"The thing that vexed him most was her horror of snakes. He was unblessed--or uncursed, whichever you may prefer--with imagination of any kind. There was no special enmity between him and the seed of the serpent. A creature that crawled upon its belly was no more terrible to him than a creature that walked upon its legs; indeed, less so, for he knew that, as a rule, there was less danger to be apprehended from them.

A reptile is only too eager at all times to escape from man. Unless attacked or frightened, it will make no onset. Most people are content to acquire their knowledge of this fact from the natural history books.

He had proved it for himself. His servant, an old sergeant of dragoons, has told me that he has seen him stop with his face six inches from the head of a hooded cobra, and stand watching it through his eye-gla.s.s as it crawled away from him, knowing that one touch of its fangs would mean death from which there could be no possible escape. That any reasoning being should be inspired with terror--sickening, deadly terror--by such pitifully harmless things, seemed to him monstrous; and he determined to try and cure her of her fear of them.

"He succeeded in doing this eventually somewhat more thoroughly than he had antic.i.p.ated, but it left a terror in his own eyes that has not gone out of them to this day, and that never will.

"One evening, riding home through a part of the jungle not far from his bungalow, he heard a soft, low hiss close to his ear, and, looking up, saw a python swing itself from the branch of a tree and make off through the long gra.s.s. He had been out antelope-shooting, and his loaded rifle hung by his stirrup. Springing from the frightened horse, he was just in time to get a shot at the creature before it disappeared. He had hardly expected, under the circ.u.mstances, to even hit it. By chance the bullet struck it at the junction of the vertebrae with the head, and killed it instantly. It was a well-marked specimen, and, except for the small wound the bullet had made, quite uninjured. He picked it up, and hung it across the saddle, intending to take it home and preserve it.

"Galloping along, glancing down every now and again at the huge, hideous thing swaying and writhing in front of him almost as if still alive, a brilliant idea occurred to him. He would use this dead reptile to cure his wife of her fear of living ones. He would fix matters so that she should see it, and think it was alive, and be terrified by it; then he would show her that she had been frightened by a mere dead thing, and she would feel ashamed of herself, and be healed of her folly. It was the sort of idea that would occur to a fool.

"When he reached home, he took the dead snake into his smoking-room; then, locking the door, the idiot set out his prescription. He arranged the monster in a very natural and life-like position. It appeared to be crawling from the open window across the floor, and any one coming into the room suddenly could hardly avoid treading on it. It was very cleverly done.

"That finished, he picked out a book from the shelves, opened it, and laid it face downward upon the couch. When he had completed all things to his satisfaction he unlocked the door and came out, very pleased with himself.

"After dinner he lit a cigar and sat smoking a while in silence.

""Are you feeling tired?" he said to her at length, with a smile.

"She laughed, and, calling him a lazy old thing, asked what it was he wanted.

""Only my novel that I was reading. I left it in my den. Do you mind?

You will find it open on the couch."

"She sprang up and ran lightly to the door.

"As she paused there for a moment to look back at him and ask the name of the book, he thought how pretty and how sweet she was; and for the first time a faint glimmer of the true nature of the thing he was doing forced itself into his brain.

""Never mind," he said, half rising, "I"ll--"; then, enamoured of the brilliancy of his plan, checked himself; and she was gone.

"He heard her footsteps pa.s.sing along the matted pa.s.sage, and smiled to himself. He thought the affair was going to be rather amusing. One finds it difficult to pity him even now when one thinks of it.

"The smoking-room door opened and closed, and he still sat gazing dreamily at the ash of his cigar, and smiling.

"One moment, perhaps two pa.s.sed, but the time seemed much longer. The man blew the gray cloud from before his eyes and waited. Then he heard what he had been expecting to hear--a piercing shriek. Then another, which, expecting to hear the clanging of the distant door and the scurrying back of her footsteps along the pa.s.sage, puzzled him, so that the smile died away from his lips.

"Then another, and another, and another, shriek after shriek.

"The native servant, gliding noiselessly about the room, laid down the thing that was in his hand and moved instinctively towards the door. The man started up and held him back.

""Keep where you are," he said hoa.r.s.ely. "It is nothing. Your mistress is frightened, that is all. She must learn to get over this folly." Then he listened again, and the shrieks ended with what sounded curiously like a smothered laugh; and there came a sudden silence.

"And out of that bottomless silence, Fear for the first time in his life came to the man, and he and the dusky servant looked at each other with eyes in which there was a strange likeness; and by a common instinct moved together towards the place where the silence came from.

