The trail of the serpent
words. If a cove offends me, I give him my left between his eyes,
playful; if he does it agen, I give him my left agen, with a meanin’,
and he don’t repeat it. If a gent as I like does me proud, I feels
grateful, and when I has a chance I shows him my gratitude. Mr. Richard
Marwood, I’m your friend to the last spoonful of my claret; and let the
man as murdered your uncle keep clear of my left mawley, if he wants to
preserve his beauty.”
CHAPTER VI.
MR. PETERS RELATES HOW HE THOUGHT HE HAD A CLUE, AND HOW HE LOST IT.
A WEEK after the meeting of the Cherokees Richard Marwood received his
mother, in a small furnished house he had taken in Spring Gardens. Mrs.
Marwood, possessed of the entire fortune of her murdered brother, was
a very rich woman. Of her large income she had, during the eight years
of her son’s imprisonment, spent scarcely anything; as, encouraged by
Mr. Joseph Peters’s mysterious hints and vague promises, she had looked
forward to the deliverance of her beloved and only child. The hour had
come. She held him in her arms again, free.
“No, mother, no,” he says, “not free. Free from the prison walls, but
not free from the stain of the false accusation. Not till the hour
when all England declares my innocence shall I be indeed a free man.
Why, look you, mother, I cannot go out of this room into yonder street
without such a disguise as a murderer himself might wear, for fear
some Slopperton official should recognise the features of the lunatic
criminal, and send me back to my cell at the asylum.”
“My darling boy,” she lays her hands upon his shoulders, and looks
proudly into his handsome face, “my darling boy, these people at
Slopperton think you dead. See,” she touched her black dress as she
spoke, “it is for you I wear this. A painful deception, Richard, even
for such an object. I cannot bear to think of that river, and of what
might have been.”
“Dear mother, I have been saved, perhaps, that I may make some
atonement for that reckless, wicked past.”
“Only reckless, Richard; never wicked. You had always the same noble
heart, always the same generous soul; you were always my dear and only
son.”
“You remember what the young man says in the play, mother, when he gets
into a scrape through neglecting his garden and making love to his
master’s daughter--‘You shall be proud of your son yet.’”
“I _shall_ be proud of you, Richard. I am proud of you. We are
rich; and wealth is power. Justice shall be done you yet, my darling
boy. You have friends----”
“Yes, mother, good and true ones. Peters--you brought him with you?”
“Yes; I persuaded him to resign his situation. I have settled a hundred
a year on him for life--a poor return for what he has done, Richard;
but it was all I could induce him to accept, and he only agreed to take
that on condition that every moment of his life should be devoted to
your service.”
“Is he in the house now, mother?”
“Yes, he is below; I will ring for him.”
“Do, mother. I must go over to Darley, and take him with me. You must
not think me an inattentive or neglectful son; but remember that my
life has but one business till that man is found.”
He wrung her hand, and left her standing at the window watching his
receding figure through the quiet dusky street.
Her gratitude to Heaven for his restoration is deep and heartfelt;
but there is a shade of sadness in her face as she looks out into the
twilight after him, and thinks of the eight wasted years of his youth,
and of his bright manhood now spent on a chimera; for she thinks he
will never find the murderer of his uncle. How, after eight years,
without one clue by which to trace him, how can he hope to track the
real criminal?
But Heaven is above us all, Agnes Marwood; and in the dark and winding
paths of life light sometimes comes when and whence we least expect it.
If you go straight across Blackfriars Bridge, and do not suffer
yourself to be beguiled either by the attractions of that fashionable
transpontine lounge, the “New Cut,” or by the eloquence of the last
celebrity at that circular chapel some time sacred to Rowland Hill--if
you are not a man to be led away by whelks and other piscatorial
delicacies, second-hand furniture, birds and bird-cages, or easy
shaving, you may ultimately reach, at the inland end of the road, a
locality known to the inhabitants of the district of Friar Street.
Whether, in any dark period of our ecclesiastical history, the members
of the mother church were ever reduced to the necessity of living in
this neighbourhood I am not prepared to say. But if ever any of the
magnates of the Catholic faith did hang out in this direction, it is
to be hoped that the odours from the soapboiler’s round the corner,
the rich essences from the tallow manufactory over the way, the varied
perfumes from the establishment of the gentleman who does a thousand
pounds a week in size, to say nothing of such minor and domestic
effluvia as are represented by an amalgamation of red herrings, damp
corduroy, old boots, onions, washing, a chimney on fire, dead cats,
bad eggs, and an open drain or two--it is to be hoped, I say, that
these conflicting scents did not pervade the breezes of Friar Street so
strongly in the good old times as they do in these our later days of
luxury and refinement.
