Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  There were two wine-glasses on the table which stood a little way behind the low chair in which Valerie was seated — very beautiful glasses, antique, exquisitely cut, and emblazoned with the arms of the De Cevennes. In one of those glasses, the one from which Gaston de Lancy had drunk, there remained a few drops of wine, and a little white sediment. Valerie did not see Raymond, as with a stealthy hand he removed this glass from the table, and put it in the pocket of his greatcoat.

  He looked once more at her as she sat with rigid mouth and staring eyes, and then he said, as he moved towards the door, —

  “I shall see you at the opera, madame! I shall be in the stalls. You will be, with more than your wonted brilliancy and beauty, the centre of observation in the box next to the King’s. Remember, that until to-night is over, your play will not be played out. Au revoir, madame. To-morrow I shall say mademoiselle! For to-morrow the secret marriage of Valerie de Cevennes with an opera-singer will only be a foolish memory of the past.”

  CHAPTER VII. THE LAST ACT OF LUCRETIA BORGIA.

  Two hours after this interview in the pavilion Raymond Marolles is seated in his old place in the front row of the stalls. Several times during the prologue and the first act of the opera his glass seeks the box next to that of the King, always to find it empty. But after the curtain has fallen on the finale to the first act, the quiet watcher raises his glass once more, and sees Valerie enter, leaning on her uncle’s arm. Her dark beauty loses nothing by its unusual pallor, and her eyes to-night have a brilliancy which, to the admiring crowd, who know so little and so little care to know the secrets of her proud soul, is very beautiful. She wears a high dress of dark green velvet, fastened at the throat with one small diamond ornament, which trembles and emits bright scintillations of rainbow light. This sombre dress, her deadly pallor, and the strange fire in her eyes, give to her beauty of to-night a certain peculiarity which renders her more than usually the observed of all observers.

  She seats herself directly facing the stage, laying down her costly bouquet, which is of one pure white, being composed entirely of orange-flowers, snowdrops, and jasmine, a mixture of winter, summer, and hot-house blossoms for which her florist knows how to charge her. She veils the intensity which is the distinctive character of her face with a weary listless glance to-night. She does not once look round the house. She has no need to look, for it seems as if without looking she can see the pale face of Monsieur Marolles, who lounges with his back to the orchestra, and his opera-glass in his hand.

  The Marquis de Cevennes glances at the programme of the opera, and rows it away from him with a dissatisfied air.

  “That abominable poisoning woman!” he says; “when will the Parisians be tired of horrors?”

  His niece raises her eyebrows slightly, but does not lift her eyelids as she says—”Ah, when, indeed!”

  “I don’t like these subjects,” continued the marquis. “Even the handling of a Victor Hugo cannot make them otherwise than repulsive: and then again, there is something to be said on the score of their evil tendency. They set a dangerous example. Lucretia Borgia, in black velvet, avenging an insult according to the rules of high art and to the music of Donizetti is very charming, no doubt; but we don’t want our wives and daughters to learn how they may poison us without fear of detection. What do you say, Rinval?” he asked, turning to a young officer who had just entered the box. Do you think I am right?”

  “Entirely, my dear marquis. The representation of such a hideous subject is a sin against beauty and innocence,” he said, bowing to Valerie. “And, though the music is very exquisite—”

  “Yes,” said Valerie, “my uncle cannot help admiring the music. How have they been singing to night?”

  “Why, strange to say, for once De Lancy has disappointed his admirers. His Gennaro is a very weak performance.”

  “Indeed!” She takes her bouquet in her hand and plays with the drooping blossom of a snowdrop. “A weak performance? You surprise me really!” She might be speaking of the flowers she holds, from the perfect indifference of her tone.

  “They say he is ill,” continues Monsieur Rinval. “He almost broke down in the ‘Pescator ignobile.’ But the curtain has risen — we shall have the poison scene soon, and you can judge for yourself.”

  She laughs. “Nay,” she says, “I have never been so enthusiastic an admirer of this young man as you are, Monsieur Rinval. I should not think the world had come to an end if he happened to sing a false note.”

