Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  ‘It is all I desire to know, my loveliest. Or not quite all. I should like to know — out of mere idle curiosity — when you first began to think me not altogether despicable.’

  ‘Do you want the history of the case from the very beginning?’

  ‘From the eggs to the apples, from the very first instant when your heart began to beat a little more kindly for me than for all the rest of the world.’

  ‘I will tell you — —’

  She paused, and looked up at him with a smile of innocent coquetry.

  ‘Yes, dearest.’

  ‘When you have told me the history of your life, from the instant when I became more to you than the common herd of women.’

  His first answer was a deep sigh.

  ‘Ah, dear love, my case was different. I struggled against my passion.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I felt myself unworthy of you.’

  ‘That was foolish.’

  ‘No, dear, it was wise and right. You are like a happy child, Laura; your past is a blank page, it has no dark secrets — —’

  He felt her trembling as he spoke. Had his words frightened her? Did she begin to divine the dangers that hemmed him around?

  ‘Dearest, I don’t want to alarm you: but in the past experience of a man of my age there is generally one page he would give ten years of his life to cancel. I have a dark page. Oh, my love, my love, if I felt myself really worthy of you my heart would hardly hold my happiness. It would break with too great a joy. Men’s hearts have so broken. When did I begin to love you? Why, on the night I first entered this house — the cheerless winter night, when I came, like the prodigal son, weary of the husks and the stye, vaguely yearning for some better life. Your thrilling eyes, your grave, sweet smile, your tender voice, came upon me like a revelation of a new world, in which womanhood meant goodness and purity and truth. My senses were as yet unmoved by your beauty; my mind reverenced your goodness. You were no more to me than a picture in a gallery, but you thrilled my soul as the picture might have done; you awakened new thoughts, you opened a door into heaven. Yes, Laura, admiration, reverence, worship, those began on the first night. Before I left Hazlehurst, worship had warmed into passionate love.’

  ‘Yet you stayed away from January to April?’

  ‘My absence was one long conflict with my love.’

  ‘And from April to December —— after — —’

  ‘After you had shown me your heart, dear love, and I knew that you might be mine. That last absence needed a more desperate courage. Well, I came back, you see. Love was stronger than wisdom.’

  ‘Why must it be unwise for us to love each other?’

  ‘Only because of my unworthiness.’

  ‘Then we will forget your unworthiness, or, if your modesty likes better, I will love you and your unworthiness too. I do not suppose you a faultless paragon, John. Papa told me that you had been extravagant and foolish. You will not be extravagant and foolish any more, will you, dear, when you are a sober, married man?’

  ‘No, love.’

  ‘And we will both strive to do all the good we can with our large fortune.’

  ‘You shall be the chief disposer of it.’

  ‘No, no, I would not have it so on any account. You must be lord and master. I shall expect you to be quite the ideal country squire, the sun and centre of our little universe, the general benefactor. I will be your prime minister and adviser, if you like. I know all the poor people for ten miles round, on our estate, and on other people’s land. I know their wants and their weaknesses. Yes, John, I think I can help you in doing much good; in making improvements that will not ruin you, and will make the lives of the labouring people much happier.’

  ‘Being your slave, what should I do but tend

  Upon the hours and times of your desire?

  I have no precious time at all to spend,

  Nor services to do, till you require.’

  quoted John, tenderly. ‘Can I ever be happier than in obeying you?’

  ‘Do you know that it will be a great happiness to me not to leave the Manor,’ said Laura, presently. ‘You must not think me mercenary, or that I value a big house and a large fortune. It is not so, John. I could live quite contentedly on the income papa left me, more than contentedly, in a cottage with you; but I love the Manor for its own sake. I know every tree in the grounds, and have watched them all growing, and sketched and painted them until I almost know the form of every branch. And I have lived so long in these old rooms that I doubt if any other rooms would ever look like home. It is a dear old house, is it not, John? Will you not be very proud when you are the master of it.’

