Alfred promised to be calm; and she got him an interview with Mr. Baker.
He was a full-blown pawnbroker of Silverton town, whom the legislature, with that keen knowledge of human nature which marks the British senate, permitted, and still permits, to speculate in Insanity, stipulating, however, that the upper servant of all in his asylum should be a doctor; but omitting to provide against the instant dismissal of the said doctor should he go and rob his employer of a lodger—by curing a patient.
As you are not the British legislature, I need not tell you that to this pawnbroker insanity mattered nothing, nor sanity: his trade lay in catching, and keeping, and stinting, as many lodgers, sane or insane, as he could hold.
There are certain formulae in these quiet retreats, which naturally impose upon greenhorns such as Alfred certainly was, and some visiting justices and lunacy commissioners would seem to be. Baker had been a lodging-house keeper for certified people many years, and knew all the formulae: some call them dodges: but these must surely be vulgar minds. Baker worked “the see-saw formula.”
“Letters, young gentleman?” said he: “they are not in my department They go into the surgery, and are passed by the doctor, except those he examines and orders to be detained.”
Alfred demanded the doctor.
“He is gone,” was the reply. (Formula.)
Alfred found it as hard to be calm as some people find it easy to say that word over the wrongs of others.
The next day, but not till the afternoon, he caught the doctor: “My letters! Surely, sir, you have not been so cruel as to intercept them?”
“I intercept no letters,” said the doctor, as if scandalised at the very idea. “I see who writes them, and hand them to Mr. Baker, with now and then a remark. If any are detained, the responsibility rests with him.”