  The young Parisian bent over her chair, admiring her grace and beauty — admiring, perhaps, more than all, the haughty indifference with which she spoke of the opera-singer, as if he were something too far removed from her sphere for her to be in earnest about him even for one moment. Might he not have wondered even more, if he had admired her less, could he have known that as she looked up at him with a radiant face, she could not even see him standing close beside her; that to her clouded sight the opera-house was only a confusion of waving lights and burning eyes; and that, in the midst of a chaos of blood and fire, she saw the vision of her lover and her husband dying by the hand that had caressed him?

  “Now for the banquet scene,” exclaimed Monsieur Rinval.

  “Ah! there is Gennaro. Is he not gloriously handsome in ruby velvet and gold? That clubbed Venetian wig becomes him. It is a wig. I suppose.”

  “Oh, no doubt. That sort of people owe half their beauty to wigs, and white and red paint, do they not?” she asked, I contemptuously; and even as she spoke she was thinking of the dark hair which her white fingers had smoothed away from the broad brow so often, in that time which, gone by a few short days, seemed centuries ago to her. She had suffered the anguish of a life-time in losing the bright dream of her life.

  “See,” said Monsieur Rinval, “Gennaro has the poisoned goblet in his hand. He is acting very badly. He is supporting himself with one hand on the back of that chair, though he has not yet drunk the fatal draught.”

  De Lancy was indeed leaning on an antique stage-chair for support. Once he passed his hand across his forehead, as if to collect his scattered senses, but he drank the wine, and went on with the music. Presently, however, every performer in the orchestra looked up as if thunderstruck. He had left off singing in the middle of a concerted piece; but the Maffeo Orsini took up the passage, and the opera proceeded.

  “He is either ill, or he does not know the music,” said Monsieur Rinval. “If the last, it is really shameful; and he presumes on the indulgence of the public.”

  “It is always the case with these favourites, is it not?” asked Valerie.

  At this moment the centre of the stage was thrown open. There entered first a procession of black and shrouded monks singing a dirge. Next, pale, haughty, and vengeful, the terrible Lucretia burst upon the scene.

  Scornful and triumphant she told the companions of Gennaro that their doom was sealed, pointing to where, in the ghastly background, were ranged five coffins, waiting for their destined occupants. The audience, riveted by the scene, awaited that thrilling question of Gennaro, “Then, madame, where is the sixth?” and as De Lancy emerged from behind his comrades every eye was fixed upon him.

  He advanced towards Lucretia, tried to sing, but his voice broke on the first note; he caught with his hand convulsively at his throat, staggered a pace or two forward, and then fell heavily to the floor. There was immediate consternation and confusion on the stage; chorus and singers crowded round him; one of the singers knelt down by his side, and raised his head. As he did so, the curtain fell suddenly.

  “I was certain he was ill,” said Monsieur Rinval, “I fear it must be apoplexy.”

  “It is rather an uncharitable suggestion,” said the marquis; “but do you not think it just possible that the young man may be tipsy?”

  There was a great buzz of surprise amongst the audience, and in about three minutes one of the performers came before the curtain, and announced that in consequence of the sudden and alarming illness of Mons
ieur de Lancy it was impossible to conclude the opera. He requested the indulgence of the audience for a favourite ballet which would commence immediately.

  The orchestra began the overture of the ballet, and several of the audience rose to leave the house.

  “Will you stop any longer, Valerie? or has this dismal finale dispirited you?” said the marquis.

  “A little,” said Valerie; “besides, we have promised to look in at Madame de Vermanville’s concert before going to the Duchess’s ball.”

  Monsieur Rinval helped to muffle her in her cloak, and then offered her his arm. As they passed from the great entrance to the carriage of the marquis, Valerie dropped her bouquet. A gentleman advanced from the crowd and restored it to her.

  “I congratulate you alike on your strength of mind, as on your beauty, mademoiselle!” he said, in a whisper too low for her companions to hear, but with a terrible emphasis on the last word.

