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 over-grown 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,
over-grown 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 Tennis 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
of 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 forring 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 malicious 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 whitewinged 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 by 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 Buckingham 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 schoolboy. 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 hand, 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 sovering 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 exertions, and
blew his nose very deliberately on a handkerchief which, from its
dilapidated condition, resembled a red cotton cabbagenet. 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 you
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 anyone 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.
Next morning, 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 cored 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 VII.
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 chronometer,
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 other 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 been 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 deep 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 he 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!
=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.