“In the first place, my dear boy,” he said, “if you can’t catch the fellow, you can’t catch the fellow—that’s sound logic and a mathematical argument; then why make yourself unhappy about it? Why try to square the circle, only because the circle’s round, and can’t be squared? Let it alone. If this fellow turns up, hang him! I should glory in seeing him hung,2 for he’s an out-and-out scoundrel, and I should make a point of witnessing the performance, if the officials would do the thing at a reasonable hour, and not execute him in the middle of the night and swindle the respectable public. If he doesn’t turn up, why, let the matter rest; marry that little girl in there, Darley’s pretty sister—who seems, by the bye, to be absurdly fond of you—and let the question rest. That’s my philosophy.”
The young man turned away with an impatient sigh; then, laying his hand on Percy’s shoulder, he said, “My dear old fellow, if everybody in the world were like you, Napoleon would have died a Corsican lawyer, or a lieutenant in the French army. Robespierre would have lived a petty barrister, with a penchant for getting up in the night to eat jam tarts and a mania for writing bad poetry. The third state3 would have gone home quietly to its farmyards, and its merchants’ offices; there would have been no Oath of the Tenis Court,4 and no Battle of Waterloo.”5
“And a very good thing, too,” said his philosophical friend; “nobody would have been a loser but Astley’s6—only think of that. If there had been no Napoleon, what a loss for image boys, Gomersal the Great, and Astley’s. Forgive me, Dick, for laughing at you. I’ll cut down to the Cheerfuls, and see if anything’s up. The Smasher’s away, or he might have given us his advice; the genius of the P.R. might have been of some service in this affair. Good night!” He gave Richard a languidly affectionate shake of the hand, and departed.
Now, when Mr. Cordonner said he would cut down to the Cherokees, let it not be thought by the simple-minded reader that the expression “cut down,” from his lips, conveyed that degree of velocity which, though perhaps a sufficiently vague phrase in itself, it is calculated to carry to the ordinary mind. Percy Cordonner had never been seen by mortal man in a hurry. He had been known to be too late for a train, and had been beheld placidly lounging at a few paces from the departing engine, and mildly but rather reproachfully regarding that object. The prospects of his entire life may have hinged on his going by that particular train; but he would never be so false to his principles as to make himself unpleasantly warm, or in any way disturb the delicate organization with which nature had gifted him. He had been seen at the doors of the Opera-house when Jenny Lind7 was going to appear in the Figlia,8 and while those around him were afflicted with a temporary lunacy, and trampling one another wildly in the mud, he had been observed leaning against a couple of fat men as in an easy-chair, and standing high and dry upon somebody else’s boots, breathing gentlemanly and polyglot execrations upon the surrounding crowd, when, in swaying to and fro, it disturbed or attempted to disturb his serenity. So, when he said he would cut down to the Cherokees, he of course meant that he would cut after his manner; and he accordingly rolled languidly along the deserted pavements of the Strand, with something of the insouciant and purposeless manner that Rasselas may have had in a walk through the arcades of his happy valley. He reached the well-known tavern at last, however, and stopping under the sign of the washed-out Indian desperately tomahawking nothing, in the direction of Covent Garden, with an arm more distinguished for muscular development than correct drawing, he gave the well-known signal of the club, and was admitted by the damsel before described, who appeared always to devote the watches of the night to the process of putting her hair in papers, that she might wear that becoming “head” for the admiration of the jug-and-bottle customers of the following day, and shine in a frame of very long and very greasy curls that were apt to sweep the heads off brown stouts,9 and dip gently into “goes” of spirits upon the more brilliant company of the evening. This young lady, popularly known as ’Liza,10 was well up in the sporting business of the house, read the Life11 during church-time on Sundays, and was even believed to have communicated with that Rhadamanthine12 journal, under the signature of L., in the answers to correspondents. She was understood to be engaged, or, as her friends and admirers expressed it, to be “keeping company”13 with that luminary of the P.R., the Middlesex Mawler, whose head-quarters were at the Cherokee.
Mr. Cordonner found three Cheerfuls assembled in the bar, in a state of intense excitement and soda-water. A telegraphic message had just arrived from the Smasher. It was worthy, in economy of construction, of the Delphic oracle, and had the advantage of being easy to understand. It was as follows—“Tell R. M. he’s here: had no orders, so went in with left: he won’t be able to move for a day or two.”
