“Come down,” said the voice softly from below; “if Jack sees you, it will be worse for you.”
It was the voice of Bridget, and Andy felt it was better to be with her than exposed to the savagery of Shan More and his myrmidons; so he descended quietly, and gave himself up to the tight hold of Bridget, who, with many asseverations that “out of her arms she would not let the prisoner go till morning,” led him back to the cave.
CHAPTER XXXIX
“Great wit to madness nearly is allied,
And thin partitions do the bounds divide.”
So sings the poet; but whether the wit be great or little, the “thin partition” separating madness from sanity is equally mysterious. It is true that the excitability attendant upon genius approximates so closely to madness, that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between them; but, without the attendant “genius” to hold up the train of madness, and call for our special permission and respect in any of its fantastic excursions, the most ordinary crack-brain sometimes chooses to sport in the regions of sanity, and, without the license which genius is supposed to dispense to her children, poach over the preserves of common sense. This is a well-known fact, and would not be reiterated here, but that the circumstances about to be recorded hereafter might seem unworthy of belief; and as the veracity of our history we would not have for one moment questioned, we have ventured to jog the memory of our readers as to the close neighbourhood of madness and common sense, before we record a curious instance of intermitting madness in the old dowager O'Grady.
Her son's death had, by the violence of the shock, dragged her from the region of fiction in which she habitually existed; but after the funeral she relapsed into all her strange aberration, and her bird-clock and her chimney-pot head-dress were once more in requisition.
The old lady had her usual attendance from her granddaughter, and the customary offering of flowers was rendered, but they were not so cared for as before, and Charlotte was dismissed sooner than usual from her morning's attendance, and a new favourite received in her place. And “of all the birds in the air,” who should this favourite be but Master Ratty. Yes!—Ratty—the caricaturist of his grandmamma, was, “for the nonce,” her closeted companion. Many a guess was given as to “what in the world” grandmamma could want with Ratty; but the secret was kept between them, for this reason, that the old lady kept the reward she promised Ratty for preserving it in her own hands, until the duty she required on his part should be accomplished, and the shilling a day to which Ratty looked forward kept him faithful.
Now the duty Master Ratty had to perform was instructing his grandmamma how to handle a pistol; the bringing up quick to the mark, and levelling by “the sight,” was explained; but a difficulty arose in the old lady's shutting her left eye, which Ratty declared to be indispensable, and for some time Ratty was obliged to stand on a chair and cover his grandmamma's eye with his hand while she took aim; this was found inconvenient, however, and the old lady substituted a black silk shade to obfuscate her sinister luminary in her exercises, which now advanced to snapping the lock, and knocking sparks from the flint, which made the old lady wink with her right eye. When this second habit was overcome, the “dry” practice, that is, without powder, was given up; and a “flash in the pan” was ventured upon, but this made her shut both eyes together, and it was some time before she could prevail on herself to hold her eye fixed on her mark, and pull the trigger. This, however, at last was accomplished, and when she had conquered the fear of seeing the flash, she adopted the plan of standing before a handsome old-fashioned looking-glass which reached from the ceiling to the floor, and levelling the pistol at her own reflection within it, as if she were engaged in mortal combat; and every time she snapped and burned priming she would exclaim, “I hit him that time!—I know I can kill him—tremble, villain!”