put that twenty shillings worth of gold into my hand.”
“You don’t, don’t you?” said the landlord, repeating the operations described above, and looking very hard at Gus all the time: after which he sat staring silently from Gus to Peters, and from Peters to the puce-coloured liquid, for some minutes: at last he said—“It ain’t a trap?”
“There’s the note,” replied Mr. Darley; “look at it, and see if it’s a good one. I’ll lay it on this table, and when you lay down that sovereign—that one, mind, and no other—it’s yours.”
“You think I’ve got it, then?” said the landlord, interrogatively.
“I know you’ve got it,” said Gus, “unless you’ve spent it.”
“Why, as to that,” said the landlord, “when you first called to mind the circumstance of the girl, and the gent, and the inquest, and all that, I’ve a short memory, and couldn’t quite recollect that there sovereign; but now I do remember finding of that very coin a year and a half afterwards, for the drains was bad that year, and the Board of Health came a-chivying of us to take up our floorings, and lime-wash ourselves inside; and in taking up the flooring of this room what should we come across but that very bit of gold?”
“And you never changed it?”
“Shall I tell you why I never changed it? Sovereigns ain’t so plentiful in these parts that I should keep this one to look at. What do you say to its not being a sovereign at all?”
“Not a sovereign?”
“Not; what do you say to its being a twopenny-halfpenny foreign coin, with a lot of rum writin’ about it—a coin as they has the cheek to offer me four-and-sixpence for as old gold, and as I kep’, knowin’ it was worth more for a curiosity—eh?”
“Why, all I can say is,” said Gus, “that you did very wisely to keep it; and here’s five or perhaps ten times its value, and plenty of interest for your money.”
“Wait a bit,” muttered the landlord; and disappearing into the bar, he rummaged in some drawer in the interior of that sanctum, and presently reappeared with a little parcel screwed carefully in newspaper. “Here it is,” he said, “and jolly glad I am to get rid of the useless lumber, as wouldn’t buy a loaf of bread if one was a-starving; and thank you kindly, sir,” he continued, as he pocketed the note. “I should like to sell you half-a-dozen more of ’em at the same price, that’s all.”
The coin was East Indian; worth perhaps six or seven rupees; in size and touch not at all unlike a sovereign, but about fifty years old.
“And now,” said Gus, “my friend and I will take a stroll; you can cook us a steak for five o’clock, and in the meantime we can amuse ourselves about the town.”
“The factories might be interesting to the foreigneering gent,” said the landlord, whose spirits seemed very much improved by the possession of the five-pound note; “there’s a factory hard by as employs a power of hands, and there’s a wheel as killed a man only last week, and you could see it, I’m sure, gents, and welcome, by only mentioning my name. I serves the hands as lives round this way, which is a many.”
Gus thanked him for his kind offer, and said they would make a point of availing themselves of it.
The landlord watched them as they walked along the bank in the direction of Slopperton. “I expect,” he remarked to himself, “the lively one’s mad, and the quiet one’s his keeper. But five pounds is five pounds; and that’s neither here nor there.”
Instead of seeking both amusement and instruction, as they might have done from a careful investigation of the factory in question, Messrs. Darley and Peters walked at a pretty brisk rate, looking neither to the right nor to the left, choosing the most out-of-the-way and unfrequented streets, till they left the town of Slopperton and the waters of the Sloshy behind them, and emerged on to the high road, not so many hundred yards from the house in which Mr. Montague Harding met his death—the house of the Black Mill.
It had never been a lively-looking place at best; but now, with the association of a hideous murder belonging to it—and so much a part of it, that, to all who knew the dreadful story, death, like a black shadow, seemed to brood above the gloomy pile of building and warn the stranger from the infected spot—it was indeed a melancholy habitation. The shutters of all the windows but one were closed; the garden-paths were overgrown with weeds; the beds choked up; the trees had shot forth wild erratic branches that trailed across the path of the intruder, and entangling themselves about him, threw him down before he was aware. The house, however, was not uninhabited—Martha, the old servant, who had nursed Richard Marwood when a little child, had the entire care of it; and she was further provided with a comfortable income and a youthful domestic to attend upon her, the teaching, admonishing, scolding, and patronizing of whom made the delight of her quiet existence.
The bell which Mr. Darley rang at the gate went clanging down the walk, as if to be heard in the house were a small part of its mission, for its sonorous power was calculated to awaken all Slopperton in case of fire, flood, or invasion of the foreign foe.
Perhaps Gus thought just a little—as he stood at the broad white gate, overgrown now with damp and moss, but once so trim and bright—of the days when Richard and he had worn little cloth frocks, all ornamented with divers meandering braids and shining buttons, and had swung to and fro in the evening sunshine on that very gate.
He remembered Richard throwing him off, and hurting his nose upon the gravel. They had made mud-pies upon that very walk; they had set elaborate and most efficient traps for birds, and never caught any, in those very shrubberies; they had made a swing under the lime-trees yonder, and a fountain that would never work, but had to be ignominiously supplied with jugs of water, and stirred with spoons like a pudding, before the crystal shower would consent to mount. A thousand recollections of that childish time came back, and with them came the thought that the little boy in the braided frock was now an outcast from society, supposed to be dead, and his name branded as that of a madman and a murderer.
Martha’s attendant, a rosy-cheeked country girl, came down the walk at the sound of the clanging bell, and stared aghast at the apparition of two gentlemen—one of them so brilliant in costume as our friend Mr. Darley.
Gus told the youthful domestic that he had a letter for Mrs. Jones. Martha’s surname was Jones; the Mrs. was an honorary distinction, as the holy state of matrimony was one of the evils the worthy woman had escaped. Gus brought a note from Martha’s mistress, which assured him a warm welcome. “Would the gentlemen have tea?” Martha said. “Sararanne—(the youthful domestic’s name was Sarah Anne, pronounced, both for euphony and convenience, Sararanne)—Sararanne should get them anything they would please to like directly.” Poor Martha was quite distressed, on being told that all they wanted was to look at the room in which the murder was committed.
“Was it in the same state as at the time of Mr. Harding’s death?” asked Gus.
It had never been touched, Mrs. Jones assured them, since that dreadful time. Such was her mistress’s wish; it had been kept clean and dry; but not a bit of furniture had been moved.
Mrs. Jones was rheumatic, and rarely stirred from her seat of honour by the fireside; so Sararanne was sent with a bunch of keys in her hand to conduct the gentlemen to the room in question.
Now there were two things self-evident in the manner of Sararanne; first, that she was pleased at the idea of a possible flirtation with the brilliant Mr. Darley; secondly,
