As she replaced the document, he pointed to the manuscript 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 Gods, 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 Titaness. 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 hell! 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 hell 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 muffled 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 reassured 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 amusements. 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 assassin 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."
"It is strange," said the lawyer.
"And he was getting on so well," muttered a hungry-looking man.
"And his place is vacant!" repeated the employee, as he quitted the crowd abstractedly.
In the house of Olivier Dalibard sits Lucretia alone, and in her own usual morning-room. The officer appointed to such tasks by the French law has performed his visit, and made his notes, and expressed condolence with the widow, and promised justice and retribution, and placed his seal on the locks till the representatives of the heir-at-law shall arrive; and the heir-at-law is the very boy who had succeeded so unexpectedly to the wealth of Jean Bellanger the contractor! But Lucretia has obtained beforehand all she wishes to save from the rest. An open box is on the floor, into which her hand drops noiselessly a volume in manuscript. On the forefinger of that hand is a ring, larger and more massive than those usually worn by women,—by Lucretia never worn before. Why should that ring have been selected with such care from the dead man's hoards? Why so precious the dull opal in that cumbrous setting? From the hand the volume drops without sound into the box, as those whom the secrets of the volume instruct you to destroy may drop without noise into the grave. The trace of some illness, recent and deep, nor conquered yet, has ploughed lines in that young countenance, and dimmed the light of those searching eyes. Yet courage! the poison is arrested, the poisoner is no more. Minds like thine, stern woman, are cased in coffers of steel, and the rust as yet has gnawed no deeper than the surface. So over that face, stamped with bodily suffering, plays a calm smile of triumph. The schemer has baffled the schemer! Turn now to the right, pass by that narrow corridor: you are in the marriage-chamber; the windows are closed; tall tapers burn at the foot of the bed. Now go back to that narrow corridor. Disregarded, thrown aside, are a cloth and a besom: the cloth is wet still; but here and there the red stains are dry, and clotted as with bloody glue; and the hairs of the besom start up, torn and ragged, as if the bristles had a sense of some horror, as if things inanimate still partook of men's dread at men's deeds. If you passed through the corridor and saw in the shadow of the wall that homeliest of instruments cast away and forgotten, you would smile at the slatternly housework. But if you knew that a corpse had been borne down those stairs to the left,—borne along those floors to that marriage- bed,—with the blood oozing and gushing and plashing below as the bearers passed with their burden, then straight that dead thing would take the awe of the dead being; it told its own tale of violence and murder; it had dabbled in the gore of the violated clay; it had become an evidence of the crime. No wonder that its hairs bristled up, sharp and ragged, in the shadow of the wall.
The first part of the tragedy ends; let fall the curtain. When next it rises, years will have passed away, graves uncounted will have wrought fresh hollows in our merry sepulchre,—sweet earth! Take a sand from the shore, take a drop from the ocean,—less than sand-grain and drop in man's planet one Death and one Crime! On the map, trace all oceans, and search out every shore,—more than seas, more than lands, in God's balance shall weigh one Death and one Crime!