CHAPTER V.
THE WEAVERS AND THE WOOF.
"And what," said Varney,--"what, while we are pursuing a fancied clew,
and seeking to provide first a name, and then a fortune for this young
lawyer,--what steps have you really taken to meet the danger that menaces
me,--to secure, if our inquiries fail, an independence for yourself?
Months have elapsed, and you have still shrunk from advancing the great
scheme upon which we built, when the daughter of Susan Mainwaring was
admitted to your hearth."
"Why recall me, in these rare moments when I feel myself human still,--
why recall me back to the nethermost abyss of revenge and crime? Oh, let
me be sure that I have still a son! Even if John Ardworth, with his
gifts and energies, be denied to me, a son, though in rags, I will give
him wealth!--a son, though ignorant as the merest boor, I will pour into
his brain my dark wisdom! A son! a son! my heart swells at the word.
Ah, you sneer! Yes, my heart swells, but not with the mawkish fondness
of a feeble mother. In a son, I shall live again,--transmigrate from
this tortured and horrible life of mine; drink back my youth. In him I
shall rise from my fall,--strong in his power, great in his grandeur. It
is because I was born a woman,--had woman's poor passions and infirm
weakness,--that I am what I am. I would transfer myself into the soul of
man,--man, who has the strength to act, and the privilege to rise. Into
the bronze of man's nature I would pour the experience which has broken,
with its fierce elements, the puny vessel of clay. Yes, Gabriel, in
return for all I have done and sacrificed for you, I ask but co-operation
in that one hope of my shattered and storm-beat being. Bear, forbear,
await; risk not that hope by some wretched, peddling crime which will
bring on us both detection,--some wanton revelry in guilt, which is not
worth the terror that treads upon its heels."
"You forget," answered Varney, with a kind of submissive sullenness,--for
whatever had passed between these two persons in their secret and fearful
intimacy, there was still a power in Lucretia, surviving her fall amidst
the fiends, that impressed Varney with the only respect he felt for man
or woman,--"you forget strangely the nature of our elaborate and master
project when you speak of 'peddling crime,' or 'wanton revelry' in guilt!
You forget, too, how every hour that we waste deepens the peril that
surrounds me, and may sweep from your side the sole companion that can
aid you in your objects,--nay, without whom they must wholly fail. Let
me speak first of that most urgent danger, for your memory seems short
and troubled, since you have learned only to hope the recovery of your
son. If this man Stubmore, in whom the trust created by my uncle's will
is now vested, once comes to town, once begins to bustle about his
accursed projects of transferring the money from the Bank of England, I
tell you again and again that my forgery on the bank will be detected,
and that transportation will be the smallest penalty inflicted. Part of
the forgery, as you know, was committed on your behalf, to find the
moneys necessary for the research for your son,--committed on the clear
understanding that our project on Helen should repay me, should enable
me, perhaps undetected, to restore the sums illegally abstracted, or, at
the worst, to confess to Stubmore--whose character I well know--that,
oppressed by difficulties, I had yielded to temptation, that I had forged
his name (as I had forged his father's) as an authority to sell the
capital from the bank, and that now, in replacing the money, I repaid my
error and threw myself on his indulgence, on his silence. I say that I
know enough of the man to know that I should be thus cheaply saved, or at
the worst, I should have but to strengthen his compassion by a bribe to
his avarice; but if I cannot replace the money, I am lost."
"Well, well," said Lucretia; "the money you shall have, let me but find
my son, and--"
"Grant me patience!" cried Varney, impetuously. "But what can your son
do, if found, unless you endow him with the heritage of Laughton? To do
that, Helen, who comes next to Percival St. John in the course of the
entail, must cease to live! Have I not aided, am I not aiding you
hourly, in your grand objects? This evening I shall see a man whom I
have long lost sight of, but who has acquired in a lawyer's life the true
scent after evidence: if that evidence exist, it shall be found. I have
just learned his address. By tomorrow he shall be on the track. I have
stinted myself to save from the results of the last forgery the gold to
whet his zeal. For the rest, as I have said, your design involves the
removal of two lives. Already over the one more difficult to slay the
shadow creeps and the pall hangs. I have won, as you wished, and as was
necessary, young St. John's familiar acquaintance; when the hour comes,
he is in my hands."
Lucretia smiled sternly. "So!" she said, between her ground teeth, "the
father forbade me the house that was my heritage! I have but to lift a
finger and breathe a word, and, desolate as I am, I thrust from that home
the son! The spoiler left me the world,--I leave his son the grave!"
"But," said Varney, doggedly pursuing his dreadful object, "why force me
to repeat that his is not the only life between you and your son's
inheritance? St. John gone, Helen still remains. And what, if your
researches fail, are we to lose the rich harvest which Helen will yield
us,--a harvest you reap with the same sickle which gathers in your
revenge? Do you no longer see in Helen's face the features of her
mother? Is the perfidy of William Mainwaring forgotten or forgiven?"
