The Trail of the Serpent

by Mary Braddon

  “I wonder whether he will come, or whether I must wear out my heart through another long long day.—Hush, hush! As if my trouble was not bad enough without your crying.”

  This is an appeal to the fretful baby; but that young gentleman is engaged at fisticuffs with his cap, and has just destroyed a handful of its tattered border.

  There is on this dingy bank of the Sloshy a little dingy public-house, very old-fashioned, though surrounded by newly-begun houses. It is a little, one-sided, pitiful place, ornamented with the cheering announcements of “Our noted Old Tom at 4d. per quartern;” and “This is the only place for the real Mountain Dew.”3 It is a wretched place, which has never seen better days, and never hopes to see better days. The men who frequent it are a few stragglers from a factory near, and the colliers whose barges are moored in the neighbourhood. These shamble in on dark afternoons, and play at all-fours, or cribbage, in a little dingy parlour with dirty dog’s-eared cards, scoring their points with beer-marks on the sticky tables. Not a very attractive house of entertainment this; but it has an attraction for the woman with the baby, for she looks at it wistfully, as she paces up and down. Presently she fumbles in her pocket, and produces two or three halfpence—just enough, it seems, for her purpose, for she sneaks in at the half-open door, and in a few minutes emerges in the act of wiping her lips.

  As she does so, she almost stumbles against a man wrapped in a great coat, and with the lower part of his face muffled in a thick handkerchief.

  “I thought you would not come,” she said.

  “Did you? Then you see you thought wrong. But you might have been right, for my coming was quite a chance: I can’t be at your beck and call night and day.”

  “I don’t expect you to be at my beck and call. I’ve not been used to get so much attention, or so much regard from you as to expect that, Jabez.”

  The man started, and looked round as if he expected to find all Slopperton at his shoulder; but there wasn’t a creature about.

  “You needn’t be quite so handy with my name,” he said; “there’s no knowing who might hear you. Is there any one in there?” he asked, pointing to the public-house.

  “No one but the landlord.”

  “Come in, then; we can talk better there. This fog pierces one to the bones.”

  He seems never to consider that the woman and the child have been exposed to that piercing fog for an hour and more, as he is above an hour after his appointment.

  He leads the way through the bar into the little parlour. There are no colliers playing at all-fours to-day, and the dog’s-eared cards lie tumbled in a heap on one of the sticky tables among broken clay-pipes and beer-stains. This table is near the one window which looks out on the river, and by this window the woman sits, Jabez placing himself on the other side of the table.

  The fretful baby has fallen asleep, and lies quietly in the woman’s lap.

  “What will you take?”

  “A little gin,” she answers, not without a certain shame in her tone.

  “So you’ve found out that comfort, have you?” He says this with a glance of satisfaction he cannot repress.

  “What other comfort is there for such as me, Jabez? It seemed at first to make me forget. Nothing can do that now—except——”

  She did not finish this sentence, but sat looking with a dull vacant stare at the black waters of the Sloshy, which, as the tide rose, washed with a hollow noise against the brickwork of the pathway close to the window.

  “Well, as I suppose you didn’t ask me to meet you here for the sole purpose of making miserable speeches, perhaps you’ll tell me what you want with me. My time is precious, and if it were not, I can’t say I should much care about stopping long in this place; it’s such a deliciously lively hole and such a charming neighbourhood.”

  “I live in this neighbourhood—at least, I starve in this neighbourhood, Jabez.”

  “Oh, now we’re coming to it,” said the gentleman, with a very gloomy face, “we’re coming to it. You want some money. That’s how this sort of thing always ends.”

  “I hoped a better end than that, Jabez. I hoped long ago, when I thought you loved me——”

  “Oh, we’re going over that ground again, are we?” said he; and with a gesture of weariness, he took up the dog’s-eared cards on the sticky table before him, and began to build a house with them, such as children build in their play.

  Nothing could express better than this action his thorough determination not to listen to what the woman might have to say; but in spite of this she went on—

  “You see I was a foolish country girl, Jabez, or I might have known better. I had been accustomed to take my father and my brother’s word of mouth as Bible truth, and had never known that word to be belied. I did not think, when the man I loved with all my heart and soul—to utter forgetfulness of every other living creature on the earth, of every duty that I knew to man and heaven—I did not think when the man I loved so much said this or that, to ask him if he meant it honestly, or if it was not a cruel and a wicked lie. Being so ignorant, I did not think of that, and I thought to be your wife, as you swore I should be, and that this helpless little one lying here might live to look up to you as a father, and be a comfort and an honour to you.”

  To be a comfort and an honour to you! The fretful baby awoke at the words, and clenched its tiny fists with a spiteful action.

  If the river, as a thing eternal in comparison to man—if the river had been a prophet, and had had a voice in its waters wherewith to prophesy, I wonder whether it would have cried—

  “A shame and a dishonour, an enemy and an avenger in the days to come!”

  Jabez’s card-house had risen to three stories; he took the dog’s-eared cards one by one in his white hands with a slow deliberate touch that never faltered.

  The woman looked at him with a piteous but tearless glance; from him to the river; and back again to him.

  “You don’t ask to look at the child, Jabez.”

  “I don’t like children,” said he. “I get enough of children at the Doctor’s. Children and Latin grammar—and the end so far off yet,”—he said the last words to himself, in a gloomy tone.

  “But your own child, Jabez—your own.”

