CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE LOTS VANISH WITHIN THE URN.
Varney's self-commune restored to him his constitutional audacity. He
returned to Laughton towards the evening, and held a long conference with
Greville. Fortunately for him, perhaps, and happily for all, Helen had
lost all more dangerous symptoms; and the physician, who was in the
house, saw in her state nothing not easily to be accounted for by natural
causes. Percival had arrived, had seen Helen,--no wonder she was better!
Both from him and from Helen, Madame Dalibard's fearful condition was for
the present concealed. Ardworth's story, and the fact of Beck's identity
with Vincent Braddell, were also reserved for a later occasion. The tale
which Beck had poured into the ear of Greville (when, recognizing the St.
John livery, the captain stopped his chaise to inquire if Percival were
at the Hall, and when thrilled by the hideous import of his broken reply,
that gentleman had caused him to enter the vehicle to explain himself
further), Varney, with his wonted art and address, contrived to strip of
all probable semblance. Evidently the poor lad had been already
delirious; his story must be deemed the nightmare of his disordered
reason. Varney insisted upon surgical examination as to the cause of his
death. The membranes of the brain were found surcharged with blood, as
in cases of great mental excitement; the slight puncture in the wrist,
ascribed to the prick of a rusty nail, provoked no suspicion. If some
doubts remained still in Greville's acute mind, he was not eager to
express, still less to act upon them. Helen was declared to be out of
danger; Percival was safe,--why affix by minute inquiry into the alleged
guilt of Madame Dalibard (already so awfully affected by the death of her
son and by the loss of her reason) so foul a stain on the honoured family
of St. John? But Greville was naturally anxious to free the house as
soon as possible both of Varney and that ominous Lucretia, whose sojourn
under its roof seemed accursed. He therefore readily assented when
Varney proposed, as his obvious and personal duty, to take charge of his
mother-in-law, and remove her to London for immediate advice.
At the dead of the black-clouded night, no moon and no stars, the son of
Olivier Dalibard bore away the form of the once-formidable Lucretia,--the
form, for the mind was gone; that teeming, restless, and fertile
intellect, which had carried along the projects with the preterhuman
energies of the fiend, was hurled into night and chaos. Manacled and
bound, for at times her paroxysms were terrible, and all partook of the
destructive and murderous character which her faculties, when present,
had betrayed, she was placed in the vehicle by the shrinking side of her
accomplice.
Long before he arrived in London, Varney had got rid of his fearful
companion. His chaise had stopped at the iron gates of a large building
somewhat out of the main road, and the doors of the madhouse closed on
Lucretia Dalibard.
Varney then hastened to Dover, with intention of flight into France; he
was just about to step into the vessel, when he was tapped rudely on the
shoulder, and a determined voice said, "Mr. Gabriel Varney, you are my
prisoner!"
"For what? Some paltry debt?" said Varney, haughtily.
"For forgery on the Bank of England!"
Varney's hand plunged into his vest. The officer seized it in time, and
wrested the blade from his grasp. Once arrested for an offence it was
impossible to disprove, although the very smallest of which his
conscience might charge him, Varney sank into the blackest despair.
Though he had often boasted, not only to others, but to his own vain
breast, of the easy courage with which, when life ceased to yield
enjoyment, he could dismiss it by the act of his own will; though he had
possessed himself of Lucretia's murderous ring, and death, if fearful,
was therefore at his command,--self-destruction was the last thought that
occurred to him; that morbid excitability of fancy which, whether in his
art or in his deeds, had led him to strange delight in horror, now served
but to haunt him with the images of death in those ghastliest shapes
familiar to them who look only into the bottom of the charnel, and see
but the rat and the worm and the loathsome agencies of corruption. It
was not the despair of conscience that seized him, it was the abject
clinging to life; not the remorse of the soul,--that still slept within
him, too noble an agency for one so debased,--but the gross physical
terror. As the fear of the tiger, once aroused, is more paralyzing than
that of the deer, proportioned to the savageness of a disposition to
which fear is a novelty, so the very boldness of Varney, coming only from
the perfection of the nervous organization, and unsupported by one moral
sentiment, once struck down, was corrupted into the vilest cowardice.
With his audacity, his shrewdness forsook him. Advised by his lawyer to
plead guilty, he obeyed, and the sentence of transportation for life gave
him at first a feeling of reprieve; but when his imagination began to
picture, in the darkness of his cell, all the true tortures of that
penalty,--not so much, perhaps, to the uneducated peasant-felon, inured
to toil, and familiarized with coarse companionship, as to one pampered
like himself by all soft and half-womanly indulgences,--the shaven hair,
the convict's dress, the rigorous privation, the drudging toil, the
exile, seemed as grim as the grave. In the dotage of faculties smitten
into drivelling, he wrote to the Home Office, offering to disclose
secrets connected with crimes that had hitherto escaped or baffled
justice, on condition that his sentence might be repealed, or mitigated
into the gentler forms of ordinary transportation. No answer was
returned to him, but his letter provoked research. Circumstances
connected with his uncle's death, and with various other dark passages in
his life, sealed against him all hope of a more merciful sentence; and
when some acquaintances, whom his art had made for him, and who, while
grieving for his crime, saw in it some excuses (ignorant of his feller
deeds), sought to intercede in his behalf, the reply of the Home Office
was obvious: "He is a fortunate man to have been tried and condemned for
his least offence." Not one indulgence that could distinguish him from
the most execrable ruffian condemned to the same sentence was conceded.
The idea of the gibbet lost all its horror. Here was a gibbet for every
hour. No hope,--no escape. Already that Future Doom which comprehends
the "Forever" opened upon him black and fathomless. The hour-glass was
broken up, the hand of the timepiece was arrested. The Beyond stretched
before him without limit, without goal,--on into Annihilation or into
Hell.
