Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  Happily the younger girls in the class which she taught were fond of her, and when she wanted company she let these juveniles cluster round her in her garden rambles; but in a general way she preferred loneliness, and to work at the cracked old piano in the room where she slept. Beethoven and Chopin, Mozart and Mendelssohn were companions of whom she never grew weary.

  So the slow days wore on till nearly the end of the month, and on one cool, misty, afternoon, when the river flowed sluggishly under a dull grey sky she walked alone along that allotted extent of the river-side path which the mistresses and pupil-teachers were allowed to promenade without surveillance. This river walk skirted a meadow which was in Miss Pew’s occupation, and ranked as a part of the Mauleverer grounds, although it was divided by the high road from the garden proper.

  A green paling, and a little green gate, always padlocked, secured this meadow from intrusion on the road-side, but it was open to the river. To be entrusted with the key of this pastoral retreat was a privilege only accorded to governesses and pupil-teachers.

  It was supposed by Miss Pew that no young person in her employment would be capable of walking quite alone, where it was within the range of possibility that her solitude might be intruded upon by an unknown member of the opposite sex. She trusted, as she said afterwards, in the refined feeling of any person brought into association with her, and, until rudely awakened by facts, she never would have stooped from the lofty pinnacle of her own purity to suspect the evil consequences which arose from the liberty too generously accorded to her dependents.

  Ida detested Miss Pillby and despised Miss Motley; and the greatest relief she knew to the dismal monotony of her days was a lonely walk by the river, with a shabby Wordsworth or a battered little volume of Shelley’s minor poems for her companions. She possessed so few books that it was only natural for her to read those she had until love ripened with familiarity.

  On this autumnal afternoon she walked with slow steps, while the river went murmuring by, and now and then a boat drifted lazily down the stream. The boating season was over for the most part — the season of picnics and beanfeasts, and Cockney holiday-making, and noisy revelry, smart young women, young men in white flannels, with bare arms and sunburnt noses. It was the dull blank time when everybody who could afford to wander far from this suburban paradise, was away upon his and her travels. Only parsons, doctors, schoolmistresses, and poverty stayed at home. Yet now and then a youth in boating costume glided by, his shoulders bending slowly to the lazy dip of his oars, his keel now and then making a rushing sound among long trailing weeds.

  Such a youth presently came creeping along the bank, almost at Ida’s feet, but passed her unseen. Her heavy lids were drooping, her eyes intent upon the familiar page. The young man looked up at her with keen gray eyes, recognised her, and pushed his boat in among the rushes by the bank, moored it to a pollard willow, and with light footstep leaped on shore.

  He landed a few yards in the rear of Ida’s slowly moving figure, followed softly, came close behind her, and read aloud across her shoulder:

  ‘There was a Power in this sweet place,

  An Eve in this garden; a ruling grace

  Which to the flowers, did they waken or dream,

  Was as God is to the starry scheme.’

  Ida looked round, first indignant, then laughing.

  ‘How you startled me!’ she exclaimed; ‘I thought you were some horrid, impertinent stranger; and yet the voice had a familiar sound. How are they all at The Knoll? It is nearly a fortnight since Bessie wrote to me. If she only knew how I hunger for her letters.’

  ‘Very sweet of you,’ answered Mr. Wendover, holding the girl’s hand with a lingering pressure, releasing it reluctantly when her rising colour told him it would be insolent to keep it longer.

  How those large dark eyes beamed with pleasure at seeing him! Was it for his own sake, or for love of her friends at Kingthorpe? The smile was perhaps too frank to be flattering.

  ‘Very sweet of you to care so much for Bessie’s girlish epistles,’ he said lazily; ‘they are full of affection, but the style of composition always recalls our dear Mrs. Nickleby. “Aunt Betsy was asking after you the other day: and that reminds me that the last litter of black Hampshires was sixteen — the largest number father ever remembers having. The vicar and his wife are coming to dinner on Tuesday, and do tell me if this new picture that everybody is talking about is really better than the Derby Day,” and that sort of thing. Not a very consecutive style, don’t you know.’

  ‘Every word is interesting to me,’ said Ida, with a look that told him she was not one of those young ladies who enjoy a little good-natured ridicule of their nearest and dearest. ‘Is it long since you left Kingthorpe?’

  ‘Not four-and-twenty hours. I promised Bessie that my very first occupation on coming to London should be to make my way down here to see you, in order that I may tell her faithfully and truly whether you are well and happy. She has a lurking conviction that you are unable to live without her, that you will incontinently go into a galloping consumption, and keep the fact concealed from all your friends until they receive a telegram summoning them to your death-bed. I know that is the picture Bessie’s sentimental fancies have depicted.’

  ‘I did not think Bessie was so morbid,’ said Ida, laughing. ‘No, I am not one of those whom the gods love. I am made of very tough material, or I should hardly have lived till now. I see before me a perspective of lonely, loveless old age — finishing in a governess’ almshouse. I hope there are almshouses for governesses.

  ‘Nobody will pity your loneliness or lovelessness,’ retorted Brian,’ for they will both be your own fault.’

