The Trail of the Serpent

by Mary Braddon

  “My good Blurosset,” says Raymond, “I have brought a lady to see you, to whom I have been speaking very highly of your talents.”

  “With the pasteboard or the crucible?” asks the impassible mouth.

  “Both, my dear fellow; we shall want both your talents. Sit down, madame; I must do the honours of the apartment, for my friend Laurent Blurosset is too much a man of science to be a man of gallantry. Sit down, madame; place yourself at this table—there, opposite Monsieur Blurosset, and then to business.”

  This Raymond Marolles, of whom she knows absolutely nothing, has a strange influence over Valerie; an influence against which she no longer struggles. She obeys him passively, and seats herself before the little green baize-covered table.

  The blue spectacles of Monsieur Laurent Blurosset look at her attentively for two or three minutes. As for the eyes behind the spectacles, she cannot even guess what might be revealed in their light. The man seems to have a strange advantage in looking at every one as from behind a screen. His own face, with hidden eyes and inflexible mouth, is like a blank wall.

  “Now then, Blurosset, we will begin with the pasteboard. Madame would like to have her fortune told. She knows of course that this fortune-telling is mere charlatanism, but she wishes to see one of the cleverest charlatans.”

  “Charlatanism! Charlatan! Well, it doesn’t matter. I believe in what I read here, because I find it true. The first time I find a false meaning in these bits of pasteboard I shall throw them into that fire, and never touch a card again. They’ve been the hobby of twenty years, but you know I could do it, Englishman!”

  “Englishman!” exclaimed Valerie, looking up with astonishment.

  “Yes,” answered Raymond, laughing; “a surname which Monsieur Blurosset has bestowed upon me, in ridicule of my politics, which happened once to resemble those of our honest neighbour, John Bull.”

  Monsieur Blurosset nods an assent to Raymond’s assertion, as he takes the cards in his thin yellow-white hands and begins shuffling them. He does this with a skill peculiar to himself, and you could almost guess in watching him that these little pieces of pasteboard have been his companions for twenty years. Presently he arranges them in groups of threes, fives, sevens, and nines, on the green baize, reserving a few cards in his hand; then the blue spectacles are lifted and contemplate Valerie for two or three seconds.

  “Your friend is the queen of spades,” he says, turning to Raymond.

  “Decidedly,” replies Monsieur Marolles. “How the insipid diamond beauties fade beside this gorgeous loveliness of the south!”

  Valerie does not hear the compliment, which at another time she would have resented as an insult. She is absorbed in watching the groups of cards over which the blue spectacles are so intently bent.

  Monsieur Blurosset seems to be working some abstruse calculations with these groups of cards, assisted by those he has in his hand. The spectacles wander from the threes to the nines; from the sevens to the fives; back again; across again; from five to nine, from three to seven; from five to three, from seven to nine. Presently he says—

  “The king of spades is everywhere here.” He does not look up as he speaks—never raising the spectacles from the cards. His manner of speaking is so passionless and mechanical, that he might almost be some calculating automaton.

  “The king of spades,” says Raymond, “is a dark and handsome young man.”

  “Yes,” says Blurosset, “he’s everywhere beside the queen of spades.”

  Valerie in spite of herself is absorbed by this man’s words. She never takes her eyes from the spectacles and the thin pale lips of the fortune-teller.

  “I do not like his influence. It is bad. This king of spades is dragging the queen down, down into the very mire.” Valerie’s cheeks can scarcely grow whiter than it has been ever since the revelation of the Bois de Boulogne, but she cannot repress a shudder at these words.

  “There is a falsehood,” continues Monsieur Blurosset; “and there is a fair woman here.”

  “A fair woman! That girl we saw to-night is fair,” whispers Raymond. “No doubt Monsieur Don Giovanni admires blondes, having himself the southern beauty.”

  “The fair woman is always with the king of spades,” says the fortune-teller. “There is here no falsehood—nothing but devotion. The king of spades can be true; he is true to this diamond woman; but for the queen of spades he has nothing but treachery.”

