Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  ‘Why cruel?’

  ‘Because you unconsciously taunt me with my poverty. The eight or ten patients I ought to see to-morrow morning are worth a hundred pounds a year to me at most, and yet I can hardly venture to jeopardise that insignificant income.’

  ‘How you will look back and laugh at these days years hence, when you are being driven in your brougham from Savile-row to the railway station, to start for Windsor Castle, at the command of a telegram from royalty.’

  ‘Leaving royal telegrams and Windsor Castle out of the question, there is such a distance between my present abode and Savile-row that I doubt my ever being able to traverse it,’ said Gerard; ‘but in the meantime my few paying patients are of vital importance to me, and I have some rather critical cases among my poor people.’

  ‘Poor dear things, I am sure they can all wait,’ said Celia. ‘Perhaps it will do them good to suspend their treatment for a day or two. Physic seems at best such a doubtful advantage.’

  ‘I have a friend who looks after anything serious,’ said Gerard, dubiously. ‘If I were to follow my own inclination I should most assuredly stay.’

  ‘Then follow it,’ cried Celia. ‘I always do. Mamma, give Mr. Gerard some bacon and potatoes, while I run and tell Peter to go to the George, and let them know that the omnibus need not call here.’

  ‘I am afraid I am imposing upon your kind hospitality, and giving you a great deal of trouble,’ said Gerard, when Celia had slipped out of the room to give her orders.

  ‘You are giving us no trouble; and you must know that I should be happy to receive any friend of my son’s.’

  Gerard’s sallow cheek flushed faintly at this speech. He felt that there was a kind of imposture in his position at the Vicarage. Every one insisted upon regarding him as an intimate friend of Edward Clare; and already it had been made clear to him that Edward was a man whom he could never make his friend. But for Edward Clare’s mother and sister he had a much more cordial feeling.

  He sat down to breakfast with the two ladies. The Vicar would breakfast later, and one of Edward’s privileges as a poet of the future was to lie in bed until ten o’clock every morning in the present. Never, perhaps, was a merrier breakfast eaten. Gerard, having made up his mind to stay, abandoned himself unreservedly to the pleasure of the moment. Celia questioned him about his life, and drew from him a lively description of some of the more curious incidents in his career. He had but rarely joined in the wilder amusements of his fellow students, but he had joined them often enough to see all that was strange and interesting in London life. Celia listened open-eyed, with rosy lips apart in wonder.

  ‘Ah, that is what I call living,’ she exclaimed. ‘How different from our system of vegetation here. I’m sure if Harvey had lived all his life at Hazlehurst he would never have found out anything about the circulation of the blood. I don’t believe ours does circulate.’

  ‘If you could only know how sweet your rural stagnation seems to a dweller in cities,’ said Gerard.

  ‘Let the dweller in cities try it for a month or six weeks,’ said Celia. ‘He will be weary enough by the end of that time; unless he is one of those sporting creatures who are always happy as long as they can go about with a gun or a fishing rod murdering something.’

  ‘I should want neither gun nor rod,’ said Gerard. ‘I think I could find complete happiness among these hills.’

  ‘What, away from all your hospitals?’

  ‘I am speaking of my holiday life. I could not afford to live always away from the hospitals. I have to learn my profession.’

  ‘I thought you had done with all that when you passed your examination.’

  ‘A medical man has never done learning. Medical science is progressive. The tyro of to-day knows more than the adept of a century ago.’

  As Mr. Gerard had only one day to spend at the Vicarage, Celia gave herself up to the task of making that one day agreeable to him, with the utmost benevolence and amiability. Her brother seemed dull and morose, and shut himself in his den all day, upon the pretence of polishing a lyric he had flung off, in a moment of inspiration, for one of the magazines; so Celia had the visitor thrown altogether on her hands, as she complained afterwards rather plaintively, though she bore the infliction pretty cheerfully at the time.

