Varney’s self-commune restored to him his constitutional audacity. He
returned to Laughton towards the evening, and held a long conference
with Greville. Fortunately for him, perhaps, and happily for all, Helen
had lost all more dangerous symptoms; and the physician, who was in
the house, saw in her state nothing not easily to be accounted for by
natural causes. Percival had arrived, had seen Helen,--no wonder she
was better! Both from him and from Helen, Madame Dalibard’s fearful
condition was for the present concealed. Ardworth’s story, and the fact
of Beck’s identity with Vincent Braddell, were also reserved for a later
occasion. The tale which Beck had poured into the ear of Greville (when,
recognizing the St. John livery, the captain stopped his chaise to
inquire if Percival were at the Hall, and when thrilled by the hideous
import of his broken reply, that gentleman had caused him to enter the
vehicle to explain himself further), Varney, with his wonted art and
address, contrived to strip of all probable semblance. Evidently the
poor lad had been already delirious; his story must be deemed the
nightmare of his disordered reason. Varney insisted upon surgical
examination as to the cause of his death. The membranes of the
brain were found surcharged with blood, as in cases of great mental
excitement; the slight puncture in the wrist, ascribed to the prick of
a rusty nail, provoked no suspicion. If some doubts remained still in
Greville’s acute mind, he was not eager to express, still less to
act upon them. Helen was declared to be out of danger; Percival was
safe,--why affix by minute inquiry into the alleged guilt of Madame
Dalibard (already so awfully affected by the death of her son and by the
loss of her reason) so foul a stain on the honoured family of St. John?
But Greville was naturally anxious to free the house as soon as possible
both of Varney and that ominous Lucretia, whose sojourn under its roof
seemed accursed. He therefore readily assented when Varney proposed, as
his obvious and personal duty, to take charge of his mother-in-law, and
remove her to London for immediate advice.
At the dead of the black-clouded night, no moon and no stars, the son
of Olivier Dalibard bore away the form of the once-formidable
Lucretia,--the form, for the mind was gone; that teeming, restless,
and fertile intellect, which had carried along the projects with the
preterhuman energies of the fiend, was hurled into night and chaos.
Manacled and bound, for at times her paroxysms were terrible, and all
partook of the destructive and murderous character which her faculties,
when present, had betrayed, she was placed in the vehicle by the
shrinking side of her accomplice.
Long before he arrived in London, Varney had got rid of his fearful
companion. His chaise had stopped at the iron gates of a large building
somewhat out of the main road, and the doors of the madhouse closed on
Lucretia Dalibard.
Varney then hastened to Dover, with intention of flight into France; he
was just about to step into the vessel, when he was tapped rudely on the
shoulder, and a determined voice said, “Mr. Gabriel Varney, you are my
prisoner!”
“For what? Some paltry debt?” said Varney, haughtily.
“For forgery on the Bank of England!”
Varney’s hand plunged into his vest. The officer seized it in time, and
wrested the blade from his grasp. Once arrested for an offence it
was impossible to disprove, although the very smallest of which his
conscience might charge him, Varney sank into the blackest despair.
Though he had often boasted, not only to others, but to his own vain
breast, of the easy courage with which, when life ceased to yield
enjoyment, he could dismiss it by the act of his own will; though he had
possessed himself of Lucretia’s murderous ring, and death, if fearful,
was therefore at his command,--self-destruction was the last thought
that occurred to him; that morbid excitability of fancy which, whether
in his art or in his deeds, had led him to strange delight in horror,
now served but to haunt him with the images of death in those ghastliest
shapes familiar to them who look only into the bottom of the charnel,
and see but the rat and the worm and the loathsome agencies of
corruption. It was not the despair of conscience that seized him, it was
the abject clinging to life; not the remorse of the soul,--that still
slept within him, too noble an agency for one so debased,--but the
gross physical terror. As the fear of the tiger, once aroused, is more
paralyzing than that of the deer, proportioned to the savageness of a
disposition to which fear is a novelty, so the very boldness of Varney,
coming only from the perfection of the nervous organization, and
unsupported by one moral sentiment, once struck down, was corrupted into
the vilest cowardice. With his audacity, his shrewdness forsook him.
