Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The Bird of Paradise

Chapter XII. The Transformation of Lillie Delaine

Chapter XII. The Transformation of Lillie Delaine.

"Here's fennel for you and columbines; there's rue for you and here's some for me: you must wear your rue with a difference: we may call it herb of grace o' Sundays."

In the interval between the serving upon the doctor of the petition and citation and the beginning of the quadra-mensal2 sittings of the court constituted to hear causes in divorce and matrimonial jurisdiction, the judicial bench of the State of Louisiana received one of the greatest blows to its prestige and magnificence since the day of its inauguration by the demise of the noble and good man who had adorned its lofty thrones for more than forty years—the man who had pitied and shown the mercy that becomes the sceptred monarch better than his throne, when he sentenced even the brutal and blood-thirsty Graves to death on the prosecution of Marmaduke Payne. Like a beacon light, in his eloquent pleadings at the bar and his unerring judgments on the dais, he shone over the entire legal hemisphere.

By his death the whole machinery of the law was for some time thrown out of gear. Angry discussions arose in the State legislature and at the law institute as to the nomination of his probable successor. Senatorial influences were kept rolling to foist upon the nation inferior and incapable men, but the voice of the people clamoured against these contrivances. The judge next in seniority to the late popular ornament of the bench was in every way well-fitted from length of service as a judge of the Supreme Court, long experience, remarkable ability, wonderful success at the bar, penetrative acumen and stately bearing on the seat of justice, to follow in the footsteps of the judge deceased. This superb lawyer for some inscrutable reason was passed over, and in his stead was appointed to the vacancy the judge next below him in seniority. At the time the judges were appointed by the government, but since then they have been appointed by the people. With widespread approbation this superlative judge, whose knowledge of the complex intricacies of the law was paramount and second to none in the world, was with all appropriate ceremony elevated by the page 387seal and signature of the governor of the State to the appointment held so decorously by his predecessor.

It so happened that the quadra-mensal sittings of the divorce court came simultaneously with the elevation of Judge Winterbourne, and, in accordance with the scheme arranged for the administration of justice at the beginning of the year, it devolved upon the successor of the deceased judge to adjudicate in divorce and matrimonial causes in the country courts on circuit, while the judge who had heard the application for habeas corpus ad subjiciendum was appointed divorce judge in the Supreme Court of the city3.

Thus the case of Whitworth versus Whitworth would come before a judge who had a previous insight into the case. His Honour, however, feeling that it would possibly be considered prejudicial to the hearing of the suit if he carried out his judicial functions is a case in which he had in its earlier stages been to a certain extent influenced, deferred the hearing of the case of Whitworth versus Whitworth until the April sittings of the following year. This change, which the doctor surmised had been effected by the strategic exertions of Craig, Clack, Carrick and Clark in order to protract the case and afford them every opportunity of making all the money they could out of it, did not meet with the approval of Eugene himself, who felt anxious that the case should be heard and the suspense blotted out from his mind.

Settling down again in the interval to his medical practice at the seaside, he had as a companion for a month his brother, who had turned over a new leaf and had been so busy and prosperous in his renewed profession that he could afford to allow himself a few weeks' holiday. There was nothing in the house in the shape of alcohol but a few bottles of German Lager beer. Often before retiring to bed they together drank between them a bottle. They took nothing in the day-time at all. In these small quantities it had a soothing and soporific effect and acted as a stimulo-sedative. To the doctor it was conducive to more peaceful slumber than had been his portion before. On his brother it had a disturbing and confusing influence. He frequently complained of the drowsy conditions that accompanied its earlier symptoms. Still no suggestion was made by either of them at to the specific ingredient which had these unusual effects, and the somnipathic result was ascribed to some peculiar property in the hops which the beer contained.

Had one of those remnant bottles of German Lager beer been tested with toxicological reagents in time there would have possibly been revealed the causes for the breaking of the needle of that little hypodermic syringe which for long time he thought had been lost. Then it would have dawned upon his mind that in every bottle which bad been stacked in that pantry at Myamyn was diffused in the beer enough poison to make a man excited, passionate and reckless in his expressions and deportment if he were of an active inclination of mind, and by continuous instillation of its poisonous page 388adulterations enough to make him wander unwittingly into scenes of moral and social degradation.

