The trail of the serpent
“Don’t let us have any chattering,” said Jabez, as he laid a rough hand
upon her arm; “unless you want to wake everybody in the place.”
“But, I say, deary, is it all over? Nothing unfair, you know. Remember
your promise.”
“All over? Yes; half an hour ago. If you hinder me here with your talk,
the girl will be back before we’re ready for her.”
“Let me come in and close his eyes, deary,” supplicated the old woman.
“His mother was my own child. Let me close his eyes.”
“Keep where you are, or I’ll strangle you!” growled her dutiful
grandson, as he shut the door upon his venerable relation, and left her
mumbling upon the threshold.
Jabez crept cautiously towards the bed on which his brother lay. Jim
at this moment awoke from his restless slumber; and, opening his eyes
to their widest extent, looked full at the man by his side. He made
no effort to speak, pointed to his lips, and, stretching out his hand
towards the bottles on the table, made signs to his brother. These
signs were a supplication for the cooling draught which always allayed
the burning beat of the fever.
Jabez never stirred. “He has awoke,” he murmured. “This is the crisis
of his life, and of my fate.”
The clocks of Slopperton chimed the quarter before eleven.
“It’s a black gulf, lass,” gasped the dying man; “and I’m fast sinking
into it.”
There was no friendly hand, Jim, to draw you back from that terrible
gulf. The medicine stood untouched upon the table; and, perhaps as
guilty as the first murderer, your twin brother stood by your bedside.
CHAPTER V.
MIDNIGHT BY THE SLOPPERTON CLOCKS.
THE clouds and the sky kept their promise, and as the clocks chimed the
quarter before twelve the storm broke over the steeples at Slopperton.
Blue lightning-flashes lit up Blind Peter, and attendant thunder-claps
shook him to his very foundation; while a violent shower of rain gave
him such a washing-down of every flagstone, chimney-pot, and doorstep,
as he did not often get. Slopperton in bed was almost afraid to go to
sleep; and Slopperton not in bed did not seem to care about going to
bed. Slopperton at supper was nervous as to handling of glittering
knives and steel forks; and Slopperton going to windows to look out
at the lightning was apt to withdraw hurriedly at the sight thereof.
Slopperton in general was depressed by the storm; thought there would
be mischief somewhere; and had a vague idea that something dreadful
would happen before the night was out.
In Dr. Tappenden’s quiet household there was consternation and alarm.
Mr. Jabez North, the principal assistant, had gone out early in the
evening, and had not returned at the appointed hour for shutting up
the house. This was such an unprecedented occurrence, that it had
occasioned considerable uneasiness--especially as Dr. Tappenden was
away from home, and Jabez was, in a manner, deputy-master of the
house. The young woman who looked after the gentlemen’s wardrobes had
taken compassion upon the housemaid, who sat up awaiting Mr. North’s
return, and had brought her workbox, and a lapful of young gentlemen’s
dilapidated socks, to the modest chamber in which the girl waited.
“I hope,” said the housemaid, “nothing ain’t happened to him through
the storm. I hope he hasn’t been getting under no trees.”
The housemaid had a fixed idea that to go under a tree in a
thunderstorm was to encounter immediate death.
“Poor dear young gentleman,” said the lady of the wardrobes; “I tremble
to think what can keep him out so. Such a steady young man; never known
to be a minute after time either. I’m sure every sound I hear makes me
expect to see him brought in on a shutter.”
“Don’t now, Miss Smithers!” cried the housemaid, looking behind her as
if she expected to see the ghost of Jabez North pointing to a red spot
on his left breast at the back of her chair. “I wish you wouldn’t now!
Oh, I hope he ain’t been murdered. There’s been such a many murders in
Slopperton since I can remember. It’s only three years and a half ago
since a man cut his wife’s throat down in Windmill Lane, because she
hadn’t put no salt in the saucepan when she boiled the greens.”
The frightful parallel between the woman who boiled the greens without
salt and Jabez North two hours after his time, struck such terror to
the hearts of the young women, that they were silent for some minutes,
during which they both looked uneasily at a thief in the candle which
neither of them had the courage to take out--their nerves not being
equal to the possible clicking of the snuffers.
“Poor young man!” said the housemaid, at last. “Do you know, Miss
Smithers, I can’t help thinking he has been rather low lately.”
Now this word “low” admits of several applications, so Miss Smithers
replied, rather indignantly,--
“Low, Sarah Anna! Not in his language, I’m sure. And as to his manners,
they’d be a credit to the nobleman that wrote the letters.”
“No, no, Miss Smithers; I mean his spirits. I’ve fancied lately he’s
been a fretting about something; perhaps he’s in love, poor dear.”
Miss Smithers coloured up. The conversation was getting interesting.
Mr. North had lent her _Rasselas_, which she thought a story of
thrilling interest; and she had kept his stockings and shirt buttons in
order for three years. Such things had happened; and Mrs. Jabez North
sounded more comfortable than Miss Smithers, at any rate.
“Perhaps,” said Sarah Anne, rather maliciously--“perhaps he’s been
forgetting his situation and giving way to thoughts of marrying our
young missus. She’s got a deal of money, you know, Miss Smithers,
though her figure ain’t much to look at.”
Sarah Anne’s figure was plenty to look at, having a tendency to break
out into luxuriance where you least expected it.
