The trail of the serpent
clutched as a dying man clutches what his hand closes upon. I say this
ain’t how people make away with themselves when they can’t stand life
any longer. It was a do--a plant, such as very few but that man could
be capable of; and that man’s your tutor, and the death was meant to
put a stop to all suspicion; and while you was a-sighin’ and a-groanin’
over that poor young innocent, Mr. Jabez North was a-cuttin’ a fine
figure, and a-captivatin’ a furring heiress, with your money, or your
banker’s money, as had to bear the loss of them forged cheques.”
“But the likeness?” said Dr. Tappenden. “That dead man was the very
image of Jabez North.”
“Very likely, sir. There’s mysterious goin’s on, and some coincidences
in this life, as well as in your story-books that’s lent out at three
half-pence a volume, keep ’em three days and return ’em clean.”
“Well,” continued the schoolmaster, “the moment I see this man I shall
know whether he is indeed the person we want to find. If he should be
the man who was my usher, I can prove a circumstance which will go a
great way, Mr. Marwood, towards fixing your uncle’s murder upon him.”
“And that is----?” asked Richard, eagerly.
But there is no occasion for the reader to know what it is just yet;
so we will leave the little party in the Friar Street surgery to talk
this business over, which they do with such intense interest that the
small hours catch them still talking of the same subject, and Mr.
Percy Cordonner still snowed up in his corner, reading from the loose
leaves the most fascinating _olla podrida_ of literature, wherein
the writings of Charles Dickens, George Sand, Harrison Ainsworth, and
Alexandra Dumas are blended together in the most delicious and exciting
confusion.
CHAPTER IX.
CAPTAIN LANSDOWN OVERHEARS A CONVERSATION WHICH APPEARS TO INTEREST HIM.
LAURENT BLUROSSET was a sort of rage at the West-end of London. What
did they seek, these weary denizens of the West-end, but excitement?
Excitement! No matter how obtained. If Laurent Blurosset were a
magician, so much the better; if he had sold himself to the devil,
so much the better again, and so much the more exciting. There was
something almost approaching to a sensation in making a morning
call upon a gentleman who had possibly entered into a contract with
Sathanus, or put his name on the back of a bit of stamped paper payable
at sight to Lucifer himself. And then there was the slightest chance,
the faintest shadow of a probability, of meeting the proprietor of the
gentleman they called upon; and what could be more delightful than
that? How did he visit Marlborough Street--the proprietor? Had he a
pass-key to the hall-door? or did he leave his card with the servant,
like any other of the gentlemen his pupils and allies? Or did he rise
through a trap in the Brussels carpet in the drawing-room? or slide
through one of the sham Wouvermanns that adorned the walls? At any
rate, a visit to the mysterious chemist of Marlborough Street was about
the best thing to do at this fag-end of the worn-out London season; and
Monsieur Laurent Blurosset was considered a great deal better than the
Opera.
It was growing dusk on the evening on which there was so much
excitement in the little surgery in Friar Street, when a plain close
carriage stopped at Monsieur Blurosset’s door, and a lady alighted
thickly veiled. The graceful but haughty head is one we know. It is
Valerie, who, in the depth of her misery, comes to this man, who is in
part the author of that misery.
She is ushered into a small apartment at the back of the house, half
study, half laboratory, littered with books, manuscripts, crucibles,
and mathematical instruments. On a little table, near a fire that burns
low in the grate, are thrown in a careless heap the well-remembered
cards--the cards which eight years ago foretold the death of the king
of spades.
The room is empty when she enters it, and she seats herself in the
depth of the shadow; for there is no light but the flickering flame of
the low fire.
What does she think of, as she sits in the gloom of that silent
apartment? Who shall say? What forest deep, what lonely ocean strand,
what desert island, is more dismal than the backroom of a London
house, at the window of which looks in a high black wall, or a dreary,
smoke-dried, weird, vegetable phenomenon which nobody on earth but the
landlord ever called a tree?
