The trail of the serpent
Edgardo is looked forward to with anxiety. Presently the hero of the
square-cut coat and jack-boots enters. He is a handsome fellow, with a
dark southern face, and an easy insouciant manner. His voice is melody
itself; the rich notes roll out in a flood of sweetness, without the
faintest indication of effort. Though Richard pretends to look at the
stage, though perhaps he does try to direct his attention that way,
his pale face, his wandering glance, and his restless under-lip, show
him to be greatly agitated. He is waiting for that moment when the
detective shall say to him, “There is the murderer of your uncle. There
is the man for whose guilt you have suffered, and must suffer, till he
is brought to justice.” The first act of the opera seemed endless to
Daredevil Dick; while his philosophical friend, Mr. Cordonner, looked
on as coolly as he would have done at an earthquake, or the end of the
world, or any other trifling event of that nature.
The curtain has fallen upon the first act, when Mr. Peters lays his
hand on Richard’s arm and points to a box on the grand tier.
A gentleman and lady, and a little boy, have just taken their seats.
The gentleman, as becomes him, sits with his back to the stage and
faces the house. He lifts his opera-glass to take a leisurely survey
of the audience. Percy puts his glass into Richard’s hand, and with a
hearty “Courage, old boy!” watches him as he looks for the first time
at his deadliest enemy.
And is that calm, aristocratic, and serene face the face of a murderer?
The shifting blue eyes and the thin arched lips are not discernible
from this distance; but through the glass the general effect of the
face is very plainly seen, and there is no fear that Richard will fail
to know its owner again, whenever and wherever he may meet him.
Mr. Cordonner, after a deliberate inspection of the personal
attractions of the Count de Marolles, remarks, with less respect than
indifference.
“Well, the beggar is by no means bad-looking, but he looks a
determined scoundrel. He’d make a first-rate light-comedy villain for
a Porte-St.-Martin drama. I can imagine him in Hessian boots poisoning
all his relations, and laughing at the police when they come to arrest
him.”
“Shall you know him again, Percy?” asks Richard.
“Among an army of soldiers, every one of them dressed in the same
uniform,” replies his friend. “There’s something unmistakable about
that pale thin face. I’ll go and bring the other fellows in, that they
may all be able to swear to him when they see him.”
In groups of two and three the Cherokees strolled into the pit, and
were conducted by Mr. Cordonner--who, to serve a friend, could, on a
push, be almost active--to the spot where Richard and the detective
stood. One after another they took a long look, through the most
powerful glass they could select, at the tranquil features of Victor de
Marolles.
Little did that gentleman dream of this amateur band of police, formed
for the special purpose of the detection of the crime he was supposed
to have committed.
One by one the “Cheerfuls” register the Count’s handsome face upon
their memories, and with a hearty shake of the hand each man declares
his willingness to serve Richard whenever and wherever he may see a
chance, however faint or distant, of so doing.
And all this time the Count is utterly unmoved. Not quite so unmoved
though, when, in the second act, he recognizes in the Edgardo--the new
tenor, the hero of the night--his old acquaintance of the Parisian
Italian Opera, the chorus-singer and mimic, Monsieur Paul Moucée. This
skilful workman does not care about meeting with a tool which, once
used, were better thrown aside and for ever done away with. But this
Signor Paolo Mosquetti is neither more nor less than the slovenly,
petit-verre-drinking, domino-playing chorus-singer, at a salary of
thirty francs a week. His genius, which enabled him to sing an aria
in perfect imitation of the fashionable tenor of the day, has also
enabled him, with a little industry, and a little less wine-drinking
and gambling, to become a fashionable tenor himself, and Milan, Naples,
Vienna, and Paris testify to his triumphs.
And all this time Valerie de Marolles looks on a stage such as that
on which, years ago, she so often saw the form she loved. That faint
resemblance, that likeness in his walk, voice, and manner, which Moucée
has to Gaston de Lancy strikes her very forcibly. It is no great
likeness, except when the mimic is bent on representing the man he
resembles; then, indeed, as we know, it is remarkable. But at any time
it is enough to strike a bitter pang to this bereaved and remorseful
heart, which in every dream and every shadow is only too apt to recall
that unforgotten past.
The Cherokees meanwhile express their sentiments pretty freely about
Monsieur Raymond de Marolles, and discuss divers schemes for the
bringing of him to justice. Splitters, whose experiences as a dramatic
writer suggested to him every possible kind of mode but a natural one,
proposed that Richard should wait upon the Count, when convenient, at
the hour of midnight, disguised as his uncle’s ghost, and confound
the villain in the stronghold of his crime--meaning Park Lane. This
sentence was verbatim from a playbill, as well as the whole very
available idea; Mr. Splitters’s notions of justice being entirely
confined to the retributive or poetical, in the person of a gentleman
with a very long speech and two pistols.
“The Smasher’s outside,” said Percy Cordonner. “He wants to have a look
at our friend as he goes out, that he may reckon him up. You’d better
let him go into the Count’s peepers with his left, Dick, and damage his
beauty; it’s the best chance you’ll get.”
