Hunchback

“ Thine eyes shall seldom see a man that doth a nickname bear, But, if thou search, thou'lt find the name his nature doth declare.
So the King said, 'Explain the hunchback's case to him and repeat to him the stories told by the physician, the controller, the broker and the tailor.' They did as he commanded, and the barber shook his head and exclaimed, 'By Allah, this is indeed a wonder of wonders!' Then said he, 'Uncover the hunchback's body, that I may see it.' They did so, and he sat down and taking the hunchback's head in his lap, looked at his face and laughed till he fell backward. ”

“ The hunchback slunk forward without protest and, in movement like a recalcitrant child who has agreed to kiss and make up, put out the long and bony hand that had so lately sought to kill the man to whom it was now offered. ”

“ And then the hunchback came to his rescue and inserted a question. He was a terrible person in the debating society with his questions, and they invariably took one form—a demand for a definition. "What's your definition of righteousness?" said the hunchback at this stage.
Hill experienced a sudden loss of complacency at this question, but even as it was asked, relief came in the person of Brooks, the laboratory attendant, who entered by the preparation-room door, carrying a number of freshly killed guineapigs by their hind legs. ”

“ But the hunchback knew what he was about. Ward said of Ump that, in his field, the land of the horse's foot, he was as much an expert as any professor behind his spectacles. His knowledge came from the observation of a lifetime, gathered by tireless study of every detail. Even now, when I see a great chemist who knows all about some drug; a great surgeon who knows all about the body of a man; or a great oculist who knows all about the human eye, I must class the hunchback with them. ”

“ The past is past, and for the future we must think and act as speedily as we may. If our salaries are half [512] what they are now we need not starve; and, as long as God keeps us in health of body and mind, nothing need signify, provided we are not obliged to separate and go off to that dreadful America.
Thursday, March 1st.— ... After dinner I read over again Knowles's play, "The Hunchback," and like it better than ever. What would I not give to have written that play! He cannot agree with Drury Lane about it, and has brought it back to us, and means to act Master Walter himself. ”

“ The minister made a gesture of contempt. "Hugon! Hugon, half Monacan and half Frenchman, is bartering skins with a Quaker. Begone, child, and when you are transformed return to us."
When the door had closed he turned upon his wife. "The girl has been cared for," he said. "She has been fed,—if not with cates and dainties, then with bread and meat; she has been clothed,—if not in silk and lace, then in good blue linen and penistone. She is young and of the springtime, hath more learning than had many a princess of old times, is innocent and good to look at. ”

“ He will be hurrying home before the bursting of the storm—he will be riding the planter's pace"—
"Man and horse will come crashing down!" cried the storekeeper, with a great oath "And then"—
"Hugon's knife, so there will be no noise.... They think he has gold upon him: that is for the schoolmaster.... Hugon is an Indian, and he will hide their trail. Men will think that some outlying slave was in the woods, and set upon and killed him." ”

“ It was with quivering lips and trembling eyelids that she spoke of her brother’s danger, and it was with looks and tones of answering sympathy that Charles Huyton replied to her. Had not her eyes been at that moment blinded by her tears, she might have read how deep his feelings were.
“It is very wrong, I know,” added she, dashing away the drops from her eye-lashes; “I ought to feel more resigned, knowing as I do he is in the same Hands still, and that nothing will happen but for the best. ”

“ What Hugh saw was enough to give any boy a thrill of horror. Some ten feet below the top a human figure sprawled, kicking with his legs in the endeavor to find a brace for his feet. He was clinging to a bush that seemed to be growing from the face of the precipice, and which Hugh could see was slowly but surely giving way, one root after another losing its grip in the soil and rocky crevices. ”

“ The single tap of the drum warned him; the singing had ceased. And this bitter idealist, this preacher of the hollowness of the real, wondered where were the sable trappings of woe, the hideous envisagement of them that are condemned with mortuary symbols in garbs of painted flame to the stake, faggot, axe, and headsman. None of these were visible, and the gentle spirit of the prisoner became ruffled, alarmed. He expected violence but instead they offered churchly music. Restless, his nerves fretted, he asked himself the reason. He did not fear death, for he despised life ”

