A Simpleton

C >> Charles Reade >> A Simpleton


That night, the last they had to travel, was cloudy, for a wonder, and
they groped with lanterns.

Ucatella and her child brought up the rear. Presently there was a light
pattering behind them. The swift-eared Ucatella clutched Christopher's
arm, and turning round, pointed back, with eyeballs white and rolling.
There were full a dozen animals following them, whose bodies seemed
colorless as shadows, but their eyes little balls of flaming lime-light.

"GUN!" said Christie, and gave the Kafir's arm a pinch. She flew to the
caravan; he walked backwards, facing the foe. The wagon was halted,
and Dick ran back with two loaded rifles. In his haste he gave one
to Christopher, and repented at leisure; but Christopher took it,
and handled it like an experienced person, and said, with delight,
"VOLUNTEER." But with this the cautious animals had vanished like
bubbles. But Dick told Christopher they would be sure to come back; he
ordered Ucatella into the wagon, and told her to warn Phoebe not to
be frightened if guns should be fired. This soothing message brought
Phoebe's white face out between the curtains, and she implored them to
get into the wagon, and not tempt Providence.

"Not till I have got thee a kaross of jackal's fur."

"I'll never wear it!" said Phoebe violently, to divert him from his
purpose.

"Time will show," said Dick dryly. "These varmint are on and off
like shadows, and as cunning as Old Nick. We two will walk on quite
unconcerned like, and as soon as ever the varmint are at our heels you
give us the office; and we'll pepper their fur--won't we, doctor?"

"We--will--pepper--their fur," said Christopher, repeating what to him
was a lesson in the ancient and venerable English tongue.

So they walked on expectant; and by and by the four-footed shadows with
large lime-light eyes came stealing on; and Phoebe shrieked, and they
vanished before the men could draw a bead on them.

"Thou's no use at this work, Pheeb," said Dick. "Shut thy eyes, and let
us have Yuke."

"Iss, master: here I be."

"You can bleat like a lamb; for I've heard ye."

"Iss, master. I bleats beautiful;" and she showed snowy teeth from ear
to ear.

"Well, then, when the varmint are at our heels, draw in thy woolly head,
and bleat like a young lamb. They won't turn from that, I know, the
vagabonds."

Matters being thus prepared, they sauntered on; but the jackals were
very wary. They came like shadows, so departed--a great many times: but
at last being re-enforced, they lessened the distance, and got so close,
that Ucatella withdrew her head, and bleated faintly inside the wagon.
The men turned, levelling their rifles, and found the troop within
twenty yards of them. They wheeled directly: but the four barrels poured
their flame, four loud reports startled the night, and one jackal lay
dead as a stone, another limped behind the flying crowd, and one lay
kicking. He was soon despatched, and both carcasses flung over the
patient oxen; and good-by jackals for the rest of that journey.

Ucatella, with all a Kafir's love of fire-arms, clapped her hands with
delight. "My child shoots loud and strong," said she.

"Ay, ay," replied Phoebe; "they are all alike; wherever there's men,
look for quarrelling and firing off. We had only to sit quiet in the
wagon."

"Ay." said Dick, "the cattle especially--for it is them the varmint were
after--and let 'em eat my Hottentots."

At this picture of the cattle inside the wagon, and the jackals supping
on cold Hottentot alongside, Phoebe, who had no more humor than a cat,
but a heart of gold, shut up, and turned red with confusion at her false
estimate of the recent transaction in fur.

When the sun rose they found themselves in a tract somewhat less arid
and inhuman; and, at last, at the rise of a gentle slope, they saw, half
a mile before them, a large farmhouse partly clad with creepers, and a
little plot of turf, the fruit of eternal watering; item, a flower-bed;
item, snow-white palings; item, an air of cleanliness and neatness
scarcely known to those dirty descendants of clean ancestors, the Boers.
At some distance a very large dam glittered in the sun, and a troop of
snow-white sheep were watering at it.

"ENGLAND!" cried Christopher.

"Ay, sir," said Phoebe; "as nigh as man can make it." But soon she began
to fret: "Oh, dear! where are they all? If it was me, I'd be at the door
looking out. Ah, there goes Yuke to rouse them up."

"Come, Pheeb, don't you fidget," said Dick kindly. "Why, the lazy lot
are scarce out of their beds by this time."

"More shame for 'em. If they were away from me, and coming home, I
should be at the door day AND night, I know. Ah!"

