Doctor Grimshawe's Secret Part 22

is the original of this charity.

_Note 3. Author's note_.--"The children find a gravestone with something like a footprint on it."

_Note 4. Author's note_.--"Put into the Doctor's character a continual enmity against somebody, breaking out in curses of which n.o.body can understand the application."

CHAPTER IV.

_Note 1._ The Doctor's propensity for cobwebs is amplified in the following note for an earlier and somewhat milder version of the character: "According to him, all science was to be renewed and established on a sure ground by no other means than cobwebs. The cobweb was the magic clue by which mankind was to be rescued from all its errors, and guided safely back to the right. And so he cherished spiders above all things, and kept them spinning, spinning away; the only textile factory that existed at that epoch in New England. He distinguished the production of each of his ugly friends, and a.s.signed peculiar qualities to each; and he had been for years engaged in writing a work on this new discovery, in reference to which he had already compiled a great deal of folio ma.n.u.script, and had unguessed at resources still to come. With this suggestive subject he interwove all imaginable learning, collected from his own library, rich in works that few others had read, and from that of his beloved University, crabbed with Greek, rich with Latin, drawing into itself, like a whirlpool, all that men had thought hitherto, and combining them anew in such a way that it had all the charm of a racy originality. Then he had projects for the cultivation of cobwebs, to which end, in the good Doctor's opinion, it seemed desirable to devote a certain part of the national income; and not content with this, all public-spirited citizens would probably be induced to devote as much of their time and means as they could to the same end. According to him, there was no such beautiful festoon and drapery for the halls of princes as the spinning of this heretofore despised and hated insect; and by due encouragement it might be hoped that they would flourish, and hang and dangle and wave triumphant in the breeze, to an extent as yet generally undreamed of.

And he lamented much the destruction that has heretofore been wrought upon this precious fabric by the housemaid's broom, and insisted upon by foolish women who claimed to be good housewives. Indeed, it was the general opinion that the Doctor's celibacy was in great measure due to the impossibility of finding a woman who would pledge herself to co-operate with him in this great ambition of his life,--that of reducing the world to a cobweb factory; or who would bind herself to let her own drawing-room be ornamented with this kind of tapestry. But there never was a wife precisely fitted for our friend the Doctor, unless it had been Arachne herself, to whom, if she could again have been restored to her female shape, he would doubtless have lost no time in paying his addresses. It was doubtless the having dwelt too long among the musty and dusty clutter and litter of things gone by, that made the Doctor almost a monomaniac on this subject. There were cobwebs in his own brain, and so he saw nothing valuable but cobwebs in the world around him; and deemed that the march of created things, up to this time, had been calculated by foreknowledge to produce them."

_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Ned must learn something of the characteristics of the Catechism, and simple cottage devotion."

CHAPTER V.

_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Make the following scene emblematic of the world's treatment of a dissenter."

_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Yankee characteristics should be shown in the schoolmaster's manners."

CHAPTER VI.

_Note 1. Author's note_.--"He had a sort of horror of violence, and of the strangeness that it should be done to him; this affected him more than the blow."

_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Jokes occasionally about the schoolmaster's thinness and lightness,--how he might suspend himself from the spider's web and swing, etc."

_Note 3. Author's note_.--"The Doctor and the Schoolmaster should have much talk about England."

_Note 4. Author's note_.--"The children were at play in the churchyard."

_Note 5. Author's note_.--"He mentions that he was probably buried in the churchyard there."

CHAPTER VII.

_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Perhaps put this narratively, not as spoken."

_Note 2. Author's note_.--"He was privately married to the heiress, if she were an heiress. They meant to kill him in the wood, but, by contrivance, he was kidnapped."

_Note 3. Author's note_.--"They were privately married."

_Note 4. Author's note_.--"Old descriptive letters, referring to localities as they existed."

_Note 5. Author's note_.--"There should be symbols and tokens, hinting at the schoolmaster's disappearance, from the first opening of the scene."

CHAPTER VIII.

_Note 1. Author's note_.--"They had got up in remarkably good case that morning."

_Note 2. Author's note_.--"The stranger may be the future master of the Hospital.--Describe the winter day."

_Note 3. Author's note_.--"Describe him as clerical."

_Note 4. Author's note_.--"Represent him as a refined, agreeable, genial young man, of frank, kindly, gentlemanly manners."

_Note 5._ Alternative reading: "A clergyman."

CHAPTER IX.

_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Make the old grave-digger a _laudator temporis acti_,--especially as to burial customs."

_Note 2._ Instead of "written," as in the text, the author probably meant to write "read."

_Note 3._ The MS. has "delight," but "a light" is evidently intended.

_Note 4. Author's note_.--"He aims a blow, perhaps with his pipe, at the boy, which Ned wards off."

CHAPTER X.

_Note 1. Author's note_.--"No longer could play at quarter-staff with Ned."

_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Referring to places and people in England: the b.l.o.o.d.y Footstep sometimes."

_Note 3._ In the original the following occurs, but marked to indicate that it was to be omitted: "And kissed his hand to her, and laughed feebly; and that was the last that she or anybody, the last glimpse they had of Doctor Grimshawe alive."

_Note 4. Author's notes_.--"A great deal must be made out of the spiders, and their gloomy, dusky, flaunting tapestry. A web across the orifice of his inkstand every morning; everywhere, indeed, except across the snout of his brandy-bottle.--Depict the Doctor in an old dressing-gown, and a strange sort of a cap, like a wizard's.--The two children are witnesses of many strange experiments in the study; they see his moods, too.--The Doctor is supposed to be writing a work on the Natural History of Spiders. Perhaps he used them as a blind for his real project, and used to bamboozle the learned with pretending to read them pa.s.sages in which great learning seemed to be elaborately worked up, crabbed with Greek and Latin, as if the topic drew into itself, like a whirlpool, all that men thought and knew; plans to cultivate cobwebs on a large scale. Sometimes, after overwhelming them with astonishment in this way, he would burst into one of his laughs. Schemes to make the world a cobweb-factory, etc., etc. Cobwebs in his own brain. Crusty Hannah such a mixture of persons and races as could be found only at a seaport. There was a rumor that the Doctor had murdered a former maid, for having, with housewifely instinct, swept away the cobwebs; some said that he had her skeleton in a closet. Some said that he had strangled a wife with web of the great spider."--"Read the description of Bolton Hall, the garden, lawn, etc., Aug. 8, '53.--Bebbington church and churchyard, Aug. 29, '53.--The Doctor is able to love,--able to hate; two great and rare abilities nowadays.--Introduce two pine trees, ivy-grown, as at Lowwood Hotel, July 16, '58.--The family name might be Redclyffe.--Thatched cottage, June 22, '55.--Early introduce the mention of the cognizance of the family,--the Leopard's Head, for instance, in the first part of the romance; the Doctor may have possessed it engraved as coat of arms in a book.--The Doctor shall show Ned, perhaps, a drawing or engraving of the Hospital, with figures of the pensioners in the quadrangle, fitly dressed; and this picture and the figures shall impress themselves strongly on his memory."

The above dates and places refer to pa.s.sages in the published "English Note-Books."

CHAPTER XI.

_Note 1. Author's note_.--"Compare it with Spenser's Cave of Despair.

Put instruments of suicide there."

_Note 2. Author's note_.--"Once, in looking at the mansion, Redclyffe is struck by the appearance of a marble inserted into the wall, and kept clear of lichens."