THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT
Book the First.
A Respectable Young Man.
Chapter I.
The Good Schoolmaster.
I don't suppose it rained harder in the good town of Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy than it rained anywhere else. But it did rain. There was scarcely an umbrella in Slopperton that could hold its own against the rain that came pouring down that November afternoon, between the hours of four and five. Every gutter in High Street, Slopperton; every gutter in Broad Street (which was of course the narrowest street); in New Street (which by the same rule was the oldest street); in East Street, West Street, Blue Dragon Street, and Windmill Street; every gutter in every one of these thoroughfares was a little Niagara, with a maelstrom at the corner, down which such small craft as bits of orange-peel, old boots and shoes, scraps of paper, and fragments of rag were absorbed—as better ships have been in the great northern whirlpool. That dingy stream, the Sloshy, was swollen into a kind of dirty Mississippi, and the graceful coal-barges which adorned its bosom were stripped of the clothes-lines and fluttering linen which usually were to be seen on their decks. A bad, determined, black-minded November day. A day on which the fog shaped itself into a demon, and lurked behind men's shoulders, whispering into their ears, "Cut your throat—you know you've got a razor, and can't shave with it, because you've been drinking and your hand shakes; one little gash under the left ear, and the business is done. It's the best thing you can do. It is, really." A day on which the rain, the monotonous ceaseless persevering rain, has a voice as it comes down, and says, "Don't you think you could go melancholy mad? Look at me; be good enough to watch me for a couple of hours or so, and think, while you watch me, of the girl who jilted you ten years ago; and of what a much better man you would be to-day if she had only loved you truly. Oh, I think, if you'll only be so good as watch me, you might really contrive to go mad." Then again the wind. What does the wind say, as it comes cutting through the dark passage, and stabbing you, like a coward as it is, in the back, just between the shoulders—what does it say? Why, it whistles in your ear a reminder of the little bottle of laudanum you've got upstairs, which you had for your toothache last week, and never used. A foggy wet windy November day. A bad day—a dangerous day. Keep us from bad thoughts to-day, and keep us out of the Police Reports next week. Give us a glass of something hot and strong, and a bit of something nice for supper, and bear with us a little this day; for if the strings of yonder piano—an instrument fashioned on mechanical principles by mortal hands—if they are depressed and slackened by the influence of damp and fog, how do we know that there may not be some string in this more critical instrument, the human mind, not made on mechanical principles or by mortal hands, a little out of order on this bad November day?
But of course bad influences can only come to bad men; and of course he must be a very bad man whose spirits go up and down with every fluctuation of the weather-glass. Virtuous people no doubt are virtuous always; and by no chance, or change, or trial, or temptation, can they ever become other than virtuous. Therefore why should a wet day or a dark day depress them? No; they look out of the windows at houseless men and women and fatherless and motherless children wet through to the skin, and thank Heaven that they are not as other men: like good Christians, punctual rate-payers, and unflinching church-goers as they are.
Thus it was with Mr. Jabez North, assistant and usher at the academy of Dr. Tappenden. He was not in anywise affected by fog, rain, or wind. There was a fire at one end of the schoolroom, and Allecompain Major had been fined sixpence, and condemned to a page of Latin grammar, for surreptitiously warming his worst chilblain at the bars thereof. But Jabez North did not want to go near the fire, though in his official capacity he might have done so; ay, even might have warmed his hands in moderation. He was not cold, or if he was cold, he didn't mind being cold. He was sitting at his desk, mending pens and hearing six red-nosed boys conjugate the verb Amare, "to love"—while the aforesaid boys were giving practical illustrations of the active verb "to shiver,"—and the passive ditto, "to be puzzled." He was not only a good young man, this Jabez North (and he must have been a very good young man, for his goodness was in almost every mouth in Slopperton—indeed, he was looked upon by many excellent old ladies as an incarnation of the adjective "pious")—but he was rather a handsome young man also. He had delicate features, a pale fair complexion, and, as young women said, very beautiful blue eyes; only it was unfortunate that these eyes, being, according to report, such a very beautiful colour, had a shifting way with them, and never looked at you long enough for you to find out their exact hue, or their exact expression either. He had also what was called a very fine head of fair curly hair, and what some people considered a very fine head—though it was a pity it shelved off on either side in the locality where prejudiced people place the organ of conscientiousness. A professor of phrenology, lecturing at Slopperton, had declared Jabez North to be singularly wanting in that small virtue; and had even gone so far as to hint that he had never met with a parallel case of deficiency in the entire moral region, except in the skull of a very distinguished criminal, who invited a friend to dinner and murdered him on the kitchen stairs while the first course was being dished. But of course the Sloppertonians pronounced this professor to be an impostor, and his art a piece of charlatanism, as they were only too happy to pronounce any professor or any art that came in their way.
Slopperton believed in Jabez North. Partly because Slopperton had in a manner created, clothed, and fed him, set him on his feet, patted him on his head, and reared him under the shadow of Sloppertonian wings, to be the good and worthy individual he was.
The story was in this wise. Nineteen years before this bad November day, a little baby had been dragged, to all appearance drowned, out of the muddy waters of the Sloshy. Fortunately or unfortunately, as the case may be, he turned out to be less drowned than dirty, and after being subjected to very sharp treatment—such as being held head downwards, and scrubbed raw with a jack-towel, by the Sloppertonian Humane Society, founded by a very excellent gentleman, somewhat renowned for maltreating his wife and turning his eldest son out of doors—this helpless infant set up a feeble squall, and evinced other signs of a return to life. He was found in a Slopperton river by a Slopperton bargeman, resuscitated by a Slopperton society, and taken by the Slopperton beadle to the Slopperton workhouse; he therefore belonged to Slopperton. Slopperton found him a species of barnacle rather difficult to shake off. The wisest thing, therefore, for Slopperton to do, was to put the best face on a bad matter, and, out of its abundance, rear this un-welcome little stranger. And truly virtue has its reward; for, from the workhouse brat to the Sunday-school teacher; from the Sunday-school teacher to the scrub at Dr. Tappenden's academy; from scrub to usher of the fourth form; and from fourth form usher to first assistant, pet toady, and factotum, were so many steps in the ladder of fortune which Jabez mounted, as in seven-leagued boots.
As to his name, Jabez North, it is not to be supposed that when some wretched drab (mad with what madness, or wretched to what intensity of wretchedness, who shall guess?) throws her hapless and sickly offspring into the river—it is not, I say, to be supposed that she puts his card-case in his pocket, with his name and address inscribed in neat copper-plate upon enamelled cards therein. No, the foundling of Slopperton was called by the board of the workhouse Jabez; first, because Jabez was a scriptural name; secondly, perhaps, because it was an ugly one, and agreed better with the cut of his clothes and the fashion of his appointments than Reginald, Conrad, or Augustus might have done. The gentlemen of the board further bestowed upon him the surname of North because he was found on the north bank of the Sloshy, and because North was an unobtrusive and commonplace cognomen, appropriate to a pauper; like whose impudence it would indeed be to write himself down Montmorency or Fitz-Hardinge.
Now there are many natures (God-created though they be) of so black and vile a tendency as to be soured and embittered by workhouse treatment; by constant keeping down; by days and days which grow into years and years, in which to hear a kind word is to hear a strange language—a language so strange as to bring a choking sensation into the throat, and not unbidden tears into the eyes. Natures there are, so innately wicked, as not to be improved by tyranny; by the dominion, the mockery, and the insult of little boys, who are wise enough to despise poverty, but not charitable enough to respect misfortune. And fourth-form ushers in a second-rate academy have to endure this sort of thing now and then. Some natures too may be so weak and sentimental as to sicken at a life without one human tie; a boyhood without father or mother; a youth without sister or brother. Not such the excellent nature of Jabez North. Tyranny found him meek, it is true, but it left him much meeker. Insult found him mild, but it left him lamb-like. Scornful speeches glanced away from him; cruel words seemed drops of water on marble, so powerless were they to strike or wound. He would take an insult from a boy whom with his powerful right hand he could have strangled: he would smile at the insolence of a brat whom he could have thrown from the window with one uplifting of his strong arm almost as easily as he threw away a bad pen. But he was a good young man; a benevolent young man; giving in secret, and generally getting his reward openly. His left hand scarcely knew what his right hand did; but Slopperton always knew it before long. So every citizen of the borough praised and applauded this model young man, and many were the prophecies of the day when the pauper boy should be one of the greatest men in that greatest of all towns, the town of Slopperton.
The bad November day merged into a bad November night. Dark night at five o'clock, when candles, few and far between, flickering in Dr. Tappenden's schoolroom, and long rows of half-pint mugs—splendid institutions for little boys to warm their hands at, being full of a boiling and semi-opaque liquid, par excellence milk-and-water—ornamented the schoolroom table. Darker night still, when the half-pint mugs have been collected by a red maid-servant, with nose, elbows, and knuckles picked out in purple; when all traces of the evening meal are removed; when the six red-nosed first-form boys have sat down to Virgil—for whom they entertain a deadly hatred, feeling convinced that he wrote with special view to their being flogged from inability to construe him. Of course, if he hadn't been a spiteful beast he would have written in English, and then he wouldn't have had to be construed. Darker night still at eight o'clock, when the boys have gone to bed, and perhaps would have gone to sleep, if Allecompain Major had not a supper-party in his room, with Banbury cakes, pigs trotters, periwinkles, acid rock, and ginger-beer powders, laid out upon the bolster. Not so dark by the head assistant's desk, at which Jabez sits, his face ineffably calm, examining a pile of exercises. Look at his face by that one candle; look at the eyes, which are steady now, for he does not dream that any one is watching him—steady and luminous with a subdued fire, which might blaze out some day into a deadly flame. Look at the face, the determined mouth, the thin lips, which form almost an arch—and say, is that the face of a man to be content with a life of dreary and obscure monotony? A somewhat intellectual face; but not the face of a man with an intellect seeking no better employment than the correcting of French and Latin exercises. If we could look into his heart, we might find the answers to these questions. He raises the lid of his desk; a deep desk that holds many things—paper, pens, letters; and what?—a thick coil of rope. A strange object in the assistant's desk, this coil of rope! He looks at it as if to assure himself that it is safe; shuts his desk quickly, locks it, puts the key in his waistcoat-pocket; and when at half-past nine he goes up into his little bedroom at the top of the house, he will carry the desk under his arm.
Chapter II.
Good for Nothing.
The November night is darkest, foggiest, wettest, and windiest out on the open road that leads into Slopperton. A dreary road at the best of times, this Slopperton road, and dreariest of all in one spot about a mile and a half out of the town. Upon this spot stands a solitary house, known as the Black Mill. It was once the cottage of a miller, and the mill still stands, though in disuse.
The cottage had been altered and improved within the last few years, and made into a tolerable-sized house; a dreary, rambling, tumble-down place, it is true, but still with some pretension about it. It was occupied at this time by a widow lady, a Mrs. Marwood, once the owner of a large fortune, which had nearly all been squandered by the dissipation of her only son. This son had long left Slopperton. His mother had not heard of him for years. Some said he had gone abroad. She tried to hope this, but sometimes she mourned him as dead. She lived in modest style, with one old female servant, who had been with her since her marriage, and had been faithful through every change of fortune—as these common and unlearned creatures, strange to say, sometimes are. It happened that at this very time Mrs. Marwood had just received the visit of a brother, who had returned from the East Indies with a large fortune. This brother, Mr. Montague Harding, had on his landing in England hastened to seek out his only sister, and the arrival of the wealthy nabob at the solitary house on the Slopperton road had been a nine days' wonder for the good citizens of Slopperton. He brought with him only one servant, a half-caste; his visit was to be a short one, as he was about buying an estate in the south of England, on which he intended to reside with his widowed sister.
Slopperton had a great deal to say about Mr. Harding. Slopperton gave him credit for the possession of uncounted and uncountable lacs of rupees; but Slopperton wouldn't give him credit for the possession of the hundredth part of an ounce of liver. Slopperton left cards at the Black Mill, and had serious thoughts of getting up a deputation to invite the rich East Indian to represent its inhabitants at the great congress of Westminster. But both Mr. Harding and Mrs. Marwood keptaloof from Slopperton, and were set down accordingly as mysterious, not to say dark-minded individuals, forthwith. The brother and sister are seated in the little, warm, lamp-lit drawing-room at the Black Mill this dark November night. She is a woman who has once been handsome, but whose beauty has been fretted away by anxieties and suspenses, which wear out the strongest hope, as water wears away the hardest rock. The Anglo-Indian very much resembles her; but though his face is that of an invalid, it is not care-worn. It is the face of a good man, who has a hope so strong that neither fear nor trouble can disquiet him.
He is speaking—"And you have not heard from your son?"
"For nearly seven years. Seven years of cruel suspense; seven years, during which every knock at yonder door seems to have beaten a blow upon my heart—every footstep on yonder garden-walk seems to have trodden down a hope."
"And you do not think him dead?"
"I hope and pray not. Not dead, impenitent; not dead, without my blessing; not gone away from me for ever, without one pressure of the hand, one prayer for my forgiveness, one whisper of regret for all he has made me suffer."
"He was very wild, then, very dissipated?"
"He was a reprobate and a gambler. He squandered his money like water. He had bad companions, I know; but was not himself wicked at heart. The very night he ran away, the night I saw him for the last time, I'm sure he was sorry for his bad courses. He said something to that effect; said his road was a dark one, but that it had only one end, and he must go on to the end."
"And you made no remonstrance?"
"I was tired of remonstrance, tired of prayer, and had wearied out my soul with hope deferred."
"My dear Agnes! And this poor boy, this wretched misguided boy, Heaven have pity upon him and restore him! Heaven have pity upon every wanderer, this dismal and pitiless night!"
Heaven, indeed, have pity upon that wanderer, out on the bleak highroad to Slopperton; out on the shelterless Slopperton road, a mile away from the Black Mill! The wanderer is a young man, whose garments, of the shabby-genteel order, are worst of all fitted to keep out the cruel weather; a handsome young man, or a man who has once been handsome, but on whom riotous days and nights, drunkenness, recklessness, and folly, have had their dire effects. He is struggling to keep a bad cigar alight, and when it goes out, which is about twice in five minutes, he utters expressions which in Slopperton are thought very wicked, and consigns that good city, with its virtuous citizens, to a very bad neighbourhood.
He talks to himself between his struggles with the cigar. "Foot-sore and weary, hungry and thirsty, cold and ill; it is not a very hopeful way for the only son of a rich man to come back to his native place after seven years' absence. I wonder what star presides over my vagabond existence; if I knew, I'd shake my fist at it," he muttered, as he looked up at two or three feeble luminaries glimmering through the rain and fog. "Another mile to the Black Mill—and then what will she say to me? What can she say to me but to curse me? What have I earned by such a life as mine except a mother's curse?" His cigar chose this very moment of all others to go out. If the bad three-halfpenny Havannah had been a sentient thing with reasoning powers, it might have known better. He threw it aside into a ditch with an oath. He slouched his hat over his eyes, thrust one hand into the breast of his coat—(he had a stick cut from some hedgerow in the other)—and walked with a determined though a weary air onward through slush and mire towards the Black Mill, from which already the lighted windows shone through the darkness like so many beacons.
On through slush and mire, with a weary and slouching step. No matter. It is the step for which his mother has waited for seven long years; it is the step whose ghostly echo on the garden-walk has smitten so often on her heart and trodden out the light of hope. But surely the step comes on now—full surely, and for good or ill. Whether for good or ill comes this long-watched-for step, this bad November night, who shall say?
In a quarter of an hour the wanderer stands in the little garden of the Black Mill. He has not courage to knock at the door; it might be opened by a stranger; he might hear something he dare not whisper to his own heart—he might hear something which would strike him down dead upon the threshold.
He sees the light in the drawing-room windows. He approaches, and hears his mother's voice.
It is a long time since he has uttered a prayer: but he falls on his knees by the long French window and breathes a thanksgiving.
That voice is not still!
What shall he do? What can he hope from his mother, so cruelly abandoned?
At this moment Mr. Harding opens the window to look out at the dismal night. As he does so, the young man falls fainting, exhausted, into the room.
Draw a curtain over the agitation and the bewilderment of that scene. The almost broken-hearted mother's joy is too sacred for words. And the passionate tears of the prodigal son—who shall measure the remorseful agony of a man whose life has been one long career of recklessness, and who sees his sin written in his mother's face?
The mother and son sit together, talking gravely, hand in hand, for two long hours. He tells her, not of all his follies, but of all his regrets—his punishment, his anguish, his penitence, and his resolutions for the future.
Surely it is for good, and good alone, that he has come over a long and dreary road, through toil and suffering, to kneel here at his mother's feet and build up fair schemes for the future. The old servant, who has known Richard from a baby, shares in his mother's joy. After the slight supper which the weary wanderer is induced to eat, her brother and her son persuade Mrs. Marwood to retire to rest; and left tête-à-tête, the uncle and nephew sit down to discuss a bottle of old madeira by the sea-coal fire.
"My dear Richard"—the young man's name is Richard—("Daredevil Dick" he has been called by his wild companions)—"My dear Richard," says Mr. Harding very gravely, "I am about to say something to you, which I trust you will take in good part."
"I am not so used to kind words from good men that I am likely to take anything you can say amiss."
"You will not, then, doubt the joy I feel in your return this night, if I ask you what are your plans for the future?"
The young man shook his head. Poor Richard! he had never in his life had any definite plan for the future, or he might not have been what he was that night.
"My poor boy, I believe you have a noble heart, but you have led a wasted life. This must be repaired."
Richard shook his head again. He was very hopeless of himself.
"I am good for nothing," he said; "I am a bad lot. I wonder they don't hang such men as me."
"I wonder they don't hang such men." He uttered this reckless speech in his own reckless way, as if it would be rather a good joke to be hung up out of the way and done for.
"My dear boy, thank Heaven you have returned to us. Now I have a plan to make a man of you yet."
Richard looked up this time with a hopeful light in his dark eyes. He was hopeless at five minutes past ten; he was radiant when the minute hand had moved on to the next figure on the dial. He was one of those men whose bad and good angels have a sharp fight and a constant struggle, but whom we all hope to see saved at last.
"I have a plan which has occurred to me since your unexpected arrival this evening," continued his uncle. "Now, if you stay here, your mother, who has a trick (as all loving mothers have) of fancying you are still a little boy in a pinafore and frock—your mother will be for having you loiter about from morning till night with nothing to do and nothing to care for; you will fall in again with all your old Slopperton companions, and all those companions' bad habits. This isn't the way to make a man of you, Richard."
Richard, very radiant by this time, thinks not.
"My plan is, that you start off to-morrow morning before your mother is up, with a letter of introduction which I will give you to an old friend of mine, a merchant in the town of Gardenford, forty miles from here. At my request, he will give you a berth in his office, and will treat you as if you were his own son. You can come over here to see your mother as often as you like; and if you choose to work hard as a merchant's clerk, so as to make your own fortune, I know an old fellow just returned from the East Indies, with not enough liver to keep him alive many years, who will leave you another fortune to add to it. What do you say, Richard? Is it a bargain?"
"My dear generous uncle!" Richard cries, shaking the old man by the hand.
Was it a bargain? Of course it was. A merchant's office—the very thing for Richard. He would work hard, work night and day to repair the past, and to show the world there was stuff in him to make a man, and a good man yet. Poor Richard, half an hour ago wishing to be hung and put out of the way, now full of radiance and hope, while the good angel has the best of it!
"You must not begin your new life without money, Richard: I shall, therefore, give you all I have in the house. I think I cannot better show my confidence in you, and my certainty that you will not return to your old habits, than by giving you this money." Richard looks—he cannot speak his gratitude. The old man conducts his nephew up stairs to his bedroom, an old-fashioned apartment, in one window of which is a handsome cabinet, half desk, half bureau. He unlocks this, and takes from it a pocket-book containing one hundred and thirty-odd pounds in small notes and gold, and two bills for one hundred pounds each on an Anglo-Indian bank in the city.
"Take this, Richard. Use the broken cash as you require it for present purposes—in purchasing such an outfit as becomes my nephew; and on your arrival in Gardenford, place the bills in the bank for future exigencies. And as I wish your mother to know nothing of our little plan until you are gone, the best thing you can do is to start before any one is up—to-morrow morning."
"I will start at day-break. I can leave a note for my mother."
"No, no," said the uncle, "I will tell her all. You can write directly you reach your destination. Now, you will think it cruel of me to ask you to leave your home on the very night of your return to it; but it is quite as well, my dear boy, to strike while the iron's hot. If you remain here your good resolutions may be vanquished by old influences; for the best resolution, Richard, is but a seed, and if it doesn't bear the fruit of a good action, it is less than worthless, for it is a lie, and promises what it doesn't perform. I've a higher opinion of you than to think that you brought no better fruit of your penitence home to your loving mother than empty resolutions. I believe you have a steady determination to reform."
"You only do me justice in that belief, sir. I ask nothing better than the opportunity of showing that I am in earnest."
Mr. Harding is quite satisfied, and once more suggests that Richard should depart very early the next day.
"I will leave this house at five in the morning," said the nephew; "a train starts for Gardenford about six. I shall creep out quietly, and not disturb any one. I know the way out of the dear old house—I can get out of the drawing-room window, and need not unlock the hall-door; for I know that good stupid old woman Martha sleeps with the key under her pillow."
"Ah, by the bye, where does Martha mean to put you to-night?"
"In the little back parlour, I think she said; the room under this."
The uncle and nephew went down to this little parlour, where they found old Martha making up a bed on the sofa.
"You will sleep very comfortably here for to-night, Master Richard," said the old woman; "but if my mistress doesn't have this ceiling mended before long there'll be an accident some day."
They all looked up at the ceiling. The plaster had fallen in several places, and there were one or two cracks of considerable size.
"If it was daylight," grumbled the old woman, "you could see through into Mister Harding's bedroom, for his worship won't have a carpet."
His worship said he had not been used to carpets in India and liked the sight of Mrs. Martha's snow-white boards.
"And it's hard to keep them white, sir, I can tell you; for when I scour the floor of that room the water runs through and spoils the furniture down here."
But Daredevil Dick didn't seem to care much for the dilapidated ceiling. The madeira, his brightened prospects, and the excitement he had gone through, all combined to make him thoroughly wearied out. He shook his uncle's hand with a brief but energetic expression of gratitude, and then flung himself half dressed upon the bed.
"There is an alarum clock in my room," said the old man, "which I will set for five o'clock. I always sleep with my door open; so you will be sure to hear it go down. It won't disturb your mother, for she sleeps at the other end of the house. And now good night, and God bless you, my boy!"
He is gone, and the returned prodigal is asleep. His handsome face has lost half its look of dissipation and care, in the renewed light of hope; his black hair is tossed off his broad forehead, and it is a fine candid countenance, with a sweet smile playing round the mouth. Oh, there is stuff in him to make a man yet, though he says they should hang such fellows as he!
