Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  ‘My treasure, my delight!’

  ‘But it would have been so much easier to for give if you lead trusted me, if you had told me, all the truth. Oh, John, husband and yet no husband, you have treated me very cruelly.’

  ‘Here she forgot her unreasoning joy at seeing him again, and suddenly remembered herself and her wrongs.

  ‘I know, love’ he said, on his knees beside her, ‘I seem to have acted vilely, and yet, believe me, dearest, any sole motive was the desire to protect your interests.’

  ‘Your conduct has put me to shame before all mankind,’ urged Laura, meaning the village of Hazlehurst. ‘You have no right to approach me, no right to look me in the face. Have you not confessed in that cruel letter that you were not free to marry me, that you belong in some way to another woman.’

  ‘That other woman is dead. I am free as the air.’

  ‘What was she? Your wife?’

  There was a look of infinite pain in John Treverton’s face. His lips moved as if about to speak, but he was silent. There are some truths difficult of utterance; and it is not easy to all men to lie.

  ‘It is too painful a story,’ he began, at last, speaking hurriedly, as if he wanted to make a speedy end of a hateful subject. ‘A good many years ago, when I was very young, and a most consummate fool — I got myself entrapped into a Scotch marriage. You have heard of the peculiarities of the marriage law in Scotland.’

  ‘Yes, I have heard and read about them.’

  ‘Of course. Well, it was a marriage and no marriage — a, reckless, half-jesting promise, tortured, by false witnesses, into a legal undertaking. I found myself, unawares, a married man — a millstone tied round my neck. I will tell you no more of that wretched entanglement, dearest. It would not be good for you to hear. I will only say that I bore my burthen more patiently than most men would have borne it, and now I thank God with all my heart and soul for my freedom. And I come to you, dear love, to implore your forgiveness, and to ask you to join me, three weeks hence, in some quiet place thirty or forty miles from here, where no one will know us, and where we may be married again some fine summer morning; so that, if that Scotch marriage of mine were really binding, and our former marriage illegal, we may tie the knot securely, and for ever.’

  ‘You should have trusted me at first, John,’ Laura said reproachfully.

  ‘I ought to have done so, love, but I so feared to lose you. Oh, my darling, grant all I ask, and you shall never have cause to regret your goodness. Forgive me, and forget all that I have told you tonight. Let it be as if it had never been. The second marriage which I ask for is a precautionary act — needless, perhaps — but it will make me feel more secure in my happiness. My beloved, will you do what I ask?’

  She had dried her tears. Her heart was welling over with gladness and love for this sinner, still kneeling by her side as she sat on the ferny river bank, in the brightening moonlight, holding both her hands in his, looking up pleadingly as he made his prayer. There was no thought of denying him in her mind. She only wanted to yield with good grace, not to humiliate herself too deeply.

  ‘It must be as you wish,’ she said. ‘When you have arranged this second marriage you can write to me and tell me where and when it is to be. I will come to the place you appoint with my maid. She is a good girl, and I can trust her. She can be one of the witnesses of our wedding.’

  ‘Are you sure she will not talk about it afterwards?’

  ‘I have proved her already, and I know she is trustworthy.’

  ‘Be it so, love. See here.’ He took a Cornish guide book from his pocket, and opened it at the map of the county. ‘I have been thinking that we might go farther west, to some remote parish. Here is Camelot, for instance. I never heard of any one living at Camelot, or going to Camelot, since the time of King Arthur. Surely there we should be safe from observation. The guide book acknowledges that there is nothing particular to be seen at Camelot. It has not even a good word for the inns. The place is miles away from everything. It is an anomaly in towns, for though it has a town hall and a market place, it has no church that it can call its own, but hooks itself on to a brace of outlying churches, each a mile and a half away. Let us be married at one of those out-of-the-way churches, Laura, and I shall love Camelot all the days of my life, as one loves the plain face of a friend who has done one a great service.’

  Laura had nothing to say against Camelot; so it was finally resolved that John Treverton should get there as quickly as rail and coach would carry him, and that he should have the banns put up at one of the churches, and that he should meet Laura at Didford Junction three weeks from that day, and escort her by coach across the wild moors and under the shadow of giant brown tors, to the little town of Camelot, where a modest population of six or seven hundred souls seemed to have lost themselves among the hills, and got somehow left behind in the march of time and progress.

