Alice, or the Mysteries — Complete
him from the horrors, perhaps, of starvation itself, to which his escape
condemned him: if he could detain Cesarini till De Montaigne could
arrive!
Agreeably to this thought, he quietly drew towards him the portfolio
which had been laid on the table, and, Cesarini's back still turned to
him, wrote a hasty line to De Montaigne. When his servant re-entered
with the wine and viands, Maltravers followed him out of the room, and
bade him see the note sent immediately. On returning, he found Cesarini
devouring the food before him with all the voracity of famine. It was
a dreadful sight!--the intellect ruined, the mind darkened, the wild,
fierce animal alone left!
When Cesarini had appeased his hunger, he drew near to Maltravers, and
thus accosted him,--
"I must lead you back to the past. I sinned against you and the dead;
but Heaven has avenged you, and me you can pity and forgive. Maltravers,
there is another more guilty than I,--but proud, prosperous, and great.
_His_ crime Heaven has left to the revenge of man! I bound myself by an
oath not to reveal his villany. I cancel the oath now, for the knowledge
of it should survive his life and mine. And, mad though they deem me,
the mad are prophets, and a solemn conviction, a voice not of earth,
tells me that he and I are already in the Shadow of Death."
Here Cesarini, with a calm and precise accuracy of self-possession,--a
minuteness of circumstance and detail, that, coming from one whose very
eyes betrayed his terrible disease, was infinitely thrilling in its
effect,--related the counsels, the persuasions, the stratagems of
Lumley. Slowly and distinctly he forced into the heart of Maltravers
that sickening record of cold fraud calculating on vehement passion as
its tool; and thus he concluded his narration,--
"Now wonder no longer why I have lived till this hour; why I have
clung to freedom, through want and hunger, amidst beggars, felons, and
outcasts! In that freedom was my last hope,--the hope of revenge!"
Maltravers returned no answer for some moments. At length he said
calmly, "Cesarini, there are injuries so great that they defy revenge.
Let us alike, since we are alike injured, trust our cause to Him who
reads all hearts, and, better than we can do, measures both crime and
its excuses. You think that our enemy has not suffered,--that he has
gone free. We know not his internal history; prosperity and power are no
signs of happiness, they bring no exemption from care. Be soothed and
be ruled, Cesarini. Let the stone once more close over the solemn grave.
Turn with me to the future; and let us rather seek to be the judges of
ourselves, than the executioners of another."
Cesarini listened gloomily, and was about to answer, when--
But here we must return to Lord Vargrave.
CHAPTER IV.
MY noble lord,
Your worthy friends do lack you.--_Macbeth_.
He is about it;
The doors are open.--_Ibid._
ON quitting Lady Doltimore's house, Lumley drove to his hotel. His
secretary had been the bearer of other communications, with the
nature of which he had not yet acquainted himself; but he saw by the
superscriptions that they were of great importance. Still, however,
even in the solitude and privacy of his own chamber, it was not on the
instant that he could divert his thoughts from the ruin of his fortunes:
the loss not only of Evelyn's property, but his own claims upon it (for
the whole capital had been placed in Douce's hands), the total wreck of
his grand scheme, the triumph he had afforded to Maltravers! He ground
his teeth in impotent rage, and groaned aloud, as he traversed his room
with hasty and uneven strides. At last he paused and muttered: "Well,
the spider toils on even when its very power of weaving fresh webs is
exhausted; it lies in wait,--it forces itself into the webs of others.
Brave insect, thou art my model! While I have breath in my body, the
world and all its crosses, Fortune and all her malignity, shall not
prevail against me! What man ever yet failed until he himself grew
craven, and sold his soul to the arch fiend, Despair! 'Tis but a girl
and a fortune lost,--they were gallantly fought for, that is some
comfort. Now to what is yet left to me!"
The first letter Lumley opened was from Lord Saxingham. It filled him
with dismay. The question at issue had been formally, but abruptly,
decided in the Cabinet against Vargrave and his manoeuvres. Some hasty
expressions of Lord Saxingham had been instantly caught at by the
premier, and a resignation, rather hinted at than declared, had been
peremptorily accepted. Lord Saxingham and Lumley's adherents in the
Government were to a man dismissed; and at the time Lord Saxingham wrote
the premier was with the king.
"Curse their folly!--the puppets! the dolts!" exclaimed Lumley, crushing
the letter in his hand. "The moment I leave them, they run their heads
against the wall. Curse them! curse myself! curse the man who weaves
ropes with sand! Nothing--nothing left for me but exile or suicide!
Stay, what is this?" His eye fell on the well-known hand writing of the
premier. He tore the envelope, impatient to know the worst. His
eyes sparkled as he proceeded. The letter was most courteous, most
complimentary, most wooing. The minister was a man consummately versed
in the arts that increase, as well as those which purge, a party.
