CHAPTER XVIII. RETROSPECT.
We have now arrived at that stage in this history when it is necessaryto look back on the interval in Lucretia's life,--between the death ofDalibard, and her reintroduction in the second portion of our tale.
One day, without previous notice or warning, Lucretia arrived at WilliamMainwaring's house; she was in the deep weeds of widowhood, and thatgarb of mourning sufficed to add Susan's tenderest commiseration to thewarmth of her affectionate welcome. Lucretia appeared to have forgiventhe past, and to have conquered its more painful recollections; she wasgentle to Susan, though she rather suffered than returned her caresses;she was open and frank to William. Both felt inexpressibly grateful forher visit, the forgiveness it betokened, and the confidence it implied.At this time no condition could be more promising and prosperous thanthat of the young banker. From the first the most active partner in thebank, he had now virtually almost monopolized the business. The seniorpartner was old and infirm; the second had a bucolic turn, and was muchtaken up by the care of a large farm he had recently purchased; so thatMainwaring, more and more trusted and honoured, became the sole managingadministrator of the firm. Business throve in his able hands; and withpatient and steady perseverance there was little doubt but that, beforemiddle age was attained, his competence would have swelled into afortune sufficient to justify him in realizing the secret dream of hisheart,--the parliamentary representation of the town, in which he hadalready secured the affection and esteem of the inhabitants.
It was not long before Lucretia detected the ambition William's industrybut partially concealed; it was not long before, with the ascendencynatural to her will and her talents, she began to exercise considerable,though unconscious, influence over a man in whom a thousand goodqualities and some great talents were unhappily accompanied by infirmpurpose and weak resolutions. The ordinary conversation of Lucretiaunsettled his mind and inflamed his vanity,--a conversation able,aspiring, full both of knowledge drawn from books and of that experienceof public men which her residence in Paris (whereon, with its new andgreater Charlemagne, the eyes of the world were turned) had added toher acquisitions in the lore of human life. Nothing more disturbs a mindlike William Mainwaring's than that species of eloquence which rebukesits patience in the present by inflaming all its hopes in the future.Lucretia had none of the charming babble of women, none of that tenderinterest in household details, in the minutiae of domestic life, whichrelaxes the intellect while softening the heart. Hard and vigorous, hersentences came forth in eternal appeal to the reason, or address to thesterner passions in which love has no share. Beside this strong thinker,poor Susan's sweet talk seemed frivolous and inane. Her soft hold uponMainwaring loosened. He ceased to consult her upon business; he began torepine that the partner of his lot could have little sympathy with hisdreams. More often and more bitterly now did his discontented glance, inhis way homeward, rove to the rooftops of the rural member for the town;more eagerly did he read the parliamentary debates; more heavily did hesigh at the thought of eloquence denied a vent, and ambition delayed inits career.
When arrived at this state of mind, Lucretia's conversation took a moreworldly, a more practical turn. Her knowledge of the speculators ofParis instructed her pictures of bold ingenuity creating suddenwealth; she spoke of fortunes made in a day,--of parvenus bursting intomillionnaires; of wealth as the necessary instrument of ambition, as thearch ruler of the civilized world. Never once, be it observed, in thesetemptations, did Lucretia address herself to the heart; the ordinarychannels of vulgar seduction were disdained by her. She would not havestooped so low as Mainwaring's love, could she have commanded or alluredit; she was willing to leave to Susan the husband reft from her ownpassionate youth, but leave him with the brand on his brow and the wormat his heart,--a scoff and a wreck.
At this time there was in that market-town one of those adventurous,speculative men, who are the more dangerous impostors because imposedupon by their own sanguine chimeras, who have a plausibility in theircalculations, an earnestness in their arguments, which account forthe dupes they daily make in our most sober and wary of civilizedcommunities. Unscrupulous in their means, yet really honest in thebelief that their objects can be attained, they are at once the roguesand fanatics of Mammon. This person was held to have been fortunatein some adroit speculations in the corn trade, and he was brought toofrequently into business with Mainwaring not to be a frequent visitorat the house. In him Lucretia saw the very instrument of her design. Sheled him on to talk of business as a game, of money as a realizer of centper cent; she drew him into details, she praised him, she admired. Inhis presence she seemed only to hear him; in his absence, musingly, shestarted from silence to exclaim on the acuteness of his genius and theaccuracy of his figures. Soon the tempter at Mainwaring's heart gavesignification to these praises, soon this adventurer became his mostintimate friend. Scarcely knowing why, never ascribing the change to hersister, poor Susan wept, amazed at Mainwaring's transformation. No carenow for the new books from London, or the roses in the garden; the musicon the instrument was unheeded. Books, roses, music,--what are thosetrifles to a man thinking upon cent per cent? Mainwaring's verycountenance altered; it lost its frank, affectionate beauty: sullen,abstracted, morose, it showed that some great care was at the core.Then Lucretia herself began grievingly to notice the change to Susan;gradually she altered her tone with regard to the speculator, and hintedvague fears, and urged Susan's remonstrance and warning. As she hadanticipated, warning and remonstrance came in vain to the man who,comparing Lucretia's mental power to Susan's, had learned to despise theunlearned, timid sense of the latter.
