Richard thanked the Smasher for his good opinion, and they shook hands again.
“I’ll tell you what it is,” continued the host, “I’m a man of few words. If a cove offends me, I give him my left between his eyes, playful; if he does it agen, I give him my left agen, with a meanin’, and he don’t repeat it. If a gent as I like does me proud, I feels grateful, and when I has a chance I show him my gratitude. Mr. Richard Marwood, I’m your friend to the last spoonful of my claret; and let the man as murdered your uncle keep clear of my left mawley, if he wants to preserve his beauty.”
CHAPTER VI. MR. PETERS RELATES HOW HE THOUGHT HE HAD A CLUE, AND HOW HE LOST IT.
A WEEK after the meeting of the Cherokees Richard Marwood received his mother, in a small furnished house he had taken in Spring Gardens. Mrs. Marwood, possessed of the entire fortune of her murdered brother, was a very rich woman. Of her large income she had, during the eight years of her son’s imprisonment, spent scarcely anything; as, encouraged by Mr. Joseph Peters’s mysterious hints and vague promises, she had looked forward to the deliverance of her beloved and only child. The hour had come. She held him in her arms again, free.
“No, mother, no,” he says, “not free. Free from the prison walls, but not free from the stain of the false accusation. Not till the hour when all England declares my innocence shall I be indeed a free man. Why, look you, mother, I cannot go out of this room into yonder street without such a disguise as a murderer himself might wear, for fear some Slopperton official should recognise the features of the lunatic criminal, and send me back to my cell at the asylum.”
“My darling boy,” she lays her hands upon his shoulders, and looks proudly into his handsome face, “my darling boy, these people at Slopperton think you dead. See,” she touched her lack dress as she spoke, “it is for you I wear this. A painful deception, Richard, even for such an object. I cannot bear to think of that river, and of what might have been.”
“Dear mother, I have been saved, perhaps, that I may make some atonement for that reckless, wicked past.”
“Only reckless, Richard; never wicked. You had always the same noble heart, always the same generous soul; you’re always my dear and only son.”
“You remember what the young man says in the pray, mother, when he gets into a scrape through neglecting his garden and making love to his master’s daughter—’You shall he proud of your son yet.’”
“I shall be proud of you, Richard. I am proud of you. We are rich; and wealth is power. Justice shall be done you yet, my darling boy. You have friends—”
“Yes, mother, good and true ones. Peters — you brought him with you?”
“Yes; I persuaded him to resign his situation. I have settled a hundred a year on him for life — a poor return for what he has done, Richard; but it was all I could induce him to accept, and he only agreed to take that on condition that every moment of his life should be devoted to your service.”
“Is he in the house now, mother?”
“Yes, he is below; I will ring for him.”
“Do, mother. I must go over to Darley, and take him with me. You must not think me an inattentive or neglectful son; but remember that my life has but one business till that man is found.”
He wrung her hand, and left her standing at the window watching his receding figure through the quiet dusky street.
Her gratitude to Heaven for his restoration is deep and heartfelt; but there is a shade of sadness in her face as she looks out into the twilight after him, and thinks of the eight wasted years of his youth, and of his bright manhood now spent on a chimera; for she thinks he will never find the murderer of his uncle. How, after eight years, without one clue by which to trace him, how can he hope to track the real criminal?
But Heaven is above us all, Agnes Marwood; and in the dark and winding paths of life light sometimes comes when and whence we least expect it.
