When I was lifted out of the cellar
by two men, of whom one came peeping down alone first, and ran
away and brought the other, I could hardly bear the light of the
street. I was sitting in the road-way, blinking at it, and
at a ring of people collected around me, but not close to me,
when, true to my character of worldly little devil, I broke
silence by saying, ‘I am hungry and thirsty!’
‘Does he know they are dead?’ asked one of
another.
‘Do you know your father and mother are both dead of
fever?’ asked a third of me severely.
‘I don’t know what it is to be dead. I
supposed it meant that, when the cup rattled against their teeth,
and the water spilt over them. I am hungry and
thirsty.’ That was all I had to say about it.
The ring of people widened outward from the inner side as I
looked around me; and I smelt vinegar, and what I know to be
camphor, thrown in towards where I sat. Presently some one
put a great vessel of smoking vinegar on the ground near me; and
then they all looked at me in silent horror as I ate and drank of
what was brought for me. I knew at the time they had a
horror of me, but I couldn’t help it.
I was still eating and drinking, and a murmur of discussion
had begun to arise respecting what was to be done with me next,
when I heard a cracked voice somewhere in the ring say, ‘My
name is Hawkyard, Mr. Verity Hawkyard, of West
Bromwich.’ Then the ring split in one place; and a
yellow-faced, peak-nosed gentleman, clad all in iron-gray to his
gaiters, pressed forward with a policeman and another official of
some sort. He came forward close to the vessel of smoking
vinegar; from which he sprinkled himself carefully, and me
copiously.
‘He had a grandfather at Birmingham, this young boy, who
is just dead too,’ said Mr. Hawkyard.
I turned my eyes upon the speaker, and said in a ravening
manner, ‘Where’s his houses?’
‘Hah! Horrible worldliness on the edge of the
grave,’ said Mr. Hawkyard, casting more of the vinegar over
me, as if to get my devil out of me. ‘I have
undertaken a slight—a very slight—trust in behalf of
this boy; quite a voluntary trust: a matter of mere honour, if
not of mere sentiment: still I have taken it upon myself, and it
shall be (O, yes, it shall be!) discharged.’
The bystanders seemed to form an opinion of this gentleman
much more favourable than their opinion of me.
‘He shall be taught,’ said Mr. Hawkyard,
‘(O, yes, he shall be taught!) but what is to be done with
him for the present? He may be infected. He may
disseminate infection.’ The ring widened
considerably. ‘What is to be done with
him?’
He held some talk with the two officials. I could
distinguish no word save ‘Farm-house.’ There
was another sound several times repeated, which was wholly
meaningless in my ears then, but which I knew afterwards to be
‘Hoghton Towers.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr. Hawkyard. ‘I think
that sounds promising; I think that sounds hopeful. And he
can be put by himself in a ward, for a night or two, you
say?’
It seemed to be the police-officer who had said so; for it was
he who replied, Yes! It was he, too, who finally took me by
the arm, and walked me before him through the streets, into a
whitewashed room in a bare building, where I had a chair to sit
in, a table to sit at, an iron bedstead and good mattress to lie
upon, and a rug and blanket to cover me. Where I had enough
to eat too, and was shown how to clean the tin porringer in which
it was conveyed to me, until it was as good as a
looking-glass. Here, likewise, I was put in a bath, and had
new clothes brought to me; and my old rags were burnt, and I was
camphored and vinegared and disinfected in a variety of ways.
When all this was done,—I don’t know in how many
days or how few, but it matters not,—Mr. Hawkyard stepped
in at the door, remaining close to it, and said, ‘Go and
stand against the opposite wall, George Silverman. As far
off as you can. That’ll do. How do you
feel?’
I told him that I didn’t feel cold, and didn’t
feel hungry, and didn’t feel thirsty. That was the
whole round of human feelings, as far as I knew, except the pain
of being beaten.
‘Well,’ said he, ‘you are going, George, to
a healthy farm-house to be purified. Keep in the air there
as much as you can. Live an out-of-door life there, until
you are fetched away. You had better not say much—in
fact, you had better be very careful not to say
anything—about what your parents died of, or they might not
like to take you in. Behave well, and I’ll put you to
school; O, yes! I’ll put you to school, though
I’m not obligated to do it. I am a servant of the
Lord, George; and I have been a good servant to him, I have,
these five-and-thirty years. The Lord has had a good
servant in me, and he knows it.’
What I then supposed him to mean by this, I cannot
imagine. As little do I know when I began to comprehend
that he was a prominent member of some obscure denomination or
congregation, every member of which held forth to the rest when
so inclined, and among whom he was called Brother Hawkyard.
It was enough for me to know, on that day in the ward, that the
farmer’s cart was waiting for me at the street
corner. I was not slow to get into it; for it was the first
ride I ever had in my life.
It made me sleepy, and I slept. First, I stared at
Preston streets as long as they lasted; and, meanwhile, I may
have had some small dumb wondering within me whereabouts our
cellar was; but I doubt it. Such a worldly little devil was
I, that I took no thought who would bury father and mother, or
where they would be buried, or when. The question whether
the eating and drinking by day, and the covering by night, would
be as good at the farm-house as at the ward superseded those
questions.
The jolting of the cart on a loose stony road awoke me; and I
found that we were mounting a steep hill, where the road was a
rutty by-road through a field. And so, by fragments of an
ancient terrace, and by some rugged outbuildings that had once
been fortified, and passing under a ruined gateway we came to the
old farm-house in the thick stone wall outside the old quadrangle
of Hoghton Towers: which I looked at like a stupid savage, seeing
no specially in, seeing no antiquity in; assuming all farm-houses
to resemble it; assigning the decay I noticed to the one potent
cause of all ruin that I knew,—poverty; eyeing the pigeons
in their flights, the cattle in their stalls, the ducks in the
pond, and the fowls pecking about the yard, with a hungry hope
that plenty of them might be killed for dinner while I stayed
there; wondering whether the scrubbed dairy vessels, drying in
the sunlight, could be goodly porringers out of which the master
ate his belly-filling food, and which he polished when he had
done, according to my ward experience; shrinkingly doubtful
whether the shadows, passing over that airy height on the bright
spring day, were not something in the nature of
frowns,—sordid, afraid, unadmiring,—a small brute to
shudder at.
To that time I had never had the faintest impression of
duty. I had had no knowledge whatever that there was
anything lovely in this life. When I had occasionally slunk
up the cellar-steps into the street, and glared in at
shop-windows, I had done so with no higher feelings than we may
suppose to animate a mangy young dog or wolf-cub. It is
equally the fact that I had never been alone, in the sense of
holding unselfish converse with myself. I had been solitary
often enough, but nothing better.
Such was my condition when I sat down to my dinner that day,
in the kitchen of the old farm-house. Such was my condition
when I lay on my bed in the old farm-house that night, stretched
out opposite the narrow mullioned window, in the cold light of
the moon, like a young vampire.