It is unnecessary to trace this change in Mainwaring step by step, orto measure the time which sufficed to dazzle his reason and blind hishonour. In the midst of schemes and hopes which the lust of gold nowpervaded came a thunderbolt. An anonymous letter to the head partnerof the bank provoked suspicions that led to minute examination of theaccounts. It seemed that sums had been irregularly advanced (uponbills drawn by men of straw) to the speculator by Mainwaring; and thedestination of these sums could be traced to gambling operations intrade in which Mainwaring had a private interest and partnership. Sogreat, as we have said, had been the confidence placed in William'sabilities and honour that the facilities afforded him in the disposal ofthe joint stock far exceeded those usually granted to the partner of afirm, and the breach of trust appeared the more flagrant from the extentof the confidence misplaced. Meanwhile, William Mainwaring, thoughas yet unconscious of the proceedings of his partners, was gnawed byanxiety and remorse, not unmixed with hope. He depended upon the resultof a bold speculation in the purchase of shares in a Canal Company,a bill for which was then before parliament, with (as he was ledto believe) a certainty of success. The sums he had, on his ownresponsibility, abstracted from the joint account were devoted to thisadventure. But, to do him justice, he never dreamed of appropriating theprofits anticipated to himself. Though knowing that the bills on whichthe moneys had been advanced were merely nominal deposits, he hadconfidently calculated on the certainty of success for the speculationsto which the proceeds so obtained were devoted, and he looked forwardto the moment when he might avow what he had done, and justify it bydoubling the capital withdrawn. But to his inconceivable horror, thebill of the Canal Company was rejected in the Lords; the shares boughtat a premium went down to zero; and to add to his perplexity, thespeculator abruptly disappeared from the town. In this crisis he wassummoned to meet his indignant associates.
The evidence against him was morally damning, if not legally conclusive.The unhappy man heard all in the silence of despair. Crushed andbewildered, he attempted no defence. He asked but an hour to sum up thelosses of the bank and his own; they amounted within a few hundreds tothe 10,000 pounds he had brought to the firm, and which, in the absenceof marriage-settlements, was entirely at his own disposal. This sum heat once resigned to his associates, on condition that they should defrayfrom it his personal liabilities. The money
thus repaid, his partnersnaturally relinquished all further inquiry. They were moved by pity forone so gifted and so fallen,--they even offered him a subordinatebut lucrative situation in the firm in which he had been partner;but Mainwaring wanted the patience and resolution to work back theredemption of his name,--perhaps, ultimately, of his fortunes. In thefatal anguish of his shame and despair, he fled from the town; hisflight confirmed forever the rumours against him,--rumours worse thanthe reality. It was long before he even admitted Susan to the knowledgeof the obscure refuge he had sought; there, at length, she joined him.Meanwhile, what did Lucretia? She sold nearly half of her own fortune,constituted principally of the moiety of her portion which, atDalibard's death, had passed to herself as survivor, and partly of theshare in her deceased husband's effects which the French law awarded toher, and with the proceeds of this sum she purchased an annuity for hervictims. Was this strange generosity the act of mercy, the resultof repentance? No; it was one of the not least subtle and deliciousrefinements of her revenge. To know him who had rejected her, the rivalwho had supplanted, the miserable pensioners of her bounty, was dear toher haughty and disdainful hate. The lust of power, ever stronger in herthan avarice, more than reconciled her to the sacrifice of gold. Yes,here she, the despised, the degraded, had power still; her wrath hadruined the fortunes of her victim, blasted the repute, embittered anddesolated evermore the future,--now her contemptuous charity fed thewretched lives that she spared in scorn. She had no small difficulty,it is true, in persuading Susan to accept this sacrifice, and she didso only by sustaining her sister's belief that the past could yet beretrieved, that Mainwaring's energies could yet rebuild their fortunes,and that as the annuity was at any time redeemable, the aid thereforewas only temporary. With this understanding, Susan, overwhelmed withgratitude, weeping and broken-hearted, departed to join the choice ofher youth. As the men deputed by the auctioneer to arrange and ticketthe furniture for sale entered the desolate house, Lucretia then, withthe step of a conqueror, passed from the threshold.
