Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1110 page)

The glass doors which protected the upper division of the cabinet were locked; the key being in the possession of the overseer. The cupboard in the lower division, containing towels and flannel wrappers, was left unsecured. Opening the door, the watchman drew out a bottle and an old traveling flask, concealed behind the bath-linen. “I call this my cellar,” he explained. “Cheer up, Jacky; we’ll have a jolly night of it yet.”

“I don’t want to see your cellar!” said Jack impatiently. “I want to be of use to Mistress — show me the place where we call for help.”

“Call?” repeated Schwartz, with a roar of laughter. “Do you think they can hear us at the overseer’s, through a courtyard, and a waiting-room, and a grand hall, and another courtyard, and another waiting-room beyond? Not if we were twenty men all bawling together till we were hoarse! I’ll show you how we can make the master hear us — if that miraculous revival of yours happens,” he added facetiously in a whisper to himself.

He led the way back into the passage, and held up his lantern so as to show the cornice. A row of fire-buckets was suspended there by books. Midway between them, a stout rope hung through a metal-lined hole in the roof.

“Do you see that?” said Schwartz. “You have only to pull, and there’s an iron tongue in the belfry above that will speak loud enough to be heard at the city gate. The overseer will come tumbling in, with his bunch of keys, as if the devil was at his heels, and the two women-servants after him — old and ugly, Jack! — they attend to the bath, you know, when a woman wants it. Wait a bit! Take the light into the bedroom, and get a chair for yourself — we haven’t much accommodation for evening visitors. Got it? that’s right. Would you like to see where the mad watchman hung himself? On the last hook at the end of the row there. We’ve got a song he made about the Deadhouse. I think it’s in the drawer of the table. A gentleman had it printed and sold, for the benefit of the widow and children. Wait till we are well warmed with our liquor, and I’ll tell you what I’ll do — I’ll sing you the mad watchman’s song; and Jacky, my man, you shall sing the chorus! Tow-row-rub-a-dub-boom — that’s the tune. Pretty, isn’t it? Come along back to our snuggery.” He led the way to the Watchman’s Chamber.

CHAPTER XIX

Jack looked eagerly into the cell again. There was no change — not a sign of that happy waking in which he so firmly believed.

Schwartz opened the drawer of the table. Tobacco and pipes; two or three small drinking-glasses; a dirty pack of playing-cards; the mad watchman’s song, with a woodcut illustration of the suicide — all lay huddled together. He took from the drawer the song, and two of the drinking-glasses, and called to his little guest to come out of the cell.

“There;” he said, filling the glasses, “you never tasted such wine as that in all your life. Off with it!”

Jack turned away with a look of disgust. “What did you say of wine, when I drank with you the other night?” he asked reproachfully. “You said it would warm my heart, and make a man of me. And what did it do? I couldn’t stand on my legs. I couldn’t hold up my head — I was so sleepy and stupid that Joseph had to take me upstairs to bed. I hate your wine! Your wine’s a liar, who promises and doesn’t perform! I’m weary enough, and wretched enough in my mind, as it is. No more wine for me!”

“Wrong!” remarked Schwartz, emptying his glass, and smacking his lips after it.

“You made a serious mistake the other night — you didn’t drink half enough. Give the good liquor a fair chance, my son. No, you won’t? Must I try a little gentle persuasion before you will come back to your chair?” Suiting the action to the word, he put his arm round Jack. “What’s this I feel under my hand?” he asked. “A bottle?” He took it out of Jack’s breast-pocket. “Lord help us!” he exclaimed; “it looks like physic!”

Jack snatched it away from him, with a cry of delight. “The very thing for me — and I never thought of it!”

It was the phial which Madame Fontaine had repentantly kept to herself, after having expressly filled it for him with the fatal dose of “Alexander’s Wine” — the phial which he had found, when he first opened the “Pink-Room Cupboard.” In the astonishment and delight of finding the blue-glass bottle immediately afterwards, he had entirely forgotten it. Nothing had since happened to remind him that it was in his pocket, until Schwartz had stumbled on the discovery.

