The Trail of the Serpent

by Mary Braddon

  Raymond by this time gets quite interested; so does the boy in the big coat and the slouched hat, who has transferred the field of his gambling operations in the marble line to the landing outside the garret door.

  “He wanted the secret kept, and I kept it for gold. I kept it even from her, your mother, my own ill-used girl, for gold. She never knew who he was; she thought he’d deserted her, and she took to drinking; she and I threw you into the river when we were mad drunk, and couldn’t stand your squalling. She died—don’t you ask me how. I told you before not to ask me how my girl died—I’m mad enough without that question; she died, and I kept the secret. For a long time it was gold to me, and he used to send me money regular to keep it dark; but by-and-by the money stopped from coming. I got savage, but still I kept the secret; because, you see, it was nothing when it was told, and there was no one rich enough to pay me to tell it. I didn’t know where to find the marquis; I only knew he was somewhere in France.”

  “France?” exclaims Raymond.

  “Yes; didn’t I tell you France? He was a French marquis—a refugee they called him when he first made acquaintance with my girl—a teacher of French and mathematics.”

  “And his name—his name?” asks Raymond, eagerly. “His name, woman, if you don’t want to drive me mad.”

  “He called himself Smith, when he was a-teachin’, my dear,” said the old woman with a ghastly leer; “what are you going to pay me for the secret?”

  “Whatever you like, only tell me—tell me before you——”

  “Die. Yes, deary; there ain’t any time to waste, is there? I don’t want to make a hard bargain. Will you bury me up to my neck in gold?”

  “Yes, yes; speak!” He is almost beside himself, and raises a threatening hand. The old woman grins.

  “I told you before that wasn’t the way, deary. Wait a bit. Sillikens, give me that ’ere old shoe, will you? Look you here! It’s a double sole, and the marriage certificate is between the two leathers. I’ve walked on it this thirty years and more.”

  “And the name—the name?”

  “The name of the Marquis was De—de——”

  “She’s dying! Give me some water!” cried Raymond.

  “De Ce—Ce——” the syllables come in fitful gasps. Raymond throws some water over her face.

  “De Cevennes, my deary!—and the golden secret is told.”

  And the golden bowl is broken!

  Lay the ragged sheet over the ghastly face, Sillikens, and kneel down and pray for help in your utter loneliness; for the guilty being whose soul has gone forth to meet its Maker was your only companion and stay, however frail that stay might be.

  Go out into the sunshine, Monsieur de Marolles; that which you leave behind in the tottering garret, shaken by an ague-paroxysm with the fitful autumn wind, is nothing so terrible to your eyes.

  You have accustomed yourself to the face of Death before now; you have met that grim potentate on his own ground, and done with him what it is your policy to do with everything on earth—you have made him useful to you.

  CHAPTER VIII

  ONE STEP FURTHER ON THE RIGHT TRACK

  It is not a very romantic locality to which we must now conduct the reader, being neither more nor less than the shop and surgery of Mr. Augustus Darley; which temple of the healing god is scented, this autumn afternoon, with the mingled perfumes of Cavendish and bird’s-eye tobacco, Turkey rhubarb, whiskey-punch, otto of roses,1 and muffins; conflicting odours, which form, or rather object to form, an amalgamation, each particular effluvium asserting its individuality.

  In the surgery Gus is seated, playing the intellectual and intensely exciting game of dominoes with our acquaintance of the Cheerful Cherokee Society, Mr. Percy Cordonner. A small jug, without either of those earthenware conventionalities, spout or handle, and with Mr. Cordonner’s bandanna stuffed into the top to imprison the subtle essences of the mixture within, stands between the two gentlemen; while Percy, as a guest, is accommodated with a real tumbler, having only three triangular bits chipped out of the edge. Gus imbibes the exciting fluid from a cracked custard-cup, with paper wafered round it to keep the parts from separating, two of which cups are supposed to be equal (by just measurement) to Mr. P. C.’s tumbler. Before the small fire kneels the juvenile domestic of the young surgeon, toasting muffins, and presenting to the two gentlemen a pleasing study in anatomical perspective and the mysteries of foreshortening; to which, however, they are singularly inattentive, devoting their entire energies to the pieces of spotted ivory in their hands, and the consumption, by equitable division, of the whiskey-punch.

