Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  ‘No,’ said Chicot, reddening indignantly. He had not fallen low enough to hear his wife maligned, though he hated her. ‘No. If my wife were a woman to be led away by temptation of that kind, she and I would have parted long ago. But I don’t want to leave her exposed to the pursuit of a scoundrel. She and I have quarrelled about his trumpery bracelet, and I am going to leave her for a few days, till we are both in a better temper. I don’t want to leave her unprotected, with some silky rascal lying in wait for her between her lodgings and the theatre. I want some one, a man I can trust — —’

  ‘To keep an eye upon her while you’re away,’ said Desrolles. ‘My dear fellow, consider it done. Madame Chicot and I are excellent friends. I admire her; and I think she likes me. I will be her slave and her guardian in your absence, a father, with more than a father’s devotion.’

  ‘She must not know,’ exclaimed Jack.

  ‘Of course not. Women are children of a larger growth, and must be treated as such. The pills we give them must be coated with sugar, the powders concealed in raspberry Jain. I will make myself so agreeable to Madame Chicot that She will be delighted to accept my escort to and from the theatre: but I will keep leer anonymous admirer at a distance as thoroughly as the fiercest dragon that ever kept watch over beauty.’

  ‘A thousand thanks, Desrolles. You won’t find me ungrateful. Good-bye.’

  ‘Are you going across the Channel?’

  Mr. Chicot did not say where lie was going, and Desrolles was too discreet to push the question. He was a man who boasted sometimes, when drink had made him maudlin, that, whatever had become of his morals, lie had never lost his manners.

  Jack Chicot left a brief pencilled note for his wife: —

  ‘DEAR ZAIRE, —

  Since we get on so badly together, a few days’ separation will be good for both of us. I am off to the country for a breath of fresh air. I sicken in the odour of gas and stale brandy. Take care of yourself for your own sake, if not for mine.

  — Yours, ‘J. C.’

  CHAPTER VII. ‘A LITTLE WHILE SUCH LIPS AS THINE TO KISS.’

  IT was midwinter when Jasper Treverton died. Spring had come in all her glory — her balmy airs and sultry noontides, stolen from summer; her variety and wealth of wood and meadow blossoms; her snowy orchard bloom, tinted with carnation; her sweetness and freshness of beauty, — a season to be welcomed and enjoyed like no other season in the changing year; a little glimpse of Paradise on earth between the destroying gales of March and the fatal thunderstorms of July. Spring had filled all the lanes and glades round Hazlehurst with perfume and colour when John Treverton reappeared in the village, as unexpectedly as if he had dropped from the skies.

  Eliza Sampson was destroying the aphids on a favourite rose tree, handling them daintily with the tips of hex gloved lingers, as if she loved them, when Mr. Treverton appeared at the little iron carrying his own portmanteau. He, the heir of all the ages, and of what signified much more in Miss Sampson’s estimation, an estate worth Fourteen thousand a year.

  ‘Oh,’ She cried, ‘Mr. Treverton, how could you? We would have sent the boy to the station.’

  ‘How could I do what?’ he asked, laughing at her horrified Look.

  ‘Carry your own portmanteau. Tom will be so vexed.’

  ‘Tom need know nothing about it, if it will vex him. The portmanteau is light enough, and I have only brought it from the ‘George,’ where the ‘bus dropped me. You see I have taken your brother at his word, Miss Sampson, and have come to quarter myself upon you for a few days.’

  ‘Turn will be delighted,’ said Eliza.

  She was meditating how the dinner she had arranged for Tom and herself could be made to do for the heir of Hazlehurst Manor. It was one of those dinners in which the economical housekeeper delights, a dinner that clears up every scrap in the larder, and leaves not so much as a knuckle bone for the predatory ‘follower,’ male or female, the cook’s hungry niece, or the house-maid’s young man. A little soup, squeezed, as by hydraulic pressure, out of cleanly picked bones and odd remnants of gristle; a dish of hashed mutton, a very small hash, fenced round with a machicolated parapet of toasted bread; a beefsteak pudding with a kidney in it, boiled in a basin the size of a breakfast-cup. This latter savoury mess was intended to gratify Tom, who was prejudiced against hashed mutton, and always pretended that it disagreed with him. For entrentets sucrésthere were a dish of stewed rhubarb, and a mould of boiled rice, wholesome, simple, and inexpensive. It was a little dinner which did honour to Miss Sampson’s head and heart; but she felt that it was not good enough for the future lord of Hazlehurst, a gentleman out of whom her brother hoped to make plenty of money by-and-bye.