His uncle has retired to his room, where his half-caste servant assists at his toilette for the night. This servant, who is a Lascar, and cannot speak one word of English (his master converses with him in Hindostanee), and is thought to be as faithful as a dog, sleeps in a little bed in the dressing-room adjoining his master's apartment.
So, on this bad November night, with the wind howling round the walls as if it were an angry unadmitted guest that clamoured to come in; with the rain beating on the roof, as if it had a special purpose and was bent on flooding the old house; there is peace and happiness, and a returned and penitent wanderer at the desolate old Black Mill.
The wind this night seems to howl with a peculiar significance, but nobody has the key to its strange language; and if, in every shrill dissonant shriek, it tries to tell a ghastly secret or to give a timely warning, it tries in vain, for no one heeds or understands.
Chapter III.
The Usher Washes his Hands.
Mr. Jabez North had not his little room quite to himself at Dr. Tappenden's. There are some penalties attendant even on being a good young man, and our friend Jabez sometimes found his very virtues rather inconvenient. It happened that Allecompain Junior was ill of a fever—sometimes delirious; and as the usher was such an excellent young person, beloved by the pupils and trusted implicitly by the master, the sick little boy was put under his especial care, and a bed was made up for him in Jabez' room.
This very November night, when the usher comes up stairs, his great desk under one arm (he is very strong, this usher), and a little feeble tallow candle in his left hand, he finds the boy very ill indeed. He does not know Jabez, for he is talking of a boat-race—a race that took place in the bright summer gone by. He is sitting up on the pillow, waving his little thin hand, and crying out at the top of his feeble voice, "Bravo, red! Red wins! Three cheers for red! Go it—go it, red! Blue's beat—I say blue's beat! George Harris has won the day. I've backed George Harris. I've bet six-pennorth of toffey on George Harris! Go it, red!"
"We're worse to-night, then," said the usher; "so much the better. We're off our head, and we're not likely to take much notice; so much the better;" and this benevolent young man began to undress. To undress, but not to go to bed; for from a small trunk he takes out a dark smock-frock, a pair of leather gaiters, a black scratch wig, and a countryman's slouched hat. He dresses himself in these things, and sits down at a little table with his desk before him.
The boy rambles on. He is out nutting in the woods with his little sister in the glorious autumn months gone by.
"Shake the tree, Harriet, shake the tree; they'll fall if you only shake hard enough. Look at the hazel-nuts! so thick you can't count 'em. Shake away, Harriet; and take care of your head, for they'll come down like a shower of rain!"
The usher takes the coil of rope from his desk, and begins to unwind it; he has another coil in his little trunk, another hidden away under the mattress of his bed. He joins the three to-gether, and they form a rope of considerable length. He looks round the room; holds the light over the boy's face, but sees no consciousness of passing events in those bright feverish eyes.
He opens the window of his room; it is on the second story, and looks out into the playground—a large space shut in from the lane in which the school stands by a wall of considerable height. About half the height of this room are some posts erected for gymnastics; they are about ten feet from the wall of the house, and the usher looks at them dubiously. He lowers the rope out of the window and attaches one end of it to an iron hook in the wall—a very convenient hook, and very secure apparently, for it looks as if it had been only driven in that very day.
He surveys the distance beneath him, takes another dubious look at the posts in the playground, and is about to step out of the window, when a feeble voice from the little bed cries out—not in any delirious ramblings this time—"What are you doing with that rope? Who are you? What are you doing with that rope?"
Jabez looks round, and although so good a young man, mutters something very much resembling an oath.
"Silly boy, don't you know me? I'm Jabez, your old friend"
"Ah, kind old Jabez; you won't send me back in Virgil, because I've been ill; eh, Mr. North?"
"No, no! See, you want to know what I am doing with this rope; why, making a swing, to be sure."
"A swing? Oh, that's capital. Such a jolly thick rope too! When shall I be well enough to swing, I wonder? It's so dull up here. I'll try and go to sleep; but I dream such bad dreams."
"There, there, go to sleep," says the usher, in a soothing voice. This time, before he goes to the window, he puts out his tallow candle; the rushlight on the hearth he extinguishes also; feels for something in his bosom, clutches this something tightly; takes a firm grasp of the rope, and gets out of the window.
A curious way to make a swing! He lets himself down foot by foot, with wonderful caution and wonderful courage. When he gets on a level with the posts of the gymnasium he gives himself a sudden jerk, and swinging over against them, catches hold of the highest post, and his descent is then an easy one for the post is notched for the purpose of climbing, and Jabez, always good at gymnastics, descends it almost as easily as another man would an ordinary staircase. He leaves the rope still hanging from his bedroom window, scales the playground wall, and when the Slopperton clocks strike twelve is out upon the highroad. He skirts the town of Slopperton by a circuitous route, and in another half hour is on the other side of it, bearing towards the Black Mill. A curious manner of making a swing this midnight ramble. Altogether a curious ramble for this good young usher; but even good men have sometimes strange fancies, and this may be one of them.
One o'clock from the Slopperton steeples: two o'clock: three o'clock. The sick little boy does not go to sleep, but wanders, oh, how wearily, through past scenes in his young life. Midsummer rambles, Christmas holidays, and merry games; the pretty speeches of the little sister who died three years ago; unfinished tasks and puzzling exercises, all pass through his wandering mind; and when the clocks chime the quarter after three, he is still talking, still rambling on in feeble accents, still tossing wearily on his pillow.
As the clocks chime the quarter, the rope is at work again, and five minutes afterwards the usher clambers into the room. Not very good to look upon, either in costume or countenance; bad to look upon, with his clothes mud-bespattered and torn; wet to the skin; his hair in matted locks streaming over his forehead; worse to look upon, with his light blue eyes, bright with a dangerous and wicked fire—the eyes of a wild beast baulked of his prey; dreadful to look upon, with his hands clenched in fury, and his tongue busy with half-suppressed but terrible imprecations.
"All for nothing!" he mutters. "All the toil, the scheming, and the danger for nothing—all the work of the brain and the hands wasted—nothing gained, nothing gained!"
He hides away the rope in his trunk, and begins to unbutton his mud-stained gaiters. The little boy cries out in a feeble voice for his medicine.
The usher pours a tablespoonful of the mixture into a wineglass with a steady hand, and carries it to the bedside.
The boy is about to take it from him, when he utters a sudden cry.
"What's the matter?" asks Jabez, angrily.
"Your hand!—your hand! What's that upon your hand?"
A dark stain scarcely dry—a dark stain, at the sight of which the boy trembles from head to foot.
"Nothing, nothing!" answers the tutor. "Take your medicine, and go to sleep."
No, the boy cries hysterically, he won't take his medicine; he will never take anything again from that dreadful hand. "I know what that horrid stain is. What have you been doing? Why did you climb out of the window with a rope? It wasn't to make a swing; it must have been for something dreadful! Why did you stay away three hours in the middle of the night? I counted the hours by the church clocks. Why have you got those strange clothes on? What does it all mean? I'll ask the Doctor to take me out of this room! I'll go to him this moment, for I'm afraid of you."
The boy tries to get out of bed as he speaks; but the usher holds him down with one powerful hand, which he places upon the boy's mouth, at the same time keeping him from stirring and preventing him from crying out.
With his free right hand he searches among the bottles on the table by the bedside.
He throws the medicine out of the glass, and pours from another bottle a few spoonfuls of a dark liquid labelled, "Opium—Poison!"
"Now, sir, take your medicine, or I'll report you to the principal to-morrow morning."
The boy tries to remonstrate, but in vain; the powerful hand throws back his head, and Jabez pours the liquid down his throat.
For a little time the boy, quite delirious now, goes on talking of the summer rambles and the Christmas games, and then falls into a deep slumber.
Then Jabez North sets to work to wash his hands. A curious young man, with curious fashions for doing things—above all, a curious fashion of washing his hands.
He washes them very carefully in a small quantity of water, and when they are quite clean, and the water has become a dark and ghastly colour, he drinks it, and doesn't make even one wry face at the horrible draught.
"Well, well," he mutters, "if nothing is gained by to-night's work, I have at least tried my strength, and I now know what I'm made of."
Very strange stuff he must have been made of—very strange and perhaps not very good stuff, to be able to look at the bed on which the innocent and helpless boy lay in a deep slumber, and say,—
"At any rate, he will tell no tales."
No! he will tell no tales, nor ever talk again of summer rambles, or of Christmas holidays, or of his dead sister's pretty words. Perhaps he will join that wept-for little sister in a better world, where there are no such good young men as Jabez North.
That worthy gentleman goes down aghast, with a white face, next morning, to tell Dr. Tappenden that his poor little charge is dead, and that perhaps he had better break the news to Allecompain Major, who is sick after that supper, which, in his boyish thoughtlessness, and his certainty of his little brother's recovery, he had given last night.
"Do, yes, by all means, break the sad news to the poor boy; for I know, North, you'll do it tenderly."
Chapter IV.
Richard Marwood lights his Pipe.
Daredevil Dick hears the alarum at five o'clock, and leaves his couch very cautiously. He would like, before he leaves the house, to go to his mother's door, if it were only to breathe a prayer upon the threshold. He would like to go to his uncle's bedside, to give one farewell look at the kind face; but he has promised to be very cautious, and to awaken no one; so he steals quietly out through the drawing-room window—the same window by which he entered so strangely the preceding evening—into the chill morning, dark as night yet. He pauses in the little garden-walk for a minute while he lights his pipe, and looks up at the shrouded windows of the familiar house. "God bless her!" he mutters; "and God reward that good old man, for giving a scamp like me the chance of redeeming his honour!"
There is a thick fog, but no rain. Daredevil Dick knows his way so well, that neither fog nor darkness are any hindrance to him, and he trudges on with a cheery step, and his pipe in his mouth, towards the Slopperton railway station. The station is half an hour's walk out of the town, and when he reaches it the clocks are striking six. Learning that the train will not start for half an hour, he walks up and down the platform, looking, with his handsome face and shabby dress, rather conspicuous. Two or three trains for different destinations start while he is waiting on the platform, and several people stare at him, as he strides up and down, his hands in his pockets, and his weather-beaten hat slouched over his eyes—(for he does not want to be known by any Slopperton people yet awhile, till his position is better)—and when one man, with whom he had been intimate before he left the town, seemed to recognize him, and approached as if to speak to him, Richard turned abruptly on his heel and crossed to the other side of the station.
If he had known that such a little incident as that could have a dark and dreadful influence on his life, surely he would have thought himself foredoomed and set apart for a cruel destiny. He strolled into the refreshment-room, took a cup of coffee, changed a sovereign in paying for his ticket, bought a newspaper, seated himself in a second-class carriage, and in a few minutes was out of Slopperton.
There was only one other passenger in the carriage—a commercial traveller; and Richard and he smoked their pipes in defiance of the guards at the stations they passed. When did ever Daredevil Dick quail before any authorities? He had faced all Bow Street, chaffed Marlborough Street out of countenance, and had kept the station-house awake all night singing, "We won't go home till morning."
It is rather a dull journey at the best of times from Slopperton to Gardenford, and on this dark foggy November morning, of course, duller than usual. It was still dark at half-past six. The station was lighted with gas, and there was a little lamp in the railway carriage, but for which the two travellers would not have seen each other's faces. Richard looked out of the window for a few minutes, got up a little conversation with his fellow traveller, which soon flagged (for the young man was rather out of spirits at leaving his mother directly after their reconciliation), and then, being sadly at a loss to amuse himself, took out his uncle's letter to the Gardenford merchant, and looked at the superscription. The letter was not sealed, but he did not take it from the envelope. "If he said any good of me, it's a great deal more than I deserve," said Richard to himself; "but I'm young yet, and there's plenty of time to redeem the past."
Time to redeem the past! O poor Richard!
He twisted the letter about in his hands, lighted another pipe, and smoked till the train arrived at the Gardenford station.
Another foggy November day had set in.
If Richard Marwood had been a close observer of men and manners, he might have been rather puzzled by the conduct of a short, thick-set man, shabbily dressed, who was standing on the platform when he descended from the carriage. The man was evidently waiting for some one to arrive by this train: and as surely that some one had arrived, for the man looked perfectly satisfied when he had scanned, with a glance marvellously rapid, the face of every passenger who alighted. But who this some one was, for whom the man was waiting, it was rather difficult to discover. He did not speak to any one, nor approach any one, nor did he appear to have any particular purpose in being there after that one rapid glance at all the travellers. A very minute observer might certainly have detected in him a slight interest in the movements of Richard Marwood; and when that individual left the station the stranger strolled out after him, and walked a few paces behind him down the back street that led from the station to the town. Presently he came up closer to him, and a few minutes afterwards suddenly and unceremoniously hooked his arm into that of Richard.
"Mr. Richard Marwood, I think," he said.
"I'm not ashamed of my name," replied Daredevil Dick, "and that is my name. Perhaps you'll oblige me with yours, since you're so uncommonly friendly." And the young man tried to withdraw his arm from that of the stranger; but the stranger was of an affectionate turn of mind, and kept his arm tightly hooked in his.
"Oh, never mind my name," he said: "you'll learn my name fast enough, I dare say. But," he continued, as he caught a threatening look in Richard's eye, "if you want to call me anything, why, call me Jinks."
"Very well then, Mr. Jinks, since I didn't come to Gardenford to make your acquaintance, and as now, having made your acquaintance, I can't say I much care about cultivating it further, why I wish you a very good morning!" As he said this, Richard wrenched his arm from that of the stranger, and strode two or three paces forward.
Not more than two or three paces though, for the affectionate Mr. Jinks caught him again by the arm, and a friend of Mr. Jinks, who had also been lurking outside the station when the train arrived, happening to cross over from the other side of the street at this very moment, caught hold of his other arm, and poor Daredevil Dick, firmly pinioned by these two new-found friends, looked with a puzzled expression from one to the other.
"Come, come," said Mr. Jinks, in a soothing tone, "the best thing you can do is to take it quietly, and come along with me."
"Oh, I see," said Richard. "Here's a spoke in the wheel of my reform; it's those cursed Jews, I suppose, have got wind of my coming down here. Show us your writ, Mr. Jinks, and tell us at whose suit it is, and for what amount? I've got a considerable sum about me, and can settle it on the spot."
"Oh, you have, have you?" Mr. Jinks was so surprised by this last speech of Richard's that he was obliged to take off his hat, and rub his hand through his hair before he could recover himself. "Oh!" he continued, staring at Richard, "Oh! you've got a considerable sum of money about you, have you? Well, my friend, you're either very green, or you're very cheeky; and all I can say is, take care how you commit yourself. I'm not a sheriff's officer. If you'd done me the honour to reckon up my nose you might have knowed it" (Mr. Jinks's olfactory organ was a decided snub); "and I ain't going to arrest you for debt."
"Oh, very well then," said Dick; "perhaps you and your affectionate friend, who both seem to be afflicted with rather an over-large allowance of the organ of adhesiveness, will be so very obliging as to let me go. I'll leave you a lock of my hair, as you've taken such a wonderful fancy to me." And with a powerful effort he shook the two strangers off him; but Mr. Jinks caught him again by the arm, and Mr. Jinks's friend, producing a pair of handcuffs, locked them on Richard's wrists with railroad rapidity.
"Now, don't you try it on," said Mr. Jinks. "I didn't want to use these, you know, if you'd have come quietly. I've heard you belong to a respectable family, so I thought I wouldn't ornament you with these here objects of bigotry" (it is to be presumed Mr. Jinks means bijouterie); "but it seems there's no help for it, so come along to the station; we shall catch the eight-thirty train, and be in Slopperton before ten. The inquest won't come on till to-morrow."
Richard looked at his wrists, from his wrists to the faces of the two men, with an utterly hopeless expression of wonder.
"Am I mad," he said, "or drunk, or dreaming? What have you put these cursed things upon me for? Why do you want to take me back to Slopperton? What inquest? Who's dead?"
Mr. Jinks put his head on one side, and contemplated the prisoner with the eye of a connoisseur.
"Don't he come the hinnocent dodge stunnin'?" he said, rather to himself than to his companion, who, by the bye, throughout the affair had never once spoken. "Don't he do it beautiful? Wouldn't he be a first-rate actor up at the Wictoria Theayter in London? Wouldn't he be prime in the 'Suspected One,' or 'Gonsalvo the Guiltless?' Vy," said Mr. Jinks, with intense admiration, "he'd be worth his two-pound-ten a week and a clear half benefit every month to any manager as is."
As Mr. Jinks made these complimentary remarks, he and his friend walked on. Richard, puzzled, bewildered, and unresisting, walked between them towards the railway station; but presently Mr. Jinks condescended to reply to his prisoner's questions, in this wise:—
"You want to know what inquest? Well, a inquest on a gentleman what's been barbarously murdered. You want to know who's dead? Why, your uncle is the gent as has been murdered. You want to know why we are going to take you back to Slopperton? Well, because we've got a warrant to arrest you upon suspicion of having committed the murder."
"My uncle murdered!" cried Richard, with a face that now for the first time since his arrest betrayed anxiety and horror; for throughout his interview with Mr. Jinks he had never once seemed frightened. His manner had expressed only utter bewilderment of mind.
"Yes, murdered; his throat cut from ear to ear."
"It cannot be," said Richard. "There must be some horrid mistake here. My uncle, Montague Harding, murdered! I bade him good-bye at twelve last night in perfect health."
"And this morning he was found murdered in his bed; with the cabinet in his room broken open, and rifled of a pocket-book known to contain upwards of three hundred pounds."
"Why, he gave me that pocket-book last night. He gave it to me. I have it here in my breast-pocket."
"You'd better keep that story for the coroner," said Mr. Jinks. "Perhaps he'll believe it."
"I must be mad, I must be mad," said Richard.
They had by this time reached the station, and Mr. Jinks having glanced into two or three carriages of the train about to start, selected one of the second-class, and ushered Richard into it. He seated himself by the young man's side, while his silent and unobtrusive friend took his place opposite. The guard locked the door, and the train started.
Mr. Jinks's quiet friend was exactly one of those people adapted to pass in a crowd. He might have passed in a hundred crowds, and no one of the hundreds of people in any of those hundred crowds would have glanced aside to look at him.
You could only describe him by negatives. He was neither very tall nor very short, he was neither very stout nor very thin, neither dark nor fair, neither ugly nor handsome; but just such a medium between the two extremities of each as to be utterly commonplace and unnoticeable.
If you looked at his face for three hours together, you would in those three hours find only one thing in that face that was any way out of the common—that one thing was the expression of the mouth.
It was a compressed mouth with thin lips, which tightened and drew themselves rigidly together when the man thought—and the man was almost always thinking: and this was not all, for when he thought most deeply the mouth shifted in a palpable degree to the left side of his face. This was the only thing remarkable about the man, except, indeed, that he was dumb but not deaf, having lost the use of his speech during a terrible illness which he had suffered in his youth.
Throughout Richard's arrest he had watched the proceedings with unswerving intensity, and he now sat opposite the prisoner, thinking deeply, with his compressed lips drawn on one side.
The dumb man was a mere scrub, one of the very lowest of the police-force, a sort of outsider and employé of Mr. Jinks, the Gardenford detective; but he was useful, quiet, and steady, and above all, as his patrons said, he was to be relied on, because he could not talk.
He could talk though, in his own way, and he began to talk presently in his own way to Mr. Jinks; he began to talk with his fingers with a rapidity which seemed marvellous. The fingers were more active than clean, and made rather a dirty alphabet.
"Oh, hang it," said Mr. Jinks, after watching him for a moment, "you must do it a little slower, if you want me to understand. I am not an electric telegraph."
The scrub nodded, and began again with his fingers, very slowly.
This time Richard too watched him; for Richard knew this dumb alphabet. He had talked whole reams of nonsense with it, in days gone by, to a pretty girl at a boarding-school, between whom and himself there had existed a platonic attachment, to say nothing of a high wall and broken glass bottles.
Richard watched the dirty alphabet.
First, two grimy fingers laid flat upon the dirty palm, N. Next, the tip of the grimy forefinger of the right hand upon the tip of the grimy third finger of the left hand, O; the next letter is T, and the man snaps his fingers—the word is finished, Not. Not what? Richard found himself wondering with an intense eagerness, which, even in the bewildered state of his mind, surprised him.
The dumb man began another word—
G—U—I—L—
Mr. Jinks cut him short.
"Not guilty? Not fiddlesticks! What do you know about it, I should like to know? Where did you get your experience? Where did you get your sharp practice? What school have you been formed in, I wonder, that you can come out so positive with your opinion; and what's the value you put your opinion at, I wonder? I should be glad to hear what you'd take for your opinion."
Mr. Jinks uttered the whole of this speech with the most intense sarcasm; for Mr. Jinks was a distinguished detective, and prided himself highly on his acumen; and was therefore very indignant that his sub and scrub should dare to express an opinion.
"My uncle murdered!" said Richard; "my good, kind, generous-hearted uncle! Murdered in cold blood! Oh, it is too horrible!"
The scrub's mouth was very much on one side as Richard muttered this, half to himself.
"And I am suspected of the murder?"
"Well, you see," said Mr. Jinks, "there's two or three things tell pretty strong against you. Why were you in such a hurry this morning to cut and run to Gardenford?"
"My uncle had recommended me to a merchant's office in that town: see, here is the letter of introduction—read it."
"No, it ain't my place," said Mr. Jinks. "The letter's not sealed, I see, but I mustn't read it, or if I do, I stand the chance of gettin' snubbed and lectured for goin' beyond my dooty: howsumdever, you can show it to the coroner. I'm sure I should be very glad to see you clear yourself, for I've heard you belong to one of our good old county families, and it ain't quite the thing to hang such as you."
Poor Richard! His reckless words of the night before came back to him: "I wonder they don't hang such fellows as I am."
"And now," says Jinks, "as I should like to make all things comfortable, if you're willing to come along quietly with me and my friend here, why, I'll move those bracelets, because they are not quite so ornamental as they're sometimes useful; and as I'm going to light my pipe, why, if you like to blow a cloud, too, you can."
With this Mr. Jinks unlocked and removed the handcuffs, and produced his pipe and tobacco. Richard did the same, and took from his pocket a match-box in which there was only one match.
"That's awkward," said Jinks, "for I haven't a light about me."
They filled the two pipes, and lighted the one match.
Now, all this time Richard had held his uncle's letter of introduction in his hand, and when there was some little difficulty in lighting the tobacco from the expiring lucifer, he, without a moment's thought, held the letter over the nickering flame, and from the burning paper lighted his pipe.
In a moment he remembered what he had done.
The letter of introduction! the one piece of evidence in his favour! He threw the blazing paper on the ground and stamped on it, but in vain. In spite of all his efforts a few black ashes alone remained.
"The devil must have possessed me," he exclaimed. "I have burnt my uncle's letter."
"Well," says Mr. Jinks, "I've seen many dodges in my time, and I've seen a many knowing cards; but if that isn't the neatest dodge, and if you ain't the knowingest card I ever did see, blow me."