She uttered a scream of delight, for just then, out came Ucatella, with
little Tommy on her shoulder, and danced along to meet her. As she came
close, she raised the chubby child high in the air, and he crowed;
and then she lowered him to his mother, who rushed at him, seized,
and devoured him with a hundred inarticulate cries of joy and love
unspeakable.

"NATURE!" said Christopher dogmatically, recognizing an old
acquaintance, and booking it as one more conquest gained over the past.
But there was too much excitement over the cherub to attend to him. So
he watched the woman gravely, and began to moralize with all his might.
"This," said he, "is what we used to call maternal love; and all animals
had it, and that is why the noble savage went for him. It was very good
of you, Miss Savage," said the poor soul sententiously.

"Good of her!" cried Phoebe. "She is all goodness. Savage, find me a
Dutchwoman like her! I'll give her a good cuddle for it;" and she took
the Kafir round the neck, and gave her a hearty kiss, and made the
little boy kiss her too.

At this moment out came a collie dog, hunting Ucatella by scent alone,
which process landed him headlong in the group; he gave loud barks of
recognition, fawned on Phoebe and Dick, smelt poor Christopher, gave
a growl of suspicion, and lurked about squinting, dissatisfied, and
lowering his tail.

"Thou art wrong, lad, for once," said Dick; "for he's an old friend, and
a good one."

"After the dog, perhaps some Christian will come to welcome us," said
poor Phoebe.

Obedient to the wish, out walked Sophy, the English nurse, a scraggy
woman, with a very cocked nose and thin, pinched lips, and an air of
respectability and pertness mingled. She dropped a short courtesy, shot
the glance of a basilisk at Ucatella, and said stiffly, "You are welcome
home, ma'am." Then she took the little boy as one having authority.
Not that Phoebe would have surrendered him; but just then Mr. Falcon
strolled out, with a cigar in his mouth, and Phoebe, with her heart in
HER mouth, flew to meet him. There was a rapturous conjugal embrace,
followed by mutual inquiries; and the wagon drew up at the door. Then,
for the first time, Falcon observed Staines, saw at once he was a
gentleman, and touched his hat to him, to which Christopher responded in
kind, and remembered he had done so in the locked-up past.

Phoebe instantly drew her husband apart by the sleeve. "Who do you think
that is? You'll never guess. 'Tis the great doctor that saved Dick's
life in England with cutting of his throat. But, oh, my dear, he is not
the man he was. He is afflicted. Out of his mind partly. Well, we must
cure him, and square the account for Dick. I'm a proud woman at finding
him, and bringing him here to make him all right again, I can tell you.
Oh, I am happy, I am happy. Little did I think to be so happy as I am.
And, my dear, I have brought you a whole sackful of newspapers, old and
new."

"That is a good girl. But tell me a little more about him. What is his
name?"

"Christie."

"Dr. Christie?"

"No doubt. He wasn't an apothecary, or a chemist, you may be sure, but
a high doctor, and the cleverest ever was or ever will be: and isn't it
sad, love, to see him brought down so? My heart yearns for the poor
man: and then his wife--the sweetest, loveliest creature you ever--oh!"
Phoebe stopped very short, for she remembered something all of a sudden;
nor did she ever again give Falcon a chance of knowing that the woman,
whose presence had so disturbed him, was this very Dr. Christie's wife.
"Curious!" thought she to herself, "the world to be so large, and yet so
small:" then aloud, "They are unpacking the wagon; come, dear. I don't
think I have forgotten anything of yours. There's cigars, and
tobacco, and powder, and shot, and bullets, and everything to make you
comfortable, as my duty 'tis; and--oh, but I'm a happy woman."

Hottentots, big and little, clustered about the wagon. Treasure after
treasure was delivered with cries of delight; the dogs found out it was
a joyful time, and barked about the wheeled treasury; and the place did
not quiet down till sunset.

A plain but tidy little room was given to Christopher, and he slept
there like a top. Next morning his nurse called him up to help her water
the grass. She led the way with a tub on her head and two buckets in it.
She took him to the dam; when she got there she took out the buckets,
left one on the bank, and gave the other to Christie. She then went down
the steps till the water was up to her neck, and bade Christie fill the
tub. He poured eight bucketsful in. Then she came slowly out, straight
as an arrow, balancing this tub full on her head. Then she held out her
hands for the two buckets. Christie filled them, wondering, and gave
them to her. She took them like toy buckets, and glided slowly home with
this enormous weight, and never spilled a drop. Indeed, the walk was
more smooth and noble than ever, if possible.

