CHAPTER XVII.
THE WAKING OF THE SERPENT.
And how, O Poet of the sad belief, and eloquence "like ebony, at once
dark and splendid [It was said of Tertullian that "his style was like
ebony, dark and splendid"]," how couldst thou, august Lucretius, deem it
but sweet to behold from the steep the strife of the great sea, or, safe
from the peril, gaze on the wrath of the battle, or, serene in the
temples of the wise, look afar on the wanderings of human error? Is it
so sweet to survey the ills from which thou art delivered? Shall not the
strong law of SYMPATHY find thee out, and thy heart rebuke thy
philosophy? Not sweet, indeed, can be man's shelter in self when he says
to the storm, "I have no bark on the sea;" or to the gods of the battle,
"I have no son in the slaughter;" when he smiles unmoved upon Woe, and
murmurs, "Weep on, for these eyes know no tears;" when, unappalled, he
beholdeth the black deeds of crime, and cries to his conscience, "Thou
art calm." Yet solemn is the sight to him who lives in all life,--seeks
for Nature in the storm, and Providence in the battle; loses self in the
woe; probes his heart in the crime; and owns no philosophy that sets him
free from the fetters of man. Not in vain do we scan all the contrasts
in the large framework of civilized earth if we note "when the dust
groweth into hardness, and the clods cleave fast together." Range, O
Art, through all space, clasp together in extremes, shake idle wealth
from its lethargy, and bid States look in hovels where the teacher is
dumb, and Reason unweeded runs to rot! Bid haughty Intellect pause in
its triumph, and doubt if intellect alone can deliver the soul from its
tempters! Only that lives uncorrupt which preserves in all seasons the
human affections in which the breath of God breathes and is. Go forth to
the world, O Art, go forth to the innocent, the guilty, the wise, and the
dull; go forth as the still voice of Fate! Speak of the insecurity even
of goodness below; carry on the rapt vision of suffering Virtue through
"the doors of the shadows of death;" show the dim revelation symbolled
forth in the Tragedy of old,--how incomplete is man's destiny, how
undeveloped is the justice divine, if Antigone sleep eternally in the
ribs of the rock, and Oedipus vanish forever in the Grove of the Furies.
Here below, "the waters are hid with a stone, and the face of the deep is
frozen;" but above liveth He "who can bind the sweet influence of the
Pleiades, and loose the bands of Orion." Go with Fate over the bridge,
and she vanishes in the land beyond the gulf! Behold where the Eternal
demands Eternity for the progress of His creatures and the vindication of
His justice!
It was past midnight, and Lucretia sat alone in her dreary room; her head
buried on her bosom, her eyes fixed on the ground, her hands resting on
her knees,--it was an image of inanimate prostration and decrepitude that
might have moved compassion to its depth. The door opened, and Martha
entered, to assist Madame Dalibard, as usual, to retire to rest. Her
mistress slowly raised her eyes at the noise of the opening door, and
those eyes took their searching, penetrating acuteness as they fixed upon
the florid nor uncomely countenance of the waiting-woman.
In her starched cap, her sober-coloured stuff gown, in her prim, quiet
manner and a certain sanctified demureness of aspect, there was something
in the first appearance of this woman that impressed you with the notion
of respectability, and inspired confidence in those steady good qualities
which we seek in a trusty servant. But more closely examined, an
habitual observer might have found much to qualify, perhaps to disturb,
his first prepossessions. The exceeding lowness of the forehead, over
which that stiff, harsh hair was so puritanically parted; the severe
hardness of those thin, small lips, so pursed up and constrained; even a
certain dull cruelty in those light, cold blue eyes,--might have caused
an uneasy sentiment, almost approaching to fear. The fat grocer's spoilt
child instinctively recoiled from her when she entered the shop to make
her household purchases; the old, gray-whiskered terrier dog at the
public-house slunk into the tap when she crossed the threshold.
Madame Dalibard silently suffered herself to be wheeled into the
adjoining bedroom, and the process of disrobing was nearly completed
before she said abruptly,--
"So you attended Mr. Varney's uncle in his last illness. Did he suffer
much?"
"He was a poor creature at best," answered Martha; "but he gave me a deal
of trouble afore he went. He was a scranny corpse when I strecked him
out."
Madame Dalibard shrank from the hands at that moment employed upon
herself, and said,--
"It was not, then, the first corpse you have laid out for the grave?"
"Not by many."
"And did any of those you so prepared die of the same complaint?"
"I can't say, I'm sure," returned Martha. "I never inquires how folks
die; my bizness was to nurse 'em till all was over, and then to sit up.
As they say in my country, 'Riving Pike wears a hood when the weather
bodes ill.'" [If Riving Pike do wear a hood, The day, be sure,
will ne'er be good. A Lancashire Distich.]
"And when you sat up with Mr. Varney's uncle, did you feel no fear in the
dead of the night,--that corpse before you, no fear?"
"Young Mr. Varney said I should come to no harm. Oh, he's a clever man!
What should I fear, ma'am?" answered Martha, with a horrid simplicity.
"You have belonged to a very religious sect, I think I have heard you
say,--a sect not unfamiliar to me; a sect to which great crime is very
rarely known?"
"Yes, ma'am, some of 'em be tame enough, but others be weel [whirlpool]
deep!"
"You do not believe what they taught you?"
"I did when I was young and silly."
"And what disturbed your belief?"
"Ma'am, the man what taught me, and my mother afore me, was the first I
ever kep' company with," answered Martha, without a change in her florid
hue, which seemed fixed in her cheek, as the red in an autumn leaf.
"After he had ruined me, as the girls say, he told me as how it was all
sham!"
"You loved him, then?"
