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_ 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. _
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