Doctor Grimshawe's Secret — a Romance

But then the sweet, calm sense of safety that was here: the certainty that with the wild element that centuries ago had passed out of this scene had gone all the perils of wild men and savage beasts, dwarfs, witches, leaving nature, not effete, but only disarmed of those rougher, deadlier characteristics, that cruel rawness, which make primeval Nature the deadly enemy even of her own children. Here was consolation, doubtless; so we sit down on the stone step of the last stile that he had crossed, and listen to the footsteps of the traveller, and the distant rustle among the shrubbery, as he goes deeper and deeper into the seclusion, having by this time lost the deceitful track. No matter if he go astray; even were it after nightfall instead of noontime, a will-o’-the-wisp, or Puck himself, would not lead him into worse harm than to delude him into some mossy pool, the depths of which the truant schoolboys had known for ages. Nevertheless, some little time after his disappearance, there was the report of a shot that echoed sharp and loud, startling the pheasants from their boughs, and sending the hares and deer a-scampering in good earnest.

We next find our friend, from whom we parted on the footpath, in a situation of which he then was but very imperfectly aware; for, indeed, he had been in a state of unconsciousness, lasting until it was now late towards the sunset of that same day. He was endeavoring to make out where he was, and how he came thither, or what had happened; or whether, indeed, anything had happened, unless to have fallen asleep, and to be still enveloped in the fragments of some vivid and almost tangible dream, the more confused because so vivid. His wits did not come so readily about him as usual; there may have been a slight delusion, which mingled itself with his sober perceptions, and by its leaven of extravagance made the whole substance of the scene untrue. Thus it happened that, as it were at the same instant, he fancied himself years back in life, thousands of miles away, in a gloomy cobwebbed room, looking out upon a graveyard, while yet, neither more nor less distinctly, he was conscious of being in a small chamber, panelled with oak, and furnished in an antique style. He was doubtful, too, whether or no there was a grim feudal figure, in a shabby dressing-gown and an old velvet cap, sitting in the dusk of the room, smoking a pipe that diffused a scent of tobacco, — quaffing a deep-hued liquor out of a tumbler, — looking upwards at a spider that hung above. “Was there, too, a child sitting in a little chair at his footstool?” In his earnestness to see this apparition more distinctly, he opened his eyes wider and stirred, and ceased to see it at all.

But though that other dusty, squalid, cobwebbed scene quite vanished, and along with it the two figures, old and young, grim and childish, of whose portraits it had been the framework, still there were features in the old, oaken-panelled chamber that seemed to belong rather to his dream. The panels were ornamented, here and there, with antique carving, representing over and over again an identical device, being a bare arm, holding the torn-off head of some savage beast, which the stranger could not know by species, any more than Agassiz himself could have assigned its type or kindred; because it was that kind of natural history of which heraldry alone keeps the menagerie. But it was just as familiar to his recollection as that of the cat which he had fondled in his childhood.

There was likewise a mantelpiece, heavily wrought of oak, quite black with smoke and age, in the centre of which, more prominent than elsewhere, was that same leopard’s head that seemed to thrust itself everywhere into sight, as if typifying some great mystery which human nature would never be at rest till it had solved; and below, in a cavernous hollow, there was a smouldering fire of coals; for the genial day had suddenly grown chill, and a shower of rain spattered against the small window-panes, almost at the same time with the struggling sunshine. And over the mantelpiece, where the light of the declining day came strongest from the window, there was a larger and more highly relieved carving of this same device, and underneath it a legend, in Old English letters, which, though his eyes could not precisely trace it at that distance, he knew to be this: —

“Hold hard the Head.”

Otherwise the aspect of the room bewildered him by not being known, since these details were so familiar; a narrow precinct it was, with one window full of old-fashioned, diamond-shaped panes of glass, a small desk table, standing on clawed feet; two or three high-backed chairs, on the top of each of which was carved that same crest of the fabulous brute’s head, which the carver’s fancy seemed to have clutched so strongly that he could not let it go; in another part of the room a very old engraving, rude and strong, representing some ruffled personage, which the stranger only tried to make out with a sort of idle curiosity, because it was strange he should dream so distinctly.