  “As you say,” he muttered.

  She rose from her chair and looked full at him—a long long gaze which seemed to say, “And this is the man I loved; this is the man for whom I am lost!” If he could have seen her look! But he was stooping to pick up a card from the ground—his house of cards was five stories high by this time. “Come,” he said, in a hard resolute tone, “you’ve written to me to beg me to meet you here, for you were dying of a broken heart; that’s to say you have taken to drinking gin (I dare say it’s an excellent thing to nurse a child upon), and you want to be bought off. How much do you expect? I thought to have a sum of money at my command to-day. Never you mind how; it’s no business of yours.” He said this savagely, as if in answer to a look of inquiry from her; but she was standing with her back turned to him, looking steadily out of the window.

  “I thought to have been richer to-day,” he continued, “but I’ve had a disappointment. However, I’ve brought as much as I could afford; so the best thing you can do is to take it, and get out of Slopperton as soon as you can, so that I may never see your wretched white face again.”

  He counted out four sovereigns on the sticky table, and then, adding the sixth story to his card-house, looked at the frail erection with a glance of triumph.

  “And so will I build my fortune in days to come,” he muttered.

  A man who had entered the dark little parlour very softly passed behind him and brushed against his shoulder at this moment; the house of cards shivered, and fell in a heap on the table.

  Jabez turned round with an angry look.

  “What the devil did you do that for?” he asked.

  The man gave an apologetic shrug, pointed with his fingers to his lips, and shook his head.

&
nbsp; “Oh,” said Jabez, “deaf and dumb! So much the better.”

  The strange man seated himself at another table, on which the landlord placed a pint of beer; took up a newspaper, and seemed absorbed in it; but from behind the cover of this newspaper he watched Jabez with a furtive glance, and his mouth, which was very much on one side, twitched now and then with a nervous action.

  All this time the woman had never touched the money—never indeed turned from the window by which she stood; but she now came up to the table, and took the sovereigns up one by one.

  “After what you have said to me this day, I would see this child starve, hour by hour, and die a slow death before my eyes, before I would touch one morsel of bread bought with your money. I have heard that the waters of that river are foul and poisonous, and death to those who live on its bank; but I know the thoughts of your wicked heart to be so much more foul and so much bitterer a poison, that I would go to that black river for pity and help rather than to you.” As she said this, she threw the sovereigns into his face with such a strong and violent hand, that one of them, striking him above the eyebrow, cut his forehead to the bone, and brought the blood gushing over his eyes.

  The woman took no notice of his pain, but turning once more to the window, threw herself into a chair and sat moodily staring out at the river, as if indeed she looked to that for pity.

  The dumb man helped the landlord to dress the cut on Jabez’s forehead. It was a deep cut, and likely to leave a scar for years to come.

  Mr. North didn’t look much the better, either in appearance or temper, for this blow. He did not utter a word to the woman, but began, in a hang-dog manner, to search for the money, which had rolled away into the corners of the room. He could only find three sovereigns; and though the landlord brought a light, and the three men searched the room in every direction, the fourth could not be found; so, abandoning the search, Jabez paid his score and strode out of the place without once looking at the woman.

  “I’ve got off cheap from that tiger-cat,” he said to himself; “but it has been a bad afternoon’s work. What can I say about my cut face to the governor?” He looked at his watch, a homely silver one attached to a black ribbon. “Five o’clock; I shall be at the Doctor’s by tea-time. I can get into the gymnasium the back way, take a few minutes’ turn with the poles and ropes, and say the accident happened in climbing. They always believe what I say, poor dolts.”

  His figure was soon lost in the darkness and the fog—so dense a fog that very few people saw the woman with the fretful baby when she emerged from the public-house, and walked along the riverbank, leaving even the outskirts of Slopperton behind, and wandered on and on till she came to a dreary spot, where dismal pollard willows stretched their dark and ugly shadows, like the bare arms of withered hags, over the dismal waters of the lonely Sloshy.

  O river, sometimes so pitiless when thou devourest youth, beauty, and happiness, wilt thou be pitiful and tender to-night, and take a poor wretch, who has no hope of mortal pity, to peace and quiet on thy breast?

  O merciless river, so often bitter foe to careless happiness, wilt thou to-night be friend to reckless misery and hopeless pain?

  God made thee, dark river, and God made the wretch who stands shivering on thy bank: and may be, in His boundless love and compassion for the creatures of His hand, He may have pity even for those so lost as to seek forbidden comfort in thy healing waters.

  CHAPTER VI

  TWO CORONER’S INQUESTS

  There had not been since the last general election, when George Augustus Slashington, the Liberal member, had been returned against strong Conservative opposition, in a blaze of triumph and a shower of rotten eggs and cabbage-stumps—there had not been since that great day such excitement in Slopperton as there was on the discovery of the murder of Mr. Montague Harding.

  A murder was always a great thing for Slopperton. When John Boggins, weaver, beat out the brains of Sarah his wife, first with the heel of his clog and ultimately with a poker, Slopperton had a great deal to say about it—though, of course, the slaughter of one “hand” by another was no great thing out of the factories. But this murder at the Black Mill was something out of the common. Uncommonly cruel, cowardly, and unmanly, and moreover occurring in a respectable rank of life.

  Round that lonely house on the Slopperton road there was a crowd and 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-halfpence 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.1

  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 bed-side, 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 ha
d 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.