CHAPTER XII. A CHARACTER
There must have been a very considerable interval from the moment I have last recorded to that in which I next became a responsible individual; but in what manner, in what place, or in what company it was passed, the reader must excuse my indulging, for many important reasons, – one of which is, I never clearly knew anything of the matter.
To date my recollections from my first consciousness, I may state that I found myself on my back in a very narrow bed, a table beside me covered with phials and small flasks, with paper cravats, some of which hung down, queue fashion, to an absurd extent. A few rush backed and bottomed chairs lay along the walls, which were coarsely whitewashed. A window, of very unclean and unprepossessing aspect, was partly shaded by a faded scarlet curtain, while the floor was equally sparingly decked with a small and ragged carpet. Where was I? was the frequent but unsatisfactory query I ever put to myself. Could this be a prison? had I been captured on that riotous evening, and carried off to jail? or was I in Darby M’Keown’s territory? – for somehow, a very general impression was on my mind that Darby’s gifts of ubiquity were somewhat remarkable, – or, lastly (and the thought was not a pleasant one), was this the domicile of Anthony Basset, Esq., attorney-at-law? To have resolved any or all of these doubts by rising and taking a personal survey of the premises would have been my first thought; but unluckily I found one of my arms bandaged, and enclosed in a brace of wooden splints; a very considerable general impression pervaded me of bruises and injuries all over my body; and, worse still, a kind of megrim accompanied every attempt to lift my head from the pillow, that made me heartily glad to lie down again and be at rest.
That I had not fallen into unfriendly hands was about the extent to which my deductions led me; and with this consolatory fact, and a steady resolve to remain awake three days, if necessary, so as to interrogate the first visitor who should approach me, I mustered all my patience, and waited quietly. What hour of the day it was when first I awoke to even thus much of consciousness I cannot say; but I well remember watching what appeared to me twelve mortal hours in my anxious expectation. At last a key turned in an outer lock, a door opened, and I heard a heavy foot enter. This was shortly followed by another step, whose less imposing tread was, I suspected, a woman’s.
“Where, in the devil’s name, is the candle?” said a gruff voice, that actually seemed to me not unknown. “I left it on the table when I went out. Oh, my shin’s broke! – that infernal table!”
“Oh, Lord! oh, Lord!” screamed the female voice.
“Ah, you ‘ve caught it too!” cried the other, in glee; “did you think you saw a little blue flame before you when your shin was barked?”
“You’re a monster!” said the lady, in a tone of passionate indignation.
“Here it is, – I have it,” replied the other, not paying the slightest attention to the endearing epithet last bestowed; “and damn me, if it ‘s not burned down to the socket. Halloo there, Peter Dodd! You scoundrel, where are you?”
“Call him Saladin,” said the lady, with a sneer, “and perhaps he ‘ll answer.”
“Imp of darkness, where are you gone to? Peter – Dodd – Dodd – Peter! Ah, you young blackguard! where were you all this time?”
“Asleep, sir; sure you know well, sir, it ‘s little rest I get,” said a thin, childish voice in answer. “Wasn’t it five o’clock this morning when I devilled the two kidneys ye had for supper for the four officers, and had to borrey the kian pepper over the way?”
“I’ll bore a gimlet hole through your pineal gland, and stuff it with brass-headed nails, if you reply to me. Anna Maria, that was a fine thought, eh? glorious, by Jove! There, put the candle there, hand your mistress a chair; give me my robe-de’chambre. Confound me, if it’s not getting like the kingdom of Prussia on the map, full of very straggling dependencies. Supper, Saladin!”
“The sorrow taste – ”
“What, thou piece of human ebony! what do you say?”
“Me hab no – a – ting in de larder,” cried the child, in a broken voice.
“Isn’t there a back of a duck and two slices of cold bacon?” asked the lady, in the tone of a cross-examining barrister.
