The Trail of the Serpent Part 3

Book the Fifth.
THE DUMB DETECTIVE.

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Chapter I.
The Count de Marolles at Home.

The denizens of Friar Street and such localities, being in the habit of waking in the morning to the odour of melted tallow and boiling soap, and of going to sleep at night with the smell of burning bones under their noses, can of course have nothing of an external nature in common with the inhabitants of Park Lane and its vicinity; for the gratification of whose olfactory nerves exotics live short and unnatural lives, on staircases, in boudoirs, and in conservatories of rich plate-glass and fairy architecture, where perfumed waters play in gilded fountains through the long summer days.

It might be imagined, then, that the common griefs and vulgar sorrows—such as hopeless love and torturing jealousy, sickness, or death, or madness, or despair—would be also banished from the regions of Park Lane, and entirely confined to the purlieus of Friar Street. Any person with a proper sense of the fitness of things would of course conclude this to be the case, and would as soon picture my lady the Duchess of Mayfair dining on red herrings and potatoes at the absurd hour of one o'clock p.m., or blackleading her own grate with her own alabaster fingers, as weeping over the death of her child, or breaking her heart for her faithless husband, just like Mrs. Stiggins, potato and coal merchant on a small scale, or Mrs. Higgins, whose sole revenues come from "Mangling done here."

And it does seem hard, oh my brethren, that there should be any limit to the magic power of gold! It may exclude bad airs, foul scents, ugly sights, and jarring sounds; it may surround its possessors with beauty, grace, art, luxury, and so-called pleasure; but it cannot shut out death or care; for to these stern visitors Mayfair and St. Giles's must alike open their reluctant doors whenever the dreaded guests may be pleased to call.

You do not send cards for your morning concerts, or fêtes champêtres, or thés dansantes, to Sorrow or Sadness, oh noble ​duchesses and countesses; but have you never seen their faces in the crowd when you least looked to meet them?

Through the foliage and rich blossoms in the conservatory, and through the white damask curtains of the long French window, the autumn sunshine comes with subdued light into a boudoir on the second floor of a large house in Park Lane. The velvet-pile carpets in this room and the bedchamber and dressing room adjoining, are made in imitation of a mossy ground on which autumn leaves have fallen; so exquisite, indeed, is the design, that it is difficult to think that the light breeze which enters at the open window cannot sweep away the fragile leaf, which seems to flutter in the sun. The walls are of the palest cream-colour, embellished with enamelled portraits of Louis the Sixteenth, Marie Antoinette, Madame Elizabeth, and the unfortunate boy prisoner of the Temple, let into the oval panels on the four sides of the room. Everything in this apartment, though perfect in form and colour, is subdued and simple; there are none of the buhl and marqueterie cabinets, the artificial flowers, ormolu clocks, French prints, and musical boxes which might adorn the boudoir of an opera-dancer or the wife of a parvenu. The easy-chairs and luxurious sofas are made of a polished white wood, and are covered with white damask. On the marble mantelpiece there are two or three vases of the purest and most classical forms; and these, with Canovo's bust of Napoleon, are the only ornaments in the room. Near the fireplace, in which burns a small fire, there is a table loaded with books, French, English, and German, the newest publications of the day; but they are tossed in a great heap, as if they had one by one been looked at and cast aside unread. By this table there is a lady seated, whose beautiful face is rendered still more striking by the simplicity of her black dress.

This lady is Valerie de Lancy, now Countess de Marolles; for Monsieur Marolles has expended some part of his wife's fortune upon certain estates in the south of France which give him the title of Count de Marolles.

A lucky man, this Raymond Marolles. A beautiful wife, a title, and an immense fortune are no such poor prizes in the lottery of life. But this Raymond is a man who likes to extend his possessions; and in South America he has established himself as a banker on a large scale, and he has lately come over to England with his wife and son, for the purpose of establishing a branch of this bank in London. Of course, a man with his aristocratic connections and enormous fortune is respected and trusted throughout the continent of South America.

Eight years have taken nothing from the beauty of Valerie de Marolles. The dark eyes have the same fire, the proud head the same haughty grace; but alone and in repose the face has a ​shadow of deep and settled sadness that is painful to look upon, for it is the gloomy sadness of despair. The world in which this woman lives, which knows her only as the brilliant, witty, vivacious, and sparkling Parisian, little dreams that she talks because she dare not think; that she is restless and vivacious because she dare not be still; that she hurries from place to place in pursuit of pleasure and excitement because only in excitement, and in a life which is as false and hollow as the mirth she assumes, can she fly from the phantom which pursues her. O shadow that will not be driven away! O pale and pensive ghost, that rises before us in every hour and in every scene, to mock the noisy and tumultuous revelry which, by the rule of opposites, we call Pleasure!—which of us is free from your haunting presence, phantom, whose name is The Past?

Valerie is not alone; a little boy, between seven and eight years of age, is standing at her knee, reading aloud to her from a book of fables.

"A frog beheld an ox——" he began. But as he read the first words the door of the boudoir opened, and a gentleman entered, whose pale fair face, blue eyes, light eyelashes, and dark hair and eyebrows proclaimed him to be the husband of Valerie.

"Ah," he said, glancing with a sneer at the boy, who lifted his dark eyes for a moment, and then dropped them on his book with an indifference that bespoke little love for the new-comer, "you are teaching your child, madame. Teaching him to read? Is not that an innovation? The boy has a fine voice, and the ear of a maestro. Let him learn the solfeggi, and very likely one of these days he will be as great a man as——"

Valerie looks at him with the old contempt, the old icy coldness in her face. "Do you want anything of me this morning, monsieur?" she asked.

"No, madame. Having the entire command of your fortune, what can I ask? A smile? Nay, madame; you keep your smiles for your son; and again, they are so cheap in London, the smiles of beauty."

"Then, monsieur, since you require nothing at my hands, may I ask why you insult me with your presence?"

"You teach your son to respect—his father, madame," said Raymond with a sneer, throwing himself into an easy-chair opposite Valerie. "You set the future Count de Marolles a good example. He will be a model of filial piety, as you are of——"

"Do not fear, Monsieur de Marolles, but that one day I shall teach my son to respect his father; fear rather lest I teach him to avenge——"

"Nay, madame, it is for you to fear that."

​During the whole of this brief dialogue, the little boy has held his mother's hand, looking with his serious eyes anxiously in her face. Young as he is, there is a courage in his glance and a look of firmness in his determined under-lip that promises well for the future. Valerie turns from the cynical face of her husband, and lays a caressing hand on the boy's dark ringlets. Do those ringlets remind her of any other dark hair? Do any other eyes look out in the light of those she gazes at now?

"You were good enough to ask me just now, madame, the purport of my visit; your discrimination naturally suggesting to you that there is nothing so remarkably attractive in the society to be found in these apartments, infantine lectures in words of one syllable included"—he glances towards the boy as he speaks, and the cruel blue eyes are never so cruel as when they look that way—"as to induce me to enter them without some purpose or other."

"Perhaps monsieur will be so good as to be brief in stating that purpose? He may imagine, that being entirely devoted to my son, I do not choose to have his studies, or even his amusements, interrupted."

"You bring up young Count Almaviva like a prince, madame. It is something to have good blood in one's veins, even on one side——"

If she could have killed him with a look of those bright dark eyes, he would have fallen dead as he spoke the words that struck one by one at her broken heart. He knew his power; he knew wherein it lay, and how to use it—and he loved to wound her; because, though he had won wealth and rank from her, he had never conquered her, and he felt that even in her despair she defied him.

"You are irrelevant, monsieur. Pray be so kind as to say what brought you here, where I would not insult your good sense by saying you are a welcome visitor."

"Briefly then, madame. Our domestic arrangements do not please me. We are never known to quarrel, it is true; but we are rarely seen to address each other, and we are not often seen in public together. Very well this in South America, where we were king and queen of our circle—here it will not do. To say the least, it is mysterious. The fashionable world is scandalous. People draw inferences—monsieur docs not love madame, and he married her for her money; or, on the other hand, madame does not love monsieur, but married him because she had some powerful motive for so doing. This will not do, countess. A banker must be respectable, or people may be afraid to trust him. I must be, what I am now called, 'the eminent banker;' and I must be universally trusted."

"That you may the better betray, monsieur; that is the motive ​for winning people's confidence, in your code of moral economy, is it not?"

"Madame is becoming a logician; her argument by induction does her credit."

"But, your business, monsieur?"

"Was to signify my wish, madame, that we should be seen oftener together in public. The Italian Opera, now, madame, though you have so great a distaste for it—a distaste which, by-the-bye, you did not possess during the early period of your life—is a very popular resort. All the world will be there to-night, to witness the début of a singer of continental celebrity. Perhaps you will do me the honour to accompany me there?"

"I do not take any interest, monsieur——"

"In the fortunes of tenor singers. Ah, how completely we outlive the foolish fancies of our youth! But you will occupy the box on the grand tier of her Majesty's Theatre, which I have taken for the season. It is to your son's—to Cherubino's interest, for you to comply with my request." He glances towards the boy once more, with a sneer on his thin lips, and then turns and bows to Valerie, as he says—

"Au revoir, madame. I shall order the carriage for eight o'clock."

A horse, which at a sale at Tattersall's had attracted the attention of all the votaries of the Corner, for the perfection of his points and the enormous price which he realized, caracoles before the door, under the skilful horsemanship of a well-trained and exquisitely-appointed groom. Another horse, equally high-bred, waits for his rider, the Count de Marolles. The groom dismounts, and holds the bridle, as the gentleman emerges from the door and springs into the saddle. A consummate horseman the Count de Marolle; a handsome man too, in spite of the restless and shifting blue eyes and the thin nervous lips. His dress is perfect, just keeping pace with the fashion sufficiently to denote high ton in the wearer, without outstripping it, so as to stamp him a parvenu. It has that elegant and studious grace which, to a casual observer, looks like carelessness, but which is in reality the perfection of the highest art of all—the art of concealing art.

It is only twelve o'clock, and there are not many people of any standing in Piccadilly this September morning; but of the few gentlemen on horseback who pass Monsieur de Marolles, the most aristocratic-looking bow to him. He is well known in the great world as the eminent banker, the owner of a superb house in Park Lane. He possesses a man cook of Parisian renown, who wears the cross of the Legion of Honour, given him by the first Napoleon on the occasion of a dinner at Talleyrand's. He has estates in South America and in France; a fortune, said to ​be boundless, and a lovely wife. For the rest, if his own patent of nobility is of rather fresh date, and if, as impertinent people say, he never had a grandfather, or indeed anything in the way of a father to speak of, it must be remembered that great men, since the days of mythic history, have been celebrated for being born in rather an accidental manner.

But why a banker? Why, possessed of an enormous fortune, try to extend that fortune by speculation? That question lies between Raymond de Marolles and his conscience. Perhaps there are no bounds to the ambition of this man, who entered Paris eight years ago an obscure adventurer, and who, according to some accounts, is now a millionaire.

 Chapter II.

Mr. Peters sees a Ghost.

Mr. Peters, pensioned off by Richard's mother with an income of a hundred pounds a year, has taken and furnished for himself a small house in a very small square not far from Mr. Darley's establishment, and rejoicing in the high-sounding address of Wellington Square, Waterloo Road. Having done this, he feels that he has nothing more to do in life than to retire upon his laurels, and enjoy the otium cum dignitate which he has earned so well.

Of course Mr. Peters, as a single man, cannot by any possibility do for himself; and as—having started an establishment of his own—he is no longer in a position to be taken in and done for, the best thing he can do is to send for Kuppins; accordingly he does send for Kuppins.

Kuppins is to be cook, housekeeper, laundress, and parlour-maid all in one; and she is to have ten pounds per annum, and her tea, sugar, and beer—wages only known in Slopperton in very high and aristocratic families where footmen are kept and no followers or Sundays out allowed.

So Kuppins comes to London, bringing the "fondling" with her; and arriving at the Euston Square station at eight o'clock in the evening, is launched into the dazzlingly bewildering gaiety of the New Road.

Well, it is not paved with gold certainly, this marvellous city; and it is, maybe, on the whole, just a little muddy. But oh, the shops—what emporiums of splendour! What delightful excitement in being nearly run over every minute!—to say nothing of that delicious chance of being knocked down by the crowd which is collected round a drunken woman expostulating with a policeman. Of course there must be a general election, or a great fire, or a man hanging, or a mad ox at large, or a murder just committed in the next street, or something wonderful going on, ​or there never could be such crowds of excited pedestrians, and such tearing and rushing, and smashing of cabs, carts, omnibuses, and parcel-delivery vans, all of them driven by charioteers in the last stage of insanity, and drawn by horses as wild as that time-honoured steed employed in the artistic and poetical punishment of our old friend Mazeppa. Tottenham Court Road! What a magnificent promenade! Occupied, of course, by the houses of the nobility! And is that magnificent establishment with the iron shutters Buckingham Palace or the Tower of London? Kuppins inclines to thinking it must be the Tower of London, because the iron shutters look so warlike, and are evidently intended as a means of defence in case of an attack from the French.

Kuppins is told by her escort, Mr. Peters, that this is the emporium of Messrs. Shoolbred, haberdashers and linen-drapers. She thinks she must be dreaming, and wants to be pinched and awakened before she proceeds any further. It is rather a trying journey for Mr. Peters; for Kuppins wants to stop the cab every twenty yards or so, to get out and look at something in this wonderful Tottenham Court Road.

But the worst of Kuppins, perhaps, is, that she has almost an insane desire to see that Tottenham Court whence Tottenham Court Road derives its name; and when told that there is no such place, and never was—leastways, never as Mr. Peters heard of—she begins to think London, in spite of all its glories, rather a take-in. Then, again, Kuppins is very much disappointed at not passing either Westminster Abbey or the Bank of England, which she had made up her mind were both situated at Charing Cross; and it was a little trying for Mr. Peters to be asked whether every moderate-sized church they passed was St. Paul's Cathedral, or every little bit of dead wall Newgate. To go over a bridge, and for it not to be London Bridge, but Waterloo Bridge, was in itself a mystery; but to be told that the Shot Tower on the Surrey side was not the Monument was too bewildering for endurance. As to the Victoria Theatre, which was illuminated to such a degree that the box-entrance seemed as a pathway to fairyland, Kuppins was so thoroughly assured in her own mind of its being Drury Lane and nothing else, unless, perhaps, the Houses of Parliament or Covent Garden—that no protestations on Mr. Peters's fingers could root out the fallacy.

But the journey came to an end at last; and Kuppins, safe with bag and baggage at No. 17, Wellington Square, partook of real London saveloys and real London porter with Mr. Peters and the "fondling," in an elegant front parlour, furnished with a brilliantly polished but rather rickety Pembroke table, that was covered with a Royal Stuart plaid woollen cloth; half-a-dozen cane-seated chairs, so new and highly polished as to be ​apt to adhere to the garments of the person who so little understood their nature or properties as to attempt to sit upon them; a Kidderminster carpet, the pattern of which was of the size adapted to the requirements of a town hall, but which looked a little disproportionate to Mr. Peters's apartment, two patterns and a quarter stretching the entire length of the room; and a mantelpiece ornamented with a looking-glass divided into three compartments by gilded Corinthian pillars, and further adorned with two black velvet kittens, one at each corner, and a particoloured velvet boy on a brown velvet donkey in the centre.

The next morning Mr. Peters announced his intention of taking the "fondling" into the city of London, for the purpose of showing him the outside of St. Paul's, the Monument, Punch and Judy, and other intellectual exhibitions adapted to his tender years. Kuppins was for starting then and there on a visit to the pig-faced lady, than which magnificent creature she could not picture any greater wonder in the whole metropolis; but Kuppins had to stay at home in her post of housekeeper, and to inspect and arrange the domestic machinery of No. 17, Wellington Square. So the "fondling," being magnificently arrayed in a clean collar and a pair of boots that were too small for him, took hold of his protector's hand, and they sallied forth.

If anything, Punch and Judy bore off the palm in this young gentleman's judgment of the miracles of the big village.

It was not so sublime a sight, perhaps, as the outside of St. Paul's; but, on the other hand, it was a great deal cleaner; and the "fondling" would have liked to have seen Sir Christopher Wren's masterpiece picked out with a little fresh paint before he was called upon to admire it. The Monument, no doubt, was very charming in the abstract; but unless he could have been perpetually on the top of it, and perpetually within a hair's breadth of precipitating himself on to the pavement below, it wasn't very much in his way. But Punch, with his delightfully original style of elocution, his overpoweringly comic domestic passages with Judy, and the dolefully funny dog with a frill round his neck and an evident dislike for his profession—this, indeed, was an exhibition to be seen continually, and to be more admired the more continually seen, as no doubt the "fondling" would have said had he been familiar with Dr. Johnson, which, it is to be hoped, for his own peace of mind, he wasn't.

It is rather a trying day for Mr. Peters, and he is not sorry when, at about four o'clock in the afternoon, he has taken the "fondling" all round the Bank of England—(that young gentleman insisting on peering in at the great massive windows, in the fond hope of seeing the money)—and has shown him the broad back of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, and the ​Clearing-house, and they are going out of Lombard Street, on their way to an omnibus which will take them home. But just as they are leaving the street the "fondling" makes a dead stop, and constrains Mr. Peters to do the same.

Standing before the glass doors of a handsome building, which a brass plate announces to be the "Anglo-Spanish-American Bank," are two horses, and a groom in faultless buckskins and tops. He is evidently waiting for some one within the bank, and the "fondling" vehemently insists upon waiting too, to see the gentleman get on horseback. The good-natured detective consents; and they loiter about the pavement for some time before the glass doors are flung open by a white-neckclothed clerk, and a gentleman of rather foreign appearance emerges therefrom.

There is nothing particularly remarkable in this gentleman. The fit of his pale lavender gloves is certainly exquisite; the style of his dress is a recommendation to his tailor; but what there is in his appearance to occasion Mr. Peters's holding on to a lamp-post it is difficult to say. But Mr. Peters did certainly cling to the nearest lamp-post, and did certainly turn as white as the whitest sheet of paper that ever came out of a stationer's shop. The elegant-looking gentleman, who was no other than the Count de Marolles, had better occupation for his bright blue eyes than the observation of such small deer as Mr. Peters and the "fondling." He mounted his horse, and rode slowly away, quite unconscious of the emotion his appearance had occasioned in the breast of the detective. No sooner had he done so, than Mr. Peters, relinquishing the lamp-post and clutching the astonished "fondling," darted after him. In a moment he was in the crowded thoroughfare before Guildhall. An empty cab passed close to them. He hailed it with frantic gesticulations, and sprang in, still holding the "fondling." The Count de Marolles had to rein-in his horse for a moment from the press of cabs and omnibuses; and at Mr. Peters's direction the "fondling" pointed him out to the cabman, with the emphatic injunction to "follow that gent, and not to lose sight of him nohow." The charioteer gives a nod, cracks his whip, and drives slowly after the equestrian, who has some difficulty in making his way through Cheapside. The detective, whose complexion still wears a most striking affinity to writing-paper, looks out of the window, as if he thought the horseman they are following would melt into thin air, or go down a trap in St. Paul's Churchyard. The "fondling" follows his protector's eyes with his eyes, then looks back at Mr. Peters, and evidently does not know what to make of the business. At last his patron draws his head in at the window, and expresses himself upon his fingers thus—

"How can it be him, when he's dead?"

​This is beyond the "fondling's" comprehension, who evidently doesn't understand the drift of the query, and as evidently doesn't altogether like it, for he says,

"Don't! Come, I say, don't, now."

"How can it be him," continues Mr. Peters, enlarging upon the question, "when I found him dead myself out upon that there heath, and took him back to the station, and afterwards see him buried, which would have been between four cross roads with a stake druv' through him if he'd poisoned himself fifty years ago?"

This rather obscure speech is no more to the "fondling's" liking than the last, for he cries out more energetically than before, "I say, now, I tell you I don't like it, father. Don't you try it on now, please. What does it mean? Who's been dead fifty years ago, with a stake druv' through 'em, and four cross roads on a heath? Who?"

Mr. Peters puts his head out of the window, and directing the attention of the "fondling" to the elegant equestrian they are following, says, emphatically, upon his fingers,

"Him!"

"Dead, is he?" said the "fondling," clinging very close to his adopted parent. "Dead! and very well he looks, considerin'; but," he continued, in an awful and anxious whisper, "where's the stake and the four cross roads as was druv' through him? Does he wear that 'ere loose coat to hide 'em?"

Mr. Peters didn't answer this inquiry, but seemed to be ruminating, and, if one may be allowed the expression, thought aloud upon his fingers, as it was his habit to do at times.

"There couldn't be two men so much alike, surely. That one I found dead was the one I saw at the public talkin' to the young woman; and if so, this is another one, for that one was dead as sure as eggs is eggs. When eggs ceases to be eggs, which," continued Mr. Peters, discoursively, "considerin' they're sellin' at twenty for a shilling, French, and dangerous, if you're not partial to young parboiled chickens, is not likely yet awhile, why, then, that one I found on the heath will come to life again."

The "fondling" was too busy stretching his neck out of the window of the cab, in his eagerness to keep his eye upon the Count de Marolles, to pay any attention to Mr. Peters's fingers. The outside of St. Pauls, and the performance of Punch and Judy, were very well in their way, but they were mild dissipations indeed, compared to the delight of following a ghost which had had a stake driven through his phantasmal form and wore lavender kid gloves.

"There was one thing," continued the musing detective, "which struck me as cnrious, when I found the body of that young gent. Where was the scar from the sovering as that ​young woman throwed at him? Why nowheres! Not a trace of it to be seen, which I looked for it particular; and yet that cut wasn't one to leave a scar that would wear out in six months, nor yet in six years either. I've had my face scratched myself, though I'm a single man, and I know what that is to last, and the awkwardness one has to go through in saying one's been playing with spiteful kittens, and such-like. But what's that to a cut half a inch deep from the sharp edge of a sovering? If I could but get to see his forehead. The cut was just over his eyebrow, and I could see the mark of it with his hat on."

While Mr. Peters abandons himself to such reflections as these, the cab drives on and follows the Count de Marolles down Ludgate Hill, through Fleet Street and the Strand, Charing Cross and Pall Mall, St. James's Street and Piccadilly, till it comes up with him at the corner of Park Lane.

"This," says Mr. Peters, "is where the swells live. Very likely he hangs out here; he's a-ridin' as if he was goin' to stop presently, so we'll get out." Whereupon the "fondling" interprets to the cabman Mr. Peters's wish to that effect, and they alight from the vehicle.

The detective's surmise is correct. The Count stops, gets off his horse, and throws the reins to the groom. It happens at this very moment that an open carriage, in which two ladies are seated, passes on its way to the Grosvenor Gate. One of the ladies bows to the South-American banker, and as he lifts his hat in returning her salute, Mr. Peters, who is looking at nothing particular, sees very distinctly the scar which is the sole memorial of that public-house encounter on the banks of the Sloshy.

As Raymond throws the reins to the groom he says, "I shall not ride again to-day, Curtis. Tell Morgan to have the Countess's carriage at the door at eight for the opera."

Mr. Peters, who doesn't seem to be a person blest with the faculty of hearing, but who is, to all appearance, busily engaged in drawing the attention of the "fondling" to the architectural beauties of Grosvenor Gate, may nevertheless take due note of this remark.

The elegant banker ascends the steps of his house, at the hall-door of which stand gorgeous and obsequious flunkeys, whose liveries and legs alike fill with admiration the juvenile mind of the "fondling."

Mr. Peters is very grave for some time, as they walk away; but at last, when they have got halfway down Piccadilly, he has recourse once more to his fingers, and addresses his young friend thus:

"What did you think of him, Slosh?"

"Which," says the "fondling;" "the cove in the red velvet breeches as opened the door, or the swell ghost?"

​"The swell."

"Well, I think he's uncommon handsome, and very easy in his manners, all things taken into consideration," said that elderly juvenile with deliberation.

"Oh, you do, do you, Slosh?"

Slosh repeats that he does.

Mr. Peters's gravity increases every moment. "Oh, you do, do you, Slosh?" he asks again, and again the boy answers. At last, to the considerable inconvenience of the passers-by, the detective makes a dead stop, and says, "I'm glad you think him han'some, Slosh; and I'm glad you thinks him easy, which, all things considered, he is, uncommon. In fact, I'm glad he meets your views as far as personal appearance goes, because, between you and me, Slosh, that man's your father."

It is the boy's turn to hold on to the lamp-post now. To have a ghost for a father, and, as Slosh afterwards remarked, "a ghost as wears polishy boots, and lives in Park Lane, too," was enough to take the breath out of any boy, however preternaturally elderly and superhumanly sharp his police-office experiences may have made him. On the whole, the "fondling" bears the shock very well, shakes off the effect of the information, and is ready for more in a minute.

"I wouldn't have you mention it just now, you know, Slosh," continues Mr. Peters, "because we don't know what he may turn out, and whether he may quite answer our purpose in the parental line. There's a little outstanding matter between me and him that I shall have to look him up for. I may want your help; and if I do, you'll give it faithful, won't you, Slosh?"

"Of course I will," said that young gentleman. "Is there any reward out for him, father?" He always called Mr. Peters father, and wasn't prepared to change his habit in deference to any ghostly phenomenon in the way of a parent suddenly turning up in Lombard Street. "Is there any reward out for him?" he asks, eagerly; "bankers is good for something in the levanting line, I know, nowadays."

The detective looked at the boy's sharp thin features with a scrutinising glance common to men of his profession.

"Then you'll serve me faithful, if I want you, Slosh? I thought perhaps you might let family interests interfere with business, you know."

"Not a bit of it," said the youthful enthusiast. "I'd hang my grandmother for a sovering, and the pride of catching her, if she was a downy one."

"Chips of old blocks is of the same wood, and it's only reasonable there should be a similarity in the grain," mused Mr. Peters; as he and the "fondling" rode home in an omnibus. "I thought I'd make him a genius, but I didn't know there ​was such a under-current of his father. It'll make him the glory of his profession. Soft-heartedness has been the ruin of many a detective as has had the brains to work out a deep-laid game, but not the heart to carry it through."

Chapter III.
The Cherokees mark their Man.

Her Majesty's Theatre is peculiarly brilliant this evening. Diamonds and beauty, in tier above tier, look out from the amber-curtained boxes. The stalls are full, and the pit is crammed. In fop's alley there is scarcely standing room; indeed, one gentleman remarks to another, that if Pandemonium is equally hot and crowded, he will turn Methodist parson in his old age, and give his mind to drinking at tea-meetings.

The gentleman who makes this remark is neither more nor less than a distinguished member of the "Cheerfuls," the domino-player alluded to some chapters back.

He is standing talking to Richard; and to see him now, with an opera-glass in his hand, his hair worn in a manner conforming with the usages of society, and only in a modified degree suggesting that celebrated hero of the Newgate calendar and modern romance, Mr. John Sheppard, a dress-coat, patent leather boots, and the regulation white waistcoat, you would think he had never been tipsy or riotous in his life.

This gentleman is Mr. Percy Cordonner. All the Cherokees are more or less literary, and all the Cherokees have, more or less, admission to every place of entertainment, from Her Majesty's Theatre to the meetings of the members of the "P.R." But what brings Richard to the Opera to-night? and who is that not very musical-looking little gentleman at his elbow?

"Will they all be here?" asked Dick of Mr. Cordonner.

"Every one of them; unless Splitters is unable to tear himself away from his nightly feast of blood and blue fire at the Vic. His piece has been performed fourteen times, and it's my belief he's been at every representation; and that he tears his hair when the actors leave out the gems of the dialogue and drop their h's. They do drop their h's over the water," he continues, lapsing into a reverie; "when our compositors are short of type, they go over and sweep them up."

"You're sure they'll be here, then, Percy?"

"Every one of them, I tell you. I'm whipper-in. They're to meet at the oyster shop in the Haymarket; you know the place, where there's a pretty girl and fresh Colchesters, don't ​charge you anything extra for the lemon, and you can squeeze her hand when she gives you the change. They're sure to come in here two at a time, and put their mark upon the gentleman in question. Is he in the house yet, old fellow?"

Richard turns to the quiet little man at his elbow, who is our old friend Mr. Peters, and asks him a question: he only shakes his head in reply.

"No, he's not here yet," says Dick; "let's have a look at the stage, and see what sort of stuff this Signor Mosquetti is made of."

"I shall cut him up, on principle," says Percy; "and the better he is, the more I shall cut him up, on another principle."

There is a great deal of curiosity about this new tenor of continental celebrity. The opera is the Lucia, and the appearance of Edgardo is looked forward to with anxiety. Presently the hero of the square-cut coat and jack-boots enters. He is a handsome fellow, with a dark southern face, and an easy insouciant manner. His voice is melody itself; the rich notes roll out in a flood of sweetness, without the faintest indication of effort. Though Richard pretends to look at the stage, though perhaps he does try to direct his attention that way, his pale face, his wandering glance, and his restless under-lip, show him to be greatly agitated. He is waiting for that moment when the detective shall say to him, "There is the murderer of your uncle. There is the man for whose guilt you have suffered, and must suffer, till he is brought to justice." The first act of the opera seemed endless to Daredevil Dick; while his philosophical friend, Mr. Cordonner, looked on as coolly as he would have done at an earthquake, or the end of the world, or any other trifling event of that nature.

The curtain has fallen upon the first act, when Mr. Peters lays his hand on Richard's arm and points to a box on the grand tier.

A gentleman and lady, and a little boy, have just taken their seats. The gentleman, as becomes him, sits with his back to the stage and faces the house. He lifts his opera-glass to take a leisurely survey of the audience. Percy puts his glass into Richard's hand, and with a hearty "Courage, old boy!" watches him as he looks for the first time at his deadliest enemy.

And is that calm, aristocratic, and serene face the face of a murderer? The shifting blue eyes and the thin arched lips are not discernible from this distance; but through the glass the general effect of the face is very plainly seen, and there is no fear that Richard will fail to know its owner again, whenever and wherever he may meet him.

Mr. Cordonner, after a deliberate inspection of the personal ​attractions of the Count de Marolles, remarks, with less respect than indifference.

"Well, the beggar is by no means bad-looking, but he looks a determined scoundrel. He'd make a first-rate light-comedy villain for a Porte-St.-Martin drama. I can imagine him in Hessian boots poisoning all his relations, and laughing at the police when they come to arrest him."

"Shall you know him again, Percy?" asks Richard.

"Among an army of soldiers, every one of them dressed in the same uniform," replies his friend. "There's something unmistakable about that pale thin face. I'll go and bring the other fellows in, that they may all be able to swear to him when they see him."

In groups of two and three the Cherokees strolled into the pit, and were conducted by Mr. Cordonner—who, to serve a friend, could, on a push, be almost active—to the spot where Richard and the detective stood. One after another they took a long look, through the most powerful glass they could select, at the tranquil features of Victor de Marolles.

Little did that gentleman dream of this amateur band of police, formed for the special purpose of the detection of the crime he was supposed to have committed.

One by one the "Cheerfuls" register the Count's handsome face upon their memories, and with a hearty shake of the hand each man declares his willingness to serve Richard whenever and wherever he may see a chance, however faint or distant, of so doing.

And all this time the Count is utterly unmoved. Not quite so unmoved though, when, in the second act, he recognizes in the Edgardo—the new tenor, the hero of the night—his old acquaintance of the Parisian Italian Opera, the chorus-singer and mimic, Monsieur Paul Moucée. This skilful workman does not care about meeting with a tool which, once used, were better thrown aside and for ever done away with. But this Signor Paolo Mosquetti is neither more nor less than the slovenly, petit-verre-drinking, domino-playing chorus-singer, at a salary of thirty francs a-week. His genius, which enabled him to sing an aria in perfect imitation of the fashionable tenor of the day, has also enabled him, with a little industry, and a little less wine-drinking and gambling, to become a fashionable tenor himself, and Milan, Naples, Vienna, and Paris testify to his triumphs.

And all this time Valerie de Marolles looks on a stage such as that on which, years ago, she so often saw the form she loved. That faint resemblance, that likeness in his walk, voice, and manner, which Moucée has to Gaston de Lancy strikes her very forcibly. It is no great likeness, except when the mimic is ​bent on representing the man he resembles; then, indeed, as we know, it is remarkable. But at any time it is enough to strike a bitter pang to this bereaved and remorseful heart, which in every dream and every shadow is only too apt to recall that unforgotten past.

The Cherokees meanwhile express their sentiments pretty freely about Monsieur Raymond de Marolles, and discuss divers schemes for the bringing of him to justice. Splitters, whose experiences as a dramatic writer suggested to him every possible kind of mode but a natural one, proposed that Richard should wait upon the Count, when convenient, at the hour of midnight, disguised as his uncle's ghost, and confound the villain in the stronghold of his crime—meaning Park Lane. This sentence was verbatim from a playbill, as well as the whole very available idea; Mr. Splitters's notions of justice being entirely confined to the retributive or poetical, in the person of a gentleman with a very long speech and two pistols.

"The Smasher's outside," said Percy Cordonner. "He wants to have a look at our friend as he goes out, that he may reckon him up. You'd better let him go into the Count's peepers with his left, Dick, and damage his beauty; it's the best chance you'll get."

