Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “Mr. George had his dinner and tea alone, ma’am,” she said in tones of awful reproof, while Isabel stood before the little glass in the sitting-room taking off her bonnet; “and he’s gone out again to see some sick folks in the lanes on the other side of the church. He was right down uneasy about you.”

  “I’ve been to Hurstonleigh, to hear Mr. Colborne preach,” Isabel answered, with a very feeble effort to appear quite at her ease. “I had heard so much about his preaching, and I wanted so to hear him.”

  It was true that she had heard Austin Colborne talked of amongst her church-going acquaintance at Graybridge; but it was quite untrue that she had ever felt the faintest desire to hear him preach. Had not her whole life been bounded by a magic circle, of which Roland Lansdell was the resplendent centre?

  * * *

  CHAPTER XXVII.

  “AND NOW I LIVE, AND NOW MY LIFE IS DONE!”

  George Gilbert accepted his wife’s explanation of her prolonged absence on that March afternoon. She had carried her books to Thurston’s Crag, and had sat there reading, while the time slipped by unawares, and it was too late to come back to dinner; and so she had bethought herself that there was evening service at Hurstonleigh during Passion-week, and she might hear Mr. Colborne preach. George Gilbert received this explanation as he would have received any other statement from the lips in whose truth he believed. But Mrs. Jeffson treated her young mistress with a stately politeness that wounded Isabel to the quick. She endured it very meekly, however; for she felt that she had been wicked, and that all her sufferings were the fruit of her own sin. She stayed at home for the rest of the week, except when she attended the Good-Friday’s services at Graybridge church with her husband; and on Sunday afternoon she persuaded George to accompany her to Hurstonleigh. She was making her feeble effort to be good; and if the enthusiasm awakened in her breast by Mr. Colborne’s preaching died out a little after she left the church, there was at the worst something left which made her a better woman than she had been before. But did she forget Roland Lansdell all this time? No; with bitter anguish and regret she thought of the man who had been as powerless to comprehend her as he was intellectually her superior.

  “He knows so much, and yet did not know that I was not a wicked woman,” she thought, in simple wonder. She did not understand Roland’s sceptical manner of looking at everything, which could perceive no palpable distinction between wrong and right. She could not comprehend that this man had believed himself justified in what he had done.

  But she thought of him incessantly. The image of his pale reproachful face — so pale, so bitterly reproachful — never left her mental vision. The sound of his voice bidding her leave him was perpetually in her ears. He had loved her: yes; however deep his guilt, he had loved her, and had wept because of her. There were times when the memory of his tears, flashing back upon her suddenly, nearly swept away all her natural purity, her earnest desire to be good; there were times when she wanted to go to him and fall at his feet, crying out, “Oh, what am I, that my life should be counted against your sorrow? How can it matter what becomes of me, if you are happy?”

  There were times when the thought of Roland Lansdell’s sorrow overcame every other thought in Isabel Gilbert’s mind. Until the day when he had thrown himself upon the ground in a sudden passion of grief, she had never realized the possibility of his being unhappy because of her. For him to love her in a patronizing far-off kind of manner was very much. Was it not the condescension of a demigod, who smiles upon some earthly creature? Was it not a reversal of the story of Diana and Endymion? It was not the goddess, but the god, who came down to earth. But that he should love her desperately and passionately, and be grief-stricken because he could not win her for his own, — this was a stupendous fact, almost beyond Isabel Gilbert’s comprehension. Sometimes she thought he was only the wicked squire who pretends to be very much in earnest in the first act, and flings aside his victim with scorn and contumely in the second. Sometimes the whole truth burst upon her, sudden as a thunder-clap, and she felt that she had indeed done Roland Lansdell a great and cruel wrong.

  * * *

  And where was he all this time — the man who had judged Isabel Gilbert by a common standard, and had believed her quite ready to answer to his summons whenever he chose to call her to his side? Who shall tell the bitter sinful story of his grief and passion? Never once in all his anger against Lady Gwendoline Pomphrey, when she jilted him for the sake of young Lord Heatherland, had he felt so desperate a rage, so deep an indignation, as that which now possessed him when he thought of Isabel Gilbert. Wounded in his pride, his vanity; shaken in the self-confidence peculiar to a man of the world; he could not all at once forgive this woman who had so entirely duped and deceived him. He was mad with mingled anger and disappointment when he thought of the story of the last twelve-month. The bitterness of all his struggles with himself; his heroic resolutions — young and fresh in the early morning, old and grey and wasted before the brief day was done — came back to him; and he laughed aloud to think how useless all those perplexities and hesitations had been, when the obstacle, the real resistance, to his sinful yearnings was here — here, in the shape of a simple woman’s will.