"When the man opened the door he saw three things: one was the dead python, lying where he had left it; the second was a live python, its comrade apparently, slowly crawling round it; the third a crushed, b.l.o.o.d.y heap in the middle of the floor.

"He himself remembered nothing more until, weeks afterwards, he opened his eyes in a darkened, unfamiliar place, but the native servant, before he fled screaming from the house, saw his master fling himself upon the living serpent and grasp it with his hands, and when, later on, others burst into the room and caught him staggering in their arms, they found the second python with its head torn off.

"That is the incident that changed the character of my man--if it be changed," concluded Jephson. "He told it me one night as we sat on the deck of the steamer, returning from Bombay. He did not spare himself. He told me the story, much as I have told it to you, but in an even, monotonous tone, free from emotion of any kind. I asked him, when he had finished, how he could bear to recall it.

""Recall it!" he replied, with a slight accent of surprise; "it is always with me.""

CHAPTER VIII

One day we spoke of crime and criminals. We had discussed the possibility of a novel without a villain, but had decided that it would be uninteresting.

"It is a terribly sad reflection," remarked MacShaughna.s.sy, musingly; "but what a desperately dull place this earth would be if it were not for our friends the bad people. Do you know," he continued, "when I hear of folks going about the world trying to reform everybody and make them good, I get positively nervous. Once do away with sin, and literature will become a thing of the past. Without the criminal cla.s.ses we authors would starve."

"I shouldn"t worry," replied Jephson, drily; "one half mankind has been "reforming" the other half pretty steadily ever since the Creation, yet there appears to be a fairly appreciable amount of human nature left in it, notwithstanding. Suppressing sin is much the same sort of task that suppressing a volcano would be--plugging one vent merely opens another.

Evil will last our time."

"I cannot take your optimistic view of the case," answered MacShaughna.s.sy. "It seems to me that crime--at all events, interesting crime--is being slowly driven out of our existence. Pirates and highwaymen have been practically abolished. Dear old "Smuggler Bill" has melted down his cutla.s.s into a pint-can with a false bottom. The pressgang that was always so ready to rescue our hero from his approaching marriage has been disbanded. There"s not a lugger fit for the purposes of abduction left upon the coast. Men settle their "affairs of honour" in the law courts, and return home wounded only in the pocket.

a.s.saults on unprotected females are confined to the slums, where heroes do not dwell, and are avenged by the nearest magistrate. Your modern burglar is generally an out-of-work green-grocer. His "swag" usually consists of an overcoat and a pair of boots, in attempting to make off with which he is captured by the servant-girl. Suicides and murders are getting scarcer every season. At the present rate of decrease, deaths by violence will be unheard of in another decade, and a murder story will be laughed at as too improbable to be interesting. A certain section of busybodies are even crying out for the enforcement of the seventh commandment. If they succeed authors will have to follow the advice generally given to them by the critics, and retire from business altogether. I tell you our means of livelihood are being filched from us one by one. Authors ought to form themselves into a society for the support and encouragement of crime."

MacShaughna.s.sy"s leading intention in making these remarks was to shock and grieve Brown, and in this object he succeeded. Brown is--or was, in those days--an earnest young man with an exalted--some were inclined to say an exaggerated--view of the importance and dignity of the literary profession. Brown"s notion of the scheme of Creation was that G.o.d made the universe so as to give the literary man something to write about. I used at one time to credit Brown with originality for this idea; but as I have grown older I have learned that the theory is a very common and popular one in cultured circles.

Brown expostulated with MacShaughna.s.sy. "You speak," he said, "as though literature were the parasite of evil."

"And what else is she?" replied the MacShaughna.s.sy, with enthusiasm.

"What would become of literature without folly and sin? What is the work of the literary man but raking a living for himself out of the dust-heap of human woe? Imagine, if you can, a perfect world--a world where men and women never said foolish things and never did unwise ones; where small boys were never mischievous and children never made awkward remarks; where dogs never fought and cats never screeched; where wives never henpecked their husbands and mothers-in-law never nagged; where men never went to bed in their boots and sea-captains never swore; where plumbers understood their work and old maids never dressed as girls; where n.i.g.g.e.rs never stole chickens and proud men were never sea-sick!

where would be your humour and your wit? Imagine a world where hearts were never bruised; where lips were never pressed with pain; where eyes were never dim; where feet were never weary; where stomachs were never empty! where would be your pathos? Imagine a world where husbands never loved more wives than one, and that the right one; where wives were never kissed but by their husbands; where men"s hearts were never black and women"s thoughts never impure; where there was no hating and no envying; no desiring; no despairing! where would be your scenes of pa.s.sion, your interesting complications, your subtle psychological a.n.a.lyses? My dear Brown, we writers--novelists, dramatists, poets--we fatten on the misery of our fellow-creatures. G.o.d created man and woman, and the woman created the literary man when she put her teeth into the apple. We came into the world under the shadow of the serpent. We are special correspondents with the Devil"s army. We report his victories in our three-volume novels, his occasional defeats in our five-act melodramas."

