The Trail of the Serpent

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  A month after the death of De Lancy the physician pronounced Mademoiselle de Cervennes sufficiently recovered to be removed from Paris to her uncle’s château in Normandy. Her illness had been a terrible one. For many days she had been delirious. Ah, who shall paint the fearful dreams of that delirium!—dreams, of the anguish of which her disjointed sentences could tell so little? The face of the man she had loved had haunted her in every phase, wearing every expression—now thoughtful, now sparkling with vivacity, now cynical, now melancholy; but always distinct and palpable, and always before her night and day. The scene of her first meeting with him; her secret marriage; the little chapel a few miles out of Paris; the old priest; the bitter discovery in the Bois de Boulogne—the scene of his treachery; the lamp-lit apartment of Monsieur de Blurosset; the cards and the poisons. Every action of this dark period of her life she acted over in her disordered brain again and again a hundred times through the long day, and a hundred times more through the still longer night. So when at the expiration of a month, she was strong enough to walk from one room into another, it was but a wreck of his proud and lovely heiress which met her uncle’s eyes.

  The château of the marquis, some miles from the town of Caen,1 was situated in a park which was as wild and uncultivated as a wood. A park full of old timber, and marshy reedy grounds dotted with pools of stagnant water, which in the good days of the old régime were beaten nightly by the submissive peasantry, that monseigneur, the marquis might sleep on his bedstead of ormolu and buhl à la Louis Quatorze,2 undisturbed by the croaking of the frogs.

  Everything around was falling into ruin; the château had been sacked, and one wing of it burnt down, in the year 1793; and the present marquis, then a very little boy, had fled with his father to the hospitable shores of England, where for more than twenty years of his life he had lived in poverty and obscurity, teaching sometimes his native language, sometimes mathematics, sometimes music, sometimes one thing, sometimes another, for his daily bread. But with the restoration of the Bourbons came the restoration of the marquis to title and fortune. A wealthy marriage with the widow of a rich Buonapartist restored the house of De Cevennes to its former grandeur; and looking now at the proud and stately head of that house, it was a difficult thing to imagine that this man had ever taught French, music, and mathematics, for a few shillings a lesson, in the obscure academics of an English manufacturing town.

  The dreary park, which surrounded the still more dreary and tumble-down château, was white with the fallen snow, through which the servants, or their servants the neighbouring peasantry, coming backwards and forwards with some message or commission from the village, waded knee-deep, or well nigh lost themselves in some unsuspected hollow where the white drifts had swept and lay collected in masses whose depth was dangerous. The dark oakpanelled apartments appropriated to Valerie looked out upon the snow-clad wilderness; and very dismal they seemed in the dying February day.

  Grim pictures of dead-and-gone branches of this haughty house stared and frowned from their heavy frames at the pale girl, half seated, half reclining in a great easy-chair in the deep embayed window. One terrible mail-clad baron, who had fought and fallen at disastrous Agincourt, held an uplifted axe, and in the evening shadow it seemed to Valerie as if he raised it with a threatening glance beneath his heavy brows, which took a purpose and a meaning as the painted eyes met hers. And turn which way she would, the eyes of these dark portraits seemed to follow her; sometimes threateningly, sometimes reproachfully, sometimes with a melancholy look fraught with a strange and ominous sadness that chilled her to the soul.

  Logs of wood burned on the great hearth, supported by massive iron dogs, and their flickering light falling now here now there, left always the corners of the large room in shadow. The chill white night looking in at the high window strove with the firelight for mastery, and won it, so that the cheery beams playing bo-peep among the quaint oak carving of the panelled walls and ceiling hid themselves abashed before the chill stare of the cold steel-blue winter sky. The white face of the sick girl under this dismal light looked almost as still and lifeless as the face of her grandmother, in powder and patches, simpering down at her from the wall. She sat alone—no book near her, no sign of any womanly occupation in the great chamber, no friend to watch or tend her (for she had refused all companionship); she sat with listless hands drooping upon the velvet cushions of her chair, her head thrown back, as if in utter abandonment of all things on the face of the wide earth, and her dark eyes staring straight before her out into the dead waste of winter snow.

  So she has sat since early morning; so she will sit till her maid comes to her and leads her to her dreary bedchamber. So she sits when her uncle visits her, and tries every means in his power to awaken a smile, or bring one look of animation into that dead face. Yes, it is the face of a dead woman. Dead to hope, dead to love, dead to the past; still more utterly dead to a future, which, since it cannot restore the dead, can give her nothing.

  So the short February days, which seem so long to her, fade into the endless winter nights; and for her the morning has no light, nor the darkness any shelter. The consolations of that holy Church, on which for ages past her ancestors have leant for succour as on a rock of mighty and eternal strength, she dare not seek. Her uncle’s chaplain, a white-haired old man who had nursed her in his arms a baby, and who resides at the château, beloved and honoured by all around, comes to her every morning, and on each visit tries anew to win her confidence; but in vain. How can she pour into the ears of this good and benevolent old man her dismal story? Surely he would cast her from him with contumely and horror. Surely he would tell her that for her there is no hope; that even a merciful Heaven, ready to hear the prayer of every sinner, would be deaf to the despairing cries of such a guilty wretch as she.