  “I say, Gus,” said Mr. Cordonner, stopping in the middle of a gulp of his favourite liquid, at the risk of strangulation, with as much alarm in his face as his placid features were capable of exhibiting—“I say, this isn’t the professional tumbler, is it?”

  “Why, of course it is,” said his friend. “We have only had that one since midsummer. The patients don’t like it because it’s chipped; but I always tell them, that after having gone through having a tooth out—particularly,” he added parenthetically, “as I take ’em out (plenty of lancet, forceps, and key, for their eighteen-pence)—they needn’t grumble about having to rinse their mouths out of a cracked tumbler.”

  Mr. Cordonner turned pale.

  “Do they do that?” he said, and deliberately shot his last sip of the delicious beverage over the head of the kneeling damsel, with so good an aim that it in a manner grazed her curl-papers. “It isn’t friendly of you, Gus,” he said, with mild reproachfulness, “to treat a fellow like this.”

  “It’s all right, old boy,” said Gus, laughing. “Sarah Jane washes it, you know. You wash the tumbler and things, don’t you, Sarah Jane?”

  “Wash ’em?” answered the youthful domestic; “I should think so, sir, indeed. Why, I wipes ’em round reg’lar with my apron, and breathes on ’em to make ’em bright.”

  “Oh, that’ll do!” said Mr. Cordonner, piteously. “Don’t investigate, Gus; you’ll only make matters worse. Oh, why, why did I ask that question? Why didn’t I remember ‘it’s folly to be otherwise?’ That punch was delicious—and now——” He leant his head upon his hand, buried his face in his pocket-handkerchief, pondered in his heart, and was still.

  In the mean time the shop is not empty. Isabella is standing behind the counter, very busy with several bottles, a glass measure, and a pestle and mortar, making up a prescription, a cough mixture, from her brother’s Latin. Rather a puzzling document, this prescription, to any one but Bell; for there are calculations about next year’s Derby scribbled on the margin, and rough sketches of the Smasher, and a more youthful votary of the Smasher’s art, surnamed “Whooping William,” pencilled on the back thereof; but to Bell it seems straightforward enough. At any rate, she dashes away with the bottles, the measure, and the pestle and mortar, as if she knew perfectly well what she was about.

  She is not alone in the shop. A gentleman is leaning on the counter, watching the busy white hands very intently, and apparently deeply interested in the progress of the cough-mixture. This gentleman is her brother’s old friend, “Daredevil Dick.”

  Richard Marwood has been a great deal at the surgery since the night on which he first set foot in his old haunts; he has brought his mother over, and introduced that lady to Miss Darley. Mrs. Marwood was delighted with Isabella’s frank manners and handsome face, and insisted on carrying her back to dine in Spring Gardens. Quite a sociable little dinner they had too, Richard being—for a man who had been condemned for a murder, and had escaped from a lunatic asylum—very cheerful indeed. The young man told Isabella all his adventures, till that young lady alternately laughed and cried—thereby affording Richard’s fond mother most convincing proof of the goodness of her heart—and was altogether so very brilliant and amusing, that when at eleven o’clock Gus came round from a very critical case (viz., a quarrel of the Cheerfuls as to whether Gustavus Ponsonby, novelist and satirist, magazine-wri
ter and poet, deserved the trouncing he had received in the “Friday Pillory”) to take Bell home in a cab, the little trio simultaneously declared that the evening had gone as if by magic! As if by magic! What if to two out of those three the evening did really go by magic? There is a certain pink-legged little gentleman, with wings, and a bandage round his eyes, who, some people say, is as great a magician in his way as Albertus Magnus or Doctor Dee,2 and who has done as much mischief and worked as much ruin in his own manner as all the villainous saltpetre ever dug out of the bosom of the peaceful, corn-growing, flower-bearing earth. That gentleman, I have no doubt, presided on the occasion.

