A NIGHT WITH DURDLES
When Mr. Sapsea has nothing better to do, towards evening, and finds
the contemplation of his own profundity becoming a little monotonous in
spite of the vastness of the subject, he often takes an airing in the
Cathedral Close and thereabout. He likes to pass the churchyard with a
swelling air of proprietorship, and to encourage in his breast a sort
of benignant-landlord feeling, in that he has been bountiful towards
that meritorious tenant, Mrs. Sapsea, and has publicly given her a
prize. He likes to see a stray face or two looking in through the
railings, and perhaps reading his inscription. Should he meet a
stranger coming from the churchyard with a quick step, he is morally
convinced that the stranger is “with a blush retiring,” as monumentally
directed.
Mr. Sapsea’s importance has received enhancement, for he has become
Mayor of Cloisterham. Without mayors, and many of them, it cannot be
disputed that the whole framework of society—Mr. Sapsea is confident
that he invented that forcible figure—would fall to pieces. Mayors have
been knighted for “going up” with addresses: explosive machines
intrepidly discharging shot and shell into the English Grammar. Mr.
Sapsea may “go up” with an address. Rise, Sir Thomas Sapsea! Of such is
the salt of the earth.
Mr. Sapsea has improved the acquaintance of Mr. Jasper, since their
first meeting to partake of port, epitaph, backgammon, beef, and salad.
Mr. Sapsea has been received at the gatehouse with kindred hospitality;
and on that occasion Mr. Jasper seated himself at the piano, and sang
to him, tickling his ears—figuratively—long enough to present a
considerable area for tickling. What Mr. Sapsea likes in that young man
is, that he is always ready to profit by the wisdom of his elders, and
that he is sound, sir, at the core. In proof of which, he sang to Mr.
Sapsea that evening, no kickshaw ditties, favourites with national
enemies, but gave him the genuine George the Third home-brewed;
exhorting him (as “my brave boys”) to reduce to a smashed condition all
other islands but this island, and all continents, peninsulas,
isthmuses, promontories, and other geographical forms of land soever,
besides sweeping the seas in all directions. In short, he rendered it
pretty clear that Providence made a distinct mistake in originating so
small a nation of hearts of oak, and so many other verminous peoples.
Mr. Sapsea, walking slowly this moist evening near the churchyard with
his hands behind him, on the look-out for a blushing and retiring
stranger, turns a corner, and comes instead into the goodly presence of
the Dean, conversing with the Verger and Mr. Jasper. Mr. Sapsea makes
his obeisance, and is instantly stricken far more ecclesiastical than
any Archbishop of York or Canterbury.
“You are evidently going to write a book about us, Mr. Jasper,” quoth
the Dean; “to write a book about us. Well! We are very ancient, and we
ought to make a good book. We are not so richly endowed in possessions
as in age; but perhaps you will put _that_ in your book, among other
things, and call attention to our wrongs.”
Mr. Tope, as in duty bound, is greatly entertained by this.
“I really have no intention at all, sir,” replies Jasper, “of turning
author or archæologist. It is but a whim of mine. And even for my whim,
Mr. Sapsea here is more accountable than I am.”
“How so, Mr. Mayor?” says the Dean, with a nod of good-natured
recognition of his Fetch. “How is that, Mr. Mayor?”
“I am not aware,” Mr. Sapsea remarks, looking about him for
information, “to what the Very Reverend the Dean does me the honour of
referring.” And then falls to studying his original in minute points of
detail.
“Durdles,” Mr. Tope hints.
“Ay!” the Dean echoes; “Durdles, Durdles!”
“The truth is, sir,” explains Jasper, “that my curiosity in the man was
first really stimulated by Mr. Sapsea. Mr. Sapsea’s knowledge of
mankind and power of drawing out whatever is recluse or odd around him,
first led to my bestowing a second thought upon the man: though of
course I had met him constantly about. You would not be surprised by
this, Mr. Dean, if you had seen Mr. Sapsea deal with him in his own
parlour, as I did.”