  As she stepped into the carriage, she heard a bystander say —

  “Poor fellow, only seven-and-twenty! And so marvellously handsome and gifted!”

  “Dear me,” said Monsieur Rinval, drawing up the carriage window, “how very shocking! De Lancy is dead!”

  Valerie did not utter one exclamation at this announcement. She was looking steadily out of the opposite window. She was counting the lamps in the streets through the mist of a winter’s night.

  “Only twenty-seven!” she cried hysterically, “only twenty-seven! It might have been thirty-seven, forty-seven, fifty-seven! But he despised her love; he trampled out the best feelings of her soul; so it was only twenty-seven! Marvellously handsome, and only twenty-seven!”

  “For heaven’s sake open the windows and stop the carriage, Rinval!” cried the marquis—”I’m sure my niece is ill.” She burst into a long, ringing laugh.

  “My dear uncle, you are quite mistaken. I never was better in my life; but it seems to me as if the death of this opera-singer has driven everybody mad.”

  They drove rapidly home, and took her into the house. The maid Finette begged that her mistress might be carried to the Pavilion, but the marquis overruled her, and had his niece taken into her old suite of apartments in the mansion. The first physicians in Paris were sent for, and when they came they pronounced her to be seized by a brain-fever, which promised to be a very terrible one.

  CHAPTER VIII. BAD DREAMS AND A WORSE WAKING.

  The sudden and melancholy death of Gaston de Lancy caused a considerable sensation throughout Paris; more especially as it was attributed by many to poison. By whom administered, or from what motive, none could guess. There was one story, however, circulated that was believed by, some people, though it bore very little appearance of probability. It was reported that on the afternoon preceding the night on which De Lancy died, a stranger had obtained admission behind the scenes of the opera-house, and had been seen in earnest conversation with the man whose duty it was to provide the goblets of wine for the poison scene in Lucretia Borgia. Some went so far as to say, that this stranger had bribed the man to put the contents of a small packet into the bottom of the glass given on the stage to De Lancy. But so improbable a story was believed by very few, and, of course, stoutly denied by the man in question. The doctors attributed the death of the young man to apoplexy. There was no inquest held on his remains; and at the wish of his mother he was buried at Rouen, and his funeral was no doubt a peculiarly quiet one, for no one was allowed to know when the ceremonial took place. Paris soon forgot its favourite. A few engravings of him, in one or two of his great characters, lingered for some time in the windows of the fashionable print-shops. Brief memoirs of him appeared in several papers, and in one or two magazines; and in a couple of weeks he was forgotten. If he had been a great general, or a great minister, it is possible that he would not have been remembered much longer. The new tenor had a fair complexion and blue eyes, and had two extra notes of falsetto. So the opera-house was as brilliant as ever, though there was for the time being a prejudice among opera-goers and opera-singers against Lucretia Borgia, and that opera was put on the shelf for the remainder of the season.

  A month after the death of De Lancy the physician pronounced Mademoiselle de Cervennes sufficiently recovered to be removed from Paris to her uncle’s château in Normandy. Her illness had been a terrible one. For many days she had been delirious. Ah, who shall paint the fearful dreams of that delirium! — dreams, of the anguish of which her disjointed sentences could tell so little? The face of the man she had loved had haunted her in ever phase, wearing every expression — now thoughtful, now sparkling with vivacity, now cynical, now melancholy; but always distinct and palpable, and always before her night and day. The scene of her first meeting with him; her secret marriage; the little chapel a few miles out of Paris; the old priest; the bitter discovery in the Bois de Boulogne — the scene of his treachery; the lamp-lit apartment of Monsieur de Blurosset; the cards and the poisons. Eve action of this dark period of her life she acted over in her disordered brain again and again a hundred times through the long day, and a hundred times more through the still longer night. So when at the expiration of a month, she was strong enough to walk from one room into another, it was but a wreck of his proud and lovely heiress which met her uncle’s eyes.

