It was growing dusk on the evening on which there was so much excitement in the little surgery in Friar Street, when a plain close carriage stopped at Monsieur Blurosset’s door, and a lady alighted thickly veiled. The graceful but haughty head is one we know. It is Valerie, who, 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 latchkey—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 firelight.
“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
