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Archibald Malmaison, a novel by Julian Hawthorne |
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Chapter 2 |
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_ CHAPTER II Archibald awoke at length, and sat up in bed. He opened his mouth, apparently for the purpose of saying something, but his tongue refused to articulate any recognizable words. An irregular, disjointed sound made itself heard, like the vague outcry of an infant; and then, as if angry at his own failure, he set up a loud and indignant wail, muffled from time to time by the cramming of his fingers into his mouth. Whatever else was the matter with the child, it was evident that he was hungry--as, indeed, he well might be. Some bread and milk was brought to him, that being his favorite food; but to the general astonishment and dismay, he did not seem to know what it was, although he continued to exhibit every symptom of a ravenous and constantly augmenting appetite. They tried him with every imaginable viand, but in vain; they even put morsels into his mouth, but he had lost the power of mastication, and could not retain them. The more they labored, the greater became his exasperation, until at last there was such a hubbub and confusion on the score of Master Archibald as that hitherto rather insignificant little personage should have felt proud to occasion. Among the anxious and bewildered people who thronged the nursery at this juncture was a young woman who acted as wet-nurse to the latest born of the Malmaisons, a baby-girl three months old. She was a healthy and full-bodied peasant, and as she pressed forward to have her look at the now frantic Archibald, she held the nursing infant--the only serene and complacent member of the assemblage--to her open breast. Archibald caught sight of her, and immediately reached toward her, arms, mouth and all, accompanying the action by an outcry so eager, impatient, and gluttonous that it was capable of only one interpretation. An incredible interpretation, certainly, but that made no difference; there was nothing else to be done. Honest Maggie, giggling and rubicund, put aside her complacent nursling (who thereupon became anything but complacent) and took to her kind bosom this strapping and unreasonable young gentleman, who had already got many of his second teeth. That did not prevent him from making an unconscionably good supper, and thenceforth the only person likely to be disturbed by his new departure in gormandizing was Maggie herself. Everything being thus happily arranged, the household dispersed about its business, the Baronet declaring, with a great laugh, that he had always said Archie was but a babe in arms, and this proved it! Dr. Rollinson, however (the elder doctor, that is--father of the present [2] distinguished bearer of the name), had witnessed this scene with something more than ordinary wonder or amusement; it had puzzled, but also interested him extremely. He was less of a conservative than many of his profession; he kept his mind open, and was not disinclined to examine into odd theories, and even, perhaps, to originate a few such himself upon occasion. The question that now confronted him and challenged his ingenuity was, What was the matter with Archibald? Why had the boy suddenly gone back to the primitive source of nourishment, not from mere childish whim, but from actual ignorance--as it seemed--that nourishment was obtainable in any other way? An obvious reply would be that the boy had become wholly, idiotic; but the more Dr. Rollinson revolved this rough and ready explanation, the less satisfactory did he find it. He wisely decided to study the symptoms and weigh the evidence before committing himself one way or the other. Footnote 2: 2. Now also the late: vide supra.
The first result of his observations was to confirm his impression that Archibald was not idiotic. There was a certain sort of vacancy in the child's expression, but it was the vacancy of ignorance rather than of foolishness. And ignorant to a surprising degree he was. He had at no time been regarded as a boy of large attainments; but what he knew before his strange seizure was, to what he knew after it, as Bacon to a ploughman. Had he been newly born into the world, he could not have shown less acquaintance with it, so far as intellectual comprehension went; his father, mother, sister--all were alike strangers to him; he gazed at them with intent but unrecognizing eyes; he never looked up when his name was spoken, nor did he betray any sign of understanding the talk that went on around him. His own thoughts and wants were expressed by inarticulate sounds and by gestures; but the mystery of speech evidently interested him, and he studied the movements of the lips of those who spoke to him with a keen, grave scrutiny to them highly amusing--except in the case of his poor old Aunt Jane, who turned quite pale under his inquisition, and declared that he must be bewitched, for although he seemed to know nothing, yet he had the knowingest look of any child she ever saw. Herein Aunt Jane gave utterance to a fact that was beginning to be generally acknowledged. Whatever Archibald had lost, it was beyond dispute that he had somehow come into possession of a fund of native intelligence (the term "mother wit" seems inappropriate under the circumstances) to which he had heretofore been a stranger. He might have forgotten his own name, and the mother that bore him; but he had learned how to learn, and was for the first time in his life wide awake. This was very much like saying that he was a new boy in