The Trail of the Serpent

by Mary Braddon

  The forgery, not the murder?—no one knows of that, then—that, at least, is buried in oblivion.

  “There are two or three little things out against you, Mr. North,” said the doctor; “but the forgery will serve our purpose very well for the present. It’s the easiest charge to bring home as yet.”

  What do they mean? What other charges? Come what may, he will be firm to the last—to the last he will be himself. After all, it is but death they can threaten him with: and the best people have to die, as well as the worst.

  “Only death, at most!” he mutters. “Courage, Raymond, and finish the game as a good player should, without throwing away a trick, even though beaten by better cards.”

  “I tell you, gentlemen, I know nothing of your forgery, or you either. I am a Frenchman, born at Bordeaux, and never in your very eccentric country before; and indeed, if this is the sort of thing a gentleman is liable to in his own study, I shall certainly, when I once return to France, never visit your shores again.”

  “When you do return to France, I think it very unlikely you will ever revisit England, as you say, sir. If, as you affirm, you are indeed a Frenchman—(what excellent English you speak, monsieur, and what trouble you must have taken to acquire so perfect an accent!)—you will, of course, have no difficulty in proving the fact; also that you were not in England eight years ago, and consequently were not for some years assistant in the academy of this gentleman at Slopperton. All this an enlightened British jury will have much pleasure in hearing. We have not, however, come to try you, but to arrest you. Johnson, call a cab for the Count de Marolles! If we are wrong, monsieur, you will have a magnificent case of false imprisonment, and I congratulate you on the immense damages which you will most likely obtain. Thomson, the handcuffs! I must trouble you for your wrists, Monsieur de Marolles.”

  The police officer politely awaits the pleasure of his prisoner. Raymond pauses for a moment; thinks deeply, with his head bent on his breast; lifts it suddenly with a glitter in his eyes, and his thin lips set firm as iron. He has arranged his game.

  “As you say, sir, I shall have an excellent case of false imprisonment, and my accusers shall pay for their insolence, as well as for their mistake. In the meantime, I am ready to follow you; but, before I do so, I wish to have a moment’s conversation with this gentleman, the uncle of my wife. You have, I suppose, no objection to leaving me alone with him for a few minutes. You can watch outside in the hall; I shall not attempt to escape. We have, unfortunately, no trap-doors in this room, and I believe they do not build the houses in Park Lane with such conveniences attached to them as sliding panels or secret staircases.”

  “Perhaps not, sir,” replies the inflexible police officer; “but they do, I perceive, build them with gardens”—he walks to the window, and looks out—“a wall eight feet high—door leading into mews. Not by any means such a very inconvenient house, Monsieur de Marolles. Thomson, one of the servants will be so good as to show you the way into the garden below these windows, where you will amuse yourself till this gentleman has done talking with his uncle.”

  “One moment—one moment,” says the Marquis, who, during the foregoing conversation has been entirely absorbed in the endeavour to extract a very obstinate speck of dust from Mark Antony’s nostril. “One moment, I beg”—as the officer is about to withdraw—“why an interview? Why a police person in the garden—if you call that dreadful stone dungeon with the roof off a garden? I have nothing to say to this gentleman. Positively nothing. All I ever had to say to him I said ten minutes ago. We perfectly understand each other. He can have nothing to say to me, or I to him; and really, I think, under the circumstances, the very best thing you can do is to put on that unbecoming iron machinery—I never saw a thing of the kind before, and, as a novelty, it is actually quite interesting”—(he touches the handcuffs that are lying on the table with the extreme tip of his taper third finger, hastily withdrawing it, as if he thought they would bite)—“and to take him away immediately. If he has committed a forgery, you know,” he adds, deprecatingly, “he is not the sort of thing one likes to see about one. He really is not.”

  Raymond de Marolles never had, perhaps, too much of that absurd weakness called love for one’s fellow-creatures; but if ever he hated any man with the blackest and bitterest hate of his black and bitter heart, so did he hate the man standing now before him, twisting a ring round and round his delicate finger, and looking as entirely at his ease as if no point were in discussion of more importance than the wet weather and the cold autumn day.

