Short Fiction

clothes as he had worn them in the morning. No sight so piteous, so wretched, and at the same time so eloquent had we ever seen before. His eyes were closed, and the light of his face was therefore quenched. His mouth was open, and the slaver had fallen upon his beard. His dark, clotted hair had been pulled over his face by the unconscious movement of his hands. There came from him a stertorous sound of breathing, as though he were being choked by the attitude in which he lay; and even in his drunkenness there was an uneasy twitching as of pain about his face. And there sat, and had been sitting for hours past, the four children in the other room, knowing the condition of the parent whom they most respected, but not even endeavouring to do anything for his comfort. What could they do? They knew, by long training and thorough experience, that a fit of drunkenness had to be got out of by sleep. To them there was nothing shocking in it. It was but a periodical misfortune. “She’ll have to own he’s been and done it now,” said Grimes, looking down upon the man, and alluding to his wife’s good-natured obstinacy. He handed the candle to us, and, with a mixture of tenderness and roughness, of which the roughness was only in the manner and the tenderness was real, he raised Mackenzie’s head and placed it on the bolster, and lifted the man’s legs on to the bed. Then he took off the man’s boots, and the old silk handkerchief from the neck, and pulled the trousers straight, and arranged the folds of the coat. It was almost as though he were laying out one that was dead. The eldest girl was now standing by us, and Grimes asked her how long her father had been in that condition. “Jack Hoggart brought him in just afore it was dark,” said the girl. Then it was explained to us that Jack Hoggart was the man whom we had seen sitting on the doorstep.

“And your mother?” asked Grimes.

“The perlice took her afore dinner.”

“And you children;⁠—what have you had to eat?” In answer to this the girl only shook her head. Grimes took no immediate notice of this, but called the drunken man by his name, and shook his shoulder, and looked round to a broken ewer which stood on the little table, for water to dash upon him;⁠—but there was no water in the jug. He called again and repeated the shaking, and at last Mackenzie opened his eyes, and in a dull, half-conscious manner looked up at us. “Come, my man,” said Grimes, “shake this off and have done with it.”

“Hadn’t you better try to get up?” we asked.

There was a faint attempt at rising, then a smile⁠—a smile which was terrible to witness, so sad was all which it said; then a look of utter, abject misery, coming, as we thought, from a momentary remembrance of his degradation; and after that he sank back in the dull, brutal, painless, deathlike apathy of absolute unconsciousness.

“It’ll be morning afore he’ll move,” said the girl.

“She’s about right,” said Grimes. “He’s got it too heavy for us to do anything but just leave him. We’ll take a look for the box and the papers.”

And the man upon whom we were looking down had been born a gentleman, and was a finished scholar⁠—one so well educated, so ripe in literary acquirement, that we knew few whom we could call his equal. Judging of the matter by the light of our reason, we cannot say that the horror of the scene should have been enhanced to us by these recollections. Had the man been a shoemaker or a coalheaver there would have been enough of tragedy in it to make an angel weep⁠—that sight of the child standing by the bedside of her drunken father, while the other parent was away in custody⁠—and in no degree shocked at what she saw, because the thing was so common to her! But the thought of what the man had been, of what he was, of what he might have been, and the steps by which he had brought himself to the foul degradation which we witnessed, filled us with a dismay which we should hardly have felt had the gifts which he had polluted and the intellect which he had wasted been less capable of noble uses.

Our purpose in coming to the court was to rescue the Doctor’s papers from danger, and we turned to accompany Grimes into the other room. As we did so the publican asked the girl if she knew anything of a black box which her father had taken away from the Spotted Dog. “The box is here,” said the girl.

“And the papers?” asked Grimes. Thereupon the girl shook her head, and we both hurried into the outer room. I hardly know who first discovered the sight which we encountered, or whether it was shown to us by the child. The whole fireplace was strewn with half-burnt sheets of manuscript. There were scraps of pages of which almost the whole had been destroyed, others which were hardly more than scorched, and heaps of paper-ashes all lying tumbled together about the fender. We went down on our knees to examine them, thinking at the moment that the poor creature might in his despair have burned his own work and have spared that of the Doctor. But it was not so. We found scores of charred pages of the Doctor’s elaborate handwriting. By this time Grimes had found the open box, and we perceived that the sheets remaining in it were tumbled and huddled together in absolute confusion. There were pages of the various volumes mixed with those which Mackenzie himself had written, and they were all crushed, and rolled, and twisted as though they had been thrust thither as waste-paper⁠—out of the way. “ ’Twas mother as done it,” said