Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  ‘Ida, Ida,’ shrieked shrill voices in the distance. White figures came flying down the broad gravel-walk, ghost-like in the moonlight.

  It was a blessed relief. Ida broke from Brian, and ran to meet Blanche and Bessie.

  ‘Ida, Ida, such fun, such a surprise!’ shrieked Blanche, as the flying white figures came nearer, wavered, and stopped.

  ‘Only think of his coming on my birthday again!’ exclaimed Bessie, ‘and at this late hour — just as if he had dropped from the moon!’

  ‘Who, — who has come?’ cried Ida, looking from one to the other, with a scared white face.

  It seemed to her as if the moonlit garden was moving away in a thick white cloud, spots of fire floated before her eyes, and then all the world went round like a fiery wheel.

  ‘Brian — the other Brian — Brian Walford! Isn’t it sweet of him to come to-night?’ said Bessie.

  Ida reeled forward, and would have fallen but for the strong arm that caught her as she sank earthwards, the grip which would have held her and sustained her through all life’s journey had fate so willed it.

  She had not quite lost consciousness, but all was hazy and dim. She felt herself supported in those strong arms, caressed and borne up on the other side by Bessie, and thus upheld she half walked, and was half carried along the smooth gravel-path to the house, whence sounds of music came faintly on her ear. She had almost recovered by the time they came to the threshold of the lighted drawing-room; but she had a curious sensation of having been away somewhere for ages, as if her soul had taken flight to some strange dim world and dwelt there for a space, and were slowly coming back to this work-a-day life.

  The drawing-room was cleared ready for dancing. Urania was sitting at the piano playing the Swing Song, with dainty mincing touch, ambling and tripping over the keys with the points of her carefully trained fingers. She had given up Beethoven and all the men of might, and had cultivated the niminy-piminy school, which is to music as sunflowers and blue china are to art.

  Brian Walford was standing in the middle of the big empty room, talking to his uncle the Colonel. Mrs. Wendover and her sister-in-law were sitting on a capacious old sofa in conversation with Dr. Rylance.

  ‘Oh, you have come at last,’ said Brian Walford, as Ida came slowly through the open window, pale as death, and moving feebly.

  He went to meet her, and took her by the hand; then turning to the

  Colonel he said quietly and seriously,

  ‘Uncle Wendover, it is just a year to-night since this young lady and I met for the first time. From the hour I first saw her I loved her, and I had reason to hope that she returned my love. We were married at a little church near Mauleverer Manor, on the ninth of October last. After our marriage my wife — finding that I was not quite so rich as she supposed me to be — fearful, I suppose, for the chances of our future — refused to live with me — told me that our marriage was to be as if it had never been — and left me, within three hours of our wedding, for ever, as she intended.’

  Ida was standing in the midst of them all — alone. She had taken her hand from her husband’s — she stood before them, pale as a corpse, but erect, ready to face the worst.

  Brian of the Abbey, that Brian who would have given his life to save her this agony of humiliation, stood on the threshold of the window watching her. Could it be that she was false as fair — she whom he had so trusted and honoured?

  Urania had left off playing, and was watching the scene with a triumphant smile. She looked at Mr. Wendover of the Abbey with a look that meant, ‘Perhaps now you can believe what I told you about this girl?’

  Aunt Betsy was the first to speak,

  ‘Ida,’ she said, standing up, ‘is there any truth in this statement?’

  ‘That question is not very complimentary to your nephew!’ said Brian

  Walford.

  ‘I am not thinking of my nephew — I am thinking of this girl, whom I have loved and trusted.’

  ‘I was unworthy of your love and your trust,’ answered Ida, looking at Miss Wendover with wide, despairing eyes. ‘It is quite true — I am his wife — but he has no right to claim me. It was agreed between us that we should part — for ever — that our marriage was to be as if it had never been. It was our secret — nobody was ever to know.’

  ‘And pray, after having married him, why did you wish to cancel your marriage?’ asked Colonel Wendover, in a freezing voice. ‘You married him of your own free will I suppose?’

  ‘Of my own free will — yes.’

  ‘Then why repent all of a sudden?’