"Ah!" she murmured, as she paused, and gazed on the walls, "ah, theywere happy when I first entered those doors,--happy in each other'stranquil love; happier still when they deemed I had forgiven the wrongand abjured the past! How honoured was then their home! How knew I then,for the first time, what the home of love can be! And who had destroyedfor me, upon all the earth, a home like theirs? They on whom that homesmiled with its serene and taunting peace! I--I, the guest! I--I, theabandoned, the betrayed,--what dark memories were on my soul, what ahell boiled within my bosom! Well might those memories take each a voiceto accuse them; well, from that hell, might rise the Alecto! Their liveswere in my power, my fatal dowry at my command,--rapid death, or slow,consuming torture; but to have seen each cheer the other to the grave,lighting every downward step with the eyes of love,--vengeance sourged would have fallen only on myself! Ha! deceiver, didst thou plumethyself, forsooth, on spotless reputation? Didst thou stand, me by thyside, amongst thy perjured household gods and talk of honour? Thy home,it is reft from thee; thy reputation, it is a scoff; thine honour, itis a ghost that shall haunt thee! Thy love, can it linger yet? Shall thesoft eyes of thy wife not burn into thy heart, and shame turn love intoloathing? Wrecks of my vengeance, minions of my bounty, I did well tolet ye live; I shake the dust from my feet on your threshold. Live on,homeless, hopeless, and childless! The curse is fulfilled!"
From that hour Lucretia never paused from her career to inquire furtherof her victims; she never entered into communication with either. Theyknew not her address nor her fate, nor she theirs. As she had reckoned,Mainwaring made no effort to recover himself from his fall. All thehigh objects that had lured his ambition were gone from him evermore.No place in the State, no authority in the senate, awaits in England theman with a blighted name. For the lesser objects of life he had no heartand no care. They lived in obscurity in a small village in Cornwall tillthe Peace allowed them to remove to France; the rest of their fate isknown.
Meanwhile, Lucretia removed to one of those smaller Londons, resortsof pleasure and idleness, with which rich England abounds, and in whichwidows of limited income can make poverty seem less plebeian. And now,to all those passions that had hitherto raged within her, a dismalapathy succeeded. It was the great calm in her sea of life. The windsfell, and the sails drooped. Her vengeance satisfied, that which she hadmade so preternaturally the main object of existence, once fulfilled,left her in youth objectless.
She strove at first to take pleasure in the society of the place; butits frivolities and pettiness of purpose soon wearied that masculineand grasping mind, already made insensible to the often healthful, ofteninnocent, excitement of trifles, by the terrible ordeal it had passed.Can the touch of the hand, scorched by the burning iron, feel pleasurein the softness of silk, or the light down of the cygnet's plume? Shenext sought such relief as study could afford; and her natural bent ofthought, and her desire to vindicate her deeds to herself, plungedher into the fathomless abyss of metaphysical inquiry with the hopeto confirm into positive assurance her earlier scepticism,--with theatheist's hope to annihilate the soul, and banish the presiding God.But no voice that could satisfy her reason came from those dreary deeps;contradiction on contradiction met her in the maze. Only when, weariedwith book-lore, she turned her eyes to the visible Nature, and beheldeverywhere harmony, order, system, contrivance, art, did she start withthe amaze and awe of instinctive conviction, and the natural religionrevolted from her cheerless ethics. Then came one of those suddenreactions common with strong passions and exploring minds, but morecommon with women, however manlike, than with men. Had she lived inItaly then, she had become a nun; for in this woman, unlike Varney andDalibard, the conscience could never be utterly silenced. In her choiceof evil, she found only torture to her spirit in all the respitesafforded to the occupations it indulged. When employed upon ill, remorsegave way to the zest of scheming; when the ill was done, remorse camewith the repose.
