutal nature, if capable of receiving his influence at all, might find
+it so intolerable that it must needs get rid of him by violence,--by
+taking his blood if necessary.
+
+All these feelings were but transitory, however; they swept across him
+like a wind, and then he looked again at the old man and saw only his
+simplicity, his unworldliness,--saw little more than the worn and feeble
+individual in the Hospital garb, leaning on his staff; and then turning
+again with a gentle sigh to weed in the garden. And then Redclyffe
+went away, in a state of disturbance for which he could not account to
+himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+
+High up in the old carved roof, meanwhile, the spiders of centuries
+still hung their flaunting webs with a profusion that old Doctor
+Grimshawe would have been ravished to see; but even this was to be
+remedied, for one day, on looking in, Redclyffe found the great hall dim
+with floating dust, and down through it came great floating masses of
+cobweb, out of which the old Doctor would have undertaken to regenerate
+the world; and he saw, dimly aloft, men on ladders sweeping away these
+accumulations of years, and breaking up the haunts and residences of
+hereditary spiders.
+
+The stately old hall had been in process of cleaning and adapting to the
+banquet purposes of the nineteenth century, which it was accustomed
+to subserve, in so proud a way, in the sixteenth. It was, in the first
+place, well swept and cleansed; the painted glass windows were cleansed
+from dust, and several panes, which had been unfortunately broken and
+filled with common glass, were filled in with colored panes, which the
+Warden had picked up somewhere in his antiquarian researches. They were
+not, to be sure, just what was wanted; a piece of a saint, from some
+cathedral window, supplying what was lacking of the gorgeous purple of
+a mediæval king; but the general effect was rich and good, whenever the
+misty English atmosphere supplied sunshine bright enough to pervade it.
+Tapestry, too, from antique looms, faded, but still gorgeous, was
+hung upon the walls. Some suits of armor, that hung beneath the festal
+gallery, were polished till the old battered helmets and pierced
+breastplates sent a gleam like that with which they had flashed across
+the battle-fields of old. [Endnote: 1.]
+
+So now the great day of the Warden’s dinner had arrived; and, as may be
+supposed, there were fiery times in the venerable old kitchen. The cook,
+according to ancient custom, concocted many antique dishes, such as used
+to be set before kings and nobles; dainties that might have called the
+dead out of their graves; combinations of ingredients that had ceased
+to be put together for centuries; historic dishes, which had long, long
+ceased to be in the list of revels. Then there was the stalwart English
+cheer of the sirloin, and the round; there were the vast plum-puddings,
+the juicy mutton, the venison; there was the game, now just
+in season,--the half-tame wild fowl of English covers, the
+half-domesticated wild deer of English parks, the heathcock from
+the far-off hills of Scotland, and one little prairie hen, and some
+canvas-back ducks--obtained, Heaven knows how, in compliment to
+Redclyffe--from his native shores. O, the old jolly kitchen! how rich
+the flavored smoke that went up its vast chimney! how inestimable the
+atmosphere of steam that was diffused through it! How did the old men
+peep into it, even venture across the threshold, braving the hot wrath
+of the cook and his assistants, for the sake of imbuing themselves
+with these rich and delicate flavors, receiving them in as it were
+spiritually; for, received through the breath and in the atmosphere, it
+was really a spiritual enjoyment. The ghosts of ancient epicures seemed,
+on that day and the few preceding ones, to haunt the dim passages,
+snuffing in with shadowy nostrils the rich vapors, assuming visibility
+in the congenial medium, almost becoming earthly again in the strength
+of their earthly longings for one other feast such as they used to
+enjoy.
+
+Nor is it to be supposed that it was only these antique dainties that
+the Warden provided for his feast. No; if the cook, the cultured and
+recondite old cook, who had accumulated within himself all that his
+predecessors knew for centuries,--if he lacked anything of modern
+fashion and improvement, he had supplied his defect by temporary
+assistance from a London club; and the bill of fare was provided with
+dishes that Soyer would not have harshly criticised. The ethereal
+delicacy of modern taste, the nice adjustment of flowers, the French
+style of cookery, was richly attended to; and the list was long of
+dishes with fantastic names, fish, fowl, and flesh; and _entremets_, and
+“sweets,” as the English call them, and sugared cates, too numerous to
+think of.
+
+The wines we will not take upon ourselves to enumerate; but the juice,
+then destined to be quaffed, was in part the precious vintages that had
+been broached half a century ago, and had been ripening ever since;
+the rich and dry old port, so unlovely to the natural palate that it
+requires long English seasoning to get it down; the sherry, imported
+before these modern days of adulteration; some claret, the Warden said
+of rarest vintage; some Burgundy, of which it was the quality to warm
+the blood and genialize existence for three days after it was drunk.
+Then there was a rich liquid contributed to this department by Redclyffe
+himself; for, some weeks since, when the banquet first loomed in the
+distance, he had (anxious to evince his sense of the Warden’s kindness)
+sent across the ocean for some famous Madeira which he had inherited
+from the Doctor, and never tasted yet. This, together with some of the
+Western wines of America, had arrived, and was ready to be broached.
+
+The Warden tested these modern wines, and recognized a new flavor,
+but gave it only a moderate approbation; for, in truth, an elderly
+Englishman has not a wide appreciation of wines, nor loves new things
+in this kind more than in literature or life. But he tasted the Madeira,
+too, and underwent an ecstasy, which was only alleviated by the dread of
+gout, which he had an idea that this wine must bring on,--and truly,
+if it were so splendid a wine as he pronounced it, some pain ought to
+follow as the shadow of such a pleasure.
+
+As it was a festival of antique date, the dinner hour had been fixed
+earlier than is usual at such stately banquets; namely, at six o’clock,
+which was long before the dusky hour at which Englishmen love best to
+dine. About that period, the carriages drove into the old courtyard of
+the Hospital in great abundance; blocking up, too, the ancient portal,
+and remaining in a line outside. Carriages they were with armorial
+bearings, family coaches in which came Englishmen in their black coats
+and white neckcloths, elderly, white-headed, fresh-colored, squat; not
+beautiful, certainly, nor particularly dignified, nor very well dressed,
+nor with much of an imposing air, but yet, somehow or other, producing
+an effect of force, respectability, reliableness, trust, which is
+probably deserved, since it is invariably experienced. Cold they were
+in deportment, and looked coldly on the stranger, who, on his part, drew
+himself up with an extra haughtiness and reserve, and felt himself in
+the midst of his enemies, and more as if he were going to do battle
+than to sit down to a friendly banquet. The Warden introduced him, as an
+American diplomatist, to one or two of the gentlemen, who regarded him
+forbiddingly, as Englishmen do before dinner.
+
+Not long after Redclyffe had entered the reception-room, which was but
+shortly before the hour appointed for the dinner, there was another
+arrival betokened by the clatter of hoofs and grinding wheels in the
+courtyard; and then entered a gentleman of different mien from the
+bluff, ruddy, simple-minded, yet worldly Englishmen around him. He was a
+tall, dark man, with a black moustache and almost olive skin, a slender,
+lithe figure, a flexible face, quick, flashing, mobile. His deportment
+was graceful; his dress, though it seemed to differ in little or
+nothing from that of the gentlemen in the room, had yet a grace and
+picturesqueness in his mode of wearing it. He advanced to the Warden,
+who received him with distinction, and yet, Redclyffe fancied, not
+exactly with cordiality. It seemed to Redclyffe that the Warden looked
+round, as if with the purpose of presenting Redclyffe to this gentleman,
+but he himself, from some latent reluctance, had turned away and
+entered, into conversation with one of the other gentlemen, who said
+now, looking at the new-comer, “Are you acquainted with this last
+arrival?”
+
+“Not at all,” said Redclyffe. “I know Lord Braithwaite by sight, indeed,
+but have had no introduction. He is a man, certainly, of distinguished
+appearance.”
+
+“Why, pretty well,” said the gentleman, “but un-English, as also are his
+manners. It is a pity to see an old English family represented by such
+a person. Neither he, his father, nor grandfather was born among us; he
+has far more Italian blood than enough to drown the slender stream of
+Anglo-Saxon and Norman. His modes of life, his prejudices, his estates,
+his religion, are unlike our own; and yet here he is in the position of
+an old English gentleman, possibly to be a peer. You, whose nationality
+embraces that of all the world, cannot, I suppose, understand this
+English feeling.” [Endnote: 2.]
+
+“Pardon me,” said Redclyffe, “I can perfectly understand it. An
+American, in his feelings towards England, has all the jealousy and
+exclusiveness of Englishmen themselves,--perhaps, indeed, a little
+exaggerated.”
+
+“I beg your pardon,” said the Englishman, incredulously, “I think you
+cannot possibly understand it!” [Endnote: 3.]
+
+The guests were by this time all assembled, and at the Warden’s bidding
+they moved from the reception-room to the dining-hall, in some order and
+precedence, of which Redclyffe could not exactly discover the principle,
+though he found that to himself--in his quality, doubtless, of
+Ambassador--there was assigned a pretty high place. A venerable
+dignitary of the Church--a dean, he seemed to be--having asked a
+blessing, the fair scene of the banquet now lay before the guests,
+presenting a splendid spectacle, in the high-walled, antique, tapestried
+hall, overhung with the dark, intricate oaken beams, with the high
+Gothic windows, through one of which the setting sunbeams streamed, and
+showed the figures of kings and warriors, and the old Braithwaites among
+them. Beneath and adown the hall extended the long line of the tables,
+covered with the snow of the damask tablecloth, on which glittered,
+gleamed, and shone a good quality of ancient ancestral plate, and an
+_épergne_ of silver, extending down the middle; also the gleam of golden
+wine in the decanters; and truly Redclyffe thought that it was a noble
+spectacle, made so by old and stately associations, which made a noble
+banquet of what otherwise would be only a vulgar dinner. The English
+have this advantage and know how to make use of it. They bring--in these
+old, time-honored feasts--all the past to sit down and take the stately
+refreshment along with them, and they pledge the historic characters in
+their wine.
+
+A printed bill of fare, in gold letters, lay by each plate, on which
+Redclyffe saw the company glancing with great interest. The first dish,
+of course, was turtle soup, of which--as the gentleman next him, the
+Mayor of a neighboring town, told Redclyffe--it was allowable to take
+twice. This was accompanied, according to one of those rules which one
+knows not whether they are arbitrary or founded on some deep reason, by
+a glass of punch. Then came the noble turbot, the salmon, the sole, and
+divers of fishes, and the dinner fairly set in. The genial Warden seemed
+to have given liberal orders to the attendants, for they spared not
+to offer hock, champagne, sherry, to the guests, and good bitter ale,
+foaming in the goblet; and so the stately banquet went on, with somewhat
+tedious magnificence; and yet with a fulness of effect and thoroughness
+of sombre life that made Redclyffe feel that, so much importance being
+assigned to it,--it being so much believed in,--it was indeed a feast.
+The cumbrous courses swept by, one after another; and Redclyffe, finding
+it heavy work, sat idle most of the time, regarding the hall, the old
+decaying beams, the armor hanging beneath the galleries, and these
+Englishmen feasting where their fathers had feasted for so many ages,
+the same occasion, the same men, probably, in appearance, though
+the black coat and the white neckcloth had taken the place of ruff,
+embroidered doublet, and the magnificence of other ages. After all, the
+English have not such good things to eat as we in America, and certainly
+do not know better how to make them palatable. [Endnote: 4.]
+
+Well; but by and by the dinner came to a conclusion, as regarded the
+eating part; the cloth was withdrawn; a dessert of fruits, fresh and
+dried, pines, hothouse grapes, and all candied conserves of the Indies,
+was put on the long extent of polished mahogany. There was a tuning up
+of musicians, an interrogative drawing of fiddle-bows, and other
+musical twangs and puffs; the decanters opposite the Warden and his
+vice-president,--sherry, port, Redclyffe’s Madeira, and claret, were put
+in motion along the table, and the guests filled their glasses for the
+toast which, at English dinner-tables, is of course the first to be
+honored,--the Queen. Then the band struck up the good old anthem, “God
+save the Queen,” which the whole company rose to their feet to sing.
+It was a spectacle both interesting and a little ludicrous to
+Redclyffe,--being so apart from an American’s sympathies, so unlike
+anything that he has in his life or possibilities,--this active and warm
+sentiment of loyalty, in which love of country centres, and assimilates,
+and transforms itself into a passionate affection for a person, in whom
+they love all their institutions. To say the truth, it seemed a happy
+notion; nor could the American--while he comforted himself in the pride
+of his democracy, and that he himself was a sovereign--could he help
+envying it a little, this childlike love and reverence for a person
+embodying all their country, their past, their earthly future. He felt
+that it might be delightful to have a sovereign, provided that sovereign
+were always a woman,--and perhaps a young and fine one. But, indeed,
+this is not the difficulty, methinks, in English institutions which
+the American finds it hardest to deal with. We could endure a born
+sovereign, especially if made such a mere pageant as the English make of
+theirs. What we find it hardest to conceive of is, the satisfaction with
+which Englishmen think of a race above them, with privileges that they
+cannot share, entitled to condescend to them, and to have gracious and
+beautiful manners at their expense; to be kind, simple, unpretending,
+because these qualities are more available than haughtiness; to be
+specimens of perfect manhood;--all these advantages in consequence of
+their position. If the peerage were a mere name, it would be nothing to
+envy; but it is so much more than a name; it enables men to be really so
+superior. The poor, the lower classes, might bear this well enough;
+but the classes that come next to the nobility,--the upper middle
+classes,--how they bear it so lovingly is what must puzzle the American.
+But probably the advantage of the peerage is the less perceptible the
+nearer it is looked at.
+
+It must be confessed that Redclyffe, as he looked at this assembly
+of peers and gentlemen, thought with some self-gratulation of the
+probability that he had within his power as old a rank, as desirable a
+station, as the best of them; and that if he were restrained from taking
+it, it would probably only be by the democratic pride that made him
+feel that he could not, retaining all his manly sensibility, accept
+this gewgaw on which the ages--his own country especially--had passed
+judgment, while it had been suspended over his head. He felt himself, at
+any rate, in a higher position, having the option of taking this rank,
+and forbearing to do so, than if he took it. [Endnote: 5.]
+
+After this ensued a ceremony which is of antique date in old English
+corporations and institutions, at their high festivals. It is called the
+Loving Cup. A sort of herald or toast-master behind the Warden’s chair
+made proclamation, reciting the names of the principal guests, and
+announcing to them, “The Warden of the Braithwaite Hospital drinks to
+you in a Loving Cup”; of which cup, having sipped, or seemed to sip (for
+Redclyffe observed that the old drinkers were rather shy of it) a small
+quantity, he sent it down the table. Its progress was accompanied with
+a peculiar entanglement of ceremony, one guest standing up while another
+drinks, being pretty much as follows. First, each guest receiving it
+covered from the next above him, the same took from the silver cup its
+silver cover; the guest drank with a bow to the Warden and company, took
+the cover from the preceding guest, covered the cup, handed it to the
+next below him, then again removed the cover, replaced it after the
+guest had drunk, who, on his part, went through the same ceremony.
+And thus the cup went slowly on its way down the stately hall; these
+ceremonies being, it is said, originally precautions against the risk,
+in wild times, of being stabbed by the man who was drinking with you, or
+poisoned by one who should fail to be your taster. The cup was a fine,
+ancient piece of plate, massive, heavy, curiously wrought with armorial
+bearings, in which the leopard’s head appeared. Its contents, so far as
+Redclyffe could analyze them by a moderate sip, appeared to be claret,
+sweetened, with spices, and, however suited to the peculiarity of
+antique palates, was not greatly to Redclyffe’s taste. [Endnote: 6.]
+
+Redclyffe’s companion just below him, while the Loving Cup was beginning
+its march, had been explaining the origin of the custom as a defence
+of the drinker in times of deadly feud; when it had reached Lord
+Braithwaite, who drank and passed it to Redclyffe covered, and with the
+usual bow, Redclyffe looked into his Lordship’s Italian eyes and dark
+face as he did so, and the thought struck him, that, if there could
+possibly be any use in keeping up this old custom, it might be so now;
+for, how intimated he could hardly tell, he was sensible in his deepest
+self of a deadly hostility in this dark, courteous, handsome face. He
+kept his eyes fixed on his Lordship as he received the cup, and felt
+that in his own glance there was an acknowledgment of the enmity that he
+perceived, and a defiance, expressed without visible sign, and felt in
+the bow with which they greeted one another. When they had both resumed
+their seats, Redclyffe chose to make this ceremonial intercourse the
+occasion of again addressing him.
+
+“I know not whether your Lordship is more accustomed than myself to
+these stately ceremonials,” said he.
+
+“No,” said Lord Braithwaite, whose English was very good. “But this is
+a good old ceremony, and an ingenious one; for does it not twine us into
+knotted links of love--this Loving Cup--like a wreath of Bacchanals whom
+I have seen surrounding an antique vase. Doubtless it has great
+efficacy in entwining a company of friendly guests into one affectionate
+society.”
+
+“Yes; it should seem so,” replied Redclyffe, with a smile, and again
+meeting those black eyes, which smiled back on him. “It should seem so,
+but it appears that the origin of the custom was quite different, and
+that it was as a safeguard to a man when he drank with his enemy. What
+a peculiar flavor it must have given to the liquor, when the eyes of two
+deadly foes met over the brim of the Loving Cup, and the drinker knew
+that, if he withdrew it, a dagger would be in his heart, and the other
+watched him drink, to see if it was poison!”
+
+“Ah!” responded his Lordship, “they had strange fashions in those rough
+old times. Nowadays, we neither stab, shoot, nor poison. I scarcely
+think we hate except as interest guides us, without malevolence.”
+
+This singular conversation was interrupted by a toast, and the rising
+of one of the guests to answer it. Several other toasts of routine
+succeeded; one of which, being to the honor of the old founder of the
+Hospital, Lord Braithwaite, as his representative, rose to reply,--which
+he did in good phrases, in a sort of eloquence unlike that of the
+Englishmen around him, and, sooth to say, comparatively unaccustomed as
+he must have been to the use of the language, much more handsomely than
+they. In truth, Redclyffe was struck and amused with the rudeness, the
+slovenliness, the inartistic quality of the English speakers, who rather
+seemed to avoid grace and neatness of set purpose, as if they would be
+ashamed of it. Nothing could be more ragged than these utterances
+which they called speeches; so patched, and darned; and yet, somehow or
+other--though dull and heavy as all which seemed to inspire them--they
+had a kind of force. Each man seemed to have the faculty of getting,
+after some rude fashion, at the sense and feeling that was in him; and
+without glibness, without smoothness, without form or comeliness, still
+the object with which each one rose to speak was accomplished,--and what
+was more remarkable, it seemed to be accomplished without the speaker’s
+having any particular plan for doing it. He was surprised, too, to
+observe how loyally every man seemed to think himself bound to speak,
+and rose to do his best, however unfit his usual habits made him for the
+task. Observing this, and thinking how many an American would be taken
+aback and dumbfounded by being called on for a dinner speech, he could
+not but doubt the correctness of the general opinion, that Englishmen
+are naturally less facile of public speech than our countrymen.
+
+“You surpass your countrymen,” said Redclyffe, when his Lordship resumed
+his seat, amid rapping and loud applause.
+
+“My countrymen? I scarcely know whether you mean the English or
+Italians,” said Lord Braithwaite. “Like yourself, I am a hybrid, with
+really no country, and ready to take up with any.”
+
+“I have a country,--one which I am little inclined to deny,” replied
+Redclyffe, gravely, while a flush (perhaps of conscientious shame) rose
+to his brow.
+
+His Lordship bowed, with a dark Italian smile, but Redclyffe’s attention
+was drawn away from the conversation by a toast which the Warden now
+rose to give, and in which he found himself mainly concerned. With a
+little preface of kind words (not particularly aptly applied) to
+the great and kindred country beyond the Atlantic, the worthy Warden
+proceeded to remark that his board was honored, on this high festival,
+with a guest from that new world; a gentleman yet young, but already
+distinguished in the councils of his country; the bearer, he remarked,
+of an honored English name, which might well claim to be remembered
+here, and on this occasion, although he had understood from his friend
+that the American bearers of this name did not count kindred with the
+English ones. This gentleman, he further observed, with considerable
+flourish and emphasis, had recently been called from his retirement and
+wanderings into the diplomatic service of his country, which he would
+say, from his knowledge, the gentleman was well calculated to honor. He
+drank the health of the Honorable Edward Redclyffe, Ambassador of the
+United States to the Court of Hohen-Linden.
+
+Our English cousins received this toast with the kindest enthusiasm,
+as they always do any such allusion to our country; it being a festal
+feeling, not to be used except on holidays. They rose, with glass in
+hand, in honor of the Ambassador; the band struck up “Hail, Columbia”;
+and our hero marshalled his thoughts as well as he might for the
+necessary response; and when the tumult subsided he arose.
+
+His quick apprehending had taught him something of the difference of
+taste between an English and an American audience at a dinner-table;
+he felt that there must be a certain looseness, and carelessness, and
+roughness, and yet a certain restraint; that he must not seem to aim
+at speaking well, although, for his own ambition, he was not content
+to speak ill; that, somehow or other, he must get a heartiness into his
+speech; that he must not polish, nor be too neat, and must come with
+a certain rudeness to his good points, as if he blundered on them,
+and were surprised into them. Above all, he must let the good wine and
+cheer, and all that he knew and really felt of English hospitality, as
+represented by the kind Warden, do its work upon his heart, and speak
+up to the extent of what he felt--and if a little more, then no great
+harm--about his own love for the father-land, and the broader grounds of
+the relations between the two countries. On this system, Redclyffe began
+to speak; and being naturally and habitually eloquent, and of mobile and
+ready sensibilities, he succeeded, between art and nature, in making
+a speech that absolutely delighted the company, who made the old hall
+echo, and the banners wave and tremble, and the board shake, and the
+glasses jingle, with their rapturous applause. What he said--or some
+shadow of it, and more than he quite liked to own--was reported in the
+county paper that gave a report of the dinner; but on glancing over it,
+it seems not worth while to produce this eloquent effort in our pages,
+the occasion and topics being of merely temporary interest.
+
+Redclyffe sat down, and sipped his claret, feeling a little ashamed of
+himself, as people are apt to do after a display of this kind.
+
+“You know the way to the English heart better than I do,” remarked his
+Lordship, after a polite compliment to the speech. “Methinks these dull
+English are being improved in your atmosphere. The English need a
+change every few centuries,--either by immigration of new stock, or
+transportation of the old,--or else they grow too gross and earthly,
+with their beef, mutton, and ale. I think, now, it might benefit both
+countries, if your New England population were to be reciprocally
+exchanged with an equal number of Englishmen. Indeed, Italians might do
+as well.”
+
+“I should regret,” said Redclyffe, “to change the English, heavy as they
+are.”
+
+“You are an admirable Englishman,” said his Lordship. “For my part,
+I cannot say that the people are very much to my taste, any more than
+their skies and climate, in which I have shivered during the two years
+that I have spent here.”
+
+Here their conversation ceased; and Redclyffe listened to a long train
+of speechifying, in the course of which everybody, almost, was toasted;
+everybody present, at all events, and many absent. The Warden’s old
+wine was not spared; the music rang and resounded from the gallery; and
+everybody seemed to consider it a model feast, although there were no
+very vivid signs of satisfaction, but a decorous, heavy enjoyment, a
+dull red heat of pleasure, without flame. Soda and seltzer-water, and
+coffee, by and by were circulated; and at a late hour the company began
+to retire.
+
+Before taking his departure, Lord Braithwaite resumed his conversation
+with Redclyffe, and, as it appeared, with the purpose of making a
+hospitable proposition.
+
+“I live very much alone,” said he, “being insulated from my neighbors
+by many circumstances,--habits, religion, and everything else peculiarly
+English. If you are curious about old English modes of life, I can show
+you, at least, an English residence, little altered within a century
+past. Pray come and spend a week with me before you leave this part of
+the country. Besides, I know the court to which you are accredited, and
+can give you, perhaps, useful information about it.”
+
+Redclyffe looked at him in some surprise, and with a nameless
+hesitation; for he did not like his Lordship, and had fancied, in truth,
+that there was a reciprocal antipathy. Nor did he yet feel that he was
+mistaken in this respect; although his Lordship’s invitation was given
+in a tone of frankness, and seemed to have no reserve, except that his
+eyes did not meet his like Anglo-Saxon eyes, and there seemed an Italian
+looking out from within the man. But Redclyffe had a sort of repulsion
+within himself; and he questioned whether it would be fair to his
+proposed host to accept his hospitality, while he had this secret
+feeling of hostility and repugnance,--which might be well enough
+accounted for by the knowledge that he secretly entertained hostile
+interests to their race, and half a purpose of putting them in force.
+And, besides this,--although Redclyffe was ashamed of the feeling,--he
+had a secret dread, a feeling that it was not just a safe thing to trust
+himself in this man’s power; for he had a sense, sure as death, that he
+did not wish him well, and had a secret dread of the American. But he
+laughed within himself at this feeling, and drove it down. Yet it made
+him feel that there could be no disloyalty in accepting his Lordship’s
+invitation, because it was given in as little friendship as it would be
+accepted.
+
+“I had almost made my arrangements for quitting the neighborhood,”
+ said he, after a pause; “nor can I shorten the week longer which I
+had promised to spend with my very kind friend, the Warden. Yet your
+Lordship’s kindness offers we a great temptation, and I would gladly
+spend the next ensuing week at Braithwaite Hall.”
+
+“I shall expect you, then,” said Lord Braithwaite. “You will find me
+quite alone, except my chaplain,--a scholar, and a man of the world,
+whom you will not be sorry to know.”
+
+He bowed and took his leave, without shaking hands, as an American would
+have thought it natural to do, after such a hospitable agreement; nor
+did Redclyffe make any motion towards it, and was glad that his Lordship
+had omitted it. On the whole, there was a secret dissatisfaction with
+himself; a sense that he was not doing quite a frank and true thing in
+accepting this invitation, and he only made peace with himself on the
+consideration that Lord Braithwaite was as little cordial in asking the
+visit as he in acceding to it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+
+The guests were now rapidly taking their departure, and the Warden and
+Redclyffe were soon left alone in the antique hall, which now, in its
+solitude, presented an aspect far different from the gay festivity of
+an hour before; the duskiness up in the carved oaken beams seemed to
+descend and fill the hall; and the remembrance of the feast was like
+one of those that had taken place centuries ago, with which this was now
+numbered, and growing ghostly, and faded, and sad, even as they had long
+been.
+
+“Well, my dear friend,” said the Warden, stretching himself and yawning,
+“it is over. Come into my study with me, and we will have a devilled
+turkey-bone and a pint of sherry in peace and comfort.”
+
+“I fear I can make no figure at such a supper,” said Redclyffe. “But I
+admire your inexhaustibleness in being ready for midnight refreshment
+after such a feast.”
+
+“Not a glass of good liquor has moistened my lips to-night,” said the
+Warden, “save and except such as was supplied by a decanter of water
+made brown with toast; and such a sip as I took to the health of the
+Queen, and another to that of the Ambassador to Hohen-Linden. It is
+the only way, when a man has this vast labor of speechifying to do; and
+indeed there is no possibility of keeping up a jolly countenance for
+such a length of time except on toast-water.”
+
+They accordingly adjourned to the Warden’s sanctum, where that worthy
+dignitary seemed to enjoy himself over his sherry and cracked bones,
+in a degree that he probably had not heretofore; while Redclyffe, whose
+potations had been more liberal, and who was feverish and disturbed,
+tried the effect of a little brandy and soda-water. As often happens
+at such midnight symposiums, the two friends found themselves in a more
+kindly and confidential vein than had happened before, great as had been
+the kindness and confidence already grown up between them. Redclyffe
+told his friend of Lord Braithwaite’s invitation, and of his own
+resolution to accept it.
+
+“Why not? You will do well,” said the Warden; “and you will find his
+Lordship an accustomed host, and the old house most interesting. If he
+knows the secrets of it himself, and will show them, they will be well
+worth the seeing.”
+
+“I have had a scruple in accepting this invitation,” said Redclyffe.
+
+“I cannot see why,” said the Warden. “I advise it by all means, since I
+shall lose nothing by it myself, as it will not lop off any part of your
+visit to me.”
+
+“My dear friend,” said Redclyffe, irresistibly impelled to a confidence
+which he had not meditated a moment before, “there is a foolish secret
+which I must tell you, if you will listen to it; and which I have only
+not revealed to you because it seemed to me foolish and dream-like;
+because, too, I am an American, and a democrat; because I am ashamed of
+myself and laugh at myself.”
+
+“Is it a long story?” asked the Warden.
+
+“I can make it of any length, and almost any brevity,” said Redclyffe.
+
+“I will fill my pipe then,” answered the Warden, “and listen at my
+ease; and if, as you intimate, there prove to be any folly in it, I will
+impute it all to the kindly freedom with which you have partaken of our
+English hospitality, and forget it before to-morrow morning.”
+
+He settled himself in his easy-chair, in a most luxurious posture; and
+Redclyffe, who felt a strange reluctance to reveal--for the first time
+in his life--the shadowy hopes, if hopes they were, and purposes, if
+such they could be called, with which he had amused himself so many
+years, begun the story from almost the earliest period that he could
+remember. He told even of his earliest recollection, with an old woman,
+in the almshouse, and how he had been found there by the Doctor, and
+educated by him, with all the hints and half-revelations that had been
+made to him. He described the singular character of the Doctor, his
+scientific pursuits, his evident accomplishments, his great abilities,
+his morbidness and melancholy, his moodiness, and finally his death,
+and the singular circumstances that accompanied it. The story took a
+considerable time to tell; and after its close, the Warden, who had only
+interrupted it by now and then a question to make it plainer, continued
+to smoke his pipe slowly and thoughtfully for a long while.
+
+“This Doctor of yours was a singular character,” said he. “Evidently,
+from what you tell me as to the accuracy of his local reminiscences,
+he must have been of this part of the country,--of this immediate
+neighborhood,--and such a man could not have grown up here without being
+known. I myself--for I am an old fellow now--might have known him if he
+lived to manhood hereabouts.”
+
+“He seemed old to me when I first knew him,” said Redclyffe. “But
+children make no distinctions of age. He might have been forty-five
+then, as well as I can judge.”
+
+“You are now twenty-seven or eight,” said the Warden, “and were four
+years old when you first knew him. He might now be sixty-five. Do you
+know, my friend, that I have something like a certainty that I know who
+your Doctor was?”
+
+“How strange this seems!” exclaimed Redclyffe. “It has never struck
+me that I should be able to identify this singular personage with any
+surroundings or any friends.”
+
+The Warden, to requite his friend’s story,--and without as yet saying a
+word, good or bad, on his ancestral claims,--proceeded to tell him some
+of the gossip of the neighborhood,--what had been gossip thirty or forty
+years ago, but was now forgotten, or, at all events, seldom spoken of,
+and only known to the old, at the present day. He himself remembered it
+only as a boy, and imperfectly. There had been a personage of that day,
+a man of poor estate, who had fallen deeply in love and been betrothed
+to a young lady of family; he was a young man of more than ordinary
+abilities, and of great promise, though small fortune. It was not well
+known how, but the match between him and the young lady was broken off,
+and his place was supplied by the then proprietor of Braithwaite Hall;
+as it was supposed, by the artifices of her mother. There had been
+circumstances of peculiar treachery in the matter, and Mr. Oglethorpe
+had taken it severely to heart; so severely, indeed, that he had left
+the country, after selling his ancestral property, and had only been
+occasionally heard of again. Now, from certain circumstances, it had
+struck the Warden that this might be the mysterious Doctor of whom
+Redclyffe spoke. [Endnote: 1.]
+
+“But why,” suggested Redclyffe, “should a man with these wrongs to
+avenge take such an interest in a descendant of his enemy’s family?”
+
+“That is a strong point in favor of my supposition,” replied the Warden.
+“There is certainly, and has long been, a degree of probability that the
+true heir of this family exists in America. If Oglethorpe could discover
+him, he ousts his enemy from the estate and honors, and substitutes
+the person whom he has discovered and educated. Most certainly there is
+revenge in the thing. Should it happen now, however, the triumph would
+have lost its sweetness, even were Oglethorpe alive to partake of it;
+for his enemy is dead, leaving no heir, and this foreign branch has come
+in without Oglethorpe’s aid.”
+
+The friends remained musing a considerable time, each in his own train
+of thought, till the Warden suddenly spoke.
+
+“Do you mean to prosecute this apparent claim of yours?”
+
+“I have not intended to do so,” said Redclyffe.
+
+“Of course,” said the Warden, “that should depend upon the strength of
+your ground; and I understand you that there is some link wanting to
+establish it. Otherwise, I see not how you can hesitate. Is it a little
+thing to hold a claim to an old English estate and honors?”
+
+“No; it is a very great thing, to an Englishman born, and who need give
+up no higher birthright to avail himself of it,” answered Redclyffe.
+“You will laugh at me, my friend; but I cannot help feeling that I, a
+simple citizen of a republic, yet with none above me except those whom
+I help to place there,--and who are my servants, not my superiors,--must
+stoop to take these honors. I leave a set of institutions which are
+the noblest that the wit and civilization of man have yet conceived, to
+enlist myself in one that is based on a far lower conception of man, and
+which therefore lowers every one who shares in it. Besides,” said the
+young man, his eyes kindling with the ambition which had been so active
+a principle in his life, “what prospects--what rewards for spirited
+exertion--what a career, only open to an American, would I give up,
+to become merely a rich and idle Englishman, belonging (as I should)
+nowhere, without a possibility of struggle, such as a strong man
+loves, with only a mockery of a title, which in these days really means
+nothing,--hardly more than one of our own Honorables. What has any
+success in English life to offer (even were it within my reach, which,
+as a stranger, it would not be) to balance the proud career of an
+American statesman?”
+
+“True, you might be a President, I suppose,” said the Warden, rather
+contemptuously,--“a four years’ potentate. It seems to me an office
+about on a par with that of the Lord Mayor of London. For my part, I
+would rather be a baron of three or four hundred years’ antiquity.”
+
+“We talk in vain,” said Redclyffe, laughing. “We do not approach one
+another’s ideas on this subject. But, waiving all speculations as to
+my attempting to avail myself of this claim, do you think I can fairly
+accept this invitation to visit Lord Braithwaite? There is certainly
+a possibility that I may arraign myself against his dearest interests.
+Conscious of this, can I accept his hospitality?”
+
+The Warden paused. “You have not sought access to his house,” he
+observed. “You have no designs, it seems, no settled designs at all
+events, against his Lordship,--nor is there a probability that they
+would be forwarded by your accepting this invitation, even if you
+had any. I do not see but you may go. The only danger is, that his
+Lordship’s engaging qualities may seduce you into dropping your claims
+out of a chivalrous feeling, which I see is among your possibilities. To
+be sure, it would be more satisfactory if he knew your actual position,
+and should then renew his invitation.”
+
+“I am convinced,” said Redclyffe, looking up from his musing
+posture, “that he does know them. You are surprised; but in all Lord
+Braithwaite’s manner towards me there has been an undefinable something
+that makes me aware that he knows on what terms we stand towards each
+other. There is nothing inconceivable in this. The family have for
+generations been suspicious of an American line, and have more than once
+sent messengers to try to search out and put a stop to the apprehension.
+Why should it not have come to their knowledge that there was a person
+with such claims, and that he is now in England?”
+
+“It certainly is possible,” replied the Warden, “and if you are
+satisfied that his Lordship knows it, or even suspects it, you meet
+him on fair ground. But I fairly tell you, my good friend, that--his
+Lordship being a man of unknown principles of honor, outlandish, and an
+Italian in habit and moral sense--I scarcely like to trust you in his
+house, he being aware that your existence may be inimical to him. My
+humble board is the safer of the two.”
+
+“Pshaw!” said Redclyffe. “You Englishmen are so suspicious of anybody
+not regularly belonging to yourselves. Poison and the dagger haunt your
+conceptions of all others. In America you think we kill every third man
+with the bowie-knife. But, supposing there were any grounds for your
+suspicion, I would still encounter it. An American is no braver than
+an Englishman; but still he is not quite so chary of his life as the
+latter, who never risks it except on the most imminent necessity. We
+take such matters easy. In regard to this invitation, I feel that I can
+honorably accept it, and there are many idle and curious motives that
+impel me to it. I will go.”
+
+“Be it so; but you must come back to me for another week, after
+finishing your visit,” said the Warden. “After all, it was an idle fancy
+in me that there could be any danger. His Lordship has good English
+blood in his veins, and it would take oceans and rivers of Italian
+treachery to wash out the sterling quality of it. And, my good friend,
+as to these claims of yours, I would not have you trust too much to what
+is probably a romantic dream; yet, were the dream to come true, I should
+think the British peerage honored by such an accession to its ranks. And
+now to bed; for we have heard the chimes of midnight, two hours agone.”
+
+They accordingly retired; and Redclyffe was surprised to find what a
+distinctness his ideas respecting his claim to the Braithwaite honors
+had assumed, now that he, after so many years, had imparted them to
+another. Heretofore, though his imagination had played with them so
+much, they seemed the veriest dreams; now, they had suddenly taken form
+and hardened into substance; and he became aware, in spite of all the
+lofty and patriotic sentiments which he had expressed to the Warden,
+that these prospects had really much importance in his mind.
+
+Redclyffe, during the few days that he was to spend at the Hospital,
+previous to his visit to Braithwaite Hall, was conscious of a
+restlessness such as we have all felt on the eve of some interesting
+event. He wondered at himself at being so much wrought up by so simple
+a thing as he was about to do; but it seemed to him like a coming
+home after an absence of centuries. It was like an actual prospect
+of entrance into a castle in the air,--the shadowy threshold of which
+should assume substance enough to bear his foot, its thin, fantastic
+walls actually protect him from sun and rain, its hall echo with his
+footsteps, its hearth warm him. That delicious, thrilling uncertainty
+between reality and fancy, in which he had often been enwrapt since his
+arrival in this region, enveloped him more strongly than ever; and with
+it, too, there came a sort of apprehension, which sometimes shuddered
+through him like an icy draught, or the touch of cold steel to his
+heart. He was ashamed, too, to be conscious of anything like fear; yet
+he would not acknowledge it for fear; and indeed there was such an airy,
+exhilarating, thrilling pleasure bound up with it, that it could not
+really be so.
+
+It was in this state of mind that, a day or two after the feast, he saw
+Colcord sitting on the bench, before the portal of the Hospital, in the
+sun, which--September though it was--still came warm and bright
+(for English sunshine) into that sheltered spot; a spot where many
+generations of old men had warmed their limbs, while they looked down
+into the life, the torpid life, of the old village that trailed its
+homely yet picturesque street along by the venerable buildings of the
+Hospital.
+
+“My good friend,” said Redclyffe, “I am about leaving you, for a
+time,--indeed, with the limited time at my disposal, it is possible that
+I may not be able to come back hither, except for a brief visit. Before
+I leave you, I would fain know something more about one whom I must ever
+consider my benefactor.”
+
+“Yes,” said the old man, with his usual benignant quiet, “I saved your
+life. It is yet to be seen, perhaps, whether thereby I made myself your
+benefactor. I trust so.”
+
+“I feel it so, at least,” answered Redclyffe, “and I assure you life has
+a new value for me since I came to this place; for I have a deeper hold
+upon it, as it were,--more hope from it, more trust in something good to
+come of it.”
+
+“This is a good change,--or should be so,” quoth the old man.
+
+“Do you know,” continued Redclyffe, “how long you have been a figure in
+my life?”
+
+“I know it,” said Colcord, “though you might well have forgotten it.”
+
+“Not so,” said Redclyffe. “I remember, as if it were this morning, that
+time in New England when I first saw you.”
+
+“The man with whom you then abode,” said Colcord, “knew who I was.”
+
+“And he being dead, and finding you here now, by such a strange
+coincidence,” said Redclyffe, “and being myself a man capable of taking
+your counsel, I would have you impart it to me: for I assure you that
+the current of my life runs darkly on, and I would be glad of any light
+on its future, or even its present phase.”
+
+“I am not one of those from whom the world waits for counsel,” said the
+pensioner, “and I know not that mine would be advantageous to you, in
+the light which men usually prize. Yet if I were to give any, it would
+be that you should be gone hence.”
+
+“Gone hence!” repeated Redclyffe, surprised. “I tell you--what I have
+hardly hitherto told to myself--that all my dreams, all my wishes
+hitherto, have looked forward to precisely the juncture that seems now
+to be approaching. My dreaming childhood dreamt of this. If you know
+anything of me, you know how I sprung out of mystery, akin to none, a
+thing concocted out of the elements, without visible agency; how all
+through my boyhood I was alone; how I grew up without a root, yet
+continually longing for one,--longing to be connected with somebody, and
+never feeling myself so. Yet there was ever a looking forward to this
+time at which I now find myself. If my next step were death, yet
+while the path seemed to lead toward a certainty of establishing me in
+connection with my race, I would take it. I have tried to keep down this
+yearning, to stifle it, annihilate it, by making a position for myself,
+by being my own fact; but I cannot overcome the natural horror of being
+a creature floating in the air, attached to nothing; ever this feeling
+that there is no reality in the life and fortunes, good or bad, of
+a being so unconnected. There is not even a grave, not a heap of dry
+bones, not a pinch of dust, with which I can claim kindred, unless I
+find it here!”
+
+“This is sad,” said the old man,--“this strong yearning, and nothing to
+gratify it. Yet, I warn you, do not seek its gratification here. There
+are delusions, snares, pitfalls, in this life. I warn you, quit the
+search.”
+
+“No,” said Redclyffe, “I will follow the mysterious clue that seems to
+lead me on; and, even now, it pulls me one step further.”
+
+“How is that?” asked the old man.
+
+“It leads me onward even as far as the threshold--across the
+threshold--of yonder mansion,” said Redclyffe.
+
+“Step not across it; there is blood on that threshold!” exclaimed the
+pensioner. “A bloody footstep emerging. Take heed that there be not as
+bloody a one entering in!”
+
+“Pshaw!” said Redclyffe, feeling the ridicule of the emotion into which
+he had been betrayed, as the old man’s wildness of demeanor made him
+feel that he was talking with a monomaniac. “We are talking idly. I do
+but go, in the common intercourse of society, to see the old English
+residence which (such is the unhappy obscurity of my position) I fancy,
+among a thousand others, may have been that of my ancestors. Nothing is
+likely to come of it. My foot is not bloody, nor polluted with anything
+except the mud of the damp English soil.”
+
+“Yet go not in!” persisted the old man.
+
+“Yes, I must go,” said Redclyffe, determinedly, “and I will.”
+
+Ashamed to have been moved to such idle utterances by anything that the
+old man could say Redclyffe turned away, though he still heard the sad,
+half-uttered remonstrance of the old man, like a moan behind him, and
+wondered what strange fancy had taken possession of him.
+
+The effect which this opposition had upon him made him the more aware
+how much his heart was set upon this visit to the Hall; how much he had
+counted upon being domiciliated there; what a wrench it would be to him
+to tear himself away without going into that mansion, and penetrating
+all the mysteries wherewith his imagination, exercising itself upon the
+theme since the days of the old Doctor’s fireside talk, had invested
+it. In his agitation he wandered forth from the Hospital, and, passing
+through the village street, found himself in the park of Braithwaite
+Hall, where he wandered for a space, until his steps led him to a point
+whence the venerable Hall appeared, with its limes and its oaks around
+it; its look of peace, and aged repose, and loveliness; its stately
+domesticity, so ancient, so beautiful; its mild, sweet simplicity; it
+seemed the ideal of home. The thought thrilled his bosom, that this
+was his home,--the home of the wild Western wanderer, who had gone away
+centuries ago, and encountered strange chances, and almost forgotten his
+origin, but still kept a clue to bring him back; and had now come back,
+and found all the original emotions safe within him. It even seemed to
+him, that, by his kindred with those who had gone before,--by the line
+of sensitive blood linking him with that final emigrant,--he could
+remember all these objects;--that tree, hardly more venerable now than
+then; that clock-tower, still marking the elapsing time; that spire of
+the old church, raising itself beyond. He spread out his arms in a kind
+of rapture, and exclaimed:--
+
+“O home, my home, my forefathers’ home! I have come back to thee! The
+wanderer has come back!”
+
+There was a slight stir near him; and on a mossy seat, that was arranged
+to take advantage of a remarkably good point of view of the old Hall,
+he saw Elsie sitting. She had her drawing-materials with her, and had
+probably been taking a sketch. Redclyffe was ashamed of having been
+overheard by any one giving way to such idle passion as he had been
+betrayed into; and yet, in another sense, he was glad,--glad, at least,
+that something of his feeling, as yet unspoken to human being, was
+shared, and shared by her with whom, alone of living beings, he had any
+sympathies of old date, and whom he often thought of with feelings that
+drew him irresistibly towards her.
+
+“Elsie,” said he, uttering for the first time the old name, “Providence
+makes you my confidant. We have recognized each other, though no word
+has passed between us. Let us speak now again with one another. How
+came you hither? What has brought us together again?--Away with this
+strangeness that lurks between us! Let us meet as those who began life
+together, and whose life-strings, being so early twisted in unison,
+cannot now be torn apart.”
+
+“You are not wise,” said Elsie, in a faltering voice, “to break the
+restraint we have tacitly imposed upon ourselves. Do not let us speak
+further on this subject.”
+
+“How strangely everything evades me!” exclaimed Redclyffe. “I seem to be
+in a land of enchantment, where I can get hold of nothing that lends me
+a firm support. There is no medium in my life between the most vulgar
+realities and the most vaporous fiction, too thin to breathe. Tell me,
+Elsie, how came you here? Why do you not meet me frankly? What is there
+to keep you apart from the oldest friend, I am bold to say, you have
+on earth? Are you an English girl? Are you one of our own New England
+maidens, with her freedom, and her know-how, and her force, beyond
+anything that these demure and decorous damsels can know?”
+
+“This is wild,” said Elsie, straggling for composure, yet strongly moved
+by the recollections that he brought up. “It is best that we should meet
+as strangers, and so part.”
+
+“No,” said Redclyffe; “the long past comes up, with its memories, and
+yet it is not so powerful as the powerful present. We have met again;
+our adventures have shown that Providence has designed a relation in my
+fate to yours. Elsie, are you lonely as I am?”
+
+“No,” she replied, “I have bonds, ties, a life, a duty. I must live that
+life and do that duty. You have, likewise, both. Do yours, lead your own
+life, like me.”
+
+“Do you know, Elsie,” he said, “whither that life is now tending?”
+
+“Whither?” said she, turning towards him.
+
+“To yonder Hall,” said he.
+
+She started up, and clasped her hands about his arm.
+
+“No, no!” she exclaimed, “go not thither! There is blood upon the
+threshold! Return: a dreadful fatality awaits you here.”
+
+“Come with me, then,” said he, “and I yield my purpose.”
+
+“It cannot be,” said Elsie.
+
+“Then I, too, tell you it cannot be,” returned Redclyffe. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+The dialogue had reached this point, when there came a step along the
+wood-path; the branches rustled, and there was Lord Braithwaite, looking
+upon the pair with the ordinary slightly sarcastic glance with which he
+gazed upon the world.
+
+“A fine morning, fair lady and fair sir,” said he. “We have few such,
+except in Italy.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+
+So Redclyffe left the Hospital, where he had spent many weeks of strange
+and not unhappy life, and went to accept the invitation of the lord
+of Braithwaite Hall. It was with a thrill of strange delight, poignant
+almost to pain, that he found himself driving up to the door of the
+Hall, and actually passing the threshold of the house. He looked, as he
+stept over it, for the Bloody Footstep, with which the house had so
+long been associated in his imagination; but could nowhere see it. The
+footman ushered him into a hall, which seemed to be in the centre of
+the building, and where, little as the autumn was advanced, a fire
+was nevertheless burning and glowing on the hearth; nor was its effect
+undesirable in the somewhat gloomy room. The servants had evidently
+received orders respecting the guest; for they ushered him at once
+to his chamber, which seemed not to be one of those bachelor’s rooms,
+where, in an English mansion, young and single men are forced to be
+entertained with very bare and straitened accommodations; but a large,
+well, though antiquely and solemnly furnished room, with a curtained
+bed, and all manner of elaborate contrivances for repose; but the deep
+embrasures of the windows made it gloomy, with the little light that
+they admitted through their small panes. There must have been English
+attendance in this department of the household arrangements, at least;
+for nothing could exceed the exquisite nicety and finish of everything
+in the room, the cleanliness, the attention to comfort, amid antique
+aspects of furniture; the rich, deep preparations for repose.
+
+The servant told Redclyffe that his master had ridden out, and, adding
+that luncheon would be on the table at two o’clock, left him; and
+Redclyffe sat some time trying to make out and distinguish the feelings
+with which he found himself here, and realizing a lifelong dream. He
+ran back over all the legends which the Doctor used to tell about this
+mansion, and wondered whether this old, rich chamber were the one where
+any of them had taken place; whether the shadows of the dead haunted
+here. But, indeed, if this were the case, the apartment must have been
+very much changed, antique though it looked, with the second, or third,
+or whatever other numbered arrangement, since those old days of tapestry
+hangings and rush-strewed floor. Otherwise this stately and gloomy
+chamber was as likely as any other to have been the one where his
+ancestor appeared for the last time in the paternal mansion; here he
+might have been the night before that mysterious Bloody Footstep was
+left on the threshold, whence had arisen so many wild legends, and since
+the impression of which nothing certain had ever been known respecting
+that ill-fated man,--nothing certain in England at least,--and whose
+story was left so ragged and questionable even by all that he could add.
+
+Do what he could, Redclyffe still was not conscious of that deep
+home-feeling which he had imagined he should experience when, if ever,
+he should come back to the old ancestral place; there was strangeness,
+a struggle within himself to get hold of something that escaped him, an
+effort to impress on his mind the fact that he was, at last, established
+at his temporary home in the place that he had so long looked forward
+to, and that this was the moment which he would have thought more
+interesting than any other in his life. He was strangely cold and
+indifferent, frozen up as it were, and fancied that he would have cared
+little had he been to leave the mansion without so much as looking over
+the remaining part of it.
+
+At last, he became weary of sitting and indulging this fantastic humor
+of indifference, and emerged from his chamber with the design of
+finding his way about the lower part of the house. The mansion had that
+delightful intricacy which can never be contrived; never be attained
+by design; but is the happy result of where many builders, many
+designs,--many ages, perhaps,--have concurred in a structure, each
+pursuing his own design. Thus it was a house that you could go astray
+in, as in a city, and come to unexpected places, but never, until after
+much accustomance, go where you wished; so Redclyffe, although the great
+staircase and wide corridor by which he had been led to his room seemed
+easy to find, yet soon discovered that he was involved in an unknown
+labyrinth, where strange little bits of staircases led up and down, and
+where passages promised much in letting him out, but performed nothing.
+To be sure, the old English mansion had not much of the stateliness of
+one of Mrs. Radcliffe’s castles, with their suites of rooms opening one
+into another; but yet its very domesticity--its look as if long ago it
+had been lived in--made it only the more ghostly; and so Redclyffe felt
+the more as if he were wandering through a homely dream; sensible of
+the ludicrousness of his position, he once called aloud; but his voice
+echoed along the passages, sounding unwontedly to his ears, but arousing
+nobody. It did not seem to him as if he were going afar, but were
+bewildered round and round, within a very small compass; a predicament
+in which a man feels very foolish usually.
+
+As he stood at an old window, stone-mullioned, at the end of a passage
+into which he had come twice over, a door near him opened, and a
+personage looked out whom he had not before seen. It was a face of great
+keenness and intelligence, and not unpleasant to look at, though dark
+and sallow. The dress had something which Redclyffe recognized as
+clerical, though not exactly pertaining to the Church of England,--a
+sort of arrangement of the vest and shirt-collar; and he had knee
+breeches of black. He did not seem like an English clerical personage,
+however; for even in this little glimpse of him Redclyffe saw a
+mildness, gentleness, softness, and asking-of-leave, in his manner,
+which he had not observed in persons so well assured of their position
+as the Church of England clergy.
+
+He seemed at once to detect Redclyffe’s predicament, and came forward
+with a pleasant smile, speaking in good English, though with a somewhat
+foreign accent.
+
+“Ah, sir, you have lost your way. It is a labyrinthian house for its
+size, this old English Hall,--full of perplexity. Shall I show you to
+any point?”
+
+“Indeed, sir,” said Redclyffe, laughing, “I hardly know whither I want
+to go; being a stranger, and yet knowing nothing of the public places of
+the house. To the library, perhaps, if you will be good enough to direct
+me thither.”
+
+“Willingly, my dear sir,” said the clerical personage; “the more
+easily too, as my own quarters are close adjacent; the library being my
+province. Do me the favor to enter here.”
+
+So saying, the priest ushered Redclyffe into an austere-looking yet
+exceedingly neat study, as it seemed, on one side of which was an
+oratory, with a crucifix and other accommodations for Catholic devotion.
+Behind a white curtain there were glimpses of a bed, which seemed
+arranged on a principle of conventual austerity in respect to limits
+and lack of softness; but still there was in the whole austerity of
+the premises a certain character of restraint, poise, principle, which
+Redclyffe liked. A table was covered with books, many of them folios
+in an antique binding of parchment, and others were small, thick-set
+volumes, into which antique lore was rammed and compressed. Through
+an open door, opposite to the one by which he had entered, there was a
+vista of a larger apartment, with alcoves, a rather dreary-looking
+room, though a little sunshine came through a window at the further end,
+distained with colored glass.
+
+“Will you sit down in my little home?” said the courteous priest. “I
+hope we may be better acquainted; so allow me to introduce myself. I am
+Father Angelo, domestic chaplain to his Lordship. You, I know, are the
+American diplomatic gentleman, from whom his Lordship has been expecting
+a visit.”
+
+Redclyffe bowed.
+
+“I am most happy to know you,” continued the priest. “Ah; you have a
+happy country, most catholic, most recipient of all that is outcast on
+earth. Men of my religion must ever bless it.”
+
+“It certainly ought to be remembered to our credit,” replied Redclyffe,
+“that we have shown no narrow spirit in this matter, and have not, like
+other Protestant countries, rejected the good that is found in any man
+on account of his religious faith. American statesmanship comprises Jew,
+Catholic, all.”
+
+After this pleasant little acknowledgment, there ensued a conversation
+having some reference to books; for though Redclyffe, of late years,
+had known little of what deserves to be called literature,--having
+found political life as much estranged from it as it is apt to be
+with politicians,--yet he had early snuffed the musty fragrance of the
+Doctor’s books, and had learned to love its atmosphere. At the time
+he left college, he was just at the point where he might have been a
+scholar; but the active tendencies of American life had interfered with
+him, as with thousands of others, and drawn him away from pursuits which
+might have been better adapted to some of his characteristics than
+the one he had adopted. The priest gently felt and touched around his
+pursuits, and finding some remains of classic culture, he kept up a
+conversation on these points; showing him the possessions of the library
+in that department, where, indeed, were some treasures that he had
+discovered, and which seemed to have been collected at least a century
+ago.
+
+“Generally, however,” observed he, as they passed from one dark alcove
+to another, “the library is of little worth, except to show how much of
+living truth each generation contributes to the botheration of life, and
+what a public benefactor a bookworm is, after all. There, now! did you
+ever happen to see one? Here is one that I have watched at work, some
+time past, and have not thought it worth while to stop him.”
+
+Redclyffe looked at the learned little insect, who was eating a strange
+sort of circular trench into an old book of scholastic Latin, which
+probably only he had ever devoured,--at least ever found to his taste.
+The insect seemed in excellent condition, fat with learning, having
+doubtless got the essence of the book into himself. But Redclyffe was
+still more interested in observing in the corner a great spider, which
+really startled him,--not so much for its own terrible aspect, though
+that was monstrous, as because he seemed to see in it the very great
+spider which he had known in his boyhood; that same monster that had
+been the Doctor’s familiar, and had been said to have had an influence
+in his death. He looked so startled that Father Angelo observed it.
+
+“Do not be frightened,” said he; “though I allow that a brave man may
+well be afraid of a spider, and that the bravest of the brave need
+not blush to shudder at this one. There is a great mystery about this
+spider. No one knows whence he came; nor how long he has been here. The
+library was very much shut up during the time of the last inheritor of
+the estate, and had not been thoroughly examined for some years when
+I opened it, and swept some of the dust away from its old alcoves. I
+myself was not aware of this monster until the lapse of some weeks,
+when I was startled at seeing him, one day, as I was reading an old book
+here. He dangled down from the ceiling, by the cordage of his web, and
+positively seemed to look into my face.”
+
+“He is of the species Condetas,” said Redclyffe,--“a rare spider seldom
+seen out of the tropic regions.”
+
+“You are learned, then, in spiders,” observed the priest, surprised.
+
+“I could almost make oath, at least, that I have known this ugly
+specimen of his race,” observed Redclyffe. “A very dear friend, now
+deceased, to whom I owed the highest obligations, was studious of
+spiders, and his chief treasure was one the very image of this.”
+
+“How strange!” said the priest. “There has always appeared to me to be
+something uncanny in spiders. I should be glad to talk further with you
+on this subject. Several times I have fancied a strange intelligence in
+this monster; but I have natural horror of him, and therefore refrain
+from interviews.”
+
+“You do wisely, sir,” said Redclyffe. “His powers and purposes are
+questionably beneficent, at best.”
+
+In truth, the many-legged monster made the old library ghostly to him
+by the associations which it summoned up, and by the idea that it was
+really the identical one that had seemed so stuffed with poison, in the
+lifetime of the Doctor, and at that so distant spot. Yet, on reflection,
+it appeared not so strange; for the old Doctor’s spider, as he had heard
+him say, was one of an ancestral race that he had brought from beyond
+the sea. They might have been preserved, for ages possibly, in this old
+library, whence the Doctor had perhaps taken his specimen, and possibly
+the one now before him was the sole survivor. It hardly, however, made
+the monster any the less hideous to suppose that this might be the case;
+and to fancy the poison of old times condensed into this animal, who
+might have sucked the diseases, moral and physical, of all this family
+into him, and to have made himself their demon. He questioned with
+himself whether it might not be well to crush him at once, and so
+perhaps do away with the evil of which he was the emblem.
+
+“I felt a strange disposition to crush this monster at first,” remarked
+the priest, as if he knew what Redclyffe was thinking of,--“a feeling
+that in so doing I should get rid of a mischief; but then he is such
+a curious monster. You cannot long look at him without coming to the
+conclusion that he is indestructible.”
+
+“Yes; and to think of crushing such a deep-bowelled monster!” said
+Redclyffe, shuddering. “It is too great a catastrophe.”
+
+During this conversation in which he was so deeply concerned, the spider
+withdrew himself, and hand over hand ascended to a remote and dusky
+corner, where was his hereditary abode.
+
+“Shall I be likely to meet Lord Braithwaite here in the library?” asked
+Redclyffe, when the fiend had withdrawn himself. “I have not yet seen
+him since my arrival.”
+
+“I trust,” said the priest, with great courtesy, “that you are aware
+of some peculiarities in his Lordship’s habits, which imply nothing in
+detriment to the great respect which he pays all his few guests, and
+which, I know, he is especially desirous to pay to you. I think that
+we shall meet him at lunch, which, though an English institution, his
+Lordship has adopted very readily.”
+
+“I should hope,” said Redclyffe, willing to know how far he might be
+expected to comply with the peculiarities--which might prove to be
+eccentricities--of his host, “that my presence here will not be too
+greatly at variance with his Lordship’s habits, whatever they may be. I
+came hither, indeed, on the pledge that, as my host would not stand in
+my way, so neither would I in his.”
+
+“That is the true principle,” said the priest, “and here comes his
+Lordship in person to begin the practice of it.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+
+Lord Braithwaite came into the principal door of the library as the
+priest was speaking, and stood a moment just upon the threshold, looking
+keenly out of the stronger light into this dull and darksome apartment,
+as if unable to see perfectly what was within; or rather, as Redclyffe
+fancied, trying to discover what was passing between those two. And,
+indeed, as when a third person comes suddenly upon two who are talking
+of him, the two generally evince in their manner some consciousness of
+the fact; so it was in this case, with Redclyffe at least, although
+the priest seemed perfectly undisturbed, either through practice of
+concealment, or because he had nothing to conceal.
+
+His Lordship, after a moment’s pause, came forward, presenting his hand
+to Redclyffe, who shook it, and not without a certain cordiality; till
+he perceived that it was the left hand, when he probably intimated some
+surprise by a change of manner.
+
+“I am an awkward person,” said his Lordship. “The left hand, however, is
+nearest the heart; so be assured I mean no discourtesy.”
+
+“The Signor Ambassador and myself,” observed the priest, “have had
+a most interesting conversation (to me at least) about books and
+bookworms, spiders, and other congruous matters; and I find his
+Excellency has heretofore made acquaintance with a great spider bearing
+strong resemblance to the hermit of our library.”
+
+“Indeed,” said his Lordship. “I was not aware that America had yet
+enough of age and old misfortune, crime, sordidness, that accumulate
+with it, to have produced spiders like this. Had he sucked into himself
+all the noisomeness of your heat?”
+
+Redclyffe made some slight answer, that the spider was a sort of pet of
+an old virtuoso to whom he owed many obligations in his boyhood; and the
+conversation turned from this subject to others suggested by topics of
+the day and place. His Lordship was affable, and Redclyffe could not,
+it must be confessed, see anything to justify the prejudices of the
+neighbors against him. Indeed, he was inclined to attribute them, in
+great measure, to the narrowness of the English view,--to those insular
+prejudices which have always prevented them from fully appreciating what
+differs from their own habits. At lunch, which was soon announced, the
+party of three became very pleasant and sociable, his Lordship drinking
+a light Italian red wine, and recommending it to Redclyffe; who,
+however, was English enough to prefer some bitter ale, while the priest
+contented himself with pure water,--which is, in truth, a less agreeable
+drink in chill, moist England than in any country we are acquainted
+with.
+
+“You must make yourself quite at home here,” said his Lordship, as
+they rose from table. “I am not a good host, nor a very genial man, I
+believe. I can do little to entertain you; but here is the house and
+the grounds at your disposal,--horses in the stable,--guns in the
+hall,--here is Father Angelo, good at chess. There is the library. Pray
+make the most of them all; and if I can contribute in any way to your
+pleasure, let me know.”
+
+All this certainly seemed cordial, and the manner in which it was said
+seemed in accordance with the spirit of the words; and yet, whether
+the fault was in anything of morbid suspicion in Redclyffe’s nature, or
+whatever it was, it did not have the effect of making him feel welcome,
+which almost every Englishman has the natural faculty of producing on
+a guest, when once he has admitted him beneath his roof. It might be in
+great measure his face, so thin and refined, and intellectual without
+feeling; his voice which had melody, but not heartiness; his manners,
+which were not simple by nature, but by art;--whatever it was, Redclyffe
+found that Lord Braithwaite did not call for his own naturalness and
+simplicity, but his art, and felt that he was inevitably acting a part
+in his intercourse with him, that he was on his guard, playing a
+game; and yet he did not wish to do this. But there was a mobility, a
+subtleness in his nature, an unconscious tact,--which the mode of life
+and of mixing with men in America fosters and perfects,--that made this
+sort of finesse inevitable to him, with any but a natural character;
+with whom, on the other hand, Redclyffe could be as fresh and natural as
+any Englishman of them all.
+
+Redclyffe spent the time between lunch and dinner in wandering about the
+grounds, from which he had hitherto felt himself debarred by motives of
+delicacy. It was a most interesting ramble to him, coming to trees which
+his ancestor, who went to America, might have climbed in his boyhood,
+might have sat beneath, with his lady-love, in his youth; deer there
+were, the descendants of those which he had seen; old stone stiles,
+which his foot had trodden. The sombre, clouded light of the day fell
+down upon this scene, which in its verdure, its luxuriance of vegetable
+life, was purely English, cultivated to the last extent without losing
+the nature out of a single thing. In the course of his walk he came to
+the spot where he had been so mysteriously wounded on his first arrival
+in this region; and, examining the spot, he was startled to see that
+there was a path leading to the other side of a hedge, and this path,
+which led to the house, had brought him here.
+
+Musing upon this mysterious circumstance, and how it should have
+happened in so orderly a country as England, so tamed and subjected to
+civilization,--an incident to happen in an English park which seemed
+better suited to the Indian-haunted forests of the wilder parts of his
+own land,--and how no researches which the Warden had instituted had
+served in the smallest degree to develop the mystery,--he clambered over
+the hedge, and followed the footpath. It plunged into dells, and emerged
+from them, led through scenes which seemed those of old romances, and
+at last, by these devious ways, began to approach the old house, which,
+with its many gray gables, put on a new aspect from this point of view.
+Redclyffe admired its venerableness anew; the ivy that overran parts of
+it; the marks of age; and wondered at the firmness of the institutions
+which, through all the changes that come to man, could have kept this
+house the home of one lineal race for so many centuries; so many, that
+the absence of his own branch from it seemed but a temporary visit to
+foreign parts, from which he was now returned, to be again at home, by
+the old hearthstone.
+
+“But what do I mean to do?” said he to himself, stopping short, and
+still looking at the old house. “Am I ready to give up all the actual
+life before me for the sake of taking up with what I feel to be a less
+developed state of human life? Would it not be better for me to depart
+now, to turn my back on this flattering prospect? I am not fit to be
+here,--I, so strongly susceptible of a newer, more stirring life than
+these men lead; I, who feel that, whatever the thought and cultivation
+of England may be, my own countrymen have gone forward a long, long
+march beyond them, not intellectually, but in a way that gives them a
+further start. If I come back hither, with the purpose to make myself
+an Englishman, especially an Englishman of rank and hereditary
+estate,--then for me America has been discovered in vain, and the great
+spirit that has been breathed into us is in vain; and I am false to it
+all!”
+
+But again came silently swelling over him like a flood all that ancient
+peace, and quietude, and dignity, which looked so stately and beautiful
+as brooding round the old house; all that blessed order of ranks, that
+sweet superiority, and yet with no disclaimer of common brotherhood,
+that existed between the English gentleman and his inferiors; all that
+delightful intercourse, so sure of pleasure, so safe from rudeness,
+lowness, unpleasant rubs, that exists between gentleman and gentleman,
+where, in public affairs, all are essentially of one mind, or seem so
+to an American politician, accustomed to the fierce conflicts of our
+embittered parties; where life was made so enticing, so refined, and yet
+with a sort of homeliness that seemed to show that all its strength was
+left behind; that seeming taking in of all that was desirable in life,
+and all its grace and beauty, yet never giving life a hard enamel of
+over-refinement. What could there be in the wild, harsh, ill-conducted
+American approach to civilization, which could compare with this? What
+to compare with this juiciness and richness? What other men had ever got
+so much out of life as the polished and wealthy Englishmen of to-day?
+What higher part was to be acted, than seemed to lie before him, if he
+willed to accept it?
+
+He resumed his walk, and, drawing near the manor-house, found that he
+was approaching another entrance than that which had at first admitted
+him; a very pleasant entrance it was, beneath a porch, of antique form,
+and ivy-clad, hospitable and inviting; and it being the approach from
+the grounds, it seemed to be more appropriate to the residents of the
+house than the other one. Drawing near, Redclyffe saw that a flight of
+steps ascended within the porch, old-looking, much worn; and nothing is
+more suggestive of long time than a flight of worn steps; it must have
+taken so many soles, through so many years, to make an impression.
+Judging from the make of the outside of the edifice, Redclyffe thought
+that he could make out the way from the porch to the hall and library;
+so he determined to enter this way.
+
+There had been, as was not unusual, a little shower of rain during
+the afternoon; and as Redclyffe came close to the steps, they were
+glistening with the wet. The stones were whitish, like marble, and one
+of them bore on it a token that made him pause, while a thrill like
+terror ran through his system. For it was the mark of a footstep, very
+decidedly made out, and red, like blood,--the Bloody Footstep,--the mark
+of a foot, which seemed to have been slightly impressed into the rock,
+as if it had been a soft substance, at the same time sliding a little,
+and gushing with blood. The glistening moisture of which we have
+spoken made it appear as if it were just freshly stamped there; and it
+suggested to Redclyffe’s fancy the idea, that, impressed more than two
+centuries ago, there was some charm connected with the mark which kept
+it still fresh, and would continue to do so to the end of time. It was
+well that there was no spectator there,--for the American would have
+blushed to have it known how much this old traditionary wonder had
+affected his imagination. But, indeed, it was as old as any bugbear of
+his mind--as any of those bugbears and private terrors which grow up
+with people, and make the dreams and nightmares of childhood, and the
+fever-images of mature years, till they haunt the deliriums of the dying
+bed, and after that possibly, are either realized or known no more.
+The Doctor’s strange story vividly recurred to him, and all the horrors
+which he had since associated with this trace; and it seemed to him as
+if he had now struck upon a bloody track, and as if there were other
+tracks of this supernatural foot which he was bound to search out;
+removing the dust of ages that had settled on them, the moss and deep
+grass that had grown over them, the forest leaves that might have fallen
+on them in America--marking out the pathway, till the pedestrian lay
+down in his grave.
+
+The foot was issuing from, not entering into, the house. Whoever had
+impressed it, or on whatever occasion, he had gone forth, and doubtless
+to return no more. Redclyffe was impelled to place his own foot on the
+track; and the action, as it were, suggested in itself strange ideas of
+what had been the state of mind of the man who planted it there; and he
+felt a strange, vague, yet strong surmise of some agony, some terror and
+horror, that had passed here, and would not fade out of the spot. While
+he was in these musings, he saw Lord Braithwaite looking at him through
+the glass of the porch, with fixed, curious eyes, and a smile on his
+face. On perceiving that Redclyffe was aware of his presence, he came
+forth without appearing in the least disturbed.
+
+“What think you of the Bloody Footstep?” asked he.
+
+“It seems to me, undoubtedly,” said Redclyffe, stooping to examine it
+more closely, “a good thing to make a legend out of; and, like most
+legendary lore, not capable of bearing close examination. I should
+decidedly say that the Bloody Footstep is a natural reddish stain in the
+stone.”
+
+“Do you think so, indeed?” rejoined his Lordship. “It may be; but in
+that case, if not the record of an actual deed,--of a foot stamped down
+there in guilt and agony, and oozing out with unwipeupable blood,--we
+may consider it as prophetic;--as foreboding, from the time when the
+stone was squared and smoothed, and laid at this threshold, that a fatal
+footstep was really to be impressed here.”
+
+“It is an ingenious supposition,” said Redclyffe. “But is there any sure
+knowledge that the prophecy you suppose has yet been fulfilled?”
+
+“If not, it might yet be in the future,” said Lord Braithwaite. “But I
+think there are enough in the records of this family to prove that there
+did one cross this threshold in a bloody agony, who has since returned
+no more. Great seekings, I have understood, have been had throughout the
+world for him, or for any sign of him, but nothing satisfactory has been
+heard.”
+
+“And it is now too late to expect it,” observed the American.
+
+“Perhaps not,” replied the nobleman, with a glance that Redclyffe
+thought had peculiar meaning in it. “Ah! it is very curious to see
+what turnings up there are in this world of old circumstances that seem
+buried forever; how things come back, like echoes that have rolled away
+among the hills and been seemingly hushed forever. We cannot tell when
+a thing is really dead; it comes to life, perhaps in its old shape,
+perhaps in a new and unexpected one; so that nothing really vanishes out
+of the world. I wish it did.”
+
+The conversation now ceased, and Redclyffe entered the house, where he
+amused himself for some time in looking at the ancient hall, with its
+gallery, its armor, and its antique fireplace, on the hearth of
+which burned a genial fire. He wondered whether in that fire was the
+continuance of that custom which the Doctor’s legend spoke of, and that
+the flame had been kept up there two hundred years, in expectation of
+the wanderer’s return. It might be so, although the climate of England
+made it a natural custom enough, in a large and damp old room, into
+which many doors opened, both from the exterior and interior of the
+mansion; but it was pleasant to think the custom a traditionary one, and
+to fancy that a booted figure, enveloped in a cloak, might still
+arrive, and fling open the veiling cloak, throw off the sombre and
+drooping-brimmed hat, and show features that were similar to those seen
+in pictured faces on the walls. Was he himself--in another guise, as
+Lord Braithwaite had been saying--that long-expected one? Was his the
+echoing tread that had been heard so long through the ages--so far
+through the wide world--approaching the blood-stained threshold?
+
+With such thoughts, or dreams (for they were hardly sincerely enough
+entertained to be called thoughts), Redclyffe spent the day; a strange,
+delicious day, in spite of the sombre shadows that enveloped it. He
+fancied himself strangely wonted, already, to the house; as if his every
+part and peculiarity had at once fitted into its nooks, and corners,
+and crannies; but, indeed, his mobile nature and active fancy were not
+entirely to be trusted in this matter; it was, perhaps, his American
+faculty of making himself at home anywhere, that he mistook for the
+feeling of being peculiarly at home here.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+
+Redclyffe was now established in the great house which had been so long
+and so singularly an object of interest with him. With his customary
+impressibility by the influences around him, he begun to take in the
+circumstances, and to understand them by more subtile tokens than he
+could well explain to himself. There was the steward, [Endnote: 1] or
+whatever was his precise office; so quiet, so subdued, so nervous, so
+strange! What had been this man’s history? What was now the secret
+of his daily life? There he was, creeping stealthily up and down the
+staircases, and about the passages of the house; always as if he were
+afraid of meeting somebody. On seeing Redclyffe in the house, the latter
+fancied that the man expressed a kind of interest in his face; but
+whether pleasure or pain he could not well tell; only he sometimes found
+that he was contemplating him from a distance, or from the obscurity of
+the room in which he sat,--or from a corridor, while he smoked his cigar
+on the lawn. A great part, if not the whole of this, he imputed to
+his knowledge of Redclyffe’s connections with the Doctor; but yet this
+hardly seemed sufficient to account for the pertinacity with which the
+old man haunted his footsteps,--the poor, nervous old thing,--always
+near him, or often unexpectedly so; and yet apparently not very willing
+to hold conversation with him, having nothing of importance to say.
+
+“Mr. Omskirk,” said Redclyffe to him, a day or two after the
+commencement of his visit, “how many years have you now been in this
+situation?”
+
+“0, sir, ever since the Doctor’s departure for America,” said Omskirk,
+“now thirty and five years, five months, and three days.”
+
+“A long time,” said Redclyffe, smiling, “and you seem to keep the
+account of it very accurately.”
+
+“A very long time, your honor,” said Omskirk; “so long, that I seem to
+have lived one life before it began, and I cannot think of any life than
+just what I had. My life was broken off short in the midst; and what
+belonged to the earlier part of it was another man’s life; this is
+mine.”
+
+“It might be a pleasant life enough, I should think, in this fine old
+Hall,” said Redclyffe; “rather monotonous, however. Would you not like
+a relaxation of a few days, a pleasure trip, in all these thirty-five
+years? You old Englishmen are so sturdily faithful to one thing. You do
+not resemble my countrymen in that.”
+
+“0, none of them ever lived in an old mansion-house like this,” replied
+Omskirk, “they do not know the sort of habits that a man gets here. They
+do not know my business either, nor any man’s here.”
+
+“Is your master then, so difficult?” said Redclyffe.
+
+“My master! Who was speaking of him?” said the old man, as if surprised.
+“Ah, I was thinking of Dr. Grimshawe. He was my master, you know.”
+
+And Redclyffe was again inconceivably struck with the strength of the
+impression that was made on the poor old man’s mind by the character of
+the old Doctor; so that, after thirty years of other service, he still
+felt him to be the master, and could not in the least release himself
+from those earlier bonds. He remembered a story that the Doctor used to
+tell of his once recovering a hanged person, and more and more came to
+the conclusion that this was the man, and that, as the Doctor had said,
+this hold of a strong mind over a weak one, strengthened by the idea
+that he had made him, had subjected the man to him in a kind of slavery
+that embraced the soul.
+
+And then, again, the lord of the estate interested him greatly, and not
+unpleasantly. He compared what he seemed to be now with what, according
+to all reports, he had been in the past, and could make nothing of
+it, nor reconcile the two characters in the least. It seemed as if the
+estate were possessed by a devil,--a foul and melancholy fiend,--who
+resented the attempted possession of others by subjecting them to
+himself. One had turned from quiet and sober habits to reckless
+dissipation; another had turned from the usual gayety of life to recluse
+habits, and both, apparently, by the same influence; at least, so
+it appeared to Redclyffe, as he insulated their story from all other
+circumstances, and looked at them by one light. He even thought that he
+felt a similar influence coming over himself, even in this little
+time that he had spent here; gradually, should this be his permanent
+residence,--and not so very gradually either,--there would come its own
+individual mode of change over him. That quick suggestive mind would
+gather the moss and lichens of decay. Palsy of its powers would probably
+be the form it would assume. He looked back through the vanished
+years to the time which he had spent with the old Doctor, and he felt
+unaccountably as if the mysterious old man were yet ruling him, as he
+did in his boyhood; as if his inscrutable, inevitable eye were upon him
+in all his movements; nay, as if he had guided every step that he took
+in coming hither, and were stalking mistily before him, leading him
+about. He sometimes would gladly have given up all these wild and
+enticing prospects, these dreams that had occupied him so long, if he
+could only have gone away and looked back upon the house, its inmates,
+and his own recollections no more; but there came a fate, and took the
+shape of the old Doctor’s apparition, holding him back.
+
+And then, too, the thought of Elsie had much influence in keeping him
+quietly here; her natural sunshine was the one thing that, just now,
+seemed to have a good influence upon the world. She, too, was evidently
+connected with this place, and with the fate, whatever it might be, that
+awaited him here. The Doctor, the ruler of his destiny, had provided
+her as well as all the rest; and from his grave, or wherever he was, he
+still seemed to bring them together.
+
+So here, in this darkened dream, he waited for what should come to pass;
+and daily, when he sat down in the dark old library, it was with the
+thought that this day might bring to a close the doubt amid which he
+lived,--might give him the impetus to go forward. In such a state, no
+doubt, the witchcraft of the place was really to be recognized, the
+old witchcraft, too, of the Doctor, which he had escaped by the quick
+ebullition of youthful spirit, long ago, while the Doctor lived; but
+which had been stored up till now, till an influence that remained
+latent for years had worked out in active disease. He held himself
+open for intercourse with the lord of the mansion; and intercourse of a
+certain nature they certainly had, but not of the kind which Redclyffe
+desired. They talked together of politics, of the state of the relations
+between England and America, of the court to which Redclyffe was
+accredited; sometimes Redclyffe tried to lead the conversation to the
+family topics, nor, in truth, did Lord Braithwaite seem to decline his
+lead; although it was observable that very speedily the conversation
+would be found turned upon some other subject, to which it had swerved
+aside by subtle underhand movements. Yet Redclyffe was not the less
+determined, and at no distant period, to bring up the subject on which
+his mind dwelt so much, and have it fairly discussed between them.
+
+He was sometimes a little frightened at the position and circumstances
+in which he found himself; a great disturbance there was in his being,
+the causes of which he could not trace. It had an influence on his
+dreams, through which the Doctor seemed to pass continually, and when he
+awoke it was often with the sensation that he had just the moment before
+been holding conversation with the old man, and that the latter--with
+that gesture of power that he remembered so well--had been impressing
+some command upon him; but what that command was, he could not possibly
+call to mind. He wandered among the dark passages of the house, and up
+its antique staircases, as if expecting at every turn to meet some one
+who would have the word of destiny to say to him. When he went forth
+into the park, it was as if to hold an appointment with one who had
+promised to meet him there; and he came slowly back, lingering and
+loitering, because this expected one had not yet made himself visible,
+yet plucked up a little alacrity as he drew near the house, because the
+communicant might have arrived in his absence, and be waiting for him in
+the dim library. It seemed as if he was under a spell; he could neither
+go away nor rest,--nothing but dreams, troubled dreams. He had ghostly
+fears, as if some one were near him whom he could not make out; stealing
+behind him, and starting away when he was impelled to turn round. A
+nervousness that his healthy temperament had never before permitted him
+to be the victim of, assailed him now. He could not help imputing it
+partly to the influence of the generations who had left a portion of
+their individual human nature in the house, which had become magnetic by
+them and could not rid itself of their presence in one sense, though, in
+another, they had borne it as far off as to where the gray tower of the
+village church rose above their remains.
+
+Again, he was frightened to perceive what a hold the place was getting
+upon him; how the tendrils of the ivy seemed to hold him and would not
+let him go; how natural and homelike (grim and sombre as they were) the
+old doorways and apartments were becoming; how in no place that he had
+ever known had he had such a home-like feeling. To be sure, poor fellow,
+he had no earlier home except the almshouse, where his recollection of a
+fireside crowded by grim old women and pale, sickly children, of course
+never allowed him to have the reminiscences of a private, domestic home.
+But then there was the Doctor’s home by the graveyard, and little Elsie,
+his constant playmate? No, even those recollections did not hold him
+like this heavy present circumstance. How should he ever draw himself
+away? No; the proud and vivid and active prospects that had heretofore
+spread themselves before him,--the striving to conquer, the struggle,
+the victory, the defeat, if such it was to be,--the experiences for good
+or ill,--the life, life, life,--all possibility of these was passing
+from him; all that hearty earnest contest or communion of man with man;
+and leaving him nothing but this great sombre shade, this brooding
+of the old family mansion, with its dreary ancestral hall, its mouldy
+dignity, its life of the past, its fettering honor, which to accept must
+bind him hand and foot, as respects all effort, such as he had trained
+himself for,--such as his own country offered. It was not any value for
+these,--as it seemed to Redclyffe,--but a witchcraft, an indefinable
+spell, a something that he could not define, that enthralled him, and
+was now doing a work on him analogous to, though different from, that
+which was wrought on Omskirk and all the other inhabitants, high and
+low, of this old mansion.
+
+He felt greatly interested in the master of the mansion; although
+perhaps it was not from anything in his nature; but partly because he
+conceived that he himself had a controlling power over his fortunes, and
+likewise from the vague perception of this before-mentioned trouble
+in him. It seemed, whatever it might be, to have converted an ordinary
+superficial man of the world into a being that felt and suffered
+inwardly, had pangs, fears, a conscience, a sense of unseen things. It
+seemed as if underneath this manor-house were the entrance to the cave
+of Trophonius, one visit to which made a man sad forever after; and that
+Lord Braithwaite had been there once, or perhaps went nightly, or at
+any hour. Or the mansion itself was like dark-colored experience, the
+reality; the point of view where things were seen in their true lights;
+the true world, all outside of which was delusion, and here--dreamlike
+as its structures seemed--the absolute truth. All those that lived in it
+were getting to be a brotherhood; and he among them; and perhaps before
+the blood-stained threshold would grow up an impassable barrier, which
+would cause himself to sit down in dreary quiet, like the rest of them.
+
+Redclyffe, as has been intimated, had an unavowed--unavowed to
+himself--suspicion that the master of the house cherished no kindly
+purpose towards him; he had an indistinct feeling of danger from him;
+he would not have been surprised to know that he was concocting a plot
+against his life; and yet he did not think that Lord Braithwaite had the
+slightest hostility towards him. It might make the thing more horrible,
+perhaps; but it has been often seen in those who poison for the sake of
+interest, without feelings of personal malevolence, that they do it as
+kindly as the nature of the thing will permit; they, possibly, may even
+have a certain degree of affection for their victims, enough to induce
+them to make the last hours of life sweet and pleasant; to wind up the
+fever of life with a double supply of enjoyable throbs; to sweeten and
+delicately flavor the cup of death that they offer to the lips of him
+whose life is inconsistent with some stated necessity of their own.
+“Dear friend,” such a one might say to the friend whom he reluctantly
+condemned to death, “think not that there is any base malice, any
+desire of pain to thee, that actuates me in this thing. Heaven knows,
+I earnestly wish thy good. But I have well considered the matter,--more
+deeply than thou hast,--and have found that it is essential that one
+thing should be, and essential to that thing that thou, my friend,
+shouldst die. Is that a doom which even thou wouldst object to with such
+an end to be answered? Thou art innocent; thou art not a man of evil
+life; the worst thing that can come of it, so far as thou art concerned,
+would be a quiet, endless repose in yonder churchyard, among dust of
+thy ancestry, with the English violets growing over thee there, and
+the green, sweet grass, which thou wilt not scorn to associate with thy
+dissolving elements, remembering that thy forefather owed a debt,
+for his own birth and growth, to this English soil, and paid it
+not,--consigned himself to that rough soil of another clime, under the
+forest leaves. Pay it, dear friend, without repining, and leave me to
+battle a little longer with this troublesome world, and in a few years
+to rejoin thee, and talk quietly over this matter which we are now
+arranging. How slight a favor, then, for one friend to do another, will
+seem this that I seek of thee.”
+
+Redclyffe smiled to himself, as he thus gave expression to what he
+really half fancied were Lord Braithwaite’s feelings and purposes
+towards him, and he felt them in the kindness and sweetness of his
+demeanor, and his evident wish to make him happy, combined with his own
+subtile suspicion of some design with which he had been invited here, or
+which had grown up since he came.
+
+Whoever has read Italian history must have seen such instances of this
+poisoning without malice or personal ill-feeling.
+
+His own pleasant, companionable, perhaps noble traits and qualities,
+may have made a favorable impression on Lord Braithwaite, and perhaps he
+regretted the necessity of acting as he was about to do, but could not
+therefore weakly relinquish his deliberately formed design. And, on his
+part, Redclyffe bore no malice towards Lord Braithwaite, but felt really
+a kindly interest in him, and could he have made him happy at any less
+cost than his own life, or dearest interests, would perhaps have been
+glad to do so. He sometimes felt inclined to remonstrate with him in
+a friendly way; to tell him that his intended course was not likely to
+lead to a good result; that they had better try to arrange the matter
+on some other basis, and perhaps he would not find the American so
+unreasonable as he supposed.
+
+All this, it will be understood, were the mere dreamy suppositions of
+Redclyffe, in the idleness and languor of the old mansion, letting his
+mind run at will, and following it into dim caves, whither it tended. He
+did not actually believe anything of all this; unless it be a lawyer,
+or a policeman, or some very vulgar natural order of mind, no man really
+suspects another of crime. It is the hardest thing in the world for a
+noble nature--the hardest and the most shocking--to be convinced that
+a fellow-being is going to do a wrong thing, and the consciousness of
+one’s own inviolability renders it still more difficult to believe that
+one’s self is to be the object of the wrong. What he had been fancying
+looked to him like a romance. The strange part of the matter was, what
+suggested such a romance in regard to his kind and hospitable host, who
+seemed to exercise the hospitality of England with a kind of refinement
+and pleasant piquancy that came from his Italian mixture of blood? Was
+there no spiritual whisper here?
+
+So the time wore on; and Redclyffe began to be sensible that he must
+soon decide upon the course that he was to take; for his diplomatic
+position waited for him, and he could not loiter many days more away in
+this half delicious, half painful reverie and quiet in the midst of his
+struggling life. He was yet as undetermined what to do as ever; or, if
+we may come down to the truth, he was perhaps loath to acknowledge to
+himself the determination that he had actually formed.
+
+One day, at dinner, which now came on after candle-light, he and Lord
+Braithwaite sat together at table, as usual, while Omskirk waited at the
+sideboard. It was a wild, gusty night, in which an autumnal breeze
+of later autumn seemed to have gone astray, and come into September
+intrusively. The two friends--for such we may call them--had spent a
+pleasant day together, wandering in the grounds, looking at the old
+house at all points, going to the church, and examining the cross-legged
+stone statues; they had ridden, too, and taken a great deal of healthful
+exercise, and had now that pleasant sense of just weariness enough which
+it is the boon of the climate of England to incite and permit men
+to take. Redclyffe was in one of his most genial moods, and Lord
+Braithwaite seemed to be the same; so kindly they were both disposed
+to one another, that the American felt that he might not longer refrain
+from giving his friend some light upon the character in which he
+appeared, or in which, at least, he had it at his option to appear. Lord
+Braithwaite might or might not know it already; but at all events it
+was his duty to tell him, or to take his leave, having thus far neither
+gained nor sought anything from their connection which would tend to
+forward his pursuit--should he decide to undertake it.
+
+When the cheerful fire, the rare wine, and the good fare had put them
+both into a good physical state, Redclyffe said to Lord Braithwaite,--
+
+“There is a matter upon which I have been some time intending to speak
+to you.”
+
+Braithwaite nodded.
+
+“A subject,” continued he, “of interest to both of us. Has it ever
+occurred to you, from the identity of name, that I may be really, what
+we have jokingly assumed me to be,--a relation?”
+
+“It has,” said Lord Braithwaite, readily enough. “The family would be
+proud to acknowledge such a kinsman, whose abilities and political rank
+would add a public lustre that it has long wanted.”
+
+Redclyffe bowed and smiled.
+
+“You know, I suppose, the annals of your house,” he continued, “and have
+heard how, two centuries ago, or somewhat less, there was an ancestor
+who mysteriously disappeared. He was never seen again. There were tales
+of private murder, out of which a hundred legends have come down to
+these days, as I have myself found, though most of them in so strange a
+shape that I should hardly know them, had I not myself a clue.”
+
+“I have heard some of these legends,” said Lord Braithwaite.
+
+“But did you ever hear, among them,” asked Redclyffe, “that the lost
+ancestor did not really die,--was not murdered,--but lived long, though
+in another hemisphere,--lived long, and left heirs behind him?”
+
+“There is such a legend,” said Lord Braithwaite.
+
+“Left posterity,” continued Redclyffe,--“a representative of whom is
+alive at this day.”
+
+“That I have not known, though I might conjecture something like it,”
+ said Braithwaite.
+
+The coolness with which he took this perplexed Redclyffe. He resolved to
+make trial at once whether it were possible to move him.
+
+“And I have reason to believe,” he added, “that that representative is
+myself.”
+
+“Should that prove to be the case, you are welcome back to your own,”
+ said Lord Braithwaite, quietly. “It will be a very remarkable case, if
+the proofs for two hundred years, or thereabouts, can be so distinctly
+made out as to nullify the claim of one whose descent is undoubted. Yet
+it is certainly not impossible. I suppose it would hardly be fair in me
+to ask what are your proofs, and whether I may see them.”
+
+“The documents are in the hands of my agents in London,” replied
+Redclyffe; “and seem to be ample, among them being a certified genealogy
+from the first emigrant downward, without a break. A declaration of
+two men of note among the first settlers, certifying that they knew
+the first emigrant, under a change of name, to be the eldest son of the
+house of Braithwaite; full proofs, at least on that head.”
+
+“You are a lawyer, I believe,” said Braithwaite, “and know better than
+I what may be necessary to prove your claim. I will frankly own to you,
+that I have heard, long ago,--as long as when my connection with this
+hereditary property first began,--that there was supposed to be an heir
+extant for a long course of years, and that there, was no proof that
+that main line of the descent had ever become extinct. If these things
+had come fairly before me, and been represented to me with whatever
+force belongs to them, before my accession to the estate,--these and
+other facts which I have since become acquainted with,--I might have
+deliberated on the expediency of coming to such a doubtful possession.
+The property, I assure you, is not so desirable that, taking all things
+into consideration, it has much increased my happiness. But, now, here I
+am, having paid a price in a certain way,--which you will understand,
+if you ever come into the property,--a price of a nature that cannot
+possibly be refunded. It can hardly be presumed that I shall see your
+right a moment sooner than you make it manifest by law.”
+
+“I neither expect nor wish it,” replied Redclyffe, “nor, to speak
+frankly, am I quite sure that you will ever have occasion to defend your
+title, or to question mine. When I came hither, to be your guest, it was
+almost with the settled purpose never to mention my proofs, nor to
+seek to make them manifest. That purpose is not, I may say, yet
+relinquished.”
+
+“Yet I am to infer from your words that it is shaken?” said Braithwaite.
+“You find the estate, then, so delightful,--this life of the old
+manor-house so exquisitely agreeable,--this air so cheering,--this moral
+atmosphere so invigorating,--that your scruples are about coming to
+an end. You think this life of an Englishman, this fair prospect of a
+title, so irresistibly enticing as to be worth more than your claim, in
+behalf of your American birthright, to a possible Presidency.”
+
+There was a sort of sneer in this, which Redclyffe did not well know how
+to understand; and there was a look on Braithwaite’s face, as he said
+it, that made him think of a condemned soul, who should be dressed in
+magnificent robes, and surrounded with the mockery of state, splendor,
+and happiness, who, if he should be congratulated on his fortunate and
+blissful situation, would probably wear just such a look, and speak in
+just that tone. He looked a moment in Braithwaite’s face.
+
+“No,” he replied. “I do not think that there is much happiness in it.
+A brighter, healthier, more useful, far more satisfactory, though
+tumultuous life would await me in my own country. But there is about
+this place a strange, deep, sad, brooding interest, which possesses me,
+and draws me to it, and will not let me go. I feel as if, in spite of
+myself and my most earnest efforts, I were fascinated by something in
+the spot, and must needs linger here, and make it my home if I can.”
+
+“You shall be welcome; the old hereditary chair will be filled at last,”
+ said Braithwaite, pointing to the vacant chair. “Come, we will drink to
+you in a cup of welcome. Take the old chair now.”
+
+In half-frolic Redclyffe took the chair.
+
+He called to Omskirk to bring a bottle of a particularly exquisite
+Italian wine, known only to the most deeply skilled in the vintages
+of that country, and which, he said, was oftener heard of than
+seen,--oftener seen than tasted. Omskirk put it on the table in its
+original glass, and Braithwaite filled Redclyffe’s glass and his own,
+and raised the latter to his lips, with a frank expression of his mobile
+countenance.
+
+“May you have a secure possession of your estate,” said he, “and live
+long in the midst of your possessions. To me, on the whole, it seems
+better than your American prospects.”
+
+Redclyffe thanked him, and drank off the glass of wine, which was not
+very much to his taste; as new varieties of wine are apt not to be. All
+the conversation that had passed had been in a free, careless sort of
+way, without apparently much earnestness in it; for they were both men
+who knew how to keep their more serious parts within them. But Redclyffe
+was glad that the explanation was over, and that he might now remain
+at Braithwaite’s table, under his roof, without that uneasy feeling of
+treachery which, whether rightly or not, had haunted him hitherto. He
+felt joyous, and stretched his hand out for the bottle which Braithwaite
+kept near himself, instead of passing it.
+
+“You do not yourself do justice to your own favorite wine,” observed
+Redclyffe, seeing his host’s full glass standing before him.
+
+“I have filled again,” said Braithwaite, carelessly; “but I know not
+that I shall venture to drink a second glass. It is a wine that does not
+bear mixture with other vintages, though of most genial and admirable
+qualities when taken by itself. Drink your own, however, for it will be
+a rare occasion indeed that would induce me to offer you another bottle
+of this rare stock.”
+
+Redclyffe sipped his second glass, endeavoring to find out what was this
+subtile and peculiar flavor that hid itself so, and yet seemed on the
+point of revealing itself. It had, he thought, a singular effect upon
+his faculties, quickening and making them active, and causing him to
+feel as if he were on the point of penetrating rare mysteries, such as
+men’s thoughts are always hovering round, and always returning from.
+Some strange, vast, sombre, mysterious truth, which he seemed to have
+searched for long, appeared to be on the point of being revealed to him;
+a sense of something to come; something to happen that had been waiting
+long, long to happen; an opening of doors, a drawing away of veils; a
+lifting of heavy, magnificent curtains, whose dark folds hung before a
+spectacle of awe;--it was like the verge of the grave. Whether it was
+the exquisite wine of Braithwaite, or whatever it might be, the American
+felt a strange influence upon him, as if he were passing through the
+gates of eternity, and finding on the other side the revelation of some
+secret that had greatly perplexed him on this side. He thought that
+Braithwaite’s face assumed a strange, subtile smile,--not malicious,
+yet crafty, triumphant, and at the same time terribly sad, and with that
+perception his senses, his life, welled away; and left him in the deep
+ancestral chair at the board of Braithwaite.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+
+When awake [Endnote: 1], or beginning to awake, he lay for some time in
+a maze; not a disagreeable one, but thoughts were running to and fro in
+his mind, all mixed and jumbled together. Reminiscences of early days,
+even those that were Preadamite; referring, we mean, to those times in
+the almshouse, which he could not at ordinary times remember at all; but
+now there seemed to be visions of old women and men, and pallid girls,
+and little dirty boys, which could only be referred to that epoch. Also,
+and most vividly, there was the old Doctor, with his sternness,
+his fierceness, his mystery; and all that happened since, playing
+phantasmagoria before his yet unclosed eyes; nor, so mysterious was his
+state, did he know, when he should unclose those lids, where he should
+find himself. He was content to let the world go on in this way, as
+long as it would, and therefore did not hurry, but rather kept back the
+proofs of awakening; willing to look at the scenes that were unrolling
+for his amusement, as it seemed; and willing, too, to keep it uncertain
+whether he were not back in America, and in his boyhood, and all other
+subsequent impressions a dream or a prophetic vision. But at length
+something stirring near him,--or whether it stirred, or whether he
+dreamed it, he could not quite tell,--but the uncertainty impelled him,
+at last, to open his eyes, and see whereabouts he was.
+
+Even then he continued in as much uncertainty as he was before, and lay
+with marvellous quietude in it, trying sluggishly to make the mystery
+out. It was in a dim, twilight place, wherever it might be; a place of
+half-awakeness, where the outlines of things were not well defined; but
+it seemed to be a chamber, antique and vaulted, narrow and high, hung
+round with old tapestry. Whether it were morning or midday he could not
+tell, such was the character of the light, nor even where it came from;
+for there appeared to be no windows, and yet it was not apparently
+artificial light; nor light at all, indeed, but a gray dimness. It was
+so like his own half-awake state that he lay in it a longer time, not
+incited to finish his awaking, but in a languor, not disagreeable, yet
+hanging heavily, heavily upon him, like a dark pall. It was, in fact, as
+if he had been asleep for years, or centuries, or till the last day was
+dawning, and then was collecting his thoughts in such slow fashion as
+would then be likely.
+
+Again that noise,--a little, low, quiet sound, as of one breathing
+somewhere near him. The whole thing was very much like that incident
+which introduced him to the Hospital, and his first coming to his senses
+there; and he almost fancied that some such accident must again have
+happened to him, and that when his sight cleared he should again behold
+the venerable figure of the pensioner. With this idea he let his head
+steady itself; and it seemed to him that its dizziness must needs be
+the result of very long and deep sleep. What if it were the sleep of a
+century? What if all things that were extant when he went to sleep had
+passed away, and he was waking now in another epoch of time? Where was
+America, and the republic in which he hoped for such great things? Where
+England? had she stood it better than the republic? Was the old Hospital
+still in being,--although the good Warden must long since have passed
+out of his warm and pleasant life? And himself, how came he to be
+preserved? In what musty old nook had he been put away, where Time
+neglected and Death forgot him, until now he was to get up friendless,
+helpless,--when new heirs had come to the estate he was on the point of
+laying claim to,--and go onward through what remained of life? Would it
+not have been better to have lived with his contemporaries, and to be
+now dead and dust with them? Poor, petty interests of a day, how slight!
+
+Again the noise, a little stir, a sort of quiet moan, or something that
+he could not quite define; but it seemed, whenever he heard it, as
+if some fact thrust itself through the dream-work with which he was
+circumfused; something alien to his fantasies, yet not powerful enough
+to dispel them. It began to be irksome to him, this little sound of
+something near him; and he thought, in the space of another hundred
+years, if it continued, he should have to arouse himself and see what
+it was. But, indeed, there was something so cheering in this long
+repose,--this rest from all the troubles of earth, which it sometimes
+seems as if only a churchyard bed would give us,--that he wished the
+noise would let him alone. But his thoughts were gradually getting
+too busy for this slumberous state. He begun, perforce, to come nearer
+actuality. The strange question occurred to him, Had any time at all
+passed? Was he not still sitting at Lord Braithwaite’s table, having
+just now quaffed a second glass of that rare and curious Italian wine?
+Was it not affecting his head very strangely,--so that he was put out of
+time as it were? He would rally himself, and try to set his head right
+with another glass. He must be still at table, for now he remembered he
+had not gone to bed at all. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+Ah, the noise! He could not bear it, he would awake now, now!--silence
+it, and then to sleep again. In fact, he started up; started to his
+feet, in puzzle and perplexity, and stood gazing around him, with
+swimming brain. It was an antique room, which he did not at all
+recognize, and, indeed, in that dim twilight--which how it came he could
+not tell--he could scarcely discern what were its distinguishing marks.
+But he seemed to be sensible, that, in a high-backed chair, at a little
+distance from him, sat a figure in a long robe; a figure of a man
+with snow-white hair and a long beard, who seemed to be gazing at him,
+quietly, as if he had been gazing a hundred years. I know not what it
+was, but there was an influence as if this old man belonged to some
+other age and category of man than he was now amongst. He remembered the
+old family legend of the existence of an ancestor two or three centuries
+in age.
+
+“It is the old family personified,” thought he.
+
+The old figure made no sign, but continued to sit gazing at him in so
+strangely still a manner that it made Redclyffe shiver with something
+that seemed like affright. There was an aspect of long, long time about
+him; as if he had never been young, or so long ago as when the world
+was young along with him. He might be the demon of this old house; the
+representative of all that happened in it, the grief, the long languor
+and weariness of life, the deaths, gathering them all into himself, and
+figuring them in furrows, wrinkles, and white hairs,--a being that might
+have been young, when those old Saxon timbers were put together, with
+the oaks that were saplings when Caesar landed, and was in his maturity
+when the Conqueror came, and was now lapsing into extreme age when the
+nineteenth century was elderly. His garb might have been of any time,
+that long, loose robe that enveloped him. Redclyffe remained in this
+way, gazing at this aged figure; at first without the least wonder, but
+calmly, as we feel in dreams, when, being in a land of enchantment, we
+take everything as if it were a matter of course, and feel, by the right
+of our own marvellous nature, on terms of equal kindred with all other
+marvels. So it was with him when he first became aware of the old man,
+sitting there with that age-long regard directed towards him.
+
+But, by degrees, a sense of wonder had its will, and grew, slowly at
+first, in Redclyffe’s mind; and almost twin-born with it, and growing
+piece by piece, there was a sense of awful fear, as his waking senses
+came slowly back to him. In the dreamy state, he had felt no fear; but,
+as a waking man, it was fearful to discover that the shadowy forms did
+not fly from his awaking eyes. He started at last to his feet from the
+low couch on which he had all this time been lying.
+
+“What are you?” he exclaimed. “Where am I?”
+
+The old figure made no answer; nor could Redclyffe be quite sure that
+his voice had any effect upon it, though he fancied that it was shaken
+a little, as if his voice came to it from afar. But it continued to gaze
+at him, or at least to have its aged face turned towards him in the dim
+light; and this strange composure, and unapproachableness, were very
+frightful. As his manhood gathered about his heart, however, the
+American endeavored to shake off this besetting fear, or awe, or
+whatever it was; and to bring himself to a sense of waking things,--to
+burst through the mist and delusive shows that bewildered him, and catch
+hold of a reality. He stamped upon the floor; it was solid stone, the
+pavement, or oak so old and stanch that it resembled it. There was
+one firm thing, therefore. But the contrast between this and the
+slipperiness, the unaccountableness, of the rest of his position, made
+him the more sensible of the latter. He made a step towards the old
+figure; another; another. He was face to face with him, within a yard of
+distance. He saw the faint movement of the old man’s breath; he sought,
+through the twilight of the room, some glimmer of perception in his
+eyes.
+
+“Are you a living man?” asked Redclyffe, faintly and doubtfully.
+
+He mumbled, the old figure, some faint moaning sound, that, if it
+were language at all, had all the edges and angles worn off it by
+decay,--unintelligible, except that it seemed to signify a faint
+mournfulness and complainingness of mood; and then held his peace,
+continuing to gaze as before. Redclyffe could not bear the awe that
+filled him, while he kept at a distance, and, coming desperately
+forward, he stood close to the old figure; he touched his robe, to see
+if it were real; he laid his hand upon the withered hand that held the
+staff, in which he now recognized the very staff of the Doctor’s legend.
+His fingers touched a real hand, though, bony and dry, as if it had been
+in the grave.
+
+“Then you are real?” said Redclyffe doubtfully.
+
+The old figure seemed to have exhausted itself--its energies, what there
+were of them--in the effort of making the unintelligible communication
+already vouchsafed. Then he seemed to lapse out of consciousness, and
+not to know what was passing, or to be sensible that any person was
+near him. But Redclyffe was now resuming his firmness and daylight
+consciousness even in the dimness. He ran over all that he had heard of
+the legend of the old house, rapidly considering whether there might not
+be something of fact in the legend of the undying old man; whether, as
+told or whispered in the chimney-corners, it might not be an instance
+of the mysterious, the half-spiritual mode, in which actual truths
+communicate themselves imperfectly through a medium that gives them the
+aspect of falsehood. Something in the atmosphere of the house made its
+inhabitants and neighbors dimly aware that there was a secret resident;
+it was by a language not audible, but of impression; there could not
+be such a secret in its recesses, without making itself sensible. This
+legend of the undying one translated it to vulgar apprehension. He
+remembered those early legends, told by the Doctor, in his childhood;
+he seemed imperfectly and doubtfully to see what was their true meaning,
+and how, taken aright, they had a reality, and were the craftily
+concealed history of his own wrongs, sufferings, and revenge. And this
+old man! who was he? He joined the Warden’s account of the family to
+the Doctor’s legends. He could not believe, or take thoroughly in, the
+strange surmise to which they led him; but, by an irresistible impulse,
+he acted on it.
+
+“Sir Edward Redclyffe!” he exclaimed.
+
+“Ha! who speaks to me?” exclaimed the old man, in a startled voice, like
+one who hears himself called at an unexpected moment.
+
+“Sir Edward Redclyffe,” repeated Redclyffe, “I bring you news of Norman
+Oglethorpe!” [Endnote: 3.]
+
+“The villain! the tyrant! mercy! mercy! save me!” cried the old man, in
+most violent emotion of terror and rage intermixed, that shook his old
+frame as if it would be shaken asunder. He stood erect, the picture of
+ghastly horror, as if he saw before him that stern face that had thrown
+a blight over his life, and so fearfully avenged, from youth to age, the
+crime that he had committed. The effect, the passion, was too much,--the
+terror with which it smote, the rage that accompanied it, blazed up
+for a moment with a fierce flame, then flickered and went out. He stood
+tottering; Redclyffe put out his hand to support him; but he sank down
+in a heap on the floor, as if a thing of dry bones had been suddenly
+loosened at the joints, and fell in a rattling heap. [Endnote: 4.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+
+Redclyffe, apparently, had not communicated to his agent in London his
+change of address, when he left the Warden’s residence to avail himself
+of the hospitality of Braithwaite Hall; for letters arrived for him,
+from his own country, both private and with the seal of state upon them;
+one among the rest that bore on the envelope the name of the President
+of the United States. The good Warden was impressed with great respect
+for so distinguished a signature, and, not knowing but that the welfare
+of the Republic (for which he had an Englishman’s contemptuous
+interest) might be involved in its early delivery at its destination,
+he determined to ride over to Braithwaite Hall, call on his friend, and
+deliver it with his own hand. With this purpose, he mounted his horse,
+at the hour of his usual morning ride, and set forth; and, before
+reaching the village, saw a figure before him which he recognized as
+that of the pensioner. [Endnote: 1.]
+
+“Soho! whither go you, old friend?” said the Warden, drawing his bridle
+as he came up with the old man.
+
+“To Braithwaite Hall, sir,” said the pensioner, who continued to walk
+diligently on; “and I am glad to see your honor (if it be so) on the
+same errand.”
+
+“Why so?” asked the Warden. “You seem much in earnest. Why should my
+visit to Braithwaite Hall be a special cause of rejoicing?”
+
+“Nay,” said the pensioner, “your honor is specially interested in this
+young American, who has gone thither to abide; and when one is in a
+strange country he needs some guidance. My mind is not easy about the
+young man.”
+
+“Well,” said the Warden, smiling to himself at the old gentleman’s idle
+and senile fears, “I commend your diligence on behalf of your friend.”
+
+He rode on as he spoke, and deep in one of the woodland paths he saw
+the flutter of a woman’s garment, and, greatly to his surprise, overtook
+Elsie, who seemed to be walking along with great rapidity, and, startled
+by the approach of hoofs behind her, looked up at him, with a pale
+cheek.
+
+“Good morning, Miss Elsie,” said the Warden. “You are taking a long walk
+this morning. I regret to see that I have frightened you.”
+
+“Pray, whither are you going?” said she.
+
+“To the Hall,” said the Warden, wondering at the abrupt question.
+
+“Ah, sir,” exclaimed Elsie, “for Heaven’s sake, pray insist on seeing
+Mr. Redclyffe,--take no excuse. There are reasons for it.”
+
+“Certainly, fair lady,” responded the Warden, wondering more and more
+at this injunction from such a source. “And when I see this fascinating
+gentleman, pray what message am I to give him from Miss Elsie,--who,
+moreover, seems to be on the eve of visiting him in person?”
+
+“See him! see him! Only see him!” said Elsie, with passionate
+earnestness, “and in haste! See him now!”
+
+She waved him onward as she spoke; and the Warden, greatly commoted for
+the nonce, complied with the maiden’s fantasy so far as to ride on at
+a quicker pace, uneasily marvelling at what could have aroused this
+usually shy and reserved girl’s nervousness to such a pitch. The
+incident served at all events to titillate his English sluggishness; so
+that he approached the avenue of the old Hall with a vague expectation
+of something that had happened there, though he knew not of what nature
+it could possibly be. However, he rode round to the side entrance, by
+which horsemen generally entered the house, and, a groom approaching to
+take his bridle, he alighted and approached the door. I know not whether
+it were anything more than the glistening moisture common in an English
+autumnal morning; but so it was, that the trace of the Bloody Footstep
+seemed fresh, as if it had been that very night imprinted anew, and the
+crime made all over again, with fresh guilt upon somebody’s soul.
+
+When the footman came to the door, responsive to his ring, the Warden
+inquired for Mr. Redclyffe, the American gentleman.
+
+“The American gentleman left for London, early this morning,” replied
+the footman, in a matter-of-fact way.
+
+“Gone!” exclaimed the Warden. “This is sudden; and strange that he
+should go without saying good by. Gone,” and then he remembered the
+old pensioner’s eagerness that the Warden should come here, and Elsie’s
+strange injunction that he should insist on seeing Redclyffe. “Pray, is
+Lord Braithwaite at home?”
+
+“I think, sir, he is in the library,” said the servant, “but will see;
+pray, sir, walk in.”
+
+He returned in a moment, and ushered the Warden through passages with
+which he was familiar of old, to the library, where he found Lord
+Braithwaite sitting with the London newspaper in his hand. He rose and
+welcomed his guest with great equanimity.
+
+To the Warden’s inquiries after Redclyffe, Lord Braithwaite replied that
+his guest had that morning left the house, being called to London by
+letters from America; but of what nature Lord Braithwaite was unable
+to say, except that they seemed to be of urgency and importance. The
+Warden’s further inquiries, which he pushed as far as was decorous,
+elicited nothing more than this; and he was preparing to take his
+leave,--not seeing any reason for insisting (according to Elsie’s
+desire) on the impossibility of seeing a man who was not there,--nor,
+indeed, any reason for so doing. And yet it seemed very strange
+that Redclyffe should have gone so unceremoniously; nor was he half
+satisfied, though he knew not why he should be otherwise.
+
+“Do you happen to know Mr. Redclyffe’s address in London,” asked the
+Warden.
+
+“Not at all,” said Braithwaite. “But I presume there is courtesy enough
+in the American character to impel him to write to me, or both of us,
+within a day or two, telling us of his whereabouts and whatabouts.
+Should you know, I beg you will let me know; for I have really been
+pleased with this gentleman, and should have been glad could he have
+favored me with a somewhat longer visit.”
+
+There was nothing more to be said; and the Warden took his leave, and
+was about mounting his horse, when he beheld the pensioner approaching
+the house, and he remained standing until he should come up.
+
+“You are too late,” said he, as the old man drew near. “Our friend has
+taken French leave.”
+
+“Mr. Warden,” said the old man solemnly, “let me pray you not to give
+him up so easily. Come with me into the presence of Lord Braithwaite.”
+
+The Warden made some objections; but the pensioner’s manner was so
+earnest, that he soon consented; knowing that the strangeness of his
+sudden return might well enough be put upon the eccentricities of the
+pensioner, especially as he was so well known to Lord Braithwaite.
+He accordingly again rang at the door, which being opened by the same
+stolid footman, the Warden desired him to announce to Lord Braithwaite
+that the Warden and a pensioner desired to see him. He soon returned,
+with a request that they would walk in, and ushered them again to the
+library, where they found the master of the house in conversation with
+Omskirk at one end of the apartment,--a whispered conversation, which
+detained him a moment, after their arrival. The Warden fancied that he
+saw in old Omskirk’s countenance a shade more of that mysterious horror
+which made him such a bugbear to children; but when Braithwaite
+turned from him and approached his visitor, there was no trace of any
+disturbance, beyond a natural surprise to see his good friend the Warden
+so soon after his taking leave. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+“I see you are surprised,” said the latter. “But you must lay the blame,
+if any, on our good old friend here, who, for some reason, best known to
+himself, insisted on having my company here.”
+
+Braithwaite looked to the old pensioner, with a questioning look, as
+if good-humoredly (yet not as if he cared much about it) asking for an
+explanation. As Omskirk was about leaving the room, having remained till
+this time, with that nervous look which distinguished him gazing
+towards the party, the pensioner made him a sign, which he obeyed as if
+compelled to do so.
+
+“Well, my friend,” said the Warden, somewhat impatient of the aspect
+in which he himself appeared, “I beg of you, explain at once to Lord
+Braithwaite why you have brought me back in this strange way.”
+
+“It is,” said the pensioner quietly, “that in your presence I request
+him to allow me to see Mr. Redclyffe.”
+
+“Why, my friend,” said Braithwaite, “how can I show you a man who has
+left my house, and whom in the chances of this life, I am not very
+likely to see again, though hospitably desirous of so doing?”
+
+Here ensued a laughing sort of colloquy between the Warden and
+Braithwaite, in which the former jocosely excused himself for having
+yielded to the whim of the pensioner, and returned with him on an errand
+which he well knew to be futile.
+
+“I have long been aware,” he said apart, in a confidential way, “of
+something a little awry in our old friend’s mental system. You will
+excuse him, and me for humoring him.”
+
+“Of course, of course,” said Braithwaite, in the same tone. “I shall not
+be moved by anything the old fellow can say.”
+
+The old pensioner, meanwhile, had been as it were heating up, and
+gathering himself into a mood of energy which those who saw him had
+never before witnessed in his usually quiet person. He seemed somehow to
+grow taller and larger, more impressive. At length, fixing his eyes on
+Lord Braithwaite, he spoke again.
+
+“Dark, murderous man,” exclaimed he. “Your course has not been
+unwatched; the secrets of this mansion are not unknown. For two
+centuries back, they have been better known to them who dwell afar off
+than to those resident within the mansion. The foot that made the
+Bloody Footstep has returned from its long wanderings, and it passes on,
+straight as destiny,--sure as an avenging Providence,--to the punishment
+and destruction of those who incur retribution.”
+
+“Here is an odd kind of tragedy,” said Lord Braithwaite, with a scornful
+smile. “Come, my old friend, lay aside this vein and talk sense.”
+
+“Not thus do you escape your penalty, hardened and crafty one!”
+ exclaimed the pensioner. “I demand of you, before this worthy Warden,
+access to the secret ways of this mansion, of which thou dost unjustly
+retain possession. I shall disclose what for centuries has remained
+hidden,--the ghastly secrets that this house hides.”
+
+“Humor him,” whispered the Warden, “and hereafter I will take care that
+the exuberance of our old friend shall be duly restrained. He shall not
+trouble you again.”
+
+Lord Braithwaite, to say the truth, appeared a little flabbergasted
+and disturbed by these latter expressions of the old gentleman. He
+hesitated, turned pale; but at last, recovering his momentary confusion
+and irresolution, he replied, with apparent carelessness:--
+
+“Go wherever you will, old gentleman. The house is open to you for this
+time. If ever you have another opportunity to disturb it, the fault will
+be mine.”
+
+“Follow, sir,” said the pensioner, turning to the Warden; “follow,
+maiden![Endnote: 3] Now shall a great mystery begin to be revealed.”
+
+So saying, he led the way before them, passing out of the hall, not
+by the doorway, but through one of the oaken panels of the wall, which
+admitted the party into a passage which seemed to pass through the
+thickness of the wall, and was lighted by interstices through which
+shone gleams of light. This led them into what looked like a little
+vestibule, or circular room, which the Warden, though deeming himself
+many years familiar with the old house, had never seen before, any more
+than the passage which led to it. To his surprise, this room was not
+vacant, for in it sat, in a large old chair, Omskirk, like a toad in its
+hole, like some wild, fearful creature in its den, and it was now partly
+understood how this man had the possibility of suddenly disappearing, so
+inscrutably, and so in a moment; and, when all quest for him was given
+up, of as suddenly appearing again.
+
+“Ha!” said old Omskirk, slowly rising, as at the approach of some event
+that he had long expected. “Is he coming at last?”
+
+“Poor victim of another’s iniquity,” said the pensioner. “Thy release
+approaches. Rejoice!”
+
+The old man arose with a sort of trepidation and solemn joy intermixed
+in his manner, and bowed reverently, as if there were in what he heard
+more than other ears could understand in it.
+
+“Yes; I have waited long,” replied he. “Welcome; if my release is come.”
+
+“Well,” said Lord Braithwaite, scornfully. “This secret retreat of my
+house is known to many. It was the priest’s secret chamber when it was
+dangerous to be of the old and true religion, here in England. There is
+no longer any use in concealing this place; and the Warden, or any man,
+might have seen it, or any of the curiosities of the old hereditary
+house, if desirous so to do.”
+
+“Aha! son of Belial!” quoth the pensioner. “And this, too!”
+
+He took three pieces from a certain point of the wall, which he seemed
+to know, and stooped to press upon the floor. The Warden looked at Lord
+Braithwaite, and saw that he had grown deadly pale. What his change of
+cheer might bode, he could not guess; but, at the pressure of the old
+pensioner’s finger, the floor, or a segment of it, rose like the lid
+of a box, and discovered a small darksome pair of stairs, within which
+burned a lamp, lighting it downward, like the steps that descend into a
+sepulchre.
+
+“Follow,” said he, to those who looked on, wondering.
+
+And he began to descend. Lord Braithwaite saw him disappear, then
+frantically followed, the Warden next, and old Omskirk took his place in
+the rear, like a man following his inevitable destiny. At the bottom
+of a winding descent, that seemed deep and remote, and far within, they
+came to a door, which the pensioner pressed with a spring; and, passing
+through the space that disclosed itself, the whole party followed, and
+found themselves in a small, gloomy room. On one side of it was a couch,
+on which sat Redclyffe; face to face with him was a white-haired figure
+in a chair.
+
+“You are come!” said Redclyffe, solemnly. “But too late!”
+
+“And yonder is the coffer,” said the pensioner. “Open but that; and our
+quest is ended.”
+
+“That, if I mistake not, I can do,” said Redclyffe.
+
+He drew forth--what he had kept all this time, as something that might
+yet reveal to him the mystery of his birth--the silver key that had been
+found by the grave in far New England; and applying it to the lock, he
+slowly turned it on the hinges, that had not been turned for two hundred
+years. All--even Lord Braithwaite, guilty and shame-stricken as he
+felt--pressed forward to look upon what was about to be disclosed. What
+were the wondrous contents? The entire, mysterious coffer was full of
+golden ringlets, abundant, clustering through the whole coffer, and
+living with elasticity, so as immediately, as it were, to flow over
+the sides of the coffer, and rise in large abundance from the long
+compression. Into this--by a miracle of natural production which was
+known likewise in other cases--into this had been resolved the whole
+bodily substance of that fair and unfortunate being, known so long in
+the legends of the family as the Beauty of the Golden Locks. As the
+pensioner looked at this strange sight,--the lustre of the precious and
+miraculous hair gleaming and glistening, and seeming to add light to the
+gloomy room,--he took from his breast pocket another lock of hair, in
+a locket, and compared it, before their faces, with that which brimmed
+over from the coffer.
+
+“It is the same!” said he.
+
+“And who are you that know it?” asked Redclyffe, surprised.
+
+“He whose ancestors taught him the secret,--who has had it handed down
+to him these two centuries, and now only with regret yields to the
+necessity of making it known.”
+
+“You are the heir!” said Redclyffe.
+
+In that gloomy room, beside the dead old man, they looked at him, and
+saw a dignity beaming on him, covering his whole figure, that broke out
+like a lustre at the close of day.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+_Note 1._ The MS. gives the following alternative openings: “Early in
+the present century”; “Soon after the Revolution”; “Many years ago.”
+
+_Note 2._ Throughout the first four pages of the MS. the Doctor is
+called “Ormskirk,” and in an earlier draft of this portion of the
+romance, “Etheredge.”
+
+_Note 3. Author’s note_.--“Crusty Hannah is a mixture of Indian and
+negro.”
+
+_Note 4. Author’s note_.--“It is understood from the first that the
+children are not brother and sister.--Describe the children with really
+childish traits, quarrelling, being naughty, etc.--The Doctor should
+occasionally beat Ned in course of instruction.”
+
+_Note 5._ In order to show the manner in which Hawthorne would modify
+a passage, which was nevertheless to be left substantially the same,
+I subjoin here a description of this graveyard as it appears in the
+earlier draft: “The graveyard (we are sorry to have to treat of such a
+disagreeable piece of ground, but everybody’s business centres there at
+one time or another) was the most ancient in the town. The dust of the
+original Englishmen had become incorporated with the soil; of those
+Englishmen whose immediate predecessors had been resolved into the earth
+about the country churches,--the little Norman, square, battlemented
+stone towers of the villages in the old land; so that in this point of
+view, as holding bones and dust of the first ancestors, this graveyard
+was more English than anything else in town. There had been hidden from
+sight many a broad, bluff visage of husbandmen that had ploughed the
+real English soil; there the faces of noted men, now known in history;
+there many a personage whom tradition told about, making wondrous
+qualities of strength and courage for him;--all these, mingled with
+succeeding generations, turned up and battened down again with
+the sexton’s spade; until every blade of grass was human more than
+vegetable,--for an hundred and fifty years will do this, and so much
+time, at least, had elapsed since the first little mound was piled up in
+the virgin soil. Old tombs there were too, with numerous sculptures on
+them; and quaint, mossy gravestones; although all kinds of monumental
+appendages were of a date more recent than the time of the first
+settlers, who had been content with wooden memorials, if any, the
+sculptor’s art not having then reached New England. Thus rippled,
+surged, broke almost against the house, this dreary graveyard, which
+made the street gloomy, so that people did not like to pass the dark,
+high wooden fence, with its closed gate, that separated it from the
+street. And this old house was one that crowded upon it, and took up the
+ground that would otherwise have been sown as thickly with dead as the
+rest of the lot; so that it seemed hardly possible but that the dead
+people should get up out of their graves, and come in there to warm
+themselves. But in truth, I have never heard a whisper of its being
+haunted.”
+
+_Note 6. Author’s note_.--“The spiders are affected by the weather and
+serve as barometers.--It shall always be a moot point whether the Doctor
+really believed in cobwebs, or was laughing at the credulous.”
+
+_Note 7. Author’s note_.--“The townspeople are at war with the
+Doctor.--Introduce the Doctor early as a smoker, and describe.--The
+result of Crusty Hannah’s strangely mixed breed should be shown in some
+strange way.--Give vivid pictures of the society of the day, symbolized
+in the street scenes.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+_Note 1. Author’s note_.--“Read the whole paragraph before copying any
+of it.”
+
+_Note 2. Author’s note_.--“Crusty Hannah teaches Elsie curious
+needlework, etc.”
+
+_Note 3._ These two children are described as follows in an early
+note of the author’s: “The boy had all the qualities fitted to excite
+tenderness in those who had the care of him; in the first and most
+evident place, on account of his personal beauty, which was very
+remarkable,--the most intelligent and expressive face that can be
+conceived, changing in those early years like an April day, and
+beautiful in all its changes; dark, but of a soft expression, kindling,
+melting, glowing, laughing; a varied intelligence, which it was as good
+as a book to read. He was quick in all modes of mental exercise; quick
+and strong, too, in sensibility; proud, and gifted (probably by the
+circumstances in which he was placed) with an energy which the softness
+and impressibility of his nature needed.--As for the little girl, all
+the squalor of the abode served but to set off her lightsomeness and
+brightsomeness. She was a pale, large-eyed little thing, and it might
+have been supposed that the air of the house and the contiguity of the
+burial-place had a bad effect upon her health. Yet I hardly think this
+could have been the case, for she was of a very airy nature, dancing
+and sporting through the house as if melancholy had never been made. She
+took all kinds of childish liberties with the Doctor, and with his
+pipe, and with everything appertaining to him except his spiders and his
+cobwebs.”--All of which goes to show that Hawthorne first conceived his
+characters in the mood of the “Twice-Told Tales,” and then by meditation
+solidified them to the inimitable flesh-and-blood of “The House of the
+Seven Gables” and “The Blithedale Romance.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+_Note 1._ An English church spire, evidently the prototype of this, and
+concerning which the same legend is told, is mentioned in the author’s
+“English Mote-Books.”
+
+_Note 2._ Leicester Hospital, in Warwick, described in “Our Old Home,”
+ is the original of this charity.
+
+_Note 3. Author’s note_.--“The children find a gravestone with something
+like a footprint on it.”
+
+_Note 4. Author’s note_.--“Put into the Doctor’s character a continual
+enmity against somebody, breaking out in curses of which nobody can
+understand the application.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+_Note 1._ The Doctor’s propensity for cobwebs is amplified in the
+following note for an earlier and somewhat milder version of the
+character: “According to him, all science was to be renewed and
+established on a sure ground by no other means than cobwebs. The cobweb
+was the magic clue by which mankind was to be rescued from all its
+errors, and guided safely back to the right. And so he cherished spiders
+above all things, and kept them spinning, spinning away; the only
+textile factory that existed at that epoch in New England. He
+distinguished the production of each of his ugly friends, and assigned
+peculiar qualities to each; and he had been for years engaged in writing
+a work on this new discovery, in reference to which he had already
+compiled a great deal of folio manuscript, and had unguessed at
+resources still to come. With this suggestive subject he interwove all
+imaginable learning, collected from his own library, rich in works that
+few others had read, and from that of his beloved University, crabbed
+with Greek, rich with Latin, drawing into itself, like a whirlpool, all
+that men had thought hitherto, and combining them anew in such a way
+that it had all the charm of a racy originality. Then he had projects
+for the cultivation of cobwebs, to which end, in the good Doctor’s
+opinion, it seemed desirable to devote a certain part of the national
+income; and not content with this, all public-spirited citizens would
+probably be induced to devote as much of their time and means as they
+could to the same end. According to him, there was no such beautiful
+festoon and drapery for the halls of princes as the spinning of this
+heretofore despised and hated insect; and by due encouragement it
+might be hoped that they would flourish, and hang and dangle and wave
+triumphant in the breeze, to an extent as yet generally undreamed of.
+And he lamented much the destruction that has heretofore been wrought
+upon this precious fabric by the housemaid’s broom, and insisted upon
+by foolish women who claimed to be good housewives. Indeed, it was the
+general opinion that the Doctor’s celibacy was in great measure due
+to the impossibility of finding a woman who would pledge herself
+to co-operate with him in this great ambition of his life,--that of
+reducing the world to a cobweb factory; or who would bind herself to let
+her own drawing-room be ornamented with this kind of tapestry. But there
+never was a wife precisely fitted for our friend the Doctor, unless it
+had been Arachne herself, to whom, if she could again have been restored
+to her female shape, he would doubtless have lost no time in paying his
+addresses. It was doubtless the having dwelt too long among the musty
+and dusty clutter and litter of things gone by, that made the Doctor
+almost a monomaniac on this subject. There were cobwebs in his own
+brain, and so he saw nothing valuable but cobwebs in the world around
+him; and deemed that the march of created things, up to this time, had
+been calculated by foreknowledge to produce them.”
+
+_Note 2. Author’s note_.--“Ned must learn something of the
+characteristics of the Catechism, and simple cottage devotion.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+_Note 1. Author’s note_.--“Make the following scene emblematic of the
+world’s treatment of a dissenter.”
+
+_Note 2. Author’s note_.--“Yankee characteristics should be shown in the
+schoolmaster’s manners.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+_Note 1. Author’s note_.--“He had a sort of horror of violence, and of
+the strangeness that it should be done to him; this affected him more
+than the blow.”
+
+_Note 2. Author’s note_.--“Jokes occasionally about the schoolmaster’s
+thinness and lightness,--how he might suspend himself from the spider’s
+web and swing, etc.”
+
+_Note 3. Author’s note_.--“The Doctor and the Schoolmaster should have
+much talk about England.”
+
+_Note 4. Author’s note_.--“The children were at play in the churchyard.”
+
+_Note 5. Author’s note_.--“He mentions that he was probably buried in
+the churchyard there.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+_Note 1. Author’s note_.--“Perhaps put this narratively, not as spoken.”
+
+_Note 2. Author’s note_.--“He was privately married to the heiress,
+if she were an heiress. They meant to kill him in the wood, but, by
+contrivance, he was kidnapped.”
+
+_Note 3. Author’s note_.--“They were privately married.”
+
+_Note 4. Author’s note_.--“Old descriptive letters, referring to
+localities as they existed.”
+
+_Note 5. Author’s note_.--“There should be symbols and tokens, hinting
+at the schoolmaster’s disappearance, from the first opening of the
+scene.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+_Note 1. Author’s note_.--“They had got up in remarkably good case that
+morning.”
+
+_Note 2. Author’s note_.--“The stranger may be the future master of the
+Hospital.--Describe the winter day.”
+
+_Note 3. Author’s note_.--“Describe him as clerical.”
+
+_Note 4. Author’s note_.--“Represent him as a refined, agreeable, genial
+young man, of frank, kindly, gentlemanly manners.”
+
+_Note 5._ Alternative reading: “A clergyman.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+_Note 1. Author’s note_.--“Make the old grave-digger a _laudator
+temporis acti_,--especially as to burial customs.”
+
+_Note 2._ Instead of “written,” as in the text, the author probably
+meant to write “read.”
+
+_Note 3._ The MS. has “delight,” but “a light” is evidently intended.
+
+_Note 4. Author’s note_.--“He aims a blow, perhaps with his pipe, at the
+boy, which Ned wards off.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+_Note 1. Author’s note_.--“No longer could play at quarter-staff with
+Ned.”
+
+_Note 2. Author’s note_.--“Referring to places and people in England:
+the Bloody Footstep sometimes.”
+
+_Note 3._ In the original the following occurs, but marked to indicate
+that it was to be omitted: “And kissed his hand to her, and laughed
+feebly; and that was the last that she or anybody, the last glimpse they
+had of Doctor Grimshawe alive.”
+
+_Note 4. Author’s notes_.--“A great deal must be made out of the
+spiders, and their gloomy, dusky, flaunting tapestry. A web across the
+orifice of his inkstand every morning; everywhere, indeed, except
+across the snout of his brandy-bottle.--Depict the Doctor in an old
+dressing-gown, and a strange sort of a cap, like a wizard’s.--The two
+children are witnesses of many strange experiments in the study; they
+see his moods, too.--The Doctor is supposed to be writing a work on the
+Natural History of Spiders. Perhaps he used them as a blind for his real
+project, and used to bamboozle the learned with pretending to read them
+passages in which great learning seemed to be elaborately worked up,
+crabbed with Greek and Latin, as if the topic drew into itself, like a
+whirlpool, all that men thought and knew; plans to cultivate cobwebs on
+a large scale. Sometimes, after overwhelming them with astonishment in
+this way, he would burst into one of his laughs. Schemes to make the
+world a cobweb-factory, etc., etc. Cobwebs in his own brain. Crusty
+Hannah such a mixture of persons and races as could be found only at a
+seaport. There was a rumor that the Doctor had murdered a former maid,
+for having, with housewifely instinct, swept away the cobwebs; some said
+that he had her skeleton in a closet. Some said that he had strangled
+a wife with web of the great spider.”--“Read the description of Bolton
+Hall, the garden, lawn, etc., Aug. 8, ‘53.--Bebbington church and
+churchyard, Aug. 29, ‘53.--The Doctor is able to love,--able to hate;
+two great and rare abilities nowadays.--Introduce two pine trees,
+ivy-grown, as at Lowwood Hotel, July 16, ‘58.--The family name might be
+Redclyffe.--Thatched cottage, June 22, ‘55.--Early introduce the mention
+of the cognizance of the family,--the Leopard’s Head, for instance, in
+the first part of the romance; the Doctor may have possessed it engraved
+as coat of arms in a book.--The Doctor shall show Ned, perhaps, a
+drawing or engraving of the Hospital, with figures of the pensioners in
+the quadrangle, fitly dressed; and this picture and the figures shall
+impress themselves strongly on his memory.”
+
+The above dates and places refer to passages in the published “English
+Note-Books.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+_Note 1. Author’s note_.--“Compare it with Spenser’s Cave of Despair.
+Put instruments of suicide there.”
+
+_Note 2. Author’s note_.--“Once, in looking at the mansion, Redclyffe
+is struck by the appearance of a marble inserted into the wall, and kept
+clear of lichens.”
+
+_Note 3. Author’s note_.--“Describe, in rich poetry, all shapes of
+deadly things.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+_Note 1. Author’s note_.--“Conferred their best qualities”: an
+alternative phrase for “done their utmost.”
+
+_Note 2. Author’s note_.--“Let the old man have a beard as part of the
+costume.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+_Note 1. Author’s note_.--“Describe him as delirious, and the scene as
+adopted into his delirium.”
+
+_Note 2. Author’s note_.--“Make the whole scene very dreamlike and
+feverish.”
+
+_Note 3. Author’s note_.--“There should be a slight wildness in the
+patient’s remark to the surgeon, which he cannot prevent, though he is
+conscious of it.”
+
+_Note 4. Author’s note_.--“Notice the peculiar depth and intelligence of
+his eyes, on account of his pain and sickness.”
+
+_Note 5. Author’s note_.--“Perhaps the recognition of the pensioner
+should not be so decided. Redclyffe thinks it is he, but thinks it as
+in a dream, without wonder or inquiry; and the pensioner does not quite
+acknowledge it.”
+
+_Note 6._ The following dialogue is marked to be omitted or modified in
+the original MS.; but it is retained here, in order that the thread of
+the narrative may not be broken.
+
+_Note 7. Author’s note_.--“The patient, as he gets better, listens to
+the feet of old people moving in corridors; to the ringing of a bell
+at stated periods; to old, tremulous voices talking in the quadrangle;
+etc., etc.”
+
+_Note 8._ At this point the modification indicated in Note 5 seems to
+have been made operative: and the recognition takes place in another
+way.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+_Note 1._ This paragraph is left incomplete in the original MS.
+
+_Note 2._ The words “Rich old bindings” are interlined here, indicating,
+perhaps, a purpose to give a more detailed description of the library
+and its contents.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+_Note 1. Author’s note_.--“I think it shall be built of stone, however.”
+
+_Note 2._ This probably refers to some incident which the author
+intended to incorporate in the former portion of the romance, on a final
+revision.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+_Note 1._ Several passages, which are essentially reproductions of what
+had been previously treated, are omitted from this chapter. It belongs
+to an earlier version of the romance.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+_Note 1. Author’s note_.--“Redclyffe shows how to find, under the
+surface of the village green, an old cross.”
+
+_Note 2. Author’s note_.--“A circular seat around the tree.”
+
+_Note 3._ The reader now hears for the first time what Redclyffe
+recollected.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+_Note 1. Author’s note_.--“The dinner is given to the pensioners, as
+well as to the gentry, I think.”
+
+_Note 2. Author’s note_.--“For example, a story of three brothers, who
+had a deadly quarrel among them more than two hundred years ago for the
+affections of a young lady, their cousin, who gave her reciprocal love
+to one of them, who immediately became the object of the deadly hatred
+of the two others. There seemed to be madness in their love; perhaps
+madness in the love of all three; for the result had been a plot to
+kidnap this unfortunate young man and convey him to America, where he
+was sold for a servant.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+_Note 1._ The following passage, though it seems to fit in here
+chronologically, is concerned with a side issue which was not followed
+up. The author was experimenting for a character to act as the
+accomplice of Lord Braithwaite at the Hall; and he makes trial of the
+present personage, Mountford; of an Italian priest, Father Angelo; and
+finally of the steward, Omskirk, who is adopted. It will be noticed that
+Mountford is here endowed (for the moment) with the birthright of good
+Doctor Hammond, the Warden. He is represented as having made the journey
+to America in search of the grave. This alteration being inconsistent
+with the true thread of the story, and being, moreover, not continued, I
+have placed this passage in the Appendix, instead of in the text.
+
+Redclyffe often, in the dim weather, when the prophetic intimations of
+rain were too strong to allow an American to walk abroad with peace
+of mind, was in the habit of pacing this noble hall, and watching the
+process of renewal and adornment; or, which suited him still better, of
+enjoying its great, deep solitude when the workmen were away. Parties of
+visitors, curious tourists, sometimes peeped in, took a cursory
+glimpse at the old hall, and went away; these were the only ordinary
+disturbances. But, one day, a person entered, looked carelessly round
+the hall, as if its antiquity had no great charm to him; then he seemed
+to approach Redclyffe, who stood far and dim in the remote distance of
+the great room. The echoing of feet on the stone pavement of the
+hall had always an impressive sound, and turning his head towards the
+visitant Edward stood as if there were an expectance for him in this
+approach. It was a middle-aged man--rather, a man towards fifty, with
+an alert, capable air; a man evidently with something to do in life, and
+not in the habit of throwing away his moments in looking at old halls; a
+gentlemanly man enough, too. He approached Redclyffe without hesitation,
+and, lifting his hat, addressed him in a way that made Edward wonder
+whether he could be an Englishman. If so, he must have known that Edward
+was an American, and have been trying to adapt his manners to those of a
+democratic freedom.
+
+“Mr. Redclyffe, I believe,” said he.
+
+Redclyffe bowed, with the stiff caution of an Englishman; for, with
+American mobility, he had learned to be stiff.
+
+“I think I have had the pleasure of knowing--at least of meeting--you
+very long ago,” said the gentleman. “But I see you do not recollect me.”
+
+Redclyffe confessed that the stranger had the advantage of him in his
+recollection of a previous acquaintance.
+
+“No wonder,” said the other, “for, as I have already hinted, it was many
+years ago.”
+
+“In my own country then, of course,” said Redclyffe.
+
+“In your own country certainly,” said the stranger, “and when it would
+have required a penetrating eye to see the distinguished Mr. Redclyffe.
+the representative of American democracy abroad, in the little
+pale-faced, intelligent boy, dwelling with an old humorist in the corner
+of a graveyard.”
+
+At these words Redclyffe sent back his recollections, and, though
+doubtfully, began to be aware that this must needs be the young
+Englishman who had come to his guardian on such a singular errand as to
+search an old grave. It must be he, for it could be nobody else; and, in
+truth, he had a sense of his identity,--which, however, did not express
+itself by anything that he could confidently remember in his looks,
+manner, or voice,--yet, if anything, it was most in the voice. But the
+image which, on searching, he found in his mind of a fresh-colored young
+Englishman, with light hair and a frank, pleasant face, was terribly
+realized for the worse in this somewhat heavy figure, and coarser face,
+and heavier eye. In fact, there is a terrible difference between the
+mature Englishman and the young man who is not yet quite out of his
+blossom. His hair, too, was getting streaked and sprinkled with gray;
+and, in short, there were evident marks of his having worked, and
+succeeded, and failed, and eaten and drunk, and being made largely of
+beef, ale, port, and sherry, and all the solidities of English life.
+
+“I remember you now,” said Redclyffe, extending his hand frankly; and
+yet Mountford took it in so cold a way that he was immediately sorry
+that he had done it, and called up an extra portion of reserve to freeze
+the rest of the interview. He continued, coolly enough, “I remember you,
+and something of your American errand,--which, indeed, has frequently
+been in my mind since. I hope you found the results of your voyage,
+in the way of discovery, sufficiently successful to justify so much
+trouble.”
+
+“You will remember,” said Mountford, “that the grave proved quite
+unproductive. Yes, you will not have forgotten it; for I well recollect
+how eagerly you listened, with that queer little girl, to my talk with
+the old governor, and how disappointed you seemed when you found that
+the grave was not to be opened. And yet, it is very odd. I failed in
+that mission; and yet there are circumstances that have led me to think
+that I ought to have succeeded better,--that some other person has
+really succeeded better.”
+
+Redclyffe was silent; but he remembered the strange old silver key, and
+how he had kept it secret, and the doubts that had troubled his mind
+then and long afterwards, whether he ought not to have found means to
+convey it to the stranger, and ask whether that was what he sought. And
+now here was that same doubt and question coming up again, and he found
+himself quite as little able to solve it as he had been twenty years
+ago. Indeed, with the views that had come up since, it behooved him to
+be cautious, until he knew both the man and the circumstances.
+
+“You are probably aware,” continued Mountford,--“for I understand you
+have been some time in this neighborhood,--that there is a pretended
+claim, a contesting claim, to the present possession of the estate
+of Braithwaite, and a long dormant title. Possibly--who knows?--you
+yourself might have a claim to one or the other. Would not that be a
+singular coincidence? Have you ever had the curiosity to investigate
+your parentage with a view to this point?”
+
+“The title,” replied Redclyffe, “ought not to be a very strong
+consideration with an American. One of us would be ashamed, I verily
+believe, to assume any distinction, except such as may be supposed to
+indicate personal, not hereditary merit. We have in some measure, I
+think, lost the feeling of the past, and even of the future, as regards
+our own lines of descent; and even as to wealth, it seems to me that the
+idea of heaping up a pile of gold, or accumulating a broad estate for
+our children and remoter descendants, is dying out. We wish to enjoy the
+fulness of our success in life ourselves, and leave to those who descend
+from us the task of providing for themselves. This tendency is seen in
+our lavish expenditure, and the whole arrangement of our lives; and it
+is slowly--yet not very slowly, either--effecting a change in the whole
+economy of American life.”
+
+“Still,” rejoined Mr. Mountford, with a smile that Redclyffe fancied was
+dark and subtle, “still, I should imagine that even an American might
+recall so much of hereditary prejudice as to be sensible of some earthly
+advantages in the possession of an ancient title and hereditary
+estate like this. Personal distinction may suit you better,--to be an
+Ambassador by your own talent; to have a future for yourself, involving
+the possibility of ranking (though it were only for four years) among
+the acknowledged sovereigns of the earth;--this is very good. But if the
+silver key would open the shut up secret to-day, it might be possible
+that you would relinquish these advantages.”
+
+Before Redclyffe could reply, (and, indeed, there seemed to be an
+allusion at the close of Mountford’s speech which, whether intended or
+not, he knew not how to reply to,) a young lady entered the hall, whom
+he was at no loss, by the colored light of a painted window that fell
+upon her, translating her out of the common daylight, to recognize
+as the relative of the pensioner. She seemed to have come to give her
+fanciful superintendence to some of the decorations of the hall; such
+as required woman’s taste, rather than the sturdy English judgment and
+antiquarian knowledge of the Warden. Slowly following after her came the
+pensioner himself, leaning on his staff and looking up at the old roof
+and around him with a benign composure, and himself a fitting figure by
+his antique and venerable appearance to walk in that old hall.
+
+“Ah!” said Mountford, to Redclyffe’s surprise, “here is an
+acquaintance--two acquaintances of mine.”
+
+He moved along the hall to accost them; and as he appeared to expect
+that Redclyffe would still keep him company, and as the latter had no
+reason for not doing so, they both advanced to the pensioner, who
+was now leaning on the young woman’s arm. The incident, too, was not
+unacceptable to the American, as promising to bring him into a more
+available relation with her--whom he half fancied to be his old American
+acquaintance--than he had yet succeeded in obtaining.
+
+“Well, my old friend,” said Mountford, after bowing with a certain
+measured respect to the young woman, “how wears life with you? Rather,
+perhaps, it does not wear at all; you being so well suited to the life
+around you, you grow by it like a lichen on a wall. I could fancy now
+that you have walked here for three hundred years, and remember when
+King James of blessed memory was entertained in this hall, and could
+marshal out all the ceremonies just as they were then.”
+
+“An old man,” said the pensioner, quietly, “grows dreamy as he wanes
+away; and I, too, am sometimes at a loss to know whether I am living in
+the past or the present, or whereabouts in time I am,--or whether there
+is any time at all. But I should think it hardly worth while to call up
+one of my shifting dreams more than another.”
+
+“I confess,” said Redclyffe, “I shall find it impossible to call up this
+scene--any of these scenes--hereafter, without the venerable figure of
+this, whom I may truly call my benefactor, among them. I fancy him among
+them from the foundation,--young then, but keeping just the equal step
+with their age and decay,--and still doing good and hospitable deeds to
+those who need them.”
+
+The old man seemed not to like to hear these remarks and expressions of
+gratitude from Mountford and the American; at any rate, he moved away
+with his slow and light motion of infirmity, but then came uneasily
+back, displaying a certain quiet restlessness, which Redclyffe was
+sympathetic enough to perceive. Not so the sturdier, more heavily
+moulded Englishman, who continued to direct the conversation upon the
+pensioner, or at least to make him a part of it, thereby bringing out
+more of his strange characteristics. In truth, it is not quite easy for
+an Englishman to know how to adapt himself to the line feelings of those
+below him in point of station, whatever gentlemanly deference he may
+have for his equals or superiors.
+
+“I should like now, father pensioner,” said he, “to know how many steps
+you may have taken in life before your path led into this hole, and
+whence your course started.”
+
+“Do not let him speak thus to the old man,” said the young woman, in
+a low, earnest tone, to Redclyffe. He was surprised and startled; it
+seemed like a voice that has spoken to his boyhood.
+
+_Note 2. Author’s note_.--“Redclyffe’s place is next to that of the
+proprietor at table.”
+
+_Note 3. Author’s note_.--“Dwell upon the antique liveried servants
+somewhat.”
+
+_Note 4. Author’s note_.--“The rose-water must precede the toasts.”
+
+_Note 5. Author’s note_.--“The jollity of the Warden at the feast to be
+noticed; and afterwards explain that he had drunk nothing.”
+
+_Note 6. Author’s note_.--“Mention the old silver snuffbox which I saw
+at the Liverpool Mayor’s dinner.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+_Note 1._ This is not the version of the story as indicated in the
+earlier portion of the romance. It is there implied that Elsie is the
+Doctor’s granddaughter, her mother having been the Doctor’s daughter,
+who was ruined by the then possessor of the Braithwaite estates, and who
+died in consequence. That the Doctor’s scheme of revenge was far deeper
+and more terrible than simply to oust the family from its possessions,
+will appear further on.
+
+_Note 2._ The foregoing passage was evidently experimental, and
+the author expresses his estimate of its value in the following
+words,--“What unimaginable nonsense!” He then goes on to make the
+following memoranda as to the plot. It should be remembered, however,
+that all this part of the romance was written before the American part.
+
+“Half of a secret is preserved in England; that is to say, in the
+particular part of the mansion in which an old coffer is hidden; the
+other part is carried to America. One key of an elaborate lock is
+retained in England, among some old curiosities of forgotten purpose;
+the other is the silver key that Redclyffe found beside the grave. A
+treasure of gold is what they expect; they find a treasure of golden
+locks. This lady, the beloved of the Bloody Footstep, had been murdered
+and hidden in the coffer on account of jealousy. Elsie must know the
+baselessness of Redclyffe’s claims, and be loath to tell him, because
+she sees that he is so much interested in them. She has a paper of
+the old Doctor’s revealing the whole plot,--a death-bed confession;
+Redclyffe having been absent at the time.”
+
+The reader will recollect that this latter suggestion was not adopted:
+there was no death-bed confession. As regards the coffer full of
+golden locks, it was suggested by an incident recorded in the “English
+Note-Books,” 1854. “The grandmother of Mrs. O’Sullivan died fifty years
+ago, at the age of twenty-eight. She had great personal charms, and
+among them a head of beautiful chestnut hair. After her burial in a
+family tomb, the coffin of one of her children was laid on her own, so
+that the lid seems to have decayed, or been broken from this cause; at
+any rate, this was the case when the tomb was opened, about a year ago.
+The grandmother’s coffin was then found to be filled with beautiful,
+glossy, living chestnut ringlets, into which her whole substance seems
+to have been transformed, for there was nothing else but these shining
+curls, the growth of half a century, in the tomb. An old man, with
+a ringlet of his youthful mistress treasured in his heart, might be
+supposed to witness this wonderful thing.”
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+_Note 1._ In a study of the plot, too long to insert here, this new
+character of the steward is introduced and described. It must suffice to
+say, in this place, that he was intimately connected with Dr. Grimshawe,
+who had resuscitated him after he had been hanged, and had thus gained
+his gratitude and secured his implicit obedience to his wishes, even
+twenty years after his (Grimshawe’s) death. The use the Doctor made
+of him was to establish him in Braithwaite Hall as the perpetual
+confidential servant of the owners thereof. Of course, the latter
+are not aware that the steward is acting in Grimshawe’s interest,
+and therefore in deadly opposition to their own. Precisely what the
+steward’s mission in life was, will appear here-after.
+
+The study above alluded to, with others, amounting to about a hundred
+pages, will be published as a supplement to a future edition of this
+work.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+_Note 1. Author’s note_.--“Redclyffe lies in a dreamy state, thinking
+fantastically, as if he were one of the seven sleepers. He does not yet
+open his eyes, but lies there in a maze.”
+
+_Note 2. Author’s note_.--“Redclyffe must look at the old man quietly
+and dreamily, and without surprise, for a long while.”
+
+_Note 3._ Presumably the true name of Doctor Grimshawe.
+
+_Note 4._ This mysterious prisoner, Sir Edward Redclyffe, is not, of
+course, the Sir Edward who founded the Hospital, but a descendant of
+that man, who ruined Doctor Grimshawe’s daughter, and is the father
+of Elsie. He had been confined in this chamber, by the Doctor’s
+contrivance, ever since, Omskirk being his jailer, as is foreshadowed in
+Chapter XL He has been kept in the belief that he killed Grimshawe, in
+a struggle that took place between them; and that his confinement in the
+secret chamber is voluntary on his own part,--a measure of precaution to
+prevent arrest and execution for murder. In this miserable delusion he
+has cowered there for five and thirty years. This, and various other
+dusky points, are partly elucidated in the notes hereafter to be
+appended to this volume.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+_Note 1._ At this point, the author, for what reason I will not venture
+to surmise, chooses to append this gloss: “Bubble-and-Squeak!”
+
+_Note 2. Author’s note_.--“They found him in the hall, about to go out.”
+
+_Note 3._ Elsie appears to have joined the party.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg’s Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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+Project Gutenberg's Doctor Grimshawe's Secret, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Doctor Grimshawe's Secret
+       A Romance
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Editor: Julian Hawthorne
+
+
+Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7183]
+This file was first posted on March 24, 2003
+Last Updated: June 12, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE'S SECRET ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Michelle Shephard, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                        DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE'S SECRET
+
+
+
+                               A ROMANCE
+
+                                  BY
+                          NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
+
+                    EDITED, WITH PREFACE AND NOTES
+
+                         BY JULIAN HAWTHORNE
+
+
+
+                                  TO
+                MR. AND MRS. GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP,
+                    The Son-in-Law and Daughter
+                                  OF
+                        NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE,
+                     THIS ROMANCE IS DEDICATED
+                                  BY
+                             THE EDITOR.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+A preface generally begins with a truism; and I may set out with
+the admission that it is not always expedient to bring to light the
+posthumous work of great writers. A man generally contrives to publish,
+during his lifetime, quite as much as the public has time or inclination
+to read; and his surviving friends are apt to show more zeal than
+discretion in dragging forth from his closed desk such undeveloped
+offspring of his mind as he himself had left to silence. Literature has
+never been redundant with authors who sincerely undervalue their own
+productions; and the sagacious critics who maintain that what of his own
+an author condemns must be doubly damnable, are, to say the least of it,
+as often likely to be right as wrong.
+
+Beyond these general remarks, however, it does not seem necessary to
+adopt an apologetic attitude. There is nothing in the present volume
+which any one possessed of brains and cultivation will not be thankful
+to read. The appreciation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's writings is
+more intelligent and wide-spread than it used to be; and the later
+development of our national literature has not, perhaps, so entirely
+exhausted our resources of admiration as to leave no welcome for even
+the less elaborate work of a contemporary of Dickens and Thackeray. As
+regards "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret,"--the title which, for lack of a
+better, has been given to this Romance,--it can scarcely be pronounced
+deficient in either elaboration or profundity. Had Mr. Hawthorne written
+out the story in every part to its full dimensions, it could not have
+failed to rank among the greatest of his productions. He had looked
+forward to it as to the crowning achievement of his literary career. In
+the Preface to "Our Old Home" he alludes to it as a work into which he
+proposed to convey more of various modes of truth than he could have
+grasped by a direct effort. But circumstances prevented him from
+perfecting the design which had been before his mind for seven years,
+and upon the shaping of which he bestowed more thought and labor than
+upon anything else he had undertaken. The successive and consecutive
+series of notes or studies [Footnote: These studies, extracts from which
+will be published in one of our magazines, are hereafter to be added, in
+their complete form, to the Appendix of this volume.] which he wrote
+for this Romance would of themselves make a small volume, and one
+of autobiographical as well as literary interest. There is no other
+instance, that I happen to have met with, in which a writer's thought
+reflects itself upon paper so immediately and sensitively as in these
+studies. To read them is to look into the man's mind, and see its
+quality and action. The penetration, the subtlety, the tenacity; the
+stubborn gripe which he lays upon his subject, like that of Hercules
+upon the slippery Old Man of the Sea; the clear and cool common-sense,
+controlling the audacity of a rich and ardent imagination; the humorous
+gibes and strange expletives wherewith he ridicules, to himself, his own
+failure to reach his goal; the immense patience with which--again and
+again, and yet again--he "tries back," throwing the topic into fresh
+attitudes, and searching it to the marrow with a gaze so piercing as
+to be terrible;--all this gives an impression of power, of resource,
+of energy, of mastery, that exhilarates the reader. So many inspired
+prophets of Hawthorne have arisen of late, that the present writer,
+whose relation to the great Romancer is a filial one merely, may
+be excused for feeling some embarrassment in submitting his own
+uninstructed judgments to competition with theirs. It has occurred
+to him, however, that these undress rehearsals of the author of "The
+Scarlet Letter" might afford entertaining and even profitable reading
+to the later generation of writers whose pleasant fortune it is to charm
+one another and the public. It would appear that this author, in his
+preparatory work at least, has ventured in some manner to disregard the
+modern canons which debar writers from betraying towards their creations
+any warmer feeling than a cultured and critical indifference: nor was
+his interest in human nature such as to confine him to the dissection of
+the moral epidermis of shop-girls and hotel-boarders. On the contrary,
+we are presented with the spectacle of a Titan, baring his arms and
+plunging heart and soul into the arena, there to struggle for death or
+victory with the superb phantoms summoned to the conflict by his own
+genius. The men of new times and new conditions will achieve their
+triumphs in new ways; but it may still be worth while to consider the
+methods and materials of one who also, in his own fashion, won and wore
+the laurel of those who know and can portray the human heart.
+
+But let us return to the Romance, in whose clear though shadowy
+atmosphere the thunders and throes of the preparatory struggle are
+inaudible and invisible, save as they are implied in the fineness of
+substance and beauty of form of the artistic structure. The story is
+divided into two parts, the scene of the first being laid in America;
+that of the second, in England. Internal evidence of various kinds goes
+to show that the second part was the first written; or, in other words,
+that the present first part is a rewriting of an original first part,
+afterwards discarded, and of which the existing second part is the
+continuation. The two parts overlap, and it shall be left to the
+ingenuity of critics to detect the precise point of junction. In
+rewriting the first part, the author made sundry minor alterations in
+the plot and characters of the story, which alterations were not carried
+into the second part. It results from this that the manuscript presents
+various apparent inconsistencies. In transcribing the work for the
+press, these inconsistent sentences and passages have been withdrawn
+from the text and inserted in the Appendix; or, in a few unimportant
+instances, omitted altogether. In other respects, the text is printed as
+the author left it, with the exception of the names of the characters.
+In the manuscript each personage figures in the course of the narrative
+under from three to six different names. This difficulty has been met
+by bestowing upon each of the _dramatis person�_ the name which last
+identified him to the author's mind, and keeping him to it throughout
+the volume.
+
+The story, as a story, is complete as it stands; it has a beginning,
+a middle, and an end. There is no break in the narrative, and the
+legitimate conclusion is reached. To say that the story is complete as
+a work of art, would be quite another matter. It lacks balance and
+proportion. Some characters and incidents are portrayed with minute
+elaboration; others, perhaps not less important, are merely sketched
+in outline. Beyond a doubt it was the author's purpose to rewrite the
+entire work from the first page to the last, enlarging it, deepening
+it, adorning it with every kind of spiritual and physical beauty, and
+rounding out a moral worthy of the noble materials. But these last
+transfiguring touches to Aladdin's Tower were never to be given; and he
+has departed, taking with him his Wonderful Lamp. Nevertheless there is
+great splendor in the structure as we behold it. The character of
+old Doctor Grimshawe, and the picture of his surroundings, are hardly
+surpassed in vigor by anything their author has produced; and the dusky
+vision of the secret chamber, which sends a mysterious shiver through
+the tale, seems to be unique even in Hawthorne.
+
+There have been included in this volume photographic reproductions of
+certain pages of the original manuscript of Doctor Grimshawe, selected
+at random, upon which those ingenious persons whose convictions are in
+advance of their instruction are cordially invited to try their
+teeth; for it has been maintained that Mr. Hawthorne's handwriting
+was singularly legible. The present writer possesses specimens of Mr.
+Hawthorne's chirography at various ages, from boyhood until a day or two
+before his death. Like the handwriting of most men, it was at its best
+between the twenty-fifth and the fortieth years of life; and in some
+instances it is a remarkably beautiful type of penmanship. But as time
+went on it deteriorated, and, while of course retaining its elementary
+characteristics, it became less and less easy to read, especially in
+those writings which were intended solely for his own perusal. As with
+other men of sensitive organization, the mood of the hour, a good or
+a bad pen, a ready or an obstructed flow of thought, would all be
+reflected in the formation of the written letters and words. In the
+manuscript of the fragmentary sketch which has just been published in a
+magazine, which is written in an ordinary commonplace-book, with ruled
+pages, and in which the author had not yet become possessed with the
+spirit of the story and characters, the handwriting is deliberate and
+clear. In the manuscript of "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret," on the other
+hand, which was written almost immediately after the other, but on
+unruled paper, and when the writer's imagination was warm and eager,
+the chirography is for the most part a compact mass of minute cramped
+hieroglyphics, hardly to be deciphered save by flashes of inspiration.
+The matter is not, in itself, of importance, and is alluded to here only
+as having been brought forward in connection with other insinuations,
+with the notice of which it seems unnecessary to soil these pages.
+Indeed, were I otherwise disposed, Doctor Grimshawe himself would take
+the words out of my mouth; his speech is far more poignant and eloquent
+than mine. In dismissing this episode, I will take the liberty to
+observe that it appears to indicate a spirit in our age less sceptical
+than is commonly supposed,--belief in miracles being still possible,
+provided only the miracle be a scandalous one.
+
+It remains to tell how this Romance came to be published. It came into
+my possession (in the ordinary course of events) about eight years ago.
+I had at that time no intention of publishing it; and when, soon after,
+I left England to travel on the Continent, the manuscript, together with
+the bulk of my library, was packed and stored at a London repository,
+and was not again seen by me until last summer, when I unpacked it in
+this city. I then finished the perusal of it, and, finding it to be
+practically complete, I re-resolved to print it in connection with a
+biography of Mr. Hawthorne which I had in preparation. But upon further
+consideration it was decided to publish the Romance separately; and
+I herewith present it to the public, with my best wishes for their
+edification.
+
+                                                JULIAN HAWTHORNE.
+NEW YORK, November 21, 1882.
+
+
+
+
+DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE'S SECRET
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+A long time ago, [Endnote: 1] in a town with which I used to be
+familiarly acquainted, there dwelt an elderly person of grim aspect,
+known by the name and title of Doctor Grimshawe,[Endnote: 2] whose
+household consisted of a remarkably pretty and vivacious boy, and a
+perfect rosebud of a girl, two or three years younger than he, and an
+old maid-of-all-work, of strangely mixed breed, crusty in temper and
+wonderfully sluttish in attire. [Endnote: 3] It might be partly owing to
+this handmaiden's characteristic lack of neatness (though primarily,
+no doubt, to the grim Doctor's antipathy to broom, brush, and
+dusting-cloths) that the house--at least in such portions of it as any
+casual visitor caught a glimpse of--was so overlaid with dust, that, in
+lack of a visiting card, you might write your name with your forefinger
+upon the tables; and so hung with cobwebs that they assumed the
+appearance of dusky upholstery.
+
+It grieves me to add an additional touch or two to the reader's
+disagreeable impression of Doctor Grimshawe's residence, by confessing
+that it stood in a shabby by-street, and cornered on a graveyard, with
+which the house communicated by a back door; so that with a hop, skip,
+and jump from the threshold, across a flat tombstone, the two children
+[Endnote: 4] were in the daily habit of using the dismal cemetery as
+their playground. In their graver moods they spelled out the names and
+learned by heart doleful verses on the headstones; and in their merrier
+ones (which were much the more frequent) they chased butterflies and
+gathered dandelions, played hide-and-seek among the slate and marble,
+and tumbled laughing over the grassy mounds which were too eminent for
+the short legs to bestride. On the whole, they were the better for the
+graveyard, and its legitimate inmates slept none the worse for the two
+children's gambols and shrill merriment overhead. Here were old brick
+tombs with curious sculptures on them, and quaint gravestones, some of
+which bore puffy little cherubs, and one or two others the effigies of
+eminent Puritans, wrought out to a button, a fold of the ruff, and a
+wrinkle of the skull-cap; and these frowned upon the two children as if
+death had not made them a whit more genial than they were in life. But
+the children were of a temper to be more encouraged by the good-natured
+smiles of the puffy cherubs, than frightened or disturbed by the sour
+Puritans.
+
+This graveyard (about which we shall say not a word more than may sooner
+or later be needful) was the most ancient in the town. The clay of the
+original settlers had been incorporated with the soil; those stalwart
+Englishmen of the Puritan epoch, whose immediate ancestors had been
+planted forth with succulent grass and daisies for the sustenance of
+the parson's cow, round the low-battlemented Norman church towers in the
+villages of the fatherland, had here contributed their rich Saxon mould
+to tame and Christianize the wild forest earth of the new world. In
+this point of view--as holding the bones and dust of the primeval
+ancestor--the cemetery was more English than anything else in the
+neighborhood, and might probably have nourished English oaks and English
+elms, and whatever else is of English growth, without that tendency to
+spindle upwards and lose their sturdy breadth, which is said to be the
+ordinary characteristic both of human and vegetable productions when
+transplanted hither. Here, at all events, used to be some specimens
+of common English garden flowers, which could not be accounted
+for,--unless, perhaps, they had sprung from some English maiden's heart,
+where the intense love of those homely things, and regret of them in the
+foreign land, had conspired together to keep their vivifying principle,
+and cause its growth after the poor girl was buried. Be that as it
+might, in this grave had been hidden from sight many a broad, bluff
+visage of husbandman, who had been taught to plough among the hereditary
+furrows that had been ameliorated by the crumble of ages: much had these
+sturdy laborers grumbled at the great roots that obstructed their toil
+in these fresh acres. Here, too, the sods had covered the faces of men
+known to history, and reverenced when not a piece of distinguishable
+dust remained of them; personages whom tradition told about; and here,
+mixed up with successive crops of native-born Americans, had been
+ministers, captains, matrons, virgins good and evil, tough and tender,
+turned up and battened down by the sexton's spade, over and over again;
+until every blade of grass had its relations with the human brotherhood
+of the old town. A hundred and fifty years was sufficient to do this;
+and so much time, at least, had elapsed since the first hole was dug
+among the difficult roots of the forest trees, and the first little
+hillock of all these green beds was piled up.
+
+Thus rippled and surged, with its hundreds of little billows, the old
+graveyard about the house which cornered upon it; it made the street
+gloomy, so that people did not altogether like to pass along the high
+wooden fence that shut it in; and the old house itself, covering ground
+which else had been sown thickly with buried bodies, partook of its
+dreariness, because it seemed hardly possible that the dead people
+should not get up out of their graves and steal in to warm themselves at
+this convenient fireside. But I never heard that any of them did so;
+nor were the children ever startled by spectacles of dim horror in the
+night-time, but were as cheerful and fearless as if no grave had ever
+been dug. They were of that class of children whose material seems
+fresh, not taken at second hand, full of disease, conceits, whims,
+and weaknesses, that have already served many people's turns, and been
+moulded up, with some little change of combination, to serve the turn of
+some poor spirit that could not get a better case.
+
+So far as ever came to the present writer's knowledge, there was no
+whisper of Doctor Grimshawe's house being haunted; a fact on which both
+writer and reader may congratulate themselves, the ghostly chord
+having been played upon in these days until it has become wearisome
+and nauseous as the familiar tune of a barrel-organ. The house itself,
+moreover, except for the convenience of its position close to the
+seldom-disturbed cemetery, was hardly worthy to be haunted. As I
+remember it, (and for aught I know it still exists in the same guise,)
+it did not appear to be an ancient structure, nor one that would
+ever have been the abode of a very wealthy or prominent family;--a
+three-story wooden house, perhaps a century old, low-studded, with
+a square front, standing right upon the street, and a small enclosed
+porch, containing the main entrance, affording a glimpse up and down
+the street through an oval window on each side, its characteristic was
+decent respectability, not sinking below the boundary of the genteel. It
+has often perplexed my mind to conjecture what sort of man he could have
+been who, having the means to build a pretty, spacious, and comfortable
+residence, should have chosen to lay its foundation on the brink of so
+many graves; each tenant of these narrow houses crying out, as it were,
+against the absurdity of bestowing much time or pains in preparing any
+earthly tabernacle save such as theirs. But deceased people see matters
+from an erroneous--at least too exclusive--point of view; a comfortable
+grave is an excellent possession for those who need it, but a
+comfortable house has likewise its merits and temporary advantages.
+[Endnote: 5.]
+
+The founder of the house in question seemed sensible of this truth, and
+had therefore been careful to lay out a sufficient number of rooms and
+chambers, low, ill-lighted, ugly, but not unsusceptible of warmth and
+comfort; the sunniest and cheerfulest of which were on the side
+that looked into the graveyard. Of these, the one most spacious and
+convenient had been selected by Doctor Grimshawe as a study, and fitted
+up with bookshelves, and various machines and contrivances, electrical,
+chemical, and distillatory, wherewith he might pursue such researches as
+were wont to engage his attention. The great result of the grim Doctor's
+labors, so far as known to the public, was a certain preparation or
+extract of cobwebs, which, out of a great abundance of material, he was
+able to produce in any desirable quantity, and by the administration of
+which he professed to cure diseases of the inflammatory class, and to
+work very wonderful effects upon the human system. It is a great pity,
+for the good of mankind and the advantage of his own fortunes, that he
+did not put forth this medicine in pill-boxes or bottles, and then,
+as it were, by some captivating title, inveigle the public into his
+spider's web, and suck out its gold substance, and himself wax fat as he
+sat in the central intricacy.
+
+But grim Doctor Grimshawe, though his aim in life might be no very
+exalted one, seemed singularly destitute of the impulse to better his
+fortunes by the exercise of his wits: it might even have been
+supposed, indeed, that he had a conscientious principle or religious
+scruple--only, he was by no means a religious man--against reaping
+profit from this particular nostrum which he was said to have invented.
+He never sold it; never prescribed it, unless in cases selected on some
+principle that nobody could detect or explain. The grim Doctor, it must
+be observed, was not generally acknowledged by the profession, with
+whom, in truth, he had never claimed a fellowship; nor had he ever
+assumed, of his own accord the medical title by which the public chose
+to know him. His professional practice seemed, in a sort, forced upon
+him; it grew pretty extensive, partly because it was understood to be
+a matter of favor and difficulty, dependent on a capricious will, to
+obtain his services at all. There was unquestionably an odor of quackery
+about him; but by no means of an ordinary kind. A sort of mystery--yet
+which, perhaps, need not have been a mystery, had any one thought it
+worth while to make systematic inquiry in reference to his previous
+life, his education, even his native land--assisted the impression
+which his peculiarities were calculated to make. He was evidently not
+a New-Englander, nor a native of any part of these Western shores.
+His speech was apt to be oddly and uncouthly idiomatic, and even
+when classical in its form was emitted with a strange, rough depth of
+utterance, that came from recesses of the lungs which we Yankees seldom
+put to any use. In person, he did not look like one of us; a broad,
+rather short personage, with a projecting forehead, a red, irregular
+face, and a squab nose; eyes that looked dull enough in their ordinary
+state, but had a faculty, in conjunction with the other features, which
+those who had ever seen it described as especially ugly and awful. As
+regarded dress, Doctor Grimshawe had a rough and careless exterior,
+and altogether a shaggy kind of aspect, the effect of which was much
+increased by a reddish beard, which, contrary to the usual custom of
+the day, he allowed to grow profusely; and the wiry perversity of which
+seemed to know as little of the comb as of the razor.
+
+We began with calling the grim Doctor an elderly personage; but in so
+doing we looked at him through the eyes of the two children, who were
+his intimates, and who had not learnt to decipher the purport and value
+of his wrinkles and furrows and corrugations, whether as indicating age,
+or a different kind of wear and tear. Possibly--he seemed so aggressive
+and had such latent heat and force to throw out when occasion called--he
+might scarcely have seemed middle-aged; though here again we hesitate,
+finding him so stiffened in his own way, so little fluid, so encrusted
+with passions and humors, that he must have left his youth very far
+behind him; if indeed he ever had any.
+
+The patients, or whatever other visitors were ever admitted into the
+Doctor's study, carried abroad strange accounts of the squalor of dust
+and cobwebs in which the learned and scientific person lived; and the
+dust, they averred, was all the more disagreeable, because it could not
+well be other than dead men's almost intangible atoms, resurrected
+from the adjoining graveyard. As for the cobwebs, they were no signs of
+housewifely neglect on the part of crusty Hannah, the handmaiden; but
+the Doctor's scientific material, carefully encouraged and preserved,
+each filmy thread more valuable to him than so much golden wire. Of all
+barbarous haunts in Christendom or elsewhere, this study was the one
+most overrun with spiders. They dangled from the ceiling, crept upon
+the tables, lurked in the corners, and wove the intricacy of their
+webs wherever they could hitch the end from point to point across the
+window-panes, and even across the upper part of the doorway, and in the
+chimney-place. It seemed impossible to move without breaking some of
+these mystic threads. Spiders crept familiarly towards you and walked
+leisurely across your hands: these were their precincts, and you only an
+intruder. If you had none about your person, yet you had an odious sense
+of one crawling up your spine, or spinning cobwebs in your brain,--so
+pervaded was the atmosphere of the place with spider-life. What they fed
+upon (for all the flies for miles about would not have sufficed them)
+was a secret known only to the Doctor. Whence they came was another
+riddle; though, from certain inquiries and transactions of Doctor
+Grimshawe's with some of the shipmasters of the port, who followed the
+East and West Indian, the African and the South American trade, it was
+supposed that this odd philosopher was in the habit of importing
+choice monstrosities in the spider kind from all those tropic regions.
+[Endnote: 6.]
+
+All the above description, exaggerated as it may seem, is merely
+preliminary to the introduction of one single enormous spider, the
+biggest and ugliest ever seen, the pride of the grim Doctor's heart, his
+treasure, his glory, the pearl of his soul, and, as many people said,
+the demon to whom he had sold his salvation, on condition of possessing
+the web of the foul creature for a certain number of years. The grim
+Doctor, according to this theory, was but a great fly which this
+spider had subtly entangled in his web. But, in truth, naturalists are
+acquainted with this spider, though it is a rare one; the British
+Museum has a specimen, and, doubtless, so have many other scientific
+institutions. It is found in South America; its most hideous spread of
+legs covers a space nearly as large as a dinner-plate, and radiates from
+a body as big as a door-knob, which one conceives to be an agglomeration
+of sucked-up poison which the creature treasures through life; probably
+to expend it all, and life itself, on some worthy foe. Its colors,
+variegated in a sort of ugly and inauspicious splendor, were distributed
+over its vast bulb in great spots, some of which glistened like gems. It
+was a horror to think of this thing living; still more horrible to think
+of the foul catastrophe, the crushed-out and wasted poison, that would
+follow the casual setting foot upon it.
+
+No doubt, the lapse of time since the Doctor and his spider lived has
+already been sufficient to cause a traditionary wonderment to gather
+over them both; and, especially, this image of the spider dangles down
+to us from the dusky ceiling of the Past, swollen into somewhat uglier
+and huger monstrosity than he actually possessed. Nevertheless, the
+creature had a real existence, and has left kindred like himself; but
+as for the Doctor, nothing could exceed the value which he seemed to put
+upon him, the sacrifices he made for the creature's convenience, or the
+readiness with which he adapted his whole mode of life, apparently, so
+that the spider might enjoy the conditions best suited to his tastes,
+habits, and health. And yet there were sometimes tokens that made people
+imagine that he hated the infernal creature as much as everybody else
+who caught a glimpse of him. [Endnote: 7.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+Considering that Doctor Grimshawe, when we first look upon him, had
+dwelt only a few years in the house by the graveyard, it is wonderful
+what an appearance he, and his furniture, and his cobwebs, and
+their unweariable spinners, and crusty old Hannah, all had of having
+permanently attached themselves to the locality. For a century, at
+least, it might be fancied that the study in particular had existed just
+as it was now; with those dusky festoons of spider-silk hanging along
+the walls, those book-cases with volumes turning their parchment or
+black-leather backs upon you, those machines and engines, that table,
+and at it the Doctor, in a very faded and shabby dressing-gown, smoking
+a long clay pipe, the powerful fumes of which dwelt continually in his
+reddish and grisly beard, and made him fragrant wherever he went. This
+sense of fixedness--stony intractability--seems to belong to people
+who, instead of hope, which exalts everything into an airy, gaseous
+exhilaration, have a fixed and dogged purpose, around which everything
+congeals and crystallizes. [Endnote: 1] Even the sunshine, dim through
+the dustiness of the two casements that looked upon the graveyard,
+and the smoke, as it came warm out of Doctor Grimshawe's mouth, seemed
+already stale. But if the two children, or either of them, happened to
+be in the study,--if they ran to open the door at the knock, if they
+came scampering and peeped down over the banisters,--the sordid and
+rusty gloom was apt to vanish quite away. The sunbeam itself looked like
+a golden rule, that had been flung down long ago, and had lain there
+till it was dusty and tarnished. They were cheery little imps, who
+sucked up fragrance and pleasantness out of their surroundings, dreary
+as these looked; even as a flower can find its proper perfume in any
+soil where its seed happens to fall. The great spider, hanging by his
+cordage over the Doctor's head, and waving slowly, like a pendulum, in
+a blast from the crack of the door, must have made millions and millions
+of precisely such vibrations as these; but the children were new, and
+made over every day, with yesterday's weariness left out.
+
+The little girl, however, was the merrier of the two. It was quite
+unintelligible, in view of the little care that crusty Hannah took
+of her, and, moreover, since she was none of your prim, fastidious
+children, how daintily she kept herself amid all this dust; how
+the spider's webs never clung to her, and how, when--without being
+solicited--she clambered into the Doctor's arms and kissed him, she bore
+away no smoky reminiscences of the pipe that he kissed continually. She
+had a free, mellow, natural laughter, that seemed the ripened fruit of
+the smile that was generally on her little face, to be shaken off
+and scattered abroad by any breeze that came along. Little Elsie made
+playthings of everything, even of the grim Doctor, though against his
+will, and though, moreover, there were tokens now and then that the
+sight of this bright little creature was not a pleasure to him, but,
+on the contrary, a positive pain; a pain, nevertheless, indicating
+a profound interest, hardly less deep than though Elsie had been his
+daughter.
+
+Elsie did not play with the great spider, but she moved among the whole
+brood of spiders as if she saw them not, and, being endowed with other
+senses than those allied to these things, might coexist with them and
+not be sensible of their presence. Yet the child, I suppose, had her
+crying fits, and her pouting fits, and naughtiness enough to entitle her
+to live on earth; at least crusty Hannah often said so, and often made
+grievous complaint of disobedience, mischief, or breakage, attributable
+to little Elsie; to which the grim Doctor seldom responded by anything
+more intelligible than a puff of tobacco-smoke, and, sometimes, an
+imprecation; which, however, hit crusty Hannah instead of the child.
+Where the child got the tenderness that a child needs to live upon, is a
+mystery to me; perhaps from some aged or dead mother, or in her dreams;
+perhaps from some small modicum of it, such as boys have, from the
+little boy; or perhaps it was from a Persian kitten, which had grown to
+be a cat in her arms, and slept in her little bed, and now assumed grave
+and protective airs towards her former playmate. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+The boy, [Endnote: 3] as we have said, was two or three years Elsie's
+elder, and might now be about six years old. He was a healthy and
+cheerful child, yet of a graver mood than the little girl, appearing to
+lay a more forcible grasp on the circumstances about him, and to tread
+with a heavier footstep on the solid earth; yet perhaps not more so than
+was the necessary difference between a man-blossom, dimly conscious of
+coming things, and a mere baby, with whom there was neither past nor
+future. Ned, as he was named, was subject very early to fits of musing,
+the subject of which--if they had any definite subject, or were more
+than vague reveries--it was impossible to guess. They were of those
+states of mind, probably, which are beyond the sphere of human language,
+and would necessarily lose their essence in the attempt to communicate
+or record them. The little girl, perhaps, had some mode of sympathy with
+these unuttered thoughts or reveries, which grown people had ceased to
+have; at all events, she early learned to respect them, and, at other
+times as free and playful as her Persian kitten, she never in such
+circumstances ventured on any greater freedom than to sit down quietly
+beside him, and endeavor to look as thoughtful as the boy himself.
+
+Once, slowly emerging from one of these waking reveries, little Ned
+gazed about him, and saw Elsie sitting with this pretty pretence of
+thoughtfulness and dreaminess in her little chair, close beside him;
+now and then peeping under her eyelashes to note what changes might come
+over his face. After looking at her a moment or two, he quietly took her
+willing and warm little hand in his own, and led her up to the Doctor.
+
+The group, methinks, must have been a picturesque one, made up as it was
+of several apparently discordant elements, each of which happened to be
+so combined as to make a more effective whole. The beautiful grave boy,
+with a little sword by his side and a feather in his hat, of a brown
+complexion, slender, with his white brow and dark, thoughtful eyes, so
+earnest upon some mysterious theme; the prettier little girl, a blonde,
+round, rosy, so truly sympathetic with her companion's mood, yet
+unconsciously turning all to sport by her attempt to assume one
+similar;--these two standing at the grim Doctor's footstool; he
+meanwhile, black, wild-bearded, heavy-browed, red-eyed, wrapped in his
+faded dressing-gown, puffing out volumes of vapor from his long pipe,
+and making, just at that instant, application to a tumbler, which,
+we regret to say, was generally at his elbow, with some dark-colored
+potation in it that required to be frequently replenished from a
+neighboring black bottle. Half, at least, of the fluids in the grim
+Doctor's system must have been derived from that same black bottle, so
+constant was his familiarity with its contents; and yet his eyes were
+never redder at one time than another, nor his utterance thicker,
+nor his mood perceptibly the brighter or the duller for all his
+conviviality. It is true, when, once, the bottle happened to be empty
+for a whole day together, Doctor Grimshawe was observed by crusty Hannah
+and by the children to be considerably fiercer than usual: so that
+probably, by some maladjustment of consequences, his intemperance was
+only to be found in refraining from brandy.
+
+Nor must we forget--in attempting to conceive the effect of these two
+beautiful children in such a sombre room, looking on the graveyard,
+and contrasted with the grim Doctor's aspect of heavy and smouldering
+fierceness--that over his head, at this very moment, dangled the
+portentous spider, who seemed to have come down from his web aloft for
+the purpose of hearing what the two young people could have to say
+to his patron, and what reference it might have to certain mysterious
+documents which the Doctor kept locked up in a secret cupboard behind
+the door.
+
+"Grim Doctor," said Ned, after looking up into the Doctor's face, as
+a sensitive child inevitably does, to see whether the occasion was
+favorable, yet determined to proceed with his purpose whether so or
+not,--"Grim Doctor, I want you to answer me a question."
+
+"Here's to your good health, Ned!" quoth the Doctor, eying the pair
+intently, as he often did, when they were unconscious. "So you want to
+ask me a question? As many as you please, my fine fellow; and I shall
+answer as many, and as much, and as truly, as may please myself!"
+
+"Ah, grim Doctor!" said the little girl, now letting go of Ned's hand,
+and climbing upon the Doctor's knee, "'ou shall answer as many as Ned
+please to ask, because to please him and me!"
+
+"Well, child," said Doctor Grimshawe, "little Ned will have his rights
+at least, at my hands, if not other people's rights likewise; and, if it
+be right, I shall answer his question. Only, let him ask it at once; for
+I want to be busy thinking about something else."
+
+"Then, Doctor Grim," said little Ned, "tell me, in the first place,
+where I came from, and how you came to have me?"
+
+The Doctor looked at the little man, so seriously and earnestly putting
+this demand, with a perplexed, and at first it might almost seem a
+startled aspect.
+
+"That is a question, indeed, my friend Ned!" ejaculated he, putting
+forth a whiff of smoke and imbibing a nip from his tumbler before he
+spoke; and perhaps framing his answer, as many thoughtful and secret
+people do, in such a way as to let out his secret mood to the child,
+because knowing he could not understand it: "Whence did you come? Whence
+did any of us come? Out of the darkness and mystery; out of nothingness;
+out of a kingdom of shadows; out of dust, clay, mud, I think, and to
+return to it again. Out of a former state of being, whence we have
+brought a good many shadowy revelations, purporting that it was no very
+pleasant one. Out of a former life, of which the present one is the
+hell!--And why are you come? Faith, Ned, he must be a wiser man than
+Doctor Grim who can tell why you or any other mortal came hither; only
+one thing I am well aware of,--it was not to be happy. To toil and moil
+and hope and fear; and to love in a shadowy, doubtful sort of way, and
+to hate in bitter earnest,--that is what you came for!"
+
+"Ah, Doctor Grim! this is very naughty," said little Elsie. "You are
+making fun of little Ned, when he is in earnest."
+
+"Fun!" quoth Doctor Grim, bursting into a laugh peculiar to him, very
+loud and obstreperous. "I am glad you find it so, my little woman. Well,
+and so you bid me tell absolutely where he came from?"
+
+Elsie nodded her bright little head.
+
+"And you, friend Ned, insist upon knowing?"
+
+"That I do, Doctor Grim!" answered Ned. His white, childish brow had
+gathered into a frown, such was the earnestness of his determination;
+and he stamped his foot on the floor, as if ready to follow up his
+demand by an appeal to the little tin sword which hung by his side. The
+Doctor looked at him with a kind of smile,--not a very pleasant one;
+for it was an unamiable characteristic of his temper that a display of
+spirit, even in a child, was apt to arouse his immense combativeness,
+and make him aim a blow without much consideration how heavily it might
+fall, or on how unequal an antagonist.
+
+"If you insist upon an answer, Master Ned, you shall have it," replied
+he. "You were taken by me, boy, a foundling from an almshouse; and
+if ever hereafter you desire to know your kindred, you must take your
+chance of the first man you meet. He is as likely to be your father as
+another!"
+
+The child's eyes flashed, and his brow grew as red as fire. It was but
+a momentary fierceness; the next instant he clasped his hands over his
+face, and wept in a violent convulsion of grief and shame. Little Elsie
+clasped her arms about him, kissing his brow and chin, which were all
+that her lips could touch, under his clasped hands; but Ned turned away
+uncomforted, and was blindly making his way towards the door.
+
+"Ned, my little fellow, come back!" said Doctor Grim, who had very
+attentively watched the cruel effect of his communication.
+
+As the boy did not reply, and was still tending towards the door, the
+grim Doctor vouchsafed to lay aside his pipe, get up from his arm-chair
+(a thing he seldom did between supper and bedtime), and shuffle after
+the two children in his slippers. He caught them on the threshold,
+brought little Ned back by main force,--for he was a rough man even in
+his tenderness,--and, sitting down again and taking him on his knee,
+pulled away his hands from before his face. Never was a more pitiful
+sight than that pale countenance, so infantile still, yet looking old
+and experienced already, with a sense of disgrace, with a feeling of
+loneliness; so beautiful, nevertheless, that it seemed to possess all
+the characteristics which fine hereditary traits and culture, or many
+forefathers, could do in refining a human stock. And this was a nameless
+weed, sprouting from some chance seed by the dusty wayside!
+
+"Ned, my dear old boy," said Doctor Grim,--and he kissed that pale,
+tearful face,--the first and last time, to the best of my belief, that
+he was ever betrayed into that tenderness; "forget what I have said!
+Yes, remember, if you like, that you came from an almshouse; but
+remember, too,--what your friend Doctor Grim is ready to affirm and make
+oath of,--that he can trace your kindred and race through that sordid
+experience, and back, back, for a hundred and fifty years, into an old
+English line. Come, little Ned, and look at this picture."
+
+He led the boy by the hand to a corner of the room, where hung upon the
+wall a portrait which Ned had often looked at. It seemed an old picture;
+but the Doctor had had it cleaned and varnished, so that it looked dim
+and dark, and yet it seemed to be the representation of a man of no
+mark; not at least of such mark as would naturally leave his features to
+be transmitted for the interest of another generation. For he was
+clad in a mean dress of old fashion,--a leather jerkin it appeared to
+be,--and round his neck, moreover, was a noose of rope, as if he might
+have been on the point of being hanged. But the face of the portrait,
+nevertheless, was beautiful, noble, though sad; with a great development
+of sensibility, a look of suffering and endurance amounting to
+triumph,--a peace through all.
+
+"Look at this," continued the Doctor, "if you must go on dreaming about
+your race. Dream that you are of the blood of this being; for, mean as
+his station looks, he comes of an ancient and noble race, and was the
+noblest of them all! Let me alone, Ned, and I shall spin out the web
+that shall link you to that man. The grim Doctor can do it!"
+
+The grim Doctor's face looked fierce with the earnestness with which
+he said these words. You would have said that he was taking an oath to
+overthrow and annihilate a race, rather than to build one up by
+bringing forward the infant heir out of obscurity, and making plain the
+links--the filaments--which cemented this feeble childish life, in a far
+country, with the great tide of a noble life, which had come down like a
+chain from antiquity, in old England.
+
+Having said the words, however, the grim Doctor appeared ashamed both of
+the heat and of the tenderness into which he had been betrayed; for rude
+and rough as his nature was, there was a kind of decorum in it, too,
+that kept him within limits of his own. So he went back to his chair,
+his pipe, and his tumbler, and was gruffer and more taciturn than ever
+for the rest of the evening. And after the children went to bed, he
+leaned back in his chair and looked up at the vast tropic spider, who
+was particularly busy in adding to the intricacies of his web; until he
+fell asleep with his eyes fixed in that direction, and the extinguished
+pipe in one hand and the empty tumbler in the other.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+Doctor Grimshawe, after the foregone scene, began a practice of
+conversing more with the children than formerly; directing his discourse
+chiefly to Ned, although Elsie's vivacity and more outspoken and
+demonstrative character made her take quite as large a share in the
+conversation as he.
+
+The Doctor's communications referred chiefly to a village, or
+neighborhood, or locality in England, which he chose to call Newnham;
+although he told the children that this was not the real name, which,
+for reasons best known to himself, he wished to conceal. Whatever the
+name were, he seemed to know the place so intimately, that the
+children, as a matter of course, adopted the conclusion that it was his
+birthplace, and the spot where he had spent his schoolboy days, and
+had lived until some inscrutable reason had impelled him to quit its
+ivy-grown antiquity, and all the aged beauty and strength that he spoke
+of, and to cross the sea.
+
+He used to tell of an old church, far unlike the brick and pine-built
+meeting-houses with which the children were familiar; a church, the
+stones of which were laid, every one of them, before the world knew of
+the country in which he was then speaking: and how it had a spire, the
+lower part of which was mantled with ivy, and up which, towards its very
+spire, the ivy was still creeping; and how there was a tradition, that,
+if the ivy ever reached the top, the spire would fall upon the roof
+of the old gray church, and crush it all down among its surrounding
+tombstones. [Endnote: 1] And so, as this misfortune would be so heavy
+a one, there seemed to be a miracle wrought from year to year, by which
+the ivy, though always flourishing, could never grow beyond a certain
+point; so that the spire and church had stood unharmed for thirty years;
+though the wise old people were constantly foretelling that the passing
+year must be the very last one that it could stand.
+
+He told, too, of a place that made little Ned blush and cast down his
+eyes to hide the tears of anger and shame at he knew not what, which
+would irresistibly spring into them; for it reminded him of the
+almshouse where, as the cruel Doctor said, Ned himself had had his
+earliest home. And yet, after all, it had scarcely a feature of
+resemblance; and there was this great point of difference,--that
+whereas, in Ned's wretched abode (a large, unsightly brick house), there
+were many wretched infants like himself, as well as helpless people
+of all ages, widows, decayed drunkards, people of feeble wits, and all
+kinds of imbecility; it being a haven for those who could not contend
+in the hard, eager, pitiless struggle of life; in the place the Doctor
+spoke of, a noble, Gothic, mossy structure, there were none but aged
+men, who had drifted into this quiet harbor to end their days in a sort
+of humble yet stately ease and decorous abundance. And this shelter,
+the grim Doctor said, was the gift of a man who had died ages ago; and
+having been a great sinner in his lifetime, and having drawn lands,
+manors, and a great mass of wealth into his clutches, by violent and
+unfair means, had thought to get his pardon by founding this Hospital,
+as it was called, in which thirteen old men should always reside; and he
+hoped that they would spend their time in praying for the welfare of his
+soul. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+Said little Elsie, "I am glad he did it, and I hope the poor old men
+never forgot to pray for him, and that it did good to the poor wicked
+man's soul."
+
+"Well, child," said Doctor Grimshawe, with a scowl into vacancy, and a
+sort of wicked leer of merriment at the same time, as if he saw before
+him the face of the dead man of past centuries, "I happen to be no
+lover of this man's race, and I hate him for the sake of one of his
+descendants. I don't think he succeeded in bribing the Devil to let him
+go, or God to save him!"
+
+"Doctor Grim, you are very naughty!" said Elsie, looking shocked.
+
+"It is fair enough," said Ned, "to hate your enemies to the very brink
+of the grave, but then to leave him to get what mercy he can."
+
+"After shoving him in!" quoth the Doctor; and made no further response
+to either of these criticisms, which seemed indeed to affect him very
+little--if he even listened to them. For he was a man of singularly
+imperfect moral culture; insomuch that nothing else was so remarkable
+about him as that--possessing a good deal of intellectual ability, made
+available by much reading and experience--he was so very dark on the
+moral side; as if he needed the natural perceptions that should have
+enabled him to acquire that better wisdom. Such a phenomenon often
+meets us in life; oftener than we recognize, because a certain tact and
+exterior decency generally hide the moral deficiency. But often there is
+a mind well polished, married to a conscience and natural impulses left
+as they were in childhood, except that they have sprouted up into evil
+and poisonous weeds, richly blossoming with strong-smelling flowers, or
+seeds which the plant scatters by a sort of impulse; even as the Doctor
+was now half-consciously throwing seeds of his evil passions into the
+minds of these children. He was himself a grown-up child, without tact,
+simplicity, and innocence, and with ripened evil, all the ranker for a
+native heat that was in him and still active, which might have nourished
+good things as well as evil. Indeed, it did cherish by chance a root or
+two of good, the fragrance of which was sometimes perceptible among all
+this rank growth of poisonous weeds. A grown-up child he was,--that was
+all.
+
+The Doctor now went on to describe an old country-seat, which stood near
+this village and the ancient Hospital that he had been telling about,
+and which was formerly the residence of the wicked man (a knight and
+a brave one, well known in the Lancastrian wars) who had founded the
+latter. It was a venerable old mansion, which a Saxon Thane had begun to
+build more than a thousand years ago, the old English oak that he built
+into the frame being still visible in the ancient skeleton of its roof,
+sturdy and strong as if put up yesterday. And the descendants of the
+man who built it, through the French line (for a Norman baron wedded the
+daughter and heiress of the Saxon), dwelt there yet; and in each century
+they had done something for the old Hall,--building a tower, adding
+a suite of rooms, strengthening what was already built, putting in a
+painted window, making it more spacious and convenient,--till it seemed
+as if Time employed himself in thinking what could be done for the old
+house. As fast as any part decayed, it was renewed, with such simple
+art that the new completed, as it were, and fitted itself to the old. So
+that it seemed as if the house never had been finished, until just that
+thing was added. For many an age, the possessors had gone on adding
+strength to strength, digging out the moat to a greater depth, piercing
+the walls with holes for archers to shoot through, or building a turret
+to keep watch upon. But at last all necessity for these precautions
+passed away, and then they thought of convenience and comfort, adding
+something in every generation to these. And by and by they thought of
+beauty too; and in this time helped them with its weather-stains, and
+the ivy that grew over the walls, and the grassy depth of the dried-up
+moat, and the abundant shade that grew up everywhere, where naked
+strength would have been ugly.
+
+"One curious thing in the house," said the Doctor, lowering his voice,
+but with a mysterious look of triumph, and that old scowl, too, at the
+children, "was that they built a secret chamber,--a very secret one!"
+
+"A secret chamber!" cried little Ned; "who lived in it? A ghost?"
+
+"There was often use for it," said Doctor Grim; "hiding people who
+had fought on the wrong side, or Catholic priests, or criminals,
+or perhaps--who knows?--enemies that they wanted put out of the
+way,--troublesome folks. Ah! it was often of use, that secret chamber:
+and is so still!"
+
+Here the Doctor paused a long while, and leaned back in his chair,
+slowly puffing long whiffs from his pipe, looking up at the great
+spider-demon that hung over his head, and, as it seemed to the children
+by the expression of his face, looking into the dim secret chamber which
+he had spoken of, and which, by something in his mode of alluding to it,
+assumed such a weird, spectral aspect to their imaginations that they
+never wished to hear of it again. Coming back at length out of his
+reverie,--returning, perhaps, out of some weird, ghostly, secret
+chamber of his memory, whereof the one in the old house was but the less
+horrible emblem,--he resumed his tale. He said that, a long time ago,
+a war broke out in the old country between King and Parliament. At that
+period there were several brothers of the old family (which had adhered
+to the Catholic religion), and these chose the side of the King instead
+of that of the Puritan Parliament: all but one, whom the family hated
+because he took the Parliament side; and he became a soldier, and fought
+against his own brothers; and it was said among them that, so inveterate
+was he, he went on the scaffold, masked, and was the very man who struck
+off the King's head, and that his foot trod in the King's blood, and
+that always afterwards he made a bloody track wherever he went. And
+there was a legend that his brethren once caught the renegade and
+imprisoned him in his own birthplace--
+
+"In the secret chamber?" interrupted Ned.
+
+"No doubt!" said the Doctor, nodding, "though I never heard so."
+
+They imprisoned him, but he made his escape and fled, and in the morning
+his prison-place, wherever it was, was empty. But on the threshold
+of the door of the old manor-house there was the print of a bloody
+footstep; and no trouble that the housemaids took, no rain of all the
+years that have since passed, no sunshine, has made it fade: nor have
+all the wear and tramp of feet passing over it since then availed to
+erase it.
+
+"I have seen it myself," quoth the Doctor, "and know this to be true."
+
+"Doctor Grim, now you are laughing at us," said Ned, trying to look
+grave. But Elsie hid her face on the Doctor's knee; there being
+something that affected the vivid little girl with peculiar horror in
+the idea of this red footstep always glistening on the doorstep, and
+wetting, as she fancied, every innocent foot of child or grown person
+that had since passed over it. [Endnote: 3.]
+
+"It is true!" reiterated the grim Doctor; "for, man and boy, I have seen
+it a thousand times."
+
+He continued the family history, or tradition, or fantastic legend,
+whichever it might be; telling his young auditors that the Puritan, the
+renegade son of the family, was afterwards, by the contrivances of his
+brethren, sent to Virginia and sold as a bond slave; and how he had
+vanished from that quarter and come to New England, where he was
+supposed to have left children. And by and by two elder brothers died,
+and this missing brother became the heir to the old estate and to a
+title. Then the family tried to track his bloody footstep, and sought
+it far and near, through green country paths, and old streets of London;
+but in vain. Then they sent messengers to see whether any traces of one
+stepping in blood could be found on the forest leaves of America; but
+still in vain. The idea nevertheless prevailed that he would come back,
+and it was said they kept a bedchamber ready for him yet in the old
+house. But much as they pretended to regret the loss of him and his
+children, it would make them curse their stars were a descendant of his
+to return now. For the child of a younger son was in possession of the
+old estate, and was doing as much evil as his forefathers did; and if
+the true heir were to appear on the threshold, he would (if he might but
+do it secretly) stain the whole doorstep as red as the Bloody Footstep
+had stained one little portion of it.
+
+"Do you think he will ever come back?" asked little Ned.
+
+"Stranger things have happened, my little man!" said Doctor Grimshawe,
+"than that the posterity of this man should come back and turn these
+usurpers out of his rightful inheritance. And sometimes, as I sit here
+smoking my pipe and drinking my glass, and looking up at the cunning
+plot that the spider is weaving yonder above my head, and thinking of
+this fine old family and some little matters that have been between them
+and me, I fancy that it may be so! We shall see! Stranger things have
+happened."
+
+And Doctor Grimshawe drank off his tumbler, winking at little Ned in a
+strange way, that seemed to be a kind of playfulness, but which did not
+affect the children pleasantly; insomuch that little Elsie put both
+her hands on Doctor Grim's knees, and begged him not to do so any more.
+[Endnote: 4.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. [Endnote: 1]
+
+
+The children, after this conversation, often introduced the old English
+mansion into their dreams and little romances, which all imaginative
+children are continually mixing up with their lives, making the
+commonplace day of grown people a rich, misty, glancing orb of
+fairy-land to themselves. Ned, forgetting or not realizing the long
+lapse of time, used to fancy the true heir wandering all this while in
+America, and leaving a long track of bloody footsteps behind him; until
+the period when, his sins being expiated (whatever they might be), he
+should turn back upon his steps and return to his old native home. And
+sometimes the child used to look along the streets of the town where he
+dwelt, bending his thoughtful eyes on the ground, and think that perhaps
+some time he should see the bloody footsteps there, betraying that the
+wanderer had just gone that way.
+
+As for little Elsie, it was her fancy that the hero of the legend still
+remained imprisoned in that dreadful secret chamber, which had made a
+most dread impression on her mind; and that there he was, forgotten all
+this time, waiting, like a naughty child shut up in a closet, until
+some one should come to unlock the door. In the pitifulness of her
+disposition, she once proposed to little Ned that, as soon as they grew
+big enough, they should set out in quest of the old house, and find
+their way into it, and find the secret chamber, and let the poor
+prisoner out. So they lived a good deal of the time in a half-waking
+dream, partly conscious of the fantastic nature of their ideas, yet with
+these ideas almost as real to them as the facts of the natural world,
+which, to children, are at first transparent and unsubstantial.
+
+The Doctor appeared to have a pleasure, or a purpose, in keeping his
+legend forcibly in their memories; he often recurred to the subject of
+the old English family, and was continually giving new details about
+its history, the scenery in its neighborhood, the aspect of the
+mansion-house; indicating a very intense interest in the subject on his
+own part, of which this much talk seemed the involuntary overflowing.
+
+There was, however, an affection mingled with this sentiment. It
+appeared to be his unfortunate necessity to let his thoughts dwell very
+constantly upon a subject that was hateful to him, with which this old
+English estate and manor-house and family were somehow connected; and,
+moreover, had he spoken thus to older and more experienced auditors,
+they might have detected in the manner and matter of his talk, a certain
+hereditary reverence and awe, the growth of ages, mixed up with a newer
+hatred, impelling him to deface and destroy what, at the same time, it
+was his deepest impulse to bow before. The love belonged to his race;
+the hatred, to himself individually. It was the feeling of a man lowly
+born, when he contracts a hostility to his hereditary superior. In
+one way, being of a powerful, passionate nature, gifted with force and
+ability far superior to that of the aristocrat, he might scorn him and
+feel able to trample on him; in another, he had the same awe that a
+country boy feels of the magistrate who flings him a sixpence and shakes
+his horsewhip at him.
+
+Had the grim Doctor been an American, he might have had the vast
+antipathy to rank, without the trace of awe that made it so much more
+malignant: it required a low-born Englishman to feel the two together.
+What made the hatred so fiendish was a something that, in the natural
+course of things, would have been loyalty, inherited affection, devoted
+self-sacrifice to a superior. Whatever it might be, it seemed at times
+(when his potations took deeper effect than ordinary) almost to drive
+the grim Doctor mad; for he would burst forth in wild diatribes and
+anathemas, having a strange, rough force of expression and a depth of
+utterance, as if his words came from a bottomless pit within himself,
+where burned an everlasting fire, and where the furies had their home;
+and plans of dire revenge were welded into shape as in the heat of a
+furnace. After the two poor children had been affrighted by paroxysms
+of this kind, the strange being would break out into one of his roars of
+laughter, that seemed to shake the house, and, at all events, caused
+the cobwebs and spiders suspended from the ceiling, to swing and vibrate
+with the motion of the volumes of reverberating breath which he thus
+expelled from his capacious lungs. Then, catching up little Elsie upon
+one knee and Ned upon the other, he would become gentler than in his
+usual moods, and, by the powerful magnetism of his character, cause them
+to think him as tender and sweet an old fellow as a child could desire
+for a playmate. Upon the whole, strange as it may appear, they loved
+the grim Doctor dearly; there was a loadstone within him that drew them
+close to him and kept them there, in spite of the horror of many things
+that he said and did. One thing that, slight as it seemed, wrought
+mightily towards their mutually petting each other, was that no amount
+of racket, hubbub, shouting, laughter, or noisy mischief which the
+two children could perpetrate, ever disturbed the Doctor's studies,
+meditations, or employments of whatever kind. He had a hardy set of
+nerves, not refined by careful treatment in himself or his ancestors,
+but probably accustomed from of old to be drummed on by harsh voices,
+rude sounds, and the clatter and clamor of household life among homely,
+uncultivated, strongly animal people.
+
+As the two children grew apace, it behooved their strange guardian to
+take some thought for their instruction. So far as little Elsie was
+concerned, however, he seemed utterly indifferent to her having
+any cultivation: having imbibed no modern ideas respecting feminine
+capacities and privileges, but regarding woman, whether in the bud or
+in the blossom, as the plaything of man's idler moments, and the
+helpmeet--but in a humble capacity--of his daily life. He sometimes bade
+her go to the kitchen and take lessons of crusty Hannah in bread-making,
+sweeping, dusting, washing, the coarser needlework, and such other
+things as she would require to know when she came to be a woman; but
+carelessly allowed her to gather up the crumbs of such instruction as he
+bestowed on her playmate Ned, and thus learn to read, write, and cipher;
+which, to say the truth, was about as far in the way of scholarship as
+little Elsie cared to go.
+
+But towards little Ned the grim Doctor adopted a far different system.
+No sooner had he reached the age when the soft and tender intellect
+of the child became capable of retaining impressions, than he took him
+vigorously in hand, assigning him such tasks as were fit for him, and
+curiously investigating what were the force and character of the powers
+with which the child grasped them. Not that the Doctor pressed him
+forward unduly; indeed, there was no need of it; for the boy manifested
+a remarkable docility for instruction, and a singular quickness
+in mastering the preliminary steps which lead to science: a subtle
+instinct, indeed, which it seemed wonderful a child should possess
+for anything as artificial as systems of grammar and arithmetic. A
+remarkable boy, in truth, he was, to have been found by chance in an
+almshouse; except that, such being his origin, we are at liberty to
+suppose for him whatever long cultivation and gentility we may think
+necessary, in his parentage of either side,--such as was indicated also
+by his graceful and refined beauty of person. He showed, indeed, even
+before he began to read at all, an instinctive attraction towards books,
+and a love for and interest in even the material form of knowledge,--the
+plates, the print, the binding of the Doctor's volumes, and even in
+a bookworm which he once found in an old volume, where it had eaten a
+circular furrow. But the little boy had too quick a spirit of life to
+be in danger of becoming a bookworm himself. He had this side of the
+intellect, but his impulse would be to mix with men, and catch something
+from their intercourse fresher than books could give him; though these
+would give him what they might.
+
+In the grim Doctor, rough and uncultivated as he seemed, this budding
+intelligence found no inadequate instructor. Doctor Grimshawe proved
+himself a far more thorough scholar, in the classics and mathematics,
+than could easily have been found in our country. He himself must have
+had rigid and faithful instruction at an early period of life, though
+probably not in his boyhood. For, though the culture had been bestowed,
+his mind had been left in so singularly rough a state that it seemed
+as if the refinement of classical study could not have been begun very
+early. Or possibly the mind and nature were incapable of polish; or he
+may have had a coarse and sordid domestic life around him in his infancy
+and youth. He was a gem of coarse texture, just hewn out. An American
+with a like education would more likely have gained a certain fineness
+and grace, and it would have been difficult to distinguish him from one
+who had been born to culture and refinement. This sturdy Englishman,
+after all that had been done for his mind, and though it had been well
+done, was still but another ploughman, of a long race of such, with a
+few scratchings of refinement on his hard exterior. His son, if he left
+one, might be a little less of the ploughman; his grandson, provided
+the female element were well chosen, might approach to refinement; three
+generations--a century at least--would be required for the slow toil
+of hewing, chiselling, and polishing a gentleman out of this ponderous
+block, now rough from the quarry of human nature. But, in the mean time,
+he evidently possessed in an unusual degree the sort of learning that
+refines other minds,--the critical acquaintance with the great poets and
+historians of antiquity, and apparently an appreciation of their merits,
+and power to teach their beauty. So the boy had an able tutor, capable,
+it would seem, of showing him the way to the graces he did not himself
+possess; besides helping the growth of the strength without which
+refinement is but sickly and disgusting.
+
+Another sort of culture, which it seemed odd that this rude man should
+undertake, was that of manners; but, in fact, rude as the grim Doctor's
+own manners were, he was one of the nicest and severest censors in that
+department that was ever known. It is difficult to account for this;
+although it is almost invariably found that persons in a low rank of
+life, such as servants and laborers, will detect the false pretender to
+the character of a gentleman, with at least as sure an instinct as the
+class into which they seek to thrust themselves. Perhaps they recognize
+something akin to their own vulgarity, rather than appreciate what is
+unlike themselves. The Doctor possessed a peculiar power of rich rough
+humor on this subject, and used to deliver lectures, as it were, to
+little Ned, illustrated with sketches of living individuals in the town
+where they dwelt; by an unscrupulous use of whom he sought to teach the
+boy what to avoid in manners, if he sought to be a gentleman. But it
+must be confessed he spared himself as little as other people, and
+often wound up with this compendious injunction,--"Be everything in your
+behavior that Doctor Grim is not!"
+
+His pupil, very probably, profited somewhat by these instructions; for
+there are specialties and arbitrary rules of behavior which do not come
+by nature. But these are few; and beautiful, noble, and genial manners
+may almost be called a natural gift; and these, however he inherited
+them, soon proved to be an inherent possession of little Ned. He had a
+kind of natural refinement, which nothing could ever soil or offend;
+it seemed, by some magic or other, absolutely to keep him from the
+knowledge of much of the grim Doctor's rude and sordid exterior, and
+to render what was around him beautiful by a sort of affiliation, or
+reflection from that quality in himself, glancing its white light upon
+it. The Doctor himself was puzzled, and apparently both startled and
+delighted at the perception of these characteristics. Sometimes he
+would make a low, uncouth bow, after his fashion, to the little fellow,
+saying, "Allow me to kiss your hand, my lord!" and little Ned, not quite
+knowing what the grim Doctor meant, yet allowed the favor he asked,
+with a grave and gracious condescension that seemed much to delight the
+suitor. This refusal to recognize or to suspect that the Doctor might be
+laughing at him was a sure token, at any rate, of the lack of one vulgar
+characteristic in little Ned.
+
+In order to afford little Ned every advantage to these natural gifts,
+Doctor Grim nevertheless failed not to provide the best attainable
+instructor for such positive points of a polite education as his own
+fierce criticism, being destructive rather than generative, would not
+suffice for. There was a Frenchman in the town--a M. Le Grand, secretly
+calling himself a Count--who taught the little people, and, indeed, some
+of their elders, the Parisian pronunciation of his own language; and
+likewise dancing (in which he was more of an adept and more successful
+than in the former branch) and fencing: in which, after looking at a
+lesson or two, the grim Doctor was satisfied of his skill. Under his
+instruction, with the stimulus of the Doctor's praise and criticism, Ned
+soon grew to be the pride of the Frenchman's school, in both the
+active departments; and the Doctor himself added a further gymnastic
+acquirement (not absolutely necessary, he said, to a gentleman's
+education, but very desirable to a man perfect at all points) by
+teaching him cudgel-playing and pugilism. In short, in everything that
+related to accomplishments, whether of mind or body, no pains were
+spared with little Ned; but of the utilitarian line of education, then
+almost exclusively adopted, and especially desirable for a fortuneless
+boy like Ned, dependent on a man not wealthy, there was little given.
+
+At first, too, the Doctor paid little attention to the moral and
+religious culture of his pupil; nor did he ever make a system of it. But
+by and by, though with a singular reluctance and kind of bashfulness,
+he began to extend his care to these matters; being drawn into them
+unawares, and possibly perceiving and learning what he taught as he went
+along. One evening, I know not how, he was betrayed into speaking on
+this point, and a sort of inspiration seized him. A vista opened before
+him: handling an immortal spirit, he began to know its requisitions, in
+a degree far beyond what he had conceived them to be when his great
+task was undertaken. His voice grew deep, and had a strange, impressive
+pathos in it; his talk became eloquent with depth of meaning and
+feeling, as he told the boy of the moral dangers of the world, for which
+he was seeking to educate him; and which, he said, presented what looked
+like great triumphs, and yet were the greatest and saddest of defeats.
+He told him that many things that seemed nearest and dearest to the
+heart of man were destructive, eating and gnawing away and corroding
+what was best in him; and what a high, noble, re-creating triumph it
+was when these dark impulses were resisted and overthrown; and how, from
+that epoch, the soul took a new start. He denounced the selfish greed of
+gold, lawless passion, revenge,--and here the grim Doctor broke out into
+a strange passion and zeal of anathema against this deadly sin, making
+a dreadful picture of the ruin that it creates in the heart where it
+establishes itself, and how it makes a corrosive acid of those genial
+juices. Then he told the boy that the condition of all good was, in the
+first place, truth; then, courage; then, justice; then, mercy; out of
+which principles operating upon one another would come all brave, noble,
+high, unselfish actions, and the scorn of all mean ones; and how that
+from such a nature all hatred would fall away, and all good affections
+would be ennobled.
+
+I know not at what point it was, precisely, in these ethical
+instructions that an insight seemed to strike the grim Doctor that
+something more--vastly more--was needed than all he had said; and he
+began, doubtfully, to speak of man's spiritual nature and its demands,
+and the emptiness of everything which a sense of these demands did not
+pervade, and condense, and weighten into realities. And going on in this
+strain, he soared out of himself and astonished the two children,
+who stood gazing at him, wondering whether it were the Doctor who was
+speaking thus; until some interrupting circumstance seemed to bring him
+back to himself, and he burst into one of his great roars of laughter.
+The inspiration, the strange light whereby he had been transfigured,
+passed out of his face; and there was the uncouth, wild-bearded, rough,
+earthy, passionate man, whom they called Doctor Grim, looking ashamed of
+himself, and trying to turn the whole matter into a jest. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+It was a sad pity that he should have been interrupted, and brought
+into this mocking mood, just when he seemed to have broken away from
+the sinfulness of his hot, evil nature, and to have soared into a region
+where, with all his native characteristics transfigured, he seemed to
+have become an angel in his own likeness. Crusty Hannah, who had been
+drawn to the door of the study by the unusual tones of his voice,--a
+kind of piercing sweetness in it,--always averred that she saw the
+gigantic spider swooping round his head in great crafty circles, and
+clutching, as it were, at his brain with its great claws. But it was the
+old woman's absurd idea that this hideous insect was the Devil, in that
+ugly guise,--a superstition which deserves absolutely no countenance.
+Nevertheless, though this paroxysm of devotional feeling and insight
+returned no more to the grim Doctor, it was ever after a memorable
+occasion to the two children. It touched that religious chord, in both
+their hearts, which there was no mother to touch; but now it
+vibrated long, and never ceased to vibrate so long as they remained
+together,--nor, perhaps, after they were parted from each other and from
+the grim Doctor. And even then, in those after years, the strange music
+that had been awakened was continued, as it were the echo from harps on
+high. Now, at all events, they made little prayers for themselves, and
+said them at bedtime, generally in secret, sometimes in unison; and they
+read in an old dusty Bible which lay among the grim Doctor's books; and
+from little heathens, they became Christian children. Doctor Grimshawe
+was perhaps conscious of this result of his involuntary preachment, but
+he never directly noticed it, and did nothing either to efface or deepen
+the impression.
+
+It was singular, however, that, in both the children's minds, this
+one gush of irresistible religious sentiment, breaking out of the grim
+Doctor's inner depths, like a sort of holy lava from a volcano that
+usually emitted quite other matter, (such as hot, melted wrath and
+hate,) quite threw out of sight, then and always afterwards, his
+darker characteristics. They remembered him, with faith and love, as a
+religious man, and forgot--what perhaps had made no impression on their
+innocent hearts--all the traits that other people might have called
+devilish. To them the grim Doctor was a saint, even during his lifetime
+and constant intercourse with them, and canonized forever afterwards.
+There is almost always, to be sure, this profound faith, with regard
+to those they love, in childhood; but perhaps, in this instance, the
+children really had a depth of insight that grown people lacked; a
+profound recognition of the bottom of this strange man's nature, which
+was of such stuff as martyrs and heroic saints might have been made of,
+though here it had been wrought miserably amiss. At any rate, his face
+with the holy awe upon it was what they saw and remembered, when they
+thought of their friend Doctor Grim.
+
+One effect of his zealous and analytic instruction of the boy was very
+perceptible. Heretofore, though enduring him, and occasionally making a
+plaything of him, it may be doubted whether the grim Doctor had really
+any strong affection for the child: it rather seemed as if his strong
+will were forcing him to undertake, and carry sedulously forward, a
+self-imposed task. All that he had done--his redeeming the bright child
+from poverty and nameless degradation, ignorance, and a sordid life
+hopeless of better fortune, and opening to him the whole realm of mighty
+possibilities in an American life--did not imply any love for the little
+individual whom he thus benefited. It had some other motive.
+
+But now, approaching the child in this close, intimate, and helpful way,
+it was very evident that his interest took a tenderer character.
+There was everything in the boy, that a boy could possess, to attract
+affection; he would have been a father's pride and joy. Doctor
+Grimshawe, indeed, was not his father; but to a person of his character
+this was perhaps no cause of lesser love than if there had been the
+whole of that holy claim of kindred between them. We speak of the
+natural force of blood; we speak of the paternal relation as if it were
+productive of more earnest affection than can exist between two persons,
+one of whom is protective, but unrelated. But there are wild, forcible,
+unrestricted characters, on whom the necessity and even duty of loving
+their own child is a sort of barrier to love. They perhaps do not love
+their own traits, which they recognize in their children; they shrink
+from their own features in the reflection presented by these little
+mirrors. A certain strangeness and unlikeness (such as gives poignancy
+to the love between the sexes) would excite a livelier affection. Be
+this as it may, it is not probable that Doctor Grimshawe would have
+loved a child of his own blood, with the coarse characteristics that
+he knew both in his race and himself, with nearly such fervor as this
+beautiful, slender, yet strenuous, intelligent, refined boy,--with such
+a high-bred air, handling common things with so refined a touch, yet
+grasping them so firmly; throwing a natural grace on all he did. Was he
+not his father,--he that took this fair blossom out of the sordid mud
+in which he must soon have withered and perished? Was not this beautiful
+strangeness, which he so wondered at, the result of his care?
+
+And little Elsie? did the grim Doctor love her as well? Perhaps not,
+for, in the first place, there was a natural tie, though not the
+nearest, between her and Doctor Grimshawe, which made him feel that she
+was cast upon his love: a burden which he acknowledged himself bound to
+undertake. Then, too, there were unutterably painful reminiscences and
+thoughts, that made him gasp for breath, that turned his blood sour,
+that tormented his dreams with nightmares and hellish phantoms; all
+of which were connected with this innocent and happy child; so that,
+cheerful and pleasant as she was, there was to the grim Doctor a little
+fiend playing about his floor and throwing a lurid light on the wall,
+as the shadow of this sun-flickering child. It is certain that there was
+always a pain and horror mixed with his feelings towards Elsie; he
+had to forget himself, as it were, and all that was connected with the
+causes why she came to be, before he could love her. Amid his fondness,
+when he was caressing her upon his knee, pressing her to his rough
+bosom, as he never took the freedom to press Ned, came these hateful
+reminiscences, compelling him to set her down, and corrugating his heavy
+brows as with a pang of fiercely resented, strongly borne pain. Still,
+the child had no doubt contrived to make her way into the great gloomy
+cavern of the grim Doctor's heart, and stole constantly further and
+further in, carrying a ray of sunshine in her hand as a taper to light
+her way, and illuminate the rude dark pit into which she so fearlessly
+went.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+Doctor Grim [Endnote: 1] had the English faith in open air and daily
+acquaintance with the weather, whatever it might be; and it was his
+habit, not only to send the two children to play, for lack of a better
+place, in the graveyard, but to take them himself on long rambles, of
+which the vicinity of the town afforded a rich variety. It may be that
+the Doctor's excursions had the wider scope, because both he and the
+children were objects of curiosity in the town, and very much the
+subject of its gossip: so that always, in its streets and lanes, the
+people turned to gaze, and came to their windows and to the doors of
+shops to see this grim, bearded figure, leading along the beautiful
+children each by a hand, with a surly aspect like a bulldog. Their
+remarks were possibly not intended to reach the ears of the party, but
+certainly were not so cautiously whispered but they occasionally did do
+so. The male remarks, indeed, generally died away in the throats that
+uttered them; a circumstance that doubtless saved the utterer from some
+very rough rejoinder at the hands of the Doctor, who had grown up in the
+habit of a very ready and free recourse to his fists, which had a way
+of doubling themselves up seemingly of their own accord. But the shrill
+feminine voices sometimes sent their observations from window to window
+without dread of any such repartee on the part of the subject of them.
+
+"There he goes, the old Spider-witch!" quoth one shrill woman, "with
+those two poor babes that he has caught in his cobweb, and is going to
+feed upon, poor little tender things! The bloody Englishman makes
+free with the dead bodies of our friends and the living ones of our
+children!"
+
+"How red his nose is!" quoth another; "he has pulled at the
+brandy-bottle pretty stoutly to-day, early as it is! Pretty habits those
+children will learn, between the Devil in the shape of a great spider,
+and this devilish fellow in his own shape! It were well that our
+townsmen tarred and feathered the old British wizard!"
+
+And, as he got further off, two or three little blackguard barefoot boys
+shouted shrilly after him,--
+
+                      "Doctor Grim, Doctor Grim,
+                       The Devil wove a web for him!"
+
+being a nonsensical couplet that had been made for the grim Doctor's
+benefit, and was hooted in the streets, and under his own windows.
+Hearing such remarks and insults, the Doctor would glare round at them
+with red eyes, especially if the brandy-bottle had happened to be much
+in request that day.
+
+Indeed, poor Doctor Grim had met with a fortune which befalls many a
+man with less cause than drew the public attention on this odd humorist;
+for, dwelling in a town which was as yet but a larger village, where
+everybody knew everybody, and claimed the privilege to know and discuss
+their characters, and where there were few topics of public interest to
+take off their attention, a very considerable portion of town talk and
+criticism fell upon him. The old town had a certain provincialism,
+which is less the characteristic of towns in these days, when society
+circulates so freely, than then: besides, it was a very rude epoch, just
+when the country had come through the war of the Revolution, and while
+the surges of that commotion were still seething and swelling, and while
+the habits and morals of every individual in the community still
+felt its influence; and especially the contest was too recent for
+an Englishman to be in very good odor, unless he should cease to be
+English, and become more American than the Americans themselves in
+repudiating British prejudices or principles, habits, mode of thought,
+and everything that distinguishes Britons at home or abroad. As Doctor
+Grim did not see fit to do this, and as, moreover, he was a very
+doubtful, questionable, morose, unamiable old fellow, not seeking to
+make himself liked nor deserving to be so, he was a very unpopular
+person in the town where he had chosen to reside. Nobody thought
+very well of him; the respectable people had heard of his pipe and
+brandy-bottle; the religious community knew that he never showed himself
+at church or meeting; so that he had not that very desirable strength
+(in a society split up into many sects) of being able to rely upon the
+party sympathies of any one of them. The mob hated him with the blind
+sentiment that makes one surly cur hostile to another surly cur. He
+was the most isolated individual to be found anywhere; and, being so
+unsupported, everybody was his enemy.
+
+The town, as it happened, had been pleased to interest itself much in
+this matter of Doctor Grim and the two children, insomuch as he never
+sent them to school, nor came with them to meeting of any kind, but
+was bringing them up ignorant heathen to all appearances, and, as many
+believed, was devoting them in some way to the great spider, to which he
+had bartered his own soul. It had been mooted among the selectmen, the
+fathers of the town, whether their duty did not require them to put the
+children under more suitable guardianship; a measure which, it may be,
+was chiefly hindered by the consideration that, in that case, the cost
+of supporting them would probably be transferred from the grim Doctor's
+shoulders to those of the community. Nevertheless, they did what they
+could. Maidenly ladies, prim and starched, in one or two instances
+called upon the Doctor--the two children meanwhile being in the
+graveyard at play--to give him Christian advice as to the management of
+his charge. But, to confess the truth, the Doctor's reception of these
+fair missionaries was not extremely courteous. They were, perhaps,
+partly instigated by a natural feminine desire to see the interior of
+a place about which they had heard much, with its spiders' webs, its
+strange machines and confusing tools; so, much contrary to crusty
+Hannah's advice, they persisted in entering. Crusty Hannah listened at
+the door; and it was curious to see the delighted smile which came
+over her dry old visage as the Doctor's growling, rough voice, after an
+abrupt question or two, and a reply in a thin voice on the part of the
+maiden ladies, grew louder and louder, till the door opened, and forth
+came the benevolent pair in great discomposure. Crusty Hannah averred
+that their caps were much rumpled; but this view of the thing was
+questioned; though it were certain that the Doctor called after them
+downstairs, that, had they been younger and prettier, they would have
+fared worse. A male emissary, who was admitted on the supposition of
+his being a patient, did fare worse; for (the grim Doctor having been
+particularly intimate with the black bottle that afternoon) there
+was, about ten minutes after the visitor's entrance, a sudden fierce
+upraising of the Doctor's growl; then a struggle that shook the house;
+and, finally, a terrible rumbling down the stairs, which proved to be
+caused by the precipitate descent of the hapless visitor; who, if he
+needed no assistance of the grim Doctor on his entrance, certainly would
+have been the better for a plaster or two after his departure.
+
+Such were the terms on which Doctor Grimshawe now stood with his adopted
+townspeople; and if we consider the dull little town to be full of
+exaggerated stories about the Doctor's oddities, many of them forged,
+all retailed in an unfriendly spirit; misconceptions of a character
+which, in its best and most candidly interpreted aspects, was
+sufficiently amenable to censure; surmises taken for certainties;
+superstitions--the genuine hereditary offspring of the frame of public
+mind which produced the witchcraft delusion--all fermenting together;
+and all this evil and uncharitableness taking the delusive hue of
+benevolent interest in two helpless children;--we may partly judge what
+was the odium in which the grim Doctor dwelt, and amid which he walked.
+The horrid suspicion, too, countenanced by his abode in the corner of
+the graveyard, affording the terrible Doctor such facilities for making
+free, like a ghoul as he was, with the relics of mortality from the
+earliest progenitor to the man killed yesterday by the Doctor's own
+drugs, was not likely to improve his reputation.
+
+He had heretofore contented himself with, at most, occasionally shaking
+his stick at his assailants; but this day the black bottle had imparted,
+it may be, a little more fire than ordinary to his blood; and besides,
+an unlucky urchin happened to take particularly good aim with a mud
+ball, which took effect right in the midst of the Doctor's bushy beard,
+and, being of a soft consistency, forthwith became incorporated with
+it. At this intolerable provocation the grim Doctor pursued the little
+villain, amid a shower of similar missiles from the boy's playmates,
+caught him as he was escaping into a back yard, dragged him into the
+middle of the street, and, with his stick, proceeded to give him his
+merited chastisement.
+
+But, hereupon, it was astonishing how sudden commotion flashed up like
+gunpowder along the street, which, except for the petty shrieks and
+laughter of a few children, was just before so quiet. Forth out of every
+window in those dusky, mean wooden houses were thrust heads of women
+old and young; forth out of every door and other avenue, and as if
+they started up from the middle of the street, or out of the unpaved
+sidewalks, rushed fierce avenging forms, threatening at full yell to
+take vengeance on the grim Doctor; who still, with that fierce dark
+face of his,--his muddy beard all flying abroad, dirty and foul, his hat
+fallen off, his red eyes flashing fire,--was belaboring the poor hinder
+end of the unhappy urchin, paying off upon that one part of the boy's
+frame the whole score which he had to settle with the rude boys of the
+town; giving him at once the whole whipping which he had deserved every
+day of his life, and not a stroke of which he had yet received. Need
+enough there was, no doubt, that somebody should interfere with such
+grim and immitigable justice; and certainly the interference was prompt,
+and promised to be effectual.
+
+"Down with the old tyrant! Thrash him! Hang him! Tar and feather the
+viper's fry! the wizard! the body-snatcher!" bellowed the mob, one
+member of which was raving with delirium tremens, and another was a
+madman just escaped from bedlam.
+
+It is unaccountable where all this mischievous, bloodthirsty multitude
+came from,--how they were born into that quietness in such a moment
+of time! What had they been about heretofore? Were they waiting in
+readiness for this crisis, and keeping themselves free from other
+employment till it should come to pass? Had they been created for
+the moment, or were they fiends sent by Satan in the likeness of a
+blackguard population? There you might see the offscourings of the
+recently finished war,--old soldiers, rusty, wooden-legged: there,
+sailors, ripe for any kind of mischief; there, the drunken population
+of a neighboring grogshop, staggering helter-skelter to the scene, and
+tumbling over one another at the Doctor's feet. There came the father
+of the punished urchin, who had never shown heretofore any care for his
+street-bred progeny, but who now came pale with rage, armed with a pair
+of tongs; and with him the mother, flying like a fury, with her cap
+awry, and clutching a broomstick, as if she were a witch just alighted.
+Up they rushed from cellar doors, and dropped down from chamber windows;
+all rushing upon the Doctor, but overturning and thwarting themselves by
+their very multitude. For, as good Doctor Grim levelled the first that
+came within reach of his fist, two or three of the others tumbled
+over him and lay grovelling at his feet; the Doctor meanwhile having
+retreated into the angle between two houses. Little Ned, with a valor
+which did him the more credit inasmuch as it was exercised in spite of
+a good deal of childish trepidation, as his pale face indicated,
+brandished his fists by the Doctor's side; and little Elsie did what any
+woman may,--that is, screeched in Doctor Grim's behalf with full stretch
+of lungs. Meanwhile the street boys kept up a shower of mud balls,
+many of which hit the Doctor, while the rest were distributed upon his
+assailants, heightening their ferocity.
+
+"Seize the old scoundrel! the villain! the Tory! the dastardly
+Englishman! Hang him in the web of his own devilish spider,--'t is long
+enough! Tar and feather him! tar and feather him!"
+
+It was certainly one of those crises that show a man how few real
+friends he has, and the tendency of mankind to stand aside, at least,
+and let a poor devil fight his own troubles, if not assist them in
+their attack. Here you might have seen a brother physician of the
+grim Doctor's greatly tickled at his plight: or a decorous, powdered,
+ruffle-shirted dignitary, one of the weighty men of the town, standing
+at a neighbor's corner to see what would come of it.
+
+"He is not a respectable man, I understand, this Grimshawe,--a quack,
+intemperate, always in these scuffles: let him get out as he may!"
+
+And then comes a deacon of one of the churches, and several
+church-members, who, hearing a noise, set out gravely and decorously to
+see what was going forward in a Christian community.
+
+"Ah! it is that irreligious and profane Grimshawe, who never goes to
+meeting. We wash our hands of him!"
+
+And one of the selectmen said,--
+
+"Surely this common brawler ought not to have the care of these nice,
+sweet children; something must be done about it; and when the man is
+sober, he must be talked to!"
+
+Alas! it is a hard case with a man who lives upon his own bottom and
+responsibility, making himself no allies, sewing himself on to nobody's
+skirts, insulating himself,--hard, when his trouble comes; and so poor
+Doctor Grimshawe was like to find it.
+
+He had succeeded by dint of good skill, and some previous practice at
+quarter-staff, in keeping his assailants at bay, though not without some
+danger on his own part; but their number, their fierceness, and the more
+skilled assault of some among them must almost immediately have been
+successful, when the Doctor's part was strengthened by an unexpected
+ally. This was a person [Endnote: 2] of tall, slight figure, who,
+without lifting his hands to take part in the conflict, thrust himself
+before the Doctor, and turned towards the assailants, crying,--
+
+"Christian men, what would you do? Peace,--peace!"
+
+His so well intended exhortation took effect, indeed, in a certain way,
+but not precisely as might have been wished: for a blow, aimed at Doctor
+Grim, took effect on the head of this man, who seemed to have no sort
+of skill or alacrity at defending himself, any more than at making
+an assault; for he never lifted his hands, but took the blow as
+unresistingly as if it had been kindly meant, and it levelled him
+senseless on the ground.
+
+Had the mob really been enraged for any strenuous cause, this incident
+would have operated merely as a preliminary whet to stimulate them to
+further bloodshed. But, as they were mostly actuated only by a natural
+desire for mischief, they were about as well satisfied with what had
+been done as if the Doctor himself were the victim. And besides, the
+fathers and respectabilities of the town, who had seen this mishap from
+afar, now began to put forward, crying out, "Keep the peace! keep the
+peace! A riot! a riot!" and other such cries as suited the emergency;
+and the crowd vanished more speedily than it had congregated, leaving
+the Doctor and the two children alone beside the fallen victim of a
+quarrel not his own. Not to dwell too long on this incident, the Doctor,
+laying hold of the last of his enemies, after the rest had taken to
+their heels, ordered him sternly to stay and help him bear the man, whom
+he had helped to murder, to his house.
+
+"It concerns you, friend; for, if he dies, you hang to a dead
+certainty!"
+
+And this was done accordingly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+About an hour thereafter there lay on a couch that had been hastily
+prepared in the study a person of singularly impressive presence: a
+thin, mild-looking man, with a peculiar look of delicacy and natural
+refinement about him, although he scarcely appeared to be technically
+and as to worldly position what we call a gentleman; plain in dress and
+simple in manner, not giving the idea of remarkable intellectual gifts,
+but with a kind of spiritual aspect, fair, clear complexion, gentle
+eyes, still somewhat clouded and obscured by the syncope into which a
+blow on the head had thrown him. He looked middle-aged, and yet there
+was a kind of childlike, simple expression, which, unless you looked
+at him with the very purpose of seeing the traces of time in his face,
+would make you suppose him much younger.
+
+"And how do you find yourself now, my good fellow?" asked Doctor
+Grimshawe, putting forth his hand to grasp that of the stranger, and
+giving it a good, warm shake. "None the worse, I should hope?" [Endnote:
+1.]
+
+"Not much the worse," answered the stranger: "not at all, it may be.
+There is a pleasant dimness and uncertainty in my mode of being. I am
+taken off my feet, as it were, and float in air, with a faint delight in
+my sensations. The grossness, the roughness, the too great angularity of
+the actual, is removed from me. It is a state that I like well. It may
+be, this is the way that the dead feel when they awake in another state
+of being, with a dim pleasure, after passing through the brief darkness
+of death. It is very pleasant."
+
+He answered dreamily, and sluggishly, reluctantly, as if there were a
+sense of repose in him which he disliked to break by putting any of
+his sensations into words. His voice had a remarkable sweetness and
+gentleness, though lacking in depth of melody.
+
+"Here, take this," said the Doctor, who had been preparing some kind of
+potion in a teaspoon: it may have been a dose of his famous preparation
+of spider's web, for aught I know, the operation of which was said to
+be of a soothing influence, causing a delightful silkiness of sensation;
+but I know not whether it was considered good for concussions of the
+brain, such as it is to be supposed the present patient had undergone.
+"Take this: it will do you good; and here I drink your very good health
+in something that will do me good."
+
+So saying, the grim Doctor quaffed off a tumbler of brandy and water.
+
+"How sweet a contrast," murmured the stranger, "between that scene of
+violence and this great peace that has come over me! It is as when one
+can say, I have fought the good fight."
+
+"You are right," said the Doctor, with what would have been one of his
+deep laughs, but which he modified in consideration of his patient's
+tenderness of brain. "We both of us fought a good fight; for though you
+struck no actual stroke, you took them as unflinchingly as ever I saw
+a man, and so turned the fortune of the battle better than if you smote
+with a sledge-hammer. Two things puzzle me in the affair. First, whence
+came my assailants, all in that moment of time, unless Satan let loose
+out of the infernal regions a synod of fiends, hoping thus to get a
+triumph over me. And secondly, whence came you, my preserver, unless you
+are an angel, and dropped down from the sky."
+
+"No," answered the stranger, with quiet simplicity. "I was passing
+through the street to my little school, when I saw your peril, and felt
+it my duty to expostulate with the people."
+
+"Well," said the grim Doctor, "come whence you will, you did an angel's
+office for me, and I shall do what an earthly man may to requite it.
+There, we will talk no more for the present."
+
+He hushed up the children, who were already, of their own accord,
+walking on tiptoe and whispering, and he himself even went so far as
+to refrain from the usual incense of his pipe, having observed that the
+stranger, who seemed to be of a very delicate organization, had seemed
+sensible of the disagreeable effect on the atmosphere of the room. The
+restraint lasted, however, only till (in the course of the day) crusty
+Hannah had fitted up a little bedroom on the opposite side of the entry,
+to which she and the grim Doctor moved the stranger, who, though tall,
+they observed was of no great weight and substance,--the lightest man,
+the Doctor averred, for his size, that ever he had handled.
+
+Every possible care was taken of him, and in a day or two he was able
+to walk into the study again, where he sat gazing at the sordidness
+and unneatness of the apartment, the strange festoons and drapery of
+spiders' webs, the gigantic spider himself, and at the grim Doctor, so
+shaggy, grizzly, and uncouth, in the midst of these surroundings, with a
+perceptible sense of something very strange in it all. His mild, gentle
+regard dwelt too on the two beautiful children, evidently with a sense
+of quiet wonder how they should be here, and altogether a sense of
+their unfitness; they, meanwhile, stood a little apart, looking at him,
+somewhat disturbed and awed, as children usually are, by a sense that
+the stranger was not perfectly well, that he had been injured, and so
+set apart from the rest of the world.
+
+"Will you come to me, little one?" said he, holding out a delicate hand
+to Elsie.
+
+Elsie came to his side without any hesitation, though without any of the
+rush that accompanied her advent to those whom she affected. "And you,
+my little man," added the stranger, quietly, and looking to Ned, who
+likewise willingly approached, and, shaking him by the offered hand, let
+it go again, but continued standing by his side.
+
+"Do you know, my little friends," said the stranger, "that it is my
+business in life to instruct such little people as you?"
+
+"Do they obey you well, sir?" asked Ned, perhaps conscious of a want of
+force in the person whom he addressed.
+
+The stranger smiled faintly. "Not too well," said he. "That has been my
+difficulty; for I have moral and religious objections, and also a great
+horror, to the use of the rod, and I have not been gifted with a
+harsh voice and a stern brow; so that, after a while, my little people
+sometimes get the better of me. The present generation of men is too
+gross for gentle treatment."
+
+"You are quite right," quoth Doctor Grimshawe, who had been observing
+this little scene, and trying to make out, from the mutual deportment
+of the stranger and the two children, what sort of man this fair, quiet
+stranger was, with his gentleness and weakness,--characteristics that
+were not attractive to himself, yet in which he acknowledged, as he
+saw them here, a certain charm; nor did he know, scarcely, whether to
+despise the one in whom he saw them, or to yield to a strange sense of
+reverence. So he watched the children, with an indistinct idea of being
+guided by them. "You are quite right: the world now--and always before,
+as far as I ever heard--requires a great deal of brute force, a great
+deal of animal food and brandy in the man that is to make an impression
+on it."
+
+The convalescence of the stranger--he gave his name as
+Colcord--proceeded favorably; for the Doctor remarked that, delicate as
+his system was, it had a certain purity,--a simple healthfulness that
+did not run into disease as stronger constitutions might. It did not
+apparently require much to crush down such a being as this,--not much
+unkindly breath to blow out the taper of his life,--and yet, if not
+absolutely killed, there was a certain aptness to keep alive in him not
+readily to be overcome.
+
+No sooner was he in a condition so to do, than he went forth to look
+after the little school that he had spoken of, but soon came back,
+announcing in a very quiet and undisturbed way that, during his
+withdrawal from duty, the scholars had been distributed to other
+instructors, and consequently he was without place or occupation
+[Endnotes: 2, 3, 4.]
+
+"A hard case," said the Doctor, flinging a gruff curse at those who had
+so readily deserted the poor schoolmaster.
+
+"Not so hard," replied Colcord. "These little fellows are an unruly set,
+born of parents who have led rough lives,--here in battle time, too,
+with the spirit of battle in them,--therefore rude and contentious
+beyond my power to cope with them. I have been taught, long ago," he
+added, with a peaceful smile, "that my business in life does not lie
+with grown-up and consolidated men and women; and so, not to be useless
+in my day, and to gain the little that my sustenance requires, I have
+thought to deal with children. But even for this I lack force."
+
+"I dare say," said the Doctor, with a modified laugh. "Little devils
+they are, harder to deal with than men. Well, I am glad of your failure
+for one reason, and of your being thrown out of business; because
+we shall have the benefit of you the longer. Here is this boy to be
+instructed. I have made some attempts myself; but having no art of
+instructing, no skill, no temper I suppose, I make but an indifferent
+hand at it: and besides I have other business that occupies my thoughts.
+Take him in hand, if you like, and the girl for company. No matter
+whether you teach her anything, unless you happen to be acquainted with
+needlework."
+
+"I will talk with the children," said Colcord, "and see if I am
+likely to do good with them. The lad, I see, has a singular spirit of
+aspiration and pride,--no ungentle pride,--but still hard to cope with.
+I will see. The little girl is a most comfortable child."
+
+"You have read the boy as if you had his heart in your hand," said
+the Doctor, rather surprised. "I could not have done it better myself,
+though I have known him all but from the egg."
+
+Accordingly, the stranger, who had been thrust so providentially into
+this odd and insulated little community, abode with them, without more
+words being spoken on the subject: for it seemed to all concerned
+a natural arrangement, although, on both parts, they were mutually
+sensible of something strange in the companionship thus brought about.
