Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon
Page 880
When Lavendale grew weary of losing, and would have left off, the Frenchman urged him to go on a little longer.
“I am generally an unlucky wretch: you will have your revenge presently,” he said eagerly, and after a few more turns Fétis began to lose.
Lavendale swept up the dice and flung them into a drawer.
“It would have been unmannerly to leave off while you were winning, Monsieur Fétis,” he said; “but now the luck is turned against you, I will own I have had enough. What can be this passion of cards which possesses some of us to grovel for a long night over the board of green cloth? I have never known the gambler’s fiercest fever, though I have played deep enough in my time; and now my soul soon sickens of the stale diversion.”
The Frenchman pocketed his pile of gold with a mechanical air, and looked about him like a man awakened suddenly from a feverish dream. His hands trembled a little as he adjusted his wig, which had been pushed awry in his excitement. His eyes had a glassy brightness, and it was obvious that he was the worse for liquor.
“Good-night, my lord; Mr. Durnford, your servant. I fear I have kept your lordship up very late. If we have trenched somewhat on the dead of night—”
“Monsieur Fétis, the pleasure of your society has been an ample recompense for the loss of slumber,” said Lavendale. “My chairmen shall take you home. They have been told to wait for you.”
“Indeed, your lordship is too considerate.”
“The rest of my people have gone to bed, I believe; Durnford, will you light Monsieur Fétis to the hall?”
Herrick took a candle from a side table and led the way through the empty rooms, cold and dark and unspeakably dismal after the light and warmth of that cosy parlour in which the three men had supped. The atmosphere struck a chill to the soul of Fétis as he entered the first of those disused reception-rooms. Herrick’s one candle shed but a faint gleam of light, which served only to accentuate the gloom. Gigantic shadows, strange forms of vague blackness, like the monstrous inhabitants of some mysterious underworld, seemed to emerge out of the corners and creep towards Fétis — dragon-like monsters, with spreading pinions and eagle claws. They were but the shadow-forms of incipient delirium tremens; but to him who beheld them they were unspeakably horrible.
Yet these were as nothing to that which came afterwards.
He crept with a curious cat-like gait across the room, shrinking from side to side to avoid the clutch of those shadowy claws, to avoid being caught up and enfolded for ever beneath those dark pinions, but on the threshold of the next room he gave a wild yell of agony, and fell on his knees, grovelling, the powdered wig pushed from his bald head by those nerveless hands of his, and drops of cold sweat breaking out upon his wrinkled forehead.
At the further end of the room, luminous in the faint rays of a lamp, he saw a shadow in a long white garment, a pale face, and dark eyes gazing upon him with a solemn stillness, a pale immovable countenance, like that of the dead.
“Spare me! spare me!” he cried. “O, pale, sad victim, have I not atoned? Haunt me no more, poor murdered wretch, betrayed, betrayed, betrayed at every turn! Thy cup of sorrow was full, but O, forgive thy much more wretched murderer! Pity, and pardon!”
The words came in short gasps — uttered in a shrill treble that was almost a scream. They had a sound like the cry of a tortured animal — seemed hardly human to those who heard them. He held his hands before his eyes, clasped convulsively over the eyeballs to shut out the vision that appalled him; and then gradually he collapsed altogether, and sank fainting on the threshold.
When consciousness returned he was seated in front of an open window, the cool night air blowing in upon him, sharp with the breath of late autumn.
“Where am I?” he faltered.
“You are with those who have judged and condemned you,” answered Lavendale solemnly. “Murderer!”
“Who dares call me by that name?”
“I, Lavendale. My friend here, Durnford, is witness with me of your guilty terror. You have seen the ghost of her whom you murdered, or helped to murder. You have seen the ghost of your innocent victim, Margharita Vincenti.”
“It was Topsparkle’s crime. I was but the assistant and tool. The guilt was his. I was only a faithful servant.”
“I doubt you were the inspirer of most of his iniquities at that time,” said Lavendale. “It was your knowledge of poisons which put him in the way of accommodating his sated love and gratifying his revenge at one stroke. It is only the dead who do not come back.”
