Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  However this may be, to “The Bargeman’s Delight” came Mr. Peters on the very day of the Count’s arrest, with a carpetbag in one hand and a fishing-rod in the other, and with no less a person than Mr. Augustus Darley for his companion. The customer, by the bye, was generally initiated unto the pleasures of this hostelry by being tripped up or tripped down on the threshold, and saluting a species of thin soup of sawdust and porter, which formed the upper stratum of the floor, with his olfactory organ. The neophyte of the Rosicrucian mysteries and of Freemasonry has, I believe, something unpleasant done to him before he can be safely trusted with the secrets of the Temple; why, then, should not the guest of the Delight have his initiation? Mr. Darley, with some dexterity, however, escaped this danger; and, entering the bar safely, entreated with the slip-shod and defiant damsel aforesaid.

  “Could we have a bed?” Mr. Darley asked; “in point of fact, two beds?”

  The damsel glared at him for a few minutes without giving any answer at all. Gus repeated the question.

  “We’ve got two beds,” muttered the defiant damsel.

  “All right, then,” said Gus. “Come in, old fellow,” he added to Mr. Peters, whose legs and bluchers were visible at the top of the steps, where he patiently awaited the result of his companion’s entreaty with the priestess of the temple.

  “But I don’t know whether you can have ‘em,” said the girl, with a more injured air than usual. “We ain’t in general asked for beds.”

  “Then why do you put up that?” asked Mr. Darley, pointing to a board on which, in letters that had once been gilt, was inscribed this legend, “Good Beds.”

  “Oh, as for that,” said the girl, “that was wrote up before we took the place, and we had to pay for it in the fixtures, so of course we wasn’t a-goin’ to take it down! But I’ll ask master.” Whereon she disappeared into the damp and darkness, as if she had been the genius of that mixture; and presently reappeared, saying they could have beds, but that they couldn’t have a private sitting-room because there wasn’t one — which reason they accepted as unanswerable, and furthermore said they would content themselves with such accommodation as the bar-parlour afforded; whereon the slip-shod barmaid relaxed from her defiant mood, and told them that they would find it quite cheerful, as there was a nice look-out upon the river.”

  Mr. Darley ordered a bottle of wine — a tremendous order, rarely known to be issued in that establishment — and further remarked that he should be glad if the landlord would bring it in, as he would like five minutes’ conversation with him. After having given this overwhelming order, Gus and Mr. Peters entered the parlour.

  It was empty, the parlour; the bargeman was evidently taking his delight somewhere else that afternoon. There were the wet marks of the bargeman’s porter-pots of the morning, and the dry marks of the bargeman’s porter-pots of the day before, still on the table; there were the bargeman’s broken tobacco-pipes, and the cards wherewith he had played all-fours — which cards he had evidently chewed at the corners in aggravation of spirit when his luck deserted him — strewn about in every direction. There were the muddy marks of the bargeman’s feet on the sandy floor; there was a subtle effluvium of mingled corduroy, tobacco, onions, damp leather, and gin, which was the perfume of the bargeman himself; but the bargeman in person was not there.

  Mr. Darley walked to the window, and looked out at the river. A cheerful sight, did you say, slip-shod Hebe? Is it cheerful to look at that thick dingy water, remembering how many a wretched head its current has flowed over; how many a tired frame has lain down to find in death the rest life could not yield; how many a lost soul has found a road to another world in that black tide, and gone forth impenitent, from the shore of time to the ocean of eternity; how often the golden hair has come up in the fisherman’s net; and how many a Mary, less happy, since less innocent than the heroine of Mr. Kingsley’s melodious song, has gone out, never, never to return! Mr. Darley perhaps thinks this, for he turns his back to the window, calls out to the barmaid to come and light a fire, and proceeds to fill man’s great consoler, his pipe.