+To say the truth, it was not easy to imagine two persons apparently less
+adapted to each other's society than the rough, uncouth, animal Doctor,
+whose faith was in his own right arm, so full of the old Adam as he was,
+so sturdily a hater, so hotly impulsive, so deep, subtle, and crooked,
+so obstructed by his animal nature, so given to his pipe and black
+bottle, so wrathful and pugnacious and wicked,--and this mild spiritual
+creature, so milky, with so unforceful a grasp; and it was singular to
+see how they stood apart and eyed each other, each tacitly acknowledging
+a certain merit and kind of power, though not well able to appreciate
+its value. The grim Doctor's kindness, however, and gratitude, had
+been so thoroughly awakened, that he did not feel the disgust that he
+probably otherwise might at what seemed the mawkishness of Colcord's
+character; his want, morally speaking, of bone and muscle; his
+fastidiousness of character, the essence of which it seemed to be to
+bear no stain upon it; otherwise it must die.
+
+On Colcord's part there was a good deal of evidence to be detected, by
+a nice observer, that he found it difficult to put up with the Doctor's
+coarse peculiarities, whether physical or moral. His animal indulgences
+of appetite struck him with wonder and horror; his coarse expressions,
+his free indulgence of wrath, his sordid and unclean habits; the dust,
+the cobwebs, the monster that dangled from the ceiling; his pipe,
+diffusing its fragrance through the house, and showing, by the plainest
+and simplest proof, how we all breathe one another's breath, nice and
+proud as we may be, kings and daintiest ladies breathing the air that
+has already served to inflate a beggar's lungs. He shrank, too, from
+the rude manhood of the Doctor's character, with its human warmth,--an
+element which he seemed not to possess in his own character. He was
+capable only of gentle and mild regard,--that was his warmest affection;
+and the warmest, too, that he was capable of exciting in others. So that
+he was doomed as much apparently as the Doctor himself to be a lonely
+creature, without any very deep companionship in the world, though not
+incapable, when he, by some rare chance, met a soul distantly akin, of
+holding a certain high spiritual communion. With the children, however,
+he succeeded in establishing some good and available relations; his
+simple and passionless character coincided with their simplicity, and
+their as yet unawakened passions: they appeared to understand him better
+than the Doctor ever succeeded in doing. He touched springs and elements
+in the nature of both that had never been touched till now, and that
+sometimes made a sweet, high music. But this was rarely; and as far as
+the general duties of an instructor went, they did not seem to be very
+successfully performed. Something was cultivated; the spiritual
+germ grew, it might be; but the children, and especially Ned,
+were intuitively conscious of a certain want of substance in the
+instructor,--a something of earthly bulk; a too etherealness. But his
+connection with our story does not lie in any excellence, or lack of
+excellence, that he showed as an instructor, and we merely mention these
+things as illustrating more or less his characteristics.
+
+The grim Doctor's curiosity was somewhat piqued by what he could see of
+the schoolmaster's character, and he was desirous of finding out what
+sort of a life such a man could have led in a world which he himself had
+found so rough a one; through what difficulties he had reached middle
+age without absolutely vanishing away in his contact with more positive
+substances than himself; how the world had given him a subsistence, if
+indeed he recognized anything more dense than fragrance, like a certain
+people whom Pliny mentioned in Africa,--a point, in fact, which the
+grim Doctor denied, his performance at table being inappreciable, and
+confined, at least almost entirely, to a dish of boiled rice, which
+crusty Hannah set before him, preparing it, it might be, with a sympathy
+of her East Indian part towards him.
+
+Well, Doctor Grimshawe easily got at what seemed to be all of the facts
+of Colcord's life; how that he was a New-Englander, the descendant of an
+ancient race of settlers, the last of them; for, once pretty numerous
+in their quarter of the country, they seemed to have been dying
+out,--exhaling from the earth, and passing to some other region.
+
+"No wonder," said the Doctor bluffly. "You have been letting slip the
+vital principle, if you are a fair specimen of the race. You do not
+clothe yourself in substance. Your souls are not coated sufficiently.
+Beef and brandy would have saved you. You have exhaled for lack of
+them."
+
+The schoolmaster shook his head, and probably thought his earthly
+salvation and sustenance not worth buying at such a cost. The remainder
+of his history was not tangible enough to afford a narrative. There
+seemed, from what he said, to have always been a certain kind of
+refinement in his race, a nicety of conscience, a nicety of habit, which
+either was in itself a want of force, or was necessarily connected with
+it, and which, the Doctor silently thought, had culminated in the person
+before him.
+
+"It was always in us," continued Colcord, with a certain pride which
+people generally feel in their ancestral characteristics, be they good
+or evil. "We had a tradition among us of our first emigrant, and the
+causes that brought him to the New World; and it was said that he had
+suffered so much, before quitting his native shores, so painful had been
+his track, that always afterwards on the forest leaves of this land his
+foot left a print of blood wherever he trod." [Endnote: 5.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+"A print of blood!" said the grim Doctor, breaking his pipe-stem by some
+sudden spasm in his gripe of it. "Pooh! the devil take the pipe! A very
+strange story that! Pray how was it?" [Endnote: 1.]
+
+"Nay, it is but a very dim legend," answered the schoolmaster: "although
+there are old yellow papers and parchments, I remember, in my father's
+possession, that had some reference to this man, too, though there was
+nothing in them about the bloody footprints. But our family legend is,
+that this man was of a good race, in the time of Charles the First,
+originally Papists, but one of them--the second you, our legend
+says--was of a milder, sweeter cast than the rest, who were fierce
+and bloody men, of a hard, strong nature; but he partook most of his
+mother's character. This son had been one of the earliest Quakers,
+converted by George Fox; and moreover there had been love between him
+and a young lady of great beauty and an heiress, whom likewise the
+eldest son of the house had designed to make his wife. And these
+brothers, cruel men, caught their innocent brother and kept him in
+confinement long in his own native home--"
+
+"How?" asked the Doctor. "Why did not he appeal to the laws?"
+
+"Our legend says," replied the schoolmaster, "only that he was kept in a
+chamber that was forgotten." [Endnote: 2.]
+
+"Very strange that!" quoth the Doctor. "He was sold by his brethren."
+
+The schoolmaster went on to tell, with much shuddering, how a Jesuit
+priest had been mixed up with this wretched business, and there had been
+a scheme at once religious and political to wrest the estate and the
+lovely lady from the fortunate heir; and how this grim Italian priest
+had instigated them to use a certain kind of torture with the poor heir,
+and how he had suffered from this; but one night, when they left
+him senseless, he contrived to make his escape from that cruel home,
+bleeding as he went; and how, by some action of his imagination,--his
+sense of the cruelty and hideousness of such treatment at his brethren's
+hands, and in the holy name of his religion,--his foot, which had been
+crushed by their cruelty, bled as he went, and that blood had never been
+stanched. And thus he had come to America, and after many wanderings,
+and much track of blood along rough ways, to New England. [Endnote: 3.]
+
+"And what became of his beloved?" asked the grim Doctor, who was puffing
+away at a fresh pipe with a very queer aspect.
+
+"She died in England," replied the schoolmaster. "And before her death,
+by some means or other, they say that she found means to send him a
+child, the offspring of their marriage, and from that child our race
+descended. And they say, too, that she sent him a key to a coffin, in
+which was locked up a great treasure. But we have not the key. But he
+never went back to his own country; and being heart-broken, and sick
+and weary of the world and its pomps and vanities, he died here, after
+suffering much persecution likewise from the Puritans. For his peaceful
+religion was accepted nowhere."
+
+"Of all legends,--all foolish legends," quoth the Doctor, wrathfully,
+with a face of a dark blood-red color, so much was his anger and
+contempt excited, "and of all absurd heroes of a legend, I never heard
+the like of this! Have you the key?"
+
+"No; nor have I ever heard of it," answered the schoolmaster.
+
+"But you have some papers?"
+
+"They existed once: perhaps are still recoverable by search," said the
+schoolmaster. "My father knew of them."
+
+"A foolish legend," reiterated the Doctor. "It is strange how human
+folly strings itself on to human folly, as a story originally false and
+foolish grows older."
+
+He got up and walked about the room, with hasty and irregular strides
+and a prodigious swinging of his ragged dressing-gown, which swept away
+as many cobwebs as it would take a week to reproduce. After a few turns,
+as if to change the subject, the Doctor asked the schoolmaster if he had
+any taste for pictures, and drew his attention to the portrait which
+has been already mentioned,--the figure in antique sordid garb, with a
+halter round his neck, and the expression in his face which the Doctor
+and the two children had interpreted so differently. Colcord, who
+probably knew nothing about pictures, looked at it at first merely from
+the gentle and cool complaisance of his character; but becoming absorbed
+in the contemplation, stood long without speaking; until the Doctor,
+looking in his face, perceived his eyes were streaming with tears.
+
+"What are you crying about?" said he, gruffly.
+
+"I don't know," said the schoolmaster quietly. "But there is something
+in this picture that affects me inexpressibly; so that, not being a man
+passionate by nature, I have hardly ever been so moved as now!"
+
+"Very foolish," muttered the Doctor, resuming his strides about the
+room. "I am ashamed of a grown man that can cry at a picture, and can't
+tell the reason why."
+
+After a few more turns he resumed his easy-chair and his tumbler,
+and, looking upward, beckoned to his pet spider, which came dangling
+downward, great parti-colored monster that he was, and swung about
+his master's head in hideous conference as it seemed; a sight that so
+distressed the schoolmaster, or shocked his delicate taste, that he
+went out, and called the two children to take a walk with him, with
+the purpose of breathing air that was neither infected with spiders nor
+graves.
+
+After his departure, Doctor Grimshawe seemed even more disturbed than
+during his presence: again he strode about the study; then sat down with
+his hands on his knees, looking straight into the fire, as if it imaged
+the seething element of his inner man, where burned hot projects, smoke,
+heat, blackness, ashes, a smouldering of old thoughts, a blazing up
+of new; casting in the gold of his mind, as Aaron did that of the
+Israelites, and waiting to see what sort of a thing would come out of
+the furnace. The children coming in from their play, he spoke harshly to
+them, and eyed little Ned with a sort of savageness, as if he meant to
+eat him up, or do some other dreadful deed: and when little Elsie came
+with her usual frankness to his knee, he repelled her in such a way that
+she shook her little hand at him, saying, "Naughty Doctor Grim, what has
+come to you?"
+
+Through all that day, by some subtle means or other, the whole household
+knew that something was amiss; and nobody in it was comfortable. It was
+like a spell of weather; like the east wind; like an epidemic in the
+air, that would not let anything be comfortable or contented,--this
+pervading temper of the Doctor. Crusty Hannah knew it in the kitchen:
+even those who passed the house must have known it somehow or other, and
+have felt a chill, an irritation, an influence on the nerves, as they
+passed. The spiders knew it, and acted as they were wont to do in
+stormy weather. The schoolmaster, when he returned from his walk, seemed
+likewise to know it, and made himself secure and secret, keeping in his
+own room, except at dinner, when he ate his rice in silence, without
+looking towards the Doctor, and appeared before him no more till
+evening, when the grim Doctor summoned him into the study, after sending
+the two children to bed.
+
+"Sir," began the Doctor, "you have spoken of some old documents in your
+possession relating to the English descent of your ancestors. I have a
+curiosity to see these documents. Where are they?" [Endnote: 4.]
+
+"I have them about my person," said the schoolmaster; and he produced
+from his pocket a bundle of old yellow papers done up in a parchment
+cover, tied with a piece of white cord, and presented them to Doctor
+Grimshawe, who looked over them with interest. They seemed to consist of
+letters, genealogical lists, certified copies of entries in registers,
+things which must have been made out by somebody who knew more of
+business than this ethereal person in whose possession they now were.
+The Doctor looked at them with considerable attention, and at last did
+them hastily up in the bundle again, and returned them to the owner.
+
+"Have you any idea what is now the condition of the family to whom these
+papers refer?" asked he.
+
+"None whatever,--none for almost a hundred years," said the
+schoolmaster. "About that time ago, I have heard a vague story that one
+of my ancestors went to the old country and saw the place. But, you see,
+the change of name has effectually covered us from view; and I feel that
+our true name is that which my ancestor assumed when he was driven forth
+from the home of his fathers, and that I have nothing to do with any
+other. I have no views on the estate,--none whatever. I am not so
+foolish and dreamy."
+
+"Very right," said the Doctor. "Nothing is more foolish than to follow
+up such a pursuit as this, against all the vested interests of two
+hundred years, which of themselves have built up an impenetrably strong
+allegation against you. They harden into stone, in England, these years,
+and become indestructible, instead of melting away as they do in this
+happy country."
+
+"It is not a matter of interest with me," replied the schoolmaster.
+
+"Very right,--very right!" repeated the grim Doctor.
+
+But something was evidently amiss with him this evening. It was
+impossible to feel easy and comfortable in contact with him: if you
+looked in his face, there was the red, lurid glare of his eyes; meeting
+you fiercely and craftily as ever: sometimes he bit his lip and frowned
+in an awful manner. Once, he burst out into an awful fit of swearing,
+for no good reason, or any reason whatever that he explained, or that
+anybody could tell. Again, for no more suitable reason, he uplifted his
+stalwart arm, and smote a heavy blow with his fist upon the oak table,
+making the tumbler and black bottle leap up, and damaging, one would
+think, his own knuckles. Then he rose up, and resumed his strides about
+the room. He paused before the portrait before mentioned; then resumed
+his heavy, quick, irregular tread, swearing under his breath; and
+you would imagine, from what you heard, that all his thoughts and the
+movement of his mind were a blasphemy. Then again--but this was only
+once--he heaved a deep, ponderous sigh, that seemed to come up in spite
+of him, out of his depths, an exhalation of deep suffering, as if some
+convulsion had given it a passage to upper air, instead of its being
+hidden, as it generally was, by accumulated rubbish of later time heaped
+above it.
+
+This latter sound appealed to something within the simple schoolmaster,
+who had been witnessing the demeanor of the Doctor, like a being
+looking from another sphere into the trouble of the mortal one; a being
+incapable of passion, observing the mute, hard struggle of one in its
+grasp.
+
+"Friend," said he at length, "thou hast something on thy mind."
+
+"Aye," said the grim Doctor, coming to a stand before his chair. "You
+see that? Can you see as well what it is?"
+
+"Some stir and writhe of something in the past that troubles you, as if
+you had kept a snake for many years in your bosom, and stupefied it
+with brandy, and now it awakes again, and troubles you with bites and
+stings."
+
+"What sort of a man do you think me?" asked the Doctor.
+
+"I cannot tell," said the schoolmaster. "The sympathies of my nature are
+not those that should give me knowledge of such men."
+
+"Am I, think you," continued the grim Doctor, "a man capable of great
+crime?"
+
+"A great one, if any," said Colcord; "a great good, likewise, it might
+be."
+
+"What would I be likely to do," asked Doctor Grim, "supposing I had
+a darling purpose, to the accomplishment of which I had given my
+soul,--yes, my soul,--my success in life, my days and nights of thought,
+my years of time, dwelling upon it, pledging myself to it, until at
+last I had grown to love the burden of it, and not to regret my own
+degradation? I, a man of strongest will. What would I do, if this were
+to be resisted?"
+
+"I do not conceive of the force of will shaping out my ways," said the
+schoolmaster. "I walk gently along and take the path that opens before
+me."
+
+"Ha! ha! ha!" shouted the grim Doctor, with one of his portentous
+laughs. "So do we all, in spite of ourselves; and sometimes the path
+comes to a sudden ending!" And he resumed his drinking.
+
+The schoolmaster looked at him with wonder, and a kind of shuddering, at
+something so unlike himself; but probably he very imperfectly estimated
+the forces that were at work within this strange being, and how
+dangerous they made him. He imputed it, a great deal, to the brandy,
+which he had kept drinking in such inordinate quantities; whereas it is
+probable that this had a soothing, emollient effect, as far as it went,
+on the Doctor's emotions; a sort of like to like, that he instinctively
+felt to be a remedy, But in truth it was difficult to see these two
+human creatures together, without feeling their incompatibility; without
+having a sense that one must be hostile to the other. The schoolmaster,
+through his fine instincts, doubtless had a sense of this, and sat
+gazing at the lurid, wrathful figure of the Doctor, in a sort of trance
+and fascination: not able to stir; bewildered by the sight of the great
+spider and other surroundings; and this strange, uncouth fiend, who had
+always been abhorrent to him,--he had a kind of curiosity in it, waited
+to see what would come of it, but felt it to be an unnatural state to
+him. And again the grim Doctor came and stood before him, prepared to
+make another of those strange utterances with which he had already so
+perplexed him.
+
+That night--that midnight--it was rumored through the town that one
+of the inhabitants, going home late along the street that led by the
+graveyard, saw the grim Doctor standing by the open window of the study
+behind the elm tree, in his old dressing-gown, chill as was the night,
+and flinging his arms abroad wildly into the darkness, and muttering
+like the growling of a tempest, with occasional vociferations that grew
+even shrill with passion. The listener, though affrighted, could not
+resist an impulse to pause, and attempt overhearing something that might
+let him into the secret counsels of this strange wild man, whom the town
+held in such awe and antipathy; to learn, perhaps, what was the great
+spider, and whether he were summoning the dead out of their graves.
+However, he could make nothing out of what he overheard, except it were
+fragmentary curses, of a dreadful character, which the Doctor brought up
+with might and main out of the depths of his soul, and flung them forth,
+burning hot, aimed at what, and why, and to what practical end, it
+was impossible to say; but as necessarily as a volcano, in a state of
+eruption, sends forth boiling lava, sparkling and scintillating stones,
+and a sulphurous atmosphere, indicative of its inward state. [Endnote:
+5.]
+
+Dreading lest some one of these ponderous anathemas should alight,
+reason or none, on his own head, the man crept away, and whispered the
+thing to his cronies, from whom it was communicated to the townspeople
+at large, and so became one of many stories circulating with reference
+to our grim hero, which, if not true to the fact, had undoubtedly
+a degree of appositeness to his character, of which they were the
+legitimate flowers and symbols. If the anathemas took no other effect,
+they seemed to have produced a very remarkable one on the unfortunate
+elm tree, through the naked branches of which the Doctor discharged this
+fiendish shot. For, the next spring, when April came, no tender leaves
+budded forth, no life awakened there; and never again, on that old elm,
+widely as its roots were imbedded among the dead of many years, was
+there rustling bough in the summer time, or the elm's early golden
+boughs in September; and after waiting till another spring to give it
+a fair chance of reviving, it was cut down and made into coffins, and
+burnt on the sexton's hearth. The general opinion was that the grim
+Doctor's awful profanity had blasted that tree, fostered, as it had
+been, on grave-mould of Puritans. In Lancashire they tell of a similar
+anathema. It had a very frightful effect, it must be owned, this idea of
+a man cherishing emotions in his breast of so horrible a nature that
+he could neither tell them to any human being, nor keep them in their
+plenitude and intensity within the breast where they had their germ,
+and so was forced to fling them forth upon the night, to pollute and put
+fear into the atmosphere, and that people should breathe-in somewhat
+of horror from an unknown source, and be affected with nightmare, and
+dreams in which they were startled at their own wickedness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+At the breakfast-table the next morning, however, appeared Doctor
+Grimshawe, wearing very much the same aspect of an uncombed, unshorn,
+unbrushed, odd sort of a pagan as at other times, and making no
+difference in his breakfast, except that he poured a pretty large dose
+of brandy into his cup of tea; a thing, however, by no means unexampled
+or very unusual in his history. There were also the two children,
+fresher than the morning itself, rosy creatures, with newly scrubbed
+cheeks, made over again for the new day, though the old one had left no
+dust upon them;[Endnote: 1] laughing with one another, flinging their
+little jokes about the table, and expecting that the Doctor might, as
+was often his wont, set some ponderous old English joke trundling round
+among the breakfast cups; eating the corn-cakes which crusty Hannah,
+with the aboriginal part of her, had a knack of making in a peculiar and
+exquisite fashion. But there was an empty chair at table; one cup, one
+little jug of milk, and another of pure water, with no guest to partake
+of them.
+
+"Where is the schoolmaster?" said Ned, pausing as he was going to take
+his seat.
+
+"Yes, Doctor Grim?" said little Elsie.
+
+"He has overslept himself for once," quoth Doctor Grim gruffly; "a
+strange thing, too, for a man whose victuals and drink are so light as
+the schoolmaster's. The fiend take me if I thought he had mortal mould
+enough in him ever to go to sleep at all; though he is but a kind of
+dream-stuff in his widest-awake state. Hannah, you bronze jade, call the
+schoolmaster to come to breakfast."
+
+Hannah departed on her errand, and was heard knocking at the door of
+the schoolmaster's chamber several times, till the Doctor shouted to
+her wrathfully to cease her clatter and open the door at once, which she
+appeared to do, and speedily came back.
+
+"He no there, massa. Schoolmaster melted away!"
+
+"Vanished like a bubble!" quoth the Doctor.
+
+"The great spider caught him like a fly," quoth crusty Hannah, chuckling
+with a sense of mischief that seemed very pleasant to her strange
+combination.
+
+"He has taken a morning walk," said little Ned; "don't you think so,
+Doctor Grim?"
+
+"Yes," said the grim Doctor. "Go on with your breakfast, little monkey;
+the walk may be a long one, or he is so slight a weight that the wind
+may blow him overboard."
+
+A very long walk it proved; or it might be that some wind, whether evil
+or good, had blown him, as the Doctor suggested, into parts unknown;
+for, from that time forth, the Yankee schoolmaster returned no more. It
+was a singular disappearance.
+
+The bed did not appear to have been slept in; there was a bundle, in a
+clean handkerchief, containing two shirts, two pocket handkerchiefs, two
+pairs of cotton socks, a Testament, and that was all. Had he intended to
+go away, why did he not take this little luggage in his hand, being all
+he had, and of a kind not easily dispensed with? The Doctor made small
+question about it, however; he had seemed surprised, at first, yet gave
+certainly no energetic token of it; and when Ned, who began to have
+notions of things, proposed to advertise him in the newspapers, or send
+the town crier round, the Doctor ridiculed the idea unmercifully.
+
+"Lost, a lank Yankee schoolmaster," quoth he, uplifting his voice after
+the manner of the town crier; "supposed to have been blown out of Doctor
+Grim's window, or perhaps have ridden off astride of a humble-bee."
+
+"It is not pretty to laugh in that way, Doctor Grim," said little Elsie,
+looking into his face, with a grave shake of her head.
+
+"And why not, you saucy little witch?" said the Doctor.
+
+"It is not the way to laugh, Doctor Grim," persisted the child, but
+either could not or would not assign any reason for her disapprobation,
+although what she said appeared to produce a noticeable effect on Doctor
+Grimshawe, who lapsed into a rough, harsh manner, that seemed to satisfy
+Elsie better. Crusty Hannah, meanwhile, seemed to dance about the house
+with a certain singular alacrity, a wonderful friskiness, indeed, as
+if the diabolical result of the mixture in her nature was particularly
+pleased with something; so she went, with queer gesticulations,
+crossings, contortions, friskings, evidently in a very mirthful state;
+until, being asked by her master what was the matter, she replied,
+"Massa, me know what became of the schoolmaster. Great spider catch in
+his web and eat him!"
+
+Whether that was the mode of his disappearance, or some other,
+certainly the schoolmaster was gone; and the children were left in great
+bewilderment at the sudden vacancy in his place. They had not contracted
+a very yearning affection for him, and yet his impression had been
+individual and real, and they felt that something was gone out of their
+lives, now that he was no longer there. Something strange in their
+circumstances made itself felt by them; they were more sensible of the
+grim Doctor's uncouthness, his strange, reprehensible habits, his dark,
+mysterious life,--in looking at these things, and the spiders, and the
+graveyard, and their insulation from the world, through the crystal
+medium of this stranger's character. In remembering him in connection
+with these things, a certain seemly beauty in him showed strikingly the
+unfitness, the sombre and tarnished color, the outr�ness, of the rest
+of their lot. Little Elsie perhaps felt the loss of him more than her
+playmate, although both had been interested by him. But now things
+returned pretty much to their old fashion; although, as is inevitably
+the case, whenever persons or things have been taken suddenly or
+unaccountably out of our sphere, without telling us whither and why
+they have disappeared, the children could not, for a long while, bring
+themselves to feel that he had really gone. Perhaps, in imitation of
+the custom in that old English house, of which the Doctor had told them,
+little Elsie insisted that his place should still be kept at the table;
+and so, whenever crusty Hannah neglected to do so, she herself would
+fetch a plate, and a little pitcher of water, and set it beside a vacant
+chair; and sometimes, so like a shadow had he been, this pale, slender
+creature, it almost might have been thought that he was sitting with
+them. But crusty Hannah shook her head, and grinned. "The spider know
+where he is. We never see him more!"
+
+His abode in the house had been of only two or three weeks; and in the
+natural course of things, had he come and gone in an ordinary way, his
+recollection would have grown dim and faded out in two or three weeks
+more; but the speculations, the expectations, the watchings for his
+reappearance, served to cut and grave the recollection of him into the
+children's hearts, so that it remained a life-long thing with them,--a
+sense that he was something that had been lost out of their life too
+soon, and that was bound, sooner or later, to reappear, and finish what
+business he had with them. Sometimes they prattled around the Doctor's
+chair about him, and they could perceive sometimes that he appeared
+to be listening, and would chime in with some remark; but he never
+expressed either wonder or regret; only telling Ned, once, that he had
+no reason to be sorry for his disappearance.
+
+"Why, Doctor Grim?" asked the boy.
+
+The Doctor mused, and smoked his pipe, as if he himself were thinking
+why, and at last he answered, "He was a dangerous fellow, my old boy."
+
+"Why?" said Ned again.
+
+"He would have taken the beef out of you," said the Doctor.
+
+I know not how long it was before any other visitor (except such as
+brought their shattered constitutions there in hopes that the Doctor
+would make the worn-out machinery as good as new) came to the lonely
+little household on the corner of the graveyard. The intercourse between
+themselves and the rest of the town remained as scanty as ever. Still,
+the grim, shaggy Doctor was seen setting doggedly forth, in all seasons
+and all weathers, at a certain hour of the day, with the two children,
+going for long walks on the sea-shore, or into the country, miles
+away, and coming back, hours afterwards, with plants and herbs that had
+perhaps virtue in them, or flowers that had certainly beauty; even, in
+their season, the fragrant magnolias, leaving a trail of fragrance after
+them, that grow only in spots, the seeds having been apparently
+dropped by some happy accident when those proper to the climate were
+distributed. Shells there were, also, in the baskets that they carried,
+minerals, rare things, that a magic touch seemed to have created out
+of the rude and common things that others find in a homely and ordinary
+region. The boy was growing tall, and had got out of the merely
+infantile age; agile he was, bright, but still with a remarkable
+thoughtfulness, or gravity, or I know not what to call it; but it was a
+shadow, no doubt, falling upon him from something sombre in his warp of
+life, which the impressibility of his age and nature so far acknowledged
+as to be a little pale and grave, without positive unhappiness; and when
+a playful moment came, as they often did to these two healthy children,
+it seemed all a mistake that you had ever thought either of them too
+grave for their age. But little Elsie was still the merrier. They were
+still children, although they quarrelled seldomer than of yore, and
+kissed seldomer, and had ceased altogether to complain of one another
+to the Doctor; perhaps the time when Nature saw these bickerings to be
+necessary to the growth of some of their faculties was nearly gone. When
+they did have a quarrel, the boy stood upon his dignity, and visited
+Elsie with a whole day, sometimes, of silent and stately displeasure,
+which she was accustomed to bear, sometimes with an assumption of cold
+indifference, sometimes with liveliness, mirth in double quantity,
+laughter almost as good as real,--little arts which showed themselves
+in her as naturally as the gift of tears and smiles. In fact, having
+no advantage of female intercourse, she could not well have learnt them
+unless from crusty Hannah, who was such an anomaly of a creature, with
+all her mixtures of race, that she struck you as having lost all sex as
+one result of it. Yet this little girl was truly feminine, and had all
+the manners and pre-eminently uncriticisable tenets proper to women at
+her early age.
+
+She had made respectable advancement in study; that is, she had taught
+herself to write, with even greater mechanical facility than Ned; and
+other knowledge had fallen upon her, as it were, by a reflected light
+from him; or, to use another simile, had been spattered upon her by
+the full stream which the Doctor poured into the vessel of the boy's
+intellect. So that she had even some knowledge of the rudiments of
+Latin, and geometry, and algebra; inaccurate enough, but yet with such a
+briskness that she was sometimes able to assist Ned in studies in which
+he was far more deeply grounded than herself. All this, however, was
+more by sympathy than by any natural taste for such things; being
+kindly, and sympathetic, and impressible, she took the color of what was
+nearest to her, and especially when it came from a beloved object, so
+that it was difficult to discover that it was not really one of her
+native tastes. The only thing, perhaps, altogether suited to her
+idiosyncrasy (because it was truly feminine, calculated for dainty
+fingers, and a nice little subtlety) was that kind of embroidery,
+twisting, needle-work, on textile fabric, which, as we have before said,
+she learnt from crusty Hannah, and which was emblematic perhaps of that
+creature's strange mixture of races.
+
+Elsie seemed not only to have caught this art in its original spirit,
+but to have improved upon it, creating strange, fanciful, and graceful
+devices, which grew beneath her finger as naturally as the variegated
+hues grow in a flower as it opens; so that the homeliest material
+assumed a grace and strangeness as she wove it, whether it were grass,
+twigs, shells, or what not. Never was anything seen, that so combined
+a wild, barbarian freedom with cultivated grace; and the grim Doctor
+himself, little open to the impressions of the beautiful, used to
+hold some of her productions in his hand, gazing at them with deep
+intentness, and at last, perhaps, breaking out into one of his deep
+roars of laughter; for it seemed to suggest thoughts to him that the
+children could not penetrate. This one feature of strangeness and wild
+faculty in the otherwise sweet and natural and homely character of Elsie
+had a singular effect; it was like a wreath of wild-flowers in her hair,
+like something that set her a little way apart from the rest of the
+world, and had an even more striking effect than if she were altogether
+strange.
+
+Thus were the little family going on; the Doctor, I regret to say,
+growing more morose, self-involved, and unattainable since the
+disappearance of the schoolmaster than before; more given up to his one
+plaything, the great spider; less frequently even than before coming
+out of the grim seclusion of his moodiness, to play with the children,
+though they would often be sensible of his fierce eyes fixed upon them,
+and start and feel incommoded by the intensity of his regard;--thus
+things were going on, when one day there was really again a visitor,
+and not a dilapidated patient, to the grim Doctor's study. Crusty
+Hannah brought up his name as Mr. Hammond, and the Doctor--filling his
+everlasting pipe, meanwhile, and ordering Hannah to give him a coal
+(perhaps this was the circumstance that made people say he had imps to
+bring him coals from Tophet)--ordered him to be shown up. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+A fresh-colored, rather young man [Endnote: 3] entered the study, a
+person of rather cold and ungraceful manners, yet genial-looking enough;
+at least, not repulsive. He was dressed in rather a rough, serviceable
+travelling-dress, and except for a nicely brushed hat, and unmistakably
+white linen, was rather careless in attire. You would have thought
+twice, perhaps, before deciding him to be a gentleman, but finally
+would have decided that he was; one great token being, that the singular
+aspect of the room into which he was ushered, the spider festoonery, and
+other strange accompaniments, the grim aspect of the Doctor himself,
+and the beauty and intelligence of his two companions, and even that
+horrific weaver, the great dangling spider,--neither one nor all of
+these called any expression of surprise to the stranger's face.
+
+"Your name is Hammond?" begins the Doctor, with his usual sparseness of
+ornamental courtesy. [Endnote: 4.]
+
+The stranger bowed.
+
+"An Englishman, I perceive," continued the Doctor, but nowise intimating
+that the fact of being a countryman was any recommendation in his eyes.
+
+"Yes, an Englishman," replied Hammond; "a briefless barrister, [Endnote:
+5] in fact, of Lincoln's Inn, who, having little or nothing to detain
+him at home, has come to spend a few idle months in seeing the new
+republic which has been made out of English substance."
+
+"And what," continued Doctor Grim, not a whit relaxing the repulsiveness
+of his manner, and scowling askance at the stranger,--"what may have
+drawn on me the good fortune of being compelled to make my time idle,
+because yours is so?"
+
+The stranger's cheek flushed a little; but he smiled to himself, as if
+saying that here was a grim, rude kind of humorist, who had lost the
+sense of his own peculiarity, and had no idea that he was rude at all.
+"I came to America, as I told you," said he, "chiefly because I was
+idle, and wanted to turn my enforced idleness to what profit I could, in
+the way of seeing men, manners, governments, and problems, which I hope
+to have no time to study by and by. But I also had an errand intrusted
+to me, and of a singular nature; and making inquiry in this little town
+(where my mission must be performed, if at all), I have been directed
+to you, by your townspeople, as to a person not unlikely to be able to
+assist me in it."
+
+"My townspeople, since you choose to call them so," answered the grim
+Doctor, "ought to know, by this time, that I am not the sort of man
+likely to assist any person, in any way."
+
+"Yet this is so singular an affair," said the stranger, still with mild
+courtesy, "that at least it may excite your curiosity. I have come here
+to find a grave."
+
+"To find a grave!" said Doctor Grim, giving way to a grim sense of
+humor, and relaxing just enough to let out a joke, the tameness of which
+was a little redeemed, to his taste, by its grimness. "I might help you
+there, to be sure, since it is all in the way of business. Like others
+of my profession, I have helped many people to find their graves, no
+doubt, and shall be happy to do the same for you. You have hit upon the
+one thing in which my services are ready."
+
+"I thank you, my dear sir," said the young stranger, having tact enough
+to laugh at Dr. Grim's joke, and thereby mollifying him a little; "but
+as far as I am personally concerned, I prefer to wait a while before
+making the discovery of that little spot in Mother Earth which I am
+destined to occupy. It is a grave which has been occupied as such for
+at least a century and a half which I am in quest of; and it is as an
+antiquarian, a genealogist, a person who has had dealings with the
+dead of long ago, not as a professional man engaged in adding to their
+number, that I ask your aid."
+
+"Ah, ahah!" said the Doctor, laying down his pipe, and looking earnestly
+at the stranger; not kindly nor genially, but rather with a lurid glance
+of suspicion out of those red eyes of his, but no longer with a desire
+to escape an intruder; rather as one who meant to clutch him. "Explain
+your meaning, sir, at once."
+
+"Then here it is," said Mr. Hammond. "There is an old English family,
+one of the members of which, very long ago, emigrated to this part of
+America, then a wilderness, and long afterwards a British colony. He was
+on ill terms with his family. There is reason to believe that documents,
+deeds, titular proofs, or some other thing valuable to the family,
+were buried in the grave of this emigrant; and there have been various
+attempts, within a century, to find this grave, and if possible some
+living descendant of the man, or both, under the idea that either of
+these cases might influence the disputed descent of the property, and
+enable the family to prove its claims to an ancient title. Now, rather
+as a matter of curiosity, than with any real hope of success,--and being
+slightly connected with the family,--I have taken what seems to myself a
+wild-goose chase; making it merely incidental, you well understand, not
+by any means the main purpose of my voyage to America."
+
+"What is the name of this family?" asked the Doctor, abruptly.
+
+"The man whose grave I seek," said the stranger, "lived and died, in
+this country, under the assumed name of Colcord."
+
+"How do you expect to succeed in this ridiculous quest?" asked the
+Doctor, "and what marks, signs, directions, have you to guide your
+search? And moreover, how have you come to any knowledge whatever about
+the matter, even that the emigrant ever assumed this name of Colcord,
+and that he was buried anywhere, and that his place of burial, after
+more than a century, is of the slightest importance?"
+
+"All this was ascertained by a messenger on a similar errand with my
+own, only undertaken nearly a century ago, and more in earnest than I
+can pretend to be," replied the Englishman. "At that period, however,
+there was probably a desire to find nothing that might take the
+hereditary possessions of the family out of the branch which still
+held them; and there is strong reason to suspect that the information
+acquired was purposely kept secret by the person in England into whose
+hands it came. The thing is differently situated now; the possessor of
+the estate is recently dead; and the discovery of an American heir would
+not be unacceptable to many. At all events, any knowledge gained here
+would throw light on a somewhat doubtful matter."
+
+"Where, as nearly as you can judge," said the Doctor, after a turn or
+two through the study, "was this man buried?"
+
+"He spent the last years of his life, certainly, in this town," said
+Hammond, "and may be found, if at all, among the dead of that period."
+
+"And they--their miserable dust, at least, which is all that still
+exists of them--were buried in the graveyard under these windows," said
+the Doctor. "What marks, I say,--for you might as well seek a vanished
+wave of the sea, as a grave that surged upward so long ago."
+
+"On the gravestone," said Hammond, "a slate one, there was rudely
+sculptured the impress of a foot. What it signifies I cannot conjecture,
+except it had some reference to a certain legend of a bloody footstep,
+which is currently told, and some token of which yet remains on one of
+the thresholds of the ancient mansion-house."
+
+Ned and Elsie had withdrawn themselves from the immediate vicinity of
+the fireside, and were playing at fox and geese in a corner near the
+window. But little Elsie, having very quick ears, and a faculty of
+attending to more affairs than one, now called out, "Doctor Grim, Ned
+and I know where that gravestone is."
+
+"Hush, Elsie," whispered Ned, earnestly.
+
+"Come forward here, both of you," said Doctor Grimshawe.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+The two children approached, and stood before the Doctor and his guest,
+the latter of whom had not hitherto taken particular notice of them. He
+now looked from one to the other, with the pleasant, genial expression
+of a person gifted with a natural liking for children, and the
+freemasonry requisite to bring him acquainted with them; and it lighted
+up his face with a pleasant surprise to see two such beautiful specimens
+of boyhood and girlhood in this dismal, spider-haunted house, and under
+the guardianship of such a savage lout as the grim Doctor. He seemed
+particularly struck by the intelligence and sensibility of Ned's face,
+and met his eyes with a glance that Ned long afterwards remembered; but
+yet he seemed quite as much interested by Elsie, and gazed at her face
+with a perplexed, inquiring glance.
+
+"These are fine children," said he. "May I ask if they are your
+own?--Pardon me if I ask amiss," added he, seeing a frown on the
+Doctor's brow.
+
+"Ask nothing about the brats," replied he grimly. "Thank Heaven, they
+are not my children; so your question is answered."
+
+"I again ask pardon," said Mr. Hammond. "I am fond of children; and the
+boy has a singularly fine countenance; not in the least English.
+The true American face, no doubt. As to this sweet little girl, she
+impresses me with a vague resemblance to some person I have seen. Hers I
+should deem an English face."
+
+"These children are not our topic," said the grim Doctor, with gruff
+impatience. "If they are to be so, our conversation is ended. Ned, what
+do you know of this gravestone with the bloody foot on it?"
+
+"It is not a bloody foot, Doctor Grim," said Ned, "and I am not sure
+that it is a foot at all; only Elsie and I chose to fancy so, because
+of a story that we used to play at. But we were children then. The
+gravestone lies on the ground, within a little bit of a walk of our
+door; but this snow has covered it all over; else we might go out and
+see it."
+
+"We will go out at any rate," said the Doctor, "and if the Englishman
+chooses to come to America, he must take our snows as he finds them.
+Take your shovel, Ned, and if necessary we will uncover the gravestone."
+
+They accordingly muffled themselves in their warmest, and plunged forth
+through a back door into Ned and Elsie's playground, as the grim Doctor
+was wont to call it. The snow, except in one spot close at hand, lay
+deep, like cold oblivion, over the surging graves, and piled itself in
+drifted heaps against every stone that raised itself above the level;
+it filled enviously the letters of the inscriptions, enveloping all the
+dead in one great winding-sheet, whiter and colder than those which they
+had individually worn. The dreary space was pathless; not a footstep
+had tracked through the heavy snow; for it must be warm affection indeed
+that could so melt this wintry impression as to penetrate through the
+snow and frozen earth, and establish any warm thrills with the dead
+beneath: daisies, grass, genial earth, these allow of the magnetism of
+such sentiments; but winter sends them shivering back to the baffled
+heart.
+
+"Well, Ned," said the Doctor, impatiently.
+
+Ned looked about him somewhat bewildered, and then pointed to a spot
+within not more than ten paces of the threshold which they had just
+crossed; and there appeared, not a gravestone, but a new grave (if
+any grave could be called new in that often-dug soil, made up of old
+mortality), an open hole, with the freshly-dug earth piled up beside it.
+A little snow (for there had been a gust or two since morning) appeared,
+as they peeped over the edge, to have fallen into it; but not enough to
+prevent a coffin from finding fit room and accommodation in it. But it
+was evident that the grave had been dug that very day.
+
+"The headstone, with the foot on it, was just here," said Ned, in much
+perplexity, "and, as far as I can judge, the old sunken grave exactly
+marked out the space of this new one." [Endnote: 1.]
+
+"It is a shame," said Elsie, much shocked at the indecorum, "that the
+new person should be thrust in here; for the old one was a friend of
+ours."
+
+"But what has become of the headstone!" exclaimed the young English
+stranger.
+
+During their perplexity, a person had approached the group, wading
+through the snow from the gateway giving entrance from the street; a
+gaunt figure, with stooping shoulders, over one of which was a spade and
+some other tool fit for delving in the earth; and in his face there was
+the sort of keen, humorous twinkle that grave-diggers somehow seem
+to get, as if the dolorous character of their business necessitated
+something unlike itself by an inevitable reaction.
+
+"Well, Doctor," said he, with a shrewd wink in his face, "are you
+looking for one of your patients? The man who is to be put to bed here
+was never caught in your spider's web."
+
+"No," said Doctor Grimshawe; "when my patients have done with me, I
+leave them to you and the old Nick, and never trouble myself about them
+more. What I want to know is, why you have taken upon you to steal a
+man's grave, after he has had immemorial possession of it. By what right
+have you dug up this bed, undoing the work of a predecessor of yours,
+who has long since slept in one of his own furrows?"
+
+"Why, Doctor," said the grave-digger, looking quietly into the cavernous
+pit which he had hollowed, "it is against common sense that a dead man
+should think to keep a grave to himself longer than till you can take up
+his substance in a shovel. It would be a strange thing enough, if,
+when living families are turned out of their homes twice or thrice in a
+generation, (as they are likely to be in our new government,) a dead
+man should think he must sleep in one spot till the day of judgment. No;
+turn about, I say, to these old fellows. As long as they can decently be
+called dead men, I let them lie; when they are nothing but dust, I just
+take leave to stir them on occasion. This is the way we do things under
+the republic, whatever your customs be in the old country."
+
+"Matters are very much the same in any old English churchyard," said
+the English stranger. "But, my good friend, I have come three thousand
+miles, partly to find this grave, and am a little disappointed to find
+my labor lost."
+
+"Ah! and you are the man my father was looking for," said the
+grave-digger, nodding his head at Mr. Hammond. "My father, who was a
+grave-digger afore me, died four and thirty years ago, when we were
+under the King; and says he, 'Ebenezer, do not you turn up a sod in this
+spot, till you have turned up every other in the ground.' And I have
+always obeyed him."
+
+"And what was the reason of such a singular prohibition?" asked Hammond.
+
+"My father knew," said the grave-digger, "and he told me the reason too;
+but since we are under the republic, we have given up remembering those
+old-world legends, as we used to. The newspapers keep us from talking in
+the chimney-corner; and so things go out of our minds. An old man, with
+his stories of what he has seen, and what his great-grandfather saw
+before him, is of little account since newspapers came up. Stop--I
+remember--no, I forget,--it was something about the grave holding a
+witness, who had been sought before and might be again."
+
+"And that is all you know about it?" said Hammond.
+
+"All,--every mite," said the old grave-digger. "But my father knew, and
+would have been glad to tell you the whole story. There was a great
+deal of wisdom and knowledge, about graves especially, buried out yonder
+where my old father was put away, before the Stamp Act was thought of.
+But it is no great matter, I suppose. People don't care about old graves
+in these times. They just live, and put the dead out of sight and out of
+mind."
+
+"Well; but what have you done with the headstone?" said the Doctor. "You
+can't have eaten it up."
+
+"No, no, Doctor," said the grave-digger, laughing; "it would crack
+better teeth than mine, old and crumbly as it is. And yet I meant to do
+something with it that is akin to eating; for my oven needs a new floor,
+and I thought to take this stone, which would stand the fire well. But
+here," continued he, scraping away the snow with his shovel, a task in
+which little Ned gave his assistance,--"here is the headstone, just as I
+have always seen it, and as my father saw it before me."
+
+The ancient memorial, being cleared of snow, proved to be a slab of
+freestone, with some rude traces of carving in bas-relief around the
+border, now much effaced, and an impression, which seemed to be as much
+like a human foot as anything else, sunk into the slab; but this device
+was wrought in a much more clumsy way than the ornamented border, and
+evidently by an unskilful hand. Beneath was an inscription, over which
+the hard, flat lichens had grown, and done their best to obliterate it,
+although the following words might be written [Endnote: 2] or guessed:--
+
+"Here lyeth the mortal part of Thomas Colcord, an upright man, of
+tender and devout soul, who departed this troublous life September ye
+nineteenth, 1667, aged 57 years and nine months. Happier in his death
+than in his lifetime. Let his bones be."
+
+The name, Colcord, was somewhat defaced; it was impossible, in the
+general disintegration of the stone, to tell whether wantonly, or with
+a purpose of altering and correcting some error in the spelling, or, as
+occurred to Hammond, to change the name entirely.
+
+"This is very unsatisfactory," said Hammond, "but very curious, too. But
+this certainly is the impress of what was meant for a human foot, and
+coincides strangely with the legend of the Bloody Footstep,--the mark of
+the foot that trod in the blessed King Charles's blood."
+
+"For that matter," said the grave-digger, "it comes into my mind that my
+father used to call it the stamp of Satan's foot, because he claimed
+the dead man for his own. It is plain to see that there was a deep deft
+between two of the toes."
+
+"There are two ways of telling that legend," remarked the Doctor. "But
+did you find nothing in the grave, Hewen?"
+
+"O, yes,--a bone or two,--as much as could be expected after above a
+hundred years," said the grave-digger. "I tossed them aside; and if you
+are curious about them, you will find them when the snow melts. That was
+all; and it would have been unreasonable in old Colcord--especially in
+these republican times--to have wanted to keep his grave any longer,
+when there was so little of him left."
+
+"I must drop the matter here, then," said Hammond, with a sigh. "Here,
+my friend, is a trifle for your trouble."
+
+"No trouble," said the grave-digger, "and in these republican times we
+can't take anything for nothing, because it won't do for a poor man to
+take off his hat and say thank you."
+
+Nevertheless, he did take the silver, and winked a sort of
+acknowledgment.
+
+The Doctor, with unwonted hospitality, invited the English stranger to
+dine in his house; and though there was no pretence of cordiality in
+the invitation, Mr. Hammond accepted it, being probably influenced by
+curiosity to make out some definite idea of the strange household in
+which he found himself. Doctor Grimshawe having taken it upon him to
+be host,--for, up to this time, the stranger stood upon his own
+responsibility, and, having voluntarily presented himself to the Doctor,
+had only himself to thank for any scant courtesy he might meet,--but
+now the grim Doctor became genial after his own fashion. At dinner he
+produced a bottle of port, which made the young Englishman almost
+fancy himself on the other side of the water; and he entered into a
+conversation, which I fancy was the chief object which the grim Doctor
+had in view in showing himself in so amiable a light, [Endnote: 3] for
+in the course of it the stranger was insensibly led to disclose many
+things, as it were of his own accord, relating to the part of England
+whence he came, and especially to the estate and family which have been
+before mentioned,--the present state of that family, together with other
+things that he seemed to himself to pour out naturally,--for, at last,
+he drew himself up, and attempted an excuse.
+
+"Your good wine," said he, "or the unexpected accident of meeting a
+countryman, has made me unusually talkative, and on subjects, I fear,
+which have not a particular interest for you."
+
+"I have not quite succeeded in shaking off my country, as you see,"
+said Doctor Grimshawe, "though I neither expect nor wish ever to see it
+again."
+
+There was something rather ungracious in the grim Doctor's response, and
+as they now adjourned to his study, and the Doctor betook himself to
+his pipe and tumbler, the young Englishman sought to increase his
+acquaintance with the two children, both of whom showed themselves
+graciously inclined towards him; more warmly so than they had been to
+the schoolmaster, as he was the only other guest whom they had ever met.
+
+"Would you like to see England, my little fellow?" he inquired of Ned.
+
+"Oh, very much! more than anything else in the world," replied the boy,
+his eyes gleaming and his cheeks flushing with the earnestness of
+his response; for, indeed, the question stirred up all the dreams and
+reveries which the child had cherished, far back into the dim regions
+of his memory. After what the Doctor had told him of his origin, he had
+never felt any home feeling here; it seemed to him that he was wandering
+Ned, whom the wind had blown from afar. Somehow or other, from many
+circumstances which he put together and seethed in his own childish
+imagination, it seemed to him that he was to go back to that far old
+country, and there wander among the green, ivy-grown, venerable scenes;
+the older he grew, the more his mind took depth, the stronger was this
+fancy in him; though even to Elsie he had scarcely breathed it.
+
+"So strong a desire," said the stranger, smiling at his earnestness,
+"will be sure to work out its own accomplishment. I shall meet you in
+England, my young friend, one day or another. And you, my little girl,
+are you as anxious to see England as your brother?"
+
+"Ned is not my brother," said little Elsie.
+
+The Doctor here interposed some remark on a different subject; for it
+was observable that he never liked to have the conversation turn on
+these children, their parentage, or relations to each other or himself.
+
+The children were sent to bed; and the young Englishman, finding the
+conversation lag, and his host becoming gruffer and less communicative
+than he thought quite courteous, retired. But before he went, however,
+he could not refrain from making a remark on the gigantic spider, which
+was swinging like a pendulum above the Doctor's head.
+
+"What a singular pet!" said he; for the nervous part of him had latterly
+been getting uppermost, so that it disturbed him; in fact, the
+spider above and the grim man below equally disturbed him. "Are you a
+naturalist? Have you noted his habits?"
+
+"Yes," said the Doctor, "I have learned from his web how to weave a
+plot, and how to catch my victim and devour him!"
+
+"Thank God," said the Englishman, as he issued forth into the cold gray
+night, "I have escaped the grim fellow's web, at all events. How strange
+a group,--those two sweet children, that grim old man!"
+
+As regards this matter of the ancient grave, it remains to be recorded,
+that, when the snow melted, little Ned and Elsie went to look at the
+spot, where, by this time, there was a little hillock with the brown
+sods laid duly upon it, which the coming spring would make green. By
+the side of it they saw, with more curiosity than repugnance, a few
+fragments of crumbly bones, which they plausibly conjectured to have
+appertained to some part of the framework of the ancient Colcord,
+wherewith he had walked through the troublous life of which his
+gravestone spoke. And little Elsie, whose eyes were very sharp, and her
+observant qualities of the quickest, found something which Ned at first
+pronounced to be only a bit of old iron, incrusted with earth; but Elsie
+persisted to knock off some of the earth that seemed to have incrusted
+it, and discovered a key. The children ran with their prize to the grim
+Doctor, who took it between his thumb and finger, turned it over and
+over, and then proceeded to rub it with a chemical substance which soon
+made it bright. It proved to be a silver key, of antique and curious
+workmanship.
+
+"Perhaps this is what Mr. Hammond was in search of," said Ned. "What a
+pity he is gone! Perhaps we can send it after him."
+
+"Nonsense," said the gruff Doctor.
+
+And attaching the key to a chain, which he took from a drawer, and which
+seemed to be gold, he hung it round Ned's neck.
+
+"When you find a lock for this key," said he, "open it, and consider
+yourself heir of whatever treasure is revealed there!"
+
+Ned continued that sad, fatal habit of growing out of childhood, as boys
+will, until he was now about ten years old, and little Elsie as much as
+six or seven. He looked healthy, but pale; something there was in the
+character and influences of his life that made him look as if he were
+growing up in a shadow, with less sunshine than he needed for a robust
+and exuberant development, though enough to make his intellectual growth
+tend towards a little luxuriance, in some directions. He was likely to
+turn out a fanciful, perhaps a poetic youth; young as he was, there had
+been already discoveries, on the grim Doctor's part, of certain blotted
+and clumsily scrawled scraps of paper, the chirography on which was
+arrayed in marshalled lines of unequal length, and each commanded by a
+capital letter and marching on from six to ten lame feet. Doctor Grim
+inspected these things curiously, and to say the truth most scornfully,
+before he took them to light his pipe withal; but they told him little
+as regarded this boy's internal state, being mere echoes, and very
+lugubrious ones, of poetic strains that were floating about in the
+atmosphere of that day, long before any now remembered bard had begun
+to sing. But there were the rudiments of a poetic and imaginative mind
+within the boy, if its subsequent culture should be such as the growth
+of that delicate flower requires; a brooding habit taking outward things
+into itself and imbuing them with its own essence until, after they had
+lain there awhile, they assumed a relation both to truth and to himself,
+and became mediums to affect other minds with the magnetism of his own.
+He lived far too much an inward life for healthfulness, at his age; the
+peculiarity of his situation, a child of mystery, with certain reaches
+and vistas that seemed to promise a bright solution of his mystery,
+keeping his imagination always awake and strong. That castle in the
+air,--so much more vivid than other castles, because it had perhaps
+a real substance of ancient, ivy-grown, hewn stone somewhere,--that
+visionary hall in England, with its surrounding woods and fine lawns,
+and the beckoning shadows at the ancient windows, and that fearful
+threshold, with the blood still glistening on it,--he dwelt and wandered
+so much there, that he had no real life in the sombre house on the
+corner of the graveyard; except that the loneliness of the latter, and
+the grim Doctor with his grotesque surroundings, and then the great ugly
+spider, and that odd, inhuman mixture of crusty Hannah, all served to
+remove him out of the influences of common life. Little Elsie was all
+that he had to keep life real, and substantial; and she, a child so much
+younger than he, was influenced by the same circumstances, and still
+more by himself, so that, as far as he could impart himself to her,
+he led her hand in hand through the same dream-scenery amid which he
+strayed himself. They knew not another child in town; the grim Doctor
+was their only friend. As for Ned, this seclusion had its customary and
+normal effect upon him; it had made him think ridiculously high of his
+own gifts, powers, attainments, and at the same time doubt whether they
+would pass with those of others; it made him despise all flesh, as if he
+were of a superior race, and yet have an idle and weak fear of coming in
+contact with them, from a dread of his incompetency to cope with them;
+so he at once depreciated and exalted, to an absurd degree, both himself
+and others.
+
+"Ned," said the Doctor to him one day, in his gruffest tone, "you are
+not turning out to be the boy I looked for and meant to make. I have
+given you sturdy English instruction, and solidly grounded you in
+matters that the poor superficial people and time merely skim over; I
+looked to see the rudiments of a man in you, by this time; and you begin
+to mope and pule as if your babyhood were coming back on you. You seem
+to think more than a boy of your years should; and yet it is not manly
+thought, nor ever will be so. What do you mean, boy, by making all my
+care of you come to nothing, in this way?"
+
+"I do my best, Doctor Grim," said Ned, with sullen dignity. "What you
+teach me, I learn. What more can I do?"
+
+"I'll tell you what, my fine fellow," quoth Doctor Grim, getting rude,
+as was his habit. "You disappoint me, and I'll not bear it. I want you
+to be a man; and I'll have you a man or nothing. If I had foreboded such
+a fellow as you turn out to be, I never would have taken you from the
+place where, as I once told you, I found you,--the almshouse!"
+
+"O, Doctor Grim, Doctor Grim!" cried little Elsie, in a tone of grief
+and bitter reproach.
+
+Ned had risen slowly, as the Doctor uttered those last words, turning
+as white as a sheet, and stood gazing at him, with large eyes, in which
+there was a calm upbraiding; a strange dignity was in his childish
+aspect, which was no longer childish, but seemed to have grown older all
+in a moment.
+
+"Sir," added the Doctor, incensed at the boy's aspect, "there is
+nonsense that ought to be whipt out of you."
+
+"You have said enough, sir," said the boy. "Would to God you had left
+me where you found me![Endnote: 4] It was not my fault that you took me
+from the alms-house. But it will be my fault if I ever eat another bit
+of your bread, or stay under your roof an hour longer."
+
+He was moving towards the door, but little Elsie sprung upon him and
+caught him round the neck, although he repelled her with severe dignity;
+and Doctor Grimshawe, after a look at the group in which a bitter sort
+of mirth and mischief struggled with a better and kindlier sentiment, at
+last flung his pipe into the chimney, hastily quaffed the remnant of
+a tumbler, and shuffled after Ned, kicking off his old slippers in his
+hurry. He caught the boy just by the door.
+
+"Ned, Ned, my boy, I'm sorry for what I said," cried he. "I am a
+guzzling old blockhead, and don't know how to treat a gentleman when he
+honors me with his company. It is not in my blood nor breeding to
+have such knowledge. Ned, you will make a man, and I lied if I said
+otherwise. Come, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
+
+The boy was easily touched, at these years, as a boy ought to be;
+and though he had not yet forgiven the grim Doctor, the tears, to his
+especial shame, gushed out of his eyes in a torrent, and his whole frame
+shook with sobs. The Doctor caught him in his arms, and hugged him to
+his old tobacco-fragrant dressing-gown, hugged him like a bear, as he
+was; so that poor Ned hardly knew whether he was embracing him with his
+love, or squeezing him to death in his wrath.
+
+"Ned," said he, "I'm not going to live a great while longer; I seem an
+eternal nuisance to you, I know; but it's not so, I'm mortal and I feel
+myself breaking up. Let us be friends while I live; for believe me, Ned,
+I've done as well by you as I knew, and care for nothing, love nothing,
+so much as you. Little Elsie here, yes. I love her too. But that's
+different. You are a boy, and will be a man; and a man whom I destine to
+do for me what it has been the object of my life to achieve. Let us
+be friends. We will--we must be friends; and when old Doctor Grim,
+worthless wretch that he is, sleeps in his grave, you shall not have the
+pang of having parted from him in unkindness. Forgive me, Ned; and not
+only that, but love me better than ever; for though I am a hasty old
+wretch, I am not altogether evil as regards you."
+
+I know not whether the Doctor would have said all this, if the day had
+not been pretty well advanced, and if his potations had not been many;
+but, at any rate, he spoke no more than he felt, and his emotions
+thrilled through the sensitive system of the boy, and quite melted him
+down. He forgave Doctor Grim, and, as he asked, loved him better than
+ever; and so did Elsie. Then it was so sweet, so good, to have had this
+one outgush of affection,--he, poor child, who had no memory of mother's
+kisses, or of being cared for out of tenderness, and whose heart had
+been hungry, all his life, for some such thing; and probably Doctor
+Grim, in his way, had the same kind of enjoyment of this passionate
+crisis; so that though, the next day, they all three looked at one
+another a little ashamed, yet it had some remote analogy to that
+delicious embarrassment of two lovers, at their first meeting after they
+know all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+It is very remarkable that Ned had so much good in him as we find there;
+in the first place, born as he seemed to be of a wild, vagrant stock, a
+seedling sown by the breezes, and falling among the rocks and sands; the
+growing up without a mother to cultivate his tenderness with kisses
+and the inestimable, inevitable love of love breaking out on all little
+occasions, without reference to merit or demerit, unfailing whether or
+no; mother's faith in excellences, the buds which were yet invisible
+to all other eyes, but to which her warm faith was the genial sunshine
+necessary to their growth; mother's generous interpretation of all that
+was doubtful in him, and which might turn out good or bad, according
+as should be believed of it; mother's pride in whatever the boy
+accomplished, and unfailing excuses, explanations, apologies, so
+satisfactory, for all his failures; mother's deep intuitive insight,
+which should see the permanent good beneath all the appearance of
+temporary evil, being wiser through her love than the wisest sage could
+be,--the dullest, homeliest mother than the wisest sage. The Creator,
+apparently, has set a little of his own infinite wisdom and love (which
+are one) in a mother's heart, so that no child, in the common course of
+things, should grow up without some heavenly instruction. Instead of
+all this, and the vast deal more that mothers do for children, there had
+been only the gruff, passionate Doctor, without sense of religion,
+with only a fitful tenderness, with years' length between the fits, so
+fiercely critical, so wholly unradiant of hope, misanthropic, savagely
+morbid. Yes; there was little Elsie too; it must have been that she was
+the boy's preserver, being childhood, sisterhood, womanhood, all that
+there had been for him of human life, and enough--he being naturally of
+such good stuff--to keep him good. He had lost much, but not all: he
+was not nearly what he might have been under better auspices; flaws and
+imperfections there were, in abundance, great uncultivated wastes and
+wildernesses in his moral nature, tangled wilds where there might have
+been stately, venerable religious groves; but there was no rank growth
+of evil. That unknown mother, that had no opportunity to nurse her boy,
+must have had gentle and noblest qualities to endow him with; a noble
+father, too, a long, unstained descent, one would have thought. Was this
+an almshouse child?
+
+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.
+
+What is the furniture? An antique chair,--one chair, no more. A table,
+many-footed, of dark wood; it holds writing-materials, a book, too, on
+its face, with the dust gathered on its back. There is, moreover, a sort
+of antique box, or coffer, of some dark wood, that seems to have been
+wrought or carved with skill, wondrous skill, of some period when the
+art of carving wainscot with arms and devices was much practised;
+so that on this coffer--some six feet long it is, and two or three
+broad--most richly wrought, you see faces in relief of knight and dame,
+lords, heraldic animals; some story, very likely, told, almost revelling
+in Gothic sculpture of wood, like what we have seen on the marble
+sarcophagus of the old Greeks. It has, too, a lock, elaborately
+ornamented and inlaid with silver.
+
+What else; only the spider's webs spinning strangely over everything;
+over that light which comes into the room through the stone; over
+everything. And now we see, in a corner, a strange great spider
+curiously variegated. The ugly, terrible, seemingly poisonous thing
+makes us shudder. [Endnote: 3.]
+
+What, else? There are pistols; they lie on the coffer! There is a
+curiously shaped Italian dagger, of the kind which in a groove has
+poison that makes its wound mortal. On the old mantel-piece, over the
+fireplace, there is a vial in which are kept certain poisons. It would
+seem as if some one had meditated suicide; or else that the foul fiend
+had put all sorts of implements of self-destruction in his way; so that,
+in some frenzied moment, he might kill himself.
+
+But the inmate! There he is; but the frenzied alarm in which we last saw
+him seems to have changed its character. No throb, now; no passion; no
+frenzy of fear or despair. He sits dull and motionless. See; his cheek
+is very pale; his hair long and dishevelled. His beard has grown, and
+curls round his face. He has on a sleeping-gown, a long robe as of one
+who abides within doors, and has nothing to do with outward elements;
+a pair of slippers. A dull, dreamy reverie seems to have possessed him.
+Hark! there is again a stealthy step on the floor, and the serving-man
+is here again. There is a peering, anxious curiosity in his face, as he
+struts towards him, a sort of enjoyment, one would say, in the way in
+which he looks at the strange case.
+
+"I am here, you know," he says, at length, after feasting his eyes for
+some time on the spectacle.
+
+"I hear you!" says the young man, in a dull, indifferent tone.
+
+"Will not your honor walk out to-day?" says the man. "It is long now
+since your honor has taken the air."
+
+"Very long," says the master, "but I will not go out to-day. What
+weather is it?"
+
+"Sunny, bright, a summer day," says the man. "But you would never know
+it in these damp walls. The last winter's chill is here yet. Had not
+your honor better go forth?"
+
+It might seem that there was a sort of sneer, deeply hidden under
+respect and obeisance, in the man's words and craftily respectful tone;
+deeply hidden, but conveying a more subtile power on that account.
+At all events, the master seemed aroused from his state of dull
+indifference, and writhed as with poignant anguish--an infused poison in
+his veins--as the man spoke.
+
+"Have you procured me that new drug I spoke of?" asked the master.
+
+"Here it is," said the man, putting a small package on the table.
+
+"Is it effectual?"
+
+"So said the apothecary," answered the man; "and I tried it on a dog. He
+sat quietly a quarter of an hour; then had a spasm or two, and was dead.
+But, your honor, the dead carcass swelled horribly."
+
+"Hush, villain! Have there--have there been inquiries for me,--mention
+of me?"
+
+"O, none, sir,--none, sir. Affairs go on bravely,--the new live. The
+world fills up. The gap is not vacant. There is no mention of you.
+Marry, at the alehouse I heard some idle topers talking of a murder
+that took place some few years since, and saying that Heaven's vengeance
+would come for it yet."
+
+"Silence, villain, there is no such thing," said the young man; and,
+with a laugh that seemed like scorn, he relapsed into his state of
+sullen indifference; during which the servant stole away, after looking
+at him some time, as if to take all possible note of his aspect. The man
+did not seem so much to enjoy it himself, as he did to do these things
+in a kind of formal and matter-of-course way, as if he were performing a
+set duty; as if he were a subordinate fiend, and were doing the duty
+of a superior one, without any individual malice of his own, though a
+general satisfaction in doing what would accrue to the agglomeration of
+deadly mischief. He stole away, and the master was left to himself.
+
+By and by, by what impulse or cause it is impossible to say, he started
+upon his feet in a sudden frenzy of rage and despair. It seemed as if a
+consciousness of some strange, wild miserable fate that had befallen him
+had come upon him all at once; how that he was a prisoner to a devilish
+influence, to some wizard might, that bound him hand and foot with
+spider's web. So he stamped; so he half shrieked, yet stopped himself in
+the midst, so that his cry was stifled and smothered. Then he snatched
+up the poisoned dagger and looked at it; the noose, and put it about his
+neck,--evil instrument of death,--but laid it down again. And then was
+a voice at the door: "Quietly, quietly you know, or they will hear you."
+And at that voice he sank into sullen indifference again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+A traveller with a knapsack on his shoulders comes out of the duskiness
+of vague, unchronicled times, throwing his shadow before him in the
+morning sunshine along a well-trodden, though solitary path.
+
+It was early summer, or perhaps latter spring, and the most genial
+weather that either spring or summer ever brought, possessing a
+character, indeed, as if both seasons had done their utmost to create an
+atmosphere and temperature most suitable for the enjoyment and exercise
+of life. To one accustomed to a climate where there is seldom a medium
+between heat too fierce and cold too deadly, it was a new development
+in the nature of weather. So genial it was, so full of all comfortable
+influences, and yet, somehow or other, void of the torrid characteristic
+that inevitably burns in our full sun-bursts. The traveller thought, in
+fact, that the sun was at less than his brightest glow; for though it
+was bright,--though the day seemed cloudless,--though it appeared to be
+the clear, transparent morning that precedes an unshadowed noon,--still
+there was a mild and softened character, not so perceptible when he
+directly sought to see it, but as if some veil were interposed between
+the earth and sun, absorbing all the passionate qualities out of the
+latter, and leaving only the kindly ones. Warmth was in abundance,
+and, yet, all through it, and strangely akin to it, there was a
+half-suspected coolness that gave the atmosphere its most thrilling
+and delicious charm. It was good for human life, as the traveller, felt
+throughout all his being; good, likewise, for vegetable life, as was
+seen in the depth and richness of verdure over the gently undulating
+landscape, and the luxuriance of foliage, wherever there was tree or
+shrub to put forth leaves.
+
+The path along which the traveller was passing deserved at least a word
+or two of description: it was a well-trodden footpath, running just here
+along the edge of a field of grass, and bordered on one side by a hedge
+which contained materials within itself for varied and minute researches
+in natural history; so richly luxuriant was it with its diverse
+vegetable life, such a green intricacy did it form, so impenetrable and
+so beautiful, and such a Paradise it was for the birds that built
+their nests there in a labyrinth of little boughs and twigs, unseen and
+inaccessible, while close beside the human race to which they attach
+themselves, that they must have felt themselves as safe as when they
+sung to Eve. Homely flowers likewise grew in it, and many creeping and
+twining plants, that were an original part of the hedge, had come of
+their own accord and dwelt here, beautifying and enriching the verdant
+fence by way of repayment for the shelter and support which it afforded
+them. At intervals, trees of vast trunk and mighty spread of foliage,
+whether elms or oaks, grew in the line of the hedge, and the bark of
+those gigantic, age-long patriarchs was not gray and naked, like the
+trees which the traveller had been accustomed to see, but verdant with
+moss, or in many cases richly enwreathed with a network of creeping
+plants, and oftenest the ivy of old growth, clambering upward, and
+making its own twisted stem almost of one substance with the supporting
+tree. On one venerable oak there was a plant of mystic leaf, which the
+traveller knew by instinct, and plucked a bough of it with a certain
+reverence for the sake of the Druids and Christmas kisses and of the
+pasty in which it was rooted from of old.
+
+The path in which he walked, rustic as it was and made merely by the
+feet that pressed it down, was one of the ancientest of ways; older than
+the oak that bore the mistletoe, older than the villages between which
+it passed, older perhaps than the common road which the traveller
+had crossed that morning; old as the times when people first debarred
+themselves from wandering freely and widely wherever a vagrant
+impulse led them. The footpath, therefore, still retains some of the
+characteristics of a woodland walk, taken at random, by a lover of
+nature not pressed for time nor restrained by artificial barriers; it
+sweeps and lingers along, and finds pretty little dells and nooks of
+delightful scenery, and picturesque glimpses of halls or cottages, in
+the same neighborhood where a highroad would disclose only a tiresome
+blank. They run into one another for miles and miles together, and
+traverse rigidly guarded parks and domains, not as a matter of favor,
+but as a right; so that the poorest man thus retains a kind of property
+and privilege in the oldest inheritance of the richest. The highroad
+sees only the outside; the footpath leads down into the heart of the
+country.
+
+A pleasant feature of the footpath was the stile, between two fields;
+no frail and temporary structure, but betokening the permanence of this
+rustic way; the ancient solidity of the stone steps, worn into cavities
+by the hobnailed shoes that had pressed upon them: here not only the
+climbing foot had passed for ages, but here had sat the maiden with her
+milk-pail, the rustic on his way afield or homeward; here had been
+lover meetings, cheerful chance chats, song as natural as bird note, a
+thousand pretty scenes of rustic manners.
+
+It was curious to see the traveller pause, to contemplate so simple a
+thing as this old stile of a few stone steps; antique as an old castle;
+simple and rustic as the gap in a rail fence; and while he sat on one
+of the steps, making himself pleasantly sensible of his whereabout, like
+one who should handle a dream and find it tangible and real, he heard a
+sound that bewitched him with still another dreamy delight. A bird rose
+out of the grassy field, and, still soaring aloft, made a cheery melody
+that was like a spire of audible flame,--rapturous music, as if the
+whole soul and substance of the winged creature had been distilled into
+this melody, as it vanished skyward.
+
+"The lark! the lark!" exclaimed the traveller, recognizing the note
+(though never heard before) as if his childhood had known it.
+
+A moment afterwards another bird was heard in the shadow of a
+neighboring wood, or some other inscrutable hiding-place, singing
+softly in a flute-like note, as if blown through an instrument of
+wood,--"Cuckoo! Cuckoo!"--only twice, and then a stillness.
+
+"How familiar these rustic sounds!" he exclaimed. "Surely I was born
+here!"
+
+The person who thus enjoyed these sounds, as if they were at once
+familiar and strange, was a young man, tall and rather slenderly built,
+and though we have called him young, there were the traces of thought,
+struggle, and even of experience in his marked brow and somewhat pale
+face; but the spirit within him was evidently still that of a youth,
+lithe and active, gazing out of his dark eyes and taking note of things
+about him, with an eager, centring interest, that seemed to be unusually
+awake at the present moment.
+
+It could be but a few years since he first called himself a man; but
+they must have been thickly studded with events, turbulent with action,
+spent amidst circumstances that called for resources of energy not often
+so early developed; and thus his youth might have been kept in abeyance
+until now, when in this simple rural scene he grew almost a boy again.
+As for his station in life, his coarse gray suit and the knapsack on
+his shoulders did not indicate a very high one; yet it was such as a
+gentleman might wear of a morning, or on a pedestrian ramble, and was
+worn in a way that made it seem of a better fashion than it really was,
+as it enabled him to find a rare enjoyment, as we have seen, in by-path,
+hedge-row, rustic stile, lark, and cuckoo, and even the familiar grass
+and clover blossom. It was as if he had long been shut in a sick-chamber
+or a prison; or, at least, within the iron cage of busy life, that had
+given him but few glimpses of natural things through its bars; or else
+this was another kind of nature than he had heretofore known.
+
+As he walked along (through a kind of dream, though he seemed so
+sensibly observant of trifling things around him,) he failed to notice
+that the path grew somewhat less distinctly marked, more infringed upon
+by grass, more shut in by shrubbery; he had deviated into a side track,
+and, in fact, a certain printed board nailed against a tree had
+escaped his notice, warning off intruders with inhospitable threats of
+prosecution. He began to suspect that he must have gone astray when
+the path led over plashy ground with a still fainter trail of preceding
+footsteps, and plunged into shrubbery, and seemed on the point of
+deserting him altogether, after having beguiled him thus far. The spot
+was an entanglement of boughs, and yet did not give one the impression
+of wildness; for it was the stranger's idea that everything in this long
+cultivated region had been touched and influenced by man's care, every
+oak, every bush, every sod,--that man knew them all, and that they knew
+him, and by that mutual knowledge had become far other than they were in
+the first freedom of growth, such as may be found in an American forest.
+Nay, the wildest denizens of this sylvan neighborhood were removed in
+the same degree from their primeval character; for hares sat on their
+hind legs to gaze at the approaching traveller, and hardly thought it
+worth their while to leap away among some ferns, as he drew near;
+two pheasants looked at him from a bough, a little inward among the
+shrubbery; and, to complete the wonder, he became aware of the antlers
+and brown muzzle of a deer protruding among the boughs, and though
+immediately there ensued a great rush and rustling of the herd, it
+seemed evidently to come from a certain lingering shyness, an instinct
+that had lost its purpose and object, and only mimicked a dread of man,
+whose neighborhood and familiarity had tamed the wild deer almost into a
+domestic creature. Remembering his experience of true woodland life,
+the traveller fancied that it might be possible to want freer air, less
+often used for human breath, than was to be found anywhere among these
+woods.
+
+But then the sweet, calm sense of safety that was here: the certainty
+that with the wild element that centuries ago had passed out of this
+scene had gone all the perils of wild men and savage beasts, dwarfs,
+witches, leaving nature, not effete, but only disarmed of those rougher,
+deadlier characteristics, that cruel rawness, which make primeval
+Nature the deadly enemy even of her own children. Here was consolation,
+doubtless; so we sit down on the stone step of the last stile that
+he had crossed, and listen to the footsteps of the traveller, and the
+distant rustle among the shrubbery, as he goes deeper and deeper into
+the seclusion, having by this time lost the deceitful track. No matter
+if he go astray; even were it after nightfall instead of noontime, a
+will-o'-the-wisp, or Puck himself, would not lead him into worse harm
+than to delude him into some mossy pool, the depths of which the truant
+schoolboys had known for ages. Nevertheless, some little time after
+his disappearance, there was the report of a shot that echoed sharp and
+loud, startling the pheasants from their boughs, and sending the hares
+and deer a-scampering in good earnest.
+
+We next find our friend, from whom we parted on the footpath, in a
+situation of which he then was but very imperfectly aware; for, indeed,
+he had been in a state of unconsciousness, lasting until it was now
+late towards the sunset of that same day. He was endeavoring to make out
+where he was, and how he came thither, or what had happened; or whether,
+indeed, anything had happened, unless to have fallen asleep, and to
+be still enveloped in the fragments of some vivid and almost tangible
+dream, the more confused because so vivid. His wits did not come so
+readily about him as usual; there may have been a slight delusion,
+which mingled itself with his sober perceptions, and by its leaven
+of extravagance made the whole substance of the scene untrue. Thus it
+happened that, as it were at the same instant, he fancied himself years
+back in life, thousands of miles away, in a gloomy cobwebbed room,
+looking out upon a graveyard, while yet, neither more nor less
+distinctly, he was conscious of being in a small chamber, panelled with
+oak, and furnished in an antique style. He was doubtful, too, whether or
+no there was a grim feudal figure, in a shabby dressing-gown and an
+old velvet cap, sitting in the dusk of the room, smoking a pipe that
+diffused a scent of tobacco,--quaffing a deep-hued liquor out of a
+tumbler,--looking upwards at a spider that hung above. "Was there, too,
+a child sitting in a little chair at his footstool?" In his earnestness
+to see this apparition more distinctly, he opened his eyes wider and
+stirred, and ceased to see it at all.
+
+But though that other dusty, squalid, cobwebbed scene quite vanished,
+and along with it the two figures, old and young, grim and childish, of
+whose portraits it had been the framework, still there were features
+in the old, oaken-panelled chamber that seemed to belong rather to his
+dream. The panels were ornamented, here and there, with antique carving,
+representing over and over again an identical device, being a bare arm,
+holding the torn-off head of some savage beast, which the stranger could
+not know by species, any more than Agassiz himself could have assigned
+its type or kindred; because it was that kind of natural history of
+which heraldry alone keeps the menagerie. But it was just as familiar
+to his recollection as that of the cat which he had fondled in his
+childhood.
+
+There was likewise a mantelpiece, heavily wrought of oak, quite
+black with smoke and age, in the centre of which, more prominent than
+elsewhere, was that same leopard's head that seemed to thrust itself
+everywhere into sight, as if typifying some great mystery which human
+nature would never be at rest till it had solved; and below, in a
+cavernous hollow, there was a smouldering fire of coals; for the genial
+day had suddenly grown chill, and a shower of rain spattered against
+the small window-panes, almost at the same time with the struggling
+sunshine. And over the mantelpiece, where the light of the declining
+day came strongest from the window, there was a larger and more highly
+relieved carving of this same device, and underneath it a legend, in Old
+English letters, which, though his eyes could not precisely trace it at
+that distance, he knew to be this:--
+
+                      "Hold hard the Head."
+
+Otherwise the aspect of the room bewildered him by not being known,
+since these details were so familiar; a narrow precinct it was, with
+one window full of old-fashioned, diamond-shaped panes of glass, a small
+desk table, standing on clawed feet; two or three high-backed chairs,
+on the top of each of which was carved that same crest of the fabulous
+brute's head, which the carver's fancy seemed to have clutched so
+strongly that he could not let it go; in another part of the room a very
+old engraving, rude and strong, representing some ruffled personage,
+which the stranger only tried to make out with a sort of idle curiosity,
+because it was strange he should dream so distinctly.
+
+Very soon it became intolerably irritating that these two dreams, both
+purposeless, should have mingled and entangled themselves in his mind.
+He made a nervous and petulant motion, intending to rouse himself fully;
+and immediately a sharp pang of physical pain took him by surprise, and
+made him groan aloud.
+
+Immediately there was an almost noiseless step on the floor; and a
+figure emerged from a deep niche, that looked as if it might once have
+been an oratory, in ancient times; and the figure, too, might have been
+supposed to possess the devout and sanctified character of such as knelt
+in the oratories of ancient times. It was an elderly man, tall, thin,
+and pale, and wearing a long, dark tunic, and in a peculiar fashion,
+which--like almost everything else about him--the stranger seemed to
+have a confused remembrance of; this venerable person had a benign
+and pitiful aspect, and approached the bedside with such good will and
+evident desire to do the sufferer good, that the latter felt soothed,
+at least, by his very presence. He lay, a moment, gazing up at the
+old man's face, without being able to exert himself to say a word, but
+sensible, as it were, of a mild, soft influence from him, cooling the
+fever which seemed to burn in his veins.
+
+"Do you suffer much pain?" asked the old man, gently.
+
+"None at all," said the stranger; but again a slight motion caused him
+to feel a burning twinge in his shoulder. "Yes; there was a throb of
+strange anguish. Why should I feel pain? Where am I?"
+
+"In safety, and with those who desire to be your friends," said the old
+man. "You have met with an accident; but do not inquire about it now.
+Quiet is what you need."
+
+Still the traveller gazed at him; and the old man's figure seemed to
+enter into his dream, or delirium, whichever it might be, as if his
+peaceful presence were but a shadow, so quaint was his address, so
+unlike real life, in that dark robe, with a velvet skullcap on his head,
+beneath which his hair made a silvery border; and looking more closely,
+the stranger saw embroidered on the breast of the tunic that same
+device, the arm and the leopard's head, which was visible in the carving
+of the room. Yes; this must still be a dream, which, under the unknown
+laws which govern such psychical states, had brought out thus vividly
+figures, devices, words, forgotten since his boyish days. Though of an
+imaginative tendency, the stranger was nevertheless strongly tenacious
+of the actual, and had a natural horror at the idea of being seriously
+at odds, in beliefs, perceptions, conclusions, with the real world about
+him; so that a tremor ran through him, as if he felt the substance of
+the world shimmering before his eyes like a mere vaporous consistency.
+
+"Are you real?" said he to the antique presence; "or a spirit? or a
+fantasy?"
+
+The old man laid his thin, cool palm on the stranger's burning forehead,
+and smiled benignantly, keeping it there an instant.
+
+"If flesh and blood are real, I am so," said he; "a spirit, too, I may
+claim to be, made thin by fantasy. Again, do not perplex yourself with
+such things. To-morrow you may find denser substance in me. Drink this
+composing draught, and close your eyes to those things that disturb
+you."
+
+"Your features, too, and your voice," said the stranger, in a resigned
+tone, as if he were giving up a riddle, the solution of which he could
+not find, "have an image and echo somewhere in my memory. It is all an
+entanglement. I will drink, and shut my eyes."
+
+He drank from a little old-fashioned silver cup, which his venerable
+guardian presented to his lips; but in so doing he was still perplexed
+and tremulously disturbed with seeing that same weary old device, the
+leopard's head, engraved on the side; and shut his eyes to escape it,
+for it irritated a certain portion of his brain with vague, fanciful,
+elusive ideas. So he sighed and spoke no more. The medicine, whatever
+it might be, had the merit, rare in doctor's stuff, of being pleasant
+to take, assuasive of thirst, and imbued with a hardly perceptible
+fragrance, that was so ethereal that it also seemed to enter into his
+dream and modify it. He kept his eyes closed, and fell into a misty
+state, in which he wondered whether this could be the panacea or
+medicament which old Doctor Grimshawe used to distil from cobwebs, and
+of which the fragrance seemed to breathe through all the waste of years
+since then. He wondered, too, who was this benign, saint-like old man,
+and where, in what former state of being, he could have known him; to
+have him thus, as no strange thing, and yet so strange, be attending at
+his bedside, with all this ancient garniture. But it was best to dismiss
+all things, he being so weak; to resign himself; all this had happened
+before, and had passed away, prosperously or unprosperously; it would
+pass away in this case, likewise; and in the morning whatever might be
+delusive would have disappeared.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+The patient [Endnote: 1] had a favorable night, and awoke with a much
+clearer head, though still considerably feverish and in a state of great
+exhaustion from loss of blood, which kept down the fever. The events
+of the preceding day shimmered as it were and shifted illusively in his
+recollection; nor could he yet account for the situation in which he
+found himself, the antique chamber, the old man of medi�val garb, nor
+even for the wound which seemed to have been the occasion of bringing
+him thither. One moment, so far as he remembered, he had been straying
+along a solitary footpath, through rich shrubbery, with the antlered
+deer peeping at him, listening to the lark and the cuckoo; the next, he
+lay helpless in this oak-panelled chamber, surrounded with objects that
+appealed to some fantastic shadow of recollection, which could have had
+no reality. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+To say the truth, the traveller perhaps wilfully kept hold of this
+strange illusiveness, and kept his thoughts from too harshly analyzing
+his situation, and solving the riddle in which he found himself
+involved. In his present weakness, his mind sympathizing with the
+sinking down of his physical powers, it was delightful to let all go;
+to relinquish all control, and let himself drift vaguely into whatever
+region of improbabilities there exists apart from the dull, common plane
+of life. Weak, stricken down, given over to influences which had taken
+possession of him during an interval of insensibility, he was no longer
+responsible; let these delusions, if they were such, linger as long as
+they would, and depart of their own accord at last. He, meanwhile, would
+willingly accept the idea that some spell had transported him out of an
+epoch in which he had led a brief, troubled existence of battle, mental
+strife, success, failure, all equally feverish and unsatisfactory, into
+some past century, where the business was to rest,--to drag on dreamy
+days, looking at things through half-shut eyes; into a limbo where
+things were put away, shows of what had once been, now somehow fainted,
+and still maintaining a sort of half-existence, a serious mockery; a
+state likely enough to exist just a little apart from the actual world,
+if we only know how to find our way into it. Scenes and events that had
+once stained themselves, in deep colors, on the curtain that Time hangs
+around us, to shut us in from eternity, cannot be quite effaced by the
+succeeding phantasmagoria, and sometimes, by a palimpsest, show more
+strongly than they. [Endnote: 3.]
+
+In the course of the morning, however, he was a little too feelingly
+made sensible of realities by the visit of a surgeon, who proceeded
+to examine the wound in his shoulder, removing the bandages which he
+himself seemed to have put upon this mysterious hurt. The traveller
+closed his eyes, and submitted to the manipulations of the professional
+person, painful as they were, assisted by the gentle touch of the old
+palmer; and there was something in the way in which he resigned himself
+that met the approbation of the surgeon, in spite of a little fever, and
+slight delirium too, to judge by his eye.
+
+"A very quiet and well-behaved patient," said he to the palmer. "Unless
+I greatly mistake, he has been under the surgeon's hand for a similar
+hurt ere now. He has learned under good discipline how to take such a
+thing easily. Yes, yes; just here is a mark where a bullet went in some
+time ago,--three or four years since, when he could have been little
+more than a boy. A wild fellow this, I doubt."
+
+"It was an Indian bullet," said the patient, still fancying himself gone
+astray into the past, "shot at me in battle; 'twas three hundred years
+hereafter."
+
+"Ah! he has served in the East Indies," said the surgeon. "I thought
+this sun-burned cheek had taken its hue elsewhere than in England."
+
+The patient did not care to take the trouble which would have been
+involved in correcting the surgeon's surmise; so he let it pass, and
+patiently awaited the end of the examination, with only a moan or
+two, which seemed rather pleasing and desirable than otherwise to the
+surgeon's ear.
+
+"He has vitality enough for his needs," said he, nodding to the palmer.
+"These groans betoken a good degree of pain; though the young fellow is
+evidently a self-contained sort of nature, and does not let us know
+all he feels. It promises well, however; keep him in bed and quiet, and
+within a day or two we shall see."
+
+He wrote a recipe, or two or three, perhaps, (for in those days the
+medical fraternity had faith in their own art,) and took his leave.
+
+The white-bearded palmer withdrew into the half concealment of the
+oratory which we have already mentioned, and then, putting on a pair of
+spectacles, betook himself to the perusal of an old folio volume, the
+leaves of which he turned over so gently that not the slightest sound
+could possibly disturb the patient. All his manifestations were gentle
+and soft, but of a simplicity most unlike the feline softness which we
+are apt to associate with a noiseless tread and movement in the male
+sex. The sunshine came through the ivy and glimmered upon his great
+book, however, with an effect which a little disturbed the patient's
+nerves; besides, he desired to have a fuller view of his benign
+guardian.
+
+"Will you sit nearer the bedside?" said he. "I wish to look at you."
+
+Weakness, the relaxation of nerves, and the state of dependence on
+another's care--very long unfelt--had made him betray what we must call
+childishness; and it was perceptible in the low half-complaining tone in
+which he spoke, indicating a consciousness of kindness in the other, a
+little plaintiveness in himself; of which, the next instant, weak
+and wandering as he was, he was ashamed, and essayed to express it.
+[Endnote: 4.]
+
+"You must deem me very poor-spirited," said he, "not to bear this
+trifling hurt with a firmer mind. But perhaps it is not entirely that I
+am so weak, but I feel you to be so benign."
+
+"Be weak, and be the stronger for it," said the old man, with a grave
+smile. "It is not in the pride of our strength that we are best or
+wisest. To be made anew, we even must be again a little child, and
+consent to be enwrapt quietly in the arms of Providence, as a child in
+its mother's arms."
+
+"I never knew a mother's care," replied the traveller, in a low,
+regretful tone, being weak to the incoming of all soft feelings, in his
+present state. "Since my boyhood, I have lived among men,--a life of
+struggle and hard rivalry. It is good to find myself here in the long
+past, and in a sheltered harbor."
+
+And here he smiled, by way of showing to this old palmer that he saw
+through the slight infirmity of mind that impelled him to say such
+things as the above; that he was not its dupe, though he had not
+strength, just now, to resist its impulse. After this he dozed off
+softly, and felt through all his sleep some twinges of his wound,
+bringing him back, as it were, to the conscious surface of the great
+deep of slumber, into which he might otherwise have sunk. At all such
+brief intervals, half unclosing his eyes, (like a child, when the mother
+sits by its bed and he fears that she will steal away if he falls
+quite asleep, and leave him in the dark solitude,) he still beheld the
+white-bearded, kindly old man, of saintly aspect, sitting near him,
+and turning over the pages of his folio volume so softly that not the
+faintest rustle did it make; the picture at length got so fully into his
+idea, that he seemed to see it even through his closed eyelids. After
+a while, however, the slumberous tendency left him more entirely, and,
+without having been consciously awake, he found himself contemplating
+the old man, with wide-open eyes. The venerable personage seemed soon
+to feel his gaze, and, ceasing to look at the folio, he turned his eyes
+with quiet inquiry to meet those of the stranger. [Endnote: 5.]
+
+"What great volume is that?" asked the latter. [Endnote: 6.]
+
+"It is a book of English chronicles," said the old man, "mostly relating
+to the part of the island where you now are, and to times previous to
+the Stuarts."
+
+"Ah! it is to you, a contemporary, what reading the newspaper is to
+other men," said the stranger; then, with a smile of self-reproach, "I
+shall conquer this idle mood. I'm not so imbecile as you must think me.
+But there is something that strangely haunts me,--where, in what state
+of being, can I have seen your face before. There is nothing in it I
+distinctly remember; but some impression, some characteristic, some
+look, with which I have been long ago familiar haunts me and brings back
+all old scenes. Do you know me?"
+
+The old man smiled. "I knew, long ago, a bright and impressible boy,"
+said he.
+
+"And his name?" said the stranger.
+
+"It was Edward Redclyffe," said the old man.
+
+"Ah, I see who you are," said the traveller, not too earnestly, but with
+a soft, gratified feeling, as the riddle thus far solved itself. "You
+are my old kindly instructor. You are Colcord! That is it. I remember
+you disappeared. You shall tell me, when I am quite myself, what was
+that mystery,--and whether it is your real self, or only a part of my
+dream, and going to vanish when I quite awake. Now I shall sleep and
+dream more of it."
+
+One more waking interval he had that day, and again essayed to enter
+into conversation with the old man, who had thus strangely again become
+connected with his life, after having so long vanished from his path.
+
+"Where am I?" asked Edward Redclyffe.
+
+"In the home of misfortune," said Colcord.
+
+"Ah! then I have a right to be here!" said he. "I was born in such a
+home. Do you remember it?"
+
+"I know your story," said Colcord.
+
+"Yes; from Doctor Grim," said Edward. "People whispered he had made away
+with you. I never believed it; but finding you here in this strange way,
+and myself having been shot, perhaps to death, it seems not so strange.
+Pooh! I wander again, and ought to sleep a little more. And this is
+the home of misfortune, but not like the squalid place of rage, idiocy,
+imbecility, drunkenness, where I was born. How many times I have blushed
+to remember that native home! But not of late! I have struggled; I
+have fought; I have triumphed. The unknown boy has come to be no
+undistinguished man! His ancestry, should he ever reveal himself to
+them, need not blush for the poor foundling."
+
+"Hush!" said the quiet watcher. "Your fever burns you. Take this
+draught, and sleep a little longer." [Endnote: 7.]
+
+Another day or two found Edward Redclyffe almost a convalescent. The
+singular lack of impatience that characterized his present mood--the
+repose of spirit into which he had lapsed--had much to do with the
+favorable progress of his cure. After strife, anxiety, great mental
+exertion, and excitement of various kinds, which had harassed him
+ever since he grew to be a man, had come this opportunity of perfect
+rest;--this dream in the midst of which he lay, while its magic
+boundaries involved him, and kept far off the contact of actual life, so
+that its sounds and tumults seemed remote; its cares could not fret
+him; its ambitions, objects good or evil, were shut out from him; the
+electric wires that had connected him with the battery of life were
+broken for the time, and he did not feel the unquiet influence that kept
+everybody else in galvanic motion. So, under the benign influence of
+the old palmer, he lay in slumberous luxury, undisturbed save by some
+twinges of no intolerable pain; which, however, he almost was glad
+of, because it made him sensible that this deep luxury of quiet was
+essential to his cure, however idle it might seem. For the first time
+since he was a child, he resigned himself not to put a finger to the
+evolution of his fortune; he determined to accept all things that might
+happen, good or evil; he would not imagine an event beyond to-day, but
+would let one spontaneous and half-defined thought loiter after another,
+through his mind; listen to the spattering shower,--the puffs of
+shut-out wind; and look with half-shut eyes at the sunshine glimmering
+through the ivy-twigs, and illuminating those old devices on the wall;
+at the gathering twilight; at the dim lamp; at the creeping upward of
+another day, and with it the lark singing so far away that the thrill of
+its delicious song could not disturb him with an impulse to awake. Sweet
+as its carol was, he could almost have been content to miss the lark;
+sweet and clear, it was too like a fairy trumpet-call, summoning him to
+awake and struggle again with eager combatants for new victories, the
+best of which were not worth this deep repose.
+
+The old palmer did his best to prolong a mood so beneficial to the
+wounded young man. The surgeon also nodded approval, and attributed
+this happy state of the patient's mind, and all the physical advantages
+growing out of it, to his own consummate skill; nor, indeed, was he
+undeserving of credit, not often to be awarded to medical men, for
+having done nothing to impede the good which kind Nature was willing to
+bring about. She was doing the patient more good, indeed, than
+either the surgeon or the palmer could fully estimate, in taking
+this opportunity to recreate a mind that had too early known stirring
+impulse, and that had been worked to a degree beyond what its
+organization (in some respects singularly delicate) ought to have borne.
+Once in a long while the weary actors in the headlong drama of life must
+have such repose or else go mad or die. When the machinery of human life
+has once been stopped by sickness or other impediment, it often needs an
+impulse to set it going again, even after it is nearly wound up.
+
+But it could not last forever. The influx of new life into his being
+began to have a poignancy that would not let him lie so quietly, lapped
+in the past, in gone by centuries, and waited on by quiet Age, in the
+person of the old palmer; he began to feel again that he was young, and
+must live in the time when his lot was cast. He began to say to himself,
+that it was not well to be any longer passive, but that he must again
+take the troublesome burden of his own life on his own shoulders. He
+thought of this necessity, this duty, throughout one whole day, and
+determined that on the morrow he would make the first step towards
+terminating his inaction, which he now began to be half impatient of,
+at the same time that he clutched it still, for the sake of the
+deliciousness that it had had.
+
+"To-morrow, I hope to be clothed and in my right mind," said he to the
+old palmer, "and very soon I must thank you, with my whole heart, for
+your kind care, and go. It is a shame that I burden the hospitality of
+this house so long."
+
+"No shame whatever," replied the old man, "but, on the contrary, the
+fittest thing that could have chanced. You are dependent on no private
+benevolence, nor on the good offices of any man now living, or who has
+lived these last three hundred years. This ancient establishment is for
+the support of poverty, misfortune, and age, and, according to the word
+of the founder, it serves him:--he was indebted to the beneficiaries,
+not they to him, for, in return for his temporal bequests, he asked
+their prayers for his soul's welfare. He needed them, could they avail
+him; for this ponderous structure was built upon the founder's mortal
+transgressions, and even, I may say, out of the actual substance of
+them. Sir Edward Redclyffe was a fierce fighter in the Wars of the
+Roses, and amassed much wealth by spoil, rapine, confiscation, and all
+violent and evil ways that those disturbed times opened to him; and on
+his death-bed he founded this Hospital for twelve men, who should be
+able to prove kindred with his race, to dwell here with a stipend,
+and pray for him; and likewise provision for a sick stranger, until he
+should be able to go on his way again."
+
+"I shall pray for him willingly," said Edward, moved by the pity which
+awaits any softened state of our natures to steal into our hearts.
+"Though no Catholic, I will pray for his soul. And that is his crest
+which you wear embroidered on his garment?"
+
+"It is," said the old man. "You will see it carved, painted,
+embroidered, everywhere about the establishment; but let us give it
+the better and more reasonable interpretation;--not that he sought to
+proclaim his own pride of ancestry and race, but to acknowledge his
+sins the more manifestly, by stamping the emblem of his race on this
+structure of his penitence."
+
+"And are you," said Redclyffe, impressed anew by the quiet dignity of
+the venerable speaker, "in authority in the establishment?"
+
+"A simple beneficiary of the charity," said the palmer; "one of the
+twelve poor brethren and kinsmen of the founder. Slighter proofs of
+kindred are now of necessity received, since, in the natural course of
+things, the race has long been growing scarce. But I had it in my power
+to make out a sufficient claim."
+
+"Singular," exclaimed Redclyffe, "you being an American!" [Endnote: 8.]
+
+"You remember me, then," said the old man, quietly.
+
+"From the first," said Edward, "although your image took the fantastic
+aspect of the bewilderment in which I then was; and now that I am in
+clearer state of mind, it seems yet stranger that you should be here. We
+two children thought you translated, and people, I remember, whispered
+dark hints about your fate."
+
+"There was nothing wonderful in my disappearance," said the old man.
+"There were causes, an impulse, an intuition, that made me feel, one
+particular night, that I might meet harm, whether from myself or others,
+by remaining in a place with which I had the most casual connection. But
+I never, so long as I remained in America, quite lost sight of you; and
+Doctor Grimshawe, before his death, had knowledge of where I was, and
+gave me in charge a duty which I faithfully endeavored to perform.
+Singular man that he was! much evil, much good in him. Both, it may be,
+will live after him!"
+
+Redclyffe, when the conversation had reached this point, felt a vast
+desire to reveal to the old man all that the grim Doctor had instilled
+into his childish mind, all that he himself, in subsequent years,
+had wrought more definitely out of it, all his accompanying doubts
+respecting the secret of his birth and some supposed claims which
+he might assert, and which, only half acknowledging the purpose, had
+availed to bring him, a republican, hither as to an ancestral centre. He
+even fancied that the benign old man seemed to expect and await such a
+confidence; but that very idea contributed to make it impossible for him
+to speak.
+
+"Another time," he said to himself. "Perhaps never. It is a fantastic
+folly; and with what the workhouse foundling has since achieved, he
+would give up too many hopes to take the representation of a mouldy old
+English family."
+
+"I find my head still very weak," said he, by way of cutting short the
+conversation. "I must try to sleep again."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+The next day he called for his clothes, and, with the assistance of
+the pensioner, managed to be dressed, and awaited the arrival of the
+surgeon, sitting in a great easy-chair, with not much except his pale,
+thin cheeks, dark, thoughtful eyes, and his arm in a sling, to show the
+pain and danger through which he had passed. Soon after the departure
+of the professional gentleman, a step somewhat louder than ordinary was
+heard on the staircase, and in the corridor leading to the sick-chamber;
+the step (as Redclyffe's perceptions, nicely attempered by his weakness,
+assured him) of a man in perfect and robust health, and of station and
+authority. A moment afterwards, a gentleman of middle age, or a little
+beyond, appeared in the doorway, in a dress that seemed clerical,
+yet not very decidedly so; he had a frank, kindly, yet authoritative
+bearing, and a face that might almost be said to beam with geniality,
+when, as now, the benevolence of his nature was aroused and ready to
+express itself.
+
+"My friend," said he, "Doctor Portingale tells me you are much better;
+and I am most happy to hear it."
+
+There was something brusque and unceremonious in his manner, that a
+little jarred against Redclyffe's sensitiveness, which had become
+morbid in sympathy with his weakness. He felt that the new-comer had
+not probably the right idea as to his own position in life; he was
+addressing him most kindly, indeed, but as an inferior.
+
+"I am much better, sir," he replied, gravely, and with reserve; "so
+nearly well, that I shall very soon be able to bid farewell to my kind
+nurse here, and to this ancient establishment, to which I owe so much."
+
+The visitor seemed struck by Mr. Redclyffe's tone, and finely modulated
+voice, and glanced at his face, and then over his dress and figure, as
+if to gather from them some reliable data as to his station.
+
+"I am the Warden of this Hospital," said he, with not less benignity
+than heretofore, and greater courtesy; "and, in that capacity, must
+consider you under my care,--as my guest, in fact,--although, owing to
+my casual absence, one of the brethren of the house has been the
+active instrument in attending you. I am most happy to find you so far
+recovered. Do you feel yourself in a condition to give any account of
+the accident which has befallen you?"
+
+"It will be a very unsatisfactory one, at best," said Redclyffe, trying
+to discover some definite point in his misty reminiscences. "I am a
+stranger to this country, and was on a pedestrian tour with the purpose
+of making myself acquainted with the aspects of English scenery and
+life. I had turned into a footpath, being told that it would lead me
+within view of an old Hall, which, from certain early associations, I
+was very desirous of seeing. I think I went astray; at all events,
+the path became indistinct; and, so far as I can recollect, I had just
+turned to retrace my steps,--in fact, that is the last thing in my
+memory."
+
+"You had almost fallen a sacrifice," said the Warden, "to the old
+preference which our English gentry have inherited from their Norman
+ancestry, of game to man. You had come unintentionally as an intruder
+into a rich preserve much haunted by poachers, and exposed yourself to
+the deadly mark of a spring-gun, which had not the wit to distinguish
+between a harmless traveller and a poacher. At least, such is our
+conclusion; for our old friend here, (who luckily for you is a great
+rambler in the woods,) when the report drew him to the spot, found you
+insensible, and the gun discharged."
+
+"A gun has so little discretion," said Redclyffe, smiling, "that it
+seems a pity to trust entirely to its judgment, in a matter of life
+and death. But, to confess the truth, I had come this morning to the
+suspicion that there was a direct human agency in the matter; for I find
+missing a little pocket-book which I carried."
+
+"Then," said the Warden, "that certainly gives a new aspect to the
+affair. Was it of value?"
+
+"Of none whatever," said Redclyffe, "merely containing pencil memoranda,
+and notes of a traveller's little expenses. I had papers about me of far
+more value, and a moderate sum of money, a letter of credit, which have
+escaped. I do not, however, feel inclined, on such grounds, to transfer
+the guilt decidedly from the spring-gun to any more responsible
+criminal; for it is very possible that the pocket-book, being carelessly
+carried, might have been lost on the way. I had not used it since the
+preceding day."
+
+"Much more probable, indeed," said the Warden. "The discharged gun is
+strong evidence against itself. Mr. Colcord," continued he, raising his
+voice, "how long was the interval between the discharge of the gun and
+your arrival on the spot."
+
+"Five minutes, or less," said the old man, "for I was not far off, and
+made what haste I could, it being borne in on my spirit that mischief
+was abroad."
+
+"Did you hear two reports?" asked the Warden.
+
+"Only one," replied Colcord.
+
+"It is a plain case against the spring-gun," said the Warden; "and, as
+you tell me you are a stranger, I trust you will not suppose that our
+peaceful English woods and parks are the haunt of banditti. We must try
+to give you a better idea of us. May I ask, are you an American, and
+recently come among us?"
+
+"I believe a letter of credit is considered as decisive as most modes of
+introduction," said Redclyffe, feeling that the good Warden was desirous
+of knowing with some precision who and what he was, and that, in the
+circumstances, he had a right to such knowledge. "Here is mine, on a
+respectable house in London."
+
+The Warden took it, and glanced it over with a slight apologetic bow;
+it was a credit for a handsome amount in favor of the Honorable Edward
+Redclyffe, a title that did not fail to impress the Englishman rather
+favorably towards his new acquaintance, although he happened to know
+something of their abundance, even so early in the republic, among the
+men branded sons of equality. But, at all events, it showed no ordinary
+ability and energy for so young a man to have held such position as this
+title denoted in the fiercely contested political struggles of the new
+democracy.
+
+"Do you know, Mr. Redclyffe, that this name is familiar to us,
+hereabouts?" asked he, with a kindly bow and recognition,--"that it is
+in fact the principal name in this neighborhood,--that a family of your
+name still possesses Braithwaite Hall, and that this very Hospital,
+where you have happily found shelter, was founded by former
+representatives of your name? Perhaps you count yourself among their
+kindred."
+
+"My countrymen are apt to advance claims to kinship with distinguished
+English families on such slight grounds as to make it ridiculous,"
+said Redclyffe, coloring. "I should not choose to follow so absurd an
+example."
+
+"Well, well, perhaps not," said the Warden, laughing frankly. "I have
+been amongst your republicans myself, a long while ago, and saw that
+your countrymen have no adequate idea of the sacredness of pedigrees,
+and heraldic distinctions, and would change their own names at pleasure,
+and vaunt kindred with an English duke on the strength of the assumed
+one. But I am happy to meet an American gentleman who looks upon this
+matter as Englishmen necessarily must. I met with great kindness in your
+country, Mr. Redclyffe, and shall be truly happy if you will allow me an
+opportunity of returning some small part of the obligation. You are now
+in a condition for removal to my own quarters, across the quadrangle. I
+will give orders to prepare an apartment, and you must transfer yourself
+there by dinner-time."
+
+With this hospitable proposal, so decisively expressed, the Warden took
+his leave; and Edward Redclyffe had hardly yet recovered sufficient
+independent force to reject an invitation so put, even were he inclined;
+but, in truth, the proposal suited well with his wishes, such as they
+were, and was, moreover, backed, it is singular to say, by another of
+those dreamlike recognitions which had so perplexed him ever since he
+found himself in the Hospital. In some previous state of being, the
+Warden and he had talked together before.
+
+"What is the Warden's name?" he inquired of the old pensioner.
+
+"Hammond," said the old man; "he is a kinsman of the Redclyffe family
+himself, a man of fortune, and spends more than the income of his
+wardenship in beautifying and keeping up the glory of the establishment.
+He takes great pride in it."
+
+"And he has been in America," said Redclyffe. "How strange! I knew
+him there. Never was anything so singular as the discovery of old
+acquaintances where I had reason to suppose myself unknowing and
+unknown. Unless dear Doctor Grim, or dear little Elsie, were to start up
+and greet me, I know not what may chance next."
+
+Redclyffe took up his quarters in the Warden's house the next day, and
+was installed in an apartment that made a picture, such as he had not
+before seen, of English household comfort. He was thus established under
+the good Warden's roof, and, being very attractive of most people's
+sympathies, soon began to grow greatly in favor with that kindly
+personage.
+
+When Edward Redclyffe removed from the old pensioner's narrow quarters
+to the far ampler accommodations of the Warden's house, the latter
+gentleman was taking his morning exercise on horseback. A servant,
+however, in a grave livery, ushered him to an apartment, where the new
+guest was surprised to see some luggage which two or three days before
+Edward had ordered from London, on finding that his stay in this part
+of the country was likely to be much longer than he had originally
+contemplated. The sight of these things--the sense which they conveyed
+that he was an expected and welcome guest--tended to raise the spirits
+of the solitary wanderer, and made him.... [Endnote: 1.]
+
+The Warden's abode was an original part of the ancient establishment,
+being an entire side of the quadrangle which the whole edifice
+surrounded; and for the establishment of a bachelor (which was his new
+friend's condition), it seemed to Edward Redclyffe abundantly spacious
+and enviably comfortable. His own chamber had a grave, rich depth, as
+it were, of serene and time-long garniture, for purposes of repose,
+convenience, daily and nightly comfort, that it was soothing even to
+look at. Long accustomed, as Redclyffe had been, to the hardy and rude
+accommodations, if so they were to be called, of log huts and hasty,
+mud-built houses in the Western States of America, life, its daily
+habits, its passing accommodations, seemed to assume an importance,
+under these aspects, which it had not worn before; those deep downy
+beds, those antique chairs, the heavy carpet, the tester and curtains,
+the stateliness of the old room,--they had a charm as compared with
+the thin preparation of a forester's bedchamber, such as Redclyffe
+had chiefly known them, in the ruder parts of the country, that really
+seemed to give a more substantial value to life; so much pains had been
+taken with its modes and appliances, that it looked more solid than
+before. Nevertheless, there was something ghostly in that stately
+curtained bed, with the deep gloom within its drapery, so ancient as
+it was; and suggestive of slumberers there who had long since slumbered
+elsewhere.
+
+The old servant, whose grave, circumspect courtesy was a matter quite
+beyond Redclyffe's experience, soon knocked at the chamber door, and
+suggested that the guest might desire to await the Warden's arrival in
+the library, which was the customary sitting-room. Redclyffe assenting,
+he was ushered into a spacious apartment, lighted by various Gothic
+windows, surrounded with old oaken cases, in which were ranged volumes,
+most or many of which seemed to be coeval with the foundation of the
+hospital; and opening one of them, Redclyffe saw for the first time in
+his life [Endnote: 2] a genuine book-worm, that ancient form of creature
+living upon literature; it had gnawed a circular hole, penetrating
+through perhaps a score of pages of the seldom opened volume, and was
+still at his musty feast. There was a fragrance of old learning in
+this ancient library; a soothing influence, as the American felt,
+of time-honored ideas, where the strife, novelties, uneasy agitating
+conflict, attrition of unsettled theories, fresh-springing thought, did
+not attain a foothold; a good place to spend a life which should not be
+agitated with the disturbing element; so quiet, so peaceful; how slowly,
+with how little wear, would the years pass here! How unlike what he had
+hitherto known, and was destined to know,--the quick, violent struggle
+of his mother country, which had traced lines in his young brow already.
+How much would be saved by taking his former existence, not as dealing
+with things yet malleable, but with fossils, things that had had their
+life, and now were unchangeable, and revered, here!
+
+At one end of this large room there was a bowed window, the space near
+which was curtained off from the rest of the library, and, the window
+being filled with painted glass (most of which seemed old, though there
+were insertions evidently of modern and much inferior handiwork), there
+was a rich gloom of light, or you might call it a rich glow, according
+to your mood of mind. Redclyffe soon perceived that this curtained
+recess was the especial study of his friend, the Warden, and as such
+was provided with all that modern times had contrived for making an
+enjoyment out of the perusal of old books; a study table, with every
+convenience of multifarious devices, a great inkstand, pens; a luxurious
+study chair, where thought [Endnote: 3] upon. To say the truth, there
+was not, in this retired and thoughtful nook, anything that indicated to
+Redclyffe that the Warden had been recently engaged in consultation of
+learned authorities,--or in abstract labor, whether moral, metaphysical
+or historic; there was a volume of translations of Mother Goose's
+Melodies into Greek and Latin, printed for private circulation, and with
+the Warden's name on the title-page; a London newspaper of the preceding
+day; Lillebullero, Chevy Chase, and the old political ballads; and,
+what a little amused Redclyffe, the three volumes of a novel from a
+circulating library; so that Redclyffe came to the conclusion that the
+good Warden, like many educated men, whose early scholastic propensities
+are backed up by the best of opportunities, and all desirable facilities
+and surroundings, still contented himself with gathering a flower or
+two, instead of attempting the hard toil requisite to raise a crop.
+
+It must not be omitted, that there was a fragrance in the room, which,
+unlike as the scene was, brought back, through so many years, to
+Redclyffe's mind a most vivid remembrance of poor old Doctor Grim's
+squalid chamber, with his wild, bearded presence in the midst of it,
+puffing his everlasting cloud; for here was the same smell of tobacco,
+and on the mantel-piece of a chimney lay a German pipe, and an old
+silver tobacco-box into which was wrought the leopard's head and the
+inscription in black letter. The Warden had evidently availed himself of
+one of the chief bachelor sources of comfort. Redclyffe, whose destiny
+had hitherto, and up to a very recent period, been to pass a feverishly
+active life, was greatly impressed by all these tokens of learned
+ease,--a degree of self-indulgence combined with duties enough to
+quiet an otherwise uneasy conscience,--by the consideration that this
+pensioner acted a good part in a world where no one is entitled to be an
+unprofitable laborer. He thought within himself, that his prospects in
+his own galvanized country, that seemed to him, a few years since, to
+offer such a career for an adventurous young man, conscious of motive
+power, had nothing so enticing as such a nook as this,--a quiet recess
+of unchangeable old time, around which the turbulent tide now eddied
+and rushed, but could not disturb it. Here, to be sure, hope, love,
+ambition, came not, progress came not; but here was what, just now, the
+early wearied American could appreciate better than aught else,--here
+was rest.
+
+The fantasy took Edward to imitate the useful labors of the learned
+Warden, and to make trial whether his own classical condition--the
+results of Doctor Grim's tuition, and subsequently that of an American
+College--had utterly deserted him, by attempting a translation of a few
+verses of Yankee Doodle; and he was making hopeful progress when the
+Warden came in fresh and rosy from a morning's ride in a keen east wind.
+He shook hands heartily with his guest, and, though by no means frigid
+at their former interview, seemed to have developed at once into
+a kindlier man, now that he had suffered the stranger to cross his
+threshold, and had thus made himself responsible for his comfort.
+
+"I shall take it greatly amiss," said he, "if you do not pick up fast
+under my roof, and gather a little English ruddiness, moreover, in the
+walks and rides that I mean to take you. Your countrymen, as I saw them,
+are a sallow set; but I think you must have English blood enough in your
+veins to eke out a ruddy tint, with the help of good English beef and
+ale, and daily draughts of wholesome light and air."
+
+"My cheeks would not have been so very pale," said Edward, laughing,
+"if an English shot had not deprived me of a good deal of my American
+blood."
+
+"Only follow my guidance," said the Warden, "and I assure you you shall
+have back whatever blood we have deprived you of, together with an
+addition. It is now luncheon-time, and we will begin the process of
+replenishing your veins."
+
+So they went into a refectory, where were spread upon the board what
+might have seemed a goodly dinner to most Americans; though for this
+Englishman it was but a by-incident, a slight refreshment, to enable him
+to pass the midway stage of life. It is an excellent thing to see the
+faith of a hearty Englishman in his own stomach, and how well that
+kindly organ repays his trust; with what devout assimilation he takes to
+himself his kindred beef, loving it, believing in it, making a good
+use of it, and without any qualms of conscience or prescience as to the
+result. They surely eat twice as much as we; and probably because of
+their undoubted faith it never does them any harm. Dyspepsia is merely a
+superstition with us. If we could cease to believe in its existence,
+it would exist no more. Redclyffe, eating little himself, his wound
+compelling him to be cautious as to his diet, was secretly delighted to
+see what sweets the Warden found in a cold round of beef, in a pigeon
+pie, and a cut or two of Yorkshire ham; not that he was ravenous, but
+that his stomach was so healthy.
+
+"You eat little, my friend," said the Warden, pouring out a glass of
+sherry for Redclyffe, and another for himself. "But you are right, in
+such a predicament as yours. Spare your stomach while you are weakly,
+and it will help you when you are strong This, now, is the most
+enjoyable meal of the day with me. You will not see me play such a knife
+and fork at dinner; though there too, especially if I have ridden out
+in the afternoon, I do pretty well. But, come now, if (like most of your
+countrymen, as I have heard) you are a lover of the weed, I can offer
+you some as delicate Latakia as you are likely to find in England."
+
+"I lack that claim upon your kindness, I am sorry to say," replied
+Redclyffe. "I am not a good smoker, though I have occasionally taken a
+cigar at need."
+
+"Well, when you find yourself growing old, and especially if you chance
+to be a bachelor, I advise you to cultivate the habit," said the Warden.
+"A wife is the only real obstacle or objection to a pipe; they can
+seldom be thoroughly reconciled, and therefore it is well for a man to
+consider, beforehand, which of the two he can best dispense with. I know
+not how it might have been once, had the conflicting claim of these two
+rivals ever been fairly presented to me; but I now should be at no loss
+to choose the pipe."
+
+They returned to the study; and while the Warden took his pipe,
+Redclyffe, considering that, as the guest of this hospitable Englishman,
+he had no right to continue a stranger, thought it fit to make known to
+him who he was, and his condition, plans, and purposes. He represented
+himself as having been liberally educated, bred to the law, but (to
+his misfortune) having turned aside from that profession to engage
+in politics. In this pursuit, indeed, his success wore a flattering
+outside; for he had become distinguished, and, though so young, a
+leader, locally at least, in the party which he had adopted. He had
+been, for a biennial term, a member of Congress, after winning some
+distinction in the legislature of his native State; but some one of
+those fitful changes to which American politics are peculiarly liable
+had thrown him out, in his candidacy for his second term; and the
+virulence of party animosity, the abusiveness of the press, had acted so
+much upon a disposition naturally somewhat too sensitive for the career
+which he had undertaken, that he had resolved, being now freed from
+legislative cares, to seize the opportunity for a visit to England,
+whither he was drawn by feelings which every educated and impressible
+American feels, in a degree scarcely conceivable by the English
+themselves. And being here (but he had already too much experience of
+English self-sufficiency to confess so much) he began to feel the deep
+yearning which a sensitive American--his mind full of English thoughts,
+his imagination of English poetry, his heart of English character and
+sentiment--cannot fail to be influenced by,--the yearning of the
+blood within his veins for that from which it has been estranged; the
+half-fanciful regret that he should ever have been separated from these
+woods, these fields, these natural features of scenery, to which his
+nature was moulded, from the men who are still so like himself, from
+these habits of life and thought which (though he may not have known
+them for two centuries) he still perceives to have remained in some
+mysterious way latent in the depths of his character, and soon to be
+reassumed, not as a foreigner would do it, but like habits native to
+him, and only suspended for a season.
+
+This had been Redclyffe's state of feeling ever since he landed in
+England, and every day seemed to make him more at home; so that it
+seemed as if he were gradually awakening to a former reality.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+After lunch, the Warden showed a good degree of kind anxiety about his
+guest, and ensconced him in a most comfortable chair in his study, where
+he gave him his choice of books old and new, and was somewhat surprised,
+as well as amused, to see that Redclyffe seemed most attracted towards a
+department of the library filled with books of English antiquities, and
+genealogies, and heraldry; the two latter, indeed, having the preference
+over the others.
+
+"This is very remarkable," said he, smiling. "By what right or reason,
+by what logic of character, can you, a democrat, renouncing all
+advantages of birth,--neither priding yourself on family, nor seeking
+to found one,--how therefore can you care for genealogies, or for this
+fantastic science of heraldry? Having no antiquities, being a people
+just made, how can you care for them?"
+
+"My dear sir," said Redclyffe, "I doubt whether the most devoted
+antiquarian in England ever cares to search for an old thing merely
+because it is old, as any American just landed on your shores would do.
+Age is our novelty; therefore it attracts and absorbs us. And as for
+genealogies, I know not what necessary repulsion there may be between
+it and democracy. A line of respectable connections, being the harder to
+preserve where there is nothing in the laws to defend it, is therefore
+the more precious when we have it really to boast of."
+
+"True," said the Warden, "when a race keeps itself distinguished among
+the grimy order of your commonalty, all with equal legal rights to place
+and eminence as itself, it must needs be because there is a force and
+efficacy in the blood. I doubt not," he said, looking with the free
+approval of an elder man at the young man's finely developed face and
+graceful form,--"I doubt not that you can look back upon a line of
+ancestry, always shining out from the surrounding obscurity of the mob."
+
+Redclyffe, though ashamed of himself, could not but feel a paltry
+confusion and embarrassment, as he thought of his unknown origin, and
+his advent from the almshouse; coming out of that squalid darkness as
+if he were a thing that had had a spontaneous birth out of poverty,
+meanness, petty crime; and here in ancestral England, he felt more
+keenly than ever before what was his misfortune.
+
+"I must not let you lie under this impression," said he manfully to the
+Warden. "I have no ancestry; at the very first step my origin is lost
+in impenetrable obscurity. I only know that but for the aid of a kind
+friend--on whose benevolence I seem to have had no claim whatever--my
+life would probably have been poor, mean, unenlightened."
+
+"Well, well," said the kind Warden,--hardly quite feeling, however, the
+noble sentiment which he expressed,--"it is better to be the first noble
+illustrator of a name than even the worthy heir of a name that has been
+noble and famous for a thousand years. The highest pride of some of our
+peers, who have won their rank by their own force, has been to point to
+the cottage whence they sprung. Your posterity, at all events, will have
+the advantage of you,--they will know their ancestor."
+
+Redclyffe sighed, for there was truly a great deal of the foolish
+yearning for a connection with the past about him; his imagination had
+taken this turn, and the very circumstances of his obscure birth gave it
+a field to exercise itself.
+
+"I advise you," said the Warden, by way of changing the conversation,
+"to look over the excellent history of the county which you are now in.
+There is no reading better, to my mind, than these country histories;
+though doubtless a stranger would hardly feel so much interest in them
+as one whose progenitors, male or female, have strewn their dust over
+the whole field of which the history treats. This history is a fine
+specimen of the kind."
+
+The work to which Redclyffe's attention was thus drawn was in two large
+folio volumes, published about thirty years before, bound in calf by
+some famous artist in that line, illustrated with portraits and views of
+ruined castles, churches, cathedrals, the seats of nobility and gentry;
+Roman, British, and Saxon remains, painted windows, oak carvings, and so
+forth.
+
+And as for its contents the author ascended for the history of the
+county as far as into the pre-Roman ages, before Caesar had ever heard
+of Britain; and brought it down, an ever swelling and increasing tale,
+to his own days; inclusive of the separate histories, and pedigrees,
+and hereditary legends, and incidents, of all the principal families. In
+this latter branch of information, indeed, the work seemed particularly
+full, and contained every incident that would have worked well into
+historical romance.
+
+"Aye, aye," said the Warden, laughing at some strange incident of this
+sort which Redclyffe read out to him. "My old friend Gibber, the learned
+author of this work, (he has been dead this score of years, so he will
+not mind my saying it,) had a little too much the habit of seeking his
+authorities in the cottage chimney-corners. I mean that an old woman's
+tale was just about as acceptable to him as a recorded fact; and to say
+the truth, they are really apt to have ten times the life in them."
+
+Redclyffe saw in the volume a full account of the founding of the
+Hospital, its regulations and purposes, its edifices; all of which he
+reserved for future reading, being for the present more attracted by
+the mouldy gossip of family anecdotes which we have alluded to. Some of
+these, and not the least singular, referred to the ancient family which
+had founded the Hospital; and he was attracted by seeing a mention of a
+Bloody Footstep, which reminded him of the strange old story which
+good Doctor Grimshawe had related by his New England fireside, in those
+childish days when Edward dwelt with him by the graveyard, On reading
+it, however, he found that the English legend, if such it could be
+called, was far less full and explicit than that of New England. Indeed,
+it assigned various origins to the Bloody Footstep;--one being, that
+it was the stamp of the foot of the Saxon thane, who fought at his
+own threshold against the assault of the Norman baron, who seized his
+mansion at the Conquest; another, that it was the imprint of a fugitive
+who had sought shelter from the lady of the house during the Wars of the
+Roses, and was dragged out by her husband, and slain on the door-step;
+still another, that it was the footstep of a Protestant in Bloody Mary's
+days, who, being sent to prison by the squire of that epoch, had lifted
+his hands to Heaven, and stamped his foot, in appeal as against the
+unjust violence with which he was treated, and stamping his foot, it had
+left the bloody mark. It was hinted too, however, that another version,
+which out of delicacy to the family the author was reluctant to state,
+assigned the origin of the Bloody Footstep to so late a period as the
+wars of the Parliament. And, finally, there was an odious rumor that
+what was called the Bloody Footstep was nothing miraculous, after all,
+but most probably a natural reddish stain in the stone door-step; but
+against this heresy the excellent Dr. Gibber set his face most sturdily.
+
+The original legend had made such an impression on Redclyffe's childish
+fancy, that he became strangely interested in thus discovering it,
+or something remotely like it, in England, and being brought by such
+unsought means to reside so near it. Curious about the family to which
+it had occurred, he proceeded to examine its records, as given in the
+County History. The name was Redclyffe. Like most English pedigrees,
+there was an obscurity about a good many of the earlier links; but the
+line was traced out with reasonable definiteness from the days of Coeur
+de Lion, and there was said to be a cross-legged ancestor in the
+village church, who (but the inscription was obliterated) was probably
+a Redclyffe, and had fought either under the Lion Heart or in the
+Crusades. It was, in subsequent ages, one of the most distinguished
+families, though there had been turbulent men in all those turbulent
+times, hard fighters. In one age, a barony of early creation seemed to
+have come into the family, and had been, as it were, playing bo-peep
+with the race for several centuries. Some of them had actually assumed
+the title; others had given it up for lack of sufficient proof; but
+still there was such a claim, and up to the time at which this County
+History was written, it had neither been made out, nor had the hope of
+doing so been relinquished.
+
+"Have the family," asked Redclyffe of his host, "ever yet made out their
+claim to this title, which has so long been playing the will-of-the-wisp
+with them?"
+
+"No, not yet," said the Warden, puffing out a volume of smoke from his
+meerschaum, and making it curl up to the ceiling. "Their claim has as
+little substance, in my belief, as yonder vanishing vapor from my pipe.
+But they still keep up their delusion. I had supposed that the claim
+would perish with the last squire, who was a childless man,--at least,
+without legitimate heirs; but this estate passed to one whom we can
+scarcely call an Englishman, he being a Catholic, the descendant of
+forefathers who have lived in Italy since the time of George II., and
+who is, moreover, a Catholic. We English would not willingly see an
+ancestral honor in the possession of such a man!"
+
+"Is there, do you think, a prospect of his success?"
+
+"I have heard so, but hardly believe it," replied the Warden. "I
+remember, some dozen or fifteen years ago, it was given out that some
+clue had been found to the only piece of evidence that was wanting. It
+had been said that there was an emigration to your own country, above a
+hundred years ago, and on account of some family feud; the true heir
+had gone thither and never returned. Now, the point was to prove the
+extinction of this branch of the family. But, excuse me, I must pay an
+official visit to my charge here. Will you accompany me, or continue to
+pore over the County History?"
+
+Redclyffe felt enough of the elasticity of convalescence to be desirous
+of accompanying the Warden; and they accordingly crossed the enclosed
+quadrangle to the entrance of the Hospital portion of the large and
+intricate structure. It was a building of the early Elizabethan age, a
+plaster and timber structure, like many houses of that period and much
+earlier. [Endnote: 1] Around this court stood the building, with the
+date 1437 cut on the front. On each side, a row of gables looked upon
+the enclosed space, most venerable old gables, with heavy mullioned
+windows filled with little diamond panes of glass, and opening on
+lattices. On two sides there was a cloistered walk, under echoing
+arches, and in the midst a spacious lawn of the greenest and loveliest
+grass, such as England only can show, and which, there, is of perennial
+verdure and beauty. In the midst stood a stone statue of a venerable
+man, wrought in the best of medi�val sculpture, with robe and ruff, and
+tunic and venerable beard, resting on a staff, and holding what looked
+like a clasped book in his hand. The English atmosphere, together
+with the coal smoke, settling down in the space of centuries from the
+chimneys of the Hospital, had roughened and blackened this venerable
+piece of sculpture, enclosing it as it were in a superficies of decay;
+but still (and perhaps the more from these tokens of having stood so
+long among men) the statue had an aspect of venerable life, and of
+connection with human life, that made it strongly impressive.
+
+"This is the effigy of Sir Edward Redclyffe, the founder of the
+Hospital," said the Warden. "He is a most peaceful and venerable old
+gentleman in his attire and aspect, as you see; but he was a fierce old
+fellow in his day, and is said to have founded the Hospital as a means
+of appeasing Heaven for some particular deed of blood, which he had
+imposed upon his conscience in the War of the Roses."
+
+"Yes," said Redclyffe, "I have just read in the County History that the
+Bloody Footstep was said to have been imprinted in his time. But what is
+that thing which he holds in his hand?"
+
+"It is a famous heirloom of the Redclyffes," said the Warden, "on
+the possession of which (as long as they did possess it) they prided
+themselves, it is said, more than on their ancient manor-house. It was
+a Saxon ornament, which a certain ancestor was said to have had from
+Harold, the old Saxon king; but if there ever was any such article, it
+has been missing from the family mansion for two or three hundred years.
+There is not known to be an antique relic of that description now in
+existence."
+
+"I remember having seen such an article,--yes, precisely of that shape,"
+observed Redclyffe, "in the possession of a very dear old friend of
+mine, when I was a boy."
+
+"What, in America?" exclaimed the Warden. "That is very remarkable. The
+time of its being missed coincides well enough with that of the early
+settlement of New England. Some Puritan, before his departure, may have
+thought himself doing God service by filching the old golden gewgaw from
+the Cavalier; for it was said to be fine, ductile gold."
+
+The circumstances struck Redclyffe with a pleasant wonder; for, indeed,
+the old statue held the closest possible imitation, in marble, of that
+strange old glitter of gold which he himself had so often played with
+in the Doctor's study; [Endnote: 2] so identical, that he could have
+fancied that he saw the very thing, changed from metal into stone, even
+with its bruises and other casual marks in it. As he looked at the
+old statue, his imagination played with it, and his naturally great
+impressibility half made him imagine that the old face looked at him
+with a keen, subtile, wary glance, as if acknowledging that it held some
+secret, but at the same time defying him to find it out. And then again
+came that visionary feeling that had so often swept over him since he
+had been an inmate of the Hospital.
+
+All over the interior part of the building was carved in stone the
+leopard's head, with wearisome iteration; as if the founder were anxious
+to imprint his device so numerously, lest--when he produced this edifice
+as his remuneration to Eternal Justice for many sins--the Omniscient Eye
+should fail to be reminded that Sir Edward Redclyffe had done it.
+But, at all events, it seemed to Redclyffe that the ancient knight had
+purposed a good thing, and in a measurable degree had effected it; for
+here stood the venerable edifice securely founded, bearing the moss of
+four hundred years upon it; and though wars, and change of dynasties,
+and religious change, had swept around it, with seemingly destructive
+potency, yet here had the lodging, the food, the monastic privileges of
+the brethren been held secure, and were unchanged by all the altering
+mariners of the age. The old fellow, somehow or other, seemed to have
+struck upon an everlasting rock, and founded his pompous charity there.
+
+They entered an arched door on the left of the quadrangle, and found
+themselves hi a dark old hall with oaken beams; to say the truth, it
+was a barn-like sort of enclosure, and was now used as a sort of
+rubbish-place for the Hospital, where they stored away old furniture,
+and where carpenter's work might be done. And yet, as the Warden assured
+Redclyffe, it was once a hall of state, hung with tapestry, carpeted,
+for aught he knew, with cloth of gold, and set with rich furniture,
+and a groaning board in the midst. Here, the hereditary patron of the
+Hospital had once entertained King James the First, who made a Latin
+speech on the occasion, a copy of which was still preserved in the
+archives. On the rafters of this old hall there were cobwebs in such
+abundance that Redclyffe could not but reflect on the joy which old
+Doctor Grimshawe would have had in seeing them, and the health to the
+human race which he would have hoped to collect and distil from them.
+
+From this great, antique room they crossed the quadrangle and entered
+the kitchen of the establishment. A hospitable fire was burning there,
+and there seemed to be a great variety of messes cooking; and the Warden
+explained to Redclyffe that there was no general table in the Hospital;
+but the brethren, at their own will and pleasure, either formed
+themselves into companies or messes, of any convenient size, or enjoyed
+a solitary meal by themselves, each in their own apartments. There was
+a goodly choice of simple, but good and enjoyable food, and a sufficient
+supply of potent ale, brewed in the vats of the Hospital, which, among
+its other praiseworthy characteristics, was famous for this; having at
+some epoch presumed to vie with the famous ale of Trinity, in Cambridge,
+and the Archdeacon of Oxford,--these having come down to the hospital
+from a private receipt of Sir Edward's butler, which was now lost in the
+Redclyffe family; nor would the ungrateful Hospital give up its secret
+even out of loyalty to its founder.
+
+"I would use my influence with the brewer," said the Warden, on
+communicating this little fact to Redclyffe; "but the present man--now
+owner of the estate--is not worthy to have good ale brewed in his house;
+having himself no taste for anything but Italian wines, wretched
+fellow that he is! He might make himself an Englishman if he would take
+heartily to our ale; and with that end in view, I should be glad to give
+it him."
+
+The kitchen fire blazed warmly, as we have said, and roast and stewed
+and boiled were in process of cooking, producing a pleasant fume, while
+great heaps of wheaten loaves were smoking hot from the ovens, and the
+master cook and his subordinates were in fume and hiss, like beings that
+were of a fiery element, and, though irritable and scorching, yet were
+happier here than they could have been in any other situation.
+The Warden seemed to have an especial interest and delight in this
+department of the Hospital, and spoke apart to the head cook on the
+subject (as Redclyffe surmised from what he overheard) of some especial
+delicacy for his own table that day.
+
+"This kitchen is a genial place," said he to Redclyffe, as they retired.
+"In the evening, after the cooks have done their work, the brethren have
+liberty to use it as a sort of common room, and to sit here over their
+ale till a reasonable bedtime. It would interest you much to make one
+at such a party; for they have had a varied experience in life, each one
+for himself, and it would be strange to hear the varied roads by which
+they have come hither."
+
+"Yes," replied Redclyffe, "and, I presume, not one of them ever dreamed
+of coming hither when he started in life. The only one with whom I am
+acquainted could hardly have expected it, at all events."
+
+"He is a remarkable man, more so than you may have had an opportunity
+of knowing," said the Warden. "I know not his history, for he is not
+communicative on that subject, and it was only necessary for him to
+make out his proofs of claim to the charity to the satisfaction of the
+Curators. But it has often struck me that there must have been strange
+and striking events in his life,--though how it could have been without
+his attracting attention and being known, I cannot say. I have myself
+often received good counsel from him in the conduct of the Hospital, and
+the present owner of the Hall seems to have taken him for his counsellor
+and confidant, being himself strange to English affairs and life."
+
+"I should like to call on him, as a matter of course rather than
+courtesy," observed Redclyffe, "and thank him for his great kindness."
+
+They accordingly ascended the dark oaken staircase with its black
+balustrade, and approached the old man's chamber, the door of which they
+found open, and in the blurred looking-glass which hung deep within the
+room Redclyffe was surprised to perceive the young face of a woman, who
+seemed to be arranging her head-gear, as women are always doing. It was
+but a moment, and then it vanished like a vision.
+
+"I was not aware," he said, turning to the Warden, "that there was a
+feminine side to this establishment."
+
+"Nor is there," said the old bachelor, "else it would not have held
+together so many ages as it has. The establishment has its own wise,
+monkish regulations; but we cannot prevent the fact, that some of the
+brethren may have had foolish relations with the other sex at some
+previous period of their lives. This seems to be the case with our wise
+old friend of whom we have been speaking,--whereby he doubtless became
+both wiser and sadder. If you have seen a female face here, it is that
+of a relative who resides out of the hospital,--an excellent young lady,
+I believe, who has charge of a school."
+
+While he was speaking, the young lady in question passed out, greeting
+the Warden in a cheerful, respectful way, in which deference to him was
+well combined with a sense of what was due to herself.
+
+"That," observed the Warden, who had returned her courtesy, with
+a kindly air betwixt that of gentlemanly courtesy and a superior's
+acknowledgment,--"that is the relative of our old friend; a young
+person--a gentlewoman, I may almost call her--who teaches a little
+school in the village here, and keeps her guardian's heart warm, no
+doubt, with her presence. An excellent young woman, I do believe, and
+very useful and faithful in her station."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+
+On entering the old palmer's apartment, they found him looking over some
+ancient papers, yellow and crabbedly written, and on one of them a large
+old seal, all of which he did up in a bundle and enclosed in a parchment
+cover, so that, before they were well in the room, the documents were
+removed from view.
+
+"Those papers and parchments have a fine old yellow tint, Colcord," said
+the Warden, "very satisfactory to an antiquary."
+
+"There is nothing in them," said the old man, "of general interest. Some
+old papers they are, which came into my possession by inheritance, and
+some of them relating to the affairs of a friend of my youth;--a long
+past time, and a long past friend," added he, sighing.
+
+"Here is a new friend, at all events," said the kindly Warden, wishing
+to cheer the old man, "who feels himself greatly indebted to you for
+your care." [Endnote: 1.]
+
+There now ensued a conversation between the three, in the course of
+which reference was made to America, and the Warden's visit there.
+
+"You are so mobile," he said, "you change so speedily, that I suppose
+there are few external things now that I should recognize. The face of
+your country changes like one of your own sheets of water, under the
+influence of sun, cloud, and wind; but I suppose there is a depth below
+that is seldom effectually stirred. It is a great fault of the country
+that its sons find it impossible to feel any patriotism for it."
+
+"I do not by any means acknowledge that impossibility," responded
+Redclyffe, with a smile. "I certainly feel that sentiment very strongly
+in my own breast, more especially since I have left America three
+thousand miles behind me."
+
+"Yes, it is only the feeling of self-assertion that rises against the
+self-complacency of the English," said the Warden. "Nothing else;
+for what else have you become the subject of this noble weakness of
+patriotism? You cannot love anything beyond the soil of your own estate;
+or in your case, if your heart is very large, you may possibly take in,
+in a quiet sort of way, the whole of New England. What more is possible?
+How can you feel a heart's love for a mere political arrangement, like
+your Union? How can you be loyal, where personal attachment--the lofty
+and noble and unselfish attachment of a subject to his prince--is out
+of the question? where your sovereign is felt to be a mere man like
+yourselves, whose petty struggles, whose ambition--mean before it grew
+to be audacious--you have watched, and know him to be just the same now
+as yesterday, and that to-morrow he will be walking unhonored amongst
+you again? Your system is too bare and meagre for human nature to love,
+or to endure it long. These stately degrees of society, that have
+so strong a hold upon us in England, are not to be done away with so
+lightly as you think. Your experiment is not yet a success by any means;
+and you will live to see it result otherwise than you think!"
+
+"It is natural for you Englishmen to feel thus," said Redclyffe;
+"although, ever since I set my foot on your shores,--forgive me, but
+you set me the example of free speech,--I have had a feeling of coming
+change among all that you look upon as so permanent, so everlasting; and
+though your thoughts dwell fondly on things as they are and have
+been, there is a deep destruction somewhere in this country, that is
+inevitably impelling it in the path of my own. But I care not for this.
+I do aver that I love my country, that I am proud of its institutions,
+that I have a feeling unknown, probably, to any but a republican, but
+which is the proudest thing in me, that there is no man above me,--for
+my ruler is only myself, in the person of another, whose office I impose
+upon him,--nor any below me. If you would understand me, I would tell
+you of the shame I felt when first, on setting foot in this country,
+I heard a man speaking of his birth as giving him privileges; saw him
+looking down on laboring men, as of an inferior race. And what I can
+never understand, is the pride which you positively seem to feel in
+having men and classes of men above you, born to privileges which you
+can never hope to share. It may be a thing to be endured, but surely not
+one to be absolutely proud of. And yet an Englishman is so."
+
+"Ah! I see we lack a ground to meet upon," said the Warden. "We can
+never truly understand each other. What you have last mentioned is one
+of our inner mysteries. It is not a thing to be reasoned about, but
+to be felt,--to be born within one; and I uphold it to be a generous
+sentiment, and good for the human heart."
+
+"Forgive me, sir," said Redclyffe, "but I would rather be the poorest
+and lowest man in America than have that sentiment."
+
+"But it might change your feeling, perhaps," suggested the Warden, "if
+you were one of the privileged class."
+
+"I dare not say that it would not," said Redclyffe, "for I know I have
+a thousand weaknesses, and have doubtless as many more that I never
+suspected myself of. But it seems to me at this moment impossible that I
+should ever have such an ambition, because I have a sense of meanness
+in not starting fair, in beginning the world with advantages that my
+fellows have not."
+
+"Really this is not wise," said the Warden, bluntly, "How can the start
+in life be fair for all? Providence arranges it otherwise. Did you
+yourself,--a gentleman evidently by birth and education,--did you start
+fair in the race of life?"
+
+Redclyffe remembered what his birth, or rather what his first
+recollected place had been, and reddened.
+
+"In birth, certainly, I had no advantages," said he, and would have
+explained further but was kept back by invincible reluctance; feeling
+that the bare fact of his origin in an almshouse would be accepted,
+while all the inward assurances and imaginations that had reconciled
+himself to the ugly fact would go for nothing. "But there were
+advantages, very early in life," added he, smiling, "which perhaps I
+ought to have been ashamed to avail myself of."
+
+"An old cobwebby library,--an old dwelling by a graveyard,--an old
+Doctor, busied with his own fantasies, and entangled in his own
+cobwebs,--and a little girl for a playmate: these were things that you
+might lawfully avail yourself of," said Colcord, unheard by the Warden,
+who, thinking the conversation had lasted long enough, had paid a slight
+passing courtesy to the old man, and was now leaving the room. "Do you
+remain here long?" he added.
+
+"If the Warden's hospitality holds out," said the American, "I shall be
+glad; for the place interests me greatly."
+
+"No wonder," replied Colcord.
+
+"And wherefore no wonder?" said Redclyffe, impressed with the idea that
+there was something peculiar in the tone of the old man's remark.
+
+"Because," returned the other quietly, "it must be to you especially
+interesting to see an institution of this kind, whereby one man's
+benevolence or penitence is made to take the substance and durability of
+stone, and last for centuries; whereas, in America, the solemn decrees
+and resolutions of millions melt away like vapor, and everything shifts
+like the pomp of sunset clouds; though it may be as pompous as they.
+Heaven intended the past as a foundation for the present, to keep it
+from vibrating and being blown away with every breeze."
+
+"But," said Redclyffe, "I would not see in my country what I see
+elsewhere,--the Past hanging like a mill-stone round a country's neck,
+or encrusted in stony layers over the living form; so that, to all
+intents and purposes, it is dead."
+
+"Well," said Colcord, "we are only talking of the Hospital. You will
+find no more interesting place anywhere. Stay amongst us; this is the
+very heart of England, and if you wish to know the fatherland,--the
+place whence you sprung,--this is the very spot!"
+
+Again Redclyffe was struck with the impression that there was something
+marked, something individually addressed to himself, in the old man's
+words; at any rate, it appealed to that primal imaginative vein in him
+which had so often, in his own country, allowed itself to dream over
+the possibilities of his birth. He knew that the feeling was a vague and
+idle one; but yet, just at this time, a convalescent, with a little
+play moment in what had heretofore been a turbulent life, he felt an
+inclination to follow out this dream, and let it sport with him, and by
+and by to awake to realities, refreshed by a season of unreality. At
+a firmer and stronger period of his life, though Redclyffe might have
+indulged his imagination with these dreams, yet he would not have let
+them interfere with his course of action; but having come hither in
+utter weariness of active life, it seemed just the thing for him to
+do,--just the fool's paradise for him to be in.
+
+"Yes," repeated the old man, looking keenly in his face, "you will not
+leave us yet."
+
+Redclyffe returned through the quadrangle to the Warden's house; and
+there were the brethren, sitting on benches, loitering in the sun,
+which, though warm for England, seemed scarcely enough to keep these old
+people warm, even with their cloth robes. They did not seem unhappy; nor
+yet happy; if they were so, it must be with the mere bliss of existence,
+a sleepy sense of comfort, and quiet dreaminess about things past,
+leaving out the things to come,--of which there was nothing, indeed, in
+their future, save one day after another, just like this, with loaf and
+ale, and such substantial comforts, and prayers, and idle days again,
+gathering by the great kitchen fire, and at last a day when they should
+not be there, but some other old men in their stead. And Redclyffe
+wondered whether, in the extremity of age, he himself would like to be
+one of the brethren of the Leopard's Head. The old men, he was sorry
+to see, did not seem very genial towards one another; in fact, there
+appeared to be a secret enjoyment of one another's infirmities,
+wherefore it was hard to tell, unless that each individual might fancy
+himself to possess an advantage over his fellow, which he mistook for a
+positive strength; and so there was sometimes a sardonic smile, when,
+on rising from his seat, the rheumatism was a little evident in an old
+fellow's joints; or when the palsy shook another's fingers so that he
+could barely fill his pipe; or when a cough, the gathered spasmodic
+trouble of thirty years, fairly convulsed another. Then, any two that
+happened to be sitting near one another looked into each other's cold
+eyes, and whispered, or suggested merely by a look (for they were bright
+to such perceptions), "The old fellow will not outlast another winter."
+
+Methinks it is not good for old men to be much together. An old man is
+a beautiful object in his own place, in the midst of a circle of young
+people, going down in various gradations to infancy, and all looking up
+to the patriarch with filial reverence, keeping him warm by their own
+burning youth; giving him the freshness of their thought and feeling,
+with such natural influx that it seems as if it grew within his heart;
+while on them he reacts with an influence that sobers, tempers, keeps
+them down. His wisdom, very probably, is of no great account,--he cannot
+fit to any new state of things; but, nevertheless, it works its effect.
+In such a situation, the old man is kind and genial, mellow, more gentle
+and generous, and wider-minded than ever before. But if left to himself,
+or wholly to the society of his contemporaries, the ice gathers about
+his heart, his hope grows torpid, his love--having nothing of his own
+blood to develop it--grows cold; he becomes selfish, when he has nothing
+in the present or the future worth caring about in himself; so that,
+instead of a beautiful object, he is an ugly one, little, mean, and
+torpid. I suppose one chief reason to be, that unless he has his own
+race about him he doubts of anybody's love, he feels himself a stranger
+in the world, and so becomes unamiable.
+
+A very few days in the Warden's hospitable mansion produced an excellent
+effect on Redclyffe's frame; his constitution being naturally excellent,
+and a flow of cheerful spirits contributing much to restore him to
+health, especially as the abode in this old place, which would probably
+have been intolerably dull to most young Englishmen, had for this young
+American a charm like the freshness of Paradise. In truth it had that
+charm, and besides it another intangible, evanescent, perplexing charm,
+full of an airy enjoyment, as if he had been here before. What could it
+be? It could be only the old, very deepest, inherent nature, which the
+Englishman, his progenitor, carried over the sea with him, nearly two
+hundred years before, and which had lain buried all that time under
+heaps of new things, new customs, new institutions, new snows of winter,
+new layers of forest leaves, until it seemed dead, and was altogether
+forgotten as if it had never been; but, now, his return had seemed to
+dissolve or dig away all this incrustation, and the old English nature
+awoke all fresh, so that he saw the green grass, the hedgerows, the old
+structures and old manners, the old clouds, the old raindrops, with
+a recognition, and yet a newness. Redclyffe had never been so quietly
+happy as now. He had, as it were, the quietude of the old man about him,
+and the freshness of his own still youthful years.
+
+The Warden was evidently very favorably impressed with his Transatlantic
+guest, and he seemed to be in a constant state of surprise to find an
+American so agreeable a kind of person.
+
+"You are just like an Englishman," he sometimes said. "Are you quite
+sure that you were not born on this side of the water?"
+
+This is said to be the highest compliment that an Englishman can pay
+to an American; and doubtless he intends it as such. All the praise
+and good will that an Englishman ever awards to an American is so far
+gratifying to the recipient, that it is meant for him individually, and
+is not to be put down in the slightest degree to the score of any regard
+to his countrymen generally. So far from this, if an Englishman were to
+meet the whole thirty millions of Americans, and find each individual
+of them a pleasant, amiable, well-meaning, and well-mannered sort of
+fellow, he would acknowledge this honestly in each individual case, but
+still would speak of the whole nation as a disagreeable people.
+
+As regards Redclyffe being precisely like an Englishman, we cannot but
+think that the good Warden was mistaken. No doubt, there was a common
+ground; the old progenitor (whose blood, moreover, was mixed with a
+hundred other streams equally English) was still there, under this young
+man's shape, but with a vast difference. Climate, sun, cold, heat, soil,
+institutions, had made a change in him before he was born, and all the
+life that he had lived since (so unlike any that he could have lived
+in England) had developed it more strikingly. In manners, I cannot
+but think that he was better than the generality of Englishmen, and
+different from the highest-mannered men, though most resembling them.
+His natural sensitiveness, a tincture of reserve, had been counteracted
+by the frank mixture with men which his political course had made
+necessary; he was quicker to feel what was right at the moment, than
+the Englishman; more alive; he had a finer grain; his look was more
+aristocratic than that of a thousand Englishmen of good birth and
+breeding; he had a faculty of assimilating himself to new manners,
+which, being his most un-English trait, was what perhaps chiefly made
+the Warden think him so like an Englishman. When an Englishman is a
+gentleman, to be sure, it is as deep in him as the marrow of his bones,
+and the deeper you know him, the more you are aware of it, and that
+generation after generation has contributed to develop and perfect these
+unpretending manners, which, at first, may have failed to impress you,
+under his plain, almost homely exterior. An American often gets as good
+a surface of manners, in his own progress from youth, through the wear
+and attrition of a successful life, to some high station in middle age;
+whereas a plebeian Englishman, who rises to eminent station, never
+does credit to it by his manners. Often you would not know the American
+ambassador from a duke. This is often merely external; but in Redclyffe,
+having delicate original traits in his character, it was something more;
+and, we are bold to say, when our countrymen are developed, or any one
+class of them, as they ought to be, they will show finer traits than
+have yet been seen. We have more delicate and quicker sensibilities;
+nerves more easily impressed; and these are surely requisites for
+perfect manners; and, moreover, the courtesy that proceeds on the
+ground of perfect equality is better than that which is a gracious
+and benignant condescension,--as is the case with the manners of the
+aristocracy of England.
+
+An American, be it said, seldom turns his best side outermost abroad;
+and an observer, who has had much opportunity of seeing the figure which
+they make, in a foreign country, does not so much wonder that there
+should be severe criticism on their manners as a people. I know not
+exactly why, but all our imputed peculiarities--our nasal pronunciation,
+our ungraceful idioms, our forthputtingness, our uncouth lack of
+courtesy--do really seem to exist on a foreign shore; and even, perhaps,
+to be heightened of malice prepense. The cold, unbelieving eye of
+Englishmen, expectant of solecisms in manners, contributes to produce
+the result which it looks for. Then the feeling of hostility and
+defiance in the American must be allowed for; and partly, too, the real
+existence of a different code of manners, founded on, and arising from,
+different institutions; and also certain national peculiarities,
+which may be intrinsically as good as English peculiarities; but being
+different, and yet the whole result being just too nearly alike, and,
+moreover, the English manners having the prestige of long establishment,
+and furthermore our own manners being in a transition state between
+those of old monarchies and what is proper to a new republic,--it
+necessarily followed that the American, though really a man of
+refinement and delicacy, is not just the kind of gentleman that the
+English can fully appreciate. In cases where they do so, their
+standard being different from ours, they do not always select for their
+approbation the kind of man or manners whom we should judge the best;
+we are perhaps apt to be a little too fine, a little too sedulously
+polished, and of course too conscious of it,--a deadly social crime,
+certainly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+
+To return from this long discussion, the Warden took kindly, as we have
+said, to Redclyffe, and thought him a miraculously good fellow, to have
+come from the rude American republic. Hitherto, in the little time
+that he had been in England, Redclyffe had received civil and even kind
+treatment from the English with whom he had come casually in contact;
+but still--perhaps partly from our Yankee narrowness and reserve--he
+had felt, in the closest coming together, as if there were a naked sword
+between the Englishman and him, as between the Arabian prince in the
+tale and the princess whom he wedded; he felt as if that would be the
+case even if he should love an Englishwoman; to such a distance, into
+such an attitude of self-defence, does English self-complacency and
+belief in England's superiority throw the stranger. In fact, in a
+good-natured way, John Bull is always doubling his fist in a stranger's
+face, and though it be good-natured, it does not always produce the most
+amiable feeling.
+
+The worthy Warden, being an Englishman, had doubtless the same kind of
+feeling; doubtless, too, he thought ours a poor, distracted country,
+perhaps prosperous for the moment, but as likely as not to be the scene
+of anarchy five minutes hence; but being of so genial a nature, when he
+came to see the amiableness of his young guest, and how deeply he was
+impressed with England, all prejudice died away, and he loved him like a
+treasure that he had found for himself, and valued him as if there were
+something of his own in him. And so the old Warden's residence had never
+before been so cheery as it was now; his bachelor life passed the more
+pleasantly with this quiet, vivacious, yet not troublesomely restless
+spirit beside him,--this eager, almost childish interest in everything
+English, and yet this capacity to take independent views of things,
+and sometimes, it might be, to throw a gleam of light even on things
+appertaining to England. And so, the better they came to know one
+another, the greater was their mutual liking.
+
+"I fear I am getting too strong to burden you much longer," said
+Redclyffe, this morning. "I have no pretence to be a patient now."
+
+"Pooh! nonsense!" ejaculated the Warden. "It will not be safe to leave
+you to yourself for at least a month to come. And I have half a dozen
+excursions in a neighborhood of twenty miles, in which I mean to show
+you what old England is, in a way that you would never find out for
+yourself. Do not speak of going. This day, if you find yourself strong
+enough, you shall go and look at an old village church."
+
+"With all my heart," said Redclyffe.
+
+They went, accordingly, walking slowly, in consequence of Redclyffe's
+yet imperfect strength, along the highroad, which was overshadowed
+with elms, that grew in beautiful shape and luxuriance in that part
+of England, not with the slender, drooping, picturesque grace of a New
+England elm, but more luxuriant, fuller of leaves, sturdier in limb. It
+was a day which the Warden called fine, and which Redclyffe, at home,
+would have thought to bode rain; though here he had learned that such
+weather might continue for weeks together, with only a few raindrops all
+the time. The road was in the finest condition, hard and dry.
+
+They had not long emerged from the gateway of the Hospital,--at the
+venerable front and gables of which Redclyffe turned to look with a
+feeling as if it were his home,--when they heard the clatter of hoofs
+behind them, and a gentleman on horseback rode by, paying a courteous
+salute to the Warden as he passed. A groom in livery followed at a
+little distance, and both rode roundly towards the village, whither the
+Warden and his friend were going.
+
+"Did you observe that man?" asked the Warden.
+
+"Yes," said Redclyffe. "Is he an Englishman?"
+
+"That is a pertinent question," replied the Warden, "but I scarcely know
+how to answer it."
+
+In truth, Redclyffe's question had been suggested by the appearance of
+the mounted gentleman, who was a dark, thin man, with black hair, and a
+black moustache and pointed beard setting off his sallow face, in
+which the eyes had a certain pointed steeliness, which did not look
+English,--whose eyes, methinks, are usually not so hard as those of
+Americans or foreigners. Redclyffe, somehow or other, had fancied that
+these not very pleasant eyes had been fixed in a marked way on himself,
+a stranger, while at the same time his salute was evidently directed
+towards the Warden.
+
+"An Englishman,--why, no," continued the latter. "If you observe, he
+does not even sit his horse like an Englishman, but in that absurd,
+stiff continental way, as if a poker should get on horseback. Neither
+has he an English face, English manners, nor English religion, nor
+an English heart; nor, to sum up the whole, had he English birth.
+Nevertheless, as fate would have it, he is the inheritor of a good old
+English name, a fine patrimonial estate, and a very probable claim to an
+old English title. This is Lord Braithwaite of Braithwaite Hall, who if
+he can make his case good (and they say there is good prospect of it)
+will soon be Lord Hinchbrooke."
+
+"I hardly know why, but I should be sorry for it," said Redclyffe. "He
+certainly is not English; and I have an odd sort of sympathy, which
+makes me unwilling that English honors should be enjoyed by foreigners.
+This, then, is the gentleman of Italian birth whom you have mentioned to
+me, and of whom there is a slight mention in the County History."
+
+"Yes," said the Warden. "There have been three descents of this
+man's branch in Italy, and only one English mother in all that time.
+Positively, I do not see an English trait in his face, and as little
+in his manner. His civility is Italian, such as oftentimes, among his
+countrymen, has offered a cup of poison to a guest, or insinuated the
+stab of a stiletto into his heart."
+
+"You are particularly bitter against this poor man," said Redclyffe,
+laughing at the Warden's vehemence. "His appearance--and yet he is
+a handsome man--is certainly not prepossessing; but unless it be
+countersigned by something in his actual life, I should hardly think it
+worth while to condemn him utterly."
+
+"Well, well; you can forgive a little English prejudice," said the
+Warden, a little ashamed. "But, in good earnest, the man has few or no
+good traits, takes no interest in the country, dislikes our sky, our
+earth, our people, is close and inhospitable, a hard landlord, and
+whatever may be his good qualities, they are not such as flourish in
+this soil and climate, or can be appreciated here." [Endnote: 1.]
+
+"Has he children?" asked Redclyffe.
+
+"They say so,--a family by an Italian wife, whom some, on the other
+hand, pronounce to be no wife at all. His son is at a Catholic college
+in France; his daughter in a convent there."
+
+In talk like this they were drawing near the little rustic village
+of Braithwaite, and saw, above a cloud of foliage, the small, low,
+battlemented tower, the gray stones of which had probably been laid
+a little after the Norman conquest. Approaching nearer, they passed
+a thatched cottage or two, very plain and simple edifices, though
+interesting to Redclyffe from their antique aspect, which denoted that
+they were probably older than the settlement of his own country, and
+might very likely have nursed children who had gone, more than two
+centuries ago, to found the commonwealth of which he was a citizen. If
+you considered them in one way, prosaically, they were ugly enough; but
+then there were the old latticed windows, and there the thatch, which
+was verdant with leek, and strange weeds, possessing a whole botanical
+growth. And birds flew in and out, as if they had their homes there.
+Then came a row of similar cottages, all joined on together, and each
+with a little garden before it divided from its neighbors by a hedge,
+now in full verdure. Redclyffe was glad to see some symptoms of natural
+love of beauty here, for there were plants of box, cut into queer
+shapes of birds, peacocks, etc., as if year after year had been spent
+in bringing these vegetable sculptures to perfection. In one of the
+gardens, moreover, the ingenious inhabitant had spent his leisure in
+building grotto-work, of which the English are rather ludicrously fond,
+on their little bits of lawn, and in building a miniature castle of
+oyster-shells, where were seen turrets, ramparts, a frowning arched
+gateway, and miniature cannon looking from the embrasures. A pleasanter
+and better adornment were the homely household flowers, and a pleasant
+sound, too, was the hum of bees, who had their home in several beehives,
+and were making their honey among the flowers of the garden, or come
+from afar, buzzing dreamily through the air, laden with honey that they
+had found elsewhere. Fruit trees stood erect, or, in some instances,
+were flattened out against the walls of cottages, looking somewhat like
+hawks nailed _in terrorem_ against a barn door. The male members of this
+little community were probably afield, with the exception of one or two
+half-torpid great-grandsires, who [were] moving rheumatically about the
+gardens, and some children not yet in breeches, who stared with stolid
+eyes at the passers-by; but the good dames were busy within doors, where
+Redclyffe had glimpses of their interior with its pavement of stone
+flags. Altogether it seemed a comfortable settlement enough.
+
+"Do you see that child yonder," observed the Warden, "creeping away from
+the door, and displaying a vista of his petticoats as he does so? That
+sturdy boy is the lineal heir of one of the oldest families in this part
+of England,--though now decayed and fallen, as you may judge. So, you
+see, with all our contrivances to keep up an aristocracy, there still is
+change forever going on."
+
+"There is something not agreeable, and something otherwise, in the
+thought," replied Redclyffe. "What is the name of the old family, whose
+representative is in such a case?"
+
+"Moseby," said the Warden. "Their family residence stood within three
+miles of Braithwaite Hall, but was taken down in the last century,
+and its place supplied by a grand show-place, built by a Birmingham
+manufacturer, who also originated here."
+
+They kept onward from this outskirt of the village, and soon, passing
+over a little rising ground, and descending now into a hollow came to
+the new portion of it, clustered around its gray Norman church, one side
+of the tower of which was covered with ivy, that was carefully kept, the
+Warden said, from climbing to the battlements, on account of some
+old prophecy that foretold that the tower would fall, if ever the ivy
+mantled over its top. Certainly, however, there seemed little likelihood
+that the square, low mass would fall, unless by external violence, in
+less than as many ages as it had already stood.
+
+Redclyffe looked at the old tower and little adjoining edifice with an
+interest that attached itself to every separate, moss-grown stone; but
+the Warden, like most Englishmen, was at once amazed and wearied with
+the American's enthusiasm for this spot, which to him was uninteresting
+for the very reason that made it most interesting to Redclyffe, because
+it had stood there such a weary while. It was too common an object to
+excite in his mind, as it did in Redclyffe's, visions of the long
+ago time when it was founded, when mass was first said there, and the
+glimmer of torches at the altar was seen through the vista of that
+broad-browed porch; and of all the procession of villagers that had
+since gone in and come out during nine hundred years, in their varying
+costume and fashion, but yet--and this was the strongest and most
+thrilling part of the idea--all, the very oldest of them, bearing a
+resemblance of feature, the kindred, the family likeness, to those who
+died yesterday,--to those who still went thither to worship; and that
+all the grassy and half-obliterated graves around had held those who
+bore the same traits.
+
+In front of the church was a little green, on which stood a very ancient
+yew tree, [Endnote: 2] all the heart of which seemed to have been eaten
+away by time, so that a man could now creep into the trunk, through a
+wide opening, and, looking upward, see another opening to the sky.
+
+"That tree," observed the Warden, "is well worth the notice of such an
+enthusiastic lover of old things; though I suppose aged trees may be
+the one antiquity that you do not value, having them by myriads in your
+primeval forests. But then the interest of this tree consists greatly
+in what your trees have not,--in its long connection with men and the
+goings of men. Some of its companions were made into bows for Harold's
+archers. This tree is of unreckonable antiquity; so old, that in
+a record of the time of Edward IV. it is styled the yew tree of
+Braithwaite Green. That carries it back to Norman times, truly. It was
+in comparatively modern times when it served as a gallows for one of
+James II.'s bloodthirsty judges to hang his victims on after Monmouth's
+rebellion."
+
+On one side of this yew was a certain structure which Redclyffe did
+not recognize as anything that he had before seen, but soon guessed
+its purpose; though, from appearances, it seemed to have been very
+long since it had served that purpose. It was a ponderous old oaken
+framework, six or seven feet high, so contrived that a heavy cross-piece
+shut down over another, leaving two round holes; in short, it was a pair
+of stocks, in which, I suppose, hundreds of vagrants and petty criminals
+had sat of old, but which now appeared to be merely a matter of
+curiosity.
+
+"This excellent old machine," said the Warden, "had been lying in a
+rubbish chamber of the church tower for at least a century; when the
+clerk, who is a little of an antiquarian, unearthed it, and I advised
+him to set it here, where it used to stand;--not with any idea of its
+being used (though there is as much need of it now as ever), but that
+the present age may see what comforts it has lost."
+
+They sat down a few moments on the circular seat, and looked at the
+pretty scene of this quiet little village, clustered round the old
+church as a centre; a collection of houses, mostly thatched, though
+there were one or two, with rather more pretension, that had roofs of
+red tiles. Some of them were stone cottages, whitewashed, but the larger
+edifices had timber frames, filled in with brick and plaster, which
+seemed to have been renewed in patches, and to be a frailer and less
+durable material than the old oak of their skeletons. They were gabled,
+with lattice windows, and picturesquely set off with projecting
+stones, and many little patchwork additions, such as, in the course of
+generations, the inhabitants had found themselves to need. There was not
+much commerce, apparently, in this little village, there seeming to be
+only one shop, with some gingerbread, penny whistles, ballads, and such
+matters, displayed in the window; and there, too, across the little
+green, opposite the church, was the village alehouse, with its bench
+under the low projecting eaves, with a Teniers scene of two wayfaring
+yeomen drinking a pot of beer and smoking their pipes.
+
+With Redclyffe's Yankee feelings, there was something sad to think how
+the generations had succeeded one another, over and over, in innumerable
+succession, in this little spot, being born here, living, dying, lying
+down among their fathers' dust, and forthwith getting up again, as it
+were, and recommencing the same meaningless round, and really bringing
+nothing to pass; for probably the generation of to-day, in so secluded
+and motionless a place as this, had few or no ideas in advance of their
+ancestors of five centuries ago. It seems not worth while that more than
+one generation of them should have existed. Even in dress, with their
+smock frocks and breeches, they were just like their fathers. The
+stirring blood of the new land,--where no man dwells in his father's
+house,--where no man thinks of dying in his birthplace,--awoke within
+him, and revolted at the thought; and, as connected with it, revolted at
+all the hereditary pretensions which, since his stay here, had exercised
+such an influence over the fanciful part of his nature. In another mood,
+the village might have seemed a picture of rural peace, which it would
+have been worth while to give up ambition to enjoy; now, as his warmer
+impulse stirred, it was a weariness to think of. The new American was
+stronger in him than the hereditary Englishman.
+
+"I should go mad of it!" exclaimed he aloud.
+
+He started up impulsively, to the amazement of his companion, who of
+course could not comprehend what seemed so to have stung his American
+friend. As they passed the tree, on the other side of its huge trunk,
+they saw a young woman, sitting on that side of it, and sketching,
+apparently, the church tower, with the old Elizabethan vicarage that
+stood near it, with a gate opening into the churchyard, and much
+embowered and ivy-hung.
+
+"Ah, Miss Cheltenham," said the Warden. "I am glad to see that you have
+taken the old church in hand, for it is one of the prettiest rustic
+churches in England, and as well worthy as any to be engraved on a sheet
+of note-paper or put into a portfolio. Will you let my friend and me see
+your sketch?"
+
+The Warden had made his request with rather more freedom than perhaps he
+would to a lady whom he considered on a level with himself, though with
+perfect respect, that being considered; and Redclyffe, looking at the
+person, saw that it was the same of whose face he had had a glimpse in
+the looking-glass, in the old palmer's chamber.
+
+"No, Doctor Hammond," said the young lady, with a respectful sort of
+frankness, "you must excuse me. I am no good artist, and am but jotting
+down the old church because I like it."
+
+"Well, well, as you please," said the Warden; and whispered aside to
+Redclyffe, "A girl's sketchbook is seldom worth looking at. But now,
+Miss Cheltenham, I am about to give my American friend here a lecture on
+gargoyles, and other peculiarities of sacred Gothic architecture; and
+if you will honor me with your attention, I should be glad to find my
+audience increased by one."
+
+So the young lady arose, and Redclyffe, considering the Warden's
+allusion to him as a sort of partial introduction, bowed to her, and she
+responded with a cold, reserved, yet not unpleasant sort of courtesy.
+They went towards the church porch, and, looking in at the old stone
+bench on each side of the interior, the Warden showed them the hacks
+of the swords of the Roundheads, when they took it by storm. Redclyffe,
+mindful of the old graveyard on the edge of which he had spent his
+childhood, began to look at this far more antique receptacle, expecting
+to find there many ancient tombstones, perhaps of contemporaries or
+predecessors of the founders of his country. In this, however, he was
+disappointed, at least in a great measure; for the persons buried in the
+churchyard were probably, for the most part, of a humble rank in life,
+such as were not so ambitious as to desire a monument of any kind, but
+were content to let their low earth-mounds subside into the level, where
+their memory had waxed so faint that none among the survivors could
+point out the spot, or cared any longer about knowing it; while in other
+cases, where a monument of red freestone, or even of hewn granite, had
+been erected, the English climate had forthwith set to work to gnaw away
+the inscriptions; so that in fifty years--in a time that would have left
+an American tombstone as fresh as if just cut--it was quite impossible
+to make out the record. Their superiors, meanwhile, were sleeping
+less enviably in dismal mouldy and dusty vaults, instead of under the
+daisies. Thus Redclyffe really found less antiquity here, than in the
+graveyard which might almost be called his natal spot.
+
+When he said something to this effect, the Warden nodded.
+
+"Yes," said he, "and, in truth, we have not much need of inscriptions
+for these poor people. All good families--every one almost, with
+any pretensions to respectable station, has his family or individual
+recognition within the church, or upon its walls; or some of them you
+see on tombs on the outside. As for our poorer friends here, they are
+content, as they may well be, to swell and subside, like little billows
+of mortality, here on the outside."
+
+"And for my part," said Redclyffe, "if there were anything particularly
+desirable on either side, I should like best to sleep under this lovely
+green turf, with the daisies strewn over me by Nature herself, and
+whatever other homely flowers any friend might choose to add."
+
+"And, Doctor Hammond," said the young woman, "we see by this gravestone
+that sometimes a person of humble rank may happen to be commemorated,
+and that Nature--in this instance at least--seems to take especial pains
+and pleasure to preserve the record."
+
+She indicated a flat gravestone, near the porch, which time had indeed
+beautified in a singular way, for there was cut deep into it a name and
+date, in old English characters, very deep it must originally have been;
+and as if in despair of obliterating it, Time had taken the kindlier
+method of filling up the letters with moss; so that now, high embossed
+in loveliest green, was seen the name "Richard Oglethorpe 1613";--green,
+and flourishing, and beautiful, like the memory of a good man. The
+inscription originally seemed to have contained some twenty lines, which
+might have been poetry, or perhaps a prose eulogy, or perhaps the simple
+record of the buried person's life; but all this, having been done
+in fainter and smaller letters, was now so far worn away as to be
+illegible; nor had they ever been deep enough to be made living in moss,
+like the rest of the inscription.
+
+"How tantalizing," remarked Redclyffe, "to see the verdant shine of this
+name, impressed upon us as something remarkable--and nothing else. I
+cannot but think that there must be something worth remembering about
+a man thus distinguished. When two hundred years have taken all these
+natural pains to illustrate and emblazon 'Richard Oglethorpe 1613.' Ha!
+I surely recollect that name. It haunts me somehow, as if it had been
+familiar of old."
+
+"And me," said the young lady.
+
+"It was an old name, hereabouts," observed the Warden, "but has been
+long extinct,--a cottage name, not a gentleman's. I doubt not that
+Oglethorpes sleep in many of these undistinguished graves."
+
+Redclyffe did not much attend to what his friend said, his attention
+being attracted to the tone--to something in the tone of the young lady,
+and also to her coincidence in his remark that the name appealed to some
+early recollection. He had been taxing his memory, to tell him when and
+how the name had become familiar to him; and he now remembered that it
+had occurred in the old Doctor's story of the Bloody Footstep, told to
+him and Elsie, so long ago. [Endnote: 3] To him and Elsie! It struck
+him--what if it were possible?--but he knew it was not--that the young
+lady had a remembrance also of the fact, and that she, after so many
+years, were mingling her thoughts with his. As this fancy recurred to
+him, he endeavored to get a glimpse of her face, and while he did so she
+turned it upon him. It was a quick, sensitive face, that did not seem
+altogether English; he would rather have imagined it American; but at
+all events he could not recognize it as one that he had seen before,
+and a thousand fantasies died within him as, in his momentary glance, he
+took in the volume of its contour.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+
+After the two friends had parted from the young lady, they passed
+through the village, and entered the park gate of Braithwaite Hall,
+pursuing a winding road through its beautiful scenery, which realized
+all that Redclyffe had read or dreamed about the perfect beauty of
+these sylvan creations, with the clumps of trees, or sylvan oaks,
+picturesquely disposed. To heighten the charm, they saw a herd of deer
+reposing, who, on their appearance, rose from their recumbent position,
+and began to gaze warily at the strangers; then, tossing their horns,
+they set off on a stampede, but only swept round, and settled down not
+far from where they were. Redclyffe looked with great interest at these
+deer, who were at once wild and civilized; retaining a kind of free
+forest citizenship, while yet they were in some sense subject to man. It
+seemed as if they were a link between wild nature and tame; as if they
+could look back, in their long recollections, through a vista, into the
+times when England's forests were as wild as those of America, though
+now they were but a degree more removed from domesticity than cattle,
+and took their food in winter from the hand of man, and in summer
+reposed upon his lawns. This seemed the last touch of that delightful
+conquered and regulated wildness, which English art has laid upon the
+whole growth of English nature, animal or vegetable.
+
+"There is nothing really wild in your whole island," he observed to the
+Warden. "I have a sensation as if somebody knew, and had cultivated and
+fostered, and set out in its proper place, every tree that grows; as if
+somebody had patted the heads of your wildest animals and played with
+them. It is very delightful to me, for the present; and yet, I think, in
+the course of time, I should feel the need for something genuine, as
+it were,--something that had not the touch and breath of man upon it. I
+suppose even your skies are modified by the modes of human life that are
+going on beneath it. London skies, of course, are so; but the breath of
+a great people, to say nothing of its furnace vapors and hearth-smokes,
+make the sky other than it was a thousand years ago."
+
+"I believe we English have a feeling like this occasionally," replied
+the Warden, "and it is from that, partly, that we must account for our
+adventurousness into other regions, especially for our interest in what
+is wild and new. In your own forests, now, and prairies, I fancy we find
+a charm that Americans do not. In the sea, too, and therefore we are
+yachters. For my part, however, I have grown to like Nature a little
+smoothed down, and enriched; less gaunt and wolfish than she would be if
+left to herself."
+
+"Yes; I feel that charm too," said Redclyffe. "But yet life would be
+slow and heavy, methinks, to see nothing but English parks."
+
+Continuing their course through the noble clumps of oaks, they by and
+by had a vista of the distant hall itself. It was one of the old English
+timber and plaster houses, many of which are of unknown antiquity; as
+was the case with a portion of this house, although other portions had
+been renewed, repaired, or added, within a century. It had, originally,
+the Warden said, stood all round an enclosed courtyard, like the great
+houses of the Continent; but now one side of the quadrangle had long
+been removed, and there was only a front, with two wings; the beams of
+old oak being picked out with black, and three or four gables in a line
+forming the front, while the wings seemed to be stone. It was the timber
+portion that was most ancient. A clock was on the midmost gable, and
+pointed now towards one o'clock. The whole scene impressed Redclyffe,
+not as striking, but as an abode of ancient peace, where generation
+after generation of the same family had lived, each making the most of
+life, because the life of each successive dweller there was eked out
+with the lives of all who had hitherto lived there, and had in it
+equally those lives which were to come afterwards; so that there was
+a rare and successful contrivance for giving length, fulness, body,
+substance, to this thin and frail matter of human life. And, as life was
+so rich in comprehensiveness, the dwellers there made the most of it for
+the present and future, each generation contriving what it could to add
+to the cosiness, the comfortableness, the grave, solid respectability,
+the sylvan beauty, of the house with which they seemed to be connected
+both before and after death. The family had its home there; not merely
+the individual. Ancient shapes, that had apparently gone to the family
+tomb, had yet a right by family hearth and in family hall; nor did they
+come thither cold and shivering, and diffusing dim ghostly terrors, and
+repulsive shrinkings, and death in life; but in warm, genial attributes,
+making this life now passing more dense as it were, by adding all the
+substance of their own to it. Redclyffe could not compare this abode,
+and the feelings that it aroused, to the houses of his own country; poor
+tents of a day, inns of a night, where nothing was certain, save that
+the family of him who built it would not dwell here, even if he himself
+should have the bliss to die under the roof, which, with absurdest
+anticipations, he had built for his posterity. Posterity! An American
+can have none.
+
+"All this sort of thing is beautiful; the family institution was
+beautiful in its day," ejaculated he, aloud, to himself, not to his
+companion; "but it is a thing of the past. It is dying out in England;
+and as for ourselves, we never had it. Something better will come up;
+but as for this, it is past."
+
+"That is a sad thing to say," observed the Warden, by no means
+comprehending what was passing in his friend's mind. "But if you wish
+to view the interior of the Hall, we will go thither; for, harshly as
+I have spoken of the owner, I suppose he has English feeling enough to
+give us lunch and show us the old house of his forefathers."
+
+"Not at present, if you please," replied Redclyffe. "I am afraid of
+destroying my delightful visionary idea of the house by coming too near
+it. Before I leave this part of the country, I should be glad to ramble
+over the whole of it, but not just now."
+
+While Redclyffe was still enjoying the frank hospitality of his new
+friend, a rather marked event occurred in his life; yet not so important
+in reality as it seemed to his English friend.
+
+A large letter was delivered to him, bearing the official seal of the
+United States, and the indorsement of the State Department; a very
+important-looking document, which could not but add to the importance of
+the recipient in the eyes of any Englishman, accustomed as they are
+to bow down before any seal of government. Redclyffe opened it rather
+coolly, being rather loath to renew any of his political remembrances,
+now that he was in peace; or to think of the turmoil of modern and
+democratic politics, here in this quietude of gone-by ages and customs.
+The contents, however, took him by surprise; nor did he know whether to
+be pleased or not.
+
+The official package, in short, contained an announcement that he had
+been appointed by the President, by and with the advice of the Senate,
+to one of the Continental missions, usually esteemed an object of
+considerable ambition to any young man in politics; so that, if
+consistent with his own pleasure, he was now one of the Diplomatic
+Corps, a Minister, and representative of his country. On first
+considering the matter, Redclyffe was inclined to doubt whether this
+honor had been obtained for him altogether by friendly aid, though it
+did happen to have much in it that might suit his half-formed purpose of
+remaining long abroad; but with an eye already rendered somewhat oblique
+by political practice, he suspected that a political rival--a rival,
+though of his own party--had been exerting himself to provide an
+inducement for Redclyffe to leave the local field to him; while he
+himself should take advantage of the vacant field, and his rival be thus
+insidiously, though honorably, laid on the shelf, whence if he should
+try to remove himself a few years hence the shifting influences of
+American politics would be likely enough to thwart him; so that, for the
+sake of being a few years nominally somebody, he might in fine come back
+to his own country and find himself permanently nobody. But Redclyffe
+had already sufficiently begun to suspect that he lacked some qualities
+that a politician ought to have, and without which a political life,
+whether successful or otherwise, is sure to be a most irksome one: some
+qualities he lacked, others he had, both almost equally an obstacle.
+When he communicated the offer, therefore, to his friend, the Warden, it
+was with the remark that he believed he should accept it.
+
+"Accept it?" cried the Warden, opening his eyes. "I should think so,
+indeed! Why, it puts you above the level of the highest nobility of
+the Court to which you are accredited; simple republican as you are, it
+gives you rank with the old blood and birth of Europe. Accept it? By all
+means; and I will come and see you at your court."
+
+"Nothing is more different between England and America," said Redclyffe,
+"than the different way in which the citizen of either country looks
+at official station. To an Englishman, a commission, of whatever kind,
+emanating from his sovereign, brings apparently a gratifying sense of
+honor; to an American, on the contrary, it offers really nothing of
+the kind. He ceases to be a sovereign,--an atom of sovereignty, at all
+events,--and stoops to be a servant. If I accept this mission, honorable
+as you think it, I assure you I shall not feel myself quite the man I
+have hitherto been; although there is no obstacle in the way of party
+obligations or connections to my taking it, if I please."
+
+"I do not well understand this," quoth the good Warden. "It is one of
+the promises of Scripture to the wise man, that he shall stand before
+kings, and that this embassy will enable you to do. No man--no man of
+your country surely--is more worthy to do so; so pray accept."
+
+"I think I shall," said Redclyffe.
+
+Much as the Warden had seemed to affectionize Redclyffe hitherto, the
+latter could not but be sensible, thereafter, of a certain deference in
+his friend towards him, which he would fain have got rid of, had it been
+in his power. However, there was still the same heartiness under it all;
+and after a little he seemed, in some degree, to take Redclyffe's
+own view of the matter;--namely, that, being so temporary as these
+republican distinctions are, they really do not go skin deep, have no
+reality in them, and that the sterling quality of the man, be it higher
+or lower, is nowise altered by it;--an apothegm that is true even of
+an hereditary nobility, and still more so of our own Honorables and
+Excellencies. However, the good Warden was glad of his friend's dignity,
+and perhaps, too, a little glad that this high fortune had befallen one
+whom he chanced to be entertaining under his roof. As it happened, there
+was an opportunity which might be taken advantage of to celebrate the
+occasion; at least, to make it known to the English world so far as the
+extent of the county. [Endnote: 1.]
+
+It was an hereditary custom for the warden of Braithwaite Hospital,
+once a year, to give a grand dinner to the nobility and gentry of the
+neighborhood; and to this end a bequest had been made by one of the
+former squires or lords of Braithwaite which would of itself suffice
+to feed forty or fifty Englishmen with reasonable sumptuousness. The
+present Warden, being a gentleman of private fortune, was accustomed to
+eke the limited income, devoted for this purpose, with such additions
+from his own resources as brought the rude and hearty hospitality
+contemplated by the first founder on a par with modern refinements of
+gourmandism. The banquet was annually given in the fine old hall where
+James II. had feasted; and on some of these occasions the Warden's table
+had been honored with illustrious guests; especially when any of them
+happened to be wanting an opportunity to come before the public in an
+after-dinner speech. Just at present there was no occasion of that sort;
+and the good Warden fancied that he might give considerable _�clat_ to
+his hereditary feast by bringing forward the young American envoy, a
+distinguished and eloquent man, to speak on the well-worn topic of the
+necessity of friendly relations between England and America.
+
+"You are eloquent, I doubt not, my young friend?" inquired he.
+
+"Why, no," answered Redclyffe, modestly.
+
+"Ah, yes, I know it," returned the Warden. "If one have all the natural
+prerequisites of eloquence; a quick sensibility, ready thought, apt
+expression, a good voice--and not making its way into the world through
+your nose either, as they say most of your countrymen's voices do. You
+shall make the crack speech at my dinner; and so strengthen the bonds
+of good fellowship between our two countries, that there shall be no
+question of war for at least six months to come."
+
+Accordingly, the preparations for this stately banquet went on with
+great spirit; and the Warden exhorted Redclyffe to be thinking of some
+good topics for his international speech; but the young man laughed it
+off, and told his friend that he thought the inspiration of the moment,
+aided by the good old wine which the Warden had told him of, as among
+the treasures of the Hospital, would perhaps serve him better than any
+elaborate preparation.
+
+Redclyffe, being not even yet strong, used to spend much time, when the
+day chanced to be pleasant, (which was oftener than his preconceptions
+of English weather led him to expect,) in the garden behind the Warden's
+house. It was an extensive one, and apparently as antique as the
+foundation of the establishment; and during all these years it had
+probably been growing richer and richer. Here were flowers of ancient
+race, and some that had been merely field or wayside flowers when first
+they came into the garden; but by long cultivation and hereditary care,
+instead of dying out, they had acquired a new richness and beauty, so
+that you would scarcely recognize the daisy or the violet. Roses too,
+there were, which Doctor Hammond said had been taken from those white
+and red rose-trees in the Temple Gardens, whence the partisans of York
+and Lancaster had plucked their fatal badges. With these, there were
+all the modern and far-fetched flowers from America, the East, and
+elsewhere; even the prairie flowers and the California blossoms were
+represented here; for one of the brethren had horticultural tastes, and
+was permitted freely to exercise them there. The antique character of
+the garden was preserved, likewise, by the alleys of box, a part of
+which had been suffered to remain, and was now grown to a great height
+and density, so as to make impervious green walls. There were also
+yew trees clipped into strange shapes of bird and beast, and uncouth
+heraldic figures, among which of course the leopard's head grinned
+triumphant; and as for fruit, the high garden wall was lined with pear
+trees, spread out flat against it, where they managed to produce a cold,
+flavorless fruit, a good deal akin to cucumbers.
+
+Here, in these genial old arbors, Redclyffe used to recline in the
+sweet, mild summer weather, basking in the sun, which was seldom too
+warm to make its full embrace uncomfortable; and it seemed to him, with
+its fertility, with its marks everywhere of the quiet long-bestowed care
+of man, the sweetest and cosiest seclusion he had ever known; and two
+or three times a day, when he heard the screech of the railway train,
+rushing on towards distant London, it impressed him still more with a
+sense of safe repose here.
+
+Not unfrequently he here met the white-bearded palmer in whose chamber
+he had found himself, as if conveyed thither by enchantment, when he
+first came to the Hospital. The old man was not by any means of
+the garrulous order; and yet he seemed full of thoughts, full of
+reminiscences, and not disinclined to the company of Redclyffe. In fact,
+the latter sometimes flattered himself that a tendency for his society
+was one of the motives that brought him to the garden; though the amount
+of their intercourse, after all, was not so great as to warrant the
+idea of any settled purpose in so doing. Nevertheless, they talked
+considerably; and Redclyffe could easily see that the old man had
+been an extensive traveller, and had perhaps occupied situations far
+different from his present one, and had perhaps been a struggler
+in troubled waters before he was drifted into the retirement where
+Redclyffe found him. He was fond of talking about the unsuspected
+relationship that must now be existing between many families in England
+and unknown consanguinity in the new world, where, perhaps, really the
+main stock of the family tree was now existing, and with a new spirit
+and life, which the representative growth here in England had lost by
+too long continuance in one air and one mode of life. For history and
+observation proved that all people--and the English people by no means
+less than others--needed to be transplanted, or somehow renewed, every
+few generations; so that, according to this ancient philosopher's
+theory, it would be good for the whole people of England now, if
+it could at once be transported to America, where its fatness, its
+sleepiness, its too great beefiness, its preponderant animal character,
+would be rectified by a different air and soil; and equally good, on the
+other hand, for the whole American people to be transplanted back to the
+original island, where their nervousness might be weighted with heavier
+influences, where their little women might grow bigger, where their
+thin, dry men might get a burden of flesh and good stomachs, where their
+children might, with the air, draw in a reverence for age, forms, and
+usage.
+
+Redclyffe listened with complacency to these speculations, smiling at
+the thought of such an exodus as would take place, and the reciprocal
+dissatisfaction which would probably be the result. But he had greater
+pleasure in drawing out some of the old gentleman's legendary lore, some
+of which, whether true or not, was very curious. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+As Redclyffe sat one day watching the old man in the garden, he could
+not help being struck by the scrupulous care with which he attended
+to the plants; it seemed to him that there was a sense of justice,--of
+desiring to do exactly what was right in the matter, not favoring one
+plant more than another, and doing all he could for each. His progress,
+in consequence, was so slow, that in an hour, while Redclyffe was off
+and on looking at him, he had scarcely done anything perceptible. Then
+he was so minute; and often, when he was on the point of leaving one
+thing to take up another, some small neglect that he saw or fancied
+called him back again, to spend other minutes on the same task. He
+was so full of scruples. It struck Redclyffe that this was conscience,
+morbid, sick, a despot in trifles, looking so closely into life that it
+permitted nothing to be done. The man might once have been strong and
+able, but by some unhealthy process of his life he had ceased to be so
+now. Nor did any happy or satisfactory result appear to come from these
+painfully wrought efforts; he still seemed to know that he had left
+something undone in doing too much in another direction. Here was a lily
+that had been neglected, while he paid too much attention to a rose; he
+had set his foot on a violet; he had grubbed up, in his haste, a little
+plant that he mistook for a weed, but that he now suspected was an herb
+of grace. Grieved by such reflections as these, he heaved a deep sigh,
+almost amounting to a groan, and sat down on the little stool that he
+carried with him in his weeding, resting his face in his hands.
+
+Redclyffe deemed that he might be doing the old man a good service by
+interrupting his melancholy labors; so he emerged from the opposite door
+of the summer-house, and came along the adjoining walk with somewhat
+heavy footsteps, in order that the palmer might have warning of his
+approach without any grounds to suppose that he had been watched
+hitherto. Accordingly, when he turned into the other alley, he found the
+old man sitting erect on his stool, looking composed, but still sad, as
+was his general custom.
+
+"After all your wanderings and experience," said he, "I observe that
+you come back to the original occupation of cultivating a garden,--the
+innocentest of all."
+
+"Yes, so it would seem," said the old man; "but somehow or other I do
+not find peace in this."
+
+"These plants and shrubs," returned Redclyffe, "seem at all events to
+recognize the goodness of your rule, so far as it has extended over
+them. See how joyfully they take the sun; how clear [they are] from all
+these vices that lie scattered round, in the shape of weeds. It is a
+lovely sight, and I could almost fancy a quiet enjoyment in the plants
+themselves, which they have no way of making us aware of, except by
+giving out a fragrance."
+
+"Ah! how infinitely would that idea increase man's responsibility," said
+the old palmer, "if, besides man and beast, we should find it necessary
+to believe that there is also another set of beings dependent for their
+happiness on our doing, or leaving undone, what might have effect on
+them!"
+
+"I question," said Redclyffe, smiling, "whether their pleasurable or
+painful experiences can be so keen, that we need trouble our consciences
+much with regard to what we do, merely as it affects them. So highly
+cultivated a conscience as that would be a nuisance to one's self and
+one's fellows."
+
+"You say a terrible thing," rejoined the old man. "Can conscience be too
+much alive in us? is not everything however trifling it seems, an item
+in the great account, which it is of infinite importance therefore to
+have right? A terrible thing is that you have said."
+
+"That may be," said Redclyffe; "but it is none the less certain to me,
+that the efficient actors--those who mould the world--are the persons
+in whom something else is developed more strongly than conscience. There
+must be an invincible determination to effect something; it may be
+set to work in the right direction, but after that it must go onward,
+trampling down small obstacles--small considerations of right and
+wrong--as a great rock, thundering down a hillside, crushes a thousand
+sweet flowers, and ploughs deep furrows in the innocent hillside."
+
+As Redclyffe gave vent to this doctrine, which was not naturally his,
+but which had been the inculcation of a life, hitherto devoted to
+politics, he was surprised to find how strongly sensible he became of
+the ugliness and indefensibleness of what he said. He felt as if he were
+speaking under the eye of Omniscience, and as if every word he said were
+weighed, and its emptiness detected, by an unfailing intelligence. He
+had thought that he had volumes to say about the necessity of consenting
+not to do right in all matters minutely, for the sake of getting out an
+available and valuable right as the whole; but there was something that
+seemed to tie his tongue. Could it be the quiet gaze of this old man,
+so unpretending, so humble, so simple in aspect? He could not tell, only
+that he faltered, and finally left his speech in the midst.
+
+But he was surprised to find how he had to struggle against a certain
+repulsion within himself to the old man. He seemed so nonsensical,
+interfering with everybody's right in the world; so mischievous,
+standing there and shutting out the possibility of action. It seemed
+well to trample him down; to put him out of the way--no matter
+how--somehow. It gave him, he thought, an inkling of the way in which
+this poor old man had made himself odious to his kind, by opposing
+himself, inevitably, to what was bad in man, chiding it by his very
+presence, accepting nothing false. You must either love him utterly,
+or hate him utterly; for he could not let you alone. Redclyffe, being a
+susceptible man, felt this influence in the strongest way; for it was
+as if there was a battle within him, one party pulling, wrenching him
+towards the old man, another wrenching him away, so that, by the agony
+of the contest, he felt disposed to end it by taking flight, and never
+seeing the strange individual again. He could well enough conceive how a
+brutal nature, if capable of receiving his influence at all, might find
+it so intolerable that it must needs get rid of him by violence,--by
+taking his blood if necessary.
+
+All these feelings were but transitory, however; they swept across him
+like a wind, and then he looked again at the old man and saw only his
+simplicity, his unworldliness,--saw little more than the worn and feeble
+individual in the Hospital garb, leaning on his staff; and then turning
+again with a gentle sigh to weed in the garden. And then Redclyffe
+went away, in a state of disturbance for which he could not account to
+himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+
+High up in the old carved roof, meanwhile, the spiders of centuries
+still hung their flaunting webs with a profusion that old Doctor
+Grimshawe would have been ravished to see; but even this was to be
+remedied, for one day, on looking in, Redclyffe found the great hall dim
+with floating dust, and down through it came great floating masses of
+cobweb, out of which the old Doctor would have undertaken to regenerate
+the world; and he saw, dimly aloft, men on ladders sweeping away these
+accumulations of years, and breaking up the haunts and residences of
+hereditary spiders.
+
+The stately old hall had been in process of cleaning and adapting to the
+banquet purposes of the nineteenth century, which it was accustomed
+to subserve, in so proud a way, in the sixteenth. It was, in the first
+place, well swept and cleansed; the painted glass windows were cleansed
+from dust, and several panes, which had been unfortunately broken and
+filled with common glass, were filled in with colored panes, which the
+Warden had picked up somewhere in his antiquarian researches. They were
+not, to be sure, just what was wanted; a piece of a saint, from some
+cathedral window, supplying what was lacking of the gorgeous purple of
+a medi�val king; but the general effect was rich and good, whenever the
+misty English atmosphere supplied sunshine bright enough to pervade it.
+Tapestry, too, from antique looms, faded, but still gorgeous, was
+hung upon the walls. Some suits of armor, that hung beneath the festal
+gallery, were polished till the old battered helmets and pierced
+breastplates sent a gleam like that with which they had flashed across
+the battle-fields of old. [Endnote: 1.]
+
+So now the great day of the Warden's dinner had arrived; and, as may be
+supposed, there were fiery times in the venerable old kitchen. The cook,
+according to ancient custom, concocted many antique dishes, such as used
+to be set before kings and nobles; dainties that might have called the
+dead out of their graves; combinations of ingredients that had ceased
+to be put together for centuries; historic dishes, which had long, long
+ceased to be in the list of revels. Then there was the stalwart English
+cheer of the sirloin, and the round; there were the vast plum-puddings,
+the juicy mutton, the venison; there was the game, now just
+in season,--the half-tame wild fowl of English covers, the
+half-domesticated wild deer of English parks, the heathcock from
+the far-off hills of Scotland, and one little prairie hen, and some
+canvas-back ducks--obtained, Heaven knows how, in compliment to
+Redclyffe--from his native shores. O, the old jolly kitchen! how rich
+the flavored smoke that went up its vast chimney! how inestimable the
+atmosphere of steam that was diffused through it! How did the old men
+peep into it, even venture across the threshold, braving the hot wrath
+of the cook and his assistants, for the sake of imbuing themselves
+with these rich and delicate flavors, receiving them in as it were
+spiritually; for, received through the breath and in the atmosphere, it
+was really a spiritual enjoyment. The ghosts of ancient epicures seemed,
+on that day and the few preceding ones, to haunt the dim passages,
+snuffing in with shadowy nostrils the rich vapors, assuming visibility
+in the congenial medium, almost becoming earthly again in the strength
+of their earthly longings for one other feast such as they used to
+enjoy.
+
+Nor is it to be supposed that it was only these antique dainties that
+the Warden provided for his feast. No; if the cook, the cultured and
+recondite old cook, who had accumulated within himself all that his
+predecessors knew for centuries,--if he lacked anything of modern
+fashion and improvement, he had supplied his defect by temporary
+assistance from a London club; and the bill of fare was provided with
+dishes that Soyer would not have harshly criticised. The ethereal
+delicacy of modern taste, the nice adjustment of flowers, the French
+style of cookery, was richly attended to; and the list was long of
+dishes with fantastic names, fish, fowl, and flesh; and _entremets_, and
+"sweets," as the English call them, and sugared cates, too numerous to
+think of.
+
+The wines we will not take upon ourselves to enumerate; but the juice,
+then destined to be quaffed, was in part the precious vintages that had
+been broached half a century ago, and had been ripening ever since;
+the rich and dry old port, so unlovely to the natural palate that it
+requires long English seasoning to get it down; the sherry, imported
+before these modern days of adulteration; some claret, the Warden said
+of rarest vintage; some Burgundy, of which it was the quality to warm
+the blood and genialize existence for three days after it was drunk.
+Then there was a rich liquid contributed to this department by Redclyffe
+himself; for, some weeks since, when the banquet first loomed in the
+distance, he had (anxious to evince his sense of the Warden's kindness)
+sent across the ocean for some famous Madeira which he had inherited
+from the Doctor, and never tasted yet. This, together with some of the
+Western wines of America, had arrived, and was ready to be broached.
+
+The Warden tested these modern wines, and recognized a new flavor,
+but gave it only a moderate approbation; for, in truth, an elderly
+Englishman has not a wide appreciation of wines, nor loves new things
+in this kind more than in literature or life. But he tasted the Madeira,
+too, and underwent an ecstasy, which was only alleviated by the dread of
+gout, which he had an idea that this wine must bring on,--and truly,
+if it were so splendid a wine as he pronounced it, some pain ought to
+follow as the shadow of such a pleasure.
+
+As it was a festival of antique date, the dinner hour had been fixed
+earlier than is usual at such stately banquets; namely, at six o'clock,
+which was long before the dusky hour at which Englishmen love best to
+dine. About that period, the carriages drove into the old courtyard of
+the Hospital in great abundance; blocking up, too, the ancient portal,
+and remaining in a line outside. Carriages they were with armorial
+bearings, family coaches in which came Englishmen in their black coats
+and white neckcloths, elderly, white-headed, fresh-colored, squat; not
+beautiful, certainly, nor particularly dignified, nor very well dressed,
+nor with much of an imposing air, but yet, somehow or other, producing
+an effect of force, respectability, reliableness, trust, which is
+probably deserved, since it is invariably experienced. Cold they were
+in deportment, and looked coldly on the stranger, who, on his part, drew
+himself up with an extra haughtiness and reserve, and felt himself in
+the midst of his enemies, and more as if he were going to do battle
+than to sit down to a friendly banquet. The Warden introduced him, as an
+American diplomatist, to one or two of the gentlemen, who regarded him
+forbiddingly, as Englishmen do before dinner.
+
+Not long after Redclyffe had entered the reception-room, which was but
+shortly before the hour appointed for the dinner, there was another
+arrival betokened by the clatter of hoofs and grinding wheels in the
+courtyard; and then entered a gentleman of different mien from the
+bluff, ruddy, simple-minded, yet worldly Englishmen around him. He was a
+tall, dark man, with a black moustache and almost olive skin, a slender,
+lithe figure, a flexible face, quick, flashing, mobile. His deportment
+was graceful; his dress, though it seemed to differ in little or
+nothing from that of the gentlemen in the room, had yet a grace and
+picturesqueness in his mode of wearing it. He advanced to the Warden,
+who received him with distinction, and yet, Redclyffe fancied, not
+exactly with cordiality. It seemed to Redclyffe that the Warden looked
+round, as if with the purpose of presenting Redclyffe to this gentleman,
+but he himself, from some latent reluctance, had turned away and
+entered, into conversation with one of the other gentlemen, who said
+now, looking at the new-comer, "Are you acquainted with this last
+arrival?"
+
+"Not at all," said Redclyffe. "I know Lord Braithwaite by sight, indeed,
+but have had no introduction. He is a man, certainly, of distinguished
+appearance."
+
+"Why, pretty well," said the gentleman, "but un-English, as also are his
+manners. It is a pity to see an old English family represented by such
+a person. Neither he, his father, nor grandfather was born among us; he
+has far more Italian blood than enough to drown the slender stream of
+Anglo-Saxon and Norman. His modes of life, his prejudices, his estates,
+his religion, are unlike our own; and yet here he is in the position of
+an old English gentleman, possibly to be a peer. You, whose nationality
+embraces that of all the world, cannot, I suppose, understand this
+English feeling." [Endnote: 2.]
+
+"Pardon me," said Redclyffe, "I can perfectly understand it. An
+American, in his feelings towards England, has all the jealousy and
+exclusiveness of Englishmen themselves,--perhaps, indeed, a little
+exaggerated."
+
+"I beg your pardon," said the Englishman, incredulously, "I think you
+cannot possibly understand it!" [Endnote: 3.]
+
+The guests were by this time all assembled, and at the Warden's bidding
+they moved from the reception-room to the dining-hall, in some order and
+precedence, of which Redclyffe could not exactly discover the principle,
+though he found that to himself--in his quality, doubtless, of
+Ambassador--there was assigned a pretty high place. A venerable
+dignitary of the Church--a dean, he seemed to be--having asked a
+blessing, the fair scene of the banquet now lay before the guests,
+presenting a splendid spectacle, in the high-walled, antique, tapestried
+hall, overhung with the dark, intricate oaken beams, with the high
+Gothic windows, through one of which the setting sunbeams streamed, and
+showed the figures of kings and warriors, and the old Braithwaites among
+them. Beneath and adown the hall extended the long line of the tables,
+covered with the snow of the damask tablecloth, on which glittered,
+gleamed, and shone a good quality of ancient ancestral plate, and an
+_�pergne_ of silver, extending down the middle; also the gleam of golden
+wine in the decanters; and truly Redclyffe thought that it was a noble
+spectacle, made so by old and stately associations, which made a noble
+banquet of what otherwise would be only a vulgar dinner. The English
+have this advantage and know how to make use of it. They bring--in these
+old, time-honored feasts--all the past to sit down and take the stately
+refreshment along with them, and they pledge the historic characters in
+their wine.
+
+A printed bill of fare, in gold letters, lay by each plate, on which
+Redclyffe saw the company glancing with great interest. The first dish,
+of course, was turtle soup, of which--as the gentleman next him, the
+Mayor of a neighboring town, told Redclyffe--it was allowable to take
+twice. This was accompanied, according to one of those rules which one
+knows not whether they are arbitrary or founded on some deep reason, by
+a glass of punch. Then came the noble turbot, the salmon, the sole, and
+divers of fishes, and the dinner fairly set in. The genial Warden seemed
+to have given liberal orders to the attendants, for they spared not
+to offer hock, champagne, sherry, to the guests, and good bitter ale,
+foaming in the goblet; and so the stately banquet went on, with somewhat
+tedious magnificence; and yet with a fulness of effect and thoroughness
+of sombre life that made Redclyffe feel that, so much importance being
+assigned to it,--it being so much believed in,--it was indeed a feast.
+The cumbrous courses swept by, one after another; and Redclyffe, finding
+it heavy work, sat idle most of the time, regarding the hall, the old
+decaying beams, the armor hanging beneath the galleries, and these
+Englishmen feasting where their fathers had feasted for so many ages,
+the same occasion, the same men, probably, in appearance, though
+the black coat and the white neckcloth had taken the place of ruff,
+embroidered doublet, and the magnificence of other ages. After all, the
+English have not such good things to eat as we in America, and certainly
+do not know better how to make them palatable. [Endnote: 4.]
+
+Well; but by and by the dinner came to a conclusion, as regarded the
+eating part; the cloth was withdrawn; a dessert of fruits, fresh and
+dried, pines, hothouse grapes, and all candied conserves of the Indies,
+was put on the long extent of polished mahogany. There was a tuning up
+of musicians, an interrogative drawing of fiddle-bows, and other
+musical twangs and puffs; the decanters opposite the Warden and his
+vice-president,--sherry, port, Redclyffe's Madeira, and claret, were put
+in motion along the table, and the guests filled their glasses for the
+toast which, at English dinner-tables, is of course the first to be
+honored,--the Queen. Then the band struck up the good old anthem, "God
+save the Queen," which the whole company rose to their feet to sing.
+It was a spectacle both interesting and a little ludicrous to
+Redclyffe,--being so apart from an American's sympathies, so unlike
+anything that he has in his life or possibilities,--this active and warm
+sentiment of loyalty, in which love of country centres, and assimilates,
+and transforms itself into a passionate affection for a person, in whom
+they love all their institutions. To say the truth, it seemed a happy
+notion; nor could the American--while he comforted himself in the pride
+of his democracy, and that he himself was a sovereign--could he help
+envying it a little, this childlike love and reverence for a person
+embodying all their country, their past, their earthly future. He felt
+that it might be delightful to have a sovereign, provided that sovereign
+were always a woman,--and perhaps a young and fine one. But, indeed,
+this is not the difficulty, methinks, in English institutions which
+the American finds it hardest to deal with. We could endure a born
+sovereign, especially if made such a mere pageant as the English make of
+theirs. What we find it hardest to conceive of is, the satisfaction with
+which Englishmen think of a race above them, with privileges that they
+cannot share, entitled to condescend to them, and to have gracious and
+beautiful manners at their expense; to be kind, simple, unpretending,
+because these qualities are more available than haughtiness; to be
+specimens of perfect manhood;--all these advantages in consequence of
+their position. If the peerage were a mere name, it would be nothing to
+envy; but it is so much more than a name; it enables men to be really so
+superior. The poor, the lower classes, might bear this well enough;
+but the classes that come next to the nobility,--the upper middle
+classes,--how they bear it so lovingly is what must puzzle the American.
+But probably the advantage of the peerage is the less perceptible the
+nearer it is looked at.
+
+It must be confessed that Redclyffe, as he looked at this assembly
+of peers and gentlemen, thought with some self-gratulation of the
+probability that he had within his power as old a rank, as desirable a
+station, as the best of them; and that if he were restrained from taking
+it, it would probably only be by the democratic pride that made him
+feel that he could not, retaining all his manly sensibility, accept
+this gewgaw on which the ages--his own country especially--had passed
+judgment, while it had been suspended over his head. He felt himself, at
+any rate, in a higher position, having the option of taking this rank,
+and forbearing to do so, than if he took it. [Endnote: 5.]
+
+After this ensued a ceremony which is of antique date in old English
+corporations and institutions, at their high festivals. It is called the
+Loving Cup. A sort of herald or toast-master behind the Warden's chair
+made proclamation, reciting the names of the principal guests, and
+announcing to them, "The Warden of the Braithwaite Hospital drinks to
+you in a Loving Cup"; of which cup, having sipped, or seemed to sip (for
+Redclyffe observed that the old drinkers were rather shy of it) a small
+quantity, he sent it down the table. Its progress was accompanied with
+a peculiar entanglement of ceremony, one guest standing up while another
+drinks, being pretty much as follows. First, each guest receiving it
+covered from the next above him, the same took from the silver cup its
+silver cover; the guest drank with a bow to the Warden and company, took
+the cover from the preceding guest, covered the cup, handed it to the
+next below him, then again removed the cover, replaced it after the
+guest had drunk, who, on his part, went through the same ceremony.
+And thus the cup went slowly on its way down the stately hall; these
+ceremonies being, it is said, originally precautions against the risk,
+in wild times, of being stabbed by the man who was drinking with you, or
+poisoned by one who should fail to be your taster. The cup was a fine,
+ancient piece of plate, massive, heavy, curiously wrought with armorial
+bearings, in which the leopard's head appeared. Its contents, so far as
+Redclyffe could analyze them by a moderate sip, appeared to be claret,
+sweetened, with spices, and, however suited to the peculiarity of
+antique palates, was not greatly to Redclyffe's taste. [Endnote: 6.]
+
+Redclyffe's companion just below him, while the Loving Cup was beginning
+its march, had been explaining the origin of the custom as a defence
+of the drinker in times of deadly feud; when it had reached Lord
+Braithwaite, who drank and passed it to Redclyffe covered, and with the
+usual bow, Redclyffe looked into his Lordship's Italian eyes and dark
+face as he did so, and the thought struck him, that, if there could
+possibly be any use in keeping up this old custom, it might be so now;
+for, how intimated he could hardly tell, he was sensible in his deepest
+self of a deadly hostility in this dark, courteous, handsome face. He
+kept his eyes fixed on his Lordship as he received the cup, and felt
+that in his own glance there was an acknowledgment of the enmity that he
+perceived, and a defiance, expressed without visible sign, and felt in
+the bow with which they greeted one another. When they had both resumed
+their seats, Redclyffe chose to make this ceremonial intercourse the
+occasion of again addressing him.
+
+"I know not whether your Lordship is more accustomed than myself to
+these stately ceremonials," said he.
+
+"No," said Lord Braithwaite, whose English was very good. "But this is
+a good old ceremony, and an ingenious one; for does it not twine us into
+knotted links of love--this Loving Cup--like a wreath of Bacchanals whom
+I have seen surrounding an antique vase. Doubtless it has great
+efficacy in entwining a company of friendly guests into one affectionate
+society."
+
+"Yes; it should seem so," replied Redclyffe, with a smile, and again
+meeting those black eyes, which smiled back on him. "It should seem so,
+but it appears that the origin of the custom was quite different, and
+that it was as a safeguard to a man when he drank with his enemy. What
+a peculiar flavor it must have given to the liquor, when the eyes of two
+deadly foes met over the brim of the Loving Cup, and the drinker knew
+that, if he withdrew it, a dagger would be in his heart, and the other
+watched him drink, to see if it was poison!"
+
+"Ah!" responded his Lordship, "they had strange fashions in those rough
+old times. Nowadays, we neither stab, shoot, nor poison. I scarcely
+think we hate except as interest guides us, without malevolence."
+
+This singular conversation was interrupted by a toast, and the rising
+of one of the guests to answer it. Several other toasts of routine
+succeeded; one of which, being to the honor of the old founder of the
+Hospital, Lord Braithwaite, as his representative, rose to reply,--which
+he did in good phrases, in a sort of eloquence unlike that of the
+Englishmen around him, and, sooth to say, comparatively unaccustomed as
+he must have been to the use of the language, much more handsomely than
+they. In truth, Redclyffe was struck and amused with the rudeness, the
+slovenliness, the inartistic quality of the English speakers, who rather
+seemed to avoid grace and neatness of set purpose, as if they would be
+ashamed of it. Nothing could be more ragged than these utterances
+which they called speeches; so patched, and darned; and yet, somehow or
+other--though dull and heavy as all which seemed to inspire them--they
+had a kind of force. Each man seemed to have the faculty of getting,
+after some rude fashion, at the sense and feeling that was in him; and
+without glibness, without smoothness, without form or comeliness, still
+the object with which each one rose to speak was accomplished,--and what
+was more remarkable, it seemed to be accomplished without the speaker's
+having any particular plan for doing it. He was surprised, too, to
+observe how loyally every man seemed to think himself bound to speak,
+and rose to do his best, however unfit his usual habits made him for the
+task. Observing this, and thinking how many an American would be taken
+aback and dumbfounded by being called on for a dinner speech, he could
+not but doubt the correctness of the general opinion, that Englishmen
+are naturally less facile of public speech than our countrymen.
+
+"You surpass your countrymen," said Redclyffe, when his Lordship resumed
+his seat, amid rapping and loud applause.
+
+"My countrymen? I scarcely know whether you mean the English or
+Italians," said Lord Braithwaite. "Like yourself, I am a hybrid, with
+really no country, and ready to take up with any."
+
+"I have a country,--one which I am little inclined to deny," replied
+Redclyffe, gravely, while a flush (perhaps of conscientious shame) rose
+to his brow.
+
+His Lordship bowed, with a dark Italian smile, but Redclyffe's attention
+was drawn away from the conversation by a toast which the Warden now
+rose to give, and in which he found himself mainly concerned. With a
+little preface of kind words (not particularly aptly applied) to
+the great and kindred country beyond the Atlantic, the worthy Warden
+proceeded to remark that his board was honored, on this high festival,
+with a guest from that new world; a gentleman yet young, but already
+distinguished in the councils of his country; the bearer, he remarked,
+of an honored English name, which might well claim to be remembered
+here, and on this occasion, although he had understood from his friend
+that the American bearers of this name did not count kindred with the
+English ones. This gentleman, he further observed, with considerable
+flourish and emphasis, had recently been called from his retirement and
+wanderings into the diplomatic service of his country, which he would
+say, from his knowledge, the gentleman was well calculated to honor. He
+drank the health of the Honorable Edward Redclyffe, Ambassador of the
+United States to the Court of Hohen-Linden.
+
+Our English cousins received this toast with the kindest enthusiasm,
+as they always do any such allusion to our country; it being a festal
+feeling, not to be used except on holidays. They rose, with glass in
+hand, in honor of the Ambassador; the band struck up "Hail, Columbia";
+and our hero marshalled his thoughts as well as he might for the
+necessary response; and when the tumult subsided he arose.
+
+His quick apprehending had taught him something of the difference of
+taste between an English and an American audience at a dinner-table;
+he felt that there must be a certain looseness, and carelessness, and
+roughness, and yet a certain restraint; that he must not seem to aim
+at speaking well, although, for his own ambition, he was not content
+to speak ill; that, somehow or other, he must get a heartiness into his
+speech; that he must not polish, nor be too neat, and must come with
+a certain rudeness to his good points, as if he blundered on them,
+and were surprised into them. Above all, he must let the good wine and
+cheer, and all that he knew and really felt of English hospitality, as
+represented by the kind Warden, do its work upon his heart, and speak
+up to the extent of what he felt--and if a little more, then no great
+harm--about his own love for the father-land, and the broader grounds of
+the relations between the two countries. On this system, Redclyffe began
+to speak; and being naturally and habitually eloquent, and of mobile and
+ready sensibilities, he succeeded, between art and nature, in making
+a speech that absolutely delighted the company, who made the old hall
+echo, and the banners wave and tremble, and the board shake, and the
+glasses jingle, with their rapturous applause. What he said--or some
+shadow of it, and more than he quite liked to own--was reported in the
+county paper that gave a report of the dinner; but on glancing over it,
+it seems not worth while to produce this eloquent effort in our pages,
+the occasion and topics being of merely temporary interest.
+
+Redclyffe sat down, and sipped his claret, feeling a little ashamed of
+himself, as people are apt to do after a display of this kind.
+
+"You know the way to the English heart better than I do," remarked his
+Lordship, after a polite compliment to the speech. "Methinks these dull
+English are being improved in your atmosphere. The English need a
+change every few centuries,--either by immigration of new stock, or
+transportation of the old,--or else they grow too gross and earthly,
+with their beef, mutton, and ale. I think, now, it might benefit both
+countries, if your New England population were to be reciprocally
+exchanged with an equal number of Englishmen. Indeed, Italians might do
+as well."
+
+"I should regret," said Redclyffe, "to change the English, heavy as they
+are."
+
+"You are an admirable Englishman," said his Lordship. "For my part,
+I cannot say that the people are very much to my taste, any more than
+their skies and climate, in which I have shivered during the two years
+that I have spent here."
+
+Here their conversation ceased; and Redclyffe listened to a long train
+of speechifying, in the course of which everybody, almost, was toasted;
+everybody present, at all events, and many absent. The Warden's old
+wine was not spared; the music rang and resounded from the gallery; and
+everybody seemed to consider it a model feast, although there were no
+very vivid signs of satisfaction, but a decorous, heavy enjoyment, a
+dull red heat of pleasure, without flame. Soda and seltzer-water, and
+coffee, by and by were circulated; and at a late hour the company began
+to retire.
+
+Before taking his departure, Lord Braithwaite resumed his conversation
+with Redclyffe, and, as it appeared, with the purpose of making a
+hospitable proposition.
+
+"I live very much alone," said he, "being insulated from my neighbors
+by many circumstances,--habits, religion, and everything else peculiarly
+English. If you are curious about old English modes of life, I can show
+you, at least, an English residence, little altered within a century
+past. Pray come and spend a week with me before you leave this part of
+the country. Besides, I know the court to which you are accredited, and
+can give you, perhaps, useful information about it."
+
+Redclyffe looked at him in some surprise, and with a nameless
+hesitation; for he did not like his Lordship, and had fancied, in truth,
+that there was a reciprocal antipathy. Nor did he yet feel that he was
+mistaken in this respect; although his Lordship's invitation was given
+in a tone of frankness, and seemed to have no reserve, except that his
+eyes did not meet his like Anglo-Saxon eyes, and there seemed an Italian
+looking out from within the man. But Redclyffe had a sort of repulsion
+within himself; and he questioned whether it would be fair to his
+proposed host to accept his hospitality, while he had this secret
+feeling of hostility and repugnance,--which might be well enough
+accounted for by the knowledge that he secretly entertained hostile
+interests to their race, and half a purpose of putting them in force.
+And, besides this,--although Redclyffe was ashamed of the feeling,--he
+had a secret dread, a feeling that it was not just a safe thing to trust
+himself in this man's power; for he had a sense, sure as death, that he
+did not wish him well, and had a secret dread of the American. But he
+laughed within himself at this feeling, and drove it down. Yet it made
+him feel that there could be no disloyalty in accepting his Lordship's
+invitation, because it was given in as little friendship as it would be
+accepted.
+
+"I had almost made my arrangements for quitting the neighborhood,"
+said he, after a pause; "nor can I shorten the week longer which I
+had promised to spend with my very kind friend, the Warden. Yet your
+Lordship's kindness offers we a great temptation, and I would gladly
+spend the next ensuing week at Braithwaite Hall."
+
+"I shall expect you, then," said Lord Braithwaite. "You will find me
+quite alone, except my chaplain,--a scholar, and a man of the world,
+whom you will not be sorry to know."
+
+He bowed and took his leave, without shaking hands, as an American would
+have thought it natural to do, after such a hospitable agreement; nor
+did Redclyffe make any motion towards it, and was glad that his Lordship
+had omitted it. On the whole, there was a secret dissatisfaction with
+himself; a sense that he was not doing quite a frank and true thing in
+accepting this invitation, and he only made peace with himself on the
+consideration that Lord Braithwaite was as little cordial in asking the
+visit as he in acceding to it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+
+The guests were now rapidly taking their departure, and the Warden and
+Redclyffe were soon left alone in the antique hall, which now, in its
+solitude, presented an aspect far different from the gay festivity of
+an hour before; the duskiness up in the carved oaken beams seemed to
+descend and fill the hall; and the remembrance of the feast was like
+one of those that had taken place centuries ago, with which this was now
+numbered, and growing ghostly, and faded, and sad, even as they had long
+been.
+
+"Well, my dear friend," said the Warden, stretching himself and yawning,
+"it is over. Come into my study with me, and we will have a devilled
+turkey-bone and a pint of sherry in peace and comfort."
+
+"I fear I can make no figure at such a supper," said Redclyffe. "But I
+admire your inexhaustibleness in being ready for midnight refreshment
+after such a feast."
+
+"Not a glass of good liquor has moistened my lips to-night," said the
+Warden, "save and except such as was supplied by a decanter of water
+made brown with toast; and such a sip as I took to the health of the
+Queen, and another to that of the Ambassador to Hohen-Linden. It is
+the only way, when a man has this vast labor of speechifying to do; and
+indeed there is no possibility of keeping up a jolly countenance for
+such a length of time except on toast-water."
+
+They accordingly adjourned to the Warden's sanctum, where that worthy
+dignitary seemed to enjoy himself over his sherry and cracked bones,
+in a degree that he probably had not heretofore; while Redclyffe, whose
+potations had been more liberal, and who was feverish and disturbed,
+tried the effect of a little brandy and soda-water. As often happens
+at such midnight symposiums, the two friends found themselves in a more
+kindly and confidential vein than had happened before, great as had been
+the kindness and confidence already grown up between them. Redclyffe
+told his friend of Lord Braithwaite's invitation, and of his own
+resolution to accept it.
+
+"Why not? You will do well," said the Warden; "and you will find his
+Lordship an accustomed host, and the old house most interesting. If he
+knows the secrets of it himself, and will show them, they will be well
+worth the seeing."
+
+"I have had a scruple in accepting this invitation," said Redclyffe.
+
+"I cannot see why," said the Warden. "I advise it by all means, since I
+shall lose nothing by it myself, as it will not lop off any part of your
+visit to me."
+
+"My dear friend," said Redclyffe, irresistibly impelled to a confidence
+which he had not meditated a moment before, "there is a foolish secret
+which I must tell you, if you will listen to it; and which I have only
+not revealed to you because it seemed to me foolish and dream-like;
+because, too, I am an American, and a democrat; because I am ashamed of
+myself and laugh at myself."
+
+"Is it a long story?" asked the Warden.
+
+"I can make it of any length, and almost any brevity," said Redclyffe.
+
+"I will fill my pipe then," answered the Warden, "and listen at my
+ease; and if, as you intimate, there prove to be any folly in it, I will
+impute it all to the kindly freedom with which you have partaken of our
+English hospitality, and forget it before to-morrow morning."
+
+He settled himself in his easy-chair, in a most luxurious posture; and
+Redclyffe, who felt a strange reluctance to reveal--for the first time
+in his life--the shadowy hopes, if hopes they were, and purposes, if
+such they could be called, with which he had amused himself so many
+years, begun the story from almost the earliest period that he could
+remember. He told even of his earliest recollection, with an old woman,
+in the almshouse, and how he had been found there by the Doctor, and
+educated by him, with all the hints and half-revelations that had been
+made to him. He described the singular character of the Doctor, his
+scientific pursuits, his evident accomplishments, his great abilities,
+his morbidness and melancholy, his moodiness, and finally his death,
+and the singular circumstances that accompanied it. The story took a
+considerable time to tell; and after its close, the Warden, who had only
+interrupted it by now and then a question to make it plainer, continued
+to smoke his pipe slowly and thoughtfully for a long while.
+
+"This Doctor of yours was a singular character," said he. "Evidently,
+from what you tell me as to the accuracy of his local reminiscences,
+he must have been of this part of the country,--of this immediate
+neighborhood,--and such a man could not have grown up here without being
+known. I myself--for I am an old fellow now--might have known him if he
+lived to manhood hereabouts."
+
+"He seemed old to me when I first knew him," said Redclyffe. "But
+children make no distinctions of age. He might have been forty-five
+then, as well as I can judge."
+
+"You are now twenty-seven or eight," said the Warden, "and were four
+years old when you first knew him. He might now be sixty-five. Do you
+know, my friend, that I have something like a certainty that I know who
+your Doctor was?"
+
+"How strange this seems!" exclaimed Redclyffe. "It has never struck
+me that I should be able to identify this singular personage with any
+surroundings or any friends."
+
+The Warden, to requite his friend's story,--and without as yet saying a
+word, good or bad, on his ancestral claims,--proceeded to tell him some
+of the gossip of the neighborhood,--what had been gossip thirty or forty
+years ago, but was now forgotten, or, at all events, seldom spoken of,
+and only known to the old, at the present day. He himself remembered it
+only as a boy, and imperfectly. There had been a personage of that day,
+a man of poor estate, who had fallen deeply in love and been betrothed
+to a young lady of family; he was a young man of more than ordinary
+abilities, and of great promise, though small fortune. It was not well
+known how, but the match between him and the young lady was broken off,
+and his place was supplied by the then proprietor of Braithwaite Hall;
+as it was supposed, by the artifices of her mother. There had been
+circumstances of peculiar treachery in the matter, and Mr. Oglethorpe
+had taken it severely to heart; so severely, indeed, that he had left
+the country, after selling his ancestral property, and had only been
+occasionally heard of again. Now, from certain circumstances, it had
+struck the Warden that this might be the mysterious Doctor of whom
+Redclyffe spoke. [Endnote: 1.]
+
+"But why," suggested Redclyffe, "should a man with these wrongs to
+avenge take such an interest in a descendant of his enemy's family?"
+
+"That is a strong point in favor of my supposition," replied the Warden.
+"There is certainly, and has long been, a degree of probability that the
+true heir of this family exists in America. If Oglethorpe could discover
+him, he ousts his enemy from the estate and honors, and substitutes
+the person whom he has discovered and educated. Most certainly there is
+revenge in the thing. Should it happen now, however, the triumph would
+have lost its sweetness, even were Oglethorpe alive to partake of it;
+for his enemy is dead, leaving no heir, and this foreign branch has come
+in without Oglethorpe's aid."
+
+The friends remained musing a considerable time, each in his own train
+of thought, till the Warden suddenly spoke.
+
+"Do you mean to prosecute this apparent claim of yours?"
+
+"I have not intended to do so," said Redclyffe.
+
+"Of course," said the Warden, "that should depend upon the strength of
+your ground; and I understand you that there is some link wanting to
+establish it. Otherwise, I see not how you can hesitate. Is it a little
+thing to hold a claim to an old English estate and honors?"
+
+"No; it is a very great thing, to an Englishman born, and who need give
+up no higher birthright to avail himself of it," answered Redclyffe.
+"You will laugh at me, my friend; but I cannot help feeling that I, a
+simple citizen of a republic, yet with none above me except those whom
+I help to place there,--and who are my servants, not my superiors,--must
+stoop to take these honors. I leave a set of institutions which are
+the noblest that the wit and civilization of man have yet conceived, to
+enlist myself in one that is based on a far lower conception of man, and
+which therefore lowers every one who shares in it. Besides," said the
+young man, his eyes kindling with the ambition which had been so active
+a principle in his life, "what prospects--what rewards for spirited
+exertion--what a career, only open to an American, would I give up,
+to become merely a rich and idle Englishman, belonging (as I should)
+nowhere, without a possibility of struggle, such as a strong man
+loves, with only a mockery of a title, which in these days really means
+nothing,--hardly more than one of our own Honorables. What has any
+success in English life to offer (even were it within my reach, which,
+as a stranger, it would not be) to balance the proud career of an
+American statesman?"
+
+"True, you might be a President, I suppose," said the Warden, rather
+contemptuously,--"a four years' potentate. It seems to me an office
+about on a par with that of the Lord Mayor of London. For my part, I
+would rather be a baron of three or four hundred years' antiquity."
+
+"We talk in vain," said Redclyffe, laughing. "We do not approach one
+another's ideas on this subject. But, waiving all speculations as to
+my attempting to avail myself of this claim, do you think I can fairly
+accept this invitation to visit Lord Braithwaite? There is certainly
+a possibility that I may arraign myself against his dearest interests.
+Conscious of this, can I accept his hospitality?"
+
+The Warden paused. "You have not sought access to his house," he
+observed. "You have no designs, it seems, no settled designs at all
+events, against his Lordship,--nor is there a probability that they
+would be forwarded by your accepting this invitation, even if you
+had any. I do not see but you may go. The only danger is, that his
+Lordship's engaging qualities may seduce you into dropping your claims
+out of a chivalrous feeling, which I see is among your possibilities. To
+be sure, it would be more satisfactory if he knew your actual position,
+and should then renew his invitation."
+
+"I am convinced," said Redclyffe, looking up from his musing
+posture, "that he does know them. You are surprised; but in all Lord
+Braithwaite's manner towards me there has been an undefinable something
+that makes me aware that he knows on what terms we stand towards each
+other. There is nothing inconceivable in this. The family have for
+generations been suspicious of an American line, and have more than once
+sent messengers to try to search out and put a stop to the apprehension.
+Why should it not have come to their knowledge that there was a person
+with such claims, and that he is now in England?"
+
+"It certainly is possible," replied the Warden, "and if you are
+satisfied that his Lordship knows it, or even suspects it, you meet
+him on fair ground. But I fairly tell you, my good friend, that--his
+Lordship being a man of unknown principles of honor, outlandish, and an
+Italian in habit and moral sense--I scarcely like to trust you in his
+house, he being aware that your existence may be inimical to him. My
+humble board is the safer of the two."
+
+"Pshaw!" said Redclyffe. "You Englishmen are so suspicious of anybody
+not regularly belonging to yourselves. Poison and the dagger haunt your
+conceptions of all others. In America you think we kill every third man
+with the bowie-knife. But, supposing there were any grounds for your
+suspicion, I would still encounter it. An American is no braver than
+an Englishman; but still he is not quite so chary of his life as the
+latter, who never risks it except on the most imminent necessity. We
+take such matters easy. In regard to this invitation, I feel that I can
+honorably accept it, and there are many idle and curious motives that
+impel me to it. I will go."
+
+"Be it so; but you must come back to me for another week, after
+finishing your visit," said the Warden. "After all, it was an idle fancy
+in me that there could be any danger. His Lordship has good English
+blood in his veins, and it would take oceans and rivers of Italian
+treachery to wash out the sterling quality of it. And, my good friend,
+as to these claims of yours, I would not have you trust too much to what
+is probably a romantic dream; yet, were the dream to come true, I should
+think the British peerage honored by such an accession to its ranks. And
+now to bed; for we have heard the chimes of midnight, two hours agone."
+
+They accordingly retired; and Redclyffe was surprised to find what a
+distinctness his ideas respecting his claim to the Braithwaite honors
+had assumed, now that he, after so many years, had imparted them to
+another. Heretofore, though his imagination had played with them so
+much, they seemed the veriest dreams; now, they had suddenly taken form
+and hardened into substance; and he became aware, in spite of all the
+lofty and patriotic sentiments which he had expressed to the Warden,
+that these prospects had really much importance in his mind.
+
+Redclyffe, during the few days that he was to spend at the Hospital,
+previous to his visit to Braithwaite Hall, was conscious of a
+restlessness such as we have all felt on the eve of some interesting
+event. He wondered at himself at being so much wrought up by so simple
+a thing as he was about to do; but it seemed to him like a coming
+home after an absence of centuries. It was like an actual prospect
+of entrance into a castle in the air,--the shadowy threshold of which
+should assume substance enough to bear his foot, its thin, fantastic
+walls actually protect him from sun and rain, its hall echo with his
+footsteps, its hearth warm him. That delicious, thrilling uncertainty
+between reality and fancy, in which he had often been enwrapt since his
+arrival in this region, enveloped him more strongly than ever; and with
+it, too, there came a sort of apprehension, which sometimes shuddered
+through him like an icy draught, or the touch of cold steel to his
+heart. He was ashamed, too, to be conscious of anything like fear; yet
+he would not acknowledge it for fear; and indeed there was such an airy,
+exhilarating, thrilling pleasure bound up with it, that it could not
+really be so.
+
+It was in this state of mind that, a day or two after the feast, he saw
+Colcord sitting on the bench, before the portal of the Hospital, in the
+sun, which--September though it was--still came warm and bright
+(for English sunshine) into that sheltered spot; a spot where many
+generations of old men had warmed their limbs, while they looked down
+into the life, the torpid life, of the old village that trailed its
+homely yet picturesque street along by the venerable buildings of the
+Hospital.
+
+"My good friend," said Redclyffe, "I am about leaving you, for a
+time,--indeed, with the limited time at my disposal, it is possible that
+I may not be able to come back hither, except for a brief visit. Before
+I leave you, I would fain know something more about one whom I must ever
+consider my benefactor."
+
+"Yes," said the old man, with his usual benignant quiet, "I saved your
+life. It is yet to be seen, perhaps, whether thereby I made myself your
+benefactor. I trust so."
+
+"I feel it so, at least," answered Redclyffe, "and I assure you life has
+a new value for me since I came to this place; for I have a deeper hold
+upon it, as it were,--more hope from it, more trust in something good to
+come of it."
+
+"This is a good change,--or should be so," quoth the old man.
+
+"Do you know," continued Redclyffe, "how long you have been a figure in
+my life?"
+
+"I know it," said Colcord, "though you might well have forgotten it."
+
+"Not so," said Redclyffe. "I remember, as if it were this morning, that
+time in New England when I first saw you."
+
+"The man with whom you then abode," said Colcord, "knew who I was."
+
+"And he being dead, and finding you here now, by such a strange
+coincidence," said Redclyffe, "and being myself a man capable of taking
+your counsel, I would have you impart it to me: for I assure you that
+the current of my life runs darkly on, and I would be glad of any light
+on its future, or even its present phase."
+
+"I am not one of those from whom the world waits for counsel," said the
+pensioner, "and I know not that mine would be advantageous to you, in
+the light which men usually prize. Yet if I were to give any, it would
+be that you should be gone hence."
+
+"Gone hence!" repeated Redclyffe, surprised. "I tell you--what I have
+hardly hitherto told to myself--that all my dreams, all my wishes
+hitherto, have looked forward to precisely the juncture that seems now
+to be approaching. My dreaming childhood dreamt of this. If you know
+anything of me, you know how I sprung out of mystery, akin to none, a
+thing concocted out of the elements, without visible agency; how all
+through my boyhood I was alone; how I grew up without a root, yet
+continually longing for one,--longing to be connected with somebody, and
+never feeling myself so. Yet there was ever a looking forward to this
+time at which I now find myself. If my next step were death, yet
+while the path seemed to lead toward a certainty of establishing me in
+connection with my race, I would take it. I have tried to keep down this
+yearning, to stifle it, annihilate it, by making a position for myself,
+by being my own fact; but I cannot overcome the natural horror of being
+a creature floating in the air, attached to nothing; ever this feeling
+that there is no reality in the life and fortunes, good or bad, of
+a being so unconnected. There is not even a grave, not a heap of dry
+bones, not a pinch of dust, with which I can claim kindred, unless I
+find it here!"
+
+"This is sad," said the old man,--"this strong yearning, and nothing to
+gratify it. Yet, I warn you, do not seek its gratification here. There
+are delusions, snares, pitfalls, in this life. I warn you, quit the
+search."
+
+"No," said Redclyffe, "I will follow the mysterious clue that seems to
+lead me on; and, even now, it pulls me one step further."
+
+"How is that?" asked the old man.
+
+"It leads me onward even as far as the threshold--across the
+threshold--of yonder mansion," said Redclyffe.
+
+"Step not across it; there is blood on that threshold!" exclaimed the
+pensioner. "A bloody footstep emerging. Take heed that there be not as
+bloody a one entering in!"
+
+"Pshaw!" said Redclyffe, feeling the ridicule of the emotion into which
+he had been betrayed, as the old man's wildness of demeanor made him
+feel that he was talking with a monomaniac. "We are talking idly. I do
+but go, in the common intercourse of society, to see the old English
+residence which (such is the unhappy obscurity of my position) I fancy,
+among a thousand others, may have been that of my ancestors. Nothing is
+likely to come of it. My foot is not bloody, nor polluted with anything
+except the mud of the damp English soil."
+
+"Yet go not in!" persisted the old man.
+
+"Yes, I must go," said Redclyffe, determinedly, "and I will."
+
+Ashamed to have been moved to such idle utterances by anything that the
+old man could say Redclyffe turned away, though he still heard the sad,
+half-uttered remonstrance of the old man, like a moan behind him, and
+wondered what strange fancy had taken possession of him.
+
+The effect which this opposition had upon him made him the more aware
+how much his heart was set upon this visit to the Hall; how much he had
+counted upon being domiciliated there; what a wrench it would be to him
+to tear himself away without going into that mansion, and penetrating
+all the mysteries wherewith his imagination, exercising itself upon the
+theme since the days of the old Doctor's fireside talk, had invested
+it. In his agitation he wandered forth from the Hospital, and, passing
+through the village street, found himself in the park of Braithwaite
+Hall, where he wandered for a space, until his steps led him to a point
+whence the venerable Hall appeared, with its limes and its oaks around
+it; its look of peace, and aged repose, and loveliness; its stately
+domesticity, so ancient, so beautiful; its mild, sweet simplicity; it
+seemed the ideal of home. The thought thrilled his bosom, that this
+was his home,--the home of the wild Western wanderer, who had gone away
+centuries ago, and encountered strange chances, and almost forgotten his
+origin, but still kept a clue to bring him back; and had now come back,
+and found all the original emotions safe within him. It even seemed to
+him, that, by his kindred with those who had gone before,--by the line
+of sensitive blood linking him with that final emigrant,--he could
+remember all these objects;--that tree, hardly more venerable now than
+then; that clock-tower, still marking the elapsing time; that spire of
+the old church, raising itself beyond. He spread out his arms in a kind
+of rapture, and exclaimed:--
+
+"O home, my home, my forefathers' home! I have come back to thee! The
+wanderer has come back!"
+
+There was a slight stir near him; and on a mossy seat, that was arranged
+to take advantage of a remarkably good point of view of the old Hall,
+he saw Elsie sitting. She had her drawing-materials with her, and had
+probably been taking a sketch. Redclyffe was ashamed of having been
+overheard by any one giving way to such idle passion as he had been
+betrayed into; and yet, in another sense, he was glad,--glad, at least,
+that something of his feeling, as yet unspoken to human being, was
+shared, and shared by her with whom, alone of living beings, he had any
+sympathies of old date, and whom he often thought of with feelings that
+drew him irresistibly towards her.
+
+"Elsie," said he, uttering for the first time the old name, "Providence
+makes you my confidant. We have recognized each other, though no word
+has passed between us. Let us speak now again with one another. How
+came you hither? What has brought us together again?--Away with this
+strangeness that lurks between us! Let us meet as those who began life
+together, and whose life-strings, being so early twisted in unison,
+cannot now be torn apart."
+
+"You are not wise," said Elsie, in a faltering voice, "to break the
+restraint we have tacitly imposed upon ourselves. Do not let us speak
+further on this subject."
+
+"How strangely everything evades me!" exclaimed Redclyffe. "I seem to be
+in a land of enchantment, where I can get hold of nothing that lends me
+a firm support. There is no medium in my life between the most vulgar
+realities and the most vaporous fiction, too thin to breathe. Tell me,
+Elsie, how came you here? Why do you not meet me frankly? What is there
+to keep you apart from the oldest friend, I am bold to say, you have
+on earth? Are you an English girl? Are you one of our own New England
+maidens, with her freedom, and her know-how, and her force, beyond
+anything that these demure and decorous damsels can know?"
+
+"This is wild," said Elsie, straggling for composure, yet strongly moved
+by the recollections that he brought up. "It is best that we should meet
+as strangers, and so part."
+
+"No," said Redclyffe; "the long past comes up, with its memories, and
+yet it is not so powerful as the powerful present. We have met again;
+our adventures have shown that Providence has designed a relation in my
+fate to yours. Elsie, are you lonely as I am?"
+
+"No," she replied, "I have bonds, ties, a life, a duty. I must live that
+life and do that duty. You have, likewise, both. Do yours, lead your own
+life, like me."
+
+"Do you know, Elsie," he said, "whither that life is now tending?"
+
+"Whither?" said she, turning towards him.
+
+"To yonder Hall," said he.
+
+She started up, and clasped her hands about his arm.
+
+"No, no!" she exclaimed, "go not thither! There is blood upon the
+threshold! Return: a dreadful fatality awaits you here."
+
+"Come with me, then," said he, "and I yield my purpose."
+
+"It cannot be," said Elsie.
+
+"Then I, too, tell you it cannot be," returned Redclyffe. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+The dialogue had reached this point, when there came a step along the
+wood-path; the branches rustled, and there was Lord Braithwaite, looking
+upon the pair with the ordinary slightly sarcastic glance with which he
+gazed upon the world.
+
+"A fine morning, fair lady and fair sir," said he. "We have few such,
+except in Italy."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+
+So Redclyffe left the Hospital, where he had spent many weeks of strange
+and not unhappy life, and went to accept the invitation of the lord
+of Braithwaite Hall. It was with a thrill of strange delight, poignant
+almost to pain, that he found himself driving up to the door of the
+Hall, and actually passing the threshold of the house. He looked, as he
+stept over it, for the Bloody Footstep, with which the house had so
+long been associated in his imagination; but could nowhere see it. The
+footman ushered him into a hall, which seemed to be in the centre of
+the building, and where, little as the autumn was advanced, a fire
+was nevertheless burning and glowing on the hearth; nor was its effect
+undesirable in the somewhat gloomy room. The servants had evidently
+received orders respecting the guest; for they ushered him at once
+to his chamber, which seemed not to be one of those bachelor's rooms,
+where, in an English mansion, young and single men are forced to be
+entertained with very bare and straitened accommodations; but a large,
+well, though antiquely and solemnly furnished room, with a curtained
+bed, and all manner of elaborate contrivances for repose; but the deep
+embrasures of the windows made it gloomy, with the little light that
+they admitted through their small panes. There must have been English
+attendance in this department of the household arrangements, at least;
+for nothing could exceed the exquisite nicety and finish of everything
+in the room, the cleanliness, the attention to comfort, amid antique
+aspects of furniture; the rich, deep preparations for repose.
+
+The servant told Redclyffe that his master had ridden out, and, adding
+that luncheon would be on the table at two o'clock, left him; and
+Redclyffe sat some time trying to make out and distinguish the feelings
+with which he found himself here, and realizing a lifelong dream. He
+ran back over all the legends which the Doctor used to tell about this
+mansion, and wondered whether this old, rich chamber were the one where
+any of them had taken place; whether the shadows of the dead haunted
+here. But, indeed, if this were the case, the apartment must have been
+very much changed, antique though it looked, with the second, or third,
+or whatever other numbered arrangement, since those old days of tapestry
+hangings and rush-strewed floor. Otherwise this stately and gloomy
+chamber was as likely as any other to have been the one where his
+ancestor appeared for the last time in the paternal mansion; here he
+might have been the night before that mysterious Bloody Footstep was
+left on the threshold, whence had arisen so many wild legends, and since
+the impression of which nothing certain had ever been known respecting
+that ill-fated man,--nothing certain in England at least,--and whose
+story was left so ragged and questionable even by all that he could add.
+
+Do what he could, Redclyffe still was not conscious of that deep
+home-feeling which he had imagined he should experience when, if ever,
+he should come back to the old ancestral place; there was strangeness,
+a struggle within himself to get hold of something that escaped him, an
+effort to impress on his mind the fact that he was, at last, established
+at his temporary home in the place that he had so long looked forward
+to, and that this was the moment which he would have thought more
+interesting than any other in his life. He was strangely cold and
+indifferent, frozen up as it were, and fancied that he would have cared
+little had he been to leave the mansion without so much as looking over
+the remaining part of it.
+
+At last, he became weary of sitting and indulging this fantastic humor
+of indifference, and emerged from his chamber with the design of
+finding his way about the lower part of the house. The mansion had that
+delightful intricacy which can never be contrived; never be attained
+by design; but is the happy result of where many builders, many
+designs,--many ages, perhaps,--have concurred in a structure, each
+pursuing his own design. Thus it was a house that you could go astray
+in, as in a city, and come to unexpected places, but never, until after
+much accustomance, go where you wished; so Redclyffe, although the great
+staircase and wide corridor by which he had been led to his room seemed
+easy to find, yet soon discovered that he was involved in an unknown
+labyrinth, where strange little bits of staircases led up and down, and
+where passages promised much in letting him out, but performed nothing.