“I poisoned the bacon for the rats, Miss; and for the duck – ”
“Let me strangle him with my own hands,” shouted the man; “let me tear him up into merrythoughts. Look here, sirrah,” said he, in a voice like John Kemble’s; “there may be nothing which man eats within these walls; there may not be wherewithal to regale a sickly fly, – no, not enough for one poor spider to lunch upon; but if you ever dare to reply to me, save in Oriental phrase, I ‘ll throw you in a sack, call my mutes, and hurl you into the Bosphorus.”
“Where, sir?”
“The Dodder, you son of a burned father! My hookah.”
“My slippers,” repeated the lady.
“My lute, and the sherbet,” added the gentleman.
By the stir in the chamber, these arrangements, or something equivalent to them, seemed to have taken place; when again I heard, – “Dance a lively measure, Saladin; my soul is heavy.”
Here a most vile tinkling of a guitar was heard, to which, by the sounds of the feet, I could perceive Saladin was moving in a species of dance.
“Let the child go to bed, and don’t be making a fool of yourself,” said the lady, in a voice of bursting passion.
“Thank Heaven,” said I, half aloud, “she isn’t mad.”
“Tink, tink, a – tink – a – tink, tink – a – tink – a – dido!” thrummed out her companion. “I say, Saladin, heat me a little porter, with an egg and some sugar.”
The door closed as the imp made his exit, and there was silence for some seconds, during which my uppermost thought was, “What infernal mischance has thrown me into a lunatic asylum?” At length the man spoke, —
“I say, Anna Maria, Cradock has this run of luck a long time.”
“He plays better than you,” responded the lady, sharply.
“I deny it,” rejoined he, angrily. “I play whist better than any man that ever lived, except the Begum of Soutancantantarahad, who beat my father. They played for lacs of rupees on the points, and a territory on the rub; five to two, first game against the loser, in white elephants.”
“How you do talk!” said Anna Maria. “Do you forget that all this rubbish does n’t go down with me?”
“Well, I mean old Hickory, that had the snuffshop in Bath, used only to give me one point in the rub, and we played for sixpence; damme, I ‘ll not forget it, – he cleaned me out in no time. Tink, tink, a-tink-a-tink, tink-a-tinka-dido! Here, Saladin! bear me the spicy cup, ambrosial boy!”
“Ahem!” said the lady, in a tone that didn’t sound exactly like concurrence.
“Eat a few dates, and then repose,” said the deep voice.
“I wish I had them, av they were eatable,” said Saladin, as he turned away.
“Wretch, you have forgotten to salaam; exit slowly. Tink, tink, a-tink-a-tink! Anna Maria, he’s devilish good now for black parts; I think I’ll make Jones bring him out. Wouldn’t it be original to make Othello talk broken English? ‘Farewell de camp!’ Eh, by Jove! that ‘s a fine thought. ‘De spirit stir a drum, de piercy pipe.’ By Jove! I like that notion.”
Here the gentleman rose in a glorious burst of enthusiasm, and began repeating snatches from Shakspeare, in the pleasant travesty he had hit upon.
“Cradock revoked, and you never saw him,” said the lady, dryly, interrupting the monologue.
“I did see it clearly enough, but I had done so twice the same game,” said he, gayly; “and if the grave were to give up its dead, I, too, should be a murderer. Fine thought that, is n’t it?”
“He won seventeen and sixpence from you,” rejoined she, pettishly.
“Two bad half-crowns, – dowlas, filthy dowlas,” was the answer.
“And the hopeful young gentleman in the next room, – what profitable intentions, may I ask you, have you with respect to him?”
“Burke! Tom Burke! Bless your heart, he ‘s only son and heir to Burke of Mount Blazes, in the county Galway. His father keeps three packs of harriers, one of fox, and another of staghounds, – a kind of brindled devils, three feet eight in height; he won’t take them under. His father and mine were schoolfellows at Dundunderamud, in the Himalaya, and he – that is, old Burke – saved my father’s life in a tiger hunt. And am I to forget the heritage of gratitude my father left me?”
“You ought not, perhaps, since it was the only one he bequeathed,” quoth the lady.
“What! is the territory of Shamdoonah and Bunfunterabad nothing? are the great suits of red emeralds and blue opal, that were once the crown jewels of Saidh Sing Doolah, nothing? is the scymitar of Hafiz, with verses of the Koran in letters of pure brilliants, nothing?”
