The trail of the serpent
an onslaught on Mr. Peters’s cup of steaming tea, but scalding his
hands therewith, withdrew to the bosom of Kuppins, and gave vent to his
indignation in loud screams, which the detective said made the gardens
quite lively. After the two teas, Mr. Peters, attended by Kuppins and
the infant, strolled round the gardens, and peered into the arbours,
very few of which were tenanted this week-day afternoon. The detective
indulged in a gambling speculation with some wonderful machine, the
distinguishing features of which were numbers and Barcelona nuts; and
by the aid of which you might lose as much as threepence half-penny
before you knew where you were, while you could not by any possibility
win anything. There was also a bowling-green, and a swing, which
Kuppins essayed to mount, and which repudiated that young lady, by
precipitating her forward on her face at the first start.
Having exhausted the mild dissipations of the gardens, Mr. Peters
and Kuppins returned to their bower, where the gentleman sat smoking
his clay pipe, and contemplating the infant, with a perfect serenity
and calm enjoyment delightful to witness. But there was more on Mr.
Peters’s mind that summer’s evening than the infant. He was thinking of
the trial of Richard Marwood, and the part he had taken in that trial
by means of the dirty alphabet; he was thinking, perhaps, of the fate
of Richard--poor unlucky Richard, a hopeless and incurable lunatic,
imprisoned for life in a dreary asylum, and comforting himself in that
wretched place by wild fancies of imaginary greatness. Presently Mr.
Peters, with a preparatory snap of his fingers, asks Kuppins if she can
“call to mind that there story of the lion and the mouse.”
Kuppins _can_ call it to mind, and proceeds to narrate with
volubility, how a lion, once having rendered a service to a mouse,
found himself caught in a great net, and in need of a friend; how this
insignificant mouse had, by sheer industry and perseverance, effected
the escape of the mighty lion. Whether they lived happy ever afterwards
Kuppins couldn’t say, but had no doubt they did; that being the
legitimate conclusion of every legend, in this young lady’s opinion.
Mr. Peters scratched his head violently during this story, to which he
listened with his mouth very much round the corner; and when it was
finished he fell into a reverie that lasted till the distant Slopperton
clocks chimed the quarter before eight--at which time he laid down his
pipe, and departed to prepare Mr. Vorkins’s trap for the journey home.
Perhaps of the two journeys, the journey home was almost the more
pleasant. It seemed to Kuppins’s young imagination as if Mr. Peters was
bent on driving Mr. Vorkins’s trap straight into the sinking sun, which
was going down in a sea of crimson behind a ridge of purple heath.
Slopperton was yet invisible, except as a dark cloud on the purple sky.
This road across the heath was very lonely on every evening except
Sunday, and the little party only met one group of haymakers returning
from their work, and one stout farmer’s wife, laden with groceries,
hastening home from Slopperton. It was a still evening, and not a sound
rose upon the clear air, except the last song of a bird or the chirping
of a grasshopper. Perhaps, if Kuppins had been with anybody else, she
might have been frightened for Kuppins had a confused idea that such
appearances as highwaymen and ghosts are common to the vesper hour;
but in the company of Mr. Peters, Kuppins would have fearlessly met a
regiment of highwaymen, or a churchyard full of ghosts: for was he not
the law and the police in person, under whose shadow there could be no
fear?
Mr. Vorkins’s trap was fast gaining on the sinking sun, when Mr. Peters
drew up, and paused irresolutely between two roads. These diverging
roads met at a point a little further on, and the Sunday afternoon
pleasure-seekers crossing the heath took sometimes one, sometimes the
other; but the road to the left was the least frequented, being the
narrower and more hilly, and this road Mr. Peters took, still driving
towards the dark line behind which the red sun was going down.
The broken ground of the heath was all a-glow with the warm crimson
light; a dissipated skylark and an early nightingale were singing
a duet, to which the grasshoppers seemed to listen with suspended
chirpings; a frog of an apparently fretful disposition was keeping up
a captious croak in a ditch by the tide of the road; and beyond these
voices there seemed to be no sound beneath the sky. The peaceful
landscape and the tranquil evening shed a benign influence upon
Kuppins, and awakened the dormant poetry in that young lady’s breast.
“Lor’, Mr. Peters,” she said, “it’s hard to think in such a place as
this, that gents of your perfession should be wanted. I do think now,
if I was ever led to feel to want to take and murder somebody, which
I hopes ain’t likely--knowin’ my duty to my neighbour better--I do
think, somehow, this evening would come back to my mind, and I should
hear them birds a-singing, and see that there sun a-sinking, till I
shouldn’t be able to do it, somehow.”
Mr. Peters shakes his head dubiously: he is a benevolent man and a
philanthropist; but he doesn’t like his profession run down, and a
murder and bread-and-cheese are inseparable things in his mind.
“And, do you know,” continued Kuppins, “it seems to me as if, when this
world is so beautiful and quiet, it’s quite hard to think there’s one
wicked person in it to cast a shadow on its peace.”
