With the rapidity of lightning he flings the window up violently, hurls the pistol to the farthest extremity of the garden, snatches the Marquis’s hat from the chair on which it lies, presses one finger on the gilded back of a volume of Gibbon’s Rome, a narrow slip of the bookcase opens inwards, and reveals a door leading into the next apartment, which is the dining-room. This door is made on a peculiar principle, and, as he pushes through, it closes behind him.
This is the work of a second; and as the officers, alarmed by the sound of the opening of the window, rush into the room, the Marquis gives the alarm. “He has escaped by the window!” he said. “He has wounded your assistant, and passed through that door. He cannot be twenty yards in advance; you will easily know him by his having no hat on.”
“Stop!” cries the detective officer, “this may be a trap. He may have got round to the front door. Go and watch, Johnson.”
A little too late this precaution. As the officers rushed into the library, Raymond passed from the dining-room door out of the open street-door, and jumped into the very cab which was waiting to take him to prison. “Five pounds, if you catch the Liverpool Express,” he said to the cabman.
“All right, sir,” replied that worthy citizen, with a wink. “I’ve druv a many gents like you, and very good fares they is too, and a godsend to a hardworking man, what old ladies with handbags and umbrellas grudges eightpence a mile to,” mutters the charioteer, as he gallops down Upper Brook Street and across Hanover Square, while the gentlemen of the police force, aided by Dr. Tappenden and the obliging Marquis, search the mews and neighbourhood adjoining. Strange to say, they cannot obtain any information from the coachman and stable-boys concerning a gentleman without a hat, who must have passed through the mews about three minutes before.
III
The Left-Handed Smasher Makes His Mark
“It is a palpable and humiliating proof of the decadence of the glories of white-cliffed Albion and her lionhearted children,” said the sporting correspondent of the Liverpool Bold Speaker and Threepenny Aristides—a gentleman who, by the by, was very clever at naming—for half-a-dozen stamps—the horses that didn’t win; and was, indeed, useful to fancy betters, as affording accurate information what to avoid; nothing being better policy than to give the odds against any horse named by him as a sure winner, or a safe second: for those gallant steeds were sure to be, whatever the fluctuating fortune of the race, ignominiously nowhere. “It is,” continued the Liverpool B.S., “a sign of the downfalling of the lion and unicorn—over which Britannia may shed tears and the inhabitants of Liverpool and its vicinity mourn in silent despair—that the freedom of England is no more! We repeat (The Liverpool Aristides here gets excited, and goes into small capitals)—Britain is no longer free! Her freedom departed from her on that day on which the blue-coated British Sbirri of Sir Robert Peel broke simultaneously into the liberties of the nation, the mightiest clauses of Magna Charta, and the Prize Ring, and stopped the operations of the Lancashire Daddy Longlegs and the celebrated Metropolitan favourite, the Left-handed Smasher, during the eighty-ninth round, and just as the real interest of the fight was about to begin. Under these humiliating circumstances, a meeting has been held by the referees and backers of the men, and it has been agreed between the latter and the stakeholder to draw the money. But, that the valiant and admired Smasher may have no occasion to complain of the inhospitality of the town of Liverpool, the patrons of the fancy have determined on giving him a dinner, at which his late opponent, our old favourite and honoured townsman, Daddy Longlegs, will be in the chair, having a distinguished gentleman of sporting celebrity as his vice. It is to be hoped that, as some proof that the noble art of self-defence is not entirely extinct in Liverpool, the friends of the Ring will muster pretty strong on this occasion. Tickets, at half-a-guinea, to be obtained at the Gloves Tavern, where the entertainment will take place.”
On the very day on which the Count de Marolles left his establishment in Park Lane in so very abrupt a manner, the tributary banquet to the genius of the Ring, in the person of the Left-handed Smasher, came off in excellent style at the above-mentioned Gloves Tavern—a small hostelry, next door to one of the Liverpool minor theatres, and chiefly supported by the members of the Thespian and pugilistic arts. The dramatic element, perhaps, rather predominated in the small parlour behind the bar, where Brandolph of the Burning Brand—after fighting sixteen terrific broadsword combats, and being left for dead behind the first grooves seven times in the course of three acts—would take his Welsh rarebit and his pint of half-and-half in company with the Lancashire Grinder and the Pottery Pet, and listen with due solemnity to the discourse of these two popular characters. The little parlour was so thickly hung with portraits of theatrical and sporting celebrities, that Oedipus himself—distinguished as he is for having guessed the dullest of conundrums—could never have discovered the pattern of the paper which adorned the walls. Here, Mr. Montmorency, the celebrated comedian, smirked—with that mild smirk only known in portraits—over the ample shoulders of his very much better half, at the Pet in fighting attitude. There, Mr. Marmaduke Montressor, the great tragedian, frowned, in the character of Richard the Third, at Pyrrhus the First, winner of the last Derby. Here, again, Mademoiselle Pasdebasque pointed her satin slipper side by side with the youthful Challoner of that day; and opposite Mademoiselle Pasdebasque, a gentleman in scarlet, whose name is