Saxingham and his friends were imbeciles, incapables, mostly men who had
outlived their day. But Lord Vargrave, in the prime of life--versatile,
accomplished, vigorous, bitter, unscrupulous--Vargrave was of another
mould, Vargrave was to be dreaded; and therefore, if possible, to be
retained. His powers of mischief were unquestionably increased by the
universal talk of London that he was about soon to wed so wealthy a
lady. The minister knew his man. In terms of affected regret, he
alluded to the loss the Government would sustain in the services of Lord
Saxingham, etc.; he rejoiced that Lord Vargrave's absence from London
had prevented his being prematurely mixed up, by false scruples of
honour, in secessions which his judgment must condemn. He treated of
the question in dispute with the most delicate address,--confessed the
reasonableness of Lord Vargrave's former opposition to it; but contended
that it was now, if not wise, inevitable. He said nothing of the
_justice_ of the measure he proposed to adopt, but much on the
_expediency_. He concluded by offering to Vargrave, in the most cordial
and flattering terms, the very seat in the Cabinet which Lord Saxingham
had vacated, with an apology for its inadequacy to his lordship's
merits, and a distinct and definite promise of the refusal of the
gorgeous viceroyalty of India, which would be vacant next year by the
return of the present governor-general.
Unprincipled as Vargrave was, it is not, perhaps, judging him too mildly
to say that, had he succeeded in obtaining Evelyn's hand and fortune,
he would have shrunk from the baseness he now meditated. To step coldly
into the very post of which he, and he alone, had been the cause of
depriving his earliest patron and nearest relative; to profit by the
betrayal of his own party; to damn himself eternally in the eyes of
his ancient friends; to pass down the stream of history as a mercenary
apostate,--from all this Vargrave must have shrunk, had he seen one spot
of honest ground on which to maintain his footing. But now the waters of
the abyss were closing over his head; he would have caught at a straw;
how much more consent to be picked up by the vessel of an enemy! All
objection, all scruple, vanished at once. And the "barbaric gold" "of
Ormus and of Ind" glittered before the greedy eyes of the penniless
adventurer! Not a day was now to be lost. How fortunate that a written
proposition, from which it was impossible to recede, had been made to
him before the failure of his matrimonial projects had become known!
Too happy to quit Paris, he would set off on the morrow, and conclude
in person the negotiation. Vargrave glanced towards the clock; it was
scarcely past eleven. What revolutions are worked in moments! Within an
hour he had lost a wife, a noble fortune, changed the politics of his
whole life, stepped into a Cabinet office, and was already calculating
how much a governor-general of India could lay by in five years! But it
was only eleven o'clock. He had put off Mr. Howard's visit till twelve;
he wished so much to see him, and learn all the London gossip connected
with the recent events. Poor Mr. Douce! Vargrave had already forgotten
_his_ existence!--he rang his bell hastily. It was some time before his
servant answered.
Promptitude and readiness were virtues that Lord Vargrave peremptorily
demanded in a servant; and as he paid the best price for the
articles--less in wages than in plunder--he was generally sure to obtain
them.
"Where the deuce have you been? This is the third time I have rung! you
ought to be in the anteroom!"
"I beg your lordship's pardon; but I was helping Mr. Maltravers's valet
to find a key which he dropped in the courtyard."
"Mr. Maltravers! Is he at this hotel?"
"Yes, my lord; his rooms are just overhead."
"Humph! Has Mr. Howard engaged a lodging here?"
"No, my lord. He left word that he was gone to his aunt, Lady Jane."
"Ah, Lady Jane--lives at Paris--so she does; Rue Chaussee d'Antin--you
know the House? Go immediately--go yourself; don't trust to a
messenger--and beg Mr. Howard to return with you. I want to see him
instantly."
"Yes, my lord."
The servant went. Lumley was in a mood in which solitude was
intolerable. He was greatly excited; and some natural compunctions at
the course on which he had decided made him long to escape from thought.
So Maltravers was under the same roof! He had promised to give him an
interview next day; but next day he wished to be on the road to London.
Why not have it over to-night? But could Maltravers meditate any hostile
proceedings? Impossible! Whatever his causes of complaint, they were
of too delicate and secret a nature for seconds, bullets, and newspaper
paragraphs! Vargrave might feel secure that he should not be delayed by
any Bois de Boulogne assignation; but it was necessary to _his honour_
(!) that he should not seem to shun the man he had deceived and wronged.
He would go up to him at once,--a new excitement would distract his
thoughts. Agreeably to this resolution, Lord Vargrave quitted his room,
and was about to close the outer door, when he recollected that perhaps
his servant might not meet with Howard; that the secretary might
probably arrive before the time fixed,--it would be as well to leave his
door open. He accordingly stopped, and writing upon a piece of paper,
"Dear Howard, send up for me the moment you arrive: I shall be with Mr.
Maltravers _au second_"--Vargrave wafered the _affiche_ to the door,
which he then left ajar, and the lamp in the landing-place fell clear
and full on the paper.
It was the voice of Vargrave, in the little stone-paved antechamber
without, inquiring of the servant if Mr. Maltravers was at home, which
had startled and interrupted Cesarini as he was about to reply to
Ernest. Each recognized that sharp clear voice; each glanced at the
other.
"I will not see him," said Maltravers, hastily moving towards the door;
"you are not fit to--"
"Meet him? no!" said Cesarini, with a furtive and sinister glance, which
a man versed in his disease would have understood, but which Maltravers
did not even observe; "I will retire into your bedroom; my eyes are
heavy. I could sleep."
He opened the inner door as he spoke, and had scarcely reclosed it
before Vargrave entered.
"Your servant said you were engaged; but I thought you might see an old
friend:" and Vargrave coolly seated himself.