The trail of the serpent
in the way of furniture not worth naming. Miss Darley’s birds, again,
though they did spill seed and water into the eyes of unoffending
visitors, and drop lumps of dirty sugar sharply down upon the noses of
the same, could not of course be considered a nuisance; but certainly
the compound surgery and back-parlour in the mansion of Augustus Darley
was, to say the least, a little too full of furniture.
While Isabel is pouring out the tea, two gentlemen open the shop door,
and the bell attached thereto, which should ring but doesn’t, catching
in the foremost visitor’s foot, nearly precipitates him headlong into
the emporium of the disciple of Esculapius. This foremost visitor is
no other than Mr. Peters, and the tall figure behind him, wrapped in a
greatcoat, is Daredevil Dick.
“Here I am, Gus!” he cries out, in his own bold hearty voice; “here I
am; found your place at last, in spite of the fascinations of half the
stale shell-fish in the United Kingdom. Here I am; and here’s the best
friend I have in the world, not even excepting yourself, old fellow.”
Gus introduces Richard to his sister Isabel, who has been taught from
her childhood to look upon the young man shut up in a lunatic asylum
down at Slopperton as the greatest hero, next to Napoleon Buonaparte,
that ever the world had boasted. She was a little girl of eleven years
old at the time of Dick’s trial, and had never seen her wild brother’s
wilder companion; and she looks up now at the dark handsome face with
a glance of almost reverence in her deep gray eyes. But Bell is by
no means a heroine; and she has a dozen unheroine-like occupations.
She has the tea to pour out, and in her nervous excitement she scalds
Richard’s fingers, drops the sugar into the slop-basin, and pours all
the milk into one cup of tea. What she would have done without the
assistance of Mr. Peters, it is impossible to say; for that gentleman
showed himself the very genius of order; cut thin bread-and-butter
enough for half-a-dozen, which not one of the party touched; re-filled
the tea-pot before it was empty; lit the gas-lamp which hung from the
ceiling; shut the door which communicated with the shop and the other
door which led on to the staircase; and did all so quietly that nobody
knew he was doing anything.
Poor Richard! In spite of the gratitude and happiness he feels in his
release, there is a gloom upon his brow and an abstraction in his
manner, which he tries in vain to shake off.
A small, round, chubby individual, who might be twelve or twenty,
according to the notions of the person estimating her age, removed
the tea-tray, and in so doing broke a saucer. Gus looked up. “She
always does it,” he said, mildly. “We’re getting quite accustomed to
the sound. It rather reduces our stock of china, and we sometimes are
obliged to send out to buy tea-things before we can have any breakfast;
but she’s a good girl, and she doesn’t steal the honey, or the jujubes,
or the tartaric acid out of the seidlitz-powders, as the other one did;
not that I minded that much,” he continued; “but she couldn’t read, and
she sometimes filled up the papers with arsenic for fear of being found
out; and that might have been inconvenient, if we’d ever happened to
sell them.”
“Now, Gus,” said Richard, as he drew his chair up to the fireplace
and lit his pipe--permission being awarded by Bell, who lived in one
perpetual atmosphere of tobacco-smoke--“now, Gus, I want Peters to tell
you all about this affair; how it was he thought me innocent; how he
hit upon the plan he formed for saving my neck; how he tried to cast
about and find a clue to the real murderer; how he thought he had found
a clue, and how he lost it.”
“Shall my sister stop while he tells the story?” asked Gus.
“She _is_ your sister, Gus,” answered Richard. “She cannot be so
unlike you as not to be a true and pitying friend to me. Miss Darley,”
he continued, turning towards her as he spoke, “you do not think me
quite so bad a fellow as the world has made me out; you would like to
see me righted, and my name freed from the stain of a vile crime?”
“Mr. Marwood,” the girl answered, in an earnest voice, “I have heard
your sad story again and again from my brother’s lips. Had you too been
my brother, I could not, believe me, have felt a deeper interest in
your fate, or a truer sorrow for your misfortunes. It needs but to look
into your face, or hear your voice, to know how little you deserve the
imputation that has been cast upon you.”
Richard rises and gives her his hand. No languid and lady-like
pressure, such as would not brush the down off a butterfly’s wing, but
an honest hearty grasp, that comes straight from the heart.
“And now for Mr. Peters’s story,” said Gus, “while I brew a jugful of
whisky-punch.”
“You can follow his hands, Gus?” asks Richard.
“Every twist and turn of them. He and I had many a confab about you,
old fellow, before we went out fishing,” said Gus, looking up from the
pleasing occupation of peeling a lemon.
“Now for it, then,” said Richard; and Mr. Peters accordingly began.
Perhaps, considering his retiring from the Slopperton police force
a great event, not to say a crisis, in his life, Mr. Peters had
celebrated it by another event; and, taking the tide of his affairs at
the flood, had availed himself of the water to wash his hands with.
At any rate, the digital alphabet was a great deal cleaner than when,
eight years ago, he spelt out the two words, “Not guilty,” in the
railway carriage.
There was something very strange to a looker-on in the little party,
Gus, Richard, and Bell, all with earnest eyes fixed on the active
fingers of the detective--the silence only broken by some exclamation
at intervals from one of the three.
