THE LOTS VANISH WITHIN THE URN.
Varney's self-commune restored to him his constitutional audacity. He
returned to Laughton towards the evening, and held a long conference with
Greville. Fortunately for him, perhaps, and happily for all, Helen had
lost all more dangerous symptoms; and the physician, who was in the
house, saw in her state nothing not easily to be accounted for by natural
causes. Percival had arrived, had seen Helen,--no wonder she was better!
Both from him and from Helen, Madame Dalibard's fearful condition was for
the present concealed. Ardworth's story, and the fact of Beck's identity
with Vincent Braddell, were also reserved for a later occasion. The tale
which Beck had poured into the ear of Greville (when, recognizing the St.
John livery, the captain stopped his chaise to inquire if Percival were
at the Hall, and when thrilled by the hideous import of his broken reply,
that gentleman had caused him to enter the vehicle to explain himself
further), Varney, with his wonted art and address, contrived to strip of
all probable semblance. Evidently the poor lad had been already
delirious; his story must be deemed the nightmare of his disordered
reason. Varney insisted upon surgical examination as to the cause of his
death. The membranes of the brain were found surcharged with blood, as
in cases of great mental excitement; the slight puncture in the wrist,
ascribed to the prick of a rusty nail, provoked no suspicion. If some
doubts remained still in Greville's acute mind, he was not eager to
express, still less to act upon them. Helen was declared to be out of
danger; Percival was safe,--why affix by minute inquiry into the alleged
guilt of Madame Dalibard (already so awfully affected by the death of her
son and by the loss of her reason) so foul a stain on the honoured family
of St. John? But Greville was naturally anxious to free the house as
soon as possible both of Varney and that ominous Lucretia, whose sojourn
under its roof seemed accursed. He therefore readily assented when
Varney proposed, as his obvious and personal duty, to take charge of his
mother-in-law, and remove her to London for immediate advice.
At the dead of the black-clouded night, no moon and no stars, the son of
Olivier Dalibard bore away the form of the once-formidable Lucretia,--the
form, for the mind was gone; that teeming, restless, and fertile
intellect, which had carried along the projects with the preterhuman
energies of the fiend, was hurled into night and chaos. Manacled and
bound, for at times her paroxysms were terrible, and all partook of the
destructive and murderous character which her faculties, when present,
had betrayed, she was placed in the vehicle by the shrinking side of her
accomplice.
Long before he arrived in London, Varney had got rid of his fearful
companion. His chaise had stopped at the iron gates of a large building
somewhat out of the main road, and the doors of the madhouse closed on
Lucretia Dalibard.
Varney then hastened to Dover, with intention of flight into France; he
was just about to step into the vessel, when he was tapped rudely on the
shoulder, and a determined voice said, "Mr. Gabriel Varney, you are my
prisoner!"
"For what? Some paltry debt?" said Varney, haughtily.
"For forgery on the Bank of England!"
Varney's hand plunged into his vest. The officer seized it in time, and
wrested the blade from his grasp. Once arrested for an offence it was
impossible to disprove, although the very smallest of which his
conscience might charge him, Varney sank into the blackest despair.
Though he had often boasted, not only to others, but to his own vain
breast, of the easy courage with which, when life ceased to yield
enjoyment, he could dismiss it by the act of his own will; though he had
possessed himself of Lucretia's murderous ring, and death, if fearful,
was therefore at his command,--self-destruction was the last thought that
occurred to him; that morbid excitability of fancy which, whether in his
art or in his deeds, had led him to strange delight in horror, now served
but to haunt him with the images of death in those ghastliest shapes
familiar to them who look only into the bottom of the charnel, and see
but the rat and the worm and the loathsome agencies of corruption. It
was not the despair of conscience that seized him, it was the abject
clinging to life; not the remorse of the soul,--that still slept within
him, too noble an agency for one so debased,--but the gross physical
terror. As the fear of the tiger, once aroused, is more paralyzing than
that of the deer, proportioned to the savageness of a disposition to
which fear is a novelty, so the very boldness of Varney, coming only from
the perfection of the nervous organization, and unsupported by one moral
sentiment, once struck down, was corrupted into the vilest cowardice.