Very soon it became intolerably irritating that these two dreams, both purposeless, should have mingled and entangled themselves in his mind. He made a nervous and petulant motion, intending to rouse himself fully; and immediately a sharp pang of physical pain took him by surprise, and made him groan aloud.

Immediately there was an almost noiseless step on the floor; and a figure emerged from a deep niche, that looked as if it might once have been an oratory, in ancient times; and the figure, too, might have been supposed to possess the devout and sanctified character of such as knelt in the oratories of ancient times. It was an elderly man, tall, thin, and pale, and wearing a long, dark tunic, and in a peculiar fashion, which — like almost everything else about him — the stranger seemed to have a confused remembrance of; this venerable person had a benign and pitiful aspect, and approached the bedside with such good will and evident desire to do the sufferer good, that the latter felt soothed, at least, by his very presence. He lay, a moment, gazing up at the old man’s face, without being able to exert himself to say a word, but sensible, as it were, of a mild, soft influence from him, cooling the fever which seemed to burn in his veins.

“Do you suffer much pain?” asked the old man, gently.

“None at all,” said the stranger; but again a slight motion caused him to feel a burning twinge in his shoulder. “Yes; there was a throb of strange anguish. Why should I feel pain? Where am I?”

“In safety, and with those who desire to be your friends,” said the old man. “You have met with an accident; but do not inquire about it now. Quiet is what you need.”

Still the traveller gazed at him; and the old man’s figure seemed to enter into his dream, or delirium, whichever it might be, as if his peaceful presence were but a shadow, so quaint was his address, so unlike real life, in that dark robe, with a velvet skullcap on his head, beneath which his hair made a silvery border; and looking more closely, the stranger saw embroidered on the breast of the tunic that same device, the arm and the leopard’s head, which was visible in the carving of the room. Yes; this must still be a dream, which, under the unknown laws which govern such psychical states, had brought out thus vividly figures, devices, words, forgotten since his boyish days. Though of an imaginative tendency, the stranger was nevertheless strongly tenacious of the actual, and had a natural horror at the idea of being seriously at odds, in beliefs, perceptions, conclusions, with the real world about him; so that a tremor ran through him, as if he felt the substance of the world shimmering before his eyes like a mere vaporous consistency.

“Are you real?” said he to the antique presence; “or a spirit? or a fantasy?”

The old man laid his thin, cool palm on the stranger’s burning forehead, and smiled benignantly, keeping it there an instant.

“If flesh and blood are real, I am so,” said he; “a spirit, too, I may claim to be, made thin by fantasy. Again, do not perplex yourself with such things. To-morrow you may find denser substance in me. Drink this composing draught, and close your eyes to those things that disturb you.”

“Your features, too, and your voice,” said the stranger, in a resigned tone, as if he were giving up a riddle, the solution of which he could not find, “have an image and echo somewhere in my memory. It is all an entanglement. I will drink, and shut my eyes.”

He drank from a little old-fashioned silver cup, which his venerable guardian presented to his lips; but in so doing he was still perplexed and tremulously disturbed with seeing that same weary old device, the leopard’s head, engraved on the side; and shut his eyes to escape it, for it irritated a certain portion of his brain with vague, fanciful, elusive ideas. So he sighed and spoke no more. The medicine, whatever it might be, had the merit, rare in doctor’s stuff, of being pleasant to take, assuasive of thirst, and imbued with a hardly perceptible fragrance, that was so ethereal that it also seemed to enter into his dream and modify it. He kept his eyes closed, and fell into a misty state, in which he wondered whether this could be the panacea or medicament which old Doctor Grimshawe used to distil from cobwebs, and of which the fragrance seemed to breathe through all the waste of years since then. He wondered, too, who was this benign, saint-like old man, and where, in what former state of being, he could have known him; to have him thus, as no strange thing, and yet so strange, be attending at his bedside, with all this ancient garniture. But it was best to dismiss all things, he being so weak; to resign himself; all this had happened before, and had passed away, prosperously or unprosperously; it would pass away in this case, likewise; and in the morning whatever might be delusive would have disappeared.