If you go straight across Blackfriars Bridge, and do not suffer yourself to be beguiled either by the attractions of that fashionable transpontine lounge, the “New Cut,” or by the eloquence of the last celebrity at that circular chapel some time sacred to Rowland Hill — if you are not a man to be led away by whelks and other piscatorial delicacies, second-hand furniture, birds and bird-cages, or easy shaving, you may ultimately reach, at the inland end of the road, a locality known to the inhabitants of the district of Friar Street. Whether, in any dark period of our ecclesiastical history, the members of the mother church were ever reduced to the necessity of living in this neighbourhood I am not prepared to say. But if ever any of the magnates of the Catholic faith did hang out in this direction, it is to be hoped that the odours from the soap-boiler’s round the corner, the rich essences from the tallow manufactory over the way, the varied perfumes from the establishment of the gentleman who does a thousand pounds a week in size, to say nothing of such minor and domestic effluvia as are represented by an amalgamation of red herrings, damp corduroy, old boots, onions, washing, a chimney on fire, dead cats, bad eggs, and an open drain or two — it is to be hoped, I say, that these conflicting scents did not pervade the breezes of friar Street so strongly in the good old times as they do in these our later days of luxury and refinement.
Mr. Darley’s establishment, ordinarily spoken of as the surgery par excellence, was perhaps one of the most pretending features of the street. It asserted itself, in fact, with such a redundancy of gilt letters and gas burners, that it seemed to say, “Really now, you must be ill; or if you’re not, you ought to be.” It was not a very large house, this establishment of Mr. Darley’s, but there were at least half-a-dozen bells on the doorpost. There was Surgery; then there was Day and Night (Gus wanted to have Morning and Afternoon, but somebody told him it wasn’t professional); then there was besides surgery, day, and night bells, another brilliant brass knob, inscribed “Visitors,” and a ditto ditto, whereon was engraved “Shop.” Though, as there was only one small back-parlour beyond the shop into which visitors ever penetrated, and as it was the custom for all such visitors to walk straight through the aforesaid shop into the aforesaid parlour without availing themselves of any bell whatever, the brass knobs were looked upon rather in the light of a conventionality than a convenience.
But Gus said they looked like business, especially when they were clean, which wasn’t always, as a couple of American gentlemen, friends of Darley’s, were in the habit of squirting tobacco juice at them from the other side of the way, in the dusky twilight; the man who hit the brass oftenest out of six times to be the winner, and the loser to stand beer all the evening — that is to say, until some indefinite time on the following morning, for Darley’s parties seldom broke up very early; and to let the visitors out and take the morning milk in was often a simultaneous proceeding in the household of our young surgeon.
If he had been a surgeon only, he would surely have been a Sir Benjamin Brodie; for when it is taken into account that he could play the piano, organ, guitar, and violoncello, without having learned any of those instruments; that he could write a song, and compose the melody to it; that he could draw horses and dogs after Herring and Landseer; make more puns in one sentence than any burlesque writer living; make love to half-a-dozen women at once, and be believed by every one of them; sing a comic song, or tell a funny story; name the winner of the Derby safer than any prophet on that side of the water; and make his book for the Leger with one hand while he wrote a prescription with the other; the discriminating reader will allow that there was a good deal of some sort of talent or other in the composition of Mr. Augustus Darley.
In the twilight of this particular autumn evening he is busily engaged putting up a heap of little packets labelled “Best Epsom Salts,” while his assistant, a very small youth, of a far more elderly appearance than his master, lights the gas. The half-glass door that communicates with the little back parlour is ajar, and Gus is talking to some one within.
“If I go over the water to-night, Bell—” he says.
A feminine voice from within interrupts him—”But you won’t go to-night, Gus; the last time you went to that horrid Smasher’s, Mrs. Tompkins’s little boy was ill, and they sent into the London Road for Mr. Parker. And you are such a favourite with everybody, dear, that they say if you’d only stay at home always, you’d have the best practice in the neighbourhood.”
“But, Bell, how can a fellow stay at home night after night, and perhaps half his time only sell a penn’orth of salts or a poor man’s plaster? If they’d be ill,” he added, almost savagely, “I wouldn’t mind stopping in; there’s some interest in that. Or if they’d come and have their teeth drawn; but they never will: and I’m sure I sell ’em our Infallible Anti-toothache Tincture; and if that don’t make ’em have their teeth out, nothing will.”
“Come and have your tea, Gus; and tell Snix to bring his basin.”
