Darrell nerved his courage. He had wished to spare Waife the pain which his own persuasions caused to himself. Better now to be frank. He laid his hand on Waife’s shoulder, and looking him in the face, said solemnly: “I entreat you not! Do you suppose that I would not resume inquiry in person, nor pause till the truth were made amply clear, if I had not strong reason to prefer doubt to certainty?”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“There is a woman whose career is, I believe, at this moment revived into fresh notoriety as the heroine of some drama on the stage of Paris—a woman who, when years paled her fame and reft her spoils, as a courtesan renowned for the fools she had beggared, for the young hearts she had corrupted, sought plunder still by crimes, to which law is less lenient; charged with swindling, with fraud, with forgery, and at last more than suspected as a practised poisoner, she escaped by suicide the judgment of human tribunals.”
“I know of whom you speak—that dreadful Gabrielle Desmarets, but for whom my sacrifice to Jasper’s future might not have been in vain! It was to save Sophy from the chance of Jasper’s ever placing her within reach of that woman’s example that I took her away.”
“Is it not, then, better to forbear asking who were your Sophy’s parents, than to learn from inquiry that she is indeed your grandchild, and that her mother was Gabrielle Desmarets?”
Waife uttered a cry like a shriek, and then sate voiceless and aghast. At last he exclaimed: “I am certain it is not so! Did you ever see that woman?”
“Never that I know of; but George tells me that he heard your son state to you that she had made acquaintance with me under another name, and if there was a design to employ her in confirmation of his tale—if he was then speaking truth to you, doubtless this was the lady of rank referred to in the nurse’s confession—doubtless this was the woman once palmed upon me as Matilda’s confidante. In that case I have seen her. What then?”
“Mother was not written on her face! She could never have been a mother. Oh, you may smile, sir; but all my life I have been a reader of the human face; and there is in the aspect of some women the barrenness as of stone—no mother’s throb in their bosom—no mother’s kiss on their lips.”
“I am a poor reader of women’s faces,” said Darrell; “but she must be very unlike women in general, who allows you to know her a bit better if you stood reading her face till doomsday. Besides, at the time you saw Gabrielle Desmarets, her mode of life had perhaps given to her an aspect not originally in her countenance. And I can only answer your poetic conceit by a poetic illustration—Niobe turned to stone; but she had a great many daughters before she petrified. Pardon me, if I would turn off by a jest a thought that I see would shock you, as myself, if gravely encouraged. Encourage it not. Let us suppose it only a chance that inquiry might confirm this conjecture; but let us shun that chance. Meanwhile, if inquiry is to be made, one more likely than either of us to get at the truth has promised to make it, and sooner or later we may learn from her the results—I mean that ill-fated Arabella Fossett, whom you knew as Crane.”
Waife was silent; but he kept turning in his hand, almost disconsolately, the document which assoiled him from the felon’s taint, and said at length, as Darrell was about to leave, “And this thing is of no use to her, then?”