The Trail of the Serpent

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “I wish he’d move,” said Kuppins; “he looks so awful quiet, lying there all so lonesome.”

  “Call to him, my girl,” said Mr. Peters with his fingers.

  Kuppins essayed a loud “Hilloa,” but it was a dismal failure, on which Mr. Peters gave a long shrill whistle, which must surely have disturbed the peaceful dreams of the seven sleepers,11 though it might not have awakened them. The man on the hillock never stirred. The pony, taking advantage of the halt, drew nearer to the heath and began to crop the short grass by the road-side, thus bringing Mr. Vorkins’s trap a little nearer the sleeper.

  “Get down, lass,” said the fingers of the detective; “get down, my lass, and have a look at him, for I can’t leave this ’ere pony.”

  Kuppins looked at Mr. Peters; and Mr. Peters looked at Kuppins, as much as to say, “Well, what then?” So Kuppins to whom the laws of the Medes and Persians would have been mild compared to the word of Mr. Peters, surrendered the infant to his care, and descending from the trap, mounted the hillock, and looked at the still reclining figure.

  She did not look long, but returning rapidly to Mr. Peters, took hold of his arm, and said—

  “I don’t think he’s asleep—leastways, his eyes is open; but he don’t look as if he could see anything, somehow. He’s got a little bottle in his hand.”

  Why Kuppins should keep so tight a hold on Mr. Peters’s arm while she said this it is difficult to tell; but she did clutch his coat-sleeve very tightly, looking back while she spoke with her white face turned towards that whiter face under the evening sky.

  Mr. Peters jumped quickly from the trap, tied the elderly pony to a furze-bush, mounted the hillock, and proceeded to inspect the sleeping figure. The pale set face, and the fixed blue eyes, looked up at the crimson light melting into the purple shadows of the evening sky, but never more would earthly sunlight or shadow, or night or morning, or storm or calm, be of any account to that quiet figure lying on the heath. Why the man was there, or how he had come there, was a part of the great mystery under the darkness of which he lay; and that mystery was Death! He had died apparently by poison administered by his own hand; for on the grass by his side there was a little empty bottle labelled “Opium,” on which his fingers lay, not clasping it, but lying as if they had fallen over it. His clothes were soaked through with wet, so that he must in all probability have lain in that place through the storm of the previous night. A silver watch was in the pocket of his waistcoat, which Mr. Peters found, on looking at it, to have stopped at ten o’clock—ten o’clock of the night before, most likely. His hat had fallen off, and lay at a little distance, and his curling light hair hung in wet ringlets over his high forehead. His face was handsome, the features well chiselled, but the cheeks were sunken and hollow, making the large blue eyes seem larger.

  Mr. Peters, in examining the pockets of the suicide, found no clue to his identity; a handkerchief, a little silver, a few half-pence, a penknife wrapped in a leaf torn out of a Latin Grammar, were the sole contents.

  The detective reflected for a few moments, with his mouth on one side, and then, mounting the highest hillock near, looked over the surrounding country. He presently descried a group of haymakers at a little distance, whom he signalled with a loud whistle. To them, through Kuppins as interpreter, he gave his directions; and two of the tallest and strongest of the men took the body by the head and feet and carried it between them, with Kuppins’s shawl spread over the still white face. They were two miles from Slopperton, and those two miles were by no means pleasant to Kuppins, seated in Mr. Vorkins’s trap, which Mr. Peters drove slowly, so as to keep pace with the two men and their ghastly burden. Kuppins’s shawl, which of course would never be any use as a shawl again, was no good to conceal the sharp outline of the face it covered; for Kuppins had seen those blue eyes, and once to see was always to see them as she thought. The dreary journey came at last to a dreary end at the police-office, where the men deposited their dreadful load, and being paid for their trouble, departed rejoicing. Mr. Peters was busy enough for the next half-hour giving an account of the finding of the body, and issuing handbills of “Found dead, &c.”