  I’ll go and see about your room while you have a chat with Tom in the office,’ she said, tripping lightly away, and leaving John Treverton on the lawn in front of the drawing-room windows, a closely shorn piece of grass, about fifty feet by twenty-five.

  ‘Pray don’t give yourself any trouble,’ he called after her, ‘I’m used to roughing it.’

  Eliza was in the kitchen before he had finished his sentence, she was deep in consultation with the cook, who would have resented the unannounced arrival of any ordinary guest, but who felt that Mr. Treverton was a person for whom people must be expected to put themselves about. He had given liberal vails, too, after his last visit, and that was much in his favour.

  ‘We must have some fish, Mary,’ said Eliza, ‘and poultry. It’s dreadfully dear at this time of year, and Trimpson does impose so, but we must have it.’

  Trimpson was the only fishmonger and poulterer of Hazlehurst, a trader whose stock sometimes consisted of a pound and a half of salmon, and a single fowl, long-necked and skinny, hanging in solitary glory above the slate slab, where the salmon steak lay frizzling in the afternoon sun, which shone full upon Trimpson’s shop.

  ‘Well, miss, if I was you, I’d have a pair of soles and a duck to follow, with the beefsteak pudding for a bottom dish,’ suggested cook, ‘but, lawks, what’s the good of talking? we must have what we can get. But I saw two ducks in Trimpson’s window this morning when I went up street.’

  ‘Put on your bonnet, Mary, and run and see what you can do,’ said Eliza. And then, while Mary ran off, without stopping to put on her bonnet, Miss Sampson and the housemaid went upstairs together and took out lavender-scented linen, and decorated the spare room with all those pin-trays, china candlesticks, and pomatum pots, which went into retirement when there was no company.

  ‘Of course he has come to make her an offer,’ mused Eliza, as she lingered to give a finishing-touch to the room, after the housemaid had gone downstairs.

  ‘He has waited a proper time after the old gentleman’s death, and now he has come down to ask her to marry him, and I dare say they will be married before the rammer is over. It will be rather awkward for her to throw off such deep mourning all at once, but that’s her own fault for going into crape, just as if Mr. Treverton had really been her father! I put it down to pride.’

  Miss Sampson had a knack of finding motives for all the acts of her acquaintance, and those motives were rarely of the best.

  John Treverton’s chat with Mr. Sampson did not last more than ten minutes, friendly, and even affectionate, as was the lawyer’s reception.

  ‘I see you’re busy,’ said Treverton; ‘I’ll go and have a stroll in the village.’

  ‘No, upon my honour, I was just going to strike work. I’ll come with you if you like.’

  ‘On no account; I know you haven’t half finished. Dinner at six, as usual, I suppose. I’ll be Back in time for a talk before we sit down.’

  And before Mr. Sampson could remonstrate, John Treverton was gone. He wanted to see what Hazlehurst Manor was like in the clear spring light, framed in greenery, brightened with all the flowers that bloom in early May, musical with thrush and blackbird, noisy with the return of the swallows. Never had he so longed to look upon anything as he longed to-day to see the home of his a
ncestors, the home which might be his.

  He walked quickly along the village street. Such a quaint little street, with never one house like another; here a building bulging forward, with bow-windows below and projecting dormers above; there a house retiring modestly behind a patch of garden; further on an inn set at right angles with the highway, its chief door approached by a flight of stone steps that time had worn crooked. Such a variety of chimneys, such complexities in the way of roofs and gables; but everywhere cleanliness and spring flowers, and a purer air than John Treverton had breathed for a long time. Even this queer little village street, with its dozen shops and its half-dozen public-houses, was very fair and pleasant in his town-weary eyes.

  When he left the street he entered a noble high road, bordered on each side by a row of fine old elms, which made the turnpike road an avenue, worthy to be the approach to a king’s palace. The Manor-house lay off this road, guarded by tall gates of florid iron tracery, manufactured in the low countries two hundred years ago. He stopped at the gates to contemplate the scene, looking at it dreamily, as at something unreal — a picture that was fair hut evanescent, and might vanish as he gazed.

