The Trail of the Serpent

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “Interfere with private friendship. A noble sentiment, general. Very well, you shall mix with the other boarders to-morrow. I’ll speak to the Board about it this afternoon. This, luckily, is a Boardday. You’ll find George the Fourth a very nice fellow. He came here because he would take everything of other people’s that he could lay his hands on, and said he was only taking taxes from his subjects. Good-day. I’ll send round some port wine immediately, and you shall have a couple of glasses a day given you; so keep up your spirits, general.”

  “Well,” said the boy from Slopperton, as the doctor closed the door behind him, “that ’ere medical officer’s a regular brick: and all I can say is to repeat his last words—which ought to be printed in gold letters a foot high—and those words is,—‘Keep up your spirits, general.’ ”

  CHAPTER II

  MR. AUGUSTUS DARLEY AND MR. JOSEPH PETERS GO OUT FISHING

  A long period of incessant rains had by no means improved the natural beauties of the Sloshy; nor had it in any manner enhanced the advantages attending a residence on the banks of that river. The occupants of the houses by the waterside were in the habit of going to sleep at night with the firm conviction that the lower portion of their tenement was a comfortable kitchen, and awakening in the morning were apt to find it a miniature lake.

  Then, again, the river had a knack of dropping in at odd times, in a friendly way, when least expected—when Mrs. Jones was cooking the Sunday’s dinner, or while Mrs. Brown was gone to market; and, as its manner of entering an apartment was, after the fashion of a ghost in a melodrama, to rise through the floor, the surprise occasioned by its appearance was not unalloyed by vexation.

  It would intrude, an uninvited guest, at a social tea-party, and suddenly isolate every visitor on his or her chair as on an island.

  There was not a mouse or a black-beetle in any of the kitchens by the Sloshy whose life was worth the holding, such an enemy was the swelling water to all domestic peace or comfort.

  It is true that to some fresh and adventurous spirits the rising of the river afforded a kind of eccentric gratification. It gave a smack of the flavour of Venice to the dull insipidity of Slopperton life; and to an imaginative mind every coal-barge that went by became a gondola, and only wanted a cavalier, with a very short doublet, pointed shoes, and a guitar, to make it perfection.

  Indeed, Miss Jones, milliner and dressmaker, had been heard to say, that when she saw the water coming up to the parlour-windows she could hardly believe she was not really in the city of the winged horses, round the corner out of the square of St. Mark’s,1 and three doors from the Bridge of Sighs.2 Miss Jones was well up in Venetian topography, as she was engaged in the perusal of a powerful work in penny numbers,3 detailing the adventures of a celebrated “Bravo”4 of that city.

  To the ardent minds of the juvenile denizens of the waterside the swollen river was a source of pure and unalloyed delight. To take a tour round one’s own back kitchen in a washing-tub, with a duster for a sail, is perhaps, at the age of six, a more perfect species of enjoyment than that afforded by any Alpine glories or Highland scenery through which we may wander in after-years, when Reason has taught us her cold lesson, that, however bright the sun may shine on one side of the mountain, the shadows are awaiting us on the other.

  There is a gentleman in a cutaway coat and a white hat, smoking a very short and black clay pipe, as he loiters on the bank of the Sloshy. I wonder what he thinks of the river?

  It is eight years since this gentleman was last in Slopperton; then he came as a witness in the trial of Richard Marwood; then he had a black eye, and was out-at-elbows; now, his optics are surrounded with no dark shades which mar their natural colour—clear bright grey. Now, too, he is, to speak familiarly, in high feather. His cutaway coat of the newest fashion (for there is fashion even in cutaways); his plaid trousers, painfully tight at the knees, and admirably adapted to display the development of the calf, are still bright with the greens and blues of the Macdonald. His hat is not crushed or indented in above half-a-dozen directions—a sign that it is comparatively new, for the circle in which he moves considers bonneting a friendly demonstration, and to knock a man’s hat off his head and into the gutter rather a polite attention.

