Book: Lucretia, Volume 4.

E >> Edward Bulwer Lytton >> Lucretia, Volume 4.




"P.S.--Do not let the boy write to me, nor give him this clew to my
address."

On the receipt of this letter, I wrote fully to Ardworth about the
excellent promise and conduct of his poor neglected son. I told him
truly he was a son any father might be proud of, and rebuked, even to
harshness, Walter's unseemly tone respecting him. One's child is one's
child, however the father may have wronged the mother. To this letter I
never received any answer. When John was of age, and had made himself
independent of want by obtaining a college fellowship, I spoke to him
about his prospects. I told him that his father, though residing abroad
and for some reason keeping himself concealed, had munificently paid
hitherto for his maintenance, and would lay down what might be necessary
to start him in business, or perhaps place him in the army, but that his
father might be better pleased if he could show a love of independence,
and henceforth maintain himself. I knew the boy I spoke to! John
thought as I did, and I never applied for another donation to the elder
Ardworth. The allowance ceased; John since then has maintained himself.
I have heard no more from his father, though I have written often to the
address he gave me. I begin to fear that he is dead. I once went up to
town and saw one of the heads of Messrs. Drummond's firm, a very polite
gentleman, but he could give me no information, except that he obeyed
instructions from a correspondent at Calcutta,--one Mr. Macfarren.
Whereon I wrote to Mr. Macfarren, and asked him, as I thought very
pressingly, to tell me all he knew of poor Ardworth the elder. He
answered shortly that he knew of no such person at all, and that A. B.
was a French merchant, settled in Calcutta, who had been dead for above
two years. I now gave up all hopes of any further intelligence, and was
more convinced than ever that I had acted rightly in withholding from
poor John my correspondence with his father. The lad had been curious
and inquisitive naturally; but when I told him that I thought it my duty
to his father to be so reserved, he forebore to press me. I have only to
add, first, that by all the inquiries I could make of the surviving
members of Walter Ardworth's family, it seemed their full belief that he
had never been married, and therefore I fear we must conclude that he had
no legitimate children,--which may account for, though it cannot excuse,
his neglect; and secondly, with respect to the sums received on dear
John's account, I put them all by, capital and interest, deducting only
the expense of his first year at Cambridge (the which I could not defray
without injuring my own children), and it all stands in his name at
Messrs. Drummond's, vested in the Three per Cents. That I have not told
him of this was by my poor dear wife's advice; for she said, very
sensibly,--and she was a shrewd woman on money matters,--"If he knows he
has such a large sum all in the lump, who knows but he may grow idle and
extravagant, and spend it at once, like his father before him? Whereas,
some time or other he will want to marry, or need money for some
particular purpose,--then what a blessing it will be!"

However, my dear madam, as you know the world better than I do, you can
now do as you please, both as to communicating to John all the
information herein contained as to his parentage, and as to apprising him
of the large sum of which he is lawfully possessed.
MATTHEW FIELDEN.

P.S.--In justice to poor John Ardworth, and to show that whatever whim he
may have conceived about his own child, he had still a heart kind enough
to remember mine, though Heaven knows I said nothing about them in my
letters, my eldest boy received an offer of an excellent place in a West
India merchant's house, and has got on to be chief clerk; and my second
son was presented to a living of 117 pounds a year by a gentleman he
never heard of. Though I never traced these good acts to Ardworth, from
whom else could they come?

Ardworth put down the paper without a word; and Lucretia, who had watched
him while he read, was struck with the self-control he evinced when he
came to the end of the disclosure. She laid her hand on his and said,--

"Courage! you have lost nothing!"

"Nothing!" said Ardworth, with a bitter smile. "A father's love and a
father's name,--nothing!"

"But," exclaimed Lucretia, "is this man your father? Does a father's
heart beat in one line of those hard sentences? No, no; it seems to me
probable,--it seems to me almost certain, that you are--" She stopped,
and continued, with a calmer accent, "near to my own blood. I am now in
England, in London, to prosecute the inquiry built upon that hope. If
so, if so, you shall--" Madame Dalibard again stopped abruptly, and
there was something terrible in the very exultation of her countenance.
She drew a long breath, and resumed, with an evident effort at self-
command, "If so, I have a right to the interest I feel for you. Suffer
me yet to be silent as to the grounds of my belief, and--and--love me a
little in the mean while!"

Her voice trembled, as if with rushing tears, at these last words, and
there was almost an agony in the tone in which they were said, and in the
gesture of the clasped hands she held out to him.

Much moved (amidst all his mingled emotions at the tale thus made known
to him) by the manner and voice of the narrator, Ardworth bent down and
kissed the extended hands. Then he rose abruptly, walked to and fro the
room, muttering to himself, paused opposite the window, threw it open, as
for air, and, indeed, fairly gasped for breath. When he turned round,
however, his face was composed, and folding his arms on his large breast
with a sudden action, he said aloud, and yet rather to himself than to
his listener,--

"What matter, after all, by what name men call our fathers? We ourselves
make our own fate! Bastard or noble, not a jot care I. Give me
ancestors, I will not disgrace them; raze from my lot even the very name
of father, and my sons shall have an ancestor in me!"