  I very much wonder, gentle readers of the fair sex, that you have never contrived somehow or other to pick a quarrel with the manes of good, cloak-spoiling, guinea-finding, chivalrous, mutineer-encountering, long-suffering, maid-of-honour-adoring Walter Raleigh — the importer of the greatest rival woman ever had in the affections of man, the tenth Muse, the fourth Grace, she uncanonized saint, Tobacco. You are angry with poor Tom, whom you henpeck so cruelly, Mrs. Jones, because he came home last night from that little business dinner at Greenwich slightly the worse for the salmon and the cucumber — not the iced punch! — oh, no! he scarcely touched that! You are angry with your better half, and you wish to give him, as you elegantly put it, a bit of your mind. My good soul, what does Tom care for you — behind his pipe? Do you think he is listening to you, or thinking of you, as he sits lazily watching with dreamy eyes the blue wreaths of smoke curling upwards from that honest meerschaum bowl? He is thinking of the girl he knew fourteen years ago, before ever he fell on his knees in the back parlour, and ricked his ancle in proposing to you; he is thinking of a pic-nic in Epping Forest, where he first met her; when coats were worn short-waisted, and Plancus was consul; when there was scaffolding at Charing Cross, and stage-coaches between London and Brighton; when the wandering minstrel was to be found at Beulah Spa, and there was no Mr. Robson at the Olympic. He is looking full in your face, poor Tony! and attending to every word you say — as you think! Ah! my dear madam, believe me, he does not see one feature of your face, or hear one word of your peroration. He sees her; he sees her standing at the end of a green arcade, with the sunlight flickering between the restless leaves upon her bright brown curls, and making arabesques of light and shade on her innocent white dress; he sees the little coquettish glance she flings back at him, as he stands in an attitude he knows now was, if anything, spooney, all amongst the débris of the banquet — lobster-salads, veal-and-ham pies, empty champagne-bottles, strawberry-stalks, parasols, and bonnets and shawls. He hears the singing of the Essex birds, the rustling of the forest leaves, her ringing laugh, the wheels of a carriage, the tinkling of a sheep-bell, the roar of a blacksmith’s forge, and the fall of waters in the distance. All those sweet rustic sounds, which make a music very different to the angry tones of your voice, are in his ears; and you, madam — you, for any impression you can make on him, might just as well be on the culminating point of Teneriffe, and would find quite as attentive a listener in the waste of ocean you might behold from that eminence!

  And who is the fairy that works the spell? Her earthly name is Tobacco, alias Bird’s-eye, alias Latakia, alias Cavendish; and the magician who raised her first in the British dominions was Walter Raleigh. Are you not glad now, gentle reader, that the sailors mutinied, that the dear son was killed in that far land, and that the mean-spirited Stuart rewarded the noblest and wisest of his age with a life in a dungeon and the death of a traitor?

  I don’t know whether Augustus Darley thought all this as he sat over the struggling smoke and damp in the parlour of the Bargeman’s Delight, which smoke and damp the defiant barmaid told him would soon develop into a good fire. Gus was not a married man; and, again, he and Mr. Peters had very particular business on their hands, and had very little time for sentimental or philosophical reflections.

  The landlord of the “Delight” appeared presently, with what, he assured his guests, was such a bottle of port as they wouldn’t often meet with. There was a degree of obscurity in this commendation which savoured of the inspired communications of the priestess of the oracle. æacida might conquer the Romans, or the Romans might annihilate æ;acida; the bottle of port might be unapproachable by its excellence, or so utterly execrable in quality as to be beyond the power of wine-merchant to imitate; and either way the landlord not forsworn. Gus looked at the bright side of the question, and requested his host to draw the cork and bring another glass—”that is,” he said, “
if you can spare half an hour or so for a friendly chat.”

  “Oh, as for that,” said the landlord, “I can spare time enough, it isn’t the business as’ll keep me movin’; it’s never brisk except on wet afternoons, when they comes in with their dirty boots, and makes more mess than they drinks beer. A ‘found drowned’ or a inquest enlivens us up now and then; but Lord, there’s nothing doing nowadays, and even inquests and drownin’ seems a-goin’ out.”

  The landlord was essentially a melancholy and blighted creature; and he seated himself at his own table, wiped away yesterday’s beer with his own coat-sleeve, and prepared himself to drink his own port, with a gloomy resignation sublime enough to have taken a whole band of conspirators to the scaffold in a most creditable manner.

  “My friend,” said Mr. Darley, introducing Mr. Peters by a wave of his hand, “is a foreigner, and hasn’t got hold of our language yet; he finds it slippery, and hard to catch, on account of the construction of it, so you must excuse his not being lively.”

  The landlord nodded, and remarked, in a cheering manner, that he didn’t see what there was for the liveliest cove goin’ to be lively about nowadays.

  After a good deal of desultory conversation, and a description of 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 in; 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 it 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-six pence 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 is 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 i
nfected spot — it was indeed a melancholy habitation. The shutters of all the windows but one were closed; the garden-paths were overgrown 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, overgrown 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 hail 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.