lay his hands on, and said he was only taking taxes from his subjects. Good-day. I’ll send round some port wine immediately, and you shall have a couple of glasses a day given you; so keep up your spirits, general.”
“Well,” said the boy from Slopperton, as the doctor closed the door behind him, “that ’ere medical officer’s a regular brick: and all I can say is to repeat his last words—which ought to be printed in gold letters a foot high—and those words is,—‘Keep up your spirits, general.’ ”
Chapter II
Mr. Augustus Darley and Mr. Joseph Peters Go Out Fishing
A long period of incessant rains had by no means improved the natural beauties of the Sloshy; nor had it in any manner enhanced the advantages attending a residence on the banks of that river. The occupants of the houses by the waterside were in the habit of going to sleep at night with the firm conviction that the lower portion of their tenement was a comfortable kitchen, and awakening in the morning were apt to find it a miniature lake.
Then, again, the river had a knack of dropping in at odd times, in a friendly way, when least expected—when Mrs. Jones was cooking the Sunday’s dinner, or while Mrs. Brown was gone to market; and, as its manner of entering an apartment was, after the fashion of a ghost in a melodrama, to rise through the floor, the surprise occasioned by its appearance was not unalloyed by vexation.
It would intrude, an uninvited guest, at a social tea-party, and suddenly isolate every visitor on his or her chair as on an island.
There was not a mouse or a black-beetle in any of the kitchens by the Sloshy whose life was worth the holding, such an enemy was the swelling water to all domestic peace or comfort.
It is true that to some fresh and adventurous spirits the rising of the river afforded a kind of eccentric gratification. It gave a smack of the flavour of Venice to the dull insipidity of Slopperton life; and to an imaginative mind every coal-barge that went by became a gondola, and only wanted a cavalier, with a very short doublet, pointed shoes, and a guitar, to make it perfection.
Indeed, Miss Jones, milliner and dressmaker, had been heard to say, that when she saw the water coming up to the parlour-windows she could hardly believe she was not really in the city of the winged horses, round the corner out of the square of St. Mark’s, and three doors from the Bridge of Sighs. Miss Jones was well up in Venetian topography, as she was engaged in the perusal of a powerful work in penny numbers, detailing the adventures of a celebrated “Bravo” of that city.
To the ardent minds of the juvenile denizens of the waterside the swollen river was a source of pure and unalloyed delight. To take a tour round one’s own back kitchen in a washing-tub, with a duster for a sail, is perhaps, at the age of six, a more perfect species of enjoyment than that afforded by any Alpine glories or Highland scenery through which we may wander in after-years, when Reason has taught us her cold lesson, that, however bright the sun may shine on one side of the mountain, the shadows are awaiting us on the other.
There is a gentleman in a cutaway coat and a white hat, smoking a very short and black clay pipe, as he loiters on the bank of the Sloshy. I wonder what he thinks of the river?
It is eight years since this gentleman was last in Slopperton; then he came as a witness in the trial of Richard Marwood; then he had a black eye, and was out-at-elbows; now, his optics are surrounded with no dark shades which mar their natural colour—clear bright grey. Now, too, he is, to speak familiarly, in high feather. His cutaway coat of the newest fashion (for there is fashion even in cutaways); his plaid trousers, painfully tight at the knees, and admirably adapted to display the development of the calf, are still bright with the greens and blues of the Macdonald. His hat is not crushed or indented in above half-a-dozen directions—a sign that it is comparatively new, for the circle in which he moves considers bonneting a friendly demonstration, and to knock a man’s hat off his head and into the gutter rather a polite attention.
Yes, during the last eight years the prospects of Mr. Augustus Darley—(that is the name of the witness)—have been decidedly looking up. Eight years ago he was a medical student, loose on wide London; eating bread-and-cheese and drinking bottled stout in dissecting-rooms, and chalking up alarming scores at the caravansary round the corner of Goodge Street—when the proprietor of the caravansary would chalk up. There were days which that stern man refused to mark with a white stone. Now, he has a dispensary of his own; a marvellous place, which would be entirely devoted to scientific pursuits if dominoes and racing calendars did not in some degree predominate therein. This dispensary is in a populous neighbourhood on the Surrey side of the water; and in the streets and squares—to say nothing of the court and mows—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,
