In half an hour the butcher is home by his cheerful fireside; and I think he has a more loving and protecting glance than usual for the fair-haired daughter who pours out his tea.
No one recognizes the dead woman. No one knows her story; they guess at it as a very common history, and bury her in a parish burying-ground—a damp and dreary spot not far from the river’s brink, in which many such as she are laid.
Our friend Jabez North, borrowing the Saturday’s paper of his principal in the evening after school-hours, is very much interested in the accounts of these two coroner’s inquests.
Chapter VII
The Dumb Detective a Philanthropist
The dreary winter months pass by. Time, slow of foot to some, and fast of wing to others, is a very chameleon, such different accounts do different people give of him.
He is very rapid in his flight, no doubt, for the young gentlemen from Dr. Tappenden’s home for the Christmas holidays: rapid enough perhaps for the young gentlemen’s papas, who have to send their sons back to the academy armed with Dr. Tappenden’s little account—which is not such a very little account either, when you reckon up all the extras, such as dancing, French, gymnastics, drillserjeant, hair-cutting, stationery, servants, and pew at church.
Fast enough, perhaps, is the flight of Time for Allecompain Major, who goes home in a new suit of mourning, and who makes it sticky about the cuffs and white about the elbows before the holidays are out. I don’t suppose he forgets his little dead brother; and I dare say, by the blazing hearth, where the firelight falls dullest upon his mother’s black dress, he sometimes thinks very sadly of the little grave out in the bleak winter night, on which the snow falls so purely white. But “cakes and ale” are eternal institutions; and if you or I, reader, died to-morrow, the baker would still bake, and Messrs. Barclay and Perkins would continue to brew the ale and stout for which they are so famous, and the friends who were sorriest for us would eat, drink, ay and be merry too, before long.
Who shall say how slow of foot is Time to the miserable young man awaiting his trial in the dreary gaol of Slopperton?
Who shall say how slow to the mother awaiting in agony the result of that trial?
The assizes take place late in February. So, through the fog and damp of gloomy November; through long, dark, and dreary December nights; through January frost and snow—(of whose outward presence he has no better token than the piercing cold within)—Richard paces up and down his narrow cell, and broods upon the murder of his uncle, and of his trial which is to come.
Ministers of religion come to convert him, as they say. He tells them that he hopes and believes all they can teach him, for that it was taught him in years gone by at his mother’s knee.
“The best proof of my faith,” he says, “is that I am not mad. Do you think, if I did not believe in an All-seeing Providence, I should not go stark staring mad, when, night after night, through hours which are as years in duration, I think, and think, of the situation in which I am placed, till my brain grows wild and my senses reel? I have no hope in the result of my trial, for I feel how every circumstance tells against me: but I have hope that Heaven, with a mighty hand, and an instrument of its own choosing, may yet work out the saving of an innocent man from an ignominious death.”
The dumb detective Peters had begged to be transferred from Gardenford to Slopperton, and was now in the employ of the police force of that town. Of very little account this scrub among the officials. His infirmity, they say, makes him scarcely worth his salt, though they admit that his industry is unfailing.
So the scrub awaits the trial of Richard Marwood, in whose fortunes he takes an interest which is in no way abated since he spelt out the words “Not guilty” in the railway carriage.
He had taken up his Slopperton abode in a lodging in a small street of six-roomed houses yclept Little Gulliver Street. At No. 5, Little Gulliver Street, Mr. Peters’s attention had been attracted by the announcement of the readiness and willingness of the occupier of the house to take in and do for a single gentleman. Mr. Peters was a single gentleman, and he accordingly presented himself at No. 5, expressing the amiable desire of being forthwith taken in and done for.
The back bedroom of that establishment, he was assured by its proprietress, was an indoor garden-of-Eden for a single man; and certainly, looked at by the light of such advantages as a rent of four-and-sixpence a week, a sofa-bedstead—(that deliciously innocent white lie in the way of furniture which never yet deceived anybody); a Dutch oven, an apparatus for cooking anything, from a pheasant to a red herring; and a little high-art in the way of a young gentleman in red-and-yellow making honourable proposals to a young lady in yellow-and-red, in picture number one; and the same lady and gentleman perpetuating themselves in picture number two, by means of a red baby in a yellow cradle;—taking into consideration such advantages as these, the one-pair back was a paradise calculated to charm a virtuously-minded single man. Mr. Peters therefore took immediate possession by planting his honest gingham in a corner of the room, and by placing two-and-sixpence in the hands of the proprietress by way of deposit. His luggage was more convenient than extensive—consisting of a parcel in the crown of his hat, containing the lighter elegancies of his costume; a small bundle in a red cotton pocket handkerchief, which held the heavier articles of his wardrobe; and a comb, which he carried in his pocket-book.
The proprietress of the indoor Eden was a maiden lady of mature age, with a sharp red nose and metallic pattens. It was with some difficulty that Mr. Peters made her understand, by the aid of pantomimic gestures and violent shakings of the head, that he was dumb, but not deaf; that she need be under no necessity of doing violence to the muscles of her throat, as he could hear her with perfect ease in her natural key. He then—still by the aid of pantomime—made known a desire for pencil and paper, and on being supplied with these articles wrote the one word “baby,” and handed that specimen of caligraphy to the proprietress.
That sharp-nosed damsel’s maidenly indignation sent new roses to join the permanent blossoms at the end of her olfactory organ, and she remarked, in a voice of vinegar, that she let her lodgings to single men, and that single men as were single men, and not impostors, had no business with babies.
Mr. Peters again had recourse to the pencil, “Not mine—fondling; to be brought up by hand; would pay for food and nursing.”
The maiden proprietress had no objection to a fondling, if paid for its requirements; liked children in their places; would call Kuppins; and did call Kuppins.
A voice at the bottom of the stairs responded to the call of Kuppins; a boy’s voice most decidedly; a boy’s step upon the stairs announced the approach of Kuppins; and Kuppins entered the room with a boy’s stride and a boy’s slouch; but for all this, Kuppins was a girl.
Not very much like a girl about the head, with that shock of dark rough short hair; not much like a girl about the feet, in high-lows, with hob-nailed soles; but a girl for all that, as testified by short petticoats and a long blue pinafore, ornamented profusely with every variety of decoration in the way of three-cornered slits and grease-spots.
Kuppins was informed by her mistress that the gent had come to lodge; and moreover that the gent was dumb. It is impossible to describe Kuppins’s delight at the idea of a dumb lodger.
Kuppins had knowed a dumb boy as lived three doors from mother’s (Kuppins’s mother understood); this ’ere dumb boy was wicious, and when he was gone agin, ’owled ’orrid.
Was told that the gent wasn’t vicious and never howled, and seemed, if anything, disappointed. Understood the dumb alphabet, and had conversed in it for hours with the aforesaid dumb boy. The author, as omniscient, may state that Kuppins and the vicious boy had had some love-passages in days gone by. Mr. Peters was delighted to find a kindred spirit capable of understanding