“Yes; but do you happen to remember,” said Gus, “that he only found three out of the four sovereigns; and that he was obliged to give up looking for the last, and go away without it?”
The landlord of the “Delight” suddenly lapsed into most profound meditation; he rubbed his chin, making a rasping noise as he did so, as if going cautiously over a French roll, first with one hand and then with the other; he looked with an earnest gaze into the glass of puce-coloured liquid before him, took a sip of that liquid, smacked his lips after the manner of a connoisseur, and then said that he couldn’t at the present moment call to mind the last circumstance alluded to.
“Shall I tell you,” said Gus, “my motive in asking this question?”
The landlord said he might as well mention it as not.
“Then I will. I want that sovereign. I’ve a particular reason, which I don’t want to stop to explain just now, for wanting that very coin of all others; and I don’t mind giving a five-pound note to the man that’ll put that twenty shillings worth of gold into my hand.”
“You don’t, don’t you?” said the landlord, repeating the operations described above, and looking very hard at Gus all the time: after which he sat staring silently from Gus to Peters, and from Peters to the puce-coloured liquid, for some minutes: at last he said—“It ain’t a trap?”
“There’s the note,” replied Mr. Darley; “look at it, and see if it’s a good one. I’ll lay it on this table, and when you lay down that sovereign—that one, mind, and no other—it’s yours.”
“You think I’ve got it, then?” said the landlord, interrogatively.
“I know you’ve got it,” said Gus, “unless you’ve spent it.”
“Why, as to that,” said the landlord, “when you first called to mind the circumstance of the girl, and the gent, and the inquest, and all that, I’ve a short memory, and couldn’t quite recollect that there sovereign; but now I do remember finding of that very coin a year and a half afterwards, for the drains was bad that year, and the Board of Health came a-chivying of us to take up our floorings, and lime-wash ourselves inside; and in taking up the flooring of this room what should we come across but that very bit of gold?”
“And you never changed it?”
“Shall I tell you why I never changed it? Sovereigns ain’t so plentiful in these parts that I should keep this one to look at. What do you say to its not being a sovereign at all?”
“Not a sovereign?”
“Not; what do you say to its being a twopenny-halfpenny foreign coin, with a lot of rum writin’ about it—a coin as they has the cheek to offer me four-and-sixpence for as old gold, and as I kep’, knowin’ it was worth more for a curiosity—eh?”
“Why, all I can say is,” said Gus, “that you did very wisely to keep it; and here’s five or perhaps ten times its value, and plenty of interest for your money.”
“Wait a bit,” muttered the landlord; and disappearing into the bar, he rummaged in some drawer in the interior of that sanctum, and presently reappeared with a little parcel screwed carefully in newspaper. “Here it is,” he said, “and jolly glad I am to get rid of the useless lumber, as wouldn’t buy a loaf of bread if one was a-starving; and thank you kindly, sir,” he continued, as he pocketed the note. “I should like to sell you half-a-dozen more of ’em at the same price, that’s all.”
The coin was East Indian; worth perhaps six or seven rupees; in size and touch not at all unlike a sovereign, but about fifty years old.
“And now,” said Gus, “my friend and I will take a stroll; you can cook us a steak for five o’clock, and in the meantime we can amuse ourselves about the town.”
“The factories might be interesting to the foreigneering gent,” said the landlord, whose spirits seemed very much improved by the possession of the five-pound note; “there’s a factory hard by as employs a power of hands, and there’s a wheel as killed a man only last week, and you could see it, I’m sure, gents, and welcome, by only mentioning my name. I serves the hands as lives round this way, which is a many.”
Gus thanked him for his kind offer, and said they would make a point of availing themselves of it.
The landlord watched them as they walked along the bank in the direction of Slopperton. “I expect,” he remarked to himself, “the lively one’s mad, and the quiet one’s his keeper. But five pounds is five pounds; and that’s neither here nor there.”
