“These memories were of an older date. They went back to the last century, when you were a youth and a student, an adept in chemistry, I am told.”
Fétis started, and turned towards his interlocutor with an ashen countenance, the snuffbox shaking in his tremulous hand.
“Who told you that?” he asked; “who remembers me so long?”
“An old Venetian who happened to hear of you at that time, and who is one of my most intimate friends.”
“Will your lordship tell me his name?”
He had recovered himself by this time, and had closed the snuffbox, not without spilling a slight shower of the scented mixture upon his olive-silk knee-breeches.
“Borromeo.”
Fétis shook his head.
“I have no memory of such a person. Yes, my lord, I was in Venice forty years ago as a travelling secretary to Mr. Topsparkle. We were both young men in those days, and I was more of a student than I have ever been since that time. The world soon drew me from the study of science; but at three-and-twenty I was full of enthusiasm, hoped to discover the philosopher’s stone, to make myself as powerful as Dr. Faustus. Idle dreams, my lord. The world is wiser nowadays. I am told that Sir Richard Steele was the last person who ever cultivated the necromantic arts in England, and that he set up his laboratory at Islington. But even he learnt to laugh at his own delusions.”
“But there are more practical studies for the chemist than the arts of Paracelsus or the Geber Arabs,” said Lavendale lightly. “My informant told me that you had the repute of being a great toxicologist.”
Fétis looked at the speaker intently, but did not answer for the moment. He seemed sunk in a reverie.
“Borromeo,” he muttered to himself; “I know no such name.”
“Fétis, the deal is yours,” cried Mr. Spencer, and Fétis took the cards with a mechanical air, and went on with the game.
Lavendale was satisfied. He had gone far enough for a first attack, and he had seen enough in the manner and expression of the man to assure him that Vincenti’s story was true.
“And the woman I love is married to a secret assassin!” he thought despairingly, “and when I might have plucked her out of that hell yonder, I drew back and left her there at peril of her life! If he was capable of murdering that early victim of his forty years ago, at what crime would he stop now, hardened and emboldened by a long life of wickedness? She has but to go a step too far — provoke his jealousy beyond endurance — and Mr. Fétis and his black art may be invoked again. Fool that I was to leave her in his power, and yet—” And yet he felt that the alternative might have been worse — to ally her to a fast vanishing life, to leave her with a dishonoured name, ruined in worldly circumstance, widowed in heart without a widow’s title of honour, desolate, unpitied, to wander about the Continent in fourth-rate society — an outcast — as the Duke of Wharton was wandering now. No, that would have been a moral murder, worse than the hazard of Topsparkle’s revenge. Again, there was always this to be considered — that, although a nameless foreign mistress might be murdered almost with impunity, it would be a very perilous matter to make away with an English lady of rank.
“No, she is safe,” reflected Lavendale, “and if she is unhappy she wears her rue with a difference — everybody thinks her the gayest and luckiest of women. I will not waste my pity upon her.”
Before the entertainment was over, his lordship and Mr. Fétis were on the friendliest terms.
“You must visit me in Bloomsbury Square, Monsieur Fétis,” said Lavendale. “The house is not without interest, for ’twas a chosen resort of the Whigs in Godolphin’s time, and it has seen some curious meetings at the beginning of the late king’s reign.”
“I shall be proud to wait upon your lordship.”
“Say you so; then name your evening to sup with me. Shall it be to-morrow?”
“If your lordship has no better occupation.”
“I could have none better. Your mind is a treasury of interesting facts, Mr. Fétis, and your conversation is the best entertainment I can imagine for an idle hour after supper. I want to talk with you of my poor friend Wharton. He and I have been companions in many a revel in London and Vienna; and ’tis sad to think that fiery comet should have plunged so fast into space and darkness, a burnt-out shell.”
“His grace was one of my most generous friends and patrons, and I mourn for him as for a son,” said Fétis.
