Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  ‘Poor fellow,’ thought Mary. ‘He is afraid to sadden me by telling me how hard the struggle is.’

  Her own letters to her betrothed were simple outpourings of girlish love, breathing that too flattering-sweet idolatry which an innocent girl gives to her first lover. Mary wrote as if she herself were of the least possible value among created things.

  With one of Mr. Hammond’s earlier letters came the engagement ring; no half-hoop of brilliants or sapphires, rubies or emeralds, no gorgeous triple circlet of red, white, and green; but only a massive band of dead gold, on the inside of which was engraved this posy—’For ever.’

  Mary thought it the loveliest ring she had ever seen in her life.

  May was half over and the last patch of snow had vanished from the crest of Helvellyn, from Eagle’s Crag and Raven’s Crag, and Coniston Old Man. Spring — slow to come along these shadowy gorges — had come in real earnest now, spring that was almost summer; and Lady Maulevrier’s gardens were as lovely as dreamland. But it was an unpeopled paradise. Mary had the grounds all to herself, except at those stated times when the Fräulein, who was growing lazier and larger day by day in her leisurely and placid existence, took her morning and afternoon constitutional on the terrace in front of the drawing-room, or solemnly perambulated the shrubberies.

  On fine days Mary lived in the garden, save when she was far afield learning the domestic arts from the cottagers. She read French and German, and worked conscientiously at her intellectual education, as well as at domestic economy. For she told herself that accomplishments and culture might be useful to her in her married life. She might be able to increase her husband’s means by giving lessons abroad, or taking pupils at home. She was ready to do anything. She would teach the stupidest children, or scrub floors, or bake bread. There was no service she would deem degrading for his sake. She meant when she married to drop her courtesy title. She would not be Lady Mary Hammond, a poor sprig of nobility, but plain Mrs. Hammond, a working man’s wife.

  Lesbia’s presentation was over, and had realised all Lady Kirkbank’s expectations. The Society papers were unanimous in pronouncing Lord Maulevrier’s sister the prettiest débutante of the season. They praised her classical features, the admirable poise of her head, her peerless complexion. They described her dress at the drawing-room; they described her ‘frocks’ in the Park and at Sandown. They expatiated on the impression she had made at great assemblies. They hinted at even Royal admiration. All this, frivolous fribble though it might be, Lady Maulevrier read with delight, and she was still more gratified by Lesbia’s own account of her successes. But as the season advanced Lesbia’s letters to her grandmother grew briefer — mere hurried scrawls dashed off while the carriage was at the door, or while her maid was brushing her hair. Lady Maulevrier divined, with the keen instinct of love, that she counted for very little in Lesbia’s life, now that the whirligig of society, the fret and fever of fashion, had begun.

  One afternoon in May, at that hour when Hyde Park is fullest, and the carriages move slowly in triple rank along the Lady’s Mile, and the mounted constables jog up and down with a business-like air which sets every one on the alert for the advent of the Princess of Wales, just at that hour when Lesbia sat in Lady Kirkbank’s barouche, and distributed gracious bows and enthralling smiles to her numerous acquaintance, Mary rode slowly down the Fell, after a rambling ride on the safest and most venerable of mountain ponies. The pony was grey, and Mary was grey, for she wore a neat little homespun habit made by the local tailor, and a neat little felt hat with a ptarmigan’s feather.

  All was very quiet at Fellside as she went in at the stable gate. There was not an underling stirring in the large old stable-yard which had remained almost unaltered for a century and a half; for Lady Maulevrier, whilst spending thousands on the new part of the house, had deemed the existing stables good enough for her stud. They were spacious old stables, built as solidly as a Norman castle, and with all the virtues and all the vices of their age.

  Mary looked round her with a sigh. The stillness of the place was oppressive, and within doors she knew there would be the same stillness, made still more oppressive by the society of the Fräulein, who grew duller and duller every day, as it seemed to Mary.

  She took her pony into the dusky old stable, where four other ponies began rattling their halters in the gloom, by way of greeting. A bundle of purple tares lay ready in a corner for Mary to feed her favourites; and for the next ten minutes or so she was happily employed going from stall to stall, and gratifying that inordinate appetite for green meat which seems natural to all horses.

