Chapter 4 - Page 2

belonged to
his race; the hatred, to himself individually. It was the feeling of a
man lowly born, when he contracts a hostility to his hereditary
superior. In one way, being of a powerful, passionate nature, gifted
with force and ability far superior to that of the aristocrat, he might
scorn him and feel able to trample on him; in another, he had the same
awe that a country boy feels of the magistrate who flings him a
sixpence and shakes his horsewhip at him.

Had the grim Doctor been an American, he might have had the vast
antipathy to rank, without the trace of awe that made it so much more
malignant: it required a low-born Englishman to feel the two together.
What made the hatred so fiendish was a something that, in the natural
course of things, would have been loyalty, inherited affection, devoted
self-sacrifice to a superior. Whatever it might be, it seemed at times
(when his potations took deeper effect than ordinary) almost to drive
the grim Doctor mad; for he would burst forth in wild diatribes and
anathemas, having a strange, rough force of expression and a depth of
utterance, as if his words came from a bottomless pit within himself,
where burned an everlasting fire, and where the furies had their home;
and plans of dire revenge were welded into shape as in the heat of a
furnace. After the two poor children had been affrighted by paroxysms
of this kind, the strange being would break out into one of his roars
of laughter, that seemed to shake the house, and, at all events, caused
the cobwebs and spiders suspended from the ceiling, to swing and
vibrate with the motion of the volumes of reverberating breath which he
thus expelled from his capacious lungs. Then, catching up little Elsie
upon one knee and Ned upon the other, he would become gentler than in
his usual moods, and, by the powerful magnetism of his character, cause
them to think him as tender and sweet an old fellow as a child could
desire for a playmate. Upon the whole, strange as it may appear, they
loved the grim Doctor dearly; there was a loadstone within him that
drew them close to him and kept them there, in spite of the horror of
many things that he said and did. One thing that, slight as it seemed,
wrought mightily towards their mutually petting each other, was that no
amount of racket, hubbub, shouting, laughter, or noisy mischief which
the two children could perpetrate, ever disturbed the Doctor's studies,
meditations, or employments of whatever kind. He had a hardy set of
nerves, not refined by careful treatment in himself or his ancestors,
but probably accustomed from of old to be drummed on by harsh voices,
rude sounds, and the clatter and clamor of household life among homely,
uncultivated, strongly animal people.