"I tell you that letter was in my uncle's hand; written to his friend, the merchant at Gardenford; and in it he mentions having given me the very money you say has been stolen from his cabinet."
"Oh, the letter was all that, was it? And you've lighted your pipe with it. You'd better tell that little story before the coroner. It will be so very conwincing to the jury."
The scrub, with his mouth very much to the left, spells out again the two words, "Not guilty!"
"Oh," says Mr. Jinks, "you mean to stick to your opinion, do you, now you've formed it? Upon my word, you're too clever for a country-town practice; I wonder they don't send for you up at Scotland Yard; with your talents, you'd be at the top of the tree in no time, I've no doubt."
During the journey, the thick November fog had been gradually clearing away, and at this very moment the sun broke out with a bright and sudden light that shone full upon the threadbare coat-sleeve of Daredevil Dick.
"Not guilty!" cried Mr. Jinks, with sudden energy. "Not guilty! Why, look here! I'm blest if his coat-sleeve isn't covered with blood!"
Yes, on the shabby worn-out coat the sunlight revealed dark and ghastly stains; and, stamped and branded by those hideous marks as a villain and a murderer, Richard Marwood re-entered his native town.
Chapter V.
The Healing Waters.
The Sloshy is not a beautiful river, unless indeed mud is beautiful, for it is very muddy. The Sloshy is a disagreeable kind of compromise between a river and a canal. It is like a canal which (after the manner of the mythic frog that wanted to be an ox) had seen a river, and swelled itself to bursting in imitation thereof. It has quite a knack of swelling and bursting, this Sloshy; it overflows its banks and swallows up a house or two, or takes an impromptu snack off a few outbuildings, once or twice a year. It is inimical to children, and has been known to suck into its muddy bosom the hopes of divers families; and has afterwards gone down to the distant sea, flaunting on its breast Billy's straw hat or Johnny's pinafore, as a flag of triumph for having done a little amateur business for the gentleman on the pale horse.
It has been a soft pillow of rest, too, this muddy breast of the Sloshy; and weary heads have been known to sleep more soundly in that loathsome, dark, and slimy bed than on couches of down.
Oh, keep us ever from even whispering to our own hearts that our best chance of peaceful slumber might be in such a bed!
An ugly, dark, and dangerous river—a river that is alwaystelling you of trouble, and anguish, and weariness of spirit—a river that to some poor impressionable mortal creatures, who are apt to be saddened by a cloud or brightened by a sunbeam, is not healthy to look upon.
I wonder what that woman thinks of the river? A badly-dressed woman carrying a baby, who walks with a slow and restless step up and down by one of its banks, on the afternoon of the day on which the murder of Mr. Montague Harding took place.
It is a very solitary spot she has chosen, on the furthest outskirts of the town of Slopperton; and the town of Slopperton being at best a very ugly town, is ugliest at the outskirts, which consist of two or three straggling manufactories, a great gaunt gaol—the stoniest of stone jugs—and a straggling fringe of shabby houses, some new and only half-built, others ancient and half fallen to decay, which hang all round Slopperton like the rags that fringe the edges of a dirty garment.
The woman's baby is fretful, and it may be that the damp foggy atmosphere on the banks of the Sloshy is scarcely calculated to engender either high spirits or amiable temper in the bosom of infant or adult. The woman hushes it impatiently to her breast, and looks down at the little puny features with a strange unmotherly glance. Poor wretch! Perhaps she scarcely thinks of that little load as a mother is apt to think of her child. She may remember it only as a shame, a burden, and a grief. She has been pretty; a bright country beauty, perhaps, a year ago; but she is a faded, careworn-looking creature now, with a pale face, and hollow circles round her eyes. She has played the only game a woman has to play, and lost the only stake a woman has to lose.
"I wonder whether he will come, or whether I must wear out my heart through another long long day.—Hush, hush! As if my trouble was not bad enough without your crying."
This is an appeal to the fretful baby; but that young gentleman is engaged at fisticuffs with his cap, and has just destroyed a handful of its tattered border.
There is on this dingy bank of the Sloshy a little dingy public-house, very old-fashioned, though surrounded by newly-begun houses. It is a little, one-sided, pitiful place, ornamented with the cheering announcements of "Our noted Old Tom at 4d. per quartern;" and "This is the only place for the real Mountain Dew." It is a wretched place, which has never seen better days, and never hopes to see better days. The men who frequent it are a few stragglers from a factory near, and the colliers whose barges are moored in the neighbourhood. These shamble in on dark afternoons, and play at all-fours, or cribbage, in a little dingy parlour with dirty dog's-eared cards, scoring their points with beer-marks on the sticky tables. Not a very attractive house of entertainment this; but it has an attraction for the woman with the baby, for she looks at it wistfully, as she paces up and down. Presently she fumbles in her pocket, and produces two or three halfpence—just enough, it seems, for her purpose, for she sneaks in at the half-open door, and in a few minutes emerges in the act of wiping her lips.
As she does so, she almost stumbles against a man wrapped in a great coat, and with the lower part of his face muffled in a thick handkerchief.
"I thought you would not come," she said.
"Did you? Then you see you thought wrong. But you might have been right, for my coming was quite a chance: I can't be at your beck and call night and day."
"I don't expect you to be at my beck and call. I've not been used to get so much attention, or so much regard from you as to expect that, Jabez."
The man started, and looked round as if he expected to find all Slopperton at his shoulder; but there wasn't a creature about.
"You needn't be quite so handy with my name," he said; "there's no knowing who might hear you. Is there any one in there?" he asked, pointing to the public-house.
"No one but the landlord."
"Come in, then; we can talk better there. This fog pierces one to the bones."
He seems never to consider that the woman and the child have been exposed to that piercing fog for an hour and more, as he is above an hour after his appointment.
He leads the way through the bar into the little parlour. There are no colliers playing at all-fours to-day, and the dog's-eared cards lie tumbled in a heap on one of the sticky tables among broken clay-pipes and beer-stains. This table is near the one window which looks out on the river, and by this window the woman sits, Jabez placing himself on the other side of the table.
The fretful baby has fallen asleep, and lies quietly in the woman's lap.
"What will you take?"
"A little gin," she answers, not without a certain shame in her tone.
"So you've found out that comfort, have you?" He says this with a glance of satisfaction he cannot repress.
"What other comfort is there for such as me, Jabez? It seemed at first to make me forget. Nothing can do that now—except———"
She did not finish this sentence, but sat looking with a dull vacant stare at the black waters of the Sloshy, which, as the tide rose, washed with a hollow noise against the brickwork of the pathway close to the window.
"Well, as I suppose you didn't ask me to meet you here for the sole purpose of making miserable speeches, perhaps you'll tell me what you want with me. My time is precious, and if it were not, I can't say I should much care about stopping long in this place; it's such a deliciously lively hole and such a charming neighbourhood."
"I live in this neighbourhood—at least, I starve in this neighbourhood, Jabez."
"Oh, now we're coming to it," said the gentleman, with a very gloomy face, "we're coming to it. You want some money. That's how this sort of thing always ends."
"I hoped a better end than that, Jabez. I hoped long ago, when I thought you loved me"
"Oh, we're going over that ground again, are we?" said he; and with a gesture of weariness, he took up the dog's-eared cards on the sticky table before him, and began to build a house with them, such as children build in their play.
Nothing could express better than this action his thorough determination not to listen to what the woman might have to say; but in spite of this she went on—
"You see I was a foolish country girl, Jabez, or I might have known better. I had been accustomed to take my father and my brother's word of mouth as Bible truth, and had never known that word to be belied. I did not think, when the man I loved with all my heart and soul—to utter forgetfulness of every other living creature on the earth, of every duty that I knew to man and heaven—I did not think when the man I loved so much said this or that, to ask him if he meant it honestly, or if it was not a cruel and a wicked lie. Being so ignorant, I did not think of that, and I thought to be your wife, as you swore I should be, and that this helpless little one lying here might live to look up to you as a father, and be a comfort and an honour to you."
To be a comfort and an honour to you! The fretful baby awoke at the words, and clenched its tiny fists with a spiteful action.
If the river, as a thing eternal in comparison to man—if the river had been a prophet, and had had a voice in its waters wherewith to prophesy, I wonder whether it would have cried—
"A shame and a dishonour, an enemy and an avenger in the days to come!"
Jabez' card-house had risen to three stories; he took the dog's-eared cards one by one in his white hands with a slow deliberate touch that never faltered.
The woman looked at him with a piteous but tearless glance; from him to the river; and back again to him.
"You don't ask to look at the child, Jabez."
"I don't like children," said he. "I get enough of children at the Doctor's. Children and Latin grammar—and the end so far off yet,"—he said the last words to himself, in a gloomy tone.
"But your own child, Jabez—your own."
"As you say," he muttered.
She rose from her chair and looked full at him—a long long gaze which seemed to say, "And this is the man I loved; this is the man for whom I am lost!" If he could have seen her look! But he was stooping to pick up a card from the ground—his house of cards was five stories high by this time. "Come," he said, in a hard resolute tone, "you've written to me to beg me to meet you here, for you were dying of a broken heart; that's to say you have taken to drinking gin (I dare say it's an excellent thing to nurse a child upon), and you want to be bought off. How much do you expect? I thought to have a sum of money at my command to-day. Never you mind how; it's no business of yours." He said this savagely, as if in answer to a look of inquiry from her; but she was standing with her back turned to him, looking steadily out of the window.
"I thought to have been richer to-day," he continued, "but I've had a disappointment. However, I've brought as much as I could afford; so the best thing you can do is to take it, and get out of Slopperton as soon as you can, so that I may never see your wretched white face again."
He counted out four sovereigns on the sticky table, and then, adding the sixth story to his card-house, looked at the frail erection with a glance of triumph.
"And so will I build my fortune in days to come," he muttered.
A man who had entered the dark little parlour very softly passed behind him and brushed against his shoulder at this moment; the house of cards shivered, and fell in a heap on the table.
Jabez turned round with an angry look.
"What the devil did you do that for?" he asked.
The man gave an apologetic shrug, pointed with his fingers to his lips, and shook his head.
"Oh," said Jabez, "deaf and dumb! So much the better."
The strange man seated himself at another table, on which the landlord placed a pint of beer; took up a newspaper, and seemed absorbed in it; but from behind the cover of this newspaper he watched Jabez with a furtive glance, and his mouth, which was very much on one side, twitched now and then with a nervous action.
All this time the woman had never touched the money—never indeed turned from the window by which she stood; but she now came up to the table, and took the sovereigns up one by one.
"After what you have said to me this day, I would see this child starve, hour by hour, and die a slow death before my eyes, before I would touch one morsel of bread bought with your money. I have heard that the waters of that river are foul and poisonous, and death to those who live on its bank; but I know the thoughts of your wicked heart to be so much more foul and so much bitterer a poison, that I would go to that black river for pity and help rather than to you." As she said this, she threw the sovereigns into his face with such a strong and violent hand, that one of them, striking him above the eyebrow, cut his forehead to the bone, and brought the blood gushing over his eyes.
The woman took no notice of his pain, but turning once more to the window, threw herself into a chair and sat moodily staring out at the river, as if indeed she looked to that for pity.
The dumb man helped the landlord to dress the cut on Jabez' forehead. It was a deep cut, and likely to leave a scar for years to come.
Mr. North didn't look much the better, either in appearance or temper, for this blow. He did not utter a word to the woman, but began, in a hang-dog manner, to search for the money, which had rolled away into the corners of the room. He could only find three sovereigns; and though the landlord brought a light, and the three men searched the room in every direction, the fourth could not be found; so, abandoning the search, Jabez paid his score and strode out of the place without once looking at the woman.
"I've got off cheap from that tiger-cat," he said to himself; "but it has been a bad afternoon's work. What can I say about my cut face to the governor?" He looked at his watch, a homely silver one attached to a black ribbon. "Five o'clock; I shall be at the Doctor's by tea-time. I can get into the gymnasium the back way, take a few minutes' turn with the poles and ropes, and say the accident happened in climbing. They always believe what I say, poor dolts."
His figure was soon lost in the darkness and the fog—so dense a fog that very few people saw the woman with the fretful baby when she emerged from the public-house, and walked along the river-bank, leaving even the outskirts of Slopperton behind, and wandered on and on till she came to a dreary spot, where dismal pollard willows stretched their dark and ugly shadows, like the bare arms of withered hags, over the dismal waters of the lonely Sloshy.
O river, sometimes so pitiless when thou devourest youth, beauty, and happiness, wilt thou be pitiful and tender to-night, and take a poor wretch, who has no hope of mortal pity, to peace and quiet on thy breast?
O merciless river, so often bitter foe to careless happiness, wilt thou to-night be friend to reckless misery and hopeless pain?
God made thee, dark river, and God made the wretch who stands shivering on thy bank: and may be, in His boundless love and compassion for the creatures of His hand, He may have pity even for those so lost as to seek forbidden comfort in thy healing waters.
Chapter VI.
Two Coroner's Inquests.
There had not been since the last general election, when George Augustus Slashington, the Liberal member, had been returned against strong Conservative opposition, in a blaze of triumph and a shower of rotten eggs and cabbage-stumps—there had not been since that great day such excitement in Slopperton as there was on the discovery of the murder of Mr. Montague Harding.
A murder was always a great thing for Slopperton. When John Boggins, weaver, beat out the brains of Sarah his wife, first with the heel of his clog and ultimately with a poker, Slopperton had a great deal to say about it—though, of course, the slaughter of one "hand" by another was no great thing out of the factories. But this murder at the Black Mill was something out of the common. Uncommonly cruel, cowardly, and unmanly, and moreover occurring in a respectable rank of life.
Round that lonely house on the Slopperton road there was a crowd and a bustle throughout that short foggy day on which Richard Marwood was arrested.
Gentlemen of the Press were there, sniffing out, with miraculous acumen, particulars of the murder, which as yet were known to none but the heads of the Slopperton police force.
How many lines at three-halfpence per line these gentlemenwrote concerning the dreadful occurrence, without knowing anything whatever about it, no one unacquainted with the mysteries of their art would dare to say.
The two papers which appeared on Friday had accounts varying in every item, and the one paper which appeared on Saturday had a happy amalgamation of the two conflicting accounts—demonstrating thereby the triumph of paste and scissors over penny-a-liners' copy.
The head officials of the Slopperton police, attired in plain clothes, went in and out of the Black Mill from an early hour on that dark November day. Every time they came out, though none of them ever spoke, by some strange magic a fresh report got current among the crowd. I think the magical process was this: Some one man, auguring from such and such a significance in their manner, whispered to his nearest neighbour his suggestion of what might have been revealed to them within; and this whispered suggestion was repeated from one to another till it grew into a fact, and was still repeated through the crowd, while with every speaker it gathered interest until it grew into a series of imaginary facts.
Of one thing the crowd was fully convinced—that was, that those grave men in plain clothes, the Slopperton detectives, knew all, and could tell all, if they only chose to speak. And yet I doubt if there was beneath the stars more than one person who really knew the secret of the dreadful deed.
The following day the coroner's inquisition was held at a respectable hostelry near the Black Mill, whither the jury went, accompanied by the medical witness, to contemplate the body of the victim. With solemn faces they hovered round the bed of the murdered man: they took depositions, talked to each other in low hushed tones; and exchanged a few remarks, in a low voice, with the doctor who had probed the deep gashes in that cold breast.
All the evidence that transpired at the inquest only amounted to this—
The servant Martha, rising at six o'clock on the previous morning, went, as she was in the habit of doing, to the door of the old East Indian to call him—he being always an early riser, and getting up even in winter to study by lamplight.
Receiving, after repeated knocking at the door, no answer the old woman had gone into the room, and there had beheld, by the flint light of her candle, the awful spectacle of the Anglo-Indian lying on the floor by the bed-side, his throat cut, cruel stabs upon his breast, and a pool of blood surrounding him; the cabinet in the room broken open and ransacked, and the pocket-book and money which it was known to contain missing. The papers of the murdered gentleman were thrown into confusion and lay in a heap near the cabinet; and as there was no blood upon them, the detectives concluded that the cabinet had been rifled prior to the commission of the murder.
The Lascar had been found lying insensible on his bed in the little dressing-room, his head cruelly beaten; and beyond this there was nothing to be discovered. The Lascar had been taken to the hospital, where little hope was given by the doctors of his recovery from the injuries he had received.
In the first horror and anguish of that dreadful morning Mrs. Marwood had naturally inquired for her son; had expressed her surprise at his disappearance; and when questioned had revealed the history of his unexpected return the night before. Suspicion fell at once upon the missing man. His reappearance after so many years on the return of his rich uncle; his secret departure from the house before any one had risen—everything told against him. Inquiries were immediately set on foot at the turnpike gates on the several roads out of Slopperton; and at the railway station from which he had started for Gardenford by the first train.
In an hour it was discovered that a man answering to Richard's description had been seen at the station; half an hour afterwards a man appeared, who deposed to having seen and recognized him on the platform—and deposed, too, to Richard's evident avoidance of him. The railway clerks remembered giving a ticket to a handsome young man with a dark moustache, in a shabby suit, having a pipe in his mouth. Poor Richard! the dark moustache and pipe tracked him at every stage. "Dark moustache—pipe—shabby dress—tall—handsome face." The clerk who played upon the electric-telegraph wires, as other people play upon the piano, sent these words shivering down the line to the Gardenford station; from the Gardenford station to the Gardenford police-office the words were carried in less than five minutes; in five minutes more Mr. Jinks the detective was on the platform, and his dumb assistant, Joe Peters, was ready outside the station; and they both were ready to recognize Richard the moment they saw him.
O wonders of civilized life! cruel wonders, when you help to track an innocent man to a dreadful doom.
Richard's story of the letter only damaged his case with the jury. The fact of his having burned a document of such importance seemed too incredible to make any impression in his favour.
Throughout the proceedings there stood in the background a shabbily-dressed man, with watchful observant eyes, and a mouth very much on one side.
This man was Joseph Peters, the scrub of the detective force of Gardenford. He rarely took his eyes from Richard, who, with pale bewildered face, dishevelled hair, and slovenly costume, looked perhaps as much like guilt as innocence.
The verdict of the coroner's jury was, as every one expected it would be, to the effect that the deceased had been wilfully murdered by Richard Marwood his nephew; and poor Dick was removed immediately to the county gaol on the outskirts of Slopperton, there to lie till the assizes.
The excitement in Slopperton, as before observed, was immense. Slopperton had but one voice—a voice loud in execration of the innocent prisoner, horror of the treachery and cruelty of the dreadful deed, and pity for the wretched mother of this wicked son, whose anguish had thrown her on a sick bed—but who, despite of every proof repeated every hour, expressed her assurance of her unfortunate son's innocence.
The coroner had plenty of work on that dismal November day: for from the inquest on the unfortunate Mr. Harding he had to hurry down to a little dingy public-house on the river's bank, there to inquire into the cause of the untimely death of a wretched outcast found by some bargemen in the Sloshy.
This sort of death was so common an event in the large and thickly-populated town of Slopperton, that the coroner and the jury (lighted by two guttering tallow candles with long wicks, at four o'clock on that dull afternoon) had very little to say about it.
One glance at that heap of wet, torn, and shabby garments—one half-shuddering, half-pitying look at the white face, blue lips, and damp loose auburn hair, and a merciful verdict—"Found drowned."
One juryman, a butcher—(we sometimes think them hard-hearted, these butchers)—lays a gentle hand upon the auburn hair, and brushes a lock of it away from the pale forehead.
Perhaps so tender a touch had not been laid upon that head for two long years. Perhaps not since the day when the dead woman left her native village, and a fond and happy mother for the last time smoothed the golden braids beneath her daughter's Sunday bonnet.
In half an hour the butcher is home by his cheerful fireside; and I think he has a more loving and protecting glance than usual for the fair-haired daughter who pours out his tea.
No one recognizes the dead woman. No one knows her story; they guess at it as a very common history, and bury her in a parish burying-ground—a damp and dreary spot not far from the river's brink, in which many such as she are laid.
Our friend Jabez North, borrowing the Saturday's paper of his principal in the evening after school-hours, is very much interested in the accounts of these two coroner's inquests.
Chapter VII.
The Dumb Detective a Philanthropist.
The dreary winter months pass by. Time, slow of foot to some, and fast of wing to others, is a very chameleon, such different accounts do different people give of him.
He is very rapid in his flight, no doubt, for the young gentlemen from Dr. Tappenden's home for the Christmas holidays: rapid enough perhaps for the young gentlemen's papas, who have to send their sons back to the academy armed with Dr. Tappenden's little account—which is not such a very little account either, when you reckon up all the extras, such as dancing, French, gymnastics, drill-serjeant, hair-cutting, stationery, servants, and pew at church.
Fast enough, perhaps, is the flight of Time for Allecompain Major, who goes home in a new suit of mourning, and who makes it sticky about the cuffs and white about the elbows before the holidays are out. I don't suppose he forgets his little dead brother; and I dare say, by the blazing hearth, where the firelight falls dullest upon his mother's black dress, be sometimes thinks very sadly of the little grave out in the bleak winter night, on which the snow falls so purely white. But "cakes and ale" are eternal institutions; and if you or I, reader, died to-morrow, the baker would still bake, and Messrs. Barclay and Perkins would continue to brew the ale and stout for which they are so famous, and the friends who were sorriest for us would eat, drink, ay and be merry too, before long.
Who shall say how slow of foot is Time to the miserable young man awaiting his trial in the dreary gaol of Slopperton?
Who shall say how slow to the mother awaiting in agony the result of that trial?
The assizes take place late in February. So, through the fog and damp of gloomy November; through long, dark, and dreary December nights; through January frost and snow—(of whose outward presence he has no better token than the piercing cold within)—Richard paces up and down his narrow cell, and broods upon the murder of his uncle, and of his trial which is to come.
Ministers of religion come to convert him, as they say. He tells them that he hopes and believes all they can teach him, for that it was taught him in years gone by at his mother's knee.
"The best proof of my faith," he says, "is that I am not mad. Do you think, if I did not believe in an All-seeing Providence, I should not go stark staring mad, when, night after night, through hours which are as years in duration, I think, and think, of the situation in which I am placed, till my brain grows wild and my senses reel? I have no hope in the result of my trial, for I feel how every circumstance tells against me: but I have hope that Heaven, with a mighty hand, and an instrument of its own choosing, may yet work out the saving of an innocent man from an ignominious death."
The dumb detective Peters had begged to be transferred from Gardenford to Slopperton, and was now in the employ of the police force of that town. Of very little account this scrub among the officials. His infirmity, they say, makes him scarcely worth his salt, though they admit that his industry is unfailing.
So the scrub awaits the trial of Richard Marwood, in whose fortunes he takes an interest which is in no way abated since he spelt out the words "Not guilty" in the railway carriage.