Advised by his lawyer to plead guilty, he obeyed, and the sentence of
transportation for life gave him at first a feeling of reprieve; but
when his imagination began to picture, in the darkness of his cell,
all the true tortures of that penalty,--not so much, perhaps, to the
uneducated peasant-felon, inured to toil, and familiarized with
coarse companionship, as to one pampered like himself by all soft and
half-womanly indulgences,--the shaven hair, the convict’s dress, the
rigorous privation, the drudging toil, the exile, seemed as grim as the
grave. In the dotage of faculties smitten into drivelling, he wrote to
the Home Office, offering to disclose secrets connected with crimes that
had hitherto escaped or baffled justice, on condition that his sentence
might be repealed, or mitigated into the gentler forms of ordinary
transportation. No answer was returned to him, but his letter provoked
research. Circumstances connected with his uncle’s death, and with
various other dark passages in his life, sealed against him all hope of
a more merciful sentence; and when some acquaintances, whom his art
had made for him, and who, while grieving for his crime, saw in it
some excuses (ignorant of his feller deeds), sought to intercede in his
behalf, the reply of the Home Office was obvious: “He is a fortunate
man to have been tried and condemned for his least offence.” Not one
indulgence that could distinguish him from the most execrable ruffian
condemned to the same sentence was conceded.
The idea of the gibbet lost all its horror. Here was a gibbet for every
hour. No hope,--no escape. Already that Future Doom which comprehends
the “Forever” opened upon him black and fathomless. The hour-glass was
broken up, the hand of the timepiece was arrested. The Beyond stretched
before him without limit, without goal,--on into Annihilation or into
Hell.
EPILOGUE TO PART THE SECOND.
Stand, O Man! upon the hill-top in the stillness of the evening hour,
and gaze, not with joyous, but with contented eyes, upon the beautiful
world around thee. See where the mists, soft and dim, rise over the
green meadows, through which the rivulet steals its way. See where,
broadest and stillest, the wave expands to the full smile of the setting
sun, and the willow that trembles on the breeze, and the oak that stands
firm in the storm, are reflected back, peaceful both, from the clear
glass of the tides. See where, begirt by the gold of the harvests, and
backed by the pomp of a thousand groves, the roofs of the town bask,
noiseless, in the calm glow of the sky. Not a sound from those abodes
floats in discord to thine ear; only from the church-tower, soaring high
above the rest, perhaps faintly heard through the stillness, swells the
note of the holy bell. Along the mead low skims the swallow,--on the
wave the silver circlet, breaking into spray, shows the sport of the
fish. See the Earth, how serene, though all eloquent of activity and
life! See the Heavens, how benign, though dark clouds, by yon mountain,
blend the purple with the gold! Gaze contented, for Good is around
thee,--not joyous, for Evil is the shadow of Good! Let thy soul pierce
through the veil of the senses, and thy sight plunge deeper than the
surface which gives delight to thine eye. Below the glass of that river,
the pike darts on his prey; the circle in the wave, the soft plash
amongst the reeds, are but signs of Destroyer and Victim. In the ivy
round the oak by the margin, the owl hungers for the night, which shall
give its beak and its talons living food for its young; and the spray
of the willow trembles with the wing of the redbreast, whose bright eye
sees the worm on the sod. Canst thou count too, O Man! all the cares,
all the sins, that those noiseless rooftops conceal? With every curl of
that smoke to the sky, a human thought soars as dark, a human hope melts
as briefly. And the bell from the church-tower, that to thy ear gives
but music, perhaps knolls for the dead. The swallow but chases the
moth, and the cloud, that deepens the glory of the heaven and the sweet
shadows on the earth, nurses but the thunder that shall rend the grove,
and the storm that shall devastate the harvests. Not with fear, not with
doubt, recognize, O Mortal, the presence of Evil in the world. [Not,
indeed, that the evil here narrated is the ordinary evil of the
world,--the lesson it inculcates would be lost if so construed,--but
that the mystery of evil, whatever its degree, only increases the
necessity of faith in the vindication of the contrivance which requires
infinity for its range, and eternity for its consummation. It is in the
existence of evil that man finds his duties, and his soul its progress.]