  Not a groom or stable-boy appeared while she was in the stable; and she was just going away, when her attention was caught by a flood of sunshine streaming into an old disused harness-room at the end of the stable — a room with one small window facing the Fell.

  Whence could that glow of western light come? Assuredly not from the low-latticed window which faced eastward, and was generally obscured by a screen of cobwebs. The room was only used as a storehouse for lumber, and it was nobody’s business to clean the window.

  Mary looked in, curious to solve the riddle. A door which she had often noticed, but never seen opened, now stood wide open, and the old quadrangular garden, which was James Steadman’s particular care, smiled at her in the golden evening light. Seen thus, this little old Dutch garden seemed to Mary the prettiest thing she had ever looked upon. There were beds of tulips and hyacinths, ranunculus, narcissus, tuberose, making a blaze of colour against the old box borders, a foot high. The crumbling old brick walls of the outbuildings, and that dungeon-like wall which formed the back of the new house, were clothed with clematis and wistaria, woodbine and magnolia. All that loving labour could do had been done day by day for the last forty years to make this confined space a thing of beauty. Mary went out of the dark stable into the sunny garden, and looked round her, full of admiration for James Steadman’s work.

  ‘If ever Jack and I can afford to have a garden, I hope we shall be able to make it like this,’ she thought. ‘It is such a comfort to know that so small a garden can be pretty: for of course any garden we could afford must be small.’

  Lady Mary had no idea that this quadrangle was spacious as compared with the narrow strip allotted to many a suburban villa calling itself ‘an eligible residence.’

  In the centre of the garden there was an old sundial, with a stone bench at the base, and, as she came upon an opening in the circular yew tree hedge which environed this sundial, and from which the flower beds radiated in a geometrical pattern, Lady Mary was surprised to see an old man — a very old man — sitting on this bench, and basking in the low light of the westering sun.

  His figure was shrunken and bent, and he sat with his chin resting on the handle of a crutched stick, and his head leaning forward. His long white hair fell in thin straggling locks over the collar of his coat. He had an old-fashioned, mummyfied aspect, and Mary thought he must be very, very old.

  Very, very old! In a flash there came back upon her the memory of John Hammond’s curiosity about a hoary and withered old man whom he had met on the Fell in the early morning. She remembered how she had taken him to see old Sam Barlow, and how he had protested that Sam in no wise resembled the strange-looking old man of the Fell. And now here, close to the Fell, was a face and figure which in every detail resembled that ancient stranger whom Hammond had described so graphically.

  It was very strange. Could this person be the same her lover had seen two months ago? And, if so, had he been living at Fellside all the time; or was he only an occasional visitor of Steadman’s?

  While she stood for a few moments meditating thus, the old man raised his head and looked up at her, with eyes that burned like red-hot coals under his shaggy white brows. The look scared her. There was something awful in it, like the gaze of an evil spirit, a soul in torment, and she began to move away, with side-long steps, her eyes riveted on that uncanny countenance.

 
‘Don’t go,’ said the man, with an authoritative air, rattling his bony fingers upon the bench. ‘Sit down here by my side, and talk to me. Don’t be frightened, child. You wouldn’t, if you knew what they say of me indoors.’ He made a motion of his head towards the windows of the old wing—’”Harmless,” they say, “quite harmless. Let him alone, he’s harmless.” A tiger with his claws cut and his teeth drawn — an old, grey-bearded tiger, ghastly and grim, but harmless — a cobra with the poison-bag plucked out of his jaw! The venom grows again, child — the snake’s venom — but youth never comes back. Old, and helpless, and harmless!’

  Again Mary tried to move away, but those evil eyes held her as if she were a bird riveted by the gaze of a serpent.

  ‘Why do you shrink away?’ asked the old man, frowning at her. ‘Sit down here, and let me talk to you. I am accustomed to be obeyed.’

