The Dolliver Romance
by
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Produced by Mark Zinthefer, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
BY
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE TO THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
A SCENE FROM THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
ANOTHER SCENE FROM THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
ANOTHER FRAGMENT OF THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
INTRODUCTORY NOTE.
THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE.
In "The Dolliver Romance," only three chapters of which the author lived
to complete, we get an intimation as to what would have been the ultimate
form given to that romance founded on the Elixir of Life, for which
"Septimius Felton" was the preliminary study. Having abandoned this study,
and apparently forsaken the whole scheme in 1862, Hawthorne was moved to
renew his meditation upon it in the following year; and as the plan of the
romance had now seemingly developed to his satisfaction, he listened to
the publisher's proposal that it should begin its course as a serial story
in the "Atlantic Monthly" for January, 1864--the first instance in which
he had attempted such a mode of publication.
But the change from England to Massachusetts had been marked by, and had
perhaps in part caused, a decline in his health. Illness in his family,
the depressing and harrowing effect of the Civil War upon his
sensibilities, and anxiety with regard to pecuniary affairs, all combined
to make still further inroads upon his vitality; and so early as the
autumn of 1862 Mrs. Hawthorne noted in her private diary that her husband
was looking "miserably ill." At no time since boyhood had he suffered any
serious sickness, and his strong constitution enabled him to rally from
this first attack; but the gradual decline continued. After sending forth
"Our Old Home," he had little strength for any employment more arduous
than reading, or than walking his accustomed path among the pines and
sweetfern on the hill behind The Wayside, known to his family as the Mount
of Vision. The projected work, therefore, advanced but slowly. He wrote to
Mr. Fields:--
"I don't see much probability of my having the first chapter of the
Romance ready so soon as you want it. There are two or three chapters
ready to be written, but I am not yet robust enough to begin, and I feel
as if I should never carry it through."
The presentiment proved to be only too well founded. He had previously
written:--
"There is something preternatural in my reluctance to begin. I linger at
the threshold, and have a perception of very disagreeable phantasms to be
encountered if I enter. I wish God had given me the faculty of writing a
sunshiny book."
And again, in November, he says: "I foresee that there is little
probability of my getting the first chapter ready by the 15th, although I
have a resolute purpose to write it by the end of the month." He did
indeed send it by that time, but it began to be apparent in January that
he could not go on.
"Seriously," he says, in one letter, "my mind has, for the present, lost
its temper and its fine edge, and I have an instinct that I had better
keep quiet. Perhaps I shall have a new spirit of vigor if I wait quietly
for it; perhaps not." In another: "I hardly know what to say to the public
about this abortive Romance, though I know pretty well what the case will
be. I shall never finish it.... I cannot finish it unless a great change
comes over me; and if I make too great an effort to do so, it will be my
death."
Finally, work had to be given over indefinitely. In April he went
southward with Mr. Ticknor, the senior partner of his publishing house;
but Mr. Ticknor died suddenly in Philadelphia, and Hawthorne returned to
The Wayside more feeble than ever. He lingered there a little while. Then,
early in May, came the last effort to recover tone, by means of a
carriage-journey, with his friend Ex-President Pierce, through the
southern part of New Hampshire. A week passed, and all was ended: at the
hotel in Plymouth, New Hampshire, where he and his companion had stopped
to rest, he died in the night, between the 18th and the 19th of May, 1864.
Like Thackeray and Dickens, he was touched by death's "petrific mace"
before he had had time to do more than lay the groundwork and begin the
main structure of the fiction he had in hand; and, as in the case of
Thackeray, the suddenness of his decease has never been clearly accounted
for. The precise nature of his malady was not known, since with quiet
hopelessness he had refused to take medical advice. His friend Dr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes was the only physician who had an opportunity to take even
a cursory view of his case, which he did in the course of a brief walk and
conversation in Boston before Hawthorne started with Mr. Pierce; but he
was unable, with that slight opportunity, to reach any definite
conclusion. Dr. Holmes prescribed and had put up for him a remedy to
palliate some of the poignant symptoms, and this Hawthorne carried with
him; but "I feared," Dr. Holmes writes to the editor, "that there was some
internal organic--perhaps malignant--disease; for he looked wasted and as
if stricken with a mortal illness."
The manuscript of the unfinished "Dolliver Romance" lay upon his coffin
during the funeral services at Concord, but, contrary to the impression
sometimes entertained on this point, was not buried with him. It is
preserved in the Concord Public Library. The first chapter was published
in the "Atlantic" as an isolated portion, soon after his death; and
subsequently the second chapter, which he had been unable to revise,
appeared in the same periodical. Between this and the third fragment there
is a gap, for bridging which no material was found among his papers; but,
after hesitating for several years, Mrs. Hawthorne copied and placed in
the publishers' hands that final portion, which, with the two parts
previously printed, constitutes the whole of what Hawthorne had put into
tangible form.
Hawthorne had purposed prefixing a sketch of Thoreau, "because, from a
tradition which he told me about this house of mine, I got the idea of a
deathless man, which is now taking a shape very different from the
original one." This refers to the tradition mentioned in the editor's
note to "Septimius Felton," and forms a link in the interesting chain of
evidence connecting that romance with the "Dolliver Romance." With the
plan respecting Thoreau he combined the idea of writing an
autobiographical preface, wherein The Wayside was to be described, after
the manner of his Introduction to the "Mosses from an Old Manse"; but, so
far as is known, nothing of this was ever actually committed to paper.
Beginning with the idea of producing an English romance, fragments of
which remain to us in "The Ancestral Footstep," and the incomplete work
known as "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret," he replaced these by another design,
of which "Septimius Felton" represents the partial execution. But that
elaborate study yielded, in its turn, to "The Dolliver Romance." The last-
named work, had the author lived to carry it out, would doubtless have
become the vehicle of a profound and pathetic drama, based on the
instinctive yearning of man for an immortal existence, the attempted
gratification of which would have been set forth in a variety of ways:
First, through the selfish old sensualist, Colonel Dabney, who greedily
seized the mysterious elixir and took such a draught of it that he
perished on the spot; then, through the simple old Grandsir, anxious to
live for Pansie's sake; and, perhaps, through Pansie herself, who, coming
into the enjoyment of some ennobling love, would wish to defeat death, so
that she might always keep the perfection of her mundane happiness,--all
these forms of striving to be made the adumbration of a higher one, the
shadow-play that should direct our minds to the true immortality beyond
this world.
G. P. L.
THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE.
A SCENE FROM THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE.
Dr. Dolliver, a worthy personage of extreme antiquity, was aroused rather
prematurely, one summer morning, by the shouts of the child Pansie, in an
adjoining chamber, summoning old Martha (who performed the duties of
nurse, housekeeper, and kitchen-maid, in the Doctor's establishment) to
take up her little ladyship and dress her. The old gentleman woke with
more than his customary alacrity, and, after taking a moment to gather his
wits about him, pulled aside the faded moreen curtains of his ancient bed,
and thrust his head into a beam of sunshine that caused him to wink and
withdraw it again. This transitory glimpse of good Dr. Dolliver showed a
flannel night-cap, fringed round with stray locks of silvery white hair,
and surmounting a meagre and duskily yellow visage, which was crossed and
criss-crossed with a record of his long life in wrinkles, faithfully
written, no doubt, but with such cramped chirography of Father Time that
the purport was illegible. It seemed hardly worth while for the patriarch
to get out of bed any more, and bring his forlorn shadow into the summer
day that was made for younger folks. The Doctor, however, was by no means
of that opinion, being considerably encouraged towards the toil of living
twenty-four hours longer by the comparative ease with which he found
himself going through the usually painful process of bestirring his rusty
joints (stiffened by the very rest and sleep that should have made them
pliable) and putting them in a condition to bear his weight upon the
floor. Nor was he absolutely disheartened by the idea of those tonsorial,
ablutionary, and personally decorative labors which are apt to become so
intolerably irksome to an old gentleman, after performing them daily and
daily for fifty, sixty, or seventy years, and finding them still as
immitigably recurrent as at first. Dr. Dolliver could nowise account for
this happy condition of his spirits and physical energies, until he
remembered taking an experimental sip of a certain cordial which was long
ago prepared by his grandson, and carefully sealed up in a bottle, and had
been reposited in a dark closet, among a parcel of effete medicines, ever
since that gifted young man's death.
"It may have wrought effect upon me," thought the doctor, shaking his head
as he lifted it again from the pillow. "It may be so; for poor Edward
oftentimes instilled a strange efficacy into his perilous drugs. But I
will rather believe it to be the operation of God's mercy, which may have
temporarily invigorated my feeble age for little Pansie's sake."
A twinge of his familiar rheumatism, as he put his foot out of bed, taught
him that he must not reckon too confidently upon even a day's respite from
the intrusive family of aches and infirmities, which, with their
proverbial fidelity to attachments once formed, had long been the closest
acquaintances that the poor old gentleman had in the world. Nevertheless,
he fancied the twinge a little less poignant than those of yesterday; and,
moreover, after stinging him pretty smartly, it passed gradually off with
a thrill, which, in its latter stages, grew to be almost agreeable. Pain
is but pleasure too strongly emphasized. With cautious movements, and only
a groan or two, the good Doctor transferred himself from the bed to the
floor, where he stood awhile, gazing from one piece of quaint furniture to
another (such as stiff-backed Mayflower chairs, an oaken chest-of-drawers
carved cunningly with shapes of animals and wreaths of foliage, a table
with multitudinous legs, a family record in faded embroidery, a shelf of
black-bound books, a dirty heap of gallipots and phials in a dim
corner),--gazing at these things, and steadying himself by the bedpost,
while his inert brain, still partially benumbed with sleep, came slowly
into accordance with the realities about him. The object which most helped
to bring Dr. Dolliver completely to his waking perceptions was one that
common observers might suppose to have been snatched bodily out of his
dreams. The same sunbeam that had dazzled the doctor between the bed-
curtains gleamed on the weather-beaten gilding which had once adorned this
mysterious symbol, and showed it to be an enormous serpent, twining round
a wooden post, and reaching quite from the floor of the chamber to its
ceiling.
