One Of Them

“‘"No man can trace these affections to primary causes.”

“‘"I can, – here, at least,” breaks he in. “This is poison, and you know it. Come, sir,” he cried, “be frank and honest with one whose moments are to be so few here. Tell me, as you would speak the truth in your last hour, am I not right?”

“‘"I cannot say with certainty. There are things here I am unable to account for, and there are traits which I cannot refer to any poisonous agency.”

“‘"Think over the poisons; you know best. Is it arsenic?”

“‘"No, certainly not.”

“‘"Nor henbane, nor nicotine, nor nitre, nor strychnine, – none of these?”

“‘"None.”

“‘"How subtle the dogs have been!” muttered he. “What fools they make of you, with all your science! The commonest money-changer will detect a spurious shilling, but you, with all your learning, are baffled by every counterfeit case that meets you. Examine, sir; inquire, investigate well,” he cried; “it is for your honor as a physician not to blunder here.”

“‘"Be calm; compose yourself. These moments of passion only waste your strength.”

“‘"Let me drink, – no, from the water-jug; they surely have not drugged that! What are you doing there?”

“‘"I was decanting the tea into a small bottle, that I might take it home and test it.”

“‘"And so,” said he, sighing, “with all your boasted skill, it is only after death you can pronounce. It is to aid the law, not to help the living, you come. Be it so. But mind, sir,” cried he, with a wild energy, “they are all in it, – all. Let none escape. And these were my friends!” said he, with a smile of inexpressible sorrow. “Oh, what friends are a bad man’s friends! You swear to me, doctor, if there has been foul play it shall be discovered. They shall swing for it Don’t you screen them. No mumbling, sir; your oath, – your solemn sworn oath! Take those keys and open that drawer there, – no, the second one; fetch me the papers. This was my will two months ago,” said he, tearing open the seals of an envelope. “You shall see with your own eyes how I meant by her. You will declare to the world how you read in my own hand that I had left her everything that was not Clara’s by right. Call her here; send for her; let her be present while you read it aloud, and let her see it burned afterwards.”

“‘It was long before I could calm him after this paroxysm. At length he said: “What a guilty conscience will be yours if this crime pass unpunished!”

“‘"If there be a crime, it shall not,” said I, firmly.

“‘"If it were to do,” muttered he, in a low voice, “I ‘d rather they ‘d have shot me; these agonies are dreadful, and all this lingering too! Oh! could you not hasten it now? But not yet!” cried he, wildly. “I have to tell you about Clara. They may rob her of all here, but she will be rich after all. There is that great tract in America, in Ohio, called ‘Peddar’s Clearings;’ don’t forget the name. Peddar’s Clearings, all hers; it was her mother’s fortune. Harvey Winthrop, in Norfolk, has the titles, and is the guardian when I am dead.’’”

“Why, I know that ‘ere tract well; there’s a cousin of mine, Obadiah B. Quackinboss, located there, and there ain’t finer buckwheat in all the West than is grown on that location. But go on, let’s hear about this sick fellow.”

“This is an account of chemical tests, all this here,” said Alfred, passing over several leaves of the diary. “It seems to have been a difficult investigation, but ending at last in the detection of corrosive sublimate.”

“And it killed him?”

“Yes; he died on the third evening after this was written. Here follows the whole story of the inquest, and a remarkable letter, too, signed ‘T. Towers.’ It is addressed to my father, and marked ‘Private and Secret’: ‘The same hand which delivers you this will put you in possession of five hundred pounds sterling; and, in return, you will do whatever is necessary to make all safe. There is no evidence, except yours, of consequence; and all the phials and bottles have been already disposed of. Be cautious, and stand fast to yours, – T. T.’ On a slip wafered to this note was written: ‘I am without twenty shillings in the world; my shoes are falling to pieces, and my coat threadbare; but I cannot do this.’ But what have we here?” cried Alfred, as a neatly folded note with deep black margin met his eyes. It was a short and most gracefully worded epistle in a lady’s hand, thanking Dr. Layton for his unremitting kindness and perfect delicacy in a season of unexampled suffering. “I cannot,” wrote she, “leave the island, dearly associated as it is with days of happiness, and now more painfully attached to my heart by the most terrible of afflictions, without tendering to the kindest of physicians my last words of gratitude.” The whole, conveyed in lines of strictly conventional use, gave no evidence of anything beyond a due sense of courtesy, and the rigid observance of a fitting etiquette. It was very polished in style, and elegant in phraseology; but to have been written amid such scenes as she then lived in, it seemed a perfect marvel of unfeeling conduct.