  “Is there anything more on the cards?” asks Raymond.

  “Yes! A priest—a marriage—money. Ah! this king of spades imagines that he is within reach of a great fortune.”

  “Does he deceive himself?”

  “Yes! Now the treachery changes sides. The queen of spades is in it now—— But stay—the traitor, the real traitor is here; this fair man—the knave of diamonds——”

  Raymond Marolles lays his white hand suddenly upon the card to which Blurosset is pointing, and says, hurriedly,—

  “Bah! You have told us all about yesterday; now tell us of to-morrow.” And then he adds, in a whisper, in the ear of Monsieur Blurosset,—

  “Fool! Have you forgotten your lesson?”

  “They will speak the truth,” mutters the fortune-teller. “I was carried away by them. I will be more careful.”

  This whispered dialogue is unheard by Valerie, who sits immovable, awaiting the sentence of the oracle, as if the monotonous voice of Monsieur Blurosset were the voice of Nemesis.

  “Now then for the future,” says Raymond. “It is possible to tell what has happened. We wish to pass the confines of the possible: tell us, then, what is going to happen.”

  Monsieur Blurosset collects the cards, shuffles them, and rearranges them in groups, as before. Again the blue spectacles wander. From three to nine; from nine to seven; from seven to five; Valerie following them with bright and hollow eyes. Presently the fortune-teller says, in his old mechanical way,—

  “The queen of spades is very proud.”

  “Yes,” mutters Raymond in Valerie’s ear. “Heaven help the king who injures such a queen!”

  She does not take her eyes from the blue spectacles of Monsieur Blurosset; but there is a tightening of her determined mouth which seems like an assent to this remark.

  “She can hate as well as love. The king of spades is in danger,” says the fortune-teller.

  There is, for a few minutes, dead silence, while the blue spectacles shift from group to group of cards; Valerie intently watching them, Raymond intently watching her.

  This time there seems to be something difficult in the calculation of the numbers. The spectacles shift hither and thither, and the thin white lips move silently and rapidly, from seven to nine, and back again to seven.

  “There is something on the cards that puzzles you,” says Raymond, breaking the deathly silence. “What is it?”

  “A death!” answers the passionless voice of Monsieur Blurosset. “A violent death, which bears no outward sign of violence. I said, did I not, that the king of spades was in danger?”

  “You did.”

  From three to five, from five to nine, from nine to seven, from seven to nine: the groups of cards form a circle: three times round the circle, as the sun goes; back again, and three times round the circle in a contrary direction: across the circle from three to seven, from seven to five, from five to nine, and the blue spectacles come to a dead stop at nine.

  “Before twelve o’clock to-morrow night the king of spades will be dead!” says the monotonous voice of Monsieur Blurosset. The voices of the clocks of Paris seem to take up Monsieur Blurosset’s voice as they strike the hour of midnight.

  Twenty-four hours for the king of spades!

  Monsieur Blurosset gathers up his cards and drops them into his pocket. Malicious people say that he sleeps with them under his pillow; that he plays écarté by himself in his sleep; and that he has played piquet with a very tall dark gentleman, whom the porter never let either in or out, and who left a sulphureous a
nd suffocating atmosphere behind him in Monsieur Blurosset’s little apartment.

  “Good!” says Monsieur Raymond Marolles. “So much for the pasteboard. Now for the crucible.”

  For the first time since the discovery of the treachery of her husband Valerie de Lancy smiles. She has a beautiful smile, which curves the delicate lips without distorting them, and which brightens in her large dark eyes with a glorious fire of the sunny south. But for all that, Heaven save the man who has injured her from the light of such a smile as hers of to-night.

  “You want my assistance in some matters of chemistry?” asks Blurosset.

  “Yes! I forgot to tell you, madame, that my friend Laurent Blurosset—though he chooses to hide himself in one of the most obscure streets of Paris—is perhaps one of the greatest men in this mighty city. He is a chemist who will one day work a revolution in the chemical science; but he is a fanatic, madame, or, let me rather say, he is a lover, and his crucible is his mistress. This blind devotion to a science is surely only another form of the world’s great madness—love! Who knows what bright eyes a problem in Euclid may have replaced? Who can tell what fair hair may not have been forgotten in the search after a Greek root?”