With his audacity, his shrewdness forsook him. Advised by his lawyer to
plead guilty, he obeyed, and the sentence of transportation for life gave
him at first a feeling of reprieve; but when his imagination began to
picture, in the darkness of his cell, all the true tortures of that
penalty,--not so much, perhaps, to the uneducated peasant-felon, inured
to toil, and familiarized with coarse companionship, as to one pampered
like himself by all soft and half-womanly indulgences,--the shaven hair,
the convict's dress, the rigorous privation, the drudging toil, the
exile, seemed as grim as the grave. In the dotage of faculties smitten
into drivelling, he wrote to the Home Office, offering to disclose
secrets connected with crimes that had hitherto escaped or baffled
justice, on condition that his sentence might be repealed, or mitigated
into the gentler forms of ordinary transportation. No answer was
returned to him, but his letter provoked research. Circumstances
connected with his uncle's death, and with various other dark passages in
his life, sealed against him all hope of a more merciful sentence; and
when some acquaintances, whom his art had made for him, and who, while
grieving for his crime, saw in it some excuses (ignorant of his feller
deeds), sought to intercede in his behalf, the reply of the Home Office
was obvious: "He is a fortunate man to have been tried and condemned for
his least offence." Not one indulgence that could distinguish him from
the most execrable ruffian condemned to the same sentence was conceded.
The idea of the gibbet lost all its horror. Here was a gibbet for every
hour. No hope,--no escape. Already that Future Doom which comprehends
the "Forever" opened upon him black and fathomless. The hour-glass was
broken up, the hand of the timepiece was arrested. The Beyond stretched
before him without limit, without goal,--on into Annihilation or into
Hell.
EPILOGUE TO PART THE SECOND.
Stand, O Man! upon the hill-top in the stillness of the evening hour, and
gaze, not with joyous, but with contented eyes, upon the beautiful world
around thee. See where the mists, soft and dim, rise over the green
meadows, through which the rivulet steals its way. See where, broadest
and stillest, the wave expands to the full smile of the setting sun, and
the willow that trembles on the breeze, and the oak that stands firm in
the storm, are reflected back, peaceful both, from the clear glass of the
tides. See where, begirt by the gold of the harvests, and backed by the
pomp of a thousand groves, the roofs of the town bask, noiseless, in the
calm glow of the sky. Not a sound from those abodes floats in discord to
thine ear; only from the church-tower, soaring high above the rest,
perhaps faintly heard through the stillness, swells the note of the holy
bell. Along the mead low skims the swallow,--on the wave the silver
circlet, breaking into spray, shows the sport of the fish. See the
Earth, how serene, though all eloquent of activity and life! See the
Heavens, how benign, though dark clouds, by yon mountain, blend the
purple with the gold! Gaze contented, for Good is around thee,--not
joyous, for Evil is the shadow of Good! Let thy soul pierce through the
veil of the senses, and thy sight plunge deeper than the surface which
gives delight to thine eye. Below the glass of that river, the pike
darts on his prey; the circle in the wave, the soft plash amongst the
reeds, are but signs of Destroyer and Victim. In the ivy round the oak
by the margin, the owl hungers for the night, which shall give its beak
and its talons living food for its young; and the spray of the willow
trembles with the wing of the redbreast, whose bright eye sees the worm
on the sod. Canst thou count too, O Man! all the cares, all the sins,
that those noiseless rooftops conceal? With every curl of that smoke to
the sky, a human thought soars as dark, a human hope melts as briefly.
And the bell from the church-tower, that to thy ear gives but music,
perhaps knolls for the dead. The swallow but chases the moth, and the
cloud, that deepens the glory of the heaven and the sweet shadows on the
earth, nurses but the thunder that shall rend the grove, and the storm
that shall devastate the harvests. Not with fear, not with doubt,
recognize, O Mortal, the presence of Evil in the world. [Not, indeed,
that the evil here narrated is the ordinary evil of the world,--the
lesson it inculcates would be lost if so construed,--but that the mystery
of evil, whatever its degree, only increases the necessity of faith in
the vindication of the contrivance which requires infinity for its range,
and eternity for its consummation. It is in the existence of evil that
man finds his duties, and his soul its progress.] Hush thy heart in the
humbleness of awe, that its mirror may reflect as serenely the shadow as
the light. Vainly, for its moral, dost thou gaze on the landscape, if
thy soul puts no check on the dull delight of the senses. Two wings only
raise thee to the summit of Truth, where the Cherub shall comfort the
sorrow, where the Seraph shall enlighten the joy. Dark as ebon spreads
the one wing, white as snow gleams the other,--mournful as thy reason
when it descends into the deep; exulting as thy faith when it springs to
the day-star.