  So, impenitent and despairing, she wears out the time, and waits for death. Sometimes she thinks of the arch tempter who smoothed the path of crime and misery in which she had trodden, and, who, in doing so seemed so much a part of herself, and so closely linked with her anguish and her revenge, that she often, in the weakness of her shattered mind, wondered if there were indeed such a person, or whether he might not be only the hideous incarnation of her own dark thoughts. He had spoken though of payment, of reward for his base services. If he were indeed human as her wretched self, why did he not come to claim his due?

  As the lonely impenitent woman pondered thus in the wintry dusk, her uncle entered the chamber in which she sat.

  “My dear Valerie,” he said, “I am sorry to disturb you, but a person has just arrived on horseback from Caen. He has travelled, he says, all the way from Paris to see you, and he knows that you will grant him an interview. I told him it was not likely you would do so, and that you certainly would not with my consent. Who can this person be who has the impertinence to intrude at such a time as this? His name is entirely unknown to me.”

  He gave her a card. She looked at it, and read aloud—

  “ ‘Monsieur Raymond Marolles.’ The person is quite right, my dear uncle; I will see him.”

  “But, Valerie——!” remonstrated the marquis.

  She looked at him, with her mother’s proud Spanish blood mantling in her pale cheek.

  “My dear uncle,” she said quietly, “it is agreed between us, is it not, that I am in all things my own mistress, and that you have entire confidence in me? When you cease to trust me, we had better bid each other farewell, for we can then no longer live beneath the same roof.”

  He looked with one imploring glance at the inflexible face, but it was fixed as death.

  “Tell them,” she said, “to conduct Monsieur Marolles to this apartment. I must see him, and alone.”

  The marquis left her, and in a few moments Raymond entered the room, ushered in by the groom of the chambers.

  He had the old air of well-bred and fashionable indifference which so well became him, and carried a light gold-headed riding-whip in his hand.

 
“Mademoiselle,” he said, “will perhaps pardon my intrusion of this evening, which can scarcely surprise her, if she will be pleased to remember that more than a month has elapsed since a melancholy occurrence at the Royal Italian Opera House, and that I have some right to be impatient.”

  She did not answer him immediately; for at this moment a servant entered, carrying a lamp, which he placed on the table by her side, and afterwards drew the heavy velvet curtains across the great window, shutting out the chill winter night.

  “You are very much altered, mademoiselle,” said Raymond, as he scrutinized the wan face under the lamp-light.

  “That is scarcely strange,” she answered, in a chilling tone. “I am not yet accustomed to crime, and cannot wear the memory of it lightly.”

  Her visitor was dusting his polished riding-boot with his handkerchief as he spoke. Looking up with a smile, he said,—

  “Nay, mademoiselle, I give you credit for more philosophy. Why use ugly words? Crime—poison—murder!” He paused between each of these three words, as if every syllable had been some sharp instrument—as if every time he spoke he stabbed her to the heart and stopped to calculate the depth of the wound. “There are no such words as those for beauty and high rank. A person far removed from our sphere offends us, and we sweep him from our path. We might as well regret the venomous insect which, having stung us, we destroy.”

  She did not acknowledge his words by so much as one glance or gesture, but said coldly,—

  “You were so candid as to confess, monsieur, when you served me, yonder in Paris, that you did so in the expectation of a reward. You are here, no doubt, to claim that reward?”

  He looked up at her with so strange a light in his blue eyes, and so singular a smile curving the dark moustache which hid his thin arched lips, that in spite of herself she was startled into looking at him anxiously. He was determined that in the game they were playing she should hold no hidden cards, and he was therefore resolved to see her face stripped of its mask of cold indifference. After a minute’s pause he answered her question,—

  “I am.”

  “It is well, monsieur. Will you be good enough to state the amount you claim for your services?”

  “You are determined, mademoiselle, it appears,” he said, with the strange light still glittering in his eyes, “you are determined to give me credit for none but the most mercenary sentiments. Suppose I do not claim any amount of money in repayment of my services?”

  “Then, monsieur, I have wronged you. You are a disinterested villain, and, as such, worthy of the respect of the wicked. But since this is the case, our interview is at end. I am sorry you decline the reward you have earned so worthily, and I have the honour to wish you good evening.”

  He gave a low musical laugh. “Pardon me, mademoiselle,” he said, “but really your words amuse me. ‘A disinterested villain!’ Believe me, when I tell you that disinterested villany is as great an impossibility as disinterested virtue. You are mistaken, mademoiselle, but only as to the nature of the reward I come to claim. You would confine the question to one of money. Cannot you imagine that I have acted in the hope of a higher reward than any recompense your banker’s book could afford me?”

  She looked at him with a puzzled expression, but his face was hidden. He was trifling with his light riding-whip, and looking down at the hearth. After a minute’s pause he lifted his head, and glanced at her with the same dangerous smile.

