The Trail of the Serpent
Page 10
Jabez paces up and down the long schoolroom with a step so light that it scarcely wakes an echo (those crotchety physiologists call this light step another indication of a secretive disposition)—up and down, in the darkening summer evening.
“Another six months’ Latin grammar,” he mutters, “another half-year’s rudiments of Greek, and all the tiresome old fables of Paris and Helen, and Hector and Achilles, for entertainment! A nice life for a man with my head—for those fools who preached about my deficient moral region were right perhaps when they told me my intellect might carry me anywhere. What has it done for me yet? Well, at the worst, it has taken me out of loathsome parish rags; it has given me independence. And it shall give me fortune. But how? What is to be the next trial? This time it must be no failure. This time my premises must be sure. If I could only hit upon some scheme! There is a way by which I could obtain a large sum of money; but then, the fear of detection! Detection, which if eluded to-day might come to-morrow! And it is not a year or two’s riot and dissipation that I want to purchase; but a long life of wealth and luxury, with proud men’s necks to trample on, and my old patrons to lick the dust off my shoes. This is what I must fight for, and this is what I must attain—but how? How?”
He takes his hat up, and goes out of the house. He is quite his own master during these holidays. He comes in and goes out as he likes, provided he is always at home by ten o’clock, when the house is shut up for the night.
He strolls with a purposeless step through the streets of Slopperton. It is half-past eight o’clock, and the factory hands fill the streets, enjoying the coolness of the evening, but quiet and subdued in their manner, being exhausted by the heat of the long June day. Jabez does not much affect these crowded streets, and turns out of one of the most busy quarters of the town into a little lane of old houses, which leads to a great old-fashioned square, in which stand two ancient churches with very high steeples, an antique-looking town-hall (once a prison), a few quaint houses with peaked roofs and projecting upper stories, and a gaunt gump. Jabez soon leaves this square behind him, and strolls through two or three dingy, narrow, old-fashioned streets, till he comes to a labyrinth of tumble-down houses, pigstyes, and dog-kennels, known as Blind Peter’s Alley. Who Blind Peter was, or how he ever came to have this alley—or whether, as a place possessing no thoroughfare and admitting very little light, it had not originally been called Peter’s Blind Alley—nobody living knew. But if Blind Peter was a myth, the alley was a reality, and a dirty loathsome fetid reality, with regard to which the Board of Health seemed as if smitten with the aforesaid Peter’s own infirmity, ignoring the horror of the place with fatal blindness. So Blind Peter was the Alsatia3 of Slopperton, a refuge for crime and destitution—since destitution cannot pick its company, but must be content often, for the sake of shelter, to jog cheek by jowl with crime. And thus no doubt it is on the strength of that golden adage about birds of a feather that destitution and crime are thought by numerous wise and benevolent persons to mean one and the same thing. Blind Peter had risen to popularity once or twice—on the occasion of a girl poisoning her father in the crust of a beef-steak pudding, and a boy of fourteen committing suicide by hanging himself behind a door. Blind Peter, on the first of these occasions, had even had his portrait taken for a Sunday paper; and very nice indeed he had looked in a woodcut—so nice, that he had found some difficulty in recognizing himself; which perhaps was scarcely wonderful, when it is taken into consideration that the artist, who lived in the neighbourhood of Holborn, had sketched Blind Peter from a mountain gorge in the Tyrol, broken up with three or four houses out of Chancery Lane.
Certainly Blind Peter had a peculiar wildness in his aspect, being built on the side of a steep hill, and looked very much like a London alley which had been removed from its site and pitched haphazard on to a Slopperton mountain.
It is not to be supposed for a moment that so highly respectable an individual as Mr. Jabez North had any intention of plunging into the dirty obscurity of Blind Peter. He had come thus far only on his way to the outskirts of the town, where there was a little brick-bestrewn, pseudo country, very much more liberally ornamented by oyster-shells, broken crockery, and scaffolding, than by trees or wild flowers—which natural objects were wondrous rarities in this part of the Sloppertonian outskirts.
So Jabez pursued his way past the mouth of Blind Peter—which was adorned by two or three broken-down and rusty iron railings that looked like jagged teeth—when he was suddenly arrested by a hideous-looking woman, who threw her arms about him, and addressed him in a shrill voice thus—
“What, he’s come back to his best friends, has he? He’s come back to his old granny, after frightening her out of her poor old wits by staying away four days and four nights. Where have you been, Jim, my deary? And where did you get your fine toggery?”
“Where did I get my fine toggery? What do you mean, you old hag? I don’t know you, and you don’t know me. Let me pass, will you? or I’ll knock you down!”
“No, no,” she screamed; “he wouldn’t knock down his old granny; he wouldn’t knock down his precious granny that nursed him, and brought him up like a gentleman, and will tell him a secret one of these days worth a mint of money, if he treats her well.”
Jabez pricked up his ears at the words “mint of money,” and said in rather a milder tone—
“I tell you, my good woman, you mistake me for somebody else. I never saw you before.”
“What! you’re not my Jim?”