Hush thy heart in the humbleness of awe, that its mirror may reflect as
serenely the shadow as the light. Vainly, for its moral, dost thou gaze
on the landscape, if thy soul puts no check on the dull delight of the
senses. Two wings only raise thee to the summit of Truth, where the
Cherub shall comfort the sorrow, where the Seraph shall enlighten
the joy. Dark as ebon spreads the one wing, white as snow gleams the
other,--mournful as thy reason when it descends into the deep; exulting
as thy faith when it springs to the day-star.
Beck sleeps in the churchyard of Laughton. He had lived to frustrate
the monstrous design intended to benefit himself, and to become the
instrument, while the victim, of the dread Eumenides. That done, his
life passed with the crimes that had gathered around, out of the sight
of mortals. Helen slowly regained her health in the atmosphere of love
and happiness; and Lady Mary soon learned to forget the fault of the
father in the virtues of the child. Married to Percival, Helen fulfilled
the destinies of woman’s genius, in calling forth into action man’s
earnest duties. She breathed into Percival’s warm, beneficent heart her
own more steadfast and divine intelligence. Like him she grew ambitious,
by her he became distinguished. While I write, fair children play under
the cedars of Laughton. And the husband tells the daughters to resemble
their mother; and the wife’s highest praise to the boys is: “You have
spoken truth, or done good, like your father.”
John Ardworth has not paused in his career, nor belied the promise
of his youth. Though the elder Ardworth, partly by his own exertions,
partly by his second marriage with the daughter of the French merchant
(through whose agency he had corresponded with Fielden), had realized a
moderate fortune, it but sufficed for his own wants and for the children
of his later nuptials, upon whom the bulk of it was settled. Hence,
happily perhaps for himself and others, the easy circumstances of his
father allowed to John Ardworth no exemption from labour. His success in
the single episode from active life to literature did not intoxicate
or mislead him. He knew that his real element was not in the field of
letters, but in the world of men. Not undervaluing the noble destinies
of the author, he felt that those destinies, if realized to the utmost,
demanded powers other than his own, and that man is only true to his
genius when the genius is at home in his career. He would not renounce
for a brief celebrity distant and solid fame. He continued for a few
years in patience and privation and confident self-reliance to drudge
on, till the occupation for the intellect fed by restraint, and the
learning accumulated by study, came and found the whole man developed
and prepared. Then he rose rapidly from step to step; then, still
retaining his high enthusiasm, he enlarged his sphere of action from
the cold practice of law into those vast social improvements which law,
rightly regarded, should lead and vivify and create. Then, and long
before the twenty years he had imposed on his probation had expired, he
gazed again upon the senate and the abbey, and saw the doors of the one
open to his resolute tread, and anticipated the glorious sepulchre which
heart and brain should win him in the other. John Ardworth has never
married. When Percival rebukes him for his celibacy, his lip quivers
slightly, and he applies himself with more dogged earnestness to his
studies or his career. But he never complains that his lot is lonely or
his affections void. For him who aspires, and for him who loves, life
may lead through the thorns, but it never stops in the desert.
On the minor personages involved in this history, there is little need
to dwell. Mr. Fielden, thanks to St. John, has obtained a much better
living in the rectory of Laughton, but has found new sources of pleasant
trouble for himself in seeking to drill into the mind of Percival’s
eldest son the elements of Euclid, and the principles of Latin syntax.
We may feel satisfied that the Miverses will go on much the same while
trade enriches without refining, and while, nevertheless, right feelings
in the common paths of duty may unite charitable emotions with graceless
language.
We may rest assured that the poor widow who had reared the lost son of
Lucretia received from the bounty of Percival all that could comfort her
for his death.
We have no need to track the dull crimes of Martha, or the quick,
cunning vices of Grabman, to their inevitable goals, in the hospital or
the prison, the dunghill or the gibbet.
Of the elder Ardworth our parting notice may be less brief. We first saw
him in sanguine and generous youth, with higher principles and clearer
insight into honour than William Mainwaring. We have seen him next
a spendthrift and a fugitive, his principles debased and his honour
dimmed. He presents to us no uncommon example of the corruption
engendered by that vulgar self-indulgence which mortgages the morrow
for the pleasures of to-day. No Deity presides where Prudence is absent.
