"BY FOREIGN HANDS THY DYING EYES WERE CLOSED."
Alone in his library Lavendale devoured the contents of the manuscript.
It was written in Italian, a language he knew perfectly, and in which he
often conversed with the adept.
"In the year 1686, being the year before last, I, Nicolino Vincenti,
goldsmith, lived at Venice, on the Grand Canal, with my only son Filippo
Vincenti, and his only child and most beloved daughter Margharita, a
girl of remarkable beauty and as remarkable talent; I may say that she
was born with the gift of music, since she gave token of musical genius
at so early an age that it seemed rather a reminiscence of the heavenly
spheres than knowledge acquired upon earth. She had been educated at a
convent, where her gifts had been highly cultivated. She sang better
than La Boverina, who was then prima donna at the Venetian Opera House,
and she played the harpsichord with exquisite taste. It was her father's
delight to hear her play and sing, his pride and pleasure to watch her
growing beauty; and had he been in independent circumstances he would
have given his whole life to her companionship; but he had his business
as goldsmith and jeweller, upon which he was dependent for the means of
life. He had saved a little money, just enough to secure him from an old
age of penury; but he was not rich, and never hoped to be rich. He was
too much of an artist, too much above the average tradesman in intellect
and refinement, ever to make a fortune. He had not the mercantile bent
of mind.
"At this time I, Nicolino Vincenti, after practising the goldsmith's
craft during the earlier years of manhood, and learning many secrets
concerning the properties of precious metals and their meaner alloys,
had withdrawn myself altogether from that craft, and devoted all my
energies and all my means to experimental chemistry. I had a spacious
laboratory upon an upper floor over my son's shop and dwelling-house;
and here I spent almost the whole of my time, having a pallet in a
corner where I lay after late watchings, rather than disturb the
sleeping household by descending to my bedchamber on the lower floor.
Gradually as the years went on I came to live almost entirely in my
laboratory, which I only left for an occasional stroll in the twilit
streets, or at the importunity of my granddaughter, who would sometimes
insist upon my spending an hour in the family sitting-room.
"The all-absorbing researches upon which I had now entered had gradually
drifted me away from family life, and almost from natural human interest
in my kindred or my fellow-men. I tried to resist the current, and was
sometimes horrified at the thought that my heart was gradually hardening
itself against those whom I had once loved; but it was in vain that I
struggled against the magnetic attraction of the science which absorbed
all my hopes and dreams and thoughts. There came a time when my son's
voice had a far-away sound, even when he was close at my elbow talking
earnestly to me, and when my granddaughter's lovely face was seen dimly
like a face in a dream.
"There was but little sympathy between my son and me. He was an artist,
a craftsman, whose genius lay in his fingers rather than in his brain.
He had no leaning to abstract science, none of the eager curiosity of
the discoverer. He was active and energetic, and wanted quick results;
was ambitious, but with an ambition which to me seemed narrow and petty.
He wanted to excel in the creation of beautiful objects, like Benvenuto
Cellini--to be remembered as the maker of drinking-cups and monstrances.
But though there was little resemblance in our tastes, there had been
much affection between us as father and son, and I had mourned with him
when he lost his young wife shortly after the birth of their only child.
That child seemed to me the concentrated expression of all the best
attributes in a highly-gifted and vanishing race. I could trace every
quality and characteristic of her mind and nature to their source in the
characters of her ancestry. I found in her all which her father
lacked--an ardent sympathy with me in my loftiest aspirations, a
yearning for knowledge beyond the narrow boundaries of common life, a
profound belief in the supernatural. I would have given much to be
allowed to train her, to make her the confidante and assistant of my
labours, as Flamel's wife was to him; but Filippo was narrow-minded and
priest-ridden, and he had a pious horror of my laboratory, and of
experiments which his ignorance condemned as diabolical.
"Thus deprived of the one sympathiser whose society I should have
cherished, my life grew daily more and more apart from that of
surrounding humanity, and, absorbing as were the hopes and dreams that
led me on from link to link in the chain of occult knowledge, there were
yet times when I felt my isolation, and when the silence and gloom of my
laboratory weighed heavily upon me.
"It was in vain that I sought relief in the society of the family
sitting-room. The air of every-day life oppressed me even worse than the
sense of isolation--or I may say that I felt my isolation most keenly
when I was among my fellow-men. What I yearned for was not company, but
sympathy. The companionship of those who had nothing in common with my
pursuits only fatigued and irritated me.
"My one pleasure in the household room was Margharita's singing or
playing. There were quaint old sixteenth-century melodies which soothed
me with an almost magical power. I have sat in the twilight listening to
her with tears streaming down my cheeks. Her voice thrilled and yet
calmed my troubled brain.
"My evening walks had but one motive, health. I had long made that a
consideration, even when my studies were most enthralling; for I knew
that the only way to long life was to husband the oil in the lamp. Every
evening, in good or bad weather, I walked about the streets and quays of
Venice, and generally ended my promenade by taking a cup of coffee at a
respectable resort, where I heard all the news of the city and of the
external world. It was not because I was interested in the world outside
my laboratory that I listened keenly to the gossip of worldlings, but I
was always on the watch for any new discovery or invention that might
have some bearing on my pursuits. Science has many branches curiously
interwoven, and the scientific world was at this period peculiarly
active. I listened to discussions upon all the new facts and new
theories which were upon men's tongues in those days--listened while
ignorance dogmatised and folly argued, and religiously held my peace. I
had no wish to be known as a disputant or an experimentalist. Scarcely
half a dozen people in Venice knew of the existence of my laboratory.
