ANIMAL MAGNETISM.
NEARLY a month has passed since this strange marriage, and Monsieur
Blurosset is seated at his little green-covered table, the lamp-light
falling full upon the outspread pack of cards, over which the blue
spectacles bend with the same intent and concentrated gaze as on the
night when the fate of Valerie hung on the lips of the professor of
chemistry and pasteboard. Every now and then, with light and careful
fingers, Monsieur Blurosset changes the position of some card or cards.
Sometimes he throws himself back in his chair and thinks deeply. The
expressionless mouth, which betrays no secrets, tells nothing of the
nature of his thoughts. Sometimes he makes notes on a long slip of
paper; rows of figures, and problems in algebra, over which he ponders
long. By-and-by, for the first time, he looks up and listens.
His little apartment has two doors. One, which leads out on to the
staircase; a second, which communicates with his bedchamber. This door
is open a very little, but enough to show that there is a feeble light
burning within the chamber. It is in the direction of this door that
the blue spectacles are fixed when Monsieur Blurosset suspends his
calculations in order to listen; and it is to a sound within this room
that he listens intently.
That sound is the laboured and heavy breathing of a man. The room is
tenanted.
“Good,” says Monsieur Blurosset, presently, “the respiration is
certainly more regular. It is really a most wonderful case.”
As he says this, he looks at his watch. “Five minutes past eleven--time
for the dose,” he mutters.
He goes to the little cabinet from which he took the drug he gave to
Valerie, and busies himself with some bottles, from which he mixes a
draught in a small medicine-glass; he holds it to the light, puts it to
his lips, and then passes with it into the next room.
There is a sound as if the person to whom he gave the medicine made
some faint resistance, but in a few minutes Monsieur Blurosset emerges
from the room carrying the empty glass.
He reseats himself before the green table, and resumes his
contemplation of the cards. Presently a bell rings. “So late,” mutters
Monsieur Blurosset; “it is most likely some one for me.” He rises,
sweeps the cards into one pack, and going over to the door of his
bedroom, shuts its softly. When he has done so, he listens for a
moment with his ear close to the woodwork. There is not a sound of the
breathing within.
He has scarcely done so when the bell rings for the second time. He
opens the door communicating with the staircase, and admits a visitor.
The visitor is a woman, very plainly dressed, and thickly veiled.
“Monsieur Blurosset?” she says, inquiringly.
“The same, madame. Pray enter, and be good enough to be seated.” He
hands her a chair at a little distance from the green table, and as
far away as he can place it from the door of the bedchamber: she sits
down, and as he appears to wait for her to speak, she says,--
“I have heard of your fame, monsieur, and come----”
“Nay, madame,” he says, interrupting her, “you can raise your veil if
you will. I perfectly remember you; I never forget voices, Mademoiselle
de Cevennes.”
There is no shade of impertinence in his manner as he says this; he
speaks as though he were merely stating a simple fact which it is as
well for her to know. He has the air, in all he does or says, of a
scientific man who has no existence out of the region of science.
Valerie--for it is indeed she--raises her veil.
“Monsieur,” she says, “you are candid with me, and it will be the best
for me to be frank with you. I am very unhappy--I have been so for some
months past; and I shall be so until my dying day. One reason alone has
prevented my coming to you long ere this, to offer you half my fortune
for such another drug as that which you sold to me some time past. You
may judge, then, that reason is a very powerful one, since, though
death alone can give me peace, I yet do not wish to die. But I wish to
have at my command a means of certain death. I may never use it at all:
I swear never to use it on anyone but myself!”
All this time the blue spectacles have been fixed on her face, and now
Monsieur Blurosset interrupts her--
“And now for such a drug, mademoiselle, you would offer me a large sum
of money?” he asks.
“I would, monsieur.”
“I cannot sell it you,” he says, as quietly as though he were speaking
of some unimportant trifle.
“You cannot?” she exclaims.
“No, mademoiselle. I am a man absorbed entirely in the pursuit of
science. My life has been so long devoted to science only, that perhaps
I may have come to hold everything beyond the circle of my little
laboratory too lightly. You asked me some time since for a poison, or
at least you were introduced to me by a pupil of mine, at whose request
I sold you a drug. I had been twenty years studying the properties
of that drug. I may not know them fully yet, but I expect to do so
before this year is out. I gave it to you, and, for all I know to the
contrary, it may in your hands have done some mischief.” He pauses here
and looks at her for a moment; but she has borne the knowledge of her
crime so long, and it has become so much a part of her, that she does
not flinch under his scrutiny.
“I placed a weapon in your hands,” he continues, “and I had no right to
do so. I never thought of this at that time; but I have thought of it
since. For the rest, I have no inducement to sell you the drug you ask
for. Money is of little use to me except in the necessary expenses of
the chemicals I use. These”--he points to the cards--“give me enough
for those expenses; beyond those, my wants amount to some few francs a
week.”
“Then you will not sell me this drug? You are determined?” she asks.
“Quite determined.”
She shrugs her shoulders. “As you please. There is always some river
within reach of the wretched; and you may depend, monsieur, that they
who cannot support life will find a means of death. I will wish you
good evening.”
She is about to leave the room, when she stops, with her hand upon the
lock of the door, and turns round.
She stands for a few minutes motionless and silent, holding the handle
of the door, and with her other hand upon her heart. Monsieur Blurosset
has the faintest shadow of a look of surprise in his expressionless
countenance.
“I don’t know what is the matter with me to-night,” she says, “but
something seems to root me to this spot. I cannot leave this room.”
“You are ill, mademoiselle, perhaps. Let me give you some restorative.”
“No, no, I am not ill.”
Again she is silent; her eyes are fixed, not on the chemist, but with a
strange vacant gaze upon the wall before her. Suddenly she asks him,--
“Do you believe in animal magnetism?”
“Madame, I have spent half my lifetime in trying to answer that
question, and I can only answer it now by halves. Sometimes no;
sometimes yes.”
“Do you believe it possible for one soul to be gifted with a mysterious
prescience of the emotions of another soul?--to be sad when that is
sad, though utterly unconscious of any cause for sadness; and to
rejoice when that is happy, having no reason for rejoicing?”
“I cannot answer your question, madame, because it involves another. I
never yet have discovered what the soul really is. Animal magnetism,
if it ever become a science, will be a material science, and the soul
escapes from all material dissection.”
“Do you believe, then, that by some subtle influence, whose nature is
unknown to us, we may have a strange consciousness of the presence or
the approach of some people, conveyed to us by neither the hearing nor
the sight, but rather as if we _felt_ that they were near?”
“_You_ believe this possible, madame, or you would not ask the
question.”
“Perhaps. I have sometimes thought that I had this consciousness; but
it related to a person who is dead----”
“Yes, madame.”
“And--you will think me mad; Heaven knows, I think myself so--I feel as
if that person were near me to-night.”
The chemist rises, and, going over to her, feels her pulse. It is rapid
and intermittent. She is evidently violently agitated, though she is
trying with her utmost power to control herself.
“But you say that this person is dead?” he asks.
“Yes; he died some months since.”
“You know that there are no such things as ghosts?”
“I am perfectly convinced of that!”
“And yet--?” he asks.
“And yet I feel as though the dead were near me to-night. Tell
me--there is no one in this room but ourselves?”
“No one.”
“And that door--it leads----”
“Into the room in which I sleep.”
“And there is no one there?” she asks.
“No one. Let me give you a sedative, madame: you are certainly ill.”
“No, no, monsieur; you are very good. I am still weak from the effects
of a long illness. That weakness may be the cause of my silly fancies
of to-night. To-morrow I leave France, perhaps for ever.”
She leaves him; but on the steep dark staircase she pauses for a
moment, and seems irresolute, as if half determined to return: then she
hurries on, and in a minute is in the street.
She takes a circuitous route towards the house in which she lives. So
plainly dressed, and thickly veiled, no one stops to notice her as she
walks along.
Her husband, Monsieur Marolles, is engaged at a dinner given by a
distinguished member of the chamber of peers. Decidedly he has held
winning cards in the game of life. And she, for ever haunted by the
past, with weary step goes onward to a dark and unknown future.
=Book the Fourth.=
NAPOLEON THE GREAT.
CHAPTER I.
THE BOY FROM SLOPPERTON.
EIGHT years have passed since the trial of Richard Marwood. How have
those eight years been spent by “Daredevil Dick?”
In a small room a few feet square, in the County Lunatic Asylum,
fourteen miles from the town of Slopperton, with no human being’s
companionship but that of a grumpy old deaf keeper, and a boy, his
assistant--for eight monotonous years this man’s existence has crept
slowly on; always the same: the same food, the same hours at which that
food must be eaten, the same rules and regulations for every action of
his inactive life. Think of this, and pity the man surnamed “Daredevil
Dick,” and once the maddest and merriest creature in a mad and merry
circle. Think of the daily walk in a great square flagged yard--the
solitary walk, for he is not allowed even the fellowship of the other
lunatics, lest the madness which led him to commit an awful crime
should again break out, and endanger the lives of those about him.
During eight long years he has counted every stone in the flooring,
every flaw and every crack in each of those stones. He knows the shape
of every shadow that falls upon the white-washed wall, and can, at
all seasons of the year, tell the hour by the falling of it. He knows
that at such a time on a summer’s evening the shadows of the iron bars
of the window will make long black lines across the ground, and mount
and mount, dividing the wall as if it were in panels, till they meet,
and absorbing altogether the declining light, surround and absorb him
too, till he is once more alone in the darkness. He knows, too, that
at such a time on the grey winter’s morning these same shadows will be
the first indications of the coming light; that, from the thick gloom
of the dead night they will break out upon the wall, with strips of
glimmering day between, only enough like light to show the blackness
of the shade. He has sometimes been mad enough and wretched enough to
pray that these shadows might fall differently, that the very order of
nature might be reversed, to break this bitter and deadly monotony.
He has sometimes prayed that, looking up, he might see a great fire
in the sky, and know that the world was at an end. How often he has
prayed to die, it would be difficult to say. At one time it was his
only prayer; at one time he did not pray at all. He has been permitted
at intervals to see his mother; but her visits, though he has counted
the days, hours, and even minutes between them, have only left him
more despondent than ever. She brings so much with her into his lonely
prison, so much memory of a joyous past, of freedom, of a happy home,
whose happiness he did his best in his wild youth to destroy; the
memory, too, of that careless youth, its boon companions, its devoted
friends. She brings so much of all this back to him by the mere fact
of her presence, that she leaves behind her the blackness of a despair
far more terrible than the most terrible death. She represents to him
the outer world; for she is the only creature belonging to it who ever
crosses the threshold of his prison. The asylum chaplain, the asylum
doctor, the keepers and the officials belonging to the asylum--all
these are part and parcel of this great prison-house of stone, brick,
and mortar, and seem to be about as capable of feeling for him,
listening to him, or understanding him, as the stones, bricks, and
mortar themselves. Routine is the ruler of this great prison; and if
this wretched insane criminal cannot live by rules and regulations, he
must die according to them, and be buried by them, and so be done with,
out of the way; and his little room, No. 35, will be ready for some one
else, as wicked, as dangerous, and as unfortunate as he.
During the earlier part of his imprisonment the idea had pervaded the
asylum that as he had been found guilty of committing one murder, he
might, very likely, find it necessary to his peculiar state of mind
to commit more murders, and would probably find it soothing to his
feelings to assassinate anybody who might come in his way any morning
before breakfast. The watch kept upon him was therefore for some
time very strict. He was rather popular at first in the asylum, as a
distinguished public character; and the keepers, though a little shy
of attending upon him in their proper persons, were extremely fond of
peering in at him through a little oval opening in the upper panel
of the door of his cell. They also brought such visitors as came to
improve their minds by going over the hospital for the insane to have a
special and private view of this maniacal murderer; and they generally
received an extra donation from the sight-seers thus gratified. Even
the lunatics themselves were interested in the supposed assassin. A
gentleman, who claimed to be the Emperor of the German Ocean and the
Chelsea Waterworks, was very anxious to see him, as he had received
a despatch from his minister of police informing him that Richard
Marwood had red hair, and he particularly wished to confirm this
intelligence, or to give the minister his _congé_.
