Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  How ever it came about, I don’t know; but all of a sudden we were behind the scenes. It was very dark, and there were a good many stairs, and somebody tumbled down, and I hurt myself. Peck knew the manager; and it was by some occult and back-stairs influence on the part of Peck that we had gained admittance to those sacred precincts. And there was Yellow-boots dressed in the costume of private life, smoking a meerschaum-pipe, and playing dominoes with the virtuous steward. My first impulse was to strangle the V.S., on account of those abusive remarks he had made about me; but Peck said I had better not; and then I found that I actually had a strong feeling of friendship for the Y.S., and that I should respect and admire him to my dying day.

  I think presently the manager wanted to turn me out, because I was something that began with a d, and disorderly, I knew that I was a model of gentlemanly propriety, and that the remark was the emanation of an envious mind; so I did not resent it. But Peck told the manager I was a jolly good fellow, and as quiet as a lamb when I was something that began with an s; and he invited the manager to come and sup with us at the Reindeer, which the manager consented to do.

  They gave us a spatch-cock and curried lobster for supper; and this time we tried the sparkling moselle, quite a lady’s wine, and not the sort of stuff to get into your head, especially if you laid a good foundation of old dry sherry and bitter beer, as I did. Wasn’t that manager a glorious fellow too? And couldn’t he sing a comic song too? And did not Peck and I join in the chorus? O, it was such a song! There were seven murders and nine ghosts in it; and really, though you were ready to expire with laughing while you heard it sung, it was not the sort of thing to think of afterwards when you found yourself alone in the dark.

  After supper I proposed the manager, with all the honours; and the manager proposed Peck and me, with all the honours; and we drank the theatrical profession, out of compliment to the manager; and the manager proposed the law, out of compliment to Peck and me. Did he not make a witty speech about landsharks and bilge-water? I believe it was extracted from the drama of Black-eyed Susan; but the manager passed it off as original. And then Peck returned thanks in a speech that was positively affecting; and then we drank the ladies — not that there were any present, but the fair sex in general; Peck said, the black-eyed ballet-girl in particular: but of course Peck is a single man. And then we went to the station.

  Yes, we went to the station, though I don’t particularly remember how we went. We had been to bed, of course, because it was six o’clock to-morrow morning, and there we were at the station. We might have had a cab, or we might have walked down and carried our carpet-bags ourselves — I can’t say which; but I am ready to make an affidavit that it was six o’clock A.M., and there we were on the platform. How that clerk we took our tickets from came to be my second cousin Mary Jane Thomas’s husband, who died when I was a little boy, I don’t know; but Mary Jane T.’s husband he was; and what’s more, I was not in the least surprised to see him. Neither did I perceive anything incongruous in the conduct of the manager, though, on my turning round to wish him good-bye, he all at once grew so like my great aunt Storkins — Aunt Storkins was in trade once, and no Pettifer ever would notice anybody connected with trade — that I could have taken him for that elderly individual, if I had not known all the time that he was the manager as well.

  Talk of a long journey! I conclude we went express, because we didn’t stop anywhere; but, upon my honour, it seemed to me as if we began that journey in the period of the old red sandstone, and didn’t reach our destination till the reign of Queen Victoria. Eons and eons seemed to pass away, and still that Wandering Jew of an express-train tore onward on its interminable course; and there was Peck sitting opposite me eating sandwiches the whole time. He wasn’t always Peck, by the bye; sometimes he was Earl Russell; once he was the Emperor Nero, with a faint tinge of Mr. Alfred Tennyson,* but there was an under-current of himself perceptible all the time.

  How we came to pass Bagdad I don’t know, unless it was through the stupidity of the engine-driver; but I remember somebody pointing to a city which seemed to be constructed of brick-and-mortar pepper-boxes and fish-sauce bottles with tall stoppers, and which Peck declared to be that ancient capital of the Saracenic Caliphs. In spite of everything, we reached London by half-past ten A.M.; and before I knew where I was, I found myself opposite my own door, No. 4 Montefiasco-villas, Denmark-hill.

  When I say my own door, I am bound to add that at first I could hardly believe it to be my own door; for of all the stylish funerals I ever remembered seeing, the most stylish was just starting from No. 4 Montefiasco-villas. Such ponderous mutes! I knew the grief depicted in their rubicund faces could not have cost a trifle. Such feathers! I clung convulsively to the palings, for my thoughts reverted to Julia Maria. I remembered the guilty deception which had attended my departure from home, and I felt a conscience-stricken man.

  Our parlour-maid Mary was standing at the garden-gate, gaping after the dismal cortège. I gasped out, “Whose funeral? Not your mistress’s?”

