The Trail of the Serpent

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “I placed a weapon in your hands,” he continues, “and I had no right to do so. I never thought of this at that time; but I have thought of it since. For the rest, I have no inducement to sell you the drug you ask for. Money is of little use to me except in the necessary expenses of the chemicals I use. These”—he points to the cards—“give me enough for those expenses; beyond those, my wants amount to some few francs a week.”

  “Then you will not sell me this drug? You are determined?” she asks.

  “Quite determined.”

  She shrugs her shoulders. “As you please. There is always some river within reach of the wretched; and you may depend, monsieur, that they who cannot support life will find a means of death. I will wish you good evening.”

  She is about to leave the room, when she stops, with her hand upon the lock of the door, and turns round.

  She stands for a few minutes motionless and silent, holding the handle of the door, and with her other hand upon her heart. Monsieur Blurosset has the faintest shadow of a look of surprise in his expressionless countenance.

  “I don’t know what is the matter with me to-night,” she says, “but something seems to root me to this spot. I cannot leave this room.”

  “You are ill, mademoiselle, perhaps. Let me give you some restorative.”

  “No, no, I am not ill.”

  Again she is silent; her eyes are fixed, not on the chemist, but with a strange vacant gaze upon the wall before her. Suddenly she asks him,—

  “Do you believe in animal magnetism?”

  “Madame, I have spent half my lifetime in trying to answer that question, and I can only answer it now by halves. Sometimes no; sometimes yes.”

  “Do you believe it possible for one soul to be gifted with a mysterious prescience of the emotions of another soul?—to be sad when that is sad, though utterly unconscious of any cause for sadness; and to rejoice when that is happy, having no reason for rejoicing?”

  “I cannot answer your question, madame, because it involves another. I never yet have discovered what the soul really is. Animal magnetism, if it ever become a science, will be a material science, and the soul escapes from all material dissection.”

  “Do you believe, then, that by some subtle influence, whose nature is unknown to us, we may have a strange consciousness of the presence or the approach of some people, conveyed to us by neither the hearing nor the sight, but rather as if we felt that they were near?”

  “You believe this possible, madame, or you would not ask the question.”

  “Perhaps. I have sometimes thought that I had this consciousness; but it related to a person who is dead——”

  “Yes, madame.”

  “And—you will think me mad; Heaven knows, I think myself so—I feel as if that person were near me to-night.”

  The chemist rises, and, going over to her, feels her pulse. It is rapid and intermittent. She is evidently violently agitated, though she is trying with her utmost power to control herself.

  “But you say that this person is dead?” he asks.

  “Yes; he died some months since.”

  “You know that there are no such things as ghosts?”

  “I am perfectly convinced of that!”

  “And yet—?” he asks.

  “And yet I feel as though the dead were near me to-night. Tell me—there is no one in this room but ourselves?”

  “No one.”

  “And that door—it leads——”

  “Into the room in which I sleep.”

  “And there is no one there?” she asks.

  “No one. Let me give you a sedative, madame: you are certainly ill.”

  “No, no, monsieur; you are very good. I am still weak from the effects of a long illness. That weakness may be the cause of my silly fancies of to-night. To-morrow I leave France, perhaps for ever.”

  She leaves him; but on the steep dark staircase she pauses for a moment, and seems irresolute, as if half determined to return: then she hurries on, and in a minute is in the street.

  She takes a circuitous route towards the house in which she lives. So plainly dressed, and thickly veiled, no one stops to notice her as she walks along.

  Her husband, Monsieur Marolles, is engaged at a dinner given by a distinguished member of the chamber of peers. Decidedly he has held winning cards in the game of life. And she, for ever haunted by the past, with weary step goes onward to a dark and unknown future.

  BOOK THE FOURTH

  NAPOLEON THE GREAT

  CHAPTER I

  THE BOY FROM SLOPPERTON

  Eight years have passed since the trial of Richard Marwood. How have those eight years been spent by “Daredevil Dick”?

