BAD DREAMS AND A WORSE WAKING.
THE sudden and melancholy death of Gaston de Lancy caused a
considerable sensation throughout Paris; more especially as it was
attributed by many to poison. By whom administered, or from what
motive, none could guess. There was one story, however, circulated that
was believed by some people, though it bore very little appearance of
probability. It was reported that on the afternoon preceding the night
on which De Lancy died, a stranger had obtained admission behind the
scenes of the opera-house, and had been seen in earnest conversation
with the man whose duty it was to provide the goblets of wine for the
poison scene in Lucretia Borgia. Some went so far as to say, that this
stranger had bribed the man to put the contents of a small packet
into the bottom of the glass given on the stage to De Lancy. But so
improbable a story was believed by very few, and, of course, stoutly
denied by the man in question. The doctors attributed the death of
the young man to apoplexy. There was no inquest held on his remains;
and at the wish of his mother he was buried at Rouen, and his funeral
was no doubt a peculiarly quiet one, for no one was allowed to know
when the ceremonial took place. Paris soon forgot its favourite. A few
engravings of him, in one or two of his great characters, lingered for
some time in the windows of the fashionable print-shops. Brief memoirs
of him appeared in several papers, and in one or two magazines; and in
a couple of weeks he was forgotten. If he had been a great general, or
a great minister, it is possible that he would not have been remembered
much longer. The new tenor had a fair complexion and blue eyes, and had
two extra notes of falsetto. So the opera-house was as brilliant as
ever, though there was for the time being a prejudice among opera-goers
and opera-singers against Lucretia Borgia, and that opera was put on
the shelf for the remainder of the season.
A month after the death of De Lancy the physician pronounced
Mademoiselle de Cevennes sufficiently recovered to be removed from
Paris to her uncle’s château in Normandy. Her illness had been a
terrible one. For many days she had been delirious. Ah, who shall paint
the fearful dreams of that delirium!--dreams, of the anguish of which
her disjointed sentences could tell so little? The face of the man she
had loved had haunted her in every phase, wearing every expression--now
thoughtful, now sparkling with vivacity, now cynical, now melancholy;
but always distinct and palpable, and always before her night and day.
The scene of her first meeting with him; her secret marriage; the
little chapel a few miles out of Paris; the old priest; the bitter
discovery in the Bois de Boulogne--the scene of his treachery; the
lamp-lit apartment of Monsieur de Blurosset; the cards and the poisons.
Every action of this dark period of her life she acted over in her
disordered brain again and again a hundred times through the long day,
and a hundred times more through the still longer night. So when at the
expiration of a month, she was strong enough to walk from one room into
another, it was but a wreck of his proud and lovely heiress which met
her uncle’s eyes.
The château of the marquis, some miles from the town of Caen, was
situated in a park which was as wild and uncultivated as a wood. A
park full of old timber, and marshy reedy grounds dotted with pools
of stagnant water, which in the good days of the old _régime_
were beaten nightly by the submissive peasantry, that monseigneur,
the marquis might sleep on his bedstead of ormolu and buhl à la Louis
Quatorze, undisturbed by the croaking of the frogs.
Everything around was falling into ruin; the château had been sacked,
and one wing of it burnt down, in the year 1793; and the present
marquis, then a very little boy, had fled with his father to the
hospitable shores of England, where for more than twenty years of his
life he had lived in poverty and obscurity, teaching sometimes his
native language, sometimes mathematics, sometimes music, sometimes one
thing, sometimes another, for his daily bread. But with the restoration
of the Bourbons came the restoration of the marquis to title and
fortune. A wealthy marriage with the widow of a rich Buonapartist
restored the house of De Cevennes to its former grandeur; and looking
now at the proud and stately head of that house, it was a difficult
thing to imagine that this man had ever taught French, music, and
mathematics, for a few shillings a lesson, in the obscure academies of
an English manufacturing town.
