Lucretia Part 20

You stretch out your arms in the dark, you feel nothing, and you die!

Oh, do not fancy that I have not thought well (for I am almost a man now) if there were no means to resist,--there are none! As well make head against the plague,--it is in the atmosphere. Come to England, and return. Live poorly, if you must, but live--but live!"

"Return to England poor and despised, and bound still to him, or a disgraced and divorced wife,--disgraced by the low-born dependant on my kinsman's house,--and fawn perhaps upon my sister and her husband for bread! Never! I am at my post, and I will not fly."

"Brave, brave!" said the boy, clapping his hands, and sincerely moved by a daring superior to his own; "I wish I could help you!"

Lucretia's eye rested on him with the full gaze, so rare in its looks.

She drew him to her and kissed his brow. "Boy, through life, whatever our guilt and its doom, we are bound to each other. I may yet live to have wealth; if so, it is yours as a son's. I may be iron to others,--never to you. Enough of this; I must reflect!" She pa.s.sed her hands over her eyes a moment, and resumed: "You would help me in my self-defence; I think you can. You have been more alert in your watch than I have. You must have means I have not secured. Your father guards well all his papers."

"I have keys to every desk. My foot pa.s.sed the threshold of that room under the roof before yours. But no; his powers can never be yours!

He has never confided to you half his secrets. He has antidotes for every--every--"

"Hist! what noise is that? Only the shower on the cas.e.m.e.nts. No, no, child, that is not my object. Cadoudal's conspiracy! Your father has letters from Fouche which show how he has betrayed others who are stronger to avenge than a woman and a boy."

"Well?"

"I would have those letters. Give me the keys. But hold! Gabriel, Gabriel, you may yet misjudge him. This woman--wife to the dead man--his wife! Horror! Have you no proofs of what you imply?"

"Proofs!" echoed Gabriel, in a tone of wonder; "I can but see and conjecture. You are warned, watch and decide for yourself. But again I say, come to England; I shall go!"

Without reply, Lucretia took the keys from Gabriel's half-reluctant hand, and pa.s.sed into her husband's writing-room. When she had entered, she locked the door. She pa.s.sed at once to a huge secretary, of which the key was small as a fairy's work. She opened it with ease by one of the counterfeits. No love-correspondence--the first object of her search, for she was woman--met her eye. What need of letters, when interviews were so facile? But she soon found a doc.u.ment that told all which love-letters could tell,--it was an account of the moneys and possessions of Madame Bellanger; and there were pencil notes on the margin: "Vautran will give four hundred thousand francs for the lands in Auvergne,--to be accepted. Consult on the power of sale granted to a second husband. Query, if there is no chance of the heir-at-law disputing the moneys invested in Madame B.'s name,"--and such memoranda as a man notes down in the schedule of properties about to be his own.

In these inscriptions there was a hideous mockery of all love; like the blue lights of corruption, they showed the black vault of the heart. The pale reader saw what her own attractions had been, and, fallen as she was, she smiled superior in her bitterness of scorn. Arranged methodically with the precision of business, she found the letters she next looked for; one recognizing Dalibard's services in the detection of the conspiracy, and authorizing him to employ the police in the search of Pierre Guillot, sufficed for her purpose. She withdrew, and secreted it. She was about to lock up the secretary, when her eye fell on the t.i.tle of a small ma.n.u.script volume in a corner; and as shet read, she pressed one hand convulsively to her heart, while twice with the other she grasped the volume, and twice withdrew the grasp. The t.i.tle ran harmlessly thus: "Philosophical and Chemical Inquiries into the Nature and Materials of the Poisons in Use between the Fourteenth and Sixteenth Centuries." Hurriedly, and at last as if doubtful of herself, she left the ma.n.u.script, closed the secretary, and returned to Gabriel.

"You have got the paper you seek?" he said.

"Yes."

"Then whatever you do, you must be quick; he will soon discover the loss."

"I will be quick."

"It is I whom he will suspect," said Gabriel, in alarm, as that thought struck him. "No, for my sake do not take the letter till I am gone. Do not fear in the mean time; he will do nothing against you while I am here."