The Venetians are fonder of pleasure than of science--a gay and idle
people, spending their nights in casinos, dividing their energies
between the fever of high play and the excitement of secret intrigues;
not a people to watch the progress of discovery with any profound
interest. They gossiped about Newton and Descartes just in as light a
tone as they discussed the last European war or the last revolt in
Turkey.
"One evening the conversation was about an English millionaire who had
hired a palace on the Canal Reggio, and whose wealth and splendour were
the talk of the city. He was young, handsome, elegant, an accomplished
musician, and a great linguist. He travelled with a secretary and twenty
servants of different nationalities, and had engaged half a dozen
gondoliers, and as many more miscellaneous attendants, in the city. One
of the gossips whispered that, not content with the palace where he
lived in an almost royal state and before the public eye, and where he
received all the nobility of Venice, the Englishman had imitated our
native manners so far as to engage a small suite of apartments in a
quiet nook behind the Piazza, so hidden from the public eye that as yet
even gossip had not been able to identify the exact position of this
secret haven. Rumour asserted that there were days and nights when Mr.
Topsparkle disappeared altogether from his palace, and was yet known not
to have left the city. These mysterious disappearances might be easily
accounted for in Venice, where it is a common thing for a wealthy
profligate to provide himself with a secondary and secret establishment
whose whereabouts is known only to the initiated.
"I had no interest in hearing of the rich Mr. Topsparkle, and listened
with the utmost indifference to those minuter details of his life which
the company at the coffee-house discussed with a keen relish, merely
because this young man happened to be inordinately rich.
"It was not long after the advent of Mr. Topsparkle, and while the
stories about his excellent manners and his worse than doubtful morals
were still on every lip, that I met a young Frenchman at the
coffee-house, whose conversation, addressed to a person at the next
table, at once interested me.
"They were talking of the latest discovery in chemistry, which had been
made at Munich by the great Johann Becher; and by the Frenchman's
conversation I gathered that he was a good practical chemist, and had an
intelligence which went far beyond his actual knowledge. He was just the
order of neophyte to interest a worker who longs for some younger mind
with which to share his developing ideas. Almost for the first time
since I had frequented the coffee-house I joined unasked in the
conversation of two strangers. I ventured to correct an assertion of the
Frenchman's, and he received my correction with a modesty that delighted
me. I enlarged upon the subject, and his interest was so much engaged
that he walked with me to my door, listening respectfully to all I could
tell him.
"We met again and again. The Frenchman told me that he had been
educated as a chemist and apothecary, but, disliking the beaten tracks
of medicine, had given up his profession, and was now maintaining
himself by his attendance as secretary upon a travelling gentleman. I
was so interested in the young man himself and his aspirations that I
was entirely unconcerned as to his employer, and it certainly never
occurred to me that he could be in the service of the rich Mr.
Topsparkle.
"I asked my new friend his name. 'Louis,' he told me. 'What, Louis
only--no surname?'
"He shrugged his shoulders. 'A waif, sir,' he said; 'there are many such
in Paris.'
"I was content to accept him as a waif, and to know him only as Louis.
"After meeting him about a dozen times, I invited him to my laboratory,
first exacting from him a promise that he should tell no one in Venice
of anything that he saw there, or indeed of the existence of such a
chamber under my son's roof.
"He came upon many evenings, and sometimes worked with me till daybreak.
I was disappointed on finding that his chief interest was in the lower
branches of chemistry--that his ardour for great discoveries was less
than my own. He took an ardent delight in the more curious kinds of
drugs, whether of a curative or a poisonous nature. He was keenly
interested in the secrets of Don Antonio Medici, whose skill in poisons
was famous in the early part of the century; and he pored with delight
over the records of execution by poison as ordered by the Council of
Ten; and in the experiences of Brother John of Ragusa, who suggested to
the Tribunal various admirable methods of mysteriously causing death. He
had strange theories about the poisons and medicines of the ancient
world and of the Middle Ages, and asked my permission to experiment with
certain vegetable and mineral poisons upon stray curs and rabbits which
he brought secretly to my laboratory. I think it was his callousness to
the pain of these animals which first gave me a feeling of revulsion
against him.
"One evening, when he left me rather earlier than usual, the door of the
family sitting-room was open as I conducted him down-stairs, and he was
surprised at the beauty of my granddaughter's voice. She was seated at
her harpsichord, singing an _Agnus Dei_, and he could see her in the
lamplight as we passed the door. He pretended to be enraptured by her
singing, but was discreet enough to make no remark upon her beauty,
which was very striking as she sat with uplifted countenance, her face
radiant in the lamplight, her soul looking out of her eyes in a
religious ecstasy.
"A week passed after this, in which I saw Louis only on two evenings,
during both of which he occupied himself chiefly in his study of
toxicology. On one occasion, when I had been particularly disgusted by
the tortures he had inflicted upon a helpless cur which he had captured
in his evening walk, and upon which he had been trying the effect of
small doses of aconite, I taxed him with the brutality and uselessness
of his experiments.
"'I grant that the taste is somewhat morbid,' he said; 'but since I have
been in Italy I have been studying the history of your Borgias and your
Medicis, and I have a philosophical pleasure in imagining their ideas
and realising their excitement in little. I can imagine now that this
stray cur is a powerful enemy whose life I am slowly sapping. I can
feel as your Italian Catherine, our Queen-mother, felt when her son's
frail body wasted slowly under her diabolical arts, to make way for that
other son whom she loved so much better.'