He had taken up his Slopperton abode in a lodging in a small street of six-roomed houses yclept Little Gulliver Street. At No. 5, Little Gulliver Street, Mr. Peters' attention had been attracted by the announcement of the readiness and willingness of the occupier of the house to take in and do for a single gentleman. Mr. Peters was a single gentleman, and he accordingly presented himself at No. 5, expressing the amiable desire of being forthwith taken in and done for.
The back bedroom of that establishment, he was assured by its proprietress, was an indoor garden-of-Eden for a single man; and certainly, looked at by the light of such advantages as a rent of four-and-sixpence a week, a sofa-bedstead—(that deliciously innocent white lie in the way of furniture which never yet deceived anybody); a Dutch oven, an apparatus for cooking anything, from a pheasant to a red herring; and a little high-art in the way of a young gentleman in red-and-yellow making honourable proposals to a young lady in yellow-and-red, in picture number one; and the same lady and gentleman perpetuating themselves in picture number two, by means of a red baby in a yellow cradle;—taking into consideration such advantages as these, the one-pair back was a paradise calculated to charm a virtuously-minded single man. Mr. Peters therefore took immediate possession by planting his honest gingham in a corner of the room, and by placing two-and-sixpence in the hands of the proprietress by way of deposit. His luggage was more convenient than extensive—consisting of a parcel in the crown of his hat, containing the lighter elegancies of his costume; a small bundle in a red cotton pocket handkerchief, which held the heavier articles of his wardrobe; and a comb, which he carried in his pocket-book.
The proprietress of the indoor Eden was a maiden lady of mature age, with a sharp red nose and metallic pattens. It was with some difficulty that Mr. Peters made her understand, by the aid of pantomimic gestures and violent shakings of the head, that he was dumb, but not deaf; that she need be under no necessity of doing violence to the muscles of her throat, as he could hear her with perfect ease in her natural key. He then—still by the aid of pantomime—made known a desire for pencil and paper, and on being supplied with these articles wrote the one word "baby," and handed that specimen of caligraphy to the proprietress.
That sharp-nosed damsel's maidenly indignation sent new roses to join the permanent blossoms at the end of her olfactory organ, and she remarked, in a voice of vinegar, that she let her lodgings to single men, and that single men as were single men, and not impostors, had no business with babies.
Mr. Peters again had recourse to the pencil, "Not mine—fondling; to be brought up by hand; would pay for food and nursing."
The maiden proprietress had no objection to a fondling, if paid for its requirements; liked children in their places; would call Kuppins; and did call Kuppins.
A voice at the bottom of the stairs responded to the call of Kuppins; a boy's voice most decidedly; a boy's step upon the stairs announced the approach of Kuppins; and Kuppins entered the room with a boy's stride and a boy's slouch; but for all this, Kuppins was a girl.
Not very much like a girl about the head, with that shock of dark rough short hair; not much like a girl about the feet, in high-lows, with hob-nailed soles; but a girl for all that, as testified by short petticoats and a long blue pinafore, ornamented profusely with every variety of decoration in the way of three-cornered slits and grease-spots.
Kuppins was informed by her mistress that the gent had come to lodge; and moreover that the gent was dumb. It is impossible to describe Kuppins' delight at the idea of a dumb lodger.
Kuppins had knowed a dumb boy as lived three doors from mother's (Kuppins' mother understood); this 'ere dumb boy was wicious, and when he was gone agin, 'owled 'orrid.
Was told that the gent wasn't vicious and never howled, and seemed, if anything, disappointed. Understood the dumb alphabet, and had conversed in it for hours with the aforesaid dumb boy. The author, as omniscient, may state that Kuppins and the vicious boy had had some love-passages in days gone by. Mr. Peters was delighted to find a kindred spirit capable of understanding his dirty alphabet, and explained his wish that a baby, "a fondling" he intended to bring up, might be taken in and done for as well as himself.
Kuppins doated on babies; had nursed nine brothers and sisters, and had nursed outside the family circle, at the rate of fifteen-pence a week, for some years. Kuppins had been out in the world from the age of twelve, and was used up as to Slopperton at sixteen.
Mr. Peters stated by means of the dirty alphabet—(more than usually dirty to-day, after his journey from Gardenford, whence he had transplanted his household gods, namely, the gingham umbrella, the bundle, parcel, pocket-book, and comb)—that he would go and fetch the baby. Kuppins immediately proved herself an adept in the art of construing this manual language, and nodded triumphantly a great many times in token that she understood the detective's meaning.
The baby was apparently not far off, for Mr. Peters returned in five minutes with a limp bundle smothered in an old pea-jacket, which on close inspection turned out to be the "fondling."
Mr. Peters had lately purchased the pea-jacket second-hand, and believed it to be an appropriate outer garment for a baby in long-clothes.
The fondling soon evinced signs of a strongly-marked character, not to say a vindictive disposition, and fought manfully with Kuppins, smiting that young lady in the face, and abstracting handfuls of her hair with an address beyond his years.
"Ain't he playful?" asked that young person, who was evidently experienced in fretful babies, and indifferent to the loss of a stray tress or so from her luxuriant locks. "Ain't he playful, pretty hinnercent! Lor! he'll make the place quite cheerful!"
In corroboration of which prediction the "fondling" set up a dismal wail, varied with occasional chokes and screams.
Surely there never could have been, since the foundation-stones of the hospitals for abandoned children in Paris and London were laid, such a "fondling" to choke as this fondling. The manner in which his complexion would turn—from its original sickly sallow to a vivid crimson, from crimson to dark blue, and from blue to black—was something miraculous; and Kuppins was promised much employment in the way of shakings and pattings on the back, to keep the "fondling " from an early and unpleasant death. But Kuppins, as we have remarked, liked a baby—and, indeed, would have given the preference to a cross baby—a cross baby being, as it were, a battle to fight, and a victory to achieve.
In half an hour she had conquered the fondling in a manner wonderful to behold. She laid him across her knee while she lighted a fire in the smoky little grate; for the in-door Eden offered a Hobson's choice to its inhabitants, of smoke or damp; and Mr. Peters preferred smoke. She carried the infant on her left arm, while she fetched a red herring, an ounce of tea, and other comestibles from the chandler's at the corner; put him under her arm while she cooked the herring and made the tea, and waited on Mr. Peters at his modest repast with the fondling choking on her shoulder.
Mr. Peters, having discussed his meal, conversed with Kuppins as she removed the tea-things. The alphabet by this time had acquired a piscatorial flavour, from his having made use of the five vowels to remove the bones of his herring.
"That baby's a rare fretful one," says Mr. Peters with rapid fingers.
Kuppins had nursed a many fretful babies. "Orphants was generally fretful; supposed the 'fondling' was a orphant."
"Poor little chap!—yes," said Peters. "He's had his trials, though he is a young 'un. I'm afeard he'll never grow up a teetotaller. He's had a little too much of the water already."
Has had too much of the water? Kuppins would very much like to know the meaning of this observation. But Mr. Peters relapses into profound thought, and looks at the "fondling" (still choking) with the eye of a philanthropist and almost the tenderness of a father.
He who provides for the young ravens had, perhaps, in the marvellous fitness of all things of His creation, given to this helpless little one a better protector in the dumb scrub of the police force than he might have had in the father who had cast him off, whoever that father might be.
Mr. Peters presently remarks to the interested Kuppins, that he shall "ederkate,"—he is some time deciding on the conflicting merits of a c or a k for this word—he shall "ederkate the fondling, and bring him up to his own business."
"What is his business?" asks Kuppins naturally.
"Detecktive," Mr. Peters spells, embellishing the word with en extraneous k.
"Oh, perlice," said Kuppins. "Criky, how jolly! Shouldn't I like to be a perliceman, and find out all about this 'ere orrid murder!"
Mr. Peters brightens at the word "murder," and he regards Kuppins with a friendly glance.
"So you takes a hinterest in this 'ere murder, do yer?" he spells out.
"Oh, don't I? I bought a Sunday paper. Shouldn't I like to see that there young man as killed his uncle scragged—that's all!"
Mr. Peters shook his head doubtfully, with a less friendly glance at Kuppins. But there were secrets and mysteries of his art he did not trust at all times to the dirty alphabet; and perhaps his opinion on the subject of the murder of Mr. Montague Harding was one of them.
Kuppins presently fetched him a pipe; and as he sat by the smoky fire, he watched alternately the blue cloud that issued from his lips and the clumsy figure of the damsel pacing up and down with the "fondling" (asleep after the exhaustion attendant on a desperate choke) upon her arms.
"If," mused Mr. Peters, with his mouth very much to the left of his nose—"if that there baby was grow'd up, he might help me to find out the rights and wrongs of this 'ere murder."
Who so fit? or who so unfit? Which shall we say? If in the wonderful course of events, this little child shall ever have a part in dragging a murderer to a murderer's doom, shall it be called a monstrous and a terrible outrage of nature, or a just and a fitting retribution?
Chapter VIII.
Seven Letters on the Dirty Alphabet.
The 17th of February shone out bright and clear, and a frosty sunlight illumined the windows of the court where Richard Marwood stood to be tried for his life.
Never, perhaps, had that court been so crowded; never, perhaps, had there been so much anxiety felt in Slopperton for the result of any trial as was felt that day for the issue of the trial of Richard Marwood.
The cold bright sunlight streaming in at the windows seemed to fall brightest and coldest on the wan white face of the prisoner at the bar.
Three months of mental torture had done their work, and had written their progress in such characters upon that young and once radiant countenance, as Time, in his smooth and peaceful course, would have taken years to trace. But Richard Marwood was calm to-day, with the awful calmness of that despair which is past all hope. Suspense had exhausted him. But he had done with suspense, and felt that his fate was sealed; unless, indeed, Heaven—infinite both in mercy and in power—raised up as by a miracle some earthly instrument to save him.
The court was one vast sea of eager faces; for, to the spectators, this trial was as a great game of chance, which the counsel for the prosecution, the judge, and the jury, played against the prisoner and his advocate, and at which the prisoner staked his life.
There was but one opinion in that vast assemblage; and that was, that the accused would lose in this dreadful game, and that he well deserved to lose.
There had been betting in Slopperton on the result of this awful hazard. For the theory of chances is to certain minds so delightful, that the range of subjects for a wager may ascend from a maggot-race to a trial for murder. Some adventurous spirits had taken desperate odds against the outsider "Acquittal;" and many enterprising gentlemen had made what they considered "good books," by putting heavy sums on the decided favourite, "Found Guilty." As, however, there might be a commutation of the sentence of death to transportation for life, some speculators had bet upon the chance of the prisoner being found guilty, but not executed; or, as it had been forcibly expressed, had backed "Penal Servitude" against "Gallows."
So there were private interests, as well as a public interest, among that swelling ocean of men and women; and Richard had but very few backers in the great and terrible game that was being played.
In a corner of the gallery of the court, high up over the heads of the multitude, there was a little spot railed off from the public, and accessible only to the officials, or persons introduced by them. Here, among two or three policemen, stood our friend Mr. Joseph Peters, with his mouth very much on one side, and his eyes fixed intently upon the prisoner at the bar. The gallery in which he stood faced the dock, though at a great distance from it.
If there was one man in that vast assembly who, next to the prisoner, was most wretched, that man was the prisoner's counsel. He was young, and this was only his third or fourth brief; and this was, moreover, the first occasion upon which he had ever been intrusted with an important case. He was an intensely nervous and excitable man, and failure would be to him worse than death; and he felt failure inevitable. He had not one inch of ground for the defence; and, in spite of the prisoner's repeated protestations of his innocence, he believed that prisoner to be guilty. He was an earnest man; and this belief damped his earnestness. He was a conscientious man; and he felt that to defend Richard Marwood was something like a dishonest action.
The prisoner pleaded "Not guilty" in a firm voice. We read of this whenever we read of the trial of a great criminal; we read of the firm voice, the calm demeanour, the composed face, and the dignified bearing; and we wonder. "Would it not be more wonderful were it otherwise? If we consider the pitch to which that man's feelings have been wrought; the tension of every nerve; the exertion of every force, mental and physical, to meet those five or six desperate hours, we wonder no longer. The man's life has become a terrible drama, and he is playing his great act. That mass of pale and watchful faces carries him through the long agony. Or perhaps it is less an agony than an excitement. It may be that his mind is mercifully darkened, and that he cannot see beyond the awful present into the more awful future. He is not busy with the vision of a ghastly structure of wood and iron; a dangling rope swinging loose in the chill morning air, till it is tightened and strained by a quivering and palpitating figure, which so soon grows rigid. He does not, it is to be hoped, see this. Life for him to-day stands still, and there is not room in his breast—absorbed with the one anxious desire to preserve a proud and steady outward seeming—for a thought of that dreadful future which may be so close at hand.
So, Richard Marwood, in an unfaltering voice, pleaded "Not guilty."
There was among that vast crowd but one person who believed him.
Ay, Richard Marwood, thou mightest reverence those dirty hands, for they have spelt out the only language, except that of thy wretched mother, that ever spoke conviction of thy innocence.
Now the prisoner, though firm and collected in his manner spoke in so low and subdued a voice as to be only clearly audible to those near him. It happened that the judge, one of the celebrities of the bench, was afflicted with a trifling infirmity, which he would never condescend to acknowledge. That infirmity was partial deafness. He was what is called hard of hearing on one side, and his—to use a common expression—game ear happened to be nearest Richard.
"Guilty," said the judge. "So, so—Guilty. Very good."
"Pardon me, my lord," said the counsel for the defence, "the prisoner pleaded not guilty."
"Nonsense, sir. Do you suppose me deaf?" asked his lordship; at which there was a slight titter among the habitués of the court.
The barrister gave his head a deprecatory shake. Of course, a gentleman in his lordship's position could not be deaf.
"Very well, then," said the judge, "unless I am deaf, the prisoner pleaded guilty. I heard him, sir, with my own ears—my own ears."
The barrister thought his lordship should have said "my own ear," as the game organ ought not to count.
"Perhaps," said the judge, "perhaps the prisoner will be good enough to repeat his plea; and this time he will be good enough to speak out."
"Not guilty," said Richard again, in a firm but not a loud voice—his long imprisonment, with days, weeks, and months of slow agony, had so exhausted his physical powers, that to speak at all, under such circumstances, was an effort.
"Not guilty?" said the judge. "Why, the man doesn't know his own mind. The man must be a born idiot—he can't be right in his intellect."
Scarcely had the words passed his lordship's lips, when a long low whistle resounded through the court.
Everybody looked up towards a corner of the gallery from which the sound came, and the officials cried "Order!"
Among the rest the prisoner raised his eyes, and looking to the spot from which this unexampled and daring interruption proceeded, recognized the face of the man who had spelt out the words "Not guilty" in the railway carriage. Their eyes met: and the man signalled to Richard to watch his hands, whilst with his fingers he spelt out several words slowly and deliberately.
This occurred during the pause caused by the endeavours of the officials to discover what contumacious person had dared to whistle at the close of his lordship's remark.
The counsel for the prosecution stated the case—a very clear case it seemed too—against Richard Marwood.
"Here," said the barrister, "is the case of a young man, who, after squandering a fortune, and getting deeply in debt in his native town, leaves that town, as it is thought by all, never to return. For seven years he does not return. His widowed and lonely mother awaits in anguish for any tidings of this heartless reprobate; but, for seven long years, by not so much as one line or one word, sent through any channel whatever, does he attempt to relieve her anxiety. His townsmen believe him to be dead; his mother believes him to be dead; and it is to be presumed from his conduct that he wishes to be lost sight of by all to whom he once was dear. But at the end of this seven years, his uncle, his mother's only brother, a man of large fortune, returns from India and takes up his temporary abode at the Black Mill. Of course all Slopperton knows of the arrival of this gentleman, and knows also the extent of his wealth. We are always interested in rich people, gentlemen of the jury. Now, it is not very difficult to imagine, that through some channel or other the prisoner at the bar was made aware of his uncle's return, and his residence at the Black Mill. The fact was mentioned in every one of the five enterprising journals which are the pride of Slopperton. The prisoner may have seen one of these journals; he may have had some former boon companion resident in Slopperton, with whom he may have been in correspondence. Be that as it may, gentlemen, on the eighth night after Mr. Montague Harding's arrival, the prisoner at the bar appears, after seven years' absence, with a long face and a penitent story, to beg his mother's forgiveness. Gentlemen, we know the boundless power of maternal love; the inexhaustible depth of affection in a mother's breast. His mother forgave him. The fatted calf was killed; the returned wanderer was welcomed to the home he had rendered desolate; the past was wiped out; and seven long years of neglect and desertion were forgotten. The family retired to rest. That night, gentlemen, a murder was committed of a deeper and darker dye than guilt ordinarily wears: a murder which in centuries hence will stand amongst the blackest chapters in the gloomy annals of crime. Under the roof whose shelter he had sought for the repose of his old age, Montague Harding was cruelly and brutally murdered.
"Now, gentlemen, who committed this outrage? Who was the monster in human form that perpetrated this villanous, cowardly, and bloodthirsty deed? Suspicion, gentlemen of the jury, only points to one man; and to that man suspicion points with so unerring a finger, that the criminal stands revealed in the broad glare of detected guilt. That man is the prisoner at the bar. On the discovery of the murder, the returned wanderer, the penitent and dutiful son, was of course sought for. But was he to be found? No, gentlemen. The bird had flown. The affectionate son, who, after seven years' desertion, had returned to his mother's feet—as it was of course presumed never again to leave her—had departed, secretly, in the dead of the night; choosing to sneak out of a window like a burglar, rather than to leave by the door, as the legitimate master of the house. Suspicion at once points to him; he is sought and found—where, gentlemen? Forty miles from the scene of the murder, with the money rifled from the cabinet of the murdered man in his possession, and with his coat-sleeve stained by the blood of his victim. These, gentlemen, are, in brief, the circumstances of this harrowing case; and I think you will agree with me that never did circumstantial evidence so dearly point out the true criminal. I stall now proceed to call the witnesses for the crown."
There was a pause and a little bustle in the court, the waves of the human sea were agitated for a moment. The backers of the favourites, "Guilty" and "Gallows," felt they had made safe books. During this pause, a man pushed his way through the crowd, up to the spot where the prisoner's counsel was seated, and put a little dirty slip of paper into his hand. There was written on it only one word, a word of three letters. The counsel read it, and then tore the slip of paper into the smallest atoms it was possible to reduce it to, and threw the fragments on the floor at his feet; but a warm flush mounted to his face, hitherto so pale, and he prepared himself to watch the evidence.
Richard Marwood, who knew the strength of the evidence against him, and knew his powerlessness to controvert it, had listened to its recapitulation with the preoccupied air of a man whom the proceedings of the day in no way concerned. His abstracted manner had been noticed by the spectators, and much commented upon.
It was singular, but at this most important crisis it appeared as if his chief attention was attracted by Joseph Peters, for he kept his eyes intently fixed upon the corner where that individual stood. The eyes of the people, following the direction of Richard's eyes, saw nothing but a little group of officials leaning over a corner of the gallery.
The crowd did not see what Richard saw, namely, the fingers of Mr. Peters slowly shaping seven letters—two words—four letters in the first word, and three letters in the second. There lay before the prisoner a few sprigs of rue; he took them up one by one, and gathering them together info a little bouquet, placed them in his button-hole—the eyes of the multitude staring at him all the time.
Strange to say, this trifling action appeared to be so pleasing to Mr. Joseph Peters, that he danced, as involuntarily, the first steps of an extempore hornpipe, and being sharply called to order by the officials, relapsed into insignificance for the remainder of the trial.
Chapter IX.
"Mad, Gentlemen of the Jury."
The first witness called was Richard's mother. From one to another amidst the immense number of persons in that well-packed court-room there ran a murmur of compassion for that helpless woman with the white, anguish-worn face, and the quivering lip which tried so vainly to be still. All in Slopperton who knew anything of Mrs. Marwood, knew her to be a proud woman; they knew how silently she had borne the wild conduct of her son; how deeply she had loved that son; and they could guess now the depth of the bitterness of her soul when called upon to utter words which must help to condemn him.
After the witness had been duly sworn, the counsel for the prosecution addressed her thus:
"We have every wish, madam, to spare your feelings; I know there is not one individual present who does not sympathize with you in the position in which you now stand. But the course of Justice is as inevitable as it is sometimes painful, and we must all of us yield to its stern necessities. You will be pleased to state how long it is since your son left his home?"
"Seven years—seven years last August."
"Can you also state his reasons for leaving his home?"
"He had embarrassments in Slopperton—debts, which I have since his departure liquidated."
"Can you tell me what species of debts?"
"They were—" she hesitated a little, "chiefly debts of honour."
"Then am I to understand your son was a gambler?"
"He was unfortunately much addicted to cards."
"To any other description of gambling?"
"Yes, to betting on the events of the turf."
"He had fallen, I imagine, into bad companionship?"
She bowed her head, and in a faltering voice replied, "He had."
"And he had acquired in Slopperton the reputation of being a scamp—a ne'er-do-well?"
"I am afraid he had."
"We will not press you further on this very painful subject; we will proceed to his departure from home. Your son gave you no intimation of his intention of leaving Slopperton?"
"None whatever. The last words he said to me were, that he was sorry for the past, but that he had started on a bad road, and must go on to the end."
In this manner the examination proceeded, the account of the discovery of the murder being elicited from the witness, whose horror at having to give the details was exceedingly painful to behold.
The prisoner's counsel rose and addressed Mrs. Marwood.
"In examining you, madam, my learned friend has not asked you whether you had looked upon your son, the prisoner at the bar, as a good or a bad son. Will you be kind enough to state your impression on this subject?"
"Apart from his wild conduct, he was a good son. He was kind and affectionate, and I believe it was his regret for the grief his dissipation had caused me that drove him away from his home."
"He was kind and affectionate. I am to understand, then, that his disposition was naturally good?"
"Naturally he had a most excellent disposition. He was universally beloved as a boy; the servants were excessively attached to him; he had a great love of animals—dogs followed him instinctively, as I believe they always do follow people who like them."
"A very interesting trait, no doubt, in the prisoner's disposition; but if we are to have so much charmingly minute description, I'm afraid we shall never conclude this trial," said the opposite counsel. And a juryman, who had a ticket for a public dinner at four o'clock in his pocket, forgot himself so far that he applauded with the heels of his boots.
The prisoner's counsel, regardless of the observation of his "learned friend," proceeded.
"Madam," he said, "had your son, before his departure from home, any serious illness?"
"The question is irrelevant," said the judge.
"Pardon me, my lord. I shall not detain you long. I believe the question to be of importance. Permit me to proceed."
Mrs. Marwood looked surprised by the question, but it came from her son's advocate, and she did her best to answer it.
"My son had, shortly before his leaving home, a violent attack of brain-fever."
"During which he was delirious?"
"Everybody is delirious in brain-fever," said the judge. "This is trifling with the court, sir."
