The trail of the serpent
her to see more than the indistinct figure of a man hurrying away in
the direction of Slopperton. Wondering who could be leaving Blind Peter
on such a night and at such an hour, she hastened back to carry her
lover the wine.
The old woman still sat before the hearth. The sputtering candle had
gone out, and the light from the miserable little fire only revealed
the dark outlines of the wretched furniture and the figure of Jim’s
grandmother, looking, as she sat mumbling over the broken teacup, like
a wicked witch performing an incantation over a portable cauldron.
The girl hurried to the bedside--the sick man was not there.
“Grandmother! Jim--Jim! Where is he?” she asked, in an alarmed voice;
for the figure she had met hurrying through the storm flashed upon her
with a strange distinctness. “Jim! Grandmother! tell me where he is, or
I shall go mad! Not gone--not gone out on such a night as this, and in
a burning fever?”
“Yes, lass, he’s gone. My precious boy, my darling boy. His dead
mother was my only child, and he’s gone for ever and ever, and on this
dreadful night. I’m a miserable old woman.”
No other explanation than this, no other words than these, chattered
and muttered again and again, could the wretched girl extort from the
old woman, who, half imbecile and more than half tipsy, sat grinning
and grunting over the teacup till she fell asleep in a heap on the cold
damp hearth, still hugging the empty teacup, and still muttering, even
in her sleep,--
“His dead mother was my only child; and it’s very cruel it should come
to this at last, and on such a night.”
CHAPTER VI.
THE QUIET FIGURE ON THE HEATH.
THE morning after the storm broke bright and clear, promising a hot
summer’s day, but also promising a pleasant breeze to counterbalance
the heat of the sun. This was the legacy of the storm, which, dying
out about three o’clock, after no purposeless fury, had left behind
it a better and purer air in place of the sultry atmosphere which had
heralded its coming.
Mr. Joseph Peters, seated at breakfast this morning, attended by
Kuppins nursing the “fondling,” has a great deal to say by means of the
dirty alphabet (greasy from the effects of matutinal bacon) about last
night’s storm. Kuppins has in nowise altered since we last saw her,
and four months have made no change in the inscrutable physiognomy of
the silent detective; but four months have made a difference in the
“fondling,” now familiarly known as “baby.” Baby is short-coated; baby
takes notice. This accomplishment of taking notice appears to consist
chiefly in snatching at every article within its reach, from Kuppins’s
luxuriant locks to the hot bowl of Mr. Peters’s pipe. Baby also is
possessed of a marvellous pair of shoes, which are alternately in his
mouth, under the fender, and upon his feet--to say nothing of their
occasionally finding their way out of the window, on to the dust-heap,
and into divers other domestic recesses too numerous to mention. Baby
is also possessed of a cap with frills, which it is Kuppins’s delight
to small-plait, and the delight of baby to demolish. Baby is devotedly
attached to Kuppins, and evinces his affection by such pleasing
demonstrations as poking his fists down her throat, hanging on to
her nose, pushing a tobacco-pipe up her nostrils, and other equally
gratifying proofs of infantine regard. Baby is, in short, a wonderful
child; and the eye of Mr. Peters at breakfast wanders from his bacon
and his watercresses to his young adopted, with a look of pride he does
not attempt to conceal.
Mr. Peters has risen in his profession since last February. He has
assisted at the discovery of two or three robberies, and has evinced
on those occasions such a degree of tact, triumphing so completely
over the difficulties he labours under from his infirmity, as to have
won for himself a better place in the police force of Slopperton--and
of course a better salary. But business has been dull lately, and Mr.
Joseph Peters, who is ambitious, has found no proper field for his
abilities as yet.
“I should like an iron-safe case, a regular out-and-out burglary,” he
muses, “or a good forgery, say to the tune of a thousand or so. Or a
bit of bigamy; that would be something new. But a jolly good poisoning
case might make my fortune. If that there little ’un was growed up,” he
mentally ejaculated, as Kuppins’s charge gave an unusually loud scream,
“his lungs might be a fortune to me. Lord,” he continued, waxing
metaphysical, “I don’t look upon that hinfant as a hinfant, I looks
upon him as a voice.”
The “voice” was a very powerful one just at this moment; for in an
interval of affectionate weakness Kuppins had regaled the “fondling”
on the rind of Mr. Peters’s rasher, which, not harmonizing with the
limited development of his swallowing apparatus, had brought out the
purple tints in his complexion with alarming violence.
For a long time Mr. Peters mused, and at last, after signalling
Kuppins, as was his wont on commencing a conversation, with a loud snap
of his finger and thumb, he began thus:
“There’s a case of shop-lifting at Halford’s Heath, and I’ve got to go
over and look up some evidence in the village. I’ll tell you what I’ll
do with you; I’ll take you and baby over in Vorkins’s trap--he said as
how he’d lend it me whenever I liked to ask him for the loan of it; and
I’ll stand treat to the Rosebush tea-gardens.”
Never had the dirty alphabet fashioned such sweet words. A drive in
Mr. Vorkins’s trap, and the Rosebush tea-gardens! If Kuppins had been
a fairy changeling, and had awoke one morning to find herself a queen,
I don’t think she would have chosen any higher delight wherewith to
celebrate her accession to the throne.
