In vain did Mr. Hayes prefer his complaint to Dr. Wolf. The Archbold had been before him, and the answer was, "Served you right."These and many other good deeds did Alfred Hardie in Drayton House. But, as the days rolled on, and no answer came from the Commissioners, his own anxiety, grief, and dismay left him less and less able to sympathise with the material but smaller wrongs around him. He became silent, dejected.
At last he came to Mrs. Archbold, and said sternly his letters to the Commissioners were intercepted.
"I can't believe that," said she. "It is against the law."So it was: but law and custom are two.
"I am sure of it," said he; "and may the eternal curse of Heaven light on the cowardly traitor and miscreant who has done it." And he stalked gloomily away.
When he left her, she sighed at this imprecation from his lips; but did not repent. "I _can't_ part with him," she said despairingly; "and if Idid not stop his poor dear letters, Wolf would:" and the amorous crocodile shed a tear, and persisted in her double-faced course.
By-and-by, when she saw him getting thinner and paler, and his bright face downcast and inexpressibly sad, she shared his misery: ay, shed scalding tears for him: yet could not give him up; for her will was as strong as the rest of her was supple; and hers was hot love, but not true love like Julia's.
Perhaps a very subtle observer, seeing this man and woman wax pale and spiritless together in one house, might have divined her secret. Dr.
Wolf, then, was no such observer, for she made him believe she had a rising _penchant_ for him. He really had a strong one for her.
While Alfred's visible misery pulled at her heart-strings, and sometimes irritated, sometimes melted her, came curious complications; one of which requires preface.
Mrs. Dodd then was not the wife to trust blindly where her poor husband was concerned. She bribed so well that a keeperess in David's first asylum told her David had been harshly used by an attendant. She instantly got Eve Dodd to take him away: and transfer him to a small asylum nearer London, and kept by a Mrs. Ellis. "Women are not cruel to men," said the sagacious Lucy Dodd.
But, alas! if women are not cruel where sex comes in and mimics that wider sentiment, Humanity, women are deadly economical. Largely gifted with that household virtue, Mrs. Ellis kept too few servants, and, sure consequence in a madhouse, too many straitjackets, hobbles, muffs, leg-locks, bodybelts, &c. &c. Hence half her patients were frequently kept out of harm's way by cruel restraints administered, not out of hearty cruelty, but female parsimony. Mrs. and Miss Dodd invaded the house one day when the fair economist was out, and found seven patients out of the twelve kept out of mischief thus: one in a restraint chair, two hobbled like asses, two chained like dogs, and two in straight-waistcoats, and fastened to beds by webbing and straps; amongst the latter, David, though quiet as a lamb.
Mrs. Dodd cried over him as if her heart would break, and made Miss Dodd shift him to a large asylum, where I believe he was very well used. But here those dreadful newspapers interfered; a prying into sweet secluded spots. They diversified Mrs. Dodd's breakfast by informing her that the doctor of this asylum had just killed a patient; the mode of execution bloodless and sure, as became fair science. It was a man between sixty and seventy; an age at which the heart can seldom stand very much shocking, or lowering, especially where the brain is diseased. So they placed him in a shower-bath, narrow enough to impede respiration, without the falling water, which of necessity drives out air. In short a vertical box with holes all round the top.
Here the doctor ordered him a cold shower-bath of unparalleled duration:
half an hour. To be followed by an unprecedented dose of tartar emetic.
This double-barrelled order given, the doctor went away. (Formula.)The water was down to forty-five degrees Fahrenheit. Half an hour's shower-bath at that temperature in a roomy bath would kill the youngest and strongest man in her Majesty's dominions.
For eight-and-twenty mortal minutes the poor old man stood in this vertical coffin under this cold cascade. Six hundred gallons of icy water were in that his last hour, his last half-hour, discharged upon his devoted head and doomed body.
He had to be helped away from this death-torrent he had walked into in high spirits, poor soul.
Even this change awakened no misgivings, no remorse; though you or I, or any man or woman picked at hazard out of the streets, would at once have seen that he was dying, he was duly dozed by the fire with four spoonfuls of antimonial tincture--_to mak' sicker._ But even the "Destructive Art of Healing" cannot slay the slain. The old man cheated the emetic; for, before it could hurt him, he died of the bath; And his body told its own sad tale; to use the words of a medical eye-witness, it was "A PIECE OFALABASTER." The death-torrent had driven the whole circulation from the surface.** This mode of execution is well known in the United States. They settle refractory prisoners with it periodically. But half an hour is not needed; twenty minutes will do the trick. _"Harper's Weekly,_" a year or two ago, contained an admirable woodcut of a negro's execution by water.
In this remarkable picture you see the poor darkie seated powerless, howling and panting his life away under the deadly cascade, and there stands the stolid turnkey, erect, formal, stiff as a ramrod, pulling the deadly string with a sort of drill exercise air, and no more compunction nor reflection than if he himself was a machine constructed to pull strings or triggers on his own string being pulled by butcher or fool. Apicture well studied, and so worth study.
Mrs. Dodd was terrified, and in spite of Sampson's assurance that this was the asylum of all others they would not settle another patient in until the matter should have blown over, got Eve Dodd to write to Dr.