“ Would she ever forget the night of horror that saw the compact made. The lonely, dusty highroad to Hunmouth, with its wide grass borders sloping down to the ditch bottoms, between the trimmed, stunted hedgerows, where the schoolmaster led her; the rising moon; the sickly, suffocating mist of harvest; the dim stars. And there, backward and forward over the powdery road, she had fought that last fateful fight for her soul's freedom—and failed.
Give her the letter back ... only give her the letter back ... and she would try to love him in earnest. She would force herself to love him. ”

“ The only evidence before me is evidence against my fears. Instead of an intangible horror, there is an affirmed and ponderable assurance that although my name is Hanbury, and I got that name from Sir Hanbury Williams, not a drop of his blood is in my veins! Why, I am more like a girl with her first love-letter, trying to guess its contents from the outside, than a man with a business document in his hand! ”

“ Ah! now could they give up their bodies to the rods, the scorpions, the leaded clubs, the iron hooks, to be torn and flayed, who are now so delicate and tender that they cannot bear the prick of a needle; who find a fast-day intolerable, and are absolutely unable to stand or kneel for an hour in church, or to rise early in the morning on account of the cold ? How could they allow them selves to be roasted or boiled alive who, if their beds are the least uncomfortable, cannot sleep for impatience? ”

“ Judge of my consternation when I saw, saw as distinctly as I see the pen which traces these letters, a huge bronze serpent, with overlapping, glistening, metallic scales. The eyes of this python were almost feminine, and their regard gentle, reproachful, and voluptuous. My knees bent beneath me and my face was wet with fright.
[Pg 269]
“You are a believer, then?” crooned a dull voice in my ear. It was Moreau. He had thrown off his outer wrap and stood in a black soutane. He was white with emotion and said in tenderest accents: “Listen; be my friend. Do not desert me at the crisis of my life. ”

“ To what end that great disturbance and consternation of all creatures? First, says Abulensis, it is a sign of compassion, and as it were a fainting and death-agony of all nature at the destruction of the world. When the head of a household is at the point of death the whole family is disturbed and bewildered; the wife weeps and tears her hair in an agony of grief; the children give vent to their sorrow in noisy cries; the relatives weep; the servants run hither and thither sighing and moaning ”

“ Towards the end of his days Hankford fell into deep fits of depression in retirement at Annery, where, weary of life and despondent at the prospect of the new reign with an infant as king, and with furious rivalries ready to break forth and tear the kingdom to pieces, he was impatient that death might end his troubles. ”

“ I, James Allison, have pondered much on that phenomenon which I witnessed through the eyes of Hunwulf. Was that winged man merely a freak, an isolated example of distorted nature, dwelling in solitude and immemorial desolation? Or was he a survival of a forgotten race, which had risen, reigned and vanished before the coming of man as we know him? The little brown people of the hills might have told me, but we had no speech in common. Yet I am inclined to the latter theory. Winged men are not uncommon in mythology; they are met with in the folklore of many nations and many races. ”

“ A little indecency. Devil take it! what of that? Look voluptuous, and rush into wild melodies. Snort, blow, whistle, flourish, play the tambourine.—What a number of people, my poor Gwynplaine!"
He interrupted himself.
"Gwynplaine, help me. Let down the platform." He spread out his pocket-handkerchief. "But first let me roar in my rag," and he blew his nose violently as a ventriloquist ought. ”

“ Gwynplaine, stirred by spring, and by the sap rising in all things, was prompt to dream the dream of the flesh. The old man who is not to be stamped out, and over whom none of us can triumph, was awaking in that backward youth, still a boy at twenty-four.
It was just then, at the most stormy moment of the crisis, that the offer was made him, and the naked bosom of the Sphinx appeared before his dazzled eyes. Youth is an inclined plane. Gwynplaine was stooping, and something pushed him forward. ”

“ Hugomort did not hear the words; but he understood their import through the little panic scuffle that followed, and hurried out just as the bully had got his arm about the child's waist. He caught the fellow by the neck, as a dog catches a rat, and flung him to the ground.
The swaggerer, half-stunned for the moment, rose the next, with a howl of fury, and felt for his sword-hilt. ”

