Chapter XXVI: I Revisit Mother Carey

The last of the snow was gurgling itself away into the black drain-traps, and the face of the town was smeared like a sweep’s under a dreary drizzle, when Mr Shapter, and I, and a certain hard-faced gentleman, with a habit of rubbing his jaw grittily under reflection, came down to the grimy little tenement in Old Paradise Street. At the door, the hard-faced gentleman, motioning us to one side and bending to the keyhole, gave a call like an itinerant potman’s. The commendable ruse proving successful, brought, after the briefest interview, an old remembered step shuffling along the passage. The key turned and the chain ran gratingly, and, following the unbaring, a filthy claw, grasping a jug, was protruded through the aperture revealed. Quick and soft as the swoop of an owl, the hard-faced man’s fingers closed on the boney wrist, and the jug dropped to the pavement with a crash. And straightway, like a hooked fish’s, the nose and flexuous mouth of old Mother Carey came wobbling and gasping to the light of day. The screech of fear and fury, which she struggled on the instant to omit, sticking in her throat, the detective took quick advantage of that momentary paralysis.

“Come along now,” he said. “I’m the law, do you understand? and you’re wanted on a charge of murder. You’d best let me in, and hear what I’ve got to say.”

As with the jug on one side of the door, so, on the other, down went Mother Carey. She tumbled in a heap, rending away from the clutch on her wrist, and appeared to lie in the hall moaning. Very swiftly and neatly then, using a tool he had taken from his pocket, the detective, nearly closing the door first, ran the chain along its socket within, and made himself master of the filthy stronghold. Once entered, he beckoned to us, and stooping to the collapsed figure a moment, rose to his height again.

“All right, gentlemen,” he said. “She’s all right. Shut that door please--now my good people” (this to the inevitable congregation gathering outside), “this ain’t an inquest, you know. Come clear away, clear away.”

He stepped across the whispering bundle on the boards, drew us in, and closed the door on the little breathless group of faces.

“Now,” he said, “if you’ll please to go and make a light somewheres, will you, sir, so as we can see ourselves speak? Better take the back for privacy.”

We went as directed, and found a reasty little kitchen, black with grease and soot, its walls flaking, its floor vermin-riddled, its long cold grate one refuse-bin of garbage. There was a tattered curtain pinned across the window, and this we unfastened to let in the daylight. It seemed to awaken immemorial odours in its entrance. The squalor of the place took on a festering sickness.

Hardly had we pulled the rag from its string, when the detective came bearing in his capture professionalwise. He did not actually carry the old woman, but he lifted her before him at a sort of helpless run. I was glad to see at least that she had recovered her nerves of motion, as I had feared that her downfall might have signified a stroke of some sort.

He flopped her unceremoniously into a chair, where she sat rocking and weeping and mumbling, and swaying her head and hands up and down like a Japanese tortoise. But, for all her apparent collapse, I had a shrewd idea that her eyes were not failing to take stock of me, and that her mind was busy over that association of ideas which my return in company with the law could not have failed to suggest. She kept up her mechanical moaning, I thought, simply to gain time.

“Now, ma’am,” said the detective suavely. “When you’re quite recovered.”

Her moans rose the windier at that, but presently with scraps of articulation threading them.

“O good sir the deuce! ... O my heart and lungs! ... the shock of it good sir ... wouldn’t hurt a fly the devil take it ... O what a libel and slander on poor old Mother Carey the deuce!”

“Jannaway,” said Mr Shapter, “we can’t undertake to breathe this atmosphere indefinitely. You’d better call a cab, and remove this woman.”

“Very well, sir.”

The suggestion wrought its desired effect. Mother Carey became all in a moment distinct to tearfulness.

“O good gentlemen, what is it you want of me? O that I should have lived to hear my deuced self accused of the devil and all! Is it anything about this young gentleman? O I’ll tell you the truth I will!”

“That’ll do, then,” said the detective. “It won’t serve you the worse perhaps in the long run. You’re pretty deep involved, you know, old lady; but mayhap there’s another deeper yet. Don’t be saying now you was never in collusion with Mr Dalston, because I know better. We’re coming to him in good time; but just for the present the question stands with you. Do you understand what I mean, a-linking of you and him together? Of course you do, a woman of your cleverness. Well, look at this young gentleman. Have you seen him afore?”

She whispered something, huddled into herself.

“What! more than once, perhaps,” said Mr Jannaway. “Right you are, I do believe. It was him, wasn’t it now, you played the dutiful grandmother to once upon a time, and ended by palming off on your daughter as her own very partic’lar offspring? That was a cute move, upon my word; and it paid you, didn’t it--paid you nigh as well as Mr Dalston did for putting that other out of the way?”

