The mention of the name of Gaston de Lancy, the man she so dearly and devotedly loved, has a power that nothing else on earth has over Valerie, and she breaks into a passionate torrent of tears.
Laurent Blurosset looks on silently at this burst of anguish; perhaps he regards it as a man of science, and can calculate to a moment how long it will last.
The Indian officer, in the shadow of the doorway, is more affected than the chemist and philosopher, for he falls on his knees by the threshold and hides his pale face in his hands.
There in a silence of perhaps five minutes — a terrible silence, it seems, only broken by the heartrending sobs of this despairing woman. At last Laurent Blurosset speaks — speaks in a tone in which she has never heard him speak before — in a tone in which, probably, very few have heard him speak — in a tone so strange to him and his ordinary habits that it in a manner transforms him into a new man.
“You say, madame, I was an accomplice of this man’s. How if he did not condescend to make me an accomplice? How, if this gentleman, who, owing all his success in life to his unassisted villany, has considerable confidence in his own talents, did not think me worthy of the honour of being his accomplice?”
“How, monsieur?”
“No, madame; Laurent Blurosset was not a man for the brilliant Parisian adventurer Raymond Marolles to enlist as a colleague. No, Laurent Blurosset was merely a philosopher, a physiologist, a dreamer, a little bit of a madman, and but a poor puppet in the hands of the man of the world, the chevalier of fortune, the unscrupulous and designing Englishman.”
“An Englishman?”
“Yes, madame; that is one of your husband’s secrets: he is an Englishman. I was not clever enough to be the accomplice of Monsieur Marolles; in his opinion I was not too clever to become his dupe.”
“His dupe?”
“Yes, madame, his dupe. His contempt for the man of science was most supreme: I was a useful automaton — nothing more. The chemist, the physiologist, the man whose head had grown gray in the pursuit of an inductive science — whose nights and days had been given to the study of the great laws of cause and effect — was a puppet in the hands of the chevalier of fortune, and as little likely to fathom his motives as the wooden doll is likely to guess those of the showman who pulls the strings that make it dance. So thought Raymond Marolles, the adventurer, the fortune-hunter, the thief, the murderer!”
“What, monsieur, you knew him, then?”
“To the very bottom of his black heart, madame. Science would indeed have been a lie, wisdom would indeed have been a chimera, if I could not have read through the low cunning of the superficial showy adventurer, as well as I can read the words written in yonder book through the thin veil of a foreign. character. I, his dupe, as he thought — the learned fool at whose labours he laughed, even while he sought to avail himself of their help — I laughed at him in turn, read every motive; but let him laugh on, lie on, till the time at which it should be my pleasure to lift the mask, and say to him—’Raymond Marolles, charlatan! liar! fool! dupe! in the battle between Wisdom and Cunning the gray-eyed goddess is the conqueror.’”
“What, monsieur? Then you are doubly a murderer. You knew this man, and yet abetted him in the vilest plot by which a wretched woman was ever made to destroy the man she loved a thousand times better than her worthless self!”
Laurent Blurosset smiled a most impenetrable smile.
“I acted for a purpose, madame. I wished to test the effects of a new poison. Yours the murder — if there was a murder; not mine. You asked me for a weapon; I put it into your hands; I did not compel you to use it.”
“No, monsieur; but you prompted me. If there is justice on earth, you shall suffer for that act as well as Monsieur Marolles; if not, there is justice in heaven! God’s punishments are more terrible than those of men, and you have all the more cause to tremble, you and the wretch whose accomplice you were — whose willing accomplice, by your own admission, you were.”
“And yourself, madame? In dragging us to justice, may you not yourself suffer?”