Mr. Cordonner was almost surprised, and was thus very nearly false, for once in his life, to the only art he knew. “This will be good news in Spring Gardens,” he said; “but Peters won’t be back till to-morrow night. Suppose,” he added, musing, “we were to telegraph to him at Slopperton instanter? I know where he hangs out there. If anybody could find a cab and take the message it would be doing Marwood an inestimable service,” added Mr. Cordonner, passing through the bar, and lazily seating himself on a green-and-gold Cream of the Valley cask, with his hat very much on the back of his head, and his hands in his pockets. “I’ll write the message.”
He scribbled upon a card—“Go across to Liverpool. He’s given us the slip, and is there;” and handed it politely towards the three Cheerfuls who were leaning over the pewter counter.
Splitters, the dramatic author, clutched the document eagerly; to his poetic mind it suggested that best gift of inspiration, “a situation.”
“I’ll take it,” he said; “what a fine line it would make in a bill! ‘The intercepted telegram,’ with a comic railway clerk, and the villain of the piece cutting the wires!”
“Away with you, Splitters,” said Percy Cordonner. “Don’t let the Strand become verdant beneath your airy tread. Don’t stop to compose a five-act drama as you go, that’s a good fellow. ’Liza, my dear girl, a pint of your creamiest Edinburgh, and let it be as mild as the disposition of your humble servant.”
Three days after the above conversation, three gentlemen were assembled at breakfast in a small room in a tavern overlooking the quay at Liverpool. This triangular party consisted of the Smasher, in an elegant and simple morning costume, consisting of tight trousers of Stuart plaid, an orange-coloured necktie, a blue checked waistcoat, and shirt-sleeves. The Smasher looked upon a coat as an essentially outdoor garment, and would no more have invested himself in it to eat his breakfast than he would have partaken of that refreshment with his hat on, or an umbrella up. The two other gentlemen were Mr. Darley, and his chief, Mr. Peters, who had a little document in his pocket signed by a Lancashire magistrate, on which he set considerable value. They had come across to Liverpool as directed by the telegraph, and had there met with the Smasher, who had received letters for them from London with the details of the escape, and orders to be on the look-out for Peters and Gus. Since the arrival of these two, the trio had led a sufficiently idle and apparently purposeless life. They had engaged an apartment overlooking the quay, in the window of which they were seated for the best part of the day, playing the intellectual and exciting game of all-fours. There did not seem much in this to forward the cause of Richard Marwood. It is true that Mr. Peters was wont to vanish from the room every now and then, in order to speak to mysterious and grave-looking gentlemen, who commanded respect wherever they went, and before whom the most daring thief in Liverpool shrank as before Mr. Calcraft himself.14 He held strange conferences with them in corners of the hostelry in which the trio had taken up their abode; he went out with them, and hovered about the quays and the shipping; he prowled about in the dusk of the evening, and meeting these gentlemen also prowling in the uncertain light, would sometimes salute them as friends and brothers, at other times be entirely unacquainted with them, and now and
then interchange two or three hurried gestures with them, which the close observer would have perceived to mean a great deal. Beyond this, nothing had been done—and, in spite of all this, no tidings could be obtained of the Count de Marolles, except that no person answering to his description had left Liverpool either by land or water. Still, neither Mr. Peters’s spirits nor patience failed him; and after every interview held upon the stairs or in the passage, after every excursion to the quays or the streets, he returned as briskly as on the first day, and re-seated himself at the little table by the window, at which his colleagues—or rather his companions, for neither Mr. Darley nor the Smasher were of the smallest use to him—played, and took it in turns to ruin each other from morning till night. The real truth of the matter was, that, if anything, the detective’s so-called assistants were decidedly in his way; but Augustus Darley, having distinguished himself in the escape from the asylum, considered himself an amateur Vidocque;15 and the Smasher, from the moment of putting in his left, and unconsciously advancing the cause of Richard and justice by extinguishing the Count de Marolles, had panted to write his name, or rather make his mark, upon the scroll of fame, by arresting that gentleman in his own proper person, and without any extraneous aid whatever. It was rather hard for him, then, to have to resign the prospect of such a glorious adventure to a man of Mr. Peters’s inches; but he was of a calm and amiable disposition, and would floor his adversary with as much good temper as he would eat his favourite dinner; so, with a growl of resignation, he abandoned the reins to the steady hands so used to hold them, and seated himself down to the consumption of innumerable clay pipes and glasses of bitter ale with Gus, who, being one of the most ancient of the order of the Cherokees, was an especial favourite with him.