The dreary park, which surrounded the still more dreary and tumble-down
château, was white with the fallen snow, through which the servants,
or their servants the neighbouring peasantry, coming backwards and
forwards with some message or commission from the village, waded
knee-deep, or well nigh lost themselves in some unsuspected hollow
where the white drifts had swept and lay collected in masses whose
depth was dangerous. The dark oak-panelled apartments appropriated to
Valerie looked out upon the snow-clad wilderness; and very dismal they
seemed in the dying February day.
Grim pictures of dead and gone branches of this haughty house stared
and frowned from their heavy frames at the pale girl, half seated,
half reclining in a great easy-chair in the deep embayed window. One
terrible mail-clad baron, who had fought and fallen at disastrous
Agincourt, held an uplifted axe, and in the evening shadow it seemed
to Valerie as if he raised it with a threatening glance beneath his
heavy brows, which took a purpose and a meaning as the painted eyes met
hers. And turn which way she would, the eyes of these dark portraits
seemed to follow her; sometimes threateningly, sometimes reproachfully,
sometimes with a melancholy look fraught with a strange and ominous
sadness that chilled her to the soul.
Logs of wood burned on the great hearth, supported by massive iron
dogs, and their flickering light falling now here, now there, left
always the corners of the large room in shadow. The chill white night
looking in at the high window strove with the fire light for mastery,
and won it, so that the cheery beams playing bo-peep among the quaint
oak carving of the panelled walls and ceiling hid themselves abashed
before the chill stare of the cold steel-blue winter sky. The white
face of the sick girl under this dismal light looked almost as still
and lifeless as the face of her grandmother, in powder and patches,
simpering down at her from the wall. She sat alone--no book near her,
no sign of any womanly occupation in the great chamber, no friend to
watch or tend her (for she had refused all companionship); she sat with
listless hands drooping upon the velvet cushions of her chair, her head
thrown back, as if in utter abandonment of all things on the face of
the wide earth, and her dark eyes staring straight before her out into
the dead waste of winter snow.
So she has sat since early morning; so she will sit till her maid comes
to her and leads her to her dreary bedchamber. So she sits when her
uncle visits her, and tries every means in his power to awaken a smile,
or bring one look of animation into that dead face. Yes, it is the face
of a dead woman. Dead to hope, dead to love, dead to the past; still
more utterly dead to a future, which, since it cannot restore the dead,
can give her nothing.
So the short February days, which seem so long to her, fade into the
endless winter nights; and for her the morning has no light, nor the
darkness any shelter. The consolations of that holy Church, on which
for ages past her ancestors have leant for succour as on a rock of
mighty and eternal strength, she dare not seek. Her uncle’s chaplain,
a white-haired old man who had nursed her in his arms a baby, and who
resides at the château, beloved and honoured by all around, comes to
her every morning, and on each visit tries anew to win her confidence;
but in vain. How can she pour into the ears of this good and benevolent
old man her dismal story? Surely he would cast her from him with
contumely and horror. Surely he would tell her that for her there is no
hope; that even a merciful Heaven, ready to hear the prayer of every
sinner, would be deaf to the despairing cries of such a guilty wretch
as she.
So, impenitent and despairing, she wears out the time, and waits
for death. Sometimes she thinks of the arch tempter who smoothed
the path of crime and misery in which she had trodden, and, who, in
doing so seemed so much a part of herself, and so closely linked with
her anguish and her revenge, that she often, in the weakness of her
shattered mind, wondered if there were indeed such a person, or whether
he might not be only the hideous incarnation of her own dark thoughts.
He had spoken though of payment, of reward for his base services. If he
were indeed human as her wretched self, why did he not come to claim
his due?
As the lonely impenitent woman pondered thus in the wintry dusk, her
uncle entered the chamber in which she sat.
“My dear Valerie,” he said, “I am sorry to disturb you, but a person
has just arrived on horseback from Caen. He has travelled, he says, all
the way from Paris to see you, and he knows that you will grant him an
interview. I told him it was not likely you would do so, and that you
certainly would not with my consent. Who can this person be who has the
impertinence to intrude at such a time as this? His name is entirely
unknown to me.”