+To be sure, the old English mansion had not much of the stateliness of
+one of Mrs. Radcliffe's castles, with their suites of rooms opening one
+into another; but yet its very domesticity--its look as if long ago it
+had been lived in--made it only the more ghostly; and so Redclyffe felt
+the more as if he were wandering through a homely dream; sensible of
+the ludicrousness of his position, he once called aloud; but his voice
+echoed along the passages, sounding unwontedly to his ears, but arousing
+nobody. It did not seem to him as if he were going afar, but were
+bewildered round and round, within a very small compass; a predicament
+in which a man feels very foolish usually.
+
+As he stood at an old window, stone-mullioned, at the end of a passage
+into which he had come twice over, a door near him opened, and a
+personage looked out whom he had not before seen. It was a face of great
+keenness and intelligence, and not unpleasant to look at, though dark
+and sallow. The dress had something which Redclyffe recognized as
+clerical, though not exactly pertaining to the Church of England,--a
+sort of arrangement of the vest and shirt-collar; and he had knee
+breeches of black. He did not seem like an English clerical personage,
+however; for even in this little glimpse of him Redclyffe saw a
+mildness, gentleness, softness, and asking-of-leave, in his manner,
+which he had not observed in persons so well assured of their position
+as the Church of England clergy.
+
+He seemed at once to detect Redclyffe's predicament, and came forward
+with a pleasant smile, speaking in good English, though with a somewhat
+foreign accent.
+
+"Ah, sir, you have lost your way. It is a labyrinthian house for its
+size, this old English Hall,--full of perplexity. Shall I show you to
+any point?"
+
+"Indeed, sir," said Redclyffe, laughing, "I hardly know whither I want
+to go; being a stranger, and yet knowing nothing of the public places of
+the house. To the library, perhaps, if you will be good enough to direct
+me thither."
+
+"Willingly, my dear sir," said the clerical personage; "the more
+easily too, as my own quarters are close adjacent; the library being my
+province. Do me the favor to enter here."
+
+So saying, the priest ushered Redclyffe into an austere-looking yet
+exceedingly neat study, as it seemed, on one side of which was an
+oratory, with a crucifix and other accommodations for Catholic devotion.
+Behind a white curtain there were glimpses of a bed, which seemed
+arranged on a principle of conventual austerity in respect to limits
+and lack of softness; but still there was in the whole austerity of
+the premises a certain character of restraint, poise, principle, which
+Redclyffe liked. A table was covered with books, many of them folios
+in an antique binding of parchment, and others were small, thick-set
+volumes, into which antique lore was rammed and compressed. Through
+an open door, opposite to the one by which he had entered, there was a
+vista of a larger apartment, with alcoves, a rather dreary-looking
+room, though a little sunshine came through a window at the further end,
+distained with colored glass.
+
+"Will you sit down in my little home?" said the courteous priest. "I
+hope we may be better acquainted; so allow me to introduce myself. I am
+Father Angelo, domestic chaplain to his Lordship. You, I know, are the
+American diplomatic gentleman, from whom his Lordship has been expecting
+a visit."
+
+Redclyffe bowed.
+
+"I am most happy to know you," continued the priest. "Ah; you have a
+happy country, most catholic, most recipient of all that is outcast on
+earth. Men of my religion must ever bless it."
+
+"It certainly ought to be remembered to our credit," replied Redclyffe,
+"that we have shown no narrow spirit in this matter, and have not, like
+other Protestant countries, rejected the good that is found in any man
+on account of his religious faith. American statesmanship comprises Jew,
+Catholic, all."
+
+After this pleasant little acknowledgment, there ensued a conversation
+having some reference to books; for though Redclyffe, of late years,
+had known little of what deserves to be called literature,--having
+found political life as much estranged from it as it is apt to be
+with politicians,--yet he had early snuffed the musty fragrance of the
+Doctor's books, and had learned to love its atmosphere. At the time
+he left college, he was just at the point where he might have been a
+scholar; but the active tendencies of American life had interfered with
+him, as with thousands of others, and drawn him away from pursuits which
+might have been better adapted to some of his characteristics than
+the one he had adopted. The priest gently felt and touched around his
+pursuits, and finding some remains of classic culture, he kept up a
+conversation on these points; showing him the possessions of the library
+in that department, where, indeed, were some treasures that he had
+discovered, and which seemed to have been collected at least a century
+ago.
+
+"Generally, however," observed he, as they passed from one dark alcove
+to another, "the library is of little worth, except to show how much of
+living truth each generation contributes to the botheration of life, and
+what a public benefactor a bookworm is, after all. There, now! did you
+ever happen to see one? Here is one that I have watched at work, some
+time past, and have not thought it worth while to stop him."
+
+Redclyffe looked at the learned little insect, who was eating a strange
+sort of circular trench into an old book of scholastic Latin, which
+probably only he had ever devoured,--at least ever found to his taste.
+The insect seemed in excellent condition, fat with learning, having
+doubtless got the essence of the book into himself. But Redclyffe was
+still more interested in observing in the corner a great spider, which
+really startled him,--not so much for its own terrible aspect, though
+that was monstrous, as because he seemed to see in it the very great
+spider which he had known in his boyhood; that same monster that had
+been the Doctor's familiar, and had been said to have had an influence
+in his death. He looked so startled that Father Angelo observed it.
+
+"Do not be frightened," said he; "though I allow that a brave man may
+well be afraid of a spider, and that the bravest of the brave need
+not blush to shudder at this one. There is a great mystery about this
+spider. No one knows whence he came; nor how long he has been here. The
+library was very much shut up during the time of the last inheritor of
+the estate, and had not been thoroughly examined for some years when
+I opened it, and swept some of the dust away from its old alcoves. I
+myself was not aware of this monster until the lapse of some weeks,
+when I was startled at seeing him, one day, as I was reading an old book
+here. He dangled down from the ceiling, by the cordage of his web, and
+positively seemed to look into my face."
+
+"He is of the species Condetas," said Redclyffe,--"a rare spider seldom
+seen out of the tropic regions."
+
+"You are learned, then, in spiders," observed the priest, surprised.
+
+"I could almost make oath, at least, that I have known this ugly
+specimen of his race," observed Redclyffe. "A very dear friend, now
+deceased, to whom I owed the highest obligations, was studious of
+spiders, and his chief treasure was one the very image of this."
+
+"How strange!" said the priest. "There has always appeared to me to be
+something uncanny in spiders. I should be glad to talk further with you
+on this subject. Several times I have fancied a strange intelligence in
+this monster; but I have natural horror of him, and therefore refrain
+from interviews."
+
+"You do wisely, sir," said Redclyffe. "His powers and purposes are
+questionably beneficent, at best."
+
+In truth, the many-legged monster made the old library ghostly to him
+by the associations which it summoned up, and by the idea that it was
+really the identical one that had seemed so stuffed with poison, in the
+lifetime of the Doctor, and at that so distant spot. Yet, on reflection,
+it appeared not so strange; for the old Doctor's spider, as he had heard
+him say, was one of an ancestral race that he had brought from beyond
+the sea. They might have been preserved, for ages possibly, in this old
+library, whence the Doctor had perhaps taken his specimen, and possibly
+the one now before him was the sole survivor. It hardly, however, made
+the monster any the less hideous to suppose that this might be the case;
+and to fancy the poison of old times condensed into this animal, who
+might have sucked the diseases, moral and physical, of all this family
+into him, and to have made himself their demon. He questioned with
+himself whether it might not be well to crush him at once, and so
+perhaps do away with the evil of which he was the emblem.
+
+"I felt a strange disposition to crush this monster at first," remarked
+the priest, as if he knew what Redclyffe was thinking of,--"a feeling
+that in so doing I should get rid of a mischief; but then he is such
+a curious monster. You cannot long look at him without coming to the
+conclusion that he is indestructible."
+
+"Yes; and to think of crushing such a deep-bowelled monster!" said
+Redclyffe, shuddering. "It is too great a catastrophe."
+
+During this conversation in which he was so deeply concerned, the spider
+withdrew himself, and hand over hand ascended to a remote and dusky
+corner, where was his hereditary abode.
+
+"Shall I be likely to meet Lord Braithwaite here in the library?" asked
+Redclyffe, when the fiend had withdrawn himself. "I have not yet seen
+him since my arrival."
+
+"I trust," said the priest, with great courtesy, "that you are aware
+of some peculiarities in his Lordship's habits, which imply nothing in
+detriment to the great respect which he pays all his few guests, and
+which, I know, he is especially desirous to pay to you. I think that
+we shall meet him at lunch, which, though an English institution, his
+Lordship has adopted very readily."
+
+"I should hope," said Redclyffe, willing to know how far he might be
+expected to comply with the peculiarities--which might prove to be
+eccentricities--of his host, "that my presence here will not be too
+greatly at variance with his Lordship's habits, whatever they may be. I
+came hither, indeed, on the pledge that, as my host would not stand in
+my way, so neither would I in his."
+
+"That is the true principle," said the priest, "and here comes his
+Lordship in person to begin the practice of it."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+
+Lord Braithwaite came into the principal door of the library as the
+priest was speaking, and stood a moment just upon the threshold, looking
+keenly out of the stronger light into this dull and darksome apartment,
+as if unable to see perfectly what was within; or rather, as Redclyffe
+fancied, trying to discover what was passing between those two. And,
+indeed, as when a third person comes suddenly upon two who are talking
+of him, the two generally evince in their manner some consciousness of
+the fact; so it was in this case, with Redclyffe at least, although
+the priest seemed perfectly undisturbed, either through practice of
+concealment, or because he had nothing to conceal.
+
+His Lordship, after a moment's pause, came forward, presenting his hand
+to Redclyffe, who shook it, and not without a certain cordiality; till
+he perceived that it was the left hand, when he probably intimated some
+surprise by a change of manner.
+
+"I am an awkward person," said his Lordship. "The left hand, however, is
+nearest the heart; so be assured I mean no discourtesy."
+
+"The Signor Ambassador and myself," observed the priest, "have had
+a most interesting conversation (to me at least) about books and
+bookworms, spiders, and other congruous matters; and I find his
+Excellency has heretofore made acquaintance with a great spider bearing
+strong resemblance to the hermit of our library."
+
+"Indeed," said his Lordship. "I was not aware that America had yet
+enough of age and old misfortune, crime, sordidness, that accumulate
+with it, to have produced spiders like this. Had he sucked into himself
+all the noisomeness of your heat?"
+
+Redclyffe made some slight answer, that the spider was a sort of pet of
+an old virtuoso to whom he owed many obligations in his boyhood; and the
+conversation turned from this subject to others suggested by topics of
+the day and place. His Lordship was affable, and Redclyffe could not,
+it must be confessed, see anything to justify the prejudices of the
+neighbors against him. Indeed, he was inclined to attribute them, in
+great measure, to the narrowness of the English view,--to those insular
+prejudices which have always prevented them from fully appreciating what
+differs from their own habits. At lunch, which was soon announced, the
+party of three became very pleasant and sociable, his Lordship drinking
+a light Italian red wine, and recommending it to Redclyffe; who,
+however, was English enough to prefer some bitter ale, while the priest
+contented himself with pure water,--which is, in truth, a less agreeable
+drink in chill, moist England than in any country we are acquainted
+with.
+
+"You must make yourself quite at home here," said his Lordship, as
+they rose from table. "I am not a good host, nor a very genial man, I
+believe. I can do little to entertain you; but here is the house and
+the grounds at your disposal,--horses in the stable,--guns in the
+hall,--here is Father Angelo, good at chess. There is the library. Pray
+make the most of them all; and if I can contribute in any way to your
+pleasure, let me know."
+
+All this certainly seemed cordial, and the manner in which it was said
+seemed in accordance with the spirit of the words; and yet, whether
+the fault was in anything of morbid suspicion in Redclyffe's nature, or
+whatever it was, it did not have the effect of making him feel welcome,
+which almost every Englishman has the natural faculty of producing on
+a guest, when once he has admitted him beneath his roof. It might be in
+great measure his face, so thin and refined, and intellectual without
+feeling; his voice which had melody, but not heartiness; his manners,
+which were not simple by nature, but by art;--whatever it was, Redclyffe
+found that Lord Braithwaite did not call for his own naturalness and
+simplicity, but his art, and felt that he was inevitably acting a part
+in his intercourse with him, that he was on his guard, playing a
+game; and yet he did not wish to do this. But there was a mobility, a
+subtleness in his nature, an unconscious tact,--which the mode of life
+and of mixing with men in America fosters and perfects,--that made this
+sort of finesse inevitable to him, with any but a natural character;
+with whom, on the other hand, Redclyffe could be as fresh and natural as
+any Englishman of them all.
+
+Redclyffe spent the time between lunch and dinner in wandering about the
+grounds, from which he had hitherto felt himself debarred by motives of
+delicacy. It was a most interesting ramble to him, coming to trees which
+his ancestor, who went to America, might have climbed in his boyhood,
+might have sat beneath, with his lady-love, in his youth; deer there
+were, the descendants of those which he had seen; old stone stiles,
+which his foot had trodden. The sombre, clouded light of the day fell
+down upon this scene, which in its verdure, its luxuriance of vegetable
+life, was purely English, cultivated to the last extent without losing
+the nature out of a single thing. In the course of his walk he came to
+the spot where he had been so mysteriously wounded on his first arrival
+in this region; and, examining the spot, he was startled to see that
+there was a path leading to the other side of a hedge, and this path,
+which led to the house, had brought him here.
+
+Musing upon this mysterious circumstance, and how it should have
+happened in so orderly a country as England, so tamed and subjected to
+civilization,--an incident to happen in an English park which seemed
+better suited to the Indian-haunted forests of the wilder parts of his
+own land,--and how no researches which the Warden had instituted had
+served in the smallest degree to develop the mystery,--he clambered over
+the hedge, and followed the footpath. It plunged into dells, and emerged
+from them, led through scenes which seemed those of old romances, and
+at last, by these devious ways, began to approach the old house, which,
+with its many gray gables, put on a new aspect from this point of view.
+Redclyffe admired its venerableness anew; the ivy that overran parts of
+it; the marks of age; and wondered at the firmness of the institutions
+which, through all the changes that come to man, could have kept this
+house the home of one lineal race for so many centuries; so many, that
+the absence of his own branch from it seemed but a temporary visit to
+foreign parts, from which he was now returned, to be again at home, by
+the old hearthstone.
+
+"But what do I mean to do?" said he to himself, stopping short, and
+still looking at the old house. "Am I ready to give up all the actual
+life before me for the sake of taking up with what I feel to be a less
+developed state of human life? Would it not be better for me to depart
+now, to turn my back on this flattering prospect? I am not fit to be
+here,--I, so strongly susceptible of a newer, more stirring life than
+these men lead; I, who feel that, whatever the thought and cultivation
+of England may be, my own countrymen have gone forward a long, long
+march beyond them, not intellectually, but in a way that gives them a
+further start. If I come back hither, with the purpose to make myself
+an Englishman, especially an Englishman of rank and hereditary
+estate,--then for me America has been discovered in vain, and the great
+spirit that has been breathed into us is in vain; and I am false to it
+all!"
+
+But again came silently swelling over him like a flood all that ancient
+peace, and quietude, and dignity, which looked so stately and beautiful
+as brooding round the old house; all that blessed order of ranks, that
+sweet superiority, and yet with no disclaimer of common brotherhood,
+that existed between the English gentleman and his inferiors; all that
+delightful intercourse, so sure of pleasure, so safe from rudeness,
+lowness, unpleasant rubs, that exists between gentleman and gentleman,
+where, in public affairs, all are essentially of one mind, or seem so
+to an American politician, accustomed to the fierce conflicts of our
+embittered parties; where life was made so enticing, so refined, and yet
+with a sort of homeliness that seemed to show that all its strength was
+left behind; that seeming taking in of all that was desirable in life,
+and all its grace and beauty, yet never giving life a hard enamel of
+over-refinement. What could there be in the wild, harsh, ill-conducted
+American approach to civilization, which could compare with this? What
+to compare with this juiciness and richness? What other men had ever got
+so much out of life as the polished and wealthy Englishmen of to-day?
+What higher part was to be acted, than seemed to lie before him, if he
+willed to accept it?
+
+He resumed his walk, and, drawing near the manor-house, found that he
+was approaching another entrance than that which had at first admitted
+him; a very pleasant entrance it was, beneath a porch, of antique form,
+and ivy-clad, hospitable and inviting; and it being the approach from
+the grounds, it seemed to be more appropriate to the residents of the
+house than the other one. Drawing near, Redclyffe saw that a flight of
+steps ascended within the porch, old-looking, much worn; and nothing is
+more suggestive of long time than a flight of worn steps; it must have
+taken so many soles, through so many years, to make an impression.
+Judging from the make of the outside of the edifice, Redclyffe thought
+that he could make out the way from the porch to the hall and library;
+so he determined to enter this way.
+
+There had been, as was not unusual, a little shower of rain during
+the afternoon; and as Redclyffe came close to the steps, they were
+glistening with the wet. The stones were whitish, like marble, and one
+of them bore on it a token that made him pause, while a thrill like
+terror ran through his system. For it was the mark of a footstep, very
+decidedly made out, and red, like blood,--the Bloody Footstep,--the mark
+of a foot, which seemed to have been slightly impressed into the rock,
+as if it had been a soft substance, at the same time sliding a little,
+and gushing with blood. The glistening moisture of which we have
+spoken made it appear as if it were just freshly stamped there; and it
+suggested to Redclyffe's fancy the idea, that, impressed more than two
+centuries ago, there was some charm connected with the mark which kept
+it still fresh, and would continue to do so to the end of time. It was
+well that there was no spectator there,--for the American would have
+blushed to have it known how much this old traditionary wonder had
+affected his imagination. But, indeed, it was as old as any bugbear of
+his mind--as any of those bugbears and private terrors which grow up
+with people, and make the dreams and nightmares of childhood, and the
+fever-images of mature years, till they haunt the deliriums of the dying
+bed, and after that possibly, are either realized or known no more.
+The Doctor's strange story vividly recurred to him, and all the horrors
+which he had since associated with this trace; and it seemed to him as
+if he had now struck upon a bloody track, and as if there were other
+tracks of this supernatural foot which he was bound to search out;
+removing the dust of ages that had settled on them, the moss and deep
+grass that had grown over them, the forest leaves that might have fallen
+on them in America--marking out the pathway, till the pedestrian lay
+down in his grave.
+
+The foot was issuing from, not entering into, the house. Whoever had
+impressed it, or on whatever occasion, he had gone forth, and doubtless
+to return no more. Redclyffe was impelled to place his own foot on the
+track; and the action, as it were, suggested in itself strange ideas of
+what had been the state of mind of the man who planted it there; and he
+felt a strange, vague, yet strong surmise of some agony, some terror and
+horror, that had passed here, and would not fade out of the spot. While
+he was in these musings, he saw Lord Braithwaite looking at him through
+the glass of the porch, with fixed, curious eyes, and a smile on his
+face. On perceiving that Redclyffe was aware of his presence, he came
+forth without appearing in the least disturbed.
+
+"What think you of the Bloody Footstep?" asked he.
+
+"It seems to me, undoubtedly," said Redclyffe, stooping to examine it
+more closely, "a good thing to make a legend out of; and, like most
+legendary lore, not capable of bearing close examination. I should
+decidedly say that the Bloody Footstep is a natural reddish stain in the
+stone."
+
+"Do you think so, indeed?" rejoined his Lordship. "It may be; but in
+that case, if not the record of an actual deed,--of a foot stamped down
+there in guilt and agony, and oozing out with unwipeupable blood,--we
+may consider it as prophetic;--as foreboding, from the time when the
+stone was squared and smoothed, and laid at this threshold, that a fatal
+footstep was really to be impressed here."
+
+"It is an ingenious supposition," said Redclyffe. "But is there any sure
+knowledge that the prophecy you suppose has yet been fulfilled?"
+
+"If not, it might yet be in the future," said Lord Braithwaite. "But I
+think there are enough in the records of this family to prove that there
+did one cross this threshold in a bloody agony, who has since returned
+no more. Great seekings, I have understood, have been had throughout the
+world for him, or for any sign of him, but nothing satisfactory has been
+heard."
+
+"And it is now too late to expect it," observed the American.
+
+"Perhaps not," replied the nobleman, with a glance that Redclyffe
+thought had peculiar meaning in it. "Ah! it is very curious to see
+what turnings up there are in this world of old circumstances that seem
+buried forever; how things come back, like echoes that have rolled away
+among the hills and been seemingly hushed forever. We cannot tell when
+a thing is really dead; it comes to life, perhaps in its old shape,
+perhaps in a new and unexpected one; so that nothing really vanishes out
+of the world. I wish it did."
+
+The conversation now ceased, and Redclyffe entered the house, where he
+amused himself for some time in looking at the ancient hall, with its
+gallery, its armor, and its antique fireplace, on the hearth of
+which burned a genial fire. He wondered whether in that fire was the
+continuance of that custom which the Doctor's legend spoke of, and that
+the flame had been kept up there two hundred years, in expectation of
+the wanderer's return. It might be so, although the climate of England
+made it a natural custom enough, in a large and damp old room, into
+which many doors opened, both from the exterior and interior of the
+mansion; but it was pleasant to think the custom a traditionary one, and
+to fancy that a booted figure, enveloped in a cloak, might still
+arrive, and fling open the veiling cloak, throw off the sombre and
+drooping-brimmed hat, and show features that were similar to those seen
+in pictured faces on the walls. Was he himself--in another guise, as
+Lord Braithwaite had been saying--that long-expected one? Was his the
+echoing tread that had been heard so long through the ages--so far
+through the wide world--approaching the blood-stained threshold?
+
+With such thoughts, or dreams (for they were hardly sincerely enough
+entertained to be called thoughts), Redclyffe spent the day; a strange,
+delicious day, in spite of the sombre shadows that enveloped it. He
+fancied himself strangely wonted, already, to the house; as if his every
+part and peculiarity had at once fitted into its nooks, and corners,
+and crannies; but, indeed, his mobile nature and active fancy were not
+entirely to be trusted in this matter; it was, perhaps, his American
+faculty of making himself at home anywhere, that he mistook for the
+feeling of being peculiarly at home here.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+
+Redclyffe was now established in the great house which had been so long
+and so singularly an object of interest with him. With his customary
+impressibility by the influences around him, he begun to take in the
+circumstances, and to understand them by more subtile tokens than he
+could well explain to himself. There was the steward, [Endnote: 1] or
+whatever was his precise office; so quiet, so subdued, so nervous, so
+strange! What had been this man's history? What was now the secret
+of his daily life? There he was, creeping stealthily up and down the
+staircases, and about the passages of the house; always as if he were
+afraid of meeting somebody. On seeing Redclyffe in the house, the latter
+fancied that the man expressed a kind of interest in his face; but
+whether pleasure or pain he could not well tell; only he sometimes found
+that he was contemplating him from a distance, or from the obscurity of
+the room in which he sat,--or from a corridor, while he smoked his cigar
+on the lawn. A great part, if not the whole of this, he imputed to
+his knowledge of Redclyffe's connections with the Doctor; but yet this
+hardly seemed sufficient to account for the pertinacity with which the
+old man haunted his footsteps,--the poor, nervous old thing,--always
+near him, or often unexpectedly so; and yet apparently not very willing
+to hold conversation with him, having nothing of importance to say.
+
+"Mr. Omskirk," said Redclyffe to him, a day or two after the
+commencement of his visit, "how many years have you now been in this
+situation?"
+
+"0, sir, ever since the Doctor's departure for America," said Omskirk,
+"now thirty and five years, five months, and three days."
+
+"A long time," said Redclyffe, smiling, "and you seem to keep the
+account of it very accurately."
+
+"A very long time, your honor," said Omskirk; "so long, that I seem to
+have lived one life before it began, and I cannot think of any life than
+just what I had. My life was broken off short in the midst; and what
+belonged to the earlier part of it was another man's life; this is
+mine."
+
+"It might be a pleasant life enough, I should think, in this fine old
+Hall," said Redclyffe; "rather monotonous, however. Would you not like
+a relaxation of a few days, a pleasure trip, in all these thirty-five
+years? You old Englishmen are so sturdily faithful to one thing. You do
+not resemble my countrymen in that."
+
+"0, none of them ever lived in an old mansion-house like this," replied
+Omskirk, "they do not know the sort of habits that a man gets here. They
+do not know my business either, nor any man's here."
+
+"Is your master then, so difficult?" said Redclyffe.
+
+"My master! Who was speaking of him?" said the old man, as if surprised.
+"Ah, I was thinking of Dr. Grimshawe. He was my master, you know."
+
+And Redclyffe was again inconceivably struck with the strength of the
+impression that was made on the poor old man's mind by the character of
+the old Doctor; so that, after thirty years of other service, he still
+felt him to be the master, and could not in the least release himself
+from those earlier bonds. He remembered a story that the Doctor used to
+tell of his once recovering a hanged person, and more and more came to
+the conclusion that this was the man, and that, as the Doctor had said,
+this hold of a strong mind over a weak one, strengthened by the idea
+that he had made him, had subjected the man to him in a kind of slavery
+that embraced the soul.
+
+And then, again, the lord of the estate interested him greatly, and not
+unpleasantly. He compared what he seemed to be now with what, according
+to all reports, he had been in the past, and could make nothing of
+it, nor reconcile the two characters in the least. It seemed as if the
+estate were possessed by a devil,--a foul and melancholy fiend,--who
+resented the attempted possession of others by subjecting them to
+himself. One had turned from quiet and sober habits to reckless
+dissipation; another had turned from the usual gayety of life to recluse
+habits, and both, apparently, by the same influence; at least, so
+it appeared to Redclyffe, as he insulated their story from all other
+circumstances, and looked at them by one light. He even thought that he
+felt a similar influence coming over himself, even in this little
+time that he had spent here; gradually, should this be his permanent
+residence,--and not so very gradually either,--there would come its own
+individual mode of change over him. That quick suggestive mind would
+gather the moss and lichens of decay. Palsy of its powers would probably
+be the form it would assume. He looked back through the vanished
+years to the time which he had spent with the old Doctor, and he felt
+unaccountably as if the mysterious old man were yet ruling him, as he
+did in his boyhood; as if his inscrutable, inevitable eye were upon him
+in all his movements; nay, as if he had guided every step that he took
+in coming hither, and were stalking mistily before him, leading him
+about. He sometimes would gladly have given up all these wild and
+enticing prospects, these dreams that had occupied him so long, if he
+could only have gone away and looked back upon the house, its inmates,
+and his own recollections no more; but there came a fate, and took the
+shape of the old Doctor's apparition, holding him back.
+
+And then, too, the thought of Elsie had much influence in keeping him
+quietly here; her natural sunshine was the one thing that, just now,
+seemed to have a good influence upon the world. She, too, was evidently
+connected with this place, and with the fate, whatever it might be, that
+awaited him here. The Doctor, the ruler of his destiny, had provided
+her as well as all the rest; and from his grave, or wherever he was, he
+still seemed to bring them together.
+
+So here, in this darkened dream, he waited for what should come to pass;
+and daily, when he sat down in the dark old library, it was with the
+thought that this day might bring to a close the doubt amid which he
+lived,--might give him the impetus to go forward. In such a state, no
+doubt, the witchcraft of the place was really to be recognized, the
+old witchcraft, too, of the Doctor, which he had escaped by the quick
+ebullition of youthful spirit, long ago, while the Doctor lived; but
+which had been stored up till now, till an influence that remained
+latent for years had worked out in active disease. He held himself
+open for intercourse with the lord of the mansion; and intercourse of a
+certain nature they certainly had, but not of the kind which Redclyffe
+desired. They talked together of politics, of the state of the relations
+between England and America, of the court to which Redclyffe was
+accredited; sometimes Redclyffe tried to lead the conversation to the
+family topics, nor, in truth, did Lord Braithwaite seem to decline his
+lead; although it was observable that very speedily the conversation
+would be found turned upon some other subject, to which it had swerved
+aside by subtle underhand movements. Yet Redclyffe was not the less
+determined, and at no distant period, to bring up the subject on which
+his mind dwelt so much, and have it fairly discussed between them.
+
+He was sometimes a little frightened at the position and circumstances
+in which he found himself; a great disturbance there was in his being,
+the causes of which he could not trace. It had an influence on his
+dreams, through which the Doctor seemed to pass continually, and when he
+awoke it was often with the sensation that he had just the moment before
+been holding conversation with the old man, and that the latter--with
+that gesture of power that he remembered so well--had been impressing
+some command upon him; but what that command was, he could not possibly
+call to mind. He wandered among the dark passages of the house, and up
+its antique staircases, as if expecting at every turn to meet some one
+who would have the word of destiny to say to him. When he went forth
+into the park, it was as if to hold an appointment with one who had
+promised to meet him there; and he came slowly back, lingering and
+loitering, because this expected one had not yet made himself visible,
+yet plucked up a little alacrity as he drew near the house, because the
+communicant might have arrived in his absence, and be waiting for him in
+the dim library. It seemed as if he was under a spell; he could neither
+go away nor rest,--nothing but dreams, troubled dreams. He had ghostly
+fears, as if some one were near him whom he could not make out; stealing
+behind him, and starting away when he was impelled to turn round. A
+nervousness that his healthy temperament had never before permitted him
+to be the victim of, assailed him now. He could not help imputing it
+partly to the influence of the generations who had left a portion of
+their individual human nature in the house, which had become magnetic by
+them and could not rid itself of their presence in one sense, though, in
+another, they had borne it as far off as to where the gray tower of the
+village church rose above their remains.
+
+Again, he was frightened to perceive what a hold the place was getting
+upon him; how the tendrils of the ivy seemed to hold him and would not
+let him go; how natural and homelike (grim and sombre as they were) the
+old doorways and apartments were becoming; how in no place that he had
+ever known had he had such a home-like feeling. To be sure, poor fellow,
+he had no earlier home except the almshouse, where his recollection of a
+fireside crowded by grim old women and pale, sickly children, of course
+never allowed him to have the reminiscences of a private, domestic home.
+But then there was the Doctor's home by the graveyard, and little Elsie,
+his constant playmate? No, even those recollections did not hold him
+like this heavy present circumstance. How should he ever draw himself
+away? No; the proud and vivid and active prospects that had heretofore
+spread themselves before him,--the striving to conquer, the struggle,
+the victory, the defeat, if such it was to be,--the experiences for good
+or ill,--the life, life, life,--all possibility of these was passing
+from him; all that hearty earnest contest or communion of man with man;
+and leaving him nothing but this great sombre shade, this brooding
+of the old family mansion, with its dreary ancestral hall, its mouldy
+dignity, its life of the past, its fettering honor, which to accept must
+bind him hand and foot, as respects all effort, such as he had trained
+himself for,--such as his own country offered. It was not any value for
+these,--as it seemed to Redclyffe,--but a witchcraft, an indefinable
+spell, a something that he could not define, that enthralled him, and
+was now doing a work on him analogous to, though different from, that
+which was wrought on Omskirk and all the other inhabitants, high and
+low, of this old mansion.
+
+He felt greatly interested in the master of the mansion; although
+perhaps it was not from anything in his nature; but partly because he
+conceived that he himself had a controlling power over his fortunes, and
+likewise from the vague perception of this before-mentioned trouble
+in him. It seemed, whatever it might be, to have converted an ordinary
+superficial man of the world into a being that felt and suffered
+inwardly, had pangs, fears, a conscience, a sense of unseen things. It
+seemed as if underneath this manor-house were the entrance to the cave
+of Trophonius, one visit to which made a man sad forever after; and that
+Lord Braithwaite had been there once, or perhaps went nightly, or at
+any hour. Or the mansion itself was like dark-colored experience, the
+reality; the point of view where things were seen in their true lights;
+the true world, all outside of which was delusion, and here--dreamlike
+as its structures seemed--the absolute truth. All those that lived in it
+were getting to be a brotherhood; and he among them; and perhaps before
+the blood-stained threshold would grow up an impassable barrier, which
+would cause himself to sit down in dreary quiet, like the rest of them.
+
+Redclyffe, as has been intimated, had an unavowed--unavowed to
+himself--suspicion that the master of the house cherished no kindly
+purpose towards him; he had an indistinct feeling of danger from him;
+he would not have been surprised to know that he was concocting a plot
+against his life; and yet he did not think that Lord Braithwaite had the
+slightest hostility towards him. It might make the thing more horrible,
+perhaps; but it has been often seen in those who poison for the sake of
+interest, without feelings of personal malevolence, that they do it as
+kindly as the nature of the thing will permit; they, possibly, may even
+have a certain degree of affection for their victims, enough to induce
+them to make the last hours of life sweet and pleasant; to wind up the
+fever of life with a double supply of enjoyable throbs; to sweeten and
+delicately flavor the cup of death that they offer to the lips of him
+whose life is inconsistent with some stated necessity of their own.
+"Dear friend," such a one might say to the friend whom he reluctantly
+condemned to death, "think not that there is any base malice, any
+desire of pain to thee, that actuates me in this thing. Heaven knows,
+I earnestly wish thy good. But I have well considered the matter,--more
+deeply than thou hast,--and have found that it is essential that one
+thing should be, and essential to that thing that thou, my friend,
+shouldst die. Is that a doom which even thou wouldst object to with such
+an end to be answered? Thou art innocent; thou art not a man of evil
+life; the worst thing that can come of it, so far as thou art concerned,
+would be a quiet, endless repose in yonder churchyard, among dust of
+thy ancestry, with the English violets growing over thee there, and
+the green, sweet grass, which thou wilt not scorn to associate with thy
+dissolving elements, remembering that thy forefather owed a debt,
+for his own birth and growth, to this English soil, and paid it
+not,--consigned himself to that rough soil of another clime, under the
+forest leaves. Pay it, dear friend, without repining, and leave me to
+battle a little longer with this troublesome world, and in a few years
+to rejoin thee, and talk quietly over this matter which we are now
+arranging. How slight a favor, then, for one friend to do another, will
+seem this that I seek of thee."
+
+Redclyffe smiled to himself, as he thus gave expression to what he
+really half fancied were Lord Braithwaite's feelings and purposes
+towards him, and he felt them in the kindness and sweetness of his
+demeanor, and his evident wish to make him happy, combined with his own
+subtile suspicion of some design with which he had been invited here, or
+which had grown up since he came.
+
+Whoever has read Italian history must have seen such instances of this
+poisoning without malice or personal ill-feeling.
+
+His own pleasant, companionable, perhaps noble traits and qualities,
+may have made a favorable impression on Lord Braithwaite, and perhaps he
+regretted the necessity of acting as he was about to do, but could not
+therefore weakly relinquish his deliberately formed design. And, on his
+part, Redclyffe bore no malice towards Lord Braithwaite, but felt really
+a kindly interest in him, and could he have made him happy at any less
+cost than his own life, or dearest interests, would perhaps have been
+glad to do so. He sometimes felt inclined to remonstrate with him in
+a friendly way; to tell him that his intended course was not likely to
+lead to a good result; that they had better try to arrange the matter
+on some other basis, and perhaps he would not find the American so
+unreasonable as he supposed.
+
+All this, it will be understood, were the mere dreamy suppositions of
+Redclyffe, in the idleness and languor of the old mansion, letting his
+mind run at will, and following it into dim caves, whither it tended. He
+did not actually believe anything of all this; unless it be a lawyer,
+or a policeman, or some very vulgar natural order of mind, no man really
+suspects another of crime. It is the hardest thing in the world for a
+noble nature--the hardest and the most shocking--to be convinced that
+a fellow-being is going to do a wrong thing, and the consciousness of
+one's own inviolability renders it still more difficult to believe that
+one's self is to be the object of the wrong. What he had been fancying
+looked to him like a romance. The strange part of the matter was, what
+suggested such a romance in regard to his kind and hospitable host, who
+seemed to exercise the hospitality of England with a kind of refinement
+and pleasant piquancy that came from his Italian mixture of blood? Was
+there no spiritual whisper here?
+
+So the time wore on; and Redclyffe began to be sensible that he must
+soon decide upon the course that he was to take; for his diplomatic
+position waited for him, and he could not loiter many days more away in
+this half delicious, half painful reverie and quiet in the midst of his
+struggling life. He was yet as undetermined what to do as ever; or, if
+we may come down to the truth, he was perhaps loath to acknowledge to
+himself the determination that he had actually formed.
+
+One day, at dinner, which now came on after candle-light, he and Lord
+Braithwaite sat together at table, as usual, while Omskirk waited at the
+sideboard. It was a wild, gusty night, in which an autumnal breeze
+of later autumn seemed to have gone astray, and come into September
+intrusively. The two friends--for such we may call them--had spent a
+pleasant day together, wandering in the grounds, looking at the old
+house at all points, going to the church, and examining the cross-legged
+stone statues; they had ridden, too, and taken a great deal of healthful
+exercise, and had now that pleasant sense of just weariness enough which
+it is the boon of the climate of England to incite and permit men
+to take. Redclyffe was in one of his most genial moods, and Lord
+Braithwaite seemed to be the same; so kindly they were both disposed
+to one another, that the American felt that he might not longer refrain
+from giving his friend some light upon the character in which he
+appeared, or in which, at least, he had it at his option to appear. Lord
+Braithwaite might or might not know it already; but at all events it
+was his duty to tell him, or to take his leave, having thus far neither
+gained nor sought anything from their connection which would tend to
+forward his pursuit--should he decide to undertake it.
+
+When the cheerful fire, the rare wine, and the good fare had put them
+both into a good physical state, Redclyffe said to Lord Braithwaite,--
+
+"There is a matter upon which I have been some time intending to speak
+to you."
+
+Braithwaite nodded.
+
+"A subject," continued he, "of interest to both of us. Has it ever
+occurred to you, from the identity of name, that I may be really, what
+we have jokingly assumed me to be,--a relation?"
+
+"It has," said Lord Braithwaite, readily enough. "The family would be
+proud to acknowledge such a kinsman, whose abilities and political rank
+would add a public lustre that it has long wanted."
+
+Redclyffe bowed and smiled.
+
+"You know, I suppose, the annals of your house," he continued, "and have
+heard how, two centuries ago, or somewhat less, there was an ancestor
+who mysteriously disappeared. He was never seen again. There were tales
+of private murder, out of which a hundred legends have come down to
+these days, as I have myself found, though most of them in so strange a
+shape that I should hardly know them, had I not myself a clue."
+
+"I have heard some of these legends," said Lord Braithwaite.
+
+"But did you ever hear, among them," asked Redclyffe, "that the lost
+ancestor did not really die,--was not murdered,--but lived long, though
+in another hemisphere,--lived long, and left heirs behind him?"
+
+"There is such a legend," said Lord Braithwaite.
+
+"Left posterity," continued Redclyffe,--"a representative of whom is
+alive at this day."
+
+"That I have not known, though I might conjecture something like it,"
+said Braithwaite.
+
+The coolness with which he took this perplexed Redclyffe. He resolved to
+make trial at once whether it were possible to move him.
+
+"And I have reason to believe," he added, "that that representative is
+myself."
+
+"Should that prove to be the case, you are welcome back to your own,"
+said Lord Braithwaite, quietly. "It will be a very remarkable case, if
+the proofs for two hundred years, or thereabouts, can be so distinctly
+made out as to nullify the claim of one whose descent is undoubted. Yet
+it is certainly not impossible. I suppose it would hardly be fair in me
+to ask what are your proofs, and whether I may see them."
+
+"The documents are in the hands of my agents in London," replied
+Redclyffe; "and seem to be ample, among them being a certified genealogy
+from the first emigrant downward, without a break. A declaration of
+two men of note among the first settlers, certifying that they knew
+the first emigrant, under a change of name, to be the eldest son of the
+house of Braithwaite; full proofs, at least on that head."
+
+"You are a lawyer, I believe," said Braithwaite, "and know better than
+I what may be necessary to prove your claim. I will frankly own to you,
+that I have heard, long ago,--as long as when my connection with this
+hereditary property first began,--that there was supposed to be an heir
+extant for a long course of years, and that there, was no proof that
+that main line of the descent had ever become extinct. If these things
+had come fairly before me, and been represented to me with whatever
+force belongs to them, before my accession to the estate,--these and
+other facts which I have since become acquainted with,--I might have
+deliberated on the expediency of coming to such a doubtful possession.
+The property, I assure you, is not so desirable that, taking all things
+into consideration, it has much increased my happiness. But, now, here I
+am, having paid a price in a certain way,--which you will understand,
+if you ever come into the property,--a price of a nature that cannot
+possibly be refunded. It can hardly be presumed that I shall see your
+right a moment sooner than you make it manifest by law."
+
+"I neither expect nor wish it," replied Redclyffe, "nor, to speak
+frankly, am I quite sure that you will ever have occasion to defend your
+title, or to question mine. When I came hither, to be your guest, it was
+almost with the settled purpose never to mention my proofs, nor to
+seek to make them manifest. That purpose is not, I may say, yet
+relinquished."
+
+"Yet I am to infer from your words that it is shaken?" said Braithwaite.
+"You find the estate, then, so delightful,--this life of the old
+manor-house so exquisitely agreeable,--this air so cheering,--this moral
+atmosphere so invigorating,--that your scruples are about coming to
+an end. You think this life of an Englishman, this fair prospect of a
+title, so irresistibly enticing as to be worth more than your claim, in
+behalf of your American birthright, to a possible Presidency."
+
+There was a sort of sneer in this, which Redclyffe did not well know how
+to understand; and there was a look on Braithwaite's face, as he said
+it, that made him think of a condemned soul, who should be dressed in
+magnificent robes, and surrounded with the mockery of state, splendor,
+and happiness, who, if he should be congratulated on his fortunate and
+blissful situation, would probably wear just such a look, and speak in
+just that tone. He looked a moment in Braithwaite's face.
+
+"No," he replied. "I do not think that there is much happiness in it.
+A brighter, healthier, more useful, far more satisfactory, though
+tumultuous life would await me in my own country. But there is about
+this place a strange, deep, sad, brooding interest, which possesses me,
+and draws me to it, and will not let me go. I feel as if, in spite of
+myself and my most earnest efforts, I were fascinated by something in
+the spot, and must needs linger here, and make it my home if I can."
+
+"You shall be welcome; the old hereditary chair will be filled at last,"
+said Braithwaite, pointing to the vacant chair. "Come, we will drink to
+you in a cup of welcome. Take the old chair now."
+
+In half-frolic Redclyffe took the chair.
+
+He called to Omskirk to bring a bottle of a particularly exquisite
+Italian wine, known only to the most deeply skilled in the vintages
+of that country, and which, he said, was oftener heard of than
+seen,--oftener seen than tasted. Omskirk put it on the table in its
+original glass, and Braithwaite filled Redclyffe's glass and his own,
+and raised the latter to his lips, with a frank expression of his mobile
+countenance.
+
+"May you have a secure possession of your estate," said he, "and live
+long in the midst of your possessions. To me, on the whole, it seems
+better than your American prospects."
+
+Redclyffe thanked him, and drank off the glass of wine, which was not
+very much to his taste; as new varieties of wine are apt not to be. All
+the conversation that had passed had been in a free, careless sort of
+way, without apparently much earnestness in it; for they were both men
+who knew how to keep their more serious parts within them. But Redclyffe
+was glad that the explanation was over, and that he might now remain
+at Braithwaite's table, under his roof, without that uneasy feeling of
+treachery which, whether rightly or not, had haunted him hitherto. He
+felt joyous, and stretched his hand out for the bottle which Braithwaite
+kept near himself, instead of passing it.
+
+"You do not yourself do justice to your own favorite wine," observed
+Redclyffe, seeing his host's full glass standing before him.
+
+"I have filled again," said Braithwaite, carelessly; "but I know not
+that I shall venture to drink a second glass. It is a wine that does not
+bear mixture with other vintages, though of most genial and admirable
+qualities when taken by itself. Drink your own, however, for it will be
+a rare occasion indeed that would induce me to offer you another bottle
+of this rare stock."
+
+Redclyffe sipped his second glass, endeavoring to find out what was this
+subtile and peculiar flavor that hid itself so, and yet seemed on the
+point of revealing itself. It had, he thought, a singular effect upon
+his faculties, quickening and making them active, and causing him to
+feel as if he were on the point of penetrating rare mysteries, such as
+men's thoughts are always hovering round, and always returning from.
+Some strange, vast, sombre, mysterious truth, which he seemed to have
+searched for long, appeared to be on the point of being revealed to him;
+a sense of something to come; something to happen that had been waiting
+long, long to happen; an opening of doors, a drawing away of veils; a
+lifting of heavy, magnificent curtains, whose dark folds hung before a
+spectacle of awe;--it was like the verge of the grave. Whether it was
+the exquisite wine of Braithwaite, or whatever it might be, the American
+felt a strange influence upon him, as if he were passing through the
+gates of eternity, and finding on the other side the revelation of some
+secret that had greatly perplexed him on this side. He thought that
+Braithwaite's face assumed a strange, subtile smile,--not malicious,
+yet crafty, triumphant, and at the same time terribly sad, and with that
+perception his senses, his life, welled away; and left him in the deep
+ancestral chair at the board of Braithwaite.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+
+When awake [Endnote: 1], or beginning to awake, he lay for some time in
+a maze; not a disagreeable one, but thoughts were running to and fro in
+his mind, all mixed and jumbled together. Reminiscences of early days,
+even those that were Preadamite; referring, we mean, to those times in
+the almshouse, which he could not at ordinary times remember at all; but
+now there seemed to be visions of old women and men, and pallid girls,
+and little dirty boys, which could only be referred to that epoch. Also,
+and most vividly, there was the old Doctor, with his sternness,
+his fierceness, his mystery; and all that happened since, playing
+phantasmagoria before his yet unclosed eyes; nor, so mysterious was his
+state, did he know, when he should unclose those lids, where he should
+find himself. He was content to let the world go on in this way, as
+long as it would, and therefore did not hurry, but rather kept back the
+proofs of awakening; willing to look at the scenes that were unrolling
+for his amusement, as it seemed; and willing, too, to keep it uncertain
+whether he were not back in America, and in his boyhood, and all other
+subsequent impressions a dream or a prophetic vision. But at length
+something stirring near him,--or whether it stirred, or whether he
+dreamed it, he could not quite tell,--but the uncertainty impelled him,
+at last, to open his eyes, and see whereabouts he was.
+
+Even then he continued in as much uncertainty as he was before, and lay
+with marvellous quietude in it, trying sluggishly to make the mystery
+out. It was in a dim, twilight place, wherever it might be; a place of
+half-awakeness, where the outlines of things were not well defined; but
+it seemed to be a chamber, antique and vaulted, narrow and high, hung
+round with old tapestry. Whether it were morning or midday he could not
+tell, such was the character of the light, nor even where it came from;
+for there appeared to be no windows, and yet it was not apparently
+artificial light; nor light at all, indeed, but a gray dimness. It was
+so like his own half-awake state that he lay in it a longer time, not
+incited to finish his awaking, but in a languor, not disagreeable, yet
+hanging heavily, heavily upon him, like a dark pall. It was, in fact, as
+if he had been asleep for years, or centuries, or till the last day was
+dawning, and then was collecting his thoughts in such slow fashion as
+would then be likely.
+
+Again that noise,--a little, low, quiet sound, as of one breathing
+somewhere near him. The whole thing was very much like that incident
+which introduced him to the Hospital, and his first coming to his senses
+there; and he almost fancied that some such accident must again have
+happened to him, and that when his sight cleared he should again behold
+the venerable figure of the pensioner. With this idea he let his head
+steady itself; and it seemed to him that its dizziness must needs be
+the result of very long and deep sleep. What if it were the sleep of a
+century? What if all things that were extant when he went to sleep had
+passed away, and he was waking now in another epoch of time? Where was
+America, and the republic in which he hoped for such great things? Where
+England? had she stood it better than the republic? Was the old Hospital
+still in being,--although the good Warden must long since have passed
+out of his warm and pleasant life? And himself, how came he to be
+preserved? In what musty old nook had he been put away, where Time
+neglected and Death forgot him, until now he was to get up friendless,
+helpless,--when new heirs had come to the estate he was on the point of
+laying claim to,--and go onward through what remained of life? Would it
+not have been better to have lived with his contemporaries, and to be
+now dead and dust with them? Poor, petty interests of a day, how slight!
+
+Again the noise, a little stir, a sort of quiet moan, or something that
+he could not quite define; but it seemed, whenever he heard it, as
+if some fact thrust itself through the dream-work with which he was
+circumfused; something alien to his fantasies, yet not powerful enough
+to dispel them. It began to be irksome to him, this little sound of
+something near him; and he thought, in the space of another hundred
+years, if it continued, he should have to arouse himself and see what
+it was. But, indeed, there was something so cheering in this long
+repose,--this rest from all the troubles of earth, which it sometimes
+seems as if only a churchyard bed would give us,--that he wished the
+noise would let him alone. But his thoughts were gradually getting
+too busy for this slumberous state. He begun, perforce, to come nearer
+actuality. The strange question occurred to him, Had any time at all
+passed? Was he not still sitting at Lord Braithwaite's table, having
+just now quaffed a second glass of that rare and curious Italian wine?
+Was it not affecting his head very strangely,--so that he was put out of
+time as it were? He would rally himself, and try to set his head right
+with another glass. He must be still at table, for now he remembered he
+had not gone to bed at all. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+Ah, the noise! He could not bear it, he would awake now, now!--silence
+it, and then to sleep again. In fact, he started up; started to his
+feet, in puzzle and perplexity, and stood gazing around him, with
+swimming brain. It was an antique room, which he did not at all
+recognize, and, indeed, in that dim twilight--which how it came he could
+not tell--he could scarcely discern what were its distinguishing marks.
+But he seemed to be sensible, that, in a high-backed chair, at a little
+distance from him, sat a figure in a long robe; a figure of a man
+with snow-white hair and a long beard, who seemed to be gazing at him,
+quietly, as if he had been gazing a hundred years. I know not what it
+was, but there was an influence as if this old man belonged to some
+other age and category of man than he was now amongst. He remembered the
+old family legend of the existence of an ancestor two or three centuries
+in age.
+
+"It is the old family personified," thought he.
+
+The old figure made no sign, but continued to sit gazing at him in so
+strangely still a manner that it made Redclyffe shiver with something
+that seemed like affright. There was an aspect of long, long time about
+him; as if he had never been young, or so long ago as when the world
+was young along with him. He might be the demon of this old house; the
+representative of all that happened in it, the grief, the long languor
+and weariness of life, the deaths, gathering them all into himself, and
+figuring them in furrows, wrinkles, and white hairs,--a being that might
+have been young, when those old Saxon timbers were put together, with
+the oaks that were saplings when Caesar landed, and was in his maturity
+when the Conqueror came, and was now lapsing into extreme age when the
+nineteenth century was elderly. His garb might have been of any time,
+that long, loose robe that enveloped him. Redclyffe remained in this
+way, gazing at this aged figure; at first without the least wonder, but
+calmly, as we feel in dreams, when, being in a land of enchantment, we
+take everything as if it were a matter of course, and feel, by the right
+of our own marvellous nature, on terms of equal kindred with all other
+marvels. So it was with him when he first became aware of the old man,
+sitting there with that age-long regard directed towards him.
+
+But, by degrees, a sense of wonder had its will, and grew, slowly at
+first, in Redclyffe's mind; and almost twin-born with it, and growing
+piece by piece, there was a sense of awful fear, as his waking senses
+came slowly back to him. In the dreamy state, he had felt no fear; but,
+as a waking man, it was fearful to discover that the shadowy forms did
+not fly from his awaking eyes. He started at last to his feet from the
+low couch on which he had all this time been lying.
+
+"What are you?" he exclaimed. "Where am I?"
+
+The old figure made no answer; nor could Redclyffe be quite sure that
+his voice had any effect upon it, though he fancied that it was shaken
+a little, as if his voice came to it from afar. But it continued to gaze
+at him, or at least to have its aged face turned towards him in the dim
+light; and this strange composure, and unapproachableness, were very
+frightful. As his manhood gathered about his heart, however, the
+American endeavored to shake off this besetting fear, or awe, or
+whatever it was; and to bring himself to a sense of waking things,--to
+burst through the mist and delusive shows that bewildered him, and catch
+hold of a reality. He stamped upon the floor; it was solid stone, the
+pavement, or oak so old and stanch that it resembled it. There was
+one firm thing, therefore. But the contrast between this and the
+slipperiness, the unaccountableness, of the rest of his position, made
+him the more sensible of the latter. He made a step towards the old
+figure; another; another. He was face to face with him, within a yard of
+distance. He saw the faint movement of the old man's breath; he sought,
+through the twilight of the room, some glimmer of perception in his
+eyes.
+
+"Are you a living man?" asked Redclyffe, faintly and doubtfully.
+
+He mumbled, the old figure, some faint moaning sound, that, if it
+were language at all, had all the edges and angles worn off it by
+decay,--unintelligible, except that it seemed to signify a faint
+mournfulness and complainingness of mood; and then held his peace,
+continuing to gaze as before. Redclyffe could not bear the awe that
+filled him, while he kept at a distance, and, coming desperately
+forward, he stood close to the old figure; he touched his robe, to see
+if it were real; he laid his hand upon the withered hand that held the
+staff, in which he now recognized the very staff of the Doctor's legend.
+His fingers touched a real hand, though, bony and dry, as if it had been
+in the grave.
+
+"Then you are real?" said Redclyffe doubtfully.
+
+The old figure seemed to have exhausted itself--its energies, what there
+were of them--in the effort of making the unintelligible communication
+already vouchsafed. Then he seemed to lapse out of consciousness, and
+not to know what was passing, or to be sensible that any person was
+near him. But Redclyffe was now resuming his firmness and daylight
+consciousness even in the dimness. He ran over all that he had heard of
+the legend of the old house, rapidly considering whether there might not
+be something of fact in the legend of the undying old man; whether, as
+told or whispered in the chimney-corners, it might not be an instance
+of the mysterious, the half-spiritual mode, in which actual truths
+communicate themselves imperfectly through a medium that gives them the
+aspect of falsehood. Something in the atmosphere of the house made its
+inhabitants and neighbors dimly aware that there was a secret resident;
+it was by a language not audible, but of impression; there could not
+be such a secret in its recesses, without making itself sensible. This
+legend of the undying one translated it to vulgar apprehension. He
+remembered those early legends, told by the Doctor, in his childhood;
+he seemed imperfectly and doubtfully to see what was their true meaning,
+and how, taken aright, they had a reality, and were the craftily
+concealed history of his own wrongs, sufferings, and revenge. And this
+old man! who was he? He joined the Warden's account of the family to
+the Doctor's legends. He could not believe, or take thoroughly in, the
+strange surmise to which they led him; but, by an irresistible impulse,
+he acted on it.
+
+"Sir Edward Redclyffe!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Ha! who speaks to me?" exclaimed the old man, in a startled voice, like
+one who hears himself called at an unexpected moment.
+
+"Sir Edward Redclyffe," repeated Redclyffe, "I bring you news of Norman
+Oglethorpe!" [Endnote: 3.]
+
+"The villain! the tyrant! mercy! mercy! save me!" cried the old man, in
+most violent emotion of terror and rage intermixed, that shook his old
+frame as if it would be shaken asunder. He stood erect, the picture of
+ghastly horror, as if he saw before him that stern face that had thrown
+a blight over his life, and so fearfully avenged, from youth to age, the
+crime that he had committed. The effect, the passion, was too much,--the
+terror with which it smote, the rage that accompanied it, blazed up
+for a moment with a fierce flame, then flickered and went out. He stood
+tottering; Redclyffe put out his hand to support him; but he sank down
+in a heap on the floor, as if a thing of dry bones had been suddenly
+loosened at the joints, and fell in a rattling heap. [Endnote: 4.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+
+Redclyffe, apparently, had not communicated to his agent in London his
+change of address, when he left the Warden's residence to avail himself
+of the hospitality of Braithwaite Hall; for letters arrived for him,
+from his own country, both private and with the seal of state upon them;
+one among the rest that bore on the envelope the name of the President
+of the United States. The good Warden was impressed with great respect
+for so distinguished a signature, and, not knowing but that the welfare
+of the Republic (for which he had an Englishman's contemptuous
+interest) might be involved in its early delivery at its destination,
+he determined to ride over to Braithwaite Hall, call on his friend, and
+deliver it with his own hand. With this purpose, he mounted his horse,
+at the hour of his usual morning ride, and set forth; and, before
+reaching the village, saw a figure before him which he recognized as
+that of the pensioner. [Endnote: 1.]
+
+"Soho! whither go you, old friend?" said the Warden, drawing his bridle
+as he came up with the old man.
+
+"To Braithwaite Hall, sir," said the pensioner, who continued to walk
+diligently on; "and I am glad to see your honor (if it be so) on the
+same errand."
+
+"Why so?" asked the Warden. "You seem much in earnest. Why should my
+visit to Braithwaite Hall be a special cause of rejoicing?"
+
+"Nay," said the pensioner, "your honor is specially interested in this
+young American, who has gone thither to abide; and when one is in a
+strange country he needs some guidance. My mind is not easy about the
+young man."
+
+"Well," said the Warden, smiling to himself at the old gentleman's idle
+and senile fears, "I commend your diligence on behalf of your friend."
+
+He rode on as he spoke, and deep in one of the woodland paths he saw
+the flutter of a woman's garment, and, greatly to his surprise, overtook
+Elsie, who seemed to be walking along with great rapidity, and, startled
+by the approach of hoofs behind her, looked up at him, with a pale
+cheek.
+
+"Good morning, Miss Elsie," said the Warden. "You are taking a long walk
+this morning. I regret to see that I have frightened you."
+
+"Pray, whither are you going?" said she.
+
+"To the Hall," said the Warden, wondering at the abrupt question.
+
+"Ah, sir," exclaimed Elsie, "for Heaven's sake, pray insist on seeing
+Mr. Redclyffe,--take no excuse. There are reasons for it."
+
+"Certainly, fair lady," responded the Warden, wondering more and more
+at this injunction from such a source. "And when I see this fascinating
+gentleman, pray what message am I to give him from Miss Elsie,--who,
+moreover, seems to be on the eve of visiting him in person?"
+
+"See him! see him! Only see him!" said Elsie, with passionate
+earnestness, "and in haste! See him now!"
+
+She waved him onward as she spoke; and the Warden, greatly commoted for
+the nonce, complied with the maiden's fantasy so far as to ride on at
+a quicker pace, uneasily marvelling at what could have aroused this
+usually shy and reserved girl's nervousness to such a pitch. The
+incident served at all events to titillate his English sluggishness; so
+that he approached the avenue of the old Hall with a vague expectation
+of something that had happened there, though he knew not of what nature
+it could possibly be. However, he rode round to the side entrance, by
+which horsemen generally entered the house, and, a groom approaching to
+take his bridle, he alighted and approached the door. I know not whether
+it were anything more than the glistening moisture common in an English
+autumnal morning; but so it was, that the trace of the Bloody Footstep
+seemed fresh, as if it had been that very night imprinted anew, and the
+crime made all over again, with fresh guilt upon somebody's soul.
+
+When the footman came to the door, responsive to his ring, the Warden
+inquired for Mr. Redclyffe, the American gentleman.
+
+"The American gentleman left for London, early this morning," replied
+the footman, in a matter-of-fact way.
+
+"Gone!" exclaimed the Warden. "This is sudden; and strange that he
+should go without saying good by. Gone," and then he remembered the
+old pensioner's eagerness that the Warden should come here, and Elsie's
+strange injunction that he should insist on seeing Redclyffe. "Pray, is
+Lord Braithwaite at home?"
+
+"I think, sir, he is in the library," said the servant, "but will see;
+pray, sir, walk in."
+
+He returned in a moment, and ushered the Warden through passages with
+which he was familiar of old, to the library, where he found Lord
+Braithwaite sitting with the London newspaper in his hand. He rose and
+welcomed his guest with great equanimity.
+
+To the Warden's inquiries after Redclyffe, Lord Braithwaite replied that
+his guest had that morning left the house, being called to London by
+letters from America; but of what nature Lord Braithwaite was unable
+to say, except that they seemed to be of urgency and importance. The
+Warden's further inquiries, which he pushed as far as was decorous,
+elicited nothing more than this; and he was preparing to take his
+leave,--not seeing any reason for insisting (according to Elsie's
+desire) on the impossibility of seeing a man who was not there,--nor,
+indeed, any reason for so doing. And yet it seemed very strange
+that Redclyffe should have gone so unceremoniously; nor was he half
+satisfied, though he knew not why he should be otherwise.
+
+"Do you happen to know Mr. Redclyffe's address in London," asked the
+Warden.
+
+"Not at all," said Braithwaite. "But I presume there is courtesy enough
+in the American character to impel him to write to me, or both of us,
+within a day or two, telling us of his whereabouts and whatabouts.
+Should you know, I beg you will let me know; for I have really been
+pleased with this gentleman, and should have been glad could he have
+favored me with a somewhat longer visit."
+
+There was nothing more to be said; and the Warden took his leave, and
+was about mounting his horse, when he beheld the pensioner approaching
+the house, and he remained standing until he should come up.
+
+"You are too late," said he, as the old man drew near. "Our friend has
+taken French leave."
+
+"Mr. Warden," said the old man solemnly, "let me pray you not to give
+him up so easily. Come with me into the presence of Lord Braithwaite."
+
+The Warden made some objections; but the pensioner's manner was so
+earnest, that he soon consented; knowing that the strangeness of his
+sudden return might well enough be put upon the eccentricities of the
+pensioner, especially as he was so well known to Lord Braithwaite.
+He accordingly again rang at the door, which being opened by the same
+stolid footman, the Warden desired him to announce to Lord Braithwaite
+that the Warden and a pensioner desired to see him. He soon returned,
+with a request that they would walk in, and ushered them again to the
+library, where they found the master of the house in conversation with
+Omskirk at one end of the apartment,--a whispered conversation, which
+detained him a moment, after their arrival. The Warden fancied that he
+saw in old Omskirk's countenance a shade more of that mysterious horror
+which made him such a bugbear to children; but when Braithwaite
+turned from him and approached his visitor, there was no trace of any
+disturbance, beyond a natural surprise to see his good friend the Warden
+so soon after his taking leave. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+"I see you are surprised," said the latter. "But you must lay the blame,
+if any, on our good old friend here, who, for some reason, best known to
+himself, insisted on having my company here."
+
+Braithwaite looked to the old pensioner, with a questioning look, as
+if good-humoredly (yet not as if he cared much about it) asking for an
+explanation. As Omskirk was about leaving the room, having remained till
+this time, with that nervous look which distinguished him gazing
+towards the party, the pensioner made him a sign, which he obeyed as if
+compelled to do so.
+
+"Well, my friend," said the Warden, somewhat impatient of the aspect
+in which he himself appeared, "I beg of you, explain at once to Lord
+Braithwaite why you have brought me back in this strange way."
+
+"It is," said the pensioner quietly, "that in your presence I request
+him to allow me to see Mr. Redclyffe."
+
+"Why, my friend," said Braithwaite, "how can I show you a man who has
+left my house, and whom in the chances of this life, I am not very
+likely to see again, though hospitably desirous of so doing?"
+
+Here ensued a laughing sort of colloquy between the Warden and
+Braithwaite, in which the former jocosely excused himself for having
+yielded to the whim of the pensioner, and returned with him on an errand
+which he well knew to be futile.
+
+"I have long been aware," he said apart, in a confidential way, "of
+something a little awry in our old friend's mental system. You will
+excuse him, and me for humoring him."
+
+"Of course, of course," said Braithwaite, in the same tone. "I shall not
+be moved by anything the old fellow can say."
+
+The old pensioner, meanwhile, had been as it were heating up, and
+gathering himself into a mood of energy which those who saw him had
+never before witnessed in his usually quiet person. He seemed somehow to
+grow taller and larger, more impressive. At length, fixing his eyes on
+Lord Braithwaite, he spoke again.
+
+"Dark, murderous man," exclaimed he. "Your course has not been
+unwatched; the secrets of this mansion are not unknown. For two
+centuries back, they have been better known to them who dwell afar off
+than to those resident within the mansion. The foot that made the
+Bloody Footstep has returned from its long wanderings, and it passes on,
+straight as destiny,--sure as an avenging Providence,--to the punishment
+and destruction of those who incur retribution."
+
+"Here is an odd kind of tragedy," said Lord Braithwaite, with a scornful
+smile. "Come, my old friend, lay aside this vein and talk sense."
+
+"Not thus do you escape your penalty, hardened and crafty one!"
+exclaimed the pensioner. "I demand of you, before this worthy Warden,
+access to the secret ways of this mansion, of which thou dost unjustly
+retain possession. I shall disclose what for centuries has remained
+hidden,--the ghastly secrets that this house hides."
+
+"Humor him," whispered the Warden, "and hereafter I will take care that
+the exuberance of our old friend shall be duly restrained. He shall not
+trouble you again."
+
+Lord Braithwaite, to say the truth, appeared a little flabbergasted
+and disturbed by these latter expressions of the old gentleman. He
+hesitated, turned pale; but at last, recovering his momentary confusion
+and irresolution, he replied, with apparent carelessness:--
+
+"Go wherever you will, old gentleman. The house is open to you for this
+time. If ever you have another opportunity to disturb it, the fault will
+be mine."
+
+"Follow, sir," said the pensioner, turning to the Warden; "follow,
+maiden![Endnote: 3] Now shall a great mystery begin to be revealed."
+
+So saying, he led the way before them, passing out of the hall, not
+by the doorway, but through one of the oaken panels of the wall, which
+admitted the party into a passage which seemed to pass through the
+thickness of the wall, and was lighted by interstices through which
+shone gleams of light. This led them into what looked like a little
+vestibule, or circular room, which the Warden, though deeming himself
+many years familiar with the old house, had never seen before, any more
+than the passage which led to it. To his surprise, this room was not
+vacant, for in it sat, in a large old chair, Omskirk, like a toad in its
+hole, like some wild, fearful creature in its den, and it was now partly
+understood how this man had the possibility of suddenly disappearing, so
+inscrutably, and so in a moment; and, when all quest for him was given
+up, of as suddenly appearing again.
+
+"Ha!" said old Omskirk, slowly rising, as at the approach of some event
+that he had long expected. "Is he coming at last?"
+
+"Poor victim of another's iniquity," said the pensioner. "Thy release
+approaches. Rejoice!"
+
+The old man arose with a sort of trepidation and solemn joy intermixed
+in his manner, and bowed reverently, as if there were in what he heard
+more than other ears could understand in it.
+
+"Yes; I have waited long," replied he. "Welcome; if my release is come."
+
+"Well," said Lord Braithwaite, scornfully. "This secret retreat of my
+house is known to many. It was the priest's secret chamber when it was
+dangerous to be of the old and true religion, here in England. There is
+no longer any use in concealing this place; and the Warden, or any man,
+might have seen it, or any of the curiosities of the old hereditary
+house, if desirous so to do."
+
+"Aha! son of Belial!" quoth the pensioner. "And this, too!"
+
+He took three pieces from a certain point of the wall, which he seemed
+to know, and stooped to press upon the floor. The Warden looked at Lord
+Braithwaite, and saw that he had grown deadly pale. What his change of
+cheer might bode, he could not guess; but, at the pressure of the old
+pensioner's finger, the floor, or a segment of it, rose like the lid
+of a box, and discovered a small darksome pair of stairs, within which
+burned a lamp, lighting it downward, like the steps that descend into a
+sepulchre.
+
+"Follow," said he, to those who looked on, wondering.
+
+And he began to descend. Lord Braithwaite saw him disappear, then
+frantically followed, the Warden next, and old Omskirk took his place in
+the rear, like a man following his inevitable destiny. At the bottom
+of a winding descent, that seemed deep and remote, and far within, they
+came to a door, which the pensioner pressed with a spring; and, passing
+through the space that disclosed itself, the whole party followed, and
+found themselves in a small, gloomy room. On one side of it was a couch,
+on which sat Redclyffe; face to face with him was a white-haired figure
+in a chair.
+
+"You are come!" said Redclyffe, solemnly. "But too late!"
+
+"And yonder is the coffer," said the pensioner. "Open but that; and our
+quest is ended."
+
+"That, if I mistake not, I can do," said Redclyffe.
+
+He drew forth--what he had kept all this time, as something that might
+yet reveal to him the mystery of his birth--the silver key that had been
+found by the grave in far New England; and applying it to the lock, he
+slowly turned it on the hinges, that had not been turned for two hundred
+years. All--even Lord Braithwaite, guilty and shame-stricken as he
+felt--pressed forward to look upon what was about to be disclosed. What
+were the wondrous contents? The entire, mysterious coffer was full of
+golden ringlets, abundant, clustering through the whole coffer, and
+living with elasticity, so as immediately, as it were, to flow over
+the sides of the coffer, and rise in large abundance from the long
+compression. Into this--by a miracle of natural production which was
+known likewise in other cases--into this had been resolved the whole
+bodily substance of that fair and unfortunate being, known so long in
+the legends of the family as the Beauty of the Golden Locks. As the
+pensioner looked at this strange sight,--the lustre of the precious and
+miraculous hair gleaming and glistening, and seeming to add light to the
+gloomy room,--he took from his breast pocket another lock of hair, in
+a locket, and compared it, before their faces, with that which brimmed
+over from the coffer.
+
+"It is the same!" said he.
+
+"And who are you that know it?" asked Redclyffe, surprised.
+
+"He whose ancestors taught him the secret,--who has had it handed down
+to him these two centuries, and now only with regret yields to the
+necessity of making it known."
+
+"You are the heir!" said Redclyffe.
+
+In that gloomy room, beside the dead old man, they looked at him, and
+saw a dignity beaming on him, covering his whole figure, that broke out
+like a lustre at the close of day.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+_Note 1._ The MS. gives the following alternative openings: "Early in
+the present century"; "Soon after the Revolution"; "Many years ago."
+
+_Note 2._ Throughout the first four pages of the MS. the Doctor is
+called "Ormskirk," and in an earlier draft of this portion of the
+romance, "Etheredge."
+
+_Note 3. Author's note_.--"Crusty Hannah is a mixture of Indian and
+negro."
+
+_Note 4. Author's note_.--"It is understood from the first that the
+children are not brother and sister.--Describe the children with really
+childish traits, quarrelling, being naughty, etc.--The Doctor should
+occasionally beat Ned in course of instruction."
+
+_Note 5._ In order to show the manner in which Hawthorne would modify
+a passage, which was nevertheless to be left substantially the same,
+I subjoin here a description of this graveyard as it appears in the
+earlier draft: "The graveyard (we are sorry to have to treat of such a
+disagreeable piece of ground, but everybody's business centres there at
+one time or another) was the most ancient in the town. The dust of the
+original Englishmen had become incorporated with the soil; of those
+Englishmen whose immediate predecessors had been resolved into the earth
+about the country churches,--the little Norman, square, battlemented
+stone towers of the villages in the old land; so that in this point of
+view, as holding bones and dust of the first ancestors, this graveyard
+was more English than anything else in town. There had been hidden from
+sight many a broad, bluff visage of husbandmen that had ploughed the
+real English soil; there the faces of noted men, now known in history;
+there many a personage whom tradition told about, making wondrous
+qualities of strength and courage for him;--all these, mingled with
+succeeding generations, turned up and battened down again with
+the sexton's spade; until every blade of grass was human more than
+vegetable,--for an hundred and fifty years will do this, and so much
+time, at least, had elapsed since the first little mound was piled up in
+the virgin soil. Old tombs there were too, with numerous sculptures on
+them; and quaint, mossy gravestones; although all kinds of monumental
+appendages were of a date more recent than the time of the first
+settlers, who had been content with wooden memorials, if any, the
+sculptor's art not having then reached New England. Thus rippled,
+surged, broke almost against the house, this dreary graveyard, which
+made the street gloomy, so that people did not like to pass the dark,
+high wooden fence, with its closed gate, that separated it from the
+street. And this old house was one that crowded upon it, and took up the
+ground that would otherwise have been sown as thickly with dead as the
+rest of the lot; so that it seemed hardly possible but that the dead
+people should get up out of their graves, and come in there to warm
+themselves. But in truth, I have never heard a whisper of its being
+haunted."
+
+_Note 6. Author's note_.--"The spiders are affected by the weather and
+serve as barometers.--It shall always be a moot point whether the Doctor
+really believed in cobwebs, or was laughing at the credulous."
+
+_Note 7. Author's note_.--"The townspeople are at war with the
+Doctor.--Introduce the Doctor early as a smoker, and describe.--The
+result of Crusty Hannah's strangely mixed breed should be shown in some
+strange way.--Give vivid pictures of the society of the day, symbolized
+in the street scenes."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Read the whole paragraph before copying any
+of it."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Crusty Hannah teaches Elsie curious
+needlework, etc."
+
+_Note 3._ These two children are described as follows in an early
+note of the author's: "The boy had all the qualities fitted to excite
+tenderness in those who had the care of him; in the first and most
+evident place, on account of his personal beauty, which was very
+remarkable,--the most intelligent and expressive face that can be
+conceived, changing in those early years like an April day, and
+beautiful in all its changes; dark, but of a soft expression, kindling,
+melting, glowing, laughing; a varied intelligence, which it was as good
+as a book to read. He was quick in all modes of mental exercise; quick
+and strong, too, in sensibility; proud, and gifted (probably by the
+circumstances in which he was placed) with an energy which the softness
+and impressibility of his nature needed.--As for the little girl, all
+the squalor of the abode served but to set off her lightsomeness and
+brightsomeness. She was a pale, large-eyed little thing, and it might
+have been supposed that the air of the house and the contiguity of the
+burial-place had a bad effect upon her health. Yet I hardly think this
+could have been the case, for she was of a very airy nature, dancing
+and sporting through the house as if melancholy had never been made. She
+took all kinds of childish liberties with the Doctor, and with his
+pipe, and with everything appertaining to him except his spiders and his
+cobwebs."--All of which goes to show that Hawthorne first conceived his
+characters in the mood of the "Twice-Told Tales," and then by meditation
+solidified them to the inimitable flesh-and-blood of "The House of the
+Seven Gables" and "The Blithedale Romance."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+_Note 1._ An English church spire, evidently the prototype of this, and
+concerning which the same legend is told, is mentioned in the author's
+"English Mote-Books."
+
+_Note 2._ Leicester Hospital, in Warwick, described in "Our Old Home,"
+is the original of this charity.
+
+_Note 3. Author's note_.--"The children find a gravestone with something
+like a footprint on it."
+
+_Note 4. Author's note_.--"Put into the Doctor's character a continual
+enmity against somebody, breaking out in curses of which nobody can
+understand the application."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+_Note 1._ The Doctor's propensity for cobwebs is amplified in the
+following note for an earlier and somewhat milder version of the
+character: "According to him, all science was to be renewed and
+established on a sure ground by no other means than cobwebs. The cobweb
+was the magic clue by which mankind was to be rescued from all its
+errors, and guided safely back to the right. And so he cherished spiders
+above all things, and kept them spinning, spinning away; the only
+textile factory that existed at that epoch in New England. He
+distinguished the production of each of his ugly friends, and assigned
+peculiar qualities to each; and he had been for years engaged in writing
+a work on this new discovery, in reference to which he had already
+compiled a great deal of folio manuscript, and had unguessed at
+resources still to come. With this suggestive subject he interwove all
+imaginable learning, collected from his own library, rich in works that
+few others had read, and from that of his beloved University, crabbed
+with Greek, rich with Latin, drawing into itself, like a whirlpool, all
+that men had thought hitherto, and combining them anew in such a way
+that it had all the charm of a racy originality. Then he had projects
+for the cultivation of cobwebs, to which end, in the good Doctor's
+opinion, it seemed desirable to devote a certain part of the national
+income; and not content with this, all public-spirited citizens would
+probably be induced to devote as much of their time and means as they
+could to the same end. According to him, there was no such beautiful
+festoon and drapery for the halls of princes as the spinning of this
+heretofore despised and hated insect; and by due encouragement it
+might be hoped that they would flourish, and hang and dangle and wave
+triumphant in the breeze, to an extent as yet generally undreamed of.
+And he lamented much the destruction that has heretofore been wrought
+upon this precious fabric by the housemaid's broom, and insisted upon
+by foolish women who claimed to be good housewives. Indeed, it was the
+general opinion that the Doctor's celibacy was in great measure due
+to the impossibility of finding a woman who would pledge herself
+to co-operate with him in this great ambition of his life,--that of
+reducing the world to a cobweb factory; or who would bind herself to let
+her own drawing-room be ornamented with this kind of tapestry. But there
+never was a wife precisely fitted for our friend the Doctor, unless it
+had been Arachne herself, to whom, if she could again have been restored
+to her female shape, he would doubtless have lost no time in paying his
+addresses. It was doubtless the having dwelt too long among the musty
+and dusty clutter and litter of things gone by, that made the Doctor
+almost a monomaniac on this subject. There were cobwebs in his own
+brain, and so he saw nothing valuable but cobwebs in the world around
+him; and deemed that the march of created things, up to this time, had
+been calculated by foreknowledge to produce them."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Ned must learn something of the
+characteristics of the Catechism, and simple cottage devotion."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Make the following scene emblematic of the
+world's treatment of a dissenter."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Yankee characteristics should be shown in the
+schoolmaster's manners."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"He had a sort of horror of violence, and of
+the strangeness that it should be done to him; this affected him more
+than the blow."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Jokes occasionally about the schoolmaster's
+thinness and lightness,--how he might suspend himself from the spider's
+web and swing, etc."
+
+_Note 3. Author's note_.--"The Doctor and the Schoolmaster should have
+much talk about England."
+
+_Note 4. Author's note_.--"The children were at play in the churchyard."
+
+_Note 5. Author's note_.--"He mentions that he was probably buried in
+the churchyard there."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Perhaps put this narratively, not as spoken."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"He was privately married to the heiress,
+if she were an heiress. They meant to kill him in the wood, but, by
+contrivance, he was kidnapped."
+
+_Note 3. Author's note_.--"They were privately married."
+
+_Note 4. Author's note_.--"Old descriptive letters, referring to
+localities as they existed."
+
+_Note 5. Author's note_.--"There should be symbols and tokens, hinting
+at the schoolmaster's disappearance, from the first opening of the
+scene."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"They had got up in remarkably good case that
+morning."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"The stranger may be the future master of the
+Hospital.--Describe the winter day."
+
+_Note 3. Author's note_.--"Describe him as clerical."
+
+_Note 4. Author's note_.--"Represent him as a refined, agreeable, genial
+young man, of frank, kindly, gentlemanly manners."
+
+_Note 5._ Alternative reading: "A clergyman."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Make the old grave-digger a _laudator
+temporis acti_,--especially as to burial customs."
+
+_Note 2._ Instead of "written," as in the text, the author probably
+meant to write "read."
+
+_Note 3._ The MS. has "delight," but "a light" is evidently intended.
+
+_Note 4. Author's note_.--"He aims a blow, perhaps with his pipe, at the
+boy, which Ned wards off."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"No longer could play at quarter-staff with
+Ned."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Referring to places and people in England:
+the Bloody Footstep sometimes."
+
+_Note 3._ In the original the following occurs, but marked to indicate
+that it was to be omitted: "And kissed his hand to her, and laughed
+feebly; and that was the last that she or anybody, the last glimpse they
+had of Doctor Grimshawe alive."
+
+_Note 4. Author's notes_.--"A great deal must be made out of the
+spiders, and their gloomy, dusky, flaunting tapestry. A web across the
+orifice of his inkstand every morning; everywhere, indeed, except
+across the snout of his brandy-bottle.--Depict the Doctor in an old
+dressing-gown, and a strange sort of a cap, like a wizard's.--The two
+children are witnesses of many strange experiments in the study; they
+see his moods, too.--The Doctor is supposed to be writing a work on the
+Natural History of Spiders. Perhaps he used them as a blind for his real
+project, and used to bamboozle the learned with pretending to read them
+passages in which great learning seemed to be elaborately worked up,
+crabbed with Greek and Latin, as if the topic drew into itself, like a
+whirlpool, all that men thought and knew; plans to cultivate cobwebs on
+a large scale. Sometimes, after overwhelming them with astonishment in
+this way, he would burst into one of his laughs. Schemes to make the
+world a cobweb-factory, etc., etc. Cobwebs in his own brain. Crusty
+Hannah such a mixture of persons and races as could be found only at a
+seaport. There was a rumor that the Doctor had murdered a former maid,
+for having, with housewifely instinct, swept away the cobwebs; some said
+that he had her skeleton in a closet. Some said that he had strangled
+a wife with web of the great spider."--"Read the description of Bolton
+Hall, the garden, lawn, etc., Aug. 8, '53.--Bebbington church and
+churchyard, Aug. 29, '53.--The Doctor is able to love,--able to hate;
+two great and rare abilities nowadays.--Introduce two pine trees,
+ivy-grown, as at Lowwood Hotel, July 16, '58.--The family name might be
+Redclyffe.--Thatched cottage, June 22, '55.--Early introduce the mention
+of the cognizance of the family,--the Leopard's Head, for instance, in
+the first part of the romance; the Doctor may have possessed it engraved
+as coat of arms in a book.--The Doctor shall show Ned, perhaps, a
+drawing or engraving of the Hospital, with figures of the pensioners in
+the quadrangle, fitly dressed; and this picture and the figures shall
+impress themselves strongly on his memory."
+
+The above dates and places refer to passages in the published "English
+Note-Books."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Compare it with Spenser's Cave of Despair.
+Put instruments of suicide there."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Once, in looking at the mansion, Redclyffe
+is struck by the appearance of a marble inserted into the wall, and kept
+clear of lichens."
+
+_Note 3. Author's note_.--"Describe, in rich poetry, all shapes of
+deadly things."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Conferred their best qualities": an
+alternative phrase for "done their utmost."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Let the old man have a beard as part of the
+costume."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Describe him as delirious, and the scene as
+adopted into his delirium."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Make the whole scene very dreamlike and
+feverish."
+
+_Note 3. Author's note_.--"There should be a slight wildness in the
+patient's remark to the surgeon, which he cannot prevent, though he is
+conscious of it."
+
+_Note 4. Author's note_.--"Notice the peculiar depth and intelligence of
+his eyes, on account of his pain and sickness."
+
+_Note 5. Author's note_.--"Perhaps the recognition of the pensioner
+should not be so decided. Redclyffe thinks it is he, but thinks it as
+in a dream, without wonder or inquiry; and the pensioner does not quite
+acknowledge it."
+
+_Note 6._ The following dialogue is marked to be omitted or modified in
+the original MS.; but it is retained here, in order that the thread of
+the narrative may not be broken.
+
+_Note 7. Author's note_.--"The patient, as he gets better, listens to
+the feet of old people moving in corridors; to the ringing of a bell
+at stated periods; to old, tremulous voices talking in the quadrangle;
+etc., etc."
+
+_Note 8._ At this point the modification indicated in Note 5 seems to
+have been made operative: and the recognition takes place in another
+way.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+_Note 1._ This paragraph is left incomplete in the original MS.
+
+_Note 2._ The words "Rich old bindings" are interlined here, indicating,
+perhaps, a purpose to give a more detailed description of the library
+and its contents.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"I think it shall be built of stone, however."
+
+_Note 2._ This probably refers to some incident which the author
+intended to incorporate in the former portion of the romance, on a final
+revision.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+_Note 1._ Several passages, which are essentially reproductions of what
+had been previously treated, are omitted from this chapter. It belongs
+to an earlier version of the romance.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Redclyffe shows how to find, under the
+surface of the village green, an old cross."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"A circular seat around the tree."
+
+_Note 3._ The reader now hears for the first time what Redclyffe
+recollected.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"The dinner is given to the pensioners, as
+well as to the gentry, I think."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"For example, a story of three brothers, who
+had a deadly quarrel among them more than two hundred years ago for the
+affections of a young lady, their cousin, who gave her reciprocal love
+to one of them, who immediately became the object of the deadly hatred
+of the two others. There seemed to be madness in their love; perhaps
+madness in the love of all three; for the result had been a plot to
+kidnap this unfortunate young man and convey him to America, where he
+was sold for a servant."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+_Note 1._ The following passage, though it seems to fit in here
+chronologically, is concerned with a side issue which was not followed
+up. The author was experimenting for a character to act as the
+accomplice of Lord Braithwaite at the Hall; and he makes trial of the
+present personage, Mountford; of an Italian priest, Father Angelo; and
+finally of the steward, Omskirk, who is adopted. It will be noticed that
+Mountford is here endowed (for the moment) with the birthright of good
+Doctor Hammond, the Warden. He is represented as having made the journey
+to America in search of the grave. This alteration being inconsistent
+with the true thread of the story, and being, moreover, not continued, I
+have placed this passage in the Appendix, instead of in the text.
+
+Redclyffe often, in the dim weather, when the prophetic intimations of
+rain were too strong to allow an American to walk abroad with peace
+of mind, was in the habit of pacing this noble hall, and watching the
+process of renewal and adornment; or, which suited him still better, of
+enjoying its great, deep solitude when the workmen were away. Parties of
+visitors, curious tourists, sometimes peeped in, took a cursory
+glimpse at the old hall, and went away; these were the only ordinary
+disturbances. But, one day, a person entered, looked carelessly round
+the hall, as if its antiquity had no great charm to him; then he seemed
+to approach Redclyffe, who stood far and dim in the remote distance of
+the great room. The echoing of feet on the stone pavement of the
+hall had always an impressive sound, and turning his head towards the
+visitant Edward stood as if there were an expectance for him in this
+approach. It was a middle-aged man--rather, a man towards fifty, with
+an alert, capable air; a man evidently with something to do in life, and
+not in the habit of throwing away his moments in looking at old halls; a
+gentlemanly man enough, too. He approached Redclyffe without hesitation,
+and, lifting his hat, addressed him in a way that made Edward wonder
+whether he could be an Englishman. If so, he must have known that Edward
+was an American, and have been trying to adapt his manners to those of a
+democratic freedom.
+
+"Mr. Redclyffe, I believe," said he.
+
+Redclyffe bowed, with the stiff caution of an Englishman; for, with
+American mobility, he had learned to be stiff.
+
+"I think I have had the pleasure of knowing--at least of meeting--you
+very long ago," said the gentleman. "But I see you do not recollect me."
+
+Redclyffe confessed that the stranger had the advantage of him in his
+recollection of a previous acquaintance.
+
+"No wonder," said the other, "for, as I have already hinted, it was many
+years ago."
+
+"In my own country then, of course," said Redclyffe.
+
+"In your own country certainly," said the stranger, "and when it would
+have required a penetrating eye to see the distinguished Mr. Redclyffe.
+the representative of American democracy abroad, in the little
+pale-faced, intelligent boy, dwelling with an old humorist in the corner
+of a graveyard."
+
+At these words Redclyffe sent back his recollections, and, though
+doubtfully, began to be aware that this must needs be the young
+Englishman who had come to his guardian on such a singular errand as to
+search an old grave. It must be he, for it could be nobody else; and, in
+truth, he had a sense of his identity,--which, however, did not express
+itself by anything that he could confidently remember in his looks,
+manner, or voice,--yet, if anything, it was most in the voice. But the
+image which, on searching, he found in his mind of a fresh-colored young
+Englishman, with light hair and a frank, pleasant face, was terribly
+realized for the worse in this somewhat heavy figure, and coarser face,
+and heavier eye. In fact, there is a terrible difference between the
+mature Englishman and the young man who is not yet quite out of his
+blossom. His hair, too, was getting streaked and sprinkled with gray;
+and, in short, there were evident marks of his having worked, and
+succeeded, and failed, and eaten and drunk, and being made largely of
+beef, ale, port, and sherry, and all the solidities of English life.
+
+"I remember you now," said Redclyffe, extending his hand frankly; and
+yet Mountford took it in so cold a way that he was immediately sorry
+that he had done it, and called up an extra portion of reserve to freeze
+the rest of the interview. He continued, coolly enough, "I remember you,
+and something of your American errand,--which, indeed, has frequently
+been in my mind since. I hope you found the results of your voyage,
+in the way of discovery, sufficiently successful to justify so much
+trouble."
+
+"You will remember," said Mountford, "that the grave proved quite
+unproductive. Yes, you will not have forgotten it; for I well recollect
+how eagerly you listened, with that queer little girl, to my talk with
+the old governor, and how disappointed you seemed when you found that
+the grave was not to be opened. And yet, it is very odd. I failed in
+that mission; and yet there are circumstances that have led me to think
+that I ought to have succeeded better,--that some other person has
+really succeeded better."
+
+Redclyffe was silent; but he remembered the strange old silver key, and
+how he had kept it secret, and the doubts that had troubled his mind
+then and long afterwards, whether he ought not to have found means to
+convey it to the stranger, and ask whether that was what he sought. And
+now here was that same doubt and question coming up again, and he found
+himself quite as little able to solve it as he had been twenty years
+ago. Indeed, with the views that had come up since, it behooved him to
+be cautious, until he knew both the man and the circumstances.
+
+"You are probably aware," continued Mountford,--"for I understand you
+have been some time in this neighborhood,--that there is a pretended
+claim, a contesting claim, to the present possession of the estate
+of Braithwaite, and a long dormant title. Possibly--who knows?--you
+yourself might have a claim to one or the other. Would not that be a
+singular coincidence? Have you ever had the curiosity to investigate
+your parentage with a view to this point?"
+
+"The title," replied Redclyffe, "ought not to be a very strong
+consideration with an American. One of us would be ashamed, I verily
+believe, to assume any distinction, except such as may be supposed to
+indicate personal, not hereditary merit. We have in some measure, I
+think, lost the feeling of the past, and even of the future, as regards
+our own lines of descent; and even as to wealth, it seems to me that the
+idea of heaping up a pile of gold, or accumulating a broad estate for
+our children and remoter descendants, is dying out. We wish to enjoy the
+fulness of our success in life ourselves, and leave to those who descend
+from us the task of providing for themselves. This tendency is seen in
+our lavish expenditure, and the whole arrangement of our lives; and it
+is slowly--yet not very slowly, either--effecting a change in the whole
+economy of American life."
+
+"Still," rejoined Mr. Mountford, with a smile that Redclyffe fancied was
+dark and subtle, "still, I should imagine that even an American might
+recall so much of hereditary prejudice as to be sensible of some earthly
+advantages in the possession of an ancient title and hereditary
+estate like this. Personal distinction may suit you better,--to be an
+Ambassador by your own talent; to have a future for yourself, involving
+the possibility of ranking (though it were only for four years) among
+the acknowledged sovereigns of the earth;--this is very good. But if the
+silver key would open the shut up secret to-day, it might be possible
+that you would relinquish these advantages."
+
+Before Redclyffe could reply, (and, indeed, there seemed to be an
+allusion at the close of Mountford's speech which, whether intended or
+not, he knew not how to reply to,) a young lady entered the hall, whom
+he was at no loss, by the colored light of a painted window that fell
+upon her, translating her out of the common daylight, to recognize
+as the relative of the pensioner. She seemed to have come to give her
+fanciful superintendence to some of the decorations of the hall; such
+as required woman's taste, rather than the sturdy English judgment and
+antiquarian knowledge of the Warden. Slowly following after her came the
+pensioner himself, leaning on his staff and looking up at the old roof
+and around him with a benign composure, and himself a fitting figure by
+his antique and venerable appearance to walk in that old hall.
+
+"Ah!" said Mountford, to Redclyffe's surprise, "here is an
+acquaintance--two acquaintances of mine."
+
+He moved along the hall to accost them; and as he appeared to expect
+that Redclyffe would still keep him company, and as the latter had no
+reason for not doing so, they both advanced to the pensioner, who
+was now leaning on the young woman's arm. The incident, too, was not
+unacceptable to the American, as promising to bring him into a more
+available relation with her--whom he half fancied to be his old American
+acquaintance--than he had yet succeeded in obtaining.
+
+"Well, my old friend," said Mountford, after bowing with a certain
+measured respect to the young woman, "how wears life with you? Rather,
+perhaps, it does not wear at all; you being so well suited to the life
+around you, you grow by it like a lichen on a wall. I could fancy now
+that you have walked here for three hundred years, and remember when
+King James of blessed memory was entertained in this hall, and could
+marshal out all the ceremonies just as they were then."
+
+"An old man," said the pensioner, quietly, "grows dreamy as he wanes
+away; and I, too, am sometimes at a loss to know whether I am living in
+the past or the present, or whereabouts in time I am,--or whether there
+is any time at all. But I should think it hardly worth while to call up
+one of my shifting dreams more than another."
+
+"I confess," said Redclyffe, "I shall find it impossible to call up this
+scene--any of these scenes--hereafter, without the venerable figure of
+this, whom I may truly call my benefactor, among them. I fancy him among
+them from the foundation,--young then, but keeping just the equal step
+with their age and decay,--and still doing good and hospitable deeds to
+those who need them."
+
+The old man seemed not to like to hear these remarks and expressions of
+gratitude from Mountford and the American; at any rate, he moved away
+with his slow and light motion of infirmity, but then came uneasily
+back, displaying a certain quiet restlessness, which Redclyffe was
+sympathetic enough to perceive. Not so the sturdier, more heavily
+moulded Englishman, who continued to direct the conversation upon the
+pensioner, or at least to make him a part of it, thereby bringing out
+more of his strange characteristics. In truth, it is not quite easy for
+an Englishman to know how to adapt himself to the line feelings of those
+below him in point of station, whatever gentlemanly deference he may
+have for his equals or superiors.
+
+"I should like now, father pensioner," said he, "to know how many steps
+you may have taken in life before your path led into this hole, and
+whence your course started."
+
+"Do not let him speak thus to the old man," said the young woman, in
+a low, earnest tone, to Redclyffe. He was surprised and startled; it
+seemed like a voice that has spoken to his boyhood.
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Redclyffe's place is next to that of the
+proprietor at table."
+
+_Note 3. Author's note_.--"Dwell upon the antique liveried servants
+somewhat."
+
+_Note 4. Author's note_.--"The rose-water must precede the toasts."
+
+_Note 5. Author's note_.--"The jollity of the Warden at the feast to be
+noticed; and afterwards explain that he had drunk nothing."
+
+_Note 6. Author's note_.--"Mention the old silver snuffbox which I saw
+at the Liverpool Mayor's dinner."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+_Note 1._ This is not the version of the story as indicated in the
+earlier portion of the romance. It is there implied that Elsie is the
+Doctor's granddaughter, her mother having been the Doctor's daughter,
+who was ruined by the then possessor of the Braithwaite estates, and who
+died in consequence. That the Doctor's scheme of revenge was far deeper
+and more terrible than simply to oust the family from its possessions,
+will appear further on.
+
+_Note 2._ The foregoing passage was evidently experimental, and
+the author expresses his estimate of its value in the following
+words,--"What unimaginable nonsense!" He then goes on to make the
+following memoranda as to the plot. It should be remembered, however,
+that all this part of the romance was written before the American part.
+
+"Half of a secret is preserved in England; that is to say, in the
+particular part of the mansion in which an old coffer is hidden; the
+other part is carried to America. One key of an elaborate lock is
+retained in England, among some old curiosities of forgotten purpose;
+the other is the silver key that Redclyffe found beside the grave. A
+treasure of gold is what they expect; they find a treasure of golden
+locks. This lady, the beloved of the Bloody Footstep, had been murdered
+and hidden in the coffer on account of jealousy. Elsie must know the
+baselessness of Redclyffe's claims, and be loath to tell him, because
+she sees that he is so much interested in them. She has a paper of
+the old Doctor's revealing the whole plot,--a death-bed confession;
+Redclyffe having been absent at the time."
+
+The reader will recollect that this latter suggestion was not adopted:
+there was no death-bed confession. As regards the coffer full of
+golden locks, it was suggested by an incident recorded in the "English
+Note-Books," 1854. "The grandmother of Mrs. O'Sullivan died fifty years
+ago, at the age of twenty-eight. She had great personal charms, and
+among them a head of beautiful chestnut hair. After her burial in a
+family tomb, the coffin of one of her children was laid on her own, so
+that the lid seems to have decayed, or been broken from this cause; at
+any rate, this was the case when the tomb was opened, about a year ago.
+The grandmother's coffin was then found to be filled with beautiful,
+glossy, living chestnut ringlets, into which her whole substance seems
+to have been transformed, for there was nothing else but these shining
+curls, the growth of half a century, in the tomb. An old man, with
+a ringlet of his youthful mistress treasured in his heart, might be
+supposed to witness this wonderful thing."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+_Note 1._ In a study of the plot, too long to insert here, this new
+character of the steward is introduced and described. It must suffice to
+say, in this place, that he was intimately connected with Dr. Grimshawe,
+who had resuscitated him after he had been hanged, and had thus gained
+his gratitude and secured his implicit obedience to his wishes, even
+twenty years after his (Grimshawe's) death. The use the Doctor made
+of him was to establish him in Braithwaite Hall as the perpetual
+confidential servant of the owners thereof. Of course, the latter
+are not aware that the steward is acting in Grimshawe's interest,
+and therefore in deadly opposition to their own. Precisely what the
+steward's mission in life was, will appear here-after.
+
+The study above alluded to, with others, amounting to about a hundred
+pages, will be published as a supplement to a future edition of this
+work.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Redclyffe lies in a dreamy state, thinking
+fantastically, as if he were one of the seven sleepers. He does not yet
+open his eyes, but lies there in a maze."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Redclyffe must look at the old man quietly
+and dreamily, and without surprise, for a long while."
+
+_Note 3._ Presumably the true name of Doctor Grimshawe.
+
+_Note 4._ This mysterious prisoner, Sir Edward Redclyffe, is not, of
+course, the Sir Edward who founded the Hospital, but a descendant of
+that man, who ruined Doctor Grimshawe's daughter, and is the father
+of Elsie. He had been confined in this chamber, by the Doctor's
+contrivance, ever since, Omskirk being his jailer, as is foreshadowed in
+Chapter XL He has been kept in the belief that he killed Grimshawe, in
+a struggle that took place between them; and that his confinement in the
+secret chamber is voluntary on his own part,--a measure of precaution to
+prevent arrest and execution for murder. In this miserable delusion he
+has cowered there for five and thirty years. This, and various other
+dusky points, are partly elucidated in the notes hereafter to be
+appended to this volume.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+_Note 1._ At this point, the author, for what reason I will not venture
+to surmise, chooses to append this gloss: "Bubble-and-Squeak!"
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"They found him in the hall, about to go out."
+
+_Note 3._ Elsie appears to have joined the party.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Doctor Grimshawe's Secret, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
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+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
+    <title>
+      Doctor Grimshawe's Secret, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
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+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
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+    .side      { float: right; font-size: 75%; width: 25%; padding-left: 0.8em;
+               border-left: dashed thin; margin-left: 0.8em; text-align: left;
+               text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;
+               font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: solid 1px;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Doctor Grimshawe's Secret, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Doctor Grimshawe's Secret
+       A Romance
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Editor: Julian Hawthorne
+
+
+Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7183]
+This file was first posted on March 24, 2003
+Last Updated: December 14, 2016
+
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE'S SECRET ***
+
+
+
+
+Text file produced by Michelle Shephard, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+HTML file produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE&rsquo;S SECRET
+    </h1>
+    <h3>
+      A ROMANCE
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Nathaniel Hawthorne
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h4>
+      Edited, With Preface And Notes By Julian Hawthorne
+    </h4>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      To<br /> Mr. And Mrs. George Parsons Lathrop,<br /> The Son-In-Law And
+      Daughter<br /> Of<br /> Nathaniel Hawthorne,<br /> This Romance Is Dedicated<br /><br />
+      By<br /> The Editor.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_PREF"> PREFACE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> <b>DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE&rsquo;S SECRET</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER XVII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER XIX. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0020"> CHAPTER XX. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0021"> CHAPTER XXI. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0022"> CHAPTER XXII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0023"> CHAPTER XXIII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0024"> CHAPTER XXIV. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0025"> CHAPTER XXV. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_APPE"> APPENDIX </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PREFACE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A preface generally begins with a truism; and I may set out with the
+      admission that it is not always expedient to bring to light the posthumous
+      work of great writers. A man generally contrives to publish, during his
+      lifetime, quite as much as the public has time or inclination to read; and
+      his surviving friends are apt to show more zeal than discretion in
+      dragging forth from his closed desk such undeveloped offspring of his mind
+      as he himself had left to silence. Literature has never been redundant
+      with authors who sincerely undervalue their own productions; and the
+      sagacious critics who maintain that what of his own an author condemns
+      must be doubly damnable, are, to say the least of it, as often likely to
+      be right as wrong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beyond these general remarks, however, it does not seem necessary to adopt
+      an apologetic attitude. There is nothing in the present volume which any
+      one possessed of brains and cultivation will not be thankful to read. The
+      appreciation of Nathaniel Hawthorne&rsquo;s writings is more intelligent and
+      wide-spread than it used to be; and the later development of our national
+      literature has not, perhaps, so entirely exhausted our resources of
+      admiration as to leave no welcome for even the less elaborate work of a
+      contemporary of Dickens and Thackeray. As regards &ldquo;Doctor Grimshawe&rsquo;s
+      Secret,&rdquo;&mdash;the title which, for lack of a better, has been given to
+      this Romance,&mdash;it can scarcely be pronounced deficient in either
+      elaboration or profundity. Had Mr. Hawthorne written out the story in
+      every part to its full dimensions, it could not have failed to rank among
+      the greatest of his productions. He had looked forward to it as to the
+      crowning achievement of his literary career. In the Preface to &ldquo;Our Old
+      Home&rdquo; he alludes to it as a work into which he proposed to convey more of
+      various modes of truth than he could have grasped by a direct effort. But
+      circumstances prevented him from perfecting the design which had been
+      before his mind for seven years, and upon the shaping of which he bestowed
+      more thought and labor than upon anything else he had undertaken. The
+      successive and consecutive series of notes or studies [Footnote: These
+      studies, extracts from which will be published in one of our magazines,
+      are hereafter to be added, in their complete form, to the Appendix of this
+      volume.] which he wrote for this Romance would of themselves make a small
+      volume, and one of autobiographical as well as literary interest. There is
+      no other instance, that I happen to have met with, in which a writer&rsquo;s
+      thought reflects itself upon paper so immediately and sensitively as in
+      these studies. To read them is to look into the man&rsquo;s mind, and see its
+      quality and action. The penetration, the subtlety, the tenacity; the
+      stubborn gripe which he lays upon his subject, like that of Hercules upon
+      the slippery Old Man of the Sea; the clear and cool common-sense,
+      controlling the audacity of a rich and ardent imagination; the humorous
+      gibes and strange expletives wherewith he ridicules, to himself, his own
+      failure to reach his goal; the immense patience with which&mdash;again and
+      again, and yet again&mdash;he &ldquo;tries back,&rdquo; throwing the topic into fresh
+      attitudes, and searching it to the marrow with a gaze so piercing as to be
+      terrible;&mdash;all this gives an impression of power, of resource, of
+      energy, of mastery, that exhilarates the reader. So many inspired prophets
+      of Hawthorne have arisen of late, that the present writer, whose relation
+      to the great Romancer is a filial one merely, may be excused for feeling
+      some embarrassment in submitting his own uninstructed judgments to
+      competition with theirs. It has occurred to him, however, that these
+      undress rehearsals of the author of &ldquo;The Scarlet Letter&rdquo; might afford
+      entertaining and even profitable reading to the later generation of
+      writers whose pleasant fortune it is to charm one another and the public.
+      It would appear that this author, in his preparatory work at least, has
+      ventured in some manner to disregard the modern canons which debar writers
+      from betraying towards their creations any warmer feeling than a cultured
+      and critical indifference: nor was his interest in human nature such as to
+      confine him to the dissection of the moral epidermis of shop-girls and
+      hotel-boarders. On the contrary, we are presented with the spectacle of a
+      Titan, baring his arms and plunging heart and soul into the arena, there
+      to struggle for death or victory with the superb phantoms summoned to the
+      conflict by his own genius. The men of new times and new conditions will
+      achieve their triumphs in new ways; but it may still be worth while to
+      consider the methods and materials of one who also, in his own fashion,
+      won and wore the laurel of those who know and can portray the human heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But let us return to the Romance, in whose clear though shadowy atmosphere
+      the thunders and throes of the preparatory struggle are inaudible and
+      invisible, save as they are implied in the fineness of substance and
+      beauty of form of the artistic structure. The story is divided into two
+      parts, the scene of the first being laid in America; that of the second,
+      in England. Internal evidence of various kinds goes to show that the
+      second part was the first written; or, in other words, that the present
+      first part is a rewriting of an original first part, afterwards discarded,
+      and of which the existing second part is the continuation. The two parts
+      overlap, and it shall be left to the ingenuity of critics to detect the
+      precise point of junction. In rewriting the first part, the author made
+      sundry minor alterations in the plot and characters of the story, which
+      alterations were not carried into the second part. It results from this
+      that the manuscript presents various apparent inconsistencies. In
+      transcribing the work for the press, these inconsistent sentences and
+      passages have been withdrawn from the text and inserted in the Appendix;
+      or, in a few unimportant instances, omitted altogether. In other respects,
+      the text is printed as the author left it, with the exception of the names
+      of the characters. In the manuscript each personage figures in the course
+      of the narrative under from three to six different names. This difficulty
+      has been met by bestowing upon each of the <i>dramatis personæ</i> the
+      name which last identified him to the author&rsquo;s mind, and keeping him to it
+      throughout the volume.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story, as a story, is complete as it stands; it has a beginning, a
+      middle, and an end. There is no break in the narrative, and the legitimate
+      conclusion is reached. To say that the story is complete as a work of art,
+      would be quite another matter. It lacks balance and proportion. Some
+      characters and incidents are portrayed with minute elaboration; others,
+      perhaps not less important, are merely sketched in outline. Beyond a doubt
+      it was the author&rsquo;s purpose to rewrite the entire work from the first page
+      to the last, enlarging it, deepening it, adorning it with every kind of
+      spiritual and physical beauty, and rounding out a moral worthy of the
+      noble materials. But these last transfiguring touches to Aladdin&rsquo;s Tower
+      were never to be given; and he has departed, taking with him his Wonderful
+      Lamp. Nevertheless there is great splendor in the structure as we behold
+      it. The character of old Doctor Grimshawe, and the picture of his
+      surroundings, are hardly surpassed in vigor by anything their author has
+      produced; and the dusky vision of the secret chamber, which sends a
+      mysterious shiver through the tale, seems to be unique even in Hawthorne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There have been included in this volume photographic reproductions of
+      certain pages of the original manuscript of Doctor Grimshawe, selected at
+      random, upon which those ingenious persons whose convictions are in
+      advance of their instruction are cordially invited to try their teeth; for
+      it has been maintained that Mr. Hawthorne&rsquo;s handwriting was singularly
+      legible. The present writer possesses specimens of Mr. Hawthorne&rsquo;s
+      chirography at various ages, from boyhood until a day or two before his
+      death. Like the handwriting of most men, it was at its best between the
+      twenty-fifth and the fortieth years of life; and in some instances it is a
+      remarkably beautiful type of penmanship. But as time went on it
+      deteriorated, and, while of course retaining its elementary
+      characteristics, it became less and less easy to read, especially in those
+      writings which were intended solely for his own perusal. As with other men
+      of sensitive organization, the mood of the hour, a good or a bad pen, a
+      ready or an obstructed flow of thought, would all be reflected in the
+      formation of the written letters and words. In the manuscript of the
+      fragmentary sketch which has just been published in a magazine, which is
+      written in an ordinary commonplace-book, with ruled pages, and in which
+      the author had not yet become possessed with the spirit of the story and
+      characters, the handwriting is deliberate and clear. In the manuscript of
+      &ldquo;Doctor Grimshawe&rsquo;s Secret,&rdquo; on the other hand, which was written almost
+      immediately after the other, but on unruled paper, and when the writer&rsquo;s
+      imagination was warm and eager, the chirography is for the most part a
+      compact mass of minute cramped hieroglyphics, hardly to be deciphered save
+      by flashes of inspiration. The matter is not, in itself, of importance,
+      and is alluded to here only as having been brought forward in connection
+      with other insinuations, with the notice of which it seems unnecessary to
+      soil these pages. Indeed, were I otherwise disposed, Doctor Grimshawe
+      himself would take the words out of my mouth; his speech is far more
+      poignant and eloquent than mine. In dismissing this episode, I will take
+      the liberty to observe that it appears to indicate a spirit in our age
+      less sceptical than is commonly supposed,&mdash;belief in miracles being
+      still possible, provided only the miracle be a scandalous one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It remains to tell how this Romance came to be published. It came into my
+      possession (in the ordinary course of events) about eight years ago. I had
+      at that time no intention of publishing it; and when, soon after, I left
+      England to travel on the Continent, the manuscript, together with the bulk
+      of my library, was packed and stored at a London repository, and was not
+      again seen by me until last summer, when I unpacked it in this city. I
+      then finished the perusal of it, and, finding it to be practically
+      complete, I re-resolved to print it in connection with a biography of Mr.
+      Hawthorne which I had in preparation. But upon further consideration it
+      was decided to publish the Romance separately; and I herewith present it
+      to the public, with my best wishes for their edification.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      JULIAN HAWTHORNE.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      NEW YORK, November 21, 1882.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE&rsquo;S SECRET
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A long time ago, [Endnote: 1] in a town with which I used to be familiarly
+      acquainted, there dwelt an elderly person of grim aspect, known by the
+      name and title of Doctor Grimshawe,[Endnote: 2] whose household consisted
+      of a remarkably pretty and vivacious boy, and a perfect rosebud of a girl,
+      two or three years younger than he, and an old maid-of-all-work, of
+      strangely mixed breed, crusty in temper and wonderfully sluttish in
+      attire. [Endnote: 3] It might be partly owing to this handmaiden&rsquo;s
+      characteristic lack of neatness (though primarily, no doubt, to the grim
+      Doctor&rsquo;s antipathy to broom, brush, and dusting-cloths) that the house&mdash;at
+      least in such portions of it as any casual visitor caught a glimpse of&mdash;was
+      so overlaid with dust, that, in lack of a visiting card, you might write
+      your name with your forefinger upon the tables; and so hung with cobwebs
+      that they assumed the appearance of dusky upholstery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It grieves me to add an additional touch or two to the reader&rsquo;s
+      disagreeable impression of Doctor Grimshawe&rsquo;s residence, by confessing
+      that it stood in a shabby by-street, and cornered on a graveyard, with
+      which the house communicated by a back door; so that with a hop, skip, and
+      jump from the threshold, across a flat tombstone, the two children
+      [Endnote: 4] were in the daily habit of using the dismal cemetery as their
+      playground. In their graver moods they spelled out the names and learned
+      by heart doleful verses on the headstones; and in their merrier ones
+      (which were much the more frequent) they chased butterflies and gathered
+      dandelions, played hide-and-seek among the slate and marble, and tumbled
+      laughing over the grassy mounds which were too eminent for the short legs
+      to bestride. On the whole, they were the better for the graveyard, and its
+      legitimate inmates slept none the worse for the two children&rsquo;s gambols and
+      shrill merriment overhead. Here were old brick tombs with curious
+      sculptures on them, and quaint gravestones, some of which bore puffy
+      little cherubs, and one or two others the effigies of eminent Puritans,
+      wrought out to a button, a fold of the ruff, and a wrinkle of the
+      skull-cap; and these frowned upon the two children as if death had not
+      made them a whit more genial than they were in life. But the children were
+      of a temper to be more encouraged by the good-natured smiles of the puffy
+      cherubs, than frightened or disturbed by the sour Puritans.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This graveyard (about which we shall say not a word more than may sooner
+      or later be needful) was the most ancient in the town. The clay of the
+      original settlers had been incorporated with the soil; those stalwart
+      Englishmen of the Puritan epoch, whose immediate ancestors had been
+      planted forth with succulent grass and daisies for the sustenance of the
+      parson&rsquo;s cow, round the low-battlemented Norman church towers in the
+      villages of the fatherland, had here contributed their rich Saxon mould to
+      tame and Christianize the wild forest earth of the new world. In this
+      point of view&mdash;as holding the bones and dust of the primeval ancestor&mdash;the
+      cemetery was more English than anything else in the neighborhood, and
+      might probably have nourished English oaks and English elms, and whatever
+      else is of English growth, without that tendency to spindle upwards and
+      lose their sturdy breadth, which is said to be the ordinary characteristic
+      both of human and vegetable productions when transplanted hither. Here, at
+      all events, used to be some specimens of common English garden flowers,
+      which could not be accounted for,&mdash;unless, perhaps, they had sprung
+      from some English maiden&rsquo;s heart, where the intense love of those homely
+      things, and regret of them in the foreign land, had conspired together to
+      keep their vivifying principle, and cause its growth after the poor girl
+      was buried. Be that as it might, in this grave had been hidden from sight
+      many a broad, bluff visage of husbandman, who had been taught to plough
+      among the hereditary furrows that had been ameliorated by the crumble of
+      ages: much had these sturdy laborers grumbled at the great roots that
+      obstructed their toil in these fresh acres. Here, too, the sods had
+      covered the faces of men known to history, and reverenced when not a piece
+      of distinguishable dust remained of them; personages whom tradition told
+      about; and here, mixed up with successive crops of native-born Americans,
+      had been ministers, captains, matrons, virgins good and evil, tough and
+      tender, turned up and battened down by the sexton&rsquo;s spade, over and over
+      again; until every blade of grass had its relations with the human
+      brotherhood of the old town. A hundred and fifty years was sufficient to
+      do this; and so much time, at least, had elapsed since the first hole was
+      dug among the difficult roots of the forest trees, and the first little
+      hillock of all these green beds was piled up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus rippled and surged, with its hundreds of little billows, the old
+      graveyard about the house which cornered upon it; it made the street
+      gloomy, so that people did not altogether like to pass along the high
+      wooden fence that shut it in; and the old house itself, covering ground
+      which else had been sown thickly with buried bodies, partook of its
+      dreariness, because it seemed hardly possible that the dead people should
+      not get up out of their graves and steal in to warm themselves at this
+      convenient fireside. But I never heard that any of them did so; nor were
+      the children ever startled by spectacles of dim horror in the night-time,
+      but were as cheerful and fearless as if no grave had ever been dug. They
+      were of that class of children whose material seems fresh, not taken at
+      second hand, full of disease, conceits, whims, and weaknesses, that have
+      already served many people&rsquo;s turns, and been moulded up, with some little
+      change of combination, to serve the turn of some poor spirit that could
+      not get a better case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far as ever came to the present writer&rsquo;s knowledge, there was no
+      whisper of Doctor Grimshawe&rsquo;s house being haunted; a fact on which both
+      writer and reader may congratulate themselves, the ghostly chord having
+      been played upon in these days until it has become wearisome and nauseous
+      as the familiar tune of a barrel-organ. The house itself, moreover, except
+      for the convenience of its position close to the seldom-disturbed
+      cemetery, was hardly worthy to be haunted. As I remember it, (and for
+      aught I know it still exists in the same guise,) it did not appear to be
+      an ancient structure, nor one that would ever have been the abode of a
+      very wealthy or prominent family;&mdash;a three-story wooden house,
+      perhaps a century old, low-studded, with a square front, standing right
+      upon the street, and a small enclosed porch, containing the main entrance,
+      affording a glimpse up and down the street through an oval window on each
+      side, its characteristic was decent respectability, not sinking below the
+      boundary of the genteel. It has often perplexed my mind to conjecture what
+      sort of man he could have been who, having the means to build a pretty,
+      spacious, and comfortable residence, should have chosen to lay its
+      foundation on the brink of so many graves; each tenant of these narrow
+      houses crying out, as it were, against the absurdity of bestowing much
+      time or pains in preparing any earthly tabernacle save such as theirs. But
+      deceased people see matters from an erroneous&mdash;at least too exclusive&mdash;point
+      of view; a comfortable grave is an excellent possession for those who need
+      it, but a comfortable house has likewise its merits and temporary
+      advantages. [Endnote: 5.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The founder of the house in question seemed sensible of this truth, and
+      had therefore been careful to lay out a sufficient number of rooms and
+      chambers, low, ill-lighted, ugly, but not unsusceptible of warmth and
+      comfort; the sunniest and cheerfulest of which were on the side that
+      looked into the graveyard. Of these, the one most spacious and convenient
+      had been selected by Doctor Grimshawe as a study, and fitted up with
+      bookshelves, and various machines and contrivances, electrical, chemical,
+      and distillatory, wherewith he might pursue such researches as were wont
+      to engage his attention. The great result of the grim Doctor&rsquo;s labors, so
+      far as known to the public, was a certain preparation or extract of
+      cobwebs, which, out of a great abundance of material, he was able to
+      produce in any desirable quantity, and by the administration of which he
+      professed to cure diseases of the inflammatory class, and to work very
+      wonderful effects upon the human system. It is a great pity, for the good
+      of mankind and the advantage of his own fortunes, that he did not put
+      forth this medicine in pill-boxes or bottles, and then, as it were, by
+      some captivating title, inveigle the public into his spider&rsquo;s web, and
+      suck out its gold substance, and himself wax fat as he sat in the central
+      intricacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But grim Doctor Grimshawe, though his aim in life might be no very exalted
+      one, seemed singularly destitute of the impulse to better his fortunes by
+      the exercise of his wits: it might even have been supposed, indeed, that
+      he had a conscientious principle or religious scruple&mdash;only, he was
+      by no means a religious man&mdash;against reaping profit from this
+      particular nostrum which he was said to have invented. He never sold it;
+      never prescribed it, unless in cases selected on some principle that
+      nobody could detect or explain. The grim Doctor, it must be observed, was
+      not generally acknowledged by the profession, with whom, in truth, he had
+      never claimed a fellowship; nor had he ever assumed, of his own accord the
+      medical title by which the public chose to know him. His professional
+      practice seemed, in a sort, forced upon him; it grew pretty extensive,
+      partly because it was understood to be a matter of favor and difficulty,
+      dependent on a capricious will, to obtain his services at all. There was
+      unquestionably an odor of quackery about him; but by no means of an
+      ordinary kind. A sort of mystery&mdash;yet which, perhaps, need not have
+      been a mystery, had any one thought it worth while to make systematic
+      inquiry in reference to his previous life, his education, even his native
+      land&mdash;assisted the impression which his peculiarities were calculated
+      to make. He was evidently not a New-Englander, nor a native of any part of
+      these Western shores. His speech was apt to be oddly and uncouthly
+      idiomatic, and even when classical in its form was emitted with a strange,
+      rough depth of utterance, that came from recesses of the lungs which we
+      Yankees seldom put to any use. In person, he did not look like one of us;
+      a broad, rather short personage, with a projecting forehead, a red,
+      irregular face, and a squab nose; eyes that looked dull enough in their
+      ordinary state, but had a faculty, in conjunction with the other features,
+      which those who had ever seen it described as especially ugly and awful.
+      As regarded dress, Doctor Grimshawe had a rough and careless exterior, and
+      altogether a shaggy kind of aspect, the effect of which was much increased
+      by a reddish beard, which, contrary to the usual custom of the day, he
+      allowed to grow profusely; and the wiry perversity of which seemed to know
+      as little of the comb as of the razor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We began with calling the grim Doctor an elderly personage; but in so
+      doing we looked at him through the eyes of the two children, who were his
+      intimates, and who had not learnt to decipher the purport and value of his
+      wrinkles and furrows and corrugations, whether as indicating age, or a
+      different kind of wear and tear. Possibly&mdash;he seemed so aggressive
+      and had such latent heat and force to throw out when occasion called&mdash;he
+      might scarcely have seemed middle-aged; though here again we hesitate,
+      finding him so stiffened in his own way, so little fluid, so encrusted
+      with passions and humors, that he must have left his youth very far behind
+      him; if indeed he ever had any.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The patients, or whatever other visitors were ever admitted into the
+      Doctor&rsquo;s study, carried abroad strange accounts of the squalor of dust and
+      cobwebs in which the learned and scientific person lived; and the dust,
+      they averred, was all the more disagreeable, because it could not well be
+      other than dead men&rsquo;s almost intangible atoms, resurrected from the
+      adjoining graveyard. As for the cobwebs, they were no signs of housewifely
+      neglect on the part of crusty Hannah, the handmaiden; but the Doctor&rsquo;s
+      scientific material, carefully encouraged and preserved, each filmy thread
+      more valuable to him than so much golden wire. Of all barbarous haunts in
+      Christendom or elsewhere, this study was the one most overrun with
+      spiders. They dangled from the ceiling, crept upon the tables, lurked in
+      the corners, and wove the intricacy of their webs wherever they could
+      hitch the end from point to point across the window-panes, and even across
+      the upper part of the doorway, and in the chimney-place. It seemed
+      impossible to move without breaking some of these mystic threads. Spiders
+      crept familiarly towards you and walked leisurely across your hands: these
+      were their precincts, and you only an intruder. If you had none about your
+      person, yet you had an odious sense of one crawling up your spine, or
+      spinning cobwebs in your brain,&mdash;so pervaded was the atmosphere of
+      the place with spider-life. What they fed upon (for all the flies for
+      miles about would not have sufficed them) was a secret known only to the
+      Doctor. Whence they came was another riddle; though, from certain
+      inquiries and transactions of Doctor Grimshawe&rsquo;s with some of the
+      shipmasters of the port, who followed the East and West Indian, the
+      African and the South American trade, it was supposed that this odd
+      philosopher was in the habit of importing choice monstrosities in the
+      spider kind from all those tropic regions. [Endnote: 6.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the above description, exaggerated as it may seem, is merely
+      preliminary to the introduction of one single enormous spider, the biggest
+      and ugliest ever seen, the pride of the grim Doctor&rsquo;s heart, his treasure,
+      his glory, the pearl of his soul, and, as many people said, the demon to
+      whom he had sold his salvation, on condition of possessing the web of the
+      foul creature for a certain number of years. The grim Doctor, according to
+      this theory, was but a great fly which this spider had subtly entangled in
+      his web. But, in truth, naturalists are acquainted with this spider,
+      though it is a rare one; the British Museum has a specimen, and,
+      doubtless, so have many other scientific institutions. It is found in
+      South America; its most hideous spread of legs covers a space nearly as
+      large as a dinner-plate, and radiates from a body as big as a door-knob,
+      which one conceives to be an agglomeration of sucked-up poison which the
+      creature treasures through life; probably to expend it all, and life
+      itself, on some worthy foe. Its colors, variegated in a sort of ugly and
+      inauspicious splendor, were distributed over its vast bulb in great spots,
+      some of which glistened like gems. It was a horror to think of this thing
+      living; still more horrible to think of the foul catastrophe, the
+      crushed-out and wasted poison, that would follow the casual setting foot
+      upon it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No doubt, the lapse of time since the Doctor and his spider lived has
+      already been sufficient to cause a traditionary wonderment to gather over
+      them both; and, especially, this image of the spider dangles down to us
+      from the dusky ceiling of the Past, swollen into somewhat uglier and huger
+      monstrosity than he actually possessed. Nevertheless, the creature had a
+      real existence, and has left kindred like himself; but as for the Doctor,
+      nothing could exceed the value which he seemed to put upon him, the
+      sacrifices he made for the creature&rsquo;s convenience, or the readiness with
+      which he adapted his whole mode of life, apparently, so that the spider
+      might enjoy the conditions best suited to his tastes, habits, and health.
+      And yet there were sometimes tokens that made people imagine that he hated
+      the infernal creature as much as everybody else who caught a glimpse of
+      him. [Endnote: 7.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Considering that Doctor Grimshawe, when we first look upon him, had dwelt
+      only a few years in the house by the graveyard, it is wonderful what an
+      appearance he, and his furniture, and his cobwebs, and their unweariable
+      spinners, and crusty old Hannah, all had of having permanently attached
+      themselves to the locality. For a century, at least, it might be fancied
+      that the study in particular had existed just as it was now; with those
+      dusky festoons of spider-silk hanging along the walls, those book-cases
+      with volumes turning their parchment or black-leather backs upon you,
+      those machines and engines, that table, and at it the Doctor, in a very
+      faded and shabby dressing-gown, smoking a long clay pipe, the powerful
+      fumes of which dwelt continually in his reddish and grisly beard, and made
+      him fragrant wherever he went. This sense of fixedness&mdash;stony
+      intractability&mdash;seems to belong to people who, instead of hope, which
+      exalts everything into an airy, gaseous exhilaration, have a fixed and
+      dogged purpose, around which everything congeals and crystallizes.
+      [Endnote: 1] Even the sunshine, dim through the dustiness of the two
+      casements that looked upon the graveyard, and the smoke, as it came warm
+      out of Doctor Grimshawe&rsquo;s mouth, seemed already stale. But if the two
+      children, or either of them, happened to be in the study,&mdash;if they
+      ran to open the door at the knock, if they came scampering and peeped down
+      over the banisters,&mdash;the sordid and rusty gloom was apt to vanish
+      quite away. The sunbeam itself looked like a golden rule, that had been
+      flung down long ago, and had lain there till it was dusty and tarnished.
+      They were cheery little imps, who sucked up fragrance and pleasantness out
+      of their surroundings, dreary as these looked; even as a flower can find
+      its proper perfume in any soil where its seed happens to fall. The great
+      spider, hanging by his cordage over the Doctor&rsquo;s head, and waving slowly,
+      like a pendulum, in a blast from the crack of the door, must have made
+      millions and millions of precisely such vibrations as these; but the
+      children were new, and made over every day, with yesterday&rsquo;s weariness
+      left out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little girl, however, was the merrier of the two. It was quite
+      unintelligible, in view of the little care that crusty Hannah took of her,
+      and, moreover, since she was none of your prim, fastidious children, how
+      daintily she kept herself amid all this dust; how the spider&rsquo;s webs never
+      clung to her, and how, when&mdash;without being solicited&mdash;she
+      clambered into the Doctor&rsquo;s arms and kissed him, she bore away no smoky
+      reminiscences of the pipe that he kissed continually. She had a free,
+      mellow, natural laughter, that seemed the ripened fruit of the smile that
+      was generally on her little face, to be shaken off and scattered abroad by
+      any breeze that came along. Little Elsie made playthings of everything,
+      even of the grim Doctor, though against his will, and though, moreover,
+      there were tokens now and then that the sight of this bright little
+      creature was not a pleasure to him, but, on the contrary, a positive pain;
+      a pain, nevertheless, indicating a profound interest, hardly less deep
+      than though Elsie had been his daughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Elsie did not play with the great spider, but she moved among the whole
+      brood of spiders as if she saw them not, and, being endowed with other
+      senses than those allied to these things, might coexist with them and not
+      be sensible of their presence. Yet the child, I suppose, had her crying
+      fits, and her pouting fits, and naughtiness enough to entitle her to live
+      on earth; at least crusty Hannah often said so, and often made grievous
+      complaint of disobedience, mischief, or breakage, attributable to little
+      Elsie; to which the grim Doctor seldom responded by anything more
+      intelligible than a puff of tobacco-smoke, and, sometimes, an imprecation;
+      which, however, hit crusty Hannah instead of the child. Where the child
+      got the tenderness that a child needs to live upon, is a mystery to me;
+      perhaps from some aged or dead mother, or in her dreams; perhaps from some
+      small modicum of it, such as boys have, from the little boy; or perhaps it
+      was from a Persian kitten, which had grown to be a cat in her arms, and
+      slept in her little bed, and now assumed grave and protective airs towards
+      her former playmate. [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy, [Endnote: 3] as we have said, was two or three years Elsie&rsquo;s
+      elder, and might now be about six years old. He was a healthy and cheerful
+      child, yet of a graver mood than the little girl, appearing to lay a more
+      forcible grasp on the circumstances about him, and to tread with a heavier
+      footstep on the solid earth; yet perhaps not more so than was the
+      necessary difference between a man-blossom, dimly conscious of coming
+      things, and a mere baby, with whom there was neither past nor future. Ned,
+      as he was named, was subject very early to fits of musing, the subject of
+      which&mdash;if they had any definite subject, or were more than vague
+      reveries&mdash;it was impossible to guess. They were of those states of
+      mind, probably, which are beyond the sphere of human language, and would
+      necessarily lose their essence in the attempt to communicate or record
+      them. The little girl, perhaps, had some mode of sympathy with these
+      unuttered thoughts or reveries, which grown people had ceased to have; at
+      all events, she early learned to respect them, and, at other times as free
+      and playful as her Persian kitten, she never in such circumstances
+      ventured on any greater freedom than to sit down quietly beside him, and
+      endeavor to look as thoughtful as the boy himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once, slowly emerging from one of these waking reveries, little Ned gazed
+      about him, and saw Elsie sitting with this pretty pretence of
+      thoughtfulness and dreaminess in her little chair, close beside him; now
+      and then peeping under her eyelashes to note what changes might come over
+      his face. After looking at her a moment or two, he quietly took her
+      willing and warm little hand in his own, and led her up to the Doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The group, methinks, must have been a picturesque one, made up as it was
+      of several apparently discordant elements, each of which happened to be so
+      combined as to make a more effective whole. The beautiful grave boy, with
+      a little sword by his side and a feather in his hat, of a brown
+      complexion, slender, with his white brow and dark, thoughtful eyes, so
+      earnest upon some mysterious theme; the prettier little girl, a blonde,
+      round, rosy, so truly sympathetic with her companion&rsquo;s mood, yet
+      unconsciously turning all to sport by her attempt to assume one similar;&mdash;these
+      two standing at the grim Doctor&rsquo;s footstool; he meanwhile, black,
+      wild-bearded, heavy-browed, red-eyed, wrapped in his faded dressing-gown,
+      puffing out volumes of vapor from his long pipe, and making, just at that
+      instant, application to a tumbler, which, we regret to say, was generally
+      at his elbow, with some dark-colored potation in it that required to be
+      frequently replenished from a neighboring black bottle. Half, at least, of
+      the fluids in the grim Doctor&rsquo;s system must have been derived from that
+      same black bottle, so constant was his familiarity with its contents; and
+      yet his eyes were never redder at one time than another, nor his utterance
+      thicker, nor his mood perceptibly the brighter or the duller for all his
+      conviviality. It is true, when, once, the bottle happened to be empty for
+      a whole day together, Doctor Grimshawe was observed by crusty Hannah and
+      by the children to be considerably fiercer than usual: so that probably,
+      by some maladjustment of consequences, his intemperance was only to be
+      found in refraining from brandy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor must we forget&mdash;in attempting to conceive the effect of these two
+      beautiful children in such a sombre room, looking on the graveyard, and
+      contrasted with the grim Doctor&rsquo;s aspect of heavy and smouldering
+      fierceness&mdash;that over his head, at this very moment, dangled the
+      portentous spider, who seemed to have come down from his web aloft for the
+      purpose of hearing what the two young people could have to say to his
+      patron, and what reference it might have to certain mysterious documents
+      which the Doctor kept locked up in a secret cupboard behind the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Grim Doctor,&rdquo; said Ned, after looking up into the Doctor&rsquo;s face, as a
+      sensitive child inevitably does, to see whether the occasion was
+      favorable, yet determined to proceed with his purpose whether so or not,&mdash;&ldquo;Grim
+      Doctor, I want you to answer me a question.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here&rsquo;s to your good health, Ned!&rdquo; quoth the Doctor, eying the pair
+      intently, as he often did, when they were unconscious. &ldquo;So you want to ask
+      me a question? As many as you please, my fine fellow; and I shall answer
+      as many, and as much, and as truly, as may please myself!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, grim Doctor!&rdquo; said the little girl, now letting go of Ned&rsquo;s hand, and
+      climbing upon the Doctor&rsquo;s knee, &ldquo;&lsquo;ou shall answer as many as Ned please
+      to ask, because to please him and me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, child,&rdquo; said Doctor Grimshawe, &ldquo;little Ned will have his rights at
+      least, at my hands, if not other people&rsquo;s rights likewise; and, if it be
+      right, I shall answer his question. Only, let him ask it at once; for I
+      want to be busy thinking about something else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, Doctor Grim,&rdquo; said little Ned, &ldquo;tell me, in the first place, where
+      I came from, and how you came to have me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Doctor looked at the little man, so seriously and earnestly putting
+      this demand, with a perplexed, and at first it might almost seem a
+      startled aspect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is a question, indeed, my friend Ned!&rdquo; ejaculated he, putting forth
+      a whiff of smoke and imbibing a nip from his tumbler before he spoke; and
+      perhaps framing his answer, as many thoughtful and secret people do, in
+      such a way as to let out his secret mood to the child, because knowing he
+      could not understand it: &ldquo;Whence did you come? Whence did any of us come?
+      Out of the darkness and mystery; out of nothingness; out of a kingdom of
+      shadows; out of dust, clay, mud, I think, and to return to it again. Out
+      of a former state of being, whence we have brought a good many shadowy
+      revelations, purporting that it was no very pleasant one. Out of a former
+      life, of which the present one is the hell!&mdash;And why are you come?
+      Faith, Ned, he must be a wiser man than Doctor Grim who can tell why you
+      or any other mortal came hither; only one thing I am well aware of,&mdash;it
+      was not to be happy. To toil and moil and hope and fear; and to love in a
+      shadowy, doubtful sort of way, and to hate in bitter earnest,&mdash;that
+      is what you came for!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, Doctor Grim! this is very naughty,&rdquo; said little Elsie. &ldquo;You are
+      making fun of little Ned, when he is in earnest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fun!&rdquo; quoth Doctor Grim, bursting into a laugh peculiar to him, very loud
+      and obstreperous. &ldquo;I am glad you find it so, my little woman. Well, and so
+      you bid me tell absolutely where he came from?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Elsie nodded her bright little head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you, friend Ned, insist upon knowing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That I do, Doctor Grim!&rdquo; answered Ned. His white, childish brow had
+      gathered into a frown, such was the earnestness of his determination; and
+      he stamped his foot on the floor, as if ready to follow up his demand by
+      an appeal to the little tin sword which hung by his side. The Doctor
+      looked at him with a kind of smile,&mdash;not a very pleasant one; for it
+      was an unamiable characteristic of his temper that a display of spirit,
+      even in a child, was apt to arouse his immense combativeness, and make him
+      aim a blow without much consideration how heavily it might fall, or on how
+      unequal an antagonist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you insist upon an answer, Master Ned, you shall have it,&rdquo; replied he.
+      &ldquo;You were taken by me, boy, a foundling from an almshouse; and if ever
+      hereafter you desire to know your kindred, you must take your chance of
+      the first man you meet. He is as likely to be your father as another!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The child&rsquo;s eyes flashed, and his brow grew as red as fire. It was but a
+      momentary fierceness; the next instant he clasped his hands over his face,
+      and wept in a violent convulsion of grief and shame. Little Elsie clasped
+      her arms about him, kissing his brow and chin, which were all that her
+      lips could touch, under his clasped hands; but Ned turned away
+      uncomforted, and was blindly making his way towards the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ned, my little fellow, come back!&rdquo; said Doctor Grim, who had very
+      attentively watched the cruel effect of his communication.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the boy did not reply, and was still tending towards the door, the grim
+      Doctor vouchsafed to lay aside his pipe, get up from his arm-chair (a
+      thing he seldom did between supper and bedtime), and shuffle after the two
+      children in his slippers. He caught them on the threshold, brought little
+      Ned back by main force,&mdash;for he was a rough man even in his
+      tenderness,&mdash;and, sitting down again and taking him on his knee,
+      pulled away his hands from before his face. Never was a more pitiful sight
+      than that pale countenance, so infantile still, yet looking old and
+      experienced already, with a sense of disgrace, with a feeling of
+      loneliness; so beautiful, nevertheless, that it seemed to possess all the
+      characteristics which fine hereditary traits and culture, or many
+      forefathers, could do in refining a human stock. And this was a nameless
+      weed, sprouting from some chance seed by the dusty wayside!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ned, my dear old boy,&rdquo; said Doctor Grim,&mdash;and he kissed that pale,
+      tearful face,&mdash;the first and last time, to the best of my belief,
+      that he was ever betrayed into that tenderness; &ldquo;forget what I have said!
+      Yes, remember, if you like, that you came from an almshouse; but remember,
+      too,&mdash;what your friend Doctor Grim is ready to affirm and make oath
+      of,&mdash;that he can trace your kindred and race through that sordid
+      experience, and back, back, for a hundred and fifty years, into an old
+      English line. Come, little Ned, and look at this picture.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He led the boy by the hand to a corner of the room, where hung upon the
+      wall a portrait which Ned had often looked at. It seemed an old picture;
+      but the Doctor had had it cleaned and varnished, so that it looked dim and
+      dark, and yet it seemed to be the representation of a man of no mark; not
+      at least of such mark as would naturally leave his features to be
+      transmitted for the interest of another generation. For he was clad in a
+      mean dress of old fashion,&mdash;a leather jerkin it appeared to be,&mdash;and
+      round his neck, moreover, was a noose of rope, as if he might have been on
+      the point of being hanged. But the face of the portrait, nevertheless, was
+      beautiful, noble, though sad; with a great development of sensibility, a
+      look of suffering and endurance amounting to triumph,&mdash;a peace
+      through all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look at this,&rdquo; continued the Doctor, &ldquo;if you must go on dreaming about
+      your race. Dream that you are of the blood of this being; for, mean as his
+      station looks, he comes of an ancient and noble race, and was the noblest
+      of them all! Let me alone, Ned, and I shall spin out the web that shall
+      link you to that man. The grim Doctor can do it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The grim Doctor&rsquo;s face looked fierce with the earnestness with which he
+      said these words. You would have said that he was taking an oath to
+      overthrow and annihilate a race, rather than to build one up by bringing
+      forward the infant heir out of obscurity, and making plain the links&mdash;the
+      filaments&mdash;which cemented this feeble childish life, in a far
+      country, with the great tide of a noble life, which had come down like a
+      chain from antiquity, in old England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having said the words, however, the grim Doctor appeared ashamed both of
+      the heat and of the tenderness into which he had been betrayed; for rude
+      and rough as his nature was, there was a kind of decorum in it, too, that
+      kept him within limits of his own. So he went back to his chair, his pipe,
+      and his tumbler, and was gruffer and more taciturn than ever for the rest
+      of the evening. And after the children went to bed, he leaned back in his
+      chair and looked up at the vast tropic spider, who was particularly busy
+      in adding to the intricacies of his web; until he fell asleep with his
+      eyes fixed in that direction, and the extinguished pipe in one hand and
+      the empty tumbler in the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Doctor Grimshawe, after the foregone scene, began a practice of conversing
+      more with the children than formerly; directing his discourse chiefly to
+      Ned, although Elsie&rsquo;s vivacity and more outspoken and demonstrative
+      character made her take quite as large a share in the conversation as he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Doctor&rsquo;s communications referred chiefly to a village, or
+      neighborhood, or locality in England, which he chose to call Newnham;
+      although he told the children that this was not the real name, which, for
+      reasons best known to himself, he wished to conceal. Whatever the name
+      were, he seemed to know the place so intimately, that the children, as a
+      matter of course, adopted the conclusion that it was his birthplace, and
+      the spot where he had spent his schoolboy days, and had lived until some
+      inscrutable reason had impelled him to quit its ivy-grown antiquity, and
+      all the aged beauty and strength that he spoke of, and to cross the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He used to tell of an old church, far unlike the brick and pine-built
+      meeting-houses with which the children were familiar; a church, the stones
+      of which were laid, every one of them, before the world knew of the
+      country in which he was then speaking: and how it had a spire, the lower
+      part of which was mantled with ivy, and up which, towards its very spire,
+      the ivy was still creeping; and how there was a tradition, that, if the
+      ivy ever reached the top, the spire would fall upon the roof of the old
+      gray church, and crush it all down among its surrounding tombstones.
+      [Endnote: 1] And so, as this misfortune would be so heavy a one, there
+      seemed to be a miracle wrought from year to year, by which the ivy, though
+      always flourishing, could never grow beyond a certain point; so that the
+      spire and church had stood unharmed for thirty years; though the wise old
+      people were constantly foretelling that the passing year must be the very
+      last one that it could stand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He told, too, of a place that made little Ned blush and cast down his eyes
+      to hide the tears of anger and shame at he knew not what, which would
+      irresistibly spring into them; for it reminded him of the almshouse where,
+      as the cruel Doctor said, Ned himself had had his earliest home. And yet,
+      after all, it had scarcely a feature of resemblance; and there was this
+      great point of difference,&mdash;that whereas, in Ned&rsquo;s wretched abode (a
+      large, unsightly brick house), there were many wretched infants like
+      himself, as well as helpless people of all ages, widows, decayed
+      drunkards, people of feeble wits, and all kinds of imbecility; it being a
+      haven for those who could not contend in the hard, eager, pitiless
+      struggle of life; in the place the Doctor spoke of, a noble, Gothic, mossy
+      structure, there were none but aged men, who had drifted into this quiet
+      harbor to end their days in a sort of humble yet stately ease and decorous
+      abundance. And this shelter, the grim Doctor said, was the gift of a man
+      who had died ages ago; and having been a great sinner in his lifetime, and
+      having drawn lands, manors, and a great mass of wealth into his clutches,
+      by violent and unfair means, had thought to get his pardon by founding
+      this Hospital, as it was called, in which thirteen old men should always
+      reside; and he hoped that they would spend their time in praying for the
+      welfare of his soul. [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Said little Elsie, &ldquo;I am glad he did it, and I hope the poor old men never
+      forgot to pray for him, and that it did good to the poor wicked man&rsquo;s
+      soul.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, child,&rdquo; said Doctor Grimshawe, with a scowl into vacancy, and a
+      sort of wicked leer of merriment at the same time, as if he saw before him
+      the face of the dead man of past centuries, &ldquo;I happen to be no lover of
+      this man&rsquo;s race, and I hate him for the sake of one of his descendants. I
+      don&rsquo;t think he succeeded in bribing the Devil to let him go, or God to
+      save him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doctor Grim, you are very naughty!&rdquo; said Elsie, looking shocked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is fair enough,&rdquo; said Ned, &ldquo;to hate your enemies to the very brink of
+      the grave, but then to leave him to get what mercy he can.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After shoving him in!&rdquo; quoth the Doctor; and made no further response to
+      either of these criticisms, which seemed indeed to affect him very little&mdash;if
+      he even listened to them. For he was a man of singularly imperfect moral
+      culture; insomuch that nothing else was so remarkable about him as that&mdash;possessing
+      a good deal of intellectual ability, made available by much reading and
+      experience&mdash;he was so very dark on the moral side; as if he needed
+      the natural perceptions that should have enabled him to acquire that
+      better wisdom. Such a phenomenon often meets us in life; oftener than we
+      recognize, because a certain tact and exterior decency generally hide the
+      moral deficiency. But often there is a mind well polished, married to a
+      conscience and natural impulses left as they were in childhood, except
+      that they have sprouted up into evil and poisonous weeds, richly
+      blossoming with strong-smelling flowers, or seeds which the plant scatters
+      by a sort of impulse; even as the Doctor was now half-consciously throwing
+      seeds of his evil passions into the minds of these children. He was
+      himself a grown-up child, without tact, simplicity, and innocence, and
+      with ripened evil, all the ranker for a native heat that was in him and
+      still active, which might have nourished good things as well as evil.
+      Indeed, it did cherish by chance a root or two of good, the fragrance of
+      which was sometimes perceptible among all this rank growth of poisonous
+      weeds. A grown-up child he was,&mdash;that was all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Doctor now went on to describe an old country-seat, which stood near
+      this village and the ancient Hospital that he had been telling about, and
+      which was formerly the residence of the wicked man (a knight and a brave
+      one, well known in the Lancastrian wars) who had founded the latter. It
+      was a venerable old mansion, which a Saxon Thane had begun to build more
+      than a thousand years ago, the old English oak that he built into the
+      frame being still visible in the ancient skeleton of its roof, sturdy and
+      strong as if put up yesterday. And the descendants of the man who built
+      it, through the French line (for a Norman baron wedded the daughter and
+      heiress of the Saxon), dwelt there yet; and in each century they had done
+      something for the old Hall,&mdash;building a tower, adding a suite of
+      rooms, strengthening what was already built, putting in a painted window,
+      making it more spacious and convenient,&mdash;till it seemed as if Time
+      employed himself in thinking what could be done for the old house. As fast
+      as any part decayed, it was renewed, with such simple art that the new
+      completed, as it were, and fitted itself to the old. So that it seemed as
+      if the house never had been finished, until just that thing was added. For
+      many an age, the possessors had gone on adding strength to strength,
+      digging out the moat to a greater depth, piercing the walls with holes for
+      archers to shoot through, or building a turret to keep watch upon. But at
+      last all necessity for these precautions passed away, and then they
+      thought of convenience and comfort, adding something in every generation
+      to these. And by and by they thought of beauty too; and in this time
+      helped them with its weather-stains, and the ivy that grew over the walls,
+      and the grassy depth of the dried-up moat, and the abundant shade that
+      grew up everywhere, where naked strength would have been ugly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One curious thing in the house,&rdquo; said the Doctor, lowering his voice, but
+      with a mysterious look of triumph, and that old scowl, too, at the
+      children, &ldquo;was that they built a secret chamber,&mdash;a very secret one!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A secret chamber!&rdquo; cried little Ned; &ldquo;who lived in it? A ghost?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was often use for it,&rdquo; said Doctor Grim; &ldquo;hiding people who had
+      fought on the wrong side, or Catholic priests, or criminals, or perhaps&mdash;who
+      knows?&mdash;enemies that they wanted put out of the way,&mdash;troublesome
+      folks. Ah! it was often of use, that secret chamber: and is so still!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here the Doctor paused a long while, and leaned back in his chair, slowly
+      puffing long whiffs from his pipe, looking up at the great spider-demon
+      that hung over his head, and, as it seemed to the children by the
+      expression of his face, looking into the dim secret chamber which he had
+      spoken of, and which, by something in his mode of alluding to it, assumed
+      such a weird, spectral aspect to their imaginations that they never wished
+      to hear of it again. Coming back at length out of his reverie,&mdash;returning,
+      perhaps, out of some weird, ghostly, secret chamber of his memory, whereof
+      the one in the old house was but the less horrible emblem,&mdash;he
+      resumed his tale. He said that, a long time ago, a war broke out in the
+      old country between King and Parliament. At that period there were several
+      brothers of the old family (which had adhered to the Catholic religion),
+      and these chose the side of the King instead of that of the Puritan
+      Parliament: all but one, whom the family hated because he took the
+      Parliament side; and he became a soldier, and fought against his own
+      brothers; and it was said among them that, so inveterate was he, he went
+      on the scaffold, masked, and was the very man who struck off the King&rsquo;s
+      head, and that his foot trod in the King&rsquo;s blood, and that always
+      afterwards he made a bloody track wherever he went. And there was a legend
+      that his brethren once caught the renegade and imprisoned him in his own
+      birthplace&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the secret chamber?&rdquo; interrupted Ned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No doubt!&rdquo; said the Doctor, nodding, &ldquo;though I never heard so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They imprisoned him, but he made his escape and fled, and in the morning
+      his prison-place, wherever it was, was empty. But on the threshold of the
+      door of the old manor-house there was the print of a bloody footstep; and
+      no trouble that the housemaids took, no rain of all the years that have
+      since passed, no sunshine, has made it fade: nor have all the wear and
+      tramp of feet passing over it since then availed to erase it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have seen it myself,&rdquo; quoth the Doctor, &ldquo;and know this to be true.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doctor Grim, now you are laughing at us,&rdquo; said Ned, trying to look grave.
+      But Elsie hid her face on the Doctor&rsquo;s knee; there being something that
+      affected the vivid little girl with peculiar horror in the idea of this
+      red footstep always glistening on the doorstep, and wetting, as she
+      fancied, every innocent foot of child or grown person that had since
+      passed over it. [Endnote: 3.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is true!&rdquo; reiterated the grim Doctor; &ldquo;for, man and boy, I have seen
+      it a thousand times.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He continued the family history, or tradition, or fantastic legend,
+      whichever it might be; telling his young auditors that the Puritan, the
+      renegade son of the family, was afterwards, by the contrivances of his
+      brethren, sent to Virginia and sold as a bond slave; and how he had
+      vanished from that quarter and come to New England, where he was supposed
+      to have left children. And by and by two elder brothers died, and this
+      missing brother became the heir to the old estate and to a title. Then the
+      family tried to track his bloody footstep, and sought it far and near,
+      through green country paths, and old streets of London; but in vain. Then
+      they sent messengers to see whether any traces of one stepping in blood
+      could be found on the forest leaves of America; but still in vain. The
+      idea nevertheless prevailed that he would come back, and it was said they
+      kept a bedchamber ready for him yet in the old house. But much as they
+      pretended to regret the loss of him and his children, it would make them
+      curse their stars were a descendant of his to return now. For the child of
+      a younger son was in possession of the old estate, and was doing as much
+      evil as his forefathers did; and if the true heir were to appear on the
+      threshold, he would (if he might but do it secretly) stain the whole
+      doorstep as red as the Bloody Footstep had stained one little portion of
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think he will ever come back?&rdquo; asked little Ned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stranger things have happened, my little man!&rdquo; said Doctor Grimshawe,
+      &ldquo;than that the posterity of this man should come back and turn these
+      usurpers out of his rightful inheritance. And sometimes, as I sit here
+      smoking my pipe and drinking my glass, and looking up at the cunning plot
+      that the spider is weaving yonder above my head, and thinking of this fine
+      old family and some little matters that have been between them and me, I
+      fancy that it may be so! We shall see! Stranger things have happened.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Doctor Grimshawe drank off his tumbler, winking at little Ned in a
+      strange way, that seemed to be a kind of playfulness, but which did not
+      affect the children pleasantly; insomuch that little Elsie put both her
+      hands on Doctor Grim&rsquo;s knees, and begged him not to do so any more.
+      [Endnote: 4.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      [Endnote: 1]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The children, after this conversation, often introduced the old English
+      mansion into their dreams and little romances, which all imaginative
+      children are continually mixing up with their lives, making the
+      commonplace day of grown people a rich, misty, glancing orb of fairy-land
+      to themselves. Ned, forgetting or not realizing the long lapse of time,
+      used to fancy the true heir wandering all this while in America, and
+      leaving a long track of bloody footsteps behind him; until the period
+      when, his sins being expiated (whatever they might be), he should turn
+      back upon his steps and return to his old native home. And sometimes the
+      child used to look along the streets of the town where he dwelt, bending
+      his thoughtful eyes on the ground, and think that perhaps some time he
+      should see the bloody footsteps there, betraying that the wanderer had
+      just gone that way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for little Elsie, it was her fancy that the hero of the legend still
+      remained imprisoned in that dreadful secret chamber, which had made a most
+      dread impression on her mind; and that there he was, forgotten all this
+      time, waiting, like a naughty child shut up in a closet, until some one
+      should come to unlock the door. In the pitifulness of her disposition, she
+      once proposed to little Ned that, as soon as they grew big enough, they
+      should set out in quest of the old house, and find their way into it, and
+      find the secret chamber, and let the poor prisoner out. So they lived a
+      good deal of the time in a half-waking dream, partly conscious of the
+      fantastic nature of their ideas, yet with these ideas almost as real to
+      them as the facts of the natural world, which, to children, are at first
+      transparent and unsubstantial.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Doctor appeared to have a pleasure, or a purpose, in keeping his
+      legend forcibly in their memories; he often recurred to the subject of the
+      old English family, and was continually giving new details about its
+      history, the scenery in its neighborhood, the aspect of the mansion-house;
+      indicating a very intense interest in the subject on his own part, of
+      which this much talk seemed the involuntary overflowing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was, however, an affection mingled with this sentiment. It appeared
+      to be his unfortunate necessity to let his thoughts dwell very constantly
+      upon a subject that was hateful to him, with which this old English estate
+      and manor-house and family were somehow connected; and, moreover, had he
+      spoken thus to older and more experienced auditors, they might have
+      detected in the manner and matter of his talk, a certain hereditary
+      reverence and awe, the growth of ages, mixed up with a newer hatred,
+      impelling him to deface and destroy what, at the same time, it was his
+      deepest impulse to bow before. The love belonged to his race; the hatred,
+      to himself individually. It was the feeling of a man lowly born, when he
+      contracts a hostility to his hereditary superior. In one way, being of a
+      powerful, passionate nature, gifted with force and ability far superior to
+      that of the aristocrat, he might scorn him and feel able to trample on
+      him; in another, he had the same awe that a country boy feels of the
+      magistrate who flings him a sixpence and shakes his horsewhip at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Had the grim Doctor been an American, he might have had the vast antipathy
+      to rank, without the trace of awe that made it so much more malignant: it
+      required a low-born Englishman to feel the two together. What made the
+      hatred so fiendish was a something that, in the natural course of things,
+      would have been loyalty, inherited affection, devoted self-sacrifice to a
+      superior. Whatever it might be, it seemed at times (when his potations
+      took deeper effect than ordinary) almost to drive the grim Doctor mad; for
+      he would burst forth in wild diatribes and anathemas, having a strange,
+      rough force of expression and a depth of utterance, as if his words came
+      from a bottomless pit within himself, where burned an everlasting fire,
+      and where the furies had their home; and plans of dire revenge were welded
+      into shape as in the heat of a furnace. After the two poor children had
+      been affrighted by paroxysms of this kind, the strange being would break
+      out into one of his roars of laughter, that seemed to shake the house,
+      and, at all events, caused the cobwebs and spiders suspended from the
+      ceiling, to swing and vibrate with the motion of the volumes of
+      reverberating breath which he thus expelled from his capacious lungs.
+      Then, catching up little Elsie upon one knee and Ned upon the other, he
+      would become gentler than in his usual moods, and, by the powerful
+      magnetism of his character, cause them to think him as tender and sweet an
+      old fellow as a child could desire for a playmate. Upon the whole, strange
+      as it may appear, they loved the grim Doctor dearly; there was a loadstone
+      within him that drew them close to him and kept them there, in spite of
+      the horror of many things that he said and did. One thing that, slight as
+      it seemed, wrought mightily towards their mutually petting each other, was
+      that no amount of racket, hubbub, shouting, laughter, or noisy mischief
+      which the two children could perpetrate, ever disturbed the Doctor&rsquo;s
+      studies, meditations, or employments of whatever kind. He had a hardy set
+      of nerves, not refined by careful treatment in himself or his ancestors,
+      but probably accustomed from of old to be drummed on by harsh voices, rude
+      sounds, and the clatter and clamor of household life among homely,
+      uncultivated, strongly animal people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the two children grew apace, it behooved their strange guardian to take
+      some thought for their instruction. So far as little Elsie was concerned,
+      however, he seemed utterly indifferent to her having any cultivation:
+      having imbibed no modern ideas respecting feminine capacities and
+      privileges, but regarding woman, whether in the bud or in the blossom, as
+      the plaything of man&rsquo;s idler moments, and the helpmeet&mdash;but in a
+      humble capacity&mdash;of his daily life. He sometimes bade her go to the
+      kitchen and take lessons of crusty Hannah in bread-making, sweeping,
+      dusting, washing, the coarser needlework, and such other things as she
+      would require to know when she came to be a woman; but carelessly allowed
+      her to gather up the crumbs of such instruction as he bestowed on her
+      playmate Ned, and thus learn to read, write, and cipher; which, to say the
+      truth, was about as far in the way of scholarship as little Elsie cared to
+      go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But towards little Ned the grim Doctor adopted a far different system. No
+      sooner had he reached the age when the soft and tender intellect of the
+      child became capable of retaining impressions, than he took him vigorously
+      in hand, assigning him such tasks as were fit for him, and curiously
+      investigating what were the force and character of the powers with which
+      the child grasped them. Not that the Doctor pressed him forward unduly;
+      indeed, there was no need of it; for the boy manifested a remarkable
+      docility for instruction, and a singular quickness in mastering the
+      preliminary steps which lead to science: a subtle instinct, indeed, which
+      it seemed wonderful a child should possess for anything as artificial as
+      systems of grammar and arithmetic. A remarkable boy, in truth, he was, to
+      have been found by chance in an almshouse; except that, such being his
+      origin, we are at liberty to suppose for him whatever long cultivation and
+      gentility we may think necessary, in his parentage of either side,&mdash;such
+      as was indicated also by his graceful and refined beauty of person. He
+      showed, indeed, even before he began to read at all, an instinctive
+      attraction towards books, and a love for and interest in even the material
+      form of knowledge,&mdash;the plates, the print, the binding of the
+      Doctor&rsquo;s volumes, and even in a bookworm which he once found in an old
+      volume, where it had eaten a circular furrow. But the little boy had too
+      quick a spirit of life to be in danger of becoming a bookworm himself. He
+      had this side of the intellect, but his impulse would be to mix with men,
+      and catch something from their intercourse fresher than books could give
+      him; though these would give him what they might.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the grim Doctor, rough and uncultivated as he seemed, this budding
+      intelligence found no inadequate instructor. Doctor Grimshawe proved
+      himself a far more thorough scholar, in the classics and mathematics, than
+      could easily have been found in our country. He himself must have had
+      rigid and faithful instruction at an early period of life, though probably
+      not in his boyhood. For, though the culture had been bestowed, his mind
+      had been left in so singularly rough a state that it seemed as if the
+      refinement of classical study could not have been begun very early. Or
+      possibly the mind and nature were incapable of polish; or he may have had
+      a coarse and sordid domestic life around him in his infancy and youth. He
+      was a gem of coarse texture, just hewn out. An American with a like
+      education would more likely have gained a certain fineness and grace, and
+      it would have been difficult to distinguish him from one who had been born
+      to culture and refinement. This sturdy Englishman, after all that had been
+      done for his mind, and though it had been well done, was still but another
+      ploughman, of a long race of such, with a few scratchings of refinement on
+      his hard exterior. His son, if he left one, might be a little less of the
+      ploughman; his grandson, provided the female element were well chosen,
+      might approach to refinement; three generations&mdash;a century at least&mdash;would
+      be required for the slow toil of hewing, chiselling, and polishing a
+      gentleman out of this ponderous block, now rough from the quarry of human
+      nature. But, in the mean time, he evidently possessed in an unusual degree
+      the sort of learning that refines other minds,&mdash;the critical
+      acquaintance with the great poets and historians of antiquity, and
+      apparently an appreciation of their merits, and power to teach their
+      beauty. So the boy had an able tutor, capable, it would seem, of showing
+      him the way to the graces he did not himself possess; besides helping the
+      growth of the strength without which refinement is but sickly and
+      disgusting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another sort of culture, which it seemed odd that this rude man should
+      undertake, was that of manners; but, in fact, rude as the grim Doctor&rsquo;s
+      own manners were, he was one of the nicest and severest censors in that
+      department that was ever known. It is difficult to account for this;
+      although it is almost invariably found that persons in a low rank of life,
+      such as servants and laborers, will detect the false pretender to the
+      character of a gentleman, with at least as sure an instinct as the class
+      into which they seek to thrust themselves. Perhaps they recognize
+      something akin to their own vulgarity, rather than appreciate what is
+      unlike themselves. The Doctor possessed a peculiar power of rich rough
+      humor on this subject, and used to deliver lectures, as it were, to little
+      Ned, illustrated with sketches of living individuals in the town where
+      they dwelt; by an unscrupulous use of whom he sought to teach the boy what
+      to avoid in manners, if he sought to be a gentleman. But it must be
+      confessed he spared himself as little as other people, and often wound up
+      with this compendious injunction,&mdash;&ldquo;Be everything in your behavior
+      that Doctor Grim is not!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His pupil, very probably, profited somewhat by these instructions; for
+      there are specialties and arbitrary rules of behavior which do not come by
+      nature. But these are few; and beautiful, noble, and genial manners may
+      almost be called a natural gift; and these, however he inherited them,
+      soon proved to be an inherent possession of little Ned. He had a kind of
+      natural refinement, which nothing could ever soil or offend; it seemed, by
+      some magic or other, absolutely to keep him from the knowledge of much of
+      the grim Doctor&rsquo;s rude and sordid exterior, and to render what was around
+      him beautiful by a sort of affiliation, or reflection from that quality in
+      himself, glancing its white light upon it. The Doctor himself was puzzled,
+      and apparently both startled and delighted at the perception of these
+      characteristics. Sometimes he would make a low, uncouth bow, after his
+      fashion, to the little fellow, saying, &ldquo;Allow me to kiss your hand, my
+      lord!&rdquo; and little Ned, not quite knowing what the grim Doctor meant, yet
+      allowed the favor he asked, with a grave and gracious condescension that
+      seemed much to delight the suitor. This refusal to recognize or to suspect
+      that the Doctor might be laughing at him was a sure token, at any rate, of
+      the lack of one vulgar characteristic in little Ned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In order to afford little Ned every advantage to these natural gifts,
+      Doctor Grim nevertheless failed not to provide the best attainable
+      instructor for such positive points of a polite education as his own
+      fierce criticism, being destructive rather than generative, would not
+      suffice for. There was a Frenchman in the town&mdash;a M. Le Grand,
+      secretly calling himself a Count&mdash;who taught the little people, and,
+      indeed, some of their elders, the Parisian pronunciation of his own
+      language; and likewise dancing (in which he was more of an adept and more
+      successful than in the former branch) and fencing: in which, after looking
+      at a lesson or two, the grim Doctor was satisfied of his skill. Under his
+      instruction, with the stimulus of the Doctor&rsquo;s praise and criticism, Ned
+      soon grew to be the pride of the Frenchman&rsquo;s school, in both the active
+      departments; and the Doctor himself added a further gymnastic acquirement
+      (not absolutely necessary, he said, to a gentleman&rsquo;s education, but very
+      desirable to a man perfect at all points) by teaching him cudgel-playing
+      and pugilism. In short, in everything that related to accomplishments,
+      whether of mind or body, no pains were spared with little Ned; but of the
+      utilitarian line of education, then almost exclusively adopted, and
+      especially desirable for a fortuneless boy like Ned, dependent on a man
+      not wealthy, there was little given.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first, too, the Doctor paid little attention to the moral and religious
+      culture of his pupil; nor did he ever make a system of it. But by and by,
+      though with a singular reluctance and kind of bashfulness, he began to
+      extend his care to these matters; being drawn into them unawares, and
+      possibly perceiving and learning what he taught as he went along. One
+      evening, I know not how, he was betrayed into speaking on this point, and
+      a sort of inspiration seized him. A vista opened before him: handling an
+      immortal spirit, he began to know its requisitions, in a degree far beyond
+      what he had conceived them to be when his great task was undertaken. His
+      voice grew deep, and had a strange, impressive pathos in it; his talk
+      became eloquent with depth of meaning and feeling, as he told the boy of
+      the moral dangers of the world, for which he was seeking to educate him;
+      and which, he said, presented what looked like great triumphs, and yet
+      were the greatest and saddest of defeats. He told him that many things
+      that seemed nearest and dearest to the heart of man were destructive,
+      eating and gnawing away and corroding what was best in him; and what a
+      high, noble, re-creating triumph it was when these dark impulses were
+      resisted and overthrown; and how, from that epoch, the soul took a new
+      start. He denounced the selfish greed of gold, lawless passion, revenge,&mdash;and
+      here the grim Doctor broke out into a strange passion and zeal of anathema
+      against this deadly sin, making a dreadful picture of the ruin that it
+      creates in the heart where it establishes itself, and how it makes a
+      corrosive acid of those genial juices. Then he told the boy that the
+      condition of all good was, in the first place, truth; then, courage; then,
+      justice; then, mercy; out of which principles operating upon one another
+      would come all brave, noble, high, unselfish actions, and the scorn of all
+      mean ones; and how that from such a nature all hatred would fall away, and
+      all good affections would be ennobled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I know not at what point it was, precisely, in these ethical instructions
+      that an insight seemed to strike the grim Doctor that something more&mdash;vastly
+      more&mdash;was needed than all he had said; and he began, doubtfully, to
+      speak of man&rsquo;s spiritual nature and its demands, and the emptiness of
+      everything which a sense of these demands did not pervade, and condense,
+      and weighten into realities. And going on in this strain, he soared out of
+      himself and astonished the two children, who stood gazing at him,
+      wondering whether it were the Doctor who was speaking thus; until some
+      interrupting circumstance seemed to bring him back to himself, and he
+      burst into one of his great roars of laughter. The inspiration, the
+      strange light whereby he had been transfigured, passed out of his face;
+      and there was the uncouth, wild-bearded, rough, earthy, passionate man,
+      whom they called Doctor Grim, looking ashamed of himself, and trying to
+      turn the whole matter into a jest. [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a sad pity that he should have been interrupted, and brought into
+      this mocking mood, just when he seemed to have broken away from the
+      sinfulness of his hot, evil nature, and to have soared into a region
+      where, with all his native characteristics transfigured, he seemed to have
+      become an angel in his own likeness. Crusty Hannah, who had been drawn to
+      the door of the study by the unusual tones of his voice,&mdash;a kind of
+      piercing sweetness in it,&mdash;always averred that she saw the gigantic
+      spider swooping round his head in great crafty circles, and clutching, as
+      it were, at his brain with its great claws. But it was the old woman&rsquo;s
+      absurd idea that this hideous insect was the Devil, in that ugly guise,&mdash;a
+      superstition which deserves absolutely no countenance. Nevertheless,
+      though this paroxysm of devotional feeling and insight returned no more to
+      the grim Doctor, it was ever after a memorable occasion to the two
+      children. It touched that religious chord, in both their hearts, which
+      there was no mother to touch; but now it vibrated long, and never ceased
+      to vibrate so long as they remained together,&mdash;nor, perhaps, after
+      they were parted from each other and from the grim Doctor. And even then,
+      in those after years, the strange music that had been awakened was
+      continued, as it were the echo from harps on high. Now, at all events,
+      they made little prayers for themselves, and said them at bedtime,
+      generally in secret, sometimes in unison; and they read in an old dusty
+      Bible which lay among the grim Doctor&rsquo;s books; and from little heathens,
+      they became Christian children. Doctor Grimshawe was perhaps conscious of
+      this result of his involuntary preachment, but he never directly noticed
+      it, and did nothing either to efface or deepen the impression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was singular, however, that, in both the children&rsquo;s minds, this one
+      gush of irresistible religious sentiment, breaking out of the grim
+      Doctor&rsquo;s inner depths, like a sort of holy lava from a volcano that
+      usually emitted quite other matter, (such as hot, melted wrath and hate,)
+      quite threw out of sight, then and always afterwards, his darker
+      characteristics. They remembered him, with faith and love, as a religious
+      man, and forgot&mdash;what perhaps had made no impression on their
+      innocent hearts&mdash;all the traits that other people might have called
+      devilish. To them the grim Doctor was a saint, even during his lifetime
+      and constant intercourse with them, and canonized forever afterwards.
+      There is almost always, to be sure, this profound faith, with regard to
+      those they love, in childhood; but perhaps, in this instance, the children
+      really had a depth of insight that grown people lacked; a profound
+      recognition of the bottom of this strange man&rsquo;s nature, which was of such
+      stuff as martyrs and heroic saints might have been made of, though here it
+      had been wrought miserably amiss. At any rate, his face with the holy awe
+      upon it was what they saw and remembered, when they thought of their
+      friend Doctor Grim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One effect of his zealous and analytic instruction of the boy was very
+      perceptible. Heretofore, though enduring him, and occasionally making a
+      plaything of him, it may be doubted whether the grim Doctor had really any
+      strong affection for the child: it rather seemed as if his strong will
+      were forcing him to undertake, and carry sedulously forward, a
+      self-imposed task. All that he had done&mdash;his redeeming the bright
+      child from poverty and nameless degradation, ignorance, and a sordid life
+      hopeless of better fortune, and opening to him the whole realm of mighty
+      possibilities in an American life&mdash;did not imply any love for the
+      little individual whom he thus benefited. It had some other motive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But now, approaching the child in this close, intimate, and helpful way,
+      it was very evident that his interest took a tenderer character. There was
+      everything in the boy, that a boy could possess, to attract affection; he
+      would have been a father&rsquo;s pride and joy. Doctor Grimshawe, indeed, was
+      not his father; but to a person of his character this was perhaps no cause
+      of lesser love than if there had been the whole of that holy claim of
+      kindred between them. We speak of the natural force of blood; we speak of
+      the paternal relation as if it were productive of more earnest affection
+      than can exist between two persons, one of whom is protective, but
+      unrelated. But there are wild, forcible, unrestricted characters, on whom
+      the necessity and even duty of loving their own child is a sort of barrier
+      to love. They perhaps do not love their own traits, which they recognize
+      in their children; they shrink from their own features in the reflection
+      presented by these little mirrors. A certain strangeness and unlikeness
+      (such as gives poignancy to the love between the sexes) would excite a
+      livelier affection. Be this as it may, it is not probable that Doctor
+      Grimshawe would have loved a child of his own blood, with the coarse
+      characteristics that he knew both in his race and himself, with nearly
+      such fervor as this beautiful, slender, yet strenuous, intelligent,
+      refined boy,&mdash;with such a high-bred air, handling common things with
+      so refined a touch, yet grasping them so firmly; throwing a natural grace
+      on all he did. Was he not his father,&mdash;he that took this fair blossom
+      out of the sordid mud in which he must soon have withered and perished?
+      Was not this beautiful strangeness, which he so wondered at, the result of
+      his care?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And little Elsie? did the grim Doctor love her as well? Perhaps not, for,
+      in the first place, there was a natural tie, though not the nearest,
+      between her and Doctor Grimshawe, which made him feel that she was cast
+      upon his love: a burden which he acknowledged himself bound to undertake.
+      Then, too, there were unutterably painful reminiscences and thoughts, that
+      made him gasp for breath, that turned his blood sour, that tormented his
+      dreams with nightmares and hellish phantoms; all of which were connected
+      with this innocent and happy child; so that, cheerful and pleasant as she
+      was, there was to the grim Doctor a little fiend playing about his floor
+      and throwing a lurid light on the wall, as the shadow of this
+      sun-flickering child. It is certain that there was always a pain and
+      horror mixed with his feelings towards Elsie; he had to forget himself, as
+      it were, and all that was connected with the causes why she came to be,
+      before he could love her. Amid his fondness, when he was caressing her
+      upon his knee, pressing her to his rough bosom, as he never took the
+      freedom to press Ned, came these hateful reminiscences, compelling him to
+      set her down, and corrugating his heavy brows as with a pang of fiercely
+      resented, strongly borne pain. Still, the child had no doubt contrived to
+      make her way into the great gloomy cavern of the grim Doctor&rsquo;s heart, and
+      stole constantly further and further in, carrying a ray of sunshine in her
+      hand as a taper to light her way, and illuminate the rude dark pit into
+      which she so fearlessly went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Doctor Grim [Endnote: 1] had the English faith in open air and daily
+      acquaintance with the weather, whatever it might be; and it was his habit,
+      not only to send the two children to play, for lack of a better place, in
+      the graveyard, but to take them himself on long rambles, of which the
+      vicinity of the town afforded a rich variety. It may be that the Doctor&rsquo;s
+      excursions had the wider scope, because both he and the children were
+      objects of curiosity in the town, and very much the subject of its gossip:
+      so that always, in its streets and lanes, the people turned to gaze, and
+      came to their windows and to the doors of shops to see this grim, bearded
+      figure, leading along the beautiful children each by a hand, with a surly
+      aspect like a bulldog. Their remarks were possibly not intended to reach
+      the ears of the party, but certainly were not so cautiously whispered but
+      they occasionally did do so. The male remarks, indeed, generally died away
+      in the throats that uttered them; a circumstance that doubtless saved the
+      utterer from some very rough rejoinder at the hands of the Doctor, who had
+      grown up in the habit of a very ready and free recourse to his fists,
+      which had a way of doubling themselves up seemingly of their own accord.
+      But the shrill feminine voices sometimes sent their observations from
+      window to window without dread of any such repartee on the part of the
+      subject of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There he goes, the old Spider-witch!&rdquo; quoth one shrill woman, &ldquo;with those
+      two poor babes that he has caught in his cobweb, and is going to feed
+      upon, poor little tender things! The bloody Englishman makes free with the
+      dead bodies of our friends and the living ones of our children!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How red his nose is!&rdquo; quoth another; &ldquo;he has pulled at the brandy-bottle
+      pretty stoutly to-day, early as it is! Pretty habits those children will
+      learn, between the Devil in the shape of a great spider, and this devilish
+      fellow in his own shape! It were well that our townsmen tarred and
+      feathered the old British wizard!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And, as he got further off, two or three little blackguard barefoot boys
+      shouted shrilly after him,&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                      &ldquo;Doctor Grim, Doctor Grim,
+                       The Devil wove a web for him!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      being a nonsensical couplet that had been made for the grim Doctor&rsquo;s
+      benefit, and was hooted in the streets, and under his own windows. Hearing
+      such remarks and insults, the Doctor would glare round at them with red
+      eyes, especially if the brandy-bottle had happened to be much in request
+      that day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, poor Doctor Grim had met with a fortune which befalls many a man
+      with less cause than drew the public attention on this odd humorist; for,
+      dwelling in a town which was as yet but a larger village, where everybody
+      knew everybody, and claimed the privilege to know and discuss their
+      characters, and where there were few topics of public interest to take off
+      their attention, a very considerable portion of town talk and criticism
+      fell upon him. The old town had a certain provincialism, which is less the
+      characteristic of towns in these days, when society circulates so freely,
+      than then: besides, it was a very rude epoch, just when the country had
+      come through the war of the Revolution, and while the surges of that
+      commotion were still seething and swelling, and while the habits and
+      morals of every individual in the community still felt its influence; and
+      especially the contest was too recent for an Englishman to be in very good
+      odor, unless he should cease to be English, and become more American than
+      the Americans themselves in repudiating British prejudices or principles,
+      habits, mode of thought, and everything that distinguishes Britons at home
+      or abroad. As Doctor Grim did not see fit to do this, and as, moreover, he
+      was a very doubtful, questionable, morose, unamiable old fellow, not
+      seeking to make himself liked nor deserving to be so, he was a very
+      unpopular person in the town where he had chosen to reside. Nobody thought
+      very well of him; the respectable people had heard of his pipe and
+      brandy-bottle; the religious community knew that he never showed himself
+      at church or meeting; so that he had not that very desirable strength (in
+      a society split up into many sects) of being able to rely upon the party
+      sympathies of any one of them. The mob hated him with the blind sentiment
+      that makes one surly cur hostile to another surly cur. He was the most
+      isolated individual to be found anywhere; and, being so unsupported,
+      everybody was his enemy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The town, as it happened, had been pleased to interest itself much in this
+      matter of Doctor Grim and the two children, insomuch as he never sent them
+      to school, nor came with them to meeting of any kind, but was bringing
+      them up ignorant heathen to all appearances, and, as many believed, was
+      devoting them in some way to the great spider, to which he had bartered
+      his own soul. It had been mooted among the selectmen, the fathers of the
+      town, whether their duty did not require them to put the children under
+      more suitable guardianship; a measure which, it may be, was chiefly
+      hindered by the consideration that, in that case, the cost of supporting
+      them would probably be transferred from the grim Doctor&rsquo;s shoulders to
+      those of the community. Nevertheless, they did what they could. Maidenly
+      ladies, prim and starched, in one or two instances called upon the Doctor&mdash;the
+      two children meanwhile being in the graveyard at play&mdash;to give him
+      Christian advice as to the management of his charge. But, to confess the
+      truth, the Doctor&rsquo;s reception of these fair missionaries was not extremely
+      courteous. They were, perhaps, partly instigated by a natural feminine
+      desire to see the interior of a place about which they had heard much,
+      with its spiders&rsquo; webs, its strange machines and confusing tools; so, much
+      contrary to crusty Hannah&rsquo;s advice, they persisted in entering. Crusty
+      Hannah listened at the door; and it was curious to see the delighted smile
+      which came over her dry old visage as the Doctor&rsquo;s growling, rough voice,
+      after an abrupt question or two, and a reply in a thin voice on the part
+      of the maiden ladies, grew louder and louder, till the door opened, and
+      forth came the benevolent pair in great discomposure. Crusty Hannah
+      averred that their caps were much rumpled; but this view of the thing was
+      questioned; though it were certain that the Doctor called after them
+      downstairs, that, had they been younger and prettier, they would have
+      fared worse. A male emissary, who was admitted on the supposition of his
+      being a patient, did fare worse; for (the grim Doctor having been
+      particularly intimate with the black bottle that afternoon) there was,
+      about ten minutes after the visitor&rsquo;s entrance, a sudden fierce upraising
+      of the Doctor&rsquo;s growl; then a struggle that shook the house; and, finally,
+      a terrible rumbling down the stairs, which proved to be caused by the
+      precipitate descent of the hapless visitor; who, if he needed no
+      assistance of the grim Doctor on his entrance, certainly would have been
+      the better for a plaster or two after his departure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such were the terms on which Doctor Grimshawe now stood with his adopted
+      townspeople; and if we consider the dull little town to be full of
+      exaggerated stories about the Doctor&rsquo;s oddities, many of them forged, all
+      retailed in an unfriendly spirit; misconceptions of a character which, in
+      its best and most candidly interpreted aspects, was sufficiently amenable
+      to censure; surmises taken for certainties; superstitions&mdash;the
+      genuine hereditary offspring of the frame of public mind which produced
+      the witchcraft delusion&mdash;all fermenting together; and all this evil
+      and uncharitableness taking the delusive hue of benevolent interest in two
+      helpless children;&mdash;we may partly judge what was the odium in which
+      the grim Doctor dwelt, and amid which he walked. The horrid suspicion,
+      too, countenanced by his abode in the corner of the graveyard, affording
+      the terrible Doctor such facilities for making free, like a ghoul as he
+      was, with the relics of mortality from the earliest progenitor to the man
+      killed yesterday by the Doctor&rsquo;s own drugs, was not likely to improve his
+      reputation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had heretofore contented himself with, at most, occasionally shaking
+      his stick at his assailants; but this day the black bottle had imparted,
+      it may be, a little more fire than ordinary to his blood; and besides, an
+      unlucky urchin happened to take particularly good aim with a mud ball,
+      which took effect right in the midst of the Doctor&rsquo;s bushy beard, and,
+      being of a soft consistency, forthwith became incorporated with it. At
+      this intolerable provocation the grim Doctor pursued the little villain,
+      amid a shower of similar missiles from the boy&rsquo;s playmates, caught him as
+      he was escaping into a back yard, dragged him into the middle of the
+      street, and, with his stick, proceeded to give him his merited
+      chastisement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, hereupon, it was astonishing how sudden commotion flashed up like
+      gunpowder along the street, which, except for the petty shrieks and
+      laughter of a few children, was just before so quiet. Forth out of every
+      window in those dusky, mean wooden houses were thrust heads of women old
+      and young; forth out of every door and other avenue, and as if they
+      started up from the middle of the street, or out of the unpaved sidewalks,
+      rushed fierce avenging forms, threatening at full yell to take vengeance
+      on the grim Doctor; who still, with that fierce dark face of his,&mdash;his
+      muddy beard all flying abroad, dirty and foul, his hat fallen off, his red
+      eyes flashing fire,&mdash;was belaboring the poor hinder end of the
+      unhappy urchin, paying off upon that one part of the boy&rsquo;s frame the whole
+      score which he had to settle with the rude boys of the town; giving him at
+      once the whole whipping which he had deserved every day of his life, and
+      not a stroke of which he had yet received. Need enough there was, no
+      doubt, that somebody should interfere with such grim and immitigable
+      justice; and certainly the interference was prompt, and promised to be
+      effectual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Down with the old tyrant! Thrash him! Hang him! Tar and feather the
+      viper&rsquo;s fry! the wizard! the body-snatcher!&rdquo; bellowed the mob, one member
+      of which was raving with delirium tremens, and another was a madman just
+      escaped from bedlam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is unaccountable where all this mischievous, bloodthirsty multitude
+      came from,&mdash;how they were born into that quietness in such a moment
+      of time! What had they been about heretofore? Were they waiting in
+      readiness for this crisis, and keeping themselves free from other
+      employment till it should come to pass? Had they been created for the
+      moment, or were they fiends sent by Satan in the likeness of a blackguard
+      population? There you might see the offscourings of the recently finished
+      war,&mdash;old soldiers, rusty, wooden-legged: there, sailors, ripe for
+      any kind of mischief; there, the drunken population of a neighboring
+      grogshop, staggering helter-skelter to the scene, and tumbling over one
+      another at the Doctor&rsquo;s feet. There came the father of the punished
+      urchin, who had never shown heretofore any care for his street-bred
+      progeny, but who now came pale with rage, armed with a pair of tongs; and
+      with him the mother, flying like a fury, with her cap awry, and clutching
+      a broomstick, as if she were a witch just alighted. Up they rushed from
+      cellar doors, and dropped down from chamber windows; all rushing upon the
+      Doctor, but overturning and thwarting themselves by their very multitude.
+      For, as good Doctor Grim levelled the first that came within reach of his
+      fist, two or three of the others tumbled over him and lay grovelling at
+      his feet; the Doctor meanwhile having retreated into the angle between two
+      houses. Little Ned, with a valor which did him the more credit inasmuch as
+      it was exercised in spite of a good deal of childish trepidation, as his
+      pale face indicated, brandished his fists by the Doctor&rsquo;s side; and little
+      Elsie did what any woman may,&mdash;that is, screeched in Doctor Grim&rsquo;s
+      behalf with full stretch of lungs. Meanwhile the street boys kept up a
+      shower of mud balls, many of which hit the Doctor, while the rest were
+      distributed upon his assailants, heightening their ferocity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Seize the old scoundrel! the villain! the Tory! the dastardly Englishman!
+      Hang him in the web of his own devilish spider,&mdash;&lsquo;t is long enough!
+      Tar and feather him! tar and feather him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was certainly one of those crises that show a man how few real friends
+      he has, and the tendency of mankind to stand aside, at least, and let a
+      poor devil fight his own troubles, if not assist them in their attack.
+      Here you might have seen a brother physician of the grim Doctor&rsquo;s greatly
+      tickled at his plight: or a decorous, powdered, ruffle-shirted dignitary,
+      one of the weighty men of the town, standing at a neighbor&rsquo;s corner to see
+      what would come of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is not a respectable man, I understand, this Grimshawe,&mdash;a quack,
+      intemperate, always in these scuffles: let him get out as he may!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then comes a deacon of one of the churches, and several
+      church-members, who, hearing a noise, set out gravely and decorously to
+      see what was going forward in a Christian community.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! it is that irreligious and profane Grimshawe, who never goes to
+      meeting. We wash our hands of him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And one of the selectmen said,&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely this common brawler ought not to have the care of these nice,
+      sweet children; something must be done about it; and when the man is
+      sober, he must be talked to!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alas! it is a hard case with a man who lives upon his own bottom and
+      responsibility, making himself no allies, sewing himself on to nobody&rsquo;s
+      skirts, insulating himself,&mdash;hard, when his trouble comes; and so
+      poor Doctor Grimshawe was like to find it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had succeeded by dint of good skill, and some previous practice at
+      quarter-staff, in keeping his assailants at bay, though not without some
+      danger on his own part; but their number, their fierceness, and the more
+      skilled assault of some among them must almost immediately have been
+      successful, when the Doctor&rsquo;s part was strengthened by an unexpected ally.
+      This was a person [Endnote: 2] of tall, slight figure, who, without
+      lifting his hands to take part in the conflict, thrust himself before the
+      Doctor, and turned towards the assailants, crying,&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Christian men, what would you do? Peace,&mdash;peace!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His so well intended exhortation took effect, indeed, in a certain way,
+      but not precisely as might have been wished: for a blow, aimed at Doctor
+      Grim, took effect on the head of this man, who seemed to have no sort of
+      skill or alacrity at defending himself, any more than at making an
+      assault; for he never lifted his hands, but took the blow as unresistingly
+      as if it had been kindly meant, and it levelled him senseless on the
+      ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Had the mob really been enraged for any strenuous cause, this incident
+      would have operated merely as a preliminary whet to stimulate them to
+      further bloodshed. But, as they were mostly actuated only by a natural
+      desire for mischief, they were about as well satisfied with what had been
+      done as if the Doctor himself were the victim. And besides, the fathers
+      and respectabilities of the town, who had seen this mishap from afar, now
+      began to put forward, crying out, &ldquo;Keep the peace! keep the peace! A riot!
+      a riot!&rdquo; and other such cries as suited the emergency; and the crowd
+      vanished more speedily than it had congregated, leaving the Doctor and the
+      two children alone beside the fallen victim of a quarrel not his own. Not
+      to dwell too long on this incident, the Doctor, laying hold of the last of
+      his enemies, after the rest had taken to their heels, ordered him sternly
+      to stay and help him bear the man, whom he had helped to murder, to his
+      house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It concerns you, friend; for, if he dies, you hang to a dead certainty!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And this was done accordingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      About an hour thereafter there lay on a couch that had been hastily
+      prepared in the study a person of singularly impressive presence: a thin,
+      mild-looking man, with a peculiar look of delicacy and natural refinement
+      about him, although he scarcely appeared to be technically and as to
+      worldly position what we call a gentleman; plain in dress and simple in
+      manner, not giving the idea of remarkable intellectual gifts, but with a
+      kind of spiritual aspect, fair, clear complexion, gentle eyes, still
+      somewhat clouded and obscured by the syncope into which a blow on the head
+      had thrown him. He looked middle-aged, and yet there was a kind of
+      childlike, simple expression, which, unless you looked at him with the
+      very purpose of seeing the traces of time in his face, would make you
+      suppose him much younger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And how do you find yourself now, my good fellow?&rdquo; asked Doctor
+      Grimshawe, putting forth his hand to grasp that of the stranger, and
+      giving it a good, warm shake. &ldquo;None the worse, I should hope?&rdquo; [Endnote:
+      1.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not much the worse,&rdquo; answered the stranger: &ldquo;not at all, it may be. There
+      is a pleasant dimness and uncertainty in my mode of being. I am taken off
+      my feet, as it were, and float in air, with a faint delight in my
+      sensations. The grossness, the roughness, the too great angularity of the
+      actual, is removed from me. It is a state that I like well. It may be,
+      this is the way that the dead feel when they awake in another state of
+      being, with a dim pleasure, after passing through the brief darkness of
+      death. It is very pleasant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He answered dreamily, and sluggishly, reluctantly, as if there were a
+      sense of repose in him which he disliked to break by putting any of his
+      sensations into words. His voice had a remarkable sweetness and
+      gentleness, though lacking in depth of melody.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here, take this,&rdquo; said the Doctor, who had been preparing some kind of
+      potion in a teaspoon: it may have been a dose of his famous preparation of
+      spider&rsquo;s web, for aught I know, the operation of which was said to be of a
+      soothing influence, causing a delightful silkiness of sensation; but I
+      know not whether it was considered good for concussions of the brain, such
+      as it is to be supposed the present patient had undergone. &ldquo;Take this: it
+      will do you good; and here I drink your very good health in something that
+      will do me good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So saying, the grim Doctor quaffed off a tumbler of brandy and water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How sweet a contrast,&rdquo; murmured the stranger, &ldquo;between that scene of
+      violence and this great peace that has come over me! It is as when one can
+      say, I have fought the good fight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are right,&rdquo; said the Doctor, with what would have been one of his
+      deep laughs, but which he modified in consideration of his patient&rsquo;s
+      tenderness of brain. &ldquo;We both of us fought a good fight; for though you
+      struck no actual stroke, you took them as unflinchingly as ever I saw a
+      man, and so turned the fortune of the battle better than if you smote with
+      a sledge-hammer. Two things puzzle me in the affair. First, whence came my
+      assailants, all in that moment of time, unless Satan let loose out of the
+      infernal regions a synod of fiends, hoping thus to get a triumph over me.
+      And secondly, whence came you, my preserver, unless you are an angel, and
+      dropped down from the sky.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; answered the stranger, with quiet simplicity. &ldquo;I was passing through
+      the street to my little school, when I saw your peril, and felt it my duty
+      to expostulate with the people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the grim Doctor, &ldquo;come whence you will, you did an angel&rsquo;s
+      office for me, and I shall do what an earthly man may to requite it.
+      There, we will talk no more for the present.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He hushed up the children, who were already, of their own accord, walking
+      on tiptoe and whispering, and he himself even went so far as to refrain
+      from the usual incense of his pipe, having observed that the stranger, who
+      seemed to be of a very delicate organization, had seemed sensible of the
+      disagreeable effect on the atmosphere of the room. The restraint lasted,
+      however, only till (in the course of the day) crusty Hannah had fitted up
+      a little bedroom on the opposite side of the entry, to which she and the
+      grim Doctor moved the stranger, who, though tall, they observed was of no
+      great weight and substance,&mdash;the lightest man, the Doctor averred,
+      for his size, that ever he had handled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every possible care was taken of him, and in a day or two he was able to
+      walk into the study again, where he sat gazing at the sordidness and
+      unneatness of the apartment, the strange festoons and drapery of spiders&rsquo; 
+      webs, the gigantic spider himself, and at the grim Doctor, so shaggy,
+      grizzly, and uncouth, in the midst of these surroundings, with a
+      perceptible sense of something very strange in it all. His mild, gentle
+      regard dwelt too on the two beautiful children, evidently with a sense of
+      quiet wonder how they should be here, and altogether a sense of their
+      unfitness; they, meanwhile, stood a little apart, looking at him, somewhat
+      disturbed and awed, as children usually are, by a sense that the stranger
+      was not perfectly well, that he had been injured, and so set apart from
+      the rest of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you come to me, little one?&rdquo; said he, holding out a delicate hand to
+      Elsie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Elsie came to his side without any hesitation, though without any of the
+      rush that accompanied her advent to those whom she affected. &ldquo;And you, my
+      little man,&rdquo; added the stranger, quietly, and looking to Ned, who likewise
+      willingly approached, and, shaking him by the offered hand, let it go
+      again, but continued standing by his side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know, my little friends,&rdquo; said the stranger, &ldquo;that it is my
+      business in life to instruct such little people as you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do they obey you well, sir?&rdquo; asked Ned, perhaps conscious of a want of
+      force in the person whom he addressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger smiled faintly. &ldquo;Not too well,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;That has been my
+      difficulty; for I have moral and religious objections, and also a great
+      horror, to the use of the rod, and I have not been gifted with a harsh
+      voice and a stern brow; so that, after a while, my little people sometimes
+      get the better of me. The present generation of men is too gross for
+      gentle treatment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are quite right,&rdquo; quoth Doctor Grimshawe, who had been observing this
+      little scene, and trying to make out, from the mutual deportment of the
+      stranger and the two children, what sort of man this fair, quiet stranger
+      was, with his gentleness and weakness,&mdash;characteristics that were not
+      attractive to himself, yet in which he acknowledged, as he saw them here,
+      a certain charm; nor did he know, scarcely, whether to despise the one in
+      whom he saw them, or to yield to a strange sense of reverence. So he
+      watched the children, with an indistinct idea of being guided by them.
+      &ldquo;You are quite right: the world now&mdash;and always before, as far as I
+      ever heard&mdash;requires a great deal of brute force, a great deal of
+      animal food and brandy in the man that is to make an impression on it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The convalescence of the stranger&mdash;he gave his name as Colcord&mdash;proceeded
+      favorably; for the Doctor remarked that, delicate as his system was, it
+      had a certain purity,&mdash;a simple healthfulness that did not run into
+      disease as stronger constitutions might. It did not apparently require
+      much to crush down such a being as this,&mdash;not much unkindly breath to
+      blow out the taper of his life,&mdash;and yet, if not absolutely killed,
+      there was a certain aptness to keep alive in him not readily to be
+      overcome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No sooner was he in a condition so to do, than he went forth to look after
+      the little school that he had spoken of, but soon came back, announcing in
+      a very quiet and undisturbed way that, during his withdrawal from duty,
+      the scholars had been distributed to other instructors, and consequently
+      he was without place or occupation [Endnotes: 2, 3, 4.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A hard case,&rdquo; said the Doctor, flinging a gruff curse at those who had so
+      readily deserted the poor schoolmaster.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not so hard,&rdquo; replied Colcord. &ldquo;These little fellows are an unruly set,
+      born of parents who have led rough lives,&mdash;here in battle time, too,
+      with the spirit of battle in them,&mdash;therefore rude and contentious
+      beyond my power to cope with them. I have been taught, long ago,&rdquo; he
+      added, with a peaceful smile, &ldquo;that my business in life does not lie with
+      grown-up and consolidated men and women; and so, not to be useless in my
+      day, and to gain the little that my sustenance requires, I have thought to
+      deal with children. But even for this I lack force.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dare say,&rdquo; said the Doctor, with a modified laugh. &ldquo;Little devils they
+      are, harder to deal with than men. Well, I am glad of your failure for one
+      reason, and of your being thrown out of business; because we shall have
+      the benefit of you the longer. Here is this boy to be instructed. I have
+      made some attempts myself; but having no art of instructing, no skill, no
+      temper I suppose, I make but an indifferent hand at it: and besides I have
+      other business that occupies my thoughts. Take him in hand, if you like,
+      and the girl for company. No matter whether you teach her anything, unless
+      you happen to be acquainted with needlework.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will talk with the children,&rdquo; said Colcord, &ldquo;and see if I am likely to
+      do good with them. The lad, I see, has a singular spirit of aspiration and
+      pride,&mdash;no ungentle pride,&mdash;but still hard to cope with. I will
+      see. The little girl is a most comfortable child.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have read the boy as if you had his heart in your hand,&rdquo; said the
+      Doctor, rather surprised. &ldquo;I could not have done it better myself, though
+      I have known him all but from the egg.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Accordingly, the stranger, who had been thrust so providentially into this
+      odd and insulated little community, abode with them, without more words
+      being spoken on the subject: for it seemed to all concerned a natural
+      arrangement, although, on both parts, they were mutually sensible of
+      something strange in the companionship thus brought about. To say the
+      truth, it was not easy to imagine two persons apparently less adapted to
+      each other&rsquo;s society than the rough, uncouth, animal Doctor, whose faith
+      was in his own right arm, so full of the old Adam as he was, so sturdily a
+      hater, so hotly impulsive, so deep, subtle, and crooked, so obstructed by
+      his animal nature, so given to his pipe and black bottle, so wrathful and
+      pugnacious and wicked,&mdash;and this mild spiritual creature, so milky,
+      with so unforceful a grasp; and it was singular to see how they stood
+      apart and eyed each other, each tacitly acknowledging a certain merit and
+      kind of power, though not well able to appreciate its value. The grim
+      Doctor&rsquo;s kindness, however, and gratitude, had been so thoroughly
+      awakened, that he did not feel the disgust that he probably otherwise
+      might at what seemed the mawkishness of Colcord&rsquo;s character; his want,
+      morally speaking, of bone and muscle; his fastidiousness of character, the
+      essence of which it seemed to be to bear no stain upon it; otherwise it
+      must die.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On Colcord&rsquo;s part there was a good deal of evidence to be detected, by a
+      nice observer, that he found it difficult to put up with the Doctor&rsquo;s
+      coarse peculiarities, whether physical or moral. His animal indulgences of
+      appetite struck him with wonder and horror; his coarse expressions, his
+      free indulgence of wrath, his sordid and unclean habits; the dust, the
+      cobwebs, the monster that dangled from the ceiling; his pipe, diffusing
+      its fragrance through the house, and showing, by the plainest and simplest
+      proof, how we all breathe one another&rsquo;s breath, nice and proud as we may
+      be, kings and daintiest ladies breathing the air that has already served
+      to inflate a beggar&rsquo;s lungs. He shrank, too, from the rude manhood of the
+      Doctor&rsquo;s character, with its human warmth,&mdash;an element which he
+      seemed not to possess in his own character. He was capable only of gentle
+      and mild regard,&mdash;that was his warmest affection; and the warmest,
+      too, that he was capable of exciting in others. So that he was doomed as
+      much apparently as the Doctor himself to be a lonely creature, without any
+      very deep companionship in the world, though not incapable, when he, by
+      some rare chance, met a soul distantly akin, of holding a certain high
+      spiritual communion. With the children, however, he succeeded in
+      establishing some good and available relations; his simple and passionless
+      character coincided with their simplicity, and their as yet unawakened
+      passions: they appeared to understand him better than the Doctor ever
+      succeeded in doing. He touched springs and elements in the nature of both
+      that had never been touched till now, and that sometimes made a sweet,
+      high music. But this was rarely; and as far as the general duties of an
+      instructor went, they did not seem to be very successfully performed.
+      Something was cultivated; the spiritual germ grew, it might be; but the
+      children, and especially Ned, were intuitively conscious of a certain want
+      of substance in the instructor,&mdash;a something of earthly bulk; a too
+      etherealness. But his connection with our story does not lie in any
+      excellence, or lack of excellence, that he showed as an instructor, and we
+      merely mention these things as illustrating more or less his
+      characteristics.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The grim Doctor&rsquo;s curiosity was somewhat piqued by what he could see of
+      the schoolmaster&rsquo;s character, and he was desirous of finding out what sort
+      of a life such a man could have led in a world which he himself had found
+      so rough a one; through what difficulties he had reached middle age
+      without absolutely vanishing away in his contact with more positive
+      substances than himself; how the world had given him a subsistence, if
+      indeed he recognized anything more dense than fragrance, like a certain
+      people whom Pliny mentioned in Africa,&mdash;a point, in fact, which the
+      grim Doctor denied, his performance at table being inappreciable, and
+      confined, at least almost entirely, to a dish of boiled rice, which crusty
+      Hannah set before him, preparing it, it might be, with a sympathy of her
+      East Indian part towards him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, Doctor Grimshawe easily got at what seemed to be all of the facts of
+      Colcord&rsquo;s life; how that he was a New-Englander, the descendant of an
+      ancient race of settlers, the last of them; for, once pretty numerous in
+      their quarter of the country, they seemed to have been dying out,&mdash;exhaling
+      from the earth, and passing to some other region.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No wonder,&rdquo; said the Doctor bluffly. &ldquo;You have been letting slip the
+      vital principle, if you are a fair specimen of the race. You do not clothe
+      yourself in substance. Your souls are not coated sufficiently. Beef and
+      brandy would have saved you. You have exhaled for lack of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The schoolmaster shook his head, and probably thought his earthly
+      salvation and sustenance not worth buying at such a cost. The remainder of
+      his history was not tangible enough to afford a narrative. There seemed,
+      from what he said, to have always been a certain kind of refinement in his
+      race, a nicety of conscience, a nicety of habit, which either was in
+      itself a want of force, or was necessarily connected with it, and which,
+      the Doctor silently thought, had culminated in the person before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was always in us,&rdquo; continued Colcord, with a certain pride which
+      people generally feel in their ancestral characteristics, be they good or
+      evil. &ldquo;We had a tradition among us of our first emigrant, and the causes
+      that brought him to the New World; and it was said that he had suffered so
+      much, before quitting his native shores, so painful had been his track,
+      that always afterwards on the forest leaves of this land his foot left a
+      print of blood wherever he trod.&rdquo; [Endnote: 5.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A print of blood!&rdquo; said the grim Doctor, breaking his pipe-stem by some
+      sudden spasm in his gripe of it. &ldquo;Pooh! the devil take the pipe! A very
+      strange story that! Pray how was it?&rdquo; [Endnote: 1.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, it is but a very dim legend,&rdquo; answered the schoolmaster: &ldquo;although
+      there are old yellow papers and parchments, I remember, in my father&rsquo;s
+      possession, that had some reference to this man, too, though there was
+      nothing in them about the bloody footprints. But our family legend is,
+      that this man was of a good race, in the time of Charles the First,
+      originally Papists, but one of them&mdash;the second you, our legend says&mdash;was
+      of a milder, sweeter cast than the rest, who were fierce and bloody men,
+      of a hard, strong nature; but he partook most of his mother&rsquo;s character.
+      This son had been one of the earliest Quakers, converted by George Fox;
+      and moreover there had been love between him and a young lady of great
+      beauty and an heiress, whom likewise the eldest son of the house had
+      designed to make his wife. And these brothers, cruel men, caught their
+      innocent brother and kept him in confinement long in his own native home&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How?&rdquo; asked the Doctor. &ldquo;Why did not he appeal to the laws?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our legend says,&rdquo; replied the schoolmaster, &ldquo;only that he was kept in a
+      chamber that was forgotten.&rdquo; [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very strange that!&rdquo; quoth the Doctor. &ldquo;He was sold by his brethren.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The schoolmaster went on to tell, with much shuddering, how a Jesuit
+      priest had been mixed up with this wretched business, and there had been a
+      scheme at once religious and political to wrest the estate and the lovely
+      lady from the fortunate heir; and how this grim Italian priest had
+      instigated them to use a certain kind of torture with the poor heir, and
+      how he had suffered from this; but one night, when they left him
+      senseless, he contrived to make his escape from that cruel home, bleeding
+      as he went; and how, by some action of his imagination,&mdash;his sense of
+      the cruelty and hideousness of such treatment at his brethren&rsquo;s hands, and
+      in the holy name of his religion,&mdash;his foot, which had been crushed
+      by their cruelty, bled as he went, and that blood had never been stanched.
+      And thus he had come to America, and after many wanderings, and much track
+      of blood along rough ways, to New England. [Endnote: 3.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what became of his beloved?&rdquo; asked the grim Doctor, who was puffing
+      away at a fresh pipe with a very queer aspect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She died in England,&rdquo; replied the schoolmaster. &ldquo;And before her death, by
+      some means or other, they say that she found means to send him a child,
+      the offspring of their marriage, and from that child our race descended.
+      And they say, too, that she sent him a key to a coffin, in which was
+      locked up a great treasure. But we have not the key. But he never went
+      back to his own country; and being heart-broken, and sick and weary of the
+      world and its pomps and vanities, he died here, after suffering much
+      persecution likewise from the Puritans. For his peaceful religion was
+      accepted nowhere.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of all legends,&mdash;all foolish legends,&rdquo; quoth the Doctor, wrathfully,
+      with a face of a dark blood-red color, so much was his anger and contempt
+      excited, &ldquo;and of all absurd heroes of a legend, I never heard the like of
+      this! Have you the key?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; nor have I ever heard of it,&rdquo; answered the schoolmaster.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you have some papers?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They existed once: perhaps are still recoverable by search,&rdquo; said the
+      schoolmaster. &ldquo;My father knew of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A foolish legend,&rdquo; reiterated the Doctor. &ldquo;It is strange how human folly
+      strings itself on to human folly, as a story originally false and foolish
+      grows older.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up and walked about the room, with hasty and irregular strides and
+      a prodigious swinging of his ragged dressing-gown, which swept away as
+      many cobwebs as it would take a week to reproduce. After a few turns, as
+      if to change the subject, the Doctor asked the schoolmaster if he had any
+      taste for pictures, and drew his attention to the portrait which has been
+      already mentioned,&mdash;the figure in antique sordid garb, with a halter
+      round his neck, and the expression in his face which the Doctor and the
+      two children had interpreted so differently. Colcord, who probably knew
+      nothing about pictures, looked at it at first merely from the gentle and
+      cool complaisance of his character; but becoming absorbed in the
+      contemplation, stood long without speaking; until the Doctor, looking in
+      his face, perceived his eyes were streaming with tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you crying about?&rdquo; said he, gruffly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; said the schoolmaster quietly. &ldquo;But there is something in
+      this picture that affects me inexpressibly; so that, not being a man
+      passionate by nature, I have hardly ever been so moved as now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very foolish,&rdquo; muttered the Doctor, resuming his strides about the room.
+      &ldquo;I am ashamed of a grown man that can cry at a picture, and can&rsquo;t tell the
+      reason why.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a few more turns he resumed his easy-chair and his tumbler, and,
+      looking upward, beckoned to his pet spider, which came dangling downward,
+      great parti-colored monster that he was, and swung about his master&rsquo;s head
+      in hideous conference as it seemed; a sight that so distressed the
+      schoolmaster, or shocked his delicate taste, that he went out, and called
+      the two children to take a walk with him, with the purpose of breathing
+      air that was neither infected with spiders nor graves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After his departure, Doctor Grimshawe seemed even more disturbed than
+      during his presence: again he strode about the study; then sat down with
+      his hands on his knees, looking straight into the fire, as if it imaged
+      the seething element of his inner man, where burned hot projects, smoke,
+      heat, blackness, ashes, a smouldering of old thoughts, a blazing up of
+      new; casting in the gold of his mind, as Aaron did that of the Israelites,
+      and waiting to see what sort of a thing would come out of the furnace. The
+      children coming in from their play, he spoke harshly to them, and eyed
+      little Ned with a sort of savageness, as if he meant to eat him up, or do
+      some other dreadful deed: and when little Elsie came with her usual
+      frankness to his knee, he repelled her in such a way that she shook her
+      little hand at him, saying, &ldquo;Naughty Doctor Grim, what has come to you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Through all that day, by some subtle means or other, the whole household
+      knew that something was amiss; and nobody in it was comfortable. It was
+      like a spell of weather; like the east wind; like an epidemic in the air,
+      that would not let anything be comfortable or contented,&mdash;this
+      pervading temper of the Doctor. Crusty Hannah knew it in the kitchen: even
+      those who passed the house must have known it somehow or other, and have
+      felt a chill, an irritation, an influence on the nerves, as they passed.
+      The spiders knew it, and acted as they were wont to do in stormy weather.
+      The schoolmaster, when he returned from his walk, seemed likewise to know
+      it, and made himself secure and secret, keeping in his own room, except at
+      dinner, when he ate his rice in silence, without looking towards the
+      Doctor, and appeared before him no more till evening, when the grim Doctor
+      summoned him into the study, after sending the two children to bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir,&rdquo; began the Doctor, &ldquo;you have spoken of some old documents in your
+      possession relating to the English descent of your ancestors. I have a
+      curiosity to see these documents. Where are they?&rdquo; [Endnote: 4.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have them about my person,&rdquo; said the schoolmaster; and he produced from
+      his pocket a bundle of old yellow papers done up in a parchment cover,
+      tied with a piece of white cord, and presented them to Doctor Grimshawe,
+      who looked over them with interest. They seemed to consist of letters,
+      genealogical lists, certified copies of entries in registers, things which
+      must have been made out by somebody who knew more of business than this
+      ethereal person in whose possession they now were. The Doctor looked at
+      them with considerable attention, and at last did them hastily up in the
+      bundle again, and returned them to the owner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you any idea what is now the condition of the family to whom these
+      papers refer?&rdquo; asked he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None whatever,&mdash;none for almost a hundred years,&rdquo; said the
+      schoolmaster. &ldquo;About that time ago, I have heard a vague story that one of
+      my ancestors went to the old country and saw the place. But, you see, the
+      change of name has effectually covered us from view; and I feel that our
+      true name is that which my ancestor assumed when he was driven forth from
+      the home of his fathers, and that I have nothing to do with any other. I
+      have no views on the estate,&mdash;none whatever. I am not so foolish and
+      dreamy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very right,&rdquo; said the Doctor. &ldquo;Nothing is more foolish than to follow up
+      such a pursuit as this, against all the vested interests of two hundred
+      years, which of themselves have built up an impenetrably strong allegation
+      against you. They harden into stone, in England, these years, and become
+      indestructible, instead of melting away as they do in this happy country.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not a matter of interest with me,&rdquo; replied the schoolmaster.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very right,&mdash;very right!&rdquo; repeated the grim Doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But something was evidently amiss with him this evening. It was impossible
+      to feel easy and comfortable in contact with him: if you looked in his
+      face, there was the red, lurid glare of his eyes; meeting you fiercely and
+      craftily as ever: sometimes he bit his lip and frowned in an awful manner.
+      Once, he burst out into an awful fit of swearing, for no good reason, or
+      any reason whatever that he explained, or that anybody could tell. Again,
+      for no more suitable reason, he uplifted his stalwart arm, and smote a
+      heavy blow with his fist upon the oak table, making the tumbler and black
+      bottle leap up, and damaging, one would think, his own knuckles. Then he
+      rose up, and resumed his strides about the room. He paused before the
+      portrait before mentioned; then resumed his heavy, quick, irregular tread,
+      swearing under his breath; and you would imagine, from what you heard,
+      that all his thoughts and the movement of his mind were a blasphemy. Then
+      again&mdash;but this was only once&mdash;he heaved a deep, ponderous sigh,
+      that seemed to come up in spite of him, out of his depths, an exhalation
+      of deep suffering, as if some convulsion had given it a passage to upper
+      air, instead of its being hidden, as it generally was, by accumulated
+      rubbish of later time heaped above it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This latter sound appealed to something within the simple schoolmaster,
+      who had been witnessing the demeanor of the Doctor, like a being looking
+      from another sphere into the trouble of the mortal one; a being incapable
+      of passion, observing the mute, hard struggle of one in its grasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Friend,&rdquo; said he at length, &ldquo;thou hast something on thy mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye,&rdquo; said the grim Doctor, coming to a stand before his chair. &ldquo;You see
+      that? Can you see as well what it is?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some stir and writhe of something in the past that troubles you, as if
+      you had kept a snake for many years in your bosom, and stupefied it with
+      brandy, and now it awakes again, and troubles you with bites and stings.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What sort of a man do you think me?&rdquo; asked the Doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot tell,&rdquo; said the schoolmaster. &ldquo;The sympathies of my nature are
+      not those that should give me knowledge of such men.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I, think you,&rdquo; continued the grim Doctor, &ldquo;a man capable of great
+      crime?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A great one, if any,&rdquo; said Colcord; &ldquo;a great good, likewise, it might
+      be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What would I be likely to do,&rdquo; asked Doctor Grim, &ldquo;supposing I had a
+      darling purpose, to the accomplishment of which I had given my soul,&mdash;yes,
+      my soul,&mdash;my success in life, my days and nights of thought, my years
+      of time, dwelling upon it, pledging myself to it, until at last I had
+      grown to love the burden of it, and not to regret my own degradation? I, a
+      man of strongest will. What would I do, if this were to be resisted?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not conceive of the force of will shaping out my ways,&rdquo; said the
+      schoolmaster. &ldquo;I walk gently along and take the path that opens before
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha! ha! ha!&rdquo; shouted the grim Doctor, with one of his portentous laughs.
+      &ldquo;So do we all, in spite of ourselves; and sometimes the path comes to a
+      sudden ending!&rdquo; And he resumed his drinking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The schoolmaster looked at him with wonder, and a kind of shuddering, at
+      something so unlike himself; but probably he very imperfectly estimated
+      the forces that were at work within this strange being, and how dangerous
+      they made him. He imputed it, a great deal, to the brandy, which he had
+      kept drinking in such inordinate quantities; whereas it is probable that
+      this had a soothing, emollient effect, as far as it went, on the Doctor&rsquo;s
+      emotions; a sort of like to like, that he instinctively felt to be a
+      remedy, But in truth it was difficult to see these two human creatures
+      together, without feeling their incompatibility; without having a sense
+      that one must be hostile to the other. The schoolmaster, through his fine
+      instincts, doubtless had a sense of this, and sat gazing at the lurid,
+      wrathful figure of the Doctor, in a sort of trance and fascination: not
+      able to stir; bewildered by the sight of the great spider and other
+      surroundings; and this strange, uncouth fiend, who had always been
+      abhorrent to him,&mdash;he had a kind of curiosity in it, waited to see
+      what would come of it, but felt it to be an unnatural state to him. And
+      again the grim Doctor came and stood before him, prepared to make another
+      of those strange utterances with which he had already so perplexed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night&mdash;that midnight&mdash;it was rumored through the town that
+      one of the inhabitants, going home late along the street that led by the
+      graveyard, saw the grim Doctor standing by the open window of the study
+      behind the elm tree, in his old dressing-gown, chill as was the night, and
+      flinging his arms abroad wildly into the darkness, and muttering like the
+      growling of a tempest, with occasional vociferations that grew even shrill
+      with passion. The listener, though affrighted, could not resist an impulse
+      to pause, and attempt overhearing something that might let him into the
+      secret counsels of this strange wild man, whom the town held in such awe
+      and antipathy; to learn, perhaps, what was the great spider, and whether
+      he were summoning the dead out of their graves. However, he could make
+      nothing out of what he overheard, except it were fragmentary curses, of a
+      dreadful character, which the Doctor brought up with might and main out of
+      the depths of his soul, and flung them forth, burning hot, aimed at what,
+      and why, and to what practical end, it was impossible to say; but as
+      necessarily as a volcano, in a state of eruption, sends forth boiling
+      lava, sparkling and scintillating stones, and a sulphurous atmosphere,
+      indicative of its inward state. [Endnote: 5.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dreading lest some one of these ponderous anathemas should alight, reason
+      or none, on his own head, the man crept away, and whispered the thing to
+      his cronies, from whom it was communicated to the townspeople at large,
+      and so became one of many stories circulating with reference to our grim
+      hero, which, if not true to the fact, had undoubtedly a degree of
+      appositeness to his character, of which they were the legitimate flowers
+      and symbols. If the anathemas took no other effect, they seemed to have
+      produced a very remarkable one on the unfortunate elm tree, through the
+      naked branches of which the Doctor discharged this fiendish shot. For, the
+      next spring, when April came, no tender leaves budded forth, no life
+      awakened there; and never again, on that old elm, widely as its roots were
+      imbedded among the dead of many years, was there rustling bough in the
+      summer time, or the elm&rsquo;s early golden boughs in September; and after
+      waiting till another spring to give it a fair chance of reviving, it was
+      cut down and made into coffins, and burnt on the sexton&rsquo;s hearth. The
+      general opinion was that the grim Doctor&rsquo;s awful profanity had blasted
+      that tree, fostered, as it had been, on grave-mould of Puritans. In
+      Lancashire they tell of a similar anathema. It had a very frightful
+      effect, it must be owned, this idea of a man cherishing emotions in his
+      breast of so horrible a nature that he could neither tell them to any
+      human being, nor keep them in their plenitude and intensity within the
+      breast where they had their germ, and so was forced to fling them forth
+      upon the night, to pollute and put fear into the atmosphere, and that
+      people should breathe-in somewhat of horror from an unknown source, and be
+      affected with nightmare, and dreams in which they were startled at their
+      own wickedness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At the breakfast-table the next morning, however, appeared Doctor
+      Grimshawe, wearing very much the same aspect of an uncombed, unshorn,
+      unbrushed, odd sort of a pagan as at other times, and making no difference
+      in his breakfast, except that he poured a pretty large dose of brandy into
+      his cup of tea; a thing, however, by no means unexampled or very unusual
+      in his history. There were also the two children, fresher than the morning
+      itself, rosy creatures, with newly scrubbed cheeks, made over again for
+      the new day, though the old one had left no dust upon them;[Endnote: 1]
+      laughing with one another, flinging their little jokes about the table,
+      and expecting that the Doctor might, as was often his wont, set some
+      ponderous old English joke trundling round among the breakfast cups;
+      eating the corn-cakes which crusty Hannah, with the aboriginal part of
+      her, had a knack of making in a peculiar and exquisite fashion. But there
+      was an empty chair at table; one cup, one little jug of milk, and another
+      of pure water, with no guest to partake of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is the schoolmaster?&rdquo; said Ned, pausing as he was going to take his
+      seat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Doctor Grim?&rdquo; said little Elsie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has overslept himself for once,&rdquo; quoth Doctor Grim gruffly; &ldquo;a strange
+      thing, too, for a man whose victuals and drink are so light as the
+      schoolmaster&rsquo;s. The fiend take me if I thought he had mortal mould enough
+      in him ever to go to sleep at all; though he is but a kind of dream-stuff
+      in his widest-awake state. Hannah, you bronze jade, call the schoolmaster
+      to come to breakfast.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hannah departed on her errand, and was heard knocking at the door of the
+      schoolmaster&rsquo;s chamber several times, till the Doctor shouted to her
+      wrathfully to cease her clatter and open the door at once, which she
+      appeared to do, and speedily came back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He no there, massa. Schoolmaster melted away!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Vanished like a bubble!&rdquo; quoth the Doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The great spider caught him like a fly,&rdquo; quoth crusty Hannah, chuckling
+      with a sense of mischief that seemed very pleasant to her strange
+      combination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has taken a morning walk,&rdquo; said little Ned; &ldquo;don&rsquo;t you think so,
+      Doctor Grim?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the grim Doctor. &ldquo;Go on with your breakfast, little monkey;
+      the walk may be a long one, or he is so slight a weight that the wind may
+      blow him overboard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A very long walk it proved; or it might be that some wind, whether evil or
+      good, had blown him, as the Doctor suggested, into parts unknown; for,
+      from that time forth, the Yankee schoolmaster returned no more. It was a
+      singular disappearance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bed did not appear to have been slept in; there was a bundle, in a
+      clean handkerchief, containing two shirts, two pocket handkerchiefs, two
+      pairs of cotton socks, a Testament, and that was all. Had he intended to
+      go away, why did he not take this little luggage in his hand, being all he
+      had, and of a kind not easily dispensed with? The Doctor made small
+      question about it, however; he had seemed surprised, at first, yet gave
+      certainly no energetic token of it; and when Ned, who began to have
+      notions of things, proposed to advertise him in the newspapers, or send
+      the town crier round, the Doctor ridiculed the idea unmercifully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lost, a lank Yankee schoolmaster,&rdquo; quoth he, uplifting his voice after
+      the manner of the town crier; &ldquo;supposed to have been blown out of Doctor
+      Grim&rsquo;s window, or perhaps have ridden off astride of a humble-bee.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not pretty to laugh in that way, Doctor Grim,&rdquo; said little Elsie,
+      looking into his face, with a grave shake of her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And why not, you saucy little witch?&rdquo; said the Doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not the way to laugh, Doctor Grim,&rdquo; persisted the child, but either
+      could not or would not assign any reason for her disapprobation, although
+      what she said appeared to produce a noticeable effect on Doctor Grimshawe,
+      who lapsed into a rough, harsh manner, that seemed to satisfy Elsie
+      better. Crusty Hannah, meanwhile, seemed to dance about the house with a
+      certain singular alacrity, a wonderful friskiness, indeed, as if the
+      diabolical result of the mixture in her nature was particularly pleased
+      with something; so she went, with queer gesticulations, crossings,
+      contortions, friskings, evidently in a very mirthful state; until, being
+      asked by her master what was the matter, she replied, &ldquo;Massa, me know what
+      became of the schoolmaster. Great spider catch in his web and eat him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether that was the mode of his disappearance, or some other, certainly
+      the schoolmaster was gone; and the children were left in great
+      bewilderment at the sudden vacancy in his place. They had not contracted a
+      very yearning affection for him, and yet his impression had been
+      individual and real, and they felt that something was gone out of their
+      lives, now that he was no longer there. Something strange in their
+      circumstances made itself felt by them; they were more sensible of the
+      grim Doctor&rsquo;s uncouthness, his strange, reprehensible habits, his dark,
+      mysterious life,&mdash;in looking at these things, and the spiders, and
+      the graveyard, and their insulation from the world, through the crystal
+      medium of this stranger&rsquo;s character. In remembering him in connection with
+      these things, a certain seemly beauty in him showed strikingly the
+      unfitness, the sombre and tarnished color, the outréness, of the rest of
+      their lot. Little Elsie perhaps felt the loss of him more than her
+      playmate, although both had been interested by him. But now things
+      returned pretty much to their old fashion; although, as is inevitably the
+      case, whenever persons or things have been taken suddenly or unaccountably
+      out of our sphere, without telling us whither and why they have
+      disappeared, the children could not, for a long while, bring themselves to
+      feel that he had really gone. Perhaps, in imitation of the custom in that
+      old English house, of which the Doctor had told them, little Elsie
+      insisted that his place should still be kept at the table; and so,
+      whenever crusty Hannah neglected to do so, she herself would fetch a
+      plate, and a little pitcher of water, and set it beside a vacant chair;
+      and sometimes, so like a shadow had he been, this pale, slender creature,
+      it almost might have been thought that he was sitting with them. But
+      crusty Hannah shook her head, and grinned. &ldquo;The spider know where he is.
+      We never see him more!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His abode in the house had been of only two or three weeks; and in the
+      natural course of things, had he come and gone in an ordinary way, his
+      recollection would have grown dim and faded out in two or three weeks
+      more; but the speculations, the expectations, the watchings for his
+      reappearance, served to cut and grave the recollection of him into the
+      children&rsquo;s hearts, so that it remained a life-long thing with them,&mdash;a
+      sense that he was something that had been lost out of their life too soon,
+      and that was bound, sooner or later, to reappear, and finish what business
+      he had with them. Sometimes they prattled around the Doctor&rsquo;s chair about
+      him, and they could perceive sometimes that he appeared to be listening,
+      and would chime in with some remark; but he never expressed either wonder
+      or regret; only telling Ned, once, that he had no reason to be sorry for
+      his disappearance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, Doctor Grim?&rdquo; asked the boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Doctor mused, and smoked his pipe, as if he himself were thinking why,
+      and at last he answered, &ldquo;He was a dangerous fellow, my old boy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; said Ned again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He would have taken the beef out of you,&rdquo; said the Doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I know not how long it was before any other visitor (except such as
+      brought their shattered constitutions there in hopes that the Doctor would
+      make the worn-out machinery as good as new) came to the lonely little
+      household on the corner of the graveyard. The intercourse between
+      themselves and the rest of the town remained as scanty as ever. Still, the
+      grim, shaggy Doctor was seen setting doggedly forth, in all seasons and
+      all weathers, at a certain hour of the day, with the two children, going
+      for long walks on the sea-shore, or into the country, miles away, and
+      coming back, hours afterwards, with plants and herbs that had perhaps
+      virtue in them, or flowers that had certainly beauty; even, in their
+      season, the fragrant magnolias, leaving a trail of fragrance after them,
+      that grow only in spots, the seeds having been apparently dropped by some
+      happy accident when those proper to the climate were distributed. Shells
+      there were, also, in the baskets that they carried, minerals, rare things,
+      that a magic touch seemed to have created out of the rude and common
+      things that others find in a homely and ordinary region. The boy was
+      growing tall, and had got out of the merely infantile age; agile he was,
+      bright, but still with a remarkable thoughtfulness, or gravity, or I know
+      not what to call it; but it was a shadow, no doubt, falling upon him from
+      something sombre in his warp of life, which the impressibility of his age
+      and nature so far acknowledged as to be a little pale and grave, without
+      positive unhappiness; and when a playful moment came, as they often did to
+      these two healthy children, it seemed all a mistake that you had ever
+      thought either of them too grave for their age. But little Elsie was still
+      the merrier. They were still children, although they quarrelled seldomer
+      than of yore, and kissed seldomer, and had ceased altogether to complain
+      of one another to the Doctor; perhaps the time when Nature saw these
+      bickerings to be necessary to the growth of some of their faculties was
+      nearly gone. When they did have a quarrel, the boy stood upon his dignity,
+      and visited Elsie with a whole day, sometimes, of silent and stately
+      displeasure, which she was accustomed to bear, sometimes with an
+      assumption of cold indifference, sometimes with liveliness, mirth in
+      double quantity, laughter almost as good as real,&mdash;little arts which
+      showed themselves in her as naturally as the gift of tears and smiles. In
+      fact, having no advantage of female intercourse, she could not well have
+      learnt them unless from crusty Hannah, who was such an anomaly of a
+      creature, with all her mixtures of race, that she struck you as having
+      lost all sex as one result of it. Yet this little girl was truly feminine,
+      and had all the manners and pre-eminently uncriticisable tenets proper to
+      women at her early age.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had made respectable advancement in study; that is, she had taught
+      herself to write, with even greater mechanical facility than Ned; and
+      other knowledge had fallen upon her, as it were, by a reflected light from
+      him; or, to use another simile, had been spattered upon her by the full
+      stream which the Doctor poured into the vessel of the boy&rsquo;s intellect. So
+      that she had even some knowledge of the rudiments of Latin, and geometry,
+      and algebra; inaccurate enough, but yet with such a briskness that she was
+      sometimes able to assist Ned in studies in which he was far more deeply
+      grounded than herself. All this, however, was more by sympathy than by any
+      natural taste for such things; being kindly, and sympathetic, and
+      impressible, she took the color of what was nearest to her, and especially
+      when it came from a beloved object, so that it was difficult to discover
+      that it was not really one of her native tastes. The only thing, perhaps,
+      altogether suited to her idiosyncrasy (because it was truly feminine,
+      calculated for dainty fingers, and a nice little subtlety) was that kind
+      of embroidery, twisting, needle-work, on textile fabric, which, as we have
+      before said, she learnt from crusty Hannah, and which was emblematic
+      perhaps of that creature&rsquo;s strange mixture of races.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Elsie seemed not only to have caught this art in its original spirit, but
+      to have improved upon it, creating strange, fanciful, and graceful
+      devices, which grew beneath her finger as naturally as the variegated hues
+      grow in a flower as it opens; so that the homeliest material assumed a
+      grace and strangeness as she wove it, whether it were grass, twigs,
+      shells, or what not. Never was anything seen, that so combined a wild,
+      barbarian freedom with cultivated grace; and the grim Doctor himself,
+      little open to the impressions of the beautiful, used to hold some of her
+      productions in his hand, gazing at them with deep intentness, and at last,
+      perhaps, breaking out into one of his deep roars of laughter; for it
+      seemed to suggest thoughts to him that the children could not penetrate.
+      This one feature of strangeness and wild faculty in the otherwise sweet
+      and natural and homely character of Elsie had a singular effect; it was
+      like a wreath of wild-flowers in her hair, like something that set her a
+      little way apart from the rest of the world, and had an even more striking
+      effect than if she were altogether strange.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus were the little family going on; the Doctor, I regret to say, growing
+      more morose, self-involved, and unattainable since the disappearance of
+      the schoolmaster than before; more given up to his one plaything, the
+      great spider; less frequently even than before coming out of the grim
+      seclusion of his moodiness, to play with the children, though they would
+      often be sensible of his fierce eyes fixed upon them, and start and feel
+      incommoded by the intensity of his regard;&mdash;thus things were going
+      on, when one day there was really again a visitor, and not a dilapidated
+      patient, to the grim Doctor&rsquo;s study. Crusty Hannah brought up his name as
+      Mr. Hammond, and the Doctor&mdash;filling his everlasting pipe, meanwhile,
+      and ordering Hannah to give him a coal (perhaps this was the circumstance
+      that made people say he had imps to bring him coals from Tophet)&mdash;ordered
+      him to be shown up. [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A fresh-colored, rather young man [Endnote: 3] entered the study, a person
+      of rather cold and ungraceful manners, yet genial-looking enough; at
+      least, not repulsive. He was dressed in rather a rough, serviceable
+      travelling-dress, and except for a nicely brushed hat, and unmistakably
+      white linen, was rather careless in attire. You would have thought twice,
+      perhaps, before deciding him to be a gentleman, but finally would have
+      decided that he was; one great token being, that the singular aspect of
+      the room into which he was ushered, the spider festoonery, and other
+      strange accompaniments, the grim aspect of the Doctor himself, and the
+      beauty and intelligence of his two companions, and even that horrific
+      weaver, the great dangling spider,&mdash;neither one nor all of these
+      called any expression of surprise to the stranger&rsquo;s face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your name is Hammond?&rdquo; begins the Doctor, with his usual sparseness of
+      ornamental courtesy. [Endnote: 4.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger bowed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An Englishman, I perceive,&rdquo; continued the Doctor, but nowise intimating
+      that the fact of being a countryman was any recommendation in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, an Englishman,&rdquo; replied Hammond; &ldquo;a briefless barrister, [Endnote:
+      5] in fact, of Lincoln&rsquo;s Inn, who, having little or nothing to detain him
+      at home, has come to spend a few idle months in seeing the new republic
+      which has been made out of English substance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what,&rdquo; continued Doctor Grim, not a whit relaxing the repulsiveness
+      of his manner, and scowling askance at the stranger,&mdash;&ldquo;what may have
+      drawn on me the good fortune of being compelled to make my time idle,
+      because yours is so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger&rsquo;s cheek flushed a little; but he smiled to himself, as if
+      saying that here was a grim, rude kind of humorist, who had lost the sense
+      of his own peculiarity, and had no idea that he was rude at all. &ldquo;I came
+      to America, as I told you,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;chiefly because I was idle, and
+      wanted to turn my enforced idleness to what profit I could, in the way of
+      seeing men, manners, governments, and problems, which I hope to have no
+      time to study by and by. But I also had an errand intrusted to me, and of
+      a singular nature; and making inquiry in this little town (where my
+      mission must be performed, if at all), I have been directed to you, by
+      your townspeople, as to a person not unlikely to be able to assist me in
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My townspeople, since you choose to call them so,&rdquo; answered the grim
+      Doctor, &ldquo;ought to know, by this time, that I am not the sort of man likely
+      to assist any person, in any way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yet this is so singular an affair,&rdquo; said the stranger, still with mild
+      courtesy, &ldquo;that at least it may excite your curiosity. I have come here to
+      find a grave.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To find a grave!&rdquo; said Doctor Grim, giving way to a grim sense of humor,
+      and relaxing just enough to let out a joke, the tameness of which was a
+      little redeemed, to his taste, by its grimness. &ldquo;I might help you there,
+      to be sure, since it is all in the way of business. Like others of my
+      profession, I have helped many people to find their graves, no doubt, and
+      shall be happy to do the same for you. You have hit upon the one thing in
+      which my services are ready.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thank you, my dear sir,&rdquo; said the young stranger, having tact enough to
+      laugh at Dr. Grim&rsquo;s joke, and thereby mollifying him a little; &ldquo;but as far
+      as I am personally concerned, I prefer to wait a while before making the
+      discovery of that little spot in Mother Earth which I am destined to
+      occupy. It is a grave which has been occupied as such for at least a
+      century and a half which I am in quest of; and it is as an antiquarian, a
+      genealogist, a person who has had dealings with the dead of long ago, not
+      as a professional man engaged in adding to their number, that I ask your
+      aid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, ahah!&rdquo; said the Doctor, laying down his pipe, and looking earnestly
+      at the stranger; not kindly nor genially, but rather with a lurid glance
+      of suspicion out of those red eyes of his, but no longer with a desire to
+      escape an intruder; rather as one who meant to clutch him. &ldquo;Explain your
+      meaning, sir, at once.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then here it is,&rdquo; said Mr. Hammond. &ldquo;There is an old English family, one
+      of the members of which, very long ago, emigrated to this part of America,
+      then a wilderness, and long afterwards a British colony. He was on ill
+      terms with his family. There is reason to believe that documents, deeds,
+      titular proofs, or some other thing valuable to the family, were buried in
+      the grave of this emigrant; and there have been various attempts, within a
+      century, to find this grave, and if possible some living descendant of the
+      man, or both, under the idea that either of these cases might influence
+      the disputed descent of the property, and enable the family to prove its
+      claims to an ancient title. Now, rather as a matter of curiosity, than
+      with any real hope of success,&mdash;and being slightly connected with the
+      family,&mdash;I have taken what seems to myself a wild-goose chase; making
+      it merely incidental, you well understand, not by any means the main
+      purpose of my voyage to America.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the name of this family?&rdquo; asked the Doctor, abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man whose grave I seek,&rdquo; said the stranger, &ldquo;lived and died, in this
+      country, under the assumed name of Colcord.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you expect to succeed in this ridiculous quest?&rdquo; asked the Doctor,
+      &ldquo;and what marks, signs, directions, have you to guide your search? And
+      moreover, how have you come to any knowledge whatever about the matter,
+      even that the emigrant ever assumed this name of Colcord, and that he was
+      buried anywhere, and that his place of burial, after more than a century,
+      is of the slightest importance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All this was ascertained by a messenger on a similar errand with my own,
+      only undertaken nearly a century ago, and more in earnest than I can
+      pretend to be,&rdquo; replied the Englishman. &ldquo;At that period, however, there
+      was probably a desire to find nothing that might take the hereditary
+      possessions of the family out of the branch which still held them; and
+      there is strong reason to suspect that the information acquired was
+      purposely kept secret by the person in England into whose hands it came.
+      The thing is differently situated now; the possessor of the estate is
+      recently dead; and the discovery of an American heir would not be
+      unacceptable to many. At all events, any knowledge gained here would throw
+      light on a somewhat doubtful matter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where, as nearly as you can judge,&rdquo; said the Doctor, after a turn or two
+      through the study, &ldquo;was this man buried?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He spent the last years of his life, certainly, in this town,&rdquo; said
+      Hammond, &ldquo;and may be found, if at all, among the dead of that period.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And they&mdash;their miserable dust, at least, which is all that still
+      exists of them&mdash;were buried in the graveyard under these windows,&rdquo;
+       said the Doctor. &ldquo;What marks, I say,&mdash;for you might as well seek a
+      vanished wave of the sea, as a grave that surged upward so long ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the gravestone,&rdquo; said Hammond, &ldquo;a slate one, there was rudely
+      sculptured the impress of a foot. What it signifies I cannot conjecture,
+      except it had some reference to a certain legend of a bloody footstep,
+      which is currently told, and some token of which yet remains on one of the
+      thresholds of the ancient mansion-house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ned and Elsie had withdrawn themselves from the immediate vicinity of the
+      fireside, and were playing at fox and geese in a corner near the window.
+      But little Elsie, having very quick ears, and a faculty of attending to
+      more affairs than one, now called out, &ldquo;Doctor Grim, Ned and I know where
+      that gravestone is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hush, Elsie,&rdquo; whispered Ned, earnestly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come forward here, both of you,&rdquo; said Doctor Grimshawe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The two children approached, and stood before the Doctor and his guest,
+      the latter of whom had not hitherto taken particular notice of them. He
+      now looked from one to the other, with the pleasant, genial expression of
+      a person gifted with a natural liking for children, and the freemasonry
+      requisite to bring him acquainted with them; and it lighted up his face
+      with a pleasant surprise to see two such beautiful specimens of boyhood
+      and girlhood in this dismal, spider-haunted house, and under the
+      guardianship of such a savage lout as the grim Doctor. He seemed
+      particularly struck by the intelligence and sensibility of Ned&rsquo;s face, and
+      met his eyes with a glance that Ned long afterwards remembered; but yet he
+      seemed quite as much interested by Elsie, and gazed at her face with a
+      perplexed, inquiring glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These are fine children,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;May I ask if they are your own?&mdash;Pardon
+      me if I ask amiss,&rdquo; added he, seeing a frown on the Doctor&rsquo;s brow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ask nothing about the brats,&rdquo; replied he grimly. &ldquo;Thank Heaven, they are
+      not my children; so your question is answered.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I again ask pardon,&rdquo; said Mr. Hammond. &ldquo;I am fond of children; and the
+      boy has a singularly fine countenance; not in the least English. The true
+      American face, no doubt. As to this sweet little girl, she impresses me
+      with a vague resemblance to some person I have seen. Hers I should deem an
+      English face.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These children are not our topic,&rdquo; said the grim Doctor, with gruff
+      impatience. &ldquo;If they are to be so, our conversation is ended. Ned, what do
+      you know of this gravestone with the bloody foot on it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not a bloody foot, Doctor Grim,&rdquo; said Ned, &ldquo;and I am not sure that
+      it is a foot at all; only Elsie and I chose to fancy so, because of a
+      story that we used to play at. But we were children then. The gravestone
+      lies on the ground, within a little bit of a walk of our door; but this
+      snow has covered it all over; else we might go out and see it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will go out at any rate,&rdquo; said the Doctor, &ldquo;and if the Englishman
+      chooses to come to America, he must take our snows as he finds them. Take
+      your shovel, Ned, and if necessary we will uncover the gravestone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They accordingly muffled themselves in their warmest, and plunged forth
+      through a back door into Ned and Elsie&rsquo;s playground, as the grim Doctor
+      was wont to call it. The snow, except in one spot close at hand, lay deep,
+      like cold oblivion, over the surging graves, and piled itself in drifted
+      heaps against every stone that raised itself above the level; it filled
+      enviously the letters of the inscriptions, enveloping all the dead in one
+      great winding-sheet, whiter and colder than those which they had
+      individually worn. The dreary space was pathless; not a footstep had
+      tracked through the heavy snow; for it must be warm affection indeed that
+      could so melt this wintry impression as to penetrate through the snow and
+      frozen earth, and establish any warm thrills with the dead beneath:
+      daisies, grass, genial earth, these allow of the magnetism of such
+      sentiments; but winter sends them shivering back to the baffled heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Ned,&rdquo; said the Doctor, impatiently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ned looked about him somewhat bewildered, and then pointed to a spot
+      within not more than ten paces of the threshold which they had just
+      crossed; and there appeared, not a gravestone, but a new grave (if any
+      grave could be called new in that often-dug soil, made up of old
+      mortality), an open hole, with the freshly-dug earth piled up beside it. A
+      little snow (for there had been a gust or two since morning) appeared, as
+      they peeped over the edge, to have fallen into it; but not enough to
+      prevent a coffin from finding fit room and accommodation in it. But it was
+      evident that the grave had been dug that very day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The headstone, with the foot on it, was just here,&rdquo; said Ned, in much
+      perplexity, &ldquo;and, as far as I can judge, the old sunken grave exactly
+      marked out the space of this new one.&rdquo; [Endnote: 1.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a shame,&rdquo; said Elsie, much shocked at the indecorum, &ldquo;that the new
+      person should be thrust in here; for the old one was a friend of ours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what has become of the headstone!&rdquo; exclaimed the young English
+      stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During their perplexity, a person had approached the group, wading through
+      the snow from the gateway giving entrance from the street; a gaunt figure,
+      with stooping shoulders, over one of which was a spade and some other tool
+      fit for delving in the earth; and in his face there was the sort of keen,
+      humorous twinkle that grave-diggers somehow seem to get, as if the
+      dolorous character of their business necessitated something unlike itself
+      by an inevitable reaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Doctor,&rdquo; said he, with a shrewd wink in his face, &ldquo;are you looking
+      for one of your patients? The man who is to be put to bed here was never
+      caught in your spider&rsquo;s web.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Doctor Grimshawe; &ldquo;when my patients have done with me, I leave
+      them to you and the old Nick, and never trouble myself about them more.
+      What I want to know is, why you have taken upon you to steal a man&rsquo;s
+      grave, after he has had immemorial possession of it. By what right have
+      you dug up this bed, undoing the work of a predecessor of yours, who has
+      long since slept in one of his own furrows?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, Doctor,&rdquo; said the grave-digger, looking quietly into the cavernous
+      pit which he had hollowed, &ldquo;it is against common sense that a dead man
+      should think to keep a grave to himself longer than till you can take up
+      his substance in a shovel. It would be a strange thing enough, if, when
+      living families are turned out of their homes twice or thrice in a
+      generation, (as they are likely to be in our new government,) a dead man
+      should think he must sleep in one spot till the day of judgment. No; turn
+      about, I say, to these old fellows. As long as they can decently be called
+      dead men, I let them lie; when they are nothing but dust, I just take
+      leave to stir them on occasion. This is the way we do things under the
+      republic, whatever your customs be in the old country.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Matters are very much the same in any old English churchyard,&rdquo; said the
+      English stranger. &ldquo;But, my good friend, I have come three thousand miles,
+      partly to find this grave, and am a little disappointed to find my labor
+      lost.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! and you are the man my father was looking for,&rdquo; said the
+      grave-digger, nodding his head at Mr. Hammond. &ldquo;My father, who was a
+      grave-digger afore me, died four and thirty years ago, when we were under
+      the King; and says he, &lsquo;Ebenezer, do not you turn up a sod in this spot,
+      till you have turned up every other in the ground.&rsquo; And I have always
+      obeyed him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what was the reason of such a singular prohibition?&rdquo; asked Hammond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My father knew,&rdquo; said the grave-digger, &ldquo;and he told me the reason too;
+      but since we are under the republic, we have given up remembering those
+      old-world legends, as we used to. The newspapers keep us from talking in
+      the chimney-corner; and so things go out of our minds. An old man, with
+      his stories of what he has seen, and what his great-grandfather saw before
+      him, is of little account since newspapers came up. Stop&mdash;I remember&mdash;no,
+      I forget,&mdash;it was something about the grave holding a witness, who
+      had been sought before and might be again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that is all you know about it?&rdquo; said Hammond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All,&mdash;every mite,&rdquo; said the old grave-digger. &ldquo;But my father knew,
+      and would have been glad to tell you the whole story. There was a great
+      deal of wisdom and knowledge, about graves especially, buried out yonder
+      where my old father was put away, before the Stamp Act was thought of. But
+      it is no great matter, I suppose. People don&rsquo;t care about old graves in
+      these times. They just live, and put the dead out of sight and out of
+      mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well; but what have you done with the headstone?&rdquo; said the Doctor. &ldquo;You
+      can&rsquo;t have eaten it up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no, Doctor,&rdquo; said the grave-digger, laughing; &ldquo;it would crack better
+      teeth than mine, old and crumbly as it is. And yet I meant to do something
+      with it that is akin to eating; for my oven needs a new floor, and I
+      thought to take this stone, which would stand the fire well. But here,&rdquo;
+       continued he, scraping away the snow with his shovel, a task in which
+      little Ned gave his assistance,&mdash;&ldquo;here is the headstone, just as I
+      have always seen it, and as my father saw it before me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The ancient memorial, being cleared of snow, proved to be a slab of
+      freestone, with some rude traces of carving in bas-relief around the
+      border, now much effaced, and an impression, which seemed to be as much
+      like a human foot as anything else, sunk into the slab; but this device
+      was wrought in a much more clumsy way than the ornamented border, and
+      evidently by an unskilful hand. Beneath was an inscription, over which the
+      hard, flat lichens had grown, and done their best to obliterate it,
+      although the following words might be written [Endnote: 2] or guessed:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here lyeth the mortal part of Thomas Colcord, an upright man, of tender
+      and devout soul, who departed this troublous life September ye nineteenth,
+      1667, aged 57 years and nine months. Happier in his death than in his
+      lifetime. Let his bones be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The name, Colcord, was somewhat defaced; it was impossible, in the general
+      disintegration of the stone, to tell whether wantonly, or with a purpose
+      of altering and correcting some error in the spelling, or, as occurred to
+      Hammond, to change the name entirely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is very unsatisfactory,&rdquo; said Hammond, &ldquo;but very curious, too. But
+      this certainly is the impress of what was meant for a human foot, and
+      coincides strangely with the legend of the Bloody Footstep,&mdash;the mark
+      of the foot that trod in the blessed King Charles&rsquo;s blood.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For that matter,&rdquo; said the grave-digger, &ldquo;it comes into my mind that my
+      father used to call it the stamp of Satan&rsquo;s foot, because he claimed the
+      dead man for his own. It is plain to see that there was a deep deft
+      between two of the toes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are two ways of telling that legend,&rdquo; remarked the Doctor. &ldquo;But did
+      you find nothing in the grave, Hewen?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O, yes,&mdash;a bone or two,&mdash;as much as could be expected after
+      above a hundred years,&rdquo; said the grave-digger. &ldquo;I tossed them aside; and
+      if you are curious about them, you will find them when the snow melts.