  She blushed, looking dreamily across the dark-gray river to the level shores beyond — the low meadows — gentle hills in the back-ground — the wooded slopes of Weybridge and Chertsey. If this speaker, whose voice dropped to so tender a tone, had been like the Brian of her imaginings — if he had looked at her with the dark eyes of Sir Tristram’s picture, how differently his speech would have affected her! As it was, she listened with airy indifference, only blushing girlishly at his compliment, and wondering a little if he really admired her — he the owner of that glorious old Abbey — the wealthy head of the house of Wendover — the golden fish for whom so many pretty fishers must have angled in days gone by.

  ‘Did you stay at The Knoll all the time,’ she inquired, her thoughts having flown back to Kingthorpe; ‘or at the Abbey?’

  ‘At The Knoll. It is ever so much livelier, and my cousins like to have me with them.’

  ‘Naturally. But I wonder you did not prefer living in that lovely old house of yours. To occupy it must seem like living in the Middle Ages.’

  ‘Uncommonly. One is twelve miles from a station, and four from post-office, butcher, and baker. Very like the Middle Ages. There is no gas even in the offices, and there are as many rats behind the wainscot as there were Israelites in Egypt. All the rooms are draughty and some are damp. No servant who has not been born and bred on the estate will stay more than six months. There is a deficient water supply in dry summers, and there are three distinct ghosts all the year round. Extremely like the Middle Ages.’

  ‘I would not mind ghosts, rats, anything, if it were my house’ exclaimed

  Ida, enthusiastically. ‘The house is a poem.’

  ‘Perhaps; but it is not a house; in the modern sense of the word, that is to say, which implies comfort and convenience.’

  Ida sighed, deeply disgusted at this want of appreciation of the romantic spot where she had dreamed away more than one happy summer noontide, while the Wendover children played hide-and-seek in the overgrown old shrubberies.

  No doubt life was always thus. The people to whom blind fortune gave such blessings were unable to appreciate them, and only the hungry outsiders could imagine the delight of possession.

  ‘Are you living in London now?’ she asked, as Mr. Wendover lingered at her side, and seemed to expect th
e conversation to be continued indefinitely.

  His boat was safe enough, moving gently up and down among the rushes, with the gentle flow of the tide. Ida looked at it longingly, thinking how sweet it would be to step into it and let it carry her — any whither, so long as it was away from Mauleverer Manor.

  ‘Yes, I am in London for the present.’

  ‘But not for long, I suppose.’

  ‘I hardly know. I have no plans. I won’t say with Romeo that I am fortune’s fool — but I am fortune’s shuttlecock; and I suppose that means pretty much the same.’

  ‘It was very kind of you to come to see me,’ said Ida.

  ‘Kind to myself, for in coming I indulged the dearest wish of my soul,’ said the young man, looking at her with eyes whose meaning even her inexperience could not misread.

  ‘Please don’t pay me compliments,’ she said, hastily, ‘or I shall feel very sorry you came. And now I must hurry back to the house — the tea-bell will ring in a few minutes. Please tell Bessie I am very well, and only longing for one of her dear letters. Good-bye.’

  She made him a little curtsey, and would have gone without shaking hands, but he caught her hand and detained her in spite of herself.

  ‘Don’t be angry,’ he pleaded; ‘don’t look at me with such cold, proud eyes. Is it an offence to admire, to love you too quickly? If it is, I have sinned deeply, and am past hope of pardon. Must one serve an apprenticeship to mere formal acquaintance first, then rise step by step to privileged friendship, before one dares to utter the sweet word love? Remember, at least, that I am your dearest friend’s first cousin, and ought not to appear to you as a stranger.’

  ‘I can remember nothing when you talk so wildly,’ said Ida, crimson to the roots of her hair. Never before had a young lover talked to her of love. ‘Pray let me go. Miss Pew will be angry if I am not at tea.’

  ‘To think that such a creature as you should be under the control of any such harpy,’ exclaimed Brian. ‘Well, if I must go, at least tell me I am forgiven, and that I may exist upon the hope of seeing you again. I suppose if I were to come to the hall-door, and send in my card, I should not be allowed to see you?’

  ‘Certainly not. Not if you were my own cousin instead of Bessie’s.

  Good-bye.’

  ‘Then I shall happen to be going by in my boat every afternoon for the next month or so. There is a dear good soul at the lock who lets lodgings. I shall take up my abode there.’

  ‘Please never land on this pathway again,’ said Ida earnestly ‘Miss Pew would be horribly angry if she heard I had spoken to you. And now I must go.’

  She withdrew her hand from his grasp, and ran off across the meadow, light-footed as Atalanta. Her heart was beating wildly, beating furiously, when she flew up to her room to take off her hat and jacket and smooth her disordered hair. Never before had any man, except middle-aged Dr. Rylance, talked to her of love: and that this man of all others, this man, sole master of the old mansion she so intensely admired, her friend’s kinsman, owner of a good old Saxon name; this man, who could lift her in a moment from poverty to wealth, from obscurity to place and station; that this man should look at her with admiring eyes, and breathe impassioned words into her ear, was enough to set her heart beating tumultuously, to bring hot blushes to her cheeks. It was too wild a dream.

