“For the sake of my two millions. Are women so mercenary?”
“They are obliged to be,” answered Edith Champion. “We live in an age in which poverty is utterly intolerable. One must be rich or miserable. Do you think I would have consented to marry Mr. Champion, in spite of all the pressure my family put upon me, if I bad been brave enough to bear poverty with you? No, to be well born means the necessity of wealth. One’s birthright is to belong to the smart world, and to be poor in that world is to be a social martyr. I have often envied the women born at Camberwell or Islington; the women who go to the butcher’s to buy the dinner, and who wear cotton gloves.”
“Yes, there is an independence in those lower depths. One can be poor and unashamed, if one belongs to the proletariat. But be assured, my dear Mrs. Champion, that I shall not fall a victim to a manoeuvring mother or an enterprising young lady. I shall know how to enjoy wealth and freedom.”
Edith sighed. Would not the independence of unlimited wealth tempt her slave to throw off the yoke? Could he ever be again — he the millionaire — what he had been to her? Would he be content to dance attendance upon her, to be at her beck and call, an inevitable guest at all her parties, to hand tea-cups at her afternoons when he was perhaps the only man present, to fetch and carry for her, find her the newest books in French and German, taste them for her before she took the trouble to read them, keep her posted in the gossip of the clubs, so far as such gossip was fitting for a lady to know? For the last three years he had been her second self, had supplemented her intellect and amused her leisure. But would he be content to play the satellite now that wealth would give him power to be a planet, with moons and satellites of his own?
“He will marry,” she told herself. “There is no use talking about it. It was easy to keep him in leading-strings while he was too poor to be worth any marriageable girl’s attention. But now he will be forced into marriage. The thing is inevitable.”
The carriage stopped at the Riding School, and the footman went in to look for Rosa Gresham, who came tripping out presently, airily dressed as befitted the summer solstice, and somewhat purple as to complexion.
“We are going to take you to dine at Hurlingham,” said Edith.
“How awfully good of you! I am dead beat. The shilling people were too horrid — staring, and pushing, and squabbling for their right change, and gobbling cake in a revolting manner. I don’t think our stall can have cleared its expenses. How well you are looking this afternoon, Mr. Hillersdon! and yesterday I thought you looked dreadful, so hollow under the eyes, so pale and “I thought I was going away, to part company with all I cared for,” said Gerard.
“And now you are not going?”
“No,” Edith answered, with a laugh which was not altogether joyous. “He may well look different. Though form and feature are unchanged he is a different man. Rosa, you are sitting opposite a millionaire.”
“Heavens! Do you really mean it, or is it a joke?”
“I hope and believe that it is serious. I have the assurance of a dry-as-dust solicitor that there is as much money in the world, and that it belongs to me. And I cannot even thank the man who gave it me, for the hand that gave it is in the dust.”
“And to think that you never came to our Bazaar, never gave one thought, in the midst of your prosperity, to the Anglican Orphans!” exclaimed Rosa.
CHAPTER V. LIFE UPON NEW LINES.
THE nightingales were gone, but the roses were left, and it was pleasant to sit on the lawn and hear the plash of the tide, and see the stars come slowly out, large and red in the smoke-tainted atmosphere, above the tufted elms of Hurlingham. Roger Larose talked his best in that dim light, and Gerard, who had been silent and moody at the little dinner in Hertford Street yesterday, was to-night as joyous as the thrushes that were singing their evening hymn in the cool dusk of deserted shrubberies. And all the difference — the difference between despair and gladness, between gloom and mirth, between eager delight in life and dull disgust, had been brought about by the most sordid factor in the sum of man’s existence — filthy lucre.
No matter the cause when the effect was so enchanting. Gerard’s elation communicated itself to his companions. More champagne was consumed at that little table in the garden than at any other party of four in the club, and yet the house was crowded with diners, and there were other groups scattered here and there, banqueting under the roof of heaven. Lightest talk and gladdest laughter beguiled the hours till nearly midnight, when Mrs. Gresham remembered an early celebration at a ritualistic temple in Holborn, and entreated to be taken home at once, so that she might secure certain horns of pious seclusion before dawn.