It was in this peculiar period of her life that Lucretia, turningeverywhere, and desperately, for escape from the past, became acquaintedwith some members of one of the most rigid of the sects of Dissent. Atfirst she permitted herself to know and commune with these personsfrom a kind of contemptuous curiosity; she desired to encourage, incontemplating them, her experience of the follies of human nature: butin that crisis of her mind, in those struggles of her reason, whatevershowed that which she most yearned to discover,--namely, earnestfaith, rooted and genuine conviction, whether of annihilation orof immortality, a philosophy that might reconcile her to crime bydestroying the providence of good, or a creed that could hold out thehope of redeeming the past and exorcising sin by the mystery of a Divinesacrifice,--had over her a power which she had not imagined or divined.Gradually the intense convictions of her new associates disturbed andinfected her. Their affirmations that as we are born in wrath, so sinis our second nature, our mysterious heritage, seemed, to herunderstanding, willing to be blinded, to imply excuses for her pastmisdeeds. Their assurances that the worst sinner may become the mostearnest saint; that through but one act of the will, resolute faith,all redemption is to be found,--these affirmations and these assurances,which have so often restored the guilty and remodelled the human heart,made a salutary, if brief, impression upon her. Nor were the lives ofthese Dissenters (for the most part austerely moral), nor the peaceand self-complacency which they evidently found in the satisfaction ofconscience and fulfilment of duty, without an influence over her thatfor a while both chastened and soothed.
Hopeful of such a convert, the good teachers strove hard to confirm theseeds springing up from the granite and amidst the weeds; and amongstthem came one man more eloquent, more seductive, than the rest,--AlfredBraddell. This person, a trader at Liverpool, was one of those strangeliving paradoxes that can rarely be found out of a commercial community.He himself had been a convert to the sect, and like most converts,he pushed his enthusiasm into the bigotry of the zealot; he saw nosalvation out of the pale in
to which he had entered. But though hisbelief was sincere, it did not genially operate on his practical life;with the most scrupulous attention to forms, he had the worldliness andcunning of the carnal. He had abjured the vices of the softer senses,but not that which so seldom wars on the decorums of outer life. He wasessentially a money-maker,--close, acute, keen, overreaching. Good workswith him were indeed as nothing,--faith the all in all. He was one ofthe elect, and could not fall. Still, in this man there was allthe intensity which often characterizes a mind in proportion to thenarrowness of its compass; that intensity gave fire to his gloomyeloquence, and strength to his obstinate will. He saw Lucretia, and hiszeal for her conversion soon expanded into love for her person; yetthat love was secondary to his covetousness. Though ostensibly in aflourishing business, he was greatly distressed for money to carry onoperations which swelled beyond the reach of his capital; his fingersitched for the sum which Lucretia had still at her disposal. But theseeming sincerity of the man, the persuasion of his goodness, hisreputation for sanctity, deceived her; she believed herself honestlyand ardently beloved, and by one who could guide her back, if not tohappiness, at least to repose. She herself loved him not,--she couldlove no more. But it seemed to her a luxury to find some one she couldtrust, she could honour. If you had probed into the recesses of her mindat that time, you would have found that no religious belief was theresettled,--only the desperate wish to believe; only the disturbance ofall previous infidelity; only a restless, gnawing desire to escape frommemory, to emerge from the gulf. In this troubled, impatient disorderof mind and feeling, she hurried into a second marriage as fatal as thefirst.
For a while she bore patiently all the privations of that ascetichousehold, assisted in all those external formalities, centred all herintellect within that iron range of existence. But no grace descendedon her soul,--no warm ray unlocked the ice of the well. Then, graduallybecoming aware of the niggardly meanness, of the harsh, uncharitablejudgments, of the decorous frauds that, with unconscious hypocrisy, herhusband concealed beneath the robes of sanctity, a weary disgust stoleover her,--it stole, it deepened, it increased; it became intolerablewhen she discovered that Braddell had knowingly deceived her as tohis worldly substance. In that mood in which she had rushed into theseominous nuptials, she had had no thought for vulgar advantages; hadBraddell been a beggar, she had married him as rashly. But he, withthe inability to comprehend a nature like hers,--dim not more to herterrible vices than to the sinister grandeur which made their ordinaryatmosphere,--had descended cunningly to address the avarice he thoughtas potent in others as himself, to enlarge on the worldly prosperitywith which Providence had blessed him; and now she saw that her dowryalone had saved the crippled trader from the bankrupt list. With thisrevolting discovery, with the scorn it produced, vanished all Lucretia'sunstable visions of reform. She saw this man a saint amongst histribe, and would not believe in the virtues of his brethren, great andunquestionable as they might have been proved to a more dispassionateand humbler inquirer. The imposture she detected she deemed universalin the circle in which she dwelt; and Satan once more smiled upon thesubject he regained. Lucretia became a mother; but their child formed noendearing tie between the ill-assorted pair,--it rather embittered theirdiscord. Dimly even then, as she bent over the cradle, that vision,which now, in the old house at Brompton, haunted her dreams and beckonedher over seas of blood into the fancied future, was foreshadowed