The Trail of the Serpent

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “And did you see the murderer’s face, Mujeebez?” asks Monsieur Blurosset.

  “No, sahib. It was dark, I could see nothing. The blow stunned me: when I recovered my senses, I was in the hospital, where I lay for months. The shock had brought on what the doctors called a nervous fever. For a long time I was utterly incapable of work; when I left the hospital I had not a friend in the world; but the good lady, the sister of my poor murdered master, gave me money to return to India, where I was kitmutghar4 for some time to an English colonel, in whose household I learned the language, and whom I did not leave till I entered the service of the good Captain.”

  The “good Captain” laid his hand affectionately on his follower’s white-turbaned head, something with the protecting gesture with which he might caress a favourite and faithful dog.

  “After you had saved my life, Mujeebez,” he said.

  “I would have died to save it, sahib,” answered the Hindoo. “A kind word sinks deep in the heart of the Indian.”

  “And there was no doubt of the guilt of this nephew?” asks Blurosset.

  “I cannot say, sahib. I did not know the English language then; I could understand nothing told me, except my poor master’s nephew was not hung, but put in a madhouse.”

  “Did you see him—this nephew?”

  “Yes, sahib, the night before the murder. He came into the room with my master when he retired to rest. I saw him only for a minute, for I left the room as they entered.”

  “Should you know him again?” inquired the student.

  “Anywhere, sahib. He was a handsome young man, with dark hazel eyes and a bright smile. He did not look like a murderer.”

  “That is scarcely a sure rule to go by, is it, Laurent?” asks the Captain, with a bitter smile.

  “I don’t know. A black heart will make strange lines in the handsomest face, which are translatable to the close observer.”

  “Now,” says the officer, rising, and surrendering his pipe to the hands of his watchful attendant—“now for my morning’s ride, and you will have the place to yourself for your scientific visitors, Laurent.”

  “You will not go where you are likely to meet——”

  “Anyone I know? No, Blurosset. The lonelier the road the better I like it. I miss the deep jungle and the tiger-hunt, eh, Mujeebez?—we miss them, do we not?”

  The Hindoo’s eyes brightened, as he answered eagerly, “Yes, indeed, sahib.”

  Captain Lansdown (that is the name of the officer) is of French extraction; he speaks English perfectly, but still with a slightly foreign accent. He has distinguished himself by his marvellous courage and military genius in the Punjaub,5 and is over in England on leave of absence. It is singular that so great a friendship should exist between this impetuous, danger-loving soldier, and the studious French chemist and pseudo-magician, Laurent Blurosset; but that a very firm friendship does exist between them is evident. They live in the same house; are both waited upon by Egerton Lansdown’s Indian servant, and are constantly together.

  Laurent Blurosset, after becoming the fashion in Paris, is now the rage in London. But he rarely stirs beyond the threshold of his own door, though his presence is eagerly sought for in scientific coteries, where opinion is still, however, divided as to whether he is a charlatan or a great man. The materialists sneer—the spiritualists believe. His disinterestedness, at any rate, speaks in favour of his truth. He will receive no money from any of his numerous visitors. He will serve them, he says, if he can, but he will not sell the wisdom of the mighty dead; for that is something too grand and solemn to be made a thing of barter. His discoveries in chemistry have made him sufficiently rich; and he can afford to devote himself to science, in the hope of finding truth for his reward. He asks no better recompense than the glory of the light he seeks. We leave him, then, to his eager and inquisitive visitors, while the Captain rides slowly through Oxford Street, on his way to the Edgware Road, through which he emerges into the country.

  CHAPTER V

  THE NEW MILKMAN IN PARK LANE

  The post of kitchenmaid in the household of the Count de Marolles is no unimportant one, and Mrs. Moper is accounted a person of some consequence in the servants’ hall. The French chef, who has his private sitting-room, wherein he works elaborate and scientific culinary combinations, which, when he condescends to talk English, he designates “plates,” has of course very little communication with the household. Mrs. Moper is his prime minister; he gives his orders to her for execution, and throws himself back in his easy-chair to think out a dish, while his handmaiden collects for him the vulgar elements of his noble art. Mrs. Moper is a very good cook herself; and when she leaves the Count de Marolles she will go into a family where there is no foreigner kept, and will have forty pounds per annum and a still-room of her own. She is in the caterpillar stage now, Mrs. Sarah Moper, and is content to write herself down kitchenmaid ad interim.

