The Greatest Murder Mysteries of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Читать онлайн книгу.
endurance. As to the Victoria Theatre, which was illuminated to such a degree that the box-entrance seemed as a pathway to fairyland, Kuppins was so thoroughly assured in her own mind of its being Drury Lane and nothing else, unless, perhaps, the Houses of Parliament or Covent Garden—that no protestations on Mr. Peters’s fingers could root out the fallacy.
But the journey came to an end at last; and Kuppins, safe with bag and baggage at No. 17, Wellington Square, partook of real London saveloys and real London porter with Mr. Peters and the “fondling,” in an elegant front parlour, furnished with a brilliantly-polished but rather rickety Pembroke table, that was covered with a Royal Stuart plaid woollen cloth; half-a-dozen cane-seated chairs, so new and highly polished as to be apt to adhere to the garments of the person who so little understood their nature or properties as to attempt to sit upon them; a Kidderminster carpet, the pattern of which was of the size adapted to the requirements of a town hall, but which looked a little disproportionate to Mr. Peters’s apartment, two patterns and a quarter stretching the entire length of the room; and a mantelpiece ornamented with a looking-glass divided into three compartments by gilded Corinthian pillars, and further adorned with two black velvet kittens, one at each corner, and a parti-coloured velvet boy on a brown velvet donkey in the centre.
The next morning Mr. Peters announced his intention of taking the “fondling” into the city of London, for the purpose of showing him the outside of St. Paul’s, the Monument, Punch and Judy, and other intellectual exhibitions adapted to his tender years. Kuppins was for starting then and there on a visit to the pig-faced lady, than which magnificent creature she could not picture any greater wonder in the whole metropolis; but Kuppins had to stay at home in her post of housekeeper, and to inspect and arrange the domestic machinery of No. 17, Wellington Square. So the “fondling,” being magnificently arrayed in a clean collar and a pair of boots that were too small for him, took hold of his protector’s hand, and they sallied forth.
If anything, Punch and Judy bore off the palm in this young gentleman’s judgment of the miracles of the big village.
It was not so sublime a sight, perhaps, as the outside of St. Paul’s; but, on the other hand, it was a great deal cleaner; and the “fondling” would have liked to have seen Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece picked out with a little fresh paint before he was called upon to admire it. The Monument, no doubt, was very charming in the abstract; but unless he could have been perpetually on the top of it, and perpetually within a hair’s breadth of precipitating himself on to the pavement below, it wasn’t very much in his way. But Punch, with his delightfully original style of elocution, his overpoweringly comic domestic passages with Judy, and the dolefully funny dog with a frill round his neck and an evident dislike for his profession—this, indeed, was an exhibition to be seen continually, and to be more admired the more continually seen, as no doubt the “fondling” would have said had he been familiar with Dr. Johnson, which, it is to be hoped, for his own peace of mind, he wasn’t.
It is rather a trying day for Mr. Peters, and he is not sorry when, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, he has taken the “fondling” all round the Bank of England—(that young gentleman insisting on peering in at the great massive windows, in the fond hope of seeing the money)—and has shown him the broad back of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, and the Clearing-house, and they are going out of Lombard Street, on their way to an omnibus which will take them home. But just as they are leaving the street the “fondling” makes a dead stop, and constrains Mr. Peters to do the same.
Standing before the glass doors of a handsome building, which a brass plate announces to be the “Anglo-Spanish-American Bank,” are two horses, and a groom in faultless buckskins and tops. He is evidently waiting for some one within the bank, and the “fondling”vehemently insists upon waiting too, to see the gentleman get on horseback. The good-natured detective consents; and they loiter about the pavement for some time before the glass doors are flung open by a white-neckclothed clerk, and a gentleman of rather foreign appearance emerges therefrom.
There is nothing particularly remarkable in this gentleman. The fit of his pale lavender gloves is certainly exquisite; the style of his dress is a recommendation to his tailor; but what there is in his appearance to occasion Mr. Peters’s holding on to a lamp-post it is difficult to say. But Mr. Peters did certainly cling to the nearest lamp-post, and did certainly turn as white as the whitest sheet of paper that ever came out of a stationer’s shop. The elegant-looking gentleman, who was no other than the Count de Marolles, had better occupation for his bright blue eyes than the observation of such small deer as Mr. Peters and the “fondling.” He mounted his horse, and rode slowly away, quite unconscious of the emotion his appearance had occasioned in the breast of the detective. No sooner had he done so, than Mr. Peters, relinquishing the lamp-post and clutching the astonished “fondling,” darted after him. In a moment he was in the crowded thoroughfare before Guildhall. An empty cab passed close to them. He hailed it with frantic gesticulations, and sprang in, still holding the “fondling.” The Count de Marolles had to rein-in his horse for a moment from the press of cabs and omnibuses; and at Mr. Peters’s direction the “fondling” pointed him out to the cabman, with the emphatic injunction to “follow that gent, and not to lose sight of him nohow.” The charioteer gives a nod, cracks his whip, and drives slowly after the equestrian, who has some difficulty in making his way through Cheapside. The detective, whose complexion still wears a most striking affinity to writing-paper, looks out of the window, as if he thought the horseman they are following would melt into thin air, or go down a trap in St. Paul’s Churchyard. The “fondling” follows his protector’s eyes with his eyes, then looks back at Mr. Peters, and evidently does not know what to make of the business. At last his patron draws his head in at the window, and expresses himself upon his fingers thus—
“How can it be him, when he’s dead?”
This is beyond the “fondling’s” comprehension, who evidently doesn’t understand the drift of the query, and as evidently doesn’t altogether like it, for he says.
“Don’t! Come, I say, don’t, now.”
“How can it be him,” continues Mr. Peters, enlarging upon the question, “when I found him dead myself out upon that there heath, and took him back to the station, and afterwards see him buried, which would have been between four cross roads with a stake druv’ through him if he’d poisoned himself fifty years ago?”
This rather obscure speech is no more to the “fondling’s” liking than the last, for he cries out more energetically than before,
“I say, now, I tell you I don’t like it, father. Don’t you try it on now, please. What does it mean? Who’s been dead fifty years ago, with a stake druv’ through ’em, and four cross roads on a heath? Who?”
Mr. Peters puts his head out of the window, and directing the attention of the “fondling” to the elegant equestrian they are following, says, emphatically, upon his fingers,
“Him!”
“Dead, is he?” said the “fondling,” clinging very close to his adopted parent. “Dead! and very well he looks, considerin’; but,” he continued, in an awful and anxious whisper, “where’s the stake and the four cross roads as was druv’ through him? Does he wear that ’ere loose coat to hide ’em?”
Mr. Peters didn’t answer this inquiry, but seemed to be ruminating, and, if one may be allowed the expression, thought aloud upon his fingers, as it was his habit to do at times.
“There couldn’t be two men so much alike, surely. That one I found dead was the one I saw at the public talkin’ to the young woman; and if so, this is another one, for that one was dead as sure as eggs is eggs. When eggs ceases to be eggs, which,” continued Mr. Peters, discoursively, “considerin’ they’re sellin’ at twenty for a shilling, French, and dangerous, if you’re not partial to young parboiled chickens, is not likely yet awhile, why, then, that one I found on the heath will come to life again.”
The “fondling” was too busy stretching his neck out of the window of the cab, in his eagerness to keep his eye upon the Count de Marolles, to pay any attention to Mr. Peters’s fingers. The outside of St. Pauls, and the