  Between the gates and the house the ground undulated gently. It was all smooth sward, too small for a park, too irregular for a lawn. A winding carriage road, shadowed with fine old trees, skirted the green expanse, and groups of shrubs here and there adorned it, rhododendrons, laurels, bay, deodoras, cypresses, all the variety of ornamental conifers. Two great cedars made islets of shadow in the sunny grass, and a copper beech, a giant of his kind, was just showing its dark brown buds. Beyond stood the Manor-house, tall, and broad, and red, with white stone dressings to door and windows, and a noble cornice, a house of Charles the Second’s reign, a real Sir Christopher Wren house, massive and grand in its stern simplicity.

  John Treverton roused himself from his waking dream and rang the bell. A woman came out of the lodge, looked at him, dropped a low curtsey, opened the gate, and admitted him without a word, as if he were master there. In her mind he was master, though the trustees paid her wages. It was an understood thing in the household that Mr. Treverton was going to marry Miss Malcolm and reign at Hazlehurst Manor.

  He walked slowly across the smooth, well-kept grass. Everything was changed and improved by the altered season. House and grounds seemed new to him. He remembered the flower garden on the left of the house, the cheerless garden without a flower, where he had walked in the bleak winter mornings, smoking his solitary cigar; he remembered the walled fruit garden beyond, to which he had seen that strange guest admitted under cover of darkness.

  The thought of that night scene in the winter disturbed him even to-day, despite the apparent frankness of Laura’s explanation.

  ‘I suppose there is a mystery in every life,’ he said, with a sigh; ‘and, after all, what can it matter to me?’

  He had heard nothing of the change in Miss Malcolm’s plans, and supposed the house abandoned to the care of servants. He was surprised to see the drawing-room windows open, flowers on the tables, and a look of domesticity everywhere. He went past the house and into the flower garden, a garden of the Dutch school, prim and formal, with long, straight walks, box borders, junipers clipped into obelisks, a dense yew hedge, eight feet high, with arches cut in it, to give admittance to the adjoining orchard. The beds and borders were a blaze of red and yellow tulips, which shone out against the verdure of the close-shorn bowling green and the tawny hue of the gravel, and made a feast of vivid colour, like the painted windows of a cathedral. John Treverton, who had not seen such a garden for years, was almost dazzled by its homely beauty.

  He walked slowly to the end of the long path, looking about him in dreamy contentment. The sweet, soft air, the sunshine — just at that quiet hour of the afternoon when the light begins to be golden — the whistling of the blackbirds in the shrubbery, the freshness and beauty of all things, steeped his soul in a new delight. His life of late had been spent in cities, fenced from the beauty of earth by a wilderness of walls, the glory of heaven screened by smoke, the air thick and foul with the breath of men. This placid garden scene was as new to him as if he had come straight from the bottom of a mine.

  Presently he stopped, as if struck with a new thought, looked straight before him, and muttered between clenched teeth, —

  ‘I shall be a fool if I let it slip from my hand.’

  ‘It’ meant Hazlehurst Manor, and the lands and fortune thereto belonging.

  He was standing within a few yards of the yew tree hedge, and just at this moment the green arch opposite him became the frame of a living picture, and that a lovely one.

  Laura Malcolm stood there, bareheaded, dressed in black, with a basket of flowers upon her arm, — Laura, Whom he had no idea of meeting in this place.

  The western sky was behind her, and she stood, a tall, slim figure in straight, black drapery, against a golden background, like a saint in an early Italian picture, an edge of light upon her chestnut hair making almost an aureole, her face in shadow.

  For a few moments she paused, evidently startled at the apparition of a stranger, then recognized the intruder, and came forward and offered him her hand frankly, as if he had been quite a commonplace acquaintance.

  ‘Pray, forgive me for coming in unannounced,’ he said,’ I had no idea I should find you here. Yet it is natural that you should come sometimes to look at the old gardens.’

  ‘I am living here,’ answered Laura, ‘Didn’t you know?’

  ‘No, indeed. No one informed me of the change in your plans.’