Instead of seeking both amusement and instruction, as they might have done from a careful investigation of the factory in question, Messrs. Darley and Peters walked at a pretty brisk rate, looking neither to the right nor to the left, choosing the most out-of-the-way and unfrequented streets, till they left the town of Slopperton and the waters of the Sloshy behind them, and emerged on to the high road, not so many hundred yards from the house in which Mr. Montague Harding met his death—the house of the Black Mill.
It had never been a lively-looking place at best; but now, with the association of a hideous murder belonging to it—and so much a part of it, that, to all who knew the dreadful story, death, like a black shadow, seemed to brood above the gloomy pile of building and warn the stranger from the infected spot—it was indeed a melancholy habitation. The shutters of all the windows but one were closed; the garden-paths were overgrown with weeds; the beds choked up; the trees had shot forth wild erratic branches that trailed across the path of the intruder, and entangling themselves about him, threw him down before he was aware. The house, however, was not uninhabited—Martha, the old servant, who had nursed Richard Marwood when a little child, had the entire care of it; and she was further provided with a comfortable income and a youthful domestic to attend upon her, the teaching, admonishing, scolding, and patronizing of whom made the delight of her quiet existence.
The bell which Mr. Darley rang at the gate went clanging down the walk, as if to be heard in the house were a small part of its mission, for its sonorous power was calculated to awaken all Slopperton in case of fire, flood, or invasion of the foreign foe.
Perhaps Gus thought just a little—as he stood at the broad white gate, overgrown now with damp and moss, but once so trim and bright—of the days when Richard and he had worn little cloth frocks, all ornamented with divers meandering braids and shining buttons, and had swung to and fro in the evening sunshine on that very gate.
He remembered Richard throwing him off, and hurting his nose upon the gravel. They had made mud-pies upon that very walk; they had set elaborate and most efficient traps for birds, and never caught any, in those very shrubberies; they had made a swing under the lime-trees yonder, and a fountain that would never work, but had to be ignominiously supplied with jugs of water, and stirred with spoons like a pudding, before the crystal shower would consent to mount. A thousand recollections of that childish time came back, and with them came the thought that the little boy in the braided frock was now an outcast from society, supposed to be dead, and his name branded as that of a madman and a murderer.
Martha’s attendant, a rosy-cheeked country girl, came down the walk at the sound of the clanging bell, and stared aghast at the apparition of two gentlemen—one of them so brilliant in costume as our friend Mr. Darley.
Gus told the youthful domestic that he had a letter for Mrs. Jones. Martha’s surname was Jones; the Mrs. was an honorary distinction, as the holy state of matrimony was one of the evils the worthy woman had escaped. Gus brought a note from Martha’s mistress, which assured him a warm welcome. “Would the gentlemen have tea?” Martha said. “Sararanne—(the youthful domestic’s name was Sarah Anne, pronounced, both for euphony and convenience, Sararanne)—Sararanne should get them anything they would please to like directly.” Poor Martha was quite distressed, on being told that all they wanted was to look at the room in which the murder was committed.
“Was it in the same state as at the time of Mr. Harding’s death?” asked Gus.
It had never been touched, Mrs. Jones assured them, since that dreadful time. Such was her mis
tress’s wish; it had been kept clean and dry; but not a bit of furniture had been moved.
Mrs. Jones was rheumatic, and rarely stirred from her seat of honour by the fireside; so Sararanne was sent with a bunch of keys in her hand to conduct the gentlemen to the room in question.
Now there were two things self-evident in the manner of Sararanne; first, that she was pleased at the idea of a possible flirtation with the brilliant Mr. Darley; secondly, that she didn’t at all like the ordeal of opening and entering the dreaded room in question; so, between her desire to be fascinating and her uncontrollable fear of the encounter before her, she endured a mental struggle painful to the beholder.
