We have now arrived at that stage in this history when it is necessary
to look back on the interval in Lucretia’s life,--between the death of
Dalibard, and her reintroduction in the second portion of our tale.
One day, without previous notice or warning, Lucretia arrived at William
Mainwaring’s house; she was in the deep weeds of widowhood, and that
garb of mourning sufficed to add Susan’s tenderest commiseration to the
warmth of her affectionate welcome. Lucretia appeared to have forgiven
the past, and to have conquered its more painful recollections; she was
gentle to Susan, though she rather suffered than returned her caresses;
she was open and frank to William. Both felt inexpressibly grateful for
her visit, the forgiveness it betokened, and the confidence it implied.
At this time no condition could be more promising and prosperous than
that of the young banker. From the first the most active partner in the
bank, he had now virtually almost monopolized the business. The senior
partner was old and infirm; the second had a bucolic turn, and was much
taken up by the care of a large farm he had recently purchased; so that
Mainwaring, more and more trusted and honoured, became the sole managing
administrator of the firm. Business throve in his able hands; and with
patient and steady perseverance there was little doubt but that, before
middle age was attained, his competence would have swelled into a
fortune sufficient to justify him in realizing the secret dream of his
heart,--the parliamentary representation of the town, in which he had
already secured the affection and esteem of the inhabitants.
It was not long before Lucretia detected the ambition William’s industry
but partially concealed; it was not long before, with the ascendency
natural to her will and her talents, she began to exercise considerable,
though unconscious, influence over a man in whom a thousand good
qualities and some great talents were unhappily accompanied by infirm
purpose and weak resolutions. The ordinary conversation of Lucretia
unsettled his mind and inflamed his vanity,--a conversation able,
aspiring, full both of knowledge drawn from books and of that experience
of public men which her residence in Paris (whereon, with its new and
greater Charlemagne, the eyes of the world were turned) had added to
her acquisitions in the lore of human life. Nothing more disturbs a mind
like William Mainwaring’s than that species of eloquence which rebukes
its patience in the present by inflaming all its hopes in the future.
Lucretia had none of the charming babble of women, none of that tender
interest in household details, in the minutiae of domestic life, which
relaxes the intellect while softening the heart. Hard and vigorous, her
sentences came forth in eternal appeal to the reason, or address to the
sterner passions in which love has no share. Beside this strong thinker,
poor Susan’s sweet talk seemed frivolous and inane. Her soft hold upon
Mainwaring loosened. He ceased to consult her upon business; he began to
repine that the partner of his lot could have little sympathy with his
dreams. More often and more bitterly now did his discontented glance, in
his way homeward, rove to the rooftops of the rural member for the town;
more eagerly did he read the parliamentary debates; more heavily did he
sigh at the thought of eloquence denied a vent, and ambition delayed in
its career.
When arrived at this state of mind, Lucretia’s conversation took a more
worldly, a more practical turn. Her knowledge of the speculators of
Paris instructed her pictures of bold ingenuity creating sudden
wealth; she spoke of fortunes made in a day,--of parvenus bursting into
millionnaires; of wealth as the necessary instrument of ambition, as the
arch ruler of the civilized world. Never once, be it observed, in these
temptations, did Lucretia address herself to the heart; the ordinary
channels of vulgar seduction were disdained by her. She would not have
stooped so low as Mainwaring’s love, could she have commanded or allured
it; she was willing to leave to Susan the husband reft from her own
passionate youth, but leave him with the brand on his brow and the worm
at his heart,--a scoff and a wreck.
At this time there was in that market-town one of those adventurous,
speculative men, who are the more dangerous impostors because imposed
upon by their own sanguine chimeras, who have a plausibility in their
calculations, an earnestness in their arguments, which account for
the dupes they daily make in our most sober and wary of civilized
communities. Unscrupulous in their means, yet really honest in the
belief that their objects can be attained, they are at once the rogues
and fanatics of Mammon. This person was held to have been fortunate
in some adroit speculations in the corn trade, and he was brought too
frequently into business with Mainwaring not to be a frequent visitor
at the house. In him Lucretia saw the very instrument of her design. She
led him on to talk of business as a game, of money as a realizer of cent
per cent; she drew him into details, she praised him, she admired. In
his presence she seemed only to hear him; in his absence, musingly, she
started from silence to exclaim on the acuteness of his genius and the
accuracy of his figures. Soon the tempter at Mainwaring’s heart gave
signification to these praises, soon this adventurer became his most
intimate friend. Scarcely knowing why, never ascribing the change to her
sister, poor Susan wept, amazed at Mainwaring’s transformation. No care
now for the new books from London, or the roses in the garden; the music
on the instrument was unheeded. Books, roses, music,--what are those
trifles to a man thinking upon cent per cent? Mainwaring’s very
countenance altered; it lost its frank, affectionate beauty: sullen,
abstracted, morose, it showed that some great care was at the core.