  Thus the acquaintance of Richard and Isabella had ripened into something very much like friendship; and here he is, watching her employed in the rather unromantic business of making up a cough-mixture for an elderly washerwoman of methodistical persuasions. But it is one of the fancies of the pink-legged gentleman aforesaid to lend his bandage to his victims; and there is nothing that John, William, George, Henry, James, or Alfred can do, in which Jane, Eliza, Susan, or Sarah will not see a dignity and a charm, or vice versâ. Pshaw! It is not Mokannah who wears the silver veil; it is we who are in love with Mokannah3 who put on the glittering, blinding medium; and, looking at that gentleman through the dazzle and the glitter, insist on thinking him a very handsome man, till some one takes the veil off our eyes, and we straightway fall to and abuse poor Mokannah, because he is not what we chose to fancy him. It is very hard upon poor tobacco-smoking, beer-imbibing, card-playing, latch-key-loving Tom Jones, that Sophia will insist on elevating him into a god, and then being angry with him because he is Tom Jones and fond of bitter ale and bird’s-eye. But come what may, the pink-legged gentleman must have his diversion, and no doubt his eyes twinkle merrily behind that bandage of his, to see the fools this wise world of ours is made up of.

  “You could trust me, Isabella, then,” said Richard; “you could trust me, in spite of all—in spite of my wasted youth and the blight upon my name?”

  “Do we not all trust you, Mr. Marwood, with our entire hearts?” answered the young lady, taking shelter under cover of a very wide generality.

  “Not ‘Mr. Marwood,’ Bell; it sounds very cold from the lips of my old friend’s sister. Every one calls me Richard, and I, without once asking permission, have called you Bell. Call me Richard, Bell, if you trust me.”

  She looks him in the face, and is silent for a moment; her heart beats a great deal faster—so fast that her lips can scarcely shape the words she speaks.

  “I do trust you, Richard; I believe your heart to be goodness and truth itself.”

  “Is it worth having, then, Bell? I wouldn’t ask you that question if I had not a hope now—ay, and not such a feeble one either—to see my name cleared from the stain that rests upon it. If there is any truth in my heart, Isabella, that truth is yours alone. Can you trust me, as the woman who loves trusts—through life and till death, under every shadow and through every cloud?”

  I don’t know whether essence of peppermint, tincture of myrrh, and hair-oil, are the proper ingredients in a cough-mixture; but I know that Isabella poured them into the glass measure very liberally.

  “You do not answer me, Isabella. Ah, you cannot trust the branded criminal—the escaped lunatic—the man the world calls a murderer!”

  “Not trust you, Richard?” Only four words, and only one glance from the grey eyes into the brown, and so much told! So much more than I could tell in a dozen chapters, told in those four words and that one look!

  Gus opens the half-glass door at this very moment. “Are you coming to tea?” he asks; “here’s Sarah Jane up to her eyes in grease and muffins.”

  “Yes, Gus, dear old friend,” said Richard, laying his hand on Darley’s shoulder; “we’re coming in to tea immediately, brother!”

  Gus looked at him with a glance of considerable astonishment, shook him heartily by the hand, and gave a long whistle; after which he walked up to the counter and examined the cough-mixture.

  “Oh!” he said, “I suppose that’s why you’ve put enough laudanum into this to poison a small regiment, eh, Bell? Perhaps we may as well throw it out of the window; for if it goes out of the door I shall be hung for wholesale murder.”

  They were a very merry party over the little tea-table; and if nobody ate any of the muffins, which Mr. Cordonner called “embodied indigestions,” they laughed a great deal, and talked still more—so much so, that Percy declared his reasoning faculties to be quite overpowered, and wanted to be distinctly informed whether it was Richard who was going to marry Gus, or Gus about to unite himself to the juvenile domestic, or he himself who was to be married against his inclination—which, seeing he was of a yielding and peace-loving disposition, was not so unlikely—or, in short, to use his own expressive language, “what the row was all about?”