As Kuppins said this, she and Mr. Peters were startled by a shadow
which came between them and the sinking sun--a distorted shadow thrown
across the narrow road from the sharp outline of the figure of a man
lying upon a hillock a little way above them. Now, there is not much
to alarm the most timid person in the sight of a man asleep upon a
summer’s evening among heath and wild flowers; but something in this
man’s appearance startled Kuppins, who drew nearer to Mr. Peters, and
held the “fondling,” now fast asleep and muffled in a shawl, closer to
her bosom. The man was lying on his back, with his face upturned to
the evening sky, and his arms straight down at his sides. The sound
of the wheels of Mr. Vorkins’s trap did not awaken him; and even when
Mr. Peters drew up with a sudden jerk, the sleeping man did not raise
his head. Now, I don’t know why Mr. Peters should stop, or why either
he or Kuppins should feel any curiosity about this sleeping man; but
they certainly did feel considerable curiosity. He was dressed rather
shabbily, but still like a gentleman; and it was perhaps a strange
thing for a gentleman to be sleeping so soundly in such a lonely spot
as this. Then again, there was something in his attitude--a want of
ease, a certain stiffness, which had a strange effect upon both Kuppins
and Mr. Peters.
“I wish he’d move,” said Kuppins; “he looks so awful quiet, lying there
all so lonesome.”
“Call to him, my girl,” said Mr. Peters with his fingers.
Kuppins essayed a loud “Hilloa,” but it was a dismal failure, on which
Mr. Peters gave a long shrill whistle, which must surely have disturbed
the peaceful dreams of the seven sleepers, though it might not have
awakened them. The man on the hillock never stirred. The pony, taking
advantage of the halt, drew nearer to the heath and began to crop the
short grass by the road-side, thus bringing Mr. Yorkins’s trap a little
nearer the sleeper.
“Get down, lass,” said the fingers of the detective; “get down, my
lass, and have a look at him, for I can’t leave this ’ere pony.”
Kuppins looked at Mr. Peters; and Mr. Peters looked at Kuppins, as much
as to say, “Well, what then?” So Kuppins to whom the laws of the Medes
and Persians would have been mild compared to the word of Mr. Peters,
surrendered the infant to his care, and descending from the trap,
mounted the hillock, and looked at the still reclining figure.
She did not look long, but returning rapidly to Mr. Peters, took hold
of his arm, and said--
“I don’t think he’s asleep--leastways, his eyes is open; but he don’t
look as if he could see anything, somehow. He’s got a little bottle in
his hand.”
Why Kuppins should keep so tight a hold on Mr. Peters’s arm while she
said this it is difficult to tell; but she did clutch his coat-sleeve
very tightly, looking back while she spoke with her white face turned
towards that whiter face under the evening sky.
Mr. Peters jumped quickly from the trap, tied the elderly pony to a
furze-bush, mounted the hillock, and proceeded to inspect the sleeping
figure. The pale set face, and the fixed blue eyes, looked up at the
crimson light melting into the purple shadows of the evening sky, but
never more would earthly sunlight or shadow, or night or morning, or
storm or calm, be of any account to that quiet figure lying on the
heath. Why the man was there, or how he had come there, was a part of
the great mystery under the darkness of which he lay; and that mystery
was Death! He had died apparently by poison administered by his own
hand; for on the grass by his side there was a little empty bottle
labelled “Opium,” on which his fingers lay, not clasping it, but lying
as if they had fallen over it. His clothes were soaked through with
wet, so that he must in all probability have lain in that place through
the storm of the previous night. A silver watch was in the pocket
of his waistcoat, which Mr. Peters found, on looking at it, to have
stopped at ten o’clock--ten o’clock of the night before, most likely.
His hat had fallen off, and lay at a little distance, and his curling
light hair hung in wet ringlets over his high forehead. His face was
handsome, the features well chiselled, but the cheeks were sunken and
hollow, making the large blue eyes seem larger.
Mr. Peters, in examining the pockets of the suicide, found no clue to
his identity; a handkerchief, a little silver, a few half-pence, a
penknife wrapped in a leaf torn out of a Latin Grammar, were the sole
contents.
The detective reflected for a few moments, with his mouth on one
side, and then, mounting the highest hillock near, looked over the
surrounding country. He presently descried a group of haymakers at
a little distance, whom he signalled with a loud whistle. To them,
through Kuppins as interpreter, he gave his directions; and two of the
tallest and strongest of the men took the body by the head and feet and
carried it between them, with Kuppins’s shawl spread over the still
white face. They were two miles from Slopperton, and those two miles
were by no means pleasant to Kuppins, seated in Mr. Vorkins’s trap,
which Mr. Peters drove slowly, so as to keep pace with the two men and
their ghastly burden. Kuppins’s shawl, which of course would never be
any use as a shawl again, was no good to conceal the sharp outline of
the face it covered; for Kuppins had seen those blue eyes, and once
to see was always to see them as she thought. The dreary journey came
at last to a dreary end at the police-office, where the men deposited
their dreadful load, and being paid for their trouble, departed
rejoicing. Mr. Peters was busy enough for the next half-hour giving an
account of the finding of the body, and issuing handbills of “Found
dead, &c.”
Kuppins and the “fondling” returned to Little Gulliver Street, and if
ever there had been a heroine in that street, that heroine was Kuppins.
People came from three streets off to see her, and to hear the story,
which she told so often that she came at last to tell it mechanically,
and to render it slightly obscure by the vagueness of her punctuation.
Anything in the way of supper that Kuppins would accept, and two or
three dozen suppers if Kuppins would condescend to partake of them,