  The servants’-hall dinner and the housekeeper’s repast are both over; but the preparations for the dinner have not yet begun, and Mrs. Moper and Liza, the scullerymaid, snatch half-an-hour’s calm before the coming storm, and sit down to darn stockings,—

  “Which,” Mrs. Moper says, “my toes is through and my heels is out, and never can I get the time to set a stitch. For time there isn’t any in this house for a under-servant, which under-servant I will be no more than one year longer; or say my name’s not Sarah Moper.”

  Liza, who is mending a black stocking with white thread (and a very fanciful effect it has too), evidently has no wish to dispute such a proposition.

  “Indeed, Mrs. Moper,” she said, “that’s the truest word as ever you’ve spoke. It’s well for them as takes their wages for wearin’ silk gowns, and oilin’ of their hair, and lookin’ out of winder to watch the carriages go in at Grosvenor Gate; which, don’t tell me as Life Guardsmen would look up imperdent, if they hadn’t been looked down to likewise.” Eliza gets rather obscure here. “This ’ouse, Mrs. M., for upper-servants may be ’eaven, but for unders it’s more like the place as is pronounced like a letter of the alphabet, and isn’t to be named by me.”

  There is no knowing how far this rather revolutionary style of conversation might have gone, for at this moment there came that familiar sound of the clink of milk-pails on the pavement above, and the London cry of milk.

  “It’s Bugden with the milk, Liza; there was a pint of cream wrong in the last bill, Mrs. Mellflower says. Ask him to come down and correctify it, will you, Liza?”

  Liza ascends the area steps and parleys with the milkman; presently he comes jingling down, with his pails swinging against the railings; he is rather awkward with his pails, this milkman, and I’m afraid he must spill more milk than he sells, as the Park Lane pavements testify.

  “It isn’t Bugden,” says Liza, explanatory, as she ushers him into the kitchen. “Bugden ’as ’urt his leg, a-milkin’ a cow wot kicks when the flies worrits, and ’as sent this young man, as is rather new to the business, but is anxious to do his best.”

  The new milkman enters the kitchen as she concludes her speech, and releasing himself from the pails, expresses his readiness to settle any mistake in the weekly bill.

  He is rather a good-looking fellow, this milkman, and he has a very curly head of flaxen hair, preposterously light eyebrows, and dark hazel eyes, which form rather a piquant contrast. I don’t suppose Mrs. Moper and Liza think him bad-looking, for they beg him to sit down, and the scullerymaid thrusts the black stocking, on which she was heretofore engaged, into a table-drawer, and gives her hair a rapid extemporary smoothing with the palms of her hands. Mr. Bugden’s man seems by no means disinclined for a little friendly chat: he tells them how new he is to the business; how he thinks he should scarcely have chosen cowkeeping for his way of life, if he’d known as much about it as he does now; how there’s many things in the milk business, such as horses’ brains, warm water and treacle, and such-like, as goes against his conscience; how he’s quite new to Lond
on and London ways, having come up only lately from the country.

  “Whereabouts in the country?” Mrs. Moper asks.

  “Berkshire,” the young man replies.

  “Lor’,” Mrs. Moper says, “never was any thing so remarkable. Poor Moper come from Berkshire, and knowed every inch of the country, and so I think do I, pretty well. What part of Berkshire, Mr.—Mr.——?”

  “Volpes,” suggested the young man.

  “What part of Berkshire, Mr. Volpes?”

  Mr. Volpes looks, strange to say, rather at a loss to answer this very natural and simple inquiry. He looks at Mrs. Moper, then at Liza, and lastly at the pails. The pails seem to assist his memory, for he says, very distinctly, “Burley Scuffers.”

  It is Mrs. Moper’s turn to look puzzled now, and she exclaims “Burley——”

  “Scuffers,” replies the young man. “Burley Scuffers, market town, fourteen miles on this side of Reading. The ‘Chicories,’ Sir Yorrick Tristram’s place, is a mile and a half out of the town.”