Lavendale went home in a thoughtful mood, and was glad to find lights burning in Durnford’s study, and that his friend was sitting up late to finish his newspaper work, after a long afternoon at the House. Herrick and Irene were still his lordship’s guests, and he was very loth to part with them; but they had found a cottage at Battersea, with a garden sloping to the river, not far from that big house of Lord St. John’s which dominated the village. The cottage was in a wretched state of repair, and a month or more must elapse before it could be made habitable; but to Herrick and Irene there was rapture in the idea of this modest home which was to be all their own, maintained by the husband’s industry, brightened and beautified by the young wife’s care.
Mdlle. Latour was in possession already, living in the one habitable room, and superintending the repairs and improvements. She was installed as Irene’s housekeeper, with a stout servant-girl for the rest of the establishment.
Lavendale was vexed that his friend should not be content to share his home in London and Surrey.
“’Tis churlish of you to go and build your own nest four miles off, and leave me to the desolation of empty rooms and echoing passages,” he complained. “Pray, have I been over-officious in my hospitality, or intrusive of my company? Have I ever disturbed your billing and cooing?”
“You have done all that hospitality and delicatest feeling could do to make us happy, dear Jack,” returned Herrick warmly; “but it is not well for any man to set up his Lares and Penates under another man’s roof. The sense of independence, the burden of bread-winning, is the one attribute of manhood which no man dare surrender, least of all when he has a dear soul dependent upon him. What would the world say, d’ye think, were my wife and I to riot in luxury at your cost?”
“Damn the world!”
“Ay, Jack, I could afford to say that while I was a bachelor; but for my wife’s sake I must truckle to the town, and do nothing to forfeit the most pragmatical person’s good opinion. Do you think I shall love you less when I am living at Battersea?”
“I know that I shall have less of your society — that when my dark hour is on there will be no one to cheer me.”
“Order your horse and ride to Battersea whenever the dark hour comes. The ride will do you good, and you shall have a loving welcome and a decent meal, come when you may. We shall always keep open house for you.”
“And I shall visit you so often as to make you heartily sick of me. Good God, Herrick, how I envy you your happiness, your future with its fulness of hope; while for me there is nothing—”
Herrick clasped his hand without a word; that honest affectionate grasp was all the comfort he could offer to one whose wasted life and broken constitution left scarce the possibility of hope on this side of the grave; and to suggest spiritual consolation at all times and seasons was not in Herrick’s line. He knew too well that no man could be preached into piety.
Lavendale went straight to the room where his friend was at work, and told him of his evening in Poland Street, and of his invitation to Fétis. He had told Herrick all the facts in Vincenti’s narrative, and the two had discussed the story together. Herrick was keenly interested, and it was partly on his suggestion that Lavendale had made himself familiar with the Fétis establishment.
“Let him come to-morrow night by all means,” he said eagerly, “and if we lay our heads together meanwhile, we might, I think, with Irene’s help, frighten the wretch into a confession.”
“What, after forty years of secrecy, after having so hardened himself in crime!”
�
��Well, say an admission of some kind — a full confession were perhaps too much to expect. Nothing but the immediate prospect of a hempen necklace would extort that. And yet it has been found that the most hardened villain has sometimes a vein of superstition, an abject terror of that spirit world whose judgments and punishments he has hazarded so audaciously.”
“With Irene’s help, you said. What has Irene to do with the matter?”
“Have you forgotten that picture in Mr. Topsparkle’s cabinet — that Italian head which might have been intended for my wife’s portrait, so vivid was the likeness?”
“Yes, I remember it perfectly.”
“I have a notion that I can play upon Fétis’s feelings by means of that resemblance.”
“But the likeness will not be new to him. He saw your wife at Ringwood Abbey.”
“Yes; but the circumstances under which he shall see her again will be new, and his own feelings will be new. Leave me to work out my scheme after my own fashion, Jack. All you have to do is to ply your guest with the strongest liquor he will swallow, and then watch and listen.”
CHAPTER V.