  In a small room a few feet square, in the County Lunatic Asylum, fourteen miles from the town of Slopperton, with no human being’s companionship but that of a grumpy old deaf keeper, and a boy, his assistant—for eight monotonous years this man’s existence has crept slowly on; always the same: the same food, the same hours at which that food must be eaten, the same rules and regulations for every action of his inactive life. Think of this, and pity the man surnamed “Daredevil Dick,” and once the maddest and merriest creature in a mad and merry circle. Think of the daily walk in a great square flagged yard—the solitary walk, for he is not allowed even the fellowship of the other lunatics, lest the madness which led him to commit an awful crime should again break out, and endanger the lives of those about him. During eight long years he has counted every stone in the flooring, every flaw and every crack in each of those stones. He knows the shape of every shadow that falls upon the whitewashed wall, and can, at all seasons of the year, tell the hour by the falling of it. He knows that at such a time on a summer’s evening the shadows of the iron bars of the window will make long black lines across the ground, and mount and mount, dividing the wall as if it were in panels, till they meet, and absorbing altogether the declining light, surround and absorb him too, till he is once more alone in the darkness. He knows, too, that at such a time on the grey winter’s morning these same shadows will be the first indications of the coming light; that, from the thick gloom of the dead night they will break out upon the wall, with strips of glimmering day between, only enough like light to show the blackness of the shade. He has sometimes been mad enough and wretched enough to pray that these shadows might fall differently, that the very order of nature might be reversed, to break this bitter and deadly monotony. He has sometimes prayed that, looking up, he might see a great fire in the sky, and know that the world was at an end. How often he has prayed to die, it would be difficult to say. At one time it was his only prayer; at one time he did not pray at all. He has been permitted at intervals to see his mother; but her visits, though he has counted the days, hours, and even minutes between them, have only left him more despondent than ever. She brings so much with her into his lonely prison, so much memory of a joyous past, of freedom, of a happy home, whose happiness he did his best in his wild youth to destroy; the memory, too, of that careless youth, its boon companions, its devoted friends. She brings so much of all this back to him by the mere fact of her presence, that she leaves behind her the blackness of a despair far more terrible than the most terrible death. She represents to him the outer world; for she is the only creature belonging to it who ever crosses the threshold of his prison. The asylum chaplain, the asylum doctor, the keepers and the officials belonging to the asylum—all these are part and parcel of this great prison-house of stone, brick, and mortar, and seem to be about as capable of feeling for him, listening to him, or understanding him, as the stones, bricks, and mortar themselves. Routine is the ruler of this great prison; and if this wretched insane criminal cannot live by rules and regulations, he must die according to them, and be buried by them, and so be done with, out of the way; and his little room, No. 35, will be ready for some one else, as wicked, as dangerous, and as unfortunate as he.

  During the earlier part of his imprisonment the idea had pervaded the asylum
that as he had been found guilty of committing one murder, he might, very likely, find it necessary to his peculiar state of mind to commit more murders, and would probably find it soothing to his feelings to assassinate anybody who might come in his way any morning before breakfast. The watch kept upon him was therefore for some time very strict. He was rather popular at first in the asylum, as a distinguished public character; and the keepers, though a little shy of attending upon him in their proper persons, were extremely fond of peering in at him through a little oval opening in the upper panel of the door of his cell. They also brought such visitors as came to improve their minds by going over the hospital for the insane to have a special and private view of this maniacal murderer; and they generally received an extra donation from the sight-seers thus gratified. Even the lunatics themselves were interested in the supposed assassin. A gentleman, who claimed to be the Emperor of the German Ocean and the Chelsea Waterworks, was very anxious to see him, as he had received a despatch from his minister of police informing him that Richard Marwood had red hair, and he particularly wished to confirm this intelligence, or to give the minister his congé.1

  Another highly-respectable person, whose case was before the House of Commons, and who took minutes of it every day on a slate, with a bit of slate pencil which he wore attached to his button-hole by a string, and which also served him as a toothpick—the slate being intrusted to a keeper who forwarded it to the electric telegraph, to be laid on the table of the House, and brought home, washed clean, in half an hour, which was always done to the minute;—this gentleman also sighed for an introduction to poor Dick, for Maria Martin had come to him in a vision all the way from the Red Barn,2 to tell him that the prisoner was his first cousin, through the marriage of his uncle with the third daughter of Henry the Eighth’s seventh wife;3 and he considered it only natural and proper that such near relations should become intimately acquainted with each other.

  A lady, who pronounced herself to be the only child of the Pope of Rome, by a secret union with a highly-respectable youngperson, heiress to a gentleman connected with the muffin trade somewhere about Drury Lane, fell in love off-hand with Richard, from description alone; and begged one of the keepers to let him know that she had a clue to a subterranean passage, which led straight from the asylum to a baker’s shop in Little Russell Street, Covent Garden, a distance of some two hundred and fifty miles, and had been originally constructed by William the Conqueror4 for the convenience of his visits to Fair Rosamond5 when the weather was bad. The lady begged her messenger to inform Mr. Marwood that if he liked to unite his fortune with hers, they could escape by this passage, and set up in the muffin business—unless, indeed, his Holiness of the triple crown invited them over to the Vatican, which perhaps, under existing circumstances, was hardly likely.

  But though a wonder, which elsewhere would only last nine days, may in the dreary monotony of such a place as this, endure for more than nine weeks, it must still die out at last. So at last Richard was forgotten by every one except his heartbroken mother, and the keeper and boy attending upon him.

  His peculiar hallucination being his fancy that he was the Emperor Napoleon the First,6 was, of course, little wonder in a place where every wretched creature fancied himself some one or something which he was not; where men and women walked about in long disjointed dreams, which had no waking but in death; where once bright and gifted human beings found a wild and imbecile happiness in crowns of straw, and decorations of paper and rags; which was more sad to see than the worst misery a consciousness of their state might have brought them. At first, Richard had talked wildly of his fancied greatness, had called his little room the rock of St. Helena,7 and his keeper, Sir Hudson Lowe.8 But he grew quieter day by day, and at last never spoke at all, except in answer to a question. And so on, for eight long years.