Beck sleeps in the churchyard of Laughton. He had lived to frustrate the
monstrous design intended to benefit himself, and to become the
instrument, while the victim, of the dread Eumenides. That done, his
life passed with the crimes that had gathered around, out of the sight of
mortals. Helen slowly regained her health in the atmosphere of love and
happiness; and Lady Mary soon learned to forget the fault of the father
in the virtues of the child. Married to Percival, Helen fulfilled the
destinies of woman's genius, in calling forth into action man's earnest
duties. She breathed into Percival's warm, beneficent heart her own more
steadfast and divine intelligence. Like him she grew ambitious, by her
he became distinguished. While I write, fair children play under the
cedars of Laughton. And the husband tells the daughters to resemble
their mother; and the wife's highest praise to the boys is: "You have
spoken truth, or done good, like your father."
John Ardworth has not paused in his career, nor belied the promise of his
youth. Though the elder Ardworth, partly by his own exertions, partly by
his second marriage with the daughter of the French merchant (through
whose agency he had corresponded with Fielden), had realized a moderate
fortune, it but sufficed for his own wants and for the children of his
later nuptials, upon whom the bulk of it was settled. Hence, happily
perhaps for himself and others, the easy circumstances of his father
allowed to John Ardworth no exemption from labour. His success in the
single episode from active life to literature did not intoxicate or
mislead him. He knew that his real element was not in the field of
letters, but in the world of men. Not undervaluing the noble destinies
of the author, he felt that those destinies, if realized to the utmost,
demanded powers other than his own, and that man is only true to his
genius when the genius is at home in his career. He would not renounce
for a brief celebrity distant and solid fame. He continued for a few
years in patience and privation and confident self-reliance to drudge on,
till the occupation for the intellect fed by restraint, and the learning
accumulated by study, came and found the whole man developed and
prepared. Then he rose rapidly from step to step; then, still retaining
his high enthusiasm, he enlarged his sphere of action from the cold
practice of law into those vast social improvements which law, rightly
regarded, should lead and vivify and create. Then, and long before the
twenty years he had imposed on his probation had expired, he gazed again
upon the senate and the abbey, and saw the doors of the one open to his
resolute tread, and anticipated the glorious sepulchre which heart and
brain should win him in the other. John Ardworth has never married.
When Percival rebukes him for his celibacy, his lip quivers slightly, and
he applies himself with more dogged earnestness to his studies or his
career. But he never complains that his lot is lonely or his affections
void. For him who aspires, and for him who loves, life may lead through
the thorns, but it never stops in the desert.
On the minor personages involved in this history, there is little need to
dwell. Mr. Fielden, thanks to St. John, has obtained a much better
living in the rectory of Laughton, but has found new sources of pleasant
trouble for himself in seeking to drill into the mind of Percival's
eldest son the elements of Euclid, and the principles of Latin syntax.
We may feel satisfied that the Miverses will go on much the same while
trade enriches without refining, and while, nevertheless, right feelings
in the common paths of duty may unite charitable emotions with graceless
language.
We may rest assured that the poor widow who had reared the lost son of
Lucretia received from the bounty of Percival all that could comfort her
for his death.
We have no need to track the dull crimes of Martha, or the quick, cunning
vices of Grabman, to their inevitable goals, in the hospital or the
prison, the dunghill or the gibbet.
Of the elder Ardworth our parting notice may be less brief. We first saw
him in sanguine and generous youth, with higher principles and clearer
insight into honour than William Mainwaring. We have seen him next a
spendthrift and a fugitive, his principles debased and his honour dimmed.
