“And what,” said Varney,--“what, while we are pursuing a fancied clew,
and seeking to provide first a name, and then a fortune for this young
lawyer,--what steps have you really taken to meet the danger that
menaces me,--to secure, if our inquiries fail, an independence for
yourself? Months have elapsed, and you have still shrunk from advancing
the great scheme upon which we built, when the daughter of Susan
Mainwaring was admitted to your hearth.”
“Why recall me, in these rare moments when I feel myself human
still,--why recall me back to the nethermost abyss of revenge and crime?
Oh, let me be sure that I have still a son! Even if John Ardworth, with
his gifts and energies, be denied to me, a son, though in rags, I will
give him wealth!--a son, though ignorant as the merest boor, I will
pour into his brain my dark wisdom! A son! a son! my heart swells at
the word. Ah, you sneer! Yes, my heart swells, but not with the mawkish
fondness of a feeble mother. In a son, I shall live again,--transmigrate
from this tortured and horrible life of mine; drink back my youth.
In him I shall rise from my fall,--strong in his power, great in his
grandeur. It is because I was born a woman,--had woman’s poor passions
and infirm weakness,--that I am what I am. I would transfer myself into
the soul of man,--man, who has the strength to act, and the privilege to
rise. Into the bronze of man’s nature I would pour the experience which
has broken, with its fierce elements, the puny vessel of clay. Yes,
Gabriel, in return for all I have done and sacrificed for you, I ask
but co-operation in that one hope of my shattered and storm-beat being.
Bear, forbear, await; risk not that hope by some wretched, peddling
crime which will bring on us both detection,--some wanton revelry in
guilt, which is not worth the terror that treads upon its heels.”
“You forget,” answered Varney, with a kind of submissive
sullenness,--for whatever had passed between these two persons in
their secret and fearful intimacy, there was still a power in Lucretia,
surviving her fall amidst the fiends, that impressed Varney with the
only respect he felt for man or woman,--“you forget strangely the nature
of our elaborate and master project when you speak of ‘peddling crime,’
or ‘wanton revelry’ in guilt! You forget, too, how every hour that we
waste deepens the peril that surrounds me, and may sweep from your side
the sole companion that can aid you in your objects,--nay, without whom
they must wholly fail. Let me speak first of that most urgent danger,
for your memory seems short and troubled, since you have learned only to
hope the recovery of your son. If this man Stubmore, in whom the trust
created by my uncle’s will is now vested, once comes to town, once
begins to bustle about his accursed projects of transferring the money
from the Bank of England, I tell you again and again that my forgery on
the bank will be detected, and that transportation will be the smallest
penalty inflicted. Part of the forgery, as you know, was committed on
your behalf, to find the moneys necessary for the research for your
son,--committed on the clear understanding that our project on Helen
should repay me, should enable me, perhaps undetected, to restore
the sums illegally abstracted, or, at the worst, to confess to
Stubmore--whose character I well know--that, oppressed by difficulties,
I had yielded to temptation, that I had forged his name (as I had forged
his father’s) as an authority to sell the capital from the bank, and
that now, in replacing the money, I repaid my error and threw myself on
his indulgence, on his silence. I say that I know enough of the man to
know that I should be thus cheaply saved, or at the worst, I should have
but to strengthen his compassion by a bribe to his avarice; but if I
cannot replace the money, I am lost.”
“Well, well,” said Lucretia; “the money you shall have, let me but find
my son, and--”
“Grant me patience!” cried Varney, impetuously. “But what can your son
do, if found, unless you endow him with the heritage of Laughton? To do
that, Helen, who comes next to Percival St. John in the course of
the entail, must cease to live! Have I not aided, am I not aiding you
hourly, in your grand objects? This evening I shall see a man whom I
have long lost sight of, but who has acquired in a lawyer’s life the
true scent after evidence: if that evidence exist, it shall be found. I
have just learned his address. By tomorrow he shall be on the track.
I have stinted myself to save from the results of the last forgery
the gold to whet his zeal. For the rest, as I have said, your design
involves the removal of two lives. Already over the one more difficult
to slay the shadow creeps and the pall hangs. I have won, as you wished,
and as was necessary, young St. John’s familiar acquaintance; when the
hour comes, he is in my hands.”
Lucretia smiled sternly. “So!” she said, between her ground teeth, “the
father forbade me the house that was my heritage! I have but to lift
a finger and breathe a word, and, desolate as I am, I thrust from
that home the son! The spoiler left me the world,--I leave his son the
grave!”
“But,” said Varney, doggedly pursuing his dreadful object, “why force
me to repeat that his is not the only life between you and your son’s
inheritance? St. John gone, Helen still remains. And what, if your
researches fail, are we to lose the rich harvest which Helen will yield
us,--a harvest you reap with the same sickle which gathers in your
revenge? Do you no longer see in Helen’s face the features of her
mother? Is the perfidy of William Mainwaring forgotten or forgiven?”