“O!” cries Sapsea, picking up the ball thrown to him with ineffable
complacency and pomposity; “yes, yes. The Very Reverend the Dean refers
to that? Yes. I happened to bring Durdles and Mr. Jasper together. I
regard Durdles as a Character.”
“A character, Mr. Sapsea, that with a few skilful touches you turn
inside out,” says Jasper.
“Nay, not quite that,” returns the lumbering auctioneer. “I may have a
little influence over him, perhaps; and a little insight into his
character, perhaps. The Very Reverend the Dean will please to bear in
mind that I have seen the world.” Here Mr. Sapsea gets a little behind
the Dean, to inspect his coat-buttons.
“Well!” says the Dean, looking about him to see what has become of his
copyist: “I hope, Mr. Mayor, you will use your study and knowledge of
Durdles to the good purpose of exhorting him not to break our worthy
and respected Choir-Master’s neck; we cannot afford it; his head and
voice are much too valuable to us.”
Mr. Tope is again highly entertained, and, having fallen into
respectful convulsions of laughter, subsides into a deferential murmur,
importing that surely any gentleman would deem it a pleasure and an
honour to have his neck broken, in return for such a compliment from
such a source.
“I will take it upon myself, sir,” observes Sapsea loftily, “to answer
for Mr. Jasper’s neck. I will tell Durdles to be careful of it. He will
mind what _I_ say. How is it at present endangered?” he inquires,
looking about him with magnificent patronage.
“Only by my making a moonlight expedition with Durdles among the tombs,
vaults, towers, and ruins,” returns Jasper. “You remember suggesting,
when you brought us together, that, as a lover of the picturesque, it
might be worth my while?”
“I remember!” replies the auctioneer. And the solemn idiot really
believes that he does remember.
“Profiting by your hint,” pursues Jasper, “I have had some day-rambles
with the extraordinary old fellow, and we are to make a moonlight
hole-and-corner exploration to-night.”
“And here he is,” says the Dean.
Durdles with his dinner-bundle in his hand, is indeed beheld slouching
towards them. Slouching nearer, and perceiving the Dean, he pulls off
his hat, and is slouching away with it under his arm, when Mr. Sapsea
stops him.
“Mind you take care of my friend,” is the injunction Mr. Sapsea lays
upon him.
“What friend o’ yourn is dead?” asks Durdles. “No orders has come in
for any friend o’ yourn.”
“I mean my live friend there.”
“O! him?” says Durdles. “He can take care of himself, can Mister
Jarsper.”
“But do you take care of him too,” says Sapsea.
Whom Durdles (there being command in his tone) surlily surveys from
head to foot.
“With submission to his Reverence the Dean, if you’ll mind what
concerns you, Mr. Sapsea, Durdles he’ll mind what concerns him.”
“You’re out of temper,” says Mr. Sapsea, winking to the company to
observe how smoothly he will manage him. “My friend concerns me, and
Mr. Jasper is my friend. And you are my friend.”
“Don’t you get into a bad habit of boasting,” retorts Durdles, with a
grave cautionary nod. “It’ll grow upon you.”
[Illustration: Durdles cautions Mr. Sapsea against boasting]
“You are out of temper,” says Sapsea again; reddening, but again
sinking to the company.
“I own to it,” returns Durdles; “I don’t like liberties.”
Mr. Sapsea winks a third wink to the company, as who should say: “I
think you will agree with me that I have settled _his_ business;” and
stalks out of the controversy.
Durdles then gives the Dean a good evening, and adding, as he puts his
hat on, “You’ll find me at home, Mister Jarsper, as agreed, when you
want me; I’m a-going home to clean myself,” soon slouches out of sight.
This going home to clean himself is one of the man’s incomprehensible
compromises with inexorable facts; he, and his hat, and his boots, and
his clothes, never showing any trace of cleaning, but being uniformly
in one condition of dust and grit.