It was evidently a thing that could boast of considerable antiquity, the
dry-rot having eaten out its eyes and gnawed away the tip of its tail; and
it must have stood long exposed to the atmosphere, for a kind of gray moss
had partially overspread its tarnished gilt surface, and a swallow, or
other familiar little bird in some by-gone summer, seemed to have built
its nest in the yawning and exaggerated mouth. It looked like a kind of
Manichean idol, which might have been elevated on a pedestal for a century
or so, enjoying the worship of its votaries in the open air, until the
impious sect perished from among men,--all save old Dr. Dolliver, who had
set up the monster in his bedchamber for the convenience of private
devotion. But we are unpardonable in suggesting such a fantasy to the
prejudice of our venerable friend, knowing him to have been as pious and
upright a Christian, and with as little of the serpent in his character,
as ever came of Puritan lineage. Not to make a further mystery about a
very simple matter, this bedimmed and rotten reptile was once the medical
emblem or apothecary's sign of the famous Dr. Swinnerton, who practised
physic in the earlier days of New England, when a head of Aesculapius or
Hippocrates would have vexed the souls of the righteous as savoring of
heathendom. The ancient dispenser of drugs had therefore set up an image
of the Brazen Serpent, and followed his business for many years with great
credit, under this Scriptural device; and Dr. Dolliver, being the
apprentice, pupil, and humble friend of the learned Swinnerton's old age,
had inherited the symbolic snake, and much other valuable property by his
bequest.
While the patriarch was putting on his small-clothes, he took care to
stand in the parallelogram of bright sunshine that fell upon the
uncarpeted floor. The summer warmth was very genial to his system, and yet
made him shiver; his wintry veins rejoiced at it, though the reviving
blood tingled through them with a half-painful and only half-pleasurable
titillation. For the first few moments after creeping out of bed, he kept
his back to the sunny window, and seemed mysteriously shy of glancing
thitherward; but, as the June fervor pervaded him more and more
thoroughly, he turned bravely about, and looked forth at a burial-ground
on the corner of which he dwelt. There lay many an old acquaintance, who
had gone to sleep with the flavor of Dr. Dolliver's tinctures and powders
upon his tongue; it was the patient's final bitter taste of this world,
and perhaps doomed to be a recollected nauseousness in the next.
Yesterday, in the chill of his forlorn old age, the Doctor expected soon
to stretch out his weary bones among that quiet community, and might
scarcely have shrunk from the prospect on his own account, except, indeed,
that he dreamily mixed up the infirmities of his present condition with
the repose of the approaching one, being haunted by a notion that the damp
earth, under the grass and dandelions, must needs be pernicious for his
cough and his rheumatism. But, this morning, the cheerful sunbeams, or the
mere taste of his grandson's cordial that he had taken at bedtime, or the
fitful vigor that often sports irreverently with aged people, had caused
an unfrozen drop of youthfulness, somewhere within him, to expand.
"Hem! ahem!" quoth the Doctor, hoping with one effort to clear his throat
of the dregs of a ten-years' cough. "Matters are not so far gone with me
as I thought. I have known mighty sensible men, when only a little age-
stricken or otherwise out of sorts, to die of mere faint-heartedness, a
great deal sooner than they need."
He shook his silvery head at his own image in the looking-glass, as if to
impress the apothegm on that shadowy representative of himself; and, for
his part, he determined to pluck up a spirit and live as long as he
possibly could, if it were only for the sake of little Pansie, who stood
as close to one extremity of human life as her great-grandfather to the
other. This child of three years old occupied all the unfossilized portion
of Dr. Dolliver's heart. Every other interest that he formerly had, and
the entire confraternity of persons whom he once loved, had long ago
departed; and the poor Doctor could not follow them, because the grasp of
Pansie's baby-fingers held him back.
So he crammed a great silver watch into his fob, and drew on a patchwork
morning-gown of an ancient fashion. Its original material was said to have
been the embroidered front of his own wedding-waistcoat and the silken
skirt of his wife's bridal attire, which his eldest granddaughter had
taken from the carved chest-of-drawers, after poor Bessie, the beloved of
his youth, had been half a century in the grave. Throughout many of the
intervening years, as the garment got ragged, the spinsters of the old
man's family had quilted their duty and affection into it in the shape of
patches upon patches, rose-color, crimson, blue, violet, and green, and
then (as their hopes faded, and their life kept growing shadier, and their
attire took a sombre hue) sober gray and great fragments of funereal
black, until the Doctor could revive the memory of most things that had
befallen him by looking at his patchwork-gown, as it hung upon a chair.
And now it was ragged again, and all the fingers that should have mended
it were cold. It had an Eastern fragrance, too, a smell of drugs, strong-
scented herbs, and spicy gums, gathered from the many potent infusions
that had from time to time been spilt over it; so that, snuffing him afar
off, you might have taken Dr. Dolliver for a mummy, and could hardly have
been undeceived by his shrunken and torpid aspect, as he crept nearer.
Wrapt in his odorous and many-colored robe, he took staff in hand, and
moved pretty vigorously to the head of the staircase. As it was somewhat
steep, and but dimly lighted, he began cautiously to descend, putting his
left hand on the banister, and poking down his long stick to assist him in
making sure of the successive steps; and thus he became a living
illustration of the accuracy of Scripture, where it describes the aged as
being "afraid of that which is high,"--a truth that is often found to have
a sadder purport than its external one. Half-way to the bottom, however,
the Doctor heard the impatient and authoritative tones of little Pansie,--
Queen Pansie, as she might fairly have been styled, in reference to her
position in the household,--calling amain for grandpapa and breakfast. He
was startled into such perilous activity by the summons, that his heels
slid on the stairs, the slippers were shuffled off his feet, and he saved
himself from a tumble only by quickening his pace, and coming down at
almost a run.
"Mercy on my poor old bones!" mentally exclaimed the Doctor, fancying
himself fractured in fifty places. "Some of them are broken, surely, and,
methinks, my heart has leaped out of my mouth! What! all right? Well,
well! but Providence is kinder to me than I deserve, prancing down this
steep staircase like a kid of three months old!"
He bent stiffly to gather up his slippers and fallen staff; and meanwhile
Pansie had heard the tumult of her great-grandfather's descent, and was
pounding against the door of the breakfast-room in her haste to come at
him. The Doctor opened it, and there she stood, a rather pale and large-
eyed little thing, quaint in her aspect, as might well be the case with a
motherless child, dwelling in an uncheerful house, with no other playmates
than a decrepit old man and a kitten, and no better atmosphere within-
doors than the odor of decayed apothecary's stuff, nor gayer neighborhood
than that of the adjacent burial-ground, where all her relatives, from her
great-grandmother downward, lay calling to her, "Pansie, Pansie, it is
bedtime!" even in the prime of the summer morning. For those dead women-
folk, especially her mother and the whole row of maiden aunts and grand-
aunts, could not but be anxious about the child, knowing that little
Pansie would be far safer under a tuft of dandelions than if left alone,
as she soon must be, in this difficult and deceitful world.
Yet, in spite of the lack of damask roses in her cheeks, she seemed a
healthy child, and certainly showed great capacity of energetic movement
in the impulsive capers with which she welcomed her venerable progenitor.
She shouted out her satisfaction, moreover (as her custom was, having
never had any oversensitive auditors about her to tame down her voice),
till even the Doctor's dull ears were full of the clamor.
"Pansie, darling," said Dr. Dolliver, cheerily, patting her brown hair
with his tremulous fingers, "thou hast put some of thine own friskiness
into poor old grandfather, this fine morning! Dost know, child, that he
came near breaking his neck down-stairs at the sound of thy voice? What
wouldst thou have done then, little Pansie?"
"Kiss poor grandpapa and make him well!" answered the child, remembering
the Doctor's own mode of cure in similar mishaps to herself. "It shall do
poor grandpapa good!" she added, putting up her mouth to apply the remedy.
"Ah, little one, thou hast greater faith in thy medicines than ever I had
in my drugs," replied the patriarch, with a giggle, surprised and
delighted at his own readiness of response. "But the kiss is good for my
feeble old heart, Pansie, though it might do little to mend a broken neck;
so give grandpapa another dose, and let us to breakfast."
In this merry humor they sat down to the table, great-grandpapa and Pansie
side by side, and the kitten, as soon appeared, making a third in the
party. First, she showed her mottled head out of Pansie's lap, delicately
sipping milk from the child's basin without rebuke: then she took post on
the old gentleman's shoulder, purring like a spinning-wheel, trying her
claws in the wadding of his dressing-gown, and still more impressively
reminding him of her presence by putting out a paw to intercept a warmed-
over morsel of yesterday's chicken on its way to the Doctor's mouth. After
skilfully achieving this feat, she scrambled down upon the breakfast-table
and began to wash her face and hands. Evidently, these companions were all
three on intimate terms, as was natural enough, since a great many
childish impulses were softly creeping back on the simple-minded old man;
insomuch that, if no worldly necessities nor painful infirmity had
disturbed him, his remnant of life might have been as cheaply and cheerily
enjoyed as the early playtime of the kitten and the child. Old Dr.
Dolliver and his great-granddaughter (a ponderous title, which seemed
quite to overwhelm the tiny figure of Pansie) had met one another at the
two extremities of the life-circle: her sunrise served him for a sunset,
illuminating his locks of silver and hers of golden brown with a
homogeneous shimmer of twinkling light.
