“I hope you believe in me, Mr. Leopold,” he said, when his solicitor held out his hand at parting.
“From my soul,” answered the other, earnestly. “And, what’s more, I mean to pull you through this. It’s a troublesome business, but I think I can see my way to the end of it. I wish you could help me to find Desrolles.”
“That I cannot do,” said Treverton, decidedly.
“It’s a pity. Well, good day. The inquiry is adjourned till next Tuesday, so we have a week before us. It will be hard if we don’t do something in that time.”
“The police have done very little in a twelvemonth,” said Treverton.
“The police have not a monopoly of human intelligence,” answered Mr. Leopold. “We may do better than the police.”
Two advertisements appeared in the Times, Telegraph, and Standard, next morning:—
“Desrolles.—Ten Pounds Reward will be given to anybody furnishing the present address of Mr. Desrolles, late of Cibber Street, Leicester Square.”
“To Jewellers, Pawnbrokers, etc.—Lost, in February, 187‒, a collet necklace of imitation diamonds.—Anybody giving information about the same will be liberally rewarded.”
XLI
Mrs. Evitt Makes a Revelation
Mrs. Evitt was very ill. It may be that a prolonged residence on a level with the sewers, and remote from the direct rays of the sun, is not conducive to health or good spirits.
Mrs. Evitt had long suffered from a gentle melancholy, an all-pervading dolefulness, which impelled her to hang her head on one side, and to sigh faintly, at intervals, without any apparent motive. She had been also prone to see all the affairs of life in their darkest aspect, as one living remote from the sun might naturally do. She had been given to prophesy death and doom to her acquaintance, to give a sick friend over directly the doctor was called in, to foresee sheriff’s officers and ruin at the slightest indication of extravagance in the management of a neighbour’s household, to augur bad things of babies, and worse things of husbands, to mistrust all mankind, and to perform under her human aspect that ungenial office which the screech owl was supposed to fulfil in a more romantic age.
She had always been ailing. She suffered from vague pains and stitches, and undefinable aches, which took her at awkward angles of her bony frame, or which wracked the innermost recesses of that edifice. She knew a great deal more about her internal economy than is consistent with happiness, and was wont to talk about her liver and other organs with an almost professional technicality. She was not an agreeable companion; but a long succession of lodgers had borne with her, because she was tolerably clean and unscrupulously honest. Upon this last point she prided herself immensely. She knew that she belonged to a maligned and suspected race; nay, that the very name of her calling was synonymous with peculation; and her soul swelled with pride as she declared that she had never wronged a lodger by so much as a crust of bread. She would let a mutton bone rot in her larder rather than appropriate the barest shank without express permission. Rashers of bacon, half-pounds of Dorset, lard, flour, eggs, were as safe in her care as bullion in the Bank of England.
George Gerard, to whom every penny was of consequence, had discovered this sovereign virtue in his landlady, and honoured her for it. He had suffered much from the harpies with whom he had dwelt in the city. He found his half-pound of tea or coffee last twice as long as in former lodgings; his rasher of bacon less costly; his mutton-chop better cooked; his loaf respected. For him Mrs. Evitt was a model landlady; and he rewarded her integrity by such small civilities as lay in his power. What gratified her most was his readiness to prescribe for those ailments which were the most salient feature of her life. Her mind had a natural bent towards medicine, and she loved to talk to the good-natured surgeon of her disorders, or even to question him about his patients.
“That’s a bad case of smallpox you’ve got in Green Street, isn’t it, Mr. Gerard?” she would say to him, with a dismal relish, when she came in after his day’s work to ask what she ought to do for that “grumbling” pain in her back.
“Who told you it was smallpox?” asked Gerard.
“Well, I had it from very good authority. The charwoman that works at number seven in this street is own sister to Mrs. Jewell’s Mary Ann, and Mrs. Jewell and Mrs. Peacock in Green Street is bosom friends, and the house where you’re attending is exackerly opposite Mr. Peacock’s.”
“Excellent authority,” answered Gerard, smiling, “but I am happy to tell you I haven’t a case of smallpox on my list. Did you ever hear of such a thing as rheumatic fever?”
“Hear of it,” echoed Mrs. Evitt, rapturously. “I’ve been down with it seven times.”
She looked very hard at him as she made the assertion, as if not expecting to be believed.
“Have you?” said Gerard. “Then I wonder you’re alive.”
“That’s what I wonder at myself,” answered Mrs. Evitt, with subdued pride. “I must have had a splendid constitution to go through all I’ve gone through, and to be here to tell it. The quinsies I’ve had. Why the mustard that’s been put to my throat in the form of poultices would stock a first rate tea-grocer with the article. As to fever, I don’t think you could name the kind I haven’t had since I had the scarlatina at five months old, and the whooping-cough a top of the measles before I’d got over it. I’ve been a martyr.”
“I’m afraid that damp kitchen of yours has had something to do with it,” suggested Gerard.
“Damp!” cried Mrs. Evitt, casting up her hands. “You never made a greater mistake in your life,