  John Treverton and his wife lingered for a dung time beside the brawling river, walking arm in arm along the narrow woodland path, half in moonshine half in shadow, talking of the future; both supremely happy, and one of them, at least, tasting pure and perfect happiness for the first time in his life.

  ‘Shall we go to Penzance after our wedding, love, and then cross to the Scilly Isles for our honeymoon. It will be so sweet to inhabit a little rock-bound world of our own, circled by the Atlantic.’

  Laura assented that it would be sweet. Her world was henceforth to be small, John Treverton its sun and centre, and all things outside him and beyond him a mere elementary universe.

  He looked at his watch presently when they came out of the pinewood into the broad moonlight.

  ‘By Jove, dearest, I shall have no more than time to see you as far as the orchard gate, and then run off to catch the last train for Didford. I shall sleep at the hotel there, to-night. I don’t want to be seen within twenty miles of Hazlehurst till you and I come buck from the Scilly Isles, sunburnt and happy, to take up, our abode at the clear old Manor House. Oh, Laura, how I shall love that good, honest, respectable old home; how earnestly I shall thank God night and morning for my blissful life. Ah, love, you can never filly understand what a kicked-about waif I have been for the last seven years of my worthless existence. You can never fully know how thrice, blessed is a tranquil haven after stormy seas.

  They had opened their hearts and minds fully to each other in that long talk beside the river; she withholding nothing, he entering into no details of his life-history, but frankly admitting his unworthiness. She told him how she had borne her life at Hazlehurst after her solitary return from a supposed honeymoon; how she had hidden the truth from all her little world. It would seem the most natural thing for her to go away to meet her husband on his return from abroad, and then for them both to come home together.

  They parted at the orchard gate hurriedly, for John had three miles to walk to the station, and and only three-quarters of an hour for the walk. There was but one hasty kiss at parting, but, oh, the blissfulness of such a kiss on the threshold of so fair a future. Laura threaded her way slowly through the moonlit orchard, where the old apple trees cast their crooked shadows on the soft deep turf, and happy tears poured down her flushed cheeks as she went.

  ‘God is hood to us, God is very good,’ she kept repeating inwardly. ‘Oh, how can we ever be grateful enough, how can we ever be earnest enough in doing our duty?’

  In all her talk with John Treverton she had not said a word about the settlement. She had not praised him or thanked him for his generosity. All thought of Jasper Treverton’s fortune was as remote from her mind as if the old man had died a pauper, and there had been not a shilling of loss or gain contingent upon her marriage with his kinsman.

  CHAPTER VI. THE CHURCH NEAR CAMELOT.

  CELIA opened her eyes to their widest extent a fortnight later when Mrs. Treverton informed her that she was going to meet her husband, and that, after a few weeks’ holiday, they were coming home together for good.

  �
�For good,’ repeated Celia, drily, after which her eyes slowly resumed their normal state, and her lips drew themselves tightly together. ‘I am glad to hear that your existence as a married woman is about to assume a reasonable shape. Up to this time you have been as insoluble a mystery as that horrid creature, the man in the iron mask; and, pray, may I be permitted to ask, without being considered offensive, where you are to meet the returning wanderer?’

  ‘At Plymouth,’ said Laura, who had received minute instructions from John as to what she was to say.

  ‘Why blush at the mention of Plymouth,’ asked Celia. ‘There is nothing improper in the name of Plymouth; nothing unfit for publication. I presume that, as Mr. Treverton arrives at Plymouth he comes from some distant portion of the globe?’

  He is coming from Buenos Ayres, where he had business that absolutely required his personal attention.’

  What an extraordinary girl you are, Laura,’ ejaculated Celia, her eyes again widening.

  ‘Why extraordinary?’

  ‘Because you must have been perfectly aware that I, and I think I may go so far as to say all the inhabitants of Hazlehurst, have been bursting with curiosity about your husband for the last six months, and yet you could not have the good grace to enlighten us. If you had said he had gone to Buenos Ayres on business, we should have been satisfied.’

  ‘I told you he had affairs that detained him abroad.’

  ‘But why not have given his affairs a local habitation and a name?’

  ‘My husband did not wish me to talk about him.’