The shutters in the front of the house being, with one exception, all closed, the hall and staircase were wrapped in a shadowy gloom, far more alarming to the timid mind than complete darkness. In complete darkness, for instance, the eight-day clock in the corner would have been a clock, and not an elderly ghost with a broad white face and a brown greatcoat, as it seemed to be in the uncertain glimmer which crept through a distant skylight covered with ivy. Sararanne was evidently possessed with the idea that Mr. Darley and his friend would decoy her to the very threshold of the haunted chamber, and then fly ignominiously, leaving her to brave the perils of it by herself. Mr. Darley’s repeated assurances that it was all right, and that on the whole it would be advisable to look alive, as life was short and time was long, etcetera, had the effect at last of inducing the damsel to ascend the stairs—looking behind her at every other step—and to conduct the visitors along a passage, at the end of which she stopped, selected with considerable celerity a key from the bunch, plunged it into the keyhole of the door before her, said, “That is the room, gentlemen, if you please,” dropped a curtsey, and turned and fled.
The door opened with a scroop,8 and Mr. Peters realized at last the darling wish of his heart, and stood in the very room in which the murder had been committed. Gus looked round, went to the window, opened the shutters to the widest extent, and the afternoon sunshine streamed full into the room, lighting every crevice, revealing every speck of dust on the moth-eaten damask9 bed-curtains—every crack and stain on the worm-eaten flooring.
To see Mr. Darley look round the room, and to see Mr. Peters look round it, is to see two things as utterly wide apart as it is possible for one look to be from another. The young surgeon’s eyes wander here and there, fix themselves nowhere, and rest two or three times upon the same object before they seem to take in the full meaning of that object. The eyes of Mr. Peters, on the contrary, take the circuit of the apartment with equal precision and rapidity—go from number one to number two, from number two to number three; and having given a careful inspection to every article of furniture in the room, fix at last in a gaze of concentrated intensity on the tout ensemble of the chamber.
“Can you make out anything?” at last asks Mr. Darley.
Mr. Peters nods his head, and in reply to this question drops on one knee, and falls to examining the flooring.
“Do you see anything in that?” asks Gus.
“Yes,” replies Mr. Peters on his fingers; “look at this.”
Gus does look at this. This is the flooring, which is in a very rotten and dilapidated state, by the bed-side. “Well, what then?” he asks.
“What then?” said Mr. Peters, on his fingers, with an expression of considerable contempt pervading his features; “what then? You’re a very talented young gent, Mr. Darley, and if I wanted a prescription for the bile, which I’m troubled with sometimes, or a tip for the Derby, which I don’t, not being a sporting man, you’re the gent I’d come to; but for all that you ain’t no police-officer, or you’d never ask that question. What then? Do you remember as one of the facts so hard agen Mr. Marwood was the blood-stains on his sleeve? You see these here cracks and crevices in this here floorin’? Very well, then; Mr. Marwood slept in the room under this. He was tired, I’ve heard him say, and he threw himself down on the bed in his coat. What more natural, then, than that there should be blood upon his sleeve, and what more easy to guess than the way it came there?”
“You think it dropped through, then?” asked Gus.
“I think it dropped through,” said Mr. Peters, on his fingers, with biting irony; “I know it dropped through. His counsel was a nice un, not to bring this into court,” he added, pointing to the boards on which he knelt. “If I’d only seen this place before the trial——But I was nobody, and it was like my precious impudence to ask to go over the house, of course! Now then, for number two.”
“And that is——?” asked Mr. Darley, who was quite in the dark as to Mr. Peters’s views; that functionary being implicitly believed in by Richard and his friend, and allowed, therefore, to be just as mysterious as he pleased.
“Number two’s this here,” answered the detective. “I wants to find another or two of them rum Indian coins; for our young friend Dead-and-Alive, as is here to-day and gone to-morrow, got that one as he gave the girl from that cabinet, or my name’s not Joseph Peters;” wherewith Mr. Peters, who had been entrusted by Mrs. Marwood with the keys of the cabinet in question, proceeded to open the doors of it, and to carefully inspect that old-fashioned piece of furniture.
