And how, O Poet of the sad belief, and eloquence “like ebony, at once
dark and splendid [It was said of Tertullian that ‘his style was like
ebony, dark and splendid’],” how couldst thou, august Lucretius, deem it
but sweet to behold from the steep the strife of the great sea, or,
safe from the peril, gaze on the wrath of the battle, or, serene in the
temples of the wise, look afar on the wanderings of human error? Is it
so sweet to survey the ills from which thou art delivered? Shall not
the strong law of SYMPATHY find thee out, and thy heart rebuke thy
philosophy? Not sweet, indeed, can be man’s shelter in self when he says
to the storm, “I have no bark on the sea;” or to the gods of the battle,
“I have no son in the slaughter;” when he smiles unmoved upon Woe, and
murmurs, “Weep on, for these eyes know no tears;” when, unappalled, he
beholdeth the black deeds of crime, and cries to his conscience, “Thou
art calm.” Yet solemn is the sight to him who lives in all life,--seeks
for Nature in the storm, and Providence in the battle; loses self in the
woe; probes his heart in the crime; and owns no philosophy that sets him
free from the fetters of man. Not in vain do we scan all the contrasts
in the large framework of civilized earth if we note “when the dust
groweth into hardness, and the clods cleave fast together.” Range, O
Art, through all space, clasp together in extremes, shake idle wealth
from its lethargy, and bid States look in hovels where the teacher is
dumb, and Reason unweeded runs to rot! Bid haughty Intellect pause in
its triumph, and doubt if intellect alone can deliver the soul from its
tempters! Only that lives uncorrupt which preserves in all seasons the
human affections in which the breath of God breathes and is. Go forth
to the world, O Art, go forth to the innocent, the guilty, the wise, and
the dull; go forth as the still voice of Fate! Speak of the insecurity
even of goodness below; carry on the rapt vision of suffering Virtue
through “the doors of the shadows of death;” show the dim revelation
symbolled forth in the Tragedy of old,--how incomplete is man’s destiny,
how undeveloped is the justice divine, if Antigone sleep eternally in
the ribs of the rock, and Oedipus vanish forever in the Grove of the
Furies. Here below, “the waters are hid with a stone, and the face
of the deep is frozen;” but above liveth He “who can bind the sweet
influence of the Pleiades, and loose the bands of Orion.” Go with Fate
over the bridge, and she vanishes in the land beyond the gulf! Behold
where the Eternal demands Eternity for the progress of His creatures and
the vindication of His justice!
It was past midnight, and Lucretia sat alone in her dreary room; her
head buried on her bosom, her eyes fixed on the ground, her hands
resting on her knees,--it was an image of inanimate prostration and
decrepitude that might have moved compassion to its depth. The door
opened, and Martha entered, to assist Madame Dalibard, as usual, to
retire to rest. Her mistress slowly raised her eyes at the noise of the
opening door, and those eyes took their searching, penetrating
acuteness as they fixed upon the florid nor uncomely countenance of the
waiting-woman.
In her starched cap, her sober-coloured stuff gown, in her prim,
quiet manner and a certain sanctified demureness of aspect, there was
something in the first appearance of this woman that impressed you with
the notion of respectability, and inspired confidence in those steady
good qualities which we seek in a trusty servant. But more closely
examined, an habitual observer might have found much to qualify, perhaps
to disturb, his first prepossessions. The exceeding lowness of the
forehead, over which that stiff, harsh hair was so puritanically
parted; the severe hardness of those thin, small lips, so pursed up
and constrained; even a certain dull cruelty in those light, cold blue
eyes,--might have caused an uneasy sentiment, almost approaching to
fear. The fat grocer’s spoilt child instinctively recoiled from her
when she entered the shop to make her household purchases; the old,
gray-whiskered terrier dog at the public-house slunk into the tap when
she crossed the threshold.
Madame Dalibard silently suffered herself to be wheeled into the
adjoining bedroom, and the process of disrobing was nearly completed
before she said abruptly,--
“So you attended Mr. Varney’s uncle in his last illness. Did he suffer
much?”
“He was a poor creature at best,” answered Martha; “but he gave me a
deal of trouble afore he went. He was a scranny corpse when I strecked
him out.”
Madame Dalibard shrank from the hands at that moment employed upon
herself, and said,--
“It was not, then, the first corpse you have laid out for the grave?”
“Not by many.”
“And did any of those you so prepared die of the same complaint?”
“I can’t say, I’m sure,” returned Martha. “I never inquires how folks
die; my bizness was to nurse ‘em till all was over, and then to sit up.
As they say in my country, ‘Riving Pike wears a hood when the weather
bodes ill.’” [If Riving Pike do wear a hood, The day, be sure, will
ne’er be good. A Lancashire Distich.]
“And when you sat up with Mr. Varney’s uncle, did you feel no fear in
the dead of the night,--that corpse before you, no fear?”
“Young Mr. Varney said I should come to no harm. Oh, he’s a clever man!
What should I fear, ma’am?” answered Martha, with a horrid simplicity.
“You have belonged to a very religious sect, I think I have heard you
say,--a sect not unfamiliar to me; a sect to which great crime is very
rarely known?”
“Yes, ma’am, some of ‘em be tame enough, but others be weel [whirlpool]
deep!”
“You do not believe what they taught you?”
“I did when I was young and silly.”
“And what disturbed your belief?”
“Ma’am, the man what taught me, and my mother afore me, was the first I
ever kep’ company with,” answered Martha, without a change in her florid
hue, which seemed fixed in her cheek, as the red in an autumn leaf.
“After he had ruined me, as the girls say, he told me as how it was all
sham!”
“You loved him, then?”
“The man was well enough, ma’am, and he behaved handsome and got me a
husband. I’ve known better days.”
