Page:Braddon--The Trail of the Serpent.djvu/248

244 There is a silence of perhaps five minutes—a terrible silence it seems, only broken by the heartrending sobs of this despairing woman. At last Laurent Blurosset speaks—speaks in a tone in which she has never heard him speak before—in a tone in which, probably, very few have heard him speak—in a tone so strange to him and his ordinary habits that it in a manner transforms him into a new man.

"You say, madame, I was an accomplice of this man's. How if he did not condescend to make me an accomplice? How, if this gentleman, who, owing all his success in life to his unassisted villany, has considerable confidence in his own talents, did not think me worthy of the honour of being his accomplice?"

"How, monsieur?"

"No, madame; Laurent Blurosset was not a man for the brilliant Parisian adventurer Raymond Marolles to enlist as a colleague. No, Laurent Blurosset was merely a philosopher, a physiologist, a dreamer, a little bit of a madman, and but a poor puppet in the hands of the man of the world, the chevalier of fortune, the unscrupulous and designing Englishman."

"An Englishman?"

"Yes, madame; that is one of your husband's secrets: he is an Englishman. I was not clever enough to be the accomplice of Monsieur Marolles; in his opinion I was not too clever to become his dupe."

"His dupe?"

"Yes, madame, his dupe. His contempt for the man of science was most supreme: I was a useful automaton—nothing more. The chemist, the physiologist, the man whose head had grown gray in the pursuit of an inductive science—whose nights and days had been given to the study of the great laws of cause and effect—was a puppet in the hands of the chevalier of fortune, and as little likely to fathom his motives as the wooden doll is likely to guess those of the showman who pulls the strings that make it dance. So thought Raymond Marolles, the adventurer, the fortune-hunter, the thief, the murderer!"

"What, monsieur, you knew him, then?"

"To the very bottom of his black heart, madame. Science would indeed have been a lie, wisdom would indeed have been a chimera, if I could not have read through the low cunning of the superficial showy adventurer, as well as I can read the words written in yonder book through the thin veil of a foreign character. I, his dupe, as he thought—the learned fool at whose labours he laughed, even while he sought to avail himself of their help—I laughed at him in turn, read every motive; but let him laugh on, lie on, till the time at which it should be my pleasure to lift the mask, and say to him—'Raymond Marolles,