Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  ‘I am not afraid of her ill-usage.’

  ‘Upon my honour and conscience,’ mused Thomas Sampson, as he laid himself down to rest that night. ‘I believe John Treverton is over head and ears in love with Miss Malcolm. Nothing but love or lunacy can explain his conduct. Which is it? Well, perhaps the line that divides the two is only a distinction without a difference.’

  CHAPTER XI. NO TROUSSEAU.

  LAURA was utterly happy in the brief interval between her betrothal and her wedding. She had given her love and trust unreservedly, feeling that duty and love went hand in hand. In following the inclination of her heart she was obeying the behest of her benefactor. She had been very fond of Jasper Treverton, had loved him as truly as ever daughter loved a father. It seemed the most natural process to transfer her love from the adopted father to his young kinsman. The old man in his grave was the bond of union between the girl and her lover.

  ‘How pleased papa would have been if he could have known that John and I would be so fond of each other,’ she said to herself, innocently.

  Celia Clare hurried back from Brighton, eager to assist her friend at this momentous crisis of her life.

  ‘Brighton was quite too delightful,’ said Celia, ‘but not for worlds would I be absent from you at such a time. Poor soul, what would you have done without me?’

  ‘Dear Celia, you know how fond I am of you, but I think I could really have managed to get married without your assistance.’

  ‘Get married! Yes, but how would you have done it?’ cried Celia, making her eyes very round and big. ‘You would have made a most horrid muddle of it. Now, what about your trousseau? I’ll wager you have hardly thought of it.’

  ‘There you are wrong. I have ordered two travelling dresses, and a handsome dinner dress.’

  ‘And your collars and cuffs, your handkerchiefs, your peignoirs, your camisoles,’ pursued Celia, enumerating a string of articles.

  ‘My dear child, do you suppose I have lived all these years, without cuffs and collars, and handkerchiefs?’

  ‘Laura, unless you have everything new you might just as well not be married at all.’

  ‘ Then you may consider my marriage no marriage, for I am not troubling myself about new things.’

  ‘Give me carte blanche and leave everything to me. What is the use of my sacrificing Brighton just when it was more than too enchanting, unless I can be of some use to you?’

  ‘Well, Celia, in order that yon may not be unhappy, I will give you permission to review my wardrobe, and if you find an alarming dearth of collars and handkerchiefs I’ll drive you to Beechampton in the pony carriage, and you shall buy whatever you think proper.’

  ‘Beechampton is hideously behind the age, disgustingly dé modé, and your things ought to be in the latest style. I’ll look through the advertisements in the Queen, and send to London for patterns. It is no use having new things if they are not in the newest fashion. One does not wear out one’s cuffs and collars — they go out.’

  ‘You shall have carte blanche, dear, if it will atone for the loss of Brighton.’

  ‘My dearest girl, you know I would not desert you at such a crisis of your life for forty Brightons,’ cried Celia, who had lofty ideas about friendship; ‘and now about your wedding gown? That is the most important point of all.’

  ‘It is ordered.’

  ‘You did not mention it just now.’

  ‘Did I not? I am going to be married in one of the gowns I ordered for travelling, a mixture of grey silk and velvet, the jacket trimmed with chinchilla. I think it will be very handsome.’

  Celia fell back in her chair as if she were going to faint.

  ‘No wedding gown! ‘she cried; ‘no trousseau, and no wedding gown! This is indeed an ill-omened marriage! Well may poor Edward talk.’

  Laura flushed indignantly at this last sentence.

  ‘Pray what has your brother been saying against my marriage?’ she asked, haughtily.

  ‘Well, dear, you cannot expect him to feel particularly pleasant about it, knowing — as you must know — how he has gone on doting upon you, and hoping against hope, for the last three years. I don’t want to make you unhappy, but I must confess that Edward has a very bad opinion of Mr. Treverton.’

  ‘I daresay Mr. Treverton will manage to exist without Edward’s good opinion.’

  ‘He thinks there is something so utterly mysterious in his conduct — something insulting to you in the fact of his holding himself aloof so long, and then coming back at the last moment, just in time to secure the estate!’

  ‘I am the best judge of Mr. Treverton’s conduct,’ answered Laura, deeply wounded. ‘If I can trust him other people may Spare themselves the trouble of speculating upon his motives.’