“You sleep well at night?”
“Yes, ma’am, thank you; I loves my bed.”
“I have done with you,” said Madame Dalibard, stifling a groan, as
now, placed in her bed, she turned to the wall. Martha extinguished the
candle, leaving it on the table by the bed, with a book and a box of
matches, for Madame Dalibard was a bad sleeper, and often read in the
night. She then drew the curtains and went her way.
It might be an hour after Martha had retired to rest that a hand was
stretched from the bed, that the candle was lighted, and Lucretia
Dalibard rose; with a sudden movement she threw aside the coverings, and
stood in her long night-gear on the floor. Yes, the helpless, paralyzed
cripple rose, was on her feet,--tall, elastic, erect! It was as a
resuscitation from the grave. Never was change more startling than that
simple action effected,--not in the form alone, but the whole character
of the face. The solitary light streamed upward on a countenance on
every line of which spoke sinister power and strong resolve. If you
had ever seen her before in her false, crippled state, prostrate and
helpless, and could have seen her then,--those eyes, if haggard still,
now full of life and vigour; that frame, if spare, towering aloft in
commanding stature, perfect in its proportions as a Grecian image of
Nemesis,--your amaze would have merged into terror, so preternatural did
the transformation appear, so did aspect and bearing contradict the very
character of her sex, uniting the two elements most formidable in man or
in fiend,--wickedness and power.
She stood a moment motionless, breathing loud, as if it were a joy to
breathe free from restraint; and then, lifting the light, and gliding to
the adjoining room, she unlocked a bureau in the corner, and bent over a
small casket, which she opened with a secret spring.
Reader, cast back your eye to that passage in this history when Lucretia
Clavering took down the volume from the niche in the tapestried chamber
at Laughton, and numbered, in thought, the hours left to her uncle’s
life. Look back on the ungrateful thought; behold how it has swelled
and ripened into the guilty deed! There, in that box, Death guards his
treasure crypt. There, all the science of Hades numbers its murderous
inventions. As she searched for the ingredients her design had
pre-selected, something heavier than those small packets she deranged
fell to the bottom of the box with a low and hollow sound. She started
at the noise, and then smiled, in scorn of her momentary fear, as she
took up the ring that had occasioned the sound,--a ring plain and solid,
like those used as signets in the Middle Ages, with a large dull opal
in the centre. What secret could that bauble have in common with
its ghastly companions in Death’s crypt? This had been found amongst
Olivier’s papers; a note in that precious manuscript, which had given
to the hands of his successors the keys of the grave, had discovered
the mystery of its uses. By the pressure of the hand, at the touch of a
concealed spring, a barbed point flew forth steeped in venom more deadly
than the Indian extracts from the bag of the cobar de capello,--a venom
to which no antidote is known, which no test can detect. It corrupts the
whole mass of the blood; it mounts in frenzy and fire to the brain; it
rends the soul from the body in spasm and convulsion. But examine the
dead, and how divine the effect of the cause! How go back to the records
of the Borgias, and amidst all the scepticisms of times in which,
happily, such arts are unknown, unsuspected, learn from the hero of
Machiavel how a clasp of the hand can get rid of a foe! Easier and more
natural to point to the living puncture in the skin, and the swollen
flesh round it, and dilate on the danger a rusty nail--nay, a pin--can
engender when the humours are peccant and the blood is impure! The
fabrication of that bauble, the discovery of Borgia’s device, was the
masterpiece in the science of Dalibard,--a curious and philosophical
triumph of research, hitherto unused by its inventor and his heirs; for
that casket is rich in the choice of more gentle materials: but the use
yet may come. As she gazed on the ring, there was a complacent and proud
expression on Lucretia’s face.
“Dumb token of Caesar Borgia,” she murmured,--“him of the wisest head
and the boldest hand that ever grasped at empire, whom Machiavel, the
virtuous, rightly praised as the model of accomplished ambition! Why
should I falter in the paths which he trod with his royal step, only
because my goal is not a throne? Every circle is as complete in itself,
whether rounding a globule or a star. Why groan in the belief that
the mind defiles itself by the darkness through which it glides on its
object, or the mire through which it ascends to the hill? Murderer as
he was, poisoner, and fratricide, did blood clog his intellect, or crime
impoverish the luxury of his genius? Was his verse less melodious [It
is well known that Caesar Borgia was both a munificent patron and
an exquisite appreciator of art; well known also are his powers of
persuasion but the general reader may not, perhaps, be acquainted with
the fact that this terrible criminal was also a poet], or his love of
art less intense, or his eloquence less persuasive, because he sought to
remove every barrier, revenge every wrong, crush every foe?”
In the wondrous corruption to which her mind had descended, thus
murmured Lucretia. Intellect had been so long made her sole god that
the very monster of history was lifted to her reverence by his ruthless
intellect alone,--lifted in that mood of feverish excitement when
conscience, often less silenced, lay crushed, under the load of the deed
to come, into an example and a guide.
Though at times, when looking back, oppressed by the blackest despair,
no remorse of the past ever weakened those nerves when the Hour called
up its demon, and the Will ruled the rest of the human being as a
machine.
She replaced the ring, she reclosed the casket, relocked its depository;
then passed again into the adjoining chamber.
A few minutes afterwards, and the dim light that stole from the heavens
(in which the moon was partially overcast) through the casement on
the staircase rested on a shapeless figure robed in black from head to
foot,--a figure so obscure and undefinable in outline, so suited to the
gloom in its hue, so stealthy and rapid in its movements, that had you
started from sleep and seen it on your floor, you would perforce have
deemed that your fancy had befooled you!
Thus darkly, through the darkness, went the Poisoner to her prey.