George Silvermans Explanation | Page 5

in my
ears then, but which I knew afterwards to be 'Hoghton Towers.'
'Yes,' said Mr. Hawkyard. 'I think that sounds promising; I think that sounds hopeful.
And he can be put by himself in a ward, for a night or two, you say?'
It seemed to be the police-officer who had said so; for it was he who replied, Yes! It was
he, too, who finally took me by the arm, and walked me before him through the streets,

into a whitewashed room in a bare building, where I had a chair to sit in, a table to sit at,
an iron bedstead and good mattress to lie upon, and a rug and blanket to cover me. Where
I had enough to eat too, and was shown how to clean the tin porringer in which it was
conveyed to me, until it was as good as a looking-glass. Here, likewise, I was put in a
bath, and had new clothes brought to me; and my old rags were burnt, and I was
camphored and vinegared and disinfected in a variety of ways.
When all this was done, - I don't know in how many days or how few, but it matters not, -
Mr. Hawkyard stepped in at the door, remaining close to it, and said, 'Go and stand
against the opposite wall, George Silverman. As far off as you can. That'll do. How do
you feel?'
I told him that I didn't feel cold, and didn't feel hungry, and didn't feel thirsty. That was
the whole round of human feelings, as far as I knew, except the pain of being beaten.
'Well,' said he, 'you are going, George, to a healthy farm-house to be purified. Keep in the
air there as much as you can. Live an out-of-door life there, until you are fetched away.
You had better not say much - in fact, you had better be very careful not to say anything -
about what your parents died of, or they might not like to take you in. Behave well, and
I'll put you to school; O, yes! I'll put you to school, though I'm not obligated to do it. I am
a servant of the Lord, George; and I have been a good servant to him, I have, these
five-and-thirty years. The Lord has had a good servant in me, and he knows it.'
What I then supposed him to mean by this, I cannot imagine. As little do I know when I
began to comprehend that he was a prominent member of some obscure denomination or
congregation, every member of which held forth to the rest when so inclined, and among
whom he was called Brother Hawkyard. It was enough for me to know, on that day in the
ward, that the farmer's cart was waiting for me at the street corner. I was not slow to get
into it; for it was the first ride I ever had in my life.
It made me sleepy, and I slept. First, I stared at Preston streets as long as they lasted; and,
meanwhile, I may have had some small dumb wondering within me whereabouts our
cellar was; but I doubt it. Such a worldly little devil was I, that I took no thought who
would bury father and mother, or where they would be buried, or when. The question
whether the eating and drinking by day, and the covering by night, would be as good at
the farm-house as at the ward superseded those questions.
The jolting of the cart on a loose stony road awoke me; and I found that we were
mounting a steep hill, where the road was a rutty by- road through a field. And so, by
fragments of an ancient terrace, and by some rugged outbuildings that had once been
fortified, and passing under a ruined gateway we came to the old farm-house in the thick
stone wall outside the old quadrangle of Hoghton Towers: which I looked at like a stupid
savage, seeing no specially in, seeing no antiquity in; assuming all farm-houses to
resemble it; assigning the decay I noticed to the one potent cause of all ruin that I knew, -
poverty; eyeing the pigeons in their flights, the cattle in their stalls, the ducks in the pond,
and the fowls pecking about the yard, with a hungry hope that plenty of them might be
killed for dinner while I stayed there; wondering whether the scrubbed dairy vessels,

drying in the sunlight, could be goodly porringers out of which the master ate his
belly-filling food, and which he polished when he had done, according to my ward
experience; shrinkingly doubtful whether the shadows, passing over that airy height on
the bright spring day, were not something in the nature