That same evening Beck, according to appointment, met Percival and
showed him the dreary-looking house which held the fair stranger who had
so attracted his youthful fancy. And Percival looked at the high walls
with the sailor’s bold desire for adventure, while confused visions
reflected from plays, operas, and novels, in which scaling walls with
rope-ladders and dark-lanterns was represented as the natural vocation
of a lover, flitted across his brain; and certainly he gave a deep sigh
as his common-sense plucked him back from such romance. However, having
now ascertained the house, it would be easy to learn the name of its
inmates, and to watch or make his opportunity. As slowly and reluctantly
he walked back to the spot where he had left his cabriolet, he entered
into some desultory conversation with his strange guide; and the pity
he had before conceived for Beck increased upon him as he talked and
listened. This benighted mind, only illumined by a kind of miserable
astuteness and that “cunning of the belly” which is born of want to
engender avarice; this joyless temperament; this age in youth; this
living reproach, rising up from the stones of London against our social
indifference to the souls which wither and rot under the hard eyes
of science and the deaf ears of wealth,--had a pathos for his lively
sympathies and his fresh heart.
“If ever you want a friend, come to me,” said St. John, abruptly.
The sweeper stared, and a gleam of diviner nature, a ray of gratitude
and unselfish devotion, darted through the fog and darkness of his mind.
He stood, with his hat off, watching the wheels of the cabriolet as it
bore away the happy child of fortune, and then, shaking his head, as at
some puzzle that perplexed and defied his comprehension, strode back to
the town and bent his way homeward.
Between two and three hours after Percival thus parted from the sweeper,
a man whose dress was little in accordance with the scene in which we
present him, threaded his way through a foul labyrinth of alleys in the
worst part of St. Giles’s,--a neighbourhood, indeed, carefully shunned
at dusk by wealthy passengers; for here dwelt not only Penury in its
grimmest shape, but the desperate and dangerous guilt which is not to
be lightly encountered in its haunts and domiciles. Here children
imbibe vice with their mother’s milk. Here Prostitution, commencing with
childhood, grows fierce and sanguinary in the teens, and leagues with
theft and murder. Here slinks the pickpocket, here emerges the burglar,
here skulks the felon. Yet all about and all around, here, too, may
be found virtue in its rarest and noblest form,--virtue outshining
circumstance and defying temptation; the virtue of utter poverty, which
groans, and yet sins not. So interwoven are these webs of penury and
fraud that in one court your life is not safe; but turn to the right
hand, and in the other, you might sleep safely in that worse than Irish
shealing, though your pockets were full of gold. Through these haunts
the ragged and penniless may walk unfearing, for they have nothing to
dread from the lawless,--more, perhaps, from the law; but the wealthy,
the respectable, the spruce, the dainty, let them beware the spot,
unless the policeman is in sight or day is in the skies!
As this passenger, whose appearance, as we have implied, was certainly
not that of a denizen, turned into one of the alleys, a rough hand
seized him by the arm, and suddenly a group of girls and tatterdemalions
issued from a house, in which the lower shutters unclosed showed a light
burning, and surrounded him with a hoarse whoop.
The passenger whispered a word in the ear of the grim blackguard who had
seized him, and his arm was instantly released.
“Hist! a pal,--he has the catch,” said the blackguard, surlily. The
group gave way, and by the light of the clear starlit skies, and a
single lamp hung at the entrance of the alley, gazed upon the stranger.
But they made no effort to detain him; and as he disappeared in the
distant shadows, hastened back into the wretched hostlery where they had
been merry-making. Meanwhile, the stranger gained a narrow court, and
stopped before a house in one of its angles,--a house taller than the
rest, so much taller than the rest that it had the effect of a tower;
you would have supposed it (perhaps rightly) to be the last remains
of some ancient building of importance, around which, as population
thickened and fashion changed, the huts below it had insolently sprung
up. Quaint and massive pilasters, black with the mire and soot of
centuries, flanked the deep-set door; the windows were heavy with
mullions and transoms, and strongly barred in the lower floor; but few
of the panes were whole, and only here and there had any attempt been
made to keep out the wind and rain by rags, paper, old shoes, old hats,
and other ingenious contrivances. Beside the door was conveniently
placed a row of some ten or twelve bell-pulls, appertaining no doubt
to the various lodgments into which the building was subdivided. The
stranger did not seem very familiar with the appurtenances of the place.