Then Lucretia herself began grievingly to notice the change to Susan;
gradually she altered her tone with regard to the speculator, and hinted
vague fears, and urged Susan’s remonstrance and warning. As she had
anticipated, warning and remonstrance came in vain to the man who,
comparing Lucretia’s mental power to Susan’s, had learned to despise the
unlearned, timid sense of the latter.
It is unnecessary to trace this change in Mainwaring step by step, or
to measure the time which sufficed to dazzle his reason and blind his
honour. In the midst of schemes and hopes which the lust of gold now
pervaded came a thunderbolt. An anonymous letter to the head partner
of the bank provoked suspicions that led to minute examination of the
accounts. It seemed that sums had been irregularly advanced (upon
bills drawn by men of straw) to the speculator by Mainwaring; and the
destination of these sums could be traced to gambling operations in
trade in which Mainwaring had a private interest and partnership. So
great, as we have said, had been the confidence placed in William’s
abilities and honour that the facilities afforded him in the disposal of
the joint stock far exceeded those usually granted to the partner of a
firm, and the breach of trust appeared the more flagrant from the extent
of the confidence misplaced. Meanwhile, William Mainwaring, though
as yet unconscious of the proceedings of his partners, was gnawed by
anxiety and remorse, not unmixed with hope. He depended upon the result
of a bold speculation in the purchase of shares in a Canal Company,
a bill for which was then before parliament, with (as he was led
to believe) a certainty of success. The sums he had, on his own
responsibility, abstracted from the joint account were devoted to this
adventure. But, to do him justice, he never dreamed of appropriating the
profits anticipated to himself. Though knowing that the bills on which
the moneys had been advanced were merely nominal deposits, he had
confidently calculated on the certainty of success for the speculations
to which the proceeds so obtained were devoted, and he looked forward
to the moment when he might avow what he had done, and justify it by
doubling the capital withdrawn. But to his inconceivable horror, the
bill of the Canal Company was rejected in the Lords; the shares bought
at a premium went down to zero; and to add to his perplexity, the
speculator abruptly disappeared from the town. In this crisis he was
summoned to meet his indignant associates.
The evidence against him was morally damning, if not legally conclusive.
The unhappy man heard all in the silence of despair. Crushed and
bewildered, he attempted no defence. He asked but an hour to sum up the
losses of the bank and his own; they amounted within a few hundreds to
the 10,000 pounds he had brought to the firm, and which, in the absence
of marriage-settlements, was entirely at his own disposal. This sum he
at once resigned to his associates, on condition that they should defray
from it his personal liabilities. The money thus repaid, his partners
naturally relinquished all further inquiry. They were moved by pity for
one so gifted and so fallen,--they even offered him a subordinate
but lucrative situation in the firm in which he had been partner;
but Mainwaring wanted the patience and resolution to work back the
redemption of his name,--perhaps, ultimately, of his fortunes. In the
fatal anguish of his shame and despair, he fled from the town; his
flight confirmed forever the rumours against him,--rumours worse than
the reality. It was long before he even admitted Susan to the knowledge
of the obscure refuge he had sought; there, at length, she joined him.
Meanwhile, what did Lucretia? She sold nearly half of her own fortune,
constituted principally of the moiety of her portion which, at
Dalibard’s death, had passed to herself as survivor, and partly of the
share in her deceased husband’s effects which the French law awarded to
her, and with the proceeds of this sum she purchased an annuity for her
victims. Was this strange generosity the act of mercy, the result
of repentance? No; it was one of the not least subtle and delicious
refinements of her revenge. To know him who had rejected her, the rival
who had supplanted, the miserable pensioners of her bounty, was dear to
her haughty and disdainful hate. The lust of power, ever stronger in her
than avarice, more than reconciled her to the sacrifice of gold. Yes,
here she, the despised, the degraded, had power still; her wrath had
ruined the fortunes of her victim, blasted the repute, embittered and
desolated evermore the future,--now her contemptuous charity fed the
wretched lives that she spared in scorn. She had no small difficulty,
it is true, in persuading Susan to accept this sacrifice, and she did
so only by sustaining her sister’s belief that the past could yet be
retrieved, that Mainwaring’s energies could yet rebuild their fortunes,
and that as the annuity was at any time redeemable, the aid therefore
was only temporary. With this understanding, Susan, overwhelmed with
gratitude, weeping and broken-hearted, departed to join the choice of
her youth. As the men deputed by the auctioneer to arrange and ticket
the furniture for sale entered the desolate house, Lucretia then, with
the step of a conqueror, passed from the threshold.