"'Such a woman was incapable of love!' I exclaimed; 'she was made up of
policy and self-interest, and if she preferred Henry to Charles it was
because she thought she could more easily govern France with Henry for
her mouthpiece.'
"I was disgusted and angry. The pupil from whom I had hoped much had
turned aside from the lofty heights of science to flirt with futilities,
to dabble with the petty arts of the barber and the charlatan, the
seller of poisoned gloves and poisoned handkerchiefs.
"'It was a pity you did not live in Catherine's time,' I said to him
once; 'you would have rivalled Cosme Ruggieri in her favour, and would
have made a handsome fortune.'
"'I fear I shall never grow rich by the transmutation of metals,' he
answered.
"After this he worked no more at toxicology, and seemed to resume his
interest in my own particular studies. He was a man of remarkable
intelligence, and had a specious art of appearing interested, which won
my affection and sympathy. I know now that he was an infidel in science
as in everything else, and that he only used my laboratory and my
knowledge as a means of perfecting himself in the art of secret murder.
Whether he studied poisons with the deliberate intent to use them at the
first profitable occasion, or whether his dark soul delighted in the
power to do evil, without the actual intention of crime, I know not; but
I know that before he left my laboratory he had acquired by reading and
experiment the most minute knowledge of poisons, and their effects and
evidences.
"About a week after that evening upon which Louis had seen my
granddaughter at her harpsichord, my son told me with an air of triumph
that the rich Mr. Topsparkle, the wealthiest Englishman who had ever
visited Venice, had been to his shop, had looked at various examples of
his workmanship, and had ordered a covered cup in parcel-gilt, set with
agate and lapis-lazuli, after the manner of Cellini. My son took an
artist's delight in the commission, and was almost indifferent to the
profit which would be derived from his labour.
"'He is quite a young man,' he told me, 'but he has a wonderful
knowledge of the fine arts. I believe he knows every masterpiece of
Cellini's; for while we were discussing the form of the cup which I am
to make for him he drew at least twenty different forms of cups and
covers, all after Cellini, with the most careless pencil. He is an
excellent draughtsman, but music, he tells me, is his chief passion.'
"A week later I was told that Mr. Topsparkle, having called to see the
progress of his cup, had heard Margharita singing, and had asked to be
introduced to the songstress. He had stayed for an hour listening to
her, ravished by her talent.
"Had I been a man of the world I should at once have taken alarm,
remembering what I had heard in the coffee-house as to the Englishman's
character. But I was too completely absorbed in my own studies to be on
the alert for any danger that did not menace the secrets of my
laboratory. I heard what had happened without being impressed by it.
"After this Mr. Topsparkle was a frequent visitor to my son's
sitting-room, but as he never saw my granddaughter alone the most
careful father would scarcely conceive the possibility of danger.
"So insidious were the approaches of the seducer, so completely was the
father hoodwinked, that the first indication of danger was the fall of a
thunderbolt. One evening in late autumn, between sunset and darkness,
Margharita disappeared. No one saw her leave the house, but she was
gone; and as she never went out alone, but was always escorted by an old
servant who had been her mother's nurse as well as her own, her absence
created immediate alarm.
"My son was like a man distracted. He searched every public resort, went
over the whole city on foot or in a gondola, visited his few friends,
hunted every likely and unlikely place for some trace of his lost
daughter, but found none. He came to me at ten o'clock in my laboratory,
to ask my advice. He was half dead with fatigue, broken down with the
agony of apprehension.
"The greatness of this calamity startled me into an awakened interest
in the outer life around me. My sympathy with my son in his distress
roused my reason to new action.
"'It must mean one of three things,' I told him: 'accident, suicide, or
flight with a lover.'
"'What accident is possible? She could not have fallen out of a window
or into the canal without our knowing all about it. Suicide is
impossible. Lover she had none.'
"'Are you sure of that?'
"'She was never out of my sight. We have had no visitors--except the
Englishman who came to hear her singing.'
"'Then the Englishman is the lover,' I said; and the thought flashed
upon me with the force of conviction, 'it is the Englishman who has
carried her off.'
"My unhappy son sprang to his feet in a paroxysm of despair.
"'It was I that brought him to her room. I was proud of his admiration
of her genius,' he cried; 'I was fooled by his patronage, his art, his
liberality, his specious tongue. But her lover--no, that is impossible.
There was no opportunity for love-making. I was always there. The
English signor was distant in his politeness; he respected her station
and his own. He could not be her lover; I say it is impossible.'
"'Anything is possible to the practised seducer. It is to that man you
must look for your daughter's fate.'
"'I will go to his house this instant,' said Filippo.
"'I will go with you.' And then recalling what I had heard at the
coffee-house, I said, 'There are two houses which we have to search--the
palace on the Canal Reggio, and that secret apartment which I have only
heard of from people who knew not the locality. But if there is such an
apartment, the scene of secret orgies, hidden infamies, it is for us to
find it.'
"We went together, father and son, to the Canal Reggio. It was as I
expected. Mr. Topsparkle was denied to us. He had left Venice early in
the afternoon, his porter told us, and had gone in his gondola to one of
the islands. The porter did not know to which island.
"We forced an entrance into the hall and adjoining rooms. The servants,
who were mostly English, gave way before us, and I believe took us for
members of the Venetian police upon an official visitation. They at
first were inclined to remonstrate, but finally allowed us to go freely
from room to room.
