THE RATTLE OF THE SNAKE.
The progress of affection between natures like those of Percival and
Helen, favoured by free and constant intercourse, was naturally rapid.
It was scarcely five weeks from the day he had first seen Helen, and he
already regarded her as his plighted bride. During the earlier days of
his courtship, Percival, enamoured and absorbed for the first time in his
life, did not hasten to make his mother the confidante of his happiness.
He had written but twice; and though he said briefly, in the second
letter, that he had discovered two relations, both interesting and one
charming, he had deferred naming them or entering into detail. This not
alone from that indescribable coyness which all have experienced in
addressing even those with whom they are most intimate, in the early,
half-unrevealed, and mystic emotions of first love, but because Lady
Diary's letters had been so full of her sister's declining health, of her
own anxieties and fears, that he had shrunk from giving her a new subject
of anxiety; and a confidence full of hope and joy seemed to him unfeeling
and unseasonable. He knew how necessarily uneasy and restless an avowal
that his heart was seriously engaged to one she had never seen, would
make that tender mother, and that his confession would rather add to her
cares than produce sympathy with his transports. But now, feeling
impatient for his mother's assent to the formal proposals which had
become due to Madame Dalibard and Helen, and taking advantage of the
letter last received from her, which gave more cheering accounts of her
sister, and expressed curiosity for further explanation as to his half
disclosure, he wrote at length, and cleared his breast of all its
secrets. It was the same day in which he wrote this confession and
pleaded his cause that we accompany him to the house of his sweet
mistress, and leave him by her side, in the accustomed garden. Within,
Madame Dalibard, whose chair was set by the window, bent over certain
letters, which she took, one by one, from her desk and read slowly,
lifting her eyes from time to time and glancing towards the young people
as they walked, hand in hand, round the small demesnes, now hid by the
fading foliage, now emerging into view. Those letters were the early
love-epistles of William Mainwaring. She had not recurred to them for
years. Perhaps she now felt that food necessary to the sustainment of
her fiendish designs. It was a strange spectacle to see this being, so
full of vital energy, mobile and restless as a serpent, condemned to that
helpless decrepitude, chained to the uneasy seat, not as in the resigned
and passive imbecility of extreme age, but rather as one whom in the
prime of life the rack has broken, leaving the limbs inert, the mind
active, the form as one dead, the heart with superabundant vigour,--a,
cripple's impotence and a Titan's will! What, in that dreary
imprisonment and amidst the silence she habitually preserved, passed
through the caverns of that breast, one can no more conjecture than one
can count the blasts that sweep and rage through the hollows of
impenetrable rock, or the elements that conflict in the bosom of the
volcano, everlastingly at work. She had read and replaced the letters,
and leaning her cheek on her hand, was gazing vacantly on the wall, when
Varney intruded on that dismal solitude.
He closed the door after him with more than usual care; and drawing a
seat close to Lucretia, said, "Belle-mere, the time has arrived for you
to act; my part is wellnigh closed."
"Ay," said Lucretia, wearily, "what is the news you bring?"
"First," replied Varney, and as he spoke, he shut the window, as if his
whisper could possibly be heard without,--"first, all this business
connected with Helen is at length arranged. You know when, agreeably to
your permission, I first suggested to her, as it were casually, that you
were so reduced in fortune that I trembled to regard your future; that
you had years ago sacrificed nearly half your pecuniary resources to
maintain her parents,--she of herself reminded me that she was entitled,
when of age, to a sum far exceeding all her wants, and--"
"That I might be a pensioner on the child of William Mainwaring and Susan
Mivers," interrupted Lucretia. "I know that, and thank her not. Pass
on."
"And you know, too, that in the course of my conversation with the girl I
let out also incidentally that, even so, you were dependent on the
chances of her life; that if she died (and youth itself is mortal) before
she was of age, the sum left her by her grandfather would revert to her
father's family; and so, by hints, I drew her on to ask if there was no
mode by which, in case of her death, she might insure subsistence to you.
So that you see the whole scheme was made at her own prompting. I did
but, as a man of business, suggest the means,--an insurance on her life."
"Varney, these details are hateful. I do not doubt that you have done
all to forestall inquiry and elude risk. The girl has insured her life
to the amount of her fortune?"
"To that amount only? Pooh! Her death will buy more than that. As no
one single office will insure for more than 5,000 pounds, and as it was
easy to persuade her that such offices were liable to failure, and that
it was usual to insure in several, and for a larger amount than the sum
desired, I got her to enter herself at three of the principal offices.
