The trail of the serpent
a bustle throughout that short foggy day on which Richard Marwood was
arrested.
Gentlemen of the Press were there, sniffing out, with miraculous
acumen, particulars of the murder, which as yet were known to none but
the heads of the Slopperton police force.
How many lines at three-half-pence per line these gentlemen wrote
concerning the dreadful occurrence, without knowing anything whatever
about it, no one unacquainted with the mysteries of their art would
dare to say.
The two papers which appeared on Friday had accounts varying in
every item, and the one paper which appeared on Saturday had a happy
amalgamation of the two conflicting accounts--demonstrating thereby the
triumph of paste and scissors over penny-a-liners’ copy.
The head officials of the Slopperton police, attired in plain clothes,
went in and out of the Black Mill from an early hour on that dark
November day. Every time they came out, though none of them ever spoke,
by some strange magic a fresh report got current among the crowd. I
think the magical process was this: Some one man, auguring from such
and such a significance in their manner, whispered to his nearest
neighbour his suggestion of what _might_ have been revealed to
them within; and this whispered suggestion was repeated from one to
another till it grew into a fact, and was still repeated through the
crowd, while with every speaker it gathered interest until it grew into
a series of imaginary facts.
Of one thing the crowd was fully convinced--that was, that those grave
men in plain clothes, the Slopperton detectives, knew all, and could
tell all, if they only chose to speak. And yet I doubt if there was
beneath the stars more than one person who really knew the secret of
the dreadful deed.
The following day the coroner’s inquisition was held at a respectable
hostelry near the Black Mill, whither the jury went, accompanied by
the medical witness, to contemplate the body of the victim. With
solemn faces they hovered round the bed of the murdered man: they took
depositions, talked to each other in low hushed tones; and exchanged a
few remarks, in a low voice, with the doctor who had probed the deep
gashes in that cold breast.
All the evidence that transpired at the inquest only amounted to this--
The servant Martha, rising at six o’clock on the previous morning,
went, as she was in the habit of doing, to the door of the old East
Indian to call him--he being always an early riser, and getting up even
in winter to study by lamp-light.
Receiving, after repeated knocking at the door, no answer the old
woman had gone into the room, and there had beheld, by the faint light
of her candle, the awful spectacle of the Anglo-Indian lying on the
floor by the bedside, his throat cut, cruel stabs upon his breast, and
a pool of blood surrounding him; the cabinet in the room broken open
and ransacked, and the pocket-book and money which it was known to
contain missing. The papers of the murdered gentleman were thrown into
confusion and lay in a heap near the cabinet; and as there was no blood
upon them, the detectives concluded that the cabinet had been rifled
prior to the commission of the murder.
The Lascar had been found lying insensible on his bed in the little
dressing-room, his head cruelly beaten; and beyond this there was
nothing to be discovered. The Lascar had been taken to the hospital,
where little hope was given by the doctors of his recovery from the
injuries he had received.
In the first horror and anguish of that dreadful morning Mrs. Marwood
had naturally inquired for her son; had expressed her surprise at his
disappearance; and when questioned had revealed the history of his
unexpected return the night before. Suspicion fell at once upon the
missing man. His reappearance after so many years on the return of his
rich uncle; his secret departure from the house before any one had
risen--everything told against him. Inquiries were immediately set on
foot at the turnpike gates on the several roads out of Slopperton; and
at the railway station from which he had started for Gardenford by the
first train.
In an hour it was discovered that a man answering to Richard’s
description had been seen at the station; half an hour afterwards a
man appeared, who deposed to having seen and recognized him on the
platform--and deposed, too, to Richard’s evident avoidance of him.
The railway clerks remembered giving a ticket to a handsome young man
with a dark moustache, in a shabby suit, having a pipe in his mouth.
Poor Richard! the dark moustache and pipe tracked him at every stage.
“Dark moustache--pipe--shabby dress--tall--handsome face.” The clerk
who played upon the electric telegraph wires, as other people play upon
the piano, sent these words shivering down the line to the Gardenford
station; from the Gardenford station to the Gardenford police-office
the words were carried in less than five minutes; in five minutes more
Mr. Jinks the detective was on the platform, and his dumb assistant,
Joe Peters, was ready outside the station; and they both were ready to
recognize Richard the moment they saw him.
O wonders of civilized life! cruel wonders, when you help to track an
innocent man to a dreadful doom.
Richard’s story of the letter only damaged his case with the jury. The
fact of his having burned a document of such importance seemed too
incredible to make any impression in his favour.
Throughout the proceedings there stood in the background a shabbily
dressed man, with watchful observant eyes, and a mouth very much on one
side.
This man was Joseph Peters, the scrub of the detective force of
Gardenford. He rarely took his eyes from Richard, who, with pale
bewildered face, dishevelled hair, and slovenly costume, looked perhaps
as much like guilt as innocence.
The verdict of the coroner’s jury was, as every one expected it would
be, to the effect that the deceased had been wilfully murdered by
Richard Marwood his nephew; and poor Dick was removed immediately to
the county gaol on the outskirts of Slopperton, there to lie till the
assizes.
