"/Per Bacco/!" said Dr. Riccabocca, putting his hand on Lenny's shoulder,
and bending down to look into his face,--"/per Bacco/! my young friend,
do you sit here from choice or necessity?"
Lenny slightly shuddered, and winced under the touch of one whom he had
hitherto regarded with a sort of superstitious abhorrence.
"I fear," resumed Riccabocca, after waiting in vain for an answer to his
question, "that though the situation is charming, you did not select it
yourself. What is this?"--and the irony of the tone vanished--"what is
this, my poor boy? You have been bleeding, and I see that those tears
which you try to check come from a deep well. Tell me, /povero fanciullo
mio/" (the sweet Italian vowels, though Lenny did not understand them,
sounded softly and soothingly),--"tell me, my child, how all this
happened. Perhaps I can help you; we have all erred,--we should all help
each other."
Lenny's heart, that just before had seemed bound in brass, found itself a
way as the Italian spoke thus kindly, and the tears rushed down; but he
again stopped them, and gulped out sturdily,--
"I have not done no wrong; it ben't my fault,--and 't is that which kills
me!" concluded Lenny, with a burst of energy.
"You have not done wrong? Then," said the philosopher, drawing out his
pocket-handkerchief with great composure, and spreading it on the
ground,--"then I may sit beside you. I could only stoop pityingly over
sin, but I can lie down on equal terms with misfortune."
Lenny Fairfield did not quite comprehend the words, but enough of their
general meaning was apparent to make him cast a grateful glance on the
Italian. Riccabocca resumed, as he adjusted the pocket-handkerchief, "I
have a right to your confidence, my child, for I have been afflicted in
my day; yet I too say with thee, 'I have not done wrong.' /Cospetto/!"
(and here the doctor seated himself deliberately, resting one arm on the
side column of the stocks, in familiar contact with the captive's
shoulder, while his eye wandered over the lovely scene around)--
"/Cospetto/! my prison, if they had caught me, would not have had so fair
a look-out as this. But, to be sure, it is all one; there are no ugly
loves, and no handsome prisons."
With that sententious maxim, which, indeed, he uttered in his native
Italian, Riccabocca turned round and renewed his soothing invitations to
confidence. A friend in need is a friend indeed, even if he come in the
guise of a Papist and wizard. All Lenny's ancient dislike to the
foreigner had gone, and he told him his little tale.
Dr. Riccabocca was much too shrewd a man not to see exactly the motives
which had induced Mr. Stirn to incarcerate his agent (barring only that
of personal grudge, to which Lenny's account gave him no clew). That a
man high in office should make a scapegoat of his own watch-dog for an
unlucky snap, or even an indiscreet bark, was nothing strange to the
wisdom of the student of Machiavelli. However, he set himself to the
task of consolation with equal philosophy and tenderness. He began by
reminding, or rather informing, Leonard Fairfield of all the instances of
illustrious men afflicted by the injustice of others that occurred to his
own excellent memory. He told him how the great Epictetus, when in
slavery, had a master whose favourite amusement was pinching his leg,
which, as the amusement ended in breaking that limb, was worse than the
stocks. He also told him the anecdote of Lenny's own gallant countryman,
Admiral Byng, whose execution gave rise to Voltaire's celebrated
witticism, "En Angleterre on tue un admiral pour encourager les autres."
["In England they execute one admiral in order to encourage the
others."]
Many other illustrations, still more pertinent to the case in point, his
erudition supplied from the stores of history. But on seeing that Lenny
did not seem in the slightest degree consoled by these memorable
examples, he shifted his ground, and reducing his logic to the strict
/argumentum ad rem/, began to prove, first, that there was no disgrace at
all in Lenny's present position, that every equitable person would
recognize the tyranny of Stirn and the innocence of its victim; secondly,
that if even here he were mistaken, for public opinion was not always
righteous, what was public opinion after all?--"A breath, a puff," cried
Dr. Riccabocca, "a thing without matter,--without length, breadth, or
substance,--a shadow, a goblin of our own creating. A man's own
conscience is his sole tribunal, and he should care no more for that
phantom 'opinion' than he should fear meeting a ghost if he crossed the
churchyard at dark."
Now, as Lenny did very much fear meeting a ghost if he crossed the
churchyard at dark, the simile spoiled the argument, and he shook his
head very mournfully. Dr. Riccabocca, was about to enter into a third
course of reasoning, which, had it come to an end, would doubtless have
settled the matter, and reconciled Lenny to sitting in the stocks till
doomsday, when the captive, with the quick ear and eye of terror and
calamity, became conscious that church was over, that the congregation in
a few seconds more would be flocking thitherwards. He saw visionary hats
and bonnets through the trees, which Riccabocca saw not, despite all the
excellence of his spectacles; heard phantasmal rustlings and murmurings
which Riccabocca heard not, despite all that theoretical experience in
plots, stratagems, and treasons, which should have made the Italian's ear
as fine as a conspirator's or a mole's. And with another violent but
vain effort at escape, the prisoner exclaimed,--
"Oh, if I could but get out before they come! Let me out, let me out!
Oh, kind sir, have pity,--let me out!"