"We went through several reception-rooms, all lighted, all empty, and at
the end of the suite came to a small doorway curtained with tapestry.
"My son flung back the curtain, and looking across his shoulder into the
room I saw my neophyte Louis, sitting before a writing-desk, in the
light of a powerful lamp. He started up and faced us with a scared look.
"'Scoundrel!' I cried, ''twas you who sent your master in quest of his
prey. You were my lord's jackal. Where is my granddaughter? Take me to
her without a moment's delay, or I will drag you to the tribunal to
answer for the seduction of a Venetian citizen's daughter.'
"I tried to seize him by the throat as I would have done any other dog;
but he evaded me, and would have slipped from the room by an inner
door, when my son clutched him by the lapel of his coat, and held him
there.
"'What do I know of your daughter, my good Vincenti,' he said lightly,
'except that she sings like a nightingale, and is one of the handsomest
women I have seen in Venice? Such a one would count her lovers by the
score. Why fix upon Mr. Topsparkle?'
"'There is no one else, and you know it,' I said; 'twas you who sent the
seducer to our house. He never came there till you had marked the
victim.'
"I then gave him his alternative: to take us straight to his master's
secret lodgings, and surprise him there with his victim, or to go with
us to the Venetian police. He refused to do either, and told us that the
police would laugh at a charge founded upon such slight grounds.
"'The authorities of this city know too much about my master to assail
him on such an accusation as yours,' said Fétis. He had his staff of
lacqueys at his elbow. Violence would have been useless; so we were
obliged to abandon the idea of taking this scoundrel to the
head-quarters of the police. But my son stayed in the hall of the
palace while I went to the chief of the police and gave him an account
of my granddaughter's disappearance, and my suspicions as to the man who
had lured her away.
"I saw at once, by the air with which he heard my complaint, that Mr.
Topsparkle had secured the good graces of our timeserving officials, and
that I should get no help here. I left the office choking with rage, and
wandered about Venice all night, penetrating into the obscurest alleys,
watching in doorways for the entrance and exit of mysterious visitors,
waiting below lighted windows, listening to the sounds of music and
singing, surprising more than one nocturnal orgy and secret rendezvous,
but finding no trace of my son's runaway daughter. I went back to the
house on the Reggio Canal in the early morning, and found Filippo
sitting in the hall. There had been no attempt to drive him out with
violence. The servants had laughed at his folly in waiting for their
master.
"There is no need to recall every detail of a futile search. For three
days and nights my son and I hunted Venice and the neighbouring islands
for traces of the missing girl and her seducer, and the first evidence
we came upon was the information of a gondolier who, on the evening of
Margharita's flight, had seen Mr. Topsparkle's gondola embark three
passengers on a small sailing vessel standing out at sea about a mile
from the city. The birds were fled while we were searching for their
nest in some secret corner of Venice.
"I went back to my laboratory after hearing this, and took out my
granddaughter's horoscope, which I had not looked at since her
childhood; I remembered only that the stars had foreboded evil. There
were the signs of sudden death in a foreign land; early untimely death.
"I showed my son the result of my calculations, made within an hour of
his daughter's birth; and I undertook, old as I was, to follow the
fugitives, if it were possible for human intelligence to track them. I
urged him to remain in Venice, to be on the spot to receive his lost
child should she return to her home, and also to be on the alert for any
evidence of Mr. Topsparkle's guilt which time might bring forth. I had
travelled much, he but little. It was agony to me to leave my
laboratory, to give up those researches which had daily become more
precious to me; but I blamed myself as the indirect cause of my
granddaughter's ruin, since it was I who had admitted the traitor Fétis
within our doors.
"My son was at first bent on going in pursuit of his daughter, but at
last ceded to my arguments, and was content to intrust the task to me.
Before starting on my difficult enterprise I tried to discover something
more as to the manner of my granddaughter's flight. By close inquiries
among our neighbours I found that on the evening of her disappearance
two men had been seen waiting about in our street, and that these same
men had been seen a little later walking quickly towards the canal with
a woman supported between them, almost as if they had been carrying her.
Each held her by an arm, my informant observed, and her feet seemed
scarcely to touch the ground. But the night was dark, and the three
passed so quickly in the darkness that my neighbour was conscious only
of something indefinitely strange in the bearing of the three; yet on
reflecting upon it after, he had been horrified at the idea that he
might have seen a corpse carried past in this manner, and might have
unconsciously witnessed the end of an assassination.
"I was now assured that my granddaughter had been carried away in a
fainting and helpless condition, and this idea was speedily confirmed by
a discovery which I made in the family sitting-room, where, lying
underneath the harpsichord, I found a handkerchief that had been steeped
in a solution of an Indian drug, the properties of which I had explained
and demonstrated to Fétis. It was a preparation which when smoked or
inhaled produces almost immediate giddiness and loss of consciousness; a
condition not lasting long, but certainly long enough to allow of the
subject being carried quickly for two or three hundred yards. I
remembered how minutely Fétis had questioned me about this drug, and how
keenly interested he had been in my experiments with it. He had himself
smoked a pipe filled with the drug in question, and had calculated the
average period of unconsciousness by his own experience.
"I had now no doubt that Margharita had been surprised by Fétis alone at
her harpsichord, and had been carried from the house in a state of
semi-unconsciousness. A gondola was doubtless ready to receive her at
the end of the court, where a flight of steps leads down to the canal.