Another highly-respectable person, whose case was before the House of
Commons, and who took minutes of it every day on a slate, with a bit
of slate pencil which he wore attached to his button-hole by a string,
and which also served him as a toothpick--the slate being intrusted to
a keeper who forwarded it to the electric telegraph, to be laid on the
table of the House, and brought home, washed clean, in half an hour,
which was always done to the minute;--this gentleman also sighed for an
introduction to poor Dick, for Maria Martin had come to him in a vision
all the way from the Red Barn, to tell him that the prisoner was his
first cousin, through the marriage of his uncle with the third daughter
of Henry the Eighth’s seventh wife; and he considered it only natural
and proper that such near relations should become intimately acquainted
with each other.
A lady, who pronounced herself to be the only child of the Pope of
Rome, by a secret union with a highly-respectable youngperson, heiress
to a gentleman connected with the muffin trade somewhere about Drury
Lane, fell in love off-hand with Richard, from description alone; and
begged one of the keepers to let him know that she had a clue to a
subterranean passage, which led straight from the asylum to a baker’s
shop in Little Russell Street, Covent Garden, a distance of some two
hundred and fifty miles, and had been originally constructed by William
the Conqueror for the convenience of his visits to Fair Rosamond when
the weather was bad. The lady begged her messenger to inform Mr.
Marwood that if he liked to unite his fortune with hers, they could
escape by this passage, and set up in the muffin business--unless,
indeed, his Holiness of the triple crown invited them over to the
Vatican, which perhaps, under existing circumstances, was hardly likely.
But though a wonder, which elsewhere would only last nine days, may in
the dreary monotony of such a place as this, endure for more than nine
weeks, it must still die out at last. So at last Richard was forgotten
by every one except his heartbroken mother, and the keeper and boy
attending upon him.
His peculiar hallucination being his fancy that he was the Emperor
Napoleon the First, was, of course, little wonder in a place where
every wretched creature fancied himself some one or something which he
was not; where men and women walked about in long disjointed dreams,
which had no waking but in death; where once bright and gifted human
beings found a wild and imbecile happiness in crowns of straw, and
decorations of paper and rags; which was more sad to see than the worst
misery a consciousness of their state might have brought them. At
first, Richard had talked wildly of his fancied greatness, had called
his little room the rock of St. Helena, and his keeper, Sir Hudson
Lowe. But he grew quieter day by day, and at last never spoke at all,
except in answer to a question. And so on, for eight long years.
In the autumn of the eighth year he fell ill. A strange illness.
Perhaps scarcely to be called an illness. Rather a dying out of the
last light of hope, and an utter abandonment of himself to despair.
Yes, that was the name of the disease under which the high and bold
spirit of Daredevil Dick sank at last. Despair. A curious disease. Not
to be cured by rules and regulations, however salutary those rules
might be; not to be cured even by the Board, which was supposed to be
in a manner omnipotent, and to be able to cure anything in one sitting;
not to be cured certainly by the asylum doctor, who found Richard’s
case very difficult to deal with--more especially difficult since there
was no positive physical malady to attack. There was a physical malady,
because the patient grew every day weaker, lost appetite, and was
compelled to take to his bed; but it was the malady of the mind acting
on the body, and the cure of the last could only be effected by the
cure of the first.
So Richard lay upon his narrow little couch, watching the shadows on
the bare wall, and the clouds that passed across the patch of sky which
he could see through the barred window opposite his bed, through long
sunny days, and moonlight nights, throughout the month of September.
Thus it happened that one dull afternoon, on looking up, he saw a
darker cloud than usual hurry by; and in its train another, darker
still; then a black troop of ragged followers; and then such a shower
of rain came down, as he could not remember having seen throughout the
time of his captivity. But this heavy shower was only the beginning
of three weeks’ rainy weather; at the end of which time the country
round was flooded in every direction, and Richard heard his keeper
tell another man that the river outside the prison, which usually ran
within twenty feet of the wall on one side of the great yard, was now
swollen to such a degree as to wash the stonework of this wall for a
considerable height.
The day Richard heard this he heard another dialogue, which took place
in the passage outside his room. He was lying on his bed, thinking of
the bitterness of his fate, as he had thought so many hundred times,
through so many hundred days, till he had become, as it were, the slave
of a dreadful habit of his mind, and was obliged to go over the same
ground for ever and ever, whether he would or no--he was lying thus,
when he heard his keeper say--
“To think as how the discontented little beast should take and go and
better hisself at such a time as this here, when there ain’t a boy to
be had for love or money--which three shillings a week is all the Board
will give--as will come here to take care of him.”
Richard knew himself to be the “him” alluded to. The doctor had ordered
the boy to sit up with him at night during the latter part of his
illness, and it had been something of a relief to him, in the blank
monotony of his life, to watch this boy’s attempts to keep awake, and
his furtive games at marbles under the bed when he thought Richard was
not looking, or to listen to his snoring when he slept.
“You see, boys as is as bold as brass many ways--as would run under
’osses’ heads, and like it; as thinks it fun to run across the railroad
when there’s a _h_express _h_engine a comin’, and as will amuse
theirselves for the hour together with twopen’orth of gunpowder and a
lighted candle--still feels timersome about sittin’ up alone of nights
with him,” said the keeper.
“But he’s harmless enough, ain’t he?” asked the other.
“Harmless! Lord bless his poor hinnercent ’art! there ain’t no more
harm in him nor a baby. But it’s no use a sayin’ that, for there ain’t
a boy far or near what’ll come and help to take care of him.”
A minute or two after this, the keeper came into Richard’s room with
the regulation basin of broth--a panacea, as it was supposed, for all
ills, from water on the brain to rheumatism. As he put the basin down,
and was about to go, Richard spoke to him,--
“The boy is going, then?”
“Yes, sir.” The keeper treated him with great respect, for he had been
handsomely fed by Mrs. Marwood on every visit throughout the eight
years of her son’s imprisonment. “Yes, he’s a-goin’, sir. The place
ain’t lively enough for him, if you please. I’d lively him, if I was
the Board! Ain’t he had the run of the passages, and half an hour
every night to enjoy hisself in the yard! He’s a goin’ into a doctor’s
service. He says it’ll be jolly, carrying out medicine for other people
to take, and gloating over the thought of ’em a-taking it.”
“And you can’t get another boy to come here?”
“Well, you see, sir, the boys about here don’t seem to take kindly to
the place. So I’ve got orders from the Board to put an advertisement in
one of the Slopperton papers; and I’m a-goin’ to do it this afternoon.
So you’ll have a change in your attendance, maybe, sir, before the
week’s out.”
Nothing could better prove the utter dreariness and desolation of
Richard’s life than that such a thing as the probable arrival of a
strange boy to wait upon him seemed an event of importance. He could
not help, though he despised himself for his folly, speculating upon
the possible appearance of the new boy. Would he be big or little,
stout or thin? What would be the colour of his eyes and hair? Would his
voice be gruff or squeaky; or would it be that peculiar and uncertain
voice, common to over-grown boys, which is gruff one minute and squeaky
the next, and always is in one of these extremes when you most expect
it to be in the other?
But these speculations were of course a part of his madness; for it is
not to be supposed that a long course of solitary confinement could
produce any dreadful change in the mind of a sane man; or surely no
human justices or lawgivers would ever adjudge so terrible a punishment
to any creature, human as themselves, and no more liable to error than
themselves.
So Richard, lying on his little bed through the long rainy days, awaits
the departure of his old attendant and the coming of a new one; and in
the twilight of the third day he still lies looking up at the square
grated window, and counting the drops falling from the eaves--for there
is at last some cessation in the violence of the rain. He knows it is
an autumn evening; but he has not seen the golden red of one fallen
leaf, or the subdued colouring of one autumnal flower: he knows it is
the end of September, because his keeper has told him so; and when
his window is open, he can hear sometimes, far away, deadened by the
rainy atmosphere as well as by the distance, the occasional report
of some sportsman’s gun. He thinks, as he hears this, of a September
many years ago, when he and a scapegrace companion took a fortnight’s
shooting in a country where to brush against a bush, or to tread upon
the long grass, was to send a feathered creature whirring up in the
clear air. He remembers the merry pedestrian journey, the road-side
inns, the pretty barmaids, the joint purse; the blue smoke from two
short meerschaum pipes curling up to the grey morning sky; the merry
laughter from two happy hearts ringing out upon the chill morning air.
He remembers encounters with savage gamekeepers, of such ferocious
principle and tender consciences as even the administration of a
half-crown could not lull to sleep; he remembers jovial evenings in
the great kitchens of old inns, where unknown quantities of good old
ale were drunk, and comic songs were sung, with such a chorus, that to
join in it was to be overcome by such fatigue, or to be reduced from
wildest mirth to such a pitch of sudden melancholy, as ultimately to
lead to the finishing of the evening in tears, or else under the table.
He remembers all these things, and he wonders--as, being a madman, it
is natural he should--wonders whether it can be indeed himself, who
once was that wittiest, handsomest, most generous, and best of fellows,
baptised long ago in a river of sparkling hock, moselle, and burgundy,
“Daredevil Dick.”
But something more than these sad memories comes with the deepening
twilight, for presently Richard hears the door of his room unlocked,
and his keeper’s voice, saying,--
“There, go in, and tell the gent you’ve come. I’m a-comin’ in with his
supper and his lamp presently, and then I’ll tell you what you’ve got
to do.”
Naturally Richard looked round in the direction of the door, for he
knew this must be the strange boy. Now, his late juvenile attendant
had numbered some fifteen summers; to say nothing of the same number
of winters, duly chronicled by chilblains and chapped hands. Richard’s
eyes therefore looked towards the open door at about that height from
the ground which a lad of fifteen has commonly attained; and looking
thus, Richard saw nothing. He therefore lowered his glance, and in
about the neighbourhood of what would have been the lowest button of
his last attendant’s waistcoat, he beheld the small pale thin face of a
very small and very thin boy.
This small boy was standing rubbing his right little foot against his
left little wizen leg, and looking intently at Richard. To say that his
tiny face had a great deal of character in it would not be to say much;
what face he had was all character.
Determination, concentration, energy, strength of will, and brightness
of intellect, were all written in unmistakable lines upon that pale
pinched face. The boy’s features were wonderfully regular, and had
nothing in common with the ordinary features of a boy of his age
and his class; the tiny nose was a perfect aquiline; the decided
mouth might have belonged to a prime minister with the blood of the
Plantagenets in his veins. The eyes, of a bluish grey, were small, and
a little too near together, but the light in them was the light of an
intelligence marvellous in one so young.
Richard, though a wild and reckless fellow, had never been devoid of
thought, and in the good days past had dabbled in many a science,
and had adopted and abandoned many a creed. He was something of a
physiognomist, and he read enough in one glance at this boy’s face to
awaken both surprise and interest in him.
“So,” said he, “you are the new boy! Sit down,” he pointed to a little
wooden stool near the bed as he spoke. “Sit down, and make yourself at
home.”
The boy obeyed, and seated himself firmly by the side of Richard’s
pillow; but the stool was so low, and he was so small, that Richard
had to change his position to look over the edge of the bed at his
new attendant. While Daredevil Dick contemplated him the boy’s small
grey eyes peered round the four white-washed walls, and then fixed
themselves upon the barred window with such a look of concentration,
that it seemed to Richard as if the little lad must be calculating the
thickness and power of resistance of each iron bar with the accuracy of
a mathematician.
“What’s your name, my lad?” asked Richard. He had been always beloved
by all his inferiors for a manner combining the stately reserve of a
great king with the friendly condescension of a popular prince.
“Slosh, sir,” answered the boy, bringing his grey eyes with a great
effort away from the iron bars and back to Richard.