Snix was the boy, who forthwith drew from a cupboard under the counter the identical basin into which, when a drunken man was brought into the shop, Gus usually bled him, with a double view of obtaining practice in his art and bringing the patient back to consciousness.
The feminine occupant of the parlour is a young lady with dark hair and grey eyes, and something under twenty years of age. She is Augustus Darley’s only sister; she keeps his house, and in an emergency she can make up a prescription, nay, has been known to draw a juvenile patient’s first tooth, and give him his money back after the operation for the purchase of consolatory sweetstuffs.
Perhaps Isabel Darley is just a little what very prim young ladies, who have never passed the confines of the boarding-school or the drawing-room, might call “fast.” But when it is taken into consideration that she was left an orphan at an early age, that she never went to school in her life, and that she has for a very considerable period been in the habit of associating with her brother’s friends, chiefly members of the Cherokee Society, it is not so much to be wondered at that she is a little more masculine in her attainments, and “go-ahead” in her opinions, than some others of her sex.
The parlour is small, as has before been stated. One of the Cherokees has been known to suggest, when there were several visitors present and the time arrived for their departure, that they should be taken out singly with a corkscrew. Other Cherokees, arriving after the room had been filled with visitors, had been heard to advise that somebody should go in first with a candle, to ascertain whether vitality could be sustained in the atmosphere. Perhaps the accommodation was not extended by the character of the furniture, which consisted of a cottage piano, a chair for the purposes of dental surgery, a small Corinthian column supporting a basin with a metal plug and chain useful for like purposes; also a violoncello in the corner, a hanging bookshelf — (which was a torture to tall Cherokees, as one touch from a manly head would tilt down the shelves and shower the contents of Mr. Darley’s library on the head in question, like a literary waterfall) — and a good-sized sofa, with that unmistakable well, and hard back and arms, which distinguish the genus sofa-bedstead. Of course tables, chairs, china ornaments, a plaster-of-Paris bust here and there, caricatures on the walls, a lamp that wouldn’t burn, and a patent arrangement for the manufacture of toasted cheese, are trifles in the way of furniture not worth naming. Miss Darley’s birds, again, though they did spill seed and water into the eyes of unoffending visitors, and drop lumps of dirty sugar sharply down upon the noses of the same, could not of course be considered a nuisance; but certainly the compound surgery and back-parlour in the mansion of Augustus Parley was, to say the least, a little too full of furniture.
While Isabel is pouring out the tea, two gentlemen open the shop door, and the bell attached thereto, which should ring but doesn’t, catching in the foremost visitor’s foot, nearly precipitates him headlong into the emporium of the disciple of Esculapius. This foremost visitor is no other than Mr. Peters, and the tall figure behind him, wrapped in a greatcoat, is Daredevil Dick.
“Here I am, Gus!” he cries out, in his own bold hearty voice; “here I am; found your place at last, in spite of the fascinations of half the stale shell-fish in the United Kingdom. Here I am; and here’s the best friend I have in the world, not even excepting yourself, old fellow.”
Gus introduces Richard to his sister Isabel, who has been taught from her childhood to look upon the young man shut up in a lunatic asylum down at Slopperton as the greatest hero, next to Napoleon Buonaparte, that ever the world had boasted. She was a little girl of eleven years old at the time of Dick’s trial, and had never seen her wild brother’s wilder companion; and she looks up now at the dark handsome face with a glance of almost reverence in her deep gray eyes. But Bell is by no means a heroine; and she has a dozen unheroine-like occupations. She has the tea to pour out, and in her nervous excitement she scalds Richard’s fingers, drops the sugar into the slop-basin, and pours all the milk into one cup of tea. What she would have done without the assistance of Mr. Peters, it is impossible to say; for that gentleman showed himself the very genius of order; cut thin bread-and-butter enough for half-a-dozen, which not one of the party touched; re-filled the teapot before it was empty; lit the gas-lamp which hung from the ceiling; shut the door which communicated with the shop and the other door which led on to the staircase; and did all so quietly that nobody knew he was doing anything.