in theface of her infant son. To be born again in that birth, to live onlyin that life, to aspire as man may aspire, in that future man whom shewould train to knowledge and lead to power,--these were the feelingswith which that sombre mother gazed upon her babe. The idea that thelow-born, grovelling father had the sole right over that son's destiny,had the authority to cabin his mind in the walls of form, bind him downto the sordid apprenticeship, debased, not dignified, by the solemnmien, roused her indignant wrath; she sickened when Braddell touched herchild. All her pride of intellect, that had never slept, all her prideof birth, long dormant, woke up to protect the heir of her ambition, thedescendant of her race, from the defilement of the father's nurture.Not long after her confinement, she formed a plan for escape; shedisappeared from the house with her child. Taking refuge in a cottage,living on the sale of the few jewels she possessed, she was for someweeks almost happy. But Braddell, less grieved by the loss than shockedby the scandal, was indefatigable in his researches,--he discovered herretreat. The scene between them was terrible. There was no resisting thepower which all civilized laws give to the rights of husband and father.Before this man, whom she scorned so unutterably, Lucretia was impotent.Then all the boiling passions long suppressed beneath that command oftemper which she owed both to habitual simulation and intense disdain,rushed forth. Then she appalled the impostor with her indignantdenunciations of his hypocrisy, his meanness, and his guile. Then,throwing off the mask she had worn, she hurled her anathema on his sect,on his faith, with the same breath that smote his conscience and left itwordless. She shocked all the notions he sincerely entertained, and hestood awed by accusations from a blasphemer whom he dared not rebuke.His rage broke at length from his awe. Stung, maddened by the scorn ofhimself, his blood fired into juster indignation by her scoff at hiscreed, he lost all self-possession and struck her to the ground. In themidst of shame and dread at disclosure of his violence, which succeededthe act so provoked, he was not less relieved than amazed when Lucretia,rising slowly, laid her hand gently on his arm and said, "Repent not, itis passed; fear not, I will be silent! Come, you are the stronger,--youprevail. I will follow my child to your home."
In this unexpected submission in one so imperious, Braddell's imperfectcomprehension of character saw but fear, and his stupidity exulted inhis triumph. Lucretia returned with him. A few days afterwards Braddellbecame ill; the illness increased,--slow, gradual, wearying. It brokehis spirit with his health; and then the steadfast imperiousness ofLucretia's stern will ruled and subjugated him. He cowered beneath herhaughty, searching gaze, he shivered at her sidelong, malignant glance;but with this fear came necessarily hate, and this hate, sometimessufficing to vanquish the fear, spitefully evinced itself in thwartingher legitimate control over her infant. He would have it (though hehad little real love for children) constantly with him, and affected tocontradict all her own orders to the servants, in the sphere in whichmothers arrogate most the right. Only on these occasions sometimes wouldLucretia lose her grim self-control, and threaten that her child yetshould be emancipated from his hands, should yet be taught the scorn forhypocrites which he had taught herself. These words sank deep, not onlyin the resentment, but in the conscience, of the husband. Meanwhile,Lucretia scrupled not to evince her disdain of Braddell by markedlyabstaining from all the ceremonies she had before so rigidly observed.The sect grew scandalized. Braddell did not abstain from making knownhis causes of complaint. The haughty, imperious woman was condemned inthe community, and hated in the household.
It was at this time that Walter Ardworth, who was then striving to ekeout his means by political lectures (which in the earlier part of thecentury found ready audience) in our great towns, came to Liverpool.Braddell and Ardworth had been schoolfellows, and even at school embryopoliticians of congenial notions; and the conversion of the former toone of the sects which had grown out of the old creeds, that, underCromwell, had broken the sceptre of the son of Belial and establishedthe Commonwealth of Saints, had only strengthened the republican tenetsof the sour fanatic. Ardworth called on Braddell, and was startled tofind in his schoolfellow's wife the niece of his benefactor, Sir MilesSt. John. Now, Lucretia had never divulged her true parentage to herhusband. In a union so much beneath her birth, she had desired toconceal from all her connections the fall of the once-honoured heiress.She had descended, in search of peace, to obscurity; but her priderevolted from the thought that her low-born husband might boast of herconnections and parade her descent to his level. Fortunately, as shethought, she received Ardworth before he was admitted to her husband,who now, growin
g feebler and feebler, usually kept his room. She stoopedto beseech Ardworth not to reveal her secret; and he, comprehending herpride, as a man well-born himself, and pitying her pain, readily gavehis promise. At the first interview, Braddell evinced no pleasure in thesight of his old schoolfellow. It was natural enough that one so preciseshould be somewhat revolted by one so careless of all form. But whenLucretia imprudently evinced satisfaction at his surly remarks on hisvisitor; when he perceived that it would please her that he should notcultivate the acquaintance offered him,--he was moved, by the spirit ofcontradiction, and the spiteful delight even in frivolous annoyance, toconciliate and court the intimacy he had at first disdained: and then,by degrees, sympathy in political matters and old recollections ofsportive, careless boyhood cemented the intimacy into a more familiarbond than the sectarian had contracted really with any of his lateassociates.
