Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/619

 violent as to shake the house. He had broken off in vexation.

“I protest it is too bad!” he exclaimed angrily. “Not a minute in the house yet, and I must be hunted up and fetched out of it. I won’t attend. Go down,” he added to the new maid. “Say I am not at liberty to attend to patients to-night.”

She obeyed, but came up again instantly.

“It is not patients, sir. It’s a policeman. I told him you could see no one to-night, but he says he must see you.”

Mr. Carlton seemed taken aback at the words. “A policeman!” he repeated, in a strangely timid, hesitating tone.

“He was here yesterday and again this morning asking after you, sir,” returned the girl. “Hannah was very curious to know what he could want, but he wouldn’t say, except that it was something connected with that lady that died in Palace Street.”

Lady Laura, who had been taking off her bonnet at the toilette glass, turned round and looked at her husband.

“What can it be, Lewis?”

Never had Mr. Carlton appeared so vacillating. He took up the candle to descend, went as far as the door, came back and laid in on the drawers again. Again he moved forward without the candle, and again came back.

“Where is the policeman?” he questioned.

“He’s standing in the hall, sir.”

“It is a strange thing people cannot come at proper hours,” he exclaimed, finally taking up the wax-light to descend. “I have a great mind to say I would not see him, and make him come in the morning.”

Mr. Carlton recognised the policeman as one who had been busy in the case in Palace Street. Ho saluted Mr. Carlton respectfully, and the latter took him into the parlour opposite the dining-room.

“I’m sorry to disturb you at this late hour, sir,” he said, “but there is such a row at our station about this business that never was.”

“What about? What row?” asked the surgeon.

“Well, sir, we have got a new inspector come on, through the other one being moved elsewhere, and he makes out, or tries to make out, that the affair has been mismanaged, else he says more would have come to light about it. His name’s Medler, and goodness knows it seems as if he was going to be a meddler. First of all, sir, he wants to ask you a few particulars, especially as to the man you saw on the stairs.”

“Does he want to ask me to-night?” sarcastically inquired Mr. Carlton.

“No, sir, but as soon as ever is convenient to you in the morning; so I thought I’d just step down and tell you to-night, hearing you had come home.”

“So he wants to rip it all up again, does he, this new inspector?” remarked Mr. Carlton.

“It seems so,” replied the policeman.

“Well, he’s welcome to all I can tell him of the matter. I’ll call in to-morrow.”

“Thank you, sir. It would be satisfactory, of course, if anything more should be found out; but if it’s not, Mr. Medler will just see what reason he has to reproach us with negligence. Good night, sir.”

“Good night,” replied Mr. Carlton. And he shut the door on his troublesome and unseasonable visitor.

last the hopes and wishes of our poets and painters are about to be fulfilled; and the “Silent Highway” is in course of being terraced in a manner worthy of the mighty commerce it bears upon its bosom. It certainly is only another testimony to the slowness of our Anglo-Saxon nature, that such a splendid stream, running through the richest city in the world, should be allowed to ramble at its own pleasure over an immense amount of shore, converting it, at low-water, into a fetid mudbank of thousands of acres in extent, which, under the influence of the summer sun, gives out exhalations of the most unhealthy character. And it will be observed, on looking at the map, that this unhealthy swelling of the stream takes place just in the very centre of the metropolis, where land is or will be the dearest. The centre of London lies between Waterloo and Hungerford Bridges, where the aneurismal swelling of the river, at high-tide, is full a third as wide again as it is either at London or Vauxhall Bridges. If the shore is shabby, the warehouses that line it are miserable in the extreme. In the vicinity of London Bridge the giant proportions of British commerce are stamped upon the noble warehouses that flank the stream; but from Blackfriars Bridge westward the river is lined by nothing better than a succession of tumble-down wharfs and petty boat-houses, and these, in all probability, would have held their ground for another century, had it not been for the necessity of making the low-level sewer and for the revolution the railways have worked in every department of metropolitan traffic. The value of waterside premises would have been too great twenty years ago to have permitted the embankment of the river: the coal-trade would have been irre-