  “You cannot guess, then, mademoiselle, the price I claim for my services yonder?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Nay, mademoiselle, reflect.”

  “It would be useless. I might anticipate your claiming half my fortune, as I am, in a manner, in your power——”

  “Oh, yes,” he murmured softly, interrupting her, “you are, in a manner, in my power certainly.”

  “But the possibility of your claiming from me anything except money has never for a moment occurred to me.”

  “Mademoiselle, when first I saw you I looked at you through an opera-glass from my place in the stalls of the Italian Opera. The glass, mademoiselle, was an excellent one, for it revealed every line and every change in your beautiful face. From my observation of that face I made two or three conclusions about your character, which I now find were not made upon false premises. You are impulsive, mademoiselle, but you are not far-seeing. You are strong in your resolutions when once your mind is fixed; but that mind is easily influenced by others. You have passion, genius, courage—rare and beautiful gifts which distinguish you from the rest of womankind; but you have not that power of calculation, that inductive science, which never sees the effect without looking for the cause, which men have christened mathematics. I, mademoiselle, am a mathematician. As such, I sat down to play a deep and dangerous game with you; and as such, now that the hour has come at which I can show my hand, you will see that I hold the winning cards.”

  “I cannot understand, monsieur——”

  “Perhaps not, yet. When you first honoured me with an interview you were pleased to call me ‘an adventurer.’ You used the expression as a term of reproach. Strange to say, I never held it in that light. When it pleased Heaven, or Fate—whichever name you please to give the abstraction—to throw me out upon a world with which my life has been one long war, it pleased that Power to give me nothing but my brains for weapons in the great fight. No rank, no rent-roll, neither mother nor father, friend nor patron. All to win, and nothing to lose. How much I had won when I first saw you it would be hard for you, born in those great saloons to which I have struggled from the mire of the streets—it would be very hard, I say, for you to guess. I entered Paris one year ago, possessed of a sum of money which to me was wealth, but which might, perhaps, to you, be a month’s income. I had only one object—to multiply that sum a hundredfold. I became, therefore, a speculator, or, as you call it, ‘an adventurer.’ As a speculator, I took my seat in the stalls of the Opera House the night I first saw you.”

  She looked at him in utter bewilderment, as he sat in his most careless attitude, playing with the gold handle of his riding-whip, but she did not attempt to speak, and he continued,—

  “I happened to hear from a bystander that you were the richest woman in France. Do you know, mademoiselle, how an adventurer, with a tolerably handsome face and a sufficiently gentlemanly address, generally calculates on enriching himself? Or, if you do not know, can you guess?”

  “No,” she muttered, looking at him now as if she were in a trance, and he had some strange magnetic power over her.

  “Then, mademoiselle, I must enlighten you. The adventurer who does not care to grow grey and decrepit in making a fortune by that slow and uncertain mode which people call ‘honest industry,’ looks about him for a fortune ready made and waiting for him to claim it. He makes a wealthy marriage.”

  “A wealthy marriage?” She repeated the words after him, as if mechanically.

  “Therefore, mademoiselle, on seeing you, and on hearing the extent of your fortune, I said to myself, ‘That is the woman I must marry!”

  “Monsieur!” She started indignantly from her reclining attitude; but the effort was too much for her shattered frame, and she sank back exhausted.

  “Nay, mademoiselle, I did not say ‘That is the woman I will marry,’ but rather, ‘That is the woman I must try to marry;’ for as yet, remember, I did not hold one card in the great game I had to play. I raised my glass, and looked long at your face. A very beautiful face, mademoiselle, as you and your glass have long decided between you. I was—pardon me—disappointed. Had you been an ugly woman, my chances would have been so much better. Had you been disfigured by a hump—(if it had been but the faintest elevation of one white shoulder, prouder, perhaps, than its fellow)—had your hair been tinged with even a suspicion of the ardent hue which prejudice condemns,3 it would have been a wonderful advantage to me. Vain hope to win you by flattery, when even the truth must sound like flattery. And then, again, one glance told me that
you were no pretty simpleton, to be won by a stratagem, or bewildered by romantic speeches. And yet, mademoiselle, I did not despair. You were beautiful; you were impassioned. In your veins ran the purple blood of a nation whose children’s love and hate are both akin to madness! You had, in short, a soul, and you might have a secret!”

  “Monsieur!”

  “At any rate it would be no lost time to watch you. I therefore watched. Two or three gentlemen were talking to you; you did not listen to them; you were asked the same question three times, and on the second repetition of it you started, and replied as by an effort. You were weary, or indifferent. Now, as I have told you, mademoiselle, in the science of mathematics we acknowledge no effect without a cause; there was a cause, then, for this distraction on your part. In a few minutes the curtain rose. You were no longer absent-minded. Elvino came on the stage—you were all attention. You tried, mademoiselle, not to appear attentive; but your mouth, the most flexible feature in your face, betrayed you. The cause, then, of your late distraction was Elvino, otherwise the fashionable tenor, Gaston de Lancy.”