Circumstances had obliged my aunt to perform the last stage of her
journey to Frankfort by the night mail. She had only stopped at our house
on her way to the hotel; being unwilling to trespass on the hospitality
of her partners, while she was accompanied by such a half-witted fellow
as Jack. Mr. Keller, however, refused even to hear of the head partner in
the business being reduced to accept a mercenary welcome at an hotel. One
whole side of the house, situated immediately over the offices, had been
already put in order in anticipation of Mrs. Wagner's arrival. The
luggage was then and there taken off the carriage; and my aunt was
obliged, by all the laws of courtesy and good fellowship, to submit.
This information was communicated to me by Joseph, on my return from an
early visit to one of our warehouses at the riverside. When I asked if I
could see my aunt, I was informed that she had already retired to rest in
her room, after the fatigue of a seven hours' journey by night.
"And where is Jack Straw?" I asked.
"Playing the devil already, sir, with the rules of the house," Joseph
answered.
Fritz's voice hailed me from the lower regions.
"Come down, David; here's something worth seeing!"
I descended at once to the servants' offices. There, crouched up in a
corner of the cold stone corridor which formed the medium of
communication between the kitchen and the stairs, I saw Jack Straw
again--in the very position in which I had found him at Bedlam; excepting
the prison, the chains, and the straw.
But for his prematurely gray hair and the strange yellow pallor of his
complexion, I doubt if I should have recognized him again. He looked fat
and happy; he was neatly and becomingly dressed, with a flower in his
button-hole and rosettes on his shoes. In one word, so far as his costume
was concerned, he might have been taken for a lady's page, dressed under
the superintendence of his mistress herself.
"There he is!" said Fritz, "and there he means to remain, till your aunt
wakes and sends for him."
"Upsetting the women servants, on their way to their work," Joseph added,
with an air of supreme disgust--"and freezing in that cold corner, when
he might be sitting comfortably by the kitchen fire!"
Jack listened to this with an ironical expression of approval. "That's
very well said, Joseph," he remarked. "Come here; I want to speak to you.
Do you see that bell?" He pointed to a row of bells running along the
upper wall of the corridor, and singled out one of them which was
numbered ten. "They tell me that's the bell of Mistress's bedroom," he
resumed, still speaking of my aunt by the name which he had first given
to her on the day when they met in the madhouse. "Very well, Joseph! I
don't want to be in anybody's way; but no person in the house must see
that bell ring before me. Here I stay till Mistress rings--and then you
will get rid of me; I shall move to the mat outside her door, and wait
till she whistles for me. Now you may go. That's a poor half-witted
creature," he said as Joseph retired. "Lord! what a lot of them there are
in this world!" Fritz burst out laughing. "I'm afraid you're another of
them," said Jack, looking at him with an expression of the sincerest
compassion.
"Do you remember me?" I asked.
Jack nodded his head in a patronizing way. "Oh, yes--Mistress has been
talking of you. I know you both. You're David, and he's Fritz. All right!
all right!"
"What sort of journey from London have you had?" I inquired next.
He stretched out his shapely little arms and legs, and yawned. "Oh, a
pretty good journey. We should have been better without the courier and
the maid. The courier is a tall man. I have no opinion of tall men. I am
a man myself of five foot--that's the right height for a courier. I could
have done all the work, and saved Mistress the money. Her maid is another
tall person; clumsy with her fingers. I could dress Mistress's hair a
deal better than the maid, if she would only let me. The fact is, I want
to do everything for her myself. I shall never be quite happy till I'm
the only servant she has about her."
"Ah, yes," said Fritz, good-naturedly sympathizing with him. "You're a
grateful little man; you remember what Mrs. Wagner has done for you."
"Remember?" Jack reported scornfully. "I say, if you can't talk more
sensibly than that, you had better hold your tongue." He turned and
appealed to me. "Did you ever hear anything like Fritz? He seems to think
it wonderful that I remember the day when she took me out of Bedlam!"
"Ah, Jack, that was a great day in your life, wasn't it?"
"A great day? Oh, good Lord in Heaven! where are there words that are big
enough to speak about it?" He sprang to his feet, wild with the sudden
tumult of his own recollections. "The sun--the warm, golden, glorious,
beautiful sun--met us when we came out of the gates, and all but drove me
stark-staring-mad with the joy of it! Forty thousand devils--little
straw-colored, lively, tempting devils--(mind, I counted them!)--all
crawled over me together. They sat on my shoulders--and they tickled my
hands--and they scrambled in my hair--and they were all in one cry at me
like a pack of dogs. 'Now, Jack! we are waiting for you; your chains are
off, and the sun's shining, and Mistress's carriage is at the gate--join
us, Jack, in a good yell; a fine, tearing, screeching, terrifying, mad
yell!' I dropped on my knees, down in the bottom of the carriage; and I
held on by the skirts of Mistress's dress. 'Look at me!' I said; 'I won't
burst out; I won't frighten you, if I die for it. Only help me with your
eyes! only look at me!' And she put me on the front seat of the carriage,
opposite her, and she never took her eyes off me all the way through the
streets till we got to the house. 'I believe in you, Jack,' she said. And
I wouldn't even open my lips to answer her--I was so determined to be
quiet. Ha! ha! how you two fellows would have yelled, in my place!" He
sat down again in his corner, delighted with his own picture of the two
fellows who would have yelled in his place.