  The two young people spent the morning in conversation beside the breakfast-room fire, Celia pretending to work very hard at an antimacassar in crewels; while Gerard paced the room, and stared out of the window, and fidgeted on his chair, after the manner of a young man, not belonging to the tame cat species, when he finds himself shut up in a country house with a young woman. In spite of this restlessness, however, the surgeon seemed particularly well pleased with his idle morning. He found a great deal to talk about — people — places books — life in the abstract — and, finally, his own youth and boyhood in particular. He told Celia much more than it was his habit to tell an acquaintance. Those blue eyes of hers expressed such gentle sympathy; the pretty, pouting, under lip had a tender look that tempted him to trust her. As a physiognomist he was inclined to think well of Celia, despite her frivolity. As a young man he was inclined to admire her.

  ‘You must have had a very hard youth,’ she said compassionately, when he had given her a sketch, half sad, half humorous, of his life at the Marischal College, Aberdeen.

  ‘Yes, and I am likely to have a hard manhood,’ he answered gravely. ‘How can I ever dare ask a woman to share a life which has at present so little promise of sunshine?’

  ‘But do not all your great men begin in that kind of way?’ interrogated Celia; ‘Sir Astley Cooper, for instance, and that poor dear who found out the separate functions of the nerves that direct our thoughts and movements — though goodness knows what actual use that discovery could have been to anybody—’

  ‘I think you must mean Sir Charles Bell,’ suggested Gerard, rather disgusted at this flippant mention of genius.

  ‘I suppose I do,’ said Celia. ‘He wrote a book about hands, I believe. I only wish he had written a book about gloves; for your glove-maker’s idea of anatomy is simply absurd. I never yet could find a maker who understands my thumb,’

  ‘What an advantage my sex has over yours in that respect,’ remarked Gerard.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘We never need wear gloves, except when we dance or when we drive.’

  ‘Ah, sighed Celia, with her wondering look. ‘I suppose there are sane men in big places like London and Manchester, who walk about without gloves. They wouldn’t do it here, where every-body knows everybody else.’

  ‘I think I have bought about two pairs of gloves since I attained to man’s estate,’ said Gerard.

  ‘But your dances? How do you manage for those?’

  ‘Easily. I never dance.’

  ‘What, are you never tired of playing the wallflower? Do not German waltzes inspire you?’

  ‘I never go in the way of being inspired. I have never been to a party since I came to London.’

  ‘Good gracious! Why don’t you go to parties?’

  ‘I could give you fifty reasons, but perhaps one will do as well. Nobody ever asks me.’

  ‘Poor fellow!’ cried Celia, with intense compassion. Nothing he had told her of his early struggles had touched her like this. Here was the acme of desolation. ‘What, you live in London all the season, and nobody asks you to dances and things?’

  ‘In that part of London I inhabit there is no season. Life there runs on the same monotonous wheels all the year round — poverty all the year round — hard work all the year round — debt, and difficulty, and sickness, and sorrow all the year round.’

  ‘You are making my heart bleed,’ said Celia; ‘at least I suppose that’s anatomically impossible, and I ought not to mention such an absurdity to a doctor; but you are making me feel quite too unhappy.’

  ‘I should be sorry to do that,’ returned Gerard gently, ‘and it would be a very bad return for your kindness to me. Do not imagine th
at the kind of life I lead is a silent martyrdom. I am happy in my profession. I am getting on quite as fast as I ever expected to get on. I believe — yes, I do honestly believe, that I shall make name and fortune sooner or later, if I live long enough. It is only when I reflect how long it must be before I can conquer a position good enough for a wife to share, that I am inclined to feel impatient.’

  Celia became suddenly interested in the shading of a vine leaf, and bent her face so low over her work, that a flood of crimson rushed into her cheeks, and she felt disinclined to look up again.

  She gave a little, nervous cough presently, and, as Gerard was pacing the room in silence, felt herself constrained to say something.

  ‘I dare say the young lady to whom you are engaged will not mind how long she has to wait,’ Celia suggested; ‘or, if she is very brave, she will not shrink from sharing your early struggles.’

  ‘There is no such young lady in question; answered Gerard. ‘I am not engaged.’

  ‘I beg your pardon. Ah, I forgot you had said you didn’t go to parties.’

  ‘Do you think a man should choose a wife at a dance?’

  ‘I don’t know. Such things do happen at dances, don’t they?’