“No. My name is Jabez North. If you’re not satisfied, here’s my card,” and he took out his card-case.
The old woman stuck her arms a kimbo, and stared at him with a gaze of admiration.
“Lor’,” she cried, “don’t he do it nat’ral? Ain’t he a born genius? He’s been a-doing the respectable reduced tradesman, or the young man brought up to the church, what waits upon the gentry with a long letter, and has a wife and two innocent children staying in another town, and only wants the railway fare to go to ’em. Eh, Jim, that’s what you’ve been a-doing, ain’t it now? And you’ve brought home the swag like a good lad to your grandmother, haven’t you now?” she said in a wheedling tone.
“I tell you, you confounded old fool, I’m not the man you take me for.”
“What, not my Jim! And you can look at me with his eyes and tell me so with his voice. Then, if you’re not him, he’s dead, and you’re his ghost.”
Jabez thought the old woman was mad; but he was no coward, and the adventure began to interest him. Who was this man who was so like him, and who was to learn a secret some day worth a mint of money?
“Will you come with me, then,” said the old woman, “and let me get a light, and see whether you are my Jim or not?”
“Where’s the house?” asked Jabez.
“Why, in Blind Peter, to be sure. Where should it be?”
“How should I know?” said Jabez, following her. He thought himself safe even in Blind Peter, having nothing of value about him, and having considerable faith in the protecting power of his strong right arm.
The old woman led the way into the little mountain gorge, choked up with rickety hovels lately erected, or crazy old houses which had once been goodly residences, in the days when the site of Blind Peter had been a pleasant country lane. The house she entered was of this latter class; and she led the way into a stone-paved room, which had once been a tolerably spacious entrance-hall.
It was lighted by one feeble little candle with a long drooping wick, stuck in an old ginger-beer bottle; and by this dim light Jabez saw, seated on a heap of rubbish by the desolate hearth, his own reflection—a man dressed, unlike him, in the rough garments of a labourer, but whose face gave back as faithfully as ever glass had done the shadow of his own.
CHAPTER II
LIKE AND UNLIKE
The old woman stared aghast, first at one of the young men, then at the other.
“Why, then, he isn’t Jim!” she exclaimed.
“But the other,” she said,—“this young gentleman. Look at him, Jim.”
The man took up the candle, snuffed it with his fingers, and walked straight to Jabez. He held the light before the face of the usher, and surveyed him with a leisurely stare. That individual’s blue eyes winked and blinked at the flame like an owl’s in the sunshine, and looked every way except straight into the eyes looking into his.
“Why, curse his impudence!” said the man, with a faint sickly laugh; “I’m blest if he hasn’t been and boned my mug.1 I hope it’ll do him more good than it’s done me,” he added, bitterly.
“I can’t make out the meaning of this,” mumbled the old woman. “It’s all dark to me. I saw where the other one was put myself. I saw it done, and safely done too. Oh, yes, of course—”
“What do you mean by ‘the other one’?” asked the man, while Jabez listened intently for the answer.
“Why, my deary, that’s a part of the secret you’re to know some of these days. Such a secret. Gold, gold, gold, as long as it’s kept; and gold when it’s told, if it’s told at the right time, deary.”
“If it’s to be told at the right time to do me any good, it had better be told soon, then,” said Jim, with a dreary shiver. “My bones ache, and my head’s on fire, and my feet are like lumps of ice. I’ve walked twenty miles to-day, and I haven’t had bite nor sup since last night. Where’s Sillikens?”
“At the factory, Jim deary. Somebody’s given her a piece of work—one of the regular hands; and she’s to bring home some money to-night. Poor girl, she’s been a fretting and a crying her eyes out since you’ve been gone, Jim.”
“Poor lass. I thought I might do some good for her and me both by going away where I did; but I haven’t; and so I’ve come back to eat her starvation wages, poor lass. It’s a cowardly thing to do, and if I’d had strength I should have gone on further, but I couldn’t.”
As he was saying these words a girl came in at the half-open door, and running up to him, threw her arms round his neck.
“O Jim, you’ve come back! I said you would; I knew you’d never stop away; I knew you couldn’t be so cruel.”
“It’s crueller to come back, lass,” he said; “it’s bad to be a burden on a girl like you.”
“A burden, Jim!” she said, in a low reproachful voice, and then dropped quietly down amongst the dust and rubbish at his feet, and laid her head caressingly against his knee.
She was not what is generally called a pretty girl. Hers had not been the delicate nurture which nourishes so frail an exotic as beauty. She had a pale sickly face; but it was lighted up by large dark eyes, and framed by a heavy mass of dark hair.
She took the man’s rough hand in hers, and kissed it tenderly. It is not likely that a duchess would have done such a thing; but if she had, she could scarcely have done it with better grace.
“A burden, Jim!” she said,—“a burden! Do you think if I worked for you day and night, and never rested, that I should be weary? Do you think, if I worked my fingers to the bone for you, that I should ever feel the pain? Do you think, if my death could make you a happy man, I should not be glad to die? Oh, you don’t know, you don’t know!”