the old skin; and this, again, was little better than a euphemism for changeling. Was he a changeling after all? The sage old woman whom we have already quoted asserted confidently that he was, and that, however much he pretended to ignorance, he really knew vastly more than any plain human child did or ought to know. And as a warrant for this opinion they brought forward evidence that Master Archibald, having been left alone one day in the nursery, had been overheard humming to himself the words of a certain song--a thing, it was argued, which he could not have done had he known no words at all; and therefore he was a changeling. Dr. Rollinson happened to hear this argument, and thought it worth while to inquire further into the matter. Such testimony as he could collect went to confirm the truth of the story. Not only so, but the song itself, if the witnesses were to be believed, so far from being an ordinary childish ditty, was some matter of pretty maids and foaming wine-cups that Tom Moore might have written, and that gentlemen sometimes trolled out, an hour or two after dinner. Now this looked very black for Archibald. Further investigation, however, put a somewhat different face upon the affair. It transpired that the song had been often sung in Archibald's hearing, and before his fit, by the Honorable Richard, for whom, as has been said, the boy had taken a queer fancy. And, perhaps because affection is a good teacher, the boy had acquired the power of repeating some of the verses to himself, of course without understanding a syllable of them, and very likely without himself being conscious of what he was doing, he hummed them over, in short, exactly as a preoccupied parrot might do; and always at a certain time, namely, after he had been put to bed, and was staring up at the darkening ceiling previous to falling asleep. This, by itself, was nothing very remarkable; the puzzle was, how could he do it now? Out of all the wreck of his small memory, why was this song, the meaning of which he had never understood, the sole survivor? Was it that his affection for Mr. Pennroyal had kept it alive? So might a sentimentalist have concluded; but the Doctor was a man of sense. Was it that the boy was shamming? Impossible on all accounts. But then, what was it? The Doctor had by this time worked himself up to believe that the solution of this problem would help largely toward the clearing up of the whole mystery. So he took notes, and continued to observe and to consider. He found, in the first place, that the song-singing took place under exactly the same circumstances as before the fit, and at no other time or place. Hereupon, he devised experiments to discover whether Archibald was conscious that he was singing, or whether it was an act performed mechanically, while the mind was otherwise engaged. After the child was in bed, he quietly arranged a lamp so as to cast a circular space of light upon the ceiling above the bed, the rest of the room being left in shadow. Not a word of any song was heard that night; and the test was tried twice more during the week, with a like result. At another time he got the Honorable Richard to come into a room adjoining the nursery, and sing the song so that Archibald might hear it. Archibald heard it, but gave no sign of being affected thereby. He was then brought into Mr. Richard's presence; it was the first time they had met since the change. Now, if ever, was an opportunity for the imperishable quality of the affections to be vindicated. But no such vindication occurred. On the contrary, after having stared his uncle almost out of countenance for some minutes, he turned from him with a marked expression of disapproval, and could never afterward be induced voluntarily to go near him. The affection had become an antipathy. "No, madam; set your mind at rest," said the bluff Doctor to Lady Malmaison over a cup of tea that evening. "The child's no changeling; but he's changed, and changed for the better, too, by Gad! He can tell a bad egg from a good one now," continued the Doctor, with a significant chuckle, the significance of which, however, Lady Malmaison perhaps failed to perceive. But the fact was, the Honorable Richard Pennroyal had never been an especial favorite with Dr. Rollinson. The next day was a new excitement. Archibald had walked, and that, too, as well as the best-grown boy of seven that you would want to see. "Ay, and where did he walk to?" demanded the Doctor. It was explained that it was at the time for nursing him, and he was sitting in his little chair at one end of the nursery, when Maggie had entered at the other. As soon as he clapped eyes on her, he had set up his usual impatient outcries; but Maggie, instead of going directly to him, had stopped to exchange a few words with the head-nurse, unfastening the front of her dress the while, however, so that Master Archibald's impatience was carried to the point of intolerance by the glimpse thus afforded of the good things in store for him. And then, before you had time to think, he had got up from his chair, and trotted across the floor, bellowing all the time, and had tugged at Maggie's dress. "Bellowing all the time, eh?" said the Doctor. "And walking all the same like he was ten year old, sir: and it did give us all a turn; and if you please, sir, what do you say to _that_?" "What do I say to that?