“Suffer!” She laughs a hollow bitter peal of mocking laughter, painful to hear; very painful to the ears of the listener in the shadow, whose face is still buried in his hands. “Suffer! No, Monsieur Blurosset, for me on earth there is no more suffering. If in hell the wretches doomed to eternal punishment suffer as I have suffered for the last eight years, as punishment on that winter’s night when the man I loved died, then, indeed, God is an avenging Deity. Do you think the worst the law can inflict upon me for that guilty deed is by one thousandth degree equal to the anguish of my own mind, every day and every hour? Do you think I fear disgrace? Disgrace! Bah! What is it? There never was but one being on earth whose good opinion I valued, or whose bad opinion I feared. That man I murdered. You think I fear the world? The world to me was him; and he is dead. If you do not wish to be denounced as the accomplice of a murderess and her accomplice, do not let me quit this room; for, by the heaven above me, so surely as I quit this room alive I go to deliver you, Raymond Marolles, and myself into the hands of justice!”
“And your son, madame — what of him?”
“I have made arrangements for his future happiness, monsieur. He will return to France, and be placed under the care of my uncle.”
For a few moments there is silence. Laurent Blurosset seems lost in thought. Valerie sits with her bright hollow eyes fixed on the flickering flame of the low fire. Blurosset is the first to speak.
“You say, madame, that if I do not wish to be given up to justice as the accomplice of a murderer, I shall not suffer you to leave this room, but sacrifice you to the preservation of my own safety. Nothing more easy, madame; I have only to raise my hand — to wave a handkerchief, medicated in the manner of those the Borgias and Medicis used of old, before your face; to scatter a few grains of powder into that fire at your feet; to give you a book to read, a flower to smell; and you do not leave this room alive. And this is how I should act, if I were, what you say I am, the accomplice of a murderer.”
“How, monsieur! — you had no part in the murder of my husband? — you, who gave me the drug which killed him?”
“You jump at conclusions, madame. How do you know that the drug which I gave you killed Gaston de Lancy?”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, do not juggle with me, Monsieur. Speak! What do you mean?”
“Simply this, madame. That the death of your husband on the evening of the day on which you gave him the drugged wine may have been — a coincidence.”
“Oh, monsieur! in mercy—”
“Nay, madame, it was a coincidence. The drug I gave you was not a poison. You are guiltless of your husband’s death.”
“Oh, heaven be praised! Merciful heaven be praised!” She falls on her knees, and buries her head in her hands in a wild burst of tearful thanksgiving.
While her face is thus hidden, Blurosset takes from a little cabinet on one side of the fireplace a handful of a light-coloured powder, which he throws upon the expiring cinders in the grate. A lurid flame blazes up, illuminating the room with a strange unnatural glare.
“Valerie, Countess de Marolles,” he says, in a tone of solemn earnestness, “men say I am a magician — a sorcerer — a disciple of the angel of darkness! Nay, some more foolish than the rest have been so blasphemous as to declare that I have power to raise the dead. Yours is no mind to be fooled by such shallow lies as these. The dead never rise again in answer to the will of mortal man. Lift your head, Valerie — not Countess de Marolles. I no longer call you by that name, which is in itself a falsehood. Valerie de Lancy, look yonder!”
He points in the direction of the open door. She rises, looks towards the threshold, staggers a step forward, utters one long wild shriek, and falls senseless to the floor.
In all the agonies she has endured, in all the horrors through which she has passed, she has never before lost her senses. The cause must indeed be a powerful one.
BOOK THE S
IXTH. ON THE TRACK.
CHAPTER I. FATHER AND SON.
THREE days have passed since the interview of Valerie with Laurent Blurosset, and Raymond de Marolles paces up and down his study in Park Lane. He is not going to the bank to-day. The autumn rains beat in against the double windows of the apartment, which is situated at the back of the house, looking out upon a small square patch of so-called garden. This garden is shut in by a wall, over which a weak-minded and erratic-looking creeper sprawls and straggles; and there is a little green door in this wall, which communicates with a mews.
A hopelessly wet day. Twelve by the clock, and not enough blue in the gloomy sky to make the smallest article of wearing apparel — no, not so much as a pair of wristbands for an unhappy seaman. Well to be the Count de Marolles, and to have no occasion to extend one’s walk beyond the purple-and-crimson border of that Turkey carpet on such a day as this! The London sparrows, transformed for the time being into a species of water-fowl, flutter dismally about the small swamp of grassplot, flanked here and there by a superannuated clump of withered geraniums which have evidently seen better days. The sparrows seem to look enviously at the bright blaze reflected on the double windows of the Count’s apartment, and would like, perhaps, to go in and sit on the hob; and I dare say they twitter to each other, in confidence, “A fine thing to be the Count de Marolles, with a fortune which it would take the lifetime of an Old Parr to calculate, and a good fire in wet weather.”