Lucretia regarded this growing friendship with great uneasiness; theuneasiness increased to alarm when one day, in the presence of Ardworth,Braddell, writhing with a sudden spasm, said: "I cannot account forthese strange seizures; I think verily I am poisoned!" and his dull eyerested on Lucretia's pallid brow. She was unusually thoughtful for somedays after this remark; and one morning she informed her husband thatshe had received the intelligence that a relation, from whom shehad pecuniary expectations, was dangerously ill, and requested hispermission to visit this sick kinsman, who dwelt in a distant county.Braddell's eyes brightened at the thought of her absence; with littlefurther questioning he consented; and Lucretia, sure perhaps that thebarb was in the side of her victim, and reckoning, it may be, on greaterfreedom from suspicion if her husband died in her absence, left thehouse. It was, indeed, to the neighbourhood of her kindred that shewent. In a private conversation with Ardworth, when questioning him ofhis news of the present possessor of Laughton, he had informed her thathe had heard accidentally that Vernon's two sons (Percival was not thenborn) were sickly; and she went into Hampshire secretly and unknown, tosee what were really the chances that her son might yet become the lordof her lost inheritance.
During this absence, Braddell, now gloomily aware that his days werenumbered, resolved to put into practice the idea long contemplated,and even less favoured by his spite than justified by the genuineconvictions of his conscience. Whatever his faults, sincere at least inhis religious belief, he might well look with dread to the prospect ofthe training and education his son would receive from the hands of amother who had blasphemed his sect and openly proclaimed her infidelity.By will, it is true, he might create a trust, and appoint guardians tohis child. But to have lived under the same roof with his wife,--nay, tohave carried her back to that roof when she had left it,--afforded tacitevidence that whatever the disagreement between them, her conduct couldhardly have merited her exclusion from the privileges of a mother.The guardianship might therefore avail little to frustrate Lucretia'sindirect contamination, if not her positive control. Besides, whereguardians are appointed, money must be left; and Braddell knew thatat his death his assets would be found insufficient for his debts. Whowould be guardian to a penniless infant? He resolved, therefore, to sendhis child from his roof to some place where, if reared humbly, it mightat least be brought up in the right faith,--some place which might defythe search and be beyond the perversion of the unbelieving mother. Helooked round, and discovered no instrument for his purpose that seemedso ready as Walter Ardworth; for by this time he had thoroughly excitedthe pity and touched the heart of that good-natured, easy man. Hisrepresentations of the misconduct of Lucretia were the more implicitlybelieved by one who had always been secretly prepossessed against her;who, admitted to household intimacy, was an eye-witness to her hardindifference to her husband's sufferings; who saw in her very requestnot to betray her gentle birth, the shame she felt in her election; whoregarded with indignation her unfeeling desertion of Braddell in hislast moments, and who, besides all this, had some private misfortunes ofhis own which made him the more ready listener to themes on the faultsof women; and had already, by mutual confidences, opened the hearts ofthe two ancient schoolfellows to each other's complaints and wrongs. Theonly other confidant in the refuge selected for the child was a memberof the same community as Braddell, who kindly undertook to search for apious, godly woman, who, upon such pecuniary considerations as Braddell,by robbing his creditors, could afford to bestow, would permanentlyoffer to the poor infant a mother's home and a mother's care. When thiswoman was found, Braddell confided his child to Ardworth, with sucha sum as he could scrape together for its future maintenance. And toArdworth, rather than to his fellow-sectarian, this double trust wasgiven, because the latter feared scandal and misrepresentation ifhe should be ostensibly mixed up in so equivocal a charge. Poorand embarrassed as Walter Ardworth was, Braddell did not for oncemisinterpret character when he placed the money in his hands; and thisbecause the characters we have known in transparent boyhood we haveknown forever. Ardworth was reckless, and his whole life had beenwrecked, his whole nature materially degraded, by the want of commonthrift and prudence. His own money slipped through his fingers and lefthim surrounded by creditors, whom, rigidly speaking, he thus defrauded;but direct dishonesty was as wholly out of the chapter of his vicesas if he had been a man of the strictest principles and the steadiesthonour.