Through every cork of the remaining bottles was afterwards found a hole drilled as if by some sharp and stout needle, through which might have found its way the fine needle of the hypodermic syringe, charged with the solution of atropine and morphine, while the ragged tinsel capsule had been cunningly replaced over the head of the cork.

There he would have found the reason why he had ventilated the sudden outburst upon his wife when Guinevere had been insulted by her in the surgery, and the causes of his associating himself at bars with his inferiors and his final contamination with the dyed hand of Marmaduke Payne. Then too, the dangers he had run of being seen at covert meetings with his old servant and the cause of that sword through clumsiness slipping out of its scabbard as he attempted to stand it up in the corner of the surgery, late though it might have been, would have been clearly and incontrovertibly revealed.

His brother subsequently suggested that both Gloriana Bloobumper and Esmeralda Knight might have been the culprits, but Eugene attributed the laceration of the capsules to the children and scorned the theory that malice had anything to do with the tampering with the bottles and the doctoring of the beer. He blamed himself for having injected the morphia into the bottles when distracted by loss of sleep. He had forgotten all about it afterwards, but Brosie stoutly maintained that it was either Knight or Bloobumper.

Prompted, probably by the new firm of solicitors as well as by Brassy, to incite the doctor into a quarrel, to have that quarrel witnessed and its version magnified and distorted by under-strappers paid for the express purpose, the malignant Marvel had strained every nerve in her frame. He refused to believe that she was so viperous as to be a husband-poisoner— such as could induce her cousin to learn from his own lips, under the rose of her amiability, the modus operandi of that little syringe at Bendemeer years before, and bring her knowledge, acquired by dissembling low cunning, to bear upon him in the hour of danger and in the climax of his life, in order to eke out her revenge to the bitter end. Marvel was no more guilty of such treachery than could have been Guinevere or Miriam.

Shortly after the arrival of Brosie in Myamyn came also the old mother of the servant, with the ostensible object of relieving her of some of the work, as she was showing signs of fatigue and worry. Her real object was to stay at Myamyn acting propriety in the wifeless home. During the first week of her sojourn Lillie's mother asked the doctor if he thought a glass of Lager beer would strengthen and fortify the girl, to which he replied that it probably would, and further that it might conduce to the sleep of the want of which her mother had said she complained. Eugene, moreover, suited the action to the word by offering her the freedom of the cellar where the bottles were kept. For some days the fretting girl drank a glass page 389of the Lager beer every day, in order to restore her failing appctite and at night to conduce to the sleep which had deserted her for weeks.

It drove her mad—stark staring mad! For weeks that simple-minded and innocent girl was a raving and raging lunatic; yet nobody suspected the cause. Her mother remembered that she had suffered from hysterical fits when she was very young, but since that early epoch she had all her life been in good bodily and mental health. Her mother, naturally a lightheaded woman who had been for some time incapacitated from her domestic duties by a severe attack of Russian influenza, some weeks after her advent to Myamyn complained of giddiness and a sensation of fulness in her head. She was forced to go home just as the premonitory symptoms of acute mania in her daughter had somewhat temporarily abated. Accordingly, when the girl's insanity broke out in all its heinous fury there was nobody in the house to attend her but Eugene and Brosie.

Sitting together in the dining-room one Saturday evening, they saw her leave the house to do presumably the Saturday evening's shopping in accordance with her usual custom. Lillie returned in about an hour with a London shilling-shocker4 novelette. She had quite forgotten what provisions she had intended to order. She sat down without speaking at the fire, like one visibly distraite staring at the novelette till after the two brothers had gone to bed.

On arising next morning they found her bedroom door wide open. The girl was gone! Looking round about the premises Eugene noticed her coming down the road, still staring at the novelette and gesticulating with her arms in the public compound. No hat! her hair hanging down upon her shoulders! she had the general appearance of one who had been wandering about in a night-long feat of somnambulism. He withdrew to the diningroom as he saw her and sat down beside Brosie. She entered like Hamlet, staring at the words, words, words and tapping the novelette with a rose. Her reason was unstrung.