"Gabriel Varney," said Lucretia, in a hollow and tremulous voice, "when
in that hour in which my whole being was revulsed, and I heard the cord
snap from the anchor, and saw the demons of the storm gather round my
bark; when in that hour I stooped calmly down and kissed my rival's
brow,--I murmured an oath which seemed not inspired by my own soul, but
by an influence henceforth given to my fate: I vowed that the perfidy
dealt to me should be repaid; I vowed that the ruin of my own existence
should fall on the brow which I kissed. I vowed that if shame and
disgrace were to supply the inheritance I had forfeited, I would not
stand alone amidst the scorn of the pitiless world. In the vision of my
agony, I saw, afar, the altar dressed and the bride-chamber prepared; and
I breathed my curse, strong as prophecy, on the marriage-hearth and the
marriage-bed. Why dream, then, that I would rescue the loathed child of
that loathed union from your grasp? But is the time come? Yours may be
come: is mine?"
Something so awful there was in the look of his accomplice, so intense in
the hate of her low voice, that Varney, wretch as he was, and
contemplating at that very hour the foulest and most hideous guilt, drew
back, appalled.
Madame Dalibard resumed, and in a somewhat softer tone, but softened only
by the anguish of despair.
"Oh, had it been otherwise, what might I have been! Given over from that
hour to the very incarnation of plotting crime, none to resist the evil
impulse of my own maddening heart, the partner, forced on me by fate,
leading me deeper and deeper into the inextricable hell,--from that hour
fraud upon fraud, guilt upon guilt, infamy heaped on infamy, till I stand
a marvel to myself that the thunderbolt falls not, that Nature thrusts
not from her breast a living outrage on all her laws! Was I not
justified in the desire of retribution? Every step that I fell, every
glance that I gave to the gulf below, increased but in me the desire for
revenge. All my acts had flowed from one fount: should the stream roll
pollution, and the fount spring pure?"
"You have had your revenge on your rival and her husband."
"I had it, and I passed on!" said Lucretia, with nostrils dilated as with
haughty triumph; "they were crushed, and I suffered them to live! Nay,
when, by chance, I heard of William Mainwaring's death, I bowed down my
head, and I almost think I wept. The old days came back upon me. Yes, I
wept! But I had not destroyed their love. No, no; there I had miserably
failed. A pledge of that love lived. I had left their hearth barren;
Fate sent them a comfort which I had not foreseen. And suddenly my hate
returned, my wrongs rose again, my vengeance was not sated. The love
that had destroyed more than my life,--my soul,--rose again and cursed me
in the face of Helen. The oath which I took when I kissed my rival's
brow, demanded another prey when I kissed the child of those nuptials."
"You are prepared at last, then, to act?" cried Varney, in a tone of
savage joy.
At that moment, close under the window, rose, sudden and sweet, the voice
of one singing,--the young voice of Helen. The words were so distinct
that they came to the ears of the dark-plotting and guilty pair. In the
song itself there was little to remark or peculiarly apposite to the
consciences of those who heard; yet in the extreme and touching purity of
the voice, and in the innocence of the general spirit of the words, trite
as might be the image they conveyed, there was something that contrasted
so fearfully their own thoughts and minds that they sat silent, looking
vacantly into each other's faces, and shrinking perhaps to turn their
eyes within themselves.
HELEN'S HYMN.
Ye fade, yet still how sweet, ye Flowers! Your scent outlives
the bloom! So, Father, may my mortal hours Grow sweeter towards
the tomb!
In withered leaves a healing cure The simple gleaners find;
So may our withered hopes endure In virtues left behind!
Oh, not to me be vainly given The lesson ye bestow, Of
thoughts that rise in sweets to Heaven, And turn to use below.
The song died, but still the listeners remained silent, till at length,
shaking off the effect, with his laugh of discordant irony, Varney said,-
-
"Sweet innocence, fresh from the nursery! Would it not be sin to suffer
the world to mar it? You hear the prayer: why not grant it, and let the
flower 'turn to use below'?"
"Ah, but could it wither first!" muttered Lucretia, with an accent of
suppressed rage. "Do you think that her--that his--daughter is to me but
a vulgar life to be sacrificed merely for gold? Imagine away your sex,
man! Women only know what I--such as I, woman still--feel in the
presence of the pure! Do you fancy that I should not have held death a
blessing if death could have found me in youth such as Helen is? Ah,
could she but live to suffer! Die! Well, since it must be, since my son
requires the sacrifice, do as you will with the victim that death
mercifully snatches from my grasp. I could have wished to prolong her
life, to load it with some fragment of the curse her parents heaped upon
me,--baffled love, and ruin, and despair! I could have hoped, in this
division of the spoil, that mine had been the vengeance, if yours the
gold. You want the life, I the heart,--the heart to torture first; and
then--why then more willingly than I do now, could I have thrown the
carcass to the jackal!"
"Listen!" began Varney; when the door opened and Helen herself stood
unconsciously smiling at the threshold.