  “No, sir; master’s.” Yes; she said it quite distinctly; “master’s.”

  “Stop a minute,” I said. “Collect yourself, Mary; you may have been availing yourself of a false key to the cellaret. Calm yourself, my good girl, and try back. Whose funeral?”

  “Master’s, sir. Fatal collision” (she said “klision) “on the Slitherem-on-the-Dwingey Railroad. Poor Mr. Pettifer brought home on a shutter!”

  Slitherem-on-the Dwingey. The girl had the name of that mysterious vicinity as pat as I have my A B C, — perhaps patter.

  I was a little thrown off my moral equilibrium, but I was not going to give way; so I said, “Don’t you know me, Mary?”

  The girl stared at me with that vacuous expression peculiar to the lower classes.

  “I never saw you before, sir, to my knowledge.”

  This was too much. I strode past the girl, and up the gravel-walk; but she stopped me, and said she didn’t think her mistress would see a stranger to-day. I used bad language; I said “Fiddlesticks’ ends!” And I went into the house.

  She told me, this pert menial, to wipe my shoes on my own mat, that I might not injure my own carpet; and she looked at me, when she showed me into my own drawing-room, very much as if she thought I might mean to purloin some of my own nicknacks.

  There was a newspaper on the table. I took it up mechanically. It was the Slithererm-on-the-Dwingey Chronicle and Monday Morning Advertiser. Good gracious me! this Slitherem-on-the-Dwingey — a place the very name of which I believed to be an emanation of my own brain, devised to pacify Mrs. Pettifer — seemed to have sprung into life by some mysterious agency, and to have become a flourishing city. The paper was fall of advertisements, which plainly showed that Slitherem was a populous place. One column was marked with a long black streak, evidently the work of a soft quill-pen. I read that column. It was a detailed account of the fatal accident on the Dwingey-Junction line, between the stations of Slitcherem and Slopeydregon, — I never invented Slopeydregon; that place was a frightful reality, — and of the subsequent death of Mr. Augustus Pettifer, solicitor, of Gray’s-inn, from injuries received therein.

  Yes; there were the full particulars. The engine had run off the bank, and I, with several other passengers, had been precipitated into a field at some distance from the railroad, fearfully mutilated. Fearfully mutilated! Yes; that was the expression.

  The door opened, and admitted Julia Maria Pettifer, in tears and a widow’s cap. In mourning for me! Things were really growing unpleasant. “Julia Maria!” I was about to exclaim; but I had scarcely enunciated the J before she interrupted me by burying her face in her pocket-handkerchief with a sound as of choking.

  I felt very awkward; here was I expected to console my own wife for my own loss. After an embarrassing pause of some moments, Julia Maria emerged from behind the pocket-handkerchief. I don’t know what she had been doing, but her eyes were not at all red. I took a note of that.

/>   “Ah, sir,” she said, “you perhaps were a friend of the dear departed.”

  Well, I flattered myself I was.

  “But,” I ejaculated, “Ju—”

  She stopped me short at the Ju.

  “In that case,” she said, “I am sorry you did not arrive in time to attend the funeral. There was a vacant place in one of the carriages. Mr. Spivins had the toothache, and couldn’t come.”

  O, Spivins had the toothache, had he! and it was too much trouble to attend my funeral! I took another note of Spivins’s toothache — I had lent Spivins money.

  “But as you were a friend of the dear departed, you may like to hear the will read,” continued my wife. “It will be read in the dining-room at one o’clock. You would perhaps wish to be present; you may be interested.” Having said which, she went back into the pocket-handkerchief and out of the room.

  Now what did it all mean? That was the question I put to myself. What did it all mean? Could it be possible that any impostor had had the impertinence to be killed on the Dwingey Junction in my name, brought home to my house on a shutter, and had even carried his audacity so far as to go and be buried in my coffin in my family vault in Norwood-cemetery? I had been induced to purchase a family vault by Julia Maria, though really I had thought it a foolish investment, because of course if I died, somebody must bury me, or if they did not choose to go to that expense, it would be their look-out.

  One thing may strike the reader as rather singular, — it struck me in that light myself, — namely, that I didn’t explain myself; that I didn’t say to Julia Maria, “Take off that widow’s cap, and put that absurd handkerchief in your pocket, and draw the blinds up. For this is me; and I never went to Slitherem-on-the-Dwingey in my life, and consequently never came home on a shutter;” and so on. The fact is, that I was continually trying to say these very words, and I continually couldn’t. This failure I attributed to two causes. First, the pain at my chest — O, such a pain — a weight, an oppression! I don’t suppose anybody ever had an Atlas omnibus, full inside and out, settled on their lungs; but only a person who had laboured under such a disease could form a just estimate of my sensations. Secondly, really, what with the parlour-maid’s asseverations, Julia Maria’s mourning, and the graphic account of the accident in the newspaper, I was in a manner beginning to believe in Slitherem-on-the-Dwingey. Suppose I had been killed? Suppose I had been brought home on a shutter, and didn’t know it? There was an awful situation!

