Doctor Grimshawe's Secret — a Romance

Lord Braithwaite, to say the truth, appeared a little flabbergasted and disturbed by these latter expressions of the old gentleman. He hesitated, turned pale; but at last, recovering his momentary confusion and irresolution, he replied, with apparent carelessness: —

“Go wherever you will, old gentleman. The house is open to you for this time. If ever you have another opportunity to disturb it, the fault will be mine.”

“Follow, sir,” said the pensioner, turning to the Warden; “follow, maiden![Endnote: 3] Now shall a great mystery begin to be revealed.”

So saying, he led the way before them, passing out of the hall, not by the doorway, but through one of the oaken panels of the wall, which admitted the party into a passage which seemed to pass through the thickness of the wall, and was lighted by interstices through which shone gleams of light. This led them into what looked like a little vestibule, or circular room, which the Warden, though deeming himself many years familiar with the old house, had never seen before, any more than the passage which led to it. To his surprise, this room was not vacant, for in it sat, in a large old chair, Omskirk, like a toad in its hole, like some wild, fearful creature in its den, and it was now partly understood how this man had the possibility of suddenly disappearing, so inscrutably, and so in a moment; and, when all quest for him was given up, of as suddenly appearing again.

“Ha!” said old Omskirk, slowly rising, as at the approach of some event that he had long expected. “Is he coming at last?”

“Poor victim of another’s iniquity,” said the pensioner. “Thy release approaches. Rejoice!”

The old man arose with a sort of trepidation and solemn joy intermixed in his manner, and bowed reverently, as if there were in what he heard more than other ears could understand in it.

“Yes; I have waited long,” replied he. “Welcome; if my release is come.”

“Well,” said Lord Braithwaite, scornfully. “This secret retreat of my house is known to many. It was the priest’s secret chamber when it was dangerous to be of the old and true religion, here in England. There is no longer any use in concealing this place; and the Warden, or any man, might have seen it, or any of the curiosities of the old hereditary house, if desirous so to do.”

“Aha! son of Belial!” quoth the pensioner. “And this, too!”

He took three pieces from a certain point of the wall, which he seemed to know, and stooped to press upon the floor. The Warden looked at Lord Braithwaite, and saw that he had grown deadly pale. What his change of cheer might bode, he could not guess; but, at the pressure of the old pensioner’s finger, the floor, or a segment of it, rose like the lid of a box, and discovered a small darksome pair of stairs, within which burned a lamp, lighting it downward, like the steps that descend into a sepulchre.

“Follow,” said he, to those who looked on, wondering.

And he began to descend. Lord Braithwaite saw him disappear, then frantically followed, the Warden next, and old Omskirk took his place in the rear, like a man following his inevitable destiny. At the bottom of a winding descent, that seemed deep and remote, and far within, they came to a door, which the pensioner pressed with a spring; and, passing through the space that disclosed itself, the whole party followed, and found themselves in a small, gloomy room. On one side of it was a couch, on which sat Redclyffe; face to face with him was a white-haired figure in a chair.

“You are come!” said Redclyffe, solemnly. “But too late!”

“And yonder is the coffer,” said the pensioner. “Open but that; and our quest is ended.”

“That, if I mistake not, I can do,” said Redclyffe.

He drew forth — what he had kept all this time, as something that might yet reveal to him the mystery of his birth — the silver key that had been found by the grave in far New England; and applying it to the lock, he slowly turned it on the hinges, that had not been turned for two hundred years. All — even Lord Braithwaite, guilty and shame-stricken as he felt — pressed forward to look upon what was about to be disclosed. What were the wondrous contents? The entire, mysterious coffer was full of golden ringlets, abundant, clustering through the whole coffer, and living with elasticity, so as immediately, as it were, to flow over the sides of the coffer, and rise in large abundance from the long compression. Into this — by a miracle of natural production which was known likewise in other cases — into this had been resolved the whole bodily substance of that fair and unfortunate being, known so long in the legends of the family as the Beauty of the Golden Locks. As the pensioner looked at this strange sight, — the lustre of the precious and miraculous hair gleaming and glistening, and seeming to add light to the gloomy room, — he took from his breast pocket another lock of hair, in a locket, and compared it, before their faces, with that which brimmed over from the coffer.

