The trail of the serpent
5, Little Gulliver Street, Kuppins, with a lighted candle, flew to open
it. How she threw her arms round Mr. Peters’s neck and kissed him--how
she left a lump of tallow in his hair, and a smell of burning in his
whiskers--how, in her excitement she blew the candle out--and how, by
a feat of leger-de-main, or leger-de-lungs, she blew it in again, must
have been seen to be sufficiently appreciated. Her next proceeding was
to drag Mr. Peters upstairs into the indoor Eden, which bore the very
same appearance it had done eight years ago. One almost expected to
find the red baby grown up--but it wasn’t; and that dreadful attack
of the mumps from which the infant had suffered when Mr. Peters first
became acquainted with it did not appear to have abated in the least.
Kuppins thrust the detective into his own particular chair, planted
herself in an opposite seat, put the candlestick on the table, snuffed
the candle, and then, with her eyes opened to the widest extent,
evidently awaited his saying something.
He did say something--in his own way, of course; the fingers went to
work. “I’ve d----” said the fingers.
“_’One_ it,” cried Kuppins, dreadfully excited by this time, “done
it! you’ve done it! Didn’t I always say you would? Didn’t I know you
would? Didn’t I always dream you would, three times running, and a
house on fire?--that meant the river; and an army of soldiers--that
meant the boat; and everybody in black clothes--meaning joy and
happiness. It’s come true; it’s all come out. Oh, I’m so happy!” In
proof of which Kuppins immediately commenced a series of evolutions
of the limbs and exercises of the human voice, popularly known in the
neighbourhood as strong hysterics--so strong, in fact, that Mr. Peters
couldn’t have held her still if he had tried. Perhaps that’s why he
didn’t try; but he looked about in every direction for something cold
to put down her back, and finding nothing handy but the poker, he
stirred her up with that in the neighbourhood of the spinal marrow, as
if she had been a bad fire; whereon she came to.
“And where’s the blessed boy?” she asked, presently.
Mr. Peters signified upon his fingers that the blessed boy was still
at the asylum, and that there he must remain till such time as he
should be able to leave without raising suspicion.
“And to think,” said Kuppins, “that we should have seen the
advertisement for a boy to wait upon poor Mr. Marwood; and to think
that we should have thought of sending our Slosh to take the situation;
and to think that he should have been so clever in helping you through
with it! Oh my!” As Kuppins here evinced a desire for a second edition
of the hysterics, Mr. Peters changed the conversation by looking
inquiringly towards a couple of saucepans on the fire.
“Tripe,” said Kuppins, answering the look, “and taters, floury ones;”
whereon she began to lay the supper-table. Kuppins was almost mistress
of the house now, for the elderly proprietress was a sufferer from
rheumatism, and kept to her room, enlivened by the society of a large
black cat, and such gossip as Kuppins collected about the neighbourhood
in the course of the day and retailed to her mistress in the evening.
So we leave Mr. Peters smoking his pipe and roasting his legs at his
own hearth, while Kuppins dishes the tripe and onions, and strips the
floury potatoes of their russet jackets.
Where all this time is the Emperor Napoleon?
There are two gentlemen pacing up and down the platform of the
Birmingham station, waiting for the 10 p.m. London express. One of them
is Mr. Augustus Darley; the other is a man wrapped in a greatcoat, who
has red hair and whiskers, and wears a pair of spectacles; but behind
these spectacles there are dark brown eyes, which scarcely match the
red hair, any better than the pale dark complexion agrees with the very
roseate hue of the whiskers. These two gentlemen have come across the
country from a little station a few miles from Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy.
“Well, Dick,” said Darley, “doesn’t this bring back old times, my boy?”
The red-haired gentleman, who was smoking a cigar, took it from his
mouth and clasped his companion by the hand, and said--
“It does, Gus, old fellow; and when I forget the share you’ve had in
to-day’s work, may I----may I go back to that place and eat out my own
heart, as I have done for eight years!”
There was something so very like a mist behind his spectacles, and such
an ominous thickness in his voice, as the red-haired gentleman said
this, that Gus proposed a glass of brandy before the train started.
“Come, Dick, old fellow, you’re quite womanish to-night, I declare.
This won’t do, you know. I shall have to knock up some of our old pals
and make a jolly night of it, when we get to London; though it will be
to-morrow morning if you go on in this way.”
“I’ll tell you what it is, Gus,” replied the red-haired gentleman,
“nobody who hadn’t gone through what I’ve gone through could tell
what I feel to-night. I think, Gus, I shall end by being mad in real
earnest; and that my release will do what my imprisonment even couldn’t
effect--turn my brain. But I say, Gus, tell me, tell me the truth; did
any of the old fellows--did they ever think me guilty?”
“Not one of them, Dick, not one; and I know if one of them had so much
as hinted at such a thought, the others would have throttled him before
he could have said the words. Have another drop of brandy,” he said
hastily, thrusting the glass into his hand; “you’ve no more pluck than
a kitten or a woman, Dick.”
“I had pluck enough to bear eight years of that,” said the young man,
pointing in the direction of Slopperton, “but this does rather knock me
over. My mother, you’ll write to her, Gus--the sight of my hand might
upset her, without a word of warning--you’ll write and tell her that
I’ve got a chance of escaping; and then you’ll write and say that I
have escaped. We must guard against a shock, Gus; she has suffered too
much already on my account.”
