Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  ‘What disease?’ asked Gerard, curtly.

  ‘The fever called love.’

  ‘Do you suppose I’m in love with the new dancer, because I drop in here pretty often to look at her?’

  ‘I don’t see any other motive for your presence here. You’re not a playgoing man.’

  ‘I come to see La Chicot simply because she is quite the most beautiful woman in face and form that I ever remember seeing. I come as a painter might to look at the perfection of human loveliness, or as an anatomist to contemplate the completeness of God’s work, a creature turned out of the divine workshop without a flaw.’

  ‘Did you ever hear such a fellow?’ cried Latimer. ‘He comes to look at a ballet dancer, and talks about it as if it were a kind of religion.’

  ‘The worship of the beautiful is the religion of art,’ answered Gerard, gravely. ‘I respect La Chicot as much as I admire her. I have not an unworthy thought about her.’

  Latimer touched his forehead lightly with two fingers, and looked at his friend Brown.

  ‘Gone!’ said Latimer.

  ‘Very far gone,’ replied Brown.

  ‘Come and try the Dutch oysters, Gerard, and let us make a night of it,’ said Latimer, persuasively.

  ‘Thanks, no. I must go home to my den and read.’

  And so they parted, the idlers to their pleasure, the plodding student — the man who loved work for its own sake — to his books.

  CHAPTER V. A DISAPPOINTED LOVER.

  LAURA MALCOLM remained at the Manor House. Mr. Clare, the vicar, had persuaded her to relinquish her idea of going into lodgings in the village. It would be a pity to abandon the good old house, he argued. A house left to the care of servants must always suffer some decay; and this house was full of art treasures, objects of interest and of price which hitherto had been in Laura’s charge. Why should she not stay in the home of her girlhood till it was decided whether she was to rule there as mistress, or to abandon it for ever?

  ‘Your remaining here will not compromise your freedom of choice,’ said Mr. Clare, kindly, ‘if you find before the end of the year that you cannot make up your mind to accept John Treverton as a husband.’

  ‘He may not ask me,’ interjected Laura, with a curious smile.

  ‘Oh yes, he will. He will come to you in good time to offer you his heart and hand, you may be sure, my dear. It cannot be a difficult thing for any young man to fall in love with such a girl as you, and it seems to me that this John Treverton is very worthy of any woman’s regard. I see no reason why your marriage should not be a love match on both sides, in spite of my old friend’s eccentric will.’

  ‘I’m afraid that can never be,’ answered Laura, with a sigh; ‘Mr. Treverton will never be able to think of me as he might of any other woman. I must always seem to him an obstacle to his freedom and his happiness. He is constrained to assume an affection for me, or to surrender a splendid fortune. If he is mercenary he will not hesitate. He will take the fortune and me, and I shall despise him for his readiness to accept a wife chosen for him by another. No, dear Mr. Clare, there is no possibility of happiness for John Treverton and me.’

  ‘My dear child, if you are convinced that you cannot be happy in this marriage, you are free on your part to refuse him,’ said the vicar.

  Laura’s pale cheek crimsoned.

  ‘That would be to doom him to poverty, and to frustrate his cousin’s wish,’ she answered, falteringly. ‘I should hate myself if I could be so selfish as to do that.’

  ‘Then, my dear girl, you must resign yourself to the alternative: and if John Treverton and you are not as passionately in love as the young people who defy their parents and run away to Gretna Green to be married — or did when I was a young man — you may at least enjoy a sober kind of happiness, and get on as well together as the princes and princesses whose marriages are arranged by cabinet councils and foreign powers.’

  ‘Do you know anything about Mr. Treverton?’ asked Laura, thoughtfully.

  ‘Very little. He is an only son — an only child, I believe. His father and mother died while he was a boy, and he became a ward in Chancery. He had a nice little property when he came of age, and ran through it nicely, after the manner of idle young men without friends to advise and guide them. He began his career in the army, but sold out after he had spent his money. I have no idea what he has been doing since — living by his wits, I’m afraid.’

  So it was settled that Laura was to remain at the Manor House, with so many of the old servants as would suffice to keep things in good order — the servants to be paid and fed at the expense of the estate, Laura to maintain herself out of her own modest income. She was a young lady of particularly independent temper, and upon this point she was resolute.

