Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  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 val 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 site of his weakness, had a convulsive energy that nearly topped 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, 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 o
ne 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 Slosh 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 sort 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 i
ll, 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. It 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 pharmacopoeia 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 be 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.