He gave her a card. She looked at it, and read aloud--
“‘Monsieur Raymond Marolles.’ The person is quite right, my dear uncle;
I will see him.”
“But, Valerie----!” remonstrated the marquis.
She looked at him, with her mother’s proud Spanish blood mantling in
her pale cheek.
“My dear uncle,” she said quietly, “it is agreed between us, is it
not, that I am in all things my own mistress, and that you have entire
confidence in me? When you cease to trust me, we had better bid each
other farewell, for we can then no longer live beneath the same roof.”
He looked with one imploring glance at the inflexible face, but it was
fixed as death.
“Tell them,” she said, “to conduct Monsieur Marolles to this apartment.
I must see him, and alone.”
The marquis left her, and in a few moments Raymond entered the room,
ushered in by the groom of the chambers.
He had the old air of well-bred and fashionable indifference which so
well became him, and carried a light gold-headed riding-whip in his
hand.
“Mademoiselle,” he said, “will perhaps pardon my intrusion of this
evening, which can scarcely surprise her, if she will be pleased
to remember that more than a month has elapsed since a melancholy
occurrence at the Royal Italian Opera House, and that I have some right
to be impatient.”
She did not answer him immediately; for at this moment a servant
entered, carrying a lamp, which he placed on the table by her side,
and afterwards drew the heavy velvet curtains across the great window,
shutting out the chill winter night.
“You are very much altered, mademoiselle,” said Raymond, as he
scrutinized the wan face under the lamp-light.
“That is scarcely strange,” she answered, in a chilling tone. “I am not
yet accustomed to crime, and cannot wear the memory of it lightly.”
Her visitor was dusting his polished riding-boot with his handkerchief
as he spoke. Looking up with a smile, he said,--
“Nay, mademoiselle, I give you credit for more philosophy. Why use ugly
words? Crime--poison--murder!” He paused between each of these three
words, as if every syllable had been some sharp instrument--as if every
time he spoke he stabbed her to the heart and stopped to calculate the
depth of the wound. “There are no such words as those for beauty and
high rank. A person far removed from our sphere offends us, and we
sweep him from our path. We might as well regret the venemous insect
which, having stung us, we destroy.”
She did not acknowledge his words by so much as one glance or gesture,
but said coldly,--
“You were so candid as to confess, monsieur, when you served me, yonder
in Paris, that you did so in the expectation of a reward. You are here,
no doubt, to claim that reward?”
He looked up at her with so strange a light in his blue eyes, and so
singular a smile curving the dark moustache which hid his thin arched
lips, that in spite of herself she was startled into looking at him
anxiously. He was determined that in the game they were playing she
should hold no hidden cards, and he was therefore resolved to see her
face stripped of its mask of cold indifference. After a minute’s pause
he answered her question,--
“I am.”
“It is well, monsieur. Will you be good enough to state the amount you
claim for your _services_?”
“You are determined, mademoiselle, it appears,” he said, with the
strange light still glittering in his eyes, “you are determined to give
me credit for none but the most mercenary sentiments. Suppose I do not
claim any amount of money in repayment of my services?”
“Then, monsieur, I have wronged you. You are a disinterested villain,
and, as such, worthy of the respect of the wicked. But since this is
the case, our interview is at end. I am sorry you decline the reward
you have earned so worthily, and I have the honour to wish you good
evening.”
He gave a low musical laugh. “Pardon me, mademoiselle,” he said, “but
really your words amuse me. ‘A disinterested villain!’ Believe me, when
I tell you that disinterested villainy is as great an impossibility
as disinterested virtue. You are mistaken, mademoiselle, but only as
to the nature of the reward I come to claim. You would confine the
question to one of money. Cannot you imagine that I have acted in the
hope of a higher reward than any recompense your banker’s book could
afford me?”
She looked at him with a puzzled expression, but his face was hidden.