  ‘The money is nobody’s money at present,’ she said. ‘I will not touch a penny of it.’

  Sad as were the associations of the house, dreary as was the blank left in the familiar rooms by the absence of one revered figure, dismal as was the silence which that voice could never break again, Laura was better pleased to stay in her old home than she would have been to leave it. Even the mute, lifeless things among which she had lived so long had some part of her some hold upon her heart. She would have felt herself a waif and long, had some part of her love, stray in a stranger’s house. Here she felt always at home. If the rooms were haunted by the shadow of the dead, the ghost was a friendly one, and looked upon her with loving eyes. She had never thwarted, or neglected, or wronged her adopted father. There was no remorse mingled with her grief. She thought of him with deepest sadness, but without pain.

  The vicar was anxious that Miss Malcolm should have a companion. There were plenty of homeless young women — women of spotless reputation and genteel connections — who would no doubt have been delighted to be her unsalaried companion, for the sake of a pleasant home. But Laura declared that she wanted no companion.

  ‘You must think me very empty-minded if you suppose I cannot endure my life without a young woman of the same age to sit opposite me and answer to all my idle fancies like an echo, or to walk out with me and help me to admire the landscape, or to advise me what I should order for dinner,’ she said. ‘No, dear Mr. Clare, I want no companion, except Celia now and then. You will let her come and see me very often, won’t you?’

  ‘As often as you like, or as often as she can be spared from her parish work,’ answered the Vicar.

  ‘Ah, you are all such hard workers at the Vicarage,’ exclaimed Laura.

  ‘Some of us work hard enough, I believe,’ answered Mr. Clare, with a sigh. ‘I wish my son could make up his mind to work a little harder.’

  ‘That will come in good time.’

  ‘I hope so, but I am almost tired of waiting for that good time.’

  ‘He is clever and artistic,’ said Laura.

  ‘His cleverness allowed him to leave the University without a degree, and his artistic faculties will never help him to a living,’ answered the Vicar, bitterly.

  This only son of the Vicar’s was a thorn in his side. Edward Clare was everybody’s favourite, and nobody’s enemy but his own. That was what the village said of him. He was good-looking, clever, agreeable, but he had no ballast. He was a feather to be blown by every puff of wind. He had never been able to discover the work which he had been sent into the world to do, but he had speedily found out the work for which he was not adapted. At the University he discovered that the curriculum of an English classical education was not fitted to the peculiar cast of his mind. How much better he could have done at Heidelberg or Bonn! But when he made this discovery he had wasted three years at Oxford, and had cost his father something very close to a thousand pounds.

  The Vicar wanted his only son to go into the Church, and Edward had been educated with that view, but after failing to get his degree, Edward found out that he had a conscientious repugnance to the Church. His opinions were too broad.

  ‘A man who admires Ernest Renan as warmly as I do h
as no right to be a parson.’ said Edward, with agreeable frankness; so poor Mr. Clare had to submit to the disappointment of his most cherished hopes, because his son admired Renan.

  After having made up his mind upon this point Edward stayed at home, read a good deal in a desultory way, wrote a little, sketched a little in fine weather, fished, shot, and dawdled away life in the pleasantest manner, finding his days never so sweet as when they were spent at the Manor House.

  Jasper Treverton had warmly esteemed the Vicar, and he had liked the son for the father’s sake. Edward had always been welcome at the Manor House while the old man lived, and as Edward’s sister was Laura Malcolm’s chosen friend, it was natural that the Oxonian should be very often in Laura’s society.

  But now his visits to the good old house where he had felt himself so completely at home, the library in which he had read, the garden in whose formal walks he had delighted to smoke, were suddenly restricted. Miss Malcolm had given him to understand, through his sister, that she considered herself no longer at liberty to receive him. Her friendship for him was in no wise lessened, but it would not do for him to drop in at all hours, or to spend half his afternoons in the library, as in the days that were gone.

  ‘I don’t see why there should be such restrictions among old friends,’ said Edward, with an injured air. ‘Laura and I are like sister and brother.’