  The château of the marquis, some miles from the town of Caen, was situated in a park which was as wild and uncultivated as a wood. A park full of old timber, and marshy reedy grounds dotted with pools of stagnant water, which in the good days of the old régime were beaten nightly by the submissive peasantry, that monseigneur, the marquis might sleep on his bedstead of ormolu and buhl à la Louis Quatorze, undisturbed by the croaking of the frogs.

  Everything around was falling into ruin; the château had been sacked, and one wing of it burnt down, in the year 1793 and the present marquis, then a very little boy, had fled with his father to the hospitable shores of England, where for more than twenty years of his life he had lived in poverty and obscurity, teaching sometimes his native language, sometimes mathematics, sometimes music, sometimes one thing, sometimes another, for his daily bread. But with the restoration of the Bourbons came the restoration of the marquis to title and fortune. A wealthy marriage with the widow of a rich Buonapartist restored the house of De Cevennes to its former grandeur; and looking now at the proud and stately head of that house, it was a difficult thing to imagine that this man had ever taught French, music, and mathematics, for a few shillings a lesson, in the obscure academies of an English manufacturing town.

  The dreary park, which surrounded the still more dreary and tumble-down château, was white with the fallen snow, through which the servants, or their servants the neighbouring peasantry, coming backwards and forwards with some message or commission from the village, waded knee-deep, or well nigh lost themselves in some unsuspected hollow where the white drifts had swept and lay collected in masses whose depth was dangerous. The dark oak-panelled apartments appropriated to Valerie looked out upon the snow-clad wilderness; and very dismal they seemed in the dying February day.

  Grim pictures of dead-and-gone branches of this haughty house stared and frowned from their heavy frames at the pale girl, half seated, half reclining in a great easy-chair in the deep embayed window. One terrible mail-clad baron, who had fought and fallen at disastrous Agincourt, held an uplifted axe, and in the evening shadow it seemed to Valerie as if he raised it with a threatening glance beneath his heavy brows, which took a purpose and a meaning as the painted eyes met hers. And turn which way she would, the eyes of these dark portraits seemed to follow her; sometimes threateningly, some times reproachfully, sometimes with a melancholy look fraught with a strange and ominous sadness that chilled her to the soul.

  Logs of wood burned on the great hearth, supported by massive iron dogs, and their flickering light falling now here now there, left always the corners of the large room in shadow. The chill white night looking in at the high window strove with the fire light for mastery, and won it, so that the
cheery beams playing bo-peep among the quaint oak carving of the panelled walls and ceiling hid themselves unabashed before the chill stare of the cold steel-blue winter sky. The white face of the sick girl under this dismal light looked almost as still and lifeless as the face of her grandmother, in powder and patches, simpering down at her from the wall. She sat alone — no book near her, no sign of any womanly occupation in the great chamber, no friend to watch or tend her (for she had refused all companionship); she sat with listless hands drooping upon the velvet cushions of her chair, her head thrown back, as if in utter abandonment of all things on the face of the wide earth, and her dark eyes staring straight before her out into the dead waste of winter snow.

  So she has sat since early morning; so she will sit till her maid comes to her and leads her to her dreary bedchamber. So she sits when her uncle visits her, and tries every means in his power to awaken a smile, or bring one look of animation into that dead face. Yes, it is the face of a dead woman. Dead to hope, dead to love, dead to the past; still more utterly dead to a future, which, since it cannot restore the dead, can give her nothing.

  So the short February days, which seem so long to her, fade into the endless winter nights; and for her the morning has no light, nor the darkness any shelter. The consolations of that holy Church, on which for ages past her ancestors have leant for succour as on a rock of mighty and eternal strength, she dare not seek. Her uncle’s chaplain, a white-haired old man who had nursed her in his arms a baby, and who resides at the château, beloved and honoured by all around, comes to her every morning, and on each visit tries anew to win her confidence; but in vain. How can she pour into the ears of this good and benevolent old man her dismal story? Surely he would cast her from him with contumely and horror. Surely he would tell her that for her there is no hope; that even a merciful Heaven, ready to hear the prayer of every sinner, would be deaf to the despairing cries of such a guilty wretch as she.