On this third morning, however, there is a decided tone of weariness pervading the minds of both Gus and the Smasher. Three-handed all-fours, though a delicious and exciting game, will pall upon the inconstant mind, especially when your third player is perpetually summoned from the table to take part in a mysterious dialogue with a person or persons unknown, the result of which he declines to communicate to you. The view from the bow-window of the blue parlour in the White Lion, Liverpool, is no doubt as animated as it is beautiful; but Rasselas, we know, got tired of some very pretty scenery, and there have been readers so inconstant as to grow weary of Dr. Johnson’s book, and to go down peacefully to their graves unacquainted with the climax thereof. So it is scarcely perhaps to be wondered that the volatile Augustus thirsted for the waterworks of Blackfriars; while the Smasher, feeling himself to be blushing unseen, and wasting his stamina, if not his sweetness, on the desert air,16 pined for the familiar shades of Bow Street and Vinegar Yard, and the home-sounds of the rumbling and jingling of the wagons, and the unpolite language of the drivers thereof, on market mornings in the adjacent market. Pleasures and palaces are all very well in their way, as the song says; but there is just one little spot on earth which, whether it be a garret in Petticoat Lane or a mansion in Belgrave Square, is apt to be dearer to us than the best of them; and the Smasher languishes for the friendly touch of the ebony handles of the porter-engine, and the scent of the Welsh rarebits of his youth. Perhaps I express myself in a more romantic manner on this subject, however, than I should do, for the remark of the Left-handed one, as he pours himself out a cup of tea from the top of the teapot—he despises the spout of that vessel as a modern innovation on ancient simplicity—is as simple as it is energetic. He merely observes that he is “jolly sick of this lot,”—this lot meaning Liverpool, the Count de Marolles, the White Lion, three-handed all-fours, and the detective police force.
“There was nobody ill in Friar Street when I left,” said Gus mournfully; “but there had been a run upon Pimperneckel’s Universal Regenerator Pills: and if that don’t make business a little brisker, nothing will.”
“It’s my opinion,” observed the Smasher doggedly, “that this ’ere forrin cove has give us the slip out and out; and the sooner we gets back to London the better. I never was much of a hand at chasing wild geese, and”—he added, with rather a spiteful glance at the mild countenance of the detective—“I don’t see neither that standin’ and makin’ signs to parties unbeknown at street-corners and stair-heads is the quickest way to catch them sort of birds; leastways it’s not the opinion held by the gents belongin’ to the Ring as I’ve had the honour to make acquaintance with.”
“Suppose——” said Mr. Peters, on his fingers.
“Oh!” muttered the Smasher, “blow them fingers of his. I can’t understand ’em—there!” The left-handed Hercules knew that this was to attack the detective on his tenderest point. “Blest if I ever knows his p’s from his b’s, or his w’s from his x’s, let alone his vowels, and them would puzzle a conjuror.”
Mr. Peters glanced at the prize-fighter more in sorrow than in anger, and taking out a greasy little pocket-book, and a greasier little pencil, considerably the worse for having been vehemently chewed in moments of preoccupation, he wrote upon a leaf of it thus—“Suppose we catch him to-day?”
“Ah, very true,” said the Smasher sulkily, after he had examined the document in two or three different lights before he came upon its full bearings; “very true, indeed, suppose we do—and suppose we don’t, on the other hand; and I know which is the likeliest. Suppose, Mr. Peters, we give up lookin’ for a needle in a bundle of hay, which after a time gets tryin’ to a lively disposition, and go back to our businesses. If you had a girl as didn’t know British from best French a-servin’ of your customers,” he continued in an injured tone, “you’d be anxious to get home, and let your forrin counts go to the devil their own ways.”
“Then go,” Mr. Peters wrote, in large letters and no capitals.
“Oh, ah; yes, to be sure,” replied the Smasher, who, I regret to say, felt painfully, in his absence from domestic pleasures, the want of somebody to quarrel with; “No, I thank you! Go the very day as you’re going to catch him! Not if I’m in any manner aware of the circumstance. I’m obliged to you,” he added, with satirical emphasis.
“Come, I say, old boy,” interposed Gus, who had been quietly doing execution upon a plate of devilled kidneys17 during this little friendly altercation, “come, I say, no snarling, Smasher, Peters isn’t going to contest the belt with you, you know.”
“You needn’t be a-diggin’ at me because I ain’t champion,” said the ornament of the P.R., who was inclined to find a malcious meaning in every word uttered that morning; “you needn’t come any of your sneers because I ain’t got the belt any longer.”
The Smasher had been Champion of England in his youth, but had retired upon his laurels for many years, and only occasionally emerged from private life in a public-house to take a round or two with some old opponent.
