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