  Yes, during the last eight years the prospects of Mr. Augustus Darley—(that is the name of the witness)—have been decidedly looking up. Eight years ago he was a medical student, loose on wide London; eating bread-and-cheese and drinking bottled stout in dissecting-rooms, and chalking up alarming scores at the caravansary5 round the corner of Goodge Street—when the proprietor of the caravansary would chalk up. There were days which that stern man refused to mark with a white stone.6 Now, he has a dispensary of his own; a marvellous place, which would be entirely devoted to scientific pursuits if dominoes and racing calendars did not in some degree predominate therein. This dispensary is in a populous neighbourhood on the Surrey side of the water; and in the streets and squares—to say nothing of the court and mows—round this establishment the name of Augustus Darley is synonymous with everything which is popular and pleasant. His very presence is said to be as good as physic. Now, as physic in the abstract, and apart from its curative qualities, is scarcely a very pleasant thing, this may be considered rather a doubtful compliment; but for all that, it was meant in perfect good faith, and what’s more, it meant a great deal.

  When anybody felt ill, he sent for Gus Darley—(he had never been called Mr. but once in his life, and then by a sheriff’s officer, who, arresting him for the first time, wasn’t on familiar terms; all Cursitor Street knew him as “Gus, old fellow,” and “Darley, my boy,” before long). If the patient was very bad, Gus told him a good story. If the case seemed a serious one, he sang a comic song. If the patient felt, in popular parlance, “low,” Darley would stop to supper; and if by that time the patient was not entirely restored, his medical adviser would send him a ha’porth of Epsom salts,7 or three-farthings’ worth8 of rhubarb and magnesia,9 jocosely labelled “The Mixture.” It was a comforting delusion, laboured under by every patient of Gus Darley’s, that the young surgeon prescribed for him a very mysterious and peculiar amalgamation of drugs, which, though certain death to any other man, was the only preparation in the whole pharmacopœia that could possibly keep him alive.

  There was a saying current in the neighbourhood of the dispensary, to the effect that Gus Darley’s description of the Derby Day was the best Epsom salts ever invented for the cure of man’s diseases; and he has been known to come home from the races at ten o’clock at night, and assist at a sick-bed (successfully), with a wet towel round his head, and a painful conviction that he was prescribing for two patients at once.

  But all this time he is strolling by the swollen Sloshy, with his pipe in his mouth and a contemplative face, which ever and anon looks earnestly up the river. Presently he stops by a boat-builder’s yard, and speaks to a man at work.

  “Well,” he says, “is that boat finished yet?”

  “Yes, sir,” says the man, “quite finished, and uncommon well she looks too; you might eat your dinner off her; the paint’s as dry as a bone.”

  “How about the false bottom I spoke of?” he asks.

  “Oh, that’s all right, sir, two feet and a half deep, and six feet and a half long. I’ll tell you what, sir,—no offence—but you must catch a precious sight more eels than I think you will catch, if you mean to fill the bottom of that ’ere punt.”

  As the man speaks, he points to where the boat lies high and dry in the builder’s yard. A great awkward flat-bottomed punt, big enough to hold half-a-dozen people.

  Gus strolls up to look at it. The man follows him.

  He lifts up the bottom of the boat with a great thick loop of rope. It is made like a trap-door, two feet and a half above the keel.

  “Why,” said Gus, “a man could lie down in the keel of the boat, with that main deck over him.”

  “To be sure he could, sir, and a pretty long un, too; though I don�
��t say much for its being a over-comfortable berth. He might feel himself rather cramped if he was of a restless disposition.”

  Gus laughed, and said,—“You’re right, he might, certainly, poor fellow! Come, now, you’re rather a tall chap, I should like to see if you could lie down there comfortably for a minute or so. We’ll talk about some beer when you come out.”

  The man looked at Mr. Darley with rather a puzzled glance. He had heard the legend of the mistletoe bough.10 He had helped to build the boat, but for all that there might be a hidden spring somewhere about it, and Gus’s request might conceal some sinister intent; but no one who had once looked our medical friend in the face ever doubted him; so the man laughed and said,—

  “Well, you’re a rum un, whoever the other is” (people were rarely very deferential in their manner of addressing Gus Darley); “howsomedever, here’s to oblige you.” And the man got into the boat, and lying down, suffered Gus to lower the false bottom of it over him.

  “How do you feel?” asks Gus. “Can you breathe?—have you plenty of air?”