The judge was rather inclined to snub the prisoner's counsel; first, because he was a young and struggling man, and therefore ought to be snubbed; and secondly, because he had in a manner inferred that his lordship was deaf.
"Pardon me, my lord; you will see the drift of my question by-and-by."
"I hope so, sir," said his lordship, very testily.
"Was your son, madam, delirious during this fever?"
"Throughout it, sir."
"And you attributed the fever"
"To his bad conduct having preyed upon his mind."
"Were you alarmed for his life during his illness?"
"Much alarmed. But our greatest fear was for his reason."
"Did the faculty apprehend the loss of his reason?"
"They did."
"The doctors who attended him were resident in Slopperton?"
"They were, and are so still. He was attended by Dr. Morton and Mr. Lamb."
The prisoner's counsel here beckoned to some officials near him—whispered some directions to them, and they immediately left the court.
Resuming the examination of this witness, the counsel said:
"You repeated just now the words your son made use of on the night of his departure from home. They were rather singular words—'he had started on a dark road, and he must go on to the end of it.'"
"Those were his exact words, sir."
"Was there any wildness in his manner in saying these words?" he asked.
"His manner was always wild at this time—perhaps wilder that night than usual."
"His manner, you say, was always wild. He had acquired a reputation for a wild recklessness of disposition from an early age, had he not?"
"He had, unfortunately—from the time of his going to school."
"And his companions, I believe, had given him some name expressive of this?"
"They had."
"And that name was"
"Daredevil Dick."
Martha, the old servant, was next sworn. She described the finding of the body of Mr. Harding.
The examination by the prisoner's counsel of this witness elicited nothing but that—
Master Dick had always been a wild boy, but a good boy at heart; that he had been never known to hurt so much as a worm; and that she, Martha, was sure he'd never done the murder. When asked if she had any suspicion as to who had done the deed, she became nebulous in her manner, and made some allusions to "the French"—having lived in the days of Waterloo, and being inclined to ascribe any deed of darkness, from the stealing of a leg of mutton to the exploding of an infernal machine, to the emissaries of Napoleon.
Mr. Jinks, who was then examined, gave a minute and rather discursive account of the arrest of Richard, paying several artful compliments to his own dexterity as a detective officer.
The man who met Richard on the platform at the railway station deposed to the prisoner's evident wish to avoid a recognition; to his even crossing the line for that purpose.
"There is one witness," said the counsel for the crown, "I am sorry to say I shall be unable to produce. That witness is the half-caste servant of the murdered gentleman, who still lies in a precarious state at the county hospital, and whose recovery from the injuries inflicted on him by the murderer of his master is pronounced next to an impossibility."
The case for the prosecution closed; still a very clear case against Richard Marwood, and still the backers of the "Gallows" thought they had made a very good book.
The deposition of the Lascar, the servant of the murdered man, had been taken through an interpreter, at the hospital. It threw little light on the case. The man said, that on the night of the murder he had been awoke by a sound in Mr. Harding's room, and had spoken in Hindostanee, asking if his master required his assistance, when he received in the darkness a blow on the head, which immediately deprived him of his senses. He could tell nothing of the person who struck the blow, except that at the moment of striking it a hand passed across his face—a hand which was peculiarly soft and delicate, and the fingers of which were long and slender.
As this passage in the deposition was read, every eye in court was turned to the prisoner, who at that moment happened to be leaning forward with his elbow on the ledge of the dock before him, and his hand shading his forehead—a very white hand, with long slender fingers. Poor Richard! In the good days gone by he had been rather proud of his delicate and somewhat feminine hand.
The prisoner's counsel rose and delivered his speech for the defence. A very elaborate defence. A defence which went to prove that the prisoner at the bar, though positively guilty, was not morally guilty, or legally guilty—"because, gentlemen of the jury, he is, and for some time has been, insane. Yes, mad, gentlemen of the jury. What has been every action of his life but the action of a madman? His wild boyhood; his reckless extravagant youth; his dissipated and wasted manhood, spent among drunken and dangerous companions. What was his return? Premeditated during the sufferings of delirium tremens, and premeditated long before the arrival of his rich uncle at Slopperton, as I shall presently prove to you. What was this, but the sudden repentance of a madman? Scarcely recovered from this frightful disease—a disease during which men have been known frequently to injure themselves, and those very dear to them, in the most terrible manner—scarcely recovered from this disease, he starts on foot, penniless, for a journey of upwards of two hundred miles. He accomplishes that journey—how, gentlemen, in that dreary November weather, I tremble even to think—he accomplishes that long and painful journey; and on the evening of the eighth day from that on which he left London he falls fainting at his mother's feet. I shall prove to you, gentlemen, that the prisoner left London on the very day on which his uncle arrived in Slopperton; it is therefore impossible he could have had any knowledge of that arrival when he started. Well, gentlemen, the prisoner, after the fatigue, the extreme privation, he has suffered, has yet another trial to undergo—the terrible agitation caused by a reconciliation with his beloved mother. He has eaten scarcely anything for two days, and is injudiciously allowed to drink nearly a bottle of old madeira. That night, gentlemen of the jury, a cruel murder is perpetrated; a murder as certain of immediate discovery, as clumsy in execution, as it is frightful in detail. Can there be any doubt that if it was committed by my unhappy client, the prisoner at the bar, it was perpetrated by him while labouring under an access of delirium, or insanity—temporary, if you will, but unmitigated insanity—aggravated by excessive fatigue, unprecedented mental excitement, and the bad effects of the wine he had been drinking? It has been proved that the cabinet was rifled, and that the pocket-book stolen therefrom was found in the prisoner's possession. This may have been one of those strange flashes of method which are the distinguishing features of madness. In his horror at the crime he had in his delirium committed, the prisoner's endeavour was to escape. For this escape he required money—hence the plunder of the cabinet. The manner of his attempting to escape again proclaims the madman. Instead of flying to Liverpool, which is only thirty miles from this town—whence he could have sailed for any part of the globe, and thus defied pursuit—he starts without any attempt at disguise for a small inland town, whence escape is next to an impossibility, and is captured a few hours after the crime has been committed, with the blood of his unhappy victim upon the sleeve of his coat. Would a man in his senses, gentlemen, not have removed, at any rate, this fatal evidence of his guilt? Would a man in his senses not have endeavoured to disguise himself, and to conceal the money he had stolen? Gentlemen of the jury, I have perfect confidence in your coming to a just decision respecting this most unhappy affair. Weighing well the antecedents of the prisoner, and the circumstances of the crime, I can have not one shadow of a doubt that your verdict will be to the effect that the wretched man before you is, alas! too certainly his uncle's murderer, but that he is as certainly irresponsible for a deed committed during an aberration of intellect."
Strange to say, the counsel did not once draw attention to the singular conduct of the prisoner while in court; but this conduct had not been the less remarked by the jury, and did not the less weigh with them.
The witnesses for the defence were few in number. The first who mounted the witness-box was rather peculiar in his appearance. If you include amongst his personal attractions a red nose (which shone like the danger-signal on a railway through the dusky air of the court); a black eye—not that admired darkness of the organ itself which is the handiwork of liberal nature, but that peculiarly mottled purple-and-green appearance about the region which bears witness to the fist of an acquaintance; a bushy moustache of a fine blue-black dye; a head of thick black hair, not too intimately acquainted with that modern innovation on manly habits, the comb—you may perhaps have some notion of his physical qualifications. But nothing could ever give a full or just idea of the recklessness, the effrontery of his manner, the twinkle in his eye, the expression in every pimple of that radiant nose, or the depth of meaning he could convey by one twitch of his moustache, of one shake of his forest of black ringlets.
His costume inclined towards the fast and furious, consisting of a pair of loose Scotch plaid unmentionables, a bright blue greatcoat, no under-coat or waistcoat, a great deal of shirt ornamented with death's-heads and pink ballet-dancers—to say nothing of coffee and tobacco stains, and enough sham gold chain meandering over his burly breast to make up for every deficiency. While he was being duly sworn, the eyes of the witness wandered with a friendly and pitying glance towards the wretched prisoner at the bar.
"You are a member of the medical profession?"
"I am."
"You were, I believe, in the company of the prisoner the night of his departure from London for this town?"
"I was."
"What was the conduct of the prisoner on that night?"
"Rum."
On being further interrogated, the witness stated that he had known Mr. Richard Marwood for many years, being himself originally a Slopperton man.
"Can you tell what led the prisoner to determine on returning to his mother's house in the month of November last?"
"Blue devils," replied the witness, with determined conciseness.
"Blue devils?"
"Yes, he'd been in a low way for three months, or more; he'd had a sharp attack of delirium tremens, and a touch of his old complaint"
"His old complaint?"
"Yes, brain-fever. During the fever he talked a great deal of his mother; said he had killed her by his bad conduct, but that he'd beg her forgiveness if he walked to Slopperton on his bare feet."
"Can you tell me at what date he first expressed this desire to come to Slopperton?"
"Some time during the month of September."
"Did you during this period consider him to be in a sound mind?"
"Well, several of my friends at Guy's used to think rather the reverse. It was customary amongst us to say he had a loose slate somewhere."
The counsel for the prosecution taking exception to this phrase "loose slate," the witness went on to state that he thought the prisoner very often off his nut; had hidden his razors during his illness, and piled up a barricade of furniture before the window. The prisoner was remarkable for reckless generosity, good temper, a truthful disposition, and a talent for doing everything, and always doing it better than anybody else. This, and a great deal more, was elicited from him by the advocate for the defence.
He was cross-examined by the counsel for the prosecution.
"I think you told my learned friend that you were a member of the medical profession?"
"I did."
Was first apprenticed to a chemist and druggist at Slopperton, and was now walking one of the hospitals in London with a view to attaining a position in the profession; had not yet attained eminence, but hoped to do so; had operated with some success in a desperate case of whitlow on the finger of a servant-girl, and should have effected a surprising cure, if the girl had not grown impatient and allowed her finger to be amputated by a rival practitioner before the curative process had time to develop itself; had always entertained a sincere regard for the prisoner; had at divers times borrowed money of him; couldn't say he remembered ever returning any; perhaps he never had returned any, and that might account for his not remembering the circumstance; had been present at the election of, and instrumental in electing the prisoner a member of a convivial club called the "Cheerful Cherokees." No "Cheerful Cherokee" had ever been known to commit a murder, and the club was convinced of the prisoner's innocence.
"You told the court and jury a short time ago, that the prisoner's state on the last night you saw him in London was 'rum,'" said the learned gentleman conducting the prosecution; "will you be good enough to favour us with the meaning of that adjective—you intend it for an adjective, I presume?"
"Certainly," replied the witness. "Rum, an adjective when applied to a gentleman's conduct; a substantive when used to denominate his tipple."
The counsel for the prosecution doesn't clearly understand the meaning of the word "tipple."
The witness thinks the learned gentleman had better buy a dictionary before he again assists in a criminal prosecution.
"Come, come, sir," said the judge; "you are extremely impertinent. We don't want to be kept here all night. Let us have your evidence in a straightforward manner."
The witness squared his elbows, and turned that luminary, his nose, full on his lordship, as if it had been a bull's-eye lantern.
"You used another strange expression," said the counsel, "in answer to my friend. Will you have the kindness to explain what you mean by the prisoner having 'a loose slate'?"
"A tile off. Something wrong about the roof—the garret—the upper story—the nut."
The counsel for the prosecution confessed himself to be still in the dark.
The witness declared himself sorry to hear it—he could undertake to give his evidence; but he could not undertake to provide the gentleman with understanding.
"I will trouble you to be respectful in your replies to the counsel for the crown," said the judge.
The medical student's variegated eye looked defiantly at his lordship; the counsel for the crown had done with him, and he retired from the witness-box, after bowing to the judge and jury with studious politeness.
The next witnesses were two medical gentlemen of a different stamp to the "Cheerful Cherokee," who had now taken his place amongst the spectators.
These gentlemen gave evidence of having attended the prisoner some years before, during brain-fever, and having very much feared the fever would have resulted in the loss of the patient's reason.
The trial had by this time lasted so long, that the juryman who had a ticket for the public dinner began to feel that his card of admission to the festive board was so much waste pasteboard, and that the green fat of the turtle and the prime cut from the haunch of venison were not for him.
The counsel for the prosecution delivered himself of his second address to the jury, in which he endeavoured to demolish the superstructure which his "learned friend" had so ingeniously raised for the defence. Why should the legal defender of a man whose life is in the hands of the jury not be privileged to address that jury in favour of his client as often, at least, as the legal representative of the prosecutor?
the judge delivered his charge to the jury.
The jury retired, and in an hour and fifteen minutes returned.
They found that the prisoner, Richard Marwood, had murdered his uncle, Montague Harding, and had further beaten and injured a half-caste servant in the employ of his uncle, while suffering from aberration of intellect—or, in simple phraseology, they found the prisoner "Not Guilty, on the ground of insanity."
The prisoner seemed little affected by the verdict. He looked with a vacant stare round the court, removed the bouquet of rue from his button-hole and placed it in his bosom; and then said, with a clear distinct enunciation—
"Gentlemen of the jury, I am extremely obliged to you for the politeness with which you have treated me. Thanks to your powerful sense of justice, I have won the battle of Arcola, and I think I have secured the key of Italy."
It is common for lunatics to fancy themselves some great and distinguished person. This unhappy young man believed himself to be Napoleon the First.
Book the Second.
A Clearance of All Scores.
Chapter I.
Blind Peter.
The favourite, "Gallows," having lost in the race with Richard Marwood, there was very little more interest felt in Slopperton about poor Daredevil Dick's fate. It was known that he was in the county lunatic asylum, a prisoner for life, or, as it is expressed by persons learned in legal matters, during the pleasure of the sovereign. It was known that his poor mother had taken up her abode near the asylum, and that at intervals she was allowed the melancholy pleasure of seeing the wreck of her once light-hearted boy. Mrs. Marwood was now a very rich woman, inheritress of the whole of her poor murdered brother's wealth—for Mr. Montague Harding's will had been found to bequeath the whole of his immense fortune to his only sister. She spent little, however, and what she did expend was chiefly devoted to works of charity; but even her benevolence was limited, and she did little more for the poor than she had done before from her own small income. The wealth of the East Indian remained accumulating in the hands of her bankers. Mrs. Marwood was, therefore, very rich, and Slopperton accordingly set her down as a miser.
So the nine-days' wonder died out, and the murder of Mr. Harding was forgotten. The sunshine on the factory chimneys of Slopperton grew warmer every day. Every day the "hands" appertaining to the factories felt more and more the necessity of frequent application to the public-house, as the weather grew brighter and brighter—till the hot June sun blazed down upon the pavement of every street in Slopperton, baking and grilling the stones; till the sight of a puddle or an overflowing gutter would have been welcome as pools of water in the great desert of Sahara; till the people who lived on the sunny side of the way felt spitefully disposed towards the inhabitants of the shady side; till the chandler at the corner, who came out with a watering-pot and sprinkled the pavement before his door every evening, was thought a public benefactor; till the baker, who added his private stock of caloric to the great firm of Sunshine and Co., and baked the pavement above his oven on his own account, was thought a public nuisance, and hot bread an abomination; till the butter Slopperton had for tea was no longer butter, but oil, and eluded the pursuit of the knife, or hid itself in a cowardly manner in the holes of the quartern loaf when the housewife attempted to spread it thereon; till cattle standing in pools of water were looked upon with envy and hatred; and till—wonder of wonders!—Slopperton paid up the water-rate sharp, in fear and anguish at the thought of the possible cutting-off of that refreshing fluid.
The 17th of June ushered in the midsummer holidays at Dr. Tappenden's establishment, and on the evening of that day Dr. Tappenden broke up. Of course, this phrase, breaking up, is only a schoolboy's slang. I do not mean that the worthy Doctor (how did he ever come to be a doctor, I wonder? or where did he get his degree?) experienced any physical change when he broke up; or that he underwent the moral change of going into the Gazette and coming out thereof better off than when he went in—which is, I believe, the custom in most cases of bankruptcy; I merely mean to say, that on the evening of the 17th of June Dr. Tappenden gave a species of ball, at which Mr. Pranskey, the dancing-master, assisted with his pumps and his violin; and at which the young gentlemen appeared also in pumps, a great deal of wrist-band and shirt-collar, and shining faces—in a state of painfully high polish, from the effect of the yellow soap that had been lavished upon them by the respectable young person who looked to the wardrobe department, and mended the linen of the young gentlemen.
By the evening of the 18th, Dr. Tappenden's young gentlemen, with the exception of two little fellows with dark complexions and frizzy hair, whose nearest connections were at Trinidad, all departed to their respective family circles; and Mr. Jabez North had the schoolroom to himself for the whole of the holidays—for, of course, the little West Indians, playing at a sea-voyage on one of the forms, with a cricket-bat for a mast, or reading Sinbad the Sailor in a corner, were no hindrance to that gentleman's proceedings.
Our friend Jabez is as calm-looking as ever. The fair pale complexion may be, perhaps, a shade paler, and the arched mouth a trifle more compressed—(that absurd professor of phrenology had declared that both the head and face of Jabez bespoke a marvellous power of secretiveness)—but our friend is as placid as ever. The pale face, delicate aquiline nose, the fair hair and rather slender figure, give a tone of aristocracy to his appearance which even his shabby black suit cannot conceal. But Jabez is not too well pleased with his lot. He paces up and down the schoolroom in the twilight of the June evening, quite alone, for the little West Indians have retired to the long dormitory which they now inhabit in solitary grandeur. Dr. Tappenden has gone to the sea-side with his slim only daughter, familiarly known amongst the scholars, who have no eyes for ethereal beauty, as "Skinny Jane." Dr. Tappenden has gone to enjoy himself; for Dr. Tappenden is a rich man. He is said to have some twenty thousand pounds in a London bank. He doesn't bank his money in Slopperton. And of "Skinny Jane," it may be observed, that there are young men in the town who would give something for a glance from her insipid grey eyes, and who think her ethereal figure the very incarnation of the poet's ideal, when they add to that slender form the bulky figures that form the sum-total of her father's banking account.
Jabez paces up and down the long schoolroom with a step so light that it scarcely wakes an echo (those crotchety physiologists call this light step another indication of a secretive disposition)—up and down, in the darkening summer evening.
"Another six months' Latin grammar," he mutters, "another half-year's rudiments of Greek, and all the tiresome old fables of Paris and Helen, and Hector and Achilles, for entertainment! A nice life for a man with my head—for those fools who preached about my deficient moral region were right perhaps when they told me my intellect might carry me anywhere. What has it done for me yet? Well, at the worst, it has taken me out of loathsome parish rags; it has given me independence. And it shall give me fortune. But how? What is to be the next trial? This time it must be no failure. This time my premises must be sure. If I could only hit upon some scheme! There is a way by which I could obtain a large sum of money; but then, the fear of detection! Detection, which if eluded to-day might come to-morrow! And it is not a year or two's riot and dissipation that I want to purchase; but a long life of wealth and luxury, with proud men's necks to trample on, and my old patrons to lick the dust off my shoes. This is what I must fight for, and this is what I must attain—but how? How?"
He takes his hat up, and goes out of the house. He is quite his own master during these holidays. He comes in and goes out as he likes, provided he is always at home by ten o'clock, when the house is shut up for the night.
He strolls with a purposeless step through the streets of Slopperton. It is half-past eight o'clock, and the factory hands fill the streets, enjoying the coolness of the evening, but quiet and subdued in their manner, being exhausted by the heat of the long June day. Jabez does not much affect these crowded streets, and turns out of one of the most busy quarters of the town into a little lane of old houses, which leads to a great old-fashioned square, in which stand two ancient churches with very high steeples, an antique-looking town-hall (once a prison), a few quaint houses with peaked roofs and projecting upper stories, and a gaunt gump. Jabez soon leaves this square behind him, and strolls through two or three dingy, narrow, old-fashioned streets, till he comes to a labyrinth of tumble-down houses, pig-styes, and dog-kennels, known as Blind Peter's Alley. Who Blind Peter was, or how he ever came to have this alley—or whether, as a place possessing no thoroughfare and admitting very little light, it had not originally been called Peter's Blind Alley—nobody living knew. But if Blind Peter was a myth, the alley was a reality, and a dirty loathsome fetid reality, with regard to which the Board of Health seemed as if smitten with the aforesaid Peter's own infirmity, ignoring the horror of the place with fatal blindness. So Blind Peter was the Alsatia of Slopperton, a refuge for crime and destitution—since destitution cannot pick its company, but must be content often, for the sake of shelter, to jog cheek by jowl with crime. And thus no doubt it is on the strength of that golden adage about birds of a feather that destitution and crime are thought by numerous wise and benevolent persons to mean one and the same thing. Blind Peter had risen to popularity once or twice—on the occasion of a girl poisoning her father in the crust of a beef-steak pudding, and a boy of fourteen committing suicide by hanging himself behind a door. Blind Peter, on the first of these occasions, had even had his portrait taken for a Sunday paper; and very nice indeed he had looked in a woodcut—so nice, that he had found some difficulty in recognizing himself; which perhaps was scarcely wonderful, when it is taken into consideration that the artist, who lived in the neighbourhood of Holborn, had sketched Blind Peter from a mountain gorge in the Tyrol, broken up with three or four houses out of Chancery Lane.
Certainly Blind Peter had a peculiar wildness in his aspect, being built on the side of a steep hill, and looked very much like a London alley which had been removed from its site and pitched haphazard on to a Slopperton mountain.
It is not to be supposed for a moment that so highly respectable an individual as Mr. Jabez North had any intention of plunging into the dirty obscurity of Blind Peter. He had come thus far only on his way to the outskirts of the town, where there was a little brick-bestrewn, pseudo country, very much more liberally ornamented by oyster-shells, broken crockery, and scaffolding, than by trees or wild flowers—which natural objects were wondrous rarities in this part of the Sloppertonian outskirts.
So Jabez pursued his way past the mouth of Blind Peter— which was adorned by two or three broken-down and rusty iron railings that looked like jagged teeth—when he was suddenly arrested by a hideous-looking woman, who threw her arms about him, and addressed him in a shrill voice thus—
"What, he's come back to his best friends, has he? He's come back to his old granny, after frightening her out of her poor old wits by staying away four days and four nights. Where have you been, Jim, my deary? And where did you get your fine toggery?"
"Where did I get my fine toggery? What do you mean, you old hag? I don't know you, and you don't know me. Let me pass, will you? or I'll knock you down!"
"No, no," she screamed; "he wouldn't knock down his old granny; he wouldn't knock down his precious granny that nursed him, and brought him up like a gentleman, and will tell him a secret one of these days worth a mint of money, if he treats her well."
Jabez pricked up his ears at the words "mint of money," and said in rather a milder tone—
"I tell you, my good woman, you mistake me for somebody else. I never saw you before."
"What! you're not my Jim?"
"No. My name is Jabez North. If you're not satisfied, here's my card," and he took out his card-case.
