Mrs. B. is my wife; and her alarms are those produced by a delusion
under which she labours that there are assassins, gnomes, vampires,
or what not, in our house at night, and that it is my bounden duty to
leave my bed at any hour or temperature, and to do battle with the
same, in very inadequate apparel. The circumstances which attend Mrs.
B.'s alarms are generally of the following kind. I am awakened by the
mention of my baptismal name in that peculiar species of whisper
which has something uncanny in its very nature, besides the dismal
associations which belong to it, from the fact of its being used only
in melodramas and sick-rooms.
"_Henry, Henry, Henry!_"
How many times she had repeated this I know not; the sound falls on
my ear like the lapping of a hundred waves, or as the "Robin Crusoe,
Robin Crusoe," of the parrot smote upon the ear of the terrified
islander of Defoe; but at last I wake, to view, by the dim firelight,
this vision: Mrs. B. is sitting up beside me, in a listening attitude
of the very intensest kind; her nightcap (one with cherry-coloured
ribbons, such as it can be no harm to speak about) is tucked back
behind either ear; her hair--in paper--is rolled out of the way upon
each side like a banner furled; her eyes are rather wide open, and
her mouth very much so; her fingers would be held up to command
attention, but that she is supporting herself in a somewhat absurd
manner upon her hands.
"_Henry_, did you hear _that_?"
"What, my love?"
"That noise. There it is again; there--there."
The disturbance referred to is that caused by a mouse nibbling at the
wainscot; and I venture to say so much in a tone of the deepest
conviction.
"No, no, Henry; it's not the least like that: it's a file working at
the bars of the pantry-window. I will stake my existence, Henry, that
it is a file."
Whenever my wife makes use of this particular form of words I know
that opposition is useless. I rise, therefore, and put on my slippers
and dressing-gown. Mrs. B. refuses to let me have the candle, because
she will die of terror if she is left alone without a light. She puts
the poker into my hand, and with a gentle violence is about to expel
me from the chamber, when a sudden thought strikes her.
"Stop a bit, Henry," she exclaims, "until I have looked into the
cupboards and places;" which she proceeds to do most minutely,
investigating even the short drawers of a foot and a half square. I
am at length dismissed upon my perilous errand, and Mrs. B. locks and
double-locks the door behind me with a celerity that almost catches
my retreating garment. My expedition therefore combines all the
dangers of a sally, with the additional disadvantage of having my
retreat into my own fortress cut off. Thus cumbrously but
ineffectually caparisoned, I peramulate the lower stories of the
house in darkness, in search of the disturber of Mrs. B.'s repose,
which, I am well convinced, is behind the wainscot of her own
apartment, and nowhere else. The pantry, I need not say, is as
silent as the grave, and about as cold. The great clock in the
kitchen looks spectral enough by the light of the expiring embers,
but there is nothing there with life except black-beetles, which
crawl in countless numbers over my naked ankles. There is a noise in
the cellar such as Mrs. B. would at once identify with the suppressed
converse of anticipated burglars, but which I recognise in a moment
as the dripping of the small-beer cask, whose tap is troubled with a
nervous disorganisation of that kind. The dining-room is chill and
cheerless; a ghostly armchair is doing the grim honours of the table
to three other vacant seats, and dispensing hospitality in the shape
of a mouldy orange and some biscuits, which I remember to have left
in some disgust, about----Hark! the clicking of a revolver? No! the
warning of the great clock--one, two, three.... What a frightful
noise it makes in the startled ear of night! Twelve o'clock. I left
this dining-room, then, but three hours and a-half ago; it certainly
does not look like the same room now. The drawing-room is also far
from wearing its usual snug and comfortable appearance. Could we
possibly have all been sitting in the relative positions to one
another which these chairs assume? Or since we were there, has some
spiritual company, with no eye for order left among them, taken
advantage of the remains of our fire to hold a _réunion_? They are
here even at this moment perhaps, and their gentlemen have not yet
come up from the dining-room. I shudder from head to foot, partly at
the bare idea of such a thing, partly from the naked fact of my
exceedingly unclothed condition. They do say that in the very passage
which I have now to cross in order to get to Mrs. B. again, my
great-grandfather "walks"; in compensation, I suppose, for having
been prevented by gout from taking that species of exercise while he
was alive. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt
of in your philosophy, I think, as I approach this spot; but I do not
say so, for I am well-nigh speechless with the cold: yes, the cold.
