The trail of the serpent
the enormous price which he realized, caracoles before the door, under
the skilful horsemanship of a well-trained and exquisitely-appointed
groom. Another horse, equally high-bred, waits for his rider, the
Count de Marolles. The groom dismounts, and holds the bridle, as
the gentleman emerges from the door and springs into the saddle. A
consummate horseman the Count de Marolles; a handsome man too, in spite
of the restless and shifting blue eyes and the thin nervous lips. His
dress is perfect, just keeping pace with the fashion sufficiently to
denote high ton in the wearer, without outstripping it, so as to stamp
him a parvenu. It has that elegant and studious grace which, to a
casual observer, looks like carelessness, but which is in reality the
perfection of the highest art of all--the art of concealing art.
It is only twelve o’clock, and there are not many people of any
standing in Piccadilly this September morning; but of the few
gentlemen on horseback who pass Monsieur de Marolles, the most
aristocratic-looking bow to him. He is well-known in the great world
as the eminent banker, the owner of a superb house in Park Lane. He
possesses a man cook of Parisian renown, who wears the cross of the
Legion of Honour, given him by the first Napoleon on the occasion
of a dinner at Talleyrand’s. He has estates in South America and in
France; a fortune, said to be boundless, and a lovely wife. For the
rest, if his own patent of nobility is of rather fresh date, and if, as
impertinent people say, he never had a grandfather, or indeed anything
in the way of a father to speak of, it must be remembered that great
men, since the days of mythic history, have been celebrated for being
born in rather an accidental manner.
But why a banker? Why, possessed of an enormous fortune, try to extend
that fortune by speculation? That question lies between Raymond de
Marolles and his conscience. Perhaps there are no bounds to the
ambition of this man, who entered Paris eight years ago an obscure
adventurer, and who, according to some accounts, is now a millionaire.
CHAPTER II.
MR. PETERS SEES A GHOST.
MR. PETERS, pensioned off by Richard’s mother with an income of a
hundred pounds a year, has taken and furnished for himself a small
house in a very small square not far from Mr. Darley’s establishment,
and rejoicing in the high-sounding address of Wellington Square,
Waterloo Road. Having done this, he feels that he has nothing more to
do in life than to retire upon his laurels, and enjoy the _otium cum
dignitate_ which he has earned so well.
Of course Mr. Peters, as a single man, cannot by any possibility _do
for_ himself; and as--having started an establishment of his own--he
is no longer in a position to be taken in and done for, the best thing
he can do is to send for Kuppins; accordingly he does send for Kuppins.
Kuppins is to be cook, housekeeper, laundress, and parlourmaid all in
one; and she is to have ten pounds per annum, and her tea, sugar, and
beer--wages only known in Slopperton in very high and aristocratic
families where footmen are kept and no followers or Sundays out allowed.
So Kuppins comes to London, bringing the “fondling” with her; and
arriving at the Euston Square station at eight o’clock in the evening,
is launched into the dazzlingly bewildering gaiety of the New Road.
Well, it is not paved with gold certainly, this marvellous city; and it
is, maybe, on the whole, just a little muddy. But oh, the shops--what
emporiums of splendour! What delightful excitement in being nearly run
over every minute!--to say nothing of that delicious chance of being
knocked down by the crowd which is collected round a drunken woman
expostulating with a policeman. Of course there must be a general
election, or a great fire, or a man hanging, or a mad ox at large, or a
murder just committed in the next street, or something wonderful going
on, or there never could be such crowds of excited pedestrians, and
such tearing and rushing, and smashing of cabs, carts, omnibuses, and
parcel-delivery vans, all of them driven by charioteers in the last
stage of insanity, and drawn by horses as wild as that time-honoured
steed employed in the artistic and poetical punishment of our old
friend Mazeppa. Tottenham Court Road! What a magnificent promenade!
Occupied, of course, by the houses of the nobility! And is that
magnificent establishment with the iron shutters Buckingham Palace or
the Tower of London? Kuppins inclines to thinking it must be the Tower
of London, because the iron shutters look so warlike, and are evidently
intended as a means of defence in case of an attack from the French.
Kuppins is told by her escort, Mr. Peters, that this is the emporium of
Messrs. Shoolbred, haberdashers and linendrapers. She thinks she must
be dreaming, and wants to be pinched and awakened before she proceeds
any further. It is rather a trying journey for Mr. Peters; for Kuppins
wants to stop the cab every twenty yards or so, to get out and look at
something in this wonderful Tottenham Court Road.
But the worst of Kuppins, perhaps, is, that she has almost an insane
desire to see that Tottenham Court whence Tottenham Court Road derives
its name; and when told that there is no such place, and never
was--leastways, never as Mr. Peters heard of--she begins to think
London, in spite of all its glories, rather a take-in. Then, again,
Kuppins is very much disappointed at not passing either Westminster
Abbey or the Bank of England, which she had made up her mind were both
situated at Charing Cross; and it was a little trying for Mr. Peters
to be asked whether every moderate-sized church they passed was St.
Paul’s Cathedral, or every little bit of dead wall Newgate. To go over
a bridge, and for it not to be London Bridge, but Waterloo Bridge,
was in itself a mystery; but to be told that the Shot Tower on the
Surrey side was not the Monument was too bewildering for endurance.