"I went again to the palace on the Canal Reggio, and was informed that
Fétis had left Venice on the previous evening, with all the English
servants. The house had a dismantled air, and I was told that it was
left in charge of the old steward, who had lived for nearly half a
century in the service of the Venetian nobleman from whom Mr. Topsparkle
had purchased the property. Topsparkle was not expected to return to
Venice until the following autumn. He had gone to Paris, and would go
thence to London, where he had a house in a fashionable quarter.
"I followed him to Paris; and there I found him established near the
Court end of the town, where my granddaughter lived openly with him and
passed as his wife; but as the society in which they lived was the most
audaciously debauched in Paris--a circle of rakes, demi-reps, and
infidels, a society which surpassed in open iniquity the worst phases of
Venetian dissipation--the legality of the tie that bound Mr. Topsparkle
and his companion was not likely to be questioned. He was inordinately
rich, and scattered his money lavishly.
"I made my way into my granddaughter's apartment with considerable
difficulty, threatened and all but assaulted by the bodyguard of
lacqueys. I reproached her with her cruelty and treachery towards her
father and myself, and asked her if she was legally wedded to the man
who had carried her off.
"She answered me only with her tears, and we were interrupted by
Topsparkle before I could question her further. He drew his sword and
would have attacked me, but Margharita threw herself between us and
piteously entreated me to leave the house. She declared that she was
happy, that she was fondly beloved, that nothing could induce her to
abandon her lover. She had learnt the language of that infamous circle
in which she had wed, and impudently confessed her dishonour.
"'What bond could be more sacred than that which binds us?' she asked;
'a love that can end only with death. The same passion inspires us both,
the same tastes, the same pleasures. We live but for music and love.'
She flung herself weeping upon his breast.
"'You see, sir,' he said scornfully, 'she makes no complaint of me; and
she does not wish to go back to her father's shop.'
"This was said with infinite contempt, and with an insolent glance at
the profligate luxury of the apartment, a kind of Armida Palace
calculated to deprave the taste and enervate the mind of its occupants.
"'I am answered, sir,' I replied; 'I shall wait till my granddaughter
has awakened from this glittering dream, and has discovered what it is
for a woman to become--what you have done her the honour to make her.'
"I left the house, sick at heart. That glimpse of the ruined girl amidst
her garish splendour had pained me more than it would have done to find
her forsaken and destitute, for then I could have carried her back to
her father a true penitent. I felt, however, that the hour of repentance
must come, and I determined to wait for it.
"I was able to pursue my studies in Paris. I had taken a quiet lodging
in one of the smaller streets of the Marais, and I passed a great deal
of my time at the hospital, where I devoted my days to the study of
anatomy, while my evenings were mostly spent in the laboratory of an old
man with whom I had studied toxicology forty years before. He had been
one of the experts in the Brinvilliers case, and perhaps knew more about
the secret poisoners of Paris than any living man. My life under such
circumstances was full of interest and occupation; but I never let a day
pass without paying a visit to the street where Mr. Topsparkle had his
apartment. This was also in the Marais, and not ten minutes' walk from
my own obscure lodging.
"I heard the sounds of music and gaiety from those lighted windows night
after night, saw visitors enter, saw Margharita pass to her carriage or
her sedan-chair, saw all the indications of a life devoted to pleasure
and dissipation. One night I followed the chair to the Opera House, and
took my seat in the pit, from which I saw my granddaughter in her box,
blazing with diamonds, and one of the loveliest women in the house. My
neighbours pointed her out to each other, and talked of her as the rich
Englishman's mistress.
"'Is she not his wife?' I asked. My neighbour shrugged his shoulders,
and answered as a true Parisian cynic:
"'Wife or mistress is all the same nowadays, except that in some cases
the mistress is the more virtuous. Every fine gentleman's wife is some
other fine gentleman's mistress; but I believe there is here and there a
Miss who is faithful to her protector.'
"This kind of life continued for a little more than four months, and
then one morning I found Mr. Topsparkle's splendour melted like a fairy
palace and the apartment in the Marais to let. He had gone to London
with all his retinue, including Fétis, whom I had met several times in
the street and who had tried to make his peace with me. I had, however,
treated all his advances with contempt, and on but one occasion did I
stoop to speak to him. This was to accuse him of having carried
Margharita away under the influence of the Indian drug, the knowledge of
which he had obtained in my laboratory.
"'Do you think drugs were needed?' he asked sneeringly. 'You have seen
the lady. If she is a snared bird, you will admit that she is uncommonly
fond of her cage.'
"I followed the seducer to London, and found myself a cheap lodging in
an alley near St. Martin's Lane, from which den I went forth daily and
nightly to keep watch upon my granddaughter's life.
"She reigned to all appearances as sole mistress in the house in Soho
Square, but she did not appear in public with Mr. Topsparkle as
audaciously as she had appeared in Paris. She was called by his name,
but he introduced her nowhere as his wife; and she now seemed to give up
all her time to the cultivation of her musical talent, under the tuition
of famous masters who attended daily at the house in Soho Square.
"I found, as time went on, that there were some grounds for this
seclusion, as she was ere long to become a mother.
"Mr. Topsparkle himself was quite as dissipated in London as he had been
in Paris, and spent most of his nights at the chocolate-houses, or in
society of an even worse character than was to be found in those
resorts. Margharita's life at this period must have been sadly lonely.