  ‘And you can trust him?’ asked Celia, anxiously.

  ‘With all my heart and soul.’

  ‘Then have a proper wedding gown,’ exclaimed Celia, as if the whole question of bliss or woe were involved in that one detail.

  When next Miss Malcolm met Edward Clare there was a coolness in her greeting which the young man could not mistake.

  ‘What have I done to offend you, Laura?’ he asked, piteously.

  ‘I am offended with everyone who doubts the honour of my future husband,’ she answered.

  ‘I’m sorry for that,’ he said, gloomily. ‘A man cannot help his thoughts.’

  “A man can hold his tongue,’ said Laura.

  ‘Well, I will be silent henceforth. Good-bye.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Anywhere, anywhere out of the world; that is to say out of this little world of Hazlehurst. I think I am going to London. I shall take a lodging close to the British Museum, and work hard at literature. It is time I made my mark.’

  Laura thought so too. Edward had been talking of making his mark for the last five years, but the mark as yet was a very feeble one.

  Next day he was gone, and Laura had a sense of relief in his absence.

  Celia stayed at the Manor House during the time before the wedding. She was always in attendance upon the lovers, drove with them, walked with them, sat by the fire with them at the cheery, dusky afternoon tea time, when those mysterious shadows that looked like guardian angels came and went upon the walls. John Treverton seemed to have no objection to Celia’s company, he rather courted it, even. He was not an ardent lover, Celia thought; and yet it would have been difficult to doubt that he was deeply in love. Never since that first evening had Laura’s head rested against his breast, never since then had he given full and unrestrained utterance to his passion. His manner was full of reverent affection; as if he respected his betrothed almost too deeply to be lavish in the expression of warmer feeling; as if she stood so high above him in his thoughts of her that love was a kind of worship.

  ‘I think I should like a more demonstrative lover,’ said Celia, with a critical air. “Mr. Treverton is so awfully serious.’

  ‘And now that you have seen more of him, Celia, are you still inclined to think that he is mercenary; that it is the estate and not me he cares for?’ asked Laura, with no fear as to the answer.

  ‘No, dear, I honestly believe that he adores you, that he is dreadfully, desperately, almost despairingly, in love with you,’ answered Celia, very seriously, ‘but still he is not my style of lover. He is too melancholy.’

  Laura had no answer to this objection. As the days had hurried on towards the end of this eventful year her lover’s spirits had assuredly not grown lighter. He was full of thought, curiously absentminded at times. She, too, grew grave in sympathy with him.

  ‘It is such a solemn crisis in our lives,’ she thought. ‘Sometimes I feel as if all things could not go happily to the end, as if something must happen to part us, at the very last, on the eve of our wedding day.’

  The eve of the wedding came, and brought no calamity. It was a very quiet evening. The lovers dined together at the vicarage, and walked to the Manor-house afterwards, alone with each
other, almost for the first time since the night of their betrothal. Everything had been arranged for to-morrow’s wedding. Such a quiet wedding! No one had been invited except Mr. Sampson and his sister. The vicar’s wife was to be present, of course. She would in a manner represent the bride’s mother. Celia was to be the only brides-maid. They were to be married by licence, and no one in the village had as yet any inkling of the event. The servants at the Manor-house had only been told the date of the marriage within the last two days, and had been forbidden to talk about it; and as they were old servants, who had long learned to identify themselves with ‘the family,’ they were not likely to disobey Miss Malcolm’s orders.

  The house, always the perfection of neatness, had been swept and garnished for this important occasion. The chintz covers had been taken off the chairs and sofas in the drawing-room, revealing tapestry wreaths and clusters of flowers, worked by Jasper Treverton’s mother and aunts in a period of almost awful remoteness. The housekeeper had been baking her honest old face in front of a huge kitchen fire, while she stirred her jellies, and watched her custards, and turned her game pie. There was to be a breakfast fit for the grandest wedding, though Miss Malcolm had told Mrs. Trimmer that a very simple meal would be wanted.