  I pinched myself; it was painful. There was a fire in the grate; I laid hold of the bars; that was painful, very, and I believe I swore; but O, it was such a comfort to feel that I was mortal, that I could have blessed anybody for treading upon my pet corn.

  It was a nice thing to be asked into my own dining-room to hear my own will read. There was Peck, in a suit of black, with ebony death’s-heads for studs, — he always had a playful fancy, — sitting in one of my morocco chairs at the top of my patent telescopic dining-table. He seemed to have forgotten all about Doncaster. I tried to recall it to his recollection, but a temporary paralysis of the vocal organs prevented me.

  I suppose our dining-room must have been built on some newly-invented expanding principle, because it certainly was not as large as Exeter-hall when I left home; and in the matter of cubic feet it decidedly had the advantage of that edifice now.

  It was really edifying to sit and hear how I had disposed of my property. There was a picture I rather prided myself upon — a Titian, a genuine Titian. The man I bought it from said it was, and of course he ought to know. Now, I had bequeathed this picture to Peck; Peck was not a bad fellow on the whole, and had stood my friend once or twice with Julia Maria after our Masonic dinner in Great Queen-street; and what do you think was Peck’s remark on reading the passage in my will which made him possessor of this gem? “Poor fellow!” he said; “I appreciate his kind feeling; but he wouldn’t have known a Reynolds from a Morland, and he always considered Michael Angelo and Buonarotti two distinct artists. The thing is the vilest daub that ever came out of Wardour-street.” I tried to express my indignation, but another touch of paralysis was too much for me, and I took another note. Peck — daub — Wardour-street. I had learnt Beniowski’s system of artificial memory, and I checked off those three heads on the fire-irons.

  After the will was read, we all gathered round the fire, and we really became quite sociable. Mary the parlour-maid brought in a tray of decanters. Didn’t the wine go to work! — my’48 port in particular. I don’t know who it was that suggested smoking; but we all looked at each other; and presently someone — I think it was Peck — said there was a box of poor Pettifer’s cheroots in the sideboard drawer, and as it wasn’t likely he would ever smoke them, we might as well blow a cloud. And so there was I, thanking Peck for one of my own cigars.

  Our conversation was very melancholy at first; but presently we became a little more resigned; afterwards we grew quite cheerful; and at last, upon my word, we were almost uproarious. Peck told one of his best stories. I knew it by heart, and I laughed in the wrong place, and he scowled at me. I did it on purpose. Ha, ha! that vengeance at least was within my power.

  It was very pleasant, too, to be taken by the button and told a good story about myself, the point of which was, that I had made a consummate fool of myself; and I think if Peck told me one such story, he told me six; and what’s more, I laughed — yes, I actually laughed.

  I think it was Peck proposed that as we’d had a very melancholy morning, we should run down to Greenwich and take a bit of dinner at the Crown and Sceptre — of course in a quiet way. “We shall find plenty of hansoms at Camberwell-green,” said Peck; and off we went.

  Now, when I say off we went, I mean to say off they went, for I did not go; and yet I wanted to go, and yet I kept continually trying to go, and yet I continually seemed to be going; but go I did not. Go I did not; for the substantial macadam of Denmark-hill transformed itself all in a moment into the airy nothingness of the Goodwin-sands, and I felt myself suddenly going down, down, down into a fathomless gulf, like another Edgar Ravenswood.

  Two broken wine-glasses, a plate of oyster and lobster shells, a play-bill, a candlestick, and my boots! When I opened my eyes at the bottom of the fathomless gulf, these were the articles which met my bewildered gaze. They were on the table above my head; my feet were in the boots, and I was lying on the floor of that apartment in the Reindeer in which Peck, the manager, and I had partaken of supper prior to my hearing my own will read. I was lying on my back on the floor, with my feet on the table above me; and that is not a pleasant attitude in which to abandon oneself to slumber. I had one corkscrew, two balance-handle knives, and the neck of a champagne-bottle exactly under the small of my back. Those trifles did not add to the comfort of my position; and when I tell you that my head was against a sharp corner of the fender, and that I found the heel of the manager’s varnished boot planted upon my chest, you will not perhaps wonder that I had assisted at the reading of my own will.