He stood in some suspense as to the proper bell to select; but at last,
guided by a brass plate annexed to one of the pulls, which, though it
was too dark to decipher the inscription, denoted a claim to superior
gentility to the rest of that nameless class, he hazarded a tug, which
brought forth a ‘larum loud enough to startle the whole court from its
stillness.
In a minute or less, the casement in one of the upper stories opened, a
head peered forth, and one of those voices peculiar to low debauch--raw,
cracked, and hoarse--called out: “Who waits?”
“Is it you, Grabman?” asked the stranger, dubiously.
“Yes,--Nicholas Grabman, attorney-at-law, sir, at your service; and your
name?”
“Jason,” answered the stranger.
“Ho, there! ho, Beck!” cried the cracked voice to some one within; “go
down and open the door.”
In a few moments the heavy portal swung and creaked and yawned sullenly,
and a gaunt form, half-undressed, with an inch of a farthing rushlight
glimmering through a battered lantern in its hand, presented itself to
Jason. The last eyed the ragged porter sharply.
“Do you live here?”
“Yes,” answered Beck, with the cringe habitual to him. “H-up the ladder,
vith the rats, drat ‘em.”
“Well, lead on; hold up the lantern. A devil of a dark place this!”
grumbled Jason, as he nearly stumbled over sundry broken chattels, and
gained a flight of rude, black, broken stairs, that creaked under his
tread.
“‘St! ‘st!” said Beck between his teeth, as the stranger, halting at the
second floor, demanded, in no gentle tones, whether Mr. Grabman lived in
the chimney-pots.
“‘St! ‘st! Don’t make such a rumpus, or No. 7 will be at you.”
“What do I care for No. 7? And who the devil is No. 7?”
“A body-snatcher!” whispered Beck, with a shudder. “He’s a dillicut
sleeper,--can’t abide having his night’s rest sp’ilt. And he’s the
houtrageoustest great cretur when he’s h-up in his tantrums; it makes
your ‘air stand on ind to ‘ear him!”
“I should like very much to hear him, then,” said the stranger,
curiously. And while he spoke, the door of No. 7 opened abruptly. A
huge head, covered with matted hair, was thrust for a moment through the
aperture, and two dull eyes, that seemed covered with a film like that
of the birds which feed on the dead, met the stranger’s bold, sparkling
orbs.
“Hell and fury!” bawled out the voice of this ogre, like a clap of near
thunder, “if you two keep tramp, tramp, there close at my door, I’ll
make you meat for the surgeons, b---- you!”
“Stop a moment, my civil friend,” said the stranger, advancing; “just
stand where you are: I should like to make a sketch of your head.”
That head protruded farther from the door, and with it an enormous
bulk of chest and shoulder. But the adventurous visitor was not to be
daunted. He took out, very coolly, a pencil and the back of a letter,
and began his sketch.
The body-snatcher stared at him an instant in mute astonishment; but
that operation and the composure of the artist were so new to him that
they actually inspired him with terror. He slunk back, banged to
the door; and the stranger, putting up his implements, said, with a
disdainful laugh, to Beck, who had slunk away into a corner,--
“No. 7 knows well how to take care of No. 1. Lead on, and be quick,
then!”
As they continued to mount, they heard the body-snatcher growling and
blaspheming in his den, and the sound made Beck clamber the quicker,
till at the next landing-place he took breath, threw open a door, and
Jason, pushing him aside, entered first.
The interior of the room bespoke better circumstances than might have
been supposed from the approach; the floor was covered with sundry
scraps of carpet, formerly of different hues and patterns, but mellowed
by time into one threadbare mass of grease and canvas. There was a good
fire on the hearth, though the night was warm; there were sundry volumes
piled round the walls, in the binding peculiar to law books; in a corner
stood a tall desk, of the fashion used by clerks, perched on tall, slim
legs, and companioned by a tall, slim stool. On a table before the fire
were scattered the remains of the nightly meal,--broiled bones, the
skeleton of a herring; and the steam rose from a tumbler containing a
liquid colourless as water, but poisonous as gin.