"Months elapsed, and I heard one day that she was the mother of a baby
girl. I would have given much to have seen mother and child, but dared
not trust myself to approach her while she was still impenitent, lest I
should say hard things to her. I so hated her seducer that I could not
enter his house without the hazard of a quarrel which might end in
bloodshed. I contented myself, therefore with keeping my stealthy watch
upon my poor child's life, and obtaining as much knowledge as I could
through the servants.
"From them I heard that their lady was unhappy, and devoted to her
infant: but only a few days after receiving this information I saw the
child carried off one evening by a buxom countrywoman in a hackney
coach.
"My chief informant among the servants, an underling whom I had bribed
on several occasions, and who was always serviceable and obliging, told
me that the woman was a wet-nurse who was carrying the child to her home
in Buckinghamshire, where the infant was to be reared by this rustic
foster-mother, as my lady was too delicate to nurse her.
"This I took to be the beginning of sorrow for my deluded granddaughter,
and I felt that the time was now at hand when I might lead her back to
her duty; but at this very time I was attacked by a fever which laid me
up for over a month, and when I was again able to get about a change had
come over Margharita's life.
"She had a secret admirer, a young and handsome man, who haunted her
footsteps on those rare occasions when she took the air, and who had
paid clandestine visits to the house. It was my informant's opinion that
although she had openly repulsed this person's advances, and had on one
occasion ordered her servants to turn him out of her house, where he
pretended to have followed her under a mistake, supposing her to be a
lady of his acquaintance, she was yet secretly inclined to favour him.
Her waiting-woman had surprised her in tears on several occasions.
"Mr. Topsparkle had been often absent of late. He had been at Paris and
at Newmarket, leaving his mistress to the companionship of her shock dog
and her old Italian music-master. She had fretted for the loss of her
baby, whom she was not allowed to see, as Mr. Topsparkle hated
squallers.
"Apprehending the perils of this present position I forced my way into
the house one evening, and found my unhappy granddaughter alone in the
midst of her splendour, and as desolate a woman as I had ever looked
upon. I urged her to take advantage of Topsparkle's absence, and to
leave his house at once and for ever. We would start together next
morning, and not stop till she was safe beneath her father's roof. I
promised her that there should be not one word of reproach from him or
from me. The interval of her sin and her splendour should be forgotten
as if it were an ill dream.
"'I cannot forget that I am a mother, and that I have a child whom I
love,' she said. 'Those facts cannot be wiped out of my life like a blot
of ink off a fair white page. No, I cannot go backward.'
"'And you still adore your seducer; his love can still reconcile you to
your infamy?' I asked.
"She hung her head and melted into tears, tears which I believe were the
marks of a deep-rooted anguish. She was a being not made for dishonour,
and she felt in this moment that she was drifting into deeper shame.
"'You have ceased to love your paramour,' I said sternly.
"'He has ceased to be kind to me,' she faltered.
"'Come,' I said, 'it is time for you to leave him. Your life in this
house is beset with peril.'
"It was in vain that I urged her. I was by turns stern and gentle. I
promised all that love could offer, I threatened all that my experience
could foresee of evil in her present course.
"'You are on the high-road to an abandoned life,' I said; 'between you
and the most notorious courtesan in London or Paris there is but the
narrowest boundary-line, and so long as you remain in this house you
are in hourly danger of passing it. If your own inconstant heart do not
betray you, 'tis ten to one your first betrayer will tire of you and pay
off old scores by passing you on to his friend.'
"She fell on her knees at my feet in a flood of tears, entreated me to
give her time to think of the matter, and if she could find a way of
taking her child with her, she would perhaps go with me.
"'Tell me where your child is to be found, and I will look to that part
of the business,' I said; and then I discovered that she did not even
know the name of the town or village to which her baby had been taken.
She knew only that the nurse lived in Buckinghamshire.
"I left her at last, deeply moved--left her, full of anxiety as to her
fate. On the threshold of the house I met Fétis, who had his usual air
of triumphant malignity masked under a silken courtesy. It was the first
time he and I had met in London.
"He asked me where I lodged, how long I had been in town, and whether I
was still pursuing my scientific investigations. I told him I had other
investigations on my hands, even more absorbing than those of the
laboratory; I had my granddaughter's evil fortunes to guard from further
decline.
"'Do you call it evil fortune to be mistress of such a house as this?'
he asked, looking round him at the hall in which we were standing.
"'I call it infamy to be the mistress of your master, most of all, his
slighted mistress,' I answered.
"'O, fie, sir! we all call the lady his wife. She is known here only as
Mrs. Topsparkle.'
"'An empty honour, sir, which the more strongly indicates her dishonour.
Did you ever know Mr. Topsparkle introduce his lady to any decent woman,
to any persons of standing or repute? No, his only generosity is to
surround her with a sybarite luxury, to leave her in a gilded
desolation. You all know she is _not_ your master's wife, and that no
wife would consent to have her child carried off from her by a stranger
to a place of which she knows not the name.'
"'My master is a man accustomed to rule,' answered Fétis. 'We none of
us ever presume to thwart him.'
"I passed out of the house without another word, and waited day after
day for some sign from Margharita, to whom I had given the address of my
lodging; but none came. My illness had weakened me considerably, and I
was no longer able to loiter about within sight of Mr. Topsparkle's door
for an hour at a time; yet I dragged myself there every evening, and
generally contrived to got a word with my ally in the servants' hall.
"One evening at dusk I saw a young man of remarkably handsome appearance
leave Mr. Topsparkle's house, as I thought with a stealthy air, hurrying
away with anxious glances to right and left, and with the collar of his
cloak pulled up about his ears.