"No, no; I tell you, Percy, that man shall stand where I stood. That man shall drink to the dregs the cup I drank, when I stood in the criminal dock at Slopperton and saw every eye turned towards me with execration and horror, and knew that my innocence was of no avail to sustain me in the good opinion of one creature who had known me from my very boyhood."

"Except the 'Cheerfuls,'" said Percy. "Don't forget the 'Cheerfuls.'"

"When I do, I shall have forgotten all on this side of the grave, you may depend, Percy. No; I have some firm friends on earth, and here is one;" and he laid his hand on the shoulder of Mr. Peters, who still stood at his elbow.

The opera was concluded, and the Count de Marolles and his lovely wife rose to leave their box. Richard, Percy, Splitters, two or three more of the Cherokees, and Mr. Peters left the pit at the same time, and contrived to be at the box-entranco before Raymond's party came out.

At last the Count de Marolles' carriage was called; and ⟨as⟩ it drew up, Raymond descended the steps with his wife on his arm, her little boy clinging to her left hand.

"She's a splendid creature," said Percy; "but there's a spice of devilry in those glorious dark eyes. I wouldn't be her husband for a trifle, if I happened to offend her."

As the Count and Countess crossed from the doors of the ​opera-house to their carriage, a drunken man came reeling past, and before the servants or policemen standing by could interfere, stumbled against Raymond de Marolles, and in so doing knocked his hat off. He picked it up immediately, and, muttering some unintelligible apology, returned it to Raymond, looking, as he did so, very steadily in the face of M. de Marolles. The occurrence did not occupy a moment, and the Count was too finished a gentleman to make any disturbance. This man was the Smasher.

As the carriage drove off, he joined the group under the colonnade, perfectly sober by this time.

"I've had a jolly good look at him, Mr. Marwood," he said, "and I'd swear to him after forty rounds in the ring, which is apt sometimes to take a little of the Cupid out of a gent. He's not a bad-looking cove on the whole, and looks game. He's rather slight built, but he might make that up in science, and dance a pretty tidy quadrille round the chap he was put up agin, bein' active and lissom. I see the cut upon his forehead, Mr. Peters, as you told me to take notice of," he said, addressing the detective. "He didn't get that in a fair stand-up fight, leastways not from an Englishman. When you cross the water for your antagonist, you don't know what you may get."

"He got it from an Englishwoman, though," said Richard.

"Did he, now? Ah, that's the worst of the softer sect; you see. sir, you never know where they'll have you. They're awful deficient in science, to be sure; but, Lord bless you, they make it up with the will," and the Left-handed one rubbed his nose. He had been married during his early career, and was in the habit of saying that ten rounds inside the ropes was a trifle compared with one round in your own back-parlour, when your missus had got your knowledge-box in chancery against the corner of the mantelpiece, and was marking a dozen different editions of the ten commandments on your complexion with her bunch of fives.

"Come, gentlemen," said the hospitable Smasher, "what do you say to a Welsh rarebit and a bottle of bitter at my place? We're as full as we can hold down stairs, for the Finsbury Fizzer's trainer has come up from Newmarket; and his backers is hearin' anecdotes of his doings for the last interesting week. They talk of dropping down the river on Tuesday for the great event between him and the Atlantic Alligator, and the excitement's tremendous; our barmaid's hands is blistered with working at the engines. So come round and see the game, gentlemen; and if you've any loose cash you'd like to put upon the Fizzer I can get you decent odds, considerin' he's the favourite."

Richard shook his head. He would go home to his mother, he said; he wanted to talk to Peters about the day's work. He ​shook hands heartily with his friends, and as they strolled off to the Smasher's, walked with them as far as Charing Cross, and left them at the corner that led into quiet Spring Gardens.

In the club-room of the Cherokees that night the members renewed the oath they had taken on the night of Richard's arrival, and formally inaugurated themselves as "Daredevil Dick's secret police."

Chapter IV.
The Captain, the Chemist, and the Lascar.

In the drawing-room of a house in a small street leading out of Regent Street are assembled, the morning after this opera-house recontre, three people. It is almost difficult to imagine three persons more dissimilar than those who compose this little group. On a sofa near the open window, at which the autumn breeze comes blowing in over boxes of dusty London flowers, reclines a gentleman, whose bronzed and bearded face, and the military style even of the loose morning undress which he wears, proclaim him to be a soldier. A very handsome face it is, this soldier's, although darkened not a little by a tropical sun, and a good deal shrouded by the thick black moustache and beard which conceal the expression of the mouth, and detract from the individuality of the face. He is smoking a long cherry-stemmed pipe, the bowl of which rests on the floor. A short distance from the sofa on which he is lying, an Indian servant is seated on the carpet, who watches the bowl of the pipe, ready to replenish it the moment it fails, and every now and then glances upward to the grave face of the officer with a look of unmistakable affection in his soft black eyes.

The third occupant of the little drawing-room is a pale, thin, studious-looking man, who is seated at a cabinet in a corner away from the window, amongst papers and books, which are heaped in a chaotic pile on the floor about him. Strange books and papers these are. Mathematical charts, inscribed with figures such as perhaps neither Newton or Leplace ever dreamed of. Volumes in old worm-eaten bindings, and written in strange languages long since dead and forgotten upon this earth; but they all seem familiar to this pale student, whose blue spectacles bend over pages of crabbed Arabic as intently as the eyes of a boarding-school miss who devours the last volume of the last new novel. Now and then he scratches a few figures, or a sign in algebra, or a sentence in Arabic, on the paper before him, and then goes back to the book again, never looking up towards the smoker or his Hindoo attendant. Presently the soldier, as he ​relinquishes his pipe to the Indian to be replenished, breaks the silence.

"So the great people of London, as well as of Paris, are beginning to believe in you, Laurent?" he says.

The student lifts his head from his work, and turning the blue spectacles towards the smoker, says in his old unimpassioned manner—

"How can they do otherwise, when I tell them the truth? These," he points to the pile of books and papers at his side, "do not err: they only want to be interpreted rightly. I may have been sometimes mistaken—I have never been deceived."

"You draw nice distinctions, Blurosset."

"Not at all. If I have made mistakes in the course of my career, it has been from my own ignorance, my own powerlessness to read these aright; not from any shortcoming in the things themselves. I tell you, they do not deceive."

"But will you ever read them aright? Will you ever fathom to the very bottom this dark gulf of forgotten science?"

"Yes, I am on the right road. I only pray to live long enough to reach the end."

"And then———?"

"Then it will be within the compass of my own will to live for ever."

"Pshaw! The old story—the old delusion. How strange that the wisest on this earth should have been fooled by it!"

"Make sure that it is a delusion, before you say they were fooled by it, Captain."

"Well, my dear Blurosset, Heaven forbid that I should dispute with one so learned as you upon so obscure a subject. I am more at home holding a fort against the Indians than holding an argument against Albertus Magnus. You still, however, persist that this faithful Mujeebez here is in some manner or other linked with my destiny?"

"I do."

"And yet it is very singular! What can connect two men whose experiences in every way are so dissimilar?"

"I tell you again that he will be instrumental in confounding your enemies."

"You know who they are—or rather, who he is. I have but one."

"Not two, Captain?"

"Not two. No, Blurosset. There is but one on whom I would wreak a deep and deadly vengeance."

"And for the other?"

"Pity and forgiveness. Do not speak of that. There are some things which even now I am not strong enough to hear spoken of. That is one of them."

​"The history of your faithful Mujeebez there is a singular one, is it not?" asks the student, rising from his books, and advancing to the window.

"A very singular one. His master, an Englishman, with whom he came from Calcutta, and to whom he was devotedly attached———"

"I was indeed, sahib," said the Indian, in very good English, but with a strong foreign accent.

"This master, a rich nabob, was murdered, in the house of his sister, by his own nephew."

"Very horrible, and very unnatural! Was the nephew hung?"

"No. The jury brought in a verdict of insanity: he was sent to a madhouse, where no doubt he still remains confined⟨.⟩ Mujeebez was not present at the trial; he had escaped by a miracle with his own life; for the murderer, coming into the little room in which he slept, and finding him stirring, gave him a blow on the head, which placed him for some time in a very precarious state."

"And did you see the murderer's face, Mujeebez?" asks Monsieur Blurosset.

"No, sahib. It was dark, I could see nothing. The blow stunned me: when I recovered my senses, I was in the hospital, where I lay for months. The shock had brought on what the doctors called a nervous fever. For a long time I was utterly incapable of work; when I left the hospital I had not a friend in the world; but the good lady, the sister of my poor murdered master, gave me money to return to India, where I was kit-mutghar for some time to an English colonel, in whose household I learned the language, and whom I did not leave till I entered the service of the good Captain."

The "good Captain" laid his hand affectionately on his follower's white-turbaned head, something with the protecting gesture with which he might caress a favourite and faithful dog.

"After you had saved my life, Mujeebez," he said.

"I would have died to save it, sahib," answered the Hindoo. "A kind word sinks deep in the heart of the Indian."

"And there was no doubt of the guilt of this nephew?" asks Blurosset.

"I cannot say, sahib. I did not know the English language then; I could understand nothing told me, except my poor master's nephew was not hung, but put in a madhouse."

"Did you see him—this nephew?"

"Yes, sahib, the night before the murder. He came into the room with my master when he retired to rest. I saw him only for a minute, for I left the room as they entered."

​"Should you know him again?" inquired the student.

"Anywhere, sahib. He was a handsome young man, with dark hazel eyes and a bright smile. He did not look like a murderer."

"That is scarcely a sure rule to go by, is it, Laurent?" asks the Captain, with a bitter smile.

"I don't know. A black heart will make strange lines in the handsomest face, which are translatable to the close observer."

"Now," says the officer, rising, and surrendering his pipe to the hands of his watchful attendant—"now for my morning's ride, and you will have the place to yourself for your scientific visitors, Laurent."

"You will not go where you are likely to meet———"

"Anyone I know? No, Blurosset. The lonelier the road the better I like it. I miss the deep jungle and the tiger-hunt, eh, Mujeebez?—we miss them, do we not?"

The Hindoo's eyes brightened, as he answered eagerly, "Yes, indeed, sahib."

Captain Lansdown (that is the name of the officer) is of French extraction; he speaks English perfectly, but still with a slightly foreign accent. He has distinguished himself by his marvellous courage and military genius in the Punjaub, and is over in England on leave of absence. It is singular that so great a friendship should exist between this impetuous, danger-loving soldier, and the studious French chemist and pseudo-magician, Laurent Blurosset; but that a very firm friendship does exist between them is evident. They live in the same house; are both waited upon by Egerton Lansdown's Indian servant, and are constantly together.

Laurent Blurosset, after becoming the fashion in Paris, is now the rage in London. But he rarely stirs beyond the threshold of his own door, though his presence is eagerly sought for in scientific coteries, where opinion is still, however, divided as to whether he is a charlatan or a great man. The materialists sneer—the spiritualists believe. His disinterestedness, at any rate, speaks in favour of his truth. He will receive no money from any of his numerous visitors. He will serve them, he says, if he can, but he will not sell the wisdom of the mighty dead; for that is something too grand and solemn to be made a thing of barter. His discoveries in chemistry have made him sufficiently rich; and he can afford to devote himself to science, in the hope of finding truth for his reward. He asks no better recompense than the glory of the light he seeks. We leave him, then, to his eager and inquisitive visitors, while the Captain rides slowly through Oxford Street, on his way to the Edgware Road, through which he emerges into the country.

Chapter V.
The New Milkman in Park Lane.

The post of kitchenmaid in the household of the Count de Marolles is no unimportant one, and Mrs. Moper is accounted a person of some consequence in the servants' hall. The French chef, who has his private sitting-room, wherein he works elaborate and scientific culinary combinations, which, when he condescends to talk English, he designates "plates," has of course very little communication with the household. Mrs. Moper is his prime minister; he gives his orders to her for execution, and throws himself back in his easy-chair to think out a dish, while his handmaiden collects for him the vulgar elements of his noble art. Mrs. Moper is a very good cook herself; and when she leaves the Count de Marolles she will go into a family where there is no foreigner kept, and will have forty pounds per annum and a still-room of her own. She is in the caterpillar stage now, Mrs. Sarah Moper, and is content to write herself down kitchenmaid ad interim.

The servants'-hall dinner and the housekeeper's repast are both over; but the preparations for the dinner have not yet begun, and Mrs. Moper and Liza, the scullerymaid, snatch half-an-hour's calm before the coming storm, and sit down to darn stockings,—

"Which," Mrs. Moper says, "my toes is through and my heels is out, and never can I get the time to set a stitch. For time there isn't any in this house for a under-servant, which under-servant I will be no more than one year longer; or say my name's not Sarah Moper."

Liza, who is mending a black stocking with white thread (and a very fanciful effect it has too), evidently has no wish to dispute such a proposition.

"Indeed, Mrs. Moper," she said, "that's the truest word as ever you've spoke. It's well for them as takes their wages for wearin' silk gowns, and oilin' of their hair, and lookin' out of winder to watch the carriages go in at Grosvenor Gate; which, don't tell me as Life Guardsmen would look up imperdent, if they hadn't been looked down to likewise." Eliza gets rather obscure here. "This 'ouse, Mrs. M., for upper-servants may be 'eaven, but for unders it's more like the place as is pronounced like a letter of the alphabet, and isn't to be named by me."

There is no knowing how far this rather revolutionary style of conversation might have gone, for at this moment there came that familiar sound of the clink of milk-pails on the pavement above, and the London cry of milk.

"It's Bugden with the milk, Liza; there was a pint of cream ​wrong in the last bill, Mrs. Mellflower says. Ask him to come down and correctify it, will you, Liza?"

Liza ascends the area steps and parleys with the milkman; presently he comes jingling down, with his pails swinging against the railings; he is rather awkward with his pails, this milkman, and I'm afraid he must spill more milk than he sells, as the Park Lane pavements testify.

"It isn't Bugden," says Liza, explanatory, as she ushers him into the kitchen. "Bugden 'as 'urt his leg, a-milkin' a cow wot kicks when the flies worrits, and 'as sent this young man, as is rather new to the business, but is anxious to do his best."

The new milkman enters the kitchen as she concludes her speech, and releasing himself from the pails, expresses his readiness to settle any mistake in the weekly bill.

He is rather a good-looking fellow, this milkman, and he has a very curly head of flaxen hair, preposterously light eyebrows, and dark hazel eyes, which form rather a piquant contrast. I don't suppose Mrs. Moper and Liza think him bad-looking, for they beg him to sit down, and the scullerymaid thrusts the black stocking, on which she was heretofore engaged, into a table-drawer, and gives her hair a rapid extemporary smoothing with the palms of her hands. Mr. Bugden's man seems by no means disinclined for a little friendly chat: he tells them how new he is to the business; how he thinks he should scarcely have chosen cowkeeping for his way of life, if he'd known as much about it as he does now; how there's many things in the milk business, such as horses' brains, warm water and treacle, and such-like, as goes against his conscience; how he's quite new to London and London ways, having come up only lately from the country.

"Whereabouts in the country?" Mrs. Moper asks.

"Berkshire," the young man replies.

"Lor'," Mrs. Moper says, "never was any thing so remarkable. Poor Moper come from Berkshire, and knowed every inch of the country, and so I think do I, pretty well. What part of Berkshire, Mr.— Mr.———?"

"Volpes," suggested the young man.

"What part of Berkshire, Mr. Volpes?"

Mr. Volpes looks, strange to say, rather at a loss to answer this very natural and simple inquiry. He looks at Mrs. Moper, then at Liza, and lastly at the pails. The pails seem to assist his memory, for he says, very distinctly, "Burley Scuffers."

It is Mrs. Moper's turn to look puzzled now, and she exclaims "Burley———"

"Scuffers," replies the young man. "Burley Scuffers, market town, fourteen miles on this side of Reading. The 'Chicories,' Sir Yorrick Tristram's place, is a mile and a half out of the town."

​There's no disputing such an accurate and detailed description as this. Mrs. Moper says it's odd, all the times she's been to Reading—"which I wish I had as many sovereigns," she mutters in parenthesis—never did she remember passing through "Burley Scuffers."

"It's a pretty little town, too," says the milkman; "there's a lime-tree avenue just out of the High Street, called Pork-butchers' Walk, as is crowded with young people of a Sunday evening after church."

Mrs. Moper is quite taken with this description; and says, the very next time she goes to Reading to see poor Moper's old mother, she will make a point of going to Burley Scuffers during her stay.

Mr. Volpes says, he would if he were she, and that she couldn't employ her leisure time better.

They talk a good deal about Berkshire; and then Mrs. Moper relates some very interesting facts relative to the late Mr. Moper, and her determination, "which upon his dying bed it was his comfort so to think," never to marry again; at which the milkman looks grieved, and says the gentlemen will be very blind indeed to their own interests if they don't make her change her mind some day; and somehow or other (I don't suppose servants often do such things), they get to talking about their master and their mistress. The milkman seems quite interested in this subject, and, forgetting in how many houses the innocent liquid he dispenses may be required, he sits with his elbows on the kitchen-table, listening to Mrs. Moper's remarks, and now and then, when she wanders from her subject, drawing her back to it with an adroit question. She didn't know much about the Count, she said, for the servants was most all of 'em new; they only brought two people with them from South America, which was Monsieur St. Mirotaine, the chef, and the Countess's French maid, Mademoiselle Finette. But she thought Monsieur de Marolles very 'aughty, and as proud as he was 'igh, and that madame was very unhappy, "though it's hard to know with them furriners, Mr. Volpes, what is what," she continues; "and madame's gloomy ways may be French for happiness, for all I knows."

"He's an Englishman, the Count, isn't he?" asks Mr. Volpes.

"A Englishman! Lor' bless your heart, no. They're both French; she's of Spanish igstraction, I believe, and they lived since their marriage mostly in Spanish America. But they always speaks to each other in French, when they do speak; which them as waits upon them says isn't often."

"He's very rich, I suppose," says the milkman.

"Rich!" cries Mrs. Moper, "the money as that man has got they say is fabellous; and he's a regular business man too, down ​at his bank every day, rides off to the City as punctual as the clock strikes ten. Lor', by the bye, Mr. Volpes," says Mrs. Moper suddenly, "you don't happen to know of a tempory tiger, do you?"

"A temporary tiger!" Mr. Volpes looks considerably puzzled.

"Why, you see, the Count's tiger, as wasn't higher than the kitchen table I do believe, broke his arm the other day. He was a-hangin' on to the strap behind the cab, a-standin' upon nothing, as them boys will, when the vehicle was knocked agen an omnibus, and his arm bein' wrenched sudden out of the strap, snapped like a bit of sealing-wax; and they've took him to the hospital, and he's to come back as soon as ever he's well; for he's a deal thought on, bein' a'most the smallest tiger at the West-end. So, if you happen to know of a boy as would come temporary, we should be obliged by your sending him round."

"Did he know of a boy as would come temporary?" Mr. Budgen's young man appeared so much impressed by this question, that for a minute or two he was quite incapable of answering it. He leaned his elbows on the kitchen table, with his face buried in his hands and his fingers twisted in his flaxen hair, and when he looked up there was, strange to say, a warm flush over his pale complexion, and something like a triumphant sparkle in his dark brown eyes.

"Nothing could fall out better," he said; "nothing, nothing!"

"What, the poor lad breaking his arm?" asked Mrs. Moper, in a tone of surprise.

"No, no, not that," said Mr. Budgen's young man, just a little confused; "what I mean is, that I know the very boy to suit you—the very boy, the very boy of all others to undertake the business. Ah," he continued in a lower voice, "and to go through with it, too, to the end."

"Why, as to the business," replied Mrs. Moper, "it ain't overmuch, hangin' on behind, and lookin' knowin', and givin' other tigers as good as they bring, when waitin' outside the Calting or the Anthinium; which tigers as is used to the highest names in the peerage familiar as their meat and drink, will go on contemptuous about our fambly, callin' the bank 'the shop,' and a-askin', till they got our lad's blood up (which he had had his guinea lessons from the May Fair Mawler, and were better left alone), when the smash was a-comin', or whether we meant to give out three-and-sixpence in the pound like a honest house, or do the shabby thing and clear ourselves by a compensation with our creditors of fourpence-farthing? Ah," continued Mrs. Moper, gravely, "many's the time that child have come home with his nose as big as the 'ead of a six-week old baby, and no eyes at all as any one could discover, which he'd been ​that knocked about in a stand-up fight with a lad three times his weight and size."

"Then I can send the boy, and you'll get him the situation?" said Mr. Budgen's young man, who did not seem particularly interested in the rather elaborate recital of the exploits of the invalid tiger.

"He can have a character, I suppose?" inquired the lady.

"Oh, ah, to be sure. Budgen will give him a character."

"You will impress upon the youth," said Mrs. Moper, with great dignity, "that he will not be able to make this his permanence 'ome. The pay is good, and the meals is reg'lar, but the situation is tempory."

"All right," said Mr. Budgen's assistant; "he doesn't want a situation for long. I'll bring him round myself this evening—good afternoon;" with which very brief farewell, the flaxen-haired, dark-eyed milkman strode out of the kitchen.

"Hum!" muttered the cook, "his manners has not the London polish: I meant to have ast him to tea."

"Why, I'm blest," exclaimed the scullerymaid suddenly, "if he haven't been and gone and left his yoke and pails behind him! Well, of all the strange milkmen I ever come a-nigh, if he ain't the strangest!"

She might have thought him stranger still, perhaps, this light-haired milkman, had she seen him hail a stray cab in Brook Street, spring into it, snatch off his flaxen locks, whose hyacinthine waves were in the convenient form known by that most disagreeable of words, a wig; snatch off also the holland blouse common to the purveyors of milk, and rolling the two into a bundle, stuff them into the pocket of his shooting-jacket, before throwing himself back into the corner of the vehicle, to enjoy a meditative cigar, as his charioteer drives his best pace in the direction of that transpontine temple of Esculapius, Mr. Darley's surgery. Daredevil Dick has made the first move in that fearful game of chess which is to be played between him and the Count de Marolles.

Chapter VI.
Signor Mosquetti relates an Adventure.

On the evening which follows the very afternoon during which Richard Marwood made his first and only essay in the milk-trade, the Count and Countess de Marolles attend a musical party—I beg pardon, I should, gentle reader, as you know, have said a soirée musicale—at the house of a lady of high rank in Belgrave Square. London was almost empty, and this was one of the last parties of the season; but it is a goodly and an ​impressive sight to see—even when London is, according to every fashionable authority, a perfect Sahara—how many splendid carriages will draw up to the awning my Lady erects over the pavement before her door, when she announces herself "at home;" how many gorgeously dressed and lovely women will descend therefrom, scenting the night air of Belgravia with the fragrance wafted from their waving tresses and point-d'Alençon-bordered handkerchiefs; lending a perfume to the autumn violets struggling out a fading existence in Dresden boxes on the drawing-room balconies; lending the light of their diamonds to the gas-lamps before the door, and the light of their eyes to help out the aforesaid diamonds; sweeping the autumn dust and evening dews with the borders of costly silks, and marvels of Lyons and Spitalfields, and altogether glorifying the ground over which they walk.

On this evening one range of windows, at least, in Belgrave Square is brilliantly illuminated. Lady Londersdon's Musical Wednesday, the last of the season, has been inaugurated with éclat by a scena from Signora Scorici, of Her Majesty's Theatre and the Nobility's Concerts; and Mr. Argyle Fitz-Bertram, the great English basso-baritono, and the handsomest man in England, has just shaken the square with the buffo duet from the Cenerentola—in which performance he, Argyle, has so entirely swamped that amiable tenor Signor Maretti, that the latter gentleman has serious thoughts of calling him out to-morrow morning; which idea he would carry into execution if Argyle Fitz-Bertram were not a crack shot, and a pet pupil of Mr. Angelo's into the bargain.

But even the great Argyle finds himself—with the exception of being up to his eyes in a slough of despond, in the way of platonic flirtation with a fat duchess of fifty—comparatively nowhere. The star of the evening is the new tenor, Signor Mosquetti, who has condescended to attend Lady Londersdon's Wednesday. Argyle, who is the best-natured fellow as well as the most generous, and whose great rich voice wells up from a heart as sound as his lungs, throws himself back into a low easy-chair—it creaks a little under his weight, by the bye—and allows the duchess to flirt with him, while a buzz goes round the room; Mosquetti is going to sing. Argyle looks lazily out of his half-closed dark eyes, with that peculiar expression which seems to say—"Sing your best, old fellow! My g in the bass clef would crush your half-octave or so of falsetto before you knew where you were, or your 'Pretty Jane' either. Sing away, my boy! we'll have 'Scots wha hae' by-and-by. I've some friends down in Essex who want to hear it, and the wind's in the right quarter for the voice to travel. They won't hear you five doors off. Sing your best."

​Just as Signor Mosquetti is about to take his place at the piano, the Count and Countess de Marolles advance through the crowd about the doorway.

Valerie, beautiful, pale, calm as ever, is received with considerable empressement by her hostess. She is the heiress of one of the most ancient and aristocratic families in France, and is moreover the wife of one of the richest men in London, so is sure of a welcome throughout Belgravia.

"Mosquetti is going to sing," murmurs Lady Londersdon; "you were charmed with him in the Lucia, of course? You have lost Fitz-Bertram's duet. It was charming; all the chandeliers were shaken by his lower notes; charming, I assure you. He'll sing again after Mosquetti: the Duchess of C. is éprise, as you see. I believe she is perpetually sending him diamond rings and studs; and the Duke, they do say, has refused to be responsible for her account at Storr's."

Valerie's interest in Mr. Fitz-Bertram's conduct is not very intense; she bends her haughty head, just slightly elevating her arched eyebrows with the faintest indication of well-bred surprise; but she is interested in Signor Mosquetti, and avails herself of the seat her hostess offers to her near Erard's grand piano. The song concludes very soon after she is seated; but Mosquetti remains near the piano, talking to an elderly gentleman, who is evidently a connoisseur.

"I have never heard but one man, Signor Mosquetti," says this gentleman, "whose voice resembled yours."

There is nothing very particular in the words, but Valerie's attention is apparently arrested by them, for she fixes her eyes intently on Signor Mosquetti, as though awaiting his reply.

"And he, my lord?" says Mosquetti, interrogatively.

"He, poor fellow, is dead." Now indeed Valerie, pale with a pallor greater than usual, listens as though her whole soul hung on the words she heard.

"He is dead," continued the gentleman. "He died young, in the zenith of his reputation. His name was—let me see—I heard him in Paris last; his name was———"

"De Lancy, perhaps, my lord?" says Mosquetti.

"It was De Lancy; yes. He had some most peculiar and at the same time most beautiful tones in his voice, and you appeal to me to have the very same."

Mosquetti bowed at the compliment. "It is singular, my lord," he said; "but I doubt if those tones are quite natural to me. I am a little of a mimic, and at one period of my life I was in the habit of imitating poor De Lancy, whose singing I very much admired."

Valerie grasps the delicate fan in her nervous hand so tightly that the group of courtiers and fair ladies, of the time of Louis ​Quatorze, dancing nothing particular on a blue cloud, are crushed out of all symmetry as she listens to this conversation.

"I was, at the time I knew De Lancy, merely a chorus-singer at the Italian Opera, Paris."

The listeners draw nearer, and form quite a circle round Mosquetti, who is the lion of the night; even Argyle Fitz-Bertram pricks up his ears, and deserts the Duchess in order to hear this conversation.

"A low chorus-singer," he mutters to himself. "So help me, Jupiter, I knew he was a nobody."

"This passion for mimicry," said Mosquetti, "was so great that I acquired a sort of celebrity throughout the Opera House, and even beyond its walls. I could imitate De Lancy better, perhaps, than any one else; for in height, figure, and general appearance I was said to resemble him."

"You do," said the gentleman; "you do very much resemble the poor fellow."

"This resemblance one day gave rise to quite an adventure, which, if I shall not bore you———" he glanced round.

There is a general murmur. "Bore us! No! Delighted, enraptured, charmed above all things!" Fitz-Bertram is quite energetic in this omnes business, and says, "No, no!"—muttering to himself afterwards, "So help me, Jupiter, I knew the fellow was a nuisance!"

"But the adventure! Pray let us hear it!" cried eager voices.

"Well, ladies and gentlemen, I was a careless reckless fellow; quite content to put on a pair of russet boots which half swallowed me, and a green cotton-velvet tunic short in the sleeves and tight across the chest, and to go on the stage and sing in a chorus with fifty others, as idle as myself, in other russet boots and cotton-velvet tunics, which, as you know, is the court costume of a chorus-singer from the time of Charlemagne to the reign of Louis XV. I was quite happy, I say, to lounge on to the stage, unknown, unnoticed, badly paid and worse dressed, provided when the chorus was finished I had my cigarette, dominoes, and my glass of cognac in a third-rate café. I was playing one morning at those eternal dominoes—(and never, I think," said Mosquetti, parenthetically, "had a poor fellow so many double-sixes in his hand)—when I was told a gentleman wanted to see me. This seemed too good a joke—a gentleman for me! It couldn't be a limb of the law, as I didn't owe a farthing—no Parisian tradesman being quite so demented as to give me credit. It was a gentleman—a very aristocratic-looking fellow; handsome—but I didn't like his face; affable—and yet I didn't like his manner."

Ah, Valerie! you may well listen now!

"He wanted me, he said," continued Mosquetti, "to decide a ​little wager. Some foolish girl, who had seen De Lancy on the stage, and who believed him the ideal hero of romance, and was only in too much danger of throwing her heart and fortune at his feet, was to be disenchanted by any stratagem that could be devised. Her parents had intrusted the management of the affair to him, a relation of the lady's. Would I assist him? Would I represent De Lancy, and play a little scene in the Bois de Boulogne, to open the eyes of this silly boarding-school miss—would I, for a consideration? It was only to act a little stage play off the stage, and was for a good cause. I consented; and that evening, at half-past ten o'clock, under the shadow of the winter night and the leafless trees, I———"

"Stop, stop! Signor Mosquetti!" cry the bystanders. "Madame! Madame de Marolles! Water! Smelling-salts! Your flacon, Lady Emily: she has fainted!"

No; she has not fainted; this is something worse than fainting, this convulsive agony, in which the proud form writhes, while the white and livid lips murmur strange and dreadful words.

"Murdered, murdered and innocent! while I, vile dupe, pitiful fool, was only a puppet in the hands of a demon!"

At this very moment Monsieur de Marolles, who has been summoned from the adjoining apartment, where he has been discussing a financial measure with some members of the lower House, enters hurriedly.

"Valerie, Valerie, what is the matter?" he says, approaching his wife.

She rises—rises with a terrible effort, and looks him full in the face.

"I thought, monsieur, that I knew the hideous abyss of your black soul to its lowest depths. I was wrong; I never knew you till to-night."

Imagine such strong language as this in a Belgravian drawingroom, and then you can imagine the astonishment of the bystanders.

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Signor Mosquetti hurriedly.

"What?" cried they eagerly.

"That is the very man I have been speaking of."

"That? The Count de Marolles?"

"The man bending over the lady who has fainted."

Petrified Belgravians experience a new sensation—surprise—and rather like it.

Argyle Fitz-Bertram twists his black moustachios reflectively, and mutters—

"So help me, Jupiter, I knew there'd be a row! I shan't have to sing 'Scots wha hae,' and shall be just in time for that little supper at the Café de l'Europe."

Chapter VII.
The Golden Secret Is Told, and the Golden Bowl Is Broken.

The new tiger, or, as he is called in the kitchen, the "tempory tiger," takes his place, on the morning after Lady Londersdon's Wednesday, behind the Count de Marolles' cab, as that gentleman drives into the City.

There is little augury to be drawn from the pale smooth face of Raymond de Marolles, though Signor Mosquetti's revelation has made his position rather a critical one. Till now he has ruled Valerie with a high hand; and though never conquering the indomitable spirit of the proud Spanish woman, he has at least forced that spirit to do the will of his. But now, now that she knows the trick put upon her—now that she knows that the man she so deeply adored did not betray her, but died the victim of another's treachery—that the blood in which she has steeped her soul was the blood of the innocent,—what if now, in her desperation and despair, she dares all, and reveals all; what then?

"Why, then," says Raymond de Marolles, cutting his horse over the ears with a delicate touch of the whip, which stings home, though, for all its delicacy; "why then, never shall it be said that Raymond Marolles found himself in a dilemma, without finding within himself the power to extricate himself. We are not conquered yet, and we have seen a good deal of life in thirty years—and not a little danger. Play your best card, Valerie; I've a trump in my own hand to play when the time comes. Till then, keep dark. I tell you, my good woman, I have hothouses of my own, and don't want your Covent-Garden exotics at twopence a bunch!"

This last sentence is addressed to a woman, who pleads earnestly for the purchase of a wretched bunch of violets, which she holds up to tempt the man of fashion as she runs by the wheels of his cab, driving very slowly through the Strand.

"Fresh violets, sir. Do, sir, please. Only twopence, just twopence, sir, for the love of charity. I've a poor old woman at home, not related to me, sir, but I keep her. She's dying—starving, sir, and dying of old age."