"There's the poison!" she suddenly glowered at them, and shouted at the top of her voice; "there it is:" as she pointed with the rose at some ink-stains on the sleeve of her dress; "the doctor up the street said it was poison. I am dead and poisoned: poisoned and dead. I am the virgin Mary! I have a letter from Jesus in my pocket 1 it says you must not scrub out the poison from my dress, because I am made of pure crystalline glass and might smash. I am the virgin Mary and the sister of all the angels in Heaven! I could lift fifty million tons and run all around the world in five minutes. I made the sun and the moon and all the stars in the sky! Brosie will I blacken your boots or lend you a three? I am poisoned and dead: I am the virgin Mary. Doctor will I sweep the chimney or will you buy some pigs for me to feed? Beautiful pigs! Oh 'Arry, 'Arry gimme yer answer do (falsetto): all murdered me: my mother poisoned me: the doctor poisoned me: Brosie poisoned me: Pearly! I'm the virgin Mary now, and the chick-a-leary bloke with my one two three."

Then she yelled out prolonged, inhuman moans, such as Eugene had page 390heard on the night of his return to Myamyn from the St. Bernard. The moans lasted fully an hour. Lillie interspersed them with the reading aloud of a letter, purporting to have been sent to her from Heaven, which address she had written on the corner at the top and signed "Yours truly, God Almighty," and calling out with heart-rending cries, "My God! it's not true: it's a lie: my God! my God!" Then came flood upon flood of tears alternating with preternatural sobs.

Little Vallie ran in for his breakfast with the rocking-horse whip in his hand. With the whip he began to tickle up the servant, saying—"Puppa, ain't she silly? ain't she silly?"

Arranging with his brother to watch her, the doctor went away to the druggist's shop to secure some bromide of potassium. From the druggist he learned that Lillie had climbed up the verandah-post, throwing stones at his bedroom window to wake him up the night before, until she had smashed the glass; stood in the shop raving till he pushed her out; knocked over a large blue show-jar, which he had on the counter, to smithereens on the floor and, declaring she was poisoned, rushed frantically over to the fire-plug in the centre of the street, gave herself the signal to start, and did a mile up and down the road in the fastest time on record, a few seconds over that taken by Moss Rose, and vanished like a wraith about five o'clock in the morning.

Mixing the bromide of potassium in a tumbler, Eugene tried all manner of means to induce her to take it, but she would only agree to sip a few drops off the tip of the spoon and run away to the tap to wash it out of her mouth.

It was Sunday. All nature outside Myamyn was gay, and the little yellowhammer whistled from the eaves. There was no way whatever of telegraphing to her mother. All that could be done was to watch her and struggle to keep her inside the house. The doctor cooked some breakfast for the children and endeavoured to persuade the hapless girl to have some; but she clenched her jaws as tight as a vyce when he proffered it to her, every now and then screeching out the old exclamations and preaching sermons to the great amusement of the children, but the unspeakable dismay of Eugene. During the outbreak she spoke better English than usual. The sermons ranged from the heights of glorious eloquence and spiritual exaltation down to the depths of bathos and levity.

The children looked upon the agonised distraction of the maniacal girl as a grand bit of fun. They kept goading her on for more. In the house of one of the neighbours there was a little opposition, in the shape of a chronic and quieter lunatic, who at that time was enjoying a lucid interval, so that the neighbours of the doctor were used to it and not at all alarmed.

Following her in rotation every step she took in the house, the doctor and Brosie mounted guard over Lillie. They relieved each other by relays, page 391while all the time she vehemently raged, clamouring to get oat into the street and bursting into passions of sobs and tears.

With the sublime cunning and dexterity of a lunatic, she managed to get hold of the key of the back door, which was locked. Quick as lightning she had it open and flew down the side avenue of the house out past the escalonia hedges; over the gate in a vaulting bound into the street, in and out through the open doors of the houses with Brosie at her heels in hot pursuit. The fugitive cleverly dodged him and secreted herself in a shed. If it had not been so sad, it was laughable. Non-plussed for a few minutes by the rampant girl, he looked here and there, like a harrier sniffing about on the trail of a rabbit, or a bloodhound in chase of a criminal. Marching boldly into the open, strange houses, and out through the passage to the back, finally he found her sitting on a log of wood in an outhouse of the police-camp poring as before over the sensational pictures in the shilling shocker. From there by slow stages he persuaded her to walk along with him, and eventually inveigled her into following him home, Brosie looking as if he had done a great scientific stroke.

