Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  ‘Well, I’m sure,’ cried Mary, indignantly, and then she expressed a hope that her soul was her own, even at Hazlehurst Manor.

  Before half-past seven, Mary had packed her box, and had it conveyed to the hall. Mrs. Treverton’s trunks and bags had also been brought down. At a quarter to eight the carriage drove up to the door, an old-fashioned landau in which Jasper Treverton used to take his daily airing, drawn by a pair of big horses that had begun life at the plough. Since the lamps had been lighted no one had seen the bridegroom. The tea things had been taken into the book room, and the urn had hissed itself to silence, but no one had come there to take tea. Laura only came downstairs when the carriage was at the door.

  ‘Joe, run and look for Mr. Treverton,’ cried the butler to his underling.

  `Mr. Treverton will meet us at the station,’ Laura said, hurriedly; and then she got into the carriage, and called to Mary to follow her.

  ‘Tell Berrows to drive quickly to the station,’ she told the butler, and at the first crack of the whip the over-fed horses swung the big carriage round, as if they meant to annihilate the good old house, and went off along the avenue with the noise of a Barclay and Perkins dray.

  ‘Well, I never did!’ exclaimed the housekeeper. ‘Fancy his meeting her at the station, instead of their going off together, sitting side by side, like true lovers.’

  ‘I’m afraid there’s not much true love about it, Martha,’ said her husband, sententiously, and then, waxing familiar, he said,’When you and me was married we didn’t manage matters so, did we my lass?’

  CHAPTER XIII. THE SETTLEMENT.

  LAURA had been married three weeks and a day, and the new year was just three weeks old. It was a very ailing and ungenial year in this infantine stage of its existence. There had been hardly a day of pleasant weather since its birth, nothing but rain and sleet, and damp raw cold, and morning mists and evening fogs. It was not a good, honest, old-fashioned winter, such as we read of in story books, and enjoy about once in a decade. It was simply obnoxious, ill-conditioned weather, characteristic of no particular season.

  It was just a day after the anniversary of Jasper Treverton’s death, and Tom Sampson was meditating in a lazy, comfortable way, on his former client, as he sat by the office fire sipping his tea, which he had desired to be brought to him in his den, as he was so terribly busy. He had not dipped a pen in the ink yet, and it was half-past nine o’clock; but it was not for Eliza Sampson to know this. She was always taught to believe that when her brother spent his evenings in the office he was working severely—’double tides,’ he called it. If she came in to look at him she found him scratching away violently with a quill that tore shrieking along the paper, like an express train rushing through a village station; and it was not for her to know that Thomas snatched up his pen and put on this appearance of industry when he heard her gentle footfall at his door. Domestic life is made up of such small secrets.

  To-night Tom Sampson was in a particularly lazy humour. He was getting a rich man, not by large earnings but by small expenditure, and life, which is an insoluble problem for many, was as easy for him as one of those nine elementary axioms in Euclid that seem too foolishly obvious to engage the reasoning power of the smallest schoolboy, such as—’if equals be taken from equals the remainders are equal,’ and so on. Tom was thinking that he ought to be thinking about marrying. He was not in love, and never had been since he exchanged his schoolboy jacket for a tail-coat; but he told himself that the time had come when he might prudently allow himself to fall in love. He would love not too well, but wisely.

  ‘Lizzie is a good girl, and she knows my ways,’ he said to himself, ‘but she’s getting old maidish, and that’s a fault which will grow upon her. Yes, decidedly, it is time I thought of a wife. A man’s choice is confoundedly limited in such a hole as this. I don’t want to marry a farmer’s daughter, though I might get a fine, healthy young women, and a tidy little bit of money, if I could please myself among the agricultural class; but Tom Sampson has his failings, and pride is one of ‘em. I should like my wife to be a cut above me. There’s Celia Clare, now. She’s more the kind of thing I should fancy; plump and pretty, with nice, lively ways. I’ve had a little too much of the sentimental from poor Lizzie. Yes, I might do worse than marry Celia. And I think she likes me.’

  Mr. Sampson’s meditations were interrupted at this point by the sound of a footstep on the sloshy gravel walk outside his office door. There was a half-glass door opening into the garden, as well as the door opening from the passage, which was the formal approach for Mr. Sampson’s clients. Only his intimates entered by the garden door, and he was unable to imagine who his late visitor could be.

