CHAPTER XXVIII. THE LOTS VANISH WITHIN THE URN.
Varney's self-commune restored to him his constitutional audacity. Hereturned to Laughton towards the evening, and held a long conferencewith Greville. Fortunately for him, perhaps, and happily for all, Helenhad lost all more dangerous symptoms; and the physician, who was inthe house, saw in her state nothing not easily to be accounted for bynatural causes. Percival had arrived, had seen Helen,--no wonder shewas better! Both from him and from Helen, Madame Dalibard's fearfulcondition was for the present concealed. Ardworth's story, and the factof Beck's identity with Vincent Braddell, were also reserved for a lateroccasion. The tale which Beck had poured into the ear of Greville (when,recognizing the St. John livery, the captain stopped his chaise toinquire if Percival were at the Hall, and when thrilled by the hideousimport of his broken reply, that gentleman had caused him to enter thevehicle to explain himself further), Varney, with his wonted art andaddress, contrived to strip of all probable semblance. Evidently thepoor lad had been already delirious; his story must be deemed thenightmare of his disordered reason. Varney insisted upon surgicalexamination as to the cause of his death. The membranes of thebrain were found surcharged with blood, as in cases of great mentalexcitement; the slight puncture in the wrist, ascribed to the prick ofa rusty nail, provoked no suspicion. If some doubts remained still inGreville's acute mind, he was not eager to express, still less toact upon them. Helen was declared to be out of danger; Percival wassafe,--why affix by minute inquiry into the alleged guilt of MadameDalibard (already so awfully affected by the death of her son and by theloss of her reason) so foul a stain on the honoured family of St. John?But Greville was naturally anxious to free the house as soon as possibleboth of Varney and that ominous Lucretia, whose sojourn under its roofseemed accursed. He therefore readily assented when Varney proposed, ashis obvious and personal duty, to take charge of his mother-in-law, andremove her to London for immediate advice.
At the dead of the black-clouded night, no moon and no stars, the sonof Olivier Dalibard bore away the form of the once-formidableLucretia,--the form, for the mind was gone; that teeming, restless,and fertile intellect, which had carried along the projects with thepreterhuman energies of the fiend, was hurled into night and chaos.Manacled and bound, for at times her paroxysms were terrible, and allpartook of the destructive and murderous character which her faculties,when present, had betrayed, she was placed in the vehicle by theshrinking side of her accomplice.
Long before he arrived in London, Varney had got rid of his fearfulcompanion. His chaise had stopped at the iron gates of a large buildingsomewhat out of the main road, and the doors of the madhouse closed onLucretia Dalibard.
Varney then hastened to Dover, with intention of flight into France; hewas just about to step into the vessel, when he was tapped rudely on theshoulder, and a determined voice said, "Mr. Gabriel Varney, you are myprisoner!"
"For what? Some paltry debt?" said Varney, haughtily.
"For forgery on the Bank of England!"
Varney's hand plunged into his vest. The officer seized it in time, andwrested the blade from his grasp. Once arrested for an offence itwas impossible to disprove, although the very smallest of which hisconscience might charge him, Varney sank into the blackest despair.Though he had often boasted, not only to others, but to his own vainbreast, of the easy courage with which, when life ceased to yieldenjoyment, he could dismiss it by the act of his own will; though he hadpossessed himself of Lucretia's murderous ring, and death, if fearful,was therefore at his command,--self-destruction was the last thoughtthat occurred to him; that morbid excitability of fancy which, whetherin his art or in his deeds, had led him to strange delight in horror,now served but to haunt him with the images of death in those ghastliestshapes familiar to them who look only into the bottom of the charnel,and see but the rat and the worm and the loathsome agencies ofcorruption. It was not the despair of conscience that seized him, it wasthe abject clinging to life; not the remorse of the soul,--that stillslept within him, too noble an agency for one so debased,--but thegross physical terror. As the fear of the tiger, once aroused, is moreparalyzing than that of the deer, proportioned to the savageness of adisposition to which fear is a novelty, so the very boldness of Varney,coming only from the perfection of the nervous organization, andunsupported by one moral sentiment, once struck down, was corrupted intothe vilest cowardice. With his audacity, his shrewdness forsook him.Advised by his lawyer to plead guilty, he obeyed, and the sentence oftransportation for life gave him at first a feeling of reprieve; butwhen his imagination began