CONCERNING THE TROUBLES AND THE SHAPES THAT BEGAN TO GATHER ABOUT DOCTOR
STURK.
It was just about that time that our friend, Dr. Sturk, had two or three
odd dreams that secretly acted disagreeably upon his spirits. His liver
he thought was a little wrong, and there was certainly a little light
gout sporting about him. His favourite 'pupton,' at mess, disagreed with
him; so did his claret, and hot suppers as often as he tried them, and
that was, more or less, nearly every night in the week. So he was,
perhaps, right, in ascribing these his visions to the humours, the
spleen, the liver, and the juices. Still they sat uncomfortably upon his
memory, and helped his spirits down, and made him silent and testy, and
more than usually formidable to poor, little, quiet, hard-worked Mrs.
Sturk.
Dreams! What talk can be idler? And yet haven't we seen grave people and
gay listening very contentedly at times to that wild and awful sort of
frivolity; and I think there is in most men's minds, sages or zanies, a
secret misgiving that dreams may have an office and a meaning, and are
perhaps more than a fortuitous concourse of symbols, in fact, the
language which good or evil spirits whisper over the sleeping brain.
There was an ugly and ominous consistency in these dreams which might
have made a less dyspeptic man a little nervous. Tom Dunstan, a sergeant
whom Sturk had prosecuted and degraded before a court-martial, who owed
the doctor no good-will, and was dead and buried in the church-yard
close by, six years ago, and whom Sturk had never thought about in the
interval--made a kind of resurrection now, and was with him every night,
figuring in these dreary visions and somehow in league with a sort of
conspirator-in-chief, who never showed distinctly, but talked in
scoffing menaces from outside the door, or clutched him by the throat
from behind his chair, and yelled some hideous secret into his ear,
which his scared and scattered wits, when he started into consciousness,
could never collect again. And this fellow, with whose sneering
cavernous talk--with whose very knock at the door or thump at the
partition-wall he was as familiar as with his own wife's voice, and the
touch of whose cold convulsive hand he had felt so often on his cheek or
throat, and the very suspicion of whose approach made him faint with
horror, his dreams would not present to his sight. There was always
something interposed, or he stole behind him, or just as he was entering
and the door swinging open, Sturk would awake--and he never saw him, at
least in a human shape.
But one night he thought he saw, as it were, his sign or symbol. As
Sturk lay his length under the bed-clothes, with his back turned upon
his slumbering helpmate, he was, in the spirit, sitting perpendicularly
in his great balloon-backed chair at his writing-table, in the window of
the back one-pair-of-stairs chamber which he called his library, where
he sometimes wrote prescriptions, and pondering over his pennyweights,
his Roman numerals, his guttæ and pillulæ, his 3s, his 5s, his 9s, and
the other arabesque and astrological symbols of his mystery, he looked
over his pen into the church-yard, which inspiring prospect he thence
commanded.
Thus, as out of the body sat our recumbent doctor in the room underneath
the bed in which his snoring idolon lay, Tom Dunstan stood beside the
table, with the short white threads sticking out on his blue sleeve,
where the stitching of the stripes had been cut through on that twilight
parade morning when the doctor triumphed, and Tom's rank, fortune, and
castles in the air, all tumbled together in the dust of the barrack
pavement; and so, with his thin features and evil eye turned sideways to
Sturk, says he, with a stiff salute--'A gentleman, Sir, that means to
dine with you,' and there was the muffled knock at the door which he
knew so well, and a rustling behind him. So the doctor turned him about
quickly with a sort of chill between his shoulders, and perched on the
back of his chair sat a portentous old quizzical carrion-crow, the
antediluvian progenitor of the whole race of carrion-crows, monstrous,
with great shining eyes, and head white as snow, and a queer human look,
and the crooked beak of an owl, that opened with a loud grating 'caw'
close in his ears; and with a 'bo-o-oh!' and a bounce that shook the bed
and made poor Mrs. Sturk jump out of it, and spin round in the curtain,
Sturk's spirit popped back again into his body, which sat up wide awake
that moment.
It is not pretended that at this particular time the doctor was a
specially good sleeper. The contrary stands admitted; and I don't ask
you, sagacious reader, to lay any sort of stress upon his dreams; only
as there came a time when people talked of them a good deal over the
fireside in Chapelizod, and made winter's tales about them, I thought
myself obliged to tell you that such things were.
He did not choose to narrate them to his brother-officers, and to be
quizzed about them at mess. But he opened his budget to old Dr.
Walsingham, of course, only as a matter to be smiled at by a pair of
philosophers like them. But Dr. Walsingham, who was an absent man, and
floated upon the ocean of his learning serenely and lazily, drawn finely
and whimsically, now hither, now thither, by the finest hair of
association, glided complacently off into the dim region of visionary
prognostics and warnings, and reminded him how Joseph dreamed, and
Pharaoh, and Benvenuto, Cellini's father, and St. Dominick's mother, and
Edward II. of England, and dodged back and forward among patriarchs and
pagans, and modern Christians, men and women not at all suspecting that
he was making poor Sturk, who had looked for a cheerful, sceptical sort
of essay, confoundedly dismal and uncomfortable.