  Nobody, however, took the trouble to set Mr. P. C.’s doubts at rest, and he drank his tea with perfect contentment, but without sugar, and in a dense intellectual fog. “It doesn’t matter,” he murmured; “perhaps Richard will turn again and be Lord Mayor of London town, and then my children will read his adventures in a future Pinnock,4 and they may understand it. It’s a great thing to be a child, and to understand those sort of things. When I was six years old I knew who William Rufus married, and how many people died in the Plague of London. I can’t say it made me any happier or better, but I dare say it was a great advantage.”

  At this moment the bell hung at the shop-door (a noisy preventive of petty larceny, giving the alarm if any juvenile delinquent had a desire to abstract a bottle of castor-oil, or a camomile-pill or so, for his peculiar benefit) rang violently, and our old friend Mr. Peters burst into the shop, and through the shop into the parlour, in a state of such excitement that his very fingers seemed out of breath.

  “Back again?” cried Richard, starting up with surprise; for be it known to the reader that Mr. Peters had only the day before started for Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy to hunt up evidence about this man, whose very image lay buried outside that town.

  Before the fingers of Mr. Peters, which quite shook with excitement, could shape an answer to Richard’s exclamation of surprise, a very dignified elderly gentleman, whose appearance was almost clerical, followed the detective into the room, and bowed politely to the assembled party.

  “I will take upon myself to be my own sponsor,” said that gentleman. “If, as I believe, I am speaking to Mr. Marwood,” he added, looking at Richard, who bowed affirmatively, “it is to the interest of both of us—of you, sir, more especially—that we should become acquainted. I am Dr. Tappenden, of Slopperton.”

  Mr. Cordonner, having politely withdrawn himself from the group so as not to interfere with any confidential communication, was here imprudent enough to attempt to select a book from the young surgeon’s hanging-library, and, in endeavouring to take down the third volume of Bragelonne,5 brought down, as usual, the entire literary shower-bath on his devoted head, and sat quietly snowed up, as it were, in loose leaves of Michel Lévy’s6 shilling edition, and fragments of illustrations by Tony Johannot.7

  Richard looked a little puzzled at Dr. Tappenden’s introduction; but Mr. Peters threw in upon his fingers this piece of information,—“He knows him!” and Richard was immediately interested.

  “We are all friends here, I believe?” said the schoolmaster, glancing round interrogatively.

  “Oh, decidedly, Monsieur d’Artagnan,”8 replied Percy, absently looking up from one of the loose leaves he had selected for perusal from those scattered around him.

  “Monsieur d’Artagnan! Your friend is pleased to be facetious,” said the Doctor, with some indignation.

  “Oh, pray excuse him, sir. He is only absent-minded,” replied Richard. “My friend Peters informs me that you know this man—this singular, this incomprehensible villain, whose supposed death is so extraordinary.”

  “He—either the man who died, or this man who is now occupying a high position
in London—was for some years in my employ; but in spite of what our worthy friend the detective says, I am inclined to think that Jabez North, my tutor, did actually die, and that it was his body which I saw at the police-station.”

  “Not a bit of it, sir,” said the detective on his rapid fingers, “not a bit of it! That death was a do—a do, out and out. It was too systematic to be anything else, and I was a fool not to see there was something black at the bottom of it at the time. People don’t go and lay themselves out high and dry upon a heath, with clean soles to their shoes, on a stormy night, and the bottle in their hand—not took hold of, neither, but lying loose, you understand; put there—not clutched as a dying man clutches what his hand closes upon. I say this ain’t how people make away with themselves when they can’t stand life any longer. It was a do—a plant, such as very few but that man could be capable of; and that man’s your tutor, and the death was meant to put a stop to all suspicion; and while you was a-sighin’ and a-groanin’ over that poor young innocent, Mr. Jabez North was a-cuttin’ a fine figure, and a-captivatin’ a furrin heiress, with your money, or your banker’s money, as had to bear the loss of them forged cheques.”

  “But the likeness?” said Dr. Tappenden. “That dead man was the very image of Jabez North.”

  “Very likely, sir. There’s mysterious goin’s on, and some coincidences in this life, as well as in your story-books that’s lent out at three half-pence a volume, keep ’em three days and return ’em clean.”