  She stood for a few moments silent, enduring such an agony of shame as all her sad experiences of life had not yet given her. The bitter, galling truth must be told — and in his hearing. He must be suffered to know how sordid and vile she had been.

  ‘Because I had been deceived,’ she faltered at last, her eyelids drooping over those piteous eyes.

  Brian of the Abbey had advanced into the room by this time. He was standing by his uncle’s side, his hand upon his uncle’s arm. He wanted, if it were possible, to save Ida from further questioning, to restrain his uncle’s wrath.

  ‘I married your nephew under a delusion,’ she said. ‘I believed that I

  was marrying wealth and station. I had been told that the Brian Wendover

  I knew — the man who asked me to be his wife — was the owner of Wendover

  Abbey.’

  ‘I see,’ said the Colonel; ‘you wanted to marry Wendover Abbey.’

  Miss Rylance gave a little silvery laugh — the most highly cultivated thing in laughs — but the scowl she got from Brian of the Abbey checked her vivacity in a breath.

  ‘Oh, I know what a wretch I must seem to you all,’ said Ida, looking up at the Colonel with pleading eyes. ‘But you have never known what it is to be poor — a genteel pauper — to have your poverty flung into your face like a handful of mud at every hour of your life; to have the instincts, the needs of a lady, but to be poorer and lower in status than any servant; to see your schoolfellows grinning at your shabby boots, making witty speeches about your threadbare gown; to patch, and mend, and struggle, yet never to be decently clad; to have the desire to help others, but nothing to give. If any of you — if you, Miss Rylance, with that exquisite sneer of yours, you who invented the plot that wrecked me — if you had ever endured what I have borne, you would have been as ready as I was to thank Providence for having sent me a rich lover, and to accept him gratefully as my husband.’

  ‘Brian Walford,’ interrogated the Colonel, looking severely at his nephew, ‘am I to understand that you married this girl without undeceiving her as to the children’s, or rather Miss Rylance’s, most ill-judged practical joke — that you stood before the altar in God’s House, the temple of truth and holiness, and won her by a lie?’

  ‘I never lied to her,’ answered Brian Walford, sulkily. ‘My cousins chose to have their joke, but there was no joke in my love for Ida. I loved her, and was ready to marry her, and take my chance of the future, as another young man in my position would have done. I never bragged about the Abbey, or told her that it belonged to me. She never asked me who I was.’

  ‘Because she had been told a wicked, shameful falsehood, and believed it, poor darling,’ cried Bessie, running to her friend and embracing her. ‘Oh, forgive me, dear — pray, pray do. It was all my fault. But as you have married him, darling, and it can’t be helped, do try and be happy with him, for indeed, dear, he is very nice.’

  Ida stood silent, with lowered eyelids.

  ‘My daughter is right, Miss Palliser — Mrs. Brian Walford,’ said the Colonel, in a less severe tone than he had employed before. ‘It is quite true that you have been hardly used. Any deception is bad, worst of all a cheat that is maintained as far as the steps of the altar. But after all, in spite of your natural disappointment at finding you had married a poor man instead of a rich one, my nephew is the same man after marriage as he was before, the man you were
willing to marry. And I cannot think so badly of you as to believe that you would marry a man you did not love, for the sake of his wealth and position. No, I cannot think that of you. I take it, therefore, that you liked my nephew for his own sake; and that it was only pique and natural indignation at having been duped which made you cast him off and agree to cancel your marriage. And I say that there is only one course open to you, as a good and honourable young woman, and that is to take your husband by the hand, as you took him in the house of God, for better for worse, and face the difficulties of life honestly and fearlessly. Heaven is always on the side of true-hearted young couples.’

  Ida lifted her drooping eyelids and looked, not at the Colonel, not at her husband, not at her staunch friend Aunt Betsy, but at that other Brian — at him who this night only had declared his love. She looked at him with despair in her eyes, humbly beseeching him to stand between her and this loathed wedlock. But there was no sign in his sad countenance, no indication except of deepest sorrow, no ray of light to guide her on her path. The Colonel had spoken with such perfect common sense and justice, he had so clearly right on his side, that Brian Wendover, as a man of principle, could say nothing. Here was this woman he loved, and she was another man’s wife, and that other man claimed her. If the King of Terrors himself had stretched forth his bony hand and clasped her, she could not be more utterly lost to the man who loved her than she was by this pre-existing tie. Brian of the Abbey was not the man to woo his cousin’s wife.

