_ [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 (_pensee_), 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 pharmacopoia 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. _