When she was in safe keeping in the house and all the keys were taken out of the locks, table-knives wedged in between the sashes and the window-frames and the latches of the windows fastened, Brosie suggested that if he played a little music it might have the desirable effect of relieving her mind. He sat down on the piano-stool and the children made instanter a stampede for the band in the bedroom, returning with bugles, triangles and drums. The health-giving, mind-restoring, pleasant- Sunday-afternoon matinée performance was begun with the obbligato of the Benedictus—"Blessed be the Lord God of Israel for He hath visited and redeemed His people and hath raised up a mighty salvation for us in the house of His servant David," while the children rang rings around the girl, and the doctor stood guarding the passage door, with his back against the door and his eye on the maniac. The effect on "the virgin Mary" for a little while was electrical. The whole thing was glorious. The potency of the balmy, soothing electricity from the pianoforte battery soon appeared to pall, and again the girl began her parade to and fro, like a captured cheetah in a prison. In an instant she seemed to see slantin dicularly that the latch of the window was bent. In less time than it takes to say so she pulled out the knife-wedge, hoisted the bottom sash flush with the top sash, and like a pertinacious jack-in-a-box she leaped quicksticks through the window, rushed to the summer-house and sprang like a cat up the lattice-work. Brosie made after her; he dragged her off the summer-house to the ground, the lattice laths tearing and splintering her hands, and hauled her bodily into the house like a captive whale. By dint of coaxing, finessing and threatening, they succeeded in administering to her a large dose of the bromide of potassium. She lay down in respite on the floor. They carried her into her room and watched over her every hour of the night.

Running backwards and forwards, as children will do with the most page 392recent information between their own and the neighbours' houses, Pearly and Vallie amused themselves as best they could, and in the evening they serenaded the girl with the raucous band.

It was remarkable what aptitude and smartness little Pearly showed during the emergency, in carrying out the duties of a miniature housewife. She could spread the table-cloth as well as old Hemlock, set the things in fantastic order on the table, clear them all away as well as old Jean Gould, and at washing up the dishes she was quite au fait; but when an attempt was made to wash Vallie's face, he sent the basin spinning down the passage. She could sweep the floor, make beds, dust and tidy up the rooms with a dexterity that would have defied the competition of the flying Dutchman. So "busied in her hussyskep" did the sturdy little housewife make herself, that her father thought he would never find her equal in the world. Still there was not a grain of old-fashionedness in Pearly. She was a perfect child of nature.

When the Monday morning came, Brosie went out to look for a suitable nurse for the girl, who was by this time apparently quieter than she was on the Sunday. When the doctor thought she was enjoying a lucid interval and had gone to sleep, he quietly stole down the passage to look into a disturbance between Pearly and Valentine. The disturbance consisted of a bombardment of the cupboard in the kitchen, in which fortification Pearly had ensconced herself for shelter from assaults with potatoes and loaves of bread by the recalcitrant Valentine. As he walked up the passage he saw the front door wide open and the frenzied girl partly standing, partly hanging over the front gate, dressed—or rather undressed in the apparel of her primeval mother, looking up and down the street and swaying her head backwards and forwards. She wore nothing but the habiliments of her toilette de nuit. It was about nine o'clock in the morning, and the people passing by gathered in little knots and gaped at the nocturnally habited Lillie.

Quietly approaching her from behind, he coaxed her back as far as the verandah, when in a sudden fury she threw her arms around the verandah post and yelled out—"Murder! murder! police: help, murder! the virgin Mary!" He seized "the virgin Mary" around the waist and with the help of his brother, who had just come back from the house of the nurse and the telegraph office, they carried her back to the bedroom. They laid her on the bed. Brosie dragged the piano into the bedroom and tried again the effect of "Blessed be the Lord God of Israel."

In about half-an-hour the old nurse came and sat by her side. Shortly afterwards her mother came in response to a telegram which the doctor had sent by his brother. Her mother supplanted the nurse. She remained with her daughter all day, when her son came in the evening and assisted in the taking of his sister home.

