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Updated: June 27, 2025
Doctor Grimshawe was perhaps conscious of this result of his involuntary preachment, but he never directly noticed it, and did nothing either to efface or deepen the impression. They remembered him, with faith and love, as a religious man, and forgot what perhaps had made no impression on their innocent hearts all the traits that other people might have called devilish.
The unfinished "Grimshawe" was another development of the same theme, and the "Septimius" a later sketch, with a new element introduced.
Of these, the one most spacious and convenient had been selected by Doctor Grimshawe as a study, and fitted up with bookshelves, and various machines and contrivances, electrical, chemical, and distillatory, wherewith he might pursue such researches as were wont to engage his attention.
"You are quite right," quoth Doctor Grimshawe, who had been observing this little scene, and trying to make out, from the mutual deportment of the stranger and the two children, what sort of man this fair, quiet stranger was, with his gentleness and weakness, characteristics that were not attractive to himself, yet in which he acknowledged, as he saw them here, a certain charm; nor did he know, scarcely, whether to despise the one in whom he saw them, or to yield to a strange sense of reverence.
Well, Doctor Grimshawe easily got at what seemed to be all of the facts of Colcord's life; how that he was a New-Englander, the descendant of an ancient race of settlers, the last of them; for, once pretty numerous in their quarter of the country, they seemed to have been dying out, exhaling from the earth, and passing to some other region. "No wonder," said the Doctor bluffly.
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.
For at Montauto one of the terrors was the cohort of great spiders. There is no word in the dictionary so large or so menacing as a large spider of the Dr. Grimshawe kind. Such appear, like exclamations, all over the world. I saw one as huge and thrilling as these Italian monsters on the Larch Path at the Wayside, a few years later; but at Montauto they really swaggered and remained.
But much as they pretended to regret the loss of him and his children, it would make them curse their stars were a descendant of his to return now. "Do you think he will ever come back?" asked little Ned. "Stranger things have happened, my little man!" said Doctor Grimshawe, "than that the posterity of this man should come back and turn these usurpers out of his rightful inheritance.
Here you might have seen a brother physician of the grim Doctor's greatly tickled at his plight: or a decorous, powdered, ruffle-shirted dignitary, one of the weighty men of the town, standing at a neighbor's corner to see what would come of it. "He is not a respectable man, I understand, this Grimshawe, a quack, intemperate, always in these scuffles: let him get out as he may!"
Grimshawe, and many another that have flitted through the pages of Hawthorne's strange romances, leaving Salem the richer by the memories? There was another little girl who was to grow up and take a great interest in all these things, and finally to see the old Leverett house pass away, after its more than two hundred years.
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