+      That was all; and it would have been unreasonable in old Colcord&mdash;especially
+      in these republican times&mdash;to have wanted to keep his grave any
+      longer, when there was so little of him left.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must drop the matter here, then,&rdquo; said Hammond, with a sigh. &ldquo;Here, my
+      friend, is a trifle for your trouble.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No trouble,&rdquo; said the grave-digger, &ldquo;and in these republican times we
+      can&rsquo;t take anything for nothing, because it won&rsquo;t do for a poor man to
+      take off his hat and say thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, he did take the silver, and winked a sort of acknowledgment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Doctor, with unwonted hospitality, invited the English stranger to
+      dine in his house; and though there was no pretence of cordiality in the
+      invitation, Mr. Hammond accepted it, being probably influenced by
+      curiosity to make out some definite idea of the strange household in which
+      he found himself. Doctor Grimshawe having taken it upon him to be host,&mdash;for,
+      up to this time, the stranger stood upon his own responsibility, and,
+      having voluntarily presented himself to the Doctor, had only himself to
+      thank for any scant courtesy he might meet,&mdash;but now the grim Doctor
+      became genial after his own fashion. At dinner he produced a bottle of
+      port, which made the young Englishman almost fancy himself on the other
+      side of the water; and he entered into a conversation, which I fancy was
+      the chief object which the grim Doctor had in view in showing himself in
+      so amiable a light, [Endnote: 3] for in the course of it the stranger was
+      insensibly led to disclose many things, as it were of his own accord,
+      relating to the part of England whence he came, and especially to the
+      estate and family which have been before mentioned,&mdash;the present
+      state of that family, together with other things that he seemed to himself
+      to pour out naturally,&mdash;for, at last, he drew himself up, and
+      attempted an excuse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your good wine,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;or the unexpected accident of meeting a
+      countryman, has made me unusually talkative, and on subjects, I fear,
+      which have not a particular interest for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not quite succeeded in shaking off my country, as you see,&rdquo; said
+      Doctor Grimshawe, &ldquo;though I neither expect nor wish ever to see it again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something rather ungracious in the grim Doctor&rsquo;s response, and
+      as they now adjourned to his study, and the Doctor betook himself to his
+      pipe and tumbler, the young Englishman sought to increase his acquaintance
+      with the two children, both of whom showed themselves graciously inclined
+      towards him; more warmly so than they had been to the schoolmaster, as he
+      was the only other guest whom they had ever met.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you like to see England, my little fellow?&rdquo; he inquired of Ned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, very much! more than anything else in the world,&rdquo; replied the boy,
+      his eyes gleaming and his cheeks flushing with the earnestness of his
+      response; for, indeed, the question stirred up all the dreams and reveries
+      which the child had cherished, far back into the dim regions of his
+      memory. After what the Doctor had told him of his origin, he had never
+      felt any home feeling here; it seemed to him that he was wandering Ned,
+      whom the wind had blown from afar. Somehow or other, from many
+      circumstances which he put together and seethed in his own childish
+      imagination, it seemed to him that he was to go back to that far old
+      country, and there wander among the green, ivy-grown, venerable scenes;
+      the older he grew, the more his mind took depth, the stronger was this
+      fancy in him; though even to Elsie he had scarcely breathed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So strong a desire,&rdquo; said the stranger, smiling at his earnestness, &ldquo;will
+      be sure to work out its own accomplishment. I shall meet you in England,
+      my young friend, one day or another. And you, my little girl, are you as
+      anxious to see England as your brother?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ned is not my brother,&rdquo; said little Elsie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Doctor here interposed some remark on a different subject; for it was
+      observable that he never liked to have the conversation turn on these
+      children, their parentage, or relations to each other or himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The children were sent to bed; and the young Englishman, finding the
+      conversation lag, and his host becoming gruffer and less communicative
+      than he thought quite courteous, retired. But before he went, however, he
+      could not refrain from making a remark on the gigantic spider, which was
+      swinging like a pendulum above the Doctor&rsquo;s head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a singular pet!&rdquo; said he; for the nervous part of him had latterly
+      been getting uppermost, so that it disturbed him; in fact, the spider
+      above and the grim man below equally disturbed him. &ldquo;Are you a naturalist?
+      Have you noted his habits?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the Doctor, &ldquo;I have learned from his web how to weave a plot,
+      and how to catch my victim and devour him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank God,&rdquo; said the Englishman, as he issued forth into the cold gray
+      night, &ldquo;I have escaped the grim fellow&rsquo;s web, at all events. How strange a
+      group,&mdash;those two sweet children, that grim old man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As regards this matter of the ancient grave, it remains to be recorded,
+      that, when the snow melted, little Ned and Elsie went to look at the spot,
+      where, by this time, there was a little hillock with the brown sods laid
+      duly upon it, which the coming spring would make green. By the side of it
+      they saw, with more curiosity than repugnance, a few fragments of crumbly
+      bones, which they plausibly conjectured to have appertained to some part
+      of the framework of the ancient Colcord, wherewith he had walked through
+      the troublous life of which his gravestone spoke. And little Elsie, whose
+      eyes were very sharp, and her observant qualities of the quickest, found
+      something which Ned at first pronounced to be only a bit of old iron,
+      incrusted with earth; but Elsie persisted to knock off some of the earth
+      that seemed to have incrusted it, and discovered a key. The children ran
+      with their prize to the grim Doctor, who took it between his thumb and
+      finger, turned it over and over, and then proceeded to rub it with a
+      chemical substance which soon made it bright. It proved to be a silver
+      key, of antique and curious workmanship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps this is what Mr. Hammond was in search of,&rdquo; said Ned. &ldquo;What a
+      pity he is gone! Perhaps we can send it after him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nonsense,&rdquo; said the gruff Doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And attaching the key to a chain, which he took from a drawer, and which
+      seemed to be gold, he hung it round Ned&rsquo;s neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When you find a lock for this key,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;open it, and consider
+      yourself heir of whatever treasure is revealed there!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ned continued that sad, fatal habit of growing out of childhood, as boys
+      will, until he was now about ten years old, and little Elsie as much as
+      six or seven. He looked healthy, but pale; something there was in the
+      character and influences of his life that made him look as if he were
+      growing up in a shadow, with less sunshine than he needed for a robust and
+      exuberant development, though enough to make his intellectual growth tend
+      towards a little luxuriance, in some directions. He was likely to turn out
+      a fanciful, perhaps a poetic youth; young as he was, there had been
+      already discoveries, on the grim Doctor&rsquo;s part, of certain blotted and
+      clumsily scrawled scraps of paper, the chirography on which was arrayed in
+      marshalled lines of unequal length, and each commanded by a capital letter
+      and marching on from six to ten lame feet. Doctor Grim inspected these
+      things curiously, and to say the truth most scornfully, before he took
+      them to light his pipe withal; but they told him little as regarded this
+      boy&rsquo;s internal state, being mere echoes, and very lugubrious ones, of
+      poetic strains that were floating about in the atmosphere of that day,
+      long before any now remembered bard had begun to sing. But there were the
+      rudiments of a poetic and imaginative mind within the boy, if its
+      subsequent culture should be such as the growth of that delicate flower
+      requires; a brooding habit taking outward things into itself and imbuing
+      them with its own essence until, after they had lain there awhile, they
+      assumed a relation both to truth and to himself, and became mediums to
+      affect other minds with the magnetism of his own. He lived far too much an
+      inward life for healthfulness, at his age; the peculiarity of his
+      situation, a child of mystery, with certain reaches and vistas that seemed
+      to promise a bright solution of his mystery, keeping his imagination
+      always awake and strong. That castle in the air,&mdash;so much more vivid
+      than other castles, because it had perhaps a real substance of ancient,
+      ivy-grown, hewn stone somewhere,&mdash;that visionary hall in England,
+      with its surrounding woods and fine lawns, and the beckoning shadows at
+      the ancient windows, and that fearful threshold, with the blood still
+      glistening on it,&mdash;he dwelt and wandered so much there, that he had
+      no real life in the sombre house on the corner of the graveyard; except
+      that the loneliness of the latter, and the grim Doctor with his grotesque
+      surroundings, and then the great ugly spider, and that odd, inhuman
+      mixture of crusty Hannah, all served to remove him out of the influences
+      of common life. Little Elsie was all that he had to keep life real, and
+      substantial; and she, a child so much younger than he, was influenced by
+      the same circumstances, and still more by himself, so that, as far as he
+      could impart himself to her, he led her hand in hand through the same
+      dream-scenery amid which he strayed himself. They knew not another child
+      in town; the grim Doctor was their only friend. As for Ned, this seclusion
+      had its customary and normal effect upon him; it had made him think
+      ridiculously high of his own gifts, powers, attainments, and at the same
+      time doubt whether they would pass with those of others; it made him
+      despise all flesh, as if he were of a superior race, and yet have an idle
+      and weak fear of coming in contact with them, from a dread of his
+      incompetency to cope with them; so he at once depreciated and exalted, to
+      an absurd degree, both himself and others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ned,&rdquo; said the Doctor to him one day, in his gruffest tone, &ldquo;you are not
+      turning out to be the boy I looked for and meant to make. I have given you
+      sturdy English instruction, and solidly grounded you in matters that the
+      poor superficial people and time merely skim over; I looked to see the
+      rudiments of a man in you, by this time; and you begin to mope and pule as
+      if your babyhood were coming back on you. You seem to think more than a
+      boy of your years should; and yet it is not manly thought, nor ever will
+      be so. What do you mean, boy, by making all my care of you come to
+      nothing, in this way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do my best, Doctor Grim,&rdquo; said Ned, with sullen dignity. &ldquo;What you
+      teach me, I learn. What more can I do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tell you what, my fine fellow,&rdquo; quoth Doctor Grim, getting rude, as
+      was his habit. &ldquo;You disappoint me, and I&rsquo;ll not bear it. I want you to be
+      a man; and I&rsquo;ll have you a man or nothing. If I had foreboded such a
+      fellow as you turn out to be, I never would have taken you from the place
+      where, as I once told you, I found you,&mdash;the almshouse!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O, Doctor Grim, Doctor Grim!&rdquo; cried little Elsie, in a tone of grief and
+      bitter reproach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ned had risen slowly, as the Doctor uttered those last words, turning as
+      white as a sheet, and stood gazing at him, with large eyes, in which there
+      was a calm upbraiding; a strange dignity was in his childish aspect, which
+      was no longer childish, but seemed to have grown older all in a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir,&rdquo; added the Doctor, incensed at the boy&rsquo;s aspect, &ldquo;there is nonsense
+      that ought to be whipt out of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have said enough, sir,&rdquo; said the boy. &ldquo;Would to God you had left me
+      where you found me![Endnote: 4] It was not my fault that you took me from
+      the alms-house. But it will be my fault if I ever eat another bit of your
+      bread, or stay under your roof an hour longer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was moving towards the door, but little Elsie sprung upon him and
+      caught him round the neck, although he repelled her with severe dignity;
+      and Doctor Grimshawe, after a look at the group in which a bitter sort of
+      mirth and mischief struggled with a better and kindlier sentiment, at last
+      flung his pipe into the chimney, hastily quaffed the remnant of a tumbler,
+      and shuffled after Ned, kicking off his old slippers in his hurry. He
+      caught the boy just by the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ned, Ned, my boy, I&rsquo;m sorry for what I said,&rdquo; cried he. &ldquo;I am a guzzling
+      old blockhead, and don&rsquo;t know how to treat a gentleman when he honors me
+      with his company. It is not in my blood nor breeding to have such
+      knowledge. Ned, you will make a man, and I lied if I said otherwise. Come,
+      I&rsquo;m sorry, I&rsquo;m sorry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy was easily touched, at these years, as a boy ought to be; and
+      though he had not yet forgiven the grim Doctor, the tears, to his especial
+      shame, gushed out of his eyes in a torrent, and his whole frame shook with
+      sobs. The Doctor caught him in his arms, and hugged him to his old
+      tobacco-fragrant dressing-gown, hugged him like a bear, as he was; so that
+      poor Ned hardly knew whether he was embracing him with his love, or
+      squeezing him to death in his wrath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ned,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not going to live a great while longer; I seem an
+      eternal nuisance to you, I know; but it&rsquo;s not so, I&rsquo;m mortal and I feel
+      myself breaking up. Let us be friends while I live; for believe me, Ned,
+      I&rsquo;ve done as well by you as I knew, and care for nothing, love nothing, so
+      much as you. Little Elsie here, yes. I love her too. But that&rsquo;s different.
+      You are a boy, and will be a man; and a man whom I destine to do for me
+      what it has been the object of my life to achieve. Let us be friends. We
+      will&mdash;we must be friends; and when old Doctor Grim, worthless wretch
+      that he is, sleeps in his grave, you shall not have the pang of having
+      parted from him in unkindness. Forgive me, Ned; and not only that, but
+      love me better than ever; for though I am a hasty old wretch, I am not
+      altogether evil as regards you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I know not whether the Doctor would have said all this, if the day had not
+      been pretty well advanced, and if his potations had not been many; but, at
+      any rate, he spoke no more than he felt, and his emotions thrilled through
+      the sensitive system of the boy, and quite melted him down. He forgave
+      Doctor Grim, and, as he asked, loved him better than ever; and so did
+      Elsie. Then it was so sweet, so good, to have had this one outgush of
+      affection,&mdash;he, poor child, who had no memory of mother&rsquo;s kisses, or
+      of being cared for out of tenderness, and whose heart had been hungry, all
+      his life, for some such thing; and probably Doctor Grim, in his way, had
+      the same kind of enjoyment of this passionate crisis; so that though, the
+      next day, they all three looked at one another a little ashamed, yet it
+      had some remote analogy to that delicious embarrassment of two lovers, at
+      their first meeting after they know all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER X.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It is very remarkable that Ned had so much good in him as we find there;
+      in the first place, born as he seemed to be of a wild, vagrant stock, a
+      seedling sown by the breezes, and falling among the rocks and sands; the
+      growing up without a mother to cultivate his tenderness with kisses and
+      the inestimable, inevitable love of love breaking out on all little
+      occasions, without reference to merit or demerit, unfailing whether or no;
+      mother&rsquo;s faith in excellences, the buds which were yet invisible to all
+      other eyes, but to which her warm faith was the genial sunshine necessary
+      to their growth; mother&rsquo;s generous interpretation of all that was doubtful
+      in him, and which might turn out good or bad, according as should be
+      believed of it; mother&rsquo;s pride in whatever the boy accomplished, and
+      unfailing excuses, explanations, apologies, so satisfactory, for all his
+      failures; mother&rsquo;s deep intuitive insight, which should see the permanent
+      good beneath all the appearance of temporary evil, being wiser through her
+      love than the wisest sage could be,&mdash;the dullest, homeliest mother
+      than the wisest sage. The Creator, apparently, has set a little of his own
+      infinite wisdom and love (which are one) in a mother&rsquo;s heart, so that no
+      child, in the common course of things, should grow up without some
+      heavenly instruction. Instead of all this, and the vast deal more that
+      mothers do for children, there had been only the gruff, passionate Doctor,
+      without sense of religion, with only a fitful tenderness, with years&rsquo; 
+      length between the fits, so fiercely critical, so wholly unradiant of
+      hope, misanthropic, savagely morbid. Yes; there was little Elsie too; it
+      must have been that she was the boy&rsquo;s preserver, being childhood,
+      sisterhood, womanhood, all that there had been for him of human life, and
+      enough&mdash;he being naturally of such good stuff&mdash;to keep him good.
+      He had lost much, but not all: he was not nearly what he might have been
+      under better auspices; flaws and imperfections there were, in abundance,
+      great uncultivated wastes and wildernesses in his moral nature, tangled
+      wilds where there might have been stately, venerable religious groves; but
+      there was no rank growth of evil. That unknown mother, that had no
+      opportunity to nurse her boy, must have had gentle and noblest qualities
+      to endow him with; a noble father, too, a long, unstained descent, one
+      would have thought. Was this an almshouse child?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Doctor Grim knew, very probably, that there was all this on the womanly
+      side that was wanting to Ned&rsquo;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,&mdash;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&mdash;the grim Doctor, Ned, and Elsie&mdash;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s behoof, and next morning prepared to leave him
+      there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ned, my son, good by,&rdquo; cried he, shaking the little fellow&rsquo;s hand as he
+      stood tearful and wistful beside the chaise shivering at the loneliness
+      which he felt settling around him,&mdash;a new loneliness to him,&mdash;the
+      loneliness of a crowd. &ldquo;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&rsquo;s name, I invoke it upon you heartily.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Elsie was sobbing, and flung her arms about Ned&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is all over,&mdash;all over,&rdquo; said he to himself: &ldquo;Doctor Grim and
+      little Elsie are gone out of my life. They leave me and will never come
+      back,&mdash;not they to me, not I to them. O, how cold the world is! Would
+      we three&mdash;the Doctor, and Elsie, and I&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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,&mdash;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,&mdash;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, &ldquo;Colcord! Colcord!&rdquo; 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,&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you little jade, what have you been overhearing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing, Doctor Grim,&mdash;nothing that I could make out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Make out as much as you can,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I am not afraid of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Afraid of little Elsie, dear Doctor Grim!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Neither of you, nor of the Devil,&rdquo; murmured the Doctor,&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he would lie back in his chair and look up at the great spider, who
+      (or else it was Elsie&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is of no use to carry this on any further,&rdquo; said he, fiercely, in a
+      decided tone, as if he had taken a resolution. &ldquo;Elsie, my girl, come and
+      kiss me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Elsie, my little girl, I mean to die to-day,&rdquo; said the old man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To die, dear Doctor Grim? O, no! O, no!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O, yes! Elsie,&rdquo; said the Doctor, in a very positive tone. &ldquo;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;&mdash;and I am weary,
+      weary. The pipe does not taste good, the brandy bewilders me. Ned is gone,
+      too;&mdash;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&rsquo;t know
+      whether to execute it or no. Ned is gone; there is nobody but my little
+      Elsie,&mdash;a good child, but not quite enough to live for. I will let
+      myself die, therefore, before sunset.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O, no! Doctor Grim. Let us send for Ned, and you will think it worth the
+      trouble of living.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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,&mdash;and, as it
+      happened, the one who had taken a most decidedly hostile part to our
+      Doctor,&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He terrible man, our old Doctor Grim,&rdquo; quoth crusty Hannah. &ldquo;He drive us
+      all to the wicked place before him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;we are sorry to say&mdash;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&rsquo;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.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Seeing the poor little girl, the Doctor cried out to her, half wrathfully,
+      half tenderly, &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t cry, you little wretch! Come and kiss me once more.&rdquo;
+       So Elsie, restraining her grief with a great effort, ran to him and gave
+      him a last kiss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell Ned,&rdquo; said the Doctor solemnly, &ldquo;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!&rdquo; Then he said, with his thunderous and
+      imperative tone, &ldquo;Let no one come near me till to-morrow morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;No, Ned, no. Drop it, drop it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then there was an utter silence, unbroken forevermore by the lips that
+      had uttered so many objectionable things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,&mdash;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,&mdash;dead and alive alike,&mdash;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then Ned went out of the back door, and found his way to the Doctor&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the heart never breaks on the first grave; and, after many graves, it
+      gets so obtuse that nothing can break it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,&mdash;though it
+      may have lain over land and sea since then; but the footsteps that trod
+      there are treading here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      There is&mdash;or there was, now many years ago, and a few years also it
+      was still extant&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;now at
+      least&mdash;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.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I safe?&rdquo; asks the inmate of the prison-chamber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir, there has been a search.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave the pistols,&rdquo; said the voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,&mdash;perhaps as dim as ever,&mdash;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&mdash;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,&mdash;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&mdash;never
+      making a shadow&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What is the furniture? An antique chair,&mdash;one chair, no more. A
+      table, many-footed, of dark wood; it holds writing-materials, a book, too,
+      on its face, with the dust gathered on its back. There is, moreover, a
+      sort of antique box, or coffer, of some dark wood, that seems to have been
+      wrought or carved with skill, wondrous skill, of some period when the art
+      of carving wainscot with arms and devices was much practised; so that on
+      this coffer&mdash;some six feet long it is, and two or three broad&mdash;most
+      richly wrought, you see faces in relief of knight and dame, lords,
+      heraldic animals; some story, very likely, told, almost revelling in
+      Gothic sculpture of wood, like what we have seen on the marble sarcophagus
+      of the old Greeks. It has, too, a lock, elaborately ornamented and inlaid
+      with silver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What else; only the spider&rsquo;s webs spinning strangely over everything; over
+      that light which comes into the room through the stone; over everything.
+      And now we see, in a corner, a strange great spider curiously variegated.
+      The ugly, terrible, seemingly poisonous thing makes us shudder. [Endnote:
+      3.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What, else? There are pistols; they lie on the coffer! There is a
+      curiously shaped Italian dagger, of the kind which in a groove has poison
+      that makes its wound mortal. On the old mantel-piece, over the fireplace,
+      there is a vial in which are kept certain poisons. It would seem as if
+      some one had meditated suicide; or else that the foul fiend had put all
+      sorts of implements of self-destruction in his way; so that, in some
+      frenzied moment, he might kill himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the inmate! There he is; but the frenzied alarm in which we last saw
+      him seems to have changed its character. No throb, now; no passion; no
+      frenzy of fear or despair. He sits dull and motionless. See; his cheek is
+      very pale; his hair long and dishevelled. His beard has grown, and curls
+      round his face. He has on a sleeping-gown, a long robe as of one who
+      abides within doors, and has nothing to do with outward elements; a pair
+      of slippers. A dull, dreamy reverie seems to have possessed him. Hark!
+      there is again a stealthy step on the floor, and the serving-man is here
+      again. There is a peering, anxious curiosity in his face, as he struts
+      towards him, a sort of enjoyment, one would say, in the way in which he
+      looks at the strange case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am here, you know,&rdquo; he says, at length, after feasting his eyes for
+      some time on the spectacle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hear you!&rdquo; says the young man, in a dull, indifferent tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will not your honor walk out to-day?&rdquo; says the man. &ldquo;It is long now since
+      your honor has taken the air.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very long,&rdquo; says the master, &ldquo;but I will not go out to-day. What weather
+      is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sunny, bright, a summer day,&rdquo; says the man. &ldquo;But you would never know it
+      in these damp walls. The last winter&rsquo;s chill is here yet. Had not your
+      honor better go forth?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It might seem that there was a sort of sneer, deeply hidden under respect
+      and obeisance, in the man&rsquo;s words and craftily respectful tone; deeply
+      hidden, but conveying a more subtile power on that account. At all events,
+      the master seemed aroused from his state of dull indifference, and writhed
+      as with poignant anguish&mdash;an infused poison in his veins&mdash;as the
+      man spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you procured me that new drug I spoke of?&rdquo; asked the master.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here it is,&rdquo; said the man, putting a small package on the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it effectual?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So said the apothecary,&rdquo; answered the man; &ldquo;and I tried it on a dog. He
+      sat quietly a quarter of an hour; then had a spasm or two, and was dead.
+      But, your honor, the dead carcass swelled horribly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hush, villain! Have there&mdash;have there been inquiries for me,&mdash;mention
+      of me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O, none, sir,&mdash;none, sir. Affairs go on bravely,&mdash;the new live.
+      The world fills up. The gap is not vacant. There is no mention of you.
+      Marry, at the alehouse I heard some idle topers talking of a murder that
+      took place some few years since, and saying that Heaven&rsquo;s vengeance would
+      come for it yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Silence, villain, there is no such thing,&rdquo; said the young man; and, with
+      a laugh that seemed like scorn, he relapsed into his state of sullen
+      indifference; during which the servant stole away, after looking at him
+      some time, as if to take all possible note of his aspect. The man did not
+      seem so much to enjoy it himself, as he did to do these things in a kind
+      of formal and matter-of-course way, as if he were performing a set duty;
+      as if he were a subordinate fiend, and were doing the duty of a superior
+      one, without any individual malice of his own, though a general
+      satisfaction in doing what would accrue to the agglomeration of deadly
+      mischief. He stole away, and the master was left to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By and by, by what impulse or cause it is impossible to say, he started
+      upon his feet in a sudden frenzy of rage and despair. It seemed as if a
+      consciousness of some strange, wild miserable fate that had befallen him
+      had come upon him all at once; how that he was a prisoner to a devilish
+      influence, to some wizard might, that bound him hand and foot with
+      spider&rsquo;s web. So he stamped; so he half shrieked, yet stopped himself in
+      the midst, so that his cry was stifled and smothered. Then he snatched up
+      the poisoned dagger and looked at it; the noose, and put it about his
+      neck,&mdash;evil instrument of death,&mdash;but laid it down again. And
+      then was a voice at the door: &ldquo;Quietly, quietly you know, or they will
+      hear you.&rdquo; And at that voice he sank into sullen indifference again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A traveller with a knapsack on his shoulders comes out of the duskiness of
+      vague, unchronicled times, throwing his shadow before him in the morning
+      sunshine along a well-trodden, though solitary path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was early summer, or perhaps latter spring, and the most genial weather
+      that either spring or summer ever brought, possessing a character, indeed,
+      as if both seasons had done their utmost to create an atmosphere and
+      temperature most suitable for the enjoyment and exercise of life. To one
+      accustomed to a climate where there is seldom a medium between heat too
+      fierce and cold too deadly, it was a new development in the nature of
+      weather. So genial it was, so full of all comfortable influences, and yet,
+      somehow or other, void of the torrid characteristic that inevitably burns
+      in our full sun-bursts. The traveller thought, in fact, that the sun was
+      at less than his brightest glow; for though it was bright,&mdash;though
+      the day seemed cloudless,&mdash;though it appeared to be the clear,
+      transparent morning that precedes an unshadowed noon,&mdash;still there
+      was a mild and softened character, not so perceptible when he directly
+      sought to see it, but as if some veil were interposed between the earth
+      and sun, absorbing all the passionate qualities out of the latter, and
+      leaving only the kindly ones. Warmth was in abundance, and, yet, all
+      through it, and strangely akin to it, there was a half-suspected coolness
+      that gave the atmosphere its most thrilling and delicious charm. It was
+      good for human life, as the traveller, felt throughout all his being;
+      good, likewise, for vegetable life, as was seen in the depth and richness
+      of verdure over the gently undulating landscape, and the luxuriance of
+      foliage, wherever there was tree or shrub to put forth leaves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The path along which the traveller was passing deserved at least a word or
+      two of description: it was a well-trodden footpath, running just here
+      along the edge of a field of grass, and bordered on one side by a hedge
+      which contained materials within itself for varied and minute researches
+      in natural history; so richly luxuriant was it with its diverse vegetable
+      life, such a green intricacy did it form, so impenetrable and so
+      beautiful, and such a Paradise it was for the birds that built their nests
+      there in a labyrinth of little boughs and twigs, unseen and inaccessible,
+      while close beside the human race to which they attach themselves, that
+      they must have felt themselves as safe as when they sung to Eve. Homely
+      flowers likewise grew in it, and many creeping and twining plants, that
+      were an original part of the hedge, had come of their own accord and dwelt
+      here, beautifying and enriching the verdant fence by way of repayment for
+      the shelter and support which it afforded them. At intervals, trees of
+      vast trunk and mighty spread of foliage, whether elms or oaks, grew in the
+      line of the hedge, and the bark of those gigantic, age-long patriarchs was
+      not gray and naked, like the trees which the traveller had been accustomed
+      to see, but verdant with moss, or in many cases richly enwreathed with a
+      network of creeping plants, and oftenest the ivy of old growth, clambering
+      upward, and making its own twisted stem almost of one substance with the
+      supporting tree. On one venerable oak there was a plant of mystic leaf,
+      which the traveller knew by instinct, and plucked a bough of it with a
+      certain reverence for the sake of the Druids and Christmas kisses and of
+      the pasty in which it was rooted from of old.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The path in which he walked, rustic as it was and made merely by the feet
+      that pressed it down, was one of the ancientest of ways; older than the
+      oak that bore the mistletoe, older than the villages between which it
+      passed, older perhaps than the common road which the traveller had crossed
+      that morning; old as the times when people first debarred themselves from
+      wandering freely and widely wherever a vagrant impulse led them. The
+      footpath, therefore, still retains some of the characteristics of a
+      woodland walk, taken at random, by a lover of nature not pressed for time
+      nor restrained by artificial barriers; it sweeps and lingers along, and
+      finds pretty little dells and nooks of delightful scenery, and picturesque
+      glimpses of halls or cottages, in the same neighborhood where a highroad
+      would disclose only a tiresome blank. They run into one another for miles
+      and miles together, and traverse rigidly guarded parks and domains, not as
+      a matter of favor, but as a right; so that the poorest man thus retains a
+      kind of property and privilege in the oldest inheritance of the richest.
+      The highroad sees only the outside; the footpath leads down into the heart
+      of the country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A pleasant feature of the footpath was the stile, between two fields; no
+      frail and temporary structure, but betokening the permanence of this
+      rustic way; the ancient solidity of the stone steps, worn into cavities by
+      the hobnailed shoes that had pressed upon them: here not only the climbing
+      foot had passed for ages, but here had sat the maiden with her milk-pail,
+      the rustic on his way afield or homeward; here had been lover meetings,
+      cheerful chance chats, song as natural as bird note, a thousand pretty
+      scenes of rustic manners.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was curious to see the traveller pause, to contemplate so simple a
+      thing as this old stile of a few stone steps; antique as an old castle;
+      simple and rustic as the gap in a rail fence; and while he sat on one of
+      the steps, making himself pleasantly sensible of his whereabout, like one
+      who should handle a dream and find it tangible and real, he heard a sound
+      that bewitched him with still another dreamy delight. A bird rose out of
+      the grassy field, and, still soaring aloft, made a cheery melody that was
+      like a spire of audible flame,&mdash;rapturous music, as if the whole soul
+      and substance of the winged creature had been distilled into this melody,
+      as it vanished skyward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The lark! the lark!&rdquo; exclaimed the traveller, recognizing the note
+      (though never heard before) as if his childhood had known it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A moment afterwards another bird was heard in the shadow of a neighboring
+      wood, or some other inscrutable hiding-place, singing softly in a
+      flute-like note, as if blown through an instrument of wood,&mdash;&ldquo;Cuckoo!
+      Cuckoo!&rdquo;&mdash;only twice, and then a stillness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How familiar these rustic sounds!&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;Surely I was born
+      here!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The person who thus enjoyed these sounds, as if they were at once familiar
+      and strange, was a young man, tall and rather slenderly built, and though
+      we have called him young, there were the traces of thought, struggle, and
+      even of experience in his marked brow and somewhat pale face; but the
+      spirit within him was evidently still that of a youth, lithe and active,
+      gazing out of his dark eyes and taking note of things about him, with an
+      eager, centring interest, that seemed to be unusually awake at the present
+      moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It could be but a few years since he first called himself a man; but they
+      must have been thickly studded with events, turbulent with action, spent
+      amidst circumstances that called for resources of energy not often so
+      early developed; and thus his youth might have been kept in abeyance until
+      now, when in this simple rural scene he grew almost a boy again. As for
+      his station in life, his coarse gray suit and the knapsack on his
+      shoulders did not indicate a very high one; yet it was such as a gentleman
+      might wear of a morning, or on a pedestrian ramble, and was worn in a way
+      that made it seem of a better fashion than it really was, as it enabled
+      him to find a rare enjoyment, as we have seen, in by-path, hedge-row,
+      rustic stile, lark, and cuckoo, and even the familiar grass and clover
+      blossom. It was as if he had long been shut in a sick-chamber or a prison;
+      or, at least, within the iron cage of busy life, that had given him but
+      few glimpses of natural things through its bars; or else this was another
+      kind of nature than he had heretofore known.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he walked along (through a kind of dream, though he seemed so sensibly
+      observant of trifling things around him,) he failed to notice that the
+      path grew somewhat less distinctly marked, more infringed upon by grass,
+      more shut in by shrubbery; he had deviated into a side track, and, in
+      fact, a certain printed board nailed against a tree had escaped his
+      notice, warning off intruders with inhospitable threats of prosecution. He
+      began to suspect that he must have gone astray when the path led over
+      plashy ground with a still fainter trail of preceding footsteps, and
+      plunged into shrubbery, and seemed on the point of deserting him
+      altogether, after having beguiled him thus far. The spot was an
+      entanglement of boughs, and yet did not give one the impression of
+      wildness; for it was the stranger&rsquo;s idea that everything in this long
+      cultivated region had been touched and influenced by man&rsquo;s care, every
+      oak, every bush, every sod,&mdash;that man knew them all, and that they
+      knew him, and by that mutual knowledge had become far other than they were
+      in the first freedom of growth, such as may be found in an American
+      forest. Nay, the wildest denizens of this sylvan neighborhood were removed
+      in the same degree from their primeval character; for hares sat on their
+      hind legs to gaze at the approaching traveller, and hardly thought it
+      worth their while to leap away among some ferns, as he drew near; two
+      pheasants looked at him from a bough, a little inward among the shrubbery;
+      and, to complete the wonder, he became aware of the antlers and brown
+      muzzle of a deer protruding among the boughs, and though immediately there
+      ensued a great rush and rustling of the herd, it seemed evidently to come
+      from a certain lingering shyness, an instinct that had lost its purpose
+      and object, and only mimicked a dread of man, whose neighborhood and
+      familiarity had tamed the wild deer almost into a domestic creature.
+      Remembering his experience of true woodland life, the traveller fancied
+      that it might be possible to want freer air, less often used for human
+      breath, than was to be found anywhere among these woods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But then the sweet, calm sense of safety that was here: the certainty that
+      with the wild element that centuries ago had passed out of this scene had
+      gone all the perils of wild men and savage beasts, dwarfs, witches,
+      leaving nature, not effete, but only disarmed of those rougher, deadlier
+      characteristics, that cruel rawness, which make primeval Nature the deadly
+      enemy even of her own children. Here was consolation, doubtless; so we sit
+      down on the stone step of the last stile that he had crossed, and listen
+      to the footsteps of the traveller, and the distant rustle among the
+      shrubbery, as he goes deeper and deeper into the seclusion, having by this
+      time lost the deceitful track. No matter if he go astray; even were it
+      after nightfall instead of noontime, a will-o&rsquo;-the-wisp, or Puck himself,
+      would not lead him into worse harm than to delude him into some mossy
+      pool, the depths of which the truant schoolboys had known for ages.
+      Nevertheless, some little time after his disappearance, there was the
+      report of a shot that echoed sharp and loud, startling the pheasants from
+      their boughs, and sending the hares and deer a-scampering in good earnest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We next find our friend, from whom we parted on the footpath, in a
+      situation of which he then was but very imperfectly aware; for, indeed, he
+      had been in a state of unconsciousness, lasting until it was now late
+      towards the sunset of that same day. He was endeavoring to make out where
+      he was, and how he came thither, or what had happened; or whether, indeed,
+      anything had happened, unless to have fallen asleep, and to be still
+      enveloped in the fragments of some vivid and almost tangible dream, the
+      more confused because so vivid. His wits did not come so readily about him
+      as usual; there may have been a slight delusion, which mingled itself with
+      his sober perceptions, and by its leaven of extravagance made the whole
+      substance of the scene untrue. Thus it happened that, as it were at the
+      same instant, he fancied himself years back in life, thousands of miles
+      away, in a gloomy cobwebbed room, looking out upon a graveyard, while yet,
+      neither more nor less distinctly, he was conscious of being in a small
+      chamber, panelled with oak, and furnished in an antique style. He was
+      doubtful, too, whether or no there was a grim feudal figure, in a shabby
+      dressing-gown and an old velvet cap, sitting in the dusk of the room,
+      smoking a pipe that diffused a scent of tobacco,&mdash;quaffing a
+      deep-hued liquor out of a tumbler,&mdash;looking upwards at a spider that
+      hung above. &ldquo;Was there, too, a child sitting in a little chair at his
+      footstool?&rdquo; In his earnestness to see this apparition more distinctly, he
+      opened his eyes wider and stirred, and ceased to see it at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But though that other dusty, squalid, cobwebbed scene quite vanished, and
+      along with it the two figures, old and young, grim and childish, of whose
+      portraits it had been the framework, still there were features in the old,
+      oaken-panelled chamber that seemed to belong rather to his dream. The
+      panels were ornamented, here and there, with antique carving, representing
+      over and over again an identical device, being a bare arm, holding the
+      torn-off head of some savage beast, which the stranger could not know by
+      species, any more than Agassiz himself could have assigned its type or
+      kindred; because it was that kind of natural history of which heraldry
+      alone keeps the menagerie. But it was just as familiar to his recollection
+      as that of the cat which he had fondled in his childhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was likewise a mantelpiece, heavily wrought of oak, quite black with
+      smoke and age, in the centre of which, more prominent than elsewhere, was
+      that same leopard&rsquo;s head that seemed to thrust itself everywhere into
+      sight, as if typifying some great mystery which human nature would never
+      be at rest till it had solved; and below, in a cavernous hollow, there was
+      a smouldering fire of coals; for the genial day had suddenly grown chill,
+      and a shower of rain spattered against the small window-panes, almost at
+      the same time with the struggling sunshine. And over the mantelpiece,
+      where the light of the declining day came strongest from the window, there
+      was a larger and more highly relieved carving of this same device, and
+      underneath it a legend, in Old English letters, which, though his eyes
+      could not precisely trace it at that distance, he knew to be this:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                      &ldquo;Hold hard the Head.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Otherwise the aspect of the room bewildered him by not being known, since
+      these details were so familiar; a narrow precinct it was, with one window
+      full of old-fashioned, diamond-shaped panes of glass, a small desk table,
+      standing on clawed feet; two or three high-backed chairs, on the top of
+      each of which was carved that same crest of the fabulous brute&rsquo;s head,
+      which the carver&rsquo;s fancy seemed to have clutched so strongly that he could
+      not let it go; in another part of the room a very old engraving, rude and
+      strong, representing some ruffled personage, which the stranger only tried
+      to make out with a sort of idle curiosity, because it was strange he
+      should dream so distinctly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very soon it became intolerably irritating that these two dreams, both
+      purposeless, should have mingled and entangled themselves in his mind. He
+      made a nervous and petulant motion, intending to rouse himself fully; and
+      immediately a sharp pang of physical pain took him by surprise, and made
+      him groan aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Immediately there was an almost noiseless step on the floor; and a figure
+      emerged from a deep niche, that looked as if it might once have been an
+      oratory, in ancient times; and the figure, too, might have been supposed
+      to possess the devout and sanctified character of such as knelt in the
+      oratories of ancient times. It was an elderly man, tall, thin, and pale,
+      and wearing a long, dark tunic, and in a peculiar fashion, which&mdash;like
+      almost everything else about him&mdash;the stranger seemed to have a
+      confused remembrance of; this venerable person had a benign and pitiful
+      aspect, and approached the bedside with such good will and evident desire
+      to do the sufferer good, that the latter felt soothed, at least, by his
+      very presence. He lay, a moment, gazing up at the old man&rsquo;s face, without
+      being able to exert himself to say a word, but sensible, as it were, of a
+      mild, soft influence from him, cooling the fever which seemed to burn in
+      his veins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you suffer much pain?&rdquo; asked the old man, gently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None at all,&rdquo; said the stranger; but again a slight motion caused him to
+      feel a burning twinge in his shoulder. &ldquo;Yes; there was a throb of strange
+      anguish. Why should I feel pain? Where am I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In safety, and with those who desire to be your friends,&rdquo; said the old
+      man. &ldquo;You have met with an accident; but do not inquire about it now.
+      Quiet is what you need.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Still the traveller gazed at him; and the old man&rsquo;s figure seemed to enter
+      into his dream, or delirium, whichever it might be, as if his peaceful
+      presence were but a shadow, so quaint was his address, so unlike real
+      life, in that dark robe, with a velvet skullcap on his head, beneath which
+      his hair made a silvery border; and looking more closely, the stranger saw
+      embroidered on the breast of the tunic that same device, the arm and the
+      leopard&rsquo;s head, which was visible in the carving of the room. Yes; this
+      must still be a dream, which, under the unknown laws which govern such
+      psychical states, had brought out thus vividly figures, devices, words,
+      forgotten since his boyish days. Though of an imaginative tendency, the
+      stranger was nevertheless strongly tenacious of the actual, and had a
+      natural horror at the idea of being seriously at odds, in beliefs,
+      perceptions, conclusions, with the real world about him; so that a tremor
+      ran through him, as if he felt the substance of the world shimmering
+      before his eyes like a mere vaporous consistency.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you real?&rdquo; said he to the antique presence; &ldquo;or a spirit? or a
+      fantasy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man laid his thin, cool palm on the stranger&rsquo;s burning forehead,
+      and smiled benignantly, keeping it there an instant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If flesh and blood are real, I am so,&rdquo; said he; &ldquo;a spirit, too, I may
+      claim to be, made thin by fantasy. Again, do not perplex yourself with
+      such things. To-morrow you may find denser substance in me. Drink this
+      composing draught, and close your eyes to those things that disturb you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your features, too, and your voice,&rdquo; said the stranger, in a resigned
+      tone, as if he were giving up a riddle, the solution of which he could not
+      find, &ldquo;have an image and echo somewhere in my memory. It is all an
+      entanglement. I will drink, and shut my eyes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He drank from a little old-fashioned silver cup, which his venerable
+      guardian presented to his lips; but in so doing he was still perplexed and
+      tremulously disturbed with seeing that same weary old device, the
+      leopard&rsquo;s head, engraved on the side; and shut his eyes to escape it, for
+      it irritated a certain portion of his brain with vague, fanciful, elusive
+      ideas. So he sighed and spoke no more. The medicine, whatever it might be,
+      had the merit, rare in doctor&rsquo;s stuff, of being pleasant to take,
+      assuasive of thirst, and imbued with a hardly perceptible fragrance, that
+      was so ethereal that it also seemed to enter into his dream and modify it.
+      He kept his eyes closed, and fell into a misty state, in which he wondered
+      whether this could be the panacea or medicament which old Doctor Grimshawe
+      used to distil from cobwebs, and of which the fragrance seemed to breathe
+      through all the waste of years since then. He wondered, too, who was this
+      benign, saint-like old man, and where, in what former state of being, he
+      could have known him; to have him thus, as no strange thing, and yet so
+      strange, be attending at his bedside, with all this ancient garniture. But
+      it was best to dismiss all things, he being so weak; to resign himself;
+      all this had happened before, and had passed away, prosperously or
+      unprosperously; it would pass away in this case, likewise; and in the
+      morning whatever might be delusive would have disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The patient [Endnote: 1] had a favorable night, and awoke with a much
+      clearer head, though still considerably feverish and in a state of great
+      exhaustion from loss of blood, which kept down the fever. The events of
+      the preceding day shimmered as it were and shifted illusively in his
+      recollection; nor could he yet account for the situation in which he found
+      himself, the antique chamber, the old man of mediæval garb, nor even for
+      the wound which seemed to have been the occasion of bringing him thither.
+      One moment, so far as he remembered, he had been straying along a solitary
+      footpath, through rich shrubbery, with the antlered deer peeping at him,
+      listening to the lark and the cuckoo; the next, he lay helpless in this
+      oak-panelled chamber, surrounded with objects that appealed to some
+      fantastic shadow of recollection, which could have had no reality.
+      [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To say the truth, the traveller perhaps wilfully kept hold of this strange
+      illusiveness, and kept his thoughts from too harshly analyzing his
+      situation, and solving the riddle in which he found himself involved. In
+      his present weakness, his mind sympathizing with the sinking down of his
+      physical powers, it was delightful to let all go; to relinquish all
+      control, and let himself drift vaguely into whatever region of
+      improbabilities there exists apart from the dull, common plane of life.
+      Weak, stricken down, given over to influences which had taken possession
+      of him during an interval of insensibility, he was no longer responsible;
+      let these delusions, if they were such, linger as long as they would, and
+      depart of their own accord at last. He, meanwhile, would willingly accept
+      the idea that some spell had transported him out of an epoch in which he
+      had led a brief, troubled existence of battle, mental strife, success,
+      failure, all equally feverish and unsatisfactory, into some past century,
+      where the business was to rest,&mdash;to drag on dreamy days, looking at
+      things through half-shut eyes; into a limbo where things were put away,
+      shows of what had once been, now somehow fainted, and still maintaining a
+      sort of half-existence, a serious mockery; a state likely enough to exist
+      just a little apart from the actual world, if we only know how to find our
+      way into it. Scenes and events that had once stained themselves, in deep
+      colors, on the curtain that Time hangs around us, to shut us in from
+      eternity, cannot be quite effaced by the succeeding phantasmagoria, and
+      sometimes, by a palimpsest, show more strongly than they. [Endnote: 3.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the course of the morning, however, he was a little too feelingly made
+      sensible of realities by the visit of a surgeon, who proceeded to examine
+      the wound in his shoulder, removing the bandages which he himself seemed
+      to have put upon this mysterious hurt. The traveller closed his eyes, and
+      submitted to the manipulations of the professional person, painful as they
+      were, assisted by the gentle touch of the old palmer; and there was
+      something in the way in which he resigned himself that met the approbation
+      of the surgeon, in spite of a little fever, and slight delirium too, to
+      judge by his eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A very quiet and well-behaved patient,&rdquo; said he to the palmer. &ldquo;Unless I
+      greatly mistake, he has been under the surgeon&rsquo;s hand for a similar hurt
+      ere now. He has learned under good discipline how to take such a thing
+      easily. Yes, yes; just here is a mark where a bullet went in some time
+      ago,&mdash;three or four years since, when he could have been little more
+      than a boy. A wild fellow this, I doubt.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was an Indian bullet,&rdquo; said the patient, still fancying himself gone
+      astray into the past, &ldquo;shot at me in battle; &lsquo;twas three hundred years
+      hereafter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! he has served in the East Indies,&rdquo; said the surgeon. &ldquo;I thought this
+      sun-burned cheek had taken its hue elsewhere than in England.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The patient did not care to take the trouble which would have been
+      involved in correcting the surgeon&rsquo;s surmise; so he let it pass, and
+      patiently awaited the end of the examination, with only a moan or two,
+      which seemed rather pleasing and desirable than otherwise to the surgeon&rsquo;s
+      ear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has vitality enough for his needs,&rdquo; said he, nodding to the palmer.
+      &ldquo;These groans betoken a good degree of pain; though the young fellow is
+      evidently a self-contained sort of nature, and does not let us know all he
+      feels. It promises well, however; keep him in bed and quiet, and within a
+      day or two we shall see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He wrote a recipe, or two or three, perhaps, (for in those days the
+      medical fraternity had faith in their own art,) and took his leave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The white-bearded palmer withdrew into the half concealment of the oratory
+      which we have already mentioned, and then, putting on a pair of
+      spectacles, betook himself to the perusal of an old folio volume, the
+      leaves of which he turned over so gently that not the slightest sound
+      could possibly disturb the patient. All his manifestations were gentle and
+      soft, but of a simplicity most unlike the feline softness which we are apt
+      to associate with a noiseless tread and movement in the male sex. The
+      sunshine came through the ivy and glimmered upon his great book, however,
+      with an effect which a little disturbed the patient&rsquo;s nerves; besides, he
+      desired to have a fuller view of his benign guardian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you sit nearer the bedside?&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;I wish to look at you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Weakness, the relaxation of nerves, and the state of dependence on
+      another&rsquo;s care&mdash;very long unfelt&mdash;had made him betray what we
+      must call childishness; and it was perceptible in the low half-complaining
+      tone in which he spoke, indicating a consciousness of kindness in the
+      other, a little plaintiveness in himself; of which, the next instant, weak
+      and wandering as he was, he was ashamed, and essayed to express it.
+      [Endnote: 4.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must deem me very poor-spirited,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;not to bear this trifling
+      hurt with a firmer mind. But perhaps it is not entirely that I am so weak,
+      but I feel you to be so benign.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be weak, and be the stronger for it,&rdquo; said the old man, with a grave
+      smile. &ldquo;It is not in the pride of our strength that we are best or wisest.
+      To be made anew, we even must be again a little child, and consent to be
+      enwrapt quietly in the arms of Providence, as a child in its mother&rsquo;s
+      arms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never knew a mother&rsquo;s care,&rdquo; replied the traveller, in a low, regretful
+      tone, being weak to the incoming of all soft feelings, in his present
+      state. &ldquo;Since my boyhood, I have lived among men,&mdash;a life of struggle
+      and hard rivalry. It is good to find myself here in the long past, and in
+      a sheltered harbor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And here he smiled, by way of showing to this old palmer that he saw
+      through the slight infirmity of mind that impelled him to say such things
+      as the above; that he was not its dupe, though he had not strength, just
+      now, to resist its impulse. After this he dozed off softly, and felt
+      through all his sleep some twinges of his wound, bringing him back, as it
+      were, to the conscious surface of the great deep of slumber, into which he
+      might otherwise have sunk. At all such brief intervals, half unclosing his
+      eyes, (like a child, when the mother sits by its bed and he fears that she
+      will steal away if he falls quite asleep, and leave him in the dark
+      solitude,) he still beheld the white-bearded, kindly old man, of saintly
+      aspect, sitting near him, and turning over the pages of his folio volume
+      so softly that not the faintest rustle did it make; the picture at length
+      got so fully into his idea, that he seemed to see it even through his
+      closed eyelids. After a while, however, the slumberous tendency left him
+      more entirely, and, without having been consciously awake, he found
+      himself contemplating the old man, with wide-open eyes. The venerable
+      personage seemed soon to feel his gaze, and, ceasing to look at the folio,
+      he turned his eyes with quiet inquiry to meet those of the stranger.
+      [Endnote: 5.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What great volume is that?&rdquo; asked the latter. [Endnote: 6.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a book of English chronicles,&rdquo; said the old man, &ldquo;mostly relating
+      to the part of the island where you now are, and to times previous to the
+      Stuarts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! it is to you, a contemporary, what reading the newspaper is to other
+      men,&rdquo; said the stranger; then, with a smile of self-reproach, &ldquo;I shall
+      conquer this idle mood. I&rsquo;m not so imbecile as you must think me. But
+      there is something that strangely haunts me,&mdash;where, in what state of
+      being, can I have seen your face before. There is nothing in it I
+      distinctly remember; but some impression, some characteristic, some look,
+      with which I have been long ago familiar haunts me and brings back all old
+      scenes. Do you know me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man smiled. &ldquo;I knew, long ago, a bright and impressible boy,&rdquo; said
+      he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And his name?&rdquo; said the stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was Edward Redclyffe,&rdquo; said the old man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, I see who you are,&rdquo; said the traveller, not too earnestly, but with a
+      soft, gratified feeling, as the riddle thus far solved itself. &ldquo;You are my
+      old kindly instructor. You are Colcord! That is it. I remember you
+      disappeared. You shall tell me, when I am quite myself, what was that
+      mystery,&mdash;and whether it is your real self, or only a part of my
+      dream, and going to vanish when I quite awake. Now I shall sleep and dream
+      more of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      One more waking interval he had that day, and again essayed to enter into
+      conversation with the old man, who had thus strangely again become
+      connected with his life, after having so long vanished from his path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where am I?&rdquo; asked Edward Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the home of misfortune,&rdquo; said Colcord.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! then I have a right to be here!&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;I was born in such a home.
+      Do you remember it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know your story,&rdquo; said Colcord.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; from Doctor Grim,&rdquo; said Edward. &ldquo;People whispered he had made away
+      with you. I never believed it; but finding you here in this strange way,
+      and myself having been shot, perhaps to death, it seems not so strange.
+      Pooh! I wander again, and ought to sleep a little more. And this is the
+      home of misfortune, but not like the squalid place of rage, idiocy,
+      imbecility, drunkenness, where I was born. How many times I have blushed
+      to remember that native home! But not of late! I have struggled; I have
+      fought; I have triumphed. The unknown boy has come to be no
+      undistinguished man! His ancestry, should he ever reveal himself to them,
+      need not blush for the poor foundling.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hush!&rdquo; said the quiet watcher. &ldquo;Your fever burns you. Take this draught,
+      and sleep a little longer.&rdquo; [Endnote: 7.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another day or two found Edward Redclyffe almost a convalescent. The
+      singular lack of impatience that characterized his present mood&mdash;the
+      repose of spirit into which he had lapsed&mdash;had much to do with the
+      favorable progress of his cure. After strife, anxiety, great mental
+      exertion, and excitement of various kinds, which had harassed him ever
+      since he grew to be a man, had come this opportunity of perfect rest;&mdash;this
+      dream in the midst of which he lay, while its magic boundaries involved
+      him, and kept far off the contact of actual life, so that its sounds and
+      tumults seemed remote; its cares could not fret him; its ambitions,
+      objects good or evil, were shut out from him; the electric wires that had
+      connected him with the battery of life were broken for the time, and he
+      did not feel the unquiet influence that kept everybody else in galvanic
+      motion. So, under the benign influence of the old palmer, he lay in
+      slumberous luxury, undisturbed save by some twinges of no intolerable
+      pain; which, however, he almost was glad of, because it made him sensible
+      that this deep luxury of quiet was essential to his cure, however idle it
+      might seem. For the first time since he was a child, he resigned himself
+      not to put a finger to the evolution of his fortune; he determined to
+      accept all things that might happen, good or evil; he would not imagine an
+      event beyond to-day, but would let one spontaneous and half-defined
+      thought loiter after another, through his mind; listen to the spattering
+      shower,&mdash;the puffs of shut-out wind; and look with half-shut eyes at
+      the sunshine glimmering through the ivy-twigs, and illuminating those old
+      devices on the wall; at the gathering twilight; at the dim lamp; at the
+      creeping upward of another day, and with it the lark singing so far away
+      that the thrill of its delicious song could not disturb him with an
+      impulse to awake. Sweet as its carol was, he could almost have been
+      content to miss the lark; sweet and clear, it was too like a fairy
+      trumpet-call, summoning him to awake and struggle again with eager
+      combatants for new victories, the best of which were not worth this deep
+      repose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old palmer did his best to prolong a mood so beneficial to the wounded
+      young man. The surgeon also nodded approval, and attributed this happy
+      state of the patient&rsquo;s mind, and all the physical advantages growing out
+      of it, to his own consummate skill; nor, indeed, was he undeserving of
+      credit, not often to be awarded to medical men, for having done nothing to
+      impede the good which kind Nature was willing to bring about. She was
+      doing the patient more good, indeed, than either the surgeon or the palmer
+      could fully estimate, in taking this opportunity to recreate a mind that
+      had too early known stirring impulse, and that had been worked to a degree
+      beyond what its organization (in some respects singularly delicate) ought
+      to have borne. Once in a long while the weary actors in the headlong drama
+      of life must have such repose or else go mad or die. When the machinery of
+      human life has once been stopped by sickness or other impediment, it often
+      needs an impulse to set it going again, even after it is nearly wound up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it could not last forever. The influx of new life into his being began
+      to have a poignancy that would not let him lie so quietly, lapped in the
+      past, in gone by centuries, and waited on by quiet Age, in the person of
+      the old palmer; he began to feel again that he was young, and must live in
+      the time when his lot was cast. He began to say to himself, that it was
+      not well to be any longer passive, but that he must again take the
+      troublesome burden of his own life on his own shoulders. He thought of
+      this necessity, this duty, throughout one whole day, and determined that
+      on the morrow he would make the first step towards terminating his
+      inaction, which he now began to be half impatient of, at the same time
+      that he clutched it still, for the sake of the deliciousness that it had
+      had.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To-morrow, I hope to be clothed and in my right mind,&rdquo; said he to the old
+      palmer, &ldquo;and very soon I must thank you, with my whole heart, for your
+      kind care, and go. It is a shame that I burden the hospitality of this
+      house so long.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No shame whatever,&rdquo; replied the old man, &ldquo;but, on the contrary, the
+      fittest thing that could have chanced. You are dependent on no private
+      benevolence, nor on the good offices of any man now living, or who has
+      lived these last three hundred years. This ancient establishment is for
+      the support of poverty, misfortune, and age, and, according to the word of
+      the founder, it serves him:&mdash;he was indebted to the beneficiaries,
+      not they to him, for, in return for his temporal bequests, he asked their
+      prayers for his soul&rsquo;s welfare. He needed them, could they avail him; for
+      this ponderous structure was built upon the founder&rsquo;s mortal
+      transgressions, and even, I may say, out of the actual substance of them.
+      Sir Edward Redclyffe was a fierce fighter in the Wars of the Roses, and
+      amassed much wealth by spoil, rapine, confiscation, and all violent and
+      evil ways that those disturbed times opened to him; and on his death-bed
+      he founded this Hospital for twelve men, who should be able to prove
+      kindred with his race, to dwell here with a stipend, and pray for him; and
+      likewise provision for a sick stranger, until he should be able to go on
+      his way again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall pray for him willingly,&rdquo; said Edward, moved by the pity which
+      awaits any softened state of our natures to steal into our hearts. &ldquo;Though
+      no Catholic, I will pray for his soul. And that is his crest which you
+      wear embroidered on his garment?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is,&rdquo; said the old man. &ldquo;You will see it carved, painted, embroidered,
+      everywhere about the establishment; but let us give it the better and more
+      reasonable interpretation;&mdash;not that he sought to proclaim his own
+      pride of ancestry and race, but to acknowledge his sins the more
+      manifestly, by stamping the emblem of his race on this structure of his
+      penitence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And are you,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, impressed anew by the quiet dignity of the
+      venerable speaker, &ldquo;in authority in the establishment?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A simple beneficiary of the charity,&rdquo; said the palmer; &ldquo;one of the twelve
+      poor brethren and kinsmen of the founder. Slighter proofs of kindred are
+      now of necessity received, since, in the natural course of things, the
+      race has long been growing scarce. But I had it in my power to make out a
+      sufficient claim.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Singular,&rdquo; exclaimed Redclyffe, &ldquo;you being an American!&rdquo; [Endnote: 8.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You remember me, then,&rdquo; said the old man, quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From the first,&rdquo; said Edward, &ldquo;although your image took the fantastic
+      aspect of the bewilderment in which I then was; and now that I am in
+      clearer state of mind, it seems yet stranger that you should be here. We
+      two children thought you translated, and people, I remember, whispered
+      dark hints about your fate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was nothing wonderful in my disappearance,&rdquo; said the old man.
+      &ldquo;There were causes, an impulse, an intuition, that made me feel, one
+      particular night, that I might meet harm, whether from myself or others,
+      by remaining in a place with which I had the most casual connection. But I
+      never, so long as I remained in America, quite lost sight of you; and
+      Doctor Grimshawe, before his death, had knowledge of where I was, and gave
+      me in charge a duty which I faithfully endeavored to perform. Singular man
+      that he was! much evil, much good in him. Both, it may be, will live after
+      him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe, when the conversation had reached this point, felt a vast
+      desire to reveal to the old man all that the grim Doctor had instilled
+      into his childish mind, all that he himself, in subsequent years, had
+      wrought more definitely out of it, all his accompanying doubts respecting
+      the secret of his birth and some supposed claims which he might assert,
+      and which, only half acknowledging the purpose, had availed to bring him,
+      a republican, hither as to an ancestral centre. He even fancied that the
+      benign old man seemed to expect and await such a confidence; but that very
+      idea contributed to make it impossible for him to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Another time,&rdquo; he said to himself. &ldquo;Perhaps never. It is a fantastic
+      folly; and with what the workhouse foundling has since achieved, he would
+      give up too many hopes to take the representation of a mouldy old English
+      family.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I find my head still very weak,&rdquo; said he, by way of cutting short the
+      conversation. &ldquo;I must try to sleep again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The next day he called for his clothes, and, with the assistance of the
+      pensioner, managed to be dressed, and awaited the arrival of the surgeon,
+      sitting in a great easy-chair, with not much except his pale, thin cheeks,
+      dark, thoughtful eyes, and his arm in a sling, to show the pain and danger
+      through which he had passed. Soon after the departure of the professional
+      gentleman, a step somewhat louder than ordinary was heard on the
+      staircase, and in the corridor leading to the sick-chamber; the step (as
+      Redclyffe&rsquo;s perceptions, nicely attempered by his weakness, assured him)
+      of a man in perfect and robust health, and of station and authority. A
+      moment afterwards, a gentleman of middle age, or a little beyond, appeared
+      in the doorway, in a dress that seemed clerical, yet not very decidedly
+      so; he had a frank, kindly, yet authoritative bearing, and a face that
+      might almost be said to beam with geniality, when, as now, the benevolence
+      of his nature was aroused and ready to express itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My friend,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;Doctor Portingale tells me you are much better; and
+      I am most happy to hear it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something brusque and unceremonious in his manner, that a little
+      jarred against Redclyffe&rsquo;s sensitiveness, which had become morbid in
+      sympathy with his weakness. He felt that the new-comer had not probably
+      the right idea as to his own position in life; he was addressing him most
+      kindly, indeed, but as an inferior.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am much better, sir,&rdquo; he replied, gravely, and with reserve; &ldquo;so nearly
+      well, that I shall very soon be able to bid farewell to my kind nurse
+      here, and to this ancient establishment, to which I owe so much.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The visitor seemed struck by Mr. Redclyffe&rsquo;s tone, and finely modulated
+      voice, and glanced at his face, and then over his dress and figure, as if
+      to gather from them some reliable data as to his station.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am the Warden of this Hospital,&rdquo; said he, with not less benignity than
+      heretofore, and greater courtesy; &ldquo;and, in that capacity, must consider
+      you under my care,&mdash;as my guest, in fact,&mdash;although, owing to my
+      casual absence, one of the brethren of the house has been the active
+      instrument in attending you. I am most happy to find you so far recovered.
+      Do you feel yourself in a condition to give any account of the accident
+      which has befallen you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will be a very unsatisfactory one, at best,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, trying to
+      discover some definite point in his misty reminiscences. &ldquo;I am a stranger
+      to this country, and was on a pedestrian tour with the purpose of making
+      myself acquainted with the aspects of English scenery and life. I had
+      turned into a footpath, being told that it would lead me within view of an
+      old Hall, which, from certain early associations, I was very desirous of
+      seeing. I think I went astray; at all events, the path became indistinct;
+      and, so far as I can recollect, I had just turned to retrace my steps,&mdash;in
+      fact, that is the last thing in my memory.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You had almost fallen a sacrifice,&rdquo; said the Warden, &ldquo;to the old
+      preference which our English gentry have inherited from their Norman
+      ancestry, of game to man. You had come unintentionally as an intruder into
+      a rich preserve much haunted by poachers, and exposed yourself to the
+      deadly mark of a spring-gun, which had not the wit to distinguish between
+      a harmless traveller and a poacher. At least, such is our conclusion; for
+      our old friend here, (who luckily for you is a great rambler in the
+      woods,) when the report drew him to the spot, found you insensible, and
+      the gun discharged.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A gun has so little discretion,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, smiling, &ldquo;that it seems
+      a pity to trust entirely to its judgment, in a matter of life and death.
+      But, to confess the truth, I had come this morning to the suspicion that
+      there was a direct human agency in the matter; for I find missing a little
+      pocket-book which I carried.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then,&rdquo; said the Warden, &ldquo;that certainly gives a new aspect to the affair.
+      Was it of value?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of none whatever,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;merely containing pencil memoranda,
+      and notes of a traveller&rsquo;s little expenses. I had papers about me of far
+      more value, and a moderate sum of money, a letter of credit, which have
+      escaped. I do not, however, feel inclined, on such grounds, to transfer
+      the guilt decidedly from the spring-gun to any more responsible criminal;
+      for it is very possible that the pocket-book, being carelessly carried,
+      might have been lost on the way. I had not used it since the preceding
+      day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Much more probable, indeed,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;The discharged gun is
+      strong evidence against itself. Mr. Colcord,&rdquo; continued he, raising his
+      voice, &ldquo;how long was the interval between the discharge of the gun and
+      your arrival on the spot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Five minutes, or less,&rdquo; said the old man, &ldquo;for I was not far off, and
+      made what haste I could, it being borne in on my spirit that mischief was
+      abroad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you hear two reports?&rdquo; asked the Warden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only one,&rdquo; replied Colcord.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a plain case against the spring-gun,&rdquo; said the Warden; &ldquo;and, as you
+      tell me you are a stranger, I trust you will not suppose that our peaceful
+      English woods and parks are the haunt of banditti. We must try to give you
+      a better idea of us. May I ask, are you an American, and recently come
+      among us?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe a letter of credit is considered as decisive as most modes of
+      introduction,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, feeling that the good Warden was desirous
+      of knowing with some precision who and what he was, and that, in the
+      circumstances, he had a right to such knowledge. &ldquo;Here is mine, on a
+      respectable house in London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Warden took it, and glanced it over with a slight apologetic bow; it
+      was a credit for a handsome amount in favor of the Honorable Edward
+      Redclyffe, a title that did not fail to impress the Englishman rather
+      favorably towards his new acquaintance, although he happened to know
+      something of their abundance, even so early in the republic, among the men
+      branded sons of equality. But, at all events, it showed no ordinary
+      ability and energy for so young a man to have held such position as this
+      title denoted in the fiercely contested political struggles of the new
+      democracy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know, Mr. Redclyffe, that this name is familiar to us,
+      hereabouts?&rdquo; asked he, with a kindly bow and recognition,&mdash;&ldquo;that it
+      is in fact the principal name in this neighborhood,&mdash;that a family of
+      your name still possesses Braithwaite Hall, and that this very Hospital,
+      where you have happily found shelter, was founded by former
+      representatives of your name? Perhaps you count yourself among their
+      kindred.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My countrymen are apt to advance claims to kinship with distinguished
+      English families on such slight grounds as to make it ridiculous,&rdquo; said
+      Redclyffe, coloring. &ldquo;I should not choose to follow so absurd an example.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, well, perhaps not,&rdquo; said the Warden, laughing frankly. &ldquo;I have been
+      amongst your republicans myself, a long while ago, and saw that your
+      countrymen have no adequate idea of the sacredness of pedigrees, and
+      heraldic distinctions, and would change their own names at pleasure, and
+      vaunt kindred with an English duke on the strength of the assumed one. But
+      I am happy to meet an American gentleman who looks upon this matter as
+      Englishmen necessarily must. I met with great kindness in your country,
+      Mr. Redclyffe, and shall be truly happy if you will allow me an
+      opportunity of returning some small part of the obligation. You are now in
+      a condition for removal to my own quarters, across the quadrangle. I will
+      give orders to prepare an apartment, and you must transfer yourself there
+      by dinner-time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With this hospitable proposal, so decisively expressed, the Warden took
+      his leave; and Edward Redclyffe had hardly yet recovered sufficient
+      independent force to reject an invitation so put, even were he inclined;
+      but, in truth, the proposal suited well with his wishes, such as they
+      were, and was, moreover, backed, it is singular to say, by another of
+      those dreamlike recognitions which had so perplexed him ever since he
+      found himself in the Hospital. In some previous state of being, the Warden
+      and he had talked together before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the Warden&rsquo;s name?&rdquo; he inquired of the old pensioner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hammond,&rdquo; said the old man; &ldquo;he is a kinsman of the Redclyffe family
+      himself, a man of fortune, and spends more than the income of his
+      wardenship in beautifying and keeping up the glory of the establishment.
+      He takes great pride in it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And he has been in America,&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;How strange! I knew him
+      there. Never was anything so singular as the discovery of old
+      acquaintances where I had reason to suppose myself unknowing and unknown.
+      Unless dear Doctor Grim, or dear little Elsie, were to start up and greet
+      me, I know not what may chance next.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe took up his quarters in the Warden&rsquo;s house the next day, and was
+      installed in an apartment that made a picture, such as he had not before
+      seen, of English household comfort. He was thus established under the good
+      Warden&rsquo;s roof, and, being very attractive of most people&rsquo;s sympathies,
+      soon began to grow greatly in favor with that kindly personage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Edward Redclyffe removed from the old pensioner&rsquo;s narrow quarters to
+      the far ampler accommodations of the Warden&rsquo;s house, the latter gentleman
+      was taking his morning exercise on horseback. A servant, however, in a
+      grave livery, ushered him to an apartment, where the new guest was
+      surprised to see some luggage which two or three days before Edward had
+      ordered from London, on finding that his stay in this part of the country
+      was likely to be much longer than he had originally contemplated. The
+      sight of these things&mdash;the sense which they conveyed that he was an
+      expected and welcome guest&mdash;tended to raise the spirits of the
+      solitary wanderer, and made him.... [Endnote: 1.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Warden&rsquo;s abode was an original part of the ancient establishment,
+      being an entire side of the quadrangle which the whole edifice surrounded;
+      and for the establishment of a bachelor (which was his new friend&rsquo;s
+      condition), it seemed to Edward Redclyffe abundantly spacious and enviably
+      comfortable. His own chamber had a grave, rich depth, as it were, of
+      serene and time-long garniture, for purposes of repose, convenience, daily
+      and nightly comfort, that it was soothing even to look at. Long
+      accustomed, as Redclyffe had been, to the hardy and rude accommodations,
+      if so they were to be called, of log huts and hasty, mud-built houses in
+      the Western States of America, life, its daily habits, its passing
+      accommodations, seemed to assume an importance, under these aspects, which
+      it had not worn before; those deep downy beds, those antique chairs, the
+      heavy carpet, the tester and curtains, the stateliness of the old room,&mdash;they
+      had a charm as compared with the thin preparation of a forester&rsquo;s
+      bedchamber, such as Redclyffe had chiefly known them, in the ruder parts
+      of the country, that really seemed to give a more substantial value to
+      life; so much pains had been taken with its modes and appliances, that it
+      looked more solid than before. Nevertheless, there was something ghostly
+      in that stately curtained bed, with the deep gloom within its drapery, so
+      ancient as it was; and suggestive of slumberers there who had long since
+      slumbered elsewhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old servant, whose grave, circumspect courtesy was a matter quite
+      beyond Redclyffe&rsquo;s experience, soon knocked at the chamber door, and
+      suggested that the guest might desire to await the Warden&rsquo;s arrival in the
+      library, which was the customary sitting-room. Redclyffe assenting, he was
+      ushered into a spacious apartment, lighted by various Gothic windows,
+      surrounded with old oaken cases, in which were ranged volumes, most or
+      many of which seemed to be coeval with the foundation of the hospital; and
+      opening one of them, Redclyffe saw for the first time in his life
+      [Endnote: 2] a genuine book-worm, that ancient form of creature living
+      upon literature; it had gnawed a circular hole, penetrating through
+      perhaps a score of pages of the seldom opened volume, and was still at his
+      musty feast. There was a fragrance of old learning in this ancient
+      library; a soothing influence, as the American felt, of time-honored
+      ideas, where the strife, novelties, uneasy agitating conflict, attrition
+      of unsettled theories, fresh-springing thought, did not attain a foothold;
+      a good place to spend a life which should not be agitated with the
+      disturbing element; so quiet, so peaceful; how slowly, with how little
+      wear, would the years pass here! How unlike what he had hitherto known,
+      and was destined to know,&mdash;the quick, violent struggle of his mother
+      country, which had traced lines in his young brow already. How much would
+      be saved by taking his former existence, not as dealing with things yet
+      malleable, but with fossils, things that had had their life, and now were
+      unchangeable, and revered, here!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At one end of this large room there was a bowed window, the space near
+      which was curtained off from the rest of the library, and, the window
+      being filled with painted glass (most of which seemed old, though there
+      were insertions evidently of modern and much inferior handiwork), there
+      was a rich gloom of light, or you might call it a rich glow, according to
+      your mood of mind. Redclyffe soon perceived that this curtained recess was
+      the especial study of his friend, the Warden, and as such was provided
+      with all that modern times had contrived for making an enjoyment out of
+      the perusal of old books; a study table, with every convenience of
+      multifarious devices, a great inkstand, pens; a luxurious study chair,
+      where thought [Endnote: 3] upon. To say the truth, there was not, in this
+      retired and thoughtful nook, anything that indicated to Redclyffe that the
+      Warden had been recently engaged in consultation of learned authorities,&mdash;or
+      in abstract labor, whether moral, metaphysical or historic; there was a
+      volume of translations of Mother Goose&rsquo;s Melodies into Greek and Latin,
+      printed for private circulation, and with the Warden&rsquo;s name on the
+      title-page; a London newspaper of the preceding day; Lillebullero, Chevy
+      Chase, and the old political ballads; and, what a little amused Redclyffe,
+      the three volumes of a novel from a circulating library; so that Redclyffe
+      came to the conclusion that the good Warden, like many educated men, whose
+      early scholastic propensities are backed up by the best of opportunities,
+      and all desirable facilities and surroundings, still contented himself
+      with gathering a flower or two, instead of attempting the hard toil
+      requisite to raise a crop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must not be omitted, that there was a fragrance in the room, which,
+      unlike as the scene was, brought back, through so many years, to
+      Redclyffe&rsquo;s mind a most vivid remembrance of poor old Doctor Grim&rsquo;s
+      squalid chamber, with his wild, bearded presence in the midst of it,
+      puffing his everlasting cloud; for here was the same smell of tobacco, and
+      on the mantel-piece of a chimney lay a German pipe, and an old silver
+      tobacco-box into which was wrought the leopard&rsquo;s head and the inscription
+      in black letter. The Warden had evidently availed himself of one of the
+      chief bachelor sources of comfort. Redclyffe, whose destiny had hitherto,
+      and up to a very recent period, been to pass a feverishly active life, was
+      greatly impressed by all these tokens of learned ease,&mdash;a degree of
+      self-indulgence combined with duties enough to quiet an otherwise uneasy
+      conscience,&mdash;by the consideration that this pensioner acted a good
+      part in a world where no one is entitled to be an unprofitable laborer. He
+      thought within himself, that his prospects in his own galvanized country,
+      that seemed to him, a few years since, to offer such a career for an
+      adventurous young man, conscious of motive power, had nothing so enticing
+      as such a nook as this,&mdash;a quiet recess of unchangeable old time,
+      around which the turbulent tide now eddied and rushed, but could not
+      disturb it. Here, to be sure, hope, love, ambition, came not, progress
+      came not; but here was what, just now, the early wearied American could
+      appreciate better than aught else,&mdash;here was rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fantasy took Edward to imitate the useful labors of the learned
+      Warden, and to make trial whether his own classical condition&mdash;the
+      results of Doctor Grim&rsquo;s tuition, and subsequently that of an American
+      College&mdash;had utterly deserted him, by attempting a translation of a
+      few verses of Yankee Doodle; and he was making hopeful progress when the
+      Warden came in fresh and rosy from a morning&rsquo;s ride in a keen east wind.
+      He shook hands heartily with his guest, and, though by no means frigid at
+      their former interview, seemed to have developed at once into a kindlier
+      man, now that he had suffered the stranger to cross his threshold, and had
+      thus made himself responsible for his comfort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall take it greatly amiss,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;if you do not pick up fast
+      under my roof, and gather a little English ruddiness, moreover, in the
+      walks and rides that I mean to take you. Your countrymen, as I saw them,
+      are a sallow set; but I think you must have English blood enough in your
+      veins to eke out a ruddy tint, with the help of good English beef and ale,
+      and daily draughts of wholesome light and air.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My cheeks would not have been so very pale,&rdquo; said Edward, laughing, &ldquo;if
+      an English shot had not deprived me of a good deal of my American blood.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only follow my guidance,&rdquo; said the Warden, &ldquo;and I assure you you shall
+      have back whatever blood we have deprived you of, together with an
+      addition. It is now luncheon-time, and we will begin the process of
+      replenishing your veins.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So they went into a refectory, where were spread upon the board what might
+      have seemed a goodly dinner to most Americans; though for this Englishman
+      it was but a by-incident, a slight refreshment, to enable him to pass the
+      midway stage of life. It is an excellent thing to see the faith of a
+      hearty Englishman in his own stomach, and how well that kindly organ
+      repays his trust; with what devout assimilation he takes to himself his
+      kindred beef, loving it, believing in it, making a good use of it, and
+      without any qualms of conscience or prescience as to the result. They
+      surely eat twice as much as we; and probably because of their undoubted
+      faith it never does them any harm. Dyspepsia is merely a superstition with
+      us. If we could cease to believe in its existence, it would exist no more.
+      Redclyffe, eating little himself, his wound compelling him to be cautious
+      as to his diet, was secretly delighted to see what sweets the Warden found
+      in a cold round of beef, in a pigeon pie, and a cut or two of Yorkshire
+      ham; not that he was ravenous, but that his stomach was so healthy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You eat little, my friend,&rdquo; said the Warden, pouring out a glass of
+      sherry for Redclyffe, and another for himself. &ldquo;But you are right, in such
+      a predicament as yours. Spare your stomach while you are weakly, and it
+      will help you when you are strong This, now, is the most enjoyable meal of
+      the day with me. You will not see me play such a knife and fork at dinner;
+      though there too, especially if I have ridden out in the afternoon, I do
+      pretty well. But, come now, if (like most of your countrymen, as I have
+      heard) you are a lover of the weed, I can offer you some as delicate
+      Latakia as you are likely to find in England.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I lack that claim upon your kindness, I am sorry to say,&rdquo; replied
+      Redclyffe. &ldquo;I am not a good smoker, though I have occasionally taken a
+      cigar at need.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, when you find yourself growing old, and especially if you chance to
+      be a bachelor, I advise you to cultivate the habit,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;A
+      wife is the only real obstacle or objection to a pipe; they can seldom be
+      thoroughly reconciled, and therefore it is well for a man to consider,
+      beforehand, which of the two he can best dispense with. I know not how it
+      might have been once, had the conflicting claim of these two rivals ever
+      been fairly presented to me; but I now should be at no loss to choose the
+      pipe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They returned to the study; and while the Warden took his pipe, Redclyffe,
+      considering that, as the guest of this hospitable Englishman, he had no
+      right to continue a stranger, thought it fit to make known to him who he
+      was, and his condition, plans, and purposes. He represented himself as
+      having been liberally educated, bred to the law, but (to his misfortune)
+      having turned aside from that profession to engage in politics. In this
+      pursuit, indeed, his success wore a flattering outside; for he had become
+      distinguished, and, though so young, a leader, locally at least, in the
+      party which he had adopted. He had been, for a biennial term, a member of
+      Congress, after winning some distinction in the legislature of his native
+      State; but some one of those fitful changes to which American politics are
+      peculiarly liable had thrown him out, in his candidacy for his second
+      term; and the virulence of party animosity, the abusiveness of the press,
+      had acted so much upon a disposition naturally somewhat too sensitive for
+      the career which he had undertaken, that he had resolved, being now freed
+      from legislative cares, to seize the opportunity for a visit to England,
+      whither he was drawn by feelings which every educated and impressible
+      American feels, in a degree scarcely conceivable by the English
+      themselves. And being here (but he had already too much experience of
+      English self-sufficiency to confess so much) he began to feel the deep
+      yearning which a sensitive American&mdash;his mind full of English
+      thoughts, his imagination of English poetry, his heart of English
+      character and sentiment&mdash;cannot fail to be influenced by,&mdash;the
+      yearning of the blood within his veins for that from which it has been
+      estranged; the half-fanciful regret that he should ever have been
+      separated from these woods, these fields, these natural features of
+      scenery, to which his nature was moulded, from the men who are still so
+      like himself, from these habits of life and thought which (though he may
+      not have known them for two centuries) he still perceives to have remained
+      in some mysterious way latent in the depths of his character, and soon to
+      be reassumed, not as a foreigner would do it, but like habits native to
+      him, and only suspended for a season.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This had been Redclyffe&rsquo;s state of feeling ever since he landed in
+      England, and every day seemed to make him more at home; so that it seemed
+      as if he were gradually awakening to a former reality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      After lunch, the Warden showed a good degree of kind anxiety about his
+      guest, and ensconced him in a most comfortable chair in his study, where
+      he gave him his choice of books old and new, and was somewhat surprised,
+      as well as amused, to see that Redclyffe seemed most attracted towards a
+      department of the library filled with books of English antiquities, and
+      genealogies, and heraldry; the two latter, indeed, having the preference
+      over the others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is very remarkable,&rdquo; said he, smiling. &ldquo;By what right or reason, by
+      what logic of character, can you, a democrat, renouncing all advantages of
+      birth,&mdash;neither priding yourself on family, nor seeking to found one,&mdash;how
+      therefore can you care for genealogies, or for this fantastic science of
+      heraldry? Having no antiquities, being a people just made, how can you
+      care for them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear sir,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;I doubt whether the most devoted
+      antiquarian in England ever cares to search for an old thing merely
+      because it is old, as any American just landed on your shores would do.
+      Age is our novelty; therefore it attracts and absorbs us. And as for
+      genealogies, I know not what necessary repulsion there may be between it
+      and democracy. A line of respectable connections, being the harder to
+      preserve where there is nothing in the laws to defend it, is therefore the
+      more precious when we have it really to boast of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;True,&rdquo; said the Warden, &ldquo;when a race keeps itself distinguished among the
+      grimy order of your commonalty, all with equal legal rights to place and
+      eminence as itself, it must needs be because there is a force and efficacy
+      in the blood. I doubt not,&rdquo; he said, looking with the free approval of an
+      elder man at the young man&rsquo;s finely developed face and graceful form,&mdash;&ldquo;I
+      doubt not that you can look back upon a line of ancestry, always shining
+      out from the surrounding obscurity of the mob.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe, though ashamed of himself, could not but feel a paltry
+      confusion and embarrassment, as he thought of his unknown origin, and his
+      advent from the almshouse; coming out of that squalid darkness as if he
+      were a thing that had had a spontaneous birth out of poverty, meanness,
+      petty crime; and here in ancestral England, he felt more keenly than ever
+      before what was his misfortune.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must not let you lie under this impression,&rdquo; said he manfully to the
+      Warden. &ldquo;I have no ancestry; at the very first step my origin is lost in
+      impenetrable obscurity. I only know that but for the aid of a kind friend&mdash;on
+      whose benevolence I seem to have had no claim whatever&mdash;my life would
+      probably have been poor, mean, unenlightened.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, well,&rdquo; said the kind Warden,&mdash;hardly quite feeling, however,
+      the noble sentiment which he expressed,&mdash;&ldquo;it is better to be the
+      first noble illustrator of a name than even the worthy heir of a name that
+      has been noble and famous for a thousand years. The highest pride of some
+      of our peers, who have won their rank by their own force, has been to
+      point to the cottage whence they sprung. Your posterity, at all events,
+      will have the advantage of you,&mdash;they will know their ancestor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe sighed, for there was truly a great deal of the foolish yearning
+      for a connection with the past about him; his imagination had taken this
+      turn, and the very circumstances of his obscure birth gave it a field to
+      exercise itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I advise you,&rdquo; said the Warden, by way of changing the conversation, &ldquo;to
+      look over the excellent history of the county which you are now in. There
+      is no reading better, to my mind, than these country histories; though
+      doubtless a stranger would hardly feel so much interest in them as one
+      whose progenitors, male or female, have strewn their dust over the whole
+      field of which the history treats. This history is a fine specimen of the
+      kind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The work to which Redclyffe&rsquo;s attention was thus drawn was in two large
+      folio volumes, published about thirty years before, bound in calf by some
+      famous artist in that line, illustrated with portraits and views of ruined
+      castles, churches, cathedrals, the seats of nobility and gentry; Roman,
+      British, and Saxon remains, painted windows, oak carvings, and so forth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as for its contents the author ascended for the history of the county
+      as far as into the pre-Roman ages, before Caesar had ever heard of
+      Britain; and brought it down, an ever swelling and increasing tale, to his
+      own days; inclusive of the separate histories, and pedigrees, and
+      hereditary legends, and incidents, of all the principal families. In this
+      latter branch of information, indeed, the work seemed particularly full,
+      and contained every incident that would have worked well into historical
+      romance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye, aye,&rdquo; said the Warden, laughing at some strange incident of this
+      sort which Redclyffe read out to him. &ldquo;My old friend Gibber, the learned
+      author of this work, (he has been dead this score of years, so he will not
+      mind my saying it,) had a little too much the habit of seeking his
+      authorities in the cottage chimney-corners. I mean that an old woman&rsquo;s
+      tale was just about as acceptable to him as a recorded fact; and to say
+      the truth, they are really apt to have ten times the life in them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe saw in the volume a full account of the founding of the
+      Hospital, its regulations and purposes, its edifices; all of which he
+      reserved for future reading, being for the present more attracted by the
+      mouldy gossip of family anecdotes which we have alluded to. Some of these,
+      and not the least singular, referred to the ancient family which had
+      founded the Hospital; and he was attracted by seeing a mention of a Bloody
+      Footstep, which reminded him of the strange old story which good Doctor
+      Grimshawe had related by his New England fireside, in those childish days
+      when Edward dwelt with him by the graveyard, On reading it, however, he
+      found that the English legend, if such it could be called, was far less
+      full and explicit than that of New England. Indeed, it assigned various
+      origins to the Bloody Footstep;&mdash;one being, that it was the stamp of
+      the foot of the Saxon thane, who fought at his own threshold against the
+      assault of the Norman baron, who seized his mansion at the Conquest;
+      another, that it was the imprint of a fugitive who had sought shelter from
+      the lady of the house during the Wars of the Roses, and was dragged out by
+      her husband, and slain on the door-step; still another, that it was the
+      footstep of a Protestant in Bloody Mary&rsquo;s days, who, being sent to prison
+      by the squire of that epoch, had lifted his hands to Heaven, and stamped
+      his foot, in appeal as against the unjust violence with which he was
+      treated, and stamping his foot, it had left the bloody mark. It was hinted
+      too, however, that another version, which out of delicacy to the family
+      the author was reluctant to state, assigned the origin of the Bloody
+      Footstep to so late a period as the wars of the Parliament. And, finally,
+      there was an odious rumor that what was called the Bloody Footstep was
+      nothing miraculous, after all, but most probably a natural reddish stain
+      in the stone door-step; but against this heresy the excellent Dr. Gibber
+      set his face most sturdily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The original legend had made such an impression on Redclyffe&rsquo;s childish
+      fancy, that he became strangely interested in thus discovering it, or
+      something remotely like it, in England, and being brought by such unsought
+      means to reside so near it. Curious about the family to which it had
+      occurred, he proceeded to examine its records, as given in the County
+      History. The name was Redclyffe. Like most English pedigrees, there was an
+      obscurity about a good many of the earlier links; but the line was traced
+      out with reasonable definiteness from the days of Coeur de Lion, and there
+      was said to be a cross-legged ancestor in the village church, who (but the
+      inscription was obliterated) was probably a Redclyffe, and had fought
+      either under the Lion Heart or in the Crusades. It was, in subsequent
+      ages, one of the most distinguished families, though there had been
+      turbulent men in all those turbulent times, hard fighters. In one age, a
+      barony of early creation seemed to have come into the family, and had
+      been, as it were, playing bo-peep with the race for several centuries.
+      Some of them had actually assumed the title; others had given it up for
+      lack of sufficient proof; but still there was such a claim, and up to the
+      time at which this County History was written, it had neither been made
+      out, nor had the hope of doing so been relinquished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have the family,&rdquo; asked Redclyffe of his host, &ldquo;ever yet made out their
+      claim to this title, which has so long been playing the will-of-the-wisp
+      with them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, not yet,&rdquo; said the Warden, puffing out a volume of smoke from his
+      meerschaum, and making it curl up to the ceiling. &ldquo;Their claim has as
+      little substance, in my belief, as yonder vanishing vapor from my pipe.
+      But they still keep up their delusion. I had supposed that the claim would
+      perish with the last squire, who was a childless man,&mdash;at least,
+      without legitimate heirs; but this estate passed to one whom we can
+      scarcely call an Englishman, he being a Catholic, the descendant of
+      forefathers who have lived in Italy since the time of George II., and who
+      is, moreover, a Catholic. We English would not willingly see an ancestral
+      honor in the possession of such a man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there, do you think, a prospect of his success?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have heard so, but hardly believe it,&rdquo; replied the Warden. &ldquo;I remember,
+      some dozen or fifteen years ago, it was given out that some clue had been
+      found to the only piece of evidence that was wanting. It had been said
+      that there was an emigration to your own country, above a hundred years
+      ago, and on account of some family feud; the true heir had gone thither
+      and never returned. Now, the point was to prove the extinction of this
+      branch of the family. But, excuse me, I must pay an official visit to my
+      charge here. Will you accompany me, or continue to pore over the County
+      History?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe felt enough of the elasticity of convalescence to be desirous of
+      accompanying the Warden; and they accordingly crossed the enclosed
+      quadrangle to the entrance of the Hospital portion of the large and
+      intricate structure. It was a building of the early Elizabethan age, a
+      plaster and timber structure, like many houses of that period and much
+      earlier. [Endnote: 1] Around this court stood the building, with the date
+      1437 cut on the front. On each side, a row of gables looked upon the
+      enclosed space, most venerable old gables, with heavy mullioned windows
+      filled with little diamond panes of glass, and opening on lattices. On two
+      sides there was a cloistered walk, under echoing arches, and in the midst
+      a spacious lawn of the greenest and loveliest grass, such as England only
+      can show, and which, there, is of perennial verdure and beauty. In the
+      midst stood a stone statue of a venerable man, wrought in the best of
+      mediæval sculpture, with robe and ruff, and tunic and venerable beard,
+      resting on a staff, and holding what looked like a clasped book in his
+      hand. The English atmosphere, together with the coal smoke, settling down
+      in the space of centuries from the chimneys of the Hospital, had roughened
+      and blackened this venerable piece of sculpture, enclosing it as it were
+      in a superficies of decay; but still (and perhaps the more from these
+      tokens of having stood so long among men) the statue had an aspect of
+      venerable life, and of connection with human life, that made it strongly
+      impressive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the effigy of Sir Edward Redclyffe, the founder of the Hospital,&rdquo;
+       said the Warden. &ldquo;He is a most peaceful and venerable old gentleman in his
+      attire and aspect, as you see; but he was a fierce old fellow in his day,
+      and is said to have founded the Hospital as a means of appeasing Heaven
+      for some particular deed of blood, which he had imposed upon his
+      conscience in the War of the Roses.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;I have just read in the County History that the
+      Bloody Footstep was said to have been imprinted in his time. But what is
+      that thing which he holds in his hand?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a famous heirloom of the Redclyffes,&rdquo; said the Warden, &ldquo;on the
+      possession of which (as long as they did possess it) they prided
+      themselves, it is said, more than on their ancient manor-house. It was a
+      Saxon ornament, which a certain ancestor was said to have had from Harold,
+      the old Saxon king; but if there ever was any such article, it has been
+      missing from the family mansion for two or three hundred years. There is
+      not known to be an antique relic of that description now in existence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I remember having seen such an article,&mdash;yes, precisely of that
+      shape,&rdquo; observed Redclyffe, &ldquo;in the possession of a very dear old friend
+      of mine, when I was a boy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What, in America?&rdquo; exclaimed the Warden. &ldquo;That is very remarkable. The
+      time of its being missed coincides well enough with that of the early
+      settlement of New England. Some Puritan, before his departure, may have
+      thought himself doing God service by filching the old golden gewgaw from
+      the Cavalier; for it was said to be fine, ductile gold.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The circumstances struck Redclyffe with a pleasant wonder; for, indeed,
+      the old statue held the closest possible imitation, in marble, of that
+      strange old glitter of gold which he himself had so often played with in
+      the Doctor&rsquo;s study; [Endnote: 2] so identical, that he could have fancied
+      that he saw the very thing, changed from metal into stone, even with its
+      bruises and other casual marks in it. As he looked at the old statue, his
+      imagination played with it, and his naturally great impressibility half
+      made him imagine that the old face looked at him with a keen, subtile,
+      wary glance, as if acknowledging that it held some secret, but at the same
+      time defying him to find it out. And then again came that visionary
+      feeling that had so often swept over him since he had been an inmate of
+      the Hospital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All over the interior part of the building was carved in stone the
+      leopard&rsquo;s head, with wearisome iteration; as if the founder were anxious
+      to imprint his device so numerously, lest&mdash;when he produced this
+      edifice as his remuneration to Eternal Justice for many sins&mdash;the
+      Omniscient Eye should fail to be reminded that Sir Edward Redclyffe had
+      done it. But, at all events, it seemed to Redclyffe that the ancient
+      knight had purposed a good thing, and in a measurable degree had effected
+      it; for here stood the venerable edifice securely founded, bearing the
+      moss of four hundred years upon it; and though wars, and change of
+      dynasties, and religious change, had swept around it, with seemingly
+      destructive potency, yet here had the lodging, the food, the monastic
+      privileges of the brethren been held secure, and were unchanged by all the
+      altering mariners of the age. The old fellow, somehow or other, seemed to
+      have struck upon an everlasting rock, and founded his pompous charity
+      there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They entered an arched door on the left of the quadrangle, and found
+      themselves hi a dark old hall with oaken beams; to say the truth, it was a
+      barn-like sort of enclosure, and was now used as a sort of rubbish-place
+      for the Hospital, where they stored away old furniture, and where
+      carpenter&rsquo;s work might be done. And yet, as the Warden assured Redclyffe,
+      it was once a hall of state, hung with tapestry, carpeted, for aught he
+      knew, with cloth of gold, and set with rich furniture, and a groaning
+      board in the midst. Here, the hereditary patron of the Hospital had once
+      entertained King James the First, who made a Latin speech on the occasion,
+      a copy of which was still preserved in the archives. On the rafters of
+      this old hall there were cobwebs in such abundance that Redclyffe could
+      not but reflect on the joy which old Doctor Grimshawe would have had in
+      seeing them, and the health to the human race which he would have hoped to
+      collect and distil from them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this great, antique room they crossed the quadrangle and entered the
+      kitchen of the establishment. A hospitable fire was burning there, and
+      there seemed to be a great variety of messes cooking; and the Warden
+      explained to Redclyffe that there was no general table in the Hospital;
+      but the brethren, at their own will and pleasure, either formed themselves
+      into companies or messes, of any convenient size, or enjoyed a solitary
+      meal by themselves, each in their own apartments. There was a goodly
+      choice of simple, but good and enjoyable food, and a sufficient supply of
+      potent ale, brewed in the vats of the Hospital, which, among its other
+      praiseworthy characteristics, was famous for this; having at some epoch
+      presumed to vie with the famous ale of Trinity, in Cambridge, and the
+      Archdeacon of Oxford,&mdash;these having come down to the hospital from a
+      private receipt of Sir Edward&rsquo;s butler, which was now lost in the
+      Redclyffe family; nor would the ungrateful Hospital give up its secret
+      even out of loyalty to its founder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would use my influence with the brewer,&rdquo; said the Warden, on
+      communicating this little fact to Redclyffe; &ldquo;but the present man&mdash;now
+      owner of the estate&mdash;is not worthy to have good ale brewed in his
+      house; having himself no taste for anything but Italian wines, wretched
+      fellow that he is! He might make himself an Englishman if he would take
+      heartily to our ale; and with that end in view, I should be glad to give
+      it him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The kitchen fire blazed warmly, as we have said, and roast and stewed and
+      boiled were in process of cooking, producing a pleasant fume, while great
+      heaps of wheaten loaves were smoking hot from the ovens, and the master
+      cook and his subordinates were in fume and hiss, like beings that were of
+      a fiery element, and, though irritable and scorching, yet were happier
+      here than they could have been in any other situation. The Warden seemed
+      to have an especial interest and delight in this department of the
+      Hospital, and spoke apart to the head cook on the subject (as Redclyffe
+      surmised from what he overheard) of some especial delicacy for his own
+      table that day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This kitchen is a genial place,&rdquo; said he to Redclyffe, as they retired.
+      &ldquo;In the evening, after the cooks have done their work, the brethren have
+      liberty to use it as a sort of common room, and to sit here over their ale
+      till a reasonable bedtime. It would interest you much to make one at such
+      a party; for they have had a varied experience in life, each one for
+      himself, and it would be strange to hear the varied roads by which they
+      have come hither.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; replied Redclyffe, &ldquo;and, I presume, not one of them ever dreamed of
+      coming hither when he started in life. The only one with whom I am
+      acquainted could hardly have expected it, at all events.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is a remarkable man, more so than you may have had an opportunity of
+      knowing,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;I know not his history, for he is not
+      communicative on that subject, and it was only necessary for him to make
+      out his proofs of claim to the charity to the satisfaction of the
+      Curators. But it has often struck me that there must have been strange and
+      striking events in his life,&mdash;though how it could have been without
+      his attracting attention and being known, I cannot say. I have myself
+      often received good counsel from him in the conduct of the Hospital, and
+      the present owner of the Hall seems to have taken him for his counsellor
+      and confidant, being himself strange to English affairs and life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should like to call on him, as a matter of course rather than
+      courtesy,&rdquo; observed Redclyffe, &ldquo;and thank him for his great kindness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They accordingly ascended the dark oaken staircase with its black
+      balustrade, and approached the old man&rsquo;s chamber, the door of which they
+      found open, and in the blurred looking-glass which hung deep within the
+      room Redclyffe was surprised to perceive the young face of a woman, who
+      seemed to be arranging her head-gear, as women are always doing. It was
+      but a moment, and then it vanished like a vision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was not aware,&rdquo; he said, turning to the Warden, &ldquo;that there was a
+      feminine side to this establishment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor is there,&rdquo; said the old bachelor, &ldquo;else it would not have held
+      together so many ages as it has. The establishment has its own wise,
+      monkish regulations; but we cannot prevent the fact, that some of the
+      brethren may have had foolish relations with the other sex at some
+      previous period of their lives. This seems to be the case with our wise
+      old friend of whom we have been speaking,&mdash;whereby he doubtless
+      became both wiser and sadder. If you have seen a female face here, it is
+      that of a relative who resides out of the hospital,&mdash;an excellent
+      young lady, I believe, who has charge of a school.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While he was speaking, the young lady in question passed out, greeting the
+      Warden in a cheerful, respectful way, in which deference to him was well
+      combined with a sense of what was due to herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That,&rdquo; observed the Warden, who had returned her courtesy, with a kindly
+      air betwixt that of gentlemanly courtesy and a superior&rsquo;s acknowledgment,&mdash;&ldquo;that
+      is the relative of our old friend; a young person&mdash;a gentlewoman, I
+      may almost call her&mdash;who teaches a little school in the village here,
+      and keeps her guardian&rsquo;s heart warm, no doubt, with her presence. An
+      excellent young woman, I do believe, and very useful and faithful in her
+      station.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On entering the old palmer&rsquo;s apartment, they found him looking over some
+      ancient papers, yellow and crabbedly written, and on one of them a large
+      old seal, all of which he did up in a bundle and enclosed in a parchment
+      cover, so that, before they were well in the room, the documents were
+      removed from view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Those papers and parchments have a fine old yellow tint, Colcord,&rdquo; said
+      the Warden, &ldquo;very satisfactory to an antiquary.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is nothing in them,&rdquo; said the old man, &ldquo;of general interest. Some
+      old papers they are, which came into my possession by inheritance, and
+      some of them relating to the affairs of a friend of my youth;&mdash;a long
+      past time, and a long past friend,&rdquo; added he, sighing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here is a new friend, at all events,&rdquo; said the kindly Warden, wishing to
+      cheer the old man, &ldquo;who feels himself greatly indebted to you for your
+      care.&rdquo; [Endnote: 1.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There now ensued a conversation between the three, in the course of which
+      reference was made to America, and the Warden&rsquo;s visit there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are so mobile,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you change so speedily, that I suppose
+      there are few external things now that I should recognize. The face of
+      your country changes like one of your own sheets of water, under the
+      influence of sun, cloud, and wind; but I suppose there is a depth below
+      that is seldom effectually stirred. It is a great fault of the country
+      that its sons find it impossible to feel any patriotism for it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not by any means acknowledge that impossibility,&rdquo; responded
+      Redclyffe, with a smile. &ldquo;I certainly feel that sentiment very strongly in
+      my own breast, more especially since I have left America three thousand
+      miles behind me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, it is only the feeling of self-assertion that rises against the
+      self-complacency of the English,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;Nothing else; for what
+      else have you become the subject of this noble weakness of patriotism? You
+      cannot love anything beyond the soil of your own estate; or in your case,
+      if your heart is very large, you may possibly take in, in a quiet sort of
+      way, the whole of New England. What more is possible? How can you feel a
+      heart&rsquo;s love for a mere political arrangement, like your Union? How can
+      you be loyal, where personal attachment&mdash;the lofty and noble and
+      unselfish attachment of a subject to his prince&mdash;is out of the
+      question? where your sovereign is felt to be a mere man like yourselves,
+      whose petty struggles, whose ambition&mdash;mean before it grew to be
+      audacious&mdash;you have watched, and know him to be just the same now as
+      yesterday, and that to-morrow he will be walking unhonored amongst you
+      again? Your system is too bare and meagre for human nature to love, or to
+      endure it long. These stately degrees of society, that have so strong a
+      hold upon us in England, are not to be done away with so lightly as you
+      think. Your experiment is not yet a success by any means; and you will
+      live to see it result otherwise than you think!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is natural for you Englishmen to feel thus,&rdquo; said Redclyffe;
+      &ldquo;although, ever since I set my foot on your shores,&mdash;forgive me, but
+      you set me the example of free speech,&mdash;I have had a feeling of
+      coming change among all that you look upon as so permanent, so
+      everlasting; and though your thoughts dwell fondly on things as they are
+      and have been, there is a deep destruction somewhere in this country, that
+      is inevitably impelling it in the path of my own. But I care not for this.
+      I do aver that I love my country, that I am proud of its institutions,
+      that I have a feeling unknown, probably, to any but a republican, but
+      which is the proudest thing in me, that there is no man above me,&mdash;for
+      my ruler is only myself, in the person of another, whose office I impose
+      upon him,&mdash;nor any below me. If you would understand me, I would tell
+      you of the shame I felt when first, on setting foot in this country, I
+      heard a man speaking of his birth as giving him privileges; saw him
+      looking down on laboring men, as of an inferior race. And what I can never
+      understand, is the pride which you positively seem to feel in having men
+      and classes of men above you, born to privileges which you can never hope
+      to share. It may be a thing to be endured, but surely not one to be
+      absolutely proud of. And yet an Englishman is so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! I see we lack a ground to meet upon,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;We can never
+      truly understand each other. What you have last mentioned is one of our
+      inner mysteries. It is not a thing to be reasoned about, but to be felt,&mdash;to
+      be born within one; and I uphold it to be a generous sentiment, and good
+      for the human heart.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forgive me, sir,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;but I would rather be the poorest and
+      lowest man in America than have that sentiment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it might change your feeling, perhaps,&rdquo; suggested the Warden, &ldquo;if you
+      were one of the privileged class.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dare not say that it would not,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;for I know I have a
+      thousand weaknesses, and have doubtless as many more that I never
+      suspected myself of. But it seems to me at this moment impossible that I
+      should ever have such an ambition, because I have a sense of meanness in
+      not starting fair, in beginning the world with advantages that my fellows
+      have not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really this is not wise,&rdquo; said the Warden, bluntly, &ldquo;How can the start in
+      life be fair for all? Providence arranges it otherwise. Did you yourself,&mdash;a
+      gentleman evidently by birth and education,&mdash;did you start fair in
+      the race of life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe remembered what his birth, or rather what his first recollected
+      place had been, and reddened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In birth, certainly, I had no advantages,&rdquo; said he, and would have
+      explained further but was kept back by invincible reluctance; feeling that
+      the bare fact of his origin in an almshouse would be accepted, while all
+      the inward assurances and imaginations that had reconciled himself to the
+      ugly fact would go for nothing. &ldquo;But there were advantages, very early in
+      life,&rdquo; added he, smiling, &ldquo;which perhaps I ought to have been ashamed to
+      avail myself of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An old cobwebby library,&mdash;an old dwelling by a graveyard,&mdash;an
+      old Doctor, busied with his own fantasies, and entangled in his own
+      cobwebs,&mdash;and a little girl for a playmate: these were things that
+      you might lawfully avail yourself of,&rdquo; said Colcord, unheard by the
+      Warden, who, thinking the conversation had lasted long enough, had paid a
+      slight passing courtesy to the old man, and was now leaving the room. &ldquo;Do
+      you remain here long?&rdquo; he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If the Warden&rsquo;s hospitality holds out,&rdquo; said the American, &ldquo;I shall be
+      glad; for the place interests me greatly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No wonder,&rdquo; replied Colcord.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And wherefore no wonder?&rdquo; said Redclyffe, impressed with the idea that
+      there was something peculiar in the tone of the old man&rsquo;s remark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because,&rdquo; returned the other quietly, &ldquo;it must be to you especially
+      interesting to see an institution of this kind, whereby one man&rsquo;s
+      benevolence or penitence is made to take the substance and durability of
+      stone, and last for centuries; whereas, in America, the solemn decrees and
+      resolutions of millions melt away like vapor, and everything shifts like
+      the pomp of sunset clouds; though it may be as pompous as they. Heaven
+      intended the past as a foundation for the present, to keep it from
+      vibrating and being blown away with every breeze.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;I would not see in my country what I see
+      elsewhere,&mdash;the Past hanging like a mill-stone round a country&rsquo;s
+      neck, or encrusted in stony layers over the living form; so that, to all
+      intents and purposes, it is dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Colcord, &ldquo;we are only talking of the Hospital. You will find
+      no more interesting place anywhere. Stay amongst us; this is the very
+      heart of England, and if you wish to know the fatherland,&mdash;the place
+      whence you sprung,&mdash;this is the very spot!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again Redclyffe was struck with the impression that there was something
+      marked, something individually addressed to himself, in the old man&rsquo;s
+      words; at any rate, it appealed to that primal imaginative vein in him
+      which had so often, in his own country, allowed itself to dream over the
+      possibilities of his birth. He knew that the feeling was a vague and idle
+      one; but yet, just at this time, a convalescent, with a little play moment
+      in what had heretofore been a turbulent life, he felt an inclination to
+      follow out this dream, and let it sport with him, and by and by to awake
+      to realities, refreshed by a season of unreality. At a firmer and stronger
+      period of his life, though Redclyffe might have indulged his imagination
+      with these dreams, yet he would not have let them interfere with his
+      course of action; but having come hither in utter weariness of active
+      life, it seemed just the thing for him to do,&mdash;just the fool&rsquo;s
+      paradise for him to be in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; repeated the old man, looking keenly in his face, &ldquo;you will not
+      leave us yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe returned through the quadrangle to the Warden&rsquo;s house; and there
+      were the brethren, sitting on benches, loitering in the sun, which, though
+      warm for England, seemed scarcely enough to keep these old people warm,
+      even with their cloth robes. They did not seem unhappy; nor yet happy; if
+      they were so, it must be with the mere bliss of existence, a sleepy sense
+      of comfort, and quiet dreaminess about things past, leaving out the things
+      to come,&mdash;of which there was nothing, indeed, in their future, save
+      one day after another, just like this, with loaf and ale, and such
+      substantial comforts, and prayers, and idle days again, gathering by the
+      great kitchen fire, and at last a day when they should not be there, but
+      some other old men in their stead. And Redclyffe wondered whether, in the
+      extremity of age, he himself would like to be one of the brethren of the
+      Leopard&rsquo;s Head. The old men, he was sorry to see, did not seem very genial
+      towards one another; in fact, there appeared to be a secret enjoyment of
+      one another&rsquo;s infirmities, wherefore it was hard to tell, unless that each
+      individual might fancy himself to possess an advantage over his fellow,
+      which he mistook for a positive strength; and so there was sometimes a
+      sardonic smile, when, on rising from his seat, the rheumatism was a little
+      evident in an old fellow&rsquo;s joints; or when the palsy shook another&rsquo;s
+      fingers so that he could barely fill his pipe; or when a cough, the
+      gathered spasmodic trouble of thirty years, fairly convulsed another.
+      Then, any two that happened to be sitting near one another looked into
+      each other&rsquo;s cold eyes, and whispered, or suggested merely by a look (for
+      they were bright to such perceptions), &ldquo;The old fellow will not outlast
+      another winter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Methinks it is not good for old men to be much together. An old man is a
+      beautiful object in his own place, in the midst of a circle of young
+      people, going down in various gradations to infancy, and all looking up to
+      the patriarch with filial reverence, keeping him warm by their own burning
+      youth; giving him the freshness of their thought and feeling, with such
+      natural influx that it seems as if it grew within his heart; while on them
+      he reacts with an influence that sobers, tempers, keeps them down. His
+      wisdom, very probably, is of no great account,&mdash;he cannot fit to any
+      new state of things; but, nevertheless, it works its effect. In such a
+      situation, the old man is kind and genial, mellow, more gentle and
+      generous, and wider-minded than ever before. But if left to himself, or
+      wholly to the society of his contemporaries, the ice gathers about his
+      heart, his hope grows torpid, his love&mdash;having nothing of his own
+      blood to develop it&mdash;grows cold; he becomes selfish, when he has
+      nothing in the present or the future worth caring about in himself; so
+      that, instead of a beautiful object, he is an ugly one, little, mean, and
+      torpid. I suppose one chief reason to be, that unless he has his own race
+      about him he doubts of anybody&rsquo;s love, he feels himself a stranger in the
+      world, and so becomes unamiable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A very few days in the Warden&rsquo;s hospitable mansion produced an excellent
+      effect on Redclyffe&rsquo;s frame; his constitution being naturally excellent,
+      and a flow of cheerful spirits contributing much to restore him to health,
+      especially as the abode in this old place, which would probably have been
+      intolerably dull to most young Englishmen, had for this young American a
+      charm like the freshness of Paradise. In truth it had that charm, and
+      besides it another intangible, evanescent, perplexing charm, full of an
+      airy enjoyment, as if he had been here before. What could it be? It could
+      be only the old, very deepest, inherent nature, which the Englishman, his
+      progenitor, carried over the sea with him, nearly two hundred years
+      before, and which had lain buried all that time under heaps of new things,
+      new customs, new institutions, new snows of winter, new layers of forest
+      leaves, until it seemed dead, and was altogether forgotten as if it had
+      never been; but, now, his return had seemed to dissolve or dig away all
+      this incrustation, and the old English nature awoke all fresh, so that he
+      saw the green grass, the hedgerows, the old structures and old manners,
+      the old clouds, the old raindrops, with a recognition, and yet a newness.
+      Redclyffe had never been so quietly happy as now. He had, as it were, the
+      quietude of the old man about him, and the freshness of his own still
+      youthful years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Warden was evidently very favorably impressed with his Transatlantic
+      guest, and he seemed to be in a constant state of surprise to find an
+      American so agreeable a kind of person.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are just like an Englishman,&rdquo; he sometimes said. &ldquo;Are you quite sure
+      that you were not born on this side of the water?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This is said to be the highest compliment that an Englishman can pay to an
+      American; and doubtless he intends it as such. All the praise and good
+      will that an Englishman ever awards to an American is so far gratifying to
+      the recipient, that it is meant for him individually, and is not to be put
+      down in the slightest degree to the score of any regard to his countrymen
+      generally. So far from this, if an Englishman were to meet the whole
+      thirty millions of Americans, and find each individual of them a pleasant,
+      amiable, well-meaning, and well-mannered sort of fellow, he would
+      acknowledge this honestly in each individual case, but still would speak
+      of the whole nation as a disagreeable people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As regards Redclyffe being precisely like an Englishman, we cannot but
+      think that the good Warden was mistaken. No doubt, there was a common
+      ground; the old progenitor (whose blood, moreover, was mixed with a
+      hundred other streams equally English) was still there, under this young
+      man&rsquo;s shape, but with a vast difference. Climate, sun, cold, heat, soil,
+      institutions, had made a change in him before he was born, and all the
+      life that he had lived since (so unlike any that he could have lived in
+      England) had developed it more strikingly. In manners, I cannot but think
+      that he was better than the generality of Englishmen, and different from
+      the highest-mannered men, though most resembling them. His natural
+      sensitiveness, a tincture of reserve, had been counteracted by the frank
+      mixture with men which his political course had made necessary; he was
+      quicker to feel what was right at the moment, than the Englishman; more
+      alive; he had a finer grain; his look was more aristocratic than that of a
+      thousand Englishmen of good birth and breeding; he had a faculty of
+      assimilating himself to new manners, which, being his most un-English
+      trait, was what perhaps chiefly made the Warden think him so like an
+      Englishman. When an Englishman is a gentleman, to be sure, it is as deep
+      in him as the marrow of his bones, and the deeper you know him, the more
+      you are aware of it, and that generation after generation has contributed
+      to develop and perfect these unpretending manners, which, at first, may
+      have failed to impress you, under his plain, almost homely exterior. An
+      American often gets as good a surface of manners, in his own progress from
+      youth, through the wear and attrition of a successful life, to some high
+      station in middle age; whereas a plebeian Englishman, who rises to eminent
+      station, never does credit to it by his manners. Often you would not know
+      the American ambassador from a duke. This is often merely external; but in
+      Redclyffe, having delicate original traits in his character, it was
+      something more; and, we are bold to say, when our countrymen are
+      developed, or any one class of them, as they ought to be, they will show
+      finer traits than have yet been seen. We have more delicate and quicker
+      sensibilities; nerves more easily impressed; and these are surely
+      requisites for perfect manners; and, moreover, the courtesy that proceeds
+      on the ground of perfect equality is better than that which is a gracious
+      and benignant condescension,&mdash;as is the case with the manners of the
+      aristocracy of England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An American, be it said, seldom turns his best side outermost abroad; and
+      an observer, who has had much opportunity of seeing the figure which they
+      make, in a foreign country, does not so much wonder that there should be
+      severe criticism on their manners as a people. I know not exactly why, but
+      all our imputed peculiarities&mdash;our nasal pronunciation, our
+      ungraceful idioms, our forthputtingness, our uncouth lack of courtesy&mdash;do
+      really seem to exist on a foreign shore; and even, perhaps, to be
+      heightened of malice prepense. The cold, unbelieving eye of Englishmen,
+      expectant of solecisms in manners, contributes to produce the result which
+      it looks for. Then the feeling of hostility and defiance in the American
+      must be allowed for; and partly, too, the real existence of a different
+      code of manners, founded on, and arising from, different institutions; and
+      also certain national peculiarities, which may be intrinsically as good as
+      English peculiarities; but being different, and yet the whole result being
+      just too nearly alike, and, moreover, the English manners having the
+      prestige of long establishment, and furthermore our own manners being in a
+      transition state between those of old monarchies and what is proper to a
+      new republic,&mdash;it necessarily followed that the American, though
+      really a man of refinement and delicacy, is not just the kind of gentleman
+      that the English can fully appreciate. In cases where they do so, their
+      standard being different from ours, they do not always select for their
+      approbation the kind of man or manners whom we should judge the best; we
+      are perhaps apt to be a little too fine, a little too sedulously polished,
+      and of course too conscious of it,&mdash;a deadly social crime, certainly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      To return from this long discussion, the Warden took kindly, as we have
+      said, to Redclyffe, and thought him a miraculously good fellow, to have
+      come from the rude American republic. Hitherto, in the little time that he
+      had been in England, Redclyffe had received civil and even kind treatment
+      from the English with whom he had come casually in contact; but still&mdash;perhaps
+      partly from our Yankee narrowness and reserve&mdash;he had felt, in the
+      closest coming together, as if there were a naked sword between the
+      Englishman and him, as between the Arabian prince in the tale and the
+      princess whom he wedded; he felt as if that would be the case even if he
+      should love an Englishwoman; to such a distance, into such an attitude of
+      self-defence, does English self-complacency and belief in England&rsquo;s
+      superiority throw the stranger. In fact, in a good-natured way, John Bull
+      is always doubling his fist in a stranger&rsquo;s face, and though it be
+      good-natured, it does not always produce the most amiable feeling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The worthy Warden, being an Englishman, had doubtless the same kind of
+      feeling; doubtless, too, he thought ours a poor, distracted country,
+      perhaps prosperous for the moment, but as likely as not to be the scene of
+      anarchy five minutes hence; but being of so genial a nature, when he came
+      to see the amiableness of his young guest, and how deeply he was impressed
+      with England, all prejudice died away, and he loved him like a treasure
+      that he had found for himself, and valued him as if there were something
+      of his own in him. And so the old Warden&rsquo;s residence had never before been
+      so cheery as it was now; his bachelor life passed the more pleasantly with
+      this quiet, vivacious, yet not troublesomely restless spirit beside him,&mdash;this
+      eager, almost childish interest in everything English, and yet this
+      capacity to take independent views of things, and sometimes, it might be,
+      to throw a gleam of light even on things appertaining to England. And so,
+      the better they came to know one another, the greater was their mutual
+      liking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I fear I am getting too strong to burden you much longer,&rdquo; said
+      Redclyffe, this morning. &ldquo;I have no pretence to be a patient now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pooh! nonsense!&rdquo; ejaculated the Warden. &ldquo;It will not be safe to leave you
+      to yourself for at least a month to come. And I have half a dozen
+      excursions in a neighborhood of twenty miles, in which I mean to show you
+      what old England is, in a way that you would never find out for yourself.
+      Do not speak of going. This day, if you find yourself strong enough, you
+      shall go and look at an old village church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With all my heart,&rdquo; said Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They went, accordingly, walking slowly, in consequence of Redclyffe&rsquo;s yet
+      imperfect strength, along the highroad, which was overshadowed with elms,
+      that grew in beautiful shape and luxuriance in that part of England, not
+      with the slender, drooping, picturesque grace of a New England elm, but
+      more luxuriant, fuller of leaves, sturdier in limb. It was a day which the
+      Warden called fine, and which Redclyffe, at home, would have thought to
+      bode rain; though here he had learned that such weather might continue for
+      weeks together, with only a few raindrops all the time. The road was in
+      the finest condition, hard and dry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had not long emerged from the gateway of the Hospital,&mdash;at the
+      venerable front and gables of which Redclyffe turned to look with a
+      feeling as if it were his home,&mdash;when they heard the clatter of hoofs
+      behind them, and a gentleman on horseback rode by, paying a courteous
+      salute to the Warden as he passed. A groom in livery followed at a little
+      distance, and both rode roundly towards the village, whither the Warden
+      and his friend were going.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you observe that man?&rdquo; asked the Warden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;Is he an Englishman?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is a pertinent question,&rdquo; replied the Warden, &ldquo;but I scarcely know
+      how to answer it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In truth, Redclyffe&rsquo;s question had been suggested by the appearance of the
+      mounted gentleman, who was a dark, thin man, with black hair, and a black
+      moustache and pointed beard setting off his sallow face, in which the eyes
+      had a certain pointed steeliness, which did not look English,&mdash;whose
+      eyes, methinks, are usually not so hard as those of Americans or
+      foreigners. Redclyffe, somehow or other, had fancied that these not very
+      pleasant eyes had been fixed in a marked way on himself, a stranger, while
+      at the same time his salute was evidently directed towards the Warden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An Englishman,&mdash;why, no,&rdquo; continued the latter. &ldquo;If you observe, he
+      does not even sit his horse like an Englishman, but in that absurd, stiff
+      continental way, as if a poker should get on horseback. Neither has he an
+      English face, English manners, nor English religion, nor an English heart;
+      nor, to sum up the whole, had he English birth. Nevertheless, as fate
+      would have it, he is the inheritor of a good old English name, a fine
+      patrimonial estate, and a very probable claim to an old English title.
+      This is Lord Braithwaite of Braithwaite Hall, who if he can make his case
+      good (and they say there is good prospect of it) will soon be Lord
+      Hinchbrooke.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hardly know why, but I should be sorry for it,&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;He
+      certainly is not English; and I have an odd sort of sympathy, which makes
+      me unwilling that English honors should be enjoyed by foreigners. This,
+      then, is the gentleman of Italian birth whom you have mentioned to me, and
+      of whom there is a slight mention in the County History.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;There have been three descents of this man&rsquo;s
+      branch in Italy, and only one English mother in all that time. Positively,
+      I do not see an English trait in his face, and as little in his manner.
+      His civility is Italian, such as oftentimes, among his countrymen, has
+      offered a cup of poison to a guest, or insinuated the stab of a stiletto
+      into his heart.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are particularly bitter against this poor man,&rdquo; said Redclyffe,
+      laughing at the Warden&rsquo;s vehemence. &ldquo;His appearance&mdash;and yet he is a
+      handsome man&mdash;is certainly not prepossessing; but unless it be
+      countersigned by something in his actual life, I should hardly think it
+      worth while to condemn him utterly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, well; you can forgive a little English prejudice,&rdquo; said the Warden,
+      a little ashamed. &ldquo;But, in good earnest, the man has few or no good
+      traits, takes no interest in the country, dislikes our sky, our earth, our
+      people, is close and inhospitable, a hard landlord, and whatever may be
+      his good qualities, they are not such as flourish in this soil and
+      climate, or can be appreciated here.&rdquo; [Endnote: 1.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has he children?&rdquo; asked Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They say so,&mdash;a family by an Italian wife, whom some, on the other
+      hand, pronounce to be no wife at all. His son is at a Catholic college in
+      France; his daughter in a convent there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In talk like this they were drawing near the little rustic village of
+      Braithwaite, and saw, above a cloud of foliage, the small, low,
+      battlemented tower, the gray stones of which had probably been laid a
+      little after the Norman conquest. Approaching nearer, they passed a
+      thatched cottage or two, very plain and simple edifices, though
+      interesting to Redclyffe from their antique aspect, which denoted that
+      they were probably older than the settlement of his own country, and might
+      very likely have nursed children who had gone, more than two centuries
+      ago, to found the commonwealth of which he was a citizen. If you
+      considered them in one way, prosaically, they were ugly enough; but then
+      there were the old latticed windows, and there the thatch, which was
+      verdant with leek, and strange weeds, possessing a whole botanical growth.
+      And birds flew in and out, as if they had their homes there. Then came a
+      row of similar cottages, all joined on together, and each with a little
+      garden before it divided from its neighbors by a hedge, now in full
+      verdure. Redclyffe was glad to see some symptoms of natural love of beauty
+      here, for there were plants of box, cut into queer shapes of birds,
+      peacocks, etc., as if year after year had been spent in bringing these
+      vegetable sculptures to perfection. In one of the gardens, moreover, the
+      ingenious inhabitant had spent his leisure in building grotto-work, of
+      which the English are rather ludicrously fond, on their little bits of
+      lawn, and in building a miniature castle of oyster-shells, where were seen
+      turrets, ramparts, a frowning arched gateway, and miniature cannon looking
+      from the embrasures. A pleasanter and better adornment were the homely
+      household flowers, and a pleasant sound, too, was the hum of bees, who had
+      their home in several beehives, and were making their honey among the
+      flowers of the garden, or come from afar, buzzing dreamily through the
+      air, laden with honey that they had found elsewhere. Fruit trees stood
+      erect, or, in some instances, were flattened out against the walls of
+      cottages, looking somewhat like hawks nailed <i>in terrorem</i> against a
+      barn door. The male members of this little community were probably afield,
+      with the exception of one or two half-torpid great-grandsires, who [were]
+      moving rheumatically about the gardens, and some children not yet in
+      breeches, who stared with stolid eyes at the passers-by; but the good
+      dames were busy within doors, where Redclyffe had glimpses of their
+      interior with its pavement of stone flags. Altogether it seemed a
+      comfortable settlement enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you see that child yonder,&rdquo; observed the Warden, &ldquo;creeping away from
+      the door, and displaying a vista of his petticoats as he does so? That
+      sturdy boy is the lineal heir of one of the oldest families in this part
+      of England,&mdash;though now decayed and fallen, as you may judge. So, you
+      see, with all our contrivances to keep up an aristocracy, there still is
+      change forever going on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is something not agreeable, and something otherwise, in the
+      thought,&rdquo; replied Redclyffe. &ldquo;What is the name of the old family, whose
+      representative is in such a case?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Moseby,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;Their family residence stood within three
+      miles of Braithwaite Hall, but was taken down in the last century, and its
+      place supplied by a grand show-place, built by a Birmingham manufacturer,
+      who also originated here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They kept onward from this outskirt of the village, and soon, passing over
+      a little rising ground, and descending now into a hollow came to the new
+      portion of it, clustered around its gray Norman church, one side of the
+      tower of which was covered with ivy, that was carefully kept, the Warden
+      said, from climbing to the battlements, on account of some old prophecy
+      that foretold that the tower would fall, if ever the ivy mantled over its
+      top. Certainly, however, there seemed little likelihood that the square,
+      low mass would fall, unless by external violence, in less than as many
+      ages as it had already stood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe looked at the old tower and little adjoining edifice with an
+      interest that attached itself to every separate, moss-grown stone; but the
+      Warden, like most Englishmen, was at once amazed and wearied with the
+      American&rsquo;s enthusiasm for this spot, which to him was uninteresting for
+      the very reason that made it most interesting to Redclyffe, because it had
+      stood there such a weary while. It was too common an object to excite in
+      his mind, as it did in Redclyffe&rsquo;s, visions of the long ago time when it
+      was founded, when mass was first said there, and the glimmer of torches at
+      the altar was seen through the vista of that broad-browed porch; and of
+      all the procession of villagers that had since gone in and come out during
+      nine hundred years, in their varying costume and fashion, but yet&mdash;and
+      this was the strongest and most thrilling part of the idea&mdash;all, the
+      very oldest of them, bearing a resemblance of feature, the kindred, the
+      family likeness, to those who died yesterday,&mdash;to those who still
+      went thither to worship; and that all the grassy and half-obliterated
+      graves around had held those who bore the same traits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In front of the church was a little green, on which stood a very ancient
+      yew tree, [Endnote: 2] all the heart of which seemed to have been eaten
+      away by time, so that a man could now creep into the trunk, through a wide
+      opening, and, looking upward, see another opening to the sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That tree,&rdquo; observed the Warden, &ldquo;is well worth the notice of such an
+      enthusiastic lover of old things; though I suppose aged trees may be the
+      one antiquity that you do not value, having them by myriads in your
+      primeval forests. But then the interest of this tree consists greatly in
+      what your trees have not,&mdash;in its long connection with men and the
+      goings of men. Some of its companions were made into bows for Harold&rsquo;s
+      archers. This tree is of unreckonable antiquity; so old, that in a record
+      of the time of Edward IV. it is styled the yew tree of Braithwaite Green.
+      That carries it back to Norman times, truly. It was in comparatively
+      modern times when it served as a gallows for one of James II.&lsquo;s
+      bloodthirsty judges to hang his victims on after Monmouth&rsquo;s rebellion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On one side of this yew was a certain structure which Redclyffe did not
+      recognize as anything that he had before seen, but soon guessed its
+      purpose; though, from appearances, it seemed to have been very long since
+      it had served that purpose. It was a ponderous old oaken framework, six or
+      seven feet high, so contrived that a heavy cross-piece shut down over
+      another, leaving two round holes; in short, it was a pair of stocks, in
+      which, I suppose, hundreds of vagrants and petty criminals had sat of old,
+      but which now appeared to be merely a matter of curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This excellent old machine,&rdquo; said the Warden, &ldquo;had been lying in a
+      rubbish chamber of the church tower for at least a century; when the
+      clerk, who is a little of an antiquarian, unearthed it, and I advised him
+      to set it here, where it used to stand;&mdash;not with any idea of its
+      being used (though there is as much need of it now as ever), but that the
+      present age may see what comforts it has lost.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They sat down a few moments on the circular seat, and looked at the pretty
+      scene of this quiet little village, clustered round the old church as a
+      centre; a collection of houses, mostly thatched, though there were one or
+      two, with rather more pretension, that had roofs of red tiles. Some of
+      them were stone cottages, whitewashed, but the larger edifices had timber
+      frames, filled in with brick and plaster, which seemed to have been
+      renewed in patches, and to be a frailer and less durable material than the
+      old oak of their skeletons. They were gabled, with lattice windows, and
+      picturesquely set off with projecting stones, and many little patchwork
+      additions, such as, in the course of generations, the inhabitants had
+      found themselves to need. There was not much commerce, apparently, in this
+      little village, there seeming to be only one shop, with some gingerbread,
+      penny whistles, ballads, and such matters, displayed in the window; and
+      there, too, across the little green, opposite the church, was the village
+      alehouse, with its bench under the low projecting eaves, with a Teniers
+      scene of two wayfaring yeomen drinking a pot of beer and smoking their
+      pipes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With Redclyffe&rsquo;s Yankee feelings, there was something sad to think how the
+      generations had succeeded one another, over and over, in innumerable
+      succession, in this little spot, being born here, living, dying, lying
+      down among their fathers&rsquo; dust, and forthwith getting up again, as it
+      were, and recommencing the same meaningless round, and really bringing
+      nothing to pass; for probably the generation of to-day, in so secluded and
+      motionless a place as this, had few or no ideas in advance of their
+      ancestors of five centuries ago. It seems not worth while that more than
+      one generation of them should have existed. Even in dress, with their
+      smock frocks and breeches, they were just like their fathers. The stirring
+      blood of the new land,&mdash;where no man dwells in his father&rsquo;s house,&mdash;where
+      no man thinks of dying in his birthplace,&mdash;awoke within him, and
+      revolted at the thought; and, as connected with it, revolted at all the
+      hereditary pretensions which, since his stay here, had exercised such an
+      influence over the fanciful part of his nature. In another mood, the
+      village might have seemed a picture of rural peace, which it would have
+      been worth while to give up ambition to enjoy; now, as his warmer impulse
+      stirred, it was a weariness to think of. The new American was stronger in
+      him than the hereditary Englishman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should go mad of it!&rdquo; exclaimed he aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He started up impulsively, to the amazement of his companion, who of
+      course could not comprehend what seemed so to have stung his American
+      friend. As they passed the tree, on the other side of its huge trunk, they
+      saw a young woman, sitting on that side of it, and sketching, apparently,
+      the church tower, with the old Elizabethan vicarage that stood near it,
+      with a gate opening into the churchyard, and much embowered and ivy-hung.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, Miss Cheltenham,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;I am glad to see that you have
+      taken the old church in hand, for it is one of the prettiest rustic
+      churches in England, and as well worthy as any to be engraved on a sheet
+      of note-paper or put into a portfolio. Will you let my friend and me see
+      your sketch?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Warden had made his request with rather more freedom than perhaps he
+      would to a lady whom he considered on a level with himself, though with
+      perfect respect, that being considered; and Redclyffe, looking at the
+      person, saw that it was the same of whose face he had had a glimpse in the
+      looking-glass, in the old palmer&rsquo;s chamber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Doctor Hammond,&rdquo; said the young lady, with a respectful sort of
+      frankness, &ldquo;you must excuse me. I am no good artist, and am but jotting
+      down the old church because I like it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, well, as you please,&rdquo; said the Warden; and whispered aside to
+      Redclyffe, &ldquo;A girl&rsquo;s sketchbook is seldom worth looking at. But now, Miss
+      Cheltenham, I am about to give my American friend here a lecture on
+      gargoyles, and other peculiarities of sacred Gothic architecture; and if
+      you will honor me with your attention, I should be glad to find my
+      audience increased by one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So the young lady arose, and Redclyffe, considering the Warden&rsquo;s allusion
+      to him as a sort of partial introduction, bowed to her, and she responded
+      with a cold, reserved, yet not unpleasant sort of courtesy. They went
+      towards the church porch, and, looking in at the old stone bench on each
+      side of the interior, the Warden showed them the hacks of the swords of
+      the Roundheads, when they took it by storm. Redclyffe, mindful of the old
+      graveyard on the edge of which he had spent his childhood, began to look
+      at this far more antique receptacle, expecting to find there many ancient
+      tombstones, perhaps of contemporaries or predecessors of the founders of
+      his country. In this, however, he was disappointed, at least in a great
+      measure; for the persons buried in the churchyard were probably, for the
+      most part, of a humble rank in life, such as were not so ambitious as to
+      desire a monument of any kind, but were content to let their low
+      earth-mounds subside into the level, where their memory had waxed so faint
+      that none among the survivors could point out the spot, or cared any
+      longer about knowing it; while in other cases, where a monument of red
+      freestone, or even of hewn granite, had been erected, the English climate
+      had forthwith set to work to gnaw away the inscriptions; so that in fifty
+      years&mdash;in a time that would have left an American tombstone as fresh
+      as if just cut&mdash;it was quite impossible to make out the record. Their
+      superiors, meanwhile, were sleeping less enviably in dismal mouldy and
+      dusty vaults, instead of under the daisies. Thus Redclyffe really found
+      less antiquity here, than in the graveyard which might almost be called
+      his natal spot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he said something to this effect, the Warden nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;and, in truth, we have not much need of inscriptions for
+      these poor people. All good families&mdash;every one almost, with any
+      pretensions to respectable station, has his family or individual
+      recognition within the church, or upon its walls; or some of them you see
+      on tombs on the outside. As for our poorer friends here, they are content,
+      as they may well be, to swell and subside, like little billows of
+      mortality, here on the outside.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And for my part,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;if there were anything particularly
+      desirable on either side, I should like best to sleep under this lovely
+      green turf, with the daisies strewn over me by Nature herself, and
+      whatever other homely flowers any friend might choose to add.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And, Doctor Hammond,&rdquo; said the young woman, &ldquo;we see by this gravestone
+      that sometimes a person of humble rank may happen to be commemorated, and
+      that Nature&mdash;in this instance at least&mdash;seems to take especial
+      pains and pleasure to preserve the record.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She indicated a flat gravestone, near the porch, which time had indeed
+      beautified in a singular way, for there was cut deep into it a name and
+      date, in old English characters, very deep it must originally have been;
+      and as if in despair of obliterating it, Time had taken the kindlier
+      method of filling up the letters with moss; so that now, high embossed in
+      loveliest green, was seen the name &ldquo;Richard Oglethorpe 1613&rdquo;;&mdash;green,
+      and flourishing, and beautiful, like the memory of a good man. The
+      inscription originally seemed to have contained some twenty lines, which
+      might have been poetry, or perhaps a prose eulogy, or perhaps the simple
+      record of the buried person&rsquo;s life; but all this, having been done in
+      fainter and smaller letters, was now so far worn away as to be illegible;
+      nor had they ever been deep enough to be made living in moss, like the
+      rest of the inscription.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How tantalizing,&rdquo; remarked Redclyffe, &ldquo;to see the verdant shine of this
+      name, impressed upon us as something remarkable&mdash;and nothing else. I
+      cannot but think that there must be something worth remembering about a
+      man thus distinguished. When two hundred years have taken all these
+      natural pains to illustrate and emblazon &lsquo;Richard Oglethorpe 1613.&rsquo; Ha! I
+      surely recollect that name. It haunts me somehow, as if it had been
+      familiar of old.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And me,&rdquo; said the young lady.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was an old name, hereabouts,&rdquo; observed the Warden, &ldquo;but has been long
+      extinct,&mdash;a cottage name, not a gentleman&rsquo;s. I doubt not that
+      Oglethorpes sleep in many of these undistinguished graves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe did not much attend to what his friend said, his attention being
+      attracted to the tone&mdash;to something in the tone of the young lady,
+      and also to her coincidence in his remark that the name appealed to some
+      early recollection. He had been taxing his memory, to tell him when and
+      how the name had become familiar to him; and he now remembered that it had
+      occurred in the old Doctor&rsquo;s story of the Bloody Footstep, told to him and
+      Elsie, so long ago. [Endnote: 3] To him and Elsie! It struck him&mdash;what
+      if it were possible?&mdash;but he knew it was not&mdash;that the young
+      lady had a remembrance also of the fact, and that she, after so many
+      years, were mingling her thoughts with his. As this fancy recurred to him,
+      he endeavored to get a glimpse of her face, and while he did so she turned
+      it upon him. It was a quick, sensitive face, that did not seem altogether
+      English; he would rather have imagined it American; but at all events he
+      could not recognize it as one that he had seen before, and a thousand
+      fantasies died within him as, in his momentary glance, he took in the
+      volume of its contour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      After the two friends had parted from the young lady, they passed through
+      the village, and entered the park gate of Braithwaite Hall, pursuing a
+      winding road through its beautiful scenery, which realized all that
+      Redclyffe had read or dreamed about the perfect beauty of these sylvan
+      creations, with the clumps of trees, or sylvan oaks, picturesquely
+      disposed. To heighten the charm, they saw a herd of deer reposing, who, on
+      their appearance, rose from their recumbent position, and began to gaze
+      warily at the strangers; then, tossing their horns, they set off on a
+      stampede, but only swept round, and settled down not far from where they
+      were. Redclyffe looked with great interest at these deer, who were at once
+      wild and civilized; retaining a kind of free forest citizenship, while yet
+      they were in some sense subject to man. It seemed as if they were a link
+      between wild nature and tame; as if they could look back, in their long
+      recollections, through a vista, into the times when England&rsquo;s forests were
+      as wild as those of America, though now they were but a degree more
+      removed from domesticity than cattle, and took their food in winter from
+      the hand of man, and in summer reposed upon his lawns. This seemed the
+      last touch of that delightful conquered and regulated wildness, which
+      English art has laid upon the whole growth of English nature, animal or
+      vegetable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is nothing really wild in your whole island,&rdquo; he observed to the
+      Warden. &ldquo;I have a sensation as if somebody knew, and had cultivated and
+      fostered, and set out in its proper place, every tree that grows; as if
+      somebody had patted the heads of your wildest animals and played with
+      them. It is very delightful to me, for the present; and yet, I think, in
+      the course of time, I should feel the need for something genuine, as it
+      were,&mdash;something that had not the touch and breath of man upon it. I
+      suppose even your skies are modified by the modes of human life that are
+      going on beneath it. London skies, of course, are so; but the breath of a
+      great people, to say nothing of its furnace vapors and hearth-smokes, make
+      the sky other than it was a thousand years ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe we English have a feeling like this occasionally,&rdquo; replied the
+      Warden, &ldquo;and it is from that, partly, that we must account for our
+      adventurousness into other regions, especially for our interest in what is
+      wild and new. In your own forests, now, and prairies, I fancy we find a
+      charm that Americans do not. In the sea, too, and therefore we are
+      yachters. For my part, however, I have grown to like Nature a little
+      smoothed down, and enriched; less gaunt and wolfish than she would be if
+      left to herself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; I feel that charm too,&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;But yet life would be slow
+      and heavy, methinks, to see nothing but English parks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Continuing their course through the noble clumps of oaks, they by and by
+      had a vista of the distant hall itself. It was one of the old English
+      timber and plaster houses, many of which are of unknown antiquity; as was
+      the case with a portion of this house, although other portions had been
+      renewed, repaired, or added, within a century. It had, originally, the
+      Warden said, stood all round an enclosed courtyard, like the great houses
+      of the Continent; but now one side of the quadrangle had long been
+      removed, and there was only a front, with two wings; the beams of old oak
+      being picked out with black, and three or four gables in a line forming
+      the front, while the wings seemed to be stone. It was the timber portion
+      that was most ancient. A clock was on the midmost gable, and pointed now
+      towards one o&rsquo;clock. The whole scene impressed Redclyffe, not as striking,
+      but as an abode of ancient peace, where generation after generation of the
+      same family had lived, each making the most of life, because the life of
+      each successive dweller there was eked out with the lives of all who had
+      hitherto lived there, and had in it equally those lives which were to come
+      afterwards; so that there was a rare and successful contrivance for giving
+      length, fulness, body, substance, to this thin and frail matter of human
+      life. And, as life was so rich in comprehensiveness, the dwellers there
+      made the most of it for the present and future, each generation contriving
+      what it could to add to the cosiness, the comfortableness, the grave,
+      solid respectability, the sylvan beauty, of the house with which they
+      seemed to be connected both before and after death. The family had its
+      home there; not merely the individual. Ancient shapes, that had apparently
+      gone to the family tomb, had yet a right by family hearth and in family
+      hall; nor did they come thither cold and shivering, and diffusing dim
+      ghostly terrors, and repulsive shrinkings, and death in life; but in warm,
+      genial attributes, making this life now passing more dense as it were, by
+      adding all the substance of their own to it. Redclyffe could not compare
+      this abode, and the feelings that it aroused, to the houses of his own
+      country; poor tents of a day, inns of a night, where nothing was certain,
+      save that the family of him who built it would not dwell here, even if he
+      himself should have the bliss to die under the roof, which, with absurdest
+      anticipations, he had built for his posterity. Posterity! An American can
+      have none.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All this sort of thing is beautiful; the family institution was beautiful
+      in its day,&rdquo; ejaculated he, aloud, to himself, not to his companion; &ldquo;but
+      it is a thing of the past. It is dying out in England; and as for
+      ourselves, we never had it. Something better will come up; but as for
+      this, it is past.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is a sad thing to say,&rdquo; observed the Warden, by no means
+      comprehending what was passing in his friend&rsquo;s mind. &ldquo;But if you wish to
+      view the interior of the Hall, we will go thither; for, harshly as I have
+      spoken of the owner, I suppose he has English feeling enough to give us
+      lunch and show us the old house of his forefathers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at present, if you please,&rdquo; replied Redclyffe. &ldquo;I am afraid of
+      destroying my delightful visionary idea of the house by coming too near
+      it. Before I leave this part of the country, I should be glad to ramble
+      over the whole of it, but not just now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While Redclyffe was still enjoying the frank hospitality of his new
+      friend, a rather marked event occurred in his life; yet not so important
+      in reality as it seemed to his English friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A large letter was delivered to him, bearing the official seal of the
+      United States, and the indorsement of the State Department; a very
+      important-looking document, which could not but add to the importance of
+      the recipient in the eyes of any Englishman, accustomed as they are to bow
+      down before any seal of government. Redclyffe opened it rather coolly,
+      being rather loath to renew any of his political remembrances, now that he
+      was in peace; or to think of the turmoil of modern and democratic
+      politics, here in this quietude of gone-by ages and customs. The contents,
+      however, took him by surprise; nor did he know whether to be pleased or
+      not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The official package, in short, contained an announcement that he had been
+      appointed by the President, by and with the advice of the Senate, to one
+      of the Continental missions, usually esteemed an object of considerable
+      ambition to any young man in politics; so that, if consistent with his own
+      pleasure, he was now one of the Diplomatic Corps, a Minister, and
+      representative of his country. On first considering the matter, Redclyffe
+      was inclined to doubt whether this honor had been obtained for him
+      altogether by friendly aid, though it did happen to have much in it that
+      might suit his half-formed purpose of remaining long abroad; but with an
+      eye already rendered somewhat oblique by political practice, he suspected
+      that a political rival&mdash;a rival, though of his own party&mdash;had
+      been exerting himself to provide an inducement for Redclyffe to leave the
+      local field to him; while he himself should take advantage of the vacant
+      field, and his rival be thus insidiously, though honorably, laid on the
+      shelf, whence if he should try to remove himself a few years hence the
+      shifting influences of American politics would be likely enough to thwart
+      him; so that, for the sake of being a few years nominally somebody, he
+      might in fine come back to his own country and find himself permanently
+      nobody. But Redclyffe had already sufficiently begun to suspect that he
+      lacked some qualities that a politician ought to have, and without which a
+      political life, whether successful or otherwise, is sure to be a most
+      irksome one: some qualities he lacked, others he had, both almost equally
+      an obstacle. When he communicated the offer, therefore, to his friend, the
+      Warden, it was with the remark that he believed he should accept it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Accept it?&rdquo; cried the Warden, opening his eyes. &ldquo;I should think so,
+      indeed! Why, it puts you above the level of the highest nobility of the
+      Court to which you are accredited; simple republican as you are, it gives
+      you rank with the old blood and birth of Europe. Accept it? By all means;
+      and I will come and see you at your court.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing is more different between England and America,&rdquo; said Redclyffe,
+      &ldquo;than the different way in which the citizen of either country looks at
+      official station. To an Englishman, a commission, of whatever kind,
+      emanating from his sovereign, brings apparently a gratifying sense of
+      honor; to an American, on the contrary, it offers really nothing of the
+      kind. He ceases to be a sovereign,&mdash;an atom of sovereignty, at all
+      events,&mdash;and stoops to be a servant. If I accept this mission,
+      honorable as you think it, I assure you I shall not feel myself quite the
+      man I have hitherto been; although there is no obstacle in the way of
+      party obligations or connections to my taking it, if I please.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not well understand this,&rdquo; quoth the good Warden. &ldquo;It is one of the
+      promises of Scripture to the wise man, that he shall stand before kings,
+      and that this embassy will enable you to do. No man&mdash;no man of your
+      country surely&mdash;is more worthy to do so; so pray accept.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I shall,&rdquo; said Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Much as the Warden had seemed to affectionize Redclyffe hitherto, the
+      latter could not but be sensible, thereafter, of a certain deference in
+      his friend towards him, which he would fain have got rid of, had it been
+      in his power. However, there was still the same heartiness under it all;
+      and after a little he seemed, in some degree, to take Redclyffe&rsquo;s own view
+      of the matter;&mdash;namely, that, being so temporary as these republican
+      distinctions are, they really do not go skin deep, have no reality in
+      them, and that the sterling quality of the man, be it higher or lower, is
+      nowise altered by it;&mdash;an apothegm that is true even of an hereditary
+      nobility, and still more so of our own Honorables and Excellencies.
+      However, the good Warden was glad of his friend&rsquo;s dignity, and perhaps,
+      too, a little glad that this high fortune had befallen one whom he chanced
+      to be entertaining under his roof. As it happened, there was an
+      opportunity which might be taken advantage of to celebrate the occasion;
+      at least, to make it known to the English world so far as the extent of
+      the county. [Endnote: 1.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an hereditary custom for the warden of Braithwaite Hospital, once a
+      year, to give a grand dinner to the nobility and gentry of the
+      neighborhood; and to this end a bequest had been made by one of the former
+      squires or lords of Braithwaite which would of itself suffice to feed
+      forty or fifty Englishmen with reasonable sumptuousness. The present
+      Warden, being a gentleman of private fortune, was accustomed to eke the
+      limited income, devoted for this purpose, with such additions from his own
+      resources as brought the rude and hearty hospitality contemplated by the
+      first founder on a par with modern refinements of gourmandism. The banquet
+      was annually given in the fine old hall where James II. had feasted; and
+      on some of these occasions the Warden&rsquo;s table had been honored with
+      illustrious guests; especially when any of them happened to be wanting an
+      opportunity to come before the public in an after-dinner speech. Just at
+      present there was no occasion of that sort; and the good Warden fancied
+      that he might give considerable <i>éclat</i> to his hereditary feast by
+      bringing forward the young American envoy, a distinguished and eloquent
+      man, to speak on the well-worn topic of the necessity of friendly
+      relations between England and America.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are eloquent, I doubt not, my young friend?&rdquo; inquired he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, no,&rdquo; answered Redclyffe, modestly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, yes, I know it,&rdquo; returned the Warden. &ldquo;If one have all the natural
+      prerequisites of eloquence; a quick sensibility, ready thought, apt
+      expression, a good voice&mdash;and not making its way into the world
+      through your nose either, as they say most of your countrymen&rsquo;s voices do.
+      You shall make the crack speech at my dinner; and so strengthen the bonds
+      of good fellowship between our two countries, that there shall be no
+      question of war for at least six months to come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Accordingly, the preparations for this stately banquet went on with great
+      spirit; and the Warden exhorted Redclyffe to be thinking of some good
+      topics for his international speech; but the young man laughed it off, and
+      told his friend that he thought the inspiration of the moment, aided by
+      the good old wine which the Warden had told him of, as among the treasures
+      of the Hospital, would perhaps serve him better than any elaborate
+      preparation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe, being not even yet strong, used to spend much time, when the
+      day chanced to be pleasant, (which was oftener than his preconceptions of
+      English weather led him to expect,) in the garden behind the Warden&rsquo;s
+      house. It was an extensive one, and apparently as antique as the
+      foundation of the establishment; and during all these years it had
+      probably been growing richer and richer. Here were flowers of ancient
+      race, and some that had been merely field or wayside flowers when first
+      they came into the garden; but by long cultivation and hereditary care,
+      instead of dying out, they had acquired a new richness and beauty, so that
+      you would scarcely recognize the daisy or the violet. Roses too, there
+      were, which Doctor Hammond said had been taken from those white and red
+      rose-trees in the Temple Gardens, whence the partisans of York and
+      Lancaster had plucked their fatal badges. With these, there were all the
+      modern and far-fetched flowers from America, the East, and elsewhere; even
+      the prairie flowers and the California blossoms were represented here; for
+      one of the brethren had horticultural tastes, and was permitted freely to
+      exercise them there. The antique character of the garden was preserved,
+      likewise, by the alleys of box, a part of which had been suffered to
+      remain, and was now grown to a great height and density, so as to make
+      impervious green walls. There were also yew trees clipped into strange
+      shapes of bird and beast, and uncouth heraldic figures, among which of
+      course the leopard&rsquo;s head grinned triumphant; and as for fruit, the high
+      garden wall was lined with pear trees, spread out flat against it, where
+      they managed to produce a cold, flavorless fruit, a good deal akin to
+      cucumbers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, in these genial old arbors, Redclyffe used to recline in the sweet,
+      mild summer weather, basking in the sun, which was seldom too warm to make
+      its full embrace uncomfortable; and it seemed to him, with its fertility,
+      with its marks everywhere of the quiet long-bestowed care of man, the
+      sweetest and cosiest seclusion he had ever known; and two or three times a
+      day, when he heard the screech of the railway train, rushing on towards
+      distant London, it impressed him still more with a sense of safe repose
+      here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not unfrequently he here met the white-bearded palmer in whose chamber he
+      had found himself, as if conveyed thither by enchantment, when he first
+      came to the Hospital. The old man was not by any means of the garrulous
+      order; and yet he seemed full of thoughts, full of reminiscences, and not
+      disinclined to the company of Redclyffe. In fact, the latter sometimes
+      flattered himself that a tendency for his society was one of the motives
+      that brought him to the garden; though the amount of their intercourse,
+      after all, was not so great as to warrant the idea of any settled purpose
+      in so doing. Nevertheless, they talked considerably; and Redclyffe could
+      easily see that the old man had been an extensive traveller, and had
+      perhaps occupied situations far different from his present one, and had
+      perhaps been a struggler in troubled waters before he was drifted into the
+      retirement where Redclyffe found him. He was fond of talking about the
+      unsuspected relationship that must now be existing between many families
+      in England and unknown consanguinity in the new world, where, perhaps,
+      really the main stock of the family tree was now existing, and with a new
+      spirit and life, which the representative growth here in England had lost
+      by too long continuance in one air and one mode of life. For history and
+      observation proved that all people&mdash;and the English people by no
+      means less than others&mdash;needed to be transplanted, or somehow
+      renewed, every few generations; so that, according to this ancient
+      philosopher&rsquo;s theory, it would be good for the whole people of England
+      now, if it could at once be transported to America, where its fatness, its
+      sleepiness, its too great beefiness, its preponderant animal character,
+      would be rectified by a different air and soil; and equally good, on the
+      other hand, for the whole American people to be transplanted back to the
+      original island, where their nervousness might be weighted with heavier
+      influences, where their little women might grow bigger, where their thin,
+      dry men might get a burden of flesh and good stomachs, where their
+      children might, with the air, draw in a reverence for age, forms, and
+      usage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe listened with complacency to these speculations, smiling at the
+      thought of such an exodus as would take place, and the reciprocal
+      dissatisfaction which would probably be the result. But he had greater
+      pleasure in drawing out some of the old gentleman&rsquo;s legendary lore, some
+      of which, whether true or not, was very curious. [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Redclyffe sat one day watching the old man in the garden, he could not
+      help being struck by the scrupulous care with which he attended to the
+      plants; it seemed to him that there was a sense of justice,&mdash;of
+      desiring to do exactly what was right in the matter, not favoring one
+      plant more than another, and doing all he could for each. His progress, in
+      consequence, was so slow, that in an hour, while Redclyffe was off and on
+      looking at him, he had scarcely done anything perceptible. Then he was so
+      minute; and often, when he was on the point of leaving one thing to take
+      up another, some small neglect that he saw or fancied called him back
+      again, to spend other minutes on the same task. He was so full of
+      scruples. It struck Redclyffe that this was conscience, morbid, sick, a
+      despot in trifles, looking so closely into life that it permitted nothing
+      to be done. The man might once have been strong and able, but by some
+      unhealthy process of his life he had ceased to be so now. Nor did any
+      happy or satisfactory result appear to come from these painfully wrought
+      efforts; he still seemed to know that he had left something undone in
+      doing too much in another direction. Here was a lily that had been
+      neglected, while he paid too much attention to a rose; he had set his foot
+      on a violet; he had grubbed up, in his haste, a little plant that he
+      mistook for a weed, but that he now suspected was an herb of grace.
+      Grieved by such reflections as these, he heaved a deep sigh, almost
+      amounting to a groan, and sat down on the little stool that he carried
+      with him in his weeding, resting his face in his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe deemed that he might be doing the old man a good service by
+      interrupting his melancholy labors; so he emerged from the opposite door
+      of the summer-house, and came along the adjoining walk with somewhat heavy
+      footsteps, in order that the palmer might have warning of his approach
+      without any grounds to suppose that he had been watched hitherto.
+      Accordingly, when he turned into the other alley, he found the old man
+      sitting erect on his stool, looking composed, but still sad, as was his
+      general custom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After all your wanderings and experience,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;I observe that you
+      come back to the original occupation of cultivating a garden,&mdash;the
+      innocentest of all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, so it would seem,&rdquo; said the old man; &ldquo;but somehow or other I do not
+      find peace in this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These plants and shrubs,&rdquo; returned Redclyffe, &ldquo;seem at all events to
+      recognize the goodness of your rule, so far as it has extended over them.
+      See how joyfully they take the sun; how clear [they are] from all these
+      vices that lie scattered round, in the shape of weeds. It is a lovely
+      sight, and I could almost fancy a quiet enjoyment in the plants
+      themselves, which they have no way of making us aware of, except by giving
+      out a fragrance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! how infinitely would that idea increase man&rsquo;s responsibility,&rdquo; said
+      the old palmer, &ldquo;if, besides man and beast, we should find it necessary to
+      believe that there is also another set of beings dependent for their
+      happiness on our doing, or leaving undone, what might have effect on
+      them!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I question,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, smiling, &ldquo;whether their pleasurable or
+      painful experiences can be so keen, that we need trouble our consciences
+      much with regard to what we do, merely as it affects them. So highly
+      cultivated a conscience as that would be a nuisance to one&rsquo;s self and
+      one&rsquo;s fellows.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You say a terrible thing,&rdquo; rejoined the old man. &ldquo;Can conscience be too
+      much alive in us? is not everything however trifling it seems, an item in
+      the great account, which it is of infinite importance therefore to have
+      right? A terrible thing is that you have said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That may be,&rdquo; said Redclyffe; &ldquo;but it is none the less certain to me,
+      that the efficient actors&mdash;those who mould the world&mdash;are the
+      persons in whom something else is developed more strongly than conscience.
+      There must be an invincible determination to effect something; it may be
+      set to work in the right direction, but after that it must go onward,
+      trampling down small obstacles&mdash;small considerations of right and
+      wrong&mdash;as a great rock, thundering down a hillside, crushes a
+      thousand sweet flowers, and ploughs deep furrows in the innocent
+      hillside.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As Redclyffe gave vent to this doctrine, which was not naturally his, but
+      which had been the inculcation of a life, hitherto devoted to politics, he
+      was surprised to find how strongly sensible he became of the ugliness and
+      indefensibleness of what he said. He felt as if he were speaking under the
+      eye of Omniscience, and as if every word he said were weighed, and its
+      emptiness detected, by an unfailing intelligence. He had thought that he
+      had volumes to say about the necessity of consenting not to do right in
+      all matters minutely, for the sake of getting out an available and
+      valuable right as the whole; but there was something that seemed to tie
+      his tongue. Could it be the quiet gaze of this old man, so unpretending,
+      so humble, so simple in aspect? He could not tell, only that he faltered,
+      and finally left his speech in the midst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he was surprised to find how he had to struggle against a certain
+      repulsion within himself to the old man. He seemed so nonsensical,
+      interfering with everybody&rsquo;s right in the world; so mischievous, standing
+      there and shutting out the possibility of action. It seemed well to
+      trample him down; to put him out of the way&mdash;no matter how&mdash;somehow.
+      It gave him, he thought, an inkling of the way in which this poor old man
+      had made himself odious to his kind, by opposing himself, inevitably, to
+      what was bad in man, chiding it by his very presence, accepting nothing
+      false. You must either love him utterly, or hate him utterly; for he could
+      not let you alone. Redclyffe, being a susceptible man, felt this influence
+      in the strongest way; for it was as if there was a battle within him, one
+      party pulling, wrenching him towards the old man, another wrenching him
+      away, so that, by the agony of the contest, he felt disposed to end it by
+      taking flight, and never seeing the strange individual again. He could
+      well enough conceive how a brutal nature, if capable of receiving his
+      influence at all, might find it so intolerable that it must needs get rid
+      of him by violence,&mdash;by taking his blood if necessary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All these feelings were but transitory, however; they swept across him
+      like a wind, and then he looked again at the old man and saw only his
+      simplicity, his unworldliness,&mdash;saw little more than the worn and
+      feeble individual in the Hospital garb, leaning on his staff; and then
+      turning again with a gentle sigh to weed in the garden. And then Redclyffe
+      went away, in a state of disturbance for which he could not account to
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      High up in the old carved roof, meanwhile, the spiders of centuries still
+      hung their flaunting webs with a profusion that old Doctor Grimshawe would
+      have been ravished to see; but even this was to be remedied, for one day,
+      on looking in, Redclyffe found the great hall dim with floating dust, and
+      down through it came great floating masses of cobweb, out of which the old
+      Doctor would have undertaken to regenerate the world; and he saw, dimly
+      aloft, men on ladders sweeping away these accumulations of years, and
+      breaking up the haunts and residences of hereditary spiders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stately old hall had been in process of cleaning and adapting to the
+      banquet purposes of the nineteenth century, which it was accustomed to
+      subserve, in so proud a way, in the sixteenth. It was, in the first place,
+      well swept and cleansed; the painted glass windows were cleansed from
+      dust, and several panes, which had been unfortunately broken and filled
+      with common glass, were filled in with colored panes, which the Warden had
+      picked up somewhere in his antiquarian researches. They were not, to be
+      sure, just what was wanted; a piece of a saint, from some cathedral
+      window, supplying what was lacking of the gorgeous purple of a mediæval
+      king; but the general effect was rich and good, whenever the misty English
+      atmosphere supplied sunshine bright enough to pervade it. Tapestry, too,
+      from antique looms, faded, but still gorgeous, was hung upon the walls.
+      Some suits of armor, that hung beneath the festal gallery, were polished
+      till the old battered helmets and pierced breastplates sent a gleam like
+      that with which they had flashed across the battle-fields of old.
+      [Endnote: 1.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So now the great day of the Warden&rsquo;s dinner had arrived; and, as may be
+      supposed, there were fiery times in the venerable old kitchen. The cook,
+      according to ancient custom, concocted many antique dishes, such as used
+      to be set before kings and nobles; dainties that might have called the
+      dead out of their graves; combinations of ingredients that had ceased to
+      be put together for centuries; historic dishes, which had long, long
+      ceased to be in the list of revels. Then there was the stalwart English
+      cheer of the sirloin, and the round; there were the vast plum-puddings,
+      the juicy mutton, the venison; there was the game, now just in season,&mdash;the
+      half-tame wild fowl of English covers, the half-domesticated wild deer of
+      English parks, the heathcock from the far-off hills of Scotland, and one
+      little prairie hen, and some canvas-back ducks&mdash;obtained, Heaven
+      knows how, in compliment to Redclyffe&mdash;from his native shores. O, the
+      old jolly kitchen! how rich the flavored smoke that went up its vast
+      chimney! how inestimable the atmosphere of steam that was diffused through
+      it! How did the old men peep into it, even venture across the threshold,
+      braving the hot wrath of the cook and his assistants, for the sake of
+      imbuing themselves with these rich and delicate flavors, receiving them in
+      as it were spiritually; for, received through the breath and in the
+      atmosphere, it was really a spiritual enjoyment. The ghosts of ancient
+      epicures seemed, on that day and the few preceding ones, to haunt the dim
+      passages, snuffing in with shadowy nostrils the rich vapors, assuming
+      visibility in the congenial medium, almost becoming earthly again in the
+      strength of their earthly longings for one other feast such as they used
+      to enjoy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor is it to be supposed that it was only these antique dainties that the
+      Warden provided for his feast. No; if the cook, the cultured and recondite
+      old cook, who had accumulated within himself all that his predecessors
+      knew for centuries,&mdash;if he lacked anything of modern fashion and
+      improvement, he had supplied his defect by temporary assistance from a
+      London club; and the bill of fare was provided with dishes that Soyer
+      would not have harshly criticised. The ethereal delicacy of modern taste,
+      the nice adjustment of flowers, the French style of cookery, was richly
+      attended to; and the list was long of dishes with fantastic names, fish,
+      fowl, and flesh; and <i>entremets</i>, and &ldquo;sweets,&rdquo; as the English call
+      them, and sugared cates, too numerous to think of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wines we will not take upon ourselves to enumerate; but the juice,
+      then destined to be quaffed, was in part the precious vintages that had
+      been broached half a century ago, and had been ripening ever since; the
+      rich and dry old port, so unlovely to the natural palate that it requires
+      long English seasoning to get it down; the sherry, imported before these
+      modern days of adulteration; some claret, the Warden said of rarest
+      vintage; some Burgundy, of which it was the quality to warm the blood and
+      genialize existence for three days after it was drunk. Then there was a
+      rich liquid contributed to this department by Redclyffe himself; for, some
+      weeks since, when the banquet first loomed in the distance, he had
+      (anxious to evince his sense of the Warden&rsquo;s kindness) sent across the
+      ocean for some famous Madeira which he had inherited from the Doctor, and
+      never tasted yet. This, together with some of the Western wines of
+      America, had arrived, and was ready to be broached.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Warden tested these modern wines, and recognized a new flavor, but
+      gave it only a moderate approbation; for, in truth, an elderly Englishman
+      has not a wide appreciation of wines, nor loves new things in this kind
+      more than in literature or life. But he tasted the Madeira, too, and
+      underwent an ecstasy, which was only alleviated by the dread of gout,
+      which he had an idea that this wine must bring on,&mdash;and truly, if it
+      were so splendid a wine as he pronounced it, some pain ought to follow as
+      the shadow of such a pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As it was a festival of antique date, the dinner hour had been fixed
+      earlier than is usual at such stately banquets; namely, at six o&rsquo;clock,
+      which was long before the dusky hour at which Englishmen love best to
+      dine. About that period, the carriages drove into the old courtyard of the
+      Hospital in great abundance; blocking up, too, the ancient portal, and
+      remaining in a line outside. Carriages they were with armorial bearings,
+      family coaches in which came Englishmen in their black coats and white
+      neckcloths, elderly, white-headed, fresh-colored, squat; not beautiful,
+      certainly, nor particularly dignified, nor very well dressed, nor with
+      much of an imposing air, but yet, somehow or other, producing an effect of
+      force, respectability, reliableness, trust, which is probably deserved,
+      since it is invariably experienced. Cold they were in deportment, and
+      looked coldly on the stranger, who, on his part, drew himself up with an
+      extra haughtiness and reserve, and felt himself in the midst of his
+      enemies, and more as if he were going to do battle than to sit down to a
+      friendly banquet. The Warden introduced him, as an American diplomatist,
+      to one or two of the gentlemen, who regarded him forbiddingly, as
+      Englishmen do before dinner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not long after Redclyffe had entered the reception-room, which was but
+      shortly before the hour appointed for the dinner, there was another
+      arrival betokened by the clatter of hoofs and grinding wheels in the
+      courtyard; and then entered a gentleman of different mien from the bluff,
+      ruddy, simple-minded, yet worldly Englishmen around him. He was a tall,
+      dark man, with a black moustache and almost olive skin, a slender, lithe
+      figure, a flexible face, quick, flashing, mobile. His deportment was
+      graceful; his dress, though it seemed to differ in little or nothing from
+      that of the gentlemen in the room, had yet a grace and picturesqueness in
+      his mode of wearing it. He advanced to the Warden, who received him with
+      distinction, and yet, Redclyffe fancied, not exactly with cordiality. It
+      seemed to Redclyffe that the Warden looked round, as if with the purpose
+      of presenting Redclyffe to this gentleman, but he himself, from some
+      latent reluctance, had turned away and entered, into conversation with one
+      of the other gentlemen, who said now, looking at the new-comer, &ldquo;Are you
+      acquainted with this last arrival?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;I know Lord Braithwaite by sight, indeed,
+      but have had no introduction. He is a man, certainly, of distinguished
+      appearance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, pretty well,&rdquo; said the gentleman, &ldquo;but un-English, as also are his
+      manners. It is a pity to see an old English family represented by such a
+      person. Neither he, his father, nor grandfather was born among us; he has
+      far more Italian blood than enough to drown the slender stream of
+      Anglo-Saxon and Norman. His modes of life, his prejudices, his estates,
+      his religion, are unlike our own; and yet here he is in the position of an
+      old English gentleman, possibly to be a peer. You, whose nationality
+      embraces that of all the world, cannot, I suppose, understand this English
+      feeling.&rdquo; [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon me,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;I can perfectly understand it. An American,
+      in his feelings towards England, has all the jealousy and exclusiveness of
+      Englishmen themselves,&mdash;perhaps, indeed, a little exaggerated.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg your pardon,&rdquo; said the Englishman, incredulously, &ldquo;I think you
+      cannot possibly understand it!&rdquo; [Endnote: 3.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The guests were by this time all assembled, and at the Warden&rsquo;s bidding
+      they moved from the reception-room to the dining-hall, in some order and
+      precedence, of which Redclyffe could not exactly discover the principle,
+      though he found that to himself&mdash;in his quality, doubtless, of
+      Ambassador&mdash;there was assigned a pretty high place. A venerable
+      dignitary of the Church&mdash;a dean, he seemed to be&mdash;having asked a
+      blessing, the fair scene of the banquet now lay before the guests,
+      presenting a splendid spectacle, in the high-walled, antique, tapestried
+      hall, overhung with the dark, intricate oaken beams, with the high Gothic
+      windows, through one of which the setting sunbeams streamed, and showed
+      the figures of kings and warriors, and the old Braithwaites among them.
+      Beneath and adown the hall extended the long line of the tables, covered
+      with the snow of the damask tablecloth, on which glittered, gleamed, and
+      shone a good quality of ancient ancestral plate, and an <i>épergne</i> of
+      silver, extending down the middle; also the gleam of golden wine in the
+      decanters; and truly Redclyffe thought that it was a noble spectacle, made
+      so by old and stately associations, which made a noble banquet of what
+      otherwise would be only a vulgar dinner. The English have this advantage
+      and know how to make use of it. They bring&mdash;in these old,
+      time-honored feasts&mdash;all the past to sit down and take the stately
+      refreshment along with them, and they pledge the historic characters in
+      their wine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A printed bill of fare, in gold letters, lay by each plate, on which
+      Redclyffe saw the company glancing with great interest. The first dish, of
+      course, was turtle soup, of which&mdash;as the gentleman next him, the
+      Mayor of a neighboring town, told Redclyffe&mdash;it was allowable to take
+      twice. This was accompanied, according to one of those rules which one
+      knows not whether they are arbitrary or founded on some deep reason, by a
+      glass of punch. Then came the noble turbot, the salmon, the sole, and
+      divers of fishes, and the dinner fairly set in. The genial Warden seemed
+      to have given liberal orders to the attendants, for they spared not to
+      offer hock, champagne, sherry, to the guests, and good bitter ale, foaming
+      in the goblet; and so the stately banquet went on, with somewhat tedious
+      magnificence; and yet with a fulness of effect and thoroughness of sombre
+      life that made Redclyffe feel that, so much importance being assigned to
+      it,&mdash;it being so much believed in,&mdash;it was indeed a feast. The
+      cumbrous courses swept by, one after another; and Redclyffe, finding it
+      heavy work, sat idle most of the time, regarding the hall, the old
+      decaying beams, the armor hanging beneath the galleries, and these
+      Englishmen feasting where their fathers had feasted for so many ages, the
+      same occasion, the same men, probably, in appearance, though the black
+      coat and the white neckcloth had taken the place of ruff, embroidered
+      doublet, and the magnificence of other ages. After all, the English have
+      not such good things to eat as we in America, and certainly do not know
+      better how to make them palatable. [Endnote: 4.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well; but by and by the dinner came to a conclusion, as regarded the
+      eating part; the cloth was withdrawn; a dessert of fruits, fresh and
+      dried, pines, hothouse grapes, and all candied conserves of the Indies,
+      was put on the long extent of polished mahogany. There was a tuning up of
+      musicians, an interrogative drawing of fiddle-bows, and other musical
+      twangs and puffs; the decanters opposite the Warden and his
+      vice-president,&mdash;sherry, port, Redclyffe&rsquo;s Madeira, and claret, were
+      put in motion along the table, and the guests filled their glasses for the
+      toast which, at English dinner-tables, is of course the first to be
+      honored,&mdash;the Queen. Then the band struck up the good old anthem,
+      &ldquo;God save the Queen,&rdquo; which the whole company rose to their feet to sing.
+      It was a spectacle both interesting and a little ludicrous to Redclyffe,&mdash;being
+      so apart from an American&rsquo;s sympathies, so unlike anything that he has in
+      his life or possibilities,&mdash;this active and warm sentiment of
+      loyalty, in which love of country centres, and assimilates, and transforms
+      itself into a passionate affection for a person, in whom they love all
+      their institutions. To say the truth, it seemed a happy notion; nor could
+      the American&mdash;while he comforted himself in the pride of his
+      democracy, and that he himself was a sovereign&mdash;could he help envying
+      it a little, this childlike love and reverence for a person embodying all
+      their country, their past, their earthly future. He felt that it might be
+      delightful to have a sovereign, provided that sovereign were always a
+      woman,&mdash;and perhaps a young and fine one. But, indeed, this is not
+      the difficulty, methinks, in English institutions which the American finds
+      it hardest to deal with. We could endure a born sovereign, especially if
+      made such a mere pageant as the English make of theirs. What we find it
+      hardest to conceive of is, the satisfaction with which Englishmen think of
+      a race above them, with privileges that they cannot share, entitled to
+      condescend to them, and to have gracious and beautiful manners at their
+      expense; to be kind, simple, unpretending, because these qualities are
+      more available than haughtiness; to be specimens of perfect manhood;&mdash;all
+      these advantages in consequence of their position. If the peerage were a
+      mere name, it would be nothing to envy; but it is so much more than a
+      name; it enables men to be really so superior. The poor, the lower
+      classes, might bear this well enough; but the classes that come next to
+      the nobility,&mdash;the upper middle classes,&mdash;how they bear it so
+      lovingly is what must puzzle the American. But probably the advantage of
+      the peerage is the less perceptible the nearer it is looked at.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must be confessed that Redclyffe, as he looked at this assembly of
+      peers and gentlemen, thought with some self-gratulation of the probability
+      that he had within his power as old a rank, as desirable a station, as the
+      best of them; and that if he were restrained from taking it, it would
+      probably only be by the democratic pride that made him feel that he could
+      not, retaining all his manly sensibility, accept this gewgaw on which the
+      ages&mdash;his own country especially&mdash;had passed judgment, while it
+      had been suspended over his head. He felt himself, at any rate, in a
+      higher position, having the option of taking this rank, and forbearing to
+      do so, than if he took it. [Endnote: 5.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After this ensued a ceremony which is of antique date in old English
+      corporations and institutions, at their high festivals. It is called the
+      Loving Cup. A sort of herald or toast-master behind the Warden&rsquo;s chair
+      made proclamation, reciting the names of the principal guests, and
+      announcing to them, &ldquo;The Warden of the Braithwaite Hospital drinks to you
+      in a Loving Cup&rdquo;; of which cup, having sipped, or seemed to sip (for
+      Redclyffe observed that the old drinkers were rather shy of it) a small
+      quantity, he sent it down the table. Its progress was accompanied with a
+      peculiar entanglement of ceremony, one guest standing up while another
+      drinks, being pretty much as follows. First, each guest receiving it
+      covered from the next above him, the same took from the silver cup its
+      silver cover; the guest drank with a bow to the Warden and company, took
+      the cover from the preceding guest, covered the cup, handed it to the next
+      below him, then again removed the cover, replaced it after the guest had
+      drunk, who, on his part, went through the same ceremony. And thus the cup
+      went slowly on its way down the stately hall; these ceremonies being, it
+      is said, originally precautions against the risk, in wild times, of being
+      stabbed by the man who was drinking with you, or poisoned by one who
+      should fail to be your taster. The cup was a fine, ancient piece of plate,
+      massive, heavy, curiously wrought with armorial bearings, in which the
+      leopard&rsquo;s head appeared. Its contents, so far as Redclyffe could analyze
+      them by a moderate sip, appeared to be claret, sweetened, with spices,
+      and, however suited to the peculiarity of antique palates, was not greatly
+      to Redclyffe&rsquo;s taste. [Endnote: 6.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe&rsquo;s companion just below him, while the Loving Cup was beginning
+      its march, had been explaining the origin of the custom as a defence of
+      the drinker in times of deadly feud; when it had reached Lord Braithwaite,
+      who drank and passed it to Redclyffe covered, and with the usual bow,
+      Redclyffe looked into his Lordship&rsquo;s Italian eyes and dark face as he did
+      so, and the thought struck him, that, if there could possibly be any use
+      in keeping up this old custom, it might be so now; for, how intimated he
+      could hardly tell, he was sensible in his deepest self of a deadly
+      hostility in this dark, courteous, handsome face. He kept his eyes fixed
+      on his Lordship as he received the cup, and felt that in his own glance
+      there was an acknowledgment of the enmity that he perceived, and a
+      defiance, expressed without visible sign, and felt in the bow with which
+      they greeted one another. When they had both resumed their seats,
+      Redclyffe chose to make this ceremonial intercourse the occasion of again
+      addressing him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know not whether your Lordship is more accustomed than myself to these
+      stately ceremonials,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Lord Braithwaite, whose English was very good. &ldquo;But this is a
+      good old ceremony, and an ingenious one; for does it not twine us into
+      knotted links of love&mdash;this Loving Cup&mdash;like a wreath of
+      Bacchanals whom I have seen surrounding an antique vase. Doubtless it has
+      great efficacy in entwining a company of friendly guests into one
+      affectionate society.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; it should seem so,&rdquo; replied Redclyffe, with a smile, and again
+      meeting those black eyes, which smiled back on him. &ldquo;It should seem so,
+      but it appears that the origin of the custom was quite different, and that
+      it was as a safeguard to a man when he drank with his enemy. What a
+      peculiar flavor it must have given to the liquor, when the eyes of two
+      deadly foes met over the brim of the Loving Cup, and the drinker knew
+      that, if he withdrew it, a dagger would be in his heart, and the other
+      watched him drink, to see if it was poison!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; responded his Lordship, &ldquo;they had strange fashions in those rough
+      old times. Nowadays, we neither stab, shoot, nor poison. I scarcely think
+      we hate except as interest guides us, without malevolence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This singular conversation was interrupted by a toast, and the rising of
+      one of the guests to answer it. Several other toasts of routine succeeded;
+      one of which, being to the honor of the old founder of the Hospital, Lord
+      Braithwaite, as his representative, rose to reply,&mdash;which he did in
+      good phrases, in a sort of eloquence unlike that of the Englishmen around
+      him, and, sooth to say, comparatively unaccustomed as he must have been to
+      the use of the language, much more handsomely than they. In truth,
+      Redclyffe was struck and amused with the rudeness, the slovenliness, the
+      inartistic quality of the English speakers, who rather seemed to avoid
+      grace and neatness of set purpose, as if they would be ashamed of it.
+      Nothing could be more ragged than these utterances which they called
+      speeches; so patched, and darned; and yet, somehow or other&mdash;though
+      dull and heavy as all which seemed to inspire them&mdash;they had a kind
+      of force. Each man seemed to have the faculty of getting, after some rude
+      fashion, at the sense and feeling that was in him; and without glibness,
+      without smoothness, without form or comeliness, still the object with
+      which each one rose to speak was accomplished,&mdash;and what was more
+      remarkable, it seemed to be accomplished without the speaker&rsquo;s having any
+      particular plan for doing it. He was surprised, too, to observe how
+      loyally every man seemed to think himself bound to speak, and rose to do
+      his best, however unfit his usual habits made him for the task. Observing
+      this, and thinking how many an American would be taken aback and
+      dumbfounded by being called on for a dinner speech, he could not but doubt
+      the correctness of the general opinion, that Englishmen are naturally less
+      facile of public speech than our countrymen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You surpass your countrymen,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, when his Lordship resumed
+      his seat, amid rapping and loud applause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My countrymen? I scarcely know whether you mean the English or Italians,&rdquo;
+       said Lord Braithwaite. &ldquo;Like yourself, I am a hybrid, with really no
+      country, and ready to take up with any.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a country,&mdash;one which I am little inclined to deny,&rdquo; replied
+      Redclyffe, gravely, while a flush (perhaps of conscientious shame) rose to
+      his brow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His Lordship bowed, with a dark Italian smile, but Redclyffe&rsquo;s attention
+      was drawn away from the conversation by a toast which the Warden now rose
+      to give, and in which he found himself mainly concerned. With a little
+      preface of kind words (not particularly aptly applied) to the great and
+      kindred country beyond the Atlantic, the worthy Warden proceeded to remark
+      that his board was honored, on this high festival, with a guest from that
+      new world; a gentleman yet young, but already distinguished in the
+      councils of his country; the bearer, he remarked, of an honored English
+      name, which might well claim to be remembered here, and on this occasion,
+      although he had understood from his friend that the American bearers of
+      this name did not count kindred with the English ones. This gentleman, he
+      further observed, with considerable flourish and emphasis, had recently
+      been called from his retirement and wanderings into the diplomatic service
+      of his country, which he would say, from his knowledge, the gentleman was
+      well calculated to honor. He drank the health of the Honorable Edward
+      Redclyffe, Ambassador of the United States to the Court of Hohen-Linden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our English cousins received this toast with the kindest enthusiasm, as
+      they always do any such allusion to our country; it being a festal
+      feeling, not to be used except on holidays. They rose, with glass in hand,
+      in honor of the Ambassador; the band struck up &ldquo;Hail, Columbia&rdquo;; and our
+      hero marshalled his thoughts as well as he might for the necessary
+      response; and when the tumult subsided he arose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His quick apprehending had taught him something of the difference of taste
+      between an English and an American audience at a dinner-table; he felt
+      that there must be a certain looseness, and carelessness, and roughness,
+      and yet a certain restraint; that he must not seem to aim at speaking
+      well, although, for his own ambition, he was not content to speak ill;
+      that, somehow or other, he must get a heartiness into his speech; that he
+      must not polish, nor be too neat, and must come with a certain rudeness to
+      his good points, as if he blundered on them, and were surprised into them.
+      Above all, he must let the good wine and cheer, and all that he knew and
+      really felt of English hospitality, as represented by the kind Warden, do
+      its work upon his heart, and speak up to the extent of what he felt&mdash;and
+      if a little more, then no great harm&mdash;about his own love for the
+      father-land, and the broader grounds of the relations between the two
+      countries. On this system, Redclyffe began to speak; and being naturally
+      and habitually eloquent, and of mobile and ready sensibilities, he
+      succeeded, between art and nature, in making a speech that absolutely
+      delighted the company, who made the old hall echo, and the banners wave
+      and tremble, and the board shake, and the glasses jingle, with their
+      rapturous applause. What he said&mdash;or some shadow of it, and more than
+      he quite liked to own&mdash;was reported in the county paper that gave a
+      report of the dinner; but on glancing over it, it seems not worth while to
+      produce this eloquent effort in our pages, the occasion and topics being
+      of merely temporary interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe sat down, and sipped his claret, feeling a little ashamed of
+      himself, as people are apt to do after a display of this kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know the way to the English heart better than I do,&rdquo; remarked his
+      Lordship, after a polite compliment to the speech. &ldquo;Methinks these dull
+      English are being improved in your atmosphere. The English need a change
+      every few centuries,&mdash;either by immigration of new stock, or
+      transportation of the old,&mdash;or else they grow too gross and earthly,
+      with their beef, mutton, and ale. I think, now, it might benefit both
+      countries, if your New England population were to be reciprocally
+      exchanged with an equal number of Englishmen. Indeed, Italians might do as
+      well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should regret,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;to change the English, heavy as they
+      are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are an admirable Englishman,&rdquo; said his Lordship. &ldquo;For my part, I
+      cannot say that the people are very much to my taste, any more than their
+      skies and climate, in which I have shivered during the two years that I
+      have spent here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here their conversation ceased; and Redclyffe listened to a long train of
+      speechifying, in the course of which everybody, almost, was toasted;
+      everybody present, at all events, and many absent. The Warden&rsquo;s old wine
+      was not spared; the music rang and resounded from the gallery; and
+      everybody seemed to consider it a model feast, although there were no very
+      vivid signs of satisfaction, but a decorous, heavy enjoyment, a dull red
+      heat of pleasure, without flame. Soda and seltzer-water, and coffee, by
+      and by were circulated; and at a late hour the company began to retire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before taking his departure, Lord Braithwaite resumed his conversation
+      with Redclyffe, and, as it appeared, with the purpose of making a
+      hospitable proposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I live very much alone,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;being insulated from my neighbors by
+      many circumstances,&mdash;habits, religion, and everything else peculiarly
+      English. If you are curious about old English modes of life, I can show
+      you, at least, an English residence, little altered within a century past.
+      Pray come and spend a week with me before you leave this part of the
+      country. Besides, I know the court to which you are accredited, and can
+      give you, perhaps, useful information about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe looked at him in some surprise, and with a nameless hesitation;
+      for he did not like his Lordship, and had fancied, in truth, that there
+      was a reciprocal antipathy. Nor did he yet feel that he was mistaken in
+      this respect; although his Lordship&rsquo;s invitation was given in a tone of
+      frankness, and seemed to have no reserve, except that his eyes did not
+      meet his like Anglo-Saxon eyes, and there seemed an Italian looking out
+      from within the man. But Redclyffe had a sort of repulsion within himself;
+      and he questioned whether it would be fair to his proposed host to accept
+      his hospitality, while he had this secret feeling of hostility and
+      repugnance,&mdash;which might be well enough accounted for by the
+      knowledge that he secretly entertained hostile interests to their race,
+      and half a purpose of putting them in force. And, besides this,&mdash;although
+      Redclyffe was ashamed of the feeling,&mdash;he had a secret dread, a
+      feeling that it was not just a safe thing to trust himself in this man&rsquo;s
+      power; for he had a sense, sure as death, that he did not wish him well,
+      and had a secret dread of the American. But he laughed within himself at
+      this feeling, and drove it down. Yet it made him feel that there could be
+      no disloyalty in accepting his Lordship&rsquo;s invitation, because it was given
+      in as little friendship as it would be accepted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had almost made my arrangements for quitting the neighborhood,&rdquo; said
+      he, after a pause; &ldquo;nor can I shorten the week longer which I had promised
+      to spend with my very kind friend, the Warden. Yet your Lordship&rsquo;s
+      kindness offers we a great temptation, and I would gladly spend the next
+      ensuing week at Braithwaite Hall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall expect you, then,&rdquo; said Lord Braithwaite. &ldquo;You will find me quite
+      alone, except my chaplain,&mdash;a scholar, and a man of the world, whom
+      you will not be sorry to know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He bowed and took his leave, without shaking hands, as an American would
+      have thought it natural to do, after such a hospitable agreement; nor did
+      Redclyffe make any motion towards it, and was glad that his Lordship had
+      omitted it. On the whole, there was a secret dissatisfaction with himself;
+      a sense that he was not doing quite a frank and true thing in accepting
+      this invitation, and he only made peace with himself on the consideration
+      that Lord Braithwaite was as little cordial in asking the visit as he in
+      acceding to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0020" id="link2HCH0020"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The guests were now rapidly taking their departure, and the Warden and
+      Redclyffe were soon left alone in the antique hall, which now, in its
+      solitude, presented an aspect far different from the gay festivity of an
+      hour before; the duskiness up in the carved oaken beams seemed to descend
+      and fill the hall; and the remembrance of the feast was like one of those
+      that had taken place centuries ago, with which this was now numbered, and
+      growing ghostly, and faded, and sad, even as they had long been.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, my dear friend,&rdquo; said the Warden, stretching himself and yawning,
+      &ldquo;it is over. Come into my study with me, and we will have a devilled
+      turkey-bone and a pint of sherry in peace and comfort.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I fear I can make no figure at such a supper,&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;But I
+      admire your inexhaustibleness in being ready for midnight refreshment
+      after such a feast.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a glass of good liquor has moistened my lips to-night,&rdquo; said the
+      Warden, &ldquo;save and except such as was supplied by a decanter of water made
+      brown with toast; and such a sip as I took to the health of the Queen, and
+      another to that of the Ambassador to Hohen-Linden. It is the only way,
+      when a man has this vast labor of speechifying to do; and indeed there is
+      no possibility of keeping up a jolly countenance for such a length of time
+      except on toast-water.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They accordingly adjourned to the Warden&rsquo;s sanctum, where that worthy
+      dignitary seemed to enjoy himself over his sherry and cracked bones, in a
+      degree that he probably had not heretofore; while Redclyffe, whose
+      potations had been more liberal, and who was feverish and disturbed, tried
+      the effect of a little brandy and soda-water. As often happens at such
+      midnight symposiums, the two friends found themselves in a more kindly and
+      confidential vein than had happened before, great as had been the kindness
+      and confidence already grown up between them. Redclyffe told his friend of
+      Lord Braithwaite&rsquo;s invitation, and of his own resolution to accept it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not? You will do well,&rdquo; said the Warden; &ldquo;and you will find his
+      Lordship an accustomed host, and the old house most interesting. If he
+      knows the secrets of it himself, and will show them, they will be well
+      worth the seeing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have had a scruple in accepting this invitation,&rdquo; said Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot see why,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;I advise it by all means, since I
+      shall lose nothing by it myself, as it will not lop off any part of your
+      visit to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear friend,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, irresistibly impelled to a confidence
+      which he had not meditated a moment before, &ldquo;there is a foolish secret
+      which I must tell you, if you will listen to it; and which I have only not
+      revealed to you because it seemed to me foolish and dream-like; because,
+      too, I am an American, and a democrat; because I am ashamed of myself and
+      laugh at myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it a long story?&rdquo; asked the Warden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can make it of any length, and almost any brevity,&rdquo; said Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will fill my pipe then,&rdquo; answered the Warden, &ldquo;and listen at my ease;
+      and if, as you intimate, there prove to be any folly in it, I will impute
+      it all to the kindly freedom with which you have partaken of our English
+      hospitality, and forget it before to-morrow morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He settled himself in his easy-chair, in a most luxurious posture; and
+      Redclyffe, who felt a strange reluctance to reveal&mdash;for the first
+      time in his life&mdash;the shadowy hopes, if hopes they were, and
+      purposes, if such they could be called, with which he had amused himself
+      so many years, begun the story from almost the earliest period that he
+      could remember. He told even of his earliest recollection, with an old
+      woman, in the almshouse, and how he had been found there by the Doctor,
+      and educated by him, with all the hints and half-revelations that had been
+      made to him. He described the singular character of the Doctor, his
+      scientific pursuits, his evident accomplishments, his great abilities, his
+      morbidness and melancholy, his moodiness, and finally his death, and the
+      singular circumstances that accompanied it. The story took a considerable
+      time to tell; and after its close, the Warden, who had only interrupted it
+      by now and then a question to make it plainer, continued to smoke his pipe
+      slowly and thoughtfully for a long while.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This Doctor of yours was a singular character,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;Evidently, from
+      what you tell me as to the accuracy of his local reminiscences, he must
+      have been of this part of the country,&mdash;of this immediate
+      neighborhood,&mdash;and such a man could not have grown up here without
+      being known. I myself&mdash;for I am an old fellow now&mdash;might have
+      known him if he lived to manhood hereabouts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He seemed old to me when I first knew him,&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;But children
+      make no distinctions of age. He might have been forty-five then, as well
+      as I can judge.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are now twenty-seven or eight,&rdquo; said the Warden, &ldquo;and were four years
+      old when you first knew him. He might now be sixty-five. Do you know, my
+      friend, that I have something like a certainty that I know who your Doctor
+      was?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How strange this seems!&rdquo; exclaimed Redclyffe. &ldquo;It has never struck me
+      that I should be able to identify this singular personage with any
+      surroundings or any friends.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Warden, to requite his friend&rsquo;s story,&mdash;and without as yet saying
+      a word, good or bad, on his ancestral claims,&mdash;proceeded to tell him
+      some of the gossip of the neighborhood,&mdash;what had been gossip thirty
+      or forty years ago, but was now forgotten, or, at all events, seldom
+      spoken of, and only known to the old, at the present day. He himself
+      remembered it only as a boy, and imperfectly. There had been a personage
+      of that day, a man of poor estate, who had fallen deeply in love and been
+      betrothed to a young lady of family; he was a young man of more than
+      ordinary abilities, and of great promise, though small fortune. It was not
+      well known how, but the match between him and the young lady was broken
+      off, and his place was supplied by the then proprietor of Braithwaite
+      Hall; as it was supposed, by the artifices of her mother. There had been
+      circumstances of peculiar treachery in the matter, and Mr. Oglethorpe had
+      taken it severely to heart; so severely, indeed, that he had left the
+      country, after selling his ancestral property, and had only been
+      occasionally heard of again. Now, from certain circumstances, it had
+      struck the Warden that this might be the mysterious Doctor of whom
+      Redclyffe spoke. [Endnote: 1.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why,&rdquo; suggested Redclyffe, &ldquo;should a man with these wrongs to avenge
+      take such an interest in a descendant of his enemy&rsquo;s family?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is a strong point in favor of my supposition,&rdquo; replied the Warden.
+      &ldquo;There is certainly, and has long been, a degree of probability that the
+      true heir of this family exists in America. If Oglethorpe could discover
+      him, he ousts his enemy from the estate and honors, and substitutes the
+      person whom he has discovered and educated. Most certainly there is
+      revenge in the thing. Should it happen now, however, the triumph would
+      have lost its sweetness, even were Oglethorpe alive to partake of it; for
+      his enemy is dead, leaving no heir, and this foreign branch has come in
+      without Oglethorpe&rsquo;s aid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The friends remained musing a considerable time, each in his own train of
+      thought, till the Warden suddenly spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean to prosecute this apparent claim of yours?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not intended to do so,&rdquo; said Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; said the Warden, &ldquo;that should depend upon the strength of
+      your ground; and I understand you that there is some link wanting to
+      establish it. Otherwise, I see not how you can hesitate. Is it a little
+      thing to hold a claim to an old English estate and honors?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; it is a very great thing, to an Englishman born, and who need give up
+      no higher birthright to avail himself of it,&rdquo; answered Redclyffe. &ldquo;You
+      will laugh at me, my friend; but I cannot help feeling that I, a simple
+      citizen of a republic, yet with none above me except those whom I help to
+      place there,&mdash;and who are my servants, not my superiors,&mdash;must
+      stoop to take these honors. I leave a set of institutions which are the
+      noblest that the wit and civilization of man have yet conceived, to enlist
+      myself in one that is based on a far lower conception of man, and which
+      therefore lowers every one who shares in it. Besides,&rdquo; said the young man,
+      his eyes kindling with the ambition which had been so active a principle
+      in his life, &ldquo;what prospects&mdash;what rewards for spirited exertion&mdash;what
+      a career, only open to an American, would I give up, to become merely a
+      rich and idle Englishman, belonging (as I should) nowhere, without a
+      possibility of struggle, such as a strong man loves, with only a mockery
+      of a title, which in these days really means nothing,&mdash;hardly more
+      than one of our own Honorables. What has any success in English life to
+      offer (even were it within my reach, which, as a stranger, it would not
+      be) to balance the proud career of an American statesman?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;True, you might be a President, I suppose,&rdquo; said the Warden, rather
+      contemptuously,&mdash;&ldquo;a four years&rsquo; potentate. It seems to me an office
+      about on a par with that of the Lord Mayor of London. For my part, I would
+      rather be a baron of three or four hundred years&rsquo; antiquity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We talk in vain,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, laughing. &ldquo;We do not approach one
+      another&rsquo;s ideas on this subject. But, waiving all speculations as to my
+      attempting to avail myself of this claim, do you think I can fairly accept
+      this invitation to visit Lord Braithwaite? There is certainly a
+      possibility that I may arraign myself against his dearest interests.
+      Conscious of this, can I accept his hospitality?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Warden paused. &ldquo;You have not sought access to his house,&rdquo; he observed.
+      &ldquo;You have no designs, it seems, no settled designs at all events, against
+      his Lordship,&mdash;nor is there a probability that they would be
+      forwarded by your accepting this invitation, even if you had any. I do not
+      see but you may go. The only danger is, that his Lordship&rsquo;s engaging
+      qualities may seduce you into dropping your claims out of a chivalrous
+      feeling, which I see is among your possibilities. To be sure, it would be
+      more satisfactory if he knew your actual position, and should then renew
+      his invitation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am convinced,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, looking up from his musing posture,
+      &ldquo;that he does know them. You are surprised; but in all Lord Braithwaite&rsquo;s
+      manner towards me there has been an undefinable something that makes me
+      aware that he knows on what terms we stand towards each other. There is
+      nothing inconceivable in this. The family have for generations been
+      suspicious of an American line, and have more than once sent messengers to
+      try to search out and put a stop to the apprehension. Why should it not
+      have come to their knowledge that there was a person with such claims, and
+      that he is now in England?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It certainly is possible,&rdquo; replied the Warden, &ldquo;and if you are satisfied
+      that his Lordship knows it, or even suspects it, you meet him on fair
+      ground. But I fairly tell you, my good friend, that&mdash;his Lordship
+      being a man of unknown principles of honor, outlandish, and an Italian in
+      habit and moral sense&mdash;I scarcely like to trust you in his house, he
+      being aware that your existence may be inimical to him. My humble board is
+      the safer of the two.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pshaw!&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;You Englishmen are so suspicious of anybody not
+      regularly belonging to yourselves. Poison and the dagger haunt your
+      conceptions of all others. In America you think we kill every third man
+      with the bowie-knife. But, supposing there were any grounds for your
+      suspicion, I would still encounter it. An American is no braver than an
+      Englishman; but still he is not quite so chary of his life as the latter,
+      who never risks it except on the most imminent necessity. We take such
+      matters easy. In regard to this invitation, I feel that I can honorably
+      accept it, and there are many idle and curious motives that impel me to
+      it. I will go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be it so; but you must come back to me for another week, after finishing
+      your visit,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;After all, it was an idle fancy in me that
+      there could be any danger. His Lordship has good English blood in his
+      veins, and it would take oceans and rivers of Italian treachery to wash
+      out the sterling quality of it. And, my good friend, as to these claims of
+      yours, I would not have you trust too much to what is probably a romantic
+      dream; yet, were the dream to come true, I should think the British
+      peerage honored by such an accession to its ranks. And now to bed; for we
+      have heard the chimes of midnight, two hours agone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They accordingly retired; and Redclyffe was surprised to find what a
+      distinctness his ideas respecting his claim to the Braithwaite honors had
+      assumed, now that he, after so many years, had imparted them to another.
+      Heretofore, though his imagination had played with them so much, they
+      seemed the veriest dreams; now, they had suddenly taken form and hardened
+      into substance; and he became aware, in spite of all the lofty and
+      patriotic sentiments which he had expressed to the Warden, that these
+      prospects had really much importance in his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe, during the few days that he was to spend at the Hospital,
+      previous to his visit to Braithwaite Hall, was conscious of a restlessness
+      such as we have all felt on the eve of some interesting event. He wondered
+      at himself at being so much wrought up by so simple a thing as he was
+      about to do; but it seemed to him like a coming home after an absence of
+      centuries. It was like an actual prospect of entrance into a castle in the
+      air,&mdash;the shadowy threshold of which should assume substance enough
+      to bear his foot, its thin, fantastic walls actually protect him from sun
+      and rain, its hall echo with his footsteps, its hearth warm him. That
+      delicious, thrilling uncertainty between reality and fancy, in which he
+      had often been enwrapt since his arrival in this region, enveloped him
+      more strongly than ever; and with it, too, there came a sort of
+      apprehension, which sometimes shuddered through him like an icy draught,
+      or the touch of cold steel to his heart. He was ashamed, too, to be
+      conscious of anything like fear; yet he would not acknowledge it for fear;
+      and indeed there was such an airy, exhilarating, thrilling pleasure bound
+      up with it, that it could not really be so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in this state of mind that, a day or two after the feast, he saw
+      Colcord sitting on the bench, before the portal of the Hospital, in the
+      sun, which&mdash;September though it was&mdash;still came warm and bright
+      (for English sunshine) into that sheltered spot; a spot where many
+      generations of old men had warmed their limbs, while they looked down into
+      the life, the torpid life, of the old village that trailed its homely yet
+      picturesque street along by the venerable buildings of the Hospital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My good friend,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;I am about leaving you, for a time,&mdash;indeed,
+      with the limited time at my disposal, it is possible that I may not be
+      able to come back hither, except for a brief visit. Before I leave you, I
+      would fain know something more about one whom I must ever consider my
+      benefactor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the old man, with his usual benignant quiet, &ldquo;I saved your
+      life. It is yet to be seen, perhaps, whether thereby I made myself your
+      benefactor. I trust so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel it so, at least,&rdquo; answered Redclyffe, &ldquo;and I assure you life has a
+      new value for me since I came to this place; for I have a deeper hold upon
+      it, as it were,&mdash;more hope from it, more trust in something good to
+      come of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is a good change,&mdash;or should be so,&rdquo; quoth the old man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know,&rdquo; continued Redclyffe, &ldquo;how long you have been a figure in my
+      life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know it,&rdquo; said Colcord, &ldquo;though you might well have forgotten it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not so,&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;I remember, as if it were this morning, that
+      time in New England when I first saw you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man with whom you then abode,&rdquo; said Colcord, &ldquo;knew who I was.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And he being dead, and finding you here now, by such a strange
+      coincidence,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;and being myself a man capable of taking
+      your counsel, I would have you impart it to me: for I assure you that the
+      current of my life runs darkly on, and I would be glad of any light on its
+      future, or even its present phase.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not one of those from whom the world waits for counsel,&rdquo; said the
+      pensioner, &ldquo;and I know not that mine would be advantageous to you, in the
+      light which men usually prize. Yet if I were to give any, it would be that
+      you should be gone hence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gone hence!&rdquo; repeated Redclyffe, surprised. &ldquo;I tell you&mdash;what I have
+      hardly hitherto told to myself&mdash;that all my dreams, all my wishes
+      hitherto, have looked forward to precisely the juncture that seems now to
+      be approaching. My dreaming childhood dreamt of this. If you know anything
+      of me, you know how I sprung out of mystery, akin to none, a thing
+      concocted out of the elements, without visible agency; how all through my
+      boyhood I was alone; how I grew up without a root, yet continually longing
+      for one,&mdash;longing to be connected with somebody, and never feeling
+      myself so. Yet there was ever a looking forward to this time at which I
+      now find myself. If my next step were death, yet while the path seemed to
+      lead toward a certainty of establishing me in connection with my race, I
+      would take it. I have tried to keep down this yearning, to stifle it,
+      annihilate it, by making a position for myself, by being my own fact; but
+      I cannot overcome the natural horror of being a creature floating in the
+      air, attached to nothing; ever this feeling that there is no reality in
+      the life and fortunes, good or bad, of a being so unconnected. There is
+      not even a grave, not a heap of dry bones, not a pinch of dust, with which
+      I can claim kindred, unless I find it here!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is sad,&rdquo; said the old man,&mdash;&ldquo;this strong yearning, and nothing
+      to gratify it. Yet, I warn you, do not seek its gratification here. There
+      are delusions, snares, pitfalls, in this life. I warn you, quit the
+      search.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;I will follow the mysterious clue that seems to
+      lead me on; and, even now, it pulls me one step further.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How is that?&rdquo; asked the old man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It leads me onward even as far as the threshold&mdash;across the
+      threshold&mdash;of yonder mansion,&rdquo; said Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Step not across it; there is blood on that threshold!&rdquo; exclaimed the
+      pensioner. &ldquo;A bloody footstep emerging. Take heed that there be not as
+      bloody a one entering in!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pshaw!&rdquo; said Redclyffe, feeling the ridicule of the emotion into which he
+      had been betrayed, as the old man&rsquo;s wildness of demeanor made him feel
+      that he was talking with a monomaniac. &ldquo;We are talking idly. I do but go,
+      in the common intercourse of society, to see the old English residence
+      which (such is the unhappy obscurity of my position) I fancy, among a
+      thousand others, may have been that of my ancestors. Nothing is likely to
+      come of it. My foot is not bloody, nor polluted with anything except the
+      mud of the damp English soil.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yet go not in!&rdquo; persisted the old man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I must go,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, determinedly, &ldquo;and I will.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ashamed to have been moved to such idle utterances by anything that the
+      old man could say Redclyffe turned away, though he still heard the sad,
+      half-uttered remonstrance of the old man, like a moan behind him, and
+      wondered what strange fancy had taken possession of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The effect which this opposition had upon him made him the more aware how
+      much his heart was set upon this visit to the Hall; how much he had
+      counted upon being domiciliated there; what a wrench it would be to him to
+      tear himself away without going into that mansion, and penetrating all the
+      mysteries wherewith his imagination, exercising itself upon the theme
+      since the days of the old Doctor&rsquo;s fireside talk, had invested it. In his
+      agitation he wandered forth from the Hospital, and, passing through the
+      village street, found himself in the park of Braithwaite Hall, where he
+      wandered for a space, until his steps led him to a point whence the
+      venerable Hall appeared, with its limes and its oaks around it; its look
+      of peace, and aged repose, and loveliness; its stately domesticity, so
+      ancient, so beautiful; its mild, sweet simplicity; it seemed the ideal of
+      home. The thought thrilled his bosom, that this was his home,&mdash;the
+      home of the wild Western wanderer, who had gone away centuries ago, and
+      encountered strange chances, and almost forgotten his origin, but still
+      kept a clue to bring him back; and had now come back, and found all the
+      original emotions safe within him. It even seemed to him, that, by his
+      kindred with those who had gone before,&mdash;by the line of sensitive
+      blood linking him with that final emigrant,&mdash;he could remember all
+      these objects;&mdash;that tree, hardly more venerable now than then; that
+      clock-tower, still marking the elapsing time; that spire of the old
+      church, raising itself beyond. He spread out his arms in a kind of
+      rapture, and exclaimed:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O home, my home, my forefathers&rsquo; home! I have come back to thee! The
+      wanderer has come back!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a slight stir near him; and on a mossy seat, that was arranged
+      to take advantage of a remarkably good point of view of the old Hall, he
+      saw Elsie sitting. She had her drawing-materials with her, and had
+      probably been taking a sketch. Redclyffe was ashamed of having been
+      overheard by any one giving way to such idle passion as he had been
+      betrayed into; and yet, in another sense, he was glad,&mdash;glad, at
+      least, that something of his feeling, as yet unspoken to human being, was
+      shared, and shared by her with whom, alone of living beings, he had any
+      sympathies of old date, and whom he often thought of with feelings that
+      drew him irresistibly towards her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Elsie,&rdquo; said he, uttering for the first time the old name, &ldquo;Providence
+      makes you my confidant. We have recognized each other, though no word has
+      passed between us. Let us speak now again with one another. How came you
+      hither? What has brought us together again?&mdash;Away with this
+      strangeness that lurks between us! Let us meet as those who began life
+      together, and whose life-strings, being so early twisted in unison, cannot
+      now be torn apart.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are not wise,&rdquo; said Elsie, in a faltering voice, &ldquo;to break the
+      restraint we have tacitly imposed upon ourselves. Do not let us speak
+      further on this subject.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How strangely everything evades me!&rdquo; exclaimed Redclyffe. &ldquo;I seem to be
+      in a land of enchantment, where I can get hold of nothing that lends me a
+      firm support. There is no medium in my life between the most vulgar
+      realities and the most vaporous fiction, too thin to breathe. Tell me,
+      Elsie, how came you here? Why do you not meet me frankly? What is there to
+      keep you apart from the oldest friend, I am bold to say, you have on
+      earth? Are you an English girl? Are you one of our own New England
+      maidens, with her freedom, and her know-how, and her force, beyond
+      anything that these demure and decorous damsels can know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is wild,&rdquo; said Elsie, straggling for composure, yet strongly moved
+      by the recollections that he brought up. &ldquo;It is best that we should meet
+      as strangers, and so part.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Redclyffe; &ldquo;the long past comes up, with its memories, and yet
+      it is not so powerful as the powerful present. We have met again; our
+      adventures have shown that Providence has designed a relation in my fate
+      to yours. Elsie, are you lonely as I am?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she replied, &ldquo;I have bonds, ties, a life, a duty. I must live that
+      life and do that duty. You have, likewise, both. Do yours, lead your own
+      life, like me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know, Elsie,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;whither that life is now tending?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whither?&rdquo; said she, turning towards him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To yonder Hall,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She started up, and clasped her hands about his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no!&rdquo; she exclaimed, &ldquo;go not thither! There is blood upon the
+      threshold! Return: a dreadful fatality awaits you here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come with me, then,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;and I yield my purpose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It cannot be,&rdquo; said Elsie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I, too, tell you it cannot be,&rdquo; returned Redclyffe. [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dialogue had reached this point, when there came a step along the
+      wood-path; the branches rustled, and there was Lord Braithwaite, looking
+      upon the pair with the ordinary slightly sarcastic glance with which he
+      gazed upon the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A fine morning, fair lady and fair sir,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;We have few such,
+      except in Italy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0021" id="link2HCH0021"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      So Redclyffe left the Hospital, where he had spent many weeks of strange
+      and not unhappy life, and went to accept the invitation of the lord of
+      Braithwaite Hall. It was with a thrill of strange delight, poignant almost
+      to pain, that he found himself driving up to the door of the Hall, and
+      actually passing the threshold of the house. He looked, as he stept over
+      it, for the Bloody Footstep, with which the house had so long been
+      associated in his imagination; but could nowhere see it. The footman
+      ushered him into a hall, which seemed to be in the centre of the building,
+      and where, little as the autumn was advanced, a fire was nevertheless
+      burning and glowing on the hearth; nor was its effect undesirable in the
+      somewhat gloomy room. The servants had evidently received orders
+      respecting the guest; for they ushered him at once to his chamber, which
+      seemed not to be one of those bachelor&rsquo;s rooms, where, in an English
+      mansion, young and single men are forced to be entertained with very bare
+      and straitened accommodations; but a large, well, though antiquely and
+      solemnly furnished room, with a curtained bed, and all manner of elaborate
+      contrivances for repose; but the deep embrasures of the windows made it
+      gloomy, with the little light that they admitted through their small
+      panes. There must have been English attendance in this department of the
+      household arrangements, at least; for nothing could exceed the exquisite
+      nicety and finish of everything in the room, the cleanliness, the
+      attention to comfort, amid antique aspects of furniture; the rich, deep
+      preparations for repose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The servant told Redclyffe that his master had ridden out, and, adding
+      that luncheon would be on the table at two o&rsquo;clock, left him; and
+      Redclyffe sat some time trying to make out and distinguish the feelings
+      with which he found himself here, and realizing a lifelong dream. He ran
+      back over all the legends which the Doctor used to tell about this
+      mansion, and wondered whether this old, rich chamber were the one where
+      any of them had taken place; whether the shadows of the dead haunted here.
+      But, indeed, if this were the case, the apartment must have been very much
+      changed, antique though it looked, with the second, or third, or whatever
+      other numbered arrangement, since those old days of tapestry hangings and
+      rush-strewed floor. Otherwise this stately and gloomy chamber was as
+      likely as any other to have been the one where his ancestor appeared for
+      the last time in the paternal mansion; here he might have been the night
+      before that mysterious Bloody Footstep was left on the threshold, whence
+      had arisen so many wild legends, and since the impression of which nothing
+      certain had ever been known respecting that ill-fated man,&mdash;nothing
+      certain in England at least,&mdash;and whose story was left so ragged and
+      questionable even by all that he could add.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Do what he could, Redclyffe still was not conscious of that deep
+      home-feeling which he had imagined he should experience when, if ever, he
+      should come back to the old ancestral place; there was strangeness, a
+      struggle within himself to get hold of something that escaped him, an
+      effort to impress on his mind the fact that he was, at last, established
+      at his temporary home in the place that he had so long looked forward to,
+      and that this was the moment which he would have thought more interesting
+      than any other in his life. He was strangely cold and indifferent, frozen
+      up as it were, and fancied that he would have cared little had he been to
+      leave the mansion without so much as looking over the remaining part of
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, he became weary of sitting and indulging this fantastic humor of
+      indifference, and emerged from his chamber with the design of finding his
+      way about the lower part of the house. The mansion had that delightful
+      intricacy which can never be contrived; never be attained by design; but
+      is the happy result of where many builders, many designs,&mdash;many ages,
+      perhaps,&mdash;have concurred in a structure, each pursuing his own
+      design. Thus it was a house that you could go astray in, as in a city, and
+      come to unexpected places, but never, until after much accustomance, go
+      where you wished; so Redclyffe, although the great staircase and wide
+      corridor by which he had been led to his room seemed easy to find, yet
+      soon discovered that he was involved in an unknown labyrinth, where
+      strange little bits of staircases led up and down, and where passages
+      promised much in letting him out, but performed nothing. To be sure, the
+      old English mansion had not much of the stateliness of one of Mrs.
+      Radcliffe&rsquo;s castles, with their suites of rooms opening one into another;
+      but yet its very domesticity&mdash;its look as if long ago it had been
+      lived in&mdash;made it only the more ghostly; and so Redclyffe felt the
+      more as if he were wandering through a homely dream; sensible of the
+      ludicrousness of his position, he once called aloud; but his voice echoed
+      along the passages, sounding unwontedly to his ears, but arousing nobody.
+      It did not seem to him as if he were going afar, but were bewildered round
+      and round, within a very small compass; a predicament in which a man feels
+      very foolish usually.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he stood at an old window, stone-mullioned, at the end of a passage
+      into which he had come twice over, a door near him opened, and a personage
+      looked out whom he had not before seen. It was a face of great keenness
+      and intelligence, and not unpleasant to look at, though dark and sallow.
+      The dress had something which Redclyffe recognized as clerical, though not
+      exactly pertaining to the Church of England,&mdash;a sort of arrangement
+      of the vest and shirt-collar; and he had knee breeches of black. He did
+      not seem like an English clerical personage, however; for even in this
+      little glimpse of him Redclyffe saw a mildness, gentleness, softness, and
+      asking-of-leave, in his manner, which he had not observed in persons so
+      well assured of their position as the Church of England clergy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He seemed at once to detect Redclyffe&rsquo;s predicament, and came forward with
+      a pleasant smile, speaking in good English, though with a somewhat foreign
+      accent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, sir, you have lost your way. It is a labyrinthian house for its size,
+      this old English Hall,&mdash;full of perplexity. Shall I show you to any
+      point?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed, sir,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, laughing, &ldquo;I hardly know whither I want to
+      go; being a stranger, and yet knowing nothing of the public places of the
+      house. To the library, perhaps, if you will be good enough to direct me
+      thither.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Willingly, my dear sir,&rdquo; said the clerical personage; &ldquo;the more easily
+      too, as my own quarters are close adjacent; the library being my province.
+      Do me the favor to enter here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So saying, the priest ushered Redclyffe into an austere-looking yet
+      exceedingly neat study, as it seemed, on one side of which was an oratory,
+      with a crucifix and other accommodations for Catholic devotion. Behind a
+      white curtain there were glimpses of a bed, which seemed arranged on a
+      principle of conventual austerity in respect to limits and lack of
+      softness; but still there was in the whole austerity of the premises a
+      certain character of restraint, poise, principle, which Redclyffe liked. A
+      table was covered with books, many of them folios in an antique binding of
+      parchment, and others were small, thick-set volumes, into which antique
+      lore was rammed and compressed. Through an open door, opposite to the one
+      by which he had entered, there was a vista of a larger apartment, with
+      alcoves, a rather dreary-looking room, though a little sunshine came
+      through a window at the further end, distained with colored glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you sit down in my little home?&rdquo; said the courteous priest. &ldquo;I hope
+      we may be better acquainted; so allow me to introduce myself. I am Father
+      Angelo, domestic chaplain to his Lordship. You, I know, are the American
+      diplomatic gentleman, from whom his Lordship has been expecting a visit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe bowed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am most happy to know you,&rdquo; continued the priest. &ldquo;Ah; you have a happy
+      country, most catholic, most recipient of all that is outcast on earth.
+      Men of my religion must ever bless it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It certainly ought to be remembered to our credit,&rdquo; replied Redclyffe,
+      &ldquo;that we have shown no narrow spirit in this matter, and have not, like
+      other Protestant countries, rejected the good that is found in any man on
+      account of his religious faith. American statesmanship comprises Jew,
+      Catholic, all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After this pleasant little acknowledgment, there ensued a conversation
+      having some reference to books; for though Redclyffe, of late years, had
+      known little of what deserves to be called literature,&mdash;having found
+      political life as much estranged from it as it is apt to be with
+      politicians,&mdash;yet he had early snuffed the musty fragrance of the
+      Doctor&rsquo;s books, and had learned to love its atmosphere. At the time he
+      left college, he was just at the point where he might have been a scholar;
+      but the active tendencies of American life had interfered with him, as
+      with thousands of others, and drawn him away from pursuits which might
+      have been better adapted to some of his characteristics than the one he
+      had adopted. The priest gently felt and touched around his pursuits, and
+      finding some remains of classic culture, he kept up a conversation on
+      these points; showing him the possessions of the library in that
+      department, where, indeed, were some treasures that he had discovered, and
+      which seemed to have been collected at least a century ago.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Generally, however,&rdquo; observed he, as they passed from one dark alcove to
+      another, &ldquo;the library is of little worth, except to show how much of
+      living truth each generation contributes to the botheration of life, and
+      what a public benefactor a bookworm is, after all. There, now! did you
+      ever happen to see one? Here is one that I have watched at work, some time
+      past, and have not thought it worth while to stop him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe looked at the learned little insect, who was eating a strange
+      sort of circular trench into an old book of scholastic Latin, which
+      probably only he had ever devoured,&mdash;at least ever found to his
+      taste. The insect seemed in excellent condition, fat with learning, having
+      doubtless got the essence of the book into himself. But Redclyffe was
+      still more interested in observing in the corner a great spider, which
+      really startled him,&mdash;not so much for its own terrible aspect, though
+      that was monstrous, as because he seemed to see in it the very great
+      spider which he had known in his boyhood; that same monster that had been
+      the Doctor&rsquo;s familiar, and had been said to have had an influence in his
+      death. He looked so startled that Father Angelo observed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do not be frightened,&rdquo; said he; &ldquo;though I allow that a brave man may well
+      be afraid of a spider, and that the bravest of the brave need not blush to
+      shudder at this one. There is a great mystery about this spider. No one
+      knows whence he came; nor how long he has been here. The library was very
+      much shut up during the time of the last inheritor of the estate, and had
+      not been thoroughly examined for some years when I opened it, and swept
+      some of the dust away from its old alcoves. I myself was not aware of this
+      monster until the lapse of some weeks, when I was startled at seeing him,
+      one day, as I was reading an old book here. He dangled down from the
+      ceiling, by the cordage of his web, and positively seemed to look into my
+      face.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is of the species Condetas,&rdquo; said Redclyffe,&mdash;&ldquo;a rare spider
+      seldom seen out of the tropic regions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are learned, then, in spiders,&rdquo; observed the priest, surprised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could almost make oath, at least, that I have known this ugly specimen
+      of his race,&rdquo; observed Redclyffe. &ldquo;A very dear friend, now deceased, to
+      whom I owed the highest obligations, was studious of spiders, and his
+      chief treasure was one the very image of this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How strange!&rdquo; said the priest. &ldquo;There has always appeared to me to be
+      something uncanny in spiders. I should be glad to talk further with you on
+      this subject. Several times I have fancied a strange intelligence in this
+      monster; but I have natural horror of him, and therefore refrain from
+      interviews.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do wisely, sir,&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;His powers and purposes are
+      questionably beneficent, at best.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In truth, the many-legged monster made the old library ghostly to him by
+      the associations which it summoned up, and by the idea that it was really
+      the identical one that had seemed so stuffed with poison, in the lifetime
+      of the Doctor, and at that so distant spot. Yet, on reflection, it
+      appeared not so strange; for the old Doctor&rsquo;s spider, as he had heard him
+      say, was one of an ancestral race that he had brought from beyond the sea.
+      They might have been preserved, for ages possibly, in this old library,
+      whence the Doctor had perhaps taken his specimen, and possibly the one now
+      before him was the sole survivor. It hardly, however, made the monster any
+      the less hideous to suppose that this might be the case; and to fancy the
+      poison of old times condensed into this animal, who might have sucked the
+      diseases, moral and physical, of all this family into him, and to have
+      made himself their demon. He questioned with himself whether it might not
+      be well to crush him at once, and so perhaps do away with the evil of
+      which he was the emblem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I felt a strange disposition to crush this monster at first,&rdquo; remarked
+      the priest, as if he knew what Redclyffe was thinking of,&mdash;&ldquo;a feeling
+      that in so doing I should get rid of a mischief; but then he is such a
+      curious monster. You cannot long look at him without coming to the
+      conclusion that he is indestructible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; and to think of crushing such a deep-bowelled monster!&rdquo; said
+      Redclyffe, shuddering. &ldquo;It is too great a catastrophe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      During this conversation in which he was so deeply concerned, the spider
+      withdrew himself, and hand over hand ascended to a remote and dusky
+      corner, where was his hereditary abode.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall I be likely to meet Lord Braithwaite here in the library?&rdquo; asked
+      Redclyffe, when the fiend had withdrawn himself. &ldquo;I have not yet seen him
+      since my arrival.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I trust,&rdquo; said the priest, with great courtesy, &ldquo;that you are aware of
+      some peculiarities in his Lordship&rsquo;s habits, which imply nothing in
+      detriment to the great respect which he pays all his few guests, and
+      which, I know, he is especially desirous to pay to you. I think that we
+      shall meet him at lunch, which, though an English institution, his
+      Lordship has adopted very readily.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should hope,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, willing to know how far he might be
+      expected to comply with the peculiarities&mdash;which might prove to be
+      eccentricities&mdash;of his host, &ldquo;that my presence here will not be too
+      greatly at variance with his Lordship&rsquo;s habits, whatever they may be. I
+      came hither, indeed, on the pledge that, as my host would not stand in my
+      way, so neither would I in his.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is the true principle,&rdquo; said the priest, &ldquo;and here comes his
+      Lordship in person to begin the practice of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0022" id="link2HCH0022"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Lord Braithwaite came into the principal door of the library as the priest
+      was speaking, and stood a moment just upon the threshold, looking keenly
+      out of the stronger light into this dull and darksome apartment, as if
+      unable to see perfectly what was within; or rather, as Redclyffe fancied,
+      trying to discover what was passing between those two. And, indeed, as
+      when a third person comes suddenly upon two who are talking of him, the
+      two generally evince in their manner some consciousness of the fact; so it
+      was in this case, with Redclyffe at least, although the priest seemed
+      perfectly undisturbed, either through practice of concealment, or because
+      he had nothing to conceal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His Lordship, after a moment&rsquo;s pause, came forward, presenting his hand to
+      Redclyffe, who shook it, and not without a certain cordiality; till he
+      perceived that it was the left hand, when he probably intimated some
+      surprise by a change of manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am an awkward person,&rdquo; said his Lordship. &ldquo;The left hand, however, is
+      nearest the heart; so be assured I mean no discourtesy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Signor Ambassador and myself,&rdquo; observed the priest, &ldquo;have had a most
+      interesting conversation (to me at least) about books and bookworms,
+      spiders, and other congruous matters; and I find his Excellency has
+      heretofore made acquaintance with a great spider bearing strong
+      resemblance to the hermit of our library.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed,&rdquo; said his Lordship. &ldquo;I was not aware that America had yet enough
+      of age and old misfortune, crime, sordidness, that accumulate with it, to
+      have produced spiders like this. Had he sucked into himself all the
+      noisomeness of your heat?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe made some slight answer, that the spider was a sort of pet of an
+      old virtuoso to whom he owed many obligations in his boyhood; and the
+      conversation turned from this subject to others suggested by topics of the
+      day and place. His Lordship was affable, and Redclyffe could not, it must
+      be confessed, see anything to justify the prejudices of the neighbors
+      against him. Indeed, he was inclined to attribute them, in great measure,
+      to the narrowness of the English view,&mdash;to those insular prejudices
+      which have always prevented them from fully appreciating what differs from
+      their own habits. At lunch, which was soon announced, the party of three
+      became very pleasant and sociable, his Lordship drinking a light Italian
+      red wine, and recommending it to Redclyffe; who, however, was English
+      enough to prefer some bitter ale, while the priest contented himself with
+      pure water,&mdash;which is, in truth, a less agreeable drink in chill,
+      moist England than in any country we are acquainted with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must make yourself quite at home here,&rdquo; said his Lordship, as they
+      rose from table. &ldquo;I am not a good host, nor a very genial man, I believe.
+      I can do little to entertain you; but here is the house and the grounds at
+      your disposal,&mdash;horses in the stable,&mdash;guns in the hall,&mdash;here
+      is Father Angelo, good at chess. There is the library. Pray make the most
+      of them all; and if I can contribute in any way to your pleasure, let me
+      know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All this certainly seemed cordial, and the manner in which it was said
+      seemed in accordance with the spirit of the words; and yet, whether the
+      fault was in anything of morbid suspicion in Redclyffe&rsquo;s nature, or
+      whatever it was, it did not have the effect of making him feel welcome,
+      which almost every Englishman has the natural faculty of producing on a
+      guest, when once he has admitted him beneath his roof. It might be in
+      great measure his face, so thin and refined, and intellectual without
+      feeling; his voice which had melody, but not heartiness; his manners,
+      which were not simple by nature, but by art;&mdash;whatever it was,
+      Redclyffe found that Lord Braithwaite did not call for his own naturalness
+      and simplicity, but his art, and felt that he was inevitably acting a part
+      in his intercourse with him, that he was on his guard, playing a game; and
+      yet he did not wish to do this. But there was a mobility, a subtleness in
+      his nature, an unconscious tact,&mdash;which the mode of life and of
+      mixing with men in America fosters and perfects,&mdash;that made this sort
+      of finesse inevitable to him, with any but a natural character; with whom,
+      on the other hand, Redclyffe could be as fresh and natural as any
+      Englishman of them all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe spent the time between lunch and dinner in wandering about the
+      grounds, from which he had hitherto felt himself debarred by motives of
+      delicacy. It was a most interesting ramble to him, coming to trees which
+      his ancestor, who went to America, might have climbed in his boyhood,
+      might have sat beneath, with his lady-love, in his youth; deer there were,
+      the descendants of those which he had seen; old stone stiles, which his
+      foot had trodden. The sombre, clouded light of the day fell down upon this
+      scene, which in its verdure, its luxuriance of vegetable life, was purely
+      English, cultivated to the last extent without losing the nature out of a
+      single thing. In the course of his walk he came to the spot where he had
+      been so mysteriously wounded on his first arrival in this region; and,
+      examining the spot, he was startled to see that there was a path leading
+      to the other side of a hedge, and this path, which led to the house, had
+      brought him here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Musing upon this mysterious circumstance, and how it should have happened
+      in so orderly a country as England, so tamed and subjected to
+      civilization,&mdash;an incident to happen in an English park which seemed
+      better suited to the Indian-haunted forests of the wilder parts of his own
+      land,&mdash;and how no researches which the Warden had instituted had
+      served in the smallest degree to develop the mystery,&mdash;he clambered
+      over the hedge, and followed the footpath. It plunged into dells, and
+      emerged from them, led through scenes which seemed those of old romances,
+      and at last, by these devious ways, began to approach the old house,
+      which, with its many gray gables, put on a new aspect from this point of
+      view. Redclyffe admired its venerableness anew; the ivy that overran parts
+      of it; the marks of age; and wondered at the firmness of the institutions
+      which, through all the changes that come to man, could have kept this
+      house the home of one lineal race for so many centuries; so many, that the
+      absence of his own branch from it seemed but a temporary visit to foreign
+      parts, from which he was now returned, to be again at home, by the old
+      hearthstone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what do I mean to do?&rdquo; said he to himself, stopping short, and still
+      looking at the old house. &ldquo;Am I ready to give up all the actual life
+      before me for the sake of taking up with what I feel to be a less
+      developed state of human life? Would it not be better for me to depart
+      now, to turn my back on this flattering prospect? I am not fit to be here,&mdash;I,
+      so strongly susceptible of a newer, more stirring life than these men
+      lead; I, who feel that, whatever the thought and cultivation of England
+      may be, my own countrymen have gone forward a long, long march beyond
+      them, not intellectually, but in a way that gives them a further start. If
+      I come back hither, with the purpose to make myself an Englishman,
+      especially an Englishman of rank and hereditary estate,&mdash;then for me
+      America has been discovered in vain, and the great spirit that has been
+      breathed into us is in vain; and I am false to it all!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But again came silently swelling over him like a flood all that ancient
+      peace, and quietude, and dignity, which looked so stately and beautiful as
+      brooding round the old house; all that blessed order of ranks, that sweet
+      superiority, and yet with no disclaimer of common brotherhood, that
+      existed between the English gentleman and his inferiors; all that
+      delightful intercourse, so sure of pleasure, so safe from rudeness,
+      lowness, unpleasant rubs, that exists between gentleman and gentleman,
+      where, in public affairs, all are essentially of one mind, or seem so to
+      an American politician, accustomed to the fierce conflicts of our
+      embittered parties; where life was made so enticing, so refined, and yet
+      with a sort of homeliness that seemed to show that all its strength was
+      left behind; that seeming taking in of all that was desirable in life, and
+      all its grace and beauty, yet never giving life a hard enamel of
+      over-refinement. What could there be in the wild, harsh, ill-conducted
+      American approach to civilization, which could compare with this? What to
+      compare with this juiciness and richness? What other men had ever got so
+      much out of life as the polished and wealthy Englishmen of to-day? What
+      higher part was to be acted, than seemed to lie before him, if he willed
+      to accept it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He resumed his walk, and, drawing near the manor-house, found that he was
+      approaching another entrance than that which had at first admitted him; a
+      very pleasant entrance it was, beneath a porch, of antique form, and
+      ivy-clad, hospitable and inviting; and it being the approach from the
+      grounds, it seemed to be more appropriate to the residents of the house
+      than the other one. Drawing near, Redclyffe saw that a flight of steps
+      ascended within the porch, old-looking, much worn; and nothing is more
+      suggestive of long time than a flight of worn steps; it must have taken so
+      many soles, through so many years, to make an impression. Judging from the
+      make of the outside of the edifice, Redclyffe thought that he could make
+      out the way from the porch to the hall and library; so he determined to
+      enter this way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There had been, as was not unusual, a little shower of rain during the
+      afternoon; and as Redclyffe came close to the steps, they were glistening
+      with the wet. The stones were whitish, like marble, and one of them bore
+      on it a token that made him pause, while a thrill like terror ran through
+      his system. For it was the mark of a footstep, very decidedly made out,
+      and red, like blood,&mdash;the Bloody Footstep,&mdash;the mark of a foot,
+      which seemed to have been slightly impressed into the rock, as if it had
+      been a soft substance, at the same time sliding a little, and gushing with
+      blood. The glistening moisture of which we have spoken made it appear as
+      if it were just freshly stamped there; and it suggested to Redclyffe&rsquo;s
+      fancy the idea, that, impressed more than two centuries ago, there was
+      some charm connected with the mark which kept it still fresh, and would
+      continue to do so to the end of time. It was well that there was no
+      spectator there,&mdash;for the American would have blushed to have it
+      known how much this old traditionary wonder had affected his imagination.
+      But, indeed, it was as old as any bugbear of his mind&mdash;as any of
+      those bugbears and private terrors which grow up with people, and make the
+      dreams and nightmares of childhood, and the fever-images of mature years,
+      till they haunt the deliriums of the dying bed, and after that possibly,
+      are either realized or known no more. The Doctor&rsquo;s strange story vividly
+      recurred to him, and all the horrors which he had since associated with
+      this trace; and it seemed to him as if he had now struck upon a bloody
+      track, and as if there were other tracks of this supernatural foot which
+      he was bound to search out; removing the dust of ages that had settled on
+      them, the moss and deep grass that had grown over them, the forest leaves
+      that might have fallen on them in America&mdash;marking out the pathway,
+      till the pedestrian lay down in his grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The foot was issuing from, not entering into, the house. Whoever had
+      impressed it, or on whatever occasion, he had gone forth, and doubtless to
+      return no more. Redclyffe was impelled to place his own foot on the track;
+      and the action, as it were, suggested in itself strange ideas of what had
+      been the state of mind of the man who planted it there; and he felt a
+      strange, vague, yet strong surmise of some agony, some terror and horror,
+      that had passed here, and would not fade out of the spot. While he was in
+      these musings, he saw Lord Braithwaite looking at him through the glass of
+      the porch, with fixed, curious eyes, and a smile on his face. On
+      perceiving that Redclyffe was aware of his presence, he came forth without
+      appearing in the least disturbed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What think you of the Bloody Footstep?&rdquo; asked he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems to me, undoubtedly,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, stooping to examine it more
+      closely, &ldquo;a good thing to make a legend out of; and, like most legendary
+      lore, not capable of bearing close examination. I should decidedly say
+      that the Bloody Footstep is a natural reddish stain in the stone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think so, indeed?&rdquo; rejoined his Lordship. &ldquo;It may be; but in that
+      case, if not the record of an actual deed,&mdash;of a foot stamped down
+      there in guilt and agony, and oozing out with unwipeupable blood,&mdash;we
+      may consider it as prophetic;&mdash;as foreboding, from the time when the
+      stone was squared and smoothed, and laid at this threshold, that a fatal
+      footstep was really to be impressed here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is an ingenious supposition,&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;But is there any sure
+      knowledge that the prophecy you suppose has yet been fulfilled?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If not, it might yet be in the future,&rdquo; said Lord Braithwaite. &ldquo;But I
+      think there are enough in the records of this family to prove that there
+      did one cross this threshold in a bloody agony, who has since returned no
+      more. Great seekings, I have understood, have been had throughout the
+      world for him, or for any sign of him, but nothing satisfactory has been
+      heard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it is now too late to expect it,&rdquo; observed the American.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps not,&rdquo; replied the nobleman, with a glance that Redclyffe thought
+      had peculiar meaning in it. &ldquo;Ah! it is very curious to see what turnings
+      up there are in this world of old circumstances that seem buried forever;
+      how things come back, like echoes that have rolled away among the hills
+      and been seemingly hushed forever. We cannot tell when a thing is really
+      dead; it comes to life, perhaps in its old shape, perhaps in a new and
+      unexpected one; so that nothing really vanishes out of the world. I wish
+      it did.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The conversation now ceased, and Redclyffe entered the house, where he
+      amused himself for some time in looking at the ancient hall, with its
+      gallery, its armor, and its antique fireplace, on the hearth of which
+      burned a genial fire. He wondered whether in that fire was the continuance
+      of that custom which the Doctor&rsquo;s legend spoke of, and that the flame had
+      been kept up there two hundred years, in expectation of the wanderer&rsquo;s
+      return. It might be so, although the climate of England made it a natural
+      custom enough, in a large and damp old room, into which many doors opened,
+      both from the exterior and interior of the mansion; but it was pleasant to
+      think the custom a traditionary one, and to fancy that a booted figure,
+      enveloped in a cloak, might still arrive, and fling open the veiling
+      cloak, throw off the sombre and drooping-brimmed hat, and show features
+      that were similar to those seen in pictured faces on the walls. Was he
+      himself&mdash;in another guise, as Lord Braithwaite had been saying&mdash;that
+      long-expected one? Was his the echoing tread that had been heard so long
+      through the ages&mdash;so far through the wide world&mdash;approaching the
+      blood-stained threshold?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With such thoughts, or dreams (for they were hardly sincerely enough
+      entertained to be called thoughts), Redclyffe spent the day; a strange,
+      delicious day, in spite of the sombre shadows that enveloped it. He
+      fancied himself strangely wonted, already, to the house; as if his every
+      part and peculiarity had at once fitted into its nooks, and corners, and
+      crannies; but, indeed, his mobile nature and active fancy were not
+      entirely to be trusted in this matter; it was, perhaps, his American
+      faculty of making himself at home anywhere, that he mistook for the
+      feeling of being peculiarly at home here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0023" id="link2HCH0023"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe was now established in the great house which had been so long
+      and so singularly an object of interest with him. With his customary
+      impressibility by the influences around him, he begun to take in the
+      circumstances, and to understand them by more subtile tokens than he could
+      well explain to himself. There was the steward, [Endnote: 1] or whatever
+      was his precise office; so quiet, so subdued, so nervous, so strange! What
+      had been this man&rsquo;s history? What was now the secret of his daily life?
+      There he was, creeping stealthily up and down the staircases, and about
+      the passages of the house; always as if he were afraid of meeting
+      somebody. On seeing Redclyffe in the house, the latter fancied that the
+      man expressed a kind of interest in his face; but whether pleasure or pain
+      he could not well tell; only he sometimes found that he was contemplating
+      him from a distance, or from the obscurity of the room in which he sat,&mdash;or
+      from a corridor, while he smoked his cigar on the lawn. A great part, if
+      not the whole of this, he imputed to his knowledge of Redclyffe&rsquo;s
+      connections with the Doctor; but yet this hardly seemed sufficient to
+      account for the pertinacity with which the old man haunted his footsteps,&mdash;the
+      poor, nervous old thing,&mdash;always near him, or often unexpectedly so;
+      and yet apparently not very willing to hold conversation with him, having
+      nothing of importance to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Omskirk,&rdquo; said Redclyffe to him, a day or two after the commencement
+      of his visit, &ldquo;how many years have you now been in this situation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;0, sir, ever since the Doctor&rsquo;s departure for America,&rdquo; said Omskirk,
+      &ldquo;now thirty and five years, five months, and three days.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A long time,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, smiling, &ldquo;and you seem to keep the account
+      of it very accurately.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A very long time, your honor,&rdquo; said Omskirk; &ldquo;so long, that I seem to
+      have lived one life before it began, and I cannot think of any life than
+      just what I had. My life was broken off short in the midst; and what
+      belonged to the earlier part of it was another man&rsquo;s life; this is mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It might be a pleasant life enough, I should think, in this fine old
+      Hall,&rdquo; said Redclyffe; &ldquo;rather monotonous, however. Would you not like a
+      relaxation of a few days, a pleasure trip, in all these thirty-five years?
+      You old Englishmen are so sturdily faithful to one thing. You do not
+      resemble my countrymen in that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;0, none of them ever lived in an old mansion-house like this,&rdquo; replied
+      Omskirk, &ldquo;they do not know the sort of habits that a man gets here. They
+      do not know my business either, nor any man&rsquo;s here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is your master then, so difficult?&rdquo; said Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My master! Who was speaking of him?&rdquo; said the old man, as if surprised.
+      &ldquo;Ah, I was thinking of Dr. Grimshawe. He was my master, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Redclyffe was again inconceivably struck with the strength of the
+      impression that was made on the poor old man&rsquo;s mind by the character of
+      the old Doctor; so that, after thirty years of other service, he still
+      felt him to be the master, and could not in the least release himself from
+      those earlier bonds. He remembered a story that the Doctor used to tell of
+      his once recovering a hanged person, and more and more came to the
+      conclusion that this was the man, and that, as the Doctor had said, this
+      hold of a strong mind over a weak one, strengthened by the idea that he
+      had made him, had subjected the man to him in a kind of slavery that
+      embraced the soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, again, the lord of the estate interested him greatly, and not
+      unpleasantly. He compared what he seemed to be now with what, according to
+      all reports, he had been in the past, and could make nothing of it, nor
+      reconcile the two characters in the least. It seemed as if the estate were
+      possessed by a devil,&mdash;a foul and melancholy fiend,&mdash;who
+      resented the attempted possession of others by subjecting them to himself.
+      One had turned from quiet and sober habits to reckless dissipation;
+      another had turned from the usual gayety of life to recluse habits, and
+      both, apparently, by the same influence; at least, so it appeared to
+      Redclyffe, as he insulated their story from all other circumstances, and
+      looked at them by one light. He even thought that he felt a similar
+      influence coming over himself, even in this little time that he had spent
+      here; gradually, should this be his permanent residence,&mdash;and not so
+      very gradually either,&mdash;there would come its own individual mode of
+      change over him. That quick suggestive mind would gather the moss and
+      lichens of decay. Palsy of its powers would probably be the form it would
+      assume. He looked back through the vanished years to the time which he had
+      spent with the old Doctor, and he felt unaccountably as if the mysterious
+      old man were yet ruling him, as he did in his boyhood; as if his
+      inscrutable, inevitable eye were upon him in all his movements; nay, as if
+      he had guided every step that he took in coming hither, and were stalking
+      mistily before him, leading him about. He sometimes would gladly have
+      given up all these wild and enticing prospects, these dreams that had
+      occupied him so long, if he could only have gone away and looked back upon
+      the house, its inmates, and his own recollections no more; but there came
+      a fate, and took the shape of the old Doctor&rsquo;s apparition, holding him
+      back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, too, the thought of Elsie had much influence in keeping him
+      quietly here; her natural sunshine was the one thing that, just now,
+      seemed to have a good influence upon the world. She, too, was evidently
+      connected with this place, and with the fate, whatever it might be, that
+      awaited him here. The Doctor, the ruler of his destiny, had provided her
+      as well as all the rest; and from his grave, or wherever he was, he still
+      seemed to bring them together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So here, in this darkened dream, he waited for what should come to pass;
+      and daily, when he sat down in the dark old library, it was with the
+      thought that this day might bring to a close the doubt amid which he
+      lived,&mdash;might give him the impetus to go forward. In such a state, no
+      doubt, the witchcraft of the place was really to be recognized, the old
+      witchcraft, too, of the Doctor, which he had escaped by the quick
+      ebullition of youthful spirit, long ago, while the Doctor lived; but which
+      had been stored up till now, till an influence that remained latent for
+      years had worked out in active disease. He held himself open for
+      intercourse with the lord of the mansion; and intercourse of a certain
+      nature they certainly had, but not of the kind which Redclyffe desired.