“Ah!” she murmured, as she paused, and gazed on the walls, “ah, they
were happy when I first entered those doors,--happy in each other’s
tranquil love; happier still when they deemed I had forgiven the wrong
and abjured the past! How honoured was then their home! How knew I then,
for the first time, what the home of love can be! And who had destroyed
for me, upon all the earth, a home like theirs? They on whom that home
smiled with its serene and taunting peace! I--I, the guest! I--I, the
abandoned, the betrayed,--what dark memories were on my soul, what a
hell boiled within my bosom! Well might those memories take each a voice
to accuse them; well, from that hell, might rise the Alecto! Their lives
were in my power, my fatal dowry at my command,--rapid death, or slow,
consuming torture; but to have seen each cheer the other to the grave,
lighting every downward step with the eyes of love,--vengeance so
urged would have fallen only on myself! Ha! deceiver, didst thou plume
thyself, forsooth, on spotless reputation? Didst thou stand, me by thy
side, amongst thy perjured household gods and talk of honour? Thy home,
it is reft from thee; thy reputation, it is a scoff; thine honour, it
is a ghost that shall haunt thee! Thy love, can it linger yet? Shall the
soft eyes of thy wife not burn into thy heart, and shame turn love into
loathing? Wrecks of my vengeance, minions of my bounty, I did well to
let ye live; I shake the dust from my feet on your threshold. Live on,
homeless, hopeless, and childless! The curse is fulfilled!”
From that hour Lucretia never paused from her career to inquire further
of her victims; she never entered into communication with either. They
knew not her address nor her fate, nor she theirs. As she had reckoned,
Mainwaring made no effort to recover himself from his fall. All the
high objects that had lured his ambition were gone from him evermore.
No place in the State, no authority in the senate, awaits in England the
man with a blighted name. For the lesser objects of life he had no heart
and no care. They lived in obscurity in a small village in Cornwall till
the Peace allowed them to remove to France; the rest of their fate is
known.
Meanwhile, Lucretia removed to one of those smaller Londons, resorts
of pleasure and idleness, with which rich England abounds, and in which
widows of limited income can make poverty seem less plebeian. And now,
to all those passions that had hitherto raged within her, a dismal
apathy succeeded. It was the great calm in her sea of life. The winds
fell, and the sails drooped. Her vengeance satisfied, that which she had
made so preternaturally the main object of existence, once fulfilled,
left her in youth objectless.
She strove at first to take pleasure in the society of the place; but
its frivolities and pettiness of purpose soon wearied that masculine
and grasping mind, already made insensible to the often healthful, often
innocent, excitement of trifles, by the terrible ordeal it had passed.
Can the touch of the hand, scorched by the burning iron, feel pleasure
in the softness of silk, or the light down of the cygnet’s plume? She
next sought such relief as study could afford; and her natural bent of
thought, and her desire to vindicate her deeds to herself, plunged
her into the fathomless abyss of metaphysical inquiry with the hope
to confirm into positive assurance her earlier scepticism,--with the
atheist’s hope to annihilate the soul, and banish the presiding God.
But no voice that could satisfy her reason came from those dreary deeps;
contradiction on contradiction met her in the maze. Only when, wearied
with book-lore, she turned her eyes to the visible Nature, and beheld
everywhere harmony, order, system, contrivance, art, did she start with
the amaze and awe of instinctive conviction, and the natural religion
revolted from her cheerless ethics. Then came one of those sudden
reactions common with strong passions and exploring minds, but more
common with women, however manlike, than with men. Had she lived in
Italy then, she had become a nun; for in this woman, unlike Varney and
Dalibard, the conscience could never be utterly silenced. In her choice
of evil, she found only torture to her spirit in all the respites
afforded to the occupations it indulged. When employed upon ill, remorse
gave way to the zest of scheming; when the ill was done, remorse came
with the repose.
It was in this peculiar period of her life that Lucretia, turning
everywhere, and desperately, for escape from the past, became acquainted
with some members of one of the most rigid of the sects of Dissent. At
first she permitted herself to know and commune with these persons
from a kind of contemptuous curiosity; she desired to encourage, in
contemplating them, her experience of the follies of human nature: but
in that crisis of her mind, in those struggles of her reason, whatever
showed that which she most yearned to discover,--namely, earnest
faith, rooted and genuine conviction, whether of annihilation or
of immortality, a philosophy that might reconcile her to crime by
destroying the providence of good, or a creed that could hold out the
hope of redeeming the past and exorcising sin by the mystery of a Divine
sacrifice,--had over her a power which she had not imagined or divined.