As to the Victoria Theatre, which was illuminated to such a degree
that the box-entrance seemed as a pathway to fairyland, Kuppins was so
thoroughly assured in her own mind of its being Drury Lane and nothing
else, unless, perhaps, the Houses of Parliament or Covent Garden--that
no protestations on Mr. Peters’s fingers could root out the fallacy.
But the journey came to an end at last; and Kuppins, safe with bag
and baggage at No. 17, Wellington Square, partook of real London
saveloys and real London porter with Mr. Peters and the “fondling,” in
an elegant front parlour, furnished with a brilliantly polished but
rather rickety Pembroke table, that was covered with a Royal Stuart
plaid woollen cloth; half-a-dozen cane-seated chairs, so new and highly
polished as to be apt to adhere to the garments of the person who so
little understood their nature or properties as to attempt to sit upon
them; a Kidderminster carpet, the pattern of which was of the size
adapted to the requirements of a town hall, but which looked a little
disproportionate to Mr. Peters’s apartment, two patterns and a quarter
stretching the entire length of the room; and a mantelpiece ornamented
with a looking-glass divided into three compartments by gilded
Corinthian pillars, and further adorned with two black velvet kittens,
one at each corner, and a parti-coloured velvet boy on a brown velvet
donkey in the centre.
The next morning Mr. Peters announced his intention of taking the
“fondling” into the city of London, for the purpose of showing him
the outside of St. Paul’s, the Monument, Punch and Judy, and other
intellectual exhibitions adapted to his tender years. Kuppins was for
starting then and there on a visit to the pig-faced lady, than which
magnificent creature she could not picture any greater wonder in the
whole metropolis; but Kuppins had to stay at home in her post of
housekeeper, and to inspect and arrange the domestic machinery of No.
17, Wellington Square. So the “fondling,” being magnificently arrayed
in a clean collar and a pair of boots that were too small for him, took
hold of his protector’s hand, and they sallied forth.
If anything, Punch and Judy bore off the palm in this young gentleman’s
judgment of the miracles of the big village.
It was not so sublime a sight, perhaps, as the outside of St. Paul’s;
but, on the other hand, it was a great deal cleaner; and the “fondling”
would have liked to have seen Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece picked
out with a little fresh paint before he was called upon to admire it.
The Monument, no doubt, was very charming in the abstract; but unless
he could have been perpetually on the top of it, and perpetually within
a hair’s breadth of precipitating himself on to the pavement below, it
wasn’t very much in his way. But Punch, with his delightfully original
style of elocution, his overpoweringly comic domestic passages with
Judy, and the dolefully funny dog with a frill round his neck and an
evident dislike for his profession--this, indeed, was an exhibition to
be seen continually, and to be more admired the more continually seen,
as no doubt the “fondling” would have said had he been familiar with
Dr. Johnson, which, it is to be hoped, for his own peace of mind, he
wasn’t.
It is rather a trying day for Mr. Peters, and he is not sorry when,
at about four o’clock in the afternoon, he has taken the “fondling”
all round the Bank of England--(that young gentleman insisting on
peering in at the great massive windows, in the fond hope of seeing
the money)--and has shown him the broad back of the Old Lady of
Threadneedle Street, and the Clearing-house, and they are going out of
Lombard Street, on their way to an omnibus which will take them home.
But just as they are leaving the street the “fondling” makes a dead
stop, and constrains Mr. Peters to do the same.
Standing before the glass doors of a handsome building, which a brass
plate announces to be the “Anglo-Spanish-American Bank,” are two
horses, and a groom in faultless buckskins and tops. He is evidently
waiting for some one within the bank, and the “fondling” vehemently
insists upon waiting too, to see the gentleman get on horseback. The
good-natured detective consents; and they loiter about the pavement for
some time before the glass doors are flung open by a white-neckclothed
clerk, and a gentleman of rather foreign appearance emerges therefrom.
There is nothing particularly remarkable in this gentleman. The fit of
his pale lavender gloves is certainly exquisite; the style of his dress
is a recommendation to his tailor; but what there is in his appearance
to occasion Mr. Peters’s holding on to a lamp-post it is difficult to
say. But Mr. Peters did certainly cling to the nearest lamp-post, and
did certainly turn as white as the whitest sheet of paper that ever
came out of a stationer’s shop. The elegant-looking gentleman, who
was no other than the Count de Marolles, had better occupation for
his bright blue eyes than the observation of such small deer as Mr.
Peters and the “fondling.” He mounted his horse, and rode slowly away,
quite unconscious of the emotion his appearance had occasioned in the
breast of the detective. No sooner had he done so, than Mr. Peters,
relinquishing the lamp-post and clutching the astonished “fondling,”
darted after him. In a moment he was in the crowded thoroughfare before
Guildhall. An empty cab passed close to them. He hailed it with frantic
gesticulations, and sprang in, still holding the “fondling.” The Count
de Marolles had to rein-in his horse for a moment from the press of
cabs and omnibuses; and at Mr. Peters’s direction the “fondling”
pointed him out to the cabman, with the emphatic injunction to “follow
that gent, and not to lose sight of him nohow.” The charioteer gives a