Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Between eight and nine o’clock on the night after La Chicot’s funeral an elderly man called upon Mr. Mosheh, a diamond merchant in a small way, who lived in one of the streets near Brunswick Square. The gentleman was respectably clad in a long overcoat, and wore a grey beard which had been allowed to grow with a luxuriance that entirely concealed the lower part of his face. Under his soft felt hat he wore a black velvet skull cap, below which there appeared no vestige of hair; whereby it might be inferred that the velvet cap was intended to hide the baldness of the skull it covered. Under the rim of the cap, which was drawn low upon the brow, appeared a pair of shaggy grey eyebrows, shadowing prominent eyes. Mr. Mosheh came out of his dining room, whence the savoury odour of fish fried in purest olive oil followed hint like a kind of incense, and found the stranger waiting for him in the front room, which was half parlour half office.

  The diamond merchant had a sharp eye for character, and he saw at a glance that his visitor Belonged to the hawk rather than to the pigeon family.

  ‘Wants to do me if he can,” he said to himself.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked, with oily affability.

  ‘You buy diamonds, I want to sell some; and as I sell them under the pressure of peculiar circumstances I am prepared to let you have their a bargain,” said the stranger, with a tone at once friendly and business-like.

  ‘I don’t believe in bargains. I’ll give you a fair price for a good article, if you came by the things honestly,’ replied Mr. Mosheh, with a suspicious look. ‘I am not a receiver of stolen goods. You have come to the wrong shop for that.’

  ‘If I’d thought you were I shouldn’t have come here,’ said the grey-bearded old man. ‘I want to deal with a gentleman. I am a gentleman myself, though a decayed one. I have not come on my own business, but on that of a friend, a man you know by name and repute as well as you know the Prince of Wales — a man carrying on one of the most successful businesses in London. I’m not going to tell you his name. I only give you the facts. My friend has bills coming due to-morrow. If they are dishonoured he must be in the Gazette next week. In his difficulty he went to his wife, and made a clean breast of it. She behaved as a good woman ought, put her arms round his neck and told him not to be down-hearted, and then ran for lien jewel-case, and gave him her diamonds.’

  ‘Let us have a look at these said diamonds,’ replied Mr. Mosheh, without vouchsafing any praise of the wife’s devotion.

  The man took out a small parcel, and unfolded it. There, on a sheet of cotton wool, reposed the gems, five-and-thirty large white stones, the smallest of their as big as a pea.

  ‘Why, they’re unset!’ exclaimed the diamond merchant. ‘How’s that?’

  ‘My friend is a proud man. He didn’t want his wife’s jewels to be recognised.’

  ‘So he broke up the setting? Your friend was a, fool, sir. What do these stones belong to?’ speculated Mr. Mosheh, touching the gems lightly with the tip of his fleshy forefinger, and arranging them in a circle. ‘A collet necklace, evidently, and a very fine collet necklace it must have been. You friend was an idiot to destroy it.’

  ‘I believe it was a necklace,’ assented the Visitor. ‘My friend celebrated his silver wedding last year, and the diamonds were a gift to his wife on that occasion.’

  The room was dimly lighted with a single candle which the servant had set down upon the centre table when she admitted the stranger.

  Mr. Mosheh drew down a movable gutta percha gas tube, and lighted an office lamp, which stood beside his desk. By this light he examined the jewels. Not content with the closest inspection, he took a little file from his waistcoat pocket, and drew it across the face of one of the stones.

  ‘Your friend is doubly a fool, if he isn’t a knave,’ said Mr. Mosheh. ‘These stones are sham.’

  There came a look so ghastly over the face of the grey-bearded man that the aspect of death itself could hardly have been more awful.

  ‘It’s a lie!’ he gasped.

  ‘You are an impudent rascal, sir, to bring me such trumpery, and a blatant ass for thinking you could palm your paste upon Benjamin Mosheh, a man who has dealt in diamonds, off and on, for nearly thirty years. The stones are imitation, very clever in their way, and a very good colour. Look here, sir; do you see the mark my file leaves on the surface? Father Abraham, how the man trembles! Do you mean to tell me that you’ve been fooled by these stones — that you’ve given money for them. I don’t believe a word of your cock and a bull story about your London tradesman and his silver wedding. But do you mean to say you didn’t know these stones were duffers, and that I shouldn’t be justified in giving you in charge for trying to obtain money upon false pretences?’