Yet, for all this, Raymond de Marolles does not look the most enviable object in creation on this particular rainy morning. His pale fair face is paler than ever; there are dark circles round the blue eyes, and a nervous and incessant twitching of the thin lower lip — signs which never were, and never will be, indications of a peaceful mind. He has not seen Valerie since the night on which Monsieur Paul Moucée, alias Signor Mosquetti, told his story. She has remained secluded in her own apartments; and even Raymond de Marolles has scarce cared to break upon the solitude of this woman, in whom grief is so near akin to desperation.
“What will she do, now she knows all? Will she denounce me? If she does, I am prepared. If Blurosset, poor scientific fool, only plays his part faithfully, I am safe. But she will hardly reveal the truth. For her son’s sake she will be silent. Oh, strange, inexplicable, and mysterious chance, that this fortune for which I have so deeply schemed, for which I have hazarded so much and worked so hard, should be my own — my own! — this woman a mere usurper, and I the rightful heir to the wealth of the De Cevennes! What is to be done? For the first time in my life I am at fault. Should I fly to the Marquis — tell him I am his son? — difficult to prove, now that old hag is dead; and even if I prove it — as I would move heaven and earth to do — what if she denounce me to her uncle, and he refuse to acknowledge the adventurer, the poisoner? I could soon silence her. But unfortunately she has been behind the scenes, and I fear she would scarcely accept a drop of water from the hands of her devoted husband. If I had any one to help me! But I have no one; no one that I can trust — no one in my power. Oh, Laurent Blurosset, for some of your mighty secrets, so that the very autumn wind blowing in at her window might seal the lips of my beautiful cousin for ever!”
Pleasant thoughts to be busy with this rainy autumn day; but such thoughts are by no means unfamiliar to the heart of Raymond de Marolles.
It is from a reverie such as this that he is aroused by the sound of carriage-wheels, and a loud knocking and ringing at the hall door. “Too early for morning callers. Who can it be at such an hour? Some one from the bank, perhaps?” He paces up and down the room rather anxiously, wondering who this unexpected visitor might be, when the groom of the chambers opens the door and announces, “The Marquis de Cevennes!”
“So, then,” mutters Raymond, “she has played her first card — she has sent for her uncle. We shall have need of all our brains to-day. Now then, to meet my father face to face.”
As he speaks, the Marquis enters.
Face to face — father and son. Sixty years of age — fair and pale, blue eyes, aquiline nose, and thin lips. Thirty years of age — fair and pale, blue eyes, aquiline nose, and thin lips again; and neither of the two faces to be trusted; not one look of truth, not one glance of benevolence, not one noble expression in either. Truly father and son — all the world over, father and son.
“Monsieur le Marquis affords me an unexpected honour and pleasure,” said Raymond Marolles, as he advanced to receive his visitor.
“Nay, Monsieur de Marolles, scarcely, I should imagine, unexpected; I come in accordance with the earnest request of my niece; though what that most erratic young lady can want with me in this abominable country of your adoption is quite beyond my poor comprehension.”
Raymond draws a long breath. “So,” he thinks, “he knows nothing yet. Good! You are slow to play your cards, Valerie. I will take the initiative; my leading trump shall commence the game.”
“I repeat,” said the Marquis, throwing himself into the easy-chair which Raymond had wheeled forward, and warming his delicate white hands before the blazing fire; “I repeat, that the urgent request of my very lovely but extremely erratic niece, that I should cross the Channel in the autumn of a very stormy year — I am not a good sailor — is quite beyond my comprehension.” He wears a very magnificent emerald ring, which is too large for the slender third finger of his left hand, and he amuses himself by twisting it round and round, sometimes stopping to contemplate the effect of it with the plain gold outside, when it looks like a lady’s wedding-ring. “It is, I positively assure you,” he repeated, looking at the ring, and not at Raymond, “utterly beyond the limited powers of my humble comprehension.”