The old woman stuck her arms a kimbo, and stared at him with a gaze of admiration.
"Lor'," she cried, "don't he do it nat'ral? Ain't he a born genius? He's been a-doing the respectable reduced tradesman, or the young man brought up to the church, what waits upon the gentry with a long letter, and has a wife and two innocent children staying in another town, and only wants the railway fare to go to 'em. Eh, Jim, that's what you've been a-doing, ain't it now? And you've brought home the swag like a good lad to your grandmother, haven't you now?" she said in a wheedling tone.
"I tell you, you confounded old fool, I'm not the man you take me for."
"What, not my Jim! And you can look at me with his eyes and tell me so with his voice. Then, if you're not him, he's dead, and you're his ghost."
Jabez thought the old woman was mad; but he was no coward, and the adventure began to interest him. Who was this man who was so like him, and who was to learn a secret some day worth a mint of money?
"Will you come with me, then," said the old woman, "and let me get a light, and see whether you are my Jim or not?"
"Where's the house?" asked Jabez.
"Why, in Blind Peter, to be sure. Where should it be?"
"How should I know?" said Jabez, following her. He thought himself safe even in Blind Peter, having nothing of value about him, and having considerable faith in the protecting power of his strong right arm.
The old woman led the way into the little mountain gorge, choked up with rickety hovels lately erected, or crazy old houses which had once been goodly residences, in the days when the site of Blind Peter had been a pleasant country lane. The house she entered was of this latter class; and she led the way into a stone-paved room, which had once been a tolerably spacious entrance-hall.
It was lighted by one feeble little candle with a long drooping wick, stuck in an old ginger-beer bottle; and by this dim light Jabez saw, seated on heap of rubbish by the desolate hearth, his own reflection—a man dressed, unlike him, in the rough garments of a labourer, but whose face gave back as faithfully as ever glass had done the shadow of his own.
Chapter II.
Like and Unlike.
The old woman stared aghast, first at one of the young men, then at the other.
"Why, then, he isn't Jim!" she exclaimed.
"Who isn't Jim, grandmother? What do you mean? Here I am, back again; a bundle of aching bones, old rags, and empty pockets. I've done no good where I've been; so you needn't ask me for any money, for I haven't earned a farthing either by fair means or foul."
"But the other," she said,—"this young gentleman. Look at him, Jim."
The man took up the candle, snuffed it with his fingers, and walked straight to Jabez. He held the light before the face of the usher, and surveyed him with a leisurely stare. That individual's blue eyes winked and blinked at the flame like an owl's in the sunshine, and looked every way except straight into the eyes looking into his.
"Why, curse his impudence!" said the man, with a faint sickly laugh; "I'm blest if he hasn't been and boned my mug. I hope it'll do him more good than it's done me," he added, bitterly.
"I can't make out the meaning of this," mumbled the old woman. "It's all dark to me. I saw where the other one was put myself. I saw it done, and safely done too. Oh, yes, of course"
"What do you mean by 'the other one'?" asked the man, while Jabez listened intently for the answer.
"Why, my deary, that's a part of the secret you're to know some of these days. Such a secret. Gold, gold, gold, as long as it's kept; and gold when it's told, if it's told at the right time, deary."
"If it's to be told at the right time to do me any good, it had better be told soon, then," said Jim, with a dreary shiver. "My bones ache, and my head's on fire, and my feet are like lumps of ice. I've walked twenty miles to-day, and I haven't had bite nor sup since last night. Where's Sillikens?"
"At the factory, Jim deary. Somebody's given her a piece of work—one of the regular hands; and she's to bring home some money to-night. Poor girl, she's been a fretting and a crying her eyes out since you've been gone, Jim."
"Poor lass. I thought I might do some good for her and me both by going away where I did; but I haven't; and so I've come back to eat her starvation wages, poor lass. It's a cowardly thing to do, and if I'd had strength I should have gone on further, but I couldn't."
As he was saying these words a girl came in at the half-open door, and running up to him, threw her arms round his neck.
"Jim, you've come back! I said you would; I knew you'd never stop away; I knew you couldn't be so cruel."
"It's crueller to come back, lass," he said; "it's bad to be a burden on a girl like you."
"A burden, Jim!" she said, in a low reproachful voice, and then dropped quietly down amongst the dust and rubbish at his feet, and laid her head caressingly against his knee. She was not what is generally called a pretty girl. Hers had not been the delicate nurture which nourishes so frail an exotic as beauty. She had a pale sickly face; but it was lighted up by large dark eyes, and framed by a heavy mass of dark hair.
She took the man's rough hand in hers, and kissed it tenderly. It is not likely that a duchess would have done such a thing; but if she had, she could scarcely have done it with better grace.
"A burden, Jim!" she said,—"a burden! Do you think if I worked for you day and night, and never rested, that I should be weary? Do you think, if I worked my fingers to the bone for you, that I should ever feel the pain? Do you think, if my death could make you a happy man, I should not be glad to die? Oh, you don't know, you don't know!"
She said this half-despairingly, as if she knew there was no power in his soul to fathom the depth of love in hers.
"Poor lass, poor lass," he said, as he laid the other rough hand gently on her black hair. "If it's as bad as this. I'm sorry for it—more than ever sorry to-night."
"Why, Jim?" She looked up at him with a sudden glance of alarm. "Why, Jim? Is anything the matter?"
"Not much, lass; but I don't think I'm quite the thing to-night." His head drooped as he spoke. The girl put it on her shoulder, and it lay there as if he had scarcely power to lift it up again.
"Grandmother, he's ill—he's ill! why didn't you tell me this before? Is that gentleman the doctor?" she asked, looking at Jabez, who still stood in the shadow of the doorway, watching the scene within.
"No; but I'll fetch the doctor, if you like," said that benevolent personage, who appeared to take a wonderful interest in this family group.
"Do, sir, if you will be so good," said the girl imploringly; "he's very ill, I'm sure. Jim, look up, and tell us what's the matter?"
The man lifted his heavy eyelids with an effort, and looked up with bloodshot eyes into her face. No, no! Never could he fathom the depth of this love which looks down at him now with more than a mother's tenderness, with more than a sister's devotion, with more than a wife's self-abnegation. This love, which knows no change, which would shelter him in those entwining arms a thief or a murderer, and which could hold him no dearer were he a king upon a throne.
Jabez North goes for a doctor, and returns presently with a gentleman, who, on seeing Jim the labourer, pronounces that he had better go to bed at once; "for," as he whispers to the old woman, "he's got rheumatic fever, and got it pretty sharp, too."
The girl they call Sillikens bursts out crying on hearing this announcement, but soon chokes down her tears—(as tears are wont to be choked down in Blind Peter, whose inhabitants have little time for weeping)—and sets to work to get ready a poor apology for a bed—a worn-out mattress and a thin patch-work counterpane; and on this they lay the bundle of aching bones known to Blind Peter as Jim Lomax.
The girl receives the doctor's directions, promises to fetch some medicine from his surgery in a few minutes, and then kneels down by the sick man.
"O Jim, dear Jim," she says, "keep a good heart, for the sake of those who love you."
She might have said for the sake of her who loves you, for it never surely was the lot of any man, from my lord the marquis to Jim the labourer, to be twice in his life loved as this man was loved by her.
Jabez North on his way home must go the same way as the doctor; so they walk side by side.
"Do you think he will recover?" asks Jabez.
"I doubt it. He has evidently been exposed to great hardship, wet, and fatigue. The fever is very strong upon him; and I'm afraid there's not much chance of his getting over it. I should think something might be done for him, to make him a little more comfortable. You are his brother, I presume, in spite of the apparent difference between you in station?"
Jabez laughed a scornful laugh. "His brother! Why, I never saw the man till ten minutes before you did."
"Bless me!" said the old doctor, "you amaze me. I should have taken you for twin brothers. The likeness between you is something wonderful; in spite, too, of the great difference in your clothes. Dressed alike, it would be impossible to tell one from the other."
"You really think so?"
"The fact must strike any one."
Jabez North was silent for a little time after this. Presently, as he parted from the doctor at a street-corner, he said—
"And you really think there's very little chance of this poor man's recovery?"
"I'm afraid there is positively none. Unless a wonderful change takes place for the better, in three days he will be a dead man. Good night."
"Good night," says Jabez, thoughtfully. And he walked slowly home.
It would seem about this time that he was turning his attention to his personal appearance, and in some danger of becoming a fop; for the next morning he bought a bottle of hair-dye, and tried some experiments with it on one or two of his own light ringlets, which he cut off for that purpose.
It would seem a very trivial employment for so superior and intellectual a man as Jabez North, but it may be that every action of this man's life, however apparently trivial, bore towards one deep and settled purpose.
Chapter III.
A Golden Secret.
Mr. Jabez North, being of such a truly benevolent character, came the next day to Blind Peter, full of kind and sympathetic inquiries for the sick man. For once in a way he offered something more than sympathy, and administered what little help he could afford from his very slender purse. Truly a good young man, this Jabez.
The dilapidated house in Blind Peter looked still more dreary and dilapidated in the daylight, or in such light as was called daylight by the denizens of that wretched alley. By this light, too, Jim Lomax looked none the better, with hungry pinched features, bloodshot eyes, and two burning crimson spots on his hollow cheeks. He was asleep when Jabez entered. The girl was still seated by his side, never looking up, or taking her large dark eyes from his face—never stirring, except to rearrange the poor bundle of rags which served as a pillow for the man's weary head, or to pour out his medicine, or moisten his hot forehead with wet linen. The old woman sat by the great gaunt fireplace, where she had lighted a few sticks, and made the best fire she could, by the doctor's orders; for the place was damp and draughty, even in this warm June weather. She was rocking herself to and fro on a low three-legged stool, and muttering some disconnected jargon.
When Jabez had spoken a few words to the sick man, and made his offer of assistance, he did not leave the place, but stood on the hearth, looking with a thoughtful face at the old woman.
She was not quite right in her mind, according to general opinion in Blind Peter; and if a Commission of Lunacy had been called upon to give a return of her state of intellect on that day, I think that return would have agreed with the opinion openly expressed in a friendly manner by her neighbours.
She kept muttering to herself, "And so, my deary, this is the other one. The water couldn't have been deep enough. But it's not my fault, Lucy dear, for I saw it safely put away."
"What did you see so safely put away?" asked Jabez, in so low a voice as to be heard neither by the sick man nor the girl.
"Wouldn't you like to know, deary?" mumbled the old hag, looking up at him with a malicious grin. "Don't you very much want to know, my dear? But you never will; or if you ever do, you must be a rich man first; for it's part of the secret, and the secret's gold—as long as it is kept, my dear, and it's been kept a many years, and kept faithful."
"Does he know it?" Jabez asked, pointing to the sick man.
"No, my dear; he'd want to tell it. I mean to sell it some day, for it's worth a mint of money! A mint of money! He doesn't know it—nor she—not that it matters to her; but it does matter to him."
"Then you had best let him know before three days are over or he'll never know it!" said the schoolmaster.
"Why not, deary?"
"Never you mind! I want to speak to you; and I don't want those two to hear what I say. Can we go anywhere hereabouts where I can talk to you without the chance of being overheard?"
The old woman nodded assent, and led the way with feeble tottering steps out of the house, and through a gap in a hedge to some broken ground at the back of Blind Peter. Here the old crone seated herself upon a little hillock, Jabez standing opposite her, looking her full in the face.
"Now," said he, with a determined look at the grinning face before him, "now tell me,—what was the something that was put away so safely? And what relation is that man in there to me? Tell me, and tell me the truth, or" He only finishes the sentence with a threatening look, but the old woman finishes it for him,—
"Or you'll kill me—eh, deary? I'm old and feeble, and you might easily do it—eh? But you won't—you won't, deary! You know better than that! Kill me, and you'll never know the secret!—the secret that may be gold to you some day, and that nobody alive but me can tell. If you'd got some very precious wine in a glass bottle, my dear, you wouldn't smash the bottle now, would you? because, you see, you couldn't smash the bottle without spilling the wine. And you won't lay so much as a rough finger upon me, I know."
The usher looked rather as if he would have liked to lay the whole force of ten very rough fingers upon the most vital part of the grinning hag's anatomy at that moment—but he restrained himself, as if by an effort, and thrust his hands deep into his trousers-pockets, in order the better to resist temptation.
"Then you don't mean to tell me what I asked you?" he said impatiently.
"Don't be in a hurry, my dear! I'm an old woman, and I don't like to be hurried. What is it you want to know?"
"What that man in there is to me."
"Own brother—twin brother, my dear—that's all. And I'm your grandmother—your mother's mother. Ain't you pleased to find your relations, my blessed boy?"
If he were, he had a strange way of showing pleasure; a very strange manner of welcoming newly-found relations, if his feelings were to be judged by that contracted brow and moody glance.
"Is this true?" he asked.
The old harridan looked at him and grinned. "That's an ugly mark you've got upon your left arm, my dear," she said, "just above the elbow; it's very lucky, though, it's under your coat-sleeve, where nobody can see it."
Jabez started. He had indeed a scar upon his arm, though very few people knew of it. He remembered it from his earliest days in the Slopperton workhouse.
"Do you know how you came by that mark?" continued the old woman. "Shall I tell you? Why, you fell into the fire, deary, when you were only three weeks old. We'd been drinking a little bit, my dear, and we weren't used to drinking much then, nor to eating much either, and one of us let you tumble into the fireplace, and before we could get you out, your arm was burnt; but you got over it, my dear, and three days after that you had the misfortune to fall into the water."
"You threw me in, you old she-devil!" he exclaimed fiercely.
"Come, come," she said, "you are of the same stock, so I wouldn't call names if I were you. Perhaps I did throw you into the Sloshy. I don't want to contradict you. If you say so, I dare say I did. I suppose you think me a very unnatural old woman?"
"It wouldn't be so strange if I did."
"Do you know what choice we had, your mother and me, as to what we were to do with our youngest hope—you're younger by two hours than your brother in there? Why, there was the river on one side, and a life of misery, perhaps starvation, perhaps worse, on the other. At the very best, such a life as he in there has led—hard labour and bad food, long toilsome days and short nights, and bad words and black looks from all who ought to help him. So we thought one was enough for that, and we chose the river for the other. Yes, my precious boy, I took you down to the river-side one very dark night and dropped you in where I thought the water was deepest; but, you see, it wasn't deep enough for you. Oh, dear," she said, with an imbecile grin, "I suppose there's a fate in it, and you were never born to be drowned."
Her hopeful grandson looked at her with a savage frown.
"Drop that!" he said, "I don't want any of your cursed wit."
"Don't you, deary? Lor, I was quite a wit in my young, days. They used to call me Lively Betty; but that's a long time ago."
There was sufficient left, however, of the liveliness of a long time ago to give an air of ghastly mirth to the old woman's manner, which made that manner extremely repulsive. What can be more repulsive than old age, which, shorn of the beauties and graces, is yet not purified from the follies or the vices of departed youth?
"And so, my dear, the water wasn't deep enough, and you were saved. How did it all come about? Tell us, my precious boy?"
"Yes; I dare say you'd like to know," replied her "precious boy,"—"but you can keep your secret, and I can keep mine. Perhaps you'll tell me whether my mother is alive or dead?"
Now this was a question which would have cruelly agitated some men in the position of Jabez North; but that gentleman was a philosopher, and he might have been inquiring the fate of some cast-off garment, for all the fear, tenderness, or emotion of any kind that his tone or manner betrayed.
"Your mother's been dead these many years. Don't you ask me how she died. I'm an old woman, and my head's not so right but what some things will set it wrong. Talking of that is one of 'em. She's dead. I couldn't save her, nor help her, nor set her right. I hope there's more pity where she's gone than she ever got here; for I'm sure if trouble can need it, she needed it. Don't ask me anything about her."
"Then I won't," said Jabez. "My relations don't seem such an eligible lot that I should set to work to write the history of the family. I suppose I had a father of some kind or other. What's become of him? Dead or"
"Hung, eh, deary?" said the old woman, relapsing into the malicious grin.
"Take care what you're about," said the fascinating Mr. North, "or you'll tempt me to shake the life out of your shrivelled old carcass."
"And then you'll never know who your father was. Eh? Ha, ha! my precious boy; that's part of the golden secret that none but me can tell."
"Then you won't tell me my father's name?"
"Perhaps I've forgotten it, deary; perhaps I never knew it—who knows?"
"Was he of your class—poor, insignificant, and wretched, the scum of the earth, the mud in the streets, the slush in the gutters, for other people to trample upon with their dirty boots? Was he that sort of thing? Because if he was, I shan't put myself out of the way to make any tender inquiries about him."
"Of course not, deary. You'd like him to have been a fine gentleman—a baronet, or an earl, or a marquis, eh, my blessed boy? A marquis is about the ticket for you, eh? What do you say to a marquis?"
It was not very polite, certainly, what he did say; not quite the tone of conversation to be pleasing to any marquis, or to any noble or potentate whatever, except one, and him, by the laws of polite literature, I am not allowed to mention.
Puzzled by her mysterious mumblings, grinnings, and gesticulations, our friend Jabez stared hard in the old crone's face for about three minutes—looking very much as if he would have liked to throttle her; but he refrained from that temptation, turned on his heel, and walked off in the direction of Slopperton.
The old woman apostrophized his receding figure.
"Oh, yes, deary, you're a nice young man, and a clever, civil-spoken young man, and a credit to them that reared you; but you'll never have the golden secret out of me till you've got the money to pay for it."
Chapter IV.
Jim looks over the Brink of the Terrible Gulf.
The light had gone down on the last of the days through which, according to the doctor's prophecy, Jim Lomax was to live to see that light.
Poor Jim's last sun sank to his rest upon such cloud-pillows of purple and red, and drew a curtain of such gorgeous colours round him in the western sky, as it would have very much puzzled any earthly monarch to have matched, though Buskin himself had chosen the colours, and Turner had been the man to lay them on. Of course some of this red sunset nickered and faded upon the chimney-pots and window-panes—rare luxuries, by the bye, those window-panes—of Blind Peter; but there it came in a modified degree only—this blessed sign-manual of an Almighty Power—as all earthly and heavenly blessings should come to the poor.
One ray of the crimson light fell full upon the face of the sick man, and slanted from him upon the dark hair of the girl, who sat on the ground in her old position by the bedside. This light, which fell on them and on no other object in the dusky room, seemed to unite them, as though it were a messenger from the sky that said, "They stand alone in the world, and never have been meant to stand asunder."
"It's a beautiful light, lass," said the sick man, "and I wonder I never cared more to notice or to watch it than I have. Lord, I've seen it many a time sinking behind the sharp edge of ploughed land, as if it had dug its own grave, and was glad to go down to it, and I've thought no more of it than a bit of candle; but now it seems such a beautiful light, and I feel as if I should like to see it again, lass."
"And you will—you will see it again, Jim." She drew his head upon her bosom, and stroked the rough hair away from his damp forehead. She was half dead herself, with want, anxiety, and fatigue; but she spoke in a cheerful voice. She had not shed a tear throughout his illness. "Lord help you, Jim dear, you'll live to see many and many a bright sunset— live to see it go down upon our wedding-day, perhaps."
"No, no, lass; that's a day no sun will ever shine upon. You must get another sweetheart, and a bettor one, maybe. I'm sure you deserve a better one, for you're true, lass, true as steel."
The girl drew his head closer to her breast, and bending over him, kissed his dry lips. She never thought, or cared to know, what fever or what poison she might inhale in that caress. If she had thought about it, perhaps she would have prayed that the same fever which had struck him down might lay her low beside him. He spoke again, as the light, with a lingering glow, brightened, and flickered, and then faded out.
"It's gone; it's gone for ever; it's behind me now, lass, and must look straight before"
"At what, Jim?—at what?"
"At a terrible gulf, my lass. I'm a-standing on the edge of it, and I'm a-looking down to the bottom of it—a cold dark lonesome place. But perhaps there's another light beyond it, lass; who knows?"
"Some say they do know, Jim," said the girl; "some say they do know, and that there is another light beyond, better than the one we see here, and always shining. Some people do know all about it, Jim."
"Then why didn't they tell us about it?" asked the man, with an angry expression in his hollow eyes. "I suppose those as taught them meant them to teach us; but I suppose they didn't think us worth the teaching. How many will be sorry for me, lass, when I am gone? Not grandmother; her brain's crazed with that fancy of hers of a golden secret—as if she wouldn't have sold it long before this if she'd had a secret—sold it for bread, or more likely for gin. Not anybody in Blind Peter—they've enough to do to think of the bit of food to put inside them, or of the shelter to cover their unfortunate heads. Nobody but you, lass, nobody but you, will be sorry for me; and I think you will."
He thinks she will be sorry. What has been the story of her life but one long thought and care for him, in which her every sorrow and her every joy have taken their colour from joys and sorrows of his?
While they are talking, Jabez comes in, and, seating himself on a low stool by the bed, talks to the sick man.
"And so," says Jim, looking him full in the face with a curious glance—"so you're my brother—the old woman's told me all about it—my twin brother; so like me, that it's quite a treat to look at you. It's like looking in a glass, and that's a luxury I've never been accustomed to. Light a candle, lass; I want to see my brother's face."
His brother was against the lighting of the candle—it might hurt the eyes of the sufferer, he suggested; but Jim repeated his request, and the girl obeyed.
"Now come here and hold the candle, lass, and hold it close to my brother's face, for I want to have a good look at him."
Mr. Jabez North seemed scarcely to relish the unflinching gaze of his newly-found relation; and again those fine blue eyes, for which he was distinguished, winked and shifted, and hid themselves, under the scrutiny of the sick man.
"It's a handsome face," said Jim; "and it looks like the face of one of your fine high-born gentlemen too, which is rather queer, considering who it belongs to; but for all that, I can't say it's a face I much care about. There's something under—something behind the curtain. I say, brother, you're hatching of some plot to-night, and a very deep-laid plot it is too, or my name isn't Jim Lomax."
"Poor fellow," murmured the compassionate Jabez, "his mind wanders sadly."
"Does it?" asked the sick man; "does my mind wander, lad? I hope it does; I hope I can't see very clear to-night, for I didn't want to think my own brother a villain. I don't want to think bad of thee, lad, if it's only for my dead mother's sake."
"You hear!" said Jabez, with a glance of appeal to the girl, "you hear how delirious he is?"
"Stop a bit, lad," cried Jim, with sudden energy, laying his wasted hand upon his brother's wrist; "stop a bit. I'm dying fast; and before it's too late I've one prayer to make. I haven't made so many either to God or man that I need forget this one. You see this lass; we've been sweethearts, I don't know how long, now—ever since she was a little toddling thing that I could carry on my shoulder; and, one of these days, when wages got to be better, and bread cheaper, and hopes brighter, somehow, for poor folks like us, we was to have been married; but that's over now. Keep a good heart, lass, and don't look so white; perhaps it's better as it is. Well, as I was saying, we've been sweethearts for a many year, and often when I haven't been able to get work, maybe sometimes when I haven't been willing, when I've been lazy, or on the drink, or among bad companions, this lass has kept a shelter over me, and given me bread to eat with the labour of her own hands. She's been true to me. I could tell you how true, but there's something about the corners of your mouth that makes me think you wouldn't care to hear it. But if you want me to die in peace, promise me this—that as long as you've got a shilling she shall never be without a sixpence; that as long as you've got a roof to cover your head she shall never be without a shelter. Promise!"