Little Pansie was the one earthly creature that inherited a drop of the
Dolliver blood. The Doctor's only child, poor Bessie's offspring, had died
the better part of a hundred years before, and his grandchildren, a
numerous and dimly remembered brood, had vanished along his weary track in
their youth, maturity, or incipient age, till, hardly knowing, how it had
all happened, he found himself tottering onward with an infant's small
fingers in his nerveless grasp. So mistily did his dead progeny come and
go in the patriarch's decayed recollection, that this solitary child
represented for him the successive babyhoods of the many that had gone
before. The emotions of his early paternity came back to him. She seemed
the baby of a past age oftener than she seemed Pansie. A whole family of
grand-aunts (one of whom had perished in her cradle, never so mature as
Pansie now, another in her virgin bloom, another in autumnal maidenhood,
yellow and shrivelled, with vinegar in her blood, and still another, a
forlorn widow, whose grief outlasted even its vitality, and grew to be
merely a torpid habit, and was saddest then),--all their hitherto
forgotten features peeped through the face of the great-grandchild, and
their long-inaudible voices sobbed, shouted, or laughed, in her familiar
tones. But it often happened to Dr. Dolliver, while frolicking amid this
throng of ghosts, where the one reality looked no more vivid than its
shadowy sisters,--it often happened that his eyes filled with tears at a
sudden perception of what a sad and poverty-stricken old man he was,
already remote from his own generation, and bound to stray further onward
as the sole playmate and protector of a child!
As Dr. Dolliver, in spite of his advanced epoch of life, is likely to
remain a considerable time longer upon our hands, we deem it expedient to
give a brief sketch of his position, in order that the story may get
onward with the greater freedom when he rises from the breakfast-table.
Deeming it a matter of courtesy, we have allowed him the honorary title of
Doctor, as did all his towns-people and contemporaries, except, perhaps,
one or two formal old physicians, stingy of civil phrases and over-jealous
of their own professional dignity. Nevertheless, these crusty graduates
were technically right in excluding Dr. Dolliver from their fraternity. He
had never received the degree of any medical school, nor (save it might be
for the cure of a toothache, or a child's rash, or a whitlow on a
seamstress's finger, or some such trifling malady) had he ever been even a
practitioner of the awful science with which his popular designation
connected him. Our old friend, in short, even at his highest social
elevation, claimed to be nothing more than an apothecary, and, in these
later and far less prosperous days, scarcely so much. Since the death of
his last surviving grandson (Pansie's father, whom he had instructed in
all the mysteries of his science, and who, being distinguished by an
experimental and inventive tendency, was generally believed to have
poisoned himself with an infallible panacea of his own distillation),--
since that final bereavement, Dr. Dolliver's once pretty flourishing
business had lamentably declined. After a few months of unavailing
struggle, he found it expedient to take down the Brazen Serpent from the
position to which Dr. Swinnerton had originally elevated it, in front of
his shop in the main street, and to retire to his private dwelling,
situated in a by-lane and on the edge of a burial-ground.
This house, as well as the Brazen Serpent, some old medical books, and a
drawer full of manuscripts, had come to him by the legacy of Dr.
Swinnerton. The dreariness of the locality had been of small importance to
our friend in his young manhood, when he first led his fair wife over the
threshold, and so long as neither of them had any kinship with the human
dust that rose into little hillocks, and still kept accumulating beneath
their window. But, too soon afterwards, when poor Bessie herself had gone
early to rest there, it is probable that an influence from her grave may
have prematurely calmed and depressed her widowed husband, taking away
much of the energy from what should have been the most active portion of
his life. Thus he never grew rich. His thrifty townsmen used to tell him,
that, in any other man's hands, Dr. Swinnerton's Brazen Serpent (meaning,
I presume, the inherited credit and good-will of that old worthy's trade)
would need but ten years' time to transmute its brass into gold. In Dr.
Dolliver's keeping, as we have seen, the inauspicious symbol lost the
greater part of what superficial gilding it originally had. Matters had
not mended with him in more advanced life, after he had deposited a
further and further portion of his heart and its affections in each
successive one of a long row of kindred graves; and as he stood over the
last of them, holding Pansie by the hand and looking down upon the coffin
of his grandson, it is no wonder that the old man wept, partly for those
gone before, but not so bitterly as for the little one that stayed behind.
Why had not God taken her with the rest? And then, so hopeless as he was,
so destitute of possibilities of good, his weary frame, his decrepit
bones, his dried-up heart, might have crumbled into dust at once, and have
been scattered by the next wind over all the heaps of earth that were akin
to him.
This intensity of desolation, however, was of too positive a character to
be long sustained by a person of Dr. Dolliver's original gentleness and
simplicity, and now so completely tamed by age and misfortune. Even before
he turned away from the grave, he grew conscious of a slightly cheering
and invigorating effect from the tight grasp of the child's warm little
hand. Feeble as he was, she seemed to adopt him willingly for her
protector. And the Doctor never afterwards shrank from his duty nor
quailed beneath it, but bore himself like a man, striving, amid the sloth
of age and the breaking-up of intellect, to earn the competency which he
had failed to accumulate even in his most vigorous days.
To the extent of securing a present subsistence for Pansie and himself, he
was successful. After his son's death, when the Brazen Serpent fell into
popular disrepute, a small share of tenacious patronage followed the old
man into his retirement. In his prime, he had been allowed to possess more
skill than usually fell to the share of a Colonial apothecary, having been
regularly apprenticed to Dr. Swinnerton, who, throughout his long
practice, was accustomed personally to concoct the medicines which he
prescribed and dispensed. It was believed, indeed, that the ancient
physician had learned the art at the world-famous drug-manufactory of
Apothecary's Hall, in London, and, as some people half-malignly whispered,
had perfected himself under masters more subtle than were to be found even
there. Unquestionably, in many critical cases he was known to have
employed remedies of mysterious composition and dangerous potency, which,
in less skilful hands, would have been more likely to kill than cure. He
would willingly, it is said, have taught his apprentice the secrets of
these prescriptions, but the latter, being of a timid character and
delicate conscience, had shrunk from acquaintance with them. It was
probably as the result of the same scrupulosity that Dr. Dolliver had
always declined to enter the medical profession, in which his old
instructor had set him such heroic examples of adventurous dealing with
matters of life and death. Nevertheless, the aromatic fragrance, so to
speak, of the learned Swinnerton's reputation, had clung to our friend
through life; and there were elaborate preparations in the pharmacopœia of
that day, requiring such minute skill and conscientious fidelity in the
concocter that the physicians were still glad to confide them to one in
whom these qualities were so evident.
Moreover, the grandmothers of the community were kind to him, and mindful
of his perfumes, his rose-water, his cosmetics, tooth-powders, pomanders,
and pomades, the scented memory of which lingered about their toilet-
tables, or came faintly back from the days when they were beautiful. Among
this class of customers there was still a demand for certain comfortable
little nostrums (delicately sweet and pungent to the taste, cheering to
the spirits, and fragrant in the breath), the proper distillation of which
was the airiest secret that the mystic Swinnerton had left behind him.
And, besides, these old ladies had always liked the manners of Dr.
Dolliver, and used to speak of his gentle courtesy behind the counter as
having positively been something to admire; though of later years, an
unrefined, and almost rustic simplicity, such as belonged to his humble
ancestors, appeared to have taken possession of him, as it often does of
prettily mannered men in their late decay.
But it resulted from all these favorable circumstances that the Doctor's
marble mortar, though worn with long service and considerably damaged by a
crack that pervaded it, continued to keep up an occasional intimacy with
the pestle; and he still weighed drachms and scruples in his delicate
scales, though it seemed impossible, dealing with such minute quantities,
that his tremulous fingers should not put in too little or too much,
leaving out life with the deficiency, or spilling in death with the
surplus. To say the truth, his stanchest friends were beginning to think
that Dr. Dolliver's fits of absence (when his mind appeared absolutely to
depart from him, while his frail old body worked on mechanically) rendered
him not quite trustworthy without a close supervision of his proceedings.
It was impossible, however, to convince the aged apothecary of the
necessity for such vigilance; and if anything could stir up his gentle
temper to wrath, or, as oftener happened, to tears, it was the attempt
(which he was marvellously quick to detect) thus to interfere with his
long-familiar business.
The public, meanwhile, ceasing to regard Dr. Dolliver in his professional
aspect, had begun to take an interest in him as perhaps their oldest
fellow-citizen. It was he that remembered the Great Fire and the Great
Snow, and that had been a grown-up stripling at the terrible epoch of
Witch-Times, and a child just breeched at the breaking out of King
Philip's Indian War. He, too, in his school-boy days, had received a
benediction from the patriarchal Governor Bradstreet, and thus could boast
(somewhat as Bishops do of their unbroken succession from the Apostles) of
a transmitted blessing from the whole company of sainted Pilgrims, among
whom the venerable magistrate had been an honored companion. Viewing their
townsman in this aspect, the people revoked the courteous Doctorate with
which they had heretofore decorated him, and now knew him most familiarly
as Grandsir Dolliver. His white head, his Puritan band, his threadbare
garb (the fashion of which he had ceased to change, half a century ago),
his gold-headed staff, that had been Dr. Swinnerton's, his shrunken,
frosty figure, and its feeble movement,--all these characteristics had a
wholeness and permanence in the public recognition, like the meeting-house
steeple or the town-pump. All the younger portion of the inhabitants
unconsciously ascribed a sort of aged immortality to Grandsir Dolliver's
infirm and reverend presence. They fancied that he had been born old (at
least, I remember entertaining some such notions about age-stricken
people, when I myself was young), and that he could the better tolerate
his aches and incommodities, his dull ears and dim eyes, his remoteness
from human intercourse within the crust of indurated years, the cold
temperature that kept him always shivering and sad, the heavy burden that
invisibly bent down his shoulders,--that all these intolerable things
might bring a kind of enjoyment to Grandsir Dolliver, as the lifelong
conditions of his peculiar existence.
But, alas! it was a terrible mistake. This weight of years had a perennial
novelty for the poor sufferer. He never grew accustomed to it, but, long
as he had now borne the fretful torpor of his waning life, and patient as
he seemed, he still retained an inward consciousness that these stiffened
shoulders, these quailing knees, this cloudiness of sight and brain, this
confused forgetfulness of men and affairs, were troublesome accidents that
did not really belong to him. He possibly cherished a half-recognized idea
that they might pass away. Youth, however eclipsed for a season, is
undoubtedly the proper, permanent, and genuine condition of man; and if we
look closely into this dreary delusion of growing old, we shall find that
it never absolutely succeeds in laying hold of our innermost convictions.