  There may be some men who would not have thought the story finished with that farewell under Lord Thurston’s oak; but Roland Lansdell was not one of those men. He had little force of mind or strength of purpose with which to fight against temptation: but he had, on the other hand, few of the qualifications which make a tempter. So long as he had been uncertain of himself, and the strength of his love for Isabel, he had indeed dissembled, so far as to make a poor show of indifference. So long as he meant to go away from Midlandshire without “doing any harm,” he had thought it a venial sin to affect some little friendship for the husband of the woman he loved. But from the moment in which all vacillation gave way before a settled purpose — from the hour of his return to Midlandshire — he had made no secret of his feelings or intentions. He had urged this girl to do a dishonourable act, but he had used no dishonourable means. No words can tell how bitterly he felt his disappointment. For the first time in his life this favourite of bountiful nature, this spoiled child of fortune, found there was something in the world he could not have, something that was denied to his desire. It was such a very little time since he had bewailed the extinction of all youthful hope and ardour in pretty cynical little verses, all sparkling with scraps of French and Latin, and Spanish and Italian, cunningly woven into the native pattern of the rhyme. It was only a few months since he had amused himself by scribbling melodious lamentations upon the emptiness of life in general, and that “mortal coldness of the soul” to which a young man of seven-and-twenty, with a great deal of money, and nothing particular to do, is especially subject. Ah, how pitilessly he had laughed at other men’s tenderest sentiments! What cruel aphorisms from Scarron and Rochefoucauld, and Swift and Voltaire, and Wilkes and Mirabeau, he had quoted upon the subject of love and woman! How resolutely he had refused to believe in the endurance of passion! how coldly he had sneered at the holy power of affection! He had given himself cynical airs upon the strength of his cousin’s falsehood: and had declared there was no truth in woman, because Lady Gwendoline Pomphrey had been true to the teaching of her life, and had tried to make the best market of her Saxon face and her long ringlets. And now he was utterly false to his own creed. He was in love, passionately, earnestly in love, with a foolish sentimental little woman, whose best charm was — what? That was the question which he tried in vain to answer. He gnashed his teeth in an access of rage when he sought to discover why he loved this woman. Other women more beautiful, and how much more accomplished, had spread enchanted webs of delicious flattery and tenderness about him; and he had broken through the impalpable meshes, and had gone away unscathed from the flashing glances of bright eyes, unmoved by the smiles for which other men were ready to peril so much. Why was it that his heart yearned for this woman’s presence? She was in
no way his intellectual equal: she was not a companion for him, even at her best, when she murmured pretty little feminine truisms about Shelley and Byron. In all his loiterings by Lord Thurston’s waterfall, he could recall no wise or witty saying that had ever fallen from those childish lips. And yet, and yet — she was something to him that no other woman had ever been, or, as he firmly believed, ever could become. Oh, for one upward glance of those dark eyes, so shyly tender, so pensively serene! Oh, for the deep delight of standing by her side upon the border of a still Italian lake; for the pure happiness of opening all the wild realms of wisdom and poetry before those youthful feet! And then in after years, when she had risen little by little to the standard which the world would deem befitting his wife, — then, fate, or chance, the remote abstraction most men call Providence, having favoured the truest and purest love upon this earth, — then he might proclaim the ownership of the prize he had won for himself; then he might exhibit before shallow, sceptical mankind, one bright and grand example of a perfect union.

  Mr. Lansdell’s thoughts wandered very much after this fashion as he wore out the long dreary days in his solitary home. He went nowhere; he received no one. He gave the servants standing orders to say that he was out, or engaged, to whomsoever came to Mordred. His portmanteaus were packed, and had been packed ever since the night of his last meeting with Isabel Gilbert. Every day he gave fresh orders respecting his departure. He would have the carriage at such an hour, to catch a certain train: but when the hour came, the groom was sent back to the stables, and Mr. Lansdell lingered yet another day at Mordred Priory.

  He could not go away. In vain, in vain he wrestled with himself: most bitterly did he despise and hate himself for his unmanly weakness; but he could not go away. She would repent: she would write to summon him to another meeting beneath the bare old oak. With an imagination as ardent as her own, he could picture that meeting; he could almost hear her voice as he fancied the things she would say. “My love, my love!” she would cry, clasping those slender hands about his arm; “I cannot live without you: I cannot, I cannot!”