  Valerie shivers. Heaven help that shattered heart! Every word that touches on the master-passion of her life is a wound that pierces it to the core.

  “You do not smoke, Blurosset. Foolish man you do not know how to live. Pardon, madame.” He lights his cigar at the green-shaded gas-lamp, seats himself close to the stove, and smokes for a few minutes in silence.

  Valerie, still seated before the little table, watches him with fixed eyes, waiting for him to speak.

  In the utter shipwreck of her every hope this adventurer is the only anchor to which she can cling. Presently he says, in his most easy and indifferent manner,—

  “It was the fashion at the close of the fifteenth and throughout the sixteenth century for the ladies of Italy to acquire a certain knowledge of some of the principles of chemistry. Of course, at the head of these ladies we must place Lucretia Borgia.”1

  Monsieur Blurosset nods an assent. Valerie looks from Raymond to the blue spectacles; but the face of the chemist testifies no shade of surprise at the singularity of Raymond’s observation.

  “Then,” continued Monsieur Marolles, “if a lady was deeply injured or cruelly insulted by the man she loved; if her pride was trampled in the dust, or her name and her weakness held up to ridicule and contempt—then she knew how to avenge herself and to defy the world. A tender pressure of the traitor’s hand; a flower or a ribbon given as a pledge of love; the leaves of a book hastily turned over with the tips of moistened fingers—people had such vulgar habits in those days—and behold the gentleman died, and no one was any the wiser but the worms, with whose constitutions aqua tofana2 at second hand may possibly have disagreed.”

  “Vultures have died from the effects of poisoned carrion,” muttered Monsieur Blurosset.

  “But in this degenerate age,” continued Raymond, “what can our Parisian ladies do when they have reason to be revenged on a traitor? The poor blunderers can only give him half a pint of laudanum, or an ounce or so of arsenic, and run the risk of detection half an hour after his death! I think that time is a circle, and that we retreat as we advance, in spite of our talk of progress.”

  His horrible words, thrice horrible when contrasted with the coolness of his easy manner, freeze Valerie to the very heart; but she does not make one effort to interrupt him.

  “Now, my good Blurosset,” he resumes, “what I want of you is this. Something which will change a glass of wine into a death-warrant, but which will defy the scrutiny of a college of physicians. This lady wishes to take a lesson in chemistry. She will, of course, only experimentalise on rabbits, and she is so tender-hearted that, as you see, she shudders even at the thought of that little cruelty. For the rest, to repay you for your trouble, if you will give her pen and ink, she will write you an order on her banker for five thousand francs.

  Monsieur Blurosset appears no more surprised at this request than if he had been asked for a glass of water. He goes to a cabinet, which he opens, and after a little search selects a small tin box, from which he takes a few grains of white powder, which he screws carelessly in a scrap of newspaper. He is so much accustomed to handling these compounds that he treats them with very small ceremony.

  “It is a slow poison,” he says. “For a full-grown rabbit use the eighth part of what you have there; the whole of it would poison a man; but death in either case would not be immediate. The operation of the poison occupies some hours before it terminates fatally.”

  “Madame will use it with discretion,” says Raymond; “do not fear.”

  Monsieur Blurosset holds out the little packet as if expecting Valerie to take it; she recoils with a ghastly face, and shudders as she looks from the chemist to Raymond Marolles.

  “In this degenerate age,” says Raymond, looking her steadily in the face, “our women cannot redress their own wrongs, however deadly those wrongs may be; they must have fathers, brothers, or uncles to fight for them, and the world to witness the struggle. Bah! There is not a woman in France who is any better than a sentimental schoolgirl.”

  Valerie stretches out her small hand to receive the packet.