  Kuppins and the “fondling” returned to Little Gulliver Street, and if ever there had been a heroine in that street, that heroine was Kuppins. People came from three streets off to see her, and to hear the story, which she told so often that she came at last to tell it mechanically, and to render it slightly obscure by the vagueness of her punctuation. Anything in the way of supper that Kuppins would accept, and two or three dozen suppers if Kuppins would condescend to partake of them, were at Kuppins’s service; and her reign as heroine-in-chief of this dark romance in real life was only put an end to by the appearance of Mr. Peters, the hero, who came home by-and-by, hot and dusty, to announce to the world of Little Gulliver Street, by means of the alphabet, very grimy after his exertions, that the dead man had been recognized as the principal usher of a great school up at the other end of the town, and that his name was, or had been, Jabez North. His motive for committing suicide he had carried a secret with him into the dark and mysterious region to which he was a voluntary traveller; and Mr. Peters, whose business it was to pry about the confines of this shadowy land, though powerless to penetrate the interior, could only discover some faint rumour of an ambitious love for his master’s daughter as being the cause of the young usher’s untimely end. What secrets this dead man had carried with him into the shadow-land, who shall say? There might be one, perhaps, which even Mr. Peters, with his utmost acuteness, could not discover.

  CHAPTER VII

  THE USHER RESIGNS HIS SITUATION

  On the very day on which Mr. Peters treated Kuppins and the “fondling” to tea and watercresses, Dr. Tappenden and Jane his daughter returned to their household gods at Slopperton.

  Who shall describe the ceremony and bustle with which that great dignitary, the master of the house, was received? He had announced his return by the train which reached Slopperton at seven o’clock; so at that hour a well-furnished tea-table was ready laid in the study—that terrible apartment which little boys entered with red eyes and pale cheeks, emerging therefrom in a pleasant glow, engendered by a specific peculiar to schoolmasters whose desire it is not to spoil the child. But no ghosts of bygone canings, no infantine whimpers from shadow-land—(though little Allecompain, dead and gone, had received correction in this very room)—haunted the Doctor’s sanctorum—a cheerful apartment, warm in winter, and cool in summer, and handsomely furnished at all times. The silver teapot reflected the evening sunshine; and reflected too Sarah Jane laying the table, none the handsomer for being represented upside down, with a tendency to become collapsed or elongated, as she hovered about the tea-tray. Anchovy-paste, pound-cake,1 Scotch marmalade and fancy bread, all seemed to cry aloud for the arrival of the doctor and his daughter to demolish them; but for all that there was fear in the hearts of the household as the hour for that arrival drew near. What would he say to the absence of his factotum? Who should tell him? Every one was innocent enough, certainly; but in the first moment of his fury might not the descending avalanche of the Doctor’s wrath crush the innocent? Miss Smithers—who, as well as being presiding divinity of the young gentlemen’s wardrobes, was keeper of the keys of divers presses and cupboards, and had sundry awful trusts connected with tea and sugar and butchers’ bills—was elected by the whole household, from the cook to the knife-boy, as the proper person to make the awful announcement of the unaccountable disappearance of Mr. Jabez North. So, when the doctor and his daughter had alighted from the fly which brought them and their luggage from the station, Miss Smithers hovered timidly about them, on the watch for a propitious moment.

  “How have you enjoyed yourself, miss? Judging by your looks I should say very much indeed, for never did I see you looking better,” said Miss Smithers, with more enthusiasm than punctuation, as she removed the shawl from the lovely shoulders of Miss Tappenden.

  “Thank you, Smithers, I
am better,” replied the young lady, with languid condescension. Miss Tappenden, on the strength of never having anything the matter with her, was always complaining, and passed her existence in taking sal-volatile2 and red lavender,3 and reading three volumes a day from the circulating library.4

  “And how,” asked the ponderous voice of the ponderous Doctor, “how is everything going on, Smithers?” By this time they were seated at the tea-table, and the learned Tappenden was in the act of putting five lumps of sugar in his cup, while the fair Smithers lingered in attendance.

  “Quite satisfactory, sir, I’m sure,” replied that young lady, growing very much confused. “Everything quite satisfactory, sir; leastways——”

  “What do you mean by leastways, Smithers?” asked the Doctor, impatiently. “In the first place it isn’t English; and in the next it sounds as if it meant something unpleasant. For goodness sake, Smithers, be straightforward and business-like. Has anything gone wrong? What is it? And why wasn’t I informed of it?”