"Bah! I tell you, my good woman, I'm not Lawrence Sterne on a sentimental journey, but a practical man of business. I don't give macaroons to donkeys, or save mythic old women from starvation. You'd better keep out of the way of the wheels—they'll be over your feet presently, and if you suffer from corns they may probably hurt you," says the philanthropic banker, in his politest tones.

"Stop, stop!" suddenly exclaims the woman, with an energy that almost startles even Raymond. "It's you, is it—Jim? ​No, not Jim; he's dead and gone, I know; but you, you, the fine gentleman, the other brother. Stop, stop, I tell you, if you want to know a secret that's in the keeping of one who may die while I am talking here! Stop, if you want to know who you are and what you are! Stop!"

Raymond does pull up at this last sentence.

"My good woman, do not be so energetic. Every eye in the Strand is on us; we shall have a crowd presently. Stay, wait for me in Essex Street; I'll get out at the corner; that's a quiet street, and we shall not be observed. Anything you have to tell me you can tell me there."

The woman obeys him, and draws back to the pavement, where she keeps pace with the cab.

"A pretty time this for discoveries!" mutters the Count. "Who I am, and what I am! It's the secret, I suppose, that the twaddling old maniac in Blind Peter made such a row about. Who I am, and what I am! Oh, I dare say I shall turn out to be somebody great, as the hero does in a lady's novel. It's a pity I haven't the mark of a coronet behind my ear, or a bloody hand on my wrist. Who I am, and what I am! The son of a journeyman tailor perhaps, or a chemist's apprentice, whose aristocratic connections prevented his acknowledging my mother."

He is at the corner of Essex Street by this time, and springs out of the cab, throwing the reins to the temporary tiger, whose sharp face we need scarcely inform the reader discloses the features of the boy Slosh.

The woman is waiting for him; and after a few moments' earnest conversation, Raymond emerges from the street, and orders the boy to drive the cab home immediately: he is not going to the City, but is going on particular business elsewhere.

Whether the "temporary tiger" proves himself worthy of the responsible situation he holds, and does drive the cab home, I cannot say; but I only know that a very small boy, in a ragged coat a great deal too large for him, and a battered hat so slouched over his eyes as quite to conceal his face from the casual observer, creeps cautiously, now a few paces behind, now a hundred yards on the other side of the way, now disappearing in the shadow of a doorway, now reappearing at the corner of the street, but never losing sight of the Count de Marolles and the purveyor of violets, as they bend their steps in the direction of Seven Dials.

Heaven forbid that we should follow them through all the turnings and twistings of that odoriferous neighbourhood, where foul scents, foul sights, and fouler language abound; whence May Fair and Belgravia shrink shuddering, as from an ill it is well for them to let alone, and a wrong that he may mend who will: not they who have been born for better things ​than to set disjointed times aright, or play the revolutionist to the dethronement of the legitimate monarchy of Queen Starvation and King Fever, to say nothing of the princes of the blood—Dirt, Drunkenness, Theft, and Murder. When John Jones, tired of the monotonous pastime of beating his wife's skull with a poker, comes to Lambeth and murders an Archbishop of Canterbury for the sake of the spoons, it will be time, in the eyes of Belgravia, to reform John Jones. In the meanwhile we of the upper ten thousand have Tattersall's and Her Majesty's Theatre, and John Jones (who, low republican, says he must have his amusements too) has such little diversions as wife-murder and cholera to break the monotony of his existence.

The Count and the violet-seller at last come to a pause. They had walked very quickly through the pestiferous streets, Raymond holding his aristocratic breath and shutting his patrician ears to the scents and the sounds around him. They come to a stand at last, in a dark court, before a tall lopsided house, with irresolute chimneypots, which looked as if the only thing that kept them erect was the want of unanimity as to which way they should fall.

Raymond, when invited by the woman to enter, looks suspiciously at the dingy staircase, as if wondering whether it would last his time, but at the request of his companion ascends it.

The boy in the large coat and slouched hat is playing marbles with another boy on the second-floor landing, and has evidently lived there all his life: and yet I'm puzzled as to who drove that cab home to the stables at the back of Park Lane. I fear it was not the "temporary tiger."

The Count de Marolles and his guide pass the youthful gamester, who has just lost his second halfpenny, and ascend to the very top of the rickety house, the garrets of which are afflicted with intermittent ague whenever there is a high wind.

Into one of these garrets the woman conducts Raymond, and on a bed—or its apology, a thing of shreds and patches, straw and dirt, which goes by the name of a bed at this end of the town—lies the old woman we last saw in Blind Peter.

Eight years, more or less, have not certainly had the effect of enhancing the charms of this lady; and there is something in her face to-day more terrible even than wicked old age or feminine drunkenness. It is death that lends those livid hues to her complexion, which all the cosmetics from Atkinson's or the Burlington Arcade, were she minded to use them, would never serve to conceal. Raymond has not come too soon if he is to hear any secret from those ghastly lips. It is some time before the woman, whom she still calls Sillikens, can make the dying hag understand who this fine gentleman is, and what it is he wants with her; and even when she does succeed in ​making her comprehend all this, the old woman's speech is very obscure, and calculated to try the patience of a more amiable man than the Count de Marolles.

"Yes, it was a golden secret—a golden secret, eh, my dear? It was something to have a marquis for a son-in-law, wasn't it, my dear, eh?" mumbled the dying old hag.

"A marquis for a son-in-law! What does the jibbering old idiot mean?" muttered Raymond, whose reverence for his grandmother was not one of the strongest points in his composition. "A marquis! I dare say my respected progenitor kept a public-house, or something of that sort. A marquis! The 'Marquis of Granby,' most likely!"

"Yes, a marquis," continued the old woman, "eh, dear! And he married your mother—married her at the parish church, one cold dark November morning; and I've got the c'tificate. Yes," she mumbled, in answer to Raymond's eager gesture, "I've got it; but I'm not going to tell you where;—no, not till I'm paid. I must be paid for that secret in gold—yes, in gold. They say that we don't rest any easier in our coffins for the money that's buried with us; but I should like to lie up to neck in golden sovereigns new from the Mint, and not one light one amongst 'em."

"Well," said Raymond, impatiently, "your secret! I'm rich, and can pay for it. Your secret—quick!"

"Well, he hadn't been married to her long before a change came, in his native country, over the sea yonder," said the old woman, pointing in the direction of St. Martin's Lane, as if she thought the British Channel flowed somewhere behind that thoroughfare. "A change came, and he got his rights again. One king was put down and another king was set up, and everybody else was massacred in the streets; it was—a—I don't know what they call it; but they're always a-doin' it. So he got his rights, and he was a rich man again, and a great man; and then his first thought was to keep his marriage with my girl a secret. All very well, you know, my girl for a wife while he was giving lessons at a shilling a-piece, in Parlez-vous Français, and all that; but now he was a marquis, and it was quite another thing."

Raymond by this time gets quite interested; so does the boy in the big coat and the slouched hat, who has transferred the field of his gambling operations in the marble line to the landing outside the garret door.

"He wanted the secret kept, and I kept it for gold. I kept it even from her, your mother, my own ill-used girl, for gold. She never knew who he was; she thought he'd deserted her, and she took to drinking; she and I threw you into the river when we were mad drunk, and couldn't stand your squalling. ​She died—don't you ask me how. I told you before not to ask me how my girl died—I'm mad enough without that question; she died, and I kept the secret. For a long time it was gold to me, and he used to send me money regular to keep it dark; but by-and-by the money stopped from coming. I got savage, but still I kept the secret; because, you see, it was nothing when it was told, and there was no one rich enough to pay me to tell it. I didn't know where to find the marquis; I only knew he was somewhere in France."

"France?" exclaims Raymond.

"Yes; didn't I tell you France? He was a French marquis—a refugee they called him when he first made acquaintance with my girl—a teacher of French and mathematics."

"And his name—his name?" asks Raymond, eagerly. "His name, woman, if you don't want to drive me mad."

"He called himself Smith, when he was a-teachin', my dear," said the old woman with a ghastly leer; "what are you going to pay me for the secret?"

"Whatever you like, only tell me—tell me before you———"

"Die. Yes, deary; there ain't any time to waste, is there? I don't want to make a hard bargain. Will you bury me up to my neck in gold?"

"Yes, yes; speak!" He is almost beside himself, and raises a threatening hand. The old woman grins.

"I told you before that wasn't the way, deary. Wait a bit. Sillikens, give me that 'ere old shoe, will you? Look you here! It's a double sole, and the marriage certificate is between the two leathers. I've walked on it this thirty years and more."

"And the name—the name?"

"The name of the Marquis was De—de———"

"She's dying! Give me some water!" cried Raymond.

"De Ce—Ce———" the syllables come in fitful gasps. Raymond throws some water over her face.

"De Cevennes, my deary!—and the golden secret is told."

And the golden bowl is broken!

Lay the ragged sheet over the ghastly face, Sillikens, and kneel down and pray for help in your utter loneliness; for the guilty being whose soul has gone forth to meet its Maker was your only companion and stay, however frail that stay might be.

Go out into the sunshine, Monsieur de Marolles; that which you leave behind in the tottering garret, shaken by an ague-paroxysm with the fitful autumn wind, is nothing so terrible to your eyes.

You have accustomed yourself to the face of Death before now; you have met that grim potentate on his own ground, and done with him what it is your policy to do with everything on earth—you have made him useful to you.

Chapter VIII.
One Step Further on the Right Track.

It is not a very romantic locality to which we must now conduct the reader, being neither more nor less than the shop and surgery of Mr. Augustus Darley; which temple of the healing god is scented, this autumn afternoon, with the mingled perfumes of Cavendish and bird's-eye tobacco, Turkey rhubarb, whiskey-punch, otto of roses, and muffins; conflicting odours, which form, or rather object to form, an amalgamation, each particular effluvium asserting its individuality.

In the surgery Gus is seated, playing the intellectual and intensely exciting game of dominoes with our acquaintance of the Cheerful Cherokee Society, Mr. Percy Cordonner. A small jug, without either of those earthenware conventionalities, spout or handle, and with Mr. Cordonner's bandanna stuffed into the top to imprison the subtle essences of the mixture within, stands between the two gentlemen; while Percy, as a guest, is accommodated with a real tumbler, having only three triangular bits chipped out of the edge. Gus imbibes the exciting fluid from a cracked custard-cup, with paper wafered round it to keep the parts from separating, two of which cups are supposed to be equal (by just measurement) to Mr. P. C.'s tumbler. Before the small fire kneels the juvenile domestic of the young surgeon, toasting muffins, and presenting to the two gentlemen a pleasing study in anatomical perspective and the mysteries of foreshortening; to which, however, they are singularly inattentive, devoting their entire energies to the pieces of spotted ivory in their hands, and the consumption, by equitable division, of the whiskey-punch.

"I say, Gus," said Mr. Cordonner, stopping in the middle of a gulp of his favourite liquid, at the risk of strangulation, with as much alarm in his face as his placid features were capable of exhibiting—"I say, this isn't the professional tumbler, is it?"

"Why, of course it is," said his friend. "We have only had that one since midsummer. The patients don't like it because It's chipped; but I always tell them, that after having gone through having a tooth out—particularly," he added parenthetically, "as I take 'em out (plenty of lancet, forceps, and key, for their eighteen-pence)—they needn't grumble about having to rinse their mouths out of a cracked tumbler."

Mr. Cordonner turned pale.

"Do they do that?" he said, and deliberately shot his last sip of the delicious beverage over the head of the kneeling damsel, with so good an aim that it in a manner grazed her curl-papers. "It isn't friendly of you, Gus," he said, with mild reproachfulness, "to treat a fellow like this."

​"It's all right, old boy," said Gus, laughing. "Sarah Jane washes it, you know. You wash the tumbler and things, don't you, Sarah Jane?"

"Wash 'em?" answered the youthful domestic; "I should think so, sir, indeed. Why, I wipes 'em round reg'lar with my apron, and breathes on 'em to make 'em bright."

"Oh, that'll do!" said Mr. Cordonner, piteously. "Don't investigate, Gus; you'll only make matters worse. Oh, why, why did I ask that question? Why didn't I remember 'it's folly to be otherwise?' That punch was delicious—and now———" He leant his head upon his hand, buried his face in his pocket-handkerchief, pondered in his heart, and was still.

In the mean time the shop is not empty. Isabella is standing behind the counter, very busy with several bottles, a glass measure, and a pestle and mortar, making up a prescription, a cough mixture, from her brother's Latin. Rather a puzzling document, this prescription, to any one but Bell; for there are calculations about next year's Derby scribbled on the margin, and rough sketches of the Smasher, and a more youthful votary of the Smasher's art, surnamed "Whooping William," pencilled on the back thereof; but to Bell it seems straightforward enough. At any rate, she dashes away with the bottles, the measure, and the pestle and mortar, as if she knew perfectly well what she was about.

She is not alone in the shop. A gentleman is leaning on the counter, watching the busy white hands very intently, and apparently deeply interested in the progress of the cough-mixture. This gentleman is her brother's old friend, "Daredevil Dick."

Richard Marwood has been a great deal at the surgery since the night on which he first set foot in his old haunts; he has brought his mother over, and introduced that lady to Miss Darley. Mrs. Marwood was delighted with Isabella's frank manners and handsome face, and insisted on carrying her back to dine in Spring Gardens. Quite a sociable little dinner they had too, Richard being—for a man who had been condemned for a murder, and had escaped from a lunatic asylum—very cheerful indeed. The young man told Isabella all his adventures, till that young lady alternately laughed and cried—thereby affording Richard's fond mother most convincing proof of the goodness of her heart—and was altogether so very brilliant and amusing, that when at eleven o'clock Gus came round from a very critical case (viz., a quarrel of the Cheerfuls as to whether Gustavus Ponsonby, novelist and satirist, magazine-writer and poet, deserved the trouncing he had received in the "Friday Pillory") to take Bell home in a cab, the little trio simultaneously declared that the evening had gone as if by magic! As if by magic! What if to two out of those three the evening did really go by ​magic? There is a certain pink-legged little gentleman, with wings, and a bandage round his eyes, who, some people say, is as great a magician in his way as Albertus Magnus or Doctor Dee, and who has done as much mischief and worked as much ruin in his own manner as all the villainous saltpetre ever dug out of the bosom of the peaceful, corn-growing, flower-bearing earth. That gentleman, I have no doubt, presided on the occasion.

Thus the acquaintance of Richard and Isabella had ripened into something very much like friendship; and here he is, watching her employed in the rather unromantic business of making up a cough-mixture for an elderly washerwoman of methodistical persuasions. But it is one of the fancies of the pink-legged gentleman aforesaid to lend his bandage to his victims; and there is nothing that John, William, George, Henry, James, or Alfred can do, in which Jane, Eliza, Susan, or Sarah will not see a dignity and a charm, or vice versa. Pshaw! It is not Mokannah who wears the silver veil; it is we who are in love with Mokannah who put on the glittering, blinding medium; and, looking at that gentleman through the dazzle and the glitter, insist on thinking him a very handsome man, till some one takes the veil off our eyes, and we straightway fall to and abuse poor Mokannah, because he is not what we chose to fancy him. It is very hard upon poor tobacco-smoking, beer-imbibing, card-playing, latch-key-loving Tom Jones, that Sophia will insist on elevating him into a god, and then being angry with him because he is Tom Jones and fond of bitter ale and bird's-eye. But come what may, the pink-legged gentleman must have his diversion, and no doubt his eyes twinkle merrily behind that bandage of his, to see the fools this wise world of ours is made up of.

"You could trust me, Isabella, then," said Richard; "you could trust me, in spite of all—in spite of my wasted youth and the blight upon my name?"

"Do we not all trust you, Mr. Marwood, with our entire hearts?" answered the young lady, taking shelter under cover of a very wide generality.

"Not 'Mr. Marwood,' Bell; it sounds very cold from the lips of my old friend's sister. Every one calls me Richard, and I, without once asking permission, have called you Bell. Call me Richard, Bell, if you trust me."

She looks him in the face, and is silent for a moment; her heart beats a great deal faster—so fast that her lips can scarcely shape the words she speaks.

"I do trust you, Richard; I believe your heart to be goodness and truth itself."

"Is it worth having, then, Bell? I wouldn't ask you that question if I had not a hope now—ay, and not such a feeble one ​either—to see my name cleared from the stain that rests upon it. If there is any truth in my heart, Isabella, that truth is yours alone. Can you trust me, as the woman who loves trusts—through life and till death, under every shadow and through every cloud?"

I don't know whether essence of peppermint, tincture of myrrh, and hair-oil, are the proper ingredients in a cough-mixture; but I know that Isabella poured them into the glass measure very liberally.

"You do not answer me, Isabella. Ah, you cannot trust the branded criminal—the escaped lunatic—the man the world calls a murderer!"

"Not trust you, Richard?" Only four words, and only one glance from the gray eyes into the brown, and so much told! So much more than I could tell in a dozen chapters, told in those four words and that one look!

Gus opens the half-glass door at this very moment. "Are you coming to tea?" he asks; "here's Sarah Jane up to her eyes in grease and muffins."

"Yes, Gus, dear old friend," said Richard, laying his hand on Darley's shoulder; "we're coming in to tea immediately, brother!"

Gus looked at him with a glance of considerable astonishment, shook him heartily by the hand, and gave a long whistle; after which he walked up to the counter and examined the cough-mixture.

"Oh!" he said, "I suppose that’s why you’ve put enough laudanum into this to poison a small regiment, eh, Bell? Perhaps we may as well throw it out of the window; for if it goes out of the door I shall be hung for wholesale murder."

They were a very merry party over the little tea-table; and if nobody ate any of the muffins, which Mr. Cordonner called "embodied indigestions," they laughed a great deal, and talked still more—so much so, that Percy declared his reasoning faculties to be quite overpowered, and wanted to be distinctly informed whether it was Richard who was going to marry Gus, or Gus about to unite himself to the juvenile domestic, or he himself who was to be married against his inclination—which, seeing he was of a yielding and peace-loving disposition, was not so unlikely—or, in short, to use his own expressive language, "what the row was all about?"

Nobody, however, took the trouble to set Mr. P. C.'s doubts at rest, and he drank his tea with perfect contentment, but without sugar, and in a dense intellectual fog. "It doesn't matter," he murmured; "perhaps Richard will turn again and be Lord Mayor of London town, and then my children will read his adventures in a future Pinnock, and they may understand it. ​It's a great thing to be a child, and to understand those sort of things. When I was six years old I knew who William Rufus married, and how many people died in the Plague of London. I can't say it made me any happier or better, but I dare say it was a great advantage."

At this moment the bell hung at the shop-door (a noisy preventive of petty larceny, giving the alarm if any juvenile delinquent had a desire to abstract a bottle of castor-oil, or a camomile-pill or so, for his peculiar benefit) rang violently, and our old friend Mr. Peters burst into the shop, and through the shop into the parlour, in a state of such excitement that his very fingers seemed out of breath.

"Back again?" cried Richard, starting up with surprise; for be it known to the reader that Mr. Peters had only the day before started for Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy to hunt up evidence about this man, whose very image lay buried outside that town.

Before the fingers of Mr. Peters, which quite shook with excitement, could shape an answer to Richard’s exclamation of surprise, a very dignified elderly gentleman, whose appearance was almost clerical, followed the detective into the room, and bowed politely to the assembled party.

"I will take upon myself to be my own sponsor," said that gentleman. "If, as I believe, I am speaking to Mr. Marwood," he added, looking at Richard, who bowed affirmatively, "it is to the interest of both of us—of you, sir, more especially—that we should become acquainted. I am Dr. Tappenden, of Slopperton."

Mr. Cordonner, having politely withdrawn himself from the group so as not to interfere with any confidential communication, was here imprudent enough to attempt to select a book from the young surgeon's hanging-library, and, in endeavouring to take down the third volume of Bragelonne, brought down, as usual, the entire literary shower-bath on his devoted head, and sat quietly snowed up, as it were, in loose leaves of Michel Lévy’s shilling edition, and fragments of illustrations by Tony Johannot.

Richard looked a little puzzled at Dr. Tappenden's introduction; but Mr. Peters threw in upon his fingers this piece of information,—"He knows him!" and Richard was immediately interested.

"We are all friends here, I believe?" said the schoolmaster, glancing round interrogatively.

"Oh, decidedly, Monsieur d'Artagnan," replied Percy, absently looking up from one of the loose leaves he had selected for perusal from those scattered around him.

"Monsieur d'Artagnan! Your friend is pleased to be facetious," said the Doctor, with some indignation.

"Oh, pray excuse him, sir. He is only absent-minded," replied ​Richard. "My friend Peters informs me that you know this man—this singular, this incomprehensible villain, whose supposed death is so extraordinary."

"He—either the man who died, or this man who is now occupying a high position in London—was for some years in my employ; but in spite of what our worthy friend the detective says, I am inclined to think that Jabez North, my tutor, did actually die, and that it was his body which I saw at the police-station."

"Not a bit of it, sir," said the detective on his rapid fingers, "not a bit of it! That death was a do—a do, out and out. It was too systematic to be anything else, and I was a fool not to see there was something black at the bottom of it at the time. People don't go and lay themselves out high and dry upon a heath, with clean soles to their shoes, on a stormy night, and the bottle in their hand—not took hold of, neither, but lying loose, you understand; put there—not clutched as a dying man clutches what his hand closes upon. I say this ain't how people make away with themselves when they can't stand life any longer. It was a do—a plant, such as very few but that man could be capable of; and that man's your tutor, and the death was meant to put a stop to all suspicion; and while you was a-sighin' and a-groanin' over that poor young innocent, Mr. Jabez North was a-cuttin' a fine figure, and a-captivatin' a furrin heiress, with your money, or your banker's money, as had to bear the loss of them forged cheques."

"But the likeness?" said Dr. Tappenden. "That dead man was the very image of Jabez North."

"Very likely, sir. There's mysterious goin's on, and some coincidences in this life, as well as in your story-books that's lent out at three half-pence a volume, keep 'em three days and return 'em clean."

"Well," continued the schoolmaster, "the moment I see this man I shall know whether he is indeed the person we want to find. If he should be the man who was my usher, I can prove a circumstance which will go a great way, Mr. Marwood, towards fixing your uncle's murder upon him."

"And that is———?" asked Richard, eagerly.

But there is no occasion for the reader to know what it is just yet; so we will leave the little party in the Friar Street surgery to talk this business over, which they do with such intense interest that the small hours catch them still talking of the same subject, and Mr. Percy Cordonner still snowed up in his corner, reading from the loose leaves the most fascinating olla podrida of literature, wherein the writings of Charles Dickens, George Sand, Harrison Ainsworth, and Alexandre Dumas are blended together in the most delicious and exciting confusion.

Chapter IX.
Captain Lansdown overhears a Conversation which appears to interest him.

Laurent Blurosset was a sort of rage at the West-end of London. What did they seek, these weary denizens of the West-end, but excitement? Excitement! No matter how obtained. If Laurent Blurosset were a magician, so much the better; if he had sold himself to the devil, so much the better again, and so much the more exciting. There was something almost approaching to a sensation in making a morning call upon a gentleman who had possibly entered into a contract with Sathanas, or put his name on the back of a bit of stamped paper payable at sight to Lucifer himself. And then there was the slightest chance, the faintest shadow of a probability, of meeting the proprietor of the gentleman they called upon; and what could be more delightful than that? How did he visit Marlborough Street—the proprietor? Had he a pass-key to the hall-door? or did he leave his card with the servant, like any other of the gentlemen his pupils and allies? Or did he rise through a trap in the Brussels carpet in the drawingroom? or slide through one of the sham Wouvermanns that adorned the walls? At any rate, a visit to the mysterious chemist of Marlborough Street was about the best thing to do at this fag-end of the worn-out London season; and Monsieur Laurent Blurosset was considered a great deal better than the Opera.

It was growing dusk on the evening on which there was so much excitement in the little surgery in Friar Street, when a plain close carriage stopped at Monsieur Blurosset's door, and a lady alighted thickly veiled. The graceful but haughty head is one we know. It is Valerie, who, in the depth of her misery, comes to this man, who is in part the author of that misery.

She is ushered into a small apartment at the back of the house, half study, half laboratory, littered with books, manuscripts, crucibles, and mathematical instruments. On a little table, near a fire that burns low in the grate, are thrown in a careless heap the well-remembered cards—the cards which eight years ago foretold the death of the king of spades.

The room is empty when she enters it, and she seats herself in the depth of the shadow; for there is no light but the flickering flame of the low fire.

What does she think of, as she sits in the gloom of that silent apartment? Who shall say? What forest deep, what lonely ocean strand, what desert island, is more dismal than the backroom of a London house, at the window of which looks in a high black wall, or a dreary, smoke-dried, weird, vegetable phenomenon which nobody on earth but the landlord ever called a tree?

​What does she think of in this dreary room? What can she think of? What has she ever thought for eight years past but of the man she loved and murdered? And he was innocent! As long as she had been convinced of his guilt, of his cruel and bitter treachery, it had been a sacrifice, that ordeal of the November night. Now it took another colour; it was a murder—and she a pitiful puppet in the hands of a master-fiend!

Monsieur Blurosset enters the room, and finds her alone with these thoughts.

"Madame," he says, "I have perhaps the honour of knowing you?" He has so many fair visitors that he thinks this one, whose face he cannot see, may be one of his old clients.

"It is eight years since you have seen me, monsieur," she replies. "You have most likely forgotten me?"

"Forgotten you, madame, perhaps, but not your voice. That is not to be forgotten."

"Indeed, monsieur—and why not?"

"Because, madame, it has a peculiarity of its own, which, as a physiologist, I cannot mistake. It is the voice of one who has suffered?"

"It is!—it is!"

"Of one who has suffered more than it is the common lot of woman to suffer."

"You are right, monsieur."

"And now, madame, what can I do for you?"

"Nothing, monsieur. You can do nothing for me but that which the commonest apothecary in this city who will sell me an ounce of laudanum can do as well as you."

"Oh, has it come to that again?" he says, with a shade of sarcasm in his tone. "I remember, eight years ago———"

"I asked you for the means of death. I did not say I wished to die then, at that moment. I did not. I had a purpose in life. I have still."

As she said these words the fellow-lodger of Blurosset—the Indian soldier, Captain Lansdown, who had let himself in with his latch-key—crossed the hall, and was arrested at the half-open door of the study by the sound of voices within. I don't know how to account for conduct so unworthy of an officer and a gentleman, but the captain stopped in the shadow of the dark hall and listened—as if life and death were on the words—to the voice of the speaker.

"I have, I say, still a purpose in life—a solemn and a sacred one—to protect the innocent. However guilty I may be, thank Heaven I have still the power to protect my son."

"You are married, madame?"

"I am married. You know it as well as I, Monsieur Laurent Blurosset. The man who first brought me to your apartment ​must have been, if not your accomplice, at least your colleague. He revealed to you his scheme, no doubt, in order to secure your assistance in that scheme. I am married to a villain—such a villain as I think Heaven never before looked down upon."

"And you would protect your son, madame, from his father?"

Captain Lansdown's face gleams through the shadow as white as the face of Valerie herself, as she stands looking full at Monsieur Blurosset in the flickering fire-light.

"And you would protect your son from his father, madame?" repeats the chemist.

"The man to whom I am at present married is not the father of my son," says Valerie, in a cold calm voice.

"How, madame?"

"I was married before," she continued. "The son I so dearly love is the son of my first husband. My second marriage has been a marriage only in name. All your worthy colleague, Monsieur Raymond Marolles, stained his hands in innocent blood to obtain was a large fortune. He has that, and is content; but he shall not hold it long."

"And your purpose in coming to me, madame———?"

"Is to accuse you—yes, Monsieur Laurent Blurosset, to accuse you—as an accomplice in the murder of Gaston de Lancy."

"An accomplice in a murder!"

"Yes; you sold me a poison—you knew for what that poison was to be used; you were in the plot, the vile and demoniac plot, that was to steep my soul in guilt. You prophesied the death of the man I was intended to murder; you put the thought into my distracted brain—the weapon into my guilty hand; and while I suffer all the tortures which Heaven inflicts on those who break its laws, are you to go free? No, monsieur, you shall not go free. Either join with me in accusing this man, and help me to drag him to justice, or by the light in the sky, by the life-blood of my broken heart—by the life of my only child, I swear to denounce you! Gaston de Lancy shall not go unavenged by the woman who loved and murdered him."

The mention of the name of Gaston de Lancy, the man she so dearly and devotedly loved, has a power that nothing else on earth has over Valerie, and she breaks into a passionate torrent of tears.

Laurent Blurosset looks on silently at this burst of anguish; perhaps he regards it as a man of science, and can calculate to a moment how long it will last.

The Indian officer, in the shadow of the doorway, is more affected than the chemist and philosopher, for he falls on his knees by the threshold and hides his pale face in his hands.

​There is a silence of perhaps five minutes—a terrible silence it seems, only broken by the heartrending sobs of this despairing woman. At last Laurent Blurosset speaks—speaks in a tone in which she has never heard him speak before—in a tone in which, probably, very few have heard him speak—in a tone so strange to him and his ordinary habits that it in a manner transforms him into a new man.

"You say, madame, I was an accomplice of this man's. How if he did not condescend to make me an accomplice? How, if this gentleman, who, owing all his success in life to his unassisted villany, has considerable confidence in his own talents, did not think me worthy of the honour of being his accomplice?"

"How, monsieur?"

"No, madame; Laurent Blurosset was not a man for the brilliant Parisian adventurer Raymond Marolles to enlist as a colleague. No, Laurent Blurosset was merely a philosopher, a physiologist, a dreamer, a little bit of a madman, and but a poor puppet in the hands of the man of the world, the chevalier of fortune, the unscrupulous and designing Englishman."

"An Englishman?"

"Yes, madame; that is one of your husband's secrets: he is an Englishman. I was not clever enough to be the accomplice of Monsieur Marolles; in his opinion I was not too clever to become his dupe."

"His dupe?"

"Yes, madame, his dupe. His contempt for the man of science was most supreme: I was a useful automaton—nothing more. The chemist, the physiologist, the man whose head had grown gray in the pursuit of an inductive science—whose nights and days had been given to the study of the great laws of cause and effect—was a puppet in the hands of the chevalier of fortune, and as little likely to fathom his motives as the wooden doll is likely to guess those of the showman who pulls the strings that make it dance. So thought Raymond Marolles, the adventurer, the fortune-hunter, the thief, the murderer!"

"What, monsieur, you knew him, then?"

"To the very bottom of his black heart, madame. Science would indeed have been a lie, wisdom would indeed have been a chimera, if I could not have read through the low cunning of the superficial showy adventurer, as well as I can read the words written in yonder book through the thin veil of a foreign character. I, his dupe, as he thought—the learned fool at whose labours he laughed, even while he sought to avail himself of their help—I laughed at him in turn, read every motive; but let him laugh on, lie on, till the time at which it should be my pleasure to lift the mask, and say to him—'Raymond Marolles, ​charlatan! liar! fool! dupe! in the battle between Wisdom and Cunning the gray-eyed goddess is the conqueror."

"What, monsieur? Then you are doubly a murderer. You knew this man, and yet abetted him in the vilest plot by which a wretched woman was ever made to destroy the man she loved a thousand times better than her worthless self!"

Laurent Blurosset smiled a most impenetrable smile.

"I acted for a purpose, madame. I wished to test the effects of a new poison. Yours the murder—if there was a murder; not mine. You asked me for a weapon; I put it into your hands; I did not compel you to use it."

"No, monsieur; but you prompted me. If there is justice on earth, you shall suffer for that act as well as Monsieur Marolles; if not, there is justice in heaven! God's punishments are more terrible than those of men, and you have all the more cause to tremble, you and the wretch whose accomplice you were—whose willing accomplice, by your own admission, you were."

"And yourself, madame? In dragging us to justice, may you not yourself suffer?"

"Suffer!" She laughs a hollow bitter peal of mocking laughter, painful to hear; very painful to the ears of the listener in the shadow, whose face is still buried in his hands. "Suffer! No, Monsieur Blurosset, for me on earth there is no more suffering. If in hell the wretches doomed to eternal punishment suffer as I have suffered for the last eight years, as I suffered on that winter's night when the man I loved died, then, indeed, God is an avenging Deity. Do you think the worst the law can inflict upon me for that guilty deed is by one thousandth degree equal to the anguish of my own mind, every day and every hour? Do you think I fear disgrace? Disgrace! Bah! What is it? There never was but one being on earth whose good opinion I valued, or whose bad opinion I feared. That man I murdered. You think I fear the world? The world to me was him; and he is dead. If you do not wish to be denounced as the accomplice of a murderess and her accomplice, do not let me quit this room; for, by the heaven above me, so surely as I quit this room alive I go to deliver you, Raymond Marolles, and myself into the hands of justice!"

"And your son, madame—what of him?"

"I have made arrangements for his future happiness, monsieur. He will return to France, and be placed under the care of my uncle."

For a few moments there is silence. Laurent Blurosset seems lost in thought. Valerie sits with her bright hollow eyes fixed on the flickering flame of the low fire. Blurosset is the first to speak.

