"Not if you were amply provided for elsewhere?" asked Topsparkle.

"Ah, sir, to be provided for by others--by a kind of pension from a wealthy benefactor for instance," looking at him searchingly, as if she were measuring his capacity for generosity, "that is all very well for poor-spirited people--the English lower cla.s.ses have no pride. But my husband and I are of an independent mind. We would rather have our liberty even in poverty than be pensioners upon any one's bounty, which might be withdrawn at a day's notice."

"Nay, a pension of that kind to be useful must be a.s.sured to you--something in the way of an annuity in the public funds, for instance--dependent on your own lives, and not upon any one else's frail thread of existence."

Mrs. Fetis looked interested, and almost convinced.

"'Twould be a delicious life and free from care; but Fetis has a pa.s.sion for London, and all whom I love in my own country are dead. It would be but to go back to their graves."

Mr. Topsparkle said no more. He did not want to appear over anxious to banish his old servant, yet the man's tone to-day and the wife's revelations had intensified a feeling he had entertained for a long time, a feeling that the hour had come when it would be very agreeable to get rid of his _ame d.a.m.nee_. He would suffer considerable inconvenience undoubtedly from the loss of a valet who so thoroughly understood his complexion; but anything was better than the everlasting vicinity of a servant who knew too much.

He dismissed the Frenchwoman with a compliment, escorted her to the ante-room, and kissed her hand with a finished courtesy before he committed her to the care of the footman, and then he went back to his sofa, warmed his feet at the log-fire, and gave himself up to a serious thought.

"The man is getting dangerous," he thought; "he always was a creature of excitable temper, and now he has drunk or gamed himself into a kind of mental fever, from which perhaps the next stage would be madness. Better so! n.o.body believes a madman. And if he were to make any revelations about the remote past, who is there to confirm him? No one. The old Venetian must long since have been numbered with his ancestors. The apothecary disappeared thirty years ago and left no trace behind him.

If it had not been for that d.a.m.nable scandal at the time, set on foot and fostered by that villain Churchill, I could laugh any accusation of Fetis to scorn; but there are a few of my contemporaries malicious enough to have long memories, and I would do much to avoid a revival of that h.e.l.lish outcry which drove me from the hustings and from the country. I have not forgotten. That hateful scene at Brentford is as vivid in my mind as if it had happened yesterday. And he has begun to talk, to get up in the middle of the night and to rave about being haunted. And this loquacious wife of his will repeat his ravings to all her gossips. Yes, there is danger, were it ever so slight. A man of my importance is a target for every venomous arrow. Fetis, you must be silenced."

He rose and paced the room slowly, meditating upon the position in all its aspects, and with all its possibilities of evil. There was his wife, of whose loyalty he was ever doubtful. What if that ancient scandal were to reach her ears? Would she not use it as a weapon against him, ally herself with her old lover for his destruction? The very thought made that magnificent periwig of his tremulous as if with a palsy.

The man must be got out of the way somehow. If he did not snap at the bait of a handsome annuity and accept retirement to his native land, there might be other means, nearer, shorter, of disposing of him.

Yes, there was one way, short and easy, as it seemed to Mr. Topsparkle; a way of making Louis Fetis safe for ever: but that way would leave the wife at liberty--and she might be dangerous.

"No, she can be bought," thought Topsparkle, "she is vain and empty-headed. I can manage her--but he--I have been an idiot to keep him about me so long--and yet he has been useful. I have leant upon him--never knowing when I might need his help. I believed in his discretion, thought him secret as the grave; and now he has begun to blab to that silly wife of his, my confidence is destroyed for ever--all sense of security is gone."

CHAPTER IV.

"SMITE HIS HARD HEART, AND SHAKE HIS REPTILE SOUL."

With Vincenti's narrative fresh in his mind, and with a very lively recollection of Mr. Philter's story, Lord Lavendale had a keen desire to see something more of the French valet--or private secretary--who had been so diabolically subservient to his master's jealousy and revenge.

There was of course always the possibility that Vincenti's theory and the floating suspicions of the neighbourhood might be without substantial foundation. People have had a knack of attributing all sudden or mysterious deaths to poison ever since the days of Sir Thomas Overbury--nor could Lord Ess.e.x cut his throat with his own razor without giving rise to an accusation of murder. In any case Lavendale was determined to see something more of the supposed tool, and to study him on his own ground, at the house in Poland Street.

It was very easy for him to get invited to supper at this favourite rendezvous. The Schemers' Club was extinct, and almost forgotten. It had expired with Wharton's disgrace and exile; and Wharton himself, the brilliant orator, the unscrupulous turncoat, the prodigal and profligate, was a wanderer in the wilds of Catalonia, ruined, broken, and dying.

There were other bloods of the same kidney, lesser lights in the firmament of pleasure, and one of these, Sir Randal Hetherington, invited Lavendale to a card party at the house in Poland Street.

"'Tis a snug retreat, where a gentleman can receive his friends without being stared at by the chance mob of a chocolate house; 'tis more secluded even than a club, and has the advantage of admitting feminine company," he said; "and Fetis has one of the best cooks in London. A very clever fellow, Fetis, monstrously superior to his station--knows more about foreign politics than Peterborough or Horace Walpole; I have sometimes suspected that he is one of old Fleury's spies."