Gradually the intense convictions of her new associates disturbed and
infected her. Their affirmations that as we are born in wrath, so sin
is our second nature, our mysterious heritage, seemed, to her
understanding, willing to be blinded, to imply excuses for her past
misdeeds. Their assurances that the worst sinner may become the most
earnest saint; that through but one act of the will, resolute faith,
all redemption is to be found,--these affirmations and these assurances,
which have so often restored the guilty and remodelled the human heart,
made a salutary, if brief, impression upon her. Nor were the lives of
these Dissenters (for the most part austerely moral), nor the peace
and self-complacency which they evidently found in the satisfaction of
conscience and fulfilment of duty, without an influence over her that
for a while both chastened and soothed.
Hopeful of such a convert, the good teachers strove hard to confirm the
seeds springing up from the granite and amidst the weeds; and amongst
them came one man more eloquent, more seductive, than the rest,--Alfred
Braddell. This person, a trader at Liverpool, was one of those strange
living paradoxes that can rarely be found out of a commercial community.
He himself had been a convert to the sect, and like most converts,
he pushed his enthusiasm into the bigotry of the zealot; he saw no
salvation out of the pale into which he had entered. But though his
belief was sincere, it did not genially operate on his practical life;
with the most scrupulous attention to forms, he had the worldliness and
cunning of the carnal. He had abjured the vices of the softer senses,
but not that which so seldom wars on the decorums of outer life. He was
essentially a money-maker,--close, acute, keen, overreaching. Good works
with him were indeed as nothing,--faith the all in all. He was one of
the elect, and could not fall. Still, in this man there was all
the intensity which often characterizes a mind in proportion to the
narrowness of its compass; that intensity gave fire to his gloomy
eloquence, and strength to his obstinate will. He saw Lucretia, and his
zeal for her conversion soon expanded into love for her person; yet
that love was secondary to his covetousness. Though ostensibly in a
flourishing business, he was greatly distressed for money to carry on
operations which swelled beyond the reach of his capital; his fingers
itched for the sum which Lucretia had still at her disposal. But the
seeming sincerity of the man, the persuasion of his goodness, his
reputation for sanctity, deceived her; she believed herself honestly
and ardently beloved, and by one who could guide her back, if not to
happiness, at least to repose. She herself loved him not,--she could
love no more. But it seemed to her a luxury to find some one she could
trust, she could honour. If you had probed into the recesses of her mind
at that time, you would have found that no religious belief was there
settled,--only the desperate wish to believe; only the disturbance of
all previous infidelity; only a restless, gnawing desire to escape from
memory, to emerge from the gulf. In this troubled, impatient disorder
of mind and feeling, she hurried into a second marriage as fatal as the
first.
For a while she bore patiently all the privations of that ascetic
household, assisted in all those external formalities, centred all her
intellect within that iron range of existence. But no grace descended
on her soul,--no warm ray unlocked the ice of the well. Then, gradually
becoming aware of the niggardly meanness, of the harsh, uncharitable
judgments, of the decorous frauds that, with unconscious hypocrisy, her
husband concealed beneath the robes of sanctity, a weary disgust stole
over her,--it stole, it deepened, it increased; it became intolerable
when she discovered that Braddell had knowingly deceived her as to
his worldly substance. In that mood in which she had rushed into these
ominous nuptials, she had had no thought for vulgar advantages; had
Braddell been a beggar, she had married him as rashly. But he, with
the inability to comprehend a nature like hers,--dim not more to her
terrible vices than to the sinister grandeur which made their ordinary
atmosphere,--had descended cunningly to address the avarice he thought
as potent in others as himself, to enlarge on the worldly prosperity
with which Providence had blessed him; and now she saw that her dowry
alone had saved the crippled trader from the bankrupt list. With this
revolting discovery, with the scorn it produced, vanished all Lucretia’s
unstable visions of reform. She saw this man a saint amongst his
tribe, and would not believe in the virtues of his brethren, great and
unquestionable as they might have been proved to a more dispassionate
and humbler inquirer. The imposture she detected she deemed universal
in the circle in which she dwelt; and Satan once more smiled upon the
subject he regained. Lucretia became a mother; but their child formed no
endearing tie between the ill-assorted pair,--it rather embittered their
discord. Dimly even then, as she bent over the cradle, that vision,
which now, in the old house at Brompton, haunted her dreams and beckoned
her over seas of blood into the fancied future, was foreshadowed in the
face of her infant son. To be born again in that birth, to live only
in that life, to aspire as man may aspire, in that future man whom she
would train to knowledge and lead to power,--these were the feelings
with which that sombre mother gazed upon her babe. The idea that the
low-born, grovelling father had the sole right over that son’s destiny,
had the authority to cabin his mind in the walls of form, bind him down
to the sordid apprenticeship, debased, not dignified, by the solemn
mien, roused her indignant wrath; she sickened when Braddell touched her
child. All her pride of intellect, that had never slept, all her pride
of birth, long dormant, woke up to protect the heir of her ambition, the
descendant of her race, from the defilement of the father’s nurture.
