I MURDER MY BABY-BROTHER.
Misfortunes never come singly, and they did not come singly to us. It
was not for us to give the lie to a proverb. Often in a family, death
is in a hurry when it commences, and takes one after another quickly;
then pauses for a long breath.
In very truth, sorrow in its deepest phase had entered our house, and
my mother's form seemed to shrink and grow less from the day she put
on mourning for my grandmother. But if my mother had her troubles, I
am sure I had mine; and one was of such a strange and terrible nature
that, even at this distance of time, and with a better comprehension
of things, a curiously-reluctant feeling comes upon me as I prepare to
narrate it. It is summarised in a very few words. I murdered my
baby-brother.
At least, such was my impression at the time. For a long while I was
afflicted by secret remorse and by fear of discovery, and never till
now have I made confession. There was only one witness of my crime:
our cat. I remember well that my father was said to be sinking at the
time, and my mother, having her hands full, and her heart, too, poor
dear! placed me and my baby-brother in the room in which I used to sit
with my grandmother. My task was to take care of the little fellow,
and to amuse him. He was so young that he could scarcely toddle, and
we had great fun with two oranges which my mother had given us to play
with. It required great strength of mind not to eat them instead of
playing with them; but the purpose for which they were given to us had
been plainly set down by my mother. All that I could hope for,
therefore, was that they might burst their skins after being knocked
about a little, when of course they would become lawful food. We
played ball with them; my baby-brother rolling them towards me, not
being strong enough to throw them, and I (secretly animated by the
wish that they would burst their skins) throwing them up to him, with
a little more force than was actually necessary, and trying to make
him catch them. I cannot tell for how long we played, for at this
precise moment of my history a mist steals upon such of my early
reminiscences as are related in this and the preceding chapters--a
mist which divides, as by a curtain, one part of my life from another.
My actual life will soon commence, the life that is tangible to me, as
it were, that stands out in stronger colour and is distinct from the
brief prologue which was acted in dreamland, and which lies nestled
deep among the days of my childhood. Cloud-memories these; most of us
have such. Some are wholly bright and sweet, some wholly sad and
bitter, some parti-coloured. When the dreamland in which these
cloud-memories have birth has faded, and we are in the summer or the
winter of our days, fighting the Battle, or, having fought it, are
waiting for the trumpet-sound which proclaims the Grand Retreat, we
can all remember where we received such and such a wound, where such
and such a refreshing draught was given to us, at what part of the
fight such and such a scar was gained, and at what part a spiritual
vision dawned upon our souls, captivating and entrancing us with hopes
too bright and beautiful ever to be realised; and though our blood be
thin and poor, and the glory of life seems to have waned with the
waning of our strength, our pulses thrill and our hearts beat with
something of the old glow as the remembrance of these pains and
pleasures comes upon us!
To return to my baby-brother. The dusk steals upon us, and we are
still playing with the oranges. The cat is watching us, and when an
orange rolls in her direction she, half timidly, half sportively,
stretches out her paw towards it, and on one occasion lies full-length
on her stomach, with an orange between the tips of her paws, and her
nose in a straight line with it. I hear my baby-brother laugh
gleefully as I scramble on all-fours after the orange. The dusk has
deepened, and my baby-brother's face grows indistinct. I throw the
orange towards him. It hits him in the face, and his gleeful laughter
changes to a scream. I absolutely never see my baby-brother again, and
never again hear his voice. All that afterwards refers to him seems to
be imparted to me when it is dark, and so strong is my impression of
this detail that in my memory I never see his face with a light upon
it. My baby-brother is taken suddenly ill, I am told. I go about the
house, always in the dark, stepping very gently, and wondering whether
my secret will become known, and if it does, what will be done to me.
Still in the dark I hear that my baby-brother is worse; that he is
dangerously ill. Then, without an interval as it seems, comes the news
that my baby-brother is dead, and I learn in some undiscoverable way
that he has died of the croup. I know better. I know that I gave him
his death-blow with the orange, and I tremble for the consequences.