“No, no; I tell you, Percy, that man shall stand where I stood. That
man shall drink to the dregs the cup I drank, when I stood in the
criminal dock at Slopperton and saw every eye turned towards me with
execration and horror, and knew that my innocence was of no avail to
sustain me in the good opinion of one creature who had known me from my
very boyhood.”
“Except the ‘Cheerfuls,’” said Percy. “Don’t forget the ‘Cheerfuls.’”
“When I do, I shall have forgotten all on this side of the grave, you
may depend, Percy. No; I have some firm friends on earth, and here is
one;” and he laid his hand on the shoulder of Mr. Peters, who still
stood at his elbow.
The opera was concluded, and the Count de Marolles and his lovely wife
rose to leave their box. Richard, Percy, Splitters, two or three more
of the Cherokees, and Mr. Peters left the pit at the same time, and
contrived to be at the box-entrance before Raymond’s party came out.
At last the Count de Marolles’ carriage was called; and as it drew up,
Raymond descended the steps with his wife on his arm, her little boy
clinging to her left hand.
“She’s a splendid creature,” said Percy; “but there’s a spice of
devilry in those glorious dark eyes. I wouldn’t be her husband for a
trifle, if I happened to offend her.”
As the Count and Countess crossed from the doors of the opera-house
to their carriage, a drunken man came reeling past, and before the
servants or policemen standing by could interfere, stumbled against
Raymond de Marolles, and in so doing knocked his hat off. He picked it
up immediately, and, muttering some unintelligible apology, returned it
to Raymond, looking, as he did so, very steadily in the face of M. de
Marolles. The occurrence did not occupy a moment, and the Count was too
finished a gentleman to make any disturbance. This man was the Smasher.
As the carriage drove off, he joined the group under the colonnade,
perfectly sober by this time.
“I’ve had a jolly good look at him, Mr. Marwood,” he said, “and I’d
swear to him after forty rounds in the ring, which is apt sometimes to
take a little of the Cupid out of a gent. He’s not a bad-looking cove
on the whole, and looks game. He’s rather slight built, but he might
make that up in science, and dance a pretty tidy quadrille round the
chap he was put up agin, bein’ active and lissom. I see the cut upon
his forehead, Mr. Peters, as you told me to take notice of,” he said,
addressing the detective. “He didn’t get that in a fair stand-up fight.
leastways not from an Englishman. When you cross the water for your
antagonist, you don’t know what you may get.”
“He got it from an Englishwoman, though,” said Richard.
“Did he, now? Ah, that’s the worst of the softer sect; you see, sir,
you never know where they’ll have you. They’re awful deficient in
science, to be sure; but, Lord bless you, they make it up with the
will,” and the Left-handed one rubbed his nose. He had been married
during his early career, and was in the habit of saying that ten
rounds inside the ropes was a trifle compared with one round in your
own back-parlour, when your missus had got your knowledge-box in
chancery against the corner of the mantelpiece, and was marking a dozen
different editions of the ten commandments on your complexion with her
bunch of fives.
“Come, gentlemen,” said the hospitable Smasher, “what do you say to
a Welsh rarebit and a bottle of bitter at my place? We’re as full as
we can hold down stairs, for the Finsbury Fizzer’s trainer has come
up from Newmarket; and his backers is hearin’ anecdotes of his doings
for the last interesting week. They talk of dropping down the river on
Tuesday for the great event between him and the Atlantic Alligator,
and the excitement’s tremendous; our barmaid’s hands is blistered with
working at the engines. So come round and see the game, gentlemen; and
if you’ve any loose cash you’d like to put upon the Fizzer I can get
you decent odds, considerin’ he’s the favourite.”
Richard shook his head. He would go home to his mother, he said; he
wanted to talk to Peters about the day’s work. He shook hands heartily
with his friends, and as they strolled off to the Smasher’s, walked
with them as far as Charing Cross, and left them at the corner that led
into quiet Spring Gardens.
In the club-room of the Cherokees that night the members renewed the
oath they had taken on the night of Richard’s arrival, and formally
inaugurated themselves as “Daredevil Dick’s secret police.”
CHAPTER IV.
THE CAPTAIN, THE CHEMIST, AND THE LASCAR.
IN the drawing-room of a house in a small street leading out of Regent
Street are assembled, the morning after this opera-house rencontre,
three people. It is almost difficult to imagine three persons more
dissimilar than those who compose this little group. On a sofa near the
open window, at which the autumn breeze comes blowing in over boxes of
dusty London flowers, reclines a gentleman, whose bronzed and bearded
face, and the military style even of the loose morning undress which
he wears, proclaim him to be a soldier. A very handsome face it is,
this soldier’s, although darkened not a little by a tropical sun, and a
good deal shrouded by the thick black moustache and beard which conceal
the expression of the mouth, and detract from the individuality of the
face. He is smoking a long cherry-stemmed pipe, the bowl of which rests
on the floor. A short distance from the sofa on which he is lying, an
Indian servant is seated on the carpet, who watches the bowl of the
pipe, ready to replenish it the moment it fails, and every now and
then glances upward to the grave face of the officer with a look of
unmistakable affection in his soft black eyes.
The third occupant of the little drawing-room is a pale, thin,
studious-looking man, who is seated at a cabinet in a corner away from
the window, amongst papers and books, which are heaped in a chaotic
pile on the floor about him. Strange books and papers these are.