The room was squalid and dirty, and bespoke mean and slovenly habits;
but it did not bespeak penury and want, it had even an air of filthy
comfort of its own,--the comfort of the swine in its warm sty. The
occupant of the chamber was in keeping with the localities. Figure to
yourself a man of middle height, not thin, but void of all muscular
flesh,--bloated, puffed, unwholesome. He was dressed in a gray-flannel
gown and short breeches, the stockings wrinkled and distained, the feet
in slippers. The stomach was that of a portly man, the legs were those
of a skeleton; the cheeks full and swollen, like a ploughboy’s, but
livid, bespeckled, of a dull lead-colour, like a patient in the dropsy.
The head, covered in patches with thin, yellowish hair, gave some
promise of intellect, for the forehead was high, and appeared still more
so from partial baldness; the eyes, embedded in fat and wrinkled skin,
were small and lustreless, but they still had that acute look which
education and ability communicate to the human orb; the mouth most
showed the animal,--full-lipped, coarse, and sensual; while behind one
of two great ears stuck a pen.
You see before you, then, this slatternly figure,--slipshod,
half-clothed, with a sort of shabby demi-gentility about it, half
ragamuffin, half clerk; while in strong contrast appeared the new-comer,
scrupulously neat, new, with bright black-satin stock, coat cut jauntily
to the waist, varnished boots, kid gloves, and trim mustache.
Behind this sleek and comely personage, on knock-knees, in torn shirt
open at the throat, with apathetic, listless, unlighted face, stood the
lean and gawky Beck.
“Set a chair for the gentleman,” said the inmate of the chamber to Beck,
with a dignified wave of the hand.
“How do you do, Mr.--Mr.--humph--Jason? How do you do? Always smart and
blooming; the world thrives with you.”
“The world is a farm that thrives with all who till it properly,
Grabman,” answered Jason, dryly; and with his handkerchief he carefully
dusted the chair, on which he then daintily deposited his person.
“But who is your Ganymede, your valet, your gentleman-usher?”
“Oh, a lad about town who lodges above and does odd jobs for
me,--brushes my coat, cleans my shoes, and after his day’s work goes an
errand now and then. Make yourself scarce, Beck! Anatomy, vanish!”
Beck grinned, nodded, pulled hard at a flake of his hair, and closed the
door.
“One of your brotherhood, that?” asked Jason, carelessly.
“He, oaf? No,” said Grabman, with profound contempt in his sickly
visage. “He works for his bread,--instinct! Turnspits and truffle-dogs
and some silly men have it! What an age since we met! Shall I mix you a
tumbler?”
“You know I never drink your vile spirits; though in Champagne and
Bordeaux I am any man’s match.”
“And how the devil do you keep old black thoughts out of your mind by
those washy potations?”
“Old black thoughts--of what?”
“Of black actions, Jason. We have not met since you paid me for
recommending the nurse who attended your uncle in his last illness.”
“Well, poor coward?”
Grabman knit his thin eyebrows and gnawed his blubber lips.
“I am no coward, as you know.”
“Not when a thing is to be done, but after it is done. You brave the
substance, and tremble at the shadow. I dare say you see ugly goblins in
the dark, Grabman?”
“Ay, ay; but it is no use talking to you. You call yourself Jason
because of your yellow hair, or your love for the golden fleece; but
your old comrades call you ‘Rattlesnake,’ and you have its blood, as its
venom.”
“And its charm, man,” added Jason, with a strange smile, that, though
hypocritical and constrained, had yet a certain softness, and added
greatly to the comeliness of features which many might call beautiful,
and all would allow to be regular and symmetrical. “I shall find at
least ten love-letters on my table when I go home. But enough of these
fopperies, I am here on business.”
“Law, of course; I am your man. Who’s the victim?” and a hideous grin
on Grabman’s face contrasted the sleek smile that yet lingered upon his
visitor’s.
“No; something less hazardous, but not less lucrative than our old
practices. This is a business that may bring you hundreds, thousands;
that may take you from this hovel to speculate at the West End; that may
change your gin into Lafitte, and your herring into venison; that may
lift the broken attorney again upon the wheel,--again to roll down, it
may be; but that is your affair.”