“You’ll drive me distracted with your insane folly,” rejoined the lady, rising and pushing back her chair with violence. “To talk this way when you know you have n’t got a five pound note in the world.”
“Ha, ha, ha!” laughed out the jolly voice of the other; “that’s good, faith. If I only consented to dip my Irish property, I could raise fourteen hundred and seventy thousand pounds, – so Mahony tells me. But I ‘ll never give up the royalties, – never! There, you have my last word on the matter: rather than surrender my tin mine, I’d consent to starve on twelve thousand a year, and resign my claim to the title which, I believe, the next session will give me; and when you are Lady Machinery – something or other – maybe they won’t bite, eh? Ramskins versus wrinkles.”
A violent bang of the door announced at this moment the exit of the lady in a rage, to which her companion paid no attention, as he continued to mumble to himself, “Surrender the royalties, – never! Oh, she ‘s gone. Well, she’s not far wrong, after all. I dare not draw a cheque on my own exchequer at this moment for a larger sum than – let me see – twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-eight and tenpence; with twenty-nine shillings, the grand firm of Bubbleton and Co. must shut up and suspend their payments.” So saying, he walked from the room in stately fashion, and closed the door after him.
My first thought, as I listened to this speech, was one of gratefulness that I had fallen into the friendly hands of my old coach companion, whose kindness still lived fresh in my memory; my next was, what peculiar form of madness could account for the strange outpouring I had just overheard, in which my own name was so absurdly introduced, coupled with family circumstances I knew never had occurred. Sleep was now out of the question with me; for whole hours long I could do nothing but revolve in my mind all the extraordinary odds and ends of my friend Bubbleton’s conversation, which I remembered to have been so struck by at my first meeting with him. The miraculous adventures of his career, his hairbreadth ‘scapes, his enormous wealth, the voluptuous ease of his daily life, and his habits of luxury and expenditure with which he then astounded me, had now received some solution; while, at the same time, there was something in his own common-sense observations to himself that puzzled me much, and gave a great difficulty to all my calculations concerning him.
To all these conflicting doubts and difficulties sleep at last succeeded. But better far for me it had not; for with it came dreams such as sick men only experience: all the distorted images that rose before my wandering faculties, mingling with the strange fragments of Bubbleton’s conversation, made a phantasmagoria the most perplexing and incomprehensible; and which, even on waking, I could not banish, so completely had Saladin and his pas seul, the guitar, the hookah, and the suit of red emeralds taken hold of my erring intellect.
Candid, though not fair reader, have you ever been tipsy? Have you ever gone so far over the boundaryline that separates the land of mere sobriety from its neighboring territory, the country of irresponsible impulses, that you actually doubted which was the way back, – that you thought you saw as much good sense and good judgment on the one side of the frontier as the other, with only a strong balance of good-fellowship to induce a preference? If you know this state, – if you have taken the precise quantum of champagne or moselle mousseux that induces it, and yet goes no farther, – then do you perfectly understand all the trials and difficulties of my waking moments, and you can appreciate the arduous task I undertook in my effort to separate the real from the imaginary, the true types from their counterfeits; in a word, the wanderings of my own brain from those of Captain Bubbleton’s.
