Hard Cash Part 92

The following precis, though imperfect, will give some idea of the correspondence:

1. The Board wrote to Thomas Hardie, letting him know the result of the Special Commission, and requesting him to discharge his nephew.

Thomas quaked. Richard smiled, and advised Thomas to take no notice. By this a week was gained to Injustice, and lost to Justice.

2. The Board pointed out Thomas Hardie's inadvertence in not answering No. 1; enclosed copy of it, and pressed for a reply.

Thomas quaked, Richard smiled.

3. Thomas Hardie to the Board. From what he had heard, it would be premature to discharge Alfred. Should prefer to wait a month or two.

4. Board to Alfred, conveying this in other terms.

5. Alfred to Board, warning them against this proposal. To postpone justice was to refuse justice, certainly for a time, probably for ever.

6. The Board to Thomas Hardie, suggesting that if not released immediately Alfred ought to have a trial--_i.e.,_ be allowed to go into the world with a keeper.

7. Alfred to the Board, begging that Dr. Sampson, an honest independent physician, might be allowed to visit him and report to them.

8. The Board to Alfred, declining this, for the present as unadvisable, they being in correspondence with the person who had signed the order--with a view to his liberation.

9. T. Hardie to the Board, shuffling, and requesting time to make further inquiries.

10. The Board, suggesting there should be some reasonable limit to delay.

11. T. Hardie, asking for a month to see about it.

12. The Board, suggesting a week.

13. Alfred Hardie, asking permission to be visited by a solicitor with a view to protection of his liberty and property.

14. The Board, declining this, pending their correspondence with other parties; but asking him for the names and addresses of all his trustees.

15. Thomas Hardie, informing the Board he had now learned Alfred had threatened to kill his father as soon as ever he should get out, and leaving the Board to discharge him on their own responsibility if they chose after this warning: but declining peremptorily to do so himself.

16, 17, 18. The Board, by advice of Mr. Abbott, to Alfred's trustees, warning them against any alienation of Alfred's money under the notion that he was legally a lunatic; and saying that a public inquiry appeared inevitable, owing to Mr. T. Hardie's unwillingness to enter into their views.

19. To Alfred, inquiring whether he wished to encounter the expense of Chancery proceedings to establish his sanity.

20. Alfred to the Board, imploring them to use their powers and discharge him without further delay, and a.s.suring them he meditated no violence on his liberation, but should proceed against all parties under legal advice.

21. The Board to T. Hardie, warning him that he must in future pay Alfred's maintenance in Asylum out of his own pocket, and pressing him either to discharge the young man, or else to apply to the Lord Chancellor for a Commission de Lunatico Inquirendo, and enclosing copy of a letter from Wycherley saying the patient was harmless.

22. T. Hardie respectfully declining to do either, but reminding the Commissioners that the matter could be thrown into Chancery without his consent; only the expense, which would be tremendous, would fall on the lunatic's estate, which might hereafter be regretted by the party himself. He concluded by promising to come to town and visit Alfred with his family physician, and write further in a week.

Having thus thrown dust in the eyes of the Board, Thomas Hardie and Richard consulted with a notoriously unscrupulous madhouse keeper in the suburbs of London, and effected a masterstroke; whereof anon.

The correspondence had already occupied three months, and kept Alfred in a fever of the mind; of all the maddening things with which he had been hara.s.sed by the pretended curers of insanity, this tried him hardest. To see a dozen honest gentlemen wis.h.i.+ng to do justice, able to do justice by one manly stroke of the pen, yet forego their vantage-ground, and descend to coax an able rogue to do their duty and undo his own interest and rascality! To see a strong cause turned into a weak one by the timidity of champions clad by law in complete steel; and a rotten cause, against which Law and Power, as well as Truth, Justice, and Common Sense, had now declared, turned into a strong one by the pluck and cunning of his one unarmed enemy! The ancients feigned that the ingenious G.o.ds tortured Tantalus in h.e.l.l by ever-present thirst, and water flowing to just the outside of his lips. A Briton can thirst for liberty as hard as Tantalus or hunted deer can thirst for cooling springs and this soul-gnawing correspondence brought liberty, and citizenhood, and love, and happiness, to the lips of Alfred's burning, pining, aching heart, again, and again, and again; then carried them away from him in mockery. Oh, the sickening anguish of Hope deferred, and deferred:

"The h.e.l.l it is in suing long to bide."

But indeed his hopes began to sicken for good when he found that the Board would not allow any honest independent physician to visit him, or any solicitor to see him. At first, indeed, they refused it because Mr.

Thomas Hardie was going to let him out: but when T. Hardie would not move at their request, then on a fresh application they refused it, giving as their reason that they had already refused it. Yet in so keen a battle he would not throw away a chance: so he determined to win Dr. Wycherley altogether by hook or by crook, and get a certificate of sanity from him. Now a single white lie, he knew would do the trick.

He had only to say that Hamlet was mad. And "Hamlet was mad" is easily said.

Dr. Wycherley was a collector of mad people, and collectors are always amateurs, and very seldom connoisseurs. His turn of mind co-operating with his interests, led him to put down any man a lunatic, whose intellect was manifestly superior to his own. Alfred Hardie, and one or two more contemporaries, had suffered by this humour of the good doctor's. Nor did the dead escape him entirely. Pascal, according to Wycherley, was a madman with an illusion about a precipice; John Howard a moral lunatic in whom the affections were reversed; Saul a moping maniac with homicidal paroxysms and nocturnal visions; Paul an incoherent lunatic, who in his writings flies off at a tangent, and who admits having once been the victim of a photopsic illusion in broad daylight; Nebuchadnezzar a lycanthropical lunatic; Joan of Arc a theomaniac; Bobby Burton and Oliver Cromwell melancholy maniacs; Napoleon an ambitious maniac, in whom the sense of impossibility became gradually extinguished by visceral and cerebral derangement; Porson an oinomaniac; Luther a phrenetic patient of the old demoniac breed, alluded to by Shakespeare:

"One sees more devils than vast h.e.l.l can hold.

