'You don't suppose the treasure is in that?' said my mother, laughing.
'No; though Jessie and I did think one day that we had made a discovery. Good-night, mother.'
'Good-night, dear child, and God bless you. Remember, my dear, there are brighter days to come, and your mother will live to see them.'
That, before she went to sleep, she prayed for those brighter days, I was certain, but I scarcely dared to hope that what she so fondly desired would ever take place.
Before I went to bed I took from my box the stone image of the brown monkey-man; it was at the very bottom of my box, which I had not opened for many months, for the reason that it contained all the sketches I had made of Jessie, and which I had put away when I lost her. But for these, and the tender thought which they excited, I should have given more attention to the stone image which looked uglier and more repulsive than ever. How such a hideous thing could be considered an ornament it puzzled me to think; but it occurred to me that there were more flagrant violations of art than this. On the previous day I had seen a ghastly death's-head pin in the cravat of a coxcomb, who seemed very proud of it. I set the image of the monkey-man on the mantelshelf, and slowly replaced the sketches in my box, lingering over them with fond regret.
Among them I found a sketch with the name of 'Anthony Bullpit' at the foot, and I remembered that it was a fancy drawing I had made of my grandmother's lover, after reading the account of his arrest by the detective Vinnicombe, elsewhere narrated; a sneaking figure was Anthony Bullpit, as I had represented him, with his hang-dog look and hypocritical face, gnawing at his finger-nails. I pushed it out of sight, and turned again to the contemplation of my sketches of Jessie, over which I spent a sad and tender quarter of an hour. Then, with a sigh, I closed the box and locked it, and went to bed. It was my habit of a night to lie awake for a few minutes with the candle alight on a chair close to my bed. Generally I passed these minutes in reading, but on this night 'I lay a-thynkinge,' and did not open my book. Directly opposite the head of my bed was the mantelshelf, with the smoke-dried monkey of a man in stone on it, and this was the last thing that presented itself to my sight before I blew out the light. Restless as I was with the events of the evening, and with the conversation which had taken place between my mother and myself, I was tired enough to fall asleep within a very few moments. But I was not too tired to dream; my body was asleep, but my imagination was never more active. To me, the most wonderful feature in the physiology of dreams has always been the fact that Time, the dominant and inexorable tyrant which rules and guides our course, and regulates the passions and emotions of life, is in our sleep utterly set at naught; a lifetime is compressed in a moment, as it were, and between waking and sleeping a hundred years of history are played out. I think I must have dreamt of every important event in my life, and of many in the lives of others; they presented themselves to me without coherence or sequence, and there was but one consistent feature in my fancies--the figure of the monkey-man, which was never absent. I dreamt of Snaggletooth and Snaggletooth's wife. She was relating the stories of the Cock-lane Ghost and Old Mother Shipton, as she had related them in the kitchen on the night my father lay dying upstairs, but in my dream she was not speaking to me, but to the monkey-image, which gravely wagged its head at her as she proceeded; Snaggletooth was running up and down the stairs, and poking in the oddest corners, in his search for the long stocking, and the monkey-man was assisting him frantically, running at his heels, and tearing things open with fiendish haste; I was in the mourning coach, following my father's body to the churchyard, and the monkey-man was sitting opposite to me, grinning at me; Snaggletooth was carrying me out of the churchyard, and as I opened my eyes, the monkey-man, squatting on Snaggletooth's shoulder, squinted at me. In the same way the image presented itself in every incident connected with Jessie and my mother and uncle Bryan; and when I lay trembling in bed, and Jane Painter stood in my bedroom in the dark telling me stories of blood and murder, the monkey-man prowled about the floor, and dropped from the ceiling, and crept from under my bed, and sat on my pillow with its ugly face illumined. When Jessie knocked at the shop-door, as she had done years ago for the first time, and my mother opened it, the monkey-man entered first, and jumped on to the table; and on the night of the amateur performance at Josey West's the monkey-man was among the audience, seated in a place of honour. Suddenly all this chaos of persons and circumstances came to an end, and there were only my grandmother, and I, and the monkey-figure sitting together. I was in my little low chair, my grandmother, very stately and grand, was in her armchair, and the monkey-man was on the mantelshelf. Said my grandmother in my dream, in a very distinct tone, 'He had a knob on the top of his head, and was always eating his nails.' I looked at the monkey-man for confirmation of her words, and it said, in a stony voice, 'He had a knob on the top of his head, and was always eating his nails.' After this confirmation, my grandmother continued, 'And the last time I set eyes on him was on my wedding-day.' Again I looked at the monkey-man, and again it confirmed my grandmother's statement, but with a slight difference this time, 'And the last time we set eyes on him was on our wedding-day.' Which inference on the part of the monkey-man of being my grandfather somewhat disturbed me. Now, at this point of my fancies, what on earth brought old Mac, the actor, into the scene? There he was, however, face to face with the monkey-man, who questioned him as a lawyer would have done. 'What do you say his name commences with?' asked the monkey-man? 'It commences with a G,' replied old Mac. 'And what is that habit of his that you say is a sign of ill-temper?' asked the monkey-man. 