  “Give me the pen, monsieur,” says she; and the chemist presents her a half-sheet of paper, on which she writes hurriedly an order on her bankers, which she signs in full with her maiden name.

  Monsieur Blurosset looked over the paper as she wrote.

  “Valerie de Cevennes!” he exclaimed. “I did not know I was honoured by so aristocratic a visitor.”

  Valerie put her hand to her head as if bewildered. “My name!” she muttered, “I forgot, I forgot.”

  “What do you fear, madame?” asked Raymond, with a smile. “Are you not among friends?”

  “For pity’s sake, monsieur,” she said, “give me your arm, and take me back to the carriage! I shall drop down dead if I stay longer in this room.”

  The blue spectacles contemplated her gravely for a moment. Monsieur Blurosset laid one cold hand upon her pulse, and with the other took a little bottle from the cabinet, out of which he gave his visitor a few drops of a transparent liquid.

  “She will do now,” he said to Raymond, “till you get her home; then see that she takes this,” he added, handing Monsieur Marolles another phial; “it is an opiate which will procure her six hours’ sleep. Without that she would go mad.”

  Raymond led Valerie from the room; but, once outside, her head fell heavily on his shoulder, and he was obliged to carry her down the steep stairs.

  “I think,” he muttered to himself as he went out into the courtyard with his unconscious burden, “I think we have sealed the doom of the king of spades!”

  CHAPTER VI

  A GLASS OF WINE

  Upon a little table in the boudoir of the pavilion lay a letter. It was the first thing Valerie de Lancy beheld on entering the room, with Raymond Marolles by her side, half an hour after she had left the apartment of Monsieur Blurosset. This letter was in the handwriting of her husband, and it bore the postmark of Rouen. Valerie’s face told her companion whom the letter came from before she took it in her hand.

  “Read it,” he said, coolly. “It contains his excuses, no doubt. Let us see what pretty story he has invented. In his early professional career his companions surnamed him Baron Munchausen.”1

  Valerie’s hand shook as she broke the seal; but she read the letter carefully through, and then turning to Raymond she said—

  “You are right; his excuse is excellent, only a little too transparent: listen.

  “ ‘The reason of my absence from Paris’—(absence from Paris, and to-night in the Bois de Boulogne)—‘is most extraordinary. At the conclusion of the opera last night, I was summoned to the stage-door, where I found a messenger waiting for me, who told me he had come post-haste from Rouen, where my mother was lying dangerously ill, and t
o implore me, if I wished to see her before her death, to start for that place immediately. Even my love for you, which you well know, Valerie, is the absorbing passion of my life, was forgotten in such a moment. I had no means of communicating with you without endangering our secret. Imagine, then, my surprise on my arrival here, to find that my mother is in perfect health, and had of course sent no messenger to me. I fear in this mystery some conspiracy which threatens the safety of our secret. I shall be in Paris to-night, but too late to see you. To-morrow, at dusk, I shall be at the dear little pavilion, once more to be blest by a smile from the only eyes I love.—Gaston de Lancy.’ ”

  “Rather a blundering epistle,” muttered Raymond. “I should really have given him credit for something better. You will receive him to-morrow evening, madame?”

  She knew so well the purport of this question that her hand almost involuntarily tightened on the little packet given her by Monsieur Blurosset, which she had held all this time, but she did not answer him.

  “You will receive him to-morrow; or by to-morrow night all Paris will know of this romantic but rather ridiculous marriage; it will be in all the newspapers—caricatured in all the print-shops; Charivari2 will have a word or two about it, and little boys will cry it in the streets, a full, true, and particular account for only one sous. But then, as I said before, you are superior to your sex, and perhaps you will not mind this kind of thing.”

  “I shall see him to-morrow evening at dusk,” she said, in a hoarse whisper not pleasant to hear; “and I shall never see him again after to-morrow.”

  “Once more, then, good night,” says Raymond. “But stay, Monsieur begs you will take this opiate. Nay,” he muttered with a laugh as she looked at him strangely, “you may be perfectly assured of its harmlessness. Remember, I have not been paid yet.”