That is the madman."

But without intending any disrespect to any of these gentlemen, he a.s.signed the golden crown of Insanity to Hamlet. To be sure, this character tells his friends in the play he shall _feign_ insanity, and swears them not to reveal the reason; and after this hint to his friends and the pit (it is notorious he was not written for readers) he keeps his word, and does it as cleverly as if his name was David or Brutus instead of Hamlet; indeed, like Edgar, he rather overdoes it, and so puzzles his enemies in the play, and certain German criticasters and English mad doctors in the closet, and does not puzzle his bosom friend in the play one bit, nor the pit for whom he was created. Add to this his sensibility, and his kindness to others, and his eloquent grief at the heart-rending situation which his father's and mother's son was placed in and had brains to realise, though his psychological critics, it seems, have not; and add to all that the prodigious extent of his mind, his keen observation, his deep reflection; his brilliant fancy, united for once in a way with the great Academic, or judicial, intellect, that looks down and sees all the sides of everything--and what can this rare intellectual compound be? Wycherley decided the question. Hamlet was too much greater in the world of mind than S. T.

Coleridge and his German criticasters; too much higher, deeper, and broader than Esquirol, Pinel, Sauze, Haslam, Munro, Pagan, Wigan, Prichard, Romberg, Wycherley, and such small deer, to be anything less than a madman.

Now, in their midnight discussions, Dr. Wycherley more than once alluded to the insanity of Hamlet; and offered proofs. But Alfred declined the subject as too puerile. "A man must exist before he can be insane," said the Oxonian philosopher, severe in youthful gravity. But when he found that Dr. Wycherley, had he lived in Denmark at the time, would have conferred cannily with Hamlet's uncle, removed that worthy relative's disbelief in Hamlet's insanity, and signed the young gentleman away behind his back into a lunatic asylum, Alfred began to sympathise with this posthumous victim of Psychological Science. "I believe the bloke was no madder than I am," said he. He got the play, studied it afresh, compared the fiction with the legend, compared Hamlet humbugging his enemies and their tool, Ophelia, with Hamlet opening his real mind to himself or his Horatio the very next moment; contrasted the real madness the author has portrayed in the plays of Hamlet and Lear by the side of these extravagant imitations, to save, if possible, even dunces, and dreamers, and criticasters from being taken in by the latter; and at their next seance pitched into the doctor's pet chimera, and what with logic, fact, ridicule, and the author's lines, knocked it to atoms.

Now, in their midnight discussions, Dr. Wycherley had always handled the question of Alfred Hardie's Sanity or Insanity with a philosophical coolness the young man admired, and found it hard to emulate; but this philosophic calmness deserted him the moment Hamlet's insanity was disputed, and the harder he was pressed the angrier, the louder, the more confused the Psychological physician became; and presently he got furious, burst out of the anti-spasmodic or round-about style and called Alfred a d--d ungrateful, insolent puppy, and went stamping about the room; and, finally, to the young man's horror, fell down in a fit of an epileptic character, grinding his teeth and foaming at the mouth.

Alfred was filled with regret, and, though alarmed, had the presence of mind not to call for a.s.sistance. The fit was a very mild one in reality, though horrible to look at. The doctor came to, and asked feebly for wine. Alfred got it him, and the doctor, with a mixture of cunning and alarm in his eye, said he had fainted away, or nearly. Alfred a.s.sented coaxingly, and looked sheepish. After this he took care never to libel Hamlet's intellect again by denying his insanity; for he was now convinced of what he had long half suspected, that the doctor had a bee in his own bonnet; and Alfred had studied true insanity all this time, and knew how inhumane it is to oppose a monomaniac's foible; it only infuriates and worries him. No power can convince him.

But now he resolved to play on the doctor's foible. It went against his conscience; but the temptation was so strong. He came to him with a hang-dog air.

"Doctor," said he, "I have been thinking over your arguments, and I capitulate. If Hamlet ever existed, he was as mad as a March hare." And he blushed at this his first quibble.

Dr. Wycherley beamed with satisfaction.

"My young friend, this gives me sincere pleasure; not on my account, but on your own. There goes one of your illusions then. Now tell me--the L.

4,000! Have you calmly reconsidered that too?"

Alfred hung his head, and looked guiltier and guiltier.

"Why," said he, "that never amounted to anything more than a strong suspicion. It has long ceased to occupy my mind in excess. However, should I ever be so fortunate as to recover my liberty, I have no objection to collect the evidence about it pro and con., and then make you the judge instead of myself." This he delivered with an admirable appearance of indifference.

"Very well, sir," said the doctor drily. "Then, now I have a piece of good news for _you._

"Oh, doctor, what is that?"

"Your cure is complete; that is all! You are now a sane man, as sane as I am."

Alfred was a little disappointed at this piece of news; but recovering himself, asked him to certify that and let him send the certificate to the Board. Dr. Wycherley said he would with pleasure.

"I'll bring it to you when I make my round," said he.

Alfred retired triumphant, and went in at Plato with a good heart.

In about an hour Dr. Wycherley paid him the promised visit. But what may not an hour bring forth? He came with mortification and regret in his face to tell Alfred that an order of transfer had been signed by the proper parties, and counter-signed by two Commissioners, and he was to go to Dr. Wolf's asylum that day.

Alfred groaned. "I knew my father would out-wit my feeble friends somehow or other," said he. "What is his game! do you know?"