"I will replace the letter till then," said Lucretia, meekly. "You have a right to my first thoughts." So she went back, and Gabriel (suspicious perhaps) crept after her.

As she replaced the doc.u.ment, he pointed to the ma.n.u.script which had tempted her. "I have seen that before; how I longed for it! If anything ever happens to him, I claim that as my legacy."

Their hands met as he said this, and grasped each other convulsively; Lucretia relocked the secretary, and when she gained the next room, she tottered to a chair. Her strong nerves gave way for the moment; she uttered no cry, but by the whiteness of her face, Gabriel saw that she was senseless,--senseless for a minute or so; scarcely more. But the return to consciousness with a clenched hand, and a brow of defiance, and a stare of mingled desperation and dismay, seemed rather the awaking from some frightful dream of violence and struggle than the slow, languid recovery from the faintness of a swoon. Yes, henceforth, to sleep was to couch by a serpent,--to breathe was to listen for the avalanche! Thou who didst trifle so wantonly with Treason, now gravely front the grim comrade thou hast won; thou scheming desecrator of the Household G.o.ds, now learn, to the last page of dark knowledge, what the hearth is without them!

Gabriel was strangely moved as he beheld that proud and solitary despair. An instinct of nature had hitherto checked him from actively aiding Lucretia in that struggle with his father which could but end in the destruction of one or the other. He had contented himself with forewarnings, with hints, with indirect suggestions; but now all his sympathy was so strongly roused on her behalf that the last faint scruple of filial conscience vanished into the abyss of blood over which stood that lonely t.i.taness. He drew near, and clasping her hand, said, in a quick and broken voice,--

"Listen! You know where to find proof of my fa--that is, of Dalibard's treason to the conspirators, you know the name of the man he dreads as an avenger, and you know that he waits but the proof to strike; but you do not know where to find that man, if his revenge is wanting for yourself. The police have not hunted him out: how can you? Accident has made me acquainted with one of his haunts. Give me a single promise, and I will put you at least upon that clew,--weak, perhaps, but as yet the sole one to be followed. Promise me that, only in defence of your own life, not for mere jealousy, you will avail yourself of the knowledge, and you shall know all I do!"

"Do you think," said Lucretia, in a calm, cold voice, "that it is for jealousy, which is love, that I would murder all hope, all peace? For we have here"--and she smote her breast--"here, if not elsewhere, a heaven and a h.e.l.l! Son, I will not harm your father, except in self-defence.

But tell me nothing that may make the son a party in the father's doom."

"The father slew the mother," muttered Gabriel, between his clenched teeth; "and to me, you have wellnigh supplied her place. Strike, if need be, in her name! If you are driven to want the arm of Pierre Guillot, seek news of him at the Cafe Dufour, Rue S----, Boulevard du Temple. Be calm now; I hear your husband's step."

A few days more, and Gabriel is gone! Wife and husband are alone with each other. Lucretia has refused to depart. Then that mute coma of horror, that suspense of two foes in the conflict of death; for the subtle, prying eye of Olivier Dalibard sees that he himself is suspected,--further he shuns from sifting! Glance fastens on glance, and then hurries smilingly away. From the cup grins a skeleton, at the board warns a spectre. But how kind still the words, and how gentle the tone; and they lie down side by side in the marriage-bed,--brain plotting against brain, heart loathing heart. It is a duel of life and death between those sworn through life and beyond death at the altar. But it is carried on with all the forms and courtesies of duel in the age of chivalry. No conjugal wrangling, no slip of the tongue; the oil is on the surface of the wave,--the monsters in the h.e.l.l of the abyss war invisibly below. At length, a dull torpor creeps over the woman; she feels the taint in her veins,--the slow victory is begun. What mattered all her vigilance and caution? Vainly glide from the fangs of the serpent,--his very breath suffices to destroy! Pure seems the draught and wholesome the viand,--that master of the science of murder needs not the means of the bungler! Then, keen and strong from the creeping lethargy started the fierce instinct of self and the ruthless impulse of revenge. Not too late yet to escape; for those subtle banes, that are to defy all detection, work but slowly to their end.