But no human being appears to suspect me, and for my own sake I must
preserve silence. Even to assume an air of grief at my baby-brother's
death might be dangerous; it might look as if I were too deeply
interested in the event; so I put on my most indifferent air. There
are, however, two things in the house that I am frightened of. One is
our old Dutch clock, the significant ticking and the very ropes and
iron weights of which appear to me to be pregnant with knowledge of my
crime. Five minutes before every hour the clock gives vent to a
whirring sound, and at that sound, hitherto without significance, I
tremble. There is a warning in it, and with nervous apprehension I
count the seconds that intervene between it and the striking of the
hour, believing that then the bell will proclaim my guilt. It _does_
proclaim it; but no person understands it, no one heeds it. I lean
against the passage wall, listening to the denunciation. Snaggletooth
comes in and stands by my side while the clock is striking. I look up
into his face with imploring eyes and a sinking heart. He taps my
cheek kindly, and passes on. I breathe more freely; he does not know
the language of the bells. The other thing of which I am frightened is
our cat. I know that she knows, and I am fearful lest, by some
mysterious means, she will denounce me. If I meet her in the dark, her
green eyes glare at me. I try to win her over to my side in a covert
manner by stroking her coat; but as I smooth her fur skilfully and
cunningly, I am convinced that she arches her back in a manner more
significant than usual, and that by that action she declines to be a
passive accessory to the fact. Her very tail, as it curls beneath my
fingers, accuses me. But time goes on, and I am not arrested and led
away to be hanged. When my baby-brother is in his coffin I am taken to
see him. The cat follows at my heels; I strive to push her away
stealthily with my foot, but she rubs her ear against my leg, and will
not leave me. I do not see my baby-brother, because I shut my eyes,
and I sob and tremble so that they are compelled to take me out of the
room; but I have a vague remembrance of flowers about his coffin. I am
a little relieved when I hear that he is buried, but the night that
follows is a night of torture to me. The Dutch clock ticks, 'I know! I
know!' and the cat purrs, 'I know! I know!' and when I am in bed the
shade of Jane Painter steals into the room, and after smelling about
for blood, whispers in a ghastly undertone that _she_ knows, and is
going to tell. Of the doctor, also, I begin to be frightened, for
after his visit to my father's sick-room, my mother brings him to see
me--being anxious about me, I hear her say. He stops and speaks to me,
and when his fingers are on my wrist, I fancy that the beating of my
pulse is revealing my crime to him.
But more weighty cares even than mine are stirring in our house, and
making themselves felt. My father's last moments are approaching, and
I hear that he cannot last the day out. He lasts the day out, but he
does not last the night out. As the friend of the family, Snaggletooth
remains in the house to see the end of his old comrade. He and my
father were schoolboys together, he tells me. 'He was the cleverest
boy in the school,' Snaggletooth says; 'the cleverest boy in the
school! He used to do my sums for me. We went out birds'-nesting
together; and many and many's the time we've stood up against the
whole school, snowballing. A snowball, with a stone in it, hit him in
the face once, and knocked him flat down; but he was up in a minute,
all bloody, and rushed into the middle of our enemies, like a young
lion--like a young lion! He was the first and the cleverest of all of
us--I was a long way behind him. And now, think of him lying there
almost at his last breath, and look at me!' Snaggletooth straightens
himself as he walks upstairs, murmuring, 'The cleverest boy in the
school! And now think of him, and look at me!'
Snaggletooth's wife is in the house, and helps my mother in her
trouble. In the night this good creature and I sit together in the
kitchen--waiting. My mother comes in softly two or three times; once
she draws me out of the kitchen on to the dark landing, and kneels
down, and with her arms around my neck, sobs quietly upon my shoulder.
She kisses me many times, and whispers a prayer to me, which I repeat
after her.
'Be a good child always, Chris,' she says.
'I will, mother.' And the promise, given at such a time, sinks into my
heart with the force of a sacred obligation.
Then my mother takes me into the kitchen, and gives me into the charge
of Snaggletooth's wife, and steals away. Snaggletooth's wife begins to
prattle to amuse me, and in a few minutes I ascertain that she in some
way resembles Jane Painter; for--probably influenced by the
appropriateness of the occasion for such narrations--she tells me
stories in a low tone about the Ghost of the Red Barn, and the
Cock-lane Ghost, and Old Mother Shipton. The old witch is a favourite
theme with Snaggletooth's wife, and I hear many strange things. She
says:
'One night Mother Shipton was in a terrible rage, and she told the
grasshopper on the top of the Royal Exchange to jump over to the ball
on St. Paul's Church steeple. And so it did. Soon after that, London
was burnt to the ground.'
I muse upon this, and presently inquire: 'Was it an accident?'
'The fire? No; it was done on purpose.'
'Was it because the grasshopper jumped on to the steeple that London
was set on fire?'
'Of course,' is the reply. 'That was Mother Shipton's spite.'
Snaggletooth's wife tells so many stories of ghosts and witches that
the air smells of fire and brimstone, and I see the cat's tail stiffen
and its eyes glow fearfully. Then I hear a cry from upstairs, and
Snaggletooth's wife rises hurriedly, and looks about her with restless
hands, and the whole house is in a strange confusion. Snaggletooth
himself comes into the room, and as he whispers some consoling words
to me--only the import of which I understand--his great tooth sticks
out like a horn. He looks like a fiend.