  ‘As I am a living man, I thought them real,’ gasped the grey-bearded man, who had been seized with a convulsive trembling, awful to see.

  ‘And you advanced money upon them?’

  Yes.’

  Much?’

  ‘All I have in the world. All! All!’ he repeated passionately. ‘I am a ruined man. For God’s sake give me half a tumbler of brandy, if you don’t want me to drop down dead in your house.’

  The man’s condition was so dejected that Mr. Mosheh, though inclined to believe him a swindler, took compassion upon hire. He opened the door leading into his dining-room, and called to his wife.

  ‘Rachel, bring me the brandy and a tumbler.’

  Mrs. Mosheh obeyed. She was a large woman magnificently attired in black satin and gold ornaments, like an ebony cabinet mounted in ormolu. Nobody could have believed that she had fried a large consignment of fish that very day before putting on her splendid raiment.

  ‘Is the gentleman ill?’ she asked kindly.

  ‘He feels a little faint. There, my dear, that will do. Yon can go back to the children.’

  ‘They’re uncommonly clever,’ said Mr. Mosheh, fingering the stones, and testing them one by one, sometimes with his file, sometimes by the simpler process of wetting them with the tip of his tongue, and looking to see if they retained their fire and light while wet. ‘But there’s not a real diamond among them. If you’ve advanced money on ‘em, you’ve been had. They’re of French manufacture, I’ve no doubt. I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you. If you’ll leave ’em with me, I’ll try and find out where they were made, and all about them.’

  ‘No, no,’ answered the other, breathlessly, drawing the parcel out of Mr. Mosheh’s reach, and rolling up the cotton wool hurriedly. ‘It’s not worth while, it’s no matter. I’ve been cheated, that’s all. It can’t help me, to know who manufactured the stones, or where they were bought. They’re false, you say, and if you are right I’m a ruined roan. Good night.’

  He had drunk half a tumbler of raw brandy, and the brandy had stopped that convulsive trembling which affected him a few minutes before. He put his parcel in his breast pocket, pulled himself together, and walked slowly and stiffly out of the room and out of the house, Mr. Mosheh accompanying him to the door.

  ‘You can show those stones to as many dealer, as you like,’ said the Jew; ‘you’ll find I’m right about ‘em. Good night.’

  ‘Good night,’ the other answered faintly, and so disappeared in the wintry fog that wrapped the street round like a veil.

  ‘Is the fellow a knave or a fool, I wonder?’ questioned Mr. Mosheh.

  CHAPTER V. ‘TO A DEEP LAWNY DELL THEY CAME.’

  IT was summer time again, the beginning of June, the time when summer is fairest and freshest, the young leaves in the woods tender and transparent enough to let the sunlight through, the ferns just unfurling their broad feathers, the roses just opening, the patches of common land and fuzzy corners of meadows ablaze with gold, the sky an Italian blue, the day so long that one almost forgets there is such a thing as night in the world

  It was a season that Laura had always loved, and even now, gloomy as was the outlook of her young life, she felt her Spirits lightened with the brightness of the land. Her cheerfulness astonished Celia, who was in a state of ch
ronic indignation against John Treverton, which was all the more intense because she was forbidden to talk of him.

  ‘I never knew any one take things so lightly as you do, Laura,’ she exclaimed, one afternoon when she found Mrs. Treverton just returned from a, long ramble in the little wood that adjoined the Manor House grounds.

  ‘Why should I make the most of my troubles? Earth seems so fill of gladness and hope at this season that one cannot help hoping.’

  ‘You cannot, perhaps. Don’t say one cannot,’ Celia retorted, snappishly, ‘if you mean to include me. I left off hoping before I was eighteen. What is there to hope for in a parish where there are only two eligible bachelors, one of the two as ugly as sin, and the other an incorrigible flirt, a man who seems always on the brink of proposing, yet never proposes?’