'Biting his nails,' replied old Mac; 'he is always at it.' By this time my dream has resolved itself into a court of inquiry; the monkey-man is dressed in a wig and gown, which do not hide his ugliness; my grandmother, very broad and portly, sits as judge, and I, it seems, am in some way the criminal whose case is being tried, for my grandmother nods her head at me continually, and says, 'Perhaps you will believe me now; all these things happened on my wedding-day.' Old Mac fades away, and is replaced by Turk West. 'Curse all professional moneylenders, I say,' he cries; 'and if ever I believe again in a man with a handle on the top of his head, my name's not Turk West' 'Hold your tongue,' calls out the monkey-man; 'who wants to know what your name is? We'll come to names presently. 'When did you first discover the handle?' It isn't a handle,' says Turk, in correction, 'it's a knob.' My grandmother nods in confirmation. 'He had a knob on the top of his head,' she says, 'and he was always biting his nails.' 'I don't know about that,' says Turk, 'but his fingers are always at his moustache, and he is the soul of honour and comes from a highly-respectable family.' 'That he does,' adds my grandmother. 'Poor Anthony! He proposed and wished to run away with me, but my family stepped in and prevented him.' 'Very wrong,' says Turk gravely; 'wasn't his family respectable enough for them? The soul of honour!' 'Quite so,' says my grandmother. 'He told me, after I had accepted this child's grandfather' (at this point of my dream I become suddenly a child, in a pinafore), 'that life was valueless to him without me, and that as he had lost me, he would be sure to go to the devil.' 'Did he go?' asks the monkey-man. 'I always found him a man of his word,' replies my grandmother. 'Now attend to me, sir,' cries the monkey-man, in a bullying tone, turning suddenly upon Turk; 'when did you say you first discovered this knob?' 'Last week,' replies Turk, 'when he sat in that chair' (the chair comes into the dream) 'and told me to shampoo him.' 'You were surprised when you felt it?' asks the monkey-man. 'I was,' says Turk, 'and I asked him if he had knocked his head against something. He said, no, that he was born with it.' 'And what was the remark,' continues the monkey-man, levelling a threatening finger at me, 'you made to the prisoner at the bar?' 'I said,' says Turk, 'that that sort of thing runs in families, and that if he had it, his father must have had it before him.' Suddenly, and as if it were quite in the natural order of things, we are all listening to the statement of a new witness who has risen in Turk's place. 'I am an officer in the detective force, and my name is Vinnicombe. From information received, I went to Liverpool, and tracked Anthony Bullpit on board the Prairie Bird, bound for America. "It's no use making a noise about it," I says to him, as I slipped the handcuffs on him; "I want you, Anthony Bullpit. You sha'n't be done out of a voyage across the sea, but Botany Bay's the place as'll suit you best, I should think." Here my grandmother brindles up, 'You're an infamous designing creature,' she screams. 'He is no more guilty than I am.' 'He pleads guilty at all events,' is the detective's reply. 'That is to spite me,' says my grandmother, 'and to prove that he's a man of his word.' Then, by quite an easy transition, the court and the crowd fade away, and my grandmother, I, and the monkey-figure are again in the little parlour, and she is saying to me, 'Your grandfather has much to answer for, child. Mr. Bullpit was transported for twenty-one years. Some wicked people said it was a mercy he wasn't hanged. If he had been, I should never have survived it. Poor Anthony!' 'You would like to have a peep at him, I daresay,' says the monkey-man to me, my grandmother having disappeared; 'come along, I'll show him to you.' And in the same moment we are peeping through the keyhole of Turk West's shop-door at the figure of Mr. Glover, who sits in the chair with his fingers at his lips. Here a sudden movement or noise partially awakes me.
With all the details of this strange dream in my mind I lay for a few moments half asleep and half awake, endeavouring to bring the confused particulars into some kind of order; but the only thing that was clear to me was the connection that had been created between Anthony Bullpit and Mr. Glover. As I gradually returned to full consciousness, this connection seemed to become something more than a fancy. That the knob on Anthony Bullpit's head, of which I heard so much from my grandmother's lips in my young days, was reproduced, according to Turk West's testimony, on the head of Mr. Glover, was certainly no fancy; Anthony Bullpit bit his nails; Mr. Glover had the same objectionable habit. Stranger discoveries were made every day than the discovery that Mr. Glover was Anthony Bullpit's son. If this were so, what became of Mr. Glover's boast that there was not a stain upon his good name, and that his character and the character of all his family were above reproach? It occurred to me here that his ardent desire to make people believe this sprang from the fact that he had something disreputable to conceal. What made me so anxious in the matter was, that if there were a solid foundation to the suspicion, and if I could prove a connection between Mr. Glover and Anthony Bullpit the convict, then I had a lever in my hands which I could use to good effect against Mr. Glover--a lever which I believed would cause him at once to cease his attentions to Jessie. That he had laid her under an obligation to him was evident, and he might be inclined to persecute her in consequence. The lever I speak of was the printed account by Vinnicombe, the detective, of the arrest and conviction of Anthony Bullpit for the robbery from the bank.
I rose and lit the candle, and taking the mouldy old paper from the hollow of the stone monkey-figure, I read it carefully. I was particularly struck in the reading by the description given by the detective of the peculiarity in Anthony Bullpit's teeth. If that peculiarity existed in the teeth of Mr. Glover, it would be almost impossible to resist the conviction that he was Anthony Bullpit's son. I set to work at once, and made a fair copy of the 'Remarkable Discovery of a Forger by the Celebrated Detective, Mr. Vinnicombe.' At nine o'clock in the morning I was in Turk West's shop, with the manuscript in my pocket.