  The weeks went slowly by, and Mr. Lansdell’s body-servant had what that individual was pleased to designate “a precious time of it.” Never was gentleman’s gentleman so tormented by the whims and vagaries of his master. One day “we” were off to Swisserland — Mr. Lansdell’s valet always called it Swisserland — and we were to go as fast as the railway service could carry us, and not get a wink of sleep anywheres, except in railway-carriages, until we got to Paw or Bas-el — the valet called it Bas-el. Another day we were going to St. Petersburg, with our friend Hawkwood, the Queen’s messenger; and a pretty rate we were going at, knocking the very lives out of us. Sometimes we were for tearing across the Balkan range, on those blessed Turkish horses, that jolt a man’s life half out of him; or we were going on a yachting-cruise in the Mediterranean; or fishing in the wildest regions of Norway. And all about a trumpery minx at Graybridge! Mr. Lansdell’s body-servant would wind up, with unmitigated contempt: all about a young person who was not fit to hold a candle to Sarah Jane the housemaid, or Eliza in the laundry! Alas for Roland Lansdell, the servants who waited upon him knew quite as well as he knew himself the nature of the fever which had made him so restless! They knew that he was in love with a woman who could never be his wife; and they despised him for his folly, and discussed all the phases of his madness over their ponderous meat-suppers in the servants’ hall.

  The weeks went slowly by. To Roland, the days were weary and the nights intolerable. He went up to London several times, always leaving Mordred alone and at abnormal hours, and every time intending to remain away. But he could not: a sudden fever seized him as the distance grew wider between him and Midlandshire. She would repent of her stern determination: she would write to him, avowing that she could not live without him. Ah, how long he had expected that letter! She would grow suddenly unable to endure her life, perhaps, and would be rash and desperate enough to go to Mordred in the hope of seeing him. This would happen while he was away: the chance of happiness would be offered to him, and he would not be there to seize it. She, his love, the sole joy and treasure of his life, would be there, trembling on his threshold, and he would not be near to welcome and receive her. The people at the Clarendon thought that Mr. Lansdell had gone mad, so sudden were his flights from their comfortable quarters.

  And all this time he could hear nothing of the woman he loved. He could not talk to his servants, and he had closed his doors against all visitors. What was she doing? Was she at Graybridge still? Was she leading the old quiet life, sitting in that shabby parlour, where he had sat by her side? He remembered the pattern of the Kidderminster carpet, the limp folds of the muslin-curtains, the faded crimson silk that decorated the front of the piano upon which she had sometimes played to him, oh, so indifferently. Day after day he haunted the bridge under Lord Thurston’s oak; day after day he threw tribute of cigar-ends into the waterfall, while he waited in the faint hope that the Doctor’s Wife might wander thither. Oh, how cruel she was; how cruel! If she had ever loved him, she too would have haunted that spot. She would have come to the place associated with his memory: she would have come, as he came, in the hope of another meeting.

  Sometimes Mr. Lansdell ventured to ride along the little street at Graybridge and through the dusty lane in which the doctor’s house stood. On horseback the master of Mordred Priory was almost on a level with the bedroom windows of George Gilbert’s habitation, and could look down into the little parlour where Isabel was wont to sit. Once and once only he saw her there, sitting before the table with some needlework in her hands, so deeply absorbed, as it seemed, in her commonplace labour that she did not see the cavalier who rode so slowly past her window. How should he know how often she had run eagerly to that very window — her face pale, her heart beating tempestuously — only to find that it was not his horse whose hoof she had heard in the lane?

  Perhaps the sight of George Gilbert’s wife sitting at her needlework gave Roland Lansdell a sharper pang than he would have felt had he seen two mutes from Wareham keeping guard at the gate, and Mrs. Gilbert’s coffin being carried out at the door. She was not dead, then: she could live and be happy, while he —— ! Well, he was not dead himself, certainly; but he was the very next thing to being dead; and he felt indignant at the sight of Isabel’s apparent composure.

  He walked to Lowlands in the course of a week or so after this, and strolled into the drawing-rooms with some undefined intention of flirting desperately with his cousin Gwendoline; of making her an offer of marriage, perhaps. Why should he not marry? He could scarcely be more miserable than he was; and a marriage with Gwendoline would be some kind of revenge upon Isabel. He was inclined to do anything desperate and foolish, if by so doing he could sting that cruel, obdurate heart. Was this generous? Ah, no. But then, in spite of all that is said and sung in its honour, love is not such a very generous passion. Roland found his cousin alone, in the long low morning-room looking out into her flower-garden. She was making wax flowers, and looked almost as tired of her employment as if she had been some poor little artisan toiling for scanty wages.

  “I’m very glad you have interrupted me, Roland,” she said, pushing away all the paraphernalia of her work; “they are very tiresome; and, after all, the roses are as stiff as camellias, and at the very best a vase of wax-flowers only reminds one of an hotel at a watering-place. They always have wax-flowers and Bohemian-glass candelabra at sea-side hotels. And now tell me what you have been doing, Roland; and why you have never come to us. We are so terribly dull.”