Mr. Pepys--to mention him once again--kept, as we know, a
commonplace book, in which he was accustomed to jot down (in
shorthand, let us hope) the good stories, post-prandial and otherwise,
which came his way. It must have been a rich if unseemly collection,
and is ill lost in these days to a world which, whatever its mental
capital, has never more than enough of refreshing anecdotes to go
round. Included in it, one may be sure, were those gems of information
(as related in the Diary) proffered at my lord Crewe’s table by one
Templer on the habits of the viper and the tarantula. This Mr.
Templer, we note, was a clergyman, and by virtue of his cloth should
be exonerated from the suspicion, otherwise irresistible, that he was
pulling our Samuel’s fat leg. But it is worth quoting the passage _in
extenso_ that the reader may judge for himself--
“He told us some [i.e. serpents] in the waste places of Lancashire do
grow to a great bigness, and do feed upon larkes which they take thus:
They observe, when the lark is soared to the highest, and do crawl
till they come to be just underneath them; and there they place
themselves with their mouth uppermost, and there, as is conceived,
they do eject poyson upon the bird; for the bird do suddenly come down
again in its course of a circle, and falls directly into the mouth of
the serpent; which is very strange.”
It _is_ very strange; and that lark at his highest, be it
observed--how many hundred feet up?--and the stupendous accuracy of
the aim! But Mr. Templer was “a great traveller”--and, of course,
therefore, not at all a great liar--and necessarily, on the other
hand, too shrewd a man to be himself taken in by the gammoning of
local naturalists. Of the tarantula he goes on to say that “All the
harvest long” (in Italy presumably) “there are fiddlers go up and down
the fields everywhere, in expectation of being hired by those that are
stung.” Bless him! and bless his admirable chronicler, who never
recorded a more ingenious tale--save that, perhaps, which relates of
his friend, Batalier, the jovial but conscienceless, cheapening a butt
of Bordeaux wine of some merchant, on the score that it was soured by
a thunderstorm, the said storm having been just produced by an artful
rogue hired to counterfeit the noise of one, with rain and hail, “upon
a deale board”--an incident which reminds one of Peter Simple and
Captain Kearney.
But, for Mr. Pepys’s book of tales; no part of it survives, so far as
I know, to supplement the Diary, or very possibly there might be found
in it some mention of the adventure of Jack Bannister with the
cly-faker. This adventure had befallen our musician some time before
his encounter with the Clerk of the Acts, which had turned out so
signally to his advantage, and one may be certain that the grateful
protégé, in the course of unburdening his heart to that generous
patron, would not have omitted to mention an incident so poignantly
associated with his recent hard experiences. The story, however, may
be given in our own words.
In the days precedent to that lucky contretemps in Duke Street, Sad
Jack had once possessed a donkey. Acquiring the beast, by a stroke of
good fortune, through a raffle conducted in an inn yard over the
effects of a deceased tinker, he had used her to bear the burden of
the instrument which, in his ploddings abroad, made so heavy physical
an addition to the weight of melancholy which oppressed him.
Thenceforth patient Griselda acted the part of minstrel-boy to the
wandering harpist, bearing on her sturdy little back the dumb
intervals between performance and performance, and standing apathetic
by while the pence for her night’s board and lodging and her master’s
were being charmed from a reluctant public. She was a docile little
ass and intelligent, and between her and her owner was quickly
established a comradeship which made their too soon severance a source
of poignant grief to at least the human one of them. It happened in
this way--
They came chancing together one day into the broad thoroughfare of
Cornhill, where, about the neighbourhood of the great conduit, near
the east end, they halted and prepared for their parts. Here, hard by,
stood the “tun,” or lock-up, a square detached building used for the
temporary impounding of night offenders; and it may have been their
contiguity to that place of ill savour which procured them the company
which was responsible for their separation. Rogues gravitate of
instinct towards the gallows, and your thief is never to be found
hovering so certainly as about the buildings where Justice inhabits.
However that might be, and whether it were owing to the insolvency or
the insensibility of his audience I cannot say; but the net result to
the musician showed itself in such a beggarly taking, that he was
driven to bring his performance to a short end, with a view to
shifting his ground and endeavouring to discover a more profitable
pitch. He loaded up Griselda and moved off, his expression, perhaps,
reflecting the nature of his inward disappointment.
But he had not trudged fifty paces when his dismal preoccupation
became conscious of a voice that pursued and arrested him.
“Hillo, my troll-away!”