“Slosh! A curious name. Your surname, I suppose?”
“Surname and christen name too, sir. Slosh--short for Sloshy.”
“But have you no surname, then?”
“No, sir; _fondling_, sir.”
“A foundling: dear me, and you are called Sloshy! Why, that is the name
of the river that runs through Slopperton.”
“Yes, sir, which I was found in the mud of the river, sir, when I was
only three months old, sir.”
“Found in the river--were you? Poor boy--and by whom?”
“By the gent what adopted me, sir.”
“And he is----?” asked Richard.
“A gent connected with the police force, sir; detective----”
This one word worked a sudden change in Richard’s manner. He raised
himself on his elbow, looked intently at the boy, and asked, eagerly,--
“This detective, what is his name? But no,” he muttered, “I did not
even know the name of that man. Stay--tell me, you know perhaps some of
the men in the Slopperton police force besides your adopted father?”
“I knows every man jack of ’em, sir; and a fine staff they is--a credit
to their country and a happiness to theirselves.”
“Do you happen to know amongst them a dumb man?” asked Richard.
“Lor’, sir, that’s him.”
“Who?”
“Father, sir. The gent what found me and adopted me. I’ve got a message
for you, sir, from father, and I was a-goin’ to give it you, only I
thought I’d look about me a little first; but stay--Oh, dear, the
gentleman’s took and fainted. Here,” he said, running to the door and
calling out in a shrill voice, “come and unlock this here place, will
yer, and look alive with that lamp! The gentleman’s gone off into a
dead faint, and there ain’t so much as a drop of water to chuck over
his face.”
The prisoner had indeed fallen back insensible on the bed. For eight
long years he had nourished in his heart a glimmering though dying hope
that he might one day receive some token of remembrance from the man
who had taken a strange part in the eventful crisis of his life. This
ray of light had lately died out, along with every other ray which had
once illuminated his dreary life; but in the very moment when hope was
abandoned, the token once eagerly looked for came upon him so suddenly,
that the shock was too much for his shattered mind and feeble frame.
When Richard recovered from his swoon, he found himself alone with the
boy from Slopperton. He was a little startled by the position of that
young person, who had seated himself upon the small square deal table
by the bedside, commanding from this elevation a full view of Richard’s
face, whereon his two small grey eyes were intently fixed, with that
same odd look of concentration with which he had regarded the iron bars.
“Come now,” said he, with the consolatory tone of an experienced
sick-nurse; “come now, we mustn’t give way like this, just because we
hears from our friends; because, you see, if we does, our friends can’t
be no good to us whichever way their intention may be.”
“You said you had a message for me,” said Richard, in feeble but
anxious tones.
“Well, it ain’t a long un, and here it is,” answered the young
gentleman from his extempore pulpit; and then he continued, with very
much the air of giving out a text--“Keep up your pecker.”
“Keep up what?” muttered Richard.
“Your pecker. ‘Keep up your pecker,’ them’s his words; and as he never
yet vos known to make a dirty dinner off his own syllables, it ain’t
likely as he’ll take and eat ’em. He says to me--on his fingers, in
course--‘Tell the gent to keep up his pecker, and leave all the rest
to you; for you’re a pocket edition of all the sharpness as ever
knives was nothing to, or else say I’ve brought you up for no good
whatsomedever.’”
This was rather a vague speech; so perhaps it is scarcely strange that
Richard did not derive much immediate comfort from it. But, in spite
of himself, he did derive a great deal of comfort from the presence of
this boy, though he almost despised himself for attaching the least
importance to the words of an urchin of little better than eight years
of age. Certainly this urchin of eight had a shrewdness of manner which
would have been almost remarkable in a man of the world of fifty, and
Richard could scarcely help fancying that he must have graduated in
some other hemisphere, and been thrown, small as to size, but full
grown as to acuteness, into this; or it seemed as if some great strong
man had been reduced into the compass of a little boy, in order to
make him sharper, as cooks boil down a gallon of gravy to a pint in the
manufacture of strong soup.
But, however the boy came to be what he was, there he was, holding
forth from his pulpit, and handing Richard the regulation basin of
broth which composed his supper.
“Now, what you’ve got to do,” said he, “is to get well; for until you
are well, and strong too, there ain’t the least probability of your
bein’ able to change your apartments, if you should feel so inclined,
which perhaps ain’t likely.”
Richard looked at the diminutive speaker with a wonderment he could not
repress.
“Starin’ won’t cure you,” said his juvenile attendant, with friendly
disrespect, “not if you took the pattern of my face till you could draw
it in the dark. The best thing you can do is to eat your supper, and
to-morrow we must try what we can do for you in the way of port wine;
for if you ain’t strong and well afore that ere river outside this ere
vall goes down, it’s a chance but vot it’ll be a long time afore you
sees the outside of the val in question.”
Richard caught hold of the boy’s small arm with a grasp which, in
spite of his weakness, had a convulsive energy that nearly toppled his
youthful attendant from his elevation.
“You never can think of anything so wild?” he said, in a tumult of
agitation.
“Lor’ bless yer ’art, no,” said the boy; “we never thinks of anything
vot’s wild--our ’abits is business-like; but vot you’ve got to do is to
go to sleep, and not to worrit yourself; and as I said before, I say
again, when you’re well and strong we’ll think about changin’ these
apartments. We can make excuse that the look-out was too lively, or
that the colour of the whitewash was a-hinjurin’ our eyesight.”
For the first time for many nights Richard slept well; and opening
his eyes the next morning, his first anxiety was to convince himself
that the arrival of the boy from Slopperton was not some foolish dream
engendered in his disordered brain. No, there the boy sat: whether
he had been to sleep on the table, or whether he had never taken his
eyes off Richard the whole night, there he was, with those eyes fixed,
exactly as they had been the night before, on the prisoner’s face.
“Why, I declare we’re all the better for our good night’s rest,” he
said, rubbing his hands, as he contemplated Richard; “and we’re ready
for our breakfast as soon as ever we can get it, which will be soon,
judging by our keeper’s hobnailed boots as is a-comin’ down the passage
with a tray in his hand.”
This rather confused statement was confirmed by a noise in the stone
corridor without, which sounded as if a pair of stout working men’s
bluchers were walking in company with a basin and a teaspoon.
“Hush!” said the boy, holding up a warning forefinger, “keep it dark!”
Richard did not exactly know what he was to keep dark; but as he had,
without one effort at resistance, surrendered himself, mentally and
physically, to the direction of his small attendant, he lay perfectly
still, and did not utter a word.
In obedience to this youthful director, he also took his breakfast, to
the last mouthful of the regulation bread, and to the last spoonful of
the regulation coffee--ay, even to the grounds (which, preponderating
in that liquid, formed a species of stratum at the bottom of the basin,
commonly known to the inmates of the asylum as “the thick”)--for as the
boy said, “grounds is strengthening.” Breakfast finished, the asylum
physician came, in the course of his rounds, for his matutinal visit
to Richard’s cell. His skill was entirely at a loss to find any cure
for so strange a disease as that which affected the prisoner. One of
the leading features, however, in this young man’s sickness, had been
an entire loss of appetite, and almost an entire inability to sleep.
When, therefore, he heard that his patient had eaten a good supper,
slept well all night, and had just finished the regulation breakfast,
he said,--
“Come, come, we are getting better, then--our complaint is taking a
turn. We are quiet in our mind, too, eh? Not fretting about Moscow, or
making ourselves unhappy about Waterloo, I hope?”
The asylum doctor was a cheerful easy good-tempered fellow, who
humoured the fancies of his patients, however wild they might be;
and though half the kings in the history of England, and some
sovereigns unchronicled in any history whatever were represented
in the establishment, he was never known to forget the respect due
to a monarch, however condescending that monarch might be. He was,
therefore, a general favourite; and had received more orders of the
Bath and the Garter, in the shape of red tape and scraps of paper, and
more title-deeds, in the way of old curl-papers and bits of newspaper,
than would have served as the stock-in-trade of a marine storekeeper,
with the addition of a few bottles and a black doll. He knew that one
characteristic of Richard’s madness was to fancy himself the chained
eagle of the sea-bound rock, and he thought to humour the patient by
humouring the hallucination.
Richard looked at this gentleman with a thoughtful glance in his dark
eyes.
“I didn’t mind Moscow, sir,” he said, very gravely; “the elements beat
me there--and they were stronger than Hannibal; but at Waterloo, what
broke my heart was--not the defeat, but the disgrace!” He turned away
his head as he spoke, and lay in silence, with his back turned to the
good natured physician.
“No complaints about Sir Hudson Lowe, I hope?” said the medical man.
“They give you everything you want, general?”
The good doctor, being so much in the habit of humouring his patients,
had their titles always at the tip of his tongue; and walked about in a
perfect atmosphere of Pinnock’s Goldsmith.
As the general made no reply to his question, the doctor looked from
him to the boy, who had, out of respect to the medical official,
descended from his pulpit, and stood tugging at a very diminutive lock
of hair, with an action which he intended to represent a bow.
“Does he ask for anything?” asked the doctor.
“Don’t he, sir?” said the boy, answering one question with another.
“He’s been doing nothin’ for ever so long but askin’ for a drop o’
wine. He says he feels a kind of sinkin’ that nothin’ but wine can
cure.”
“He shall have it, then,” said the doctor. “A little port wine with a
touch of iron in it would help to bring him round as soon as anything,
and be sure you see that he takes it. I’ve been giving him quinine for
some time past; but it has done so little towards making him stronger,
that I sometimes doubt his having taken it. Has he complained of
anything else?”
“Well, sir,” said the boy, this time looking at his questioner very
intently, and seeming to consider every word before he said it, “there
is somethin’ which I can make out from what he says when he talks to
hisself--and he does talk to hisself awful--somethin’ which preys upon
his mind very much; but I don’t suppose it’s much good mentioning it
either.” Here he stopped, hesitating, and looking very earnestly at the
doctor.
“Why not, my boy?”
“Because you see, sir, what he hankers after is agen the rules of the
asylum--leastways, the rules the Board makes for such as him.”
“But what is it, my good lad? Tell me what it is he wishes for?” said
the medical man.
“Why, it’s a singular wish, I dare say, sir; but he’s allus a talkin’
about the other lun----” he hesitated, as if out of delicacy towards
Richard, and substituted the word “boarders” for that which he had
been about to use--“and he says, if he could only be allowed to mix
with ’em now and then he’d be as happy as a king. But, of course, as
I was a-tellin’ him when you come in, sir, that’s agen the rules of
the establishment, and in consequence is impossible--’cause why, these
’ere rules is like Swedes and Nasturtiums--[the boy from Slopperton may
possibly have been thinking of the Medes and Persians]--and can’t be
gone agen.”
“I don’t know about that,” said the good-natured doctor. “So, general,”
he added, turning to Richard, who had shifted his position, and now lay
looking at his visitor rather anxiously, “so, general, you would like
to mix with your friends out there?”
“Indeed I should, sir.” Those deep and earnest dark eyes, with which
Richard watched the doctor’s face, were scarcely the eyes of a madman.
“Very well, then,” said the medical man, “very well; we must see
if it can’t be managed. But I say, general, you’ll find the Prince
Regent among your fellow-boarders; and I wouldn’t answer for your not
meeting with Lord Castlereagh, and that might cause unpleasantness--eh,
general?”
“No, no, sir; there’s no fear of that. Political differences should
never----”
“Interfere with private friendship. A noble sentiment, general. Very
well, you shall mix with the other boarders to-morrow. I’ll speak to
the Board about it this afternoon. This, luckily, is a Board-day.
You’ll find George the Fourth a very nice fellow. He came here because
he would take everything of other people’s that he could lay his hands
on, and said he was only taking taxes from his subjects. Good-day. I’ll
send round some port wine immediately, and you shall have a couple of
glasses a day given you; so keep up your spirits, general.”
“Well,” said the boy from Slopperton, as the doctor closed the door
behind him, “that ’ere medical officer’s a regular brick: and all I
can say is to repeat his last words--which ought to be printed in
gold letters a foot high--and those words is,--‘Keep up your spirits,
general.’”