  True, that for the man himself, considered apart from his belongings, his name and race, she cared not at all. But just now, in this tumult of excited feeling, she was disposed to confuse the man with his surroundings — to think of him, not as that young man with gray eyes and thin lips, who had walked with her at The Knoll, who had stood beside her just now by the river, but as the living embodiment of fortune, pride, delight.

  Perhaps the vision really dominant in her mind was the thought of Herself as mistress of the Abbey, herself as living for ever among the people she loved, amidst those breezy Hampshire hills, in the odour of pine-woods — rich, important, honoured, and beloved, doing good to all who came within the limit of her life. Yes, that was a glorious vision, and its reflected light shone upon Brian Wendover, and in somewise glorified him.

  She went down to tea with such a triumphant light in her eyes that the smaller pupils who sat at her end of the table, so as to be under her surveillance during the meal, exclaimed at her beauty.

  ‘What a colour you’ve got, Miss Palliser!’ said Lucy Dobbs, ‘and how your eyes sparkle! You look as if you’d just had a hamper.’

  ‘I’m not quite so greedy as you, Lucy,’ retorted Ida; ‘I don’t think a hamper would make my eyes sparkle, even if there were anybody to send me one.’

  ‘But there is somebody to send you one,’ argued Lucy, with her mouth full of bread and butter; ‘your father isn’t dead?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then he might send you a hamper.’

  ‘He might, if he lived within easy reach of Mauleverer Manor,’ replied

  Ida; ‘but as he lives in France—’

  ‘He could send a post-office order to a confectioner in London, and the confectioner would send you a big box of cakes, and marmalade, and jam, and mixed biscuits, and preserved ginger,’ said Lucy, her cheeks glowing with the rapture of her theme. ‘That is what my mamma and papa did, when they were in Switzerland, on my birthday. I never had such a hamper as that one. I was ill for a week afterwards.’

  ‘And I suppose you were very glad your mother and father were away,’ said

  Ida, while the other children laughed in chorus.

  ‘It was a splendid hamper,’ said Lucy, stolidly. ‘I shall never forget it. So you see your father might send you a hamper,’ she went on, for the sake of argument, ‘though he is in France.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Ida, ‘if I were not too old to care about cakes and jam.’

  ‘We are not too old,’ persisted Lucy; ‘you might share them among us.’

  Ida’s heart had not stilled its stormy vehemence yet. She talked lightly to her young companions, and tried to eat a little bread and butter, but that insipid fare almost choked her. Her mind was overcharged with thought and wonder.

  Could he have meant all or half he said just now? — this young man with the delicate features, pale complexion, and thin lips. He had seemed intensely earnest. Those gray eyes of his, somewhat too pale of hue for absolutely beauty, had glowed with a fire which even Ida’s inexperience recognised as something above and beyond common feeling. His hand had trembled as it clasped hers. Could there be such a thing as love at first sight? and was she destined to be the object of that romantic passion? She had read of the triumphs of beauty, and she knew that she was handsome. She had been told the fact in too many ways — by praise sometimes, but much more often by envy — to remain unconscious of her charms. She was scornful of her beauty, inclined to undervalue the gift as compared with the blessings of other girls — a prosperous home, the world’s respect, the means to gratify the natural yearnings of youth — but she knew that she was beautiful. And now it seemed to her all at once that beauty was a much more valuable gift than she had supposed hitherto — indeed, a kind of talisman or Aladdin’s lamp, which could win for her all she wanted in this world — Wendover Abbey and the position of a country squire’s wife. It was not a dazzling or giddy height to which to aspire; but to Ida just now it seemed the topmost pinnacle of social success.

  ‘Oh, what a wretch I am!’ she said to herself presently; ‘what a despicable, mercenary creature! I don’t care a straw for this man; and yet I am already thinking of myself as his wife.’

  And then, remembering how she had once openly declared her intention of marrying for money, she shrugged her shoulders disdainfully.

  ‘Ought I to hesitate when the chance comes to me?’ she thought. ‘I always meant to marry for money, if ever such wonderful fortune as a rich husband fell in my way.’

  And yet she had refused Dr. Rylance’s offer, without a moment’s hesitation. Was it really as he had said, in the bitterness of his wrath, because the offer
was not good enough, the temptation not large enough? No, she told herself, she had rejected the smug physician, with his West End mansion and dainty Hampshire villa, his courtly manners, his perfect dress, because the man himself was obnoxious to her. Now, she did not dislike Brian Wendover — indeed, she was rather inclined to like him. She was only just a little disappointed that he was not the ideal Brian of her dreams. The dark-browed cavalier, with grave forehead and eagle eyes. She had a vague recollection of having once heard Blanche say that her cousin Brian of the Abbey was like Sir Tristram’s portrait; but this must have been a misapprehension upon her part, since no two faces could have differed more than the pale delicate-featured countenance of the living man and the dark rugged face in the picture.

  She quieted the trouble of her thoughts as well as she could before tea was over and the evening task of preparation, — the gulfs and straits, the predicates and noun sentences, rule of three, common denominators, and all the dry-as-dust machinery was set in motion again.