What does she think of in this dreary room? What _can_ she think
of? What has she ever thought for eight years past but of the man
she loved and murdered? And he was innocent! As long as she had been
convinced of his guilt, of his cruel and bitter treachery, it had been
a sacrifice, that ordeal of the November night. Now it took another
colour; it was a murder--and she a pitiful puppet in the hands of a
master-fiend!
Monsieur Blurosset enters the room, and finds her alone with these
thoughts.
“Madame,” he says, “I have perhaps the honour of knowing you?” He has
so many fair visitors that he thinks this one, whose face he cannot
see, may be one of his old clients.
“It is eight years since you have seen me, monsieur,” she replies. “You
have most likely forgotten me?”
“Forgotten you, madame, perhaps, but not your voice. That is not to be
forgotten.”
“Indeed, monsieur--and why not?”
“Because, madame, it has a peculiarity of its own, which, as a
physiologist, I cannot mistake. It is the voice of one who has
suffered?”
“It is!--it is!”
“Of one who has suffered more than it is the common lot of woman to
suffer.”
“You are right, monsieur.”
“And now, madame, what can I do for you?”
“Nothing, monsieur. You can do nothing for me but that which the
commonest apothecary in this city who will sell me an ounce of laudanum
can do as well as you.”
“Oh, has it come to that again?” he says, with a shade of sarcasm in
his tone. “I remember, eight years ago----”
“I asked you for the means of death. I did not say I wished to die
then, at that moment. I did not. I had a purpose in life. I have still.”
As she said these words the fellow-lodger of Blurosset--the
Indian soldier, Captain Lansdown, who had let himself in with his
latch-key--crossed the hall, and was arrested at the half-open door of
the study by the sound of voices within. I don’t know how to account
for conduct so unworthy of an officer and a gentleman, but the captain
stopped in the shadow of the dark hall and listened--as if life and
death were on the words--to the voice of the speaker.
“I have, I say, still a purpose in life--a solemn and a sacred one--to
protect the innocent. However guilty I may be, thank Heaven I have
still the power to protect my son.”
“You are married, madame?”
“I am married. You know it as well as I, Monsieur Laurent Blurosset.
The man who first brought me to your apartment must have been, if
not your accomplice, at least your colleague. He revealed to you his
scheme, no doubt, in order to secure your assistance in that scheme. I
am married to a villain--such a villain as I think Heaven never before
looked down upon.”
“And you would protect your son, madame, from his father?”
Captain Lansdown’s face gleams through the shadow as white as the face
of Valerie herself, as she stands looking full at Monsieur Blurosset in
the flickering firelight.
“And you would protect your son from his father, madame?” repeats the
chemist.
“The man to whom I am at present married is not the father of my son,”
says Valerie, in a cold calm voice.
“How, madame?”
“I was married before,” she continued. “The son I so dearly love is the
son of my first husband. My second marriage has been a marriage only in
name. All your worthy colleague, Monsieur Raymond Marolles, stained his
hands in innocent blood to obtain was a large fortune. He has that, and
is content; but he shall not hold it long.”
“And your purpose in coming to me, madame----?”
“Is to accuse you--yes, Monsieur Laurent Blurosset, to accuse you--as
an accomplice in the murder of Gaston de Lancy.”
“An accomplice in a murder!”
“Yes; you sold me a poison--you knew for what that poison was to be
used; you were in the plot, the vile and demoniac plot, that was to
steep my soul in guilt. You prophesied the death of the man I was
intended to murder; you put the thought into my distracted brain--the
weapon into my guilty hand; and while I suffer all the tortures which
Heaven inflicts on those who break its laws, are you to go free? No,
monsieur, you shall not go free. Either join with me in accusing this
man, and help me to drag him to justice, or by the light in the sky,
by the life-blood of my broken heart--by the life of my only child, I
swear to denounce you! Gaston de Lancy shall not go unavenged by the
woman who loved and murdered him.”
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 is 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 villainy, 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