  Old and feeble and shrunken as he was, there was a power in his tone of command which Mary was unable to resist. She felt very sure that he was imbecile or mad. She knew that madmen are apt to imagine themselves great personages, and to take upon themselves, with a wonderful power of impersonation, the dignity and authority of their imaginary rank; and she supposed that it must be thus with this strange old man. She struggled against her sense of terror. After all there could be no real danger, in the broad daylight, within the precincts of her own home, within call of the household.

  She seated herself on the bench by the unknown, willing to humour him a little; and he turned himself about slowly, as if every bone in his body were stiff with age, and looked at her with a deliberate scrutiny.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XXIV.

  ‘NOW NOTHING LEFT TO LOVE OR HATE.’

  The old man sat looking at Mary in silence for some moments; not a great space of time, perhaps, as marked by the shadow on the dial behind them, but to Mary that gaze was unpleasantly prolonged. He looked at her as if he could read every pulsation in every fibre of her brain, and knew exactly what it meant.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, at last.

  ‘My name is Mary Haselden.’

  ‘Haselden,’ he repeated musingly, ‘I have heard that name before.’

  And then he resumed his former attitude, his chin resting on the handle of his crutch-stick, his eyes bent upon the gravel path, their unholy brightness hidden under the penthouse brows.

  ‘Haselden,’ he murmured, and repeated the name over and over again, slowly, dreamily, with a troubled tone, like some one trying to work out a difficult problem. ‘Haselden — when? where?’

  And then with a profound sigh he muttered, ‘Harmless, quite harmless. You may trust him anywhere. Memory a blank, a blank, a blank, my lord!’

  His head sank lower upon his breast, and again he sighed, the sigh of a spirit in torment, Mary thought. Her vivid imagination was already interested, her quick sympathies were awakened.

  She looked at him wonderingly, compassionately. So old, so infirm, and with a mind astray; and yet there were indications in his speech and manner that told of reason struggling against madness, like the light behind storm-clouds. He had tones that spoke of a keen sensitiveness to pain, not the lunatic’s imbecile placidity. She observed him intently, trying to make out what manner of man he was.

  He did not belong to the peasant class: of that she felt assured. The shrunken, tapering hand had never worked at peasant’s work. The profile turned towards her was delicate to effeminacy. The man’s clothes were shabby and old-fashioned, but they were a gentleman’s garments, the cloth of a finer texture than she had ever seen worn by her brother. The coat, with its velvet collar, was of an old-world fashion. She remembered having seen just such a coat in an engraved portrait of Count d’Orsay, a print nearly fifty years old. No Dalesman born and bred ever wore such a coat; no tailor in the Dales could have made it.

  The old man looked up after a long pause, during which Mary felt afraid to move. He looked at her again with inquiring eyes, as if her presence there had only just become known to him.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked again.

  ‘I told you my name just now. I am Mary Haselden.’

  ‘Haselden — that is a name I knew — once. Mary? I think my mother’s name was Mary. Yes, yes, I remember that. You have a sweet face, Mary — like my mother’s. She had brown eyes, like yours, and auburn hair. You don’t recollect her, perhaps?’

  ‘Alas! poor maniac,’ thought Mary, ‘you have lost all count of time. Fifty years to you in the confusion of your distraught brain, are but as yesterday.’

  ‘No, of course not, of course not,’ he muttered; ‘how should she recollect my mother, who died while I was a boy? Impossible. That must be half a century ago.’

  ‘Good evening to you,’ said Mary, rising with a great effort, so strong was her feeling of being spellbound by the uncanny old man, ‘I must go indoors now.’

  He stretched out his withered old hand, small, semi-transparent, with the blue veins showing darkly under the parchment-coloured skin, and grasped Mary’s arm.

  ‘Don’t go,’ he pleaded. ‘I like your face, child; I like your voice — I like to have you here. What do you mean by going indoors? Where do you live?’

  ‘There,’ said Mary, pointing to the dead wall which faced them. ‘In the new part of Fellside House. I suppose you are staying in the old part with James Steadman.’

