Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  ‘I can quite believe that. I believe Mr. Hammond is a worthy man, and that his influence has been very good for you; but that does not make him a good match for Mary. However, you seem to have settled the business among you, and I suppose I must submit. You had better all drink tea with me to morrow afternoon; and I will receive your friend as Mary’s future husband.’

  ‘That is the best and kindest of grandmothers.’

  ‘But I should like to know more of his antecedents and his relations.’

  ‘His antecedents are altogether creditable. He took honours at the University; he has been liked and respected everywhere. He is an orphan, and it is better not to talk to him of his family. He is sensitive on that point, like most men who stand alone in the world.’

  ‘Well, I will hold my peace. You have taken this business into your hands, Maulevrier; and you must be responsible for the result.’

  Maulevrier left his grandmother soon after this, and went downstairs, whistling for very joyousness. Finding the billiard-room deserted he repaired to the drawing-room, where he found Mary playing scraps of melody to her lover at the shadowy end of the room, while Fräulein sat by the fire weaving her web as steadily as one of the Fatal Sisters, and with a brow prophetic of evil.

  Maulevrier crept up to the piano, and came stealthily behind the lovers.

  ‘Bless you, my children,’ he said, hovering over them with outspread hands. ‘I am the dove coming back to the ark. I am the bearer of happy tidings. Lady Maulevrier consents to your acquiring the legal right to make each other miserable for the rest of your lives.’

  ‘God bless you, Maulevrier,’ said Hammond, clasping him by the hand.

  ‘Only as this sister of mine is hardly out of the nursery you will have to wait for her at least a year. So says the dowager, whose word is like the law of the Medes and Persians, and altereth not.’

  ‘I would wait for her twice seven years, as Jacob waited, and toil for her, as Jacob toiled,’ answered Hammond, ‘but I should like to call her my own to-morrow, if it were possible.’

  Nothing could be happier or gayer than the tea-drinking in Lady Maulevrier’s room on the following afternoon. Her ladyship having once given way upon a point knew how to make her concession gracefully. She extended her hand to Mr. Hammond as frankly as if he had been her own particular choice.

  ‘I cannot refuse my granddaughter to her brother’s dearest friend,’ she said, ‘but I think you are two most imprudent young people.’

  ‘Providence takes care of imprudent lovers, just as it does of the birds in their nests,’ answered Hammond, smiling.

  ‘Just as much and no more, I fear. Providence does not keep off the cat or the tax-gatherer.’

  ‘Birds must take care of their nests, and husbands must work for their homes,’ argued Hammond. ‘Heaven gives sweet air and sunlight, and a beautiful world to live in.’

  ‘I think,’ said Lady Maulevrier, looking at him critically, ‘you are just the kind of person who ought to emigrate. You have ideas that would do for the Bush or the Yosemite Valley, but which are too primitive for an over-crowded country.’

  ‘No, Lady Maulevrier, I am not going to steal your granddaughter. When she is my wife she shall live within call. I know she loves her native land, and I don’t think either of us would care to put an ocean between us and rugged old Helvellyn.’

  ‘Of course having made idiots of yourselves up there in the fog and the storm you are going to worship the mountain for ever afterwards,’ said her ladyship laughing.

  Never had she seemed gayer or brighter. Perhaps in her heart of hearts she rejoiced at getting Mary engaged, even to so humble a suitor as fortuneless John Hammond. Ever since the visit of the so-called Rajah she had lived as Damocles lived, with the sword of destiny — the avenging sword — hanging over her by the finest hair. Every time she heard carriage wheels in the drive — every time the hall-door bell rang a little louder than usual, her heart seemed to stop beating and her whole being to hang suspended on a thread. If the thread were to snap, there would come darkness and death. The blow that had paralysed one side of her body must needs, if repeated, bring total extinction. She who believed in no after life saw in her maimed and wasting arm the beginning of death. She who recognised only the life of the body felt that one half of her was already dead. But months had gone by, and Louis Asoph had made no sign. She began to hope that his boasted documents and witnesses were altogether mythical. And yet the engines of the law are slow to put in motion. He might be working up his case, line upon line, with some hard-headed London lawyer; arranging and marshalling his facts; preparing his witnesses; waiting for affidavits from India; working slowly but surely, underground like the mole; and all at once, in an hour, his case might be before the law courts. His story and the story of Lord Maulevrier’s infamy might be town talk again; as it had been forty years ago, when the true story of that crime had been happily unknown.

