The trail of the serpent
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 Cevennes 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 every 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.
Every 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, sometimes 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 abashed
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.
So, impenitent and despairing, she wears out the time, and waits
for death. Sometimes she thinks of the arch tempter who smoothed
the path of crime and misery in which she had trodden, and, who, in
doing so seemed so much a part of herself, and so closely linked with
her anguish and her revenge, that she often, in the weakness of her
shattered mind, wondered if there were indeed such a person, or whether
he might not be only the hideous incarnation of her own dark thoughts.
He had spoken though of payment, of reward for his base services. If he
were indeed human as her wretched self, why did he not come to claim
his due?
As the lonely impenitent woman pondered thus in the wintry dusk, her
uncle entered the chamber in which she sat.
“My dear Valerie,” he said, “I am sorry to disturb you, but a person
has just arrived on horseback from Caen. He has travelled, he says, all
the way from Paris to see you, and he knows that you will grant him an
interview. I told him it was not likely you would do so, and that you
certainly would not with my consent. Who can this person be who has the
impertinence to intrude at such a time as this? His name is entirely
unknown to me.”
He gave her a card. She looked at it, and read aloud--
“‘Monsieur Raymond Marolles.’ The person is quite right, my dear uncle;
I will see him.”
“But, Valerie----!” remonstrated the marquis.
She looked at him, with her mother’s proud Spanish blood mantling in
her pale cheek.
“My dear uncle,” she said quietly, “it is agreed between us, is it
not, that I am in all things my own mistress, and that you have entire
confidence in me? When you cease to trust me, we had better bid each
other farewell, for we can then no longer live beneath the same roof.”
He looked with one imploring glance at the inflexible face, but it was
fixed as death.
“Tell them,” she said, “to conduct Monsieur Marolles to this apartment.
I must see him, and alone.”
The marquis left her, and in a few moments Raymond entered the room,
ushered in by the groom of the chambers.
He had the old air of well-bred and fashionable indifference which so
well became him, and carried a light gold-headed riding-whip in his
hand.