He was trifling with his light riding-whip, and looking down at the
hearth. After a minute’s pause he lifted his head, and glanced at her
with the same dangerous smile.
“You cannot guess, then, mademoiselle, the price I claim for my
services yonder?” he asked.
“No.”
“Nay, mademoiselle, reflect.”
“It would be useless. I might anticipate your claiming half my fortune,
as I am, in a manner, in your power----”
“Oh, yes,” he murmured softly, interrupting her, “you are, in a manner,
in my power certainly.”
“But the possibility of your claiming from me anything except money has
never for a moment occurred to me.”
“Mademoiselle, when first I saw you I looked at you through an
opera-glass from my place in the stalls of the Italian Opera. The
glass, mademoiselle, was an excellent one, for it revealed every line
and every change in your beautiful face. From my observation of that
face I made two or three conclusions about your character, which
I now find were not made upon false premises. You are impulsive,
mademoiselle, but you are not far-seeing. You are strong in your
resolutions when once your mind is fixed; but that mind is easily
influenced by others. You have passion, genius, courage--rare and
beautiful gifts which distinguish you from the rest of womankind; but
you have not that power of calculation, that inductive science, which
never sees the effect without looking for the cause, which men have
christened mathematics. I, mademoiselle, am a mathematician. As such, I
sat down to play a deep and dangerous game with you; and as such, now
that the hour has come at which I can show my hand, you will see that I
hold the winning cards.”
“I cannot understand, monsieur----”
“Perhaps not, yet. When you first honoured me with an interview you
were pleased to call me ‘an adventurer.’ You used the expression as
a term of reproach. Strange to say, I never held it in that light.
When it pleased Heaven, or Fate--whichever name you please to give the
abstraction--to throw me out upon a world with which my life has been
one long war, it pleased that Power to give me nothing but my brains
for weapons in the great fight. No rank, no rent-roll, neither mother
nor father, friend nor patron. All to win, and nothing to lose. How
much I had won when I first saw you it would be hard for you, born in
those great saloons to which I have struggled from the mire of the
streets--it would be very hard, I say, for you to guess. I entered
Paris one year ago, possessed of a sum of money which to me was wealth,
but which might, perhaps, to you, be a month’s income. I had only one
object--to multiply that sum a hundredfold. I became, therefore, a
speculator, or, as you call it, ‘an adventurer.’ As a speculator, I
took my seat in the stalls of the Opera House the night I first saw
you.”
She looked at him in utter bewilderment, as he sat in his most careless
attitude, playing with the gold handle of his riding-whip, but she did
not attempt to speak, and he continued,--
“I happened to hear from a bystander that you were the richest woman in
France. Do you know, mademoiselle, how an adventurer, with a tolerably
handsome face and a sufficiently gentlemanly address, generally
calculates on enriching himself? Or, if you do not know, can you guess?”
“No,” she muttered, looking at him now as if she were in a trance, and
he had some strange magnetic power over her.
“Then, mademoiselle, I must enlighten you. The adventurer who does not
care to grow grey and decrepit in making a fortune by that slow and
uncertain mode which people call ‘honest industry,’ looks about him
for a fortune ready made and waiting for him to claim it. He makes a
wealthy marriage.”
“A wealthy marriage?” She repeated the words after him, as if
mechanically.
“Therefore, mademoiselle, on seeing you, and on hearing the extent of
your fortune, I said to myself, ‘That is the woman I must marry!’”
“Monsieur!” She started indignantly from her reclining attitude; but
the effort was too much for her shattered frame, and she sank back
exhausted.