The lamplighter now dotting the quiet Close with specks of light, and
running at a great rate up and down his little ladder with that
object—his little ladder under the sacred shadow of whose inconvenience
generations had grown up, and which all Cloisterham would have stood
aghast at the idea of abolishing—the Dean withdraws to his dinner, Mr.
Tope to his tea, and Mr. Jasper to his piano. There, with no light but
that of the fire, he sits chanting choir-music in a low and beautiful
voice, for two or three hours; in short, until it has been for some
time dark, and the moon is about to rise.
Then he closes his piano softly, softly changes his coat for a
pea-jacket, with a goodly wicker-cased bottle in its largest pocket,
and putting on a low-crowned, flap-brimmed hat, goes softly out. Why
does he move so softly to-night? No outward reason is apparent for it.
Can there be any sympathetic reason crouching darkly within him?
Repairing to Durdles’s unfinished house, or hole in the city wall, and
seeing a light within it, he softly picks his course among the
gravestones, monuments, and stony lumber of the yard, already touched
here and there, sidewise, by the rising moon. The two journeymen have
left their two great saws sticking in their blocks of stone; and two
skeleton journeymen out of the Dance of Death might be grinning in the
shadow of their sheltering sentry-boxes, about to slash away at cutting
out the gravestones of the next two people destined to die in
Cloisterham. Likely enough, the two think little of that now, being
alive, and perhaps merry. Curious, to make a guess at the two;—or say
one of the two!
“Ho! Durdles!”
The light moves, and he appears with it at the door. He would seem to
have been “cleaning himself” with the aid of a bottle, jug, and
tumbler; for no other cleansing instruments are visible in the bare
brick room with rafters overhead and no plastered ceiling, into which
he shows his visitor.
“Are you ready?”
“I am ready, Mister Jarsper. Let the old ’uns come out if they dare,
when we go among their tombs. My spirit is ready for ’em.”
“Do you mean animal spirits, or ardent?”
“The one’s the t’other,” answers Durdles, “and I mean ’em both.”
He takes a lantern from a hook, puts a match or two in his pocket
wherewith to light it, should there be need; and they go out together,
dinner-bundle and all.
Surely an unaccountable sort of expedition! That Durdles himself, who
is always prowling among old graves, and ruins, like a Ghoul—that he
should be stealing forth to climb, and dive, and wander without an
object, is nothing extraordinary; but that the Choir-Master or any one
else should hold it worth his while to be with him, and to study
moonlight effects in such company is another affair. Surely an
unaccountable sort of expedition, therefore!
“’Ware that there mound by the yard-gate, Mister Jarsper.”
“I see it. What is it?”
“Lime.”
Mr. Jasper stops, and waits for him to come up, for he lags behind.
“What you call quick-lime?”
“Ay!” says Durdles; “quick enough to eat your boots. With a little
handy stirring, quick enough to eat your bones.”
They go on, presently passing the red windows of the Travellers’
Twopenny, and emerging into the clear moonlight of the Monks’ Vineyard.
This crossed, they come to Minor Canon Corner: of which the greater
part lies in shadow until the moon shall rise higher in the sky.
The sound of a closing house-door strikes their ears, and two men come
out. These are Mr. Crisparkle and Neville. Jasper, with a strange and
sudden smile upon his face, lays the palm of his hand upon the breast
of Durdles, stopping him where he stands.
At that end of Minor Canon Corner the shadow is profound in the
existing state of the light: at that end, too, there is a piece of old
dwarf wall, breast high, the only remaining boundary of what was once a
garden, but is now the thoroughfare. Jasper and Durdles would have
turned this wall in another instant; but, stopping so short, stand
behind it.
“Those two are only sauntering,” Jasper whispers; “they will go out
into the moonlight soon. Let us keep quiet here, or they will detain
us, or want to join us, or what not.”
