The trail of the serpent
night when the fate of Valerie hung on the lips of the professor of
chemistry and pasteboard. Every now and then, with light and careful
fingers, Monsieur Blurosset changes the position of some card or cards.
Sometimes he throws himself back in his chair and thinks deeply. The
expressionless mouth, which betrays no secrets, tells nothing of the
nature of his thoughts. Sometimes he makes notes on a long slip of
paper; rows of figures, and problems in algebra, over which he ponders
long. By-and-by, for the first time, he looks up and listens.
His little apartment has two doors. One, which leads out on to the
staircase; a second, which communicates with his bedchamber. This door
is open a very little, but enough to show that there is a feeble light
burning within the chamber. It is in the direction of this door that
the blue spectacles are fixed when Monsieur Blurosset suspends his
calculations in order to listen; and it is to a sound within this room
that he listens intently.
That sound is the laboured and heavy breathing of a man. The room is
tenanted.
“Good,” says Monsieur Blurosset, presently, “the respiration is
certainly more regular. It is really a most wonderful case.”
As he says this, he looks at his watch. “Five minutes past eleven--time
for the dose,” he mutters.
He goes to the little cabinet from which he took the drug he gave to
Valerie, and busies himself with some bottles, from which he mixes a
draught in a small medicine-glass; he holds it to the light, puts it to
his lips, and then passes with it into the next room.
There is a sound as if the person to whom he gave the medicine made
some faint resistance, but in a few minutes Monsieur Blurosset emerges
from the room carrying the empty glass.
He reseats himself before the green table, and resumes his
contemplation of the cards. Presently a bell rings. “So late,” mutters
Monsieur Blurosset; “it is most likely some one for me.” He rises,
sweeps the cards into one pack, and going over to the door of his
bedroom, shuts its softly. When he has done so, he listens for a
moment with his ear close to the woodwork. There is not a sound of the
breathing within.
He has scarcely done so when the bell rings for the second time. He
opens the door communicating with the staircase, and admits a visitor.
The visitor is a woman, very plainly dressed, and thickly veiled.
“Monsieur Blurosset?” she says, inquiringly.
“The same, madame. Pray enter, and be good enough to be seated.” He
hands her a chair at a little distance from the green table, and as
far away as he can place it from the door of the bedchamber: she sits
down, and as he appears to wait for her to speak, she says,--
“I have heard of your fame, monsieur, and come----”
“Nay, madame,” he says, interrupting her, “you can raise your veil if
you will. I perfectly remember you; I never forget voices, Mademoiselle
de Cevennes.”
There is no shade of impertinence in his manner as he says this; he
speaks as though he were merely stating a simple fact which it is as
well for her to know. He has the air, in all he does or says, of a
scientific man who has no existence out of the region of science.
Valerie--for it is indeed she--raises her veil.
“Monsieur,” she says, “you are candid with me, and it will be the best
for me to be frank with you. I am very unhappy--I have been so for some
months past; and I shall be so until my dying day. One reason alone has
prevented my coming to you long ere this, to offer you half my fortune
for such another drug as that which you sold to me some time past. You
may judge, then, that reason is a very powerful one, since, though
death alone can give me peace, I yet do not wish to die. But I wish to
have at my command a means of certain death. I may never use it at all:
I swear never to use it on anyone but myself!”
All this time the blue spectacles have been fixed on her face, and now
Monsieur Blurosset interrupts her--
“And now for such a drug, mademoiselle, you would offer me a large sum
of money?” he asks.
“I would, monsieur.”
“I cannot sell it you,” he says, as quietly as though he were speaking
of some unimportant trifle.
“You cannot?” she exclaims.
“No, mademoiselle. I am a man absorbed entirely in the pursuit of
science. My life has been so long devoted to science only, that perhaps
I may have come to hold everything beyond the circle of my little
laboratory too lightly. You asked me some time since for a poison, or
at least you were introduced to me by a pupil of mine, at whose request
I sold you a drug. I had been twenty years studying the properties
of that drug. I may not know them fully yet, but I expect to do so
before this year is out. I gave it to you, and, for all I know to the
contrary, it may in your hands have done some mischief.” He pauses here
and looks at her for a moment; but she has borne the knowledge of her
crime so long, and it has become so much a part of her, that she does
not flinch under his scrutiny.
“I placed a weapon in your hands,” he continues, “and I had no right to
do so. I never thought of this at that time; but I have thought of it
since. For the rest, I have no inducement to sell you the drug you ask
for. Money is of little use to me except in the necessary expenses of
the chemicals I use. These”--he points to the cards--“give me enough
for those expenses; beyond those, my wants amount to some few francs a
week.”
“Then you will not sell me this drug? You are determined?” she asks.
“Quite determined.”
She shrugs her shoulders. “As you please. There is always some river
within reach of the wretched; and you may depend, monsieur, that they
who cannot support life will find a means of death. I will wish you
good evening.”
She is about to leave the room, when she stops, with her hand upon the
lock of the door, and turns round.