Not long after her confinement, she formed a plan for escape; she
disappeared from the house with her child. Taking refuge in a cottage,
living on the sale of the few jewels she possessed, she was for some
weeks almost happy. But Braddell, less grieved by the loss than shocked
by the scandal, was indefatigable in his researches,--he discovered her
retreat. The scene between them was terrible. There was no resisting the
power which all civilized laws give to the rights of husband and father.
Before this man, whom she scorned so unutterably, Lucretia was impotent.
Then all the boiling passions long suppressed beneath that command of
temper which she owed both to habitual simulation and intense disdain,
rushed forth. Then she appalled the impostor with her indignant
denunciations of his hypocrisy, his meanness, and his guile. Then,
throwing off the mask she had worn, she hurled her anathema on his sect,
on his faith, with the same breath that smote his conscience and left it
wordless. She shocked all the notions he sincerely entertained, and he
stood awed by accusations from a blasphemer whom he dared not rebuke.
His rage broke at length from his awe. Stung, maddened by the scorn of
himself, his blood fired into juster indignation by her scoff at his
creed, he lost all self-possession and struck her to the ground. In the
midst of shame and dread at disclosure of his violence, which succeeded
the act so provoked, he was not less relieved than amazed when Lucretia,
rising slowly, laid her hand gently on his arm and said, “Repent not, it
is passed; fear not, I will be silent! Come, you are the stronger,--you
prevail. I will follow my child to your home.”
In this unexpected submission in one so imperious, Braddell’s imperfect
comprehension of character saw but fear, and his stupidity exulted in
his triumph. Lucretia returned with him. A few days afterwards Braddell
became ill; the illness increased,--slow, gradual, wearying. It broke
his spirit with his health; and then the steadfast imperiousness of
Lucretia’s stern will ruled and subjugated him. He cowered beneath her
haughty, searching gaze, he shivered at her sidelong, malignant glance;
but with this fear came necessarily hate, and this hate, sometimes
sufficing to vanquish the fear, spitefully evinced itself in thwarting
her legitimate control over her infant. He would have it (though he
had little real love for children) constantly with him, and affected to
contradict all her own orders to the servants, in the sphere in which
mothers arrogate most the right. Only on these occasions sometimes would
Lucretia lose her grim self-control, and threaten that her child yet
should be emancipated from his hands, should yet be taught the scorn for
hypocrites which he had taught herself. These words sank deep, not only
in the resentment, but in the conscience, of the husband. Meanwhile,
Lucretia scrupled not to evince her disdain of Braddell by markedly
abstaining from all the ceremonies she had before so rigidly observed.
The sect grew scandalized. Braddell did not abstain from making known
his causes of complaint. The haughty, imperious woman was condemned in
the community, and hated in the household.
It was at this time that Walter Ardworth, who was then striving to eke
out his means by political lectures (which in the earlier part of the
century found ready audience) in our great towns, came to Liverpool.
Braddell and Ardworth had been schoolfellows, and even at school embryo
politicians of congenial notions; and the conversion of the former to
one of the sects which had grown out of the old creeds, that, under
Cromwell, had broken the sceptre of the son of Belial and established
the Commonwealth of Saints, had only strengthened the republican tenets
of the sour fanatic. Ardworth called on Braddell, and was startled to
find in his schoolfellow’s wife the niece of his benefactor, Sir Miles
St. John. Now, Lucretia had never divulged her true parentage to her
husband. In a union so much beneath her birth, she had desired to
conceal from all her connections the fall of the once-honoured heiress.
She had descended, in search of peace, to obscurity; but her pride
revolted from the thought that her low-born husband might boast of her
connections and parade her descent to his level. Fortunately, as she
thought, she received Ardworth before he was admitted to her husband,
who now, growing feebler and feebler, usually kept his room. She stooped
to beseech Ardworth not to reveal her secret; and he, comprehending her
pride, as a man well-born himself, and pitying her pain, readily gave
his promise. At the first interview, Braddell evinced no pleasure in the
sight of his old schoolfellow. It was natural enough that one so precise
should be somewhat revolted by one so careless of all form. But when
Lucretia imprudently evinced satisfaction at his surly remarks on his
visitor; when he perceived that it would please her that he should not
cultivate the acquaintance offered him,--he was moved, by the spirit of
contradiction, and the spiteful delight even in frivolous annoyance, to
conciliate and court the intimacy he had at first disdained: and then,
by degrees, sympathy in political matters and old recollections of
sportive, careless boyhood cemented the intimacy into a more familiar
bond than the sectarian had contracted really with any of his late
associates.