In this agreeable and profitable occupation was I engaged; when the same imposing tread and heavy footstep I had heard the previous evening entered the adjoining room and approached my door. The lock turned, and the illustrious captain himself appeared. And here let me observe, that if grave censure be occasionally bestowed on persons who, by the assumption of voice, look, or costume, seek to terrorize over infant minds, a no less heavy sentence should be bestowed on all who lord it over the frail faculties of sickness by any absurdity in their personal appearance. And that I may not seem captious, let me describe my friend. The captain, who was somewhere about the forties, was a full-faced, chubby, good-looking fellow, of some five feet ten or eleven inches in height; his countenance had been intended by nature for the expression of such emotions as arise from the enjoyment of turtle, milk punch, truffled turkeys, mulled port, mullagatawny, stilton, stout, and pickled oysters; a rich, mellow-looking pair of dark-brown eyes, with large bushy eyebrows meeting above the nose, which latter feature was a little “on the snub and off the Roman;” his mouth was thick-lipped, and had that peculiar mobility which seems inseparable wherever eloquence or imagination predominate; in color, his face was of that uniform hue painters denominate as “warm, “ – in fact, a rich sunset Claude-Lorrainish tint that seemed a compound, the result of high-seasoned meats, plethora, punch, and the tropics; in figure, he was like a huge pudding-bag, supported on two short little dumpy pillars, that from a sense of the superincumbent weight had wisely spread themselves out below, giving to his lower man the appearance of a stunted letter A; his arms were most preposterously short, and for the convenience of locomotion he used them somewhat after the fashion of fins. As to his costume on the morning in question, it was a singularly dirty and patched dressing-gown of antique silk, fastened about the waist by a girdle, from which depended a scymitar on one side and a meerschaum on the other; a well-worn and not over clean-looking shawl was fastened in fashion of a turban round his head; a pair of yellow buskins with faded gold tassels decorated legs which occasionally peeped from the folds of the robe-de-chambre without any other covering.
Such was the outward man of him who suddenly stopped short at the doorway, while he held the latch in his hand, and called out, —
“Burke, Tom Burke! don’t be violent, don’t be outrageous; you see I’m armed! I’d cut you down without mercy if you attempt to lift a finger! Promise me this, – do you hear me?”
That any one even unarmed could have conceived fear from such a poor weak object as I was seemed so utterly absurd that I laughed outright; an emotion on my part that seemingly imparted but little confidence to my friend the captain, who retreated still closer to the door, and seemed ready for flight. The first use I could make of speech, however, was, to assure him that I was not only perfectly calm and sensible, but deeply grateful for kindness which I knew not how, nor to whom, I became indebted.
“Don’t roll your eyes there; don’t look so damned treacherous!” said he. “Keep down your hands; keep them under the bedclothes. I ‘ll put a bullet through your skull if you stirred!”
I again protested that any manifestation of quietness he asked for I would immediately comply with, and begged him to sit down beside me and tell me where I was and how I had come hither. Having established an outwork of a table and two chairs between us, and cautiously having left the door ajar to secure his retreat, he drew the scymitar and placed it before him, his eyes being fixed on me the entire time.
“Well,” said he, as he assumed a seat, and leaned his arm on the table, “so you are quiet at last. Lord, what a frightful lunatic you were! Nobody would approach your bed but me. The stoutest keeper of Swift’s Hospital fled from the spot; while I said, ‘Leave him to me, the human eye is your true agent to humble the pride of maniacal frenzy.’”
With these words he fixed on me a look such as the chief murderer in a melodrama assumes at the moment he proceeds to immolate a whole family.
“You infernal young villain, how I subdued you! how you quailed before me!”
There was something so ludicrous in the contrast of this bravery with his actual terror, that again I burst out a-laughing; upon which he sprang up, and brandishing his sabre, vowed vengeance on me if I stirred. After a considerable time spent thus, I at last succeeded in impressing him with the fact, that if I had all the will in the world to tear him to pieces, my strength would not suffice to carry me to the door, – an assurance which, however sorrowfully made by me, I perceived to afford him the most unmixed satisfaction.
“That’s right, quite right,” said he; “and mad should he be indeed who would measure strength with me. The red men of Tuscarora always called me the ‘Great Buffalo.’ I used to carry a bark canoe with my squaw and nine little black devils under one arm, so as to leave the other free for my tomahawk. ‘He, how, he!’ that ‘s the war step.”
Here he stooped down to his knees, and then sprang up again, with a yell that actually made me start, and brought a new actor on the scene in the person of Anna Maria, whose name I had so frequently heard the night before.
“What is the matter?” said the lady, a short, squablike woman, of nearly the captain’s age, but none of his personal attractions. “We can’t have him screaming all day in that fashion.”