to picture, in the darkness of his cell,all the true tortures of that penalty,--not so much, perhaps, to theuneducated peasant-felon, inured to toil, and familiarized withcoarse companionship, as to one pampered like himself by all soft andhalf-womanly indulgences,--the shaven hair, the convict's dress, therigorous privation, the drudging toil, the exile, seemed as grim as thegrave. In the dotage of faculties smitten into drivelling, he wrote tothe Home Office, offering to disclose secrets connected with crimes thathad hitherto escaped or baffled justice, on condition that his sentencemight be repealed, or mitigated into the gentler forms of ordinarytransportation. No answer was returned to him, but his letter provokedresearch. Circumstances connected with his uncle's death, and withvarious other dark passages in his life, sealed against him all hope ofa more merciful sentence; and when some acquaintances, whom his arthad made for him, and who, while grieving for his crime, saw in itsome excuses (ignorant of his feller deeds), sought to intercede in hisbehalf, the reply of the Home Office was obvious: "He is a fortunateman to have been tried and condemned for his least offence." Not oneindulgence that could distinguish him from the most execrable ruffiancondemned to the same sentence was conceded.
The idea of the gibbet lost all its horror. Here was a gibbet for everyhour. No hope,--no escape. Already that Future Doom which comprehendsthe "Forever" opened upon him black and fathomless. The hour-glass wasbroken up, the hand of the timepiece was arrested. The Beyond stretchedbefore him without limit, without goal,--on into Annihilation or intoHell.
EPILOGUE TO PART THE SECOND.
Stand, O Man! upon the hill-top in the stillness of the evening hour,and gaze, not with joyous, but with contented eyes, upon the beautifulworld around thee. See where the mists, soft and dim, rise over thegreen meadows, through which the rivulet steals its way. See where,broadest and stillest, the wave expands to the full smile of the settingsun, and the willow that trembles on the breeze, and the oak that standsfirm in the storm, are reflected back, peaceful both, from the clearglass of the tides. See where, begirt by the gold of the harvests, andbacked by the pomp of a thousand groves, the roofs of the town bask,noiseless, in the calm glow of the sky. Not a sound from those abodesfloats in discord to thine ear; only from the church-tower, soaring highabove the rest, perhaps faintly heard through the stillness, swells thenote of the holy bell. Along the mead low skims the swallow,--on thewave the silver circlet, breaking into spray, shows the sport of thefish. See the Earth, how serene, though all eloquent of activity andlife! See the Heavens, how benign, though dark clouds, by yon mountain,blend the purple with the gold! Gaze contented, for Good is aroundthee,--not joyous, for Evil is the shadow of Good! Let thy soul piercethrough the veil of the senses, and thy sight plunge deeper than thesurface which gives delight to thine eye. Below the glass of that river,the pike darts on his prey; the circle in the wave, the soft plashamongst the reeds, are but signs of Destroyer and Victim. In the ivyround the oak by the margin, the owl hungers for the night, which shallgive its beak and its talons living food for its young; and the sprayof the willow trembles with the wing of the redbreast, whose bright eyesees the worm on the sod. Canst thou count too, O Man! all the cares,all the sins, that those noiseless rooftops conceal? With every curl ofthat smoke to the sky, a human thought soars as dark, a human hope meltsas briefly. And the bell from the church-tower, that to thy ear givesbut music, perhaps knolls for the dead. The swallow but chases themoth
, and the cloud, that deepens the glory of the heaven and the sweetshadows on the earth, nurses but the thunder that shall rend the grove,and the storm that shall devastate the harvests. Not with fear, not withdoubt, recognize, O Mortal, the presence of Evil in the world. [Not,indeed, that the evil here narrated is the ordinary evil of theworld,--the lesson it inculcates would be lost if so construed,--butthat the mystery of evil, whatever its degree, only increases thenecessity of faith in the vindication of the contrivance which requiresinfinity for its range, and eternity for its consummation. It is in theexistence of evil that man finds his duties, and his soul its progress.]Hush thy heart in the humbleness of awe, that its mirror may reflect asserenely the shadow as the light. Vainly, for its moral, dost thou gazeon the landscape, if thy soul puts no check on the dull delight of thesenses. Two wings only raise thee to the summit of Truth, where theCherub shall comfort the sorrow, where the Seraph shall enlightenthe joy. Dark as ebon spreads the one wing, white as snow gleams theother,--mournful as thy reason when it descends into the deep; exultingas thy faith when it springs to the day-star.