“It cures you when you are tired or troubled in your mind,” Jack announced in his grandest manner, repeating Madame Fontaine’s own words. “Is there any water here?”

“Not a drop, thank Heaven!” said Schwartz, devoutly.

“Give me my glass, then. I once tried the remedy by itself, and it stung me as it went down. The wine won’t hurt me, with this splendid stuff in it. I’ll take it in the wine.”

“Who told you to take it?” Schwartz asked, holding back the glass.

“Mrs. Housekeeper told me.”

“A woman!” growled Schwartz, in a tone of sovereign contempt. “How dare you let a woman physic you, when you’ve got me for a doctor? Jack! I’m ashamed of you.”

Jack defended his manhood. “Oh, I don’t care what she says! I despise her — she’s mad. You don’t suppose she made this? I wouldn’t touch it, if she had. No, no; her husband made it — a wonderful man! the greatest man in Germany!”

He reached across the table and secured his glass of wine. Before it was possible to interfere, he had emptied the contents of the phial into it, and had raised it to his lips. At that moment, Schwartz’s restraining hand found its way to his wrist. The deputy watchman had far too sincere a regard for good wine to permit it to be drunk, in combination with physic, at his own table.

“Put it down!” he said gruffly. “You’re my visitor, ain’t you? Do you think I’m going to let housekeeper’s cat-lap be drunk at my table? Look here!”

He held up his traveling-flask, with the metal drinking-cup taken off, so as to show the liquor through the glass. The rich amber colour of it fascinated Jack. He put his wine-glass back on the table. “What is it?” he asked eagerly.

“Drinkable gold, Jack!
My
physic. Brandy!”

He poured out a dram into the metal cup. “Try that,” he said, “and don’t let me hear any more about the housekeeper’s physic.”

Jack tasted it. The water came into his eyes — he put his hands on his throat. “Fire!” he gasped faintly.

“Wait!” said Schwartz.

Jack waited. The fiery grip of the brandy relaxed; the genial warmth of it was wafted through him persuasively from head to foot. He took another sip. His eyes began to glitter. “What divine being made this?” he asked. Without waiting to be answered, he tried it again, and emptied the cup. “More!” he cried. “I never felt so big, I never felt so strong, I never felt so clever, as I feel now!”

Schwartz, drinking freely from his own bottle, recovered, and more than recovered, his Bacchanalian good humor. He clapped Jack on the shoulder. “Who’s the right doctor now?” he asked cheerfully. “A drab of a housekeeper? or Father Schwartz? Your health, my jolly boy! When the bottle’s empty, I’ll help you to finish the flask. Drink away! and the devil take all heel-taps!”

The next dose of brandy fired Jack’s excitable brain with a new idea. He fell on his knees at the table, and clasped his hands in a sudden fervor of devotion. “Silence!” he commanded sternly. “Your wine’s only a poor devil. Your drinkable gold is a god. Take your cap off, Schwartz — I’m worshipping drinkable gold!”

Schwartz, highly diverted, threw his cap up to the ceiling. “Drinkable gold, ora pro nobis!” he shouted, profanely adapting himself to Jack’s humor. “You shall be Pope, my boy — and I’ll be the Pope’s butler. Allow me to help your sacred majesty back to your chair.”

Jack’s answer betrayed another change in him. His tones were lofty; his manner was distant. “I prefer the floor,” he said; “hand me down my mug.” As he reached up to take it, the alarm-bell over the door caught his eye. Debased as he was by the fiery strength of the drink, his ineradicable love for his mistress made its noble influence felt through the coarse fumes that were mounting to his brain. “Stop!” he cried. “I must be where I can see the bell — I must be ready for her, the instant it rings.”