  ‘Ten o’clock,’ he said to himself. ‘It must be something particular. Old Pulsby has got another attack of gout in the stomach, perhaps, and wants to alter his will. He always alters his will when he gets a sharp attack. The pain makes him so savage that it’s a relief to him to disinherit somebody.’

  Mr. Sampson speculated thus as he undrew the bolt and opened the glass door. The man who stood before him was no messenger from old Pulsby, but John Treverton, clad in a white mackintosh, from which the water ran in little rills.

  ‘Is it yourself or your ghost?’ asked Sampson, falling back to let his client enter.

  The question was not without reason. John Treverton’s face was as white as his raiment, and the combined effect of the pale, haggard face and the long white coat was altogether spectral.

  ‘Flesh and blood, my dear Sampson, I assure you,’ replied the other coolly, as he divested himself of his mackintosh, and took up his stand in front of the comfortable fire, ‘flesh and blood frozen to the bone.’

  ‘I thought you were in the south of France.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what you thought, you see I am here. Yesterday put me in legal possession of my cousin’s estate. I have come to execute the deed of settlement. It’s all ready, of course.’

  ‘It’s ready, yes; but I didn’t think you’d be in such a hurry. I should have thought you would have stopped to finish your honeymoon.’

  ‘My honeymoon is of very little importance compared with my wife’s future welfare. Come, Sampson, look sharp. Who’s to witness my signature?’

  ‘My sister and one of the servants can do that.’

  ‘Call them in, then. I’m ready to sign.’

  ‘Hadn’t you better read the deed first?’

  ‘Well, yes, perhaps. One can’t be too careful. I want my wife’s position to be unassailable as the summit of Mount Everest. You have taken counsel’s opinion, and the deed will hold water?’

  ‘It would hold the Atlantic. Your gift is so entirely simple, that there could be no difficulty in wording the deed. You give your wife everything. I think you a fool, so did the advising counsel; but that makes no difference.’

  ‘Not a whit.’

  John Treverton sat down at the office table and read the deed of settlement from the first word to the last. He gave to his dear wife, Laura Treverton, all the property, real and personal, of which he stood possessed, for her sole and separate use. There was a good deal of legal jargon, but the drift of the deed was clear enough.

  ‘I am ready,’ said John.

  Mr. Sampson rang the bell for the servant, and shouted into the passage for his sister. Eliza came running in, and at sight of John Treverton’s pale, face, screamed, and made as if she would have fainted.

  ‘Gracious, Mr. Treverton,’ she gasped, ‘I thought there were oceans between us. What in mercy’s name has happened?’

  ‘Nothing alarming. I have only come to execute my marriage settlement, which I was not in a position to make till yesterday.’

  ‘How dreadful for poor Mrs. Treverton to be left alone in a foreign land!’

  John Treverton did not notice this speech. He dipped his pen in the ink, and signed the paper, while Miss Sampson and Sophia, the housemaid, looked on wonderingly.

  ‘Sophia, run and get a pai
r of sheets aired, and get the spare room ready,’ cried Eliza, when she had affixed her signature as witness. ‘Of course you are going to stop with us, Mr. Treverton?’

  ‘You are very kind. No, I must get away immediately. I have a trap waiting to take me back to the station. Oh, by-the-way, Sampson, about that money you kindly advanced to me. It must come out of the estate somehow; I suppose you can manage that?’

  ‘Yes, I think I can manage that,’ answered Sampson modestly. ‘Do you want any further advance?’

  ‘No, the estate belongs to my wife, now. I must not tamper with it.’

  ‘And what’s hers is yours of course. Well, I congratulate you with all my heart. You are the luckiest fellow I ever knew, bar none. A handsome wife, and a handsome fortune. What more can a man ask from Fate?’

  ‘Not much, certainly,’ said John Treverton, ‘but I must catch the last up-train. Good-night.’

  ‘Going back to the South of France?’

  John Treverton did not wait to answer the question. He shook hands hastily with Eliza, and dashed out into the garden. A minute afterwards Mr. Sampson and his sister heard the crack of a whip, and the sound of wheels upon the high road.

