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 roadside inns, the pretty barmaids, the joint purse; the blue smoke from two short meerschaum10 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 whitewashed 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 bed-side, 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 a
nxious 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 bluchers11 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,12 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.13
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]14—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,15 and that might cause unpleasantness—eh, general?”
“No, no, sir; there’s no fear of that. Political differences should never——”
The Trail of the Serpent Page 23