A sombre garment, woven of life's unrealities, has muffled us from our
true self, but within it smiles the young man whom we knew; the ashes of
many perishable things have fallen upon our youthful fire, but beneath
them lurk the seeds of inextinguishable flame. So powerful is this
instinctive faith, that men of simple modes of character are prone to
antedate its consummation. And thus it happened with poor Grandsir
Dolliver, who often awoke from an old man's fitful sleep with a sense that
his senile predicament was but a dream of the past night; and hobbling
hastily across the cold floor to the looking-glass, he would be grievously
disappointed at beholding the white hair, the wrinkles and furrows, the
ashen visage and bent form, the melancholy mask of Age, in which, as he
now remembered, some strange and sad enchantment had involved him for
years gone by!
To other eyes than his own, however, the shrivelled old gentleman looked
as if there were little hope of his throwing off this too artfully wrought
disguise, until, at no distant day, his stooping figure should be
straightened out, his hoary locks be smoothed over his brows, and his
much-enduring bones be laid safely away, with a green coverlet spread over
them, beside his Bessie, who doubtless would recognize her youthful
companion in spite of his ugly garniture of decay. He longed to be gazed
at by the loving eyes now closed; he shrank from the hard stare of them
that loved him not. Walking the streets seldom and reluctantly, he felt a
dreary impulse to elude the people's observation, as if with a sense that
he had gone irrevocably out of fashion, and broken his connecting links
with the net-work of human life; or else it was that nightmare-feeling
which we sometimes have in dreams, when we seem to find ourselves
wandering through a crowded avenue, with the noonday sun upon us, in some
wild extravagance of dress or nudity. He was conscious of estrangement
from his towns-people, but did not always know how nor wherefore, nor why
he should be thus groping through the twilight mist in solitude. If they
spoke loudly to him, with cheery voices, the greeting translated itself
faintly and mournfully to his ears; if they shook him by the hand, it was
as if a thick, insensible glove absorbed the kindly pressure and the
warmth. When little Pansie was the companion of his walk, her childish
gayety and freedom did not avail to bring him into closer relationship
with men, but seemed to follow him into that region of indefinable
remoteness, that dismal Fairy-Land of aged fancy, into which old Grandsir
Dolliver had so strangely crept away.
Yet there were moments, as many persons had noticed, when the great-
grandpapa would suddenly take stronger hues of life. It was as if his
faded figure had been colored over anew, or at least, as he and Pansie
moved along the street, as if a sunbeam had fallen across him, instead of
the gray gloom of an instant before. His chilled sensibilities had
probably been touched and quickened by the warm contiguity of his little
companion through the medium of her hand, as it stirred within his own, or
some inflection of her voice that set his memory ringing and chiming with
forgotten sounds. While that music lasted, the old man was alive and
happy. And there were seasons, it might be, happier than even these, when
Pansie had been kissed and put to bed, and Grandsir Dolliver sat by his
fireside gazing in among the massive coals, and absorbing their glow into
those cavernous abysses with which all men communicate. Hence come angels
or fiends into our twilight musings, according as we may have peopled them
in by-gone years. Over our friend's face, in the rosy flicker of the fire-
gleam, stole an expression of repose and perfect trust that made him as
beautiful to look at, in his high-backed chair, as the child Pansie on her
pillow; and sometimes the spirits that were watching him beheld a calm
surprise draw slowly over his features and brighten into joy, yet not so
vividly as to break his evening quietude. The gate of heaven had been
kindly left ajar, that this forlorn old creature might catch a glimpse
within. All the night afterwards, he would be semi-conscious of an
intangible bliss diffused through the fitful lapses of an old man's
slumber, and would awake, at early dawn, with a faint thrilling of the
heart-strings, as if there had been music just now wandering over them.
ANOTHER SCENE FROM THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
[Footnote: This scene was not revised by the author, but is printed from
his first draught.]
We may now suppose Grandsir Dolliver to have finished his breakfast, with
a better appetite and sharper perception of the qualities of his food than
he has generally felt of late years, whether it were due to old Martha's
cookery or to the cordial of the night before. Little Pansie had also made
an end of her bread and milk with entire satisfaction, and afterwards
nibbled a crust, greatly enjoying its resistance to her little white
teeth.
How this child came by the odd name of Pansie, and whether it was really
her baptismal name, I have not ascertained. More probably it was one of
those pet appellations that grow out of a child's character, or out of
some keen thrill of affection in the parents, an unsought-for and
unconscious felicity, a kind of revelation, teaching them the true name by
which the child's guardian angel would know it,--a name with playfulness
and love in it, that we often observe to supersede, in the practice of
those who love the child best, the name that they carefully selected, and
caused the clergyman to plaster indelibly on the poor little forehead at
the font,--the love-name, whereby, if the child lives, the parents know
it in their hearts, or by which, if it dies, God seems to have called it
away, leaving the sound lingering faintly and sweetly through the house.
In Pansie's case, it may have been a certain pensiveness which was
sometimes seen under her childish frolic, and so translated itself into
French (_pensée_), her mother having been of Acadian kin; or, quite
as probably, it alluded merely to the color of her eyes, which, in some
lights, were very like the dark petals of a tuft of pansies in the
Doctor's garden. It might well be, indeed, on account of the suggested
pensiveness; for the child's gayety had no example to sustain it, no
sympathy of other children or grown people,--and her melancholy, had it
been so dark a feeling, was but the shadow of the house, and of the old
man. If brighter sunshine came, she would brighten with it. This morning,
surely, as the three companions, Pansie, puss, and Grandsir Dolliver,
emerged from the shadow of the house into the small adjoining enclosure,
they seemed all frolicsome alike.
The Doctor, however, was intent over something that had reference to his
lifelong business of drugs. This little spot was the place where he was
wont to cultivate a variety of herbs supposed to be endowed with medicinal
virtue. Some of them had been long known in the pharmacopœia of the Old
World; and others, in the early days of the country, had been adopted by
the first settlers from the Indian medicine-men, though with fear and even
contrition, because these wild doctors were supposed to draw their
pharmaceutic knowledge from no gracious source, the Black Man himself
being the principal professor in their medical school. From his own
experience, however, Dr. Dolliver had long since doubted, though he was
not bold enough quite to come to the conclusion, that Indian shrubs, and
the remedies prepared from them, were much less perilous than those so
freely used in European practice, and singularly apt to be followed by
results quite as propitious. Into such heterodoxy our friend was the more
liable to fall, because it had been taught him early in life by his old
master, Dr. Swinnerton, who, at those not infrequent times when he
indulged a certain unhappy predilection for strong waters, had been
accustomed to inveigh in terms of the most cynical contempt and coarsest
ridicule against the practice by which he lived, and, as he affirmed,
inflicted death on his fellow-men. Our old apothecary, though too loyal to
the learned profession with which he was connected fully to believe this
bitter judgment, even when pronounced by his revered master, was still so
far influenced that his conscience was possibly a little easier when
making a preparation from forest herbs and roots than in the concoction of
half a score of nauseous poisons into a single elaborate drug, as the
fashion of that day was.
But there were shrubs in the garden of which he had never ventured to make
a medical use, nor, indeed, did he know their virtue, although from year
to year he had tended and fertilized, weeded and pruned them, with
something like religious care. They were of the rarest character, and had
been planted by the learned and famous Dr. Swinnerton, who, on his death-
bed, when he left his dwelling and all his abstruse manuscripts to his
favorite pupil, had particularly directed his attention to this row of
shrubs. They had been collected by himself from remote countries, and had
the poignancy of torrid climes in them; and he told him, that, properly
used, they would be worth all the rest of the legacy a hundred-fold. As
the apothecary, however, found the manuscripts, in which he conjectured
there was a treatise on the subject of these shrubs, mostly illegible, and
quite beyond his comprehension in such passages as he succeeded in
puzzling out (partly, perhaps, owing to his very imperfect knowledge of
Latin, in which language they were written), he had never derived from
them any of the promised benefit. And, to say the truth, remembering that
Dr. Swinnerton himself never appeared to triturate or decoct or do
anything else with the mysterious herbs, our old friend was inclined to
imagine the weighty commendation of their virtues to have been the idly
solemn utterance of mental aberration at the hour of death. So, with the
integrity that belonged to his character, he had nurtured them as tenderly
as was possible in the ungenial climate and soil of New England, putting
some of them into pots for the winter; but they had rather dwindled than
flourished, and he had reaped no harvests from them, nor observed them
with any degree of scientific interest.
His grandson, however, while yet a school-boy, had listened to the old
man's legend of the miraculous virtues of these plants; and it took so
firm a hold of his mind, that the row of outlandish vegetables seemed
rooted in it, and certainly flourished there with richer luxuriance than
in the soil where they actually grew. The story, acting thus early upon
his imagination, may be said to have influenced his brief career in life,
and, perchance, brought about its early close. The young man, in the
opinion of competent judges, was endowed with remarkable abilities, and
according to the rumor of the people had wonderful gifts, which were
proved by the cures he had wrought with remedies of his own invention. His
talents lay in the direction of scientific analysis and inventive
combination of chemical powers. While under the pupilage of his
grandfather, his progress had rapidly gone quite beyond his instructor's
hope,--leaving him even to tremble at the audacity with which he
overturned and invented theories, and to wonder at the depth at which he
wrought beneath the superficialness and mock-mystery of the medical
science of those days, like a miner sinking his shaft and running a
hideous peril of the earth caving in above him. Especially did he devote
himself to these plants; and under his care they had thriven beyond all
former precedent, bursting into luxuriance of bloom, and most of them
bearing beautiful flowers, which, however, in two or three instances, had
the sort of natural repulsiveness that the serpent has in its beauty,
compelled against its will, as it were, to warn the beholder of an
unrevealed danger. The young man had long ago, it must be added, demanded
of his grandfather the documents included in the legacy of Professor
Swinnerton, and had spent days and nights upon them, growing pale over
their mystic lore, which seemed the fruit not merely of the Professor's
own labors, but of those of more ancient sages than he; and often a whole
volume seemed to be compressed within the limits of a few lines of crabbed
manuscript, judging from the time which it cost even the quick-minded
student to decipher them.