The excitement in Slopperton, as before observed, was immense.
Slopperton had but one voice--a voice loud in execration of the
innocent prisoner, horror of the treachery and cruelty of the dreadful
deed, and pity for the wretched mother of this wicked son, whose
anguish had thrown her on a sick bed--but who, despite of every proof
repeated every hour, expressed her assurance of her unfortunate son’s
innocence.
The coroner had plenty of work on that dismal November day: for from
the inquest on the unfortunate Mr. Harding he had to hurry down to a
little dingy public-house on the river’s bank, there to inquire into
the cause of the untimely death of a wretched outcast found by some
bargemen in the Sloshy.
This sort of death was so common an event in the large and
thickly-populated town of Slopperton, that the coroner and the jury
(lighted by two guttering tallow candles with long wicks, at four
o’clock on that dull afternoon) had very little to say about it.
One glance at that heap of wet, torn, and shabby garments--one
half-shuddering, halt-pitying look at the white face, blue lips, and
damp loose auburn hair, and a merciful verdict--“Found drowned.”
One juryman, a butcher--(we sometimes think them hard-hearted, these
butchers)--lays a gentle hand upon the auburn hair, and brushes a lock
of it away from the pale forehead.
Perhaps so tender a touch had not been laid upon that head for two long
years. Perhaps not since the day when the dead woman left her native
village, and a fond and happy mother for the last time smoothed the
golden braids beneath her daughter’s Sunday bonnet.
In half an hour the butcher is home by his cheerful fireside; and I
think he has a more loving and protecting glance than usual for the
fair-haired daughter who pours out his tea.
No one recognizes the dead woman. No one knows her story; they
guess at it as a very common history, and bury her in a parish
burying-ground--a damp and dreary spot not far from the river’s brink,
in which many such as she are laid.
Our friend Jabez North, borrowing the Saturday’s paper of his principal
in the evening after school-hours, is very much interested in the
accounts of these two coroner’s inquests.
CHAPTER VII.
THE DUMB DETECTIVE A PHILANTHROPIST.
THE dreary winter months pass by. Time, slow of foot to some, and fast
of wing to others, is a very chameleon, such different accounts do
different people give of him.
He is very rapid in his flight, no doubt, for the young gentlemen from
Dr. Tappenden’s home for the Christmas holidays: rapid enough perhaps
for the young gentlemen’s papas, who have to send their sons back to
the academy armed with Dr. Tappenden’s little account--which is not
such a very little account either, when you reckon up all the extras,
such as dancing, French, gymnastics, drill-serjeant, hair-cutting,
stationery, servants, and pew at church.
Fast enough, perhaps, is the flight of Time for Allecompain Major, who
goes home in a new suit of mourning, and who makes it sticky about the
cuffs and white about the elbows before the holidays are out. I don’t
suppose he forgets his little dead brother; and I dare say, by the
blazing hearth, where the firelight falls dullest upon his mother’s
black dress, he sometimes thinks very sadly of the little grave out in
the bleak winter night, on which the snow falls so purely white. But
“cakes and ale” are eternal institutions; and if you or I, reader, died
to-morrow, the baker would still bake, and Messrs. Barclay and Perkins
would continue to brew the ale and stout for which they are so famous,
and the friends who were sorriest for us would eat, drink, ay and be
merry too, before long.
Who shall say how slow of foot is Time to the miserable young man
awaiting his trial in the dreary gaol of Slopperton?
Who shall say how slow to the mother awaiting in agony the result of
that trial?
The assizes take place late in February. So, through the fog and damp
of gloomy November; through long, dark, and dreary December nights;
through January frost and snow--(of whose outward presence he has no
better token than the piercing cold within)--Richard paces up and down
his narrow cell, and broods upon the murder of his uncle, and of his
trial which is to come.
Ministers of religion come to convert him, as they say. He tells them
that he hopes and believes all they can teach him, for that it was
taught him in years gone by at his mother’s knee.
“The best proof of my faith,” he says, “is that I am not mad. Do you
think, if I did not believe in an All-seeing Providence, I should not
go stark staring mad, when, night after night, through hours which are
as years in duration, I think, and think, of the situation in which
I am placed, till my brain grows wild and my senses reel? I have no
hope in the result of my trial, for I feel how every circumstance
tells against me: but I have hope that Heaven, with a mighty hand, and
an instrument of its own choosing, may yet work out the saving of an
innocent man from an ignominious death.”
The dumb detective Peters had begged to be transferred from Gardenford
to Slopperton, and was now in the employ of the police force of that
town. Of very little account this scrub among the officials. His
infirmity, they say, makes him scarcely worth his salt, though they
admit that his industry is unfailing.
So the scrub awaits the trial of Richard Marwood, in whose fortunes
he takes an interest which is in no way abated since he spelt out the
words “Not guilty” in the railway carriage.
He had taken up his Slopperton abode in a lodging in a small street