  Yes, with the present fear of this Louis Asoph’s revelations, of a new scandal, if not a calamity, Lady Maulevrier felt that it was a good thing to have her younger granddaughter’s future in some measure secured. John Hammond had said of himself to Lesbia that he was not the kind of man to fail, and looking at him critically to-day Lady Maulevrier saw the stamp of power and dauntless courage in his countenance and bearing. It is the inner mind of a man which moulds the lines of his face and figure; and a man’s character may be read in the way he walks and holds himself, the action of his hand, his smile, his frown, his general outlook, as clearly as in any phrenological development. John Hammond had a noble outlook: bold, without impudence or self-assertion; self-possessed, without vanity. Yes, assuredly a man to wrestle with difficulty, and to conquer fate.

  When that little tea-drinking was over and Maulevrier and his friend were going away to dress for dinner, Lady Maulevrier detained Mary for a minute or two by her couch. She took her by the hand with unaccustomed tenderness.

  ‘My child, I congratulate you,’ she said. ‘Last night I thought you a fool, but I begin to think that you are wiser than Lesbia. You have won the heart of a noble young man.’

  * * *

  CHAPTER XXIII.

  ‘A YOUNG LAMB’S HEART AMONG THE FULL-GROWN FLOCKS.’

  For three most happy days Mary rejoiced in her lover’s society, Maulevrier was with them everywhere, by brookside and fell, on the lake, in the gardens, in the billiard-room, playing propriety with admirable patience. But this could not last for ever. A man who has to win name and fortune and a home for his young wife cannot spend all his days in the primrose path. Fortunes and reputations are not made in dawdling beside a mountain stream, or watching the play of sunlight and shadow on a green hill-side; unless, indeed, one were a new Wordsworth, and even then fortune and renown are not quickly made.

  And again, Maulevrier, who had been a marvel of good-nature and contentment for the last eight weeks, was beginning to be tired of this lovely Lakeland. Just when Lakeland was daily developing into new beauty, Maulevrier began to feel an itching for London, where he had a comfortable nest in the Albany, and which was to his mind a metropolis expressly created as a centre or starting point for Newmarket, Epsom, Ascot and Goodwood.

  So there came a morning upon which Mary had to say good-bye to those two companions who had so blest and gladdened her life. It was a bright sunshiny morning, and all the world looked gay; which seemed very unkind of Nature, Mary thought. And yet, even in the sadness of this parting, she had much reason to be glad. As she stood with her lover in the library, in the three minutes of tête-à-tête stolen from the argus-eyed Fräulein, folded in his arms, looking up at his manly face, it seemed to her that the mere knowledge that she belonged to him and was beloved by him ought to sustain and console her even in long years of severance. Yes, even if he were one of the knights of old, going to the Holy Land on a crusade full of peril and uncertainty. Even then a woman ought to be brave, having such a lover.

  But her parting was to be only for a f
ew months. Maulevrier promised to come back to Fellside for the August sports, and Hammond was to come with him. Three months — or a little more — and they were to meet again.

  Yet in spite of these arguments for courage, Mary’s face blanched and her eyes grew unutterably sad as she looked up at her lover.

  ‘You will take care of yourself, Jack, for my sake, won’t you, dear?’ she murmured. ‘If you should be ill while you are in London! If you should die—’

  ‘Life is very uncertain, love, but I don’t feel like sickness or death just at present,’ answered Hammond cheerily. ‘Indeed, I feel that the present is full of sweetness, and the future full of hope. Don’t suppose, dear, that I am not grieved at this good-bye; but before we are a year older I hope the time will have come when there will be no more farewells for you and me. I shall be a very exacting husband, Molly. I shall want to spend all the days and hours of my life with you; to have not a fancy or a pursuit in which you cannot share, or with which you cannot sympathise. I hope you will not grow tired of me!’