“I’LL JOIN WITH THEE IN A MOST JUST REVENGE.”
Fétis repaired to Bloomsbury Square next evening, not altogether with the innocent simplicity of the lamb that goes to the slaughter, but with the caution of an astute mind which perceives a snare in every civility, and suspects a trap in every invitation.
“Why was the man so civil, and what does he know about my life in Venice forty years ago?”
Those were the questions which had agitated the Frenchman’s mind during that brief remnant of the night which he had spent in restless wakefulness, and they had proved unanswerable. Caution might have prompted him to avoid Lord Lavendale’s house and turn a deaf ear to that nobleman’s civilities; but anxiety made him curious, and fear of the future made him bold in the present. He wanted to know the extent of Lavendale’s knowledge of his own past life, and to that end he accepted his lordship’s invitation. His vanity again, which was large, made him suppose himself a match for Lord Lavendale in any intellectual encounter.
“If he has courted me in order to pump me for the secrets of the past, he will find he has wasted his trouble,” thought Mr. Fétis, as his chair was being carried through perilous St. Giles’s.
It was eleven o’clock, a late hour for supper; but Lord Lavendale had been at the House of Lords, and had dined with some of his brother peers after the debate. Supper had been prepared in the late lord’s private sitting-room, a small triangular parlour at the end of a stately suite of reception-rooms, a room which had been rarely used of late, but which Herrick, for some unexplained motive, had selected as the scene of this evening’s entertainment. It was altogether the cosiest room in the house, and with a heaped-up fire of sea-coal and oak logs in the wide grate, a small round table laid for supper, a pair of silver candelabra holding a dozen wax candles, and a side table loaded with all the materials for a jovial evening, the little triangular parlour looked the very picture of comfort.
The brightness and warmth of the room had an agreeable effect upon Mr. Fétis, who had been chilled and depressed for the moment by those cold and empty apartments through which a footman had ushered him by the light of a single candle, borne aloft as the man stalked in advance with a ghostlike air.
“Let me perish, my lord, but your empty saloons have given me the shivers,” said Fétis, as he warmed his spindleshanks at the blaze; “your tall footman looked like a spectre.”
“Come, come, Mr. Fétis, you are not the kind of man to believe in apparitions,” said Durnford gaily. “I think we are all materialists here, are we not? We accept nothing for truth that cannot be mathematically demonstrated.”
Lavendale looked grave. “It is not every sceptic who is free from superstition,” he said. “There are men who cannot believe in a Personal God, and who will yet tremble at a shadow. I have known an infidel who would scoff at the Gospel, stand up for the story of the Witch of Endor.”
Mr. Fétis shrugged his shoulders, and did not pursue the argument.
The butler and a pair of footmen brought in the hot dishes, and opened a magnum of champagne, and supper began in serious earnest — one of those exquisite suppers for which Lavendale had been renowned in his wild youth, when he had vied with the Regent Philip in the studied extravagance of his table.
Fétis was a connoisseur, and his secret anxieties did not hinder him from doing ample justice to the meal. Lavendale pretended to eat, but scarcely tasted the delicacies which were set before him. Durnford ate hurriedly, hardly knowing what he was eating, full of nervous anticipation. Fétis was the only one of the party who could calmly appreciate the talents of the chef and the aroma of the wines.
He refused champagne altogether, as a liquor only fit for boyhood and senility; but he highly approved the Burgundy, which had been laid down by the last Lord Lavendale, and had been maturing for nearly fifteen years.
“There is no wine like that which comes from the Côte d’Or,” he said; and then, in a somewhat cracked voice, he chirruped a stanza of Villon’s “Ballade joyeuse des Taverniers.”
“I did not see your lordship at the opera to-night,” he said presently.
“No, I was at a less agreeable entertainment. I was at the House of Lords. Was the Opera House full?”
“A galaxy of fashion and beauty; but I think that lady whom I may call my mistress still bears the palm. There was not a woman among them to outshine Mr. Topsparkle’s wife.”