"All of which is very true," remarked Jephson; "but you must remember it is not only the literary man who traffics in misfortune. The doctor, the lawyer, the preacher, the newspaper proprietor, the weather prophet, will hardly, I should say, welcome the millennium. I shall never forget an anecdote my uncle used to relate, dealing with the period when he was chaplain of the Lincolnshire county jail. One morning there was to be a hanging; and the usual little crowd of witnesses, consisting of the sheriff, the governor, three or four reporters, a magistrate, and a couple of warders, was a.s.sembled in the prison. The condemned man, a brutal ruffian who had been found guilty of murdering a young girl under exceptionally revolting circ.u.mstances, was being pinioned by the hangman and his a.s.sistant; and my uncle was employing the last few moments at his disposal in trying to break down the sullen indifference the fellow had throughout manifested towards both his crime and his fate.

"My uncle failing to make any impression upon him, the governor ventured to add a few words of exhortation, upon which the man turned fiercely on the whole of them.

""Go to h.e.l.l," he cried, "with your snivelling jaw. Who are you, to preach at me? _You"re_ glad enough I"m here--all of you. Why, I"m the only one of you as ain"t going to make a bit over this job. Where would you all be, I should like to know, you canting swine, if it wasn"t for me and my sort? Why, it"s the likes of me as _keeps_ the likes of you,"

with which he walked straight to the gallows and told the hangman to "hurry up" and not keep the gentlemen waiting."

"There was some "grit" in that man," said MacShaughna.s.sy.

"Yes," added Jephson, "and wholesome wit also."

MacShaughna.s.sy puffed a mouthful of smoke over a spider which was just about to kill a fly. This caused the spider to fall into the river, from where a supper-hunting swallow quickly rescued him.

"You remind me," he said, "of a scene I once witnessed in the office of _The Daily_--well, in the office of a certain daily newspaper. It was the dead season, and things were somewhat slow. An endeavour had been made to launch a discussion on the question "Are Babies a Blessing?" The youngest reporter on the staff, writing over the simple but touching signature of "Mother of Six," had led off with a scathing, though somewhat irrelevant, attack upon husbands, as a cla.s.s; the Sporting Editor, signing himself "Working Man," and garnishing his contribution with painfully elaborated orthographical lapses, arranged to give an air of verisimilitude to the correspondence, while, at the same time, not to offend the susceptibilities of the democracy (from whom the paper derived its chief support), had replied, vindicating the British father, and giving what purported to be stirring midnight experiences of his own. The Gallery Man, calling himself, with a burst of imagination, "Gentleman and Christian," wrote indignantly that he considered the agitation of the subject to be both impious and indelicate, and added he was surprised that a paper holding the exalted, and deservedly popular, position of _The_ --- should have opened its columns to the brainless vapourings of "Mother of Six" and "Working Man."

"The topic had, however, fallen flat. With the exception of one man who had invented a new feeding-bottle, and thought he was going to advertise it for nothing, the outside public did not respond, and over the editorial department gloom had settled down.

"One evening, as two or three of us were mooning about the stairs, praying secretly for a war or a famine, Todhunter, the town reporter, rushed past us with a cheer, and burst into the Sub-editor"s room. We followed. He was waving his notebook above his head, and clamouring, after the manner of people in French exercises, for pens, ink, and paper.

""What"s up?" cried the Sub-editor, catching his enthusiasm; "influenza again?"

""Better than that!" shouted Todhunter. "Excursion steamer run down, a hundred and twenty-five lives lost--four good columns of heartrending scenes."

""By Jove!" said the Sub, "couldn"t have happened at a better time either"--and then he sat down and dashed off a leaderette, in which he dwelt upon the pain and regret the paper felt at having to announce the disaster, and drew attention to the exceptionally harrowing account provided by the energy and talent of "our special reporter.""