  ‘I am so fond of the dear old house and garden, and the place is so full of associations for me that I was easily induced to stay, when Mr. Clare told me that it would be better for the house. I am a kind of housekeeper in charge of everything.’

  ‘I hope you will stay here all your life,’ said Treverton, quickly, and then he coloured crimson, as if he had said something awful.

  The same crimson flush mounted almost as quickly to Laura’s pale cheeks and brow. Both stood looking at the ground, embarrassed as a schoolboy and girl, while the blackbirds whistled triumphantly in the shrubbery, and a thrush in the orchard went into ecstacies of melody.

  Laura was the first to recover.

  ‘Have you been staying long at Hazlehurst?’ she asked, quietly.

  ‘I only came an hour ago. My first visit was to the Manor, though I expected to find it an empty house.’

  Another picture now appeared in the green frame — a young lady with a neat little figure, a retroussé nose, and an agreeably vivacious countenance.

  ‘Come here, Celia,’ cried Laura,’ and let me introduce Mr. Treverton. You have heard your father talk about him. Mr. Treverton, Miss Clare.’

  Miss Clare bowed and smiled, and murmured something indefinite. ‘Poor Edward,’ she was thinking all the while, ‘this Mr. Treverton is awfully good-looking.’

  Awfully was Miss Clare’s chief laudatory adjective; her superlative form of praise was ‘quite too awfully,’ and when enthusiasm carried her beyond herself she called things ‘nice.’ ‘Quite too awfully nice,’ was her maximum of rapture.

  As she rarely left Hazlehurst Vicarage, and knew in all about twenty people, it is something to her credit that she had made herself mistress of the current metropolitan slang.

  ‘I suppose you are staying at the Sampsons?’ she said; ‘Mr. Sampson is always talking of you. ‘My friend Treverton,’ he calls you, but I suppose you won’t mind that. It’s rather trying.’

  ‘I think I can survive even that,’ answered John, who felt grateful to this young person for having come to his rescue at a moment when he felt himself curiously embarrassed; ‘Mr. Sampson has been very kind to me.’

  ‘If you can only manage to endure him he is an awfully good-natured little fellow,’ said Miss Clare with her undergraduate air. She modelled her manners and opinions upon those of her brother, and was in most things a feminine copy of the Oxonian. ‘But how do
you contrive to get on with his sister? She is quite too dreadful.’

  ‘I confess that she is a lady whose society does not afford me unqualified delight,’ said John, ‘but I believe she means kindly.’

  ‘Can a person with white eyelashes mean kindly?’ enquired Celia, with a philosophical air. ‘Has not Providence created them like that, as a warning; just as venemous snakes have flat heads.’

  ‘That is treating the matter rather too seriously,’ said John, ‘I don’t admire white eyelashes, but I am not so prejudiced as to consider them an indication of character.’

  ‘Ah,’ replied Celia, with a significant air, ‘you will know better by-and-bye.’

  She was only twenty, but she talked to John Treverton with as assured a tone as if she had been ages older than he in wisdom and experience of life.

  ‘How pretty the gardens are at this season,’ said Treverton, looking round admiringly, and addressing his remark to Laura.

  ‘Ah, you have only seen them in winter,’ she answered, ‘perhaps you would like to walk round the orchard and shrubberies?’

  ‘I should, very much.’

  ‘And after that we will go indoors and have some tea,’ said Celia. ‘You are fond of tea, of course, Mr. Treverton?’

  ‘I confess that weakness.’

  ‘I am glad to hear it. I hate a man who is not fond of tea. There is that brother of mine appreciates nothing but strong coffee without milk. I’m afraid he’ll come to a bad end.’

  ‘I am glad you think tea-drinking a virtue,’ said John, laughing.

  And then they all three went under the yew-tree arch, into the loveliest of orchards — an orchard of seven or eight acres — an orchard that had been growing century and a half, — pears, plums, cherries, apples; here and there a walnut tree towering above the rest; here and there a grey old medlar; a pool in a corner overshadowed by two rugged old quinces; grass so soft, and deep, and mossy; primroses, daffodils; pale purple crocuses; the whole bounded by a sloping bank on which the ferns were just unfolding their snaky, grey coils, and revealing young leaves of tenderest green, under a straggling hedge, of hawthorn, honeysuckle, and eglantine.