  ‘You have not counted your devoted admirer, Mr. Sampson. He makes a third.’

  ‘Sandy-haired, and a village solicitor. Thank you, Laura. I have not sunk so low as that. If I married him I should have to marry his sister Eliza, and that would be quite too dreadful. No, dear, I can manage to exist as I am, ‘in maiden meditation, fancy free.’ When I change my situation I shall expect to better myself. As for you, Laura, you are a perfect wonder. I never saw you looking so well. Yet in your position I am sure I should have cried my eyes out.’

  ‘That wouldn’t have made the position better. I have not left off hoping, Celia, and when I feel low-spirited I set myself to work to forget my own troubles. There is so much to be looked after on an estate like this — the house, the grounds, the poor people — I can always find something to do.’

  ‘You are a paragon of industry. I never saw the garden as pretty its it is this year.’

  ‘I like everything to look its best,’ said Laura, blushing at her own thoughts.

  The one solace of her life of late had been to preserve and beautify the good old house and its surroundings. The secret hope that John Treverton would come back some day, and that life would be fair and sweet for her again, was the hidden spring of all her actions. Every morning she said to herself. ‘He may come to-day;’ every night she consoled herself’ with the fancy that he might come to-morrow.

  ‘I may have to wait for years,’ She said in her graver moments, ‘but let him come when he will, he shall find that I have been a faithful steward.’

  She had never left the Manor House since she came back from her lonely honeymoon. She had received various hospitable invitations from the county families, who were anxious to be civil to her now that she was firmly established among them as a landowner; but she refused all such invitations, excusing herself because of her husband’s enforced absence, When he returned to England she would be delighted to visit with him, and so oil; whereby the county people were given to understand that there was nothing extraordinary or unwarrantable in Mr. Treverton’s non-appearance at the Manor House.

  ‘His wife seems to approve of his conduct, so one can only suppose that it’s all right,’ said people; notwithstanding which the majority clung affectionately to the supposition that it was gill wrong.

  Despite Laura’s hopefulness, and that sweetness of temper and gaiety of mind which preserved the youthful beauty of her face, there were hours — one hour, perhaps, in every day — when her spirits drooped, and hope seemed to sicken. She had pored over John Treverton’s last letter until the paper upon which it was written had grown thin and worn with frequent handling; but at the best, dear as the letter was to her, she could not extract melt hope from it. The tone of the writer was not utterly hopeless. Yet he spoke of a parting that might be for life; of a tie that might last for ever; a tie that bound him in honour, if not in fact, to some other woman.

  He had wronged her deeply by that broken marriage — wronged her by supposing that the possession of Jasper Treverton’s estate could in any wise compensate her for the false position in which that marriage had placed her; and yet she could not find it in her heart to be angry with him. She loved him too well. And this letter, whatever guilt it vaguely confessed, overflowed with love for her. She forgave hint all things for the sake of that love.

  When had she begun to love him, she asked herself sometimes in a sad reverie. She had questioned him closely as to the growth of his love, but had been slow to make her own confession.

  How well she remembered his pale, tired face that winter night, just a year and a half ago, when he came into the lamp-lit room and took his seat on the opposite side of the hearth, a stranger and half an enemy.

  She had liked and admired him from the very first, knowing that he was prejudiced against her. The pale, clear cut face, the grey eyes with their black lashes, which made them look black in some lights, hazel in others; the thoughtful mouth, and that all-pervading expression of melancholy which had at once enlisted her sympathy; all these had pleased her.

  ‘I must have been dreadfully weak-minded,’ she said to herself, ‘for I really think I fell in love with him at first sight.’

  That little wood behind the Manor House grounds was Laura’s favourite resort in this early summer time. It was the most picturesque of woods, for the ground sloped steeply to a narrow river, on the further side of which there was a rugged bank, topped by a grove of fir-trees. The stream ran brawling over a rocky bed; and the bold masses of rock, here shining purple, or changeful grey, there green with moss; the fringe of ferns upon the river brink, the old half-ruined wooden bridge that spanned the torrent; the background of beech and oak, mingled with the darker foliage of old Scotch firs; and towering darkly above all, the lofty ridge of moorland, made a picture that Laura fondly loved. Here she came when the prim gardens of the Manor House seemed too small to hold her thoughts and cares. Here she seemed to breathe a freer air.

