The Abbé could not imagine how the suffering wretches in the dirty beds could be expected to get well. Probably they were not expected to. They were here not to be healed, but to be observed and experimented upon. Fury boiled in the Abbé. Horrorrather than fury had predominated when he entered Newgate, but a change had taken place in him since then. He was no longer a spectator on the shore. He had plunged into the sea, and these men were his friends.
There was no Michael Burke upon the hospital books. The porter had cheerfully remarked to the Abbé that not every young ragamuffin brought in from a street accident was in a state to remember his name-if he had one-but the gentleman was perfectly at liberty to look around the place and see what he could find there. And so for an hour the Abbé tramped through the wards, stopping at every bed that had a redheaded boy in it, and asking if his name was Michael Burke. Some of the redheads were unable to answer him, and among these was a lanky boy with bewildered unfocused green eyes, an arrogant child’s mouth, and a bandage ’round his head.
When he had had a look at every man and boy in the hospital, the Abbé returned to the green-eyed boy. He liked his ugly face. There was breeding about it. He sat down on the bed and asked him again if he was Michael Burke. There was no answer, but the green eyes turned in his direction and suddenly focused upon his face with a distinct expression of pleasure, as though a man marooned for weeks with wild beasts on a desert island should suddenly meet one of his own kind. The Abbé took the bull-roarer from his pocket and held it out on the palm of his hand. The boy smiled, his green eyes lighting up with delight of a child who, after a long and painful parting, is reunited with his favorite toy.
The Abbé put the thing in the huge red hand lying on the dirty blanket, the boy’s fingers closed upon it, and he fell asleep.
The Abbé sighed in exasperation but remained where he was, sitting patiently upon the bed, until the 'visiting hour was over and an irritable ward attendant requested him to remove himself at once.
"What are his injuries?" asked the Abbé.
"Bruises, a few teeth knocked out, concussion, and a cut head. Must have been in a street fight and fallen on a sharp stone. Regular bruiser, he looks, but got the worst of it for once. Time’s up, Sir, and I’ll trouble you to be moving."
"Will he live?" demanded the Abbé, immovable.
"Live!" The attendant snorted contemptuously. "Skull of an ox, and a hide to match. In another three or four days, he’ll remember all about himself."
The Abbé rose. "I shall return in three days," he said briefly, and left the hospital.
He was satisfied that this was Mike, and with Zachary cleared of the charge of manslaughter, he proceeded at once to pay a few visits upon persons of importance in the legal world. His letters of introduction, his own distinction and air of frigid authority, won him instant admittance and attention, and two evenings later, after an excellent dinner, he found himself sitting with a learned judge in his library, and after receiving a promise that Mr. Midshipman Anthony Mary O’Connell should be sent up for trial and subsequently liberated with all possible speed, remained in conversation with him until after midnight.
A curious state of affairs was revealed to him. His host and his kind were not, he found, altogether indifferent to the squalor and lawlessness of London, nor to the appalling confusion and misery in the prisons. They were awake to the fact that the officers of the watch were few and incompetent. They deplored the cruelty of the law, and knew that many of its victims were convicted in error and innocent of the crimes for which they died. But what could be done? It was the English way to let things alone to develop as they would until they got to such a pass that public opinion was awakened. English public opinion was a sleepy sort of giant and it took a good deal to awake it, yet once awake it could be powerful.
"Any signs of awakening upon the matter of the prisons?" asked the Abbé dryly.