Man, a world in himself, requires for the development of his faculties
patience, and for the balance of his actions, order. Even where he
had deemed himself most oppressively made the martyr,--namely, in the
profession of mere political opinions,--Walter Ardworth had but followed
out into theory the restless, uncalculating impatience which had brought
adversity on his manhood, and, despite his constitutional cheerfulness,
shadowed his age with remorse. The death of the child committed to his
charge long (perhaps to the last) embittered his pride in the son whom,
without merit of his own, Providence had spared to a brighter fate. But
for the faults which had banished him his country, and the habits which
had seared his sense of duty, could that child have been so abandoned,
and have so perished?
It remains only to cast our glance over the punishments which befell
the sensual villany of Varney, the intellectual corruption of his fell
stepmother.
These two persons had made a very trade of those crimes to which man’s
law awards death. They had said in their hearts that they would dare
the crime, but elude the penalty. By wonderful subtlety, craft, and
dexterity, which reduced guilt to a science, Providence seemed, as in
disdain of the vulgar instruments of common retribution, to concede to
them that which they had schemed for,--escape from the rope and gibbet.
Varney, saved from detection of his darker and more inexpiable crimes,
punished only for the least one, retained what had seemed to him the
master boon,--life. Safer still from the law, no mortal eye had plumbed
the profound night of Lucretia’s awful guilt. Murderess of husband and
son, the blinded law bade her go unscathed, unsuspected. Direct, as from
heaven, without a cloud, fell the thunderbolt. Is the life they have
saved worth the prizing? Doth the chalice, unspilt on the ground, not
return to the hand? Is the sudden pang of the hangman more fearful than
the doom which they breathe and bear? Look, and judge.
Behold that dark ship on the waters! Its burdens are not of Ormus and
Tyre. No goodly merchandise doth it waft over the wave, no blessing
cleaves to its sails; freighted with terror and with guilt, with remorse
and despair, or, more ghastly than either, the sullen apathy of souls
hardened into stone, it carries the dregs and offal of the old world
to populate the new. On a bench in that ship sit side by side two men,
companions assigned to each other. Pale, abject, cowering, all the
bravery rent from his garb, all the gay insolence vanished from his
brow,--can that hollow-eyed, haggard wretch be the same man whose senses
opened on every joy, whose nerves mocked at every peril? But beside him,
with a grin of vile glee on his features, all muscle and brawn in the
form, all malice, at once spiteful and dull, in the heavy eye, sits his
fit comrade, the Gravestealer! At the first glance each had recognized
each, and the prophecy and the vision rushed back upon the daintier
convict. If he seek to escape from him, the Gravestealer claims him as
a prey; he threatens him with his eye as a slave; he kicks him with his
hoof as they sit, and laughs at the writhings of the pain. Carry on your
gaze from the ship, hear the cry from the masthead, see the land arise
from the waste,--a land without hope. At first, despite the rigour of
the Home Office, the education and intelligence of Varney have their
price,--the sole crime for which he is convicted is not of the
darkest. He escapes from that hideous comrade; he can teach as
a schoolmaster,--let his brain work, not his hands. But the most
irredeemable of convicts are ever those of nurture and birth and culture
better than the ruffian rest. You may enlighten the clod, but the meteor
still must feed on the marsh; and the pride and the vanity work where
the crime itself seems to lose its occasion. Ever avid, ever grasping,
he falls, step by step, in the foul sink, and the colony sees in Gabriel
Varney its most pestilent rogue. Arch-convict amidst convicts, doubly
lost amongst the damned, they banish him to the sternest of the penal
settlements; they send him forth with the vilest to break stones upon
the roads. Shrivelled and bowed and old prematurely, see that sharp face
peering forth amongst that gang, scarcely human, see him cringe to the
lash of the scornful overseer, see the pairs chained together, night
and day! Ho, ho! his comrade hath found him again,--the Artist and the
Gravestealer leashed together! Conceive that fancy so nurtured by habit,
those tastes, so womanized by indulgence,--the one suggesting the very
horrors that are not; the other revolting at all toil as a torture.