  Smithers, in despair at her incapability of answering these three questions at once, as no doubt she ought to have been able to do, or the Doctor would not have asked them, stammered out,—

  “Mr. North, sir——”

  “ ‘Mr. North, sir’! Well, what of ‘Mr. North, sir’? By the bye, where is Mr. North? Why isn’t he here to receive us?”

  Smithers feels that she is in for it; so, after two or three nervous gulps, and other convulsive movements of the throat, she continues thus—“Mr. North, sir, didn’t come home last night, sir. We sat up for him till one o’clock this morning—last night, sir.”

  The rising storm in the Doctor’s face is making Smithers’s English more un-English every moment.

  “Didn’t come last night? Didn’t return to my house at the hour of ten, which hour has been appointed by me for the retiring to rest of every person in my employment?” cried the Doctor, aghast.

  “No, sir! Nor yet this morning, sir! Nor yet this afternoon, sir! And the West-Indian pupils have been looking out of the window, sir, and would, which we told them not till we were hoarse, sir.”

  “The person intrusted by me with the care of my pupils abandoning his post, and my pupils looking out of the window!” exclaimed Dr. Tappenden, in the tone of a man who says—“The glory of England has departed! You wouldn’t, perhaps, believe it; but it has!”

  “We didn’t know what to do, sir, and so we thought we’d better not do it,” continued the bewildered Smithers. “And we thought as you was coming back to-day, we’d better leave it till you did come back—and please, sir, will you take any new-laid eggs?”

  “Eggs!” said the Doctor; “new-laid eggs! Go away, Smithers. There must be some steps taken immediately. That young man was my right hand, and I would have trusted him with untold gold; or,” he added, “with my cheque-book.”

  As he uttered the words “cheque-book,” he, as it were instinctively, laid his hand upon the pocket which contained that precious volume; but as he did so, he remembered that he had used the last leaf but one when writing a cheque for a midsummer butcher’s bill, and that he had a fresh book in his desk untouched. This desk was always kept in the study, and the Doctor gave an involuntary glance in the direction in which it stood.

  It was a very handsome piece of furniture, ponderous, like the Doctor himself; a magnificent construction of shining walnut-wood and dark green morocco, with a recess for the Doctor’s knees, and on either side of this recess two rows of drawers, with brass handles and Bramah locks. The centre drawer on the left-hand side contained an inner and secret drawer, and towards the lock of this drawer the Doctor looked, for this contained his new cheque-book. The walnut-wood round the lock of this centre drawer seemed a little chipped; the Doctor thought he might as well get up and look at it; and a nearer examination showed the brass handle to be slightly twisted, as if a powerful hand had wrenched it out of shape. The Doctor, taking hold of the handle to pull it straight, drew the drawer out, and scattered its contents upon the floor; also the contents of the inner drawer, and amongst them the cheque-book, half-a-dozen leaves of which had been torn out.

  “So,” said the Doctor, “this man, whom I trusted, has broken open my desk, and finding no money, he has taken blank cheques, in the hope of being able to forge my name. To think that I did not know this man!”

  To think that you did not, Doctor; to think, too, that you do not even now, perhaps, know half this man may have been capable of.

  But it was time for action, not reflection; so the Doctor hurried to the railway station, and telegraphed to his bankers in London to stop any cheques presented in his signature, and to have the person presenting such cheques immediately arrested. From the railway station he hurried, in an undignified perspiration, to the police-office, to institute a search for the missing Jabez, and then returned home, striking terror into the hearts of his household, ay, even to the soul of his daughter, the lovely Jane, who took an extra dose of sal-volatile, and went to bed to read “Lady Clarinda, or the Heartbreaks of Belgravia.”

  With the deepening twilight came a telegraphic message from the bank to say that cheques for divers sums had been presented and cashed by different people in the course of the day. On the heels of this message came another from the police-station, announcing that a body had been found upon Halford Heath answering to the description of the missing man.