Watching every maniacal peregrination and noting every wild, frantic, unearthly exclamation she uttered; gloating and chuckling over the sight of the ludicrous chase by Brosie among the houses on the Sunday, the forcible page 393dragging of her down from the lattice-work of the summer-house, and the avulsion of her from the verandah-post on the Monday morning as the people were passing and she screamed out to them that she was being murdered, were two of the numerous squirming mouchers, employed by Hallam. Brassy and Hoare in conjunction with Craig, Clack, Carrick and Clark, fomenting perjury and dogging the footsteps of their unsuspecting victim.

Now that the working housekeeper was disabled by her mental breakdown, whose immediate causation was the poison of the deadly nightshade in the battles, the burthen of the domestic economy and the care and espionnage of the volatile Vallie devolved upon the fifteen-inches-broad shoulders of Eugene's pet little girl. Her skill and perfect acquaintance with whatever was required to be done were, for one of her tender years, incredible, There was no duty in that bouse in which she was not adept. No grown-up woman could have cleaned up a bedroom or dusted a mantelpiece or a piano, as she stood on a chair, better than that precocious little sunbeam of Myamyn. In the burlesque of custodian to her little brother, however, she signally failed. Where she did succeed, it was with all the more credit to herself; as with his espiéglerie he made himself as formidable an obstacle to her success as he could by pulling her clusters of golden hair, dragging the chair from under her and flicking her with the whip.

Within a few weeks Miriam came from Lily Cottage and took the children under her fostering care at Myamyn for a few weeks; after which they left with her for the benefit of a change in the Galveston cottage by the sea. Before leaving however, they were taken by their father and Brosie on a visit to the demented Lillie Delaine.

At first, instead of deriving any benefit from the change from Myamyn, she performed still greater freaks by ringing the bells of all the lawyers' houses in the suburb, marching into their rooms, calling them liars or stating she came to let them know she felt better and refusing to leave because she said she had come back to look after their children. All her relatives were at their wits' ends devising schemes for keeping her from bolting out of the house, taking the train to Houston on the supposition that it was going to Mobile, and getting out at the first station to be sent walking home by the porters, while her mother and all her kindred were scouring the town in search of her. She narrowly escaped several times from being arrested by the police. At the time of the visit of the children to her home Eugene was agreeably surprised to find that she was quieter and showed signs of a coming and permanent improvement.

There were still about two months to run before the divorce court for April would sit, and the doctor, who realised to what a further disadvantage he would be placed if his old servant would be unable to give evidence, entertained some sanguine hopes that the aberration would right itself and that she would be able to appear and answer questions in the witness-box before the two months passed away. About that time he was the sport of circumstance and catastrophe and the workings of an inimical invisible page 394hand; everything seemed to be going against him. With the sword of Damocles hanging over his head, "the stars in their courses fought against Sisera."5 As the dark speck in the distant sky in its flight earthward gathers other scores, nay hundreds of moving omens, till in one compact united flight the vultures descend in a serried swoop and with their carnivorous maws rend the quarry in the desert, so misfortune follows upon misfortune till the victim of misfortune is overpowered and annihilated. The calamity which had befallen the girl was not without its influence over the medical practice at Myamyn. It was the last straw in the causation of its collapse—it crushed and crumbled it away to nothing. He had to swim through a river of bird-lime and tar to get the children, and now uncontrollable circumstances impeded his professional progress. The populace of the village and district shunned the house altogether as soon as the story of the servant's outbreak of insanity was fully enlarged in height, width and depth, and passed along from lip to lip by the scandalmongers who abound in every small community. Their sympathies ever after appeared to veer round from the doctor towards his wife, whereas theretofore they had pointed to Eugene, as true as compass needle to the north, ever since he had been embroiled in the law.