He tightened his grasp convulsively upon his brother's wrist. That gentleman made an effort to look him full in the face; but not seeming to relish the searching gaze of the dying man's eyes, Mr. Jabez North was compelled to drop his own.
"Come," said Jim; "promise—swear to me, by all you hold sacred, that you'll do this."
"I swear!" said Jabez, solemnly.
"And if you break your oath," added his brother, "never come anigh the place where I'm buried, for I'll rise out of my grave and haunt you."
The dying man fell back exhausted on his pillow. The girl poured out some medicine and gave it to him, while Jabez walked to the door, and looked up at the sky.
A very dark sky for a night in June. A wide black canopy hung over the earth, and as yet there was not one feeble star to break the inky darkness. A threatening night—the low murmuring of whose sultry wind moaned and whispered prophecies of a coming storm. Never had the blindness of Blind Peter been darker than to-night. You could scarcely see your hand before you. A wretched woman who had just fetched half-a-quartern of gin from the nearest public-house, though a denizen of the place, and familiar with every broken flag-stone and crumbling brick, stumbled over her own threshold, and spilt a portion of the precious liquid.
It would have been difficult to imagine either the heavens or the earth under a darker aspect in the month of June. Not so, however, thought Mr. Jabez North; for, after contemplating the sky for some moments in silence, he exclaimed—"A fine night! A glorious night! It could not be better!"
A figure, one shade darker than the night, came between him and the darkness. It was the doctor, who said—
"Well, sir, I'm glad you think it a fine night; but I must beg to differ with you on the subject, for I never remember seeing a blacker sky, or one that threatened a more terrible storm at this season of the year."
"I was scarcely thinking of what I was saying, doctor. That poor man in there"
"Ah, yes; poor fellow! I doubt if he'll witness the storm, near as it seems to be. I suppose you take some interest in him on account of his extraordinary likeness to you?"
"That would be rather an egotistical reason for being interested in him. Common humanity induced me to come down to this wretched place, to see if I could be of any service to the poor creature."
"The action does you credit, sir," said the doctor. "And now for my patient."
It was with a very grave face that the medical man looked at poor Jim, who had, by this time, fallen into a fitful and restless slumber; and when Jabez drew him aside to ask his opinion, he said,—"If he lives through the next half-hour I shall be surprised. Where is the old woman—his grandmother?"
"I haven't seen her this evening," answered Jabez. And then, turning to the girl, he asked her if she knew where the old woman was.
"No; she went out some time ago, and didn't say where she was going. She's not quite right in her mind, you know, sir, and often goes out after dark."
The doctor seated himself on a broken chair, near the mattress on which the sick man lay. Only one feeble guttering candle, with a long, top-heavy wick, lighted the dismal and comfortless room. Jabez paced up and down with that soft step of which we have before spoken. Although in his character of a philosopher the death of a fellow-creature could scarcely have been very distressing to him, there was an uneasiness in his manner on this night which he could not altogether conceal. He looked from the doctor to the girl, and from the girl to his sick brother. Sometimes he paused in his walk up and down the room to peer out at the open door. Once he stooped over the feeble candle to look at his watch. There was a listening expression too in his eyes; an uneasy twitching about his mouth; and at times he could scarcely suppress a tremulous action of his slender fingers, which bespoke impatience and agitation. Presently the clocks of Slopperton chimed the first quarter after ten. On hearing this, Jabez drew the medical man aside, and whispered to him,—
"Are there no means," he said, "of getting that poor girl out of the way? She is very much attached to that unfortunate creature; and if he dies, I fear there will be a terrible scene. It would be an act of mercy to remove her by some stratagem or other. How can we get her away till it is all over?"
"I think I can manage it," said the doctor. "My partner has a surgery at the other end of the town; I will send her there."
He returned to the bedside, and presently said,—
"Look here, my good girl; I am going to write a prescription for something which I think will do our patient good. Will you take it for me, and get the medicine made up?"
The girl looked at him with an appealing glance in her mournful eyes.
"I don't like to leave him, sir."
"But if it's for his good, my dear?"
"Yes, yes, sir. You're very kind. I will go. I can run all the the way. And you won't leave him while I'm gone, will you, sir?"
"No, my good girl, I won't. There, there; here's the prescription. It's written in pencil, but the assistant will understand it. Now listen, while I tell you where to find the surgery."
He gave her the direction; and after a lingering and mournful look at her lover, who still slept, she left the house, and darted off in the direction of Slopperton.
"If she runs as fast as that all the way," said Jabez, as he watched her receding figure, "she will be back in less than an hour."
"Then she will find him either past all help, or better," replied the doctor.
Jabez' pale face turned white as death at this word "better."
"Better!" he said. "Is there any chance of his recovery?"
"There are wonderful chances in this race between life and death. This sleep may be a crisis. If he wakes, there may be a faint hope of his living."
Jabez' hand shook like a leaf. He turned his back to the doctor, walked once up and down the room, and then asked, with his old calmness,—
"And you, sir—you, whose time is of such value to so many sick persons—you can afford to desert them all, and remain here, watching this man?"
"His case is a singular one, and interests me. Besides, I do not know that I have any patient in imminent danger tonight. My assistant has my address, and would send for me were my services peculiarly needed."
"I will go out and smoke a cigar," said Jabez, after a pause. "I can scarcely support this sick room, and the suspense of this terrible conflict between life and death."
He strode out into the darkness, was absent about five minutes, and returned.
"Your cigar did not last long," remarked the doctor. "You are a quick smoker. Bad for the system, sir."
"My cigar was a bad one. I threw it away."
Shortly afterwards there was a knock at the door, and a ragged vagabond-looking boy, peeping in, asked,—
"Is Mr. Saunders the doctor here?"
"Yes, my lad. Who wants me?"
"A young woman up in Hill Fields, sir, what's took poison, they say. You're wanted very bad."
"Poison! that's urgent," said Mr. Saunders. "Who sent you here for me?"
The lad looked with a puzzled expression at Jabez standing in the shadow, who, unperceived by the doctor, whispered something behind his hand.
"Surgery, sir," answered the boy, still looking at Jabez.
"Oh, you were sent from the surgery. I must be off, for this is no doubt a desperate case. I must leave you to look after this poor fellow. If he wakes, give him two teaspoonfuls of that medicine there. I could do no more if I stopped myself. Come, my lad."
The doctor left the house, followed by the boy, and in a few moments both were lost in the darkness, and far out of the ken of Blind Peter.
Five minutes after the departure of the medical man Jabez went to the door, and after looking out at the squalid houses, which were all dark, gave a long low whistle.
A figure crept out of the darkness, and came up to where he stood. It was the old woman, his grandmother.
"All's right, deary," she whispered. "Bill Withers has got everything ready. He's a waiting down by the wall yonder. There's not a mortal about; and I'll keep watch. You'll want Bill's help. When you're ready for him, you're to whistle softly three times running. He'll know what it means—and I'm going to watch while he helps you. Haven't I managed beautiful, deary? and shan't I deserve the golden sovereigns you've promised me? They was guineas always when I was young, deary. Nothing's as good now as it used to be."
"Don't let us have any chattering," said Jabez, as he laid a rough hand upon her arm; "unless you want to wake everybody in the place."
"But, I say, deary, is it all over? Nothing unfair, you know. Remember your promise."
"All over? Yes; half an hour ago. If you hinder me here with your talk, the girl will be back before we're ready for her."
"Let me come in and close his eyes, deary," supplicated the old woman. "His mother was my own child. Let me close his eyes."
"Keep where you are, or I'll strangle you!" growled her dutiful grandson, as he shut the door upon his venerable relation, and left her mumbling upon the threshold.
Jabez crept cautiously towards the bed on which his brother lay. Jim at this moment awoke from his restless slumber; and, opening his eyes to their widest extent, looked full at the man by his side. He made no effort to speak, pointed to his lips, and, stretching out his hand towards the bottles on the table, made signs to his brother. These signs were a supplication for the cooling draught which always allayed the burning heat of the fever.
Jabez never stirred. "He has awoke," he murmured. "Tide is the crisis of his life, and of my fate."
The clocks of Slopperton chimed the quarter before eleven.
"It's a black gulf, lass," gasped the dying man; "and I'm fast sinking into it."
There was no friendly hand, Jim, to draw you back from that terrible gulf. The medicine stood untouched upon the table; and, perhaps as guilty as the first murderer, your twin brother stood by your bed-side.
Chapter V.
Midnight by the Slopperton Clocks.
The clouds and the sky kept their promise, and as the clocks chimed the quarter before twelve the storm broke over the steeples at Slopperton.
Blue lightning-flashes lit up Blind Peter, and attendant thunder-claps shook him to his very foundation; while a violent shower of rain gave him such a washing-down of every flagstone, chimney-pot, and door-step, as he did not often get. Slopperton in bed was almost afraid to go to sleep; and Slopperton not in bed did not seem to care about going to bed. Slopperton at supper was nervous as to handling of glittering knives and steel forks; and Slopperton going to windows to look out at the lightning was apt to withdraw hurriedly at the sight thereof. Slopperton in general was depressed by the storm; thought there would be mischief somewhere; and had a vague idea that something dreadful would happen before the night was out.
In Dr. Tappenden's quiet household there was consternation and alarm. Mr. Jabez North, the principal assistant, had gone out early in the evening, and had not returned at the appointed hour for shutting up the house. This was such an unprecedented occurrence, that it had occasioned considerable uneasiness—especially as Dr. Tappenden was away from home, and Jabez was, in a manner, deputy-master of the house. The young woman who looked after the gentlemen's wardrobes had taken compassion upon the housemaid, who sat up awaiting Mr. North's return, and had brought her workbox, and a lapful of young gentlemen's dilapidated socks, to the modest chamber in which the girl waited.
"I hope," said the housemaid, "nothing ain't happened to him through the storm. I hope he hasn't been getting under no trees."
The housemaid had a fixed idea that to go under a tree in a thunderstorm was to encounter immediate death.
"Poor dear young gentleman," said the lady of the wardrobes; "I tremble to think what can keep him out so. Such a steady young man; never known to be a minute after time either. I'm sure every sound I hear makes me expect to see him brought in on a shutter."
"Don't now, Miss Smithers!" cried the housemaid, looking behind her as if she expected to see the ghost of Jabez North pointing to a red spot on his left breast at the back of her chair. "I wish you wouldn't now! Oh, I hope he ain't been murdered. There's been such a many murders in Slopperton since I can remember. It's only three years and a half ago since a man cut his wife's throat down in Windmill Lane, because she hadn't put no salt in the saucepan when she boiled the greens."
The frightful parallel between the woman who boiled the greens without salt and Jabez North two hours after his time, struck such terror to the hearts of the young women, that they were silent for some minutes, during which they both looked uneasily at a thief in the candle which neither of them had the courage to take out—their nerves not being equal to the possible clicking of the snuffers.
"Poor young man!" said the housemaid, at last. "Do you know, Miss Smithers, I can't help thinking he has been rather low lately."
Now this word "low" admits of several applications, so Miss Smithers replied, rather indignantly,—
"Low, Sarah Anne! Not in his language, I'm sure. And as to his manners, they'd be a credit to the nobleman that wrote the letters."
"No, no, Miss Smithers; I mean his spirits. I've fancied lately he's been a fretting about something; perhaps he's in love, poor dear."
Miss Smithers coloured up. The conversation was getting interesting. Mr. North had lent her Rasselas, which she thought a story of thrilling interest; and she had kept his stockings and shirt buttons in order for three years. Such things had happened; and Mrs. Jabez North sounded more comfortable than Miss Smithers, at any rate.
"Perhaps," said Sarah Anne, rather maliciously—"perhaps he's been forgetting his situation and giving way to thoughts of marrying our young missus. She's got a deal of money, you know, Miss Smithers, though her figure ain't much to look at."
Sarah Anne's figure was plenty to look at, having a tendency to break out into luxuriance where you least expected it.
It was in vain that Sarah Anne or Miss Smithers speculated on the probable causes of the usher's absence. Midnight struck from the Dutch clock in the kitchen, the eight-day clock on the staircase, the time-piece in the drawing-room—a liberal and complicated piece of machinery which always struck eighteen to the dozen—and eventually from every clock in Slopperton; and yet there was no sign of Jabez North.
No sign of Jabez North. A white face and a pair of glazed eyes staring up at the sky, out on a dreary heath three miles from Slopperton, exposed to the fury of a pitiless storm; a man lying alone on a wretched mattress in a miserable apartment in Blind Peter—but no Jabez North
Through the heartiest storm, dripping wet with the pelting rain, the girl they have christened Sillikens hastens back to Blind Peter. The feeble glimmer of the candle, with the drooping wick sputtering in a pool of grease, is the only light which illumes that cheerless neighbourhood. The girl's heart beats with a terrible flutter as she approaches that light, for an agonizing doubt is in her soul about that other light which she left so feebly burning, and which may be now extinct. But she takes courage; and pushing open the door, which opposes neither bolts nor bars to any deluded votary of Mercury, she enters the dimly-lighted room. The man lies with his face turned to the wall; the old woman is seated by the hearth, on which a dull and struggling flame is burning. She has on the table among the medicine-bottles, another, which no doubt contains spirits, for she has a broken teacup in her hand, from which ever and anon she sips consolation, for it is evident she has been crying.
"Mother, how is he—how is he?" the girl asks, with a hurried agitation painful to witness, since it reveals how much she dreads the answer.
"Better, deary, better—Oh, ever so much better," the old woman answers in a crying voice, and with another application to the broken teacup.
"Better! thank Heaven!—thank Heaven!" and the girl, stealing softly to the bed-side, bends down and listens to the sick man's breathing, which is feeble, but regular.
"He seems very fast asleep, grandmother. Has he been sleeping all the time?"
"Since when, deary?"
"Since I went out. Where's the doctor?"
"Gone, deary. Oh, my blessed boy, to think that it should come to this, and his dead mother was my only child! dear, dear!" And the old woman burst out crying, only choking her sobs by the aid of the teacup.
"But he's better, grandmother; perhaps he'll get over it now. I always said he would. Oh, I'm so glad—so glad." The girl sat down in her wet garments, of which she never once thought, on the little stool by the side of the bed. Presently the sick man turned round and opened his eyes.
"You've been away a long time, lass," he said.
Something in his voice, or in his way of speaking, she did not know which, startled her; but she wound her arm round his neck, and said—
"Jim, my own dear Jim, the danger's past. The black gulf you've been looking down is closed for these many happy years to come, and maybe the sun will shine on our wedding-day yet."
"Maybe, lass—maybe. But tell me, what's the time?"
"Never mind the time, Jim. Very late, and a very dreadful night; but no matter for that! You're better, Jim; and if the sun never shone upon the earth again, I don't think I should be able to be sorry, now you are safe."
"Are all the lights out in Blind Peter, lass?" he asked.
"All the lights out? Yes, Jim—these two hours. But why do you ask?"
"And in Slopperton did you meet many people, lass?"
"Not half-a-dozen in all the streets. Nobody would be out in such a night, Jim, that could help it."
He turned his face to the wall again, and seemed to sleep. The old woman kept moaning and mumbling over the broken teacup,—
"To think that my blessed boy should come to this—on such a night too, on such a night!"
The storm raged with unabated fury, and the rain pouring in at the dilapidated door threatened to flood the room. Presently the sick man raised his head a little way from the pillow.
"Lass," he said, "could you get me a drop o' wine? I think, if I could drink a drop o' wine, it would put some strength into me somehow."
"Grandmother," said the girl, "can I get him any? You've got some money; it's only just gone twelve; I can get in at the public-house. I will get in, if I knock them up, to get a drop o' wine for Jim."
The old woman fumbled among her rags and produced a sixpence, part of the money given her from the slender purse of the benevolent Jabez, and the girl hurried away to fetch the wine.
The public-house was called the Seven Stars; the seven stars being represented on a signboard in such a manner as to bear rather a striking resemblance to seven yellow hot-cross buns on a very blue background. The landlady of the Seven Stars was putting her hair in papers when the girl called Sillikens invaded the sanctity of her private life. Why she underwent the pain and grief of curling her hair for the admiration of such a neighbourhood as Blind Peter is one of those enigmas of this dreary existence to solve which the Œdipus has not yet appeared. I don't suppose she much cared about suspending her toilet, and opening her bar, for the purpose of selling sixpennyworth of port wine; but when she heard it was for a sick man, she did not grumble. The girl thanked her heartily, and hurried homewards with her pitiful measure of wine.
Through the pitiless rain, and under the dark sky, it was almost impossible to see your hand before you; but as Sillikens entered the mouth of Blind Peter, a flash of lightning revealed to her the figure of a man gliding with a soft step between the broken iron railings. In the instantaneous glimpse she caught of him under the blue light, something familiar in his face or form quickened the beating of her heart, and made her turn to look back at him; but it was too dark for her to see more than the indistinct figure of a man hurrying away in the direction of Slopperton. Wondering who could be leaving Blind Peter on such a night and at such an hour, she hastened back to carry her lover the wine.
The old woman still sat before the hearth. The sputtering candle had gone out, and the light from the miserable little fire only revealed the dark outlines of the wretched furniture and the figure of Jim's grandmother, looking, as she sat mumbling over the broken teacup, like a wicked witch performing an incantation over a portable cauldron.
The girl hurried to the bed-side—the sick man was not there.
"Grandmother! Jim—Jim! Where is he?" she asked, in an alarmed voice; for the figure she had met hurrying through the storm flashed upon her with a strange distinctness. "Jim! Grandmother! tell me where he is, or I shall go mad! Not gone—not gone out on such a night as this, and in a burning fever?"
"Yes, lass, he's gone. My precious boy, my darling boy. His dead mother was my only child, and he's gone for ever and ever, and on this dreadful night. I'm a miserable old woman."
No other explanation than this, no other words than these, chattered and muttered again and again, could the wretched girl extort from the old woman, who, half imbecile and more than half tipsy, sat grinning and grunting over the teacup till she fell asleep in a heap on the cold damp hearth, still hugging the empty teacup, and still muttering, even in her sleep,—
"His dead mother was my only child; and it's very cruel it should come to this at last, and on such a night."
Chapter VI.
The Quiet Figure on the Heath.
The morning after the storm broke bright and clear, promising a hot summer's day, but also promising a pleasant breeze to counterbalance the heat of the sun. This was the legacy of the storm, which, dying out about three o'clock, after no purposeless fury, had left behind it a better and purer air in place of the sultry atmosphere which had heralded its coming.
Mr. Joseph Peters, seated at breakfast this morning, attended by Kuppins nursing the "fondling," has a great deal to say by means of the dirty alphabet (greasy from the effects of matutinal bacon) about last night's storm. Kuppins has in nowise altered since we last saw her, and four months have made no change in the inscrutable physiognomy of the silent detective; but four months have made a difference in the "fondling," now familiarly known as "baby." Baby is short-coated; baby takes notice. This accomplishment of taking notice appears to consist chiefly in snatching at every article within its reach, from Kuppins's luxuriant locks to the hot bowl of Mr. Peters's pipe. Baby also is possessed of a marvellous pair of shoes, which are alternately in his mouth, under the fender, and upon his feet—to say nothing of their occasionally finding their way out of the window, on to the dust-heap, and into divers other domestic recesses too numerous to mention. Baby is also possessed of a cap with frills, which it is Kuppins's delight to small-plait, and the delight of baby to demolish. Baby is devotedly attached to Kuppins, and evinces his affection by such pleasing demonstrations as poking his fists down her throat, hanging on to her nose, pushing a tobacco-pipe up her nostrils, and other equally gratifying proofs of infantine regard. Baby is, in short, a wonderful child; and the eye of Mr. Peters at breakfast wanders from his bacon and his water-cresses to his young adopted, with a look of pride he does not attempt to conceal.
Mr. Peters has risen in his profession since last February. He has assisted at the discovery of two or three robberies, and has evinced on those occasions such a degree of tact, triumphing so completely over the difficulties he labours under from his infirmity, as to have won for himself a better place in the police force of Slopperton—and of course a better salary. But business has been dull lately, and Mr. Joseph Peters, who is ambitious, has found no proper field for his abilities as yet.
"I should like an iron-safe case, a regular out-and-out burglary," he muses, "or a good forgery, say to the tune of a thousand or so. Or a bit of bigamy; that would be something new. But a jolly good poisoning case might make my fortune. If that there little 'un was growed up," he mentally ejaculated, as Kuppins's charge gave an unusually loud scream, "his lungs might be a fortune to me. Lord," he continued, waxing metaphysical, "I don't look upon that hinfant as a hinfant, I looks upon him as a voice."
The "voice" was a very powerful one just at this moment; for in an interval of affectionate weakness Kuppins had regaled the "fondling" on the rind of Mr. Peters's rasher, which, not harmonizing with the limited development of his swallowing apparatus, had brought out the purple tints in his complexion with alarming violence.
For a long time Mr. Peters mused, and at last, after signalling Kuppins, as was his wont on commencing a conversation, with a loud snap of his finger and thumb, he began thus:
"There's a case of shop-lifting at Halford's Heath, and I've got to go over and look up some evidence in the village. I'll tell you what I'll do with you; I'll take you and baby over in Vorkins's trap—he said as how he'd lend it me whenever I liked to ask him for the loan of it; and I'll stand treat to the Rosebush tea-gardens."
Never had the dirty alphabet fashioned such sweet words. A drive in Mr. Vorkins's trap, and the Rosebush tea-gardens! If Kuppins had been a fairy changeling, and had awoke one morning to find herself a queen, I don't think she would have chosen any higher delight wherewith to celebrate her accession to the throne.
Kuppins had, during the few months of Mr. Peters's residence in the indoor Eden of No. 5, Little Gulliver Street, won a very high place in that gentleman's regards. The elderly proprietress of the Eden was as nothing in the eyes of Mr. Peters when compared with Kuppins. It was Kuppins whom he consulted when giving his orders for dinner; Kuppins, whose eye he knew to be infallible as regarded a chop, either mutton or pork; whose finger was as the finger of Fate in the matter of hard or soft-roed herrings. It was by Kuppins's advice he purchased some mysterious garment for the baby, or some prodigious wonder in the shape of a bandanna or a neck-handkerchief for himself; and this tea-garden treat he had long contemplated as a fitting reward for the fidelity of his handmaiden.