  The bewildered schoolmaster, hastening to the station, recognises, at a glance, the features of his late assistant. The contents of the dead man’s pocket, the empty bottle with the too significant label, are shown him. No, some other hand than the usher’s must have broken open the desk in the study, and the unfortunate young man’s reputation had been involved in a strange coincidence. But the motive for his rash act? That is explained by a most affecting letter in the dead man’s hand, which is found in his desk. It is addressed to the Doctor, expresses heartfelt gratitude for that worthy gentleman’s past kindnesses, and hints darkly at a hopeless attachment to his daughter, which renders the writer’s existence a burden too heavy for him to bear. For the rest, Jabez North has passed a threshold, over which the boldest and most inquisitive scarcely care to follow him. So he takes his own little mystery with him into the land of the great mystery.

  There is, of course, an inquest, at which two different chemists, who sold laudanum to Jabez North on the night before his disappearance, give their evidence. There is another chemist, who deposes to having sold him, a day or two before, a bottle of patent hair-dye, which is also a poisonous compound; but surely he never could have thought of poisoning himself with hair-dye.

  The London police are at fault in tracing the presenters of the cheques; and the proprietors of the bank, or the clerks, who maintain a common fund to provide against their own errors, are likely to be considerable losers. In the mean while the worthy Doctor announces, by advertisements in the Slopperton papers, that “his pupils assemble on the 27th of July.”

  BOOK THE THIRD

  A HOLY INSTITUTION

  CHAPTER I

  THE VALUE OF AN OPERA-GLASS

  Paris!—City of fashion, pleasure, beauty, wealth, rank, talent, and indeed all the glories of the earth. City of palaces, in which La Vallière smiled, and Scarron sneered; under whose roofs the echoes of Bossuet’s1 voice have resounded, while folly, coming to be amused, has gone away in tears, only to forget to-morrow what it has heard to-night. Glorious city, in which a bon mot2 is more famous than a good action; which is richer in the records of Ninon de Lenclos than in those of Joan of Arc; for which Beaumarchais wrote, and Marmontel moralised; which Scottish John Law infected with a furious madness, in those halcyon days when jolly, good-tempered, accomplished, easy-going Philippe of Orleans held the reins of power. Paris, which young Arouet, afterwards Voltaire, ruled with the distant jingle of his jester’s wand, from the far retreat of Ferney. Paris, in which Madame du Deffand dragged out those weary, brilliant, dismal, salon-keeping years, quarrelling with Mademoiselle de l�
��Espinasse, and corresponding with Horace Walpole;3 ce cher4 Horace, who described those brilliant French ladies as women who neglected all the duties of life, and gave very pretty suppers.

  Paris, in which Bailly spoke, and Madame Roland dreamed; in which Marie Antoinette despaired, and gentle Princess Elizabeth laid down her saintly life; in which the son of St. Louis5 went calmly to the red mouth of that terrible machine invented by the charitable doctor6 who thought to benefit his fellow creatures. City, under whose roofs bilious Robespierre7 suspected and feared; beneath whose shadow the glorious twenty-two went hand in hand to death, with the psalm of freedom swelling from their lips. Paris, which rejoiced when Marengo was won, and rang joy-bells for the victories of Lodd, Arcola, Austerlitz, Auerstadt, and Jena;8 Paris, which mourned over fatal Waterloo, and opened its arms, after weary years of waiting, to take to its heart only the ashes of the ruler of its election; Paris, the marvellous; Paris, the beautiful, whose streets are streets of palaces—fairy wonders of opulence and art;—can it be that under some of thy myriad roofs there are such incidental trifles as misery, starvation, vice, crime, and death? Nay, we will not push the question, but enter at once into one of the most brilliant of the temples of that goddess whose names are Pleasure, Fashion, Folly, and Idleness: and what more splendid shrine can we choose whereat to worship the divinity called Pleasure than the Italian Opera House?

  To-night the house is thronged with fashion and beauty. Bright uniforms glitter in the backgrounds of the boxes, and sprinkle the crowded parterre. The Citizen King9 is there—not King of France; no such poor title will he have, but King of the French. His throne is based, not on the broad land, but on the living hearts of his people. May it never prove to be built on a shallow foundation! In eighteen hundred and forty-two all is well for Louis Philippe and his happy family.