Beck sleeps in the churchyard of Laughton. He had lived to frustratethe monstrous design intended to benefit himself, and to become theinstrument, while the victim, of the dread Eumenides. That done, hislife passed with the crimes that had gathered around, out of the sightof mortals. Helen slowly regained her health in the atmosphere of loveand happiness; and Lady Mary soon learned to forget the fault of thefather in the virtues of the child. Married to Percival, Helen fulfilledthe destinies of woman's genius, in calling forth into action man'searnest duties. She breathed into Percival's warm, beneficent heart herown more steadfast and divine intelligence. Like him she grew ambitious,by her he became distinguished. While I write, fair children play underthe cedars of Laughton. And the husband tells the daughters to resembletheir mother; and the wife's highest praise to the boys is: "You havespoken truth, or done good, like your father."
John Ardworth has not paused in his career, nor belied the promiseof his youth. Though the elder Ardworth, partly by his own exertions,partly by his second marriage with the daughter of the French merchant(through whose agency he had corresponded with Fielden), had realized amoderate fortune, it but sufficed for his own wants and for the childrenof his later nuptials, upon whom the bulk of it was settled. Hence,happily perhaps for himself and others, the easy circumstances of hisfather allowed to John Ardworth no exemption from labour. His success inthe single episode from active life to literature did not intoxicateor mislead him. He knew that his real element was not in the field ofletters, but in the world of men. Not undervaluing the noble destiniesof the author, he felt that those destinies, if realized to the utmost,demanded powers other than his own, and that man is only true to hisgenius when the genius is at home in his career. He would not renouncefor a brief celebrity distant and solid fame. He continued for a fewyears in patience and privation and confident self-reliance to drudgeon, till the occupation for the intellect fed by restraint, and thelearning accumulated by study, came and found the whole man developedand prepared. Then he rose rapidly from step to step; then, stillretaining his high enthusiasm, he enlarged his sphere of action fromthe cold practice of law into those vast social improvements which law,rightly regarded, should lead and vivify and create. Then, and longbefore the twenty years he had imposed on his probation had expired, hegazed again upon the senate and the abbey, and saw the doors of the oneopen to his resolute tread, and anticipated the glorious sepulchre whichheart and brain should win him in the other. John Ardworth has nevermarried. When Percival rebukes him for his celibacy, his lip quiversslightly, and he applies himself with more dogged earnestness to hisstudies or his career. But he never complains that his lot is lonely orhis affections void. For him who aspires, and for him who loves, lifemay lead through the thorns, but it never stops in the desert.
On the minor personages involved in this history, there is little needto dwell. Mr. Fielden, thanks to St. John, has obtained a much betterliving in the rectory of Laughton, but has found new sources of pleasanttrouble for himself in seeking to drill into the mind of Percival'seldest son the elements of Euclid, and the principles of Latin syntax.
We may feel satisfied that the Miverses will go on much the same whiletrade enriches without refining, and while, nevertheless, right feelingsin the common paths of duty may unite charitable emotions with gracelesslanguage.
We may rest assured that the poor widow who had reared the lost son ofLucretia received from the bounty of Percival all that could comfort herfor his death.
We have no need to track the dull crimes of Martha, or the quick,cunning vices of Grabman, to their inevitable goals, in the hospital orthe prison, the dunghill or the gibbet.
