The Greatest Murder Mysteries of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Mary Elizabeth Braddon
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such a glorious adventure to a man of Mr. Peters’s inches; but he was of a calm and amiable disposition, and would floor his adversary with as much good temper as he would eat his favourite dinner; so, with a growl of resignation, he abandoned the reins to the steady hands so used to hold them, and seated himself down to the consumption of innumerable clay pipes and glasses of bitter ale with Gus, who, being one of the most ancient of the order of the Cherokees, was an especial favourite with him.
On this third morning, however, there is a decided tone of weariness pervading the minds of both Gus and the Smasher. Three-handed all-fours, though a delicious and exciting game, will pall upon the inconstant mind, especially when your third player is perpetually summoned from the table to take part in a mysterious dialogue with a person or persons unknown, the result of which he declines to communicate to you. The view from the bow-window of the blue parlour in the White Lion, Liverpool, is no doubt as animated as it is beautiful; but Rasselas, we know, got tired of some very pretty scenery, and there have been readers so inconstant as to grow weary of Dr. Johnson’s book, and to go down peacefully to their graves unacquainted with the climax thereof. So it is scarcely perhaps to be wondered that the volatile Augustus thirsted for the waterworks of Blackfriars; while the Smasher, feeling himself to be blushing unseen, and wasting his stamina, if not his sweetness, on the desert air, pined for the familiar shades of Bow Street and Vinegar Yard, and the home-sounds of the rumbling and jingling of the wagons, and the unpolite language of the drivers thereof, on market mornings in the adjacent market. Pleasures and palaces are all very well in their way, as the song says; but there is just one little spot on earth which, whether it be a garret in Petticoat Lane or a mansion in Belgrave Square, is apt to be dearer to us than the best of them; and the Smasher languishes for the friendly touch of the ebony handles of the porter-engine, and the scent of the Welsh rarebits of his youth. Perhaps I express myself in a more romantic manner on this subject, however, than I should do, for the remark of the Left-handed one, as he pours himself out a cup of tea from the top of the teapot—he despises the spout of that vessel as a modern innovation on ancient simplicity—is as simple as it is energetic. He merely observes that he is “jolly sick of this lot,”—this lot meaning Liverpool, the Count de Marolles, the White Lion, three-handed all-fours, and the detective police force.
“There was nobody ill in Friar Street when I left,” said Gus mournfully; “but there had been a run upon Pimperneckel’s Universal Regenerator Pills: and if that don’t make business a little brisker, nothing will.”
“It’s my opinion,” observed the Smasher doggedly, “that this ’ere forrin cove has give us the slip out and out; and the sooner we gets back to London the better. I never was much of a hand at chasing wild geese, and”—he added, with rather a spiteful glance at the mild countenance of the detective—“I don’t see neither that standin’ and makin’ signs to parties unbeknown at street-corners and stair-heads is the quickest way to catch them sort of birds; leastways it’s not the opinion held by the gents belongin’ to the Ring as I’ve had the honour to make acquaintance with.”
“Suppose——” said Mr. Peters, on his fingers.
“Oh!” muttered the Smasher, “blow them fingers of his. I can’t understand ’em—there!” The left-handed Hercules knew that this was to attack the detective on his tenderest point. “Blest if I ever knows his p’s from his b’s, or his w’s from his x’s, let alone his vowels, and them would puzzle a conjuror.”
Mr. Peters glanced at the prize-fighter more in sorrow than in anger, and taking out a greasy little pocket-book, and a greasier little pencil, considerably the worse for having been vehemently chewed in moments of preoccupation, he wrote upon a leaf of it thus—“Suppose we catch him to-day?”
“Ah, very true,” said the Smasher sulkily, after he had examined the document in two or three different lights before he came upon its full bearings; “very true, indeed, suppose we do—and suppose we don’t, on the other hand; and I know which is the likeliest. Suppose, Mr. Peters, we give up lookin’ for a needle in a bundle of hay, which after a time gets tryin’ to a lively disposition, and go back to our businesses. If you had a girl as didn’t know British from best French a-servin’ of your customers,” he continued in an injured tone, “you’d be anxious to get home, and let your forrin counts go to the devil their own ways.”
“Then go,” Mr. Peters wrote, in large letters and no capitals.
“Oh, ah; yes, to be sure,” replied the Smasher, who, I regret to say, felt painfully, in his absence from domestic pleasures, the want of somebody to quarrel with; “No, I thank you! Go the very day as you’re going to catch him! Not if I’m in any manner aware of the circumstance. I’m obliged to you,” he added, with satirical emphasis.
“Come, I say, old boy,” interposed Gus, who had been quietly doing execution upon a plate of devilled kidneys during this little friendly altercation, “come, I say, no snarling, Smasher, Peters isn’t going to contest the belt with you, you know.”
“You needn’t be a-diggin’ at me because I ain’t champion,” said the ornament of the P.R., who was inclined to find a malcious meaning in every word uttered that morning; “you needn’t come any of your sneers because I ain’t got the belt any longer.”
The Smasher had been Champion of England in his youth, but had retired upon his laurels for many years, and only occasionally emerged from private life in a public-house to take a round or two with some old opponent.
“I tell you what it is, Smasher—it’s my opinion the air of Liverpool don’t suit your constitution,” said Gus. “We’ve promised to stand by Peters here, and to go by his word in everything, for the sake of the man we want to serve; and, however trying it may be to our patience doing nothing, which perhaps is about as much as we can do and make no mistakes, the first that gets tired and deserts the ship will be no friend to Richard Marwood.”
“I’m a bad lot, Mr. Darley, and that’s the truth,” said the mollified Smasher; “but the fact is, I’m used to a turn with the gloves every morning before breakfast with the barman, and when I don’t get it, I dare say I ain’t the pleasantest company goin’. I should think they’ve got gloves in the house: would you mind taking off your coat and having a turn—friendly like?”
Gus assured the Smasher that nothing would please him better than that trifling diversion; and in five minutes they had pushed Mr. Peters and the breakfast-table into a corner, and were hard at it, Mr. Darley’s knowledge of the art being all required to keep the slightest pace with the scientific movements of the agile though elderly Smasher.
Mr. Peters did not stay at the breakfast-table long, but after having drunk a huge breakfast cupful of very opaque and substantial-looking coffee at a draught, just as if it had been half a pint of beer, he slid quietly out of the room.
“It’s my opinion,” said the Smasher, as he stood, or rather lounged, upon his guard, and warded off the most elaborate combinations of Mr. Darley’s fists with as much ease as he would have brushed aside so many flies—“it’s my opinion that chap ain’t up to his business.”
“Isn’t he?” replied Gus, as he threw down the gloves in despair, after having been half an hour in a violent perspiration, without having succeeded in so much as rumpling the Smasher’s hair. “Isn’t he?” he said, choosing the interrogative as the most expressive form of speech. “That man’s got head enough to be prime minister, and carry the House along with every twist of his fingers.”
“He must make his p’s and b’s a little plainer afore he’ll get a bill through the Commons though,” muttered the Left-handed one, who couldn’t quite get over his feelings of injury against the detective for the utter darkness in which he had been kept for the last three days as to the other’s plans.
The Smasher and Mr. Darley passed the morning in that remarkably intellectual and praiseworthy manner peculiar to gentlemen who, being thrown out of their usual occupation, are cast upon their own resources for amusement and employment. There was the daily paper to be looked at, to begin with; but after Gus had glanced at the leading article,