Mohawks Volume Ii Part 21

"I was disgusted and angry. The pupil from whom I had hoped much had turned aside from the lofty heights of science to flirt with futilities, to dabble with the petty arts of the barber and the charlatan, the seller of poisoned gloves and poisoned handkerchiefs.

"'It was a pity you did not live in Catherine's time,' I said to him once; 'you would have rivalled Cosme Ruggieri in her favour, and would have made a handsome fortune.'

"'I fear I shall never grow rich by the trans.m.u.tation of metals,' he answered.

"After this he worked no more at toxicology, and seemed to resume his interest in my own particular studies. He was a man of remarkable intelligence, and had a specious art of appearing interested, which won my affection and sympathy. I know now that he was an infidel in science as in everything else, and that he only used my laboratory and my knowledge as a means of perfecting himself in the art of secret murder.

Whether he studied poisons with the deliberate intent to use them at the first profitable occasion, or whether his dark soul delighted in the power to do evil, without the actual intention of crime, I know not; but I know that before he left my laboratory he had acquired by reading and experiment the most minute knowledge of poisons, and their effects and evidences.

"About a week after that evening upon which Louis had seen my granddaughter at her harpsichord, my son told me with an air of triumph that the rich Mr. Topsparkle, the wealthiest Englishman who had ever visited Venice, had been to his shop, had looked at various examples of his workmanship, and had ordered a covered cup in parcel-gilt, set with agate and lapis-lazuli, after the manner of Cellini. My son took an artist's delight in the commission, and was almost indifferent to the profit which would be derived from his labour.

"'He is quite a young man,' he told me, 'but he has a wonderful knowledge of the fine arts. I believe he knows every masterpiece of Cellini's; for while we were discussing the form of the cup which I am to make for him he drew at least twenty different forms of cups and covers, all after Cellini, with the most careless pencil. He is an excellent draughtsman, but music, he tells me, is his chief pa.s.sion.'

"A week later I was told that Mr. Topsparkle, having called to see the progress of his cup, had heard Margharita singing, and had asked to be introduced to the songstress. He had stayed for an hour listening to her, ravished by her talent.

"Had I been a man of the world I should at once have taken alarm, remembering what I had heard in the coffee-house as to the Englishman's character. But I was too completely absorbed in my own studies to be on the alert for any danger that did not menace the secrets of my laboratory. I heard what had happened without being impressed by it.

"After this Mr. Topsparkle was a frequent visitor to my son's sitting-room, but as he never saw my granddaughter alone the most careful father would scarcely conceive the possibility of danger.

"So insidious were the approaches of the seducer, so completely was the father hoodwinked, that the first indication of danger was the fall of a thunderbolt. One evening in late autumn, between sunset and darkness, Margharita disappeared. No one saw her leave the house, but she was gone; and as she never went out alone, but was always escorted by an old servant who had been her mother's nurse as well as her own, her absence created immediate alarm.

"My son was like a man distracted. He searched every public resort, went over the whole city on foot or in a gondola, visited his few friends, hunted every likely and unlikely place for some trace of his lost daughter, but found none. He came to me at ten o'clock in my laboratory, to ask my advice. He was half dead with fatigue, broken down with the agony of apprehension.

"The greatness of this calamity startled me into an awakened interest in the outer life around me. My sympathy with my son in his distress roused my reason to new action.

"'It must mean one of three things,' I told him: 'accident, suicide, or flight with a lover.'

"'What accident is possible? She could not have fallen out of a window or into the ca.n.a.l without our knowing all about it. Suicide is impossible. Lover she had none.'

"'Are you sure of that?'

"'She was never out of my sight. We have had no visitors--except the Englishman who came to hear her singing.'

"'Then the Englishman is the lover,' I said; and the thought flashed upon me with the force of conviction, 'it is the Englishman who has carried her off.'

"My unhappy son sprang to his feet in a paroxysm of despair.

"'It was I that brought him to her room. I was proud of his admiration of her genius,' he cried; 'I was fooled by his patronage, his art, his liberality, his specious tongue. But her lover--no, that is impossible.

There was no opportunity for love-making. I was always there. The English signor was distant in his politeness; he respected her station and his own. He could not be her lover; I say it is impossible.'