  “Stay, Monsieur le Marquis de Cevennes,” he said, in a tone of suppressed passion, “you are too hasty in your conclusions. You have nothing to say to me. Granted! But I may have something to say to you—and I have a great deal to say to you, which must be said; if not in private, then in public—if not by word of mouth, I will print it in the public journals, till Paris and London shall ring with the sound of it on the lips of other men. You will scarcely care for this alternative, Monsieur de Cevennes, when you learn what it is I have to say. Your sang froid does you credit, monsieur; especially when, just now, though you could not repress a start of surprise at hearing that gentleman,” he indicates Dr. Tappenden with a wave of his hand, “speak of a certain manufacturing town called Slopperton, you so rapidly regained your composure that only so close an observer as myself would have perceived your momentary agitation. You appear entirely to ignore, monsieur, the existence of a certain aristocratic emigrant’s son, who thirty years ago taught French and mathematics in that very town of Slopperton. Nevertheless, there was such a person, and you knew him—although he was content to teach his native language for a shilling a lesson, and had at that period no cameo or emerald rings to twist round his fingers.”

  If the Marquis was ever to be admired in the whole course of his career, he was to be admired at this moment. He smiled a gentle and deprecating smile, and said, in his politest tone—

  “Pardon me, he had eighteenpence a lesson—eighteenpence, I assure you; and he was often invited to dinner at the houses where he taught. The women adored him—they are so simple, poor things. He might have married a manufacturer’s daughter, with an immense fortune, thick ancles, and erratic h’s.”

  “But he did not marry any one so distinguished. Monsieur de Cevennes, I see you understand me. I do not ask you to grant me this interview in the name of justice or humanity, because I do not wish to address you in a language which is a foreign one to me, and which you do not even comprehend; but in the name of that young Frenchman of noble family, who was so very weak and foolish, so entirely false to himself and to his own principles, as to marry a woman because he loved, or fancied that he loved her, I say to you, Monsieur le Marquis, you will find it to your interest to hear what I have to reveal.”

  The Marquis shrugs his shoulders slightly. “As you please,” he says. “Gentlemen, be good enough to remain outside that door. My dear Valerie, you had better retire to your own apartments. My poor child, all this must be so extremely wearisome to you—almost as bad as the third volume of a fashionable novel. Monsieur de Marolles, I am prepared to hear what you may have to say—though”—he here addresses himself generally—“I beg to protest against this affair from first to last—I repeat, from first to last—it is so intolerably melodramatic.”

  CHAPTER II

  RAYMOND DE MAROLLES SHOWS HIMSELF BETTER THAN ALL BOW STREET

  “And so, Monsieur de Marolles,” said the Marquis, as Raymond closed the door on the group in the hall, and the two gentlemen were left entirely alone, “and so you have—by what means I shall certainly not so far inconvenience myself as to endeavour to guess—contrived to become informed of some of the antecedents of your very humble servant?”

  “Of some of the antecedents—why not say of all the antecedents, Monsieur de Cevennes?”

  “Just as you like, my dear young friend,” replies the Marquis. He really seems to get quite affectionate to Raymond, but in a far-off, patronizi
ng, and superb manner—something that of a gentlemanly Mephistopheles to a promising Doctor Faustus;1—“and having possessed yourself of this information, may I ask what use you intend making of it? In this utilitarian age everything is put to a use, sooner or later. Do you purpose writing my biography? It will not be interesting. Not as you would have to write it to-day. Alas! we are not so fortunate as to live under the Regency, and there are not many interesting biographies nowadays.”

  “My dear Marquis, I really have no time to listen to what I have no doubt, amongst your own particular friends, is considered most brilliant wit; I have two or three things to say to you that must be said; and the sort of people who are now waiting outside the door are apt to be impatient.”