Lucretia regarded this growing friendship with great uneasiness; the
uneasiness increased to alarm when one day, in the presence of Ardworth,
Braddell, writhing with a sudden spasm, said: “I cannot account for
these strange seizures; I think verily I am poisoned!” and his dull eye
rested on Lucretia’s pallid brow. She was unusually thoughtful for some
days after this remark; and one morning she informed her husband that
she had received the intelligence that a relation, from whom she
had pecuniary expectations, was dangerously ill, and requested his
permission to visit this sick kinsman, who dwelt in a distant county.
Braddell’s eyes brightened at the thought of her absence; with little
further questioning he consented; and Lucretia, sure perhaps that the
barb was in the side of her victim, and reckoning, it may be, on greater
freedom from suspicion if her husband died in her absence, left the
house. It was, indeed, to the neighbourhood of her kindred that she
went. In a private conversation with Ardworth, when questioning him of
his news of the present possessor of Laughton, he had informed her that
he had heard accidentally that Vernon’s two sons (Percival was not then
born) were sickly; and she went into Hampshire secretly and unknown, to
see what were really the chances that her son might yet become the lord
of her lost inheritance.
During this absence, Braddell, now gloomily aware that his days were
numbered, resolved to put into practice the idea long contemplated,
and even less favoured by his spite than justified by the genuine
convictions of his conscience. Whatever his faults, sincere at least in
his religious belief, he might well look with dread to the prospect of
the training and education his son would receive from the hands of a
mother who had blasphemed his sect and openly proclaimed her infidelity.
By will, it is true, he might create a trust, and appoint guardians to
his child. But to have lived under the same roof with his wife,--nay, to
have carried her back to that roof when she had left it,--afforded tacit
evidence that whatever the disagreement between them, her conduct could
hardly have merited her exclusion from the privileges of a mother.
The guardianship might therefore avail little to frustrate Lucretia’s
indirect contamination, if not her positive control. Besides, where
guardians are appointed, money must be left; and Braddell knew that
at his death his assets would be found insufficient for his debts. Who
would be guardian to a penniless infant? He resolved, therefore, to send
his child from his roof to some place where, if reared humbly, it might
at least be brought up in the right faith,--some place which might defy
the search and be beyond the perversion of the unbelieving mother. He
looked round, and discovered no instrument for his purpose that seemed
so ready as Walter Ardworth; for by this time he had thoroughly excited
the pity and touched the heart of that good-natured, easy man. His
representations of the misconduct of Lucretia were the more implicitly
believed by one who had always been secretly prepossessed against her;
who, admitted to household intimacy, was an eye-witness to her hard
indifference to her husband’s sufferings; who saw in her very request
not to betray her gentle birth, the shame she felt in her election; who
regarded with indignation her unfeeling desertion of Braddell in his
last moments, and who, besides all this, had some private misfortunes of
his own which made him the more ready listener to themes on the faults
of women; and had already, by mutual confidences, opened the hearts of
the two ancient schoolfellows to each other’s complaints and wrongs. The
only other confidant in the refuge selected for the child was a member
of the same community as Braddell, who kindly undertook to search for a
pious, godly woman, who, upon such pecuniary considerations as Braddell,
by robbing his creditors, could afford to bestow, would permanently
offer to the poor infant a mother’s home and a mother’s care. When this
woman was found, Braddell confided his child to Ardworth, with such
a sum as he could scrape together for its future maintenance. And to
Ardworth, rather than to his fellow-sectarian, this double trust was
given, because the latter feared scandal and misrepresentation if
he should be ostensibly mixed up in so equivocal a charge. Poor
and embarrassed as Walter Ardworth was, Braddell did not for once
misinterpret character when he placed the money in his hands; and this
because the characters we have known in transparent boyhood we have
known forever. Ardworth was reckless, and his whole life had been
wrecked, his whole nature materially degraded, by the want of common
thrift and prudence. His own money slipped through his fingers and left
him surrounded by creditors, whom, rigidly speaking, he thus defrauded;
but direct dishonesty was as wholly out of the chapter of his vices
as if he had been a man of the strictest principles and the steadiest
honour.