But intellect, not all gone, though hourly dying heavily down to the
level of the brute, yet schemes for delivery and escape. Let the plot
ripen, and the heart bound; break his chain, set him free, send him
forth to the wilderness. Hark, the whoop of the wild men! See those
things that ape our species dance and gibber round the famishing, hunted
wretch. Hark, how he shrieks at the torture! How they tear and they
pinch and they burn and they rend him! They, too, spare his life,--it
is charmed. A Caliban amidst Calibans, they heap him with their burdens,
and feed him on their offal. Let him live; he loved life for himself; he
has cheated the gibbet,--LET HIM LIVE! Let him watch, let him once more
escape; all naked and mangled, let him wander back to the huts of his
gang. Lo, where he kneels, the foul tears streaming down, and cries
aloud: “I have broken all your laws, I will tell you all my crimes; I
ask but one sentence,--hang me up; let me die!” And from the gang groan
many voices: “Hang us up; let us die!” The overseer turns on his heel,
and Gabriel Varney again is chained to the laughing Gravestealer.
You enter those gates so jealously guarded, you pass, with a quick beat
of the heart, by those groups on the lawn, though they are harmless;
you follow your guide through those passages; where the open doors will
permit, you see the emperor brandish his sceptre of straw, hear the
speculator counting his millions, sigh where the maiden sits smiling the
return of her shipwrecked lover, or gravely shake the head and hurry on
where the fanatic raves his Apocalypse, and reigns in judgment on the
world; you pass by strong gates into corridors gloomier and more remote.
Nearer and nearer you hear the yell and the oath and blaspheming curse;
you are in the heart of the madhouse, where they chain those at once
cureless and dangerous,--who have but sense enough left them to smite
and to throttle and to murder. Your guide opens that door, massive as a
wall; you see (as we, who narrate, have seen her) Lucretia Dalibard,--a
grisly, squalid, ferocious mockery of a human being, more appalling
and more fallen than Dante ever fabled in his spectres, than Swift ever
scoffed in his Yahoos! Only, where all other feature seems to have lost
its stamp of humanity, still burns with unquenchable fever the red,
devouring eye. That eye never seems to sleep, or in sleep, the lid never
closes over it. As you shrink from its light, it seems to you as if the
mind, that had lost coherence and harmony, still retained latent and
incommunicable consciousness as its curse. For days, for weeks, that
awful maniac will preserve obstinate, unbroken silence; but as the eye
never closes, so the hands never rest,--they open and grasp, as if at
some palpable object on which they close, vicelike, as a bird’s talons
on its prey; sometimes they wander over that brow, where the furrows
seem torn as the thunder scars, as if to wipe from it a stain, or charm
from it a pang; sometimes they gather up the hem of that sordid robe,
and seem, for hours together, striving to rub from it a soil. Then, out
from prolonged silence, without cause or warning, will ring, peal after
peal (till the frame, exhausted with the effort sinks senseless into
stupor), the frightful laugh. But speech, intelligible and coherent,
those lips rarely yield. There are times, indeed, when the attendants
are persuaded that her mind in part returns to her; and those times
experience has taught them to watch with peculiar caution. The crisis
evinces itself by a change in the manner,--by a quick apprehension of
all that is said; by a straining, anxious look at the dismal walls; by
a soft, fawning docility; by murmured complaints of the chains that
fetter; and (though, as we have said, but very rarely) by prayers, that
seem rational, for greater ease and freedom.
In the earlier time of her dread captivity, perhaps when it was believed
at the asylum that she was a patient of condition, with friends who
cared for her state, and would liberally reward her cure, they in those
moments relaxed her confinement, and sought the gentler remedies their
art employs; but then invariably, and, it was said, with a cunning that
surpassed all the proverbial astuteness of the mad, she turned this
indulgence to the most deadly uses,--she crept to the pallet of some
adjacent sufferer weaker than herself, and the shrieks that brought the
attendants into the cell scarcely saved the intended victim from her
hands. It seemed, in those imperfectly lucid intervals, as if the reason
only returned to guide her to destroy,--only to animate the broken
mechanism into the beast of prey.
Years have now passed since her entrance within those walls. He who
placed her there never had returned. He had given a false name,--no clew
to him was obtained; the gold he had left was but the quarter’s pay.
