"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 pa.s.sions 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 pa.s.sed 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 compa.s.sion 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 h.e.l.l,--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 pa.s.sed 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 s.e.x, 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 s.n.a.t.c.hes 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 carca.s.s to the jackal!"
"Listen!" began Varney; when the door opened and Helen herself stood unconsciously smiling at the threshold.
CHAPTER VI. THE LAWYER AND THE BODY-s.n.a.t.c.hER.
That same evening Beck, according to appointment, met Percival and showed him the dreary-looking house which held the fair stranger who had so attracted his youthful fancy. And Percival looked at the high walls with the sailor"s bold desire for adventure, while confused visions reflected from plays, operas, and novels, in which scaling walls with rope-ladders and dark-lanterns was represented as the natural vocation of a lover, flitted across his brain; and certainly he gave a deep sigh as his common-sense plucked him back from such romance. However, having now ascertained the house, it would be easy to learn the name of its inmates, and to watch or make his opportunity. As slowly and reluctantly he walked back to the spot where he had left his cabriolet, he entered into some desultory conversation with his strange guide; and the pity he had before conceived for Beck increased upon him as he talked and listened. This benighted mind, only illumined by a kind of miserable astuteness and that "cunning of the belly" which is born of want to engender avarice; this joyless temperament; this age in youth; this living reproach, rising up from the stones of London against our social indifference to the souls which wither and rot under the hard eyes of science and the deaf ears of wealth,--had a pathos for his lively sympathies and his fresh heart.
"If ever you want a friend, come to me," said St. John, abruptly.
The sweeper stared, and a gleam of diviner nature, a ray of grat.i.tude and unselfish devotion, darted through the fog and darkness of his mind.
He stood, with his hat off, watching the wheels of the cabriolet as it bore away the happy child of fortune, and then, shaking his head, as at some puzzle that perplexed and defied his comprehension, strode back to the town and bent his way homeward.
Between two and three hours after Percival thus parted from the sweeper, a man whose dress was little in accordance with the scene in which we present him, threaded his way through a foul labyrinth of alleys in the worst part of St. Giles"s,--a neighbourhood, indeed, carefully shunned at dusk by wealthy pa.s.sengers; for here dwelt not only Penury in its grimmest shape, but the desperate and dangerous guilt which is not to be lightly encountered in its haunts and domiciles. Here children imbibe vice with their mother"s milk. Here Prost.i.tution, commencing with childhood, grows fierce and sanguinary in the teens, and leagues with theft and murder. Here slinks the pickpocket, here emerges the burglar, here skulks the felon. Yet all about and all around, here, too, may be found virtue in its rarest and n.o.blest form,--virtue outs.h.i.+ning circ.u.mstance and defying temptation; the virtue of utter poverty, which groans, and yet sins not. So interwoven are these webs of penury and fraud that in one court your life is not safe; but turn to the right hand, and in the other, you might sleep safely in that worse than Irish shealing, though your pockets were full of gold. Through these haunts the ragged and penniless may walk unfearing, for they have nothing to dread from the lawless,--more, perhaps, from the law; but the wealthy, the respectable, the spruce, the dainty, let them beware the spot, unless the policeman is in sight or day is in the skies!
As this pa.s.senger, whose appearance, as we have implied, was certainly not that of a denizen, turned into one of the alleys, a rough hand seized him by the arm, and suddenly a group of girls and tatterdemalions issued from a house, in which the lower shutters unclosed showed a light burning, and surrounded him with a hoa.r.s.e whoop.
The pa.s.senger whispered a word in the ear of the grim blackguard who had seized him, and his arm was instantly released.
"Hist! a pal,--he has the catch," said the blackguard, surlily. The group gave way, and by the light of the clear starlit skies, and a single lamp hung at the entrance of the alley, gazed upon the stranger.
But they made no effort to detain him; and as he disappeared in the distant shadows, hastened back into the wretched hostlery where they had been merry-making. Meanwhile, the stranger gained a narrow court, and stopped before a house in one of its angles,--a house taller than the rest, so much taller than the rest that it had the effect of a tower; you would have supposed it (perhaps rightly) to be the last remains of some ancient building of importance, around which, as population thickened and fas.h.i.+on changed, the huts below it had insolently sprung up. Quaint and ma.s.sive pilasters, black with the mire and soot of centuries, flanked the deep-set door; the windows were heavy with mullions and transoms, and strongly barred in the lower floor; but few of the panes were whole, and only here and there had any attempt been made to keep out the wind and rain by rags, paper, old shoes, old hats, and other ingenious contrivances. Beside the door was conveniently placed a row of some ten or twelve bell-pulls, appertaining no doubt to the various lodgments into which the building was subdivided. The stranger did not seem very familiar with the appurtenances of the place.
He stood in some suspense as to the proper bell to select; but at last, guided by a bra.s.s plate annexed to one of the pulls, which, though it was too dark to decipher the inscription, denoted a claim to superior gentility to the rest of that nameless cla.s.s, he hazarded a tug, which brought forth a "larum loud enough to startle the whole court from its stillness.
In a minute or less, the cas.e.m.e.nt in one of the upper stories opened, a head peered forth, and one of those voices peculiar to low debauch--raw, cracked, and hoa.r.s.e--called out: "Who waits?"
"Is it you, Grabman?" asked the stranger, dubiously.
"Yes,--Nicholas Grabman, attorney-at-law, sir, at your service; and your name?"
"Jason," answered the stranger.
"Ho, there! ho, Beck!" cried the cracked voice to some one within; "go down and open the door."
In a few moments the heavy portal swung and creaked and yawned sullenly, and a gaunt form, half-undressed, with an inch of a farthing rushlight glimmering through a battered lantern in its hand, presented itself to Jason. The last eyed the ragged porter sharply.
"Do you live here?"
"Yes," answered Beck, with the cringe habitual to him. "H-up the ladder, vith the rats, drat "em."
"Well, lead on; hold up the lantern. A devil of a dark place this!"
grumbled Jason, as he nearly stumbled over sundry broken chattels, and gained a flight of rude, black, broken stairs, that creaked under his tread.
""St! "st!" said Beck between his teeth, as the stranger, halting at the second floor, demanded, in no gentle tones, whether Mr. Grabman lived in the chimney-pots.
""St! "st! Don"t make such a rumpus, or No. 7 will be at you."
"What do I care for No. 7? And who the devil is No. 7?"
"A body-s.n.a.t.c.her!" whispered Beck, with a shudder. "He"s a dillicut sleeper,--can"t abide having his night"s rest sp"ilt. And he"s the houtrageoustest great cretur when he"s h-up in his tantrums; it makes your "air stand on ind to "ear him!"