She said this half-despairingly, as if she knew there was no power in his soul to fathom the depth of love in hers.
“Poor lass, poor lass,” he said, as he laid the other rough hand gently on her black hair. “If it’s as bad as this, I’m sorry for it—more than ever sorry to-night.”
“Why, Jim?” She looked up at him with a sudden glance of alarm. “Why, Jim? Is anything the matter?”
“Not much, lass; but I don’t think I’m quite the thing to-night.” His head drooped as he spoke. The girl put it on her shoulder, and it lay there as if he had scarcely power to lift it up again.
“Grandmother, he’s ill—he’s ill! why didn’t you tell me this before? Is that gentleman the doctor?” she asked, looking at Jabez, who still stood in the shadow of the doorway, watching the scene within.
“No; but I’ll fetch the doctor, if you like,” said that benevolent personage, who appeared to take a wonderful interest in this family group.
“Do, sir, if you will be so good,” said the girl imploringly; “he’s very ill, I’m sure. Jim, look up, and tell us what’s the matter?”
The man lifted his heavy eyelids with an effort, and looked up with bloodshot eyes into her face. No, no! Never could he fathom the depth of this love which looks down at him now with more than a mother’s tenderness, with more than a sister’s devotion, with more than a wife’s self-abnegation. This love, which knows no change, which would shelter him in those entwining arms a thief or a murderer, and which could hold him no dearer were he a king upon a throne.
Jabez North goes for a doctor, and returns presently with a gentleman, who, on seeing Jim the labourer, pronounces that he had better go to bed at once; “for,” as he whispers to the old woman, “he’s got rheumatic fever,2 and got it pretty sharp, too.”
The girl they call Sillikens bursts out crying on hearing this announcement, but soon chokes down her tears—(as tears are wont to be choked down in Blind Peter, whose inhabitants have little time for weeping)—and sets to work to get ready a poor apology for a bed—a worn-out mattress and a thin patch-work counterpane; and on this they lay the bundle of aching bones known to Blind Peter as Jim Lomax.
The girl receives the doctor’s directions, promises to fetch some medicine from his surgery in a few minutes, and then kneels down by the sick man.
“O Jim, dear Jim,” she says, “keep a good heart, for the sake of those who love you.”
She might have said for the sake of her who loves you, for it never surely was the lot of any man, from my lord the marquis to Jim the labourer, to be twice in his life loved as this man was loved by her.
Jabez North on his way home must go the same way as the doctor; so they walk side by side.
“Do you think he will recover?” asks Jabez.
“I doubt it. He has evidently been exposed to great hardship, wet, and fatigue. The fever is very strong upon him; and I’m afraid there’s not much chance of his getting over it. I should think something might be done for him, to make him a little more comfortable. You are his brother, I presume, in spite of the apparent difference between you in station?”
Jabez laughed a scornful laugh. “His brother! Why, I never saw the man till ten minutes before you did.”
“Bless me!” said the old doctor, “you amaze me. I should have taken you for twin brothers. The likeness between you is something wonderful; in spite, too, of the great difference in your clothes. Dressed alike, it would be impossible to tell one from the other.”
“You really think so?”
“The fact must strike any one.”
Jabez North was silent for a little time after this. Presently, as he parted from the doctor at a street-corner, he said—
“And you really think there’s very little chance of this poor man’s recovery?”
“I’m afraid there is positively none. Unless a wonderful change takes place for the better, in three days he will be a dead man. Good night.”
“Good night,” says Jabez, thoughtfully. And he walked slowly home.
It would seem about this time that he was turning his attention to his personal appearance, and in some danger of becoming a fop; for the next morning he bought a bottle of hair-dye, and tried some experiments with it on one or two of his own light ringlets, which he cut off for that purpose.
It would seem a very trivial employment for so superior and intellectual a man as Jabez North, but it may be that every action of this man’s life, however apparently trivial, bore towards one deep and settled purpose.
CHA
PTER III
A GOLDEN SECRET
Mr. Jabez North, being of such a truly benevolent character, came the next day to Blind Peter, full of kind and sympathetic inquiries for the sick man. For once in a way he offered something more than sympathy, and administered what little help he could afford from his very slender purse. Truly a good young man, this Jabez.
The dilapidated house in Blind Peter looked still more dreary and dilapidated in the daylight, or in such light as was called daylight by the denizens of that wretched alley. By this light, too, Jim Lomax looked none the better, with hungry pinched features, bloodshot eyes, and two burning crimson spots on his hollow cheeks. He was asleep when Jabez entered. The girl was still seated by his side, never looking up, or taking her large dark eyes from his face—never stirring, except to re-arrange the poor bundle of rags which served as a pillow for the man’s weary head, or to pour out his medicine, or moisten his hot forehead with wet linen. The old woman sat by the great gaunt fireplace, where she had lighted a few sticks, and made the best fire she could, by the doctor’s orders; for the place was damp and draughty, even in this warm June weather. She was rocking herself to and fro on a low three-legged stool, and muttering some disconnected jargon.