An Eye for an Eye

Dick Cleugh, thorough-going Bohemian that he was, cared but little, I believe, for those riparian gatherings. True, he played tennis, rowed, punted and ate the strawberries and cream with as great a zest as any of us; nevertheless, I knew that he accepted the invitation with but one object, and that he would far rather have strolled in one of the parks with Lily Lowry than row Mary Blain up and down the stream.

Lily often came to our chambers. She was about twenty-two, of a rather Southern type of beauty, with a good figure, a graceful gait, and a decidedly London chic. She spoke, however, with that nasal twang which stamps the true South Londoner, and her expressions were not absolutely devoid of the slang of the Newington Butts. Yet withal she was a quiet, pleasant girl.

Thus half the month of July went by practically without incident, until one blazing day at noon, when, I went forth into Fleet Street for lunch, I unexpectedly encountered Dick, hot and hurrying, his hat tilted back. He had left home very early that morning to work up some “startling discovery” that had been made out at Plaistow, and already hoarse-voiced men were crying the “Fourth Comet” with the “latest details” he had unearthed.

In reply to his question as to where I was going, I told him that after luncheon I had to go down to Walworth to make some trifling inquiry, whereupon he said —

“Then I wish you’d do a favour for me, old fellow.”

“Of course,” I answered promptly. “What is it?”

“Call at the Lowrys and tell Lily to meet me at Loughborough Junction at eight to-night, at the usual place. I want to take her to the Crystal Palace to see the fireworks. I was going to wire, but you’ll pass her father’s place. Will you give her the message?”

“Certainly,” I answered. “But is she at home?”

“Yes. She’s got her holidays. Tell her I’m very busy, or I’d have come down myself. Sorry to trouble you.”

I promised him to deliver the message, and after eating a chop at the Cock, I walked along to the Gaiety and there took a blue motor-bus, which deposited me outside a small, very dingy shop, a few doors up the Walworth Road from the Elephant and Castle, which bore over the little, old-fashioned window the sign, “Morris Lowry, Herbalist.” Displayed to the gaze of the passer-by were various assortments of lozenges and bunches of dried herbs, boxes of pills guaranteed to cure every ill, and a row of dirty glass bottles filled with yellow liquids, containing filthy-looking specimens of various repulsive objects. The glaring cards in the window advertised such desirable commodities as “Lowry’s Wind Pills,” “Lowry’s Cough Tablets,” and “Lowry’s Herbal Ointment,” while the window itself and the whole shop-front was dirt-encrusted, one pane being cracked across.

As I entered the dark little shop, a mere box of a place smelling strongly of camomile, sarsaparilla and such-like herbs, which hung in dried and dusty confusion all over the ceiling, there arose from a chair the queerest, oddest creature that one might ever meet, even in the diverse crowds of lower London. Morris Lowry, the herbalist, was a strange specimen of distorted humanity, hunch-backed, with an abnormally large, semi-bald head, a scrubby grey beard, and wearing large, old-fashioned, steel-rimmed spectacles, which imparted to him an appearance of learning and distinction. His legs were short and stumpy, his body rather stout, and his arms of inordinate length, while the whole appearance of his sickly, yellow, wizened face was such as might increase one’s belief in the Darwinian theory. Indeed, it was impossible to look upon him without one’s mind reverting to monkeys, for his high cheek bones and square jaws bore a striking resemblance to the facial expression of the ancestral gorilla.

Dressed in black cloak and conical hat he would have made an ideal stage wizard; but attired as he was in greasy black frock coat, and trousers that had long ago passed the glossy stage, he was certainly as curious-looking an individual as one could have found on the Surrey side of the Thames. He was no stranger to me, for on several occasions I had called there with Dick, and had chatted with him. Trade in herbs had dwindled almost to nothing. Nowadays, with all sorts and varieties of well-advertised medicines, the people of Newington, Walworth, and the New Kent Road did not patronise the old-fashioned herbal remedies, which, if truth be told, are perhaps more potent and wholesome than any of the quack nostrums flaunted in the daily papers and on the hoardings. Ten years ago the herbalists did a brisk trade in London, especially among lower class housewives who, having come up from the country, were glad enough to obtain the old-world decoctions; but nowadays the herbalists’ only source of profit seems to be in the sale of skin soaps and worm tablets.