  ‘You mustn’t deny me the pleasure of doing my best, at such a time,’ urged the faithful servant. ‘I should feel it a reproach to me all the rest of my life, if I didn’t. There shan’t be no extravagance, Miss, but I must put a pretty breakfast on the table. I’m so glad our barberry bushes bore well this year. The berries make such a tasty garnish for cold dishes.’

  Mrs. Trimmer was roasting herself and her poultry in the spacious old kitchen, at ten o’clock at night, while John and Laura were coming from the vicarage, arm in arm, Laura strangely glad to have him all to herself for one little half hour, he vexatiously silent. Celia was at the Manor-house, laid up with a headache and a new novel. She had excused herself from the dinner in her usual flippant style.

  ‘Give them my love, and say I was too seedy to come,’ she said. ‘Going to dine with one’s parent’s is quite too slow. I dined with them on Christmas day, you know; and Christmas day at the vicarage has always been the quintessence of dulness. The thing I wondered at most, when I came of age, was how I ever could have lived through twenty-one of our Christmases.’

  They were thus, by happy accident, as Laura thought, alone together; and, behold! the lover, the bridegroom of to-morrow, had not a word to say.

  ‘John,’ Laura began softly at last, almost afraid to break this gloomy silence, ‘there is one thing you have not told me, and yet it is what most girls in my position would call a very important matter.’

  ‘What is that, dearest?’

  ‘You have never told me where we are to spend our honeymoon. Celia has been worrying me with questions about our plans, and I have found it difficult to evade her. I did not like to confess my ignorance.’

  A simple and a natural question surely, yet John Treverton started, as at the sharpest thrust that Fate could have at him.

  ‘My dearest love — I — I have really not thought about it,’ he answered, stumblingly. ‘We will go anywhere you like. We will decide to-morrow, after the wedding.

  ‘Is not that a rather unusual mode of proceeding,’ asked Laura, with a faint laugh.

  She was somewhat wounded by this show of indifference as to the very first stage in their journey through life. She would have liked her lover to be full of wild schemes, to be eager to take her everywhere — to the Engadine, the Black Forest, the English Lakes, Killarney, the Trossachs — all in a breath.

  ‘Are not all the circumstances of our marriage unusual,’ he replied gravely. ‘There is only one thing certain, there is only one thing sweet and sacred in the whole business — we love each other truly and dearly. That is certain, is it not, Laura?’

  ‘On my side quite certain.’

  ‘And on my side quite as certain as that I live and that I shall die. Our love is deep and fixed, rooted in the very ground of our lives, is it not, Laura? Nothing, no stroke of time or fate can change it.’

  ‘No stroke of time or fate can change my love for you’ she said, solemnly.

  ‘That is all I want to know. That is the certainty which makes my soul glad and hopeful.’

  ‘Why should it be otherwise? Were there ever two people more fortunate than you and I. My dear adopted father dies, leaving a will that might have made us both wretched, that might have tempted you to pretend a love you could not feel, me to give myself to a man I could not love. But instead of any such misery as that, we fall in love with each other, almost at first sight, and feel that Providence meant us for each other, and that we could be happy together in the deepest poverty?’

  ‘Yes,’ said John, meditatively, ‘it is odd that my cousin Jasper should have been so sure we should suit each other.’

  ‘There is a Providence in these things,’ murmured Laura.

  ‘If I could but think so,’ said her lover, rather to himself than to her.

  CHAPTER XII. AN ILL-OMENED WEDDING.

  THE last day of the year, nature’s dullest, dreariest interval between the richness of autumn and the fresh young beauty of spring. Not a flower in the prim old Manor-house garden, save a melancholy tea-rose, that looked white and wan under the dull grey sky, and a few pallid chrysanthemums, with ragged petals and generally deplorable aspect.

  ‘What a miserable morning!’ exclaimed Celia, shivering, as she looked out of Laura’s dressing-room window at the sodden lawn and the glistening yew-tree hedge, beyond which stretched a dismal perspective of leafless apple-trees, and the tall black poplars that marked the boundary of the home pastures, where the pretty grey Jersey cows had such a happy time in spring and summer.

  Laura and her companion were taking an early breakfast — a meal at which neither could eat — by the dressing-room fire. Both young women were in a state of nervous agitation, but while one was restless and full of talk, the other sat pale and silent, too deeply moved for any show of emotion.

