The trail of the serpent
several very interesting inquests, Gus asked the landlord whether he
remembered an affair that happened about eight or nine years ago, or
thereabouts--a girl found drowned in the fall of the year.
“There’s always bein’ girls found drowned,” said the landlord moodily;
“it’s my belief they likes it, especially when they’ve long hair. They
takes off their bonnets, and they lets down their back hairs, and they
puts a note in their pockets, wrote large, to say as they hopes as how
he’ll be sorry, and so on. I can’t remember no girl in particular,
eight years ago, at the back end of the year. I can call to mind a many
promiscuous like, off and on, but not to say this was Jane, or that was
Sarah.”
“Do you remember a quarrel, then, between a man and a girl in this very
room, and the man having his head cut by a sovereign she threw at him?”
“We never have no quarrels in this room,” replied the landlord, with
dignity. “The bargemen sometimes have a few words, and tramples upon
each other with their hobnailed boots, and their iron heels and toes
will dance again when their temper’s up; but I don’t allow no quarrels
here. And yet,” he added, after a few moments’ reflection, “there was a
sort of a row, I remember, a many years ago, between a girl as drowned
herself that night down below, and a young gent, in this ’ere room; he
a-sittin’ just as you may be a-sittin’ now, and she a-standin’ over
by that window, and throwin’ four sovereigns at him spiteful, one of
them a-catchin’ him just over the eyebrow, and cuttin’ of him to the
bone--and he a-pickin’ ’em up when his head was bound, and walkin’ off
with ’em as if nothin’ had happened.”
“Yes; but do you happen to remember,” said Gus, “that he only found
three out of the four sovereigns; and that he was obliged to give up
looking for the last, and go away without it?”
The landlord of the “Delight” suddenly lapsed into most profound
meditation; he rubbed his chin, making a rasping noise as he did so,
as if going cautiously over a French roll, first with one hand and
then with the other; he looked with an earnest gaze into the glass of
puce-coloured liquid before him, took a sip of that liquid, smacked his
lips after the manner of a connoisseur, and then said that he couldn’t
at the present moment call to mind the last circumstance alluded to.
“Shall I tell you,” said Gus, “my motive in asking this question?”
The landlord said he might as well mention it as not.
“Then I will. I want that sovereign. I’ve a particular reason, which
I don’t want to stop to explain just now, for wanting that very coin
of all others; and I don’t mind giving a five-pound note to the man
that’ll put that twenty shillings worth of gold into my hand.”
“You don’t, don’t you?” said the landlord, repeating the operations
described above, and looking very hard at Gus all the time: after which
he sat staring silently from Gus to Peters, and from Peters to the
puce-coloured liquid, for some minutes: at last he said--“It ain’t a
trap?”
“There’s the note,” replied Mr. Darley; “look at it, and see if it’s
a good one. I’ll lay it on this table, and when you lay down that
sovereign--_that_ one, mind, and no other--it’s yours.”
“You think I’ve got it, then?” said the landlord, interrogatively.
“I know you’ve got it,” said Gus, “unless you’ve spent it.”
“Why, as to that,” said the landlord, “when you first called to mind
the circumstance of the girl, and the gent, and the inquest, and all
that, I’ve a short memory, and couldn’t quite recollect that there
sovereign; but now I _do_ remember finding of that very coin a
year and a half afterwards, for the drains was bad that year, and the
Board of Health came a-chivying of us to take up our floorings, and
lime-wash ourselves inside; and in taking up the flooring of this room
what should we come across but that very bit of gold?”
“And you never changed it?”
“Shall I tell you why I never changed it? Sovereigns ain’t so plentiful
in these parts that I should keep this one to look at. What do you say
to it’s not being a sovereign at all?”
“Not a sovereign?”
“Not; what do you say to it’s being a twopenny-halfpenny foreign coin,
with a lot of rum writin’ about it--a coin as they has the cheek to
offer me four-and-sixpence for as old gold, and as I kep’, knowin’ it
was worth more for a curiosity--eh?”
“Why, all I can say is,” said Gus, “that you did very wisely to keep
it; and here’s five or perhaps ten times its value, and plenty of
interest for your money.”
“Wait a bit,” muttered the landlord; and disappearing into the bar, he
rummaged in some drawer in the interior of that sanctum, and presently
reappeared with a little parcel screwed carefully in newspaper. “Here
it is,” he said, “and jolly glad I am to get rid of the useless lumber,
as wouldn’t buy a loaf of bread if one was a starving; and thank you
kindly, sir,” he continued, as he pocketed the note. “I should like to
sell you half-a-dozen more of ’em at the same price, that’s all.”
The coin was East Indian; worth perhaps six or seven rupees; in size
and touch not at all unlike a sovereign, but about fifty years old.
“And now,” said Gus, “my friend and I will take a stroll; you can cook
us a steak for five o’clock, and in the meantime we can amuse ourselves
about the town.”
“The factories might be interesting to the foreigneering gent,” said
the landlord, whose spirits seemed very much improved by the possession
of the five-pound note; “there’s a factory hard by as employs a power
of hands, and there’s a wheel as killed a man only last week, and you
could see it, I’m sure, gents, and welcome, by only mentioning my name.
I serves the hands as lives round this way, which is a many.”
