She pointed out two as the leaders. The Archbold instantly had them seized by the others—who, with treachery equal to their cowardice, turned eagerly against their fellow-culprits, to make friends with Power—and, inviting all the sensible maniacs who had been tanked, to assist or inspect, she bared her own statuesque arms, and, ably aided, soon plunged the offenders, screaming, crying, and whining, like spaniel bitches whipped, under the dirty water. They swallowed some, and appreciated their own acts. Then she forced them to walk twice round the yard with their wet clothes clinging to them, hooted by the late victims.
“There,” said Alfred, “let that teach you men will not own hyaenas in petticoats for women.”
Poor Alfred took all the credit of this performance; but in fact, when the Archbold invited him to bear a hand, he showed the white feather.
“I won't touch the blackguardesses,” said he, haughtily turning it off on the score of contempt. “You give it them! Again, again! Brava!”
Mosaic retribution completed, Mrs. Archbold told the nurses if ever “tanking recurred she would bundle the whole female staff into the street, and then have them indicted by the Commissioners.”
These virtuous acts did Edith Archbold for love for a young man. Whether mad women or sane, women pregnant, or the reverse, were tanked or not, she cared at heart no more than whether sheep were washed or no in Ettrick's distant dale. She was retiring with a tender look at Alfred, and her pulse secretly unaccelerated by sheep-washing of she-wolves, when her grateful favourite appealed to her again:
“Dear Mrs. Archbold, shall we punish and not comfort? This poor Mrs. Dale!”
The Archbold could have boxed his ears. “Dear boy,” she murmured tenderly, “you teach us all our duty.” She visited the tanked one, found her in a cold room after it, shivering like ague, and her teeth chattering. Mrs. Archbold had her to the fire, and got her warm clothes and a pint of wine, and probably saved her life and her child's—for love of a young man.
Why I think Mrs. Dale would otherwise have left this shifting scene, Mrs. Carey, the last woman in her condition they tanked and then turned into a flagged cell that only wanted one frog of a grotto, was found soon after moribund; on which they bundled her out of the asylum to die. She did die next day, at home, but murdered by the asylum; and they told the Commissioners she died through her friends taking her away from the asylum too soon. The Commissioners had nothing to do but believe this, and did believe it. Inspectors who visit a temple of darkness, lies, cunning, and hypocrisy, four times a year, know mighty little of what goes on there the odd three hundred and sixty-one days, five hours, forty-eight minutes, and fifty-seven seconds.*
* Arithmetic of my boyhood. I hear the world revolves some
minutes quicker now.