CHAPTER XXVII.
LUCRETIA REGAINS HER SON.
It seemed as if now, when danger became most imminent and present, that
that very danger served to restore to Lucretia Dalibard her faculties,
which during the earlier day had been steeped in a kind of dreary stupor.
The absolute necessity of playing out her execrable part with all
suitable and consistent hypocrisy, braced her into iron. But the
disguise she assumed was a supernatural effort, it stretched to cracking
every fibre of the brain; it seemed almost to herself as if, her object
once gained, either life or consciousness could hold out no more.
A chaise stopped at the porch; two gentlemen descended. The elder paused
irresolutely, and at length, taking out a card, inscribed "Mr. Walter
Ardworth," said, "If Madame Dalibard can be spoken to for a moment, will
you give her this card?"
The footman hesitatingly stared at the card, and then invited the
gentleman into the hall while he took up the message. Not long had the
visitor to wait, pacing the dark oak floors and gazing on the faded
banners, before the servant reappeared: Madame Dalibard would see him.
He followed his guide up the stairs, while his young companion turned
from the hall, and seated himself musingly on one of the benches on the
deserted terrace.
Grasping the arms of her chair with both hands, her eyes fixed eagerly on
his face, Lucretia Dalibard awaited the welcome visitor.
Prepared as he had been for change, Walter was startled by the ghastly
alteration in Lucretia's features, increased as it was at that moment by
all the emotions which raged within. He sank into the chair placed for
him opposite Lucretia, and clearing his throat, said falteringly,--
"I grieve indeed, Madame, that my visit, intended to bring but joy,
should chance thus inopportunely. The servant informed me as we came up
the stairs that your niece was ill; and I sympathize with your natural
anxiety,--Susan's only child, too; poor Susan!"
"Sir," said Lucretia, impatiently, "these moments are precious. Sir,
sir, my son,--my son!" and her eyes glanced to the door. "You have
brought with you a companion,--does he wait without? My son!"
"Madame, give me a moment's patience. I will be brief, and compress what
in other moments might be a long narrative into a few sentences."
Rapidly then Walter Ardworth passed over the details, unnecessary now to
repeat to the reader,--the injunctions of Braddell, the delivery of the
child to the woman selected by his fellow-sectarian (who, it seemed, by
John Ardworth's recent inquiries, was afterwards expelled the community,
and who, there was reason to believe, had been the first seducer of the
woman thus recommended). No clew to the child's parentage had been given
to the woman with the sum intrusted for his maintenance, which sum had
perhaps been the main cause of her reckless progress to infamy and ruin.
The narrator passed lightly over the neglect and cruelty of the nurse, to
her abandonment of the child when the money was exhausted. Fortunately
she had overlooked the coral round its neck. By that coral, and by the
initials V. B., which Ardworth had had the precaution to have burned into
the child's wrist, the lost son had been discovered; the nurse herself
(found in the person of Martha Skeggs, Lucretia's own servant) had been
confronted with the woman to whom she gave the child, and recognized at
once. Nor had it been difficult to obtain from her the confession which
completed the evidence.
"In this discovery," concluded Ardworth, "the person I employed met your
own agent, and the last links in the chain they traced together. But to
that person--to his zeal and intelligence--you owe the happiness I trust
to give you. He sympathized with me the more that he knew you
personally, felt for your sorrows, and had a lingering belief that you
supposed him to be the child you yearned for. Madame, thank my son for
the restoration of your own!"
Without sound, Lucretia had listened to these details, though her
countenance changed fearfully as the narrator proceeded. But now she
groaned aloud and in agony.
"Nay, Madame," said Ardworth, feelingly, and in some surprise, "surely
the discovery of your son should create gladder emotions! Though,
indeed, you will be prepared to find that the poor youth so reared wants
education and refinement, I have heard enough to convince me that his
dispositions are good and his heart grateful. Judge of this yourself; he
is in these walls, he is--"
"Abandoned by a harlot,--reared by a beggar! My son!" interrupted
Lucretia, in broken sentences. "Well, sir, have you discharged your
task! Well have you replaced a mother!" Before Ardworth could reply,
loud and rapid steps were heard in the corridor, and a voice, cracked,
indistinct, but vehement. The door was thrown open, and, half-supported
by Captain Greville, half dragging him along, his features convulsed,
whether by pain or passion, the spy upon Lucretia's secrets, the
denouncer of her crime, tottered to the threshold. Pointing to where she
sat with his long, lean arm, Beck exclaimed, "Seize her! I 'cuse her,
face to face, of the murder of her niece,--of--of I told you, sir--I told
you--"
"Madame," said Captain Greville, "you stand charged by this witness with
the most terrible of human crimes. I judge you not. Your niece, I
rejoice to bear, yet lives. Pray God that her death be not traced to
those kindred hands!" Turning her eyes from one to the other with a
wandering stare, Lucretia Dalibard remained silent. But there was still
scorn on her lip, and defiance on her brow. At last she said slowly, and
to Ardworth,--
"Where is my son? You say he is within these walls. Call him forth to
protect his mother! Give me at least my son,--my son!"
Her last words were drowned by a fresh burst of fury from her denouncer.
In all the coarsest invective his education could supply, in all the
hideous vulgarities of his untutored dialect, in that uncurbed
licentiousness of tone, look, and manner which passion, once aroused,
gives to the dregs and scum of the populace, Beck poured forth his
frightful charges, his frantic execrations. In vain Captain Greville
strove to check him; in vain Walter Ardworth sought to draw him from the
room. But while the poor wretch--maddening not more with the
consciousness of the crime than with the excitement of the poison in his
blood--thus raved and stormed, a terrible suspicion crossed Walter
Ardworth; mechanically,--as his grasp was on the accuser's arm,--he bared
the sleeve, and on the wrist were the dark-blue letters burned into the
skin and bearing witness to his identity with the lost Vincent Braddell.
"Hold, hold!" he exclaimed then; "hold, unhappy man!--it is your mother
whom you denounce!"
Lucretia sprang up erect; her eyes seemed starting from her head. She
caught at the arm pointed towards her in wrath and menace, and there,
amidst those letters that proclaimed her son, was the small puncture,
surrounded by a livid circle, that announced her victim. In the same
instant she discovered her child in the man who was calling down upon her
head the hatred of Earth and the justice of Heaven, and knew herself his
murderess!
She dropped the arm, and sank back on the chair; and whether the poison
had now reached to the vitals, or whether so unwonted a passion in so
frail a frame sufficed for the death-stroke, Beck himself, with a low,
suffocated cry, slid from the hand of Ardworth, and tottering a step or
so, the blood gushed from his mouth over Lucretia's robe; his head
drooped an instant, and, falling, rested first upon her lap, then struck
heavily upon the floor. The two men bent over him and raised him in
their arms; his eyes opened and closed, his throat rattled, and as he
fell back into their arms a corpse, a laugh rose close at hand,--it rang
through the walls, it was heard near and afar, above and below; not an
ear in that house that heard it not. In that laugh fled forever, till
the Judgment-day, from the blackened ruins of her lost soul, the reason
of the murderess-mother.