  In the autumn of the eighth year he fell ill. A strange illness. Perhaps scarcely to be called an illness. Rather a dying out of the last light of hope, and an utter abandonment of himself to despair. Yes, that was the name of the disease under which the high and bold spirit of Daredevil Dick sank at last. Despair. A curious disease. Not to be cured by rules and regulations, however salutary those rules might be; not to be cured even by the Board, which was supposed to be in a manner omnipotent, and to be able to cure anything in one sitting; not to be cured certainly by the asylum doctor, who found Richard’s case very difficult to deal with—more especially difficult since there was no positive physical malady to attack. There was a physical malady, because the patient grew every day weaker, lost appetite, and was compelled to take to his bed; but it was the malady of the mind acting on the body, and the cure of the last could only be effected by the cure of the first.

  So Richard lay upon his narrow little couch, watching the shadows on the bare wall, and the clouds that passed across the patch of sky which he could see through the barred window opposite his bed, through long sunny days, and moonlight nights, throughout the month of September.

  Thus it happened that one dull afternoon, on looking up, he saw a darker cloud than usual hurry by; and in its train another, darker still; then a black troop of ragged followers; and then such a shower of rain came down, as he could not remember having seen throughout the time of his captivity. But this heavy shower was only the beginning of three weeks’ rainy weather; at the end of which time the country round was flooded in every direction, and Richard heard his keeper tell another man that the river outside the prison, which usually ran within twenty feet of the wall on one side of the great yard, was now swollen to such a degree as to wash the stonework of this wall for a considerable height.

  The day Richard heard this he heard another dialogue, which took place in the passage outside his room. He was lying on his bed, thinking of the bitterness of his fate, as he had thought so many hundred times, through so many hundred days, till he had become, as it were, the slave of a dreadful habit of his mind, and was obliged to go over the same ground for ever and ever, whether he would or no—he was lying thus, when he heard his keeper say,—

  “To think as how the discontented little beast should take and go and better hisself at such a time as this here, when there ain’t a boy to be had for love or money—which three shillings a week is all the Board will give—as will come here to take care of him.”

  Richard knew himself to be the “him” alluded to. The doctor had ordered the boy to sit up with him at night during the latter part of his illness, and it had been something of a relief to him, in the blank monotony of his life, to watch this boy’s attempts to keep awake, and his furtive games at marbles under the bed when he thought Richard was not looking, or to listen to his snoring when he slept.

  “You see, boys as is as bold as brass many ways—as would run under ’osses’ heads, and like it; as thinks it fun to run across the railroad when there’s a hexpress hengine a-comin’, and as will amuse theirselves for the hour together with twopen’orth of gunpowder and a lighted candle—still feels timersome about sittin’ up alone of nights with him,” said the keeper.

  “But he’s harmless enough, ain’t he?” asked the other.

  “Harmless! Lord bless his poor hinnercent ’art! there ain’t no more harm in him nor a baby. But it’s no use a sayin’ that, for there ain’t a boy far or near what’ll come and help to take care of him.”

  A minute or two after this, the keeper came into Richard’s room with the regulation basin of broth—a panacea, as it was supposed, for all ills, from water on the brain9 to rheumatism. As he put the basin down, and was about to go, Richard spoke to him,—

  “The boy is going, then?”

  “Yes, sir.” The keeper treated him with great respect, for he had been handsomely feed by Mrs. Marwood on every visit throughout the eight years of her son’s imprisonment. “Yes, he’s a-goin’, sir. The place ain’t lively enough for him, if you please. I’d lively him, if I was the Board! Ain’t he had the run of the passages, and half an hour every night to enjoy hisself i
n the yard! He’s a-goin’ into a doctor’s service. He says it’ll be jolly, carring out medicine for other people to take, and gloating over the thought of ’em a-taking it.”

  “And you can’t get another boy to come here?”

  “Well, you see, sir, the boys about here don’t seem to take kindly to the place. So I’ve got orders from the Board to put an advertisement in one of the Slopperton papers; and I’m a-goin’ to do it this afternoon. So you’ll have a change in your attendance, maybe, sir, before the week’s out.”

  Nothing could better prove the utter dreariness and desolation of Richard’s life than that such a thing as the probable arrival of a strange boy to wait upon him seemed an event of importance. He could not help, though he despised himself for his folly, speculating upon the possible appearance of the new boy. Would he be big or little, stout or thin? What would be the colour of his eyes and hair? Would his voice be gruff or squeaky; or would it be that peculiar and uncertain voice, common to over-grown boys, which is gruff one minute and squeaky the next, and always is in one of these extremes when you most expect it to be in the other?

  But these speculations were of course a part of his madness; for it is not to be supposed that a long course of solitary confinement could produce any dreadful change in the mind of a sane man; or surely no human justices or lawgivers would ever adjudge so terrible a punishment to any creature, human as themselves, and no more liable to error than themselves.