That last gust of October wind did its work. Fétis rose to his feet with his nerves restored, and faced his accuser with an easy insolence.
“Your lordship’s wine has been too strong for my poor brain,” he said lightly, “and I fear I have troubled you with one of my raving fits. My good little wife will tell you that I am subject to a kind of brain fever after anything in the way of a debauch. Your lordship should not have tempted me to so far exceed my usual two bottles. Pray, Mr. Durnford, be so good as to show me to the hall. I shall not trouble your lordship’s chairmen. The walk home will steady my poor head. Your lordship’s most humble and deeply obliged servant.”
He gave a low bow, a succession of bows rather, with which he bent and wriggled himself out of Lord Lavendale’s presence, in a series of serpentine curves.
Lavendale made as if he would have sprung at him, longing to clutch at that wizened throat and pin the secret murderer to the floor, to imprison him for the rest of the night, and deliver him over to the officers of justice in the morning; but Durnford laid a warning hand upon his shoulder.
“Let him go,” he whispered. “There is no evidence against him yet.”
Lavendale submitted, and Durnford led the way to the hall, and saw Mr. Fétis out of doors with supreme courtesy. Fétis flung a couple of crowns to the sleepy chairmen as he passed out.
“Get to your beds, my good fellows,” he said. “My legs are steady enough to carry me home, in spite of your master’s Burgundy.”
“Why did you not help me to detain him?” asked Lavendale, when Durnford rejoined him in the wainscoted parlour. “What can justice want more than the wretch’s own confession of his guilt?”
“Justice — as represented by a Bow Street magistrate — would want a great deal more evidence than the incoherent ravings of a drunkard, repeated at second hand. Our moral certainty that Fétis poisoned your old Venetian’s granddaughter will not hang him, any more than the suspicions of the neighbours and the apothecary forty years ago.”
“Yet I think your little play succeeded, and that the craven hound revealed himself clearly enough at sight of your poor pale wife, scared to death at the part she had to act, and looking every inch a ghost. Neither you nor I can ever doubt that he and Topsparkle were accomplices in a villainous murder. A pleasant reflection for one who loves Topsparkle’s wife, and might have run away with her, yet chose to play the moralist and leave her in a murderer’s clutches.”
“’Twould have been a worse murder to slay her honour, as you would have done. She is safe enough with her wicked old husband, guarded and fenced round by society. Lady Judith is a personage. Topsparkle trembles at her frown.”
“Yes, as the devils are said to tremble before the Eternal; but his heart may rebel against her all the same, torn by jealous fury. To know himself old, effete, a mere simulacrum of humanity, and to see her surrounded by all the bucks and bloods of the town, idolising and pursuing her: could the infernal powers in Tartarus invent a more horrible agony for a worn-out old profligate? And when once a man has got his hand at poisoning, how easy the art! See how often my Lord This or my Lady That is hustled into the family vault after a three days’ illness — a fever, a putrid sore-throat, the Lord knows what! Two or three doses of arsenic or antimony, and the trick is done. ‘Putrid fever,’ says the physician. ‘Your house is unhealthy, Mr. Topsparkle. I have heard your first wife died of the same kind of malady. You should move further to the West; the
new houses in Cavendish Square are almost in the country. Here you are too near to Newgate and the Compter. The foul odours of the gaol-birds are blown in at your windows by every east wind.’ Do you think Lady Judith’s untimely death would be more than a nine days’ wonder, happen when it might?”
“I think you should concern yourself less about her, dear Jack, for your own peace of mind.”
“That was shattered long ago, friend. It is gone irrevocably, shivered, smashed, annihilated, like that glass goblet which was once the luck of Eden Hall. O, that Topsparkle is a damned villain! Could I but see him and his accomplice at the Old Bailey, I would answer the dread summons cheerfully. But to die and leave those two behind, and to leave her in their power!”
“God grant that you may outlive those ancient sinners.”
“God will not grant it, Herrick. My days are numbered, like the beads upon a rosary — I am telling them off bead by bead—’tis but a short string.”