Meantime these abstruse investigations had not wrought such disastrous
effects as might have been feared, in causing Edward Dolliver to neglect
the humble trade, the conduct of which his grandfather had now
relinquished almost entirely into his hands. On the contrary, with the
mere side results of his study, or what may be called the chips and
shavings of his real work, he created a prosperity quite beyond anything
that his simple-minded predecessor had ever hoped for, even at the most
sanguine epoch of his life. The young man's adventurous endowments were
miraculously alive, and connecting themselves with his remarkable ability
for solid research, and perhaps his conscience being as yet imperfectly
developed (as it sometimes lies dormant in the young), he spared not to
produce compounds which, if the names were anywise to be trusted, would
supersede all other remedies, and speedily render any medicine a needless
thing, making the trade of apothecary an untenable one, and the title of
Doctor obsolete. Whether there was real efficacy in these nostrums, and
whether their author himself had faith in them, is more than can safely be
said; but, at all events, the public believed in them, and thronged to the
old and dim sign of the Brazen Serpent, which, though hitherto familiar to
them and their forefathers, now seemed to shine with auspicious lustre, as
if its old Scriptural virtues were renewed. If any faith was to be put in
human testimony, many marvellous cures were really performed, the fame of
which spread far and wide, and caused demands for these medicines to come
in from places far beyond the precincts of the little town. Our old
apothecary, now degraded by the overshadowing influence of his grandson's
character to a position not much above that of a shop-boy, stood behind
the counter with a face sad and distrustful, and yet with an odd kind of
fitful excitement in it, as if he would have liked to enjoy this new
prosperity, had he dared. Then his venerable figure was to be seen
dispensing these questionable compounds by the single bottle and by the
dozen, wronging his simple conscience as he dealt out what he feared was
trash or worse, shrinking from the reproachful eyes of every ancient
physician who might chance to be passing by, but withal examining closely
the silver, or the New England coarsely printed bills, which he took in
payment, as if apprehensive that the delusive character of the commodity
which he sold might be balanced by equal counterfeiting in the money
received, or as if his faith in all things were shaken.
Is it not possible that this gifted young man had indeed found out those
remedies which Nature has provided and laid away for the cure of every
ill?
The disastrous termination of the most brilliant epoch that ever came to
the Brazen Serpent must be told in a few words. One night, Edward
Dolliver's young wife awoke, and, seeing the gray dawn creeping into the
chamber, while her husband, it should seem, was still engaged in his
laboratory, arose in her nightdress, and went to the door of the room to
put in her gentle remonstrance against such labor. There she found him
dead,--sunk down out of his chair upon the hearth, where were some ashes,
apparently of burnt manuscripts, which appeared to comprise most of those
included in Dr. Swinnerton's legacy, though one or two had fallen near the
heap, and lay merely scorched beside it. It seemed as if he had thrown
them into the fire, under a sudden impulse, in a great hurry and passion.
It may be that he had come to the perception of something fatally false
and deceptive in the successes which he had appeared to win, and was too
proud and too conscientious to survive it. Doctors were called in, but had
no power to revive him. An inquest was held, at which the jury, under the
instruction, perhaps, of those same revengeful doctors, expressed the
opinion that the poor young man, being given to strange contrivances with
poisonous drugs, had died by incautiously tasting them himself. This
verdict, and the terrible event itself, at once deprived the medicines of
all their popularity; and the poor old apothecary was no longer under any
necessity of disturbing his conscience by selling them. They at once lost
their repute, and ceased to be in any demand. In the few instances in
which they were tried the experiment was followed by no good results; and
even those individuals who had fancied themselves cured, and had been
loudest in spreading the praises of these beneficent compounds, now, as if
for the utter demolition of the poor youth's credit, suffered under a
recurrence of the worst symptoms, and, in more than one case, perished
miserably: insomuch (for the days of witchcraft were still within the
memory of living men and women) it was the general opinion that Satan had
been personally concerned in this affliction, and that the Brazen Serpent,
so long honored among them, was really the type of his subtle malevolence
and perfect iniquity. It was rumored even that all preparations that came
from the shop were harmful: that teeth decayed that had been made pearly
white by the use of the young chemist's dentifrice; that cheeks were
freckled that had been changed to damask roses by his cosmetics; that hair
turned gray or fell off that had become black, glossy, and luxuriant from
the application of his mixtures; that breath which his drugs had sweetened
had now a sulphurous smell. Moreover, all the money heretofore amassed by
the sale of them had been exhausted by Edward Dolliver in his lavish
expenditure for the processes of his study; and nothing was left for
Pansie, except a few valueless and unsalable bottles of medicine, and one
or two others, perhaps more recondite than their inventor had seen fit to
offer to the public.
Little Pansie's mother lived but a short time after the shock of the
terrible catastrophe; and, as we began our story with saying, she was left
with no better guardianship or support than might be found in the efforts
of a long superannuated man.
Nothing short of the simplicity, integrity, and piety of Grandsir
Dolliver's character, known and acknowledged as far back as the oldest
inhabitants remembered anything, and inevitably discoverable by the
dullest and most prejudiced observers, in all its natural manifestations,
could have protected him in still creeping about the streets. So far as he
was personally concerned, however, all bitterness and suspicion had
speedily passed away; and there remained still the careless and neglectful
good-will, and the prescriptive reverence, not altogether reverential,
which the world heedlessly awards to the unfortunate individual who
outlives his generation.
And now that we have shown the reader sufficiently, or at least to the
best of our knowledge, and perhaps at tedious length, what was the present
position of Grandsir Dolliver, we may let our story pass onward, though at
such a pace as suits the feeble gait of an old man.
The peculiarly brisk sensation of this morning, to which we have more than
once alluded, enabled the Doctor to toil pretty vigorously at his
medicinal herbs,--his catnip, his vervain, and the like; but he did not
turn his attention to the row of mystic plants, with which so much of
trouble and sorrow either was, or appeared to be, connected. In truth, his
old soul was sick of them, and their very fragrance, which the warm
sunshine made strongly perceptible, was odious to his nostrils. But the
spicy, homelike scent of his other herbs, the English simples, was
grateful to him, and so was the earth-smell, as he turned up the soil
about their roots, and eagerly snuffed it in. Little Pansie, on the other
hand, perhaps scandalized at great-grandpapa's neglect of the prettiest
plants in his garden, resolved to do her small utmost towards balancing
his injustice; so with an old shingle, fallen from the roof, which she had
appropriated as her agricultural tool, she began to dig about them,
pulling up the weeds, as she saw grandpapa doing. The kitten, too, with a
look of elfish sagacity, lent her assistance, plying her paws with vast
haste and efficiency at the roots of one of the shrubs. This particular
one was much smaller than the rest, perhaps because it was a native of the
torrid zone, and required greater care than the others to make it
flourish; so that, shrivelled, cankered, and scarcely showing a green
leaf, both Pansie and the kitten probably mistook it for a weed. After
their joint efforts had made a pretty big trench about it, the little girl
seized the shrub with both hands, bestriding it with her plump little
legs, and giving so vigorous a pull, that, long accustomed to be
transplanted annually, it came up by the roots, and little Pansie came
down in a sitting posture, making a broad impress on the soft earth. "See,
see, Doctor!" cries Pansie, comically enough giving him his title of
courtesy,--"look, grandpapa, the big, naughty weed!"
Now the Doctor had at once a peculiar dread and a peculiar value for this
identical shrub, both because his grandson's investigations had been
applied more ardently to it than to all the rest, and because it was
associated in his mind with an ancient and sad recollection. For he had
never forgotten that his wife, the early lost, had once taken a fancy to
wear its flowers, day after day, through the whole season of their bloom,
in her bosom, where they glowed like a gem, and deepened her somewhat
pallid beauty with a richness never before seen in it. At least such was
the effect which this tropical flower imparted to the beloved form in his
memory, and thus it somehow both brightened and wronged her. This had
happened not long before her death; and whenever, in the subsequent years,
this plant had brought its annual flower, it had proved a kind of talisman
to bring up the image of Bessie, radiant with this glow that did not
really belong to her naturally passive beauty, quickly interchanging with
another image of her form, with the snow of death on cheek and forehead.
This reminiscence had remained among the things of which the Doctor was
always conscious, but had never breathed a word, through the whole of his
long life,--a sprig of sensibility that perhaps helped to keep him
tenderer and purer than other men, who entertain no such follies. And the
sight of the shrub often brought back the faint, golden gleam of her hair,
as if her spirit were in the sunlights of the garden, quivering into view
and out of it. And therefore, when he saw what Pansie had done, he sent
forth a strange, inarticulate, hoarse, tremulous exclamation, a sort of
aged and decrepit cry of mingled emotion. "Naughty Pansie, to pull up
grandpapa's flower!" said he, as soon as he could speak. "Poison, Pansie,
poison! Fling it away, child!"
And dropping his spade, the old gentleman scrambled towards the little
girl as quickly as his rusty joints would let him,--while Pansie, as
apprehensive and quick of motion as a fawn, started up with a shriek of
mirth and fear to escape him. It so happened that the garden-gate was
ajar; and a puff of wind blowing it wide open, she escaped through this
fortuitous avenue, followed by great-grandpapa and the kitten.
"Stop, naughty Pansie, stop!" shouted our old friend. "You will tumble
into the grave!" The kitten, with the singular sensitiveness that seems to
affect it at every kind of excitement, was now on her back.
And, indeed, this portentous warning was better grounded and had a more
literal meaning than might be supposed; for the swinging gate communicated
with the burial-ground, and almost directly in little Pansie's track there
was a newly dug grave, ready to receive its tenant that afternoon. Pansie,
however, fled onward with outstretched arms, half in fear, half in fun,
plying her round little legs with wonderful promptitude, as if to escape
Time or Death, in the person of Grandsir Dolliver, and happily avoiding
the ominous pitfall that lies in every person's path, till, hearing a
groan from her pursuer, she looked over her shoulder, and saw that poor
grandpapa had stumbled over one of the many hillocks. She then suddenly
wrinkled up her little visage, and sent forth a full-breathed roar of
sympathy and alarm.
"Grandpapa has broken his neck now!" cried little Pansie, amid her sobs.