She stands for a few minutes motionless and silent, holding the handle
of the door, and with her other hand upon her heart. Monsieur Blurosset
has the faintest shadow of a look of surprise in his expressionless
countenance.
“I don’t know what is the matter with me to-night,” she says, “but
something seems to root me to this spot. I cannot leave this room.”
“You are ill, mademoiselle, perhaps. Let me give you some restorative.”
“No, no, I am not ill.”
Again she is silent; her eyes are fixed, not on the chemist, but with a
strange vacant gaze upon the wall before her. Suddenly she asks him,--
“Do you believe in animal magnetism?”
“Madame, I have spent half my lifetime in trying to answer that
question, and I can only answer it now by halves. Sometimes no;
sometimes yes.”
“Do you believe it possible for one soul to be gifted with a mysterious
prescience of the emotions of another soul?--to be sad when that is
sad, though utterly unconscious of any cause for sadness; and to
rejoice when that is happy, having no reason for rejoicing?”
“I cannot answer your question, madame, because it involves another. I
never yet have discovered what the soul really is. Animal magnetism,
if it ever become a science, will be a material science, and the soul
escapes from all material dissection.”
“Do you believe, then, that by some subtle influence, whose nature is
unknown to us, we may have a strange consciousness of the presence or
the approach of some people, conveyed to us by neither the hearing nor
the sight, but rather as if we _felt_ that they were near?”
“_You_ believe this possible, madame, or you would not ask the
question.”
“Perhaps. I have sometimes thought that I had this consciousness; but
it related to a person who is dead----”
“Yes, madame.”
“And--you will think me mad; Heaven knows, I think myself so--I feel as
if that person were near me to-night.”
The chemist rises, and, going over to her, feels her pulse. It is rapid
and intermittent. She is evidently violently agitated, though she is
trying with her utmost power to control herself.
“But you say that this person is dead?” he asks.
“Yes; he died some months since.”
“You know that there are no such things as ghosts?”
“I am perfectly convinced of that!”
“And yet--?” he asks.
“And yet I feel as though the dead were near me to-night. Tell
me--there is no one in this room but ourselves?”
“No one.”
“And that door--it leads----”
“Into the room in which I sleep.”
“And there is no one there?” she asks.
“No one. Let me give you a sedative, madame: you are certainly ill.”
“No, no, monsieur; you are very good. I am still weak from the effects
of a long illness. That weakness may be the cause of my silly fancies
of to-night. To-morrow I leave France, perhaps for ever.”
She leaves him; but on the steep dark staircase she pauses for a
moment, and seems irresolute, as if half determined to return: then she
hurries on, and in a minute is in the street.
She takes a circuitous route towards the house in which she lives. So
plainly dressed, and thickly veiled, no one stops to notice her as she
walks along.
Her husband, Monsieur Marolles, is engaged at a dinner given by a
distinguished member of the chamber of peers. Decidedly he has held
winning cards in the game of life. And she, for ever haunted by the
past, with weary step goes onward to a dark and unknown future.
=Book the Fourth.=
NAPOLEON THE GREAT.
CHAPTER I.
THE BOY FROM SLOPPERTON.
EIGHT years have passed since the trial of Richard Marwood. How have
those eight years been spent by “Daredevil Dick?”
In a small room a few feet square, in the County Lunatic Asylum,
fourteen miles from the town of Slopperton, with no human being’s
companionship but that of a grumpy old deaf keeper, and a boy, his
assistant--for eight monotonous years this man’s existence has crept
slowly on; always the same: the same food, the same hours at which that
food must be eaten, the same rules and regulations for every action of
his inactive life. Think of this, and pity the man surnamed “Daredevil
Dick,” and once the maddest and merriest creature in a mad and merry
circle. Think of the daily walk in a great square flagged yard--the
solitary walk, for he is not allowed even the fellowship of the other
lunatics, lest the madness which led him to commit an awful crime
should again break out, and endanger the lives of those about him.
During eight long years he has counted every stone in the flooring,
every flaw and every crack in each of those stones. He knows the shape
of every shadow that falls upon the white-washed wall, and can, at
all seasons of the year, tell the hour by the falling of it. He knows
that at such a time on a summer’s evening the shadows of the iron bars
of the window will make long black lines across the ground, and mount
and mount, dividing the wall as if it were in panels, till they meet,
and absorbing altogether the declining light, surround and absorb him
too, till he is once more alone in the darkness. He knows, too, that
at such a time on the grey winter’s morning these same shadows will be
the first indications of the coming light; that, from the thick gloom
of the dead night they will break out upon the wall, with strips of
glimmering day between, only enough like light to show the blackness
of the shade. He has sometimes been mad enough and wretched enough to
pray that these shadows might fall differently, that the very order of
nature might be reversed, to break this bitter and deadly monotony.
He has sometimes prayed that, looking up, he might see a great fire
in the sky, and know that the world was at an end. How often he has
prayed to die, it would be difficult to say. At one time it was his
only prayer; at one time he did not pray at all. He has been permitted