Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

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

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

  “How can it be him, when he’s dead?”

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

  “Don’t! Come, I say, don’t, now.”

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

  This rather obscure speech is no more to the “fondling’s” liking than the last, for he cries out more energetically than before,

  “I say, now, I tell you I don’t like it, father. Don’t you try it on now, please. What does it mean? Who’s been dead fifty years ago, with a stake druv’ through ‘em, and four cross roads in a heath? Who?”

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

  “Him!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What did you think of him, Slosh?”

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

  “The swell.”

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

  “Oh, you do, do you, Slosh?”

  Slosh repeats that he does.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER III. THE CHEROKEES MARK THEIR MAN.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You’re sure they’ll be here, then, Percy?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Shall you know him again, Percy?” asks Richard.

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

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

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

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

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

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