The trail of the serpent
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 ill, 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. If 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 pharmacopœia 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 he 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.
“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
builder’s 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 scena 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
shipped, 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 prim 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 spikes 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 three 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 were 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 has own manufacture--a species of