CHAPTER II.
MR. AUGUSTUS DARLEY AND MR. JOSEPH PETERS GO OUT FISHING.
A LONG period of incessant rains had by no means improved the
natural beauties of the Sloshy; nor had it in any manner enhanced
the advantages attending a residence on the banks of that river. The
occupants of the houses by the waterside were in the habit of going to
sleep at night with the firm conviction that the lower portion of their
tenement was a comfortable kitchen, and awakening in the morning were
apt to find it a miniature lake.
Then, again, the river had a knack of dropping in at odd times, in a
friendly way, when least expected--when Mrs. Jones was cooking the
Sunday’s dinner, or while Mrs. Brown was gone to market; and, as its
manner of entering an apartment was, after the fashion of a ghost in
a melodrama, to rise through the floor, the surprise occasioned by its
appearance was not unalloyed by vexation.
It would intrude, an uninvited guest, at a social tea-party, and
suddenly isolate every visitor on his or her chair as on an island.
There was not a mouse or a black-beetle in any of the kitchens by the
Sloshy whose life was worth the holding, such an enemy was the swelling
water to all domestic peace or comfort.
It is true that to some fresh and adventurous spirits the rising of the
river afforded a kind of eccentric gratification. It gave a smack of
the flavour of Venice to the dull insipidity of Slopperton life; and to
an imaginative mind every coal-barge that went by became a gondola, and
only wanted a cavalier, with a very short doublet, pointed shoes, and a
guitar, to make it perfection.
Indeed, Miss Jones, milliner and dressmaker, had been heard to say,
that when she saw the water coming up to the parlour-windows she could
hardly believe she was not really in the city of the winged horses,
round the corner out of the square of St. Mark’s, and three doors from
the Bridge of Sighs. Miss Jones was well up in Venetian topography, as
she was engaged in the perusal of a powerful work in penny numbers,
detailing the adventures of a celebrated ‘Bravo’ of that city.
To the ardent minds of the juvenile denizens of the waterside the
swollen river was a source of pure and unalloyed delight. To take a
tour round one’s own back kitchen in a washing-tub, with a duster
for a sail, is perhaps, at the age of six, a more perfect species of
enjoyment than that afforded by any Alpine glories or Highland scenery
through which we may wander in after-years, when Reason has taught us
her cold lesson, that, however bright the sun may shine on one side of
the mountain, the shadows are awaiting us on the other.
There is a gentleman in a cutaway coat and a white hat, smoking a very
short and black clay pipe, as he loiters on the bank of the Sloshy. I
wonder what he thinks of the river?
It is eight years since this gentleman was last in Slopperton; then
he came as a witness in the trial of Richard Marwood; then he had a
black eye, and was out-at-elbows; now, his optics are surrounded with
no dark shades which mar their natural colour--clear bright grey. Now,
too, he is, to speak familiarly, in high feather. His cutaway coat
of the newest fashion (for there is fashion even in cutaways); his
plaid trousers, painfully tight at the knees, and admirably adapted to
display the development of the calf, are still bright with the greens
and blues of the Macdonald. His hat is not crushed or indented in above
half-a-dozen directions--a sign that it is comparatively new, for the
circle in which he moves considers bonneting a friendly demonstration,
and to knock a man’s hat off his head and into the gutter rather a
polite attention.
Yes, during the last eight years the prospects of Mr. Augustus
Darley--(that is the name of the witness)--have been decidedly looking
up. Eight years ago he was a medical student, loose on wide London;
eating bread-and-cheese and drinking bottled stout in dissecting-rooms,
and chalking up alarming scores at the caravansary round the corner
of Goodge Street--when the proprietor of the caravansary _would_
chalk up. There were days which that stern man refused to mark with a
white stone. Now, he has a dispensary of his own; a marvellous place,
which would be entirely devoted to scientific pursuits if dominoes
and racing calendars did not in some degree predominate therein.
This dispensary is in a populous neighbourhood on the Surrey side
of the water; and in the streets and squares--to say nothing of the
court and mews--round this establishment the name of Augustus Darley
is synonymous with everything which is popular and pleasant. His
very presence is said to be as good as physic. Now, as physic in the
abstract, and apart from its curative qualities, is scarcely a very
pleasant thing, this may be considered rather a doubtful compliment;
but for all that, it was meant in perfect good faith, and what’s more,
it meant a great deal.
When anybody felt ill, he sent for Gus Darley--(he had never been
called Mr. but once in his life, and then by a sheriff’s officer,
who, arresting him for the first time, wasn’t on familiar terms; all
Cursitor Street knew him as “Gus, old fellow,” and “Darley, my boy,”
before long). If the patient was very bad, Gus told him a good story.
If the case seemed a serious one, he sang a comic song. If the patient
felt, in popular parlance, “low,” Darley would stop to supper; and
if by that time the patient was not entirely restored, his medical
adviser would send him a ha’porth of Epsom salts, or three-farthings’
worth of rhubarb and magnesia, jocosely labelled “The Mixture.” It
was a comforting delusion, laboured under by every patient of Gus
Darley’s, that the young surgeon prescribed for him a very mysterious
and peculiar amalgamation of drugs, which, though certain death to any
other man, was the only preparation in the whole pharmacopœia that
could possibly keep him alive.
There was a saying current in the neighbourhood of the dispensary, to
the effect that Gus Darley’s description of the Derby Day was the best
Epsom salts ever invented for the cure of man’s diseases; and he has
been known to come home from the races at ten o’clock at night, and
assist at a sick-bed (successfully), with a wet towel round his head,
and a painful conviction that he was prescribing for two patients at
once.
But all this time he is strolling by the swollen Sloshy, with his
pipe in his mouth and a contemplative face, which ever and anon looks
earnestly up the river. Presently he stops by a boat-builder’s yard,
and speaks to a man at work.
“Well,” he says, “is that boat finished yet?”
“Yes, sir,” says the man, “quite finished, and uncommon well she looks
too; you might eat your dinner off her; the paint’s as dry as a bone.”
“How about the false bottom I spoke of?” he asks.
“Oh, that’s all right, sir, two feet and a half deep, and six feet and
a half long. I’ll tell you what, sir,--no offence--but you must catch
a precious sight more eels than I think you will catch, if you mean to
fill the bottom of that ’ere punt.”
As the man speaks, he points to where the boat lies high and dry in the
builder’s yard. A great awkward flat-bottomed punt, big enough to hold
half-a-dozen people.
Gus strolls up to look at it. The man follows him.
He lifts up the bottom of the boat with a great thick loop of rope. It
is made like a trap-door, two feet and a half above the keel.
“Why,” said Gus, “a man could lie down in the keel of the boat, with
that main deck over him.”
“To be sure he could, sir, and a pretty long un, too; though I don’t
say much for its being a over-comfortable berth. He might feel himself
rather cramped if he was of a restless disposition.”
Gus laughed, and said,--“You’re right, he might, certainly, poor
fellow! Come, now, you’re rather a tall chap, I should like to see if
you could lie down there comfortably for a minute or so. We’ll talk
about some beer when you come out.”
The man looked at Mr. Darley with rather a puzzled glance. He had heard
the legend of the mistletoe bough. He had helped to build the boat, but
for all that there might be a hidden spring somewhere about it, and
Gus’s request might conceal some sinister intent; but no one who had
once looked our medical friend in the face ever doubted him; so the man
laughed and said,--
“Well, you’re a rum un, whoever the other is” (people were rarely very
deferential in their manner of addressing Gus Darley); “howsomedever,
here’s to oblige you.” And the man got into the boat, and lying down,
suffered Gus to lower the false bottom of it over him.
“How do you feel?” asks Gus. “Can you breathe?--have you plenty of air?”
“All right, sir,” says the man through a hole in the plank. “It’s quite
a extensive berth, when you’ve once settled yourself, only it ain’t
much calculated for active exercise.”
“Do you think you could stand it for half an hour?” Gus inquires.
“Lor, bless you, sir! for half-a-dozen hours, if I was paid accordin’.”
“Should you think half-a-crown enough for twenty minutes?”
“Well, I don’t know, sir; suppose you made it three shillings?”
“Very good,” said Gus; “three shillings it shall be. It’s now half-past
twelve;” he looks at his watch as he speaks. “I’ll sit here and smoke a
pipe; and if you lie quiet till ten minutes to one, you’ll have earned
the three bob.”
Gus steps into the boat, and seats himself at the prow; the man’s head
lies at the stern.
“Can you see me?” Gus inquires.
“Yes, sir, when I squints.”
“Very well, then, you can see I don’t make a bolt of it. Make your mind
easy: there’s five minutes gone already.”
Gus finishes his pipe, looks at his watch again--a quarter to one. He
whistles a scena from an opera, and then jumps out of the boat and
pulls up the false bottom.
“All’s right,” he says; “time’s up.”
The man gets out and stretches his legs and arms, as if to convince
himself that those members are unimpaired.
“Well, was it pretty comfortable?” Gus asks.
“Lor’ love you, sir! regular jolly, with the exception of bein’ rather
warm, and makin’ a cove precious dry.”
Gus gives the man wherewith to assuage this drought, and says,--
“You may shove the boat down to the water, then. My friend will be here
in a minute with the tackle, and we can then see about making a start.”
The boat is launched, and the man amuses himself with rowing a few
yards up the river, while Gus waits for his friend.
In about ten minutes his friend arrives, in the person of Mr. Joseph
Peters, of the police force, with a couple of eel-spears over his
shoulder (which give him somewhat the appearance of a dry-land
Neptune), and a good-sized carpet-bag, which he carries in his hand.
Gus and he exchange a few remarks in the silent alphabet, in which Gus
is almost as great an adept as the dumb detective, and they step into
the punt.
The boat-builder’s man is sent for a gallon of beer in a stone bottle,
a half-quartern loaf, and a piece of cheese. These provisions being
shipped, Darley and Peters each take an oar, and they pull away from
the bank and strike out into the middle of the river.
CHAPTER III.
THE EMPEROR BIDS ADIEU TO ELBA.
ON this same day, but at a later hour in the afternoon, Richard
Marwood, better known as the Emperor Napoleon, joined the inmates of
the county asylum in their daily exercise in the grounds allotted for
that purpose. These grounds consisted of prim grass-plots, adorned
with here and there a bed in which some dismal shrubs, or a few sickly
chrysanthemums held up their gloomy heads, beaten and shattered by the
recent heavy rains. These grass-plots were surrounded by stiff straight
gravel-walks; and the whole was shut in by a high wall, surmounted by a
_chevaux-de-frise_. The iron spikes composing this adornment had
been added of late years; for, in spite of the comforts and attractions
of the establishment, some foolish inhabitants thereof, languishing
for gayer and more dazzling scenes, had been known to attempt, if not
to effect, an escape from the numerous advantages of their home. I
cannot venture to say whether or not the vegetable creation may have
some mysterious sympathy with animated nature; but certainly no trees,
shrubs, flowers, grass, or weeds ever grew like the trees, shrubs,
flowers, grass, and weeds in the grounds of the county lunatic asylum.
From the gaunt elm, which stretched out two great rugged arms, as if
in a wild imprecation, such as might come from the lips of some human
victim of the worst form of insanity, to the frivolous chickweed in
a corner of a gravel-walk, which grew as if not a root, or leaf, or
fibre but had a different purpose to its fellow, and flew off at its
own peculiar tangent, with an infantine and kittenish madness, such
as might have afflicted a love-sick miss of seventeen; from the great
melancholy mad laurel-bushes that rocked themselves to and fro in the
wind with a restlessness known only to the insane, to the eccentric
dandelions that reared their disordered heads from amidst the troubled
and dishevelled grass--every green thing in that great place seemed
more or less a victim to that terrible disease whose influence is of
so subtle a nature, that it infects the very stones of the dark walls
which shut in shattered minds that once were strong and whole, and
fallen intellects that once were bright and lofty.