He crawled across the floor, and seated himself with his back against the wall of one of the empty cells, on the left-hand side of the room. Schwartz, shaking his fat sides with laughter, handed down the cup to his guest. Jack took no notice of it. His eyes, reddened already by the brandy, were fixed on the bell opposite to him. “I want to know about it,” he said. “What’s that steel thing there, under the brass cover?”

“What’s the use of asking?” Schwartz replied, returning to his bottle.

“I want to know!”

“Patience, Jack — patience. Follow my fore-finger. My hand seems to shake a little; but it’s as honest a hand as ever was. That steel thing there, is the bell hammer, you know. And, bless your heart, the hammer’s everything. Cost, Lord knows how much. Another toast, my son. Good luck to the bell!”

Jack changed again; he began to cry. “She’s sleeping too long on that sofa, in there,” he said sadly. “I want her to speak to me; I want to hear her scold me for drinking in this horrid place. My heart’s all cold again. Where’s the mug?” He found it, as he spoke; the fire of the brandy went down his throat once more, and lashed him into frantic high spirits. “I’m up in the clouds!” he shouted; “I’m riding on a whirlwind. Sing, Schwartz! Ha! there are the stars twinkling through the skylight! Sing the stars down from heaven!”

Schwartz emptied his bottle, without the ceremony of using the glass. “Now we are primed!” he said — ”now for the mad watchman’s song!” He snatched up the paper from the table, and roared out hoarsely the first verse:

The moon was shining, cold and bright,
In the Frankfort Deadhouse, on New Year’s night
And I was the watchman, left alone,
While the rest to feast and dance were gone;
I envied their lot, and cursed my own —
Poor me!

“Chorus, Jack! ‘I envied their lot and cursed my own’ —
 
— ”

The last words of the verse were lost in a yell of drunken terror. Schwartz started out of his chair, and pointed, panic-stricken, to the lower end of the room. “A ghost!” he screamed. “A ghost in black, at the door!”

Jack looked round, and burst out laughing. “Sit down again, you old fool,” he said. “It’s only Mrs. Housekeeper. We are singing, Mrs. Housekeeper! You haven’t heard my voice yet — I’m the finest singer in Germany.”

Madame Fontaine approached him humbly. “You have a kind heart, Jack — I am sure you will help me,” she said. “Show me how to get out of this frightful place.”

“The devil take you!” growled Schwartz, recovering himself. “How did you get in?”

“She’s a witch!” shouted Jack. “She rode in on a broomstick — she crept in through the keyhole. Where’s the fire? Let’s take her downstairs, and burn her!”

Schwartz applied himself to the brandy-flask, and began to laugh again. “There never was such good company as Jack,” he said, in his oiliest tones. “You can’t get out to-night, Mrs. Witch. The gates are locked — and they don’t trust me with the key. Walk in, ma’am. Plenty of accommodation for you, on that side of the room where Jack sits. We are slack of guests for the grave, to-night. Walk in.”

She renewed her entreaties. “I’ll give you all the money I have about me! Who can I go to for the key? Jack! Jack! speak for me!”

“Go on with the song!” cried Jack.

She appealed again in her despair to Schwartz. “Oh, sir, have mercy on me! I fainted, out there — and, when I came to myself, I tried to open the gates — and I called, and called, and nobody heard me.”

Schwartz’s sense of humour was tickled by this. “If you could bellow like a bull,” he said, “nobody would hear you. Take a seat, ma’am.”

“Go on with the song!” Jack reiterated. “I’m tired of waiting.”

Madame Fontaine looked wildly from one to the other of them. “Oh, God, I’m locked in with an idiot and a drunkard!” The thought of it maddened her as it crossed her mind. Once more, she fled from the room. Again, and again, in the outer darkness, she shrieked for help.

Schwartz advanced staggering towards the door, with Jack’s empty chair in his hand. “Perhaps you’ll be able to pipe a little higher, ma’am, if you come back, and sit down? Now for the song, Jack!”