​"You say, madame, that if I do not wish to be given up to justice as the accomplice of a murderer, I shall not suffer you to leave this room, but sacrifice you to the preservation of my own safety. Nothing more easy, madame; I have only to raise my hand—to wave a handkerchief, medicated in the manner of those the Borgias and Medicis used of old, before your face; to scatter a few grains of powder into that fire at your feet; to give you a book to read, a flower to smell; and you do not leave this room alive. And this is how I should act, if I were, what you say I am, the accomplice of a murderer."

"How, monsieur!—you had no part in the murder of my husband?—you, who gave me the drug which killed him?"

"You jump at conclusions, madame. How do you know that the drug which I gave you killed Gaston de Lancy?"

"Oh, for pity's sake, do not juggle with me, Monsieur. Speak! What do you mean?"

"Simply this, madame. That the death of your husband on the evening of the day on which you gave him the drugged wine may have been—a coincidence."

"Oh, monsieur! in mercy———"

"Nay, madame, it was a coincidence. The drug I gave you was not a poison. You are guiltless of your husband's death."

"Oh, heaven be praised! Merciful heaven be praised!" She falls on her knees, and buries her head in her hands in a wild burst of tearful thanksgiving.

While her face is thus hidden, Blurosset takes from a little cabinet on one side of the fireplace a handful of a light-coloured powder, which he throws upon the expiring cinders in the grate. A lurid flame blazes up, illuminating the room with a strange unnatural glare.

"Valerie, Countess de Marolles," he says, in a tone of solemn earnestness, "men say I am a magician—a sorcerer—a disciple of the angel of darkness! Nay, some more foolish than the rest have been so blasphemous as to declare that I have power to raise the dead. Yours is no mind to be fooled by such shallow lies as these. The dead never rise again in answer to the will of mortal man. Lift your head, Valerie—not Countess de Marolles. I no longer call you by that name, which is in itself a falsehood. Valerie de Lancy, look yonder!"

He points in the direction of the open door. She rises, looks towards the threshold, staggers a step forward, utters one long wild shriek, and falls senseless to the floor.

In all the agonies she has endured, in all the horrors through which she has passed, she has never before lost her senses. The cause must indeed be a powerful one.

Book the Sixth.
ON THE TRACK.

---

Chapter I.
Father and Son.

Three days have passed since the interview of Valerie with Laurent Blurosset, and Raymond de Marolles paces up and down his study in Park Lane. He is not going to the bank to-day. The autumn rains beat in against the double windows of the apartment, which is situated at the back of the house, looking out upon a small square patch of so-called garden. This garden is shut in by a wall, over which a weak-minded and erratic-looking creeper sprawls and straggles; and there is a little green door in this wall, which communicates with a mews.

A hopelessly wet day. Twelve by the clock, and not enough blue in the gloomy sky to make the smallest article of wearing apparel—no, not so much as a pair of wristbands for an unhappy seaman. Well to be the Count de Marolles, and to have no occasion to extend one's walk beyond the purple-and-crimson border of that Turkey carpet on such a day as this! The London sparrows, transformed for the time being into a species of water-fowl, flutter dismally about the small swamp of grass-plot, flanked here and there by a superannuated clump of withered geraniums which have evidently seen better days. The sparrows seem to look enviously at the bright blaze reflected on the double windows of the Count's apartment, and would like, perhaps, to go in and sit on the hob; and I dare say they twitter to each other, in confidence, "A fine thing to be the Count de Marolles, with a fortune which it would take the lifetime of an Old Parr to calculate, and a good fire in wet weather."

Yet, for all this, Raymond de Marolles does not look the most enviable object in creation on this particular rainy morning. His pale fair face is paler than ever; there are dark circles round the blue eyes, and a nervous and incessant twitching of the thin lower lip—signs which never were, and never will be, indications of a peaceful mind. He has not seen Valerie since ​the night on which Monsieur Paul Moucée, alias Signor Mosquetti, told his story. She has remained secluded in her own apartments; and even Raymond de Marolles has scarce cared to break upon the solitude of this woman, in whom grief is so near akin to desperation.

"What will she do, now she knows all? Will she denounce me? If she does, I am prepared. If Blurosset, poor scientific fool, only plays his part faithfully, I am safe. But she will hardly reveal the truth. For her son's sake she will be silent. Oh, strange, inexplicable, and mysterious chance, that this fortune for which I have so deeply schemed, for which I have hazarded so much and worked so hard, should be my own—my own!—this woman a mere usurper, and I the rightful heir to the wealth of the De Cevennes! What is to be done? For the first time in my life I am at fault. Should I fly to the Marquis—tell him I am his son?—difficult to prove, now that old hag is dead; and even if I prove it—as I would move heaven and earth to do—what if she denounce me to her uncle, and he refuse to acknowledge the adventurer, the poisoner? I could soon silence her. But unfortunately she has been behind the scenes, and I fear she would scarcely accept a drop of water from the hands of her devoted husband. If I had any one to help me! But I have no one; no one that I can trust—no one in my power. Oh, Laurent Blurosset, for some of your mighty secrets, so that the very autumn wind blowing in at her window might seal the lips of my beautiful cousin for ever!"

Pleasant thoughts to be busy with this rainy autumn day; but such thoughts are by no means unfamiliar to the heart of Raymond de Marolles.

It is from a reverie such as this that he is aroused by the sound of carriage-wheels, and a loud knocking and ringing at the hall door. "Too early for morning callers. Who can it be at such an hour? Some one from the bank, perhaps?" He paces up and down the room rather anxiously, wondering who this unexpected visitor might be, when the groom of the chambers opens the door and announces, "The Marquis de Cevennes!"

"So, then," mutters Raymond, "she has played her first card—she has sent for her uncle. We shall have need of all our brains to-day. Now then, to meet my father face to face."

As he speaks, the Marquis enters.

Face to face—father and son. Sixty years of age—fair and pale, blue eyes, aquiline nose, and thin lips. Thirty years of age—fair and pale, blue eyes, aquiline nose, and thin lips again; and neither of the two faces to be trusted; not one look of truth, not one glance of benevolence, not one noble expression in either. Truly father and son—all the world over, father and son.

​"Monsieur le Marquis affords me an unexpected honour and pleasure," said Raymond Marolles, as he advanced to receive his visitor.

"Nay, Monsieur de Marolles, scarcely, I should imagine, unexpected; I come in accordance with the earnest request of my niece; though what that most erratic young lady can want with me in this abominable country of your adoption is quite beyond my poor comprehension."

Raymond draws a long breath. "So," he thinks, "he knows nothing yet. Good! You are slow to play your cards, Valerie. I will take the initiative; my leading trump shall commence the game."

"I repeat," said the Marquis, throwing himself into the easy-chair which Raymond had wheeled forward, and warming his delicate white hands before the blazing fire; "I repeat, that the urgent request of my very lovely but extremely erratic niece, that I should cross the Channel in the autumn of a very stormy year—I am not a good sailor—is quite beyond my comprehension." He wears a very magnificent emerald ring, which is too large for the slender third finger of his left hand, and he amuses himself by twisting it round and round, sometimes stopping to contemplate the effect of it with the plain gold outside, when it looks like a lady's wedding-ring. "It is, I positively assure you," he repeated, looking at the ring, and not at Raymond, "utterly beyond the limited powers of my humble comprehension."

Raymond looks very grave, and takes two or three turns up and down the room. The light-blue eyes of the Marquis follow him for a turn and a half—find the occupation monotonous, and go back to the ring and the white hand, always interesting objects for contemplation. Presently the Count de Marolles stops, leans on the easy-chair on the opposite side of the fireplace to that on which the Marquis is seated, and says, in a very serious tone of voice—

"Monsieur de Cevennes, I am about to allude to a subject of so truly painful and distressing a nature, both for you to hear and for me to speak of, that I almost fear adverting to it."

The Marquis has been so deeply interested in the ring, emerald outwards, that he has evidently heard the words of Raymond without comprehending their meaning; but he looks up reflectively for a moment, recalls them, glances over them afresh as it were, nods, and says—

"Oh, ah! Distressing nature; you fear adverting to it—eh! Pray don't agitate yourself, my good De Marolles. I don't think it likely you'll agitate me." He leaves the ring for a minute or two, and looks over the five nails on his left hand, evidently in search of the pinkest; finds it on the third finger, ​and caresses it tenderly, while awaiting Raymond's very painful communication.

"You said, Monsieur le Marquis, that you were utterly at a loss to comprehend my wife's motive in sending for you in this abrupt manner?"

"Utterly. And I assure you I am a bad sailor—a very bad sailor. When the weather's rough, I am positively compelled to—it is really so absurd," he says, with a light clear laugh—"I am obliged to—to go to the side of the vessel. Both undignified and disagreeable, I give you my word of honour. But you were saying———"

"I was about to say, monsieur, that it is my deep grief to have to state that the conduct of your niece has been for the last few months in every way inexplicable—so much so, that I have been led to fear———"

"What, monsieur?" The Marquis folds his white hands one over the other on his knee, leaves off the inspection of their beauties, and looks full in the face of his niece's husband.

"I have been led, with what grief I need scarcely say———"

"Oh, no, indeed; pray reserve the account of your grief—your grief must have been so very intense. You have been led to fear———"

"That my unhappy wife is out of her mind."

"Precisely. I thought that was to be the climax. My good Monsieur Raymond, Count de Marolles—my very worthy Monsieur Raymond Marolles—my most excellent whoever and whatever you may be—do you think that René Théodore Auguste Philippe Le Grange Martel, Marquis de Cevennes, is the sort of man to be twisted round your fingers, however clever, unscrupulous, and designing a villain you may be?"

"Monsieur le Marquis!"

"I have not the least wish to quarrel with you, my good friend. Nay, on the contrary, I will freely confess that I am not without a certain amount of respect for you. You are a thorough villain. Everything thorough is, in my mind, estimable. Virtue is said to lie in the golden mean—virtue is not in my way; I therefore do not dispute the question—but to me all mediums are contemptible. You are, in your way, thorough; and, on the whole, I respect you."

He goes back to the contemplation of his hands and his rings, and concentrates all his attention on a cameo head of Mark Antony, which he wears on his little finger.

"A villain, Monsieur le Marquis!"

"And a clever villain, Monsieur de Marolles—a clever villain! Witness your success. But you are not quite clever enough to hoodwink me—not quite clever enough to hoodwink any one blest with a moderate amount of brains!"

​"Monsieur!"

"Because you have one fault. Yes, really,"—he flicks a grain of dust out of Mark Antony's eye with his little finger—"yes, you have one fault. You are too smooth. Nobody ever was so estimable as you appear to be—you over-do it. If you remember," continues the Marquis, addressing him in an easy, critical, and conversational tone, "the great merit in that Venetian villain in the tragedy of the worthy but very much over-rated person, William Shakspeare, is, that he is not smooth. Othello trusts Iago, not because he is smooth, but because he isn't. 'I know this fellow's of exceeding honesty,' says the Moor; as much as to say, 'He's a disagreeable beast, but I think trustworthy.' You are a very clever fellow, Monsieur Raymond de Marolles, but you would never have got Desdemona smothered. Othello would have seen through you—as I did!"

"Monsieur, I will not suffer———"

"You will be good enough to allow me to finish what I have to say. I dare say I am prosy, but I shall not detain you long. I repeat, that though you are a very clever fellow, you would never have got the bolster-and-pillow business accomplished, because Othello would have seen through you as I did. My niece insisted on marrying you. Why? It was not such a very difficult riddle to read, this marriage, apparently so mysterious. You, an enterprising person, with a small capital, plenty of brains, and white hands quite unfit for rough work, naturally are on the look-out for some heiress whom you may entrap into marrying you."

"Monsieur de Cevennes!"

"My dear fellow, I am not quarrelling with you. In your position I should have done the same. That is the very clue by which I unravel the mystery. I say to myself, what should I have done if fate had been so remarkably shabby as to throw me into the position of that young man? Why, naturally I should have looked out for some woman foolish enough to be deceived by that legitimate and old-established sham—so useful to novelists and the melodramatic theatres—called 'Love.' Now, my niece is not a fool; ergo, she was not in love with you. You had then obtained some species of power over her. What that power was I did not ask; I do not ask now. Enough that it was necessary for her, for me, that this marriage should take place. She swore it on the crucifix. I am a Voltairean myself, but, poor girl, she derived those sort of ideas from her mother; so there was nothing for me but to consent to the marriage, and accept a gentleman of doubtful pedigree."

"Perhaps not so doubtful."

"Perhaps not so doubtful! There is a triumphant curl about ​your upper lip, my dear nephew-in-law. Has papa turned up lately?"

"Perhaps. I think I shall soon be able to lay my hand upon him." He lays a light and delicate hand on the Marquis's shoulder as he says the words.

"No doubt; but if in the meantime you would kindly refrain from laying it on me, you would oblige—you would really oblige me. Though why," said the Marquis philosophically, addressing himself to Mark Antony, as if he would like to avail himself of that Roman's sagacity, "why we should object to a villain simply because he is a villain, I can't imagine. We may object to him if he is coarse, or dirty, or puts his knife in his mouth, or takes soup twice, or wears ill-made coats, because those things annoy us; but, object to him because he is a liar, or a hypocrite, or a coward? Perfectly absurd! I say, therefore, I consented to the marriage, asked no unnecessary or ill-bred questions, and resigned myself to the force of circumstances; and for some years affairs appeared to go on very smoothly, when suddenly I am startled by a most alarming letter from my niece. She implores me to come to England. She is alone, without a friend, an adviser, and she is determined to reveal all."

"To reveal all!" Raymond cannot repress a start. The sang froid of the Marquis had entirely deceived him whose chief weapon was that very sang froid.

"Yes. What then? You, being aware of this letter having been written—or, say, guessing that such a letter would be written—determine on your course. You will throw over your wife's evidence by declaring her to be mad. Eh? This is what you determine upon, isn't it?" It appears so good a joke to the Marquis, that he laughs and nods at Mark Antony, as if he would really like that respectable Roman to participate in the fun.

For the first time in his life Raymond Marolles has found his match. In the hands of this man he is utterly powerless.

"An excellent idea. Only, as I said before, too obvious—too transparently obvious. It is the only thing you can do. If I were looking for a man, and came to a part of the country where there was but one road, I should of course know that he must—if he went anywhere—go down that road. So with you, my dear Marolles, there was but one resource left you—to disprove the revelations of your wife by declaring them the hallucinations of a maniac. I take no credit to myself for seeing through you, I assure you. There is no talent whatever in finding out that two and two make four; the genius would be the man who made them into five. I do not think I have any thing more to say. I have no wish to attack you, my dear nephew-in-law. I merely wanted to prove to you that I was not your dupe. I think you must be by this time sufficiently ​convinced of that fact. If you have any good Madeira in your cellars, I should like a glass or two, and the wing of a chicken, before I hear what my niece may have to say to me. I made a very poor breakfast some hours ago at the Lord Warden." Having expressed himself thus, the Marquis throws himself back in his easy-chair, yawns once or twice, and polishes Mark Antony with the corner of his handkerchief; he has evidently entirely dismissed the subject on which he has been speaking, and is ready for pleasant conversation.

At this moment the door is thrown open, and Valerie enters the room.

It is the first time Raymond has seen Valerie since the night of Mosquetti's story, and as his eyes meet hers he starts involuntarily.

What is it?—this change, this transformation, which has taken eight years off the age of this woman, and restored her as she was on that night when he first saw her at the Opera House in Paris. What is it? So great and marvellous an alteration, he might almost doubt if this indeed were she. And yet he can scarcely define the change. It seems a transformation, not of the face, but of the soul. A new soul looking out of the old beauty. A new soul? No, the old soul, which he thought dead. It is indeed a resurrection of the dead.

She advances to her uncle, who embraces her with a graceful and drawingroom species of tenderness, about as like real tenderness as ormolu is like rough Australian gold—as Lawrence Sterne's sentiment is like Oliver Goldsmith's pathos.

"My dear uncle! You received my letter, then?"

"Yes, dear child. And what, in Heaven's name, can you have to tell me that would not admit of being delayed until the weather changed?—and I am such a bad sailor," he repeats plaintively. "What can you have to tell me?"

"Nothing yet, my dear uncle"—the bright dark eyes look with a steady gaze at Raymond as she speaks—"nothing yet; the hour has not yet come."

"For mercy's sake, my dear girl," says the Marquis, in a tone of horror, "don't be melodramatic. If you're going to act a Porte-St.-Martin drama, in thirteen acts and twenty-six tableaux, I'll go back to Paris. If you've nothing to say to me, why, in the name of all that's feminine, did you send for me?"

"When I wrote to you, I told you that I appealed to you because I had no other friend upon earth to whom, in the hour of my anguish, I could turn for help and advice."

"You did, you did. If you had not been my only brother's only child, I should have waited a change in the wind before I crossed the Channel—I am such a wretched sailor! But life, as the religious party asserts, is a long sacrifice—I came!"

​"Suppose that, since writing that letter, I have found a friend, an adviser, a guiding hand and a supporting arm, and no longer need the help of any one on earth besides this new-found friend to revenge me upon my enemies?"

Raymond's bewilderment increases every moment. Has she indeed gone mad, and is this new light in her eyes the fire of insanity?

"I am sure, my dear Valerie, if you have met with such a very delightful person, I am extremely glad to hear it, as it relieves me from the trouble. It is melodramatic certainly, but excessively convenient. I have remarked, that in melodrama circumstances generally are convenient. I never alarm myself when everything is hopelessly wrong, and villany deliciously triumphant; for I know that somebody who died in the first act will come in at the centre doors, and make it all right before the curtain falls."

"Since Madame de Marolles will no doubt wish to be alone with her uncle, I may perhaps be permitted to go into the City till dinner, when I shall have the honour of meeting Monsieur le Marquis, I trust."

"Certainly, my good De Marolles; your chef, I believe, understands his profession. I shall have great pleasure in dining with you. Au revoir, mon enfant; we shall go upon velvet, now we so thoroughly understand each other." He waves his white left hand to Raymond, as a graceful dismissal, and turns towards his niece.

"Adieu, madame," says the Count, as he passes his wife; then, in a lower tone, adds, "I do not ask you to be silent for my sake or your own; I merely recommend you to remember that you have a son, and that you will do well not to make me your enemy. When I strike, I strike home, and my policy has always been to strike in the weakest place. Do not forget poor little Cherubino!" He looks at her steadily with his cruel blue eyes, and then turns to leave the room.

As he opens the door, he almost knocks down an elderly gentleman dressed in a suit of clerical-looking black and a white neckcloth, and carrying an unpleasantly damp umbrella under his arm.

"Not yet, Mr. Jabez North," says the gentleman, who is neither more nor less than that respectable preceptor and guide to the youthful mind, Dr. Tappenden, of Slopperton—"not yet, Mr. North; I think your clerks in Lombard Street will be compelled to do without you to-day. You are wanted elsewhere at present."

Anything but this—anything but this, and he would have borne it, like—like himself! Thank Heaven there is no comparison for such as he. He was prepared for all but this. This early period of his life, which he thought blotted out and forgotten—this he is unprepared for; and he falls back with a ​ghastly face, and white lips that refuse to shape even one exclamation of horror or surprise.

"What is this?" murmurs the Marquis. "North—Jabez—Jabez North? Oh, I see, we have come upon the pro-Parisian formation, and that," he glances towards Dr. Tappenden, "is one of the vestiges."

At last Raymond's tremulous lips consent to form the words he struggles to utter.

"You are under some mistake, sir, whoever you may be. My name is not North, and I have not the honour of your acquaintance. I am a Frenchman; my name is De Marolles. I am not the person you seek."

A gentleman advances from the doorway—(there is quite a group of people in the hall)—and says—

"At least, sir, you are the person who presented, eight years ago, three forged cheques at my bank. I am ready, as well as two of my clerks, to swear to your identity. We have people here with a warrant to arrest you for that forgery."

The forgery, not the murder?—no one knows of that, then—that, at least, is buried in oblivion.

"There are two or three little things out against you, Mr. North," said the doctor; "but the forgery will serve our purpose very well for the present. It's the easiest charge to bring home as yet."

What do they mean? What other charges? Come what may, he will be firm to the last—to the last he will be himself. After all, it is but death they can threaten him with: and the best people have to die, as well as the worst.

"Only death, at most!" he mutters. "Courage, Raymond, and finish the game as a good player should, without throwing away a trick, even though beaten by better cards."

"I tell you, gentlemen, I know nothing of your forgery, or you either. I am a Frenchman, born at Bordeaux, and never in your very eccentric country before; and indeed, if this is the sort of thing a gentleman is liable to in his own study, I shall certainly, when I once return to France, never visit your shores again."

"When you do return to France, I think it very unlikely you will ever revisit England, as you say, sir. If, as you affirm, you are indeed a Frenchman—(what excellent English you speak, monsieur, and what trouble you must have taken to acquire so perfect an accent!)—you will, of course, have no difficulty in proving the fact; also that you were not in England eight years ago, and consequently were not for some years assistant in the academy of this gentleman at Slopperton. All this an enlightened British jury will have much pleasure in hearing. We have not, however, come to try you, but to arrest you. Johnson, call a cab for the Count de Marolles! If we are wrong, ​monsieur, you will have a magnificent case of false imprisonment, and I congratulate you on the immense damages which you will most likely obtain. Thomson, the handcuffs! I must trouble you for your wrists, Monsieur de Marolles."

The police officer politely awaits the pleasure of his prisoner. Raymond pauses for a moment; thinks deeply, with his head bent on his breast; lifts it suddenly with a glitter in his eyes, and his thin lips set firm as iron. He has arranged his game.

"As you say, sir, I shall have an excellent case of false imprisonment, and my accusers shall pay for their insolence, as well as for their mistake. In the meantime, I am ready to follow you; but, before I do so, I wish to have a moment's conversation with this gentleman, the uncle of my wife. You have, I suppose, no objection to leaving me alone with him for a few minutes. You can watch outside in the hall; I shall not attempt to escape. We have, unfortunately, no trap-doors in this room, and I believe they do not build the houses in Park Lane with such conveniences attached to them as sliding panels or secret staircases."

"Perhaps not, sir," replies the inflexible police officer; "but they do, I perceive, build them with gardens"—he walks to the window, and looks out—"a wall eight feet high—door leading into mews. Not by any means such a very inconvenient house, Monsieur de Marolles. Thomson, one of the servants will be so good as to show you the way into the garden below these windows, where you will amuse yourself till this gentleman has done talking with his uncle."

"One moment—one moment," says the Marquis, who, during the foregoing conversation has been entirely absorbed in the endeavour to extract a very obstinate speck of dust from Mark Antony's nostril. "One moment, I beg"—as the officer is about to withdraw—"why an interview? Why a police person in the garden—if you call that dreadful stone dungeon with the roof off a garden? I have nothing to say to this gentleman. Positively nothing. All I ever had to say to him I said ten minutes ago. We perfectly understand each other. He can have nothing to say to me, or I to him; and really, I think, under the circumstances, the very best thing you can do is to put on that unbecoming iron machinery—I never saw a thing of the kind before, and, as a novelty, it is actually quite interesting"—(he touches the handcuffs that are lying on the table with the extreme tip of his taper third finger, hastily withdrawing it as if he thought they would bite)—"and to take him away immediately. If he has committed a forgery, you know," he adds, deprecatingly, "he is not the sort of thing one likes to see about one. He really is not."

Raymond de Marolles never had, perhaps, too much of that ​absurd weakness called love for one's fellow-creatures; but if ever he hated any man with the blackest and bitterest hate of his black and bitter heart, so did he hate the man standing now before him, twisting a ring round and round his delicate finger, and looking as entirely at his ease as if no point were in discussion of more importance than the wet weather and the cold autumn day.

"Stay, Monsieur le Marquis de Cevennes," he said, in a tone of suppressed passion, "you are too hasty in your conclusions. You have nothing to say to me. Granted! But I may have something to say to you—and I have a great deal to say to you, which must be said; if not in private, then in public—if not by word of mouth, I will print it in the public journals, till Paris and London shall ring with the sound of it on the lips of other men. You will scarcely care for this alternative, Monsieur de Cevennes, when you learn what it is I have to say. Your sang froid does you credit, monsieur; especially when, just now, though you could not repress a start of surprise at hearing that gentleman," he indicates Dr. Tappenden with a wave of his hand, "speak of a certain manufacturing town called Slopperton, you so rapidly regained your composure that only so close an observer as myself would have perceived your momentary agitation. You appear entirely to ignore, monsieur, the existence of a certain aristocratic emigrant's son, who thirty years ago taught French and mathematics in that very town of Slopperton. Nevertheless, there was such a person, and you knew him—although he was content to teach his native language for a shilling a lesson, and had at that period no cameo or emerald rings to twist round his fingers."

If the Marquis was ever to be admired in the whole course of his career, he was to be admired at this moment. He smiled a gentle and deprecating smile, and said, in his politest tone—

"Pardon me, he had eighteenpence a lesson—eighteenpence, I assure you; and he was often invited to dinner at the houses where he taught. The women adored him—they are so simple, poor things. He might have married a manufacturer's daughter, with an immense fortune, thick ancles, and erratic h's."

"But he did not marry any one so distinguished. Monsieur de Cevennes, I see you understand me. I do not ask you to grant me this interview in the name of justice or humanity, because I do not wish to address you in a language which is a foreign one to me, and which you do not even comprehend; but in the name of that young Frenchman of noble family, who was so very weak and foolish, so entirely false to himself and to his own principles, as to marry a woman because he loved, or fancied that he loved her, I say to you, Monsieur le Marquis, you will find it to your interest to hear what I have to reveal."

The Marquis shrugs his shoulders slightly. "As you please," ​he says. "Gentlemen, be good enough to remain outside that door. My dear Valerie, you had better retire to your own apartments. My poor child, all this must be so extremely wearisome to you—almost as bad as the third volume of a fashionable novel. Monsieur de Marolles, I am prepared to hear what you may have to say—though"—he here addresses himself generally—"I beg to protest against this affair from first to last—I repeat, from first to last—it is so intolerably melodramatic."

Chapter II.
Raymond de Marolles shows himself better than all Bow Street.

"And so, Monsieur de Marolles," said the Marquis, as Raymond closed the door on the group in the hall, and the two gentlemen were left entirely alone, "and so you have—by what means I shall certainly not so far inconvenience myself as to endeavour to guess—contrived to become informed of some of the antecedents of your very humble servant?"

"Of some of the antecedents—why not say of all the antecedents, Monsieur de Cevennes?"

"Just as you like, my dear young friend," replies the Marquis. He really seems to get quite affectionate to Raymond, but in a far-off, patronizing, and superb manner something that of a gentlemanly Mephistopheles to a promising Doctor Faustus;—"and having possessed yourself of this information, may I ask what use you intend making of it? In this utilitarian age everything is put to a use, sooner or later. Do you purpose writing my biography? It will not be interesting. Not as you would have to write it to-day. Alas! we are not so fortunate as to live under the Regency, and there are not many interesting biographies nowadays."

"My dear Marquis, I really have no time to listen to what I have no doubt, amongst your own particular friends, is considered most brilliant wit; I have two or three things to say to you that must be said; and the sort of people who are now waiting outside the door are apt to be impatient."

"Ah, you are experienced; you know their manners and customs! And they are impatient," murmured the Marquis, thoughtfully; "and they put you in stone places as if you were coal, and behind bars as if you were zoological; and then they hang you. They call you up at an absurd hour in the morning, and they take you out into a high place, and drop you down through a hole as if you were a penny put into a savings box; and other people get up at an equally absurd hour of the morning, or stay up all night, in order to see it done. And yet there are persons who declare that the age of romance has passed away."

​"Monsieur de Cevennes, that which I have to say to you relates to your marriage."

"My marriage. Suppose I say that I never was married, my amiable friend?"

"I shall then reply, monsieur, that I not only am informed of all the circumstances of your marriage, but what is more, I am possessed of a proof of that marriage."

"Supposing there was such a marriage, which I am prepared to deny, there could only be two proofs—the witnesses and the certificate."

"The witnesses, monsieur, are dead," said Raymond.

"Then that would reduce the possible proofs to one—the certificate."

"Nay, monsieur, there might be another evidence of the marriage."

"And that would be?"

"The issue of it. You had two sons by that marriage, monsieur. One of those sons died eight years ago."

"And the other?" asked the Marquis.

"Still lives. I shall have something to say about him by-and-by."

"It is a subject in which I take no sort of interest," said the Marquis, throwing himself back into his chair, and abandoning himself once more to Marc Antony. "I may have been married, or I may not have been married—it is not worth my while to deny that fact to you; because if I confess it to you, I can of course deny it the moment I cross the threshold of that door—I may have sons, or I may not have sons; in either case, I have no wish to hear of them, and anything you may have to say about them is, it appears to me, quite irrelevant to the matter in hand; which merely is your going to prison for forgery, or your not going to prison for forgery. But what I most earnestly recommend, my very dear young friend, is, that you take the cab and handcuffs quietly, and go! That will, at least, put an end to fuss and discussion; and oh, what an inexpressible relief there is in that! I always envy Noah, floundering about in that big boat of his: no new books; no houses of parliament; no poor relations; no Times newspaper; and no taxes—'universal as you were,' as Mr. Carlyle says; plenty to eat, and everything come to an end; and that foolish Noah must needs send out the dove, and begin it all over again. Yes, he began it all over again, that preposterous Noah. Whereby, cab, handcuffs, forgery, long conversation, and police persons outside that door; all of which might have been prevented if Noah had kept the dove indoors, and had been unselfish enough to bore a hole in the bottom of his boat."

"If you will listen to me, Monsieur le Marquis, and keep your ​philosophical reflections for a more convenient season, there will be some chance of our coming to an understanding. One of these twin sons still lives."

"Now, really, that is the old ground again. We are not getting on———"

"Still lives, I say. Whatever he is, Monsieur de Cevennes—whatever his chequered life may have been, the guilt and the misery of that life rest alike on your head."

The Marquis gives the head alluded to an almost imperceptible jerk, as if he threw this moral burden off, and looks relieved by the proceeding. "Don't be melodramatic," he remarks, mildly, "this is not the Porte-St.-Martin, and there are no citizens in the gallery to applaud."

"That guilt and that misery, I say, rest upon your head. When you married the woman whom you abandoned to starvation and despair, you loved her, I suppose?"

"I dare say I did; I have no doubt I told her so, poor little thing!"

"And a few months after your marriage you wearied of her, as you would have done of any other plaything."

"As I should have done of any other plaything. Poor dear child, she was dreadfully wearisome. Her relations too. Heaven and earth, what relations! They were looked upon in the light of human beings at Slopperton: but they were wise to keep out of Paris, for they'd have been most decidedly put into the Jardin des Plantes; and, really," said the Marquis, thoughtfully, "behind bars, and aggravated by fallacious offers of buns from small children, they would have been rather amusing."

"You were quite content that this unhappy girl should share your poverty, Monsieur le Marquis; but in the hour of your good fortune———"

"I left her. Decidedly. Look you, Monsieur de Marolles, when I married that young person, whom you insist on dragging out of her grave—poor girl, she is dead, no doubt, by this time—in this remarkably melodramatic manner, I was a young man, without a penny in the world, and with very slight expectations of ever becoming possessed of one. I am figurative, of course. I believe men of my temperament and complexion are not very subject to that popular epidemic, called love. But as much as it was in my power to love any one, I loved this little factory girl. I used to meet her going backwards and forwards to her work, as I went backwards and forwards to mine; and we became acquainted. She was gentle, innocent, pretty. I was very young, and, I need scarcely say, extremely stupid; and I married her. We had not been married six months before that dreadful Corsican person took it into his head to abdicate, and I was summoned back to France, to make my appearance ​at the Tuileries as Marquis de Cevennes. Now, what I have to say is this: if you wish to quarrel with any one, quarrel with the Corsican person; for if he had never signed his abdication at Fontainebleau (which he did, by the bye, in a most melodramatic manner—I am acquainted with some weak-minded people who cannot read the description of that event without shedding tears), I should never have deserted my poor little English wife."

"The Marquis de Cevennes could not, then, ratify the marriage of the obscure teacher of French and mathematics?" asked Raymond.

"If the Marquis de Cevennes had been a rich man, he might have done so; but the Restoration, which gave me back my title, and the only château (my ancestors had three) which the Jacobins had not burned to the ground, did not restore me the fortune which the Revolution had devoured. I was a poor man. Only one course was open to me—a rich marriage. The wealthy widow of a Buonapartist general beheld and admired your humble servant, and the doom of my poor little wife was sealed. For many years I sent money regularly to her old mother—an awful woman, who knew my secret. She had, therefore, no occasion to starve, Monsieur de Marolles. And now, may I be permitted to ask what interest you have in this affair, that you should insist on recalling these very disagreeable circumstances at this particular moment?"

"There is one question you do not ask, Monsieur le Marquis."

"Indeed; and what is that?" asked the Marquis.

"You seem to have very little curiosity about the fate of your surviving son."

"I seem to have very little curiosity, my young friend; I have very little curiosity. I dare say he is a very worthy individual; but I have no anxiety whatever about his fate; for if he at all resembles his father, there is very little doubt that he has taken every care of himself. The De Cevennes have always taken care of themselves; it is a family trait."

"He has proved himself worthy of that family, then. He was thrown into a river, but he did not sink; he was put into a workhouse and brought up as a pauper, but by the force of his own will and the help of his own brain he extricated himself, and won his way in the world. He became, what his father was before him, a teacher in a school. He grew tired of that, as his father did, and left England for Paris. In Paris, like his father before him, he married a woman he did not love for the sake of her fortune. He became master of that fortune, and till this very day he has surmounted every obstacle and triumphed over every difficulty. Your only son, Monsieur de Cevennes—the son whose mother you deserted—the son whom you abandoned ​to starve, steal, drown, or hang, to beg in the streets, die in a gutter, a workhouse, or a prison—has lived through all, to stand face to face with you this day, and to tell you that for his own and for his mother's wrongs, with all the strength of a soul which those wrongs have steeped in wickedness—he hates you!"

"Don't be violent," said the Marquis, gently. "So, you are my son? Upon my word I thought all along you were something of that kind, for you are such a consummate villain."

For the first time in his life Raymond de Marolles feels what it is to be beaten by his own weapons. Against the sang froid of the Marquis the torrent of his passionate words dashes, as the sea dashes at the foot of a rock, and makes as little impression.

"And what then?" says the Marquis. "Since it appears you are my son, what then?"

"You must save me, monsieur," said Raymond, in a hoarse voice.

"Save you? But, my worthy friend, how save you? Save you from the cab and handcuffs? If I go out to those people and say, 'He is my son; be so good as to forego the cab and handcuffs,' they will laugh at me. They are so dreadfully matter-of-fact, that sort of people. What is to be done?"

"Only this, monsieur. I must make my escape from this apartment. That window looks into the garden, from the garden to the mews, through the mews into a retired street, and thence———"

"Never mind that, if you get there. I really doubt the possibility of your getting there. There is a policeman watching in that garden."

Raymond smiles. He is recovering his presence of mind in the necessity for action. He opens a drawer in the library table and takes out an air-pistol, which looks rather like some elegant toy than a deadly weapon.

"I must shoot that man," he says.

"Then I give the alarm. I will not be implicated in a murder. Good Heavens! the Marquis de Cevennes implicated in a murder! Why, it would be talked of in Paris for a month."

"There will be no murder, monsieur. I shall fire at that man from this window and hit him in the knee. He will fall, and most likely faint from the pain, and will not, therefore know whether I pass through the garden or not. You will give the alarm, and tell the men without that I have escaped through this window and the door in the wall yonder. They will pursue me in that direction, while I———"

"You will do what?"

"Go out at the front door as a gentleman should. I was not unprepared for such an event as this. Every room in this house has a secret communication with the next room. There is only ​one door in this library, as it seems, and they are carefully watching that."

As he speaks he softly opens the window and fires at the man in the garden, who falls, only uttering a groan. As Raymond predicted, he faints with the pain.

With the rapidity of lightning he flings the window up violently, hurls the pistol to the farthest extremity of the garden, snatches the Marquis's hat from the chair on which it lies, presses one finger on the gilded back of a volume of Gibbon's Rome, a narrow slip of the bookcase opens inwards, and reveals a door leading into the next apartment, which is the dining-room. This door is made on a peculiar principle, and, as he pushes through, it closes behind him.

This is the work of a second; and as the officers, alarmed by the sound of the opening of the window, rush into the room, the Marquis gives the alarm. "He has escaped by the window!" he said. "He has wounded your assistant, and passed through that door. He cannot be twenty yards in advance; you will easily know him by his having no hat on."

"Stop!" cries the detective officer, "this may be a trap. He may have got round to the front door. Go and watch, Johnson."

A little too late this precaution. As the officers rushed into the library, Raymond passed from the dining-room door out of the open street-door, and jumped into the very cab which was waiting to take him to prison. "Five pounds, if you catch the Liverpool Express," he said to the cabman.

"All right, sir," replied that worthy citizen, with a wink. "I've druv a many gents like you, and very good fares they is too, and a godsend to a hard-working man, what old ladies with hand-bags and umbrellas grudges eightpence a mile to," mutters the charioteer, as he gallops down Upper Brook Street and across Hanover Square, while the gentlemen of the police force, aided by Dr. Tappenden and the obliging Marquis, search the mews and neighbourhood adjoining. Strange to say, they cannot obtain any information from the coachman and stableboys concerning a gentleman without a hat, who must have passed through the mews about three minutes before.

Chapter III.
The Left-handed Smasher makes his Mark.

"It is a palpable and humiliating proof of the decadence of the glories of white-cliffed Albion and her lion-hearted children," said the sporting correspondent of the Liverpool Bold Speaker and Threepenny Aristides—a gentleman who, by the bye, was very clever at naming—for half-a-dozen stamps—the horses that didn't win; and was, indeed, useful to fancy betters, as ​affording accurate information what to avoid; nothing being better policy than to give the odds against any horse named by him as a sure winner, or a safe second: for those gallant steeds were sure to be, whatever the fluctuating fortune of the race, ignominiously nowhere. "It is," continued the Liverpool B. S., "a sign of the downfalling of the lion and unicorn—over which Britannia may shed tears and the inhabitants of Liverpool and its vicinity mourn in silent despair—that the freedom of England is no more! We repeat (The Liverpool Aristides here gets excited, and goes into small capitals)—Britain is no longer Free! Her freedom departed from her on that day on which the blue-coated British Sbirri of Sir Robert Peel broke simultaneously into the liberties of the nation, the mightiest clauses of Magna Charta, and the Prize Ring, and stopped the operations of the Lancashire Daddy Longlegs and the celebrated Metropolitan favourite, the Left-handed Smasher, during the eighty-ninth round, and just as the real interest of the fight was about to begin. Under these humiliating circumstances, a meeting has been held by the referees and backers of the men, and it has been agreed between the latter and the stakeholder to draw the money. But, that the valiant and admired Smasher may have no occasion to complain of the inhospitality of the town of Liverpool, the patrons of the fancy have determined on giving him a dinner, at which his late opponent, our old favourite and honoured townsman, Daddy Longlegs, will be in the chair, having a distinguished gentleman of sporting celebrity as his vice. It is to be hoped that, as some proof that the noble art of self-defence is not entirely extinct in Liverpool, the friends of the Ring will muster pretty strong on this occasion. Tickets, at half-a-guinea, to be obtained at the Gloves Tavern, where the entertainment will take place."

On the very day on which the Count de Marolles left his establishment in Park Lane in so very abrupt a manner, the tributary banquet to the genius of the Ring, in the person of the Left-handed Smasher, came off in excellent style at the above-mentioned Gloves Tavern—a small hostelry, next door to one of the Liverpool minor theatres, and chiefly supported by the members of the Thespian and pugilistic arts. The dramatic element, perhaps, rather predominated in the small parlour behind the bar, where Brandolph of the Burning Brand—after fighting sixteen terrific broadsword combats, and being left for dead behind the first grooves seven times in the course of three acts—would take his Welsh rarebit and his pint of half-and-half in company with the Lancashire Grinder and the Pottery Pet, and listen with due solemnity to the discourse of these two popular characters. The little parlour was so thickly hung with portraits of theatrical and sporting celebrities, that Œdipus ​himself—distinguished as he is for having guessed the dullest of conundrums—could never have discovered the pattern of the paper which adorned the walls. Here, Mr. Montmorency, the celebrated comedian, smirked—with that mild smirk only known in portraits—over the ample shoulders of his very much better half, at the Pet in fighting attitude. There, Mr. Marmaduke Montressor, the great tragedian, frowned, in the character of Richard the Third, at Pyrrhus the First, winner of the last Derby. Here, again; Mademoiselle Pasdebasque pointed her satin slipper side by side with the youthful Challoner of that day; and opposite Mademoiselle Pasdebasque, a gentleman in scarlet, whose name is unknown, tumbled off a burnt-sienna horse, in excellent condition, and a very high state of varnish, into a Prussian-blue ditch, thereby filling the spectator with apprehension lest he should be, not drowned, but dyed. As to Brandolph of the Brand, there were so many pictures of him, in so many different attitudes, and he was always looking so very handsome and doing something so very magnanimous, that perhaps, upon the whole, it was rather a disappointment to look from the pictures down to the original of them in the dingy costume of private life, seated at the shiny little mahogany table, partaking of refreshment.

The theatrical profession mustered pretty strongly to do honour to the sister art on this particular occasion. The theatre next door to the Gloves happened, fortunately, to be closed, on account of the extensive scale of preparations for a grand dramatic and spectacular performance, entitled, "The Sikh Victories; or, The Tyrant of the Ganges," which was to be brought out the ensuing Monday, with even more than usual magnificence. So the votaries of Thespis were free to testify their admiration for the noble science of self-defence, by taking tickets for the dinner at ten- and- sixpence a-piece, the banquet being, as Mr. Montressor, the comedian above-mentioned, remarked, with more energy than elegance, a cheap blow-out, as the dinner would last the guests who partook of it two days, and the indigestion attendant thereon would carry them through the rest of the week.

I shall not enter into the details of the pugilistic dinner, but will introduce the reader into the banquet-hall at rather a late stage in the proceedings; in point of fact, just as the festival is about to break up. It is two o'clock in the morning; the table is strewn with the débris of a dessert, in which figs, almonds and raisins, mixed biscuits, grape-stalks, and apple and orange-peel seem rather to predominate. The table is a very field of Cressy or Waterloo, as to dead men in the way of empty bottles; good execution having evidently been done upon Mr. Hemmar's well-stocked cellar. From the tumblers and spoons before each guest, however, it is also evident that the festive throng has ​followed the example of Mr. Sala's renowned hero, and after having tried a "variety of foreign drains," has gone back to gin-and-water pur et simple. It is rather a peculiar and paradoxical quality of neat wines that they have, if anything, rather an untidy effect on those who drink them: certainly there is a looseness about the hair, a thickness and indecision in the speech, and an erratic and irrelevant energy and emphasis in the gestures of the friends of the Smasher, which is entirely at variance with our ordinary idea of the word "neat." Yet, why should we quarrel with them on that account? They are harmless, and they are happy. It is surely no crime to see two gas-burners where, to the normal eye, there is only one; neither is it criminal to try five distinct times to enunciate the two words, "slightest misunderstanding," and to fail ignominiously every time. If anything, that must be an amiable feeling which inspires a person with a sudden wild and almost pathetic friendship for a man he never saw before; such a friendship, in short, as pants to go to the block for him, or to become his surety to a loan-office for five pounds. Is it any such terrible offence against society to begin a speech of a patriotic nature, full of allusions to John Bull, Queen Victoria, Wooden Walls, and the Prize Ring, and to burst into tears in the middle thereof? Is there no benevolence in the wish to see your friend home, on account of your strong impression that he has taken a little too much, and that he will tumble against the railings and impale his chin upon the spikes; which, of course, you are in no danger of doing? Are these things crimes? No! We answer boldly, No! Then, hurrah for neat wines and free trade! Open wide our harbours to the purple grapes that flourish in the vineyards of sunny Burgundy and Bordeaux; and welcome, thrice welcome, to the blushing tides which Horace sang so many hundred years ago, when our beautiful Earth was younger, and maybe fairer, and held its course, though it is hard to believe it, very well indeed, without the genius of modern civilization at the helm.

There had been a silver cup, with one of the labours of Hercules—poor Hercules, how hard they work him in the sporting world!—embossed thereon, presented to the Smasher, as a tribute of respect for those British qualities which had endeared him to his admirers; and the Smasher's health had been drunk with three-times-three, and a little one in; and then three more three-times-three, and another little one in; and the Smasher had returned thanks, and Brandolph of the Brand had proposed the Daddy Longlegs, and the Daddy Longlegs had made a very neat speech in the Lancashire dialect, which the gentlemen of the theatrical profession had pretended to understand, but had not understood; and a literary individual—being, in fact, the gentleman whose spirited writing we have quoted above, Mr. ​Jeffrey Hallam Jones, of the Liverpool Aristides, sporting and theatrical correspondent, and constant visitor at the Gloves—had proposed the Ring; and the Smasher had proposed the Press, for the liberties of which, as he said in noble language afterwards quoted in the Aristides, the gentlemen of the Prize Ring were prepared to fight as long as they had a bunch of fives to rattle upon the knowledge-box of the foe; and then the Daddy Longlegs had proposed the Stage, and its greatest glory, Brandolph of the Brand; and ultimately everybody had proposed everybody else—and then, some one suggesting a quiet song, everybody sang.

Now, as the demand for a song from each member of the festive band was of so noisy and imperative a nature that a refusal was not only a moral, but a physical impossibility, it would be unbecoming to remark that the melody and harmony of the evening were, at best, fluctuating. Annie Laurie was evidently a young lady of an undecided mind, and wandered in a pleasing manner from C into D, and from D into E, and then back again with laudable dexterity to C, for the finish. The gentleman whose heart was bowed down in the key of G might have rendered his performance more effective, had he given big statement of that affliction entirely in one key; and another gentleman, who sang a comic song of seventeen eight-line verses, with four lines of chorus to every verse, would have done better if he had confined himself to his original plan of singing superhumanly flat, instead of varying it, as he occasionally did, by singing preternaturally sharp. Of course it is an understood thing, that in a chorus, every singer should choose his own key, or where is the liberty of the subject?—so that need not be alluded to. But all this is over; and the guests of Mr. Hemmar have risen to depart, and have found the act of rising to depart by no means the trifle they thought it. It is very hard, of course, in such an atmosphere of tobacco, to find the door; and that, no doubt, is the reason why so many gentlemen seek for it in the wrong direction, and buffet insanely with their arms against the wall, in search of that orifice.

Now, there are two gentlemen in whom Mr. Hemmar's neat wines have developed a friendship of the warmest description. Those two gentlemen are none other than the two master-spirits of the evening, the Left-handed Smasher and Brandolph of the Brand—who, by the bye, in private life, is known as Augustus de Clifford. His name is not written thus in the register of his baptism. On that malicious document he is described as William Watson; but to his friends and the public he has for fifteen years been admired and beloved as the great De Clifford, although often familiarly called Brandolph, in delicate allusion to his greatest character.

​Now, Brandolph is positively convinced that the Smasher is not in a fit state to go home alone, and the Smasher is equally assured that Brandolph will do himself a mischief unless he is watched; so Brandolph is going to see the Smasher home to his hotel, which is a considerable distance from the Gloves Tavern; and then the Smasher is coming back again to see Brandolph to his lodgings, which are next door but two to the Gloves Tavern. So, after having bade good night to every one else, in some instances with tears, and always with an affectionate pathos verging upon tears, Brandolph flings on his loose overcoat, just as Manfred might have flung on his cloak prior to making a morning call upon the witch of the Alps, and the Smasher twists about five yards of particoloured woollen raiment, which he calls a comforter, round his neck, and they sally forth.

A glorious autumn night; the full moon high in the heavens, with a tiny star following in her wake like a well-bred tuft-hunter, and all the other stars keeping their distance, as if they had retired to their own "grounds," as the French say, and were at variance with their queen on some matter connected with taxes. A glorious night; as light as day—nay, almost lighter; for it is a light which will bear looking at, and which does not dazzle our eyes as the sun does, when we are presumptuous enough to elevate our absurdly infinitesimal optics to his sublimity. Not a speck on the Liverpool pavement, not a dog asleep on the doorstep, or a dissipated cat sneaking home down an area, but is as visible as in the broad glare of noon. "Such a night as this" was almost too much for Lara, and Brandolph of the Brand grows sentimental.

"You wouldn't think," he murmurs, abstractedly, gazing at the moon, as he and the Smasher meander arm-in-arm over the pavement; "you wouldn't think she hadn't an atmosphere, would you? A man might build a theatre there, and he might get his company up in balloons; but I question if it would pay, on account of that trivial want—she hasn't got an atmosphere."

"Hasn't she?" said the Smasher, who certainly, if anything, had, in the matter of sobriety, the advantage of the tragedian. "You'll have a black eye though, if you don't steer clear of that 'ere lamp-post you're makin' for. I never did see such a cove," he added; "with his hatmospheres, and his moons, and his b'loons, one would think he'd never had a glass or two of wine before."

Now, to reach the hotel which the left-handed one honoured by his presence, it was necessary to pass the quay; and the sight of the water and the shipping reposing in the stillness under the light of the moon, again awakened all the poetry in the nature of the romantic Brandolph.

"It is beautiful!" he said, taking his pet position, and waving his arm in the orthodox circle, prior to pointing to the scene ​before him. "It is peaceful: it is we who are the blots upon the beauty of the earth. Oh, why—why are we false to the beautiful and heroic, as the author of the Lady of Lyons would observe? Why are we false to the true? Why do we drink too much and see double? Standing amidst the supreme silences, with breathless creation listening to our words, we look up to the stars that looked down upon the philosopher of the cave; and we feel that we have retrograded." Here the eminent tragedian gave a lurch, and seated himself with some violence and precipitation on the kerbstone. "We feel," he repeated, "that we have retrograded. It is a pity!"

"Now, who's to pick him up?" inquired the Smasher, looking round in silent appeal to the lamp-posts about him. "Who's to pick him up? I can't; and if he sleeps here he'll very likely get cold. Get up, you snivelling fool, can't you?" he said, with some asperity, to the descendant of Thespis, who, after weeping piteously, was drying his eyes with an announce bill of the "Tyrant of the Ganges," and by no means improving his personal appearance with the red and black printer's ink thereof.

How mine host of the Cheerful Cherokee would ever have extricated his companion from this degraded position, without the timely intervention of others, is not to be said; for at this very moment the Smasher beheld a gentleman alight from a cab at a little distance from where he stood, ask two or three questions of the cabman, pay and dismiss him, and then walk on in the direction of some steps that led to the water. This gentleman wore his hat very much slouched over his face; he was wrapped in a heavy loose coat, that entirely concealed his figure, and evidently carried a parcel of some kind under his left arm.

"Hi!" said the Smasher, as the pedestrian approached; "Hi, you there! Give us a hand, will you?"

The gentleman addressed as "you there" took not the slightest notice of this appeal, except, indeed, that he quickened his pace considerably, and tried to pass the left-handed one.

"No, you don't," said our pugilistic friend; "the cove as refuses to pick up the man that's down is a blot upon the English character, and the sooner he's scratched out the better;" wherewith the Smasher squared his fists and placed himself directly in the path of the gentleman with the slouched hat.

"I tell you what it is, my good fellow," said this individual, "you may pick up your drunken friend yourself, or you may wait the advent of the next policeman, who will do the public a service by conveying you both to the station-house, where you may finish the evening in your own highly-intellectual manner. But perhaps you will be good enough to let me pass, for I'm in a hurry! You see that American vessel yonder—she's dropped down the river to wait for the wind; the breeze is springing up ​as fast as it can, and she may set sail as it is before I can reach her; so, if you want to earn a sovereign, come and see if you can help me in arousing a waterman and getting off to her?"

"Oh, you are off to America, are you?" said the Smasher, thoughtfully. "Blow that 'ere wine of Hemmar's! I ought to know the cut of your figure-head. I've seen you before—I've seen you somewheres before, though where that somewheres was, spiflicate me if I can call to mind! Come, lend a hand with this 'ere friend o' mine, and I'll lend you a hand with the boatman."

"D—n your friend," said the other, savagely; "let me pass, will you, you drunken fool?"

This was quite enough for the Smasher, who was just in that agreeable frame of mind attendant on the consumption of strong waters, in which the jaundiced eye is apt to behold an enemy even in a friend, and the equally prejudiced ear is ready to hear an insult in the most civil address.

"Come on, then," said he; and putting himself in a scientific attitude, he dodged from side to side two or three times, as if setting to his partner in a quadrille, and then, with a movement rapid as lightning, went in with his left fist, and planted a species of postman's knock exactly between the eyes of the stranger, who fell to the ground as an ox falls under the hand of an accomplished butcher.

It is needless to say that, in falling, his hat fell off, and as he lay senseless on the pavement, the moonlight on his face revealed every feature as distinctly as in the broadest day.

The Smasher knelt down by his side, looked at him attentively for a few moments, and then gave a long, low whistle.

"Under the circumstances," he said, "perhaps I couldn't have done a better thing than this 'ere I've done promiscuous. He won't go to America by that vessel at any rate; so if I telegraph to the Cherokees, maybe they will be glad to hear what he's up to down here. Come along," continued the sobered Smasher, hauling up Mr. De Clifford by the collar, as ruthlessly as if he had been a sack of coal; "I think I hear the footsteps of a Bobby a-coming this way, so we'd better make ourselves scarce before we're asked any questions."

"If," said the distinguished Brandolph, still shedding tears, "if the town of Liverpool was conducted after the manner of the Republic of Plato, there wouldn't be any policemen. But, as I said before, we have retrograded. Take care of the posts," he added plaintively. "It is marvellous the effect a few glasses of light wine have upon some people's legs; while others, on the contrary———" here he slid again to the ground, and this time eluded all the Smasher's endeavours to pick him up.

"You had better let me be," he murmured. "It is hard, but it is clean and comfortable. Bring me my boots and hot water ​at nine o'clock; I've an early rehearsal of 'The Tyrant.' Go home quietly, my dear friend, and don't take anything more to drink, for your head is evidently not a strong one. Good night."

"Here's a situation!" said the Smasher. "I can't dance attendance on him any more, for I must run round to the telegraph office and see if it's open, that I may send Mr. Marwood word about this night's work. The Count de Marolles is safe enough for a day or two, anyhow; for I have set a mark upon him that he won't rub off just yet, clever as he is."

Chapter IV.
What they find in the Room in which the Murder was committed.

At the time that the arrest of the Count de Marolles was taking place, Mr. Joseph Peters was absent from London, being employed upon some mission of a delicate and secret nature in the town of Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy.

Slopperton is very little changed since the murder at the Black Mill set every tongue going upon its nine-days wonder. There may be a few more tall factory chimneys; a few more young factory ladies in cotton jackets and coral necklaces all the week, and in rustling silks and artificial flowers on Sunday; the new town—that dingy hanger-on of the old town—may have spread a little farther out towards the bright and breezy country; and the railway passenger may perhaps see a larger veil of black smoke hanging in the atmosphere as he approaches the Slopperton station than he saw eight years ago.

Mr. Peters, being no longer a householder in the town, takes up his abode at a hostelry, and, strange to say, selects the little river-side public-house in which he overheard that conversation between the usher and the country girl, the particulars of which are already known to the reader.

He is peculiar in his choice of an hotel, for "The Bargeman's Delight" certainly does not offer many attractions to any one not a bargeman. It is hard indeed to guess what the particular delight of the bargeman may be, which the members of that guild find provided for them in the waterside tavern alluded to. The bargeman's delight is evidently not cleanliness, or he would go elsewhere in search of that virtue; neither can the bargeman affect civility in his entertainers, for the host and that one slip-shod young person who is barmaid, barman, ostler, cook, chambermaid, and waiter all in one, are notoriously sulky in their conversation with their patrons, and have an aggrieved and injured bearing very unpleasant to the sensitive customer. But if, on the other hand, the bargeman's delight should happen to consist in dirt, and damp, and bad cooking, and worse ​attendance, and liquors on which the small glass brandy-balls peculiar to the publican float triumphantly, and pertinaciously refuse to go down to the bottom—if such things as these be the bargeman's delight, he has them handsomely provided for him at this establishment.

However this may be, to "The Bargeman's Delight" came Mr. Peters on the very day of the Count's arrest, with a carpet-bag in one hand and a fishing-rod in the other, and with no less a person than Mr. Augustus Darley for his companion. The customer, by the bye, was generally initiated into the pleasures of this hostelry by being tripped up or tripped down on the threshold, and saluting a species of thin soup of sawdust and porter, which formed the upper stratum of the floor, with his olfactory organ. The neophyte of the Rosicrucian mysteries and of Freemasonry has, I believe, something unpleasant done to him before he can be safely trusted with the secrets of the Temple; why, then, should not the guest of the Delight have his initiation? Mr. Darley, with some dexterity, however, escaped this danger; and, entering the bar safely, entreated with the slip-shod and defiant damsel aforesaid.

"Could we have a bed?" Mr. Darley asked; "in point of fact, two beds?"

The damsel glared at him for a few minutes without giving any answer at all. Gus repeated the question.

"We've got two beds," muttered the defiant damsel.

"All right, then," said Gus. "Come in, old fellow," he added to Mr. Peters, whose legs and bluchers were visible at the top of the steps, where he patiently awaited the result of his companion's entreaty with the priestess of the temple.

"But I don't know whether you can have 'em," said the girl, with a more injured air than usual. "We ain't in general asked for beds."

"Then why do you put up that?" asked Mr. Darley, pointing to a board on which, in letters that had once been gilt, was inscribed this legend, "Good Beds."

"Oh, as for that," said the girl, "that was wrote up before we took the place, and we had to pay for it in the fixtures, so of course we wasn't a-goin' to take it down! But I'll ask master." Whereon she disappeared into the damp and darkness, as if she had been the genius of that mixture; and presently reappeared, saying they could have beds, but that they couldn't have a private sitting-room because there wasn't one—which reason they accepted as unanswerable, and furthermore said they would content themselves with such accommodation as the bar-parlour afforded; whereon the slip-shod barmaid relaxed from her defiant mood, and told them that they would find it quite cheerful, as there was a nice look-out upon the river."

​Mr. Darley ordered a bottle of wine—a tremendous order, rarely known to be issued in that establishment—and further remarked that he should be glad if the landlord would bring it in, as he would like five minutes' conversation with him. After having given this overwhelming order, Gus and Mr. Peters entered the parlour.

It was empty, the parlour; the bargeman was evidently taking his delight somewhere else that afternoon. There were the wet marks of the bargeman's porter-pots of the morning, and the dry marks of the bargeman's porter-pots of the day before, still on the table; there were the bargeman's broken tobacco-pipes, and the cards wherewith he had played all-fours—which cards he had evidently chewed at the corners in aggravation of spirit when his luck deserted him—strewn about in every direction. There were the muddy marks of the bargeman's feet on the sandy floor; there was a subtle effluvium of mingled corduroy, tobacco, onions, damp leather, and gin, which was the perfume of the bargeman himself; but the bargeman in person was not there.

Mr. Darley walked to the window, and looked out at the river. A cheerful sight, did you say, slip-shod Hebe? Is it cheerful to look at that thick dingy water, remembering how many a wretched head its current has flowed over; how many a tired frame has lain down to find in death the rest life could not yield; how many a lost soul has found a road to another world in that black tide, and gone forth impenitent, from the shore of time to the ocean of eternity; how often the golden hair has come up in the fisherman's net; and how many a Mary, less happy, since less innocent than the heroine of Mr. Kingsley's melodious song, has gone out, never, never to return! Mr. Darley perhaps thinks this, for he turns his back to the window, calls out to the barmaid to come and light a fire, and proceeds to fill man's great consoler, his pipe.

I very much wonder, gentle readers of the fair sex, that you have never contrived somehow or other to pick a quarrel with the manes of good, cloak-spoiling, guinea-finding, chivalrous, mutineer-encountering, long-suffering, maid-of-honour-adoring Walter Raleigh—the importer of the greatest rival woman ever had in the affections of man, the tenth Muse, the fourth Grace, the uncanonized saint, Tobacco. You are angry with poor Tom, whom you henpeck so cruelly, Mrs. Jones, because he came home last night from that little business dinner at Greenwich slightly the worse for the salmon and the cucumber—not the iced punch!—oh, no! he scarcely touched that! You are angry with your better half, and you wish to give him, as you elegantly put it, a bit of your mind. My good soul, what does Tom care for you—behind his pipe? Do you think he is listening to you, or thinking of you, as he sits lazily watching with dreamy eyes ​the blue wreaths of smoke curling upwards from that honest meerschaum bowl? He is thinking of the girl he knew fourteen years ago, before ever he fell on his knees in the back parlour, and ricked his ancle in proposing to you; he is thinking of a pic-nic in Epping Forest, where he first met her; when coats were worn short-waisted, and Plancus was consul; when there was scaffolding at Charing Cross, and stage-coaches between London and Brighton; when the wandering minstrel was to be found at Beulah Spa, and there was no Mr. Robson at the Olympic. He is looking full in your face, poor Tom! and attending to every word you say—as you think! Ah! my dear madam, believe me, he does not see one feature of your face, or hear one word of your peroration. He sees her; he sees her standing at the end of a green arcade, with the sunlight flickering between the restless leaves upon her bright brown curls, and making arabesques of light and shade on her innocent white dress; he sees the little coquettish glance she flings back at him, as he stands in an attitude he knows now was, if anything, spooney, all amongst the débris of the banquet—lobster-salads, veal-and-ham pies, empty champagne-bottles, strawberry-stalks, parasols, and bonnets and shawls. He hears the singing of the Essex birds, the rustling of the forest leaves, her ringing laugh, the wheels of a carriage, the tinkling of a sheep-bell, the roar of a blacksmith's forge, and the fall of waters in the distance. All those sweet rustic sounds, which make a music very different to the angry tones of your voice, are in his ears; and you, madam—you, for any impression you can make on him, might just as well be on the culminating point of Teneriffe, and would find quite as attentive a listener in the waste of ocean you might behold from that eminence!

And who is the fairy that works the spell? Her earthly name is Tobacco, alias Bird's-eye, alias Latakia, alias Cavendish; and the magician who raised her first in the British dominions was Walter Raleigh. Are you not glad now, gentle reader, that the sailors mutinied, that the dear son was killed in that far land, and that the mean-spirited Stuart rewarded the noblest and wisest of his age with a life in a dungeon and the death of a traitor?

I don't know whether Augustus Darley thought all this as he sat over the struggling smoke and damp in the parlour of the "Bargeman's Delight," which smoke and damp the defiant barmaid told him would soon develop into a good fire. Gus was not a married man; and, again, he and Mr. Peters had very particular business on their hands, and had very little time for sentimental or philosophical reflections.

The landlord of the "Delight" appeared presently, with what, he assured his guests, was such a bottle of port as they wouldn't often meet with. There was a degree of obscurity in this com​mendation which savoured of the inspired communications of the priestess of the oracle. Æacida might conquer the Romans, or the Romans might annihilate Æacida; the bottle of port might be unapproachable by its excellence, or so utterly execrable in quality as to be beyond the power of wine-merchant to imitate; and either way the landlord not forsworn. Gus looked at the bright side of the question, and requested his host to draw the cork and bring another glass—"that is," he said, "if you can spare half an hour or so for a friendly chat."

"Oh, as for that," said the landlord, "I can spare time enough, it isn't the business as'll keep me movin'; it's never brisk except on wet afternoons, when they comes in with their dirty boots, and makes more mess than they drinks beer. A 'found drowned' or a inquest enlivens us up now and then; but Lord, there's nothing doing nowadays, and even inquests and drownin' seems a-goin' out."

The landlord was essentially a melancholy and blighted creature; and he seated himself at his own table, wiped away yesterday's beer with his own coat-sleeve, and prepared himself to drink his own port, with a gloomy resignation sublime enough to have taken a whole band of conspirators to the scaffold in a most creditable manner.

"My friend," said Mr. Darley, introducing Mr. Peters by a wave of his hand, "is a foreigner, and hasn't got hold of our language yet; he finds it slippery, and hard to catch, on account of the construction of it, so you must excuse his not being lively."

The landlord nodded, and remarked, in a cheering manner, that he didn't see what there was for the liveliest cove goin' to be lively about nowadays.

After a good deal of desultory conversation, and a description of several very interesting inquests, Gus asked the landlord whether he remembered an affair that happened about eight or nine years ago, or thereabouts—a girl found drowned in the fall of the year.

"There's always bein' girls found drowned," said the landlord moodily; "it's my belief they likes it, especially when they've long hair. They takes off their bonnets, and they lets down their back hairs, and they puts a note in their pockets, wrote large, to say as they hopes as how he'll be sorry, and so on. I can't remember no girl in particular, eight years ago, at the back end of the year. I can call to mind a many promiscuous like, off and on, but not to say this was Jane, or that was Sarah."

"Do you remember a quarrel, then, between a man and a girl in this very room, and the man having his head cut by a sovereign she threw at him?"

"We never have no quarrels in this room," replied the landlord, with dignity. "The bargemen sometimes have a few words, ​and tramples upon each other with their hobnailed boots, and their iron heels and toes will dance again when their temper's up; but I don't allow no quarrels here. And yet," he added, after a few moments' reflection, "there was a sort of a row, I remember, a many years ago, between a girl as drowned herself that night down below, and a young gent, in this 'ere room; he a-sittin' just as you may be a-sittin' now, and she a-standin' over by that window, and throwin' four sovereigns at him spiteful, one of them a-catchin' him just over the eyebrow, and cuttin' of him to the bone—and he a-pickin' 'em up when his head was bound, and walkin' off with 'em as if nothin' had happened."

"Yes; but do you happen to remember," said Gus, "that he only found three out of the four sovereigns; and that he was obliged to give up looking for the last, and go away without it?"

The landlord of the "Delight" suddenly lapsed into most profound meditation; he rubbed his chin, making a rasping noise as he did so, as if going cautiously over a French roll, first with one hand and then with the other; he looked with an earnest gaze into the glass of puce-coloured liquid before him, took a sip of that liquid, smacked his lips after the manner of a connoisseur, and then said that he couldn't at the present moment call to mind the last circumstance alluded to.

"Shall I tell you," said Gus, "my motive in asking this question?"

The landlord said he might as well mention it as not.

"Then I will. I want that sovereign. I've a particular reason, which I don't want to stop to explain just now, for wanting that very coin of all others; and I don't mind giving a five-pound note to the man that'll put that twenty shillings worth of gold into my hand."

"You don't, don't you?" said the landlord, repeating the operations described above, and looking very hard at Gus all the time: after which he sat staring silently from Gus to Peters, and from Peters to the puce-coloured liquid, for some minutes: at last he said—"It ain't a trap?"

"There's the note," replied Mr. Darley; "look at it, and see if it's a good one. I'll lay it on this table, and when you lay down that sovereign—that one, mind, and no other—it's yours."

"You think I've got it, then?" said the landlord, interrogatively.

"I know you've got it," said Gus, "unless you've spent it."

"Why, as to that," said the landlord, "when you first called to mind the circumstance of the girl, and the gent, and the inquest, and all that, I've a short memory, and couldn't quite recollect that there sovereign; but now I do remember finding of that very coin a year and a half afterwards, for the drains ​was bad that year, and the Board of Health came a-chivying of us to take up our floorings, and lime-wash ourselves inside; and in taking up the flooring of this room what should we come across but that very bit of gold?"

"And you never changed it?"

"Shall I tell you why I never changed it? Sovereigns ain't so plentiful in these parts that I should keep this one to look at. What do you say to it's not being a sovereign at all?"

"Not a sovereign?"

"Not; what do you say to it's being a twopenny-halfpenny foreign coin, with a lot of rum writin' about it—a coin as they has the cheek to offer me four-and-sixpence for as old gold, and as I kep', knowin' it was worth more for a curiosity—eh?"

"Why, all I can say is," said Gus, "that you did very wisely to keep it; and here's five or perhaps ten times its value, and plenty of interest for your money."

"Wait a bit," muttered the landlord; and disappearing into the bar, he rummaged in some drawer in the interior of that sanctum, and presently reappeared with a little parcel screwed carefully in newspaper. "Here it is," he said, "and jolly glad I am to get rid of the useless lumber, as wouldn't buy a loaf of bread if one was a starving; and thank you kindly, sir," he continued, as he pocketed the note. "I should like to sell you half-a-dozen more of 'em at the same price, that's all."

The coin was East Indian; worth perhaps six or seven rupees; in size and touch not at all unlike a sovereign, but about fifty years old.

"And now," said Gus, "my friend and I will take a stroll; you can cook us a steak for five o'clock, and in the meantime we can amuse ourselves about the town."

"The factories might be interesting to the foreigneering gent," said the landlord, whose spirits seemed very much improved by the possession of the five-pound note; "there's a factory hard by as employs a power of hands, and there's a wheel as killed a man only last week, and you could see it, I'm sure, gents, and welcome, by only mentioning my name. I serves the hands as lives round this way, which is a many."

Gus thanked him for his kind offer, and said they would make a point of availing themselves of it.

The landlord watched them as they walked along the bank in the direction of Slopperton. "I expect," he remarked to himself, "the lively one's mad, and the quiet one's his keeper. But five pounds is five pounds; and that's neither here nor there."

Instead of seeking both amusement and instruction, as they might have done from a careful investigation of the factory in question, Messrs. Darley and Peters walked at a pretty brisk rate, looking neither to the right nor to the left, choosing the ​most out-of-the-way and unfrequented streets, till they left the town of Slopperton and the waters of the Sloshy behind them, and emerged on to the high road, not so many hundred yards from the house in which Mr. Montague Harding met his death—the house of the Black Mill.

It had never been a lively-looking place at best; but now, with the association of a hideous murder belonging to it—and so much a part of it, that, to all who knew the dreadful story, death, like a black shadow, seemed to brood above the gloomy pile of building and warn the stranger from the infected spot—it was indeed a melancholy habitation. The shutters of all the windows but one were closed; the garden-paths were overgrown with weeds; the beds choked up; the trees had shot forth wild erratic branches that trailed across the path of the intruder, and entangling themselves about him, threw him down before he was aware. The house, however, was not uninhabited—Martha, the old servant, who had nursed Richard Marwood when a little child, had the entire care of it; and she was further provided with a comfortable income and a youthful domestic to attend upon her, the teaching, admonishing, scolding, and patronizing of whom made the delight of her quiet existence.

The bell which Mr. Darley rang at the gate went clanging down the walk, as if to be heard in the house were a small part of its mission, for its sonorous power was calculated to awaken all Slopperton in case of fire, flood, or invasion of the foreign foe.

Perhaps Gus thought just a little—as he stood at the broad white gate, overgrown now with damp and moss, but once so trim and bright—of the days when Richard and he had worn little cloth frocks, all ornamented with divers meandering braids and shining buttons, and had swung to and fro in the evening sunshine on that very gate.

He remembered Richard throwing him off, and hurting his nose upon the gravel. They had made mud-pies upon that very walk; they had set elaborate and most efficient traps for birds, and never caught any, in those very shrubberies; they had made a swing under the lime-trees yonder, and a fountain that would never work, but had to be ignominiously supplied with jugs of water, and stirred with spoons like a pudding, before the crystal shower would consent to mount. A thousand recollections of that childish time came back, and with them came the thought that the little boy in the braided frock was now an outcast from society, supposed to be dead, and his name branded as that of a madman and a murderer.

Martha's attendant, a rosy-cheeked country girl, came down the walk at the sound of the clanging bell, and stared aghast at the apparition of two gentlemen—one of them so brilliant in costume as our friend Mr. Darley.

​Gus told the youthful domestic that he had a letter for Mrs. Jones. Martha's surname was Jones; the Mrs. was an honorary distinction, as the holy state of matrimony was one of the evils the worthy woman had escaped. Gus brought a note from Martha's mistress, which assured him a warm welcome. "Would the gentlemen have tea?" Martha said. "Sararanne—(the youthful domestic's name was Sarah Anne, pronounced, both for euphony and convenience, Sararanne)—Sararanne should get them anything they would please to like directly." Poor Martha was quite distressed, on being told that all they wanted was to look at the room in which the murder was committed.

"Was it in the same state as at the time of Mr. Harding's death?" asked Gus.

It had never been touched, Mrs. Jones assured them, since that dreadful time. Such was her mistress's wish; it had been kept clean and dry; but not a bit of furniture had been moved.

Mrs. Jones was rheumatic, and rarely stirred from her seat of honour by the fireside; so Sararanne was sent with a bunch of keys in her hand to conduct the gentlemen to the room in question.

Now there were two things self-evident in the manner of Sararanne; first, that she was pleased at the idea of a possible flirtation with the brilliant Mr. Darley; secondly, that she didn't at all like the ordeal of opening and entering the dreaded room in question; so, between her desire to be fascinating and her uncontrollable fear of the encounter before her, she endured a mental struggle painful to the beholder.

The shutters in the front of the house being, with one exception, all closed, the hall and staircase were wrapped in a shadowy gloom, far more alarming to the timid mind than complete darkness. In complete darkness, for instance, the eight-day clock in the corner would have been a clock, and not an elderly ghost with a broad white face and a brown greatcoat, as it seemed to be in the uncertain glimmer which crept through a distant skylight covered with ivy. Sararanne was evidently possessed with the idea that Mr. Darley and his friend would decoy her to the very threshold of the haunted chamber, and then fly ignominiously, leaving her to brave the perils of it by herself. Mr. Darley's repeated assurances that it was all right, and that on the whole it would be advisable to look alive, as life was short and time was long, etcetera, had the effect at last of inducing the damsel to ascend the stairs—looking behind her at every other step—and to conduct the visitors along a passage, at the end of which she stopped, selected with considerable celerity a key from the bunch, plunged it into the keyhole of the door before her, said, "That is the room, gentlemen, if you please," dropped a curtsey, and turned and fled.

​The door opened with a scroop, and Mr. Peters realized at last the darling wish of his heart, and stood in the very room in which the murder had been committed. Gus looked round, went to the window, opened the shutters to the widest extent, and the afternoon sunshine streamed full into the room, lighting every crevice, revealing every speck of dust on the moth-eaten damask bed-curtains—every crack and stain on the worm-eaten flooring.

To see Mr. Darley look round the room, and to see Mr. Peters look round it, is to see two things as utterly wide apart as it is possible for one look to be from another. The young surgeon's eyes wander here and there, fix themselves nowhere, and rest two or three times upon the same object before they seem to take in the full meaning of that object. The eyes of Mr. Peters, on the contrary, take the circuit of the apartment with equal precision and rapidity—go from number one to number two, from number two to number three; and having given a careful inspection to every article of furniture in the room, fix at last in a gaze of concentrated intensity on the tout ensemble of the chamber.

"Can you make out anything?" at last asks Mr. Darley.

Mr. Peters nods his head, and in reply to this question drops on one knee, and falls to examining the flooring.

"Do you see anything in that?" asks Gus.

"Yes," replies Mr. Peters on his fingers; "look at this."

Gus does look at this. This is the flooring, which is in a very rotten and dilapidated state, by the bedside. "Well, what then?" he asks.

"What then?" said Mr. Peters, on his fingers, with an expression of considerable contempt pervading his features; "what then? You're a very talented young gent, Mr. Darley, and if I wanted a prescription for the bile, which I'm troubled with sometimes, or a tip for the Derby, which I don't, not being a sporting man, you're the gent I'd come to; but for all that you ain't no police-officer, or you'd never ask that question. What then? Do you remember as one of the facts so hard agen Mr. Marwood was the blood-stains on his sleeve? You see these here cracks and crevices in this here floorin'? Very well, then; Mr. Marwood slept in the room under this. He was tired, I've heard him say, and he threw himself down on the bed in his coat. What more natural, then, than that there should be blood upon his sleeve, and what more easy to guess than the way it came there?"

"You think it dropped through, then?" asked Gus.

"I think it dropped through," said Mr. Peters, on his fingers, with biting irony; "I know it dropped through. His counsel was a nice un, not to bring this into court," he added, pointing to the boards on which he knelt. "If I'd only seen this place ​before the trial——But I was nobody, and it was like my precious impudence to ask to go over the house, of course! Now then, for number two."

"And that is——?" asked Mr. Darley, who was quite in the dark as to Mr. Peters's views; that functionary being implicitly believed in by Richard and his friend, and allowed, therefore, to be just as mysterious as he pleased.

"Number two's this here," answered the detective. "I wants to find another or two of them rum Indian coins; for our young friend Dead-and-Alive, as is here to-day and gone to-morrow, got that one as he gave the girl from that cabinet, or my name's not Joseph Peters;" wherewith Mr. Peters, who had been entrusted by Mrs. Marwood with the keys of the cabinet in question, proceeded to open the doors of it, and to carefully inspect that old-fashioned piece of furniture.

There were a great many drawers, and boxes, and pigeon-holes, and queer nooks and corners in this old cabinet, all smelling equally of old age, damp, and cedar-wood. Mr. Peters pulled out drawers and opened boxes, found secret drawers in the inside of other drawers, and boxes hid in ambush in other boxes, all with so little result, beyond the discovery of old papers, bundles of letters tied with faded red tape, a simpering and neutral-tinted miniature or two of the fashion of some fifty years gone by, when a bright blue coat and brass buttons was the correct thing for a dinner-party, and your man about town wore a watch in each of his breeches-pockets, and simpered at you behind a shirt-frill wide enough to separate him for ever from his friends and acquaintance. Besides these things, Mr. Peters found a Johnson's dictionary, a ready-reckoner, and a pair of boot-hooks; but as he found nothing else, Mr. Darley grew quite tired of watching his proceedings, and suggested that they should adjourn; for he remarked—"Is it likely that such a fellow as this North would leave anything behind him?"

"Wait a bit," said Mr. Peters, with an expressive jerk of his head. Gus shrugged his shoulders, took out his cigar-case, lighted a cheroot, and walked to the window, where he leaned with his elbows on the sill, puffing blue clouds of tobacco-smoke down among the straggling creepers that covered the walls and climbed round the casement, while the detective resumed his search among the old bundles of papers. He was nearly abandoning it, when, in one of the outer drawers, he took up an object he had passed over in his first inspection. It was a small canvas bag, such as is used to hold money, and was apparently empty; but while pondering on his futile search, Mr. Peters twisted this bag in a moment of absence of mind between his fingers, swinging it backwards and forwards in the air. In so doing, he knocked it against the side of the cabinet, and, to his ​surprise, it emitted a sharp metallic sound. It was not empty, then, although it appeared so. A moment's examination showed the detective that he had succeeded in obtaining the object of his search; the bag had been used for money, and a small coin had lodged in the seam at one corner of the bottom of it, and had stuck so firmly as not to be easily shaken out. This, in the murderer's hurried ransacking of the cabinet, in his blind fury at not finding the sum he expected to obtain, had naturally escaped him. The piece of money was a small gold coin, only half the value of the one found by the landlord, but of the same date and style.

Mr. Peters gave his fingers a triumphant snap, which aroused the attention of Mr. Darley; and, with a glance expressive of the pride in his art which is peculiar to your true genius, held up the little piece of dingy gold.

"By Jove!" exclaimed the admiring Gus, "you've got it, then! Egad, Peters, I think you'd make evidence, if there wasn't any."

"Eight years of that young man's life, sir," said the rapid fingers, "has been sacrificed to the stupidity of them as should have pulled him through."

Chapter V.
Mr. Peters decides on a strange Step, and arrests the Dead.

While Mr. Peters, assisted by Richard's sincere friend, the young surgeon, made the visit above described, Daredevil Dick counted the hours in London. It was essential to the success of his cause, Gus and Peters urged, that he should not show himself, or in any way reveal the fact of his existence, till the real murderer was arrested. Let the truth appear to all the world, and then time enough for Richard to come forth, with an unbranded forehead, in the sight of his fellow-men. But when he heard that Raymond Marolles had given his pursuers the slip, and was off, no one knew where, it was all that his mother, his friend Percy Cordonner, Isabella Darley, and the lawyers to whom he had intrusted his cause, could do, to prevent his starting that instant on the track of the guilty man. It was a weary day, this day of the failure of the arrest, for all. Neither his mother's tender consolation, nor his solicitor's assurances that all was not yet lost, could moderate the young man's impatience. Neither Isabella's tearful prayers that he would leave the issue in the hands of Heaven, nor Mr. Cordonner's philosophical recommendation to take it quietly and let the "beggar" go, could keep him quiet. He felt like a caged lion, whose ignoble bonds kept him from the vile object of his rage. The day wore out, however, and no tidings came of the fugitive. Mr. Cordonner insisted on stopping with his friend till three o'clock in the morning, and at that very late hour set out, with the ​intention of going down to the Cherokees—it was a Cheerful night, and they would most likely be still assembled—to ascertain, as he popularly expressed it, whether anything had "turned up" there. The clock of St. Martin's struck three as he stood with Richard at the street-door in Spring Gardens, giving friendly consolation between the puffs of his cigar to the agitated young man.

"In the first place, my dear boy," he said, "if you can't catch the fellow, you can't catch the fellow—that's sound logic and a mathematical argument; then why make yourself unhappy about it? Why try to square the circle, only because the circle's round, and can't be squared? Let it alone. If this fellow turns up, hang him! I should glory in seeing him hung, for he's an out-and-out scoundrel, and I should make a point of witnessing the performance, if the officials would do the thing at a reasonable hour, and not execute him in the middle of the night and swindle the respectable public. If he doesn't turn up, why, let the matter rest; marry that little girl in there, Darley's pretty sister—who seems, by the bye, to be absurdly fond of you—and let the question rest. That's my philosophy."

The young man turned away with an impatient sigh; then, laying his hand on Percy's shoulder, he said, "My dear old fellow, if everybody in the world were like you, Napoleon would have died a Corsican lawyer, or a lieutenant in the French army. Robespierre would have lived a petty barrister, with a penchant for getting up in the night to eat jam tarts and a mania for writing bad poetry. The third state would have gone home quietly to its farmyards and its merchants' offices; there would have been no Oath of the Tenis Court, and no Battle of Waterloo."

"And a very good thing, too," said his philosophical friend; "nobody would have been a loser but Astley's—only think of that. If there had been no Napoleon, what a loss for image boys, Gomersal the Great, and Astley's. Forgive me, Dick, for laughing at you. I'll cut down to the Cheerfuls, and see if anything's up. The Smasher's away, or he might have given us his advice; the genius of the P.R. might have been of some service in this affair. Good night!" He gave Richard a languidly affectionate shake of the hand, and departed.

Now, when Mr. Cordonner said he would cut down to the Cherokees, let it not be thought by the simple-minded reader that the expression "cut down," from his lips, conveyed that degree of velocity which, though perhaps a sufficiently vague phrase in itself, it is calculated to carry to the ordinary mind. Percy Cordonner had never been seen by mortal man in a hurry. He had been known to be too late for a train, and had been beheld placidly lounging at a few paces from the departing engine, and mildly but rather reproachfully regarding that object. The prospects of his entire life may have hinged on his ​going by that particular train; but he would never be so false to his principles as to make himself unpleasantly warm, or in any way disturb the delicate organization with which nature had gifted him. He had been seen at the doors of the Opera-house when Jenny Lind was going to appear in the Figlia, and while those around him were afflicted with a temporary lunacy, and trampling one another wildly in the mud, he had been observed leaning against a couple of fat men as in an easy-chair, and standing high and dry upon somebody else's boots, breathing gentlemanly and polyglot execrations upon the surrounding crowd, when, in swaying to and fro, it disturbed or attempted to disturb his serenity. So, when he said he would cut down to the Cherokees, he of course meant that he would cut after his manner; and he accordingly rolled languidly along the deserted pavements of the Strand, with something of the insouciant and purposeless manner that Rasselas may have had in a walk through the arcades of his happy valley. He reached the well-known tavern at last, however, and stopping under the sign of the washed-out Indian desperately tomahawking nothing, in the direction of Covent Garden, with an arm more distinguished for muscular development than correct drawing, he gave the well-known signal of the club, and was admitted by the damsel before described, who appeared always to devote the watches of the night to the process of putting her hair in papers, that she might wear that becoming "head" for the admiration of the jug-and-bottle customers of the following day, and shine in a frame of very long and very greasy curls that were apt to sweep the heads off brown stouts, and dip gently into "goes" of spirits upon the more brilliant company of the evening. This young lady, popularly known as 'Liza, was well up in the sporting business of the house, read the Life during church-time on Sundays, and was even believed to have communicated with that Rhadamanthine journal, under the signature of L., in the answers to correspondents. She was understood to be engaged, or, as her friends and admirers expressed it, to be "keeping company" with that luminary of the P.R., the Middlesex Mawler, whose head-quarters were at the Cherokee.

Mr. Cordonner found three Cheerfuls assembled in the bar, in a state of intense excitement and soda-water. A telegraphic message had just arrived from the Smasher. It was worthy, in economy of construction, of the Delphic oracle, and had the advantage of being easy to understand. It was as follows—"Tell R. M. he's here: had no orders, so went in with left: he won't be able to move for a day or two."

Mr. Cordonner was almost surprised, and was thus very nearly false, for once in his life, to the only art he knew. "This will be good news in Spring Gardens," he said; "but Peters won't ​be back till to-morrow night. Suppose," he added, musing, "we were to telegraph to him at Slopperton instanter? I know where he hangs out there. If anybody could find a cab and take the message it would be doing Marwood an inestimable service," added Mr. Cordonner, passing through the bar, and lazily seating himself on a green-and-gold Cream of the Valley cask, with his hat very much on the back of his head, and his hands in his pockets. "I'll write the message."

He scribbled upon a card—"Go across to Liverpool. He's given us the slip, and is there;" and handed it politely towards the three Cheerfuls who were leaning over the pewter counter.

Splitters, the dramatic author, clutched the document eagerly; to his poetic mind it suggested that best gift of inspiration, "a situation."

"I'll take it," he said; "what a fine line it would make in a bill! 'The intercepted telegram,' with a comic railway clerk, and the villain of the piece cutting the wires!"

"Away with you, Splitters," said Percy Cordonner. "Don't let the Strand become verdant beneath your airy tread. Don't stop to compose a five-act drama as you go, that's a good fellow. 'Liza, my dear girl, a pint of your creamiest Edinburgh, and let it be as mild as the disposition of your humble servant."

Three days after the above conversation, three gentlemen were assembled at breakfast in a small room in a tavern overlooking the quay at Liverpool. This triangular party consisted of the Smasher, in an elegant and simple morning costume, consisting of tight trousers of Stuart plaid, an orange-coloured necktie, a blue checked waistcoat, and shirt-sleeves. The Smasher looked upon a coat as an essentially outdoor garment, and would no more have invested himself in it to eat his breakfast than he would have partaken of that refreshment with his hat on, or an umbrella up. The two other gentlemen were Mr. Darley, and his chief, Mr. Peters, who had a little document in his pocket signed by a Lancashire magistrate, on which he set considerable value. They had come across to Liverpool as directed by the telegraph, and had there met with the Smasher, who had received letters for them from London with the details of the escape, and orders to be on the look-out for Peters and Gus. Since the arrival of these two, the trio had led a sufficiently idle and apparently purposeless life. They had engaged an apartment overlooking the quay, in the window of which they were seated for the best part of the day, playing the intellectual and exciting game of all-fours. There did not seem much in this to forward the cause of Richard Marwood. It is true that Mr. Peters was wont to vanish from the room every now and then, in order to speak to mysterious and grave-looking gentlemen, who commanded respect wherever they went, and before whom ​the most daring thief in Liverpool shrank as before Mr Calcraft himself. He held strange conferences with them in corners of the hostelry in which the trio had taken up their abode; he went out with them, and hovered about the quays and the shipping; he prowled about in the dusk of the evening, and meeting these gentlemen also prowling in the uncertain light, would sometimes salute them as friends and brothers, at other times be entirely unacquainted with them, and now and then interchange two or three hurried gestures with them, which the close observer would have perceived to mean a great deal. Beyond this, nothing had been done—and, in spite of all this, no tidings could be obtained of the Count de Marolles, except that no person answering to his description had left Liverpool either by land or water. Still, neither Mr. Peters's spirits nor patience failed him; and after every interview held upon the stairs or in the passage, after every excursion to the quays or the streets, he returned as briskly as on the first day, and reseated himself at the little table by the window, at which his colleagues—or rather his companions, for neither Mr. Darley nor the Smasher were of the smallest use to him—played, and took it in turns to ruin each other from morning till night. The real truth of the matter was, that, if anything, the detective's so-called assistants were decidedly in his way; but Augustus Darley, having distinguished himself in the escape from the asylum, considered himself an amateur Vidocque; and the Smasher, from the moment of putting in his left, and unconsciously advancing the cause of Richard and justice by extinguishing the Count de Marolles, had panted to write his name, or rather make his mark, upon the scroll of fame, by arresting that gentleman in his own proper person, and without any extraneous aid whatever. It was rather hard for him, then, to have to resign the prospect of such a glorious adventure to a man of Mr. Peters's inches; but he was of a calm and amiable disposition, and would floor his adversary with as much good temper as he would eat his favourite dinner; so, with a growl of resignation, he abandoned the reins to the steady hands so used to hold them, and seated himself down to the consumption of innumerable clay pipes and glasses of bitter ale with Gus, who, being one of the most ancient of the order of the Cherokees, was an especial favourite with him.

On this third morning, however, there is a decided tone of weariness pervading the minds of both Gus and the Smasher. Three-handed all-fours, though a delicious and exciting game, will pall upon the inconstant mind, especially when your third player is perpetually summoned from the table to take part in a mysterious dialogue with a person or persons unknown, the result of which he declines to communicate to you. The view from ​the bow-window of the blue parlour in the White Lion, Liverpool, is no doubt as animated as it is beautiful; but Rasselas, we know, got tired of some very pretty scenery, and there have been readers so inconstant as to grow weary of Dr. Johnson's book, and to go down peacefully to their graves unacquainted with the climax thereof. So it is scarcely perhaps to be wondered that the volatile Augustus thirsted for the waterworks o⟨f⟩ Blackfriars; while the Smasher, feeling himself to be blushing unseen, and wasting his stamina, if not his sweetness, on the desert air, pined for the familiar shades of Bow Street and Vinegar Yard, and the home-sounds of the rumbling and jingling of the wagons, and the unpolite language of the drivers thereof, on market mornings in the adjacent market. Pleasures and palaces are all very well in their way, as the song says; but there is just one little spot on earth which, whether it be a garret in Petticoat Lane or a mansion in Belgrave Square, is apt to be dearer to us than the best of them; and the Smasher languishes for the friendly touch of the ebony handles of the porter-engine, and the scent of the Welsh rarebits of his youth. Perhaps I express myself in a more romantic manner on this subject, however, than I should do, for the remark of the Left-handed one, as he pours himself out a cup of tea from the top of the tea-pot—he despises the spout of that vessel as a modern innovation on ancient simplicity—is as simple as it is energetic. He merely observes that he is "jolly sick of this lot,"—this lot meaning Liverpool, the Count de Marolles, the White Lion, three-handed all-fours, and the detective police-force.

"There was nobody ill in Friar Street when I left," said Gus mournfully; "but there had been a run upon Pimperneckel's Universal Regenerator Pills: and if that don't make business a little brisker, nothing will."

"It's my opinion," observed the Smasher doggedly, "that this 'ere forrin cove has give us the slip out and out; and the sooner we gets back to London the better. I never was much of a hand at chasing wild geese, and"—he added, with rather a spiteful glance at the mild countenance of the detective—"I don't see neither that standin' and makin' signs to parties unbeknown at street-corners and stair-heads is the quickest way to catch them sort of birds; leastways it's not the opinion held by the gents belongin' to the Ring as I've had the honour to make acquaintance with."

"Suppose——" said Mr. Peters, on his fingers.

"Oh!" muttered the Smasher, "blow them fingers of his. I can't understand 'em—there!" The left-handed Hercules knew that this was to attack the detective on his tenderest point. "Blest if I ever knows his p's from his b's, or his w's from his x's, let alone his vowels, and them would puzzle a conjuror."

​Mr. Peters glanced at the prize-fighter more in sorrow than in anger, and taking out a greasy little pocket-book, and a greasier little pencil, considerably the worse for having been vehemently chewed in moments of preoccupation, he wrote upon a leaf of it thus—"Suppose we catch him to-day?"

"Ah, very true," said the Smasher sulkily, after he had examined the document in two or three different lights before he came upon its full bearings; "very true, indeed, suppose we do—and suppose we don't, on the other hand; and I know which is the likeliest. Suppose, Mr. Peters, we give up lookin' for a needle in a bundle of hay, which after a time gets tryin' to a lively disposition, and go back to our businesses. If you had a girl as didn't know British from best French a-servin' of your customers," he continued in an injured tone, "you'd be anxious to get home, and let your forrin counts go to the devil their own ways."

"Then go," Mr. Peters wrote, in large letters and no capitals.

"Oh, ah; yes, to be sure," replied the Smasher, who, I regret to say, felt painfully, in his absence from domestic pleasures, the want of somebody to quarrel with; "No, I thank you! Go the very day as you're going to catch him! Not if I'm in any manner aware of the circumstance. I'm obliged to you," he added, with satirical emphasis.

"Come, I say, old boy," interposed Gus, who had been quietly doing execution upon a plate of devilled kidneys during this little friendly altercation, "come, I say, no snarling, Smasher. Peters isn't going to contest the belt with you, you know."

"You needn't be a-diggin' at me because I ain't champion," said the ornament of the P.R., who was inclined to find a malcious meaning in every word uttered that morning; "you needn't come any of your sneers because I ain't got the belt any longer."

The Smasher had been Champion of England in his youth, but had retired upon his laurels for many years, and only occasionally emerged from private life in a public-house to take a round or two with some old opponent.

"I tell you what it is, Smasher—it's my opinion the air of Liverpool don't suit your constitution," said Gus. "We've promised to stand by Peters here, and to go by his word in everything, for the sake of the man we want to serve; and, however trying it may be to our patience doing nothing, which perhaps is about as much as we can do and make no mistakes, the first that gets tired and deserts the ship will be no friend to Richard Marwood."

"I'm a bad lot, Mr. Darley, and that's the truth," said the mollified Smasher; "but the fact is, I'm used to a turn with the gloves every morning before breakfast with the barman, and when I don't get it, I dare say I ain't the pleasantest company goin'. I should think they've got gloves in the ​house: would you mind taking off your coat and having a turn—friendly like?"

Gus assured the Smasher that nothing would please him better than that trifling diversion; and in five minutes they had pushed Mr. Peters and the breakfast-table into a corner, and were hard at it, Mr. Darley's knowledge of the art being all required to keep the slightest pace with the scientific movements of the agile though elderly Smasher.

Mr. Peters did not stay at the breakfast-table long, but after having drunk a huge breakfast cupful of very opaque and substantial-looking coffee at a draught, just as if it had been half a pint of beer, he slid quietly out of the room.

"It's my opinion," said the Smasher, as he stood, or rather lounged, upon his guard, and warded off the most elaborate combinations of Mr. Darley's fists with as much ease as he would have brushed aside so many flies—"it's my opinion that chap ain't up to his business."

"Isn't he?" replied Gus, as he threw down the gloves in despair, after having been half an hour in a violent perspiration, without having succeeded in so much as rumpling the Smasher's hair. "Isn't he?" he said, choosing the interrogative as the most expressive form of speech. "That man's got head enough to be prime minister, and carry the House along with every twist of his fingers."

"He must make his p's and b's a little plainer afore he'll get a bill through the Commons though," muttered the Left-handed one, who couldn't quite get over his feelings of injury against the detective for the utter darkness in which he had been kept for the last three days as to the other's plans.

The Smasher and Mr. Darley passed the morning in that remarkably intellectual and praiseworthy manner peculiar to gentlemen who, being thrown out of their usual occupation, are cast upon their own resources for amusement and employment. There was the daily paper to be looked at, to begin with; but after Gus had glanced at the leading article, a rifacimento of the Times leader of the day before, garnished with some local allusions, and highly spiced with satirical remarks apropos to our spirited contemporary the Liverpool Aristides; after the Smasher had looked at the racing fixtures for the coming week, and made rude observations on the editing of a journal which failed to describe the coming off of the event between Silver-polled Robert and the Chester Crusher—after, I say, the two gentlemen had each devoured his favourite page, the paper was an utter failure in the matter of excitement, and the window was the next best thing. Now to the peculiarly constituted mind of the Left-handed one, looking out of a window was in itself very slow work; and unless he was allowed to eject missiles of a ​trifling but annoying character—such as hot ashes out of his pipe, the last drop of his pint of beer, the dirty water out of the saucers belonging to the flower-pots on the window-sill, or lighted lucifer-matches—into the eyes of the unoffending passers-by, he didn't, to use his own forcible remark, "seem to see the fun of it." Harmless old gentlemen with umbrellas, mild elderly ladies with hand-baskets and brass-handled green-silk parasols, and young ladies of from ten to twelve going to school in clean frocks, and on particularly good terms with themselves, the Smasher looked upon as his peculiar prey. To put his head out of the window and make tender and polite inquiries about their maternal parents; to go further still, and express an earnest wish to be informed of those parents' domestic arrangements, and whether they had been induced to part with a piece of machinery of some importance in the getting up of linen; to insinuate alarming suggestions of mad bulls in the next street, or a tiger just broke loose from the Zoological Gardens; to terrify the youthful scholar by asking him derisively whether he wouldn't "catch it when he got to school? Oh, no, not at all, neither!" and to draw his head away suddenly, and altogether disappear from public view; to act, in fact, after the manner of an accomplished clown in a Christmas pantomime, was the weak delight of his manly mind: and when prevented by Mr. Darley's friendly remonstrance from doing this, the Smasher abandoned the window altogether, and concentrated all the powers of his intellect on the pursuit of a lively young bluebottle, which eluded his bandanna at every turn, and bumped itself violently against the window-panes at the very moment its pursuer was looking for it up the chimney.

Time and the hour made very long work of this particular morning, and several glasses of bitter had been called for, and numerous games of cribbage had been played by the two companions, when Mr. Darley, looking at his watch for not more than the twenty-second time in the last hour, announced with some satisfaction that it was half-past two o'clock, and that it was consequently very near dinner-time.

"Peters is a long time gone," suggested the Smasher.

"Take my word for it," said Gus, "something has turned up; he has laid his hand upon De Marolles at last."

"I don't think it," replied his ally, obstinately refusing to believe in Mr. Peters's extra share of the divine afflatus; "and if he did come across him, how's he to detain him, I'd like to know? He couldn't go in with his left," he muttered derisively, "and split his head open upon the pavement to keep him quiet for a day or two.

At this very moment there came a tap at the door, and a youthful person in corduroy and a perspiration entered the ​room, with a very small and very dirty piece of paper twisted up into a bad imitation of a three-cornered note.

"Please, you was to give me sixpence if I run all the way," remarked the youthful Mercury, "an' I 'ave: look at my forehead;" and, in proof of his fidelity, the messenger pointed to the water-drops which chased each other down his open brow and ran a dead heat to the end of his nose.

