"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,—
"Where is my son? You say he is within these walls. Call him forth to protect his mother! Give me at least my son,—my son!"
Her last words were drowned by a fresh burst of fury from her denouncer. In all the coarsest invective his education could supply, in all the hideous vulgarities of his untutored dialect, in that uncurbed licentiousness of tone, look, and manner which passion, once aroused, gives to the dregs and scum of the populace, Beck poured forth his frightful charges, his frantic execrations. In vain Captain Greville strove to check him; in vain Walter Ardworth sought to draw him from the room. But while the poor wretch—maddening not more with the consciousness of the crime than with the excitement of the poison in his blood—thus raved and stormed, a terrible suspicion crossed Walter Ardworth; mechanically,—as his grasp was on the accuser's arm,—he bared the sleeve, and on the wrist were the dark-blue letters burned into the skin and bearing witness to his identity with the lost Vincent Braddell.
"Hold, hold!" he exclaimed then; "hold, unhappy man!—it is your mother whom you denounce!"
Lucretia sprang up erect; her eyes seemed starting from her head. She caught at the arm pointed towards her in wrath and menace, and there, amidst those letters that proclaimed her son, was the small puncture, surrounded by a livid circle, that announced her victim. In the same instant she discovered her child in the man who was calling down upon her head the hatred of Earth and the justice of Heaven, and knew herself his murderess!
She dropped the arm, and sank back on the chair; and whether the poison had now reached to the vitals, or whether so unwonted a passion in so frail a frame sufficed for the death-stroke, Beck himself, with a low, suffocated cry, slid from the hand of Ardworth, and tottering a step or so, the blood gushed from his mouth over Lucretia's robe; his head drooped an instant, and, falling, rested first upon her lap, then struck heavily upon the floor. The two men bent over him and raised him in their arms; his eyes opened and closed, his throat rattled, and as he fell back into their arms a corpse, a laugh rose close at hand,—it rang through the walls, it was heard near and afar, above and below; not an ear in that house that heard it not. In that laugh fled forever, till the Judgment-day, from the blackened ruins of her lost soul, the reason of the murderess-mother.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE LOTS VANISH WITHIN THE URN.
Varney's self-commune restored to him his constitutional audacity. He returned to Laughton towards the evening, and held a long conference with Greville. Fortunately for him, perhaps, and happily for all, Helen had lost all more dangerous symptoms; and the physician, who was in the house, saw in her state nothing not easily to be accounted for by natural causes. Percival had arrived, had seen Helen,—no wonder she was better! Both from him and from Helen, Madame Dalibard's fearful condition was for the present concealed. Ardworth's story, and the fact of Beck's identity with Vincent Braddell, were also reserved for a later occasion. The tale which Beck had poured into the ear of Greville (when, recognizing the St. John livery, the captain stopped his chaise to inquire if Percival were at the Hall, and when thrilled by the hideous import of his broken reply, that gentleman had caused him to enter the vehicle to explain himself further), Varney, with his wonted art and address, contrived to strip of all probable semblance. Evidently the poor lad had been already delirious; his story must be deemed the nightmare of his disordered reason. Varney insisted upon surgical examination as to the cause of his death. The membranes of the brain were found surcharged with blood, as in cases of great mental excitement; the slight puncture in the wrist, ascribed to the prick of a rusty nail, provoked no suspicion. If some doubts remained still in Greville's acute mind, he was not eager to express, still less to act upon them. Helen was declared to be out of danger; Percival was safe,—why affix by minute inquiry into the alleged guilt of Madame Dalibard (already so awfully affected by the death of her son and by the loss 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 possible both of Varney and that ominous Lucretia, whose sojourn under its roof seemed accursed. He therefore readily assented when Varney proposed, as his obvious and personal duty, to take charge of his mother-in-law, and remove her to London for immediate advice.