Durdles nods assent, and falls to munching some fragments from his
bundle. Jasper folds his arms upon the top of the wall, and, with his
chin resting on them, watches. He takes no note whatever of the Minor
Canon, but watches Neville, as though his eye were at the trigger of a
loaded rifle, and he had covered him, and were going to fire. A sense
of destructive power is so expressed in his face, that even Durdles
pauses in his munching, and looks at him, with an unmunched something
in his cheek.
Meanwhile Mr. Crisparkle and Neville walk to and fro, quietly talking
together. What they say, cannot be heard consecutively; but Mr. Jasper
has already distinguished his own name more than once.
“This is the first day of the week,” Mr. Crisparkle can be distinctly
heard to observe, as they turn back; “and the last day of the week is
Christmas Eve.”
“You may be certain of me, sir.”
The echoes were favourable at those points, but as the two approach,
the sound of their talking becomes confused again. The word
“confidence,” shattered by the echoes, but still capable of being
pieced together, is uttered by Mr. Crisparkle. As they draw still
nearer, this fragment of a reply is heard: “Not deserved yet, but shall
be, sir.” As they turn away again, Jasper again hears his own name, in
connection with the words from Mr. Crisparkle: “Remember that I said I
answered for you confidently.” Then the sound of their talk becomes
confused again; they halting for a little while, and some earnest
action on the part of Neville succeeding. When they move once more, Mr.
Crisparkle is seen to look up at the sky, and to point before him. They
then slowly disappear; passing out into the moonlight at the opposite
end of the Corner.
It is not until they are gone, that Mr. Jasper moves. But then he turns
to Durdles, and bursts into a fit of laughter. Durdles, who still has
that suspended something in his cheek, and who sees nothing to laugh
at, stares at him until Mr. Jasper lays his face down on his arms to
have his laugh out. Then Durdles bolts the something, as if desperately
resigning himself to indigestion.
Among those secluded nooks there is very little stir or movement after
dark. There is little enough in the high tide of the day, but there is
next to none at night. Besides that the cheerfully frequented High
Street lies nearly parallel to the spot (the old Cathedral rising
between the two), and is the natural channel in which the Cloisterham
traffic flows, a certain awful hush pervades the ancient pile, the
cloisters, and the churchyard, after dark, which not many people care
to encounter. Ask the first hundred citizens of Cloisterham, met at
random in the streets at noon, if they believed in Ghosts, they would
tell you no; but put them to choose at night between these eerie
Precincts and the thoroughfare of shops, and you would find that
ninety-nine declared for the longer round and the more frequented way.
The cause of this is not to be found in any local superstition that
attaches to the Precincts—albeit a mysterious lady, with a child in her
arms and a rope dangling from her neck, has been seen flitting about
there by sundry witnesses as intangible as herself—but it is to be
sought in the innate shrinking of dust with the breath of life in it
from dust out of which the breath of life has passed; also, in the
widely diffused, and almost as widely unacknowledged, reflection: “If
the dead do, under any circumstances, become visible to the living,
these are such likely surroundings for the purpose that I, the living,
will get out of them as soon as I can.” Hence, when Mr. Jasper and
Durdles pause to glance around them, before descending into the crypt
by a small side door, of which the latter has a key, the whole expanse
of moonlight in their view is utterly deserted. One might fancy that
the tide of life was stemmed by Mr. Jasper’s own gatehouse. The murmur
of the tide is heard beyond; but no wave passes the archway, over which
his lamp burns red behind his curtain, as if the building were a
Lighthouse.
They enter, locking themselves in, descend the rugged steps, and are
down in the Crypt. The lantern is not wanted, for the moonlight strikes
in at the groined windows, bare of glass, the broken frames for which
cast patterns on the ground. The heavy pillars which support the roof
engender masses of black shade, but between them there are lanes of
light. Up and down these lanes they walk, Durdles discoursing of the
“old uns” he yet counts on disinterring, and slapping a wall, in which
he considers “a whole family on ’em” to be stoned and earthed up, just
as if he were a familiar friend of the family. The taciturnity of
Durdles is for the time overcome by Mr. Jasper’s wicker bottle, which
circulates freely;—in the sense, that is to say, that its contents
enter freely into Mr. Durdles’s circulation, while Mr. Jasper only
rinses his mouth once, and casts forth the rinsing.