"And what did Mistress do with you when she brought you home?" I asked.
His gaiety suddenly left him. He lifted one of his hands, and waved it to
and fro gently in the air.
"You are too loud, David," he said. "All this part of it must be spoken
softly--because all this part of it is beautiful, and kind, and good.
There was a picture in the room, of angels and their harps. I wish I had
the angels and the harps to help me tell you about it. Fritz there came
in with us, and called it a bedroom. I knew better than that; I called it
Heaven. You see, I thought of the prison and the darkness and the cold
and the chains and the straw--and I named it Heaven. You two may say what
you please; Mistress said I was right."
He closed his eyes with a luxurious sense of self-esteem, and appeared to
absorb himself in his own thoughts. Fritz unintentionally roused him by
continuing the story of Jack's introduction to the bedroom.
"Our little friend," Fritz began confidentially, "did the strangest
things when he found himself in his new room. It was a cold day; and he
insisted on letting the fire out. Then he looked at the bedclothes,
and----"
Jack solemnly opened his eyes again, and stopped the narrative at that
point.
"You are not the right person to speak of it," he said. "Nobody must
speak of it but a person who understands me. You shan't be disappointed,
David. I understand myself--_I'll_ tell you about it. You saw what sort
of place I lived in and slept in at the madhouse, didn't you?"
"I saw it, Jack--and I can never forget it."
"Now just think of my having a room, to begin with. And add, if you
please, a fire--and a light--and a bed--and blankets and sheets and
pillows--and clothes, splendid new clothes, for Me! And then ask yourself
if any man could bear it, all pouring on him at once (not an hour after
he had left Bedlam), without going clean out of his senses and screeching
for joy? No, no. If I have a quality, it's profound common sense. Down I
went on my knees before her again! 'If you have any mercy on me,
Mistress, let me have all this by a bit at a time. Upon my soul, I can't
swallow it at once!' She understood me. We let the fire out--and
surprised that deficient person, Fritz. A little of the Bedlam cold kept
me nice and quiet. The bed that night if you like--but Heaven defend me
from the blankets and the sheets and the pillows till I'm able to bear
them! And as to putting on coat, waistcoat, and breeches, all together,
the next morning--it was as much as I could do, when I saw myself in my
breeches, to give the word of command in the voice of a gentleman--'Away
with the rest of them! The shirt for to-morrow, the waistcoat for next
day, and the coat--if I can bear the sight of it without screaming--the
day after!' A gradual process, you see, David. And every morning Mistress
helped me by saying the words she said in the carriage, 'I believe in
you, Jack.' You ask her, when she gets up, if I ever once frightened her,
from the day when she took me home." He looked again, with undiminished
resentment, at Fritz. _"Now_ do you understand what I did when I got into
my new room? Is Fritz in the business, David? He'll want a deal of
looking after if he is. Just step this way--I wish to speak to you."
He got up again, and taking my arm with a look of great importance, led
me a few steps away--but not far enough to be out of sight of my aunt's
bell.
"I say," he began, "I've heard they call this place Frankfort. Am I
right?"
"Quite right!"
"And there's a business here, like the business in London?"
"Certainly."
"And Mistress _is_ Mistress here, like she is in London?"
"Yes."
"Very well, then, I want to know something. What about the Keys?"
I looked at him, entirely at a loss to understand what this last question
meant. He stamped his foot impatiently.
"Do you mean to say, David, you have never heard what situation I held in
the London office?"
"Never, Jack!"
He drew himself up and folded his arms, and looked at me from the
immeasurable height of his own superiority.
"I was Keeper of the Keys in London!" he announced. "And what I want to
know is--Am I to be Keeper of the Keys here?"
It was now plain enough that my aunt--proceeding on the wise plan of
always cultivating the poor creature's sense of responsibility--had given
him some keys to take care of, and had put him on his honor to be worthy
of his little trust. I could not doubt that she would find some means of
humoring him in the same way at Frankfort.
"Wait till the bells rings," I answered "and perhaps you will find the
Keys waiting for you in Mistress' room."
He rubbed his hands in delight. "That's it!" he said. "Let's keep watch
on the bell."
As he turned to go back again to his corner, Madame Fontaine's voice
reached us from the top of the kitchen stairs. She was speaking to her
daughter. Jack stopped directly and waited, looking round at the stairs.
"Where is the other person who came here with Mrs. Wagner?" the widow
asked. "A man with an odd English name. Do you know, Minna, if they have
found a room for him?"
She reached the lower stair as she spoke--advanced along the
corridor--and discovered Jack Straw. In an instant, her languid
indifferent manner disappeared. Her eyes opened wildly under their heavy
lids. She stood motionless, like a woman petrified by surprise--perhaps
by terror.
"Hans Grimm!" I heard her say to herself. "God in heaven! what brings
_him_ here?"