  ‘Well, you are altogether the oddest couple. However, I am very glad things are going to be different. Would it be too much to ask if Mr. Treverton will remain at the Manor House, or if he is going to re-appear only in his usual meteoric fashion?’

  ‘I hope he will stay at Hazlehurst all his life.’

  ‘Poor fellow,’ sighed Celia. ‘If he does I’m sure I shall pity him.’

  ‘You need not be so absurdly literal. Of course we shall go far afield sometimes and see the world, and all that is interesting and beautiful in it.’

  ‘How glibly you talk about what ‘we’ are going to do. A week ago you could not be induced to mention your husband’s name. And how happy you look; I never saw such a change.’

  ‘It is all because I am going to see him again. I hope you do not begrudge me my happiness?’

  ‘No, but I rather envy you. I only wish some benevolent old party would leave me a splendid estate on condition I married a handsome young man. You would see how willingly I would obey him. There should be no mystery about my conduct, I assure you. I should not make an iron mask of myself.’

  Celia wrote next day to her brother to tell him how that most incomprehensible of husbands, John Treverton, was expected home from Buenos Ayres, and how his wife was going to Plymouth to meet him. ‘And I never saw any human creature look so happy in my life,’ wrote Celia. I have seen dogs look like it when one has given them biscuits, and cats when they sit blinking at the fire, and young pigs lying on a bank in the sunshine. Yes, I have seen those dumb things appear the image of perfect, unreasoning, unquestioning happiness, which looks neither behind nor before; but such an expression is rarely to be seen in humanity.’

  A nice letter for Edward Clare to get — disappointed, more or less out at elbows, with a growing sense of failure upon him, sick to death of his London lodging, sick of the few literary men whose acquaintance he had contrived to make, and with whom he did not amalgamate as well as he had anticipated. He tore his sister’s lively epistle into morsels and sent them flying; over Waterloo-bridge, upon the light summer wind, and felt as if he would like to have gone, over with them.

  Yet once I thought she loved me,’ he said to himself, ‘and so she did, before that plausible scoundrel came in her way. But I ought to remember how much she gains by loving hint. If the old man had happened to leave me his estate, perhaps she might have looked unutterably happy at the idea of my return after a long absence, Only God, who made women, knows what hypocrites they are,’ and then Mr. Clare went home to his shabby lodging, and sat down in bitterest mood, and dipped his pen in the ink, and wrung out of himself a passionate page of verse for one of the magazines — not without labour and the sweat of his brow — and then took his poem and sold it, and dined luxuriously on the proceeds, hugging his wrongs and nursing his wrath to keep it warm, as he sat in a corner of the bright little French restaurant he liked best, slowly sipping his modest half-bottle of Pomard.

  That which Celia had told him was perfectly true. There never was a happier woman than Laura, after that interview by the river. During the last week before her departure she was full of business, preparing for her husband’s return.

  ‘Your master will be here in a few weeks,’ she said to the old housekeeper, with infinite pride, ‘and we must have everything ready for him.’

  ‘So we will, ma’am, spick and span,’ answered Mrs. Trimmer. ‘It will be happiness to have him settle down among us. It must have been a sore trial to you both, to be parted so, just at the beginning of your married life, too. It would have come more nat’ral afterwards.’

  ‘It was a sore trial, Trimmer,’ Mrs. Treverton answered, full of confidential friendliness. ‘But it’s all over now. I could hardly have borne to speak about it before.’

  ‘No, ma’am, I noticed as you was close and silent like, and I knew my place too well to say anything. Troubles take hold of people different. If there’s anything on my mind I must out with it, if it was but to Ginger, the tortoise-shell cat; but some folks can keep their worrits screwed up inside ‘em. It hurts ’em to speak.’

  ‘That was my case, Trimmer. It hurt me to speak my husband’s name, or to hear it spoken, while he was forced to be far away from me. But now it’s all different. You cannot talk of him too much to please me. I hope you will be as fond of him as you were of the dear old man who is gone.’