  ‘Did you ever see such a volcanic individual?’ exclaimed the solicitor, folding up the deed of settlement.

  ‘I am afraid he is not happy,’ sighed Eliza.

  ‘I am afraid he is mad,’ said Tom.

  CHAPTER XIV. ‘YOU HAVE BUT TO SAY THE WORD.’

  MR. SMOLENDO was in his glory. In the words of his friends and followers he was coining money. He was a man to be cultivated and revered. A man for whom champagne suppers or dinners at Richmond were as nothing; a man for whom it was easier to lend a five-pound note than it is for the common ruck of humanity to advance half-a-crown. Flatterers fawned upon him, intimate acquaintances hung fondly upon him, reminding him pathetically that they knew him twenty years ago, when he hadn’t a sixpence, as if that knowledge of byegone adversity were a merit and a claim. A man of smaller mind might have had his mental equilibrium shaken by all this adulation. Mr. Smolendo was a man of granite, and took it for what it was worth. When people were particularly civil, he knew they wanted something from him,

  ‘The lessee of a London theatre is not a man to be easily had,’ he said; ‘he sees human nature on the ugliest side.’

  Christmas had come and gone, the New Year was six weeks old, and Mr. Smolendo’s prosperity continued without abatement. The theatre was nightly crowded to suffocation. There were morning performances every Saturday. Stalls and boxes were booked a month in advance.

  ‘La Chicot is a little gold mine,’ said Mr. Smolendo’s followers.

  Yes, La Chicot had the credit of it all. Mr. Smolendo had produced a grand fairy spectacle, in which La Chicot was the central figure. She appeared in half-a-dozen costumes, all equally original, expensive, and audacious. She was a fountain of golden water, draped exclusively in dazzling golden fringe, a robe of light, through which her finely sculptured form flashed now and then, as the glittering fringe parted for an instant, like a revelation of the beautiful. She was a fish-woman in a scanty satin kirtle, scarlet stockings, and a high cap of finest Brussels lace. She was a bayadère, a debardeur, a wood nymph, an odalisque. She did not dance as she danced before her accident, but she was as beautiful as ever, and a trifle more impudent. She had learnt enough English to speak the lines of her part, and her accent gave a charm and a quaintness to the performance. She sang a comic song with more chic than melody, and was applauded to the echo. The critics told her she had ascended to a higher grade in the drama. La Chicot told herself that she was the greatest woman in London, as well as the handsomest. She lived in a circle of which she herself was the centre. The circumference was a ring of admirers. There was no world beyond.

  Something to this effect she told her fellow lodger, Mr. Desrolles, one grey afternoon in February, when he dropped in to beg a glass of brandy, in order to stave off one of those attacks he so often talked about. She was always particular friendly with the ‘Second Floor,’ as it was the fashion of the house to call this gentleman. He flattered and amused her, fetched and carried for her, and sometimes kept her company when she was in too low spirits to drink alone.

  ‘My good creature, you oughtn’t to live in such a hole as this. Upon my soul, you ought not,’ said Desrolles, with an air that was half-protection, half-patronage.

  ‘I know I ought not,’ replied La Chicot. ‘There is not an actress in Paris who would not call me stupid as an owl for my pains. Que diable, diable, I sacrifice myself for the honour of a husband who mocks himself of me, who amuses himself elsewhere, and leaves me to fret and pine alone. It is too much. See then, Desrolles, it may be that you think I boast myself when I tell you that one of the richest men in London is over head and ears in love with me. See, here are his letters. Read them, and see how much I have refused.’

  She opened a work-basket on the table, and from a chaos of reels of cotton, tapes and buttons, and shreds and patches, extracted half-a-dozen letters, which she tossed across the table to Desrolles.

  ‘Do you leave your love-letters where your husband might so easily find them?’ asked Desrolles, wonderfully.

  ‘Do you suppose he would give himself the trouble to look at them?’ she cried, scornfully. ‘Not he. He has so long left off caring for me himself that he never supposes that anybody else can fall in love with me. Help yourself to that cognac, Monsieur Desrolles. It is the only safe drink in this miserable climate of yours; and put some coals on the fire, mon bonhomme. I am frozen to the marrow of my bones.’