He turned about, to see a figure approaching. It was that of a common
young fellow, white-faced, dirty, but with a world of shifty cunning
in his diminutive optics. His dress--some refuse of finery cheapened
from the hangman--overhung his puny limbs, he had packthread in his
shoes, and he wore his hat with a jack-a-dandy cock that did nothing
but emphasize its extreme age and greasiness No one less unworldly
than our musician would have stopped to parley with a creature so
obviously questionable. But in truth Jack was, in the slang of the
canting tribe, a born “buzzard,” or pigeon.
“What now?” demanded he.
“Heard ye,” said the stranger, coming up with a rather panting grin,
“harping it yonder, over against lob’s pound; and, thinks I to myself,
‘Here be the very man for my master.’”
“What master?”
The stranger jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
“Salvator they call him--a great learned doctor.”
“Well, what about him?”
“A needs a merry-Andrew, so to speak.”
“I fail to smoke you, friend.”
“One to play outside his door and attract custom.”
“Ah!”
He thought he understood. It was being suggested that he should devote
his gift to the services of an empiric, by drawing, siren-like, chance
patients to his lure.
Well, why not? There was no moral degradation implied in the business.
This Salvator might be a perfectly honest practitioner; and in any
case his own art would be used for no purpose baser than its wont--to
procure him, that was to say, a profitable audience. And with that his
responsibility would cease. The issue, for Salvator, would be his own
affair. He thought of the comparative rest implied, of his empty
pockets.
“What sayest thou, Grisel?” said he.
The little she ass grunted--a small purr of affection.
“Would he make it worth my while?” asked Jack of the pallid rogue.
“Take my word for’t,” says he, “and demand your own terms.”
The musician hesitated a moment longer, then succumbed. After all, he
was committing himself to no more than an interview. “Lead on,” he
said, and, the rascal going before, he followed, with the beast, in
his tracks.
They were here in a wide place of gabled houses, all having stalls
below, with a common pent-roof over, and signs of trades innumerable
hung, like flags, from its eaves. Out of this spacious thoroughfare
they turned sharply into an alley, sunless like a ravine from the
overtopping of its tenements, but full of life and bustle. This was
Birchin Lane, much inhabited of dealers in second-hand frippery and
upholstery, yet with spaces of quiet between, where in the shadows
lurked here and there a doorway enclosing some business less officious
in its character. And before one of these doors the stranger stopped.
A modest sign hung over it, showing the inscription, “Salvator,
Physician,” with a tiny pestle and mortar depicted in the top outer
corner, and its base was sunk a single step below the street level.
“Wait you here,” said the fellow, “the whiles I go before to acquaint
my master.”
He rapped on the door with the iron knocker, shaped like a sphinx,
that hung there, and in a little it was opened to him by a strong,
hard-faced woman, who inquired his business. That fact again should
have warned our harpist; but the man was a dreamer and simpleton. He
noted only that his escort was admitted, and thereafter was content to
await his reappearance with patience.
Salvator sat alone in an upper room when the rogue was shown in to
him. The physician was of a piece with his chamber, moth-blown and
fusty. He wore a long black robe with a fur tippet, and a fur cap was
on his head, from which his locks hung down, the colour of dry ginger.
He looked spoiled and stained, from much handling of medicaments, and
his jaw seemed to goggle with his eyes. The room, beyond a table, an
astral globe, a bookcase stuffed with treatises, and a chair or two,
possessed little furniture, and no sign whatever of the usual
mummified paraphernalia of a dealer in the healing arts. He turned,
from his occupation of filling a test-tube from a glass phial, to
face, somewhat impatiently, the visitor.
“Well, friend, and what is thy need?”
The rogue fumbled his doffed hat.
“None of my own, master, but my brother’s. A waits in the street
below, unwitting of my purpose.”
“What need? What purpose? State, state, and be done with it.”
“The purpose to have his wits cured, if so be I can entice him into
your honour’s presence.”
“What, then, hath befallen his wits?”
“What not, great sir? A thinks every one he meets doth owe him money,
and importunes the same for payment.”
“A kleptomaniacal symptom; from mental possession to material. You did
well to approach me timely. Since when---- But I can judge nothing
without I see him. Send him up to me.”
“Mayhap he’ll be persuaded so he come alone. But he’ll ask you
payment.”
“That were to put the cart before the horse; to fee the
patient--_husteron proteron_. But dispatch, dispatch.”