  ‘Very likely, Ned, but then you see everybody knows you and Laura are not brother and sister, and I think there are a good many people in Hazlehurst who think that you feel something a good deal stronger than brotherly regard for her. If she and I were drowning, I know which of us you would try to save.’

  ‘You can swim,’ growled Edward, remembering Talleyrand’s famous answer. ‘Well, I suppose I must submit to fate. Miss Malcolm no doubt considers herself engaged to the mysterious heir, who does not seem in any hurry to begin his courtship. If old Treverton had bequeathed such a chance to me I should have seized upon my opportunity without an instant’s hesitation.’

  ‘I admire the delicacy which prompts Mr. Treverton to keep in the background just at first,’ said Celia.

  ‘How do you know that it is delicacy which restrains him V exclaimed Edward. ‘How do you know that it is not some entanglement — some degrading connection, perhaps — or at any rate a previous engagement of some kind which ties his hands, and hinders his advancement with Laura? No man, unless so constrained, would be besotted enough to neglect such an opportunity, or to hazard his chances of success. If he offends Laura, she is just the kind of girl to refuse him, fortune and all.’

  ‘I don’t think she would do that, except upon very serious grounds,’ said Celia. ‘Laura has a strong sense of duty, and she believes it her duty to her adopted father to assist in carrying out his wishes. I believe she would sacrifice her own inclination to that duty.’

  ‘That’s going far,’ said Edward, discontentedly, ‘I begin to think that she has fallen in love with this fellow, meteoric as was his appearance here.’

  ‘He stayed nearly a fortnight,’ remarked Celia, ‘and Laura saw him several times. I don’t mean to say that she is in love with him. She has too much common sense to fall in love in that rapid way — but I am sure she does not dislike him.’

  ‘Oh, when love begins common sense ends. I dare say she is in love with him. Hasn’t she told you as much now, Celia? Girls like to talk about such things.’

  ‘What do you know about girls?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. I’ve got a sister who is one of the breed: a model always at hand to draw from. Come, now, Celia, be sisterly for once in your life. What has Laura told you about John Treverton?’

  ‘Nothing. She is particularly reserved upon the subject. I know that it is a painful one for her, and I rarely approach it.’

  ‘Well, he is a lucky dog. I never hated a fellow so much. I have an instinctive idea that he is a scoundrel.’

  ‘Are not instinctive ideas convictions that jump with our own inclinations?’ speculated Celia, philosophically. ‘I am heartily sorry for you, Ned dear, for I know you are fond of Laura, and it does seem hard to have her willed away from you like this. But seriously now, would you be pleased to marry her with no better portion than her own little income?’

  ‘Six thousand in consols,’ said Edward, meditatively. ‘That would not go very far with a young man and woman of refined tastes. We might love each other ever so dearly, and be ever so happy together, but I’m afraid we should starve, Celia, and that our children’s only inheritance would be their legal claim on their own parish. I thought that wicked old man would leave her handsomely provided for.’

  ‘You had no right to think that, knowing that he had pledged himself to leave her nothing.’

  ‘Oh, there would always have been a way of evading that, I call his will absolutely shameful — to force a high-spirited girl to take a husband of his choosing — a fellow whom he had never seen when he made the stipulation.’

  ‘He took care to see young Mr. Treverton before he died. I dare say if he had not been favourably impressed he would have altered his will at the last moment.’

  This conversation took place nearly four months after Jasper Treverton’s death. The hedgerows were growing green; the birds had eaten the last of the crocuses; the violets were all in bloom in the shrubbery borders, the grass grew fast enough to require weekly shearing, and the Manor House garden was a pleasant place to walk in, full of budding trees and opening blossoms, and the songs of birds, telling each other rapturously that spring had come in earnest, and that winter days and a stony-hearted, frost-bound earth were things of the past.

  Edward Clare believed himself the most ill-used of young men. He was good-looking — nay, according to the general judgment of his particular circle, remarkably handsome; he was cleverer and more accomplished than most young men of his age and standing. If he had done nothing as yet to distinguish himself it was not for lack of talent, he told himself, complacently. It was only because he had never yet put his shoulder to the wheel. He did not consider that duty strongly called upon every man to do his uttermost part in the labour of moving that mighty wheel. A clever young man, like himself, might stand on one side and watch other fellows toiling at the job, knowing that he could do it ever so much better if he only cared to try.