He presents to us no uncommon example of the corruption engendered by
that vulgar self-indulgence which mortgages the morrow for the pleasures
of to-day. No Deity presides where Prudence is absent. Man, a world in
himself, requires for the development of his faculties patience, and for
the balance of his actions, order. Even where he had deemed himself most
oppressively made the martyr,--namely, in the profession of mere
political opinions,--Walter Ardworth had but followed out into theory the
restless, uncalculating impatience which had brought adversity on his
manhood, and, despite his constitutional cheerfulness, shadowed his age
with remorse. The death of the child committed to his charge long
(perhaps to the last) embittered his pride in the son whom, without merit
of his own, Providence had spared to a brighter fate. But for the faults
which had banished him his country, and the habits which had seared his
sense of duty, could that child have been so abandoned, and have so
perished?
It remains only to cast our glance over the punishments which befell the
sensual villany of Varney, the intellectual corruption of his fell
stepmother.
These two persons had made a very trade of those crimes to which man's
law awards death. They had said in their hearts that they would dare the
crime, but elude the penalty. By wonderful subtlety, craft, and
dexterity, which reduced guilt to a science, Providence seemed, as in
disdain of the vulgar instruments of common retribution, to concede to
them that which they had schemed for,--escape from the rope and gibbet.
Varney, saved from detection of his darker and more inexpiable crimes,
punished only for the least one, retained what had seemed to him the
master boon,--life. Safer still from the law, no mortal eye had plumbed
the profound night of Lucretia's awful guilt. Murderess of husband and
son, the blinded law bade her go unscathed, unsuspected. Direct, as from
heaven, without a cloud, fell the thunderbolt. Is the life they have
saved worth the prizing? Doth the chalice, unspilt on the ground, not
return to the hand? Is the sudden pang of the hangman more fearful than
the doom which they breathe and bear? Look, and judge.
Behold that dark ship on the waters! Its burdens are not of Ormus and
Tyre. No goodly merchandise doth it waft over the wave, no blessing
cleaves to its sails; freighted with terror and with guilt, with remorse
and despair, or, more ghastly than either, the sullen apathy of souls
hardened into stone, it carries the dregs and offal of the old world to
populate the new. On a bench in that ship sit side by side two men,
companions assigned to each other. Pale, abject, cowering, all the
bravery rent from his garb, all the gay insolence vanished from his
brow,--can that hollow-eyed, haggard wretch be the same man whose senses
opened on every joy, whose nerves mocked at every peril? But beside him,
with a grin of vile glee on his features, all muscle and brawn in the
form, all malice, at once spiteful and dull, in the heavy eye, sits his
fit comrade, the Gravestealer! At the first glance each had recognized
each, and the prophecy and the vision rushed back upon the daintier
convict. If he seek to escape from him, the Gravestealer claims him as a
prey; he threatens him with his eye as a slave; he kicks him with his
hoof as they sit, and laughs at the writhings of the pain. Carry on your
gaze from the ship, hear the cry from the masthead, see the land arise
from the waste,--a land without hope. At first, despite the rigour of
the Home Office, the education and intelligence of Varney have their
price,--the sole crime for which he is convicted is not of the darkest.
He escapes from that hideous comrade; he can teach as a schoolmaster,--
let his brain work, not his hands. But the most irredeemable of convicts
are ever those of nurture and birth and culture better than the ruffian
rest. You may enlighten the clod, but the meteor still must feed on the
marsh; and the pride and the vanity work where the crime itself seems to
lose its occasion. Ever avid, ever grasping, he falls, step by step, in
the foul sink, and the colony sees in Gabriel Varney its most pestilent
rogue. Arch-convict amidst convicts, doubly lost amongst the damned,
they banish him to the sternest of the penal settlements; they send him
forth with the vilest to break stones upon the roads. Shrivelled and
bowed and old prematurely, see that sharp face peering forth amongst that
gang, scarcely human, see him cringe to the lash of the scornful
overseer, see the pairs chained together, night and day! Ho, ho! his
comrade hath found him again,--the Artist and the Gravestealer leashed
together! Conceive that fancy so nurtured by habit, those tastes, so
womanized by indulgence,--the one suggesting the very horrors that are
not; the other revolting at all toil as a torture.