  ‘Drip, drip, drip,’ cried Celia, pettishly,’ one of those odious Scotch mists, that is as likely to last for a week as for an hour. Nice draggle-tail creatures we shall look after we have walked up that long churchyard path under such rain as this. Well, really, Laura, don’t think me unkind for saying so, but I do call this an ill-omened wedding.’

  ‘Do you?’ said Laura, with a faint smile. ‘Do you really suppose that it will make any difference to my future life whether I am married on a rainy day or on a fine one? I rather like the idea of going out of the dulness into the sun-shine, for I know our wedded life will be full of sunshine.’

  ‘How confident you are,’ exclaimed Celia, wonderingly.

  ‘What have I to fear? We love each other dearly. How can we fail to he happy?’

  ‘That’s all very well, but I should have been easier in my mind if you had had a wedding gown. Think how awkward it will be, by-and-bye, when you are asked to dinner parties. As a bride you will be expected to appear in ivory satin and orange blossoms. People will hardly believe in you.’

  ‘How many dinner parties are likely to be given within ten miles of Hazlehurst during the next six months?’ asked Laura.

  ‘Not many, I admit,’ sighed Celia.’ One might as well live on the Gold Coast, or at some remote station in Bengal. Of course, papa and mamma will give a dinner in your honour, and Miss Sampson will ask you to tea. Oh, Miss Sampson’s teas, with the tea and coffee handed round on an electro-plated salver, and Rosellen’s Reverie in G on the cracked old piano, and vingt et un at the loo-table, and anchovy sandwiches, blanc-mange, and jelly to wind up the wild dissipations of the evening. Then there are the county families, bounded on the east by Sir Joshua Parker, and on the north by the Dowager Lady Barker. You will have stately calls from them. Lady Barker will regret that she has left off giving dinner parties since her lamented husband’s death. Lady Parker will square accounts by sending you a card for a garden par
ty next July.’

  This conversation took place at half-past eight. At ten the two girls were dressed and ready to drive to the church. Laura looked lovely in her grey silk travelling dress, and grey Gainsborough hat, with its drooping ostrich plume.

  ‘One thing I can honestly say, from the bottom of my heart,’ exclaimed Celia, and Laura turned to her with a smile, expecting to hear something interesting; ‘you have out and away the handsomest ostrich feather I ever saw in my life. You may leave it to me in your will if you like. I’m sure I took trouble enough to get it; and you ought to be grateful to me for getting your hat to match your gown so exactly.’

  And now they are driving along the muddy road, between bare ranks of dark and dripping trees, and under as dull and colourless a sky as ever roofed in Hazlehurst. The old church, with its queer corners and darksome side-aisles, its curious gallery pews in front of the organ, something like boxes at a theatre, where the aristocracy sit in privileged retirement, its hatchments, its old-fashioned pulpit, reading-desk, and clerk’s desk, its faded crimson cushions and draperies — a church which the restorer’s hand has never improved, for whose adornment no devout ladies have toiled and striven, the dull old-world parish church of the last century — looked its darkest and gloomiest to-day. Not even the presence of youth and beauty could brighten and enliven it.

  John Treverton, and Mr. Sampson, who was to give the bride away, were the last to arrive. The bridegroom was deadly pale, and the smile with which he met his bride, though full of fondest love, was wanting in gladness. Celia performed her duty as bridesmaid in a business-like way, worthy of the highest praise. Mr. Clare read the service deliberately and well, the pale bridegroom spoke out manfully when his time came; nor did Laura’s low voice falter when she pronounced the words that sealed her fate.

  The wedding breakfast was quietly cheerful. That the bridegroom should have very little to say, and that the bride should be pale and thoughtful, surprised no one. The vicar and the lawyer were in excellent spirits; Celia’s lively tongue chimed in at every opportunity. Mrs. Clare was full of friendly anticipations about what the young couple would do when they settled down. The dull, damp morning had sharpened people’s appetites, and there was a good deal said in praise of the game pie, and the truffled turkey; while the old wines that had been brought forth, mantled in cobwebs, from the dark recesses of Jasper Treverton’s cellar, were good enough to evolve faint flashes of wit from the most sluggish brain. Thus the wedding breakfast, which had the air of a small family gathering, went off pleasantly enough.