Old Morris, with his ugly, deformed figure and shining bald head, welcomed me warmly as I entered, and at once invited me into the little shop-parlour beyond, a mere dark cupboard which still retained the odour of the midday meal – Irish stew it must have been – and seemed infested with a myriad of flies. Possibly the fragrance of the herbs attracted them, or else they revelled among the succulent tablets exposed in the open boxes upon the narrow counter. These lozenges, together with his various bottled brews, tinctures of this and of that, the old man manufactured in a kind of dilapidated shed at the rear, which, be it said, often offended the olfactory nerves of the whole neighbourhood when certain herbs were in the process of stewing.

“Lily is out,” croaked the weird old fellow, in response to my inquiry, “but I’ll, of course, give her the message. She don’t get much chance nowadays, poor child! When her mother was alive we used to manage to run down to Margit for a week or fortnight in the hot weather. But now – ” and he shrugged his shoulders with quite a foreign air. “Well, there’s only me to look after the shop,” he added. “And things are not so brisk as they were a few years ago.” He spoke with a slight accent, due, Cleugh had told me, to the fact that his mother was French, and he had lived in France a number of years. Few people, however, noticed it, for by many he was believed to be a Jew.

I nodded. I could see that the trade done there was infinitesimal and quite insufficient to pay the rent; besides, was not the fact that Lily had been compelled to go out and earn her own living proof in itself that the strange-looking old fellow was the reverse of prosperous? The herbal trade in London is nearly as dead as the manufacture of that once popular metal known as German silver.

“Lily has gone to see an aunt of hers over at Battersea,” the old man explained. “But she’ll be home at five. She’s got her holidays now, and, poor girl, she’s been sadly disappointed. She expected to go down to her married sister at Huntingdon, but couldn’t go because her sister’s laid up with rheumatic fever. So she has to stay at home this year. And this place isn’t much of a change for her.”

I glanced around at the dark, close little den, and at the strong-smelling shop beyond, and was fain to admit that he spoke the truth.

“I suppose your friend, Mr Cleugh, is busy as usual with his murders and his horrors?” he remarked, smiling. “He’s a wonderful acute fellow. I always read the paper every day, and am generally interested in the results of the inquiries by the Comet man. Half London reads his interviews and latest details.”

“Yes,” I answered. “He’s kept hard at work always. There seems to be a never-ceasing string of sensations nowadays. As soon as one mystery is elucidated another springs up somewhere else.”

“Ah,” he answered, his dark eyes gazing at me through his heavy-rimmed glasses, “it was always so. Never a day goes past without a mystery of some sort or another.”

“I suppose,” I said, “if the truth were told, more people are poisoned in London than ever the police or the public imagine.” I knew that all herbalists were versed in toxicology more or less, and had a vague idea that I might learn something from him.

“Of course,” he answered, “there are several poisons, the results of which bear such strong resemblance to symptoms of disease, that doctors are very frequently misled, and the verdict is ‘Death from natural causes.’ In dozens of cases every year the post-mortem proves disease, and thus the poisoner escapes.”

“What causes you to think this?” I inquired eagerly, recollections of the tragedy in Kensington vividly in my mind.

“Well,” he said, “I only make that allegation because every herbalist in London sells poisons in smaller or greater quantity. If he’s an unwise man, he asks no questions. – If he’s wise, he makes the usual inquiry.”

“And then?”

“Well,” the old man croaked with his small eyes twinkling in the semi-darkness, “the customer generally jays pretty dearly for the article.”