  There’s no disputing such an accurate and detailed description as this. Mrs. Moper says it’s odd, all the times she’s been to Reading—“which I wish I had as many sovereigns,” she mutters in parenthesis—never did she remember passing through “Burley Scuffers.”

  “It’s a pretty little town, too,” says the milkman; “there’s a lime-tree avenue just out of the High Street, called Pork-butchers’ Walk, as is crowded with young people of a Sunday evening after church.”

  Mrs. Moper is quite taken with this description; and says, the very next time she goes to Reading to see poor Moper’s old mother, she will make a point of going to Burley Scuffers during her stay.

  Mr. Volpes says, he would if he were she, and that she couldn’t employ her leisure time better.

  They talk a good deal about Berkshire; and then Mrs. Moper relates some very interesting facts relative to the late Mr. Moper, and her determination, “which upon his dying bed it was his comfort so to think,” never to marry again; at which the milkman looks grieved, and says the gentlemen will be very blind indeed to their own interests if they don’t make her change her mind some day; and somehow or other (I don’t suppose servants often do such things), they get to talking about their master and their mistress. The milkman seems quite interested in this subject, and, forgetting in how many houses the innocent liquid he dispenses may be required, he sits with his elbows on the kitchen-table, listening to Mrs. Moper’s remarks, and now and then, when she wanders from her subject, drawing her back to it with an adroit question. She didn’t know much about the Count, she said, for the servants was most all of ’em new; they only brought two people with them from South America, which was Monsieur St. Mirotaine, the chef, and the Countess’s French maid, Mademoiselle Finette. But she thought Monsieur de Marolles very ’aughty, and as proud as he was ’igh, and that madame was very unhappy, “though it’s hard to know with them furriners, Mr. Volpes, what is what,” she continues; “and madame’s gloomy ways may be French for happiness, for all I knows.”

  “He’s an Englishman, the Count, isn’t he?” asks Mr. Volpes.

  “A Englishman! Lor’ bless your heart, no. They’re both French; she’s of Spanish igstraction, I believe, and they lived since their marriage mostly in Spanish America. But they always speaks to each other in French, when they do speak; which them as waits upon them says isn’t often.”

  “He’s very rich, I suppose,” says the milkman.

  “Rich!” cries Mrs. Moper, “the money as that man has got they say is fabellous; and he’s a regular business man too, down at his bank every day, rides off to the City as punctual as the clock strikes ten. Lor’, by the bye, Mr. Volpes,” says Mrs. Moper suddenly, “you don’t happen to know of a tempory tiger,1 do you?”

  “A temporary tiger!” Mr. Volpes looks considerably puzzled.

  “Why, you see, the Count’s tiger, as wasn’t higher than the kitchen table I do believe, broke his arm the other day. He was a-hangin’ on to the strap behind the cab, a-standin’ upon nothing, as them boys will, when the vehicle was knocked agen an omnibus, and his arm bein’ wrenched sudden out of the strap, snapped like a bit of sealing-wax; and they’ve took him to the hospital, and he’s to come back as soon as ever he’s well; for he’s a deal thought on, bein’ a’most the smallest tiger at the West-end. So, if you happen to know of a boy as would come temporary, we should be obliged by your sending him round.”

  “Did he know of a boy as would come temporary?” Mr. Budgen’s young man appeared so much impressed by this question, that for a minute or two he was quite incapable of answering it. He leaned his elbows on the kitchen-table, with his face buried in his hands and his fingers twisted in his flaxen hair, and when he looked up there was, strange to say, a warm flush over his pale complexion, and something like a triumphant sparkle in his dark brown eyes.

  “Nothing could fall out better,” he said; “nothing, nothing!”

  “What, the poor lad breaking his arm?” asked Mrs. Moper, in a tone of surprise.

  “No, no, not that,” said Mr. Budgen’s young man, just a little confused; “what I mean is, that I know the very boy to suit you—the very boy, the very boy of all others to undertake the business. Ah,” he continued in a lower voice, “and to go through with it, too, to the end.”