They are to ascend the great Tower. On the steps by which they rise to
the Cathedral, Durdles pauses for new store of breath. The steps are
very dark, but out of the darkness they can see the lanes of light they
have traversed. Durdles seats himself upon a step. Mr. Jasper seats
himself upon another. The odour from the wicker bottle (which has
somehow passed into Durdles’s keeping) soon intimates that the cork has
been taken out; but this is not ascertainable through the sense of
sight, since neither can descry the other. And yet, in talking, they
turn to one another, as though their faces could commune together.
“This is good stuff, Mister Jarsper!”
“It is very good stuff, I hope.—I bought it on purpose.”
“They don’t show, you see, the old uns don’t, Mister Jarsper!”
“It would be a more confused world than it is, if they could.”
“Well, it _would_ lead towards a mixing of things,” Durdles acquiesces:
pausing on the remark, as if the idea of ghosts had not previously
presented itself to him in a merely inconvenient light, domestically or
chronologically. “But do you think there may be Ghosts of other things,
though not of men and women?”
“What things? Flower-beds and watering-pots? Horses and harness?”
“No. Sounds.”
“What sounds?”
“Cries.”
“What cries do you mean? Chairs to mend?”
“No. I mean screeches. Now I’ll tell you, Mr. Jarsper. Wait a bit till
I put the bottle right.” Here the cork is evidently taken out again,
and replaced again. “There! _Now_ it’s right! This time last year, only
a few days later, I happened to have been doing what was correct by the
season, in the way of giving it the welcome it had a right to expect,
when them town-boys set on me at their worst. At length I gave ’em the
slip, and turned in here. And here I fell asleep. And what woke me? The
ghost of a cry. The ghost of one terrific shriek, which shriek was
followed by the ghost of the howl of a dog: a long, dismal, woeful
howl, such as a dog gives when a person’s dead. That was _my_ last
Christmas Eve.”
“What do you mean?” is the very abrupt, and, one might say, fierce
retort.
“I mean that I made inquiries everywhere about, and, that no living
ears but mine heard either that cry or that howl. So I say they was
both ghosts; though why they came to me, I’ve never made out.”
“I thought you were another kind of man,” says Jasper, scornfully.
“So I thought myself,” answers Durdles with his usual composure; “and
yet I was picked out for it.”
Jasper had risen suddenly, when he asked him what he meant, and he now
says, “Come; we shall freeze here; lead the way.”
Durdles complies, not over-steadily; opens the door at the top of the
steps with the key he has already used; and so emerges on the Cathedral
level, in a passage at the side of the chancel. Here, the moonlight is
so very bright again that the colours of the nearest stained-glass
window are thrown upon their faces. The appearance of the unconscious
Durdles, holding the door open for his companion to follow, as if from
the grave, is ghastly enough, with a purple hand across his face, and a
yellow splash upon his brow; but he bears the close scrutiny of his
companion in an insensible way, although it is prolonged while the
latter fumbles among his pockets for a key confided to him that will
open an iron gate, so to enable them to pass to the staircase of the
great tower.
“That and the bottle are enough for you to carry,” he says, giving it
to Durdles; “hand your bundle to me; I am younger and longer-winded
than you.” Durdles hesitates for a moment between bundle and bottle;
but gives the preference to the bottle as being by far the better
company, and consigns the dry weight to his fellow-explorer.
