Doctor Grimshawe's Secret — a RomanceHawthorne, Nathaniel
Science
Doctor Grimshawe's Secret — a Romance
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Fiction
awake and struggle again with eager combatants for new victories, the
best of which were not worth this deep repose.
The old palmer did his best to prolong a mood so beneficial to the
wounded young man. The surgeon also nodded approval, and attributed
this happy state of the patient’s mind, and all the physical advantages
growing out of it, to his own consummate skill; nor, indeed, was he
undeserving of credit, not often to be awarded to medical men, for
having done nothing to impede the good which kind Nature was willing to
bring about. She was doing the patient more good, indeed, than
either the surgeon or the palmer could fully estimate, in taking
this opportunity to recreate a mind that had too early known stirring
impulse, and that had been worked to a degree beyond what its
organization (in some respects singularly delicate) ought to have borne.
Once in a long while the weary actors in the headlong drama of life must
have such repose or else go mad or die. When the machinery of human life
has once been stopped by sickness or other impediment, it often needs an
impulse to set it going again, even after it is nearly wound up.
But it could not last forever. The influx of new life into his being
began to have a poignancy that would not let him lie so quietly, lapped
in the past, in gone by centuries, and waited on by quiet Age, in the
person of the old palmer; he began to feel again that he was young, and
must live in the time when his lot was cast. He began to say to himself,
that it was not well to be any longer passive, but that he must again
take the troublesome burden of his own life on his own shoulders. He
thought of this necessity, this duty, throughout one whole day, and
determined that on the morrow he would make the first step towards
terminating his inaction, which he now began to be half impatient of,
at the same time that he clutched it still, for the sake of the
deliciousness that it had had.
“To-morrow, I hope to be clothed and in my right mind,” said he to the
old palmer, “and very soon I must thank you, with my whole heart, for
your kind care, and go. It is a shame that I burden the hospitality of
this house so long.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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