"Kiss grandpapa, and make it well, then," said the old gentleman,
recollecting her remedy, and scrambling up more readily than could be
expected. "Well," he murmured to himself, "a hair's-breadth more, and I
should have been tumbled into yonder grave. Poor little Pansie! what
wouldst thou have done then?"
"Make the grass grow over grandpapa," answered Pansie, laughing up in his
face.
"Poh, poh, child, that is not a pretty thing to say," said grandpapa,
pettishly and disappointed, as people are apt to be when they try to
calculate on the fitful sympathies of childhood. "Come, you must go in to
old Martha now."
The poor old gentleman was in the more haste to leave the spot because he
found himself standing right in front of his own peculiar row of
gravestones, consisting of eight or nine slabs of slate, adorned with
carved borders rather rudely cut, and the earliest one, that of his
Bessie, bending aslant, because the frost of so many winters had slowly
undermined it. Over one grave of the row, that of his gifted grandson,
there was no memorial. He felt a strange repugnance, stronger than he had
ever felt before, to linger by these graves, and had none of the tender
sorrow, mingled with high and tender hopes, that had sometimes made it
seem good to him to be there. Such moods, perhaps, often come to the aged,
when the hardened earth-crust over their souls shuts them out from
spiritual influences.
Taking the child by the hand,--her little effervescence of infantile fun
having passed into a downcast humor, though not well knowing as yet what a
dusky cloud of disheartening fancies arose from these green hillocks,--he
went heavily toward the garden-gate. Close to its threshold, so that one
who was issuing forth or entering must needs step upon it or over it, lay
a small flat stone, deeply imbedded in the ground, and partly covered with
grass, inscribed with the name of "Dr. John Swinnerton, Physician."
"Ay," said the old man, as the well-remembered figure of his ancient
instructor seemed to rise before him in his grave-apparel, with beard and
gold-headed cane, black velvet doublet and cloak, "here lies a man who, as
people have thought, had it in his power to avoid the grave! He had no
little grandchild to tease him. He had the choice to die, and chose it."
So the old gentleman led Pansie over the stone, and carefully closed the
gate; and, as it happened, he forgot the uprooted shrub, which Pansie, as
she ran, had flung away, and which had fallen into the open grave; and
when the funeral came that afternoon, the coffin was let down upon it, so
that its bright, inauspicious flower never bloomed again.
ANOTHER FRAGMENT OF THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE.
"Be secret!" and he kept his stern eye fixed upon him, as the coach began
to move.
"Be secret!" repeated the apothecary. "I know not any secret that he has
confided to me thus far, and as for his nonsense (as I will be bold to
style it now he is gone) about a medicine of long life, it is a thing I
forget in spite of myself, so very empty and trashy it is. I wonder, by
the by, that it never came into my head to give the Colonel a dose of the
cordial whereof I partook last night. I have no faith that it is a
valuable medicine--little or none--and yet there has been an unwonted
briskness in me all the morning."
Then a simple joy broke over his face--a flickering sunbeam among his
wrinkles--as he heard the laughter of the little girl, who was running
rampant with a kitten in the kitchen.
"Pansie! Pansie!" cackled he, "grandpapa has sent away the ugly man now.
Come, let us have a frolic in the garden."
And he whispered to himself again, "That is a cordial yonder, and I will
take it according to the prescription, knowing all the ingredients." Then,
after a moment's thought, he added, "All, save one."
So, as he had declared to himself his intention, that night, when little
Pansie had long been asleep, and his small household was in bed, and most
of the quiet, old-fashioned townsfolk likewise, this good apothecary went
into his laboratory, and took out of a cupboard in the wall a certain
ancient-looking bottle, which was cased over with a net-work of what
seemed to be woven silver, like the wicker-woven bottles of our days. He
had previously provided a goblet of pure water. Before opening the bottle,
however, he seemed to hesitate, and pondered and babbled to himself;
having long since come to that period of life when the bodily frame,
having lost much of its value, is more tenderly cared for than when it was
a perfect and inestimable machine.
"I triturated, I infused, I distilled it myself in these very rooms, and
know it--know it all--all the ingredients, save one. They are common
things enough--comfortable things--some of them a little queer--one or two
that folks have a prejudice against--and then there is that one thing
that I don't know. It is foolish in me to be dallying with such a mess,
which I thought was a piece of quackery, while that strange visitor bade
me do it,--and yet, what a strength has come from it! He said it was a
rare cordial, and, methinks, it has brightened up my weary life all day,
so that Pansie has found me the fitter playmate. And then the dose--it is
so absurdly small! I will try it again."
He took the silver stopple from the bottle, and with a practised hand,
tremulous as it was with age, so that one would have thought it must have
shaken the liquor into a perfect shower of misapplied drops, he dropped--I
have heard it said--only one single drop into the goblet of water. It fell
into it with a dazzling brightness, like a spark of ruby flame, and subtly
diffusing itself through the whole body of water, turned it to a rosy hue
of great brilliancy. He held it up between his eyes and the light, and
seemed to admire and wonder at it.
"It is very odd," said he, "that such a pure, bright liquor should have
come out of a parcel of weeds that mingled their juices here. The thing is
a folly,--it is one of those compositions in which the chemists--the
cabalists, perhaps--used to combine what they thought the virtues of many
plants, thinking that something would result in the whole, which was not
in either of them, and a new efficacy be created. Whereas, it has been the
teaching of my experience that one virtue counteracts another, and is the
enemy of it. I never believed the former theory, even when that strange
madman bade me do it. And what a thick, turbid matter it was, until that
last ingredient,--that powder which he put in with his own hand! Had he
let me see it, I would first have analyzed it, and discovered its
component parts. The man was mad, undoubtedly, and this may have been
poison. But its effect is good. Poh! I will taste again, because of this
weak, agued, miserable state of mine; though it is a shame in me, a man of
decent skill in my way, to believe in a quack's nostrum. But it is a
comfortable kind of thing."
Meantime, that single drop (for good Dr. Dolliver had immediately put a
stopper into the bottle) diffused a sweet odor through the chamber, so
that the ordinary fragrances and scents of apothecaries' stuff seemed to
be controlled and influenced by it, and its bright potency also dispelled
a certain dimness of the antiquated room.
The Doctor, at the pressure of a great need, had given incredible pains to
the manufacture of this medicine; so that, reckoning the pains rather than
the ingredients (all except one, of which he was not able to estimate the
cost nor value), it was really worth its weight in gold. And, as it
happened, he had bestowed upon it the hard labor of his poor life, and the
time that was necessary for the support of his family, without return; for
the customers, after playing off this cruel joke upon the old man, had
never come back; and now, for seven years, the bottle had stood in a
corner of the cupboard. To be sure, the silver-cased bottle was worth a
trifle for its silver, and still more, perhaps, as an antiquarian knick-
knack. But, all things considered, the honest and simple apothecary
thought that he might make free with the liquid to such small extent as
was necessary for himself. And there had been something in the concoction
that had struck him; and he had been fast breaking lately; and so, in the
dreary fantasy and lonely recklessness of his old age, he had suddenly
bethought himself of this medicine (cordial,--as the strange man called
it, which had come to him by long inheritance in his family) and he had
determined to try it. And again, as the night before, he took out the
receipt--a roll of antique parchment, out of which, provokingly, one fold
had been lost--and put on his spectacles to puzzle out the passage.
Guttam unicam in aquam puram, two gills. "If the Colonel should hear of
this," said Dr. Dolliver, "he might fancy it his nostrum of long life, and
insist on having the bottle for his own use. The foolish, fierce old
gentleman! He has grown very earthly, of late, else he would not desire
such a thing. And a strong desire it must be to make him feel it
desirable. For my part, I only wish for something that, for a short time,
may clear my eyes, so that I may see little Pansie's beauty, and quicken
my ears, that I may hear her sweet voice, and give me nerve, while God
keeps me here, that I may live longer to earn bread for dear Pansie. She
provided for, I would gladly lie down yonder with Bessie and our children.
Ah! the vanity of desiring lengthened days!--There!--I have drunk it,
and methinks its final, subtle flavor hath strange potency in it."
The old man shivered a little, as those shiver who have just swallowed
good liquor, while it is permeating their vitals. Yet he seemed to be in a
pleasant state of feeling, and, as was frequently the case with this
simple soul, in a devout frame of mind. He read a chapter in the Bible,
and said his prayers for Pansie and himself, before he went to bed, and
had much better sleep than usually comes to people of his advanced age;
for, at that period, sleep is diffused through their wakefulness, and a
dim and tiresome half-perception through their sleep, so that the only
result is weariness.
Nothing very extraordinary happened to Dr. Dolliver or his small household
for some time afterwards. He was favored with a comfortable winter, and
thanked Heaven for it, and put it to a good use (at least he intended it
so) by concocting drugs; which perhaps did a little towards peopling the
graveyard, into which his windows looked; but that was neither his purpose
nor his fault. None of the sleepers, at all events, interrupted their
slumbers to upbraid him. He had done according to his own artless
conscience and the recipes of licensed physicians, and he looked no
further, but pounded, triturated, infused, made electuaries, boluses,
juleps, or whatever he termed his productions, with skill and diligence,
thanking Heaven that he was spared to do so, when his contemporaries
generally were getting incapable of similar efforts. It struck him with
some surprise, but much gratitude to Providence, that his sight seemed to
be growing rather better than worse. He certainly could read the crabbed
handwriting and hieroglyphics of the physicians with more readiness than
he could a year earlier. But he had been originally near-sighted, with
large, projecting eyes; and near-sighted eyes always seem to get a new
lease of light as the years go on. One thing was perceptible about the
Doctor's eyes, not only to himself in the glass, but to everybody else;
namely, that they had an unaccustomed gleaming brightness in them; not so
very bright either, but yet so much so, that little Pansie noticed it, and
sometimes, in her playful, roguish way, climbed up into his lap, and put
both her small palms over them; telling Grandpapa that he had stolen
somebody else's eyes, and given away his own, and that she liked his old
ones better. The poor old Doctor did his best to smile through his eyes,
and so to reconcile Pansie to their brightness: but still she continually
made the same silly remonstrance, so that he was fain to put on a pair of
green spectacles when he was going to play with Pansie, or took her on his
knee. Nay, if he looked at her, as had always been his custom, after she
was asleep, in order to see that all was well with her, the little child
would put up her hands, as if he held a light that was flashing on her
eyeballs; and unless he turned away his gaze quickly, she would wake up in
a fit of crying.
