He, whom she thus acknowledged as her husband, had sunk exhausted into a chair near her. He took out his gold snuff-box, and refreshed himself with a leisurely pinch of snuff, looking about him curiously all the while, with a senile grin. That flash of passion which for a few minutes had restored him to the full possession of his reason had burnt itself out, and his mind had relapsed into the condition in which it had been when he talked to Mary in the garden.
‘My pipe, Steadman,’ he said, looking towards the door; ‘bring me my pipe,’ and then, impatiently, ‘What has become of Steadman? He has been getting inattentive — very inattentive.’
He got up, and moved slowly to the door, leaning on his crutch-stick, his head sunk upon his breast, muttering to himself as he went; and thus he vanished from them, like the spectre of some terrible ancestor which had returned from the grave to announce the coming of calamity to a doomed race. His grandson looked after him, with an expression of intense displeasure.
‘And so, Lady Maulevrier,’ he exclaimed, turning to his grandmother, ‘I have borne a title that never belonged to me, and enjoyed the possession of another man’s estates all this time, thanks to your pretty little plot. A very respectable position for your grandson to occupy, upon my life!’
Lord Hartfield lifted his hand with a warning gesture.
‘Spare her,’ he said. ‘She is in no condition to endure your reproaches.’
Spare her — yes. Fate had not spared her. The beautiful face — beautiful even in age and decay — changed suddenly as she looked at them — the mouth became distorted, the eyes fixed: and then the heavy head fell back upon the pillow — the paralysed form, wholly paralysed now, lay like a thing of stone. It never moved again. Consciousness was blotted out for ever in that moment. The feeble pulses of heart and brain throbbed with gradually diminishing power for a night and a day; and in the twilight of that dreadful day of nothingness the last glimmer of the light died in the lamp, and Lady Maulevrier and the burden of her sin were beyond the veil.
Viscount Haselden, alias Lord Maulevrier, held a long consultation with Lord Hartfield on the night of his grandmother’s death, as to what steps ought to be taken in relation to the real Earl of Maulevrier: and it was only at the end of a serious and earnest discussion that both young men came to the decision that Lady Maulevrier’s secret ought to be kept faithfully to the end. Assuredly no good purpose could be achieved by letting the world know of old Lord Maulevrier’s existence. A half-lunatic octogenarian could gain nothing by being restored to rights and possessions which he had most justly forfeited. All that justice demanded was that the closing years of his life should be made as comfortable as care and wealth could make them; and Hartfield and Haselden took immediate steps to this end. But their first act was to send the old earl’s treasure chest under safe convoy to the India House, with a letter explaining how this long-hidden wealth, brought from India by Lord Maulevrier, had been discovered among other effects in a lumber-room at Lady Maulevrier’s country house. The money so delivered up might possibly have formed part of his lordship’s private fortune; but, in the absence of any knowledge as to its origin, his grandson, the present Lord Maulevrier, preferred to deliver it up to the authorities of the India House, to be dealt with as they might think fit.
The old earl made no further attempt to assert himself. He seemed content to remain in his own rooms as of old, to potter about the garden, where his solitude was as complete as that of a hermit’s cell. The only moan be made was for James Steadman, whose services he missed sorely. Lord Hartfield replaced that devoted servant by a clever Austrian valet, a new importation from Vienna, who understood very little English, a trained attendant upon mental invalids, and who was quite capable of dealing with old Lord Maulevrier.
Lord Hartfield went a step farther; and within a week of those two funerals of servant and mistress, which cast a gloom over the peaceful valley of Grasmere, he brought down a famous mad-doctor to diagnose his lordship’s case. There was but little risk in so doing, he argued with his friend, and it was their duty so to do. If the old man should assert himself to the doctor as Lord Maulevrier, the declaration would pass as a symptom of his lunacy. But it happened that the physician arrived at Fellside on one of Lord Maulevrier’s bad days, and the patient never emerged from the feeblest phase of imbecility.
‘Brain quite gone,’ pronounced the doctor, ‘bodily health very poor. Take him to the South of France for the winter — Hyères, or any quiet place. He can’t last long.’
To Hyères the old man was taken, with Mrs. Steadman as nurse, and the Austrian valet as body-servant and keeper. Mary, for whom, in his brighter hours he showed a warm affection, went with him under her husband’s wing.
Lord Hartfield rented a chateau on the slope of an olive-clad hill, where he and his young wife, whose health was somewhat delicate at this time, spent a winter in peaceful seclusion; while Lesbia and her brother travelled together in Italy. The old man’s strength improved in that lovely climate. He lived to see the roses and orange blossoms of the early spring, and died in his arm-chair suddenly, without a pang, while Mary sat at his feet reading to him: a quiet end of an evil and troubled life. And now he whom the world had known as Lord Maulevrier was verily the earl, and could hear himself called by his title once more without a touch of shame.