The judge shrugged. "We are at war. England is still fighting for her life, and the government is too much occupied with foreign affairs to pay much attention to reform at home. But the citizens of London are not easy in their minds. I have known many cases of humane men who have let a thief go free when they could have handed him over to justice, so they would not have it on their conscience that they had sent a fellow human being to the gallows. Officers of the watch often connive at escapes. juries seize upon extenuating circumstances to return a verdict of not guilty, and judges incline to the side of mercy. If it were not so, with the English law as it stands at present, with death as the penalty for most offences, we should have about four hangings a day, with the Old Bailey alone furnishing a hundred victims every year. Public opinion is stirring, undoubtedly, but it lacks leadership. We want men and women with the courage to visit the prisons, immerse themselves in the horrors there, inform themselves thoroughly as to conditions, and then shout what they have seen from the housetops. But such people are not easy to come by. Those who have never suffered torture are extremely sorry for the tortured, but as a general rule they content themselves with compassionate feelings. Those who have themselves endured great suffering, who know it from the inside and not as mere spectators, belong for the most part to the ranks of the uneducated and the inarticulate and are powerless?
Both men were silent. It was late and there was no sound in the room but the distant rattle of a home-going coach over the cobbles and a whisper of wind in the trees in the judge’s garden. Charles de Colbert was a man who had suffered. He knew many kinds of torture from the inside. But it was not the making of a decision that was keeping him silent; almost unconsciously that had been made already, at the moment when the waves broke over his head. He was silent because he was marveling that he had delayed so long .... To have suffered, and then to have crept up to his lonely safety on the shore while other men were still drowning .... A faint red tinged his cheekbones and the judge, looking at him curiously, saw the face of a man most deeply shamed.
2
During the next few days of waiting, he visited Zachary at Newgate and Mike at Guy’s hospital. Conversation with Zachary was practically impossible, but he had been able to shout the information that Mike was alive and recovering, and that freedom was only a matter of time and patience, and he put little packets of food into the wooden spoon that Zachary thrust through the double grating, food which Zachary hid hastily in his pocket and would not eat before him. He looked more like a scarecrow every day, and his body was covered with bruises and sores from the perpetual scrimmaging that went on in the ward, but now that he knew about Mike, his eyes were peaceful. There was no trace of cringing or depravity in his face or bearing. If he did not wash his shirt now, it was only because he no longer had it.
The Abbé was anxious lest he should fall sick, but that was his only anxiety. The boy had discovered, apparently, how to live amidst foulness without being defiled, and if before he came here there had been any kind of fear that he had not met and mastered, he had faced and conquered it now. And never, after this experience would he, like Charles de Colbert, crawl up to the shore and leave other men to drown. The Abbé knew quite well where the food went and where the shirt had gone-to the other fellows. That proved it. Charles de Colbert, at his age and in his place, would have wolfed the food himself and fought like a tiger to keep his shirt upon his own back. Most humbly respecting this boy, he wondered if the isolation in which he had encased himself would ever have cracked if the doctor had not carried Zachary into his sitting room that autumn day at Torre. It might be that he owed his immortal soul to the prisoner behind the bars.
Mike recovered rapidly. The dirt, noise, and stench of the hospital did not worry him at all, but his own inaction drove him wild, and he was so profane and furious a patient that the Abbé was given permission to remove him at the first possible moment. The evening before he fetched Mike from the hospital, he went to the inn where Zachary and Mike had stayed when they first reached London, to pay their bill and see if their belongings were still in existence
. The landlady, an honest woman, guessing at the kind of disaster that had overtaken the two boys, had packed up their things and kept them carefully.
Alone in his green-paneled room, the Abbé laid out Mike’s things ready for him, but Zachary’s he put away in the press with his own. He smiled at the contrast between Mike’s rags and Zachary’s neatly mended shirts and socks, and at the means of recreation with which each boy had provided himself for use in the intervals of battle and storm. Mike’s rags were folded around various instruments for making a noise picked up in foreign parts, a mouth organ from Spain, a concertina from Italy, and a bird-scarer’s clapper from Corsica. Zachary’s shirts were wrapped around his few precious books. With the reverence of a passionate book lover, the Abbé laid them gently with his own, then picked up the little Shakespeare again to take a look at the type and paper. His action was automatic. As a lover of children must touch the bright hair, so a lover of books must take a look at the type and smooth the page with his finger. The summer breeze, blowing through the open window, took a slip of paper that was between the pages and carried it to the floor. He picked it up, glanced at it, and instantly the room spun around him.