When Varney had been first apprehended, Percival requested the younger
Ardworth to seek the forger in prison, and to question him as to Madame
Dalibard; but Varney was then so apprehensive that, even if still
insane, her very ravings might betray his share in her crimes, or still
more, if she recovered, that the remembrance of her son’s murder would
awaken the repentance and the confession of crushed despair, that the
wretch had judged it wiser to say that his accomplice was no more,--that
her insanity had already terminated in death. The place of her
confinement thus continued a secret locked in his own breast. Egotist
to the last, she was henceforth dead to him,--why not to the world?
Thus the partner of her crimes had cut off her sole resource, in the
compassion of her unconscious kindred; thus the gates of the living
world were shut to her evermore. Still, in a kind of compassion, or as
an object of experiment,--as a subject to be dealt with unscrupulously
in that living dissection-hall,--her grim jailers did not grudge her
an asylum. But, year after year, the attendance was more slovenly,
the treatment more harsh; and strange to say, while the features were
scarcely recognizable, while the form underwent all the change which
the shape suffers when mind deserts it, that prodigious vitality which
belonged to the temperament still survived. No signs of decay are yet
visible. Death, as if spurning the carcass, stands inexorably afar off.
Baffler of man’s law, thou, too, hast escaped with life! Not for thee
is the sentence, “Blood for blood!” Thou livest, thou mayst pass
the extremest boundaries of age. Live on, to wipe the blood from thy
robe,--LIVE ON!
Not for the coarse object of creating an idle terror, not for the
shock upon the nerves and the thrill of the grosser interest which the
narrative of crime creates, has this book been compiled from the
facts and materials afforded to the author. When the great German poet
describes, in not the least noble of his lyrics, the sudden apparition
of some “Monster Fate” in the circles of careless Joy, he assigns to him
who teaches the world, through parable or song, the right to invoke the
spectre. It is well to be awakened at times from the easy commonplace
that surrounds our habitual life; to cast broad and steady and patient
light on the darker secrets of the heart,--on the vaults and caverns of
the social state over which we build the market-place and the palace. We
recover from the dread and the awe and the half-incredulous wonder, to
set closer watch upon our inner and hidden selves. In him who cultivates
only the reason, and suffers the heart and the spirit to lie waste and
dead, who schemes and constructs, and revolves round the axle of self,
unwarmed by the affections, unpoised by the attraction of right, lies
the germ Fate might ripen into the guilt of Olivier Dalibard. Let him
who but lives through the senses, spreads the wings of the fancy in
the gaudy glare of enjoyment corrupted, avid to seize, and impatient
to toil, whose faculties are curbed but to the range of physical
perception, whose very courage is but the strength of the nerves, who
develops but the animal as he stifles the man,--let him gaze on the
villany of Varney, and startle to see some magnified shadow of himself
thrown dimly on the glass! Let those who, with powers to command and
passions to wing the powers, would sweep without scruple from the aim to
the end, who, trampling beneath their footprint of iron the humanities
that bloom up in their path, would march to success with the proud
stride of the destroyer, hear, in the laugh of yon maniac murderess, the
glee of the fiend they have wooed to their own souls! Guard well, O Heir
of Eternity, the portal of sin,--the thought! From the thought to the
deed, the subtler thy brain and the bolder thy courage, the briefer
and straighter is the way. Read these pages in disdain of
self-commune,--they shall revolt thee, not instruct; read them, looking
steadfastly within,--and how humble soever the art of the narrator, the
facts he narrates, like all history, shall teach by example. Every human
act, good or ill, is an angel to guide or to warn; and the deeds of the
worst have messages from Heaven to the listening hearts of the best.
Amidst the glens in the Apennine, in the lone wastes of Calabria, the
sign of the cross marks the spot where a deed of violence has been done;
on all that pass by the road, the symbol has varying effect: sometimes
it startles the conscience, sometimes it invokes the devotion; the
robber drops the blade, the priest counts the rosary. So is it with the
record of crime; and in the witness of Guilt, Man is thrilled with the
whisper of Religion.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, The fatal shadows that walk by
us still. FLETCHER.
End of Project Gutenberg’s Lucretia, Complete, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton