I REVISIT MOTHER CAREY
The last of the snow was gurgling itself away into the black
drain-traps, and the face of the town was smeared like a sweep’s under
a dreary drizzle, when Mr Shapter, and I, and a certain hard-faced
gentleman, with a habit of rubbing his jaw grittily under reflection,
came down to the grimy little tenement in Old Paradise Street. At the
door, the hard-faced gentleman, motioning us to one side and bending
to the keyhole, gave a call like an itinerant potman’s. The
commendable ruse proving successful, brought, after the briefest
interview, an old remembered step shuffling along the passage. The key
turned and the chain ran gratingly, and, following the unbaring, a
filthy claw, grasping a jug, was protruded through the aperture
revealed. Quick and soft as the swoop of an owl, the hard-faced man’s
fingers closed on the boney wrist, and the jug dropped to the pavement
with a crash. And straightway, like a hooked fish’s, the nose and
flexuous mouth of old Mother Carey came wobbling and gasping to the
light of day. The screech of fear and fury, which she struggled on the
instant to omit, sticking in her throat, the detective took quick
advantage of that momentary paralysis.
“Come along now,” he said. “I’m the law, do you understand? and you’re
wanted on a charge of murder. You’d best let me in, and hear what I’ve
got to say.”
As with the jug on one side of the door, so, on the other, down went
Mother Carey. She tumbled in a heap, rending away from the clutch on
her wrist, and appeared to lie in the hall moaning. Very swiftly and
neatly then, using a tool he had taken from his pocket, the detective,
nearly closing the door first, ran the chain along its socket within,
and made himself master of the filthy stronghold. Once entered, he
beckoned to us, and stooping to the collapsed figure a moment, rose to
his height again.
“All right, gentlemen,” he said. “She’s all right. Shut that door
please--now my good people” (this to the inevitable congregation
gathering outside), “this ain’t an inquest, you know. Come clear away,
clear away.”
He stepped across the whispering bundle on the boards, drew us in, and
closed the door on the little breathless group of faces.
“Now,” he said, “if you’ll please to go and make a light somewheres,
will you, sir, so as we can see ourselves speak? Better take the back
for privacy.”
We went as directed, and found a reasty little kitchen, black with
grease and soot, its walls flaking, its floor vermin-riddled, its long
cold grate one refuse-bin of garbage. There was a tattered curtain
pinned across the window, and this we unfastened to let in the
daylight. It seemed to awaken immemorial odours in its entrance. The
squalor of the place took on a festering sickness.
Hardly had we pulled the rag from its string, when the detective came
bearing in his capture professionalwise. He did not actually carry the
old woman, but he lifted her before him at a sort of helpless run. I
was glad to see at least that she had recovered her nerves of motion,
as I had feared that her downfall might have signified a stroke of
some sort.
He flopped her unceremoniously into a chair, where she sat rocking and
weeping and mumbling, and swaying her head and hands up and down like
a Japanese tortoise. But, for all her apparent collapse, I had a
shrewd idea that her eyes were not failing to take stock of me, and
that her mind was busy over that association of ideas which my return
in company with the law could not have failed to suggest. She kept up
her mechanical moaning, I thought, simply to gain time.
“Now, ma’am,” said the detective suavely. “When you’re quite
recovered.”
Her moans rose the windier at that, but presently with scraps of
articulation threading them.
“O good sir the deuce! ... O my heart and lungs! ... the shock of it
good sir ... wouldn’t hurt a fly the devil take it ... O what a libel
and slander on poor old Mother Carey the deuce!”
“Jannaway,” said Mr Shapter, “we can’t undertake to breathe this
atmosphere indefinitely. You’d better call a cab, and remove this
woman.”
“Very well, sir.”
The suggestion wrought its desired effect. Mother Carey became all in
a moment distinct to tearfulness.
“O good gentlemen, what is it you want of me? O that I should have
lived to hear my deuced self accused of the devil and all! Is it
anything about this young gentleman? O I’ll tell you the truth I
will!”
“That’ll do, then,” said the detective. “It won’t serve you the worse
perhaps in the long run. You’re pretty deep involved, you know, old
lady; but mayhap there’s another deeper yet. Don’t be saying now you
was never in collusion with Mr Dalston, because I know better. We’re
coming to him in good time; but just for the present the question
stands with you. Do you understand what I mean, a-linking of you and
him together? Of course you do, a woman of your cleverness. Well, look
at this young gentleman. Have you seen him afore?”
She whispered something, huddled into herself.
“What! more than once, perhaps,” said Mr Jannaway. “Right you are, I
do believe. It was him, wasn’t it now, you played the dutiful
grandmother to once upon a time, and ended by palming off on your
daughter as her own very partic’lar offspring? That was a cute move,
upon my word; and it paid you, didn’t it--paid you nigh as well as Mr
Dalston did for putting that other out of the way?”
She uttered a thin screech, and sank upon her quaking ignoble old
knees.
“I didn’t do it, good gentlemen,” she cried--“before God and the deuce
of my poor lungs I didn’t. O I’ve always been expecting something of
this sort to be charged to me, ever since him there came prying in
with his rakings-up and smellings-out of old deuces. I never put
anything out of the way I didn’t. My Georgie’s baby was dead already
when Dalston brought the other. Ask the devil of a doctor if you don’t
believe me.”
“Ah!” The detective shot a significant glance at Mr Shapter. “Dead was
it--the fruits of the little mistake as your daughter had made with Mr
Dalston, eh?”
“It was that drove me to send a message to him,” cried the miserable
old woman. “I told him he needn’t expect on that account to escape the
consequences of his deuced deed, but that I’d prove it against him,
and ruin him with his fine new lady none the less, if he didn’t come
to terms.”
“Exactly. And he answered?”
“He answered, O the devil, by turning up with a live baby as his fine
lady had borne to another, and by proposing to exchange it for the
dead one. She’d never know, he said, and Georgie would never know
neither, as they was both, the two of them, lying light-headed from
their confinements. It was true of my daughter, anyhow; and, when she
came to herself at last, she never thought but to accept the other
one’s baby for her own, though to be sure, as things turned out, she
never could abide it. He told me, for his part, that he’d no mind as
the child of another should come to inherit his lady’s money; and so
we agreed to make the exchange, and he paid me to keep the secret, and
that is the devil and all of the truth, so God burst my lungs if it
isn’t.”
“And bad enough, old lady. It couldn’t be much worse, to my mind,
short of murder.”
“I never killed nothing,” she moaned. “I wouldn’t put my hand to such
a wickedness.”
“You’ll have to put it to a document attesting all this, though,” said
the detective, “if you want to save your bacon.”
“I’ll do it, sir,” she said; “I’ll do it, on the deuce of my honour,
if you’ll only promise not to let him get at me.”
Mr Shapter, standing with me in the background, caught and pressed my
hand congratulatory, and then stepped forward.
“Come, Jannaway,” he said; “paper and ink. We’ll clinch this matter
while we are about it.”
It was what I had half expected, half foreseen; but the assurance of
its actuality found me stunned from speech. I could only look on and
listen in a sort of stupor, while the lawyer wrote, and finished, and
read out what he had written--the evidence--circumstantial, if you
like--to my parentage.
They had to support the old woman between them while she put her
trembling signature to the statement; and, when they released her, she
sank moaning once more to the floor.
“Don’t tell him I done it, good deuced gentlemen; don’t set him on to
me.”
“Now, look here, old lady,” said the detective, “if what we’re aiming
at doing comes to pass, _he_ won’t be in a position to be set on to
anything but a galley bench. All you’ve got to do is to lie quiet and
hold your mouth until you hear from us again; and then possibly, I say
possibly, it may come to happen that you don’t hear from us at all.”
She looked up with a sudden relief of craft in her watery eyes.
“And my little settlement as I draw from his lawyers the deuce bless
you, dears--it won’t be interfered with?--now say it won’t, dovies.”
“Come, Jannaway!” said Mr Shapter sharply.
She gathered herself together hurriedly, and got to her feet with a
scrambling skip, and followed us protesting and entreating all down
the passage. Finally, perceiving her prayers to be entirely
disregarded, she slammed the door upon us with a screaming oath.
Outside, the detective pondered me, grating his chin.
“Well, sir,” he said, “that settles it. There’s no rope for his neck
here. We’ll have to be satisfied with what Italy can give us in its
place.”
“Whatever that may be, it must fall far short of his deserts,” said Mr
Shapter. “A very pretty scoundrel, on my honour. Well, Mr Gaskett--as
I must still call you I suppose” (he took my arm, and we all set off
on our way back to his office)--“so far, I think we may say so,
excellently good. Whether Italy will confirm our claim, or fail of its
evidence, remains to be seen. It would be a pity, apart from our more
personal interest, if it did fail, because any such conclusion must
mean the escape of a scoundrel of a very choice pattern. But we will
hope for the best.”
“Will it be necessary, do you think, to draw further upon Lady Skene’s
parent?”
“I hope not; I think not; family feelings must be respected. At the
same time it must depend very largely upon the attitude which Lord
Skene shall elect to adopt.”
“Well, sir, when is it to be Italy, and for which of us?”
“There must be a delay, I think, of a few days, while Scotland Yard
communicates with Turin. Mr Dando insists upon accompanying us; so
there will be for the venture he, you, I, Jannaway, and your
witness--quite a little regiment--I trust not a forlorn hope. But it
all turns upon the question of that marriage--its proof and
legitimacy. A lot may come to perish in twenty years. That may stand
for a text out of the criminal’s Vade-mecum. I daresay Mr Dalston
nowadays is not troubled much with nightmare.”