  La Chicot filled her glass by way of setting a good example, and emptied it as placidly as if the brandy had been sugar and water.

  Desrolles looked over the letters she had handed him. They all went to the same tune. They told La Chicot that she was beautiful, and that the writer was madly in love with her. They offered her a carriage, a house in Mayfair, a settlement. The offers rose in value with the lapse of time.

  ‘How have you answered him?’ asked Desrolles, curious and interested.

  ‘Not at all. I knew better how to make myself valued. Let him wait for his answer.”

  ‘A man must be very hard hit to write like that,’ suggested the gentleman.

  La Chicot shrugged her statuesque shoulders. She was lovely even in her more than careless attire. She wore a long loose dressing-gown of scarlet cashmere, girdled with a cord and tassels, which she tied and untied, and twisted and untwisted in sheer idleness. Her massy hair was rolled in a great rough knob at the back of her head, ready to escape from the comb and slide down her back at the slightest provocation. The dead white of her complexion showed like marble against the scarlet robe, the dense hair showed raven black above the pale brow and large luminous eyes.

  ‘Is he as rich as he pretends to be?’ asked La Chicot, thoughtfully swinging the heavy scarlet tassel, and lazily contemplating the fire.

  ‘To my certain knowledge,’ said Mr. Desrolles, with an oracular air, ‘Joseph Lemuel is one of the wealthiest men in London,’

  ‘I don’t see that it much matters,’ said La Chicot, meditatively. ‘I like money, but so long as I have enough to buy what I want, it’s all that I care about, and I don’t like that grim-looking Jew.’

  ‘Compare a house in Mayfair with this den,’ urged Desrolles.

  “Where is Mayfair?’

  Desrolles described the neighbourhood.

  ‘A wilderness of dull streets,’ said La Chicot, with a contemptuous shrug. ‘What is one street better than another? I should like a house in the Champs Elysées — a house in a garden, dazzling white, all over flowers, with big shining windows, and a Swiss stable.’

  ‘A house like a toy,’ said Desrolles. ‘Well, Lemuel could buy you one as easily as I could buy you a handful of sugar plums. You have but to say the word.’

  ‘It is a word that I shall never say,’ exclaimed La Chicot, decisively. ‘I am an honest woman. And then, I am too proud.�
��

  Desrolles wondered whether it was pride, virtue, or rank obstinacy which made La Chicot reject such brilliant offers. It was not easy for him to believe in virtue, masculine or feminine. He had not travelled by those paths in which the virtues grow and flourish, but he had made intimate acquaintance with the vices. Since a certain interview with La Chicot’s husband, in which he had promised to keep a paternal eye upon the lady, Mr. Desrolles had wound himself completely into the wife’s confidence. He had made himself alike useful and agreeable. Though she kept her wealthy adorer at arm’s length, she liked to talk of him. The hot-house flowers he sent her adorned her table, and looked strangely out of place in the tawdry, littered room, where yesterday’s dust was generally left to be swept away to-morrow.

  One thing La Chicot did not know, and that was that Mr. Desrolles had made the acquaintance of her admirer, and was being paid by Mr. Lemuel to plead his cause.

  ‘You seem to be better off than you used to be, my friend,’ she said to him one day. ‘Unless I deceive myself that is a new coat,’

  ‘Yes,’ answered the man of the world, without blushing. ‘I have been dabbling a little on the Stock Exchange, and have had better luck than usual.’

  Desrolles stirred the heaped-up coals into a blaze, and filled himself a third glass of cognac.

  ‘It’s as fine as a liqueur,’ he said, smacking his lips. ‘It would be a sin to dilute such stuff. By-the-way, when do you expect your husband?’

  ‘I never expect him,’ answered La Chicot. ‘He goes and comes as he chooses. He is like the wandering Jew.’

  ‘He is gone to Paris on business, I suppose?’

  ‘On business or pleasure. I neither know nor care which. He earns his living. Those ridiculous pictures of his please both in London and Paris. See here!’

  She tossed him over a crumpled heap of comic papers, English and French. Her husband’s name figured in all, affixed to the wildest caricatures — scenes theatrical and Bohemian, sketches full of life and humour.