Mr. Darley’s establishment, ordinarily spoken of as _the_ surgery
_par excellence_, was perhaps one of the most pretending features
of the street. It asserted itself, in fact, with such a redundancy
of gilt letters and gas burners, that it seemed to say, “Really now,
you must be ill; or if you’re not, you ought to be.” It was not a
very large house, this establishment of Mr. Darley’s, but there were
at least half-a-dozen bells on the doorpost. There was Surgery; then
there was Day and Night (Gus wanted to have Morning and Afternoon,
but somebody told him it wasn’t professional); then there was besides
surgery, day, and night bells, another brilliant brass knob, inscribed
“Visitors,” and a ditto, whereon was engraved “Shop.” Though, as there
was only one small back-parlour beyond the shop into which visitors
ever penetrated, and as it was the custom for all such visitors to walk
straight through the aforesaid shop into the aforesaid parlour without
availing themselves of any bell whatever, the brass knobs were looked
upon rather in the light of a conventionality than a convenience.
But Gus said they looked like business, especially when they were
clean, which wasn’t always, as a couple of American gentlemen, friends
of Darley’s, were in the habit of squirting tobacco-juice at them from
the other side of the way, in the dusky twilight; the man who hit the
brass oftenest out of six times to be the winner, and the loser to
stand beer all the evening--that is to say, until some indefinite time
on the following morning, for Darley’s parties seldom broke up very
early; and to let the visitors out and take the morning milk in was
often a simultaneous proceeding in the household of our young surgeon.
If he had been a surgeon only, he would surely have been a Sir Benjamin
Brodie; for when it is taken into account that he could play the piano,
organ, guitar, and violoncello, without having learned any of those
instruments; that he could write a song, and compose the melody to it;
that he could draw horses and dogs after Herring and Landseer; make
more puns in one sentence than any burlesque writer living; make love
to half-a-dozen women at once, and be believed by every one of them;
sing a comic song, or tell a funny story; name the winner of the Derby
safer than any prophet on that side of the water; and make his book for
the Leger with one hand while he wrote a prescription with the other;
the discriminating reader will allow that there was a good deal of some
sort of talent or other in the composition of Mr. Augustus Darley.
In the twilight of this particular autumn evening he is busily engaged
putting up a heap of little packets labelled “Best Epsom Salts,” while
his assistant, a very small youth, of a far more elderly appearance
than his master, lights the gas. The half-glass door that communicates
with the little back parlour is ajar, and Gus is talking to some one
within.
“If I go over the water to-night, Bell--” he says.
A feminine voice from within interrupts him--“But you won’t go
to-night, Gus; the last time you went to that horrid Smasher’s, Mrs.
Tompkins’s little boy was ill, and they sent into the London Road
for Mr. Parker. And you are such a favourite with everybody, dear,
that they say if you’d only stay at home always, you’d have the best
practice in the neighbourhood.”
“But, Bell, how can a fellow stay at home night after night, and
perhaps half his time only sell a penn’orth of salts or a poor man’s
plaster? If they’d be ill,” he added, almost savagely, “I wouldn’t mind
stopping in; there’s some interest in that. Or if they’d come and have
their teeth drawn; but they never will: and I’m sure I sell ’em our
Infallible Anti-toothache Tincture; and if that don’t make ’em have
their teeth out, nothing will.”
“Come and have your tea, Gus; and tell Snix to bring his basin.”
Snix was the boy, who forthwith drew from a cupboard under the counter
the identical basin into which, when a drunken man was brought into the
shop, Gus usually bled him, with a double view of obtaining practice in
his art and bringing the patient back to consciousness.
The feminine occupant of the parlour is a young lady with dark hair and
grey eyes, and something under twenty years of age. She is Augustus
Darley’s only sister; she keeps his house, and in an emergency she
can make up a prescription--nay, has been known to draw a juvenile
patient’s first tooth, and give him his money back after the operation
for the purchase of consolatory sweetstuffs.
Perhaps Isabel Darley is just a little what very prim young
ladies, who have never passed the confines of the boarding-school
or the drawing-room, might call “fast.” But when it is taken into
consideration that she was left an orphan at an early age, that
she never went to school in her life, and that she has for a very
considerable period been in the habit of associating with her brother’s
friends, chiefly members of the Cherokee Society, it is not so much to
be wondered at that she is a little more masculine in her attainments,
and “go-ahead” in her opinions, than some others of her sex.
The parlour is small, as has before been stated. One of the Cherokees
has been known to suggest, when there were several visitors present
and the time arrived for their departure, that they should be taken
out singly with a corkscrew. Other Cherokees, arriving after the room
had been filled with visitors, had been heard to advise that somebody
should go in first with a candle, to ascertain whether vitality could
be sustained in the atmosphere. Perhaps the accommodation was not
extended by the character of the furniture, which consisted of a
cottage piano, a chair for the purposes of dental surgery, a small
Corinthian column supporting a basin with a metal plug and chain
useful for like purposes; also a violoncello in the corner, a hanging
bookshelf--(which was a torture to tall Cherokees, as one touch from
a manly head would tilt down the shelves and shower the contents
of Mr. Darley’s library on the head in question, like a literary
waterfall)--and a good-sized sofa, with that unmistakable well, and
hard back and arms, which distinguish the genus sofa-bedstead. Of
course tables, chairs, china ornaments, a plaster-of-Paris bust here
and there, caricatures on the walls, a lamp that wouldn’t burn, and a
patent arrangement for the manufacture of toasted cheese, are trifles