  ‘Tired!’

  Then came silence, and a long farewell kiss, and then the voice of Maulevrier shouting in the hall, just in time to warn the lovers, before Miss Müller opened the door and exclaimed,

  ‘Oh, Mr. Hammond, we have been looking for you everywhere. The luggage is all in the carriage, and Maulevrier says there is only just time to get to Windermere!’

  In another minute or so the carriage was driving down the hill; and Mary stood in the porch looking after the travellers.

  ‘It seems as if it is my fate to stand here and see everybody drive away,’ she said to herself.

  And then she looked round at the lovely gardens, bright with spring flowers, the trees glorious with their young, fresh foliage, and the vast panorama of hill and dale, and felt that it was a wicked thing to murmur in the midst of such a world. And she remembered the great unhoped-for bliss that had come to her within the last four days, and the cloud upon her brow vanished, as she clasped her hands in child-like joyousness.

  ‘God bless you, dear old Helvellyn,’ she exclaimed, looking up at the sombre crest of the mountain. ‘Perhaps if it had not been for you he would have never proposed.’

  But she was obliged to dismiss this idea instantly; for to suppose John Hammond’s avowal of his love an accident, the mere impulse of a weak moment, would be despair. Had he not told her how she had grown nearer and nearer to his heart, day by day, and hour by hour, until she had become part of his life? He had told her this — he, in whom she believed as in the very spirit of truth.

  She wandered about the gardens for an hour after the carriage had started for Windermere, revisiting every spot where she and her lover had walked together within the last three days, living over again the rapture of those hours, repeating to herself his words, recalling his looks, with the fatuity of a first girlish love. And yet amidst the silliness inseparable from love’s young dream, there was a depth of true womanly feeling, thoughtful, unselfish, forecasting a future which was not to travel always along the primrose path of dalliance — a future in which the roses were not always to be thornless.

  John Hammond was going to London to work for a position in the world, to strive and labour among the seething mass of strugglers, all pressing onward for the same goal — independence, wealth, renown. Little as Mary know of the world by experience, she had at least heard the wiseacres talk; and that which she had heard was calculated to depress rather than to inspire industrious youth. She had heard how the professions were all over-crowded: how a mighty army of young men were walking the hospitals, all intent on feeling the pulses and picking the pockets of the rising generation: how at the Bar men were growing old and grey before they saw their first brief: how competitors were elbowing and hustling each other upon every road, thronging at every gate. And while masculine youth strove and wrestled for places in the race, aunts and sisters and cousins were pressing into the same arena, doing their best to crowd out the uncles and the brothers and the nephews.

  ‘Poor Jack,’ sighed Mary, ‘at the worst we can go to the Red River country and grow corn.’

  This was her favourite fancy, that she and her lover should find their first dwelling in the new world, live as humbly as the peasants lived round Grasmere, and patiently wait upon fortune. And yet that would not be happiness, unless Maulevrier were to come and stay with them every autumn. Nothing could reconcile Mary to being separated from Maulevrier for any lengthened period.

  There were hours in which she was more hopeful, and defied the wiseacres. Clever young men had succeeded in the past — clever men whose hair was not yet grey had come to the front in the present. Granted that these were the exceptional men, the fine flower of humanity. Did she not know that John Hammond was as far above average youth as Helvellyn was above yonder mound in her grandmother’s shrubbery?

  Yes, he would succeed in literature, in politics, in whatever career he had chosen for himself. He was a man to do the thing he set himself to do, were it ever so difficult. To doubt his success would be to doubt his truth and his honesty; for he had sworn to her he would make her life bright and happy, and that evil days should never come to her; and he was not the man to promise that which he was not able to perform.