When she reached the house, she hailed a Hottentot, and it cost the
man and Christopher a great effort of strength to lower her tub between
them.

"What a vertebral column you must have!" said Christopher.

"You must not speak bad words, my child," said she. "Now, you water the
grass and the flowers." She gave him a watering-pot, and watched him
maternally; but did not put a hand to it. She evidently considered this
part of the business as child's play, and not a fit exercise of her
powers.

It was only by drowning that little oasis twice a day that the grass was
kept green and the flowers alive.

She found him other jobs in course of the day, and indeed he was always
helping somebody or other, and became quite ruddy, bronzed, and plump of
cheek, and wore a strange look of happiness, except at times when he
got apart, and tried to recall the distant past. Then he would knit his
brow, and looked perplexed and sad.

They were getting quite used to him, and he to them, when one day he did
not come in to dinner. Phoebe sent out for him; but they could not find
him.

The sun set. Phoebe became greatly alarmed, and even Dick was anxious.

They all turned out, with guns and dogs, and hunted for him beneath the
stars.

Just before daybreak Dick Dale saw a fire sparkle by the side of a
distant thicket. He went to it, and there was Ucatella seated, calm and
grand as antique statue, and Christopher lying by her side, with a shawl
thrown over him. As Dale came hurriedly up, she put her finger to her
lips, and said, "My child sleeps. Do not wake him. When he sleeps, he
hunts the past, as Collie hunts the springbok."

"Here's a go," said Dick. Then, hearing a chuckle, he looked up, and was
aware of a comical appendage to the scene. There hung, head downwards,
from a branch, a Kafir boy, who was, in fact, the brother of the stately
Ucatella, only went further into antiquity for his models of deportment;
for, as she imitated the antique marbles, he reproduced the habits of
that epoch when man roosted, and was arboreal. Wheel somersaults, and,
above all, swinging head downwards from a branch, were the sweeteners of
his existence.

"Oh! YOU are there, are you?" said Dick.

"Iss," said Ucatella. "Tim good boy. Tim found my child."

"Well," said Dick, "he has chosen a nice place. This is the clump the
last lion came out of, at least they say so. For my part, I never saw
an African lion; Falcon says they've all took ship, and gone to England.
However, I shall stay here with my rifle till daybreak. 'Tis tempting
Providence to lie down on the skirt of a wood for Lord knows what to
jump out on ye unawares."

Tim was sent home for Hottentots, and Christopher was carried home,
still sleeping, and laid on his own bed.

He slept twenty-four hours more, and, when he was fairly awake, a sort
of mist seemed to clear away in places, and he remembered things at
random. He remembered being at sea on the raft with the dead body;
that picture was quite vivid to him. He remembered, too, being in the
hospital, and meeting Phoebe, and every succeeding incident; but as
respected the more distant past, he could not recall it by any effort
of his will. His mind could only go into that remoter past by material
stepping-stones; and what stepping-stones he had about him here led him
back to general knowledge, but not to his private history.

In this condition he puzzled them all strangely at the farm; his mind
was alternately so clear and so obscure. He would chat with Phoebe, and
sometimes give her a good practical hint; but the next moment, helpless
for want of memory, that great faculty without which judgment cannot
act, having no material.

After some days of this, he had another great sleep. It brought him back
the distant past in chapters. His wedding-day. His wife's face and dress
upon that day. His parting with her: his whole voyage out: but, strange
to say, it swept away one-half of that which he had recovered at his
last sleep, and he no longer remembered clearly how he came to be at
Dale's Kloof.

Thus his mind might be compared to one climbing a slippery place, who
gains a foot or two, then slips back; but on the whole gains more than
he loses.

He took a great liking to Falcon. That gentleman had the art of
pleasing, and the tact never to offend.

Falcon affected to treat the poor soul's want of memory as a common
infirmity; pretended he was himself very often troubled in the same way,
and advised him to read the newspapers. "My good wife," said he, "has
brought me a whole file of the Cape Gazette. I'd read them if I was you.
The deuce is in it, if you don't rake up something or other."

Christopher thanked him warmly for this: he got the papers to his own
little room, and had always one or two in his pocket for reading. At
first he found a good many hard words that puzzled him; and he borrowed
a pencil of Phoebe, and noted them down. Strange to say, the words that
puzzled him were always common words, that his unaccountable memory had
forgotten: a hard word, he was sure to remember that.