The child was gone, the father died, Lucretia returned, as we have seenin Grabman's letter, to the house of death, to meet suspicion, and coldlooks, and menial accusations, and an inquest on the dead; but throughall this the reft tigress mourned her stolen whelp. As soon as allevidence against her was proved legally groundless, and she had leave todepart, she searched blindly and frantically for her lost child; but invain. The utter and penniless destitution in which she was left by herhusband's decease did not suffice to terminate her maddening chase. Onfoot she wandered from village to village, and begged her way wherever afalse clew misled her steps.
At last, in reluctant despair, she resigned the pursuit, and foundherself one day in the midst of the streets of London, half-famishedand in rags; and before her suddenly, now grown into vigorousyouth,--blooming, sleek, and seemingly prosperous,--stood GabrielVarney. By her voice, as she approached and spoke, he recognized hisstepmother; and after a short pause of hesitation, he led her to hishome. It is not our purpose (for it is not necessary to those passagesof their lives from which we have selected the thread of our tale)to follow these two, thus united, through their general career ofspoliation and crime. Birds of prey, they searched in human folliesand human errors for their food: sometimes severed, sometimes together,their interests remained one. Varney profited by the mightier andsubtler genius of evil to which he had leashed himself; for, caringlittle for luxuries, and dead to the softer senses, she abandoned to himreadily the larger share of their plunder. Under a variety of names anddisguises, through a succession of frauds, some vast and some mean, butchiefly on the Continent, they had pursued their course, eluding alldanger and baffling all law.
Between three and four years before this period, Varney's uncle, thepainter, by one of those unexpected caprices of fortune which sometimesfind heirs to a millionnaire at the weaver's loom or the labourer'splough, had suddenly, by the death of a very distant kinsman whom he hadnever seen, come into possession of a small estate, which he sold for6,000 pounds. Retiring from all his profession, he lived as comfortablyas his shattered constitution permitted upon the interest of this sum;and he wrote to his nephew, then at Paris, to communicate the good newsand offer the hospitality of his hearth. Varney hastened to London.Shortly afterwards a nurse, recommended as an experienced, useful personin her profession, by Nicholas Grabman, who in many a tortuous schemehad been Gabriel's confederate, was installed in the poor painter'shouse. From that time his infirmities increased. He died, as his doctorsaid, "by abstaining from the stimulants to which his constitution hadbeen so long accustomed;" and Gabriel Varney was summoned to the readingof the will. To his inconceivable disappointment, instead of bequeathingto his nephew the free disposal of h
is 6,000 pounds, that sum wasassigned to trustees for the benefit of Gabriel and his children yetunborn,--"An inducement," said the poor testator, tenderly, "for the boyto marry and reform!" So that the nephew could only enjoy the interest,and had no control over the capital. The interest of 6,000 poundsinvested in the Bank of England was flocci nauci to the voluptuousspendthrift, Gabriel Varney.
Now, these trustees were selected from the painter's earlier and morerespectable associates, who had dropped him, it is true, in his days ofbeggary and disrepute, but whom the fortune that made him respectablehad again conciliated. One of these trustees had lately retired to passthe remainder of his days at Boulogne; the other was a hypochondriacalvaletudinarian,--neither of them, in short, a man of business. Gabrielwas left to draw out the interest of the money as it became periodicallydue at the Bank of England. In a few months the trustee settled atBoulogne died; the trust, of course, lapsed to Mr. Stubmore, thevaletudinarian survivor. Soon pinched by extravagances, and emboldenedby the character and helpless state of the surviving trustee, Varneyforged Mr. Stubmore's signature to an order on the bank to sell outsuch portion of the capital as his wants required. The impunity of oneoffence begot courage for others, till the whole was well-nigh expended.Upon these sums Varney had lived very pleasantly, and he saw with a deepsigh the approaching failure of so facile a resource.
In one of the melancholy moods engendered by this reflection, Varneyhappened to be in the very town in France in which the Mainwarings,in their later years, had taken refuge, and from which Helen had beenremoved to the roof of Mr. Fielden. By accident he heard the name, and,his curiosity leading to further inquiries, learned that Helen was madean heiress by the will of her grandfather. With this knowledge camea thought of the most treacherous, the most miscreant, and the vilestcrime that even he yet had perpetrated; so black was it that for a whilehe absolutely struggled against it. But in guilt there seems ever aNecessity that urges on, step after step, to the last consummation.Varney received a letter to inform him that the last surviving trusteewas no more, that the trust was therefore now centred in his son andheir, that that gentleman was at present very busy in settling his ownaffairs and examining into a very mismanaged property in Devonshirewhich had devolved upon him, but that he hoped in a few months todischarge, more efficiently than his father had done, the duties oftrustee, and that some more profitable investment than the Bank ofEngland would probably occur.