  “Ah, you are experienced; you know their manners and customs! And they are impatient,” murmured the Marquis, thoughtfully; “and they put you in stone places as if you were coal, and behind bars as if you were zoological; and then they hang you. They call you up at an absurd hour in the morning, and they take you out into a high place, and drop you down through a hole as if you were a penny put into a savings box; and other people get up at an equally absurd hour of the morning, or stay up all night, in order to see it done. And yet there are persons who declare that the age of romance has passed away.”

  “Monsieur de Cevennes, that which I have to say to you relates to your marriage.”

  “My marriage. Suppose I say that I never was married, my amiable friend?”

  “I shall then reply, monsieur, that I not only am informed of all the circumstances of your marriage, but what is more, I am possessed of a proof of that marriage.”

  “Supposing there was such a marriage, which I am prepared to deny, there could only be two proofs—the witnesses and the certificate.”

  “The witnesses, monsieur, are dead,” said Raymond.

  “Then that would reduce the possible proofs to one—the certificate.”

  “Nay, monsieur, there might be another evidence of the marriage.”

  “And that would be——?”

  “The issue of it. You had two sons by that marriage, monsieur. One of those sons died eight years ago.”

  “And the other——?” asked the Marquis.

  “Still lives. I shall have something to say about him by-and-by.”

  “It is a subject in which I take no sort of interest,” said the Marquis, throwing himself back into his chair, and abandoning himself once more to Mark Antony. “I may have been married, or I may not have been married—it is not worth my while to deny that fact to you; because if I confess it to you, I can of course deny it the moment I cross the threshold of that door—I may have sons, or I may not have sons; in either case, I have no wish to hear of them, and anything you may have to say about them is, it appears to me, quite irrelevant to the matter in hand; which merely is your going to prison for forgery, or your not going to prison for forgery. But what I most earnestly recommend, my very dear young friend, is, that you take the cab and handcuffs quietly, and go! That will, at least, put an end to fuss and discussion; and oh, what an inexpressible relief there is in that! I always envy Noah, floundering about in that big boat of his: no new books; no houses of parliament; no poor relations; no Times newspaper; and no taxes—‘universal as you were,’ as Mr. Carlyle2 says; plenty to eat, and everything come to an end; and that foolish Noah must needs send out the dove, and begin it all over again. Yes, he began it all over again, that preposterous Noah. Whereby, cab, handcuffs, forgery, long conversation, and police persons outside that door; all of which might have been prevented if Noah had kept the dove indoors, and had been unselfish enough to bore a hole in the bottom of his boat.”

  “If you will listen to me, Monsieur le Marquis, and keep your philosophical reflections for a more convenient season, there will be some chance of our coming to an understanding. One of these twin sons still lives.”

  “Now, really, that is the old ground again. We are not getting on——”

  “Still lives, I say. Whatever he is, Monsieur de Cevennes—whatever his chequered life may have been, the guilt and the misery of that life rest alike on your head.”

  The Marquis gives the head alluded to an almost imperceptible jerk, as if he threw this moral burden off, and looks relieved by the proceeding. “Don’t be melodramatic,” he remarks, mildly; “this is not the Porte-St.-Martin, and there are no citizens in the gallery to applaud.”

  “That guilt and that misery, I say, rest upon your head. When you married the woman whom you abandoned to starvation and despair, you loved her, I suppose?”

  “I dare say I did; I have no doubt I told her so, poor little thing!”

  “And a few months after your marriage you wearied of her, as you would have done of any other plaything.”

  “As I should have done of any other plaything. Poor dear child, she was dreadfully wearisome. Her relations too. Heaven and earth, what relations! They were looked upon in the light of human beings at Slopperton: but they were wise to keep out of Paris, for they’d have been most decidedly put into the Jardin des Plantes;3 and, really,” said the Marquis, thoughtfully, “behind bars, and aggravated by fallacious offers of buns from small children, they would have been rather amusing.”