  Mr. Treverton must have a sitting room of his own, of course; a den where he might write his letters, and see his bailiff, where he could smoke and meditate at his leisure, study if he ever cared to study, read novels even, were he disposed to be lazy; and where his happy wife could only come on sufferance, deeming it a vast indulgence to be allowed to sit at his feet sometimes, or even to fill his pipe for him, or, in rough winter weather, to kneel down before the blazing fire and warm his slippers, when he had come in from a cold ride round his land, doing good wherever he went, like a benevolent fairy in the modern form of an enlightened landlord.

  After much debate and perplexity, Laura decided upon giving her husband, for his own particular sanctum, that very room in which they two had met for the first time, on the snowy winter night when John Treverton came to see his dying kinsman. It was a good old room, not large, but pleasant, oak panelled, with a fireplace in the corner, which gave a quaintness to the room; an oak mantelpiece with half a dozen narrow shelves running in a pyramid above it, and on these shelves an arrangement of old blue Nankin cups and saucers, crowned at the apex with the most delightful thing in tea-pots. There was an old cabinet in the room, so full of secret drawers, and mysterious boxes and recesses at the back of drawers, that it was in itself the study of a life-time.

  ‘Never hide anything in it, my dear,’ Jasper Treverton had said to his adopted daughter, ‘for be sure if you do you won’t be able to find it.’

  To this room Laura brought other treasures; the most comfortable easy chairs in the house, the best of the small Dutch pictures, the softest of the Turkey carpets, the richest tapestry curtains, two or three fine bronzes, a lovely little Chippendale bookcase. This last she filled with all her own favourite books, robbing the book-room below ruthlessly, in the delight of enriching her husband’s study, as this room was henceforth to be called.

  ‘He shall know and feel that he is welcome,’ she said to herself, softly, as she lingered in the room, touching everything, re-arranging, polishing, whisking away invisible grains of dust with a dainty feather bru
sh, caressing the things that were so soon to belong to the man she loved.

  The adjoining room — the room in which Jasper Treverton had died — was to be her own bed-chamber. It was a spacious room, with three long windows and deep window seats, a fireplace at which an ox, or at all events a baron of beef’ might have been roasted — a tall fourpost bed, with twisted columns, richly carved; curtains of Utrecht velvet, crimson and amber, lined with white silk all somewhat faded, but splendid in decay — a, noble room altogether, yet Laura had rather a horror of it, dearly as she had loved him whose generous spirit seemed to haunt the chamber.

  But Mrs. Trimmer told her that, as the mistress of Hazlehurst Manor, she ought to occupy this room. It always had been the Squire’s bedchamber, and it ought to be so still.

  ‘Nothing like old ways,’ said Mrs. Trimmer, decisively.

  The room opened into John Treverton’s study. That was a reason why Laura should like it.

  If he were to sit up late at night reading or writing, she would be near him. She might see the face she loved, through the open door, bending over his papers in the lamplight.

  ‘We are going to be a regular Darby and Joan, Mrs. Trimmer,’ she said to the housekeeper, as she made all her small domestic arrangements

  In such trivial work she contrived to get rid of the third week, and then came the lovely summer noontide when she started on her journey, with the faithful Mary in attendance.

  ‘Mary,’ she had said, the night before, ‘I am going to trust you with a great secret, because I believe you are staunch and true.’

  ‘If you could find another young woman in my capacity, mum, that would be stauncherer or truerer, I’ll undertake to eat her without a grain of salt,’ protested Mary, sacrificing grammar to intensity.

  The train from Beechampton took them across a stretch of wild moorland, where the granite cropped up in scattered boulders, as if Titans had been pelting one another, to Didford Junction. At Didford they found John Treverton waiting for them, and here they got on to another line of railway, and into a more pastoral landscape, and so on to Lyonstown — pronounced Linson — where they mounted the stage-coach which was to take them across the moor to Camelot. It was about four o’clock in the after-noon by this time, and it would be evening before they reached the little town among the Cornish hills. Oh, what a happy drive it was across the free open moorland, in the mild afternoon light, a thousand feet above the sea-level, above the smoke and turmoil of cities, far away from all mankind, in a lonely world of heather and granite. The dark brown hills, twin brothers, rose between them and the western sun, now blending into one dark mass of mountain, now standing far apart, as some new turn of the narrow moorland road seemed to alter their position in the landscape. It was like a new world even to Laura, though she came from the sister county, and had lived the best part of her life under the edge of Dartmoor.