  “Why, as to the business,” replied Mrs. Moper, “it ain’t overmuch, hangin’ on behind, and lookin’ knowin’, and givin’ other tigers as good as they bring, when waitin’ outside the Calting or the Anthinium;2 which tigers as is used to the highest names in the peerage familiar as their meat and drink, will go on contemptuous about our fambly, callin’ the bank ‘the shop,’ and a-askin’, till they got our lad’s blood up (which he had had his guinea lessons from the May Fair Mawler, and were better left alone), when the smash was a-comin’, or whether we meant to give out three-and-sixpence in the pound like a honest house, or do the shabby thing and clear ourselves by a compensation with our creditors of fourpence-farthing? Ah,” continued Mrs. Moper, gravely, “many’s the time that child have come home with his nose as big as the ’ead of a six-week old baby, and no eyes at all as any one could discover, which he’d been that knocked about in a stand-up fight with a lad three times his weight and size.”

  “Then I can send the boy, and you’ll get him the situation?” said Mr. Budgen’s young man, who did not seem particularly interested in the rather elaborate recital of the exploits of the invalid tiger.

  “He can have a character, I suppose?” inquired the lady.

  “Oh, ah, to be sure. Budgen will give him a character.”

  “You will impress upon the youth,” said Mrs. Moper, with great dignity, “that he will not be able to make this his permanence ’ome. The pay is good, and the meals is reg’lar, but the situation is tempory.”

  “All right,” said Mr. Budgen’s assistant; “he doesn’t want a situation for long. I’ll bring him round myself this evening—good afternoon;” with which very brief farewell, the flaxen-haired, dark-eyed milkman strode out of the kitchen.

  “Hum!” muttered the cook, “his manners has not the London polish: I meant to have ast him to tea.”

  “Why, I’m blest,” exclaimed the scullerymaid suddenly, “if he haven’t been and gone and left his yoke and pails behind him! Well, of all the strange milkmen I ever come a-nigh, if he ain’t the strangest!”

  She might have thought him stranger still, perhaps, this light-haired milkman, had she seen him hail a stray cab in Brook Street, spring into it, snatch off his flaxen locks, whose hyacinthine waves were in the convenient form known by that most disagreeable of words, a wig; snatch off also the holland blouse common to the purveyors of milk, and rolling the two into a bundle, stuff them into the pocket of his shooting-jacket, before throwing himself back into the corner of the vehicle, to enjoy a meditative cigar, as his charioteer drives his best pace in the direction of that transpontine temple of Esculapius, Mr. Darley’s surgery. Daredevil Dick has made the
first move in that fearful game of chess which is to be played between him and the Count de Marolles.

  CHAPTER VI

  SIGNOR MOSQUETTI RELATES AN ADVENTURE

  On the evening which follows the very afternoon during which Richard Marwood made his first and only essay in the milk-trade, the Count and Countess de Marolles attend a musical party—I beg pardon, I should, gentle reader, as you know, have said a soirée musicale—at the house of a lady of high rank in Belgrave Square. London was almost empty, and this was one of the last parties of the season; but it is a goodly and an impressive sight to see—even when London is, according to every fashionable authority, a perfect Sahara—how many splendid carriages will draw up to the awning my Lady erects over the pavement before her door, when she announces herself “at home;” how many gorgeously dressed and lovely women will descend therefrom, scenting the night air of Belgravia with the fragrance wafted from their waving tresses and point-d’Alençon1-bordered handkerchiefs; lending a perfume to the autumn violets struggling out a fading existence in Dresden boxes on the drawing-room balconies; lending the light of their diamonds to the gas-lamps before the door, and the light of their eyes to help out the aforesaid diamonds; sweeping the autumn dust and evening dews with the borders of costly silks, and marvels of Lyons and Spitalfields,2 and altogether glorifying the ground over which they walk.

  On this evening one range of windows, at least, in Belgrave Square is brilliantly illuminated. Lady Londersdon’s Musical Wednesday, the last of the season, has been inaugurated with éclat by a scena from Signora Scorici, of Her Majesty’s Theatre and the Nobility’s Concerts; and Mr. Argyle Fitz-Bertram, the great English basso-baritono, and the handsomest man in England, has just shaken the square with the buffo duet3 from the Cenerentola4—in which performance he, Argyle, has so entirely swamped that amiable tenor Signor Maretti, that the latter gentleman has serious thoughts of calling him out to-morrow morning; which idea he would carry into execution if Argyle Fitz-Bertram were not a crack shot, and a pet pupil of Mr. Angelo’s into the bargain.