  ‘I shall be very proud of my wife when I can dare to call her mine. That will be pride enough for me,’ answered John, drawing her a little nearer to his heart. ‘And now, I suppose, I ought to go and see Sampson, and tell him that everything is definitely settled. When are we to be married, love? My cousin died on the 20th of January. We ought not to delay our marriage longer than the end of this month.’

  ‘Let us be married on the last day of the month,’ said Laura. ‘It is the most solemn day in all the year. We shall never forget the anniversary of our wedding if it is on that day.’

  ‘I should never forget it in any case,’ answered John Treverton. ‘Let it be on that day, love. The closing year shall unite me to you for life. I shall see Mr. Clare to-night, and arrange everything.’

  They were a long time saying ‘Good-bye,’ and just at the last John Treverton suggested that Laura should put on her hat and jacket and walk to the gates with him, so the first ‘Good-bye’ was wasted trouble. They were a long time walking to the gates, and the early winter night had come, and the stars were shining when they reluctantly parted. Laura tripped along the avenue with as light a foot as Juliet’s when she came to the friar’s cell to be married; John Treverton went slowly down the road towards Hazlehurst village, with his head bent upon his breast, and all the joy faded out of his face.

  He found Mr. Sampson and his sister just sitting down to dinner, and was welcomed with enthusiasm by both.

  ‘Upon my soul, you’re a most extraordinary fellow,’ exclaimed the lawyer, after a good deal of handshaking. ‘You run off in no end of a hurry, promising to come back in a week or two at latest, and for six months we see no more of you; and you don’t even favour your family solicitor with a line to say why you don’t come. There are not many men in England who would play fast and loose with such chances as yours. Your cousin, when he made that curious will of his, told me you had been wild, but I was not prepared for such wildness as this.’

  ‘Really, Tom,’ remonstrated Miss Sampson, blushing the salmon pink peculiar to sandy-haired beauty, ‘you have no right to talk to Mr. Treverton like that.’

  ‘ Yes, I have,’ answered Sampson, who prided himself on his open manner — his ‘bonnomy,’ as he called it; ‘I have the right given me by a genuine interest in his affairs — the interest of a friend rather than a lawyer. You don’t suppose it’s for the sake of the six-and-eightpences I take so much upon myself, Lizzie? No, it is because I have a sincere regard for my old client’s kinsman, and a disinterested anxiety for his welfare.’

  ‘I think you may make your mind easy about me,’ said John, without any appearance of elation; ‘I am going to be married on the last day of this month, and I want you to prepare the settlement.’

  ‘Bravo!’ cried Tom Sampson, flourishing his napkin; ‘I’m almost as glad as if I’d backed the winner of the double event, and woke up to find myself worth twenty thousand pounds. My dear fellow, I congratulate you. The Hazlehurst property is a good eight thousand a year. There’s three thousand in ground rents in Beechampton, and your dividends from railways and consols bring your income to a clean fourteen thousand.’

  ‘If Miss Malcolm were penniless, I should be as proud of winning her as I am now,’ said John, gravely.

  ‘That’s a very gentlemanlike way of looking at it,’
exclaimed the lawyer, as much as to say, ‘We know all about it; you are bound to say that kind of thing.’

  Miss Sampson looked down at her plate, and felt that appetite was gone for ever. It was foolishness, no doubt, to feel so keen a pang; but girlhood is prone to foolishness, and Eliza Sampson had not yet owned to thirty. She had known from the first that John Treverton was to marry Laura Malcolm, and yet she had allowed herself to indulge in secret worship at his shrine. He was handsome and attractive, and Miss Sampson had seen so few young men who were either one or the other, that she may be forgiven for fixing her young unhackneyed affection on the first distinguished stranger who came within the narrow orbit of her colourless life.

  She had lived under the same roof with him; she had handed him his coffee in the morning his tea — ah, how carefully creamed and sugared! in the evening. She had studied his tastes, and catered for him with unfailing care. She had played Rosellen’s Reverie in G for his delectation every evening during his two visits. She had sung his favourite ballads, and if her voice sometimes failed her on the high notes, she made up in pathos what she wanted in power. These things are not easily to be forgotten by a youthful mind fed upon three-volume novels, and naturally prone to sentiment.