"'Anything is possible to the practised seducer. It is to that man you must look for your daughter's fate.'

"'I will go to his house this instant,' said Filippo.

"'I will go with you.' And then recalling what I had heard at the coffee-house, I said, 'There are two houses which we have to search--the palace on the Ca.n.a.l Reggio, and that secret apartment which I have only heard of from people who knew not the locality. But if there is such an apartment, the scene of secret orgies, hidden infamies, it is for us to find it.'

"We went together, father and son, to the Ca.n.a.l Reggio. It was as I expected. Mr. Topsparkle was denied to us. He had left Venice early in the afternoon, his porter told us, and had gone in his gondola to one of the islands. The porter did not know to which island.

"We forced an entrance into the hall and adjoining rooms. The servants, who were mostly English, gave way before us, and I believe took us for members of the Venetian police upon an official visitation. They at first were inclined to remonstrate, but finally allowed us to go freely from room to room.

"We went through several reception-rooms, all lighted, all empty, and at the end of the suite came to a small doorway curtained with tapestry.

"My son flung back the curtain, and looking across his shoulder into the room I saw my neophyte Louis, sitting before a writing-desk, in the light of a powerful lamp. He started up and faced us with a scared look.

"'Scoundrel!' I cried, "twas you who sent your master in quest of his prey. You were my lord's jackal. Where is my granddaughter? Take me to her without a moment's delay, or I will drag you to the tribunal to answer for the seduction of a Venetian citizen's daughter.'

"I tried to seize him by the throat as I would have done any other dog; but he evaded me, and would have slipped from the room by an inner door, when my son clutched him by the lapel of his coat, and held him there.

"'What do I know of your daughter, my good Vincenti,' he said lightly, 'except that she sings like a nightingale, and is one of the handsomest women I have seen in Venice? Such a one would count her lovers by the score. Why fix upon Mr. Topsparkle?'

"'There is no one else, and you know it,' I said; 'twas you who sent the seducer to our house. He never came there till you had marked the victim.'

"I then gave him his alternative: to take us straight to his master's secret lodgings, and surprise him there with his victim, or to go with us to the Venetian police. He refused to do either, and told us that the police would laugh at a charge founded upon such slight grounds.

"'The authorities of this city know too much about my master to a.s.sail him on such an accusation as yours,' said Fetis. He had his staff of lacqueys at his elbow. Violence would have been useless; so we were obliged to abandon the idea of taking this scoundrel to the head-quarters of the police. But my son stayed in the hall of the palace while I went to the chief of the police and gave him an account of my granddaughter's disappearance, and my suspicions as to the man who had lured her away.

"I saw at once, by the air with which he heard my complaint, that Mr.

Topsparkle had secured the good graces of our timeserving officials, and that I should get no help here. I left the office choking with rage, and wandered about Venice all night, penetrating into the obscurest alleys, watching in doorways for the entrance and exit of mysterious visitors, waiting below lighted windows, listening to the sounds of music and singing, surprising more than one nocturnal orgy and secret rendezvous, but finding no trace of my son's runaway daughter. I went back to the house on the Reggio Ca.n.a.l in the early morning, and found Filippo sitting in the hall. There had been no attempt to drive him out with violence. The servants had laughed at his folly in waiting for their master.

"There is no need to recall every detail of a futile search. For three days and nights my son and I hunted Venice and the neighbouring islands for traces of the missing girl and her seducer, and the first evidence we came upon was the information of a gondolier who, on the evening of Margharita's flight, had seen Mr. Topsparkle's gondola embark three pa.s.sengers on a small sailing vessel standing out at sea about a mile from the city. The birds were fled while we were searching for their nest in some secret corner of Venice.

"I went back to my laboratory after hearing this, and took out my granddaughter's horoscope, which I had not looked at since her childhood; I remembered only that the stars had foreboded evil. There were the signs of sudden death in a foreign land; early untimely death.

"I showed my son the result of my calculations, made within an hour of his daughter's birth; and I undertook, old as I was, to follow the fugitives, if it were possible for human intelligence to track them. I urged him to remain in Venice, to be on the spot to receive his lost child should she return to her home, and also to be on the alert for any evidence of Mr. Topsparkle's guilt which time might bring forth. I had travelled much, he but little. It was agony to me to leave my laboratory, to give up those researches which had daily become more precious to me; but I blamed myself as the indirect cause of my granddaughter's ruin, since it was I who had admitted the traitor Fetis within our doors.

