Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “That sort of man would get a ticket-of-leave in less than twelve months,” replied the philosophic friend. “I’m afraid you are only throwing good money after bad.”

  The event proved this gentleman but too able a seer. In the monster city of New York Philip Sheldon had disappeared like a single drop of water flung upon the Atlantic Ocean. There was no trace of him: too intangible for the grasp of international law, he melted into the mass of humanity, only one struggler the more in the great army perpetually fighting life’s desperate battle.

  From among all those who had known him this man had utterly vanished, and not one sigh of regret followed him in his unknown wanderings — not one creature amongst all those who had taken his hand and given him friendly greeting thought of him kindly, or cared to know whither he went or how he prospered. He had not left in the house that had sheltered him for years so much as a dog to whine at his door or listen for his returning footstep.

  This fact, if he had known it or considered it, would have troubled him very little. He had played his game for a certain stake, and had lost it. This he felt, and cursed his own too cautious play as the cause of his defeat. That there were higher stakes for which he might have played an easier game, was a fact that never occurred to him. In his philosophy there was indeed nothing higher given to the hopes of man than worldly success, and a dull, cold, prosperous life spent among prosperous acquaintance.

  He was gone, and those who remembered him most keenly — Valentine Hawkehurst, Diana Paget, Ann Woolper — remembered him with a shudder. The old Yorkshirewoman thought of him sometimes as she bent over the little muslin-bedecked cradle where the hope of the Hawkehursts slumbered, and looked round fearfully in the gloaming, half expecting to see his dreaded face glower upon her, dark and threatening, from between the curtains of the window.

  It was a belief of all ancient races, nay indeed, a belief still current amongst modern nations, that it is not given to man to behold the beings of another world and live. The Arab who meets a phantom in the desert goes home to his tent to die. He knows that the hand of doom is upon him. He has seen that upon which, for mortal eyes, it is fatal to look. And it is thus in some measure with those who are admitted within the dark precincts of murder’s dread sanctuary. Not swiftly does the curtain fall which has once been lifted from the hidden horrors of that ghastly temple. The revelations of an utterly wicked soul leave a lasting impress upon the mind which unwillingly becomes recipient of those awful secrets.

  The circumstances of Tom Halliday’s death and of Charlotte’s illness were not to be forgotten by Ann Woolper. The shadow of that dark cruel face, which had lain upon her bosom forty years before, haunted many a peaceful hour of her quiet old age. Her ignorance, and that faint tinge of superstition which generally accompanies ignorance, exaggerated the terror of those dark memories. The thought that Philip Sheldon still lived, still had the power to plot and plan evil against the innocent, was an ever-present source of terror to her. She could not understand that such an element could exist among the forces of evil without fatal result to some one. It seemed to her as if a devil were at large, and there could be neither peace nor security until the evil spirit was exorcised, the baneful presence laid in nethermost depths of unfathomable sea.

  These feelings and these fears would scarcely have arisen in the old woman’s breast, had she alone been subject to the possible plottings of that evil nature. For herself she had little fear. Her span of life was nearly ended; very few were the sands that had yet to run; and, for her own sake, she would have cared little if some rough hand had spilt them untimely. But a new interest in life had been given to Mrs. Woolper just as life drew near its close. That peerless child, the son and heir of the Hawkehursts, had been intrusted to the old woman’s care; and this infant she loved with an affection much more intense than that which had once made Philip Sheldon so dear to her.

  It was by the cradle of this much-treasured child that Ann Woolper nursed her fear of her old master. She knew that he had been counter-plotted and beaten ignominiously in that deadly game which he had played so boldly. And she asked herself whether he was the man to submit to such utter defeat without any effort to revenge himself upon those who had helped to compass his failure.

  On that night when Charlotte Halliday had lain between life and death, suffering on the one hand from the effects of a prolonged and gradual course of poison, on the other from the violent measures taken to eliminate that poisonous element from her system, — on that night when the precious life yet trembled in the balance, Ann Woolper had seen murderous looks in the face of the man whom she dared boldly to defy, and who knew in that hour that his ghastly plot was discovered. Even now, secure in a haven of safety, she could not forget that baneful look in Philip Sheldon’s eyes. She could not find perfect rest while she knew not where that man might be, or what mischief he might be plotting against those she loved.