He soon found it was not worth his while to waste his energies and time in the quest of willing witnesses in the neighbourhood of Myamyn. Indeed, nearly all the people whom he approached on the subject in all the other places he found very shy and reluctant to appear in a divorce court, as most of them were very proper and strait-laced people; while, on the other hand, the witnesses whom Hallam, Brassy, Hoare, Craig, Clack, Carrick and Clark were adding to their lists every day, were mostly hirelings from the "leisure classes," such as would accept payment to swear what was put into their mouths and to swear it well up to the mark. The market was glutted with seared consciences, professional scoundrels, and nefarious costermongers. He had no money to offer for the expenses of his witnesses. He had to trust to their firmness as friends and their generosities for evidence on his behalf.

No sooner had the report of the detectives who had witnessed the mad antics of Lillie Delaine been forwarded to the head office of Craig, Clack, Carrick and Clark in the Fourth Avenue than an application was made by their coadjutors, Hallam, Brassy and Hoare, to the judge for permission to amend the petition by adding to it the charge that they had taken him alive in their trawls at last, insomuch he had assaulted his servant, chased her out of the house in the night and brutally dragged her back to the bedroom. The permission prayed for was granted, and the additional gun was dragged on the field and levelled at the devoted head of Whitworth.

He was compelled to give up Myamyn from fear that it would be objected that the children were not under his personal supervision and under his own roof at the time of the trial for divorce. He took his departure from the little village in order to stay with them in the cottage by the sea.

page 395

Whatever remained of the seaside practice, for which he had paid eight hundred and fifty dollars, was usurped by an interloping doctor, who took every advantage of Eugene's distresses and the aversions of his patients since the magnified and distorted canard of the scene on the verandah had been bruited broadcast over the district. The new doctor, a Frenchman, had settled down in the "Old House at Home," lying low like a crouching fox watching until he would leave, and snapping up the whole of his business when he was gone.

Before leaving the city of New Orleans, where, unknown to him, every move he made was closely watched, he re-visited the cottage of the mother of the house-keeper to inquire into the condition of her mental faculties; what progress she was making towards recovery, and what prospects there were of her opportune rehabilitation to justify her presentment for examination and cross-examination by unmerciful barristers in the court. She had considerably improved, and was almost then able to resume her ordinary avocation. From want of house-room his mother's cottage was unable to afford its customary welcome as a resort for the old servant; though Miriam, whose heart was big enough for the whole parish, endeavoured to accommodate her there.

When he bad finally departed from the city, he wrote to her mother from Lily Cottage, advising her of a light situation in Galveston suitable for the present circumstances of her daughter. It was advertised in the newspapers, and with the assistance of Miriam she procured the employment.

It was an advantage to Eugene to have her close at hand, in order that he might supervise the convalescence from her mental disorder; obtain from her the necessary statement which she intended to make in the court, and present it in proper form at the trial. Her mother quickly came to Galveston She obtained the situation of nurse-girl for her daughter at a house near the pier where the steam-boat was berthed.

Upon Lillie's arrival at the seaside town late at night she was met by Brosie, who carried her little tin box of articles of clothing to the house where she was to be employed. Depositing it for her at the front gate, he stood talking to her for a little while, when their conversation was interrupted by the appearance on the scene of a strange woman, who seemed to have dropped from the clouds and who, it was subsequently discovered, was a mouchard in female disguise.

Refreshed by the change to his new abode and released from the imbibition of the poisonous Lager beer, the doctor renewed his labours as his own solicitor in spite of the premonitions of the judge. He obtained statements from the various witnesses whom he intended to call for the defence. Chief among these statements came the one of such paramount importance—a scrawled narration of her five years' experience by Lillie Delaine as housekeeper to the doctor.

Finding it, when received by post, in rather a confused and hieroglyphical form, he made it more readable and presentable by copying it oat himself. His doing so himself was animadverted upon by the judge at the trial, page 396although such is the work of a solicitor, who copies out or takes statements from witnesses proposed to be called. At the time he had no money to employ solicitors and had to do the whole of the work himself, being as it were his own lawyer. During the five weeks he stayed in Galveston he seldom had even a dollar in his pocket. He was in the anomalous state of a penniless man.