Of the elder Ardworth our parting notice may be less brief. We first sawhim in sanguine and generous youth, with higher principles and clearerinsight into honour than William Mainwaring. We have seen him nexta spendthrift and a fugitive, his principles debased and his honourdimmed. He presents to us no uncommon example of the corruptionengendered by that vulgar self-indulgence which mortgages the morrowfor the pleasures of to-day. No Deity presides where Prudence is absent.Man, a world in himself, requires for the development of his facultiespatience, and for the balance of his actions, order. Even where hehad deemed himself most oppressively made the martyr,--namely, in theprofession of mere political opinions,--Walter Ardworth had but followedout into theory the restless, uncalculating impatience which had broughtadversity on his manhood, and, despite his constitutional cheerfulness,shadowed his age with remorse. The death of the child committed to hischarge long (perhaps to the last) embittered his pride in the son whom,without merit of his own, Providence had spared to a brighter fate. Butfor the faults which had banished him his country, and the habits whichhad seared his sense of duty, could that child have been so abandoned,and have so perished?
It remains only to cast our glance over the punishments which befellthe sensual villany of Varney, the intellectual corruption of his fellstepmother.
These two persons had made a very trade of those crimes to which man'slaw awards death. They had said in their hearts that they would darethe crime, but elude the penalty. By wonderful subtlety, craft, anddexterity, which reduced guilt to a science, Providence seemed, as indisdain of the vulgar instruments of common retribution, to concede tothem that which they had schemed for,--escape from the rope and gibbet.Varney, saved from detection of his darker and more inexpiable crimes,punished only for the least one, retained what had seemed to him themaster boon,--life. Safer still from the law, no mortal eye had plumbedthe profound night of Lucretia's awful guilt. Murderess of husband andson, the blinded law bade her go unscathed, unsuspected. Direct, as fromheaven, without a cloud, fell the thunderbolt. Is the life they havesaved worth the prizing? Doth the chalice, unspilt on the ground, notreturn to the hand? Is the sudden pang of the hangman more fearful thanthe doom which they breathe and bear? Look, and judge.
Behold that dark ship on the waters! Its burdens are not of Ormus andTyre. No goodly merchandise doth it waft over the wave, no blessingcleaves to its sails; freighted with terror and with guilt, with remorseand despair, or, more ghastly than either, the sullen apathy of soulshardened into stone, it carries the dregs and offal of the old worldto populate the new. On a bench in that ship sit side by side two men,companions assigned to each other. Pale, abject, cowering, all thebravery rent from his garb, all the gay insolence vanished from hisbrow,--can that hollow-eyed, haggard wretch be the same man whose sensesopened on every joy, whose nerves mocked at every peril? But beside him,with a grin of vile glee on his features, all muscle and brawn in theform, all malice, at once spiteful and dull, in the heavy eye, sits hisfit comrade, the Gravestealer! At the first glance each had recognizedeach, and the prophecy and the vision rushed back upon the daintierconvict. If he seek to escape from him, the Gravestealer claims him asa prey; he threatens him with his eye as a slave; he kicks him with hishoof as they sit, and laughs at the w
rithings of the pain. Carry on yourgaze from the ship, hear the cry from the masthead, see the land arisefrom the waste,--a land without hope. At first, despite the rigour ofthe Home Office, the education and intelligence of Varney have theirprice,--the sole crime for which he is convicted is not of thedarkest. He escapes from that hideous comrade; he can teach asa schoolmaster,--let his brain work, not his hands. But the mostirredeemable of convicts are ever those of nurture and birth and culturebetter than the ruffian rest. You may enlighten the clod, but the meteorstill must feed on the marsh; and the pride and the vanity work wherethe crime itself seems to lose its occasion. Ever avid, ever grasping,he falls, step by step, in the foul sink, and the colony sees in GabrielVarney its most pestilent rogue. Arch-convict amidst convicts, doublylost amongst the damned, they banish him to the sternest of the penalsettlements; they send him forth with the vilest to break stones uponthe roads. Shrivelled and bowed and old prematurely, see that sharp facepeering forth amongst that gang, scarcely human, see him cringe to thelash of the scornful overseer, see the pairs chained together, nightand day! Ho, ho! his comrade hath found him again,--the Artist and theGravestealer leashed together! Conceive that fancy so nurtured by habit,those tastes, so womanized by indulgence,--the one suggesting the veryhorrors that are not; the other revolting at all toil as a torture.