Poor Richard! In spite of the gratitude and happiness he feels in his release, there is a gloom upon his brow and an abstraction in his manner, which he tries in vain to shake off.
A small, round, chubby individual, who might be twelve or twenty, according to the notions of the person estimating her age, removed the tea-tray, and in so doing broke a saucer. Gus looked up. “She always does it,” he said, mildly. “We’re getting quite accustomed to the sound. It rather reduces our stock of china, and we sometimes are obliged to send out to buy tea-things before we can have any breakfast; but she’s a good girl, and she doesn’t steal the honey, or the jujubes, or the tartaric acid out of the seidlitz-powders, as the other one did; not that I minded that much,” he continued; “but she couldn’t read, and she sometimes filled up the papers with arsenic for fear of being found out; and that might have been inconvenient, if we’d ever happened to sell them.”
“Now, Gus,” said Richard, as he drew his chair up to the fireplace and lit his pipe — permission being awarded by Bell, who lived in one perpetual atmosphere of tobacco-smoke—”now, Gus, I want Peters to tell you all about this affair; how it was he thought me innocent; how he hit upon the plan he formed for saving my neck; how he tried to cast about and find a clue to the real murderer; how he thought he had found a clue, and how he lost it.”
“Shall my sister stop while he tells the story?” asked Gus.
“She is your sister, Gus,” answered Richard. “She cannot be so unlike you as not to be a true and pitying friend to me. Miss Darley,” he continued, turning towards her as he spoke, “you do not think me quite so bad a fellow as the world has made me out; you would like to see me righted, and my name freed from the stain of a vile crime?”
“Mr. Marwood,” the girl answered, in an earnest voice, “I have heard your sad story again and again from my brother’s lips. Had you too been my brother, I could not, believe me, have felt a deeper interest in your fate, or a truer sorrow for your misfortunes. It needs but to look into your face, or hear your voice, to know how little you deserve the imputation that has been cast upon you.”
Richard rises and gives her his hand. No languid and lady-like pressure, such as would not brush the down off a butterfly’s wing, but an honest hearty grasp, that comes straight from the heart.
“And now for Mr. Peters’s story,” said Gus, “while I brew a jugful of whisky-punch.”
“You can follow his hands, Gus?” asks Richard.
“Every twist and turn of them. He and I had many a confab about you, old fellow, before we went out fishing,” said Gus, looking up from the pleasing occupation of peeling a lemon.
“Now for it, then,” said Richard; an
d Mr. Peters accordingly began.
Perhaps, considering his retiring from the Slopperton police force a great event, not to say a crisis, in his life, Mr. Peters had celebrated it by another event; and, taking the tide of his affairs at the flood, had availed himself of the water to wash his hands with. At any rate, the digital alphabet was a great deal cleaner than when, eight years ago, he spelt out the two words, “Not guilty,” in the railway carriage.
There was something very strange to a looker-on in the little party, Gus, Richard, and Bell, all with earnest eyes fixed on the active fingers of the detective — the silence only broken by some exclamation at intervals from one of the three.
“When first I see this young gent,” say the fingers, as Mr. Peters designates Richard with a jerk of his elbow, “I was a-standin’ on the other side of the way, a-waitin’ till my superior, Jinks, as was as much up to his business as a kitting,” — (Mr. Peters has rather what we may call a fancy style of orthography, and takes the final g off some words to clap it on to others, as his taste dictates)—”a-waitin,’ I say, till Jinks should want my assistance. Well, gents all — beggin’ the lady’s parding, as sits up so manly, with none of yer faintin’ nor ‘steriky games, as I a’most forgot she was a lady — no sooner did I clap eyes upon Mr. Marwood here, a-smokin’ his pipe, in Jinks’s face, and a-answerin’ him sharp, and a-behavin’ what you may call altogether cocky, than I says to myself, ‘They’ve got the wrong un. My fust words and my last about this ‘ere gent, was, ‘They’ve got the wrong un.’”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 26