Here ensued a laughing sort of colloquy between the Warden and Braithwaite, in which the former jocosely excused himself for having yielded to the whim of the pensioner, and returned with him on an errand which he well knew to be futile.
"I have long been aware," he said apart, in a confidential way, "of something a little awry in our old friend"s mental system. You will excuse him, and me for humoring him."
"Of course, of course," said Braithwaite, in the same tone. "I shall not be moved by anything the old fellow can say."
The old pensioner, meanwhile, had been as it were heating up, and gathering himself into a mood of energy which those who saw him had never before witnessed in his usually quiet person. He seemed somehow to grow taller and larger, more impressive. At length, fixing his eyes on Lord Braithwaite, he spoke again.
"Dark, murderous man," exclaimed he. "Your course has not been unwatched; the secrets of this mansion are not unknown. For two centuries back, they have been better known to them who dwell afar off than to those resident within the mansion. The foot that made the b.l.o.o.d.y Footstep has returned from its long wanderings, and it pa.s.ses on, straight as destiny,--sure as an avenging Providence,--to the punishment and destruction of those who incur retribution."
"Here is an odd kind of tragedy," said Lord Braithwaite, with a scornful smile. "Come, my old friend, lay aside this vein and talk sense."
"Not thus do you escape your penalty, hardened and crafty one!"
exclaimed the pensioner. "I demand of you, before this worthy Warden, access to the secret ways of this mansion, of which thou dost unjustly retain possession. I shall disclose what for centuries has remained hidden,--the ghastly secrets that this house hides."
"Humor him," whispered the Warden, "and hereafter I will take care that the exuberance of our old friend shall be duly restrained. He shall not trouble you again."
Lord Braithwaite, to say the truth, appeared a little flabbergasted and disturbed by these latter expressions of the old gentleman. He hesitated, turned pale; but at last, recovering his momentary confusion and irresolution, he replied, with apparent carelessness:--
"Go wherever you will, old gentleman. The house is open to you for this time. If ever you have another opportunity to disturb it, the fault will be mine."
"Follow, sir," said the pensioner, turning to the Warden; "follow, maiden![Endnote: 3] Now shall a great mystery begin to be revealed."
So saying, he led the way before them, pa.s.sing out of the hall, not by the doorway, but through one of the oaken panels of the wall, which admitted the party into a pa.s.sage which seemed to pa.s.s through the thickness of the wall, and was lighted by interstices through which shone gleams of light. This led them into what looked like a little vestibule, or circular room, which the Warden, though deeming himself many years familiar with the old house, had never seen before, any more than the pa.s.sage which led to it. To his surprise, this room was not vacant, for in it sat, in a large old chair, Omskirk, like a toad in its hole, like some wild, fearful creature in its den, and it was now partly understood how this man had the possibility of suddenly disappearing, so inscrutably, and so in a moment; and, when all quest for him was given up, of as suddenly appearing again.
"Ha!" said old Omskirk, slowly rising, as at the approach of some event that he had long expected. "Is he coming at last?"
"Poor victim of another"s iniquity," said the pensioner. "Thy release approaches. Rejoice!"
The old man arose with a sort of trepidation and solemn joy intermixed in his manner, and bowed reverently, as if there were in what he heard more than other ears could understand in it.
"Yes; I have waited long," replied he. "Welcome; if my release is come."
"Well," said Lord Braithwaite, scornfully. "This secret retreat of my house is known to many. It was the priest"s secret chamber when it was dangerous to be of the old and true religion, here in England. There is no longer any use in concealing this place; and the Warden, or any man, might have seen it, or any of the curiosities of the old hereditary house, if desirous so to do."
"Aha! son of Belial!" quoth the pensioner. "And this, too!"
He took three pieces from a certain point of the wall, which he seemed to know, and stooped to press upon the floor. The Warden looked at Lord Braithwaite, and saw that he had grown deadly pale. What his change of cheer might bode, he could not guess; but, at the pressure of the old pensioner"s finger, the floor, or a segment of it, rose like the lid of a box, and discovered a small darksome pair of stairs, within which burned a lamp, lighting it downward, like the steps that descend into a sepulchre.
"Follow," said he, to those who looked on, wondering.
And he began to descend. Lord Braithwaite saw him disappear, then frantically followed, the Warden next, and old Omskirk took his place in the rear, like a man following his inevitable destiny. At the bottom of a winding descent, that seemed deep and remote, and far within, they came to a door, which the pensioner pressed with a spring; and, pa.s.sing through the s.p.a.ce that disclosed itself, the whole party followed, and found themselves in a small, gloomy room. On one side of it was a couch, on which sat Redclyffe; face to face with him was a white-haired figure in a chair.
"You are come!" said Redclyffe, solemnly. "But too late!"
"And yonder is the coffer," said the pensioner. "Open but that; and our quest is ended."
"That, if I mistake not, I can do," said Redclyffe.
He drew forth--what he had kept all this time, as something that might yet reveal to him the mystery of his birth--the silver key that had been found by the grave in far New England; and applying it to the lock, he slowly turned it on the hinges, that had not been turned for two hundred years. All--even Lord Braithwaite, guilty and shame-stricken as he felt--pressed forward to look upon what was about to be disclosed. What were the wondrous contents? The entire, mysterious coffer was full of golden ringlets, abundant, cl.u.s.tering through the whole coffer, and living with elasticity, so as immediately, as it were, to flow over the sides of the coffer, and rise in large abundance from the long compression. Into this--by a miracle of natural production which was known likewise in other cases--into this had been resolved the whole bodily substance of that fair and unfortunate being, known so long in the legends of the family as the Beauty of the Golden Locks. As the pensioner looked at this strange sight,--the l.u.s.tre of the precious and miraculous hair gleaming and glistening, and seeming to add light to the gloomy room,--he took from his breast pocket another lock of hair, in a locket, and compared it, before their faces, with that which brimmed over from the coffer.