Gus thanked him for his kind offer, and said they would make a point of
availing themselves of it.
The landlord watched them as they walked along the bank in the
direction of Slopperton. “I expect,” he remarked to himself, “the
lively one’s mad, and the quiet one’s his keeper. But five pounds is
five pounds; and that’s neither here nor there.”
Instead of seeking both amusement and instruction, as they might have
done from a careful investigation of the factory in question, Messrs.
Darley and Peters walked at a pretty brisk rate, looking neither to
the right nor to the left, choosing the most out of the way and
unfrequented streets, till they left the town of Slopperton and the
waters of the Sloshy behind them, and emerged on to the high road, not
so many hundred yards from the house in which Mr. Montague Harding met
his death--the house of the Black Mill.
It had never been a lively-looking place at best; but now, with the
association of a hideous murder belonging to it--and so much a part
of it, that, to all who knew the dreadful story, death, like a black
shadow, seemed to brood above the gloomy pile of building and warn the
stranger from the infected spot--it was indeed a melancholy habitation.
The shutters of all the windows but one were closed; the garden-paths
were over-grown with weeds; the beds choked up; the trees had shot
forth wild erratic branches that trailed across the path of the
intruder, and entangling themselves about him, threw him down before
he was aware. The house, however, was not uninhabited--Martha, the old
servant, who had nursed Richard Marwood when a little child, had the
entire care of it; and she was further provided with a comfortable
income and a youthful domestic to attend upon her, the teaching,
admonishing, scolding, and patronizing of whom made the delight of her
quiet existence.
The bell which Mr. Darley rang at the gate went clanging down the walk,
as if to be heard in the house were a small part of its mission, for
its sonorous power was calculated to awaken all Slopperton in case of
fire, flood, or invasion of the foreign foe.
Perhaps Gus thought just a little--as he stood at the broad white gate,
over-grown now with damp and moss, but once so trim and bright--of the
days when Richard and he had worn little cloth frocks, all ornamented
with divers meandering braids and shining buttons, and had swung to and
fro in the evening sunshine on that very gate.
He remembered Richard throwing him off, and hurting his nose upon
the gravel. They had made mud-pies upon that very walk; they had
set elaborate and most efficient traps for birds, and never caught
any, in those very shrubberies; they had made a swing under the
lime-trees yonder, and a fountain that would never work, but had to be
ignominiously supplied with jugs of water, and stirred with spoons like
a pudding, before the crystal shower would consent to mount. A thousand
recollections of that childish time came back, and with them came the
thought that the little boy in the braided frock was now an outcast
from society, supposed to be dead, and his name branded as that of a
madman and a murderer.
Martha’s attendant, a rosy-cheeked country girl, came down the walk at
the sound of the clanging bell, and stared aghast at the apparition of
two gentlemen--one of them so brilliant in costume as our friend Mr.
Darley.
Gus told the youthful domestic that he had a letter for Mrs. Jones.
Martha’s surname was Jones; the Mrs. was an honorary distinction, as
the holy state of matrimony was one of the evils the worthy woman had
escaped. Gus brought a note from Martha’s mistress, which assured
him a warm welcome. “Would the gentlemen have tea?” Martha said.
“Sararanne--(the youthful domestic’s name was Sarah Anne, pronounced,
both for euphony and convenience, Sararanne)--Sararanne should get them
anything they would please to like directly.” Poor Martha was quite
distressed, on being told that all they wanted was to look at the room
in which the murder was committed.
“Was it in the same state as at the time of Mr. Harding’s death?” asked
Gus.
It had never been touched, Mrs. Jones assured them, since that dreadful
time. Such was her mistress’s wish; it had been kept clean and dry; but
not a bit of furniture had been moved.
Mrs. Jones was rheumatic, and rarely stirred from her seat of honour by
the fireside; so Sararanne was sent with a bunch of keys in her hand to
conduct the gentlemen to the room in question.
Now there were two things self-evident in the manner of Sararanne;
first, that she was pleased at the idea of a possible flirtation
with the brilliant Mr. Darley; secondly, that she didn’t at all like
the ordeal of opening and entering the dreaded room in question; so,
between her desire to be fascinating and her uncontrollable fear of
the encounter before her, she endured a mental struggle painful to the
beholder.
The shutters in the front of the house being, with one exception, all
closed, the hall and staircase were wrapped in a shadowy gloom, far
more alarming to the timid mind than complete darkness. In complete
darkness, for instance, the eight-day clock in the corner would have
been a clock, and not an elderly ghost with a broad white face and a
brown greatcoat, as it seemed to be in the uncertain glimmer which
crept through a distant skylight covered with ivy. Sararanne was
evidently possessed with the idea that Mr. Darley and his friend would
decoy her to the very threshold of the haunted chamber, and then fly
ignominiously, leaving her to brave the perils of it by herself. Mr.
Darley’s repeated assurances that it was all right, and that on the
whole it would be advisable to look alive, as life was short and time
was long, etcetera, had the effect at last of inducing the damsel to
ascend the stairs--looking behind her at every other step--and to
conduct the visitors along a passage, at the end of which she stopped,
selected with considerable celerity a key from the bunch, plunged it
into the keyhole of the door before her, said, “That is the room,