“That ‘ere woman riles me considerable,” said Quackinboss; “she doesn’t seem to mind, noways, what has happened, and talks of goin’ to a new clearin’ quite uncon-sarned like. I ain’t afraid of many things, but I ‘m darned extensive if I ‘d not be afeard of her! What are you a-por-ing over there?”

“It is the handwriting. I am certain I have seen it before; but where, how, and when, I cannot bring to mind.”

“How could you, sir? Don’t all your womankind write that sort of up-and-down bristly hand, more like a prickly-pear fence than a Christian’s writin’? It’s all of a piece with your Old-World civilization, which tries to make people alike, as the eggs in a basket; but they ain’t like, for all that. No, sir, nor will any fixin’ make ‘em so!”

“I have certainly seen it before,” muttered Layton to himself.

“I ‘m main curious to know how your father found out the ‘pyson,’ – ain’t it all there?”

“Oh, it was a long and very intricate chemical investigation.”

“Did he bile him?”

“Boil him? No,” said he, with difficulty restraining a laugh;’ ‘certainly not.”

“Well, they tell me, sir, there ain’t no other sure way to discover it. They always bile ‘em in France!”

“I am so puzzled by this hand,” muttered Alfred, half aloud.

Quackinboss, equally deep in his own speculations, proceeded to give an account of the mode of inquiry pursued by Frenchmen of science in cases of poisoning, which certainly would have astonished M. Orfila, and was only brought back from this learned disquisition by Layton’s questioning him about “Peddar’s Clearings.”

“Yes, sir,” said he, “it is con-siderable of a tract, and lies between two rivers. There ‘s the lines for a new city – Pentacolis – laid down there; and the chief town, ‘Measles,’ is a thriving location. My cousin, O. B. Quackinboss, did n’t stump out less than eighty dollars an acre for his clearin’, and there’s better land than his there.”

“So far as appears, then, this is an extensive property which is spoken of here?”

“Well, sir, I expect it’s a matter of half a million of dollars now, though, mayhap, twenty thousand bought it fifteen or sixteen years back.”

“I wonder what steps my father took in this affair? I ‘ll be very curious to know if he interested himself in the matter; for, with his indolent habits, it is just as likely that he never moved in it further.”

“A ‘tarnal shame, then, for him, sir, when it was for a child left alone and friendless in the world; and I’m thinkin’ indolence ain’t the name to give it.”

For a moment an angry impulse to reply stirred Layton’s blood, but he refrained, and said nothing.

“I’ll go further,” resumed the American, “and I’ll say that if your father did neglect this duty, you are bound to look to it. Ay, sir, there ain’t no ways in this world of getting out of what we owe one to another. We are most of us ready enough to be ‘generous,’ but few take trouble to be ‘just.’”

“I believe you are right,” said Layton, reflectively.

“I know it, sir, – I know it,” said the other, resolutely. “There’s a sort of flattery in doing something more than we are obliged to do which never comes of doing what is strict fair. Ay,” added he, after a moment, “and I ‘ve seen a man who ‘d jump into the sea to save a fellow-creature as would n’t give a cent to a starving beggar on dry land.”

“I ‘ll certainly inquire after this claim, and you ‘ll help me, Quackinboss?”

“Yes, sir; and there ain’t no honester man in all the States to deal with than Harvey Winthrop. I was with him the day he cowhided Senator Jared Boles, of Massachusetts, and when I observed, ‘I think you have given him enough,’ he said, ‘Well, sir, though I have n’t the honor of knowing you, if that be your conscientious opinion, I ‘ll abstain from going further;’ and he did, and we went into the bar together, and had a mint julep.”

“The trait is worth remembering,” said Layton, dryly. “Here’s another reason to cross the Atlantic,” cried he, with something of his former energy of voice and look.

“Here’s a great cause to sustain and a problem to work out. Shall we go at once?”

“There’s the ‘Asia’ to sail on Wednesday, and I ‘m ready,” said Quackinboss, calmly.

“Wednesday be it, then,” cried Layton, with a gayety that showed how the mere prospect of activity and exertion had already cheered him.

