Lucretia read steadily, and with no change of countenance, to the last line of the letter. Then, as she put it down on the table before her, she repeated, with a tone of deep exultation: “No doubt of ultimate success!”
“You do not fear to brave all which the spite of this woman, Jane Prior, may prompt her to say against you?” asked Varney.
Lucretia’s brow fell. “It is another torture,” she said, “even to own my marriage with a low-born hypocrite. But I can endure it for the cause,” she added, more haughtily. “Nothing can really hurt me in these obsolete aspersions and this vague scandal. The inquest acquitted me, and the world will be charitable to the mother of him who has wealth and rank and that vigorous genius which, if proved in obscurity, shall command opinion in renown.”
“You are now, then, disposed at once to proceed to action. For Helen all is prepared,—the insurances are settled, the trust for which I hold them on your behalf is signed and completed. But for Percival St. John I await your directions. Will it be best first to prove your son’s identity, or when morally satisfied that that proof is forthcoming, to remove betimes both the barriers to his inheritance? If we tarry for the last, the removal of St. John becomes more suspicious than it does at a time when you have no visible interest in his death. Besides, now we have the occasion, or can make it, can we tell how long it will last? Again, it will seem more natural that the lover should break his heart in the first shock of—”
“Ay,” interrupted Lucretia, “I would have all thought and contemplation of crime at an end when, clasping my boy to my heart, I can say, ‘Your mother’s inheritance is yours.’ I would not have a murder before my eyes when they should look only on the fair prospects beyond. I would cast back all the hideous images of horror into the rear of memory, so that hope may for once visit me again undisturbed. No, Gabriel, were I to speak forever, you would comprehend not what I grasp at in a son. It is at a future! Rolling a stone over the sepulchre of the past, it is a resurrection into a fresh world; it is to know again one emotion not impure, one scheme not criminal,—it is, in a word, to cease to be as myself, to think in another soul, to hear my heart beat in another form. All this I covet in a son. And when all this should smile before me in his image, shall I be plucked back again into my hell by the consciousness that a new crime is to be done? No; wade quickly through the passage of blood, that we may dry our garments and breathe the air upon the bank where sun shines and flowers bloom!”
“So be it, then,” said Varney. “Before the week is out, I must be under the same roof as St. John. Before the week is out, why not all meet in the old halls of Laughton?”
“Ay, in the halls of Laughton. On the hearth of our ancestors the deeds done for our descendants look less dark.”
“And first, to prepare the way, Helen should sicken in these fogs of London, and want change of air.”
“Place before me that desk. I will read William Mainwaring’s letters again and again, till from every shadow in the past a voice comes forth, ‘The child of your rival, your betrayer, your undoer, stands between the daylight and your son!’”