It is only my teeth that chatter. What a scream that was! There it
comes again, and there is no doubt this time as to who is the owner
of that terrified voice. Mrs. B.'s alarms have evidently taken some
other direction. "Henry, Henry!" she cries, in tones of a very
tolerable pitch. A lady being in the case, I fly upon the wings of
domestic love along the precincts sacred to the perambulations of
my great-grandfather. I arrive at my wife's chamber; the screams
continue, but the door is locked.
"Open, open!" shout I. "What on earth is the matter?"
There is silence; then a man's voice--that is to say, my wife's voice
in imitation of a man's--replies in tones of indignant ferocity, to
convey the idea of a life-preserver being under the pillow of the
speaker, and ready to his hand: "Who are you--what do you want?"
"You very silly woman," I answered; not from unpoliteness, but
because I find that that sort of language recovers and assures her of
my identity better than any other--"why, it's I."
The door is then opened about six or seven inches, and I am admitted
with all the precaution which attends the entrance of an ally into a
besieged garrison.
Mrs. B., now leaning upon my shoulder, dissolves into copious tears,
and points to the door communicating with my attiring-chamber.
"There's sur--sur--somebody been snoring in your dressing-room," she
sobs, "all the time you were away."
This statement is a little too much for my sense of humour, and
although sympathising very tenderly with poor Mrs. B., I cannot help
bursting into a little roar of laughter. Laughter and fear are deadly
enemies, and I can see at once that Mrs. B. is all the better for
this explosion.
"Consider, my love," I reason, "consider the extreme improbability of
a burglar or other nefarious person making such a use of the few
precious hours of darkness as to go to sleep in them! Why, too,
should he take a bedstead without a mattress, which I believe is the
case in this particular supposition of yours, when there were
feather-beds unoccupied in other apartments? Moreover, would not this
be a still greater height of recklessness in such an individual,
should he have a habit of snor----"
A slight noise in the dressing-room, occasioned by the Venetian blind
tapping against the window, here causes Mrs. B. to bury her head with
extreme swiftness, ostrichlike, beneath the pillow, so that the
peroration of my argument is lost upon her. I enter the suspected
chamber--this time with a lighted candle--and find my trousers, with
the boots in them, hanging over the bedside something after the
manner of a drunken marauder, but nothing more. Neither is there
anybody reposing under the shadow of my boot-tree upon the floor. All
is peace there, and at sixes and sevens as I left it upon
retiring--as I had hoped--to rest.
Once more I stretch my chilled and tired limbs upon the couch; sweet
sleep once more begins to woo my eyelids, when "Henry, Henry!" again
dissolves the dim and half-formed dream.
"Are you _certain_, Henry, that you looked in the shower-bath? I am
almost sure that I heard somebody pulling the string."
No grounds, indeed, are too insufficient, no supposition too
incompatible with reason, for Mrs. B. to build her alarms upon.
Sometimes, although we lodge upon the second story, she imagines that
the window is being attempted; sometimes, although the register may
be down, she is confident that the chimney is being used as the means
of ingress.
Once, when we happened to be in London--where she feels, however, a
good deal safer than in the country--we had a real alarm, and Mrs.
B., since I was suffering from a quinsy, contracted mainly by my
being sent about the house o' nights in the usual scanty drapery, had
to be sworn in as her own special constable.
"Henry, Henry!" she whispered upon this occasion, "there's a
dreadful cat in the room."
"Pooh, pooh!" I gasped; "it's only in the street; I've heard the
wretches. Perhaps they are on the tiles."
"No, Henry. There, I don't want you to talk, since it makes you
cough; only listen to me. What am I to do, Henry? I'll stake my
existence that there's a---- Ugh, what's that?"
And, indeed, some heavy body did there and then jump upon our bed,
and off again at my wife's interjection, with extreme agility. I
thought Mrs. B. would have had a fit, but she didn't. She told me,
dear soul, upon no account to venture into the cold with my bad
throat. She would turn out the beast herself, single-handed. We
arranged that she was to take hold of my fingers, and retain them,
until she reached the fireplace, where she would find a shovel or
other offensive weapon fit for the occasion. During the progress of
this expedition, however, so terrible a caterwauling broke forth, as
it seemed, from the immediate neighbourhood of the fender, that my
disconcerted helpmate made a most precipitate retreat. She managed
after this mishap to procure a light, and by a circuitous route,
constructed of tables and chairs, to avoid stepping upon the floor,
Mrs. B. obtained the desired weapon. It was then much better than a
play to behold that heroic woman defying grimalkin from her eminence,
and to listen to the changeful dialogue which ensued between herself
and that far from dumb, though inarticulately speaking animal.
"Puss, puss, pussy--poor pussy."
"Miau, miau, miau," was the linked shrillness, long drawn out, of the
feline reply.