One day he had to ask Falcon the meaning of "spendthrift." Falcon told
him briefly. He could have illustrated the word by a striking example;
but he did not. He added, in his polite way, "No fellow can understand
all the words in a newspaper. Now, here's a word in mine--'Anemometer;'
who the deuce can understand such a word?"

"Oh, THAT is a common word enough," said poor Christopher. "It means a
machine for measuring the force of the wind."

"Oh, indeed," said Falcon; but did not believe a word of it.

One sultry day Christopher had a violent headache, and complained
to Ucatella. She told Phoebe, and they bound his brows with a wet
handkerchief, and advised him to keep in-doors. He sat down in the
coolest part of the house, and held his head with his hands, for it
seemed as if it would explode into two great fragments.

All in a moment the sky was overcast with angry clouds, whirling this
way and that. Huge drops of hail pattered down, and the next minute came
a tremendous flash of lightning, accompanied, rather than followed, by a
crash of thunder close over their heads.

This was the opening. Down came a deluge out of clouds that looked
mountains of pitch, and made the day night but for the fast and furious
strokes of lightning that fired the air. The scream of wind and awful
peals of thunder completed the horrors of the scene.

In the midst of this, by what agency I know no more than science or
a sheep does, something went off inside Christopher's head, like a
pistol-shot. He gave a sort of scream, and dashed out into the weather.

Phoebe heard his scream and his flying footstep, and uttered an
ejaculation of fear. The whole household was alarmed, and, under other
circumstances, would have followed him; but you could not see ten yards.

A chill sense of impending misfortune settled on the house. Phoebe threw
her apron over her head, and rocked in her chair.

Dick himself looked very grave.

Ucatella would have tried to follow him; but Dick forbade her. "'Tis no
use," said he. "When it clears, we that be men will go for him."

"Pray Heaven you may find him alive!"

"I don't think but what we shall. There's nowhere he can fall down to
hurt himself, nor yet drown himself, but our dam; and he has not gone
that way. But"--

"But what?"

"If we do find him, we must take him back to Cape Town, before he does
himself, or some one, a mischief. Why, Phoebe, don't you see the man has
gone raving mad?"




CHAPTER XIX.


The electrified man rushed out into the storm, but he scarcely felt
it in his body; the effect on his mind overpowered hail-stones. The
lightning seemed to light up the past; the mighty explosions of thunder
seemed cannon strokes knocking down a wall, and letting in his whole
life.

Six hours the storm raged, and, before it ended, he had recovered nearly
his whole past, except his voyage with Captain Dodd--that, indeed, he
never recovered--and the things that happened to him in the hospital
before he met Phoebe Falcon and her brother: and as soon as he had
recovered his lost memory, his body began to shiver at the hail and
rain. He tried to find his way home, but missed it; not so much,
however, but that he recovered it as soon as it began to clear, and
just as they were coming out to look for him, he appeared before them,
dripping, shivering, very pale and worn, with the handkerchief still
about his head.

At sight of him, Dick slipped back to his sister, and said, rather
roughly, "There now, you may leave off crying: he is come home; and
to-morrow I take him to Cape Town."

Christopher crept in, a dismal, sinister figure.

"Oh, sir," said Phoebe, "was this a day for a Christian to be out in?
How could you go and frighten us so?"

"Forgive me, madam," said Christopher humbly; "I was not myself."

"The best thing you can do now is to go to bed, and let us send you up
something warm."

"You are very good," said Christopher, and retired with the air of one
too full of great amazing thoughts to gossip.

He slept thirty hours at a stretch, and then, awaking in the dead of
night, he saw the past even more clear and vivid; he lighted his candle
and began to grope in the Cape Gazette. As to dates, he now remembered
when he had sailed from England, and also from Madeira. Following up
this clew, he found in the Gazette a notice that H. M. ship Amphitrite
had been spoken off the Cape, and had reported the melancholy loss of a
promising physician and man of science, Dr. Staines.

The account said every exertion had been made to save him, but in vain.

Staines ground his teeth with rage at this. "Every exertion! the
false-hearted curs. They left me to drown, without one manly effort to
save me. Curse them, and curse all the world."

Pursuing his researches rapidly, he found a much longer account of a
raft picked up by Captain Dodd, with a white man on it and a dead body,
the white man having on him a considerable sum in money and jewels.

Then a new anxiety chilled him. There was not a word to identify him
with Dr. Staines. The idea had never occurred to the editor of the Cape
Gazette. Still less would it occur to any one in England. At this moment
his wife must be mourning for him. "Poor--poor Rosa!"