“When first I see this young gent,” say the fingers, as Mr. Peters
designates Richard with a jerk of his elbow, “I was a-standin’ on the
other side of the way, a-waitin’ till my superior, Jinks, as was as
much up to his business as a kitting,”--(Mr. Peters has rather what we
may call a fancy style of orthography, and takes the final _g_ off
some words to clap it on to others, as his taste dictates)--“a-waitin,’
I say, till Jinks should want my assistance. Well, gents all--beggin’
the lady’s parding, as sits up so manly, with none of yer faintin’ nor
’steriky games, as I a’most forgot she was a lady--no sooner did I
clap eyes upon Mr. Marwood here, a-smokin’ his pipe, in Jinks’s face,
and a-answerin’ him sharp, and a-behavin’ what you may call altogether
cocky, than I says to myself, ‘They’ve got the wrong un’. My fust words
and my last about this ’ere gent, was, ‘They’ve got the wrong un.’”
Mr. Peters looked round at the attentive party with a glance of
triumph, rubbed his hands by way of a full-stop, and went on with his
manual recital.
“For why?” said the fingers, interrogatively, “for why did I think as
this ’ere gent was no good for this ’ere murder; for why did I think
them chaps at Slopperton had got on the wrong scent? Because he was
cheeky? Lor’ bless your precious eyes, miss” (by way of gallantry he
addresses himself here to Isabel), “not a bit of it! When a cove goes
and cuts another cove’s throat off-hand, it ain’t likely he ain’t
prepared to cheek a police-officer. But when I reckoned up this young
gent’s face, what was it I see? Why, as plain as I see his nose and
his moustachios--and he ain’t bad off for neither of them,” said the
fingers, parenthetically--“I see that he hadn’t done it. Now, a cove
what’s screwed up to face a judge and jury, maybe can face ’em, and
never change a line of his mug; but there isn’t a cove an lives as
can stand that first tap of a detective’s hand upon his shoulder as
tells him, plain as words, ‘The game is up.’ The best of ’em, and
the pluckiest of ’em, drops under that. If they keeps the colour in
their face--which some of ’em has got the power to do, and none as
never tried it on can guess the pain--if they can do that ’ere, the
perspiration breaks out wet and cold upon their for’eds, and that
blows ’em. But this young gent--he was took aback, he was surprised,
and he was riled, and used bad language; but his colour never changed,
and he wasn’t once knocked over till Jinks, unbusiness-like, told him
of his uncle’s murder, when he turned as white as that ’ere ’ed of
Bon-er-part.” Mr. Peters, for want of a better comparison, glanced in
the direction of a bust of the victor of Marengo, which, what with
tobacco-smoke and a ferocious pair of burnt cork moustachios, was by no
means the whitest object in creation.
“Now, what a detective officer’s good at, if he’s worth his salt, is
this ’ere: when he sees two here and another two there, he can put ’em
together, though they might be a mile apart to anybody not up to the
trade, and make ’em into four. So, thinks I, the gent isn’t took aback
at bein’ arrested; but he _is_ took aback when he hears as how
his uncle’s murdered. Now, if he’d committed the murder, he’d know of
it; and he might sham surprise, but he wouldn’t be surprised; and this
young gent was knocked all of a heap as genuine as----” Mr. Peters’s
ideas still revert to the bust of Napoleon--“as ever that ’ere forring
cove was, when he sees his old guard scrunched up small at the battle
of Waterloo.”
“Heaven knows, Peters,” said Richard, taking his pipe out of his mouth,
and looking up from his stooping position over the fire, “Heaven knows
you were right; I did feel my heart turn cold when I heard of that good
man’s death.”
“Well, that they’d got the wrong un I saw was as clear as daylight--but
where was the right un? That was the question! Who ever committed
the murder did it for the money in that ’ere cabinet: and sold agen
they was, whoever they was, and didn’t get the money. Who was in the
house? This young gent’s mother and the servant. I was nobody in the
Gardenford force, and I was less than nobody at Slopperton; so get into
that house at the Black Mill I couldn’t. This young gent was walked
off to jail and I was sent about my business--my orders bein’ to be
back in Gardenford that evenin’, leavin’ Slopperton by the three-thirty
train. Well, I was a little cut up about this young gent; for I seed
that the case was dead agen him; the money in his pocket--the blood on
his sleeve--a cock-and-a-bull story of a letter of introduction, and a
very evident attempt at a bolt--only enough to hang him, that’s all;
and, for all that, I had a inward conwiction that he was as hinnercent
of the murder as that ’ere plaster-of-Paris stattur.” Mr. Peters goes
regularly to the bust for comparisons, by way of saving time and
trouble in casting about for fresh ones.
“But my orders,” continued the fingers, “was positive, so I goes down
to the station to start by the three-thirty; and as I walks into the
station-yard, I hears the whistle, and sees the train go. I was too
late; and as the next train didn’t start for near upon three hours, I
thought I’d take a stroll and ’av a look at the beauties of Slopperton.
Well, I strolls on, promiscuous like, till I comes to the side of a
jolly dirty-looking river; and as by this time I feels a little dry, I
walks on, lookin’ about for a public; but ne’er a one do I see, till
I almost tumbles into a dingy little place, as looked as if it did
about half-a-pint a day reg’lar, when business was brisk. But in I
walks, past the bar; and straight afore me I sees a door as leads into
the parlour. The passage was jolly dark; and this ’ere door was ajar;
and inside I hears voices. Well, you see, business is business, and
pleasure is pleasure; but when a cove takes a pleasure in his business,
he gets a way of lettin’ his business habits come out unbeknownst when
he’s takin’ his pleasure: so I listens. Now, the voice I heerd fust was