CHAPTER XIII

The patient [Endnote: 1] had a favorable night, and awoke with a much clearer head, though still considerably feverish and in a state of great exhaustion from loss of blood, which kept down the fever. The events of the preceding day shimmered as it were and shifted illusively in his recollection; nor could he yet account for the situation in which he found himself, the antique chamber, the old man of mediæval garb, nor even for the wound which seemed to have been the occasion of bringing him thither. One moment, so far as he remembered, he had been straying along a solitary footpath, through rich shrubbery, with the antlered deer peeping at him, listening to the lark and the cuckoo; the next, he lay helpless in this oak-panelled chamber, surrounded with objects that appealed to some fantastic shadow of recollection, which could have had no reality. [Endnote: 2.]

To say the truth, the traveller perhaps wilfully kept hold of this strange illusiveness, and kept his thoughts from too harshly analyzing his situation, and solving the riddle in which he found himself involved. In his present weakness, his mind sympathizing with the sinking down of his physical powers, it was delightful to let all go; to relinquish all control, and let himself drift vaguely into whatever region of improbabilities there exists apart from the dull, common plane of life. Weak, stricken down, given over to influences which had taken possession of him during an interval of insensibility, he was no longer responsible; let these delusions, if they were such, linger as long as they would, and depart of their own accord at last. He, meanwhile, would willingly accept the idea that some spell had transported him out of an epoch in which he had led a brief, troubled existence of battle, mental strife, success, failure, all equally feverish and unsatisfactory, into some past century, where the business was to rest, — to drag on dreamy days, looking at things through half-shut eyes; into a limbo where things were put away, shows of what had once been, now somehow fainted, and still maintaining a sort of half-existence, a serious mockery; a state likely enough to exist just a little apart from the actual world, if we only know how to find our way into it. Scenes and events that had once stained themselves, in deep colors, on the curtain that Time hangs around us, to shut us in from eternity, cannot be quite effaced by the succeeding phantasmagoria, and sometimes, by a palimpsest, show more strongly than they. [Endnote: 3.]

In the course of the morning, however, he was a little too feelingly made sensible of realities by the visit of a surgeon, who proceeded to examine the wound in his shoulder, removing the bandages which he himself seemed to have put upon this mysterious hurt. The traveller closed his eyes, and submitted to the manipulations of the professional person, painful as they were, assisted by the gentle touch of the old palmer; and there was something in the way in which he resigned himself that met the approbation of the surgeon, in spite of a little fever, and slight delirium too, to judge by his eye.

“A very quiet and well-behaved patient,” said he to the palmer. “Unless I greatly mistake, he has been under the surgeon’s hand for a similar hurt ere now. He has learned under good discipline how to take such a thing easily. Yes, yes; just here is a mark where a bullet went in some time ago, — three or four years since, when he could have been little more than a boy. A wild fellow this, I doubt.”

“It was an Indian bullet,” said the patient, still fancying himself gone astray into the past, “shot at me in battle; ‘twas three hundred years hereafter.”

“Ah! he has served in the East Indies,” said the surgeon. “I thought this sun-burned cheek had taken its hue elsewhere than in England.”

The patient did not care to take the trouble which would have been involved in correcting the surgeon’s surmise; so he let it pass, and patiently awaited the end of the examination, with only a moan or two, which seemed rather pleasing and desirable than otherwise to the surgeon’s ear.