+      They talked together of politics, of the state of the relations between
+      England and America, of the court to which Redclyffe was accredited;
+      sometimes Redclyffe tried to lead the conversation to the family topics,
+      nor, in truth, did Lord Braithwaite seem to decline his lead; although it
+      was observable that very speedily the conversation would be found turned
+      upon some other subject, to which it had swerved aside by subtle underhand
+      movements. Yet Redclyffe was not the less determined, and at no distant
+      period, to bring up the subject on which his mind dwelt so much, and have
+      it fairly discussed between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was sometimes a little frightened at the position and circumstances in
+      which he found himself; a great disturbance there was in his being, the
+      causes of which he could not trace. It had an influence on his dreams,
+      through which the Doctor seemed to pass continually, and when he awoke it
+      was often with the sensation that he had just the moment before been
+      holding conversation with the old man, and that the latter&mdash;with that
+      gesture of power that he remembered so well&mdash;had been impressing some
+      command upon him; but what that command was, he could not possibly call to
+      mind. He wandered among the dark passages of the house, and up its antique
+      staircases, as if expecting at every turn to meet some one who would have
+      the word of destiny to say to him. When he went forth into the park, it
+      was as if to hold an appointment with one who had promised to meet him
+      there; and he came slowly back, lingering and loitering, because this
+      expected one had not yet made himself visible, yet plucked up a little
+      alacrity as he drew near the house, because the communicant might have
+      arrived in his absence, and be waiting for him in the dim library. It
+      seemed as if he was under a spell; he could neither go away nor rest,&mdash;nothing
+      but dreams, troubled dreams. He had ghostly fears, as if some one were
+      near him whom he could not make out; stealing behind him, and starting
+      away when he was impelled to turn round. A nervousness that his healthy
+      temperament had never before permitted him to be the victim of, assailed
+      him now. He could not help imputing it partly to the influence of the
+      generations who had left a portion of their individual human nature in the
+      house, which had become magnetic by them and could not rid itself of their
+      presence in one sense, though, in another, they had borne it as far off as
+      to where the gray tower of the village church rose above their remains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again, he was frightened to perceive what a hold the place was getting
+      upon him; how the tendrils of the ivy seemed to hold him and would not let
+      him go; how natural and homelike (grim and sombre as they were) the old
+      doorways and apartments were becoming; how in no place that he had ever
+      known had he had such a home-like feeling. To be sure, poor fellow, he had
+      no earlier home except the almshouse, where his recollection of a fireside
+      crowded by grim old women and pale, sickly children, of course never
+      allowed him to have the reminiscences of a private, domestic home. But
+      then there was the Doctor&rsquo;s home by the graveyard, and little Elsie, his
+      constant playmate? No, even those recollections did not hold him like this
+      heavy present circumstance. How should he ever draw himself away? No; the
+      proud and vivid and active prospects that had heretofore spread themselves
+      before him,&mdash;the striving to conquer, the struggle, the victory, the
+      defeat, if such it was to be,&mdash;the experiences for good or ill,&mdash;the
+      life, life, life,&mdash;all possibility of these was passing from him; all
+      that hearty earnest contest or communion of man with man; and leaving him
+      nothing but this great sombre shade, this brooding of the old family
+      mansion, with its dreary ancestral hall, its mouldy dignity, its life of
+      the past, its fettering honor, which to accept must bind him hand and
+      foot, as respects all effort, such as he had trained himself for,&mdash;such
+      as his own country offered. It was not any value for these,&mdash;as it
+      seemed to Redclyffe,&mdash;but a witchcraft, an indefinable spell, a
+      something that he could not define, that enthralled him, and was now doing
+      a work on him analogous to, though different from, that which was wrought
+      on Omskirk and all the other inhabitants, high and low, of this old
+      mansion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt greatly interested in the master of the mansion; although perhaps
+      it was not from anything in his nature; but partly because he conceived
+      that he himself had a controlling power over his fortunes, and likewise
+      from the vague perception of this before-mentioned trouble in him. It
+      seemed, whatever it might be, to have converted an ordinary superficial
+      man of the world into a being that felt and suffered inwardly, had pangs,
+      fears, a conscience, a sense of unseen things. It seemed as if underneath
+      this manor-house were the entrance to the cave of Trophonius, one visit to
+      which made a man sad forever after; and that Lord Braithwaite had been
+      there once, or perhaps went nightly, or at any hour. Or the mansion itself
+      was like dark-colored experience, the reality; the point of view where
+      things were seen in their true lights; the true world, all outside of
+      which was delusion, and here&mdash;dreamlike as its structures seemed&mdash;the
+      absolute truth. All those that lived in it were getting to be a
+      brotherhood; and he among them; and perhaps before the blood-stained
+      threshold would grow up an impassable barrier, which would cause himself
+      to sit down in dreary quiet, like the rest of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe, as has been intimated, had an unavowed&mdash;unavowed to
+      himself&mdash;suspicion that the master of the house cherished no kindly
+      purpose towards him; he had an indistinct feeling of danger from him; he
+      would not have been surprised to know that he was concocting a plot
+      against his life; and yet he did not think that Lord Braithwaite had the
+      slightest hostility towards him. It might make the thing more horrible,
+      perhaps; but it has been often seen in those who poison for the sake of
+      interest, without feelings of personal malevolence, that they do it as
+      kindly as the nature of the thing will permit; they, possibly, may even
+      have a certain degree of affection for their victims, enough to induce
+      them to make the last hours of life sweet and pleasant; to wind up the
+      fever of life with a double supply of enjoyable throbs; to sweeten and
+      delicately flavor the cup of death that they offer to the lips of him
+      whose life is inconsistent with some stated necessity of their own. &ldquo;Dear
+      friend,&rdquo; such a one might say to the friend whom he reluctantly condemned
+      to death, &ldquo;think not that there is any base malice, any desire of pain to
+      thee, that actuates me in this thing. Heaven knows, I earnestly wish thy
+      good. But I have well considered the matter,&mdash;more deeply than thou
+      hast,&mdash;and have found that it is essential that one thing should be,
+      and essential to that thing that thou, my friend, shouldst die. Is that a
+      doom which even thou wouldst object to with such an end to be answered?
+      Thou art innocent; thou art not a man of evil life; the worst thing that
+      can come of it, so far as thou art concerned, would be a quiet, endless
+      repose in yonder churchyard, among dust of thy ancestry, with the English
+      violets growing over thee there, and the green, sweet grass, which thou
+      wilt not scorn to associate with thy dissolving elements, remembering that
+      thy forefather owed a debt, for his own birth and growth, to this English
+      soil, and paid it not,&mdash;consigned himself to that rough soil of
+      another clime, under the forest leaves. Pay it, dear friend, without
+      repining, and leave me to battle a little longer with this troublesome
+      world, and in a few years to rejoin thee, and talk quietly over this
+      matter which we are now arranging. How slight a favor, then, for one
+      friend to do another, will seem this that I seek of thee.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe smiled to himself, as he thus gave expression to what he really
+      half fancied were Lord Braithwaite&rsquo;s feelings and purposes towards him,
+      and he felt them in the kindness and sweetness of his demeanor, and his
+      evident wish to make him happy, combined with his own subtile suspicion of
+      some design with which he had been invited here, or which had grown up
+      since he came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whoever has read Italian history must have seen such instances of this
+      poisoning without malice or personal ill-feeling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His own pleasant, companionable, perhaps noble traits and qualities, may
+      have made a favorable impression on Lord Braithwaite, and perhaps he
+      regretted the necessity of acting as he was about to do, but could not
+      therefore weakly relinquish his deliberately formed design. And, on his
+      part, Redclyffe bore no malice towards Lord Braithwaite, but felt really a
+      kindly interest in him, and could he have made him happy at any less cost
+      than his own life, or dearest interests, would perhaps have been glad to
+      do so. He sometimes felt inclined to remonstrate with him in a friendly
+      way; to tell him that his intended course was not likely to lead to a good
+      result; that they had better try to arrange the matter on some other
+      basis, and perhaps he would not find the American so unreasonable as he
+      supposed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this, it will be understood, were the mere dreamy suppositions of
+      Redclyffe, in the idleness and languor of the old mansion, letting his
+      mind run at will, and following it into dim caves, whither it tended. He
+      did not actually believe anything of all this; unless it be a lawyer, or a
+      policeman, or some very vulgar natural order of mind, no man really
+      suspects another of crime. It is the hardest thing in the world for a
+      noble nature&mdash;the hardest and the most shocking&mdash;to be convinced
+      that a fellow-being is going to do a wrong thing, and the consciousness of
+      one&rsquo;s own inviolability renders it still more difficult to believe that
+      one&rsquo;s self is to be the object of the wrong. What he had been fancying
+      looked to him like a romance. The strange part of the matter was, what
+      suggested such a romance in regard to his kind and hospitable host, who
+      seemed to exercise the hospitality of England with a kind of refinement
+      and pleasant piquancy that came from his Italian mixture of blood? Was
+      there no spiritual whisper here?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So the time wore on; and Redclyffe began to be sensible that he must soon
+      decide upon the course that he was to take; for his diplomatic position
+      waited for him, and he could not loiter many days more away in this half
+      delicious, half painful reverie and quiet in the midst of his struggling
+      life. He was yet as undetermined what to do as ever; or, if we may come
+      down to the truth, he was perhaps loath to acknowledge to himself the
+      determination that he had actually formed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day, at dinner, which now came on after candle-light, he and Lord
+      Braithwaite sat together at table, as usual, while Omskirk waited at the
+      sideboard. It was a wild, gusty night, in which an autumnal breeze of
+      later autumn seemed to have gone astray, and come into September
+      intrusively. The two friends&mdash;for such we may call them&mdash;had
+      spent a pleasant day together, wandering in the grounds, looking at the
+      old house at all points, going to the church, and examining the
+      cross-legged stone statues; they had ridden, too, and taken a great deal
+      of healthful exercise, and had now that pleasant sense of just weariness
+      enough which it is the boon of the climate of England to incite and permit
+      men to take. Redclyffe was in one of his most genial moods, and Lord
+      Braithwaite seemed to be the same; so kindly they were both disposed to
+      one another, that the American felt that he might not longer refrain from
+      giving his friend some light upon the character in which he appeared, or
+      in which, at least, he had it at his option to appear. Lord Braithwaite
+      might or might not know it already; but at all events it was his duty to
+      tell him, or to take his leave, having thus far neither gained nor sought
+      anything from their connection which would tend to forward his pursuit&mdash;should
+      he decide to undertake it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the cheerful fire, the rare wine, and the good fare had put them both
+      into a good physical state, Redclyffe said to Lord Braithwaite,&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a matter upon which I have been some time intending to speak to
+      you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Braithwaite nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A subject,&rdquo; continued he, &ldquo;of interest to both of us. Has it ever
+      occurred to you, from the identity of name, that I may be really, what we
+      have jokingly assumed me to be,&mdash;a relation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It has,&rdquo; said Lord Braithwaite, readily enough. &ldquo;The family would be
+      proud to acknowledge such a kinsman, whose abilities and political rank
+      would add a public lustre that it has long wanted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe bowed and smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know, I suppose, the annals of your house,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;and have
+      heard how, two centuries ago, or somewhat less, there was an ancestor who
+      mysteriously disappeared. He was never seen again. There were tales of
+      private murder, out of which a hundred legends have come down to these
+      days, as I have myself found, though most of them in so strange a shape
+      that I should hardly know them, had I not myself a clue.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have heard some of these legends,&rdquo; said Lord Braithwaite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But did you ever hear, among them,&rdquo; asked Redclyffe, &ldquo;that the lost
+      ancestor did not really die,&mdash;was not murdered,&mdash;but lived long,
+      though in another hemisphere,&mdash;lived long, and left heirs behind
+      him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is such a legend,&rdquo; said Lord Braithwaite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Left posterity,&rdquo; continued Redclyffe,&mdash;&ldquo;a representative of whom is
+      alive at this day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That I have not known, though I might conjecture something like it,&rdquo; said
+      Braithwaite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The coolness with which he took this perplexed Redclyffe. He resolved to
+      make trial at once whether it were possible to move him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I have reason to believe,&rdquo; he added, &ldquo;that that representative is
+      myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Should that prove to be the case, you are welcome back to your own,&rdquo; said
+      Lord Braithwaite, quietly. &ldquo;It will be a very remarkable case, if the
+      proofs for two hundred years, or thereabouts, can be so distinctly made
+      out as to nullify the claim of one whose descent is undoubted. Yet it is
+      certainly not impossible. I suppose it would hardly be fair in me to ask
+      what are your proofs, and whether I may see them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The documents are in the hands of my agents in London,&rdquo; replied
+      Redclyffe; &ldquo;and seem to be ample, among them being a certified genealogy
+      from the first emigrant downward, without a break. A declaration of two
+      men of note among the first settlers, certifying that they knew the first
+      emigrant, under a change of name, to be the eldest son of the house of
+      Braithwaite; full proofs, at least on that head.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a lawyer, I believe,&rdquo; said Braithwaite, &ldquo;and know better than I
+      what may be necessary to prove your claim. I will frankly own to you, that
+      I have heard, long ago,&mdash;as long as when my connection with this
+      hereditary property first began,&mdash;that there was supposed to be an
+      heir extant for a long course of years, and that there, was no proof that
+      that main line of the descent had ever become extinct. If these things had
+      come fairly before me, and been represented to me with whatever force
+      belongs to them, before my accession to the estate,&mdash;these and other
+      facts which I have since become acquainted with,&mdash;I might have
+      deliberated on the expediency of coming to such a doubtful possession. The
+      property, I assure you, is not so desirable that, taking all things into
+      consideration, it has much increased my happiness. But, now, here I am,
+      having paid a price in a certain way,&mdash;which you will understand, if
+      you ever come into the property,&mdash;a price of a nature that cannot
+      possibly be refunded. It can hardly be presumed that I shall see your
+      right a moment sooner than you make it manifest by law.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I neither expect nor wish it,&rdquo; replied Redclyffe, &ldquo;nor, to speak frankly,
+      am I quite sure that you will ever have occasion to defend your title, or
+      to question mine. When I came hither, to be your guest, it was almost with
+      the settled purpose never to mention my proofs, nor to seek to make them
+      manifest. That purpose is not, I may say, yet relinquished.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yet I am to infer from your words that it is shaken?&rdquo; said Braithwaite.
+      &ldquo;You find the estate, then, so delightful,&mdash;this life of the old
+      manor-house so exquisitely agreeable,&mdash;this air so cheering,&mdash;this
+      moral atmosphere so invigorating,&mdash;that your scruples are about
+      coming to an end. You think this life of an Englishman, this fair prospect
+      of a title, so irresistibly enticing as to be worth more than your claim,
+      in behalf of your American birthright, to a possible Presidency.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a sort of sneer in this, which Redclyffe did not well know how
+      to understand; and there was a look on Braithwaite&rsquo;s face, as he said it,
+      that made him think of a condemned soul, who should be dressed in
+      magnificent robes, and surrounded with the mockery of state, splendor, and
+      happiness, who, if he should be congratulated on his fortunate and
+      blissful situation, would probably wear just such a look, and speak in
+      just that tone. He looked a moment in Braithwaite&rsquo;s face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;I do not think that there is much happiness in it. A
+      brighter, healthier, more useful, far more satisfactory, though tumultuous
+      life would await me in my own country. But there is about this place a
+      strange, deep, sad, brooding interest, which possesses me, and draws me to
+      it, and will not let me go. I feel as if, in spite of myself and my most
+      earnest efforts, I were fascinated by something in the spot, and must
+      needs linger here, and make it my home if I can.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You shall be welcome; the old hereditary chair will be filled at last,&rdquo;
+       said Braithwaite, pointing to the vacant chair. &ldquo;Come, we will drink to
+      you in a cup of welcome. Take the old chair now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In half-frolic Redclyffe took the chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He called to Omskirk to bring a bottle of a particularly exquisite Italian
+      wine, known only to the most deeply skilled in the vintages of that
+      country, and which, he said, was oftener heard of than seen,&mdash;oftener
+      seen than tasted. Omskirk put it on the table in its original glass, and
+      Braithwaite filled Redclyffe&rsquo;s glass and his own, and raised the latter to
+      his lips, with a frank expression of his mobile countenance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May you have a secure possession of your estate,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;and live long
+      in the midst of your possessions. To me, on the whole, it seems better
+      than your American prospects.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe thanked him, and drank off the glass of wine, which was not very
+      much to his taste; as new varieties of wine are apt not to be. All the
+      conversation that had passed had been in a free, careless sort of way,
+      without apparently much earnestness in it; for they were both men who knew
+      how to keep their more serious parts within them. But Redclyffe was glad
+      that the explanation was over, and that he might now remain at
+      Braithwaite&rsquo;s table, under his roof, without that uneasy feeling of
+      treachery which, whether rightly or not, had haunted him hitherto. He felt
+      joyous, and stretched his hand out for the bottle which Braithwaite kept
+      near himself, instead of passing it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do not yourself do justice to your own favorite wine,&rdquo; observed
+      Redclyffe, seeing his host&rsquo;s full glass standing before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have filled again,&rdquo; said Braithwaite, carelessly; &ldquo;but I know not that
+      I shall venture to drink a second glass. It is a wine that does not bear
+      mixture with other vintages, though of most genial and admirable qualities
+      when taken by itself. Drink your own, however, for it will be a rare
+      occasion indeed that would induce me to offer you another bottle of this
+      rare stock.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe sipped his second glass, endeavoring to find out what was this
+      subtile and peculiar flavor that hid itself so, and yet seemed on the
+      point of revealing itself. It had, he thought, a singular effect upon his
+      faculties, quickening and making them active, and causing him to feel as
+      if he were on the point of penetrating rare mysteries, such as men&rsquo;s
+      thoughts are always hovering round, and always returning from. Some
+      strange, vast, sombre, mysterious truth, which he seemed to have searched
+      for long, appeared to be on the point of being revealed to him; a sense of
+      something to come; something to happen that had been waiting long, long to
+      happen; an opening of doors, a drawing away of veils; a lifting of heavy,
+      magnificent curtains, whose dark folds hung before a spectacle of awe;&mdash;it
+      was like the verge of the grave. Whether it was the exquisite wine of
+      Braithwaite, or whatever it might be, the American felt a strange
+      influence upon him, as if he were passing through the gates of eternity,
+      and finding on the other side the revelation of some secret that had
+      greatly perplexed him on this side. He thought that Braithwaite&rsquo;s face
+      assumed a strange, subtile smile,&mdash;not malicious, yet crafty,
+      triumphant, and at the same time terribly sad, and with that perception
+      his senses, his life, welled away; and left him in the deep ancestral
+      chair at the board of Braithwaite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0024" id="link2HCH0024"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXIV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When awake [Endnote: 1], or beginning to awake, he lay for some time in a
+      maze; not a disagreeable one, but thoughts were running to and fro in his
+      mind, all mixed and jumbled together. Reminiscences of early days, even
+      those that were Preadamite; referring, we mean, to those times in the
+      almshouse, which he could not at ordinary times remember at all; but now
+      there seemed to be visions of old women and men, and pallid girls, and
+      little dirty boys, which could only be referred to that epoch. Also, and
+      most vividly, there was the old Doctor, with his sternness, his
+      fierceness, his mystery; and all that happened since, playing
+      phantasmagoria before his yet unclosed eyes; nor, so mysterious was his
+      state, did he know, when he should unclose those lids, where he should
+      find himself. He was content to let the world go on in this way, as long
+      as it would, and therefore did not hurry, but rather kept back the proofs
+      of awakening; willing to look at the scenes that were unrolling for his
+      amusement, as it seemed; and willing, too, to keep it uncertain whether he
+      were not back in America, and in his boyhood, and all other subsequent
+      impressions a dream or a prophetic vision. But at length something
+      stirring near him,&mdash;or whether it stirred, or whether he dreamed it,
+      he could not quite tell,&mdash;but the uncertainty impelled him, at last,
+      to open his eyes, and see whereabouts he was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even then he continued in as much uncertainty as he was before, and lay
+      with marvellous quietude in it, trying sluggishly to make the mystery out.
+      It was in a dim, twilight place, wherever it might be; a place of
+      half-awakeness, where the outlines of things were not well defined; but it
+      seemed to be a chamber, antique and vaulted, narrow and high, hung round
+      with old tapestry. Whether it were morning or midday he could not tell,
+      such was the character of the light, nor even where it came from; for
+      there appeared to be no windows, and yet it was not apparently artificial
+      light; nor light at all, indeed, but a gray dimness. It was so like his
+      own half-awake state that he lay in it a longer time, not incited to
+      finish his awaking, but in a languor, not disagreeable, yet hanging
+      heavily, heavily upon him, like a dark pall. It was, in fact, as if he had
+      been asleep for years, or centuries, or till the last day was dawning, and
+      then was collecting his thoughts in such slow fashion as would then be
+      likely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again that noise,&mdash;a little, low, quiet sound, as of one breathing
+      somewhere near him. The whole thing was very much like that incident which
+      introduced him to the Hospital, and his first coming to his senses there;
+      and he almost fancied that some such accident must again have happened to
+      him, and that when his sight cleared he should again behold the venerable
+      figure of the pensioner. With this idea he let his head steady itself; and
+      it seemed to him that its dizziness must needs be the result of very long
+      and deep sleep. What if it were the sleep of a century? What if all things
+      that were extant when he went to sleep had passed away, and he was waking
+      now in another epoch of time? Where was America, and the republic in which
+      he hoped for such great things? Where England? had she stood it better
+      than the republic? Was the old Hospital still in being,&mdash;although the
+      good Warden must long since have passed out of his warm and pleasant life?
+      And himself, how came he to be preserved? In what musty old nook had he
+      been put away, where Time neglected and Death forgot him, until now he was
+      to get up friendless, helpless,&mdash;when new heirs had come to the
+      estate he was on the point of laying claim to,&mdash;and go onward through
+      what remained of life? Would it not have been better to have lived with
+      his contemporaries, and to be now dead and dust with them? Poor, petty
+      interests of a day, how slight!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the noise, a little stir, a sort of quiet moan, or something that he
+      could not quite define; but it seemed, whenever he heard it, as if some
+      fact thrust itself through the dream-work with which he was circumfused;
+      something alien to his fantasies, yet not powerful enough to dispel them.
+      It began to be irksome to him, this little sound of something near him;
+      and he thought, in the space of another hundred years, if it continued, he
+      should have to arouse himself and see what it was. But, indeed, there was
+      something so cheering in this long repose,&mdash;this rest from all the
+      troubles of earth, which it sometimes seems as if only a churchyard bed
+      would give us,&mdash;that he wished the noise would let him alone. But his
+      thoughts were gradually getting too busy for this slumberous state. He
+      begun, perforce, to come nearer actuality. The strange question occurred
+      to him, Had any time at all passed? Was he not still sitting at Lord
+      Braithwaite&rsquo;s table, having just now quaffed a second glass of that rare
+      and curious Italian wine? Was it not affecting his head very strangely,&mdash;so
+      that he was put out of time as it were? He would rally himself, and try to
+      set his head right with another glass. He must be still at table, for now
+      he remembered he had not gone to bed at all. [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ah, the noise! He could not bear it, he would awake now, now!&mdash;silence
+      it, and then to sleep again. In fact, he started up; started to his feet,
+      in puzzle and perplexity, and stood gazing around him, with swimming
+      brain. It was an antique room, which he did not at all recognize, and,
+      indeed, in that dim twilight&mdash;which how it came he could not tell&mdash;he
+      could scarcely discern what were its distinguishing marks. But he seemed
+      to be sensible, that, in a high-backed chair, at a little distance from
+      him, sat a figure in a long robe; a figure of a man with snow-white hair
+      and a long beard, who seemed to be gazing at him, quietly, as if he had
+      been gazing a hundred years. I know not what it was, but there was an
+      influence as if this old man belonged to some other age and category of
+      man than he was now amongst. He remembered the old family legend of the
+      existence of an ancestor two or three centuries in age.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the old family personified,&rdquo; thought he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old figure made no sign, but continued to sit gazing at him in so
+      strangely still a manner that it made Redclyffe shiver with something that
+      seemed like affright. There was an aspect of long, long time about him; as
+      if he had never been young, or so long ago as when the world was young
+      along with him. He might be the demon of this old house; the
+      representative of all that happened in it, the grief, the long languor and
+      weariness of life, the deaths, gathering them all into himself, and
+      figuring them in furrows, wrinkles, and white hairs,&mdash;a being that
+      might have been young, when those old Saxon timbers were put together,
+      with the oaks that were saplings when Caesar landed, and was in his
+      maturity when the Conqueror came, and was now lapsing into extreme age
+      when the nineteenth century was elderly. His garb might have been of any
+      time, that long, loose robe that enveloped him. Redclyffe remained in this
+      way, gazing at this aged figure; at first without the least wonder, but
+      calmly, as we feel in dreams, when, being in a land of enchantment, we
+      take everything as if it were a matter of course, and feel, by the right
+      of our own marvellous nature, on terms of equal kindred with all other
+      marvels. So it was with him when he first became aware of the old man,
+      sitting there with that age-long regard directed towards him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, by degrees, a sense of wonder had its will, and grew, slowly at
+      first, in Redclyffe&rsquo;s mind; and almost twin-born with it, and growing
+      piece by piece, there was a sense of awful fear, as his waking senses came
+      slowly back to him. In the dreamy state, he had felt no fear; but, as a
+      waking man, it was fearful to discover that the shadowy forms did not fly
+      from his awaking eyes. He started at last to his feet from the low couch
+      on which he had all this time been lying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you?&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;Where am I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old figure made no answer; nor could Redclyffe be quite sure that his
+      voice had any effect upon it, though he fancied that it was shaken a
+      little, as if his voice came to it from afar. But it continued to gaze at
+      him, or at least to have its aged face turned towards him in the dim
+      light; and this strange composure, and unapproachableness, were very
+      frightful. As his manhood gathered about his heart, however, the American
+      endeavored to shake off this besetting fear, or awe, or whatever it was;
+      and to bring himself to a sense of waking things,&mdash;to burst through
+      the mist and delusive shows that bewildered him, and catch hold of a
+      reality. He stamped upon the floor; it was solid stone, the pavement, or
+      oak so old and stanch that it resembled it. There was one firm thing,
+      therefore. But the contrast between this and the slipperiness, the
+      unaccountableness, of the rest of his position, made him the more sensible
+      of the latter. He made a step towards the old figure; another; another. He
+      was face to face with him, within a yard of distance. He saw the faint
+      movement of the old man&rsquo;s breath; he sought, through the twilight of the
+      room, some glimmer of perception in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you a living man?&rdquo; asked Redclyffe, faintly and doubtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He mumbled, the old figure, some faint moaning sound, that, if it were
+      language at all, had all the edges and angles worn off it by decay,&mdash;unintelligible,
+      except that it seemed to signify a faint mournfulness and complainingness
+      of mood; and then held his peace, continuing to gaze as before. Redclyffe
+      could not bear the awe that filled him, while he kept at a distance, and,
+      coming desperately forward, he stood close to the old figure; he touched
+      his robe, to see if it were real; he laid his hand upon the withered hand
+      that held the staff, in which he now recognized the very staff of the
+      Doctor&rsquo;s legend. His fingers touched a real hand, though, bony and dry, as
+      if it had been in the grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you are real?&rdquo; said Redclyffe doubtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old figure seemed to have exhausted itself&mdash;its energies, what
+      there were of them&mdash;in the effort of making the unintelligible
+      communication already vouchsafed. Then he seemed to lapse out of
+      consciousness, and not to know what was passing, or to be sensible that
+      any person was near him. But Redclyffe was now resuming his firmness and
+      daylight consciousness even in the dimness. He ran over all that he had
+      heard of the legend of the old house, rapidly considering whether there
+      might not be something of fact in the legend of the undying old man;
+      whether, as told or whispered in the chimney-corners, it might not be an
+      instance of the mysterious, the half-spiritual mode, in which actual
+      truths communicate themselves imperfectly through a medium that gives them
+      the aspect of falsehood. Something in the atmosphere of the house made its
+      inhabitants and neighbors dimly aware that there was a secret resident; it
+      was by a language not audible, but of impression; there could not be such
+      a secret in its recesses, without making itself sensible. This legend of
+      the undying one translated it to vulgar apprehension. He remembered those
+      early legends, told by the Doctor, in his childhood; he seemed imperfectly
+      and doubtfully to see what was their true meaning, and how, taken aright,
+      they had a reality, and were the craftily concealed history of his own
+      wrongs, sufferings, and revenge. And this old man! who was he? He joined
+      the Warden&rsquo;s account of the family to the Doctor&rsquo;s legends. He could not
+      believe, or take thoroughly in, the strange surmise to which they led him;
+      but, by an irresistible impulse, he acted on it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir Edward Redclyffe!&rdquo; he exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha! who speaks to me?&rdquo; exclaimed the old man, in a startled voice, like
+      one who hears himself called at an unexpected moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir Edward Redclyffe,&rdquo; repeated Redclyffe, &ldquo;I bring you news of Norman
+      Oglethorpe!&rdquo; [Endnote: 3.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The villain! the tyrant! mercy! mercy! save me!&rdquo; cried the old man, in
+      most violent emotion of terror and rage intermixed, that shook his old
+      frame as if it would be shaken asunder. He stood erect, the picture of
+      ghastly horror, as if he saw before him that stern face that had thrown a
+      blight over his life, and so fearfully avenged, from youth to age, the
+      crime that he had committed. The effect, the passion, was too much,&mdash;the
+      terror with which it smote, the rage that accompanied it, blazed up for a
+      moment with a fierce flame, then flickered and went out. He stood
+      tottering; Redclyffe put out his hand to support him; but he sank down in
+      a heap on the floor, as if a thing of dry bones had been suddenly loosened
+      at the joints, and fell in a rattling heap. [Endnote: 4.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0025" id="link2HCH0025"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe, apparently, had not communicated to his agent in London his
+      change of address, when he left the Warden&rsquo;s residence to avail himself of
+      the hospitality of Braithwaite Hall; for letters arrived for him, from his
+      own country, both private and with the seal of state upon them; one among
+      the rest that bore on the envelope the name of the President of the United
+      States. The good Warden was impressed with great respect for so
+      distinguished a signature, and, not knowing but that the welfare of the
+      Republic (for which he had an Englishman&rsquo;s contemptuous interest) might be
+      involved in its early delivery at its destination, he determined to ride
+      over to Braithwaite Hall, call on his friend, and deliver it with his own
+      hand. With this purpose, he mounted his horse, at the hour of his usual
+      morning ride, and set forth; and, before reaching the village, saw a
+      figure before him which he recognized as that of the pensioner. [Endnote:
+      1.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Soho! whither go you, old friend?&rdquo; said the Warden, drawing his bridle as
+      he came up with the old man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To Braithwaite Hall, sir,&rdquo; said the pensioner, who continued to walk
+      diligently on; &ldquo;and I am glad to see your honor (if it be so) on the same
+      errand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why so?&rdquo; asked the Warden. &ldquo;You seem much in earnest. Why should my visit
+      to Braithwaite Hall be a special cause of rejoicing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay,&rdquo; said the pensioner, &ldquo;your honor is specially interested in this
+      young American, who has gone thither to abide; and when one is in a
+      strange country he needs some guidance. My mind is not easy about the
+      young man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the Warden, smiling to himself at the old gentleman&rsquo;s idle
+      and senile fears, &ldquo;I commend your diligence on behalf of your friend.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He rode on as he spoke, and deep in one of the woodland paths he saw the
+      flutter of a woman&rsquo;s garment, and, greatly to his surprise, overtook
+      Elsie, who seemed to be walking along with great rapidity, and, startled
+      by the approach of hoofs behind her, looked up at him, with a pale cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good morning, Miss Elsie,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;You are taking a long walk
+      this morning. I regret to see that I have frightened you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pray, whither are you going?&rdquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To the Hall,&rdquo; said the Warden, wondering at the abrupt question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, sir,&rdquo; exclaimed Elsie, &ldquo;for Heaven&rsquo;s sake, pray insist on seeing Mr.
+      Redclyffe,&mdash;take no excuse. There are reasons for it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly, fair lady,&rdquo; responded the Warden, wondering more and more at
+      this injunction from such a source. &ldquo;And when I see this fascinating
+      gentleman, pray what message am I to give him from Miss Elsie,&mdash;who,
+      moreover, seems to be on the eve of visiting him in person?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;See him! see him! Only see him!&rdquo; said Elsie, with passionate earnestness,
+      &ldquo;and in haste! See him now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She waved him onward as she spoke; and the Warden, greatly commoted for
+      the nonce, complied with the maiden&rsquo;s fantasy so far as to ride on at a
+      quicker pace, uneasily marvelling at what could have aroused this usually
+      shy and reserved girl&rsquo;s nervousness to such a pitch. The incident served
+      at all events to titillate his English sluggishness; so that he approached
+      the avenue of the old Hall with a vague expectation of something that had
+      happened there, though he knew not of what nature it could possibly be.
+      However, he rode round to the side entrance, by which horsemen generally
+      entered the house, and, a groom approaching to take his bridle, he
+      alighted and approached the door. I know not whether it were anything more
+      than the glistening moisture common in an English autumnal morning; but so
+      it was, that the trace of the Bloody Footstep seemed fresh, as if it had
+      been that very night imprinted anew, and the crime made all over again,
+      with fresh guilt upon somebody&rsquo;s soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the footman came to the door, responsive to his ring, the Warden
+      inquired for Mr. Redclyffe, the American gentleman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The American gentleman left for London, early this morning,&rdquo; replied the
+      footman, in a matter-of-fact way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gone!&rdquo; exclaimed the Warden. &ldquo;This is sudden; and strange that he should
+      go without saying good by. Gone,&rdquo; and then he remembered the old
+      pensioner&rsquo;s eagerness that the Warden should come here, and Elsie&rsquo;s
+      strange injunction that he should insist on seeing Redclyffe. &ldquo;Pray, is
+      Lord Braithwaite at home?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think, sir, he is in the library,&rdquo; said the servant, &ldquo;but will see;
+      pray, sir, walk in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He returned in a moment, and ushered the Warden through passages with
+      which he was familiar of old, to the library, where he found Lord
+      Braithwaite sitting with the London newspaper in his hand. He rose and
+      welcomed his guest with great equanimity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the Warden&rsquo;s inquiries after Redclyffe, Lord Braithwaite replied that
+      his guest had that morning left the house, being called to London by
+      letters from America; but of what nature Lord Braithwaite was unable to
+      say, except that they seemed to be of urgency and importance. The Warden&rsquo;s
+      further inquiries, which he pushed as far as was decorous, elicited
+      nothing more than this; and he was preparing to take his leave,&mdash;not
+      seeing any reason for insisting (according to Elsie&rsquo;s desire) on the
+      impossibility of seeing a man who was not there,&mdash;nor, indeed, any
+      reason for so doing. And yet it seemed very strange that Redclyffe should
+      have gone so unceremoniously; nor was he half satisfied, though he knew
+      not why he should be otherwise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you happen to know Mr. Redclyffe&rsquo;s address in London,&rdquo; asked the
+      Warden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; said Braithwaite. &ldquo;But I presume there is courtesy enough in
+      the American character to impel him to write to me, or both of us, within
+      a day or two, telling us of his whereabouts and whatabouts. Should you
+      know, I beg you will let me know; for I have really been pleased with this
+      gentleman, and should have been glad could he have favored me with a
+      somewhat longer visit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was nothing more to be said; and the Warden took his leave, and was
+      about mounting his horse, when he beheld the pensioner approaching the
+      house, and he remained standing until he should come up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are too late,&rdquo; said he, as the old man drew near. &ldquo;Our friend has
+      taken French leave.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Warden,&rdquo; said the old man solemnly, &ldquo;let me pray you not to give him
+      up so easily. Come with me into the presence of Lord Braithwaite.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Warden made some objections; but the pensioner&rsquo;s manner was so
+      earnest, that he soon consented; knowing that the strangeness of his
+      sudden return might well enough be put upon the eccentricities of the
+      pensioner, especially as he was so well known to Lord Braithwaite. He
+      accordingly again rang at the door, which being opened by the same stolid
+      footman, the Warden desired him to announce to Lord Braithwaite that the
+      Warden and a pensioner desired to see him. He soon returned, with a
+      request that they would walk in, and ushered them again to the library,
+      where they found the master of the house in conversation with Omskirk at
+      one end of the apartment,&mdash;a whispered conversation, which detained
+      him a moment, after their arrival. The Warden fancied that he saw in old
+      Omskirk&rsquo;s countenance a shade more of that mysterious horror which made
+      him such a bugbear to children; but when Braithwaite turned from him and
+      approached his visitor, there was no trace of any disturbance, beyond a
+      natural surprise to see his good friend the Warden so soon after his
+      taking leave. [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see you are surprised,&rdquo; said the latter. &ldquo;But you must lay the blame,
+      if any, on our good old friend here, who, for some reason, best known to
+      himself, insisted on having my company here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Braithwaite looked to the old pensioner, with a questioning look, as if
+      good-humoredly (yet not as if he cared much about it) asking for an
+      explanation. As Omskirk was about leaving the room, having remained till
+      this time, with that nervous look which distinguished him gazing towards
+      the party, the pensioner made him a sign, which he obeyed as if compelled
+      to do so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, my friend,&rdquo; said the Warden, somewhat impatient of the aspect in
+      which he himself appeared, &ldquo;I beg of you, explain at once to Lord
+      Braithwaite why you have brought me back in this strange way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is,&rdquo; said the pensioner quietly, &ldquo;that in your presence I request him
+      to allow me to see Mr. Redclyffe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, my friend,&rdquo; said Braithwaite, &ldquo;how can I show you a man who has left
+      my house, and whom in the chances of this life, I am not very likely to
+      see again, though hospitably desirous of so doing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here ensued a laughing sort of colloquy between the Warden and
+      Braithwaite, in which the former jocosely excused himself for having
+      yielded to the whim of the pensioner, and returned with him on an errand
+      which he well knew to be futile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have long been aware,&rdquo; he said apart, in a confidential way, &ldquo;of
+      something a little awry in our old friend&rsquo;s mental system. You will excuse
+      him, and me for humoring him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, of course,&rdquo; said Braithwaite, in the same tone. &ldquo;I shall not
+      be moved by anything the old fellow can say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old pensioner, meanwhile, had been as it were heating up, and
+      gathering himself into a mood of energy which those who saw him had never
+      before witnessed in his usually quiet person. He seemed somehow to grow
+      taller and larger, more impressive. At length, fixing his eyes on Lord
+      Braithwaite, he spoke again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dark, murderous man,&rdquo; exclaimed he. &ldquo;Your course has not been unwatched;
+      the secrets of this mansion are not unknown. For two centuries back, they
+      have been better known to them who dwell afar off than to those resident
+      within the mansion. The foot that made the Bloody Footstep has returned
+      from its long wanderings, and it passes on, straight as destiny,&mdash;sure
+      as an avenging Providence,&mdash;to the punishment and destruction of
+      those who incur retribution.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here is an odd kind of tragedy,&rdquo; said Lord Braithwaite, with a scornful
+      smile. &ldquo;Come, my old friend, lay aside this vein and talk sense.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not thus do you escape your penalty, hardened and crafty one!&rdquo; exclaimed
+      the pensioner. &ldquo;I demand of you, before this worthy Warden, access to the
+      secret ways of this mansion, of which thou dost unjustly retain
+      possession. I shall disclose what for centuries has remained hidden,&mdash;the
+      ghastly secrets that this house hides.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Humor him,&rdquo; whispered the Warden, &ldquo;and hereafter I will take care that
+      the exuberance of our old friend shall be duly restrained. He shall not
+      trouble you again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Braithwaite, to say the truth, appeared a little flabbergasted and
+      disturbed by these latter expressions of the old gentleman. He hesitated,
+      turned pale; but at last, recovering his momentary confusion and
+      irresolution, he replied, with apparent carelessness:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go wherever you will, old gentleman. The house is open to you for this
+      time. If ever you have another opportunity to disturb it, the fault will
+      be mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Follow, sir,&rdquo; said the pensioner, turning to the Warden; &ldquo;follow,
+      maiden![Endnote: 3] Now shall a great mystery begin to be revealed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So saying, he led the way before them, passing out of the hall, not by the
+      doorway, but through one of the oaken panels of the wall, which admitted
+      the party into a passage which seemed to pass through the thickness of the
+      wall, and was lighted by interstices through which shone gleams of light.
+      This led them into what looked like a little vestibule, or circular room,
+      which the Warden, though deeming himself many years familiar with the old
+      house, had never seen before, any more than the passage which led to it.
+      To his surprise, this room was not vacant, for in it sat, in a large old
+      chair, Omskirk, like a toad in its hole, like some wild, fearful creature
+      in its den, and it was now partly understood how this man had the
+      possibility of suddenly disappearing, so inscrutably, and so in a moment;
+      and, when all quest for him was given up, of as suddenly appearing again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha!&rdquo; said old Omskirk, slowly rising, as at the approach of some event
+      that he had long expected. &ldquo;Is he coming at last?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor victim of another&rsquo;s iniquity,&rdquo; said the pensioner. &ldquo;Thy release
+      approaches. Rejoice!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man arose with a sort of trepidation and solemn joy intermixed in
+      his manner, and bowed reverently, as if there were in what he heard more
+      than other ears could understand in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; I have waited long,&rdquo; replied he. &ldquo;Welcome; if my release is come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Lord Braithwaite, scornfully. &ldquo;This secret retreat of my
+      house is known to many. It was the priest&rsquo;s secret chamber when it was
+      dangerous to be of the old and true religion, here in England. There is no
+      longer any use in concealing this place; and the Warden, or any man, might
+      have seen it, or any of the curiosities of the old hereditary house, if
+      desirous so to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aha! son of Belial!&rdquo; quoth the pensioner. &ldquo;And this, too!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took three pieces from a certain point of the wall, which he seemed to
+      know, and stooped to press upon the floor. The Warden looked at Lord
+      Braithwaite, and saw that he had grown deadly pale. What his change of
+      cheer might bode, he could not guess; but, at the pressure of the old
+      pensioner&rsquo;s finger, the floor, or a segment of it, rose like the lid of a
+      box, and discovered a small darksome pair of stairs, within which burned a
+      lamp, lighting it downward, like the steps that descend into a sepulchre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Follow,&rdquo; said he, to those who looked on, wondering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he began to descend. Lord Braithwaite saw him disappear, then
+      frantically followed, the Warden next, and old Omskirk took his place in
+      the rear, like a man following his inevitable destiny. At the bottom of a
+      winding descent, that seemed deep and remote, and far within, they came to
+      a door, which the pensioner pressed with a spring; and, passing through
+      the space that disclosed itself, the whole party followed, and found
+      themselves in a small, gloomy room. On one side of it was a couch, on
+      which sat Redclyffe; face to face with him was a white-haired figure in a
+      chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are come!&rdquo; said Redclyffe, solemnly. &ldquo;But too late!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yonder is the coffer,&rdquo; said the pensioner. &ldquo;Open but that; and our
+      quest is ended.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That, if I mistake not, I can do,&rdquo; said Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew forth&mdash;what he had kept all this time, as something that
+      might yet reveal to him the mystery of his birth&mdash;the silver key that
+      had been found by the grave in far New England; and applying it to the
+      lock, he slowly turned it on the hinges, that had not been turned for two
+      hundred years. All&mdash;even Lord Braithwaite, guilty and shame-stricken
+      as he felt&mdash;pressed forward to look upon what was about to be
+      disclosed. What were the wondrous contents? The entire, mysterious coffer
+      was full of golden ringlets, abundant, clustering through the whole
+      coffer, and living with elasticity, so as immediately, as it were, to flow
+      over the sides of the coffer, and rise in large abundance from the long
+      compression. Into this&mdash;by a miracle of natural production which was
+      known likewise in other cases&mdash;into this had been resolved the whole
+      bodily substance of that fair and unfortunate being, known so long in the
+      legends of the family as the Beauty of the Golden Locks. As the pensioner
+      looked at this strange sight,&mdash;the lustre of the precious and
+      miraculous hair gleaming and glistening, and seeming to add light to the
+      gloomy room,&mdash;he took from his breast pocket another lock of hair, in
+      a locket, and compared it, before their faces, with that which brimmed
+      over from the coffer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the same!&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And who are you that know it?&rdquo; asked Redclyffe, surprised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He whose ancestors taught him the secret,&mdash;who has had it handed
+      down to him these two centuries, and now only with regret yields to the
+      necessity of making it known.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are the heir!&rdquo; said Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In that gloomy room, beside the dead old man, they looked at him, and saw
+      a dignity beaming on him, covering his whole figure, that broke out like a
+      lustre at the close of day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_APPE" id="link2H_APPE"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      APPENDIX
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1.</i> The MS. gives the following alternative openings: &ldquo;Early in
+      the present century&rdquo;; &ldquo;Soon after the Revolution&rdquo;; &ldquo;Many years ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2.</i> Throughout the first four pages of the MS. the Doctor is
+      called &ldquo;Ormskirk,&rdquo; and in an earlier draft of this portion of the romance,
+      &ldquo;Etheredge.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Crusty Hannah is a mixture of Indian
+      and negro.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 4. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;It is understood from the first that
+      the children are not brother and sister.&mdash;Describe the children with
+      really childish traits, quarrelling, being naughty, etc.&mdash;The Doctor
+      should occasionally beat Ned in course of instruction.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 5.</i> In order to show the manner in which Hawthorne would modify
+      a passage, which was nevertheless to be left substantially the same, I
+      subjoin here a description of this graveyard as it appears in the earlier
+      draft: &ldquo;The graveyard (we are sorry to have to treat of such a
+      disagreeable piece of ground, but everybody&rsquo;s business centres there at
+      one time or another) was the most ancient in the town. The dust of the
+      original Englishmen had become incorporated with the soil; of those
+      Englishmen whose immediate predecessors had been resolved into the earth
+      about the country churches,&mdash;the little Norman, square, battlemented
+      stone towers of the villages in the old land; so that in this point of
+      view, as holding bones and dust of the first ancestors, this graveyard was
+      more English than anything else in town. There had been hidden from sight
+      many a broad, bluff visage of husbandmen that had ploughed the real
+      English soil; there the faces of noted men, now known in history; there
+      many a personage whom tradition told about, making wondrous qualities of
+      strength and courage for him;&mdash;all these, mingled with succeeding
+      generations, turned up and battened down again with the sexton&rsquo;s spade;
+      until every blade of grass was human more than vegetable,&mdash;for an
+      hundred and fifty years will do this, and so much time, at least, had
+      elapsed since the first little mound was piled up in the virgin soil. Old
+      tombs there were too, with numerous sculptures on them; and quaint, mossy
+      gravestones; although all kinds of monumental appendages were of a date
+      more recent than the time of the first settlers, who had been content with
+      wooden memorials, if any, the sculptor&rsquo;s art not having then reached New
+      England. Thus rippled, surged, broke almost against the house, this dreary
+      graveyard, which made the street gloomy, so that people did not like to
+      pass the dark, high wooden fence, with its closed gate, that separated it
+      from the street. And this old house was one that crowded upon it, and took
+      up the ground that would otherwise have been sown as thickly with dead as
+      the rest of the lot; so that it seemed hardly possible but that the dead
+      people should get up out of their graves, and come in there to warm
+      themselves. But in truth, I have never heard a whisper of its being
+      haunted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 6. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;The spiders are affected by the
+      weather and serve as barometers.&mdash;It shall always be a moot point
+      whether the Doctor really believed in cobwebs, or was laughing at the
+      credulous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 7. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;The townspeople are at war with the
+      Doctor.&mdash;Introduce the Doctor early as a smoker, and describe.&mdash;The
+      result of Crusty Hannah&rsquo;s strangely mixed breed should be shown in some
+      strange way.&mdash;Give vivid pictures of the society of the day,
+      symbolized in the street scenes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Read the whole paragraph before
+      copying any of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Crusty Hannah teaches Elsie curious
+      needlework, etc.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3.</i> These two children are described as follows in an early
+      note of the author&rsquo;s: &ldquo;The boy had all the qualities fitted to excite
+      tenderness in those who had the care of him; in the first and most evident
+      place, on account of his personal beauty, which was very remarkable,&mdash;the
+      most intelligent and expressive face that can be conceived, changing in
+      those early years like an April day, and beautiful in all its changes;
+      dark, but of a soft expression, kindling, melting, glowing, laughing; a
+      varied intelligence, which it was as good as a book to read. He was quick
+      in all modes of mental exercise; quick and strong, too, in sensibility;
+      proud, and gifted (probably by the circumstances in which he was placed)
+      with an energy which the softness and impressibility of his nature needed.&mdash;As
+      for the little girl, all the squalor of the abode served but to set off
+      her lightsomeness and brightsomeness. She was a pale, large-eyed little
+      thing, and it might have been supposed that the air of the house and the
+      contiguity of the burial-place had a bad effect upon her health. Yet I
+      hardly think this could have been the case, for she was of a very airy
+      nature, dancing and sporting through the house as if melancholy had never
+      been made. She took all kinds of childish liberties with the Doctor, and
+      with his pipe, and with everything appertaining to him except his spiders
+      and his cobwebs.&rdquo;&mdash;All of which goes to show that Hawthorne first
+      conceived his characters in the mood of the &ldquo;Twice-Told Tales,&rdquo; and then
+      by meditation solidified them to the inimitable flesh-and-blood of &ldquo;The
+      House of the Seven Gables&rdquo; and &ldquo;The Blithedale Romance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1.</i> An English church spire, evidently the prototype of this,
+      and concerning which the same legend is told, is mentioned in the author&rsquo;s
+      &ldquo;English Mote-Books.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2.</i> Leicester Hospital, in Warwick, described in &ldquo;Our Old
+      Home,&rdquo; is the original of this charity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;The children find a gravestone with
+      something like a footprint on it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 4. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Put into the Doctor&rsquo;s character a
+      continual enmity against somebody, breaking out in curses of which nobody
+      can understand the application.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. IV.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1.</i> The Doctor&rsquo;s propensity for cobwebs is amplified in the
+      following note for an earlier and somewhat milder version of the
+      character: &ldquo;According to him, all science was to be renewed and
+      established on a sure ground by no other means than cobwebs. The cobweb
+      was the magic clue by which mankind was to be rescued from all its errors,
+      and guided safely back to the right. And so he cherished spiders above all
+      things, and kept them spinning, spinning away; the only textile factory
+      that existed at that epoch in New England. He distinguished the production
+      of each of his ugly friends, and assigned peculiar qualities to each; and
+      he had been for years engaged in writing a work on this new discovery, in
+      reference to which he had already compiled a great deal of folio
+      manuscript, and had unguessed at resources still to come. With this
+      suggestive subject he interwove all imaginable learning, collected from
+      his own library, rich in works that few others had read, and from that of
+      his beloved University, crabbed with Greek, rich with Latin, drawing into
+      itself, like a whirlpool, all that men had thought hitherto, and combining
+      them anew in such a way that it had all the charm of a racy originality.
+      Then he had projects for the cultivation of cobwebs, to which end, in the
+      good Doctor&rsquo;s opinion, it seemed desirable to devote a certain part of the
+      national income; and not content with this, all public-spirited citizens
+      would probably be induced to devote as much of their time and means as
+      they could to the same end. According to him, there was no such beautiful
+      festoon and drapery for the halls of princes as the spinning of this
+      heretofore despised and hated insect; and by due encouragement it might be
+      hoped that they would flourish, and hang and dangle and wave triumphant in
+      the breeze, to an extent as yet generally undreamed of. And he lamented
+      much the destruction that has heretofore been wrought upon this precious
+      fabric by the housemaid&rsquo;s broom, and insisted upon by foolish women who
+      claimed to be good housewives. Indeed, it was the general opinion that the
+      Doctor&rsquo;s celibacy was in great measure due to the impossibility of finding
+      a woman who would pledge herself to co-operate with him in this great
+      ambition of his life,&mdash;that of reducing the world to a cobweb
+      factory; or who would bind herself to let her own drawing-room be
+      ornamented with this kind of tapestry. But there never was a wife
+      precisely fitted for our friend the Doctor, unless it had been Arachne
+      herself, to whom, if she could again have been restored to her female
+      shape, he would doubtless have lost no time in paying his addresses. It
+      was doubtless the having dwelt too long among the musty and dusty clutter
+      and litter of things gone by, that made the Doctor almost a monomaniac on
+      this subject. There were cobwebs in his own brain, and so he saw nothing
+      valuable but cobwebs in the world around him; and deemed that the march of
+      created things, up to this time, had been calculated by foreknowledge to
+      produce them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Ned must learn something of the
+      characteristics of the Catechism, and simple cottage devotion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. V.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Make the following scene emblematic
+      of the world&rsquo;s treatment of a dissenter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Yankee characteristics should be
+      shown in the schoolmaster&rsquo;s manners.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. VI.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;He had a sort of horror of violence,
+      and of the strangeness that it should be done to him; this affected him
+      more than the blow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Jokes occasionally about the
+      schoolmaster&rsquo;s thinness and lightness,&mdash;how he might suspend himself
+      from the spider&rsquo;s web and swing, etc.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;The Doctor and the Schoolmaster
+      should have much talk about England.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 4. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;The children were at play in the
+      churchyard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 5. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;He mentions that he was probably
+      buried in the churchyard there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. VII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Perhaps put this narratively, not as
+      spoken.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;He was privately married to the
+      heiress, if she were an heiress. They meant to kill him in the wood, but,
+      by contrivance, he was kidnapped.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;They were privately married.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 4. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Old descriptive letters, referring to
+      localities as they existed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 5. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;There should be symbols and tokens,
+      hinting at the schoolmaster&rsquo;s disappearance, from the first opening of the
+      scene.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. VIII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;They had got up in remarkably good
+      case that morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;The stranger may be the future master
+      of the Hospital.&mdash;Describe the winter day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Describe him as clerical.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 4. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Represent him as a refined,
+      agreeable, genial young man, of frank, kindly, gentlemanly manners.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 5.</i> Alternative reading: &ldquo;A clergyman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. IX.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Make the old grave-digger a <i>laudator
+      temporis acti</i>,&mdash;especially as to burial customs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2.</i> Instead of &ldquo;written,&rdquo; as in the text, the author probably
+      meant to write &ldquo;read.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3.</i> The MS. has &ldquo;delight,&rdquo; but &ldquo;a light&rdquo; is evidently intended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 4. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;He aims a blow, perhaps with his
+      pipe, at the boy, which Ned wards off.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. X.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;No longer could play at quarter-staff
+      with Ned.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Referring to places and people in
+      England: the Bloody Footstep sometimes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3.</i> In the original the following occurs, but marked to
+      indicate that it was to be omitted: &ldquo;And kissed his hand to her, and
+      laughed feebly; and that was the last that she or anybody, the last
+      glimpse they had of Doctor Grimshawe alive.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 4. Author&rsquo;s notes</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;A great deal must be made out of the
+      spiders, and their gloomy, dusky, flaunting tapestry. A web across the
+      orifice of his inkstand every morning; everywhere, indeed, except across
+      the snout of his brandy-bottle.&mdash;Depict the Doctor in an old
+      dressing-gown, and a strange sort of a cap, like a wizard&rsquo;s.&mdash;The two
+      children are witnesses of many strange experiments in the study; they see
+      his moods, too.&mdash;The Doctor is supposed to be writing a work on the
+      Natural History of Spiders. Perhaps he used them as a blind for his real
+      project, and used to bamboozle the learned with pretending to read them
+      passages in which great learning seemed to be elaborately worked up,
+      crabbed with Greek and Latin, as if the topic drew into itself, like a
+      whirlpool, all that men thought and knew; plans to cultivate cobwebs on a
+      large scale. Sometimes, after overwhelming them with astonishment in this
+      way, he would burst into one of his laughs. Schemes to make the world a
+      cobweb-factory, etc., etc. Cobwebs in his own brain. Crusty Hannah such a
+      mixture of persons and races as could be found only at a seaport. There
+      was a rumor that the Doctor had murdered a former maid, for having, with
+      housewifely instinct, swept away the cobwebs; some said that he had her
+      skeleton in a closet. Some said that he had strangled a wife with web of
+      the great spider.&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;Read the description of Bolton Hall, the garden,
+      lawn, etc., Aug. 8, &lsquo;53.&mdash;Bebbington church and churchyard, Aug. 29,
+      &lsquo;53.&mdash;The Doctor is able to love,&mdash;able to hate; two great and
+      rare abilities nowadays.&mdash;Introduce two pine trees, ivy-grown, as at
+      Lowwood Hotel, July 16, &lsquo;58.&mdash;The family name might be Redclyffe.&mdash;Thatched
+      cottage, June 22, &lsquo;55.&mdash;Early introduce the mention of the cognizance
+      of the family,&mdash;the Leopard&rsquo;s Head, for instance, in the first part
+      of the romance; the Doctor may have possessed it engraved as coat of arms
+      in a book.&mdash;The Doctor shall show Ned, perhaps, a drawing or
+      engraving of the Hospital, with figures of the pensioners in the
+      quadrangle, fitly dressed; and this picture and the figures shall impress
+      themselves strongly on his memory.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The above dates and places refer to passages in the published &ldquo;English
+      Note-Books.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XI.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Compare it with Spenser&rsquo;s Cave of
+      Despair. Put instruments of suicide there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Once, in looking at the mansion,
+      Redclyffe is struck by the appearance of a marble inserted into the wall,
+      and kept clear of lichens.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Describe, in rich poetry, all shapes
+      of deadly things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Conferred their best qualities&rdquo;: an
+      alternative phrase for &ldquo;done their utmost.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Let the old man have a beard as part
+      of the costume.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XIII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Describe him as delirious, and the
+      scene as adopted into his delirium.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Make the whole scene very dreamlike
+      and feverish.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;There should be a slight wildness in
+      the patient&rsquo;s remark to the surgeon, which he cannot prevent, though he is
+      conscious of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 4. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Notice the peculiar depth and
+      intelligence of his eyes, on account of his pain and sickness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 5. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Perhaps the recognition of the
+      pensioner should not be so decided. Redclyffe thinks it is he, but thinks
+      it as in a dream, without wonder or inquiry; and the pensioner does not
+      quite acknowledge it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 6.</i> The following dialogue is marked to be omitted or modified
+      in the original MS.; but it is retained here, in order that the thread of
+      the narrative may not be broken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 7. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;The patient, as he gets better,
+      listens to the feet of old people moving in corridors; to the ringing of a
+      bell at stated periods; to old, tremulous voices talking in the
+      quadrangle; etc., etc.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 8.</i> At this point the modification indicated in Note 5 seems to
+      have been made operative: and the recognition takes place in another way.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XIV.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1.</i> This paragraph is left incomplete in the original MS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2.</i> The words &ldquo;Rich old bindings&rdquo; are interlined here,
+      indicating, perhaps, a purpose to give a more detailed description of the
+      library and its contents.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XV.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;I think it shall be built of stone,
+      however.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2.</i> This probably refers to some incident which the author
+      intended to incorporate in the former portion of the romance, on a final
+      revision.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XVI.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1.</i> Several passages, which are essentially reproductions of
+      what had been previously treated, are omitted from this chapter. It
+      belongs to an earlier version of the romance.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XVII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Redclyffe shows how to find, under
+      the surface of the village green, an old cross.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;A circular seat around the tree.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3.</i> The reader now hears for the first time what Redclyffe
+      recollected.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XVIII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;The dinner is given to the
+      pensioners, as well as to the gentry, I think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;For example, a story of three
+      brothers, who had a deadly quarrel among them more than two hundred years
+      ago for the affections of a young lady, their cousin, who gave her
+      reciprocal love to one of them, who immediately became the object of the
+      deadly hatred of the two others. There seemed to be madness in their love;
+      perhaps madness in the love of all three; for the result had been a plot
+      to kidnap this unfortunate young man and convey him to America, where he
+      was sold for a servant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XIX.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1.</i> The following passage, though it seems to fit in here
+      chronologically, is concerned with a side issue which was not followed up.
+      The author was experimenting for a character to act as the accomplice of
+      Lord Braithwaite at the Hall; and he makes trial of the present personage,
+      Mountford; of an Italian priest, Father Angelo; and finally of the
+      steward, Omskirk, who is adopted. It will be noticed that Mountford is
+      here endowed (for the moment) with the birthright of good Doctor Hammond,
+      the Warden. He is represented as having made the journey to America in
+      search of the grave. This alteration being inconsistent with the true
+      thread of the story, and being, moreover, not continued, I have placed
+      this passage in the Appendix, instead of in the text.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe often, in the dim weather, when the prophetic intimations of
+      rain were too strong to allow an American to walk abroad with peace of
+      mind, was in the habit of pacing this noble hall, and watching the process
+      of renewal and adornment; or, which suited him still better, of enjoying
+      its great, deep solitude when the workmen were away. Parties of visitors,
+      curious tourists, sometimes peeped in, took a cursory glimpse at the old
+      hall, and went away; these were the only ordinary disturbances. But, one
+      day, a person entered, looked carelessly round the hall, as if its
+      antiquity had no great charm to him; then he seemed to approach Redclyffe,
+      who stood far and dim in the remote distance of the great room. The
+      echoing of feet on the stone pavement of the hall had always an impressive
+      sound, and turning his head towards the visitant Edward stood as if there
+      were an expectance for him in this approach. It was a middle-aged man&mdash;rather,
+      a man towards fifty, with an alert, capable air; a man evidently with
+      something to do in life, and not in the habit of throwing away his moments
+      in looking at old halls; a gentlemanly man enough, too. He approached
+      Redclyffe without hesitation, and, lifting his hat, addressed him in a way
+      that made Edward wonder whether he could be an Englishman. If so, he must
+      have known that Edward was an American, and have been trying to adapt his
+      manners to those of a democratic freedom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Redclyffe, I believe,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe bowed, with the stiff caution of an Englishman; for, with
+      American mobility, he had learned to be stiff.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I have had the pleasure of knowing&mdash;at least of meeting&mdash;you
+      very long ago,&rdquo; said the gentleman. &ldquo;But I see you do not recollect me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe confessed that the stranger had the advantage of him in his
+      recollection of a previous acquaintance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No wonder,&rdquo; said the other, &ldquo;for, as I have already hinted, it was many
+      years ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In my own country then, of course,&rdquo; said Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In your own country certainly,&rdquo; said the stranger, &ldquo;and when it would
+      have required a penetrating eye to see the distinguished Mr. Redclyffe.
+      the representative of American democracy abroad, in the little pale-faced,
+      intelligent boy, dwelling with an old humorist in the corner of a
+      graveyard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At these words Redclyffe sent back his recollections, and, though
+      doubtfully, began to be aware that this must needs be the young Englishman
+      who had come to his guardian on such a singular errand as to search an old
+      grave. It must be he, for it could be nobody else; and, in truth, he had a
+      sense of his identity,&mdash;which, however, did not express itself by
+      anything that he could confidently remember in his looks, manner, or
+      voice,&mdash;yet, if anything, it was most in the voice. But the image
+      which, on searching, he found in his mind of a fresh-colored young
+      Englishman, with light hair and a frank, pleasant face, was terribly
+      realized for the worse in this somewhat heavy figure, and coarser face,
+      and heavier eye. In fact, there is a terrible difference between the
+      mature Englishman and the young man who is not yet quite out of his
+      blossom. His hair, too, was getting streaked and sprinkled with gray; and,
+      in short, there were evident marks of his having worked, and succeeded,
+      and failed, and eaten and drunk, and being made largely of beef, ale,
+      port, and sherry, and all the solidities of English life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I remember you now,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, extending his hand frankly; and yet
+      Mountford took it in so cold a way that he was immediately sorry that he
+      had done it, and called up an extra portion of reserve to freeze the rest
+      of the interview. He continued, coolly enough, &ldquo;I remember you, and
+      something of your American errand,&mdash;which, indeed, has frequently
+      been in my mind since. I hope you found the results of your voyage, in the
+      way of discovery, sufficiently successful to justify so much trouble.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will remember,&rdquo; said Mountford, &ldquo;that the grave proved quite
+      unproductive. Yes, you will not have forgotten it; for I well recollect
+      how eagerly you listened, with that queer little girl, to my talk with the
+      old governor, and how disappointed you seemed when you found that the
+      grave was not to be opened. And yet, it is very odd. I failed in that
+      mission; and yet there are circumstances that have led me to think that I
+      ought to have succeeded better,&mdash;that some other person has really
+      succeeded better.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe was silent; but he remembered the strange old silver key, and
+      how he had kept it secret, and the doubts that had troubled his mind then
+      and long afterwards, whether he ought not to have found means to convey it
+      to the stranger, and ask whether that was what he sought. And now here was
+      that same doubt and question coming up again, and he found himself quite
+      as little able to solve it as he had been twenty years ago. Indeed, with
+      the views that had come up since, it behooved him to be cautious, until he
+      knew both the man and the circumstances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are probably aware,&rdquo; continued Mountford,&mdash;&ldquo;for I understand you
+      have been some time in this neighborhood,&mdash;that there is a pretended
+      claim, a contesting claim, to the present possession of the estate of
+      Braithwaite, and a long dormant title. Possibly&mdash;who knows?&mdash;you
+      yourself might have a claim to one or the other. Would not that be a
+      singular coincidence? Have you ever had the curiosity to investigate your
+      parentage with a view to this point?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The title,&rdquo; replied Redclyffe, &ldquo;ought not to be a very strong
+      consideration with an American. One of us would be ashamed, I verily
+      believe, to assume any distinction, except such as may be supposed to
+      indicate personal, not hereditary merit. We have in some measure, I think,
+      lost the feeling of the past, and even of the future, as regards our own
+      lines of descent; and even as to wealth, it seems to me that the idea of
+      heaping up a pile of gold, or accumulating a broad estate for our children
+      and remoter descendants, is dying out. We wish to enjoy the fulness of our
+      success in life ourselves, and leave to those who descend from us the task
+      of providing for themselves. This tendency is seen in our lavish
+      expenditure, and the whole arrangement of our lives; and it is slowly&mdash;yet
+      not very slowly, either&mdash;effecting a change in the whole economy of
+      American life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Still,&rdquo; rejoined Mr. Mountford, with a smile that Redclyffe fancied was
+      dark and subtle, &ldquo;still, I should imagine that even an American might
+      recall so much of hereditary prejudice as to be sensible of some earthly
+      advantages in the possession of an ancient title and hereditary estate
+      like this. Personal distinction may suit you better,&mdash;to be an
+      Ambassador by your own talent; to have a future for yourself, involving
+      the possibility of ranking (though it were only for four years) among the
+      acknowledged sovereigns of the earth;&mdash;this is very good. But if the
+      silver key would open the shut up secret to-day, it might be possible that
+      you would relinquish these advantages.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Before Redclyffe could reply, (and, indeed, there seemed to be an allusion
+      at the close of Mountford&rsquo;s speech which, whether intended or not, he knew
+      not how to reply to,) a young lady entered the hall, whom he was at no
+      loss, by the colored light of a painted window that fell upon her,
+      translating her out of the common daylight, to recognize as the relative
+      of the pensioner. She seemed to have come to give her fanciful
+      superintendence to some of the decorations of the hall; such as required
+      woman&rsquo;s taste, rather than the sturdy English judgment and antiquarian
+      knowledge of the Warden. Slowly following after her came the pensioner
+      himself, leaning on his staff and looking up at the old roof and around
+      him with a benign composure, and himself a fitting figure by his antique
+      and venerable appearance to walk in that old hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said Mountford, to Redclyffe&rsquo;s surprise, &ldquo;here is an acquaintance&mdash;two
+      acquaintances of mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved along the hall to accost them; and as he appeared to expect that
+      Redclyffe would still keep him company, and as the latter had no reason
+      for not doing so, they both advanced to the pensioner, who was now leaning
+      on the young woman&rsquo;s arm. The incident, too, was not unacceptable to the
+      American, as promising to bring him into a more available relation with
+      her&mdash;whom he half fancied to be his old American acquaintance&mdash;than
+      he had yet succeeded in obtaining.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, my old friend,&rdquo; said Mountford, after bowing with a certain
+      measured respect to the young woman, &ldquo;how wears life with you? Rather,
+      perhaps, it does not wear at all; you being so well suited to the life
+      around you, you grow by it like a lichen on a wall. I could fancy now that
+      you have walked here for three hundred years, and remember when King James
+      of blessed memory was entertained in this hall, and could marshal out all
+      the ceremonies just as they were then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An old man,&rdquo; said the pensioner, quietly, &ldquo;grows dreamy as he wanes away;
+      and I, too, am sometimes at a loss to know whether I am living in the past
+      or the present, or whereabouts in time I am,&mdash;or whether there is any
+      time at all. But I should think it hardly worth while to call up one of my
+      shifting dreams more than another.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I confess,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;I shall find it impossible to call up this
+      scene&mdash;any of these scenes&mdash;hereafter, without the venerable
+      figure of this, whom I may truly call my benefactor, among them. I fancy
+      him among them from the foundation,&mdash;young then, but keeping just the
+      equal step with their age and decay,&mdash;and still doing good and
+      hospitable deeds to those who need them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man seemed not to like to hear these remarks and expressions of
+      gratitude from Mountford and the American; at any rate, he moved away with
+      his slow and light motion of infirmity, but then came uneasily back,
+      displaying a certain quiet restlessness, which Redclyffe was sympathetic
+      enough to perceive. Not so the sturdier, more heavily moulded Englishman,
+      who continued to direct the conversation upon the pensioner, or at least
+      to make him a part of it, thereby bringing out more of his strange
+      characteristics. In truth, it is not quite easy for an Englishman to know
+      how to adapt himself to the line feelings of those below him in point of
+      station, whatever gentlemanly deference he may have for his equals or
+      superiors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should like now, father pensioner,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;to know how many steps
+      you may have taken in life before your path led into this hole, and whence
+      your course started.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do not let him speak thus to the old man,&rdquo; said the young woman, in a
+      low, earnest tone, to Redclyffe. He was surprised and startled; it seemed
+      like a voice that has spoken to his boyhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Redclyffe&rsquo;s place is next to that of
+      the proprietor at table.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Dwell upon the antique liveried
+      servants somewhat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 4. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;The rose-water must precede the
+      toasts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 5. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;The jollity of the Warden at the
+      feast to be noticed; and afterwards explain that he had drunk nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 6. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Mention the old silver snuffbox which
+      I saw at the Liverpool Mayor&rsquo;s dinner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XX.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1.</i> This is not the version of the story as indicated in the
+      earlier portion of the romance. It is there implied that Elsie is the
+      Doctor&rsquo;s granddaughter, her mother having been the Doctor&rsquo;s daughter, who
+      was ruined by the then possessor of the Braithwaite estates, and who died
+      in consequence. That the Doctor&rsquo;s scheme of revenge was far deeper and
+      more terrible than simply to oust the family from its possessions, will
+      appear further on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2.</i> The foregoing passage was evidently experimental, and the
+      author expresses his estimate of its value in the following words,&mdash;&ldquo;What
+      unimaginable nonsense!&rdquo; He then goes on to make the following memoranda as
+      to the plot. It should be remembered, however, that all this part of the
+      romance was written before the American part.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Half of a secret is preserved in England; that is to say, in the
+      particular part of the mansion in which an old coffer is hidden; the other
+      part is carried to America. One key of an elaborate lock is retained in
+      England, among some old curiosities of forgotten purpose; the other is the
+      silver key that Redclyffe found beside the grave. A treasure of gold is
+      what they expect; they find a treasure of golden locks. This lady, the
+      beloved of the Bloody Footstep, had been murdered and hidden in the coffer
+      on account of jealousy. Elsie must know the baselessness of Redclyffe&rsquo;s
+      claims, and be loath to tell him, because she sees that he is so much
+      interested in them. She has a paper of the old Doctor&rsquo;s revealing the
+      whole plot,&mdash;a death-bed confession; Redclyffe having been absent at
+      the time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The reader will recollect that this latter suggestion was not adopted:
+      there was no death-bed confession. As regards the coffer full of golden
+      locks, it was suggested by an incident recorded in the &ldquo;English
+      Note-Books,&rdquo; 1854. &ldquo;The grandmother of Mrs. O&rsquo;Sullivan died fifty years
+      ago, at the age of twenty-eight. She had great personal charms, and among
+      them a head of beautiful chestnut hair. After her burial in a family tomb,
+      the coffin of one of her children was laid on her own, so that the lid
+      seems to have decayed, or been broken from this cause; at any rate, this
+      was the case when the tomb was opened, about a year ago. The grandmother&rsquo;s
+      coffin was then found to be filled with beautiful, glossy, living chestnut
+      ringlets, into which her whole substance seems to have been transformed,
+      for there was nothing else but these shining curls, the growth of half a
+      century, in the tomb. An old man, with a ringlet of his youthful mistress
+      treasured in his heart, might be supposed to witness this wonderful
+      thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XXIII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1.</i> In a study of the plot, too long to insert here, this new
+      character of the steward is introduced and described. It must suffice to
+      say, in this place, that he was intimately connected with Dr. Grimshawe,
+      who had resuscitated him after he had been hanged, and had thus gained his
+      gratitude and secured his implicit obedience to his wishes, even twenty
+      years after his (Grimshawe&rsquo;s) death. The use the Doctor made of him was to
+      establish him in Braithwaite Hall as the perpetual confidential servant of
+      the owners thereof. Of course, the latter are not aware that the steward
+      is acting in Grimshawe&rsquo;s interest, and therefore in deadly opposition to
+      their own. Precisely what the steward&rsquo;s mission in life was, will appear
+      here-after.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The study above alluded to, with others, amounting to about a hundred
+      pages, will be published as a supplement to a future edition of this work.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XXIV.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Redclyffe lies in a dreamy state,
+      thinking fantastically, as if he were one of the seven sleepers. He does
+      not yet open his eyes, but lies there in a maze.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Redclyffe must look at the old man
+      quietly and dreamily, and without surprise, for a long while.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3.</i> Presumably the true name of Doctor Grimshawe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 4.</i> This mysterious prisoner, Sir Edward Redclyffe, is not, of
+      course, the Sir Edward who founded the Hospital, but a descendant of that
+      man, who ruined Doctor Grimshawe&rsquo;s daughter, and is the father of Elsie.
+      He had been confined in this chamber, by the Doctor&rsquo;s contrivance, ever
+      since, Omskirk being his jailer, as is foreshadowed in Chapter XL He has
+      been kept in the belief that he killed Grimshawe, in a struggle that took
+      place between them; and that his confinement in the secret chamber is
+      voluntary on his own part,&mdash;a measure of precaution to prevent arrest
+      and execution for murder. In this miserable delusion he has cowered there
+      for five and thirty years. This, and various other dusky points, are
+      partly elucidated in the notes hereafter to be appended to this volume.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XXV.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1.</i> At this point, the author, for what reason I will not
+      venture to surmise, chooses to append this gloss: &ldquo;Bubble-and-Squeak!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;They found him in the hall, about to
+      go out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3.</i> Elsie appears to have joined the party.
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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+</pre>
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+  </body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg's Doctor Grimshawe's Secret, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
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+
+
+Title: Doctor Grimshawe's Secret
+       A Romance
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Editor: Julian Hawthorne
+
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+Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7183]
+This file was first posted on March 24, 2003
+Last Updated: June 12, 2013
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE'S SECRET ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Michelle Shephard, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
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+
+                        DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE'S SECRET
+
+
+
+                               A ROMANCE
+
+                                  BY
+                          NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
+
+                    EDITED, WITH PREFACE AND NOTES
+
+                         BY JULIAN HAWTHORNE
+
+
+
+                                  TO
+                MR. AND MRS. GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP,
+                    The Son-in-Law and Daughter
+                                  OF
+                        NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE,
+                     THIS ROMANCE IS DEDICATED
+                                  BY
+                             THE EDITOR.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+A preface generally begins with a truism; and I may set out with
+the admission that it is not always expedient to bring to light the
+posthumous work of great writers. A man generally contrives to publish,
+during his lifetime, quite as much as the public has time or inclination
+to read; and his surviving friends are apt to show more zeal than
+discretion in dragging forth from his closed desk such undeveloped
+offspring of his mind as he himself had left to silence. Literature has
+never been redundant with authors who sincerely undervalue their own
+productions; and the sagacious critics who maintain that what of his own
+an author condemns must be doubly damnable, are, to say the least of it,
+as often likely to be right as wrong.
+
+Beyond these general remarks, however, it does not seem necessary to
+adopt an apologetic attitude. There is nothing in the present volume
+which any one possessed of brains and cultivation will not be thankful
+to read. The appreciation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's writings is
+more intelligent and wide-spread than it used to be; and the later
+development of our national literature has not, perhaps, so entirely
+exhausted our resources of admiration as to leave no welcome for even
+the less elaborate work of a contemporary of Dickens and Thackeray. As
+regards "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret,"--the title which, for lack of a
+better, has been given to this Romance,--it can scarcely be pronounced
+deficient in either elaboration or profundity. Had Mr. Hawthorne written
+out the story in every part to its full dimensions, it could not have
+failed to rank among the greatest of his productions. He had looked
+forward to it as to the crowning achievement of his literary career. In
+the Preface to "Our Old Home" he alludes to it as a work into which he
+proposed to convey more of various modes of truth than he could have
+grasped by a direct effort. But circumstances prevented him from
+perfecting the design which had been before his mind for seven years,
+and upon the shaping of which he bestowed more thought and labor than
+upon anything else he had undertaken. The successive and consecutive
+series of notes or studies [Footnote: These studies, extracts from which
+will be published in one of our magazines, are hereafter to be added, in
+their complete form, to the Appendix of this volume.] which he wrote
+for this Romance would of themselves make a small volume, and one
+of autobiographical as well as literary interest. There is no other
+instance, that I happen to have met with, in which a writer's thought
+reflects itself upon paper so immediately and sensitively as in these
+studies. To read them is to look into the man's mind, and see its
+quality and action. The penetration, the subtlety, the tenacity; the
+stubborn gripe which he lays upon his subject, like that of Hercules
+upon the slippery Old Man of the Sea; the clear and cool common-sense,
+controlling the audacity of a rich and ardent imagination; the humorous
+gibes and strange expletives wherewith he ridicules, to himself, his own
+failure to reach his goal; the immense patience with which--again and
+again, and yet again--he "tries back," throwing the topic into fresh
+attitudes, and searching it to the marrow with a gaze so piercing as
+to be terrible;--all this gives an impression of power, of resource,
+of energy, of mastery, that exhilarates the reader. So many inspired
+prophets of Hawthorne have arisen of late, that the present writer,
+whose relation to the great Romancer is a filial one merely, may
+be excused for feeling some embarrassment in submitting his own
+uninstructed judgments to competition with theirs. It has occurred
+to him, however, that these undress rehearsals of the author of "The
+Scarlet Letter" might afford entertaining and even profitable reading
+to the later generation of writers whose pleasant fortune it is to charm
+one another and the public. It would appear that this author, in his
+preparatory work at least, has ventured in some manner to disregard the
+modern canons which debar writers from betraying towards their creations
+any warmer feeling than a cultured and critical indifference: nor was
+his interest in human nature such as to confine him to the dissection of
+the moral epidermis of shop-girls and hotel-boarders. On the contrary,
+we are presented with the spectacle of a Titan, baring his arms and
+plunging heart and soul into the arena, there to struggle for death or
+victory with the superb phantoms summoned to the conflict by his own
+genius. The men of new times and new conditions will achieve their
+triumphs in new ways; but it may still be worth while to consider the
+methods and materials of one who also, in his own fashion, won and wore
+the laurel of those who know and can portray the human heart.
+
+But let us return to the Romance, in whose clear though shadowy
+atmosphere the thunders and throes of the preparatory struggle are
+inaudible and invisible, save as they are implied in the fineness of
+substance and beauty of form of the artistic structure. The story is
+divided into two parts, the scene of the first being laid in America;
+that of the second, in England. Internal evidence of various kinds goes
+to show that the second part was the first written; or, in other words,
+that the present first part is a rewriting of an original first part,
+afterwards discarded, and of which the existing second part is the
+continuation. The two parts overlap, and it shall be left to the
+ingenuity of critics to detect the precise point of junction. In
+rewriting the first part, the author made sundry minor alterations in
+the plot and characters of the story, which alterations were not carried
+into the second part. It results from this that the manuscript presents
+various apparent inconsistencies. In transcribing the work for the
+press, these inconsistent sentences and passages have been withdrawn
+from the text and inserted in the Appendix; or, in a few unimportant
+instances, omitted altogether. In other respects, the text is printed as
+the author left it, with the exception of the names of the characters.
+In the manuscript each personage figures in the course of the narrative
+under from three to six different names. This difficulty has been met
+by bestowing upon each of the _dramatis personae_ the name which last
+identified him to the author's mind, and keeping him to it throughout
+the volume.
+
+The story, as a story, is complete as it stands; it has a beginning,
+a middle, and an end. There is no break in the narrative, and the
+legitimate conclusion is reached. To say that the story is complete as
+a work of art, would be quite another matter. It lacks balance and
+proportion. Some characters and incidents are portrayed with minute
+elaboration; others, perhaps not less important, are merely sketched
+in outline. Beyond a doubt it was the author's purpose to rewrite the
+entire work from the first page to the last, enlarging it, deepening
+it, adorning it with every kind of spiritual and physical beauty, and
+rounding out a moral worthy of the noble materials. But these last
+transfiguring touches to Aladdin's Tower were never to be given; and he
+has departed, taking with him his Wonderful Lamp. Nevertheless there is
+great splendor in the structure as we behold it. The character of
+old Doctor Grimshawe, and the picture of his surroundings, are hardly
+surpassed in vigor by anything their author has produced; and the dusky
+vision of the secret chamber, which sends a mysterious shiver through
+the tale, seems to be unique even in Hawthorne.
+
+There have been included in this volume photographic reproductions of
+certain pages of the original manuscript of Doctor Grimshawe, selected
+at random, upon which those ingenious persons whose convictions are in
+advance of their instruction are cordially invited to try their
+teeth; for it has been maintained that Mr. Hawthorne's handwriting
+was singularly legible. The present writer possesses specimens of Mr.
+Hawthorne's chirography at various ages, from boyhood until a day or two
+before his death. Like the handwriting of most men, it was at its best
+between the twenty-fifth and the fortieth years of life; and in some
+instances it is a remarkably beautiful type of penmanship. But as time
+went on it deteriorated, and, while of course retaining its elementary
+characteristics, it became less and less easy to read, especially in
+those writings which were intended solely for his own perusal. As with
+other men of sensitive organization, the mood of the hour, a good or
+a bad pen, a ready or an obstructed flow of thought, would all be
+reflected in the formation of the written letters and words. In the
+manuscript of the fragmentary sketch which has just been published in a
+magazine, which is written in an ordinary commonplace-book, with ruled
+pages, and in which the author had not yet become possessed with the
+spirit of the story and characters, the handwriting is deliberate and
+clear. In the manuscript of "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret," on the other
+hand, which was written almost immediately after the other, but on
+unruled paper, and when the writer's imagination was warm and eager,
+the chirography is for the most part a compact mass of minute cramped
+hieroglyphics, hardly to be deciphered save by flashes of inspiration.
+The matter is not, in itself, of importance, and is alluded to here only
+as having been brought forward in connection with other insinuations,
+with the notice of which it seems unnecessary to soil these pages.
+Indeed, were I otherwise disposed, Doctor Grimshawe himself would take
+the words out of my mouth; his speech is far more poignant and eloquent
+than mine. In dismissing this episode, I will take the liberty to
+observe that it appears to indicate a spirit in our age less sceptical
+than is commonly supposed,--belief in miracles being still possible,
+provided only the miracle be a scandalous one.
+
+It remains to tell how this Romance came to be published. It came into
+my possession (in the ordinary course of events) about eight years ago.
+I had at that time no intention of publishing it; and when, soon after,
+I left England to travel on the Continent, the manuscript, together with
+the bulk of my library, was packed and stored at a London repository,
+and was not again seen by me until last summer, when I unpacked it in
+this city. I then finished the perusal of it, and, finding it to be
+practically complete, I re-resolved to print it in connection with a
+biography of Mr. Hawthorne which I had in preparation. But upon further
+consideration it was decided to publish the Romance separately; and
+I herewith present it to the public, with my best wishes for their
+edification.
+
+                                                JULIAN HAWTHORNE.
+NEW YORK, November 21, 1882.
+
+
+
+
+DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE'S SECRET
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+A long time ago, [Endnote: 1] in a town with which I used to be
+familiarly acquainted, there dwelt an elderly person of grim aspect,
+known by the name and title of Doctor Grimshawe,[Endnote: 2] whose
+household consisted of a remarkably pretty and vivacious boy, and a
+perfect rosebud of a girl, two or three years younger than he, and an
+old maid-of-all-work, of strangely mixed breed, crusty in temper and
+wonderfully sluttish in attire. [Endnote: 3] It might be partly owing to
+this handmaiden's characteristic lack of neatness (though primarily,
+no doubt, to the grim Doctor's antipathy to broom, brush, and
+dusting-cloths) that the house--at least in such portions of it as any
+casual visitor caught a glimpse of--was so overlaid with dust, that, in
+lack of a visiting card, you might write your name with your forefinger
+upon the tables; and so hung with cobwebs that they assumed the
+appearance of dusky upholstery.
+
+It grieves me to add an additional touch or two to the reader's
+disagreeable impression of Doctor Grimshawe's residence, by confessing
+that it stood in a shabby by-street, and cornered on a graveyard, with
+which the house communicated by a back door; so that with a hop, skip,
+and jump from the threshold, across a flat tombstone, the two children
+[Endnote: 4] were in the daily habit of using the dismal cemetery as
+their playground. In their graver moods they spelled out the names and
+learned by heart doleful verses on the headstones; and in their merrier
+ones (which were much the more frequent) they chased butterflies and
+gathered dandelions, played hide-and-seek among the slate and marble,
+and tumbled laughing over the grassy mounds which were too eminent for
+the short legs to bestride. On the whole, they were the better for the
+graveyard, and its legitimate inmates slept none the worse for the two
+children's gambols and shrill merriment overhead. Here were old brick
+tombs with curious sculptures on them, and quaint gravestones, some of
+which bore puffy little cherubs, and one or two others the effigies of
+eminent Puritans, wrought out to a button, a fold of the ruff, and a
+wrinkle of the skull-cap; and these frowned upon the two children as if
+death had not made them a whit more genial than they were in life. But
+the children were of a temper to be more encouraged by the good-natured
+smiles of the puffy cherubs, than frightened or disturbed by the sour
+Puritans.
+
+This graveyard (about which we shall say not a word more than may sooner
+or later be needful) was the most ancient in the town. The clay of the
+original settlers had been incorporated with the soil; those stalwart
+Englishmen of the Puritan epoch, whose immediate ancestors had been
+planted forth with succulent grass and daisies for the sustenance of
+the parson's cow, round the low-battlemented Norman church towers in the
+villages of the fatherland, had here contributed their rich Saxon mould
+to tame and Christianize the wild forest earth of the new world. In
+this point of view--as holding the bones and dust of the primeval
+ancestor--the cemetery was more English than anything else in the
+neighborhood, and might probably have nourished English oaks and English
+elms, and whatever else is of English growth, without that tendency to
+spindle upwards and lose their sturdy breadth, which is said to be the
+ordinary characteristic both of human and vegetable productions when
+transplanted hither. Here, at all events, used to be some specimens
+of common English garden flowers, which could not be accounted
+for,--unless, perhaps, they had sprung from some English maiden's heart,
+where the intense love of those homely things, and regret of them in the
+foreign land, had conspired together to keep their vivifying principle,
+and cause its growth after the poor girl was buried. Be that as it
+might, in this grave had been hidden from sight many a broad, bluff
+visage of husbandman, who had been taught to plough among the hereditary
+furrows that had been ameliorated by the crumble of ages: much had these
+sturdy laborers grumbled at the great roots that obstructed their toil
+in these fresh acres. Here, too, the sods had covered the faces of men
+known to history, and reverenced when not a piece of distinguishable
+dust remained of them; personages whom tradition told about; and here,
+mixed up with successive crops of native-born Americans, had been
+ministers, captains, matrons, virgins good and evil, tough and tender,
+turned up and battened down by the sexton's spade, over and over again;
+until every blade of grass had its relations with the human brotherhood
+of the old town. A hundred and fifty years was sufficient to do this;
+and so much time, at least, had elapsed since the first hole was dug
+among the difficult roots of the forest trees, and the first little
+hillock of all these green beds was piled up.
+
+Thus rippled and surged, with its hundreds of little billows, the old
+graveyard about the house which cornered upon it; it made the street
+gloomy, so that people did not altogether like to pass along the high
+wooden fence that shut it in; and the old house itself, covering ground
+which else had been sown thickly with buried bodies, partook of its
+dreariness, because it seemed hardly possible that the dead people
+should not get up out of their graves and steal in to warm themselves at
+this convenient fireside. But I never heard that any of them did so;
+nor were the children ever startled by spectacles of dim horror in the
+night-time, but were as cheerful and fearless as if no grave had ever
+been dug. They were of that class of children whose material seems
+fresh, not taken at second hand, full of disease, conceits, whims,
+and weaknesses, that have already served many people's turns, and been
+moulded up, with some little change of combination, to serve the turn of
+some poor spirit that could not get a better case.
+
+So far as ever came to the present writer's knowledge, there was no
+whisper of Doctor Grimshawe's house being haunted; a fact on which both
+writer and reader may congratulate themselves, the ghostly chord
+having been played upon in these days until it has become wearisome
+and nauseous as the familiar tune of a barrel-organ. The house itself,
+moreover, except for the convenience of its position close to the
+seldom-disturbed cemetery, was hardly worthy to be haunted. As I
+remember it, (and for aught I know it still exists in the same guise,)
+it did not appear to be an ancient structure, nor one that would
+ever have been the abode of a very wealthy or prominent family;--a
+three-story wooden house, perhaps a century old, low-studded, with
+a square front, standing right upon the street, and a small enclosed
+porch, containing the main entrance, affording a glimpse up and down
+the street through an oval window on each side, its characteristic was
+decent respectability, not sinking below the boundary of the genteel. It
+has often perplexed my mind to conjecture what sort of man he could have
+been who, having the means to build a pretty, spacious, and comfortable
+residence, should have chosen to lay its foundation on the brink of so
+many graves; each tenant of these narrow houses crying out, as it were,
+against the absurdity of bestowing much time or pains in preparing any
+earthly tabernacle save such as theirs. But deceased people see matters
+from an erroneous--at least too exclusive--point of view; a comfortable
+grave is an excellent possession for those who need it, but a
+comfortable house has likewise its merits and temporary advantages.
+[Endnote: 5.]
+
+The founder of the house in question seemed sensible of this truth, and
+had therefore been careful to lay out a sufficient number of rooms and
+chambers, low, ill-lighted, ugly, but not unsusceptible of warmth and
+comfort; the sunniest and cheerfulest of which were on the side
+that looked into the graveyard. Of these, the one most spacious and
+convenient had been selected by Doctor Grimshawe as a study, and fitted
+up with bookshelves, and various machines and contrivances, electrical,
+chemical, and distillatory, wherewith he might pursue such researches as
+were wont to engage his attention. The great result of the grim Doctor's
+labors, so far as known to the public, was a certain preparation or
+extract of cobwebs, which, out of a great abundance of material, he was
+able to produce in any desirable quantity, and by the administration of
+which he professed to cure diseases of the inflammatory class, and to
+work very wonderful effects upon the human system. It is a great pity,
+for the good of mankind and the advantage of his own fortunes, that he
+did not put forth this medicine in pill-boxes or bottles, and then,
+as it were, by some captivating title, inveigle the public into his
+spider's web, and suck out its gold substance, and himself wax fat as he
+sat in the central intricacy.
+
+But grim Doctor Grimshawe, though his aim in life might be no very
+exalted one, seemed singularly destitute of the impulse to better his
+fortunes by the exercise of his wits: it might even have been
+supposed, indeed, that he had a conscientious principle or religious
+scruple--only, he was by no means a religious man--against reaping
+profit from this particular nostrum which he was said to have invented.
+He never sold it; never prescribed it, unless in cases selected on some
+principle that nobody could detect or explain. The grim Doctor, it must
+be observed, was not generally acknowledged by the profession, with
+whom, in truth, he had never claimed a fellowship; nor had he ever
+assumed, of his own accord the medical title by which the public chose
+to know him. His professional practice seemed, in a sort, forced upon
+him; it grew pretty extensive, partly because it was understood to be
+a matter of favor and difficulty, dependent on a capricious will, to
+obtain his services at all. There was unquestionably an odor of quackery
+about him; but by no means of an ordinary kind. A sort of mystery--yet
+which, perhaps, need not have been a mystery, had any one thought it
+worth while to make systematic inquiry in reference to his previous
+life, his education, even his native land--assisted the impression
+which his peculiarities were calculated to make. He was evidently not
+a New-Englander, nor a native of any part of these Western shores.
+His speech was apt to be oddly and uncouthly idiomatic, and even
+when classical in its form was emitted with a strange, rough depth of
+utterance, that came from recesses of the lungs which we Yankees seldom
+put to any use. In person, he did not look like one of us; a broad,
+rather short personage, with a projecting forehead, a red, irregular
+face, and a squab nose; eyes that looked dull enough in their ordinary
+state, but had a faculty, in conjunction with the other features, which
+those who had ever seen it described as especially ugly and awful. As
+regarded dress, Doctor Grimshawe had a rough and careless exterior,
+and altogether a shaggy kind of aspect, the effect of which was much
+increased by a reddish beard, which, contrary to the usual custom of
+the day, he allowed to grow profusely; and the wiry perversity of which
+seemed to know as little of the comb as of the razor.
+
+We began with calling the grim Doctor an elderly personage; but in so
+doing we looked at him through the eyes of the two children, who were
+his intimates, and who had not learnt to decipher the purport and value
+of his wrinkles and furrows and corrugations, whether as indicating age,
+or a different kind of wear and tear. Possibly--he seemed so aggressive
+and had such latent heat and force to throw out when occasion called--he
+might scarcely have seemed middle-aged; though here again we hesitate,
+finding him so stiffened in his own way, so little fluid, so encrusted
+with passions and humors, that he must have left his youth very far
+behind him; if indeed he ever had any.
+
+The patients, or whatever other visitors were ever admitted into the
+Doctor's study, carried abroad strange accounts of the squalor of dust
+and cobwebs in which the learned and scientific person lived; and the
+dust, they averred, was all the more disagreeable, because it could not
+well be other than dead men's almost intangible atoms, resurrected
+from the adjoining graveyard. As for the cobwebs, they were no signs of
+housewifely neglect on the part of crusty Hannah, the handmaiden; but
+the Doctor's scientific material, carefully encouraged and preserved,
+each filmy thread more valuable to him than so much golden wire. Of all
+barbarous haunts in Christendom or elsewhere, this study was the one
+most overrun with spiders. They dangled from the ceiling, crept upon
+the tables, lurked in the corners, and wove the intricacy of their
+webs wherever they could hitch the end from point to point across the
+window-panes, and even across the upper part of the doorway, and in the
+chimney-place. It seemed impossible to move without breaking some of
+these mystic threads. Spiders crept familiarly towards you and walked
+leisurely across your hands: these were their precincts, and you only an
+intruder. If you had none about your person, yet you had an odious sense
+of one crawling up your spine, or spinning cobwebs in your brain,--so
+pervaded was the atmosphere of the place with spider-life. What they fed
+upon (for all the flies for miles about would not have sufficed them)
+was a secret known only to the Doctor. Whence they came was another
+riddle; though, from certain inquiries and transactions of Doctor
+Grimshawe's with some of the shipmasters of the port, who followed the
+East and West Indian, the African and the South American trade, it was
+supposed that this odd philosopher was in the habit of importing
+choice monstrosities in the spider kind from all those tropic regions.
+[Endnote: 6.]
+
+All the above description, exaggerated as it may seem, is merely
+preliminary to the introduction of one single enormous spider, the
+biggest and ugliest ever seen, the pride of the grim Doctor's heart, his
+treasure, his glory, the pearl of his soul, and, as many people said,
+the demon to whom he had sold his salvation, on condition of possessing
+the web of the foul creature for a certain number of years. The grim
+Doctor, according to this theory, was but a great fly which this
+spider had subtly entangled in his web. But, in truth, naturalists are
+acquainted with this spider, though it is a rare one; the British
+Museum has a specimen, and, doubtless, so have many other scientific
+institutions. It is found in South America; its most hideous spread of
+legs covers a space nearly as large as a dinner-plate, and radiates from
+a body as big as a door-knob, which one conceives to be an agglomeration
+of sucked-up poison which the creature treasures through life; probably
+to expend it all, and life itself, on some worthy foe. Its colors,
+variegated in a sort of ugly and inauspicious splendor, were distributed
+over its vast bulb in great spots, some of which glistened like gems. It
+was a horror to think of this thing living; still more horrible to think
+of the foul catastrophe, the crushed-out and wasted poison, that would
+follow the casual setting foot upon it.
+
+No doubt, the lapse of time since the Doctor and his spider lived has
+already been sufficient to cause a traditionary wonderment to gather
+over them both; and, especially, this image of the spider dangles down
+to us from the dusky ceiling of the Past, swollen into somewhat uglier
+and huger monstrosity than he actually possessed. Nevertheless, the
+creature had a real existence, and has left kindred like himself; but
+as for the Doctor, nothing could exceed the value which he seemed to put
+upon him, the sacrifices he made for the creature's convenience, or the
+readiness with which he adapted his whole mode of life, apparently, so
+that the spider might enjoy the conditions best suited to his tastes,
+habits, and health. And yet there were sometimes tokens that made people
+imagine that he hated the infernal creature as much as everybody else
+who caught a glimpse of him. [Endnote: 7.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+Considering that Doctor Grimshawe, when we first look upon him, had
+dwelt only a few years in the house by the graveyard, it is wonderful
+what an appearance he, and his furniture, and his cobwebs, and
+their unweariable spinners, and crusty old Hannah, all had of having
+permanently attached themselves to the locality. For a century, at
+least, it might be fancied that the study in particular had existed just
+as it was now; with those dusky festoons of spider-silk hanging along
+the walls, those book-cases with volumes turning their parchment or
+black-leather backs upon you, those machines and engines, that table,
+and at it the Doctor, in a very faded and shabby dressing-gown, smoking
+a long clay pipe, the powerful fumes of which dwelt continually in his
+reddish and grisly beard, and made him fragrant wherever he went. This
+sense of fixedness--stony intractability--seems to belong to people
+who, instead of hope, which exalts everything into an airy, gaseous
+exhilaration, have a fixed and dogged purpose, around which everything
+congeals and crystallizes. [Endnote: 1] Even the sunshine, dim through
+the dustiness of the two casements that looked upon the graveyard,
+and the smoke, as it came warm out of Doctor Grimshawe's mouth, seemed
+already stale. But if the two children, or either of them, happened to
+be in the study,--if they ran to open the door at the knock, if they
+came scampering and peeped down over the banisters,--the sordid and
+rusty gloom was apt to vanish quite away. The sunbeam itself looked like
+a golden rule, that had been flung down long ago, and had lain there
+till it was dusty and tarnished. They were cheery little imps, who
+sucked up fragrance and pleasantness out of their surroundings, dreary
+as these looked; even as a flower can find its proper perfume in any
+soil where its seed happens to fall. The great spider, hanging by his
+cordage over the Doctor's head, and waving slowly, like a pendulum, in
+a blast from the crack of the door, must have made millions and millions
+of precisely such vibrations as these; but the children were new, and
+made over every day, with yesterday's weariness left out.
+
+The little girl, however, was the merrier of the two. It was quite
+unintelligible, in view of the little care that crusty Hannah took
+of her, and, moreover, since she was none of your prim, fastidious
+children, how daintily she kept herself amid all this dust; how
+the spider's webs never clung to her, and how, when--without being
+solicited--she clambered into the Doctor's arms and kissed him, she bore
+away no smoky reminiscences of the pipe that he kissed continually. She
+had a free, mellow, natural laughter, that seemed the ripened fruit of
+the smile that was generally on her little face, to be shaken off
+and scattered abroad by any breeze that came along. Little Elsie made
+playthings of everything, even of the grim Doctor, though against his
+will, and though, moreover, there were tokens now and then that the
+sight of this bright little creature was not a pleasure to him, but,
+on the contrary, a positive pain; a pain, nevertheless, indicating
+a profound interest, hardly less deep than though Elsie had been his
+daughter.
+
+Elsie did not play with the great spider, but she moved among the whole
+brood of spiders as if she saw them not, and, being endowed with other
+senses than those allied to these things, might coexist with them and
+not be sensible of their presence. Yet the child, I suppose, had her
+crying fits, and her pouting fits, and naughtiness enough to entitle her
+to live on earth; at least crusty Hannah often said so, and often made
+grievous complaint of disobedience, mischief, or breakage, attributable
+to little Elsie; to which the grim Doctor seldom responded by anything
+more intelligible than a puff of tobacco-smoke, and, sometimes, an
+imprecation; which, however, hit crusty Hannah instead of the child.
+Where the child got the tenderness that a child needs to live upon, is a
+mystery to me; perhaps from some aged or dead mother, or in her dreams;
+perhaps from some small modicum of it, such as boys have, from the
+little boy; or perhaps it was from a Persian kitten, which had grown to
+be a cat in her arms, and slept in her little bed, and now assumed grave
+and protective airs towards her former playmate. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+The boy, [Endnote: 3] as we have said, was two or three years Elsie's
+elder, and might now be about six years old. He was a healthy and
+cheerful child, yet of a graver mood than the little girl, appearing to
+lay a more forcible grasp on the circumstances about him, and to tread
+with a heavier footstep on the solid earth; yet perhaps not more so than
+was the necessary difference between a man-blossom, dimly conscious of
+coming things, and a mere baby, with whom there was neither past nor
+future. Ned, as he was named, was subject very early to fits of musing,
+the subject of which--if they had any definite subject, or were more
+than vague reveries--it was impossible to guess. They were of those
+states of mind, probably, which are beyond the sphere of human language,
+and would necessarily lose their essence in the attempt to communicate
+or record them. The little girl, perhaps, had some mode of sympathy with
+these unuttered thoughts or reveries, which grown people had ceased to
+have; at all events, she early learned to respect them, and, at other
+times as free and playful as her Persian kitten, she never in such
+circumstances ventured on any greater freedom than to sit down quietly
+beside him, and endeavor to look as thoughtful as the boy himself.
+
+Once, slowly emerging from one of these waking reveries, little Ned
+gazed about him, and saw Elsie sitting with this pretty pretence of
+thoughtfulness and dreaminess in her little chair, close beside him;
+now and then peeping under her eyelashes to note what changes might come
+over his face. After looking at her a moment or two, he quietly took her
+willing and warm little hand in his own, and led her up to the Doctor.
+
+The group, methinks, must have been a picturesque one, made up as it was
+of several apparently discordant elements, each of which happened to be
+so combined as to make a more effective whole. The beautiful grave boy,
+with a little sword by his side and a feather in his hat, of a brown
+complexion, slender, with his white brow and dark, thoughtful eyes, so
+earnest upon some mysterious theme; the prettier little girl, a blonde,
+round, rosy, so truly sympathetic with her companion's mood, yet
+unconsciously turning all to sport by her attempt to assume one
+similar;--these two standing at the grim Doctor's footstool; he
+meanwhile, black, wild-bearded, heavy-browed, red-eyed, wrapped in his
+faded dressing-gown, puffing out volumes of vapor from his long pipe,
+and making, just at that instant, application to a tumbler, which,
+we regret to say, was generally at his elbow, with some dark-colored
+potation in it that required to be frequently replenished from a
+neighboring black bottle. Half, at least, of the fluids in the grim
+Doctor's system must have been derived from that same black bottle, so
+constant was his familiarity with its contents; and yet his eyes were
+never redder at one time than another, nor his utterance thicker,
+nor his mood perceptibly the brighter or the duller for all his
+conviviality. It is true, when, once, the bottle happened to be empty
+for a whole day together, Doctor Grimshawe was observed by crusty Hannah
+and by the children to be considerably fiercer than usual: so that
+probably, by some maladjustment of consequences, his intemperance was
+only to be found in refraining from brandy.
+
+Nor must we forget--in attempting to conceive the effect of these two
+beautiful children in such a sombre room, looking on the graveyard,
+and contrasted with the grim Doctor's aspect of heavy and smouldering
+fierceness--that over his head, at this very moment, dangled the
+portentous spider, who seemed to have come down from his web aloft for
+the purpose of hearing what the two young people could have to say
+to his patron, and what reference it might have to certain mysterious
+documents which the Doctor kept locked up in a secret cupboard behind
+the door.
+
+"Grim Doctor," said Ned, after looking up into the Doctor's face, as
+a sensitive child inevitably does, to see whether the occasion was
+favorable, yet determined to proceed with his purpose whether so or
+not,--"Grim Doctor, I want you to answer me a question."
+
+"Here's to your good health, Ned!" quoth the Doctor, eying the pair
+intently, as he often did, when they were unconscious. "So you want to
+ask me a question? As many as you please, my fine fellow; and I shall
+answer as many, and as much, and as truly, as may please myself!"
+
+"Ah, grim Doctor!" said the little girl, now letting go of Ned's hand,
+and climbing upon the Doctor's knee, "'ou shall answer as many as Ned
+please to ask, because to please him and me!"
+
+"Well, child," said Doctor Grimshawe, "little Ned will have his rights
+at least, at my hands, if not other people's rights likewise; and, if it
+be right, I shall answer his question. Only, let him ask it at once; for
+I want to be busy thinking about something else."
+
+"Then, Doctor Grim," said little Ned, "tell me, in the first place,
+where I came from, and how you came to have me?"
+
+The Doctor looked at the little man, so seriously and earnestly putting
+this demand, with a perplexed, and at first it might almost seem a
+startled aspect.
+
+"That is a question, indeed, my friend Ned!" ejaculated he, putting
+forth a whiff of smoke and imbibing a nip from his tumbler before he
+spoke; and perhaps framing his answer, as many thoughtful and secret
+people do, in such a way as to let out his secret mood to the child,
+because knowing he could not understand it: "Whence did you come? Whence
+did any of us come? Out of the darkness and mystery; out of nothingness;
+out of a kingdom of shadows; out of dust, clay, mud, I think, and to
+return to it again. Out of a former state of being, whence we have
+brought a good many shadowy revelations, purporting that it was no very
+pleasant one. Out of a former life, of which the present one is the
+hell!--And why are you come? Faith, Ned, he must be a wiser man than
+Doctor Grim who can tell why you or any other mortal came hither; only
+one thing I am well aware of,--it was not to be happy. To toil and moil
+and hope and fear; and to love in a shadowy, doubtful sort of way, and
+to hate in bitter earnest,--that is what you came for!"
+
+"Ah, Doctor Grim! this is very naughty," said little Elsie. "You are
+making fun of little Ned, when he is in earnest."
+
+"Fun!" quoth Doctor Grim, bursting into a laugh peculiar to him, very
+loud and obstreperous. "I am glad you find it so, my little woman. Well,
+and so you bid me tell absolutely where he came from?"
+
+Elsie nodded her bright little head.
+
+"And you, friend Ned, insist upon knowing?"
+
+"That I do, Doctor Grim!" answered Ned. His white, childish brow had
+gathered into a frown, such was the earnestness of his determination;
+and he stamped his foot on the floor, as if ready to follow up his
+demand by an appeal to the little tin sword which hung by his side. The
+Doctor looked at him with a kind of smile,--not a very pleasant one;
+for it was an unamiable characteristic of his temper that a display of
+spirit, even in a child, was apt to arouse his immense combativeness,
+and make him aim a blow without much consideration how heavily it might
+fall, or on how unequal an antagonist.
+
+"If you insist upon an answer, Master Ned, you shall have it," replied
+he. "You were taken by me, boy, a foundling from an almshouse; and
+if ever hereafter you desire to know your kindred, you must take your
+chance of the first man you meet. He is as likely to be your father as
+another!"
+
+The child's eyes flashed, and his brow grew as red as fire. It was but
+a momentary fierceness; the next instant he clasped his hands over his
+face, and wept in a violent convulsion of grief and shame. Little Elsie
+clasped her arms about him, kissing his brow and chin, which were all
+that her lips could touch, under his clasped hands; but Ned turned away
+uncomforted, and was blindly making his way towards the door.
+
+"Ned, my little fellow, come back!" said Doctor Grim, who had very
+attentively watched the cruel effect of his communication.
+
+As the boy did not reply, and was still tending towards the door, the
+grim Doctor vouchsafed to lay aside his pipe, get up from his arm-chair
+(a thing he seldom did between supper and bedtime), and shuffle after
+the two children in his slippers. He caught them on the threshold,
+brought little Ned back by main force,--for he was a rough man even in
+his tenderness,--and, sitting down again and taking him on his knee,
+pulled away his hands from before his face. Never was a more pitiful
+sight than that pale countenance, so infantile still, yet looking old
+and experienced already, with a sense of disgrace, with a feeling of
+loneliness; so beautiful, nevertheless, that it seemed to possess all
+the characteristics which fine hereditary traits and culture, or many
+forefathers, could do in refining a human stock. And this was a nameless
+weed, sprouting from some chance seed by the dusty wayside!
+
+"Ned, my dear old boy," said Doctor Grim,--and he kissed that pale,
+tearful face,--the first and last time, to the best of my belief, that
+he was ever betrayed into that tenderness; "forget what I have said!
+Yes, remember, if you like, that you came from an almshouse; but
+remember, too,--what your friend Doctor Grim is ready to affirm and make
+oath of,--that he can trace your kindred and race through that sordid
+experience, and back, back, for a hundred and fifty years, into an old
+English line. Come, little Ned, and look at this picture."
+
+He led the boy by the hand to a corner of the room, where hung upon the
+wall a portrait which Ned had often looked at. It seemed an old picture;
+but the Doctor had had it cleaned and varnished, so that it looked dim
+and dark, and yet it seemed to be the representation of a man of no
+mark; not at least of such mark as would naturally leave his features to
+be transmitted for the interest of another generation. For he was
+clad in a mean dress of old fashion,--a leather jerkin it appeared to
+be,--and round his neck, moreover, was a noose of rope, as if he might
+have been on the point of being hanged. But the face of the portrait,
+nevertheless, was beautiful, noble, though sad; with a great development
+of sensibility, a look of suffering and endurance amounting to
+triumph,--a peace through all.
+
+"Look at this," continued the Doctor, "if you must go on dreaming about
+your race. Dream that you are of the blood of this being; for, mean as
+his station looks, he comes of an ancient and noble race, and was the
+noblest of them all! Let me alone, Ned, and I shall spin out the web
+that shall link you to that man. The grim Doctor can do it!"
+
+The grim Doctor's face looked fierce with the earnestness with which
+he said these words. You would have said that he was taking an oath to
+overthrow and annihilate a race, rather than to build one up by
+bringing forward the infant heir out of obscurity, and making plain the
+links--the filaments--which cemented this feeble childish life, in a far
+country, with the great tide of a noble life, which had come down like a
+chain from antiquity, in old England.
+
+Having said the words, however, the grim Doctor appeared ashamed both of
+the heat and of the tenderness into which he had been betrayed; for rude
+and rough as his nature was, there was a kind of decorum in it, too,
+that kept him within limits of his own. So he went back to his chair,
+his pipe, and his tumbler, and was gruffer and more taciturn than ever
+for the rest of the evening. And after the children went to bed, he
+leaned back in his chair and looked up at the vast tropic spider, who
+was particularly busy in adding to the intricacies of his web; until he
+fell asleep with his eyes fixed in that direction, and the extinguished
+pipe in one hand and the empty tumbler in the other.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+Doctor Grimshawe, after the foregone scene, began a practice of
+conversing more with the children than formerly; directing his discourse
+chiefly to Ned, although Elsie's vivacity and more outspoken and
+demonstrative character made her take quite as large a share in the
+conversation as he.
+
+The Doctor's communications referred chiefly to a village, or
+neighborhood, or locality in England, which he chose to call Newnham;
+although he told the children that this was not the real name, which,
+for reasons best known to himself, he wished to conceal. Whatever the
+name were, he seemed to know the place so intimately, that the
+children, as a matter of course, adopted the conclusion that it was his
+birthplace, and the spot where he had spent his schoolboy days, and
+had lived until some inscrutable reason had impelled him to quit its
+ivy-grown antiquity, and all the aged beauty and strength that he spoke
+of, and to cross the sea.
+
+He used to tell of an old church, far unlike the brick and pine-built
+meeting-houses with which the children were familiar; a church, the
+stones of which were laid, every one of them, before the world knew of
+the country in which he was then speaking: and how it had a spire, the
+lower part of which was mantled with ivy, and up which, towards its very
+spire, the ivy was still creeping; and how there was a tradition, that,
+if the ivy ever reached the top, the spire would fall upon the roof
+of the old gray church, and crush it all down among its surrounding
+tombstones. [Endnote: 1] And so, as this misfortune would be so heavy
+a one, there seemed to be a miracle wrought from year to year, by which
+the ivy, though always flourishing, could never grow beyond a certain
+point; so that the spire and church had stood unharmed for thirty years;
+though the wise old people were constantly foretelling that the passing
+year must be the very last one that it could stand.
+
+He told, too, of a place that made little Ned blush and cast down his
+eyes to hide the tears of anger and shame at he knew not what, which
+would irresistibly spring into them; for it reminded him of the
+almshouse where, as the cruel Doctor said, Ned himself had had his
+earliest home. And yet, after all, it had scarcely a feature of
+resemblance; and there was this great point of difference,--that
+whereas, in Ned's wretched abode (a large, unsightly brick house), there
+were many wretched infants like himself, as well as helpless people
+of all ages, widows, decayed drunkards, people of feeble wits, and all
+kinds of imbecility; it being a haven for those who could not contend
+in the hard, eager, pitiless struggle of life; in the place the Doctor
+spoke of, a noble, Gothic, mossy structure, there were none but aged
+men, who had drifted into this quiet harbor to end their days in a sort
+of humble yet stately ease and decorous abundance. And this shelter,
+the grim Doctor said, was the gift of a man who had died ages ago; and
+having been a great sinner in his lifetime, and having drawn lands,
+manors, and a great mass of wealth into his clutches, by violent and
+unfair means, had thought to get his pardon by founding this Hospital,
+as it was called, in which thirteen old men should always reside; and he
+hoped that they would spend their time in praying for the welfare of his
+soul. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+Said little Elsie, "I am glad he did it, and I hope the poor old men
+never forgot to pray for him, and that it did good to the poor wicked
+man's soul."
+
+"Well, child," said Doctor Grimshawe, with a scowl into vacancy, and a
+sort of wicked leer of merriment at the same time, as if he saw before
+him the face of the dead man of past centuries, "I happen to be no
+lover of this man's race, and I hate him for the sake of one of his
+descendants. I don't think he succeeded in bribing the Devil to let him
+go, or God to save him!"
+
+"Doctor Grim, you are very naughty!" said Elsie, looking shocked.
+
+"It is fair enough," said Ned, "to hate your enemies to the very brink
+of the grave, but then to leave him to get what mercy he can."
+
+"After shoving him in!" quoth the Doctor; and made no further response
+to either of these criticisms, which seemed indeed to affect him very
+little--if he even listened to them. For he was a man of singularly
+imperfect moral culture; insomuch that nothing else was so remarkable
+about him as that--possessing a good deal of intellectual ability, made
+available by much reading and experience--he was so very dark on the
+moral side; as if he needed the natural perceptions that should have
+enabled him to acquire that better wisdom. Such a phenomenon often
+meets us in life; oftener than we recognize, because a certain tact and
+exterior decency generally hide the moral deficiency. But often there is
+a mind well polished, married to a conscience and natural impulses left
+as they were in childhood, except that they have sprouted up into evil
+and poisonous weeds, richly blossoming with strong-smelling flowers, or
+seeds which the plant scatters by a sort of impulse; even as the Doctor
+was now half-consciously throwing seeds of his evil passions into the
+minds of these children. He was himself a grown-up child, without tact,
+simplicity, and innocence, and with ripened evil, all the ranker for a
+native heat that was in him and still active, which might have nourished
+good things as well as evil. Indeed, it did cherish by chance a root or
+two of good, the fragrance of which was sometimes perceptible among all
+this rank growth of poisonous weeds. A grown-up child he was,--that was
+all.
+
+The Doctor now went on to describe an old country-seat, which stood near
+this village and the ancient Hospital that he had been telling about,
+and which was formerly the residence of the wicked man (a knight and
+a brave one, well known in the Lancastrian wars) who had founded the
+latter. It was a venerable old mansion, which a Saxon Thane had begun to
+build more than a thousand years ago, the old English oak that he built
+into the frame being still visible in the ancient skeleton of its roof,
+sturdy and strong as if put up yesterday. And the descendants of the
+man who built it, through the French line (for a Norman baron wedded the
+daughter and heiress of the Saxon), dwelt there yet; and in each century
+they had done something for the old Hall,--building a tower, adding
+a suite of rooms, strengthening what was already built, putting in a
+painted window, making it more spacious and convenient,--till it seemed
+as if Time employed himself in thinking what could be done for the old
+house. As fast as any part decayed, it was renewed, with such simple
+art that the new completed, as it were, and fitted itself to the old. So
+that it seemed as if the house never had been finished, until just that
+thing was added. For many an age, the possessors had gone on adding
+strength to strength, digging out the moat to a greater depth, piercing
+the walls with holes for archers to shoot through, or building a turret
+to keep watch upon. But at last all necessity for these precautions
+passed away, and then they thought of convenience and comfort, adding
+something in every generation to these. And by and by they thought of
+beauty too; and in this time helped them with its weather-stains, and
+the ivy that grew over the walls, and the grassy depth of the dried-up
+moat, and the abundant shade that grew up everywhere, where naked
+strength would have been ugly.
+
+"One curious thing in the house," said the Doctor, lowering his voice,
+but with a mysterious look of triumph, and that old scowl, too, at the
+children, "was that they built a secret chamber,--a very secret one!"
+
+"A secret chamber!" cried little Ned; "who lived in it? A ghost?"
+
+"There was often use for it," said Doctor Grim; "hiding people who
+had fought on the wrong side, or Catholic priests, or criminals,
+or perhaps--who knows?--enemies that they wanted put out of the
+way,--troublesome folks. Ah! it was often of use, that secret chamber:
+and is so still!"
+
+Here the Doctor paused a long while, and leaned back in his chair,
+slowly puffing long whiffs from his pipe, looking up at the great
+spider-demon that hung over his head, and, as it seemed to the children
+by the expression of his face, looking into the dim secret chamber which
+he had spoken of, and which, by something in his mode of alluding to it,
+assumed such a weird, spectral aspect to their imaginations that they
+never wished to hear of it again. Coming back at length out of his
+reverie,--returning, perhaps, out of some weird, ghostly, secret
+chamber of his memory, whereof the one in the old house was but the less
+horrible emblem,--he resumed his tale. He said that, a long time ago,
+a war broke out in the old country between King and Parliament. At that
+period there were several brothers of the old family (which had adhered
+to the Catholic religion), and these chose the side of the King instead
+of that of the Puritan Parliament: all but one, whom the family hated
+because he took the Parliament side; and he became a soldier, and fought
+against his own brothers; and it was said among them that, so inveterate
+was he, he went on the scaffold, masked, and was the very man who struck
+off the King's head, and that his foot trod in the King's blood, and
+that always afterwards he made a bloody track wherever he went. And
+there was a legend that his brethren once caught the renegade and
+imprisoned him in his own birthplace--
+
+"In the secret chamber?" interrupted Ned.
+
+"No doubt!" said the Doctor, nodding, "though I never heard so."
+
+They imprisoned him, but he made his escape and fled, and in the morning
+his prison-place, wherever it was, was empty. But on the threshold
+of the door of the old manor-house there was the print of a bloody
+footstep; and no trouble that the housemaids took, no rain of all the
+years that have since passed, no sunshine, has made it fade: nor have
+all the wear and tramp of feet passing over it since then availed to
+erase it.
+
+"I have seen it myself," quoth the Doctor, "and know this to be true."
+
+"Doctor Grim, now you are laughing at us," said Ned, trying to look
+grave. But Elsie hid her face on the Doctor's knee; there being
+something that affected the vivid little girl with peculiar horror in
+the idea of this red footstep always glistening on the doorstep, and
+wetting, as she fancied, every innocent foot of child or grown person
+that had since passed over it. [Endnote: 3.]
+
+"It is true!" reiterated the grim Doctor; "for, man and boy, I have seen
+it a thousand times."
+
+He continued the family history, or tradition, or fantastic legend,
+whichever it might be; telling his young auditors that the Puritan, the
+renegade son of the family, was afterwards, by the contrivances of his
+brethren, sent to Virginia and sold as a bond slave; and how he had
+vanished from that quarter and come to New England, where he was
+supposed to have left children. And by and by two elder brothers died,
+and this missing brother became the heir to the old estate and to a
+title. Then the family tried to track his bloody footstep, and sought
+it far and near, through green country paths, and old streets of London;
+but in vain. Then they sent messengers to see whether any traces of one
+stepping in blood could be found on the forest leaves of America; but
+still in vain. The idea nevertheless prevailed that he would come back,
+and it was said they kept a bedchamber ready for him yet in the old
+house. But much as they pretended to regret the loss of him and his
+children, it would make them curse their stars were a descendant of his
+to return now. For the child of a younger son was in possession of the
+old estate, and was doing as much evil as his forefathers did; and if
+the true heir were to appear on the threshold, he would (if he might but
+do it secretly) stain the whole doorstep as red as the Bloody Footstep
+had stained one little portion of it.
+
+"Do you think he will ever come back?" asked little Ned.
+
+"Stranger things have happened, my little man!" said Doctor Grimshawe,
+"than that the posterity of this man should come back and turn these
+usurpers out of his rightful inheritance. And sometimes, as I sit here
+smoking my pipe and drinking my glass, and looking up at the cunning
+plot that the spider is weaving yonder above my head, and thinking of
+this fine old family and some little matters that have been between them
+and me, I fancy that it may be so! We shall see! Stranger things have
+happened."
+
+And Doctor Grimshawe drank off his tumbler, winking at little Ned in a
+strange way, that seemed to be a kind of playfulness, but which did not
+affect the children pleasantly; insomuch that little Elsie put both
+her hands on Doctor Grim's knees, and begged him not to do so any more.
+[Endnote: 4.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. [Endnote: 1]
+
+
+The children, after this conversation, often introduced the old English
+mansion into their dreams and little romances, which all imaginative
+children are continually mixing up with their lives, making the
+commonplace day of grown people a rich, misty, glancing orb of
+fairy-land to themselves. Ned, forgetting or not realizing the long
+lapse of time, used to fancy the true heir wandering all this while in
+America, and leaving a long track of bloody footsteps behind him; until
+the period when, his sins being expiated (whatever they might be), he
+should turn back upon his steps and return to his old native home. And
+sometimes the child used to look along the streets of the town where he
+dwelt, bending his thoughtful eyes on the ground, and think that perhaps
+some time he should see the bloody footsteps there, betraying that the
+wanderer had just gone that way.
+
+As for little Elsie, it was her fancy that the hero of the legend still
+remained imprisoned in that dreadful secret chamber, which had made a
+most dread impression on her mind; and that there he was, forgotten all
+this time, waiting, like a naughty child shut up in a closet, until
+some one should come to unlock the door. In the pitifulness of her
+disposition, she once proposed to little Ned that, as soon as they grew
+big enough, they should set out in quest of the old house, and find
+their way into it, and find the secret chamber, and let the poor
+prisoner out. So they lived a good deal of the time in a half-waking
+dream, partly conscious of the fantastic nature of their ideas, yet with
+these ideas almost as real to them as the facts of the natural world,
+which, to children, are at first transparent and unsubstantial.
+
+The Doctor appeared to have a pleasure, or a purpose, in keeping his
+legend forcibly in their memories; he often recurred to the subject of
+the old English family, and was continually giving new details about
+its history, the scenery in its neighborhood, the aspect of the
+mansion-house; indicating a very intense interest in the subject on his
+own part, of which this much talk seemed the involuntary overflowing.
+
+There was, however, an affection mingled with this sentiment. It
+appeared to be his unfortunate necessity to let his thoughts dwell very
+constantly upon a subject that was hateful to him, with which this old
+English estate and manor-house and family were somehow connected; and,
+moreover, had he spoken thus to older and more experienced auditors,
+they might have detected in the manner and matter of his talk, a certain
+hereditary reverence and awe, the growth of ages, mixed up with a newer
+hatred, impelling him to deface and destroy what, at the same time, it
+was his deepest impulse to bow before. The love belonged to his race;
+the hatred, to himself individually. It was the feeling of a man lowly
+born, when he contracts a hostility to his hereditary superior. In
+one way, being of a powerful, passionate nature, gifted with force and
+ability far superior to that of the aristocrat, he might scorn him and
+feel able to trample on him; in another, he had the same awe that a
+country boy feels of the magistrate who flings him a sixpence and shakes
+his horsewhip at him.
+
+Had the grim Doctor been an American, he might have had the vast
+antipathy to rank, without the trace of awe that made it so much more
+malignant: it required a low-born Englishman to feel the two together.
+What made the hatred so fiendish was a something that, in the natural
+course of things, would have been loyalty, inherited affection, devoted
+self-sacrifice to a superior. Whatever it might be, it seemed at times
+(when his potations took deeper effect than ordinary) almost to drive
+the grim Doctor mad; for he would burst forth in wild diatribes and
+anathemas, having a strange, rough force of expression and a depth of
+utterance, as if his words came from a bottomless pit within himself,
+where burned an everlasting fire, and where the furies had their home;
+and plans of dire revenge were welded into shape as in the heat of a
+furnace. After the two poor children had been affrighted by paroxysms
+of this kind, the strange being would break out into one of his roars of
+laughter, that seemed to shake the house, and, at all events, caused
+the cobwebs and spiders suspended from the ceiling, to swing and vibrate
+with the motion of the volumes of reverberating breath which he thus
+expelled from his capacious lungs. Then, catching up little Elsie upon
+one knee and Ned upon the other, he would become gentler than in his
+usual moods, and, by the powerful magnetism of his character, cause them
+to think him as tender and sweet an old fellow as a child could desire
+for a playmate. Upon the whole, strange as it may appear, they loved
+the grim Doctor dearly; there was a loadstone within him that drew them
+close to him and kept them there, in spite of the horror of many things
+that he said and did. One thing that, slight as it seemed, wrought
+mightily towards their mutually petting each other, was that no amount
+of racket, hubbub, shouting, laughter, or noisy mischief which the
+two children could perpetrate, ever disturbed the Doctor's studies,
+meditations, or employments of whatever kind. He had a hardy set of
+nerves, not refined by careful treatment in himself or his ancestors,
+but probably accustomed from of old to be drummed on by harsh voices,
+rude sounds, and the clatter and clamor of household life among homely,
+uncultivated, strongly animal people.
+
+As the two children grew apace, it behooved their strange guardian to
+take some thought for their instruction. So far as little Elsie was
+concerned, however, he seemed utterly indifferent to her having
+any cultivation: having imbibed no modern ideas respecting feminine
+capacities and privileges, but regarding woman, whether in the bud or
+in the blossom, as the plaything of man's idler moments, and the
+helpmeet--but in a humble capacity--of his daily life. He sometimes bade
+her go to the kitchen and take lessons of crusty Hannah in bread-making,
+sweeping, dusting, washing, the coarser needlework, and such other
+things as she would require to know when she came to be a woman; but
+carelessly allowed her to gather up the crumbs of such instruction as he
+bestowed on her playmate Ned, and thus learn to read, write, and cipher;
+which, to say the truth, was about as far in the way of scholarship as
+little Elsie cared to go.
+
+But towards little Ned the grim Doctor adopted a far different system.
+No sooner had he reached the age when the soft and tender intellect
+of the child became capable of retaining impressions, than he took him
+vigorously in hand, assigning him such tasks as were fit for him, and
+curiously investigating what were the force and character of the powers
+with which the child grasped them. Not that the Doctor pressed him
+forward unduly; indeed, there was no need of it; for the boy manifested
+a remarkable docility for instruction, and a singular quickness
+in mastering the preliminary steps which lead to science: a subtle
+instinct, indeed, which it seemed wonderful a child should possess
+for anything as artificial as systems of grammar and arithmetic. A
+remarkable boy, in truth, he was, to have been found by chance in an
+almshouse; except that, such being his origin, we are at liberty to
+suppose for him whatever long cultivation and gentility we may think
+necessary, in his parentage of either side,--such as was indicated also
+by his graceful and refined beauty of person. He showed, indeed, even
+before he began to read at all, an instinctive attraction towards books,
+and a love for and interest in even the material form of knowledge,--the
+plates, the print, the binding of the Doctor's volumes, and even in
+a bookworm which he once found in an old volume, where it had eaten a
+circular furrow. But the little boy had too quick a spirit of life to
+be in danger of becoming a bookworm himself. He had this side of the
+intellect, but his impulse would be to mix with men, and catch something
+from their intercourse fresher than books could give him; though these
+would give him what they might.
+
+In the grim Doctor, rough and uncultivated as he seemed, this budding
+intelligence found no inadequate instructor. Doctor Grimshawe proved
+himself a far more thorough scholar, in the classics and mathematics,
+than could easily have been found in our country. He himself must have
+had rigid and faithful instruction at an early period of life, though
+probably not in his boyhood. For, though the culture had been bestowed,
+his mind had been left in so singularly rough a state that it seemed
+as if the refinement of classical study could not have been begun very
+early. Or possibly the mind and nature were incapable of polish; or he
+may have had a coarse and sordid domestic life around him in his infancy
+and youth. He was a gem of coarse texture, just hewn out. An American
+with a like education would more likely have gained a certain fineness
+and grace, and it would have been difficult to distinguish him from one
+who had been born to culture and refinement. This sturdy Englishman,
+after all that had been done for his mind, and though it had been well
+done, was still but another ploughman, of a long race of such, with a
+few scratchings of refinement on his hard exterior. His son, if he left
+one, might be a little less of the ploughman; his grandson, provided
+the female element were well chosen, might approach to refinement; three
+generations--a century at least--would be required for the slow toil
+of hewing, chiselling, and polishing a gentleman out of this ponderous
+block, now rough from the quarry of human nature. But, in the mean time,
+he evidently possessed in an unusual degree the sort of learning that
+refines other minds,--the critical acquaintance with the great poets and
+historians of antiquity, and apparently an appreciation of their merits,
+and power to teach their beauty. So the boy had an able tutor, capable,
+it would seem, of showing him the way to the graces he did not himself
+possess; besides helping the growth of the strength without which
+refinement is but sickly and disgusting.
+
+Another sort of culture, which it seemed odd that this rude man should
+undertake, was that of manners; but, in fact, rude as the grim Doctor's
+own manners were, he was one of the nicest and severest censors in that
+department that was ever known. It is difficult to account for this;
+although it is almost invariably found that persons in a low rank of
+life, such as servants and laborers, will detect the false pretender to
+the character of a gentleman, with at least as sure an instinct as the
+class into which they seek to thrust themselves. Perhaps they recognize
+something akin to their own vulgarity, rather than appreciate what is
+unlike themselves. The Doctor possessed a peculiar power of rich rough
+humor on this subject, and used to deliver lectures, as it were, to
+little Ned, illustrated with sketches of living individuals in the town
+where they dwelt; by an unscrupulous use of whom he sought to teach the
+boy what to avoid in manners, if he sought to be a gentleman. But it
+must be confessed he spared himself as little as other people, and
+often wound up with this compendious injunction,--"Be everything in your
+behavior that Doctor Grim is not!"
+
+His pupil, very probably, profited somewhat by these instructions; for
+there are specialties and arbitrary rules of behavior which do not come
+by nature. But these are few; and beautiful, noble, and genial manners
+may almost be called a natural gift; and these, however he inherited
+them, soon proved to be an inherent possession of little Ned. He had a
+kind of natural refinement, which nothing could ever soil or offend;
+it seemed, by some magic or other, absolutely to keep him from the
+knowledge of much of the grim Doctor's rude and sordid exterior, and
+to render what was around him beautiful by a sort of affiliation, or
+reflection from that quality in himself, glancing its white light upon
+it. The Doctor himself was puzzled, and apparently both startled and
+delighted at the perception of these characteristics. Sometimes he
+would make a low, uncouth bow, after his fashion, to the little fellow,
+saying, "Allow me to kiss your hand, my lord!" and little Ned, not quite
+knowing what the grim Doctor meant, yet allowed the favor he asked,
+with a grave and gracious condescension that seemed much to delight the
+suitor. This refusal to recognize or to suspect that the Doctor might be
+laughing at him was a sure token, at any rate, of the lack of one vulgar
+characteristic in little Ned.
+
+In order to afford little Ned every advantage to these natural gifts,
+Doctor Grim nevertheless failed not to provide the best attainable
+instructor for such positive points of a polite education as his own
+fierce criticism, being destructive rather than generative, would not
+suffice for. There was a Frenchman in the town--a M. Le Grand, secretly
+calling himself a Count--who taught the little people, and, indeed, some
+of their elders, the Parisian pronunciation of his own language; and
+likewise dancing (in which he was more of an adept and more successful
+than in the former branch) and fencing: in which, after looking at a
+lesson or two, the grim Doctor was satisfied of his skill. Under his
+instruction, with the stimulus of the Doctor's praise and criticism, Ned
+soon grew to be the pride of the Frenchman's school, in both the
+active departments; and the Doctor himself added a further gymnastic
+acquirement (not absolutely necessary, he said, to a gentleman's
+education, but very desirable to a man perfect at all points) by
+teaching him cudgel-playing and pugilism. In short, in everything that
+related to accomplishments, whether of mind or body, no pains were
+spared with little Ned; but of the utilitarian line of education, then
+almost exclusively adopted, and especially desirable for a fortuneless
+boy like Ned, dependent on a man not wealthy, there was little given.
+
+At first, too, the Doctor paid little attention to the moral and
+religious culture of his pupil; nor did he ever make a system of it. But
+by and by, though with a singular reluctance and kind of bashfulness,
+he began to extend his care to these matters; being drawn into them
+unawares, and possibly perceiving and learning what he taught as he went
+along. One evening, I know not how, he was betrayed into speaking on
+this point, and a sort of inspiration seized him. A vista opened before
+him: handling an immortal spirit, he began to know its requisitions, in
+a degree far beyond what he had conceived them to be when his great
+task was undertaken. His voice grew deep, and had a strange, impressive
+pathos in it; his talk became eloquent with depth of meaning and
+feeling, as he told the boy of the moral dangers of the world, for which
+he was seeking to educate him; and which, he said, presented what looked
+like great triumphs, and yet were the greatest and saddest of defeats.
+He told him that many things that seemed nearest and dearest to the
+heart of man were destructive, eating and gnawing away and corroding
+what was best in him; and what a high, noble, re-creating triumph it
+was when these dark impulses were resisted and overthrown; and how, from
+that epoch, the soul took a new start. He denounced the selfish greed of
+gold, lawless passion, revenge,--and here the grim Doctor broke out into
+a strange passion and zeal of anathema against this deadly sin, making
+a dreadful picture of the ruin that it creates in the heart where it
+establishes itself, and how it makes a corrosive acid of those genial
+juices. Then he told the boy that the condition of all good was, in the
+first place, truth; then, courage; then, justice; then, mercy; out of
+which principles operating upon one another would come all brave, noble,
+high, unselfish actions, and the scorn of all mean ones; and how that
+from such a nature all hatred would fall away, and all good affections
+would be ennobled.
+
+I know not at what point it was, precisely, in these ethical
+instructions that an insight seemed to strike the grim Doctor that
+something more--vastly more--was needed than all he had said; and he
+began, doubtfully, to speak of man's spiritual nature and its demands,
+and the emptiness of everything which a sense of these demands did not
+pervade, and condense, and weighten into realities. And going on in this
+strain, he soared out of himself and astonished the two children,
+who stood gazing at him, wondering whether it were the Doctor who was
+speaking thus; until some interrupting circumstance seemed to bring him
+back to himself, and he burst into one of his great roars of laughter.
+The inspiration, the strange light whereby he had been transfigured,
+passed out of his face; and there was the uncouth, wild-bearded, rough,
+earthy, passionate man, whom they called Doctor Grim, looking ashamed of
+himself, and trying to turn the whole matter into a jest. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+It was a sad pity that he should have been interrupted, and brought
+into this mocking mood, just when he seemed to have broken away from
+the sinfulness of his hot, evil nature, and to have soared into a region
+where, with all his native characteristics transfigured, he seemed to
+have become an angel in his own likeness. Crusty Hannah, who had been
+drawn to the door of the study by the unusual tones of his voice,--a
+kind of piercing sweetness in it,--always averred that she saw the
+gigantic spider swooping round his head in great crafty circles, and
+clutching, as it were, at his brain with its great claws. But it was the
+old woman's absurd idea that this hideous insect was the Devil, in that
+ugly guise,--a superstition which deserves absolutely no countenance.
+Nevertheless, though this paroxysm of devotional feeling and insight
+returned no more to the grim Doctor, it was ever after a memorable
+occasion to the two children. It touched that religious chord, in both
+their hearts, which there was no mother to touch; but now it
+vibrated long, and never ceased to vibrate so long as they remained
+together,--nor, perhaps, after they were parted from each other and from
+the grim Doctor. And even then, in those after years, the strange music
+that had been awakened was continued, as it were the echo from harps on
+high. Now, at all events, they made little prayers for themselves, and
+said them at bedtime, generally in secret, sometimes in unison; and they
+read in an old dusty Bible which lay among the grim Doctor's books; and
+from little heathens, they became Christian children. Doctor Grimshawe
+was perhaps conscious of this result of his involuntary preachment, but
+he never directly noticed it, and did nothing either to efface or deepen
+the impression.
+
+It was singular, however, that, in both the children's minds, this
+one gush of irresistible religious sentiment, breaking out of the grim
+Doctor's inner depths, like a sort of holy lava from a volcano that
+usually emitted quite other matter, (such as hot, melted wrath and
+hate,) quite threw out of sight, then and always afterwards, his
+darker characteristics. They remembered him, with faith and love, as a
+religious man, and forgot--what perhaps had made no impression on their
+innocent hearts--all the traits that other people might have called
+devilish. To them the grim Doctor was a saint, even during his lifetime
+and constant intercourse with them, and canonized forever afterwards.
+There is almost always, to be sure, this profound faith, with regard
+to those they love, in childhood; but perhaps, in this instance, the
+children really had a depth of insight that grown people lacked; a
+profound recognition of the bottom of this strange man's nature, which
+was of such stuff as martyrs and heroic saints might have been made of,
+though here it had been wrought miserably amiss. At any rate, his face
+with the holy awe upon it was what they saw and remembered, when they
+thought of their friend Doctor Grim.
+
+One effect of his zealous and analytic instruction of the boy was very
+perceptible. Heretofore, though enduring him, and occasionally making a
+plaything of him, it may be doubted whether the grim Doctor had really
+any strong affection for the child: it rather seemed as if his strong
+will were forcing him to undertake, and carry sedulously forward, a
+self-imposed task. All that he had done--his redeeming the bright child
+from poverty and nameless degradation, ignorance, and a sordid life
+hopeless of better fortune, and opening to him the whole realm of mighty
+possibilities in an American life--did not imply any love for the little
+individual whom he thus benefited. It had some other motive.
+
+But now, approaching the child in this close, intimate, and helpful way,
+it was very evident that his interest took a tenderer character.
+There was everything in the boy, that a boy could possess, to attract
+affection; he would have been a father's pride and joy. Doctor
+Grimshawe, indeed, was not his father; but to a person of his character
+this was perhaps no cause of lesser love than if there had been the
+whole of that holy claim of kindred between them. We speak of the
+natural force of blood; we speak of the paternal relation as if it were
+productive of more earnest affection than can exist between two persons,
+one of whom is protective, but unrelated. But there are wild, forcible,
+unrestricted characters, on whom the necessity and even duty of loving
+their own child is a sort of barrier to love. They perhaps do not love
+their own traits, which they recognize in their children; they shrink
+from their own features in the reflection presented by these little
+mirrors. A certain strangeness and unlikeness (such as gives poignancy
+to the love between the sexes) would excite a livelier affection. Be
+this as it may, it is not probable that Doctor Grimshawe would have
+loved a child of his own blood, with the coarse characteristics that
+he knew both in his race and himself, with nearly such fervor as this
+beautiful, slender, yet strenuous, intelligent, refined boy,--with such
+a high-bred air, handling common things with so refined a touch, yet
+grasping them so firmly; throwing a natural grace on all he did. Was he
+not his father,--he that took this fair blossom out of the sordid mud
+in which he must soon have withered and perished? Was not this beautiful
+strangeness, which he so wondered at, the result of his care?
+
+And little Elsie? did the grim Doctor love her as well? Perhaps not,
+for, in the first place, there was a natural tie, though not the
+nearest, between her and Doctor Grimshawe, which made him feel that she
+was cast upon his love: a burden which he acknowledged himself bound to
+undertake. Then, too, there were unutterably painful reminiscences and
+thoughts, that made him gasp for breath, that turned his blood sour,
+that tormented his dreams with nightmares and hellish phantoms; all
+of which were connected with this innocent and happy child; so that,
+cheerful and pleasant as she was, there was to the grim Doctor a little
+fiend playing about his floor and throwing a lurid light on the wall,
+as the shadow of this sun-flickering child. It is certain that there was
+always a pain and horror mixed with his feelings towards Elsie; he
+had to forget himself, as it were, and all that was connected with the
+causes why she came to be, before he could love her. Amid his fondness,
+when he was caressing her upon his knee, pressing her to his rough
+bosom, as he never took the freedom to press Ned, came these hateful
+reminiscences, compelling him to set her down, and corrugating his heavy
+brows as with a pang of fiercely resented, strongly borne pain. Still,
+the child had no doubt contrived to make her way into the great gloomy
+cavern of the grim Doctor's heart, and stole constantly further and
+further in, carrying a ray of sunshine in her hand as a taper to light
+her way, and illuminate the rude dark pit into which she so fearlessly
+went.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+Doctor Grim [Endnote: 1] had the English faith in open air and daily
+acquaintance with the weather, whatever it might be; and it was his
+habit, not only to send the two children to play, for lack of a better
+place, in the graveyard, but to take them himself on long rambles, of
+which the vicinity of the town afforded a rich variety. It may be that
+the Doctor's excursions had the wider scope, because both he and the
+children were objects of curiosity in the town, and very much the
+subject of its gossip: so that always, in its streets and lanes, the
+people turned to gaze, and came to their windows and to the doors of
+shops to see this grim, bearded figure, leading along the beautiful
+children each by a hand, with a surly aspect like a bulldog. Their
+remarks were possibly not intended to reach the ears of the party, but
+certainly were not so cautiously whispered but they occasionally did do
+so. The male remarks, indeed, generally died away in the throats that
+uttered them; a circumstance that doubtless saved the utterer from some
+very rough rejoinder at the hands of the Doctor, who had grown up in the
+habit of a very ready and free recourse to his fists, which had a way
+of doubling themselves up seemingly of their own accord. But the shrill
+feminine voices sometimes sent their observations from window to window
+without dread of any such repartee on the part of the subject of them.
+
+"There he goes, the old Spider-witch!" quoth one shrill woman, "with
+those two poor babes that he has caught in his cobweb, and is going to
+feed upon, poor little tender things! The bloody Englishman makes
+free with the dead bodies of our friends and the living ones of our
+children!"
+
+"How red his nose is!" quoth another; "he has pulled at the
+brandy-bottle pretty stoutly to-day, early as it is! Pretty habits those
+children will learn, between the Devil in the shape of a great spider,
+and this devilish fellow in his own shape! It were well that our
+townsmen tarred and feathered the old British wizard!"
+
+And, as he got further off, two or three little blackguard barefoot boys
+shouted shrilly after him,--
+
+                      "Doctor Grim, Doctor Grim,
+                       The Devil wove a web for him!"
+
+being a nonsensical couplet that had been made for the grim Doctor's
+benefit, and was hooted in the streets, and under his own windows.
+Hearing such remarks and insults, the Doctor would glare round at them
+with red eyes, especially if the brandy-bottle had happened to be much
+in request that day.
+
+Indeed, poor Doctor Grim had met with a fortune which befalls many a
+man with less cause than drew the public attention on this odd humorist;
+for, dwelling in a town which was as yet but a larger village, where
+everybody knew everybody, and claimed the privilege to know and discuss
+their characters, and where there were few topics of public interest to
+take off their attention, a very considerable portion of town talk and
+criticism fell upon him. The old town had a certain provincialism,
+which is less the characteristic of towns in these days, when society
+circulates so freely, than then: besides, it was a very rude epoch, just
+when the country had come through the war of the Revolution, and while
+the surges of that commotion were still seething and swelling, and while
+the habits and morals of every individual in the community still
+felt its influence; and especially the contest was too recent for
+an Englishman to be in very good odor, unless he should cease to be
+English, and become more American than the Americans themselves in
+repudiating British prejudices or principles, habits, mode of thought,
+and everything that distinguishes Britons at home or abroad. As Doctor
+Grim did not see fit to do this, and as, moreover, he was a very
+doubtful, questionable, morose, unamiable old fellow, not seeking to
+make himself liked nor deserving to be so, he was a very unpopular
+person in the town where he had chosen to reside. Nobody thought
+very well of him; the respectable people had heard of his pipe and
+brandy-bottle; the religious community knew that he never showed himself
+at church or meeting; so that he had not that very desirable strength
+(in a society split up into many sects) of being able to rely upon the
+party sympathies of any one of them. The mob hated him with the blind
+sentiment that makes one surly cur hostile to another surly cur. He
+was the most isolated individual to be found anywhere; and, being so
+unsupported, everybody was his enemy.
+
+The town, as it happened, had been pleased to interest itself much in
+this matter of Doctor Grim and the two children, insomuch as he never
+sent them to school, nor came with them to meeting of any kind, but
+was bringing them up ignorant heathen to all appearances, and, as many
+believed, was devoting them in some way to the great spider, to which he
+had bartered his own soul. It had been mooted among the selectmen, the
+fathers of the town, whether their duty did not require them to put the
+children under more suitable guardianship; a measure which, it may be,
+was chiefly hindered by the consideration that, in that case, the cost
+of supporting them would probably be transferred from the grim Doctor's
+shoulders to those of the community. Nevertheless, they did what they
+could. Maidenly ladies, prim and starched, in one or two instances
+called upon the Doctor--the two children meanwhile being in the
+graveyard at play--to give him Christian advice as to the management of
+his charge. But, to confess the truth, the Doctor's reception of these
+fair missionaries was not extremely courteous. They were, perhaps,
+partly instigated by a natural feminine desire to see the interior of
+a place about which they had heard much, with its spiders' webs, its
+strange machines and confusing tools; so, much contrary to crusty
+Hannah's advice, they persisted in entering. Crusty Hannah listened at
+the door; and it was curious to see the delighted smile which came
+over her dry old visage as the Doctor's growling, rough voice, after an
+abrupt question or two, and a reply in a thin voice on the part of the
+maiden ladies, grew louder and louder, till the door opened, and forth
+came the benevolent pair in great discomposure. Crusty Hannah averred
+that their caps were much rumpled; but this view of the thing was
+questioned; though it were certain that the Doctor called after them
+downstairs, that, had they been younger and prettier, they would have
+fared worse. A male emissary, who was admitted on the supposition of
+his being a patient, did fare worse; for (the grim Doctor having been
+particularly intimate with the black bottle that afternoon) there
+was, about ten minutes after the visitor's entrance, a sudden fierce
+upraising of the Doctor's growl; then a struggle that shook the house;
+and, finally, a terrible rumbling down the stairs, which proved to be
+caused by the precipitate descent of the hapless visitor; who, if he
+needed no assistance of the grim Doctor on his entrance, certainly would
+have been the better for a plaster or two after his departure.
+
+Such were the terms on which Doctor Grimshawe now stood with his adopted
+townspeople; and if we consider the dull little town to be full of
+exaggerated stories about the Doctor's oddities, many of them forged,
+all retailed in an unfriendly spirit; misconceptions of a character
+which, in its best and most candidly interpreted aspects, was
+sufficiently amenable to censure; surmises taken for certainties;
+superstitions--the genuine hereditary offspring of the frame of public
+mind which produced the witchcraft delusion--all fermenting together;
+and all this evil and uncharitableness taking the delusive hue of
+benevolent interest in two helpless children;--we may partly judge what
+was the odium in which the grim Doctor dwelt, and amid which he walked.
+The horrid suspicion, too, countenanced by his abode in the corner of
+the graveyard, affording the terrible Doctor such facilities for making
+free, like a ghoul as he was, with the relics of mortality from the
+earliest progenitor to the man killed yesterday by the Doctor's own
+drugs, was not likely to improve his reputation.
+
+He had heretofore contented himself with, at most, occasionally shaking
+his stick at his assailants; but this day the black bottle had imparted,
+it may be, a little more fire than ordinary to his blood; and besides,
+an unlucky urchin happened to take particularly good aim with a mud
+ball, which took effect right in the midst of the Doctor's bushy beard,
+and, being of a soft consistency, forthwith became incorporated with
+it. At this intolerable provocation the grim Doctor pursued the little
+villain, amid a shower of similar missiles from the boy's playmates,
+caught him as he was escaping into a back yard, dragged him into the
+middle of the street, and, with his stick, proceeded to give him his
+merited chastisement.
+
+But, hereupon, it was astonishing how sudden commotion flashed up like
+gunpowder along the street, which, except for the petty shrieks and
+laughter of a few children, was just before so quiet. Forth out of every
+window in those dusky, mean wooden houses were thrust heads of women
+old and young; forth out of every door and other avenue, and as if
+they started up from the middle of the street, or out of the unpaved
+sidewalks, rushed fierce avenging forms, threatening at full yell to
+take vengeance on the grim Doctor; who still, with that fierce dark
+face of his,--his muddy beard all flying abroad, dirty and foul, his hat
+fallen off, his red eyes flashing fire,--was belaboring the poor hinder
+end of the unhappy urchin, paying off upon that one part of the boy's
+frame the whole score which he had to settle with the rude boys of the
+town; giving him at once the whole whipping which he had deserved every
+day of his life, and not a stroke of which he had yet received. Need
+enough there was, no doubt, that somebody should interfere with such
+grim and immitigable justice; and certainly the interference was prompt,
+and promised to be effectual.
+
+"Down with the old tyrant! Thrash him! Hang him! Tar and feather the
+viper's fry! the wizard! the body-snatcher!" bellowed the mob, one
+member of which was raving with delirium tremens, and another was a
+madman just escaped from bedlam.
+
+It is unaccountable where all this mischievous, bloodthirsty multitude
+came from,--how they were born into that quietness in such a moment
+of time! What had they been about heretofore? Were they waiting in
+readiness for this crisis, and keeping themselves free from other
+employment till it should come to pass? Had they been created for
+the moment, or were they fiends sent by Satan in the likeness of a
+blackguard population? There you might see the offscourings of the
+recently finished war,--old soldiers, rusty, wooden-legged: there,
+sailors, ripe for any kind of mischief; there, the drunken population
+of a neighboring grogshop, staggering helter-skelter to the scene, and
+tumbling over one another at the Doctor's feet. There came the father
+of the punished urchin, who had never shown heretofore any care for his
+street-bred progeny, but who now came pale with rage, armed with a pair
+of tongs; and with him the mother, flying like a fury, with her cap
+awry, and clutching a broomstick, as if she were a witch just alighted.
+Up they rushed from cellar doors, and dropped down from chamber windows;
+all rushing upon the Doctor, but overturning and thwarting themselves by
+their very multitude. For, as good Doctor Grim levelled the first that
+came within reach of his fist, two or three of the others tumbled
+over him and lay grovelling at his feet; the Doctor meanwhile having
+retreated into the angle between two houses. Little Ned, with a valor
+which did him the more credit inasmuch as it was exercised in spite of
+a good deal of childish trepidation, as his pale face indicated,
+brandished his fists by the Doctor's side; and little Elsie did what any
+woman may,--that is, screeched in Doctor Grim's behalf with full stretch
+of lungs. Meanwhile the street boys kept up a shower of mud balls,
+many of which hit the Doctor, while the rest were distributed upon his
+assailants, heightening their ferocity.
+
+"Seize the old scoundrel! the villain! the Tory! the dastardly
+Englishman! Hang him in the web of his own devilish spider,--'t is long
+enough! Tar and feather him! tar and feather him!"
+
+It was certainly one of those crises that show a man how few real
+friends he has, and the tendency of mankind to stand aside, at least,
+and let a poor devil fight his own troubles, if not assist them in
+their attack. Here you might have seen a brother physician of the
+grim Doctor's greatly tickled at his plight: or a decorous, powdered,
+ruffle-shirted dignitary, one of the weighty men of the town, standing
+at a neighbor's corner to see what would come of it.
+
+"He is not a respectable man, I understand, this Grimshawe,--a quack,
+intemperate, always in these scuffles: let him get out as he may!"
+
+And then comes a deacon of one of the churches, and several
+church-members, who, hearing a noise, set out gravely and decorously to
+see what was going forward in a Christian community.
+
+"Ah! it is that irreligious and profane Grimshawe, who never goes to
+meeting. We wash our hands of him!"
+
+And one of the selectmen said,--
+
+"Surely this common brawler ought not to have the care of these nice,
+sweet children; something must be done about it; and when the man is
+sober, he must be talked to!"
+
+Alas! it is a hard case with a man who lives upon his own bottom and
+responsibility, making himself no allies, sewing himself on to nobody's
+skirts, insulating himself,--hard, when his trouble comes; and so poor
+Doctor Grimshawe was like to find it.
+
+He had succeeded by dint of good skill, and some previous practice at
+quarter-staff, in keeping his assailants at bay, though not without some
+danger on his own part; but their number, their fierceness, and the more
+skilled assault of some among them must almost immediately have been
+successful, when the Doctor's part was strengthened by an unexpected
+ally. This was a person [Endnote: 2] of tall, slight figure, who,
+without lifting his hands to take part in the conflict, thrust himself
+before the Doctor, and turned towards the assailants, crying,--
+
+"Christian men, what would you do? Peace,--peace!"
+
+His so well intended exhortation took effect, indeed, in a certain way,
+but not precisely as might have been wished: for a blow, aimed at Doctor
+Grim, took effect on the head of this man, who seemed to have no sort
+of skill or alacrity at defending himself, any more than at making
+an assault; for he never lifted his hands, but took the blow as
+unresistingly as if it had been kindly meant, and it levelled him
+senseless on the ground.
+
+Had the mob really been enraged for any strenuous cause, this incident
+would have operated merely as a preliminary whet to stimulate them to
+further bloodshed. But, as they were mostly actuated only by a natural
+desire for mischief, they were about as well satisfied with what had
+been done as if the Doctor himself were the victim. And besides, the
+fathers and respectabilities of the town, who had seen this mishap from
+afar, now began to put forward, crying out, "Keep the peace! keep the
+peace! A riot! a riot!" and other such cries as suited the emergency;
+and the crowd vanished more speedily than it had congregated, leaving
+the Doctor and the two children alone beside the fallen victim of a
+quarrel not his own. Not to dwell too long on this incident, the Doctor,
+laying hold of the last of his enemies, after the rest had taken to
+their heels, ordered him sternly to stay and help him bear the man, whom
+he had helped to murder, to his house.
+
+"It concerns you, friend; for, if he dies, you hang to a dead
+certainty!"
+
+And this was done accordingly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+About an hour thereafter there lay on a couch that had been hastily
+prepared in the study a person of singularly impressive presence: a
+thin, mild-looking man, with a peculiar look of delicacy and natural
+refinement about him, although he scarcely appeared to be technically
+and as to worldly position what we call a gentleman; plain in dress and
+simple in manner, not giving the idea of remarkable intellectual gifts,
+but with a kind of spiritual aspect, fair, clear complexion, gentle
+eyes, still somewhat clouded and obscured by the syncope into which a
+blow on the head had thrown him. He looked middle-aged, and yet there
+was a kind of childlike, simple expression, which, unless you looked
+at him with the very purpose of seeing the traces of time in his face,
+would make you suppose him much younger.
+
+"And how do you find yourself now, my good fellow?" asked Doctor
+Grimshawe, putting forth his hand to grasp that of the stranger, and
+giving it a good, warm shake. "None the worse, I should hope?" [Endnote:
+1.]
+
+"Not much the worse," answered the stranger: "not at all, it may be.
+There is a pleasant dimness and uncertainty in my mode of being. I am
+taken off my feet, as it were, and float in air, with a faint delight in
+my sensations. The grossness, the roughness, the too great angularity of
+the actual, is removed from me. It is a state that I like well. It may
+be, this is the way that the dead feel when they awake in another state
+of being, with a dim pleasure, after passing through the brief darkness
+of death. It is very pleasant."
+
+He answered dreamily, and sluggishly, reluctantly, as if there were a
+sense of repose in him which he disliked to break by putting any of
+his sensations into words. His voice had a remarkable sweetness and
+gentleness, though lacking in depth of melody.
+
+"Here, take this," said the Doctor, who had been preparing some kind of
+potion in a teaspoon: it may have been a dose of his famous preparation
+of spider's web, for aught I know, the operation of which was said to
+be of a soothing influence, causing a delightful silkiness of sensation;
+but I know not whether it was considered good for concussions of the
+brain, such as it is to be supposed the present patient had undergone.
+"Take this: it will do you good; and here I drink your very good health
+in something that will do me good."
+
+So saying, the grim Doctor quaffed off a tumbler of brandy and water.
+
+"How sweet a contrast," murmured the stranger, "between that scene of
+violence and this great peace that has come over me! It is as when one
+can say, I have fought the good fight."
+
+"You are right," said the Doctor, with what would have been one of his
+deep laughs, but which he modified in consideration of his patient's
+tenderness of brain. "We both of us fought a good fight; for though you
+struck no actual stroke, you took them as unflinchingly as ever I saw
+a man, and so turned the fortune of the battle better than if you smote
+with a sledge-hammer. Two things puzzle me in the affair. First, whence
+came my assailants, all in that moment of time, unless Satan let loose
+out of the infernal regions a synod of fiends, hoping thus to get a
+triumph over me. And secondly, whence came you, my preserver, unless you
+are an angel, and dropped down from the sky."
+
+"No," answered the stranger, with quiet simplicity. "I was passing
+through the street to my little school, when I saw your peril, and felt
+it my duty to expostulate with the people."
+
+"Well," said the grim Doctor, "come whence you will, you did an angel's
+office for me, and I shall do what an earthly man may to requite it.
+There, we will talk no more for the present."
+
+He hushed up the children, who were already, of their own accord,
+walking on tiptoe and whispering, and he himself even went so far as
+to refrain from the usual incense of his pipe, having observed that the
+stranger, who seemed to be of a very delicate organization, had seemed
+sensible of the disagreeable effect on the atmosphere of the room. The
+restraint lasted, however, only till (in the course of the day) crusty
+Hannah had fitted up a little bedroom on the opposite side of the entry,
+to which she and the grim Doctor moved the stranger, who, though tall,
+they observed was of no great weight and substance,--the lightest man,
+the Doctor averred, for his size, that ever he had handled.
+
+Every possible care was taken of him, and in a day or two he was able
+to walk into the study again, where he sat gazing at the sordidness
+and unneatness of the apartment, the strange festoons and drapery of
+spiders' webs, the gigantic spider himself, and at the grim Doctor, so
+shaggy, grizzly, and uncouth, in the midst of these surroundings, with a
+perceptible sense of something very strange in it all. His mild, gentle
+regard dwelt too on the two beautiful children, evidently with a sense
+of quiet wonder how they should be here, and altogether a sense of
+their unfitness; they, meanwhile, stood a little apart, looking at him,
+somewhat disturbed and awed, as children usually are, by a sense that
+the stranger was not perfectly well, that he had been injured, and so
+set apart from the rest of the world.
+
+"Will you come to me, little one?" said he, holding out a delicate hand
+to Elsie.
+
+Elsie came to his side without any hesitation, though without any of the
+rush that accompanied her advent to those whom she affected. "And you,
+my little man," added the stranger, quietly, and looking to Ned, who
+likewise willingly approached, and, shaking him by the offered hand, let
+it go again, but continued standing by his side.
+
+"Do you know, my little friends," said the stranger, "that it is my
+business in life to instruct such little people as you?"
+
+"Do they obey you well, sir?" asked Ned, perhaps conscious of a want of
+force in the person whom he addressed.
+
+The stranger smiled faintly. "Not too well," said he. "That has been my
+difficulty; for I have moral and religious objections, and also a great
+horror, to the use of the rod, and I have not been gifted with a
+harsh voice and a stern brow; so that, after a while, my little people
+sometimes get the better of me. The present generation of men is too
+gross for gentle treatment."
+
+"You are quite right," quoth Doctor Grimshawe, who had been observing
+this little scene, and trying to make out, from the mutual deportment
+of the stranger and the two children, what sort of man this fair, quiet
+stranger was, with his gentleness and weakness,--characteristics that
+were not attractive to himself, yet in which he acknowledged, as he
+saw them here, a certain charm; nor did he know, scarcely, whether to
+despise the one in whom he saw them, or to yield to a strange sense of
+reverence. So he watched the children, with an indistinct idea of being
+guided by them. "You are quite right: the world now--and always before,
+as far as I ever heard--requires a great deal of brute force, a great
+deal of animal food and brandy in the man that is to make an impression
+on it."
+
+The convalescence of the stranger--he gave his name as
+Colcord--proceeded favorably; for the Doctor remarked that, delicate as
+his system was, it had a certain purity,--a simple healthfulness that
+did not run into disease as stronger constitutions might. It did not
+apparently require much to crush down such a being as this,--not much
+unkindly breath to blow out the taper of his life,--and yet, if not
+absolutely killed, there was a certain aptness to keep alive in him not
+readily to be overcome.
+
+No sooner was he in a condition so to do, than he went forth to look
+after the little school that he had spoken of, but soon came back,
+announcing in a very quiet and undisturbed way that, during his
+withdrawal from duty, the scholars had been distributed to other
+instructors, and consequently he was without place or occupation
+[Endnotes: 2, 3, 4.]
+
+"A hard case," said the Doctor, flinging a gruff curse at those who had
+so readily deserted the poor schoolmaster.
+
+"Not so hard," replied Colcord. "These little fellows are an unruly set,
+born of parents who have led rough lives,--here in battle time, too,
+with the spirit of battle in them,--therefore rude and contentious
+beyond my power to cope with them. I have been taught, long ago," he
+added, with a peaceful smile, "that my business in life does not lie
+with grown-up and consolidated men and women; and so, not to be useless
+in my day, and to gain the little that my sustenance requires, I have
+thought to deal with children. But even for this I lack force."
+
+"I dare say," said the Doctor, with a modified laugh. "Little devils
+they are, harder to deal with than men. Well, I am glad of your failure
+for one reason, and of your being thrown out of business; because
+we shall have the benefit of you the longer. Here is this boy to be
+instructed. I have made some attempts myself; but having no art of
+instructing, no skill, no temper I suppose, I make but an indifferent
+hand at it: and besides I have other business that occupies my thoughts.
+Take him in hand, if you like, and the girl for company. No matter
+whether you teach her anything, unless you happen to be acquainted with
+needlework."
+
+"I will talk with the children," said Colcord, "and see if I am
+likely to do good with them. The lad, I see, has a singular spirit of
+aspiration and pride,--no ungentle pride,--but still hard to cope with.
+I will see. The little girl is a most comfortable child."
+
+"You have read the boy as if you had his heart in your hand," said
+the Doctor, rather surprised. "I could not have done it better myself,
+though I have known him all but from the egg."
+
+Accordingly, the stranger, who had been thrust so providentially into
+this odd and insulated little community, abode with them, without more
+words being spoken on the subject: for it seemed to all concerned
+a natural arrangement, although, on both parts, they were mutually
+sensible of something strange in the companionship thus brought about.
+To say the truth, it was not easy to imagine two persons apparently less
+adapted to each other's society than the rough, uncouth, animal Doctor,
+whose faith was in his own right arm, so full of the old Adam as he was,
+so sturdily a hater, so hotly impulsive, so deep, subtle, and crooked,
+so obstructed by his animal nature, so given to his pipe and black
+bottle, so wrathful and pugnacious and wicked,--and this mild spiritual
+creature, so milky, with so unforceful a grasp; and it was singular to
+see how they stood apart and eyed each other, each tacitly acknowledging
+a certain merit and kind of power, though not well able to appreciate
+its value. The grim Doctor's kindness, however, and gratitude, had
+been so thoroughly awakened, that he did not feel the disgust that he
+probably otherwise might at what seemed the mawkishness of Colcord's
+character; his want, morally speaking, of bone and muscle; his
+fastidiousness of character, the essence of which it seemed to be to
+bear no stain upon it; otherwise it must die.
+
+On Colcord's part there was a good deal of evidence to be detected, by
+a nice observer, that he found it difficult to put up with the Doctor's
+coarse peculiarities, whether physical or moral. His animal indulgences
+of appetite struck him with wonder and horror; his coarse expressions,
+his free indulgence of wrath, his sordid and unclean habits; the dust,
+the cobwebs, the monster that dangled from the ceiling; his pipe,
+diffusing its fragrance through the house, and showing, by the plainest
+and simplest proof, how we all breathe one another's breath, nice and
+proud as we may be, kings and daintiest ladies breathing the air that
+has already served to inflate a beggar's lungs. He shrank, too, from
+the rude manhood of the Doctor's character, with its human warmth,--an
+element which he seemed not to possess in his own character. He was
+capable only of gentle and mild regard,--that was his warmest affection;
+and the warmest, too, that he was capable of exciting in others. So that
+he was doomed as much apparently as the Doctor himself to be a lonely
+creature, without any very deep companionship in the world, though not
+incapable, when he, by some rare chance, met a soul distantly akin, of
+holding a certain high spiritual communion. With the children, however,
+he succeeded in establishing some good and available relations; his
+simple and passionless character coincided with their simplicity, and
+their as yet unawakened passions: they appeared to understand him better
+than the Doctor ever succeeded in doing. He touched springs and elements
+in the nature of both that had never been touched till now, and that
+sometimes made a sweet, high music. But this was rarely; and as far as
+the general duties of an instructor went, they did not seem to be very
+successfully performed. Something was cultivated; the spiritual
+germ grew, it might be; but the children, and especially Ned,
+were intuitively conscious of a certain want of substance in the
+instructor,--a something of earthly bulk; a too etherealness. But his
+connection with our story does not lie in any excellence, or lack of
+excellence, that he showed as an instructor, and we merely mention these
+things as illustrating more or less his characteristics.
+
+The grim Doctor's curiosity was somewhat piqued by what he could see of
+the schoolmaster's character, and he was desirous of finding out what
+sort of a life such a man could have led in a world which he himself had
+found so rough a one; through what difficulties he had reached middle
+age without absolutely vanishing away in his contact with more positive
+substances than himself; how the world had given him a subsistence, if
+indeed he recognized anything more dense than fragrance, like a certain
+people whom Pliny mentioned in Africa,--a point, in fact, which the
+grim Doctor denied, his performance at table being inappreciable, and
+confined, at least almost entirely, to a dish of boiled rice, which
+crusty Hannah set before him, preparing it, it might be, with a sympathy
+of her East Indian part towards him.
+
+Well, Doctor Grimshawe easily got at what seemed to be all of the facts
+of Colcord's life; how that he was a New-Englander, the descendant of an
+ancient race of settlers, the last of them; for, once pretty numerous
+in their quarter of the country, they seemed to have been dying
+out,--exhaling from the earth, and passing to some other region.
+
+"No wonder," said the Doctor bluffly. "You have been letting slip the
+vital principle, if you are a fair specimen of the race. You do not
+clothe yourself in substance. Your souls are not coated sufficiently.
+Beef and brandy would have saved you. You have exhaled for lack of
+them."
+
+The schoolmaster shook his head, and probably thought his earthly
+salvation and sustenance not worth buying at such a cost. The remainder
+of his history was not tangible enough to afford a narrative. There
+seemed, from what he said, to have always been a certain kind of
+refinement in his race, a nicety of conscience, a nicety of habit, which
+either was in itself a want of force, or was necessarily connected with
+it, and which, the Doctor silently thought, had culminated in the person
+before him.
+
+"It was always in us," continued Colcord, with a certain pride which
+people generally feel in their ancestral characteristics, be they good
+or evil. "We had a tradition among us of our first emigrant, and the
+causes that brought him to the New World; and it was said that he had
+suffered so much, before quitting his native shores, so painful had been
+his track, that always afterwards on the forest leaves of this land his
+foot left a print of blood wherever he trod." [Endnote: 5.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+"A print of blood!" said the grim Doctor, breaking his pipe-stem by some
+sudden spasm in his gripe of it. "Pooh! the devil take the pipe! A very
+strange story that! Pray how was it?" [Endnote: 1.]
+
+"Nay, it is but a very dim legend," answered the schoolmaster: "although
+there are old yellow papers and parchments, I remember, in my father's
+possession, that had some reference to this man, too, though there was
+nothing in them about the bloody footprints. But our family legend is,
+that this man was of a good race, in the time of Charles the First,
+originally Papists, but one of them--the second you, our legend
+says--was of a milder, sweeter cast than the rest, who were fierce
+and bloody men, of a hard, strong nature; but he partook most of his
+mother's character. This son had been one of the earliest Quakers,
+converted by George Fox; and moreover there had been love between him
+and a young lady of great beauty and an heiress, whom likewise the
+eldest son of the house had designed to make his wife. And these
+brothers, cruel men, caught their innocent brother and kept him in
+confinement long in his own native home--"
+
+"How?" asked the Doctor. "Why did not he appeal to the laws?"
+
+"Our legend says," replied the schoolmaster, "only that he was kept in a
+chamber that was forgotten." [Endnote: 2.]
+
+"Very strange that!" quoth the Doctor. "He was sold by his brethren."
+
+The schoolmaster went on to tell, with much shuddering, how a Jesuit
+priest had been mixed up with this wretched business, and there had been
+a scheme at once religious and political to wrest the estate and the
+lovely lady from the fortunate heir; and how this grim Italian priest
+had instigated them to use a certain kind of torture with the poor heir,
+and how he had suffered from this; but one night, when they left
+him senseless, he contrived to make his escape from that cruel home,
+bleeding as he went; and how, by some action of his imagination,--his
+sense of the cruelty and hideousness of such treatment at his brethren's
+hands, and in the holy name of his religion,--his foot, which had been
+crushed by their cruelty, bled as he went, and that blood had never been
+stanched. And thus he had come to America, and after many wanderings,
+and much track of blood along rough ways, to New England. [Endnote: 3.]
+
+"And what became of his beloved?" asked the grim Doctor, who was puffing
+away at a fresh pipe with a very queer aspect.
+
+"She died in England," replied the schoolmaster. "And before her death,
+by some means or other, they say that she found means to send him a
+child, the offspring of their marriage, and from that child our race
+descended. And they say, too, that she sent him a key to a coffin, in
+which was locked up a great treasure. But we have not the key. But he
+never went back to his own country; and being heart-broken, and sick
+and weary of the world and its pomps and vanities, he died here, after
+suffering much persecution likewise from the Puritans. For his peaceful
+religion was accepted nowhere."
+
+"Of all legends,--all foolish legends," quoth the Doctor, wrathfully,
+with a face of a dark blood-red color, so much was his anger and
+contempt excited, "and of all absurd heroes of a legend, I never heard
+the like of this! Have you the key?"
+
+"No; nor have I ever heard of it," answered the schoolmaster.
+
+"But you have some papers?"
+
+"They existed once: perhaps are still recoverable by search," said the
+schoolmaster. "My father knew of them."
+
+"A foolish legend," reiterated the Doctor. "It is strange how human
+folly strings itself on to human folly, as a story originally false and
+foolish grows older."
+
+He got up and walked about the room, with hasty and irregular strides
+and a prodigious swinging of his ragged dressing-gown, which swept away
+as many cobwebs as it would take a week to reproduce. After a few turns,
+as if to change the subject, the Doctor asked the schoolmaster if he had
+any taste for pictures, and drew his attention to the portrait which
+has been already mentioned,--the figure in antique sordid garb, with a
+halter round his neck, and the expression in his face which the Doctor
+and the two children had interpreted so differently. Colcord, who
+probably knew nothing about pictures, looked at it at first merely from
+the gentle and cool complaisance of his character; but becoming absorbed
+in the contemplation, stood long without speaking; until the Doctor,
+looking in his face, perceived his eyes were streaming with tears.
+
+"What are you crying about?" said he, gruffly.
+
+"I don't know," said the schoolmaster quietly. "But there is something
+in this picture that affects me inexpressibly; so that, not being a man
+passionate by nature, I have hardly ever been so moved as now!"
+
+"Very foolish," muttered the Doctor, resuming his strides about the
+room. "I am ashamed of a grown man that can cry at a picture, and can't
+tell the reason why."
+
+After a few more turns he resumed his easy-chair and his tumbler,
+and, looking upward, beckoned to his pet spider, which came dangling
+downward, great parti-colored monster that he was, and swung about
+his master's head in hideous conference as it seemed; a sight that so
+distressed the schoolmaster, or shocked his delicate taste, that he
+went out, and called the two children to take a walk with him, with
+the purpose of breathing air that was neither infected with spiders nor
+graves.
+
+After his departure, Doctor Grimshawe seemed even more disturbed than
+during his presence: again he strode about the study; then sat down with
+his hands on his knees, looking straight into the fire, as if it imaged
+the seething element of his inner man, where burned hot projects, smoke,
+heat, blackness, ashes, a smouldering of old thoughts, a blazing up
+of new; casting in the gold of his mind, as Aaron did that of the
+Israelites, and waiting to see what sort of a thing would come out of
+the furnace. The children coming in from their play, he spoke harshly to
+them, and eyed little Ned with a sort of savageness, as if he meant to
+eat him up, or do some other dreadful deed: and when little Elsie came
+with her usual frankness to his knee, he repelled her in such a way that
+she shook her little hand at him, saying, "Naughty Doctor Grim, what has
+come to you?"
+
+Through all that day, by some subtle means or other, the whole household
+knew that something was amiss; and nobody in it was comfortable. It was
+like a spell of weather; like the east wind; like an epidemic in the
+air, that would not let anything be comfortable or contented,--this
+pervading temper of the Doctor. Crusty Hannah knew it in the kitchen:
+even those who passed the house must have known it somehow or other, and
+have felt a chill, an irritation, an influence on the nerves, as they
+passed. The spiders knew it, and acted as they were wont to do in
+stormy weather. The schoolmaster, when he returned from his walk, seemed
+likewise to know it, and made himself secure and secret, keeping in his
+own room, except at dinner, when he ate his rice in silence, without
+looking towards the Doctor, and appeared before him no more till
+evening, when the grim Doctor summoned him into the study, after sending
+the two children to bed.
+
+"Sir," began the Doctor, "you have spoken of some old documents in your
+possession relating to the English descent of your ancestors. I have a
+curiosity to see these documents. Where are they?" [Endnote: 4.]
+
+"I have them about my person," said the schoolmaster; and he produced
+from his pocket a bundle of old yellow papers done up in a parchment
+cover, tied with a piece of white cord, and presented them to Doctor
+Grimshawe, who looked over them with interest. They seemed to consist of
+letters, genealogical lists, certified copies of entries in registers,
+things which must have been made out by somebody who knew more of
+business than this ethereal person in whose possession they now were.
+The Doctor looked at them with considerable attention, and at last did
+them hastily up in the bundle again, and returned them to the owner.
+
+"Have you any idea what is now the condition of the family to whom these
+papers refer?" asked he.
+
+"None whatever,--none for almost a hundred years," said the
+schoolmaster. "About that time ago, I have heard a vague story that one
+of my ancestors went to the old country and saw the place. But, you see,
+the change of name has effectually covered us from view; and I feel that
+our true name is that which my ancestor assumed when he was driven forth
+from the home of his fathers, and that I have nothing to do with any
+other. I have no views on the estate,--none whatever. I am not so
+foolish and dreamy."
+
+"Very right," said the Doctor. "Nothing is more foolish than to follow
+up such a pursuit as this, against all the vested interests of two
+hundred years, which of themselves have built up an impenetrably strong
+allegation against you. They harden into stone, in England, these years,
+and become indestructible, instead of melting away as they do in this
+happy country."
+
+"It is not a matter of interest with me," replied the schoolmaster.
+
+"Very right,--very right!" repeated the grim Doctor.
+
+But something was evidently amiss with him this evening. It was
+impossible to feel easy and comfortable in contact with him: if you
+looked in his face, there was the red, lurid glare of his eyes; meeting
+you fiercely and craftily as ever: sometimes he bit his lip and frowned
+in an awful manner. Once, he burst out into an awful fit of swearing,
+for no good reason, or any reason whatever that he explained, or that
+anybody could tell. Again, for no more suitable reason, he uplifted his
+stalwart arm, and smote a heavy blow with his fist upon the oak table,
+making the tumbler and black bottle leap up, and damaging, one would
+think, his own knuckles. Then he rose up, and resumed his strides about
+the room. He paused before the portrait before mentioned; then resumed
+his heavy, quick, irregular tread, swearing under his breath; and
+you would imagine, from what you heard, that all his thoughts and the
+movement of his mind were a blasphemy. Then again--but this was only
+once--he heaved a deep, ponderous sigh, that seemed to come up in spite
+of him, out of his depths, an exhalation of deep suffering, as if some
+convulsion had given it a passage to upper air, instead of its being
+hidden, as it generally was, by accumulated rubbish of later time heaped
+above it.
+
+This latter sound appealed to something within the simple schoolmaster,
+who had been witnessing the demeanor of the Doctor, like a being
+looking from another sphere into the trouble of the mortal one; a being
+incapable of passion, observing the mute, hard struggle of one in its
+grasp.
+
+"Friend," said he at length, "thou hast something on thy mind."
+
+"Aye," said the grim Doctor, coming to a stand before his chair. "You
+see that? Can you see as well what it is?"
+
+"Some stir and writhe of something in the past that troubles you, as if
+you had kept a snake for many years in your bosom, and stupefied it
+with brandy, and now it awakes again, and troubles you with bites and
+stings."
+
+"What sort of a man do you think me?" asked the Doctor.
+
+"I cannot tell," said the schoolmaster. "The sympathies of my nature are
+not those that should give me knowledge of such men."
+
+"Am I, think you," continued the grim Doctor, "a man capable of great
+crime?"
+
+"A great one, if any," said Colcord; "a great good, likewise, it might
+be."
+
+"What would I be likely to do," asked Doctor Grim, "supposing I had
+a darling purpose, to the accomplishment of which I had given my
+soul,--yes, my soul,--my success in life, my days and nights of thought,
+my years of time, dwelling upon it, pledging myself to it, until at
+last I had grown to love the burden of it, and not to regret my own
+degradation? I, a man of strongest will. What would I do, if this were
+to be resisted?"
+
+"I do not conceive of the force of will shaping out my ways," said the
+schoolmaster. "I walk gently along and take the path that opens before
+me."
+
+"Ha! ha! ha!" shouted the grim Doctor, with one of his portentous
+laughs. "So do we all, in spite of ourselves; and sometimes the path
+comes to a sudden ending!" And he resumed his drinking.
+
+The schoolmaster looked at him with wonder, and a kind of shuddering, at
+something so unlike himself; but probably he very imperfectly estimated
+the forces that were at work within this strange being, and how
+dangerous they made him. He imputed it, a great deal, to the brandy,
+which he had kept drinking in such inordinate quantities; whereas it is
+probable that this had a soothing, emollient effect, as far as it went,
+on the Doctor's emotions; a sort of like to like, that he instinctively
+felt to be a remedy, But in truth it was difficult to see these two
+human creatures together, without feeling their incompatibility; without
+having a sense that one must be hostile to the other. The schoolmaster,
+through his fine instincts, doubtless had a sense of this, and sat
+gazing at the lurid, wrathful figure of the Doctor, in a sort of trance
+and fascination: not able to stir; bewildered by the sight of the great
+spider and other surroundings; and this strange, uncouth fiend, who had
+always been abhorrent to him,--he had a kind of curiosity in it, waited
+to see what would come of it, but felt it to be an unnatural state to
+him. And again the grim Doctor came and stood before him, prepared to
+make another of those strange utterances with which he had already so
+perplexed him.
+
+That night--that midnight--it was rumored through the town that one
+of the inhabitants, going home late along the street that led by the
+graveyard, saw the grim Doctor standing by the open window of the study
+behind the elm tree, in his old dressing-gown, chill as was the night,
+and flinging his arms abroad wildly into the darkness, and muttering
+like the growling of a tempest, with occasional vociferations that grew
+even shrill with passion. The listener, though affrighted, could not
+resist an impulse to pause, and attempt overhearing something that might
+let him into the secret counsels of this strange wild man, whom the town
+held in such awe and antipathy; to learn, perhaps, what was the great
+spider, and whether he were summoning the dead out of their graves.
+However, he could make nothing out of what he overheard, except it were
+fragmentary curses, of a dreadful character, which the Doctor brought up
+with might and main out of the depths of his soul, and flung them forth,
+burning hot, aimed at what, and why, and to what practical end, it
+was impossible to say; but as necessarily as a volcano, in a state of
+eruption, sends forth boiling lava, sparkling and scintillating stones,
+and a sulphurous atmosphere, indicative of its inward state. [Endnote:
+5.]
+
+Dreading lest some one of these ponderous anathemas should alight,
+reason or none, on his own head, the man crept away, and whispered the
+thing to his cronies, from whom it was communicated to the townspeople
+at large, and so became one of many stories circulating with reference
+to our grim hero, which, if not true to the fact, had undoubtedly
+a degree of appositeness to his character, of which they were the
+legitimate flowers and symbols. If the anathemas took no other effect,
+they seemed to have produced a very remarkable one on the unfortunate
+elm tree, through the naked branches of which the Doctor discharged this
+fiendish shot. For, the next spring, when April came, no tender leaves
+budded forth, no life awakened there; and never again, on that old elm,
+widely as its roots were imbedded among the dead of many years, was
+there rustling bough in the summer time, or the elm's early golden
+boughs in September; and after waiting till another spring to give it
+a fair chance of reviving, it was cut down and made into coffins, and
+burnt on the sexton's hearth. The general opinion was that the grim
+Doctor's awful profanity had blasted that tree, fostered, as it had
+been, on grave-mould of Puritans. In Lancashire they tell of a similar
+anathema. It had a very frightful effect, it must be owned, this idea of
+a man cherishing emotions in his breast of so horrible a nature that
+he could neither tell them to any human being, nor keep them in their
+plenitude and intensity within the breast where they had their germ,
+and so was forced to fling them forth upon the night, to pollute and put
+fear into the atmosphere, and that people should breathe-in somewhat
+of horror from an unknown source, and be affected with nightmare, and
+dreams in which they were startled at their own wickedness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+At the breakfast-table the next morning, however, appeared Doctor
+Grimshawe, wearing very much the same aspect of an uncombed, unshorn,
+unbrushed, odd sort of a pagan as at other times, and making no
+difference in his breakfast, except that he poured a pretty large dose
+of brandy into his cup of tea; a thing, however, by no means unexampled
+or very unusual in his history. There were also the two children,
+fresher than the morning itself, rosy creatures, with newly scrubbed
+cheeks, made over again for the new day, though the old one had left no
+dust upon them;[Endnote: 1] laughing with one another, flinging their
+little jokes about the table, and expecting that the Doctor might, as
+was often his wont, set some ponderous old English joke trundling round
+among the breakfast cups; eating the corn-cakes which crusty Hannah,
+with the aboriginal part of her, had a knack of making in a peculiar and
+exquisite fashion. But there was an empty chair at table; one cup, one
+little jug of milk, and another of pure water, with no guest to partake
+of them.
+
+"Where is the schoolmaster?" said Ned, pausing as he was going to take
+his seat.
+
+"Yes, Doctor Grim?" said little Elsie.
+
+"He has overslept himself for once," quoth Doctor Grim gruffly; "a
+strange thing, too, for a man whose victuals and drink are so light as
+the schoolmaster's. The fiend take me if I thought he had mortal mould
+enough in him ever to go to sleep at all; though he is but a kind of
+dream-stuff in his widest-awake state. Hannah, you bronze jade, call the
+schoolmaster to come to breakfast."
+
+Hannah departed on her errand, and was heard knocking at the door of
+the schoolmaster's chamber several times, till the Doctor shouted to
+her wrathfully to cease her clatter and open the door at once, which she
+appeared to do, and speedily came back.
+
+"He no there, massa. Schoolmaster melted away!"
+
+"Vanished like a bubble!" quoth the Doctor.
+
+"The great spider caught him like a fly," quoth crusty Hannah, chuckling
+with a sense of mischief that seemed very pleasant to her strange
+combination.
+
+"He has taken a morning walk," said little Ned; "don't you think so,
+Doctor Grim?"
+
+"Yes," said the grim Doctor. "Go on with your breakfast, little monkey;
+the walk may be a long one, or he is so slight a weight that the wind
+may blow him overboard."
+
+A very long walk it proved; or it might be that some wind, whether evil
+or good, had blown him, as the Doctor suggested, into parts unknown;
+for, from that time forth, the Yankee schoolmaster returned no more. It
+was a singular disappearance.
+
+The bed did not appear to have been slept in; there was a bundle, in a
+clean handkerchief, containing two shirts, two pocket handkerchiefs, two
+pairs of cotton socks, a Testament, and that was all. Had he intended to
+go away, why did he not take this little luggage in his hand, being all
+he had, and of a kind not easily dispensed with? The Doctor made small
+question about it, however; he had seemed surprised, at first, yet gave
+certainly no energetic token of it; and when Ned, who began to have
+notions of things, proposed to advertise him in the newspapers, or send
+the town crier round, the Doctor ridiculed the idea unmercifully.
+
+"Lost, a lank Yankee schoolmaster," quoth he, uplifting his voice after
+the manner of the town crier; "supposed to have been blown out of Doctor
+Grim's window, or perhaps have ridden off astride of a humble-bee."
+
+"It is not pretty to laugh in that way, Doctor Grim," said little Elsie,
+looking into his face, with a grave shake of her head.
+
+"And why not, you saucy little witch?" said the Doctor.
+
+"It is not the way to laugh, Doctor Grim," persisted the child, but
+either could not or would not assign any reason for her disapprobation,
+although what she said appeared to produce a noticeable effect on Doctor
+Grimshawe, who lapsed into a rough, harsh manner, that seemed to satisfy
+Elsie better. Crusty Hannah, meanwhile, seemed to dance about the house
+with a certain singular alacrity, a wonderful friskiness, indeed, as
+if the diabolical result of the mixture in her nature was particularly
+pleased with something; so she went, with queer gesticulations,
+crossings, contortions, friskings, evidently in a very mirthful state;
+until, being asked by her master what was the matter, she replied,
+"Massa, me know what became of the schoolmaster. Great spider catch in
+his web and eat him!"
+
+Whether that was the mode of his disappearance, or some other,
+certainly the schoolmaster was gone; and the children were left in great
+bewilderment at the sudden vacancy in his place. They had not contracted
+a very yearning affection for him, and yet his impression had been
+individual and real, and they felt that something was gone out of their
+lives, now that he was no longer there. Something strange in their
+circumstances made itself felt by them; they were more sensible of the
+grim Doctor's uncouthness, his strange, reprehensible habits, his dark,
+mysterious life,--in looking at these things, and the spiders, and the
+graveyard, and their insulation from the world, through the crystal
+medium of this stranger's character. In remembering him in connection
+with these things, a certain seemly beauty in him showed strikingly the
+unfitness, the sombre and tarnished color, the outreness, of the rest
+of their lot. Little Elsie perhaps felt the loss of him more than her
+playmate, although both had been interested by him. But now things
+returned pretty much to their old fashion; although, as is inevitably
+the case, whenever persons or things have been taken suddenly or
+unaccountably out of our sphere, without telling us whither and why
+they have disappeared, the children could not, for a long while, bring
+themselves to feel that he had really gone. Perhaps, in imitation of
+the custom in that old English house, of which the Doctor had told them,
+little Elsie insisted that his place should still be kept at the table;
+and so, whenever crusty Hannah neglected to do so, she herself would
+fetch a plate, and a little pitcher of water, and set it beside a vacant
+chair; and sometimes, so like a shadow had he been, this pale, slender
+creature, it almost might have been thought that he was sitting with
+them. But crusty Hannah shook her head, and grinned. "The spider know
+where he is. We never see him more!"
+
+His abode in the house had been of only two or three weeks; and in the
+natural course of things, had he come and gone in an ordinary way, his
+recollection would have grown dim and faded out in two or three weeks
+more; but the speculations, the expectations, the watchings for his
+reappearance, served to cut and grave the recollection of him into the
+children's hearts, so that it remained a life-long thing with them,--a
+sense that he was something that had been lost out of their life too
+soon, and that was bound, sooner or later, to reappear, and finish what
+business he had with them. Sometimes they prattled around the Doctor's
+chair about him, and they could perceive sometimes that he appeared
+to be listening, and would chime in with some remark; but he never
+expressed either wonder or regret; only telling Ned, once, that he had
+no reason to be sorry for his disappearance.
+
+"Why, Doctor Grim?" asked the boy.
+
+The Doctor mused, and smoked his pipe, as if he himself were thinking
+why, and at last he answered, "He was a dangerous fellow, my old boy."
+
+"Why?" said Ned again.
+
+"He would have taken the beef out of you," said the Doctor.
+
+I know not how long it was before any other visitor (except such as
+brought their shattered constitutions there in hopes that the Doctor
+would make the worn-out machinery as good as new) came to the lonely
+little household on the corner of the graveyard. The intercourse between
+themselves and the rest of the town remained as scanty as ever. Still,
+the grim, shaggy Doctor was seen setting doggedly forth, in all seasons
+and all weathers, at a certain hour of the day, with the two children,
+going for long walks on the sea-shore, or into the country, miles
+away, and coming back, hours afterwards, with plants and herbs that had
+perhaps virtue in them, or flowers that had certainly beauty; even, in
+their season, the fragrant magnolias, leaving a trail of fragrance after
+them, that grow only in spots, the seeds having been apparently
+dropped by some happy accident when those proper to the climate were
+distributed. Shells there were, also, in the baskets that they carried,
+minerals, rare things, that a magic touch seemed to have created out
+of the rude and common things that others find in a homely and ordinary
+region. The boy was growing tall, and had got out of the merely
+infantile age; agile he was, bright, but still with a remarkable
+thoughtfulness, or gravity, or I know not what to call it; but it was a
+shadow, no doubt, falling upon him from something sombre in his warp of
+life, which the impressibility of his age and nature so far acknowledged
+as to be a little pale and grave, without positive unhappiness; and when
+a playful moment came, as they often did to these two healthy children,
+it seemed all a mistake that you had ever thought either of them too
+grave for their age. But little Elsie was still the merrier. They were
+still children, although they quarrelled seldomer than of yore, and
+kissed seldomer, and had ceased altogether to complain of one another
+to the Doctor; perhaps the time when Nature saw these bickerings to be
+necessary to the growth of some of their faculties was nearly gone. When
+they did have a quarrel, the boy stood upon his dignity, and visited
+Elsie with a whole day, sometimes, of silent and stately displeasure,
+which she was accustomed to bear, sometimes with an assumption of cold
+indifference, sometimes with liveliness, mirth in double quantity,
+laughter almost as good as real,--little arts which showed themselves
+in her as naturally as the gift of tears and smiles. In fact, having
+no advantage of female intercourse, she could not well have learnt them
+unless from crusty Hannah, who was such an anomaly of a creature, with
+all her mixtures of race, that she struck you as having lost all sex as
+one result of it. Yet this little girl was truly feminine, and had all
+the manners and pre-eminently uncriticisable tenets proper to women at
+her early age.
+
+She had made respectable advancement in study; that is, she had taught
+herself to write, with even greater mechanical facility than Ned; and
+other knowledge had fallen upon her, as it were, by a reflected light
+from him; or, to use another simile, had been spattered upon her by
+the full stream which the Doctor poured into the vessel of the boy's
+intellect. So that she had even some knowledge of the rudiments of
+Latin, and geometry, and algebra; inaccurate enough, but yet with such a
+briskness that she was sometimes able to assist Ned in studies in which
+he was far more deeply grounded than herself. All this, however, was
+more by sympathy than by any natural taste for such things; being
+kindly, and sympathetic, and impressible, she took the color of what was
+nearest to her, and especially when it came from a beloved object, so
+that it was difficult to discover that it was not really one of her
+native tastes. The only thing, perhaps, altogether suited to her
+idiosyncrasy (because it was truly feminine, calculated for dainty
+fingers, and a nice little subtlety) was that kind of embroidery,
+twisting, needle-work, on textile fabric, which, as we have before said,
+she learnt from crusty Hannah, and which was emblematic perhaps of that
+creature's strange mixture of races.
+
+Elsie seemed not only to have caught this art in its original spirit,
+but to have improved upon it, creating strange, fanciful, and graceful
+devices, which grew beneath her finger as naturally as the variegated
+hues grow in a flower as it opens; so that the homeliest material
+assumed a grace and strangeness as she wove it, whether it were grass,
+twigs, shells, or what not. Never was anything seen, that so combined
+a wild, barbarian freedom with cultivated grace; and the grim Doctor
+himself, little open to the impressions of the beautiful, used to
+hold some of her productions in his hand, gazing at them with deep
+intentness, and at last, perhaps, breaking out into one of his deep
+roars of laughter; for it seemed to suggest thoughts to him that the
+children could not penetrate. This one feature of strangeness and wild
+faculty in the otherwise sweet and natural and homely character of Elsie
+had a singular effect; it was like a wreath of wild-flowers in her hair,
+like something that set her a little way apart from the rest of the
+world, and had an even more striking effect than if she were altogether
+strange.
+
+Thus were the little family going on; the Doctor, I regret to say,
+growing more morose, self-involved, and unattainable since the
+disappearance of the schoolmaster than before; more given up to his one
+plaything, the great spider; less frequently even than before coming
+out of the grim seclusion of his moodiness, to play with the children,
+though they would often be sensible of his fierce eyes fixed upon them,
+and start and feel incommoded by the intensity of his regard;--thus
+things were going on, when one day there was really again a visitor,
+and not a dilapidated patient, to the grim Doctor's study. Crusty
+Hannah brought up his name as Mr. Hammond, and the Doctor--filling his
+everlasting pipe, meanwhile, and ordering Hannah to give him a coal
+(perhaps this was the circumstance that made people say he had imps to
+bring him coals from Tophet)--ordered him to be shown up. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+A fresh-colored, rather young man [Endnote: 3] entered the study, a
+person of rather cold and ungraceful manners, yet genial-looking enough;
+at least, not repulsive. He was dressed in rather a rough, serviceable
+travelling-dress, and except for a nicely brushed hat, and unmistakably
+white linen, was rather careless in attire. You would have thought
+twice, perhaps, before deciding him to be a gentleman, but finally
+would have decided that he was; one great token being, that the singular
+aspect of the room into which he was ushered, the spider festoonery, and
+other strange accompaniments, the grim aspect of the Doctor himself,
+and the beauty and intelligence of his two companions, and even that
+horrific weaver, the great dangling spider,--neither one nor all of
+these called any expression of surprise to the stranger's face.
+
+"Your name is Hammond?" begins the Doctor, with his usual sparseness of
+ornamental courtesy. [Endnote: 4.]
+
+The stranger bowed.
+
+"An Englishman, I perceive," continued the Doctor, but nowise intimating
+that the fact of being a countryman was any recommendation in his eyes.
+
+"Yes, an Englishman," replied Hammond; "a briefless barrister, [Endnote:
+5] in fact, of Lincoln's Inn, who, having little or nothing to detain
+him at home, has come to spend a few idle months in seeing the new
+republic which has been made out of English substance."
+
+"And what," continued Doctor Grim, not a whit relaxing the repulsiveness
+of his manner, and scowling askance at the stranger,--"what may have
+drawn on me the good fortune of being compelled to make my time idle,
+because yours is so?"
+
+The stranger's cheek flushed a little; but he smiled to himself, as if
+saying that here was a grim, rude kind of humorist, who had lost the
+sense of his own peculiarity, and had no idea that he was rude at all.
+"I came to America, as I told you," said he, "chiefly because I was
+idle, and wanted to turn my enforced idleness to what profit I could, in
+the way of seeing men, manners, governments, and problems, which I hope
+to have no time to study by and by. But I also had an errand intrusted
+to me, and of a singular nature; and making inquiry in this little town
+(where my mission must be performed, if at all), I have been directed
+to you, by your townspeople, as to a person not unlikely to be able to
+assist me in it."
+
+"My townspeople, since you choose to call them so," answered the grim
+Doctor, "ought to know, by this time, that I am not the sort of man
+likely to assist any person, in any way."
+
+"Yet this is so singular an affair," said the stranger, still with mild
+courtesy, "that at least it may excite your curiosity. I have come here
+to find a grave."
+
+"To find a grave!" said Doctor Grim, giving way to a grim sense of
+humor, and relaxing just enough to let out a joke, the tameness of which
+was a little redeemed, to his taste, by its grimness. "I might help you
+there, to be sure, since it is all in the way of business. Like others
+of my profession, I have helped many people to find their graves, no
+doubt, and shall be happy to do the same for you. You have hit upon the
+one thing in which my services are ready."
+
+"I thank you, my dear sir," said the young stranger, having tact enough
+to laugh at Dr. Grim's joke, and thereby mollifying him a little; "but
+as far as I am personally concerned, I prefer to wait a while before
+making the discovery of that little spot in Mother Earth which I am
+destined to occupy. It is a grave which has been occupied as such for
+at least a century and a half which I am in quest of; and it is as an
+antiquarian, a genealogist, a person who has had dealings with the
+dead of long ago, not as a professional man engaged in adding to their
+number, that I ask your aid."
+
+"Ah, ahah!" said the Doctor, laying down his pipe, and looking earnestly
+at the stranger; not kindly nor genially, but rather with a lurid glance
+of suspicion out of those red eyes of his, but no longer with a desire
+to escape an intruder; rather as one who meant to clutch him. "Explain
+your meaning, sir, at once."
+
+"Then here it is," said Mr. Hammond. "There is an old English family,
+one of the members of which, very long ago, emigrated to this part of
+America, then a wilderness, and long afterwards a British colony. He was
+on ill terms with his family. There is reason to believe that documents,
+deeds, titular proofs, or some other thing valuable to the family,
+were buried in the grave of this emigrant; and there have been various
+attempts, within a century, to find this grave, and if possible some
+living descendant of the man, or both, under the idea that either of
+these cases might influence the disputed descent of the property, and
+enable the family to prove its claims to an ancient title. Now, rather
+as a matter of curiosity, than with any real hope of success,--and being
+slightly connected with the family,--I have taken what seems to myself a
+wild-goose chase; making it merely incidental, you well understand, not
+by any means the main purpose of my voyage to America."
+
+"What is the name of this family?" asked the Doctor, abruptly.
+
+"The man whose grave I seek," said the stranger, "lived and died, in
+this country, under the assumed name of Colcord."
+
+"How do you expect to succeed in this ridiculous quest?" asked the
+Doctor, "and what marks, signs, directions, have you to guide your
+search? And moreover, how have you come to any knowledge whatever about
+the matter, even that the emigrant ever assumed this name of Colcord,
+and that he was buried anywhere, and that his place of burial, after
+more than a century, is of the slightest importance?"
+
+"All this was ascertained by a messenger on a similar errand with my
+own, only undertaken nearly a century ago, and more in earnest than I
+can pretend to be," replied the Englishman. "At that period, however,
+there was probably a desire to find nothing that might take the
+hereditary possessions of the family out of the branch which still
+held them; and there is strong reason to suspect that the information
+acquired was purposely kept secret by the person in England into whose
+hands it came. The thing is differently situated now; the possessor of
+the estate is recently dead; and the discovery of an American heir would
+not be unacceptable to many. At all events, any knowledge gained here
+would throw light on a somewhat doubtful matter."
+
+"Where, as nearly as you can judge," said the Doctor, after a turn or
+two through the study, "was this man buried?"
+
+"He spent the last years of his life, certainly, in this town," said
+Hammond, "and may be found, if at all, among the dead of that period."
+
+"And they--their miserable dust, at least, which is all that still
+exists of them--were buried in the graveyard under these windows," said
+the Doctor. "What marks, I say,--for you might as well seek a vanished
+wave of the sea, as a grave that surged upward so long ago."
+
+"On the gravestone," said Hammond, "a slate one, there was rudely
+sculptured the impress of a foot. What it signifies I cannot conjecture,
+except it had some reference to a certain legend of a bloody footstep,
+which is currently told, and some token of which yet remains on one of
+the thresholds of the ancient mansion-house."
+
+Ned and Elsie had withdrawn themselves from the immediate vicinity of
+the fireside, and were playing at fox and geese in a corner near the
+window. But little Elsie, having very quick ears, and a faculty of
+attending to more affairs than one, now called out, "Doctor Grim, Ned
+and I know where that gravestone is."
+
+"Hush, Elsie," whispered Ned, earnestly.
+
+"Come forward here, both of you," said Doctor Grimshawe.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+The two children approached, and stood before the Doctor and his guest,
+the latter of whom had not hitherto taken particular notice of them. He
+now looked from one to the other, with the pleasant, genial expression
+of a person gifted with a natural liking for children, and the
+freemasonry requisite to bring him acquainted with them; and it lighted
+up his face with a pleasant surprise to see two such beautiful specimens
+of boyhood and girlhood in this dismal, spider-haunted house, and under
+the guardianship of such a savage lout as the grim Doctor. He seemed
+particularly struck by the intelligence and sensibility of Ned's face,
+and met his eyes with a glance that Ned long afterwards remembered; but
+yet he seemed quite as much interested by Elsie, and gazed at her face
+with a perplexed, inquiring glance.
+
+"These are fine children," said he. "May I ask if they are your
+own?--Pardon me if I ask amiss," added he, seeing a frown on the
+Doctor's brow.
+
+"Ask nothing about the brats," replied he grimly. "Thank Heaven, they
+are not my children; so your question is answered."
+
+"I again ask pardon," said Mr. Hammond. "I am fond of children; and the
+boy has a singularly fine countenance; not in the least English.
+The true American face, no doubt. As to this sweet little girl, she
+impresses me with a vague resemblance to some person I have seen. Hers I
+should deem an English face."
+
+"These children are not our topic," said the grim Doctor, with gruff
+impatience. "If they are to be so, our conversation is ended. Ned, what
+do you know of this gravestone with the bloody foot on it?"
+
+"It is not a bloody foot, Doctor Grim," said Ned, "and I am not sure
+that it is a foot at all; only Elsie and I chose to fancy so, because
+of a story that we used to play at. But we were children then. The
+gravestone lies on the ground, within a little bit of a walk of our
+door; but this snow has covered it all over; else we might go out and
+see it."
+
+"We will go out at any rate," said the Doctor, "and if the Englishman
+chooses to come to America, he must take our snows as he finds them.
+Take your shovel, Ned, and if necessary we will uncover the gravestone."
+
+They accordingly muffled themselves in their warmest, and plunged forth
+through a back door into Ned and Elsie's playground, as the grim Doctor
+was wont to call it. The snow, except in one spot close at hand, lay
+deep, like cold oblivion, over the surging graves, and piled itself in
+drifted heaps against every stone that raised itself above the level;
+it filled enviously the letters of the inscriptions, enveloping all the
+dead in one great winding-sheet, whiter and colder than those which they
+had individually worn. The dreary space was pathless; not a footstep
+had tracked through the heavy snow; for it must be warm affection indeed
+that could so melt this wintry impression as to penetrate through the
+snow and frozen earth, and establish any warm thrills with the dead
+beneath: daisies, grass, genial earth, these allow of the magnetism of
+such sentiments; but winter sends them shivering back to the baffled
+heart.
+
+"Well, Ned," said the Doctor, impatiently.
+
+Ned looked about him somewhat bewildered, and then pointed to a spot
+within not more than ten paces of the threshold which they had just
+crossed; and there appeared, not a gravestone, but a new grave (if
+any grave could be called new in that often-dug soil, made up of old
+mortality), an open hole, with the freshly-dug earth piled up beside it.
+A little snow (for there had been a gust or two since morning) appeared,
+as they peeped over the edge, to have fallen into it; but not enough to
+prevent a coffin from finding fit room and accommodation in it. But it
+was evident that the grave had been dug that very day.
+
+"The headstone, with the foot on it, was just here," said Ned, in much
+perplexity, "and, as far as I can judge, the old sunken grave exactly
+marked out the space of this new one." [Endnote: 1.]
+
+"It is a shame," said Elsie, much shocked at the indecorum, "that the
+new person should be thrust in here; for the old one was a friend of
+ours."
+
+"But what has become of the headstone!" exclaimed the young English
+stranger.
+
+During their perplexity, a person had approached the group, wading
+through the snow from the gateway giving entrance from the street; a
+gaunt figure, with stooping shoulders, over one of which was a spade and
+some other tool fit for delving in the earth; and in his face there was
+the sort of keen, humorous twinkle that grave-diggers somehow seem
+to get, as if the dolorous character of their business necessitated
+something unlike itself by an inevitable reaction.
+
+"Well, Doctor," said he, with a shrewd wink in his face, "are you
+looking for one of your patients? The man who is to be put to bed here
+was never caught in your spider's web."
+
+"No," said Doctor Grimshawe; "when my patients have done with me, I
+leave them to you and the old Nick, and never trouble myself about them
+more. What I want to know is, why you have taken upon you to steal a
+man's grave, after he has had immemorial possession of it. By what right
+have you dug up this bed, undoing the work of a predecessor of yours,
+who has long since slept in one of his own furrows?"
+
+"Why, Doctor," said the grave-digger, looking quietly into the cavernous
+pit which he had hollowed, "it is against common sense that a dead man
+should think to keep a grave to himself longer than till you can take up
+his substance in a shovel. It would be a strange thing enough, if,
+when living families are turned out of their homes twice or thrice in a
+generation, (as they are likely to be in our new government,) a dead
+man should think he must sleep in one spot till the day of judgment. No;
+turn about, I say, to these old fellows. As long as they can decently be
+called dead men, I let them lie; when they are nothing but dust, I just
+take leave to stir them on occasion. This is the way we do things under
+the republic, whatever your customs be in the old country."
+
+"Matters are very much the same in any old English churchyard," said
+the English stranger. "But, my good friend, I have come three thousand
+miles, partly to find this grave, and am a little disappointed to find
+my labor lost."
+
+"Ah! and you are the man my father was looking for," said the
+grave-digger, nodding his head at Mr. Hammond. "My father, who was a
+grave-digger afore me, died four and thirty years ago, when we were
+under the King; and says he, 'Ebenezer, do not you turn up a sod in this
+spot, till you have turned up every other in the ground.' And I have
+always obeyed him."
+
+"And what was the reason of such a singular prohibition?" asked Hammond.
+
+"My father knew," said the grave-digger, "and he told me the reason too;
+but since we are under the republic, we have given up remembering those
+old-world legends, as we used to. The newspapers keep us from talking in
+the chimney-corner; and so things go out of our minds. An old man, with
+his stories of what he has seen, and what his great-grandfather saw
+before him, is of little account since newspapers came up. Stop--I
+remember--no, I forget,--it was something about the grave holding a
+witness, who had been sought before and might be again."
+
+"And that is all you know about it?" said Hammond.
+
+"All,--every mite," said the old grave-digger. "But my father knew, and
+would have been glad to tell you the whole story. There was a great
+deal of wisdom and knowledge, about graves especially, buried out yonder
+where my old father was put away, before the Stamp Act was thought of.
+But it is no great matter, I suppose. People don't care about old graves
+in these times. They just live, and put the dead out of sight and out of
+mind."
+
+"Well; but what have you done with the headstone?" said the Doctor. "You
+can't have eaten it up."
+
+"No, no, Doctor," said the grave-digger, laughing; "it would crack
+better teeth than mine, old and crumbly as it is. And yet I meant to do
+something with it that is akin to eating; for my oven needs a new floor,
+and I thought to take this stone, which would stand the fire well. But
+here," continued he, scraping away the snow with his shovel, a task in
+which little Ned gave his assistance,--"here is the headstone, just as I
+have always seen it, and as my father saw it before me."
+
+The ancient memorial, being cleared of snow, proved to be a slab of
+freestone, with some rude traces of carving in bas-relief around the
+border, now much effaced, and an impression, which seemed to be as much
+like a human foot as anything else, sunk into the slab; but this device
+was wrought in a much more clumsy way than the ornamented border, and
+evidently by an unskilful hand. Beneath was an inscription, over which
+the hard, flat lichens had grown, and done their best to obliterate it,
+although the following words might be written [Endnote: 2] or guessed:--
+
+"Here lyeth the mortal part of Thomas Colcord, an upright man, of
+tender and devout soul, who departed this troublous life September ye
+nineteenth, 1667, aged 57 years and nine months. Happier in his death
+than in his lifetime. Let his bones be."
+
+The name, Colcord, was somewhat defaced; it was impossible, in the
+general disintegration of the stone, to tell whether wantonly, or with
+a purpose of altering and correcting some error in the spelling, or, as
+occurred to Hammond, to change the name entirely.
+
+"This is very unsatisfactory," said Hammond, "but very curious, too. But
+this certainly is the impress of what was meant for a human foot, and
+coincides strangely with the legend of the Bloody Footstep,--the mark of
+the foot that trod in the blessed King Charles's blood."
+
+"For that matter," said the grave-digger, "it comes into my mind that my
+father used to call it the stamp of Satan's foot, because he claimed
+the dead man for his own. It is plain to see that there was a deep deft
+between two of the toes."
+
+"There are two ways of telling that legend," remarked the Doctor. "But
+did you find nothing in the grave, Hewen?"
+
+"O, yes,--a bone or two,--as much as could be expected after above a
+hundred years," said the grave-digger. "I tossed them aside; and if you
+are curious about them, you will find them when the snow melts. That was
+all; and it would have been unreasonable in old Colcord--especially in
+these republican times--to have wanted to keep his grave any longer,
+when there was so little of him left."
+
+"I must drop the matter here, then," said Hammond, with a sigh. "Here,
+my friend, is a trifle for your trouble."
+
+"No trouble," said the grave-digger, "and in these republican times we
+can't take anything for nothing, because it won't do for a poor man to
+take off his hat and say thank you."
+
+Nevertheless, he did take the silver, and winked a sort of
+acknowledgment.
+
+The Doctor, with unwonted hospitality, invited the English stranger to
+dine in his house; and though there was no pretence of cordiality in
+the invitation, Mr. Hammond accepted it, being probably influenced by
+curiosity to make out some definite idea of the strange household in
+which he found himself. Doctor Grimshawe having taken it upon him to
+be host,--for, up to this time, the stranger stood upon his own
+responsibility, and, having voluntarily presented himself to the Doctor,
+had only himself to thank for any scant courtesy he might meet,--but
+now the grim Doctor became genial after his own fashion. At dinner he
+produced a bottle of port, which made the young Englishman almost
+fancy himself on the other side of the water; and he entered into a
+conversation, which I fancy was the chief object which the grim Doctor
+had in view in showing himself in so amiable a light, [Endnote: 3] for
+in the course of it the stranger was insensibly led to disclose many
+things, as it were of his own accord, relating to the part of England
+whence he came, and especially to the estate and family which have been
+before mentioned,--the present state of that family, together with other
+things that he seemed to himself to pour out naturally,--for, at last,
+he drew himself up, and attempted an excuse.
+
+"Your good wine," said he, "or the unexpected accident of meeting a
+countryman, has made me unusually talkative, and on subjects, I fear,
+which have not a particular interest for you."
+
+"I have not quite succeeded in shaking off my country, as you see,"
+said Doctor Grimshawe, "though I neither expect nor wish ever to see it
+again."
+
+There was something rather ungracious in the grim Doctor's response, and
+as they now adjourned to his study, and the Doctor betook himself to
+his pipe and tumbler, the young Englishman sought to increase his
+acquaintance with the two children, both of whom showed themselves
+graciously inclined towards him; more warmly so than they had been to
+the schoolmaster, as he was the only other guest whom they had ever met.
+
+"Would you like to see England, my little fellow?" he inquired of Ned.
+
+"Oh, very much! more than anything else in the world," replied the boy,
+his eyes gleaming and his cheeks flushing with the earnestness of
+his response; for, indeed, the question stirred up all the dreams and
+reveries which the child had cherished, far back into the dim regions
+of his memory. After what the Doctor had told him of his origin, he had
+never felt any home feeling here; it seemed to him that he was wandering
+Ned, whom the wind had blown from afar. Somehow or other, from many
+circumstances which he put together and seethed in his own childish
+imagination, it seemed to him that he was to go back to that far old
+country, and there wander among the green, ivy-grown, venerable scenes;
+the older he grew, the more his mind took depth, the stronger was this
+fancy in him; though even to Elsie he had scarcely breathed it.
+
+"So strong a desire," said the stranger, smiling at his earnestness,
+"will be sure to work out its own accomplishment. I shall meet you in
+England, my young friend, one day or another. And you, my little girl,
+are you as anxious to see England as your brother?"
+
+"Ned is not my brother," said little Elsie.
+
+The Doctor here interposed some remark on a different subject; for it
+was observable that he never liked to have the conversation turn on
+these children, their parentage, or relations to each other or himself.
+
+The children were sent to bed; and the young Englishman, finding the
+conversation lag, and his host becoming gruffer and less communicative
+than he thought quite courteous, retired. But before he went, however,
+he could not refrain from making a remark on the gigantic spider, which
+was swinging like a pendulum above the Doctor's head.
+
+"What a singular pet!" said he; for the nervous part of him had latterly
+been getting uppermost, so that it disturbed him; in fact, the
+spider above and the grim man below equally disturbed him. "Are you a
+naturalist? Have you noted his habits?"
+
+"Yes," said the Doctor, "I have learned from his web how to weave a
+plot, and how to catch my victim and devour him!"
+
+"Thank God," said the Englishman, as he issued forth into the cold gray
+night, "I have escaped the grim fellow's web, at all events. How strange
+a group,--those two sweet children, that grim old man!"
+
+As regards this matter of the ancient grave, it remains to be recorded,
+that, when the snow melted, little Ned and Elsie went to look at the
+spot, where, by this time, there was a little hillock with the brown
+sods laid duly upon it, which the coming spring would make green. By
+the side of it they saw, with more curiosity than repugnance, a few
+fragments of crumbly bones, which they plausibly conjectured to have
+appertained to some part of the framework of the ancient Colcord,
+wherewith he had walked through the troublous life of which his
+gravestone spoke. And little Elsie, whose eyes were very sharp, and her
+observant qualities of the quickest, found something which Ned at first
+pronounced to be only a bit of old iron, incrusted with earth; but Elsie
+persisted to knock off some of the earth that seemed to have incrusted
+it, and discovered a key. The children ran with their prize to the grim
+Doctor, who took it between his thumb and finger, turned it over and
+over, and then proceeded to rub it with a chemical substance which soon
+made it bright. It proved to be a silver key, of antique and curious
+workmanship.
+
+"Perhaps this is what Mr. Hammond was in search of," said Ned. "What a
+pity he is gone! Perhaps we can send it after him."
+
+"Nonsense," said the gruff Doctor.
+
+And attaching the key to a chain, which he took from a drawer, and which
+seemed to be gold, he hung it round Ned's neck.
+
+"When you find a lock for this key," said he, "open it, and consider
+yourself heir of whatever treasure is revealed there!"
+
+Ned continued that sad, fatal habit of growing out of childhood, as boys
+will, until he was now about ten years old, and little Elsie as much as
+six or seven. He looked healthy, but pale; something there was in the
+character and influences of his life that made him look as if he were
+growing up in a shadow, with less sunshine than he needed for a robust
+and exuberant development, though enough to make his intellectual growth
+tend towards a little luxuriance, in some directions. He was likely to
+turn out a fanciful, perhaps a poetic youth; young as he was, there had
+been already discoveries, on the grim Doctor's part, of certain blotted
+and clumsily scrawled scraps of paper, the chirography on which was
+arrayed in marshalled lines of unequal length, and each commanded by a
+capital letter and marching on from six to ten lame feet. Doctor Grim
+inspected these things curiously, and to say the truth most scornfully,
+before he took them to light his pipe withal; but they told him little
+as regarded this boy's internal state, being mere echoes, and very
+lugubrious ones, of poetic strains that were floating about in the
+atmosphere of that day, long before any now remembered bard had begun
+to sing. But there were the rudiments of a poetic and imaginative mind
+within the boy, if its subsequent culture should be such as the growth
+of that delicate flower requires; a brooding habit taking outward things
+into itself and imbuing them with its own essence until, after they had
+lain there awhile, they assumed a relation both to truth and to himself,
+and became mediums to affect other minds with the magnetism of his own.
+He lived far too much an inward life for healthfulness, at his age; the
+peculiarity of his situation, a child of mystery, with certain reaches
+and vistas that seemed to promise a bright solution of his mystery,
+keeping his imagination always awake and strong. That castle in the
+air,--so much more vivid than other castles, because it had perhaps
+a real substance of ancient, ivy-grown, hewn stone somewhere,--that
+visionary hall in England, with its surrounding woods and fine lawns,
+and the beckoning shadows at the ancient windows, and that fearful
+threshold, with the blood still glistening on it,--he dwelt and wandered
+so much there, that he had no real life in the sombre house on the
+corner of the graveyard; except that the loneliness of the latter, and
+the grim Doctor with his grotesque surroundings, and then the great ugly
+spider, and that odd, inhuman mixture of crusty Hannah, all served to
+remove him out of the influences of common life. Little Elsie was all
+that he had to keep life real, and substantial; and she, a child so much
+younger than he, was influenced by the same circumstances, and still
+more by himself, so that, as far as he could impart himself to her,
+he led her hand in hand through the same dream-scenery amid which he
+strayed himself. They knew not another child in town; the grim Doctor
+was their only friend. As for Ned, this seclusion had its customary and
+normal effect upon him; it had made him think ridiculously high of his
+own gifts, powers, attainments, and at the same time doubt whether they
+would pass with those of others; it made him despise all flesh, as if he
+were of a superior race, and yet have an idle and weak fear of coming in
+contact with them, from a dread of his incompetency to cope with them;
+so he at once depreciated and exalted, to an absurd degree, both himself
+and others.
+
+"Ned," said the Doctor to him one day, in his gruffest tone, "you are
+not turning out to be the boy I looked for and meant to make. I have
+given you sturdy English instruction, and solidly grounded you in
+matters that the poor superficial people and time merely skim over; I
+looked to see the rudiments of a man in you, by this time; and you begin
+to mope and pule as if your babyhood were coming back on you. You seem
+to think more than a boy of your years should; and yet it is not manly
+thought, nor ever will be so. What do you mean, boy, by making all my
+care of you come to nothing, in this way?"
+
+"I do my best, Doctor Grim," said Ned, with sullen dignity. "What you
+teach me, I learn. What more can I do?"
+
+"I'll tell you what, my fine fellow," quoth Doctor Grim, getting rude,
+as was his habit. "You disappoint me, and I'll not bear it. I want you
+to be a man; and I'll have you a man or nothing. If I had foreboded such
+a fellow as you turn out to be, I never would have taken you from the
+place where, as I once told you, I found you,--the almshouse!"
+
+"O, Doctor Grim, Doctor Grim!" cried little Elsie, in a tone of grief
+and bitter reproach.
+
+Ned had risen slowly, as the Doctor uttered those last words, turning
+as white as a sheet, and stood gazing at him, with large eyes, in which
+there was a calm upbraiding; a strange dignity was in his childish
+aspect, which was no longer childish, but seemed to have grown older all
+in a moment.
+
+"Sir," added the Doctor, incensed at the boy's aspect, "there is
+nonsense that ought to be whipt out of you."
+
+"You have said enough, sir," said the boy. "Would to God you had left
+me where you found me![Endnote: 4] It was not my fault that you took me
+from the alms-house. But it will be my fault if I ever eat another bit
+of your bread, or stay under your roof an hour longer."
+
+He was moving towards the door, but little Elsie sprung upon him and
+caught him round the neck, although he repelled her with severe dignity;
+and Doctor Grimshawe, after a look at the group in which a bitter sort
+of mirth and mischief struggled with a better and kindlier sentiment, at
+last flung his pipe into the chimney, hastily quaffed the remnant of
+a tumbler, and shuffled after Ned, kicking off his old slippers in his
+hurry. He caught the boy just by the door.
+
+"Ned, Ned, my boy, I'm sorry for what I said," cried he. "I am a
+guzzling old blockhead, and don't know how to treat a gentleman when he
+honors me with his company. It is not in my blood nor breeding to
+have such knowledge. Ned, you will make a man, and I lied if I said
+otherwise. Come, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
+
+The boy was easily touched, at these years, as a boy ought to be;
+and though he had not yet forgiven the grim Doctor, the tears, to his
+especial shame, gushed out of his eyes in a torrent, and his whole frame
+shook with sobs. The Doctor caught him in his arms, and hugged him to
+his old tobacco-fragrant dressing-gown, hugged him like a bear, as he
+was; so that poor Ned hardly knew whether he was embracing him with his
+love, or squeezing him to death in his wrath.
+
+"Ned," said he, "I'm not going to live a great while longer; I seem an
+eternal nuisance to you, I know; but it's not so, I'm mortal and I feel
+myself breaking up. Let us be friends while I live; for believe me, Ned,
+I've done as well by you as I knew, and care for nothing, love nothing,
+so much as you. Little Elsie here, yes. I love her too. But that's
+different. You are a boy, and will be a man; and a man whom I destine to
+do for me what it has been the object of my life to achieve. Let us
+be friends. We will--we must be friends; and when old Doctor Grim,
+worthless wretch that he is, sleeps in his grave, you shall not have the
+pang of having parted from him in unkindness. Forgive me, Ned; and not
+only that, but love me better than ever; for though I am a hasty old
+wretch, I am not altogether evil as regards you."
+
+I know not whether the Doctor would have said all this, if the day had
+not been pretty well advanced, and if his potations had not been many;
+but, at any rate, he spoke no more than he felt, and his emotions
+thrilled through the sensitive system of the boy, and quite melted him
+down. He forgave Doctor Grim, and, as he asked, loved him better than
+ever; and so did Elsie. Then it was so sweet, so good, to have had this
+one outgush of affection,--he, poor child, who had no memory of mother's
+kisses, or of being cared for out of tenderness, and whose heart had
+been hungry, all his life, for some such thing; and probably Doctor
+Grim, in his way, had the same kind of enjoyment of this passionate
+crisis; so that though, the next day, they all three looked at one
+another a little ashamed, yet it had some remote analogy to that
+delicious embarrassment of two lovers, at their first meeting after they
+know all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+It is very remarkable that Ned had so much good in him as we find there;
+in the first place, born as he seemed to be of a wild, vagrant stock, a
+seedling sown by the breezes, and falling among the rocks and sands; the
+growing up without a mother to cultivate his tenderness with kisses
+and the inestimable, inevitable love of love breaking out on all little
+occasions, without reference to merit or demerit, unfailing whether or
+no; mother's faith in excellences, the buds which were yet invisible
+to all other eyes, but to which her warm faith was the genial sunshine
+necessary to their growth; mother's generous interpretation of all that
+was doubtful in him, and which might turn out good or bad, according
+as should be believed of it; mother's pride in whatever the boy
+accomplished, and unfailing excuses, explanations, apologies, so
+satisfactory, for all his failures; mother's deep intuitive insight,
+which should see the permanent good beneath all the appearance of
+temporary evil, being wiser through her love than the wisest sage could
+be,--the dullest, homeliest mother than the wisest sage. The Creator,
+apparently, has set a little of his own infinite wisdom and love (which
+are one) in a mother's heart, so that no child, in the common course of
+things, should grow up without some heavenly instruction. Instead of
+all this, and the vast deal more that mothers do for children, there had
+been only the gruff, passionate Doctor, without sense of religion,
+with only a fitful tenderness, with years' length between the fits, so
+fiercely critical, so wholly unradiant of hope, misanthropic, savagely
+morbid. Yes; there was little Elsie too; it must have been that she was
+the boy's preserver, being childhood, sisterhood, womanhood, all that
+there had been for him of human life, and enough--he being naturally of
+such good stuff--to keep him good. He had lost much, but not all: he
+was not nearly what he might have been under better auspices; flaws and
+imperfections there were, in abundance, great uncultivated wastes and
+wildernesses in his moral nature, tangled wilds where there might have
+been stately, venerable religious groves; but there was no rank growth
+of evil. That unknown mother, that had no opportunity to nurse her boy,
+must have had gentle and noblest qualities to endow him with; a noble
+father, too, a long, unstained descent, one would have thought. Was this
+an almshouse child?
+
+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.
+
+What is the furniture? An antique chair,--one chair, no more. A table,
+many-footed, of dark wood; it holds writing-materials, a book, too, on
+its face, with the dust gathered on its back. There is, moreover, a sort
+of antique box, or coffer, of some dark wood, that seems to have been
+wrought or carved with skill, wondrous skill, of some period when the
+art of carving wainscot with arms and devices was much practised;
+so that on this coffer--some six feet long it is, and two or three
+broad--most richly wrought, you see faces in relief of knight and dame,
+lords, heraldic animals; some story, very likely, told, almost revelling
+in Gothic sculpture of wood, like what we have seen on the marble
+sarcophagus of the old Greeks. It has, too, a lock, elaborately
+ornamented and inlaid with silver.
+
+What else; only the spider's webs spinning strangely over everything;
+over that light which comes into the room through the stone; over
+everything. And now we see, in a corner, a strange great spider
+curiously variegated. The ugly, terrible, seemingly poisonous thing
+makes us shudder. [Endnote: 3.]
+
+What, else? There are pistols; they lie on the coffer! There is a
+curiously shaped Italian dagger, of the kind which in a groove has
+poison that makes its wound mortal. On the old mantel-piece, over the
+fireplace, there is a vial in which are kept certain poisons. It would
+seem as if some one had meditated suicide; or else that the foul fiend
+had put all sorts of implements of self-destruction in his way; so that,
+in some frenzied moment, he might kill himself.
+
+But the inmate! There he is; but the frenzied alarm in which we last saw
+him seems to have changed its character. No throb, now; no passion; no
+frenzy of fear or despair. He sits dull and motionless. See; his cheek
+is very pale; his hair long and dishevelled. His beard has grown, and
+curls round his face. He has on a sleeping-gown, a long robe as of one
+who abides within doors, and has nothing to do with outward elements;
+a pair of slippers. A dull, dreamy reverie seems to have possessed him.
+Hark! there is again a stealthy step on the floor, and the serving-man
+is here again. There is a peering, anxious curiosity in his face, as he
+struts towards him, a sort of enjoyment, one would say, in the way in
+which he looks at the strange case.
+
+"I am here, you know," he says, at length, after feasting his eyes for
+some time on the spectacle.
+
+"I hear you!" says the young man, in a dull, indifferent tone.
+
+"Will not your honor walk out to-day?" says the man. "It is long now
+since your honor has taken the air."
+
+"Very long," says the master, "but I will not go out to-day. What
+weather is it?"
+
+"Sunny, bright, a summer day," says the man. "But you would never know
+it in these damp walls. The last winter's chill is here yet. Had not
+your honor better go forth?"
+
+It might seem that there was a sort of sneer, deeply hidden under
+respect and obeisance, in the man's words and craftily respectful tone;
+deeply hidden, but conveying a more subtile power on that account.
+At all events, the master seemed aroused from his state of dull
+indifference, and writhed as with poignant anguish--an infused poison in
+his veins--as the man spoke.
+
+"Have you procured me that new drug I spoke of?" asked the master.
+
+"Here it is," said the man, putting a small package on the table.
+
+"Is it effectual?"
+
+"So said the apothecary," answered the man; "and I tried it on a dog. He
+sat quietly a quarter of an hour; then had a spasm or two, and was dead.
+But, your honor, the dead carcass swelled horribly."
+
+"Hush, villain! Have there--have there been inquiries for me,--mention
+of me?"
+
+"O, none, sir,--none, sir. Affairs go on bravely,--the new live. The
+world fills up. The gap is not vacant. There is no mention of you.
+Marry, at the alehouse I heard some idle topers talking of a murder
+that took place some few years since, and saying that Heaven's vengeance
+would come for it yet."
+
+"Silence, villain, there is no such thing," said the young man; and,
+with a laugh that seemed like scorn, he relapsed into his state of
+sullen indifference; during which the servant stole away, after looking
+at him some time, as if to take all possible note of his aspect. The man
+did not seem so much to enjoy it himself, as he did to do these things
+in a kind of formal and matter-of-course way, as if he were performing a
+set duty; as if he were a subordinate fiend, and were doing the duty
+of a superior one, without any individual malice of his own, though a
+general satisfaction in doing what would accrue to the agglomeration of
+deadly mischief. He stole away, and the master was left to himself.
+
+By and by, by what impulse or cause it is impossible to say, he started
+upon his feet in a sudden frenzy of rage and despair. It seemed as if a
+consciousness of some strange, wild miserable fate that had befallen him
+had come upon him all at once; how that he was a prisoner to a devilish
+influence, to some wizard might, that bound him hand and foot with
+spider's web. So he stamped; so he half shrieked, yet stopped himself in
+the midst, so that his cry was stifled and smothered. Then he snatched
+up the poisoned dagger and looked at it; the noose, and put it about his
+neck,--evil instrument of death,--but laid it down again. And then was
+a voice at the door: "Quietly, quietly you know, or they will hear you."
+And at that voice he sank into sullen indifference again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+A traveller with a knapsack on his shoulders comes out of the duskiness
+of vague, unchronicled times, throwing his shadow before him in the
+morning sunshine along a well-trodden, though solitary path.
+
+It was early summer, or perhaps latter spring, and the most genial
+weather that either spring or summer ever brought, possessing a
+character, indeed, as if both seasons had done their utmost to create an
+atmosphere and temperature most suitable for the enjoyment and exercise
+of life. To one accustomed to a climate where there is seldom a medium
+between heat too fierce and cold too deadly, it was a new development
+in the nature of weather. So genial it was, so full of all comfortable
+influences, and yet, somehow or other, void of the torrid characteristic
+that inevitably burns in our full sun-bursts. The traveller thought, in
+fact, that the sun was at less than his brightest glow; for though it
+was bright,--though the day seemed cloudless,--though it appeared to be
+the clear, transparent morning that precedes an unshadowed noon,--still
+there was a mild and softened character, not so perceptible when he
+directly sought to see it, but as if some veil were interposed between
+the earth and sun, absorbing all the passionate qualities out of the
+latter, and leaving only the kindly ones. Warmth was in abundance,
+and, yet, all through it, and strangely akin to it, there was a
+half-suspected coolness that gave the atmosphere its most thrilling
+and delicious charm. It was good for human life, as the traveller, felt
+throughout all his being; good, likewise, for vegetable life, as was
+seen in the depth and richness of verdure over the gently undulating
+landscape, and the luxuriance of foliage, wherever there was tree or
+shrub to put forth leaves.
+
+The path along which the traveller was passing deserved at least a word
+or two of description: it was a well-trodden footpath, running just here
+along the edge of a field of grass, and bordered on one side by a hedge
+which contained materials within itself for varied and minute researches
+in natural history; so richly luxuriant was it with its diverse
+vegetable life, such a green intricacy did it form, so impenetrable and
+so beautiful, and such a Paradise it was for the birds that built
+their nests there in a labyrinth of little boughs and twigs, unseen and
+inaccessible, while close beside the human race to which they attach
+themselves, that they must have felt themselves as safe as when they
+sung to Eve. Homely flowers likewise grew in it, and many creeping and
+twining plants, that were an original part of the hedge, had come of
+their own accord and dwelt here, beautifying and enriching the verdant
+fence by way of repayment for the shelter and support which it afforded
+them. At intervals, trees of vast trunk and mighty spread of foliage,
+whether elms or oaks, grew in the line of the hedge, and the bark of
+those gigantic, age-long patriarchs was not gray and naked, like the
+trees which the traveller had been accustomed to see, but verdant with
+moss, or in many cases richly enwreathed with a network of creeping
+plants, and oftenest the ivy of old growth, clambering upward, and
+making its own twisted stem almost of one substance with the supporting
+tree. On one venerable oak there was a plant of mystic leaf, which the
+traveller knew by instinct, and plucked a bough of it with a certain
+reverence for the sake of the Druids and Christmas kisses and of the
+pasty in which it was rooted from of old.
+
+The path in which he walked, rustic as it was and made merely by the
+feet that pressed it down, was one of the ancientest of ways; older than
+the oak that bore the mistletoe, older than the villages between which
+it passed, older perhaps than the common road which the traveller
+had crossed that morning; old as the times when people first debarred
+themselves from wandering freely and widely wherever a vagrant
+impulse led them. The footpath, therefore, still retains some of the
+characteristics of a woodland walk, taken at random, by a lover of
+nature not pressed for time nor restrained by artificial barriers; it
+sweeps and lingers along, and finds pretty little dells and nooks of
+delightful scenery, and picturesque glimpses of halls or cottages, in
+the same neighborhood where a highroad would disclose only a tiresome
+blank. They run into one another for miles and miles together, and
+traverse rigidly guarded parks and domains, not as a matter of favor,
+but as a right; so that the poorest man thus retains a kind of property
+and privilege in the oldest inheritance of the richest. The highroad
+sees only the outside; the footpath leads down into the heart of the
+country.
+
+A pleasant feature of the footpath was the stile, between two fields;
+no frail and temporary structure, but betokening the permanence of this
+rustic way; the ancient solidity of the stone steps, worn into cavities
+by the hobnailed shoes that had pressed upon them: here not only the
+climbing foot had passed for ages, but here had sat the maiden with her
+milk-pail, the rustic on his way afield or homeward; here had been
+lover meetings, cheerful chance chats, song as natural as bird note, a
+thousand pretty scenes of rustic manners.
+
+It was curious to see the traveller pause, to contemplate so simple a
+thing as this old stile of a few stone steps; antique as an old castle;
+simple and rustic as the gap in a rail fence; and while he sat on one
+of the steps, making himself pleasantly sensible of his whereabout, like
+one who should handle a dream and find it tangible and real, he heard a
+sound that bewitched him with still another dreamy delight. A bird rose
+out of the grassy field, and, still soaring aloft, made a cheery melody
+that was like a spire of audible flame,--rapturous music, as if the
+whole soul and substance of the winged creature had been distilled into
+this melody, as it vanished skyward.
+
+"The lark! the lark!" exclaimed the traveller, recognizing the note
+(though never heard before) as if his childhood had known it.
+
+A moment afterwards another bird was heard in the shadow of a
+neighboring wood, or some other inscrutable hiding-place, singing
+softly in a flute-like note, as if blown through an instrument of
+wood,--"Cuckoo! Cuckoo!"--only twice, and then a stillness.
+
+"How familiar these rustic sounds!" he exclaimed. "Surely I was born
+here!"
+
+The person who thus enjoyed these sounds, as if they were at once
+familiar and strange, was a young man, tall and rather slenderly built,
+and though we have called him young, there were the traces of thought,
+struggle, and even of experience in his marked brow and somewhat pale
+face; but the spirit within him was evidently still that of a youth,
+lithe and active, gazing out of his dark eyes and taking note of things
+about him, with an eager, centring interest, that seemed to be unusually
+awake at the present moment.
+
+It could be but a few years since he first called himself a man; but
+they must have been thickly studded with events, turbulent with action,
+spent amidst circumstances that called for resources of energy not often
+so early developed; and thus his youth might have been kept in abeyance
+until now, when in this simple rural scene he grew almost a boy again.
+As for his station in life, his coarse gray suit and the knapsack on
+his shoulders did not indicate a very high one; yet it was such as a
+gentleman might wear of a morning, or on a pedestrian ramble, and was
+worn in a way that made it seem of a better fashion than it really was,
+as it enabled him to find a rare enjoyment, as we have seen, in by-path,
+hedge-row, rustic stile, lark, and cuckoo, and even the familiar grass
+and clover blossom. It was as if he had long been shut in a sick-chamber
+or a prison; or, at least, within the iron cage of busy life, that had
+given him but few glimpses of natural things through its bars; or else
+this was another kind of nature than he had heretofore known.
+
+As he walked along (through a kind of dream, though he seemed so
+sensibly observant of trifling things around him,) he failed to notice
+that the path grew somewhat less distinctly marked, more infringed upon
+by grass, more shut in by shrubbery; he had deviated into a side track,
+and, in fact, a certain printed board nailed against a tree had
+escaped his notice, warning off intruders with inhospitable threats of
+prosecution. He began to suspect that he must have gone astray when
+the path led over plashy ground with a still fainter trail of preceding
+footsteps, and plunged into shrubbery, and seemed on the point of
+deserting him altogether, after having beguiled him thus far. The spot
+was an entanglement of boughs, and yet did not give one the impression
+of wildness; for it was the stranger's idea that everything in this long
+cultivated region had been touched and influenced by man's care, every
+oak, every bush, every sod,--that man knew them all, and that they knew
+him, and by that mutual knowledge had become far other than they were in
+the first freedom of growth, such as may be found in an American forest.
+Nay, the wildest denizens of this sylvan neighborhood were removed in
+the same degree from their primeval character; for hares sat on their
+hind legs to gaze at the approaching traveller, and hardly thought it
+worth their while to leap away among some ferns, as he drew near;
+two pheasants looked at him from a bough, a little inward among the
+shrubbery; and, to complete the wonder, he became aware of the antlers
+and brown muzzle of a deer protruding among the boughs, and though
+immediately there ensued a great rush and rustling of the herd, it
+seemed evidently to come from a certain lingering shyness, an instinct
+that had lost its purpose and object, and only mimicked a dread of man,
+whose neighborhood and familiarity had tamed the wild deer almost into a
+domestic creature. Remembering his experience of true woodland life,
+the traveller fancied that it might be possible to want freer air, less
+often used for human breath, than was to be found anywhere among these
+woods.
+
+But then the sweet, calm sense of safety that was here: the certainty
+that with the wild element that centuries ago had passed out of this
+scene had gone all the perils of wild men and savage beasts, dwarfs,
+witches, leaving nature, not effete, but only disarmed of those rougher,
+deadlier characteristics, that cruel rawness, which make primeval
+Nature the deadly enemy even of her own children. Here was consolation,
+doubtless; so we sit down on the stone step of the last stile that
+he had crossed, and listen to the footsteps of the traveller, and the
+distant rustle among the shrubbery, as he goes deeper and deeper into
+the seclusion, having by this time lost the deceitful track. No matter
+if he go astray; even were it after nightfall instead of noontime, a
+will-o'-the-wisp, or Puck himself, would not lead him into worse harm
+than to delude him into some mossy pool, the depths of which the truant
+schoolboys had known for ages. Nevertheless, some little time after
+his disappearance, there was the report of a shot that echoed sharp and
+loud, startling the pheasants from their boughs, and sending the hares
+and deer a-scampering in good earnest.
+
+We next find our friend, from whom we parted on the footpath, in a
+situation of which he then was but very imperfectly aware; for, indeed,
+he had been in a state of unconsciousness, lasting until it was now
+late towards the sunset of that same day. He was endeavoring to make out
+where he was, and how he came thither, or what had happened; or whether,
+indeed, anything had happened, unless to have fallen asleep, and to
+be still enveloped in the fragments of some vivid and almost tangible
+dream, the more confused because so vivid. His wits did not come so
+readily about him as usual; there may have been a slight delusion,
+which mingled itself with his sober perceptions, and by its leaven
+of extravagance made the whole substance of the scene untrue. Thus it
+happened that, as it were at the same instant, he fancied himself years
+back in life, thousands of miles away, in a gloomy cobwebbed room,
+looking out upon a graveyard, while yet, neither more nor less
+distinctly, he was conscious of being in a small chamber, panelled with
+oak, and furnished in an antique style. He was doubtful, too, whether or
+no there was a grim feudal figure, in a shabby dressing-gown and an
+old velvet cap, sitting in the dusk of the room, smoking a pipe that
+diffused a scent of tobacco,--quaffing a deep-hued liquor out of a
+tumbler,--looking upwards at a spider that hung above. "Was there, too,
+a child sitting in a little chair at his footstool?" In his earnestness
+to see this apparition more distinctly, he opened his eyes wider and
+stirred, and ceased to see it at all.
