“We are responsible for your safety: we have force at hand if necessary; pray do not compel us to summon it.”
“Why, where am I?” said Alfred, panting now; “is this a prison?”
“No, no,” said Mrs. Archbold soothingly: “it is a place where you will be cured of your headaches and your delusions, and subjected to no unnecessary pain nor restraint.”
“Oh, bother,” said the short snob brutally. “Why make two bites of a cherry? You are in my asylum, young gentleman, and a devilish lucky thing for you.”
At this fatal word, “asylum,” Alfred uttered a cry of horror and despair, and his eyes roved wildly round the room in search of escape. But the windows of the room, though outside the house they seemed to come as low as those of the drawing-room, were partly bricked-up within, and made just too high to be reached without a chair. And his captors read that wild glance directly, and the doctor whipped one chair away, while Mrs. Archbold, with more tact, sat quietly down on the other. They all three blew their whistles shrilly.
Alfred uttered an oath and rushed at the door; but heard heavy feet running on stone passages towards the whistles, and felt he had no chance out that way: his dilating eye fell upon the handle of the old defunct door: he made a high leap, came down with his left foot on its knob of brass, and, though of course he could not stand on it, contrived to spring from it slap at the window—Mrs. Archbold screamed—he broke the glass with his shoulder, and tore and kicked the woodwork, and squeezed through on to a stone ledge outside, and stood there bleeding and panting, just as half a dozen keepers burst into the room at his back. He was more than twenty feet from the ground: to leap down was death or mutilation: he saw the flyman driving away. He yelled to him, “Hy! hy! stop! stop!” The flyman stopped and looked round. But soon as he saw who it was, he just grinned: Alfred could see his hideous grin; and there was the rattle of chairs being brought to the window, and men were mounting softly to secure him. A coarse hand stole towards his ankle; he took a swift step and sprang desperately on to the next ledge—it was an old manor house, and these ledges were nearly a foot broad—from this one he bounded to the next, and then to a third, the last but one on this side of the building. The corner ledge was but half the size, and offered no safe footing: but close to it he saw the outside leaves of a tree. That tree, then, must grow close to the corner; could he but get round to it he might yet reach the ground whole. Urged by that terror of a madhouse which is natural to a sane man, and in England is fed by occasional disclosures, and the general suspicion they excite, he leaped on to a piece of stone no bigger than one's hat, and then whirled himself round into the tree, all eyes to see and claws to grasp.
It was a weeping ash: he could get hold of nothing but soft yielding slivers, that went through his fingers, and so down with him like a bulrush, and souse he went with his hands full of green leaves over head and ears into the water of an enormous iron tank that fed the baths.
The heavy plunge, the sudden cold water, the instant darkness, were appalling: yet, like the fox among the hounds, the gallant young gentleman did not lose heart nor give tongue. He came up gurgling and gasping, and swimming for his life in manly silence: he swam round and round the edge of the huge tank, trying in vain to get a hold upon its cold rusty walls. He heard whistles and voices about: they came faint to him where he was, but he knew they could not be very far off.
Life is sweet. It flashed across him how, a few years before, a university man of great promise had perished miserably in a tank on some Swiss mountain—a tank placed for the comfort of travellers. He lifted his eyes to Heaven in despair, and gave one great sob.
Then he turned upon his back and floated: but he was obliged to paddle with his hands a little to keep up.