The amount paid to us on her death will be 15,000 pounds. It will be
paid (and here I have followed the best legal advice) in trust to me for
your benefit. Hence, therefore, even if our researches fail us, if no
son of yours can be found, with sufficient evidence to prove, against the
keen interests and bought advocates of heirs-at-law, the right to
Laughton, this girl will repay us well, will replace what I have taken,
at the risk of my neck, perhaps,--certainly at the risk of the hulks,--
from the capital of my uncle's legacy, will refund what we have spent on
the inquiry; and the residue will secure to you an independence sufficing
for your wants almost for life, and to me what will purchase with
economy," and Varney smiled, "a year or so of a gentleman's idle
pleasures. Are you satisfied thus far?"
"She will die happy and innocent," muttered Lucretia, with the growl of
demoniac disappointment.
"Will you wait, then, till my forgery is detected, and I have no power to
buy the silence of the trustees,--wait till I am in prison, and on a
trial for life and death? Reflect, every day, every hour, of delay is
fraught with peril. But if my safety is nothing compared to the
refinement of your revenge, will you wait till Helen marries Percival St.
John? You start! But can you suppose that this innocent love-play will
not pass rapidly to its denouement? It is but yesterday that Percival
confided to me that he should write this very day to his mother, and
communicate all his feelings and his hopes; that he waited but her assent
to propose formally for Helen. Now one of two things must happen.
Either this mother, haughty and vain as lady-mothers mostly are, may
refuse consent to her son's marriage with the daughter of a disgraced
banker and the niece of that Lucretia Dalibard whom her husband would not
admit beneath his roof--"
"Hold, sir!" exclaimed Lucretia, haughtily; and amidst all the passions
that darkened her countenance and degraded her soul, some flash of her
ancestral spirit shot across her brow. But it passed quickly, and she
added, with fierce composure, "You are right; go on!"
"Either-and pardon me for an insult that comes not from me--either this
will be the case: Lady Mary St. John will hasten back in alarm to London;
she exercises extraordinary control over her son; she may withdraw him
from us altogether, from me as well as you, and the occasion now
presented to us may be lost (who knows?) forever,--or she may be a weak
and fond woman; may be detained in Italy by her sister's illness; may be
anxious that the last lineal descendant of the St. Johns should marry
betimes, and, moved by her darling's prayers, may consent at once to the
union. Or a third course, which Percival thinks the most probable, and
which, though most unwelcome to us of all, I had wellnigh forgotten, may
be adopted. She may come to England, and in order to judge her son's
choice with her own eyes, may withdraw Helen from your roof to hers. At
all events, delays are dangerous,--dangerous, putting aside my personal
interest, and regarding only your own object,--may bring to our acts new
and searching eyes; may cut us off from the habitual presence either of
Percival or Helen, or both; or surround them, at the first breath of
illness, with prying friends and formidable precautions. The birds now
are in our hands. Why then open the cage and bid them fly, in order to
spread the net? This morning all the final documents with the Insurance
Companies are completed. It remains for me but to pay the first
quarterly premiums. For that I think I am prepared, without drawing
further on your hoards or my own scanty resources, which Grabman will
take care to drain fast enough."
"And Percival St. John?" said Madame Dalibard. "We want no idle
sacrifices. If my son be not found, we need not that boy's ghost amongst
those who haunt us."
"Surely not," said Varney; "and for my part, he may be more useful to me
alive than dead. There is no insurance on his life, and a rich friend
(credulous greenhorn that he is!) is scarcely of that flock of geese
which it were wise to slay from the mere hope of a golden egg. Percival
St. John is your victim, not mine; not till you give the order would I
lift a finger to harm him."
"Yes, let him live, unless my son be found to me," said Madame Dalibard,
almost exultingly,--"let him live to forget yon fair-faced fool, leaning
now, see you, so delightedly on his arm, and fancying eternity in the
hollow vows of love; let him live to wrong and abandon her by
forgetfulness, though even in the grave; to laugh at his boyish dreams,--
to sully her memory in the arms of harlots! Oh, if the dead can suffer,
let him live, that she may feel beyond the grave his inconstancy and his
fall. Methinks that that thought will comfort me if Vincent be no more,
and I stand childless in the world!"
"It is so settled, then," said Varney, ever ready to clinch the business
that promised gold, and relieve his apprehensions of the detection of his
fraud. "And now to your noiseless hands, as soon as may be, I consign
the girl; she has lived long enough!"