  Her fears showed themselves in many ways. When she read of dark and vengeful deeds in her newspaper, she thought of her old master, and how, in such or such an act, his fatal hand might reveal itself. He might lie in wait for Valentine some night on the dark road between Charlottenburgh and the distant railway-station. She could fancy the young wife’s agony of terror as the night wore on, and her husband did not return; the unspeakable horror that would come over all that happy household when the news came that its young master had been found on the lonely road slain by some unknown hand. Open utterance to her fears she was too wise to give; but she warned Mr. Hawkehurst of the dangers on that dark road, and besought him to arm himself with a trusty bludgeon wherewith to meet and vanquish any chance assailant. Valentine laughed at her anxious warning; but when Charlotte took up the cry he was fain to content her by the purchase of a sturdy stick, which he swung cheerily to and fro as he walked homewards in the gloaming, planning a chapter in his new book, and composing powerful and eloquent sentences which eluded his mental grasp when he tried to reduce his evening reverie to pen-and-ink.

  “When the air blows fresh across the common, and the distant lights twinkle, and the bright stars peep out in the pale-yellow sky, my language flows as it never does when I sit at my desk, Lotta,” he said to his wife. “I feel myself a Swift or a Junius out there; equal to the tackling of any social question that ever arose upon this earth, from the Wood halfpence to the policy of American taxation, and triennial elections. At home I am only Valentine Hawkehurst, with an ever-present consciousness that so many pages of copy are required from me within a given time, and that my son-and-heir is cutting his teeth, and making more fuss about it than I ever made about my teeth; and that the man about the water-rate is waiting to see me, please, and is desperately anxious about making-up his books; and that I have the dearest wife in Christendom, who opens my door, and puts her pretty head into my room once in half an hour to see how I am getting on, or to ask whether I want any more coals, or to borrow my ink to make-up her washing-book.”

  “You mean, sir, that I prevent your becoming a Junius?” cried Charlotte, with an enchanting moue.

  “Yes, dear. I begin to understand why Swift kept his poor ill-used wife at a respectful distance. She would have made him too happy if he had allowed her to be on the premises. She would have given the cruel indignation no chance of lacerating his heart; and such writing as Swift’s is only produced by a man whose heart is so lacerated. No, my darling, I shall never be a Swift or a Junius while your pretty head is thrust into my room once or twice an hour; but I may hope to be something better, if bright eyes can inspire bright thoughts, and innocent smiles give birth to pleasant fancies.”

  Upon this there was the usual little demonstration of affection between this young couple; and Charlotte praised her husband as the most brilliant and admirable of men; after which pleasing flattery she favoured him with a little interesting information about the baby’s last tooth, and the contumacious behaviour of the new housemaid, between whom and Mrs. Woolper there had been a species of disagreem
ent, which the Yorkshirewoman described as a “standfurther.”

  Thus occupied in simple pleasures and simple cares, the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Hawkehurst went on, untroubled by any fear of that crime-burdened wretch whose image haunted the dreams and meditations of Ann Woolper. For these two Mr. Sheldon was numbered among the dead. To Charlotte the actual truth had never been revealed; but she had been, in the course of time, given to understand that her stepfather had committed some unpardonable sin, which must for ever separate him from herself and her mother. She had been told as much as this, and had been told that she must seek to know no more. To this she submitted without questioning.

  “I am very sorry for him,” she said, “and for mamma.”

  She concluded that the unpardonable offence must needs have been some sin against her mother, some long-hidden infidelity brought suddenly to light, with all the treachery and falsehood involved therein. She never mentioned her stepfather after this but in her prayers the sinner was not forgotten.

  CHAPTER IX.

  ETEOCLES AND POLYNICES.

