Prepared as he had been for change, Walter was startled by the ghastly alteration in Lucretia’s features, increased as it was at that moment by all the emotions which raged within. He sank into the chair placed for him opposite Lucretia, and clearing his throat, said falteringly,—
“I grieve indeed, Madame, that my visit, intended to bring but joy, should chance thus inopportunely. The servant informed me as we came up the stairs that your niece was ill; and I sympathize with your natural anxiety,—Susan’s only child, too; poor Susan!”
“Sir,” said Lucretia, impatiently, “these moments are precious. Sir, sir, my son,—my son!” and her eyes glanced to the door. “You have brought with you a companion,—does he wait without? My son!”
“Madame, give me a moment’s patience. I will be brief, and compress what in other moments might be a long narrative into a few sentences.”
Rapidly then Walter Ardworth passed over the details, unnecessary now to repeat to the reader,—the injunctions of Braddell, the delivery of the child to the woman selected by his fellow-sectarian (who, it seemed, by John Ardworth’s recent inquiries, was afterwards expelled the community, and who, there was reason to believe, had been the first seducer of the woman thus recommended). No clew to the child’s parentage had been given to the woman with the sum intrusted for his maintenance, which sum had perhaps been the main cause of her reckless progress to infamy and ruin. The narrator passed lightly over the neglect and cruelty of the nurse, to her abandonment of the child when the money was exhausted. Fortunately she had overlooked the coral round its neck. By that coral, and by the initials V. B., which Ardworth had had the precaution to have burned into the child’s wrist, the lost son had been discovered; the nurse herself (found in the person of Martha Skeggs, Lucretia’s own servant) had been confronted with the woman to whom she gave the child, and recognized at once. Nor had it been difficult to obtain from her the confession which completed the evidence.
“In this discovery,” concluded Ardworth, “the person I employed met your own agent, and the last links in the chain they traced together. But to that person—to his zeal and intelligence—you owe the happiness I trust to give you. He sympathized with me the more that he knew you personally, felt for your sorrows, and had a lingering belief that you supposed him to be the child you yearned for. Madame, thank my son for the restoration of your own!”
Without sound, Lucretia had listened to these details, though her countenance changed fearfully as the narrator proceeded. But now she groaned aloud and in agony.
“Nay, Madame,” said Ardworth, feelingly, and in some surprise, “surely the discovery of your son should create gladder emotions! Though, indeed, you will be prepared to find that the poor youth so reared wants education and refinement, I have heard enough to convince me that his dispositions are good and his heart grateful. Judge of this yourself; he is in these walls, he is—”
“Abandoned by a harlot,—reared by a beggar! My son!” interrupted Lucretia, in broken sentences. “Well, sir, have you discharged your task! Well have you replaced a mother!” Before Ardworth could reply, loud and rapid steps were heard in the corridor, and a voice, cracked, indistinct, but vehement. The door was thrown open, and, half-supported by Captain Greville, half dragging him along, his features convulsed, whether by pain or passion, the spy upon Lucretia’s secrets, the denouncer of her crime, tottered to the threshold. Pointing to where she sat with his long, lean arm, Beck exclaimed, “Seize her! I ‘cuse her, face to face, of the murder of her niece,—of—of I told you, sir—I told you—”
“Madame,” said Captain Greville, “you stand charged by this witness with the most terrible of human crimes. I judge you not. Your niece, I rejoice to bear, yet lives. Pray God that her death be not traced to those kindred hands!” Turning her eyes from one to the other with a wandering stare, Lucretia Dalibard remained silent. But there was still scorn on her lip, and defiance on her brow. At last she said slowly, and to Ardworth,—