But as a stranger to this place, looking for the first time at the
groups of men and women lounging slowly up and down these gravel-walks,
perhaps what most startles you, perhaps even what most distresses you,
is, that these wretched people scarcely seem unhappy. Oh, merciful
and wondrous wise dispensation from Him who fits the back to bear the
burden! He so appoints it. The man, whose doubts or fears, or wild
aspirings to the misty far away, all the world’s wisdom could not
yesterday appease, is to-day made happy by a scrap of paper or a shred
of ribbon. We who, standing in the blessed light, look in upon this
piteous mental darkness, are perhaps most unhappy, because we cannot
tell how much or how little sorrow this death-in-life may shroud. They
have passed away from us; their language is not our language, nor their
world our world. I think some one has asked a strange question--Who can
tell whether their folly may not perhaps be better than our wisdom? He
only, from whose mighty hand comes the music of every soul, can tell
which is the discord and which the harmony. We look at them as we look
at all else--through the darkened glass of earth’s uncertainty.
No, they do not seem unhappy. Queen Victoria is talking to Lady Jane
Grey about to-day’s dinner, and the reprehensible superabundance of
fat in a leg-of-mutton served up thereat. Chronology never disturbs
these good people; nobody thinks it any disgrace to be an anachronism.
Lord Brougham will divide an unripe apple with Cicero, and William the
Conqueror will walk arm-in-arm with Pius the Ninth, without the least
uneasiness on the score of probability; and when, on one occasion, a
gentleman, who for three years had enjoyed considerable popularity as
Cardinal Wolsey, all of a sudden recovered, and confessed to being
plain John Thomson, the inmates of the asylum were unanimous in feeling
and expressing the most profound contempt for his unhappy state.
To-day, however, Richard is the hero. He is surrounded immediately
on his appearance by all the celebrities and a great many of the
non-celebrities of the establishment. The Emperor of the German Ocean
and the Chelsea Waterworks in particular has so much to say to him,
that he does not know how to begin; and when he does begin, has to go
back and begin again, in a manner both affable and bewildering.
Why did not Richard join them before, he asks--they are so very
pleasant, they are so very social; why, in goodness-gracious’ name (he
opens his eyes very wide as he utters the name of goodness-gracious,
and looks back over his shoulder rather as if he thinks he may have
invoked some fiend), why did not Richard join them?
Richard tells him he was not allowed to do so.
On this, the potentate looks intensely mysterious. He is rather
stout, and wears a head-dress of has own manufacture--a species of
coronet, constructed of a newspaper and a blue-and-white bird’s-eye
pocket-handkerchief. He puts his hands to the very furthest extent
that he can push them into his trousers-pockets; plants himself right
before Richard on the gravel-walk, and says, with a wink of intense
significance, “Was it the Khan?”
Richard says, he thinks not.
“Not the Khan!” he mutters thoughtfully. “You really are of opinion
that it was not the Khan?”
“I really am,” Richard replies.
“Then it lies between the last Duke of Devonshire but sixteen and
Abd-el-Kader: I do hope it wasn’t Abd-el-Kader; I had a better opinion
of Abd-el-Kader--I had indeed.”
Richard looks rather puzzled, but says nothing.
“There has evidently,” continued his friend, “been some malignant
influence at work to prevent your appearing amongst us before this.
You have been a member of this society for, let me see, three hundred
and sixty-three years--be kind enough to set me right if I make a
mis-statement--three hundred and--did I say seventy-twelve years?--and
you have never yet joined us! Now, there is something radically
wrong here; to use the language of the ancients in their religious
festivals, there is ‘a screw loose.’ You ought to have joined us,
you really ought! We are very social; we are positively buoyant;
we have a ball every evening. Well, no, perhaps it is not every
evening. My ideas as to time, I am told, are vague; but I know it is
either every ten years, or every other week. I incline to thinking
it must be every other week. On these occasions we dance. Are you
a votary of Terp--what-you-may-call-her, the lady who had so many
unmarried sisters? Do you incline to the light fantastic?” By way of
illustration, the Emperor of the Waterworks executed a caper, which
would have done honour to an elderly elephant taking his first lesson
in the polka.
There was one advantage in conversing with this gentleman. If his
questions were sometimes of rather a difficult and puzzling nature,
he never did anything so under-bred as to wait for an answer. It now
appeared for the first time to strike him, that perhaps the laws of
exclusiveness had in some manner been violated, by a person of his
distinction having talked so familiarly to an entire stranger; he
therefore suddenly skipped a pace or two backwards, leaving a track
of small open graves in the damp gravel made by the impression of
his feet, and said, in a tone of voice so dignified as to be almost
freezing--
“Pray, to whom have I the honour to make these observations?”
Richard regretted to say he had not a card about him, but added--“You
may have heard of the Emperor Napoleon?”
“Buonaparte? Oh, certainly; very frequently, very frequently: and you
are that worthy person? Dear me! this is very sad. Not at your charming
summer residence at Moscow, or your pleasant winter retreat on the
field of Waterloo: this is really distressing, very.”
His pity for Richard was so intense, that he was moved to tears, and
picked a dandelion with which to wipe his eyes.
“My Chelsea property,” he said presently, “is fluctuating--very. I find
a tendency in householders to submit to having their water cut off,
rather than pay the rate. Our only plan is to empty every cistern half
an hour before tea-time. Persevered in for a week or so, we find that
course has a harassing effect, and they pay. But all this is wearing
for the nerves--very.”
He shook his head solemnly, rubbed his eyes very hard with the
dandelion, and then ate that exotic blossom.
“An agreeable tonic,” he said; “known to be conducive to digestion. My
German Ocean I find more profitable, on account of the sea-bathing.”
Richard expressed himself very much interested in the commercial
prospects of his distinguished friend; but at this moment they were
interrupted by the approach of a lady, who, with a peculiar hop, skip,
and jump entirely her own, came up to the Emperor of the Waterworks and
took hold of his arm.
She was a gushing thing of some forty-odd summers, and wore a bonnet,
the very purchase of which would have stamped her as of unsound
intellect, without need of any further proof whatever. To say that
it was like a coal-scuttle was nothing; to say that it resembled a
coal-scuttle which had suffered from an aggravated attack of water on
the brain, and gone mad, would be perhaps a little nearer the mark.
Imagine such a bonnet adorned with a green veil, rather bigger than an
ordinary table cloth, and three quill pens tastefully inserted in the
direction in which Parisian milliners are wont to place the plumage of
foreign birds--and you may form some idea of the lady’s head-gear. Her
robes were short and scanty, but plentifully embellished with a species
of trimming, which to an ordinary mind suggested strips of calico, but
which amongst the inmates passed current as Valenciennes lace. Below
these robes appeared a pair of apple-green boots--boots of a pattern
such as no shoemaker of sound mind ever in his wildest dreams could
have originated, but which in this establishment were voted rather
recherché than otherwise. This lady was no other than the damsel who
had suggested an elopement with Richard some eight years ago, and who
claimed for her distinguished connections the Pope and the muffin-man.
“Well,” she said to the Emperor of the Waterworks, with a voice and
manner which would have been rather absurdly juvenile in a girl of
fifteen,--“and where has its precious one been hiding since dinner?
Was it the fat mutton which rendered the most brilliant of mankind
unfit for general society; or was it that it ‘had a heart for falsehood
framed?’ I hope it was the fat mutton.”
“It’s precious one” looked from the charmer at his side to Richard,
with rather an apologetic shrug.
“The sex is weak,” he said, “conqueror of Agincourt--I beg pardon,
Waterloo. The sex is weak: it is a fact established alike by medical
science and political economy. Poor thing! she loves me.”
The lady, for the first time, became aware of the presence of Richard.
She dropped a very low curtesy, in the performance of which one of the
green boots described a complete circle, and said--
“From Gloucestershire, sir?” interrogatively.
“The Emperor Napoleon Buonaparte,” said the proprietor of the German
Ocean. “My dear, you ought to know him.”
“The Emperor Nap-o-le-on Bu-o-na-parte,” she said very slowly,
checking off the syllables on her fingers, “and from Gloucestershire?
How gratifying! All our great men come from Gloucestershire. It is
a well-known fact--from Gloucestershire? Muffins were invented in
Gloucestershire by Alfred the Great. Did you know our dear Alfred?
You are perhaps too young--a great loss, my dear sir, a great loss;
conglomerated essence of toothache on the cerebral nerves took him off
in fourteen days, three weeks, and one month. We tried everything,
from dandelions--(her eyes wandered as if searching the grounds
for information as to what they had tried)--from dandelions to
chevaux-de-frise--”
She stopped abruptly, staring Richard full in the face, as if she
expected him to say something; but as he said nothing, she became
suddenly interested in the contemplation of the green boots, looking
first at one and then at the other, as if revolving in her mind the
probability of their wanting mending.
Presently she looked up, and said with great solemnity--
“Do you know the muffin-man?”
Richard shook his head.
“He lives in Drury Lane,” she added, looking at him rather sternly, as
much as to say, “Come, no nonsense! you know him well enough!”
“No,” said Richard, “I don’t remember having met him.”
“There are seventy-nine of us who know the muffin-man in this
establishment, sir--seventy-nine; and do you dare to stand there and
tell me that you----”
“I assure you, madam, I have not the honour of his acquaintance.”
“Not know the muffin-man!--you don’t know the muffin-man! Why, you
contemptible stuck-up jackanapes----”
What the lady might have gone on to say, it would be difficult to
guess. She was not celebrated for the refinement of her vocabulary
when much provoked; but at this moment a great stout man, one of the
keepers, came up, and cried out--
“Holloa! what’s all this!”
“He says he doesn’t know the muffin-man!” exclaimed the lady, her veil
flying in the wind like a pennant, her arms akimbo, and the apple-green
boots planted in a defiant manner on the gravel-walk.
“Oh, we know him well enough,” said the man, with a wink at Richard,
“and very slack he bakes his muffins.” Having uttered which piece
of information connected with the gentleman in question, the keeper
strolled off, giving just one steady look straight into the eyes of the
lively damsel, which seemed to have an instantaneous and most soothing
effect upon her nerves.
As all the lunatics allowed to disport themselves for an hour in the
gardens of the establishment were considered to be, upon the whole,
pretty safe, the keepers were not in the habit of taking much notice
of them. Those officials would congregate in little groups here and
there, talking among themselves, and apparently utterly regardless of
the unhappy beings over whom it was their duty to watch. But let Queen
Victoria or the Emperor Nero, Lady Jane Grey or Lord John Russell,
suffer themselves to be led away by their respective hobbies, or to
ride those animals at too outrageous and dangerous a pace, and a
strong hand would be laid upon the rider’s shoulder, accompanied by a
recommendation to “go indoors,” which was very seldom disregarded.
As Richard was this afternoon permitted to mix with his
fellow-prisoners for the first time, the boy from Slopperton was
ordered to keep an eye upon him; and a very sharp eye the boy kept,
never for one moment allowing a look, word, or action of the prisoner
to escape him.
The keepers this afternoon were assembled near the portico, before
which the gardens extended to the high outer wall. The ground between
the portico and the wall was a little less than a quarter of a mile
in length, and at the bottom was the grand entrance and the porter’s
lodge. The gardens surrounded the house on three sides, and on the left
side the wall ran parallel with the river Sloshy. This river was now so
much swollen by the late heavy rains that the waters washed the wall to
the height of four feet, entirely covering the towing-path, which lay
ordinarily between the wall and the waterside.
Now Richard and the Emperor of the Waterworks, accompanied by the
gushing charmer in the green boots, being all three engaged in friendly
though rather erratic conversation, happened to stroll in the direction
of the grounds on this side, and consequently out of sight of the
keepers.