“ Hugon snarled like an angry wolf, and strained at the rope which bound his arms.
Haward went on evenly: "Your tribe has smoked the peace pipe with the white man. I was not told it by singing birds, but by the great white father at Williamsburgh. They buried the hatchet very deep; the dead leaves of many moons of Cohonks lie thick upon the place where they buried it. Why have you made a warpath, treading it alone of your color?"
"Diable!" cried Hugon. "Pig of an Englishman! I will kill you for"—
"For an handful of blue beads," said Haward, with a cold smile. "And I, dog of an Indian! ”

“ The compression increased his sufferings. He could scarcely breathe.
These living thongs were pointed at their extremities, but broadened like a blade of a sword towards its hilt. All belonged evidently to the same centre. They crept and glided about him; he felt the strange points of pressure, which seemed to him like mouths, change their places from time to time. ”

“ After the dancers were seated when this quadrille was finished, Bill took Hunch aside and asked:
"Hunch, are you afraid of the devil?"
"Ain't afeard uv nuthin'!"
Hunch looked it. His wrinkled old face, with its expression of cunning, and his disfigured form suggested that he was on intimate terms with all sorts of evil spirits.
"The devil is here to-night, Hunch, begging me to play for him to dance, and I don't want to hear him. That's why I put the cotton in my ears. But I will have to play for him. He never lets me go without a dance when he comes around. ”

“ Her uncle, irritated by his interrupted discourse, exclaimed:—
"Never mind what the Princess Mila thinks, Mr. Shannon. Women change their minds. The chief matter just now is that you cannot go away to-night. You would lose your way, perhaps be drowned. Can you sleep on a hard [Pg 85] bed?" He was assured by Gerald that, if he had been turned away, he would have slept in an outhouse, even under one of those windmills he saw in such number on the strand. Karospina smiled. ”

“ The Rat-Wife is only a woman with a dog that goes about catching and killing rats. Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, she plays upon a little pipe and the rats follow her to the water and are drowned. "Just because they want not to—because they're so deadly afraid of the water—that's why they've got to plunge into it," says this horrid old bel-dame of the naughty perverse rodents. ”

“ They sniff the clean bones of the bison cow,
Howl to the skies; and now with manes a-rough
They nose the man-smell leading to the bluff;
Pause puzzled at the base and sweep the height
With questioning yelps. Aloft, crouched low in fright,
Already Hugh can hear the braves’ guffaws
At their scorned foeman yielded to the squaws’
Inverted mercy and a slow-won grave.
Since Earth’s first mother scolded from a cave
And that dear riddle of her love began,
No man has wrought a weapon against man
To match the deadly venom brewed above
The lean, blue, blinding heart-fires of her love. ”

“ I stared in sheer amazement at Michael, wondering if the strangely spent night had upset his reason. He could only splutter out between his awful curses:—
"Gluck, the rascal, the ghost, the man we're after! That harpsichord—the lying knave—that tune—I swear it wasn't Gluck—oh, the rascal has escaped again! The ghost story [Pg 200] —the villain was told to scare us out of the house—to put us off the track. A thousand devils chase the scamp!" And Michael let his head drop on the pommel of his saddle as he fairly groaned in the bitterness of defeat. ”

“ He would become a tramp—a unique tramp—king of the tramps! At least he would be an object of wonder, though an outcast. Better a kingpin among tramps than a huddling lamb in a flock of trembling sheep, all just like him!
[117] Joshua maneuvered a stick until the slug was upon it, and as on that other spring day repeated the experiment that had been the actual beginning of his vagabondage.
“How now, old-timer?” he croakingly chuckled. “You’re on an island of wood, and the earth is twenty times your length below you. What will you do? You’ve reached a momentous period in your career. ”

“ Not his wife, mind you. Oh, no! That would be wasting powder and shot on a fortress already captured. He had telephoned the faithful concubine, who awaited him, her curiosity aroused. She felt certain that he would again make his usual fiasco. As the rejuvenated old goat bounded over the sidewalk, his blood tingling with the passion of youth and Damiana Mormon Elder's Wafers, a pretty puss of eighteen touched his elbow. ”