The child was gone, the father died, Lucretia returned, as we have seen
in Grabman’s letter, to the house of death, to meet suspicion, and cold
looks, and menial accusations, and an inquest on the dead; but through
all this the reft tigress mourned her stolen whelp. As soon as all
evidence against her was proved legally groundless, and she had leave to
depart, she searched blindly and frantically for her lost child; but in
vain. The utter and penniless destitution in which she was left by her
husband’s decease did not suffice to terminate her maddening chase. On
foot she wandered from village to village, and begged her way wherever a
false clew misled her steps.
At last, in reluctant despair, she resigned the pursuit, and found
herself one day in the midst of the streets of London, half-famished
and in rags; and before her suddenly, now grown into vigorous
youth,--blooming, sleek, and seemingly prosperous,--stood Gabriel
Varney. By her voice, as she approached and spoke, he recognized his
stepmother; and after a short pause of hesitation, he led her to his
home. It is not our purpose (for it is not necessary to those passages
of their lives from which we have selected the thread of our tale)
to follow these two, thus united, through their general career of
spoliation and crime. Birds of prey, they searched in human follies
and human errors for their food: sometimes severed, sometimes together,
their interests remained one. Varney profited by the mightier and
subtler genius of evil to which he had leashed himself; for, caring
little for luxuries, and dead to the softer senses, she abandoned to him
readily the larger share of their plunder. Under a variety of names and
disguises, through a succession of frauds, some vast and some mean, but
chiefly on the Continent, they had pursued their course, eluding all
danger and baffling all law.
Between three and four years before this period, Varney’s uncle, the
painter, by one of those unexpected caprices of fortune which sometimes
find heirs to a millionnaire at the weaver’s loom or the labourer’s
plough, had suddenly, by the death of a very distant kinsman whom he had
never seen, come into possession of a small estate, which he sold for
6,000 pounds. Retiring from all his profession, he lived as comfortably
as his shattered constitution permitted upon the interest of this sum;
and he wrote to his nephew, then at Paris, to communicate the good news
and offer the hospitality of his hearth. Varney hastened to London.
Shortly afterwards a nurse, recommended as an experienced, useful person
in her profession, by Nicholas Grabman, who in many a tortuous scheme
had been Gabriel’s confederate, was installed in the poor painter’s
house. From that time his infirmities increased. He died, as his doctor
said, “by abstaining from the stimulants to which his constitution had
been so long accustomed;” and Gabriel Varney was summoned to the reading
of the will. To his inconceivable disappointment, instead of bequeathing
to his nephew the free disposal of his 6,000 pounds, that sum was
assigned to trustees for the benefit of Gabriel and his children yet
unborn,--“An inducement,” said the poor testator, tenderly, “for the boy
to marry and reform!” So that the nephew could only enjoy the interest,
and had no control over the capital. The interest of 6,000 pounds
invested in the Bank of England was flocci nauci to the voluptuous
spendthrift, Gabriel Varney.
Now, these trustees were selected from the painter’s earlier and more
respectable associates, who had dropped him, it is true, in his days of
beggary and disrepute, but whom the fortune that made him respectable
had again conciliated. One of these trustees had lately retired to pass
the remainder of his days at Boulogne; the other was a hypochondriacal
valetudinarian,--neither of them, in short, a man of business. Gabriel
was left to draw out the interest of the money as it became periodically
due at the Bank of England. In a few months the trustee settled at
Boulogne died; the trust, of course, lapsed to Mr. Stubmore, the
valetudinarian survivor. Soon pinched by extravagances, and emboldened
by the character and helpless state of the surviving trustee, Varney
forged Mr. Stubmore’s signature to an order on the bank to sell out
such portion of the capital as his wants required. The impunity of one
offence begot courage for others, till the whole was well-nigh expended.
Upon these sums Varney had lived very pleasantly, and he saw with a deep
sigh the approaching failure of so facile a resource.
In one of the melancholy moods engendered by this reflection, Varney
happened to be in the very town in France in which the Mainwarings,
in their later years, had taken refuge, and from which Helen had been
removed to the roof of Mr. Fielden. By accident he heard the name, and,
his curiosity leading to further inquiries, learned that Helen was made
an heiress by the will of her grandfather. With this knowledge came
a thought of the most treacherous, the most miscreant, and the vilest
crime that even he yet had perpetrated; so black was it that for a while
he absolutely struggled against it. But in guilt there seems ever a
Necessity that urges on, step after step, to the last consummation.
Varney received a letter to inform him that the last surviving trustee
was no more, that the trust was therefore now centred in his son and
heir, that that gentleman was at present very busy in settling his own
affairs and examining into a very mismanaged property in Devonshire
which had devolved upon him, but that he hoped in a few months to
discharge, more efficiently than his father had done, the duties of
trustee, and that some more profitable investment than the Bank of
England would probably occur.