“Which means that an entry is made in the poison-register which is not altogether the truth – eh?”

He smiled and nodded.

“When poisons are sold at a high price,” the old herbalist answered, “the vendor has no desire to know for what purpose the drug is to be used. It is generally supposed that it is to kill vermin – you understand.”

“And human beings are more often the victims?” I hazarded.

He raised his grey, shaggy brows with an expression of affected ignorance, answering —

“Who can tell? The herbs or drugs are sold unlabelled, and wrapped in blank paper. As far as the herbalist is concerned, his liability is at an end, just as a cutler sells razors, or a gun-maker revolvers.”

“And do you really believe that there is much secret poisoning in London at this moment?” I inquired, greatly interested.

“Believe it?” he echoed. “Why, there’s no doubt of it. Why do people buy certain herbs which can be used for no other purpose than the destruction of human life?”

“Do they actually buy poisons openly?” I exclaimed in surprise.

“Well, no, not exactly openly,” he responded. “They are most of them very wary how they approach the subject, and all are prepared to pay heavily.”

I looked at the odd, ugly figure before me. For the first time I had learned the secret of this trade. Perhaps even he retailed poisons to those who wanted such undesirable commodities, charging exorbitant prices for them, and entering fictitious sales in the poison-book which, by law, he was compelled to keep.

“Have you actually ever had dealings with any poisoners?” I inquired. “Remember,” I added laughing, “that I’m not interviewing you, that we are friends, and that I don’t intend to publish this conversation in the newspapers.”

“That’s rather a difficult question,” he responded, with a look of mystery upon his face. “Perhaps I’d best reply that I’ve before now sold poisons to people who could want them for no other purpose than the removal of superfluous friends.”

“But do they actually ask openly for this herb or that?”

“Certainly – with excuses for its use, of course,” and he went on to remark how lucidly the science of poisoning was explained in a certain book which might be purchased anywhere for seven-and-sixpence, a work which had undoubtedly cost thousands of human lives. Then instantly I recollected. It was a copy of this same book that Dick had noticed in the morning-room at Riverdene.

“In this very room,” the old fellow went on, “I’ve had some queer inquiries made by all sorts and conditions of people. Only the other day a young girl called to consult me, having heard, she said, that I sold for a consideration a certain deadly herb. By her voice she was evidently a lady.”

His final observation increased my interest in this remarkable conversation.

“What was she like?” I inquired with eagerness, for since the affair at Phillimore Place I took the keenest interest in anything appertaining to poisons.

“She was rather tall and slim, dressed in black. But my eyes are not so good as they used to be, and, in the dark here, I couldn’t see much of her face through her veil. She was pretty, I think.”

“And did you actually sell her what she wanted?”

He hesitated a moment.

“Certainly, and at my own price,” he answered at last in his thin, rasping voice. “The stuff, one of the most dangerous and little-known compounds, not obtainable through any ordinary channel, is most difficult to handle. But I saw that it was not the first time she’d had azotics in her possession,” and he smiled grimly, rendering his face the more hideous. “From her attitude and conversation I should imagine her to be a very ingenious, but not altogether desirable acquaintance,” he added.

“And didn’t you note anything by which you might recognise her again?” I inquired. “Surely young girls are not in the habit of buying poison in that manner!”

“Well,” croaked the distorted old fellow, with a grin, “I did notice one thing, certainly. She wore a brooch of rather uncommon pattern. It was a playing-card in gold and enamel – a tiny five of diamonds.”

“A five of diamonds!” I gasped.

At that instant the truth became plain, although I hesitated to believe it. The brooch was Eva Glaslyn’s; one that she had worn only three days before when I was last down at Riverdene, and while on the water with her I had remarked its quaintness.

Could it be possible that she had actually purchased a deadly drug of this hideous old man? Or were there other brooches of similar pattern and design? Thus were increased the shadows which seemed to envelop her. My soul seemed killed within me.