This new trustee was known personally to Varney,--a contemporary of hisown, and in earlier youth a pupil to his uncle. But, since then, he hadmade way in life, and retired from the profession of art. This youngerStubmore he knew to be a bustling, officious man of business, somewhatgreedy and covetous, but withal somewhat weak of purpose, good-naturedin the main, and with a little lukewarm kindness for Gabriel, asa quondam fellow-pupil. That Stubmore would discover the fraud wasevident; that he would declare it, for his own sake, was evident also;that the bank would prosecute, that Varney would be convicted, was noless surely to be apprehended. There was only one chance left to theforger: if he could get into his hands, and in time, before Stubmore'sbustling interference, a sum sufficient to replace what had beenfraudulently taken, he might easily manage, he thought, to preventthe forgery ever becoming known. Nay, if Stubmore, roused into strictpersonal investigation by the new power of attorney which a newinvestment in the bank would render necessary, should ascertain what hadoccurred, his liabilities being now indemnified, and the money replaced,Varney thought he could confidently rely on his ci-devant fellow-pupil'sassent to wink at the forgery and hush up the matter. But this washis only chance. How was the money to be gained? He thought of Helen'sfortune, and the last scruple gave way to the imminence of his peril andthe urgency of his fears.
With this decision, he repaired to Lucretia, whose concurrence wasnecessary to his designs. Long habits of crime had now deepened stillmore the dark and stern colour of that dread woman's sombre nature.But through all that had ground the humanity from her soul, one humansentiment, fearfully tainted and adulterated as it was, still struggledfor life,--the memory of the mother. It was by this, her least criminalemotion, that Varney led her to the worst of her crimes. He offered tosell out the remainder of the trust-money by a fresh act of forgery, todevote such proceeds to the search for her lost Vincent; he revivedthe hopes she had long since gloomily relinquished, till she began toconceive the discovery easy and certain. He then brought before her theprospect of that son's succession to Laughton: but two lives now betweenhim and those broad lands,--those two lives associated with just causeof revenge. Two lives! Lucretia till then did not know that Susan hadleft a child, that a pledge of those nuptials, to which she imputed allher infamy, existed to revive a jealousy never extinguished, appeal tothe hate that had grown out of her love. More readily than Varney hadanticipated, and with fierce exultation, she fell into his horribleschemes.
Thus had she returned to England and claimed the guardianship of herniece. Varney engaged a dull house in the suburb, and looking out for aservant not likely to upset and betray, found the nurse who had watchedover his uncle's last illness; but Lucretia, according to her invariablepractice, rejected all menial accomplices, reposed no confidence inthe tools of her black deeds. Feigning an infirmity that would mock allsuspicion of the hand that mixed the draught, and the step that stole tothe slumber, she defied the justice of earth, and stood alone under theomniscience of Heaven.
Various considerations had delayed the execution of the atrocious deedso coldly contemplated. Lucretia herself drew back, perhaps more dauntedby conscience than she herself was distinctly aware, and disguisingher scruples in those yet fouler refinements of hoped revenge which herconversations with Varney have betrayed to the reader. The failure ofthe earlier researches for the lost Vincent, the suspended activityof Stubmore, left the more impatient murderer leisure to make theacquaintance of St. John, steal into the confidence of Helen, and renderthe insurances on the life of the latter less open to suspicion than ifeffected immediately on her entrance into that shamble-house, and beforeshe could be supposed to form that affection for her aunt which madeprobable so tender a forethought. These causes of delay now vanished,the Parcae closed the abrupt woof, and lifted the impending shears.
Lucretia had long since dropped the name of Braddell. She shrank fromproclaiming those second spousals, sullied by the degradation to whichthey had exposed her, and the suspicions implied in the inquest on herhusband, until the hour for acknowledging her son should arrive. Sheresumed, therefore, the name of Dalibard, and by that we will continueto call her. Nor was Varney uninfluential in dissuading her fromproclaiming her second marriage till occasion necessitated. If the sonwere discovered, and proofs of his birth in the keeping of himselfand his accomplice, his avarice naturally suggested the expediency ofwringing from that son some pledge of adequate reward on succession toan inheritance which they alone could secure to him; out of this fanciedfund not only Grabman, but his employer, was to be paid. The concealmentof the identity between Mrs. Braddell and Madame Dalibard mightfacilitate such an arrangement. This idea Varney locked as yet in hisown breast. He did not dare to speak to Lucretia of the bargain heultimately meditated with her son.