On the whole, the apothecary had as comfortable a time as a man of his
years could expect. The air of the house and of the old graveyard seemed
to suit him. What so seldom happens in man's advancing age, his night's
rest did him good, whereas, generally, an old man wakes up ten times as
nervous and dispirited as he went to bed, just as if, during his sleep he
had been working harder than ever he did in the daytime. It had been so
with the Doctor himself till within a few months. To be sure, he had
latterly begun to practise various rules of diet and exercise, which
commended themselves to his approbation. He sawed some of his own fire-
wood, and fancied that, as was reasonable, it fatigued him less day by
day. He took walks with Pansie, and though, of course, her little
footsteps, treading on the elastic air of childhood, far outstripped his
own, still the old man knew that he was not beyond the recuperative period
of life, and that exercise out of doors and proper food can do somewhat
towards retarding the approach of age. He was inclined, also, to impute
much good effect to a daily dose of Santa Cruz rum (a liquor much in vogue
in that day), which he was now in the habit of quaffing at the meridian
hour. All through the Doctor's life he had eschewed strong spirits: "But
after seventy," quoth old Dr. Dolliver, "a man is all the better in head
and stomach for a little stimulus"; and it certainly seemed so in his
case. Likewise, I know not precisely how often, but complying
punctiliously with the recipe, as an apothecary naturally would, he took
his drop of the mysterious cordial.
He was inclined, however, to impute little or no efficacy to this, and to
laugh at himself for having ever thought otherwise. The dose was so very
minute! and he had never been sensible of any remarkable effect on taking
it, after all. A genial warmth, he sometimes fancied, diffused itself
throughout him, and perhaps continued during the next day. A quiet and
refreshing night's rest followed, and alacritous waking in the morning;
but all this was far more probably owing, as has been already hinted, to
excellent and well-considered habits of diet and exercise. Nevertheless he
still continued the cordial with tolerable regularity,--the more, because
on one or two occasions, happening to omit it, it so chanced that he slept
wretchedly, and awoke in strange aches and pains, torpors, nervousness,
shaking of the hands, bleared-ness of sight, lowness of spirits and other
ills, as is the misfortune of some old men,--who are often threatened by a
thousand evil symptoms that come to nothing, foreboding no particular
disorder, and passing away as unsatisfactorily as they come. At another
time, he took two or three drops at once, and was alarmingly feverish in
consequence. Yet it was very true, that the feverish symptoms were pretty
sure to disappear on his renewal of the medicine. "Still it could not be
that," thought the old man, a hater of empiricism (in which, however, is
contained all hope for man), and disinclined to believe in anything that
was not according to rule and art. And then, as aforesaid, the dose was so
ridiculously small!
Sometimes, however, he took, half laughingly, another view of it, and felt
disposed to think that chance might really have thrown in his way a very
remarkable mixture, by which, if it had happened to him earlier in life,
he might have amassed a larger fortune, and might even have raked together
such a competency as would have prevented his feeling much uneasiness
about the future of little Pansie. Feeling as strong as he did nowadays,
he might reasonably count upon ten years more of life, and in that time
the precious liquor might be exchanged for much gold. "Let us see!" quoth
he, "by what attractive name shall it be advertised? 'The old man's
cordial?' That promises too little. Poh, poh! I would stain my honesty, my
fair reputation, the accumulation of a lifetime, and befool my neighbor
and the public, by any name that would make them imagine I had found that
ridiculous talisman that the alchemists have sought. The old man's
cordial,--that is best. And five shillings sterling the bottle. That
surely were not too costly, and would give the medicine a better
reputation and higher vogue (so foolish is the world) than if I were to
put it lower. I will think further of this. But pshaw, pshaw!"
"What is the matter. Grandpapa," said little Pansie, who had stood by him,
wishing to speak to him at least a minute, but had been deterred by his
absorption; "why do you say 'Pshaw'?"
"Pshaw!" repeated Grandpapa, "there is one ingredient that I don't know."
So this very hopeful design was necessarily given up, but that it had
occurred to Dr. Dolliver was perhaps a token that his mind was in a very
vigorous state; for it had been noted of him through life, that he had
little enterprise, little activity, and that, for the want of these
things, his very considerable skill in his art had been almost thrown
away, as regarded his private affairs, when it might easily have led him
to fortune. Whereas, here in his extreme age, he had first bethought
himself of a way to grow rich. Sometimes this latter spring causes--as
blossoms come on the autumnal tree--a spurt of vigor, or untimely
greenness, when Nature laughs at her old child, half in kindness and half
in scorn. It is observable, however, I fancy, that after such a spurt, age
comes on with redoubled speed, and that the old man has only run forward
with a show of force, in order to fall into his grave the sooner.
Sometimes, as he was walking briskly along the street, with little Pansie
clasping his hand, and perhaps frisking rather more than became a person
of his venerable years, he had met the grim old wreck of Colonel Dabney,
moving goutily, and gathering wrath anew with every touch of his painful
foot to the ground; or driving by in his carriage, showing an ashen,
angry, wrinkled face at the window, and frowning at him--the apothecary
thought--with a peculiar fury, as if he took umbrage at his audacity in
being less broken by age than a gentleman like himself. The apothecary
could not help feeling as if there were some unsettled quarrel or dispute
between himself and the Colonel, he could not tell what or why. The
Colonel always gave him a haughty nod of half-recognition; and the people
in the street, to whom he was a familiar object, would say, "The
worshipful Colonel begins to find himself mortal like the rest of us. He
feels his years." "He'd be glad, I warrant," said one, "to change with
you, Doctor. It shows what difference a good life makes in men, to look at
him and you. You are half a score of years his elder, me-thinks, and yet
look what temperance can do for a man. By my credit, neighbor, seeing how
brisk you have been lately, I told my wife you seemed to be growing
younger. It does me good to see it. We are about of an age, I think, and I
like to notice how we old men keep young and keep one another in heart. I
myself--ahem--ahem--feel younger this season than for these five years
past."
"It rejoices me that you feel so," quoth the apothecary, who had just been
thinking that this neighbor of his had lost a great deal, both in mind and
body, within a short period, and rather scorned him for it. "Indeed, I
find old age less uncomfortable than I supposed. Little Pansie and I make
excellent companions for one another."
And then, dragged along by Pansie's little hand, and also impelled by a
certain alacrity that rose with him in the morning, and lasted till his
healthy rest at night, he bade farewell to his contemporary, and hastened
on; while the latter, left behind, was somewhat irritated as he looked at
the vigorous movement of the apothecary's legs.
"He need not make such a show of briskness neither," muttered he to
himself. "This touch of rheumatism troubles me a bit just now, but try it
on a good day, and I'd walk with him for a shilling. Pshaw! I'll walk to
his funeral yet."
One day, while the Doctor, with the activity that bestirred itself in him
nowadays, was mixing and manufacturing certain medicaments that came in
frequent demand, a carriage stopped at his door, and he recognized the
voice of Colonel Dabney, talking in his customary stern tone to the woman
who served him. And, a moment afterwards, the coach drove away, and he
actually heard the old dignitary lumbering up stairs, and bestowing a
curse upon each particular step, as if that were the method to make them
soften and become easier when he should come down again. "Pray, your
worship," said the Doctor from above, "let me attend you below stairs."
"No," growled the Colonel, "I'll meet you on your own ground. I can climb
a stair yet, and be hanged to you."
So saying, he painfully finished the ascent, and came into the laboratory,
where he let himself fall into the Doctor's easy-chair, with an anathema
on the chair, the Doctor, and himself; and, staring round through the
dusk, he met the wide-open, startled eyes of little Pansie, who had been
reading a gilt picture-book in the corner.
"Send away that child, Dolliver," cried the Colonel, angrily. "Confound
her, she makes my bones ache. I hate everything young."
"Lord, Colonel," the poor apothecary ventured to say, "there must be young
people in the world as well as old ones. 'T is my mind, a man's
grandchildren keep him warm round about him."
"I have none, and want none," sharply responded the Colonel; "and as for
young people, let me be one of them, and they may exist, otherwise not. It
is a cursed bad arrangement of the world, that there are young and old
here together."
When Pansie had gone away, which she did with anything but reluctance,
having a natural antipathy to this monster of a Colonel, the latter
personage tapped with his crutch-handled cane on a chair that stood near,
and nodded in an authoritative way to the apothecary to sit down in it.
Dr. Dolliver complied submissively, and the Colonel, with dull, unkindly
eyes, looked at him sternly, and with a kind of intelligence amid the aged
stolidity of his aspect, that somewhat puzzled the Doctor. In this way he
surveyed him all over, like a judge, when he means to hang a man, and for
some reason or none, the apothecary felt his nerves shake, beneath this
steadfast look.
"Aha! Doctor!" said the Colonel at last, with a doltish sneer, "you bear
your years well."
"Decently well, Colonel; I thank Providence for it," answered the meek
apothecary.
"I should say," quoth the Colonel, "you are younger at this moment than
when we spoke together two or three years ago. I noted then that your
eyebrows were a handsome snow-white, such as befits a man who has passed
beyond his threescore years and ten, and five years more. Why, they are
getting dark again, Mr. Apothecary."
"Nay, your worship must needs be mistaken there," said the Doctor, with a
timorous chuckle. "It is many a year since I have taken a deliberate note
of my wretched old visage in a glass, but I remember they were white when
I looked last."
"Come, Doctor, I know a thing or two," said the Colonel, with a bitter
scoff; "and what's this, you old rogue? Why, you've rubbed away a wrinkle
since we met. Take off those infernal spectacles, and look me in the face.
Ha! I see the devil in your eye. How dare you let it shine upon me so?"