But intellect, not all gone, though hourly dying heavily down to thelevel of the brute, yet schemes for delivery and escape. Let the plotripen, and the heart bound; break his chain, set him free, send himforth to the wilderness. Hark, the whoop of the wild men! See thosethings that ape our species dance and gibber round the famishing, huntedwretch. Hark, how he shrieks at the torture! How they tear and theypinch and they burn and they rend him! They, too, spare his life,--itis charmed. A Caliban amidst Calibans, they heap him with their burdens,and feed him on their offal. Let him live; he loved life for himself; hehas cheated the gibbet,--LET HIM LIVE! Let him watch, let him once moreescape; all naked and mangled, let him wander back to the huts of hisgang. Lo, where he kneels, the foul tears streaming down, and criesaloud: "I have broken all your laws, I will tell you all my crimes; Iask but one sentence,--hang me up; let me die!" And from the gang groanmany voices: "Hang us up; let us die!" The overseer turns on his heel,and Gabriel Varney again is chained to the laughing Gravestealer.
You enter those gates so jealously guarded, you pass, with a quick beatof the heart, by those groups on the lawn, though they are harmless;you follow your guide through those passages; where the open doors willpermit, you see the emperor brandish his sceptre of straw, hear thespeculator counting his millions, sigh where the maiden sits smiling thereturn of her shipwrecked lover, or gravely shake the head and hurry onwhere the fanatic raves his Apocalypse, and reigns in judgment on theworld; you pass by strong gates into corridors gloomier and more remote.Nearer and nearer you hear the yell and the oath and blaspheming curse;you are in the heart of the madhouse, where they chain those at oncecureless and dangerous,--who have but sense enough left them to smiteand to throttle and to murder. Your guide opens that door, massive as awall; you see (as we, who narrate, have seen her) Lucretia Dalibard,--agrisly, squalid, ferocious mockery of a human being, more appallingand more fallen than Dante ever fabled in his spectres, than Swift everscoffed in his Yahoos! Only, where all other feature seems to have lostits stamp of humanity, still burns with unquenchable fever the red,devouring eye. That eye never seems to sleep, or in sleep, the lid nevercloses over it. As you shrink from its light, it seems to you as if themind, that had lost coherence and harmony, still retained latent andincommunicable consciousness as its curse. For days, for weeks, thatawful maniac will preserve obstinate, unbroken silence; but as the eyenever closes, so the hands never rest,--they open and grasp, as if atsome palpable object on which they close, vicelike, as a bird's talonson its prey; sometimes they wander over that brow, where the furrowsseem torn as the thunder scars, as if to wipe from it a stain, or charmfrom it a pang; sometimes they gather up the hem of that sordid robe,and seem, for hours together, striving to rub from it a soil. Then, outfrom prolonged silence, without cause or warning, will ring, peal afterpeal (till the frame, exhausted with the effort sinks senseless intostupor), the frightful laugh. But speech, intelligible and coherent,those lips rarely yield. There are times, indeed, when the attendantsare persuaded that her mind in part returns to her; and those timesexperience has taught them to watch with peculiar caution. The crisisevinces itself by a change in the manner,--by a quick apprehension ofall that is said; by a straining, anxious look at the dismal walls; bya soft, fawning docility; by murmured complaints of the chains thatfetter; and (though, as we have said, but very rarely) by prayers, thatseem rational, for greater ease and freedom.
In the earlier time of her dread captivity, perhaps when it was believedat the asylum that she was a patient of condition, with friends whocared for her state, and would liberally reward her cure, they in thosemoments relaxed her confinement, and sought the gentler remedies theirart employs; but then invariably, and, it was said, with a cunning thatsurpassed all the proverbial astuteness of the mad, she turned thisindulgence to the most deadly uses,--she crept to the pallet of someadjacent sufferer weaker than herself, and the shrieks that brought theattendants into the cell scarcely saved the intended victim from herhands. It seemed, in those imperfectly lucid intervals, as if the reasononly returned to guide her to destroy,--only to animate the brokenmechanism into the beast of prey.