  ‘Do, dearest, be happy,’ pleaded Bessie. ‘I’m sure father is right. And you are our cousin, our own flesh and blood now, as it were. And you know I always wanted you to belong to us. And we shall all be fonder of you than ever. And you and Mr. Jardine will be cousins, later on,’ she whispered, as a conclusive argument, as if for the sake of so high a privilege a girl might fairly make some sacrifice of inclination.

  ‘Is it my duty to do as Colonel Wendover tells me?’ asked Ida, looking round at them all with piteous appeal. ‘Is it really my duty?’

  ‘In the sight of God, yes,’ said the Colonel and John Jardine.

  ‘Yes, my dear, yes, there can be no doubt of it,’ said the Colonel’s wife and Aunt Betsy.

  Brian of the Abbey said not a word, and Dr. Rylance looked on in silence, with a diabolical sneer.

  What a fate for the girl who had refused a house in Cavendish square, one of the prettiest victorias in London, and a matchless collection of old hawthorn blue!

  ‘Then I will do my duty,’ said Ida; and then, before Brian Walford could take her in his arms, or make any demonstration of delight, she threw herself upon Miss Betsy Wendover’s broad bosom, sobbing hysterically, and crying, ‘Take me away, take me out of this house, for pity’s sake!’

  ‘I’ll take her home with me. She will be calm, and quiet, and happy to-morrow,’ said Aunt Betsy. And then, as Brian Walford was following them, ‘Stay where you are, Brian,’ she said authoritatively. ‘She shall see no one but me till to-morrow. You will drive her crazy among you all, if you are not careful.’

  Miss Wendover took the girl away almost in her arms, and Brian Walford disappeared at the same time without further speech.

  ‘And now that the bride and bridegroom are gone, I suppose the wedding party can have their dance,’ sneered Urania, playing the first few bars of ‘Sweethearts.’

  But Brian of the Abbey had vanished immediately after his cousin, and no one was disposed for dancing; so, after a good deal of talk, Bessie’s birthday party broke up.

  ‘What a dismal failure it has been, though it began so well!’ said

  Bessie, as she and the other juveniles went upstairs to bed.

  ‘What! still you are not happy,’ quoted Horatio. ‘Why, I thought you wanted Brian Walford to marry Ida Palliser?’

  ‘So I did once,’ sighed Bessie; ‘but I would rather she had married Brian of the Abbey; and I know he’s over head and ears in love with her.’

  ‘Ah, then he’ll have to put his love in his pipe and smoke it! That kind of thing won’t do out of a French novel,’ said Horatio, whose personal knowledge of French romancers was derived from the Philosophe sous les toits, as published with grammatical notes for the use of schools; but he liked to talk large.

  CHAPTER XX.

  WAS THIS THE MOTIVE?

  Brian Walford came back to The Knoll after the younger members of the family had gone to their rooms.

  ‘Where have you been all this time?’ asked the Colonel, who was strolling on the broad gravel drive in front of the house, soothing his nerves with a cheroot, after the agitations of the last hour. ‘You are to have your old room, I believe; I heard it was being got ready.’

  ‘You are very kind. I walked half way to the Abbey with my cousin. We had a smoke and a talk.’

  ‘I should be glad of a little more talk with you. This business of to-night is not at all pleasant, you know, Brian. It does not redound to anybody’s credit.’

  ‘I never supposed that it did; but it is not my fault that there should be this fuss. If my wife had been true to me all would have gone well.’

  ‘I don’t think you had a right to expect things to go well, when you had so cruelly deceived her. It was a base thing to do, Brian.’

  ‘You ought not to say so much as that, sir, knowing so little of the circumstances. I did not deliberately deceive her.’