  The house seemed terribly dull now that the two young men were gone. There was an oppressive silence in the rooms which had lately resounded with Maulevrier’s frank, boyish laughter, and with his friend’s deep, manly tones — a silence broken only by the click of Fräulein Müller’s needles.

  The Fräulein was not disposed to be sympathetic or agreeable about Lady Mary’s engagement. Firstly, she had not been consulted about it. The thing had been done, she considered, in an underhand manner; and Lady Maulevrier, who had begun by strenuously opposing the match, had been talked over in a way that proved the latent weakness of that great lady’s character. Secondly, Miss Müller, having herself for some reason missed such joys as are involved in being wooed and won, was disposed to look sourly upon all love affairs, and to take a despondent view of all matrimonial engagements.

  She did not say anything openly uncivil to Mary Haselden; but she let the damsel see that she pitied her and despised her infatuated condition; and this was so unpleasant that Mary was fain to fall back upon the society of ponies and terriers, and to take up her pilgrim’s staff and go wandering over the hills, carrying her happy thoughts into solitary places, and sitting for hours in a heathery hollow, steeped in a sea of summer light, and trying to paint the mountain side and the rush of the waterfall. Her sketch-book was an excuse for hours of solitude, for the indulgence of an endless day-dream.

  Sometimes she went among her humble friends in the Grasmere cottages, or in the villages of Great and Little Langdale; and she had now a new interest in these visits, for she had made up her mind that it was her solemn duty to learn housekeeping — not such housekeeping as might have been learnt at Fellside, supposing she had mustered the courage to ask the dignified upper-servants in that establishment to instruct her; but such domestic arts as are needed in the dwellings of the poor. The art of making a very little money go a great way; the art of giving grace, neatness, prettiness to the smallest rooms and the shabbiest furniture; the art of packing all the ugly appliances and baser necessities of daily life, the pots and kettles and brooms and pails, into the narrowest compass, and hiding them from the æsthetic eye. Mary thought that if she began by learning the homely devices of the villagers — the very A B C of cookery and housewifery — she might gradually enlarge upon this simple basis to suit an income of from five to seven hundred a year. The house-mothers from whom she sought information were puzzled at this sudden curiosity about domestic matters. They looked upon the thing as a freak of girlhood which drifted into eccentricity, from sheer idleness; yet they were not the less ready to teach Mary anything she desired to learn. They told her those secret arts by which coppers and brasses are made things of beauty, and meet adornment for an old oak mantelshelf. They allo
wed her to look on at the milking of the cow, and at the churning of the butter; and at bread making, and cake making, and pie and pudding making; and some pleasant hours were spent in the acquirement of this useful knowledge. Mary did not neglect the invalid during this new phase of her existence. Lady Maulevrier was a lover of routine, and she liked her granddaughter to go to her at the same hour every day. From eleven to twelve was the time for Mary’s duty as amanuensis. Sometimes there were no letters to be written. Sometimes there were several; but her ladyship rarely allowed the task to go beyond the stroke of noon. At noon Mary was free, and free till five o’clock, when she was generally in attendance, ready to give Lady Maulevrier her afternoon tea, and sit and talk with her, and tell her any scraps of local news which she had gathered in the day.

  There were days on which her ladyship preferred to take her tea alone, and Mary was left free to follow her own devices till dinner-time.

  ‘I do not feel equal even to your society to-day, my dear,’ her ladyship would say; ‘go and enjoy yourself with your dogs and your tennis;’ forgetting that there was very seldom anybody on the premises with whom Lady Mary could play tennis.

  But in these lonely days of Mary Haselden’s life there was one crowning bliss which was almost enough to sweeten solitude, and take away the sting of separation; and that was the delight of expecting and receiving her lover’s letters. Busily as Mr. Hammond must be engaged in fighting the battle of life, he was in no way wanting in his duty as a lover. He wrote to Mary every other day; but though his letters were long, they told her hardly anything of himself or his occupation. He wrote about pictures, books, music, such things as he knew must be interesting to her; but of his own struggles not a word.