But perhaps the fatal news might not have reached her.

That hope was dashed away as soon as found. Why, these were all OLD
NEWSPAPERS. That gentlemanly man who had lent them to him had said so.

Old! yet they completed the year 1867.

He now tore through them for the dates alone, and soon found they went
to 1868. Yet they were old papers. He had sailed in May, 1867.

"My God!" he cried, in agony, "I HAVE LOST A YEAR."

This thought crushed him. By and by he began to carry this awful idea
into details. "My Rosa has worn mourning for me, and put it off again. I
am dead to her, and to all the world."

He wept long and bitterly.

Those tears cleared his brain still more. For all that, he was not yet
himself; at least, I doubt it; his insanity, driven from the intellect,
fastened one lingering claw into his moral nature, and hung on by it.
His soul filled with bitterness and a desire to be revenged on mankind
for their injustice, and this thought possessed him more than reason.

He joined the family at breakfast; and never a word all the time. But
when he got up to go, he said, in a strange, dogged way, as if it went
against the grain, "God bless the house that succors the afflicted."
Then he went out to brood alone.

"Dick," said Phoebe, "there's a change. I'll never part with him: and
look, there's Collie following him, that never could abide him."

"Part with him?" said Reginald. "Of course not. He is a gentleman, and
they are not so common in Africa."

Dick, who hated Falcon, ignored this speech entirely, and said, "Well,
Pheeb, you and Collie are wiser than I am. Take your own way, and don't
blame me if anything happens."

Soon Christopher paid the penalty of returning reason. He suffered all
the poignant agony a great heart can endure.

So this was his reward for his great act of self-denial in leaving his
beloved wife. He had lost his patient; he had lost the income from that
patient; his wife was worse off than before, and had doubtless suffered
the anguish of a loving heart bereaved. His mind, which now seemed more
vigorous than ever, after its long rest, placed her before his very
eyes, pale, and worn with grief, in her widow's cap.

At the picture, he cried like the rain. He could give her joy, by
writing; but he could not prevent her from suffering a whole year of
misery.

Turning this over in connection with their poverty, his evil genius
whispered, "By this time she has received the six thousand pounds for
your death. SHE would never think of that; but her father has: and there
is her comfort assured, in spite of the caitiffs who left her husband to
drown like a dog.

"I know my Rosa," he thought. "She has swooned--ah, my poor darling--she
has raved--she has wept," he wept himself at the thought--"she has
mourned every indiscreet act, as if it was a crime. But she HAS done
all this. Her good and loving but shallow nature is now at rest from the
agonies of bereavement, and nought remains but sad and tender regrets.
She can better endure that than poverty: cursed poverty, which has
brought her and me to this, and is the only real evil in the world, but
bodily pain."

Then came a struggle, that lasted a whole week, and knitted his brows,
and took the color from his cheek; but it ended in the triumph of love
and hate, over conscience and common sense. His Rosa should not be poor;
and he would cheat some of those contemptible creatures called men, who
had done him nothing but injustice, and at last had sacrificed his life
like a rat's.

When the struggle was over, and the fatal resolution taken, then he
became calmer, less solitary, and more sociable.

Phoebe, who was secretly watching him with a woman's eye, observed this
change in him, and, with benevolent intentions, invited him one day to
ride round the farm with her. He consented readily. She showed him the
fields devoted to maize and wheat, and then the sheepfolds. Tim's sheep
were apparently deserted; but he was discovered swinging head downwards
from the branch of a camel-thorn, and seeing him, it did strike one that
if he had had a tail he would have been swinging by that. Phoebe called
to him: he never answered, but set off running to her, and landed
himself under her nose in a wheel somersault.

"I hope you are watching them, Tim," said his mistress.

"Iss, missy, always washing 'em."

"Why, there's one straying towards the wood now."

"He not go far," said Tim coolly. The young monkey stole off a little
way, then fell flat, and uttered the cry of a jackal, with startling
precision. Back went the sheep to his comrades post haste, and Tim
effected a somersault and a chuckle.

"You are a clever boy," said Phoebe. "So that is how you manage them."

"Dat one way, missy," said Tim, not caring to reveal all his resources
at once.

Then Phoebe rode on, and showed Christopher the ostrich pan. It was
a large basin, a form the soil often takes in these parts; and in it
strutted several full-grown ostriches and their young, bred on the
premises. There was a little dam of water, and plenty of food about.
They were herded by a Kafir infant of about six, black, glossy, fat, and
clean, being in the water six times a day.