--why, that it's just what I should have expected--that's what I say!" replied Dr. Rollinson, who had apparently begun to divine some clew to the grand mystery. But he vouchsafed no explanations as yet. Archibald did not repeat the walking miracle, although, within the space of a few weeks only, he passed through the regular gradations of crawling, tottering, and toddling, to normal pedestrianism of the most active kind. His progress in other accomplishments was almost parallel with this. From inarticulate gabble he trained his tongue to definite speech; his vocabulary expanded with astonishing rapidity, and, contrary to his previous habit, he made incessant use of it. He was now as remarkable for loquacity as formerly for the opposite characteristic; and his keenness of observation and retentive memory were a theme of general admiration. In a word, he used his five senses to ten times better effect than had ever been expected of him in the old days; and no one who had not seen him for a year from the time of his fit would have recognized him as the same child. He was not only making up for lost time--he was incomparably outstripping his earlier self; he seemed to have emerged from a mental and physical cocoon--to have cast aside an incrustation of deterrent clumsiness, and to be hastening onward with the airy case and accuracy of perfect self-possession. At the end of a year he was to all intents and purposes ten years old; and what was most remarkable about this swift advance lay in the fact that a year had seen the whole of it. Though he had been eight years in the world, the first seven had furnished none of the mental or moral material for the last: it stood alone and disconnectedly. Of those seven years it is certain that he retained not the smallest recollection; they were to him as if they had never been. The only thing they did provide him with was a well-fed and sound body; in other respects Archibald was positively new. He had to make the acquaintance of his family and friends over again; but it was done with modifications. In other cases besides that of his uncle, it was observed that he felt antipathies where formerly he loved, and _vice versa_. A minor instance, but interesting as must be all evidence in a case so strange as this, is that of the brindled cat that was buried in the garden. Archibald was brought to the grave, which he had so pathetically haunted before his metamorphosis, not many weeks after the metamorphosis occurred; and every means was used to revive in him some recollection of the bereavement; they even went so far as to uncover poor pussy's remains.... Archibald was first unconscious and indifferent, then curious, finally disgusted. His feelings were not otherwise touched. All associations connected with this whilom pet of his, grief for whose loss was supposed to have been the impelling cause of the fit itself, were as utterly expunged from his mind as if they had never existed there. Moreover, aversion from all cats was from this time forth so marked in him as almost to amount to horror; while dogs, whose presence had been wont to fill him with dismay, were now his favorite companions. It was the same in other things; the boy formed independent opinions and prejudices in all the relations of life--independent, that is, of his past. His temper, too, was changed; no longer timid, appealing and docile, it was now determined, enterprising, and bold. It was manifest even thus early that here was a character fitted to make its way in the world. "No, I protest, Doctor, I can never believe it's the same child," said Lady Malmaison, with a sigh. "That noisy, self-willed boy is never my quiet, affectionate little Archie. And yesterday he beat his brother Edward, that is two years older than he. Heigho! Pray, dear Doctor, what is your opinion?" "My opinion, Lady Malmaison, is that women will never be content," answered the bluff old physician. "I can remember the time when you thought your quiet little Archie was a nincompoop--and quite right too. And now because a monstrous piece of good luck has made a Crichton of him, you begin to regret the nincompoop! It ain't logical;" and the Doctor took snuff. "But who ever heard of a child changing his whole nature all in a moment?" persisted Lady Malmaison. "Why, isn't all in a moment better than inch by inch? The thing is no such mighty matter as some folks try to make it out. The boy went to sleep as soon as he was born, and has but just waked up--that's my notion about it. So now, instead of starting, the way most of us do, at the point of helplessness, he begins life with a body full of seven years' pith, and faculties sharp set as a new watch. Till now he has but dreamed; now he's going to exist, with so much the more extra impetus. He don't recollect what he's been dreaming--why should he?" "But he did recollect some things, Doctor; that song.... And then, his walking across the room." "Purely physical--purely automatic," replied the Doctor, tapping his snuff-box, and pleased with Lady Malmaison's awe at the strange word. "If he had stopped to think what he was doing he couldn't have done it. The body, I tell you, grows under all circumstances--as much when you're asleep as when you're awake; and the body has a memory of its own, distinct from the mental memory. Have you never hummed a song when you were doing your embroidery, and thinking about--about Lady Snaffle's elopement with the captain?" "Oh, Doctor!" "Yes; and if I'd come in at the moment and asked you what you were singing, could you have told me? Of course you couldn't! You could have told me all about the elopement. Well, then, that's clear now, ain't it?" "Yes," said Lady Malmaison, meaning, it must be supposed, "as clear as mud." Dr. Rollinson chuckled to himself, and they continued their game of piquet. _ |
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