In pursuance of a suggestion in the maintenance order, he piloted the children one morning into the folds of an exceptionally choice and high class boarding school, presided over by the mother of an old collegiate fellow-student and friend of his, who was subsequently raised to the dignity of the assizes court bench just before the downfall of Brosie. At this little flowery beehive priory Pearly and Valentine were employed in congenial scholastic industries during the day. They lived in childish happiness; they slept in a region of quietude together under the benignant care of a counterpart of Guinevere. From Monday morning till Friday afternoon they were at school as weekly boarders; the rest of the time they stayed with Miriam and their father at Lily Cottage. They went for drives in the buggy with the old chestnut mare, and on piscatorial and shooting excursions with Brosie in the valleys of the Colorado River after trout, squirrels, wood-pigeons and herons.

Their father, when his law-office in the front room was closed for the day, would join in their games in the evenings, teaching them more nursery rhymes, in which they were very proficient, and sitting with them beside their little double cot, while they raised their lisping orisons to their Saviour and Father in Heaven. To part with them were to part with the world; to sit with them was to sit enthroned in an ideal holy of holies; every sound of their voices was an enchanting call for further exertion on his part in the impending war: to gaze in evening dreams upon their pure, sweet faces as they lay calm and asleep was to see the beacon that was guiding him to a new and a better life when he had proclaimed another victory over his persecutors and cut through the silken cord of bondage with their mother for ever.

What was the paradisal bird to him that he should sigh for its shimmering sheen? What was Marvel to him that he should weep for Marvel? She was a thorn in his side before her father had died: she was an arrant shrew and an implacable tormentor ever since. Like King Solomon he thought, "It is better to dwell in the corner of a house-top than with a brawling woman in a wide house."6 It was not that he dreaded being driven out of Paradise before his time, but in the loosening of that silken cord and the breaking of that golden bowl7 lay like one excentric8 working in unison and close juxta-position with another excentric9—that unalterable, irrevocable corollary that might wrench out of his tenacious grasp his two little angels in its impetuous whirl. Pearly and Vallie constituted the crux of the whole situation. Unaided, destitute, forsaken and desperate, every nerve in his oppressed frame strained with all its might and main to seek shelter from the blast that was setting free the page 397avalanche and to stem the polluted and malodorous tide that was in readiness to burst through its barriers, overflow, and overwhelm him. From that powerful and united firm of lawyers, whose ability was levered along by the low cunning, the mean trickery and the false-swearing of the vampires—who tumbled over one another with their reports in its offices every day—to escape was for the hunted hare to escape the harriers.

To be disunited from the consort who had dragged him down and had all along been the bane of his life were a blessing from the gourds of Providence. To lose the treasures who were the apple of his eye and the talisman of his very soul, were to shut out all the sunshine of life itself and to precipitate him into never-ending gloom; and he knew only too well that the corollary worked with the decree like scissor-blade with scissor-blade; that the excentric corollary revolved, perforce, in synchronizing concomitance and harmony with the excentric decree, side by side, inseparable and immutable as the decrees of the Medes and Persians10. Thus the barque with the dragon of desertion at the prow and the demon of poverty at the helm must steer her course between Scylla and Charbydis11, or sink into the "dark unfathomed caves of ocean,"12 or lay her bones to be calcined—a stranded wreck on an inhospitable foreign shore.

1 Hamlet. IV.v.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

2 Every four months. OED Online. See 'mensal', n.1 and adj.2.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

3 Here Dutton is using Australian rather than American terminology for the legal infrastructure.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

4 Cheap, short sensational novel. Green 2005.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

5 The Bible. Judges 5:20.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

6 The Bible. Proverbs 21:9.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

7 The Bible. Ecclesiastes 12:6

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

8 Probably the mechanical sense: A circular disc fixed on a revolving shaft, some distance out of centre, working freely in a ring (the eccentric strap), which is attached to a rod called an eccentric rod, by means of which the rotating motion of the shaft is converted into a backward-and-forward motion.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

9 Probably the mechanical sense: A circular disc fixed on a revolving shaft, some distance out of centre, working freely in a ring (the eccentric strap), which is attached to a rod called an eccentric rod, by means of which the rotating motion of the shaft is converted into a backward-and-forward motion. OED Online. See 'eccentric', n., sense 2.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

10 See Daniel, chapter 6; the Bible.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

11 Two rocks in the Strait of Messina which were famously difficult to navigate; also associated with monsters. Dictionary of Classical Mythology 1995.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

12 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Thomas Gray.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]