The trail of the serpent
gentlemen, if you please,” dropped a curtsey, and turned and fled.
The door opened with a scroop, and Mr. Peters realized at last the
darling wish of his heart, and stood in the very room in which the
murder had been committed. Gus looked round, went to the window, opened
the shutters to the widest extent, and the afternoon sunshine streamed
full into the room, lighting every crevice, revealing every speck of
dust on the moth-eaten damask bed-curtains--every crack and stain on
the worm-eaten flooring.
To see Mr. Darley look round the room, and to see Mr. Peters look
round it, is to see two things as utterly wide apart as it is possible
for one look to be from another. The young surgeon’s eyes wander here
and there, fix themselves nowhere, and rest two or three times upon
the same object before they seem to take in the full meaning of that
object. The eyes of Mr. Peters, on the contrary, take the circuit of
the apartment with equal precision and rapidity--go from number one to
number two, from number two to number three; and having given a careful
inspection to every article of furniture in the room, fix at last in
a gaze of concentrated intensity on the _tout ensemble_ of the
chamber.
“Can you make out anything?” at last asks Mr. Darley.
Mr. Peters nods his head, and in reply to this question drops on one
knee, and falls to examining the flooring.
“Do you see anything in that?” asks Gus.
“Yes,” replies Mr. Peters on his fingers; “look at this.”
Gus does look at this. This is the flooring, which is in a very rotten
and dilapidated state, by the bedside. “Well, what then?” he asks.
“What then?” said Mr. Peters, on his fingers, with an expression of
considerable contempt pervading his features; “what then? You’re a very
talented young gent, Mr. Darley, and if I wanted a prescription for the
bile, which I’m troubled with sometimes, or a tip for the Derby, which
I don’t, not being a sporting man, you’re the gent I’d come to; but for
all that you ain’t no police-officer, or you’d never ask that question.
What then? Do you remember as one of the facts so hard agen Mr. Marwood
was the blood-stains on his sleeve? You see these here cracks and
crevices in this here floorin’? Very well, then; Mr. Marwood slept in
the room under this. He was tired, I’ve heard him say, and he threw
himself down on the bed in his coat. What more natural, then, than that
there should be blood upon his sleeve, and what more easy to guess than
the way it came there?”
“You think it dropped through, then?” asked Gus.
“I _think_ it dropped through,” said Mr. Peters, on his fingers,
with biting irony; “I know it dropped through. His counsel was a nice
un, not to bring this into court,” he added, pointing to the boards on
which he knelt. “If I’d only seen this place before the trial----But I
was nobody, and it was like my precious impudence to ask to go over the
house, of course! Now then, for number two.”
“And that is----?” asked Mr. Darley, who was quite in the dark as
to Mr. Peters’s views; that functionary being implicitly believed
in by Richard and his friend, and allowed, therefore, to be just as
mysterious as he pleased.
“Number two’s this here,” answered the detective. “I wants to find
another or two of them rum Indian coins; for our young friend
Dead-and-Alive, as is here to-day and gone to-morrow, got that one as
he gave the girl from that cabinet, or my name’s not Joseph Peters;”
wherewith Mr. Peters, who had been entrusted by Mrs. Marwood with the
keys of the cabinet in question, proceeded to open the doors of it, and
to carefully inspect that old-fashioned piece of furniture.
There were a great many drawers, and boxes, and pigeon-holes, and queer
nooks and corners in this old cabinet, all smelling equally of old age,
damp, and cedar-wood. Mr. Peters pulled out drawers and opened boxes,
found secret drawers in the inside of other drawers, and boxes hid in
ambush in other boxes, all with so little result, beyond the discovery
of old papers, bundles of letters tied with faded red tape, a simpering
and neutral-tinted miniature or two of the fashion of some fifty years
gone by, when a bright blue coat and brass buttons was the correct
thing for a dinner-party, and your man about town wore a watch in each
of his breeches-pockets, and simpered at you behind a shirt-frill wide
enough to separate him for ever from his friends and acquaintance.
Besides these things, Mr. Peters found a Johnson’s dictionary, a
ready-reckoner, and a pair of boot-hooks; but as he found nothing else,
Mr. Darley grew quite tired of watching his proceedings, and suggested
that they should adjourn; for he remarked--“Is it likely that such a
fellow as this North would leave anything behind him?”
“Wait a bit,” said Mr. Peters, with an expressive jerk of his head. Gus
shrugged his shoulders, took out his cigar-case, lighted a cheroot,
and walked to the window, where he leaned with his elbows on the
sill, puffing blue clouds of tobacco-smoke down among the straggling
creepers that covered the walls and climbed round the casement, while
the detective resumed his search among the old bundles of papers. He
was nearly abandoning it, when, in one of the outer drawers, he took up
an object he had passed over in his first inspection. It was a small
canvas bag, such as is used to hold money, and was apparently empty;
but while pondering on his futile search, Mr. Peters twisted this
bag in a moment of absence of mind between his fingers, swinging it
backwards and forwards in the air. In so doing, he knocked it against
the side of the cabinet, and, to his surprise, it emitted a sharp
metallic sound. It was not empty, then, although it appeared so. A
moment’s examination showed the detective that he had succeeded in
obtaining the object of his search; the bag had been used for money,
and a small coin had lodged in the seam at one corner of the bottom of
it, and had stuck so firmly as not to be easily shaken out. This, in
the murderer’s hurried ransacking of the cabinet, in his blind fury at
not finding the sum he expected to obtain, had naturally escaped him.