  ‘That’s skittles,’ said the Colonel, flinging away the end of his cigar.

  ‘It is the truth. The business began in sport. Bessie asked me to pretend to be my cousin, just for fun, to see if Ida would fall in love with me. Ida had a romantic idea about my cousin, it appears, that he was an altogether perfect being, and so on. Well, I was introduced to her as Brian of the Abbey, and though she may have been a little disappointed — no doubt she was — she accepted me as the perfect being. As for me — well, sir, you know what she is — how lovely, how winning. I was a gone coon from that moment. We kept up the fun — Bess, and the boys, and I — all that evening. I talked of the Abbey as if it were my property, swaggered a good deal, and so on. Then Bess, knowing that I often stayed up the river for weeks on end, asked me to go and see Ida, to make sure that old Pew was not ill-using her, that she was not going into a decline, and all that kind of thing. So I went, saw Ida, always in the company of the German teacher, and took no pains to conceal my affection for her. But I said not another word about the Abbey. I never swaggered or put on the airs of a rich man; I only told her that I loved her, and that I hoped our lives would be spent together. I did not even suggest our marriage as a fact in the near future. I knew I was in no position to maintain a wife.’

  ‘You should have told her that plainly. As a man of honour you were bound to undeceive her.’

  ‘I meant to do it, but I wanted her to be very fond of me first. Then came the row; old Pew expelled her because she had been carrying on a clandestine flirtation with a young man. Her character was compromised, and as a man of honour I had no course but to propose immediate marriage.’

  ‘Her character was not compromised, because Miss Pew chose to act like a vulgar old tyrant. The German governess, everybody in the school, knew that Miss Palliser was unjustly treated. There was no wound that needed to be salved by an imprudent marriage. But in any case, before proposing such a marriage, it was your bounden duty to tell her the truth about your circumstances, not to marry her to poverty without her full consent to the union.’

  ‘Then I did not do my bounden duty,’ Brian Walford answered sullenly. ‘I believed in her disinterested affection. Why should she be more mercenary than I, who was willing to marry her without a sixpence in her pocket, without a second gown to her back? How could I suppose she was marrying me for the sake of a fine place and a fine fortune? I thought she was above such sordid considerations.’

  ‘You ought to have been sure of that before you married her; you ought to have trusted her fully,’ said the Colonel. ‘However, having married her, why did you consent so tamely to let
her go? Having let her go, why do you come here to-night to claim her?’

  ‘Why did I let her go? Well she shrewed me so abominably when she found out my lowly position that my pride was roused, and I told her she might go where she pleased. Why did I come here to-night? Well, it was an impulse that brought me. I am passionately fond of her. I have lived without her for nearly a year — angry with her and with fate — but to day was the anniversary of our first meeting. I knew from Bessie that my wife was here, happy. There was even some hint of a flirtation between her and the real Brian,’ — these last words were spoken with intense bitterness,—’and I thought it was time I should claim my own.’

  ‘I think so too,’ said Colonel Wendover, severely; ‘you should have claimed her long ago. Your whole conduct is faulty in the extreme. You will be a very lucky man if your married life turns out happy after such a bad beginning.’

  ‘Come, Colonel, we are both young,’ remonstrated Brian, with that careless lightness which seemed natural to him, as a man who could hardly take the gravest problems of life seriously; ‘there is no reason why we should not shake down into a very happy couple by-and-by.’

  ‘And pray how are you to live?’ inquired the Colonel. ‘You are taking this girl from a most comfortable home — a position in which she is valued and useful. What do you intend to give her in exchange for the Homestead? A garret and a red herring?’

  ‘Oh, no, sir; I hope it will be a long time before we come to that — though Beranger says that at twenty a man and the girl he loves may be happy in a garret. I think we shall do pretty well. My literary work widened a good deal while I was in Paris. I wrote for some of the London magazines, and the editors are good enough to think that I am rather a smart writer. I can earn something by my pen; I think enough to keep the pot boiling till briefs begin to drop in. My cousin was generous enough to offer me an income just now — four or five hundred a year so long as I should require it — but I told him that I thought I could support my wife with my pen for the next few years.’