Mr. Vorkins was one of the officials of the police force, and Mr. Vorkins's trap was a happy combination of the cart of a vender of feline provisions and the gig of a fast young man of half a century gone by—that is to say, it partook of the disadvantages of each, without possessing the capabilities of either: but Mr. Peters looked at it with respect, and in the eye of Kuppins it was a gorgeous and fashionable vehicle, which the most distinguished member of the peerage might have driven along the Lady's Mile, at six o'clock on a midsummer afternoon, with pride and delight.
At two o'clock on this June afternoon, behold Mr. Vorkins's trap at the door of No. 5, Little Gulliver Street, with Kuppins in a miraculous bonnet, and baby in a wonderful hat, seated therein. Mr. Peters, standing on the pavement, contemplated the appointments of the equipage with some sense of pride, and the juvenile population of the street hovered around, absorbed in admiration of the turn-out.
"Mind your bonnet don't make the wehicle top-heavy, miss," said one youthful votary of the renowned Joe Miller; "it's big enough, anyways."
Miss Kuppins (she was Miss Kuppins in her Sunday costume) flung a Parthian glance at the young barbarian, and drew down a green veil, which, next to the "fondling," was the pride of her heart. Mr. Peters, armed with a formidable whip, mounted to his seat by her side, and away drove the trap, leaving the juvenile population aforesaid venting its envy in the explosion of a perfect artillery of jeux de mots.
Mr. Vorkins's trap was as a fairy vehicle to Kuppins, and Mr. Vorkins's elderly pony an enchanted quadruped, under the strokes of whose winged hoofs Slopperton flew away like a smoky dream, and was no more seen—an enchanted quadruped, by whose means the Slopperton suburbs of unfinished houses, scaffolding, barren ground for sale in building lots, ugly lean streets, and inky river, all melted into the distance, giving place to a road that intersected a broad heath, in the undulations of which lay fairy pools of blue water, in whose crystal depths the good people might have admired their tiny beauties as in a mirror. Indeed, it was pleasant to ride in Mr. Vorkins's jingling trap through the pure country air, scented with the odours of distant bean-fields, and, looking back, to see the smoke of Sloppertonian chimneys a mere black daub on the blue sky, and to be led almost to wonder how, on the face of such a fair and lovely earth, so dark a blot as Slopperton could be.
The Rosebush tea-gardens were a favourite resort of Slopperton on a Sunday afternoon; and many teachers there were in that great city who did not hesitate to say that the rosebushes of those gardens were shrubs planted by his Satanic Majesty, and that the winding road over Halford's Heath, though to the ignorant eye bordered by bright blue streams and sweet-smelling wild flowers, lay in reality between two lakes of fire and brimstone. Some gentlemen, however, dared to say—gentlemen who wore white neckcloths too, and were familiar and welcome in the dwellings of the poor—that Slopperton might go to more wicked places than Rosebush gardens, and might possibly be led into more evil courses than the consumption of tea and watercresses at ninepence a-head. But in spite of all differences of opinion, the Rosebush gardens prospered, and Rosebush tea and bread-and-butter were pleasant in the mouth of Slopperton.
Mr. Peters deposited his fair young companion, with the baby in her arms, at the gate of the gardens—after having authorized her to order two teas, and to choose an arbour—and walked off himself into the village of Halford to transact his official business.
The ordering of the teas and the choosing of the arbour were a labour of love with the fair Kuppins. She selected a rustic retreat, over which the luxuriant tendrils of a hop-vine fell like a thick green curtain. It was a sight to see Kuppins skirmishing with the earwigs and spiders in their sylvan bower, and ultimately routing those insects from the nests of their fathers. Mr. Peters returned from the village in about an hour, hot and dusty, but triumphant as to the issue of the business he had come about, and with an inordinate thirst for tea at ninepence a-head. I don't know whether Rosebush gardens made much out of the two teas at ninepence, but I know the bread-and-butter and watercresses disappeared by the aid of the detective and his fair companion as if by magic. It was pleasant to watch the "fondling" during this humble fête champêtre. He had been brought up by hand, which would be better expressed as by spoon, and had been fed on every variety of cosmestible, from pap and farinaceous food to beef-steaks and onions and the soft roes of red herrings—to say nothing of sugar-sticks, bacon rinds, and the claws of shell-fish; he therefore, immediately upon the appearance of the two teas, laid violent hands on a bunch of watercresses and a slice of bread-and-butter, wiping the buttered side upon his face—so as to give himself the appearance of an infant in a violent perspiration—preparatory to its leisurely consumption. He also made an onslaught on Mr. Peters's cup of steaming tea, but scalding his hands therewith, withdrew to the bosom of Kuppins, and gave vent to his indignation in loud screams, which the detective said made the gardens quite lively. After the two teas, Mr. Peters, attended by Kuppins and the infant, strolled round the gardens, and peered into the arbours, very few of which were tenanted this week-day afternoon. The detective indulged in a gambling speculation with some wonderful machine, the distinguishing features of which were numbers and Barcelona nuts; and by the aid of which you might lose as much as threepence half-penny before you knew where you were, while you could not by any possibility win anything. There was also a bowling-green, and a swing, which Kuppins essayed to mount, and which repudiated that young lady, by precipitating her forward on her face at the first start.
Having exhausted the mild dissipations of the gardens, Mr. Peters and Kuppins returned to their bower, where the gentleman sat smoking his clay pipe, and contemplating the infant with a perfect serenity and calm enjoyment delightful to witness. But there was more on Mr. Peters's mind that summer's evening than the infant. He was thinking of the trial of Richard Marwood, and the part he had taken in that trial by means of the dirty alphabet; he was thinking, perhaps, of the fate of Richard—poor unlucky Richard, a hopeless and incurable lunatic, imprisoned for life in a dreary asylum, and comforting himself in that wretched place by wild fancies of imaginary greatness. Presently Mr. Peters, with a preparatory snap of his fingers, asks Kuppins if she can "call to mind that there story of the lion and the mouse."
Kuppins can call it to mind, and proceeds to narrate with volubility, how a lion, once having rendered a service to a mouse, found himself caught in a great net, and in need of a friend; how this insignificant mouse had, by sheer industry and perseverance, effected the escape of the mighty lion. Whether they lived happy ever afterwards Kuppins couldn't say, but had no doubt they did; that being the legitimate conclusion of every legend, in this young lady's opinion.
Mr. Peters scratched his head violently during this story, to which he listened with his mouth very much round the corner; and when it was finished he fell into a reverie that lasted till the distant Slopperton clocks chimed the quarter before eight—at which time he laid down his pipe, and departed to prepare Mr. Vorkins's trap for the journey home.
Perhaps of the two journeys, the journey home was almost the more pleasant. It seemed to Kuppins's young imagination as if Mr. Peters was bent on driving Mr. Vorkins's trap straight into the sinking sun, which was going down in a sea of crimson behind a ridge of purple heath. Slopperton was yet invisible, except as a dark cloud on the purple sky. This road across the heath was very lonely on every evening except Sunday, and the little party only met one group of haymakers returning from their work, and one stout farmer's wife, laden with groceries, hastening home from Slopperton. It was a still evening, and not a sound rose upon the clear air, except the last song of a bird or the chirping of a grasshopper. Perhaps, if Kuppins had been with anybody else, she might have been frightened for Kuppins had a confused idea that such appearances as highwaymen and ghosts are common to the vesper hour; but in the company of Mr. Peters, Kuppins would have fearlessly met a regiment of highwaymen, or a churchyard full of ghosts: for was he not the law and the police in person, under whose shadow there could be no fear?
Mr. Vorkins's trap was fast gaining on the sinking sun, when Mr. Peters drew up, and paused irresolutely between two roads. These diverging roads met at a point a little further on, and the Sunday afternoon pleasure-seekers crossing the heath took sometimes one, sometimes the other; but the road to the left was the least frequented, being the narrower and more hilly, and this road Mr. Peters took, still driving towards the dark line behind which the red sun was going down.
The broken ground of the heath was all a-glow with the warm crimson light; a dissipated skylark and an early nightingale were singing a duet, to which the grasshoppers seemed to listen with suspended chirpings; a frog of an apparently fretful disposition was keeping up a captious croak in a ditch by the side of the road; and beyond these voices there seemed to be no sound beneath the sky. The peaceful landscape and the tranquil evening shed a benign influence upon Kuppins, and awakened the dormant poetry in that young lady's breast.
"Lor', Mr. Peters," she said, "it's hard to think in such a place as this, that gents of your purfession should be wanted. I do think now, if I was ever led to feel to want to take and murder somebody, which I hopes ain't likely—knowin' my duty to my neighbour better—I do think, somehow, this evening would come back to my mind, and I should hear them birds a-singing, and see that there sun a-sinking, till I shouldn't be able to do it, somehow."
Mr. Peters shakes his head dubiously: he is a benevolent man and a philanthropist; but he doesn't like his profession run down, and a murder and bread-and-cheese are inseparable things in his mind.
"And, do you know," continued Kuppins, "it seems to me as if, when this world is so beautiful and quiet, it's quite hard to think there's one wicked person in it to cast a shadow on its peace."
As Kuppins said this, she and Mr. Peters were startled by a shadow which came between them and the sinking sun—a distorted shadow thrown across the narrow road from the sharp outline of the figure of a man lying upon a hillock a little way above them. Now, there is not much to alarm the most timid person in the sight of a man asleep upon a summer's evening among heath and wild flowers; but something in this man's appearance startled Kuppins, who drew nearer to Mr. Peters, and held the "fondling," now fast asleep and muffled in a shawl, closer to her bosom. The man was lying on his back, with his face upturned to the evening sky, and his arms straight down at his sides. The sound of the wheels of Mr. Vorkins's trap did not awaken him; and even when Mr. Peters drew up with a sudden jerk, the sleeping man did not raise his head. Now, I don't know why Mr. Peters should stop, or why either he or Kuppins should feel any curiosity about this sleeping man; but they certainly did feel considerable curiosity. He was dressed rather shabbily, but still like a gentleman; and it was perhaps a strange thing for a gentleman to be sleeping so soundly in such a lonely spot as this. Then again, there was something in his attitude—a want of ease, a certain stiffness, which had a strange effect upon both Kuppins and Mr. Peters.
"I wish he'd move," said Kuppins; "he looks so awful quiet, lying there all so lonesome."
"Call to him, my girl," said Mr. Peters with his fingers.
Kuppins essayed a loud "Hilloa," but it was a dismal failure, on which Mr. Peters gave a long shrill whistle, which must surely have disturbed the peaceful dreams of the seven sleepers, though it might not have awakened them. The man on the hillock never stirred. The pony, taking advantage of the halt, drew nearer to the heath and began to crop the short grass by the road-side, thus bringing Mr. Yorkins's trap a little nearer the sleeper.
"Get down, lass," said the fingers of the detective; "get down, my lass, and have a look at him, for I can't leave this 'ere pony."
Kuppins looked at Mr. Peters; and Mr. Peters looked at Kuppins, as much as to say, "Well, what then?" So Kuppins to whom the laws of the Medes and Persians would have been mild compared to the word of Mr. Peters, surrendered the infant to his care, and descending from the trap, mounted the hillock, and looked at the still reclining figure.
She did not look long, but returning rapidly to Mr. Peters, took hold of his arm, and said—
"I don't think he's asleep—leastways, his eyes is open; but he don't look as if he could see anything, somehow. He's got a little bottle in his hand."
Why Kuppins should keep so tight a hold on Mr. Peters's arm while she said this it is difficult to tell; but she did clutch his coat-sleeve very tightly, looking back while she spoke with her white face turned towards that whiter face under the evening sky.
Mr. Peters jumped quickly from the trap, tied the elderly pony to a furze-bush, mounted the hillock, and proceeded to inspect the sleeping figure. The pale set face, and the fixed blue eyes, looked up at the crimson light melting into the purple shadows of the evening sky, but never more would earthly sunlight or shadow, or night or morning, or storm or calm, be of any account to that quiet figure lying on the heath. Why the man was there, or how he had come there, was a part of the great mystery under the darkness of which he lay; and that mystery was Death! He had died apparently by poison administered by his own hand; for on the grass by his side there was a little empty bottle labelled "Opium," on which his fingers lay, not clasping it, but lying as if they had fallen over it. His clothes were soaked through with wet, so that he must in all probability have lain in that place through the storm of the previous night. A silver watch was in the pocket of his waistcoat, which Mr. Peters found, on looking at it, to have stopped at ten o'clock—ten o'clock of the night before, most likely. His hat had fallen off, and lay at a little distance, and his curling light hair hung in wet ringlets over his high forehead. His face was handsome, the features well chiselled, but the cheeks were sunken and hollow, making the large blue eyes seem larger.
Mr. Peters, in examining the pockets of the suicide, found no clue to his identity; a handkerchief, a little silver, a few halfpence, a penknife wrapped in a leaf torn out of a Latin Grammar, were the sole contents.
The detective reflected for a few moments, with his mouth on one side, and then, mounting the highest hillock near, looked over the surrounding country. He presently descried a group of haymakers at a little distance, whom he signalled with a loud whistle. To them, through Kuppins as interpreter, he gave his directions; and two of the tallest and strongest of the men took the body by the head and feet and carried it between them, with Kuppins's shawl spread over the still white face. They were two miles from Slopperton, and those two miles were by no means pleasant to Kuppins, seated in Mr. Vorkins's trap, which Mr. Peters drove slowly, so as to keep pace with the two men and their ghastly burden. Kuppins's shawl, which of course would never be any use as a shawl again, was no good to conceal the sharp outline of the face it covered; for Kuppins had seen those blue eyes, and once to see was always to see them as she thought. The dreary journey came at last to a dreary end at the police-office, where the men deposited their dreadful load, and being paid for their trouble, departed rejoicing. Mr. Peters was busy enough for the next half-hour giving an account of the finding of the body, and issuing handbills of "Found dead, &c."
Kuppins and the "fondling" returned to Little Gulliver Street, and if ever there had been a heroine in that street, that heroine was Kuppins. People came from three streets off to see her, and to hear the story, which she told so often that she came at last to tell it mechanically, and to render it slightly obscure by the vagueness of her punctuation. Anything in the way of supper that Kuppins would accept, and two or three dozen suppers if Kuppins would condescend to partake of them, were at Kuppins's service; and her reign as heroine-in-chief of this dark romance in real life was only put an end to by the appearance of Mr. Peters, the hero, who came home by-and-by, hot and dusty, to announce to the world of Little Gulliver Street, by means of the alphabet, very grimy after his exertions, that the dead man had been recognized as the principal usher of a great school up at the other end of the town, and that his name was, or had been, Jabez North. His motive for committing suicide he had carried a secret with him into the dark and mysterious region to which he was a voluntary traveller; and Mr. Peters, whose business it was to pry about the confines of this shadowy land, though powerless to penetrate the interior, could only discover some faint rumour of an ambitious love for his master's daughter as being the cause of the young usher's untimely end. What secrets this dead man had carried with him into the shadow-land, who shall say? There might be one, perhaps, which even Mr. Peters, with his utmost acuteness, could not discover.
Chapter VII.
The Usher Resigns his Situation.
On the very day on which Mr. Peters treated Kuppins and the "fondling" to tea and watercresses, Dr. Tappenden and Jane his daughter returned to their household gods at Slopperton.
Who shall describe the ceremony and bustle with which that great dignitary, the master of the house, was received? He had announced, his return by the train which reached Slopperton at seven o'clock; so at that hour a well-furnished tea-table was ready laid in the study—that terrible apartment which little boys entered with red eyes and pale cheeks, emerging therefrom in a pleasant glow, engendered by a specific peculiar to schoolmasters whose desire it is not to spoil the child. But no ghosts of bygone canings, no infantine whimpers from shadow-land—(though little Allecompain, dead and gone, had received correction in this very room)—haunted the Doctor's sanctorum—a cheerful apartment, warm in winter, and cool in summer, and handsomely furnished at all times. The silver teapot reflected the evening sunshine; and reflected too Sarah Jane laying the table, none the handsomer for being represented upside down, with a tendency to become collapsed or elongated, as she hovered about the tea-tray. Anchovy-paste, pound-cake, Scotch marmalade and fancy bread, all seemed to cry aloud for the arrival of the doctor and his daughter to demolish them; but for all that there was fear in the hearts of the household as the hour for that arrival drew near. What would he say to the absence of his factotum? Who should tell him? Every one was innocent enough, certainly, but in the first moment of his fury might not the descending avalanche of the Doctor's wrath crush the innocent? Miss Smithers—who, as well as being presiding divinity of the young gentlemen's wardrobes, was keeper of the keys of divers recesses and cupboards, and had sundry awful trusts connected with tea and sugar and butchers' bills—was elected by the whole household, from the cook to the knife-boy, as the proper person to make the awful announcement of the unaccountable disappearance of Mr. Jabez North. So, when the doctor and his daughter had alighted from the fly which brought them and their luggage from the station, Miss Smithers hovered timidly about them, on the watch for a propitious moment.
"How have you enjoyed yourself, miss? Judging by your looks I should say very much indeed, for never did I see you looking better," said Miss Smithers, with more enthusiasm than punctuation, as she removed the shawl from the lovely shoulders of Miss Tappenden.
"Thank you, Smithers, I am better," replied the young lady, with languid condescension. Miss Tappenden, on the strength of never having anything the matter with her, was always complaining, and passed her existence in taking sal-volatile and red lavender, and reading three volumes a day from the circulating library.
"And how," asked the ponderous voice of the ponderous Doctor, "how is everything going on, Smithers?" By this time they were seated at the tea-table, and the learned Tappenden was in the act of putting five lumps of sugar in his cup, while the fair Smithers lingered in attendance.
"Quite satisfactory, sir, I'm sure," replied that young lady, growing very much confused. "Everything quite satisfactory, sir; leastways"
"What do you mean by leastways, Smithers?" asked the Doctor, impatiently. "In the first place it isn't English; and in the next it sounds as if it meant something unpleasant. For goodness sake, Smithers, be straightforward and business-like. Has anything gone wrong? What is it? And why wasn't I informed of it?"
Smithers, in despair at her incapability of answering these three questions at once, as no doubt she ought to have been able to do, or the Doctor would not have asked them, stammered out,—
"Mr. North, sir"
"'Mr. North, sir'! Well, what of 'Mr. North, sir'?" By the bye, where is Mr. North? Why isn't he here to receive us?"
Smithers feels that she is in for it; so, after two or three nervous gulps, and other convulsive movements of the throat, she continues thus—"Mr. North, sir, didn't come home last night, sir. We sat up for him till one o'clock this morning—last night, sir."
The rising storm in the Doctor's face is making Smithers's English more un-English every moment.
"Didn't come last night? Didn't return to my house at the hour of ten, which hour has been appointed by me for the retiring to rest of every person in my employment?" cried the Doctor, aghast.
"No, sir! Nor yet this morning, sir! Nor yet this afternoon, sir! And the West-Indian pupils have been looking out of the window, sir, and would, which we told them not till we were hoarse, sir."
"The person intrusted by me with the care of my pupils abandoning his post, and my pupils looking out of the window!" exclaimed Dr. Tappenden, in the tone of a man who says—"The glory of England has departed! You wouldn't, perhaps, believe it; but it has!"
"We didn't know what to do, sir, and so we thought we'd better not do it," continued the bewildered Smithers. "And we thought as you was coming back to-day, we'd better leave it till you did come back—and please, sir, will you take any new-laid eggs?"
"Eggs!" said the Doctor; "new-laid eggs! Go away, Smithers. There must be some steps taken immediately. That young man was my right hand, and I would have trusted him with untold gold; or," he added, "with my cheque-book."
As he uttered the words "cheque-book," he, as it were instinctively, laid his hand upon the pocket which contained that precious volume; but as he did so, he remembered that he had used the last leaf but one when writing a cheque for a mid-summer butcher's bill, and that he had a fresh book in his desk untouched. This desk was always kept in the study, and the Doctor gave an involuntary glance in the direction in which it stood.
It was a very handsome piece of furniture, ponderous, like the Doctor himself; a magnificent construction of shining walnut-wood and dark green morocco, with a recess for the Doctor's knees, and on either side of this recess two rows of drawers, with brass handles and Bramah locks. The centre drawer on the left hand side contained an inner and secret drawer, and towards the lock of this drawer the Doctor looked, for this contained his new cheque-book. The walnut-wood round the lock of this centre drawer seemed a little chipped; the Doctor thought he might as well get up and look at it; and a nearer examination showed the brass handle to be slightly twisted, as if a powerful hand had wrenched it out of shape. The Doctor, taking hold of the handle to pull it straight, drew the drawer out, and scattered its contents upon the floor; also the contents of the inner drawer, and amongst them the cheque-book, half-a-dozen leaves of which had been torn out.
"So," said the Doctor, "this man, whom I trusted, has broken open my desk, and finding no money, he has taken blank cheques, in the hope of being able to forge my name. To think that I did not know this man!"
To think that you did not, Doctor; to think, too, that you do not even now, perhaps, know half this man may have been capable of.
But it was time for action, not reflection; so the Doctor hurried to the railway station, and telegraphed to his bankers in London to stop any cheques presented in his signature, and to have the person presenting such cheques immediately arrested. From the railway station he hurried, in an undignified perspiration, to the police-office, to institute a search for the missing Jabez, and then returned home, striking terror into the hearts of his household, ay, even to the soul of his daughter, the lovely Jane, who took an extra dose of sal-volatile, and went to bed to read "Lady Clarinda, or the Heart-breaks of Belgravia."
With the deepening twilight came a telegraphic message from the bank to say that cheques for divers sums had been presented and cashed by different people in the course of the day. On the heels of this message came another from the police-station, announcing that a body had been found upon Halford Heath answering to the description of the missing man.
The bewildered schoolmaster, hastening to the station, recognises, at a glance, the features of his late assistant. The contents of the dead man's pocket, the empty bottle with the too significant label, are shown him. No, some other hand than the usher's must have broken open the desk in the study, and the unfortunate young man's reputation had been involved in a strange coincidence. But the motive for his rash act? That is explained by a most affecting letter in the dead man's hand, which is found in his desk. It is addressed to the Doctor, expresses heartfelt gratitude for that worthy gentleman's past kindnesses, and hints darkly at a hopeless attachment to his daughter, which renders the writer's existence a burden too heavy for him to bear. For the rest, Jabez North has passed a threshold, over which the boldest and most inquisitive scarcely care to follow him. So he takes his own little mystery with him into the land of the great mystery.
There is, of course, an inquest, at which two different chemists, who sold laudanum to Jabez North on the night before his disappearance, give their evidence. There is another chemist, who deposes to having sold him, a day or two before, a bottle of patent hair-dye, which is also a poisonous compound; but surely he never could have thought of poisoning himself with hair-dye.
The London police are at fault in tracing the presenters of the cheques; and the proprietors of the bank, or the clerks, who maintain a common fund to provide against their own errors, are likely to be considerable losers. In the mean while the worthy Doctor announces, by advertisements in the Slopperton papers, that "his pupils assemble on the 27th of July."
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