Gerard had requested that no word of his altered fortunes should be spoken before Roger Larose. Roger and the rest of the world would hear all about his good luck in due course; but he shrank from the idea of endless congratulations, very few of them cordial and disinterested. Time enough when the inexorable Illustrated London News had acquainted society with the particulars of Mr Milford’s will.
The two women behaved with discretion, and although Larose wondered a little at the superb indifference with which Hillersdon paid for the dinner, and left the change of a ten-pound note to the waiter, knowing that of late his friend had suffered from youth’s common malady of impecuniousness, he ascribed this freedom only to some windfall which afforded temporary relief.
On their way to the carriage Mrs. Gresham contrived to get Hillersdon all to herself, while Larose and Mrs. Champion walked in advance of them.
“Dear Mr. Hillersdon, a fortune such as yours is a vast responsibility for a Christian,” she began solemnly.
“I haven’t looked at it in that light, Mrs. Gresham; but I own that it will take a good deal of spending.”
“It will, and the grand thing will be to secure good results for your outlay. There is one good work I should like to introduce to your notice before you are beset by appeals from strangers. The chief desire of my husband’s heart, and I may say also of mine, is to enlarge our Parish Church, now altogether unarchitectural and inadequate to the wants of the increased congregation which his eloquence and strength of character have attracted. In the late incumbent’s time the church used to be half empty, and mice ran about in the gallery. We want to do away with that horrid gallery, build a transept which would absorb the existing chancel, and add a new and finer chancel. It will cost a great deal of money, but we have many promises of help if any benefactor would give a large donation — say a thousand guineas — to start the fund in a substantial manner.”
“My dear Mrs. Gresham, you forget that I am a parson’s son. Dog doesn’t eat dog, you know. I have no doubt my father’s church needs enlargement. I know it has a pervading mouldiness which calls for restoration. I must think of him before I start your fund.”
“If you have not yet learnt how to spend your fortune, you certainly seem to know how to take care of it, Mr. Hillersdon,” said Mrs. Gresham, with some asperity; and then recovering herself, she continued airily, “It was rather too bad of me perhaps to plague you so soon, but in the cause of the Church one must ask in season and out of season.”
They went through the house and waited in the vestibule while the carriage was brought to the door, and they all went back to town together in the barouche, and wound up with an after-midnight cup of tea in Mrs. Champion’s drawing-room, a labyrinth of luxurious chairs, and palms, and Indian screens, and many-shaped tables, loaded with bric-à-brac of the costliest kind, glimmering in the tempered light of amber-shaded lamps.
“I like the French custom of midnight tea,” said Larose. “It stretches the thread of life and shortens the night of the brain.”
Mrs. Gresham slipped away with ostentatious stealthiness after a hasty cup of tea; but the others sat late, beguiled by the reposeful atmosphere — they three alone in the spacious room, with its perfume of tea-roses and shadow of dark fan-shaped leaves. Edith Champion was not a person of many accomplishments. She neither p
layed nor sang, she neither painted pictures nor wrote verses, preferring that such things should be done for her by those who made it the business of their lives to do them well. But she was past-mistress of the decorative art, and there were few women in London or Paris who could approach her in the arrangement of a drawing-room.
“My drawing-room is part of myself,” she said; “it reflects every shade of my character, and changes as I change.”
It was past one o’clock when Hillersdon and Larose left Hertford Street. Piccadilly and the Park looked almost romantic in the moonlight. That cup of strong Indian tea had worked the usual effect of such potions, and both men were disinclined to go home to the uninviting seclusion of a lodging-house bedroom.
“Shall we go to the Petunia?” asked Larose, suggesting one of those after-midnight clubs where the society is decidedly mixed, and where the champagne costs twice as much as at the Carlton or the Reform.”
“I detest the Petunia.”
“The Small Hours, then? They are giving really good music now, and we can get devilled bones or a lobster to our supper.”
“Thanks, no; I have had enough of society — even yours, which is always delightful. I am going for a long walk.”
“That is a safe way of getting rid of me,” answered Larose. “I never walk a furlong further than I am absolutely obliged. Hansom.”
His lodgings were in George Street, Hanover Square, hardly a profitable shilling’s worth, but it was not in Larose’s temperament to consider shillings, until he had spent his last. There were intervals when he was without even the indispensable shilling for a hansom.
