“A fine view, mum,” he might say, stepping up between ingratiatory and insolent. “Was you looking for anything?”
Whereupon one would do best to retire, and precipitately; because there was no appeal from any brutality offered, in his own domain, by any servant of, or partner in, this lawless oligarchy.
Rising from my little bed, and mattresses full of fragrance and down, on the morning first after my arrival—rising, fevered and exhausted, to the full realisation of my awful position, my eyes encountered the vision of a wholesome, even luxurious, little chamber, and through an unbarred window a most heavenly prospect. I could hardly believe in the reality of my fate. This was no prison, but an inn, to escape from which it seemed only necessary to pay the score, and have the landlord cry “Bon voyage!” I remembered him the night before—a little tough, square man, drily courteous in manner, with the head and depressed forehead of a burglar. He had been already on the steps to receive me, when we drove up, standing in a patch of light with an expression on his face as if we had caught him in the act of breaking into his own premises. Those we had reached, within two hours of my first kidnapping, by dark and devious roads. They stood, remote from all other homesteads, a little colony self-contained, some six miles south of Shole.
On the way thither I had soon abandoned all thought of resistance, or of appeal to my captors. They may have heard my sobs and prayers with a certain emotion: virtuous distress had no chance to prevail with cupidity. I sunk into a sullen apathy, my heart smouldering with rage, principally against the craven who had either betrayed me to this living death, or, at least, had weakly acquiesced in my doom. The prospect of revenge, though alternating with despair, alone preserved me from a condition of the last prostration. And in this state I was driven up to the House, and to it consigned, the sold slave of madness.
In the first terror, with staring eyes, a storm in my breast that would not rise and break, dishevelled hair, and, it may be, a look of the part I was called upon to play, I shrunk into a corner of the room into which I was introduced, and stood there panting. Dr. Peel went into a thin chuckle of laughter, curiously small and inward from so thick-set a frame.
“Brava!” said he. “Very well observed, madam! But, if you will look round, you will see there are no bolts, no bars, no locks here, save as the ordinary appurtenances of a domestic household.”
There were not, indeed, to the common view. To most doors, as I came to discover, the locks were inside; and, where it was otherwise, it was—mark this!—to insure from any chance insane attack, especially at night, the lives of those which it was particularly desired should be preserved. To be given the full freedom of the House was always a significant privilege, implying, as it did, one of two things: either that the proprietor had accepted at the outset a round sum down for one’s perpetual incarceration, or a hint that one’s accidental removal would be handsomely acknowledged by those interested.
Now, as I said, waking on that first morning to free prospects, my spirit experienced a rebound to the most delightful reassurance. Surely, I thought, no worse harm could be designed me than the punishment implied in my enforced temporary detention in this charming home, where, it seemed likely, a nominal deprivation of one’s liberty was used to convey a gentle moral or adorn a kindly tale of reproval. I waxed jubilant. If a meek acquiescence in my fate delayed to move my jailers to liberate me, I was confident that my wits would soon find me a way to free myself from so indulgent a thraldom. And in the meantime I would resign myself to the enjoyment of a very novel experience.
A loud bell summoned us all to breakfast, à la table d’hôte, in a pleasant refectory. Dr. Peel took the head of the table, and a plenty of attentive lackeys waited. There was no restriction, nor interference with one’s individual tastes. I accepted silently the place assigned me between a gaunt, supernaturally solemn gentleman, with mended clothes, a wigless head, and prominent fixed eyes, and the tiniest, most conceited-looking creature with humped shoulders I have ever seen. An uproarious gabble of conversation, interspersed with occasional hoots and groans, accompanied the meal throughout. Occasionally my solemn neighbour would turn to me and remark, fiercely, as though daring a contradiction, “Enough is as good as a feast; but more than enough is less than nothing.”
On the third repetition of this formula, the little man on my other side addressed me with an ill-tempered chuckle—