uncontrollable fear of the encounter before her, she endured a mental struggle painful to the beholder.
The shutters in the front of the house being, with one exception, all closed, the hall and staircase were wrapped in a shadowy gloom, far more alarming to the timid mind than complete darkness. In complete darkness, for instance, the eight-day clock in the corner would have been a clock, and not an elderly ghost with a broad white face and a brown greatcoat, as it seemed to be in the uncertain glimmer which crept through a distant skylight covered with ivy. Sararanne was evidently possessed with the idea that Mr. Darley and his friend would decoy her to the very threshold of the haunted chamber, and then fly ignominiously, leaving her to brave the perils of it by herself. Mr. Darley’s repeated assurances that it was all right, and that on the whole it would be advisable to look alive, as life was short and time was long, etcetera, had the effect at last of inducing the damsel to ascend the stairs—looking behind her at every other step—and to conduct the visitors along a passage, at the end of which she stopped, selected with considerable celerity a key from the bunch, plunged it into the keyhole of the door before her, said, “That is the room, gentlemen, if you please,” dropped a curtsey, and turned and fled.
The door opened with a scroop, and Mr. Peters realized at last the darling wish of his heart, and stood in the very room in which the murder had been committed. Gus looked round, went to the window, opened the shutters to the widest extent, and the afternoon sunshine streamed full into the room, lighting every crevice, revealing every speck of dust on the moth-eaten damask bed-curtains—every crack and stain on the worm-eaten flooring.
To see Mr. Darley look round the room, and to see Mr. Peters look round it, is to see two things as utterly wide apart as it is possible for one look to be from another. The young surgeon’s eyes wander here and there, fix themselves nowhere, and rest two or three times upon the same object before they seem to take in the full meaning of that object. The eyes of Mr. Peters, on the contrary, take the circuit of the apartment with equal precision and rapidity—go from number one to number two, from number two to number three; and having given a careful inspection to every article of furniture in the room, fix at last in a gaze of concentrated intensity on the tout ensemble of the chamber.
“Can you make out anything?” at last asks Mr. Darley.
Mr. Peters nods his head, and in reply to this question drops on one knee, and falls to examining the flooring.
“Do you see anything in that?” asks Gus.
“Yes,” replies Mr. Peters on his fingers; “look at this.”
Gus does look at this. This is the flooring, which is in a very rotten and dilapidated state, by the bed-side. “Well, what then?” he asks.
“What then?” said Mr. Peters, on his fingers, with an expression of considerable contempt pervading his features; “what then? You’re a very talented young gent, Mr. Darley, and if I wanted a prescription for the bile, which I’m troubled with sometimes, or a tip for the Derby, which I don’t, not being a sporting man, you’re the gent I’d come to; but for all that you ain’t no police-officer, or you’d never ask that question. What then? Do you remember as one of the facts so hard agen Mr. Marwood was the blood-stains on his sleeve? You see these here cracks and crevices in this here floorin’? Very well, then; Mr. Marwood slept in the room under this. He was tired, I’ve heard him say, and he threw himself down on the bed in his coat. What more natural, then, than that there should be blood upon his sleeve, and what more easy to guess than the way it came there?”
“You think it dropped through, then?” asked Gus.
“I think it dropped through,” said Mr. Peters, on his fingers, with biting irony; “I know it dropped through. His counsel was a nice un, not to bring this into court,” he added, pointing to the boards on which he knelt. “If I’d only seen this place before the trial——But I was nobody, and it was like my precious impudence to ask to go over the house, of course! Now then, for number two.”
“And that is——?” asked Mr. Darley, who was quite in the dark as to Mr. Peters’s views; that functionary being implicitly believed in by Richard and his friend, and allowed, therefore, to be just as mysterious as he pleased.
“Number two’s this here,” answered the detective. “I wants to find another or two of them rum Indian coins; for our young friend Dead-and-Alive, as is here to-day and gone to-morrow, got that one as he gave the girl from that cabinet, or my name’s not Joseph Peters;” wherewith Mr. Peters, who had been entrusted by Mrs. Marwood with the keys of the cabinet in question, proceeded to open the doors of it, and to carefully inspect that old-fashioned piece of furniture.
There were a great many drawers, and boxes, and pigeon-holes, and queer nooks and corners in this old cabinet, all smelling equally of old age, damp, and cedar-wood. Mr. Peters pulled out drawers and opened boxes, found secret drawers in the inside of other drawers, and boxes hid in ambush in other boxes, all with so little result, beyond the discovery of old papers, bundles of letters tied with faded red tape, a simpering and neutral-tinted miniature or two of the fashion of some fifty years gone by, when a bright blue coat and brass buttons was the correct thing for a dinner-party, and your man about town wore a watch in each of his breeches-pockets, and simpered at you behind a shirt-frill wide enough to separate him for ever from his friends and acquaintance. Besides these things, Mr. Peters found a Johnson’s dictionary, a ready-reckoner, and a pair of boot-hooks; but as he found nothing else, Mr. Darley grew quite tired of watching his proceedings, and suggested that they should adjourn; for he remarked—“Is it likely that such a fellow as this North would leave anything behind him?”
“Wait a bit,” said Mr. Peters, with an expressive jerk of his head. Gus shrugged his shoulders, took out his cigar-case, lighted a cheroot, and walked to the window, where he leaned with his elbows on the sill, puffing blue clouds of tobacco-smoke down among the straggling creepers that covered the walls and climbed round the casement, while the detective resumed his search among the old bundles of papers. He was nearly abandoning it, when, in one of the outer drawers, he took up an object he had passed over in his first inspection. It was a small canvas bag, such as is used to hold money, and was apparently empty; but while pondering on his futile search, Mr. Peters twisted this bag in a moment of absence of mind between his fingers, swinging it backwards and forwards in the air. In so doing, he knocked it against the side of the cabinet, and, to his surprise, it emitted a sharp metallic sound. It was not empty, then, although it appeared so. A moment’s examination showed the detective that he had succeeded in obtaining the object of his search; the bag had been used for money, and a small coin had lodged in the seam at one corner of the bottom of it, and had stuck so firmly as not to be easily shaken out. This, in the murderer’s hurried ransacking of the cabinet, in his blind fury at not finding the sum he expected to obtain, had naturally escaped him. The piece of money was a small gold coin, only half the value of the one found by the landlord, but of the same date and style.
Mr. Peters gave his fingers a triumphant snap, which aroused the attention of Mr. Darley; and, with a glance expressive of the pride in his art which is peculiar to your true genius, held up the little piece of dingy gold.
“By Jove!” exclaimed the admiring Gus, “you’ve got it, then! Egad, Peters, I think you’d make evidence, if there wasn’t any.”
“Eight years of that young man’s life, sir,” said the rapid fingers, “has been sacrificed to the stupidity of them as should have pulled him through.”
Chapter V
Mr. Peters Decides on a Strange Step, and Arrests the Dead