“‘Fore Gad, open the case,” cried Grabman, eagerly, and shoving aside
the ignoble relics of his supper, he leaned his elbows on the table and
his chin on his damp palms, while eyes that positively brightened into
an expression of greedy and relentless intelligence were fixed upon his
visitor.
“The case runs thus,” said Jason. “Once upon a time there lived, at
an old house in Hampshire called Laughton, a wealthy baronet named St.
John. He was a bachelor, his estates at his own disposal. He had two
nieces and a more distant kinsman. His eldest niece lived with him,--she
was supposed to be destined for his heiress; circumstances needless
to relate brought upon this girl her uncle’s displeasure,--she was
dismissed his house. Shortly afterwards he died, leaving to his
kinsman--a Mr. Vernon--his estates, with remainder to Vernon’s issue,
and in default thereof, first to the issue of the younger niece, next to
that of the elder and disinherited one. The elder married, and was left
a widow without children. She married again, and had a son. Her second
husband, for some reason or other, conceived ill opinions of his wife.
In his last illness (he did not live long) he resolved to punish the
wife by robbing the mother. He sent away the son, nor have we been able
to discover him since. It is that son whom you are to find.”
“I see, I see; go on,” said Grabman. “This son is now the remainderman.
How lost? When? What year? What trace?”
“Patience. You will find in this paper the date of the loss and the age
of the child, then a mere infant. Now for the trace. This husband--did
I tell you his name? No? Alfred Braddell--had one friend more intimate
than the rest,--John Walter Ardworth, a cashiered officer, a ruined man,
pursued by bill-brokers, Jews, and bailiffs. To this man we have lately
had reason to believe that the child was given. Ardworth, however, was
shortly afterwards obliged to fly his creditors. We know that he went to
India; but if residing there, it must have been under some new name, and
we fear he is now dead. All our inquiries, at least after this man,
have been fruitless. Before he went abroad, he left with his old tutor a
child corresponding in age to that of Mrs. Braddell’s. In this child she
thinks she recognizes her son. All that you have to do is to trace his
identity by good legal evidence. Don’t smile in that foolish
way,--I mean sound, bona fide evidence that will stand the fire of
cross-examination; you know what that is! You will therefore find
out,--first, whether Braddell did consign his child to Ardworth, and,
if so, you must then follow Ardworth, with that child in his keeping,
to Matthew Fielden’s house, whose address you find noted in the paper I
gave you, together with many other memoranda as to Ardworth’s creditors
and those whom he is likely to have come across.”
“John Ardworth, I see!”
“John Walter Ardworth,--commonly called Walter; he, like me, preferred
to be known only by his second baptismal name. He, because of a
favourite Radical godfather; I, because Honore is an inconvenient
Gallicism. And perhaps when Honore Mirabeau (my godfather) went out
of fashion with the sans-culottes, my father thought Gabriel a safer
designation. Now I have told you all.”
“What is the mother’s maiden name?”
“Her maiden name was Clavering; she was married under that of Dalibard,
her first husband.”
“And,” said Grabman, looking over the notes in the paper given to him,
“it is at Liverpool that the husband died, and whence the child was sent
away?”
“It is so; to Liverpool you will go first. I tell you fairly, the task
is difficult, for hitherto it has foiled me. I knew but one man who,
without flattery, could succeed, and therefore I spared no pains to find
out Nicholas Grabman. You have the true ferret’s faculty; you, too, are
a lawyer, and snuff evidence in every breath. Find us a son,--a legal
son,--a son to be shown in a court of law, and the moment he steps into
the lands and the Hall of Laughton, you have five thousand pounds.”
“Can I have a bond to that effect?”
“My bond, I fear, is worth no more than my word. Trust to the last; if I
break it, you know enough of my secrets to hang me!”
“Don’t talk of hanging; I hate that subject. But stop. If found, does
this son succeed? Did this Mr. Vernon leave no heir; this other sister
continue single, or prove barren?”