It was in vain that Sarah Anne or Miss Smithers speculated on the
probable causes of the usher’s absence. Midnight struck from the
Dutch clock in the kitchen, the eight-day clock on the staircase, the
timepiece in the drawing-room--a liberal and complicated piece of
machinery which always struck eighteen to the dozen--and eventually
from every clock in Slopperton; and yet there was no sign of Jabez
North.
No sign of Jabez North. A white face and a pair of glazed eyes staring
up at the sky, out on a dreary heath three miles from Slopperton,
exposed to the fury of a pitiless storm; a man lying alone on a
wretched mattress in a miserable apartment in Blind Peter--but no Jabez
North.
Through the heartless storm, dripping wet with the pelting rain,
the girl they have christened Sillikens hastens back to Blind Peter.
The feeble glimmer of the candle, with the drooping wick sputtering
in a pool of grease, is the only light which illumes that cheerless
neighbourhood. The girl’s heart beat; with a terrible flutter as she
approaches that light, for an agonizing doubt is in her soul about
that _other light_ which she left so feebly burning, and which
may be now extinct. But she takes courage; and pushing open the door,
which opposes neither bolts nor bars to any deluded votary of Mercury,
she enters the dimly-lighted room. The man lies with his face turned
to the wall; the old woman is seated by the hearth, on which a dull
and struggling flame is burning. She has on the table among the
medicine-bottles, another, which no doubt contains spirits, for she
has a broken teacup in her hand, from which ever and anon she sips
consolation, for it is evident she has been crying.
“Mother, how is he--how is he?” the girl asks, with a hurried notation
painful to witness, since it reveals how much she dreads the answer.
“Better, deary, better--Oh, ever so much better,” the old woman answers
in a crying voice, and with another application to the broken teacup.
“Better! thank Heaven!--thank Heaven!” and the girl, stealing softly to
the bedside, bends down and listens to the sick man’s breathing, which
is feeble, but regular.
“He seems very fast asleep, grandmother. Has he been sleeping all the
time?”
“Since when, deary?”
“Since I went out. Where’s the doctor?”
“Gone, deary. Oh, my blessed boy, to think that it should come to this,
and his dead mother was my only child! O dear, O dear!” And the old
woman burst out crying, only choking her sobs by the aid of the teacup.
“But he’s better, grandmother; perhaps he’ll get over it now. I always
said he would. Oh, I’m so glad--so glad.” The girl sat down in her wet
garments, of which she never once, thought, on the little stool by the
side of the bed. Presently the sick man turned round and opened his
eyes.
“You’ve been away a long time, lass,” he said.
Something in his voice, or in his way of speaking, she did not know
which, startled her; but she wound her arm round his neck, and said--
“Jim, my own dear Jim, the danger’s past. The black gulf you’ve been
looking down is closed for these many happy years to come, and maybe
the sun will shine on our wedding-day yet.”
“Maybe, lass--maybe. But tell me, what’s the time?”
“Never mind the time, Jim. Very late, and a very dreadful night; but
no matter for that! You’re better, Jim; and if the sun never shone upon
the earth again, I don’t think I should be able to be sorry, now you
are safe.”
“Are all the lights out in Blind Peter, lass?” he asked.
“All the lights out? Yes, Jim--these two hours. But why do you ask?”
“And in Slopperton did you meet many people, lass?”
“Not half-a-dozen in all the streets. Nobody would be out in such a
night, Jim, that could help it.”
He turned his face to the wall again, and seemed to sleep. The old
woman kept moaning and mumbling over the broken teacup,--
“To think that my blessed boy should come to this--on such a night too,
on such a night!”
The storm raged with unabated fury, and the rain pouring in at the
dilapidated door threatened to flood the room. Presently the sick man
raised his head a little way from the pillow.
“Lass,” he said, “could you get me a drop o’ wine? I think, if I could
drink a drop o’ wine, it would put some strength into me somehow.”
“Grandmother,” said the girl, “can I get him any? You’ve got some
money; it’s only just gone twelve; I can get in at the public-house. I
_will_ get in, if I knock them up, to get a drop o’ wine for Jim.”
The old woman fumbled among her rags and produced a sixpence, part of
the money given her from the slender purse of the benevolent Jabez, and
the girl hurried away to fetch the wine.
The public-house was called the Seven Stars; the seven stars being
represented on a signboard in such a manner as to bear rather a
striking resemblance to seven yellow hot-cross buns on a very blue
background. The landlady of the Seven Stars was putting her hair in
papers when the girl called Sillikens invaded the sanctity of her
private life. Why she underwent the pain and grief of curling her hair
for the admiration of such a neighbourhood as Blind Peter is one of
those enigmas of this dreary existence to solve which the Œdipus has
not yet appeared. I don’t suppose she much cared about suspending her
toilet, and opening her bar, for the purpose of selling sixpennyworth
of port wine; but when she heard it was for a sick man, she did not
grumble. The girl thanked her heartily, and hurried homewards with her
pitiful measure of wine.
Through the pitiless rain, and under the dark sky, it was almost
impossible to see your hand before you; but as Sillikens entered the
mouth of Blind Peter, a flash of lightning revealed to her the figure
of a man gliding with a soft step between the broken iron railings.
In the instantaneous glimpse she caught of him under the blue light,
something familiar in his face or form quickened the beating of her
heart, and made her turn to look back at him; but it was too dark for