LITMIR.BIZ

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      “It was always in us,” continued Colcord, with a certain pride which people generally feel in their ancestral characteristics, be they good or evil. “We had a tradition among us of our first emigrant, and the causes that brought him to the New World; and it was said that he had suffered so much, before quitting his native shores, so painful had been his track, that always afterwards on the forest leaves of this land his foot left a print of blood wherever he trod.” [Endnote: 5.]

      CHAPTER VII

      “A print of blood!” said the grim Doctor, breaking his pipe-stem by some sudden spasm in his gripe of it. “Pooh! the devil take the pipe! A very strange story that! Pray how was it?” [Endnote: 1.]

      “Nay, it is but a very dim legend,” answered the schoolmaster: “although there are old yellow papers and parchments, I remember, in my father’s possession, that had some reference to this man, too, though there was nothing in them about the bloody footprints. But our family legend is, that this man was of a good race, in the time of Charles the First, originally Papists, but one of them — the second you, our legend says — was of a milder, sweeter cast than the rest, who were fierce and bloody men, of a hard, strong nature; but he partook most of his mother’s character. This son had been one of the earliest Quakers, converted by George Fox; and moreover there had been love between him and a young lady of great beauty and an heiress, whom likewise the eldest son of the house had designed to make his wife. And these brothers, cruel men, caught their innocent brother and kept him in confinement long in his own native home — ”

      “How?” asked the Doctor. “Why did not he appeal to the laws?”

      “Our legend says,” replied the schoolmaster, “only that he was kept in a chamber that was forgotten.” [Endnote: 2.]

      “Very strange that!” quoth the Doctor. “He was sold by his brethren.”

      The schoolmaster went on to tell, with much shuddering, how a Jesuit priest had been mixed up with this wretched business, and there had been a scheme at once religious and political to wrest the estate and the lovely lady from the fortunate heir; and how this grim Italian priest had instigated them to use a certain kind of torture with the poor heir, and how he had suffered from this; but one night, when they left him senseless, he contrived to make his escape from that cruel home, bleeding as he went; and how, by some action of his imagination, — his sense of the cruelty and hideousness of such treatment at his brethren’s hands, and in the holy name of his religion, — his foot, which had been crushed by their cruelty, bled as he went, and that blood had never been stanched. And thus he had come to America, and after many wanderings, and much track of blood along rough ways, to New England. [Endnote: 3.]

      “And what became of his beloved?” asked the grim Doctor, who was puffing away at a fresh pipe with a very queer aspect.

      “She died in England,” replied the schoolmaster. “And before her death, by some means or other, they say that she found means to send him a child, the offspring of their marriage, and from that child our race descended. And they say, too, that she sent him a key to a coffin, in which was locked up a great treasure. But we have not the key. But he never went back to his own country; and being heart-broken, and sick and weary of the world and its pomps and vanities, he died here, after suffering much persecution likewise from the Puritans. For his peaceful religion was accepted nowhere.”

      “Of all legends, — all foolish legends,” quoth the Doctor, wrathfully, with a face of a dark blood-red color, so much was his anger and contempt excited, “and of all absurd heroes of a legend, I never heard the like of this! Have you the key?”

      “No; nor have I ever heard of it,” answered the schoolmaster.

      “But you have some papers?”

      “They existed once: perhaps are still recoverable by search,” said the schoolmaster. “My father knew of them.”

      “A foolish legend,” reiterated the Doctor. “It is strange how human folly strings itself on to human folly, as a story originally false and foolish grows older.”

      He got up and walked about the room, with hasty and irregular strides and a prodigious swinging of his ragged dressing-gown, which swept away as many cobwebs as it would take a week to reproduce. After a few turns, as if to change the subject, the Doctor asked the schoolmaster if he had any taste for pictures, and drew his attention to the portrait which has been already mentioned, — the figure in antique sordid garb, with a halter round his neck, and the expression in his face which the Doctor and the two children had interpreted so differently. Colcord, who probably knew nothing about pictures, looked at it at first merely from the gentle and cool complaisance of his character; but becoming absorbed in the contemplation, stood long without speaking; until the Doctor, looking in his face, perceived his eyes were streaming with tears.

      “What are you crying about?” said he, gruffly.

      “I don’t know,” said the schoolmaster quietly. “But there is something in this picture that affects me inexpressibly; so that, not being a man passionate by nature, I have hardly ever been so moved as now!”

      “Very foolish,” muttered the Doctor, resuming his strides about the room. “I am ashamed of a grown man that can cry at a picture, and can’t tell the reason why.”

      After a few more turns he resumed his easy-chair and his tumbler, and, looking upward, beckoned to his pet spider, which came dangling downward, great parti-colored monster that he was, and swung about his master’s head in hideous conference as it seemed; a sight that so distressed the schoolmaster, or shocked his delicate taste, that he went out, and called the two children to take a walk with him, with the purpose of breathing air that was neither infected with spiders nor graves.

      After his departure, Doctor Grimshawe seemed even more disturbed than during his presence: again he strode about the study; then sat down with his hands on his knees, looking straight into the fire, as if it imaged the seething element of his inner man, where burned hot projects, smoke, heat, blackness, ashes, a smouldering of old thoughts, a blazing up of new; casting in the gold of his mind, as Aaron did that of the Israelites, and waiting to see what sort of a thing would come out of the furnace. The children coming in from their play, he spoke harshly to them, and eyed little Ned with a sort of savageness, as if he meant to eat him up, or do some other dreadful deed: and when little Elsie came with her usual frankness to his knee, he repelled her in such a way that she shook her little hand at him, saying, “Naughty Doctor Grim, what has come to you?”

      Through all that day, by some subtle means or other, the whole household knew that something was amiss; and nobody in it was comfortable. It was like a spell of weather; like the east wind; like an epidemic in the air, that would not let anything be comfortable or contented, — this pervading temper of the Doctor. Crusty Hannah knew it in the kitchen: even those who passed the house must have known it somehow or other, and have felt a chill, an irritation, an influence on the nerves, as they passed. The spiders knew it, and acted as they were wont to do in stormy weather. The schoolmaster, when he returned from his walk, seemed likewise to know it, and made himself secure and secret, keeping in his own room, except at dinner, when he ate his rice in silence, without looking towards the Doctor, and appeared before him no more till evening, when the grim Doctor summoned him into the study, after sending the two children to bed.

      “Sir,” began the Doctor, “you have spoken of some old documents in your possession relating to the English descent of your ancestors. I have a curiosity to see these documents. Where are they?” [Endnote: 4.]

      “I have them about my person,” said the schoolmaster; and he produced from his pocket a bundle of old yellow papers done up in a parchment cover, tied with a piece of white cord, and presented them to Doctor Grimshawe, who looked over them with interest. They seemed to consist of letters, genealogical lists, certified copies of entries in registers, things which must have been made out by somebody who knew more of business than this ethereal person in whose possession they now were. The Doctor looked at them with considerable

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