  “All right, sir,” says the man through a hole in the plank. “It’s quite a extensive berth, when you’ve once settled yourself, only it ain’t much calculated for active exercise.”

  “Do you think you could stand it for half an hour?” Gus inquires.

  “Lor, bless you, sir! for half-a-dozen hours, if I was paid accordin’.”

  “Should you think half-a-crown enough for twenty minutes?”

  “Well, I don’t know, sir; suppose you made it three shillings?”

  “Very good,” said Gus; “three shillings it shall be. It’s now half-past twelve;” he looks at his watch as he speaks. “I’ll sit here and smoke a pipe; and if you lie quiet till ten minutes to one, you’ll have earned the three bob.”

  Gus steps into the boat, and seats himself at the prow; the man’s head lies at the stern.

  “Can you see me?” Gus inquires.

  “Yes, sir, when I squints.”

  “Very well, then, you can see I don’t make a bolt of it. Make your mind easy: there’s five minutes gone already.”

  Gus finishes his pipe, looks at his watch again—a quarter to one. He whistles a scena from an opera, and then jumps out of the boat and pulls up the false bottom.

  “All’s right,” he says; “time’s up.”

  The man gets out and stretches his legs and arms, as if to convince himself that those members are unimpaired.

  “Well, was it pretty comfortable?” Gus asks.

  “Lor’ love you, sir! regular jolly, with the exception of bein’ rather warm, and makin’ a cove precious dry.”

  Gus gives the man wherewith to assuage this drought, and says,—

  “You may shove the boat down to the water, then. My friend will be here in a minute with the tackle, and we can then see about making a start.”

  The boat is launched, and the man amuses himself with rowing a few yards up the river, while Gus waits for his friend.

  In about ten minutes his friend arrives, in the person of Mr. Joseph Peters, of the police force, with a couple of eel-spears11 over his shoulder (which give him somewhat the appearance of a dryland Neptune), and a good-sized carpet-bag, which he carries in his hand.

  Gus and he exchange a few remarks in the silent alphabet, in which Gus is almost as great an adept as the dumb detective, and they step into the punt.

  The boat-builder’s man is sent for a gallon of beer in a stone bottle, a half-quartern loaf, and a piece of cheese. These provisions being shipped, Darley and Peters each take an oar, and they pull away from the bank and strike out into the middle of the river.

  CHAPTER III

  THE EMPEROR BIDS ADIEU TO ELBA

  On this same day, but at a later hour in the afternoon, Richard Marwood, better known as the Emperor Napoleon, joined the inmates of the county asylum in their daily exercise in the grounds allotted for that purpose. These grounds consisted of prim grass-plots, adorned with here and there a bed in which some dismal shrubs, or a few sickly chrysanthemums held up their gloomy heads, beaten and shattered by the recent heavy rains. These grass-plots were surrounded by stiff straight gravel-walks; and the whole was shut in by a high wall, surmounted by a chevaux-de-frise.1 The iron spikes composing this adornment had been added of late years; for, in spite of the comforts and attractions of the establishment, some foolish inhabitants thereof, languishing for gayer and more dazzling scenes, had been known to attempt, if not to effect, an escape from the numerous advantages of their home. I cannot venture to say whether or not the vegetable creation may have some mysterious sympathy with animated nature; but certainly no trees, shrubs, flowers, grass, or weeds ever grew like the trees, shrubs, flowers, grass, and weeds in the grounds of the county lunatic asylum. From the gaunt elm, which stretched out two great rugged arms, as if in a wild imprecation, such as might come from the lips of some human victim of the worst form of insanity, to the frivolous chickweed in a corner of a gravel-walk, which grew as if not a root, or leaf, or fibre but had a different purpose to its fellow, and flew off at its own peculiar tangent, with an infantine and kittenish madness, such as might have afflicted a love-sick miss of seventeen; from the great melancholy mad laurel-bushes that rocked themselves to and fro in the wind with a restlessness known only to the insane, to the eccentric dandelions that reared their disordered heads from amidst the troubled and dishevelled grass—every green thing in that great place seemed more or less a victim to that terrible disease whose influence is of so subtle a nature, that it infects the very stones of the dark walls which shut in shattered minds that once were strong and whole, and fallen intellects that once were bright and lofty.

