Page:Braddon--The Trail of the Serpent.djvu/247

Rh 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 fire-light.

"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 has been a marriage only in name. All your worthy colleague, Monsieur Raymond Marolles, stained his hands in innocent blood to obtain was a large fortune. He has that, and is content; but he shall not hold it long."

"And your purpose in coming to me, madame?"

"Is to accuse you—yes, Monsieur Laurent Blurosset, to accuse you—as an accomplice in the murder of Gaston de Lancy."

"An accomplice in a murder!"

"Yes; you sold me a poison—you knew for what that poison was to be used; you were in the plot, the vile and demoniac plot, that was to steep my soul in guilt. You prophesied the death of the man I was intended to murder; you put the thought into my distracted brain—the weapon into my guilty hand; and while I suffer all the tortures which Heaven inflicts on those who break its laws, are you to go free? No, monsieur, you shall not go free. Either join with me in accusing this man, and help me to drag him to justice, or by the light in the sky, by the life-blood of my broken heart—by the life of my only child, I swear to denounce you! Gaston de Lancy shall not go unavenged by the woman who loved and murdered him."

The mention of the name of Gaston de Lancy, the man she so dearly and devotedly loved, has a power that nothing else on earth has over Valerie, and she breaks into a passionate torrent of tears.

Laurent Blurosset looks on silently at this burst of anguish; perhaps he regards it as a man of science, and can calculate to a moment how long it will last.

The Indian officer, in the shadow of the doorway, is more affected than the chemist and philosopher, for he falls on his knees by the threshold and hides his pale face in his hands.