"Love is the divinity who creates peace among men and calm upon the sea, the windless silence of storms, repose and sleep in sadness. Love sings to all things which live and are, soothing the troubled minds of gods and men." First Stella’s locket and now this. He pulled himself sharply together. There was nothing at all in the juxtaposition of the two. The locket that he had bought for Therese had been of the same pattern as many others. There were a thousand men who loved these words from the Banquet. He recognized Dr. Crane’s vigorous handwriting. The doctor had written out these words for the son he loved, even as he, himself, had written them for the wife he loved. He put the scrap of paper back between the pages from which it had fluttered, and his eyes caught some words that Zachary had faintly underlined. "Fear and be slain." He felt as he had when, standing in the dark garden, he had looked through the window and seen Stella sitting sewing in her green bower-ashamed of himself.
He put the book back, and looked about him at his own green bower. He had become deeply attached to this austere, green-paneled room. He wondered if he would be able to rent it permanently when he had said good-by to Devonshire, and had come back to London again to work until he died for those whom the doctor had described to him as
"the dirty, the ignorant, and the wicked, the thieves, murderers, and harlots; who so often turn out upon intimate acquaintance to be the best of us all." It was ironic that, having at last found in Devonshire love, friendship, and delight, he should immediately plan to leave it. But there was nothing else he could do. The sky was peach colored behind the gables across the way and it was already dusk in his room. He lit his candle and sat down once more to his work of translating and transcribing Stella’s fairy story.
3
The next day he fetched Mike in a hackney coach and put him to bed in his own four-poster, with the maroon curtains. As there was no vacant bed in the house, he himself slept on a palliasse on the floor. Mike protested furiously but found his fury no match for the iron determination of his host. And the Abbé assured him that he slept extremely well under these circumstances.
"I saw foreign service in the army," he assured the astonished Mike, who like all the young was incapable of visualizing any of these elderly scarecrows as having once been as young and dashing as himself. "And I went through the revolution. I’ve learned to sleep in a ditch, behind a haystack, or on a bare floor-anywhere. It is merely a question of training. The amount of time you spend in sleep is also a question of training."
The Abbé had apparently trained himself to do with the minimum of rest. When Mike went to sleep, the last thing he saw was his host sitting writing at the window, a lighted candle beside him. Wlien he woke, the Abbé had already gone to mass and he lay patiently waiting for him to return with the fresh rolls and butter he always bought on his way home, and then their landlady brought up strong hot coffee and they broke their fast together in the quiet green room.
Though he had been so wildly impatient in hospital, Mike was the reverse here, even though he was consumed with longing to get to Zachary. The quiet room soothed him, the Abbé’s great kindness, and the dawning knowledge that his friendship with Zachary had reached a new stage that was altogether good.
The fact that Zachary had half killed him had roused in him not resentment but a deep respect. Any fellow who could half kill him, Mike Burke, in fair fight, was the devil of a fellow. And but for Zachary, he’d have murdered that poor bastard who’d gone off with the bull-roarer and his purse. Zachary had seen that. He knew what he was when the drink and his devil of a temper had got hold of him together. Zachary had saved him from doing a good many detestable things in the course of their friendship, but never from any act quite so hateful as that would have been. The hugeness of Zachary’s service, his own gratitude, the hell of a time that he had had in the hospital and that Zachary was still having at Newgate, had so toughened the fiber of their friendship that now it seemed to him a rock upon which he could rebuild his hitherto chaotic life. He vowed that in future he’d try his damnedest to do what Zachary wanted him to do, see things as he saw them. The fellow’s way of thinking had the same sort of graceful rightness that his manners had.
And this old dry stick of an Abbé was the same, unerringly wise and courteous. Yet nobody is born that way, Mike knew. That sort of ease came only after such battles as gave him the horrors even to think of. After much unaccustomed thought, he came to the conclusion that such victors were, and would always be, very rare birds, but that the rest of the world would not do so badly if it could recognize them for what they were, not such fools as they appeared, and have the humility to attend to what they said. He’d chuck away that bull-roarer, and he’d go to Gentian Hill.
