“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 builders 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 scene 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 sipped, 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 print 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 spies 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 thr
ee 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 wee 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 his 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 fiery 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 hint, 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 recherchè 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 curtsey, 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 heir 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 in-doors,” which was very seldom disregarded.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 23
