The trail of the serpent
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