“I tell you what it is, Smasher—it’s my opinion the air of Liverpool don’t suit your constitution,” said Gus. “We’ve promised to stand by Peters here, and to go by his word in everything, for the sake of the man we want to serve; and, however trying it may be to our patience doing nothing, which perhaps is about as much as we can do and make no mistakes, the first that gets tired and deserts the ship will be no friend to Richard Marwood.”
“I’m a bad lot, Mr. Darley, and that’s the truth,” said the mollified Smasher; “but the fact is, I’m used to a turn with the gloves every morning before breakfast with the barman, and when I don’t get it, I dare say I ain’t the pleasantest company goin’. I should think they’ve got gloves in the house: would you mind taking off your coat and having a turn—friendly like?”
Gus assured the Smasher that nothing would please him better than that trifling diversion; and in five minutes they had pushed Mr. Peters and the breakfast-table into a corner, and were hard at it, Mr. Darley’s knowledge of the art being all required to keep the slightest pace with the scientific movements of the agile though elderly Smasher.
Mr. Peters did not stay at the breakfast-table long, but after having drunk a hu
ge breakfast cupful of very opaque and substantial-looking coffee at a draught, just as if it had been half a pint of beer, he slid quietly out of the room.
“It’s my opinion,” said the Smasher, as he stood, or rather lounged, upon his guard, and warded off the most elaborate combinations of Mr. Darley’s fists with as much ease as he would have brushed aside so many flies—“it’s my opinion that chap ain’t up to his business.”
“Isn’t he?” replied Gus, as he threw down the gloves in despair, after having been half an hour in a violent perspiration, without having succeeded in so much as rumpling the Smasher’s hair. “Isn’t he?” he said, choosing the interrogative as the most expressive form of speech. “That man’s got head enough to be prime minister, and carry the House along with every twist of his fingers.”
“He must make his p’s and b’s a little plainer afore he’ll get a bill through the Commons though,” muttered the Left-handed one, who couldn’t quite get over his feelings of injury against the detective for the utter darkness in which he had been kept for the last three days as to the other’s plans.
The Smasher and Mr. Darley passed the morning in that remarkably intellectual and praiseworthy manner peculiar to gentlemen who, being thrown out of their usual occupation, are cast upon their own resources for amusement and employment. There was the daily paper to be looked at, to begin with; but after Gus had glanced at the leading article, a rifacimento18 of the Times leader of the day before, garnished with some local allusions, and highly spiced with satirical remarks apropos to our spirited contemporary the Liverpool Aristides; after the Smasher had looked at the racing fixtures for the coming week, and made rude observations on the editing of a journal which failed to describe the coming off of the event between Silver-polled Robert and the Chester Crusher—after, I say, the two gentlemen had each devoured his favourite page, the paper was an utter failure in the matter of excitement, and the window was the next best thing. Now to the peculiarly constituted mind of the Left-handed one, looking out of a window was in itself very slow work; and unless he was allowed to eject missiles of a trifling but annoying character—such as hot ashes out of his pipe, the last drop of his pint of beer, the dirty water out of the saucers belonging to the flower-pots on the window-sill, or lighted lucifer-matches—into the eyes of the unoffending passers-by, he didn’t, to use his own forcible remark, “seem to see the fun of it.” Harmless old gentlemen with umbrellas, mild elderly ladies with hand-baskets and brass-handled green-silk parasols, and young ladies of from ten to twelve going to school in clean frocks, and on particularly good terms with themselves, the Smasher looked upon as his peculiar prey. To put his head out of the window and make tender and polite inquiries about their maternal parents; to go further still, and express an earnest wish to be informed of those parents’ domestic arrangements, and whether they had been induced to part with a piece of machinery of some importance in the getting up of linen; to insinuate alarming suggestions of mad bulls in the next street, or a tiger just broke loose from the Zoological Gardens; to terrify the youthful scholar by asking him derisively whether he wouldn’t “catch it when he got to school? Oh, no, not at all, neither!” and to draw his head away suddenly, and altogether disappear from public view; to act, in fact, after the manner of an accomplished clown in a Christmas pantomime, was the weak delight of his manly mind: and when prevented by Mr. Darley’s friendly remonstrance from doing this, the Smasher abandoned the window altogether, and concentrated all the powers of his intellect on the pursuit of a lively young bluebottle, which eluded his bandanna at every turn, and bumped itself violently against the window-panes at the very moment its pursuer was looking for it up the chimney.
The Trail of the Serpent Page 41