+
+But though that other dusty, squalid, cobwebbed scene quite vanished,
+and along with it the two figures, old and young, grim and childish, of
+whose portraits it had been the framework, still there were features
+in the old, oaken-panelled chamber that seemed to belong rather to his
+dream. The panels were ornamented, here and there, with antique carving,
+representing over and over again an identical device, being a bare arm,
+holding the torn-off head of some savage beast, which the stranger could
+not know by species, any more than Agassiz himself could have assigned
+its type or kindred; because it was that kind of natural history of
+which heraldry alone keeps the menagerie. But it was just as familiar
+to his recollection as that of the cat which he had fondled in his
+childhood.
+
+There was likewise a mantelpiece, heavily wrought of oak, quite
+black with smoke and age, in the centre of which, more prominent than
+elsewhere, was that same leopard's head that seemed to thrust itself
+everywhere into sight, as if typifying some great mystery which human
+nature would never be at rest till it had solved; and below, in a
+cavernous hollow, there was a smouldering fire of coals; for the genial
+day had suddenly grown chill, and a shower of rain spattered against
+the small window-panes, almost at the same time with the struggling
+sunshine. And over the mantelpiece, where the light of the declining
+day came strongest from the window, there was a larger and more highly
+relieved carving of this same device, and underneath it a legend, in Old
+English letters, which, though his eyes could not precisely trace it at
+that distance, he knew to be this:--
+
+                      "Hold hard the Head."
+
+Otherwise the aspect of the room bewildered him by not being known,
+since these details were so familiar; a narrow precinct it was, with
+one window full of old-fashioned, diamond-shaped panes of glass, a small
+desk table, standing on clawed feet; two or three high-backed chairs,
+on the top of each of which was carved that same crest of the fabulous
+brute's head, which the carver's fancy seemed to have clutched so
+strongly that he could not let it go; in another part of the room a very
+old engraving, rude and strong, representing some ruffled personage,
+which the stranger only tried to make out with a sort of idle curiosity,
+because it was strange he should dream so distinctly.
+
+Very soon it became intolerably irritating that these two dreams, both
+purposeless, should have mingled and entangled themselves in his mind.
+He made a nervous and petulant motion, intending to rouse himself fully;
+and immediately a sharp pang of physical pain took him by surprise, and
+made him groan aloud.
+
+Immediately there was an almost noiseless step on the floor; and a
+figure emerged from a deep niche, that looked as if it might once have
+been an oratory, in ancient times; and the figure, too, might have been
+supposed to possess the devout and sanctified character of such as knelt
+in the oratories of ancient times. It was an elderly man, tall, thin,
+and pale, and wearing a long, dark tunic, and in a peculiar fashion,
+which--like almost everything else about him--the stranger seemed to
+have a confused remembrance of; this venerable person had a benign
+and pitiful aspect, and approached the bedside with such good will and
+evident desire to do the sufferer good, that the latter felt soothed,
+at least, by his very presence. He lay, a moment, gazing up at the
+old man's face, without being able to exert himself to say a word, but
+sensible, as it were, of a mild, soft influence from him, cooling the
+fever which seemed to burn in his veins.
+
+"Do you suffer much pain?" asked the old man, gently.
+
+"None at all," said the stranger; but again a slight motion caused him
+to feel a burning twinge in his shoulder. "Yes; there was a throb of
+strange anguish. Why should I feel pain? Where am I?"
+
+"In safety, and with those who desire to be your friends," said the old
+man. "You have met with an accident; but do not inquire about it now.
+Quiet is what you need."
+
+Still the traveller gazed at him; and the old man's figure seemed to
+enter into his dream, or delirium, whichever it might be, as if his
+peaceful presence were but a shadow, so quaint was his address, so
+unlike real life, in that dark robe, with a velvet skullcap on his head,
+beneath which his hair made a silvery border; and looking more closely,
+the stranger saw embroidered on the breast of the tunic that same
+device, the arm and the leopard's head, which was visible in the carving
+of the room. Yes; this must still be a dream, which, under the unknown
+laws which govern such psychical states, had brought out thus vividly
+figures, devices, words, forgotten since his boyish days. Though of an
+imaginative tendency, the stranger was nevertheless strongly tenacious
+of the actual, and had a natural horror at the idea of being seriously
+at odds, in beliefs, perceptions, conclusions, with the real world about
+him; so that a tremor ran through him, as if he felt the substance of
+the world shimmering before his eyes like a mere vaporous consistency.
+
+"Are you real?" said he to the antique presence; "or a spirit? or a
+fantasy?"
+
+The old man laid his thin, cool palm on the stranger's burning forehead,
+and smiled benignantly, keeping it there an instant.
+
+"If flesh and blood are real, I am so," said he; "a spirit, too, I may
+claim to be, made thin by fantasy. Again, do not perplex yourself with
+such things. To-morrow you may find denser substance in me. Drink this
+composing draught, and close your eyes to those things that disturb
+you."
+
+"Your features, too, and your voice," said the stranger, in a resigned
+tone, as if he were giving up a riddle, the solution of which he could
+not find, "have an image and echo somewhere in my memory. It is all an
+entanglement. I will drink, and shut my eyes."
+
+He drank from a little old-fashioned silver cup, which his venerable
+guardian presented to his lips; but in so doing he was still perplexed
+and tremulously disturbed with seeing that same weary old device, the
+leopard's head, engraved on the side; and shut his eyes to escape it,
+for it irritated a certain portion of his brain with vague, fanciful,
+elusive ideas. So he sighed and spoke no more. The medicine, whatever
+it might be, had the merit, rare in doctor's stuff, of being pleasant
+to take, assuasive of thirst, and imbued with a hardly perceptible
+fragrance, that was so ethereal that it also seemed to enter into his
+dream and modify it. He kept his eyes closed, and fell into a misty
+state, in which he wondered whether this could be the panacea or
+medicament which old Doctor Grimshawe used to distil from cobwebs, and
+of which the fragrance seemed to breathe through all the waste of years
+since then. He wondered, too, who was this benign, saint-like old man,
+and where, in what former state of being, he could have known him; to
+have him thus, as no strange thing, and yet so strange, be attending at
+his bedside, with all this ancient garniture. But it was best to dismiss
+all things, he being so weak; to resign himself; all this had happened
+before, and had passed away, prosperously or unprosperously; it would
+pass away in this case, likewise; and in the morning whatever might be
+delusive would have disappeared.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+The patient [Endnote: 1] had a favorable night, and awoke with a much
+clearer head, though still considerably feverish and in a state of great
+exhaustion from loss of blood, which kept down the fever. The events
+of the preceding day shimmered as it were and shifted illusively in his
+recollection; nor could he yet account for the situation in which he
+found himself, the antique chamber, the old man of mediaeval garb, nor
+even for the wound which seemed to have been the occasion of bringing
+him thither. One moment, so far as he remembered, he had been straying
+along a solitary footpath, through rich shrubbery, with the antlered
+deer peeping at him, listening to the lark and the cuckoo; the next, he
+lay helpless in this oak-panelled chamber, surrounded with objects that
+appealed to some fantastic shadow of recollection, which could have had
+no reality. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+To say the truth, the traveller perhaps wilfully kept hold of this
+strange illusiveness, and kept his thoughts from too harshly analyzing
+his situation, and solving the riddle in which he found himself
+involved. In his present weakness, his mind sympathizing with the
+sinking down of his physical powers, it was delightful to let all go;
+to relinquish all control, and let himself drift vaguely into whatever
+region of improbabilities there exists apart from the dull, common plane
+of life. Weak, stricken down, given over to influences which had taken
+possession of him during an interval of insensibility, he was no longer
+responsible; let these delusions, if they were such, linger as long as
+they would, and depart of their own accord at last. He, meanwhile, would
+willingly accept the idea that some spell had transported him out of an
+epoch in which he had led a brief, troubled existence of battle, mental
+strife, success, failure, all equally feverish and unsatisfactory, into
+some past century, where the business was to rest,--to drag on dreamy
+days, looking at things through half-shut eyes; into a limbo where
+things were put away, shows of what had once been, now somehow fainted,
+and still maintaining a sort of half-existence, a serious mockery; a
+state likely enough to exist just a little apart from the actual world,
+if we only know how to find our way into it. Scenes and events that had
+once stained themselves, in deep colors, on the curtain that Time hangs
+around us, to shut us in from eternity, cannot be quite effaced by the
+succeeding phantasmagoria, and sometimes, by a palimpsest, show more
+strongly than they. [Endnote: 3.]
+
+In the course of the morning, however, he was a little too feelingly
+made sensible of realities by the visit of a surgeon, who proceeded
+to examine the wound in his shoulder, removing the bandages which he
+himself seemed to have put upon this mysterious hurt. The traveller
+closed his eyes, and submitted to the manipulations of the professional
+person, painful as they were, assisted by the gentle touch of the old
+palmer; and there was something in the way in which he resigned himself
+that met the approbation of the surgeon, in spite of a little fever, and
+slight delirium too, to judge by his eye.
+
+"A very quiet and well-behaved patient," said he to the palmer. "Unless
+I greatly mistake, he has been under the surgeon's hand for a similar
+hurt ere now. He has learned under good discipline how to take such a
+thing easily. Yes, yes; just here is a mark where a bullet went in some
+time ago,--three or four years since, when he could have been little
+more than a boy. A wild fellow this, I doubt."
+
+"It was an Indian bullet," said the patient, still fancying himself gone
+astray into the past, "shot at me in battle; 'twas three hundred years
+hereafter."
+
+"Ah! he has served in the East Indies," said the surgeon. "I thought
+this sun-burned cheek had taken its hue elsewhere than in England."
+
+The patient did not care to take the trouble which would have been
+involved in correcting the surgeon's surmise; so he let it pass, and
+patiently awaited the end of the examination, with only a moan or
+two, which seemed rather pleasing and desirable than otherwise to the
+surgeon's ear.
+
+"He has vitality enough for his needs," said he, nodding to the palmer.
+"These groans betoken a good degree of pain; though the young fellow is
+evidently a self-contained sort of nature, and does not let us know
+all he feels. It promises well, however; keep him in bed and quiet, and
+within a day or two we shall see."
+
+He wrote a recipe, or two or three, perhaps, (for in those days the
+medical fraternity had faith in their own art,) and took his leave.
+
+The white-bearded palmer withdrew into the half concealment of the
+oratory which we have already mentioned, and then, putting on a pair of
+spectacles, betook himself to the perusal of an old folio volume, the
+leaves of which he turned over so gently that not the slightest sound
+could possibly disturb the patient. All his manifestations were gentle
+and soft, but of a simplicity most unlike the feline softness which we
+are apt to associate with a noiseless tread and movement in the male
+sex. The sunshine came through the ivy and glimmered upon his great
+book, however, with an effect which a little disturbed the patient's
+nerves; besides, he desired to have a fuller view of his benign
+guardian.
+
+"Will you sit nearer the bedside?" said he. "I wish to look at you."
+
+Weakness, the relaxation of nerves, and the state of dependence on
+another's care--very long unfelt--had made him betray what we must call
+childishness; and it was perceptible in the low half-complaining tone in
+which he spoke, indicating a consciousness of kindness in the other, a
+little plaintiveness in himself; of which, the next instant, weak
+and wandering as he was, he was ashamed, and essayed to express it.
+[Endnote: 4.]
+
+"You must deem me very poor-spirited," said he, "not to bear this
+trifling hurt with a firmer mind. But perhaps it is not entirely that I
+am so weak, but I feel you to be so benign."
+
+"Be weak, and be the stronger for it," said the old man, with a grave
+smile. "It is not in the pride of our strength that we are best or
+wisest. To be made anew, we even must be again a little child, and
+consent to be enwrapt quietly in the arms of Providence, as a child in
+its mother's arms."
+
+"I never knew a mother's care," replied the traveller, in a low,
+regretful tone, being weak to the incoming of all soft feelings, in his
+present state. "Since my boyhood, I have lived among men,--a life of
+struggle and hard rivalry. It is good to find myself here in the long
+past, and in a sheltered harbor."
+
+And here he smiled, by way of showing to this old palmer that he saw
+through the slight infirmity of mind that impelled him to say such
+things as the above; that he was not its dupe, though he had not
+strength, just now, to resist its impulse. After this he dozed off
+softly, and felt through all his sleep some twinges of his wound,
+bringing him back, as it were, to the conscious surface of the great
+deep of slumber, into which he might otherwise have sunk. At all such
+brief intervals, half unclosing his eyes, (like a child, when the mother
+sits by its bed and he fears that she will steal away if he falls
+quite asleep, and leave him in the dark solitude,) he still beheld the
+white-bearded, kindly old man, of saintly aspect, sitting near him,
+and turning over the pages of his folio volume so softly that not the
+faintest rustle did it make; the picture at length got so fully into his
+idea, that he seemed to see it even through his closed eyelids. After
+a while, however, the slumberous tendency left him more entirely, and,
+without having been consciously awake, he found himself contemplating
+the old man, with wide-open eyes. The venerable personage seemed soon
+to feel his gaze, and, ceasing to look at the folio, he turned his eyes
+with quiet inquiry to meet those of the stranger. [Endnote: 5.]
+
+"What great volume is that?" asked the latter. [Endnote: 6.]
+
+"It is a book of English chronicles," said the old man, "mostly relating
+to the part of the island where you now are, and to times previous to
+the Stuarts."
+
+"Ah! it is to you, a contemporary, what reading the newspaper is to
+other men," said the stranger; then, with a smile of self-reproach, "I
+shall conquer this idle mood. I'm not so imbecile as you must think me.
+But there is something that strangely haunts me,--where, in what state
+of being, can I have seen your face before. There is nothing in it I
+distinctly remember; but some impression, some characteristic, some
+look, with which I have been long ago familiar haunts me and brings back
+all old scenes. Do you know me?"
+
+The old man smiled. "I knew, long ago, a bright and impressible boy,"
+said he.
+
+"And his name?" said the stranger.
+
+"It was Edward Redclyffe," said the old man.
+
+"Ah, I see who you are," said the traveller, not too earnestly, but with
+a soft, gratified feeling, as the riddle thus far solved itself. "You
+are my old kindly instructor. You are Colcord! That is it. I remember
+you disappeared. You shall tell me, when I am quite myself, what was
+that mystery,--and whether it is your real self, or only a part of my
+dream, and going to vanish when I quite awake. Now I shall sleep and
+dream more of it."
+
+One more waking interval he had that day, and again essayed to enter
+into conversation with the old man, who had thus strangely again become
+connected with his life, after having so long vanished from his path.
+
+"Where am I?" asked Edward Redclyffe.
+
+"In the home of misfortune," said Colcord.
+
+"Ah! then I have a right to be here!" said he. "I was born in such a
+home. Do you remember it?"
+
+"I know your story," said Colcord.
+
+"Yes; from Doctor Grim," said Edward. "People whispered he had made away
+with you. I never believed it; but finding you here in this strange way,
+and myself having been shot, perhaps to death, it seems not so strange.
+Pooh! I wander again, and ought to sleep a little more. And this is
+the home of misfortune, but not like the squalid place of rage, idiocy,
+imbecility, drunkenness, where I was born. How many times I have blushed
+to remember that native home! But not of late! I have struggled; I
+have fought; I have triumphed. The unknown boy has come to be no
+undistinguished man! His ancestry, should he ever reveal himself to
+them, need not blush for the poor foundling."
+
+"Hush!" said the quiet watcher. "Your fever burns you. Take this
+draught, and sleep a little longer." [Endnote: 7.]
+
+Another day or two found Edward Redclyffe almost a convalescent. The
+singular lack of impatience that characterized his present mood--the
+repose of spirit into which he had lapsed--had much to do with the
+favorable progress of his cure. After strife, anxiety, great mental
+exertion, and excitement of various kinds, which had harassed him
+ever since he grew to be a man, had come this opportunity of perfect
+rest;--this dream in the midst of which he lay, while its magic
+boundaries involved him, and kept far off the contact of actual life, so
+that its sounds and tumults seemed remote; its cares could not fret
+him; its ambitions, objects good or evil, were shut out from him; the
+electric wires that had connected him with the battery of life were
+broken for the time, and he did not feel the unquiet influence that kept
+everybody else in galvanic motion. So, under the benign influence of
+the old palmer, he lay in slumberous luxury, undisturbed save by some
+twinges of no intolerable pain; which, however, he almost was glad
+of, because it made him sensible that this deep luxury of quiet was
+essential to his cure, however idle it might seem. For the first time
+since he was a child, he resigned himself not to put a finger to the
+evolution of his fortune; he determined to accept all things that might
+happen, good or evil; he would not imagine an event beyond to-day, but
+would let one spontaneous and half-defined thought loiter after another,
+through his mind; listen to the spattering shower,--the puffs of
+shut-out wind; and look with half-shut eyes at the sunshine glimmering
+through the ivy-twigs, and illuminating those old devices on the wall;
+at the gathering twilight; at the dim lamp; at the creeping upward of
+another day, and with it the lark singing so far away that the thrill of
+its delicious song could not disturb him with an impulse to awake. Sweet
+as its carol was, he could almost have been content to miss the lark;
+sweet and clear, it was too like a fairy trumpet-call, summoning him to
+awake and struggle again with eager combatants for new victories, the
+best of which were not worth this deep repose.
+
+The old palmer did his best to prolong a mood so beneficial to the
+wounded young man. The surgeon also nodded approval, and attributed
+this happy state of the patient's mind, and all the physical advantages
+growing out of it, to his own consummate skill; nor, indeed, was he
+undeserving of credit, not often to be awarded to medical men, for
+having done nothing to impede the good which kind Nature was willing to
+bring about. She was doing the patient more good, indeed, than
+either the surgeon or the palmer could fully estimate, in taking
+this opportunity to recreate a mind that had too early known stirring
+impulse, and that had been worked to a degree beyond what its
+organization (in some respects singularly delicate) ought to have borne.
+Once in a long while the weary actors in the headlong drama of life must
+have such repose or else go mad or die. When the machinery of human life
+has once been stopped by sickness or other impediment, it often needs an
+impulse to set it going again, even after it is nearly wound up.
+
+But it could not last forever. The influx of new life into his being
+began to have a poignancy that would not let him lie so quietly, lapped
+in the past, in gone by centuries, and waited on by quiet Age, in the
+person of the old palmer; he began to feel again that he was young, and
+must live in the time when his lot was cast. He began to say to himself,
+that it was not well to be any longer passive, but that he must again
+take the troublesome burden of his own life on his own shoulders. He
+thought of this necessity, this duty, throughout one whole day, and
+determined that on the morrow he would make the first step towards
+terminating his inaction, which he now began to be half impatient of,
+at the same time that he clutched it still, for the sake of the
+deliciousness that it had had.
+
+"To-morrow, I hope to be clothed and in my right mind," said he to the
+old palmer, "and very soon I must thank you, with my whole heart, for
+your kind care, and go. It is a shame that I burden the hospitality of
+this house so long."
+
+"No shame whatever," replied the old man, "but, on the contrary, the
+fittest thing that could have chanced. You are dependent on no private
+benevolence, nor on the good offices of any man now living, or who has
+lived these last three hundred years. This ancient establishment is for
+the support of poverty, misfortune, and age, and, according to the word
+of the founder, it serves him:--he was indebted to the beneficiaries,
+not they to him, for, in return for his temporal bequests, he asked
+their prayers for his soul's welfare. He needed them, could they avail
+him; for this ponderous structure was built upon the founder's mortal
+transgressions, and even, I may say, out of the actual substance of
+them. Sir Edward Redclyffe was a fierce fighter in the Wars of the
+Roses, and amassed much wealth by spoil, rapine, confiscation, and all
+violent and evil ways that those disturbed times opened to him; and on
+his death-bed he founded this Hospital for twelve men, who should be
+able to prove kindred with his race, to dwell here with a stipend,
+and pray for him; and likewise provision for a sick stranger, until he
+should be able to go on his way again."
+
+"I shall pray for him willingly," said Edward, moved by the pity which
+awaits any softened state of our natures to steal into our hearts.
+"Though no Catholic, I will pray for his soul. And that is his crest
+which you wear embroidered on his garment?"
+
+"It is," said the old man. "You will see it carved, painted,
+embroidered, everywhere about the establishment; but let us give it
+the better and more reasonable interpretation;--not that he sought to
+proclaim his own pride of ancestry and race, but to acknowledge his
+sins the more manifestly, by stamping the emblem of his race on this
+structure of his penitence."
+
+"And are you," said Redclyffe, impressed anew by the quiet dignity of
+the venerable speaker, "in authority in the establishment?"
+
+"A simple beneficiary of the charity," said the palmer; "one of the
+twelve poor brethren and kinsmen of the founder. Slighter proofs of
+kindred are now of necessity received, since, in the natural course of
+things, the race has long been growing scarce. But I had it in my power
+to make out a sufficient claim."
+
+"Singular," exclaimed Redclyffe, "you being an American!" [Endnote: 8.]
+
+"You remember me, then," said the old man, quietly.
+
+"From the first," said Edward, "although your image took the fantastic
+aspect of the bewilderment in which I then was; and now that I am in
+clearer state of mind, it seems yet stranger that you should be here. We
+two children thought you translated, and people, I remember, whispered
+dark hints about your fate."
+
+"There was nothing wonderful in my disappearance," said the old man.
+"There were causes, an impulse, an intuition, that made me feel, one
+particular night, that I might meet harm, whether from myself or others,
+by remaining in a place with which I had the most casual connection. But
+I never, so long as I remained in America, quite lost sight of you; and
+Doctor Grimshawe, before his death, had knowledge of where I was, and
+gave me in charge a duty which I faithfully endeavored to perform.
+Singular man that he was! much evil, much good in him. Both, it may be,
+will live after him!"
+
+Redclyffe, when the conversation had reached this point, felt a vast
+desire to reveal to the old man all that the grim Doctor had instilled
+into his childish mind, all that he himself, in subsequent years,
+had wrought more definitely out of it, all his accompanying doubts
+respecting the secret of his birth and some supposed claims which
+he might assert, and which, only half acknowledging the purpose, had
+availed to bring him, a republican, hither as to an ancestral centre. He
+even fancied that the benign old man seemed to expect and await such a
+confidence; but that very idea contributed to make it impossible for him
+to speak.
+
+"Another time," he said to himself. "Perhaps never. It is a fantastic
+folly; and with what the workhouse foundling has since achieved, he
+would give up too many hopes to take the representation of a mouldy old
+English family."
+
+"I find my head still very weak," said he, by way of cutting short the
+conversation. "I must try to sleep again."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+The next day he called for his clothes, and, with the assistance of
+the pensioner, managed to be dressed, and awaited the arrival of the
+surgeon, sitting in a great easy-chair, with not much except his pale,
+thin cheeks, dark, thoughtful eyes, and his arm in a sling, to show the
+pain and danger through which he had passed. Soon after the departure
+of the professional gentleman, a step somewhat louder than ordinary was
+heard on the staircase, and in the corridor leading to the sick-chamber;
+the step (as Redclyffe's perceptions, nicely attempered by his weakness,
+assured him) of a man in perfect and robust health, and of station and
+authority. A moment afterwards, a gentleman of middle age, or a little
+beyond, appeared in the doorway, in a dress that seemed clerical,
+yet not very decidedly so; he had a frank, kindly, yet authoritative
+bearing, and a face that might almost be said to beam with geniality,
+when, as now, the benevolence of his nature was aroused and ready to
+express itself.
+
+"My friend," said he, "Doctor Portingale tells me you are much better;
+and I am most happy to hear it."
+
+There was something brusque and unceremonious in his manner, that a
+little jarred against Redclyffe's sensitiveness, which had become
+morbid in sympathy with his weakness. He felt that the new-comer had
+not probably the right idea as to his own position in life; he was
+addressing him most kindly, indeed, but as an inferior.
+
+"I am much better, sir," he replied, gravely, and with reserve; "so
+nearly well, that I shall very soon be able to bid farewell to my kind
+nurse here, and to this ancient establishment, to which I owe so much."
+
+The visitor seemed struck by Mr. Redclyffe's tone, and finely modulated
+voice, and glanced at his face, and then over his dress and figure, as
+if to gather from them some reliable data as to his station.
+
+"I am the Warden of this Hospital," said he, with not less benignity
+than heretofore, and greater courtesy; "and, in that capacity, must
+consider you under my care,--as my guest, in fact,--although, owing to
+my casual absence, one of the brethren of the house has been the
+active instrument in attending you. I am most happy to find you so far
+recovered. Do you feel yourself in a condition to give any account of
+the accident which has befallen you?"
+
+"It will be a very unsatisfactory one, at best," said Redclyffe, trying
+to discover some definite point in his misty reminiscences. "I am a
+stranger to this country, and was on a pedestrian tour with the purpose
+of making myself acquainted with the aspects of English scenery and
+life. I had turned into a footpath, being told that it would lead me
+within view of an old Hall, which, from certain early associations, I
+was very desirous of seeing. I think I went astray; at all events,
+the path became indistinct; and, so far as I can recollect, I had just
+turned to retrace my steps,--in fact, that is the last thing in my
+memory."
+
+"You had almost fallen a sacrifice," said the Warden, "to the old
+preference which our English gentry have inherited from their Norman
+ancestry, of game to man. You had come unintentionally as an intruder
+into a rich preserve much haunted by poachers, and exposed yourself to
+the deadly mark of a spring-gun, which had not the wit to distinguish
+between a harmless traveller and a poacher. At least, such is our
+conclusion; for our old friend here, (who luckily for you is a great
+rambler in the woods,) when the report drew him to the spot, found you
+insensible, and the gun discharged."
+
+"A gun has so little discretion," said Redclyffe, smiling, "that it
+seems a pity to trust entirely to its judgment, in a matter of life
+and death. But, to confess the truth, I had come this morning to the
+suspicion that there was a direct human agency in the matter; for I find
+missing a little pocket-book which I carried."
+
+"Then," said the Warden, "that certainly gives a new aspect to the
+affair. Was it of value?"
+
+"Of none whatever," said Redclyffe, "merely containing pencil memoranda,
+and notes of a traveller's little expenses. I had papers about me of far
+more value, and a moderate sum of money, a letter of credit, which have
+escaped. I do not, however, feel inclined, on such grounds, to transfer
+the guilt decidedly from the spring-gun to any more responsible
+criminal; for it is very possible that the pocket-book, being carelessly
+carried, might have been lost on the way. I had not used it since the
+preceding day."
+
+"Much more probable, indeed," said the Warden. "The discharged gun is
+strong evidence against itself. Mr. Colcord," continued he, raising his
+voice, "how long was the interval between the discharge of the gun and
+your arrival on the spot."
+
+"Five minutes, or less," said the old man, "for I was not far off, and
+made what haste I could, it being borne in on my spirit that mischief
+was abroad."
+
+"Did you hear two reports?" asked the Warden.
+
+"Only one," replied Colcord.
+
+"It is a plain case against the spring-gun," said the Warden; "and, as
+you tell me you are a stranger, I trust you will not suppose that our
+peaceful English woods and parks are the haunt of banditti. We must try
+to give you a better idea of us. May I ask, are you an American, and
+recently come among us?"
+
+"I believe a letter of credit is considered as decisive as most modes of
+introduction," said Redclyffe, feeling that the good Warden was desirous
+of knowing with some precision who and what he was, and that, in the
+circumstances, he had a right to such knowledge. "Here is mine, on a
+respectable house in London."
+
+The Warden took it, and glanced it over with a slight apologetic bow;
+it was a credit for a handsome amount in favor of the Honorable Edward
+Redclyffe, a title that did not fail to impress the Englishman rather
+favorably towards his new acquaintance, although he happened to know
+something of their abundance, even so early in the republic, among the
+men branded sons of equality. But, at all events, it showed no ordinary
+ability and energy for so young a man to have held such position as this
+title denoted in the fiercely contested political struggles of the new
+democracy.
+
+"Do you know, Mr. Redclyffe, that this name is familiar to us,
+hereabouts?" asked he, with a kindly bow and recognition,--"that it is
+in fact the principal name in this neighborhood,--that a family of your
+name still possesses Braithwaite Hall, and that this very Hospital,
+where you have happily found shelter, was founded by former
+representatives of your name? Perhaps you count yourself among their
+kindred."
+
+"My countrymen are apt to advance claims to kinship with distinguished
+English families on such slight grounds as to make it ridiculous,"
+said Redclyffe, coloring. "I should not choose to follow so absurd an
+example."
+
+"Well, well, perhaps not," said the Warden, laughing frankly. "I have
+been amongst your republicans myself, a long while ago, and saw that
+your countrymen have no adequate idea of the sacredness of pedigrees,
+and heraldic distinctions, and would change their own names at pleasure,
+and vaunt kindred with an English duke on the strength of the assumed
+one. But I am happy to meet an American gentleman who looks upon this
+matter as Englishmen necessarily must. I met with great kindness in your
+country, Mr. Redclyffe, and shall be truly happy if you will allow me an
+opportunity of returning some small part of the obligation. You are now
+in a condition for removal to my own quarters, across the quadrangle. I
+will give orders to prepare an apartment, and you must transfer yourself
+there by dinner-time."
+
+With this hospitable proposal, so decisively expressed, the Warden took
+his leave; and Edward Redclyffe had hardly yet recovered sufficient
+independent force to reject an invitation so put, even were he inclined;
+but, in truth, the proposal suited well with his wishes, such as they
+were, and was, moreover, backed, it is singular to say, by another of
+those dreamlike recognitions which had so perplexed him ever since he
+found himself in the Hospital. In some previous state of being, the
+Warden and he had talked together before.
+
+"What is the Warden's name?" he inquired of the old pensioner.
+
+"Hammond," said the old man; "he is a kinsman of the Redclyffe family
+himself, a man of fortune, and spends more than the income of his
+wardenship in beautifying and keeping up the glory of the establishment.
+He takes great pride in it."
+
+"And he has been in America," said Redclyffe. "How strange! I knew
+him there. Never was anything so singular as the discovery of old
+acquaintances where I had reason to suppose myself unknowing and
+unknown. Unless dear Doctor Grim, or dear little Elsie, were to start up
+and greet me, I know not what may chance next."
+
+Redclyffe took up his quarters in the Warden's house the next day, and
+was installed in an apartment that made a picture, such as he had not
+before seen, of English household comfort. He was thus established under
+the good Warden's roof, and, being very attractive of most people's
+sympathies, soon began to grow greatly in favor with that kindly
+personage.
+
+When Edward Redclyffe removed from the old pensioner's narrow quarters
+to the far ampler accommodations of the Warden's house, the latter
+gentleman was taking his morning exercise on horseback. A servant,
+however, in a grave livery, ushered him to an apartment, where the new
+guest was surprised to see some luggage which two or three days before
+Edward had ordered from London, on finding that his stay in this part
+of the country was likely to be much longer than he had originally
+contemplated. The sight of these things--the sense which they conveyed
+that he was an expected and welcome guest--tended to raise the spirits
+of the solitary wanderer, and made him.... [Endnote: 1.]
+
+The Warden's abode was an original part of the ancient establishment,
+being an entire side of the quadrangle which the whole edifice
+surrounded; and for the establishment of a bachelor (which was his new
+friend's condition), it seemed to Edward Redclyffe abundantly spacious
+and enviably comfortable. His own chamber had a grave, rich depth, as
+it were, of serene and time-long garniture, for purposes of repose,
+convenience, daily and nightly comfort, that it was soothing even to
+look at. Long accustomed, as Redclyffe had been, to the hardy and rude
+accommodations, if so they were to be called, of log huts and hasty,
+mud-built houses in the Western States of America, life, its daily
+habits, its passing accommodations, seemed to assume an importance,
+under these aspects, which it had not worn before; those deep downy
+beds, those antique chairs, the heavy carpet, the tester and curtains,
+the stateliness of the old room,--they had a charm as compared with
+the thin preparation of a forester's bedchamber, such as Redclyffe
+had chiefly known them, in the ruder parts of the country, that really
+seemed to give a more substantial value to life; so much pains had been
+taken with its modes and appliances, that it looked more solid than
+before. Nevertheless, there was something ghostly in that stately
+curtained bed, with the deep gloom within its drapery, so ancient as
+it was; and suggestive of slumberers there who had long since slumbered
+elsewhere.
+
+The old servant, whose grave, circumspect courtesy was a matter quite
+beyond Redclyffe's experience, soon knocked at the chamber door, and
+suggested that the guest might desire to await the Warden's arrival in
+the library, which was the customary sitting-room. Redclyffe assenting,
+he was ushered into a spacious apartment, lighted by various Gothic
+windows, surrounded with old oaken cases, in which were ranged volumes,
+most or many of which seemed to be coeval with the foundation of the
+hospital; and opening one of them, Redclyffe saw for the first time in
+his life [Endnote: 2] a genuine book-worm, that ancient form of creature
+living upon literature; it had gnawed a circular hole, penetrating
+through perhaps a score of pages of the seldom opened volume, and was
+still at his musty feast. There was a fragrance of old learning in
+this ancient library; a soothing influence, as the American felt,
+of time-honored ideas, where the strife, novelties, uneasy agitating
+conflict, attrition of unsettled theories, fresh-springing thought, did
+not attain a foothold; a good place to spend a life which should not be
+agitated with the disturbing element; so quiet, so peaceful; how slowly,
+with how little wear, would the years pass here! How unlike what he had
+hitherto known, and was destined to know,--the quick, violent struggle
+of his mother country, which had traced lines in his young brow already.
+How much would be saved by taking his former existence, not as dealing
+with things yet malleable, but with fossils, things that had had their
+life, and now were unchangeable, and revered, here!
+
+At one end of this large room there was a bowed window, the space near
+which was curtained off from the rest of the library, and, the window
+being filled with painted glass (most of which seemed old, though there
+were insertions evidently of modern and much inferior handiwork), there
+was a rich gloom of light, or you might call it a rich glow, according
+to your mood of mind. Redclyffe soon perceived that this curtained
+recess was the especial study of his friend, the Warden, and as such
+was provided with all that modern times had contrived for making an
+enjoyment out of the perusal of old books; a study table, with every
+convenience of multifarious devices, a great inkstand, pens; a luxurious
+study chair, where thought [Endnote: 3] upon. To say the truth, there
+was not, in this retired and thoughtful nook, anything that indicated to
+Redclyffe that the Warden had been recently engaged in consultation of
+learned authorities,--or in abstract labor, whether moral, metaphysical
+or historic; there was a volume of translations of Mother Goose's
+Melodies into Greek and Latin, printed for private circulation, and with
+the Warden's name on the title-page; a London newspaper of the preceding
+day; Lillebullero, Chevy Chase, and the old political ballads; and,
+what a little amused Redclyffe, the three volumes of a novel from a
+circulating library; so that Redclyffe came to the conclusion that the
+good Warden, like many educated men, whose early scholastic propensities
+are backed up by the best of opportunities, and all desirable facilities
+and surroundings, still contented himself with gathering a flower or
+two, instead of attempting the hard toil requisite to raise a crop.
+
+It must not be omitted, that there was a fragrance in the room, which,
+unlike as the scene was, brought back, through so many years, to
+Redclyffe's mind a most vivid remembrance of poor old Doctor Grim's
+squalid chamber, with his wild, bearded presence in the midst of it,
+puffing his everlasting cloud; for here was the same smell of tobacco,
+and on the mantel-piece of a chimney lay a German pipe, and an old
+silver tobacco-box into which was wrought the leopard's head and the
+inscription in black letter. The Warden had evidently availed himself of
+one of the chief bachelor sources of comfort. Redclyffe, whose destiny
+had hitherto, and up to a very recent period, been to pass a feverishly
+active life, was greatly impressed by all these tokens of learned
+ease,--a degree of self-indulgence combined with duties enough to
+quiet an otherwise uneasy conscience,--by the consideration that this
+pensioner acted a good part in a world where no one is entitled to be an
+unprofitable laborer. He thought within himself, that his prospects in
+his own galvanized country, that seemed to him, a few years since, to
+offer such a career for an adventurous young man, conscious of motive
+power, had nothing so enticing as such a nook as this,--a quiet recess
+of unchangeable old time, around which the turbulent tide now eddied
+and rushed, but could not disturb it. Here, to be sure, hope, love,
+ambition, came not, progress came not; but here was what, just now, the
+early wearied American could appreciate better than aught else,--here
+was rest.
+
+The fantasy took Edward to imitate the useful labors of the learned
+Warden, and to make trial whether his own classical condition--the
+results of Doctor Grim's tuition, and subsequently that of an American
+College--had utterly deserted him, by attempting a translation of a few
+verses of Yankee Doodle; and he was making hopeful progress when the
+Warden came in fresh and rosy from a morning's ride in a keen east wind.
+He shook hands heartily with his guest, and, though by no means frigid
+at their former interview, seemed to have developed at once into
+a kindlier man, now that he had suffered the stranger to cross his
+threshold, and had thus made himself responsible for his comfort.
+
+"I shall take it greatly amiss," said he, "if you do not pick up fast
+under my roof, and gather a little English ruddiness, moreover, in the
+walks and rides that I mean to take you. Your countrymen, as I saw them,
+are a sallow set; but I think you must have English blood enough in your
+veins to eke out a ruddy tint, with the help of good English beef and
+ale, and daily draughts of wholesome light and air."
+
+"My cheeks would not have been so very pale," said Edward, laughing,
+"if an English shot had not deprived me of a good deal of my American
+blood."
+
+"Only follow my guidance," said the Warden, "and I assure you you shall
+have back whatever blood we have deprived you of, together with an
+addition. It is now luncheon-time, and we will begin the process of
+replenishing your veins."
+
+So they went into a refectory, where were spread upon the board what
+might have seemed a goodly dinner to most Americans; though for this
+Englishman it was but a by-incident, a slight refreshment, to enable him
+to pass the midway stage of life. It is an excellent thing to see the
+faith of a hearty Englishman in his own stomach, and how well that
+kindly organ repays his trust; with what devout assimilation he takes to
+himself his kindred beef, loving it, believing in it, making a good
+use of it, and without any qualms of conscience or prescience as to the
+result. They surely eat twice as much as we; and probably because of
+their undoubted faith it never does them any harm. Dyspepsia is merely a
+superstition with us. If we could cease to believe in its existence,
+it would exist no more. Redclyffe, eating little himself, his wound
+compelling him to be cautious as to his diet, was secretly delighted to
+see what sweets the Warden found in a cold round of beef, in a pigeon
+pie, and a cut or two of Yorkshire ham; not that he was ravenous, but
+that his stomach was so healthy.
+
+"You eat little, my friend," said the Warden, pouring out a glass of
+sherry for Redclyffe, and another for himself. "But you are right, in
+such a predicament as yours. Spare your stomach while you are weakly,
+and it will help you when you are strong This, now, is the most
+enjoyable meal of the day with me. You will not see me play such a knife
+and fork at dinner; though there too, especially if I have ridden out
+in the afternoon, I do pretty well. But, come now, if (like most of your
+countrymen, as I have heard) you are a lover of the weed, I can offer
+you some as delicate Latakia as you are likely to find in England."
+
+"I lack that claim upon your kindness, I am sorry to say," replied
+Redclyffe. "I am not a good smoker, though I have occasionally taken a
+cigar at need."
+
+"Well, when you find yourself growing old, and especially if you chance
+to be a bachelor, I advise you to cultivate the habit," said the Warden.
+"A wife is the only real obstacle or objection to a pipe; they can
+seldom be thoroughly reconciled, and therefore it is well for a man to
+consider, beforehand, which of the two he can best dispense with. I know
+not how it might have been once, had the conflicting claim of these two
+rivals ever been fairly presented to me; but I now should be at no loss
+to choose the pipe."
+
+They returned to the study; and while the Warden took his pipe,
+Redclyffe, considering that, as the guest of this hospitable Englishman,
+he had no right to continue a stranger, thought it fit to make known to
+him who he was, and his condition, plans, and purposes. He represented
+himself as having been liberally educated, bred to the law, but (to
+his misfortune) having turned aside from that profession to engage
+in politics. In this pursuit, indeed, his success wore a flattering
+outside; for he had become distinguished, and, though so young, a
+leader, locally at least, in the party which he had adopted. He had
+been, for a biennial term, a member of Congress, after winning some
+distinction in the legislature of his native State; but some one of
+those fitful changes to which American politics are peculiarly liable
+had thrown him out, in his candidacy for his second term; and the
+virulence of party animosity, the abusiveness of the press, had acted so
+much upon a disposition naturally somewhat too sensitive for the career
+which he had undertaken, that he had resolved, being now freed from
+legislative cares, to seize the opportunity for a visit to England,
+whither he was drawn by feelings which every educated and impressible
+American feels, in a degree scarcely conceivable by the English
+themselves. And being here (but he had already too much experience of
+English self-sufficiency to confess so much) he began to feel the deep
+yearning which a sensitive American--his mind full of English thoughts,
+his imagination of English poetry, his heart of English character and
+sentiment--cannot fail to be influenced by,--the yearning of the
+blood within his veins for that from which it has been estranged; the
+half-fanciful regret that he should ever have been separated from these
+woods, these fields, these natural features of scenery, to which his
+nature was moulded, from the men who are still so like himself, from
+these habits of life and thought which (though he may not have known
+them for two centuries) he still perceives to have remained in some
+mysterious way latent in the depths of his character, and soon to be
+reassumed, not as a foreigner would do it, but like habits native to
+him, and only suspended for a season.
+
+This had been Redclyffe's state of feeling ever since he landed in
+England, and every day seemed to make him more at home; so that it
+seemed as if he were gradually awakening to a former reality.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+After lunch, the Warden showed a good degree of kind anxiety about his
+guest, and ensconced him in a most comfortable chair in his study, where
+he gave him his choice of books old and new, and was somewhat surprised,
+as well as amused, to see that Redclyffe seemed most attracted towards a
+department of the library filled with books of English antiquities, and
+genealogies, and heraldry; the two latter, indeed, having the preference
+over the others.
+
+"This is very remarkable," said he, smiling. "By what right or reason,
+by what logic of character, can you, a democrat, renouncing all
+advantages of birth,--neither priding yourself on family, nor seeking
+to found one,--how therefore can you care for genealogies, or for this
+fantastic science of heraldry? Having no antiquities, being a people
+just made, how can you care for them?"
+
+"My dear sir," said Redclyffe, "I doubt whether the most devoted
+antiquarian in England ever cares to search for an old thing merely
+because it is old, as any American just landed on your shores would do.
+Age is our novelty; therefore it attracts and absorbs us. And as for
+genealogies, I know not what necessary repulsion there may be between
+it and democracy. A line of respectable connections, being the harder to
+preserve where there is nothing in the laws to defend it, is therefore
+the more precious when we have it really to boast of."
+
+"True," said the Warden, "when a race keeps itself distinguished among
+the grimy order of your commonalty, all with equal legal rights to place
+and eminence as itself, it must needs be because there is a force and
+efficacy in the blood. I doubt not," he said, looking with the free
+approval of an elder man at the young man's finely developed face and
+graceful form,--"I doubt not that you can look back upon a line of
+ancestry, always shining out from the surrounding obscurity of the mob."
+
+Redclyffe, though ashamed of himself, could not but feel a paltry
+confusion and embarrassment, as he thought of his unknown origin, and
+his advent from the almshouse; coming out of that squalid darkness as
+if he were a thing that had had a spontaneous birth out of poverty,
+meanness, petty crime; and here in ancestral England, he felt more
+keenly than ever before what was his misfortune.
+
+"I must not let you lie under this impression," said he manfully to the
+Warden. "I have no ancestry; at the very first step my origin is lost
+in impenetrable obscurity. I only know that but for the aid of a kind
+friend--on whose benevolence I seem to have had no claim whatever--my
+life would probably have been poor, mean, unenlightened."
+
+"Well, well," said the kind Warden,--hardly quite feeling, however, the
+noble sentiment which he expressed,--"it is better to be the first noble
+illustrator of a name than even the worthy heir of a name that has been
+noble and famous for a thousand years. The highest pride of some of our
+peers, who have won their rank by their own force, has been to point to
+the cottage whence they sprung. Your posterity, at all events, will have
+the advantage of you,--they will know their ancestor."
+
+Redclyffe sighed, for there was truly a great deal of the foolish
+yearning for a connection with the past about him; his imagination had
+taken this turn, and the very circumstances of his obscure birth gave it
+a field to exercise itself.
+
+"I advise you," said the Warden, by way of changing the conversation,
+"to look over the excellent history of the county which you are now in.
+There is no reading better, to my mind, than these country histories;
+though doubtless a stranger would hardly feel so much interest in them
+as one whose progenitors, male or female, have strewn their dust over
+the whole field of which the history treats. This history is a fine
+specimen of the kind."
+
+The work to which Redclyffe's attention was thus drawn was in two large
+folio volumes, published about thirty years before, bound in calf by
+some famous artist in that line, illustrated with portraits and views of
+ruined castles, churches, cathedrals, the seats of nobility and gentry;
+Roman, British, and Saxon remains, painted windows, oak carvings, and so
+forth.
+
+And as for its contents the author ascended for the history of the
+county as far as into the pre-Roman ages, before Caesar had ever heard
+of Britain; and brought it down, an ever swelling and increasing tale,
+to his own days; inclusive of the separate histories, and pedigrees,
+and hereditary legends, and incidents, of all the principal families. In
+this latter branch of information, indeed, the work seemed particularly
+full, and contained every incident that would have worked well into
+historical romance.
+
+"Aye, aye," said the Warden, laughing at some strange incident of this
+sort which Redclyffe read out to him. "My old friend Gibber, the learned
+author of this work, (he has been dead this score of years, so he will
+not mind my saying it,) had a little too much the habit of seeking his
+authorities in the cottage chimney-corners. I mean that an old woman's
+tale was just about as acceptable to him as a recorded fact; and to say
+the truth, they are really apt to have ten times the life in them."
+
+Redclyffe saw in the volume a full account of the founding of the
+Hospital, its regulations and purposes, its edifices; all of which he
+reserved for future reading, being for the present more attracted by
+the mouldy gossip of family anecdotes which we have alluded to. Some of
+these, and not the least singular, referred to the ancient family which
+had founded the Hospital; and he was attracted by seeing a mention of a
+Bloody Footstep, which reminded him of the strange old story which
+good Doctor Grimshawe had related by his New England fireside, in those
+childish days when Edward dwelt with him by the graveyard, On reading
+it, however, he found that the English legend, if such it could be
+called, was far less full and explicit than that of New England. Indeed,
+it assigned various origins to the Bloody Footstep;--one being, that
+it was the stamp of the foot of the Saxon thane, who fought at his
+own threshold against the assault of the Norman baron, who seized his
+mansion at the Conquest; another, that it was the imprint of a fugitive
+who had sought shelter from the lady of the house during the Wars of the
+Roses, and was dragged out by her husband, and slain on the door-step;
+still another, that it was the footstep of a Protestant in Bloody Mary's
+days, who, being sent to prison by the squire of that epoch, had lifted
+his hands to Heaven, and stamped his foot, in appeal as against the
+unjust violence with which he was treated, and stamping his foot, it had
+left the bloody mark. It was hinted too, however, that another version,
+which out of delicacy to the family the author was reluctant to state,
+assigned the origin of the Bloody Footstep to so late a period as the
+wars of the Parliament. And, finally, there was an odious rumor that
+what was called the Bloody Footstep was nothing miraculous, after all,
+but most probably a natural reddish stain in the stone door-step; but
+against this heresy the excellent Dr. Gibber set his face most sturdily.
+
+The original legend had made such an impression on Redclyffe's childish
+fancy, that he became strangely interested in thus discovering it,
+or something remotely like it, in England, and being brought by such
+unsought means to reside so near it. Curious about the family to which
+it had occurred, he proceeded to examine its records, as given in the
+County History. The name was Redclyffe. Like most English pedigrees,
+there was an obscurity about a good many of the earlier links; but the
+line was traced out with reasonable definiteness from the days of Coeur
+de Lion, and there was said to be a cross-legged ancestor in the
+village church, who (but the inscription was obliterated) was probably
+a Redclyffe, and had fought either under the Lion Heart or in the
+Crusades. It was, in subsequent ages, one of the most distinguished
+families, though there had been turbulent men in all those turbulent
+times, hard fighters. In one age, a barony of early creation seemed to
+have come into the family, and had been, as it were, playing bo-peep
+with the race for several centuries. Some of them had actually assumed
+the title; others had given it up for lack of sufficient proof; but
+still there was such a claim, and up to the time at which this County
+History was written, it had neither been made out, nor had the hope of
+doing so been relinquished.
+
+"Have the family," asked Redclyffe of his host, "ever yet made out their
+claim to this title, which has so long been playing the will-of-the-wisp
+with them?"
+
+"No, not yet," said the Warden, puffing out a volume of smoke from his
+meerschaum, and making it curl up to the ceiling. "Their claim has as
+little substance, in my belief, as yonder vanishing vapor from my pipe.
+But they still keep up their delusion. I had supposed that the claim
+would perish with the last squire, who was a childless man,--at least,
+without legitimate heirs; but this estate passed to one whom we can
+scarcely call an Englishman, he being a Catholic, the descendant of
+forefathers who have lived in Italy since the time of George II., and
+who is, moreover, a Catholic. We English would not willingly see an
+ancestral honor in the possession of such a man!"
+
+"Is there, do you think, a prospect of his success?"
+
+"I have heard so, but hardly believe it," replied the Warden. "I
+remember, some dozen or fifteen years ago, it was given out that some
+clue had been found to the only piece of evidence that was wanting. It
+had been said that there was an emigration to your own country, above a
+hundred years ago, and on account of some family feud; the true heir
+had gone thither and never returned. Now, the point was to prove the
+extinction of this branch of the family. But, excuse me, I must pay an
+official visit to my charge here. Will you accompany me, or continue to
+pore over the County History?"
+
+Redclyffe felt enough of the elasticity of convalescence to be desirous
+of accompanying the Warden; and they accordingly crossed the enclosed
+quadrangle to the entrance of the Hospital portion of the large and
+intricate structure. It was a building of the early Elizabethan age, a
+plaster and timber structure, like many houses of that period and much
+earlier. [Endnote: 1] Around this court stood the building, with the
+date 1437 cut on the front. On each side, a row of gables looked upon
+the enclosed space, most venerable old gables, with heavy mullioned
+windows filled with little diamond panes of glass, and opening on
+lattices. On two sides there was a cloistered walk, under echoing
+arches, and in the midst a spacious lawn of the greenest and loveliest
+grass, such as England only can show, and which, there, is of perennial
+verdure and beauty. In the midst stood a stone statue of a venerable
+man, wrought in the best of mediaeval sculpture, with robe and ruff, and
+tunic and venerable beard, resting on a staff, and holding what looked
+like a clasped book in his hand. The English atmosphere, together
+with the coal smoke, settling down in the space of centuries from the
+chimneys of the Hospital, had roughened and blackened this venerable
+piece of sculpture, enclosing it as it were in a superficies of decay;
+but still (and perhaps the more from these tokens of having stood so
+long among men) the statue had an aspect of venerable life, and of
+connection with human life, that made it strongly impressive.
+
+"This is the effigy of Sir Edward Redclyffe, the founder of the
+Hospital," said the Warden. "He is a most peaceful and venerable old
+gentleman in his attire and aspect, as you see; but he was a fierce old
+fellow in his day, and is said to have founded the Hospital as a means
+of appeasing Heaven for some particular deed of blood, which he had
+imposed upon his conscience in the War of the Roses."
+
+"Yes," said Redclyffe, "I have just read in the County History that the
+Bloody Footstep was said to have been imprinted in his time. But what is
+that thing which he holds in his hand?"
+
+"It is a famous heirloom of the Redclyffes," said the Warden, "on
+the possession of which (as long as they did possess it) they prided
+themselves, it is said, more than on their ancient manor-house. It was
+a Saxon ornament, which a certain ancestor was said to have had from
+Harold, the old Saxon king; but if there ever was any such article, it
+has been missing from the family mansion for two or three hundred years.
+There is not known to be an antique relic of that description now in
+existence."
+
+"I remember having seen such an article,--yes, precisely of that shape,"
+observed Redclyffe, "in the possession of a very dear old friend of
+mine, when I was a boy."
+
+"What, in America?" exclaimed the Warden. "That is very remarkable. The
+time of its being missed coincides well enough with that of the early
+settlement of New England. Some Puritan, before his departure, may have
+thought himself doing God service by filching the old golden gewgaw from
+the Cavalier; for it was said to be fine, ductile gold."
+
+The circumstances struck Redclyffe with a pleasant wonder; for, indeed,
+the old statue held the closest possible imitation, in marble, of that
+strange old glitter of gold which he himself had so often played with
+in the Doctor's study; [Endnote: 2] so identical, that he could have
+fancied that he saw the very thing, changed from metal into stone, even
+with its bruises and other casual marks in it. As he looked at the
+old statue, his imagination played with it, and his naturally great
+impressibility half made him imagine that the old face looked at him
+with a keen, subtile, wary glance, as if acknowledging that it held some
+secret, but at the same time defying him to find it out. And then again
+came that visionary feeling that had so often swept over him since he
+had been an inmate of the Hospital.
+
+All over the interior part of the building was carved in stone the
+leopard's head, with wearisome iteration; as if the founder were anxious
+to imprint his device so numerously, lest--when he produced this edifice
+as his remuneration to Eternal Justice for many sins--the Omniscient Eye
+should fail to be reminded that Sir Edward Redclyffe had done it.
+But, at all events, it seemed to Redclyffe that the ancient knight had
+purposed a good thing, and in a measurable degree had effected it; for
+here stood the venerable edifice securely founded, bearing the moss of
+four hundred years upon it; and though wars, and change of dynasties,
+and religious change, had swept around it, with seemingly destructive
+potency, yet here had the lodging, the food, the monastic privileges of
+the brethren been held secure, and were unchanged by all the altering
+mariners of the age. The old fellow, somehow or other, seemed to have
+struck upon an everlasting rock, and founded his pompous charity there.
+
+They entered an arched door on the left of the quadrangle, and found
+themselves hi a dark old hall with oaken beams; to say the truth, it
+was a barn-like sort of enclosure, and was now used as a sort of
+rubbish-place for the Hospital, where they stored away old furniture,
+and where carpenter's work might be done. And yet, as the Warden assured
+Redclyffe, it was once a hall of state, hung with tapestry, carpeted,
+for aught he knew, with cloth of gold, and set with rich furniture,
+and a groaning board in the midst. Here, the hereditary patron of the
+Hospital had once entertained King James the First, who made a Latin
+speech on the occasion, a copy of which was still preserved in the
+archives. On the rafters of this old hall there were cobwebs in such
+abundance that Redclyffe could not but reflect on the joy which old
+Doctor Grimshawe would have had in seeing them, and the health to the
+human race which he would have hoped to collect and distil from them.
+
+From this great, antique room they crossed the quadrangle and entered
+the kitchen of the establishment. A hospitable fire was burning there,
+and there seemed to be a great variety of messes cooking; and the Warden
+explained to Redclyffe that there was no general table in the Hospital;
+but the brethren, at their own will and pleasure, either formed
+themselves into companies or messes, of any convenient size, or enjoyed
+a solitary meal by themselves, each in their own apartments. There was
+a goodly choice of simple, but good and enjoyable food, and a sufficient
+supply of potent ale, brewed in the vats of the Hospital, which, among
+its other praiseworthy characteristics, was famous for this; having at
+some epoch presumed to vie with the famous ale of Trinity, in Cambridge,
+and the Archdeacon of Oxford,--these having come down to the hospital
+from a private receipt of Sir Edward's butler, which was now lost in the
+Redclyffe family; nor would the ungrateful Hospital give up its secret
+even out of loyalty to its founder.
+
+"I would use my influence with the brewer," said the Warden, on
+communicating this little fact to Redclyffe; "but the present man--now
+owner of the estate--is not worthy to have good ale brewed in his house;
+having himself no taste for anything but Italian wines, wretched
+fellow that he is! He might make himself an Englishman if he would take
+heartily to our ale; and with that end in view, I should be glad to give
+it him."
+
+The kitchen fire blazed warmly, as we have said, and roast and stewed
+and boiled were in process of cooking, producing a pleasant fume, while
+great heaps of wheaten loaves were smoking hot from the ovens, and the
+master cook and his subordinates were in fume and hiss, like beings that
+were of a fiery element, and, though irritable and scorching, yet were
+happier here than they could have been in any other situation.
+The Warden seemed to have an especial interest and delight in this
+department of the Hospital, and spoke apart to the head cook on the
+subject (as Redclyffe surmised from what he overheard) of some especial
+delicacy for his own table that day.
+
+"This kitchen is a genial place," said he to Redclyffe, as they retired.
+"In the evening, after the cooks have done their work, the brethren have
+liberty to use it as a sort of common room, and to sit here over their
+ale till a reasonable bedtime. It would interest you much to make one
+at such a party; for they have had a varied experience in life, each one
+for himself, and it would be strange to hear the varied roads by which
+they have come hither."
+
+"Yes," replied Redclyffe, "and, I presume, not one of them ever dreamed
+of coming hither when he started in life. The only one with whom I am
+acquainted could hardly have expected it, at all events."
+
+"He is a remarkable man, more so than you may have had an opportunity
+of knowing," said the Warden. "I know not his history, for he is not
+communicative on that subject, and it was only necessary for him to
+make out his proofs of claim to the charity to the satisfaction of the
+Curators. But it has often struck me that there must have been strange
+and striking events in his life,--though how it could have been without
+his attracting attention and being known, I cannot say. I have myself
+often received good counsel from him in the conduct of the Hospital, and
+the present owner of the Hall seems to have taken him for his counsellor
+and confidant, being himself strange to English affairs and life."
+
+"I should like to call on him, as a matter of course rather than
+courtesy," observed Redclyffe, "and thank him for his great kindness."
+
+They accordingly ascended the dark oaken staircase with its black
+balustrade, and approached the old man's chamber, the door of which they
+found open, and in the blurred looking-glass which hung deep within the
+room Redclyffe was surprised to perceive the young face of a woman, who
+seemed to be arranging her head-gear, as women are always doing. It was
+but a moment, and then it vanished like a vision.
+
+"I was not aware," he said, turning to the Warden, "that there was a
+feminine side to this establishment."
+
+"Nor is there," said the old bachelor, "else it would not have held
+together so many ages as it has. The establishment has its own wise,
+monkish regulations; but we cannot prevent the fact, that some of the
+brethren may have had foolish relations with the other sex at some
+previous period of their lives. This seems to be the case with our wise
+old friend of whom we have been speaking,--whereby he doubtless became
+both wiser and sadder. If you have seen a female face here, it is that
+of a relative who resides out of the hospital,--an excellent young lady,
+I believe, who has charge of a school."
+
+While he was speaking, the young lady in question passed out, greeting
+the Warden in a cheerful, respectful way, in which deference to him was
+well combined with a sense of what was due to herself.
+
+"That," observed the Warden, who had returned her courtesy, with
+a kindly air betwixt that of gentlemanly courtesy and a superior's
+acknowledgment,--"that is the relative of our old friend; a young
+person--a gentlewoman, I may almost call her--who teaches a little
+school in the village here, and keeps her guardian's heart warm, no
+doubt, with her presence. An excellent young woman, I do believe, and
+very useful and faithful in her station."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+
+On entering the old palmer's apartment, they found him looking over some
+ancient papers, yellow and crabbedly written, and on one of them a large
+old seal, all of which he did up in a bundle and enclosed in a parchment
+cover, so that, before they were well in the room, the documents were
+removed from view.
+
+"Those papers and parchments have a fine old yellow tint, Colcord," said
+the Warden, "very satisfactory to an antiquary."
+
+"There is nothing in them," said the old man, "of general interest. Some
+old papers they are, which came into my possession by inheritance, and
+some of them relating to the affairs of a friend of my youth;--a long
+past time, and a long past friend," added he, sighing.
+
+"Here is a new friend, at all events," said the kindly Warden, wishing
+to cheer the old man, "who feels himself greatly indebted to you for
+your care." [Endnote: 1.]
+
+There now ensued a conversation between the three, in the course of
+which reference was made to America, and the Warden's visit there.
+
+"You are so mobile," he said, "you change so speedily, that I suppose
+there are few external things now that I should recognize. The face of
+your country changes like one of your own sheets of water, under the
+influence of sun, cloud, and wind; but I suppose there is a depth below
+that is seldom effectually stirred. It is a great fault of the country
+that its sons find it impossible to feel any patriotism for it."
+
+"I do not by any means acknowledge that impossibility," responded
+Redclyffe, with a smile. "I certainly feel that sentiment very strongly
+in my own breast, more especially since I have left America three
+thousand miles behind me."
+
+"Yes, it is only the feeling of self-assertion that rises against the
+self-complacency of the English," said the Warden. "Nothing else;
+for what else have you become the subject of this noble weakness of
+patriotism? You cannot love anything beyond the soil of your own estate;
+or in your case, if your heart is very large, you may possibly take in,
+in a quiet sort of way, the whole of New England. What more is possible?
+How can you feel a heart's love for a mere political arrangement, like
+your Union? How can you be loyal, where personal attachment--the lofty
+and noble and unselfish attachment of a subject to his prince--is out
+of the question? where your sovereign is felt to be a mere man like
+yourselves, whose petty struggles, whose ambition--mean before it grew
+to be audacious--you have watched, and know him to be just the same now
+as yesterday, and that to-morrow he will be walking unhonored amongst
+you again? Your system is too bare and meagre for human nature to love,
+or to endure it long. These stately degrees of society, that have
+so strong a hold upon us in England, are not to be done away with so
+lightly as you think. Your experiment is not yet a success by any means;
+and you will live to see it result otherwise than you think!"
+
+"It is natural for you Englishmen to feel thus," said Redclyffe;
+"although, ever since I set my foot on your shores,--forgive me, but
+you set me the example of free speech,--I have had a feeling of coming
+change among all that you look upon as so permanent, so everlasting; and
+though your thoughts dwell fondly on things as they are and have
+been, there is a deep destruction somewhere in this country, that is
+inevitably impelling it in the path of my own. But I care not for this.
+I do aver that I love my country, that I am proud of its institutions,
+that I have a feeling unknown, probably, to any but a republican, but
+which is the proudest thing in me, that there is no man above me,--for
+my ruler is only myself, in the person of another, whose office I impose
+upon him,--nor any below me. If you would understand me, I would tell
+you of the shame I felt when first, on setting foot in this country,
+I heard a man speaking of his birth as giving him privileges; saw him
+looking down on laboring men, as of an inferior race. And what I can
+never understand, is the pride which you positively seem to feel in
+having men and classes of men above you, born to privileges which you
+can never hope to share. It may be a thing to be endured, but surely not
+one to be absolutely proud of. And yet an Englishman is so."
+
+"Ah! I see we lack a ground to meet upon," said the Warden. "We can
+never truly understand each other. What you have last mentioned is one
+of our inner mysteries. It is not a thing to be reasoned about, but
+to be felt,--to be born within one; and I uphold it to be a generous
+sentiment, and good for the human heart."
+
+"Forgive me, sir," said Redclyffe, "but I would rather be the poorest
+and lowest man in America than have that sentiment."
+
+"But it might change your feeling, perhaps," suggested the Warden, "if
+you were one of the privileged class."
+
+"I dare not say that it would not," said Redclyffe, "for I know I have
+a thousand weaknesses, and have doubtless as many more that I never
+suspected myself of. But it seems to me at this moment impossible that I
+should ever have such an ambition, because I have a sense of meanness
+in not starting fair, in beginning the world with advantages that my
+fellows have not."
+
+"Really this is not wise," said the Warden, bluntly, "How can the start
+in life be fair for all? Providence arranges it otherwise. Did you
+yourself,--a gentleman evidently by birth and education,--did you start
+fair in the race of life?"
+
+Redclyffe remembered what his birth, or rather what his first
+recollected place had been, and reddened.
+
+"In birth, certainly, I had no advantages," said he, and would have
+explained further but was kept back by invincible reluctance; feeling
+that the bare fact of his origin in an almshouse would be accepted,
+while all the inward assurances and imaginations that had reconciled
+himself to the ugly fact would go for nothing. "But there were
+advantages, very early in life," added he, smiling, "which perhaps I
+ought to have been ashamed to avail myself of."
+
+"An old cobwebby library,--an old dwelling by a graveyard,--an old
+Doctor, busied with his own fantasies, and entangled in his own
+cobwebs,--and a little girl for a playmate: these were things that you
+might lawfully avail yourself of," said Colcord, unheard by the Warden,
+who, thinking the conversation had lasted long enough, had paid a slight
+passing courtesy to the old man, and was now leaving the room. "Do you
+remain here long?" he added.
+
+"If the Warden's hospitality holds out," said the American, "I shall be
+glad; for the place interests me greatly."
+
+"No wonder," replied Colcord.
+
+"And wherefore no wonder?" said Redclyffe, impressed with the idea that
+there was something peculiar in the tone of the old man's remark.
+
+"Because," returned the other quietly, "it must be to you especially
+interesting to see an institution of this kind, whereby one man's
+benevolence or penitence is made to take the substance and durability of
+stone, and last for centuries; whereas, in America, the solemn decrees
+and resolutions of millions melt away like vapor, and everything shifts
+like the pomp of sunset clouds; though it may be as pompous as they.
+Heaven intended the past as a foundation for the present, to keep it
+from vibrating and being blown away with every breeze."
+
+"But," said Redclyffe, "I would not see in my country what I see
+elsewhere,--the Past hanging like a mill-stone round a country's neck,
+or encrusted in stony layers over the living form; so that, to all
+intents and purposes, it is dead."
+
+"Well," said Colcord, "we are only talking of the Hospital. You will
+find no more interesting place anywhere. Stay amongst us; this is the
+very heart of England, and if you wish to know the fatherland,--the
+place whence you sprung,--this is the very spot!"
+
+Again Redclyffe was struck with the impression that there was something
+marked, something individually addressed to himself, in the old man's
+words; at any rate, it appealed to that primal imaginative vein in him
+which had so often, in his own country, allowed itself to dream over
+the possibilities of his birth. He knew that the feeling was a vague and
+idle one; but yet, just at this time, a convalescent, with a little
+play moment in what had heretofore been a turbulent life, he felt an
+inclination to follow out this dream, and let it sport with him, and by
+and by to awake to realities, refreshed by a season of unreality. At
+a firmer and stronger period of his life, though Redclyffe might have
+indulged his imagination with these dreams, yet he would not have let
+them interfere with his course of action; but having come hither in
+utter weariness of active life, it seemed just the thing for him to
+do,--just the fool's paradise for him to be in.
+
+"Yes," repeated the old man, looking keenly in his face, "you will not
+leave us yet."
+
+Redclyffe returned through the quadrangle to the Warden's house; and
+there were the brethren, sitting on benches, loitering in the sun,
+which, though warm for England, seemed scarcely enough to keep these old
+people warm, even with their cloth robes. They did not seem unhappy; nor
+yet happy; if they were so, it must be with the mere bliss of existence,
+a sleepy sense of comfort, and quiet dreaminess about things past,
+leaving out the things to come,--of which there was nothing, indeed, in
+their future, save one day after another, just like this, with loaf and
+ale, and such substantial comforts, and prayers, and idle days again,
+gathering by the great kitchen fire, and at last a day when they should
+not be there, but some other old men in their stead. And Redclyffe
+wondered whether, in the extremity of age, he himself would like to be
+one of the brethren of the Leopard's Head. The old men, he was sorry
+to see, did not seem very genial towards one another; in fact, there
+appeared to be a secret enjoyment of one another's infirmities,
+wherefore it was hard to tell, unless that each individual might fancy
+himself to possess an advantage over his fellow, which he mistook for a
+positive strength; and so there was sometimes a sardonic smile, when,
+on rising from his seat, the rheumatism was a little evident in an old
+fellow's joints; or when the palsy shook another's fingers so that he
+could barely fill his pipe; or when a cough, the gathered spasmodic
+trouble of thirty years, fairly convulsed another. Then, any two that
+happened to be sitting near one another looked into each other's cold
+eyes, and whispered, or suggested merely by a look (for they were bright
+to such perceptions), "The old fellow will not outlast another winter."
+
+Methinks it is not good for old men to be much together. An old man is
+a beautiful object in his own place, in the midst of a circle of young
+people, going down in various gradations to infancy, and all looking up
+to the patriarch with filial reverence, keeping him warm by their own
+burning youth; giving him the freshness of their thought and feeling,
+with such natural influx that it seems as if it grew within his heart;
+while on them he reacts with an influence that sobers, tempers, keeps
+them down. His wisdom, very probably, is of no great account,--he cannot
+fit to any new state of things; but, nevertheless, it works its effect.
+In such a situation, the old man is kind and genial, mellow, more gentle
+and generous, and wider-minded than ever before. But if left to himself,
+or wholly to the society of his contemporaries, the ice gathers about
+his heart, his hope grows torpid, his love--having nothing of his own
+blood to develop it--grows cold; he becomes selfish, when he has nothing
+in the present or the future worth caring about in himself; so that,
+instead of a beautiful object, he is an ugly one, little, mean, and
+torpid. I suppose one chief reason to be, that unless he has his own
+race about him he doubts of anybody's love, he feels himself a stranger
+in the world, and so becomes unamiable.
+
+A very few days in the Warden's hospitable mansion produced an excellent
+effect on Redclyffe's frame; his constitution being naturally excellent,
+and a flow of cheerful spirits contributing much to restore him to
+health, especially as the abode in this old place, which would probably
+have been intolerably dull to most young Englishmen, had for this young
+American a charm like the freshness of Paradise. In truth it had that
+charm, and besides it another intangible, evanescent, perplexing charm,
+full of an airy enjoyment, as if he had been here before. What could it
+be? It could be only the old, very deepest, inherent nature, which the
+Englishman, his progenitor, carried over the sea with him, nearly two
+hundred years before, and which had lain buried all that time under
+heaps of new things, new customs, new institutions, new snows of winter,
+new layers of forest leaves, until it seemed dead, and was altogether
+forgotten as if it had never been; but, now, his return had seemed to
+dissolve or dig away all this incrustation, and the old English nature
+awoke all fresh, so that he saw the green grass, the hedgerows, the old
+structures and old manners, the old clouds, the old raindrops, with
+a recognition, and yet a newness. Redclyffe had never been so quietly
+happy as now. He had, as it were, the quietude of the old man about him,
+and the freshness of his own still youthful years.
+
+The Warden was evidently very favorably impressed with his Transatlantic
+guest, and he seemed to be in a constant state of surprise to find an
+American so agreeable a kind of person.
+
+"You are just like an Englishman," he sometimes said. "Are you quite
+sure that you were not born on this side of the water?"
+
+This is said to be the highest compliment that an Englishman can pay
+to an American; and doubtless he intends it as such. All the praise
+and good will that an Englishman ever awards to an American is so far
+gratifying to the recipient, that it is meant for him individually, and
+is not to be put down in the slightest degree to the score of any regard
+to his countrymen generally. So far from this, if an Englishman were to
+meet the whole thirty millions of Americans, and find each individual
+of them a pleasant, amiable, well-meaning, and well-mannered sort of
+fellow, he would acknowledge this honestly in each individual case, but
+still would speak of the whole nation as a disagreeable people.
+
+As regards Redclyffe being precisely like an Englishman, we cannot but
+think that the good Warden was mistaken. No doubt, there was a common
+ground; the old progenitor (whose blood, moreover, was mixed with a
+hundred other streams equally English) was still there, under this young
+man's shape, but with a vast difference. Climate, sun, cold, heat, soil,
+institutions, had made a change in him before he was born, and all the
+life that he had lived since (so unlike any that he could have lived
+in England) had developed it more strikingly. In manners, I cannot
+but think that he was better than the generality of Englishmen, and
+different from the highest-mannered men, though most resembling them.
+His natural sensitiveness, a tincture of reserve, had been counteracted
+by the frank mixture with men which his political course had made
+necessary; he was quicker to feel what was right at the moment, than
+the Englishman; more alive; he had a finer grain; his look was more
+aristocratic than that of a thousand Englishmen of good birth and
+breeding; he had a faculty of assimilating himself to new manners,
+which, being his most un-English trait, was what perhaps chiefly made
+the Warden think him so like an Englishman. When an Englishman is a
+gentleman, to be sure, it is as deep in him as the marrow of his bones,
+and the deeper you know him, the more you are aware of it, and that
+generation after generation has contributed to develop and perfect these
+unpretending manners, which, at first, may have failed to impress you,
+under his plain, almost homely exterior. An American often gets as good
+a surface of manners, in his own progress from youth, through the wear
+and attrition of a successful life, to some high station in middle age;
+whereas a plebeian Englishman, who rises to eminent station, never
+does credit to it by his manners. Often you would not know the American
+ambassador from a duke. This is often merely external; but in Redclyffe,
+having delicate original traits in his character, it was something more;
+and, we are bold to say, when our countrymen are developed, or any one
+class of them, as they ought to be, they will show finer traits than
+have yet been seen. We have more delicate and quicker sensibilities;
+nerves more easily impressed; and these are surely requisites for
+perfect manners; and, moreover, the courtesy that proceeds on the
+ground of perfect equality is better than that which is a gracious
+and benignant condescension,--as is the case with the manners of the
+aristocracy of England.
+
+An American, be it said, seldom turns his best side outermost abroad;
+and an observer, who has had much opportunity of seeing the figure which
+they make, in a foreign country, does not so much wonder that there
+should be severe criticism on their manners as a people. I know not
+exactly why, but all our imputed peculiarities--our nasal pronunciation,
+our ungraceful idioms, our forthputtingness, our uncouth lack of
+courtesy--do really seem to exist on a foreign shore; and even, perhaps,
+to be heightened of malice prepense. The cold, unbelieving eye of
+Englishmen, expectant of solecisms in manners, contributes to produce
+the result which it looks for. Then the feeling of hostility and
+defiance in the American must be allowed for; and partly, too, the real
+existence of a different code of manners, founded on, and arising from,
+different institutions; and also certain national peculiarities,
+which may be intrinsically as good as English peculiarities; but being
+different, and yet the whole result being just too nearly alike, and,
+moreover, the English manners having the prestige of long establishment,
+and furthermore our own manners being in a transition state between
+those of old monarchies and what is proper to a new republic,--it
+necessarily followed that the American, though really a man of
+refinement and delicacy, is not just the kind of gentleman that the
+English can fully appreciate. In cases where they do so, their
+standard being different from ours, they do not always select for their
+approbation the kind of man or manners whom we should judge the best;
+we are perhaps apt to be a little too fine, a little too sedulously
+polished, and of course too conscious of it,--a deadly social crime,
+certainly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+
+To return from this long discussion, the Warden took kindly, as we have
+said, to Redclyffe, and thought him a miraculously good fellow, to have
+come from the rude American republic. Hitherto, in the little time
+that he had been in England, Redclyffe had received civil and even kind
+treatment from the English with whom he had come casually in contact;
+but still--perhaps partly from our Yankee narrowness and reserve--he
+had felt, in the closest coming together, as if there were a naked sword
+between the Englishman and him, as between the Arabian prince in the
+tale and the princess whom he wedded; he felt as if that would be the
+case even if he should love an Englishwoman; to such a distance, into
+such an attitude of self-defence, does English self-complacency and
+belief in England's superiority throw the stranger. In fact, in a
+good-natured way, John Bull is always doubling his fist in a stranger's
+face, and though it be good-natured, it does not always produce the most
+amiable feeling.
+
+The worthy Warden, being an Englishman, had doubtless the same kind of
+feeling; doubtless, too, he thought ours a poor, distracted country,
+perhaps prosperous for the moment, but as likely as not to be the scene
+of anarchy five minutes hence; but being of so genial a nature, when he
+came to see the amiableness of his young guest, and how deeply he was
+impressed with England, all prejudice died away, and he loved him like a
+treasure that he had found for himself, and valued him as if there were
+something of his own in him. And so the old Warden's residence had never
+before been so cheery as it was now; his bachelor life passed the more
+pleasantly with this quiet, vivacious, yet not troublesomely restless
+spirit beside him,--this eager, almost childish interest in everything
+English, and yet this capacity to take independent views of things,
+and sometimes, it might be, to throw a gleam of light even on things
+appertaining to England. And so, the better they came to know one
+another, the greater was their mutual liking.
+
+"I fear I am getting too strong to burden you much longer," said
+Redclyffe, this morning. "I have no pretence to be a patient now."
+
+"Pooh! nonsense!" ejaculated the Warden. "It will not be safe to leave
+you to yourself for at least a month to come. And I have half a dozen
+excursions in a neighborhood of twenty miles, in which I mean to show
+you what old England is, in a way that you would never find out for
+yourself. Do not speak of going. This day, if you find yourself strong
+enough, you shall go and look at an old village church."
+
+"With all my heart," said Redclyffe.
+
+They went, accordingly, walking slowly, in consequence of Redclyffe's
+yet imperfect strength, along the highroad, which was overshadowed
+with elms, that grew in beautiful shape and luxuriance in that part
+of England, not with the slender, drooping, picturesque grace of a New
+England elm, but more luxuriant, fuller of leaves, sturdier in limb. It
+was a day which the Warden called fine, and which Redclyffe, at home,
+would have thought to bode rain; though here he had learned that such
+weather might continue for weeks together, with only a few raindrops all
+the time. The road was in the finest condition, hard and dry.
+
+They had not long emerged from the gateway of the Hospital,--at the
+venerable front and gables of which Redclyffe turned to look with a
+feeling as if it were his home,--when they heard the clatter of hoofs
+behind them, and a gentleman on horseback rode by, paying a courteous
+salute to the Warden as he passed. A groom in livery followed at a
+little distance, and both rode roundly towards the village, whither the
+Warden and his friend were going.
+
+"Did you observe that man?" asked the Warden.
+
+"Yes," said Redclyffe. "Is he an Englishman?"
+
+"That is a pertinent question," replied the Warden, "but I scarcely know
+how to answer it."
+
+In truth, Redclyffe's question had been suggested by the appearance of
+the mounted gentleman, who was a dark, thin man, with black hair, and a
+black moustache and pointed beard setting off his sallow face, in
+which the eyes had a certain pointed steeliness, which did not look
+English,--whose eyes, methinks, are usually not so hard as those of
+Americans or foreigners. Redclyffe, somehow or other, had fancied that
+these not very pleasant eyes had been fixed in a marked way on himself,
+a stranger, while at the same time his salute was evidently directed
+towards the Warden.
+
+"An Englishman,--why, no," continued the latter. "If you observe, he
+does not even sit his horse like an Englishman, but in that absurd,
+stiff continental way, as if a poker should get on horseback. Neither
+has he an English face, English manners, nor English religion, nor
+an English heart; nor, to sum up the whole, had he English birth.
+Nevertheless, as fate would have it, he is the inheritor of a good old
+English name, a fine patrimonial estate, and a very probable claim to an
+old English title. This is Lord Braithwaite of Braithwaite Hall, who if
+he can make his case good (and they say there is good prospect of it)
+will soon be Lord Hinchbrooke."
+
+"I hardly know why, but I should be sorry for it," said Redclyffe. "He
+certainly is not English; and I have an odd sort of sympathy, which
+makes me unwilling that English honors should be enjoyed by foreigners.
+This, then, is the gentleman of Italian birth whom you have mentioned to
+me, and of whom there is a slight mention in the County History."
+
+"Yes," said the Warden. "There have been three descents of this
+man's branch in Italy, and only one English mother in all that time.
+Positively, I do not see an English trait in his face, and as little
+in his manner. His civility is Italian, such as oftentimes, among his
+countrymen, has offered a cup of poison to a guest, or insinuated the
+stab of a stiletto into his heart."
+
+"You are particularly bitter against this poor man," said Redclyffe,
+laughing at the Warden's vehemence. "His appearance--and yet he is
+a handsome man--is certainly not prepossessing; but unless it be
+countersigned by something in his actual life, I should hardly think it
+worth while to condemn him utterly."
+
+"Well, well; you can forgive a little English prejudice," said the
+Warden, a little ashamed. "But, in good earnest, the man has few or no
+good traits, takes no interest in the country, dislikes our sky, our
+earth, our people, is close and inhospitable, a hard landlord, and
+whatever may be his good qualities, they are not such as flourish in
+this soil and climate, or can be appreciated here." [Endnote: 1.]
+
+"Has he children?" asked Redclyffe.
+
+"They say so,--a family by an Italian wife, whom some, on the other
+hand, pronounce to be no wife at all. His son is at a Catholic college
+in France; his daughter in a convent there."
+
+In talk like this they were drawing near the little rustic village
+of Braithwaite, and saw, above a cloud of foliage, the small, low,
+battlemented tower, the gray stones of which had probably been laid
+a little after the Norman conquest. Approaching nearer, they passed
+a thatched cottage or two, very plain and simple edifices, though
+interesting to Redclyffe from their antique aspect, which denoted that
+they were probably older than the settlement of his own country, and
+might very likely have nursed children who had gone, more than two
+centuries ago, to found the commonwealth of which he was a citizen. If
+you considered them in one way, prosaically, they were ugly enough; but
+then there were the old latticed windows, and there the thatch, which
+was verdant with leek, and strange weeds, possessing a whole botanical
+growth. And birds flew in and out, as if they had their homes there.
+Then came a row of similar cottages, all joined on together, and each
+with a little garden before it divided from its neighbors by a hedge,
+now in full verdure. Redclyffe was glad to see some symptoms of natural
+love of beauty here, for there were plants of box, cut into queer
+shapes of birds, peacocks, etc., as if year after year had been spent
+in bringing these vegetable sculptures to perfection. In one of the
+gardens, moreover, the ingenious inhabitant had spent his leisure in
+building grotto-work, of which the English are rather ludicrously fond,
+on their little bits of lawn, and in building a miniature castle of
+oyster-shells, where were seen turrets, ramparts, a frowning arched
+gateway, and miniature cannon looking from the embrasures. A pleasanter
+and better adornment were the homely household flowers, and a pleasant
+sound, too, was the hum of bees, who had their home in several beehives,
+and were making their honey among the flowers of the garden, or come
+from afar, buzzing dreamily through the air, laden with honey that they
+had found elsewhere. Fruit trees stood erect, or, in some instances,
+were flattened out against the walls of cottages, looking somewhat like
+hawks nailed _in terrorem_ against a barn door. The male members of this
+little community were probably afield, with the exception of one or two
+half-torpid great-grandsires, who [were] moving rheumatically about the
+gardens, and some children not yet in breeches, who stared with stolid
+eyes at the passers-by; but the good dames were busy within doors, where
+Redclyffe had glimpses of their interior with its pavement of stone
+flags. Altogether it seemed a comfortable settlement enough.
+
+"Do you see that child yonder," observed the Warden, "creeping away from
+the door, and displaying a vista of his petticoats as he does so? That
+sturdy boy is the lineal heir of one of the oldest families in this part
+of England,--though now decayed and fallen, as you may judge. So, you
+see, with all our contrivances to keep up an aristocracy, there still is
+change forever going on."
+
+"There is something not agreeable, and something otherwise, in the
+thought," replied Redclyffe. "What is the name of the old family, whose
+representative is in such a case?"
+
+"Moseby," said the Warden. "Their family residence stood within three
+miles of Braithwaite Hall, but was taken down in the last century,
+and its place supplied by a grand show-place, built by a Birmingham
+manufacturer, who also originated here."
+
+They kept onward from this outskirt of the village, and soon, passing
+over a little rising ground, and descending now into a hollow came to
+the new portion of it, clustered around its gray Norman church, one side
+of the tower of which was covered with ivy, that was carefully kept, the
+Warden said, from climbing to the battlements, on account of some
+old prophecy that foretold that the tower would fall, if ever the ivy
+mantled over its top. Certainly, however, there seemed little likelihood
+that the square, low mass would fall, unless by external violence, in
+less than as many ages as it had already stood.
+
+Redclyffe looked at the old tower and little adjoining edifice with an
+interest that attached itself to every separate, moss-grown stone; but
+the Warden, like most Englishmen, was at once amazed and wearied with
+the American's enthusiasm for this spot, which to him was uninteresting
+for the very reason that made it most interesting to Redclyffe, because
+it had stood there such a weary while. It was too common an object to
+excite in his mind, as it did in Redclyffe's, visions of the long
+ago time when it was founded, when mass was first said there, and the
+glimmer of torches at the altar was seen through the vista of that
+broad-browed porch; and of all the procession of villagers that had
+since gone in and come out during nine hundred years, in their varying
+costume and fashion, but yet--and this was the strongest and most
+thrilling part of the idea--all, the very oldest of them, bearing a
+resemblance of feature, the kindred, the family likeness, to those who
+died yesterday,--to those who still went thither to worship; and that
+all the grassy and half-obliterated graves around had held those who
+bore the same traits.
+
+In front of the church was a little green, on which stood a very ancient
+yew tree, [Endnote: 2] all the heart of which seemed to have been eaten
+away by time, so that a man could now creep into the trunk, through a
+wide opening, and, looking upward, see another opening to the sky.
+
+"That tree," observed the Warden, "is well worth the notice of such an
+enthusiastic lover of old things; though I suppose aged trees may be
+the one antiquity that you do not value, having them by myriads in your
+primeval forests. But then the interest of this tree consists greatly
+in what your trees have not,--in its long connection with men and the
+goings of men. Some of its companions were made into bows for Harold's
+archers. This tree is of unreckonable antiquity; so old, that in
+a record of the time of Edward IV. it is styled the yew tree of
+Braithwaite Green. That carries it back to Norman times, truly. It was
+in comparatively modern times when it served as a gallows for one of
+James II.'s bloodthirsty judges to hang his victims on after Monmouth's
+rebellion."
+
+On one side of this yew was a certain structure which Redclyffe did
+not recognize as anything that he had before seen, but soon guessed
+its purpose; though, from appearances, it seemed to have been very
+long since it had served that purpose. It was a ponderous old oaken
+framework, six or seven feet high, so contrived that a heavy cross-piece
+shut down over another, leaving two round holes; in short, it was a pair
+of stocks, in which, I suppose, hundreds of vagrants and petty criminals
+had sat of old, but which now appeared to be merely a matter of
+curiosity.
+
+"This excellent old machine," said the Warden, "had been lying in a
+rubbish chamber of the church tower for at least a century; when the
+clerk, who is a little of an antiquarian, unearthed it, and I advised
+him to set it here, where it used to stand;--not with any idea of its
+being used (though there is as much need of it now as ever), but that
+the present age may see what comforts it has lost."
+
+They sat down a few moments on the circular seat, and looked at the
+pretty scene of this quiet little village, clustered round the old
+church as a centre; a collection of houses, mostly thatched, though
+there were one or two, with rather more pretension, that had roofs of
+red tiles. Some of them were stone cottages, whitewashed, but the larger
+edifices had timber frames, filled in with brick and plaster, which
+seemed to have been renewed in patches, and to be a frailer and less
+durable material than the old oak of their skeletons. They were gabled,
+with lattice windows, and picturesquely set off with projecting
+stones, and many little patchwork additions, such as, in the course of
+generations, the inhabitants had found themselves to need. There was not
+much commerce, apparently, in this little village, there seeming to be
+only one shop, with some gingerbread, penny whistles, ballads, and such
+matters, displayed in the window; and there, too, across the little
+green, opposite the church, was the village alehouse, with its bench
+under the low projecting eaves, with a Teniers scene of two wayfaring
+yeomen drinking a pot of beer and smoking their pipes.
+
+With Redclyffe's Yankee feelings, there was something sad to think how
+the generations had succeeded one another, over and over, in innumerable
+succession, in this little spot, being born here, living, dying, lying
+down among their fathers' dust, and forthwith getting up again, as it
+were, and recommencing the same meaningless round, and really bringing
+nothing to pass; for probably the generation of to-day, in so secluded
+and motionless a place as this, had few or no ideas in advance of their
+ancestors of five centuries ago. It seems not worth while that more than
+one generation of them should have existed. Even in dress, with their
+smock frocks and breeches, they were just like their fathers. The
+stirring blood of the new land,--where no man dwells in his father's
+house,--where no man thinks of dying in his birthplace,--awoke within
+him, and revolted at the thought; and, as connected with it, revolted at
+all the hereditary pretensions which, since his stay here, had exercised
+such an influence over the fanciful part of his nature. In another mood,
+the village might have seemed a picture of rural peace, which it would
+have been worth while to give up ambition to enjoy; now, as his warmer
+impulse stirred, it was a weariness to think of. The new American was
+stronger in him than the hereditary Englishman.
+
+"I should go mad of it!" exclaimed he aloud.
+
+He started up impulsively, to the amazement of his companion, who of
+course could not comprehend what seemed so to have stung his American
+friend. As they passed the tree, on the other side of its huge trunk,
+they saw a young woman, sitting on that side of it, and sketching,
+apparently, the church tower, with the old Elizabethan vicarage that
+stood near it, with a gate opening into the churchyard, and much
+embowered and ivy-hung.
+
+"Ah, Miss Cheltenham," said the Warden. "I am glad to see that you have
+taken the old church in hand, for it is one of the prettiest rustic
+churches in England, and as well worthy as any to be engraved on a sheet
+of note-paper or put into a portfolio. Will you let my friend and me see
+your sketch?"
+
+The Warden had made his request with rather more freedom than perhaps he
+would to a lady whom he considered on a level with himself, though with
+perfect respect, that being considered; and Redclyffe, looking at the
+person, saw that it was the same of whose face he had had a glimpse in
+the looking-glass, in the old palmer's chamber.
+
+"No, Doctor Hammond," said the young lady, with a respectful sort of
+frankness, "you must excuse me. I am no good artist, and am but jotting
+down the old church because I like it."
+
+"Well, well, as you please," said the Warden; and whispered aside to
+Redclyffe, "A girl's sketchbook is seldom worth looking at. But now,
+Miss Cheltenham, I am about to give my American friend here a lecture on
+gargoyles, and other peculiarities of sacred Gothic architecture; and
+if you will honor me with your attention, I should be glad to find my
+audience increased by one."
+
+So the young lady arose, and Redclyffe, considering the Warden's
+allusion to him as a sort of partial introduction, bowed to her, and she
+responded with a cold, reserved, yet not unpleasant sort of courtesy.
+They went towards the church porch, and, looking in at the old stone
+bench on each side of the interior, the Warden showed them the hacks
+of the swords of the Roundheads, when they took it by storm. Redclyffe,
+mindful of the old graveyard on the edge of which he had spent his
+childhood, began to look at this far more antique receptacle, expecting
+to find there many ancient tombstones, perhaps of contemporaries or
+predecessors of the founders of his country. In this, however, he was
+disappointed, at least in a great measure; for the persons buried in the
+churchyard were probably, for the most part, of a humble rank in life,
+such as were not so ambitious as to desire a monument of any kind, but
+were content to let their low earth-mounds subside into the level, where
+their memory had waxed so faint that none among the survivors could
+point out the spot, or cared any longer about knowing it; while in other
+cases, where a monument of red freestone, or even of hewn granite, had
+been erected, the English climate had forthwith set to work to gnaw away
+the inscriptions; so that in fifty years--in a time that would have left
+an American tombstone as fresh as if just cut--it was quite impossible
+to make out the record. Their superiors, meanwhile, were sleeping
+less enviably in dismal mouldy and dusty vaults, instead of under the
+daisies. Thus Redclyffe really found less antiquity here, than in the
+graveyard which might almost be called his natal spot.
+
+When he said something to this effect, the Warden nodded.
+
+"Yes," said he, "and, in truth, we have not much need of inscriptions
+for these poor people. All good families--every one almost, with
+any pretensions to respectable station, has his family or individual
+recognition within the church, or upon its walls; or some of them you
+see on tombs on the outside. As for our poorer friends here, they are
+content, as they may well be, to swell and subside, like little billows
+of mortality, here on the outside."
+
+"And for my part," said Redclyffe, "if there were anything particularly
+desirable on either side, I should like best to sleep under this lovely
+green turf, with the daisies strewn over me by Nature herself, and
+whatever other homely flowers any friend might choose to add."
+
+"And, Doctor Hammond," said the young woman, "we see by this gravestone
+that sometimes a person of humble rank may happen to be commemorated,
+and that Nature--in this instance at least--seems to take especial pains
+and pleasure to preserve the record."
+
+She indicated a flat gravestone, near the porch, which time had indeed
+beautified in a singular way, for there was cut deep into it a name and
+date, in old English characters, very deep it must originally have been;
+and as if in despair of obliterating it, Time had taken the kindlier
+method of filling up the letters with moss; so that now, high embossed
+in loveliest green, was seen the name "Richard Oglethorpe 1613";--green,
+and flourishing, and beautiful, like the memory of a good man. The
+inscription originally seemed to have contained some twenty lines, which
+might have been poetry, or perhaps a prose eulogy, or perhaps the simple
+record of the buried person's life; but all this, having been done
+in fainter and smaller letters, was now so far worn away as to be
+illegible; nor had they ever been deep enough to be made living in moss,
+like the rest of the inscription.
+
+"How tantalizing," remarked Redclyffe, "to see the verdant shine of this
+name, impressed upon us as something remarkable--and nothing else. I
+cannot but think that there must be something worth remembering about
+a man thus distinguished. When two hundred years have taken all these
+natural pains to illustrate and emblazon 'Richard Oglethorpe 1613.' Ha!
+I surely recollect that name. It haunts me somehow, as if it had been
+familiar of old."
+
+"And me," said the young lady.
+
+"It was an old name, hereabouts," observed the Warden, "but has been
+long extinct,--a cottage name, not a gentleman's. I doubt not that
+Oglethorpes sleep in many of these undistinguished graves."
+
+Redclyffe did not much attend to what his friend said, his attention
+being attracted to the tone--to something in the tone of the young lady,
+and also to her coincidence in his remark that the name appealed to some
+early recollection. He had been taxing his memory, to tell him when and
+how the name had become familiar to him; and he now remembered that it
+had occurred in the old Doctor's story of the Bloody Footstep, told to
+him and Elsie, so long ago. [Endnote: 3] To him and Elsie! It struck
+him--what if it were possible?--but he knew it was not--that the young
+lady had a remembrance also of the fact, and that she, after so many
+years, were mingling her thoughts with his. As this fancy recurred to
+him, he endeavored to get a glimpse of her face, and while he did so she
+turned it upon him. It was a quick, sensitive face, that did not seem
+altogether English; he would rather have imagined it American; but at
+all events he could not recognize it as one that he had seen before,
+and a thousand fantasies died within him as, in his momentary glance, he
+took in the volume of its contour.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+
+After the two friends had parted from the young lady, they passed
+through the village, and entered the park gate of Braithwaite Hall,
+pursuing a winding road through its beautiful scenery, which realized
+all that Redclyffe had read or dreamed about the perfect beauty of
+these sylvan creations, with the clumps of trees, or sylvan oaks,
+picturesquely disposed. To heighten the charm, they saw a herd of deer
+reposing, who, on their appearance, rose from their recumbent position,
+and began to gaze warily at the strangers; then, tossing their horns,
+they set off on a stampede, but only swept round, and settled down not
+far from where they were. Redclyffe looked with great interest at these
+deer, who were at once wild and civilized; retaining a kind of free
+forest citizenship, while yet they were in some sense subject to man. It
+seemed as if they were a link between wild nature and tame; as if they
+could look back, in their long recollections, through a vista, into the
+times when England's forests were as wild as those of America, though
+now they were but a degree more removed from domesticity than cattle,
+and took their food in winter from the hand of man, and in summer
+reposed upon his lawns. This seemed the last touch of that delightful
+conquered and regulated wildness, which English art has laid upon the
+whole growth of English nature, animal or vegetable.
+
+"There is nothing really wild in your whole island," he observed to the
+Warden. "I have a sensation as if somebody knew, and had cultivated and
+fostered, and set out in its proper place, every tree that grows; as if
+somebody had patted the heads of your wildest animals and played with
+them. It is very delightful to me, for the present; and yet, I think, in
+the course of time, I should feel the need for something genuine, as
+it were,--something that had not the touch and breath of man upon it. I
+suppose even your skies are modified by the modes of human life that are
+going on beneath it. London skies, of course, are so; but the breath of
+a great people, to say nothing of its furnace vapors and hearth-smokes,
+make the sky other than it was a thousand years ago."
+
+"I believe we English have a feeling like this occasionally," replied
+the Warden, "and it is from that, partly, that we must account for our
+adventurousness into other regions, especially for our interest in what
+is wild and new. In your own forests, now, and prairies, I fancy we find
+a charm that Americans do not. In the sea, too, and therefore we are
+yachters. For my part, however, I have grown to like Nature a little
+smoothed down, and enriched; less gaunt and wolfish than she would be if
+left to herself."
+
+"Yes; I feel that charm too," said Redclyffe. "But yet life would be
+slow and heavy, methinks, to see nothing but English parks."
+
+Continuing their course through the noble clumps of oaks, they by and
+by had a vista of the distant hall itself. It was one of the old English
+timber and plaster houses, many of which are of unknown antiquity; as
+was the case with a portion of this house, although other portions had
+been renewed, repaired, or added, within a century. It had, originally,
+the Warden said, stood all round an enclosed courtyard, like the great
+houses of the Continent; but now one side of the quadrangle had long
+been removed, and there was only a front, with two wings; the beams of
+old oak being picked out with black, and three or four gables in a line
+forming the front, while the wings seemed to be stone. It was the timber
+portion that was most ancient. A clock was on the midmost gable, and
+pointed now towards one o'clock. The whole scene impressed Redclyffe,
+not as striking, but as an abode of ancient peace, where generation
+after generation of the same family had lived, each making the most of
+life, because the life of each successive dweller there was eked out
+with the lives of all who had hitherto lived there, and had in it
+equally those lives which were to come afterwards; so that there was
+a rare and successful contrivance for giving length, fulness, body,
+substance, to this thin and frail matter of human life. And, as life was
+so rich in comprehensiveness, the dwellers there made the most of it for
+the present and future, each generation contriving what it could to add
+to the cosiness, the comfortableness, the grave, solid respectability,
+the sylvan beauty, of the house with which they seemed to be connected
+both before and after death. The family had its home there; not merely
+the individual. Ancient shapes, that had apparently gone to the family
+tomb, had yet a right by family hearth and in family hall; nor did they
+come thither cold and shivering, and diffusing dim ghostly terrors, and
+repulsive shrinkings, and death in life; but in warm, genial attributes,
+making this life now passing more dense as it were, by adding all the
+substance of their own to it. Redclyffe could not compare this abode,
+and the feelings that it aroused, to the houses of his own country; poor
+tents of a day, inns of a night, where nothing was certain, save that
+the family of him who built it would not dwell here, even if he himself
+should have the bliss to die under the roof, which, with absurdest
+anticipations, he had built for his posterity. Posterity! An American
+can have none.
+
+"All this sort of thing is beautiful; the family institution was
+beautiful in its day," ejaculated he, aloud, to himself, not to his
+companion; "but it is a thing of the past. It is dying out in England;
+and as for ourselves, we never had it. Something better will come up;
+but as for this, it is past."
+
+"That is a sad thing to say," observed the Warden, by no means
+comprehending what was passing in his friend's mind. "But if you wish
+to view the interior of the Hall, we will go thither; for, harshly as
+I have spoken of the owner, I suppose he has English feeling enough to
+give us lunch and show us the old house of his forefathers."
+
+"Not at present, if you please," replied Redclyffe. "I am afraid of
+destroying my delightful visionary idea of the house by coming too near
+it. Before I leave this part of the country, I should be glad to ramble
+over the whole of it, but not just now."
+
+While Redclyffe was still enjoying the frank hospitality of his new
+friend, a rather marked event occurred in his life; yet not so important
+in reality as it seemed to his English friend.
+
+A large letter was delivered to him, bearing the official seal of the
+United States, and the indorsement of the State Department; a very
+important-looking document, which could not but add to the importance of
+the recipient in the eyes of any Englishman, accustomed as they are
+to bow down before any seal of government. Redclyffe opened it rather
+coolly, being rather loath to renew any of his political remembrances,
+now that he was in peace; or to think of the turmoil of modern and
+democratic politics, here in this quietude of gone-by ages and customs.
+The contents, however, took him by surprise; nor did he know whether to
+be pleased or not.
+
+The official package, in short, contained an announcement that he had
+been appointed by the President, by and with the advice of the Senate,
+to one of the Continental missions, usually esteemed an object of
+considerable ambition to any young man in politics; so that, if
+consistent with his own pleasure, he was now one of the Diplomatic
+Corps, a Minister, and representative of his country. On first
+considering the matter, Redclyffe was inclined to doubt whether this
+honor had been obtained for him altogether by friendly aid, though it
+did happen to have much in it that might suit his half-formed purpose of
+remaining long abroad; but with an eye already rendered somewhat oblique
+by political practice, he suspected that a political rival--a rival,
+though of his own party--had been exerting himself to provide an
+inducement for Redclyffe to leave the local field to him; while he
+himself should take advantage of the vacant field, and his rival be thus
+insidiously, though honorably, laid on the shelf, whence if he should
+try to remove himself a few years hence the shifting influences of
+American politics would be likely enough to thwart him; so that, for the
+sake of being a few years nominally somebody, he might in fine come back
+to his own country and find himself permanently nobody. But Redclyffe
+had already sufficiently begun to suspect that he lacked some qualities
+that a politician ought to have, and without which a political life,
+whether successful or otherwise, is sure to be a most irksome one: some
+qualities he lacked, others he had, both almost equally an obstacle.
+When he communicated the offer, therefore, to his friend, the Warden, it
+was with the remark that he believed he should accept it.
+
+"Accept it?" cried the Warden, opening his eyes. "I should think so,
+indeed! Why, it puts you above the level of the highest nobility of
+the Court to which you are accredited; simple republican as you are, it
+gives you rank with the old blood and birth of Europe. Accept it? By all
+means; and I will come and see you at your court."
+
+"Nothing is more different between England and America," said Redclyffe,
+"than the different way in which the citizen of either country looks
+at official station. To an Englishman, a commission, of whatever kind,
+emanating from his sovereign, brings apparently a gratifying sense of
+honor; to an American, on the contrary, it offers really nothing of
+the kind. He ceases to be a sovereign,--an atom of sovereignty, at all
+events,--and stoops to be a servant. If I accept this mission, honorable
+as you think it, I assure you I shall not feel myself quite the man I
+have hitherto been; although there is no obstacle in the way of party
+obligations or connections to my taking it, if I please."
+
+"I do not well understand this," quoth the good Warden. "It is one of
+the promises of Scripture to the wise man, that he shall stand before
+kings, and that this embassy will enable you to do. No man--no man of
+your country surely--is more worthy to do so; so pray accept."
+
+"I think I shall," said Redclyffe.
+
+Much as the Warden had seemed to affectionize Redclyffe hitherto, the
+latter could not but be sensible, thereafter, of a certain deference in
+his friend towards him, which he would fain have got rid of, had it been
+in his power. However, there was still the same heartiness under it all;
+and after a little he seemed, in some degree, to take Redclyffe's
+own view of the matter;--namely, that, being so temporary as these
+republican distinctions are, they really do not go skin deep, have no
+reality in them, and that the sterling quality of the man, be it higher
+or lower, is nowise altered by it;--an apothegm that is true even of
+an hereditary nobility, and still more so of our own Honorables and
+Excellencies. However, the good Warden was glad of his friend's dignity,
+and perhaps, too, a little glad that this high fortune had befallen one
+whom he chanced to be entertaining under his roof. As it happened, there
+was an opportunity which might be taken advantage of to celebrate the
+occasion; at least, to make it known to the English world so far as the
+extent of the county. [Endnote: 1.]
+
+It was an hereditary custom for the warden of Braithwaite Hospital,
+once a year, to give a grand dinner to the nobility and gentry of the
+neighborhood; and to this end a bequest had been made by one of the
+former squires or lords of Braithwaite which would of itself suffice
+to feed forty or fifty Englishmen with reasonable sumptuousness. The
+present Warden, being a gentleman of private fortune, was accustomed to
+eke the limited income, devoted for this purpose, with such additions
+from his own resources as brought the rude and hearty hospitality
+contemplated by the first founder on a par with modern refinements of
+gourmandism. The banquet was annually given in the fine old hall where
+James II. had feasted; and on some of these occasions the Warden's table
+had been honored with illustrious guests; especially when any of them
+happened to be wanting an opportunity to come before the public in an
+after-dinner speech. Just at present there was no occasion of that sort;
+and the good Warden fancied that he might give considerable _eclat_ to
+his hereditary feast by bringing forward the young American envoy, a
+distinguished and eloquent man, to speak on the well-worn topic of the
+necessity of friendly relations between England and America.
+
+"You are eloquent, I doubt not, my young friend?" inquired he.
+
+"Why, no," answered Redclyffe, modestly.
+
+"Ah, yes, I know it," returned the Warden. "If one have all the natural
+prerequisites of eloquence; a quick sensibility, ready thought, apt
+expression, a good voice--and not making its way into the world through
+your nose either, as they say most of your countrymen's voices do. You
+shall make the crack speech at my dinner; and so strengthen the bonds
+of good fellowship between our two countries, that there shall be no
+question of war for at least six months to come."
+
+Accordingly, the preparations for this stately banquet went on with
+great spirit; and the Warden exhorted Redclyffe to be thinking of some
+good topics for his international speech; but the young man laughed it
+off, and told his friend that he thought the inspiration of the moment,
+aided by the good old wine which the Warden had told him of, as among
+the treasures of the Hospital, would perhaps serve him better than any
+elaborate preparation.
+
+Redclyffe, being not even yet strong, used to spend much time, when the
+day chanced to be pleasant, (which was oftener than his preconceptions
+of English weather led him to expect,) in the garden behind the Warden's
+house. It was an extensive one, and apparently as antique as the
+foundation of the establishment; and during all these years it had
+probably been growing richer and richer. Here were flowers of ancient
+race, and some that had been merely field or wayside flowers when first
+they came into the garden; but by long cultivation and hereditary care,
+instead of dying out, they had acquired a new richness and beauty, so
+that you would scarcely recognize the daisy or the violet. Roses too,
+there were, which Doctor Hammond said had been taken from those white
+and red rose-trees in the Temple Gardens, whence the partisans of York
+and Lancaster had plucked their fatal badges. With these, there were
+all the modern and far-fetched flowers from America, the East, and
+elsewhere; even the prairie flowers and the California blossoms were
+represented here; for one of the brethren had horticultural tastes, and
+was permitted freely to exercise them there. The antique character of
+the garden was preserved, likewise, by the alleys of box, a part of
+which had been suffered to remain, and was now grown to a great height
+and density, so as to make impervious green walls. There were also
+yew trees clipped into strange shapes of bird and beast, and uncouth
+heraldic figures, among which of course the leopard's head grinned
+triumphant; and as for fruit, the high garden wall was lined with pear
+trees, spread out flat against it, where they managed to produce a cold,
+flavorless fruit, a good deal akin to cucumbers.
+
+Here, in these genial old arbors, Redclyffe used to recline in the
+sweet, mild summer weather, basking in the sun, which was seldom too
+warm to make its full embrace uncomfortable; and it seemed to him, with
+its fertility, with its marks everywhere of the quiet long-bestowed care
+of man, the sweetest and cosiest seclusion he had ever known; and two
+or three times a day, when he heard the screech of the railway train,
+rushing on towards distant London, it impressed him still more with a
+sense of safe repose here.
+
+Not unfrequently he here met the white-bearded palmer in whose chamber
+he had found himself, as if conveyed thither by enchantment, when he
+first came to the Hospital. The old man was not by any means of
+the garrulous order; and yet he seemed full of thoughts, full of
+reminiscences, and not disinclined to the company of Redclyffe. In fact,
+the latter sometimes flattered himself that a tendency for his society
+was one of the motives that brought him to the garden; though the amount
+of their intercourse, after all, was not so great as to warrant the
+idea of any settled purpose in so doing. Nevertheless, they talked
+considerably; and Redclyffe could easily see that the old man had
+been an extensive traveller, and had perhaps occupied situations far
+different from his present one, and had perhaps been a struggler
+in troubled waters before he was drifted into the retirement where
+Redclyffe found him. He was fond of talking about the unsuspected
+relationship that must now be existing between many families in England
+and unknown consanguinity in the new world, where, perhaps, really the
+main stock of the family tree was now existing, and with a new spirit
+and life, which the representative growth here in England had lost by
+too long continuance in one air and one mode of life. For history and
+observation proved that all people--and the English people by no means
+less than others--needed to be transplanted, or somehow renewed, every
+few generations; so that, according to this ancient philosopher's
+theory, it would be good for the whole people of England now, if
+it could at once be transported to America, where its fatness, its
+sleepiness, its too great beefiness, its preponderant animal character,
+would be rectified by a different air and soil; and equally good, on the
+other hand, for the whole American people to be transplanted back to the
+original island, where their nervousness might be weighted with heavier
+influences, where their little women might grow bigger, where their
+thin, dry men might get a burden of flesh and good stomachs, where their
+children might, with the air, draw in a reverence for age, forms, and
+usage.
+
+Redclyffe listened with complacency to these speculations, smiling at
+the thought of such an exodus as would take place, and the reciprocal
+dissatisfaction which would probably be the result. But he had greater
+pleasure in drawing out some of the old gentleman's legendary lore, some
+of which, whether true or not, was very curious. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+As Redclyffe sat one day watching the old man in the garden, he could
+not help being struck by the scrupulous care with which he attended
+to the plants; it seemed to him that there was a sense of justice,--of
+desiring to do exactly what was right in the matter, not favoring one
+plant more than another, and doing all he could for each. His progress,
+in consequence, was so slow, that in an hour, while Redclyffe was off
+and on looking at him, he had scarcely done anything perceptible. Then
+he was so minute; and often, when he was on the point of leaving one
+thing to take up another, some small neglect that he saw or fancied
+called him back again, to spend other minutes on the same task. He
+was so full of scruples. It struck Redclyffe that this was conscience,
+morbid, sick, a despot in trifles, looking so closely into life that it
+permitted nothing to be done. The man might once have been strong and
+able, but by some unhealthy process of his life he had ceased to be so
+now. Nor did any happy or satisfactory result appear to come from these
+painfully wrought efforts; he still seemed to know that he had left
+something undone in doing too much in another direction. Here was a lily
+that had been neglected, while he paid too much attention to a rose; he
+had set his foot on a violet; he had grubbed up, in his haste, a little
+plant that he mistook for a weed, but that he now suspected was an herb
+of grace. Grieved by such reflections as these, he heaved a deep sigh,
+almost amounting to a groan, and sat down on the little stool that he
+carried with him in his weeding, resting his face in his hands.
+
+Redclyffe deemed that he might be doing the old man a good service by
+interrupting his melancholy labors; so he emerged from the opposite door
+of the summer-house, and came along the adjoining walk with somewhat
+heavy footsteps, in order that the palmer might have warning of his
+approach without any grounds to suppose that he had been watched
+hitherto. Accordingly, when he turned into the other alley, he found the
+old man sitting erect on his stool, looking composed, but still sad, as
+was his general custom.
+
+"After all your wanderings and experience," said he, "I observe that
+you come back to the original occupation of cultivating a garden,--the
+innocentest of all."
+
+"Yes, so it would seem," said the old man; "but somehow or other I do
+not find peace in this."
+
+"These plants and shrubs," returned Redclyffe, "seem at all events to
+recognize the goodness of your rule, so far as it has extended over
+them. See how joyfully they take the sun; how clear [they are] from all
+these vices that lie scattered round, in the shape of weeds. It is a
+lovely sight, and I could almost fancy a quiet enjoyment in the plants
+themselves, which they have no way of making us aware of, except by
+giving out a fragrance."
+
+"Ah! how infinitely would that idea increase man's responsibility," said
+the old palmer, "if, besides man and beast, we should find it necessary
+to believe that there is also another set of beings dependent for their
+happiness on our doing, or leaving undone, what might have effect on
+them!"
+
+"I question," said Redclyffe, smiling, "whether their pleasurable or
+painful experiences can be so keen, that we need trouble our consciences
+much with regard to what we do, merely as it affects them. So highly
+cultivated a conscience as that would be a nuisance to one's self and
+one's fellows."
+
+"You say a terrible thing," rejoined the old man. "Can conscience be too
+much alive in us? is not everything however trifling it seems, an item
+in the great account, which it is of infinite importance therefore to
+have right? A terrible thing is that you have said."
+
+"That may be," said Redclyffe; "but it is none the less certain to me,
+that the efficient actors--those who mould the world--are the persons
+in whom something else is developed more strongly than conscience. There
+must be an invincible determination to effect something; it may be
+set to work in the right direction, but after that it must go onward,
+trampling down small obstacles--small considerations of right and
+wrong--as a great rock, thundering down a hillside, crushes a thousand
+sweet flowers, and ploughs deep furrows in the innocent hillside."
+
+As Redclyffe gave vent to this doctrine, which was not naturally his,
+but which had been the inculcation of a life, hitherto devoted to
+politics, he was surprised to find how strongly sensible he became of
+the ugliness and indefensibleness of what he said. He felt as if he were
+speaking under the eye of Omniscience, and as if every word he said were
+weighed, and its emptiness detected, by an unfailing intelligence. He
+had thought that he had volumes to say about the necessity of consenting
+not to do right in all matters minutely, for the sake of getting out an
+available and valuable right as the whole; but there was something that
+seemed to tie his tongue. Could it be the quiet gaze of this old man,
+so unpretending, so humble, so simple in aspect? He could not tell, only
+that he faltered, and finally left his speech in the midst.
+
+But he was surprised to find how he had to struggle against a certain
+repulsion within himself to the old man. He seemed so nonsensical,
+interfering with everybody's right in the world; so mischievous,
+standing there and shutting out the possibility of action. It seemed
+well to trample him down; to put him out of the way--no matter
+how--somehow. It gave him, he thought, an inkling of the way in which
+this poor old man had made himself odious to his kind, by opposing
+himself, inevitably, to what was bad in man, chiding it by his very
+presence, accepting nothing false. You must either love him utterly,
+or hate him utterly; for he could not let you alone. Redclyffe, being a
+susceptible man, felt this influence in the strongest way; for it was
+as if there was a battle within him, one party pulling, wrenching him
+towards the old man, another wrenching him away, so that, by the agony
+of the contest, he felt disposed to end it by taking flight, and never
+seeing the strange individual again. He could well enough conceive how a
+brutal nature, if capable of receiving his influence at all, might find
+it so intolerable that it must needs get rid of him by violence,--by
+taking his blood if necessary.
+
+All these feelings were but transitory, however; they swept across him
+like a wind, and then he looked again at the old man and saw only his
+simplicity, his unworldliness,--saw little more than the worn and feeble
+individual in the Hospital garb, leaning on his staff; and then turning
+again with a gentle sigh to weed in the garden. And then Redclyffe
+went away, in a state of disturbance for which he could not account to
+himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+
+High up in the old carved roof, meanwhile, the spiders of centuries
+still hung their flaunting webs with a profusion that old Doctor
+Grimshawe would have been ravished to see; but even this was to be
+remedied, for one day, on looking in, Redclyffe found the great hall dim
+with floating dust, and down through it came great floating masses of
+cobweb, out of which the old Doctor would have undertaken to regenerate
+the world; and he saw, dimly aloft, men on ladders sweeping away these
+accumulations of years, and breaking up the haunts and residences of
+hereditary spiders.
+
+The stately old hall had been in process of cleaning and adapting to the
+banquet purposes of the nineteenth century, which it was accustomed
+to subserve, in so proud a way, in the sixteenth. It was, in the first
+place, well swept and cleansed; the painted glass windows were cleansed
+from dust, and several panes, which had been unfortunately broken and
+filled with common glass, were filled in with colored panes, which the
+Warden had picked up somewhere in his antiquarian researches. They were
+not, to be sure, just what was wanted; a piece of a saint, from some
+cathedral window, supplying what was lacking of the gorgeous purple of
+a mediaeval king; but the general effect was rich and good, whenever the
+misty English atmosphere supplied sunshine bright enough to pervade it.
+Tapestry, too, from antique looms, faded, but still gorgeous, was
+hung upon the walls. Some suits of armor, that hung beneath the festal
+gallery, were polished till the old battered helmets and pierced
+breastplates sent a gleam like that with which they had flashed across
+the battle-fields of old. [Endnote: 1.]
+
+So now the great day of the Warden's dinner had arrived; and, as may be
+supposed, there were fiery times in the venerable old kitchen. The cook,
+according to ancient custom, concocted many antique dishes, such as used
+to be set before kings and nobles; dainties that might have called the
+dead out of their graves; combinations of ingredients that had ceased
+to be put together for centuries; historic dishes, which had long, long
+ceased to be in the list of revels. Then there was the stalwart English
+cheer of the sirloin, and the round; there were the vast plum-puddings,
+the juicy mutton, the venison; there was the game, now just
+in season,--the half-tame wild fowl of English covers, the
+half-domesticated wild deer of English parks, the heathcock from
+the far-off hills of Scotland, and one little prairie hen, and some
+canvas-back ducks--obtained, Heaven knows how, in compliment to
+Redclyffe--from his native shores. O, the old jolly kitchen! how rich
+the flavored smoke that went up its vast chimney! how inestimable the
+atmosphere of steam that was diffused through it! How did the old men
+peep into it, even venture across the threshold, braving the hot wrath
+of the cook and his assistants, for the sake of imbuing themselves
+with these rich and delicate flavors, receiving them in as it were
+spiritually; for, received through the breath and in the atmosphere, it
+was really a spiritual enjoyment. The ghosts of ancient epicures seemed,
+on that day and the few preceding ones, to haunt the dim passages,
+snuffing in with shadowy nostrils the rich vapors, assuming visibility
+in the congenial medium, almost becoming earthly again in the strength
+of their earthly longings for one other feast such as they used to
+enjoy.
+
+Nor is it to be supposed that it was only these antique dainties that
+the Warden provided for his feast. No; if the cook, the cultured and
+recondite old cook, who had accumulated within himself all that his
+predecessors knew for centuries,--if he lacked anything of modern
+fashion and improvement, he had supplied his defect by temporary
+assistance from a London club; and the bill of fare was provided with
+dishes that Soyer would not have harshly criticised. The ethereal
+delicacy of modern taste, the nice adjustment of flowers, the French
+style of cookery, was richly attended to; and the list was long of
+dishes with fantastic names, fish, fowl, and flesh; and _entremets_, and
+"sweets," as the English call them, and sugared cates, too numerous to
+think of.
+
+The wines we will not take upon ourselves to enumerate; but the juice,
+then destined to be quaffed, was in part the precious vintages that had
+been broached half a century ago, and had been ripening ever since;
+the rich and dry old port, so unlovely to the natural palate that it
+requires long English seasoning to get it down; the sherry, imported
+before these modern days of adulteration; some claret, the Warden said
+of rarest vintage; some Burgundy, of which it was the quality to warm
+the blood and genialize existence for three days after it was drunk.
+Then there was a rich liquid contributed to this department by Redclyffe
+himself; for, some weeks since, when the banquet first loomed in the
+distance, he had (anxious to evince his sense of the Warden's kindness)
+sent across the ocean for some famous Madeira which he had inherited
+from the Doctor, and never tasted yet. This, together with some of the
+Western wines of America, had arrived, and was ready to be broached.
+
+The Warden tested these modern wines, and recognized a new flavor,
+but gave it only a moderate approbation; for, in truth, an elderly
+Englishman has not a wide appreciation of wines, nor loves new things
+in this kind more than in literature or life. But he tasted the Madeira,
+too, and underwent an ecstasy, which was only alleviated by the dread of
+gout, which he had an idea that this wine must bring on,--and truly,
+if it were so splendid a wine as he pronounced it, some pain ought to
+follow as the shadow of such a pleasure.
+
+As it was a festival of antique date, the dinner hour had been fixed
+earlier than is usual at such stately banquets; namely, at six o'clock,
+which was long before the dusky hour at which Englishmen love best to
+dine. About that period, the carriages drove into the old courtyard of
+the Hospital in great abundance; blocking up, too, the ancient portal,
+and remaining in a line outside. Carriages they were with armorial
+bearings, family coaches in which came Englishmen in their black coats
+and white neckcloths, elderly, white-headed, fresh-colored, squat; not
+beautiful, certainly, nor particularly dignified, nor very well dressed,
+nor with much of an imposing air, but yet, somehow or other, producing
+an effect of force, respectability, reliableness, trust, which is
+probably deserved, since it is invariably experienced. Cold they were
+in deportment, and looked coldly on the stranger, who, on his part, drew
+himself up with an extra haughtiness and reserve, and felt himself in
+the midst of his enemies, and more as if he were going to do battle
+than to sit down to a friendly banquet. The Warden introduced him, as an
+American diplomatist, to one or two of the gentlemen, who regarded him
+forbiddingly, as Englishmen do before dinner.
+
+Not long after Redclyffe had entered the reception-room, which was but
+shortly before the hour appointed for the dinner, there was another
+arrival betokened by the clatter of hoofs and grinding wheels in the
+courtyard; and then entered a gentleman of different mien from the
+bluff, ruddy, simple-minded, yet worldly Englishmen around him. He was a
+tall, dark man, with a black moustache and almost olive skin, a slender,
+lithe figure, a flexible face, quick, flashing, mobile. His deportment
+was graceful; his dress, though it seemed to differ in little or
+nothing from that of the gentlemen in the room, had yet a grace and
+picturesqueness in his mode of wearing it. He advanced to the Warden,
+who received him with distinction, and yet, Redclyffe fancied, not
+exactly with cordiality. It seemed to Redclyffe that the Warden looked
+round, as if with the purpose of presenting Redclyffe to this gentleman,
+but he himself, from some latent reluctance, had turned away and
+entered, into conversation with one of the other gentlemen, who said
+now, looking at the new-comer, "Are you acquainted with this last
+arrival?"
+
+"Not at all," said Redclyffe. "I know Lord Braithwaite by sight, indeed,
+but have had no introduction. He is a man, certainly, of distinguished
+appearance."
+
+"Why, pretty well," said the gentleman, "but un-English, as also are his
+manners. It is a pity to see an old English family represented by such
+a person. Neither he, his father, nor grandfather was born among us; he
+has far more Italian blood than enough to drown the slender stream of
+Anglo-Saxon and Norman. His modes of life, his prejudices, his estates,
+his religion, are unlike our own; and yet here he is in the position of
+an old English gentleman, possibly to be a peer. You, whose nationality
+embraces that of all the world, cannot, I suppose, understand this
+English feeling." [Endnote: 2.]
+
+"Pardon me," said Redclyffe, "I can perfectly understand it. An
+American, in his feelings towards England, has all the jealousy and
+exclusiveness of Englishmen themselves,--perhaps, indeed, a little
+exaggerated."
+
+"I beg your pardon," said the Englishman, incredulously, "I think you
+cannot possibly understand it!" [Endnote: 3.]
+
+The guests were by this time all assembled, and at the Warden's bidding
+they moved from the reception-room to the dining-hall, in some order and
+precedence, of which Redclyffe could not exactly discover the principle,
+though he found that to himself--in his quality, doubtless, of
+Ambassador--there was assigned a pretty high place. A venerable
+dignitary of the Church--a dean, he seemed to be--having asked a
+blessing, the fair scene of the banquet now lay before the guests,
+presenting a splendid spectacle, in the high-walled, antique, tapestried
+hall, overhung with the dark, intricate oaken beams, with the high
+Gothic windows, through one of which the setting sunbeams streamed, and
+showed the figures of kings and warriors, and the old Braithwaites among
+them. Beneath and adown the hall extended the long line of the tables,
+covered with the snow of the damask tablecloth, on which glittered,
+gleamed, and shone a good quality of ancient ancestral plate, and an
+_epergne_ of silver, extending down the middle; also the gleam of golden
+wine in the decanters; and truly Redclyffe thought that it was a noble
+spectacle, made so by old and stately associations, which made a noble
+banquet of what otherwise would be only a vulgar dinner. The English
+have this advantage and know how to make use of it. They bring--in these
+old, time-honored feasts--all the past to sit down and take the stately
+refreshment along with them, and they pledge the historic characters in
+their wine.
+
+A printed bill of fare, in gold letters, lay by each plate, on which
+Redclyffe saw the company glancing with great interest. The first dish,
+of course, was turtle soup, of which--as the gentleman next him, the
+Mayor of a neighboring town, told Redclyffe--it was allowable to take
+twice. This was accompanied, according to one of those rules which one
+knows not whether they are arbitrary or founded on some deep reason, by
+a glass of punch. Then came the noble turbot, the salmon, the sole, and
+divers of fishes, and the dinner fairly set in. The genial Warden seemed
+to have given liberal orders to the attendants, for they spared not
+to offer hock, champagne, sherry, to the guests, and good bitter ale,
+foaming in the goblet; and so the stately banquet went on, with somewhat
+tedious magnificence; and yet with a fulness of effect and thoroughness
+of sombre life that made Redclyffe feel that, so much importance being
+assigned to it,--it being so much believed in,--it was indeed a feast.
+The cumbrous courses swept by, one after another; and Redclyffe, finding
+it heavy work, sat idle most of the time, regarding the hall, the old
+decaying beams, the armor hanging beneath the galleries, and these
+Englishmen feasting where their fathers had feasted for so many ages,
+the same occasion, the same men, probably, in appearance, though
+the black coat and the white neckcloth had taken the place of ruff,
+embroidered doublet, and the magnificence of other ages. After all, the
+English have not such good things to eat as we in America, and certainly
+do not know better how to make them palatable. [Endnote: 4.]
+
+Well; but by and by the dinner came to a conclusion, as regarded the
+eating part; the cloth was withdrawn; a dessert of fruits, fresh and
+dried, pines, hothouse grapes, and all candied conserves of the Indies,
+was put on the long extent of polished mahogany. There was a tuning up
+of musicians, an interrogative drawing of fiddle-bows, and other
+musical twangs and puffs; the decanters opposite the Warden and his
+vice-president,--sherry, port, Redclyffe's Madeira, and claret, were put
+in motion along the table, and the guests filled their glasses for the
+toast which, at English dinner-tables, is of course the first to be
+honored,--the Queen. Then the band struck up the good old anthem, "God
+save the Queen," which the whole company rose to their feet to sing.
+It was a spectacle both interesting and a little ludicrous to
+Redclyffe,--being so apart from an American's sympathies, so unlike
+anything that he has in his life or possibilities,--this active and warm
+sentiment of loyalty, in which love of country centres, and assimilates,
+and transforms itself into a passionate affection for a person, in whom
+they love all their institutions. To say the truth, it seemed a happy
+notion; nor could the American--while he comforted himself in the pride
+of his democracy, and that he himself was a sovereign--could he help
+envying it a little, this childlike love and reverence for a person
+embodying all their country, their past, their earthly future. He felt
+that it might be delightful to have a sovereign, provided that sovereign
+were always a woman,--and perhaps a young and fine one. But, indeed,
+this is not the difficulty, methinks, in English institutions which
+the American finds it hardest to deal with. We could endure a born
+sovereign, especially if made such a mere pageant as the English make of
+theirs. What we find it hardest to conceive of is, the satisfaction with
+which Englishmen think of a race above them, with privileges that they
+cannot share, entitled to condescend to them, and to have gracious and
+beautiful manners at their expense; to be kind, simple, unpretending,
+because these qualities are more available than haughtiness; to be
+specimens of perfect manhood;--all these advantages in consequence of
+their position. If the peerage were a mere name, it would be nothing to
+envy; but it is so much more than a name; it enables men to be really so
+superior. The poor, the lower classes, might bear this well enough;
+but the classes that come next to the nobility,--the upper middle
+classes,--how they bear it so lovingly is what must puzzle the American.
+But probably the advantage of the peerage is the less perceptible the
+nearer it is looked at.
+
+It must be confessed that Redclyffe, as he looked at this assembly
+of peers and gentlemen, thought with some self-gratulation of the
+probability that he had within his power as old a rank, as desirable a
+station, as the best of them; and that if he were restrained from taking
+it, it would probably only be by the democratic pride that made him
+feel that he could not, retaining all his manly sensibility, accept
+this gewgaw on which the ages--his own country especially--had passed
+judgment, while it had been suspended over his head. He felt himself, at
+any rate, in a higher position, having the option of taking this rank,
+and forbearing to do so, than if he took it. [Endnote: 5.]
+
+After this ensued a ceremony which is of antique date in old English
+corporations and institutions, at their high festivals. It is called the
+Loving Cup. A sort of herald or toast-master behind the Warden's chair
+made proclamation, reciting the names of the principal guests, and
+announcing to them, "The Warden of the Braithwaite Hospital drinks to
+you in a Loving Cup"; of which cup, having sipped, or seemed to sip (for
+Redclyffe observed that the old drinkers were rather shy of it) a small
+quantity, he sent it down the table. Its progress was accompanied with
+a peculiar entanglement of ceremony, one guest standing up while another
+drinks, being pretty much as follows. First, each guest receiving it
+covered from the next above him, the same took from the silver cup its
+silver cover; the guest drank with a bow to the Warden and company, took
+the cover from the preceding guest, covered the cup, handed it to the
+next below him, then again removed the cover, replaced it after the
+guest had drunk, who, on his part, went through the same ceremony.
+And thus the cup went slowly on its way down the stately hall; these
+ceremonies being, it is said, originally precautions against the risk,
+in wild times, of being stabbed by the man who was drinking with you, or
+poisoned by one who should fail to be your taster. The cup was a fine,
+ancient piece of plate, massive, heavy, curiously wrought with armorial
+bearings, in which the leopard's head appeared. Its contents, so far as
+Redclyffe could analyze them by a moderate sip, appeared to be claret,
+sweetened, with spices, and, however suited to the peculiarity of
+antique palates, was not greatly to Redclyffe's taste. [Endnote: 6.]
+
+Redclyffe's companion just below him, while the Loving Cup was beginning
+its march, had been explaining the origin of the custom as a defence
+of the drinker in times of deadly feud; when it had reached Lord
+Braithwaite, who drank and passed it to Redclyffe covered, and with the
+usual bow, Redclyffe looked into his Lordship's Italian eyes and dark
+face as he did so, and the thought struck him, that, if there could
+possibly be any use in keeping up this old custom, it might be so now;
+for, how intimated he could hardly tell, he was sensible in his deepest
+self of a deadly hostility in this dark, courteous, handsome face. He
+kept his eyes fixed on his Lordship as he received the cup, and felt
+that in his own glance there was an acknowledgment of the enmity that he
+perceived, and a defiance, expressed without visible sign, and felt in
+the bow with which they greeted one another. When they had both resumed
+their seats, Redclyffe chose to make this ceremonial intercourse the
+occasion of again addressing him.
+
+"I know not whether your Lordship is more accustomed than myself to
+these stately ceremonials," said he.
+
+"No," said Lord Braithwaite, whose English was very good. "But this is
+a good old ceremony, and an ingenious one; for does it not twine us into
+knotted links of love--this Loving Cup--like a wreath of Bacchanals whom
+I have seen surrounding an antique vase. Doubtless it has great
+efficacy in entwining a company of friendly guests into one affectionate
+society."
+
+"Yes; it should seem so," replied Redclyffe, with a smile, and again
+meeting those black eyes, which smiled back on him. "It should seem so,
+but it appears that the origin of the custom was quite different, and
+that it was as a safeguard to a man when he drank with his enemy. What
+a peculiar flavor it must have given to the liquor, when the eyes of two
+deadly foes met over the brim of the Loving Cup, and the drinker knew
+that, if he withdrew it, a dagger would be in his heart, and the other
+watched him drink, to see if it was poison!"
+
+"Ah!" responded his Lordship, "they had strange fashions in those rough
+old times. Nowadays, we neither stab, shoot, nor poison. I scarcely
+think we hate except as interest guides us, without malevolence."
+
+This singular conversation was interrupted by a toast, and the rising
+of one of the guests to answer it. Several other toasts of routine
+succeeded; one of which, being to the honor of the old founder of the
+Hospital, Lord Braithwaite, as his representative, rose to reply,--which
+he did in good phrases, in a sort of eloquence unlike that of the
+Englishmen around him, and, sooth to say, comparatively unaccustomed as
+he must have been to the use of the language, much more handsomely than
+they. In truth, Redclyffe was struck and amused with the rudeness, the
+slovenliness, the inartistic quality of the English speakers, who rather
+seemed to avoid grace and neatness of set purpose, as if they would be
+ashamed of it. Nothing could be more ragged than these utterances
+which they called speeches; so patched, and darned; and yet, somehow or
+other--though dull and heavy as all which seemed to inspire them--they
+had a kind of force. Each man seemed to have the faculty of getting,
+after some rude fashion, at the sense and feeling that was in him; and
+without glibness, without smoothness, without form or comeliness, still
+the object with which each one rose to speak was accomplished,--and what
+was more remarkable, it seemed to be accomplished without the speaker's
+having any particular plan for doing it. He was surprised, too, to
+observe how loyally every man seemed to think himself bound to speak,
+and rose to do his best, however unfit his usual habits made him for the
+task. Observing this, and thinking how many an American would be taken
+aback and dumbfounded by being called on for a dinner speech, he could
+not but doubt the correctness of the general opinion, that Englishmen
+are naturally less facile of public speech than our countrymen.
+
+"You surpass your countrymen," said Redclyffe, when his Lordship resumed
+his seat, amid rapping and loud applause.
+
+"My countrymen? I scarcely know whether you mean the English or
+Italians," said Lord Braithwaite. "Like yourself, I am a hybrid, with
+really no country, and ready to take up with any."
+
+"I have a country,--one which I am little inclined to deny," replied
+Redclyffe, gravely, while a flush (perhaps of conscientious shame) rose
+to his brow.
+
+His Lordship bowed, with a dark Italian smile, but Redclyffe's attention
+was drawn away from the conversation by a toast which the Warden now
+rose to give, and in which he found himself mainly concerned. With a
+little preface of kind words (not particularly aptly applied) to
+the great and kindred country beyond the Atlantic, the worthy Warden
+proceeded to remark that his board was honored, on this high festival,
+with a guest from that new world; a gentleman yet young, but already
+distinguished in the councils of his country; the bearer, he remarked,
+of an honored English name, which might well claim to be remembered
+here, and on this occasion, although he had understood from his friend
+that the American bearers of this name did not count kindred with the
+English ones. This gentleman, he further observed, with considerable
+flourish and emphasis, had recently been called from his retirement and
+wanderings into the diplomatic service of his country, which he would
+say, from his knowledge, the gentleman was well calculated to honor. He
+drank the health of the Honorable Edward Redclyffe, Ambassador of the
+United States to the Court of Hohen-Linden.
+
+Our English cousins received this toast with the kindest enthusiasm,
+as they always do any such allusion to our country; it being a festal
+feeling, not to be used except on holidays. They rose, with glass in
+hand, in honor of the Ambassador; the band struck up "Hail, Columbia";
+and our hero marshalled his thoughts as well as he might for the
+necessary response; and when the tumult subsided he arose.
+
+His quick apprehending had taught him something of the difference of
+taste between an English and an American audience at a dinner-table;
+he felt that there must be a certain looseness, and carelessness, and
+roughness, and yet a certain restraint; that he must not seem to aim
+at speaking well, although, for his own ambition, he was not content
+to speak ill; that, somehow or other, he must get a heartiness into his
+speech; that he must not polish, nor be too neat, and must come with
+a certain rudeness to his good points, as if he blundered on them,
+and were surprised into them. Above all, he must let the good wine and
+cheer, and all that he knew and really felt of English hospitality, as
+represented by the kind Warden, do its work upon his heart, and speak
+up to the extent of what he felt--and if a little more, then no great
+harm--about his own love for the father-land, and the broader grounds of
+the relations between the two countries. On this system, Redclyffe began
+to speak; and being naturally and habitually eloquent, and of mobile and
+ready sensibilities, he succeeded, between art and nature, in making
+a speech that absolutely delighted the company, who made the old hall
+echo, and the banners wave and tremble, and the board shake, and the
+glasses jingle, with their rapturous applause. What he said--or some
+shadow of it, and more than he quite liked to own--was reported in the
+county paper that gave a report of the dinner; but on glancing over it,
+it seems not worth while to produce this eloquent effort in our pages,
+the occasion and topics being of merely temporary interest.
+
+Redclyffe sat down, and sipped his claret, feeling a little ashamed of
+himself, as people are apt to do after a display of this kind.
+
+"You know the way to the English heart better than I do," remarked his
+Lordship, after a polite compliment to the speech. "Methinks these dull
+English are being improved in your atmosphere. The English need a
+change every few centuries,--either by immigration of new stock, or
+transportation of the old,--or else they grow too gross and earthly,
+with their beef, mutton, and ale. I think, now, it might benefit both
+countries, if your New England population were to be reciprocally
+exchanged with an equal number of Englishmen. Indeed, Italians might do
+as well."
+
+"I should regret," said Redclyffe, "to change the English, heavy as they
+are."
+
+"You are an admirable Englishman," said his Lordship. "For my part,
+I cannot say that the people are very much to my taste, any more than
+their skies and climate, in which I have shivered during the two years
+that I have spent here."
+
+Here their conversation ceased; and Redclyffe listened to a long train
+of speechifying, in the course of which everybody, almost, was toasted;
+everybody present, at all events, and many absent. The Warden's old
+wine was not spared; the music rang and resounded from the gallery; and
+everybody seemed to consider it a model feast, although there were no
+very vivid signs of satisfaction, but a decorous, heavy enjoyment, a
+dull red heat of pleasure, without flame. Soda and seltzer-water, and
+coffee, by and by were circulated; and at a late hour the company began
+to retire.
+
+Before taking his departure, Lord Braithwaite resumed his conversation
+with Redclyffe, and, as it appeared, with the purpose of making a
+hospitable proposition.
+
+"I live very much alone," said he, "being insulated from my neighbors
+by many circumstances,--habits, religion, and everything else peculiarly
+English. If you are curious about old English modes of life, I can show
+you, at least, an English residence, little altered within a century
+past. Pray come and spend a week with me before you leave this part of
+the country. Besides, I know the court to which you are accredited, and
+can give you, perhaps, useful information about it."
+
+Redclyffe looked at him in some surprise, and with a nameless
+hesitation; for he did not like his Lordship, and had fancied, in truth,
+that there was a reciprocal antipathy. Nor did he yet feel that he was
+mistaken in this respect; although his Lordship's invitation was given
+in a tone of frankness, and seemed to have no reserve, except that his
+eyes did not meet his like Anglo-Saxon eyes, and there seemed an Italian
+looking out from within the man. But Redclyffe had a sort of repulsion
+within himself; and he questioned whether it would be fair to his
+proposed host to accept his hospitality, while he had this secret
+feeling of hostility and repugnance,--which might be well enough
+accounted for by the knowledge that he secretly entertained hostile
+interests to their race, and half a purpose of putting them in force.
+And, besides this,--although Redclyffe was ashamed of the feeling,--he
+had a secret dread, a feeling that it was not just a safe thing to trust
+himself in this man's power; for he had a sense, sure as death, that he
+did not wish him well, and had a secret dread of the American. But he
+laughed within himself at this feeling, and drove it down. Yet it made
+him feel that there could be no disloyalty in accepting his Lordship's
+invitation, because it was given in as little friendship as it would be
+accepted.
+
+"I had almost made my arrangements for quitting the neighborhood,"
+said he, after a pause; "nor can I shorten the week longer which I
+had promised to spend with my very kind friend, the Warden. Yet your
+Lordship's kindness offers we a great temptation, and I would gladly
+spend the next ensuing week at Braithwaite Hall."
+
+"I shall expect you, then," said Lord Braithwaite. "You will find me
+quite alone, except my chaplain,--a scholar, and a man of the world,
+whom you will not be sorry to know."
+
+He bowed and took his leave, without shaking hands, as an American would
+have thought it natural to do, after such a hospitable agreement; nor
+did Redclyffe make any motion towards it, and was glad that his Lordship
+had omitted it. On the whole, there was a secret dissatisfaction with
+himself; a sense that he was not doing quite a frank and true thing in
+accepting this invitation, and he only made peace with himself on the
+consideration that Lord Braithwaite was as little cordial in asking the
+visit as he in acceding to it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+
+The guests were now rapidly taking their departure, and the Warden and
+Redclyffe were soon left alone in the antique hall, which now, in its
+solitude, presented an aspect far different from the gay festivity of
+an hour before; the duskiness up in the carved oaken beams seemed to
+descend and fill the hall; and the remembrance of the feast was like
+one of those that had taken place centuries ago, with which this was now
+numbered, and growing ghostly, and faded, and sad, even as they had long
+been.
+
+"Well, my dear friend," said the Warden, stretching himself and yawning,
+"it is over. Come into my study with me, and we will have a devilled
+turkey-bone and a pint of sherry in peace and comfort."
+
+"I fear I can make no figure at such a supper," said Redclyffe. "But I
+admire your inexhaustibleness in being ready for midnight refreshment
+after such a feast."
+
+"Not a glass of good liquor has moistened my lips to-night," said the
+Warden, "save and except such as was supplied by a decanter of water
+made brown with toast; and such a sip as I took to the health of the
+Queen, and another to that of the Ambassador to Hohen-Linden. It is
+the only way, when a man has this vast labor of speechifying to do; and
+indeed there is no possibility of keeping up a jolly countenance for
+such a length of time except on toast-water."
+
+They accordingly adjourned to the Warden's sanctum, where that worthy
+dignitary seemed to enjoy himself over his sherry and cracked bones,
+in a degree that he probably had not heretofore; while Redclyffe, whose
+potations had been more liberal, and who was feverish and disturbed,
+tried the effect of a little brandy and soda-water. As often happens
+at such midnight symposiums, the two friends found themselves in a more
+kindly and confidential vein than had happened before, great as had been
+the kindness and confidence already grown up between them. Redclyffe
+told his friend of Lord Braithwaite's invitation, and of his own
+resolution to accept it.
+
+"Why not? You will do well," said the Warden; "and you will find his
+Lordship an accustomed host, and the old house most interesting. If he
+knows the secrets of it himself, and will show them, they will be well
+worth the seeing."
+
+"I have had a scruple in accepting this invitation," said Redclyffe.
+
+"I cannot see why," said the Warden. "I advise it by all means, since I
+shall lose nothing by it myself, as it will not lop off any part of your
+visit to me."
+
+"My dear friend," said Redclyffe, irresistibly impelled to a confidence
+which he had not meditated a moment before, "there is a foolish secret
+which I must tell you, if you will listen to it; and which I have only
+not revealed to you because it seemed to me foolish and dream-like;
+because, too, I am an American, and a democrat; because I am ashamed of
+myself and laugh at myself."
+
+"Is it a long story?" asked the Warden.
+
+"I can make it of any length, and almost any brevity," said Redclyffe.
+
+"I will fill my pipe then," answered the Warden, "and listen at my
+ease; and if, as you intimate, there prove to be any folly in it, I will
+impute it all to the kindly freedom with which you have partaken of our
+English hospitality, and forget it before to-morrow morning."
+
+He settled himself in his easy-chair, in a most luxurious posture; and
+Redclyffe, who felt a strange reluctance to reveal--for the first time
+in his life--the shadowy hopes, if hopes they were, and purposes, if
+such they could be called, with which he had amused himself so many
+years, begun the story from almost the earliest period that he could
+remember. He told even of his earliest recollection, with an old woman,
+in the almshouse, and how he had been found there by the Doctor, and
+educated by him, with all the hints and half-revelations that had been
+made to him. He described the singular character of the Doctor, his
+scientific pursuits, his evident accomplishments, his great abilities,
+his morbidness and melancholy, his moodiness, and finally his death,
+and the singular circumstances that accompanied it. The story took a
+considerable time to tell; and after its close, the Warden, who had only
+interrupted it by now and then a question to make it plainer, continued
+to smoke his pipe slowly and thoughtfully for a long while.
+
+"This Doctor of yours was a singular character," said he. "Evidently,
+from what you tell me as to the accuracy of his local reminiscences,
+he must have been of this part of the country,--of this immediate
+neighborhood,--and such a man could not have grown up here without being
+known. I myself--for I am an old fellow now--might have known him if he
+lived to manhood hereabouts."
+
+"He seemed old to me when I first knew him," said Redclyffe. "But
+children make no distinctions of age. He might have been forty-five
+then, as well as I can judge."
+
+"You are now twenty-seven or eight," said the Warden, "and were four
+years old when you first knew him. He might now be sixty-five. Do you
+know, my friend, that I have something like a certainty that I know who
+your Doctor was?"
+
+"How strange this seems!" exclaimed Redclyffe. "It has never struck
+me that I should be able to identify this singular personage with any
+surroundings or any friends."
+
+The Warden, to requite his friend's story,--and without as yet saying a
+word, good or bad, on his ancestral claims,--proceeded to tell him some
+of the gossip of the neighborhood,--what had been gossip thirty or forty
+years ago, but was now forgotten, or, at all events, seldom spoken of,
+and only known to the old, at the present day. He himself remembered it
+only as a boy, and imperfectly. There had been a personage of that day,
+a man of poor estate, who had fallen deeply in love and been betrothed
+to a young lady of family; he was a young man of more than ordinary
+abilities, and of great promise, though small fortune. It was not well
+known how, but the match between him and the young lady was broken off,
+and his place was supplied by the then proprietor of Braithwaite Hall;
+as it was supposed, by the artifices of her mother. There had been
+circumstances of peculiar treachery in the matter, and Mr. Oglethorpe
+had taken it severely to heart; so severely, indeed, that he had left
+the country, after selling his ancestral property, and had only been
+occasionally heard of again. Now, from certain circumstances, it had
+struck the Warden that this might be the mysterious Doctor of whom
+Redclyffe spoke. [Endnote: 1.]
+
+"But why," suggested Redclyffe, "should a man with these wrongs to
+avenge take such an interest in a descendant of his enemy's family?"
+
+"That is a strong point in favor of my supposition," replied the Warden.
+"There is certainly, and has long been, a degree of probability that the
+true heir of this family exists in America. If Oglethorpe could discover
+him, he ousts his enemy from the estate and honors, and substitutes
+the person whom he has discovered and educated. Most certainly there is
+revenge in the thing. Should it happen now, however, the triumph would
+have lost its sweetness, even were Oglethorpe alive to partake of it;
+for his enemy is dead, leaving no heir, and this foreign branch has come
+in without Oglethorpe's aid."
+
+The friends remained musing a considerable time, each in his own train
+of thought, till the Warden suddenly spoke.
+
+"Do you mean to prosecute this apparent claim of yours?"
+
+"I have not intended to do so," said Redclyffe.
+
+"Of course," said the Warden, "that should depend upon the strength of
+your ground; and I understand you that there is some link wanting to
+establish it. Otherwise, I see not how you can hesitate. Is it a little
+thing to hold a claim to an old English estate and honors?"
+
+"No; it is a very great thing, to an Englishman born, and who need give
+up no higher birthright to avail himself of it," answered Redclyffe.
+"You will laugh at me, my friend; but I cannot help feeling that I, a
+simple citizen of a republic, yet with none above me except those whom
+I help to place there,--and who are my servants, not my superiors,--must
+stoop to take these honors. I leave a set of institutions which are
+the noblest that the wit and civilization of man have yet conceived, to
+enlist myself in one that is based on a far lower conception of man, and
+which therefore lowers every one who shares in it. Besides," said the
+young man, his eyes kindling with the ambition which had been so active
+a principle in his life, "what prospects--what rewards for spirited
+exertion--what a career, only open to an American, would I give up,
+to become merely a rich and idle Englishman, belonging (as I should)
+nowhere, without a possibility of struggle, such as a strong man
+loves, with only a mockery of a title, which in these days really means
+nothing,--hardly more than one of our own Honorables. What has any
+success in English life to offer (even were it within my reach, which,
+as a stranger, it would not be) to balance the proud career of an
+American statesman?"
+
+"True, you might be a President, I suppose," said the Warden, rather
+contemptuously,--"a four years' potentate. It seems to me an office
+about on a par with that of the Lord Mayor of London. For my part, I
+would rather be a baron of three or four hundred years' antiquity."
+
+"We talk in vain," said Redclyffe, laughing. "We do not approach one
+another's ideas on this subject. But, waiving all speculations as to
+my attempting to avail myself of this claim, do you think I can fairly
+accept this invitation to visit Lord Braithwaite? There is certainly
+a possibility that I may arraign myself against his dearest interests.
+Conscious of this, can I accept his hospitality?"
+
+The Warden paused. "You have not sought access to his house," he
+observed. "You have no designs, it seems, no settled designs at all
+events, against his Lordship,--nor is there a probability that they
+would be forwarded by your accepting this invitation, even if you
+had any. I do not see but you may go. The only danger is, that his
+Lordship's engaging qualities may seduce you into dropping your claims
+out of a chivalrous feeling, which I see is among your possibilities. To
+be sure, it would be more satisfactory if he knew your actual position,
+and should then renew his invitation."
+
+"I am convinced," said Redclyffe, looking up from his musing
+posture, "that he does know them. You are surprised; but in all Lord
+Braithwaite's manner towards me there has been an undefinable something
+that makes me aware that he knows on what terms we stand towards each
+other. There is nothing inconceivable in this. The family have for
+generations been suspicious of an American line, and have more than once
+sent messengers to try to search out and put a stop to the apprehension.
+Why should it not have come to their knowledge that there was a person
+with such claims, and that he is now in England?"
+
+"It certainly is possible," replied the Warden, "and if you are
+satisfied that his Lordship knows it, or even suspects it, you meet
+him on fair ground. But I fairly tell you, my good friend, that--his
+Lordship being a man of unknown principles of honor, outlandish, and an
+Italian in habit and moral sense--I scarcely like to trust you in his
+house, he being aware that your existence may be inimical to him. My
+humble board is the safer of the two."
+
+"Pshaw!" said Redclyffe. "You Englishmen are so suspicious of anybody
+not regularly belonging to yourselves. Poison and the dagger haunt your
+conceptions of all others. In America you think we kill every third man
+with the bowie-knife. But, supposing there were any grounds for your
+suspicion, I would still encounter it. An American is no braver than
+an Englishman; but still he is not quite so chary of his life as the
+latter, who never risks it except on the most imminent necessity. We
+take such matters easy. In regard to this invitation, I feel that I can
+honorably accept it, and there are many idle and curious motives that
+impel me to it. I will go."
+
+"Be it so; but you must come back to me for another week, after
+finishing your visit," said the Warden. "After all, it was an idle fancy
+in me that there could be any danger. His Lordship has good English
+blood in his veins, and it would take oceans and rivers of Italian
+treachery to wash out the sterling quality of it. And, my good friend,
+as to these claims of yours, I would not have you trust too much to what
+is probably a romantic dream; yet, were the dream to come true, I should
+think the British peerage honored by such an accession to its ranks. And
+now to bed; for we have heard the chimes of midnight, two hours agone."
+
+They accordingly retired; and Redclyffe was surprised to find what a
+distinctness his ideas respecting his claim to the Braithwaite honors
+had assumed, now that he, after so many years, had imparted them to
+another. Heretofore, though his imagination had played with them so
+much, they seemed the veriest dreams; now, they had suddenly taken form
+and hardened into substance; and he became aware, in spite of all the
+lofty and patriotic sentiments which he had expressed to the Warden,
+that these prospects had really much importance in his mind.
+
+Redclyffe, during the few days that he was to spend at the Hospital,
+previous to his visit to Braithwaite Hall, was conscious of a
+restlessness such as we have all felt on the eve of some interesting
+event. He wondered at himself at being so much wrought up by so simple
+a thing as he was about to do; but it seemed to him like a coming
+home after an absence of centuries. It was like an actual prospect
+of entrance into a castle in the air,--the shadowy threshold of which
+should assume substance enough to bear his foot, its thin, fantastic
+walls actually protect him from sun and rain, its hall echo with his
+footsteps, its hearth warm him. That delicious, thrilling uncertainty
+between reality and fancy, in which he had often been enwrapt since his
+arrival in this region, enveloped him more strongly than ever; and with
+it, too, there came a sort of apprehension, which sometimes shuddered
+through him like an icy draught, or the touch of cold steel to his
+heart. He was ashamed, too, to be conscious of anything like fear; yet
+he would not acknowledge it for fear; and indeed there was such an airy,
+exhilarating, thrilling pleasure bound up with it, that it could not
+really be so.
+
+It was in this state of mind that, a day or two after the feast, he saw
+Colcord sitting on the bench, before the portal of the Hospital, in the
+sun, which--September though it was--still came warm and bright
+(for English sunshine) into that sheltered spot; a spot where many
+generations of old men had warmed their limbs, while they looked down
+into the life, the torpid life, of the old village that trailed its
+homely yet picturesque street along by the venerable buildings of the
+Hospital.
+
+"My good friend," said Redclyffe, "I am about leaving you, for a
+time,--indeed, with the limited time at my disposal, it is possible that
+I may not be able to come back hither, except for a brief visit. Before
+I leave you, I would fain know something more about one whom I must ever
+consider my benefactor."
+
+"Yes," said the old man, with his usual benignant quiet, "I saved your
+life. It is yet to be seen, perhaps, whether thereby I made myself your
+benefactor. I trust so."
+
+"I feel it so, at least," answered Redclyffe, "and I assure you life has
+a new value for me since I came to this place; for I have a deeper hold
+upon it, as it were,--more hope from it, more trust in something good to
+come of it."
+
+"This is a good change,--or should be so," quoth the old man.
+
+"Do you know," continued Redclyffe, "how long you have been a figure in
+my life?"
+
+"I know it," said Colcord, "though you might well have forgotten it."
+
+"Not so," said Redclyffe. "I remember, as if it were this morning, that
+time in New England when I first saw you."
+
+"The man with whom you then abode," said Colcord, "knew who I was."
+
+"And he being dead, and finding you here now, by such a strange
+coincidence," said Redclyffe, "and being myself a man capable of taking
+your counsel, I would have you impart it to me: for I assure you that
+the current of my life runs darkly on, and I would be glad of any light
+on its future, or even its present phase."
+
+"I am not one of those from whom the world waits for counsel," said the
+pensioner, "and I know not that mine would be advantageous to you, in
+the light which men usually prize. Yet if I were to give any, it would
+be that you should be gone hence."
+
+"Gone hence!" repeated Redclyffe, surprised. "I tell you--what I have
+hardly hitherto told to myself--that all my dreams, all my wishes
+hitherto, have looked forward to precisely the juncture that seems now
+to be approaching. My dreaming childhood dreamt of this. If you know
+anything of me, you know how I sprung out of mystery, akin to none, a
+thing concocted out of the elements, without visible agency; how all
+through my boyhood I was alone; how I grew up without a root, yet
+continually longing for one,--longing to be connected with somebody, and
+never feeling myself so. Yet there was ever a looking forward to this
+time at which I now find myself. If my next step were death, yet
+while the path seemed to lead toward a certainty of establishing me in
+connection with my race, I would take it. I have tried to keep down this
+yearning, to stifle it, annihilate it, by making a position for myself,
+by being my own fact; but I cannot overcome the natural horror of being
+a creature floating in the air, attached to nothing; ever this feeling
+that there is no reality in the life and fortunes, good or bad, of
+a being so unconnected. There is not even a grave, not a heap of dry
+bones, not a pinch of dust, with which I can claim kindred, unless I
+find it here!"
+
+"This is sad," said the old man,--"this strong yearning, and nothing to
+gratify it. Yet, I warn you, do not seek its gratification here. There
+are delusions, snares, pitfalls, in this life. I warn you, quit the
+search."
+
+"No," said Redclyffe, "I will follow the mysterious clue that seems to
+lead me on; and, even now, it pulls me one step further."
+
+"How is that?" asked the old man.
+
+"It leads me onward even as far as the threshold--across the
+threshold--of yonder mansion," said Redclyffe.
+
+"Step not across it; there is blood on that threshold!" exclaimed the
+pensioner. "A bloody footstep emerging. Take heed that there be not as
+bloody a one entering in!"
+
+"Pshaw!" said Redclyffe, feeling the ridicule of the emotion into which
+he had been betrayed, as the old man's wildness of demeanor made him
+feel that he was talking with a monomaniac. "We are talking idly. I do
+but go, in the common intercourse of society, to see the old English
+residence which (such is the unhappy obscurity of my position) I fancy,
+among a thousand others, may have been that of my ancestors. Nothing is
+likely to come of it. My foot is not bloody, nor polluted with anything
+except the mud of the damp English soil."
+
+"Yet go not in!" persisted the old man.
+
+"Yes, I must go," said Redclyffe, determinedly, "and I will."
+
+Ashamed to have been moved to such idle utterances by anything that the
+old man could say Redclyffe turned away, though he still heard the sad,
+half-uttered remonstrance of the old man, like a moan behind him, and
+wondered what strange fancy had taken possession of him.
+
+The effect which this opposition had upon him made him the more aware
+how much his heart was set upon this visit to the Hall; how much he had
+counted upon being domiciliated there; what a wrench it would be to him
+to tear himself away without going into that mansion, and penetrating
+all the mysteries wherewith his imagination, exercising itself upon the
+theme since the days of the old Doctor's fireside talk, had invested
+it. In his agitation he wandered forth from the Hospital, and, passing
+through the village street, found himself in the park of Braithwaite
+Hall, where he wandered for a space, until his steps led him to a point
+whence the venerable Hall appeared, with its limes and its oaks around
+it; its look of peace, and aged repose, and loveliness; its stately
+domesticity, so ancient, so beautiful; its mild, sweet simplicity; it
+seemed the ideal of home. The thought thrilled his bosom, that this
+was his home,--the home of the wild Western wanderer, who had gone away
+centuries ago, and encountered strange chances, and almost forgotten his
+origin, but still kept a clue to bring him back; and had now come back,
+and found all the original emotions safe within him. It even seemed to
+him, that, by his kindred with those who had gone before,--by the line
+of sensitive blood linking him with that final emigrant,--he could
+remember all these objects;--that tree, hardly more venerable now than
+then; that clock-tower, still marking the elapsing time; that spire of
+the old church, raising itself beyond. He spread out his arms in a kind
+of rapture, and exclaimed:--
+
+"O home, my home, my forefathers' home! I have come back to thee! The
+wanderer has come back!"
+
+There was a slight stir near him; and on a mossy seat, that was arranged
+to take advantage of a remarkably good point of view of the old Hall,
+he saw Elsie sitting. She had her drawing-materials with her, and had
+probably been taking a sketch. Redclyffe was ashamed of having been
+overheard by any one giving way to such idle passion as he had been
+betrayed into; and yet, in another sense, he was glad,--glad, at least,
+that something of his feeling, as yet unspoken to human being, was
+shared, and shared by her with whom, alone of living beings, he had any
+sympathies of old date, and whom he often thought of with feelings that
+drew him irresistibly towards her.
+
+"Elsie," said he, uttering for the first time the old name, "Providence
+makes you my confidant. We have recognized each other, though no word
+has passed between us. Let us speak now again with one another. How
+came you hither? What has brought us together again?--Away with this
+strangeness that lurks between us! Let us meet as those who began life
+together, and whose life-strings, being so early twisted in unison,
+cannot now be torn apart."
+
+"You are not wise," said Elsie, in a faltering voice, "to break the
+restraint we have tacitly imposed upon ourselves. Do not let us speak
+further on this subject."
+
+"How strangely everything evades me!" exclaimed Redclyffe. "I seem to be
+in a land of enchantment, where I can get hold of nothing that lends me
+a firm support. There is no medium in my life between the most vulgar
+realities and the most vaporous fiction, too thin to breathe. Tell me,
+Elsie, how came you here? Why do you not meet me frankly? What is there
+to keep you apart from the oldest friend, I am bold to say, you have
+on earth? Are you an English girl? Are you one of our own New England
+maidens, with her freedom, and her know-how, and her force, beyond
+anything that these demure and decorous damsels can know?"
+
+"This is wild," said Elsie, straggling for composure, yet strongly moved
+by the recollections that he brought up. "It is best that we should meet
+as strangers, and so part."
+
+"No," said Redclyffe; "the long past comes up, with its memories, and
+yet it is not so powerful as the powerful present. We have met again;
+our adventures have shown that Providence has designed a relation in my
+fate to yours. Elsie, are you lonely as I am?"
+
+"No," she replied, "I have bonds, ties, a life, a duty. I must live that
+life and do that duty. You have, likewise, both. Do yours, lead your own
+life, like me."
+
+"Do you know, Elsie," he said, "whither that life is now tending?"
+
+"Whither?" said she, turning towards him.
+
+"To yonder Hall," said he.
+
+She started up, and clasped her hands about his arm.
+
+"No, no!" she exclaimed, "go not thither! There is blood upon the
+threshold! Return: a dreadful fatality awaits you here."
+
+"Come with me, then," said he, "and I yield my purpose."
+
+"It cannot be," said Elsie.
+
+"Then I, too, tell you it cannot be," returned Redclyffe. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+The dialogue had reached this point, when there came a step along the
+wood-path; the branches rustled, and there was Lord Braithwaite, looking
+upon the pair with the ordinary slightly sarcastic glance with which he
+gazed upon the world.
+
+"A fine morning, fair lady and fair sir," said he. "We have few such,
+except in Italy."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+
+So Redclyffe left the Hospital, where he had spent many weeks of strange
+and not unhappy life, and went to accept the invitation of the lord
+of Braithwaite Hall. It was with a thrill of strange delight, poignant
+almost to pain, that he found himself driving up to the door of the
+Hall, and actually passing the threshold of the house. He looked, as he
+stept over it, for the Bloody Footstep, with which the house had so
+long been associated in his imagination; but could nowhere see it. The
+footman ushered him into a hall, which seemed to be in the centre of
+the building, and where, little as the autumn was advanced, a fire
+was nevertheless burning and glowing on the hearth; nor was its effect
+undesirable in the somewhat gloomy room. The servants had evidently
+received orders respecting the guest; for they ushered him at once
+to his chamber, which seemed not to be one of those bachelor's rooms,
+where, in an English mansion, young and single men are forced to be
+entertained with very bare and straitened accommodations; but a large,
+well, though antiquely and solemnly furnished room, with a curtained
+bed, and all manner of elaborate contrivances for repose; but the deep
+embrasures of the windows made it gloomy, with the little light that
+they admitted through their small panes. There must have been English
+attendance in this department of the household arrangements, at least;
+for nothing could exceed the exquisite nicety and finish of everything
+in the room, the cleanliness, the attention to comfort, amid antique
+aspects of furniture; the rich, deep preparations for repose.
+
+The servant told Redclyffe that his master had ridden out, and, adding
+that luncheon would be on the table at two o'clock, left him; and
+Redclyffe sat some time trying to make out and distinguish the feelings
+with which he found himself here, and realizing a lifelong dream. He
+ran back over all the legends which the Doctor used to tell about this
+mansion, and wondered whether this old, rich chamber were the one where
+any of them had taken place; whether the shadows of the dead haunted
+here. But, indeed, if this were the case, the apartment must have been
+very much changed, antique though it looked, with the second, or third,
+or whatever other numbered arrangement, since those old days of tapestry
+hangings and rush-strewed floor. Otherwise this stately and gloomy
+chamber was as likely as any other to have been the one where his
+ancestor appeared for the last time in the paternal mansion; here he
+might have been the night before that mysterious Bloody Footstep was
+left on the threshold, whence had arisen so many wild legends, and since
+the impression of which nothing certain had ever been known respecting
+that ill-fated man,--nothing certain in England at least,--and whose
+story was left so ragged and questionable even by all that he could add.
+
+Do what he could, Redclyffe still was not conscious of that deep
+home-feeling which he had imagined he should experience when, if ever,
+he should come back to the old ancestral place; there was strangeness,
+a struggle within himself to get hold of something that escaped him, an
+effort to impress on his mind the fact that he was, at last, established
+at his temporary home in the place that he had so long looked forward
+to, and that this was the moment which he would have thought more
+interesting than any other in his life. He was strangely cold and
+indifferent, frozen up as it were, and fancied that he would have cared
+little had he been to leave the mansion without so much as looking over
+the remaining part of it.
+
+At last, he became weary of sitting and indulging this fantastic humor
+of indifference, and emerged from his chamber with the design of
+finding his way about the lower part of the house. The mansion had that
+delightful intricacy which can never be contrived; never be attained
+by design; but is the happy result of where many builders, many
+designs,--many ages, perhaps,--have concurred in a structure, each
+pursuing his own design. Thus it was a house that you could go astray
+in, as in a city, and come to unexpected places, but never, until after
+much accustomance, go where you wished; so Redclyffe, although the great
+staircase and wide corridor by which he had been led to his room seemed
+easy to find, yet soon discovered that he was involved in an unknown
+labyrinth, where strange little bits of staircases led up and down, and
+where passages promised much in letting him out, but performed nothing.
+To be sure, the old English mansion had not much of the stateliness of
+one of Mrs. Radcliffe's castles, with their suites of rooms opening one
+into another; but yet its very domesticity--its look as if long ago it
+had been lived in--made it only the more ghostly; and so Redclyffe felt
+the more as if he were wandering through a homely dream; sensible of
+the ludicrousness of his position, he once called aloud; but his voice
+echoed along the passages, sounding unwontedly to his ears, but arousing
+nobody. It did not seem to him as if he were going afar, but were
+bewildered round and round, within a very small compass; a predicament
+in which a man feels very foolish usually.
+
+As he stood at an old window, stone-mullioned, at the end of a passage
+into which he had come twice over, a door near him opened, and a
+personage looked out whom he had not before seen. It was a face of great
+keenness and intelligence, and not unpleasant to look at, though dark
+and sallow. The dress had something which Redclyffe recognized as
+clerical, though not exactly pertaining to the Church of England,--a
+sort of arrangement of the vest and shirt-collar; and he had knee
+breeches of black. He did not seem like an English clerical personage,
+however; for even in this little glimpse of him Redclyffe saw a
+mildness, gentleness, softness, and asking-of-leave, in his manner,
+which he had not observed in persons so well assured of their position
+as the Church of England clergy.
+
+He seemed at once to detect Redclyffe's predicament, and came forward
+with a pleasant smile, speaking in good English, though with a somewhat
+foreign accent.
+
+"Ah, sir, you have lost your way. It is a labyrinthian house for its
+size, this old English Hall,--full of perplexity. Shall I show you to
+any point?"
+
+"Indeed, sir," said Redclyffe, laughing, "I hardly know whither I want
+to go; being a stranger, and yet knowing nothing of the public places of
+the house. To the library, perhaps, if you will be good enough to direct
+me thither."
+
+"Willingly, my dear sir," said the clerical personage; "the more
+easily too, as my own quarters are close adjacent; the library being my
+province. Do me the favor to enter here."
+
+So saying, the priest ushered Redclyffe into an austere-looking yet
+exceedingly neat study, as it seemed, on one side of which was an
+oratory, with a crucifix and other accommodations for Catholic devotion.
+Behind a white curtain there were glimpses of a bed, which seemed
+arranged on a principle of conventual austerity in respect to limits
+and lack of softness; but still there was in the whole austerity of
+the premises a certain character of restraint, poise, principle, which
+Redclyffe liked. A table was covered with books, many of them folios
+in an antique binding of parchment, and others were small, thick-set
+volumes, into which antique lore was rammed and compressed. Through
+an open door, opposite to the one by which he had entered, there was a
+vista of a larger apartment, with alcoves, a rather dreary-looking
+room, though a little sunshine came through a window at the further end,
+distained with colored glass.
+
+"Will you sit down in my little home?" said the courteous priest. "I
+hope we may be better acquainted; so allow me to introduce myself. I am
+Father Angelo, domestic chaplain to his Lordship. You, I know, are the
+American diplomatic gentleman, from whom his Lordship has been expecting
+a visit."
+
+Redclyffe bowed.
+
+"I am most happy to know you," continued the priest. "Ah; you have a
+happy country, most catholic, most recipient of all that is outcast on
+earth. Men of my religion must ever bless it."
+
+"It certainly ought to be remembered to our credit," replied Redclyffe,
+"that we have shown no narrow spirit in this matter, and have not, like
+other Protestant countries, rejected the good that is found in any man
+on account of his religious faith. American statesmanship comprises Jew,
+Catholic, all."
+
+After this pleasant little acknowledgment, there ensued a conversation
+having some reference to books; for though Redclyffe, of late years,
+had known little of what deserves to be called literature,--having
+found political life as much estranged from it as it is apt to be
+with politicians,--yet he had early snuffed the musty fragrance of the
+Doctor's books, and had learned to love its atmosphere. At the time
+he left college, he was just at the point where he might have been a
+scholar; but the active tendencies of American life had interfered with
+him, as with thousands of others, and drawn him away from pursuits which
+might have been better adapted to some of his characteristics than
+the one he had adopted. The priest gently felt and touched around his
+pursuits, and finding some remains of classic culture, he kept up a
+conversation on these points; showing him the possessions of the library
+in that department, where, indeed, were some treasures that he had
+discovered, and which seemed to have been collected at least a century
+ago.
+
+"Generally, however," observed he, as they passed from one dark alcove
+to another, "the library is of little worth, except to show how much of
+living truth each generation contributes to the botheration of life, and
+what a public benefactor a bookworm is, after all. There, now! did you
+ever happen to see one? Here is one that I have watched at work, some
+time past, and have not thought it worth while to stop him."
+
+Redclyffe looked at the learned little insect, who was eating a strange
+sort of circular trench into an old book of scholastic Latin, which
+probably only he had ever devoured,--at least ever found to his taste.
+The insect seemed in excellent condition, fat with learning, having
+doubtless got the essence of the book into himself. But Redclyffe was
+still more interested in observing in the corner a great spider, which
+really startled him,--not so much for its own terrible aspect, though
+that was monstrous, as because he seemed to see in it the very great
+spider which he had known in his boyhood; that same monster that had
+been the Doctor's familiar, and had been said to have had an influence
+in his death. He looked so startled that Father Angelo observed it.
+
+"Do not be frightened," said he; "though I allow that a brave man may
+well be afraid of a spider, and that the bravest of the brave need
+not blush to shudder at this one. There is a great mystery about this
+spider. No one knows whence he came; nor how long he has been here. The
+library was very much shut up during the time of the last inheritor of
+the estate, and had not been thoroughly examined for some years when
+I opened it, and swept some of the dust away from its old alcoves. I
+myself was not aware of this monster until the lapse of some weeks,
+when I was startled at seeing him, one day, as I was reading an old book
+here. He dangled down from the ceiling, by the cordage of his web, and
+positively seemed to look into my face."
+
+"He is of the species Condetas," said Redclyffe,--"a rare spider seldom
+seen out of the tropic regions."
+
+"You are learned, then, in spiders," observed the priest, surprised.
+
+"I could almost make oath, at least, that I have known this ugly
+specimen of his race," observed Redclyffe. "A very dear friend, now
+deceased, to whom I owed the highest obligations, was studious of
+spiders, and his chief treasure was one the very image of this."
+
+"How strange!" said the priest. "There has always appeared to me to be
+something uncanny in spiders. I should be glad to talk further with you
+on this subject. Several times I have fancied a strange intelligence in
+this monster; but I have natural horror of him, and therefore refrain
+from interviews."
+
+"You do wisely, sir," said Redclyffe. "His powers and purposes are
+questionably beneficent, at best."
+
+In truth, the many-legged monster made the old library ghostly to him
+by the associations which it summoned up, and by the idea that it was
+really the identical one that had seemed so stuffed with poison, in the
+lifetime of the Doctor, and at that so distant spot. Yet, on reflection,
+it appeared not so strange; for the old Doctor's spider, as he had heard
+him say, was one of an ancestral race that he had brought from beyond
+the sea. They might have been preserved, for ages possibly, in this old
+library, whence the Doctor had perhaps taken his specimen, and possibly
+the one now before him was the sole survivor. It hardly, however, made
+the monster any the less hideous to suppose that this might be the case;
+and to fancy the poison of old times condensed into this animal, who
+might have sucked the diseases, moral and physical, of all this family
+into him, and to have made himself their demon. He questioned with
+himself whether it might not be well to crush him at once, and so
+perhaps do away with the evil of which he was the emblem.
+
+"I felt a strange disposition to crush this monster at first," remarked
+the priest, as if he knew what Redclyffe was thinking of,--"a feeling
+that in so doing I should get rid of a mischief; but then he is such
+a curious monster. You cannot long look at him without coming to the
+conclusion that he is indestructible."
+
+"Yes; and to think of crushing such a deep-bowelled monster!" said
+Redclyffe, shuddering. "It is too great a catastrophe."
+
+During this conversation in which he was so deeply concerned, the spider
+withdrew himself, and hand over hand ascended to a remote and dusky
+corner, where was his hereditary abode.
+
+"Shall I be likely to meet Lord Braithwaite here in the library?" asked
+Redclyffe, when the fiend had withdrawn himself. "I have not yet seen
+him since my arrival."
+
+"I trust," said the priest, with great courtesy, "that you are aware
+of some peculiarities in his Lordship's habits, which imply nothing in
+detriment to the great respect which he pays all his few guests, and
+which, I know, he is especially desirous to pay to you. I think that
+we shall meet him at lunch, which, though an English institution, his
+Lordship has adopted very readily."
+
+"I should hope," said Redclyffe, willing to know how far he might be
+expected to comply with the peculiarities--which might prove to be
+eccentricities--of his host, "that my presence here will not be too
+greatly at variance with his Lordship's habits, whatever they may be. I
+came hither, indeed, on the pledge that, as my host would not stand in
+my way, so neither would I in his."
+
+"That is the true principle," said the priest, "and here comes his
+Lordship in person to begin the practice of it."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+
+Lord Braithwaite came into the principal door of the library as the
+priest was speaking, and stood a moment just upon the threshold, looking
+keenly out of the stronger light into this dull and darksome apartment,
+as if unable to see perfectly what was within; or rather, as Redclyffe
+fancied, trying to discover what was passing between those two. And,
+indeed, as when a third person comes suddenly upon two who are talking
+of him, the two generally evince in their manner some consciousness of
+the fact; so it was in this case, with Redclyffe at least, although
+the priest seemed perfectly undisturbed, either through practice of
+concealment, or because he had nothing to conceal.
+
+His Lordship, after a moment's pause, came forward, presenting his hand
+to Redclyffe, who shook it, and not without a certain cordiality; till
+he perceived that it was the left hand, when he probably intimated some
+surprise by a change of manner.
+
+"I am an awkward person," said his Lordship. "The left hand, however, is
+nearest the heart; so be assured I mean no discourtesy."
+
+"The Signor Ambassador and myself," observed the priest, "have had
+a most interesting conversation (to me at least) about books and
+bookworms, spiders, and other congruous matters; and I find his
+Excellency has heretofore made acquaintance with a great spider bearing
+strong resemblance to the hermit of our library."
+
+"Indeed," said his Lordship. "I was not aware that America had yet
+enough of age and old misfortune, crime, sordidness, that accumulate
+with it, to have produced spiders like this. Had he sucked into himself
+all the noisomeness of your heat?"
+
+Redclyffe made some slight answer, that the spider was a sort of pet of
+an old virtuoso to whom he owed many obligations in his boyhood; and the
+conversation turned from this subject to others suggested by topics of
+the day and place. His Lordship was affable, and Redclyffe could not,
+it must be confessed, see anything to justify the prejudices of the
+neighbors against him. Indeed, he was inclined to attribute them, in
+great measure, to the narrowness of the English view,--to those insular
+prejudices which have always prevented them from fully appreciating what
+differs from their own habits. At lunch, which was soon announced, the
+party of three became very pleasant and sociable, his Lordship drinking
+a light Italian red wine, and recommending it to Redclyffe; who,
+however, was English enough to prefer some bitter ale, while the priest
+contented himself with pure water,--which is, in truth, a less agreeable
+drink in chill, moist England than in any country we are acquainted
+with.
+
+"You must make yourself quite at home here," said his Lordship, as
+they rose from table. "I am not a good host, nor a very genial man, I
+believe. I can do little to entertain you; but here is the house and
+the grounds at your disposal,--horses in the stable,--guns in the
+hall,--here is Father Angelo, good at chess. There is the library. Pray
+make the most of them all; and if I can contribute in any way to your
+pleasure, let me know."
+
+All this certainly seemed cordial, and the manner in which it was said
+seemed in accordance with the spirit of the words; and yet, whether
+the fault was in anything of morbid suspicion in Redclyffe's nature, or
+whatever it was, it did not have the effect of making him feel welcome,
+which almost every Englishman has the natural faculty of producing on
+a guest, when once he has admitted him beneath his roof. It might be in
+great measure his face, so thin and refined, and intellectual without
+feeling; his voice which had melody, but not heartiness; his manners,
+which were not simple by nature, but by art;--whatever it was, Redclyffe
+found that Lord Braithwaite did not call for his own naturalness and
+simplicity, but his art, and felt that he was inevitably acting a part
+in his intercourse with him, that he was on his guard, playing a
+game; and yet he did not wish to do this. But there was a mobility, a
+subtleness in his nature, an unconscious tact,--which the mode of life
+and of mixing with men in America fosters and perfects,--that made this
+sort of finesse inevitable to him, with any but a natural character;
+with whom, on the other hand, Redclyffe could be as fresh and natural as
+any Englishman of them all.
+
+Redclyffe spent the time between lunch and dinner in wandering about the
+grounds, from which he had hitherto felt himself debarred by motives of
+delicacy. It was a most interesting ramble to him, coming to trees which
+his ancestor, who went to America, might have climbed in his boyhood,
+might have sat beneath, with his lady-love, in his youth; deer there
+were, the descendants of those which he had seen; old stone stiles,
+which his foot had trodden. The sombre, clouded light of the day fell
+down upon this scene, which in its verdure, its luxuriance of vegetable
+life, was purely English, cultivated to the last extent without losing
+the nature out of a single thing. In the course of his walk he came to
+the spot where he had been so mysteriously wounded on his first arrival
+in this region; and, examining the spot, he was startled to see that
+there was a path leading to the other side of a hedge, and this path,
+which led to the house, had brought him here.
+
+Musing upon this mysterious circumstance, and how it should have
+happened in so orderly a country as England, so tamed and subjected to
+civilization,--an incident to happen in an English park which seemed
+better suited to the Indian-haunted forests of the wilder parts of his
+own land,--and how no researches which the Warden had instituted had
+served in the smallest degree to develop the mystery,--he clambered over
+the hedge, and followed the footpath. It plunged into dells, and emerged
+from them, led through scenes which seemed those of old romances, and
+at last, by these devious ways, began to approach the old house, which,
+with its many gray gables, put on a new aspect from this point of view.
+Redclyffe admired its venerableness anew; the ivy that overran parts of
+it; the marks of age; and wondered at the firmness of the institutions
+which, through all the changes that come to man, could have kept this
+house the home of one lineal race for so many centuries; so many, that
+the absence of his own branch from it seemed but a temporary visit to
+foreign parts, from which he was now returned, to be again at home, by
+the old hearthstone.
+
+"But what do I mean to do?" said he to himself, stopping short, and
+still looking at the old house. "Am I ready to give up all the actual
+life before me for the sake of taking up with what I feel to be a less
+developed state of human life? Would it not be better for me to depart
+now, to turn my back on this flattering prospect? I am not fit to be
+here,--I, so strongly susceptible of a newer, more stirring life than
+these men lead; I, who feel that, whatever the thought and cultivation
+of England may be, my own countrymen have gone forward a long, long
+march beyond them, not intellectually, but in a way that gives them a
+further start. If I come back hither, with the purpose to make myself
+an Englishman, especially an Englishman of rank and hereditary
+estate,--then for me America has been discovered in vain, and the great
+spirit that has been breathed into us is in vain; and I am false to it
+all!"
+
+But again came silently swelling over him like a flood all that ancient
+peace, and quietude, and dignity, which looked so stately and beautiful
+as brooding round the old house; all that blessed order of ranks, that
+sweet superiority, and yet with no disclaimer of common brotherhood,
+that existed between the English gentleman and his inferiors; all that
+delightful intercourse, so sure of pleasure, so safe from rudeness,
+lowness, unpleasant rubs, that exists between gentleman and gentleman,
+where, in public affairs, all are essentially of one mind, or seem so
+to an American politician, accustomed to the fierce conflicts of our
+embittered parties; where life was made so enticing, so refined, and yet
+with a sort of homeliness that seemed to show that all its strength was
+left behind; that seeming taking in of all that was desirable in life,
+and all its grace and beauty, yet never giving life a hard enamel of
+over-refinement. What could there be in the wild, harsh, ill-conducted
+American approach to civilization, which could compare with this? What
+to compare with this juiciness and richness? What other men had ever got
+so much out of life as the polished and wealthy Englishmen of to-day?
+What higher part was to be acted, than seemed to lie before him, if he
+willed to accept it?
+
+He resumed his walk, and, drawing near the manor-house, found that he
+was approaching another entrance than that which had at first admitted
+him; a very pleasant entrance it was, beneath a porch, of antique form,
+and ivy-clad, hospitable and inviting; and it being the approach from
+the grounds, it seemed to be more appropriate to the residents of the
+house than the other one. Drawing near, Redclyffe saw that a flight of
+steps ascended within the porch, old-looking, much worn; and nothing is
+more suggestive of long time than a flight of worn steps; it must have
+taken so many soles, through so many years, to make an impression.
+Judging from the make of the outside of the edifice, Redclyffe thought
+that he could make out the way from the porch to the hall and library;
+so he determined to enter this way.
+
+There had been, as was not unusual, a little shower of rain during
+the afternoon; and as Redclyffe came close to the steps, they were
+glistening with the wet. The stones were whitish, like marble, and one
+of them bore on it a token that made him pause, while a thrill like
+terror ran through his system. For it was the mark of a footstep, very
+decidedly made out, and red, like blood,--the Bloody Footstep,--the mark
+of a foot, which seemed to have been slightly impressed into the rock,
+as if it had been a soft substance, at the same time sliding a little,
+and gushing with blood. The glistening moisture of which we have
+spoken made it appear as if it were just freshly stamped there; and it
+suggested to Redclyffe's fancy the idea, that, impressed more than two
+centuries ago, there was some charm connected with the mark which kept
+it still fresh, and would continue to do so to the end of time. It was
+well that there was no spectator there,--for the American would have
+blushed to have it known how much this old traditionary wonder had
+affected his imagination. But, indeed, it was as old as any bugbear of
+his mind--as any of those bugbears and private terrors which grow up
+with people, and make the dreams and nightmares of childhood, and the
+fever-images of mature years, till they haunt the deliriums of the dying
+bed, and after that possibly, are either realized or known no more.
+The Doctor's strange story vividly recurred to him, and all the horrors
+which he had since associated with this trace; and it seemed to him as
+if he had now struck upon a bloody track, and as if there were other
+tracks of this supernatural foot which he was bound to search out;
+removing the dust of ages that had settled on them, the moss and deep
+grass that had grown over them, the forest leaves that might have fallen
+on them in America--marking out the pathway, till the pedestrian lay
+down in his grave.
+
+The foot was issuing from, not entering into, the house. Whoever had
+impressed it, or on whatever occasion, he had gone forth, and doubtless
+to return no more. Redclyffe was impelled to place his own foot on the
+track; and the action, as it were, suggested in itself strange ideas of
+what had been the state of mind of the man who planted it there; and he
+felt a strange, vague, yet strong surmise of some agony, some terror and
+horror, that had passed here, and would not fade out of the spot. While
+he was in these musings, he saw Lord Braithwaite looking at him through
+the glass of the porch, with fixed, curious eyes, and a smile on his
+face. On perceiving that Redclyffe was aware of his presence, he came
+forth without appearing in the least disturbed.
+
+"What think you of the Bloody Footstep?" asked he.
+
+"It seems to me, undoubtedly," said Redclyffe, stooping to examine it
+more closely, "a good thing to make a legend out of; and, like most
+legendary lore, not capable of bearing close examination. I should
+decidedly say that the Bloody Footstep is a natural reddish stain in the
+stone."
+
+"Do you think so, indeed?" rejoined his Lordship. "It may be; but in
+that case, if not the record of an actual deed,--of a foot stamped down
+there in guilt and agony, and oozing out with unwipeupable blood,--we
+may consider it as prophetic;--as foreboding, from the time when the
+stone was squared and smoothed, and laid at this threshold, that a fatal
+footstep was really to be impressed here."
+
+"It is an ingenious supposition," said Redclyffe. "But is there any sure
+knowledge that the prophecy you suppose has yet been fulfilled?"
+
+"If not, it might yet be in the future," said Lord Braithwaite. "But I
+think there are enough in the records of this family to prove that there
+did one cross this threshold in a bloody agony, who has since returned
+no more. Great seekings, I have understood, have been had throughout the
+world for him, or for any sign of him, but nothing satisfactory has been
+heard."
+
+"And it is now too late to expect it," observed the American.
+
+"Perhaps not," replied the nobleman, with a glance that Redclyffe
+thought had peculiar meaning in it. "Ah! it is very curious to see
+what turnings up there are in this world of old circumstances that seem
+buried forever; how things come back, like echoes that have rolled away
+among the hills and been seemingly hushed forever. We cannot tell when
+a thing is really dead; it comes to life, perhaps in its old shape,
+perhaps in a new and unexpected one; so that nothing really vanishes out
+of the world. I wish it did."
+
+The conversation now ceased, and Redclyffe entered the house, where he
+amused himself for some time in looking at the ancient hall, with its
+gallery, its armor, and its antique fireplace, on the hearth of
+which burned a genial fire. He wondered whether in that fire was the
+continuance of that custom which the Doctor's legend spoke of, and that
+the flame had been kept up there two hundred years, in expectation of
+the wanderer's return. It might be so, although the climate of England
+made it a natural custom enough, in a large and damp old room, into
+which many doors opened, both from the exterior and interior of the
+mansion; but it was pleasant to think the custom a traditionary one, and
+to fancy that a booted figure, enveloped in a cloak, might still
+arrive, and fling open the veiling cloak, throw off the sombre and
+drooping-brimmed hat, and show features that were similar to those seen
+in pictured faces on the walls. Was he himself--in another guise, as
+Lord Braithwaite had been saying--that long-expected one? Was his the
+echoing tread that had been heard so long through the ages--so far
+through the wide world--approaching the blood-stained threshold?
+
+With such thoughts, or dreams (for they were hardly sincerely enough
+entertained to be called thoughts), Redclyffe spent the day; a strange,
+delicious day, in spite of the sombre shadows that enveloped it. He
+fancied himself strangely wonted, already, to the house; as if his every
+part and peculiarity had at once fitted into its nooks, and corners,
+and crannies; but, indeed, his mobile nature and active fancy were not
+entirely to be trusted in this matter; it was, perhaps, his American
+faculty of making himself at home anywhere, that he mistook for the
+feeling of being peculiarly at home here.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+
+Redclyffe was now established in the great house which had been so long
+and so singularly an object of interest with him. With his customary
+impressibility by the influences around him, he begun to take in the
+circumstances, and to understand them by more subtile tokens than he
+could well explain to himself. There was the steward, [Endnote: 1] or
+whatever was his precise office; so quiet, so subdued, so nervous, so
+strange! What had been this man's history? What was now the secret
+of his daily life? There he was, creeping stealthily up and down the
+staircases, and about the passages of the house; always as if he were
+afraid of meeting somebody. On seeing Redclyffe in the house, the latter
+fancied that the man expressed a kind of interest in his face; but
+whether pleasure or pain he could not well tell; only he sometimes found
+that he was contemplating him from a distance, or from the obscurity of
+the room in which he sat,--or from a corridor, while he smoked his cigar
+on the lawn. A great part, if not the whole of this, he imputed to
+his knowledge of Redclyffe's connections with the Doctor; but yet this
+hardly seemed sufficient to account for the pertinacity with which the
+old man haunted his footsteps,--the poor, nervous old thing,--always
+near him, or often unexpectedly so; and yet apparently not very willing
+to hold conversation with him, having nothing of importance to say.
+
+"Mr. Omskirk," said Redclyffe to him, a day or two after the
+commencement of his visit, "how many years have you now been in this
+situation?"
+
+"0, sir, ever since the Doctor's departure for America," said Omskirk,
+"now thirty and five years, five months, and three days."
+
+"A long time," said Redclyffe, smiling, "and you seem to keep the
+account of it very accurately."
+
+"A very long time, your honor," said Omskirk; "so long, that I seem to
+have lived one life before it began, and I cannot think of any life than
+just what I had. My life was broken off short in the midst; and what
+belonged to the earlier part of it was another man's life; this is
+mine."
+
+"It might be a pleasant life enough, I should think, in this fine old
+Hall," said Redclyffe; "rather monotonous, however. Would you not like
+a relaxation of a few days, a pleasure trip, in all these thirty-five
+years? You old Englishmen are so sturdily faithful to one thing. You do
+not resemble my countrymen in that."
+
+"0, none of them ever lived in an old mansion-house like this," replied
+Omskirk, "they do not know the sort of habits that a man gets here. They
+do not know my business either, nor any man's here."
+
+"Is your master then, so difficult?" said Redclyffe.
+
+"My master! Who was speaking of him?" said the old man, as if surprised.
+"Ah, I was thinking of Dr. Grimshawe. He was my master, you know."
+
+And Redclyffe was again inconceivably struck with the strength of the
+impression that was made on the poor old man's mind by the character of
+the old Doctor; so that, after thirty years of other service, he still
+felt him to be the master, and could not in the least release himself
+from those earlier bonds. He remembered a story that the Doctor used to
+tell of his once recovering a hanged person, and more and more came to
+the conclusion that this was the man, and that, as the Doctor had said,
+this hold of a strong mind over a weak one, strengthened by the idea
+that he had made him, had subjected the man to him in a kind of slavery
+that embraced the soul.
+
+And then, again, the lord of the estate interested him greatly, and not
+unpleasantly. He compared what he seemed to be now with what, according
+to all reports, he had been in the past, and could make nothing of
+it, nor reconcile the two characters in the least. It seemed as if the
+estate were possessed by a devil,--a foul and melancholy fiend,--who
+resented the attempted possession of others by subjecting them to
+himself. One had turned from quiet and sober habits to reckless
+dissipation; another had turned from the usual gayety of life to recluse
+habits, and both, apparently, by the same influence; at least, so
+it appeared to Redclyffe, as he insulated their story from all other
+circumstances, and looked at them by one light. He even thought that he
+felt a similar influence coming over himself, even in this little
+time that he had spent here; gradually, should this be his permanent
+residence,--and not so very gradually either,--there would come its own
+individual mode of change over him. That quick suggestive mind would
+gather the moss and lichens of decay. Palsy of its powers would probably
+be the form it would assume. He looked back through the vanished
+years to the time which he had spent with the old Doctor, and he felt
+unaccountably as if the mysterious old man were yet ruling him, as he
+did in his boyhood; as if his inscrutable, inevitable eye were upon him
+in all his movements; nay, as if he had guided every step that he took
+in coming hither, and were stalking mistily before him, leading him
+about. He sometimes would gladly have given up all these wild and
+enticing prospects, these dreams that had occupied him so long, if he
+could only have gone away and looked back upon the house, its inmates,
+and his own recollections no more; but there came a fate, and took the
+shape of the old Doctor's apparition, holding him back.
+
+And then, too, the thought of Elsie had much influence in keeping him
+quietly here; her natural sunshine was the one thing that, just now,
+seemed to have a good influence upon the world. She, too, was evidently
+connected with this place, and with the fate, whatever it might be, that
+awaited him here. The Doctor, the ruler of his destiny, had provided
+her as well as all the rest; and from his grave, or wherever he was, he
+still seemed to bring them together.
+
+So here, in this darkened dream, he waited for what should come to pass;
+and daily, when he sat down in the dark old library, it was with the
+thought that this day might bring to a close the doubt amid which he
+lived,--might give him the impetus to go forward. In such a state, no
+doubt, the witchcraft of the place was really to be recognized, the
+old witchcraft, too, of the Doctor, which he had escaped by the quick
+ebullition of youthful spirit, long ago, while the Doctor lived; but
+which had been stored up till now, till an influence that remained
+latent for years had worked out in active disease. He held himself
+open for intercourse with the lord of the mansion; and intercourse of a
+certain nature they certainly had, but not of the kind which Redclyffe
+desired. They talked together of politics, of the state of the relations
+between England and America, of the court to which Redclyffe was
+accredited; sometimes Redclyffe tried to lead the conversation to the
+family topics, nor, in truth, did Lord Braithwaite seem to decline his
+lead; although it was observable that very speedily the conversation
+would be found turned upon some other subject, to which it had swerved
+aside by subtle underhand movements. Yet Redclyffe was not the less
+determined, and at no distant period, to bring up the subject on which
+his mind dwelt so much, and have it fairly discussed between them.
+
+He was sometimes a little frightened at the position and circumstances
+in which he found himself; a great disturbance there was in his being,
+the causes of which he could not trace. It had an influence on his
+dreams, through which the Doctor seemed to pass continually, and when he
+awoke it was often with the sensation that he had just the moment before
+been holding conversation with the old man, and that the latter--with
+that gesture of power that he remembered so well--had been impressing
+some command upon him; but what that command was, he could not possibly
+call to mind. He wandered among the dark passages of the house, and up
+its antique staircases, as if expecting at every turn to meet some one
+who would have the word of destiny to say to him. When he went forth
+into the park, it was as if to hold an appointment with one who had
+promised to meet him there; and he came slowly back, lingering and
+loitering, because this expected one had not yet made himself visible,
+yet plucked up a little alacrity as he drew near the house, because the
+communicant might have arrived in his absence, and be waiting for him in
+the dim library. It seemed as if he was under a spell; he could neither
+go away nor rest,--nothing but dreams, troubled dreams. He had ghostly
+fears, as if some one were near him whom he could not make out; stealing
+behind him, and starting away when he was impelled to turn round. A
+nervousness that his healthy temperament had never before permitted him
+to be the victim of, assailed him now. He could not help imputing it
+partly to the influence of the generations who had left a portion of
+their individual human nature in the house, which had become magnetic by
+them and could not rid itself of their presence in one sense, though, in
+another, they had borne it as far off as to where the gray tower of the
+village church rose above their remains.
+
+Again, he was frightened to perceive what a hold the place was getting
+upon him; how the tendrils of the ivy seemed to hold him and would not
+let him go; how natural and homelike (grim and sombre as they were) the
+old doorways and apartments were becoming; how in no place that he had
+ever known had he had such a home-like feeling. To be sure, poor fellow,
+he had no earlier home except the almshouse, where his recollection of a
+fireside crowded by grim old women and pale, sickly children, of course
+never allowed him to have the reminiscences of a private, domestic home.
+But then there was the Doctor's home by the graveyard, and little Elsie,
+his constant playmate? No, even those recollections did not hold him
+like this heavy present circumstance. How should he ever draw himself
+away? No; the proud and vivid and active prospects that had heretofore
+spread themselves before him,--the striving to conquer, the struggle,
+the victory, the defeat, if such it was to be,--the experiences for good
+or ill,--the life, life, life,--all possibility of these was passing
+from him; all that hearty earnest contest or communion of man with man;
+and leaving him nothing but this great sombre shade, this brooding
+of the old family mansion, with its dreary ancestral hall, its mouldy
+dignity, its life of the past, its fettering honor, which to accept must
+bind him hand and foot, as respects all effort, such as he had trained
+himself for,--such as his own country offered. It was not any value for
+these,--as it seemed to Redclyffe,--but a witchcraft, an indefinable
+spell, a something that he could not define, that enthralled him, and
+was now doing a work on him analogous to, though different from, that
+which was wrought on Omskirk and all the other inhabitants, high and
+low, of this old mansion.
+
+He felt greatly interested in the master of the mansion; although
+perhaps it was not from anything in his nature; but partly because he
+conceived that he himself had a controlling power over his fortunes, and
+likewise from the vague perception of this before-mentioned trouble
+in him. It seemed, whatever it might be, to have converted an ordinary
+superficial man of the world into a being that felt and suffered
+inwardly, had pangs, fears, a conscience, a sense of unseen things. It
+seemed as if underneath this manor-house were the entrance to the cave
+of Trophonius, one visit to which made a man sad forever after; and that
+Lord Braithwaite had been there once, or perhaps went nightly, or at
+any hour. Or the mansion itself was like dark-colored experience, the
+reality; the point of view where things were seen in their true lights;
+the true world, all outside of which was delusion, and here--dreamlike
+as its structures seemed--the absolute truth. All those that lived in it
+were getting to be a brotherhood; and he among them; and perhaps before
+the blood-stained threshold would grow up an impassable barrier, which
+would cause himself to sit down in dreary quiet, like the rest of them.
+
+Redclyffe, as has been intimated, had an unavowed--unavowed to
+himself--suspicion that the master of the house cherished no kindly
+purpose towards him; he had an indistinct feeling of danger from him;
+he would not have been surprised to know that he was concocting a plot
+against his life; and yet he did not think that Lord Braithwaite had the
+slightest hostility towards him. It might make the thing more horrible,
+perhaps; but it has been often seen in those who poison for the sake of
+interest, without feelings of personal malevolence, that they do it as
+kindly as the nature of the thing will permit; they, possibly, may even
+have a certain degree of affection for their victims, enough to induce
+them to make the last hours of life sweet and pleasant; to wind up the
+fever of life with a double supply of enjoyable throbs; to sweeten and
+delicately flavor the cup of death that they offer to the lips of him
+whose life is inconsistent with some stated necessity of their own.
+"Dear friend," such a one might say to the friend whom he reluctantly
+condemned to death, "think not that there is any base malice, any
+desire of pain to thee, that actuates me in this thing. Heaven knows,
+I earnestly wish thy good. But I have well considered the matter,--more
+deeply than thou hast,--and have found that it is essential that one
+thing should be, and essential to that thing that thou, my friend,
+shouldst die. Is that a doom which even thou wouldst object to with such
+an end to be answered? Thou art innocent; thou art not a man of evil
+life; the worst thing that can come of it, so far as thou art concerned,
+would be a quiet, endless repose in yonder churchyard, among dust of
+thy ancestry, with the English violets growing over thee there, and
+the green, sweet grass, which thou wilt not scorn to associate with thy
+dissolving elements, remembering that thy forefather owed a debt,
+for his own birth and growth, to this English soil, and paid it
+not,--consigned himself to that rough soil of another clime, under the
+forest leaves. Pay it, dear friend, without repining, and leave me to
+battle a little longer with this troublesome world, and in a few years
+to rejoin thee, and talk quietly over this matter which we are now
+arranging. How slight a favor, then, for one friend to do another, will
+seem this that I seek of thee."
+
+Redclyffe smiled to himself, as he thus gave expression to what he
+really half fancied were Lord Braithwaite's feelings and purposes
+towards him, and he felt them in the kindness and sweetness of his
+demeanor, and his evident wish to make him happy, combined with his own
+subtile suspicion of some design with which he had been invited here, or
+which had grown up since he came.
+
+Whoever has read Italian history must have seen such instances of this
+poisoning without malice or personal ill-feeling.
+
+His own pleasant, companionable, perhaps noble traits and qualities,
+may have made a favorable impression on Lord Braithwaite, and perhaps he
+regretted the necessity of acting as he was about to do, but could not
+therefore weakly relinquish his deliberately formed design. And, on his
+part, Redclyffe bore no malice towards Lord Braithwaite, but felt really
+a kindly interest in him, and could he have made him happy at any less
+cost than his own life, or dearest interests, would perhaps have been
+glad to do so. He sometimes felt inclined to remonstrate with him in
+a friendly way; to tell him that his intended course was not likely to
+lead to a good result; that they had better try to arrange the matter
+on some other basis, and perhaps he would not find the American so
+unreasonable as he supposed.
+
+All this, it will be understood, were the mere dreamy suppositions of
+Redclyffe, in the idleness and languor of the old mansion, letting his
+mind run at will, and following it into dim caves, whither it tended. He
+did not actually believe anything of all this; unless it be a lawyer,
+or a policeman, or some very vulgar natural order of mind, no man really
+suspects another of crime. It is the hardest thing in the world for a
+noble nature--the hardest and the most shocking--to be convinced that
+a fellow-being is going to do a wrong thing, and the consciousness of
+one's own inviolability renders it still more difficult to believe that
+one's self is to be the object of the wrong. What he had been fancying
+looked to him like a romance. The strange part of the matter was, what
+suggested such a romance in regard to his kind and hospitable host, who
+seemed to exercise the hospitality of England with a kind of refinement
+and pleasant piquancy that came from his Italian mixture of blood? Was
+there no spiritual whisper here?
+
+So the time wore on; and Redclyffe began to be sensible that he must
+soon decide upon the course that he was to take; for his diplomatic
+position waited for him, and he could not loiter many days more away in
+this half delicious, half painful reverie and quiet in the midst of his
+struggling life. He was yet as undetermined what to do as ever; or, if
+we may come down to the truth, he was perhaps loath to acknowledge to
+himself the determination that he had actually formed.
+
+One day, at dinner, which now came on after candle-light, he and Lord
+Braithwaite sat together at table, as usual, while Omskirk waited at the
+sideboard. It was a wild, gusty night, in which an autumnal breeze
+of later autumn seemed to have gone astray, and come into September
+intrusively. The two friends--for such we may call them--had spent a
+pleasant day together, wandering in the grounds, looking at the old
+house at all points, going to the church, and examining the cross-legged
+stone statues; they had ridden, too, and taken a great deal of healthful
+exercise, and had now that pleasant sense of just weariness enough which
+it is the boon of the climate of England to incite and permit men
+to take. Redclyffe was in one of his most genial moods, and Lord
+Braithwaite seemed to be the same; so kindly they were both disposed
+to one another, that the American felt that he might not longer refrain
+from giving his friend some light upon the character in which he
+appeared, or in which, at least, he had it at his option to appear. Lord
+Braithwaite might or might not know it already; but at all events it
+was his duty to tell him, or to take his leave, having thus far neither
+gained nor sought anything from their connection which would tend to
+forward his pursuit--should he decide to undertake it.
+
+When the cheerful fire, the rare wine, and the good fare had put them
+both into a good physical state, Redclyffe said to Lord Braithwaite,--
+
+"There is a matter upon which I have been some time intending to speak
+to you."
+
+Braithwaite nodded.
+
+"A subject," continued he, "of interest to both of us. Has it ever
+occurred to you, from the identity of name, that I may be really, what
+we have jokingly assumed me to be,--a relation?"
+
+"It has," said Lord Braithwaite, readily enough. "The family would be
+proud to acknowledge such a kinsman, whose abilities and political rank
+would add a public lustre that it has long wanted."
+
+Redclyffe bowed and smiled.
+
+"You know, I suppose, the annals of your house," he continued, "and have
+heard how, two centuries ago, or somewhat less, there was an ancestor
+who mysteriously disappeared. He was never seen again. There were tales
+of private murder, out of which a hundred legends have come down to
+these days, as I have myself found, though most of them in so strange a
+shape that I should hardly know them, had I not myself a clue."
+
+"I have heard some of these legends," said Lord Braithwaite.
+
+"But did you ever hear, among them," asked Redclyffe, "that the lost
+ancestor did not really die,--was not murdered,--but lived long, though
+in another hemisphere,--lived long, and left heirs behind him?"
+
+"There is such a legend," said Lord Braithwaite.
+
+"Left posterity," continued Redclyffe,--"a representative of whom is
+alive at this day."
+
+"That I have not known, though I might conjecture something like it,"
+said Braithwaite.
+
+The coolness with which he took this perplexed Redclyffe. He resolved to
+make trial at once whether it were possible to move him.
+
+"And I have reason to believe," he added, "that that representative is
+myself."
+
+"Should that prove to be the case, you are welcome back to your own,"
+said Lord Braithwaite, quietly. "It will be a very remarkable case, if
+the proofs for two hundred years, or thereabouts, can be so distinctly
+made out as to nullify the claim of one whose descent is undoubted. Yet
+it is certainly not impossible. I suppose it would hardly be fair in me
+to ask what are your proofs, and whether I may see them."
+
+"The documents are in the hands of my agents in London," replied
+Redclyffe; "and seem to be ample, among them being a certified genealogy
+from the first emigrant downward, without a break. A declaration of
+two men of note among the first settlers, certifying that they knew
+the first emigrant, under a change of name, to be the eldest son of the
+house of Braithwaite; full proofs, at least on that head."
+
+"You are a lawyer, I believe," said Braithwaite, "and know better than
+I what may be necessary to prove your claim. I will frankly own to you,
+that I have heard, long ago,--as long as when my connection with this
+hereditary property first began,--that there was supposed to be an heir
+extant for a long course of years, and that there, was no proof that
+that main line of the descent had ever become extinct. If these things
+had come fairly before me, and been represented to me with whatever
+force belongs to them, before my accession to the estate,--these and
+other facts which I have since become acquainted with,--I might have
+deliberated on the expediency of coming to such a doubtful possession.
+The property, I assure you, is not so desirable that, taking all things
+into consideration, it has much increased my happiness. But, now, here I
+am, having paid a price in a certain way,--which you will understand,
+if you ever come into the property,--a price of a nature that cannot
+possibly be refunded. It can hardly be presumed that I shall see your
+right a moment sooner than you make it manifest by law."
+
+"I neither expect nor wish it," replied Redclyffe, "nor, to speak
+frankly, am I quite sure that you will ever have occasion to defend your
+title, or to question mine. When I came hither, to be your guest, it was
+almost with the settled purpose never to mention my proofs, nor to
+seek to make them manifest. That purpose is not, I may say, yet
+relinquished."
+
+"Yet I am to infer from your words that it is shaken?" said Braithwaite.
+"You find the estate, then, so delightful,--this life of the old
+manor-house so exquisitely agreeable,--this air so cheering,--this moral
+atmosphere so invigorating,--that your scruples are about coming to
+an end. You think this life of an Englishman, this fair prospect of a
+title, so irresistibly enticing as to be worth more than your claim, in
+behalf of your American birthright, to a possible Presidency."
+
+There was a sort of sneer in this, which Redclyffe did not well know how
+to understand; and there was a look on Braithwaite's face, as he said
+it, that made him think of a condemned soul, who should be dressed in
+magnificent robes, and surrounded with the mockery of state, splendor,
+and happiness, who, if he should be congratulated on his fortunate and
+blissful situation, would probably wear just such a look, and speak in
+just that tone. He looked a moment in Braithwaite's face.
+
+"No," he replied. "I do not think that there is much happiness in it.
+A brighter, healthier, more useful, far more satisfactory, though
+tumultuous life would await me in my own country. But there is about
+this place a strange, deep, sad, brooding interest, which possesses me,
+and draws me to it, and will not let me go. I feel as if, in spite of
+myself and my most earnest efforts, I were fascinated by something in
+the spot, and must needs linger here, and make it my home if I can."
+
+"You shall be welcome; the old hereditary chair will be filled at last,"
+said Braithwaite, pointing to the vacant chair. "Come, we will drink to
+you in a cup of welcome. Take the old chair now."
+
+In half-frolic Redclyffe took the chair.
+
+He called to Omskirk to bring a bottle of a particularly exquisite
+Italian wine, known only to the most deeply skilled in the vintages
+of that country, and which, he said, was oftener heard of than
+seen,--oftener seen than tasted. Omskirk put it on the table in its
+original glass, and Braithwaite filled Redclyffe's glass and his own,
+and raised the latter to his lips, with a frank expression of his mobile
+countenance.
+
+"May you have a secure possession of your estate," said he, "and live
+long in the midst of your possessions. To me, on the whole, it seems
+better than your American prospects."
+
+Redclyffe thanked him, and drank off the glass of wine, which was not
+very much to his taste; as new varieties of wine are apt not to be. All
+the conversation that had passed had been in a free, careless sort of
+way, without apparently much earnestness in it; for they were both men
+who knew how to keep their more serious parts within them. But Redclyffe
+was glad that the explanation was over, and that he might now remain
+at Braithwaite's table, under his roof, without that uneasy feeling of
+treachery which, whether rightly or not, had haunted him hitherto. He
+felt joyous, and stretched his hand out for the bottle which Braithwaite
+kept near himself, instead of passing it.
+
+"You do not yourself do justice to your own favorite wine," observed
+Redclyffe, seeing his host's full glass standing before him.
+
+"I have filled again," said Braithwaite, carelessly; "but I know not
+that I shall venture to drink a second glass. It is a wine that does not
+bear mixture with other vintages, though of most genial and admirable
+qualities when taken by itself. Drink your own, however, for it will be
+a rare occasion indeed that would induce me to offer you another bottle
+of this rare stock."
+
+Redclyffe sipped his second glass, endeavoring to find out what was this
+subtile and peculiar flavor that hid itself so, and yet seemed on the
+point of revealing itself. It had, he thought, a singular effect upon
+his faculties, quickening and making them active, and causing him to
+feel as if he were on the point of penetrating rare mysteries, such as
+men's thoughts are always hovering round, and always returning from.
+Some strange, vast, sombre, mysterious truth, which he seemed to have
+searched for long, appeared to be on the point of being revealed to him;
+a sense of something to come; something to happen that had been waiting
+long, long to happen; an opening of doors, a drawing away of veils; a
+lifting of heavy, magnificent curtains, whose dark folds hung before a
+spectacle of awe;--it was like the verge of the grave. Whether it was
+the exquisite wine of Braithwaite, or whatever it might be, the American
+felt a strange influence upon him, as if he were passing through the
+gates of eternity, and finding on the other side the revelation of some
+secret that had greatly perplexed him on this side. He thought that
+Braithwaite's face assumed a strange, subtile smile,--not malicious,
+yet crafty, triumphant, and at the same time terribly sad, and with that
+perception his senses, his life, welled away; and left him in the deep
+ancestral chair at the board of Braithwaite.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+
+When awake [Endnote: 1], or beginning to awake, he lay for some time in
+a maze; not a disagreeable one, but thoughts were running to and fro in
+his mind, all mixed and jumbled together. Reminiscences of early days,
+even those that were Preadamite; referring, we mean, to those times in
+the almshouse, which he could not at ordinary times remember at all; but
+now there seemed to be visions of old women and men, and pallid girls,
+and little dirty boys, which could only be referred to that epoch. Also,
+and most vividly, there was the old Doctor, with his sternness,
+his fierceness, his mystery; and all that happened since, playing
+phantasmagoria before his yet unclosed eyes; nor, so mysterious was his
+state, did he know, when he should unclose those lids, where he should
+find himself. He was content to let the world go on in this way, as
+long as it would, and therefore did not hurry, but rather kept back the
+proofs of awakening; willing to look at the scenes that were unrolling
+for his amusement, as it seemed; and willing, too, to keep it uncertain
+whether he were not back in America, and in his boyhood, and all other
+subsequent impressions a dream or a prophetic vision. But at length
+something stirring near him,--or whether it stirred, or whether he
+dreamed it, he could not quite tell,--but the uncertainty impelled him,
+at last, to open his eyes, and see whereabouts he was.
+
+Even then he continued in as much uncertainty as he was before, and lay
+with marvellous quietude in it, trying sluggishly to make the mystery
+out. It was in a dim, twilight place, wherever it might be; a place of
+half-awakeness, where the outlines of things were not well defined; but
+it seemed to be a chamber, antique and vaulted, narrow and high, hung
+round with old tapestry. Whether it were morning or midday he could not
+tell, such was the character of the light, nor even where it came from;
+for there appeared to be no windows, and yet it was not apparently
+artificial light; nor light at all, indeed, but a gray dimness. It was
+so like his own half-awake state that he lay in it a longer time, not
+incited to finish his awaking, but in a languor, not disagreeable, yet
+hanging heavily, heavily upon him, like a dark pall. It was, in fact, as
+if he had been asleep for years, or centuries, or till the last day was
+dawning, and then was collecting his thoughts in such slow fashion as
+would then be likely.
+
+Again that noise,--a little, low, quiet sound, as of one breathing
+somewhere near him. The whole thing was very much like that incident
+which introduced him to the Hospital, and his first coming to his senses
+there; and he almost fancied that some such accident must again have
+happened to him, and that when his sight cleared he should again behold
+the venerable figure of the pensioner. With this idea he let his head
+steady itself; and it seemed to him that its dizziness must needs be
+the result of very long and deep sleep. What if it were the sleep of a
+century? What if all things that were extant when he went to sleep had
+passed away, and he was waking now in another epoch of time? Where was
+America, and the republic in which he hoped for such great things? Where
+England? had she stood it better than the republic? Was the old Hospital
+still in being,--although the good Warden must long since have passed
+out of his warm and pleasant life? And himself, how came he to be
+preserved? In what musty old nook had he been put away, where Time
+neglected and Death forgot him, until now he was to get up friendless,
+helpless,--when new heirs had come to the estate he was on the point of
+laying claim to,--and go onward through what remained of life? Would it
+not have been better to have lived with his contemporaries, and to be
+now dead and dust with them? Poor, petty interests of a day, how slight!
+
+Again the noise, a little stir, a sort of quiet moan, or something that
+he could not quite define; but it seemed, whenever he heard it, as
+if some fact thrust itself through the dream-work with which he was
+circumfused; something alien to his fantasies, yet not powerful enough
+to dispel them. It began to be irksome to him, this little sound of
+something near him; and he thought, in the space of another hundred
+years, if it continued, he should have to arouse himself and see what
+it was. But, indeed, there was something so cheering in this long
+repose,--this rest from all the troubles of earth, which it sometimes
+seems as if only a churchyard bed would give us,--that he wished the
+noise would let him alone. But his thoughts were gradually getting
+too busy for this slumberous state. He begun, perforce, to come nearer
+actuality. The strange question occurred to him, Had any time at all
+passed? Was he not still sitting at Lord Braithwaite's table, having
+just now quaffed a second glass of that rare and curious Italian wine?
+Was it not affecting his head very strangely,--so that he was put out of
+time as it were? He would rally himself, and try to set his head right
+with another glass. He must be still at table, for now he remembered he
+had not gone to bed at all. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+Ah, the noise! He could not bear it, he would awake now, now!--silence
+it, and then to sleep again. In fact, he started up; started to his
+feet, in puzzle and perplexity, and stood gazing around him, with
+swimming brain. It was an antique room, which he did not at all
+recognize, and, indeed, in that dim twilight--which how it came he could
+not tell--he could scarcely discern what were its distinguishing marks.
+But he seemed to be sensible, that, in a high-backed chair, at a little
+distance from him, sat a figure in a long robe; a figure of a man
+with snow-white hair and a long beard, who seemed to be gazing at him,
+quietly, as if he had been gazing a hundred years. I know not what it
+was, but there was an influence as if this old man belonged to some
+other age and category of man than he was now amongst. He remembered the
+old family legend of the existence of an ancestor two or three centuries
+in age.
+
+"It is the old family personified," thought he.
+
+The old figure made no sign, but continued to sit gazing at him in so
+strangely still a manner that it made Redclyffe shiver with something
+that seemed like affright. There was an aspect of long, long time about
+him; as if he had never been young, or so long ago as when the world
+was young along with him. He might be the demon of this old house; the
+representative of all that happened in it, the grief, the long languor
+and weariness of life, the deaths, gathering them all into himself, and
+figuring them in furrows, wrinkles, and white hairs,--a being that might
+have been young, when those old Saxon timbers were put together, with
+the oaks that were saplings when Caesar landed, and was in his maturity
+when the Conqueror came, and was now lapsing into extreme age when the
+nineteenth century was elderly. His garb might have been of any time,
+that long, loose robe that enveloped him. Redclyffe remained in this
+way, gazing at this aged figure; at first without the least wonder, but
+calmly, as we feel in dreams, when, being in a land of enchantment, we
+take everything as if it were a matter of course, and feel, by the right
+of our own marvellous nature, on terms of equal kindred with all other
+marvels. So it was with him when he first became aware of the old man,
+sitting there with that age-long regard directed towards him.
+
+But, by degrees, a sense of wonder had its will, and grew, slowly at
+first, in Redclyffe's mind; and almost twin-born with it, and growing
+piece by piece, there was a sense of awful fear, as his waking senses
+came slowly back to him. In the dreamy state, he had felt no fear; but,
+as a waking man, it was fearful to discover that the shadowy forms did
+not fly from his awaking eyes. He started at last to his feet from the
+low couch on which he had all this time been lying.
+
+"What are you?" he exclaimed. "Where am I?"
+
+The old figure made no answer; nor could Redclyffe be quite sure that
+his voice had any effect upon it, though he fancied that it was shaken
+a little, as if his voice came to it from afar. But it continued to gaze
+at him, or at least to have its aged face turned towards him in the dim
+light; and this strange composure, and unapproachableness, were very
+frightful. As his manhood gathered about his heart, however, the
+American endeavored to shake off this besetting fear, or awe, or
+whatever it was; and to bring himself to a sense of waking things,--to
+burst through the mist and delusive shows that bewildered him, and catch
+hold of a reality. He stamped upon the floor; it was solid stone, the
+pavement, or oak so old and stanch that it resembled it. There was
+one firm thing, therefore. But the contrast between this and the
+slipperiness, the unaccountableness, of the rest of his position, made
+him the more sensible of the latter. He made a step towards the old
+figure; another; another. He was face to face with him, within a yard of
+distance. He saw the faint movement of the old man's breath; he sought,
+through the twilight of the room, some glimmer of perception in his
+eyes.
+
+"Are you a living man?" asked Redclyffe, faintly and doubtfully.
+
+He mumbled, the old figure, some faint moaning sound, that, if it
+were language at all, had all the edges and angles worn off it by
+decay,--unintelligible, except that it seemed to signify a faint
+mournfulness and complainingness of mood; and then held his peace,
+continuing to gaze as before. Redclyffe could not bear the awe that
+filled him, while he kept at a distance, and, coming desperately
+forward, he stood close to the old figure; he touched his robe, to see
+if it were real; he laid his hand upon the withered hand that held the
+staff, in which he now recognized the very staff of the Doctor's legend.
+His fingers touched a real hand, though, bony and dry, as if it had been
+in the grave.
+
+"Then you are real?" said Redclyffe doubtfully.
+
+The old figure seemed to have exhausted itself--its energies, what there
+were of them--in the effort of making the unintelligible communication
+already vouchsafed. Then he seemed to lapse out of consciousness, and
+not to know what was passing, or to be sensible that any person was
+near him. But Redclyffe was now resuming his firmness and daylight
+consciousness even in the dimness. He ran over all that he had heard of
+the legend of the old house, rapidly considering whether there might not
+be something of fact in the legend of the undying old man; whether, as
+told or whispered in the chimney-corners, it might not be an instance
+of the mysterious, the half-spiritual mode, in which actual truths
+communicate themselves imperfectly through a medium that gives them the
+aspect of falsehood. Something in the atmosphere of the house made its
+inhabitants and neighbors dimly aware that there was a secret resident;
+it was by a language not audible, but of impression; there could not
+be such a secret in its recesses, without making itself sensible. This
+legend of the undying one translated it to vulgar apprehension. He
+remembered those early legends, told by the Doctor, in his childhood;
+he seemed imperfectly and doubtfully to see what was their true meaning,
+and how, taken aright, they had a reality, and were the craftily
+concealed history of his own wrongs, sufferings, and revenge. And this
+old man! who was he? He joined the Warden's account of the family to
+the Doctor's legends. He could not believe, or take thoroughly in, the
+strange surmise to which they led him; but, by an irresistible impulse,
+he acted on it.
+
+"Sir Edward Redclyffe!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Ha! who speaks to me?" exclaimed the old man, in a startled voice, like
+one who hears himself called at an unexpected moment.
+
+"Sir Edward Redclyffe," repeated Redclyffe, "I bring you news of Norman
+Oglethorpe!" [Endnote: 3.]
+
+"The villain! the tyrant! mercy! mercy! save me!" cried the old man, in
+most violent emotion of terror and rage intermixed, that shook his old
+frame as if it would be shaken asunder. He stood erect, the picture of
+ghastly horror, as if he saw before him that stern face that had thrown
+a blight over his life, and so fearfully avenged, from youth to age, the
+crime that he had committed. The effect, the passion, was too much,--the
+terror with which it smote, the rage that accompanied it, blazed up
+for a moment with a fierce flame, then flickered and went out. He stood
+tottering; Redclyffe put out his hand to support him; but he sank down
+in a heap on the floor, as if a thing of dry bones had been suddenly
+loosened at the joints, and fell in a rattling heap. [Endnote: 4.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+
+Redclyffe, apparently, had not communicated to his agent in London his
+change of address, when he left the Warden's residence to avail himself
+of the hospitality of Braithwaite Hall; for letters arrived for him,
+from his own country, both private and with the seal of state upon them;
+one among the rest that bore on the envelope the name of the President
+of the United States. The good Warden was impressed with great respect
+for so distinguished a signature, and, not knowing but that the welfare
+of the Republic (for which he had an Englishman's contemptuous
+interest) might be involved in its early delivery at its destination,
+he determined to ride over to Braithwaite Hall, call on his friend, and
+deliver it with his own hand. With this purpose, he mounted his horse,
+at the hour of his usual morning ride, and set forth; and, before
+reaching the village, saw a figure before him which he recognized as
+that of the pensioner. [Endnote: 1.]
+
+"Soho! whither go you, old friend?" said the Warden, drawing his bridle
+as he came up with the old man.
+
+"To Braithwaite Hall, sir," said the pensioner, who continued to walk
+diligently on; "and I am glad to see your honor (if it be so) on the
+same errand."
+
+"Why so?" asked the Warden. "You seem much in earnest. Why should my
+visit to Braithwaite Hall be a special cause of rejoicing?"
+
+"Nay," said the pensioner, "your honor is specially interested in this
+young American, who has gone thither to abide; and when one is in a
+strange country he needs some guidance. My mind is not easy about the
+young man."
+
+"Well," said the Warden, smiling to himself at the old gentleman's idle
+and senile fears, "I commend your diligence on behalf of your friend."
+
+He rode on as he spoke, and deep in one of the woodland paths he saw
+the flutter of a woman's garment, and, greatly to his surprise, overtook
+Elsie, who seemed to be walking along with great rapidity, and, startled
+by the approach of hoofs behind her, looked up at him, with a pale
+cheek.
+
+"Good morning, Miss Elsie," said the Warden. "You are taking a long walk
+this morning. I regret to see that I have frightened you."
+
+"Pray, whither are you going?" said she.
+
+"To the Hall," said the Warden, wondering at the abrupt question.
+
+"Ah, sir," exclaimed Elsie, "for Heaven's sake, pray insist on seeing
+Mr. Redclyffe,--take no excuse. There are reasons for it."
+
+"Certainly, fair lady," responded the Warden, wondering more and more
+at this injunction from such a source. "And when I see this fascinating
+gentleman, pray what message am I to give him from Miss Elsie,--who,
+moreover, seems to be on the eve of visiting him in person?"
+
+"See him! see him! Only see him!" said Elsie, with passionate
+earnestness, "and in haste! See him now!"
+
+She waved him onward as she spoke; and the Warden, greatly commoted for
+the nonce, complied with the maiden's fantasy so far as to ride on at
+a quicker pace, uneasily marvelling at what could have aroused this
+usually shy and reserved girl's nervousness to such a pitch. The
+incident served at all events to titillate his English sluggishness; so
+that he approached the avenue of the old Hall with a vague expectation
+of something that had happened there, though he knew not of what nature
+it could possibly be. However, he rode round to the side entrance, by
+which horsemen generally entered the house, and, a groom approaching to
+take his bridle, he alighted and approached the door. I know not whether
+it were anything more than the glistening moisture common in an English
+autumnal morning; but so it was, that the trace of the Bloody Footstep
+seemed fresh, as if it had been that very night imprinted anew, and the
+crime made all over again, with fresh guilt upon somebody's soul.
+
+When the footman came to the door, responsive to his ring, the Warden
+inquired for Mr. Redclyffe, the American gentleman.
+
+"The American gentleman left for London, early this morning," replied
+the footman, in a matter-of-fact way.
+
+"Gone!" exclaimed the Warden. "This is sudden; and strange that he
+should go without saying good by. Gone," and then he remembered the
+old pensioner's eagerness that the Warden should come here, and Elsie's
+strange injunction that he should insist on seeing Redclyffe. "Pray, is
+Lord Braithwaite at home?"
+
+"I think, sir, he is in the library," said the servant, "but will see;
+pray, sir, walk in."
+
+He returned in a moment, and ushered the Warden through passages with
+which he was familiar of old, to the library, where he found Lord
+Braithwaite sitting with the London newspaper in his hand. He rose and
+welcomed his guest with great equanimity.
+
+To the Warden's inquiries after Redclyffe, Lord Braithwaite replied that
+his guest had that morning left the house, being called to London by
+letters from America; but of what nature Lord Braithwaite was unable
+to say, except that they seemed to be of urgency and importance. The
+Warden's further inquiries, which he pushed as far as was decorous,
+elicited nothing more than this; and he was preparing to take his
+leave,--not seeing any reason for insisting (according to Elsie's
+desire) on the impossibility of seeing a man who was not there,--nor,
+indeed, any reason for so doing. And yet it seemed very strange
+that Redclyffe should have gone so unceremoniously; nor was he half
+satisfied, though he knew not why he should be otherwise.
+
+"Do you happen to know Mr. Redclyffe's address in London," asked the
+Warden.
+
+"Not at all," said Braithwaite. "But I presume there is courtesy enough
+in the American character to impel him to write to me, or both of us,
+within a day or two, telling us of his whereabouts and whatabouts.
+Should you know, I beg you will let me know; for I have really been
+pleased with this gentleman, and should have been glad could he have
+favored me with a somewhat longer visit."
+
+There was nothing more to be said; and the Warden took his leave, and
+was about mounting his horse, when he beheld the pensioner approaching
+the house, and he remained standing until he should come up.
+
+"You are too late," said he, as the old man drew near. "Our friend has
+taken French leave."
+
+"Mr. Warden," said the old man solemnly, "let me pray you not to give
+him up so easily. Come with me into the presence of Lord Braithwaite."
+
+The Warden made some objections; but the pensioner's manner was so
+earnest, that he soon consented; knowing that the strangeness of his
+sudden return might well enough be put upon the eccentricities of the
+pensioner, especially as he was so well known to Lord Braithwaite.
+He accordingly again rang at the door, which being opened by the same
+stolid footman, the Warden desired him to announce to Lord Braithwaite
+that the Warden and a pensioner desired to see him. He soon returned,
+with a request that they would walk in, and ushered them again to the
+library, where they found the master of the house in conversation with
+Omskirk at one end of the apartment,--a whispered conversation, which
+detained him a moment, after their arrival. The Warden fancied that he
+saw in old Omskirk's countenance a shade more of that mysterious horror
+which made him such a bugbear to children; but when Braithwaite
+turned from him and approached his visitor, there was no trace of any
+disturbance, beyond a natural surprise to see his good friend the Warden
+so soon after his taking leave. [Endnote: 2.]
+
+"I see you are surprised," said the latter. "But you must lay the blame,
+if any, on our good old friend here, who, for some reason, best known to
+himself, insisted on having my company here."
+
+Braithwaite looked to the old pensioner, with a questioning look, as
+if good-humoredly (yet not as if he cared much about it) asking for an
+explanation. As Omskirk was about leaving the room, having remained till
+this time, with that nervous look which distinguished him gazing
+towards the party, the pensioner made him a sign, which he obeyed as if
+compelled to do so.
+
+"Well, my friend," said the Warden, somewhat impatient of the aspect
+in which he himself appeared, "I beg of you, explain at once to Lord
+Braithwaite why you have brought me back in this strange way."
+
+"It is," said the pensioner quietly, "that in your presence I request
+him to allow me to see Mr. Redclyffe."
+
+"Why, my friend," said Braithwaite, "how can I show you a man who has
+left my house, and whom in the chances of this life, I am not very
+likely to see again, though hospitably desirous of so doing?"
+
+Here ensued a laughing sort of colloquy between the Warden and
+Braithwaite, in which the former jocosely excused himself for having
+yielded to the whim of the pensioner, and returned with him on an errand
+which he well knew to be futile.
+
+"I have long been aware," he said apart, in a confidential way, "of
+something a little awry in our old friend's mental system. You will
+excuse him, and me for humoring him."
+
+"Of course, of course," said Braithwaite, in the same tone. "I shall not
+be moved by anything the old fellow can say."
+
+The old pensioner, meanwhile, had been as it were heating up, and
+gathering himself into a mood of energy which those who saw him had
+never before witnessed in his usually quiet person. He seemed somehow to
+grow taller and larger, more impressive. At length, fixing his eyes on
+Lord Braithwaite, he spoke again.
+
+"Dark, murderous man," exclaimed he. "Your course has not been
+unwatched; the secrets of this mansion are not unknown. For two
+centuries back, they have been better known to them who dwell afar off
+than to those resident within the mansion. The foot that made the
+Bloody Footstep has returned from its long wanderings, and it passes on,
+straight as destiny,--sure as an avenging Providence,--to the punishment
+and destruction of those who incur retribution."
+
+"Here is an odd kind of tragedy," said Lord Braithwaite, with a scornful
+smile. "Come, my old friend, lay aside this vein and talk sense."
+
+"Not thus do you escape your penalty, hardened and crafty one!"
+exclaimed the pensioner. "I demand of you, before this worthy Warden,
+access to the secret ways of this mansion, of which thou dost unjustly
+retain possession. I shall disclose what for centuries has remained
+hidden,--the ghastly secrets that this house hides."
+
+"Humor him," whispered the Warden, "and hereafter I will take care that
+the exuberance of our old friend shall be duly restrained. He shall not
+trouble you again."
+
+Lord Braithwaite, to say the truth, appeared a little flabbergasted
+and disturbed by these latter expressions of the old gentleman. He
+hesitated, turned pale; but at last, recovering his momentary confusion
+and irresolution, he replied, with apparent carelessness:--
+
+"Go wherever you will, old gentleman. The house is open to you for this
+time. If ever you have another opportunity to disturb it, the fault will
+be mine."
+
+"Follow, sir," said the pensioner, turning to the Warden; "follow,
+maiden![Endnote: 3] Now shall a great mystery begin to be revealed."
+
+So saying, he led the way before them, passing out of the hall, not
+by the doorway, but through one of the oaken panels of the wall, which
+admitted the party into a passage which seemed to pass through the
+thickness of the wall, and was lighted by interstices through which
+shone gleams of light. This led them into what looked like a little
+vestibule, or circular room, which the Warden, though deeming himself
+many years familiar with the old house, had never seen before, any more
+than the passage which led to it. To his surprise, this room was not
+vacant, for in it sat, in a large old chair, Omskirk, like a toad in its
+hole, like some wild, fearful creature in its den, and it was now partly
+understood how this man had the possibility of suddenly disappearing, so
+inscrutably, and so in a moment; and, when all quest for him was given
+up, of as suddenly appearing again.
+
+"Ha!" said old Omskirk, slowly rising, as at the approach of some event
+that he had long expected. "Is he coming at last?"
+
+"Poor victim of another's iniquity," said the pensioner. "Thy release
+approaches. Rejoice!"
+
+The old man arose with a sort of trepidation and solemn joy intermixed
+in his manner, and bowed reverently, as if there were in what he heard
+more than other ears could understand in it.
+
+"Yes; I have waited long," replied he. "Welcome; if my release is come."
+
+"Well," said Lord Braithwaite, scornfully. "This secret retreat of my
+house is known to many. It was the priest's secret chamber when it was
+dangerous to be of the old and true religion, here in England. There is
+no longer any use in concealing this place; and the Warden, or any man,
+might have seen it, or any of the curiosities of the old hereditary
+house, if desirous so to do."
+
+"Aha! son of Belial!" quoth the pensioner. "And this, too!"
+
+He took three pieces from a certain point of the wall, which he seemed
+to know, and stooped to press upon the floor. The Warden looked at Lord
+Braithwaite, and saw that he had grown deadly pale. What his change of
+cheer might bode, he could not guess; but, at the pressure of the old
+pensioner's finger, the floor, or a segment of it, rose like the lid
+of a box, and discovered a small darksome pair of stairs, within which
+burned a lamp, lighting it downward, like the steps that descend into a
+sepulchre.
+
+"Follow," said he, to those who looked on, wondering.
+
+And he began to descend. Lord Braithwaite saw him disappear, then
+frantically followed, the Warden next, and old Omskirk took his place in
+the rear, like a man following his inevitable destiny. At the bottom
+of a winding descent, that seemed deep and remote, and far within, they
+came to a door, which the pensioner pressed with a spring; and, passing
+through the space that disclosed itself, the whole party followed, and
+found themselves in a small, gloomy room. On one side of it was a couch,
+on which sat Redclyffe; face to face with him was a white-haired figure
+in a chair.
+
+"You are come!" said Redclyffe, solemnly. "But too late!"
+
+"And yonder is the coffer," said the pensioner. "Open but that; and our
+quest is ended."
+
+"That, if I mistake not, I can do," said Redclyffe.
+
+He drew forth--what he had kept all this time, as something that might
+yet reveal to him the mystery of his birth--the silver key that had been
+found by the grave in far New England; and applying it to the lock, he
+slowly turned it on the hinges, that had not been turned for two hundred
+years. All--even Lord Braithwaite, guilty and shame-stricken as he
+felt--pressed forward to look upon what was about to be disclosed. What
+were the wondrous contents? The entire, mysterious coffer was full of
+golden ringlets, abundant, clustering through the whole coffer, and
+living with elasticity, so as immediately, as it were, to flow over
+the sides of the coffer, and rise in large abundance from the long
+compression. Into this--by a miracle of natural production which was
+known likewise in other cases--into this had been resolved the whole
+bodily substance of that fair and unfortunate being, known so long in
+the legends of the family as the Beauty of the Golden Locks. As the
+pensioner looked at this strange sight,--the lustre of the precious and
+miraculous hair gleaming and glistening, and seeming to add light to the
+gloomy room,--he took from his breast pocket another lock of hair, in
+a locket, and compared it, before their faces, with that which brimmed
+over from the coffer.
+
+"It is the same!" said he.
+
+"And who are you that know it?" asked Redclyffe, surprised.
+
+"He whose ancestors taught him the secret,--who has had it handed down
+to him these two centuries, and now only with regret yields to the
+necessity of making it known."
+
+"You are the heir!" said Redclyffe.
+
+In that gloomy room, beside the dead old man, they looked at him, and
+saw a dignity beaming on him, covering his whole figure, that broke out
+like a lustre at the close of day.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+_Note 1._ The MS. gives the following alternative openings: "Early in
+the present century"; "Soon after the Revolution"; "Many years ago."
+
+_Note 2._ Throughout the first four pages of the MS. the Doctor is
+called "Ormskirk," and in an earlier draft of this portion of the
+romance, "Etheredge."
+
+_Note 3. Author's note_.--"Crusty Hannah is a mixture of Indian and
+negro."
+
+_Note 4. Author's note_.--"It is understood from the first that the
+children are not brother and sister.--Describe the children with really
+childish traits, quarrelling, being naughty, etc.--The Doctor should
+occasionally beat Ned in course of instruction."
+
+_Note 5._ In order to show the manner in which Hawthorne would modify
+a passage, which was nevertheless to be left substantially the same,
+I subjoin here a description of this graveyard as it appears in the
+earlier draft: "The graveyard (we are sorry to have to treat of such a
+disagreeable piece of ground, but everybody's business centres there at
+one time or another) was the most ancient in the town. The dust of the
+original Englishmen had become incorporated with the soil; of those
+Englishmen whose immediate predecessors had been resolved into the earth
+about the country churches,--the little Norman, square, battlemented
+stone towers of the villages in the old land; so that in this point of
+view, as holding bones and dust of the first ancestors, this graveyard
+was more English than anything else in town. There had been hidden from
+sight many a broad, bluff visage of husbandmen that had ploughed the
+real English soil; there the faces of noted men, now known in history;
+there many a personage whom tradition told about, making wondrous
+qualities of strength and courage for him;--all these, mingled with
+succeeding generations, turned up and battened down again with
+the sexton's spade; until every blade of grass was human more than
+vegetable,--for an hundred and fifty years will do this, and so much
+time, at least, had elapsed since the first little mound was piled up in
+the virgin soil. Old tombs there were too, with numerous sculptures on
+them; and quaint, mossy gravestones; although all kinds of monumental
+appendages were of a date more recent than the time of the first
+settlers, who had been content with wooden memorials, if any, the
+sculptor's art not having then reached New England. Thus rippled,
+surged, broke almost against the house, this dreary graveyard, which
+made the street gloomy, so that people did not like to pass the dark,
+high wooden fence, with its closed gate, that separated it from the
+street. And this old house was one that crowded upon it, and took up the
+ground that would otherwise have been sown as thickly with dead as the
+rest of the lot; so that it seemed hardly possible but that the dead
+people should get up out of their graves, and come in there to warm
+themselves. But in truth, I have never heard a whisper of its being
+haunted."
+
+_Note 6. Author's note_.--"The spiders are affected by the weather and
+serve as barometers.--It shall always be a moot point whether the Doctor
+really believed in cobwebs, or was laughing at the credulous."
+
+_Note 7. Author's note_.--"The townspeople are at war with the
+Doctor.--Introduce the Doctor early as a smoker, and describe.--The
+result of Crusty Hannah's strangely mixed breed should be shown in some
+strange way.--Give vivid pictures of the society of the day, symbolized
+in the street scenes."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Read the whole paragraph before copying any
+of it."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Crusty Hannah teaches Elsie curious
+needlework, etc."
+
+_Note 3._ These two children are described as follows in an early
+note of the author's: "The boy had all the qualities fitted to excite
+tenderness in those who had the care of him; in the first and most
+evident place, on account of his personal beauty, which was very
+remarkable,--the most intelligent and expressive face that can be
+conceived, changing in those early years like an April day, and
+beautiful in all its changes; dark, but of a soft expression, kindling,
+melting, glowing, laughing; a varied intelligence, which it was as good
+as a book to read. He was quick in all modes of mental exercise; quick
+and strong, too, in sensibility; proud, and gifted (probably by the
+circumstances in which he was placed) with an energy which the softness
+and impressibility of his nature needed.--As for the little girl, all
+the squalor of the abode served but to set off her lightsomeness and
+brightsomeness. She was a pale, large-eyed little thing, and it might
+have been supposed that the air of the house and the contiguity of the
+burial-place had a bad effect upon her health. Yet I hardly think this
+could have been the case, for she was of a very airy nature, dancing
+and sporting through the house as if melancholy had never been made. She
+took all kinds of childish liberties with the Doctor, and with his
+pipe, and with everything appertaining to him except his spiders and his
+cobwebs."--All of which goes to show that Hawthorne first conceived his
+characters in the mood of the "Twice-Told Tales," and then by meditation
+solidified them to the inimitable flesh-and-blood of "The House of the
+Seven Gables" and "The Blithedale Romance."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+_Note 1._ An English church spire, evidently the prototype of this, and
+concerning which the same legend is told, is mentioned in the author's
+"English Mote-Books."
+
+_Note 2._ Leicester Hospital, in Warwick, described in "Our Old Home,"
+is the original of this charity.
+
+_Note 3. Author's note_.--"The children find a gravestone with something
+like a footprint on it."
+
+_Note 4. Author's note_.--"Put into the Doctor's character a continual
+enmity against somebody, breaking out in curses of which nobody can
+understand the application."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+_Note 1._ The Doctor's propensity for cobwebs is amplified in the
+following note for an earlier and somewhat milder version of the
+character: "According to him, all science was to be renewed and
+established on a sure ground by no other means than cobwebs. The cobweb
+was the magic clue by which mankind was to be rescued from all its
+errors, and guided safely back to the right. And so he cherished spiders
+above all things, and kept them spinning, spinning away; the only
+textile factory that existed at that epoch in New England. He
+distinguished the production of each of his ugly friends, and assigned
+peculiar qualities to each; and he had been for years engaged in writing
+a work on this new discovery, in reference to which he had already
+compiled a great deal of folio manuscript, and had unguessed at
+resources still to come. With this suggestive subject he interwove all
+imaginable learning, collected from his own library, rich in works that
+few others had read, and from that of his beloved University, crabbed
+with Greek, rich with Latin, drawing into itself, like a whirlpool, all
+that men had thought hitherto, and combining them anew in such a way
+that it had all the charm of a racy originality. Then he had projects
+for the cultivation of cobwebs, to which end, in the good Doctor's
+opinion, it seemed desirable to devote a certain part of the national
+income; and not content with this, all public-spirited citizens would
+probably be induced to devote as much of their time and means as they
+could to the same end. According to him, there was no such beautiful
+festoon and drapery for the halls of princes as the spinning of this
+heretofore despised and hated insect; and by due encouragement it
+might be hoped that they would flourish, and hang and dangle and wave
+triumphant in the breeze, to an extent as yet generally undreamed of.