  ‘Possibly. For my own part, I would rather see my future wife at home, by her father’s fireside.’

  ‘Darning stockings,’ suggested Celia. ‘I believe that is the real test of feminine virtue. A woman may be allowed to play and sing; she may even speak a couple of modern languages; but her chief merit is supposed to lie in her ability to darn stockings and make a pudding. Now, Mr. Gerard, is not that the old-established idea of perfection in womankind?’

  ‘I believe that the darning and pudding-making are vaguely supposed to include all the domestic virtues. It may seem sordid in a lover to consider such details, but the happiness of a husband depends some what upon his wife’s housekeeping. Could any home be Eden in which the cook gave warning once a month, and the policeman eat up all the cold meat?’

  Celia laughed, but the laugh ended with a sigh. She had made up her mind that if ever she married her husband must be rich enough to be above the petty struggles of household economy, the cheese parings of a limited income. He must be able to keep at least a pony carriage, and the pony carriage must be perfect in all its appointments. A footman Celia might forego, but she must have the neatest of parlour-maids. She did not aspire to get her gowns from Worth: but she must not be circumscribed as to collars and cuffs, and must be able to employ the best dressmaker in Exeter or Plymouth.

  But here was a young man who must wait for years before he could marry; or must drag some poor young woman down into the dismal swamp of genteel poverty, Celia felt honestly sorry for him. Of all the men she had ever met he seemed to her the most manly, the brightest, the bravest — per haps altogether the best. If not exactly handsome, there was that in his marked features and vivid expression which Celia thought more attractive than absolute regularity of line, or splendour of colour.

  Mrs. Clare had been absent all the morning, engaged in small domestic duties which she considered important, but which Celia described sweepingly as ‘muddling.’ She appeared by-and-bye at luncheon — a meal which the Vicar never ate, and entertained her guest with a dissertation on the tiresomeness of servants, and the various difficulties of housekeeping, until Edward — who honoured the family circle with his society while he refreshed his exhausted muse with cold roast beef and pickles — ruthlessly cut short his mother’s sermonising, and entered upon a critical discussion with George Gerard as to the relative merits of Browning and Swinburne.

  Celia was surprised to discover how widely the young surgeon had read. She had expected to find him ignorant of almost everything outside his own particular domain.

  ‘How can you find time for light literature?’ she asked.

  ‘Light literature is my only relaxation.’

  ‘You go to the theatres now and then, I suppose?’

  ‘I like to go when there is something good to be seen,’ answered Gerard, flushing at the recollection of the time when he had gone three nights a week to feast his eyes upon La Chicot’s florid loveliness.

  He felt ashamed of an infatuation which at the time had seemed to him as noble as the Greek’s worship of abstract beauty.

  By the time luncheon was finished the rain had ceased, and the gray, wintry sky, though sunless, looked no longer threatening.

  ‘Not a bad afternoon for a ramble on yonder moor,’ said Gerard, standing in the bay window, looking out at the landscape. ‘Would you have the courage to be my pioneer, Miss Clare?’

  Celia looked at her brother, interrogatively.

  ‘I’m not in the humour for any more scribbling to-day,’ said Edward,’ so perhaps a good long walk would be the easiest way of getting rid of the afternoon. Put on your waterproof and clump soles, Celia, and show us the way.’

  Celia ran off, delighted at the opportunity. A moorland ramble with a conversable young man was at least a novelty.

  In the hall the damsel met her mother, and in a sudden overflow of spirits stopped to give her a filial hug.

  ‘Let us have something nice for dinner, mother dear,’ she pleaded. ‘It’s his last evening.’

  The tone of the request inspired Mrs. Clare with vague fears. A girl could hardly have said more had the visitor been her plighted lover.

  ‘What an idea!’ she exclaimed, good-humouredly. ‘Of course I shall do the best I can, but Monday is such an awkward day.’

  ‘Of course, dear. We all know that, but don’t let it be quite a Monday dinner,’ urged Celia.

  ‘As for that young man, I don’t believe he knows what he is eating.’

