The trail of the serpent
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