“Gabriel Varney,” said Lucretia, in a hollow and tremulous voice, “when
in that hour in which my whole being was revulsed, and I heard the cord
snap from the anchor, and saw the demons of the storm gather round my
bark; when in that hour I stooped calmly down and kissed my rival’s
brow,--I murmured an oath which seemed not inspired by my own soul, but
by an influence henceforth given to my fate: I vowed that the perfidy
dealt to me should be repaid; I vowed that the ruin of my own existence
should fall on the brow which I kissed. I vowed that if shame and
disgrace were to supply the inheritance I had forfeited, I would not
stand alone amidst the scorn of the pitiless world. In the vision of my
agony, I saw, afar, the altar dressed and the bride-chamber prepared;
and I breathed my curse, strong as prophecy, on the marriage-hearth and
the marriage-bed. Why dream, then, that I would rescue the loathed child
of that loathed union from your grasp? But is the time come? Yours may
be come: is mine?”
Something so awful there was in the look of his accomplice, so intense
in the hate of her low voice, that Varney, wretch as he was, and
contemplating at that very hour the foulest and most hideous guilt, drew
back, appalled.
Madame Dalibard resumed, and in a somewhat softer tone, but softened
only by the anguish of despair.
“Oh, had it been otherwise, what might I have been! Given over from that
hour to the very incarnation of plotting crime, none to resist the evil
impulse of my own maddening heart, the partner, forced on me by fate,
leading me deeper and deeper into the inextricable hell,--from that
hour fraud upon fraud, guilt upon guilt, infamy heaped on infamy, till
I stand a marvel to myself that the thunderbolt falls not, that Nature
thrusts not from her breast a living outrage on all her laws! Was I not
justified in the desire of retribution? Every step that I fell, every
glance that I gave to the gulf below, increased but in me the desire for
revenge. All my acts had flowed from one fount: should the stream roll
pollution, and the fount spring pure?”
“You have had your revenge on your rival and her husband.”
“I had it, and I passed on!” said Lucretia, with nostrils dilated as
with haughty triumph; “they were crushed, and I suffered them to live!
Nay, when, by chance, I heard of William Mainwaring’s death, I bowed
down my head, and I almost think I wept. The old days came back upon
me. Yes, I wept! But I had not destroyed their love. No, no; there I had
miserably failed. A pledge of that love lived. I had left their hearth
barren; Fate sent them a comfort which I had not foreseen. And suddenly
my hate returned, my wrongs rose again, my vengeance was not sated. The
love that had destroyed more than my life,--my soul,--rose again and
cursed me in the face of Helen. The oath which I took when I kissed my
rival’s brow, demanded another prey when I kissed the child of those
nuptials.”
“You are prepared at last, then, to act?” cried Varney, in a tone of
savage joy.
At that moment, close under the window, rose, sudden and sweet, the
voice of one singing,--the young voice of Helen. The words were so
distinct that they came to the ears of the dark-plotting and guilty
pair. In the song itself there was little to remark or peculiarly
apposite to the consciences of those who heard; yet in the extreme and
touching purity of the voice, and in the innocence of the general spirit
of the words, trite as might be the image they conveyed, there was
something that contrasted so fearfully their own thoughts and minds that
they sat silent, looking vacantly into each other’s faces, and shrinking
perhaps to turn their eyes within themselves.
HELEN’S HYMN.
Ye fade, yet still how sweet, ye Flowers! Your scent outlives the bloom!
So, Father, may my mortal hours Grow sweeter towards the tomb!
In withered leaves a healing cure The simple gleaners find; So may our
withered hopes endure In virtues left behind!
Oh, not to me be vainly given The lesson ye bestow, Of thoughts that
rise in sweets to Heaven, And turn to use below.
The song died, but still the listeners remained silent, till at length,
shaking off the effect, with his laugh of discordant irony, Varney
said,--
“Sweet innocence, fresh from the nursery! Would it not be sin to suffer
the world to mar it? You hear the prayer: why not grant it, and let the
flower ‘turn to use below’?”
“Ah, but could it wither first!” muttered Lucretia, with an accent of
suppressed rage. “Do you think that her--that his--daughter is to me but
a vulgar life to be sacrificed merely for gold? Imagine away your
sex, man! Women only know what I--such as I, woman still--feel in the
presence of the pure! Do you fancy that I should not have held death
a blessing if death could have found me in youth such as Helen is? Ah,
could she but live to suffer! Die! Well, since it must be, since my
son requires the sacrifice, do as you will with the victim that death
mercifully snatches from my grasp. I could have wished to prolong her
life, to load it with some fragment of the curse her parents heaped upon
me,--baffled love, and ruin, and despair! I could have hoped, in this
division of the spoil, that mine had been the vengeance, if yours the
gold. You want the life, I the heart,--the heart to torture first; and
then--why then more willingly than I do now, could I have thrown the
carcass to the jackal!”
“Listen!” began Varney; when the door opened and Helen herself stood
unconsciously smiling at the threshold.