“Oh, true! He, Mr. Vernon, who by will took the name of St. John, he
left issue; but only one son still survives, a minor and unmarried. The
sister, too, left a daughter; both are poor, sickly creatures,--their
lives not worth a straw. Never mind them. You find Vincent Braddell,
and he will not be long out of his property, nor you out of your 5,000
pounds! You see, under these circumstances a bond might become dangerous
evidence!”
Grabman emitted a fearful and tremulous chuckle,--a laugh like the laugh
of a superstitious man when you talk to him of ghosts and churchyards.
He chuckled, and his hair bristled. But after a pause, in which he
seemed to wrestle with his own conscience, he said: “Well, well, you are
a strange man, Jason; you love your joke. I have nothing to do except to
find out this ultimate remainderman; mind that!”
“Perfectly; nothing like subdivision of labour.”
“The search will be expensive.”
“There is oil for your wheels,” answered Jason, putting a note-book into
his confidant’s hands. “But mind you waste it not. No tricks, no false
play, with me; you know Jason, or, if you like the name better, you know
the Rattlesnake!”
“I will account for every penny,” said Grabman, eagerly, and clasping
his hands, while his pale face grew livid.
“I do not doubt it, my quill-driver. Look sharp, start to-morrow. Get
thyself decent clothes, be sober, cleanly, and respectable. Act as a man
who sees before him 5,000 pounds. And now, light me downstairs.”
With the candle in his hand, Grabman stole down the rugged steps even
more timorously than Beck had ascended them, and put his finger to his
mouth as they came in the dread vicinity of No. 7. But Jason, or rather
Gabriel Varney, with that fearless, reckless bravado of temper which,
while causing half his guilt, threw at times a false glitter over its
baseness, piqued by the cowardice of his comrade, gave a lusty kick at
the closed door, and shouted out: “Old grave-stealer, come out, and let
me finish your picture. Out, out! I say, out!” Grabman left the candle
on the steps, and made but three bounds to his own room.
At the third shout of his disturber the resurrection-man threw open his
door violently and appeared at the gap, the upward flare of the candle
showing the deep lines ploughed in his hideous face, and the immense
strength of his gigantic trunk and limbs. Slight, fair, and delicate as
he was, Varney eyed him deliberately, and trembled not.
“What do you want with me?” said the terrible voice, tremulous with
rage.
“Only to finish your portrait as Pluto. He was the god of Hell, you
know.”
The next moment the vast hand of the ogre hung like a great cloud over
Gabriel Varney. This last, ever on his guard, sprang aside, and the
light gleamed on the steel of a pistol. “Hands off! Or--”
The click of the pistol-cock finished the sentence. The ruffian halted.
A glare of disappointed fury gave a momentary lustre to his dull eyes.
“P’r’aps I shall meet you again one o’ these days, or nights, and I
shall know ye in ten thousand.”
“Nothing like a bird in the hand, Master Grave-stealer. Where can we
ever meet again?”
“P’r’aps in the fields, p’r’aps on the road, p’r’aps at the Old Bailey,
p’r’aps at the gallows, p’r’aps in the convict-ship. I knows what that
is! I was chained night and day once to a chap jist like you. Didn’t I
break his spurit; didn’t I spile his sleep! Ho, ho! you looks a bit less
varmently howdacious now, my flash cove!”
Varney hitherto had not known one pang of fear, one quicker beat of the
heart before. But the image presented to his irritable fancy (always
prone to brood over terrors),--the image of that companion chained to
him night and day,--suddenly quelled his courage; the image stood before
him palpably like the Oulos Oneiros,--the Evil Dream of the Greeks.
He breathed loud. The body-stealer’s stupid sense saw that he had
produced the usual effect of terror, which gratified his brutal
self-esteem; he retreated slowly, inch by inch, to the door, followed by
Varney’s appalled and staring eye, and closed it with such violence that
the candle was extinguished.
Varney, not daring,--yes, literally not daring,--to call aloud to
Grabman for another light, crept down the dark stairs with hurried,
ghostlike steps; and after groping at the door-handle with one hand,
while the other grasped his pistol with a strain of horror, he succeeded
at last in winning access to the street, and stood a moment to collect
himself in the open air,--the damps upon his forehead, and his limbs
trembling like one who has escaped by a hairbreadth the crash of a
falling house.