CHAPTER XXX. TWIST, TROVER, AND CO

They whose notions of a banker are formed on such home models as Overend and Gurney and Drummond, and the other princes o’ that ilk, will be probably not a little shocked to learn by what inferior dignitaries the great craft is represented abroad; your English banker in a foreign city being the most extraordinary agglomeration of all trades it is well possible to conceive, combining within himself very commonly the duties of house-agent, wine-merchant, picture-dealer, curiosity-vendor, with agencies for the sale of india-rubber shoes, Cuban cigars, and cod-liver oil. He will, at a moment’s notice, start you with a whole establishment from kitchen to stable, and, equally ready to do the honors of this world or the next, he will present you in society, or embalm you with every careful direction for your conveyance “homeward.” Well judging that in dealing thus broadly with mankind a variety of tastes and opinions must be consulted, they usually hunt in couples, one doing the serious, the other taking the light comedy parts. The one is the grave, calm, sensible man, with his prudent reserves and his cautious scruples; the other, a careless dog, who only “discounts” out of fun, and charges you “commission” in mere pastime and lightness of heart.

Imagine the heavy father and the light rake of comedy conspiring for some common object, and you have them. Probably the division-of-labor science never had a happier illustration than is presented by their agreement. Who, I ask you, – who can escape the double net thus stretched for his capture? Whatever your taste or temperament, you must surely be approachable by one or the other of these.

What Trover cannot, Twist will be certain to accomplish; where Twist fails, there Trover is sovereign. “Ah, you ‘ll have to ask my partner about that,” is the stereotyped saying of each. It was thus these kings of Brentford sniffed at the same nosegay, the world, and, sooth to say, to their manifest self-satisfaction and profit. If the compact worked well for all the purposes of catching clients, it was more admirable still in the difficult task of avoiding them. Strange and exceptional must his station in life be to whom the secret intelligences of Twist or Trover could not apply. Were we about to dwell on these gentlemen and their characteristics, we might advert to the curious fact that though their common system worked so smoothly and successfully, they each maintained for the other the most disparaging opinion, Twist deeming Trover a light, thoughtless, inconsiderate creature, Trover returning the compliment by regarding his partner as a bigoted, low-minded, vulgar sort of fellow, useful behind the desk, but with no range of speculation or enterprise about him.

Our present scene is laid at Mr. Trover’s villa near Florence. It stands on the sunny slope of Fiezole, and with a lovely landscape of the Val d’ Arno at its feet. O ye gentles, who love to live at ease, to inhale an air odorous with the jasmine and the orange-flower, – to gaze on scenes more beautiful than Claude ever painted, – to enjoy days of cloudless brightness, and nights gorgeous in starry brilliancy, why do ye not all come and live at Fiezole? Mr. Trover’s villa is now to let, though this announcement is not inserted as an advertisement. There was a rumor that it was once Boccaccio’s villa. Be that as it may, it was a pretty, coquettish little place, with a long terrace in front, under which ran an orangery, a sweet, cool, shady retreat in the hot noon-time, with a gushing little fountain always rippling and hissing among rock-work. The garden sloped away steeply. It was a sort of wilderness of flowers and fruit-trees, little cared for or tended, but beautiful in the wild luxuriance of its varied foliage, and almost oppressive in its wealth of perfume. Looking over this garden, and beyond it again, catching the distant domes of Florence, the tall tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, and the massive block of the Pitti, was a small but well-proportioned room whose frescos were carried from wall to ceiling by a gentle arch of the building, in which were now seated three gentlemen over their dessert. Mr. Trover’s guests were our acquaintances Stocmar and Ludlow Paten. The banker and the “Impresario” were very old friends; they had done “no end of shrewd things” together. Paten was a new acquaintance. Introduced however by Stocmar, he was at once admitted to all the intimacy of his host, and they sat there, in the free indulgence of confidence, discussing people, characters, events, and probabilities, as three such men, long case-hardened with the world’s trials, well versed in its wiles, may be supposed to do. Beneath the great broad surface of this life of ours, with its apparent impulses and motives, there is another stratum of hard stern realities, in which selfish motives and interested actions have their sphere. These gentlemen lived entirely in this layer, and never condescended to allude to what went on elsewhere. If they took a very disparaging view of life, it was not so much the admiration they bestowed on knavery as the hearty contempt they entertained for whatever was generous or trustful. Oh, how they did laugh at the poor “muffs” who believed in anything or any one! To listen to them was to declare that there was not a good trait in the heart, nor an honest sentiment which had not its origin in folly. And the stupid dog who paid his father’s debts, and the idiot that beggared himself to portion his sisters, and the wretched creature who was ruined by giving security for his friend, all figured in a category despised and ridiculed!