  But as a stranger to this place, looking for the first time at the groups of men and women lounging slowly up and down these gravel-walks, perhaps what most startles you, perhaps even what most distresses you, is, that these wretched people scarcely seem unhappy. Oh, merciful and wondrous wise dispensation from Him who fits the back to bear the burden! He so appoints it. The man, whose doubts or fears, or wild aspirings to the misty far-away, all the world’s wisdom could not yesterday appease, is to-day made happy by a scrap of paper or a shred of ribbon. We who, standing in the blessed light, look in upon this piteous mental darkness, are perhaps most unhappy, because we cannot tell how much or how little sorrow this death-in-life may shroud. They have passed away from us; their language is not our language, nor their world our world. I think some one has asked a strange question—Who can tell whether their folly may not perhaps be better than our wisdom? He only, from whose mighty hand comes the music of every soul, can tell which is the discord and which the harmony. We look at them as we look at all else—through the darkened glass2 of earth’s uncertainty.

  No, they do not seem unhappy. Queen Victoria is talking to Lady Jane Grey about to-day’s dinner, and the reprehensible superabundance of fat in a leg-of-mutton served up thereat. Chronology never disturbs these good people; nobody thinks it any disgrace to be an anachronism. Lord Brougham will divide an unripe apple with Cicero, and William the Conqueror will walk arm-in-arm with Pius the Ninth, without the least uneasiness on the score of probability; and when, on one occasion, a gentleman, who for three years had enjoyed considerable popularity as Cardinal Wolsey, all of a sudden recovered, and confessed to being plain John Thomson, the inmates of the asylum were unanimous in feeling and expressing the most profound contempt for his unhappy state.

  To-day, however, Richard is the hero. He is surrounded immediately on his appearance by all the celebrities and a great many of the non-celebrities of the establishment. The Emperor of the German Ocean and the Chelsea Waterworks in particular has so much to say to him, that he does not know how to begin; and when he does begin, has to go back and begin again, in a manner both affable and bewildering.

  Why did not Richard join them before, he asks—they are so very pleasant, they are so very social; why, in goodness-gracious’ name (he opens his eyes very wide as he utter
s the name of goodness-gracious, and looks back over his shoulder rather as if he thinks he may have invoked some fiend), why did not Richard join them?

  Richard tells him he was not allowed to do so.

  On this, the potentate looks intensely mysterious. He is rather stout, and wears a head-dress of his own manufacture—a species of coronet, constructed of a newspaper and a blue-and-white bird’s-eye pocket-handkerchief. He puts his hands to the very furthest extent that he can push them into his trousers-pockets; plants himself right before Richard on the gravel-walk, and says, with a wink of intense significance, “Was it the Khan?”

  Richard says, he thinks not.

  “Not the Khan!” he mutters thoughtfully. “You really are of opinion that it was not the Khan?”

  “I really am,” Richard replies.

  “Then it lies between the last Duke of Devonshire but sixteen and Abd-el-Kader: I do hope it wasn’t Abd-el-Kader; I had a better opinion of Abd-el-Kader3—I had indeed.”

  Richard looks rather puzzled, but says nothing.

  “There has evidently,” continued his friend, “been some malignant influence at work to prevent your appearing amongst us before this. You have been a member of this society for, let me see, three hundred and sixty-three years—be kind enough to set me right if I make a mis-statement—three hundred and—did I say seventy-twelve years?—and you have never yet joined us! Now, there is something radically wrong here; to use the language of the ancients in their religious festivals, there is ‘a screw loose.’ You ought to have joined us, you really ought! We are very social; we are positively buoyant; we have a ball every evening. Well, no, perhaps it is not every evening. My ideas as to time, I am told, are vague; but I know it is either every ten years, or every other week. I incline to thinking it must be every other week. On these occasions we dance. Are you a votary of Terp—what-you-may-call-her, the lady who had so many unmarried sisters?4 Do you incline to the light fantastic?” By way of illustration, the Emperor of the Waterworks executed a caper, which would have done honour to an elderly elephant taking his first lesson in the polka.