Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “You will give me the money, papa?” she asked, looking up at him half coaxingly through her tears.

  “Yes, my darling, to-morrow morning.”

  “In bank-notes?”

  “In any manner you please. But, Aurora, why see these people? Why listen to their disgraceful demands? Why not tell the truth?”

  “Ah! why, indeed!” she said, thoughtfully. “Ask me no questions, dear papa, but let me have the money to-morrow, and I promise you that this shall be the very last you hear of my old troubles.”

  She made this promise with such perfect confidence that her father was inspired with a faint ray of hope.

  “Come, darling papa,” she said, “your room is near mine; let us go up stairs together.”

  She entwined her arms in his, and led him up the broad staircase, only parting from him at the door of his room.

  Mr. Floyd summoned his daughter into the study early the next morning, while Talbot Bulstrode was opening his letters, and Lucy strolling up and down the terrace with John Mellish.

  “I have telegraphed for the money, my darling,” the banker said. “One of the clerks will be here with it by the time we have finished breakfast.”

  Mr. Floyd was right. A card inscribed with the name of a Mr. George Martin was brought to him during breakfast.

  “Mr. Martin will be good enough to wait in my study,” he said.

  Aurora and her father found the clerk seated at the open window, looking admiringly through festoons of foliage, which clustered round the frame of the lattice, into the richly-cultivated garden. Felden Woods was a sacred spot in the eyes of the junior clerks in Lombard street, and a drive to Beckenham in a Hansom cab on a fine summer’s morning, to say nothing of such chance refreshment as pound-cake and old Madeira, or cold fowl and Scotch ale, was considered no small treat.

  Mr. George Martin, who was laboring under the temporary affliction of being only nineteen years of age, rose in a confused flutter of respect and surprise, and blushed very violently at sight of Mrs. Mellish.

  Aurora responded to his reverential salute with such a pleasant nod as she might have bestowed upon the younger dogs in the stable-yard, and seated herself opposite to him at the little table by the window. It was such an excruciatingly narrow table that Aurora’s muslin dress rustled against the drab trowsers of the junior clerk as Mrs. Mellish sat down.

  The young man unlocked a little morocco pouch which he wore suspended from a strap across his shoulder, and produced a roll of crisp notes; so crisp, so white and new, that, in their unsullied freshness, they looked more like notes on the Bank of Elegance than the circulating medium of this busy, money-making nation.

  “I have brought the cash for which you telegraphed, sir,” said the clerk.

  “Very good, Mr. Martin,” answered the banker. “Here is my check ready written for you. The notes are—”

  “Twenty fifties, twenty-five twenties, fifty tens,” the clerk said, glibly.

  Mr. Floyd took the little bundle of tissue-paper, and counted the notes with the professional rapidity which he still retained.

  “Quite correct,” he said, ringing the bell, which was speedily answered by a simpering footman. “Give this gentleman some lunch. You will find the Madeira very good,” he added, kindly, turning to the blushing junior; “it’s a wine that is dying out, and by the time you’re my age, Mr. Martin, you won’t be able to get such a glass as I can offer you to-day. Good-morning.”

  Mr. George Martin clutched his hat nervously from the empty chair on which he had placed it, knocked down a heap of papers with his elbow, bowed, blushed, and stumbled out of the room, under convoy of the simpering footman, who nourished a profound contempt for the young men from the h’office.

  “Now, my darling,” said Mr. Floyd, “here is the money. Though, mind, I protest against—”

  “No, no, papa, not a word,” she interrupted; “I thought that was all settled last night.”

  He sighed, with the same weary sigh as on the night before, and, seating himself at his desk, dipped a pen into the ink.

  “What are you going to do, papa?”

  “I’m only going to take the numbers of the notes.”

  “There is no occasion.”

  “There is always occasion to be business-like,” said the old man, firmly, as he checked the numbers of the notes one by one upon a sheet of paper with rapid precision.

  Aurora paced up and down the room impatiently while this operation was going forward.