The boy from Slopperton was, however, close upon their heels. This
young gentleman had his hands in his pockets, and was loitering and
lounging along with an air which seemed to say, that neither man nor
woman gave him any more delight than they had afforded the Danish
prince of used-up memory. Perhaps it was in utter weariness of life
that he was, as if unconsciously, employed in whistling the melody of
a song, supposed to relate to a passage in the life of a young lady of
the name of Gray, christian name Alice, whose heart it was another’s,
and consequently, by pure logic, never could belong to the singer.
Now there may be something infectious in this melody; for no sooner had
the boy from Slopperton whistled the first few bars, than some person
in the distance outside the walls of the asylum gardens took up the
air and finished it. A trifling circumstance this in itself; but it
appeared to afford the boy considerable gratification; and he presently
came suddenly upon Richard in the middle of a very interesting
conversation, and whispered in his ear, or rather at his elbow, “All
right, general!” Now as Richard, the Emperor of the Waterworks, and
the only daughter of the Pope all talked at once, and all talked of
entirely different subjects, their conversation might, perhaps, have
been just a little distracting to a short-hand reporter; but as a
conversation, it was really charming.
Richard--still musing on the wild idea which was known in the asylum
to have possessed his disordered brain ever since the day of his
trial--was giving his companions an account of his escape from Elba.
“I was determined,” he said, taking the Emperor of the Waterworks by
the button, “I was determined to make one desperate effort to return to
my friends in France----”
“Very creditable, to be sure,” said the damsel of the green boots;
“your sentiments did you honour.”
“But to escape from the island was an enterprise of considerable
difficulty,” continued Richard.
“Of course,” said the damsel, “considering the price of flour. Flour
rose a half-penny in the bushel in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane,
which, of course, reduced the size of muffins----”
“And had a depressing effect upon the water-rates,” interrupted the
gentleman.
“Now,” continued Richard, “the island of Elba was surrounded by a high
wall----”
“A very convenient arrangement; of course facilitating the process of
cutting off the water from the inhabitants,” muttered the Emperor of
the German Ocean.
The boy Slosh again expressed his feelings with reference to Alice
Gray, and some one on the other side of the wall coincided with him.
“And,” said Richard, “on the top of this wall was a chevaux-de-frise.”
“Dear me,” exclaimed the Emperor, “quite a what-you-may-call-it. I mean
an extraordinary coincidence; we too have a chevaux-de-thing-a-me, for
the purpose, I believe, of keeping out the cats. Cats are unpleasant;
especially,” he added, thoughtfully, “especially the Tom-sex--I mean
the sterner sex.”
“To surmount this wall was my great difficulty.”
“Naturally, naturally,” said the damsel, “a great undertaking,
considering the fall in muffins--a dangerous undertaking.”
“There was a boat waiting to receive me on the other side,” said
Richard, glancing at the wall, which was about a hundred yards distant
from him.
Some person on the other side of the wall had got a good deal nearer by
this time; and, dear me, how very much excited he was about Alice Gray.
“But the question,” Richard continued, “was how to climb the
wall,”--still looking up at the chevaux-de-frise.
“I should have tried muffins,” said the lady.
“I should have cut off the water,” remarked the gentleman.
“I did neither,” said Richard; “I tried a rope.”
At this very moment, by some invisible agency, a thickly-knotted rope
was thrown across the chevaux-de-frise, and the end fell within about
four feet of the ground.
“But her heart it is another’s, and it never can be mine.”
The gentleman who couldn’t succeed in winning the affections of Miss
Gray was evidently close to the wall now.
In a much shorter time than the very greatest master in the art of
stenography could possibly have reported the occurrence, Richard threw
the Emperor of the Waterworks half-a-dozen yards from him, with such
violence as to cause that gentleman to trip-up the heels of the only
daughter of the Pope, and fall in a heap upon that lady as on a feather
bed; and then, with the activity of a cat or a sailor, clambered up the
rope, and disappeared over the chevaux-de-frise.
The gentleman outside was now growing indifferent to the loss of Miss
Gray, for he whistled the melody in a most triumphant manner, keeping
time with the sharp plash of his oars in the water.
It took the Emperor and his female friend some little time to recover
from the effects of the concussion they had experienced, each from
each; and when they had done so, they stood for a few moments looking
at one another in mute amazement.
“The gentleman has left the establishment,” at last said the lady.
“And a bruise on my elbow,” muttered the gentleman, rubbing the
locality in question.
“Such a very unpolite manner of leaving too,” said the lady. “His
muffins--I mean his manners--have evidently been very much neglected.”
“He must be a Chelsea householder,” said the Emperor. “The householders
of Chelsea are proverbial for bad manners. They are in the habit of
slamming the door in the face of the tax-gatherer, with a view to
injuring the tip of his nose; and I’m sure Lord Chesterfield never
advised his son to do that.”
It may be as well here to state that the Emperor of the Waterworks had
in early life been collector of the water-rate in the neighbourhood
of Chelsea; but having unfortunately given his manly intellect to
drinking, and being further troubled with a propensity for speculation
(some people pronounced the word without the first letter), which
involved the advantageous laying-out of his sovereign’s money for his
own benefit, he had first lost his situation and ultimately his senses.
His lady friend had once kept a baker’s shop in the vicinity of Drury
Lane, and happening, in an evil hour, at the ripe age of forty, to
place her affections on a young man of nineteen, the bent of whose
genius was muffins, and being slighted by the youth in question, she
had retired into the gin-bottle, and thence had been passed to the
asylum of her native country.
Perhaps the inquiring reader will ask what the juvenile guardian of
Richard is doing all this time? He has been told to keep an eye upon
him; and how has he kept his trust?
He is standing, very coolly, staring at the lady and gentleman before
him, and is apparently much interested in their conversation.
“I shall certainly go,” said the Emperor of the Waterworks, after
a pause, “and inform the superintendent of this proceeding--the
superintendent ought really to know of it.”
“Superintendent” was, in the asylum, the polite name given the keepers.
But just as the Emperor began to shamble off in the direction of the
front of the house, the boy called Slosh flew past him and ran on
before, and by the time the elderly gentleman reached the porch, the
boy had told the astonished keepers the whole story of the escape.
The keepers ran down to the gate, called to the porter to have it
opened, and in a few minutes were in the road in front of it. They
hurried thence to the river-side. There was not a sign of any human
being on the swollen waters, except two men in a punt close to the
opposite shore, who appeared to be eel-spearing.
“There’s no boat nearer than that,” said one of the men; “he never
could have reached that in this time if he had been the best swimmer in
England.”
The men took it for granted that they had been informed of his escape
the moment it occurred.
“He must have jumped slap into the water,” said another; “perhaps he’s
about somewhere, contriving to keep his head under.”
“He couldn’t do it,” said the first man who had spoken; “it’s my
opinion the poor chap’s drowned. They will try these escapes, though no
one ever succeeded yet.”
There was a boat moored at the angle of the asylum wall, and one of the
men sprang into it.
“Show me the place where he jumped over the wall,” he called to the
boy, who pointed out the spot at his direction.
The man rowed up to it.
“Not a sign of him anywhere about here!” he cried.
“Hadn’t you better call to those men?” asked his comrade; “they must
have seen him jump.”
The man in the boat nodded assent, and rowed across the river to the
two fishermen.
“Holloa!” he said, “have you seen any one get over that wall?”
One of the men, who had just impaled a fine eel, looked up with a
surprised expression, and asked--
“Which wall?”
“Why the asylum, yonder, straight before you.”
“The asylum! Now, you don’t mean to say that that’s the asylum; and
I’ve been taking it for a gentleman’s mansion and grounds all the
time,” said the angler (who was no other than Mr. Augustus Darley),
taking his pipe out of his mouth.
“I wish you’d give a straight answer to my question,” said the man;
“have you seen any one jump over that wall; yes, or no?”
“Then, no!” said Gus; “if I had, I should have gone over and picked him
up, shouldn’t I, stupid?”
The other fisherman, Mr. Peters, here looked up, and laying down his
eel-spear, spelt out some words on his fingers.
“Stop a bit,” cried Gus to the man, who was rowing off, “here’s my
friend says he heard a splash in the water ten minutes ago, and thought
it was some rubbish shot over the wall.”
“Then he did jump! Poor chap, I’m afraid he must be drowned.”
“Drowned?”
“Yes; don’t I tell you one of the lunatics has been trying to escape
over that wall, and must have fallen into the river?”
“Why didn’t you say so before, then?” said Gus. “What’s to be done?
Where are there any drags?”
“Why, half a mile off, worse luck, at a public-house down the river,
the ‘Jolly Life-boat.’”
“Then I’ll tell you what,” said Gus, “my friend and I will row down and
fetch the drags, while you chaps keep a look-out about here.”
“You’re very good, sir,” said the man; “dragging the river’s about all
we can do now, for it strikes me we’ve seen the last of the Emperor
Napoleon. My eyes! won’t there be a row about it with the Board!”
“Here we go,” says Gus; “keep a good heart; he may turn up yet;” with
which encouraging remarks Messrs. Darley and Peters struck off at a
rate which promised the speedy arrival of the drags.
CHAPTER IV.
JOY AND HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY.
WHETHER the drags reached the county asylum in time to be of any
service is still a mystery; but Mr. Joseph Peters arrived with the punt
at the boat-builder’s yard in the dusk of the autumn evening. He was
alone, and he left his boat, his tridents, and other fishing-tackle in
the care of the men belonging to the yard, and then putting his hands
in his pockets, trudged off in the direction of Little Gulliver Street.
If ever Mr. Peters had looked triumphant in his life, he looked
triumphant this evening: if ever his mouth had been on one side, it was
on one side this evening; but it was the twist of a conqueror which
distorted that feature.
Eight years, too, have done something for Kuppins. Time hasn’t
forgotten Kuppins, though she is a humble individual. Time has touched
up Kuppins; adding a little bit here, and taking away a little bit
there, and altogether producing something rather imposing. Kuppins
has grown. When that young lady had attained her tenth year, there
was a legend current in little Gulliver Street and its vicinity, that
in consequence of a fatal predilection for gin-and-bitters evinced
by her mother during the infancy of Kuppins, that diminutive person
would never grow any more: but she gave the lie both to the legend
and the gin-and-bitters by outgrowing her frocks at the advanced age
of seventeen; and now she was rather a bouncing young woman than
otherwise, and had a pair of such rosy cheeks as would have done honour
to healthier breezes than those of Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy.
Time had done something, too, for Kuppins’s shock of hair, for it
was now brushed, and combed, and dragged, and tortured into a state
not so very far from smoothness; and it was furthermore turned up; an
achievement in the hair-dressing line which it had taken her some years
to effect, and which, when effected, was perhaps a little calculated to
remind the admiring beholder of a good-sized ball of black cotton with
a hair-pin stuck through it.
What made Kuppins in such a state of excitement on this particular
evening, who shall say? Certain it is that she was excited. At the
first sound of the click of Mr. Peters’s latch-key in the door of No.
5, Little Gulliver Street, Kuppins, with a lighted candle, flew to open
it. How she threw her arms round Mr. Peters’s neck and kissed him--how
she left a lump of tallow in his hair, and a smell of burning in his
whiskers--how, in her excitement she blew the candle out--and how, by
a feat of leger-de-main, or leger-de-lungs, she blew it in again, must
have been seen to be sufficiently appreciated. Her next proceeding was
to drag Mr. Peters upstairs into the indoor Eden, which bore the very
same appearance it had done eight years ago. One almost expected to
find the red baby grown up--but it wasn’t; and that dreadful attack
of the mumps from which the infant had suffered when Mr. Peters first
became acquainted with it did not appear to have abated in the least.
Kuppins thrust the detective into his own particular chair, planted
herself in an opposite seat, put the candlestick on the table, snuffed
the candle, and then, with her eyes opened to the widest extent,
evidently awaited his saying something.
He did say something--in his own way, of course; the fingers went to
work. “I’ve d----” said the fingers.