"Two days afterwards I saw in the _Flying Post_ that there had been a
passage of incivilities between the rich Mr. Topsparkle and young Mr.
Churchill, a brother of the famous Mrs. Arabella Churchill, the
favourite of the late King, a dispute which had nearly resulted in a
duel. I went at once to Soho Square, but was refused admittance. Mrs.
Topsparkle was dangerously ill, and her husband was in constant
attendance upon her.
"I asked to see Fétis, and, after waiting nearly an hour in the hall, he
came to me.
"In reply to my anxious questions he affected to make light of my
granddaughter's illness. 'A fit of the spleen,' he said, 'which Mr.
Topsparkle's tenderness has exaggerated into a serious malady. One of
the Court physicians is now with her.'
"I charged him with deceiving me. 'There has been a quarrel between your
master and that unhappy girl,' I said, 'and she is reduced to a state of
misery in which you will not allow me to see her.'
"'Quarrel! What should they quarrel about?' he asked, with his
unblushing air.
"The physician came down-stairs attended by a couple of lacqueys at this
moment, and I went to him at once and questioned him about his patient.
He looked astonished at my effrontery, and turned to Fétis for an
explanation.
"'I am a near relative of the patient, sir,' I said, 'and this old
heart will break if any ill befalls her.'
"'My good man, the lady is not seriously indisposed. She is but
suffering from a languor which is natural to a woman of quality after
the ordeal of maternity; and she is somewhat vapourish from the
seclusion of convalescence. If she follows my prescriptions implicitly
she will soon be restored to good spirits and full beauty.'
"'Then she is not in danger?' I asked.
"'I can perceive none at present. I have attended her Grace of Cleveland
for the same malady; and when the Duchess of Portsmouth returned to
France she insisted on carrying my prescriptions with her.'
"I had no confidence in an old twaddler of this order, whose gold-headed
cane and embroidered velvet suit were apparently his strongest
qualifications. I looked from him to Fétis, who, in spite of his silken
smoothness, had, I thought, a more anxious air than usual. He was very
pale, and his hollow eyes indicated a night of watching.
"'I will not leave this house until I have seen my granddaughter,' I
said, resuming my seat in the hall; whereupon Fétis whispered to the
physician, who presently approached me and informed me with a solemn air
that although Mrs. Topsparkle's bodily health was in no danger, her
spirits were much affected, and that the agitation of an interview with
a relative might throw her into a fever.
"Alas, I knew that my presence could not bring calmness to that wounded
spirit. Unless she had been well enough to get up and follow me out of
that accursed house a meeting between us could be of no avail. I had the
physician's word that she was in no danger; and though I put him down as
a pompous pretender I yet gave him credit for enough skill and enough
honesty to answer such a plain question as I had asked him. So I left
the house soon after the doctor, Fétis promising that if his lady were
in calmer spirits next day I should be allowed to see her.
"When I went to the house at noon next day she was a corpse. She had
gone off suddenly in a fit of hysterics soon after midnight, Mr.
Topsparkle and her waiting-woman being present. Mr. Topsparkle was shut
up in his room in an agony of grief, and would see no one.
"Had there been any medical man called in at the time of her death? I
asked. No, there had been no one. It was too sudden; but the physician
had been there this morning, and had endeavoured to explain the cause of
the death, which had taken him by surprise.
"I asked to see the dead; but this privilege was refused to me. I
inquired for Fétis, and was told he had gone out on business, and was
not expected back for some hours. The key of the room in which
Margharita was lying was in his possession. There were lights burning in
the room, but there was no one watching there. There had been no
religious ministrations. My granddaughter had perished as the companion
of an infidel, surrounded by infidels.
"I sat in the hall for some hours, despite the sneers and incivilities
of the servants, waiting for the return of Fétis; but he did not
reappear until I was worn out by agitation and fasting and the misery of
my position as the mark of insolence from overfed lackeys. I left the
house broken-hearted, and returned there next morning only in time to
see the coffin carried to the pompous hearse with its tall plumes and
velvet trappings and six Flanders horses. I followed on foot to a
graveyard in the neighbourhood, where my granddaughter was buried in a
soil crowded with the dead. Topsparkle was not present. He was too ill
to attend, I was told; and there were hootings and hissings from the
crowd as the funeral procession, with Fétis at its head, went back to
Soho Square.
"I followed him to the threshold of his master's house.
"'Do you know why the rabble hooted you?' I asked him, as we stood side
by side within the doors, which the porter shut quickly to keep out the
crowd.
"'Only because they are rabble, and hate their betters,' he answered.
"'They hooted you because a good many people in this neighbourhood
suspect that which I know for a certainty. They suspect you and your
master of having murdered that unhappy girl.'
"He called me an idiot and a liar; but I saw how his face, which had
been white to the lips as he passed through the crowd, now changed to a
still more ghastly hue.
"'O, you forget that it was I who armed your arsenal of murder. It was
in my laboratory you learnt all the arts of the old Italian
toxicologists--the poison, and the antidote, and the drug that
neutralises the antidote. You were laborious and persevering; you wanted
to master the whole science of secret murder. You had no definite views
of mischief then, only the thirst for evil, as Satan has, revelling in
sin for its own sake, courting iniquity; but you soon found a use for
your wicked power. First you snared your victim, and then you killed
her--you, the passionless hireling of a profligate master, the venal
slave and tool.'