This new trustee was known personally to Varney,--a contemporary of his
own, and in earlier youth a pupil to his uncle. But, since then, he had
made way in life, and retired from the profession of art. This younger
Stubmore he knew to be a bustling, officious man of business, somewhat
greedy and covetous, but withal somewhat weak of purpose, good-natured
in the main, and with a little lukewarm kindness for Gabriel, as
a quondam fellow-pupil. That Stubmore would discover the fraud was
evident; that he would declare it, for his own sake, was evident also;
that the bank would prosecute, that Varney would be convicted, was no
less surely to be apprehended. There was only one chance left to the
forger: if he could get into his hands, and in time, before Stubmore’s
bustling interference, a sum sufficient to replace what had been
fraudulently taken, he might easily manage, he thought, to prevent
the forgery ever becoming known. Nay, if Stubmore, roused into strict
personal investigation by the new power of attorney which a new
investment in the bank would render necessary, should ascertain what had
occurred, his liabilities being now indemnified, and the money replaced,
Varney thought he could confidently rely on his ci-devant fellow-pupil’s
assent to wink at the forgery and hush up the matter. But this was
his only chance. How was the money to be gained? He thought of Helen’s
fortune, and the last scruple gave way to the imminence of his peril and
the urgency of his fears.
With this decision, he repaired to Lucretia, whose concurrence was
necessary to his designs. Long habits of crime had now deepened still
more the dark and stern colour of that dread woman’s sombre nature.
But through all that had ground the humanity from her soul, one human
sentiment, fearfully tainted and adulterated as it was, still struggled
for life,--the memory of the mother. It was by this, her least criminal
emotion, that Varney led her to the worst of her crimes. He offered to
sell out the remainder of the trust-money by a fresh act of forgery, to
devote such proceeds to the search for her lost Vincent; he revived
the hopes she had long since gloomily relinquished, till she began to
conceive the discovery easy and certain. He then brought before her the
prospect of that son’s succession to Laughton: but two lives now between
him and those broad lands,--those two lives associated with just cause
of revenge. Two lives! Lucretia till then did not know that Susan had
left a child, that a pledge of those nuptials, to which she imputed all
her infamy, existed to revive a jealousy never extinguished, appeal to
the hate that had grown out of her love. More readily than Varney had
anticipated, and with fierce exultation, she fell into his horrible
schemes.
Thus had she returned to England and claimed the guardianship of her
niece. Varney engaged a dull house in the suburb, and looking out for a
servant not likely to upset and betray, found the nurse who had watched
over his uncle’s last illness; but Lucretia, according to her invariable
practice, rejected all menial accomplices, reposed no confidence in
the tools of her black deeds. Feigning an infirmity that would mock all
suspicion of the hand that mixed the draught, and the step that stole to
the slumber, she defied the justice of earth, and stood alone under the
omniscience of Heaven.
Various considerations had delayed the execution of the atrocious deed
so coldly contemplated. Lucretia herself drew back, perhaps more daunted
by conscience than she herself was distinctly aware, and disguising
her scruples in those yet fouler refinements of hoped revenge which her
conversations with Varney have betrayed to the reader. The failure of
the earlier researches for the lost Vincent, the suspended activity
of Stubmore, left the more impatient murderer leisure to make the
acquaintance of St. John, steal into the confidence of Helen, and render
the insurances on the life of the latter less open to suspicion than if
effected immediately on her entrance into that shamble-house, and before
she could be supposed to form that affection for her aunt which made
probable so tender a forethought. These causes of delay now vanished,
the Parcae closed the abrupt woof, and lifted the impending shears.
Lucretia had long since dropped the name of Braddell. She shrank from
proclaiming those second spousals, sullied by the degradation to which
they had exposed her, and the suspicions implied in the inquest on her
husband, until the hour for acknowledging her son should arrive. She
resumed, therefore, the name of Dalibard, and by that we will continue
to call her. Nor was Varney uninfluential in dissuading her from
proclaiming her second marriage till occasion necessitated. If the son
were discovered, and proofs of his birth in the keeping of himself
and his accomplice, his avarice naturally suggested the expediency of
wringing from that son some pledge of adequate reward on succession to
an inheritance which they alone could secure to him; out of this fancied
fund not only Grabman, but his employer, was to be paid. The concealment
of the identity between Mrs. Braddell and Madame Dalibard might
facilitate such an arrangement. This idea Varney locked as yet in his
own breast. He did not dare to speak to Lucretia of the bargain he
ultimately meditated with her son.