  “How difficult it has been to me to get this money!” she exclaimed. “If I had been the wife and daughter of two of the poorest men in Christendom, I could scarcely have had more trouble about this two thousand pounds. And now you keep me here while you number the notes, not one of which is likely to be exchanged in this country.”

  “I learned to be business-like when I was very young, Aurora,” answered Mr. Floyd, “and I have never been able to forget my old habits.”

  He completed his task in defiance of his daughter’s impatience, and handed her the packet of notes when he had done.

  “I will keep the list of numbers, my dear,” he said. “If I were to give it to you, you would most likely lose it.”

  He folded the sheet of paper, and put it in a drawer of his desk.

  “Twenty years hence, Aurora,” he said, “should I live so long, I should be able to produce this paper, if it were wanted.”

  “Which it never will be, you dear methodical papa,” answered Aurora. “My troubles are ended now. Yes,” she added, in a graver tone, “I pray God that my troubles may be ended now.”

  She encircled her arms about her father’s neck, and kissed him tenderly.

  “I must leave you, dearest, to-day,” she said; “you must not ask me why — you must ask me nothing. You must only love and trust me — as my poor John trusts me — faithfully, hopefully, through everything.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Captain Prodder.

  While the Doncaster express was carrying Mr. and Mrs. Mellish northward, another express journeyed from Liverpool to London with its load of passengers.

  Among these passengers there was a certain broad-shouldered and rather bull-necked individual, who attracted considerable attention during the journey, and was an object of some interest to his fellow-travellers and the railway officials at the two or three stations where the train stopped.

  He was a man of about fifty years of age, but his years were worn very lightly, and only recorded by some wandering streaks and patches of gray among his thick blue-black stubble of hair. His complexion, naturally dark, had become of such a bronzed and coppery tint by perpetual exposure to meridian suns, tropical hot winds, the fiery breath of the simoon, and the many other inconveniences attendant upon an out-door life, as to cause him to be frequently mistaken for the inhabitant of some one of those countries in which the complexion of the natives fluctuates between burnt sienna, Indian red, and Vandyke brown. But it was rarely long before he took an opportunity to rectify this mistake, and to express that hearty contempt and aversion for all furriners which is natural to the unspoiled and unsophisticated Briton.

  Upon this particular occasion he had not been half an hour in the society of his fellow-passengers before he had informed them that he was a native of Liverpool, and the captain of a merchant vessel, trading, in a manner of speaking, he said, everywhere; that he had run away from his father and his home at a very early period of his life, and had shifted for himself in different parts of the globe ever since; that his Christian name was Samuel, and his surname Prodder, and that his father had been, like himself, a captain in the merchant service. He chewed so much tobacco, and drank so much fiery Jamaica rum from a pocket-pistol in the intervals of his conversation, that the first-class compartment in which he sat was odorous with the compound perfume. But he was such a hearty, loud-spoken fellow, and there was such a pleasant twinkle in his black eyes, that the passengers (with the exception of one crusty old lady) treated him with gre
at good-humor, and listened very patiently to his talk.

  “Chewin’ a’n’t smokin,’ you know, is it?” he said, with a great guffaw, as he cut himself a terrible block of Cavendish; “and railway companies a’n’t got any laws against that. They can put a fellow’s pipe out, but he can chew his quid in their faces; though I won’t say which is wust for their carpets, neither.”

  I am sorry to be compelled to confess that this brown-visaged merchant-captain, who said wust and chewed Cavendish tobacco, was uncle to Mrs. John Mellish, of Mellish Park; and that the motive for this very journey was neither more nor less than his desire to become acquainted with his niece.

  He imparted this fact — as well as much other information relating to himself, his tastes, habits, adventures, opinions, and sentiments — to his travelling companions in the course of the journey.

  “Do you know for why I’m going to London by this identical train?” he asked generally, as the passengers settled themselves into their places after taking refreshment at Rugby.

  The gentlemen looked over their newspapers at the talkative sailor, and a young lady looked up from her book, but nobody volunteered to speculate an opinion upon the mainspring of Mr. Prodder’s actions.