Raymond looks very grave, and takes two or three turns up and down the room. The light-blue eyes of the Marquis follow him for a turn and a half-find the occupation monotonous, and go back to the ring and the white hand, always interesting objects for contemplation. Presently the Count de Marolles stops, leans on the easy-chair on the opposite side of the fireplace to that on which the Marquis is seated, and says, in a very serious tone of voice —
“Monsieur de Cevennes, I am about to allude to a subject of so truly painful and distressing a nature, both for you to hear and for me to speak of, that I almost fear adverting to it.”
The Marquis has been so deeply interested in the ring, emerald outwards, that he has evidently heard the words of Raymond without comprehending their meaning; but he looks up reflectively for a moment, recalls them, glances over them afresh as it were, nods, and says —
“Oh, ah! Distressing nature; you fear adverting to it — eh! Pray don’t agitate yourself, my good De Marolles. I don’t think it likely you’ll agitate me.” He leaves the ring for a minute or two, and looks over the five nails on his left hand, evidently in search of the pinkest; finds it on the third finger, and caresses it tenderly, while awaiting Raymond’s very painful communication.
“You said, Monsieur le Marquis, that you were utterly at a loss to comprehend my wife’s motive in sending for you in this abrupt manner?”
“Utterly. And I assure you I am a bad sailor — a very bad sailor. When the weather’s rough, I am positively compelled to — it is really so absurd,” he says, with a light clear laugh—”I am obliged to — to go to the side of the vessel. Both undignified and disagreeable, I give you my word of honour. But you were saying—”
“I was about to say, monsieur, that it is my deep grief to have to state that the conduct of your niece has been for the last few months in every way inexplicable — so much so, that I have been led to fear—”
“What, monsieur?” The Marquis folds his white hands one over the other on his knee, leaves off the inspection of their beauties, and looks full in the face of his niece’s husband.
“I have been led, with what grief I need scarcely say—”
“Oh, no, indeed; pray reserve the account of your grief — your grief must have been so very intense. You have been led to fear—”
; “That my unhappy wife is out of her mind.”
“Precisely. I thought that was to be the climax. My good Monsieur Raymond, Count de Marolles — my very worthy Monsieur Raymond Marolles — my most excellent whoever and whatever you may be — do you think that Rene Theodore Auguste Philippe Le Grange Martel, Marquis de Cevennes, is the sort of man to be twisted round your fingers, however clever, unscrupulous, and designing a villain you may be?”
“Monsieur le Marquis!”
“I have not the least wish to quarrel with you, my good friend. Nay, on the contrary, I will freely confess that I am not without a certain amount of respect for you. You are a thorough villain. Everything thorough is, in my mind, estimable. Virtue is said to be in the golden mean — virtue is not in my way; I therefore do not dispute the question — but to me all mediums are contemptible. You are, in your way, thorough; and, on the whole, I respect you.”
He goes back to the contemplation of his hands and his rings, and concentrates all his attention on a cameo head of Mark Antony, which he wears on his little finger.
“A villain, Monsieur le Marquis!”
“And a clever villain, Monsieur de Marolles — a clever villain! Witness your success. But you are not quite clever enough to hoodwink me — not quite clever enough to hoodwink any one blest with a moderate amount of brains!”
“Monsieur!”
“Because you have one fault. Yes, really,” — he flicks a grain of dust out of Mark Antony’s eye with his little finger—”yes, you have one fault. You are too smooth. Nobody ever was so estimable as you appear to be — you over-do it. If you remember,” continues the Marquis, addressing him in an easy, critical, and conversational tone, “the great merit in that Venetian villain in the tragedy of the worthy but very much over-rated person, William Shakspeare, is, that he is not smooth. Othello trusts Iago, not because he is smooth, but because he isn’t. ‘I know this fellow’s of exceeding honesty,’ says the Moor; as much as to say, ‘He’s a disagreeable beast, but I think trustworthy.’ You are a very clever fellow, Monsieur Raymond de Marolles, but you would never have got Desdemona smothered. Othello would have seen through you — as I did!”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 34