The rogue descended to the street, and took Griselda’s bridle from her
master.
“Go, make your own terms,” said he, as if well pleased, “while I hold
this. A waits you up above.”
Soberly, and without suspicion, the musician mounted the stairs. At
the top Salvator met him, and, conducting him into his room, shut the
door.
“A moment,” said he, “while I examine your eyes.”
He took a lens to the astonished man, and effected a minute scrutiny,
muttering the while--
“A visible wildness; dilation of the pupil and congestion. You have
never slept in the moonlight, now?”
“Never, sir.”
“H’m! Nor been disappointed of a fortune, nor suffered a blow on the
head, nor brooded on the covetous infidelity of a loved mistress?”
“Will you tell me plainly, sir, what are the terms you offer for my
services?”
“We’ll come to that. Though ’tis true a physician usually asks a fee,
not gives it. My services are to you, good man.”
“Then, sir, I decline at once. What? pay you for bringing you custom!”
“You bring me none, I assure you, if not yourself.”
“I’ll bring you none, indeed, nor prostitute my art to such a bargain.
Why, do you think I lead the life I do for pleasure?”
“What life, now?”
“The life of a beggar, sir; the life of one who harps about the
streets for alms.”
“Harps?”
“Do not you know? Else why was I brought here?”
“Why, indeed? Your brother must explain.”
“Brother! What brother?”
“Him that came first.”
“A stranger, sir, who accosted me in the streets not half an hour
gone, and brought me, on plea of an engagement, to you his master.”
“His master? Not I. I’d never set eyes on the man before.”
One blank minute the musician stood staring at the speaker, then
turned and, pounding down the stairs, half crying, half sobbing, as he
went, “A thief, a thief, a rogue! Stop him! He’s robbed me!” burst
from the door and into the street. The stranger had disappeared, the
beast, the instrument--beloved pet and the means to a livelihood all
vanished at a stroke.
Aimless, distracted, with skirts flying, Bannister flew hither and
thither seeking and questioning. Some scoffed at him, some
sympathized; not one had any clue to offer. Amid that labyrinth of
lanes and byways, stretching its network to the very waterside, it had
been easy for the scamp to make good his escape. Exhausted and broken,
the musician had to desist at last from his efforts.
To do him justice, the poor fellow lamented more for his Griselda than
for his instrument, though the loss of the latter presented the more
desperate problem to him. He could not afford from his scanty savings
enough to buy him a new harp, and without one how was he to procure
himself a living? In a last hope that he might find his conclusions
premature, and the truants back where he had left them, he was
returning dejectedly to the scene of his bereavement, when he caught
sight of the figure of Salvator peering from his own doorway.
“What fortune?” quoth the medicus, with anxiety, and the other, his
lips grimly pursed, only shook his head.
“Come in, good man, and explain,” said the physician kindly, “since I
perceive there is more here than meets the eye, and that I have been
in some manner I wot not of the unconscious instrument of your
undoing. Nay, by your favour. I, who have been giving good advice all
my years of discretion, may yet find enough to help a
fellow-creature’s necessity.”
It was such a revelation of human charity that Sad Jack was moved to
comply. He followed that Good Samaritan to his sanctum, and there,
with some heartfelt lamenting for his ravished pet, frankly confided
to sympathetic ears his circumstances and the nature of the trick
which had victimized him. He had no reason to repent his candour. A
practised, if a generous, reader of humankind, Salvator was soon
enough convinced of the innate honesty and simplicity of soul which
underlay the frozen surface of this nature. He saw a man here to be
commiserated and trusted, and, in the end--to cut the story
short--agreed to advance him the price of a new instrument, on the
mere undertaking that he should repay the loan in such instalments as
his success might justify. And to that arrangement, very delicately
suggested, Bannister was persuaded to subscribe.
It was indeed an oasis to have discovered in this desert of a great
city; and when, in the course of months, fame and fortune, at the
instigation of an appreciative patron, leaped upon the humble street
player, he did not forget to whom his success had been primarily due,
but he sought out Salvator in his abode, and insisted on renting from
him at a princely figure a suite of upper rooms in the house in
Birchin Lane. And there he made his lodging, greatly to the
satisfaction of his landlord, who, for all he was in no need of having
patients harped to his door, was yet by far too upright a man ever to
be counted a rich one.
“Phlebotomy, the conduct of a clyster, the sane mixing of a potion,
the spreading of an adequate plaster--what more,” he would say to his
tenant, “is needed to fulfil the functions of an honest practitioner?
