This, however, did not last long, and Benson ended his career shortly after by throwing himself over the balustrade of an American gaol.
Surely never was a commonplace affair dignified with such a high-sounding title! ’Twas the novelty that did it.
Where one voracious old woman existed in the seventies, the twentieth century could produce a dozen, and where two policemen were caught accepting blackmail, a battalion exists to-day, only their tactics have marched with the times, and instead of receiving their levies in pot-houses, they secrete themselves in cupboards and receive “hush money” from alien brothel-keepers. At the same time, they affect the sorry appearance associated with badly cut frock-coats and brimless tall hats. The boots, however, beat them.
Very few of the dramatis personæ appear to be left.
Druscovitch for some years was employed as a Strand hotel detective. Meiklejohn may occasionally be seen, unkempt and down-at-heel, in the vicinity of mediocre saloon bars (glasses only), and Madame Goncourt has long since explained to the Recording Angel that though she was the first, she certainly won’t be the last, who has missed the certainties that go begging on the Turf.
But the sixties were celebrated for a much more amusing and widespread example of human credulity and vanity than the humdrum so-called “Turf frauds,” with their unsavoury, commonplace ingredients of a voracious old woman, a bevy of sharpers, and a file of flat-footed police-inspectors.
It was in 1868 that London heard that a divine being was amongst them, coming no one knew whence, and whose age no one could guess, gifted with the power of arresting Time, restoring youth and beauty, and ready—for a consideration—to impart these blessings to all who sought her aid.
It was in the narrowest part of Bond Street that the goddess pitched her tent, and to say that the traffic was impeded would convey but a poor idea of the congestion that retarded locomotion in that worst-built of thoroughfares. Old men desirous of enamelling their bald old pates, ponderous females with scratch wigs and asthma, and girls, pretty and ugly, with defects capable of improvement, hustled and tussled to pay the fee of the wonderful enchantress who guaranteed to restore youth to old age and make one and all “beautiful for ever.”
Madame Rachel was a bony and forbidding looking female, with the voice of a Deal boatman and the physique of a grenadier. The robes she affected when receiving her clients, and the crystals and gimcracks that clattered at her girdle, might well inspire awe, as, emerging from behind massive curtains, she approached her victim with some phrase suggestive of “knowing all about it,” which, indeed, was part of the system when time and opportunity permitted, or the status of the client justified it.
Rachel rarely smiled; when she laughed—which was rarer still—it was the laugh of a rhinoceros. Assisting her was a beautiful girl, of the beauté du diable type, with the suspicion of a cast in one of her heavy-lashed eyes, which made her more bewitching than ever.