“Nay, mademoiselle, I did not say ‘That is the woman I will marry,’
but rather, ‘That is the woman I must try to marry;’ for as yet,
remember, I did not hold one card in the great game I had to play. I
raised my glass, and looked long at your face. A very beautiful face,
mademoiselle, as you and your glass have long decided between you. I
was--pardon me--disappointed. Had you been an ugly woman, my chances
would have been so much better. Had you been disfigured by a hump--(if
it had been but the faintest elevation of one white shoulder, prouder,
perhaps, than its fellow)--had your hair been tinged with even a
suspicion of the ardent hue which prejudice condemns, it would have
been a wonderful advantage to me. Vain hope to win you by flattery,
when even the truth must sound like flattery. And then, again, one
glance told me that you were no pretty simpleton, to be won by a
stratagem, or bewildered by romantic speeches. And yet, mademoiselle,
I did not despair. You were beautiful; you were impassioned. In your
veins ran the purple blood of a nation whose children’s love and hate
are both akin to madness! You had, in short, a soul, and you might have
a secret!”
“Monsieur!”
“At any rate it would be no lost time to watch you. I therefore
watched. Two or three gentlemen were talking to you; you did not listen
to them; you were asked the same question three times, and on the
second repetition of it you started, and replied as by an effort. You
were weary, or indifferent. Now, as I have told you, mademoiselle, in
the science of mathematics we acknowledge no effect without a cause;
there was a cause, then, for this distraction on your part. In a few
minutes the curtain rose. You were no longer absent-minded. Elvino
came on the stage--you were all attention. You tried, mademoiselle,
not to appear attentive; but your mouth, the most flexible feature in
your face, betrayed you. The cause, then, of your late distraction was
Elvino, otherwise the fashionable tenor, Gaston de Lancy.”
“Monsieur, for pity’s sake----” she cried imploringly.
“This was card number one. My chances were looking up. In a few minutes
I saw you throw your bouquet on the stage I also saw the note. You had
a secret, mademoiselle, and I possessed the clue to it. My cards were
good ones. The rest must be done by good play. I knew I was no bad
player, and I sat down to the game with the determination to rise a
winner.”
“Finish the recital of your villainy, monsieur, I beg--it really
becomes wearisome.” She tried as she spoke to imitate his own
indifference of manner; but she was utterly subdued and broken down,
and waited for him to continue as the victim might wait the pleasure of
the executioner, and with as little thought of opposing him.
“Then, mademoiselle, I have little more to say, except to claim my
reward. That reward is--your hand.” He said this as if he never even
dreamt of the possibility of a refusal.
“Are you mad, monsieur?” She had for some time anticipated this
climax, and she felt how utterly powerless she was in the hands of an
unscrupulous villain. How unscrupulous she did not yet know.
“Nay, mademoiselle, remember! A man has been poisoned. Easy enough
to set suspicion, which has already pointed to foul play, more fully
at work. Easy enough to prove a certain secret marriage, a certain
midnight visit to that renowned and not too highly-respected chemist,
Monsieur Blurosset. Easy enough to produce the order for five thousand
francs signed by Mademoiselle de Cevennes. And should these proofs
not carry with them conviction, I am the fortunate possessor of a
wine-glass emblazoned with the arms of your house, in which still
remains the sediment of a poison well-known to the more distinguished
members of the medical science. I think, mademoiselle, these few
evidences, added to the powerful motive revealed by your secret
marriage, would be quite sufficient to set every newspaper in France
busy with the details of a murder unprecedented in the criminal annals
of this country. But, mademoiselle, I have wearied you; you are pale,
exhausted. I have no wish to hurry you into a rash acceptance of my
offer. Think of it, and to-morrow let me hear your decision. Till then,
adieu.” He rose as he spoke.
She bowed her head in assent to his last proposition, and he left her.
Did he know, or did he guess, that there might be another reason to
render her acceptance of his hand possible? Did he think that even his
obscure name might be a shelter to her in days to come?
O Valerie, Valerie, for ever haunted by the one beloved creature gone
out of this world never to return! For ever pursued by the image of the
love which never was--which at its best and brightest was--but a false
dream. Most treacherous when most tender, most cruel when most kind,
most completely false when it most seemed a holy truth. Weep, Valerie,
for the long years to come, whose dismal burden shall for ever be, “Oh,
never, never more!”