+And he lamented much the destruction that has heretofore been wrought
+upon this precious fabric by the housemaid's broom, and insisted upon
+by foolish women who claimed to be good housewives. Indeed, it was the
+general opinion that the Doctor's celibacy was in great measure due
+to the impossibility of finding a woman who would pledge herself
+to co-operate with him in this great ambition of his life,--that of
+reducing the world to a cobweb factory; or who would bind herself to let
+her own drawing-room be ornamented with this kind of tapestry. But there
+never was a wife precisely fitted for our friend the Doctor, unless it
+had been Arachne herself, to whom, if she could again have been restored
+to her female shape, he would doubtless have lost no time in paying his
+addresses. It was doubtless the having dwelt too long among the musty
+and dusty clutter and litter of things gone by, that made the Doctor
+almost a monomaniac on this subject. There were cobwebs in his own
+brain, and so he saw nothing valuable but cobwebs in the world around
+him; and deemed that the march of created things, up to this time, had
+been calculated by foreknowledge to produce them."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Ned must learn something of the
+characteristics of the Catechism, and simple cottage devotion."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Make the following scene emblematic of the
+world's treatment of a dissenter."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Yankee characteristics should be shown in the
+schoolmaster's manners."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"He had a sort of horror of violence, and of
+the strangeness that it should be done to him; this affected him more
+than the blow."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Jokes occasionally about the schoolmaster's
+thinness and lightness,--how he might suspend himself from the spider's
+web and swing, etc."
+
+_Note 3. Author's note_.--"The Doctor and the Schoolmaster should have
+much talk about England."
+
+_Note 4. Author's note_.--"The children were at play in the churchyard."
+
+_Note 5. Author's note_.--"He mentions that he was probably buried in
+the churchyard there."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Perhaps put this narratively, not as spoken."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"He was privately married to the heiress,
+if she were an heiress. They meant to kill him in the wood, but, by
+contrivance, he was kidnapped."
+
+_Note 3. Author's note_.--"They were privately married."
+
+_Note 4. Author's note_.--"Old descriptive letters, referring to
+localities as they existed."
+
+_Note 5. Author's note_.--"There should be symbols and tokens, hinting
+at the schoolmaster's disappearance, from the first opening of the
+scene."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"They had got up in remarkably good case that
+morning."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"The stranger may be the future master of the
+Hospital.--Describe the winter day."
+
+_Note 3. Author's note_.--"Describe him as clerical."
+
+_Note 4. Author's note_.--"Represent him as a refined, agreeable, genial
+young man, of frank, kindly, gentlemanly manners."
+
+_Note 5._ Alternative reading: "A clergyman."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Make the old grave-digger a _laudator
+temporis acti_,--especially as to burial customs."
+
+_Note 2._ Instead of "written," as in the text, the author probably
+meant to write "read."
+
+_Note 3._ The MS. has "delight," but "a light" is evidently intended.
+
+_Note 4. Author's note_.--"He aims a blow, perhaps with his pipe, at the
+boy, which Ned wards off."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"No longer could play at quarter-staff with
+Ned."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Referring to places and people in England:
+the Bloody Footstep sometimes."
+
+_Note 3._ In the original the following occurs, but marked to indicate
+that it was to be omitted: "And kissed his hand to her, and laughed
+feebly; and that was the last that she or anybody, the last glimpse they
+had of Doctor Grimshawe alive."
+
+_Note 4. Author's notes_.--"A great deal must be made out of the
+spiders, and their gloomy, dusky, flaunting tapestry. A web across the
+orifice of his inkstand every morning; everywhere, indeed, except
+across the snout of his brandy-bottle.--Depict the Doctor in an old
+dressing-gown, and a strange sort of a cap, like a wizard's.--The two
+children are witnesses of many strange experiments in the study; they
+see his moods, too.--The Doctor is supposed to be writing a work on the
+Natural History of Spiders. Perhaps he used them as a blind for his real
+project, and used to bamboozle the learned with pretending to read them
+passages in which great learning seemed to be elaborately worked up,
+crabbed with Greek and Latin, as if the topic drew into itself, like a
+whirlpool, all that men thought and knew; plans to cultivate cobwebs on
+a large scale. Sometimes, after overwhelming them with astonishment in
+this way, he would burst into one of his laughs. Schemes to make the
+world a cobweb-factory, etc., etc. Cobwebs in his own brain. Crusty
+Hannah such a mixture of persons and races as could be found only at a
+seaport. There was a rumor that the Doctor had murdered a former maid,
+for having, with housewifely instinct, swept away the cobwebs; some said
+that he had her skeleton in a closet. Some said that he had strangled
+a wife with web of the great spider."--"Read the description of Bolton
+Hall, the garden, lawn, etc., Aug. 8, '53.--Bebbington church and
+churchyard, Aug. 29, '53.--The Doctor is able to love,--able to hate;
+two great and rare abilities nowadays.--Introduce two pine trees,
+ivy-grown, as at Lowwood Hotel, July 16, '58.--The family name might be
+Redclyffe.--Thatched cottage, June 22, '55.--Early introduce the mention
+of the cognizance of the family,--the Leopard's Head, for instance, in
+the first part of the romance; the Doctor may have possessed it engraved
+as coat of arms in a book.--The Doctor shall show Ned, perhaps, a
+drawing or engraving of the Hospital, with figures of the pensioners in
+the quadrangle, fitly dressed; and this picture and the figures shall
+impress themselves strongly on his memory."
+
+The above dates and places refer to passages in the published "English
+Note-Books."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Compare it with Spenser's Cave of Despair.
+Put instruments of suicide there."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Once, in looking at the mansion, Redclyffe
+is struck by the appearance of a marble inserted into the wall, and kept
+clear of lichens."
+
+_Note 3. Author's note_.--"Describe, in rich poetry, all shapes of
+deadly things."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Conferred their best qualities": an
+alternative phrase for "done their utmost."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Let the old man have a beard as part of the
+costume."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Describe him as delirious, and the scene as
+adopted into his delirium."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Make the whole scene very dreamlike and
+feverish."
+
+_Note 3. Author's note_.--"There should be a slight wildness in the
+patient's remark to the surgeon, which he cannot prevent, though he is
+conscious of it."
+
+_Note 4. Author's note_.--"Notice the peculiar depth and intelligence of
+his eyes, on account of his pain and sickness."
+
+_Note 5. Author's note_.--"Perhaps the recognition of the pensioner
+should not be so decided. Redclyffe thinks it is he, but thinks it as
+in a dream, without wonder or inquiry; and the pensioner does not quite
+acknowledge it."
+
+_Note 6._ The following dialogue is marked to be omitted or modified in
+the original MS.; but it is retained here, in order that the thread of
+the narrative may not be broken.
+
+_Note 7. Author's note_.--"The patient, as he gets better, listens to
+the feet of old people moving in corridors; to the ringing of a bell
+at stated periods; to old, tremulous voices talking in the quadrangle;
+etc., etc."
+
+_Note 8._ At this point the modification indicated in Note 5 seems to
+have been made operative: and the recognition takes place in another
+way.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+_Note 1._ This paragraph is left incomplete in the original MS.
+
+_Note 2._ The words "Rich old bindings" are interlined here, indicating,
+perhaps, a purpose to give a more detailed description of the library
+and its contents.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"I think it shall be built of stone, however."
+
+_Note 2._ This probably refers to some incident which the author
+intended to incorporate in the former portion of the romance, on a final
+revision.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+_Note 1._ Several passages, which are essentially reproductions of what
+had been previously treated, are omitted from this chapter. It belongs
+to an earlier version of the romance.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Redclyffe shows how to find, under the
+surface of the village green, an old cross."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"A circular seat around the tree."
+
+_Note 3._ The reader now hears for the first time what Redclyffe
+recollected.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"The dinner is given to the pensioners, as
+well as to the gentry, I think."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"For example, a story of three brothers, who
+had a deadly quarrel among them more than two hundred years ago for the
+affections of a young lady, their cousin, who gave her reciprocal love
+to one of them, who immediately became the object of the deadly hatred
+of the two others. There seemed to be madness in their love; perhaps
+madness in the love of all three; for the result had been a plot to
+kidnap this unfortunate young man and convey him to America, where he
+was sold for a servant."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+_Note 1._ The following passage, though it seems to fit in here
+chronologically, is concerned with a side issue which was not followed
+up. The author was experimenting for a character to act as the
+accomplice of Lord Braithwaite at the Hall; and he makes trial of the
+present personage, Mountford; of an Italian priest, Father Angelo; and
+finally of the steward, Omskirk, who is adopted. It will be noticed that
+Mountford is here endowed (for the moment) with the birthright of good
+Doctor Hammond, the Warden. He is represented as having made the journey
+to America in search of the grave. This alteration being inconsistent
+with the true thread of the story, and being, moreover, not continued, I
+have placed this passage in the Appendix, instead of in the text.
+
+Redclyffe often, in the dim weather, when the prophetic intimations of
+rain were too strong to allow an American to walk abroad with peace
+of mind, was in the habit of pacing this noble hall, and watching the
+process of renewal and adornment; or, which suited him still better, of
+enjoying its great, deep solitude when the workmen were away. Parties of
+visitors, curious tourists, sometimes peeped in, took a cursory
+glimpse at the old hall, and went away; these were the only ordinary
+disturbances. But, one day, a person entered, looked carelessly round
+the hall, as if its antiquity had no great charm to him; then he seemed
+to approach Redclyffe, who stood far and dim in the remote distance of
+the great room. The echoing of feet on the stone pavement of the
+hall had always an impressive sound, and turning his head towards the
+visitant Edward stood as if there were an expectance for him in this
+approach. It was a middle-aged man--rather, a man towards fifty, with
+an alert, capable air; a man evidently with something to do in life, and
+not in the habit of throwing away his moments in looking at old halls; a
+gentlemanly man enough, too. He approached Redclyffe without hesitation,
+and, lifting his hat, addressed him in a way that made Edward wonder
+whether he could be an Englishman. If so, he must have known that Edward
+was an American, and have been trying to adapt his manners to those of a
+democratic freedom.
+
+"Mr. Redclyffe, I believe," said he.
+
+Redclyffe bowed, with the stiff caution of an Englishman; for, with
+American mobility, he had learned to be stiff.
+
+"I think I have had the pleasure of knowing--at least of meeting--you
+very long ago," said the gentleman. "But I see you do not recollect me."
+
+Redclyffe confessed that the stranger had the advantage of him in his
+recollection of a previous acquaintance.
+
+"No wonder," said the other, "for, as I have already hinted, it was many
+years ago."
+
+"In my own country then, of course," said Redclyffe.
+
+"In your own country certainly," said the stranger, "and when it would
+have required a penetrating eye to see the distinguished Mr. Redclyffe.
+the representative of American democracy abroad, in the little
+pale-faced, intelligent boy, dwelling with an old humorist in the corner
+of a graveyard."
+
+At these words Redclyffe sent back his recollections, and, though
+doubtfully, began to be aware that this must needs be the young
+Englishman who had come to his guardian on such a singular errand as to
+search an old grave. It must be he, for it could be nobody else; and, in
+truth, he had a sense of his identity,--which, however, did not express
+itself by anything that he could confidently remember in his looks,
+manner, or voice,--yet, if anything, it was most in the voice. But the
+image which, on searching, he found in his mind of a fresh-colored young
+Englishman, with light hair and a frank, pleasant face, was terribly
+realized for the worse in this somewhat heavy figure, and coarser face,
+and heavier eye. In fact, there is a terrible difference between the
+mature Englishman and the young man who is not yet quite out of his
+blossom. His hair, too, was getting streaked and sprinkled with gray;
+and, in short, there were evident marks of his having worked, and
+succeeded, and failed, and eaten and drunk, and being made largely of
+beef, ale, port, and sherry, and all the solidities of English life.
+
+"I remember you now," said Redclyffe, extending his hand frankly; and
+yet Mountford took it in so cold a way that he was immediately sorry
+that he had done it, and called up an extra portion of reserve to freeze
+the rest of the interview. He continued, coolly enough, "I remember you,
+and something of your American errand,--which, indeed, has frequently
+been in my mind since. I hope you found the results of your voyage,
+in the way of discovery, sufficiently successful to justify so much
+trouble."
+
+"You will remember," said Mountford, "that the grave proved quite
+unproductive. Yes, you will not have forgotten it; for I well recollect
+how eagerly you listened, with that queer little girl, to my talk with
+the old governor, and how disappointed you seemed when you found that
+the grave was not to be opened. And yet, it is very odd. I failed in
+that mission; and yet there are circumstances that have led me to think
+that I ought to have succeeded better,--that some other person has
+really succeeded better."
+
+Redclyffe was silent; but he remembered the strange old silver key, and
+how he had kept it secret, and the doubts that had troubled his mind
+then and long afterwards, whether he ought not to have found means to
+convey it to the stranger, and ask whether that was what he sought. And
+now here was that same doubt and question coming up again, and he found
+himself quite as little able to solve it as he had been twenty years
+ago. Indeed, with the views that had come up since, it behooved him to
+be cautious, until he knew both the man and the circumstances.
+
+"You are probably aware," continued Mountford,--"for I understand you
+have been some time in this neighborhood,--that there is a pretended
+claim, a contesting claim, to the present possession of the estate
+of Braithwaite, and a long dormant title. Possibly--who knows?--you
+yourself might have a claim to one or the other. Would not that be a
+singular coincidence? Have you ever had the curiosity to investigate
+your parentage with a view to this point?"
+
+"The title," replied Redclyffe, "ought not to be a very strong
+consideration with an American. One of us would be ashamed, I verily
+believe, to assume any distinction, except such as may be supposed to
+indicate personal, not hereditary merit. We have in some measure, I
+think, lost the feeling of the past, and even of the future, as regards
+our own lines of descent; and even as to wealth, it seems to me that the
+idea of heaping up a pile of gold, or accumulating a broad estate for
+our children and remoter descendants, is dying out. We wish to enjoy the
+fulness of our success in life ourselves, and leave to those who descend
+from us the task of providing for themselves. This tendency is seen in
+our lavish expenditure, and the whole arrangement of our lives; and it
+is slowly--yet not very slowly, either--effecting a change in the whole
+economy of American life."
+
+"Still," rejoined Mr. Mountford, with a smile that Redclyffe fancied was
+dark and subtle, "still, I should imagine that even an American might
+recall so much of hereditary prejudice as to be sensible of some earthly
+advantages in the possession of an ancient title and hereditary
+estate like this. Personal distinction may suit you better,--to be an
+Ambassador by your own talent; to have a future for yourself, involving
+the possibility of ranking (though it were only for four years) among
+the acknowledged sovereigns of the earth;--this is very good. But if the
+silver key would open the shut up secret to-day, it might be possible
+that you would relinquish these advantages."
+
+Before Redclyffe could reply, (and, indeed, there seemed to be an
+allusion at the close of Mountford's speech which, whether intended or
+not, he knew not how to reply to,) a young lady entered the hall, whom
+he was at no loss, by the colored light of a painted window that fell
+upon her, translating her out of the common daylight, to recognize
+as the relative of the pensioner. She seemed to have come to give her
+fanciful superintendence to some of the decorations of the hall; such
+as required woman's taste, rather than the sturdy English judgment and
+antiquarian knowledge of the Warden. Slowly following after her came the
+pensioner himself, leaning on his staff and looking up at the old roof
+and around him with a benign composure, and himself a fitting figure by
+his antique and venerable appearance to walk in that old hall.
+
+"Ah!" said Mountford, to Redclyffe's surprise, "here is an
+acquaintance--two acquaintances of mine."
+
+He moved along the hall to accost them; and as he appeared to expect
+that Redclyffe would still keep him company, and as the latter had no
+reason for not doing so, they both advanced to the pensioner, who
+was now leaning on the young woman's arm. The incident, too, was not
+unacceptable to the American, as promising to bring him into a more
+available relation with her--whom he half fancied to be his old American
+acquaintance--than he had yet succeeded in obtaining.
+
+"Well, my old friend," said Mountford, after bowing with a certain
+measured respect to the young woman, "how wears life with you? Rather,
+perhaps, it does not wear at all; you being so well suited to the life
+around you, you grow by it like a lichen on a wall. I could fancy now
+that you have walked here for three hundred years, and remember when
+King James of blessed memory was entertained in this hall, and could
+marshal out all the ceremonies just as they were then."
+
+"An old man," said the pensioner, quietly, "grows dreamy as he wanes
+away; and I, too, am sometimes at a loss to know whether I am living in
+the past or the present, or whereabouts in time I am,--or whether there
+is any time at all. But I should think it hardly worth while to call up
+one of my shifting dreams more than another."
+
+"I confess," said Redclyffe, "I shall find it impossible to call up this
+scene--any of these scenes--hereafter, without the venerable figure of
+this, whom I may truly call my benefactor, among them. I fancy him among
+them from the foundation,--young then, but keeping just the equal step
+with their age and decay,--and still doing good and hospitable deeds to
+those who need them."
+
+The old man seemed not to like to hear these remarks and expressions of
+gratitude from Mountford and the American; at any rate, he moved away
+with his slow and light motion of infirmity, but then came uneasily
+back, displaying a certain quiet restlessness, which Redclyffe was
+sympathetic enough to perceive. Not so the sturdier, more heavily
+moulded Englishman, who continued to direct the conversation upon the
+pensioner, or at least to make him a part of it, thereby bringing out
+more of his strange characteristics. In truth, it is not quite easy for
+an Englishman to know how to adapt himself to the line feelings of those
+below him in point of station, whatever gentlemanly deference he may
+have for his equals or superiors.
+
+"I should like now, father pensioner," said he, "to know how many steps
+you may have taken in life before your path led into this hole, and
+whence your course started."
+
+"Do not let him speak thus to the old man," said the young woman, in
+a low, earnest tone, to Redclyffe. He was surprised and startled; it
+seemed like a voice that has spoken to his boyhood.
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Redclyffe's place is next to that of the
+proprietor at table."
+
+_Note 3. Author's note_.--"Dwell upon the antique liveried servants
+somewhat."
+
+_Note 4. Author's note_.--"The rose-water must precede the toasts."
+
+_Note 5. Author's note_.--"The jollity of the Warden at the feast to be
+noticed; and afterwards explain that he had drunk nothing."
+
+_Note 6. Author's note_.--"Mention the old silver snuffbox which I saw
+at the Liverpool Mayor's dinner."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+_Note 1._ This is not the version of the story as indicated in the
+earlier portion of the romance. It is there implied that Elsie is the
+Doctor's granddaughter, her mother having been the Doctor's daughter,
+who was ruined by the then possessor of the Braithwaite estates, and who
+died in consequence. That the Doctor's scheme of revenge was far deeper
+and more terrible than simply to oust the family from its possessions,
+will appear further on.
+
+_Note 2._ The foregoing passage was evidently experimental, and
+the author expresses his estimate of its value in the following
+words,--"What unimaginable nonsense!" He then goes on to make the
+following memoranda as to the plot. It should be remembered, however,
+that all this part of the romance was written before the American part.
+
+"Half of a secret is preserved in England; that is to say, in the
+particular part of the mansion in which an old coffer is hidden; the
+other part is carried to America. One key of an elaborate lock is
+retained in England, among some old curiosities of forgotten purpose;
+the other is the silver key that Redclyffe found beside the grave. A
+treasure of gold is what they expect; they find a treasure of golden
+locks. This lady, the beloved of the Bloody Footstep, had been murdered
+and hidden in the coffer on account of jealousy. Elsie must know the
+baselessness of Redclyffe's claims, and be loath to tell him, because
+she sees that he is so much interested in them. She has a paper of
+the old Doctor's revealing the whole plot,--a death-bed confession;
+Redclyffe having been absent at the time."
+
+The reader will recollect that this latter suggestion was not adopted:
+there was no death-bed confession. As regards the coffer full of
+golden locks, it was suggested by an incident recorded in the "English
+Note-Books," 1854. "The grandmother of Mrs. O'Sullivan died fifty years
+ago, at the age of twenty-eight. She had great personal charms, and
+among them a head of beautiful chestnut hair. After her burial in a
+family tomb, the coffin of one of her children was laid on her own, so
+that the lid seems to have decayed, or been broken from this cause; at
+any rate, this was the case when the tomb was opened, about a year ago.
+The grandmother's coffin was then found to be filled with beautiful,
+glossy, living chestnut ringlets, into which her whole substance seems
+to have been transformed, for there was nothing else but these shining
+curls, the growth of half a century, in the tomb. An old man, with
+a ringlet of his youthful mistress treasured in his heart, might be
+supposed to witness this wonderful thing."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+_Note 1._ In a study of the plot, too long to insert here, this new
+character of the steward is introduced and described. It must suffice to
+say, in this place, that he was intimately connected with Dr. Grimshawe,
+who had resuscitated him after he had been hanged, and had thus gained
+his gratitude and secured his implicit obedience to his wishes, even
+twenty years after his (Grimshawe's) death. The use the Doctor made
+of him was to establish him in Braithwaite Hall as the perpetual
+confidential servant of the owners thereof. Of course, the latter
+are not aware that the steward is acting in Grimshawe's interest,
+and therefore in deadly opposition to their own. Precisely what the
+steward's mission in life was, will appear here-after.
+
+The study above alluded to, with others, amounting to about a hundred
+pages, will be published as a supplement to a future edition of this
+work.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Redclyffe lies in a dreamy state, thinking
+fantastically, as if he were one of the seven sleepers. He does not yet
+open his eyes, but lies there in a maze."
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Redclyffe must look at the old man quietly
+and dreamily, and without surprise, for a long while."
+
+_Note 3._ Presumably the true name of Doctor Grimshawe.
+
+_Note 4._ This mysterious prisoner, Sir Edward Redclyffe, is not, of
+course, the Sir Edward who founded the Hospital, but a descendant of
+that man, who ruined Doctor Grimshawe's daughter, and is the father
+of Elsie. He had been confined in this chamber, by the Doctor's
+contrivance, ever since, Omskirk being his jailer, as is foreshadowed in
+Chapter XL He has been kept in the belief that he killed Grimshawe, in
+a struggle that took place between them; and that his confinement in the
+secret chamber is voluntary on his own part,--a measure of precaution to
+prevent arrest and execution for murder. In this miserable delusion he
+has cowered there for five and thirty years. This, and various other
+dusky points, are partly elucidated in the notes hereafter to be
+appended to this volume.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+_Note 1._ At this point, the author, for what reason I will not venture
+to surmise, chooses to append this gloss: "Bubble-and-Squeak!"
+
+_Note 2. Author's note_.--"They found him in the hall, about to go out."
+
+_Note 3._ Elsie appears to have joined the party.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Doctor Grimshawe's Secret, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #7183 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7183)
diff --git a/old/7183-h.htm.2021-01-26 b/old/7183-h.htm.2021-01-26
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Doctor Grimshawe's Secret, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    .side      { float: right; font-size: 75%; width: 25%; padding-left: 0.8em;
+               border-left: dashed thin; margin-left: 0.8em; text-align: left;
+               text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;
+               font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: solid 1px;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
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+
+
+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Doctor Grimshawe's Secret, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Doctor Grimshawe's Secret
+       A Romance
+
+Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
+
+Editor: Julian Hawthorne
+
+
+Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7183]
+This file was first posted on March 24, 2003
+Last Updated: December 14, 2016
+
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE'S SECRET ***
+
+
+
+
+Text file produced by Michelle Shephard, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+HTML file produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE&rsquo;S SECRET
+    </h1>
+    <h3>
+      A ROMANCE
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Nathaniel Hawthorne
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h4>
+      Edited, With Preface And Notes By Julian Hawthorne
+    </h4>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      To<br /> Mr. And Mrs. George Parsons Lathrop,<br /> The Son-In-Law And
+      Daughter<br /> Of<br /> Nathaniel Hawthorne,<br /> This Romance Is Dedicated<br /><br />
+      By<br /> The Editor.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_PREF"> PREFACE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> <b>DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE&rsquo;S SECRET</b> </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0017"> CHAPTER XVII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER XIX. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0020"> CHAPTER XX. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0021"> CHAPTER XXI. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0022"> CHAPTER XXII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0023"> CHAPTER XXIII. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0024"> CHAPTER XXIV. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2HCH0025"> CHAPTER XXV. </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_APPE"> APPENDIX </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PREFACE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A preface generally begins with a truism; and I may set out with the
+      admission that it is not always expedient to bring to light the posthumous
+      work of great writers. A man generally contrives to publish, during his
+      lifetime, quite as much as the public has time or inclination to read; and
+      his surviving friends are apt to show more zeal than discretion in
+      dragging forth from his closed desk such undeveloped offspring of his mind
+      as he himself had left to silence. Literature has never been redundant
+      with authors who sincerely undervalue their own productions; and the
+      sagacious critics who maintain that what of his own an author condemns
+      must be doubly damnable, are, to say the least of it, as often likely to
+      be right as wrong.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beyond these general remarks, however, it does not seem necessary to adopt
+      an apologetic attitude. There is nothing in the present volume which any
+      one possessed of brains and cultivation will not be thankful to read. The
+      appreciation of Nathaniel Hawthorne&rsquo;s writings is more intelligent and
+      wide-spread than it used to be; and the later development of our national
+      literature has not, perhaps, so entirely exhausted our resources of
+      admiration as to leave no welcome for even the less elaborate work of a
+      contemporary of Dickens and Thackeray. As regards &ldquo;Doctor Grimshawe&rsquo;s
+      Secret,&rdquo;&mdash;the title which, for lack of a better, has been given to
+      this Romance,&mdash;it can scarcely be pronounced deficient in either
+      elaboration or profundity. Had Mr. Hawthorne written out the story in
+      every part to its full dimensions, it could not have failed to rank among
+      the greatest of his productions. He had looked forward to it as to the
+      crowning achievement of his literary career. In the Preface to &ldquo;Our Old
+      Home&rdquo; he alludes to it as a work into which he proposed to convey more of
+      various modes of truth than he could have grasped by a direct effort. But
+      circumstances prevented him from perfecting the design which had been
+      before his mind for seven years, and upon the shaping of which he bestowed
+      more thought and labor than upon anything else he had undertaken. The
+      successive and consecutive series of notes or studies [Footnote: These
+      studies, extracts from which will be published in one of our magazines,
+      are hereafter to be added, in their complete form, to the Appendix of this
+      volume.] which he wrote for this Romance would of themselves make a small
+      volume, and one of autobiographical as well as literary interest. There is
+      no other instance, that I happen to have met with, in which a writer&rsquo;s
+      thought reflects itself upon paper so immediately and sensitively as in
+      these studies. To read them is to look into the man&rsquo;s mind, and see its
+      quality and action. The penetration, the subtlety, the tenacity; the
+      stubborn gripe which he lays upon his subject, like that of Hercules upon
+      the slippery Old Man of the Sea; the clear and cool common-sense,
+      controlling the audacity of a rich and ardent imagination; the humorous
+      gibes and strange expletives wherewith he ridicules, to himself, his own
+      failure to reach his goal; the immense patience with which&mdash;again and
+      again, and yet again&mdash;he &ldquo;tries back,&rdquo; throwing the topic into fresh
+      attitudes, and searching it to the marrow with a gaze so piercing as to be
+      terrible;&mdash;all this gives an impression of power, of resource, of
+      energy, of mastery, that exhilarates the reader. So many inspired prophets
+      of Hawthorne have arisen of late, that the present writer, whose relation
+      to the great Romancer is a filial one merely, may be excused for feeling
+      some embarrassment in submitting his own uninstructed judgments to
+      competition with theirs. It has occurred to him, however, that these
+      undress rehearsals of the author of &ldquo;The Scarlet Letter&rdquo; might afford
+      entertaining and even profitable reading to the later generation of
+      writers whose pleasant fortune it is to charm one another and the public.
+      It would appear that this author, in his preparatory work at least, has
+      ventured in some manner to disregard the modern canons which debar writers
+      from betraying towards their creations any warmer feeling than a cultured
+      and critical indifference: nor was his interest in human nature such as to
+      confine him to the dissection of the moral epidermis of shop-girls and
+      hotel-boarders. On the contrary, we are presented with the spectacle of a
+      Titan, baring his arms and plunging heart and soul into the arena, there
+      to struggle for death or victory with the superb phantoms summoned to the
+      conflict by his own genius. The men of new times and new conditions will
+      achieve their triumphs in new ways; but it may still be worth while to
+      consider the methods and materials of one who also, in his own fashion,
+      won and wore the laurel of those who know and can portray the human heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But let us return to the Romance, in whose clear though shadowy atmosphere
+      the thunders and throes of the preparatory struggle are inaudible and
+      invisible, save as they are implied in the fineness of substance and
+      beauty of form of the artistic structure. The story is divided into two
+      parts, the scene of the first being laid in America; that of the second,
+      in England. Internal evidence of various kinds goes to show that the
+      second part was the first written; or, in other words, that the present
+      first part is a rewriting of an original first part, afterwards discarded,
+      and of which the existing second part is the continuation. The two parts
+      overlap, and it shall be left to the ingenuity of critics to detect the
+      precise point of junction. In rewriting the first part, the author made
+      sundry minor alterations in the plot and characters of the story, which
+      alterations were not carried into the second part. It results from this
+      that the manuscript presents various apparent inconsistencies. In
+      transcribing the work for the press, these inconsistent sentences and
+      passages have been withdrawn from the text and inserted in the Appendix;
+      or, in a few unimportant instances, omitted altogether. In other respects,
+      the text is printed as the author left it, with the exception of the names
+      of the characters. In the manuscript each personage figures in the course
+      of the narrative under from three to six different names. This difficulty
+      has been met by bestowing upon each of the <i>dramatis personæ</i> the
+      name which last identified him to the author&rsquo;s mind, and keeping him to it
+      throughout the volume.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story, as a story, is complete as it stands; it has a beginning, a
+      middle, and an end. There is no break in the narrative, and the legitimate
+      conclusion is reached. To say that the story is complete as a work of art,
+      would be quite another matter. It lacks balance and proportion. Some
+      characters and incidents are portrayed with minute elaboration; others,
+      perhaps not less important, are merely sketched in outline. Beyond a doubt
+      it was the author&rsquo;s purpose to rewrite the entire work from the first page
+      to the last, enlarging it, deepening it, adorning it with every kind of
+      spiritual and physical beauty, and rounding out a moral worthy of the
+      noble materials. But these last transfiguring touches to Aladdin&rsquo;s Tower
+      were never to be given; and he has departed, taking with him his Wonderful
+      Lamp. Nevertheless there is great splendor in the structure as we behold
+      it. The character of old Doctor Grimshawe, and the picture of his
+      surroundings, are hardly surpassed in vigor by anything their author has
+      produced; and the dusky vision of the secret chamber, which sends a
+      mysterious shiver through the tale, seems to be unique even in Hawthorne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There have been included in this volume photographic reproductions of
+      certain pages of the original manuscript of Doctor Grimshawe, selected at
+      random, upon which those ingenious persons whose convictions are in
+      advance of their instruction are cordially invited to try their teeth; for
+      it has been maintained that Mr. Hawthorne&rsquo;s handwriting was singularly
+      legible. The present writer possesses specimens of Mr. Hawthorne&rsquo;s
+      chirography at various ages, from boyhood until a day or two before his
+      death. Like the handwriting of most men, it was at its best between the
+      twenty-fifth and the fortieth years of life; and in some instances it is a
+      remarkably beautiful type of penmanship. But as time went on it
+      deteriorated, and, while of course retaining its elementary
+      characteristics, it became less and less easy to read, especially in those
+      writings which were intended solely for his own perusal. As with other men
+      of sensitive organization, the mood of the hour, a good or a bad pen, a
+      ready or an obstructed flow of thought, would all be reflected in the
+      formation of the written letters and words. In the manuscript of the
+      fragmentary sketch which has just been published in a magazine, which is
+      written in an ordinary commonplace-book, with ruled pages, and in which
+      the author had not yet become possessed with the spirit of the story and
+      characters, the handwriting is deliberate and clear. In the manuscript of
+      &ldquo;Doctor Grimshawe&rsquo;s Secret,&rdquo; on the other hand, which was written almost
+      immediately after the other, but on unruled paper, and when the writer&rsquo;s
+      imagination was warm and eager, the chirography is for the most part a
+      compact mass of minute cramped hieroglyphics, hardly to be deciphered save
+      by flashes of inspiration. The matter is not, in itself, of importance,
+      and is alluded to here only as having been brought forward in connection
+      with other insinuations, with the notice of which it seems unnecessary to
+      soil these pages. Indeed, were I otherwise disposed, Doctor Grimshawe
+      himself would take the words out of my mouth; his speech is far more
+      poignant and eloquent than mine. In dismissing this episode, I will take
+      the liberty to observe that it appears to indicate a spirit in our age
+      less sceptical than is commonly supposed,&mdash;belief in miracles being
+      still possible, provided only the miracle be a scandalous one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It remains to tell how this Romance came to be published. It came into my
+      possession (in the ordinary course of events) about eight years ago. I had
+      at that time no intention of publishing it; and when, soon after, I left
+      England to travel on the Continent, the manuscript, together with the bulk
+      of my library, was packed and stored at a London repository, and was not
+      again seen by me until last summer, when I unpacked it in this city. I
+      then finished the perusal of it, and, finding it to be practically
+      complete, I re-resolved to print it in connection with a biography of Mr.
+      Hawthorne which I had in preparation. But upon further consideration it
+      was decided to publish the Romance separately; and I herewith present it
+      to the public, with my best wishes for their edification.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      JULIAN HAWTHORNE.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      NEW YORK, November 21, 1882.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE&rsquo;S SECRET
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A long time ago, [Endnote: 1] in a town with which I used to be familiarly
+      acquainted, there dwelt an elderly person of grim aspect, known by the
+      name and title of Doctor Grimshawe,[Endnote: 2] whose household consisted
+      of a remarkably pretty and vivacious boy, and a perfect rosebud of a girl,
+      two or three years younger than he, and an old maid-of-all-work, of
+      strangely mixed breed, crusty in temper and wonderfully sluttish in
+      attire. [Endnote: 3] It might be partly owing to this handmaiden&rsquo;s
+      characteristic lack of neatness (though primarily, no doubt, to the grim
+      Doctor&rsquo;s antipathy to broom, brush, and dusting-cloths) that the house&mdash;at
+      least in such portions of it as any casual visitor caught a glimpse of&mdash;was
+      so overlaid with dust, that, in lack of a visiting card, you might write
+      your name with your forefinger upon the tables; and so hung with cobwebs
+      that they assumed the appearance of dusky upholstery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It grieves me to add an additional touch or two to the reader&rsquo;s
+      disagreeable impression of Doctor Grimshawe&rsquo;s residence, by confessing
+      that it stood in a shabby by-street, and cornered on a graveyard, with
+      which the house communicated by a back door; so that with a hop, skip, and
+      jump from the threshold, across a flat tombstone, the two children
+      [Endnote: 4] were in the daily habit of using the dismal cemetery as their
+      playground. In their graver moods they spelled out the names and learned
+      by heart doleful verses on the headstones; and in their merrier ones
+      (which were much the more frequent) they chased butterflies and gathered
+      dandelions, played hide-and-seek among the slate and marble, and tumbled
+      laughing over the grassy mounds which were too eminent for the short legs
+      to bestride. On the whole, they were the better for the graveyard, and its
+      legitimate inmates slept none the worse for the two children&rsquo;s gambols and
+      shrill merriment overhead. Here were old brick tombs with curious
+      sculptures on them, and quaint gravestones, some of which bore puffy
+      little cherubs, and one or two others the effigies of eminent Puritans,
+      wrought out to a button, a fold of the ruff, and a wrinkle of the
+      skull-cap; and these frowned upon the two children as if death had not
+      made them a whit more genial than they were in life. But the children were
+      of a temper to be more encouraged by the good-natured smiles of the puffy
+      cherubs, than frightened or disturbed by the sour Puritans.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This graveyard (about which we shall say not a word more than may sooner
+      or later be needful) was the most ancient in the town. The clay of the
+      original settlers had been incorporated with the soil; those stalwart
+      Englishmen of the Puritan epoch, whose immediate ancestors had been
+      planted forth with succulent grass and daisies for the sustenance of the
+      parson&rsquo;s cow, round the low-battlemented Norman church towers in the
+      villages of the fatherland, had here contributed their rich Saxon mould to
+      tame and Christianize the wild forest earth of the new world. In this
+      point of view&mdash;as holding the bones and dust of the primeval ancestor&mdash;the
+      cemetery was more English than anything else in the neighborhood, and
+      might probably have nourished English oaks and English elms, and whatever
+      else is of English growth, without that tendency to spindle upwards and
+      lose their sturdy breadth, which is said to be the ordinary characteristic
+      both of human and vegetable productions when transplanted hither. Here, at
+      all events, used to be some specimens of common English garden flowers,
+      which could not be accounted for,&mdash;unless, perhaps, they had sprung
+      from some English maiden&rsquo;s heart, where the intense love of those homely
+      things, and regret of them in the foreign land, had conspired together to
+      keep their vivifying principle, and cause its growth after the poor girl
+      was buried. Be that as it might, in this grave had been hidden from sight
+      many a broad, bluff visage of husbandman, who had been taught to plough
+      among the hereditary furrows that had been ameliorated by the crumble of
+      ages: much had these sturdy laborers grumbled at the great roots that
+      obstructed their toil in these fresh acres. Here, too, the sods had
+      covered the faces of men known to history, and reverenced when not a piece
+      of distinguishable dust remained of them; personages whom tradition told
+      about; and here, mixed up with successive crops of native-born Americans,
+      had been ministers, captains, matrons, virgins good and evil, tough and
+      tender, turned up and battened down by the sexton&rsquo;s spade, over and over
+      again; until every blade of grass had its relations with the human
+      brotherhood of the old town. A hundred and fifty years was sufficient to
+      do this; and so much time, at least, had elapsed since the first hole was
+      dug among the difficult roots of the forest trees, and the first little
+      hillock of all these green beds was piled up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus rippled and surged, with its hundreds of little billows, the old
+      graveyard about the house which cornered upon it; it made the street
+      gloomy, so that people did not altogether like to pass along the high
+      wooden fence that shut it in; and the old house itself, covering ground
+      which else had been sown thickly with buried bodies, partook of its
+      dreariness, because it seemed hardly possible that the dead people should
+      not get up out of their graves and steal in to warm themselves at this
+      convenient fireside. But I never heard that any of them did so; nor were
+      the children ever startled by spectacles of dim horror in the night-time,
+      but were as cheerful and fearless as if no grave had ever been dug. They
+      were of that class of children whose material seems fresh, not taken at
+      second hand, full of disease, conceits, whims, and weaknesses, that have
+      already served many people&rsquo;s turns, and been moulded up, with some little
+      change of combination, to serve the turn of some poor spirit that could
+      not get a better case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far as ever came to the present writer&rsquo;s knowledge, there was no
+      whisper of Doctor Grimshawe&rsquo;s house being haunted; a fact on which both
+      writer and reader may congratulate themselves, the ghostly chord having
+      been played upon in these days until it has become wearisome and nauseous
+      as the familiar tune of a barrel-organ. The house itself, moreover, except
+      for the convenience of its position close to the seldom-disturbed
+      cemetery, was hardly worthy to be haunted. As I remember it, (and for
+      aught I know it still exists in the same guise,) it did not appear to be
+      an ancient structure, nor one that would ever have been the abode of a
+      very wealthy or prominent family;&mdash;a three-story wooden house,
+      perhaps a century old, low-studded, with a square front, standing right
+      upon the street, and a small enclosed porch, containing the main entrance,
+      affording a glimpse up and down the street through an oval window on each
+      side, its characteristic was decent respectability, not sinking below the
+      boundary of the genteel. It has often perplexed my mind to conjecture what
+      sort of man he could have been who, having the means to build a pretty,
+      spacious, and comfortable residence, should have chosen to lay its
+      foundation on the brink of so many graves; each tenant of these narrow
+      houses crying out, as it were, against the absurdity of bestowing much
+      time or pains in preparing any earthly tabernacle save such as theirs. But
+      deceased people see matters from an erroneous&mdash;at least too exclusive&mdash;point
+      of view; a comfortable grave is an excellent possession for those who need
+      it, but a comfortable house has likewise its merits and temporary
+      advantages. [Endnote: 5.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The founder of the house in question seemed sensible of this truth, and
+      had therefore been careful to lay out a sufficient number of rooms and
+      chambers, low, ill-lighted, ugly, but not unsusceptible of warmth and
+      comfort; the sunniest and cheerfulest of which were on the side that
+      looked into the graveyard. Of these, the one most spacious and convenient
+      had been selected by Doctor Grimshawe as a study, and fitted up with
+      bookshelves, and various machines and contrivances, electrical, chemical,
+      and distillatory, wherewith he might pursue such researches as were wont
+      to engage his attention. The great result of the grim Doctor&rsquo;s labors, so
+      far as known to the public, was a certain preparation or extract of
+      cobwebs, which, out of a great abundance of material, he was able to
+      produce in any desirable quantity, and by the administration of which he
+      professed to cure diseases of the inflammatory class, and to work very
+      wonderful effects upon the human system. It is a great pity, for the good
+      of mankind and the advantage of his own fortunes, that he did not put
+      forth this medicine in pill-boxes or bottles, and then, as it were, by
+      some captivating title, inveigle the public into his spider&rsquo;s web, and
+      suck out its gold substance, and himself wax fat as he sat in the central
+      intricacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But grim Doctor Grimshawe, though his aim in life might be no very exalted
+      one, seemed singularly destitute of the impulse to better his fortunes by
+      the exercise of his wits: it might even have been supposed, indeed, that
+      he had a conscientious principle or religious scruple&mdash;only, he was
+      by no means a religious man&mdash;against reaping profit from this
+      particular nostrum which he was said to have invented. He never sold it;
+      never prescribed it, unless in cases selected on some principle that
+      nobody could detect or explain. The grim Doctor, it must be observed, was
+      not generally acknowledged by the profession, with whom, in truth, he had
+      never claimed a fellowship; nor had he ever assumed, of his own accord the
+      medical title by which the public chose to know him. His professional
+      practice seemed, in a sort, forced upon him; it grew pretty extensive,
+      partly because it was understood to be a matter of favor and difficulty,
+      dependent on a capricious will, to obtain his services at all. There was
+      unquestionably an odor of quackery about him; but by no means of an
+      ordinary kind. A sort of mystery&mdash;yet which, perhaps, need not have
+      been a mystery, had any one thought it worth while to make systematic
+      inquiry in reference to his previous life, his education, even his native
+      land&mdash;assisted the impression which his peculiarities were calculated
+      to make. He was evidently not a New-Englander, nor a native of any part of
+      these Western shores. His speech was apt to be oddly and uncouthly
+      idiomatic, and even when classical in its form was emitted with a strange,
+      rough depth of utterance, that came from recesses of the lungs which we
+      Yankees seldom put to any use. In person, he did not look like one of us;
+      a broad, rather short personage, with a projecting forehead, a red,
+      irregular face, and a squab nose; eyes that looked dull enough in their
+      ordinary state, but had a faculty, in conjunction with the other features,
+      which those who had ever seen it described as especially ugly and awful.
+      As regarded dress, Doctor Grimshawe had a rough and careless exterior, and
+      altogether a shaggy kind of aspect, the effect of which was much increased
+      by a reddish beard, which, contrary to the usual custom of the day, he
+      allowed to grow profusely; and the wiry perversity of which seemed to know
+      as little of the comb as of the razor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We began with calling the grim Doctor an elderly personage; but in so
+      doing we looked at him through the eyes of the two children, who were his
+      intimates, and who had not learnt to decipher the purport and value of his
+      wrinkles and furrows and corrugations, whether as indicating age, or a
+      different kind of wear and tear. Possibly&mdash;he seemed so aggressive
+      and had such latent heat and force to throw out when occasion called&mdash;he
+      might scarcely have seemed middle-aged; though here again we hesitate,
+      finding him so stiffened in his own way, so little fluid, so encrusted
+      with passions and humors, that he must have left his youth very far behind
+      him; if indeed he ever had any.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The patients, or whatever other visitors were ever admitted into the
+      Doctor&rsquo;s study, carried abroad strange accounts of the squalor of dust and
+      cobwebs in which the learned and scientific person lived; and the dust,
+      they averred, was all the more disagreeable, because it could not well be
+      other than dead men&rsquo;s almost intangible atoms, resurrected from the
+      adjoining graveyard. As for the cobwebs, they were no signs of housewifely
+      neglect on the part of crusty Hannah, the handmaiden; but the Doctor&rsquo;s
+      scientific material, carefully encouraged and preserved, each filmy thread
+      more valuable to him than so much golden wire. Of all barbarous haunts in
+      Christendom or elsewhere, this study was the one most overrun with
+      spiders. They dangled from the ceiling, crept upon the tables, lurked in
+      the corners, and wove the intricacy of their webs wherever they could
+      hitch the end from point to point across the window-panes, and even across
+      the upper part of the doorway, and in the chimney-place. It seemed
+      impossible to move without breaking some of these mystic threads. Spiders
+      crept familiarly towards you and walked leisurely across your hands: these
+      were their precincts, and you only an intruder. If you had none about your
+      person, yet you had an odious sense of one crawling up your spine, or
+      spinning cobwebs in your brain,&mdash;so pervaded was the atmosphere of
+      the place with spider-life. What they fed upon (for all the flies for
+      miles about would not have sufficed them) was a secret known only to the
+      Doctor. Whence they came was another riddle; though, from certain
+      inquiries and transactions of Doctor Grimshawe&rsquo;s with some of the
+      shipmasters of the port, who followed the East and West Indian, the
+      African and the South American trade, it was supposed that this odd
+      philosopher was in the habit of importing choice monstrosities in the
+      spider kind from all those tropic regions. [Endnote: 6.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the above description, exaggerated as it may seem, is merely
+      preliminary to the introduction of one single enormous spider, the biggest
+      and ugliest ever seen, the pride of the grim Doctor&rsquo;s heart, his treasure,
+      his glory, the pearl of his soul, and, as many people said, the demon to
+      whom he had sold his salvation, on condition of possessing the web of the
+      foul creature for a certain number of years. The grim Doctor, according to
+      this theory, was but a great fly which this spider had subtly entangled in
+      his web. But, in truth, naturalists are acquainted with this spider,
+      though it is a rare one; the British Museum has a specimen, and,
+      doubtless, so have many other scientific institutions. It is found in
+      South America; its most hideous spread of legs covers a space nearly as
+      large as a dinner-plate, and radiates from a body as big as a door-knob,
+      which one conceives to be an agglomeration of sucked-up poison which the
+      creature treasures through life; probably to expend it all, and life
+      itself, on some worthy foe. Its colors, variegated in a sort of ugly and
+      inauspicious splendor, were distributed over its vast bulb in great spots,
+      some of which glistened like gems. It was a horror to think of this thing
+      living; still more horrible to think of the foul catastrophe, the
+      crushed-out and wasted poison, that would follow the casual setting foot
+      upon it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No doubt, the lapse of time since the Doctor and his spider lived has
+      already been sufficient to cause a traditionary wonderment to gather over
+      them both; and, especially, this image of the spider dangles down to us
+      from the dusky ceiling of the Past, swollen into somewhat uglier and huger
+      monstrosity than he actually possessed. Nevertheless, the creature had a
+      real existence, and has left kindred like himself; but as for the Doctor,
+      nothing could exceed the value which he seemed to put upon him, the
+      sacrifices he made for the creature&rsquo;s convenience, or the readiness with
+      which he adapted his whole mode of life, apparently, so that the spider
+      might enjoy the conditions best suited to his tastes, habits, and health.
+      And yet there were sometimes tokens that made people imagine that he hated
+      the infernal creature as much as everybody else who caught a glimpse of
+      him. [Endnote: 7.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Considering that Doctor Grimshawe, when we first look upon him, had dwelt
+      only a few years in the house by the graveyard, it is wonderful what an
+      appearance he, and his furniture, and his cobwebs, and their unweariable
+      spinners, and crusty old Hannah, all had of having permanently attached
+      themselves to the locality. For a century, at least, it might be fancied
+      that the study in particular had existed just as it was now; with those
+      dusky festoons of spider-silk hanging along the walls, those book-cases
+      with volumes turning their parchment or black-leather backs upon you,
+      those machines and engines, that table, and at it the Doctor, in a very
+      faded and shabby dressing-gown, smoking a long clay pipe, the powerful
+      fumes of which dwelt continually in his reddish and grisly beard, and made
+      him fragrant wherever he went. This sense of fixedness&mdash;stony
+      intractability&mdash;seems to belong to people who, instead of hope, which
+      exalts everything into an airy, gaseous exhilaration, have a fixed and
+      dogged purpose, around which everything congeals and crystallizes.
+      [Endnote: 1] Even the sunshine, dim through the dustiness of the two
+      casements that looked upon the graveyard, and the smoke, as it came warm
+      out of Doctor Grimshawe&rsquo;s mouth, seemed already stale. But if the two
+      children, or either of them, happened to be in the study,&mdash;if they
+      ran to open the door at the knock, if they came scampering and peeped down
+      over the banisters,&mdash;the sordid and rusty gloom was apt to vanish
+      quite away. The sunbeam itself looked like a golden rule, that had been
+      flung down long ago, and had lain there till it was dusty and tarnished.
+      They were cheery little imps, who sucked up fragrance and pleasantness out
+      of their surroundings, dreary as these looked; even as a flower can find
+      its proper perfume in any soil where its seed happens to fall. The great
+      spider, hanging by his cordage over the Doctor&rsquo;s head, and waving slowly,
+      like a pendulum, in a blast from the crack of the door, must have made
+      millions and millions of precisely such vibrations as these; but the
+      children were new, and made over every day, with yesterday&rsquo;s weariness
+      left out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little girl, however, was the merrier of the two. It was quite
+      unintelligible, in view of the little care that crusty Hannah took of her,
+      and, moreover, since she was none of your prim, fastidious children, how
+      daintily she kept herself amid all this dust; how the spider&rsquo;s webs never
+      clung to her, and how, when&mdash;without being solicited&mdash;she
+      clambered into the Doctor&rsquo;s arms and kissed him, she bore away no smoky
+      reminiscences of the pipe that he kissed continually. She had a free,
+      mellow, natural laughter, that seemed the ripened fruit of the smile that
+      was generally on her little face, to be shaken off and scattered abroad by
+      any breeze that came along. Little Elsie made playthings of everything,
+      even of the grim Doctor, though against his will, and though, moreover,
+      there were tokens now and then that the sight of this bright little
+      creature was not a pleasure to him, but, on the contrary, a positive pain;
+      a pain, nevertheless, indicating a profound interest, hardly less deep
+      than though Elsie had been his daughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Elsie did not play with the great spider, but she moved among the whole
+      brood of spiders as if she saw them not, and, being endowed with other
+      senses than those allied to these things, might coexist with them and not
+      be sensible of their presence. Yet the child, I suppose, had her crying
+      fits, and her pouting fits, and naughtiness enough to entitle her to live
+      on earth; at least crusty Hannah often said so, and often made grievous
+      complaint of disobedience, mischief, or breakage, attributable to little
+      Elsie; to which the grim Doctor seldom responded by anything more
+      intelligible than a puff of tobacco-smoke, and, sometimes, an imprecation;
+      which, however, hit crusty Hannah instead of the child. Where the child
+      got the tenderness that a child needs to live upon, is a mystery to me;
+      perhaps from some aged or dead mother, or in her dreams; perhaps from some
+      small modicum of it, such as boys have, from the little boy; or perhaps it
+      was from a Persian kitten, which had grown to be a cat in her arms, and
+      slept in her little bed, and now assumed grave and protective airs towards
+      her former playmate. [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy, [Endnote: 3] as we have said, was two or three years Elsie&rsquo;s
+      elder, and might now be about six years old. He was a healthy and cheerful
+      child, yet of a graver mood than the little girl, appearing to lay a more
+      forcible grasp on the circumstances about him, and to tread with a heavier
+      footstep on the solid earth; yet perhaps not more so than was the
+      necessary difference between a man-blossom, dimly conscious of coming
+      things, and a mere baby, with whom there was neither past nor future. Ned,
+      as he was named, was subject very early to fits of musing, the subject of
+      which&mdash;if they had any definite subject, or were more than vague
+      reveries&mdash;it was impossible to guess. They were of those states of
+      mind, probably, which are beyond the sphere of human language, and would
+      necessarily lose their essence in the attempt to communicate or record
+      them. The little girl, perhaps, had some mode of sympathy with these
+      unuttered thoughts or reveries, which grown people had ceased to have; at
+      all events, she early learned to respect them, and, at other times as free
+      and playful as her Persian kitten, she never in such circumstances
+      ventured on any greater freedom than to sit down quietly beside him, and
+      endeavor to look as thoughtful as the boy himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once, slowly emerging from one of these waking reveries, little Ned gazed
+      about him, and saw Elsie sitting with this pretty pretence of
+      thoughtfulness and dreaminess in her little chair, close beside him; now
+      and then peeping under her eyelashes to note what changes might come over
+      his face. After looking at her a moment or two, he quietly took her
+      willing and warm little hand in his own, and led her up to the Doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The group, methinks, must have been a picturesque one, made up as it was
+      of several apparently discordant elements, each of which happened to be so
+      combined as to make a more effective whole. The beautiful grave boy, with
+      a little sword by his side and a feather in his hat, of a brown
+      complexion, slender, with his white brow and dark, thoughtful eyes, so
+      earnest upon some mysterious theme; the prettier little girl, a blonde,
+      round, rosy, so truly sympathetic with her companion&rsquo;s mood, yet
+      unconsciously turning all to sport by her attempt to assume one similar;&mdash;these
+      two standing at the grim Doctor&rsquo;s footstool; he meanwhile, black,
+      wild-bearded, heavy-browed, red-eyed, wrapped in his faded dressing-gown,
+      puffing out volumes of vapor from his long pipe, and making, just at that
+      instant, application to a tumbler, which, we regret to say, was generally
+      at his elbow, with some dark-colored potation in it that required to be
+      frequently replenished from a neighboring black bottle. Half, at least, of
+      the fluids in the grim Doctor&rsquo;s system must have been derived from that
+      same black bottle, so constant was his familiarity with its contents; and
+      yet his eyes were never redder at one time than another, nor his utterance
+      thicker, nor his mood perceptibly the brighter or the duller for all his
+      conviviality. It is true, when, once, the bottle happened to be empty for
+      a whole day together, Doctor Grimshawe was observed by crusty Hannah and
+      by the children to be considerably fiercer than usual: so that probably,
+      by some maladjustment of consequences, his intemperance was only to be
+      found in refraining from brandy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor must we forget&mdash;in attempting to conceive the effect of these two
+      beautiful children in such a sombre room, looking on the graveyard, and
+      contrasted with the grim Doctor&rsquo;s aspect of heavy and smouldering
+      fierceness&mdash;that over his head, at this very moment, dangled the
+      portentous spider, who seemed to have come down from his web aloft for the
+      purpose of hearing what the two young people could have to say to his
+      patron, and what reference it might have to certain mysterious documents
+      which the Doctor kept locked up in a secret cupboard behind the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Grim Doctor,&rdquo; said Ned, after looking up into the Doctor&rsquo;s face, as a
+      sensitive child inevitably does, to see whether the occasion was
+      favorable, yet determined to proceed with his purpose whether so or not,&mdash;&ldquo;Grim
+      Doctor, I want you to answer me a question.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here&rsquo;s to your good health, Ned!&rdquo; quoth the Doctor, eying the pair
+      intently, as he often did, when they were unconscious. &ldquo;So you want to ask
+      me a question? As many as you please, my fine fellow; and I shall answer
+      as many, and as much, and as truly, as may please myself!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, grim Doctor!&rdquo; said the little girl, now letting go of Ned&rsquo;s hand, and
+      climbing upon the Doctor&rsquo;s knee, &ldquo;&lsquo;ou shall answer as many as Ned please
+      to ask, because to please him and me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, child,&rdquo; said Doctor Grimshawe, &ldquo;little Ned will have his rights at
+      least, at my hands, if not other people&rsquo;s rights likewise; and, if it be
+      right, I shall answer his question. Only, let him ask it at once; for I
+      want to be busy thinking about something else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, Doctor Grim,&rdquo; said little Ned, &ldquo;tell me, in the first place, where
+      I came from, and how you came to have me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Doctor looked at the little man, so seriously and earnestly putting
+      this demand, with a perplexed, and at first it might almost seem a
+      startled aspect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is a question, indeed, my friend Ned!&rdquo; ejaculated he, putting forth
+      a whiff of smoke and imbibing a nip from his tumbler before he spoke; and
+      perhaps framing his answer, as many thoughtful and secret people do, in
+      such a way as to let out his secret mood to the child, because knowing he
+      could not understand it: &ldquo;Whence did you come? Whence did any of us come?
+      Out of the darkness and mystery; out of nothingness; out of a kingdom of
+      shadows; out of dust, clay, mud, I think, and to return to it again. Out
+      of a former state of being, whence we have brought a good many shadowy
+      revelations, purporting that it was no very pleasant one. Out of a former
+      life, of which the present one is the hell!&mdash;And why are you come?
+      Faith, Ned, he must be a wiser man than Doctor Grim who can tell why you
+      or any other mortal came hither; only one thing I am well aware of,&mdash;it
+      was not to be happy. To toil and moil and hope and fear; and to love in a
+      shadowy, doubtful sort of way, and to hate in bitter earnest,&mdash;that
+      is what you came for!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, Doctor Grim! this is very naughty,&rdquo; said little Elsie. &ldquo;You are
+      making fun of little Ned, when he is in earnest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fun!&rdquo; quoth Doctor Grim, bursting into a laugh peculiar to him, very loud
+      and obstreperous. &ldquo;I am glad you find it so, my little woman. Well, and so
+      you bid me tell absolutely where he came from?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Elsie nodded her bright little head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you, friend Ned, insist upon knowing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That I do, Doctor Grim!&rdquo; answered Ned. His white, childish brow had
+      gathered into a frown, such was the earnestness of his determination; and
+      he stamped his foot on the floor, as if ready to follow up his demand by
+      an appeal to the little tin sword which hung by his side. The Doctor
+      looked at him with a kind of smile,&mdash;not a very pleasant one; for it
+      was an unamiable characteristic of his temper that a display of spirit,
+      even in a child, was apt to arouse his immense combativeness, and make him
+      aim a blow without much consideration how heavily it might fall, or on how
+      unequal an antagonist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you insist upon an answer, Master Ned, you shall have it,&rdquo; replied he.
+      &ldquo;You were taken by me, boy, a foundling from an almshouse; and if ever
+      hereafter you desire to know your kindred, you must take your chance of
+      the first man you meet. He is as likely to be your father as another!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The child&rsquo;s eyes flashed, and his brow grew as red as fire. It was but a
+      momentary fierceness; the next instant he clasped his hands over his face,
+      and wept in a violent convulsion of grief and shame. Little Elsie clasped
+      her arms about him, kissing his brow and chin, which were all that her
+      lips could touch, under his clasped hands; but Ned turned away
+      uncomforted, and was blindly making his way towards the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ned, my little fellow, come back!&rdquo; said Doctor Grim, who had very
+      attentively watched the cruel effect of his communication.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the boy did not reply, and was still tending towards the door, the grim
+      Doctor vouchsafed to lay aside his pipe, get up from his arm-chair (a
+      thing he seldom did between supper and bedtime), and shuffle after the two
+      children in his slippers. He caught them on the threshold, brought little
+      Ned back by main force,&mdash;for he was a rough man even in his
+      tenderness,&mdash;and, sitting down again and taking him on his knee,
+      pulled away his hands from before his face. Never was a more pitiful sight
+      than that pale countenance, so infantile still, yet looking old and
+      experienced already, with a sense of disgrace, with a feeling of
+      loneliness; so beautiful, nevertheless, that it seemed to possess all the
+      characteristics which fine hereditary traits and culture, or many
+      forefathers, could do in refining a human stock. And this was a nameless
+      weed, sprouting from some chance seed by the dusty wayside!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ned, my dear old boy,&rdquo; said Doctor Grim,&mdash;and he kissed that pale,
+      tearful face,&mdash;the first and last time, to the best of my belief,
+      that he was ever betrayed into that tenderness; &ldquo;forget what I have said!
+      Yes, remember, if you like, that you came from an almshouse; but remember,
+      too,&mdash;what your friend Doctor Grim is ready to affirm and make oath
+      of,&mdash;that he can trace your kindred and race through that sordid
+      experience, and back, back, for a hundred and fifty years, into an old
+      English line. Come, little Ned, and look at this picture.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He led the boy by the hand to a corner of the room, where hung upon the
+      wall a portrait which Ned had often looked at. It seemed an old picture;
+      but the Doctor had had it cleaned and varnished, so that it looked dim and
+      dark, and yet it seemed to be the representation of a man of no mark; not
+      at least of such mark as would naturally leave his features to be
+      transmitted for the interest of another generation. For he was clad in a
+      mean dress of old fashion,&mdash;a leather jerkin it appeared to be,&mdash;and
+      round his neck, moreover, was a noose of rope, as if he might have been on
+      the point of being hanged. But the face of the portrait, nevertheless, was
+      beautiful, noble, though sad; with a great development of sensibility, a
+      look of suffering and endurance amounting to triumph,&mdash;a peace
+      through all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look at this,&rdquo; continued the Doctor, &ldquo;if you must go on dreaming about
+      your race. Dream that you are of the blood of this being; for, mean as his
+      station looks, he comes of an ancient and noble race, and was the noblest
+      of them all! Let me alone, Ned, and I shall spin out the web that shall
+      link you to that man. The grim Doctor can do it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The grim Doctor&rsquo;s face looked fierce with the earnestness with which he
+      said these words. You would have said that he was taking an oath to
+      overthrow and annihilate a race, rather than to build one up by bringing
+      forward the infant heir out of obscurity, and making plain the links&mdash;the
+      filaments&mdash;which cemented this feeble childish life, in a far
+      country, with the great tide of a noble life, which had come down like a
+      chain from antiquity, in old England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having said the words, however, the grim Doctor appeared ashamed both of
+      the heat and of the tenderness into which he had been betrayed; for rude
+      and rough as his nature was, there was a kind of decorum in it, too, that
+      kept him within limits of his own. So he went back to his chair, his pipe,
+      and his tumbler, and was gruffer and more taciturn than ever for the rest
+      of the evening. And after the children went to bed, he leaned back in his
+      chair and looked up at the vast tropic spider, who was particularly busy
+      in adding to the intricacies of his web; until he fell asleep with his
+      eyes fixed in that direction, and the extinguished pipe in one hand and
+      the empty tumbler in the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Doctor Grimshawe, after the foregone scene, began a practice of conversing
+      more with the children than formerly; directing his discourse chiefly to
+      Ned, although Elsie&rsquo;s vivacity and more outspoken and demonstrative
+      character made her take quite as large a share in the conversation as he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Doctor&rsquo;s communications referred chiefly to a village, or
+      neighborhood, or locality in England, which he chose to call Newnham;
+      although he told the children that this was not the real name, which, for
+      reasons best known to himself, he wished to conceal. Whatever the name
+      were, he seemed to know the place so intimately, that the children, as a
+      matter of course, adopted the conclusion that it was his birthplace, and
+      the spot where he had spent his schoolboy days, and had lived until some
+      inscrutable reason had impelled him to quit its ivy-grown antiquity, and
+      all the aged beauty and strength that he spoke of, and to cross the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He used to tell of an old church, far unlike the brick and pine-built
+      meeting-houses with which the children were familiar; a church, the stones
+      of which were laid, every one of them, before the world knew of the
+      country in which he was then speaking: and how it had a spire, the lower
+      part of which was mantled with ivy, and up which, towards its very spire,
+      the ivy was still creeping; and how there was a tradition, that, if the
+      ivy ever reached the top, the spire would fall upon the roof of the old
+      gray church, and crush it all down among its surrounding tombstones.
+      [Endnote: 1] And so, as this misfortune would be so heavy a one, there
+      seemed to be a miracle wrought from year to year, by which the ivy, though
+      always flourishing, could never grow beyond a certain point; so that the
+      spire and church had stood unharmed for thirty years; though the wise old
+      people were constantly foretelling that the passing year must be the very
+      last one that it could stand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He told, too, of a place that made little Ned blush and cast down his eyes
+      to hide the tears of anger and shame at he knew not what, which would
+      irresistibly spring into them; for it reminded him of the almshouse where,
+      as the cruel Doctor said, Ned himself had had his earliest home. And yet,
+      after all, it had scarcely a feature of resemblance; and there was this
+      great point of difference,&mdash;that whereas, in Ned&rsquo;s wretched abode (a
+      large, unsightly brick house), there were many wretched infants like
+      himself, as well as helpless people of all ages, widows, decayed
+      drunkards, people of feeble wits, and all kinds of imbecility; it being a
+      haven for those who could not contend in the hard, eager, pitiless
+      struggle of life; in the place the Doctor spoke of, a noble, Gothic, mossy
+      structure, there were none but aged men, who had drifted into this quiet
+      harbor to end their days in a sort of humble yet stately ease and decorous
+      abundance. And this shelter, the grim Doctor said, was the gift of a man
+      who had died ages ago; and having been a great sinner in his lifetime, and
+      having drawn lands, manors, and a great mass of wealth into his clutches,
+      by violent and unfair means, had thought to get his pardon by founding
+      this Hospital, as it was called, in which thirteen old men should always
+      reside; and he hoped that they would spend their time in praying for the
+      welfare of his soul. [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Said little Elsie, &ldquo;I am glad he did it, and I hope the poor old men never
+      forgot to pray for him, and that it did good to the poor wicked man&rsquo;s
+      soul.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, child,&rdquo; said Doctor Grimshawe, with a scowl into vacancy, and a
+      sort of wicked leer of merriment at the same time, as if he saw before him
+      the face of the dead man of past centuries, &ldquo;I happen to be no lover of
+      this man&rsquo;s race, and I hate him for the sake of one of his descendants. I
+      don&rsquo;t think he succeeded in bribing the Devil to let him go, or God to
+      save him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doctor Grim, you are very naughty!&rdquo; said Elsie, looking shocked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is fair enough,&rdquo; said Ned, &ldquo;to hate your enemies to the very brink of
+      the grave, but then to leave him to get what mercy he can.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After shoving him in!&rdquo; quoth the Doctor; and made no further response to
+      either of these criticisms, which seemed indeed to affect him very little&mdash;if
+      he even listened to them. For he was a man of singularly imperfect moral
+      culture; insomuch that nothing else was so remarkable about him as that&mdash;possessing
+      a good deal of intellectual ability, made available by much reading and
+      experience&mdash;he was so very dark on the moral side; as if he needed
+      the natural perceptions that should have enabled him to acquire that
+      better wisdom. Such a phenomenon often meets us in life; oftener than we
+      recognize, because a certain tact and exterior decency generally hide the
+      moral deficiency. But often there is a mind well polished, married to a
+      conscience and natural impulses left as they were in childhood, except
+      that they have sprouted up into evil and poisonous weeds, richly
+      blossoming with strong-smelling flowers, or seeds which the plant scatters
+      by a sort of impulse; even as the Doctor was now half-consciously throwing
+      seeds of his evil passions into the minds of these children. He was
+      himself a grown-up child, without tact, simplicity, and innocence, and
+      with ripened evil, all the ranker for a native heat that was in him and
+      still active, which might have nourished good things as well as evil.
+      Indeed, it did cherish by chance a root or two of good, the fragrance of
+      which was sometimes perceptible among all this rank growth of poisonous
+      weeds. A grown-up child he was,&mdash;that was all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Doctor now went on to describe an old country-seat, which stood near
+      this village and the ancient Hospital that he had been telling about, and
+      which was formerly the residence of the wicked man (a knight and a brave
+      one, well known in the Lancastrian wars) who had founded the latter. It
+      was a venerable old mansion, which a Saxon Thane had begun to build more
+      than a thousand years ago, the old English oak that he built into the
+      frame being still visible in the ancient skeleton of its roof, sturdy and
+      strong as if put up yesterday. And the descendants of the man who built
+      it, through the French line (for a Norman baron wedded the daughter and
+      heiress of the Saxon), dwelt there yet; and in each century they had done
+      something for the old Hall,&mdash;building a tower, adding a suite of
+      rooms, strengthening what was already built, putting in a painted window,
+      making it more spacious and convenient,&mdash;till it seemed as if Time
+      employed himself in thinking what could be done for the old house. As fast
+      as any part decayed, it was renewed, with such simple art that the new
+      completed, as it were, and fitted itself to the old. So that it seemed as
+      if the house never had been finished, until just that thing was added. For
+      many an age, the possessors had gone on adding strength to strength,
+      digging out the moat to a greater depth, piercing the walls with holes for
+      archers to shoot through, or building a turret to keep watch upon. But at
+      last all necessity for these precautions passed away, and then they
+      thought of convenience and comfort, adding something in every generation
+      to these. And by and by they thought of beauty too; and in this time
+      helped them with its weather-stains, and the ivy that grew over the walls,
+      and the grassy depth of the dried-up moat, and the abundant shade that
+      grew up everywhere, where naked strength would have been ugly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One curious thing in the house,&rdquo; said the Doctor, lowering his voice, but
+      with a mysterious look of triumph, and that old scowl, too, at the
+      children, &ldquo;was that they built a secret chamber,&mdash;a very secret one!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A secret chamber!&rdquo; cried little Ned; &ldquo;who lived in it? A ghost?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was often use for it,&rdquo; said Doctor Grim; &ldquo;hiding people who had
+      fought on the wrong side, or Catholic priests, or criminals, or perhaps&mdash;who
+      knows?&mdash;enemies that they wanted put out of the way,&mdash;troublesome
+      folks. Ah! it was often of use, that secret chamber: and is so still!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here the Doctor paused a long while, and leaned back in his chair, slowly
+      puffing long whiffs from his pipe, looking up at the great spider-demon
+      that hung over his head, and, as it seemed to the children by the
+      expression of his face, looking into the dim secret chamber which he had
+      spoken of, and which, by something in his mode of alluding to it, assumed
+      such a weird, spectral aspect to their imaginations that they never wished
+      to hear of it again. Coming back at length out of his reverie,&mdash;returning,
+      perhaps, out of some weird, ghostly, secret chamber of his memory, whereof
+      the one in the old house was but the less horrible emblem,&mdash;he
+      resumed his tale. He said that, a long time ago, a war broke out in the
+      old country between King and Parliament. At that period there were several
+      brothers of the old family (which had adhered to the Catholic religion),
+      and these chose the side of the King instead of that of the Puritan
+      Parliament: all but one, whom the family hated because he took the
+      Parliament side; and he became a soldier, and fought against his own
+      brothers; and it was said among them that, so inveterate was he, he went
+      on the scaffold, masked, and was the very man who struck off the King&rsquo;s
+      head, and that his foot trod in the King&rsquo;s blood, and that always
+      afterwards he made a bloody track wherever he went. And there was a legend
+      that his brethren once caught the renegade and imprisoned him in his own
+      birthplace&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the secret chamber?&rdquo; interrupted Ned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No doubt!&rdquo; said the Doctor, nodding, &ldquo;though I never heard so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They imprisoned him, but he made his escape and fled, and in the morning
+      his prison-place, wherever it was, was empty. But on the threshold of the
+      door of the old manor-house there was the print of a bloody footstep; and
+      no trouble that the housemaids took, no rain of all the years that have
+      since passed, no sunshine, has made it fade: nor have all the wear and
+      tramp of feet passing over it since then availed to erase it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have seen it myself,&rdquo; quoth the Doctor, &ldquo;and know this to be true.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Doctor Grim, now you are laughing at us,&rdquo; said Ned, trying to look grave.
+      But Elsie hid her face on the Doctor&rsquo;s knee; there being something that
+      affected the vivid little girl with peculiar horror in the idea of this
+      red footstep always glistening on the doorstep, and wetting, as she
+      fancied, every innocent foot of child or grown person that had since
+      passed over it. [Endnote: 3.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is true!&rdquo; reiterated the grim Doctor; &ldquo;for, man and boy, I have seen
+      it a thousand times.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He continued the family history, or tradition, or fantastic legend,
+      whichever it might be; telling his young auditors that the Puritan, the
+      renegade son of the family, was afterwards, by the contrivances of his
+      brethren, sent to Virginia and sold as a bond slave; and how he had
+      vanished from that quarter and come to New England, where he was supposed
+      to have left children. And by and by two elder brothers died, and this
+      missing brother became the heir to the old estate and to a title. Then the
+      family tried to track his bloody footstep, and sought it far and near,
+      through green country paths, and old streets of London; but in vain. Then
+      they sent messengers to see whether any traces of one stepping in blood
+      could be found on the forest leaves of America; but still in vain. The
+      idea nevertheless prevailed that he would come back, and it was said they
+      kept a bedchamber ready for him yet in the old house. But much as they
+      pretended to regret the loss of him and his children, it would make them
+      curse their stars were a descendant of his to return now. For the child of
+      a younger son was in possession of the old estate, and was doing as much
+      evil as his forefathers did; and if the true heir were to appear on the
+      threshold, he would (if he might but do it secretly) stain the whole
+      doorstep as red as the Bloody Footstep had stained one little portion of
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think he will ever come back?&rdquo; asked little Ned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stranger things have happened, my little man!&rdquo; said Doctor Grimshawe,
+      &ldquo;than that the posterity of this man should come back and turn these
+      usurpers out of his rightful inheritance. And sometimes, as I sit here
+      smoking my pipe and drinking my glass, and looking up at the cunning plot
+      that the spider is weaving yonder above my head, and thinking of this fine
+      old family and some little matters that have been between them and me, I
+      fancy that it may be so! We shall see! Stranger things have happened.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Doctor Grimshawe drank off his tumbler, winking at little Ned in a
+      strange way, that seemed to be a kind of playfulness, but which did not
+      affect the children pleasantly; insomuch that little Elsie put both her
+      hands on Doctor Grim&rsquo;s knees, and begged him not to do so any more.
+      [Endnote: 4.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      [Endnote: 1]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The children, after this conversation, often introduced the old English
+      mansion into their dreams and little romances, which all imaginative
+      children are continually mixing up with their lives, making the
+      commonplace day of grown people a rich, misty, glancing orb of fairy-land
+      to themselves. Ned, forgetting or not realizing the long lapse of time,
+      used to fancy the true heir wandering all this while in America, and
+      leaving a long track of bloody footsteps behind him; until the period
+      when, his sins being expiated (whatever they might be), he should turn
+      back upon his steps and return to his old native home. And sometimes the
+      child used to look along the streets of the town where he dwelt, bending
+      his thoughtful eyes on the ground, and think that perhaps some time he
+      should see the bloody footsteps there, betraying that the wanderer had
+      just gone that way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for little Elsie, it was her fancy that the hero of the legend still
+      remained imprisoned in that dreadful secret chamber, which had made a most
+      dread impression on her mind; and that there he was, forgotten all this
+      time, waiting, like a naughty child shut up in a closet, until some one
+      should come to unlock the door. In the pitifulness of her disposition, she
+      once proposed to little Ned that, as soon as they grew big enough, they
+      should set out in quest of the old house, and find their way into it, and
+      find the secret chamber, and let the poor prisoner out. So they lived a
+      good deal of the time in a half-waking dream, partly conscious of the
+      fantastic nature of their ideas, yet with these ideas almost as real to
+      them as the facts of the natural world, which, to children, are at first
+      transparent and unsubstantial.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Doctor appeared to have a pleasure, or a purpose, in keeping his
+      legend forcibly in their memories; he often recurred to the subject of the
+      old English family, and was continually giving new details about its
+      history, the scenery in its neighborhood, the aspect of the mansion-house;
+      indicating a very intense interest in the subject on his own part, of
+      which this much talk seemed the involuntary overflowing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was, however, an affection mingled with this sentiment. It appeared
+      to be his unfortunate necessity to let his thoughts dwell very constantly
+      upon a subject that was hateful to him, with which this old English estate
+      and manor-house and family were somehow connected; and, moreover, had he
+      spoken thus to older and more experienced auditors, they might have
+      detected in the manner and matter of his talk, a certain hereditary
+      reverence and awe, the growth of ages, mixed up with a newer hatred,
+      impelling him to deface and destroy what, at the same time, it was his
+      deepest impulse to bow before. The love belonged to his race; the hatred,
+      to himself individually. It was the feeling of a man lowly born, when he
+      contracts a hostility to his hereditary superior. In one way, being of a
+      powerful, passionate nature, gifted with force and ability far superior to
+      that of the aristocrat, he might scorn him and feel able to trample on
+      him; in another, he had the same awe that a country boy feels of the
+      magistrate who flings him a sixpence and shakes his horsewhip at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Had the grim Doctor been an American, he might have had the vast antipathy
+      to rank, without the trace of awe that made it so much more malignant: it
+      required a low-born Englishman to feel the two together. What made the
+      hatred so fiendish was a something that, in the natural course of things,
+      would have been loyalty, inherited affection, devoted self-sacrifice to a
+      superior. Whatever it might be, it seemed at times (when his potations
+      took deeper effect than ordinary) almost to drive the grim Doctor mad; for
+      he would burst forth in wild diatribes and anathemas, having a strange,
+      rough force of expression and a depth of utterance, as if his words came
+      from a bottomless pit within himself, where burned an everlasting fire,
+      and where the furies had their home; and plans of dire revenge were welded
+      into shape as in the heat of a furnace. After the two poor children had
+      been affrighted by paroxysms of this kind, the strange being would break
+      out into one of his roars of laughter, that seemed to shake the house,
+      and, at all events, caused the cobwebs and spiders suspended from the
+      ceiling, to swing and vibrate with the motion of the volumes of
+      reverberating breath which he thus expelled from his capacious lungs.
+      Then, catching up little Elsie upon one knee and Ned upon the other, he
+      would become gentler than in his usual moods, and, by the powerful
+      magnetism of his character, cause them to think him as tender and sweet an
+      old fellow as a child could desire for a playmate. Upon the whole, strange
+      as it may appear, they loved the grim Doctor dearly; there was a loadstone
+      within him that drew them close to him and kept them there, in spite of
+      the horror of many things that he said and did. One thing that, slight as
+      it seemed, wrought mightily towards their mutually petting each other, was
+      that no amount of racket, hubbub, shouting, laughter, or noisy mischief
+      which the two children could perpetrate, ever disturbed the Doctor&rsquo;s
+      studies, meditations, or employments of whatever kind. He had a hardy set
+      of nerves, not refined by careful treatment in himself or his ancestors,
+      but probably accustomed from of old to be drummed on by harsh voices, rude
+      sounds, and the clatter and clamor of household life among homely,
+      uncultivated, strongly animal people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the two children grew apace, it behooved their strange guardian to take
+      some thought for their instruction. So far as little Elsie was concerned,
+      however, he seemed utterly indifferent to her having any cultivation:
+      having imbibed no modern ideas respecting feminine capacities and
+      privileges, but regarding woman, whether in the bud or in the blossom, as
+      the plaything of man&rsquo;s idler moments, and the helpmeet&mdash;but in a
+      humble capacity&mdash;of his daily life. He sometimes bade her go to the
+      kitchen and take lessons of crusty Hannah in bread-making, sweeping,
+      dusting, washing, the coarser needlework, and such other things as she
+      would require to know when she came to be a woman; but carelessly allowed
+      her to gather up the crumbs of such instruction as he bestowed on her
+      playmate Ned, and thus learn to read, write, and cipher; which, to say the
+      truth, was about as far in the way of scholarship as little Elsie cared to
+      go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But towards little Ned the grim Doctor adopted a far different system. No
+      sooner had he reached the age when the soft and tender intellect of the
+      child became capable of retaining impressions, than he took him vigorously
+      in hand, assigning him such tasks as were fit for him, and curiously
+      investigating what were the force and character of the powers with which
+      the child grasped them. Not that the Doctor pressed him forward unduly;
+      indeed, there was no need of it; for the boy manifested a remarkable
+      docility for instruction, and a singular quickness in mastering the
+      preliminary steps which lead to science: a subtle instinct, indeed, which
+      it seemed wonderful a child should possess for anything as artificial as
+      systems of grammar and arithmetic. A remarkable boy, in truth, he was, to
+      have been found by chance in an almshouse; except that, such being his
+      origin, we are at liberty to suppose for him whatever long cultivation and
+      gentility we may think necessary, in his parentage of either side,&mdash;such
+      as was indicated also by his graceful and refined beauty of person. He
+      showed, indeed, even before he began to read at all, an instinctive
+      attraction towards books, and a love for and interest in even the material
+      form of knowledge,&mdash;the plates, the print, the binding of the
+      Doctor&rsquo;s volumes, and even in a bookworm which he once found in an old
+      volume, where it had eaten a circular furrow. But the little boy had too
+      quick a spirit of life to be in danger of becoming a bookworm himself. He
+      had this side of the intellect, but his impulse would be to mix with men,
+      and catch something from their intercourse fresher than books could give
+      him; though these would give him what they might.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the grim Doctor, rough and uncultivated as he seemed, this budding
+      intelligence found no inadequate instructor. Doctor Grimshawe proved
+      himself a far more thorough scholar, in the classics and mathematics, than
+      could easily have been found in our country. He himself must have had
+      rigid and faithful instruction at an early period of life, though probably
+      not in his boyhood. For, though the culture had been bestowed, his mind
+      had been left in so singularly rough a state that it seemed as if the
+      refinement of classical study could not have been begun very early. Or
+      possibly the mind and nature were incapable of polish; or he may have had
+      a coarse and sordid domestic life around him in his infancy and youth. He
+      was a gem of coarse texture, just hewn out. An American with a like
+      education would more likely have gained a certain fineness and grace, and
+      it would have been difficult to distinguish him from one who had been born
+      to culture and refinement. This sturdy Englishman, after all that had been
+      done for his mind, and though it had been well done, was still but another
+      ploughman, of a long race of such, with a few scratchings of refinement on
+      his hard exterior. His son, if he left one, might be a little less of the
+      ploughman; his grandson, provided the female element were well chosen,
+      might approach to refinement; three generations&mdash;a century at least&mdash;would
+      be required for the slow toil of hewing, chiselling, and polishing a
+      gentleman out of this ponderous block, now rough from the quarry of human
+      nature. But, in the mean time, he evidently possessed in an unusual degree
+      the sort of learning that refines other minds,&mdash;the critical
+      acquaintance with the great poets and historians of antiquity, and
+      apparently an appreciation of their merits, and power to teach their
+      beauty. So the boy had an able tutor, capable, it would seem, of showing
+      him the way to the graces he did not himself possess; besides helping the
+      growth of the strength without which refinement is but sickly and
+      disgusting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another sort of culture, which it seemed odd that this rude man should
+      undertake, was that of manners; but, in fact, rude as the grim Doctor&rsquo;s
+      own manners were, he was one of the nicest and severest censors in that
+      department that was ever known. It is difficult to account for this;
+      although it is almost invariably found that persons in a low rank of life,
+      such as servants and laborers, will detect the false pretender to the
+      character of a gentleman, with at least as sure an instinct as the class
+      into which they seek to thrust themselves. Perhaps they recognize
+      something akin to their own vulgarity, rather than appreciate what is
+      unlike themselves. The Doctor possessed a peculiar power of rich rough
+      humor on this subject, and used to deliver lectures, as it were, to little
+      Ned, illustrated with sketches of living individuals in the town where
+      they dwelt; by an unscrupulous use of whom he sought to teach the boy what
+      to avoid in manners, if he sought to be a gentleman. But it must be
+      confessed he spared himself as little as other people, and often wound up
+      with this compendious injunction,&mdash;&ldquo;Be everything in your behavior
+      that Doctor Grim is not!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His pupil, very probably, profited somewhat by these instructions; for
+      there are specialties and arbitrary rules of behavior which do not come by
+      nature. But these are few; and beautiful, noble, and genial manners may
+      almost be called a natural gift; and these, however he inherited them,
+      soon proved to be an inherent possession of little Ned. He had a kind of
+      natural refinement, which nothing could ever soil or offend; it seemed, by
+      some magic or other, absolutely to keep him from the knowledge of much of
+      the grim Doctor&rsquo;s rude and sordid exterior, and to render what was around
+      him beautiful by a sort of affiliation, or reflection from that quality in
+      himself, glancing its white light upon it. The Doctor himself was puzzled,
+      and apparently both startled and delighted at the perception of these
+      characteristics. Sometimes he would make a low, uncouth bow, after his
+      fashion, to the little fellow, saying, &ldquo;Allow me to kiss your hand, my
+      lord!&rdquo; and little Ned, not quite knowing what the grim Doctor meant, yet
+      allowed the favor he asked, with a grave and gracious condescension that
+      seemed much to delight the suitor. This refusal to recognize or to suspect
+      that the Doctor might be laughing at him was a sure token, at any rate, of
+      the lack of one vulgar characteristic in little Ned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In order to afford little Ned every advantage to these natural gifts,
+      Doctor Grim nevertheless failed not to provide the best attainable
+      instructor for such positive points of a polite education as his own
+      fierce criticism, being destructive rather than generative, would not
+      suffice for. There was a Frenchman in the town&mdash;a M. Le Grand,
+      secretly calling himself a Count&mdash;who taught the little people, and,
+      indeed, some of their elders, the Parisian pronunciation of his own
+      language; and likewise dancing (in which he was more of an adept and more
+      successful than in the former branch) and fencing: in which, after looking
+      at a lesson or two, the grim Doctor was satisfied of his skill. Under his
+      instruction, with the stimulus of the Doctor&rsquo;s praise and criticism, Ned
+      soon grew to be the pride of the Frenchman&rsquo;s school, in both the active
+      departments; and the Doctor himself added a further gymnastic acquirement
+      (not absolutely necessary, he said, to a gentleman&rsquo;s education, but very
+      desirable to a man perfect at all points) by teaching him cudgel-playing
+      and pugilism. In short, in everything that related to accomplishments,
+      whether of mind or body, no pains were spared with little Ned; but of the
+      utilitarian line of education, then almost exclusively adopted, and
+      especially desirable for a fortuneless boy like Ned, dependent on a man
+      not wealthy, there was little given.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first, too, the Doctor paid little attention to the moral and religious
+      culture of his pupil; nor did he ever make a system of it. But by and by,
+      though with a singular reluctance and kind of bashfulness, he began to
+      extend his care to these matters; being drawn into them unawares, and
+      possibly perceiving and learning what he taught as he went along. One
+      evening, I know not how, he was betrayed into speaking on this point, and
+      a sort of inspiration seized him. A vista opened before him: handling an
+      immortal spirit, he began to know its requisitions, in a degree far beyond
+      what he had conceived them to be when his great task was undertaken. His
+      voice grew deep, and had a strange, impressive pathos in it; his talk
+      became eloquent with depth of meaning and feeling, as he told the boy of
+      the moral dangers of the world, for which he was seeking to educate him;
+      and which, he said, presented what looked like great triumphs, and yet
+      were the greatest and saddest of defeats. He told him that many things
+      that seemed nearest and dearest to the heart of man were destructive,
+      eating and gnawing away and corroding what was best in him; and what a
+      high, noble, re-creating triumph it was when these dark impulses were
+      resisted and overthrown; and how, from that epoch, the soul took a new
+      start. He denounced the selfish greed of gold, lawless passion, revenge,&mdash;and
+      here the grim Doctor broke out into a strange passion and zeal of anathema
+      against this deadly sin, making a dreadful picture of the ruin that it
+      creates in the heart where it establishes itself, and how it makes a
+      corrosive acid of those genial juices. Then he told the boy that the
+      condition of all good was, in the first place, truth; then, courage; then,
+      justice; then, mercy; out of which principles operating upon one another
+      would come all brave, noble, high, unselfish actions, and the scorn of all
+      mean ones; and how that from such a nature all hatred would fall away, and
+      all good affections would be ennobled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I know not at what point it was, precisely, in these ethical instructions
+      that an insight seemed to strike the grim Doctor that something more&mdash;vastly
+      more&mdash;was needed than all he had said; and he began, doubtfully, to
+      speak of man&rsquo;s spiritual nature and its demands, and the emptiness of
+      everything which a sense of these demands did not pervade, and condense,
+      and weighten into realities. And going on in this strain, he soared out of
+      himself and astonished the two children, who stood gazing at him,
+      wondering whether it were the Doctor who was speaking thus; until some
+      interrupting circumstance seemed to bring him back to himself, and he
+      burst into one of his great roars of laughter. The inspiration, the
+      strange light whereby he had been transfigured, passed out of his face;
+      and there was the uncouth, wild-bearded, rough, earthy, passionate man,
+      whom they called Doctor Grim, looking ashamed of himself, and trying to
+      turn the whole matter into a jest. [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a sad pity that he should have been interrupted, and brought into
+      this mocking mood, just when he seemed to have broken away from the
+      sinfulness of his hot, evil nature, and to have soared into a region
+      where, with all his native characteristics transfigured, he seemed to have
+      become an angel in his own likeness. Crusty Hannah, who had been drawn to
+      the door of the study by the unusual tones of his voice,&mdash;a kind of
+      piercing sweetness in it,&mdash;always averred that she saw the gigantic
+      spider swooping round his head in great crafty circles, and clutching, as
+      it were, at his brain with its great claws. But it was the old woman&rsquo;s
+      absurd idea that this hideous insect was the Devil, in that ugly guise,&mdash;a
+      superstition which deserves absolutely no countenance. Nevertheless,
+      though this paroxysm of devotional feeling and insight returned no more to
+      the grim Doctor, it was ever after a memorable occasion to the two
+      children. It touched that religious chord, in both their hearts, which
+      there was no mother to touch; but now it vibrated long, and never ceased
+      to vibrate so long as they remained together,&mdash;nor, perhaps, after
+      they were parted from each other and from the grim Doctor. And even then,
+      in those after years, the strange music that had been awakened was
+      continued, as it were the echo from harps on high. Now, at all events,
+      they made little prayers for themselves, and said them at bedtime,
+      generally in secret, sometimes in unison; and they read in an old dusty
+      Bible which lay among the grim Doctor&rsquo;s books; and from little heathens,
+      they became Christian children. Doctor Grimshawe was perhaps conscious of
+      this result of his involuntary preachment, but he never directly noticed
+      it, and did nothing either to efface or deepen the impression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was singular, however, that, in both the children&rsquo;s minds, this one
+      gush of irresistible religious sentiment, breaking out of the grim
+      Doctor&rsquo;s inner depths, like a sort of holy lava from a volcano that
+      usually emitted quite other matter, (such as hot, melted wrath and hate,)
+      quite threw out of sight, then and always afterwards, his darker
+      characteristics. They remembered him, with faith and love, as a religious
+      man, and forgot&mdash;what perhaps had made no impression on their
+      innocent hearts&mdash;all the traits that other people might have called
+      devilish. To them the grim Doctor was a saint, even during his lifetime
+      and constant intercourse with them, and canonized forever afterwards.
+      There is almost always, to be sure, this profound faith, with regard to
+      those they love, in childhood; but perhaps, in this instance, the children
+      really had a depth of insight that grown people lacked; a profound
+      recognition of the bottom of this strange man&rsquo;s nature, which was of such
+      stuff as martyrs and heroic saints might have been made of, though here it
+      had been wrought miserably amiss. At any rate, his face with the holy awe
+      upon it was what they saw and remembered, when they thought of their
+      friend Doctor Grim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One effect of his zealous and analytic instruction of the boy was very
+      perceptible. Heretofore, though enduring him, and occasionally making a
+      plaything of him, it may be doubted whether the grim Doctor had really any
+      strong affection for the child: it rather seemed as if his strong will
+      were forcing him to undertake, and carry sedulously forward, a
+      self-imposed task. All that he had done&mdash;his redeeming the bright
+      child from poverty and nameless degradation, ignorance, and a sordid life
+      hopeless of better fortune, and opening to him the whole realm of mighty
+      possibilities in an American life&mdash;did not imply any love for the
+      little individual whom he thus benefited. It had some other motive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But now, approaching the child in this close, intimate, and helpful way,
+      it was very evident that his interest took a tenderer character. There was
+      everything in the boy, that a boy could possess, to attract affection; he
+      would have been a father&rsquo;s pride and joy. Doctor Grimshawe, indeed, was
+      not his father; but to a person of his character this was perhaps no cause
+      of lesser love than if there had been the whole of that holy claim of
+      kindred between them. We speak of the natural force of blood; we speak of
+      the paternal relation as if it were productive of more earnest affection
+      than can exist between two persons, one of whom is protective, but
+      unrelated. But there are wild, forcible, unrestricted characters, on whom
+      the necessity and even duty of loving their own child is a sort of barrier
+      to love. They perhaps do not love their own traits, which they recognize
+      in their children; they shrink from their own features in the reflection
+      presented by these little mirrors. A certain strangeness and unlikeness
+      (such as gives poignancy to the love between the sexes) would excite a
+      livelier affection. Be this as it may, it is not probable that Doctor
+      Grimshawe would have loved a child of his own blood, with the coarse
+      characteristics that he knew both in his race and himself, with nearly
+      such fervor as this beautiful, slender, yet strenuous, intelligent,
+      refined boy,&mdash;with such a high-bred air, handling common things with
+      so refined a touch, yet grasping them so firmly; throwing a natural grace
+      on all he did. Was he not his father,&mdash;he that took this fair blossom
+      out of the sordid mud in which he must soon have withered and perished?
+      Was not this beautiful strangeness, which he so wondered at, the result of
+      his care?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And little Elsie? did the grim Doctor love her as well? Perhaps not, for,
+      in the first place, there was a natural tie, though not the nearest,
+      between her and Doctor Grimshawe, which made him feel that she was cast
+      upon his love: a burden which he acknowledged himself bound to undertake.
+      Then, too, there were unutterably painful reminiscences and thoughts, that
+      made him gasp for breath, that turned his blood sour, that tormented his
+      dreams with nightmares and hellish phantoms; all of which were connected
+      with this innocent and happy child; so that, cheerful and pleasant as she
+      was, there was to the grim Doctor a little fiend playing about his floor
+      and throwing a lurid light on the wall, as the shadow of this
+      sun-flickering child. It is certain that there was always a pain and
+      horror mixed with his feelings towards Elsie; he had to forget himself, as
+      it were, and all that was connected with the causes why she came to be,
+      before he could love her. Amid his fondness, when he was caressing her
+      upon his knee, pressing her to his rough bosom, as he never took the
+      freedom to press Ned, came these hateful reminiscences, compelling him to
+      set her down, and corrugating his heavy brows as with a pang of fiercely
+      resented, strongly borne pain. Still, the child had no doubt contrived to
+      make her way into the great gloomy cavern of the grim Doctor&rsquo;s heart, and
+      stole constantly further and further in, carrying a ray of sunshine in her
+      hand as a taper to light her way, and illuminate the rude dark pit into
+      which she so fearlessly went.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Doctor Grim [Endnote: 1] had the English faith in open air and daily
+      acquaintance with the weather, whatever it might be; and it was his habit,
+      not only to send the two children to play, for lack of a better place, in
+      the graveyard, but to take them himself on long rambles, of which the
+      vicinity of the town afforded a rich variety. It may be that the Doctor&rsquo;s
+      excursions had the wider scope, because both he and the children were
+      objects of curiosity in the town, and very much the subject of its gossip:
+      so that always, in its streets and lanes, the people turned to gaze, and
+      came to their windows and to the doors of shops to see this grim, bearded
+      figure, leading along the beautiful children each by a hand, with a surly
+      aspect like a bulldog. Their remarks were possibly not intended to reach
+      the ears of the party, but certainly were not so cautiously whispered but
+      they occasionally did do so. The male remarks, indeed, generally died away
+      in the throats that uttered them; a circumstance that doubtless saved the
+      utterer from some very rough rejoinder at the hands of the Doctor, who had
+      grown up in the habit of a very ready and free recourse to his fists,
+      which had a way of doubling themselves up seemingly of their own accord.
+      But the shrill feminine voices sometimes sent their observations from
+      window to window without dread of any such repartee on the part of the
+      subject of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There he goes, the old Spider-witch!&rdquo; quoth one shrill woman, &ldquo;with those
+      two poor babes that he has caught in his cobweb, and is going to feed
+      upon, poor little tender things! The bloody Englishman makes free with the
+      dead bodies of our friends and the living ones of our children!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How red his nose is!&rdquo; quoth another; &ldquo;he has pulled at the brandy-bottle
+      pretty stoutly to-day, early as it is! Pretty habits those children will
+      learn, between the Devil in the shape of a great spider, and this devilish
+      fellow in his own shape! It were well that our townsmen tarred and
+      feathered the old British wizard!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And, as he got further off, two or three little blackguard barefoot boys
+      shouted shrilly after him,&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                      &ldquo;Doctor Grim, Doctor Grim,
+                       The Devil wove a web for him!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      being a nonsensical couplet that had been made for the grim Doctor&rsquo;s
+      benefit, and was hooted in the streets, and under his own windows. Hearing
+      such remarks and insults, the Doctor would glare round at them with red
+      eyes, especially if the brandy-bottle had happened to be much in request
+      that day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, poor Doctor Grim had met with a fortune which befalls many a man
+      with less cause than drew the public attention on this odd humorist; for,
+      dwelling in a town which was as yet but a larger village, where everybody
+      knew everybody, and claimed the privilege to know and discuss their
+      characters, and where there were few topics of public interest to take off
+      their attention, a very considerable portion of town talk and criticism
+      fell upon him. The old town had a certain provincialism, which is less the
+      characteristic of towns in these days, when society circulates so freely,
+      than then: besides, it was a very rude epoch, just when the country had
+      come through the war of the Revolution, and while the surges of that
+      commotion were still seething and swelling, and while the habits and
+      morals of every individual in the community still felt its influence; and
+      especially the contest was too recent for an Englishman to be in very good
+      odor, unless he should cease to be English, and become more American than
+      the Americans themselves in repudiating British prejudices or principles,
+      habits, mode of thought, and everything that distinguishes Britons at home
+      or abroad. As Doctor Grim did not see fit to do this, and as, moreover, he
+      was a very doubtful, questionable, morose, unamiable old fellow, not
+      seeking to make himself liked nor deserving to be so, he was a very
+      unpopular person in the town where he had chosen to reside. Nobody thought
+      very well of him; the respectable people had heard of his pipe and
+      brandy-bottle; the religious community knew that he never showed himself
+      at church or meeting; so that he had not that very desirable strength (in
+      a society split up into many sects) of being able to rely upon the party
+      sympathies of any one of them. The mob hated him with the blind sentiment
+      that makes one surly cur hostile to another surly cur. He was the most
+      isolated individual to be found anywhere; and, being so unsupported,
+      everybody was his enemy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The town, as it happened, had been pleased to interest itself much in this
+      matter of Doctor Grim and the two children, insomuch as he never sent them
+      to school, nor came with them to meeting of any kind, but was bringing
+      them up ignorant heathen to all appearances, and, as many believed, was
+      devoting them in some way to the great spider, to which he had bartered
+      his own soul. It had been mooted among the selectmen, the fathers of the
+      town, whether their duty did not require them to put the children under
+      more suitable guardianship; a measure which, it may be, was chiefly
+      hindered by the consideration that, in that case, the cost of supporting
+      them would probably be transferred from the grim Doctor&rsquo;s shoulders to
+      those of the community. Nevertheless, they did what they could. Maidenly
+      ladies, prim and starched, in one or two instances called upon the Doctor&mdash;the
+      two children meanwhile being in the graveyard at play&mdash;to give him
+      Christian advice as to the management of his charge. But, to confess the
+      truth, the Doctor&rsquo;s reception of these fair missionaries was not extremely
+      courteous. They were, perhaps, partly instigated by a natural feminine
+      desire to see the interior of a place about which they had heard much,
+      with its spiders&rsquo; webs, its strange machines and confusing tools; so, much
+      contrary to crusty Hannah&rsquo;s advice, they persisted in entering. Crusty
+      Hannah listened at the door; and it was curious to see the delighted smile
+      which came over her dry old visage as the Doctor&rsquo;s growling, rough voice,
+      after an abrupt question or two, and a reply in a thin voice on the part
+      of the maiden ladies, grew louder and louder, till the door opened, and
+      forth came the benevolent pair in great discomposure. Crusty Hannah
+      averred that their caps were much rumpled; but this view of the thing was
+      questioned; though it were certain that the Doctor called after them
+      downstairs, that, had they been younger and prettier, they would have
+      fared worse. A male emissary, who was admitted on the supposition of his
+      being a patient, did fare worse; for (the grim Doctor having been
+      particularly intimate with the black bottle that afternoon) there was,
+      about ten minutes after the visitor&rsquo;s entrance, a sudden fierce upraising
+      of the Doctor&rsquo;s growl; then a struggle that shook the house; and, finally,
+      a terrible rumbling down the stairs, which proved to be caused by the
+      precipitate descent of the hapless visitor; who, if he needed no
+      assistance of the grim Doctor on his entrance, certainly would have been
+      the better for a plaster or two after his departure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such were the terms on which Doctor Grimshawe now stood with his adopted
+      townspeople; and if we consider the dull little town to be full of
+      exaggerated stories about the Doctor&rsquo;s oddities, many of them forged, all
+      retailed in an unfriendly spirit; misconceptions of a character which, in
+      its best and most candidly interpreted aspects, was sufficiently amenable
+      to censure; surmises taken for certainties; superstitions&mdash;the
+      genuine hereditary offspring of the frame of public mind which produced
+      the witchcraft delusion&mdash;all fermenting together; and all this evil
+      and uncharitableness taking the delusive hue of benevolent interest in two
+      helpless children;&mdash;we may partly judge what was the odium in which
+      the grim Doctor dwelt, and amid which he walked. The horrid suspicion,
+      too, countenanced by his abode in the corner of the graveyard, affording
+      the terrible Doctor such facilities for making free, like a ghoul as he
+      was, with the relics of mortality from the earliest progenitor to the man
+      killed yesterday by the Doctor&rsquo;s own drugs, was not likely to improve his
+      reputation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had heretofore contented himself with, at most, occasionally shaking
+      his stick at his assailants; but this day the black bottle had imparted,
+      it may be, a little more fire than ordinary to his blood; and besides, an
+      unlucky urchin happened to take particularly good aim with a mud ball,
+      which took effect right in the midst of the Doctor&rsquo;s bushy beard, and,
+      being of a soft consistency, forthwith became incorporated with it. At
+      this intolerable provocation the grim Doctor pursued the little villain,
+      amid a shower of similar missiles from the boy&rsquo;s playmates, caught him as
+      he was escaping into a back yard, dragged him into the middle of the
+      street, and, with his stick, proceeded to give him his merited
+      chastisement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, hereupon, it was astonishing how sudden commotion flashed up like
+      gunpowder along the street, which, except for the petty shrieks and
+      laughter of a few children, was just before so quiet. Forth out of every
+      window in those dusky, mean wooden houses were thrust heads of women old
+      and young; forth out of every door and other avenue, and as if they
+      started up from the middle of the street, or out of the unpaved sidewalks,
+      rushed fierce avenging forms, threatening at full yell to take vengeance
+      on the grim Doctor; who still, with that fierce dark face of his,&mdash;his
+      muddy beard all flying abroad, dirty and foul, his hat fallen off, his red
+      eyes flashing fire,&mdash;was belaboring the poor hinder end of the
+      unhappy urchin, paying off upon that one part of the boy&rsquo;s frame the whole
+      score which he had to settle with the rude boys of the town; giving him at
+      once the whole whipping which he had deserved every day of his life, and
+      not a stroke of which he had yet received. Need enough there was, no
+      doubt, that somebody should interfere with such grim and immitigable
+      justice; and certainly the interference was prompt, and promised to be
+      effectual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Down with the old tyrant! Thrash him! Hang him! Tar and feather the
+      viper&rsquo;s fry! the wizard! the body-snatcher!&rdquo; bellowed the mob, one member
+      of which was raving with delirium tremens, and another was a madman just
+      escaped from bedlam.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is unaccountable where all this mischievous, bloodthirsty multitude
+      came from,&mdash;how they were born into that quietness in such a moment
+      of time! What had they been about heretofore? Were they waiting in
+      readiness for this crisis, and keeping themselves free from other
+      employment till it should come to pass? Had they been created for the
+      moment, or were they fiends sent by Satan in the likeness of a blackguard
+      population? There you might see the offscourings of the recently finished
+      war,&mdash;old soldiers, rusty, wooden-legged: there, sailors, ripe for
+      any kind of mischief; there, the drunken population of a neighboring
+      grogshop, staggering helter-skelter to the scene, and tumbling over one
+      another at the Doctor&rsquo;s feet. There came the father of the punished
+      urchin, who had never shown heretofore any care for his street-bred
+      progeny, but who now came pale with rage, armed with a pair of tongs; and
+      with him the mother, flying like a fury, with her cap awry, and clutching
+      a broomstick, as if she were a witch just alighted. Up they rushed from
+      cellar doors, and dropped down from chamber windows; all rushing upon the
+      Doctor, but overturning and thwarting themselves by their very multitude.
+      For, as good Doctor Grim levelled the first that came within reach of his
+      fist, two or three of the others tumbled over him and lay grovelling at
+      his feet; the Doctor meanwhile having retreated into the angle between two
+      houses. Little Ned, with a valor which did him the more credit inasmuch as
+      it was exercised in spite of a good deal of childish trepidation, as his
+      pale face indicated, brandished his fists by the Doctor&rsquo;s side; and little
+      Elsie did what any woman may,&mdash;that is, screeched in Doctor Grim&rsquo;s
+      behalf with full stretch of lungs. Meanwhile the street boys kept up a
+      shower of mud balls, many of which hit the Doctor, while the rest were
+      distributed upon his assailants, heightening their ferocity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Seize the old scoundrel! the villain! the Tory! the dastardly Englishman!
+      Hang him in the web of his own devilish spider,&mdash;&lsquo;t is long enough!
+      Tar and feather him! tar and feather him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was certainly one of those crises that show a man how few real friends
+      he has, and the tendency of mankind to stand aside, at least, and let a
+      poor devil fight his own troubles, if not assist them in their attack.
+      Here you might have seen a brother physician of the grim Doctor&rsquo;s greatly
+      tickled at his plight: or a decorous, powdered, ruffle-shirted dignitary,
+      one of the weighty men of the town, standing at a neighbor&rsquo;s corner to see
+      what would come of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is not a respectable man, I understand, this Grimshawe,&mdash;a quack,
+      intemperate, always in these scuffles: let him get out as he may!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then comes a deacon of one of the churches, and several
+      church-members, who, hearing a noise, set out gravely and decorously to
+      see what was going forward in a Christian community.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! it is that irreligious and profane Grimshawe, who never goes to
+      meeting. We wash our hands of him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And one of the selectmen said,&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely this common brawler ought not to have the care of these nice,
+      sweet children; something must be done about it; and when the man is
+      sober, he must be talked to!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alas! it is a hard case with a man who lives upon his own bottom and
+      responsibility, making himself no allies, sewing himself on to nobody&rsquo;s
+      skirts, insulating himself,&mdash;hard, when his trouble comes; and so
+      poor Doctor Grimshawe was like to find it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had succeeded by dint of good skill, and some previous practice at
+      quarter-staff, in keeping his assailants at bay, though not without some
+      danger on his own part; but their number, their fierceness, and the more
+      skilled assault of some among them must almost immediately have been
+      successful, when the Doctor&rsquo;s part was strengthened by an unexpected ally.
+      This was a person [Endnote: 2] of tall, slight figure, who, without
+      lifting his hands to take part in the conflict, thrust himself before the
+      Doctor, and turned towards the assailants, crying,&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Christian men, what would you do? Peace,&mdash;peace!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His so well intended exhortation took effect, indeed, in a certain way,
+      but not precisely as might have been wished: for a blow, aimed at Doctor
+      Grim, took effect on the head of this man, who seemed to have no sort of
+      skill or alacrity at defending himself, any more than at making an
+      assault; for he never lifted his hands, but took the blow as unresistingly
+      as if it had been kindly meant, and it levelled him senseless on the
+      ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Had the mob really been enraged for any strenuous cause, this incident
+      would have operated merely as a preliminary whet to stimulate them to
+      further bloodshed. But, as they were mostly actuated only by a natural
+      desire for mischief, they were about as well satisfied with what had been
+      done as if the Doctor himself were the victim. And besides, the fathers
+      and respectabilities of the town, who had seen this mishap from afar, now
+      began to put forward, crying out, &ldquo;Keep the peace! keep the peace! A riot!
+      a riot!&rdquo; and other such cries as suited the emergency; and the crowd
+      vanished more speedily than it had congregated, leaving the Doctor and the
+      two children alone beside the fallen victim of a quarrel not his own. Not
+      to dwell too long on this incident, the Doctor, laying hold of the last of
+      his enemies, after the rest had taken to their heels, ordered him sternly
+      to stay and help him bear the man, whom he had helped to murder, to his
+      house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It concerns you, friend; for, if he dies, you hang to a dead certainty!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And this was done accordingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      About an hour thereafter there lay on a couch that had been hastily
+      prepared in the study a person of singularly impressive presence: a thin,
+      mild-looking man, with a peculiar look of delicacy and natural refinement
+      about him, although he scarcely appeared to be technically and as to
+      worldly position what we call a gentleman; plain in dress and simple in
+      manner, not giving the idea of remarkable intellectual gifts, but with a
+      kind of spiritual aspect, fair, clear complexion, gentle eyes, still
+      somewhat clouded and obscured by the syncope into which a blow on the head
+      had thrown him. He looked middle-aged, and yet there was a kind of
+      childlike, simple expression, which, unless you looked at him with the
+      very purpose of seeing the traces of time in his face, would make you
+      suppose him much younger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And how do you find yourself now, my good fellow?&rdquo; asked Doctor
+      Grimshawe, putting forth his hand to grasp that of the stranger, and
+      giving it a good, warm shake. &ldquo;None the worse, I should hope?&rdquo; [Endnote:
+      1.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not much the worse,&rdquo; answered the stranger: &ldquo;not at all, it may be. There
+      is a pleasant dimness and uncertainty in my mode of being. I am taken off
+      my feet, as it were, and float in air, with a faint delight in my
+      sensations. The grossness, the roughness, the too great angularity of the
+      actual, is removed from me. It is a state that I like well. It may be,
+      this is the way that the dead feel when they awake in another state of
+      being, with a dim pleasure, after passing through the brief darkness of
+      death. It is very pleasant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He answered dreamily, and sluggishly, reluctantly, as if there were a
+      sense of repose in him which he disliked to break by putting any of his
+      sensations into words. His voice had a remarkable sweetness and
+      gentleness, though lacking in depth of melody.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here, take this,&rdquo; said the Doctor, who had been preparing some kind of
+      potion in a teaspoon: it may have been a dose of his famous preparation of
+      spider&rsquo;s web, for aught I know, the operation of which was said to be of a
+      soothing influence, causing a delightful silkiness of sensation; but I
+      know not whether it was considered good for concussions of the brain, such
+      as it is to be supposed the present patient had undergone. &ldquo;Take this: it
+      will do you good; and here I drink your very good health in something that
+      will do me good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So saying, the grim Doctor quaffed off a tumbler of brandy and water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How sweet a contrast,&rdquo; murmured the stranger, &ldquo;between that scene of
+      violence and this great peace that has come over me! It is as when one can
+      say, I have fought the good fight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are right,&rdquo; said the Doctor, with what would have been one of his
+      deep laughs, but which he modified in consideration of his patient&rsquo;s
+      tenderness of brain. &ldquo;We both of us fought a good fight; for though you
+      struck no actual stroke, you took them as unflinchingly as ever I saw a
+      man, and so turned the fortune of the battle better than if you smote with
+      a sledge-hammer. Two things puzzle me in the affair. First, whence came my
+      assailants, all in that moment of time, unless Satan let loose out of the
+      infernal regions a synod of fiends, hoping thus to get a triumph over me.
+      And secondly, whence came you, my preserver, unless you are an angel, and
+      dropped down from the sky.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; answered the stranger, with quiet simplicity. &ldquo;I was passing through
+      the street to my little school, when I saw your peril, and felt it my duty
+      to expostulate with the people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the grim Doctor, &ldquo;come whence you will, you did an angel&rsquo;s
+      office for me, and I shall do what an earthly man may to requite it.
+      There, we will talk no more for the present.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He hushed up the children, who were already, of their own accord, walking
+      on tiptoe and whispering, and he himself even went so far as to refrain
+      from the usual incense of his pipe, having observed that the stranger, who
+      seemed to be of a very delicate organization, had seemed sensible of the
+      disagreeable effect on the atmosphere of the room. The restraint lasted,
+      however, only till (in the course of the day) crusty Hannah had fitted up
+      a little bedroom on the opposite side of the entry, to which she and the
+      grim Doctor moved the stranger, who, though tall, they observed was of no
+      great weight and substance,&mdash;the lightest man, the Doctor averred,
+      for his size, that ever he had handled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every possible care was taken of him, and in a day or two he was able to
+      walk into the study again, where he sat gazing at the sordidness and
+      unneatness of the apartment, the strange festoons and drapery of spiders&rsquo; 
+      webs, the gigantic spider himself, and at the grim Doctor, so shaggy,
+      grizzly, and uncouth, in the midst of these surroundings, with a
+      perceptible sense of something very strange in it all. His mild, gentle
+      regard dwelt too on the two beautiful children, evidently with a sense of
+      quiet wonder how they should be here, and altogether a sense of their
+      unfitness; they, meanwhile, stood a little apart, looking at him, somewhat
+      disturbed and awed, as children usually are, by a sense that the stranger
+      was not perfectly well, that he had been injured, and so set apart from
+      the rest of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you come to me, little one?&rdquo; said he, holding out a delicate hand to
+      Elsie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Elsie came to his side without any hesitation, though without any of the
+      rush that accompanied her advent to those whom she affected. &ldquo;And you, my
+      little man,&rdquo; added the stranger, quietly, and looking to Ned, who likewise
+      willingly approached, and, shaking him by the offered hand, let it go
+      again, but continued standing by his side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know, my little friends,&rdquo; said the stranger, &ldquo;that it is my
+      business in life to instruct such little people as you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do they obey you well, sir?&rdquo; asked Ned, perhaps conscious of a want of
+      force in the person whom he addressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger smiled faintly. &ldquo;Not too well,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;That has been my
+      difficulty; for I have moral and religious objections, and also a great
+      horror, to the use of the rod, and I have not been gifted with a harsh
+      voice and a stern brow; so that, after a while, my little people sometimes
+      get the better of me. The present generation of men is too gross for
+      gentle treatment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are quite right,&rdquo; quoth Doctor Grimshawe, who had been observing this
+      little scene, and trying to make out, from the mutual deportment of the
+      stranger and the two children, what sort of man this fair, quiet stranger
+      was, with his gentleness and weakness,&mdash;characteristics that were not
+      attractive to himself, yet in which he acknowledged, as he saw them here,
+      a certain charm; nor did he know, scarcely, whether to despise the one in
+      whom he saw them, or to yield to a strange sense of reverence. So he
+      watched the children, with an indistinct idea of being guided by them.
+      &ldquo;You are quite right: the world now&mdash;and always before, as far as I
+      ever heard&mdash;requires a great deal of brute force, a great deal of
+      animal food and brandy in the man that is to make an impression on it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The convalescence of the stranger&mdash;he gave his name as Colcord&mdash;proceeded
+      favorably; for the Doctor remarked that, delicate as his system was, it
+      had a certain purity,&mdash;a simple healthfulness that did not run into
+      disease as stronger constitutions might. It did not apparently require
+      much to crush down such a being as this,&mdash;not much unkindly breath to
+      blow out the taper of his life,&mdash;and yet, if not absolutely killed,
+      there was a certain aptness to keep alive in him not readily to be
+      overcome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No sooner was he in a condition so to do, than he went forth to look after
+      the little school that he had spoken of, but soon came back, announcing in
+      a very quiet and undisturbed way that, during his withdrawal from duty,
+      the scholars had been distributed to other instructors, and consequently
+      he was without place or occupation [Endnotes: 2, 3, 4.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A hard case,&rdquo; said the Doctor, flinging a gruff curse at those who had so
+      readily deserted the poor schoolmaster.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not so hard,&rdquo; replied Colcord. &ldquo;These little fellows are an unruly set,
+      born of parents who have led rough lives,&mdash;here in battle time, too,
+      with the spirit of battle in them,&mdash;therefore rude and contentious
+      beyond my power to cope with them. I have been taught, long ago,&rdquo; he
+      added, with a peaceful smile, &ldquo;that my business in life does not lie with
+      grown-up and consolidated men and women; and so, not to be useless in my
+      day, and to gain the little that my sustenance requires, I have thought to
+      deal with children. But even for this I lack force.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dare say,&rdquo; said the Doctor, with a modified laugh. &ldquo;Little devils they
+      are, harder to deal with than men. Well, I am glad of your failure for one
+      reason, and of your being thrown out of business; because we shall have
+      the benefit of you the longer. Here is this boy to be instructed. I have
+      made some attempts myself; but having no art of instructing, no skill, no
+      temper I suppose, I make but an indifferent hand at it: and besides I have
+      other business that occupies my thoughts. Take him in hand, if you like,
+      and the girl for company. No matter whether you teach her anything, unless
+      you happen to be acquainted with needlework.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will talk with the children,&rdquo; said Colcord, &ldquo;and see if I am likely to
+      do good with them. The lad, I see, has a singular spirit of aspiration and
+      pride,&mdash;no ungentle pride,&mdash;but still hard to cope with. I will
+      see. The little girl is a most comfortable child.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have read the boy as if you had his heart in your hand,&rdquo; said the
+      Doctor, rather surprised. &ldquo;I could not have done it better myself, though
+      I have known him all but from the egg.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Accordingly, the stranger, who had been thrust so providentially into this
+      odd and insulated little community, abode with them, without more words
+      being spoken on the subject: for it seemed to all concerned a natural
+      arrangement, although, on both parts, they were mutually sensible of
+      something strange in the companionship thus brought about. To say the
+      truth, it was not easy to imagine two persons apparently less adapted to
+      each other&rsquo;s society than the rough, uncouth, animal Doctor, whose faith
+      was in his own right arm, so full of the old Adam as he was, so sturdily a
+      hater, so hotly impulsive, so deep, subtle, and crooked, so obstructed by
+      his animal nature, so given to his pipe and black bottle, so wrathful and
+      pugnacious and wicked,&mdash;and this mild spiritual creature, so milky,
+      with so unforceful a grasp; and it was singular to see how they stood
+      apart and eyed each other, each tacitly acknowledging a certain merit and
+      kind of power, though not well able to appreciate its value. The grim
+      Doctor&rsquo;s kindness, however, and gratitude, had been so thoroughly
+      awakened, that he did not feel the disgust that he probably otherwise
+      might at what seemed the mawkishness of Colcord&rsquo;s character; his want,
+      morally speaking, of bone and muscle; his fastidiousness of character, the
+      essence of which it seemed to be to bear no stain upon it; otherwise it
+      must die.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On Colcord&rsquo;s part there was a good deal of evidence to be detected, by a
+      nice observer, that he found it difficult to put up with the Doctor&rsquo;s
+      coarse peculiarities, whether physical or moral. His animal indulgences of
+      appetite struck him with wonder and horror; his coarse expressions, his
+      free indulgence of wrath, his sordid and unclean habits; the dust, the
+      cobwebs, the monster that dangled from the ceiling; his pipe, diffusing
+      its fragrance through the house, and showing, by the plainest and simplest
+      proof, how we all breathe one another&rsquo;s breath, nice and proud as we may
+      be, kings and daintiest ladies breathing the air that has already served
+      to inflate a beggar&rsquo;s lungs. He shrank, too, from the rude manhood of the
+      Doctor&rsquo;s character, with its human warmth,&mdash;an element which he
+      seemed not to possess in his own character. He was capable only of gentle
+      and mild regard,&mdash;that was his warmest affection; and the warmest,
+      too, that he was capable of exciting in others. So that he was doomed as
+      much apparently as the Doctor himself to be a lonely creature, without any
+      very deep companionship in the world, though not incapable, when he, by
+      some rare chance, met a soul distantly akin, of holding a certain high
+      spiritual communion. With the children, however, he succeeded in
+      establishing some good and available relations; his simple and passionless
+      character coincided with their simplicity, and their as yet unawakened
+      passions: they appeared to understand him better than the Doctor ever
+      succeeded in doing. He touched springs and elements in the nature of both
+      that had never been touched till now, and that sometimes made a sweet,
+      high music. But this was rarely; and as far as the general duties of an
+      instructor went, they did not seem to be very successfully performed.
+      Something was cultivated; the spiritual germ grew, it might be; but the
+      children, and especially Ned, were intuitively conscious of a certain want
+      of substance in the instructor,&mdash;a something of earthly bulk; a too
+      etherealness. But his connection with our story does not lie in any
+      excellence, or lack of excellence, that he showed as an instructor, and we
+      merely mention these things as illustrating more or less his
+      characteristics.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The grim Doctor&rsquo;s curiosity was somewhat piqued by what he could see of
+      the schoolmaster&rsquo;s character, and he was desirous of finding out what sort
+      of a life such a man could have led in a world which he himself had found
+      so rough a one; through what difficulties he had reached middle age
+      without absolutely vanishing away in his contact with more positive
+      substances than himself; how the world had given him a subsistence, if
+      indeed he recognized anything more dense than fragrance, like a certain
+      people whom Pliny mentioned in Africa,&mdash;a point, in fact, which the
+      grim Doctor denied, his performance at table being inappreciable, and
+      confined, at least almost entirely, to a dish of boiled rice, which crusty
+      Hannah set before him, preparing it, it might be, with a sympathy of her
+      East Indian part towards him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, Doctor Grimshawe easily got at what seemed to be all of the facts of
+      Colcord&rsquo;s life; how that he was a New-Englander, the descendant of an
+      ancient race of settlers, the last of them; for, once pretty numerous in
+      their quarter of the country, they seemed to have been dying out,&mdash;exhaling
+      from the earth, and passing to some other region.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No wonder,&rdquo; said the Doctor bluffly. &ldquo;You have been letting slip the
+      vital principle, if you are a fair specimen of the race. You do not clothe
+      yourself in substance. Your souls are not coated sufficiently. Beef and
+      brandy would have saved you. You have exhaled for lack of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The schoolmaster shook his head, and probably thought his earthly
+      salvation and sustenance not worth buying at such a cost. The remainder of
+      his history was not tangible enough to afford a narrative. There seemed,
+      from what he said, to have always been a certain kind of refinement in his
+      race, a nicety of conscience, a nicety of habit, which either was in
+      itself a want of force, or was necessarily connected with it, and which,
+      the Doctor silently thought, had culminated in the person before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was always in us,&rdquo; continued Colcord, with a certain pride which
+      people generally feel in their ancestral characteristics, be they good or
+      evil. &ldquo;We had a tradition among us of our first emigrant, and the causes
+      that brought him to the New World; and it was said that he had suffered so
+      much, before quitting his native shores, so painful had been his track,
+      that always afterwards on the forest leaves of this land his foot left a
+      print of blood wherever he trod.&rdquo; [Endnote: 5.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A print of blood!&rdquo; said the grim Doctor, breaking his pipe-stem by some
+      sudden spasm in his gripe of it. &ldquo;Pooh! the devil take the pipe! A very
+      strange story that! Pray how was it?&rdquo; [Endnote: 1.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay, it is but a very dim legend,&rdquo; answered the schoolmaster: &ldquo;although
+      there are old yellow papers and parchments, I remember, in my father&rsquo;s
+      possession, that had some reference to this man, too, though there was
+      nothing in them about the bloody footprints. But our family legend is,
+      that this man was of a good race, in the time of Charles the First,
+      originally Papists, but one of them&mdash;the second you, our legend says&mdash;was
+      of a milder, sweeter cast than the rest, who were fierce and bloody men,
+      of a hard, strong nature; but he partook most of his mother&rsquo;s character.
+      This son had been one of the earliest Quakers, converted by George Fox;
+      and moreover there had been love between him and a young lady of great
+      beauty and an heiress, whom likewise the eldest son of the house had
+      designed to make his wife. And these brothers, cruel men, caught their
+      innocent brother and kept him in confinement long in his own native home&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How?&rdquo; asked the Doctor. &ldquo;Why did not he appeal to the laws?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Our legend says,&rdquo; replied the schoolmaster, &ldquo;only that he was kept in a
+      chamber that was forgotten.&rdquo; [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very strange that!&rdquo; quoth the Doctor. &ldquo;He was sold by his brethren.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The schoolmaster went on to tell, with much shuddering, how a Jesuit
+      priest had been mixed up with this wretched business, and there had been a
+      scheme at once religious and political to wrest the estate and the lovely
+      lady from the fortunate heir; and how this grim Italian priest had
+      instigated them to use a certain kind of torture with the poor heir, and
+      how he had suffered from this; but one night, when they left him
+      senseless, he contrived to make his escape from that cruel home, bleeding
+      as he went; and how, by some action of his imagination,&mdash;his sense of
+      the cruelty and hideousness of such treatment at his brethren&rsquo;s hands, and
+      in the holy name of his religion,&mdash;his foot, which had been crushed
+      by their cruelty, bled as he went, and that blood had never been stanched.
+      And thus he had come to America, and after many wanderings, and much track
+      of blood along rough ways, to New England. [Endnote: 3.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what became of his beloved?&rdquo; asked the grim Doctor, who was puffing
+      away at a fresh pipe with a very queer aspect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She died in England,&rdquo; replied the schoolmaster. &ldquo;And before her death, by
+      some means or other, they say that she found means to send him a child,
+      the offspring of their marriage, and from that child our race descended.
+      And they say, too, that she sent him a key to a coffin, in which was
+      locked up a great treasure. But we have not the key. But he never went
+      back to his own country; and being heart-broken, and sick and weary of the
+      world and its pomps and vanities, he died here, after suffering much
+      persecution likewise from the Puritans. For his peaceful religion was
+      accepted nowhere.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of all legends,&mdash;all foolish legends,&rdquo; quoth the Doctor, wrathfully,
+      with a face of a dark blood-red color, so much was his anger and contempt
+      excited, &ldquo;and of all absurd heroes of a legend, I never heard the like of
+      this! Have you the key?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; nor have I ever heard of it,&rdquo; answered the schoolmaster.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you have some papers?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They existed once: perhaps are still recoverable by search,&rdquo; said the
+      schoolmaster. &ldquo;My father knew of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A foolish legend,&rdquo; reiterated the Doctor. &ldquo;It is strange how human folly
+      strings itself on to human folly, as a story originally false and foolish
+      grows older.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up and walked about the room, with hasty and irregular strides and
+      a prodigious swinging of his ragged dressing-gown, which swept away as
+      many cobwebs as it would take a week to reproduce. After a few turns, as
+      if to change the subject, the Doctor asked the schoolmaster if he had any
+      taste for pictures, and drew his attention to the portrait which has been
+      already mentioned,&mdash;the figure in antique sordid garb, with a halter
+      round his neck, and the expression in his face which the Doctor and the
+      two children had interpreted so differently. Colcord, who probably knew
+      nothing about pictures, looked at it at first merely from the gentle and
+      cool complaisance of his character; but becoming absorbed in the
+      contemplation, stood long without speaking; until the Doctor, looking in
+      his face, perceived his eyes were streaming with tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you crying about?&rdquo; said he, gruffly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; said the schoolmaster quietly. &ldquo;But there is something in
+      this picture that affects me inexpressibly; so that, not being a man
+      passionate by nature, I have hardly ever been so moved as now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very foolish,&rdquo; muttered the Doctor, resuming his strides about the room.
+      &ldquo;I am ashamed of a grown man that can cry at a picture, and can&rsquo;t tell the
+      reason why.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a few more turns he resumed his easy-chair and his tumbler, and,
+      looking upward, beckoned to his pet spider, which came dangling downward,
+      great parti-colored monster that he was, and swung about his master&rsquo;s head
+      in hideous conference as it seemed; a sight that so distressed the
+      schoolmaster, or shocked his delicate taste, that he went out, and called
+      the two children to take a walk with him, with the purpose of breathing
+      air that was neither infected with spiders nor graves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After his departure, Doctor Grimshawe seemed even more disturbed than
+      during his presence: again he strode about the study; then sat down with
+      his hands on his knees, looking straight into the fire, as if it imaged
+      the seething element of his inner man, where burned hot projects, smoke,
+      heat, blackness, ashes, a smouldering of old thoughts, a blazing up of
+      new; casting in the gold of his mind, as Aaron did that of the Israelites,
+      and waiting to see what sort of a thing would come out of the furnace. The
+      children coming in from their play, he spoke harshly to them, and eyed
+      little Ned with a sort of savageness, as if he meant to eat him up, or do
+      some other dreadful deed: and when little Elsie came with her usual
+      frankness to his knee, he repelled her in such a way that she shook her
+      little hand at him, saying, &ldquo;Naughty Doctor Grim, what has come to you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Through all that day, by some subtle means or other, the whole household
+      knew that something was amiss; and nobody in it was comfortable. It was
+      like a spell of weather; like the east wind; like an epidemic in the air,
+      that would not let anything be comfortable or contented,&mdash;this
+      pervading temper of the Doctor. Crusty Hannah knew it in the kitchen: even
+      those who passed the house must have known it somehow or other, and have
+      felt a chill, an irritation, an influence on the nerves, as they passed.
+      The spiders knew it, and acted as they were wont to do in stormy weather.
+      The schoolmaster, when he returned from his walk, seemed likewise to know
+      it, and made himself secure and secret, keeping in his own room, except at
+      dinner, when he ate his rice in silence, without looking towards the
+      Doctor, and appeared before him no more till evening, when the grim Doctor
+      summoned him into the study, after sending the two children to bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir,&rdquo; began the Doctor, &ldquo;you have spoken of some old documents in your
+      possession relating to the English descent of your ancestors. I have a
+      curiosity to see these documents. Where are they?&rdquo; [Endnote: 4.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have them about my person,&rdquo; said the schoolmaster; and he produced from
+      his pocket a bundle of old yellow papers done up in a parchment cover,
+      tied with a piece of white cord, and presented them to Doctor Grimshawe,
+      who looked over them with interest. They seemed to consist of letters,
+      genealogical lists, certified copies of entries in registers, things which
+      must have been made out by somebody who knew more of business than this
+      ethereal person in whose possession they now were. The Doctor looked at
+      them with considerable attention, and at last did them hastily up in the
+      bundle again, and returned them to the owner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you any idea what is now the condition of the family to whom these
+      papers refer?&rdquo; asked he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None whatever,&mdash;none for almost a hundred years,&rdquo; said the
+      schoolmaster. &ldquo;About that time ago, I have heard a vague story that one of
+      my ancestors went to the old country and saw the place. But, you see, the
+      change of name has effectually covered us from view; and I feel that our
+      true name is that which my ancestor assumed when he was driven forth from
+      the home of his fathers, and that I have nothing to do with any other. I
+      have no views on the estate,&mdash;none whatever. I am not so foolish and
+      dreamy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very right,&rdquo; said the Doctor. &ldquo;Nothing is more foolish than to follow up
+      such a pursuit as this, against all the vested interests of two hundred
+      years, which of themselves have built up an impenetrably strong allegation
+      against you. They harden into stone, in England, these years, and become
+      indestructible, instead of melting away as they do in this happy country.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not a matter of interest with me,&rdquo; replied the schoolmaster.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very right,&mdash;very right!&rdquo; repeated the grim Doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But something was evidently amiss with him this evening. It was impossible
+      to feel easy and comfortable in contact with him: if you looked in his
+      face, there was the red, lurid glare of his eyes; meeting you fiercely and
+      craftily as ever: sometimes he bit his lip and frowned in an awful manner.
+      Once, he burst out into an awful fit of swearing, for no good reason, or
+      any reason whatever that he explained, or that anybody could tell. Again,
+      for no more suitable reason, he uplifted his stalwart arm, and smote a
+      heavy blow with his fist upon the oak table, making the tumbler and black
+      bottle leap up, and damaging, one would think, his own knuckles. Then he
+      rose up, and resumed his strides about the room. He paused before the
+      portrait before mentioned; then resumed his heavy, quick, irregular tread,
+      swearing under his breath; and you would imagine, from what you heard,
+      that all his thoughts and the movement of his mind were a blasphemy. Then
+      again&mdash;but this was only once&mdash;he heaved a deep, ponderous sigh,
+      that seemed to come up in spite of him, out of his depths, an exhalation
+      of deep suffering, as if some convulsion had given it a passage to upper
+      air, instead of its being hidden, as it generally was, by accumulated
+      rubbish of later time heaped above it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This latter sound appealed to something within the simple schoolmaster,
+      who had been witnessing the demeanor of the Doctor, like a being looking
+      from another sphere into the trouble of the mortal one; a being incapable
+      of passion, observing the mute, hard struggle of one in its grasp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Friend,&rdquo; said he at length, &ldquo;thou hast something on thy mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye,&rdquo; said the grim Doctor, coming to a stand before his chair. &ldquo;You see
+      that? Can you see as well what it is?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some stir and writhe of something in the past that troubles you, as if
+      you had kept a snake for many years in your bosom, and stupefied it with
+      brandy, and now it awakes again, and troubles you with bites and stings.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What sort of a man do you think me?&rdquo; asked the Doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot tell,&rdquo; said the schoolmaster. &ldquo;The sympathies of my nature are
+      not those that should give me knowledge of such men.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I, think you,&rdquo; continued the grim Doctor, &ldquo;a man capable of great
+      crime?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A great one, if any,&rdquo; said Colcord; &ldquo;a great good, likewise, it might
+      be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What would I be likely to do,&rdquo; asked Doctor Grim, &ldquo;supposing I had a
+      darling purpose, to the accomplishment of which I had given my soul,&mdash;yes,
+      my soul,&mdash;my success in life, my days and nights of thought, my years
+      of time, dwelling upon it, pledging myself to it, until at last I had
+      grown to love the burden of it, and not to regret my own degradation? I, a
+      man of strongest will. What would I do, if this were to be resisted?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not conceive of the force of will shaping out my ways,&rdquo; said the
+      schoolmaster. &ldquo;I walk gently along and take the path that opens before
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha! ha! ha!&rdquo; shouted the grim Doctor, with one of his portentous laughs.
+      &ldquo;So do we all, in spite of ourselves; and sometimes the path comes to a
+      sudden ending!&rdquo; And he resumed his drinking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The schoolmaster looked at him with wonder, and a kind of shuddering, at
+      something so unlike himself; but probably he very imperfectly estimated
+      the forces that were at work within this strange being, and how dangerous
+      they made him. He imputed it, a great deal, to the brandy, which he had
+      kept drinking in such inordinate quantities; whereas it is probable that
+      this had a soothing, emollient effect, as far as it went, on the Doctor&rsquo;s
+      emotions; a sort of like to like, that he instinctively felt to be a
+      remedy, But in truth it was difficult to see these two human creatures
+      together, without feeling their incompatibility; without having a sense
+      that one must be hostile to the other. The schoolmaster, through his fine
+      instincts, doubtless had a sense of this, and sat gazing at the lurid,
+      wrathful figure of the Doctor, in a sort of trance and fascination: not
+      able to stir; bewildered by the sight of the great spider and other
+      surroundings; and this strange, uncouth fiend, who had always been
+      abhorrent to him,&mdash;he had a kind of curiosity in it, waited to see
+      what would come of it, but felt it to be an unnatural state to him. And
+      again the grim Doctor came and stood before him, prepared to make another
+      of those strange utterances with which he had already so perplexed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night&mdash;that midnight&mdash;it was rumored through the town that
+      one of the inhabitants, going home late along the street that led by the
+      graveyard, saw the grim Doctor standing by the open window of the study
+      behind the elm tree, in his old dressing-gown, chill as was the night, and
+      flinging his arms abroad wildly into the darkness, and muttering like the
+      growling of a tempest, with occasional vociferations that grew even shrill
+      with passion. The listener, though affrighted, could not resist an impulse
+      to pause, and attempt overhearing something that might let him into the
+      secret counsels of this strange wild man, whom the town held in such awe
+      and antipathy; to learn, perhaps, what was the great spider, and whether
+      he were summoning the dead out of their graves. However, he could make
+      nothing out of what he overheard, except it were fragmentary curses, of a
+      dreadful character, which the Doctor brought up with might and main out of
+      the depths of his soul, and flung them forth, burning hot, aimed at what,
+      and why, and to what practical end, it was impossible to say; but as
+      necessarily as a volcano, in a state of eruption, sends forth boiling
+      lava, sparkling and scintillating stones, and a sulphurous atmosphere,
+      indicative of its inward state. [Endnote: 5.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dreading lest some one of these ponderous anathemas should alight, reason
+      or none, on his own head, the man crept away, and whispered the thing to
+      his cronies, from whom it was communicated to the townspeople at large,
+      and so became one of many stories circulating with reference to our grim
+      hero, which, if not true to the fact, had undoubtedly a degree of
+      appositeness to his character, of which they were the legitimate flowers
+      and symbols. If the anathemas took no other effect, they seemed to have
+      produced a very remarkable one on the unfortunate elm tree, through the
+      naked branches of which the Doctor discharged this fiendish shot. For, the
+      next spring, when April came, no tender leaves budded forth, no life
+      awakened there; and never again, on that old elm, widely as its roots were
+      imbedded among the dead of many years, was there rustling bough in the
+      summer time, or the elm&rsquo;s early golden boughs in September; and after
+      waiting till another spring to give it a fair chance of reviving, it was
+      cut down and made into coffins, and burnt on the sexton&rsquo;s hearth. The
+      general opinion was that the grim Doctor&rsquo;s awful profanity had blasted
+      that tree, fostered, as it had been, on grave-mould of Puritans. In
+      Lancashire they tell of a similar anathema. It had a very frightful
+      effect, it must be owned, this idea of a man cherishing emotions in his
+      breast of so horrible a nature that he could neither tell them to any
+      human being, nor keep them in their plenitude and intensity within the
+      breast where they had their germ, and so was forced to fling them forth
+      upon the night, to pollute and put fear into the atmosphere, and that
+      people should breathe-in somewhat of horror from an unknown source, and be
+      affected with nightmare, and dreams in which they were startled at their
+      own wickedness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At the breakfast-table the next morning, however, appeared Doctor
+      Grimshawe, wearing very much the same aspect of an uncombed, unshorn,
+      unbrushed, odd sort of a pagan as at other times, and making no difference
+      in his breakfast, except that he poured a pretty large dose of brandy into
+      his cup of tea; a thing, however, by no means unexampled or very unusual
+      in his history. There were also the two children, fresher than the morning
+      itself, rosy creatures, with newly scrubbed cheeks, made over again for
+      the new day, though the old one had left no dust upon them;[Endnote: 1]
+      laughing with one another, flinging their little jokes about the table,
+      and expecting that the Doctor might, as was often his wont, set some
+      ponderous old English joke trundling round among the breakfast cups;
+      eating the corn-cakes which crusty Hannah, with the aboriginal part of
+      her, had a knack of making in a peculiar and exquisite fashion. But there
+      was an empty chair at table; one cup, one little jug of milk, and another
+      of pure water, with no guest to partake of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is the schoolmaster?&rdquo; said Ned, pausing as he was going to take his
+      seat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Doctor Grim?&rdquo; said little Elsie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has overslept himself for once,&rdquo; quoth Doctor Grim gruffly; &ldquo;a strange
+      thing, too, for a man whose victuals and drink are so light as the
+      schoolmaster&rsquo;s. The fiend take me if I thought he had mortal mould enough
+      in him ever to go to sleep at all; though he is but a kind of dream-stuff
+      in his widest-awake state. Hannah, you bronze jade, call the schoolmaster
+      to come to breakfast.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hannah departed on her errand, and was heard knocking at the door of the
+      schoolmaster&rsquo;s chamber several times, till the Doctor shouted to her
+      wrathfully to cease her clatter and open the door at once, which she
+      appeared to do, and speedily came back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He no there, massa. Schoolmaster melted away!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Vanished like a bubble!&rdquo; quoth the Doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The great spider caught him like a fly,&rdquo; quoth crusty Hannah, chuckling
+      with a sense of mischief that seemed very pleasant to her strange
+      combination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has taken a morning walk,&rdquo; said little Ned; &ldquo;don&rsquo;t you think so,
+      Doctor Grim?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the grim Doctor. &ldquo;Go on with your breakfast, little monkey;
+      the walk may be a long one, or he is so slight a weight that the wind may
+      blow him overboard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A very long walk it proved; or it might be that some wind, whether evil or
+      good, had blown him, as the Doctor suggested, into parts unknown; for,
+      from that time forth, the Yankee schoolmaster returned no more. It was a
+      singular disappearance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bed did not appear to have been slept in; there was a bundle, in a
+      clean handkerchief, containing two shirts, two pocket handkerchiefs, two
+      pairs of cotton socks, a Testament, and that was all. Had he intended to
+      go away, why did he not take this little luggage in his hand, being all he
+      had, and of a kind not easily dispensed with? The Doctor made small
+      question about it, however; he had seemed surprised, at first, yet gave
+      certainly no energetic token of it; and when Ned, who began to have
+      notions of things, proposed to advertise him in the newspapers, or send
+      the town crier round, the Doctor ridiculed the idea unmercifully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lost, a lank Yankee schoolmaster,&rdquo; quoth he, uplifting his voice after
+      the manner of the town crier; &ldquo;supposed to have been blown out of Doctor
+      Grim&rsquo;s window, or perhaps have ridden off astride of a humble-bee.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not pretty to laugh in that way, Doctor Grim,&rdquo; said little Elsie,
+      looking into his face, with a grave shake of her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And why not, you saucy little witch?&rdquo; said the Doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not the way to laugh, Doctor Grim,&rdquo; persisted the child, but either
+      could not or would not assign any reason for her disapprobation, although
+      what she said appeared to produce a noticeable effect on Doctor Grimshawe,
+      who lapsed into a rough, harsh manner, that seemed to satisfy Elsie
+      better. Crusty Hannah, meanwhile, seemed to dance about the house with a
+      certain singular alacrity, a wonderful friskiness, indeed, as if the
+      diabolical result of the mixture in her nature was particularly pleased
+      with something; so she went, with queer gesticulations, crossings,
+      contortions, friskings, evidently in a very mirthful state; until, being
+      asked by her master what was the matter, she replied, &ldquo;Massa, me know what
+      became of the schoolmaster. Great spider catch in his web and eat him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether that was the mode of his disappearance, or some other, certainly
+      the schoolmaster was gone; and the children were left in great
+      bewilderment at the sudden vacancy in his place. They had not contracted a
+      very yearning affection for him, and yet his impression had been
+      individual and real, and they felt that something was gone out of their
+      lives, now that he was no longer there. Something strange in their
+      circumstances made itself felt by them; they were more sensible of the
+      grim Doctor&rsquo;s uncouthness, his strange, reprehensible habits, his dark,
+      mysterious life,&mdash;in looking at these things, and the spiders, and
+      the graveyard, and their insulation from the world, through the crystal
+      medium of this stranger&rsquo;s character. In remembering him in connection with
+      these things, a certain seemly beauty in him showed strikingly the
+      unfitness, the sombre and tarnished color, the outréness, of the rest of
+      their lot. Little Elsie perhaps felt the loss of him more than her
+      playmate, although both had been interested by him. But now things
+      returned pretty much to their old fashion; although, as is inevitably the
+      case, whenever persons or things have been taken suddenly or unaccountably
+      out of our sphere, without telling us whither and why they have
+      disappeared, the children could not, for a long while, bring themselves to
+      feel that he had really gone. Perhaps, in imitation of the custom in that
+      old English house, of which the Doctor had told them, little Elsie
+      insisted that his place should still be kept at the table; and so,
+      whenever crusty Hannah neglected to do so, she herself would fetch a
+      plate, and a little pitcher of water, and set it beside a vacant chair;
+      and sometimes, so like a shadow had he been, this pale, slender creature,
+      it almost might have been thought that he was sitting with them. But
+      crusty Hannah shook her head, and grinned. &ldquo;The spider know where he is.
+      We never see him more!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His abode in the house had been of only two or three weeks; and in the
+      natural course of things, had he come and gone in an ordinary way, his
+      recollection would have grown dim and faded out in two or three weeks
+      more; but the speculations, the expectations, the watchings for his
+      reappearance, served to cut and grave the recollection of him into the
+      children&rsquo;s hearts, so that it remained a life-long thing with them,&mdash;a
+      sense that he was something that had been lost out of their life too soon,
+      and that was bound, sooner or later, to reappear, and finish what business
+      he had with them. Sometimes they prattled around the Doctor&rsquo;s chair about
+      him, and they could perceive sometimes that he appeared to be listening,
+      and would chime in with some remark; but he never expressed either wonder
+      or regret; only telling Ned, once, that he had no reason to be sorry for
+      his disappearance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, Doctor Grim?&rdquo; asked the boy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Doctor mused, and smoked his pipe, as if he himself were thinking why,
+      and at last he answered, &ldquo;He was a dangerous fellow, my old boy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; said Ned again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He would have taken the beef out of you,&rdquo; said the Doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I know not how long it was before any other visitor (except such as
+      brought their shattered constitutions there in hopes that the Doctor would
+      make the worn-out machinery as good as new) came to the lonely little
+      household on the corner of the graveyard. The intercourse between
+      themselves and the rest of the town remained as scanty as ever. Still, the
+      grim, shaggy Doctor was seen setting doggedly forth, in all seasons and
+      all weathers, at a certain hour of the day, with the two children, going
+      for long walks on the sea-shore, or into the country, miles away, and
+      coming back, hours afterwards, with plants and herbs that had perhaps
+      virtue in them, or flowers that had certainly beauty; even, in their
+      season, the fragrant magnolias, leaving a trail of fragrance after them,
+      that grow only in spots, the seeds having been apparently dropped by some
+      happy accident when those proper to the climate were distributed. Shells
+      there were, also, in the baskets that they carried, minerals, rare things,
+      that a magic touch seemed to have created out of the rude and common
+      things that others find in a homely and ordinary region. The boy was
+      growing tall, and had got out of the merely infantile age; agile he was,
+      bright, but still with a remarkable thoughtfulness, or gravity, or I know
+      not what to call it; but it was a shadow, no doubt, falling upon him from
+      something sombre in his warp of life, which the impressibility of his age
+      and nature so far acknowledged as to be a little pale and grave, without
+      positive unhappiness; and when a playful moment came, as they often did to
+      these two healthy children, it seemed all a mistake that you had ever
+      thought either of them too grave for their age. But little Elsie was still
+      the merrier. They were still children, although they quarrelled seldomer
+      than of yore, and kissed seldomer, and had ceased altogether to complain
+      of one another to the Doctor; perhaps the time when Nature saw these
+      bickerings to be necessary to the growth of some of their faculties was
+      nearly gone. When they did have a quarrel, the boy stood upon his dignity,
+      and visited Elsie with a whole day, sometimes, of silent and stately
+      displeasure, which she was accustomed to bear, sometimes with an
+      assumption of cold indifference, sometimes with liveliness, mirth in
+      double quantity, laughter almost as good as real,&mdash;little arts which
+      showed themselves in her as naturally as the gift of tears and smiles. In
+      fact, having no advantage of female intercourse, she could not well have
+      learnt them unless from crusty Hannah, who was such an anomaly of a
+      creature, with all her mixtures of race, that she struck you as having
+      lost all sex as one result of it. Yet this little girl was truly feminine,
+      and had all the manners and pre-eminently uncriticisable tenets proper to
+      women at her early age.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had made respectable advancement in study; that is, she had taught
+      herself to write, with even greater mechanical facility than Ned; and
+      other knowledge had fallen upon her, as it were, by a reflected light from
+      him; or, to use another simile, had been spattered upon her by the full
+      stream which the Doctor poured into the vessel of the boy&rsquo;s intellect. So
+      that she had even some knowledge of the rudiments of Latin, and geometry,
+      and algebra; inaccurate enough, but yet with such a briskness that she was
+      sometimes able to assist Ned in studies in which he was far more deeply
+      grounded than herself. All this, however, was more by sympathy than by any
+      natural taste for such things; being kindly, and sympathetic, and
+      impressible, she took the color of what was nearest to her, and especially
+      when it came from a beloved object, so that it was difficult to discover
+      that it was not really one of her native tastes. The only thing, perhaps,
+      altogether suited to her idiosyncrasy (because it was truly feminine,
+      calculated for dainty fingers, and a nice little subtlety) was that kind
+      of embroidery, twisting, needle-work, on textile fabric, which, as we have
+      before said, she learnt from crusty Hannah, and which was emblematic
+      perhaps of that creature&rsquo;s strange mixture of races.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Elsie seemed not only to have caught this art in its original spirit, but
+      to have improved upon it, creating strange, fanciful, and graceful
+      devices, which grew beneath her finger as naturally as the variegated hues
+      grow in a flower as it opens; so that the homeliest material assumed a
+      grace and strangeness as she wove it, whether it were grass, twigs,
+      shells, or what not. Never was anything seen, that so combined a wild,
+      barbarian freedom with cultivated grace; and the grim Doctor himself,
+      little open to the impressions of the beautiful, used to hold some of her
+      productions in his hand, gazing at them with deep intentness, and at last,
+      perhaps, breaking out into one of his deep roars of laughter; for it
+      seemed to suggest thoughts to him that the children could not penetrate.
+      This one feature of strangeness and wild faculty in the otherwise sweet
+      and natural and homely character of Elsie had a singular effect; it was
+      like a wreath of wild-flowers in her hair, like something that set her a
+      little way apart from the rest of the world, and had an even more striking
+      effect than if she were altogether strange.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus were the little family going on; the Doctor, I regret to say, growing
+      more morose, self-involved, and unattainable since the disappearance of
+      the schoolmaster than before; more given up to his one plaything, the
+      great spider; less frequently even than before coming out of the grim
+      seclusion of his moodiness, to play with the children, though they would
+      often be sensible of his fierce eyes fixed upon them, and start and feel
+      incommoded by the intensity of his regard;&mdash;thus things were going
+      on, when one day there was really again a visitor, and not a dilapidated
+      patient, to the grim Doctor&rsquo;s study. Crusty Hannah brought up his name as
+      Mr. Hammond, and the Doctor&mdash;filling his everlasting pipe, meanwhile,
+      and ordering Hannah to give him a coal (perhaps this was the circumstance
+      that made people say he had imps to bring him coals from Tophet)&mdash;ordered
+      him to be shown up. [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A fresh-colored, rather young man [Endnote: 3] entered the study, a person
+      of rather cold and ungraceful manners, yet genial-looking enough; at
+      least, not repulsive. He was dressed in rather a rough, serviceable
+      travelling-dress, and except for a nicely brushed hat, and unmistakably
+      white linen, was rather careless in attire. You would have thought twice,
+      perhaps, before deciding him to be a gentleman, but finally would have
+      decided that he was; one great token being, that the singular aspect of
+      the room into which he was ushered, the spider festoonery, and other
+      strange accompaniments, the grim aspect of the Doctor himself, and the
+      beauty and intelligence of his two companions, and even that horrific
+      weaver, the great dangling spider,&mdash;neither one nor all of these
+      called any expression of surprise to the stranger&rsquo;s face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your name is Hammond?&rdquo; begins the Doctor, with his usual sparseness of
+      ornamental courtesy. [Endnote: 4.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger bowed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An Englishman, I perceive,&rdquo; continued the Doctor, but nowise intimating
+      that the fact of being a countryman was any recommendation in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, an Englishman,&rdquo; replied Hammond; &ldquo;a briefless barrister, [Endnote:
+      5] in fact, of Lincoln&rsquo;s Inn, who, having little or nothing to detain him
+      at home, has come to spend a few idle months in seeing the new republic
+      which has been made out of English substance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what,&rdquo; continued Doctor Grim, not a whit relaxing the repulsiveness
+      of his manner, and scowling askance at the stranger,&mdash;&ldquo;what may have
+      drawn on me the good fortune of being compelled to make my time idle,
+      because yours is so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The stranger&rsquo;s cheek flushed a little; but he smiled to himself, as if
+      saying that here was a grim, rude kind of humorist, who had lost the sense
+      of his own peculiarity, and had no idea that he was rude at all. &ldquo;I came
+      to America, as I told you,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;chiefly because I was idle, and
+      wanted to turn my enforced idleness to what profit I could, in the way of
+      seeing men, manners, governments, and problems, which I hope to have no
+      time to study by and by. But I also had an errand intrusted to me, and of
+      a singular nature; and making inquiry in this little town (where my
+      mission must be performed, if at all), I have been directed to you, by
+      your townspeople, as to a person not unlikely to be able to assist me in
+      it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My townspeople, since you choose to call them so,&rdquo; answered the grim
+      Doctor, &ldquo;ought to know, by this time, that I am not the sort of man likely
+      to assist any person, in any way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yet this is so singular an affair,&rdquo; said the stranger, still with mild
+      courtesy, &ldquo;that at least it may excite your curiosity. I have come here to
+      find a grave.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To find a grave!&rdquo; said Doctor Grim, giving way to a grim sense of humor,
+      and relaxing just enough to let out a joke, the tameness of which was a
+      little redeemed, to his taste, by its grimness. &ldquo;I might help you there,
+      to be sure, since it is all in the way of business. Like others of my
+      profession, I have helped many people to find their graves, no doubt, and
+      shall be happy to do the same for you. You have hit upon the one thing in
+      which my services are ready.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thank you, my dear sir,&rdquo; said the young stranger, having tact enough to
+      laugh at Dr. Grim&rsquo;s joke, and thereby mollifying him a little; &ldquo;but as far
+      as I am personally concerned, I prefer to wait a while before making the
+      discovery of that little spot in Mother Earth which I am destined to
+      occupy. It is a grave which has been occupied as such for at least a
+      century and a half which I am in quest of; and it is as an antiquarian, a
+      genealogist, a person who has had dealings with the dead of long ago, not
+      as a professional man engaged in adding to their number, that I ask your
+      aid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, ahah!&rdquo; said the Doctor, laying down his pipe, and looking earnestly
+      at the stranger; not kindly nor genially, but rather with a lurid glance
+      of suspicion out of those red eyes of his, but no longer with a desire to
+      escape an intruder; rather as one who meant to clutch him. &ldquo;Explain your
+      meaning, sir, at once.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then here it is,&rdquo; said Mr. Hammond. &ldquo;There is an old English family, one
+      of the members of which, very long ago, emigrated to this part of America,
+      then a wilderness, and long afterwards a British colony. He was on ill
+      terms with his family. There is reason to believe that documents, deeds,
+      titular proofs, or some other thing valuable to the family, were buried in
+      the grave of this emigrant; and there have been various attempts, within a
+      century, to find this grave, and if possible some living descendant of the
+      man, or both, under the idea that either of these cases might influence
+      the disputed descent of the property, and enable the family to prove its
+      claims to an ancient title. Now, rather as a matter of curiosity, than
+      with any real hope of success,&mdash;and being slightly connected with the
+      family,&mdash;I have taken what seems to myself a wild-goose chase; making
+      it merely incidental, you well understand, not by any means the main
+      purpose of my voyage to America.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the name of this family?&rdquo; asked the Doctor, abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man whose grave I seek,&rdquo; said the stranger, &ldquo;lived and died, in this
+      country, under the assumed name of Colcord.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How do you expect to succeed in this ridiculous quest?&rdquo; asked the Doctor,
+      &ldquo;and what marks, signs, directions, have you to guide your search? And
+      moreover, how have you come to any knowledge whatever about the matter,
+      even that the emigrant ever assumed this name of Colcord, and that he was
+      buried anywhere, and that his place of burial, after more than a century,
+      is of the slightest importance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All this was ascertained by a messenger on a similar errand with my own,
+      only undertaken nearly a century ago, and more in earnest than I can
+      pretend to be,&rdquo; replied the Englishman. &ldquo;At that period, however, there
+      was probably a desire to find nothing that might take the hereditary
+      possessions of the family out of the branch which still held them; and
+      there is strong reason to suspect that the information acquired was
+      purposely kept secret by the person in England into whose hands it came.
+      The thing is differently situated now; the possessor of the estate is
+      recently dead; and the discovery of an American heir would not be
+      unacceptable to many. At all events, any knowledge gained here would throw
+      light on a somewhat doubtful matter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where, as nearly as you can judge,&rdquo; said the Doctor, after a turn or two
+      through the study, &ldquo;was this man buried?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He spent the last years of his life, certainly, in this town,&rdquo; said
+      Hammond, &ldquo;and may be found, if at all, among the dead of that period.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And they&mdash;their miserable dust, at least, which is all that still
+      exists of them&mdash;were buried in the graveyard under these windows,&rdquo;
+       said the Doctor. &ldquo;What marks, I say,&mdash;for you might as well seek a
+      vanished wave of the sea, as a grave that surged upward so long ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the gravestone,&rdquo; said Hammond, &ldquo;a slate one, there was rudely
+      sculptured the impress of a foot. What it signifies I cannot conjecture,
+      except it had some reference to a certain legend of a bloody footstep,
+      which is currently told, and some token of which yet remains on one of the
+      thresholds of the ancient mansion-house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ned and Elsie had withdrawn themselves from the immediate vicinity of the
+      fireside, and were playing at fox and geese in a corner near the window.
+      But little Elsie, having very quick ears, and a faculty of attending to
+      more affairs than one, now called out, &ldquo;Doctor Grim, Ned and I know where
+      that gravestone is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hush, Elsie,&rdquo; whispered Ned, earnestly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come forward here, both of you,&rdquo; said Doctor Grimshawe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The two children approached, and stood before the Doctor and his guest,
+      the latter of whom had not hitherto taken particular notice of them. He
+      now looked from one to the other, with the pleasant, genial expression of
+      a person gifted with a natural liking for children, and the freemasonry
+      requisite to bring him acquainted with them; and it lighted up his face
+      with a pleasant surprise to see two such beautiful specimens of boyhood
+      and girlhood in this dismal, spider-haunted house, and under the
+      guardianship of such a savage lout as the grim Doctor. He seemed
+      particularly struck by the intelligence and sensibility of Ned&rsquo;s face, and
+      met his eyes with a glance that Ned long afterwards remembered; but yet he
+      seemed quite as much interested by Elsie, and gazed at her face with a
+      perplexed, inquiring glance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These are fine children,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;May I ask if they are your own?&mdash;Pardon
+      me if I ask amiss,&rdquo; added he, seeing a frown on the Doctor&rsquo;s brow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ask nothing about the brats,&rdquo; replied he grimly. &ldquo;Thank Heaven, they are
+      not my children; so your question is answered.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I again ask pardon,&rdquo; said Mr. Hammond. &ldquo;I am fond of children; and the
+      boy has a singularly fine countenance; not in the least English. The true
+      American face, no doubt. As to this sweet little girl, she impresses me
+      with a vague resemblance to some person I have seen. Hers I should deem an
+      English face.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These children are not our topic,&rdquo; said the grim Doctor, with gruff
+      impatience. &ldquo;If they are to be so, our conversation is ended. Ned, what do
+      you know of this gravestone with the bloody foot on it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not a bloody foot, Doctor Grim,&rdquo; said Ned, &ldquo;and I am not sure that
+      it is a foot at all; only Elsie and I chose to fancy so, because of a
+      story that we used to play at. But we were children then. The gravestone
+      lies on the ground, within a little bit of a walk of our door; but this
+      snow has covered it all over; else we might go out and see it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We will go out at any rate,&rdquo; said the Doctor, &ldquo;and if the Englishman
+      chooses to come to America, he must take our snows as he finds them. Take
+      your shovel, Ned, and if necessary we will uncover the gravestone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They accordingly muffled themselves in their warmest, and plunged forth
+      through a back door into Ned and Elsie&rsquo;s playground, as the grim Doctor
+      was wont to call it. The snow, except in one spot close at hand, lay deep,
+      like cold oblivion, over the surging graves, and piled itself in drifted
+      heaps against every stone that raised itself above the level; it filled
+      enviously the letters of the inscriptions, enveloping all the dead in one
+      great winding-sheet, whiter and colder than those which they had
+      individually worn. The dreary space was pathless; not a footstep had
+      tracked through the heavy snow; for it must be warm affection indeed that
+      could so melt this wintry impression as to penetrate through the snow and
+      frozen earth, and establish any warm thrills with the dead beneath:
+      daisies, grass, genial earth, these allow of the magnetism of such
+      sentiments; but winter sends them shivering back to the baffled heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Ned,&rdquo; said the Doctor, impatiently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ned looked about him somewhat bewildered, and then pointed to a spot
+      within not more than ten paces of the threshold which they had just
+      crossed; and there appeared, not a gravestone, but a new grave (if any
+      grave could be called new in that often-dug soil, made up of old
+      mortality), an open hole, with the freshly-dug earth piled up beside it. A
+      little snow (for there had been a gust or two since morning) appeared, as
+      they peeped over the edge, to have fallen into it; but not enough to
+      prevent a coffin from finding fit room and accommodation in it. But it was
+      evident that the grave had been dug that very day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The headstone, with the foot on it, was just here,&rdquo; said Ned, in much
+      perplexity, &ldquo;and, as far as I can judge, the old sunken grave exactly
+      marked out the space of this new one.&rdquo; [Endnote: 1.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a shame,&rdquo; said Elsie, much shocked at the indecorum, &ldquo;that the new
+      person should be thrust in here; for the old one was a friend of ours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what has become of the headstone!&rdquo; exclaimed the young English
+      stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During their perplexity, a person had approached the group, wading through
+      the snow from the gateway giving entrance from the street; a gaunt figure,
+      with stooping shoulders, over one of which was a spade and some other tool
+      fit for delving in the earth; and in his face there was the sort of keen,
+      humorous twinkle that grave-diggers somehow seem to get, as if the
+      dolorous character of their business necessitated something unlike itself
+      by an inevitable reaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Doctor,&rdquo; said he, with a shrewd wink in his face, &ldquo;are you looking
+      for one of your patients? The man who is to be put to bed here was never
+      caught in your spider&rsquo;s web.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Doctor Grimshawe; &ldquo;when my patients have done with me, I leave
+      them to you and the old Nick, and never trouble myself about them more.
+      What I want to know is, why you have taken upon you to steal a man&rsquo;s
+      grave, after he has had immemorial possession of it. By what right have
+      you dug up this bed, undoing the work of a predecessor of yours, who has
+      long since slept in one of his own furrows?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, Doctor,&rdquo; said the grave-digger, looking quietly into the cavernous
+      pit which he had hollowed, &ldquo;it is against common sense that a dead man
+      should think to keep a grave to himself longer than till you can take up
+      his substance in a shovel. It would be a strange thing enough, if, when
+      living families are turned out of their homes twice or thrice in a
+      generation, (as they are likely to be in our new government,) a dead man
+      should think he must sleep in one spot till the day of judgment. No; turn
+      about, I say, to these old fellows. As long as they can decently be called
+      dead men, I let them lie; when they are nothing but dust, I just take
+      leave to stir them on occasion. This is the way we do things under the
+      republic, whatever your customs be in the old country.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Matters are very much the same in any old English churchyard,&rdquo; said the
+      English stranger. &ldquo;But, my good friend, I have come three thousand miles,
+      partly to find this grave, and am a little disappointed to find my labor
+      lost.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! and you are the man my father was looking for,&rdquo; said the
+      grave-digger, nodding his head at Mr. Hammond. &ldquo;My father, who was a
+      grave-digger afore me, died four and thirty years ago, when we were under
+      the King; and says he, &lsquo;Ebenezer, do not you turn up a sod in this spot,
+      till you have turned up every other in the ground.&rsquo; And I have always
+      obeyed him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what was the reason of such a singular prohibition?&rdquo; asked Hammond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My father knew,&rdquo; said the grave-digger, &ldquo;and he told me the reason too;
+      but since we are under the republic, we have given up remembering those
+      old-world legends, as we used to. The newspapers keep us from talking in
+      the chimney-corner; and so things go out of our minds. An old man, with
+      his stories of what he has seen, and what his great-grandfather saw before
+      him, is of little account since newspapers came up. Stop&mdash;I remember&mdash;no,
+      I forget,&mdash;it was something about the grave holding a witness, who
+      had been sought before and might be again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that is all you know about it?&rdquo; said Hammond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All,&mdash;every mite,&rdquo; said the old grave-digger. &ldquo;But my father knew,
+      and would have been glad to tell you the whole story. There was a great
+      deal of wisdom and knowledge, about graves especially, buried out yonder
+      where my old father was put away, before the Stamp Act was thought of. But
+      it is no great matter, I suppose. People don&rsquo;t care about old graves in
+      these times. They just live, and put the dead out of sight and out of
+      mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well; but what have you done with the headstone?&rdquo; said the Doctor. &ldquo;You
+      can&rsquo;t have eaten it up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no, Doctor,&rdquo; said the grave-digger, laughing; &ldquo;it would crack better
+      teeth than mine, old and crumbly as it is. And yet I meant to do something
+      with it that is akin to eating; for my oven needs a new floor, and I
+      thought to take this stone, which would stand the fire well. But here,&rdquo;
+       continued he, scraping away the snow with his shovel, a task in which
+      little Ned gave his assistance,&mdash;&ldquo;here is the headstone, just as I
+      have always seen it, and as my father saw it before me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The ancient memorial, being cleared of snow, proved to be a slab of
+      freestone, with some rude traces of carving in bas-relief around the
+      border, now much effaced, and an impression, which seemed to be as much
+      like a human foot as anything else, sunk into the slab; but this device
+      was wrought in a much more clumsy way than the ornamented border, and
+      evidently by an unskilful hand. Beneath was an inscription, over which the
+      hard, flat lichens had grown, and done their best to obliterate it,
+      although the following words might be written [Endnote: 2] or guessed:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here lyeth the mortal part of Thomas Colcord, an upright man, of tender
+      and devout soul, who departed this troublous life September ye nineteenth,
+      1667, aged 57 years and nine months. Happier in his death than in his
+      lifetime. Let his bones be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The name, Colcord, was somewhat defaced; it was impossible, in the general
+      disintegration of the stone, to tell whether wantonly, or with a purpose
+      of altering and correcting some error in the spelling, or, as occurred to
+      Hammond, to change the name entirely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is very unsatisfactory,&rdquo; said Hammond, &ldquo;but very curious, too. But
+      this certainly is the impress of what was meant for a human foot, and
+      coincides strangely with the legend of the Bloody Footstep,&mdash;the mark
+      of the foot that trod in the blessed King Charles&rsquo;s blood.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For that matter,&rdquo; said the grave-digger, &ldquo;it comes into my mind that my
+      father used to call it the stamp of Satan&rsquo;s foot, because he claimed the
+      dead man for his own. It is plain to see that there was a deep deft
+      between two of the toes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are two ways of telling that legend,&rdquo; remarked the Doctor. &ldquo;But did
+      you find nothing in the grave, Hewen?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O, yes,&mdash;a bone or two,&mdash;as much as could be expected after
+      above a hundred years,&rdquo; said the grave-digger. &ldquo;I tossed them aside; and
+      if you are curious about them, you will find them when the snow melts.
+      That was all; and it would have been unreasonable in old Colcord&mdash;especially
+      in these republican times&mdash;to have wanted to keep his grave any
+      longer, when there was so little of him left.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must drop the matter here, then,&rdquo; said Hammond, with a sigh. &ldquo;Here, my
+      friend, is a trifle for your trouble.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No trouble,&rdquo; said the grave-digger, &ldquo;and in these republican times we
+      can&rsquo;t take anything for nothing, because it won&rsquo;t do for a poor man to
+      take off his hat and say thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, he did take the silver, and winked a sort of acknowledgment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Doctor, with unwonted hospitality, invited the English stranger to
+      dine in his house; and though there was no pretence of cordiality in the
+      invitation, Mr. Hammond accepted it, being probably influenced by
+      curiosity to make out some definite idea of the strange household in which
+      he found himself. Doctor Grimshawe having taken it upon him to be host,&mdash;for,
+      up to this time, the stranger stood upon his own responsibility, and,
+      having voluntarily presented himself to the Doctor, had only himself to
+      thank for any scant courtesy he might meet,&mdash;but now the grim Doctor
+      became genial after his own fashion. At dinner he produced a bottle of
+      port, which made the young Englishman almost fancy himself on the other
+      side of the water; and he entered into a conversation, which I fancy was
+      the chief object which the grim Doctor had in view in showing himself in
+      so amiable a light, [Endnote: 3] for in the course of it the stranger was
+      insensibly led to disclose many things, as it were of his own accord,
+      relating to the part of England whence he came, and especially to the
+      estate and family which have been before mentioned,&mdash;the present
+      state of that family, together with other things that he seemed to himself
+      to pour out naturally,&mdash;for, at last, he drew himself up, and
+      attempted an excuse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your good wine,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;or the unexpected accident of meeting a
+      countryman, has made me unusually talkative, and on subjects, I fear,
+      which have not a particular interest for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not quite succeeded in shaking off my country, as you see,&rdquo; said
+      Doctor Grimshawe, &ldquo;though I neither expect nor wish ever to see it again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something rather ungracious in the grim Doctor&rsquo;s response, and
+      as they now adjourned to his study, and the Doctor betook himself to his
+      pipe and tumbler, the young Englishman sought to increase his acquaintance
+      with the two children, both of whom showed themselves graciously inclined
+      towards him; more warmly so than they had been to the schoolmaster, as he
+      was the only other guest whom they had ever met.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you like to see England, my little fellow?&rdquo; he inquired of Ned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, very much! more than anything else in the world,&rdquo; replied the boy,
+      his eyes gleaming and his cheeks flushing with the earnestness of his
+      response; for, indeed, the question stirred up all the dreams and reveries
+      which the child had cherished, far back into the dim regions of his
+      memory. After what the Doctor had told him of his origin, he had never
+      felt any home feeling here; it seemed to him that he was wandering Ned,
+      whom the wind had blown from afar. Somehow or other, from many
+      circumstances which he put together and seethed in his own childish
+      imagination, it seemed to him that he was to go back to that far old
+      country, and there wander among the green, ivy-grown, venerable scenes;
+      the older he grew, the more his mind took depth, the stronger was this
+      fancy in him; though even to Elsie he had scarcely breathed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So strong a desire,&rdquo; said the stranger, smiling at his earnestness, &ldquo;will
+      be sure to work out its own accomplishment. I shall meet you in England,
+      my young friend, one day or another. And you, my little girl, are you as
+      anxious to see England as your brother?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ned is not my brother,&rdquo; said little Elsie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Doctor here interposed some remark on a different subject; for it was
+      observable that he never liked to have the conversation turn on these
+      children, their parentage, or relations to each other or himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The children were sent to bed; and the young Englishman, finding the
+      conversation lag, and his host becoming gruffer and less communicative
+      than he thought quite courteous, retired. But before he went, however, he
+      could not refrain from making a remark on the gigantic spider, which was
+      swinging like a pendulum above the Doctor&rsquo;s head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a singular pet!&rdquo; said he; for the nervous part of him had latterly
+      been getting uppermost, so that it disturbed him; in fact, the spider
+      above and the grim man below equally disturbed him. &ldquo;Are you a naturalist?
+      Have you noted his habits?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the Doctor, &ldquo;I have learned from his web how to weave a plot,
+      and how to catch my victim and devour him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank God,&rdquo; said the Englishman, as he issued forth into the cold gray
+      night, &ldquo;I have escaped the grim fellow&rsquo;s web, at all events. How strange a
+      group,&mdash;those two sweet children, that grim old man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As regards this matter of the ancient grave, it remains to be recorded,
+      that, when the snow melted, little Ned and Elsie went to look at the spot,
+      where, by this time, there was a little hillock with the brown sods laid
+      duly upon it, which the coming spring would make green. By the side of it
+      they saw, with more curiosity than repugnance, a few fragments of crumbly
+      bones, which they plausibly conjectured to have appertained to some part
+      of the framework of the ancient Colcord, wherewith he had walked through
+      the troublous life of which his gravestone spoke. And little Elsie, whose
+      eyes were very sharp, and her observant qualities of the quickest, found
+      something which Ned at first pronounced to be only a bit of old iron,
+      incrusted with earth; but Elsie persisted to knock off some of the earth
+      that seemed to have incrusted it, and discovered a key. The children ran
+      with their prize to the grim Doctor, who took it between his thumb and
+      finger, turned it over and over, and then proceeded to rub it with a
+      chemical substance which soon made it bright. It proved to be a silver
+      key, of antique and curious workmanship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps this is what Mr. Hammond was in search of,&rdquo; said Ned. &ldquo;What a
+      pity he is gone! Perhaps we can send it after him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nonsense,&rdquo; said the gruff Doctor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And attaching the key to a chain, which he took from a drawer, and which
+      seemed to be gold, he hung it round Ned&rsquo;s neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When you find a lock for this key,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;open it, and consider
+      yourself heir of whatever treasure is revealed there!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ned continued that sad, fatal habit of growing out of childhood, as boys
+      will, until he was now about ten years old, and little Elsie as much as
+      six or seven. He looked healthy, but pale; something there was in the
+      character and influences of his life that made him look as if he were
+      growing up in a shadow, with less sunshine than he needed for a robust and
+      exuberant development, though enough to make his intellectual growth tend
+      towards a little luxuriance, in some directions. He was likely to turn out
+      a fanciful, perhaps a poetic youth; young as he was, there had been
+      already discoveries, on the grim Doctor&rsquo;s part, of certain blotted and
+      clumsily scrawled scraps of paper, the chirography on which was arrayed in
+      marshalled lines of unequal length, and each commanded by a capital letter
+      and marching on from six to ten lame feet. Doctor Grim inspected these
+      things curiously, and to say the truth most scornfully, before he took
+      them to light his pipe withal; but they told him little as regarded this
+      boy&rsquo;s internal state, being mere echoes, and very lugubrious ones, of
+      poetic strains that were floating about in the atmosphere of that day,
+      long before any now remembered bard had begun to sing. But there were the
+      rudiments of a poetic and imaginative mind within the boy, if its
+      subsequent culture should be such as the growth of that delicate flower
+      requires; a brooding habit taking outward things into itself and imbuing
+      them with its own essence until, after they had lain there awhile, they
+      assumed a relation both to truth and to himself, and became mediums to
+      affect other minds with the magnetism of his own. He lived far too much an
+      inward life for healthfulness, at his age; the peculiarity of his
+      situation, a child of mystery, with certain reaches and vistas that seemed
+      to promise a bright solution of his mystery, keeping his imagination
+      always awake and strong. That castle in the air,&mdash;so much more vivid
+      than other castles, because it had perhaps a real substance of ancient,
+      ivy-grown, hewn stone somewhere,&mdash;that visionary hall in England,
+      with its surrounding woods and fine lawns, and the beckoning shadows at
+      the ancient windows, and that fearful threshold, with the blood still
+      glistening on it,&mdash;he dwelt and wandered so much there, that he had
+      no real life in the sombre house on the corner of the graveyard; except
+      that the loneliness of the latter, and the grim Doctor with his grotesque
+      surroundings, and then the great ugly spider, and that odd, inhuman
+      mixture of crusty Hannah, all served to remove him out of the influences
+      of common life. Little Elsie was all that he had to keep life real, and
+      substantial; and she, a child so much younger than he, was influenced by
+      the same circumstances, and still more by himself, so that, as far as he
+      could impart himself to her, he led her hand in hand through the same
+      dream-scenery amid which he strayed himself. They knew not another child
+      in town; the grim Doctor was their only friend. As for Ned, this seclusion
+      had its customary and normal effect upon him; it had made him think
+      ridiculously high of his own gifts, powers, attainments, and at the same
+      time doubt whether they would pass with those of others; it made him
+      despise all flesh, as if he were of a superior race, and yet have an idle
+      and weak fear of coming in contact with them, from a dread of his
+      incompetency to cope with them; so he at once depreciated and exalted, to
+      an absurd degree, both himself and others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ned,&rdquo; said the Doctor to him one day, in his gruffest tone, &ldquo;you are not
+      turning out to be the boy I looked for and meant to make. I have given you
+      sturdy English instruction, and solidly grounded you in matters that the
+      poor superficial people and time merely skim over; I looked to see the
+      rudiments of a man in you, by this time; and you begin to mope and pule as
+      if your babyhood were coming back on you. You seem to think more than a
+      boy of your years should; and yet it is not manly thought, nor ever will
+      be so. What do you mean, boy, by making all my care of you come to
+      nothing, in this way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do my best, Doctor Grim,&rdquo; said Ned, with sullen dignity. &ldquo;What you
+      teach me, I learn. What more can I do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tell you what, my fine fellow,&rdquo; quoth Doctor Grim, getting rude, as
+      was his habit. &ldquo;You disappoint me, and I&rsquo;ll not bear it. I want you to be
+      a man; and I&rsquo;ll have you a man or nothing. If I had foreboded such a
+      fellow as you turn out to be, I never would have taken you from the place
+      where, as I once told you, I found you,&mdash;the almshouse!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O, Doctor Grim, Doctor Grim!&rdquo; cried little Elsie, in a tone of grief and
+      bitter reproach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ned had risen slowly, as the Doctor uttered those last words, turning as
+      white as a sheet, and stood gazing at him, with large eyes, in which there
+      was a calm upbraiding; a strange dignity was in his childish aspect, which
+      was no longer childish, but seemed to have grown older all in a moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir,&rdquo; added the Doctor, incensed at the boy&rsquo;s aspect, &ldquo;there is nonsense
+      that ought to be whipt out of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have said enough, sir,&rdquo; said the boy. &ldquo;Would to God you had left me
+      where you found me![Endnote: 4] It was not my fault that you took me from
+      the alms-house. But it will be my fault if I ever eat another bit of your
+      bread, or stay under your roof an hour longer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was moving towards the door, but little Elsie sprung upon him and
+      caught him round the neck, although he repelled her with severe dignity;
+      and Doctor Grimshawe, after a look at the group in which a bitter sort of
+      mirth and mischief struggled with a better and kindlier sentiment, at last
+      flung his pipe into the chimney, hastily quaffed the remnant of a tumbler,
+      and shuffled after Ned, kicking off his old slippers in his hurry. He
+      caught the boy just by the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ned, Ned, my boy, I&rsquo;m sorry for what I said,&rdquo; cried he. &ldquo;I am a guzzling
+      old blockhead, and don&rsquo;t know how to treat a gentleman when he honors me
+      with his company. It is not in my blood nor breeding to have such
+      knowledge. Ned, you will make a man, and I lied if I said otherwise. Come,
+      I&rsquo;m sorry, I&rsquo;m sorry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy was easily touched, at these years, as a boy ought to be; and
+      though he had not yet forgiven the grim Doctor, the tears, to his especial
+      shame, gushed out of his eyes in a torrent, and his whole frame shook with
+      sobs. The Doctor caught him in his arms, and hugged him to his old
+      tobacco-fragrant dressing-gown, hugged him like a bear, as he was; so that
+      poor Ned hardly knew whether he was embracing him with his love, or
+      squeezing him to death in his wrath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ned,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not going to live a great while longer; I seem an
+      eternal nuisance to you, I know; but it&rsquo;s not so, I&rsquo;m mortal and I feel
+      myself breaking up. Let us be friends while I live; for believe me, Ned,
+      I&rsquo;ve done as well by you as I knew, and care for nothing, love nothing, so
+      much as you. Little Elsie here, yes. I love her too. But that&rsquo;s different.
+      You are a boy, and will be a man; and a man whom I destine to do for me
+      what it has been the object of my life to achieve. Let us be friends. We
+      will&mdash;we must be friends; and when old Doctor Grim, worthless wretch
+      that he is, sleeps in his grave, you shall not have the pang of having
+      parted from him in unkindness. Forgive me, Ned; and not only that, but
+      love me better than ever; for though I am a hasty old wretch, I am not
+      altogether evil as regards you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I know not whether the Doctor would have said all this, if the day had not
+      been pretty well advanced, and if his potations had not been many; but, at
+      any rate, he spoke no more than he felt, and his emotions thrilled through
+      the sensitive system of the boy, and quite melted him down. He forgave
+      Doctor Grim, and, as he asked, loved him better than ever; and so did
+      Elsie. Then it was so sweet, so good, to have had this one outgush of
+      affection,&mdash;he, poor child, who had no memory of mother&rsquo;s kisses, or
+      of being cared for out of tenderness, and whose heart had been hungry, all
+      his life, for some such thing; and probably Doctor Grim, in his way, had
+      the same kind of enjoyment of this passionate crisis; so that though, the
+      next day, they all three looked at one another a little ashamed, yet it
+      had some remote analogy to that delicious embarrassment of two lovers, at
+      their first meeting after they know all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER X.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It is very remarkable that Ned had so much good in him as we find there;
+      in the first place, born as he seemed to be of a wild, vagrant stock, a
+      seedling sown by the breezes, and falling among the rocks and sands; the
+      growing up without a mother to cultivate his tenderness with kisses and
+      the inestimable, inevitable love of love breaking out on all little
+      occasions, without reference to merit or demerit, unfailing whether or no;
+      mother&rsquo;s faith in excellences, the buds which were yet invisible to all
+      other eyes, but to which her warm faith was the genial sunshine necessary
+      to their growth; mother&rsquo;s generous interpretation of all that was doubtful
+      in him, and which might turn out good or bad, according as should be
+      believed of it; mother&rsquo;s pride in whatever the boy accomplished, and
+      unfailing excuses, explanations, apologies, so satisfactory, for all his
+      failures; mother&rsquo;s deep intuitive insight, which should see the permanent
+      good beneath all the appearance of temporary evil, being wiser through her
+      love than the wisest sage could be,&mdash;the dullest, homeliest mother
+      than the wisest sage. The Creator, apparently, has set a little of his own
+      infinite wisdom and love (which are one) in a mother&rsquo;s heart, so that no
+      child, in the common course of things, should grow up without some
+      heavenly instruction. Instead of all this, and the vast deal more that
+      mothers do for children, there had been only the gruff, passionate Doctor,
+      without sense of religion, with only a fitful tenderness, with years&rsquo; 
+      length between the fits, so fiercely critical, so wholly unradiant of
+      hope, misanthropic, savagely morbid. Yes; there was little Elsie too; it
+      must have been that she was the boy&rsquo;s preserver, being childhood,
+      sisterhood, womanhood, all that there had been for him of human life, and
+      enough&mdash;he being naturally of such good stuff&mdash;to keep him good.
+      He had lost much, but not all: he was not nearly what he might have been
+      under better auspices; flaws and imperfections there were, in abundance,
+      great uncultivated wastes and wildernesses in his moral nature, tangled
+      wilds where there might have been stately, venerable religious groves; but
+      there was no rank growth of evil. That unknown mother, that had no
+      opportunity to nurse her boy, must have had gentle and noblest qualities
+      to endow him with; a noble father, too, a long, unstained descent, one
+      would have thought. Was this an almshouse child?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Doctor Grim knew, very probably, that there was all this on the womanly
+      side that was wanting to Ned&rsquo;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,&mdash;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&mdash;the grim Doctor, Ned, and Elsie&mdash;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s behoof, and next morning prepared to leave him
+      there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ned, my son, good by,&rdquo; cried he, shaking the little fellow&rsquo;s hand as he
+      stood tearful and wistful beside the chaise shivering at the loneliness
+      which he felt settling around him,&mdash;a new loneliness to him,&mdash;the
+      loneliness of a crowd. &ldquo;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&rsquo;s name, I invoke it upon you heartily.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Little Elsie was sobbing, and flung her arms about Ned&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is all over,&mdash;all over,&rdquo; said he to himself: &ldquo;Doctor Grim and
+      little Elsie are gone out of my life. They leave me and will never come
+      back,&mdash;not they to me, not I to them. O, how cold the world is! Would
+      we three&mdash;the Doctor, and Elsie, and I&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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,&mdash;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,&mdash;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, &ldquo;Colcord! Colcord!&rdquo; 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,&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you little jade, what have you been overhearing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing, Doctor Grim,&mdash;nothing that I could make out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Make out as much as you can,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I am not afraid of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Afraid of little Elsie, dear Doctor Grim!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Neither of you, nor of the Devil,&rdquo; murmured the Doctor,&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he would lie back in his chair and look up at the great spider, who
+      (or else it was Elsie&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is of no use to carry this on any further,&rdquo; said he, fiercely, in a
+      decided tone, as if he had taken a resolution. &ldquo;Elsie, my girl, come and
+      kiss me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Elsie, my little girl, I mean to die to-day,&rdquo; said the old man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To die, dear Doctor Grim? O, no! O, no!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O, yes! Elsie,&rdquo; said the Doctor, in a very positive tone. &ldquo;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;&mdash;and I am weary,
+      weary. The pipe does not taste good, the brandy bewilders me. Ned is gone,
+      too;&mdash;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&rsquo;t know
+      whether to execute it or no. Ned is gone; there is nobody but my little
+      Elsie,&mdash;a good child, but not quite enough to live for. I will let
+      myself die, therefore, before sunset.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O, no! Doctor Grim. Let us send for Ned, and you will think it worth the
+      trouble of living.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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,&mdash;and, as it
+      happened, the one who had taken a most decidedly hostile part to our
+      Doctor,&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He terrible man, our old Doctor Grim,&rdquo; quoth crusty Hannah. &ldquo;He drive us
+      all to the wicked place before him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;we are sorry to say&mdash;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&rsquo;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.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Seeing the poor little girl, the Doctor cried out to her, half wrathfully,
+      half tenderly, &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t cry, you little wretch! Come and kiss me once more.&rdquo;
+       So Elsie, restraining her grief with a great effort, ran to him and gave
+      him a last kiss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell Ned,&rdquo; said the Doctor solemnly, &ldquo;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!&rdquo; Then he said, with his thunderous and
+      imperative tone, &ldquo;Let no one come near me till to-morrow morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;No, Ned, no. Drop it, drop it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then there was an utter silence, unbroken forevermore by the lips that
+      had uttered so many objectionable things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,&mdash;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,&mdash;dead and alive alike,&mdash;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then Ned went out of the back door, and found his way to the Doctor&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the heart never breaks on the first grave; and, after many graves, it
+      gets so obtuse that nothing can break it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,&mdash;though it
+      may have lain over land and sea since then; but the footsteps that trod
+      there are treading here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      There is&mdash;or there was, now many years ago, and a few years also it
+      was still extant&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;now at
+      least&mdash;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.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I safe?&rdquo; asks the inmate of the prison-chamber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir, there has been a search.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave the pistols,&rdquo; said the voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,&mdash;perhaps as dim as ever,&mdash;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&mdash;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,&mdash;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&mdash;never
+      making a shadow&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What is the furniture? An antique chair,&mdash;one chair, no more. A
+      table, many-footed, of dark wood; it holds writing-materials, a book, too,
+      on its face, with the dust gathered on its back. There is, moreover, a
+      sort of antique box, or coffer, of some dark wood, that seems to have been
+      wrought or carved with skill, wondrous skill, of some period when the art
+      of carving wainscot with arms and devices was much practised; so that on
+      this coffer&mdash;some six feet long it is, and two or three broad&mdash;most
+      richly wrought, you see faces in relief of knight and dame, lords,
+      heraldic animals; some story, very likely, told, almost revelling in
+      Gothic sculpture of wood, like what we have seen on the marble sarcophagus
+      of the old Greeks. It has, too, a lock, elaborately ornamented and inlaid
+      with silver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What else; only the spider&rsquo;s webs spinning strangely over everything; over
+      that light which comes into the room through the stone; over everything.
+      And now we see, in a corner, a strange great spider curiously variegated.
+      The ugly, terrible, seemingly poisonous thing makes us shudder. [Endnote:
+      3.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What, else? There are pistols; they lie on the coffer! There is a
+      curiously shaped Italian dagger, of the kind which in a groove has poison
+      that makes its wound mortal. On the old mantel-piece, over the fireplace,
+      there is a vial in which are kept certain poisons. It would seem as if
+      some one had meditated suicide; or else that the foul fiend had put all
+      sorts of implements of self-destruction in his way; so that, in some
+      frenzied moment, he might kill himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the inmate! There he is; but the frenzied alarm in which we last saw
+      him seems to have changed its character. No throb, now; no passion; no
+      frenzy of fear or despair. He sits dull and motionless. See; his cheek is
+      very pale; his hair long and dishevelled. His beard has grown, and curls
+      round his face. He has on a sleeping-gown, a long robe as of one who
+      abides within doors, and has nothing to do with outward elements; a pair
+      of slippers. A dull, dreamy reverie seems to have possessed him. Hark!
+      there is again a stealthy step on the floor, and the serving-man is here
+      again. There is a peering, anxious curiosity in his face, as he struts
+      towards him, a sort of enjoyment, one would say, in the way in which he
+      looks at the strange case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am here, you know,&rdquo; he says, at length, after feasting his eyes for
+      some time on the spectacle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hear you!&rdquo; says the young man, in a dull, indifferent tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will not your honor walk out to-day?&rdquo; says the man. &ldquo;It is long now since
+      your honor has taken the air.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very long,&rdquo; says the master, &ldquo;but I will not go out to-day. What weather
+      is it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sunny, bright, a summer day,&rdquo; says the man. &ldquo;But you would never know it
+      in these damp walls. The last winter&rsquo;s chill is here yet. Had not your
+      honor better go forth?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It might seem that there was a sort of sneer, deeply hidden under respect
+      and obeisance, in the man&rsquo;s words and craftily respectful tone; deeply
+      hidden, but conveying a more subtile power on that account. At all events,
+      the master seemed aroused from his state of dull indifference, and writhed
+      as with poignant anguish&mdash;an infused poison in his veins&mdash;as the
+      man spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you procured me that new drug I spoke of?&rdquo; asked the master.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here it is,&rdquo; said the man, putting a small package on the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it effectual?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So said the apothecary,&rdquo; answered the man; &ldquo;and I tried it on a dog. He
+      sat quietly a quarter of an hour; then had a spasm or two, and was dead.
+      But, your honor, the dead carcass swelled horribly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hush, villain! Have there&mdash;have there been inquiries for me,&mdash;mention
+      of me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O, none, sir,&mdash;none, sir. Affairs go on bravely,&mdash;the new live.
+      The world fills up. The gap is not vacant. There is no mention of you.
+      Marry, at the alehouse I heard some idle topers talking of a murder that
+      took place some few years since, and saying that Heaven&rsquo;s vengeance would
+      come for it yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Silence, villain, there is no such thing,&rdquo; said the young man; and, with
+      a laugh that seemed like scorn, he relapsed into his state of sullen
+      indifference; during which the servant stole away, after looking at him
+      some time, as if to take all possible note of his aspect. The man did not
+      seem so much to enjoy it himself, as he did to do these things in a kind
+      of formal and matter-of-course way, as if he were performing a set duty;
+      as if he were a subordinate fiend, and were doing the duty of a superior
+      one, without any individual malice of his own, though a general
+      satisfaction in doing what would accrue to the agglomeration of deadly
+      mischief. He stole away, and the master was left to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By and by, by what impulse or cause it is impossible to say, he started
+      upon his feet in a sudden frenzy of rage and despair. It seemed as if a
+      consciousness of some strange, wild miserable fate that had befallen him
+      had come upon him all at once; how that he was a prisoner to a devilish
+      influence, to some wizard might, that bound him hand and foot with
+      spider&rsquo;s web. So he stamped; so he half shrieked, yet stopped himself in
+      the midst, so that his cry was stifled and smothered. Then he snatched up
+      the poisoned dagger and looked at it; the noose, and put it about his
+      neck,&mdash;evil instrument of death,&mdash;but laid it down again. And
+      then was a voice at the door: &ldquo;Quietly, quietly you know, or they will
+      hear you.&rdquo; And at that voice he sank into sullen indifference again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      A traveller with a knapsack on his shoulders comes out of the duskiness of
+      vague, unchronicled times, throwing his shadow before him in the morning
+      sunshine along a well-trodden, though solitary path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was early summer, or perhaps latter spring, and the most genial weather
+      that either spring or summer ever brought, possessing a character, indeed,
+      as if both seasons had done their utmost to create an atmosphere and
+      temperature most suitable for the enjoyment and exercise of life. To one
+      accustomed to a climate where there is seldom a medium between heat too
+      fierce and cold too deadly, it was a new development in the nature of
+      weather. So genial it was, so full of all comfortable influences, and yet,
+      somehow or other, void of the torrid characteristic that inevitably burns
+      in our full sun-bursts. The traveller thought, in fact, that the sun was
+      at less than his brightest glow; for though it was bright,&mdash;though
+      the day seemed cloudless,&mdash;though it appeared to be the clear,
+      transparent morning that precedes an unshadowed noon,&mdash;still there
+      was a mild and softened character, not so perceptible when he directly
+      sought to see it, but as if some veil were interposed between the earth
+      and sun, absorbing all the passionate qualities out of the latter, and
+      leaving only the kindly ones. Warmth was in abundance, and, yet, all
+      through it, and strangely akin to it, there was a half-suspected coolness
+      that gave the atmosphere its most thrilling and delicious charm. It was
+      good for human life, as the traveller, felt throughout all his being;
+      good, likewise, for vegetable life, as was seen in the depth and richness
+      of verdure over the gently undulating landscape, and the luxuriance of
+      foliage, wherever there was tree or shrub to put forth leaves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The path along which the traveller was passing deserved at least a word or
+      two of description: it was a well-trodden footpath, running just here
+      along the edge of a field of grass, and bordered on one side by a hedge
+      which contained materials within itself for varied and minute researches
+      in natural history; so richly luxuriant was it with its diverse vegetable
+      life, such a green intricacy did it form, so impenetrable and so
+      beautiful, and such a Paradise it was for the birds that built their nests
+      there in a labyrinth of little boughs and twigs, unseen and inaccessible,
+      while close beside the human race to which they attach themselves, that
+      they must have felt themselves as safe as when they sung to Eve. Homely
+      flowers likewise grew in it, and many creeping and twining plants, that
+      were an original part of the hedge, had come of their own accord and dwelt
+      here, beautifying and enriching the verdant fence by way of repayment for
+      the shelter and support which it afforded them. At intervals, trees of
+      vast trunk and mighty spread of foliage, whether elms or oaks, grew in the
+      line of the hedge, and the bark of those gigantic, age-long patriarchs was
+      not gray and naked, like the trees which the traveller had been accustomed
+      to see, but verdant with moss, or in many cases richly enwreathed with a
+      network of creeping plants, and oftenest the ivy of old growth, clambering
+      upward, and making its own twisted stem almost of one substance with the
+      supporting tree. On one venerable oak there was a plant of mystic leaf,
+      which the traveller knew by instinct, and plucked a bough of it with a
+      certain reverence for the sake of the Druids and Christmas kisses and of
+      the pasty in which it was rooted from of old.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The path in which he walked, rustic as it was and made merely by the feet
+      that pressed it down, was one of the ancientest of ways; older than the
+      oak that bore the mistletoe, older than the villages between which it
+      passed, older perhaps than the common road which the traveller had crossed
+      that morning; old as the times when people first debarred themselves from
+      wandering freely and widely wherever a vagrant impulse led them. The
+      footpath, therefore, still retains some of the characteristics of a
+      woodland walk, taken at random, by a lover of nature not pressed for time
+      nor restrained by artificial barriers; it sweeps and lingers along, and
+      finds pretty little dells and nooks of delightful scenery, and picturesque
+      glimpses of halls or cottages, in the same neighborhood where a highroad
+      would disclose only a tiresome blank. They run into one another for miles
+      and miles together, and traverse rigidly guarded parks and domains, not as
+      a matter of favor, but as a right; so that the poorest man thus retains a
+      kind of property and privilege in the oldest inheritance of the richest.
+      The highroad sees only the outside; the footpath leads down into the heart
+      of the country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A pleasant feature of the footpath was the stile, between two fields; no
+      frail and temporary structure, but betokening the permanence of this
+      rustic way; the ancient solidity of the stone steps, worn into cavities by
+      the hobnailed shoes that had pressed upon them: here not only the climbing
+      foot had passed for ages, but here had sat the maiden with her milk-pail,
+      the rustic on his way afield or homeward; here had been lover meetings,
+      cheerful chance chats, song as natural as bird note, a thousand pretty
+      scenes of rustic manners.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was curious to see the traveller pause, to contemplate so simple a
+      thing as this old stile of a few stone steps; antique as an old castle;
+      simple and rustic as the gap in a rail fence; and while he sat on one of
+      the steps, making himself pleasantly sensible of his whereabout, like one
+      who should handle a dream and find it tangible and real, he heard a sound
+      that bewitched him with still another dreamy delight. A bird rose out of
+      the grassy field, and, still soaring aloft, made a cheery melody that was
+      like a spire of audible flame,&mdash;rapturous music, as if the whole soul
+      and substance of the winged creature had been distilled into this melody,
+      as it vanished skyward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The lark! the lark!&rdquo; exclaimed the traveller, recognizing the note
+      (though never heard before) as if his childhood had known it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A moment afterwards another bird was heard in the shadow of a neighboring
+      wood, or some other inscrutable hiding-place, singing softly in a
+      flute-like note, as if blown through an instrument of wood,&mdash;&ldquo;Cuckoo!
+      Cuckoo!&rdquo;&mdash;only twice, and then a stillness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How familiar these rustic sounds!&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;Surely I was born
+      here!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The person who thus enjoyed these sounds, as if they were at once familiar
+      and strange, was a young man, tall and rather slenderly built, and though
+      we have called him young, there were the traces of thought, struggle, and
+      even of experience in his marked brow and somewhat pale face; but the
+      spirit within him was evidently still that of a youth, lithe and active,
+      gazing out of his dark eyes and taking note of things about him, with an
+      eager, centring interest, that seemed to be unusually awake at the present
+      moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It could be but a few years since he first called himself a man; but they
+      must have been thickly studded with events, turbulent with action, spent
+      amidst circumstances that called for resources of energy not often so
+      early developed; and thus his youth might have been kept in abeyance until
+      now, when in this simple rural scene he grew almost a boy again. As for
+      his station in life, his coarse gray suit and the knapsack on his
+      shoulders did not indicate a very high one; yet it was such as a gentleman
+      might wear of a morning, or on a pedestrian ramble, and was worn in a way
+      that made it seem of a better fashion than it really was, as it enabled
+      him to find a rare enjoyment, as we have seen, in by-path, hedge-row,
+      rustic stile, lark, and cuckoo, and even the familiar grass and clover
+      blossom. It was as if he had long been shut in a sick-chamber or a prison;
+      or, at least, within the iron cage of busy life, that had given him but
+      few glimpses of natural things through its bars; or else this was another
+      kind of nature than he had heretofore known.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he walked along (through a kind of dream, though he seemed so sensibly
+      observant of trifling things around him,) he failed to notice that the
+      path grew somewhat less distinctly marked, more infringed upon by grass,
+      more shut in by shrubbery; he had deviated into a side track, and, in
+      fact, a certain printed board nailed against a tree had escaped his
+      notice, warning off intruders with inhospitable threats of prosecution. He
+      began to suspect that he must have gone astray when the path led over
+      plashy ground with a still fainter trail of preceding footsteps, and
+      plunged into shrubbery, and seemed on the point of deserting him
+      altogether, after having beguiled him thus far. The spot was an
+      entanglement of boughs, and yet did not give one the impression of
+      wildness; for it was the stranger&rsquo;s idea that everything in this long
+      cultivated region had been touched and influenced by man&rsquo;s care, every
+      oak, every bush, every sod,&mdash;that man knew them all, and that they
+      knew him, and by that mutual knowledge had become far other than they were
+      in the first freedom of growth, such as may be found in an American
+      forest. Nay, the wildest denizens of this sylvan neighborhood were removed
+      in the same degree from their primeval character; for hares sat on their
+      hind legs to gaze at the approaching traveller, and hardly thought it
+      worth their while to leap away among some ferns, as he drew near; two
+      pheasants looked at him from a bough, a little inward among the shrubbery;
+      and, to complete the wonder, he became aware of the antlers and brown
+      muzzle of a deer protruding among the boughs, and though immediately there
+      ensued a great rush and rustling of the herd, it seemed evidently to come
+      from a certain lingering shyness, an instinct that had lost its purpose
+      and object, and only mimicked a dread of man, whose neighborhood and
+      familiarity had tamed the wild deer almost into a domestic creature.
+      Remembering his experience of true woodland life, the traveller fancied
+      that it might be possible to want freer air, less often used for human
+      breath, than was to be found anywhere among these woods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But then the sweet, calm sense of safety that was here: the certainty that
+      with the wild element that centuries ago had passed out of this scene had
+      gone all the perils of wild men and savage beasts, dwarfs, witches,
+      leaving nature, not effete, but only disarmed of those rougher, deadlier
+      characteristics, that cruel rawness, which make primeval Nature the deadly
+      enemy even of her own children. Here was consolation, doubtless; so we sit
+      down on the stone step of the last stile that he had crossed, and listen
+      to the footsteps of the traveller, and the distant rustle among the
+      shrubbery, as he goes deeper and deeper into the seclusion, having by this
+      time lost the deceitful track. No matter if he go astray; even were it
+      after nightfall instead of noontime, a will-o&rsquo;-the-wisp, or Puck himself,
+      would not lead him into worse harm than to delude him into some mossy
+      pool, the depths of which the truant schoolboys had known for ages.
+      Nevertheless, some little time after his disappearance, there was the
+      report of a shot that echoed sharp and loud, startling the pheasants from
+      their boughs, and sending the hares and deer a-scampering in good earnest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We next find our friend, from whom we parted on the footpath, in a
+      situation of which he then was but very imperfectly aware; for, indeed, he
+      had been in a state of unconsciousness, lasting until it was now late
+      towards the sunset of that same day. He was endeavoring to make out where
+      he was, and how he came thither, or what had happened; or whether, indeed,
+      anything had happened, unless to have fallen asleep, and to be still
+      enveloped in the fragments of some vivid and almost tangible dream, the
+      more confused because so vivid. His wits did not come so readily about him
+      as usual; there may have been a slight delusion, which mingled itself with
+      his sober perceptions, and by its leaven of extravagance made the whole
+      substance of the scene untrue. Thus it happened that, as it were at the
+      same instant, he fancied himself years back in life, thousands of miles
+      away, in a gloomy cobwebbed room, looking out upon a graveyard, while yet,
+      neither more nor less distinctly, he was conscious of being in a small
+      chamber, panelled with oak, and furnished in an antique style. He was
+      doubtful, too, whether or no there was a grim feudal figure, in a shabby
+      dressing-gown and an old velvet cap, sitting in the dusk of the room,
+      smoking a pipe that diffused a scent of tobacco,&mdash;quaffing a
+      deep-hued liquor out of a tumbler,&mdash;looking upwards at a spider that
+      hung above. &ldquo;Was there, too, a child sitting in a little chair at his
+      footstool?&rdquo; In his earnestness to see this apparition more distinctly, he
+      opened his eyes wider and stirred, and ceased to see it at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But though that other dusty, squalid, cobwebbed scene quite vanished, and
+      along with it the two figures, old and young, grim and childish, of whose
+      portraits it had been the framework, still there were features in the old,
+      oaken-panelled chamber that seemed to belong rather to his dream. The
+      panels were ornamented, here and there, with antique carving, representing
+      over and over again an identical device, being a bare arm, holding the
+      torn-off head of some savage beast, which the stranger could not know by
+      species, any more than Agassiz himself could have assigned its type or
+      kindred; because it was that kind of natural history of which heraldry
+      alone keeps the menagerie. But it was just as familiar to his recollection
+      as that of the cat which he had fondled in his childhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was likewise a mantelpiece, heavily wrought of oak, quite black with
+      smoke and age, in the centre of which, more prominent than elsewhere, was
+      that same leopard&rsquo;s head that seemed to thrust itself everywhere into
+      sight, as if typifying some great mystery which human nature would never
+      be at rest till it had solved; and below, in a cavernous hollow, there was
+      a smouldering fire of coals; for the genial day had suddenly grown chill,
+      and a shower of rain spattered against the small window-panes, almost at
+      the same time with the struggling sunshine. And over the mantelpiece,
+      where the light of the declining day came strongest from the window, there
+      was a larger and more highly relieved carving of this same device, and
+      underneath it a legend, in Old English letters, which, though his eyes
+      could not precisely trace it at that distance, he knew to be this:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+                      &ldquo;Hold hard the Head.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Otherwise the aspect of the room bewildered him by not being known, since
+      these details were so familiar; a narrow precinct it was, with one window
+      full of old-fashioned, diamond-shaped panes of glass, a small desk table,
+      standing on clawed feet; two or three high-backed chairs, on the top of
+      each of which was carved that same crest of the fabulous brute&rsquo;s head,
+      which the carver&rsquo;s fancy seemed to have clutched so strongly that he could
+      not let it go; in another part of the room a very old engraving, rude and
+      strong, representing some ruffled personage, which the stranger only tried
+      to make out with a sort of idle curiosity, because it was strange he
+      should dream so distinctly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very soon it became intolerably irritating that these two dreams, both
+      purposeless, should have mingled and entangled themselves in his mind. He
+      made a nervous and petulant motion, intending to rouse himself fully; and
+      immediately a sharp pang of physical pain took him by surprise, and made
+      him groan aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Immediately there was an almost noiseless step on the floor; and a figure
+      emerged from a deep niche, that looked as if it might once have been an
+      oratory, in ancient times; and the figure, too, might have been supposed
+      to possess the devout and sanctified character of such as knelt in the
+      oratories of ancient times. It was an elderly man, tall, thin, and pale,
+      and wearing a long, dark tunic, and in a peculiar fashion, which&mdash;like
+      almost everything else about him&mdash;the stranger seemed to have a
+      confused remembrance of; this venerable person had a benign and pitiful
+      aspect, and approached the bedside with such good will and evident desire
+      to do the sufferer good, that the latter felt soothed, at least, by his
+      very presence. He lay, a moment, gazing up at the old man&rsquo;s face, without
+      being able to exert himself to say a word, but sensible, as it were, of a
+      mild, soft influence from him, cooling the fever which seemed to burn in
+      his veins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you suffer much pain?&rdquo; asked the old man, gently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None at all,&rdquo; said the stranger; but again a slight motion caused him to
+      feel a burning twinge in his shoulder. &ldquo;Yes; there was a throb of strange
+      anguish. Why should I feel pain? Where am I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In safety, and with those who desire to be your friends,&rdquo; said the old
+      man. &ldquo;You have met with an accident; but do not inquire about it now.
+      Quiet is what you need.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Still the traveller gazed at him; and the old man&rsquo;s figure seemed to enter
+      into his dream, or delirium, whichever it might be, as if his peaceful
+      presence were but a shadow, so quaint was his address, so unlike real
+      life, in that dark robe, with a velvet skullcap on his head, beneath which
+      his hair made a silvery border; and looking more closely, the stranger saw
+      embroidered on the breast of the tunic that same device, the arm and the
+      leopard&rsquo;s head, which was visible in the carving of the room. Yes; this
+      must still be a dream, which, under the unknown laws which govern such
+      psychical states, had brought out thus vividly figures, devices, words,
+      forgotten since his boyish days. Though of an imaginative tendency, the
+      stranger was nevertheless strongly tenacious of the actual, and had a
+      natural horror at the idea of being seriously at odds, in beliefs,
+      perceptions, conclusions, with the real world about him; so that a tremor
+      ran through him, as if he felt the substance of the world shimmering
+      before his eyes like a mere vaporous consistency.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you real?&rdquo; said he to the antique presence; &ldquo;or a spirit? or a
+      fantasy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man laid his thin, cool palm on the stranger&rsquo;s burning forehead,
+      and smiled benignantly, keeping it there an instant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If flesh and blood are real, I am so,&rdquo; said he; &ldquo;a spirit, too, I may
+      claim to be, made thin by fantasy. Again, do not perplex yourself with
+      such things. To-morrow you may find denser substance in me. Drink this
+      composing draught, and close your eyes to those things that disturb you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your features, too, and your voice,&rdquo; said the stranger, in a resigned
+      tone, as if he were giving up a riddle, the solution of which he could not
+      find, &ldquo;have an image and echo somewhere in my memory. It is all an
+      entanglement. I will drink, and shut my eyes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He drank from a little old-fashioned silver cup, which his venerable
+      guardian presented to his lips; but in so doing he was still perplexed and
+      tremulously disturbed with seeing that same weary old device, the
+      leopard&rsquo;s head, engraved on the side; and shut his eyes to escape it, for
+      it irritated a certain portion of his brain with vague, fanciful, elusive
+      ideas. So he sighed and spoke no more. The medicine, whatever it might be,
+      had the merit, rare in doctor&rsquo;s stuff, of being pleasant to take,
+      assuasive of thirst, and imbued with a hardly perceptible fragrance, that
+      was so ethereal that it also seemed to enter into his dream and modify it.
+      He kept his eyes closed, and fell into a misty state, in which he wondered
+      whether this could be the panacea or medicament which old Doctor Grimshawe
+      used to distil from cobwebs, and of which the fragrance seemed to breathe
+      through all the waste of years since then. He wondered, too, who was this
+      benign, saint-like old man, and where, in what former state of being, he
+      could have known him; to have him thus, as no strange thing, and yet so
+      strange, be attending at his bedside, with all this ancient garniture. But
+      it was best to dismiss all things, he being so weak; to resign himself;
+      all this had happened before, and had passed away, prosperously or
+      unprosperously; it would pass away in this case, likewise; and in the
+      morning whatever might be delusive would have disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The patient [Endnote: 1] had a favorable night, and awoke with a much
+      clearer head, though still considerably feverish and in a state of great
+      exhaustion from loss of blood, which kept down the fever. The events of
+      the preceding day shimmered as it were and shifted illusively in his
+      recollection; nor could he yet account for the situation in which he found
+      himself, the antique chamber, the old man of mediæval garb, nor even for
+      the wound which seemed to have been the occasion of bringing him thither.
+      One moment, so far as he remembered, he had been straying along a solitary
+      footpath, through rich shrubbery, with the antlered deer peeping at him,
+      listening to the lark and the cuckoo; the next, he lay helpless in this
+      oak-panelled chamber, surrounded with objects that appealed to some
+      fantastic shadow of recollection, which could have had no reality.
+      [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To say the truth, the traveller perhaps wilfully kept hold of this strange
+      illusiveness, and kept his thoughts from too harshly analyzing his
+      situation, and solving the riddle in which he found himself involved. In
+      his present weakness, his mind sympathizing with the sinking down of his
+      physical powers, it was delightful to let all go; to relinquish all
+      control, and let himself drift vaguely into whatever region of
+      improbabilities there exists apart from the dull, common plane of life.
+      Weak, stricken down, given over to influences which had taken possession
+      of him during an interval of insensibility, he was no longer responsible;
+      let these delusions, if they were such, linger as long as they would, and
+      depart of their own accord at last. He, meanwhile, would willingly accept
+      the idea that some spell had transported him out of an epoch in which he
+      had led a brief, troubled existence of battle, mental strife, success,
+      failure, all equally feverish and unsatisfactory, into some past century,
+      where the business was to rest,&mdash;to drag on dreamy days, looking at
+      things through half-shut eyes; into a limbo where things were put away,
+      shows of what had once been, now somehow fainted, and still maintaining a
+      sort of half-existence, a serious mockery; a state likely enough to exist
+      just a little apart from the actual world, if we only know how to find our
+      way into it. Scenes and events that had once stained themselves, in deep
+      colors, on the curtain that Time hangs around us, to shut us in from
+      eternity, cannot be quite effaced by the succeeding phantasmagoria, and
+      sometimes, by a palimpsest, show more strongly than they. [Endnote: 3.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the course of the morning, however, he was a little too feelingly made
+      sensible of realities by the visit of a surgeon, who proceeded to examine
+      the wound in his shoulder, removing the bandages which he himself seemed
+      to have put upon this mysterious hurt. The traveller closed his eyes, and
+      submitted to the manipulations of the professional person, painful as they
+      were, assisted by the gentle touch of the old palmer; and there was
+      something in the way in which he resigned himself that met the approbation
+      of the surgeon, in spite of a little fever, and slight delirium too, to
+      judge by his eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A very quiet and well-behaved patient,&rdquo; said he to the palmer. &ldquo;Unless I
+      greatly mistake, he has been under the surgeon&rsquo;s hand for a similar hurt
+      ere now. He has learned under good discipline how to take such a thing
+      easily. Yes, yes; just here is a mark where a bullet went in some time
+      ago,&mdash;three or four years since, when he could have been little more
+      than a boy. A wild fellow this, I doubt.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was an Indian bullet,&rdquo; said the patient, still fancying himself gone
+      astray into the past, &ldquo;shot at me in battle; &lsquo;twas three hundred years
+      hereafter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! he has served in the East Indies,&rdquo; said the surgeon. &ldquo;I thought this
+      sun-burned cheek had taken its hue elsewhere than in England.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The patient did not care to take the trouble which would have been
+      involved in correcting the surgeon&rsquo;s surmise; so he let it pass, and
+      patiently awaited the end of the examination, with only a moan or two,
+      which seemed rather pleasing and desirable than otherwise to the surgeon&rsquo;s
+      ear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He has vitality enough for his needs,&rdquo; said he, nodding to the palmer.
+      &ldquo;These groans betoken a good degree of pain; though the young fellow is
+      evidently a self-contained sort of nature, and does not let us know all he
+      feels. It promises well, however; keep him in bed and quiet, and within a
+      day or two we shall see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He wrote a recipe, or two or three, perhaps, (for in those days the
+      medical fraternity had faith in their own art,) and took his leave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The white-bearded palmer withdrew into the half concealment of the oratory
+      which we have already mentioned, and then, putting on a pair of
+      spectacles, betook himself to the perusal of an old folio volume, the
+      leaves of which he turned over so gently that not the slightest sound
+      could possibly disturb the patient. All his manifestations were gentle and
+      soft, but of a simplicity most unlike the feline softness which we are apt
+      to associate with a noiseless tread and movement in the male sex. The
+      sunshine came through the ivy and glimmered upon his great book, however,
+      with an effect which a little disturbed the patient&rsquo;s nerves; besides, he
+      desired to have a fuller view of his benign guardian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you sit nearer the bedside?&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;I wish to look at you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Weakness, the relaxation of nerves, and the state of dependence on
+      another&rsquo;s care&mdash;very long unfelt&mdash;had made him betray what we
+      must call childishness; and it was perceptible in the low half-complaining
+      tone in which he spoke, indicating a consciousness of kindness in the
+      other, a little plaintiveness in himself; of which, the next instant, weak
+      and wandering as he was, he was ashamed, and essayed to express it.
+      [Endnote: 4.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must deem me very poor-spirited,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;not to bear this trifling
+      hurt with a firmer mind. But perhaps it is not entirely that I am so weak,
+      but I feel you to be so benign.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be weak, and be the stronger for it,&rdquo; said the old man, with a grave
+      smile. &ldquo;It is not in the pride of our strength that we are best or wisest.
+      To be made anew, we even must be again a little child, and consent to be
+      enwrapt quietly in the arms of Providence, as a child in its mother&rsquo;s
+      arms.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never knew a mother&rsquo;s care,&rdquo; replied the traveller, in a low, regretful
+      tone, being weak to the incoming of all soft feelings, in his present
+      state. &ldquo;Since my boyhood, I have lived among men,&mdash;a life of struggle
+      and hard rivalry. It is good to find myself here in the long past, and in
+      a sheltered harbor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And here he smiled, by way of showing to this old palmer that he saw
+      through the slight infirmity of mind that impelled him to say such things
+      as the above; that he was not its dupe, though he had not strength, just
+      now, to resist its impulse. After this he dozed off softly, and felt
+      through all his sleep some twinges of his wound, bringing him back, as it
+      were, to the conscious surface of the great deep of slumber, into which he
+      might otherwise have sunk. At all such brief intervals, half unclosing his
+      eyes, (like a child, when the mother sits by its bed and he fears that she
+      will steal away if he falls quite asleep, and leave him in the dark
+      solitude,) he still beheld the white-bearded, kindly old man, of saintly
+      aspect, sitting near him, and turning over the pages of his folio volume
+      so softly that not the faintest rustle did it make; the picture at length
+      got so fully into his idea, that he seemed to see it even through his
+      closed eyelids. After a while, however, the slumberous tendency left him
+      more entirely, and, without having been consciously awake, he found
+      himself contemplating the old man, with wide-open eyes. The venerable
+      personage seemed soon to feel his gaze, and, ceasing to look at the folio,
+      he turned his eyes with quiet inquiry to meet those of the stranger.
+      [Endnote: 5.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What great volume is that?&rdquo; asked the latter. [Endnote: 6.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a book of English chronicles,&rdquo; said the old man, &ldquo;mostly relating
+      to the part of the island where you now are, and to times previous to the
+      Stuarts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! it is to you, a contemporary, what reading the newspaper is to other
+      men,&rdquo; said the stranger; then, with a smile of self-reproach, &ldquo;I shall
+      conquer this idle mood. I&rsquo;m not so imbecile as you must think me. But
+      there is something that strangely haunts me,&mdash;where, in what state of
+      being, can I have seen your face before. There is nothing in it I
+      distinctly remember; but some impression, some characteristic, some look,
+      with which I have been long ago familiar haunts me and brings back all old
+      scenes. Do you know me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man smiled. &ldquo;I knew, long ago, a bright and impressible boy,&rdquo; said
+      he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And his name?&rdquo; said the stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was Edward Redclyffe,&rdquo; said the old man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, I see who you are,&rdquo; said the traveller, not too earnestly, but with a
+      soft, gratified feeling, as the riddle thus far solved itself. &ldquo;You are my
+      old kindly instructor. You are Colcord! That is it. I remember you
+      disappeared. You shall tell me, when I am quite myself, what was that
+      mystery,&mdash;and whether it is your real self, or only a part of my
+      dream, and going to vanish when I quite awake. Now I shall sleep and dream
+      more of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      One more waking interval he had that day, and again essayed to enter into
+      conversation with the old man, who had thus strangely again become
+      connected with his life, after having so long vanished from his path.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where am I?&rdquo; asked Edward Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the home of misfortune,&rdquo; said Colcord.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! then I have a right to be here!&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;I was born in such a home.
+      Do you remember it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know your story,&rdquo; said Colcord.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; from Doctor Grim,&rdquo; said Edward. &ldquo;People whispered he had made away
+      with you. I never believed it; but finding you here in this strange way,
+      and myself having been shot, perhaps to death, it seems not so strange.
+      Pooh! I wander again, and ought to sleep a little more. And this is the
+      home of misfortune, but not like the squalid place of rage, idiocy,
+      imbecility, drunkenness, where I was born. How many times I have blushed
+      to remember that native home! But not of late! I have struggled; I have
+      fought; I have triumphed. The unknown boy has come to be no
+      undistinguished man! His ancestry, should he ever reveal himself to them,
+      need not blush for the poor foundling.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hush!&rdquo; said the quiet watcher. &ldquo;Your fever burns you. Take this draught,
+      and sleep a little longer.&rdquo; [Endnote: 7.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another day or two found Edward Redclyffe almost a convalescent. The
+      singular lack of impatience that characterized his present mood&mdash;the
+      repose of spirit into which he had lapsed&mdash;had much to do with the
+      favorable progress of his cure. After strife, anxiety, great mental
+      exertion, and excitement of various kinds, which had harassed him ever
+      since he grew to be a man, had come this opportunity of perfect rest;&mdash;this
+      dream in the midst of which he lay, while its magic boundaries involved
+      him, and kept far off the contact of actual life, so that its sounds and
+      tumults seemed remote; its cares could not fret him; its ambitions,
+      objects good or evil, were shut out from him; the electric wires that had
+      connected him with the battery of life were broken for the time, and he
+      did not feel the unquiet influence that kept everybody else in galvanic
+      motion. So, under the benign influence of the old palmer, he lay in
+      slumberous luxury, undisturbed save by some twinges of no intolerable
+      pain; which, however, he almost was glad of, because it made him sensible
+      that this deep luxury of quiet was essential to his cure, however idle it
+      might seem. For the first time since he was a child, he resigned himself
+      not to put a finger to the evolution of his fortune; he determined to
+      accept all things that might happen, good or evil; he would not imagine an
+      event beyond to-day, but would let one spontaneous and half-defined
+      thought loiter after another, through his mind; listen to the spattering
+      shower,&mdash;the puffs of shut-out wind; and look with half-shut eyes at
+      the sunshine glimmering through the ivy-twigs, and illuminating those old
+      devices on the wall; at the gathering twilight; at the dim lamp; at the
+      creeping upward of another day, and with it the lark singing so far away
+      that the thrill of its delicious song could not disturb him with an
+      impulse to awake. Sweet as its carol was, he could almost have been
+      content to miss the lark; sweet and clear, it was too like a fairy
+      trumpet-call, summoning him to awake and struggle again with eager
+      combatants for new victories, the best of which were not worth this deep
+      repose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old palmer did his best to prolong a mood so beneficial to the wounded
+      young man. The surgeon also nodded approval, and attributed this happy
+      state of the patient&rsquo;s mind, and all the physical advantages growing out
+      of it, to his own consummate skill; nor, indeed, was he undeserving of
+      credit, not often to be awarded to medical men, for having done nothing to
+      impede the good which kind Nature was willing to bring about. She was
+      doing the patient more good, indeed, than either the surgeon or the palmer
+      could fully estimate, in taking this opportunity to recreate a mind that
+      had too early known stirring impulse, and that had been worked to a degree
+      beyond what its organization (in some respects singularly delicate) ought
+      to have borne. Once in a long while the weary actors in the headlong drama
+      of life must have such repose or else go mad or die. When the machinery of
+      human life has once been stopped by sickness or other impediment, it often
+      needs an impulse to set it going again, even after it is nearly wound up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it could not last forever. The influx of new life into his being began
+      to have a poignancy that would not let him lie so quietly, lapped in the
+      past, in gone by centuries, and waited on by quiet Age, in the person of
+      the old palmer; he began to feel again that he was young, and must live in
+      the time when his lot was cast. He began to say to himself, that it was
+      not well to be any longer passive, but that he must again take the
+      troublesome burden of his own life on his own shoulders. He thought of
+      this necessity, this duty, throughout one whole day, and determined that
+      on the morrow he would make the first step towards terminating his
+      inaction, which he now began to be half impatient of, at the same time
+      that he clutched it still, for the sake of the deliciousness that it had
+      had.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To-morrow, I hope to be clothed and in my right mind,&rdquo; said he to the old
+      palmer, &ldquo;and very soon I must thank you, with my whole heart, for your
+      kind care, and go. It is a shame that I burden the hospitality of this
+      house so long.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No shame whatever,&rdquo; replied the old man, &ldquo;but, on the contrary, the
+      fittest thing that could have chanced. You are dependent on no private
+      benevolence, nor on the good offices of any man now living, or who has
+      lived these last three hundred years. This ancient establishment is for
+      the support of poverty, misfortune, and age, and, according to the word of
+      the founder, it serves him:&mdash;he was indebted to the beneficiaries,
+      not they to him, for, in return for his temporal bequests, he asked their
+      prayers for his soul&rsquo;s welfare. He needed them, could they avail him; for
+      this ponderous structure was built upon the founder&rsquo;s mortal
+      transgressions, and even, I may say, out of the actual substance of them.
+      Sir Edward Redclyffe was a fierce fighter in the Wars of the Roses, and
+      amassed much wealth by spoil, rapine, confiscation, and all violent and
+      evil ways that those disturbed times opened to him; and on his death-bed
+      he founded this Hospital for twelve men, who should be able to prove
+      kindred with his race, to dwell here with a stipend, and pray for him; and
+      likewise provision for a sick stranger, until he should be able to go on
+      his way again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall pray for him willingly,&rdquo; said Edward, moved by the pity which
+      awaits any softened state of our natures to steal into our hearts. &ldquo;Though
+      no Catholic, I will pray for his soul. And that is his crest which you
+      wear embroidered on his garment?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is,&rdquo; said the old man. &ldquo;You will see it carved, painted, embroidered,
+      everywhere about the establishment; but let us give it the better and more
+      reasonable interpretation;&mdash;not that he sought to proclaim his own
+      pride of ancestry and race, but to acknowledge his sins the more
+      manifestly, by stamping the emblem of his race on this structure of his
+      penitence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And are you,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, impressed anew by the quiet dignity of the
+      venerable speaker, &ldquo;in authority in the establishment?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A simple beneficiary of the charity,&rdquo; said the palmer; &ldquo;one of the twelve
+      poor brethren and kinsmen of the founder. Slighter proofs of kindred are
+      now of necessity received, since, in the natural course of things, the
+      race has long been growing scarce. But I had it in my power to make out a
+      sufficient claim.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Singular,&rdquo; exclaimed Redclyffe, &ldquo;you being an American!&rdquo; [Endnote: 8.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You remember me, then,&rdquo; said the old man, quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From the first,&rdquo; said Edward, &ldquo;although your image took the fantastic
+      aspect of the bewilderment in which I then was; and now that I am in
+      clearer state of mind, it seems yet stranger that you should be here. We
+      two children thought you translated, and people, I remember, whispered
+      dark hints about your fate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was nothing wonderful in my disappearance,&rdquo; said the old man.
+      &ldquo;There were causes, an impulse, an intuition, that made me feel, one
+      particular night, that I might meet harm, whether from myself or others,
+      by remaining in a place with which I had the most casual connection. But I
+      never, so long as I remained in America, quite lost sight of you; and
+      Doctor Grimshawe, before his death, had knowledge of where I was, and gave
+      me in charge a duty which I faithfully endeavored to perform. Singular man
+      that he was! much evil, much good in him. Both, it may be, will live after
+      him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe, when the conversation had reached this point, felt a vast
+      desire to reveal to the old man all that the grim Doctor had instilled
+      into his childish mind, all that he himself, in subsequent years, had
+      wrought more definitely out of it, all his accompanying doubts respecting
+      the secret of his birth and some supposed claims which he might assert,
+      and which, only half acknowledging the purpose, had availed to bring him,
+      a republican, hither as to an ancestral centre. He even fancied that the
+      benign old man seemed to expect and await such a confidence; but that very
+      idea contributed to make it impossible for him to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Another time,&rdquo; he said to himself. &ldquo;Perhaps never. It is a fantastic
+      folly; and with what the workhouse foundling has since achieved, he would
+      give up too many hopes to take the representation of a mouldy old English
+      family.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I find my head still very weak,&rdquo; said he, by way of cutting short the
+      conversation. &ldquo;I must try to sleep again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The next day he called for his clothes, and, with the assistance of the
+      pensioner, managed to be dressed, and awaited the arrival of the surgeon,
+      sitting in a great easy-chair, with not much except his pale, thin cheeks,
+      dark, thoughtful eyes, and his arm in a sling, to show the pain and danger
+      through which he had passed. Soon after the departure of the professional
+      gentleman, a step somewhat louder than ordinary was heard on the
+      staircase, and in the corridor leading to the sick-chamber; the step (as
+      Redclyffe&rsquo;s perceptions, nicely attempered by his weakness, assured him)
+      of a man in perfect and robust health, and of station and authority. A
+      moment afterwards, a gentleman of middle age, or a little beyond, appeared
+      in the doorway, in a dress that seemed clerical, yet not very decidedly
+      so; he had a frank, kindly, yet authoritative bearing, and a face that
+      might almost be said to beam with geniality, when, as now, the benevolence
+      of his nature was aroused and ready to express itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My friend,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;Doctor Portingale tells me you are much better; and
+      I am most happy to hear it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something brusque and unceremonious in his manner, that a little
+      jarred against Redclyffe&rsquo;s sensitiveness, which had become morbid in
+      sympathy with his weakness. He felt that the new-comer had not probably
+      the right idea as to his own position in life; he was addressing him most
+      kindly, indeed, but as an inferior.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am much better, sir,&rdquo; he replied, gravely, and with reserve; &ldquo;so nearly
+      well, that I shall very soon be able to bid farewell to my kind nurse
+      here, and to this ancient establishment, to which I owe so much.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The visitor seemed struck by Mr. Redclyffe&rsquo;s tone, and finely modulated
+      voice, and glanced at his face, and then over his dress and figure, as if
+      to gather from them some reliable data as to his station.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am the Warden of this Hospital,&rdquo; said he, with not less benignity than
+      heretofore, and greater courtesy; &ldquo;and, in that capacity, must consider
+      you under my care,&mdash;as my guest, in fact,&mdash;although, owing to my
+      casual absence, one of the brethren of the house has been the active
+      instrument in attending you. I am most happy to find you so far recovered.
+      Do you feel yourself in a condition to give any account of the accident
+      which has befallen you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It will be a very unsatisfactory one, at best,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, trying to
+      discover some definite point in his misty reminiscences. &ldquo;I am a stranger
+      to this country, and was on a pedestrian tour with the purpose of making
+      myself acquainted with the aspects of English scenery and life. I had
+      turned into a footpath, being told that it would lead me within view of an
+      old Hall, which, from certain early associations, I was very desirous of
+      seeing. I think I went astray; at all events, the path became indistinct;
+      and, so far as I can recollect, I had just turned to retrace my steps,&mdash;in
+      fact, that is the last thing in my memory.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You had almost fallen a sacrifice,&rdquo; said the Warden, &ldquo;to the old
+      preference which our English gentry have inherited from their Norman
+      ancestry, of game to man. You had come unintentionally as an intruder into
+      a rich preserve much haunted by poachers, and exposed yourself to the
+      deadly mark of a spring-gun, which had not the wit to distinguish between
+      a harmless traveller and a poacher. At least, such is our conclusion; for
+      our old friend here, (who luckily for you is a great rambler in the
+      woods,) when the report drew him to the spot, found you insensible, and
+      the gun discharged.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A gun has so little discretion,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, smiling, &ldquo;that it seems
+      a pity to trust entirely to its judgment, in a matter of life and death.
+      But, to confess the truth, I had come this morning to the suspicion that
+      there was a direct human agency in the matter; for I find missing a little
+      pocket-book which I carried.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then,&rdquo; said the Warden, &ldquo;that certainly gives a new aspect to the affair.
+      Was it of value?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of none whatever,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;merely containing pencil memoranda,
+      and notes of a traveller&rsquo;s little expenses. I had papers about me of far
+      more value, and a moderate sum of money, a letter of credit, which have
+      escaped. I do not, however, feel inclined, on such grounds, to transfer
+      the guilt decidedly from the spring-gun to any more responsible criminal;
+      for it is very possible that the pocket-book, being carelessly carried,
+      might have been lost on the way. I had not used it since the preceding
+      day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Much more probable, indeed,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;The discharged gun is
+      strong evidence against itself. Mr. Colcord,&rdquo; continued he, raising his
+      voice, &ldquo;how long was the interval between the discharge of the gun and
+      your arrival on the spot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Five minutes, or less,&rdquo; said the old man, &ldquo;for I was not far off, and
+      made what haste I could, it being borne in on my spirit that mischief was
+      abroad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you hear two reports?&rdquo; asked the Warden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only one,&rdquo; replied Colcord.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a plain case against the spring-gun,&rdquo; said the Warden; &ldquo;and, as you
+      tell me you are a stranger, I trust you will not suppose that our peaceful
+      English woods and parks are the haunt of banditti. We must try to give you
+      a better idea of us. May I ask, are you an American, and recently come
+      among us?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe a letter of credit is considered as decisive as most modes of
+      introduction,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, feeling that the good Warden was desirous
+      of knowing with some precision who and what he was, and that, in the
+      circumstances, he had a right to such knowledge. &ldquo;Here is mine, on a
+      respectable house in London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Warden took it, and glanced it over with a slight apologetic bow; it
+      was a credit for a handsome amount in favor of the Honorable Edward
+      Redclyffe, a title that did not fail to impress the Englishman rather
+      favorably towards his new acquaintance, although he happened to know
+      something of their abundance, even so early in the republic, among the men
+      branded sons of equality. But, at all events, it showed no ordinary
+      ability and energy for so young a man to have held such position as this
+      title denoted in the fiercely contested political struggles of the new
+      democracy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know, Mr. Redclyffe, that this name is familiar to us,
+      hereabouts?&rdquo; asked he, with a kindly bow and recognition,&mdash;&ldquo;that it
+      is in fact the principal name in this neighborhood,&mdash;that a family of
+      your name still possesses Braithwaite Hall, and that this very Hospital,
+      where you have happily found shelter, was founded by former
+      representatives of your name? Perhaps you count yourself among their
+      kindred.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My countrymen are apt to advance claims to kinship with distinguished
+      English families on such slight grounds as to make it ridiculous,&rdquo; said
+      Redclyffe, coloring. &ldquo;I should not choose to follow so absurd an example.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, well, perhaps not,&rdquo; said the Warden, laughing frankly. &ldquo;I have been
+      amongst your republicans myself, a long while ago, and saw that your
+      countrymen have no adequate idea of the sacredness of pedigrees, and
+      heraldic distinctions, and would change their own names at pleasure, and
+      vaunt kindred with an English duke on the strength of the assumed one. But
+      I am happy to meet an American gentleman who looks upon this matter as
+      Englishmen necessarily must. I met with great kindness in your country,
+      Mr. Redclyffe, and shall be truly happy if you will allow me an
+      opportunity of returning some small part of the obligation. You are now in
+      a condition for removal to my own quarters, across the quadrangle. I will
+      give orders to prepare an apartment, and you must transfer yourself there
+      by dinner-time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With this hospitable proposal, so decisively expressed, the Warden took
+      his leave; and Edward Redclyffe had hardly yet recovered sufficient
+      independent force to reject an invitation so put, even were he inclined;
+      but, in truth, the proposal suited well with his wishes, such as they
+      were, and was, moreover, backed, it is singular to say, by another of
+      those dreamlike recognitions which had so perplexed him ever since he
+      found himself in the Hospital. In some previous state of being, the Warden
+      and he had talked together before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the Warden&rsquo;s name?&rdquo; he inquired of the old pensioner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hammond,&rdquo; said the old man; &ldquo;he is a kinsman of the Redclyffe family
+      himself, a man of fortune, and spends more than the income of his
+      wardenship in beautifying and keeping up the glory of the establishment.
+      He takes great pride in it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And he has been in America,&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;How strange! I knew him
+      there. Never was anything so singular as the discovery of old
+      acquaintances where I had reason to suppose myself unknowing and unknown.
+      Unless dear Doctor Grim, or dear little Elsie, were to start up and greet
+      me, I know not what may chance next.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe took up his quarters in the Warden&rsquo;s house the next day, and was
+      installed in an apartment that made a picture, such as he had not before
+      seen, of English household comfort. He was thus established under the good
+      Warden&rsquo;s roof, and, being very attractive of most people&rsquo;s sympathies,
+      soon began to grow greatly in favor with that kindly personage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Edward Redclyffe removed from the old pensioner&rsquo;s narrow quarters to
+      the far ampler accommodations of the Warden&rsquo;s house, the latter gentleman
+      was taking his morning exercise on horseback. A servant, however, in a
+      grave livery, ushered him to an apartment, where the new guest was
+      surprised to see some luggage which two or three days before Edward had
+      ordered from London, on finding that his stay in this part of the country
+      was likely to be much longer than he had originally contemplated. The
+      sight of these things&mdash;the sense which they conveyed that he was an
+      expected and welcome guest&mdash;tended to raise the spirits of the
+      solitary wanderer, and made him.... [Endnote: 1.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Warden&rsquo;s abode was an original part of the ancient establishment,
+      being an entire side of the quadrangle which the whole edifice surrounded;
+      and for the establishment of a bachelor (which was his new friend&rsquo;s
+      condition), it seemed to Edward Redclyffe abundantly spacious and enviably
+      comfortable. His own chamber had a grave, rich depth, as it were, of
+      serene and time-long garniture, for purposes of repose, convenience, daily
+      and nightly comfort, that it was soothing even to look at. Long
+      accustomed, as Redclyffe had been, to the hardy and rude accommodations,
+      if so they were to be called, of log huts and hasty, mud-built houses in
+      the Western States of America, life, its daily habits, its passing
+      accommodations, seemed to assume an importance, under these aspects, which
+      it had not worn before; those deep downy beds, those antique chairs, the
+      heavy carpet, the tester and curtains, the stateliness of the old room,&mdash;they
+      had a charm as compared with the thin preparation of a forester&rsquo;s
+      bedchamber, such as Redclyffe had chiefly known them, in the ruder parts
+      of the country, that really seemed to give a more substantial value to
+      life; so much pains had been taken with its modes and appliances, that it
+      looked more solid than before. Nevertheless, there was something ghostly
+      in that stately curtained bed, with the deep gloom within its drapery, so
+      ancient as it was; and suggestive of slumberers there who had long since
+      slumbered elsewhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old servant, whose grave, circumspect courtesy was a matter quite
+      beyond Redclyffe&rsquo;s experience, soon knocked at the chamber door, and
+      suggested that the guest might desire to await the Warden&rsquo;s arrival in the
+      library, which was the customary sitting-room. Redclyffe assenting, he was
+      ushered into a spacious apartment, lighted by various Gothic windows,
+      surrounded with old oaken cases, in which were ranged volumes, most or
+      many of which seemed to be coeval with the foundation of the hospital; and
+      opening one of them, Redclyffe saw for the first time in his life
+      [Endnote: 2] a genuine book-worm, that ancient form of creature living
+      upon literature; it had gnawed a circular hole, penetrating through
+      perhaps a score of pages of the seldom opened volume, and was still at his
+      musty feast. There was a fragrance of old learning in this ancient
+      library; a soothing influence, as the American felt, of time-honored
+      ideas, where the strife, novelties, uneasy agitating conflict, attrition
+      of unsettled theories, fresh-springing thought, did not attain a foothold;
+      a good place to spend a life which should not be agitated with the
+      disturbing element; so quiet, so peaceful; how slowly, with how little
+      wear, would the years pass here! How unlike what he had hitherto known,
+      and was destined to know,&mdash;the quick, violent struggle of his mother
+      country, which had traced lines in his young brow already. How much would
+      be saved by taking his former existence, not as dealing with things yet
+      malleable, but with fossils, things that had had their life, and now were
+      unchangeable, and revered, here!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At one end of this large room there was a bowed window, the space near
+      which was curtained off from the rest of the library, and, the window
+      being filled with painted glass (most of which seemed old, though there
+      were insertions evidently of modern and much inferior handiwork), there
+      was a rich gloom of light, or you might call it a rich glow, according to
+      your mood of mind. Redclyffe soon perceived that this curtained recess was
+      the especial study of his friend, the Warden, and as such was provided
+      with all that modern times had contrived for making an enjoyment out of
+      the perusal of old books; a study table, with every convenience of
+      multifarious devices, a great inkstand, pens; a luxurious study chair,
+      where thought [Endnote: 3] upon. To say the truth, there was not, in this
+      retired and thoughtful nook, anything that indicated to Redclyffe that the
+      Warden had been recently engaged in consultation of learned authorities,&mdash;or
+      in abstract labor, whether moral, metaphysical or historic; there was a
+      volume of translations of Mother Goose&rsquo;s Melodies into Greek and Latin,
+      printed for private circulation, and with the Warden&rsquo;s name on the
+      title-page; a London newspaper of the preceding day; Lillebullero, Chevy
+      Chase, and the old political ballads; and, what a little amused Redclyffe,
+      the three volumes of a novel from a circulating library; so that Redclyffe
+      came to the conclusion that the good Warden, like many educated men, whose
+      early scholastic propensities are backed up by the best of opportunities,
+      and all desirable facilities and surroundings, still contented himself
+      with gathering a flower or two, instead of attempting the hard toil
+      requisite to raise a crop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must not be omitted, that there was a fragrance in the room, which,
+      unlike as the scene was, brought back, through so many years, to
+      Redclyffe&rsquo;s mind a most vivid remembrance of poor old Doctor Grim&rsquo;s
+      squalid chamber, with his wild, bearded presence in the midst of it,
+      puffing his everlasting cloud; for here was the same smell of tobacco, and
+      on the mantel-piece of a chimney lay a German pipe, and an old silver
+      tobacco-box into which was wrought the leopard&rsquo;s head and the inscription
+      in black letter. The Warden had evidently availed himself of one of the
+      chief bachelor sources of comfort. Redclyffe, whose destiny had hitherto,
+      and up to a very recent period, been to pass a feverishly active life, was
+      greatly impressed by all these tokens of learned ease,&mdash;a degree of
+      self-indulgence combined with duties enough to quiet an otherwise uneasy
+      conscience,&mdash;by the consideration that this pensioner acted a good
+      part in a world where no one is entitled to be an unprofitable laborer. He
+      thought within himself, that his prospects in his own galvanized country,
+      that seemed to him, a few years since, to offer such a career for an
+      adventurous young man, conscious of motive power, had nothing so enticing
+      as such a nook as this,&mdash;a quiet recess of unchangeable old time,
+      around which the turbulent tide now eddied and rushed, but could not
+      disturb it. Here, to be sure, hope, love, ambition, came not, progress
+      came not; but here was what, just now, the early wearied American could
+      appreciate better than aught else,&mdash;here was rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fantasy took Edward to imitate the useful labors of the learned
+      Warden, and to make trial whether his own classical condition&mdash;the
+      results of Doctor Grim&rsquo;s tuition, and subsequently that of an American
+      College&mdash;had utterly deserted him, by attempting a translation of a
+      few verses of Yankee Doodle; and he was making hopeful progress when the
+      Warden came in fresh and rosy from a morning&rsquo;s ride in a keen east wind.