There were a great many drawers, and boxes, and pigeon-holes, and queer nooks and corners in this old cabinet, all smelling equally of old age, damp, and cedar-wood. Mr. Peters pulled out drawers and opened boxes, found secret drawers in the inside of other drawers, and boxes hid in ambush in other boxes, all with so little result, beyond the discovery of old papers, bundles of letters tied with faded red tape, a simpering and neutral-tinted miniature or two of the fashion of some fifty years gone by, when a bright blue coat and brass buttons was the correct thing for a dinner-party, and your man about town wore a watch in each of his breeches-pockets, and simpered at you behind a shirt-frill wide enough to separate him for ever from his friends and acquaintance. Besides these things, Mr. Peters found a Johnson’s dictionary, a ready-reckoner, and a pair of boot-hooks; but as he found nothing else, Mr. Darley grew quite tired of watching his proceedings, and suggested that they should adjourn; for he remarked—“Is it likely that such a fellow as this North would leave anything behind him?”
“Wait a bit,” said Mr. Peters, with an expressive jerk of his head. Gus shrugged his shoulders, took out his cigar-case, lighted a cheroot, and walked to the window, where he leaned with his elbows on the sill, puffing blue clouds of tobacco-smoke down among the straggling creepers that covered the walls and climbed round the casement, while the detective resumed his search among the old bundles of papers. He was nearly abandoning it, when, in one of the outer drawers, he took up an object he had passed over in his first inspection. It was a small canvas bag, such as is used to hold money, and was apparently empty; but while pondering on his futile search, Mr. Peters twisted this bag in a moment of absence of mind between his fingers, swinging it backwards and forwards in the air. In so doing, he knocked it against the side of the cabinet, and, to his surprise, it emitted a sharp metallic sound. It was not empty, then, although it appeared so. A moment’s examination showed the detective that he had succeeded in obtaining the object of his search; the bag had been used for money, and a small coin had lodged in the seam at one corner of the bottom of it, and had stuck so firmly as not to be easily shaken out. This, in the murderer’s hurried ransacking of the cabinet, in his blind fury at not finding the sum he expected to obtain, had naturally escaped him. The piece of money was a small gold coin, only half the value of the one found by the landlord, but of the same date and style.
Mr. Peters gave his fingers a triumphant snap, which aroused the attention of Mr. Darley; and, with a glance expressive of the pride in his art which is peculiar to your true genius, held up the little piece of dingy gold.
“By Jove!” exclaimed the admiring Gus, “you’ve got it, then! Egad, Peters, I think you’d make evidence, if there wasn’t any.”
“Eight years of that young man’s life, sir,”
said the rapid fingers, “has been sacrificed to the stupidity of them as should have pulled him through.”
CHAPTER V
MR. PETERS DECIDES ON A STRANGE STEP, AND ARRESTS THE DEAD
While Mr. Peters, assisted by Richard’s sincere friend, the young surgeon, made the visit above described, Daredevil Dick counted the hours in London. It was essential to the success of his cause, Gus and Peters urged, that he should not show himself, or in any way reveal the fact of his existence, till the real murderer was arrested. Let the truth appear to all the world, and then time enough for Richard to come forth, with an unbranded forehead,1 in the sight of his fellow-men. But when he heard that Raymond Marolles had given his pursuers the slip, and was off, no one knew where, it was all that his mother, his friend Percy Cordonner, Isabella Darley, and the lawyers to whom he had intrusted his cause, could do, to prevent his starting that instant on the track of the guilty man. It was a weary day, this day of the failure of the arrest, for all. Neither his mother’s tender consolation, nor his solicitor’s assurances that all was not yet lost, could moderate the young man’s impatience. Neither Isabella’s tearful prayers that he would leave the issue in the hands of Heaven, nor Mr. Cordonner’s philosophical recommendation to take it quietly and let the “beggar” go, could keep him quiet. He felt like a caged lion, whose ignoble bonds kept him from the vile object of his rage. The day wore out, however, and no tidings came of the fugitive. Mr. Cordonner insisted on stopping with his friend till three o’clock in the morning, and at that very late hour set out, with the intention of going down to the Cherokees—it was a Cheerful night, and they would most likely be still assembled—to ascertain, as he popularly expressed it, whether anything had “turned up” there. The clock of St. Martin’s struck three as he stood with Richard at the street-door in Spring Gardens, giving friendly consolation between the puffs of his cigar to the agitated young man.
The Trail of the Serpent Page 40