There be some, plain quacksalvers, who, seeking to supplement the
legitimate by abstruse suggestion, adorn their chambers with the dried
bodies of toads, crocadilloes, venomous asps contained in spirit, and
other such _monstra horrenda_ of a cheating fancy; whereby, indeed, if
they show their improbity, they exhibit a true knowledge of the uses
of the imagination, which will for ever pay to mystery the treble of
what reason would pay to knowledge. But not of such _suggestio falsi_
is my dealing: and, though I suffer by it, I would rather suffer in
the company of Galen than prosper in that of Cornelius Tilbury.”
“Yet,” says Bannister, pointing to the astral globe, “you are not, it
seems, for limiting your prescriptions to the terrestrial?”
“Why,” answered Salvator (whose real unprofessional name, by the way,
was Shovel), “am I so dense and blind to the sources of light and life
as to claim an independence for our planet? The herb is as much of
heaven as the star, and the sign-manual of our origin is printed on
man and flower alike. So must we consult man for heaven and heaven for
man, his lines, his indications, whether derived from this celestial
House or the other. For which reason I believe in astrology as in
chiromancy, since both guide me to the association of a particular
humour in a patient’s blood with its corresponding cause and remedy,
they all being contained in his nativity, or horoscope, that is to
say--man and season and herb alike. Without subscribing to the
fantastical conceits of Gaule and Indagine, who profess to find in the
palm of the hand a country of seven hills, each, as it were, a
watershed laced with innumerable descending rivulets of tendency, I
confess that I see no reason why what life hath marked on a man the
Source of life had not in the first instance predestined there. Light
is what I seek, and that comes not from the earth.”
So was this worthy doctor, sane, humane and religious in one--a very
practical Samaritan. Yet, as it came to appear, not all his honest
theories were able to serve him in the single direction where most he
pined to see them vindicated. He was a widower, and possessed of an
only child, a hopelessly crippled boy of fifteen.
Bannister had been an inmate of the house for a full week before he
learned of the existence of this pathetic incubus. The building was
well-sized, its upper part, until he came to occupy it, delivered to
gloom and emptiness, and, to reach his rooms, he had to pass by a door
on the first landing which, in his early notice of it, was invariably
closed. But one night, as he went by, he observed the door ajar, and
saw a light and heard a voice within. The voice was not that of his
landlord, nor of the hard-faced woman who acted as his sole servant
and housekeeper. It was a weak voice and a querulous, and it seemed to
be expostulating over the meagreness of some concession grudgingly
vouchsafed. The musician paused in some astonishment, resting
momentarily the foot of the harp he shouldered on a stair-tread. He
never parted from his loved instrument, though in these days he used a
good packhorse to convey it to and from the places where he performed.
It was near midnight, and the house, but for the voice, was dead
silent. The woman, after admitting him, had preceded him up the flight
and vanished. It had never occurred to him that the place contained
other than the two with whom he was familiar. He stood, petrified for
the moment, and, as the sound of his footstep ceased, so did that of
the low and feeble complaint. And then suddenly the woman came to the
door and appeared before him.
Bannister had always rather mentally recoiled from this person--her
bony sallowness, her silence, the gloom of seeming tragedy in her
eyes. He never learned from first to last what was her history; and
yet, if tragedy there were connected with it, it had likely proved a
tragedy no more heroic than that of lovelessness, and drudgery, and
the hard resignation to that lot of unfulfilment which, foredoomed of
personal ill-favour, is perhaps, to a woman, the bitterest tragedy of
all. She served him, and waited on him well; she did everything
efficiently save smile. Yet, for all her unemotional presence, he
thought he perceived now, in the guttering light of the landing lamp,
a sign of perturbation on her face.
“I was surprised,” he said; “and stopped--no witting eavesdropper. I
thought I heard a voice I did not recognize.”
“’Twas Colin’s,” she said.
“Anan?” He used, being country bred, the country expression.
“Colin’s,” she repeated--“the master’s child.”
“I never knew he had one.”
“One.” She responded like an echo.
“And ill?”
“He’s always ill.”
“Poor boy! Does this vigil signify----?”
She answered the unfinished question.
“He wanted the door left ajar that he might see you pass with your
harp.”
“See me pass?”
“Aye, since he cannot hear you play.”
He looked at her in silence; then, in a quick, unaccountable impulse,
placed a firm hand on her arm. “Let me go in;” and, almost to his
wonder, she acquiesced, and moved aside to admit him.