"My son was at first bent on going in pursuit of his daughter, but at last ceded to my arguments, and was content to intrust the task to me.

Before starting on my difficult enterprise I tried to discover something more as to the manner of my granddaughter's flight. By close inquiries among our neighbours I found that on the evening of her disappearance two men had been seen waiting about in our street, and that these same men had been seen a little later walking quickly towards the ca.n.a.l with a woman supported between them, almost as if they had been carrying her.

Each held her by an arm, my informant observed, and her feet seemed scarcely to touch the ground. But the night was dark, and the three pa.s.sed so quickly in the darkness that my neighbour was conscious only of something indefinitely strange in the bearing of the three; yet on reflecting upon it after, he had been horrified at the idea that he might have seen a corpse carried past in this manner, and might have unconsciously witnessed the end of an a.s.sa.s.sination.

"I was now a.s.sured that my granddaughter had been carried away in a fainting and helpless condition, and this idea was speedily confirmed by a discovery which I made in the family sitting-room, where, lying underneath the harpsichord, I found a handkerchief that had been steeped in a solution of an Indian drug, the properties of which I had explained and demonstrated to Fetis. It was a preparation which when smoked or inhaled produces almost immediate giddiness and loss of consciousness; a condition not lasting long, but certainly long enough to allow of the subject being carried quickly for two or three hundred yards. I remembered how minutely Fetis had questioned me about this drug, and how keenly interested he had been in my experiments with it. He had himself smoked a pipe filled with the drug in question, and had calculated the average period of unconsciousness by his own experience.

"I had now no doubt that Margharita had been surprised by Fetis alone at her harpsichord, and had been carried from the house in a state of semi-unconsciousness. A gondola was doubtless ready to receive her at the end of the court, where a flight of steps leads down to the ca.n.a.l.

"I went again to the palace on the Ca.n.a.l Reggio, and was informed that Fetis had left Venice on the previous evening, with all the English servants. The house had a dismantled air, and I was told that it was left in charge of the old steward, who had lived for nearly half a century in the service of the Venetian n.o.bleman from whom Mr. Topsparkle had purchased the property. Topsparkle was not expected to return to Venice until the following autumn. He had gone to Paris, and would go thence to London, where he had a house in a fashionable quarter.

"I followed him to Paris; and there I found him established near the Court end of the town, where my granddaughter lived openly with him and pa.s.sed as his wife; but as the society in which they lived was the most audaciously debauched in Paris--a circle of rakes, demi-reps, and infidels, a society which surpa.s.sed in open iniquity the worst phases of Venetian dissipation--the legality of the tie that bound Mr. Topsparkle and his companion was not likely to be questioned. He was inordinately rich, and scattered his money lavishly.

"I made my way into my granddaughter's apartment with considerable difficulty, threatened and all but a.s.saulted by the bodyguard of lacqueys. I reproached her with her cruelty and treachery towards her father and myself, and asked her if she was legally wedded to the man who had carried her off.

"She answered me only with her tears, and we were interrupted by Topsparkle before I could question her further. He drew his sword and would have attacked me, but Margharita threw herself between us and piteously entreated me to leave the house. She declared that she was happy, that she was fondly beloved, that nothing could induce her to abandon her lover. She had learnt the language of that infamous circle in which she had wed, and impudently confessed her dishonour.

"'What bond could be more sacred than that which binds us?' she asked; 'a love that can end only with death. The same pa.s.sion inspires us both, the same tastes, the same pleasures. We live but for music and love.'

She flung herself weeping upon his breast.

"'You see, sir,' he said scornfully, 'she makes no complaint of me; and she does not wish to go back to her father's shop.'

"This was said with infinite contempt, and with an insolent glance at the profligate luxury of the apartment, a kind of Armida Palace calculated to deprave the taste and enervate the mind of its occupants.

"'I am answered, sir,' I replied; 'I shall wait till my granddaughter has awakened from this glittering dream, and has discovered what it is for a woman to become--what you have done her the honour to make her.'