  Four years ago, when he first went to Oxford, he had made up his mind that he was to be Laura Malcolm’s husband. Of course Jasper Treverton would leave her a handsome fortune, most likely his entire estate. There must be a dozen ways of evading that ridiculous oath. The old man might make over his property to Laura by deed of gift. He might leave it to trustees for her use and benefit. In some manner or other she would be his heiress. Edward felt very sure of that, seeing as he did Jasper’s deep love of his adopted daughter. So when he found himself falling in love with Laura’s sweet face and winning ways, the young Oxonian made no struggle against Cupid, the mighty conqueror. To fall in love with Laura was the high road to fortune, infinitely better than Church or Bar. But he was in no hurry to declare himself — he was not an impulsive young man; slow and cautious rather. To make Laura an offer and be rejected would mean banishment from her society. He thought she liked him, but he wanted to be very sure as to the strength of her feelings before he declared himself her lover. His position as her friend was too advantageous to be lightly hazarded.

  CHAPTER VI. LA CHICOT HAS HER OWN WAY.

  SLOWLY, reluctantly, Winter crawled away to his hidden lair, and made room for a chilly, uncomfortable spring. It had been the longest, dullest winter that Jack Chicot had ever lived through. He did not wonder that the Continental idea associated London fog and suicide in a natural sequence. Never had he felt himself so inclined to self-destruction as in the foggy December afternoons, the bleak January twilights, when he paced the dull grey streets under the dull grey sky, smoking his solitary cigar, and thinking what a dismal ruin he had made of himself and his life; he who had entered upon the bustling scene of manhood ten years a
go, with such bright hopes, such an honourable ambition, such an arrogant confidence in the future as the bringer of all good things.

  Now where was he? What was he? The husband of La Chicot, a being in himself so worthless, so aimless and obscure that no one ever took the trouble to inquire his real name. His wife’s name — the name made notorious by a ballet dancer, the goddess of medical students and lawyers’ clerks, was good enough for him. In himself and by himself he was nothing. He was only the husband of La Chicot, a woman who drank like a fish and swore like a trooper.

  It was a sorry pass for a man to have come to, in whom the sense of shame was not utterly dead. Perhaps it was something to be remembered in Jack Chicot’s favour that at this time of his life, when despair had fastened its claw upon his aching heart, when love and liking had given place to a mute and secret abhorrence, he was not cruel or harsh to his wife. He never said hard or bitter things to her: so long as he had any lingering belief in her capability of amendment he remonstrated with her on the folly of her ways; always temperately, often with much kindness: and when he saw that reform was hopeless he held his peace and did not upbraid her.

  She had never done him that kind of wrong which honour forbids a husband to forgive. So far she had been true to him, and loved him, in her maudlin way, flying at him like a fury when she was betwixt sobriety and intoxication, calling him her angel, or her cat, or her cabbage, with imbecile tenderness, when she was comfortably tipsy. He who had quarrelled with her a good deal before he began to hate her, could now endure her utmost violence and keep calm. He dared not give the reins to passion. It might carry him — he knew not whither. He felt like a man standing on the edge of a black gulf, blindfolded, yet knowing that the pit was there. One false step might be fatal. He had been luckier in this gloomy London than in his much-regretted Paris, so far as the exercise of his own small talents went. He had obtained a regular engagement as draughtsman on one of the comic journals, and his caricatures, pencilled on a wood block while his heart ached with misery and his head burned with fever, amused the idle youth of London with reminiscences of Cham and Gavarni. By the use of his pencil he contrived to earn something like two pounds a week, more than enough for his own wants; so La Chicot could spend every sixpence of her salary on herself, an arrangement which suited her temper admirably. She had a bottle of champagne in her dressing-room every night, and finished it before she went on for her great pas. So long as she abstained from brandy this meant sobriety. She was a woman of limited ideas, and as in San Francisco champagne is ‘wine’ par excellence, no meaner liquor being deemed worthy of the noble name, so, with La Chicot, champagne was the only wine worth drinking. When she felt that its sustaining power was insufficient she fortified it with brandy, and then La Chicot was a creature to be shunned.