The scrawl ran thus—"The Washington sails at three for New York: be on the quay and see the passengers embark: don't notice me unless I notice you. Yours truly —— ——"

"It was just give me by a gent in a hurry wot was dumb, and wrote upon a piece of paper to tell me to run my legs off so as you should have it quick—thank you kindly, sir, and good afternoon," said the messenger, all in one breath, as he bowed his gratitude for the shilling Gus tossed him as he dismissed him.

"I said so," cried the young surgeon, as the Smasher applied himself to the note with quite as much, nay, perhaps more earnestness and solemnity than Chevalier Bunsen might have assumed when he deciphered a half-erased and illegible inscription, in a language which for some two thousand years has been unknown to mortal man. "I said so; Peters is on the scent, and this man will be taken yet. Put on your hat, Smasher, and let's lose no time; it only wants a quarter to three, and I wouldn't be out of this for a great deal."

"I shouldn't much relish being out of the fun either," replied his companion; "and if it comes to blows, perhaps it's just as well I haven't had my dinner."

There were a good many people going by the Washington, and the deck of the small steamer which was to convey them on board the great ship, where she lay in graceful majesty down the noble Mersey river, was crowded with every species of luggage it was possible to imagine as appertaining to the widest varieties of the genus traveller. There was the maiden lady, with a small income from the three-per-cents, and a determination of blood to the tip of a sharp nose, going out to join a married brother in New York, and evidently intent upon importing a gigantic brass cage, containing a parrot in the last stage of bald-headedness—politely called moulting; and a limp and wandering-minded umbrella—weak in the ribs, and further afflicted with a painfully sharp ferrule, which always appeared where it was not expected, and evidently hankered wildly after the bystanders' backbones—as favourable specimens of the progress of the fine arts in the mother country. There were several of those brilliant birds-of-passage popularly known as "travellers," whose heavy luggage consisted of a carpet-bag and walking-stick, and whose light ditto was composed of a pocket-book and a silver pencil-case of protean construction, which was ​sometimes a pen, now and then a penknife, and very often a toothpick. These gentlemen came down to the steamer at the last moment, inspiring the minds of nervous passengers with supernatural and convulsive cheerfulness by the light and airy way in which they bade adieu to the comrades who had just looked round to see them start, and who made appointments with them for Christmas supper-parties, and booked bets with them for next year's Newmarket first spring—as if such things as shipwreck, peril by sea, heeling over Royal Georges, lost Presidents, with brilliant Irish comedians setting forth on their return to the land in which they had been so beloved and admired, never, never to reach the shore, were things that could not be. There were rosy-cheeked country lasses, going over to earn fabulous wages and marry impossibly rich husbands. There were the old people, who essayed this long journey on an element which they knew only by sight, in answer to the kind son's noble letter, inviting them to come and share the pleasant home his sturdy arm had won far away in the fertile West. There were stout Irish labourers armed with pickaxe and spade, as with the best sword wherewith to open the great oyster of the world in these latter degenerate days. There was the distinguished American family, with ever so many handsomely dressed, spoiled, affectionate children clustering round papa and mamma, and having their own way, after the manner of transatlantic youth. There were, in short, all the people who usually assemble when a good ship sets sail for the land of dear brother Jonathan; but the Count de Marolles there was not.

No, decidedly, no Count de Marolles! There was a very quiet-looking Irish labourer, keeping quite aloof from the rest of his kind, who were sufficiently noisy and more than sufficiently forcible in the idiomatic portions of their conversation. There was this very quiet Irishman, leaning on his spade and pickaxe, and evidently bent on not going on board till the very last moment; and there was an elderly gentleman in a black coat, who looked rather like a Methodist parson, and who held a very small carpet-bag in his hand; but there was no Count de Marolles; and what's more, there was no Mr. Peters.

This latter circumstance made Augustus Darley very uneasy; but I regret to say that the Smasher wore, if anything, a look of triumph as the hands of the clocks about the quay pointed to three o'clock, and no Peters appeared.

"I knowed," he said, with effusion—"I knowed that cove wasn't up to his business. I wouldn't mind bettin' the goodwill of my little crib in London agen sixpen'orth of coppers, that he's a-standin' at this very individual moment of time at a street-corner a mile off, makin' signs to one of the Liverpool police-officers."

The gentleman in the black coat standing before them turned ​round on hearing this remark, and smiled—smiled very very faintly; but he certainly did smile. The Smasher's blood, which was something like that of Lancaster, and distinguished for its tendency to mount, was up in a moment.

"I hope you find my conversation amusin', old gent," he said, with considerable asperity; "I came down here on purpose to put you in spirits, on account of bein' grieved to see you always a-lookin' as if you'd just come home from your own funeral, and the undertaker was a-dunnin' you for the burial-fees."

Gus trod heavily on his companion's foot as a friendly hint to him not to get up a demonstration; and addressing the gentleman, who appeared in no hurry to resent the Smasher's contemptuous animadversions, asked him when he thought the boat would start.

"Not for five or ten minutes, I dare say," he answered. "Look there; is that a coffin they're bringing this way? I'm rather short-sighted; be good enough to tell me if it is a coffin?"

The Smasher, who had the glance of an eagle, replied that it decidedly was a coffin; adding, with a growl, that he knowed somebody as might be in it, and no harm done to society.

The elderly gentleman took not the slightest notice of this gratuitous piece of information on the part of the left-handed gladiator; but suddenly busied himself with his fingers in the neighbourhood of his limp white cravat.

"Why, I'm blest," cried the Smasher, "if the old baby ain't at Peters's game, a-talkin' to nobody upon his fingers!"

Nay, most distinguished professor of the noble art of self-defence, is not that assertion a little premature? Talking on his fingers, certainly—looking at nobody, certainly; but for all that, talking to somebody, and to a somebody who is looking at him; for, from the other side of the little crowd, the Irish labourer fixes his eyes intently on every movement of the grave elderly gentleman's fingers, as they run through four or five rapid words; and Gus Darley, perceiving this look, starts in amazement, for the eyes of the Irish labourer are the eyes of Mr. Peters of the detective police.

But neither the Smasher nor Gus is to notice Mr. Peters unless Mr. Peters notices them. It is so expressed in the note, which Mr. Darley has at that very moment in his waistcoat pocket. So Gus gives his companion a nudge, and directs his attention to the smock-frock and the slouched hat in which the detective has hidden himself, with a hurried injunction to him to keep quiet. We are human at the best; ay, even when we are celebrated for our genius in the muscular science, and our well-known blow of the left-handed postman's knock, or double auctioneer: and, if the sober truth must be told, the Smasher was sorry to recognize Mr. Peters in that borrowed garb. He ​didn't want the dumb detective to arrest the Count de Marolles. He had never read Coriolanus, neither had he seen the Roman, Mr. William Macready, in that character; but, for all that, the Smasher wanted to go home to the dear purlieus of Drury Lane, and say to his astonished admirers, "Alone I did it!" And lo, here were Mr. Peters and the elderly stranger both entered for the same event.

While gloomy and vengeful thoughts, therefore, troubled the manly breast of the Vinegar-Yard gladiator, four men approached, bearing on their shoulders the coffin which had so aroused the stranger's attention. They bore it on board the steamer, and a few moments after a gentlemanly and cheerful-looking man, of about forty, stepped across the narrow platform, and occupied himself with a crowd of packages, which stood in a heap, apart from the rest of the luggage on the crowded deck.

Again the elderly stranger's fingers were busy in the region of his cravat. The superficial observer would have merely thought him very fidgety about the limp bit of muslin; but this time the fingers of Mr. Peters telegraphed an answer.

"Gentlemen," said the stranger, addressing Mr. Darley and the Smasher in the most matter-of-fact manner, "you will be good enough to go on board that steamer with me? I am working with Mr. Peters in this affair. Remember, I am going to America by that vessel yonder, and you are my friends come with me to see me off. Now, gentlemen."

He has no time to say any more, for the bell rings; and the last stragglers, the people who will enjoy the latest available moment on terra firma, scramble on board; amongst them the Smasher, Gus, and the stranger, who stick very closely together. The coffin has been placed in the centre of the vessel, on the top of a pile of chests, and its gloomy black outline is sharply defined against the clear blue autumn sky. Now there is a general feeling amongst the passengers that the presence of this coffin is a peculiar injury to them.

It is unpleasant, certainly. From the very moment of its appearance amongst them a change has come over the spirits of every one of the travellers. They try to keep away from it, but they try in vain; there is a dismal fascination in the defined and ghastly shape, which all the rough wrappers that can be thrown over it will not conceal. They find their eyes wandering to it, in preference even to watching receding Liverpool, whose steeples and tall chimneys are dipping down and down into the blue water, and will soon disappear altogether. They are interested in it in spite of themselves; they ask questions of one another; they ask questions of the engineer, and of the steward, and of the captain of the steamer, but can elicit nothing—except that lying in that coffin, so close to them, and yet so very very ​far away from them, there is an American gentleman of some distinction, who, having died suddenly in England, is being carried back to New York, to be buried amongst his friends in that city. The aggrieved passengers for the Washington think it very hard upon them that the American gentleman of distinction—they remember that he is a gentleman of distinction, and modify their tone accordingly—could not have been buried in England like a reasonable being. The British dominions were not good enough for him, they supposed. Other passengers, pushing the question still further, ask whether he couldn't have been taken home by some other vessel; nay, whether indeed he ought not to have had a ship all to himself, instead of harrowing the feelings and preying upon the spirits of first-class passengers. They look almost spitefully, as they make these remarks, towards the shrouded coffin, which, to their great aggravation, is not entirely shrouded by the wrappers about it. One corner has been left uncovered, revealing the stout rough oak; for it is only a temporary coffin, and the gentleman of distinction will be put into something better befitting his rank when he arrives at his destination. It is to be observed, and it is observed by many, that the cheerful passenger in fashionable mourning, and with the last greatcoat which the inspiration of Saville Row has given to the London world thrown over his arm, hovers in a protecting manner about the coffin, and evinces a fidelity which, but for his perfectly cheerful countenance and self-possessed manner, would be really touching, towards the late American gentleman of distinction, whom he has for his only travelling companion.

Now, though a great many questions had been asked on all sides, one question especially, namely, whether it—people always dropped their voices when they pronounced that small pronoun—whether it would not be put in the hold as soon as they got on board the Washington, the answer to which question was an affirmative, and gave considerable satisfaction—except indeed to one moody old gentleman, who asked, "How about getting any little thing one happened to want on the journey out of the hold?" and was very properly snubbed for the suggestion, and told that passengers had no business to want things out of the hold on the voyage; and furthermore insulted by the liveliest of the lively travellers, who suggested, in an audible aside, that perhaps the old gentleman had only one clean shirt, and had put that at the bottom of his travelling chest,—now, though, I say, so many questions had been asked, no one had as yet presumed to address the cheerful-looking gentleman convoying the American of distinction home to his friends, though this very gentleman might, after all, be naturally supposed to know more than anybody else about the subject. He was smoking a cigar, and though he kept very close to the coffin, he was about the only ​person on board who did not look at it, but kept his gaze fixed on the fading town of Liverpool. The Smasher, Gus, and Mr. Peters's unknown ally stood very close to this gentleman, while the detective himself leant over the side of the vessel, near to, though a little apart from, the Irish labourers and rosy-cheeked country girls, who, as steerage passengers, very properly herded together, and did not attempt to contaminate by their presence the minds or the garments of those superior beings who were to occupy state-cabins six feet long by three feet wide, and to have green peas and new milk from the cow all the way out. Presently, the elderly gentleman of rather shabby-genteel but clerical appearance, who had so briefly introduced himself to Gus and the Smasher, made some remarks about the town of Liverpool to the cheerful friend of the late distinguished American.

The cheerful friend took his cigar out of his mouth, smiled, and said, "Yes; it's a thriving town, a small London, really—the metropolis in miniature."

"You know Liverpool very well?" asked the Smasher's companion.

"No, not very well; in point of fact, I know very little of England at all. My visit has been a brief one."

He is evidently an American from this remark, though there is very little of brother Jonathan in his manner.

"Your visit has been a brief one? Indeed. And it has had a very melancholy termination, I regret to perceive," said the persevering stranger, on whose every word the Smasher and Mr. Darley hung respectfully.

"A very melancholy termination," replied the gentleman, with the sweetest smile. "My poor friend had hoped to return to the bosom of his family, and delight them many an evening round the cheerful hearth by the recital of his adventures in, and impressions of, the mother country. You cannot imagine," he continued, speaking very slowly, and as he spoke, allowing his eyes to wander from the stranger to the Smasher, and from the Smasher to Gus, with a glance which, if anything, had the slightest shade of anxiety in it; "you cannot imagine the interest we on the other side of the Atlantic take in everything that occurs in the mother country. We may be great over there—we may be rich over there—we may be universally beloved and respected over there,—but I doubt—I really, after all, doubt," he said sentimentally, "whether we are truly happy. We sigh for the wings of a dove, or to speak practically, for our travelling expenses, that we may come over here and be at rest."

"And yet I conclude it was the especial wish of your late friend to be buried over there?" asked the stranger.

"It was—his dying wish."

"And the melancholy duty of complying with that wish ​devolved on you?" said the stranger, with a degree of puerile curiosity and frivolous interest in an affair entirely irrelevant to the matter in hand which bewildered Gus, and at which the Smasher palpably turned up his nose; muttering to himself at the same time that the forrin swell would have time to get to America while they was a-palaverin' and a-jawin' this 'ere humbug.

"Yes, it devolved on me," replied the cheerful gentleman, offering his cigar-case to the three friends, who declined the proffered weeds. "We were connections; his mother's half-sister married my second cousin—not very nearly connected certainly, but extremely attached to each other. It will be a melancholy satisfaction to his poor widow to see his ashes entombed upon his native shore, and the thought of that repays me threefold for anything I may suffer."

He looked altogether far too airy and charming a creature to suffer very much; but the stranger bowed gravely, and Gus, looking towards the prow of the vessel, perceived the earnest eyes of Mr. Peters attentively fixed on the little group.

As to the Smasher, he was so utterly disgusted with the stranger's manner of doing business, that he abandoned himself to his own thoughts and hummed a tune—the tune appertaining to what is generally called a comic song, being the last passages in the life of a humble and unfortunate member of the working classes as related by himself.

While talking to the cheerful gentleman on this very melancholy subject, the stranger from Liverpool happened to get quite close to the coffin, and, with an admirable freedom from prejudice which astonished the other passengers standing near, rested his hand carelessly on the stout oaken lid, just at that corner where the canvas left it exposed. It was a most speaking proof of the almost overstrained feeling of devotion possessed by the cheerful gentleman towards his late friend that this trifling action seemed to disturb him; his eyes wandered uneasily towards the stranger's black-gloved hand, and at last, when, in absence of mind, the stranger actually drew the heavy covering completely over this corner of the coffin, his uneasiness reached a climax, and drawing the dingy drapery hurriedly back, he rearranged it in its old fashion.

"Don't you wish the coffin to be entirely covered?" asked the stranger quietly.

"Yes—no; that is," said the cheerful gentleman, with some embarrassment in his tone, "that is—I—you see there is something of profanity in a stranger's hand approaching the remains of those we love."

"Suppose, then," said his interlocutor, "we take a turn about the deck? This neighbourhood must be very painful to you."

​"On the contrary," replied the cheerful gentleman, "you will think me, I dare say, a very singular person, but I prefer remaining by him to the last. The coffin will be put in the hold as soon as we get on board the Washington; then my duty will have been accomplished and my mind will be at rest. You go to New York with us?" he asked.

"I shall have that pleasure," replied the stranger.

"And your friend—your sporting friend?" asked the gentleman, with a rather supercilious glance at the many-coloured raiment and mottled-soap complexion of the Smasher, who was still singing sotto voce the above-mentioned melody, with his arms folded on the rail of the bench on which he was seated, and his chin resting moodily on his coat-sleeves.

"No," replied the stranger; "my friends, I regret to say, leave me as soon as we get on board."

In a few minutes more they reached the side of the brave ship, which, from the Liverpool quay, had looked a white-winged speck not a bit too big for Queen Mab; but which was, oh, such a Leviathan of a vessel when you stood just under her, and had to go up her side by means of a ladder—which ladder seemed to be subject to shivering fits, and struck terror into the nervous lady and the bald-headed parrot.

All the passengers, except the cheerful gentleman with the coffin and the stranger—with Gus and the Smasher and Mr. Peters loitering in the background—seemed bent on getting up each before the other, and considerably increased the confusion by evincing this wish in a candid but not conciliating manner, showing a degree of ill-feeling which was much increased by the passengers that had not got on board looking daggers at the passengers that had got on board, and seemed settled quite comfortably high and dry upon the stately deck. At last, however, every one but the aforesaid group had ascended the ladder. Some stout sailors were preparing great ropes wherewith to haul up the coffin, and the cheerful gentleman was busily directing them, when the captain of the steamer said to the stranger from Liverpool, as he loitered at the bottom of the ladder, with Mr. Peters at his elbow,—"Now then, sir, if you're for the Washington, quick's the word. We're off as soon as ever they've got that job over," pointing to the coffin. The stranger from Liverpool, instead of complying with this very natural request, whispered a few words into the ear of the captain, who looked very grave on hearing them, and then, advancing to the cheerful gentleman, who was very anxious and very uneasy about the manner in which the coffin was to be hauled up the side of the vessel, he laid a heavy hand upon his shoulder, and said,—"I want the lid of that coffin taken off before those men haul it up."

​Such a change came over the face of the cheerful gentleman as only comes over the face of a man who knows that he is playing a desperate game, and knows as surely that he has lost it. "My good sir," he said, "you're mad. Not for the Queen of England would I see that coffin-lid unscrewed."

"I don't think it will give us so much trouble as that," said the other quietly. "I very much doubt it's being screwed down at all. You were greatly alarmed just now, lest the person within should be smothered. You were terribly frightened when I drew the heavy canvas over those incisions in the oak," he added, pointing to the lid, in the corner of which two or three cracks were apparent to the close observer.

"Good Heavens! the man is mad!" cried the gentleman, whose manner had entirely lost its airiness. "The man is evidently a maniac! This is too dreadful! Is the sanctity of death to be profaned in this manner? Are we to cross the Atlantic in the company of a madman?"

"You are not to cross the Atlantic at all just yet," said the Liverpool stranger. "The man is not mad, I assure you, but he is one of the principal members of the Liverpool detective police-force, and is empowered to arrest a person who is supposed to be on board this boat. There is only one place in which that person can be concealed. Here is my warrant to arrest Jabez North, alias Raymond Marolles, alias the Count de Marolles. I know as certainly as that I myself stand here that he lies hidden in that coffin, and I desire that the lid may be removed. If I am mistaken, it can be immediately replaced, and I shall be ready to render you my most fervent apologies for having profaned the repose of the dead. Now, Peters!"

The dumb detective went to one end of the coffin, while his colleague stood at the other. The Liverpool officer was correct in his supposition. The lid was only secured by two or three long stout nails, and gave way in three minutes. The two detectives lifted it off the coffin—and there, hot, flushed, and panting, half-suffocated, with desperation in his wicked blue eyes, his teeth locked in furious rage at his utter powerlessness to escape from the grasp of his pursuers—there, run to earth at last, lay the accomplished Raymond, Count de Marolles!

They put the handcuffs on him before they lifted him out of the coffin, the Smasher assisting. Years after, when the Smasher grew to be an older and graver man, he used to tell to admiring and awe-stricken customers the story of this arrest. But it is to be observed that his memory on these occasions was wont to play him false, for he omitted to mention either the Liverpool detective or our good friend Mr. Peters as taking any part in the capture; but described the whole affair as conducted try himself alone, with an incalculable number of "I says," and ​"so then I thinks," and "well, what do I do next?" and other phrases of the same description.

The Count de Marolles, with tumbled hair, and a white face and blue lips, sitting handcuffed upon the bench of the steamer between the Liverpool detective and Mr. Peters, steaming back to Liverpool, was a sight not good to look upon. The cheerful gentleman sat with the Smasher and Mr. Darley, who had been told to keep an eye upon him, and who—the Smasher especially—kept both eyes upon him with a will.

Throughout the little voyage there were no words spoken but these from the Liverpool detective, as he first put the fetters on the white and slender wrists of his prisoner: "Monsieur de Marolles," he said, "you've tried this little game once before. This is the second occasion, I understand, on which you've done a sham die. I'd have you beware of the third time. According to superstitious people, it's generally fatal."

Chapter VI.
The End of the dark Road.

Once more Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy rang with a subject dismissed from the public mind eight years ago, and now revived with a great deal more excitement and discussion than ever. That subject was, the murder of Mr. Montague Harding. All Slopperton made itself into one voice, and spoke but upon one theme—the pending trial of another man for that very crime of which Richard Marwood had been found guilty years ago—Richard, who, according to report, had died in an attempt to escape from the county asylum.

Very little was known of the criminal, but a great deal was conjectured; a great deal more was invented; and ultimately, most conflicting reports were spread abroad by the citizens of Slopperton, every one of whom had his particular account of the seizure of De Marolles, and every one of whom stood to his view of the case with a pertinacity and fortitude worthy of a better cause. Thus, if you went into High Street, entering that thoroughfare from the Market-place, you would hear how this De Marolles was a French nobleman, who had crossed the Channel in an open boat on the night of the murder, walked from Dover to Slopperton—(not above two hundred miles by the shortest cut)—and gone back to Calais in the same manner. If, staggered by the slight discrepancies of time and place in this account of the transaction, you pursued your inquiries a little further down the same street, you would very likely be told that De Marolles was no Frenchman at all, but the son of a clergyman in the next county, whose unfortunate mother was at that moment on her knees in the throne-room at Bucking​ham Palace, soliciting his pardon on account of his connection with the clerical interest. If this story struck you as more romantic than probable, you had only to turn the corner into Little Market Street—(rather a low neighbourhood, and chiefly inhabited by butchers and the tripe and cow-heel trade)—and you might sup full of horrors, the denizens of this locality labouring under the fixed conviction that the prisoner then lying in Slopperton gaol was neither more nor less than a distinguished burglar, long the scourge of the united kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland, and guilty of outrages and murders innumerable.

There were others who confined themselves to animated and detailed descriptions of the attempted escape and capture of the accused. These congregated at street-corners, and disputed and gesticulated in little groups, one man often dropping back from his companions, and taking a wide berth on the pavement, to give his particular story the benefit of illustrative action. Some stories told how the prisoner had got half-way to America concealed in the paddle wheel of a screw steamer; others gave an animated account of his having been found hidden in the corner of the engine-room, where he had lain concealed for fourteen days without either bite or sup. Others told you he had been furled up in the foretopsail of an American man-of-war; others related how he had made the passage in the maintop of the same vessel, only descending in the dead of the night for his meals, and paying the captain of the ship a quarter of a million of money for the accommodation. As to the sums of money he had embezzled in his capacity of banker, they grew with every hour; till at last Slopperton turned up its nose at anything under a billion for the sum total of his plunder.

The assizes were looked forward to with such eager expectation and interest as never had been felt about any other assizes within the memory of living Slopperton; and the judges and barristers on this circuit were the envy of judges and barristers on other circuits, who said bitterly, that no such case ever came across their way, and that it was like Prius Q.C.'s luck to be counsel for the prosecution in such a trial; and that if Nisi, whom the Count de Marolles had intrusted with his defence, didn't get him off, he, Nisi, deserved to be hung in lieu of his client.

It seemed a strange and awful instance of retributive justice that Raymond Marolles, having been taken in his endeavour to escape in the autumn of the year, had to await the spring assizes of the following year for his trial, and had, therefore, to drag out even a longer period in his solitary cell than Richard Marwood, the innocent victim of circumstantial evidence, had done years before.

Who shall dare to enter this man's cell? Who shall dare to ​look into this hardened heart? Who shall follow the dark and terrible speculations of this perverted intellect?

At last the time, so welcome to the free citizens of Slopperton, and so very unwelcome to some of the denizens in the gaol, who preferred awaiting their trial in that retreat to crossing the briny ocean for an unlimited period as the issue of that trial—at last, the assize time came round once more. Once more the tip-top Slopperton hotels were bewilderingly gay with elegant young barristers and grave grey-headed judges. Once more the criminal court was one vast sea of human heads, rising wave on wave to the very roof; and once more every eager eye was turned towards the dock in which stood the elegant and accomplished Raymond, Count de Marolles, alias Jabez North, sometime pauper of the Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy Union, afterwards usher in the academy of Dr. Tappenden, charged with the wilful murder of Montague Harding, also of Slopperton, eight years before.

The first point the counsel for the prosecution endeavoured to prove to the minds of the jury was the identity of Raymond de Marolles, the Parisian, with Jabez North, the pauper school-boy. This hinged chiefly upon his power to disprove the supposed death of Jabez North, in which all Slopperton had hitherto firmly believed. Dr. Tappenden had stood by his usher's corpse. How, then, could that usher be alive and before the Slopperton jury to-day? But there were plenty to certify that here he was in the flesh—this very Jabez North, whom so many people remembered, and had been in the habit of seeing, eight years ago. They were ready to identify him, in spite of his dark hair and eyebrows. On the other hand, there were some who had seen the body of the suicide, found by Peters the detective, on the heath outside Slopperton; and these were as ready to declare that the afore-mentioned body was the body of Jabez North, the usher to Dr. Tappenden, and none other. But when a rough-looking man, with a mangy fur cap in his band, and two greasy locks of hair carefully twisted into limp curls on either side of his swarthy face, which curls were known to his poetically and figuratively-disposed friends as Newgate knockers—when this man, who gave his name to the jury as Slithery Bill—or, seeing the jury didn't approve of this cognomen, Bill Withers, if they liked it better—was called into the witness-box, his evidence, sulkily and rather despondingly given, as from one who says, "It may be my turn next," threw quite a new light upon the subject.

Bill Withers was politely asked if he remembered the summer of 18—. Yes; Mr. Withers could remember the summer of 18—; was out of work that summer, and made the marginal remark that "them as couldn't live might starve or steal, for all Slopperton folks cared."

​Was again politely asked if he remembered doing one particular job of work that summer.

Did remember it—made the marginal remark, "and it was a jolly queer dodge as ever a cove had a hand in."

Was asked to be good enough to state what the particular job was.

Assented to the request with a polite nod of the head, and proceeded to smooth his Newgate knockers, and fold his arms on the ledge of the witness-box prior to stating his case; then cleared his throat, and commenced discursively, thus,—

"Vy, it vas as this 'ere—I vas out of work. I does up small gent's gardens in the spring, and tidies and veeds and rakes and hoes 'em a bit, back and front, vhen I can get it to do, vich ain't often; and bein' out of vork, and old Mother Thingamy, down Blind Peter, she ses to me, vich she vas a vicked old 'ag, she ses to me, 'I've got a job for them as asks no questions, and don't vant to be told no lies;' by vich remark, and the vay of her altogether, I knowed she veren't up to no good; so I ses, 'You looks here, mother; if it's a job a respectable young man, vot's out o' vork, and ain't had a bite or sup since the day afore yesterday, can do vith a clear conscience, I'll do it—if it ain't, vy I von't. There!'" Having recorded which heroic declaration, Mr. William Withers wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and looked round the court, as much as to say, "Let Slopperton be proud of such a citizen."

"'Don't you go to flurry your tender constitution and do yourself a unrecoverable injury,' the old cat made reply; 'it's a job as the parson of the parish might do, if he'd got a truck.' 'A truck?' I ses; 'is it movin' boxes you're making this 'ere palaver about?' 'Never you mind vether it's boxes or vether it ain't; vill you do it?' she ses; 'vill you do it, and put a sovring in your pocket, and never go for to split, unless you vant that precious throat of yours slit some fine evenin'?'"

"And you consented to do what she required of you?" suggested the counsel.

"Vell, I don't know about that," replied Mr. Withers, "but I undertook the job. 'So,' ses she, that's the old un, she ses, 'you bring a truck down by that there broken buildin' ground at the back of Blind Peter at ten o'clock to-night, and you keep yourself quiet till you hears a vhistle; ven you hears a vhistle,' she ses, 'bring your truck around agin our front door. This here's all you've got to do,' she ses, 'besides keepin' your tongue between your teeth.' 'All right,' I ses, and off I goes to see if there was any cove as would trust me with a truck agen the evenin'. Vell, I finds the cove, vich, seein' I wanted it bad, he stood out for a bob and a tanner for the loan of it."

"Perhaps the jury would wish to be told what sum of money—​I conclude it is money—a bob and a tanner represent?" said the counsel.

"They must be a jolly ignorant lot, then, anyways," replied Mr. Withers, with more candour than circumlocution. "Any infant knows eighteenpence ven it's showed him."

"Oh, a bob and a tanner are eighteenpence? Very good," said the counsel, encouragingly; "pray go on, Mr. Withers."

"Vell, ten o'clock come, and veren't it a precious stormy night, that's all; and there I was a-vaitin' a-sittin' on this blessed truck at the back of Blind Peter, vich vos my directions. At last the vhistle come, and a precious cautious vhistle it vas too, as soft as a niteingel vot's payin' its addresses to another niteingel; and round I goes to the front, as vos my directions. There, agen' her door, stands the old 'ag, and agen her stands a young man in an old ragged pair of trousis an' a shirt. Lookin' him hard in the face, who does I see but Jim, the old un's grandson; so I ses, 'Jim!' friendly like, but he makes no reply; and then the old un ses, 'Lend this young gent a 'and 'ere, vill yer?' So in I goes, and there on the bed I sees something rolled up very careful in a old counterpane. It giv' me a turn like, and I didn't much like the looks of it; but I ses nothink; and then the young man, Jim, as I thinks, ses, 'Lend us a hand with this 'ere, vill yer?' and it giv'd me another turn like, for though it's Jim's face, somehow it ain't quite Jim's voice—more genteel and fine like; but I goes up to the bed, and I takes hold of von end of vot lays there; and then I gets turn number three— for I find my suspicions was correct—it was a dead body!"

"A dead body?"

"Yes; but who's it vos there vos no knowin', it vos wrapped up in that manner. But I feels myself turn dreadful vhite, and I ses, 'If this ere's anythink wrong, I vashes my hands ov it, and you may do your dirty vork yourself.' I hadn't got the vords out afore this 'ere young man, as I thought at first vos Jim, caught me by the throat sudden, and threw me down on my knee. I ain't a baby; but, lor', I vos nothink in his grasp, though his hand vos as vite and as deliket as a young lady's. 'Now, you just look 'ere,' he says; and I looked, as vell as I could, vith my eyes a-startin' out ov of my head in cosekence of bein' just upon the choke, 'you see vot this is,' and vith his left hand he takes a pistol out ov his pocket; 'you refuse to do vot ve vant done, or you go for to be noisy or in any vay ill-conwenient, and it's the last time as ever you'll have the chance ov so doing. Get up,' he says, as if I vos a dog; and I gets up, and I agrees to do vot he vants, for there vas that there devil in that young man's hye, that I began to think it vos best not to go agen him."

Here Mr. Withers paused for refreshment after his exertion ​and blew his nose very deliberately on a handkerchief which, from its dilapidated condition, resembled a red cotton cabbage-net. Silence reigned throughout the crowded court, broken only by the scratching of the pen with which the counsel for the defence was taking notes of the evidence, and the fluttering of the leaves of the reporters' pocket-books, as they threw off page after page of flimsy paper.

The prisoner at the bar looked straight before him; the firmly-compressed lips had never once quivered, the golden fringed eyelashes had never drooped.

"Can you tell me," said the counsel for the prosecution, "whether you have ever, since that night, seen this young man, who so closely resembled your old friend, Jim?"

"Never seen him since, to my knowledge"—there was a flutter in the crowded court, as if every spectator had simultaneously drawn a long breath—"till to-day."

"Till to-day?" said the counsel. This time it was more than a flutter, it was a subdued murmur that ran through the listening crowd.

"Be good enough to say if you can see him at this present moment."

"I can," replied Mr. Withers. "That's him! or my name ain't vot I've been led to believe it is." And he pointed with a dirty but decided finger at the prisoner at the bar.

The prisoner slightly elevated his arched eyebrows superciliously, as if he would say, "This is a pretty sort of witness to hang a man of my standing."

"Be so good as to continue your story," said the counsel.