"Diavolo!" said the philosopher, startled, "I wonder that I never thought
of that before. After all, I believe he has hit the right nail on the
head," and, looking close, he perceived that though the partition of wood
had hitched firmly into a sort of spring-clasp, which defied Lenny's
unaided struggles, still it was not locked (for, indeed, the padlock and
key were snug in the justice-room of the squire, who never dreamed that
his orders would be executed so literally and summarily as to dispense
with all formal appeal to himself). As soon as Dr. Riccabocca made that
discovery, it occurred to him that all the wisdom of all the schools that
ever existed can't reconcile man or boy to a bad position--the moment
there is a fair opportunity of letting him out of it. Accordingly,
without more ado, he lifted up the creaking board, and Lenny Fairfield
darted forth like a bird from a cage, halted a moment as if for breath,
or in joy; and then, taking at once to his heels, fled, as a hare to its
form, fast to his mother's home.
Dr. Riccabocca dropped the yawning wood into its place, picked up his
handkerchief and restored it to his pocket; and then, with some
curiosity, began to examine the nature of that place of duress which had
caused so much painful emotion to its rescued victim. "Man is a very
irrational animal at best," quoth the sage, soliloquizing, "and is
frightened by strange buggaboos! 'T is but a piece of wood! how little
it really injures! And, after all, the holes are but rests to the legs,
and keep the feet out of the dirt. And this green bank to sit upon,
under the shade of the elm-tree-verily the position must be more pleasant
than otherwise! I've a; great mind--" Here the doctor looked around,
and seeing the coast still clear, the oddest notion imaginable took
possession of him; yet, not indeed a notion so odd, considered
philosophically,--for all philosophy is based on practical experiment,--
and Dr. Riccabocca felt an irresistible desire practically to experience
what manner of thing that punishment of the stocks really was. "I can
but try! only for a moment," said he apologetically to his own
expostulating sense of dignity. "I have time to do it, before any one
comes." He lifted up the partition again: but stocks are built on the
true principle of English law, and don't easily allow a man to criminate
himself,--it was hard to get into them without the help of a friend.
However, as we before noticed, obstacles only whetted Dr. Riccabocca's
invention. He looked round, and saw a withered bit of stick under the
tree; this he inserted in the division of the stocks, somewhat in the
manner in which boys place a stick under a sieve for the purpose of
ensnaring sparrows; the fatal wood thus propped, Dr. Riceabocca sat
gravely down on the bank, and thrust his feet through the apertures.
"Nothing in it!" cried he, triumphantly, after a moment's deliberation.
"The evil is only in idea. Such is the boasted reason of mortals!" With
that reflection, nevertheless, he was about to withdraw his feet from
their voluntary dilemma, when the crazy stick suddenly gave way and the
partition fell back into its clasp. Dr. Riceabocca was fairly caught,--
"Facilis descensus--sed revocare gradum!" True, his hands were at
liberty, but his legs were so long that, being thus fixed, they kept the
hands from the rescue; and as Dr. Riccabocca's form was by no means
supple, and the twin parts of the wood stuck together with that firmness
of adhesion which things newly painted possess, so, after some vain
twists and contortions, in which he succeeded at length (not without a
stretch of the sinews that made them crack again) in finding the clasp
and breaking his nails thereon, the victim of his own rash experiment
resigned himself to his fate. Dr. Riceabocca was one of those men who
never do things by halves. When I say he resigned himself, I mean not
only Christian but philosophical resignation. The position was not quite
so pleasant as, theoretically, he had deemed it; but he resolved to make
himself as comfortable as he could. At first, as is natural in all
troubles to men who have grown familiar with that odoriferous comforter
which Sir Walter Raleigh is said first to have bestowed upon the
Caucasian races, the doctor made use of his hands to extract from his
pocket his pipe, match-box, and tobacco-pouch. After a few whiffs he
would have been quite reconciled to his situation, but for the discovery
that the sun had shifted its place in the heavens, and was no longer
shaded from his face by the elm-tree. The doctor again looked round, and
perceived that his red silk umbrella, which he had laid aside when he had
seated himself by Lenny, was within arm's reach. Possessing himself of
this treasure, he soon expanded its friendly folds. And thus, doubly
fortified within and without, under shade of the umbrella, and his pipe
composedly between his lips, Dr. Riceabocca gazed on his own incarcerated
legs, even with complacency.
"'He who can despise all things,'" said he, in one of his native
proverbs, "'possesses all things!'--if one despises freedom, one is free!
This seat is as soft as a sofa! I am not sure," he resumed,
soliloquizing, after a pause,--"I am not sure that there is not something
more witty than manly and philosophical in that national proverb of mine
which I quoted to the fanciullo, 'that there are no handsome prisons'!
Did not the son of that celebrated Frenchman, surnamed Bras de Fer, write
a book not only to prove that adversities are more necessary than
prosperities, but that among all adversities a prison is the most
pleasant and profitable? But is not this condition of mine, voluntarily
and experimentally incurred, a type of my life? Is it the first time
that I have thrust myself into a hobble? And if in a hobble of mine own
choosing, why should I blame the gods?"
Upon this, Dr. Riceabocca fell into a train of musing so remote from time
and place, that in a few minutes he no more remembered that he was in the
parish stocks than a lover remembers that flesh is grass, a miser that
mammon is perishable, a philosopher that wisdom is vanity. Dr.
Riccabocca was in the clouds.