Then they go up the winding staircase of the great tower, toilsomely,
turning and turning, and lowering their heads to avoid the stairs
above, or the rough stone pivot around which they twist. Durdles has
lighted his lantern, by drawing from the cold, hard wall a spark of
that mysterious fire which lurks in everything, and, guided by this
speck, they clamber up among the cobwebs and the dust. Their way lies
through strange places. Twice or thrice they emerge into level,
low-arched galleries, whence they can look down into the moonlit nave;
and where Durdles, waving his lantern, waves the dim angels’ heads upon
the corbels of the roof, seeming to watch their progress. Anon they
turn into narrower and steeper staircases, and the night-air begins to
blow upon them, and the chirp of some startled jackdaw or frightened
rook precedes the heavy beating of wings in a confined space, and the
beating down of dust and straws upon their heads. At last, leaving
their light behind a stair—for it blows fresh up here—they look down on
Cloisterham, fair to see in the moonlight: its ruined habitations and
sanctuaries of the dead, at the tower’s base: its moss-softened
red-tiled roofs and red-brick houses of the living, clustered beyond:
its river winding down from the mist on the horizon, as though that
were its source, and already heaving with a restless knowledge of its
approach towards the sea.
Once again, an unaccountable expedition this! Jasper (always moving
softly with no visible reason) contemplates the scene, and especially
that stillest part of it which the Cathedral overshadows. But he
contemplates Durdles quite as curiously, and Durdles is by times
conscious of his watchful eyes.
Only by times, because Durdles is growing drowsy. As aëronauts lighten
the load they carry, when they wish to rise, similarly Durdles has
lightened the wicker bottle in coming up. Snatches of sleep surprise
him on his legs, and stop him in his talk. A mild fit of calenture
seizes him, in which he deems that the ground so far below, is on a
level with the tower, and would as lief walk off the tower into the air
as not. Such is his state when they begin to come down. And as
aëronauts make themselves heavier when they wish to descend, similarly
Durdles charges himself with more liquid from the wicker bottle, that
he may come down the better.
The iron gate attained and locked—but not before Durdles has tumbled
twice, and cut an eyebrow open once—they descend into the crypt again,
with the intent of issuing forth as they entered. But, while returning
among those lanes of light, Durdles becomes so very uncertain, both of
foot and speech, that he half drops, half throws himself down, by one
of the heavy pillars, scarcely less heavy than itself, and indistinctly
appeals to his companion for forty winks of a second each.
“If you will have it so, or must have it so,” replies Jasper, “I’ll not
leave you here. Take them, while I walk to and fro.”
Durdles is asleep at once; and in his sleep he dreams a dream.
It is not much of a dream, considering the vast extent of the domains
of dreamland, and their wonderful productions; it is only remarkable
for being unusually restless and unusually real. He dreams of lying
there, asleep, and yet counting his companion’s footsteps as he walks
to and fro. He dreams that the footsteps die away into distance of time
and of space, and that something touches him, and that something falls
from his hand. Then something clinks and gropes about, and he dreams
that he is alone for so long a time, that the lanes of light take new
directions as the moon advances in her course. From succeeding
unconsciousness he passes into a dream of slow uneasiness from cold;
and painfully awakes to a perception of the lanes of light—really
changed, much as he had dreamed—and Jasper walking among them, beating
his hands and feet.
“Holloa!” Durdles cries out, unmeaningly alarmed.
“Awake at last?” says Jasper, coming up to him. “Do you know that your
forties have stretched into thousands?”
“No.”
“They have though.”
“What’s the time?”
“Hark! The bells are going in the Tower!”
They strike four quarters, and then the great bell strikes.
“Two!” cries Durdles, scrambling up; “why didn’t you try to wake me,
Mister Jarsper?”
“I did. I might as well have tried to wake the dead—your own family of
dead, up in the corner there.”
“Did you touch me?”
“Touch you! Yes. Shook you.”
As Durdles recalls that touching something in his dream, he looks down
on the pavement, and sees the key of the crypt door lying close to
where he himself lay.
“I dropped you, did I?” he says, picking it up, and recalling that part
of his dream. As he gathers himself up again into an upright position,
or into a position as nearly upright as he ever maintains, he is again
conscious of being watched by his companion.
“Well?” says Jasper, smiling, “are you quite ready? Pray don’t hurry.”