But intellect, not all gone, though hourly dying heavily down to the
level of the brute, yet schemes for delivery and escape. Let the plot
ripen, and the heart bound; break his chain, set him free, send him forth
to the wilderness. Hark, the whoop of the wild men! See those things
that ape our species dance and gibber round the famishing, hunted wretch.
Hark, how he shrieks at the torture! How they tear and they pinch and
they burn and they rend him! They, too, spare his life,--it is charmed.
A Caliban amidst Calibans, they heap him with their burdens, and feed him
on their offal. Let him live; he loved life for himself; he has cheated
the gibbet,--LET HIM LIVE! Let him watch, let him once more escape; all
naked and mangled, let him wander back to the huts of his gang. Lo,
where he kneels, the foul tears streaming down, and cries aloud: "I have
broken all your laws, I will tell you all my crimes; I ask but one
sentence,--hang me up; let me die!" And from the gang groan many voices:
"Hang us up; let us die!" The overseer turns on his heel, and Gabriel
Varney again is chained to the laughing Gravestealer.
You enter those gates so jealously guarded, you pass, with a quick beat
of the heart, by those groups on the lawn, though they are harmless; you
follow your guide through those passages; where the open doors will
permit, you see the emperor brandish his sceptre of straw, hear the
speculator counting his millions, sigh where the maiden sits smiling the
return of her shipwrecked lover, or gravely shake the head and hurry on
where the fanatic raves his Apocalypse, and reigns in judgment on the
world; you pass by strong gates into corridors gloomier and more remote.
Nearer and nearer you hear the yell and the oath and blaspheming curse;
you are in the heart of the madhouse, where they chain those at once
cureless and dangerous,--who have but sense enough left them to smite and
to throttle and to murder. Your guide opens that door, massive as a
wall; you see (as we, who narrate, have seen her) Lucretia Dalibard,--a
grisly, squalid, ferocious mockery of a human being, more appalling and
more fallen than Dante ever fabled in his spectres, than Swift ever
scoffed in his Yahoos! Only, where all other feature seems to have lost
its stamp of humanity, still burns with unquenchable fever the red,
devouring eye. That eye never seems to sleep, or in sleep, the lid never
closes over it. As you shrink from its light, it seems to you as if the
mind, that had lost coherence and harmony, still retained latent and
incommunicable consciousness as its curse. For days, for weeks, that
awful maniac will preserve obstinate, unbroken silence; but as the eye
never closes, so the hands never rest,--they open and grasp, as if at
some palpable object on which they close, vicelike, as a bird's talons on
its prey; sometimes they wander over that brow, where the furrows seem
torn as the thunder scars, as if to wipe from it a stain, or charm from
it a pang; sometimes they gather up the hem of that sordid robe, and
seem, for hours together, striving to rub from it a soil. Then, out from
prolonged silence, without cause or warning, will ring, peal after peal
(till the frame, exhausted with the effort sinks senseless into stupor),
the frightful laugh. But speech, intelligible and coherent, those lips
rarely yield. There are times, indeed, when the attendants are persuaded
that her mind in part returns to her; and those times experience has
taught them to watch with peculiar caution. The crisis evinces itself by
a change in the manner,--by a quick apprehension of all that is said; by
a straining, anxious look at the dismal walls; by a soft, fawning
docility; by murmured complaints of the chains that fetter; and (though,
as we have said, but very rarely) by prayers, that seem rational, for
greater ease and freedom.
In the earlier time of her dread captivity, perhaps when it was believed
at the asylum that she was a patient of condition, with friends who cared
for her state, and would liberally reward her cure, they in those moments
relaxed her confinement, and sought the gentler remedies their art
employs; but then invariably, and, it was said, with a cunning that
surpassed all the proverbial astuteness of the mad, she turned this
indulgence to the most deadly uses,--she crept to the pallet of some
adjacent sufferer weaker than herself, and the shrieks that brought the
attendants into the cell scarcely saved the intended victim from her
hands. It seemed, in those imperfectly lucid intervals, as if the reason
only returned to guide her to destroy,--only to animate the broken
mechanism into the beast of prey.