"On my conscience, Colonel," said the apothecary, strangely struck with
the coincidence of this accusation with little Pansie's complaint, "I know
not what you mean. My sight is pretty well for a man of my age. We near-
sighted people begin to know our best eyesight, when other people have
lost theirs."
"Ah! ah! old rogue," repeated the insufferable Colonel, gnashing his
ruined teeth at him, as if, for some incomprehensible reason, he wished to
tear him to pieces and devour him. "I know you. You are taking the life
away from me, villain! and I told you it was my inheritance. And I told
you there was a Bloody Footstep, bearing its track down through my race.
"I remember nothing of it," said the Doctor, in a quake, sure that the
Colonel was in one of his mad fits. "And on the word of an honest man, I
never wronged you in my life, Colonel."
"We shall see," said the Colonel, whose wrinkled visage grew absolutely
terrible with its hardness; and his dull eyes, without losing their
dulness, seemed to look through him.
"Listen to me, sir. Some ten years ago, there came to you a man on a
secret business. He had an old musty bit of parchment, on which were
written some words, hardly legible, in an antique hand,--an old deed, it
might have been,--some family document, and here and there the letters
were faded away. But this man had spent his life over it, and he had made
out the meaning, and he interpreted it to you, and left it with you, only
there was one gap,--one torn or obliterated place. Well, sir,--and he bade
you, with your poor little skill at the mortar, and for a certain sum,--
ample repayment for such a service,--to manufacture this medicine,--this
cordial. It was an affair of months. And just when you thought it
finished, the man came again, and stood over your cursed beverage, and
shook a powder, or dropped a lump into it, or put in some ingredient, in
which was all the hidden virtue,--or, at least, it drew out all the hidden
virtue of the mean and common herbs, and married them into a wondrous
efficacy. This done, the man bade you do certain other things with the
potation, and went away"--the Colonel hesitated a moment--"and never came
back again."
"Surely, Colonel, you are correct," said the apothecary; much startled,
however, at the Colonel's showing himself so well acquainted with an
incident which he had supposed a secret with himself alone. Yet he had a
little reluctance in owning it, although he did not exactly understand
why, since the Colonel had, apparently, no rightful claim to it, at all
events.
"That medicine, that receipt," continued his visitor, "is my hereditary
property, and I challenge you, on your peril, to give it up."
"But what if the original owner should call upon me for it," objected Dr.
Dolliver.
"I'll warrant you against that," said the Colonel; and the apothecary
thought there was something ghastly in his look and tone. "Why, 't is ten
year, you old fool; and do you think a man with a treasure like that in
his possession would have waited so long?"
"Seven years it was ago," said the apothecary. "Septem annis passatis: so
says the Latin."
"Curse your Latin," answers the Colonel. "Produce the stuff. You have been
violating the first rule of your trade,--taking your own drugs,--your own,
in one sense; mine by the right of three hundred years. Bring it forth, I
say!"
"Pray excuse me, worthy Colonel," pleaded the apothecary; for though
convinced that the old gentleman was only in one of his insane fits, when
he talked of the value of this concoction, yet he really did not like to
give up the cordial, which perhaps had wrought him some benefit. Besides,
he had at least a claim upon it for much trouble and skill expended in its
composition. This he suggested to the Colonel, who scornfully took out of
his pocket a net-work purse, with more golden guineas in it than the
apothecary had seen in the whole seven years, and was rude enough to fling
it in his face. "Take that," thundered he, "and give up the thing, or I
will have you in prison before you are an hour older. Nay," he continued,
growing pale, which was his mode of showing terrible wrath; since all
through life, till extreme age quenched it, his ordinary face had been a
blazing-red, "I'll put you to death, you villain, as I've a right!" And
thrusting his hand into his waistcoat pocket, lo! the madman took a small
pistol from it, which he cocked, and presented at the poor apothecary. The
old fellow, quaked and cowered in his chair, and would indeed have given
his whole shopful of better concocted medicines than this, to be out of
this danger. Besides, there were the guineas; the Colonel had paid him a
princely sum for what was probably worth nothing.
"Hold! hold!" cried he as the Colonel, with stern eye pointed the pistol
at his head. "You shall have it."
So he rose all trembling, and crept to that secret cupboard, where the
precious bottle--since precious it seemed to be--was reposited. In all his
life, long as it had been, the apothecary had never before been threatened
by a deadly weapon; though many as deadly a thing had he seen poured into
a glass, without winking. And so it seemed to take his heart and life
away, and he brought the cordial forth feebly, and stood tremulously
before the Colonel, ashy pale, and looking ten years older than his real
age, instead of five years younger, as he had seemed just before this
disastrous interview with the Colonel.
"You look as if you needed a drop of it yourself," said Colonel Dabney,
with great scorn. "But not a drop shall you have. Already have you stolen
too much," said he, lifting up the bottle, and marking the space to which
the liquor had subsided in it in consequence of the minute doses with
which the apothecary had made free. "Fool, had you taken your glass like a
man, you might have been young again. Now, creep on, the few months you
have left, poor, torpid knave, and die! Come--a goblet! quick!"
He clutched the bottle meanwhile voraciously, miserly, eagerly, furiously,
as if it were his life that he held in his grasp; angry, impatient, as if
something long sought were within his reach, and not yet secure,--with
longing thirst and desire; suspicious of the world and of fate; feeling as
if an iron hand were over him, and a crowd of violent robbers round about
him, struggling for it. At last, unable to wait longer, just as the
apothecary was tottering away in quest of a drinking-glass, the Colonel
took out the stopple, and lifted the flask itself to his lips.
"For Heaven's sake, no!" cried the Doctor. "The dose is one single drop!--
one drop, Colonel, one drop!"
"Not a drop to save your wretched old soul," responded the Colonel;
probably thinking that the apothecary was pleading for a small share of
the precious liquor. He put it to his lips, and, as if quenching a
lifelong thirst, swallowed deep draughts, sucking it in with desperation,
till, void of breath, he set it down upon the table. The rich, poignant
perfume spread itself through the air.
The apothecary, with an instinctive carefulness that was rather ludicrous
under the circumstances, caught up the stopper, which the Colonel had let
fall, and forced it into the bottle to prevent any farther escape of
virtue. He then fearfully watched the result of the madman's potation.
The Colonel sat a moment in his chair, panting for breath; then started to
his feet with a prompt vigor that contrasted widely with the infirm and
rheumatic movements that had heretofore characterized him. He struck his
forehead violently with one hand, and smote his chest with the other: he
stamped his foot thunderously on the ground; then he leaped up to the
ceiling, and came down with an elastic bound. Then he laughed, a wild,
exulting ha! ha! with a strange triumphant roar that filled the house and
reechoed through it; a sound full of fierce, animal rapture,--enjoyment of
sensual life mixed up with a sort of horror. After all, real as it was, it
was like the sounds a man makes in a dream. And this, while the potent
draught seemed still to be making its way through his system; and the
frightened apothecary thought that he intended a revengeful onslaught upon
himself. Finally, he uttered a loud unearthly screech, in the midst of
which his voice broke, as if some unseen hand were throttling him, and,
starting forward, he fought frantically, as if he would clutch the life
that was being rent away,--and fell forward with a dead thump upon the
floor.
"Colonel! Colonel!" cried the terrified Doctor.
The feeble old man, with difficulty, turned over the heavy frame, and saw
at once, with practised eye, that he was dead. He set him up, and the
corpse looked at him with angry reproach. He was so startled, that his
subsequent recollections of the moment were neither distinct nor
steadfast; but he fancied, though he told the strange impression to no
one, that on his first glimpse of the face, with a dark flush of what
looked like rage still upon it, it was a young man's face that he saw,--a
face with all the passionate energy of early manhood,--the capacity for
furious anger which the man had lost half a century ago, crammed to the
brim with vigor till it became agony. But the next moment, if it were so
(which it could not have been), the face grew ashen, withered, shrunken,
more aged than in life, though still the murderous fierceness remained,
and seemed to be petrified forever upon it.
After a moment's bewilderment, Dolliver ran to the window looking to the
street, threw it open, and called loudly for assistance. He opened also
another window, for the air to blow through, for he was almost stifled
with the rich odor of the cordial which filled the room, and was now
exuded from the corpse.
He heard the voice of Pansie, crying at the door, which was locked, and,
turning the key, he caught her in his arms, and hastened with her below
stairs, to give her into the charge of Martha, who seemed half stupefied
with a sense of something awful that had occurred.
Meanwhile there was a rattling and a banging at the street portal, to
which several people had been attracted both by the Doctor's outcry from
the window, and by the awful screech in which the Colonel's spirit (if,
indeed, he had that divine part) had just previously taken its flight.
He let them in, and, pale and shivering, ushered them up to the death-
chamber, where one or two, with a more delicate sense of smelling than the
rest, snuffed the atmosphere, as if sensible of an unknown fragrance, yet
appeared afraid to breathe, when they saw the terrific countenance leaning
back against the chair, and eying them so truculently.
I would fain quit the scene and have done with the Colonel, who, I am
glad, has happened to die at so early a period of the narrative. I
therefore hasten to say that a coroner's inquest was held on the spot,
though everybody felt that it was merely ceremonial, and that the
testimony of their good and ancient townsman, Dr. Dolliver, was amply
sufficient to settle the matter. The verdict was, "Death by the visitation
of God."
The apothecary gave evidence that the Colonel, without asking leave, and
positively against his advice, had drunk a quantity of distilled spirits;
and one or two servants, or members of the Colonel's family, testified
that he had been in a very uncomfortable state of mind for some days past,
so that they fancied he was insane. Therefore nobody thought of blaming
Dr. Dolliver for what had happened; and, if the plain truth must be told,
everybody who saw the wretch was too well content to be rid of him, to
trouble themselves more than was quite necessary about the way in which
the incumbrance had been removed.
The corpse was taken to the mansion in order to receive a magnificent
funeral; and Dr. Dolliver was left outwardly in quiet, but much disturbed,
and indeed almost overwhelmed inwardly, by what had happened.
Yet it is to be observed, that he had accounted for the death with a
singular dexterity of expression, when he attributed it to a dose of
distilled spirits. What kind of distilled spirits were those, Doctor? and
will you venture to take any more of them?
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