She uttered a thin screech, and sank upon her quaking ignoble old knees.

“I didn’t do it, good gentlemen,” she cried--“before God and the deuce of my poor lungs I didn’t. O I’ve always been expecting something of this sort to be charged to me, ever since him there came prying in with his rakings-up and smellings-out of old deuces. I never put anything out of the way I didn’t. My Georgie’s baby was dead already when Dalston brought the other. Ask the devil of a doctor if you don’t believe me.”

“Ah!” The detective shot a significant glance at Mr Shapter. “Dead was it--the fruits of the little mistake as your daughter had made with Mr Dalston, eh?”

“It was that drove me to send a message to him,” cried the miserable old woman. “I told him he needn’t expect on that account to escape the consequences of his deuced deed, but that I’d prove it against him, and ruin him with his fine new lady none the less, if he didn’t come to terms.”

“Exactly. And he answered?”

“He answered, O the devil, by turning up with a live baby as his fine lady had borne to another, and by proposing to exchange it for the dead one. She’d never know, he said, and Georgie would never know neither, as they was both, the two of them, lying light-headed from their confinements. It was true of my daughter, anyhow; and, when she came to herself at last, she never thought but to accept the other one’s baby for her own, though to be sure, as things turned out, she never could abide it. He told me, for his part, that he’d no mind as the child of another should come to inherit his lady’s money; and so we agreed to make the exchange, and he paid me to keep the secret, and that is the devil and all of the truth, so God burst my lungs if it isn’t.”

“And bad enough, old lady. It couldn’t be much worse, to my mind, short of murder.”

“I never killed nothing,” she moaned. “I wouldn’t put my hand to such a wickedness.”

“You’ll have to put it to a document attesting all this, though,” said the detective, “if you want to save your bacon.”

“I’ll do it, sir,” she said; “I’ll do it, on the deuce of my honour, if you’ll only promise not to let him get at me.”

Mr Shapter, standing with me in the background, caught and pressed my hand congratulatory, and then stepped forward.

“Come, Jannaway,” he said; “paper and ink. We’ll clinch this matter while we are about it.”

It was what I had half expected, half foreseen; but the assurance of its actuality found me stunned from speech. I could only look on and listen in a sort of stupor, while the lawyer wrote, and finished, and read out what he had written--the evidence--circumstantial, if you like--to my parentage.

They had to support the old woman between them while she put her trembling signature to the statement; and, when they released her, she sank moaning once more to the floor.

“Don’t tell him I done it, good deuced gentlemen; don’t set him on to me.”

“Now, look here, old lady,” said the detective, “if what we’re aiming at doing comes to pass, _he_ won’t be in a position to be set on to anything but a galley bench. All you’ve got to do is to lie quiet and hold your mouth until you hear from us again; and then possibly, I say possibly, it may come to happen that you don’t hear from us at all.”

She looked up with a sudden relief of craft in her watery eyes.

“And my little settlement as I draw from his lawyers the deuce bless you, dears--it won’t be interfered with?--now say it won’t, dovies.”

“Come, Jannaway!” said Mr Shapter sharply.

She gathered herself together hurriedly, and got to her feet with a scrambling skip, and followed us protesting and entreating all down the passage. Finally, perceiving her prayers to be entirely disregarded, she slammed the door upon us with a screaming oath.

Outside, the detective pondered me, grating his chin.

“Well, sir,” he said, “that settles it. There’s no rope for his neck here. We’ll have to be satisfied with what Italy can give us in its place.”

“Whatever that may be, it must fall far short of his deserts,” said Mr Shapter. “A very pretty scoundrel, on my honour. Well, Mr Gaskett--as I must still call you I suppose” (he took my arm, and we all set off on our way back to his office)--“so far, I think we may say so, excellently good. Whether Italy will confirm our claim, or fail of its evidence, remains to be seen. It would be a pity, apart from our more personal interest, if it did fail, because any such conclusion must mean the escape of a scoundrel of a very choice pattern. But we will hope for the best.”

“Will it be necessary, do you think, to draw further upon Lady Skene’s parent?”

“I hope not; I think not; family feelings must be respected. At the same time it must depend very largely upon the attitude which Lord Skene shall elect to adopt.”

“Well, sir, when is it to be Italy, and for which of us?”

“There must be a delay, I think, of a few days, while Scotland Yard communicates with Turin. Mr Dando insists upon accompanying us; so there will be for the venture he, you, I, Jannaway, and your witness--quite a little regiment--I trust not a forlorn hope. But it all turns upon the question of that marriage--its proof and legitimacy. A lot may come to perish in twenty years. That may stand for a text out of the criminal’s Vade-mecum. I daresay Mr Dalston nowadays is not troubled much with nightmare.”