Years have now passed since her entrance within those walls. He who
placed her there never had returned. He had given a false name,--no clew
to him was obtained; the gold he had left was but the quarter's pay.
When Varney had been first apprehended, Percival requested the younger
Ardworth to seek the forger in prison, and to question him as to Madame
Dalibard; but Varney was then so apprehensive that, even if still insane,
her very ravings might betray his share in her crimes, or still more, if
she recovered, that the remembrance of her son's murder would awaken the
repentance and the confession of crushed despair, that the wretch had
judged it wiser to say that his accomplice was no more,--that her
insanity had already terminated in death. The place of her confinement
thus continued a secret locked in his own breast. Egotist to the last,
she was henceforth dead to him,--why not to the world? Thus the partner
of her crimes had cut off her sole resource, in the compassion of her
unconscious kindred; thus the gates of the living world were shut to her
evermore. Still, in a kind of compassion, or as an object of
experiment,--as a subject to be dealt with unscrupulously in that living
dissection-hall,--her grim jailers did not grudge her an asylum. But,
year after year, the attendance was more slovenly, the treatment more
harsh; and strange to say, while the features were scarcely recognizable,
while the form underwent all the change which the shape suffers when mind
deserts it, that prodigious vitality which belonged to the temperament
still survived. No signs of decay are yet visible. Death, as if
spurning the carcass, stands inexorably afar off. Baffler of man's law,
thou, too, hast escaped with life! Not for thee is the sentence, "Blood
for blood!" Thou livest, thou mayst pass the extremest boundaries of age.
Live on, to wipe the blood from thy robe,--LIVE ON!
Not for the coarse object of creating an idle terror, not for the shock
upon the nerves and the thrill of the grosser interest which the
narrative of crime creates, has this book been compiled from the facts
and materials afforded to the author. When the great German poet
describes, in not the least noble of his lyrics, the sudden apparition of
some "Monster Fate" in the circles of careless Joy, he assigns to him who
teaches the world, through parable or song, the right to invoke the
spectre. It is well to be awakened at times from the easy commonplace
that surrounds our habitual life; to cast broad and steady and patient
light on the darker secrets of the heart,--on the vaults and caverns of
the social state over which we build the market-place and the palace. We
recover from the dread and the awe and the half-incredulous wonder, to
set closer watch upon our inner and hidden selves. In him who cultivates
only the reason, and suffers the heart and the spirit to lie waste and
dead, who schemes and constructs, and revolves round the axle of self,
unwarmed by the affections, unpoised by the attraction of right, lies the
germ Fate might ripen into the guilt of Olivier Dalibard. Let him who
but lives through the senses, spreads the wings of the fancy in the gaudy
glare of enjoyment corrupted, avid to seize, and impatient to toil, whose
faculties are curbed but to the range of physical perception, whose very
courage is but the strength of the nerves, who develops but the animal as
he stifles the man,--let him gaze on the villany of Varney, and startle
to see some magnified shadow of himself thrown dimly on the glass! Let
those who, with powers to command and passions to wing the powers, would
sweep without scruple from the aim to the end, who, trampling beneath
their footprint of iron the humanities that bloom up in their path, would
march to success with the proud stride of the destroyer, hear, in the
laugh of yon maniac murderess, the glee of the fiend they have wooed to
their own souls! Guard well, O Heir of Eternity, the portal of sin,--the
thought! From the thought to the deed, the subtler thy brain and the
bolder thy courage, the briefer and straighter is the way. Read these
pages in disdain of self-commune,--they shall revolt thee, not instruct;
read them, looking steadfastly within,--and how humble soever the art of
the narrator, the facts he narrates, like all history, shall teach by
example. Every human act, good or ill, is an angel to guide or to warn;
and the deeds of the worst have messages from Heaven to the listening
hearts of the best. Amidst the glens in the Apennine, in the lone wastes
of Calabria, the sign of the cross marks the spot where a deed of
violence has been done; on all that pass by the road, the symbol has
varying effect: sometimes it startles the conscience, sometimes it
invokes the devotion; the robber drops the blade, the priest counts the
rosary. So is it with the record of crime; and in the witness of Guilt,
Man is thrilled with the whisper of Religion.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
The fatal shadows that walk by us still.
FLETCHER.