  “I’ll tell you for why,” resumed the merchant-captain, addressing the assembly as if in answer to their eager questioning. “I’m going to see my niece, which I have never seen before. When I ran away from father’s ship, the Ventur’some, nigh upon forty years ago, and went aboard the craft of a captain by the name of Mobley, which was a good master to me for many a day, I had a little sister as I had left behind at Liverpool, which was dearer to me than my life.” He paused to refresh himself with rather a demonstrative sip from the pocket-pistol. “But if you,” he continued generally, “if you had a father that’d fetch you a clout of the head as soon as look at you, you’d run away, perhaps, and so did I. I took the opportunity to be missin’ one night as father was settin’ sail from Yarmouth Harbor; and, not settin’ that wonderful store by me which some folks do by their only sons, he shipped his anchor without stoppin’ to ask many questions, and left me hidin’ in one of the little alleys which cut the town of Yarmouth through and across like they cut the cakes they make there. There was many in Yarmouth that knew me, and there was n’t one that did n’t say, ‘Sarve him right,’ when they heard how I’d given father the slip, and the next day Cap’en Mobley gave me a berth as cabin-boy about the Mariar Anne.”

  Mr. Prodder again paused to partake of refreshment from his portable spirit store, and this time politely handed the pocket-pistol to the company.

  “Now, perhaps you’ll not believe me,” he resumed, after his friendly offer had been refused, and the wicker-covered vessel replaced in his capacious pocket—”you won’t perhaps believe me when I tell you, as I tell you candid, that up to last Saturday week I never could find the time nor the opportunity to go back to Liverpool, and ask after the little sister that I’d left no higher than the kitchen-table, and that had cried fit to break her poor little heart when I went away. But whether you believe it or whether you don’t, it’s as true as gospel,” cried the sailor, thumping his ponderous fist upon the padded elbow of the compartment in which he sat; “it’s as true as gospel. I’ve coasted America, North and South. I’ve carried West-Indian goods to the East Indies, and East-Indian goods to the West Indies. I’ve traded in Norwegian goods between Norway and Hull. I’ve carried Sheffield goods from Hull to South America. I’ve traded between all manner of countries and all manner of docks; but somehow or other I’ve never had the time to spare to go on shore at Liverpool, and find out the narrow little street in which I left my sister Eliza, no higher than the table, more than forty years ago, until last Saturday was a week. Last Saturday was a week I touched at Liverpool with a cargo of furs and poll-parrots — what you may call fancy goods; and I said to my mate, I said, ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Jack; I’ll go ashore and see my little sister Eliza.’”

  He paused once more, and a softening change came over the brightness of his black eyes. This time he did not apply himself to the pocket-pistol. This time he brushed the back of his brown hand across his eye-lashes, and brought it away with a drop or two of moisture glittering upon the bronzed skin. Even his voice was changed when he continued, and had mellowed to a richer and more mournful depth, until it very much resembled the melodious utterance which twenty-one years before had assisted to render Miss Eliza Percival the popular tragedian of the Preston and Bradford circuit.