+      He shook hands heartily with his guest, and, though by no means frigid at
+      their former interview, seemed to have developed at once into a kindlier
+      man, now that he had suffered the stranger to cross his threshold, and had
+      thus made himself responsible for his comfort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall take it greatly amiss,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;if you do not pick up fast
+      under my roof, and gather a little English ruddiness, moreover, in the
+      walks and rides that I mean to take you. Your countrymen, as I saw them,
+      are a sallow set; but I think you must have English blood enough in your
+      veins to eke out a ruddy tint, with the help of good English beef and ale,
+      and daily draughts of wholesome light and air.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My cheeks would not have been so very pale,&rdquo; said Edward, laughing, &ldquo;if
+      an English shot had not deprived me of a good deal of my American blood.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only follow my guidance,&rdquo; said the Warden, &ldquo;and I assure you you shall
+      have back whatever blood we have deprived you of, together with an
+      addition. It is now luncheon-time, and we will begin the process of
+      replenishing your veins.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So they went into a refectory, where were spread upon the board what might
+      have seemed a goodly dinner to most Americans; though for this Englishman
+      it was but a by-incident, a slight refreshment, to enable him to pass the
+      midway stage of life. It is an excellent thing to see the faith of a
+      hearty Englishman in his own stomach, and how well that kindly organ
+      repays his trust; with what devout assimilation he takes to himself his
+      kindred beef, loving it, believing in it, making a good use of it, and
+      without any qualms of conscience or prescience as to the result. They
+      surely eat twice as much as we; and probably because of their undoubted
+      faith it never does them any harm. Dyspepsia is merely a superstition with
+      us. If we could cease to believe in its existence, it would exist no more.
+      Redclyffe, eating little himself, his wound compelling him to be cautious
+      as to his diet, was secretly delighted to see what sweets the Warden found
+      in a cold round of beef, in a pigeon pie, and a cut or two of Yorkshire
+      ham; not that he was ravenous, but that his stomach was so healthy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You eat little, my friend,&rdquo; said the Warden, pouring out a glass of
+      sherry for Redclyffe, and another for himself. &ldquo;But you are right, in such
+      a predicament as yours. Spare your stomach while you are weakly, and it
+      will help you when you are strong This, now, is the most enjoyable meal of
+      the day with me. You will not see me play such a knife and fork at dinner;
+      though there too, especially if I have ridden out in the afternoon, I do
+      pretty well. But, come now, if (like most of your countrymen, as I have
+      heard) you are a lover of the weed, I can offer you some as delicate
+      Latakia as you are likely to find in England.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I lack that claim upon your kindness, I am sorry to say,&rdquo; replied
+      Redclyffe. &ldquo;I am not a good smoker, though I have occasionally taken a
+      cigar at need.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, when you find yourself growing old, and especially if you chance to
+      be a bachelor, I advise you to cultivate the habit,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;A
+      wife is the only real obstacle or objection to a pipe; they can seldom be
+      thoroughly reconciled, and therefore it is well for a man to consider,
+      beforehand, which of the two he can best dispense with. I know not how it
+      might have been once, had the conflicting claim of these two rivals ever
+      been fairly presented to me; but I now should be at no loss to choose the
+      pipe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They returned to the study; and while the Warden took his pipe, Redclyffe,
+      considering that, as the guest of this hospitable Englishman, he had no
+      right to continue a stranger, thought it fit to make known to him who he
+      was, and his condition, plans, and purposes. He represented himself as
+      having been liberally educated, bred to the law, but (to his misfortune)
+      having turned aside from that profession to engage in politics. In this
+      pursuit, indeed, his success wore a flattering outside; for he had become
+      distinguished, and, though so young, a leader, locally at least, in the
+      party which he had adopted. He had been, for a biennial term, a member of
+      Congress, after winning some distinction in the legislature of his native
+      State; but some one of those fitful changes to which American politics are
+      peculiarly liable had thrown him out, in his candidacy for his second
+      term; and the virulence of party animosity, the abusiveness of the press,
+      had acted so much upon a disposition naturally somewhat too sensitive for
+      the career which he had undertaken, that he had resolved, being now freed
+      from legislative cares, to seize the opportunity for a visit to England,
+      whither he was drawn by feelings which every educated and impressible
+      American feels, in a degree scarcely conceivable by the English
+      themselves. And being here (but he had already too much experience of
+      English self-sufficiency to confess so much) he began to feel the deep
+      yearning which a sensitive American&mdash;his mind full of English
+      thoughts, his imagination of English poetry, his heart of English
+      character and sentiment&mdash;cannot fail to be influenced by,&mdash;the
+      yearning of the blood within his veins for that from which it has been
+      estranged; the half-fanciful regret that he should ever have been
+      separated from these woods, these fields, these natural features of
+      scenery, to which his nature was moulded, from the men who are still so
+      like himself, from these habits of life and thought which (though he may
+      not have known them for two centuries) he still perceives to have remained
+      in some mysterious way latent in the depths of his character, and soon to
+      be reassumed, not as a foreigner would do it, but like habits native to
+      him, and only suspended for a season.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This had been Redclyffe&rsquo;s state of feeling ever since he landed in
+      England, and every day seemed to make him more at home; so that it seemed
+      as if he were gradually awakening to a former reality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      After lunch, the Warden showed a good degree of kind anxiety about his
+      guest, and ensconced him in a most comfortable chair in his study, where
+      he gave him his choice of books old and new, and was somewhat surprised,
+      as well as amused, to see that Redclyffe seemed most attracted towards a
+      department of the library filled with books of English antiquities, and
+      genealogies, and heraldry; the two latter, indeed, having the preference
+      over the others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is very remarkable,&rdquo; said he, smiling. &ldquo;By what right or reason, by
+      what logic of character, can you, a democrat, renouncing all advantages of
+      birth,&mdash;neither priding yourself on family, nor seeking to found one,&mdash;how
+      therefore can you care for genealogies, or for this fantastic science of
+      heraldry? Having no antiquities, being a people just made, how can you
+      care for them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear sir,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;I doubt whether the most devoted
+      antiquarian in England ever cares to search for an old thing merely
+      because it is old, as any American just landed on your shores would do.
+      Age is our novelty; therefore it attracts and absorbs us. And as for
+      genealogies, I know not what necessary repulsion there may be between it
+      and democracy. A line of respectable connections, being the harder to
+      preserve where there is nothing in the laws to defend it, is therefore the
+      more precious when we have it really to boast of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;True,&rdquo; said the Warden, &ldquo;when a race keeps itself distinguished among the
+      grimy order of your commonalty, all with equal legal rights to place and
+      eminence as itself, it must needs be because there is a force and efficacy
+      in the blood. I doubt not,&rdquo; he said, looking with the free approval of an
+      elder man at the young man&rsquo;s finely developed face and graceful form,&mdash;&ldquo;I
+      doubt not that you can look back upon a line of ancestry, always shining
+      out from the surrounding obscurity of the mob.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe, though ashamed of himself, could not but feel a paltry
+      confusion and embarrassment, as he thought of his unknown origin, and his
+      advent from the almshouse; coming out of that squalid darkness as if he
+      were a thing that had had a spontaneous birth out of poverty, meanness,
+      petty crime; and here in ancestral England, he felt more keenly than ever
+      before what was his misfortune.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must not let you lie under this impression,&rdquo; said he manfully to the
+      Warden. &ldquo;I have no ancestry; at the very first step my origin is lost in
+      impenetrable obscurity. I only know that but for the aid of a kind friend&mdash;on
+      whose benevolence I seem to have had no claim whatever&mdash;my life would
+      probably have been poor, mean, unenlightened.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, well,&rdquo; said the kind Warden,&mdash;hardly quite feeling, however,
+      the noble sentiment which he expressed,&mdash;&ldquo;it is better to be the
+      first noble illustrator of a name than even the worthy heir of a name that
+      has been noble and famous for a thousand years. The highest pride of some
+      of our peers, who have won their rank by their own force, has been to
+      point to the cottage whence they sprung. Your posterity, at all events,
+      will have the advantage of you,&mdash;they will know their ancestor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe sighed, for there was truly a great deal of the foolish yearning
+      for a connection with the past about him; his imagination had taken this
+      turn, and the very circumstances of his obscure birth gave it a field to
+      exercise itself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I advise you,&rdquo; said the Warden, by way of changing the conversation, &ldquo;to
+      look over the excellent history of the county which you are now in. There
+      is no reading better, to my mind, than these country histories; though
+      doubtless a stranger would hardly feel so much interest in them as one
+      whose progenitors, male or female, have strewn their dust over the whole
+      field of which the history treats. This history is a fine specimen of the
+      kind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The work to which Redclyffe&rsquo;s attention was thus drawn was in two large
+      folio volumes, published about thirty years before, bound in calf by some
+      famous artist in that line, illustrated with portraits and views of ruined
+      castles, churches, cathedrals, the seats of nobility and gentry; Roman,
+      British, and Saxon remains, painted windows, oak carvings, and so forth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as for its contents the author ascended for the history of the county
+      as far as into the pre-Roman ages, before Caesar had ever heard of
+      Britain; and brought it down, an ever swelling and increasing tale, to his
+      own days; inclusive of the separate histories, and pedigrees, and
+      hereditary legends, and incidents, of all the principal families. In this
+      latter branch of information, indeed, the work seemed particularly full,
+      and contained every incident that would have worked well into historical
+      romance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aye, aye,&rdquo; said the Warden, laughing at some strange incident of this
+      sort which Redclyffe read out to him. &ldquo;My old friend Gibber, the learned
+      author of this work, (he has been dead this score of years, so he will not
+      mind my saying it,) had a little too much the habit of seeking his
+      authorities in the cottage chimney-corners. I mean that an old woman&rsquo;s
+      tale was just about as acceptable to him as a recorded fact; and to say
+      the truth, they are really apt to have ten times the life in them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe saw in the volume a full account of the founding of the
+      Hospital, its regulations and purposes, its edifices; all of which he
+      reserved for future reading, being for the present more attracted by the
+      mouldy gossip of family anecdotes which we have alluded to. Some of these,
+      and not the least singular, referred to the ancient family which had
+      founded the Hospital; and he was attracted by seeing a mention of a Bloody
+      Footstep, which reminded him of the strange old story which good Doctor
+      Grimshawe had related by his New England fireside, in those childish days
+      when Edward dwelt with him by the graveyard, On reading it, however, he
+      found that the English legend, if such it could be called, was far less
+      full and explicit than that of New England. Indeed, it assigned various
+      origins to the Bloody Footstep;&mdash;one being, that it was the stamp of
+      the foot of the Saxon thane, who fought at his own threshold against the
+      assault of the Norman baron, who seized his mansion at the Conquest;
+      another, that it was the imprint of a fugitive who had sought shelter from
+      the lady of the house during the Wars of the Roses, and was dragged out by
+      her husband, and slain on the door-step; still another, that it was the
+      footstep of a Protestant in Bloody Mary&rsquo;s days, who, being sent to prison
+      by the squire of that epoch, had lifted his hands to Heaven, and stamped
+      his foot, in appeal as against the unjust violence with which he was
+      treated, and stamping his foot, it had left the bloody mark. It was hinted
+      too, however, that another version, which out of delicacy to the family
+      the author was reluctant to state, assigned the origin of the Bloody
+      Footstep to so late a period as the wars of the Parliament. And, finally,
+      there was an odious rumor that what was called the Bloody Footstep was
+      nothing miraculous, after all, but most probably a natural reddish stain
+      in the stone door-step; but against this heresy the excellent Dr. Gibber
+      set his face most sturdily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The original legend had made such an impression on Redclyffe&rsquo;s childish
+      fancy, that he became strangely interested in thus discovering it, or
+      something remotely like it, in England, and being brought by such unsought
+      means to reside so near it. Curious about the family to which it had
+      occurred, he proceeded to examine its records, as given in the County
+      History. The name was Redclyffe. Like most English pedigrees, there was an
+      obscurity about a good many of the earlier links; but the line was traced
+      out with reasonable definiteness from the days of Coeur de Lion, and there
+      was said to be a cross-legged ancestor in the village church, who (but the
+      inscription was obliterated) was probably a Redclyffe, and had fought
+      either under the Lion Heart or in the Crusades. It was, in subsequent
+      ages, one of the most distinguished families, though there had been
+      turbulent men in all those turbulent times, hard fighters. In one age, a
+      barony of early creation seemed to have come into the family, and had
+      been, as it were, playing bo-peep with the race for several centuries.
+      Some of them had actually assumed the title; others had given it up for
+      lack of sufficient proof; but still there was such a claim, and up to the
+      time at which this County History was written, it had neither been made
+      out, nor had the hope of doing so been relinquished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have the family,&rdquo; asked Redclyffe of his host, &ldquo;ever yet made out their
+      claim to this title, which has so long been playing the will-of-the-wisp
+      with them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, not yet,&rdquo; said the Warden, puffing out a volume of smoke from his
+      meerschaum, and making it curl up to the ceiling. &ldquo;Their claim has as
+      little substance, in my belief, as yonder vanishing vapor from my pipe.
+      But they still keep up their delusion. I had supposed that the claim would
+      perish with the last squire, who was a childless man,&mdash;at least,
+      without legitimate heirs; but this estate passed to one whom we can
+      scarcely call an Englishman, he being a Catholic, the descendant of
+      forefathers who have lived in Italy since the time of George II., and who
+      is, moreover, a Catholic. We English would not willingly see an ancestral
+      honor in the possession of such a man!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there, do you think, a prospect of his success?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have heard so, but hardly believe it,&rdquo; replied the Warden. &ldquo;I remember,
+      some dozen or fifteen years ago, it was given out that some clue had been
+      found to the only piece of evidence that was wanting. It had been said
+      that there was an emigration to your own country, above a hundred years
+      ago, and on account of some family feud; the true heir had gone thither
+      and never returned. Now, the point was to prove the extinction of this
+      branch of the family. But, excuse me, I must pay an official visit to my
+      charge here. Will you accompany me, or continue to pore over the County
+      History?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe felt enough of the elasticity of convalescence to be desirous of
+      accompanying the Warden; and they accordingly crossed the enclosed
+      quadrangle to the entrance of the Hospital portion of the large and
+      intricate structure. It was a building of the early Elizabethan age, a
+      plaster and timber structure, like many houses of that period and much
+      earlier. [Endnote: 1] Around this court stood the building, with the date
+      1437 cut on the front. On each side, a row of gables looked upon the
+      enclosed space, most venerable old gables, with heavy mullioned windows
+      filled with little diamond panes of glass, and opening on lattices. On two
+      sides there was a cloistered walk, under echoing arches, and in the midst
+      a spacious lawn of the greenest and loveliest grass, such as England only
+      can show, and which, there, is of perennial verdure and beauty. In the
+      midst stood a stone statue of a venerable man, wrought in the best of
+      mediæval sculpture, with robe and ruff, and tunic and venerable beard,
+      resting on a staff, and holding what looked like a clasped book in his
+      hand. The English atmosphere, together with the coal smoke, settling down
+      in the space of centuries from the chimneys of the Hospital, had roughened
+      and blackened this venerable piece of sculpture, enclosing it as it were
+      in a superficies of decay; but still (and perhaps the more from these
+      tokens of having stood so long among men) the statue had an aspect of
+      venerable life, and of connection with human life, that made it strongly
+      impressive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the effigy of Sir Edward Redclyffe, the founder of the Hospital,&rdquo;
+       said the Warden. &ldquo;He is a most peaceful and venerable old gentleman in his
+      attire and aspect, as you see; but he was a fierce old fellow in his day,
+      and is said to have founded the Hospital as a means of appeasing Heaven
+      for some particular deed of blood, which he had imposed upon his
+      conscience in the War of the Roses.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;I have just read in the County History that the
+      Bloody Footstep was said to have been imprinted in his time. But what is
+      that thing which he holds in his hand?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is a famous heirloom of the Redclyffes,&rdquo; said the Warden, &ldquo;on the
+      possession of which (as long as they did possess it) they prided
+      themselves, it is said, more than on their ancient manor-house. It was a
+      Saxon ornament, which a certain ancestor was said to have had from Harold,
+      the old Saxon king; but if there ever was any such article, it has been
+      missing from the family mansion for two or three hundred years. There is
+      not known to be an antique relic of that description now in existence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I remember having seen such an article,&mdash;yes, precisely of that
+      shape,&rdquo; observed Redclyffe, &ldquo;in the possession of a very dear old friend
+      of mine, when I was a boy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What, in America?&rdquo; exclaimed the Warden. &ldquo;That is very remarkable. The
+      time of its being missed coincides well enough with that of the early
+      settlement of New England. Some Puritan, before his departure, may have
+      thought himself doing God service by filching the old golden gewgaw from
+      the Cavalier; for it was said to be fine, ductile gold.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The circumstances struck Redclyffe with a pleasant wonder; for, indeed,
+      the old statue held the closest possible imitation, in marble, of that
+      strange old glitter of gold which he himself had so often played with in
+      the Doctor&rsquo;s study; [Endnote: 2] so identical, that he could have fancied
+      that he saw the very thing, changed from metal into stone, even with its
+      bruises and other casual marks in it. As he looked at the old statue, his
+      imagination played with it, and his naturally great impressibility half
+      made him imagine that the old face looked at him with a keen, subtile,
+      wary glance, as if acknowledging that it held some secret, but at the same
+      time defying him to find it out. And then again came that visionary
+      feeling that had so often swept over him since he had been an inmate of
+      the Hospital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All over the interior part of the building was carved in stone the
+      leopard&rsquo;s head, with wearisome iteration; as if the founder were anxious
+      to imprint his device so numerously, lest&mdash;when he produced this
+      edifice as his remuneration to Eternal Justice for many sins&mdash;the
+      Omniscient Eye should fail to be reminded that Sir Edward Redclyffe had
+      done it. But, at all events, it seemed to Redclyffe that the ancient
+      knight had purposed a good thing, and in a measurable degree had effected
+      it; for here stood the venerable edifice securely founded, bearing the
+      moss of four hundred years upon it; and though wars, and change of
+      dynasties, and religious change, had swept around it, with seemingly
+      destructive potency, yet here had the lodging, the food, the monastic
+      privileges of the brethren been held secure, and were unchanged by all the
+      altering mariners of the age. The old fellow, somehow or other, seemed to
+      have struck upon an everlasting rock, and founded his pompous charity
+      there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They entered an arched door on the left of the quadrangle, and found
+      themselves hi a dark old hall with oaken beams; to say the truth, it was a
+      barn-like sort of enclosure, and was now used as a sort of rubbish-place
+      for the Hospital, where they stored away old furniture, and where
+      carpenter&rsquo;s work might be done. And yet, as the Warden assured Redclyffe,
+      it was once a hall of state, hung with tapestry, carpeted, for aught he
+      knew, with cloth of gold, and set with rich furniture, and a groaning
+      board in the midst. Here, the hereditary patron of the Hospital had once
+      entertained King James the First, who made a Latin speech on the occasion,
+      a copy of which was still preserved in the archives. On the rafters of
+      this old hall there were cobwebs in such abundance that Redclyffe could
+      not but reflect on the joy which old Doctor Grimshawe would have had in
+      seeing them, and the health to the human race which he would have hoped to
+      collect and distil from them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this great, antique room they crossed the quadrangle and entered the
+      kitchen of the establishment. A hospitable fire was burning there, and
+      there seemed to be a great variety of messes cooking; and the Warden
+      explained to Redclyffe that there was no general table in the Hospital;
+      but the brethren, at their own will and pleasure, either formed themselves
+      into companies or messes, of any convenient size, or enjoyed a solitary
+      meal by themselves, each in their own apartments. There was a goodly
+      choice of simple, but good and enjoyable food, and a sufficient supply of
+      potent ale, brewed in the vats of the Hospital, which, among its other
+      praiseworthy characteristics, was famous for this; having at some epoch
+      presumed to vie with the famous ale of Trinity, in Cambridge, and the
+      Archdeacon of Oxford,&mdash;these having come down to the hospital from a
+      private receipt of Sir Edward&rsquo;s butler, which was now lost in the
+      Redclyffe family; nor would the ungrateful Hospital give up its secret
+      even out of loyalty to its founder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would use my influence with the brewer,&rdquo; said the Warden, on
+      communicating this little fact to Redclyffe; &ldquo;but the present man&mdash;now
+      owner of the estate&mdash;is not worthy to have good ale brewed in his
+      house; having himself no taste for anything but Italian wines, wretched
+      fellow that he is! He might make himself an Englishman if he would take
+      heartily to our ale; and with that end in view, I should be glad to give
+      it him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The kitchen fire blazed warmly, as we have said, and roast and stewed and
+      boiled were in process of cooking, producing a pleasant fume, while great
+      heaps of wheaten loaves were smoking hot from the ovens, and the master
+      cook and his subordinates were in fume and hiss, like beings that were of
+      a fiery element, and, though irritable and scorching, yet were happier
+      here than they could have been in any other situation. The Warden seemed
+      to have an especial interest and delight in this department of the
+      Hospital, and spoke apart to the head cook on the subject (as Redclyffe
+      surmised from what he overheard) of some especial delicacy for his own
+      table that day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This kitchen is a genial place,&rdquo; said he to Redclyffe, as they retired.
+      &ldquo;In the evening, after the cooks have done their work, the brethren have
+      liberty to use it as a sort of common room, and to sit here over their ale
+      till a reasonable bedtime. It would interest you much to make one at such
+      a party; for they have had a varied experience in life, each one for
+      himself, and it would be strange to hear the varied roads by which they
+      have come hither.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; replied Redclyffe, &ldquo;and, I presume, not one of them ever dreamed of
+      coming hither when he started in life. The only one with whom I am
+      acquainted could hardly have expected it, at all events.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is a remarkable man, more so than you may have had an opportunity of
+      knowing,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;I know not his history, for he is not
+      communicative on that subject, and it was only necessary for him to make
+      out his proofs of claim to the charity to the satisfaction of the
+      Curators. But it has often struck me that there must have been strange and
+      striking events in his life,&mdash;though how it could have been without
+      his attracting attention and being known, I cannot say. I have myself
+      often received good counsel from him in the conduct of the Hospital, and
+      the present owner of the Hall seems to have taken him for his counsellor
+      and confidant, being himself strange to English affairs and life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should like to call on him, as a matter of course rather than
+      courtesy,&rdquo; observed Redclyffe, &ldquo;and thank him for his great kindness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They accordingly ascended the dark oaken staircase with its black
+      balustrade, and approached the old man&rsquo;s chamber, the door of which they
+      found open, and in the blurred looking-glass which hung deep within the
+      room Redclyffe was surprised to perceive the young face of a woman, who
+      seemed to be arranging her head-gear, as women are always doing. It was
+      but a moment, and then it vanished like a vision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was not aware,&rdquo; he said, turning to the Warden, &ldquo;that there was a
+      feminine side to this establishment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor is there,&rdquo; said the old bachelor, &ldquo;else it would not have held
+      together so many ages as it has. The establishment has its own wise,
+      monkish regulations; but we cannot prevent the fact, that some of the
+      brethren may have had foolish relations with the other sex at some
+      previous period of their lives. This seems to be the case with our wise
+      old friend of whom we have been speaking,&mdash;whereby he doubtless
+      became both wiser and sadder. If you have seen a female face here, it is
+      that of a relative who resides out of the hospital,&mdash;an excellent
+      young lady, I believe, who has charge of a school.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While he was speaking, the young lady in question passed out, greeting the
+      Warden in a cheerful, respectful way, in which deference to him was well
+      combined with a sense of what was due to herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That,&rdquo; observed the Warden, who had returned her courtesy, with a kindly
+      air betwixt that of gentlemanly courtesy and a superior&rsquo;s acknowledgment,&mdash;&ldquo;that
+      is the relative of our old friend; a young person&mdash;a gentlewoman, I
+      may almost call her&mdash;who teaches a little school in the village here,
+      and keeps her guardian&rsquo;s heart warm, no doubt, with her presence. An
+      excellent young woman, I do believe, and very useful and faithful in her
+      station.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On entering the old palmer&rsquo;s apartment, they found him looking over some
+      ancient papers, yellow and crabbedly written, and on one of them a large
+      old seal, all of which he did up in a bundle and enclosed in a parchment
+      cover, so that, before they were well in the room, the documents were
+      removed from view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Those papers and parchments have a fine old yellow tint, Colcord,&rdquo; said
+      the Warden, &ldquo;very satisfactory to an antiquary.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is nothing in them,&rdquo; said the old man, &ldquo;of general interest. Some
+      old papers they are, which came into my possession by inheritance, and
+      some of them relating to the affairs of a friend of my youth;&mdash;a long
+      past time, and a long past friend,&rdquo; added he, sighing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here is a new friend, at all events,&rdquo; said the kindly Warden, wishing to
+      cheer the old man, &ldquo;who feels himself greatly indebted to you for your
+      care.&rdquo; [Endnote: 1.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There now ensued a conversation between the three, in the course of which
+      reference was made to America, and the Warden&rsquo;s visit there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are so mobile,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you change so speedily, that I suppose
+      there are few external things now that I should recognize. The face of
+      your country changes like one of your own sheets of water, under the
+      influence of sun, cloud, and wind; but I suppose there is a depth below
+      that is seldom effectually stirred. It is a great fault of the country
+      that its sons find it impossible to feel any patriotism for it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not by any means acknowledge that impossibility,&rdquo; responded
+      Redclyffe, with a smile. &ldquo;I certainly feel that sentiment very strongly in
+      my own breast, more especially since I have left America three thousand
+      miles behind me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, it is only the feeling of self-assertion that rises against the
+      self-complacency of the English,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;Nothing else; for what
+      else have you become the subject of this noble weakness of patriotism? You
+      cannot love anything beyond the soil of your own estate; or in your case,
+      if your heart is very large, you may possibly take in, in a quiet sort of
+      way, the whole of New England. What more is possible? How can you feel a
+      heart&rsquo;s love for a mere political arrangement, like your Union? How can
+      you be loyal, where personal attachment&mdash;the lofty and noble and
+      unselfish attachment of a subject to his prince&mdash;is out of the
+      question? where your sovereign is felt to be a mere man like yourselves,
+      whose petty struggles, whose ambition&mdash;mean before it grew to be
+      audacious&mdash;you have watched, and know him to be just the same now as
+      yesterday, and that to-morrow he will be walking unhonored amongst you
+      again? Your system is too bare and meagre for human nature to love, or to
+      endure it long. These stately degrees of society, that have so strong a
+      hold upon us in England, are not to be done away with so lightly as you
+      think. Your experiment is not yet a success by any means; and you will
+      live to see it result otherwise than you think!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is natural for you Englishmen to feel thus,&rdquo; said Redclyffe;
+      &ldquo;although, ever since I set my foot on your shores,&mdash;forgive me, but
+      you set me the example of free speech,&mdash;I have had a feeling of
+      coming change among all that you look upon as so permanent, so
+      everlasting; and though your thoughts dwell fondly on things as they are
+      and have been, there is a deep destruction somewhere in this country, that
+      is inevitably impelling it in the path of my own. But I care not for this.
+      I do aver that I love my country, that I am proud of its institutions,
+      that I have a feeling unknown, probably, to any but a republican, but
+      which is the proudest thing in me, that there is no man above me,&mdash;for
+      my ruler is only myself, in the person of another, whose office I impose
+      upon him,&mdash;nor any below me. If you would understand me, I would tell
+      you of the shame I felt when first, on setting foot in this country, I
+      heard a man speaking of his birth as giving him privileges; saw him
+      looking down on laboring men, as of an inferior race. And what I can never
+      understand, is the pride which you positively seem to feel in having men
+      and classes of men above you, born to privileges which you can never hope
+      to share. It may be a thing to be endured, but surely not one to be
+      absolutely proud of. And yet an Englishman is so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! I see we lack a ground to meet upon,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;We can never
+      truly understand each other. What you have last mentioned is one of our
+      inner mysteries. It is not a thing to be reasoned about, but to be felt,&mdash;to
+      be born within one; and I uphold it to be a generous sentiment, and good
+      for the human heart.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Forgive me, sir,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;but I would rather be the poorest and
+      lowest man in America than have that sentiment.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it might change your feeling, perhaps,&rdquo; suggested the Warden, &ldquo;if you
+      were one of the privileged class.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dare not say that it would not,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;for I know I have a
+      thousand weaknesses, and have doubtless as many more that I never
+      suspected myself of. But it seems to me at this moment impossible that I
+      should ever have such an ambition, because I have a sense of meanness in
+      not starting fair, in beginning the world with advantages that my fellows
+      have not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Really this is not wise,&rdquo; said the Warden, bluntly, &ldquo;How can the start in
+      life be fair for all? Providence arranges it otherwise. Did you yourself,&mdash;a
+      gentleman evidently by birth and education,&mdash;did you start fair in
+      the race of life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe remembered what his birth, or rather what his first recollected
+      place had been, and reddened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In birth, certainly, I had no advantages,&rdquo; said he, and would have
+      explained further but was kept back by invincible reluctance; feeling that
+      the bare fact of his origin in an almshouse would be accepted, while all
+      the inward assurances and imaginations that had reconciled himself to the
+      ugly fact would go for nothing. &ldquo;But there were advantages, very early in
+      life,&rdquo; added he, smiling, &ldquo;which perhaps I ought to have been ashamed to
+      avail myself of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An old cobwebby library,&mdash;an old dwelling by a graveyard,&mdash;an
+      old Doctor, busied with his own fantasies, and entangled in his own
+      cobwebs,&mdash;and a little girl for a playmate: these were things that
+      you might lawfully avail yourself of,&rdquo; said Colcord, unheard by the
+      Warden, who, thinking the conversation had lasted long enough, had paid a
+      slight passing courtesy to the old man, and was now leaving the room. &ldquo;Do
+      you remain here long?&rdquo; he added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If the Warden&rsquo;s hospitality holds out,&rdquo; said the American, &ldquo;I shall be
+      glad; for the place interests me greatly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No wonder,&rdquo; replied Colcord.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And wherefore no wonder?&rdquo; said Redclyffe, impressed with the idea that
+      there was something peculiar in the tone of the old man&rsquo;s remark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because,&rdquo; returned the other quietly, &ldquo;it must be to you especially
+      interesting to see an institution of this kind, whereby one man&rsquo;s
+      benevolence or penitence is made to take the substance and durability of
+      stone, and last for centuries; whereas, in America, the solemn decrees and
+      resolutions of millions melt away like vapor, and everything shifts like
+      the pomp of sunset clouds; though it may be as pompous as they. Heaven
+      intended the past as a foundation for the present, to keep it from
+      vibrating and being blown away with every breeze.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;I would not see in my country what I see
+      elsewhere,&mdash;the Past hanging like a mill-stone round a country&rsquo;s
+      neck, or encrusted in stony layers over the living form; so that, to all
+      intents and purposes, it is dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Colcord, &ldquo;we are only talking of the Hospital. You will find
+      no more interesting place anywhere. Stay amongst us; this is the very
+      heart of England, and if you wish to know the fatherland,&mdash;the place
+      whence you sprung,&mdash;this is the very spot!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again Redclyffe was struck with the impression that there was something
+      marked, something individually addressed to himself, in the old man&rsquo;s
+      words; at any rate, it appealed to that primal imaginative vein in him
+      which had so often, in his own country, allowed itself to dream over the
+      possibilities of his birth. He knew that the feeling was a vague and idle
+      one; but yet, just at this time, a convalescent, with a little play moment
+      in what had heretofore been a turbulent life, he felt an inclination to
+      follow out this dream, and let it sport with him, and by and by to awake
+      to realities, refreshed by a season of unreality. At a firmer and stronger
+      period of his life, though Redclyffe might have indulged his imagination
+      with these dreams, yet he would not have let them interfere with his
+      course of action; but having come hither in utter weariness of active
+      life, it seemed just the thing for him to do,&mdash;just the fool&rsquo;s
+      paradise for him to be in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; repeated the old man, looking keenly in his face, &ldquo;you will not
+      leave us yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe returned through the quadrangle to the Warden&rsquo;s house; and there
+      were the brethren, sitting on benches, loitering in the sun, which, though
+      warm for England, seemed scarcely enough to keep these old people warm,
+      even with their cloth robes. They did not seem unhappy; nor yet happy; if
+      they were so, it must be with the mere bliss of existence, a sleepy sense
+      of comfort, and quiet dreaminess about things past, leaving out the things
+      to come,&mdash;of which there was nothing, indeed, in their future, save
+      one day after another, just like this, with loaf and ale, and such
+      substantial comforts, and prayers, and idle days again, gathering by the
+      great kitchen fire, and at last a day when they should not be there, but
+      some other old men in their stead. And Redclyffe wondered whether, in the
+      extremity of age, he himself would like to be one of the brethren of the
+      Leopard&rsquo;s Head. The old men, he was sorry to see, did not seem very genial
+      towards one another; in fact, there appeared to be a secret enjoyment of
+      one another&rsquo;s infirmities, wherefore it was hard to tell, unless that each
+      individual might fancy himself to possess an advantage over his fellow,
+      which he mistook for a positive strength; and so there was sometimes a
+      sardonic smile, when, on rising from his seat, the rheumatism was a little
+      evident in an old fellow&rsquo;s joints; or when the palsy shook another&rsquo;s
+      fingers so that he could barely fill his pipe; or when a cough, the
+      gathered spasmodic trouble of thirty years, fairly convulsed another.
+      Then, any two that happened to be sitting near one another looked into
+      each other&rsquo;s cold eyes, and whispered, or suggested merely by a look (for
+      they were bright to such perceptions), &ldquo;The old fellow will not outlast
+      another winter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Methinks it is not good for old men to be much together. An old man is a
+      beautiful object in his own place, in the midst of a circle of young
+      people, going down in various gradations to infancy, and all looking up to
+      the patriarch with filial reverence, keeping him warm by their own burning
+      youth; giving him the freshness of their thought and feeling, with such
+      natural influx that it seems as if it grew within his heart; while on them
+      he reacts with an influence that sobers, tempers, keeps them down. His
+      wisdom, very probably, is of no great account,&mdash;he cannot fit to any
+      new state of things; but, nevertheless, it works its effect. In such a
+      situation, the old man is kind and genial, mellow, more gentle and
+      generous, and wider-minded than ever before. But if left to himself, or
+      wholly to the society of his contemporaries, the ice gathers about his
+      heart, his hope grows torpid, his love&mdash;having nothing of his own
+      blood to develop it&mdash;grows cold; he becomes selfish, when he has
+      nothing in the present or the future worth caring about in himself; so
+      that, instead of a beautiful object, he is an ugly one, little, mean, and
+      torpid. I suppose one chief reason to be, that unless he has his own race
+      about him he doubts of anybody&rsquo;s love, he feels himself a stranger in the
+      world, and so becomes unamiable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A very few days in the Warden&rsquo;s hospitable mansion produced an excellent
+      effect on Redclyffe&rsquo;s frame; his constitution being naturally excellent,
+      and a flow of cheerful spirits contributing much to restore him to health,
+      especially as the abode in this old place, which would probably have been
+      intolerably dull to most young Englishmen, had for this young American a
+      charm like the freshness of Paradise. In truth it had that charm, and
+      besides it another intangible, evanescent, perplexing charm, full of an
+      airy enjoyment, as if he had been here before. What could it be? It could
+      be only the old, very deepest, inherent nature, which the Englishman, his
+      progenitor, carried over the sea with him, nearly two hundred years
+      before, and which had lain buried all that time under heaps of new things,
+      new customs, new institutions, new snows of winter, new layers of forest
+      leaves, until it seemed dead, and was altogether forgotten as if it had
+      never been; but, now, his return had seemed to dissolve or dig away all
+      this incrustation, and the old English nature awoke all fresh, so that he
+      saw the green grass, the hedgerows, the old structures and old manners,
+      the old clouds, the old raindrops, with a recognition, and yet a newness.
+      Redclyffe had never been so quietly happy as now. He had, as it were, the
+      quietude of the old man about him, and the freshness of his own still
+      youthful years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Warden was evidently very favorably impressed with his Transatlantic
+      guest, and he seemed to be in a constant state of surprise to find an
+      American so agreeable a kind of person.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are just like an Englishman,&rdquo; he sometimes said. &ldquo;Are you quite sure
+      that you were not born on this side of the water?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This is said to be the highest compliment that an Englishman can pay to an
+      American; and doubtless he intends it as such. All the praise and good
+      will that an Englishman ever awards to an American is so far gratifying to
+      the recipient, that it is meant for him individually, and is not to be put
+      down in the slightest degree to the score of any regard to his countrymen
+      generally. So far from this, if an Englishman were to meet the whole
+      thirty millions of Americans, and find each individual of them a pleasant,
+      amiable, well-meaning, and well-mannered sort of fellow, he would
+      acknowledge this honestly in each individual case, but still would speak
+      of the whole nation as a disagreeable people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As regards Redclyffe being precisely like an Englishman, we cannot but
+      think that the good Warden was mistaken. No doubt, there was a common
+      ground; the old progenitor (whose blood, moreover, was mixed with a
+      hundred other streams equally English) was still there, under this young
+      man&rsquo;s shape, but with a vast difference. Climate, sun, cold, heat, soil,
+      institutions, had made a change in him before he was born, and all the
+      life that he had lived since (so unlike any that he could have lived in
+      England) had developed it more strikingly. In manners, I cannot but think
+      that he was better than the generality of Englishmen, and different from
+      the highest-mannered men, though most resembling them. His natural
+      sensitiveness, a tincture of reserve, had been counteracted by the frank
+      mixture with men which his political course had made necessary; he was
+      quicker to feel what was right at the moment, than the Englishman; more
+      alive; he had a finer grain; his look was more aristocratic than that of a
+      thousand Englishmen of good birth and breeding; he had a faculty of
+      assimilating himself to new manners, which, being his most un-English
+      trait, was what perhaps chiefly made the Warden think him so like an
+      Englishman. When an Englishman is a gentleman, to be sure, it is as deep
+      in him as the marrow of his bones, and the deeper you know him, the more
+      you are aware of it, and that generation after generation has contributed
+      to develop and perfect these unpretending manners, which, at first, may
+      have failed to impress you, under his plain, almost homely exterior. An
+      American often gets as good a surface of manners, in his own progress from
+      youth, through the wear and attrition of a successful life, to some high
+      station in middle age; whereas a plebeian Englishman, who rises to eminent
+      station, never does credit to it by his manners. Often you would not know
+      the American ambassador from a duke. This is often merely external; but in
+      Redclyffe, having delicate original traits in his character, it was
+      something more; and, we are bold to say, when our countrymen are
+      developed, or any one class of them, as they ought to be, they will show
+      finer traits than have yet been seen. We have more delicate and quicker
+      sensibilities; nerves more easily impressed; and these are surely
+      requisites for perfect manners; and, moreover, the courtesy that proceeds
+      on the ground of perfect equality is better than that which is a gracious
+      and benignant condescension,&mdash;as is the case with the manners of the
+      aristocracy of England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An American, be it said, seldom turns his best side outermost abroad; and
+      an observer, who has had much opportunity of seeing the figure which they
+      make, in a foreign country, does not so much wonder that there should be
+      severe criticism on their manners as a people. I know not exactly why, but
+      all our imputed peculiarities&mdash;our nasal pronunciation, our
+      ungraceful idioms, our forthputtingness, our uncouth lack of courtesy&mdash;do
+      really seem to exist on a foreign shore; and even, perhaps, to be
+      heightened of malice prepense. The cold, unbelieving eye of Englishmen,
+      expectant of solecisms in manners, contributes to produce the result which
+      it looks for. Then the feeling of hostility and defiance in the American
+      must be allowed for; and partly, too, the real existence of a different
+      code of manners, founded on, and arising from, different institutions; and
+      also certain national peculiarities, which may be intrinsically as good as
+      English peculiarities; but being different, and yet the whole result being
+      just too nearly alike, and, moreover, the English manners having the
+      prestige of long establishment, and furthermore our own manners being in a
+      transition state between those of old monarchies and what is proper to a
+      new republic,&mdash;it necessarily followed that the American, though
+      really a man of refinement and delicacy, is not just the kind of gentleman
+      that the English can fully appreciate. In cases where they do so, their
+      standard being different from ours, they do not always select for their
+      approbation the kind of man or manners whom we should judge the best; we
+      are perhaps apt to be a little too fine, a little too sedulously polished,
+      and of course too conscious of it,&mdash;a deadly social crime, certainly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      To return from this long discussion, the Warden took kindly, as we have
+      said, to Redclyffe, and thought him a miraculously good fellow, to have
+      come from the rude American republic. Hitherto, in the little time that he
+      had been in England, Redclyffe had received civil and even kind treatment
+      from the English with whom he had come casually in contact; but still&mdash;perhaps
+      partly from our Yankee narrowness and reserve&mdash;he had felt, in the
+      closest coming together, as if there were a naked sword between the
+      Englishman and him, as between the Arabian prince in the tale and the
+      princess whom he wedded; he felt as if that would be the case even if he
+      should love an Englishwoman; to such a distance, into such an attitude of
+      self-defence, does English self-complacency and belief in England&rsquo;s
+      superiority throw the stranger. In fact, in a good-natured way, John Bull
+      is always doubling his fist in a stranger&rsquo;s face, and though it be
+      good-natured, it does not always produce the most amiable feeling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The worthy Warden, being an Englishman, had doubtless the same kind of
+      feeling; doubtless, too, he thought ours a poor, distracted country,
+      perhaps prosperous for the moment, but as likely as not to be the scene of
+      anarchy five minutes hence; but being of so genial a nature, when he came
+      to see the amiableness of his young guest, and how deeply he was impressed
+      with England, all prejudice died away, and he loved him like a treasure
+      that he had found for himself, and valued him as if there were something
+      of his own in him. And so the old Warden&rsquo;s residence had never before been
+      so cheery as it was now; his bachelor life passed the more pleasantly with
+      this quiet, vivacious, yet not troublesomely restless spirit beside him,&mdash;this
+      eager, almost childish interest in everything English, and yet this
+      capacity to take independent views of things, and sometimes, it might be,
+      to throw a gleam of light even on things appertaining to England. And so,
+      the better they came to know one another, the greater was their mutual
+      liking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I fear I am getting too strong to burden you much longer,&rdquo; said
+      Redclyffe, this morning. &ldquo;I have no pretence to be a patient now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pooh! nonsense!&rdquo; ejaculated the Warden. &ldquo;It will not be safe to leave you
+      to yourself for at least a month to come. And I have half a dozen
+      excursions in a neighborhood of twenty miles, in which I mean to show you
+      what old England is, in a way that you would never find out for yourself.
+      Do not speak of going. This day, if you find yourself strong enough, you
+      shall go and look at an old village church.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With all my heart,&rdquo; said Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They went, accordingly, walking slowly, in consequence of Redclyffe&rsquo;s yet
+      imperfect strength, along the highroad, which was overshadowed with elms,
+      that grew in beautiful shape and luxuriance in that part of England, not
+      with the slender, drooping, picturesque grace of a New England elm, but
+      more luxuriant, fuller of leaves, sturdier in limb. It was a day which the
+      Warden called fine, and which Redclyffe, at home, would have thought to
+      bode rain; though here he had learned that such weather might continue for
+      weeks together, with only a few raindrops all the time. The road was in
+      the finest condition, hard and dry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had not long emerged from the gateway of the Hospital,&mdash;at the
+      venerable front and gables of which Redclyffe turned to look with a
+      feeling as if it were his home,&mdash;when they heard the clatter of hoofs
+      behind them, and a gentleman on horseback rode by, paying a courteous
+      salute to the Warden as he passed. A groom in livery followed at a little
+      distance, and both rode roundly towards the village, whither the Warden
+      and his friend were going.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you observe that man?&rdquo; asked the Warden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;Is he an Englishman?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is a pertinent question,&rdquo; replied the Warden, &ldquo;but I scarcely know
+      how to answer it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In truth, Redclyffe&rsquo;s question had been suggested by the appearance of the
+      mounted gentleman, who was a dark, thin man, with black hair, and a black
+      moustache and pointed beard setting off his sallow face, in which the eyes
+      had a certain pointed steeliness, which did not look English,&mdash;whose
+      eyes, methinks, are usually not so hard as those of Americans or
+      foreigners. Redclyffe, somehow or other, had fancied that these not very
+      pleasant eyes had been fixed in a marked way on himself, a stranger, while
+      at the same time his salute was evidently directed towards the Warden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An Englishman,&mdash;why, no,&rdquo; continued the latter. &ldquo;If you observe, he
+      does not even sit his horse like an Englishman, but in that absurd, stiff
+      continental way, as if a poker should get on horseback. Neither has he an
+      English face, English manners, nor English religion, nor an English heart;
+      nor, to sum up the whole, had he English birth. Nevertheless, as fate
+      would have it, he is the inheritor of a good old English name, a fine
+      patrimonial estate, and a very probable claim to an old English title.
+      This is Lord Braithwaite of Braithwaite Hall, who if he can make his case
+      good (and they say there is good prospect of it) will soon be Lord
+      Hinchbrooke.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hardly know why, but I should be sorry for it,&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;He
+      certainly is not English; and I have an odd sort of sympathy, which makes
+      me unwilling that English honors should be enjoyed by foreigners. This,
+      then, is the gentleman of Italian birth whom you have mentioned to me, and
+      of whom there is a slight mention in the County History.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;There have been three descents of this man&rsquo;s
+      branch in Italy, and only one English mother in all that time. Positively,
+      I do not see an English trait in his face, and as little in his manner.
+      His civility is Italian, such as oftentimes, among his countrymen, has
+      offered a cup of poison to a guest, or insinuated the stab of a stiletto
+      into his heart.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are particularly bitter against this poor man,&rdquo; said Redclyffe,
+      laughing at the Warden&rsquo;s vehemence. &ldquo;His appearance&mdash;and yet he is a
+      handsome man&mdash;is certainly not prepossessing; but unless it be
+      countersigned by something in his actual life, I should hardly think it
+      worth while to condemn him utterly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, well; you can forgive a little English prejudice,&rdquo; said the Warden,
+      a little ashamed. &ldquo;But, in good earnest, the man has few or no good
+      traits, takes no interest in the country, dislikes our sky, our earth, our
+      people, is close and inhospitable, a hard landlord, and whatever may be
+      his good qualities, they are not such as flourish in this soil and
+      climate, or can be appreciated here.&rdquo; [Endnote: 1.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has he children?&rdquo; asked Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They say so,&mdash;a family by an Italian wife, whom some, on the other
+      hand, pronounce to be no wife at all. His son is at a Catholic college in
+      France; his daughter in a convent there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In talk like this they were drawing near the little rustic village of
+      Braithwaite, and saw, above a cloud of foliage, the small, low,
+      battlemented tower, the gray stones of which had probably been laid a
+      little after the Norman conquest. Approaching nearer, they passed a
+      thatched cottage or two, very plain and simple edifices, though
+      interesting to Redclyffe from their antique aspect, which denoted that
+      they were probably older than the settlement of his own country, and might
+      very likely have nursed children who had gone, more than two centuries
+      ago, to found the commonwealth of which he was a citizen. If you
+      considered them in one way, prosaically, they were ugly enough; but then
+      there were the old latticed windows, and there the thatch, which was
+      verdant with leek, and strange weeds, possessing a whole botanical growth.
+      And birds flew in and out, as if they had their homes there. Then came a
+      row of similar cottages, all joined on together, and each with a little
+      garden before it divided from its neighbors by a hedge, now in full
+      verdure. Redclyffe was glad to see some symptoms of natural love of beauty
+      here, for there were plants of box, cut into queer shapes of birds,
+      peacocks, etc., as if year after year had been spent in bringing these
+      vegetable sculptures to perfection. In one of the gardens, moreover, the
+      ingenious inhabitant had spent his leisure in building grotto-work, of
+      which the English are rather ludicrously fond, on their little bits of
+      lawn, and in building a miniature castle of oyster-shells, where were seen
+      turrets, ramparts, a frowning arched gateway, and miniature cannon looking
+      from the embrasures. A pleasanter and better adornment were the homely
+      household flowers, and a pleasant sound, too, was the hum of bees, who had
+      their home in several beehives, and were making their honey among the
+      flowers of the garden, or come from afar, buzzing dreamily through the
+      air, laden with honey that they had found elsewhere. Fruit trees stood
+      erect, or, in some instances, were flattened out against the walls of
+      cottages, looking somewhat like hawks nailed <i>in terrorem</i> against a
+      barn door. The male members of this little community were probably afield,
+      with the exception of one or two half-torpid great-grandsires, who [were]
+      moving rheumatically about the gardens, and some children not yet in
+      breeches, who stared with stolid eyes at the passers-by; but the good
+      dames were busy within doors, where Redclyffe had glimpses of their
+      interior with its pavement of stone flags. Altogether it seemed a
+      comfortable settlement enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you see that child yonder,&rdquo; observed the Warden, &ldquo;creeping away from
+      the door, and displaying a vista of his petticoats as he does so? That
+      sturdy boy is the lineal heir of one of the oldest families in this part
+      of England,&mdash;though now decayed and fallen, as you may judge. So, you
+      see, with all our contrivances to keep up an aristocracy, there still is
+      change forever going on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is something not agreeable, and something otherwise, in the
+      thought,&rdquo; replied Redclyffe. &ldquo;What is the name of the old family, whose
+      representative is in such a case?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Moseby,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;Their family residence stood within three
+      miles of Braithwaite Hall, but was taken down in the last century, and its
+      place supplied by a grand show-place, built by a Birmingham manufacturer,
+      who also originated here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They kept onward from this outskirt of the village, and soon, passing over
+      a little rising ground, and descending now into a hollow came to the new
+      portion of it, clustered around its gray Norman church, one side of the
+      tower of which was covered with ivy, that was carefully kept, the Warden
+      said, from climbing to the battlements, on account of some old prophecy
+      that foretold that the tower would fall, if ever the ivy mantled over its
+      top. Certainly, however, there seemed little likelihood that the square,
+      low mass would fall, unless by external violence, in less than as many
+      ages as it had already stood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe looked at the old tower and little adjoining edifice with an
+      interest that attached itself to every separate, moss-grown stone; but the
+      Warden, like most Englishmen, was at once amazed and wearied with the
+      American&rsquo;s enthusiasm for this spot, which to him was uninteresting for
+      the very reason that made it most interesting to Redclyffe, because it had
+      stood there such a weary while. It was too common an object to excite in
+      his mind, as it did in Redclyffe&rsquo;s, visions of the long ago time when it
+      was founded, when mass was first said there, and the glimmer of torches at
+      the altar was seen through the vista of that broad-browed porch; and of
+      all the procession of villagers that had since gone in and come out during
+      nine hundred years, in their varying costume and fashion, but yet&mdash;and
+      this was the strongest and most thrilling part of the idea&mdash;all, the
+      very oldest of them, bearing a resemblance of feature, the kindred, the
+      family likeness, to those who died yesterday,&mdash;to those who still
+      went thither to worship; and that all the grassy and half-obliterated
+      graves around had held those who bore the same traits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In front of the church was a little green, on which stood a very ancient
+      yew tree, [Endnote: 2] all the heart of which seemed to have been eaten
+      away by time, so that a man could now creep into the trunk, through a wide
+      opening, and, looking upward, see another opening to the sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That tree,&rdquo; observed the Warden, &ldquo;is well worth the notice of such an
+      enthusiastic lover of old things; though I suppose aged trees may be the
+      one antiquity that you do not value, having them by myriads in your
+      primeval forests. But then the interest of this tree consists greatly in
+      what your trees have not,&mdash;in its long connection with men and the
+      goings of men. Some of its companions were made into bows for Harold&rsquo;s
+      archers. This tree is of unreckonable antiquity; so old, that in a record
+      of the time of Edward IV. it is styled the yew tree of Braithwaite Green.
+      That carries it back to Norman times, truly. It was in comparatively
+      modern times when it served as a gallows for one of James II.&lsquo;s
+      bloodthirsty judges to hang his victims on after Monmouth&rsquo;s rebellion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On one side of this yew was a certain structure which Redclyffe did not
+      recognize as anything that he had before seen, but soon guessed its
+      purpose; though, from appearances, it seemed to have been very long since
+      it had served that purpose. It was a ponderous old oaken framework, six or
+      seven feet high, so contrived that a heavy cross-piece shut down over
+      another, leaving two round holes; in short, it was a pair of stocks, in
+      which, I suppose, hundreds of vagrants and petty criminals had sat of old,
+      but which now appeared to be merely a matter of curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This excellent old machine,&rdquo; said the Warden, &ldquo;had been lying in a
+      rubbish chamber of the church tower for at least a century; when the
+      clerk, who is a little of an antiquarian, unearthed it, and I advised him
+      to set it here, where it used to stand;&mdash;not with any idea of its
+      being used (though there is as much need of it now as ever), but that the
+      present age may see what comforts it has lost.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They sat down a few moments on the circular seat, and looked at the pretty
+      scene of this quiet little village, clustered round the old church as a
+      centre; a collection of houses, mostly thatched, though there were one or
+      two, with rather more pretension, that had roofs of red tiles. Some of
+      them were stone cottages, whitewashed, but the larger edifices had timber
+      frames, filled in with brick and plaster, which seemed to have been
+      renewed in patches, and to be a frailer and less durable material than the
+      old oak of their skeletons. They were gabled, with lattice windows, and
+      picturesquely set off with projecting stones, and many little patchwork
+      additions, such as, in the course of generations, the inhabitants had
+      found themselves to need. There was not much commerce, apparently, in this
+      little village, there seeming to be only one shop, with some gingerbread,
+      penny whistles, ballads, and such matters, displayed in the window; and
+      there, too, across the little green, opposite the church, was the village
+      alehouse, with its bench under the low projecting eaves, with a Teniers
+      scene of two wayfaring yeomen drinking a pot of beer and smoking their
+      pipes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With Redclyffe&rsquo;s Yankee feelings, there was something sad to think how the
+      generations had succeeded one another, over and over, in innumerable
+      succession, in this little spot, being born here, living, dying, lying
+      down among their fathers&rsquo; dust, and forthwith getting up again, as it
+      were, and recommencing the same meaningless round, and really bringing
+      nothing to pass; for probably the generation of to-day, in so secluded and
+      motionless a place as this, had few or no ideas in advance of their
+      ancestors of five centuries ago. It seems not worth while that more than
+      one generation of them should have existed. Even in dress, with their
+      smock frocks and breeches, they were just like their fathers. The stirring
+      blood of the new land,&mdash;where no man dwells in his father&rsquo;s house,&mdash;where
+      no man thinks of dying in his birthplace,&mdash;awoke within him, and
+      revolted at the thought; and, as connected with it, revolted at all the
+      hereditary pretensions which, since his stay here, had exercised such an
+      influence over the fanciful part of his nature. In another mood, the
+      village might have seemed a picture of rural peace, which it would have
+      been worth while to give up ambition to enjoy; now, as his warmer impulse
+      stirred, it was a weariness to think of. The new American was stronger in
+      him than the hereditary Englishman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should go mad of it!&rdquo; exclaimed he aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He started up impulsively, to the amazement of his companion, who of
+      course could not comprehend what seemed so to have stung his American
+      friend. As they passed the tree, on the other side of its huge trunk, they
+      saw a young woman, sitting on that side of it, and sketching, apparently,
+      the church tower, with the old Elizabethan vicarage that stood near it,
+      with a gate opening into the churchyard, and much embowered and ivy-hung.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, Miss Cheltenham,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;I am glad to see that you have
+      taken the old church in hand, for it is one of the prettiest rustic
+      churches in England, and as well worthy as any to be engraved on a sheet
+      of note-paper or put into a portfolio. Will you let my friend and me see
+      your sketch?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Warden had made his request with rather more freedom than perhaps he
+      would to a lady whom he considered on a level with himself, though with
+      perfect respect, that being considered; and Redclyffe, looking at the
+      person, saw that it was the same of whose face he had had a glimpse in the
+      looking-glass, in the old palmer&rsquo;s chamber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Doctor Hammond,&rdquo; said the young lady, with a respectful sort of
+      frankness, &ldquo;you must excuse me. I am no good artist, and am but jotting
+      down the old church because I like it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, well, as you please,&rdquo; said the Warden; and whispered aside to
+      Redclyffe, &ldquo;A girl&rsquo;s sketchbook is seldom worth looking at. But now, Miss
+      Cheltenham, I am about to give my American friend here a lecture on
+      gargoyles, and other peculiarities of sacred Gothic architecture; and if
+      you will honor me with your attention, I should be glad to find my
+      audience increased by one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So the young lady arose, and Redclyffe, considering the Warden&rsquo;s allusion
+      to him as a sort of partial introduction, bowed to her, and she responded
+      with a cold, reserved, yet not unpleasant sort of courtesy. They went
+      towards the church porch, and, looking in at the old stone bench on each
+      side of the interior, the Warden showed them the hacks of the swords of
+      the Roundheads, when they took it by storm. Redclyffe, mindful of the old
+      graveyard on the edge of which he had spent his childhood, began to look
+      at this far more antique receptacle, expecting to find there many ancient
+      tombstones, perhaps of contemporaries or predecessors of the founders of
+      his country. In this, however, he was disappointed, at least in a great
+      measure; for the persons buried in the churchyard were probably, for the
+      most part, of a humble rank in life, such as were not so ambitious as to
+      desire a monument of any kind, but were content to let their low
+      earth-mounds subside into the level, where their memory had waxed so faint
+      that none among the survivors could point out the spot, or cared any
+      longer about knowing it; while in other cases, where a monument of red
+      freestone, or even of hewn granite, had been erected, the English climate
+      had forthwith set to work to gnaw away the inscriptions; so that in fifty
+      years&mdash;in a time that would have left an American tombstone as fresh
+      as if just cut&mdash;it was quite impossible to make out the record. Their
+      superiors, meanwhile, were sleeping less enviably in dismal mouldy and
+      dusty vaults, instead of under the daisies. Thus Redclyffe really found
+      less antiquity here, than in the graveyard which might almost be called
+      his natal spot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he said something to this effect, the Warden nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;and, in truth, we have not much need of inscriptions for
+      these poor people. All good families&mdash;every one almost, with any
+      pretensions to respectable station, has his family or individual
+      recognition within the church, or upon its walls; or some of them you see
+      on tombs on the outside. As for our poorer friends here, they are content,
+      as they may well be, to swell and subside, like little billows of
+      mortality, here on the outside.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And for my part,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;if there were anything particularly
+      desirable on either side, I should like best to sleep under this lovely
+      green turf, with the daisies strewn over me by Nature herself, and
+      whatever other homely flowers any friend might choose to add.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And, Doctor Hammond,&rdquo; said the young woman, &ldquo;we see by this gravestone
+      that sometimes a person of humble rank may happen to be commemorated, and
+      that Nature&mdash;in this instance at least&mdash;seems to take especial
+      pains and pleasure to preserve the record.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She indicated a flat gravestone, near the porch, which time had indeed
+      beautified in a singular way, for there was cut deep into it a name and
+      date, in old English characters, very deep it must originally have been;
+      and as if in despair of obliterating it, Time had taken the kindlier
+      method of filling up the letters with moss; so that now, high embossed in
+      loveliest green, was seen the name &ldquo;Richard Oglethorpe 1613&rdquo;;&mdash;green,
+      and flourishing, and beautiful, like the memory of a good man. The
+      inscription originally seemed to have contained some twenty lines, which
+      might have been poetry, or perhaps a prose eulogy, or perhaps the simple
+      record of the buried person&rsquo;s life; but all this, having been done in
+      fainter and smaller letters, was now so far worn away as to be illegible;
+      nor had they ever been deep enough to be made living in moss, like the
+      rest of the inscription.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How tantalizing,&rdquo; remarked Redclyffe, &ldquo;to see the verdant shine of this
+      name, impressed upon us as something remarkable&mdash;and nothing else. I
+      cannot but think that there must be something worth remembering about a
+      man thus distinguished. When two hundred years have taken all these
+      natural pains to illustrate and emblazon &lsquo;Richard Oglethorpe 1613.&rsquo; Ha! I
+      surely recollect that name. It haunts me somehow, as if it had been
+      familiar of old.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And me,&rdquo; said the young lady.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was an old name, hereabouts,&rdquo; observed the Warden, &ldquo;but has been long
+      extinct,&mdash;a cottage name, not a gentleman&rsquo;s. I doubt not that
+      Oglethorpes sleep in many of these undistinguished graves.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe did not much attend to what his friend said, his attention being
+      attracted to the tone&mdash;to something in the tone of the young lady,
+      and also to her coincidence in his remark that the name appealed to some
+      early recollection. He had been taxing his memory, to tell him when and
+      how the name had become familiar to him; and he now remembered that it had
+      occurred in the old Doctor&rsquo;s story of the Bloody Footstep, told to him and
+      Elsie, so long ago. [Endnote: 3] To him and Elsie! It struck him&mdash;what
+      if it were possible?&mdash;but he knew it was not&mdash;that the young
+      lady had a remembrance also of the fact, and that she, after so many
+      years, were mingling her thoughts with his. As this fancy recurred to him,
+      he endeavored to get a glimpse of her face, and while he did so she turned
+      it upon him. It was a quick, sensitive face, that did not seem altogether
+      English; he would rather have imagined it American; but at all events he
+      could not recognize it as one that he had seen before, and a thousand
+      fantasies died within him as, in his momentary glance, he took in the
+      volume of its contour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      After the two friends had parted from the young lady, they passed through
+      the village, and entered the park gate of Braithwaite Hall, pursuing a
+      winding road through its beautiful scenery, which realized all that
+      Redclyffe had read or dreamed about the perfect beauty of these sylvan
+      creations, with the clumps of trees, or sylvan oaks, picturesquely
+      disposed. To heighten the charm, they saw a herd of deer reposing, who, on
+      their appearance, rose from their recumbent position, and began to gaze
+      warily at the strangers; then, tossing their horns, they set off on a
+      stampede, but only swept round, and settled down not far from where they
+      were. Redclyffe looked with great interest at these deer, who were at once
+      wild and civilized; retaining a kind of free forest citizenship, while yet
+      they were in some sense subject to man. It seemed as if they were a link
+      between wild nature and tame; as if they could look back, in their long
+      recollections, through a vista, into the times when England&rsquo;s forests were
+      as wild as those of America, though now they were but a degree more
+      removed from domesticity than cattle, and took their food in winter from
+      the hand of man, and in summer reposed upon his lawns. This seemed the
+      last touch of that delightful conquered and regulated wildness, which
+      English art has laid upon the whole growth of English nature, animal or
+      vegetable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is nothing really wild in your whole island,&rdquo; he observed to the
+      Warden. &ldquo;I have a sensation as if somebody knew, and had cultivated and
+      fostered, and set out in its proper place, every tree that grows; as if
+      somebody had patted the heads of your wildest animals and played with
+      them. It is very delightful to me, for the present; and yet, I think, in
+      the course of time, I should feel the need for something genuine, as it
+      were,&mdash;something that had not the touch and breath of man upon it. I
+      suppose even your skies are modified by the modes of human life that are
+      going on beneath it. London skies, of course, are so; but the breath of a
+      great people, to say nothing of its furnace vapors and hearth-smokes, make
+      the sky other than it was a thousand years ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe we English have a feeling like this occasionally,&rdquo; replied the
+      Warden, &ldquo;and it is from that, partly, that we must account for our
+      adventurousness into other regions, especially for our interest in what is
+      wild and new. In your own forests, now, and prairies, I fancy we find a
+      charm that Americans do not. In the sea, too, and therefore we are
+      yachters. For my part, however, I have grown to like Nature a little
+      smoothed down, and enriched; less gaunt and wolfish than she would be if
+      left to herself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; I feel that charm too,&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;But yet life would be slow
+      and heavy, methinks, to see nothing but English parks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Continuing their course through the noble clumps of oaks, they by and by
+      had a vista of the distant hall itself. It was one of the old English
+      timber and plaster houses, many of which are of unknown antiquity; as was
+      the case with a portion of this house, although other portions had been
+      renewed, repaired, or added, within a century. It had, originally, the
+      Warden said, stood all round an enclosed courtyard, like the great houses
+      of the Continent; but now one side of the quadrangle had long been
+      removed, and there was only a front, with two wings; the beams of old oak
+      being picked out with black, and three or four gables in a line forming
+      the front, while the wings seemed to be stone. It was the timber portion
+      that was most ancient. A clock was on the midmost gable, and pointed now
+      towards one o&rsquo;clock. The whole scene impressed Redclyffe, not as striking,
+      but as an abode of ancient peace, where generation after generation of the
+      same family had lived, each making the most of life, because the life of
+      each successive dweller there was eked out with the lives of all who had
+      hitherto lived there, and had in it equally those lives which were to come
+      afterwards; so that there was a rare and successful contrivance for giving
+      length, fulness, body, substance, to this thin and frail matter of human
+      life. And, as life was so rich in comprehensiveness, the dwellers there
+      made the most of it for the present and future, each generation contriving
+      what it could to add to the cosiness, the comfortableness, the grave,
+      solid respectability, the sylvan beauty, of the house with which they
+      seemed to be connected both before and after death. The family had its
+      home there; not merely the individual. Ancient shapes, that had apparently
+      gone to the family tomb, had yet a right by family hearth and in family
+      hall; nor did they come thither cold and shivering, and diffusing dim
+      ghostly terrors, and repulsive shrinkings, and death in life; but in warm,
+      genial attributes, making this life now passing more dense as it were, by
+      adding all the substance of their own to it. Redclyffe could not compare
+      this abode, and the feelings that it aroused, to the houses of his own
+      country; poor tents of a day, inns of a night, where nothing was certain,
+      save that the family of him who built it would not dwell here, even if he
+      himself should have the bliss to die under the roof, which, with absurdest
+      anticipations, he had built for his posterity. Posterity! An American can
+      have none.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All this sort of thing is beautiful; the family institution was beautiful
+      in its day,&rdquo; ejaculated he, aloud, to himself, not to his companion; &ldquo;but
+      it is a thing of the past. It is dying out in England; and as for
+      ourselves, we never had it. Something better will come up; but as for
+      this, it is past.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is a sad thing to say,&rdquo; observed the Warden, by no means
+      comprehending what was passing in his friend&rsquo;s mind. &ldquo;But if you wish to
+      view the interior of the Hall, we will go thither; for, harshly as I have
+      spoken of the owner, I suppose he has English feeling enough to give us
+      lunch and show us the old house of his forefathers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at present, if you please,&rdquo; replied Redclyffe. &ldquo;I am afraid of
+      destroying my delightful visionary idea of the house by coming too near
+      it. Before I leave this part of the country, I should be glad to ramble
+      over the whole of it, but not just now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      While Redclyffe was still enjoying the frank hospitality of his new
+      friend, a rather marked event occurred in his life; yet not so important
+      in reality as it seemed to his English friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A large letter was delivered to him, bearing the official seal of the
+      United States, and the indorsement of the State Department; a very
+      important-looking document, which could not but add to the importance of
+      the recipient in the eyes of any Englishman, accustomed as they are to bow
+      down before any seal of government. Redclyffe opened it rather coolly,
+      being rather loath to renew any of his political remembrances, now that he
+      was in peace; or to think of the turmoil of modern and democratic
+      politics, here in this quietude of gone-by ages and customs. The contents,
+      however, took him by surprise; nor did he know whether to be pleased or
+      not.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The official package, in short, contained an announcement that he had been
+      appointed by the President, by and with the advice of the Senate, to one
+      of the Continental missions, usually esteemed an object of considerable
+      ambition to any young man in politics; so that, if consistent with his own
+      pleasure, he was now one of the Diplomatic Corps, a Minister, and
+      representative of his country. On first considering the matter, Redclyffe
+      was inclined to doubt whether this honor had been obtained for him
+      altogether by friendly aid, though it did happen to have much in it that
+      might suit his half-formed purpose of remaining long abroad; but with an
+      eye already rendered somewhat oblique by political practice, he suspected
+      that a political rival&mdash;a rival, though of his own party&mdash;had
+      been exerting himself to provide an inducement for Redclyffe to leave the
+      local field to him; while he himself should take advantage of the vacant
+      field, and his rival be thus insidiously, though honorably, laid on the
+      shelf, whence if he should try to remove himself a few years hence the
+      shifting influences of American politics would be likely enough to thwart
+      him; so that, for the sake of being a few years nominally somebody, he
+      might in fine come back to his own country and find himself permanently
+      nobody. But Redclyffe had already sufficiently begun to suspect that he
+      lacked some qualities that a politician ought to have, and without which a
+      political life, whether successful or otherwise, is sure to be a most
+      irksome one: some qualities he lacked, others he had, both almost equally
+      an obstacle. When he communicated the offer, therefore, to his friend, the
+      Warden, it was with the remark that he believed he should accept it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Accept it?&rdquo; cried the Warden, opening his eyes. &ldquo;I should think so,
+      indeed! Why, it puts you above the level of the highest nobility of the
+      Court to which you are accredited; simple republican as you are, it gives
+      you rank with the old blood and birth of Europe. Accept it? By all means;
+      and I will come and see you at your court.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing is more different between England and America,&rdquo; said Redclyffe,
+      &ldquo;than the different way in which the citizen of either country looks at
+      official station. To an Englishman, a commission, of whatever kind,
+      emanating from his sovereign, brings apparently a gratifying sense of
+      honor; to an American, on the contrary, it offers really nothing of the
+      kind. He ceases to be a sovereign,&mdash;an atom of sovereignty, at all
+      events,&mdash;and stoops to be a servant. If I accept this mission,
+      honorable as you think it, I assure you I shall not feel myself quite the
+      man I have hitherto been; although there is no obstacle in the way of
+      party obligations or connections to my taking it, if I please.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not well understand this,&rdquo; quoth the good Warden. &ldquo;It is one of the
+      promises of Scripture to the wise man, that he shall stand before kings,
+      and that this embassy will enable you to do. No man&mdash;no man of your
+      country surely&mdash;is more worthy to do so; so pray accept.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I shall,&rdquo; said Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Much as the Warden had seemed to affectionize Redclyffe hitherto, the
+      latter could not but be sensible, thereafter, of a certain deference in
+      his friend towards him, which he would fain have got rid of, had it been
+      in his power. However, there was still the same heartiness under it all;
+      and after a little he seemed, in some degree, to take Redclyffe&rsquo;s own view
+      of the matter;&mdash;namely, that, being so temporary as these republican
+      distinctions are, they really do not go skin deep, have no reality in
+      them, and that the sterling quality of the man, be it higher or lower, is
+      nowise altered by it;&mdash;an apothegm that is true even of an hereditary
+      nobility, and still more so of our own Honorables and Excellencies.
+      However, the good Warden was glad of his friend&rsquo;s dignity, and perhaps,
+      too, a little glad that this high fortune had befallen one whom he chanced
+      to be entertaining under his roof. As it happened, there was an
+      opportunity which might be taken advantage of to celebrate the occasion;
+      at least, to make it known to the English world so far as the extent of
+      the county. [Endnote: 1.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an hereditary custom for the warden of Braithwaite Hospital, once a
+      year, to give a grand dinner to the nobility and gentry of the
+      neighborhood; and to this end a bequest had been made by one of the former
+      squires or lords of Braithwaite which would of itself suffice to feed
+      forty or fifty Englishmen with reasonable sumptuousness. The present
+      Warden, being a gentleman of private fortune, was accustomed to eke the
+      limited income, devoted for this purpose, with such additions from his own
+      resources as brought the rude and hearty hospitality contemplated by the
+      first founder on a par with modern refinements of gourmandism. The banquet
+      was annually given in the fine old hall where James II. had feasted; and
+      on some of these occasions the Warden&rsquo;s table had been honored with
+      illustrious guests; especially when any of them happened to be wanting an
+      opportunity to come before the public in an after-dinner speech. Just at
+      present there was no occasion of that sort; and the good Warden fancied
+      that he might give considerable <i>éclat</i> to his hereditary feast by
+      bringing forward the young American envoy, a distinguished and eloquent
+      man, to speak on the well-worn topic of the necessity of friendly
+      relations between England and America.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are eloquent, I doubt not, my young friend?&rdquo; inquired he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, no,&rdquo; answered Redclyffe, modestly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, yes, I know it,&rdquo; returned the Warden. &ldquo;If one have all the natural
+      prerequisites of eloquence; a quick sensibility, ready thought, apt
+      expression, a good voice&mdash;and not making its way into the world
+      through your nose either, as they say most of your countrymen&rsquo;s voices do.
+      You shall make the crack speech at my dinner; and so strengthen the bonds
+      of good fellowship between our two countries, that there shall be no
+      question of war for at least six months to come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Accordingly, the preparations for this stately banquet went on with great
+      spirit; and the Warden exhorted Redclyffe to be thinking of some good
+      topics for his international speech; but the young man laughed it off, and
+      told his friend that he thought the inspiration of the moment, aided by
+      the good old wine which the Warden had told him of, as among the treasures
+      of the Hospital, would perhaps serve him better than any elaborate
+      preparation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe, being not even yet strong, used to spend much time, when the
+      day chanced to be pleasant, (which was oftener than his preconceptions of
+      English weather led him to expect,) in the garden behind the Warden&rsquo;s
+      house. It was an extensive one, and apparently as antique as the
+      foundation of the establishment; and during all these years it had
+      probably been growing richer and richer. Here were flowers of ancient
+      race, and some that had been merely field or wayside flowers when first
+      they came into the garden; but by long cultivation and hereditary care,
+      instead of dying out, they had acquired a new richness and beauty, so that
+      you would scarcely recognize the daisy or the violet. Roses too, there
+      were, which Doctor Hammond said had been taken from those white and red
+      rose-trees in the Temple Gardens, whence the partisans of York and
+      Lancaster had plucked their fatal badges. With these, there were all the
+      modern and far-fetched flowers from America, the East, and elsewhere; even
+      the prairie flowers and the California blossoms were represented here; for
+      one of the brethren had horticultural tastes, and was permitted freely to
+      exercise them there. The antique character of the garden was preserved,
+      likewise, by the alleys of box, a part of which had been suffered to
+      remain, and was now grown to a great height and density, so as to make
+      impervious green walls. There were also yew trees clipped into strange
+      shapes of bird and beast, and uncouth heraldic figures, among which of
+      course the leopard&rsquo;s head grinned triumphant; and as for fruit, the high
+      garden wall was lined with pear trees, spread out flat against it, where
+      they managed to produce a cold, flavorless fruit, a good deal akin to
+      cucumbers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, in these genial old arbors, Redclyffe used to recline in the sweet,
+      mild summer weather, basking in the sun, which was seldom too warm to make
+      its full embrace uncomfortable; and it seemed to him, with its fertility,
+      with its marks everywhere of the quiet long-bestowed care of man, the
+      sweetest and cosiest seclusion he had ever known; and two or three times a
+      day, when he heard the screech of the railway train, rushing on towards
+      distant London, it impressed him still more with a sense of safe repose
+      here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not unfrequently he here met the white-bearded palmer in whose chamber he
+      had found himself, as if conveyed thither by enchantment, when he first
+      came to the Hospital. The old man was not by any means of the garrulous
+      order; and yet he seemed full of thoughts, full of reminiscences, and not
+      disinclined to the company of Redclyffe. In fact, the latter sometimes
+      flattered himself that a tendency for his society was one of the motives
+      that brought him to the garden; though the amount of their intercourse,
+      after all, was not so great as to warrant the idea of any settled purpose
+      in so doing. Nevertheless, they talked considerably; and Redclyffe could
+      easily see that the old man had been an extensive traveller, and had
+      perhaps occupied situations far different from his present one, and had
+      perhaps been a struggler in troubled waters before he was drifted into the
+      retirement where Redclyffe found him. He was fond of talking about the
+      unsuspected relationship that must now be existing between many families
+      in England and unknown consanguinity in the new world, where, perhaps,
+      really the main stock of the family tree was now existing, and with a new
+      spirit and life, which the representative growth here in England had lost
+      by too long continuance in one air and one mode of life. For history and
+      observation proved that all people&mdash;and the English people by no
+      means less than others&mdash;needed to be transplanted, or somehow
+      renewed, every few generations; so that, according to this ancient
+      philosopher&rsquo;s theory, it would be good for the whole people of England
+      now, if it could at once be transported to America, where its fatness, its
+      sleepiness, its too great beefiness, its preponderant animal character,
+      would be rectified by a different air and soil; and equally good, on the
+      other hand, for the whole American people to be transplanted back to the
+      original island, where their nervousness might be weighted with heavier
+      influences, where their little women might grow bigger, where their thin,
+      dry men might get a burden of flesh and good stomachs, where their
+      children might, with the air, draw in a reverence for age, forms, and
+      usage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe listened with complacency to these speculations, smiling at the
+      thought of such an exodus as would take place, and the reciprocal
+      dissatisfaction which would probably be the result. But he had greater
+      pleasure in drawing out some of the old gentleman&rsquo;s legendary lore, some
+      of which, whether true or not, was very curious. [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Redclyffe sat one day watching the old man in the garden, he could not
+      help being struck by the scrupulous care with which he attended to the
+      plants; it seemed to him that there was a sense of justice,&mdash;of
+      desiring to do exactly what was right in the matter, not favoring one
+      plant more than another, and doing all he could for each. His progress, in
+      consequence, was so slow, that in an hour, while Redclyffe was off and on
+      looking at him, he had scarcely done anything perceptible. Then he was so
+      minute; and often, when he was on the point of leaving one thing to take
+      up another, some small neglect that he saw or fancied called him back
+      again, to spend other minutes on the same task. He was so full of
+      scruples. It struck Redclyffe that this was conscience, morbid, sick, a
+      despot in trifles, looking so closely into life that it permitted nothing
+      to be done. The man might once have been strong and able, but by some
+      unhealthy process of his life he had ceased to be so now. Nor did any
+      happy or satisfactory result appear to come from these painfully wrought
+      efforts; he still seemed to know that he had left something undone in
+      doing too much in another direction. Here was a lily that had been
+      neglected, while he paid too much attention to a rose; he had set his foot
+      on a violet; he had grubbed up, in his haste, a little plant that he
+      mistook for a weed, but that he now suspected was an herb of grace.
+      Grieved by such reflections as these, he heaved a deep sigh, almost
+      amounting to a groan, and sat down on the little stool that he carried
+      with him in his weeding, resting his face in his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe deemed that he might be doing the old man a good service by
+      interrupting his melancholy labors; so he emerged from the opposite door
+      of the summer-house, and came along the adjoining walk with somewhat heavy
+      footsteps, in order that the palmer might have warning of his approach
+      without any grounds to suppose that he had been watched hitherto.
+      Accordingly, when he turned into the other alley, he found the old man
+      sitting erect on his stool, looking composed, but still sad, as was his
+      general custom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After all your wanderings and experience,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;I observe that you
+      come back to the original occupation of cultivating a garden,&mdash;the
+      innocentest of all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, so it would seem,&rdquo; said the old man; &ldquo;but somehow or other I do not
+      find peace in this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These plants and shrubs,&rdquo; returned Redclyffe, &ldquo;seem at all events to
+      recognize the goodness of your rule, so far as it has extended over them.
+      See how joyfully they take the sun; how clear [they are] from all these
+      vices that lie scattered round, in the shape of weeds. It is a lovely
+      sight, and I could almost fancy a quiet enjoyment in the plants
+      themselves, which they have no way of making us aware of, except by giving
+      out a fragrance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! how infinitely would that idea increase man&rsquo;s responsibility,&rdquo; said
+      the old palmer, &ldquo;if, besides man and beast, we should find it necessary to
+      believe that there is also another set of beings dependent for their
+      happiness on our doing, or leaving undone, what might have effect on
+      them!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I question,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, smiling, &ldquo;whether their pleasurable or
+      painful experiences can be so keen, that we need trouble our consciences
+      much with regard to what we do, merely as it affects them. So highly
+      cultivated a conscience as that would be a nuisance to one&rsquo;s self and
+      one&rsquo;s fellows.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You say a terrible thing,&rdquo; rejoined the old man. &ldquo;Can conscience be too
+      much alive in us? is not everything however trifling it seems, an item in
+      the great account, which it is of infinite importance therefore to have
+      right? A terrible thing is that you have said.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That may be,&rdquo; said Redclyffe; &ldquo;but it is none the less certain to me,
+      that the efficient actors&mdash;those who mould the world&mdash;are the
+      persons in whom something else is developed more strongly than conscience.
+      There must be an invincible determination to effect something; it may be
+      set to work in the right direction, but after that it must go onward,
+      trampling down small obstacles&mdash;small considerations of right and
+      wrong&mdash;as a great rock, thundering down a hillside, crushes a
+      thousand sweet flowers, and ploughs deep furrows in the innocent
+      hillside.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As Redclyffe gave vent to this doctrine, which was not naturally his, but
+      which had been the inculcation of a life, hitherto devoted to politics, he
+      was surprised to find how strongly sensible he became of the ugliness and
+      indefensibleness of what he said. He felt as if he were speaking under the
+      eye of Omniscience, and as if every word he said were weighed, and its
+      emptiness detected, by an unfailing intelligence. He had thought that he
+      had volumes to say about the necessity of consenting not to do right in
+      all matters minutely, for the sake of getting out an available and
+      valuable right as the whole; but there was something that seemed to tie
+      his tongue. Could it be the quiet gaze of this old man, so unpretending,
+      so humble, so simple in aspect? He could not tell, only that he faltered,
+      and finally left his speech in the midst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he was surprised to find how he had to struggle against a certain
+      repulsion within himself to the old man. He seemed so nonsensical,
+      interfering with everybody&rsquo;s right in the world; so mischievous, standing
+      there and shutting out the possibility of action. It seemed well to
+      trample him down; to put him out of the way&mdash;no matter how&mdash;somehow.
+      It gave him, he thought, an inkling of the way in which this poor old man
+      had made himself odious to his kind, by opposing himself, inevitably, to
+      what was bad in man, chiding it by his very presence, accepting nothing
+      false. You must either love him utterly, or hate him utterly; for he could
+      not let you alone. Redclyffe, being a susceptible man, felt this influence
+      in the strongest way; for it was as if there was a battle within him, one
+      party pulling, wrenching him towards the old man, another wrenching him
+      away, so that, by the agony of the contest, he felt disposed to end it by
+      taking flight, and never seeing the strange individual again. He could
+      well enough conceive how a brutal nature, if capable of receiving his
+      influence at all, might find it so intolerable that it must needs get rid
+      of him by violence,&mdash;by taking his blood if necessary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All these feelings were but transitory, however; they swept across him
+      like a wind, and then he looked again at the old man and saw only his
+      simplicity, his unworldliness,&mdash;saw little more than the worn and
+      feeble individual in the Hospital garb, leaning on his staff; and then
+      turning again with a gentle sigh to weed in the garden. And then Redclyffe
+      went away, in a state of disturbance for which he could not account to
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      High up in the old carved roof, meanwhile, the spiders of centuries still
+      hung their flaunting webs with a profusion that old Doctor Grimshawe would
+      have been ravished to see; but even this was to be remedied, for one day,
+      on looking in, Redclyffe found the great hall dim with floating dust, and
+      down through it came great floating masses of cobweb, out of which the old
+      Doctor would have undertaken to regenerate the world; and he saw, dimly
+      aloft, men on ladders sweeping away these accumulations of years, and
+      breaking up the haunts and residences of hereditary spiders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stately old hall had been in process of cleaning and adapting to the
+      banquet purposes of the nineteenth century, which it was accustomed to
+      subserve, in so proud a way, in the sixteenth. It was, in the first place,
+      well swept and cleansed; the painted glass windows were cleansed from
+      dust, and several panes, which had been unfortunately broken and filled
+      with common glass, were filled in with colored panes, which the Warden had
+      picked up somewhere in his antiquarian researches. They were not, to be
+      sure, just what was wanted; a piece of a saint, from some cathedral
+      window, supplying what was lacking of the gorgeous purple of a mediæval
+      king; but the general effect was rich and good, whenever the misty English
+      atmosphere supplied sunshine bright enough to pervade it. Tapestry, too,
+      from antique looms, faded, but still gorgeous, was hung upon the walls.
+      Some suits of armor, that hung beneath the festal gallery, were polished
+      till the old battered helmets and pierced breastplates sent a gleam like
+      that with which they had flashed across the battle-fields of old.
+      [Endnote: 1.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So now the great day of the Warden&rsquo;s dinner had arrived; and, as may be
+      supposed, there were fiery times in the venerable old kitchen. The cook,
+      according to ancient custom, concocted many antique dishes, such as used
+      to be set before kings and nobles; dainties that might have called the
+      dead out of their graves; combinations of ingredients that had ceased to
+      be put together for centuries; historic dishes, which had long, long
+      ceased to be in the list of revels. Then there was the stalwart English
+      cheer of the sirloin, and the round; there were the vast plum-puddings,
+      the juicy mutton, the venison; there was the game, now just in season,&mdash;the
+      half-tame wild fowl of English covers, the half-domesticated wild deer of
+      English parks, the heathcock from the far-off hills of Scotland, and one
+      little prairie hen, and some canvas-back ducks&mdash;obtained, Heaven
+      knows how, in compliment to Redclyffe&mdash;from his native shores. O, the
+      old jolly kitchen! how rich the flavored smoke that went up its vast
+      chimney! how inestimable the atmosphere of steam that was diffused through
+      it! How did the old men peep into it, even venture across the threshold,
+      braving the hot wrath of the cook and his assistants, for the sake of
+      imbuing themselves with these rich and delicate flavors, receiving them in
+      as it were spiritually; for, received through the breath and in the
+      atmosphere, it was really a spiritual enjoyment. The ghosts of ancient
+      epicures seemed, on that day and the few preceding ones, to haunt the dim
+      passages, snuffing in with shadowy nostrils the rich vapors, assuming
+      visibility in the congenial medium, almost becoming earthly again in the
+      strength of their earthly longings for one other feast such as they used
+      to enjoy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor is it to be supposed that it was only these antique dainties that the
+      Warden provided for his feast. No; if the cook, the cultured and recondite
+      old cook, who had accumulated within himself all that his predecessors
+      knew for centuries,&mdash;if he lacked anything of modern fashion and
+      improvement, he had supplied his defect by temporary assistance from a
+      London club; and the bill of fare was provided with dishes that Soyer
+      would not have harshly criticised. The ethereal delicacy of modern taste,
+      the nice adjustment of flowers, the French style of cookery, was richly
+      attended to; and the list was long of dishes with fantastic names, fish,
+      fowl, and flesh; and <i>entremets</i>, and &ldquo;sweets,&rdquo; as the English call
+      them, and sugared cates, too numerous to think of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wines we will not take upon ourselves to enumerate; but the juice,
+      then destined to be quaffed, was in part the precious vintages that had
+      been broached half a century ago, and had been ripening ever since; the
+      rich and dry old port, so unlovely to the natural palate that it requires
+      long English seasoning to get it down; the sherry, imported before these
+      modern days of adulteration; some claret, the Warden said of rarest
+      vintage; some Burgundy, of which it was the quality to warm the blood and
+      genialize existence for three days after it was drunk. Then there was a
+      rich liquid contributed to this department by Redclyffe himself; for, some
+      weeks since, when the banquet first loomed in the distance, he had
+      (anxious to evince his sense of the Warden&rsquo;s kindness) sent across the
+      ocean for some famous Madeira which he had inherited from the Doctor, and
+      never tasted yet. This, together with some of the Western wines of
+      America, had arrived, and was ready to be broached.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Warden tested these modern wines, and recognized a new flavor, but
+      gave it only a moderate approbation; for, in truth, an elderly Englishman
+      has not a wide appreciation of wines, nor loves new things in this kind
+      more than in literature or life. But he tasted the Madeira, too, and
+      underwent an ecstasy, which was only alleviated by the dread of gout,
+      which he had an idea that this wine must bring on,&mdash;and truly, if it
+      were so splendid a wine as he pronounced it, some pain ought to follow as
+      the shadow of such a pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As it was a festival of antique date, the dinner hour had been fixed
+      earlier than is usual at such stately banquets; namely, at six o&rsquo;clock,
+      which was long before the dusky hour at which Englishmen love best to
+      dine. About that period, the carriages drove into the old courtyard of the
+      Hospital in great abundance; blocking up, too, the ancient portal, and
+      remaining in a line outside. Carriages they were with armorial bearings,
+      family coaches in which came Englishmen in their black coats and white
+      neckcloths, elderly, white-headed, fresh-colored, squat; not beautiful,
+      certainly, nor particularly dignified, nor very well dressed, nor with
+      much of an imposing air, but yet, somehow or other, producing an effect of
+      force, respectability, reliableness, trust, which is probably deserved,
+      since it is invariably experienced. Cold they were in deportment, and
+      looked coldly on the stranger, who, on his part, drew himself up with an
+      extra haughtiness and reserve, and felt himself in the midst of his
+      enemies, and more as if he were going to do battle than to sit down to a
+      friendly banquet. The Warden introduced him, as an American diplomatist,
+      to one or two of the gentlemen, who regarded him forbiddingly, as
+      Englishmen do before dinner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not long after Redclyffe had entered the reception-room, which was but
+      shortly before the hour appointed for the dinner, there was another
+      arrival betokened by the clatter of hoofs and grinding wheels in the
+      courtyard; and then entered a gentleman of different mien from the bluff,
+      ruddy, simple-minded, yet worldly Englishmen around him. He was a tall,
+      dark man, with a black moustache and almost olive skin, a slender, lithe
+      figure, a flexible face, quick, flashing, mobile. His deportment was
+      graceful; his dress, though it seemed to differ in little or nothing from
+      that of the gentlemen in the room, had yet a grace and picturesqueness in
+      his mode of wearing it. He advanced to the Warden, who received him with
+      distinction, and yet, Redclyffe fancied, not exactly with cordiality. It
+      seemed to Redclyffe that the Warden looked round, as if with the purpose
+      of presenting Redclyffe to this gentleman, but he himself, from some
+      latent reluctance, had turned away and entered, into conversation with one
+      of the other gentlemen, who said now, looking at the new-comer, &ldquo;Are you
+      acquainted with this last arrival?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;I know Lord Braithwaite by sight, indeed,
+      but have had no introduction. He is a man, certainly, of distinguished
+      appearance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, pretty well,&rdquo; said the gentleman, &ldquo;but un-English, as also are his
+      manners. It is a pity to see an old English family represented by such a
+      person. Neither he, his father, nor grandfather was born among us; he has
+      far more Italian blood than enough to drown the slender stream of
+      Anglo-Saxon and Norman. His modes of life, his prejudices, his estates,
+      his religion, are unlike our own; and yet here he is in the position of an
+      old English gentleman, possibly to be a peer. You, whose nationality
+      embraces that of all the world, cannot, I suppose, understand this English
+      feeling.&rdquo; [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon me,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;I can perfectly understand it. An American,
+      in his feelings towards England, has all the jealousy and exclusiveness of
+      Englishmen themselves,&mdash;perhaps, indeed, a little exaggerated.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg your pardon,&rdquo; said the Englishman, incredulously, &ldquo;I think you
+      cannot possibly understand it!&rdquo; [Endnote: 3.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The guests were by this time all assembled, and at the Warden&rsquo;s bidding
+      they moved from the reception-room to the dining-hall, in some order and
+      precedence, of which Redclyffe could not exactly discover the principle,
+      though he found that to himself&mdash;in his quality, doubtless, of
+      Ambassador&mdash;there was assigned a pretty high place. A venerable
+      dignitary of the Church&mdash;a dean, he seemed to be&mdash;having asked a
+      blessing, the fair scene of the banquet now lay before the guests,
+      presenting a splendid spectacle, in the high-walled, antique, tapestried
+      hall, overhung with the dark, intricate oaken beams, with the high Gothic
+      windows, through one of which the setting sunbeams streamed, and showed
+      the figures of kings and warriors, and the old Braithwaites among them.
+      Beneath and adown the hall extended the long line of the tables, covered
+      with the snow of the damask tablecloth, on which glittered, gleamed, and
+      shone a good quality of ancient ancestral plate, and an <i>épergne</i> of
+      silver, extending down the middle; also the gleam of golden wine in the
+      decanters; and truly Redclyffe thought that it was a noble spectacle, made
+      so by old and stately associations, which made a noble banquet of what
+      otherwise would be only a vulgar dinner. The English have this advantage
+      and know how to make use of it. They bring&mdash;in these old,
+      time-honored feasts&mdash;all the past to sit down and take the stately
+      refreshment along with them, and they pledge the historic characters in
+      their wine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A printed bill of fare, in gold letters, lay by each plate, on which
+      Redclyffe saw the company glancing with great interest. The first dish, of
+      course, was turtle soup, of which&mdash;as the gentleman next him, the
+      Mayor of a neighboring town, told Redclyffe&mdash;it was allowable to take
+      twice. This was accompanied, according to one of those rules which one
+      knows not whether they are arbitrary or founded on some deep reason, by a
+      glass of punch. Then came the noble turbot, the salmon, the sole, and
+      divers of fishes, and the dinner fairly set in. The genial Warden seemed
+      to have given liberal orders to the attendants, for they spared not to
+      offer hock, champagne, sherry, to the guests, and good bitter ale, foaming
+      in the goblet; and so the stately banquet went on, with somewhat tedious
+      magnificence; and yet with a fulness of effect and thoroughness of sombre
+      life that made Redclyffe feel that, so much importance being assigned to
+      it,&mdash;it being so much believed in,&mdash;it was indeed a feast. The
+      cumbrous courses swept by, one after another; and Redclyffe, finding it
+      heavy work, sat idle most of the time, regarding the hall, the old
+      decaying beams, the armor hanging beneath the galleries, and these
+      Englishmen feasting where their fathers had feasted for so many ages, the
+      same occasion, the same men, probably, in appearance, though the black
+      coat and the white neckcloth had taken the place of ruff, embroidered
+      doublet, and the magnificence of other ages. After all, the English have
+      not such good things to eat as we in America, and certainly do not know
+      better how to make them palatable. [Endnote: 4.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well; but by and by the dinner came to a conclusion, as regarded the
+      eating part; the cloth was withdrawn; a dessert of fruits, fresh and
+      dried, pines, hothouse grapes, and all candied conserves of the Indies,
+      was put on the long extent of polished mahogany. There was a tuning up of
+      musicians, an interrogative drawing of fiddle-bows, and other musical
+      twangs and puffs; the decanters opposite the Warden and his
+      vice-president,&mdash;sherry, port, Redclyffe&rsquo;s Madeira, and claret, were
+      put in motion along the table, and the guests filled their glasses for the
+      toast which, at English dinner-tables, is of course the first to be
+      honored,&mdash;the Queen. Then the band struck up the good old anthem,
+      &ldquo;God save the Queen,&rdquo; which the whole company rose to their feet to sing.
+      It was a spectacle both interesting and a little ludicrous to Redclyffe,&mdash;being
+      so apart from an American&rsquo;s sympathies, so unlike anything that he has in
+      his life or possibilities,&mdash;this active and warm sentiment of
+      loyalty, in which love of country centres, and assimilates, and transforms
+      itself into a passionate affection for a person, in whom they love all
+      their institutions. To say the truth, it seemed a happy notion; nor could
+      the American&mdash;while he comforted himself in the pride of his
+      democracy, and that he himself was a sovereign&mdash;could he help envying
+      it a little, this childlike love and reverence for a person embodying all
+      their country, their past, their earthly future. He felt that it might be
+      delightful to have a sovereign, provided that sovereign were always a
+      woman,&mdash;and perhaps a young and fine one. But, indeed, this is not
+      the difficulty, methinks, in English institutions which the American finds
+      it hardest to deal with. We could endure a born sovereign, especially if
+      made such a mere pageant as the English make of theirs. What we find it
+      hardest to conceive of is, the satisfaction with which Englishmen think of
+      a race above them, with privileges that they cannot share, entitled to
+      condescend to them, and to have gracious and beautiful manners at their
+      expense; to be kind, simple, unpretending, because these qualities are
+      more available than haughtiness; to be specimens of perfect manhood;&mdash;all
+      these advantages in consequence of their position. If the peerage were a
+      mere name, it would be nothing to envy; but it is so much more than a
+      name; it enables men to be really so superior. The poor, the lower
+      classes, might bear this well enough; but the classes that come next to
+      the nobility,&mdash;the upper middle classes,&mdash;how they bear it so
+      lovingly is what must puzzle the American. But probably the advantage of
+      the peerage is the less perceptible the nearer it is looked at.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must be confessed that Redclyffe, as he looked at this assembly of
+      peers and gentlemen, thought with some self-gratulation of the probability
+      that he had within his power as old a rank, as desirable a station, as the
+      best of them; and that if he were restrained from taking it, it would
+      probably only be by the democratic pride that made him feel that he could
+      not, retaining all his manly sensibility, accept this gewgaw on which the
+      ages&mdash;his own country especially&mdash;had passed judgment, while it
+      had been suspended over his head. He felt himself, at any rate, in a
+      higher position, having the option of taking this rank, and forbearing to
+      do so, than if he took it. [Endnote: 5.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After this ensued a ceremony which is of antique date in old English
+      corporations and institutions, at their high festivals. It is called the
+      Loving Cup. A sort of herald or toast-master behind the Warden&rsquo;s chair
+      made proclamation, reciting the names of the principal guests, and
+      announcing to them, &ldquo;The Warden of the Braithwaite Hospital drinks to you
+      in a Loving Cup&rdquo;; of which cup, having sipped, or seemed to sip (for
+      Redclyffe observed that the old drinkers were rather shy of it) a small
+      quantity, he sent it down the table. Its progress was accompanied with a
+      peculiar entanglement of ceremony, one guest standing up while another
+      drinks, being pretty much as follows. First, each guest receiving it
+      covered from the next above him, the same took from the silver cup its
+      silver cover; the guest drank with a bow to the Warden and company, took
+      the cover from the preceding guest, covered the cup, handed it to the next
+      below him, then again removed the cover, replaced it after the guest had
+      drunk, who, on his part, went through the same ceremony. And thus the cup
+      went slowly on its way down the stately hall; these ceremonies being, it
+      is said, originally precautions against the risk, in wild times, of being
+      stabbed by the man who was drinking with you, or poisoned by one who
+      should fail to be your taster. The cup was a fine, ancient piece of plate,
+      massive, heavy, curiously wrought with armorial bearings, in which the
+      leopard&rsquo;s head appeared. Its contents, so far as Redclyffe could analyze
+      them by a moderate sip, appeared to be claret, sweetened, with spices,
+      and, however suited to the peculiarity of antique palates, was not greatly
+      to Redclyffe&rsquo;s taste. [Endnote: 6.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe&rsquo;s companion just below him, while the Loving Cup was beginning
+      its march, had been explaining the origin of the custom as a defence of
+      the drinker in times of deadly feud; when it had reached Lord Braithwaite,
+      who drank and passed it to Redclyffe covered, and with the usual bow,
+      Redclyffe looked into his Lordship&rsquo;s Italian eyes and dark face as he did
+      so, and the thought struck him, that, if there could possibly be any use
+      in keeping up this old custom, it might be so now; for, how intimated he
+      could hardly tell, he was sensible in his deepest self of a deadly
+      hostility in this dark, courteous, handsome face. He kept his eyes fixed
+      on his Lordship as he received the cup, and felt that in his own glance
+      there was an acknowledgment of the enmity that he perceived, and a
+      defiance, expressed without visible sign, and felt in the bow with which
+      they greeted one another. When they had both resumed their seats,
+      Redclyffe chose to make this ceremonial intercourse the occasion of again
+      addressing him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know not whether your Lordship is more accustomed than myself to these
+      stately ceremonials,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Lord Braithwaite, whose English was very good. &ldquo;But this is a
+      good old ceremony, and an ingenious one; for does it not twine us into
+      knotted links of love&mdash;this Loving Cup&mdash;like a wreath of
+      Bacchanals whom I have seen surrounding an antique vase. Doubtless it has
+      great efficacy in entwining a company of friendly guests into one
+      affectionate society.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; it should seem so,&rdquo; replied Redclyffe, with a smile, and again
+      meeting those black eyes, which smiled back on him. &ldquo;It should seem so,
+      but it appears that the origin of the custom was quite different, and that
+      it was as a safeguard to a man when he drank with his enemy. What a
+      peculiar flavor it must have given to the liquor, when the eyes of two
+      deadly foes met over the brim of the Loving Cup, and the drinker knew
+      that, if he withdrew it, a dagger would be in his heart, and the other
+      watched him drink, to see if it was poison!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; responded his Lordship, &ldquo;they had strange fashions in those rough
+      old times. Nowadays, we neither stab, shoot, nor poison. I scarcely think
+      we hate except as interest guides us, without malevolence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This singular conversation was interrupted by a toast, and the rising of
+      one of the guests to answer it. Several other toasts of routine succeeded;
+      one of which, being to the honor of the old founder of the Hospital, Lord
+      Braithwaite, as his representative, rose to reply,&mdash;which he did in
+      good phrases, in a sort of eloquence unlike that of the Englishmen around
+      him, and, sooth to say, comparatively unaccustomed as he must have been to
+      the use of the language, much more handsomely than they. In truth,
+      Redclyffe was struck and amused with the rudeness, the slovenliness, the
+      inartistic quality of the English speakers, who rather seemed to avoid
+      grace and neatness of set purpose, as if they would be ashamed of it.
+      Nothing could be more ragged than these utterances which they called
+      speeches; so patched, and darned; and yet, somehow or other&mdash;though
+      dull and heavy as all which seemed to inspire them&mdash;they had a kind
+      of force. Each man seemed to have the faculty of getting, after some rude
+      fashion, at the sense and feeling that was in him; and without glibness,
+      without smoothness, without form or comeliness, still the object with
+      which each one rose to speak was accomplished,&mdash;and what was more
+      remarkable, it seemed to be accomplished without the speaker&rsquo;s having any
+      particular plan for doing it. He was surprised, too, to observe how
+      loyally every man seemed to think himself bound to speak, and rose to do
+      his best, however unfit his usual habits made him for the task. Observing
+      this, and thinking how many an American would be taken aback and
+      dumbfounded by being called on for a dinner speech, he could not but doubt
+      the correctness of the general opinion, that Englishmen are naturally less
+      facile of public speech than our countrymen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You surpass your countrymen,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, when his Lordship resumed
+      his seat, amid rapping and loud applause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My countrymen? I scarcely know whether you mean the English or Italians,&rdquo;
+       said Lord Braithwaite. &ldquo;Like yourself, I am a hybrid, with really no
+      country, and ready to take up with any.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a country,&mdash;one which I am little inclined to deny,&rdquo; replied
+      Redclyffe, gravely, while a flush (perhaps of conscientious shame) rose to
+      his brow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His Lordship bowed, with a dark Italian smile, but Redclyffe&rsquo;s attention
+      was drawn away from the conversation by a toast which the Warden now rose
+      to give, and in which he found himself mainly concerned. With a little
+      preface of kind words (not particularly aptly applied) to the great and
+      kindred country beyond the Atlantic, the worthy Warden proceeded to remark
+      that his board was honored, on this high festival, with a guest from that
+      new world; a gentleman yet young, but already distinguished in the
+      councils of his country; the bearer, he remarked, of an honored English
+      name, which might well claim to be remembered here, and on this occasion,
+      although he had understood from his friend that the American bearers of
+      this name did not count kindred with the English ones. This gentleman, he
+      further observed, with considerable flourish and emphasis, had recently
+      been called from his retirement and wanderings into the diplomatic service
+      of his country, which he would say, from his knowledge, the gentleman was
+      well calculated to honor. He drank the health of the Honorable Edward
+      Redclyffe, Ambassador of the United States to the Court of Hohen-Linden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our English cousins received this toast with the kindest enthusiasm, as
+      they always do any such allusion to our country; it being a festal
+      feeling, not to be used except on holidays. They rose, with glass in hand,
+      in honor of the Ambassador; the band struck up &ldquo;Hail, Columbia&rdquo;; and our
+      hero marshalled his thoughts as well as he might for the necessary
+      response; and when the tumult subsided he arose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His quick apprehending had taught him something of the difference of taste
+      between an English and an American audience at a dinner-table; he felt
+      that there must be a certain looseness, and carelessness, and roughness,
+      and yet a certain restraint; that he must not seem to aim at speaking
+      well, although, for his own ambition, he was not content to speak ill;
+      that, somehow or other, he must get a heartiness into his speech; that he
+      must not polish, nor be too neat, and must come with a certain rudeness to
+      his good points, as if he blundered on them, and were surprised into them.
+      Above all, he must let the good wine and cheer, and all that he knew and
+      really felt of English hospitality, as represented by the kind Warden, do
+      its work upon his heart, and speak up to the extent of what he felt&mdash;and
+      if a little more, then no great harm&mdash;about his own love for the
+      father-land, and the broader grounds of the relations between the two
+      countries. On this system, Redclyffe began to speak; and being naturally
+      and habitually eloquent, and of mobile and ready sensibilities, he
+      succeeded, between art and nature, in making a speech that absolutely
+      delighted the company, who made the old hall echo, and the banners wave
+      and tremble, and the board shake, and the glasses jingle, with their
+      rapturous applause. What he said&mdash;or some shadow of it, and more than
+      he quite liked to own&mdash;was reported in the county paper that gave a
+      report of the dinner; but on glancing over it, it seems not worth while to
+      produce this eloquent effort in our pages, the occasion and topics being
+      of merely temporary interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe sat down, and sipped his claret, feeling a little ashamed of
+      himself, as people are apt to do after a display of this kind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know the way to the English heart better than I do,&rdquo; remarked his
+      Lordship, after a polite compliment to the speech. &ldquo;Methinks these dull
+      English are being improved in your atmosphere. The English need a change
+      every few centuries,&mdash;either by immigration of new stock, or
+      transportation of the old,&mdash;or else they grow too gross and earthly,
+      with their beef, mutton, and ale. I think, now, it might benefit both
+      countries, if your New England population were to be reciprocally
+      exchanged with an equal number of Englishmen. Indeed, Italians might do as
+      well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should regret,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;to change the English, heavy as they
+      are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are an admirable Englishman,&rdquo; said his Lordship. &ldquo;For my part, I
+      cannot say that the people are very much to my taste, any more than their
+      skies and climate, in which I have shivered during the two years that I
+      have spent here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here their conversation ceased; and Redclyffe listened to a long train of
+      speechifying, in the course of which everybody, almost, was toasted;
+      everybody present, at all events, and many absent. The Warden&rsquo;s old wine
+      was not spared; the music rang and resounded from the gallery; and
+      everybody seemed to consider it a model feast, although there were no very
+      vivid signs of satisfaction, but a decorous, heavy enjoyment, a dull red
+      heat of pleasure, without flame. Soda and seltzer-water, and coffee, by
+      and by were circulated; and at a late hour the company began to retire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before taking his departure, Lord Braithwaite resumed his conversation
+      with Redclyffe, and, as it appeared, with the purpose of making a
+      hospitable proposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I live very much alone,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;being insulated from my neighbors by
+      many circumstances,&mdash;habits, religion, and everything else peculiarly
+      English. If you are curious about old English modes of life, I can show
+      you, at least, an English residence, little altered within a century past.
+      Pray come and spend a week with me before you leave this part of the
+      country. Besides, I know the court to which you are accredited, and can
+      give you, perhaps, useful information about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe looked at him in some surprise, and with a nameless hesitation;
+      for he did not like his Lordship, and had fancied, in truth, that there
+      was a reciprocal antipathy. Nor did he yet feel that he was mistaken in
+      this respect; although his Lordship&rsquo;s invitation was given in a tone of
+      frankness, and seemed to have no reserve, except that his eyes did not
+      meet his like Anglo-Saxon eyes, and there seemed an Italian looking out
+      from within the man. But Redclyffe had a sort of repulsion within himself;
+      and he questioned whether it would be fair to his proposed host to accept
+      his hospitality, while he had this secret feeling of hostility and
+      repugnance,&mdash;which might be well enough accounted for by the
+      knowledge that he secretly entertained hostile interests to their race,
+      and half a purpose of putting them in force. And, besides this,&mdash;although
+      Redclyffe was ashamed of the feeling,&mdash;he had a secret dread, a
+      feeling that it was not just a safe thing to trust himself in this man&rsquo;s
+      power; for he had a sense, sure as death, that he did not wish him well,
+      and had a secret dread of the American. But he laughed within himself at
+      this feeling, and drove it down. Yet it made him feel that there could be
+      no disloyalty in accepting his Lordship&rsquo;s invitation, because it was given
+      in as little friendship as it would be accepted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had almost made my arrangements for quitting the neighborhood,&rdquo; said
+      he, after a pause; &ldquo;nor can I shorten the week longer which I had promised
+      to spend with my very kind friend, the Warden. Yet your Lordship&rsquo;s
+      kindness offers we a great temptation, and I would gladly spend the next
+      ensuing week at Braithwaite Hall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall expect you, then,&rdquo; said Lord Braithwaite. &ldquo;You will find me quite
+      alone, except my chaplain,&mdash;a scholar, and a man of the world, whom
+      you will not be sorry to know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He bowed and took his leave, without shaking hands, as an American would
+      have thought it natural to do, after such a hospitable agreement; nor did
+      Redclyffe make any motion towards it, and was glad that his Lordship had
+      omitted it. On the whole, there was a secret dissatisfaction with himself;
+      a sense that he was not doing quite a frank and true thing in accepting
+      this invitation, and he only made peace with himself on the consideration
+      that Lord Braithwaite was as little cordial in asking the visit as he in
+      acceding to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0020" id="link2HCH0020"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The guests were now rapidly taking their departure, and the Warden and
+      Redclyffe were soon left alone in the antique hall, which now, in its
+      solitude, presented an aspect far different from the gay festivity of an
+      hour before; the duskiness up in the carved oaken beams seemed to descend
+      and fill the hall; and the remembrance of the feast was like one of those
+      that had taken place centuries ago, with which this was now numbered, and
+      growing ghostly, and faded, and sad, even as they had long been.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, my dear friend,&rdquo; said the Warden, stretching himself and yawning,
+      &ldquo;it is over. Come into my study with me, and we will have a devilled
+      turkey-bone and a pint of sherry in peace and comfort.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I fear I can make no figure at such a supper,&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;But I
+      admire your inexhaustibleness in being ready for midnight refreshment
+      after such a feast.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a glass of good liquor has moistened my lips to-night,&rdquo; said the
+      Warden, &ldquo;save and except such as was supplied by a decanter of water made
+      brown with toast; and such a sip as I took to the health of the Queen, and
+      another to that of the Ambassador to Hohen-Linden. It is the only way,
+      when a man has this vast labor of speechifying to do; and indeed there is
+      no possibility of keeping up a jolly countenance for such a length of time
+      except on toast-water.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They accordingly adjourned to the Warden&rsquo;s sanctum, where that worthy
+      dignitary seemed to enjoy himself over his sherry and cracked bones, in a
+      degree that he probably had not heretofore; while Redclyffe, whose
+      potations had been more liberal, and who was feverish and disturbed, tried
+      the effect of a little brandy and soda-water. As often happens at such
+      midnight symposiums, the two friends found themselves in a more kindly and
+      confidential vein than had happened before, great as had been the kindness
+      and confidence already grown up between them. Redclyffe told his friend of
+      Lord Braithwaite&rsquo;s invitation, and of his own resolution to accept it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not? You will do well,&rdquo; said the Warden; &ldquo;and you will find his
+      Lordship an accustomed host, and the old house most interesting. If he
+      knows the secrets of it himself, and will show them, they will be well
+      worth the seeing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have had a scruple in accepting this invitation,&rdquo; said Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot see why,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;I advise it by all means, since I
+      shall lose nothing by it myself, as it will not lop off any part of your
+      visit to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear friend,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, irresistibly impelled to a confidence
+      which he had not meditated a moment before, &ldquo;there is a foolish secret
+      which I must tell you, if you will listen to it; and which I have only not
+      revealed to you because it seemed to me foolish and dream-like; because,
+      too, I am an American, and a democrat; because I am ashamed of myself and
+      laugh at myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it a long story?&rdquo; asked the Warden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can make it of any length, and almost any brevity,&rdquo; said Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will fill my pipe then,&rdquo; answered the Warden, &ldquo;and listen at my ease;
+      and if, as you intimate, there prove to be any folly in it, I will impute
+      it all to the kindly freedom with which you have partaken of our English
+      hospitality, and forget it before to-morrow morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He settled himself in his easy-chair, in a most luxurious posture; and
+      Redclyffe, who felt a strange reluctance to reveal&mdash;for the first
+      time in his life&mdash;the shadowy hopes, if hopes they were, and
+      purposes, if such they could be called, with which he had amused himself
+      so many years, begun the story from almost the earliest period that he
+      could remember. He told even of his earliest recollection, with an old
+      woman, in the almshouse, and how he had been found there by the Doctor,
+      and educated by him, with all the hints and half-revelations that had been
+      made to him. He described the singular character of the Doctor, his
+      scientific pursuits, his evident accomplishments, his great abilities, his
+      morbidness and melancholy, his moodiness, and finally his death, and the
+      singular circumstances that accompanied it. The story took a considerable
+      time to tell; and after its close, the Warden, who had only interrupted it
+      by now and then a question to make it plainer, continued to smoke his pipe
+      slowly and thoughtfully for a long while.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This Doctor of yours was a singular character,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;Evidently, from
+      what you tell me as to the accuracy of his local reminiscences, he must
+      have been of this part of the country,&mdash;of this immediate
+      neighborhood,&mdash;and such a man could not have grown up here without
+      being known. I myself&mdash;for I am an old fellow now&mdash;might have
+      known him if he lived to manhood hereabouts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He seemed old to me when I first knew him,&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;But children
+      make no distinctions of age. He might have been forty-five then, as well
+      as I can judge.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are now twenty-seven or eight,&rdquo; said the Warden, &ldquo;and were four years
+      old when you first knew him. He might now be sixty-five. Do you know, my
+      friend, that I have something like a certainty that I know who your Doctor
+      was?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How strange this seems!&rdquo; exclaimed Redclyffe. &ldquo;It has never struck me
+      that I should be able to identify this singular personage with any
+      surroundings or any friends.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Warden, to requite his friend&rsquo;s story,&mdash;and without as yet saying
+      a word, good or bad, on his ancestral claims,&mdash;proceeded to tell him
+      some of the gossip of the neighborhood,&mdash;what had been gossip thirty
+      or forty years ago, but was now forgotten, or, at all events, seldom
+      spoken of, and only known to the old, at the present day. He himself
+      remembered it only as a boy, and imperfectly. There had been a personage
+      of that day, a man of poor estate, who had fallen deeply in love and been
+      betrothed to a young lady of family; he was a young man of more than
+      ordinary abilities, and of great promise, though small fortune. It was not
+      well known how, but the match between him and the young lady was broken
+      off, and his place was supplied by the then proprietor of Braithwaite
+      Hall; as it was supposed, by the artifices of her mother. There had been
+      circumstances of peculiar treachery in the matter, and Mr. Oglethorpe had
+      taken it severely to heart; so severely, indeed, that he had left the
+      country, after selling his ancestral property, and had only been
+      occasionally heard of again. Now, from certain circumstances, it had
+      struck the Warden that this might be the mysterious Doctor of whom
+      Redclyffe spoke. [Endnote: 1.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why,&rdquo; suggested Redclyffe, &ldquo;should a man with these wrongs to avenge
+      take such an interest in a descendant of his enemy&rsquo;s family?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is a strong point in favor of my supposition,&rdquo; replied the Warden.
+      &ldquo;There is certainly, and has long been, a degree of probability that the
+      true heir of this family exists in America. If Oglethorpe could discover
+      him, he ousts his enemy from the estate and honors, and substitutes the
+      person whom he has discovered and educated. Most certainly there is
+      revenge in the thing. Should it happen now, however, the triumph would
+      have lost its sweetness, even were Oglethorpe alive to partake of it; for
+      his enemy is dead, leaving no heir, and this foreign branch has come in
+      without Oglethorpe&rsquo;s aid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The friends remained musing a considerable time, each in his own train of
+      thought, till the Warden suddenly spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you mean to prosecute this apparent claim of yours?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have not intended to do so,&rdquo; said Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; said the Warden, &ldquo;that should depend upon the strength of
+      your ground; and I understand you that there is some link wanting to
+      establish it. Otherwise, I see not how you can hesitate. Is it a little
+      thing to hold a claim to an old English estate and honors?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; it is a very great thing, to an Englishman born, and who need give up
+      no higher birthright to avail himself of it,&rdquo; answered Redclyffe. &ldquo;You
+      will laugh at me, my friend; but I cannot help feeling that I, a simple
+      citizen of a republic, yet with none above me except those whom I help to
+      place there,&mdash;and who are my servants, not my superiors,&mdash;must
+      stoop to take these honors. I leave a set of institutions which are the
+      noblest that the wit and civilization of man have yet conceived, to enlist
+      myself in one that is based on a far lower conception of man, and which
+      therefore lowers every one who shares in it. Besides,&rdquo; said the young man,
+      his eyes kindling with the ambition which had been so active a principle
+      in his life, &ldquo;what prospects&mdash;what rewards for spirited exertion&mdash;what
+      a career, only open to an American, would I give up, to become merely a
+      rich and idle Englishman, belonging (as I should) nowhere, without a
+      possibility of struggle, such as a strong man loves, with only a mockery
+      of a title, which in these days really means nothing,&mdash;hardly more
+      than one of our own Honorables. What has any success in English life to
+      offer (even were it within my reach, which, as a stranger, it would not
+      be) to balance the proud career of an American statesman?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;True, you might be a President, I suppose,&rdquo; said the Warden, rather
+      contemptuously,&mdash;&ldquo;a four years&rsquo; potentate. It seems to me an office
+      about on a par with that of the Lord Mayor of London. For my part, I would
+      rather be a baron of three or four hundred years&rsquo; antiquity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We talk in vain,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, laughing. &ldquo;We do not approach one
+      another&rsquo;s ideas on this subject. But, waiving all speculations as to my
+      attempting to avail myself of this claim, do you think I can fairly accept
+      this invitation to visit Lord Braithwaite? There is certainly a
+      possibility that I may arraign myself against his dearest interests.
+      Conscious of this, can I accept his hospitality?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Warden paused. &ldquo;You have not sought access to his house,&rdquo; he observed.
+      &ldquo;You have no designs, it seems, no settled designs at all events, against
+      his Lordship,&mdash;nor is there a probability that they would be
+      forwarded by your accepting this invitation, even if you had any. I do not
+      see but you may go. The only danger is, that his Lordship&rsquo;s engaging
+      qualities may seduce you into dropping your claims out of a chivalrous
+      feeling, which I see is among your possibilities. To be sure, it would be
+      more satisfactory if he knew your actual position, and should then renew
+      his invitation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am convinced,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, looking up from his musing posture,
+      &ldquo;that he does know them. You are surprised; but in all Lord Braithwaite&rsquo;s
+      manner towards me there has been an undefinable something that makes me
+      aware that he knows on what terms we stand towards each other. There is
+      nothing inconceivable in this. The family have for generations been
+      suspicious of an American line, and have more than once sent messengers to
+      try to search out and put a stop to the apprehension. Why should it not
+      have come to their knowledge that there was a person with such claims, and
+      that he is now in England?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It certainly is possible,&rdquo; replied the Warden, &ldquo;and if you are satisfied
+      that his Lordship knows it, or even suspects it, you meet him on fair
+      ground. But I fairly tell you, my good friend, that&mdash;his Lordship
+      being a man of unknown principles of honor, outlandish, and an Italian in
+      habit and moral sense&mdash;I scarcely like to trust you in his house, he
+      being aware that your existence may be inimical to him. My humble board is
+      the safer of the two.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pshaw!&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;You Englishmen are so suspicious of anybody not
+      regularly belonging to yourselves. Poison and the dagger haunt your
+      conceptions of all others. In America you think we kill every third man
+      with the bowie-knife. But, supposing there were any grounds for your
+      suspicion, I would still encounter it. An American is no braver than an
+      Englishman; but still he is not quite so chary of his life as the latter,
+      who never risks it except on the most imminent necessity. We take such
+      matters easy. In regard to this invitation, I feel that I can honorably
+      accept it, and there are many idle and curious motives that impel me to
+      it. I will go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Be it so; but you must come back to me for another week, after finishing
+      your visit,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;After all, it was an idle fancy in me that
+      there could be any danger. His Lordship has good English blood in his
+      veins, and it would take oceans and rivers of Italian treachery to wash
+      out the sterling quality of it. And, my good friend, as to these claims of
+      yours, I would not have you trust too much to what is probably a romantic
+      dream; yet, were the dream to come true, I should think the British
+      peerage honored by such an accession to its ranks. And now to bed; for we
+      have heard the chimes of midnight, two hours agone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They accordingly retired; and Redclyffe was surprised to find what a
+      distinctness his ideas respecting his claim to the Braithwaite honors had
+      assumed, now that he, after so many years, had imparted them to another.
+      Heretofore, though his imagination had played with them so much, they
+      seemed the veriest dreams; now, they had suddenly taken form and hardened
+      into substance; and he became aware, in spite of all the lofty and
+      patriotic sentiments which he had expressed to the Warden, that these
+      prospects had really much importance in his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe, during the few days that he was to spend at the Hospital,
+      previous to his visit to Braithwaite Hall, was conscious of a restlessness
+      such as we have all felt on the eve of some interesting event. He wondered
+      at himself at being so much wrought up by so simple a thing as he was
+      about to do; but it seemed to him like a coming home after an absence of
+      centuries. It was like an actual prospect of entrance into a castle in the
+      air,&mdash;the shadowy threshold of which should assume substance enough
+      to bear his foot, its thin, fantastic walls actually protect him from sun
+      and rain, its hall echo with his footsteps, its hearth warm him. That
+      delicious, thrilling uncertainty between reality and fancy, in which he
+      had often been enwrapt since his arrival in this region, enveloped him
+      more strongly than ever; and with it, too, there came a sort of
+      apprehension, which sometimes shuddered through him like an icy draught,
+      or the touch of cold steel to his heart. He was ashamed, too, to be
+      conscious of anything like fear; yet he would not acknowledge it for fear;
+      and indeed there was such an airy, exhilarating, thrilling pleasure bound
+      up with it, that it could not really be so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in this state of mind that, a day or two after the feast, he saw
+      Colcord sitting on the bench, before the portal of the Hospital, in the
+      sun, which&mdash;September though it was&mdash;still came warm and bright
+      (for English sunshine) into that sheltered spot; a spot where many
+      generations of old men had warmed their limbs, while they looked down into
+      the life, the torpid life, of the old village that trailed its homely yet
+      picturesque street along by the venerable buildings of the Hospital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My good friend,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;I am about leaving you, for a time,&mdash;indeed,
+      with the limited time at my disposal, it is possible that I may not be
+      able to come back hither, except for a brief visit. Before I leave you, I
+      would fain know something more about one whom I must ever consider my
+      benefactor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said the old man, with his usual benignant quiet, &ldquo;I saved your
+      life. It is yet to be seen, perhaps, whether thereby I made myself your
+      benefactor. I trust so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I feel it so, at least,&rdquo; answered Redclyffe, &ldquo;and I assure you life has a
+      new value for me since I came to this place; for I have a deeper hold upon
+      it, as it were,&mdash;more hope from it, more trust in something good to
+      come of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is a good change,&mdash;or should be so,&rdquo; quoth the old man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know,&rdquo; continued Redclyffe, &ldquo;how long you have been a figure in my
+      life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know it,&rdquo; said Colcord, &ldquo;though you might well have forgotten it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not so,&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;I remember, as if it were this morning, that
+      time in New England when I first saw you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man with whom you then abode,&rdquo; said Colcord, &ldquo;knew who I was.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And he being dead, and finding you here now, by such a strange
+      coincidence,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;and being myself a man capable of taking
+      your counsel, I would have you impart it to me: for I assure you that the
+      current of my life runs darkly on, and I would be glad of any light on its
+      future, or even its present phase.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not one of those from whom the world waits for counsel,&rdquo; said the
+      pensioner, &ldquo;and I know not that mine would be advantageous to you, in the
+      light which men usually prize. Yet if I were to give any, it would be that
+      you should be gone hence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gone hence!&rdquo; repeated Redclyffe, surprised. &ldquo;I tell you&mdash;what I have
+      hardly hitherto told to myself&mdash;that all my dreams, all my wishes
+      hitherto, have looked forward to precisely the juncture that seems now to
+      be approaching. My dreaming childhood dreamt of this. If you know anything
+      of me, you know how I sprung out of mystery, akin to none, a thing
+      concocted out of the elements, without visible agency; how all through my
+      boyhood I was alone; how I grew up without a root, yet continually longing
+      for one,&mdash;longing to be connected with somebody, and never feeling
+      myself so. Yet there was ever a looking forward to this time at which I
+      now find myself. If my next step were death, yet while the path seemed to
+      lead toward a certainty of establishing me in connection with my race, I
+      would take it. I have tried to keep down this yearning, to stifle it,
+      annihilate it, by making a position for myself, by being my own fact; but
+      I cannot overcome the natural horror of being a creature floating in the
+      air, attached to nothing; ever this feeling that there is no reality in
+      the life and fortunes, good or bad, of a being so unconnected. There is
+      not even a grave, not a heap of dry bones, not a pinch of dust, with which
+      I can claim kindred, unless I find it here!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is sad,&rdquo; said the old man,&mdash;&ldquo;this strong yearning, and nothing
+      to gratify it. Yet, I warn you, do not seek its gratification here. There
+      are delusions, snares, pitfalls, in this life. I warn you, quit the
+      search.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;I will follow the mysterious clue that seems to
+      lead me on; and, even now, it pulls me one step further.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How is that?&rdquo; asked the old man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It leads me onward even as far as the threshold&mdash;across the
+      threshold&mdash;of yonder mansion,&rdquo; said Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Step not across it; there is blood on that threshold!&rdquo; exclaimed the
+      pensioner. &ldquo;A bloody footstep emerging. Take heed that there be not as
+      bloody a one entering in!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pshaw!&rdquo; said Redclyffe, feeling the ridicule of the emotion into which he
+      had been betrayed, as the old man&rsquo;s wildness of demeanor made him feel
+      that he was talking with a monomaniac. &ldquo;We are talking idly. I do but go,
+      in the common intercourse of society, to see the old English residence
+      which (such is the unhappy obscurity of my position) I fancy, among a
+      thousand others, may have been that of my ancestors. Nothing is likely to
+      come of it. My foot is not bloody, nor polluted with anything except the
+      mud of the damp English soil.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yet go not in!&rdquo; persisted the old man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I must go,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, determinedly, &ldquo;and I will.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ashamed to have been moved to such idle utterances by anything that the
+      old man could say Redclyffe turned away, though he still heard the sad,
+      half-uttered remonstrance of the old man, like a moan behind him, and
+      wondered what strange fancy had taken possession of him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The effect which this opposition had upon him made him the more aware how
+      much his heart was set upon this visit to the Hall; how much he had
+      counted upon being domiciliated there; what a wrench it would be to him to
+      tear himself away without going into that mansion, and penetrating all the
+      mysteries wherewith his imagination, exercising itself upon the theme
+      since the days of the old Doctor&rsquo;s fireside talk, had invested it. In his
+      agitation he wandered forth from the Hospital, and, passing through the
+      village street, found himself in the park of Braithwaite Hall, where he
+      wandered for a space, until his steps led him to a point whence the
+      venerable Hall appeared, with its limes and its oaks around it; its look
+      of peace, and aged repose, and loveliness; its stately domesticity, so
+      ancient, so beautiful; its mild, sweet simplicity; it seemed the ideal of
+      home. The thought thrilled his bosom, that this was his home,&mdash;the
+      home of the wild Western wanderer, who had gone away centuries ago, and
+      encountered strange chances, and almost forgotten his origin, but still
+      kept a clue to bring him back; and had now come back, and found all the
+      original emotions safe within him. It even seemed to him, that, by his
+      kindred with those who had gone before,&mdash;by the line of sensitive
+      blood linking him with that final emigrant,&mdash;he could remember all
+      these objects;&mdash;that tree, hardly more venerable now than then; that
+      clock-tower, still marking the elapsing time; that spire of the old
+      church, raising itself beyond. He spread out his arms in a kind of
+      rapture, and exclaimed:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O home, my home, my forefathers&rsquo; home! I have come back to thee! The
+      wanderer has come back!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a slight stir near him; and on a mossy seat, that was arranged
+      to take advantage of a remarkably good point of view of the old Hall, he
+      saw Elsie sitting. She had her drawing-materials with her, and had
+      probably been taking a sketch. Redclyffe was ashamed of having been
+      overheard by any one giving way to such idle passion as he had been
+      betrayed into; and yet, in another sense, he was glad,&mdash;glad, at
+      least, that something of his feeling, as yet unspoken to human being, was
+      shared, and shared by her with whom, alone of living beings, he had any
+      sympathies of old date, and whom he often thought of with feelings that
+      drew him irresistibly towards her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Elsie,&rdquo; said he, uttering for the first time the old name, &ldquo;Providence
+      makes you my confidant. We have recognized each other, though no word has
+      passed between us. Let us speak now again with one another. How came you
+      hither? What has brought us together again?&mdash;Away with this
+      strangeness that lurks between us! Let us meet as those who began life
+      together, and whose life-strings, being so early twisted in unison, cannot
+      now be torn apart.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are not wise,&rdquo; said Elsie, in a faltering voice, &ldquo;to break the
+      restraint we have tacitly imposed upon ourselves. Do not let us speak
+      further on this subject.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How strangely everything evades me!&rdquo; exclaimed Redclyffe. &ldquo;I seem to be
+      in a land of enchantment, where I can get hold of nothing that lends me a
+      firm support. There is no medium in my life between the most vulgar
+      realities and the most vaporous fiction, too thin to breathe. Tell me,
+      Elsie, how came you here? Why do you not meet me frankly? What is there to
+      keep you apart from the oldest friend, I am bold to say, you have on
+      earth? Are you an English girl? Are you one of our own New England
+      maidens, with her freedom, and her know-how, and her force, beyond
+      anything that these demure and decorous damsels can know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is wild,&rdquo; said Elsie, straggling for composure, yet strongly moved
+      by the recollections that he brought up. &ldquo;It is best that we should meet
+      as strangers, and so part.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Redclyffe; &ldquo;the long past comes up, with its memories, and yet
+      it is not so powerful as the powerful present. We have met again; our
+      adventures have shown that Providence has designed a relation in my fate
+      to yours. Elsie, are you lonely as I am?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she replied, &ldquo;I have bonds, ties, a life, a duty. I must live that
+      life and do that duty. You have, likewise, both. Do yours, lead your own
+      life, like me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know, Elsie,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;whither that life is now tending?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whither?&rdquo; said she, turning towards him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To yonder Hall,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She started up, and clasped her hands about his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no!&rdquo; she exclaimed, &ldquo;go not thither! There is blood upon the
+      threshold! Return: a dreadful fatality awaits you here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come with me, then,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;and I yield my purpose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It cannot be,&rdquo; said Elsie.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I, too, tell you it cannot be,&rdquo; returned Redclyffe. [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dialogue had reached this point, when there came a step along the
+      wood-path; the branches rustled, and there was Lord Braithwaite, looking
+      upon the pair with the ordinary slightly sarcastic glance with which he
+      gazed upon the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A fine morning, fair lady and fair sir,&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;We have few such,
+      except in Italy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0021" id="link2HCH0021"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      So Redclyffe left the Hospital, where he had spent many weeks of strange
+      and not unhappy life, and went to accept the invitation of the lord of
+      Braithwaite Hall. It was with a thrill of strange delight, poignant almost
+      to pain, that he found himself driving up to the door of the Hall, and
+      actually passing the threshold of the house. He looked, as he stept over
+      it, for the Bloody Footstep, with which the house had so long been
+      associated in his imagination; but could nowhere see it. The footman
+      ushered him into a hall, which seemed to be in the centre of the building,
+      and where, little as the autumn was advanced, a fire was nevertheless
+      burning and glowing on the hearth; nor was its effect undesirable in the
+      somewhat gloomy room. The servants had evidently received orders
+      respecting the guest; for they ushered him at once to his chamber, which
+      seemed not to be one of those bachelor&rsquo;s rooms, where, in an English
+      mansion, young and single men are forced to be entertained with very bare
+      and straitened accommodations; but a large, well, though antiquely and
+      solemnly furnished room, with a curtained bed, and all manner of elaborate
+      contrivances for repose; but the deep embrasures of the windows made it
+      gloomy, with the little light that they admitted through their small
+      panes. There must have been English attendance in this department of the
+      household arrangements, at least; for nothing could exceed the exquisite
+      nicety and finish of everything in the room, the cleanliness, the
+      attention to comfort, amid antique aspects of furniture; the rich, deep
+      preparations for repose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The servant told Redclyffe that his master had ridden out, and, adding
+      that luncheon would be on the table at two o&rsquo;clock, left him; and
+      Redclyffe sat some time trying to make out and distinguish the feelings
+      with which he found himself here, and realizing a lifelong dream. He ran
+      back over all the legends which the Doctor used to tell about this
+      mansion, and wondered whether this old, rich chamber were the one where
+      any of them had taken place; whether the shadows of the dead haunted here.
+      But, indeed, if this were the case, the apartment must have been very much
+      changed, antique though it looked, with the second, or third, or whatever
+      other numbered arrangement, since those old days of tapestry hangings and
+      rush-strewed floor. Otherwise this stately and gloomy chamber was as
+      likely as any other to have been the one where his ancestor appeared for
+      the last time in the paternal mansion; here he might have been the night
+      before that mysterious Bloody Footstep was left on the threshold, whence
+      had arisen so many wild legends, and since the impression of which nothing
+      certain had ever been known respecting that ill-fated man,&mdash;nothing
+      certain in England at least,&mdash;and whose story was left so ragged and
+      questionable even by all that he could add.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Do what he could, Redclyffe still was not conscious of that deep
+      home-feeling which he had imagined he should experience when, if ever, he
+      should come back to the old ancestral place; there was strangeness, a
+      struggle within himself to get hold of something that escaped him, an
+      effort to impress on his mind the fact that he was, at last, established
+      at his temporary home in the place that he had so long looked forward to,
+      and that this was the moment which he would have thought more interesting
+      than any other in his life. He was strangely cold and indifferent, frozen
+      up as it were, and fancied that he would have cared little had he been to
+      leave the mansion without so much as looking over the remaining part of
+      it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last, he became weary of sitting and indulging this fantastic humor of
+      indifference, and emerged from his chamber with the design of finding his
+      way about the lower part of the house. The mansion had that delightful
+      intricacy which can never be contrived; never be attained by design; but
+      is the happy result of where many builders, many designs,&mdash;many ages,
+      perhaps,&mdash;have concurred in a structure, each pursuing his own
+      design. Thus it was a house that you could go astray in, as in a city, and
+      come to unexpected places, but never, until after much accustomance, go
+      where you wished; so Redclyffe, although the great staircase and wide
+      corridor by which he had been led to his room seemed easy to find, yet
+      soon discovered that he was involved in an unknown labyrinth, where
+      strange little bits of staircases led up and down, and where passages
+      promised much in letting him out, but performed nothing. To be sure, the
+      old English mansion had not much of the stateliness of one of Mrs.
+      Radcliffe&rsquo;s castles, with their suites of rooms opening one into another;
+      but yet its very domesticity&mdash;its look as if long ago it had been
+      lived in&mdash;made it only the more ghostly; and so Redclyffe felt the
+      more as if he were wandering through a homely dream; sensible of the
+      ludicrousness of his position, he once called aloud; but his voice echoed
+      along the passages, sounding unwontedly to his ears, but arousing nobody.
+      It did not seem to him as if he were going afar, but were bewildered round
+      and round, within a very small compass; a predicament in which a man feels
+      very foolish usually.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he stood at an old window, stone-mullioned, at the end of a passage
+      into which he had come twice over, a door near him opened, and a personage
+      looked out whom he had not before seen. It was a face of great keenness
+      and intelligence, and not unpleasant to look at, though dark and sallow.
+      The dress had something which Redclyffe recognized as clerical, though not
+      exactly pertaining to the Church of England,&mdash;a sort of arrangement
+      of the vest and shirt-collar; and he had knee breeches of black. He did
+      not seem like an English clerical personage, however; for even in this
+      little glimpse of him Redclyffe saw a mildness, gentleness, softness, and
+      asking-of-leave, in his manner, which he had not observed in persons so
+      well assured of their position as the Church of England clergy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He seemed at once to detect Redclyffe&rsquo;s predicament, and came forward with
+      a pleasant smile, speaking in good English, though with a somewhat foreign
+      accent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, sir, you have lost your way. It is a labyrinthian house for its size,
+      this old English Hall,&mdash;full of perplexity. Shall I show you to any
+      point?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed, sir,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, laughing, &ldquo;I hardly know whither I want to
+      go; being a stranger, and yet knowing nothing of the public places of the
+      house. To the library, perhaps, if you will be good enough to direct me
+      thither.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Willingly, my dear sir,&rdquo; said the clerical personage; &ldquo;the more easily
+      too, as my own quarters are close adjacent; the library being my province.
+      Do me the favor to enter here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So saying, the priest ushered Redclyffe into an austere-looking yet
+      exceedingly neat study, as it seemed, on one side of which was an oratory,
+      with a crucifix and other accommodations for Catholic devotion. Behind a
+      white curtain there were glimpses of a bed, which seemed arranged on a
+      principle of conventual austerity in respect to limits and lack of
+      softness; but still there was in the whole austerity of the premises a
+      certain character of restraint, poise, principle, which Redclyffe liked. A
+      table was covered with books, many of them folios in an antique binding of
+      parchment, and others were small, thick-set volumes, into which antique
+      lore was rammed and compressed. Through an open door, opposite to the one
+      by which he had entered, there was a vista of a larger apartment, with
+      alcoves, a rather dreary-looking room, though a little sunshine came
+      through a window at the further end, distained with colored glass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will you sit down in my little home?&rdquo; said the courteous priest. &ldquo;I hope
+      we may be better acquainted; so allow me to introduce myself. I am Father
+      Angelo, domestic chaplain to his Lordship. You, I know, are the American
+      diplomatic gentleman, from whom his Lordship has been expecting a visit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe bowed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am most happy to know you,&rdquo; continued the priest. &ldquo;Ah; you have a happy
+      country, most catholic, most recipient of all that is outcast on earth.
+      Men of my religion must ever bless it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It certainly ought to be remembered to our credit,&rdquo; replied Redclyffe,
+      &ldquo;that we have shown no narrow spirit in this matter, and have not, like
+      other Protestant countries, rejected the good that is found in any man on
+      account of his religious faith. American statesmanship comprises Jew,
+      Catholic, all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After this pleasant little acknowledgment, there ensued a conversation
+      having some reference to books; for though Redclyffe, of late years, had
+      known little of what deserves to be called literature,&mdash;having found
+      political life as much estranged from it as it is apt to be with
+      politicians,&mdash;yet he had early snuffed the musty fragrance of the
+      Doctor&rsquo;s books, and had learned to love its atmosphere. At the time he
+      left college, he was just at the point where he might have been a scholar;
+      but the active tendencies of American life had interfered with him, as
+      with thousands of others, and drawn him away from pursuits which might
+      have been better adapted to some of his characteristics than the one he
+      had adopted. The priest gently felt and touched around his pursuits, and
+      finding some remains of classic culture, he kept up a conversation on
+      these points; showing him the possessions of the library in that
+      department, where, indeed, were some treasures that he had discovered, and
+      which seemed to have been collected at least a century ago.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Generally, however,&rdquo; observed he, as they passed from one dark alcove to
+      another, &ldquo;the library is of little worth, except to show how much of
+      living truth each generation contributes to the botheration of life, and
+      what a public benefactor a bookworm is, after all. There, now! did you
+      ever happen to see one? Here is one that I have watched at work, some time
+      past, and have not thought it worth while to stop him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe looked at the learned little insect, who was eating a strange
+      sort of circular trench into an old book of scholastic Latin, which
+      probably only he had ever devoured,&mdash;at least ever found to his
+      taste. The insect seemed in excellent condition, fat with learning, having
+      doubtless got the essence of the book into himself. But Redclyffe was
+      still more interested in observing in the corner a great spider, which
+      really startled him,&mdash;not so much for its own terrible aspect, though
+      that was monstrous, as because he seemed to see in it the very great
+      spider which he had known in his boyhood; that same monster that had been
+      the Doctor&rsquo;s familiar, and had been said to have had an influence in his
+      death. He looked so startled that Father Angelo observed it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do not be frightened,&rdquo; said he; &ldquo;though I allow that a brave man may well
+      be afraid of a spider, and that the bravest of the brave need not blush to
+      shudder at this one. There is a great mystery about this spider. No one
+      knows whence he came; nor how long he has been here. The library was very
+      much shut up during the time of the last inheritor of the estate, and had
+      not been thoroughly examined for some years when I opened it, and swept
+      some of the dust away from its old alcoves. I myself was not aware of this
+      monster until the lapse of some weeks, when I was startled at seeing him,
+      one day, as I was reading an old book here. He dangled down from the
+      ceiling, by the cordage of his web, and positively seemed to look into my
+      face.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is of the species Condetas,&rdquo; said Redclyffe,&mdash;&ldquo;a rare spider
+      seldom seen out of the tropic regions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are learned, then, in spiders,&rdquo; observed the priest, surprised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could almost make oath, at least, that I have known this ugly specimen
+      of his race,&rdquo; observed Redclyffe. &ldquo;A very dear friend, now deceased, to
+      whom I owed the highest obligations, was studious of spiders, and his
+      chief treasure was one the very image of this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How strange!&rdquo; said the priest. &ldquo;There has always appeared to me to be
+      something uncanny in spiders. I should be glad to talk further with you on
+      this subject. Several times I have fancied a strange intelligence in this
+      monster; but I have natural horror of him, and therefore refrain from
+      interviews.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do wisely, sir,&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;His powers and purposes are
+      questionably beneficent, at best.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In truth, the many-legged monster made the old library ghostly to him by
+      the associations which it summoned up, and by the idea that it was really
+      the identical one that had seemed so stuffed with poison, in the lifetime
+      of the Doctor, and at that so distant spot. Yet, on reflection, it
+      appeared not so strange; for the old Doctor&rsquo;s spider, as he had heard him
+      say, was one of an ancestral race that he had brought from beyond the sea.
+      They might have been preserved, for ages possibly, in this old library,
+      whence the Doctor had perhaps taken his specimen, and possibly the one now
+      before him was the sole survivor. It hardly, however, made the monster any
+      the less hideous to suppose that this might be the case; and to fancy the
+      poison of old times condensed into this animal, who might have sucked the
+      diseases, moral and physical, of all this family into him, and to have
+      made himself their demon. He questioned with himself whether it might not
+      be well to crush him at once, and so perhaps do away with the evil of
+      which he was the emblem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I felt a strange disposition to crush this monster at first,&rdquo; remarked
+      the priest, as if he knew what Redclyffe was thinking of,&mdash;&ldquo;a feeling
+      that in so doing I should get rid of a mischief; but then he is such a
+      curious monster. You cannot long look at him without coming to the
+      conclusion that he is indestructible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; and to think of crushing such a deep-bowelled monster!&rdquo; said
+      Redclyffe, shuddering. &ldquo;It is too great a catastrophe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      During this conversation in which he was so deeply concerned, the spider
+      withdrew himself, and hand over hand ascended to a remote and dusky
+      corner, where was his hereditary abode.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall I be likely to meet Lord Braithwaite here in the library?&rdquo; asked
+      Redclyffe, when the fiend had withdrawn himself. &ldquo;I have not yet seen him
+      since my arrival.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I trust,&rdquo; said the priest, with great courtesy, &ldquo;that you are aware of
+      some peculiarities in his Lordship&rsquo;s habits, which imply nothing in
+      detriment to the great respect which he pays all his few guests, and
+      which, I know, he is especially desirous to pay to you. I think that we
+      shall meet him at lunch, which, though an English institution, his
+      Lordship has adopted very readily.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should hope,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, willing to know how far he might be
+      expected to comply with the peculiarities&mdash;which might prove to be
+      eccentricities&mdash;of his host, &ldquo;that my presence here will not be too
+      greatly at variance with his Lordship&rsquo;s habits, whatever they may be. I
+      came hither, indeed, on the pledge that, as my host would not stand in my
+      way, so neither would I in his.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is the true principle,&rdquo; said the priest, &ldquo;and here comes his
+      Lordship in person to begin the practice of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0022" id="link2HCH0022"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Lord Braithwaite came into the principal door of the library as the priest
+      was speaking, and stood a moment just upon the threshold, looking keenly
+      out of the stronger light into this dull and darksome apartment, as if
+      unable to see perfectly what was within; or rather, as Redclyffe fancied,
+      trying to discover what was passing between those two. And, indeed, as
+      when a third person comes suddenly upon two who are talking of him, the
+      two generally evince in their manner some consciousness of the fact; so it
+      was in this case, with Redclyffe at least, although the priest seemed
+      perfectly undisturbed, either through practice of concealment, or because
+      he had nothing to conceal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His Lordship, after a moment&rsquo;s pause, came forward, presenting his hand to
+      Redclyffe, who shook it, and not without a certain cordiality; till he
+      perceived that it was the left hand, when he probably intimated some
+      surprise by a change of manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am an awkward person,&rdquo; said his Lordship. &ldquo;The left hand, however, is
+      nearest the heart; so be assured I mean no discourtesy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Signor Ambassador and myself,&rdquo; observed the priest, &ldquo;have had a most
+      interesting conversation (to me at least) about books and bookworms,
+      spiders, and other congruous matters; and I find his Excellency has
+      heretofore made acquaintance with a great spider bearing strong
+      resemblance to the hermit of our library.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed,&rdquo; said his Lordship. &ldquo;I was not aware that America had yet enough
+      of age and old misfortune, crime, sordidness, that accumulate with it, to
+      have produced spiders like this. Had he sucked into himself all the
+      noisomeness of your heat?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe made some slight answer, that the spider was a sort of pet of an
+      old virtuoso to whom he owed many obligations in his boyhood; and the
+      conversation turned from this subject to others suggested by topics of the
+      day and place. His Lordship was affable, and Redclyffe could not, it must
+      be confessed, see anything to justify the prejudices of the neighbors
+      against him. Indeed, he was inclined to attribute them, in great measure,
+      to the narrowness of the English view,&mdash;to those insular prejudices
+      which have always prevented them from fully appreciating what differs from
+      their own habits. At lunch, which was soon announced, the party of three
+      became very pleasant and sociable, his Lordship drinking a light Italian
+      red wine, and recommending it to Redclyffe; who, however, was English
+      enough to prefer some bitter ale, while the priest contented himself with
+      pure water,&mdash;which is, in truth, a less agreeable drink in chill,
+      moist England than in any country we are acquainted with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must make yourself quite at home here,&rdquo; said his Lordship, as they
+      rose from table. &ldquo;I am not a good host, nor a very genial man, I believe.
+      I can do little to entertain you; but here is the house and the grounds at
+      your disposal,&mdash;horses in the stable,&mdash;guns in the hall,&mdash;here
+      is Father Angelo, good at chess. There is the library. Pray make the most
+      of them all; and if I can contribute in any way to your pleasure, let me
+      know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All this certainly seemed cordial, and the manner in which it was said
+      seemed in accordance with the spirit of the words; and yet, whether the
+      fault was in anything of morbid suspicion in Redclyffe&rsquo;s nature, or
+      whatever it was, it did not have the effect of making him feel welcome,
+      which almost every Englishman has the natural faculty of producing on a
+      guest, when once he has admitted him beneath his roof. It might be in
+      great measure his face, so thin and refined, and intellectual without
+      feeling; his voice which had melody, but not heartiness; his manners,
+      which were not simple by nature, but by art;&mdash;whatever it was,
+      Redclyffe found that Lord Braithwaite did not call for his own naturalness
+      and simplicity, but his art, and felt that he was inevitably acting a part
+      in his intercourse with him, that he was on his guard, playing a game; and
+      yet he did not wish to do this. But there was a mobility, a subtleness in
+      his nature, an unconscious tact,&mdash;which the mode of life and of
+      mixing with men in America fosters and perfects,&mdash;that made this sort
+      of finesse inevitable to him, with any but a natural character; with whom,
+      on the other hand, Redclyffe could be as fresh and natural as any
+      Englishman of them all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe spent the time between lunch and dinner in wandering about the
+      grounds, from which he had hitherto felt himself debarred by motives of
+      delicacy. It was a most interesting ramble to him, coming to trees which
+      his ancestor, who went to America, might have climbed in his boyhood,
+      might have sat beneath, with his lady-love, in his youth; deer there were,
+      the descendants of those which he had seen; old stone stiles, which his
+      foot had trodden. The sombre, clouded light of the day fell down upon this
+      scene, which in its verdure, its luxuriance of vegetable life, was purely
+      English, cultivated to the last extent without losing the nature out of a
+      single thing. In the course of his walk he came to the spot where he had
+      been so mysteriously wounded on his first arrival in this region; and,
+      examining the spot, he was startled to see that there was a path leading
+      to the other side of a hedge, and this path, which led to the house, had
+      brought him here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Musing upon this mysterious circumstance, and how it should have happened
+      in so orderly a country as England, so tamed and subjected to
+      civilization,&mdash;an incident to happen in an English park which seemed
+      better suited to the Indian-haunted forests of the wilder parts of his own
+      land,&mdash;and how no researches which the Warden had instituted had
+      served in the smallest degree to develop the mystery,&mdash;he clambered
+      over the hedge, and followed the footpath. It plunged into dells, and
+      emerged from them, led through scenes which seemed those of old romances,
+      and at last, by these devious ways, began to approach the old house,
+      which, with its many gray gables, put on a new aspect from this point of
+      view. Redclyffe admired its venerableness anew; the ivy that overran parts
+      of it; the marks of age; and wondered at the firmness of the institutions
+      which, through all the changes that come to man, could have kept this
+      house the home of one lineal race for so many centuries; so many, that the
+      absence of his own branch from it seemed but a temporary visit to foreign
+      parts, from which he was now returned, to be again at home, by the old
+      hearthstone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what do I mean to do?&rdquo; said he to himself, stopping short, and still
+      looking at the old house. &ldquo;Am I ready to give up all the actual life
+      before me for the sake of taking up with what I feel to be a less
+      developed state of human life? Would it not be better for me to depart
+      now, to turn my back on this flattering prospect? I am not fit to be here,&mdash;I,
+      so strongly susceptible of a newer, more stirring life than these men
+      lead; I, who feel that, whatever the thought and cultivation of England
+      may be, my own countrymen have gone forward a long, long march beyond
+      them, not intellectually, but in a way that gives them a further start. If
+      I come back hither, with the purpose to make myself an Englishman,
+      especially an Englishman of rank and hereditary estate,&mdash;then for me
+      America has been discovered in vain, and the great spirit that has been
+      breathed into us is in vain; and I am false to it all!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But again came silently swelling over him like a flood all that ancient
+      peace, and quietude, and dignity, which looked so stately and beautiful as
+      brooding round the old house; all that blessed order of ranks, that sweet
+      superiority, and yet with no disclaimer of common brotherhood, that
+      existed between the English gentleman and his inferiors; all that
+      delightful intercourse, so sure of pleasure, so safe from rudeness,
+      lowness, unpleasant rubs, that exists between gentleman and gentleman,
+      where, in public affairs, all are essentially of one mind, or seem so to
+      an American politician, accustomed to the fierce conflicts of our
+      embittered parties; where life was made so enticing, so refined, and yet
+      with a sort of homeliness that seemed to show that all its strength was
+      left behind; that seeming taking in of all that was desirable in life, and
+      all its grace and beauty, yet never giving life a hard enamel of
+      over-refinement. What could there be in the wild, harsh, ill-conducted
+      American approach to civilization, which could compare with this? What to
+      compare with this juiciness and richness? What other men had ever got so
+      much out of life as the polished and wealthy Englishmen of to-day? What
+      higher part was to be acted, than seemed to lie before him, if he willed
+      to accept it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He resumed his walk, and, drawing near the manor-house, found that he was
+      approaching another entrance than that which had at first admitted him; a
+      very pleasant entrance it was, beneath a porch, of antique form, and
+      ivy-clad, hospitable and inviting; and it being the approach from the
+      grounds, it seemed to be more appropriate to the residents of the house
+      than the other one. Drawing near, Redclyffe saw that a flight of steps
+      ascended within the porch, old-looking, much worn; and nothing is more
+      suggestive of long time than a flight of worn steps; it must have taken so
+      many soles, through so many years, to make an impression. Judging from the
+      make of the outside of the edifice, Redclyffe thought that he could make
+      out the way from the porch to the hall and library; so he determined to
+      enter this way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There had been, as was not unusual, a little shower of rain during the
+      afternoon; and as Redclyffe came close to the steps, they were glistening
+      with the wet. The stones were whitish, like marble, and one of them bore
+      on it a token that made him pause, while a thrill like terror ran through
+      his system. For it was the mark of a footstep, very decidedly made out,
+      and red, like blood,&mdash;the Bloody Footstep,&mdash;the mark of a foot,
+      which seemed to have been slightly impressed into the rock, as if it had
+      been a soft substance, at the same time sliding a little, and gushing with
+      blood. The glistening moisture of which we have spoken made it appear as
+      if it were just freshly stamped there; and it suggested to Redclyffe&rsquo;s
+      fancy the idea, that, impressed more than two centuries ago, there was
+      some charm connected with the mark which kept it still fresh, and would
+      continue to do so to the end of time. It was well that there was no
+      spectator there,&mdash;for the American would have blushed to have it
+      known how much this old traditionary wonder had affected his imagination.
+      But, indeed, it was as old as any bugbear of his mind&mdash;as any of
+      those bugbears and private terrors which grow up with people, and make the
+      dreams and nightmares of childhood, and the fever-images of mature years,
+      till they haunt the deliriums of the dying bed, and after that possibly,
+      are either realized or known no more. The Doctor&rsquo;s strange story vividly
+      recurred to him, and all the horrors which he had since associated with
+      this trace; and it seemed to him as if he had now struck upon a bloody
+      track, and as if there were other tracks of this supernatural foot which
+      he was bound to search out; removing the dust of ages that had settled on
+      them, the moss and deep grass that had grown over them, the forest leaves
+      that might have fallen on them in America&mdash;marking out the pathway,
+      till the pedestrian lay down in his grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The foot was issuing from, not entering into, the house. Whoever had
+      impressed it, or on whatever occasion, he had gone forth, and doubtless to
+      return no more. Redclyffe was impelled to place his own foot on the track;
+      and the action, as it were, suggested in itself strange ideas of what had
+      been the state of mind of the man who planted it there; and he felt a
+      strange, vague, yet strong surmise of some agony, some terror and horror,
+      that had passed here, and would not fade out of the spot. While he was in
+      these musings, he saw Lord Braithwaite looking at him through the glass of
+      the porch, with fixed, curious eyes, and a smile on his face. On
+      perceiving that Redclyffe was aware of his presence, he came forth without
+      appearing in the least disturbed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What think you of the Bloody Footstep?&rdquo; asked he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seems to me, undoubtedly,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, stooping to examine it more
+      closely, &ldquo;a good thing to make a legend out of; and, like most legendary
+      lore, not capable of bearing close examination. I should decidedly say
+      that the Bloody Footstep is a natural reddish stain in the stone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think so, indeed?&rdquo; rejoined his Lordship. &ldquo;It may be; but in that
+      case, if not the record of an actual deed,&mdash;of a foot stamped down
+      there in guilt and agony, and oozing out with unwipeupable blood,&mdash;we
+      may consider it as prophetic;&mdash;as foreboding, from the time when the
+      stone was squared and smoothed, and laid at this threshold, that a fatal
+      footstep was really to be impressed here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is an ingenious supposition,&rdquo; said Redclyffe. &ldquo;But is there any sure
+      knowledge that the prophecy you suppose has yet been fulfilled?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If not, it might yet be in the future,&rdquo; said Lord Braithwaite. &ldquo;But I
+      think there are enough in the records of this family to prove that there
+      did one cross this threshold in a bloody agony, who has since returned no
+      more. Great seekings, I have understood, have been had throughout the
+      world for him, or for any sign of him, but nothing satisfactory has been
+      heard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it is now too late to expect it,&rdquo; observed the American.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps not,&rdquo; replied the nobleman, with a glance that Redclyffe thought
+      had peculiar meaning in it. &ldquo;Ah! it is very curious to see what turnings
+      up there are in this world of old circumstances that seem buried forever;
+      how things come back, like echoes that have rolled away among the hills
+      and been seemingly hushed forever. We cannot tell when a thing is really
+      dead; it comes to life, perhaps in its old shape, perhaps in a new and
+      unexpected one; so that nothing really vanishes out of the world. I wish
+      it did.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The conversation now ceased, and Redclyffe entered the house, where he
+      amused himself for some time in looking at the ancient hall, with its
+      gallery, its armor, and its antique fireplace, on the hearth of which
+      burned a genial fire. He wondered whether in that fire was the continuance
+      of that custom which the Doctor&rsquo;s legend spoke of, and that the flame had
+      been kept up there two hundred years, in expectation of the wanderer&rsquo;s
+      return. It might be so, although the climate of England made it a natural
+      custom enough, in a large and damp old room, into which many doors opened,
+      both from the exterior and interior of the mansion; but it was pleasant to
+      think the custom a traditionary one, and to fancy that a booted figure,
+      enveloped in a cloak, might still arrive, and fling open the veiling
+      cloak, throw off the sombre and drooping-brimmed hat, and show features
+      that were similar to those seen in pictured faces on the walls. Was he
+      himself&mdash;in another guise, as Lord Braithwaite had been saying&mdash;that
+      long-expected one? Was his the echoing tread that had been heard so long
+      through the ages&mdash;so far through the wide world&mdash;approaching the
+      blood-stained threshold?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With such thoughts, or dreams (for they were hardly sincerely enough
+      entertained to be called thoughts), Redclyffe spent the day; a strange,
+      delicious day, in spite of the sombre shadows that enveloped it. He
+      fancied himself strangely wonted, already, to the house; as if his every
+      part and peculiarity had at once fitted into its nooks, and corners, and
+      crannies; but, indeed, his mobile nature and active fancy were not
+      entirely to be trusted in this matter; it was, perhaps, his American
+      faculty of making himself at home anywhere, that he mistook for the
+      feeling of being peculiarly at home here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0023" id="link2HCH0023"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe was now established in the great house which had been so long
+      and so singularly an object of interest with him. With his customary
+      impressibility by the influences around him, he begun to take in the
+      circumstances, and to understand them by more subtile tokens than he could
+      well explain to himself. There was the steward, [Endnote: 1] or whatever
+      was his precise office; so quiet, so subdued, so nervous, so strange! What
+      had been this man&rsquo;s history? What was now the secret of his daily life?
+      There he was, creeping stealthily up and down the staircases, and about
+      the passages of the house; always as if he were afraid of meeting
+      somebody. On seeing Redclyffe in the house, the latter fancied that the
+      man expressed a kind of interest in his face; but whether pleasure or pain
+      he could not well tell; only he sometimes found that he was contemplating
+      him from a distance, or from the obscurity of the room in which he sat,&mdash;or
+      from a corridor, while he smoked his cigar on the lawn. A great part, if
+      not the whole of this, he imputed to his knowledge of Redclyffe&rsquo;s
+      connections with the Doctor; but yet this hardly seemed sufficient to
+      account for the pertinacity with which the old man haunted his footsteps,&mdash;the
+      poor, nervous old thing,&mdash;always near him, or often unexpectedly so;
+      and yet apparently not very willing to hold conversation with him, having
+      nothing of importance to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Omskirk,&rdquo; said Redclyffe to him, a day or two after the commencement
+      of his visit, &ldquo;how many years have you now been in this situation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;0, sir, ever since the Doctor&rsquo;s departure for America,&rdquo; said Omskirk,
+      &ldquo;now thirty and five years, five months, and three days.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A long time,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, smiling, &ldquo;and you seem to keep the account
+      of it very accurately.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A very long time, your honor,&rdquo; said Omskirk; &ldquo;so long, that I seem to
+      have lived one life before it began, and I cannot think of any life than
+      just what I had. My life was broken off short in the midst; and what
+      belonged to the earlier part of it was another man&rsquo;s life; this is mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It might be a pleasant life enough, I should think, in this fine old
+      Hall,&rdquo; said Redclyffe; &ldquo;rather monotonous, however. Would you not like a
+      relaxation of a few days, a pleasure trip, in all these thirty-five years?
+      You old Englishmen are so sturdily faithful to one thing. You do not
+      resemble my countrymen in that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;0, none of them ever lived in an old mansion-house like this,&rdquo; replied
+      Omskirk, &ldquo;they do not know the sort of habits that a man gets here. They
+      do not know my business either, nor any man&rsquo;s here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is your master then, so difficult?&rdquo; said Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My master! Who was speaking of him?&rdquo; said the old man, as if surprised.
+      &ldquo;Ah, I was thinking of Dr. Grimshawe. He was my master, you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Redclyffe was again inconceivably struck with the strength of the
+      impression that was made on the poor old man&rsquo;s mind by the character of
+      the old Doctor; so that, after thirty years of other service, he still
+      felt him to be the master, and could not in the least release himself from
+      those earlier bonds. He remembered a story that the Doctor used to tell of
+      his once recovering a hanged person, and more and more came to the
+      conclusion that this was the man, and that, as the Doctor had said, this
+      hold of a strong mind over a weak one, strengthened by the idea that he
+      had made him, had subjected the man to him in a kind of slavery that
+      embraced the soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, again, the lord of the estate interested him greatly, and not
+      unpleasantly. He compared what he seemed to be now with what, according to
+      all reports, he had been in the past, and could make nothing of it, nor
+      reconcile the two characters in the least. It seemed as if the estate were
+      possessed by a devil,&mdash;a foul and melancholy fiend,&mdash;who
+      resented the attempted possession of others by subjecting them to himself.
+      One had turned from quiet and sober habits to reckless dissipation;
+      another had turned from the usual gayety of life to recluse habits, and
+      both, apparently, by the same influence; at least, so it appeared to
+      Redclyffe, as he insulated their story from all other circumstances, and
+      looked at them by one light. He even thought that he felt a similar
+      influence coming over himself, even in this little time that he had spent
+      here; gradually, should this be his permanent residence,&mdash;and not so
+      very gradually either,&mdash;there would come its own individual mode of
+      change over him. That quick suggestive mind would gather the moss and
+      lichens of decay. Palsy of its powers would probably be the form it would
+      assume. He looked back through the vanished years to the time which he had
+      spent with the old Doctor, and he felt unaccountably as if the mysterious
+      old man were yet ruling him, as he did in his boyhood; as if his
+      inscrutable, inevitable eye were upon him in all his movements; nay, as if
+      he had guided every step that he took in coming hither, and were stalking
+      mistily before him, leading him about. He sometimes would gladly have
+      given up all these wild and enticing prospects, these dreams that had
+      occupied him so long, if he could only have gone away and looked back upon
+      the house, its inmates, and his own recollections no more; but there came
+      a fate, and took the shape of the old Doctor&rsquo;s apparition, holding him
+      back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, too, the thought of Elsie had much influence in keeping him
+      quietly here; her natural sunshine was the one thing that, just now,
+      seemed to have a good influence upon the world. She, too, was evidently
+      connected with this place, and with the fate, whatever it might be, that
+      awaited him here. The Doctor, the ruler of his destiny, had provided her
+      as well as all the rest; and from his grave, or wherever he was, he still
+      seemed to bring them together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So here, in this darkened dream, he waited for what should come to pass;
+      and daily, when he sat down in the dark old library, it was with the
+      thought that this day might bring to a close the doubt amid which he
+      lived,&mdash;might give him the impetus to go forward. In such a state, no
+      doubt, the witchcraft of the place was really to be recognized, the old
+      witchcraft, too, of the Doctor, which he had escaped by the quick
+      ebullition of youthful spirit, long ago, while the Doctor lived; but which
+      had been stored up till now, till an influence that remained latent for
+      years had worked out in active disease. He held himself open for
+      intercourse with the lord of the mansion; and intercourse of a certain
+      nature they certainly had, but not of the kind which Redclyffe desired.
+      They talked together of politics, of the state of the relations between
+      England and America, of the court to which Redclyffe was accredited;
+      sometimes Redclyffe tried to lead the conversation to the family topics,
+      nor, in truth, did Lord Braithwaite seem to decline his lead; although it
+      was observable that very speedily the conversation would be found turned
+      upon some other subject, to which it had swerved aside by subtle underhand
+      movements. Yet Redclyffe was not the less determined, and at no distant
+      period, to bring up the subject on which his mind dwelt so much, and have
+      it fairly discussed between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was sometimes a little frightened at the position and circumstances in
+      which he found himself; a great disturbance there was in his being, the
+      causes of which he could not trace. It had an influence on his dreams,
+      through which the Doctor seemed to pass continually, and when he awoke it
+      was often with the sensation that he had just the moment before been
+      holding conversation with the old man, and that the latter&mdash;with that
+      gesture of power that he remembered so well&mdash;had been impressing some
+      command upon him; but what that command was, he could not possibly call to
+      mind. He wandered among the dark passages of the house, and up its antique
+      staircases, as if expecting at every turn to meet some one who would have
+      the word of destiny to say to him. When he went forth into the park, it
+      was as if to hold an appointment with one who had promised to meet him
+      there; and he came slowly back, lingering and loitering, because this
+      expected one had not yet made himself visible, yet plucked up a little
+      alacrity as he drew near the house, because the communicant might have
+      arrived in his absence, and be waiting for him in the dim library. It
+      seemed as if he was under a spell; he could neither go away nor rest,&mdash;nothing
+      but dreams, troubled dreams. He had ghostly fears, as if some one were
+      near him whom he could not make out; stealing behind him, and starting
+      away when he was impelled to turn round. A nervousness that his healthy
+      temperament had never before permitted him to be the victim of, assailed
+      him now. He could not help imputing it partly to the influence of the
+      generations who had left a portion of their individual human nature in the
+      house, which had become magnetic by them and could not rid itself of their
+      presence in one sense, though, in another, they had borne it as far off as
+      to where the gray tower of the village church rose above their remains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again, he was frightened to perceive what a hold the place was getting
+      upon him; how the tendrils of the ivy seemed to hold him and would not let
+      him go; how natural and homelike (grim and sombre as they were) the old
+      doorways and apartments were becoming; how in no place that he had ever
+      known had he had such a home-like feeling. To be sure, poor fellow, he had
+      no earlier home except the almshouse, where his recollection of a fireside
+      crowded by grim old women and pale, sickly children, of course never
+      allowed him to have the reminiscences of a private, domestic home. But
+      then there was the Doctor&rsquo;s home by the graveyard, and little Elsie, his
+      constant playmate? No, even those recollections did not hold him like this
+      heavy present circumstance. How should he ever draw himself away? No; the
+      proud and vivid and active prospects that had heretofore spread themselves
+      before him,&mdash;the striving to conquer, the struggle, the victory, the
+      defeat, if such it was to be,&mdash;the experiences for good or ill,&mdash;the
+      life, life, life,&mdash;all possibility of these was passing from him; all
+      that hearty earnest contest or communion of man with man; and leaving him
+      nothing but this great sombre shade, this brooding of the old family
+      mansion, with its dreary ancestral hall, its mouldy dignity, its life of
+      the past, its fettering honor, which to accept must bind him hand and
+      foot, as respects all effort, such as he had trained himself for,&mdash;such
+      as his own country offered. It was not any value for these,&mdash;as it
+      seemed to Redclyffe,&mdash;but a witchcraft, an indefinable spell, a
+      something that he could not define, that enthralled him, and was now doing
+      a work on him analogous to, though different from, that which was wrought
+      on Omskirk and all the other inhabitants, high and low, of this old
+      mansion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt greatly interested in the master of the mansion; although perhaps
+      it was not from anything in his nature; but partly because he conceived
+      that he himself had a controlling power over his fortunes, and likewise
+      from the vague perception of this before-mentioned trouble in him. It
+      seemed, whatever it might be, to have converted an ordinary superficial
+      man of the world into a being that felt and suffered inwardly, had pangs,
+      fears, a conscience, a sense of unseen things. It seemed as if underneath
+      this manor-house were the entrance to the cave of Trophonius, one visit to
+      which made a man sad forever after; and that Lord Braithwaite had been
+      there once, or perhaps went nightly, or at any hour. Or the mansion itself
+      was like dark-colored experience, the reality; the point of view where
+      things were seen in their true lights; the true world, all outside of
+      which was delusion, and here&mdash;dreamlike as its structures seemed&mdash;the
+      absolute truth. All those that lived in it were getting to be a
+      brotherhood; and he among them; and perhaps before the blood-stained
+      threshold would grow up an impassable barrier, which would cause himself
+      to sit down in dreary quiet, like the rest of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe, as has been intimated, had an unavowed&mdash;unavowed to
+      himself&mdash;suspicion that the master of the house cherished no kindly
+      purpose towards him; he had an indistinct feeling of danger from him; he
+      would not have been surprised to know that he was concocting a plot
+      against his life; and yet he did not think that Lord Braithwaite had the
+      slightest hostility towards him. It might make the thing more horrible,
+      perhaps; but it has been often seen in those who poison for the sake of
+      interest, without feelings of personal malevolence, that they do it as
+      kindly as the nature of the thing will permit; they, possibly, may even
+      have a certain degree of affection for their victims, enough to induce
+      them to make the last hours of life sweet and pleasant; to wind up the
+      fever of life with a double supply of enjoyable throbs; to sweeten and
+      delicately flavor the cup of death that they offer to the lips of him
+      whose life is inconsistent with some stated necessity of their own. &ldquo;Dear
+      friend,&rdquo; such a one might say to the friend whom he reluctantly condemned
+      to death, &ldquo;think not that there is any base malice, any desire of pain to
+      thee, that actuates me in this thing. Heaven knows, I earnestly wish thy
+      good. But I have well considered the matter,&mdash;more deeply than thou
+      hast,&mdash;and have found that it is essential that one thing should be,
+      and essential to that thing that thou, my friend, shouldst die. Is that a
+      doom which even thou wouldst object to with such an end to be answered?
+      Thou art innocent; thou art not a man of evil life; the worst thing that
+      can come of it, so far as thou art concerned, would be a quiet, endless
+      repose in yonder churchyard, among dust of thy ancestry, with the English
+      violets growing over thee there, and the green, sweet grass, which thou
+      wilt not scorn to associate with thy dissolving elements, remembering that
+      thy forefather owed a debt, for his own birth and growth, to this English
+      soil, and paid it not,&mdash;consigned himself to that rough soil of
+      another clime, under the forest leaves. Pay it, dear friend, without
+      repining, and leave me to battle a little longer with this troublesome
+      world, and in a few years to rejoin thee, and talk quietly over this
+      matter which we are now arranging. How slight a favor, then, for one
+      friend to do another, will seem this that I seek of thee.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe smiled to himself, as he thus gave expression to what he really
+      half fancied were Lord Braithwaite&rsquo;s feelings and purposes towards him,
+      and he felt them in the kindness and sweetness of his demeanor, and his
+      evident wish to make him happy, combined with his own subtile suspicion of
+      some design with which he had been invited here, or which had grown up
+      since he came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whoever has read Italian history must have seen such instances of this
+      poisoning without malice or personal ill-feeling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His own pleasant, companionable, perhaps noble traits and qualities, may
+      have made a favorable impression on Lord Braithwaite, and perhaps he
+      regretted the necessity of acting as he was about to do, but could not
+      therefore weakly relinquish his deliberately formed design. And, on his
+      part, Redclyffe bore no malice towards Lord Braithwaite, but felt really a
+      kindly interest in him, and could he have made him happy at any less cost
+      than his own life, or dearest interests, would perhaps have been glad to
+      do so. He sometimes felt inclined to remonstrate with him in a friendly
+      way; to tell him that his intended course was not likely to lead to a good
+      result; that they had better try to arrange the matter on some other
+      basis, and perhaps he would not find the American so unreasonable as he
+      supposed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this, it will be understood, were the mere dreamy suppositions of
+      Redclyffe, in the idleness and languor of the old mansion, letting his
+      mind run at will, and following it into dim caves, whither it tended. He
+      did not actually believe anything of all this; unless it be a lawyer, or a
+      policeman, or some very vulgar natural order of mind, no man really
+      suspects another of crime. It is the hardest thing in the world for a
+      noble nature&mdash;the hardest and the most shocking&mdash;to be convinced
+      that a fellow-being is going to do a wrong thing, and the consciousness of
+      one&rsquo;s own inviolability renders it still more difficult to believe that
+      one&rsquo;s self is to be the object of the wrong. What he had been fancying
+      looked to him like a romance. The strange part of the matter was, what
+      suggested such a romance in regard to his kind and hospitable host, who
+      seemed to exercise the hospitality of England with a kind of refinement
+      and pleasant piquancy that came from his Italian mixture of blood? Was
+      there no spiritual whisper here?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So the time wore on; and Redclyffe began to be sensible that he must soon
+      decide upon the course that he was to take; for his diplomatic position
+      waited for him, and he could not loiter many days more away in this half
+      delicious, half painful reverie and quiet in the midst of his struggling
+      life. He was yet as undetermined what to do as ever; or, if we may come
+      down to the truth, he was perhaps loath to acknowledge to himself the
+      determination that he had actually formed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day, at dinner, which now came on after candle-light, he and Lord
+      Braithwaite sat together at table, as usual, while Omskirk waited at the
+      sideboard. It was a wild, gusty night, in which an autumnal breeze of
+      later autumn seemed to have gone astray, and come into September
+      intrusively. The two friends&mdash;for such we may call them&mdash;had
+      spent a pleasant day together, wandering in the grounds, looking at the
+      old house at all points, going to the church, and examining the
+      cross-legged stone statues; they had ridden, too, and taken a great deal
+      of healthful exercise, and had now that pleasant sense of just weariness
+      enough which it is the boon of the climate of England to incite and permit
+      men to take. Redclyffe was in one of his most genial moods, and Lord
+      Braithwaite seemed to be the same; so kindly they were both disposed to
+      one another, that the American felt that he might not longer refrain from
+      giving his friend some light upon the character in which he appeared, or
+      in which, at least, he had it at his option to appear. Lord Braithwaite
+      might or might not know it already; but at all events it was his duty to
+      tell him, or to take his leave, having thus far neither gained nor sought
+      anything from their connection which would tend to forward his pursuit&mdash;should
+      he decide to undertake it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the cheerful fire, the rare wine, and the good fare had put them both
+      into a good physical state, Redclyffe said to Lord Braithwaite,&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is a matter upon which I have been some time intending to speak to
+      you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Braithwaite nodded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A subject,&rdquo; continued he, &ldquo;of interest to both of us. Has it ever
+      occurred to you, from the identity of name, that I may be really, what we
+      have jokingly assumed me to be,&mdash;a relation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It has,&rdquo; said Lord Braithwaite, readily enough. &ldquo;The family would be
+      proud to acknowledge such a kinsman, whose abilities and political rank
+      would add a public lustre that it has long wanted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe bowed and smiled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know, I suppose, the annals of your house,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;and have
+      heard how, two centuries ago, or somewhat less, there was an ancestor who
+      mysteriously disappeared. He was never seen again. There were tales of
+      private murder, out of which a hundred legends have come down to these
+      days, as I have myself found, though most of them in so strange a shape
+      that I should hardly know them, had I not myself a clue.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have heard some of these legends,&rdquo; said Lord Braithwaite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But did you ever hear, among them,&rdquo; asked Redclyffe, &ldquo;that the lost
+      ancestor did not really die,&mdash;was not murdered,&mdash;but lived long,
+      though in another hemisphere,&mdash;lived long, and left heirs behind
+      him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is such a legend,&rdquo; said Lord Braithwaite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Left posterity,&rdquo; continued Redclyffe,&mdash;&ldquo;a representative of whom is
+      alive at this day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That I have not known, though I might conjecture something like it,&rdquo; said
+      Braithwaite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The coolness with which he took this perplexed Redclyffe. He resolved to
+      make trial at once whether it were possible to move him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I have reason to believe,&rdquo; he added, &ldquo;that that representative is
+      myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Should that prove to be the case, you are welcome back to your own,&rdquo; said
+      Lord Braithwaite, quietly. &ldquo;It will be a very remarkable case, if the
+      proofs for two hundred years, or thereabouts, can be so distinctly made
+      out as to nullify the claim of one whose descent is undoubted. Yet it is
+      certainly not impossible. I suppose it would hardly be fair in me to ask
+      what are your proofs, and whether I may see them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The documents are in the hands of my agents in London,&rdquo; replied
+      Redclyffe; &ldquo;and seem to be ample, among them being a certified genealogy
+      from the first emigrant downward, without a break. A declaration of two
+      men of note among the first settlers, certifying that they knew the first
+      emigrant, under a change of name, to be the eldest son of the house of
+      Braithwaite; full proofs, at least on that head.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a lawyer, I believe,&rdquo; said Braithwaite, &ldquo;and know better than I
+      what may be necessary to prove your claim. I will frankly own to you, that
+      I have heard, long ago,&mdash;as long as when my connection with this
+      hereditary property first began,&mdash;that there was supposed to be an
+      heir extant for a long course of years, and that there, was no proof that
+      that main line of the descent had ever become extinct. If these things had
+      come fairly before me, and been represented to me with whatever force
+      belongs to them, before my accession to the estate,&mdash;these and other
+      facts which I have since become acquainted with,&mdash;I might have
+      deliberated on the expediency of coming to such a doubtful possession. The
+      property, I assure you, is not so desirable that, taking all things into
+      consideration, it has much increased my happiness. But, now, here I am,
+      having paid a price in a certain way,&mdash;which you will understand, if
+      you ever come into the property,&mdash;a price of a nature that cannot
+      possibly be refunded. It can hardly be presumed that I shall see your
+      right a moment sooner than you make it manifest by law.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I neither expect nor wish it,&rdquo; replied Redclyffe, &ldquo;nor, to speak frankly,
+      am I quite sure that you will ever have occasion to defend your title, or
+      to question mine. When I came hither, to be your guest, it was almost with
+      the settled purpose never to mention my proofs, nor to seek to make them
+      manifest. That purpose is not, I may say, yet relinquished.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yet I am to infer from your words that it is shaken?&rdquo; said Braithwaite.
+      &ldquo;You find the estate, then, so delightful,&mdash;this life of the old
+      manor-house so exquisitely agreeable,&mdash;this air so cheering,&mdash;this
+      moral atmosphere so invigorating,&mdash;that your scruples are about
+      coming to an end. You think this life of an Englishman, this fair prospect
+      of a title, so irresistibly enticing as to be worth more than your claim,
+      in behalf of your American birthright, to a possible Presidency.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a sort of sneer in this, which Redclyffe did not well know how
+      to understand; and there was a look on Braithwaite&rsquo;s face, as he said it,
+      that made him think of a condemned soul, who should be dressed in
+      magnificent robes, and surrounded with the mockery of state, splendor, and
+      happiness, who, if he should be congratulated on his fortunate and
+      blissful situation, would probably wear just such a look, and speak in
+      just that tone. He looked a moment in Braithwaite&rsquo;s face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;I do not think that there is much happiness in it. A
+      brighter, healthier, more useful, far more satisfactory, though tumultuous
+      life would await me in my own country. But there is about this place a
+      strange, deep, sad, brooding interest, which possesses me, and draws me to
+      it, and will not let me go. I feel as if, in spite of myself and my most
+      earnest efforts, I were fascinated by something in the spot, and must
+      needs linger here, and make it my home if I can.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You shall be welcome; the old hereditary chair will be filled at last,&rdquo;
+       said Braithwaite, pointing to the vacant chair. &ldquo;Come, we will drink to
+      you in a cup of welcome. Take the old chair now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In half-frolic Redclyffe took the chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He called to Omskirk to bring a bottle of a particularly exquisite Italian
+      wine, known only to the most deeply skilled in the vintages of that
+      country, and which, he said, was oftener heard of than seen,&mdash;oftener
+      seen than tasted. Omskirk put it on the table in its original glass, and
+      Braithwaite filled Redclyffe&rsquo;s glass and his own, and raised the latter to
+      his lips, with a frank expression of his mobile countenance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May you have a secure possession of your estate,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;and live long
+      in the midst of your possessions. To me, on the whole, it seems better
+      than your American prospects.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe thanked him, and drank off the glass of wine, which was not very
+      much to his taste; as new varieties of wine are apt not to be. All the
+      conversation that had passed had been in a free, careless sort of way,
+      without apparently much earnestness in it; for they were both men who knew
+      how to keep their more serious parts within them. But Redclyffe was glad
+      that the explanation was over, and that he might now remain at
+      Braithwaite&rsquo;s table, under his roof, without that uneasy feeling of
+      treachery which, whether rightly or not, had haunted him hitherto. He felt
+      joyous, and stretched his hand out for the bottle which Braithwaite kept
+      near himself, instead of passing it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do not yourself do justice to your own favorite wine,&rdquo; observed
+      Redclyffe, seeing his host&rsquo;s full glass standing before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have filled again,&rdquo; said Braithwaite, carelessly; &ldquo;but I know not that
+      I shall venture to drink a second glass. It is a wine that does not bear
+      mixture with other vintages, though of most genial and admirable qualities
+      when taken by itself. Drink your own, however, for it will be a rare
+      occasion indeed that would induce me to offer you another bottle of this
+      rare stock.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe sipped his second glass, endeavoring to find out what was this
+      subtile and peculiar flavor that hid itself so, and yet seemed on the
+      point of revealing itself. It had, he thought, a singular effect upon his
+      faculties, quickening and making them active, and causing him to feel as
+      if he were on the point of penetrating rare mysteries, such as men&rsquo;s
+      thoughts are always hovering round, and always returning from. Some
+      strange, vast, sombre, mysterious truth, which he seemed to have searched
+      for long, appeared to be on the point of being revealed to him; a sense of
+      something to come; something to happen that had been waiting long, long to
+      happen; an opening of doors, a drawing away of veils; a lifting of heavy,
+      magnificent curtains, whose dark folds hung before a spectacle of awe;&mdash;it
+      was like the verge of the grave. Whether it was the exquisite wine of
+      Braithwaite, or whatever it might be, the American felt a strange
+      influence upon him, as if he were passing through the gates of eternity,
+      and finding on the other side the revelation of some secret that had
+      greatly perplexed him on this side. He thought that Braithwaite&rsquo;s face
+      assumed a strange, subtile smile,&mdash;not malicious, yet crafty,
+      triumphant, and at the same time terribly sad, and with that perception
+      his senses, his life, welled away; and left him in the deep ancestral
+      chair at the board of Braithwaite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0024" id="link2HCH0024"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXIV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When awake [Endnote: 1], or beginning to awake, he lay for some time in a
+      maze; not a disagreeable one, but thoughts were running to and fro in his
+      mind, all mixed and jumbled together. Reminiscences of early days, even
+      those that were Preadamite; referring, we mean, to those times in the
+      almshouse, which he could not at ordinary times remember at all; but now
+      there seemed to be visions of old women and men, and pallid girls, and
+      little dirty boys, which could only be referred to that epoch. Also, and
+      most vividly, there was the old Doctor, with his sternness, his
+      fierceness, his mystery; and all that happened since, playing
+      phantasmagoria before his yet unclosed eyes; nor, so mysterious was his
+      state, did he know, when he should unclose those lids, where he should
+      find himself. He was content to let the world go on in this way, as long
+      as it would, and therefore did not hurry, but rather kept back the proofs
+      of awakening; willing to look at the scenes that were unrolling for his
+      amusement, as it seemed; and willing, too, to keep it uncertain whether he
+      were not back in America, and in his boyhood, and all other subsequent
+      impressions a dream or a prophetic vision. But at length something
+      stirring near him,&mdash;or whether it stirred, or whether he dreamed it,
+      he could not quite tell,&mdash;but the uncertainty impelled him, at last,
+      to open his eyes, and see whereabouts he was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even then he continued in as much uncertainty as he was before, and lay
+      with marvellous quietude in it, trying sluggishly to make the mystery out.
+      It was in a dim, twilight place, wherever it might be; a place of
+      half-awakeness, where the outlines of things were not well defined; but it
+      seemed to be a chamber, antique and vaulted, narrow and high, hung round
+      with old tapestry. Whether it were morning or midday he could not tell,
+      such was the character of the light, nor even where it came from; for
+      there appeared to be no windows, and yet it was not apparently artificial
+      light; nor light at all, indeed, but a gray dimness. It was so like his
+      own half-awake state that he lay in it a longer time, not incited to
+      finish his awaking, but in a languor, not disagreeable, yet hanging
+      heavily, heavily upon him, like a dark pall. It was, in fact, as if he had
+      been asleep for years, or centuries, or till the last day was dawning, and
+      then was collecting his thoughts in such slow fashion as would then be
+      likely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again that noise,&mdash;a little, low, quiet sound, as of one breathing
+      somewhere near him. The whole thing was very much like that incident which
+      introduced him to the Hospital, and his first coming to his senses there;
+      and he almost fancied that some such accident must again have happened to
+      him, and that when his sight cleared he should again behold the venerable
+      figure of the pensioner. With this idea he let his head steady itself; and
+      it seemed to him that its dizziness must needs be the result of very long
+      and deep sleep. What if it were the sleep of a century? What if all things
+      that were extant when he went to sleep had passed away, and he was waking
+      now in another epoch of time? Where was America, and the republic in which
+      he hoped for such great things? Where England? had she stood it better
+      than the republic? Was the old Hospital still in being,&mdash;although the
+      good Warden must long since have passed out of his warm and pleasant life?
+      And himself, how came he to be preserved? In what musty old nook had he
+      been put away, where Time neglected and Death forgot him, until now he was
+      to get up friendless, helpless,&mdash;when new heirs had come to the
+      estate he was on the point of laying claim to,&mdash;and go onward through
+      what remained of life? Would it not have been better to have lived with
+      his contemporaries, and to be now dead and dust with them? Poor, petty
+      interests of a day, how slight!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again the noise, a little stir, a sort of quiet moan, or something that he
+      could not quite define; but it seemed, whenever he heard it, as if some
+      fact thrust itself through the dream-work with which he was circumfused;
+      something alien to his fantasies, yet not powerful enough to dispel them.
+      It began to be irksome to him, this little sound of something near him;
+      and he thought, in the space of another hundred years, if it continued, he
+      should have to arouse himself and see what it was. But, indeed, there was
+      something so cheering in this long repose,&mdash;this rest from all the
+      troubles of earth, which it sometimes seems as if only a churchyard bed
+      would give us,&mdash;that he wished the noise would let him alone. But his
+      thoughts were gradually getting too busy for this slumberous state. He
+      begun, perforce, to come nearer actuality. The strange question occurred
+      to him, Had any time at all passed? Was he not still sitting at Lord
+      Braithwaite&rsquo;s table, having just now quaffed a second glass of that rare
+      and curious Italian wine? Was it not affecting his head very strangely,&mdash;so
+      that he was put out of time as it were? He would rally himself, and try to
+      set his head right with another glass. He must be still at table, for now
+      he remembered he had not gone to bed at all. [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ah, the noise! He could not bear it, he would awake now, now!&mdash;silence
+      it, and then to sleep again. In fact, he started up; started to his feet,
+      in puzzle and perplexity, and stood gazing around him, with swimming
+      brain. It was an antique room, which he did not at all recognize, and,
+      indeed, in that dim twilight&mdash;which how it came he could not tell&mdash;he
+      could scarcely discern what were its distinguishing marks. But he seemed
+      to be sensible, that, in a high-backed chair, at a little distance from
+      him, sat a figure in a long robe; a figure of a man with snow-white hair
+      and a long beard, who seemed to be gazing at him, quietly, as if he had
+      been gazing a hundred years. I know not what it was, but there was an
+      influence as if this old man belonged to some other age and category of
+      man than he was now amongst. He remembered the old family legend of the
+      existence of an ancestor two or three centuries in age.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the old family personified,&rdquo; thought he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old figure made no sign, but continued to sit gazing at him in so
+      strangely still a manner that it made Redclyffe shiver with something that
+      seemed like affright. There was an aspect of long, long time about him; as
+      if he had never been young, or so long ago as when the world was young
+      along with him. He might be the demon of this old house; the
+      representative of all that happened in it, the grief, the long languor and
+      weariness of life, the deaths, gathering them all into himself, and
+      figuring them in furrows, wrinkles, and white hairs,&mdash;a being that
+      might have been young, when those old Saxon timbers were put together,
+      with the oaks that were saplings when Caesar landed, and was in his
+      maturity when the Conqueror came, and was now lapsing into extreme age
+      when the nineteenth century was elderly. His garb might have been of any
+      time, that long, loose robe that enveloped him. Redclyffe remained in this
+      way, gazing at this aged figure; at first without the least wonder, but
+      calmly, as we feel in dreams, when, being in a land of enchantment, we
+      take everything as if it were a matter of course, and feel, by the right
+      of our own marvellous nature, on terms of equal kindred with all other
+      marvels. So it was with him when he first became aware of the old man,
+      sitting there with that age-long regard directed towards him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, by degrees, a sense of wonder had its will, and grew, slowly at
+      first, in Redclyffe&rsquo;s mind; and almost twin-born with it, and growing
+      piece by piece, there was a sense of awful fear, as his waking senses came
+      slowly back to him. In the dreamy state, he had felt no fear; but, as a
+      waking man, it was fearful to discover that the shadowy forms did not fly
+      from his awaking eyes. He started at last to his feet from the low couch
+      on which he had all this time been lying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are you?&rdquo; he exclaimed. &ldquo;Where am I?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old figure made no answer; nor could Redclyffe be quite sure that his
+      voice had any effect upon it, though he fancied that it was shaken a
+      little, as if his voice came to it from afar. But it continued to gaze at
+      him, or at least to have its aged face turned towards him in the dim
+      light; and this strange composure, and unapproachableness, were very
+      frightful. As his manhood gathered about his heart, however, the American
+      endeavored to shake off this besetting fear, or awe, or whatever it was;
+      and to bring himself to a sense of waking things,&mdash;to burst through
+      the mist and delusive shows that bewildered him, and catch hold of a
+      reality. He stamped upon the floor; it was solid stone, the pavement, or
+      oak so old and stanch that it resembled it. There was one firm thing,
+      therefore. But the contrast between this and the slipperiness, the
+      unaccountableness, of the rest of his position, made him the more sensible
+      of the latter. He made a step towards the old figure; another; another. He
+      was face to face with him, within a yard of distance. He saw the faint
+      movement of the old man&rsquo;s breath; he sought, through the twilight of the
+      room, some glimmer of perception in his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you a living man?&rdquo; asked Redclyffe, faintly and doubtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He mumbled, the old figure, some faint moaning sound, that, if it were
+      language at all, had all the edges and angles worn off it by decay,&mdash;unintelligible,
+      except that it seemed to signify a faint mournfulness and complainingness
+      of mood; and then held his peace, continuing to gaze as before. Redclyffe
+      could not bear the awe that filled him, while he kept at a distance, and,
+      coming desperately forward, he stood close to the old figure; he touched
+      his robe, to see if it were real; he laid his hand upon the withered hand
+      that held the staff, in which he now recognized the very staff of the
+      Doctor&rsquo;s legend. His fingers touched a real hand, though, bony and dry, as
+      if it had been in the grave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then you are real?&rdquo; said Redclyffe doubtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old figure seemed to have exhausted itself&mdash;its energies, what
+      there were of them&mdash;in the effort of making the unintelligible
+      communication already vouchsafed. Then he seemed to lapse out of
+      consciousness, and not to know what was passing, or to be sensible that
+      any person was near him. But Redclyffe was now resuming his firmness and
+      daylight consciousness even in the dimness. He ran over all that he had
+      heard of the legend of the old house, rapidly considering whether there
+      might not be something of fact in the legend of the undying old man;
+      whether, as told or whispered in the chimney-corners, it might not be an
+      instance of the mysterious, the half-spiritual mode, in which actual
+      truths communicate themselves imperfectly through a medium that gives them
+      the aspect of falsehood. Something in the atmosphere of the house made its
+      inhabitants and neighbors dimly aware that there was a secret resident; it
+      was by a language not audible, but of impression; there could not be such
+      a secret in its recesses, without making itself sensible. This legend of
+      the undying one translated it to vulgar apprehension. He remembered those
+      early legends, told by the Doctor, in his childhood; he seemed imperfectly
+      and doubtfully to see what was their true meaning, and how, taken aright,
+      they had a reality, and were the craftily concealed history of his own
+      wrongs, sufferings, and revenge. And this old man! who was he? He joined
+      the Warden&rsquo;s account of the family to the Doctor&rsquo;s legends. He could not
+      believe, or take thoroughly in, the strange surmise to which they led him;
+      but, by an irresistible impulse, he acted on it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir Edward Redclyffe!&rdquo; he exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha! who speaks to me?&rdquo; exclaimed the old man, in a startled voice, like
+      one who hears himself called at an unexpected moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sir Edward Redclyffe,&rdquo; repeated Redclyffe, &ldquo;I bring you news of Norman
+      Oglethorpe!&rdquo; [Endnote: 3.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The villain! the tyrant! mercy! mercy! save me!&rdquo; cried the old man, in
+      most violent emotion of terror and rage intermixed, that shook his old
+      frame as if it would be shaken asunder. He stood erect, the picture of
+      ghastly horror, as if he saw before him that stern face that had thrown a
+      blight over his life, and so fearfully avenged, from youth to age, the
+      crime that he had committed. The effect, the passion, was too much,&mdash;the
+      terror with which it smote, the rage that accompanied it, blazed up for a
+      moment with a fierce flame, then flickered and went out. He stood
+      tottering; Redclyffe put out his hand to support him; but he sank down in
+      a heap on the floor, as if a thing of dry bones had been suddenly loosened
+      at the joints, and fell in a rattling heap. [Endnote: 4.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0025" id="link2HCH0025"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe, apparently, had not communicated to his agent in London his
+      change of address, when he left the Warden&rsquo;s residence to avail himself of
+      the hospitality of Braithwaite Hall; for letters arrived for him, from his
+      own country, both private and with the seal of state upon them; one among
+      the rest that bore on the envelope the name of the President of the United
+      States. The good Warden was impressed with great respect for so
+      distinguished a signature, and, not knowing but that the welfare of the
+      Republic (for which he had an Englishman&rsquo;s contemptuous interest) might be
+      involved in its early delivery at its destination, he determined to ride
+      over to Braithwaite Hall, call on his friend, and deliver it with his own
+      hand. With this purpose, he mounted his horse, at the hour of his usual
+      morning ride, and set forth; and, before reaching the village, saw a
+      figure before him which he recognized as that of the pensioner. [Endnote:
+      1.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Soho! whither go you, old friend?&rdquo; said the Warden, drawing his bridle as
+      he came up with the old man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To Braithwaite Hall, sir,&rdquo; said the pensioner, who continued to walk
+      diligently on; &ldquo;and I am glad to see your honor (if it be so) on the same
+      errand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why so?&rdquo; asked the Warden. &ldquo;You seem much in earnest. Why should my visit
+      to Braithwaite Hall be a special cause of rejoicing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nay,&rdquo; said the pensioner, &ldquo;your honor is specially interested in this
+      young American, who has gone thither to abide; and when one is in a
+      strange country he needs some guidance. My mind is not easy about the
+      young man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the Warden, smiling to himself at the old gentleman&rsquo;s idle
+      and senile fears, &ldquo;I commend your diligence on behalf of your friend.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He rode on as he spoke, and deep in one of the woodland paths he saw the
+      flutter of a woman&rsquo;s garment, and, greatly to his surprise, overtook
+      Elsie, who seemed to be walking along with great rapidity, and, startled
+      by the approach of hoofs behind her, looked up at him, with a pale cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good morning, Miss Elsie,&rdquo; said the Warden. &ldquo;You are taking a long walk
+      this morning. I regret to see that I have frightened you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pray, whither are you going?&rdquo; said she.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To the Hall,&rdquo; said the Warden, wondering at the abrupt question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah, sir,&rdquo; exclaimed Elsie, &ldquo;for Heaven&rsquo;s sake, pray insist on seeing Mr.
+      Redclyffe,&mdash;take no excuse. There are reasons for it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Certainly, fair lady,&rdquo; responded the Warden, wondering more and more at
+      this injunction from such a source. &ldquo;And when I see this fascinating
+      gentleman, pray what message am I to give him from Miss Elsie,&mdash;who,
+      moreover, seems to be on the eve of visiting him in person?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;See him! see him! Only see him!&rdquo; said Elsie, with passionate earnestness,
+      &ldquo;and in haste! See him now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She waved him onward as she spoke; and the Warden, greatly commoted for
+      the nonce, complied with the maiden&rsquo;s fantasy so far as to ride on at a
+      quicker pace, uneasily marvelling at what could have aroused this usually
+      shy and reserved girl&rsquo;s nervousness to such a pitch. The incident served
+      at all events to titillate his English sluggishness; so that he approached
+      the avenue of the old Hall with a vague expectation of something that had
+      happened there, though he knew not of what nature it could possibly be.
+      However, he rode round to the side entrance, by which horsemen generally
+      entered the house, and, a groom approaching to take his bridle, he
+      alighted and approached the door. I know not whether it were anything more
+      than the glistening moisture common in an English autumnal morning; but so
+      it was, that the trace of the Bloody Footstep seemed fresh, as if it had
+      been that very night imprinted anew, and the crime made all over again,
+      with fresh guilt upon somebody&rsquo;s soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the footman came to the door, responsive to his ring, the Warden
+      inquired for Mr. Redclyffe, the American gentleman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The American gentleman left for London, early this morning,&rdquo; replied the
+      footman, in a matter-of-fact way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gone!&rdquo; exclaimed the Warden. &ldquo;This is sudden; and strange that he should
+      go without saying good by. Gone,&rdquo; and then he remembered the old
+      pensioner&rsquo;s eagerness that the Warden should come here, and Elsie&rsquo;s
+      strange injunction that he should insist on seeing Redclyffe. &ldquo;Pray, is
+      Lord Braithwaite at home?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think, sir, he is in the library,&rdquo; said the servant, &ldquo;but will see;
+      pray, sir, walk in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He returned in a moment, and ushered the Warden through passages with
+      which he was familiar of old, to the library, where he found Lord
+      Braithwaite sitting with the London newspaper in his hand. He rose and
+      welcomed his guest with great equanimity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the Warden&rsquo;s inquiries after Redclyffe, Lord Braithwaite replied that
+      his guest had that morning left the house, being called to London by
+      letters from America; but of what nature Lord Braithwaite was unable to
+      say, except that they seemed to be of urgency and importance. The Warden&rsquo;s
+      further inquiries, which he pushed as far as was decorous, elicited
+      nothing more than this; and he was preparing to take his leave,&mdash;not
+      seeing any reason for insisting (according to Elsie&rsquo;s desire) on the
+      impossibility of seeing a man who was not there,&mdash;nor, indeed, any
+      reason for so doing. And yet it seemed very strange that Redclyffe should
+      have gone so unceremoniously; nor was he half satisfied, though he knew
+      not why he should be otherwise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you happen to know Mr. Redclyffe&rsquo;s address in London,&rdquo; asked the
+      Warden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not at all,&rdquo; said Braithwaite. &ldquo;But I presume there is courtesy enough in
+      the American character to impel him to write to me, or both of us, within
+      a day or two, telling us of his whereabouts and whatabouts. Should you
+      know, I beg you will let me know; for I have really been pleased with this
+      gentleman, and should have been glad could he have favored me with a
+      somewhat longer visit.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was nothing more to be said; and the Warden took his leave, and was
+      about mounting his horse, when he beheld the pensioner approaching the
+      house, and he remained standing until he should come up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are too late,&rdquo; said he, as the old man drew near. &ldquo;Our friend has
+      taken French leave.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Warden,&rdquo; said the old man solemnly, &ldquo;let me pray you not to give him
+      up so easily. Come with me into the presence of Lord Braithwaite.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Warden made some objections; but the pensioner&rsquo;s manner was so
+      earnest, that he soon consented; knowing that the strangeness of his
+      sudden return might well enough be put upon the eccentricities of the
+      pensioner, especially as he was so well known to Lord Braithwaite. He
+      accordingly again rang at the door, which being opened by the same stolid
+      footman, the Warden desired him to announce to Lord Braithwaite that the
+      Warden and a pensioner desired to see him. He soon returned, with a
+      request that they would walk in, and ushered them again to the library,
+      where they found the master of the house in conversation with Omskirk at
+      one end of the apartment,&mdash;a whispered conversation, which detained
+      him a moment, after their arrival. The Warden fancied that he saw in old
+      Omskirk&rsquo;s countenance a shade more of that mysterious horror which made
+      him such a bugbear to children; but when Braithwaite turned from him and
+      approached his visitor, there was no trace of any disturbance, beyond a
+      natural surprise to see his good friend the Warden so soon after his
+      taking leave. [Endnote: 2.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see you are surprised,&rdquo; said the latter. &ldquo;But you must lay the blame,
+      if any, on our good old friend here, who, for some reason, best known to
+      himself, insisted on having my company here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Braithwaite looked to the old pensioner, with a questioning look, as if
+      good-humoredly (yet not as if he cared much about it) asking for an
+      explanation. As Omskirk was about leaving the room, having remained till
+      this time, with that nervous look which distinguished him gazing towards
+      the party, the pensioner made him a sign, which he obeyed as if compelled
+      to do so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, my friend,&rdquo; said the Warden, somewhat impatient of the aspect in
+      which he himself appeared, &ldquo;I beg of you, explain at once to Lord
+      Braithwaite why you have brought me back in this strange way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is,&rdquo; said the pensioner quietly, &ldquo;that in your presence I request him
+      to allow me to see Mr. Redclyffe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, my friend,&rdquo; said Braithwaite, &ldquo;how can I show you a man who has left
+      my house, and whom in the chances of this life, I am not very likely to
+      see again, though hospitably desirous of so doing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here ensued a laughing sort of colloquy between the Warden and
+      Braithwaite, in which the former jocosely excused himself for having
+      yielded to the whim of the pensioner, and returned with him on an errand
+      which he well knew to be futile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have long been aware,&rdquo; he said apart, in a confidential way, &ldquo;of
+      something a little awry in our old friend&rsquo;s mental system. You will excuse
+      him, and me for humoring him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, of course,&rdquo; said Braithwaite, in the same tone. &ldquo;I shall not
+      be moved by anything the old fellow can say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old pensioner, meanwhile, had been as it were heating up, and
+      gathering himself into a mood of energy which those who saw him had never
+      before witnessed in his usually quiet person. He seemed somehow to grow
+      taller and larger, more impressive. At length, fixing his eyes on Lord
+      Braithwaite, he spoke again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dark, murderous man,&rdquo; exclaimed he. &ldquo;Your course has not been unwatched;
+      the secrets of this mansion are not unknown. For two centuries back, they
+      have been better known to them who dwell afar off than to those resident
+      within the mansion. The foot that made the Bloody Footstep has returned
+      from its long wanderings, and it passes on, straight as destiny,&mdash;sure
+      as an avenging Providence,&mdash;to the punishment and destruction of
+      those who incur retribution.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here is an odd kind of tragedy,&rdquo; said Lord Braithwaite, with a scornful
+      smile. &ldquo;Come, my old friend, lay aside this vein and talk sense.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not thus do you escape your penalty, hardened and crafty one!&rdquo; exclaimed
+      the pensioner. &ldquo;I demand of you, before this worthy Warden, access to the
+      secret ways of this mansion, of which thou dost unjustly retain
+      possession. I shall disclose what for centuries has remained hidden,&mdash;the
+      ghastly secrets that this house hides.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Humor him,&rdquo; whispered the Warden, &ldquo;and hereafter I will take care that
+      the exuberance of our old friend shall be duly restrained. He shall not
+      trouble you again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Braithwaite, to say the truth, appeared a little flabbergasted and
+      disturbed by these latter expressions of the old gentleman. He hesitated,
+      turned pale; but at last, recovering his momentary confusion and
+      irresolution, he replied, with apparent carelessness:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go wherever you will, old gentleman. The house is open to you for this
+      time. If ever you have another opportunity to disturb it, the fault will
+      be mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Follow, sir,&rdquo; said the pensioner, turning to the Warden; &ldquo;follow,
+      maiden![Endnote: 3] Now shall a great mystery begin to be revealed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So saying, he led the way before them, passing out of the hall, not by the
+      doorway, but through one of the oaken panels of the wall, which admitted
+      the party into a passage which seemed to pass through the thickness of the
+      wall, and was lighted by interstices through which shone gleams of light.
+      This led them into what looked like a little vestibule, or circular room,
+      which the Warden, though deeming himself many years familiar with the old
+      house, had never seen before, any more than the passage which led to it.
+      To his surprise, this room was not vacant, for in it sat, in a large old
+      chair, Omskirk, like a toad in its hole, like some wild, fearful creature
+      in its den, and it was now partly understood how this man had the
+      possibility of suddenly disappearing, so inscrutably, and so in a moment;
+      and, when all quest for him was given up, of as suddenly appearing again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ha!&rdquo; said old Omskirk, slowly rising, as at the approach of some event
+      that he had long expected. &ldquo;Is he coming at last?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poor victim of another&rsquo;s iniquity,&rdquo; said the pensioner. &ldquo;Thy release
+      approaches. Rejoice!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man arose with a sort of trepidation and solemn joy intermixed in
+      his manner, and bowed reverently, as if there were in what he heard more
+      than other ears could understand in it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; I have waited long,&rdquo; replied he. &ldquo;Welcome; if my release is come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Lord Braithwaite, scornfully. &ldquo;This secret retreat of my
+      house is known to many. It was the priest&rsquo;s secret chamber when it was
+      dangerous to be of the old and true religion, here in England. There is no
+      longer any use in concealing this place; and the Warden, or any man, might
+      have seen it, or any of the curiosities of the old hereditary house, if
+      desirous so to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Aha! son of Belial!&rdquo; quoth the pensioner. &ldquo;And this, too!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took three pieces from a certain point of the wall, which he seemed to
+      know, and stooped to press upon the floor. The Warden looked at Lord
+      Braithwaite, and saw that he had grown deadly pale. What his change of
+      cheer might bode, he could not guess; but, at the pressure of the old
+      pensioner&rsquo;s finger, the floor, or a segment of it, rose like the lid of a
+      box, and discovered a small darksome pair of stairs, within which burned a
+      lamp, lighting it downward, like the steps that descend into a sepulchre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Follow,&rdquo; said he, to those who looked on, wondering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he began to descend. Lord Braithwaite saw him disappear, then
+      frantically followed, the Warden next, and old Omskirk took his place in
+      the rear, like a man following his inevitable destiny. At the bottom of a
+      winding descent, that seemed deep and remote, and far within, they came to
+      a door, which the pensioner pressed with a spring; and, passing through
+      the space that disclosed itself, the whole party followed, and found
+      themselves in a small, gloomy room. On one side of it was a couch, on
+      which sat Redclyffe; face to face with him was a white-haired figure in a
+      chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are come!&rdquo; said Redclyffe, solemnly. &ldquo;But too late!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yonder is the coffer,&rdquo; said the pensioner. &ldquo;Open but that; and our
+      quest is ended.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That, if I mistake not, I can do,&rdquo; said Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew forth&mdash;what he had kept all this time, as something that
+      might yet reveal to him the mystery of his birth&mdash;the silver key that
+      had been found by the grave in far New England; and applying it to the
+      lock, he slowly turned it on the hinges, that had not been turned for two
+      hundred years. All&mdash;even Lord Braithwaite, guilty and shame-stricken
+      as he felt&mdash;pressed forward to look upon what was about to be
+      disclosed. What were the wondrous contents? The entire, mysterious coffer
+      was full of golden ringlets, abundant, clustering through the whole
+      coffer, and living with elasticity, so as immediately, as it were, to flow
+      over the sides of the coffer, and rise in large abundance from the long
+      compression. Into this&mdash;by a miracle of natural production which was
+      known likewise in other cases&mdash;into this had been resolved the whole
+      bodily substance of that fair and unfortunate being, known so long in the
+      legends of the family as the Beauty of the Golden Locks. As the pensioner
+      looked at this strange sight,&mdash;the lustre of the precious and
+      miraculous hair gleaming and glistening, and seeming to add light to the
+      gloomy room,&mdash;he took from his breast pocket another lock of hair, in
+      a locket, and compared it, before their faces, with that which brimmed
+      over from the coffer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the same!&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And who are you that know it?&rdquo; asked Redclyffe, surprised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He whose ancestors taught him the secret,&mdash;who has had it handed
+      down to him these two centuries, and now only with regret yields to the
+      necessity of making it known.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are the heir!&rdquo; said Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In that gloomy room, beside the dead old man, they looked at him, and saw
+      a dignity beaming on him, covering his whole figure, that broke out like a
+      lustre at the close of day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_APPE" id="link2H_APPE"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      APPENDIX
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. I.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1.</i> The MS. gives the following alternative openings: &ldquo;Early in
+      the present century&rdquo;; &ldquo;Soon after the Revolution&rdquo;; &ldquo;Many years ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2.</i> Throughout the first four pages of the MS. the Doctor is
+      called &ldquo;Ormskirk,&rdquo; and in an earlier draft of this portion of the romance,
+      &ldquo;Etheredge.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Crusty Hannah is a mixture of Indian
+      and negro.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 4. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;It is understood from the first that
+      the children are not brother and sister.&mdash;Describe the children with
+      really childish traits, quarrelling, being naughty, etc.&mdash;The Doctor
+      should occasionally beat Ned in course of instruction.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 5.</i> In order to show the manner in which Hawthorne would modify
+      a passage, which was nevertheless to be left substantially the same, I
+      subjoin here a description of this graveyard as it appears in the earlier
+      draft: &ldquo;The graveyard (we are sorry to have to treat of such a
+      disagreeable piece of ground, but everybody&rsquo;s business centres there at
+      one time or another) was the most ancient in the town. The dust of the
+      original Englishmen had become incorporated with the soil; of those
+      Englishmen whose immediate predecessors had been resolved into the earth
+      about the country churches,&mdash;the little Norman, square, battlemented
+      stone towers of the villages in the old land; so that in this point of
+      view, as holding bones and dust of the first ancestors, this graveyard was
+      more English than anything else in town. There had been hidden from sight
+      many a broad, bluff visage of husbandmen that had ploughed the real
+      English soil; there the faces of noted men, now known in history; there
+      many a personage whom tradition told about, making wondrous qualities of
+      strength and courage for him;&mdash;all these, mingled with succeeding
+      generations, turned up and battened down again with the sexton&rsquo;s spade;
+      until every blade of grass was human more than vegetable,&mdash;for an
+      hundred and fifty years will do this, and so much time, at least, had
+      elapsed since the first little mound was piled up in the virgin soil. Old
+      tombs there were too, with numerous sculptures on them; and quaint, mossy
+      gravestones; although all kinds of monumental appendages were of a date
+      more recent than the time of the first settlers, who had been content with
+      wooden memorials, if any, the sculptor&rsquo;s art not having then reached New
+      England. Thus rippled, surged, broke almost against the house, this dreary
+      graveyard, which made the street gloomy, so that people did not like to
+      pass the dark, high wooden fence, with its closed gate, that separated it
+      from the street. And this old house was one that crowded upon it, and took
+      up the ground that would otherwise have been sown as thickly with dead as
+      the rest of the lot; so that it seemed hardly possible but that the dead
+      people should get up out of their graves, and come in there to warm
+      themselves. But in truth, I have never heard a whisper of its being
+      haunted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 6. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;The spiders are affected by the
+      weather and serve as barometers.&mdash;It shall always be a moot point
+      whether the Doctor really believed in cobwebs, or was laughing at the
+      credulous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 7. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;The townspeople are at war with the
+      Doctor.&mdash;Introduce the Doctor early as a smoker, and describe.&mdash;The
+      result of Crusty Hannah&rsquo;s strangely mixed breed should be shown in some
+      strange way.&mdash;Give vivid pictures of the society of the day,
+      symbolized in the street scenes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Read the whole paragraph before
+      copying any of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Crusty Hannah teaches Elsie curious
+      needlework, etc.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3.</i> These two children are described as follows in an early
+      note of the author&rsquo;s: &ldquo;The boy had all the qualities fitted to excite
+      tenderness in those who had the care of him; in the first and most evident
+      place, on account of his personal beauty, which was very remarkable,&mdash;the
+      most intelligent and expressive face that can be conceived, changing in
+      those early years like an April day, and beautiful in all its changes;
+      dark, but of a soft expression, kindling, melting, glowing, laughing; a
+      varied intelligence, which it was as good as a book to read. He was quick
+      in all modes of mental exercise; quick and strong, too, in sensibility;
+      proud, and gifted (probably by the circumstances in which he was placed)
+      with an energy which the softness and impressibility of his nature needed.&mdash;As
+      for the little girl, all the squalor of the abode served but to set off
+      her lightsomeness and brightsomeness. She was a pale, large-eyed little
+      thing, and it might have been supposed that the air of the house and the
+      contiguity of the burial-place had a bad effect upon her health. Yet I
+      hardly think this could have been the case, for she was of a very airy
+      nature, dancing and sporting through the house as if melancholy had never
+      been made. She took all kinds of childish liberties with the Doctor, and
+      with his pipe, and with everything appertaining to him except his spiders
+      and his cobwebs.&rdquo;&mdash;All of which goes to show that Hawthorne first
+      conceived his characters in the mood of the &ldquo;Twice-Told Tales,&rdquo; and then
+      by meditation solidified them to the inimitable flesh-and-blood of &ldquo;The
+      House of the Seven Gables&rdquo; and &ldquo;The Blithedale Romance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. III.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1.</i> An English church spire, evidently the prototype of this,
+      and concerning which the same legend is told, is mentioned in the author&rsquo;s
+      &ldquo;English Mote-Books.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2.</i> Leicester Hospital, in Warwick, described in &ldquo;Our Old
+      Home,&rdquo; is the original of this charity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;The children find a gravestone with
+      something like a footprint on it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 4. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Put into the Doctor&rsquo;s character a
+      continual enmity against somebody, breaking out in curses of which nobody
+      can understand the application.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. IV.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1.</i> The Doctor&rsquo;s propensity for cobwebs is amplified in the
+      following note for an earlier and somewhat milder version of the
+      character: &ldquo;According to him, all science was to be renewed and
+      established on a sure ground by no other means than cobwebs. The cobweb
+      was the magic clue by which mankind was to be rescued from all its errors,
+      and guided safely back to the right. And so he cherished spiders above all
+      things, and kept them spinning, spinning away; the only textile factory
+      that existed at that epoch in New England. He distinguished the production
+      of each of his ugly friends, and assigned peculiar qualities to each; and
+      he had been for years engaged in writing a work on this new discovery, in
+      reference to which he had already compiled a great deal of folio
+      manuscript, and had unguessed at resources still to come. With this
+      suggestive subject he interwove all imaginable learning, collected from
+      his own library, rich in works that few others had read, and from that of
+      his beloved University, crabbed with Greek, rich with Latin, drawing into
+      itself, like a whirlpool, all that men had thought hitherto, and combining
+      them anew in such a way that it had all the charm of a racy originality.
+      Then he had projects for the cultivation of cobwebs, to which end, in the
+      good Doctor&rsquo;s opinion, it seemed desirable to devote a certain part of the
+      national income; and not content with this, all public-spirited citizens
+      would probably be induced to devote as much of their time and means as
+      they could to the same end. According to him, there was no such beautiful
+      festoon and drapery for the halls of princes as the spinning of this
+      heretofore despised and hated insect; and by due encouragement it might be
+      hoped that they would flourish, and hang and dangle and wave triumphant in
+      the breeze, to an extent as yet generally undreamed of. And he lamented
+      much the destruction that has heretofore been wrought upon this precious
+      fabric by the housemaid&rsquo;s broom, and insisted upon by foolish women who
+      claimed to be good housewives. Indeed, it was the general opinion that the
+      Doctor&rsquo;s celibacy was in great measure due to the impossibility of finding
+      a woman who would pledge herself to co-operate with him in this great
+      ambition of his life,&mdash;that of reducing the world to a cobweb
+      factory; or who would bind herself to let her own drawing-room be
+      ornamented with this kind of tapestry. But there never was a wife
+      precisely fitted for our friend the Doctor, unless it had been Arachne
+      herself, to whom, if she could again have been restored to her female
+      shape, he would doubtless have lost no time in paying his addresses. It
+      was doubtless the having dwelt too long among the musty and dusty clutter
+      and litter of things gone by, that made the Doctor almost a monomaniac on
+      this subject. There were cobwebs in his own brain, and so he saw nothing
+      valuable but cobwebs in the world around him; and deemed that the march of
+      created things, up to this time, had been calculated by foreknowledge to
+      produce them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Ned must learn something of the
+      characteristics of the Catechism, and simple cottage devotion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. V.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Make the following scene emblematic
+      of the world&rsquo;s treatment of a dissenter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Yankee characteristics should be
+      shown in the schoolmaster&rsquo;s manners.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. VI.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;He had a sort of horror of violence,
+      and of the strangeness that it should be done to him; this affected him
+      more than the blow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Jokes occasionally about the
+      schoolmaster&rsquo;s thinness and lightness,&mdash;how he might suspend himself
+      from the spider&rsquo;s web and swing, etc.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;The Doctor and the Schoolmaster
+      should have much talk about England.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 4. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;The children were at play in the
+      churchyard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 5. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;He mentions that he was probably
+      buried in the churchyard there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. VII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Perhaps put this narratively, not as
+      spoken.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;He was privately married to the
+      heiress, if she were an heiress. They meant to kill him in the wood, but,
+      by contrivance, he was kidnapped.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;They were privately married.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 4. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Old descriptive letters, referring to
+      localities as they existed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 5. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;There should be symbols and tokens,
+      hinting at the schoolmaster&rsquo;s disappearance, from the first opening of the
+      scene.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. VIII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;They had got up in remarkably good
+      case that morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;The stranger may be the future master
+      of the Hospital.&mdash;Describe the winter day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Describe him as clerical.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 4. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Represent him as a refined,
+      agreeable, genial young man, of frank, kindly, gentlemanly manners.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 5.</i> Alternative reading: &ldquo;A clergyman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. IX.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Make the old grave-digger a <i>laudator
+      temporis acti</i>,&mdash;especially as to burial customs.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2.</i> Instead of &ldquo;written,&rdquo; as in the text, the author probably
+      meant to write &ldquo;read.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3.</i> The MS. has &ldquo;delight,&rdquo; but &ldquo;a light&rdquo; is evidently intended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 4. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;He aims a blow, perhaps with his
+      pipe, at the boy, which Ned wards off.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. X.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;No longer could play at quarter-staff
+      with Ned.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Referring to places and people in
+      England: the Bloody Footstep sometimes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3.</i> In the original the following occurs, but marked to
+      indicate that it was to be omitted: &ldquo;And kissed his hand to her, and
+      laughed feebly; and that was the last that she or anybody, the last
+      glimpse they had of Doctor Grimshawe alive.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 4. Author&rsquo;s notes</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;A great deal must be made out of the
+      spiders, and their gloomy, dusky, flaunting tapestry. A web across the
+      orifice of his inkstand every morning; everywhere, indeed, except across
+      the snout of his brandy-bottle.&mdash;Depict the Doctor in an old
+      dressing-gown, and a strange sort of a cap, like a wizard&rsquo;s.&mdash;The two
+      children are witnesses of many strange experiments in the study; they see
+      his moods, too.&mdash;The Doctor is supposed to be writing a work on the
+      Natural History of Spiders. Perhaps he used them as a blind for his real
+      project, and used to bamboozle the learned with pretending to read them
+      passages in which great learning seemed to be elaborately worked up,
+      crabbed with Greek and Latin, as if the topic drew into itself, like a
+      whirlpool, all that men thought and knew; plans to cultivate cobwebs on a
+      large scale. Sometimes, after overwhelming them with astonishment in this
+      way, he would burst into one of his laughs. Schemes to make the world a
+      cobweb-factory, etc., etc. Cobwebs in his own brain. Crusty Hannah such a
+      mixture of persons and races as could be found only at a seaport. There
+      was a rumor that the Doctor had murdered a former maid, for having, with
+      housewifely instinct, swept away the cobwebs; some said that he had her
+      skeleton in a closet. Some said that he had strangled a wife with web of
+      the great spider.&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;Read the description of Bolton Hall, the garden,
+      lawn, etc., Aug. 8, &lsquo;53.&mdash;Bebbington church and churchyard, Aug. 29,
+      &lsquo;53.&mdash;The Doctor is able to love,&mdash;able to hate; two great and
+      rare abilities nowadays.&mdash;Introduce two pine trees, ivy-grown, as at
+      Lowwood Hotel, July 16, &lsquo;58.&mdash;The family name might be Redclyffe.&mdash;Thatched
+      cottage, June 22, &lsquo;55.&mdash;Early introduce the mention of the cognizance
+      of the family,&mdash;the Leopard&rsquo;s Head, for instance, in the first part
+      of the romance; the Doctor may have possessed it engraved as coat of arms
+      in a book.&mdash;The Doctor shall show Ned, perhaps, a drawing or
+      engraving of the Hospital, with figures of the pensioners in the
+      quadrangle, fitly dressed; and this picture and the figures shall impress
+      themselves strongly on his memory.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The above dates and places refer to passages in the published &ldquo;English
+      Note-Books.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XI.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Compare it with Spenser&rsquo;s Cave of
+      Despair. Put instruments of suicide there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Once, in looking at the mansion,
+      Redclyffe is struck by the appearance of a marble inserted into the wall,
+      and kept clear of lichens.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Describe, in rich poetry, all shapes
+      of deadly things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Conferred their best qualities&rdquo;: an
+      alternative phrase for &ldquo;done their utmost.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Let the old man have a beard as part
+      of the costume.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XIII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Describe him as delirious, and the
+      scene as adopted into his delirium.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Make the whole scene very dreamlike
+      and feverish.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;There should be a slight wildness in
+      the patient&rsquo;s remark to the surgeon, which he cannot prevent, though he is
+      conscious of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 4. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Notice the peculiar depth and
+      intelligence of his eyes, on account of his pain and sickness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 5. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Perhaps the recognition of the
+      pensioner should not be so decided. Redclyffe thinks it is he, but thinks
+      it as in a dream, without wonder or inquiry; and the pensioner does not
+      quite acknowledge it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 6.</i> The following dialogue is marked to be omitted or modified
+      in the original MS.; but it is retained here, in order that the thread of
+      the narrative may not be broken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 7. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;The patient, as he gets better,
+      listens to the feet of old people moving in corridors; to the ringing of a
+      bell at stated periods; to old, tremulous voices talking in the
+      quadrangle; etc., etc.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 8.</i> At this point the modification indicated in Note 5 seems to
+      have been made operative: and the recognition takes place in another way.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XIV.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1.</i> This paragraph is left incomplete in the original MS.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2.</i> The words &ldquo;Rich old bindings&rdquo; are interlined here,
+      indicating, perhaps, a purpose to give a more detailed description of the
+      library and its contents.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XV.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;I think it shall be built of stone,
+      however.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2.</i> This probably refers to some incident which the author
+      intended to incorporate in the former portion of the romance, on a final
+      revision.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XVI.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1.</i> Several passages, which are essentially reproductions of
+      what had been previously treated, are omitted from this chapter. It
+      belongs to an earlier version of the romance.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XVII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Redclyffe shows how to find, under
+      the surface of the village green, an old cross.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;A circular seat around the tree.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3.</i> The reader now hears for the first time what Redclyffe
+      recollected.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XVIII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;The dinner is given to the
+      pensioners, as well as to the gentry, I think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;For example, a story of three
+      brothers, who had a deadly quarrel among them more than two hundred years
+      ago for the affections of a young lady, their cousin, who gave her
+      reciprocal love to one of them, who immediately became the object of the
+      deadly hatred of the two others. There seemed to be madness in their love;
+      perhaps madness in the love of all three; for the result had been a plot
+      to kidnap this unfortunate young man and convey him to America, where he
+      was sold for a servant.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XIX.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1.</i> The following passage, though it seems to fit in here
+      chronologically, is concerned with a side issue which was not followed up.
+      The author was experimenting for a character to act as the accomplice of
+      Lord Braithwaite at the Hall; and he makes trial of the present personage,
+      Mountford; of an Italian priest, Father Angelo; and finally of the
+      steward, Omskirk, who is adopted. It will be noticed that Mountford is
+      here endowed (for the moment) with the birthright of good Doctor Hammond,
+      the Warden. He is represented as having made the journey to America in
+      search of the grave. This alteration being inconsistent with the true
+      thread of the story, and being, moreover, not continued, I have placed
+      this passage in the Appendix, instead of in the text.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe often, in the dim weather, when the prophetic intimations of
+      rain were too strong to allow an American to walk abroad with peace of
+      mind, was in the habit of pacing this noble hall, and watching the process
+      of renewal and adornment; or, which suited him still better, of enjoying
+      its great, deep solitude when the workmen were away. Parties of visitors,
+      curious tourists, sometimes peeped in, took a cursory glimpse at the old
+      hall, and went away; these were the only ordinary disturbances. But, one
+      day, a person entered, looked carelessly round the hall, as if its
+      antiquity had no great charm to him; then he seemed to approach Redclyffe,
+      who stood far and dim in the remote distance of the great room. The
+      echoing of feet on the stone pavement of the hall had always an impressive
+      sound, and turning his head towards the visitant Edward stood as if there
+      were an expectance for him in this approach. It was a middle-aged man&mdash;rather,
+      a man towards fifty, with an alert, capable air; a man evidently with
+      something to do in life, and not in the habit of throwing away his moments
+      in looking at old halls; a gentlemanly man enough, too. He approached
+      Redclyffe without hesitation, and, lifting his hat, addressed him in a way
+      that made Edward wonder whether he could be an Englishman. If so, he must
+      have known that Edward was an American, and have been trying to adapt his
+      manners to those of a democratic freedom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Redclyffe, I believe,&rdquo; said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe bowed, with the stiff caution of an Englishman; for, with
+      American mobility, he had learned to be stiff.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I have had the pleasure of knowing&mdash;at least of meeting&mdash;you
+      very long ago,&rdquo; said the gentleman. &ldquo;But I see you do not recollect me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe confessed that the stranger had the advantage of him in his
+      recollection of a previous acquaintance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No wonder,&rdquo; said the other, &ldquo;for, as I have already hinted, it was many
+      years ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In my own country then, of course,&rdquo; said Redclyffe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In your own country certainly,&rdquo; said the stranger, &ldquo;and when it would
+      have required a penetrating eye to see the distinguished Mr. Redclyffe.
+      the representative of American democracy abroad, in the little pale-faced,
+      intelligent boy, dwelling with an old humorist in the corner of a
+      graveyard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At these words Redclyffe sent back his recollections, and, though
+      doubtfully, began to be aware that this must needs be the young Englishman
+      who had come to his guardian on such a singular errand as to search an old
+      grave. It must be he, for it could be nobody else; and, in truth, he had a
+      sense of his identity,&mdash;which, however, did not express itself by
+      anything that he could confidently remember in his looks, manner, or
+      voice,&mdash;yet, if anything, it was most in the voice. But the image
+      which, on searching, he found in his mind of a fresh-colored young
+      Englishman, with light hair and a frank, pleasant face, was terribly
+      realized for the worse in this somewhat heavy figure, and coarser face,
+      and heavier eye. In fact, there is a terrible difference between the
+      mature Englishman and the young man who is not yet quite out of his
+      blossom. His hair, too, was getting streaked and sprinkled with gray; and,
+      in short, there were evident marks of his having worked, and succeeded,
+      and failed, and eaten and drunk, and being made largely of beef, ale,
+      port, and sherry, and all the solidities of English life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I remember you now,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, extending his hand frankly; and yet
+      Mountford took it in so cold a way that he was immediately sorry that he
+      had done it, and called up an extra portion of reserve to freeze the rest
+      of the interview. He continued, coolly enough, &ldquo;I remember you, and
+      something of your American errand,&mdash;which, indeed, has frequently
+      been in my mind since. I hope you found the results of your voyage, in the
+      way of discovery, sufficiently successful to justify so much trouble.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will remember,&rdquo; said Mountford, &ldquo;that the grave proved quite
+      unproductive. Yes, you will not have forgotten it; for I well recollect
+      how eagerly you listened, with that queer little girl, to my talk with the
+      old governor, and how disappointed you seemed when you found that the
+      grave was not to be opened. And yet, it is very odd. I failed in that
+      mission; and yet there are circumstances that have led me to think that I
+      ought to have succeeded better,&mdash;that some other person has really
+      succeeded better.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Redclyffe was silent; but he remembered the strange old silver key, and
+      how he had kept it secret, and the doubts that had troubled his mind then
+      and long afterwards, whether he ought not to have found means to convey it
+      to the stranger, and ask whether that was what he sought. And now here was
+      that same doubt and question coming up again, and he found himself quite
+      as little able to solve it as he had been twenty years ago. Indeed, with
+      the views that had come up since, it behooved him to be cautious, until he
+      knew both the man and the circumstances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are probably aware,&rdquo; continued Mountford,&mdash;&ldquo;for I understand you
+      have been some time in this neighborhood,&mdash;that there is a pretended
+      claim, a contesting claim, to the present possession of the estate of
+      Braithwaite, and a long dormant title. Possibly&mdash;who knows?&mdash;you
+      yourself might have a claim to one or the other. Would not that be a
+      singular coincidence? Have you ever had the curiosity to investigate your
+      parentage with a view to this point?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The title,&rdquo; replied Redclyffe, &ldquo;ought not to be a very strong
+      consideration with an American. One of us would be ashamed, I verily
+      believe, to assume any distinction, except such as may be supposed to
+      indicate personal, not hereditary merit. We have in some measure, I think,
+      lost the feeling of the past, and even of the future, as regards our own
+      lines of descent; and even as to wealth, it seems to me that the idea of
+      heaping up a pile of gold, or accumulating a broad estate for our children
+      and remoter descendants, is dying out. We wish to enjoy the fulness of our
+      success in life ourselves, and leave to those who descend from us the task
+      of providing for themselves. This tendency is seen in our lavish
+      expenditure, and the whole arrangement of our lives; and it is slowly&mdash;yet
+      not very slowly, either&mdash;effecting a change in the whole economy of
+      American life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Still,&rdquo; rejoined Mr. Mountford, with a smile that Redclyffe fancied was
+      dark and subtle, &ldquo;still, I should imagine that even an American might
+      recall so much of hereditary prejudice as to be sensible of some earthly
+      advantages in the possession of an ancient title and hereditary estate
+      like this. Personal distinction may suit you better,&mdash;to be an
+      Ambassador by your own talent; to have a future for yourself, involving
+      the possibility of ranking (though it were only for four years) among the
+      acknowledged sovereigns of the earth;&mdash;this is very good. But if the
+      silver key would open the shut up secret to-day, it might be possible that
+      you would relinquish these advantages.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Before Redclyffe could reply, (and, indeed, there seemed to be an allusion
+      at the close of Mountford&rsquo;s speech which, whether intended or not, he knew
+      not how to reply to,) a young lady entered the hall, whom he was at no
+      loss, by the colored light of a painted window that fell upon her,
+      translating her out of the common daylight, to recognize as the relative
+      of the pensioner. She seemed to have come to give her fanciful
+      superintendence to some of the decorations of the hall; such as required
+      woman&rsquo;s taste, rather than the sturdy English judgment and antiquarian
+      knowledge of the Warden. Slowly following after her came the pensioner
+      himself, leaning on his staff and looking up at the old roof and around
+      him with a benign composure, and himself a fitting figure by his antique
+      and venerable appearance to walk in that old hall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; said Mountford, to Redclyffe&rsquo;s surprise, &ldquo;here is an acquaintance&mdash;two
+      acquaintances of mine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved along the hall to accost them; and as he appeared to expect that
+      Redclyffe would still keep him company, and as the latter had no reason
+      for not doing so, they both advanced to the pensioner, who was now leaning
+      on the young woman&rsquo;s arm. The incident, too, was not unacceptable to the
+      American, as promising to bring him into a more available relation with
+      her&mdash;whom he half fancied to be his old American acquaintance&mdash;than
+      he had yet succeeded in obtaining.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, my old friend,&rdquo; said Mountford, after bowing with a certain
+      measured respect to the young woman, &ldquo;how wears life with you? Rather,
+      perhaps, it does not wear at all; you being so well suited to the life
+      around you, you grow by it like a lichen on a wall. I could fancy now that
+      you have walked here for three hundred years, and remember when King James
+      of blessed memory was entertained in this hall, and could marshal out all
+      the ceremonies just as they were then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An old man,&rdquo; said the pensioner, quietly, &ldquo;grows dreamy as he wanes away;
+      and I, too, am sometimes at a loss to know whether I am living in the past
+      or the present, or whereabouts in time I am,&mdash;or whether there is any
+      time at all. But I should think it hardly worth while to call up one of my
+      shifting dreams more than another.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I confess,&rdquo; said Redclyffe, &ldquo;I shall find it impossible to call up this
+      scene&mdash;any of these scenes&mdash;hereafter, without the venerable
+      figure of this, whom I may truly call my benefactor, among them. I fancy
+      him among them from the foundation,&mdash;young then, but keeping just the
+      equal step with their age and decay,&mdash;and still doing good and
+      hospitable deeds to those who need them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man seemed not to like to hear these remarks and expressions of
+      gratitude from Mountford and the American; at any rate, he moved away with
+      his slow and light motion of infirmity, but then came uneasily back,
+      displaying a certain quiet restlessness, which Redclyffe was sympathetic
+      enough to perceive. Not so the sturdier, more heavily moulded Englishman,
+      who continued to direct the conversation upon the pensioner, or at least
+      to make him a part of it, thereby bringing out more of his strange
+      characteristics. In truth, it is not quite easy for an Englishman to know
+      how to adapt himself to the line feelings of those below him in point of
+      station, whatever gentlemanly deference he may have for his equals or
+      superiors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should like now, father pensioner,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;to know how many steps
+      you may have taken in life before your path led into this hole, and whence
+      your course started.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do not let him speak thus to the old man,&rdquo; said the young woman, in a
+      low, earnest tone, to Redclyffe. He was surprised and startled; it seemed
+      like a voice that has spoken to his boyhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Redclyffe&rsquo;s place is next to that of
+      the proprietor at table.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Dwell upon the antique liveried
+      servants somewhat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 4. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;The rose-water must precede the
+      toasts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 5. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;The jollity of the Warden at the
+      feast to be noticed; and afterwards explain that he had drunk nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 6. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Mention the old silver snuffbox which
+      I saw at the Liverpool Mayor&rsquo;s dinner.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XX.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1.</i> This is not the version of the story as indicated in the
+      earlier portion of the romance. It is there implied that Elsie is the
+      Doctor&rsquo;s granddaughter, her mother having been the Doctor&rsquo;s daughter, who
+      was ruined by the then possessor of the Braithwaite estates, and who died
+      in consequence. That the Doctor&rsquo;s scheme of revenge was far deeper and
+      more terrible than simply to oust the family from its possessions, will
+      appear further on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2.</i> The foregoing passage was evidently experimental, and the
+      author expresses his estimate of its value in the following words,&mdash;&ldquo;What
+      unimaginable nonsense!&rdquo; He then goes on to make the following memoranda as
+      to the plot. It should be remembered, however, that all this part of the
+      romance was written before the American part.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Half of a secret is preserved in England; that is to say, in the
+      particular part of the mansion in which an old coffer is hidden; the other
+      part is carried to America. One key of an elaborate lock is retained in
+      England, among some old curiosities of forgotten purpose; the other is the
+      silver key that Redclyffe found beside the grave. A treasure of gold is
+      what they expect; they find a treasure of golden locks. This lady, the
+      beloved of the Bloody Footstep, had been murdered and hidden in the coffer
+      on account of jealousy. Elsie must know the baselessness of Redclyffe&rsquo;s
+      claims, and be loath to tell him, because she sees that he is so much
+      interested in them. She has a paper of the old Doctor&rsquo;s revealing the
+      whole plot,&mdash;a death-bed confession; Redclyffe having been absent at
+      the time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The reader will recollect that this latter suggestion was not adopted:
+      there was no death-bed confession. As regards the coffer full of golden
+      locks, it was suggested by an incident recorded in the &ldquo;English
+      Note-Books,&rdquo; 1854. &ldquo;The grandmother of Mrs. O&rsquo;Sullivan died fifty years
+      ago, at the age of twenty-eight. She had great personal charms, and among
+      them a head of beautiful chestnut hair. After her burial in a family tomb,
+      the coffin of one of her children was laid on her own, so that the lid
+      seems to have decayed, or been broken from this cause; at any rate, this
+      was the case when the tomb was opened, about a year ago. The grandmother&rsquo;s
+      coffin was then found to be filled with beautiful, glossy, living chestnut
+      ringlets, into which her whole substance seems to have been transformed,
+      for there was nothing else but these shining curls, the growth of half a
+      century, in the tomb. An old man, with a ringlet of his youthful mistress
+      treasured in his heart, might be supposed to witness this wonderful
+      thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XXIII.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1.</i> In a study of the plot, too long to insert here, this new
+      character of the steward is introduced and described. It must suffice to
+      say, in this place, that he was intimately connected with Dr. Grimshawe,
+      who had resuscitated him after he had been hanged, and had thus gained his
+      gratitude and secured his implicit obedience to his wishes, even twenty
+      years after his (Grimshawe&rsquo;s) death. The use the Doctor made of him was to
+      establish him in Braithwaite Hall as the perpetual confidential servant of
+      the owners thereof. Of course, the latter are not aware that the steward
+      is acting in Grimshawe&rsquo;s interest, and therefore in deadly opposition to
+      their own. Precisely what the steward&rsquo;s mission in life was, will appear
+      here-after.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The study above alluded to, with others, amounting to about a hundred
+      pages, will be published as a supplement to a future edition of this work.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XXIV.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Redclyffe lies in a dreamy state,
+      thinking fantastically, as if he were one of the seven sleepers. He does
+      not yet open his eyes, but lies there in a maze.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;Redclyffe must look at the old man
+      quietly and dreamily, and without surprise, for a long while.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3.</i> Presumably the true name of Doctor Grimshawe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 4.</i> This mysterious prisoner, Sir Edward Redclyffe, is not, of
+      course, the Sir Edward who founded the Hospital, but a descendant of that
+      man, who ruined Doctor Grimshawe&rsquo;s daughter, and is the father of Elsie.
+      He had been confined in this chamber, by the Doctor&rsquo;s contrivance, ever
+      since, Omskirk being his jailer, as is foreshadowed in Chapter XL He has
+      been kept in the belief that he killed Grimshawe, in a struggle that took
+      place between them; and that his confinement in the secret chamber is
+      voluntary on his own part,&mdash;a measure of precaution to prevent arrest
+      and execution for murder. In this miserable delusion he has cowered there
+      for five and thirty years. This, and various other dusky points, are
+      partly elucidated in the notes hereafter to be appended to this volume.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      CHAP. XXV.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 1.</i> At this point, the author, for what reason I will not
+      venture to surmise, chooses to append this gloss: &ldquo;Bubble-and-Squeak!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 2. Author&rsquo;s note</i>.&mdash;&ldquo;They found him in the hall, about to
+      go out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Note 3.</i> Elsie appears to have joined the party.
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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