The Greatest Murder Mysteries of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Mary Elizabeth Braddon
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in the depth of her misery, comes to this man, who is in part the author of that misery.
She is ushered into a small apartment at the back of the house, half study, half laboratory, littered with books, manuscripts, crucibles, and mathematical instruments. On a little table, near a fire that burns low in the grate, are thrown in a careless heap the well-remembered cards—the cards which eight years ago foretold the death of the king of spades.
The room is empty when she enters it, and she seats herself in the depth of the shadow; for there is no light but the flickering flame of the low fire.
What does she think of, as she sits in the gloom of that silent apartment? Who shall say? What forest deep, what lonely ocean strand, what desert island, is more dismal than the backroom of a London house, at the window of which looks in a high black wall, or a dreary, smoke-dried, weird, vegetable phenomenon which nobody on earth but the landlord ever called a tree?
What does she think of in this dreary room? What can she think of? What has she ever thought for eight years past but of the man she loved and murdered? And he was innocent! As long as she had been convinced of his guilt, of his cruel and bitter treachery, it had been a sacrifice, that ordeal of the November night. Now it took another colour; it was a murder—and she a pitiful puppet in the hands of a master-fiend!
Monsieur Blurosset enters the room, and finds her alone with these thoughts.
“Madame,” he says, “I have perhaps the honour of knowing you?” He has so many fair visitors that he thinks this one, whose face he cannot see, may be one of his old clients.
“It is eight years since you have seen me, monsieur,” she replies. “You have most likely forgotten me?”
“Forgotten you, madame, perhaps, but not your voice. That is not to be forgotten.”
“Indeed, monsieur—and why not?”
“Because, madame, it has a peculiarity of its own, which, as a physiologist, I cannot mistake. It is the voice of one who has suffered?”
“It is!—it is!”
“Of one who has suffered more than it is the common lot of woman to suffer.”
“You are right, monsieur.”
“And now, madame, what can I do for you?”
“Nothing, monsieur. You can do nothing for me but that which the commonest apothecary in this city who will sell me an ounce of laudanum can do as well as you.”
“Oh, has it come to that again?” he says, with a shade of sarcasm in his tone. “I remember, eight years ago——”
“I asked you for the means of death. I did not say I wished to die then, at that moment. I did not. I had a purpose in life. I have still.”
As she said these words the fellow-lodger of Blurosset—the Indian soldier, Captain Lansdown, who had let himself in with his latch-key—crossed the hall, and was arrested at the half-open door of the study by the sound of voices within. I don’t know how to account for conduct so unworthy of an officer and a gentleman, but the captain stopped in the shadow of the dark hall and listened—as if life and death were on the words—to the voice of the speaker.
“I have, I say, still a purpose in life—a solemn and a sacred one—to protect the innocent. However guilty I may be, thank Heaven I have still the power to protect my son.”
“You are married, madame?”
“I am married. You know it as well as I, Monsieur Laurent Blurosset. The man who first brought me to your apartment must have been, if not your accomplice, at least your colleague. He revealed to you his scheme, no doubt, in order to secure your assistance in that scheme. I am married to a villain—such a villain as I think Heaven never before looked down upon.”
“And you would protect your son, madame, from his father?”
Captain Lansdown’s face gleams through the shadow as white as the face of Valerie herself, as she stands looking full at Monsieur Blurosset in the flickering fire-light.
“And you would protect your son from his father, madame?” repeats the chemist.
“The man to whom I am at present married is not the father of my son,” says Valerie, in a cold calm voice.
“How, madame?”
“I was married before,” she continued. “The son I so dearly love is the son of my first husband. My second marriage has been a marriage only in name. All your worthy colleague, Monsieur Raymond Marolles, stained his hands in innocent blood to obtain was a large fortune. He has that, and is content; but he shall not hold it long.”
“And your purpose in coming to me, madame——?”
“Is to accuse you—yes, Monsieur Laurent Blurosset, to accuse you—as an accomplice in the murder of Gaston de Lancy.”
“An accomplice in a murder!”
“Yes; you sold me a poison—you knew for what that poison was to be used; you were in the plot, the vile and demoniac plot, that was to steep my soul in guilt. You prophesied the death of the man I was intended to murder; you put the thought into my distracted brain—the weapon into my guilty hand; and while I suffer all the tortures which Heaven inflicts on those who break its laws, are you to go free? No, monsieur, you shall not go free. Either join with me in accusing this man, and help me to drag him to justice, or by the light in the sky, by the life-blood of my broken heart—by the life of my only child, I swear to denounce you! Gaston de Lancy shall not go unavenged by the woman who loved and murdered him.”
The mention of the name of Gaston de Lancy, the man she so dearly and devotedly loved, has a power that nothing else on earth has over Valerie, and she breaks into a passionate torrent of tears.
Laurent Blurosset looks on silently at this burst of anguish; perhaps he regards it as a man of science, and can calculate to a moment how long it will last.
The Indian officer, in the shadow of the doorway, is more affected than the chemist and philosopher, for he falls on his knees by the threshold and hides his pale face in his hands.
There is a silence of perhaps five minutes—a terrible silence it seems, only broken by the heartrending sobs of this despairing woman. At last Laurent Blurosset speaks—speaks in a tone in which she has never heard him speak before—in a tone in which, probably, very few have heard him speak—in a tone so strange to him and his ordinary habits that it in a manner transforms him into a new man.
“You say, madame, I was an accomplice of this man’s. How if he did not condescend to make me an accomplice? How, if this gentleman, who, owing all his success in life to his unassisted villany, has considerable confidence in his own talents, did not think me worthy of the honour of being his accomplice?”
“How, monsieur?”
“No, madame; Laurent Blurosset was not a man for the brilliant Parisian adventurer Raymond Marolles to enlist as a colleague. No, Laurent Blurosset was merely a philosopher, a physiologist, a dreamer, a little bit of a madman, and but a poor puppet in the hands of the man of the world, the chevalier of fortune, the unscrupulous and designing Englishman.”
“An Englishman?”
“Yes, madame; that is one of your husband’s secrets: he is an Englishman. I was not clever enough to be the accomplice of Monsieur Marolles; in his opinion I was not too clever to become his dupe.”
“His dupe?”
“Yes, madame, his dupe. His contempt for the man of science was most supreme: I was a useful automaton—nothing more. The chemist, the physiologist, the man whose head had grown gray in the pursuit of an inductive science—whose nights and days had been given to the study of the great laws of cause and effect—was a puppet in the hands of the chevalier of fortune, and as little likely to fathom his motives as the wooden doll is likely to guess those of the showman who pulls the strings that make it dance. So thought