"He made a sign to his underlings--the stalwart porter and three tall
footmen--and they came round me and thrust me out of the house, flung me
on to the pavement, helpless and exhausted. There was no constable
within call; the crowd had dispersed. I had nothing to do but crawl back
to my lodging, an impotent worm.
"Next day I was visited by a constable, who told me that I had narrowly
escaped being sent to gaol for an assault upon the confidential servant
of a gentleman of high position. He warned me of the danger of staying
any longer in the town, where I had already made myself an object of
suspicion as a foreign spy and a dangerous person.
"I knew something about the interior of London gaols, and had heard so
many melancholy stories of the tyranny exercised even upon poor debtors,
and how much more upon common felons, that I shuddered at the idea of
being clapped into prison and kept there indefinitely by the influence
of Mr. Topsparkle. I knew that there was no cell in our dungeons of
Venice worse than some of the dens where humanity was lodged in the
Fleet, and I knew what the power of wealth can do even in a country
which boasts of freedom and equal rights between man and man; so I did
not make light of the constable's counsel, but at all hazard to myself I
obtained an interview with the Italian consul, who was civil, but could
give me no help, and who smiled at suspicions for which I could allege
no reasonable ground. The fact that Fétis had made the art of secret
poison his especial study, to this gentleman's mind implied nothing
beyond a morbid taste.
"'You are yourself a toxicologist, sir,' he said, yet I take it you have
never poisoned anybody. Pray, what motive could Mr. Topsparkle or his
servant have had for making away with a lady who, as she was not a wife,
could have been easily provided for?'
"'Revenge. Mr. Topsparkle may have believed that she had been false to
him. It is known that he was jealous of her.'
"'And you would suspect a gentleman in Mr. Topsparkle's position, a
patron of art, a highly-accomplished person, and a man of society; you
would credit such a man with the murderous violence of an Othello.'
"I tried to convince this gentleman that my granddaughter had been
poisoned, and that it was his duty to help me to bring the crime to
light. I entreated him to use his influence with the magistrate and to
get an order for the exhumation of the body; but he thought me, or
pretended to think me, a lunatic, and he warned me that I had better
leave England without delay, as I had no obvious business or means of
subsistence in this country, where there was a strong prejudice against
our countrymen, who were usually taken for Jesuits and spies, a
prejudice which had been heightened by the popular dislike of the Queen
and her confessor.
"In spite of this advice, I remained in London some time longer, in the
hope of obtaining some proof against the wretch I suspected, although
the thought of my laboratory drew me to Venice. I questioned my friend
in Mr. Topsparkle's household, and bribed him to get what information he
could from his fellow-servants; but all I could hear from this source
was that Mrs. Topsparkle had been seized with a sudden indisposition
late one evening, that an apothecary, whom her waiting-woman called in
hurriedly from the neighbourhood, had been able to do nothing to relieve
her sufferings, and had been dismissed with contumely by Mr. Topsparkle,
who was angry with his lady's woman for having sent for such a person.
The sufferer took to her bed, never left it but for her coffin, and Mr.
Topsparkle remained in close attendance upon her until the hour of her
death.
"I found the apothecary in a shabby street near St. Giles's, and
discovered that he had a shrewd suspicion of poison, but was very
fearful of committing himself, especially in opposition to the Court
physician, who had given a certificate of death. And after many useless
efforts I went back to Venice, where I found my son a broken man. He
survived his daughter little more than a year.
"This is a truthful account of my granddaughter's elopement and death,
which I hope may some day assist in bringing her murderers to shame, if
it do not lead to their actual punishment. That she was poisoned by
Fétis, with the knowledge and consent of his master, I have never
doubted; but such a crime is difficult of proof where the criminal is at
once bold and crafty."
* * * * *
Lavendale laid down the manuscript with the conviction that Vincenti's
suspicions were but too well founded. There was that in Topsparkle
himself which had ever inspired him with an instinctive aversion, while
in Fétis he recognised a still subtler scoundrel. He had heard enough of
Mr. Topsparkle's early history to know that he had been notorious for
his vices even among the openly vicious, and that such a man should
progress from vices to crimes seemed within the limits of probability.
And Judith, the woman Lavendale adored, was in the power of this man,
and by her insolent defiance, her attitude of open scorn, might at any
hour of her life provoke that evil nature beyond endurance. Hitherto she
had made the tyrant her slave; but his jealousy had been aroused, the
tiger had shown his claws, and who should say when jealousy might
culminate in murder?
"Poor giddy soul, she treats him lightly enough, and has hitherto been
mistress of the situation," thought Lavendale; "but she does not know
upon what a precipice she is treading. She does not know the man or his
true history. And in that house in Soho, where she queens it so gaily,
his victim died. There is the atmosphere of crime in the midst of all
that splendour. Would to God I could guard her from harm! I might have
saved her--might have carried her off to love and freedom--if I had had
a life to give her. But to lure her away on false pretences, to unite
her with a vanishing existence, to leave her desolate and dishonoured in
a foreign land! That were indeed cruel. And I know that the vision could
not deceive. I have accepted my doom."
He wrote to Durnford again, urging him to closer watchfulness.
"You have often told me that you love me, Herrick," he wrote; "you have
said that the sympathy between us, engendered of a curious likeness in
tastes and disposition, is almost as strong as that mysterious link
which unites twin brothers. Think of me now as your brother, and give me
all a brother's devotion. Be the guardian angel of her I dare not
guard."
END OF VOL. II.
End of Project Gutenberg's Mohawks, Volume 2 of 3, by Mary Elizabeth Braddon