The secret of Lady Maulevrier’s sin had been so faithfully kept by the two young men that neither of her granddaughters knew the true story of that mysterious person whom Mary had first heard of as James Steadman’s uncle. She and Lesbia both knew that there were painful circumstances of some kind connected with this man’s existence, his hidden life in the old house at Fellside; but they were both content to learn no more. Respect for their grandmother’s memory, sorrowful affection for the dead, prevailed over natural curiosity.
Early in February Maulevrier sent decorators and upholsterers into the old house in Curzon Street, which was ready before the middle of May to receive his lordship and his young wife, the girlish daughter of a Florentine nobleman, a gazelle-eyed Italian, with a voice whose every tone was music, and with the gentlest, shyest, most engaging manners of any girl in Florence. Lady Lesbia, strangely subdued and changed by the griefs and humiliations of her last campaign, had been her brother’s counsellor and confidante throughout his wooing of his fair Italian bride. She was to spend the season under her brother’s roof, to help to initiate young Lady Maulevrier in the mysterious rites of London society, and to warn her of those rocks and shoals which had wrecked her own fortunes.
The month of May brought a son and heir to Lord Hartfield; and it was not till after his birth that Mary, Countess of Hartfield, was presented to her sovereign, and began her career as a matron of rank and standing, very much overpowered by the weight of her honours, and looking forward with delight to the end of the season and a flight to Argyleshire with her husband and baby.
THE END
THE GOLDEN CALF
EXPERIENCES IN THE LIFE OF A MATRIMONIAL MANIAC
Published in 1883, The Golden Calf: Experiences in the Life of a Matrimonial Maniac is a melodrama about the degrading effects of alcoholism. It tells the story of Ida Palliser, whose determination to marry her way out of poverty leads to perhaps the greatest mistake of her life.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER I.
THE ARTICLED PUPIL.
‘Where is Miss Palliser?’ inquired Miss Pew, in that awful voice of hers, at which the class-room trembled, as at unexpected thunder. A murmur ran along the desks, from girl to girl, and then some one, near that end of the long room which was sacred to Miss Pew and her lieutenants, said that Miss Palliser was not in the class-room.
‘I think she is taking her music lesson, ma’am,’ faltered the girl who had ventured diffidently to impart this information to the schoolmistress.
‘Think?’ exclaimed Miss Pew, in her stentorian voice. ‘How can you think about an absolute fact? Either she is taking her lesson, or she is not taking her lesson. There is no room for thought. Let Miss Palliser be sent for this moment.’
At this command, as at the behest of the Homeric Jove himself, half a dozen Irises started up to carry the ruler’s message; but again Miss Pew’s mighty tones resounded in the echoing class-room.
‘I don’t want twenty girls to carry one message. Let Miss Rylance go.’
There was a grim smile on the principal’s coarsely-featured countenance as she gave this order. Miss Rylance was not one of the six who had started up to do the schoolmistress’s bidding. She was a young lady who considered her mission in life anything rather than to carry a message — a young lady who thought herself quite the most refined and elegant thing at Mauleverer Manor, and so entirely superior to her surroundings as to be absolved from the necessity of being obliging. But Miss Pew’s voice, when fortified by anger, was too much even for Miss Rylance’s calm sense of her own merits, and she rose at the lady’s bidding, laid down her ivory penholder on the neatly written exercise, and walked out of the room quietly, with the slow and stately deportment imparted by a long course of instruction from Madame Rigolette, the fashionable dancing-mistress.
‘Rylance won’t much like being sent on a message,’ whispered Miss Cobb, the Kentish brewer’s daughter, to Miss Mullins, the Northampton carriage-builder’s heiress.
‘And old Pew delights in taking her down a peg,’ said Miss Cobb, who was short, plump, and ruddy, a picture of rude health and unrefined good looks — a girl who bore ‘beer’ written in unmistakable characters across her forehead, Miss Rylance had observed to her own particular circle. ‘I will say that for the old lady,’ added Miss Cobb, ‘she never cottons to stuckupishness.’
Vulgarity of speech is the peculiar delight of a schoolgirl off duty. She spends so much of her life under the all-pervading eye of authority, she is so drilled, and lectured, and ruled and regulated, that, when the eye of authority is off her, she seems naturally to degenerate into licence. No speech so interwoven with slang as the speech of a schoolgirl — except that of a schoolboy.