The piece of money was a small gold coin, only half the value of the
one found by the landlord, but of the same date and style.
Mr. Peters gave his fingers a triumphant snap, which aroused the
attention of Mr. Darley; and, with a glance expressive of the pride in
his art which is peculiar to your true genius, held up the little piece
of dingy gold.
“By Jove!” exclaimed the admiring Gus, “you’ve got it, then! Egad,
Peters, I think you’d make evidence, if there wasn’t any.”
“Eight years of that young man’s life, sir,” said the rapid fingers,
“has been sacrificed to the stupidity of them as should have pulled him
through.”
CHAPTER V.
MR. PETERS DECIDES ON A STRANGE STEP, AND ARRESTS THE DEAD.
WHILE Mr. Peters, assisted by Richard’s sincere friend, the young
surgeon, made the visit above described, Daredevil Dick counted the
hours in London. It was essential to the success of his cause, Gus and
Peters urged, that he should not show himself, or in any way reveal
the fact of his existence, till the real murderer was arrested. Let
the truth appear to all the world, and then time enough for Richard to
come forth, with an unbranded forehead, in the sight of his fellow-men.
But when he heard that Raymond Marolles had given his pursuers the
slip, and was off, no one knew where, it was all that his mother,
his friend Percy Cordonner, Isabella Darley, and the lawyers to whom
he had intrusted his cause, could do, to prevent his starting that
instant on the track of the guilty man. It was a weary day, this day
of the failure of the arrest, for all. Neither his mother’s tender
consolation, nor his solicitor’s assurances that all was not yet lost,
could moderate the young man’s impatience. Neither Isabella’s tearful
prayers that he would leave the issue in the hands of Heaven, nor Mr.
Cordonner’s philosophical recommendation to take it quietly and let
the “beggar” go, could keep him quiet. He felt like a caged lion,
whose ignoble bonds kept him from the vile object of his rage. The day
wore out, however, and no tidings came of the fugitive. Mr. Cordonner
insisted on stopping with his friend till three o’clock in the morning,
and at that very late hour set out, with the intention of going down
to the Cherokees--it was a Cheerful night, and they would most likely
be still assembled--to ascertain, as he popularly expressed it, whether
anything had “turned up” there. The clock of St. Martin’s struck three
as he stood with Richard at the street-door in Spring Gardens, giving
friendly consolation between the puffs of his cigar to the agitated
young man.
“In the first place, my dear boy,” he said, “if you can’t catch
the fellow, you can’t catch the fellow--that’s sound logic and a
mathematical argument; then why make yourself unhappy about it? Why
try to square the circle, only because the circle’s round, and can’t
be squared? Let it alone. If this fellow turns up, hang him! I should
glory in seeing him hung, for he’s an out-and-out scoundrel, and I
should make a point of witnessing the performance, if the officials
would do the thing at a reasonable hour, and not execute him in the
middle of the night and swindle the respectable public. If he doesn’t
turn up, why, let the matter rest; marry that little girl in there,
Darley’s pretty sister--who seems, by the bye, to be absurdly fond of
you--and let the question rest. That’s my philosophy.”
The young man turned away with an impatient sigh; then, laying his hand
on Percy’s shoulder, he said, “My dear old fellow, if everybody in the
world were like you, Napoleon would have died a Corsican lawyer, or a
lieutenant in the French army. Robespierre would have lived a petty
barrister, with a penchant for getting up in the night to eat jam tarts
and a mania for writing bad poetry. The third state would have gone
home quietly to its farmyards and its merchants’ offices; there would
have been no Oath of the Tennis Court, and no Battle of Waterloo.”
“And a very good thing, too,” said his philosophical friend; “nobody
would have been a loser but Astley’s--only think of that. If there had
been no Napoleon, what a loss for image boys, Gomersal the Great, and
Astley’s. Forgive me, Dick, for laughing at you. I’ll cut down to the
Cheerfuls, and see if anything’s up. The Smasher’s away, or he might
have given us his advice; the genius of the P.R. might have been of
some service in this affair. Good night!” He gave Richard a languidly
affectionate shake of the hand, and departed.
Now, when Mr. Cordonner said he would cut down to the Cherokees, let
it not be thought by the simple-minded reader that the expression “cut
down,” from his lips, conveyed that degree of velocity which, though
perhaps a sufficiently vague phrase in itself, it is calculated to
carry to the ordinary mind. Percy Cordonner had never been seen by
mortal man in a hurry. He had been known to be too late for a train,
and had been beheld placidly lounging at a few paces from the departing
engine, and mildly but rather reproachfully regarding that object. The
prospects of his entire life may have hinged on his going by that
particular train; but he would never be so false to his principles as
to make himself unpleasantly warm, or in any way disturb the delicate
organization with which nature had gifted him. He had been seen at
the doors of the Opera-house when Jenny Lind was going to appear in
the _Figlia_, and while those around him were afflicted with a
temporary lunacy, and trampling one another wildly in the mud, he had
been observed leaning against a couple of fat men as in an easy-chair,