The trail of the serpent
coronet, constructed of a newspaper and a blue-and-white bird’s-eye
pocket-handkerchief. He puts his hands to the very 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 him, 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
recherché 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 curtesy, 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 their 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 indoors,” which was very seldom disregarded.
As Richard was this afternoon permitted to mix with his
fellow-prisoners for the first time, the boy from Slopperton was
ordered to keep an eye upon him; and a very sharp eye the boy kept,
never for one moment allowing a look, word, or action of the prisoner
to escape him.
The keepers this afternoon were assembled near the portico, before
which the gardens extended to the high outer wall. The ground between
the portico and the wall was a little less than a quarter of a mile
in length, and at the bottom was the grand entrance and the porter’s
lodge. The gardens surrounded the house on three sides, and on the left
side the wall ran parallel with the river Sloshy. This river was now so
much swollen by the late heavy rains that the waters washed the wall to
the height of four feet, entirely covering the towing-path, which lay
ordinarily between the wall and the waterside.
Now Richard and the Emperor of the Waterworks, accompanied by the
gushing charmer in the green boots, being all three engaged in friendly
though rather erratic conversation, happened to stroll in the direction
of the grounds on this side, and consequently out of sight of the
keepers.
The boy from Slopperton was, however, close upon their heels. This
young gentleman had his hands in his pockets, and was loitering and
lounging along with an air which seemed to say, that neither man nor
woman gave him any more delight than they had afforded the Danish
prince of used-up memory. Perhaps it was in utter weariness of life
that he was, as if unconsciously, employed in whistling the melody of
a song, supposed to relate to a passage in the life of a young lady of
the name of Gray, christian name Alice, whose heart it was another’s,
and consequently, by pure logic, never could belong to the singer.
Now there may be something infectious in this melody; for no sooner had
the boy from Slopperton whistled the first few bars, than some person
in the distance outside the walls of the asylum gardens took up the
air and finished it. A trifling circumstance this in itself; but it
appeared to afford the boy considerable gratification; and he presently
came suddenly upon Richard in the middle of a very interesting