  ‘Our wedding will be a very quiet affair,’ said John Treverton, presently; ‘Laura wishes it to be so, and I am of her mind. I shall be glad if you will kindly refrain from talking about it to any one, Sampson, and you too, Miss Sampson. We don’t want to be objects of interest in the village.’

  ‘I will be as dumb as a skin of parchment,’ answered the lawyer, ‘and I know that Eliza will be the soul of discretion.’

  Eliza looked up shyly at their guest, her white eyelashes quivering with emotion.

  ‘I ought to congratulate you, Mr. Treverton,’ she faltered, ‘but it is all so sudden, so startling, that I can hardly find words.’

  ‘My dear Miss Sampson, I know your friendly feeling towards me,’ John answered, with tranquil good-nature.

  Oh, how cool he was, how cruelly indifferent to her feelings! And yet he ought to have known! Had Rosellen’s Reverie, with the soft pedal down, said nothing?

  Later in the evening John Treverton and his host smoked their cigars tête à têtein Mr. Sampson’s office, beside the comfortable hearth, by which the lawyer was fonder of sitting than in his sister’s highly decorated drawing-room, among the starched antimacassars, and chairs that were not to be sat on, and footstools that were intended for anything rather than the accommodation of the human foot. This unsociable habit of spending his evenings aloof from the family circle Mr. Sampson excused on the plea of business.

  The two men sat opposite each other for some time in friendly silence, John Treverton gravely meditative, Mr. Sampson in an agreeable frame of mind. He was congratulating himself on the prospect of retaining his position as agent for the Treverton Estate, which profitable stewardship must have been lost to him if John Treverton had been so besotted in his folly as to forfeit his heritage by refusing to comply with the conditions of his kinsman’s will.

  ‘I want fully to understand my position,’ said John, presently. ‘Am I free to make what settlement I please upon my future wife?’

  ‘You are free to settle anything which you at present possess,’ answered the lawyer.

  ‘My present possessions amount to something less than a five-pound note.’

  ‘Then I don’t think we need talk about a marriage settlement. By the terms of your cousin’s will his estate is to be held in trust for a twelvemonth. If within that time you shall have married Miss Malcolm, the estate will pass into your possession at the end of the year. You can then make a post-nuptial settlement, on as liberal a scale as you please; but you cannot give away what you do not possess.’

  ‘I see. It must be a post-nuptial settlement. Well, you may as well take my instructions at once. You can rough-draft the settlement, submit your draft to counsel, have it engrossed and ready for execution upon the day on which I pass into possession of the property.’

  ‘You are in a desperate hurry,’ said Sampson, smiling at his client’s grave eagerness.

  ‘Life is full of desperate uncertainties. I want the welfare of the woman I love to be assured, whatever fate may be mine.’

  ‘That is a generous forethought rare in lovers. However intensely they may love in the present, their love seldom takes the form of solicitude for the beloved one’s future. Hence generation after generation of penniless widows and destitute children. After me the deluge, is your lover’s motto. Well, Mr. Treverton, what do you propose to settle on your wife in this post-nuptial deed?’

  ‘The entire estate, real and personal,’ answered John Treverton, quietly.

  Mr. Sampson dropped his cigar, and sat transfixed, an image of half-amused astonishment.

  ‘This bangs Banagher,’ he exclaimed, ‘you must be mad.’

  ‘No, I am only reasonable,’ answered Treverton. ‘The estate was left to me nominally, to Laura Malcolm actually. What was I to the testator? A blood relation, truly, but a stranger. At the time he made that will he had never seen my face; what little he had ever heard of me must have been to my disadvantage; for my life has been one long mistake, and I have given no man reason to sing my praises. What was Laura to him? His adopted daughter, the beloved and the affectionate companion of his declining years; his faithful nurse, his disinterested slave. Whatever love he had to give must have been given to her. She had grown up by his hearth. She had sweetened and cheered his lonely life. He left his estate to me, in trust for her; so that he might keep his oath, and yet leave his wealth where his heart prompted him to bestow it. He found in me a convenient instrument for the carrying out of his wishes; and I have reason to be proud that he was not unwilling to trust me with such a charge, to give me the being he held dearest. I shall settle the whole of the estate on my wife, Sampson. I consider myself bound in honour to do so.’