  “God forgive me,” continued the sailor, in that altered voice; “but throughout my voyages I’d never thought of my sister Eliza but in two ways — sometimes one, sometimes t’other. One way of thinking of her, and expecting to see her, was as the little sister that I’d left, not altered by so much as one lock of her hair being changed from the identical curl into which it was twisted the morning she cried and clung about me on board the Ventur’some, having come aboard to wish father and me good-by. Perhaps I oftenest thought of her in this way. Anyhow, it was in this way, and no other, that I always saw her in my dreams. The other way of thinking of her, and expectin’ to see her, was as a handsome, full-grown, buxom married woman, with a troop of saucy children hanging on to her apron-string, and every one of ’em askin’ what Uncle Samuel had brought ’em from foreign parts. Of course this fancy was the most rational of the two; but the other fancy, of the little child with the long, black, curly hair, would come to me very often, especially at night, when all was quiet aboard, and when I took the wheel in a spell while the helmsman turned in. Lord bless you, ladies and gentlemen, many a time of a starlight night, when we’ve been in them latitudes where the stars are brighter than common. I’ve seen the floating mists upon the water take the very shape of that light figure of a little girl in a white pinafore, and come skipping toward me across the waves. I don’t mean that I’ve seen a ghost, you know, but I mean that I could have seen one if I’d had the mind, and that I’ve seen as much of a one as folks ever do see upon this earth — the ghosts of their own memories and their own sorrows, mixed up with the mists of the sea or the shadows of the trees wavin’ back’ard and for’ard in the moonlight, or a white curtain agen a window, or something of that sort. Well, I was such a precious old fool with these fancies and fantigs” — Mr. Samuel Prodder seemed rather to pride himself upon the latter word, as something out of the common—”that when I went ashore at Liverpool last Saturday was a week, I could n’t keep my eyes off the little girls in white pinafores as passed me by in the streets, thinkin’ to see my Eliza skippin’ along, with her black curls flyin’ in the wind, and a bit of chalk, to play hop-scotch with, in her hand; so I was obliged to say to myself, quite serious, ‘Now, Samuel Prodder, the little girl you’re a lookin’ for must be fifty years of age, if she’s a day, and it’s more than likely that she’s left off playin’ hop-scotch and wearin’ white pinafores by this time.’ If I had n’t kept repeatin’ this, internally like, all the way I went, I should have stopped half the little girls in Liverpool to ask ’em if their name was Eliza, and if they’d ever had a brother as ran away and was lost. I had only one thought of how to set about findin’ her, and that was to walk straight to the back street in which I remembered leavin’ her forty years before. I’d no thought that those forty years could make any more change than to change her from a girl to a woman, and it seemed almost strange to me that they could make as much change as that. There was one thing I never thought of; and if my heart beat loud and quick when I knocked at the little front door of the very identical house in which we’d lodged, it was with nothing but hope and joy. The forty years that had sent railways spinning all over England had n’t made much difference in the old house; it was forty years dirtier, perhaps, and forty years shabbier, and it stood in the very heart of the town instead of on the edge of the open country; but, exceptin’ that, it was pretty much the same; and I expected to see the same landlady come to open the door, with the same dirty artificial flowers in her
cap, and the same old slippers down at heel scrapin’ after her along the bit of oil-cloth. It gave me a kind of a turn when I did n’t see this identical landlady, though she’d have been turned a hundred years old if she’d been alive; and I might have prepared myself for the disappointment if I’d thought of that, but I had n’t; and when the door was opened by a young woman with sandy hair, brushed backward as if she’d been a Chinese, and no eyebrows to speak of, I did feel disappointed. The young woman had a baby in her arms — a black-eyed baby, with its eyes opened so wide that it seemed as if it had been very much surprised with the look of things on first comin’ into the world, and had n’t quite recovered itself yet; so I thought to myself, as soon as I clapped eyes on the little one, why, as sure as a gun, that’s my sister Eliza’s baby, and my sister Eliza’s married, and lives here still. But the young woman had never heard the name of Prodder, and did n’t think there was anybody in the neighborhood as ever had. I felt my heart, which had been beatin’ louder and quicker every minute, stop all of a sudden when she said this, and seem to drop down like a dead weight; but I thanked her for her civil answers to my questions, and went on to the next house to inquire there. I might have saved myself the trouble, for I made the same inquiries at every house on each side of the street, going straight from door to door, till the people thought I was a sea-farin’ tax-gatherer; but nobody had ever heard the name of Prodder, and the oldest inhabitant in the street had n’t lived there ten years. I was quite disheartened when I left the neighborhood, which had once been so familiar, and which seemed so strange, and small, and mean, and shabby now. I’d had so little thought of failing to find Eliza in the very house in which I’d left her, that I’d made no plans beyond. So I was brought to a dead stop; and I went back to the tavern where I’d left my carpet-bag, and I had a chop brought me for my dinner, and I sat with my knife and fork before me thinkin’ what I was to do next. When Eliza and I had parted, forty years before, I remembered father leaving her in charge of a sister of my mother’s (my poor mother had been dead a year), and I thought to myself, the only chance there is left for me now is to find Aunt Sarah.”