  She came to this spot one evening in June, after a day of sunny weather which had seemed longer and wearier and altogether harder to bear than the generality of her days. Celia had been with her all day, and Celia’s small talk bad been drearier than solitude. Laura was thankful to be alone, in this quiet shelter, where the indefatigable labours of the woodpecker and the babble of the stream were the only sounds that stirred the summer silence.

  All day long the beat had been hardly endurable; now there was a breath of coolness in the air, and nothing left of that fierce stuff but a soft yellow light in the western sky.

  Laura had a volume of Shelley in her pocket, taken up from among the books on the table in her favourite room. It was one of the looks she loved best, and had been the companion of many a ramble. She seated herself on a fallen trunk of oak beside the river, and opened the volume haphazard at ‘Rosalind and Helen,’ and she read on till she came to those lovely lines which picture such a spot as that where she was sitting.

  To a deep lawny dell they came,

  To a stone seat beside a spring,

  O’er which the column’d wood did frame.

  A roofless temple, like the fane,

  Where, ere new creeds could faith obtain

  Man’s early race once knelt beneath

  The overhanging Deity.’

  She read on. The scene suited the poem, and its sleep melancholy harmonised but too well with her own feelings. A story of love the fondest, truest, most unworldly, ending in hopeless sorrow. Never had the gloom of that poem sunk so heavily upon her spirit.

  She closed the book suddenly, with a half-stifled sob. The moon was rising, silver pale, above the dark ridge of moorland. The last streak of golden light had faded behind the red trunks of the firs. The low, melancholy cry of an owl sounded far off in the dark heart of the wood. It was indeed as if —

  ‘The owls had all fled far away

  In a merrier glen to hoot and play.’

  In such a spot a mind attuned to melancholy might easily shape spectral forms out of the evening shadows, and call up the ghosts of the loved and lost. Laura looked up from her book with a strange uncanny feeling, as if, indeed, some ghostly presence were near. Her eyes wandered slowly across the rocky bed of
the river, and there, on the opposite bank, half in shadow, half in the tender light of the big round moon, she saw a tall figure and a pale face looking at her. She rose with a half-stifled cry of fear. That face looked so spectral in the mystical light. And their she clashed her hands joyously and cried, ‘I knew you would come back!’

  This was the deserter’s welcome. No frown, no upbraidings — a sweet face beaming with delight, a happy voice full of fondest welcome.

  ‘Humph,’ cries the woman-hater, ‘what fools these women are!’

  John Treverton came, stepping lightly across the rocks, at some risk of measuring his length in the stony bed of the river, and in less than a minute was by his wife’s side.

  Not a word did he say for the first moment or so. His greeting was dumb. He took her to his heart, and kissed her as he had never kissed her yet.

  ‘My own one, my wife! ‘ he cried. ‘You are all mine now. Love, I have been patient. Don’t be hard with me.’

  This last remonstrance was because she had drawn herself away from his arms, and was looking at hint with a smile which was no longer tender, but ironical.

  ‘Have you come back to Hazlehurst to spend an evening?’ she asked, ‘or can you prolong your visit for a week?’

  ‘I have come back to spend my life with you — I have come back to stay for ever! They may begin to build me a vault to-morrow in Hazlehurst churchyard. I shall be here to occupy it, when my time comes — if you will have me. That is the question, Laura. It all depends on you. Oh, love, love, answer me quickly. If you but knew how I have longed for this moment. Tell me, sweet, have I quite worn out your love? Has my conduct forfeited your esteem for ever?’

  ‘You have behaved very unkindly to me,’ she answered, slowly, gravely, her voice trembling a. little. ‘You have used me in a manner which I think a woman with proper womanly pride could hardly forgive.’

  ‘Laura,’ he cried, piteously.

  ‘But I fear I am not possessed of proper womanly pride: for I have forgiven you,’ she said, innocently.