  She had made up her mind that this crazy old man must be a relation of Steadman’s to whom he gave hospitality either with or without her ladyship’s consent. All powerful as Lady Maulevrier had ever been in her own house, it was just possible that now, when she was a prisoner in her own rooms, certain small liberties might be taken, even by so faithful a servant as Steadman.

  ‘Staying with James Steadman,’ repeated the old man in a meditative tone. ‘Yes, I stay with Steadman. A good servant, a worthy person. It is only for a little while. I shall be leaving Westmoreland next week. And you live in that house, do you?’ pointing to the dead wall. ‘Whose house?’

  ‘Lady Maulevrier’s. I am Lady Maulevrier’s granddaughter.’

  ‘Lady Mau-lev-rier.’ He repeated the name in syllables. ‘A good name — an old title — as old as the conquest. A Norman race those Maulevriers. And you are Lady Maulevrier’s granddaughter! You should be proud. The Maulevriers were always a proud race.’

  ‘Then I am no true Maulevrier,’ answered Mary gaily.

  She was beginning to feel more at her ease with the old man. He was evidently mad, as mad as a March hare; but his madness seemed only the harmless lunacy of extreme old age. He had flashes of reason, too. Mary began to feel a friendly interest in him. To youth in its flush of life and vigour there seems something so unspeakably sad and pitiable in feebleness and age — the brief weak remnant of life, the wreck of body and mind, sunning itself in the declining rays of a sun that is so soon to shine upon its grave.

  ‘What, are you not proud?’ asked the old man.

  ‘Not at all. I have been taught to consider myself a very insignificant person; and I am going to marry a poor man. It would not become me to be proud.’

  ‘But you ought not to do that,’ said the old man. ‘You ought not to marry a poor man. Poverty is a bad thing, my dear. You are a pretty girl, and ought to marry a man with a handsome fortune. Poor men have no pleasure in this world — they might just as well be dead. I am poor, as you see. You can tell by this threadbare coat’ — he looked down at the sleeve from which the nap was worn in places—’I am as poor as a church mouse.’

  ‘But you have kind friends, I dare say,’ Mary said, soothingly. ‘You are well taken care of, I am sure.’

  ‘Yes, I am well taken care of — very well taken care of. How long is it, I wonder — how many weeks, or months, or years, since they have taken care of me? It seems a long, long time; but it is all like a dream — a long dream. Once I used to try and wake myself. I used to try and struggle out of that weary dream. But that was ages ago. I am satisfied now — I am quite content now — s
o long as the weather is warm, and I can sit out here in the sun.’

  ‘It is growing chilly now,’ said Mary, ‘and I think you ought to go indoors. I know that I must go.’

  ‘Yes, I must go in now — I am getting shivery,’ answered the old man, meekly. ‘But I want to see you again, Mary — I like your face — and I like your voice. It strikes a chord here,’ touching his breast, ‘which has long been silent. Let me see you again, child. When can I see you again?’

  ‘Do you sit here every afternoon when it is fine?’

  ‘Yes, every day — all day long sometimes when the sun is warm.’

  ‘Then I will come here to see you.’

  ‘You must keep it a secret, then,’ said the old man, with a crafty look. ‘If you don’t they will shut me up in the house, perhaps. They don’t like me to see people, for fear I should talk. I have heard Steadman say so. Yet what should I talk about, heaven help me? Steadman says my memory is quite gone, and that I am childish and harmless — childish and harmless. I have heard him say that. You’ll come again, won’t you, and you’ll keep it a secret?’

  Mary deliberated for a few minutes.

  ‘I don’t like secrets,’ she said, ‘there is generally something dishonourable in them. But this would be an innocent secret, wouldn’t it? Well, I’ll come to see you somehow, poor old man; and if Steadman sees me here I will make everything right with him.’

  ‘He mustn’t see you here,’ said the old man. ‘If he does he will shut me up in my own rooms again, as he did once, years and years ago.’

  ‘But you have not been here long, have you?’ Mary asked, wonderingly.

  ‘A hundred years, at least. That’s what it seems to me sometimes. And yet there are times when it seems only a dream. Be sure you come again to-morrow.’

  ‘Yes, I promise you to come; good-night.’