“He has vitality enough for his needs,” said he, nodding to the palmer. “These groans betoken a good degree of pain; though the young fellow is evidently a self-contained sort of nature, and does not let us know all he feels. It promises well, however; keep him in bed and quiet, and within a day or two we shall see.”

He wrote a recipe, or two or three, perhaps, (for in those days the medical fraternity had faith in their own art,) and took his leave.

The white-bearded palmer withdrew into the half concealment of the oratory which we have already mentioned, and then, putting on a pair of spectacles, betook himself to the perusal of an old folio volume, the leaves of which he turned over so gently that not the slightest sound could possibly disturb the patient. All his manifestations were gentle and soft, but of a simplicity most unlike the feline softness which we are apt to associate with a noiseless tread and movement in the male sex. The sunshine came through the ivy and glimmered upon his great book, however, with an effect which a little disturbed the patient’s nerves; besides, he desired to have a fuller view of his benign guardian.

“Will you sit nearer the bedside?” said he. “I wish to look at you.”

Weakness, the relaxation of nerves, and the state of dependence on another’s care — very long unfelt — had made him betray what we must call childishness; and it was perceptible in the low half-complaining tone in which he spoke, indicating a consciousness of kindness in the other, a little plaintiveness in himself; of which, the next instant, weak and wandering as he was, he was ashamed, and essayed to express it. [Endnote: 4.]

“You must deem me very poor-spirited,” said he, “not to bear this trifling hurt with a firmer mind. But perhaps it is not entirely that I am so weak, but I feel you to be so benign.”

“Be weak, and be the stronger for it,” said the old man, with a grave smile. “It is not in the pride of our strength that we are best or wisest. To be made anew, we even must be again a little child, and consent to be enwrapt quietly in the arms of Providence, as a child in its mother’s arms.”

“I never knew a mother’s care,” replied the traveller, in a low, regretful tone, being weak to the incoming of all soft feelings, in his present state. “Since my boyhood, I have lived among men, — a life of struggle and hard rivalry. It is good to find myself here in the long past, and in a sheltered harbor.”

And here he smiled, by way of showing to this old palmer that he saw through the slight infirmity of mind that impelled him to say such things as the above; that he was not its dupe, though he had not strength, just now, to resist its impulse. After this he dozed off softly, and felt through all his sleep some twinges of his wound, bringing him back, as it were, to the conscious surface of the great deep of slumber, into which he might otherwise have sunk. At all such brief intervals, half unclosing his eyes, (like a child, when the mother sits by its bed and he fears that she will steal away if he falls quite asleep, and leave him in the dark solitude,) he still beheld the white-bearded, kindly old man, of saintly aspect, sitting near him, and turning over the pages of his folio volume so softly that not the faintest rustle did it make; the picture at length got so fully into his idea, that he seemed to see it even through his closed eyelids. After a while, however, the slumberous tendency left him more entirely, and, without having been consciously awake, he found himself contemplating the old man, with wide-open eyes. The venerable personage seemed soon to feel his gaze, and, ceasing to look at the folio, he turned his eyes with quiet inquiry to meet those of the stranger. [Endnote: 5.]

“What great volume is that?” asked the latter. [Endnote: 6.]

“It is a book of English chronicles,” said the old man, “mostly relating to the part of the island where you now are, and to times previous to the Stuarts.”

“Ah! it is to you, a contemporary, what reading the newspaper is to other men,” said the stranger; then, with a smile of self-reproach, “I shall conquer this idle mood. I’m not so imbecile as you must think me. But there is something that strangely haunts me, — where, in what state of being, can I have seen your face before. There is nothing in it I distinctly remember; but some impression, some characteristic, some look, with which I have been long ago familiar haunts me and brings back all old scenes. Do you know me?”

The old man smiled. “I knew, long ago, a bright and impressible boy,” said he.

“And his name?” said the stranger.

“It was Edward Redclyffe,” said the old man.