“_’One_ it,” cried Kuppins, dreadfully excited by this time, “done
it! you’ve done it! Didn’t I always say you would? Didn’t I know you
would? Didn’t I always dream you would, three times running, and a
house on fire?--that meant the river; and an army of soldiers--that
meant the boat; and everybody in black clothes--meaning joy and
happiness. It’s come true; it’s all come out. Oh, I’m so happy!” In
proof of which Kuppins immediately commenced a series of evolutions
of the limbs and exercises of the human voice, popularly known in the
neighbourhood as strong hysterics--so strong, in fact, that Mr. Peters
couldn’t have held her still if he had tried. Perhaps that’s why he
didn’t try; but he looked about in every direction for something cold
to put down her back, and finding nothing handy but the poker, he
stirred her up with that in the neighbourhood of the spinal marrow, as
if she had been a bad fire; whereon she came to.
“And where’s the blessed boy?” she asked, presently.
Mr. Peters signified upon his fingers that the blessed boy was still
at the asylum, and that there he must remain till such time as he
should be able to leave without raising suspicion.
“And to think,” said Kuppins, “that we should have seen the
advertisement for a boy to wait upon poor Mr. Marwood; and to think
that we should have thought of sending our Slosh to take the situation;
and to think that he should have been so clever in helping you through
with it! Oh my!” As Kuppins here evinced a desire for a second edition
of the hysterics, Mr. Peters changed the conversation by looking
inquiringly towards a couple of saucepans on the fire.
“Tripe,” said Kuppins, answering the look, “and taters, floury ones;”
whereon she began to lay the supper-table. Kuppins was almost mistress
of the house now, for the elderly proprietress was a sufferer from
rheumatism, and kept to her room, enlivened by the society of a large
black cat, and such gossip as Kuppins collected about the neighbourhood
in the course of the day and retailed to her mistress in the evening.
So we leave Mr. Peters smoking his pipe and roasting his legs at his
own hearth, while Kuppins dishes the tripe and onions, and strips the
floury potatoes of their russet jackets.
Where all this time is the Emperor Napoleon?
There are two gentlemen pacing up and down the platform of the
Birmingham station, waiting for the 10 p.m. London express. One of them
is Mr. Augustus Darley; the other is a man wrapped in a greatcoat, who
has red hair and whiskers, and wears a pair of spectacles; but behind
these spectacles there are dark brown eyes, which scarcely match the
red hair, any better than the pale dark complexion agrees with the very
roseate hue of the whiskers. These two gentlemen have come across the
country from a little station a few miles from Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy.
“Well, Dick,” said Darley, “doesn’t this bring back old times, my boy?”
The red-haired gentleman, who was smoking a cigar, took it from his
mouth and clasped his companion by the hand, and said--
“It does, Gus, old fellow; and when I forget the share you’ve had in
to-day’s work, may I----may I go back to that place and eat out my own
heart, as I have done for eight years!”
There was something so very like a mist behind his spectacles, and such
an ominous thickness in his voice, as the red-haired gentleman said
this, that Gus proposed a glass of brandy before the train started.
“Come, Dick, old fellow, you’re quite womanish to-night, I declare.
This won’t do, you know. I shall have to knock up some of our old pals
and make a jolly night of it, when we get to London; though it will be
to-morrow morning if you go on in this way.”
“I’ll tell you what it is, Gus,” replied the red-haired gentleman,
“nobody who hadn’t gone through what I’ve gone through could tell
what I feel to-night. I think, Gus, I shall end by being mad in real
earnest; and that my release will do what my imprisonment even couldn’t
effect--turn my brain. But I say, Gus, tell me, tell me the truth; did
any of the old fellows--did they ever think me guilty?”
“Not one of them, Dick, not one; and I know if one of them had so much
as hinted at such a thought, the others would have throttled him before
he could have said the words. Have another drop of brandy,” he said
hastily, thrusting the glass into his hand; “you’ve no more pluck than
a kitten or a woman, Dick.”
“I had pluck enough to bear eight years of that,” said the young man,
pointing in the direction of Slopperton, “but this does rather knock me
over. My mother, you’ll write to her, Gus--the sight of my hand might
upset her, without a word of warning--you’ll write and tell her that
I’ve got a chance of escaping; and then you’ll write and say that I
have escaped. We must guard against a shock, Gus; she has suffered too
much already on my account.”
At this moment the bell rang for the train’s starting: the young men
took their seats in a second-class carriage; and away sped the engine,
out through the dingy manufacturing town, into the open moonlit country.
Gus and Richard light their cigars, and wrap themselves in their
railway rugs. Gus throws himself back and drops off to sleep (he can
almost smoke in his sleep), and in a quarter of an hour he is dreaming
of a fidgety patient who doesn’t like comic songs, and who can never
see the point of a joke; but who has three pretty daughters, and who
pays his bill every Christmas without even looking at the items.
But Richard Marwood doesn’t go to sleep. Will he ever sleep again? Will
his nerves ever regain their tranquillity, after the intense excitement
of the last three or four days? He looks back--looks back at that
hideous time, and wonders at its hopeless suffering--wonders till he is
obliged to wrench his mind away from the subject, for fear he should go
mad. How did he ever endure it? How did he ever live through it? He had
no means of suicide? Pshaw! he might have dashed out his brains against
the wall. He might have resolutely refused food, and so have starved
himself to death. How did he endure it. Eight years! Eight centuries!
and every hour a fresh age of anguish! Looking back now, he knows,
what then he did not know, that at the worst--that in his bitterest
despair, there was a vague undefined something, so vague and undefined
that he did not recognise it for itself--a glimmering ray of hope, by
the aid of which alone he bore the dreadful burden of his days; and
with clasped hands and bent head he renders up to that God from whose
pity came this distant light a thanksgiving, which perhaps is not the
less sincere and heartfelt for a hundred reckless words, said long ago,
which rise up now in his mind a shame and a reproach.
Perhaps it was such a trial as this that Richard Marwood wanted, to
make him a good and earnest man. Something to awaken dormant energies;
something to arouse the better feelings of a noble soul, to stimulate
to action an intellect hitherto wasted; something to throw him back
upon the God he had forgotten, and to make him ultimately that which
God, in creating such a man, meant him to become.
Away flies the engine. Was there ever such an open country? Was there
ever such a moonlight night? Was earth ever so fair, or the heavens
ever so bright, since man’s universe was created? Not for Richard! He
is free; free to breathe that blessed air; to walk that glorious earth;
free to track to his doom the murderer of his uncle.
In the dead of the night the express train rattles into the Euston
Square station; Richard and Gus spring out, and jump into a cab. Even
smoky London, asleep under the moonlight, is beautiful in the eyes of
Daredevil Dick, as they rattle through the deserted streets on the way
to their destination.
CHAPTER V.
THE CHEROKEES TAKE AN OATH.
THE cab stops in a narrow street in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane,
before the door of a small public-house, which announces itself, in
tarnished gilt letters on a dirty board, as “The Cherokee, by Jim
Stilson.” Jim Stilson is a very distinguished professor of the noble
art of self-defence; and (in consequence of a peculiar playful knack
he has with his dexter fist) is better known to his friends and the
general public as the Left-handed Smasher.
Of course, at this hour of the night, the respectable hostelry is
wrapped in that repose which befits the house of a landlord who puts
up his shutters and locks his door as punctually as the clocks of St.
Mary-le-Strand and St. Clement Danes strike the midnight hour. There
is not so much as the faintest glimmer of a rushlight in one of the
upper windows; but for all that, Richard and Darley alight, and having
dismissed the cab, Gus looks up and down the street to see that it
is clear, puts his lips to the keyhole of the door of Mr. Stilson’s
hostelry, and gives an excellent imitation of the feeble miaow of an
invalid member of the feline species.
Perhaps the Left-handed Smasher is tender-hearted, and nourishes
an affection for distressed grimalkins; for the door is softly
opened--just wide enough to admit Richard and his friend.
The person who opens the door is a young lady, who has apparently
been surprised in the act of putting her hair in curl-papers, as
she hurriedly thrusts her brush and comb in among the biscuits and
meat-pies in a corner of the bar. She is evidently very sleepy, and
rather inclined to yawn in Mr. Augustus Darley’s face; but as soon as
they are safe inside, she fastens the door and resumes her station
behind the bar. There is only one gas-lamp alight, and it is rather
difficult to believe that the gentleman seated in the easy-chair
before an expiring fire in the bar-parlour, his noble head covered
with a red cotton bandanna, is neither more nor less than the immortal
Left-handed one; but he snores loud enough for the whole prize-ring,
and the nervous listener is inclined to wish that he had made a point
of clearing his head before he went to sleep.
“Well, Sophia Maria,” says Mr. Darley, “are they all up there?”
pointing in the direction of a door that leads to the stairs.
“Most every one of ’em, sir; there’s no getting ’em to break up, nohow.
Mr. Splitters has been and wrote a drama for the Victoria Theayter, and
they’ve been a-chaffing of him awful because there’s fifteen murders,
and four low-comedy servants that all say, ‘No you don’t,’ in it. The
guv’nor had to go up just now, and talk to ’em, for they was a throwin’
quart pots at each other, playful.”
“Then I’ll run up, and speak to them for a minute,” said Gus. “Come
along, Dick.”
“How about your friend, sir,” remonstrated the Smasher’s Hebe; “he
isn’t a Cheerful, is he, sir?”
“Oh, I’ll answer for him,” said Gus. “It’s all right, Sophia Maria;
bring us a couple of glasses of brandy-and-water hot, and tell the
Smasher to step up, when I ring the bell.”
Sophia Maria looked doubtfully from Gus to the slumbering host, and
said--
“He’ll wake up savage if I disturb him. He’s off for his first sleep
now, and he’ll go to bed as soon as the place is clear.”
“Never mind, Sophia; wake him up when I ring, and send him upstairs;
he’ll find something there to put him in a good temper. Come, Dick,
tumble up. You know the way.”
The Cheerful Cherokees made their proximity known by such a stifling
atmosphere of tobacco about the staircase as would have certainly
suffocated anyone not initiated in their mysteries. Gus opened the
door of a back room on the first floor, of a much larger size than
the general appearance of the house would have promised. This room was
full of gentlemen, who, in age, size, costume, and personal advantages,
varied as much as it is possible for any one roomful of gentlemen to
do. Some of them were playing billiards; some of them were looking on,
betting on the players; or more often upbraiding them for such play
as, in the Cheerful dialect, came under the sweeping denunciation of
the Cherokee adjective “duffing.” Some of them were eating a peculiar
compound entitled “Welsh rarebit”--a pleasant preparation, if it had
not painfully reminded the casual observer of mustard-poultices, or
yellow soap in a state of solution--while lively friends knocked the
ashes of their pipes into their plates, abstracted their porter just
as they were about to imbibe that beverage, and in like fascinating
manner beguiled the festive hour. One gentleman, a young Cherokee, had
had a rarebit, and had gone to sleep with his head in his plate and his
eyebrows in his mustard. Some were playing cards; some were playing
dominoes; one gentleman was in tears, because the double six he wished
to play had fallen into a neighbouring spittoon, and he lacked either
the moral courage or the physical energy requisite for picking it up;
but as, with the exception of the sleepy gentleman, everybody was
talking very loud and on an entirely different subject, the effect was
lively, not to say distracting.
“Gentlemen,” said Gus, “I have the honour of bringing a friend, whom I
wish to introduce to you.”
“All right, Gus!” said the gentleman engaged at dominoes, “that’s the
cove I ought to play,” and fixing one half-open eye on the spotted
ivory, he lapsed into a series of imbecile imprecations on everybody in
general, and the domino in particular.
Richard took a seat at a little distance from this gentleman, and at
the bottom of the long table--a seat sacred on grand occasions to the
vice-chairman. Some rather noisy lookers-on at the billiards were a
little inclined to resent this, and muttered something about Dick’s red
wig and whiskers, in connection with the popular accompaniments to a
boiled round of beef.
“I say, Darley,” cried a gentleman, who held a billiard-cue in his
hand, and had been for some time impotently endeavouring to smooth his
hair with the same. “I say, old fellow, I hope your friend’s committed
a murder or two, because then Splitters can put him in a new piece.”