“It is the same!” said he.

“And who are you that know it?” asked Redclyffe, surprised.

“He whose ancestors taught him the secret, — who has had it handed down to him these two centuries, and now only with regret yields to the necessity of making it known.”

“You are the heir!” said Redclyffe.

In that gloomy room, beside the dead old man, they looked at him, and saw a dignity beaming on him, covering his whole figure, that broke out like a lustre at the close of day.

APPENDIX

CHAP. I

Note 1. The MS. gives the following alternative openings: “Early in the present century”; “Soon after the Revolution”; “Many years ago.”

Note 2. Throughout the first four pages of the MS. the Doctor is called “Ormskirk,” and in an earlier draft of this portion of the romance, “Etheredge.”

Note 3. Author’s note. — “Crusty Hannah is a mixture of Indian and negro.”

Note 4. Author’s note. — “It is understood from the first that the children are not brother and sister. — Describe the children with really childish traits, quarrelling, being naughty, etc. — The Doctor should occasionally beat Ned in course of instruction.”

Note 5. In order to show the manner in which Hawthorne would modify a passage, which was nevertheless to be left substantially the same, I subjoin here a description of this graveyard as it appears in the earlier draft: “The graveyard (we are sorry to have to treat of such a disagreeable piece of ground, but everybody’s business centres there at one time or another) was the most ancient in the town. The dust of the original Englishmen had become incorporated with the soil; of those Englishmen whose immediate predecessors had been resolved into the earth about the country churches, — the little Norman, square, battlemented stone towers of the villages in the old land; so that in this point of view, as holding bones and dust of the first ancestors, this graveyard was more English than anything else in town. There had been hidden from sight many a broad, bluff visage of husbandmen that had ploughed the real English soil; there the faces of noted men, now known in history; there many a personage whom tradition told about, making wondrous qualities of strength and courage for him; — all these, mingled with succeeding generations, turned up and battened down again with the sexton’s spade; until every blade of grass was human more than vegetable, — for an hundred and fifty years will do this, and so much time, at least, had elapsed since the first little mound was piled up in the virgin soil. Old tombs there were too, with numerous sculptures on them; and quaint, mossy gravestones; although all kinds of monumental appendages were of a date more recent than the time of the first settlers, who had been content with wooden memorials, if any, the sculptor’s art not having then reached New England. Thus rippled, surged, broke almost against the house, this dreary graveyard, which made the street gloomy, so that people did not like to pass the dark, high wooden fence, with its closed gate, that separated it from the street. And this old house was one that crowded upon it, and took up the ground that would otherwise have been sown as thickly with dead as the rest of the lot; so that it seemed hardly possible but that the dead people should get up out of their graves, and come in there to warm themselves. But in truth, I have never heard a whisper of its being haunted.”

Note 6. Author’s note. — “The spiders are affected by the weather and serve as barometers. — It shall always be a moot point whether the Doctor really believed in cobwebs, or was laughing at the credulous.”

Note 7. Author’s note. — “The townspeople are at war with the Doctor. — Introduce the Doctor early as a smoker, and describe. — The result of Crusty Hannah’s strangely mixed breed should be shown in some strange way. — Give vivid pictures of the society of the day, symbolized in the street scenes.”

CHAP. II

Note 1. Author’s note. — “Read the whole paragraph before copying any of it.”

Note 2. Author’s note. — “Crusty Hannah teaches Elsie curious needlework, etc.”

Note 3. These two children are described as follows in an early note of the author’s: “The boy had all the qualities fitted to excite tenderness in those who had the care of him; in the first and most evident place, on account of his personal beauty, which was very remarkable, — the most intelligent and expressive face that can be conceived, changing in those early years like an April day, and beautiful in all its changes; dark, but of a soft expression, kindling, melting, glowing, laughing; a varied intelligence, which it was as good as a book to read. He was quick in all modes of mental exercise; quick and strong, too, in sensibility; proud, and gifted (probably by the circumstances in which he was placed) with an energy which the softness and impressibility of his nature needed. — As for the little girl, all the squalor of the abode served but to set off her lightsomeness and brightsomeness. She was a pale, large-eyed little thing, and it might have been supposed that the air of the house and the contiguity of the burial-place had a bad effect upon her health. Yet I hardly think this could have been the case, for she was of a very airy nature, dancing and sporting through the house as if melancholy had never been made. She took all kinds of childish liberties with the Doctor, and with his pipe, and with everything appertaining to him except his spiders and his cobwebs.” — All of which goes to show that Hawthorne first conceived his characters in the mood of the “Twice-Told Tales,” and then by meditation solidified them to the inimitable flesh-and-blood of “The House of the Seven Gables” and “The Blithedale Romance.”

