The policeman, finding him immovable in his determination, sent for help, and soon the battered “old Brockwell” was being washed and strapped and bandaged and stitched, and had a few feet of plaster over some strained muscles, and was generally “made over.” And then the stunned burglars had recovered their scattered senses and received a smiling and joyous welcome from the policemen, such as is only offered when the lost is found—and indeed one of these gentlemen had been lost—from the penitentiary—for several months. When the party of three were rounded up, ready for an early morning stroll to the station house, No. 1 had turned to Brockwell and growled: “See here, you old slugger, next time I come up against you just hit me over the head with a loaded cane, or the butt-end of a revolver or something soft like that, will you? I don’t want to be ‘put out’ no more with another ‘mug’s’ head, now I tell you fair!”
“A—a—ah!” cried the little fellow, “he’s a fightin’ freak, he is! He ought to be a doin’ time for jamming a tin pail over a man’s head and half cutting off his ears!”
And so they went forth, cursing the night they had tackled “old Bull Brockwell!”
And then he had returned home, “sans buttons et sans reproche,” and finding a barrel of flour standing at the side door, had picked it up and carried it into the house, apparently to convince himself that he was not much hurt. Then, beginning to feel stiff and lame, he put himself into Emily’s hands, and she promptly put him into his bed, and scrambled through the “Fall of Jericho,” stuck her gum upon the bed-post while she did it, then she had looked at his head and said, “she’d no idea a man could sew so neatly!” and then old Brockwell got hot and feverish, and his eye and cheek had blackened, and the doctor said he must be kept quiet a few days, at which dictum Emily had groaned aloud: “Kept quiet? Him? Good Lord!”
And, truly, had she been alone with him those days, her work would have been cut out for her. The ideal “bull in a china shop” would have proved an inoffensive and lymphatic creature compared to this pawing, plunging, irritable old Bull Brockwell! Bad enough at any time, when his eyes had swelled so he could no longer by the aid of his Bible put women and children to “the edge of the sword,” nor erect altars, nor even calculate the dollars’ worth of a “wedge of gold of fifty shekels weight,” he proceeded to fret himself into a fever, and I was moved partly by pity and partly, I am sorry to say, by a spirit of mischief, to seat myself by his side, and with the air of one who carefully selects a soothing and pleasant topic for sick-room conversation, I brought forward the subject of eternal punishment, and for my reward had his fixed attention in a moment.
For a time he expatiated on the strong points of that place of torment, seeing no inconsistency in paving with broken promises a bottomless pit, and as he began to run down, assuming the air of one eager for information, I asked his opinion of that place of eternal coldness—that frozen lake.
“Coldness—coldness?” he repeated, “Why, I don’t seem to remember!” and then another thought came to him and he broke out: “Fine! Splendid! I never felt such pain in my life as when I went near a fire with my frosted hands. Cold and fire! That’s good! Ah, it would have been better to have respected them commandments—only ten of ’em too!”
Egged on by his evident satisfaction, I went on introducing to him “circle” after “circle” of the great Italian’s Vision of Hell, and if Mr. Thomas Brockwell ever knew a genuinely happy afternoon, that was the one. And when I got a soft pencil and made black lines about the inside of his shaving-mug to illustrate the idea of the “circle,” he eagerly peered in with his nearly-closed, discolored eyes and triumphantly cried: “And the old, burning-brimstone lake right at the bottom—eh?”
All the punishments had met with his hearty approval save one. That great, black, “windy horror,” through which unfortunate lovers beat their blind way—seeking, eternally seeking their sinful mates—met with instant condemnation. “If they had sinned—they had broken a very important law—a law, mind you, that Moses had received direct from Heaven. Just flying round in the dark was no punishment for such a sin! They got worse than that when they were alive!” For, you see, the old man was very material, and he failed to imagine the anguish of that “eternal, loving, despairing search!”
All went well. Old Brockwell not only kept to his bed, but enjoyed himself until night and time for family service arrived, and then the “snag” appeared in my way that I should have seen from the first. Suddenly suspicious, he placed his hand on the book and asked: “Just in what part of ‘this’ did you find all that new ‘Hell’ you’ve been telling me about, lass?”