Prince Zaleski Read online

mystery, was the whole pasthistory of the House of Orven fully investigated?'

  'Not to my knowledge,' I answered; 'in the papers there were, ofcourse, sketches of the earl's career, but that I think was all.'

  'Yet it cannot be that their past was unknown, but only that it wasignored. Long, I tell you, long and often, have I pondered on thathistory, and sought to trace with what ghastly secret has been pregnantthe destiny, gloomful as Erebus and the murk of black-peplosed Nux,which for centuries has hung its pall over the men of this ill-fatedhouse. Now at last I know. Dark, dark, and red with gore and horror isthat history; down the silent corridors of the ages have theseblood-soaked sons of Atreus fled shrieking before the pursuing talonsof the dread Eumenides. The first earl received his patent in 1535 fromthe eighth Henry. Two years later, though noted as a rabid "king'sman," he joined the Pilgrimage of Grace against his master, and wassoon after executed, with Darcy and some other lords. His age was thenfifty. His son, meantime, had served in the king's army under Norfolk.It is remarkable, by the way, that females have all along been rare inthe family, and that in no instance has there been more than one son.The second earl, under the sixth Edward, suddenly threw up a civilpost, hastened to the army, and fell at the age of forty at the battleof Pinkie in 1547. He was accompanied by his son. The third in 1557,under Mary, renounced the Catholic faith, to which, both before andsince, the family have passionately clung, and suffered (at the age offorty) the last penalty. The fourth earl died naturally, but suddenly,in his bed at the age of fifty during the winter of 1566. At midnight_of the same day_ he was laid in the grave by his son. This son waslater on, in 1591, seen by _his_ son to fall from a lofty balcony atOrven Hall, while walking in his sleep at high noonday. Then for sometime nothing happens; but the eighth earl dies mysteriously in 1651 atthe age of forty-five. A fire occurring in his room, he leapt from awindow to escape the flames. Some of his limbs were thereby fractured,but he was in a fair way to recovery when there was a sudden relapse,soon ending in death. He was found to have been poisoned by _radixaconiti indica_, a rare Arabian poison not known in Europe at that timeexcept to _savants_, and first mentioned by Acosta some months before.An attendant was accused and tried, but acquitted. The then son of theHouse was a Fellow of the newly-founded Royal Society, and author of anow-forgotten work on Toxicology, which, however, I have read. Nosuspicion, of course, fell on _him_.'

  As Zaleski proceeded with this retrospect, I could not but ask myselfwith stirrings of the most genuine wonder, whether he could possessthis intimate knowledge of _all_ the great families of Europe! It wasas if he had spent a part of his life in making special study of thehistory of the Orvens.

  'In the same manner,' he went on, 'I could detail the annals of thefamily from that time to the present. But all through they have beenmarked by the same latent tragic elements; and I have said enough toshow you that in each of the tragedies there was invariably somethinglarge, leering, something of which the mind demands explanation, butseeks in vain to find it. Now we need no longer seek. Destiny did notdesign that the last Lord of Orven should any more hide from the worldthe guilty secret of his race. It was the will of the gods--and hebetrayed himself. "Return," he writes, "the beginning of the end iscome." What end?

  _The_ end--perfectly well known to Randolph, needing no explanation for_him_. The old, old end, which in the ancient dim time led the firstlord, loyal still at heart, to forsake his king; and another, stilldevout, to renounce his cherished faith, and yet another to set fire tothe home of his ancestors. You have called the two last scions of thefamily "a proud and selfish pair of beings"; proud they were, andselfish too, but you are in error if you think their selfishness apersonal one: on the contrary, they were singularly oblivious of selfin the ordinary sense of the word. Theirs was the pride and theselfishness of _race_. What consideration, think you, other than theweal of his house, could induce Lord Randolph to take on himself theshame--for as such he certainly regards it--of a conversion toradicalism? He would, I am convinced, have _died_ rather than make thispretence for merely personal ends. But he does it--and the reason? Itis because he has received that awful summons from home; because "theend" is daily coming nearer, and it must not find him unprepared tomeet it; it is because Lord Pharanx's senses are becoming _too_ acute;because the clatter of the servants' knives at the other end of thehouse inflames him to madness; because his excited palate can no longerendure any food but the subtlest delicacies; because Hester Dyett isable from the posture in which he sits to conjecture that he isintoxicated; because, in fact, he is on the brink of the dreadfulmalady which physicians call "_General Paralysis of the Insane_." Youremember I took from your hands the newspaper containing the earl'sletter to Cibras, in order to read it with my own eyes. I had myreasons, and I was justified. That letter contains three mistakes inspelling: "here" is printed "hear," "pass" appears as "pas," and "room"as "rume." Printers' errors, you say? But not so--one might be, two inthat short paragraph could hardly be, three would be impossible. Searchthe whole paper through, and I think you will not find another. Let usreverence the theory of probabilities: the errors were the writer's,not the printer's. General Paralysis of the Insane is known to havethis effect on the writing. It attacks its victims about the period ofmiddle age--the age at which the deaths of all the Orvens who diedmysteriously occurred. Finding then that the dire heritage of hisrace--the heritage of madness--is falling or fallen on him, he summonshis son from India. On himself he passes sentence of death: it is thetradition of the family, the secret vow of self-destruction handed downthrough ages from father to son. But he must have aid: in these days itis difficult for a man to commit the suicidal act withoutdetection--and if madness is a disgrace to the race, equally so issuicide. Besides, the family is to be enriched by the insurances on hislife, and is thereby to be allied with royal blood; but the money willbe lost if the suicide be detected. Randolph therefore returns andblossoms into a popular candidate.

  'For a time he is led to abandon his original plans by the appearanceof Maude Cibras; he hopes that _she_ may be made to destroy the earl;but when she fails him, he recurs to it--recurs to it all suddenly, forLord Pharanx's condition is rapidly becoming critical, patent to alleyes, could any eye see him--so much so that on the last day none ofthe servants are allowed to enter his room. We must therefore regardCibras as a mere addendum to, an extraneous element in, the tragedy,not as an integral part of it. She did not shoot the noble lord, forshe had no pistol; nor did Randolph, for he was at a distance from thebed of death, surrounded by witnesses; nor did the imaginary burglars.The earl therefore shot himself; and it was the small globular silverpistol, such as this'--here Zaleski drew a little embossed Venetianweapon from a drawer near him--'that appeared in the gloom to theexcited Hester as a "ball of cotton," while it was being drawn upwardby the Atwood's machine. But if the earl shot himself he could not havedone so after being stabbed to the heart. Maude Cibras, therefore,stabbed a dead man. She would, of course, have ample time for stealinginto the room and doing so after the shot was fired, and before theparty reached the balcony window, on account of the delay on the stairsin procuring a second light; in going to the earl's door; in examiningthe tracks, and so on. But having stabbed a dead man, she is not guiltyof murder. The message I just now sent by Ham was one addressed to theHome Secretary, telling him on no account to let Cibras die to-morrow.He well knows my name, and will hardly be silly enough to suppose mecapable of using words without meaning. It will be perfectly easy toprove my conclusions, for the pieces removed from, and replaced in, thefloorings can still be detected, if looked for; the pistol is still, nodoubt, in Randolph's room, and its bore can be compared with the bulletfound in Lord Pharanx's brain; above all, the jewels stolen by the"burglars" are still safe in some cabinet of the new earl, and mayreadily be discovered I therefore expect that the denoument will nowtake a somewhat different turn.'

  That the denoument did take a different turn, and pretty strictly inaccordance with Zaleski's forecast, is now mat
ter of history, and theincidents, therefore, need no further comment from me in this place.