And, indeed, confoundedly distressed he must have been, for he took his
brother-chip, Tom Toole, whom he loved not, to counsel upon his case--of
course, strictly as a question of dandelion, or gentian, or camomile
flowers; and Tom, who, as we all know, loved him reciprocally,
frightened him as well as he could, offered to take charge of his case,
and said, looking hard at him out of the corner of his cunning, resolute
little eye, as they sauntered in the park--
'But I need not tell _you_, my good Sir, that physic is of
small avail, if there is any sort of--a--a--vexation, or--or--in
short--a--a--_vexation,_ you know, on your mind.'
'A--ha, ha, ha!--what? Murdered my father, and married my grandmother?'
snarled Sturk, sneeringly, amused or affecting to be so, and striving to
laugh at the daisies before his toes, as he trudged along, with his
hands in his breeches' pockets. 'I have not a secret on earth, Sir. 'Tis
not a button to me, Sir, who talks about me; and I don't owe a guinea,
Sir, that is, that I could not pay to-morrow, if I liked it; and there's
nothing to trouble me--nothing, Sir, except this dirty, little, gouty
dyspepsy, scarce worth talking about.
Then came a considerable silence; and Toole's active little mind, having
just made a note of this, tripped off smartly to half-a-dozen totally
different topics, and he was mentally tippling his honest share of a
dozen of claret, with a pleasant little masonic party at the
Salmon-leap, on Sunday next, and was just going to charm them with his
best song, and a new verse of his own compounding, when Sturk, in a
moment, dispersed the masons, and brought him back by the ear at a jump
from the Salmon-leap, with a savage----
'And I'd like to know, Sir, who the deuce, or, rather, what
the ----(_plague_ we'll say) could put into your head, Sir, to suppose any
such matter?'
But this was only one of Sturk's explosions, and he and little Toole
parted no better and no worse friends than usual, in ten minutes more at
the latter's door-step.
So Toole said to Mrs. T. that evening----
'Sturk owes money, mark my words, sweetheart. Remember _I_ say it--he'll
cool his heels in a prison, if he's no wiser than of late, before a
twel'month. Since the beginning of February he has lost--just wait a
minute, and let me see--ay, that, £150 by the levanting of old Tom
Farthingale; and, I had it to-day from little O'Leary, who had it from
Jim Kelly, old Craddock's conducting clerk, he's bit to the tune of
three hundred more by the failure of Larkin, Brothers, and Hoolaghan.
You see a little bit of usury under the rose is all very well for a
vulgar dog like Sturk, if he knows the town, and how to go about it; but
hang, it, he knows nothing. Why, the turnpike-man, over the way, would
not have taken old Jos. Farthingale's bill for fippence--no, nor his
bond neither; and he's stupid beside--but he can't help that, the
hound!--and he'll owe a whole year's rent only six weeks hence, and he
has not a shilling to bless himself with. Unfortunate devil--I've no
reason to like him--but, truly, I do pity him.'
Saying which Tom Toole, with his back to the fire, and a look of concern
thrown into his comic little mug, and his eyebrows raised, experienced a
very pleasurable glow of commiseration.
Sturk, on the contrary, was more than commonly silent and savage that
evening, and sat in his drawing-room, with his fists in his breeches'
pockets, and his heels stretched out, lurid and threatening, in a gloomy
and highly electric state. Mrs. S. did not venture her usual 'would my
Barney like a dish of tea?' but plied her worsted and knitting-needles
with mild concentration, sometimes peeping under her lashes at Sturk,
and sometimes telegraphing faintly to the children if they whispered too
loud--all cautious pantomime--_nutu signisque loquuntur_.
Sturk was incensed by the suspicion that Tom Toole knew something of his
losses, 'the dirty, little, unscrupulous spy and tattler.' He was
confident, however, that he could not know their extent. It was
certainly a hard thing, and enough to exasperate a better man than
Sturk, that the savings of a shrewd, and, in many ways, a self-denying
life should have been swept away, and something along with them, by a
few unlucky casts in little more than twelve months. And he such a
clever dog, too! the best player, all to nothing, driven to the wall, by
a cursed obstinate run of infernal luck. And he used to scowl, and grind
his teeth, and nearly break the keys and shillings in his gripe in his
breeches' pocket, as imprecations, hot and unspoken, coursed one another
through his brain. Then up he would get, and walk sulkily to the
brandy-flask and have a dram, and feel better, and begin to count up his
chances, and what he might yet save out of the fire; and resolve to
press vigorously for the agency, which he thought Dangerfield, if he
wanted a useful man, could not fail to give him; and he had hinted the
matter to Lord Castlemallard, who, he thought, understood and favoured
his wishes. Yes; that agency would give him credit and opportunity, and
be the foundation of his new fortunes, and the saving of him. A
precious, pleasant companion, you may suppose, he was to poor little
Mrs. Sturk, who knew nothing of his affairs, and could not tell what to
make of her Barney's eccentricities.
And so it was, somehow, when Dangerfield spoke his greeting at Sturk's
ear, and the doctor turned short round, and saw his white frizzed hair,
great glass eyes, and crooked, short beak, quizzical and sinister,
close by, it seemed for a second as if the 'caw' and the carrion-crow of
his dream was at his shoulder; and, I suppose, he showed his
discomfiture a little, for he smiled a good deal more than Sturk usually
did at a recognition.