"It is the same!" said he.
"And who are you that know it?" asked Redclyffe, surprised.
"He whose ancestors taught him the secret,--who has had it handed down to him these two centuries, and now only with regret yields to the necessity of making it known."
"You are the heir!" said Redclyffe.
In that gloomy room, beside the dead old man, they looked at him, and saw a dignity beaming on him, covering his whole figure, that broke out like a l.u.s.tre at the close of day.
APPENDIX
CHAPTER I.
_Note 1._ The MS. gives the following alternative openings: "Early in the present century"; "Soon after the Revolution"; "Many years ago."
_Note 2._ Throughout the first four pages of the MS. the Doctor is called "Ormskirk," and in an earlier draft of this portion of the romance, "Etheredge."
_Note 3. Author"s note_.--"Crusty Hannah is a mixture of Indian and negro."
_Note 4. Author"s note_.--"It is understood from the first that the children are not brother and sister.--Describe the children with really childish traits, quarrelling, being naughty, etc.--The Doctor should occasionally beat Ned in course of instruction."
_Note 5._ In order to show the manner in which Hawthorne would modify a pa.s.sage, which was nevertheless to be left substantially the same, I subjoin here a description of this graveyard as it appears in the earlier draft: "The graveyard (we are sorry to have to treat of such a disagreeable piece of ground, but everybody"s business centres there at one time or another) was the most ancient in the town. The dust of the original Englishmen had become incorporated with the soil; of those Englishmen whose immediate predecessors had been resolved into the earth about the country churches,--the little Norman, square, battlemented stone towers of the villages in the old land; so that in this point of view, as holding bones and dust of the first ancestors, this graveyard was more English than anything else in town. There had been hidden from sight many a broad, bluff visage of husbandmen that had ploughed the real English soil; there the faces of noted men, now known in history; there many a personage whom tradition told about, making wondrous qualities of strength and courage for him;--all these, mingled with succeeding generations, turned up and battened down again with the s.e.xton"s spade; until every blade of gra.s.s was human more than vegetable,--for an hundred and fifty years will do this, and so much time, at least, had elapsed since the first little mound was piled up in the virgin soil. Old tombs there were too, with numerous sculptures on them; and quaint, mossy gravestones; although all kinds of monumental appendages were of a date more recent than the time of the first settlers, who had been content with wooden memorials, if any, the sculptor"s art not having then reached New England. Thus rippled, surged, broke almost against the house, this dreary graveyard, which made the street gloomy, so that people did not like to pa.s.s the dark, high wooden fence, with its closed gate, that separated it from the street. And this old house was one that crowded upon it, and took up the ground that would otherwise have been sown as thickly with dead as the rest of the lot; so that it seemed hardly possible but that the dead people should get up out of their graves, and come in there to warm themselves. But in truth, I have never heard a whisper of its being haunted."
_Note 6. Author"s note_.--"The spiders are affected by the weather and serve as barometers.--It shall always be a moot point whether the Doctor really believed in cobwebs, or was laughing at the credulous."
_Note 7. Author"s note_.--"The townspeople are at war with the Doctor.--Introduce the Doctor early as a smoker, and describe.--The result of Crusty Hannah"s strangely mixed breed should be shown in some strange way.--Give vivid pictures of the society of the day, symbolized in the street scenes."
CHAPTER II.
_Note 1. Author"s note_.--"Read the whole paragraph before copying any of it."
_Note 2. Author"s note_.--"Crusty Hannah teaches Elsie curious needlework, etc."
_Note 3._ These two children are described as follows in an early note of the author"s: "The boy had all the qualities fitted to excite tenderness in those who had the care of him; in the first and most evident place, on account of his personal beauty, which was very remarkable,--the most intelligent and expressive face that can be conceived, changing in those early years like an April day, and beautiful in all its changes; dark, but of a soft expression, kindling, melting, glowing, laughing; a varied intelligence, which it was as good as a book to read. He was quick in all modes of mental exercise; quick and strong, too, in sensibility; proud, and gifted (probably by the circ.u.mstances in which he was placed) with an energy which the softness and impressibility of his nature needed.--As for the little girl, all the squalor of the abode served but to set off her lightsomeness and brightsomeness. She was a pale, large-eyed little thing, and it might have been supposed that the air of the house and the contiguity of the burial-place had a bad effect upon her health. Yet I hardly think this could have been the case, for she was of a very airy nature, dancing and sporting through the house as if melancholy had never been made. She took all kinds of childish liberties with the Doctor, and with his pipe, and with everything appertaining to him except his spiders and his cobwebs."--All of which goes to show that Hawthorne first conceived his characters in the mood of the "Twice-Told Tales," and then by meditation solidified them to the inimitable flesh-and-blood of "The House of the Seven Gables" and "The Blithedale Romance."
CHAPTER III.
_Note 1._ An English church spire, evidently the prototype of this, and concerning which the same legend is told, is mentioned in the author"s "English Mote-Books."
_Note 2._ Leicester Hospital, in Warwick, described in "Our Old Home,"