Title: The Dolliver Romance
Author: Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Language: English
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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 pharmacopoeia 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?





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Dolliver Romance" ***

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