Page:Braddon--The Trail of the Serpent.djvu/318

314 stalwart damsels in dirty pink gauze and crumpled blue-and-yellow artificial flowers, had scarcely ushered in the sweet spring month of the year, when Slopperton arose simultaneously and hurried as one man to the railway-station, to welcome the hero of the day. The report has spread—no one ever knows how these reports arise—that Mr. Richard Marwood is to arrive this day. Slopperton must be at hand to bid him welcome to his native town, to repair the wrong it has so long done him in holding him up to universal detestation as the George Barnwell of modern times.

Which train will he come by? There is a whisper of the three o'clock express; and at three o'clock in the afternoon, therefore, the station and station-yard are crowded.

The Slopperton station, like most other stations, is built at a little distance from the town, so that the humble traveller who arrives by the parliamentary train, with all his earthly possessions in a red cotton pocket-handkerchief or a brown-paper parcel, and to whom such things as cabs are unknown luxuries, is often disappointed to find that when he gets to Slopperton station he is not in Slopperton proper. There is a great Sahara of building-ground and incomplete brick-and-mortar, very much to let, to be crossed before the traveller finds himself in High Street, or South Street, or East Street, or any of the populous neighbourhoods of this magnificent city.

Every disadvantage, however, is generally counterbalanced by some advantage, and nothing could be more suitable than this grand Sahara of broken ground and unfinished neighbourhood for the purposes of a triumphal entry into Slopperton.

There is a great deal of animated conversation going on upon the platform inside the station. It is a noticeable fact that everybody present—and there are some hundreds—appears to have been intimately acquainted with Richard from his very babyhood. This one remembers many a game at cricket with him on those very fields yonder; another would be a rich man if he had only a sovereign for every cigar he has smoked in the society of Mr. Marwood. That old gentleman yonder taught our hero his declensions, and always had a difficulty with him about the ablative case. The elderly female with the dropsical umbrella had nursed him as a baby; "and the finest baby he was as ever I saw," she adds enthusiastically. Those two gentlemen who came down to the station in their own brougham are the kind doctors who carried him through that terrible brain-fever of his early youth, and whose evidence was of some service to him at his trial. Everywhere along the crowded platform there are friends; noisy excited gesticulating friends, who have started a hero on their own account, and who wouldn't turn aside to-day to get a bow from majesty itself.

Five minutes to three. From the doctor's fifty-guinea chro-