WHEN I was lifted out of the cellar by two men, of whom one came peeping
down alone first, and ran away and brought the other, I could hardly bear
the light of the street. I was sitting in the road-way, blinking at it,
and at a ring of people collected around me, but not close to me, when,
true to my character of worldly little devil, I broke silence by saying,
‘I am hungry and thirsty!’
‘Does he know they are dead?’ asked one of another.
‘Do you know your father and mother are both dead of fever?’ asked a
third of me severely.
‘I don’t know what it is to be dead. I supposed it meant that, when the
cup rattled against their teeth, and the water spilt over them. I am
hungry and thirsty.’ That was all I had to say about it.
The ring of people widened outward from the inner side as I looked around
me; and I smelt vinegar, and what I know to be camphor, thrown in towards
where I sat. Presently some one put a great vessel of smoking vinegar on
the ground near me; and then they all looked at me in silent horror as I
ate and drank of what was brought for me. I knew at the time they had a
horror of me, but I couldn’t help it.
I was still eating and drinking, and a murmur of discussion had begun to
arise respecting what was to be done with me next, when I heard a cracked
voice somewhere in the ring say, ‘My name is Hawkyard, Mr. Verity
Hawkyard, of West Bromwich.’ Then the ring split in one place; and a
yellow-faced, peak-nosed gentleman, clad all in iron-gray to his gaiters,
pressed forward with a policeman and another official of some sort. He
came forward close to the vessel of smoking vinegar; from which he
sprinkled himself carefully, and me copiously.
‘He had a grandfather at Birmingham, this young boy, who is just dead
too,’ said Mr. Hawkyard.
I turned my eyes upon the speaker, and said in a ravening manner,
‘Where’s his houses?’
‘Hah! Horrible worldliness on the edge of the grave,’ said Mr. Hawkyard,
casting more of the vinegar over me, as if to get my devil out of me. ‘I
have undertaken a slight—a very slight—trust in behalf of this boy; quite
a voluntary trust: a matter of mere honour, if not of mere sentiment:
still I have taken it upon myself, and it shall be (O, yes, it shall be!)
discharged.’
The bystanders seemed to form an opinion of this gentleman much more
favourable than their opinion of me.
‘He shall be taught,’ said Mr. Hawkyard, ‘(O, yes, he shall be taught!)
but what is to be done with him for the present? He may be infected. He
may disseminate infection.’ The ring widened considerably. ‘What is to
be done with him?’
He held some talk with the two officials. I could distinguish no word
save ‘Farm-house.’ There was another sound several times repeated, which
was wholly meaningless in my ears then, but which I knew afterwards to be
‘Hoghton Towers.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr. Hawkyard. ‘I think that sounds promising; I think that
sounds hopeful. And he can be put by himself in a ward, for a night or
two, you say?’
It seemed to be the police-officer who had said so; for it was he who
replied, Yes! It was he, too, who finally took me by the arm, and walked
me before him through the streets, into a whitewashed room in a bare
building, where I had a chair to sit in, a table to sit at, an iron
bedstead and good mattress to lie upon, and a rug and blanket to cover
me. Where I had enough to eat too, and was shown how to clean the tin
porringer in which it was conveyed to me, until it was as good as a
looking-glass. Here, likewise, I was put in a bath, and had new clothes
brought to me; and my old rags were burnt, and I was camphored and
vinegared and disinfected in a variety of ways.
When all this was done,—I don’t know in how many days or how few, but it
matters not,—Mr. Hawkyard stepped in at the door, remaining close to it,
and said, ‘Go and stand against the opposite wall, George Silverman. As
far off as you can. That’ll do. How do you feel?’
I told him that I didn’t feel cold, and didn’t feel hungry, and didn’t
feel thirsty. That was the whole round of human feelings, as far as I
knew, except the pain of being beaten.
‘Well,’ said he, ‘you are going, George, to a healthy farm-house to be
purified. Keep in the air there as much as you can. Live an out-of-door
life there, until you are fetched away. You had better not say much—in
fact, you had better be very careful not to say anything—about what your
parents died of, or they might not like to take you in. Behave well, and
I’ll put you to school; O, yes! I’ll put you to school, though I’m not
obligated to do it. I am a servant of the Lord, George; and I have been
a good servant to him, I have, these five-and-thirty years. The Lord has
had a good servant in me, and he knows it.’
What I then supposed him to mean by this, I cannot imagine. As little do
I know when I began to comprehend that he was a prominent member of some
obscure denomination or congregation, every member of which held forth to
the rest when so inclined, and among whom he was called Brother Hawkyard.
It was enough for me to know, on that day in the ward, that the farmer’s
cart was waiting for me at the street corner. I was not slow to get into
it; for it was the first ride I ever had in my life.
It made me sleepy, and I slept. First, I stared at Preston streets as
long as they lasted; and, meanwhile, I may have had some small dumb
wondering within me whereabouts our cellar was; but I doubt it. Such a
worldly little devil was I, that I took no thought who would bury father
and mother, or where they would be buried, or when. The question whether
the eating and drinking by day, and the covering by night, would be as
good at the farm-house as at the ward superseded those questions.
The jolting of the cart on a loose stony road awoke me; and I found that
we were mounting a steep hill, where the road was a rutty by-road through
a field. And so, by fragments of an ancient terrace, and by some rugged
outbuildings that had once been fortified, and passing under a ruined
gateway we came to the old farm-house in the thick stone wall outside the
old quadrangle of Hoghton Towers: which I looked at like a stupid savage,
seeing no specially in, seeing no antiquity in; assuming all farm-houses
to resemble it; assigning the decay I noticed to the one potent cause of
all ruin that I knew,—poverty; eyeing the pigeons in their flights, the
cattle in their stalls, the ducks in the pond, and the fowls pecking
about the yard, with a hungry hope that plenty of them might be killed
for dinner while I stayed there; wondering whether the scrubbed dairy
vessels, drying in the sunlight, could be goodly porringers out of which
the master ate his belly-filling food, and which he polished when he had
done, according to my ward experience; shrinkingly doubtful whether the
shadows, passing over that airy height on the bright spring day, were not
something in the nature of frowns,—sordid, afraid, unadmiring,—a small
brute to shudder at.
To that time I had never had the faintest impression of duty. I had had
no knowledge whatever that there was anything lovely in this life. When
I had occasionally slunk up the cellar-steps into the street, and glared
in at shop-windows, I had done so with no higher feelings than we may
suppose to animate a mangy young dog or wolf-cub. It is equally the fact
that I had never been alone, in the sense of holding unselfish converse
with myself. I had been solitary often enough, but nothing better.
Such was my condition when I sat down to my dinner that day, in the
kitchen of the old farm-house. Such was my condition when I lay on my
bed in the old farm-house that night, stretched out opposite the narrow
mullioned window, in the cold light of the moon, like a young vampire.