But the Abbé insisted that he should visit his guardian first, as was his duty. Before he left, he took him to see Zachary in Newgate, smiling at the way the two held to the bars and stood there roaring cheerful insults to each other. Mike leaped at the bars like a dog hurling himself upon his master, and the agitation of his stern almost created the illusion that he had a tail there. Zachary’s gaunt face shone with such happiness that the horrors of the place seemed almost to disappear in the light of it, like the mist sucked up by the sun.
Two days later, Mike climbed upon the coach for Bath, the mouth organ, the concertina, and the clapper carefully packed among his shirts, but the bull-roarer was left behind in the landlady’s kitchen fire. Five days later the Abbé’s four·poster once more had a boy in it, and this time the boy was Zachary. The judge had been as good as his word. After a mere formality of a trial, at which the officers of the watch had given most favorable evidence, Zachary was set free.
For three days and nights he slept constantly, rousing only when the Abbé shook him awake to feed him. He was so dazed and drugged with sleep that he did not quite know where he was. He seemed to think that he was in his room at the doctor’s house at Gentian Hill with Tom Pearse, and was blissfully happy. But he was no less happy, though slightly startled, when he came to himself, and found where he was and who was looking after him.
"I can’t sleep in your bed, Sir," was his instant reaction.
"You will sleep where I tell you," said the Abbé shortly. "Mike did what he was told, and so will you."
Zachary smiled and went to sleep again, and the Abbé went out to buy mutton and vegetables for the landlady to make nourishing broth. She had been exceedingly put out by the introduction of vet another sick boy into her attic, and he had had to take the marketing upon himself to pacify her, as well as the sweeping and dusting of the green-paneled room. He smiled grimly to himself as he went along the sunny street with a marketing basket on his arm, and for a brief moment imagined the roar of laughter with which the doctor, could he see him now, would greet him.
Yet though he smiled, he was slightly annoyed wit
h the doctor who he thought should have appeared upon the scene to relieve him of his duties before this. He had been obliged to apply to Sir George Carey for leave to prolong his holiday, and though another priest had once more been found to undertake his duty, Sir George had assented with no great willingness. He had told the doctor this, and kept him well informed of all that occurred, and the doctor had answered that he would come at the first possible moment, but that he had several patients dangerously ill and could not leave them, and a little irritation was doing Sir George no harm. Meanwhile he knew that everything that could be done for Zachary was being done by the Abbé with a far greater skill and efficiency than his own, and he enclosed a letter to be given to his son as soon as that was possible.
The doctor had expressed himself charmingly and gratefully, and with obvious impatience to be done with his patients and on his way to London, and yet there was an undercurrent of amusement in his letter that suggested that the thought of the Abbé acting as sick nurse to two boys was giving him keen and slightly malicious pleasure. The Abbé’s grim smile developed into a chuckle, the first for a very great number of years. Well, it was giving him pleasure, too. He had not known he had it in him to be so expert at washing and feeding the young, sweeping, dusting and shopping, and his own efficiency had warmed the cockles of his heart. And so had the boys’ trust in him and reliance upon him. Long ago he had looked after Therese in her illnesses and helped her care for the child, but he thought that he had lost the trick of the old tenderness. Apparently not, and its reappearance was like the resurgence of spring. Standing with aloof distaste before the butcher, and withering that worthy with the coldness of his eye-for no matter how domesticated he became, his fastidious taste would never approve raw meat he suddenly remembered the day at Torre when he felt that the ice of his winter was cracking. It had gone now, and he was alive. He clapped the meat into the basket and strode off home to Zachary, who by this time would have waked up and be starving again. He could not endure to leave him for long. He was like a blackbird who had but the one leggy fledgling squawking for food in a green nest.