“It isn’t he; it was I who was performing the war dance. Come, now, let down your hair, and be a squaw, – do. What trouble is it? And bring in Saladin; we’ll get up a combat scene. Devilish fine thought that!”
The indignant look of the lady in reply to this modest proposal again overpowered me, and I sank back in my bed exhausted with laughter, – an emotion which I was forced to subdue as well as I might on beholding the angry countenance with which the lady regarded me.
“I say, Burke,” cried the captain, “let me present you to my sister, Miss Anna Maria Bubbleton.”
A very dry recognition on Miss Anna Maria’s part replied to the effort I made to salute her; and as she turned on her heel, she said to her brother, “Breakfast’s ready,” and left the room.
Bubbleton jumped up at this, rubbed his mouth pleasantly with his hand, smacked his lips; and then dropping his voice to a whisper, muttered, “Excuse me, Tom; but if I have a weakness it is for Yarmouth bloaters, and anchovy toast, milk chocolate, marmalade, hot rolls, and reindeer tongue, with a very small glass of pure white brandy as a qualifier.” So saying, he whisked about and made his exit.
While my host was thus occupied, I was visited by the regimental surgeon, who informed me that my illness had now been of some weeks’ duration; severe brain fever, with various attending evils, and a broken arm, being the happy results of my evening’s adventure at the Parliament House.
“Bubbleton is an old friend of yours,” continued the doctor. And then, without giving me time to reply, added, “Capital fellow, – no better; a little given to the miraculous, eh? but nothing worse.”
“Why, he does indeed seem to have a strong vein for fiction,” said I, half timidly.
“Bless your heart, he never ceases. His world is an ideal thing, fall of impossible people and events, where he has lived at least some centuries, enjoying the intimacies of princes, statesmen, poets, and warriors. He has, in his own estimation, unlimited wealth and unbounded resources, the want of which he is never convinced of till pressed for five shillings to buy his dinner.”
“And his sister,” said I; “what of her?”
“Just as strange a character in the opposite direction. She is as matter of fact as he is imaginative. To all his flights she as resolutely enters a dissentient; and he never inflates his balloon of miracles without her stepping forward to punch a hole in it. But here they come.”
“I say. Pepper, how goes your patient? Spare no pains, old fellow, – no expense; only get him round. I’ve left a cheque for you for five hundred in the next room. This is no regimental case; come, come! it ‘s my way, and I insist upon it.”
Pepper bowed with an air of the deepest gratitude, and actually looked so overpowered by the liberality that I began to suspect there might be less truth in his account of Bubbleton than I thought a few minutes before.
“All insanity has left him, – that’s pleasant. I say, Tom, you must have had glorious thoughts, eh? When you were mad, did you ever think you were an anaconda bolting a goat, or the Eddystone Lighthouse when the foundation began to shift?”
“No, never.”
“How odd! I remember being once thrown on my head off a drag. I was breaking in a pair of young unicorns for the Queen of – ”
“No!” said Anna Maria, in a voice of thunder, holding up her finger, at the same moment, in token of reproof.
The captain became mute on the instant, and the very word he was about to utter stuck in his throat, and he stood with his mouth open, like one in enchantment.
“You said a little weak tea, I think,” said Miss Bubbleton, turning towards the doctor.
“Yes; and some dry toast, if he liked it; and, in a day or two; a half glass of wine and water.”
“Some of that tokay old Pippo Esterhazy sent us.”
“No,” said the lady again, in the same tone of menace.
“And perhaps, after a week, the open air and a little exercise in a carriage.”
“The barouche and the four ponies,” interrupted Bubbleton.
“No!” repeated Miss Anna Maria, but in such a voice of imperious meaning that the poor captain actually fell back, and only muttered to himself, “What would be the use of wealth, if one could n’t contribute to the enjoyment of one’s friends?”
“There’s the drum for parade,” cried the doctor; “you’ll be late, and so shall I.”
They both bustled out of the room together; while Miss Anna Maria, taking her work out of a small bag she carried on her arm, drew a chair to the window and sat down, having quietly intimated to me that, as conversation was deemed injurious to me, I must not speak one syllable.