"Vell, I does vot he tells me, and I lays the body, vith his 'elp, on the truck. 'Now,' he ses, 'follow this 'ere old voman and do everythink vot she tells you, or you'll find it considerably vorse for your future 'appiness;' vith vich he slams the door upon me, the old un, and the truck, and I sees no more of 'im. Vell, I follows the old un through a lot o' lanes and back slums, till ve leaves the town behind, and gets right out upon the 'eath; and ve crosses over the 'eath, till ve comes to vere it's precious lonely, yet the hedge of the pathway like; and 'ere she tells me as ve're to leave the body, and 'ere ve shifts it off the truck and lays it down upon the grass, vich it vas a-rainin' 'eavens 'ard, and a-thunderin' and a-lightnin' like von o'clock. 'And now,' she ses, 'vot you've got to do is to go back from vheres you come from, and lose no time about it; and take notice,' she ses, 'if ever you speaks or jabbers about this 'ere business, it'll be the end of your jabberin' in this world,' vith vitch she looks at me like a old vitch as she vos, and points vith her skinny arm down the road. So I valks my chalks, but I doesn't valk 'em very far, and presently I sees the old 'ag a-runnin' back tovards ​the town as fast as ever she could tear. 'Ho!' I ses, 'you are a nice lot, you are; but I'll see who's dead, in spite of you.' So I crawls up to vere ve'd left the body, and there it vos sure enuff, but all uncovered now, the face a-starin' up at the black sky, and it vos dressed, as far as I could make out, quite like a gentleman, all in black, but it vos so jolly dark I couldn't see the face, vhen all of a sudden, vhile I vos a-kneelin' down and lookin' at it, there comes von of the longest flashes of lightnin' as I ever remember, and in the blue light I sees the face plainer than I could have seen it in the day. I thought I should have fell down all of a-heap. It vos Jim! Jim hisself, as I knowed as well as I ever knowed myself, dead at my feet! My first thought vos as how that young man as vos so like Jim had murdered him; but there vorn't no marks of wiolence novheres about the body. Now, I hadn't in my own mind any doubts as how it vos Jim; but still, I ses to myself, I ses, 'Everythink seems topsy-turvy like this night, so I'll be sure;' so I takes up his arm, and turns up his coat-sleeve. Now, vy I does this is this 'ere: there vos a young voman Jim vos uncommon fond ov, vhich her name vos Bess, though he and many more called her, for short, Sillikens: and von day vhen me and Jim vos at a public, ve happened to fall in vith a sailor, vot ve'd both knowed afore he vent to sea. So he vos a-tellin' of us his adventures and such-like, and then he said promiscus, 'I'll show you somethin' pretty;' and sure enuff, he slipped up the sleeve ov his Garnsey, and there, all over his arm, vos all manner ov sort ov picters done vith gunpowder, such as ankers, and Rule Britannias, and ships in full sail on the backs of flyin' alligators. So Jim takes quite a fancy to this 'ere, and he ses, 'I vish, Joe (the sailor's name bein' Joe), I vish, Joe, as how you'd do me my young voman's name and a wreath of roses on my arm, like that there.' Joe ses, 'And so I vill, and velcome.' And sure enuff, a veek or two artervards, Jim comes to me vith his arm like a picter-book, and Bess as large as life just above the elber-joint. So I turns up his coat-sleeve, and vaits for a flash ov lightnin'. I hasn't to vait long, and there I reads, 'B.E.S.S.' 'There ain't no doubt now,' I ses, 'this 'ere's Jim, and there's some willany or other in it, vot I ain't up to.'"

"Very good," said the counsel; "we may want you again by-and-by, I think, Mr. Withers; but for the present you may retire."

The next witness called was Dr. Tappenden, who related the circumstances of the admission of Jabez North into his household, the high character he had from the Board of the Slopperton Union, and the confidence reposed in him.

"You placed great trust, then, in this person?" asked the counsel for the prosecution.

"The most implicit trust," replied the schoolmaster; "so ​much so, that he was frequently employed by me to collect subscriptions for a public charity of which I was the treasurer—the Slopperton Orphan Asylum. I think it only right to mention this, as on one occasion it was the cause of his calling upon the unfortunate gentleman who was murdered."

"Indeed! Will you be so good as to relate the circumstance?"

"I think it was about three days before the murder, when, one morning, at a little before twelve o'clock—that being the time at which my pupils are dismissed from their studies for an hour's recreation—I said to him, 'Mr. North, I should like you to call upon this Indian gentleman, who is staying with Mrs. Marwood, and whose wealth is so much talked of——"

"Pardon me. You said, 'whose wealth is so much talked of.' Can y ou swear to having made that remark?"

"I can."

"Pray continue," said the counsel.

"'I should like you,' I said, 'to call upon this Mr. Harding, and solicit his aid for the Orphan Asylum; we are sadly in want of funds. I know, North, your heart is in the work, and you will plead the cause of the orphans successfully. You have an hour before dinner; it is some distance to the Black Mill, but you can walk fast there and back.' He went accordingly, and on his return brought a five-pound note, which Mr. Harding had given him."

Dr. Tappenden proceeded to describe the circumstance of the death of the little boy in the usher's apartment, on the very night of the murder. One of the servants was examined, who slept on the same floor as North, and who said she had heard strange noises in his room that night, but had attributed the noises to the fact of the usher sitting up to attend upon the invalid. She was asked what were the noises she had heard.

"I heard some one open the window, and shut it a long while after."

"How long do you imagine the interval to have been between the opening and shutting of the window?" asked the counsel.

"About two hours," she replied, "as far as I could guess."

The next witness for the prosecution was the old servant, Martha.

"Can you remember ever having seen the prisoner at the bar?"

The old woman put on her spectacles, and steadfastly regarded the elegant Monsieur de Marolles, or Jabez North, as his enemies insisted on calling him. After a very deliberate inspection of that gentleman's personal advantages, rather trying to the feelings of the spectators, Mrs. Martha Jones said, rather obscurely—

"He had light hair then."

"'He had light hair then.' You mean, I conclude," said the ​counsel, "that at the time of your first seeing the prisoner, his hair was of a different colour from what it is now. Supposing that he had dyed his hair, as is not an uncommon practice, can you swear that you have seen him before to-day?"

"I can."

"On what occasion?" asked the counsel.

"Three days before the murder of my mistress's poor brother. I opened the gate for him. He was very civil-spoken, and admired the garden very much, and asked me if he might look about it a little."

"He asked you to allow him to look about the garden? Pray was this as he went in, or as he went out?"

"It was when I let him out."

"And how long did he stay with Mr. Harding?"

"Not more than ten minutes. Mr. Harding was in his bedroom; he had a cabinet in his bedroom in which he kept papers and money, and he used to transact all his business there, and sometimes would be there till dinner-time."

"Did the prisoner see him in his bedroom?"

"He did. I showed him upstairs myself."

"Was anybody in the bedroom with Mr. Harding when he saw the prisoner?"

"Only his coloured servant: he was always with him."

"And when you showed the prisoner out, he asked to be allowed to look at the garden? Was he long looking about?"

"Not more than five minutes. He looked more at the house than the garden. I noticed him looking at Mr. Harding's window, which is on the first floor; he took particular notice of a very fine creeper that grows under the window."

"Was the window, on the night of the murder, fastened, or not?"

"It never was fastened. Mr. Harding always slept with his window a little way open."

After Martha had been dismissed from the witness-box, the old servant of Mr. Harding, the Lascar, who had been found living with a gentleman in London, was duly sworn, prior to being examined.

He remembered the prisoner at the bar, but made the same remark as Martha had done, about the change in colour of his hair,

"You were in the room with your late master when the prisoner called upon him?" asked the counsel.

"I was."

"Will you state what passed between the prisoner and your master?"

"It is scarcely in my power to do so. At that time I understood no English. My master was seated at his cabinet, looking over papers and accounts. I fancy the prisoner asked him for ​money. He showed him papers both printed and written. My master opened a pocket-book filled with notes, the pocket-book afterwards found on his nephew, and gave the prisoner a bank note. The prisoner appeared to make a good impression on my late master, who talked to him in a very cordial manner. As he was leaving the room, the prisoner made some remark about me, and I thought from the tone of his voice, he was asking a question."

"You thought he was asking a question?"

"Yes. In the Hindostanee language we have no interrogative form of speech, we depend entirely on the inflexion of the voice; our ears are therefore more acute than an Englishman's. I am certain he asked my master some questions about me."

"And your master——?"

"After replying to him, turned to me, and said, 'I am telling this gentleman what a faithful fellow you are, Mujeebez, and how you always sleep in my dressing-room.'"

"You remember nothing more?"

"Nothing more."

The Indian's deposition, taken in the hospital at the time of the trial of Richard Marwood, was then read over to him. He certified to the truth of this deposition, and left the witness-box.

The landlord of the Bargeman's Delight, Mr. Darley, and Mr. Peters (the latter by an interpreter), were examined, and the story of the quarrel and the lost Indian coin was elicited, making considerable impression on the jury.

There was only one more witness for the crown, and this was a young man, a chemist, who had been an apprentice at the time of the supposed death of Jabez North, and who had sold to him a few days before that supposed suicide the materials for a hair-dye.

The counsel for the prosecution then summed up.

It is not for us to follow him through the twistings and windings of a very complicated mass of evidence; he had to prove the identity of Jabez North with the prisoner at the bar, and he had to prove that Jabez North was the murderer of Mr. Montague Harding. To the mind of every spectator in that crowded court he succeeded in proving both.

In vain the prisoner's counsel examined and cross-examined the witnesses.

The witnesses for the defence were few. A Frenchman, who represented himself as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, failed signally in an endeavour to prove an alibi, and considerably damaged the defence. Other witnesses appeared, who swore to having known the prisoner in Paris the year of the murder. They could not say they had seen him during the November of that year—it might have been earlier, it might have been later. On being cross-examined, they broke down ignominiously, and acknowledged that it might not have been that year at all. But ​they had known him in Paris about that period. They had always believed him to be a Frenchman. They had always understood that his father fell at Waterloo, in the ranks of the Old Guard. On cross-examination they all owned to having heard him at divers periods speak English. He had, in fact, spoken it fluently, yes, even like an Englishman. On further cross-examination it also appeared that he did not like being thought an Englishman; that he would insist vehemently upon his French extraction; that nobody knew who he was, or whence he came; and that all any one did know of him was what he himself had chosen to state.

The defence was long and laboured. The prisoner's counsel did not enter into the question of the murder having been committed by Jabez North, or not having been committed by Jabez North. What he endeavoured to show was, that the prisoner at the bar was not Jabez North; but that he was a victim to one of those cases of mistaken identity of which there are so many on record both in English and foreign criminal archives. He cited the execution of the Frenchman Joseph Lesurges, for the murder of the Courier of Lyons. He spoke of the case of Elizabeth Canning, in which a crowd of witnesses on either side persisted in supporting entirely conflicting statements, without any evident motive whatsoever. He endeavoured to dissect the evidence of Mr. William Withers; he sneered at that worthy citizen's wholesale slaughter of the English of her most gracious Majesty and subjects. He tried to overthrow that gentleman by ten minutes on the wrong side of the Slopperton clocks; he did his best to damage him by puzzling him as to whether the truck he spoke of had two legs and one wheel, or two wheels and one leg: but he tried in vain. Mr. Withers was not to be damaged; he stood as firm as a rock, and still swore that he carried the dead body of Jim Lomax out of Blind Peter and on to the heath, and that the man who commanded him so to do was the prisoner at the bar. Neither was Mr. Augustus Darley to be damaged; nor yet the landlord of the Bargeman's Delight, who, in spite of all cross-examination, preserved a gloomy and resolute attitude, and declared that "that young man at the bar, which his hair was then light, had a row with a young woman in the tap-room, and throwed that there gold coin to her, which she chucked it back savage." In short, the defence, though it lasted two hours and a half, was a very lame one; and a close observer might have seen one flash from the blue eyes of the man standing at the bar, which glanced in the direction of the eloquent Mr. Prius, Q.C., as he uttered the last words of his peroration, revengeful and murderous enough, brief though it was, to give to the spectator some idea that the Count de Marolles, innocent and injured victim of circumstantial ​evidence as he might be, was not the safest person in the world to offend.

The judge delivered his charge to the jury, and they retired.

There was breathless impatience in the court for three-quarters of an hour; such impatience that the three-quarters seemed to be three entire hours, and some of the spectators would have it that the clock had stopped. Once more the jury took their places.

"Guilty!" A recommendation to mercy? No! Mercy was not for such as he. Not man's mercy. Oh, Heaven be praised that there is One whose mercy is as far above the mercy of the tenderest of earth's creatures as heaven is above that earth. Who shall say where is the man so wicked he may not hope for compassion there?

The judge put on the black cap and delivered the sentence.

"To be hanged by the neck!"

The Count de Marolles looked round at the crowd. It was beginning to disperse, when he lifted his slender ringed white hand. He was about to speak. The crowd, swaying hither and thither before, stopped as one man. As one man, nay, as one surging wave of the ocean, changed, in a breath, to stone. He smiled a bitter mocking defiant smile.

"Worthy citizens of Slopperton," he said, his clear enunciation ringing through the building distinct and musical, "I thank you for the trouble you have taken this day on my account. I have played a great game, and I have lost a great stake; but, remember, I first won that stake, and for eight years held it and enjoyed it. I have been the husband of one of the most beautiful and richest women in France. I have been a millionaire, and one of the wealthiest merchant princes of the wealthy south. I started from the workhouse of this town; I never in my life had a friend to help me or a relation to advise me. To man I owe nothing. To God I owe only this, a will as indomitable as the stars He made, which have held their course through all time. Unloved, unaided, unprayed for, unwept; motherless, fatherless, sisterless, brotherless, friendless; I have taken my own road, and have kept to it; defying the earth on which I have lived, and the unknown Powers above my head. That road has come to an end, and brought me—here! So be it! I suppose, after all, the unknown Powers are strongest! Gentlemen, I am ready." He bowed and followed the officials who led him from the dock to a coach waiting for him at the entrance to the court. The crowd gathered round him with scared faces and eager eyes.

The last Slopperton saw of the Count de Marolles was a pale handsome face, a sardonic smile, and the delicate white hand which rested upon the door of the hackney-coach.

Nex tmorning, very early, men with grave faces congregated ​at street-corners, and talked together earnestly. Through Slopperton like wildfire spread the rumour of something, which had only been darkly hinted at the gaol.

The prisoner had destroyed himself!

Later in the afternoon it was known that he had bled himself to death by means of a lancet not bigger than a pin, which he had worn for years concealed in a chased gold ring of massive form and exquisite workmanship.

The gaoler had found him, at six o'clock on the morning after his trial, seated, with his bloodless face lying on the little table of his cell, white, tranquil, and dead.

The agents from an exhibition of wax-works, and several phrenologists, came to look at and to take casts of his head, and masks of the handsome and aristocratic face. One of the phrenologists, who had given an opinion on his cerebral development ten years before, when Mr. Jabez North was considered a model of all Sloppertonian virtues and graces, and who had been treated with ignominy for that very opinion, was now in the highest spirits, and introduced the whole story into a series of lectures, which were afterwards very popular. The Count de Marolles, with very long eyelashes, very small feet, and patent-leather boots, a faultless Stultsian evening costume, a white waistcoat, and any number of rings, was much admired in the Chamber of Horrors at the eminent wax-work exhibition above mentioned, and was considered well worth the extra sixpence for admission. Young ladies fell in love with him, and vowed that a being—they called him a being—with such dear blue glass eyes, with beautiful curly eyelashes, and specks of lovely vermilion in each corner, could never have committed a horrid murder, but was, no doubt, the innocent victim of that cruel circumstantial evidence. Mr. Splitters put the Count into a melodrama in four periods—not acts, but periods: 1. Boyhood—the Workhouse. 2. Youth—the School. 3. Manhood—the Palace. 4. Death—the Dungeon. This piece was very popular, and as Mr. Percy Cordonner had prophesied, the Count was represented as living en permanence in Hessian boots with gold tassels; and as always appearing, with a spirited disregard for the unities of time and space, two or three hundred miles distant from the spot in which he had appeared five minutes before, and performing in scene four the very action which his foes had described as being already done in scene three. But the transpontine audiences to whom the piece was represented were not in the habit of asking questions, and as long as you gave them plenty of Hessian boots and pistol-shots for their money, you might snap your fingers at Aristotle's ethics, and all the Greek dramatists into the bargain. What would they have cared for the classic school? Would they have given a ​thank-you for "Zaire, vous pleurez!" or "Qu'il mourut!" No; give them enough blue fire and honest British sentiment, with plenty of chintz waistcoats and top-boots, and you might laugh Corneille and Voltaire to scorn, and be sure of a long run on the Surrey side of the water.

So the race was run, and, after all, the cleverest horse was not the winner. Where was the Countess de Marolles during her husband's trial? Alas! Valerie, thine has been a troubled youth, but it may be that a brighter fate is yet in store for thee!

Chapter the Last.
Farewell to England.

Scarcely had Slopperton subsided in some degree from the excitement into which it had been thrown by the trial and suicide of Raymond de Marolles, when it was again astir with news, which was, if anything, more exciting. It is needless to say that after the trial and condemnation of De Marolles, there was not a little regretful sympathy felt by the good citizens of Slopperton for their unfortunate townsman, Richard Marwood, who, after having been found guilty of a murder he had never committed, had perished, as the story went, in a futile attempt to escape from the asylum in which he had been confined. What, then, were the feelings of Slopperton when, about a month after the suicide of the murderer of Montague Harding, a paragraph appeared in one of the local papers which stated positively that Mr. Richard Marwood was still alive, he having succeeded in escaping from the county asylum?

This was enough. Here was a hero of romance indeed; here was innocence triumphant for once in real life, as on the mimic scene. Slopperton was wild with one universal desire to embrace so distinguished a citizen. The local papers of the following week were full of the subject, and Richard Marwood was earnestly solicited to appear once more in his native town, that every inhabitant thereof, from the highest to the lowest, might be enabled to testify heartfelt sympathy for his undeserved misfortunes, and sincere delight in his happy restoration to name and fame.

The hero was not long in replying to the friendly petition of the inhabitants of his native place. A letter from Richard appeared in one of the papers, in which he stated that as he was about to leave England for a considerable period, perhaps for ever, he should do himself the honour of responding to the kind wishes of his friends, and once more shake hands with the acquaintance of his youth before he left his native country.

The Sloppertonian Jack-in-the-green, assisted by the rather​stalwart damsels in dirty pink gauze and crumpled blue-and-yellow artificial flowers, had scarcely ushered in the sweet spring month of the year, when Slopperton arose simultaneously and hurried as one man to the railway-station, to welcome the hero of the day. The report has spread—no one ever knows how these reports arise—that Mr. Richard Marwood is to arrive this day. Slopperton must be at hand to bid him welcome to his native town, to repair the wrong it has so long done him in holding him up to universal detestation as the George Barnwell of modern times.

Which train will he come by? There is a whisper of the three o'clock express; and at three o'clock in the afternoon, therefore, the station and station-yard are crowded.

The Slopperton station, like most other stations, is built at a little distance from the town, so that the humble traveller who arrives by the parliamentary train, with all his earthly possessions in a red cotton pocket-handkerchief or a brown-paper parcel, and to whom such things as cabs are unknown luxuries, is often disappointed to find that when he gets to Slopperton station he is not in Slopperton proper. There is a great Sahara of building-ground and incomplete brick-and-mortar, very much to let, to be crossed before the traveller finds himself in High Street, or South Street, or East Street, or any of the populous neighbourhoods of this magnificent city.

Every disadvantage, however, is generally counterbalanced by some advantage, and nothing could be more suitable than this grand Sahara of broken ground and unfinished neighbourhood for the purposes of a triumphal entry into Slopperton.

There is a great deal of animated conversation going on upon the platform inside the station. It is a noticeable fact that everybody present—and there are some hundreds—appears to have been intimately acquainted with Richard from his very babyhood. This one remembers many a game at cricket with him on those very fields yonder; another would be a rich man if he had only a sovereign for every cigar he has smoked in the society of Mr. Marwood. That old gentleman yonder taught our hero his declensions, and always had a difficulty with him about the ablative case. The elderly female with the dropsical umbrella had nursed him as a baby; "and the finest baby he was as ever I saw," she adds enthusiastically. Those two gentlemen who came down to the station in their own brougham are the kind doctors who carried him through that terrible brain-fever of his early youth, and whose evidence was of some service to him at his trial. Everywhere along the crowded platform there are friends; noisy excited gesticulating friends, who have started a hero on their own account, and who wouldn't turn aside to-day to get a bow from majesty itself.

Five minutes to three. From the doctor's fifty-guinea chro​nometer, by Benson, to the silver turnip from the wide buff waistcoat of the farmer, everybody's watch is out, and nobody will believe but that his particular time is the right time, and every other watch, and the station clock into the bargain, wrong.

Two minutes to three. Clang goes the great bell. The station-master clears the line. Here it comes, only a speck of dull red fire as yet, and a slender column of curling smoke; but the London express for all that. Here it comes, wildly tearing up the tender green country, rushing headlong through the smoky suburbs; it comes within a few hundred yards of the station; and there, amidst a labyrinth of straggling lines and a chaos of empty carriages and disabled engines, it stops deliberately for the ticket-collectors to go their accustomed round.

Good gracious me, how badly those ticket-collectors do their duty!—how slow they are!—what a time the elderly females in the second class appear to be fumbling in their reticules before they produce the required document!—what an age, in short, it is before the train puffs lazily up to the platform; and yet, only two minutes by the station-clock.

Which is he? There is a long line of carriages. The eager eyes look into each. There is a fat dark man with large whiskers reading the paper. Is that Richard? He may be altered, you know, they say; but surely eight years could never have changed him into that. No! there he is! There is no mistaking him this time. The handsome dark face, with the thick black moustache, and the clustering frame of waving raven hair, looks out of a first-class carriage. In another moment he is on the platform, a lady by his side, young and pretty, who bursts into tears as the crowd press around him, and hides her face on an elderly lady's shoulder. That elderly lady is his mother. How eagerly the Sloppertonians gather round him! He does not speak, but stretches out both his hands, which are nearly shaken off his wrists before he knows where he is.

Why doesn't he speak? Is it because he cannot? Is it because there is a choking sensation in his throat, and his lips refuse to articulate the words that are trembling upon them? Is it because he remembers the last time he alighted on this very platform—the time when he wore handcuffs on his wrists and walked guarded between two men; that bitter time when the crowd held aloof from him, and pointed him out as a murderer and a villain? There is a mist over his dark eyes as he looks round at those eager friendly faces, and he is glad to slouch his hat over his forehead, and to walk quickly through the crowd to the carriage waiting for him in the station-yard. He has his mother on one arm and the young lady on the other; his old friend Gus Darley is with him too; and the four step into the carriage.

Then, how the cheers and the huzzas burst forth, in one great ​hoarse shout! Three cheers for Richard, for his mother, for his faithful friend Gus Darley, who assisted him to escape from the lunatic asylum, for the young lady—but who is the young lady? Everybody is so anxious to know who the young lady is, that when Richard introduces her to the doctors, the crowd presses round, and putting aside ceremony, openly and deliberately listens. Good Heavens! the young lady is his wife, the sister of his friend Mr. Darley, "who wasn't afraid to trust me," the crowd heard him say, "when the world was against me, and who in adversity or prosperity alike was ready to bless me with her devoted love." Good gracious me! More cheers for the young lady. The young lady is Mrs. Marwood. Three cheers for Mrs. Marwood! Three cheers for Mr. and Mrs. Marwood! Three cheers for the happy pair!

At length the cheering is over—or, at least, over for the moment. Slopperton is in such an excited state that it is easy to see it will break out again by-and-by. The coachman gives a preliminary flourish of his whip as a signal to his fiery steeds. Fiery steeds, indeed! "Nothing so common as a horse shall carry Richard Marwood into Slopperton," cry the excited townspeople. We ourselves will draw the carriage—we, the respectable tradespeople—we, the tag-rag and bob-tail, anybody and everybody—will make ourselves for the nonce beasts of burden, and think it no disgrace to draw the triumphal car of this our townsman. In vain Richard remonstrates. His handsome face—his radiant smiles, only rekindle the citizens' enthusiasm. They think of the bright young scapegrace whom they all knew years ago. They think of his very faults—which were virtues in the eyes of the populace. They remember the day he caned a policeman who had laid violent hands on a helpless little boy for begging in the streets—the night he wrenched off the knocker of an unpopular magistrate who had been hard upon a poacher. They recalled a hundred escapades for which those even who reproved him had admired him; and they gather round the carriage in which he stands with his hat off, the May sunlight in his bright hazel eyes, his dark hair waving in the spring breeze around his wide candid brow, and one slender hand stretched out to restrain, if he can, this tempest of enthusiasm. Restrain it?—No! that is not to be done. You can go and stand upon the shore and address yourselves to the waves of the sea; you can mildly remonstrate with the wolf as to his intentions with regard to the innocent lamb; but you cannot check the enthusiasm of a hearty British crowd when its feelings are excited in a good cause.

Away the carriage goes! with the noisy populace about the wheels. What is this?—music? Yes; two opposition bands. One is playing "See, the conquering hero comes!" while the ether exhausts itself, and gets black in the face, with the exertion ​necessary in doing justice to "Rule Britannia." At last, however, the hotel is reached. But the triumph of Richard is not yet finished. He must make a speech. He does, ultimately, consent to say a few words in answer to the earnest entreaties of that clamorous crowd. He tells his friends, in a very few simple sentences, how this hour, of all others, is the hour for which he has prayed for nearly nine long years; and how he sees, in the most trifling circumstances which have aided, however remotely, in bringing this hour to pass, the hand of an all-powerful Providence. He tells them how he sees in these years of sorrow through which he has passed a punishment for the careless sins of his youth, for the unhappiness he has caused his devoted mother, and for his indifference to the blessings Heaven has bestowed on him; how he now prays to be more worthy of the bright future which lies so fair before him; how he means the rest of his life to be an earnest and a useful one; and how, to the last hour of that life, he will retain the memory of their generous and enthusiastic reception of him this day. It is doubtful how much more he might have said; but just at this point his eyes became peculiarly affected—perhaps by the dust, perhaps by the sunshine—and he was forced once more to have recourse to his hat, which he pulled fairly over those optics prior to springing out of the carriage and hurrying into the hotel, amidst the frantic cheers of the sterner sex, and the audible sobs of the fairer portion of the community.

His visit was but a flying one. The night train was to take him across country to Liverpool, whence he was to start the following day for South America. This was kept, however, a profound secret from the crowd, which might else have insisted on giving him a second ovation. It was not very quickly dispersed, this enthusiastic throng. It lingered for a long time under the windows of the hotel. It drank a great deal of bottled ale and London porter in the bar round the corner by the stable-yard; and it steadfastly refused to go away until it had had Richard out upon the balcony several times, and had given him a great many more tumultuous greetings. When it had quite exhausted Richard (our hero looking pale from over-excitement) it took to Mr. Darley as vice-hero, and would have carried him round the town with one of the bands of music, had he not prudently declined that offer. It was so bent on doing something, that at last, when it did consent to go away, it went into the Market-place and had a fight—not from any pugilistic or vindictive feeling, but from the simple necessity of finishing the evening somehow.

There is no possibility of sitting down to dinner till after dark. But at last the shutters are closed and the curtains are drawn by the obsequious waiters; the dinner-table is spread with glittering plate and snowy linen; the landlord himself ​brings in the soup and uncorks the sherry, and the little party draws round the social board. Why should we break in upon that happy group? With the wife he loves, the mother whose devotion has survived every trial, the friend whose aid has brought about his restoration to freedom and society, with ample wealth wherefrom to reward all who have served him in his adversity, what more has Richard to wish for?

A close carriage conveys the little party to the station; and by the twelve o'clock train they leave Slopperton, some of them perhaps never to visit it again.

The next day a much larger party is assembled on board the Oronoko, a vessel lying off Liverpool, and about to sail for South America. Richard is there, his wife and mother still by his side; and there are several others whom we know grouped about the deck. Mr. Peters is there. He has come to bid farewell to the young man in whose fortunes and misfortunes he has taken so warm and unfailing an interest. He is a man of independent property now, thanks to Richard, who thinks the hundred a-year settled on him a very small reward for his devotion—but he is very melancholy at parting with the master he has so loved.

"I think, sir," he says on his fingers, "I shall marry Kuppins, and give my mind to the education of the 'fondling.' He'll be a great man, sir, if he lives; for his heart, boy as he is, is all in his profession. Would you believe it, sir, that child bellowed for three mortal hours because his father committed suicide, and disappointed the boy of seein' him hung? That's what I calls a love of business, and no mistake."

On the other side of the deck there is a little group which Richard presently joins. A lady and gentleman and a little boy are standing there; and, at a short distance from them, a grave-looking man with dark-blue spectacles, and a servant—a Lascar.

There is a peculiar style about the gentleman, on whose arm the lady leans, that bespeaks him to the most casual observer to be a military man, in spite of his plain dress and loose great coat. And the lady on his arm, that dark classic face, is not one to be easily forgotten. It is Valerie de Cevennes, who leans on the arm of her first and beloved husband, Gaston de Lancy. If I have said little of this meeting—of this restoration of the only man she ever loved, which has been to her as a resurrection of the dead—it is because there are some joys which, from their very intensity, are too painful and too sacred for many words. He was restored to her. She had never murdered him. The potion given her by Blurosset was a very powerful opiate, which had produced a sleep resembling death in all its outward symptoms. Through the influence of the chemist the report of the death was spread abroad. The truth, except to Gaston's ​most devoted friends, had never been revealed. But the blow had been too much for him; and when he was told by whom his death had been attempted, he fell into a fever, which lasted for many months, during which period his reason was entirely lost, and from which he was only rescued by the devotion of the chemist—a devotion on Blurosset's part which, perhaps, had proceeded as much from love of the science he studied as of the man he saved. Recovering at last, Gaston de Lancy found that the glorious voice which had been his fortune was entirely gone. What was there for him to do? He enlisted in the East India Company's service; rose through the Sikh campaign with a rapidity which astonished the bravest of his compeers. There was a romance about his story that made him a hero in his regiment. He was known to have plenty of money—to have had no earthly reason for enlisting; but he told them he would rise, as his father had done before him, in the wars of the Empire, by merit alone, and he had kept his word. The French ensign, the lieutenant, the captain—in each rising grade he had been alike beloved, alike admired, as a shining example of reckless courage and military genius.

The arrest of the soi-disant Count de Marolles had brought Richard Marwood and Gaston de Lancy into contact. Both sufferers from the consummate perfidy of one man, they became acquainted, and, ere long, friends. Some part of Gaston's story was told to Richard and his young wife, Isabella; but it is needless to say, that the dark past in which Valerie was concerned remained a secret in the breast of her husband, of Laurent Blurosset, and herself. The father clasped his son to his heart, and opened his arms to receive the wife whom he had pardoned long ago, and whose years of terrible agony had atoned for the wildly-attempted crime of her youth.

On Richard and Gaston becoming fast friends, it had bean agreed between them that Richard should join De Lancy and his wife in South America; where, far from the scenes which association had made painful to both, they might commence a new existence. Valerie, once more mistress of that immense fortune of which De Marolles had so long had the command, was enabled to bestow it on the husband of her choice. The bank was closed in a manner satisfactory to all whose interests had been connected with it. The cashier, who was no other than the lively gentleman who had assisted in De Marolles' attempted escape, was arrested on a charge of embezzlement, and made to disgorge the money he had abstracted.

The Marquis de Cevennes elevated his delicately-arched eyebrows on reading an abridged account of the trial of his son, and his subsequent suicide; but the elegant Parisian did not go into mourning for this unfortunate scion of his aristocratic ​house; and indeed, it is doubtful if five minutes after he had thrown aside the journal he had any sensation whatever about the painful circumstances therein related. He expressed the same gentlemanly surprise upon being informed of the marriage of his niece with Captain Lansdown, late of the East India Company's service, and of her approaching departure with her husband for her South American estates. He sent her his blessing and a breakfast-service; with the portraits of Louis the Well-beloved, Madame du Barry, Choiseul, and D'Aiguillon, painted on the cups, in oval medallions, on a background of turquoise, packed in a casket of buhl lined with white velvet; and, I dare say, he dismissed his niece and her troubles from his recollection quite as easily as he despatched this elegant present to the railway which was to convey it to its destination.

The bell rings; the friends of the passengers drop down the side of the vessel into the little Liverpool steamer. There are Mr. Peters and Gus Darley waving their hats in the distance. Farewell, old and faithful friends, farewell; but surely not for ever. Isabella sinks sobbing on her husband's shoulder, Valerie looks with those deed unfathomable eyes out towards the blue horizon-line that bounds the far-away to which they go.

"There, Gaston, we shall forget——"

"Never your long sufferings, my Valerie," he murmurs, as ho presses the little hand resting on his arm; "those shall never be forgotten."

"And the horror of that dreadful night, Gaston——"

"Was the madness of a love which thought itself wronged, Valerie: we can forgive every wrong which springs from the depth of such a love."

Spread thy white wings, oh, ship! The shadows melt away into that purple distance. I see in that far South two happy homes; glistening white-walled villas, half buried in the luxuriant verdure of that lovely climate. I hear the voices of the children in the dark orange-groves, where the scented blossoms fall into the marble basin of the fountain. I see Richard reclining in an easy-chair, under the veranda, half hidden by the trailing jasmines that shroud it from the evening sunshine, smoking the long cherry-stemmed pipe which his wife has filled for him. Gaston paces, with his sharp military step, up and down the terrace at their feet, stopping as he passes by to lay a caressing hand on the dark curls of the son he loves. And Valerie—she leans against the slender pillar of the porch, round which the scented yellow roses are twined, and watches, with, earnest eyes, the husband of her earliest choice. Oh happy shadows! Few in this work-a-day world so fortunate as you who win in your prime of life the fulfilment of the dear dream of your youth!

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article  Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.