Years have now passed since her entrance within those walls. He whoplaced her there never had returned. He had given a false name,--no clewto him was obtained; the gold he had left was but the quarter's pay.When Varney had been first apprehended, Percival requested the youngerArdworth to seek the forger in prison, and to question him as to MadameDalibard; but Varney was then so apprehensive that, even if stillinsane, her very ravings might betray his share in her crimes, or stillmore, if she recovered, that the remembrance of her son's murder wouldawaken the repentance and the confession of crushed despair, that thewretch had judged it wiser to say that his accomplice was no more,--thather insanity had already terminated in death. The place of herconfinement thus continued a secret locked in his own breast. Egotistto the last, she was henceforth dead to him,--why not to the world?Thus the partner of her crimes had cut off her sole resource, in thecompassion of her unconscious kindred; thus the gates of the livingworld were shut to her evermore. Still, in a kind of compassion, or asan object of experiment,--as a subject to be dealt with unscrupulouslyin that living dissection-hall,--her grim jailers did not grudge heran asylum. But, year after year, the attendance was more slovenly,the treatment more harsh; and strange to say, while the features werescarcely recognizable, while the form underwent all the change whichthe shape suffers when mind deserts it, that prodigious vitality whichbelonged to the temperament still survived. No signs of decay are yetvisible. Death, as if spurning the carcass, stands inexorably afar off.Baffler of man's law, thou, too, hast escaped with life! Not for theeis the sentence, "Blood for blood!" Thou livest, thou mayst passthe extremest boundaries of age. Live on, to wipe the blood from thyrobe,--LIVE ON!
Not for the coarse object of creating an idle terror, not for theshock upon the nerves and the thrill of the grosser interest which thenarrative of crime creates, has this book been compiled from thefacts and materials afforded to the author. When the great German poetdescribes, in not the least noble of his lyrics, the sudden apparitionof some "Monster Fate" in the circles of careless Joy, he assigns to himwho teaches the world, through parable or song, the right to invoke thespectre. It is well to be awakened at times from the easy commonplacethat surrounds our habitual life; to cast broad and steady and patientlight on the darker secrets of the heart,--on the vaults and caverns ofthe social state over which we build the market-place and the palace. Werecover from the dread and the awe and the half-incredulous wonder, toset closer watch upon our inner and hidden selves. In him who cultivatesonly the reason, and suffers the heart and the spirit to lie
waste anddead, who schemes and constructs, and revolves round the axle of self,unwarmed by the affections, unpoised by the attraction of right, liesthe germ Fate might ripen into the guilt of Olivier Dalibard. Let himwho but lives through the senses, spreads the wings of the fancy inthe gaudy glare of enjoyment corrupted, avid to seize, and impatientto toil, whose faculties are curbed but to the range of physicalperception, whose very courage is but the strength of the nerves, whodevelops but the animal as he stifles the man,--let him gaze on thevillany of Varney, and startle to see some magnified shadow of himselfthrown dimly on the glass! Let those who, with powers to command andpassions to wing the powers, would sweep without scruple from the aim tothe end, who, trampling beneath their footprint of iron the humanitiesthat bloom up in their path, would march to success with the proudstride of the destroyer, hear, in the laugh of yon maniac murderess, theglee of the fiend they have wooed to their own souls! Guard well, O Heirof Eternity, the portal of sin,--the thought! From the thought to thedeed, the subtler thy brain and the bolder thy courage, the brieferand straighter is the way. Read these pages in disdain ofself-commune,--they shall revolt thee, not instruct; read them, lookingsteadfastly within,--and how humble soever the art of the narrator, thefacts he narrates, like all history, shall teach by example. Every humanact, good or ill, is an angel to guide or to warn; and the deeds of theworst have messages from Heaven to the listening hearts of the best.Amidst the glens in the Apennine, in the lone wastes of Calabria, thesign of the cross marks the spot where a deed of violence has been done;on all that pass by the road, the symbol has varying effect: sometimesit startles the conscience, sometimes it invokes the devotion; therobber drops the blade, the priest counts the rosary. So is it with therecord of crime; and in the witness of Guilt, Man is thrilled with thewhisper of Religion.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, The fatal shadows that walk byus still. FLETCHER.
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