The Trail of the Serpent

was delighted with Isabella’s frank manners and handsome face, and insisted on carrying her back to dine in Spring Gardens. Quite a sociable little dinner they had too, Richard being⁠—for a man who had been condemned for a murder, and had escaped from a lunatic asylum⁠—very cheerful indeed. The young man told Isabella all his adventures, till that young lady alternately laughed and cried⁠—thereby affording Richard’s fond mother most convincing proof of the goodness of her heart⁠—and was altogether so very brilliant and amusing, that when at eleven o’clock Gus came round from a very critical case (viz., a quarrel of the Cheerfuls as to whether Gustavus Ponsonby, novelist and satirist, magazine-writer and poet, deserved the trouncing he had received in the “Friday Pillery”) to take Bell home in a cab, the little trio simultaneously declared that the evening had gone as if by magic! As if by magic! What if to two out of those three the evening did really go by magic? There is a certain pink-legged little gentleman, with wings, and a bandage round his eyes, who, some people say, is as great a magician in his way as Albertus Magnus or Doctor Dee, and who has done as much mischief and worked as much ruin in his own manner as all the villainous saltpetre ever dug out of the bosom of the peaceful, corn-growing, flower-bearing earth. That gentleman, I have no doubt, presided on the occasion.

Thus the acquaintance of Richard and Isabella had ripened into something very much like friendship; and here he is, watching her employed in the rather unromantic business of making up a cough-mixture for an elderly washerwoman of methodistical persuasions. But it is one of the fancies of the pink-legged gentleman aforesaid to lend his bandage to his victims; and there is nothing that John, William, George, Henry, James, or Alfred can do, in which Jane, Eliza, Susan, or Sarah will not see a dignity and a charm, or vice versa. Pshaw! It is not Mokannah who wears the silver veil; it is we who are in love with Mokannah who put on the glittering, blinding medium; and, looking at that gentleman through the dazzle and the glitter, insist on thinking him a very handsome man, till someone takes the veil off our eyes, and we straightway fall to and abuse poor Mokannah, because he is not what we chose to fancy him. It is very hard upon poor tobacco-smoking, beer-imbibing, card-playing, latchkey-loving Tom Jones, that Sophia will insist on elevating him into a god, and then being angry with him because he is Tom Jones and fond of bitter ale and bird’s-eye. But come what may, the pink-legged gentleman must have his diversion, and no doubt his eyes twinkle merrily behind that bandage of his, to see the fools this wise world of ours is made up of.

“You could trust me, Isabella, then,” said Richard; “you could trust me, in spite of all⁠—in spite of my wasted youth and the blight upon my name?”

“Do we not all trust you, Mr. Marwood, with our entire hearts?” answered the young lady, taking shelter under cover of a very wide generality.

“Not ‘Mr. Marwood,’ Bell; it sounds very cold from the lips of my old friend’s sister. Everyone calls me Richard, and I, without once asking permission, have called you Bell. Call me Richard, Bell, if you trust me.”

She looks him in the face, and is silent for a moment; her heart beats a great deal faster⁠—so fast that her lips can scarcely shape the words she speaks.

“I do trust you, Richard; I believe your heart to be goodness and truth itself.”

“Is it worth having, then, Bell? I wouldn’t ask you that question if I had not a hope now⁠—ay, and not such a feeble one either⁠—to see my name cleared from the stain that rests upon it. If there is any truth in my heart, Isabella, that truth is yours alone. Can you trust me, as the woman who loves trusts⁠—through life and till death, under every shadow and through every cloud?”

I don’t know whether essence of peppermint, tincture of myrrh, and hair-oil, are the proper ingredients in a cough-mixture; but I know that Isabella poured them into the glass measure very liberally.

“You do not answer me, Isabella. Ah, you cannot trust the branded criminal⁠—the escaped lunatic⁠—the man the world calls a murderer!”

“Not trust you, Richard?” Only four words, and only one glance from the gray eyes into the brown, and so much told! So much more than I could tell in a dozen chapters, told in those four words and that one look!

Gus opens the half-glass door at this very moment. “Are you coming to tea?” he asks; “here’s Sarah Jane up to her eyes in grease and muffins.”

“Yes, Gus, dear old friend,” said Richard, laying his hand on Darley’s shoulder; “we’re coming in to tea immediately, brother!”

Gus looked at him with a glance of considerable astonishment, shook him heartily by the hand, and gave a long whistle; after which he walked up to the counter and examined the cough-mixture.

“Oh!” he said, “I suppose that’s why you’ve put enough laudanum into this to poison a small regiment, eh, Bell? Perhaps we may as well throw it out of the window; for if it goes out of the door I shall be hung for wholesale murder.”

They were a very merry party over the little tea-table; and if nobody ate any of the muffins, which Mr. Cordonner called “embodied indigestions,” they laughed a great deal, and talked still more⁠—so much so, that Percy declared his reasoning faculties to be quite overpowered, and wanted to be distinctly informed whether it was Richard who was going to marry Gus, or Gus about to unite himself to the juvenile domestic, or he himself who was to be married against his inclination⁠—which, seeing he was of a yielding and peace-loving disposition, was not so unlikely⁠—or, in short, to use his own expressive language, “what the row was all about?”

Nobody,