At this moment the bell rang for the train’s starting: the young men
took their seats in a second-class carriage; and away sped the engine,
out through the dingy manufacturing town, into the open moonlit country.
Gus and Richard light their cigars, and wrap themselves in their
railway rugs. Gus throws himself back and drops off to sleep (he can
almost smoke in his sleep), and in a quarter of an hour he is dreaming
of a fidgety patient who doesn’t like comic songs, and who can never
see the point of a joke; but who has three pretty daughters, and who
pays his bill every Christmas without even looking at the items.
But Richard Marwood doesn’t go to sleep. Will he ever sleep again? Will
his nerves ever regain their tranquillity, after the intense excitement
of the last three or four days? He looks back--looks back at that
hideous time, and wonders at its hopeless suffering--wonders till he is
obliged to wrench his mind away from the subject, for fear he should go
mad. How did he ever endure it? How did he ever live through it? He had
no means of suicide? Pshaw! he might have dashed out his brains against
the wall. He might have resolutely refused food, and so have starved
himself to death. How did he endure it. Eight years! Eight centuries!
and every hour a fresh age of anguish! Looking back now, he knows,
what then he did not know, that at the worst--that in his bitterest
despair, there was a vague undefined something, so vague and undefined
that he did not recognise it for itself--a glimmering ray of hope, by
the aid of which alone he bore the dreadful burden of his days; and
with clasped hands and bent head he renders up to that God from whose
pity came this distant light a thanksgiving, which perhaps is not the
less sincere and heartfelt for a hundred reckless words, said long ago,
which rise up now in his mind a shame and a reproach.
Perhaps it was such a trial as this that Richard Marwood wanted, to
make him a good and earnest man. Something to awaken dormant energies;
something to arouse the better feelings of a noble soul, to stimulate
to action an intellect hitherto wasted; something to throw him back
upon the God he had forgotten, and to make him ultimately that which
God, in creating such a man, meant him to become.
Away flies the engine. Was there ever such an open country? Was there
ever such a moonlight night? Was earth ever so fair, or the heavens
ever so bright, since man’s universe was created? Not for Richard! He
is free; free to breathe that blessed air; to walk that glorious earth;
free to track to his doom the murderer of his uncle.
In the dead of the night the express train rattles into the Euston
Square station; Richard and Gus spring out, and jump into a cab. Even
smoky London, asleep under the moonlight, is beautiful in the eyes of
Daredevil Dick, as they rattle through the deserted streets on the way
to their destination.
CHAPTER V.
THE CHEROKEES TAKE AN OATH.
THE cab stops in a narrow street in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane,
before the door of a small public-house, which announces itself, in
tarnished gilt letters on a dirty board, as “The Cherokee, by Jim
Stilson.” Jim Stilson is a very distinguished professor of the noble
art of self-defence; and (in consequence of a peculiar playful knack
he has with his dexter fist) is better known to his friends and the
general public as the Left-handed Smasher.
Of course, at this hour of the night, the respectable hostelry is
wrapped in that repose which befits the house of a landlord who puts
up his shutters and locks his door as punctually as the clocks of St.
Mary-le-Strand and St. Clement Danes strike the midnight hour. There
is not so much as the faintest glimmer of a rushlight in one of the
upper windows; but for all that, Richard and Darley alight, and having
dismissed the cab, Gus looks up and down the street to see that it
is clear, puts his lips to the keyhole of the door of Mr. Stilson’s
hostelry, and gives an excellent imitation of the feeble miaow of an
invalid member of the feline species.
Perhaps the Left-handed Smasher is tender-hearted, and nourishes
an affection for distressed grimalkins; for the door is softly
opened--just wide enough to admit Richard and his friend.
The person who opens the door is a young lady, who has apparently
been surprised in the act of putting her hair in curl-papers, as
she hurriedly thrusts her brush and comb in among the biscuits and
meat-pies in a corner of the bar. She is evidently very sleepy, and
rather inclined to yawn in Mr. Augustus Darley’s face; but as soon as
they are safe inside, she fastens the door and resumes her station
behind the bar. There is only one gas-lamp alight, and it is rather
difficult to believe that the gentleman seated in the easy-chair
before an expiring fire in the bar-parlour, his noble head covered
with a red cotton bandanna, is neither more nor less than the immortal
Left-handed one; but he snores loud enough for the whole prize-ring,
and the nervous listener is inclined to wish that he had made a point
of clearing his head before he went to sleep.
“Well, Sophia Maria,” says Mr. Darley, “are they all up there?”
pointing in the direction of a door that leads to the stairs.
“Most every one of ’em, sir; there’s no getting ’em to break up, nohow.
Mr. Splitters has been and wrote a drama for the Victoria Theayter, and
they’ve been a-chaffing of him awful because there’s fifteen murders,
and four low-comedy servants that all say, ‘No you don’t,’ in it. The
guv’nor had to go up just now, and talk to ’em, for they was a throwin’
quart pots at each other, playful.”
“Then I’ll run up, and speak to them for a minute,” said Gus. “Come
along, Dick.”