“Ah, I see who you are,” said the traveller, not too earnestly, but with a soft, gratified feeling, as the riddle thus far solved itself. “You are my old kindly instructor. You are Colcord! That is it. I remember you disappeared. You shall tell me, when I am quite myself, what was that mystery, — and whether it is your real self, or only a part of my dream, and going to vanish when I quite awake. Now I shall sleep and dream more of it.”

One more waking interval he had that day, and again essayed to enter into conversation with the old man, who had thus strangely again become connected with his life, after having so long vanished from his path.

“Where am I?” asked Edward Redclyffe.

“In the home of misfortune,” said Colcord.

“Ah! then I have a right to be here!” said he. “I was born in such a home. Do you remember it?”

“I know your story,” said Colcord.

“Yes; from Doctor Grim,” said Edward. “People whispered he had made away with you. I never believed it; but finding you here in this strange way, and myself having been shot, perhaps to death, it seems not so strange. Pooh! I wander again, and ought to sleep a little more. And this is the home of misfortune, but not like the squalid place of rage, idiocy, imbecility, drunkenness, where I was born. How many times I have blushed to remember that native home! But not of late! I have struggled; I have fought; I have triumphed. The unknown boy has come to be no undistinguished man! His ancestry, should he ever reveal himself to them, need not blush for the poor foundling.”

“Hush!” said the quiet watcher. “Your fever burns you. Take this draught, and sleep a little longer.” [Endnote: 7.]

Another day or two found Edward Redclyffe almost a convalescent. The singular lack of impatience that characterized his present mood — the repose of spirit into which he had lapsed — had much to do with the favorable progress of his cure. After strife, anxiety, great mental exertion, and excitement of various kinds, which had harassed him ever since he grew to be a man, had come this opportunity of perfect rest; — this dream in the midst of which he lay, while its magic boundaries involved him, and kept far off the contact of actual life, so that its sounds and tumults seemed remote; its cares could not fret him; its ambitions, objects good or evil, were shut out from him; the electric wires that had connected him with the battery of life were broken for the time, and he did not feel the unquiet influence that kept everybody else in galvanic motion. So, under the benign influence of the old palmer, he lay in slumberous luxury, undisturbed save by some twinges of no intolerable pain; which, however, he almost was glad of, because it made him sensible that this deep luxury of quiet was essential to his cure, however idle it might seem. For the first time since he was a child, he resigned himself not to put a finger to the evolution of his fortune; he determined to accept all things that might happen, good or evil; he would not imagine an event beyond to-day, but would let one spontaneous and half-defined thought loiter after another, through his mind; listen to the spattering shower, — the puffs of shut-out wind; and look with half-shut eyes at the sunshine glimmering through the ivy-twigs, and illuminating those old devices on the wall; at the gathering twilight; at the dim lamp; at the creeping upward of another day, and with it the lark singing so far away that the thrill of its delicious song could not disturb him with an impulse to awake. Sweet as its carol was, he could almost have been content to miss the lark; sweet and clear, it was too like a fairy trumpet-call, summoning him to awake and struggle again with eager combatants for new victories, the best of which were not worth this deep repose.

The old palmer did his best to prolong a mood so beneficial to the wounded young man. The surgeon also nodded approval, and attributed this happy state of the patient’s mind, and all the physical advantages growing out of it, to his own consummate skill; nor, indeed, was he undeserving of credit, not often to be awarded to medical men, for having done nothing to impede the good which kind Nature was willing to bring about. She was doing the patient more good, indeed, than either the surgeon or the palmer could fully estimate, in taking this opportunity to recreate a mind that had too early known stirring impulse, and that had been worked to a degree beyond what its organization (in some respects singularly delicate) ought to have borne. Once in a long while the weary actors in the headlong drama of life must have such repose or else go mad or die. When the machinery of human life has once been stopped by sickness or other impediment, it often needs an impulse to set it going again, even after it is nearly wound up.