One evening a woman, closely mantled, stood at watch by the angle of a wall. The light came dim and m.u.f.fled from the window of a cafe hard at hand; the reflection slept amidst the shadows on the dark pavement, and save a solitary lamp swung at distance in the vista over the centre of the narrow street, no ray broke the gloom. The night was clouded and starless, the wind moaned in gusts, and the rain fell heavily; but the gloom and the loneliness did not appall the eye, and the wind did not chill the heart, and the rain fell unheeded on the head of the woman at her post. At times she paused in her slow, sentry-like pace to and fro, to look through the window of the cafe, and her gaze fell always on one figure seated apart from the rest. At length her pulse beat more quickly, and the patient lips smiled sternly. The figure had risen to depart. A man came out and walked quickly up the street; the woman approached, and when the man was under the single lamp swung aloft, he felt his arm touched: the woman was at his side, and looking steadily into his face--

"You are Pierre Guillot, the Breton, the friend of George Cadoudal. Will you be his avenger?"

The Chouan's first impulse had been to place his hand in his vest, and something shone bright in the lamp-light, clasped in those iron fingers.

The voice and the manner rea.s.sured him, and he answered readily,--

"I am he whom you seek, and I only live to avenge."

"Read, then, and act," answered the woman, as she placed a paper in his hands.

At Laughton the babe is on the breast of the fair mother, and the father sits beside the bed; and mother and father dispute almost angrily whether mother or father those soft, rounded features of slumbering infancy resemble most. At the red house, near the market-town, there is a hospitable bustle. William is home earlier than usual. Within the last hour, Susan has been thrice into every room. Husband and wife are now watching at the window. The good Fieldens, with a coach full of children, are expected, every moment, on a week's visit at least.

In the cafe in the Boulevard du Temple sit Pierre Guillot, the Chouan, and another of the old band of brigands whom George Cadoudal had mustered in Paris. There is an expression of content on Guillot's countenance,--it seems more open than usual, and there is a complacent smile on his lips. He is whispering low to his friend in the intervals of eating,--an employment pursued with the hearty gusto of a hungry man.

But his friend does not seem to sympathize with the cheerful feelings of his comrade; he is pale, and there is terror on his face; and you may see that the journal in his hand trembles like a leaf.

In the gardens of the Tuileries some score or so of gossips group together.

"And no news of the murderer?" asked one.

"No; but the man who had been friend to Robespierre must have made secret enemies enough."

"Ce pauvre Dalibard! He was not mixed up with the Terrorists, nevertheless."

"Ah, but the more deadly for that, perhaps; a sly man was Olivier Dalibard!"

"What's the matter?" said an employee, lounging up to the group. "Are you talking of Olivier Dalibard? It is but the other day he had Marsan's appointment. He is now to have Pleyel's. I heard it two days ago; a capital thing! Peste! il ira loin. We shall have him a senator soon."

"Speak for yourself," quoth a ci-devant abbe, with a laugh; "I should be sorry to see him again soon, wherever he be."

"Plait-il? I don't understand you!"

"Don't you know that Olivier Dalibard is murdered, found stabbed,--in his own house, too!"

"Ciel! Pray tell me all you know. His place, then, is vacant!"

"Why, it seems that Dalibard, who had been brought up to medicine, was still fond of chemical experiments. He hired a room at the top of the house for such scientific amus.e.m.e.nts. He was accustomed to spend part of his nights there. They found him at morning bathed in his blood, with three ghastly wounds in his side, and his fingers cut to the bone. He had struggled hard with the knife that butchered him."

"In his own house!" said a lawyer. "Some servant or spendthrift heir."

"He has no heir but young Bellanger, who will be riche a millions, and is now but a schoolboy at Lyons. No; it seems that the window was left open, and that it communicates with the rooftops. There the murderer had entered, and by that way escaped; for they found the leads of the gutter dabbled with blood. The next house was uninhabited,--easy enough to get in there, and lie perdu till night."

"Hum!" said the lawyer. "But the a.s.sa.s.sin could only have learned Dalibard's habits from some one in the house. Was the deceased married?"

"Oh, yes,--to an Englishwoman."

"She had lovers, perhaps?"

"Pooh, lovers! The happiest couple ever known; you should have seen them together! I dined there last week."