It was a fair-sized room, and quite handsomely appointed. What
luxuries the house could command seemed mostly accumulated here. There
were soft mats on the floor; jewels of stained glass let into the
diamond-paned casements; a silver lamp glowing among books and
illuminated manuscripts strewed over a table. And, in the midst, in
vivid contrast with the dark panelling, on a white bed lay a white
boy. His face, which, for its structure, might have been a pretty one,
was wasted to the bone; his eyes were prominent and of an unearthly
blue; though fifteen, he looked in weight and size less than a child
of nine. Sad, sad is it to see young life in any sickness--its
pathetic patience, its uncomplaining acceptance of its cruel,
uncomprehended heritage; but sadder is the sight of one doomed from
his cradle to pain and helplessness. To be born, like this, to death,
not life, to the visible processes of dissolution from the very
threshold of existence; to be fated never to know but by report the
meaning of health, as the blind must shape in their imaginations the
world they can never see--truly that is to suffer the worst loss of
possession, which is never to have possessed, while reading in the
happiness of others the measure of one’s own eternal deprivation. Here
was some constitutional atrophy, already, fifteen years ago, disputing
with its unborn victim the world to come, and proving, on release,
stronger than the life it clung to. The boy had been an invalid from
his birth--a lamp guttering before it was well lighted--a nativity
most fondly lending itself, one would have thought, to the triumphant
vindication of its parent doctrines. But that vindication never came;
the father could not cure his child, and there was the anguish. The
life he loved most on earth was the life that most baffled his efforts
to mend and prolong it. His arts could not even win it surcease from
the mortal languor and weariness which accompanied its dissolution. He
felt himself a hypocrite, an impostor, in the eyes that, turning to
him for relief, found only helplessness and impotence. He who to all
others was so glib in professional assurance had nothing here to offer
but empty commiseration and an agony of devotion. It was very pitiful.
Bannister, pausing a moment on the threshold, stepped softly in, with
wonder and compassion at his heart. The boy, propped up on his
pillows, regarded his entrance with shy, fascinated eyes. But the
grave face of the new-comer, its simplicity, its kindly melancholy,
were nothing but reassuring adjuncts to the midnight quiet of the
room. The musician shifted the harp from his shoulder.
“Would you like to hear me play,” he said: “here and now, in the
silence of the house?” The instant rapture called to the emaciated
features was his sufficient answer. He smiled. “Cannot you sleep?” he
said. “It is late to lie awake.”
The boy shook his head.
“What is time to me, sir?”
He said it without affectation. It had seemed less touching otherwise.
“Well,” said Bannister, “it must be a Lydian measure, lest those more
concerned with sleep than we resent it. Lie still, child, while I drug
thy tired brain.”
He knew his own power in that way which is the last from vainglory.
True genius has no self-consciousness. It was his soul that played,
his fingers obeying; and what conceit can there be in immortality?
Seated, he touched the strings, and his soul spoke--spoke all the pity
and soft sympathy which were its burden. It was tender music, sighing,
sweetly subdued to the occasion. And as he proceeded he lost himself
in it, lost all but the sense of that divine compassion which was
moving and inspiring him. Still, the sure instinct of the artist came
presently to decree a period; and ending, short of surfeit, on a dying
note, he came to earth.
The child was lying with closed lids, heavy tears trickling from them
upon the pillow; the woman stood in the shadows, one hand placed over
her eyes. What faint, angelic melodies must have stricken, half
fearfully, half joyfully, the ears of dark watchers in the streets
that night! Stepping very gently, the musician bent above the boy.
“Good-night, Colin,” he whispered. “And shall I come again anon?”
With a convulsive movement, two thin arms were flung about his neck.
“O, come, come again and play to me!”
“I will come. But now, my child, I am very weary. See, I will leave my
harp to stand with you all night in earnest of my promise.”
As he opened the door a gaunt and ghastly apparition faced him. It was
the father himself, awakened, and brought from his bed in doubt and
trembling. He closed the latch, and, turning on the musician, seized
him by the arms in a fierce and strenuous grip.
“I was listening, I was watching!” he whispered hoarsely. “Shall I
curse you or love you!” And then he fell upon his knees, pawing and
mumbling the sensitive hands. “No, no,” he gasped in a broken voice;
“be you his true physician--not like this empty charlatan, who, for
all his pretended knowledge, hath never learned the magic that one
touch of thy hands can dispense.”