“He has reason to be proud of such a wife,” said Lavendale lightly. “Fill your glass, I beg, Mr. Fétis, or I shall doubt your liking for that wine. She is not his first wife, by the way — nor his first beautiful wife. My Italian friend told me that Topsparkle carried off one of the handsomest women in Venice when he left that city. What became of the lady?”
“She died young.”
“In Italy?”
“No, my lord. Mr. Topsparkle brought the young lady to London, and she died of colic — or in all likelihood of the plague — at his house in Soho Square.”
“Was she his wife?”
“That question, my lord, rests with Mr. Topsparkle’s conscience. If he was married to the young lady I was not admitted to his confidence. I was not present at the marriage; but she was always spoken of in the household as Mrs. Topsparkle; and I, as a servant, had no right to question her claim to that title.”
“I have heard that there was something mysterious about her death; something that aroused suspicion in the neighbourhood.”
“O, my lord, all sudden deaths are accounted suspicious nowadays. There has not been a prince of the blood royal, or a nobleman that has died in France during the last thirty years, but there has been talk of poison, although the disease has been as obvious in its characteristics as disease can ever be. Smallpox, ague, putrid fever, have one and all been put down to the late Regent and his accomplices; whereas that poor good-natured prince would scarce have trodden willingly upon a worm. Never was a kinder creature, yet his heart was wrung many a time by the vilest accusations circulated with an insolent openness. As for Mrs. Topsparkle’s death, I could give you all the medical details, were you curious enough to listen to them.”
His manner was serenity itself; and it was difficult to suppose that guilt could lurk under so placid an aspect, so easy a bearing. Yet last night the first allusion to his life in Venice had blanched his cheek and made his hand tremulous. The difference was that he had then been unprepared, while to-night he was fortified against every shock, and had schooled himself to answer every question.
“The suspicion was doubtless unfounded,” said Lavendale, “but I have heard that the slander banished Mr. Topsparkle from this country.”
“My master was over sensitive regarding the lampoons and libels which are rife at all elections, and which were directed against him with peculiar venom on account of his wealth, his youth, and his accomplishments,” answered Fétis. “He left England i
n a fit of disgust after the Brentford Election; and as a Continental life had always suited his humour, he lived abroad for thirty years, with but occasional visits to his native country.”
“You stand by him with a truly loyal spirit, which is worthy of all admiration,” said Durnford.
“‘Twere hard if there were no fidelity between master and servant after forty years’ service. I know Mr. Topsparkle’s failings, and can compassionate him where he is weak and erring. He is a man of a jealous temper, and did not live altogether happily with the Italian lady of whom you were talking. It was known in the household that they had quarrelled — that there had been tears, scenes, recrimination on his side, distress on hers. This knowledge was the only ground for suspicion among the busy-bodies of the neighbourhood when the young lady died after an illness of two days. The fools did not take the trouble to know or to consider that she had never properly recovered her health after the birth of her infant.”
“What became of that infant, Mr. Fétis?”
“She was educated abroad, and turned out badly. I can tell you nothing about her,” replied Fétis, with an impatient shrug. “I had nothing to do with her bringing up, nor do I know her fate. I have never tried to pry into my master’s secrets.”
“But surely you, who were so much more than a servant, almost a brother, must have known everything,” urged Lavendale; and then with a lighter air he added, “but ’tis inhospitable to plague you about the history of the past when we are met here to enjoy the present. What say you to a shake of the dice-box to raise our spirits?”
Fétis assented eagerly, with all a gamester’s gusto, and he and Lord Lavendale spent nearly an hour at hazard, until the Frenchman had a pile of guineas lying in front of him, and in the pleasure of winning had drank deep of that fine old Burgundy which he had praised at supper. He played with a feverish excitement which Lavendale had remarked in his manner on the previous evening; but to-night the fiery energies of the man were intensified. He was like a man possessed by devils.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 879