  George Sheldon went his ways, picking up as good a living as he could from that chivalrous assertion of the rights of the weak which has been already described; and the thought of his brother’s sin-burdened soul troubled him very little. He did think of Tom Halliday; for that last grasp of the honest Yorkshireman’s hand, that last look in his old friend’s face, were haunting memories which this sharp practitioner had found himself powerless to exorcise. If his brother, after an absence of many years in the remote regions of the East Indies, had come home to his fatherland with a colossal fortune, and the reputation of having strangled a few natives during the process of amassing that fortune, George Sheldon would have welcomed the returning wanderer, and would, in his own parlance, have “swallowed the natives.” A few niggers, more or less, sent untimely to Gehenna, would have seemed scarcely sufficient cause for quarrel with a fraternal and liberally-disposed millionaire. But the circumstances of Tom Halliday’s death had brought all the horror of crime and treachery home to the spectator of that deliberate assassination, and had produced such an impression as no other circumstances could on so hard a nature.

  It was some satisfaction to George Sheldon to know that his old friend’s daughter had found a happy home; and he was apt to take some credit from his own share in his brother’s discomfiture. He met Valentine sometimes in the course of his peregrinations in the neighbourhood of the British Museum, and the greeting between the two men was sufficiently cordial; but Mr. Hawkehurst did not invite his old employer to Charlottenburgh, and George was able to comprehend that to that household no one bearing the name of Sheldon could be a welcome visitor.

  He jogged on comfortably enough in his own way; living in his chambers, and consorting with a few chosen friends and kindred spirits of the jolly-good-fellow class, whom he met at an old-established tavern in the west-central district, and in whose society, and the society of the subscription-ground in the Farringdon Road, he found the summum bonum in the way of social intercourse. He did a little speculation upon the turf, and discounted the bills of needy bookmakers, or bought up their bad debts, and thereby gained introductions to the noble patrons of the humble “scums,” and pushed his business into new grooves. He had no idea that such an existence was in any way ignoble; nay, indeed, when he had paid his rent, and his clerk, and his laundress, and his tavern score, and “stood glasses round” amongst his friends, he lighted his cigar, and thrust his hands into the depths of his pockets, and paced the flags of Holborn happy in the belief that he had performed the whole duty of man.

  “There are men whose business obliges them to keep up an establishment, and go to church twice a day, and all that kind of thing,” he said; “and I dare say they find it pay. My clients don’t care a doit where I live, or how I spend my Sundays; and I’d rather have five pounds a week and my liberty than the best family connection in the Fields.”

  The fate of that wretched man, who had dropped out of his old circle and vanished no one knew whither, in no manner disturbed the peace of George Sheldon.

  “Take my word for it, that gentleman has fallen on his feet,” he said, on the only occasion when the fate of Philip was discussed by Valentine and himself. “He’s doing well enough, somewhere or other, you may depend; but I don’t think he’ll ever be able to show his nose in London after those bill transactions. There’s a very strong feeling against him on Change. He’s looked upon as a discredit to the order, and that sort of thing, you see. It isn’t often a member of the House goes to the bad like that. No, I don’t think Phil will ever show himself in London again; but such a man as that can always find a platform somewhere—”

  “And go on to the end of his days unpunished, I suppose,” remarked Mr.

  Hawkehurst, with some bitterness.

  “Well, yes; I don’t see what’s to touch him in the future. Of course he could be dropped upon for those bills, if he came in the way of being dropped upon; but, as I said before, he’s too deep a card for that.”

  Thus did George Sheldon dismiss the subject. That his brother was an exile for life from his native land he did not doubt; but he took it for granted that in whatever distant spot of earth Philip had found a refuge, he would there contrive to prosper and to show a bold front in the city of his adoption.

  This belief Mr. Sheldon of Gray’s Inn cherished until one snowy Christmas Eve, a year and a half after that event, or series of events, which the lawyer briefly designated “the burst-up at Bayswater.”