Splitters, who had for four hours been in a state of abject misery,
from the unmerciful allusions to his last _chef d’œuvre_, gave
a growl from a distant corner of the table, where he was seeking
consolation in everybody else’s glass; and as everybody drank a
different beverage, was not improving his state of mind thereby.
“My friend never committed a murder in his life, Splitters, so he
won’t dramatize on that score; but he’s been accused of one; and he’s
as innocent as you are, who never murdered any thing in your life but
Lindley Murray and the language of your country.”
“Who’s been murdering somebody?” said the domino-player, passing his
left hand through his hair, till his chevelure resembled a turk’s-head
broom. “Who’s murdered? I wish everybody was; and that I could dance
my favourite dance upon their graves. Blow that double-six; he’s the
fellow I ought to play.”
“Perhaps you’ll give us your auburn-haired friend’s name, Darley,” said
a gentleman with his mouth full of Welsh rarebit; “he doesn’t seem too
brilliant to live; he’d better have gone to the ‘Deadly Livelies,’ in
the other street.” The “Deadly Livelies” was the sobriquet of a rival
club, which plumed itself on being a cut above the Cherokees. “Who’s
dead?” muttered the domino-player. “I wish everybody was, and that I
was contracted with to bury ’em cheap. I should have won the game,” he
added plaintively, “if I could have picked up that double-six.”
“I suppose your friend wants to be Vice at our next meeting,” said
the gentleman with the billiard-cue; who, in default of a row, always
complained that the assembly was too quiet for him.
“It wouldn’t be the first time if he were Vice, and it wouldn’t be the
first time if you made him Chair,” said Gus. “Come, old fellow, tell
them you’re come back, and ask them if they’re glad to see you?”
The red-haired gentleman at this sprang to his feet, threw off the rosy
locks and the ferocious whiskers, and looked round at the Cherokees
with his hands in his pockets.
“Daredevil Dick!” A shout arose--one brief wild huzza, such as
had not been heard in that room--which, as we know, was none of
the quietest--within the memory of the oldest Cherokee. Daredevil
Dick--escaped--come back--as handsome as ever--as jolly as ever--as
glorious a fellow--as thoroughgoing a brick--as noble-hearted a trump
as eight years ago, when he had been the life and soul of all of them!
such shaking of hands; everybody shaking hands with him again and
again, and then everybody shaking hands with everybody else; and the
billiard-player wiping his eyes with his cue; and the sleepy gentleman
waking up and rubbing the mustard into his drowsy optics; and the
domino-player, who, though he execrates all mankind, wouldn’t hurt the
tiniest wing of the tiniest fly, even he makes a miraculous effort,
picks up the double-six, and magnanimously presents it to Richard.
“Take it--take it, old fellow, and may it make you happy! If I’d played
that domino, I should have won the game.” Upon which he executed two
or three steps of a Cherokee dance, and relapsed into the aforesaid
imbecile imprecations, in mixed French and English, on the inhabitants
of a world not capable of appreciating him.
It was a long time before anything like quiet could be restored; but
when it was, Richard addressed the meeting.
“Gentlemen, before the unfortunate circumstance which has so long
separated us, you knew me, I believe, well, and I am proud to think you
esteemed and trusted me.”
Did they? Oh, _rather_. They jingled all the glasses, and broke
three in the enthusiastic protestation of an affirmative.
“I need not allude to the unhappy accusation of which I have been the
victim. You are, I understand, acquainted with the full particulars
of my miserable story, and you render me happy by thinking me to be
innocent.”
By thinking him to be innocent? By knowing him to be innocent! They
are so indignant at the bare thought of anybody believing otherwise,
that somebody in the doorway, the Smasher himself, growls out something
about a--forcible adjective--noise, and the police.
“Gentlemen, I have this day regained my liberty; thanks to the
exertions of a person to whom I am also indebted for my life, and
thanks also to the assistance of my old friend Gus Darley.”
Everybody here insisted on shaking hands over again with Gus, which was
rather a hindrance to the speaker’s progress; but at last Richard went
on,--
“Now, gentlemen, relying on your friendship” (hear, hear! and another
glass broken), “I am about to appeal to you to assist me in the future
object of my life. That object will be to discover the real murderer
of my uncle, Montague Harding. In what manner, when, or where you may
be able to assist me in this, I cannot at present say, but you are
all, gentlemen, men of talent.” (More glasses broken, and a good deal
of beer spilt into everybody’s boots.) “You are all men of varied
experience, of inexhaustible knowledge of the world, and of the life
of London. Strange things happen every day of our lives. Who shall
say that some one amongst you may not fall, by some strange accident,
or let me say rather by the handiwork of Providence, across a clue to
this at present entirely unravelled mystery? Promise me, therefore,
gentlemen, to give me the benefit of your experience; and whenever that
experience throws you into the haunts of bad men, remember that the man
I seek may, by some remote chance, be amongst them; and that to find
him is the one object of my life. I cannot give you the faintest index
to what he may be, or who he may be. He may be dead, and beyond the
reach of justice--but he may live! and if he does, Heaven grant that
the man who has suffered the stigma of his guilt may track him to his
doom. Gentlemen, tell me that your hearts go with me.”
They told him so, not once, but a dozen times; shaking hands with him,
and pushing divers liquors into his hand every time. But they got over
it at last, and the gentleman with the billiard-cue rapped their heads
with that instrument to tranquillize them, and then rose as president,
and said,--
“Richard Marwood, our hearts go with you, thoroughly and entirely, and
we swear to give you the best powers of our intellects and the utmost
strength of our abilities to aid you in your search. Gentlemen, are you
prepared to subscribe to this oath?”
They were prepared to subscribe to it, and they did subscribe to it,
every one of them--rather noisily, but very heartily.
When they had done so, a gentleman emerges from the shadow of the
doorway, who is no other than the illustrious left-handed one, who
had come upstairs in answer to Darley’s summons, just before Richard
addressed the Cherokees. The Smasher was not a handsome man. His nose
had been broken a good many times, and that hadn’t improved him; he had
a considerable number of scars about his face, including almost every
known variety of cut, and they didn’t improve him. His complexion,
again, bore perhaps too close a resemblance to mottled soap to come
within the region of the beautiful; but he had a fine and manly
expression of countenance, which, in his amiable moments, reminded the
beholder of a benevolent bulldog.
He came up to Richard, and took him by the hand. It was no small ordeal
of courage to shake hands with the Left-handed Smasher, but Daredevil
Dick stood it like a man.
“Mr. Richard Marwood,” said he, “you’ve been a good friend to me,
ever since you was old enough--” he stopped here, and cast about in
his mind for the fitting pursuits of early youth--“ever since you was
old enough to give a cove a black eye, or knock your friend’s teeth
down his throat with a light backhander. I’ve known you down stairs,
a-swearin’ at the barmaid, and holdin’ your own agin the whole lot
of the Cheerfuls, when other young gents of your age was a-makin’
themselves bad with sweetstuffs and green apples, and callin’ it life.
I’ve known you help that gent yonder,” he gave a jerk with his thumb
in the direction of the domino-player, “to wrench off his own pa’s
knocker, and send it to him by twopenny post next mornin’, seventeen
and sixpence to pay postage; but I never know’d you to do a bad action,
or to hit out upon a cove as was down.”
Richard thanked the Smasher for his good opinion, and they shook hands
again.
“I’ll tell you what it is,” continued the host, “I’m a man of few
words. If a cove offends me, I give him my left between his eyes,
playful; if he does it agen, I give him my left agen, with a meanin’,
and he don’t repeat it. If a gent as I like does me proud, I feels
grateful, and when I has a chance I shows him my gratitude. Mr. Richard
Marwood, I’m your friend to the last spoonful of my claret; and let the
man as murdered your uncle keep clear of my left mawley, if he wants to
preserve his beauty.”
CHAPTER VI.
MR. PETERS RELATES HOW HE THOUGHT HE HAD A CLUE, AND HOW HE LOST IT.
A WEEK after the meeting of the Cherokees Richard Marwood received his
mother, in a small furnished house he had taken in Spring Gardens. Mrs.
Marwood, possessed of the entire fortune of her murdered brother, was
a very rich woman. Of her large income she had, during the eight years
of her son’s imprisonment, spent scarcely anything; as, encouraged by
Mr. Joseph Peters’s mysterious hints and vague promises, she had looked
forward to the deliverance of her beloved and only child. The hour had
come. She held him in her arms again, free.
“No, mother, no,” he says, “not free. Free from the prison walls, but
not free from the stain of the false accusation. Not till the hour
when all England declares my innocence shall I be indeed a free man.
Why, look you, mother, I cannot go out of this room into yonder street
without such a disguise as a murderer himself might wear, for fear
some Slopperton official should recognise the features of the lunatic
criminal, and send me back to my cell at the asylum.”
“My darling boy,” she lays her hands upon his shoulders, and looks
proudly into his handsome face, “my darling boy, these people at
Slopperton think you dead. See,” she touched her black dress as she
spoke, “it is for you I wear this. A painful deception, Richard, even
for such an object. I cannot bear to think of that river, and of what
might have been.”
“Dear mother, I have been saved, perhaps, that I may make some
atonement for that reckless, wicked past.”
“Only reckless, Richard; never wicked. You had always the same noble
heart, always the same generous soul; you were always my dear and only
son.”
“You remember what the young man says in the play, mother, when he gets
into a scrape through neglecting his garden and making love to his
master’s daughter--‘You shall be proud of your son yet.’”
“I _shall_ be proud of you, Richard. I am proud of you. We are
rich; and wealth is power. Justice shall be done you yet, my darling
boy. You have friends----”
“Yes, mother, good and true ones. Peters--you brought him with you?”
“Yes; I persuaded him to resign his situation. I have settled a hundred
a year on him for life--a poor return for what he has done, Richard;
but it was all I could induce him to accept, and he only agreed to take
that on condition that every moment of his life should be devoted to
your service.”
“Is he in the house now, mother?”
“Yes, he is below; I will ring for him.”
“Do, mother. I must go over to Darley, and take him with me. You must
not think me an inattentive or neglectful son; but remember that my
life has but one business till that man is found.”
He wrung her hand, and left her standing at the window watching his
receding figure through the quiet dusky street.
Her gratitude to Heaven for his restoration is deep and heartfelt;
but there is a shade of sadness in her face as she looks out into the
twilight after him, and thinks of the eight wasted years of his youth,
and of his bright manhood now spent on a chimera; for she thinks he
will never find the murderer of his uncle. How, after eight years,
without one clue by which to trace him, how can he hope to track the
real criminal?
But Heaven is above us all, Agnes Marwood; and in the dark and winding
paths of life light sometimes comes when and whence we least expect it.
If you go straight across Blackfriars Bridge, and do not suffer
yourself to be beguiled either by the attractions of that fashionable
transpontine lounge, the “New Cut,” or by the eloquence of the last
celebrity at that circular chapel some time sacred to Rowland Hill--if
you are not a man to be led away by whelks and other piscatorial
delicacies, second-hand furniture, birds and bird-cages, or easy
shaving, you may ultimately reach, at the inland end of the road, a
locality known to the inhabitants of the district of Friar Street.
Whether, in any dark period of our ecclesiastical history, the members
of the mother church were ever reduced to the necessity of living in
this neighbourhood I am not prepared to say. But if ever any of the
magnates of the Catholic faith did hang out in this direction, it is
to be hoped that the odours from the soapboiler’s round the corner,
the rich essences from the tallow manufactory over the way, the varied
perfumes from the establishment of the gentleman who does a thousand
pounds a week in size, to say nothing of such minor and domestic
effluvia as are represented by an amalgamation of red herrings, damp
corduroy, old boots, onions, washing, a chimney on fire, dead cats,
bad eggs, and an open drain or two--it is to be hoped, I say, that
these conflicting scents did not pervade the breezes of Friar Street so
strongly in the good old times as they do in these our later days of
luxury and refinement.