There came a sudden hush upon the class-room after Miss Rylance had departed on her errand. It was a sultry afternoon in late June, and the four rows of girls seated at the two long desks in the long bare room, with its four tall windows facing a hot blue sky, felt almost as exhausted by the heat as if they had been placed under an air-pump. Miss Pew had a horror of draughts, so the upper sashes were only lowered a couple of inches, to let out the used atmosphere. There was no chance of a gentle west wind blowing in to ruffle the loose hair upon the foreheads of those weary students.
Thursday afternoons were devoted to the study of German. The sandy-haired young woman at the end of the room furthest from Miss Pew’s throne was Fräulein Wolf, from Frankfort, and it was Fräulein Wolf’s mission to go on eternally explaining the difficulties of her native language to the pupils at Mauleverer Manor, and to correct those interesting exercises of Ollendorff’s which ascend from the primitive simplicity of golden candlesticks and bakers’ dogs, to the loftiest themes in romantic literature.
For five minutes there was no sound save the scratching of pens, and the placid voice of the Fräulein demonstrating to Miss Mullins that in an exercise of twenty lines, ten words out of every twenty were wrong, and then the door was opened suddenly — not at all in the manner so carefully instilled by the teacher of deportment. It was flung back, rather, as if with an angry hand, and a young woman, taller than the generality of her sex, walked quickly up the room to Miss Pew’s desk, and stood before that bar of justice, with head erect, and dark flashing eyes, the incarnation of defiance.
‘Was für ein Mädchen.’ muttered the Fräulein, blinking at that distant figure, with her pale gray-green eyes.
Miss Pew pretended not to see the challenge in the girl’s angry eyes. She turned to her subordinate, Miss Pillby, the useful drudge who did a little indifferent teaching in English grammar and geography, looked after the younger girls’ wardrobes, and toadied the mistress of the house.
‘Miss Pillby, will you be kind enough to show Ida Palliser the state of her desk?’ asked Miss Pew, with awe-inspiring politeness.
‘She needn’t do anything of the kind, ‘said Ida coolly. ‘I know the state of my desk quite as well as she does. I daresay it’s untidy. I haven’t had time to put things straight.’
‘Untidy!’ exclaimed Miss Pew, in her appalling baritone; ‘untidy is not the word. It’s degrading. Miss Pillby, be good enough to call over the various articles which you have found in Ida Palliser’s desk.’
Miss Pillby rose to do her employer’s bidding. She was a dull piece of human machinery to which the idea of resistance to authority was impossible. There was no dirty work she would not have done meekly, willingly even, at Miss Pew’s bidding. The girls were never tired of expatiating upon Miss Pillby’s meanness; but the lady herself did not even know that she was mean. She had been born so.
She went to the locker, lifted the wooden lid, and proceeded in a flat, drawling voice to call over the items which she found in that receptacle.
‘A novel, “The Children of the Abbey,” without a cover.’
‘Ah!’ sighed Miss Pew.
‘One stocking with a rusty darning-needle sticking in it. Five apples, two mouldy. A square of hardbake. An old neck-ribbon. An odd cuff. Seven letters. A knife, with the blade broken. A bundle of pen-and-ink — well, I suppose they are meant for sketches.’
‘Hand them over to me,’ commanded Miss Pew.
She had seen some of Ida Palliser’s pen-and-ink sketches before to-day — had seen herself represented in every ridiculous guise and attitude by that young person’s facile pen. Her large cheeks reddened in anticipation of her pupil’s insolence. She took the sheaf of crumpled paper and thrust it hastily into her pocket.
A ripple of laughter swept over Miss Palliser’s resolute face; but she said not a word.
‘Half a New Testament — the margins shamefully scribbled over,’ pursued Miss Pillby, with implacable monotony. ‘Three Brazil nuts. A piece of slate-pencil. The photograph of a little boy—’
‘My brother,’ cried Ida hastily. ‘I hope you are not going to confiscate that, Miss Pew, as you have confiscated my sketches.’
‘It would be no more than you deserve if I were to burn everything in your locker, Miss Palliser,’ said the schoolmistress.
‘Burn everything except my brother’s portrait. I might never get another.
Papa is so thoughtless. Oh, please, Miss Pillby, give me back the photo.’
‘Give her the photograph,’ said Miss Pew, who was not all inhuman, although she kept a school, a hardening process which is supposed to deaden the instincts of womanhood. ‘And now, pray, Miss Palliser, what excuse have you to offer for your untidiness?’
‘None,’ said Ida, ‘except that I have no time to be tidy. You can’t expect tidiness from a drudge like me.’
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 788