“Dear Jack, if thou would’st consult a physician instead of talking this wild nonsense, and if thou would’st but take care of thyself—”
“I might live to be ninety — on ass’s milk — like Hervey. Open another bottle of Burgundy, Herrick, we are too much in the dismals.”
“You shall have no more to-night.”
“Shall I not, Mentor? Then I will go to bed and dream I am in Mahomet’s paradise, where lovely woman intoxicates instead of wine.”
CHAPTER VI.
“WHEN SCREECH-OWLS CROAK UPON THE CHIMNEY-TOPS.”
The house in Poland Street was scarce alive with the sound of footsteps on the stairs, or the opening and shutting of doors, until the day was well on towards noon. The cry of the sweep and the small coal man, the baker with his rolls, and Irish Molly with her clattering milk-pails, passed over the sleeping household, and was scarce heard dimly in a dream by any member of that strangely compacted family. The lodgers were for the most part such gentlemen as only began to think of their morning tea or chocolate when it was afternoon by the sundial. The landlord and his wife, being always among the last to retire, rose late in the morning with a struggle, lamenting the brevity of the night. Your bad sleeper is ever the most reluctant to rise, for his one chance of slumber comes generally in that fatal hour when business or duty compels him to leave his bed. Fétis, who passed most of his nights in feverish unrest, was apt after sunrise to sink into the deep sleep of mental and bodily exhaustion; but he must needs rise at ten in order to wait upon his master in Soho Square, whose toilet generally began at eleven. Madame Fétis coiled herself round like a dormouse, and would have slept twelve hours at a stretch if permitted; but as she rarely went to bed before three o’clock in the morning, so much indulgence was impossible. The house must be in order soon after noon, and delicate dainty little breakfasts must be served up for any distinguished patrons who might have spent the night upon the premises. And neither cook nor underlings could be trusted unless Madame was there with her keen bright eyes overlooking everything. It was Madame who made my lord Duke’s chocolate, and buttered my lord Marquis’s toast. She was the moving principle of grace and order in the household.
At one o’clock on the day after Lord Lavendale’s supper-party, at an hour when the sober jog-trot citizens of London had dined or were in the act of dining, Madame sat sipping her chocolate, in a morning négligé of dove-coloured tabinet — a material which Dr. Swift had done his best to make popular, through the Queen and Princesses, for the benefit of the Irish weavers. Her lace ruffles at neck and wrist were of the finest Buckinghamshire, and she wore a little mob-cap upon her piled-up tresses of unpowdered hair, which was vastly becoming. At her side lay an open ledger, and a brace of bills, which were to be delivered to his Grace and the Marquis later in the afternoon. As she sipped and munched, the lady compared the items in the bills with the figures in the ledger, and with this reading solaced her morning meal. She stopped occasionally to make a calculation with the aid of her roseate finger-tips, laboriously counted, for she resembled the great Duchess Sarah alike in being an excellent woman of business, and completely ignorant of the simplest rules of arithmetic.
For the first time for at least a year Mr. Fétis had failed in his morning duties at Mr. Topsparkle’s toilet. He had come home from his evening entertainment very ill, and he was no better this morning; so Madame had been obliged to send a little note of apology to Soho Square, a missive composed in equal parts of French and English, with an impartial measure of bad spelling in both languages.
Madame’s apartment was a small front parlour, close to the street door. From her window she could survey an approaching visitor, while from her door she could overhear any conversation that was carried on in the passage, and keep herself informed as to every one who went out or came in. It was the spider’s little parlour into which many a giddy buzzing fly had fluttered unwarily, to emerge with clipped wings. It was Circe’s cave; and the bones of innumerable victims lay bleaching there, from a metaphorical point of view.