“Let me get my bundle right, Mister Jarsper, and I’m with you.” As he
ties it afresh, he is once more conscious that he is very narrowly
observed.
“What do you suspect me of, Mister Jarsper?” he asks, with drunken
displeasure. “Let them as has any suspicions of Durdles name ’em.”
“I’ve no suspicions of you, my good Mr. Durdles; but I have suspicions
that my bottle was filled with something stiffer than either of us
supposed. And I also have suspicions,” Jasper adds, taking it from the
pavement and turning it bottom upwards, “that it’s empty.”
Durdles condescends to laugh at this. Continuing to chuckle when his
laugh is over, as though remonstrant with himself on his drinking
powers, he rolls to the door and unlocks it. They both pass out, and
Durdles relocks it, and pockets his key.
“A thousand thanks for a curious and interesting night,” says Jasper,
giving him his hand; “you can make your own way home?”
“I should think so!” answers Durdles. “If you was to offer Durdles the
affront to show him his way home, he wouldn’t go home.
Durdles wouldn’t go home till morning;
And _then_ Durdles wouldn’t go home,
Durdles wouldn’t.” This with the utmost defiance.
“Good-night, then.”
“Good-night, Mister Jarsper.”
Each is turning his own way, when a sharp whistle rends the silence,
and the jargon is yelped out:
Widdy widdy wen!
I—ket—ches—Im—out—ar—ter—ten.
Widdy widdy wy!
Then—E—don’t—go—then—I—shy—
Widdy Widdy Wake-cock warning!”
Instantly afterwards, a rapid fire of stones rattles at the Cathedral
wall, and the hideous small boy is beheld opposite, dancing in the
moonlight.
“What! Is that baby-devil on the watch there!” cries Jasper in a fury:
so quickly roused, and so violent, that he seems an older devil
himself. “I shall shed the blood of that impish wretch! I know I shall
do it!” Regardless of the fire, though it hits him more than once, he
rushes at Deputy, collars him, and tries to bring him across. But
Deputy is not to be so easily brought across. With a diabolical insight
into the strongest part of his position, he is no sooner taken by the
throat than he curls up his legs, forces his assailant to hang him, as
it were, and gurgles in his throat, and screws his body, and twists, as
already undergoing the first agonies of strangulation. There is nothing
for it but to drop him. He instantly gets himself together, backs over
to Durdles, and cries to his assailant, gnashing the great gap in front
of his mouth with rage and malice:
“I’ll blind yer, s’elp me! I’ll stone yer eyes out, s’elp me! If I
don’t have yer eyesight, bellows me!” At the same time dodging behind
Durdles, and snarling at Jasper, now from this side of him, and now
from that: prepared, if pounced upon, to dart away in all manner of
curvilinear directions, and, if run down after all, to grovel in the
dust, and cry: “Now, hit me when I’m down! Do it!”
“Don’t hurt the boy, Mister Jarsper,” urges Durdles, shielding him.
“Recollect yourself.”
“He followed us to-night, when we first came here!”
“Yer lie, I didn’t!” replies Deputy, in his one form of polite
contradiction.
“He has been prowling near us ever since!”
“Yer lie, I haven’t,” returns Deputy. “I’d only jist come out for my
’elth when I see you two a-coming out of the Kin-freederel. If
I—ket—ches—Im—out—ar—ter—ten!”
(with the usual rhythm and dance, though dodging behind Durdles), “it
ain’t _any_ fault, is it?”
“Take him home, then,” retorts Jasper, ferociously, though with a
strong check upon himself, “and let my eyes be rid of the sight of
you!”
Deputy, with another sharp whistle, at once expressing his relief, and
his commencement of a milder stoning of Mr. Durdles, begins stoning
that respectable gentleman home, as if he were a reluctant ox. Mr.
Jasper goes to his gatehouse, brooding. And thus, as everything comes
to an end, the unaccountable expedition comes to an end—for the time.