CHAP. III

Note 1. An English church spire, evidently the prototype of this, and concerning which the same legend is told, is mentioned in the author’s “English Mote-Books.”

Note 2. Leicester Hospital, in Warwick, described in “Our Old Home,” is the original of this charity.

Note 3. Author’s note. — “The children find a gravestone with something like a footprint on it.”

Note 4. Author’s note. — “Put into the Doctor’s character a continual enmity against somebody, breaking out in curses of which nobody can understand the application.”

CHAP. IV

Note 1. The Doctor’s propensity for cobwebs is amplified in the following note for an earlier and somewhat milder version of the character: “According to him, all science was to be renewed and established on a sure ground by no other means than cobwebs. The cobweb was the magic clue by which mankind was to be rescued from all its errors, and guided safely back to the right. And so he cherished spiders above all things, and kept them spinning, spinning away; the only textile factory that existed at that epoch in New England. He distinguished the production of each of his ugly friends, and assigned peculiar qualities to each; and he had been for years engaged in writing a work on this new discovery, in reference to which he had already compiled a great deal of folio manuscript, and had unguessed at resources still to come. With this suggestive subject he interwove all imaginable learning, collected from his own library, rich in works that few others had read, and from that of his beloved University, crabbed with Greek, rich with Latin, drawing into itself, like a whirlpool, all that men had thought hitherto, and combining them anew in such a way that it had all the charm of a racy originality. Then he had projects for the cultivation of cobwebs, to which end, in the good Doctor’s opinion, it seemed desirable to devote a certain part of the national income; and not content with this, all public-spirited citizens would probably be induced to devote as much of their time and means as they could to the same end. According to him, there was no such beautiful festoon and drapery for the halls of princes as the spinning of this heretofore despised and hated insect; and by due encouragement it might be hoped that they would flourish, and hang and dangle and wave triumphant in the breeze, to an extent as yet generally undreamed of. And he lamented much the destruction that has heretofore been wrought upon this precious fabric by the housemaid’s broom, and insisted upon by foolish women who claimed to be good housewives. Indeed, it was the general opinion that the Doctor’s celibacy was in great measure due to the impossibility of finding a woman who would pledge herself to co-operate with him in this great ambition of his life, — that of reducing the world to a cobweb factory; or who would bind herself to let her own drawing-room be ornamented with this kind of tapestry. But there never was a wife precisely fitted for our friend the Doctor, unless it had been Arachne herself, to whom, if she could again have been restored to her female shape, he would doubtless have lost no time in paying his addresses. It was doubtless the having dwelt too long among the musty and dusty clutter and litter of things gone by, that made the Doctor almost a monomaniac on this subject. There were cobwebs in his own brain, and so he saw nothing valuable but cobwebs in the world around him; and deemed that the march of created things, up to this time, had been calculated by foreknowledge to produce them.”

Note 2. Author’s note. — “Ned must learn something of the characteristics of the Catechism, and simple cottage devotion.”

CHAP. V

Note 1. Author’s note. — “Make the following scene emblematic of the world’s treatment of a dissenter.”

Note 2. Author’s note. — “Yankee characteristics should be shown in the schoolmaster’s manners.”

CHAP. VI

Note 1. Author’s note. — “He had a sort of horror of violence, and of the strangeness that it should be done to him; this affected him more than the blow.”

Note 2. Author’s note. — “Jokes occasionally about the schoolmaster’s thinness and lightness, — how he might suspend himself from the spider’s web and swing, etc.”

Note 3. Author’s note. — “The Doctor and the Schoolmaster should have much talk about England.”