As he thus spoke, there was a rough grandeur in his hard face and the
strong ease of his powerful form. And while thus standing and thus
looking, the door opened, and Varney walked in abruptly.

These two men had met occasionally at Madame Dalibard's, but no intimacy
had been established between them. Varney was formal and distant to
Ardworth, and Ardworth felt a repugnance to Varney. With the instinct of
sound, sterling, weighty natures, he detected at once, and disliked
heartily, that something of gaudy, false, exaggerated, and hollow which
pervaded Gabriel Varney's talk and manner,--even the trick of his walk
and the cut of his dress. And Ardworth wanted that boyish and beautiful
luxuriance of character which belonged to Percival St. John, easy to
please and to be pleased, and expanding into the warmth of admiration for
all talent and all distinction. For art, if not the highest, Ardworth
cared not a straw; it was nothing to him that Varney painted and
composed, and ran showily through the jargon of literary babble, or toyed
with the puzzles of unsatisfying metaphysics. He saw but a charlatan,
and he had not yet learned from experience what strength and what danger
lie hid in the boa parading its colours in the sun, and shifting, in the
sensual sportiveness of its being, from bough to bough.

Varney halted in the middle of the room as his eye rested first on
Ardworth, and then glanced towards Madame Dalibard. But Ardworth, jarred
from his revery or resolves by the sound of a voice discordant to his ear
at all times, especially in the mood which then possessed him, scarcely
returned Varney's salutation, buttoned his coat over his chest, seized
his hat, and upsetting two chairs, and very considerably disturbing the
gravity of a round table, forced his way to Madame Dalibard, pressed her
hand, and said in a whisper, "I shall see you again soon," and vanished.

Varney, smoothing his hair with fingers that shone with rings, slid into
the seat next Madame Dalibard, which Ardworth had lately occupied, and
said: "If I were a Clytemnestra, I should dread an Orestes in such a
son!"

Madame Dalibard shot towards the speaker one of the sidelong, suspicious
glances which of old had characterized Lucretia, and said,--

"Clytemnestra was happy! The Furies slept to her crime, and haunted but
the avenger."

"Hist!" said Varney.

The door opened, and Ardworth reappeared.

"I quite forgot what I half came to know. How is Helen? Did she return
home safe?"

"Safe--yes!"

"Dear girl, I am glad to hear it! Where is she? Not gone to those
Miverses again? I am no aristocrat, but why should one couple together
refinement and vulgarity?"

"Mr. Ardworth," said Madame Dalibard, with haughty coldness, "my niece is
under my care, and you will permit me to judge for myself how to
discharge the trust. Mr. Mivers is her own relation,--a nearer one than
you are."

Not at all abashed by the rebuke, Ardworth said carelessly: "Well, I
shall talk to you again on that subject. Meanwhile, pray give my love to
her,--Helen, I mean."

Madame Dalibard half rose in her chair, then sank back again, motioning
with her hand to Ardworth to approach. Varney rose and walked to the
window, as if sensible that something was about to be said not meant for
his ear.

When Ardworth was close to her chair, Madame Dalibard grasped his hand
with a vigour that surprised him, and drawing him nearer still, whispered
as he bent down,--

"I will give Helen your love, if it is a cousin's, or, if you will, a
brother's love. Do you intend--do you feel--an other, a warmer love?
Speak, sir!" and drawing suddenly back, she gazed on his face with a
stern and menacing expression, her teeth set, and the lips firmly pressed
together.

Ardworth, though a little startled, and half angry, answered with the
low, ironical laugh not uncommon to him, "Pish! you ladies are apt to
think us men much greater fools than we are. A briefless lawyer is not
very inflammable tinder. Yes, a cousin's love,--quite enough. Poor
little Helen! time enough to put other notions into her head; and then--
she will have a sweetheart, gay and handsome like herself!"

"Ay," said Madame Dalibard, with a slight smile, "ay, I am satisfied.
Come soon."

Ardworth nodded, and hurried down the stairs. As he gained the door, he
caught sight of Helen at a distance, bending over a flower-bed in the
neglected garden. He paused, irresolute, a moment. "No," he muttered to
himself, "no; I am fit company only for myself! A long walk into the
fields, and then away with these mists round the Past and Future; the
Present at least is mine!"




CHAPTER V.

THE WEAVERS AND THE WOOF.

"And what," said Varney,--"what, while we are pursuing a fancied clew,
and seeking to provide first a name, and then a fortune for this young
lawyer,--what steps have you really taken to meet the danger that menaces
me,--to secure, if our inquiries fail, an independence for yourself?
Months have elapsed, and you have still shrunk from advancing the great
scheme upon which we built, when the daughter of Susan Mainwaring was
admitted to your hearth."

"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 passions 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 passed 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 compassion 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 hell,--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 passed 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 sex,
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 snatches 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
carcass 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-SNATCHER.

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 gratitude 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 passengers; 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 Prostitution, 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 noblest form,--virtue outshining
circumstance 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!

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