To-day Madame Fétis was so deeply absorbed in the addition of that long column of figures that she was less on the alert than usual for external sounds, and she was surprised by the setting down of a sedan in front of her door, and within three feet of her window. It was a private sedan, painted and fitted with that studied simplicity which indicated distinction in the owner. The panels were a dark brown, the armorial bearings were unobtrusive — all was dark, plain, sober in style. Madame Fétis had not time to wonder, for the orange and brown liveries of the footmen who preceded the vehicle informed her that the chair could belong to no less important a person than her husband’s patron and quasi-master, the rich Mr. Topsparkle; and the little Frenchwoman’s heart fluttered with gratified vanity at the idea that her fascinations had brought Mr. Topsparkle to her husband’s house, which he had never visited before.
“The powdered pert proficient in the art” of disturbing a whole street by his performance on the knocker now proceeded to startle the midday quiet by a most prodigious fantasia in iron. Madame flew to open the door, and stood smiling and curtseying as Mr. Topsparkle descended from his chair, treading delicately, like the ladies of ancient Jerusalem.
“Dear Madam, you do me too much honour,” he protested, as he entered the panneled passage, bringing a cloud of perfumed powder and an overpowering odour of attar of roses into the semi-darkness of the narrow entry. “It is not often that Cerberus is replaced by Hebe.”
“My servants are so lazy, your honour,” apologised Madame; “our Cerberus is cleaning the shoes in his morning sleep, and my femme de chambre has scarce made up her mind whether the broom she is using is a dream or a reality. If your honour will be so condescending as to step into the parlour—”
“One moment, madam,” said Topsparkle, and then turning to the open door he waved his hand to the footmen. “You can take my chair home, you fellows. I shall walk.”
The chairmen took up their lightened load, and the footmen trudged off in front of the sedan, as Madame Fétis shut the door, and followed her visitor into the little parlour, where she drew forward a large armchair, in which she was wont to take her afternoon sleep, and which was naturally the most luxurious seat in the room, or it would not have been so favoured.
“So my good Fétis has broken down at last,” said Mr. Topsparkle, as he seated himself.
“Yes, sir; he is very ill.”
“I was hardly surprised at receiving your amiable billet. I have been meditating on our little chat t’other day, my good Madame Fétis,” pursued Topsparkle, lolling negligently forward in the commodious chair, with his elbow on his knee, and drawing figures upon the dusty carpet with the amber tip of his cane, “and as I am deeply concerned in the health — above all in the mental health — of your excellent husband, I felt an anxiety to hear more from the same source; so instead of sending a footman to make inquiries, I have come myself. I know the uneasiness of a wife’s affection, and that her tenderness may exaggerate the signs of evil—”
“The night before that you had Jack Spencer, and Lord Lavendale, and a party to supper and cards,” interrupted Topsparkle, tapping Madame’s plump arm with the tips of his skinny fingers. “Oh, I have heard of your banquetings and revelries, ma belle, and the money that is lost and won under this modest roof of yours.”
“Indeed, sir, it was a very sober party. There were no ladies, and there was no broken glass, nor an item of furniture damaged. I protest we should never make both ends meet by such parties as that, though I own Mr. Spencer flings a guinea where any other gentleman would give a shilling. But ’tis the mad-cap evenings — when the ladies and gentlemen take to romping over their supper, or when there are swords drawn at cards, and the furniture damaged — that bring grist to the mill.”
“And so there was not much diversion at Mr. Spencer’s party—’twas a grave and sedate assembly,” said Topsparkle, with a trivial gossiping air, as of one who talked from sheer idleness; “but those quiet evenings are more dangerous than your romping revelries. I’ll warrant the play was high.”
Madame shook her head gloomily.
“Ay, I’ll warrant it was, your honour, for that silly husband of mine tossed about in a wakeful fever till daylight, and raved like a lunatic towards nine o’clock, when he fell asleep — raved about Venice and one Borromeo. Does your honour remember any friend of my husband’s by that name?”
“Borromeo?” repeated Topsparkle meditatively. “No, the name is strange to me. And so your husband talked in his sleep, and about Venice? Do his thoughts often turn that way?”
“’Tis the first time I have heard him. His ravings have been mostly about your honour’s house in Soho Square. What can there be in that splendid mansion which should give Louis such a horror of it? He is always prating of ghosts. Do you really think ’tis haunted, sir?”