"The man was well enough, ma'am, and he behaved handsome and got me a
husband. I've known better days."
"You sleep well at night?"
"Yes, ma'am, thank you; I loves my bed."
"I have done with you," said Madame Dalibard, stifling a groan, as now,
placed in her bed, she turned to the wall. Martha extinguished the
candle, leaving it on the table by the bed, with a book and a box of
matches, for Madame Dalibard was a bad sleeper, and often read in the
night. She then drew the curtains and went her way.
It might be an hour after Martha had retired to rest that a hand was
stretched from the bed, that the candle was lighted, and Lucretia
Dalibard rose; with a sudden movement she threw aside the coverings, and
stood in her long night-gear on the floor. Yes, the helpless, paralyzed
cripple rose, was on her feet,--tall, elastic, erect! It was as a
resuscitation from the grave. Never was change more startling than that
simple action effected,--not in the form alone, but the whole character
of the face. The solitary light streamed upward on a countenance on
every line of which spoke sinister power and strong resolve. If you had
ever seen her before in her false, crippled state, prostrate and
helpless, and could have seen her then,--those eyes, if haggard still,
now full of life and vigour; that frame, if spare, towering aloft in
commanding stature, perfect in its proportions as a Grecian image of
Nemesis,--your amaze would have merged into terror, so preternatural did
the transformation appear, so did aspect and bearing contradict the very
character of her sex, uniting the two elements most formidable in man or
in fiend,--wickedness and power.
She stood a moment motionless, breathing loud, as if it were a joy to
breathe free from restraint; and then, lifting the light, and gliding to
the adjoining room, she unlocked a bureau in the corner, and bent over a
small casket, which she opened with a secret spring.
Reader, cast back your eye to that passage in this history when Lucretia
Clavering took down the volume from the niche in the tapestried chamber
at Laughton, and numbered, in thought, the hours left to her uncle's
life. Look back on the ungrateful thought; behold how it has swelled and
ripened into the guilty deed! There, in that box, Death guards his
treasure crypt. There, all the science of Hades numbers its murderous
inventions. As she searched for the ingredients her design had pre-
selected, something heavier than those small packets she deranged fell to
the bottom of the box with a low and hollow sound. She started at the
noise, and then smiled, in scorn of her momentary fear, as she took up
the ring that had occasioned the sound,--a ring plain and solid, like
those used as signets in the Middle Ages, with a large dull opal in the
centre. What secret could that bauble have in common with its ghastly
companions in Death's crypt? This had been found amongst Olivier's
papers; a note in that precious manuscript, which had given to the hands
of his successors the keys of the grave, had discovered the mystery of
its uses. By the pressure of the hand, at the touch of a concealed
spring, a barbed point flew forth steeped in venom more deadly than the
Indian extracts from the bag of the cobar de capello,--a venom to which
no antidote is known, which no test can detect. It corrupts the whole
mass of the blood; it mounts in frenzy and fire to the brain; it rends
the soul from the body in spasm and convulsion. But examine the dead,
and how divine the effect of the cause! How go back to the records of
the Borgias, and amidst all the scepticisms of times in which, happily,
such arts are unknown, unsuspected, learn from the hero of Machiavel how
a clasp of the hand can get rid of a foe! Easier and more natural to
point to the living puncture in the skin, and the swollen flesh round it,
and dilate on the danger a rusty nail--nay, a pin--can engender when the
humours are peccant and the blood is impure! The fabrication of that
bauble, the discovery of Borgia's device, was the masterpiece in the
science of Dalibard,--a curious and philosophical triumph of research,
hitherto unused by its inventor and his heirs; for that casket is rich in
the choice of more gentle materials: but the use yet may come. As she
gazed on the ring, there was a complacent and proud expression on
Lucretia's face.
"Dumb token of Caesar Borgia," she murmured,--"him of the wisest head and
the boldest hand that ever grasped at empire, whom Machiavel, the
virtuous, rightly praised as the model of accomplished ambition! Why
should I falter in the paths which he trod with his royal step, only
because my goal is not a throne? Every circle is as complete in itself,
whether rounding a globule or a star. Why groan in the belief that the
mind defiles itself by the darkness through which it glides on its
object, or the mire through which it ascends to the hill? Murderer as he
was, poisoner, and fratricide, did blood clog his intellect, or crime
impoverish the luxury of his genius? Was his verse less melodious [It is
well known that Caesar Borgia was both a munificent patron and an
exquisite appreciator of art; well known also are his powers of
persuasion but the general reader may not, perhaps, be acquainted with
the fact that this terrible criminal was also a poet], or his love of art
less intense, or his eloquence less persuasive, because he sought to
remove every barrier, revenge every wrong, crush every foe?"
In the wondrous corruption to which her mind had descended, thus murmured
Lucretia. Intellect had been so long made her sole god that the very
monster of history was lifted to her reverence by his ruthless intellect
alone,--lifted in that mood of feverish excitement when conscience, often
less silenced, lay crushed, under the load of the deed to come, into an
example and a guide.
Though at times, when looking back, oppressed by the blackest despair, no
remorse of the past ever weakened those nerves when the Hour called up
its demon, and the Will ruled the rest of the human being as a machine.
She replaced the ring, she reclosed the casket, relocked its depository;
then passed again into the adjoining chamber.
A few minutes afterwards, and the dim light that stole from the heavens
(in which the moon was partially overcast) through the casement on the
staircase rested on a shapeless figure robed in black from head to foot,-
-a figure so obscure and undefinable in outline, so suited to the gloom
in its hue, so stealthy and rapid in its movements, that had you started
from sleep and seen it on your floor, you would perforce have deemed that
your fancy had befooled you!
Thus darkly, through the darkness, went the Poisoner to her prey.
