The Greatest Murder Mysteries of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Читать онлайн книгу.
looked at him with a glance of considerable astonishment, shook him heartily by the hand, and gave a long whistle; after which he walked up to the counter and examined the cough-mixture.
“Oh!” he said, “I suppose that’s why you’ve put enough laudanum into this to poison a small regiment, eh, Bell? Perhaps we may as well throw it out of the window; for if it goes out of the door I shall be hung for wholesale murder.”
They were a very merry party over the little tea-table; and if nobody ate any of the muffins, which Mr. Cordonner called “embodied indigestions,” they laughed a great deal, and talked still more—so much so, that Percy declared his reasoning faculties to be quite overpowered, and wanted to be distinctly informed whether it was Richard who was going to marry Gus, or Gus about to unite himself to the juvenile domestic, or he himself who was to be married against his inclination—which, seeing he was of a yielding and peace-loving disposition, was not so unlikely—or, in short, to use his own expressive language, “what the row was all about?”
Nobody, however, took the trouble to set Mr. P. C.’s doubts at rest, and he drank his tea with perfect contentment, but without sugar, and in a dense intellectual fog. “It doesn’t matter,” he murmured; “perhaps Richard will turn again and be Lord Mayor of London town, and then my children will read his adventures in a future Pinnock, and they may understand it. It’s a great thing to be a child, and to understand those sort of things. When I was six years old I knew who William Rufus married, and how many people died in the Plague of London. I can’t say it made me any happier or better, but I dare say it was a great advantage.”
At this moment the bell hung at the shop-door (a noisy preventive of petty larceny, giving the alarm if any juvenile delinquent had a desire to abstract a bottle of castor-oil, or a camomile-pill or so, for his peculiar benefit) rang violently, and our old friend Mr. Peters burst into the shop, and through the shop into the parlour, in a state of such excitement that his very fingers seemed out of breath.
“Back again?” cried Richard, starting up with surprise; for be it known to the reader that Mr. Peters had only the day before started for Slopperton-on-the-Sloshy to hunt up evidence about this man, whose very image lay buried outside that town.
Before the fingers of Mr. Peters, which quite shook with excitement, could shape an answer to Richard’s exclamation of surprise, a very dignified elderly gentleman, whose appearance was almost clerical, followed the detective into the room, and bowed politely to the assembled party.
“I will take upon myself to be my own sponsor,” said that gentleman. “If, as I believe, I am speaking to Mr. Marwood,” he added, looking at Richard, who bowed affirmatively, “it is to the interest of both of us—of you, sir, more especially—that we should become acquainted. I am Dr. Tappenden, of Slopperton.”
Mr. Cordonner, having politely withdrawn himself from the group so as not to interfere with any confidential communication, was here imprudent enough to attempt to select a book from the young surgeon’s hanging-library, and, in endeavouring to take down the third volume of Bragelonne, brought down, as usual, the entire literary shower-bath on his devoted head, and sat quietly snowed up, as it were, in loose leaves of Michel Lévy’s shilling edition, and fragments of illustrations by Tony Johannot.
Richard looked a little puzzled at Dr. Tappenden’s introduction; but Mr. Peters threw in upon his fingers this piece of information,—“He knows him!” and Richard was immediately interested.
“We are all friends here, I believe?” said the schoolmaster, glancing round interrogatively.
“Oh, decidedly, Monsieur d’Artagnan,” replied Percy, absently looking up from one of the loose leaves he had selected for perusal from those scattered around him.
“Monsieur d’Artagnan! Your friend is pleased to be facetious,” said the Doctor, with some indignation.
“Oh, pray excuse him, sir. He is only absent-minded,” replied Richard. “My friend Peters informs me that you know this man—this singular, this incomprehensible villain, whose supposed death is so extraordinary.”
“He—either the man who died, or this man who is now occupying a high position in London—was for some years in my employ; but in spite of what our worthy friend the detective says, I am inclined to think that Jabez North, my tutor, did actually die, and that it was his body which I saw at the police-station.”
“Not a bit of it, sir,” said the detective on his rapid fingers, “not a bit of it! That death was a do—a do, out and out. It was too systematic to be anything else, and I was a fool not to see there was something black at the bottom of it at the time. People don’t go and lay themselves out high and dry upon a heath, with clean soles to their shoes, on a stormy night, and the bottle in their hand—not took hold of, neither, but lying loose, you understand; put there—not clutched as a dying man clutches what his hand closes upon. I say this ain’t how people make away with themselves when they can’t stand life any longer. It was a do—a plant, such as very few but that man could be capable of; and that man’s your tutor, and the death was meant to put a stop to all suspicion; and while you was a-sighin’ and a-groanin’ over that poor young innocent, Mr. Jabez North was a-cuttin’ a fine figure, and a-captivatin’ a furrin heiress, with your money, or your banker’s money, as had to bear the loss of them forged cheques.”
“But the likeness?” said Dr. Tappenden. “That dead man was the very image of Jabez North.”
“Very likely, sir. There’s mysterious goin’s on, and some coincidences in this life, as well as in your story-books that’s lent out at three half-pence a volume, keep ’em three days and return ’em clean.”
“Well,” continued the schoolmaster, “the moment I see this man I shall know whether he is indeed the person we want to find. If he should be the man who was my usher, I can prove a circumstance which will go a great way, Mr. Marwood, towards fixing your uncle’s murder upon him.”
“And that is——?” asked Richard, eagerly.
But there is no occasion for the reader to know what it is just yet; so we will leave the little party in the Friar Street surgery to talk this business over, which they do with such intense interest that the small hours catch them still talking of the same subject, and Mr. Percy Cordonner still snowed up in his corner, reading from the loose leaves the most fascinating olla podrida of literature, wherein the writings of Charles Dickens, George Sand, Harrison Ainsworth, and Alexandre Dumas are blended together in the most delicious and exciting confusion.
Chapter IX
Captain Lansdown Overhears a Conversation Which Appears to Interest Him
Laurent Blurosset was a sort of rage at the West-end of London. What did they seek, these weary denizens of the West-end, but excitement? Excitement! No matter how obtained. If Laurent Blurosset were a magician, so much the better; if he had sold himself to the devil, so much the better again, and so much the more exciting. There was something almost approaching to a sensation in making a morning call upon a gentleman who had possibly entered into a contract with Sathanas, or put his name on the back of a bit of stamped paper payable at sight to Lucifer himself. And then there was the slightest chance, the faintest shadow of a probability, of meeting the proprietor of the gentleman they called upon; and what could be more delightful than that? How did he visit Marlborough Street—the proprietor? Had he a pass-key to the hall-door? or did he leave his card with the servant, like any other of the gentlemen his pupils and allies? Or did he rise through a trap in the Brussels carpet in the drawing-room? or slide through one of the sham Wouvermanns that adorned the walls? At any rate, a visit to the mysterious chemist of Marlborough Street was about the best thing to do at this fag-end of the worn-out London season; and Monsieur Laurent Blurosset was considered a great deal better than the Opera.
It was growing dusk on the evening on which there was so much excitement in the