Lavendale went, supped, and drank deep of the champagne which Mr. Fetis supplied to his patrons at a guinea a bottle, but not so deep as to lose a word that was spoken or a single indication which could enlighten him as to the character of his host, who waited upon the little party in person during supper, and afterwards sat down to cards with them, received upon a footing which was more familiar than friendship, something after the kind of condescending jocose intimacy which obtained between the princes and court jesters of old.

Fetis under such conditions was an altogether different person from Mr.

Topsparkle's sedate and silent valet. He had a Rabelaisian wit which kept the table in a roar, had a fund of French anecdotes, short, sharp, and pungent, _apropos_ to every turn of the conversation. He had been carefully and piously educated in his early youth, and out of the theological learning acquired in those days was able to furnish an inexhaustible flow of blasphemy.

"I never knew a man who could get such a fine effect out of so small a knowledge of the Scriptures," said young Spencer, the d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough's prodigal grandson, and one of the finest gentlemen upon town. He and his elder brother were both patrons of the house in Poland Street, supped there with a confidential friend or two on a bladebone of mutton and a magnum of Burgundy, after the play, as the prologue to a quiet hour at hazard, or gave a choice banquet in the French style to a bevy of stage beauties.

Lavendale marked the change in Fetis from the grave and high-bred servant to the audacious jester, and saw in it the clue to the man's character--a creature of various masks, who could fit his manners to the occasion; but he saw also that the man was of a highly nervous excitable temperament, and that a long life of iniquity had wasted his physical forces to extreme attenuation.

"He is of a more spiritual type than his master, in spite of that gentleman's various accomplishments," thought Lavendale, "and with him the flame in the lamp burns brighter, the oil that feeds it wastes faster. Not a man to stand a violent shock of any kind, I doubt."

As the night wore on, and the party grew more riotous, and less observant of one another, Lavendale took an opportunity to talk apart with Fetis.

"I think we have met before, Monsieur Fetis?" he said.

"Yes, my lord, frequently. I was at Ringwood Abbey in attendance upon Mr. Topsparkle while you were visiting there last winter."

"True, 'twas there I saw you, slipping past me in a corridor with a most incomparable modesty. I dreamt not what a roguish wit was hidden under so subdued and sober an aspect."

"Your lordship must consider that in Mr. Topsparkle's house I am in some measure a servant. Here I am on my own ground, and these gentlemen are good enough to indulge all my follies."

"Ringwood Abbey did not give me my first knowledge of you," said Lavendale, watching the crafty face, as Fetis trifled with a silver-gilt snuffbox. "Your renown had reached me before then. I heard of you some years ago when I was travelling in Italy, where you are still remembered."

"Indeed, my lord! It is ten years since I was in Italy."

"These memories were of an older date. They went back to the last century, when you were a youth and a student, an adept in chemistry, I am told."

Fetis started, and turned towards his interlocutor with an ashen countenance, the snuffbox shaking in his tremulous hand.

"Who told you that?" he asked; "who remembers me so long?"

"An old Venetian who happened to hear of you at that time, and who is one of my most intimate friends."

"Will your lordship tell me his name?"

He had recovered himself by this time, and had closed the snuffbox, not without spilling a slight shower of the scented mixture upon his olive-silk knee-breeches.

"Borromeo."

Fetis shook his head.

"I have no memory of such a person. Yes, my lord, I was in Venice forty years ago as a travelling secretary to Mr. Topsparkle. We were both young men in those days, and I was more of a student than I have ever been since that time. The world soon drew me from the study of science; but at three-and-twenty I was full of enthusiasm, hoped to discover the philosopher's stone, to make myself as powerful as Dr. Faustus. Idle dreams, my lord. The world is wiser nowadays. I am told that Sir Richard Steele was the last person who ever cultivated the necromantic arts in England, and that he set up his laboratory at Islington. But even he learnt to laugh at his own delusions."

"But there are more practical studies for the chemist than the arts of Paracelsus or the Geber Arabs," said Lavendale lightly. "My informant told me that you had the repute of being a great toxicologist."

Fetis looked at the speaker intently, but did not answer for the moment.

He seemed sunk in a reverie.

"Borromeo," he muttered to himself; "I know no such name."

"Fetis, the deal is yours," cried Mr. Spencer, and Fetis took the cards with a mechanical air, and went on with the game.

Lavendale was satisfied. He had gone far enough for a first attack, and he had seen enough in the manner and expression of the man to a.s.sure him that Vincenti's story was true.

"And the woman I love is married to a secret a.s.sa.s.sin!" he thought despairingly, "and when I might have plucked her out of that h.e.l.l yonder, I drew back and left her there at peril of her life! If he was capable of murdering that early victim of his forty years ago, at what crime would he stop now, hardened and emboldened by a long life of wickedness? She has but to go a step too far--provoke his jealousy beyond endurance--and Mr. Fetis and his black art may be invoked again.

Fool that I was to leave her in his power, and yet--" And yet he felt that the alternative might have been worse--to ally her to a fast vanishing life, to leave her with a dishonoured name, ruined in worldly circ.u.mstance, widowed in heart without a widow's t.i.tle of honour, desolate, unpitied, to wander about the Continent in fourth-rate society--an outcast--as the Duke of Wharton was wandering now. No, that would have been a moral murder, worse than the hazard of Topsparkle's revenge. Again, there was always this to be considered--that, although a nameless foreign mistress might be murdered almost with impunity, it would be a very perilous matter to make away with an English lady of rank.