"It was there that I saw him first, in a long low room taken upon the space of that sort of coach-house. It was bare and whitewashed, with a small square aperture glazed with one cracked, dusty pane at its further end. He was lying on his back upon a straw pallet; they had given him a couple of horse-blankets, and he seemed to have spent the remainder of his strength in the exertion of clean-ing himself. He was almost speechless; his quick breathing under the blankets pulled up to his chin, his glittering, restless black eyes reminded me of a wild bird caught in a snare. While I was examining him, old Swaffer stood silently by the door, passing the tips of his fingers along his shaven upper lip.
I gave some directions, promised to send a bottle of medicine, and naturally made some inquiries.
"'Smith caught him in the stackyard at New Barns,' said the old chap in his deliberate, unmoved manner, and as if the other had been indeed a sort of wild animal. 'That's how I came by him.
Quite a curiosity, isn't he? Now tell me, doctor--you've been all over the world--don't you think that's a bit of a Hindoo we've got hold of here.'
"I was greatly surprised. His long black hair scattered over the straw bolster contrasted with the olive pallor of his face. It occurred to me he might be a Basque. It didn't necessarily follow that he should understand Spanish; but I tried him with the few words I know, and also with some French.
The whispered sounds I caught by bending my ear to his lips puzzled me utterly. That afternoon the young ladies from the Rectory (one of them read Goethe with a dictionary, and the other had strug-gled with Dante for years), coming to see Miss Swaffer, tried their German and Italian on him from the doorway. They retreated, just the least bit scared by the flood of passionate speech which, turning on his pallet, he let out at them. They ad-mitted that the sound was pleasant, soft, musical--but, in conjunction with his looks perhaps, it was startling--so excitable, so utterly unlike anything one had ever heard. The village boys climbed up the bank to have a peep through the little square aperture. Everybody was wondering what Mr.
Swaffer would do with him.
"He simply kept him.
"Swaffer would be called eccentric were he not so much respected. They will tell you that Mr.
Swaffer sits up as late as ten o'clock at night to read books, and they will tell you also that he can write a cheque for two hundred pounds without thinking twice about it. He himself would tell you that the Swaffers had owned land between this and Darnford for these three hundred years.
He must be eighty-five to-day, but he does not look a bit older than when I first came here. He is a great breeder of sheep, and deals extensively in cat-tle. He attends market days for miles around in every sort of weather, and drives sitting bowed low over the reins, his lank grey hair curling over the collar of his warm coat, and with a green plaid rug round his legs. The calmness of advanced age gives a solemnity to his manner. He is clean-shaved; his lips are thin and sensitive; something rigid and monarchal in the set of his features lends a certain elevation to the character of his face. He has been known to drive miles in the rain to see a new kind of rose in somebody's garden, or a mon-strous cabbage grown by a cottager. He loves to hear tell of or to be shown something that he calls 'outlandish.' Perhaps it was just that outlandish-ness of the man which influenced old Swaffer. Per-haps it was only an inexplicable caprice. All Iknow is that at the end of three weeks I caught sight of Smith's lunatic digging in Swaffer's kitch-en garden. They had found out he could use a spade. He dug barefooted.
"His black hair flowed over his shoulders. Isuppose it was Swaffer who had given him the striped old cotton shirt; but he wore still the na-tional brown cloth trousers (in which he had been washed ashore) fitting to the leg almost like tights; was belted with a broad leathern belt stud-ded with little brass discs; and had never yet ven-tured into the village. The land he looked upon seemed to him kept neatly, like the grounds round a landowner's house; the size of the cart-horses struck him with astonishment; the roads resembled garden walks, and the aspect of the people, espe-cially on Sundays, spoke of opulence. He won-dered what made them so hardhearted and their children so bold. He got his food at the back door, carried it in both hands carefully to his outhouse, and, sitting alone on his pallet, would make the sign of the cross before he began. Beside the same pal-let, kneeling in the early darkness of the short days, he recited aloud the Lord's Prayer before he slept.
Whenever he saw old Swaffer he would bow with veneration from the waist, and stand erect while the old man, with his fingers over his upper lip, sur-veyed him silently. He bowed also to Miss Swaffer, who kept house frugally for her father--a broad-shouldered, big-boned woman of forty-five, with the pocket of her dress full of keys, and a grey, steady eye. She was Church--as people said (while her father was one of the trustees of the Baptist Chapel)--and wore a little steel cross at her waist. She dressed severely in black, in mem-ory of one of the innumerable Bradleys of the neighbourhood, to whom she had been engaged some twenty-five years ago--a young farmer who broke his neck out hunting on the eve of the wed-ding day. She had the unmoved countenance of the deaf, spoke very seldom, and her lips, thin like her father's, astonished one sometimes by a myste-riously ironic curl.