"Poor old puss, then, was it ill? Puss, puss. Henry, the horrid beast
is going to fly at me! Whist, whist, cat."
"Ps-s-s-s. ps-s-s-s, miau; ps-s-s-s-s-s-s-s," replied the other, in a
voice like fat in the fire.
"My dear love," cried I, almost suffocated with a combination of
laughter and quinsy; "you have never opened the door; where is the
poor thing to run to?"
Mrs. B. had all this time been exciting the bewildered animal to
frenzy by her conversation and shovel, without giving it the
opportunity to escape, which, as soon as offered, it took advantage
of with an expression of savage impatience partaking very closely
indeed of the character of an oath.
This is, however, the sole instance of Mrs. B.'s having ever taken it
in hand to subdue her own alarms. It is I who, ever since her
marriage, have done the duty, and more than the duty, of an efficient
house-dog, which before that epoch, I understand, was wont to be
discharged by one of her younger sisters. Not seldom, in these
involuntary rounds of mine, I have become myself the cause of alarm
or inconvenience to others. Our little foot-page, with a courage
beyond his years, and a spirit worthy of a better cause, very nearly
transfixed me with the kitchen spit as I was trying, upon one
occasion, the door of his own pantry. Upon another nocturnal
expedition, I ran against a human body in the dark--that turned out
to be my brother-in-law's, who was also in search of robbers--with a
shock to both our nervous systems such as they have not yet recovered
from. It fell to my lot, upon a third, to discover one of the rural
police up in our attics, where, in spite of the increased powers
lately granted to the county constabulary, I could scarcely think he
was entitled to be. I once presented myself, an uninvited guest, at a
select morning entertainment--it was at 1.30 A.M.--given by our hired
London cook to nearly a dozen of her male and female friends. No
wonder that Mrs. B. had "staked her existence" that night that she
had heard the area gate "go." When I consider the extremely free and
unconstrained manner in which I was received, poker and all, by that
assembly, my only surprise is that they did not signify their
arrivals by double knocks at the front door.
On one memorable night, and on one only, have I found it necessary to
use that formidable weapon which habit has rendered as familiar to my
hand as its flower to that of the Queen of Clubs.
The grey of morning had just begun to steal into our bedchamber, when
Mrs. B. ejaculated with unusual vigour, "Henry, Henry, they're in the
front drawing-room; and they've just knocked down the parrot screen."
"My love," I was about to observe, "your imaginative powers have now
arrived at the pitch of _clairvoyance_," when a noise from the room
beneath us, as if all the fireirons had gone off together with a
bang, compelled me to acknowledge, to myself at least, that there was
something in Mrs. B.'s alarms at last. I trod downstairs as
noiselessly as I could, and in almost utter darkness. The
drawing-room door was ajar, and through the crevice I could
distinguish, despite the gloom, as many as three muffled figures.
They were all of them in black clothing, and each wore over his face
a mask of crape, fitting quite closely to his features. I had never
been confronted by anything so dreadful before. Mrs. B. had cried
"Wolf!" so often that I had almost ceased to believe in wolves of
this description at all. Unused to personal combat, and embarrassed
by the novel circumstance under which I found myself, I was standing
undecided on the landing, when I caught that well-known whisper of
"_Henry, Henry!_" from the upper story. The burglars caught it also.
They desisted from their occupation of examining the articles of
_vertu_ upon the chimney-piece, while their fiendish countenances
relaxed into a hideous grin. One of them stole cautiously towards the
door where I was standing. I hear his burglarious feet, I heard the
"_Henry, Henry!_" still going on from above-stairs; I heard my own
heart pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat within me. It was one of those moments in
which one lives a life. The head of the craped marauder was projected
cautiously round the door, as if to listen. I poised my weapon, and
brought it down with unerring aim upon his skull. He fell like a
bullock beneath the axe, and I sped up to my bedchamber with all the
noiselessness and celerity of a bird. It was I who locked the door
this time, and piled the washhand-stand, two band-boxes, and a chair
against it with the speed of lightning.
Was Mrs. B. out of her mind with terror that at such an hour as that
she should indulge in a paroxysm of mirth?
"Good heavens!" I cried, "be calm, my love; there are burglars in the
house at last."
"My dear Henry," she answered, laughing so that the tears quite stood
in her eyes, "I am very sorry; I tried to call you back. But when I
sent you downstairs, I quite forgot that this was the morning upon
which I had ordered the sweeps!"
One of those gentlemen was at that moment lying underneath with his
skull fractured, and it cost me fifteen pounds to get it mended,
besides the expense of a new drawing-room carpet.
--_From "Humorous Stories" by James Payn. By permission of
Messrs. Chatto & Windus_.