  Mr. Sampson looked at his client with a prolonged and searching gaze, a slow smile dawning on his somewhat stolid countenance.

  ‘Don’t be offended at my asking the question,’ he said. ‘Are you in debt?’

  ‘I don’t owe sixpence. I have lived a somewhat Bohemian life, but I have not lived upon other people’s money.

  ‘I am glad to hear that,’ said Sampson, selecting a fresh cigar from a comfortably-filled case, ‘because if you imagine that by such a settlement as you propose you could escape the payment of any debts now existing, you are mistaken. A man can make no settlement to the injury of his creditors. As regards future liability the case would be different, and if you were deeply involved in commerce, a speculator, I could understand your desire to shift the estate from your own shoulders to your wife’s. But as it is — —’

  ‘Can’t you understand something not strictly commercial?’ exclaimed John Treverton, waxing impatient? ‘Can’t you understand that I want to obey the spirit as well as the letter of my cousin Jasper’s will? I want to make his adopted daughter the actual mistress of the estate, in the same position she would have naturally occupied had he never made that foolish vow.’

  ‘In so doing you make yourself a pensioner on her bounty.’

  ‘So be it. I am content to occupy that position. Come, my dear Sampson, we need not argue the question any further. If you won’t draw up the form of settlement I want, I must find a lawyer who will.’

  ‘My dear sir,’ cried Tom Sampson, briskly, ‘when a client of mine is obstinately bent upon making a fool of himself, I always see him through his folly. He had better make a fool of himself in my hands than in anyone elses. I do not suffer by the loss of his business, and I am vain enough to believe that he suffers less than he would if he took his business to any other office. If you have quite made up your mind, I am ready to rough-draft any form of settlement you dictate; but I am bound to warn you that the dictation of such a settlement is a qualification for Bedlam.’

  ‘I will risk even as much as that. Nobody need know anything ab
out the settlement but you and I, and, later, my wife. I shall not speak of it to her until it is ready for execution.’

  Mr. Sampson, in a chronic state of wonder, took half a quire of slippery blue foolscap, and began his draft, with a very squeaky quill pen and a large consumption of ink. Simple and uniform as the gift was which John Treverton wished to make to his wife, the transfer of it required to be hedged round and intertwined with so much legal phraseology that Tom Sampson had consumed his half-quire of foolscap before he came to the end of the draft. The estate had to be scheduled, and every homestead and labourer’s cottage had to be described in a phrase of abstract grandeur, as ‘all that so and so, commonly known as so and so,’ and so forth, with almost maddening iteration. John Treverton, smoking his cigar, and letting his thoughts wander away at a tangent every now and then to regions that were not always paths of pleasantness, thought his host would never leave off driving that inexorable quill — the sort of pen to sign a death-warrant and feel none the worse for it — over the slippery paper.

  ‘Come,’ exclaimed Sampson, at last, ‘I think that ties the estate up pretty tightly on your wife and her children after her. She can squander the income as she pleases, and play old gooseberry up to a certain point, but she can’t put the tip of her little finger on the principal. And now you have only to name two responsible men as trustees.’

  ‘I don’t know two respectable men in the world,’ said John, frankly.

  ‘Yes, you do. You know the vicar of this parish, and you know me. Your cousin Jasper considered us worthy to be trustees to his will. You need hardly be afraid to make us trustees to your marriage settlement.’

  ‘I have no objection, and I certainly know no better men.’

  ‘Then we’ll consider it settled. I’ll send the deed to counsel by to-morrow’s post. I hope you quite understand that this settlement will make you a pauper — wholly dependent upon your wife. If you were to throw yourself on the parish, she would have to maintain you. Bar that, she may use you as badly as she likes.’