Kuppins had, during the few months of Mr. Peters’s residence in the
indoor Eden of No. 5, Little Gulliver Street, won a very high place in
that gentleman’s regards. The elderly proprietress of the Eden was as
nothing in the eyes of Mr. Peters when compared with Kuppins. It was
Kuppins whom he consulted when giving his orders for dinner; Kuppins,
whose eye he knew to be infallible as regarded a chop, either mutton
or pork; whose finger was as the finger of Fate in the matter of hard
or soft-roed herrings. It was by Kuppins’s advice he purchased some
mysterious garment for the baby, or some prodigious wonder in the shape
of a bandanna or a neck-handkerchief for himself; and this tea-garden
treat he had long contemplated as a fitting reward for the fidelity of
his handmaiden.
Mr. Vorkins was one of the officials of the police force, and Mr.
Vorkins’s trap was a happy combination of the cart of a vender of
feline provisions and the gig of a fast young man of half a century
gone by--that is to say, it partook of the disadvantages of each,
without possessing the capabilities of either: but Mr. Peters looked
at it with respect, and in the eye of Kuppins it was a gorgeous and
fashionable vehicle, which the most distinguished member of the peerage
might have driven along the Lady’s Mile, at six o’clock on a midsummer
afternoon, with pride and delight.
At two o’clock on this June afternoon, behold Mr. Vorkins’s trap at the
door of No. 5, Little Gulliver Street, with Kuppins in a miraculous
bonnet, and baby in a wonderful hat, seated therein. Mr. Peters,
standing on the pavement, contemplated the appointments of the equipage
with some sense of pride, and the juvenile population of the street
hovered around, absorbed in admiration of the turn-out.
“Mind your bonnet don’t make the wehicle top-heavy, miss,” said one
youthful votary of the renowned Joe Miller; “it’s big enough, anyways.”
Miss Kuppins (she was Miss Kuppins in her Sunday costume) flung a
Parthian glance at the young barbarian, and drew down a green veil,
which, next to the “fondling,” was the pride of her heart. Mr. Peters,
armed with a formidable whip, mounted to his seat by her side, and away
drove the trap, leaving the juvenile population aforesaid venting its
envy in the explosion of a perfect artillery of _jeux de mots_.
Mr. Vorkins’s trap was as a fairy vehicle to Kuppins, and Mr.
Vorkins’s elderly pony an enchanted quadruped, under the strokes of
whose winged hoofs Slopperton flew away like a smoky dream, and was
no more seen--an enchanted quadruped, by whose means the Slopperton
suburbs of unfinished houses, scaffolding, barren ground for sale in
building lots, ugly lean streets, and inky river, all melted into the
distance, giving place to a road that intersected a broad heath, in the
undulations of which lay fairy pools of blue water, in whose crystal
depths the good people might have admired their tiny beauties as in
a mirror. Indeed, it was pleasant to ride in Mr. Vorkins’s jingling
trap through the pure country air, scented with the odours of distant
bean-fields, and, looking back, to see the smoke of Sloppertonian
chimneys a mere black daub on the blue sky, and to be led almost to
wonder how, on the face of such a fair and lovely earth, so dark a blot
as Slopperton could be.
The Rosebush tea-gardens were a favourite resort of Slopperton on a
Sunday afternoon; and many teachers there were in that great city who
did not hesitate to say that the rosebushes of those gardens were
shrubs planted by his Satanic Majesty, and that the winding road
over Halford’s Heath, though to the ignorant eye bordered by bright
blue streams and sweet-smelling wild flowers, lay in reality between
two lakes of fire and brimstone. Some gentlemen, however, dared to
say--gentlemen who wore white neckcloths too, and were familiar and
welcome in the dwellings of the poor--that Slopperton might go to
more wicked places than Rosebush gardens, and might possibly be led
into more evil courses than the consumption of tea and watercresses
at ninepence a-head. But in spite of all differences of opinion, the
Rosebush gardens prospered, and Rosebush tea and bread-and-butter were
pleasant in the mouth of Slopperton.
Mr. Peters deposited his fair young companion, with the baby in her
arms, at the gate of the gardens--after having authorized her to order
two teas, and to choose an arbour--and walked off himself into the
village of Halford to transact his official business.
The ordering of the teas and the choosing of the arbour were a labour
of love with the fair Kuppins. She selected a rustic retreat, over
which the luxuriant tendrils of a hop-vine fell like a thick green
curtain. It was a sight to see Kuppins skirmishing with the earwigs
and spiders in their sylvan bower, and ultimately routing those
insects from the nests of their fathers. Mr. Peters returned from
the village in about an hour, hot and dusty, but triumphant as to
the issue of the business he had come about, and with an inordinate
thirst for tea at ninepence a-head. I don’t know whether Rosebush
gardens made much out of the two teas at ninepence, but I know the
bread-and-butter and watercresses disappeared by the aid of the
detective and his fair companion as if by magic. It was pleasant to
watch the “fondling” during this humble _fête champêtre_. He
had been brought up by hand, which would be better expressed as by
_spoon_, and had been fed on every variety of comestible, from
pap and farinaceous food to beef-steaks and onions and the soft roes
of red herrings--to say nothing of sugar-sticks, bacon rinds, and the
claws of shell-fish; he therefore, immediately upon the appearance
of the two teas, laid violent hands on a bunch of watercresses and
a slice of bread-and-butter, wiping the buttered side upon his
face--so as to give himself the appearance of an infant in a violent
perspiration--preparatory to its leisurely consumption. He also made