  ‘Heaven forbid that he should be like my father and his dinner the most important event in his day!’ retorted Celia, whereat Mrs. Clare murmured mildly, —

  ‘My love, your father has a very peculiar constitution. There are things which he can eat, and things which he cannot eat.’

  ‘Of course, you dear deluded mater. Cold mutton is poisonous to his constitution; but I never heard of his being the worse for truffled turkey.’

  And then Celia skipped off, to attire herself, not unbecomingly, in a dark gray Ulster, and the most impertinent of billycock hats.

  The ramble on the moor was a success. Edward held himself aloof, and smoked his cigar in gloomy silence, but the two others were as merry as a brace of schoolboys taking a stolen holiday. They clambered the steepest paths, crossed the wildest of hill and hollow, narrowly escaped coming to grief in boggy ground, and laughed and talked with inexhaustible spirits all the time. George Gerard hardly knew himself, and was struck with wonder at finding that life could be so pleasant. The wintry air was fresh and clear, the wind whistled gaily over the vast sweep of undulating turf and heather. Just at sunset there came a flood of yellow light over the low western sky; a farewell smile from a sun that had hidden himself all day.

  ‘Good gracious!’ cried Celia, ‘we shall barely have time to scamper home to dinner; and if there is one thing that irritates papa more than another, it is to wait five minutes for his dinner. He never waits more than five minutes. If he did, I believe lunacy would ensue before the tenth. You ought not to have led me astray so far, Mr. Gerard.’

  ‘I think it is you who have been leading me astray,’ said Gerard, half grave, half gay. ‘I never felt so far from my work-a-day self in my life. You have a great deal to answer for, Miss Clare.’

  Celia blushed at the charge, but did not reply to it. She turned and surveyed the ground over which they had travelled.

  ‘I can’t see Edward anywhere,’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Do you know, I have an idea that he left us about an hour ago,’ said Gerard.

  ‘What a ridiculous young man! And now he will be home ever so long before us, and make capital out of his punctuality with my father.

  ‘Could you imagine him capable of such meanness?’

  ‘He is a brother,’ answered Celia, ‘and in t
hat capacity capable of anything. Come along, pray, Mr. Gerard. We must scamper home awfully fast.’

  ‘Won’t you take my arm?’ asked Gerard.

  ‘Walk arm in arm over the moor! That would be too ridiculous,’ exclaimed Celia, tripping on lightly over hillock and hollow. ‘Do make haste, Mr. Gerard, or we shall be lost in the darkness.’

  George Gerard thought it would be rather nice to be benighted on the moor with Celia, or at any rate to go astray for an hour or so and lengthen their ramble, Happily, however, the lights of the village, glimmering in the valley below, were a safe guide to their footsteps, and Celia knew the pathway that descended the moor as well as she knew her father’s garden. The only peril was the risk of getting into some boggy patch of the common at the bottom of the moor, and even here Celia’s knowledge availed to keep them out of mischief. They arrived at the Vicarage breathless, with glowing cheeks, just in time to make a hurried toilet for dinner.

  Oh, how much too short that winter evening, though one of the longest in the year, seemed to George Gerard! And yet its pleasures were of the simplest. Three of Celia’s particular friends — the one eligible youth of Hazlehurst and his two sisters — dropped in to spend the evening, and the Vicarage drawing-room resounded with youthful voices and youthful laughter. Celia and the two young ladies played and sang; and though neither playing nor singing was above the average young lady power, the voices were tuneful and fresh, and the fingers were equal to doing justice to a German waltz. The eligible young man was capable of joining in a glee, and George Gerard consented to try the bass part, and proved himself the possessor of a fine bass voice and a correct ear, so they asked each other, ‘Who would o’er the downs so free.?’ and they requested every one to ‘See our oars with feathered spray,’ and they made valorous attempts at Bishop’s famous’ Stay, pr’ythee, stay,’ in which they did not break down more than fifteen times, and they altogether enjoyed themselves immensely, while the Vicar read John Bull and the Guardian from end to end, and good Mrs. Clare nodded comfortably over a crochet comforter, giving her ivory hook a vague dig into the woolly mass every now and then, with an idea that she was working diligently.