The Greatest Murder Mysteries of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Mary Elizabeth Braddon

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      By the evening of the 18th, Dr. Tappenden’s young gentlemen, with the exception of two little fellows with dark complexions and frizzy hair, whose nearest connections were at Trinidad, all departed to their respective family circles; and Mr. Jabez North had the schoolroom to himself for the whole of the holidays—for, of course, the little West Indians, playing at a sea-voyage on one of the forms, with a cricket-bat for a mast, or reading Sinbad the Sailor in a corner, were no hindrance to that gentleman’s proceedings.

      Our friend Jabez is as calm-looking as ever. The fair pale complexion may be, perhaps, a shade paler, and the arched mouth a trifle more compressed—(that absurd professor of phrenology had declared that both the head and face of Jabez bespoke a marvellous power of secretiveness)—but our friend is as placid as ever. The pale face, delicate aquiline nose, the fair hair and rather slender figure, give a tone of aristocracy to his appearance which even his shabby black suit cannot conceal. But Jabez is not too well pleased with his lot. He paces up and down the schoolroom in the twilight of the June evening, quite alone, for the little West Indians have retired to the long dormitory which they now inhabit in solitary grandeur. Dr. Tappenden has gone to the sea-side with his slim only daughter, familiarly known amongst the scholars, who have no eyes for ethereal beauty, as “Skinny Jane.” Dr. Tappenden has gone to enjoy himself; for Dr. Tappenden is a rich man. He is said to have some twenty thousand pounds in a London bank. He doesn’t bank his money in Slopperton. And of “Skinny Jane,” it may be observed, that there are young men in the town who would give something for a glance from her insipid grey eyes, and who think her ethereal figure the very incarnation of the poet’s ideal, when they add to that slender form the bulky figures that form the sum-total of her father’s banking account.

      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 Alsatia 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, СКАЧАТЬ