  “You were quite content that this unhappy girl should share your poverty, Monsieur le Marquis; but in the hour of your good fortune——”

  “I left her. Decidedly. Look you, Monsieur de Marolles, when I married that young person, whom you insist on dragging out of her grave—poor girl, she is dead, no doubt, by this time—in this remarkably melodramatic manner, I was a young man, without a penny in the world, and with very slight expectations of ever becoming possessed of one. I am figurative, of course. I believe men of my temperament and complexion are not very subject to that popular epidemic, called love. But as much as it was in my power to love any one, I loved this little factory girl. I used to meet her going backwards and forwards to her work, as I went backwards and forwards to mine; and we became acquainted. She was gentle, innocent, pretty. I was very young, and, I need scarcely say, extremely stupid; and I married her. We had not been married six months before that dreadful Corsican person4 took it into his head to abdicate, and I was summoned back to France, to make my appearance at the Tuileries as Marquis de Cevennes. Now, what I have to say is this: if you wish to quarrel with any one, quarrel with the Corsican person; for if he had never signed his abdication at Fontainebleau (which he did, by the bye, in a most melodramatic manner—I am acquainted with some weak-minded people who cannot read the description of that event without shedding tears), I should never have deserted my poor little English wife.”

  “The Marquis de Cevennes could not, then, ratify the marriage of the obscure teacher of French and mathematics?” asked Raymond.

  “If the Marquis de Cevennes had been a rich man, he might have done so; but the Restoration, which gave me back my title, and the only château (my ancestors had three) which the Jacobins had not burned to the ground, did not restore me the fortune which the Revolution had devoured. I was a poor man. Only one course was open to me—a rich marriage. The wealthy widow of a Buonapartist general beheld and admired your humble servant, and the doom of my poor little wife was sealed. For many years I sent money regularly to her old mother—an awful woman, who knew my secret. She had, therefore, no occasion to starve, Monsieur de Marolles. And now, may I be permitted to ask what interest you have in this affair, that you should insist on recalling these very disagreeable circumstances at this particular moment?”

  “There is one question you do not ask, Monsieur le Marquis.”

  “Indeed; and what is that?” asked the Marquis.

  “You seem to have very little curiosity about the fate of your surviving son.”

  “I seem to have very little curiosity, my young friend; I have very little curiosity. I dare say he is a very worthy individual; but I have no anxiety whatever about his fate; for if he at all resembles his father, there is very little doubt that h
e has taken every care of himself. The De Cevennes have always taken care of themselves; it is a family trait.”

  “He has proved himself worthy of that family, then. He was thrown into a river, but he did not sink; he was put into a workhouse and brought up as a pauper, but by the force of his own will and the help of his own brain he extricated himself, and won his way in the world. He became, what his father was before him, a teacher in a school. He grew tired of that, as his father did, and left England for Paris. In Paris, like his father before him, he married a woman he did not love for the sake of her fortune. He became master of that fortune, and till this very day he has surmounted every obstacle and triumphed over every difficulty. Your only son, Monsieur de Cevennes—the son whose mother you deserted—the son whom you abandoned to starve, steal, drown, or hang, to beg in the streets, die in a gutter, a workhouse, or a prison—has lived through all, to stand face to face with you this day, and to tell you that for his own and for his mother’s wrongs, with all the strength of a soul which those wrongs have steeped in wickedness—he hates you!”

  “Don’t be violent,” said the Marquis, gently. “So, you are my son? Upon my word I thought all along you were something of that kind, for you are such a consummate villain.”

  For the first time in his life Raymond de Marolles feels what it is to be beaten by his own weapons. Against the sang froid of the Marquis the torrent of his passionate words dashes, as the sea dashes at the foot of a rock, and makes as little impression.

  “And what then?” says the Marquis. “Since it appears you are my son, what then?”

  “You must save me, monsieur,” said Raymond, in a hoarse voice.

  “Save you? But, my worthy friend, how save you? Save you from the cab and handcuffs? If I go out to those people and say, ‘He is my son; be so good as to forego the cab and handcuffs,’ they will laugh at me. They are so dreadfully matter-of-fact, that sort of people. What is to be done?”