The Dolliver Romance
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Nathaniel Hawthorne >> The Dolliver Romance
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 pharmacopoia 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 (_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.