  Bleak and bitter was that December, a December not long gone by. The heart of the prosperous British nation melted as the heart of one man. The columns of the Zeus and the Diurnal Hermes, the Flag and the Hesper, overflowed with the record of subscriptions to charity funds; and the leaders of the morning journals all preached the same kindly sermon on the same Christian text. Thick lay the snow upon the housetops; “thick and slab” the greasy slush upon the pavements of crowded thoroughfares; merry the rogues and ragamuffins of the great city. The ideal Christmas of our dreams seemed to have come at last, and the heart of every true Briton rejoiced; while skaters in the parks made merry, and cabmen demanded fabulous sums of helpless wayfarers; and luckless, overworked, under-fed horses stumbled and fell at every turn, and the familiar steep of Holborn was dangerous as Alpine mountain.

  To George Sheldon neither the weather nor the Christmas season made much difference. The even current of his life was little disturbed by festive pleasures or dissipations. An extra glass at his tavern, an invitation to dinner from some friend in the bill-discounting line, were the most exciting events the season was likely to bring him. He saw the shops brighten suddenly with semi-supernal glories of crystallized fruits and gorgeous bonbon-boxes, and he was aware of a kind of movement in the streets that was brisker and gayer than the plodding hurry of everyday life. He stood aside and let the mummeries go by him, and was glad when these Christmas follies were done with, and the law-courts in full swing once more. In the happiest and most innocent days of his youth, Christmas had brought him no more than extraordinary indulgences in the way of eating and drinking, swiftly followed by that dread avenger, the demon of the bilious.

  Upon this particular occasion Mr. Sheldon had pledged himself to dine with a horsey publican lately retired from business, and big with all the pride and glory of a “place” at Hornsey.

  “Come down and see my place, Sheldon,” this gentleman had said. “I don’t pretend to do the swell thing; but I force my own pines and grow my own grapes, and can put as good a dessert on my table as you could buy in Covent Garden for a five-pun’ note. That’s my missus’s fad, that is, and I can afford it; so why shouldn’t I do it? You come and eat your Christmas dinner with us, Sheldon. I’ve got a friend coming that can sing as good a song as Reeves hisself, and might make a fortune, if he wasn’t above coming out at one of them music-halls. And I’ll give you a bottle of Madeira that you won’t match at any nobleman’s table, if noblemen’s ta
bles was in your line of business, which you and I know they ain’t, old fellow.”

  And then the jolly good fellow dug his fat fingers into George Sheldon’s ribs, and George accepted the invitation; not with any elation of spirits, but sufficiently pleased to secure a good dinner with a man who promised to be a profitable client, and whose house was within a reasonable cab-fare from the west-central district.

  “The cabmen are trying it on, anyhow, just now,” thought Mr. Sheldon; “but I don’t think they’ll try it on with me. And if they do, there’s the Marylebone stage. I’m not afraid of a five-mile walk.”

  Having accepted this invitation, and thus disposed of his Christmas-day, George Sheldon refrained from the delights of social converse at his tavern on Christmas-eve, and occupied himself with business. His clerk left him at the usual hour; but the master sat, long after dark, writing letters and reading law-papers, while the snow drifted against his windows and whitened the quiet quadrangle below.

  He had just laid aside his papers and lighted a cigar, when he was startled by a stealthy knocking at his door. He was not unaccustomed to late visitors, as he was known to live at his chambers, and to work after office-hours; but the knocking of to-night was not the loud rollicking rat-a-tat of his jolly-good-fellow friends or clients. If he had been a student of light literature, and imbued with the ghostly associations of the season, he would have gone to his door expecting to behold a weird figure clothed in the vestments of the last century; or an old woman in ruff and martingale, whose figure in the flesh had once haunted those legal precincts; or the ghostly semblance of the Baron of Verulam himself, revisiting the glimpses of the moon and the avenue of elms that were planted by his order.

  In George Sheldon’s nature there was, however, no lurking dread of fiend or phantom. His ideas in connection with ghosts were limited to a white sheet, a broomstick, and a hollow turnip with a lighted candle inside it; and he would have set down the most awful apparition that ever was revealed to German ghost-seer, with a scornful grin, as a member of the sheet and-hollow-turnip confraternity.