“And a good thing, too,” said one of his friends, on hearing that hansoms were impossible, “for then you are obliged to walk.”
“Obliged!” cried Larose. “Marry! what should oblige me to do anything I don’t like doing? No lesser person than ‘the blind fury with the abhorred shears.’ When I can’t afford cabs I take to my bed, lie a-bed all day reading Ruskin, or dreaming of Coptic churches and Moorish interiors, and get up at dusk and make a ground plan or sketch a façade, in my dressing-gown, while the housemaid arranges my room. In these intervals I live upon biscuits and soda-water, like Byron, and I emerge from my retirement a renovated and rejuvenated man. Thus do I make necessity my nurse, and profit by propulsion,” concluded the architect, who had a knack of sham quotation.
Hillersdon was glad to see the cab go swinging round into Bond Street with his vivacious friend. He wanted to be alone. He had taken a curious fancy into his head, which was to renew his search for the curious old Inn where he had supped last night. He fancied that he might be able to hit upon the place if he approached it under the same conditions of darkness and the comparative solitude of night. He had failed utterly to find the old gate-way in the glare of day; yet the fabric must exist somewhere within narrow limits. The whole thing — the house to which he was taken — the room in which he sat — the wine ho drank — could not be a vision of the night. Granted that the face of the girl was a hallucination put upon him by a clever mesmerist, other things must have been real. He could not have wandered in the streets of London for three or four hours in a mesmeric trance, full of vain imaginings. No, his memory of every detail, of every word they two had spoken, was too distinct to be only the memory of a dream.
He walked to Bow Street, and from Bow Street went in the direction in which he had gone on the night before with Justin Jermyn. After he left Lincoln’s Inn Fields he tried to abstract his mind and to walk without thought of the way he was going, hoping that instinct might direct his steps in the way they had gone last night, the same instinct by which a horse who has travelled a road only once will make every turn accurately upon a second journey.
Instinct gave him no help. He wandered up and down Holborn, he explored the side streets that He right and left of Gray’s Inn Lane, he threaded narrow courts and emerged into Hatton Garden, he went back to the Lane and hugged the dingy wall of Verulam Buildings; but nowhere did he see gate-house or archway that bore the faintest resemblance to the gate-house beneath which he passed last night. He began to think that he had been verily upon enchanted ground, and that the champagne he had drunk with Justin Jermyn was akin to that juice of the grape which Mephistopheles drew from an augur hole in a wooden table. There was devilry in last night’s business somewhere or somehow.
He went back to his lodgings mystified and dispirited. He forgot that he was a millionaire, and over the scene of life there crept once again that dreary neutral hue which it had worn when he contemplated making a sudden irrevocable exit from the stage. It was three o’clock before he got to Church Court, half-past three before he flung himself wearily upon his jingling brazen bed.
“I must move into better rooms on Monday,” he said to himself, “and I must think about getting a house of my own. What is the use of wealth if one doesn’t enjoy it?”
There was very little enjoyment in him this summer morning, when the clear bright light stole into his room, and accentuated the shabbiness of the well-worn furniture, the hideous Philistinism of the maple wardrobe, with its Corinthian columns and tall strip of looking-glass, glass in which he had critically surveyed his dress suit the other evening, wondering how long it would hold out against the want of confidence among west-end tailors. He could have as many dress suits as he liked now, and could pay as much as the most egregious tailor cared to demand. He could live where he liked, start his house and his stable on a footing worthy of Nero or Domitian. He could do what he liked with his life, and the world would call it good, would wink at his delinquencies and flatter his follies. All that the world has of good lay in the hollow of his hand, for are not all the world’s good things for sale to the highest bidder? He reflected upon this wondrous change in his fortunes, and yet in this morning hour of solitude and silence the consciousness of illimitable wealth could not bring him happiness.
There had always been a vein of superstition in his nature, perhaps; or superstitious fears would scarcely have troubled him in the midst of his prosperity. His double attempt to find Jermyn’s chambers and his double failure had disconcerted him more than such a thing should have done. The adventure gave a suggestion of diablerie to his whole history since the moment when Jermyn read his secret design in the library at Fridoline House.
He could not sleep, so he took down the “Peau de Chagrin” from the bookcase which held his limited library, composed of only that which he held choicest in literature. One could have read the bent of his mind by looking at the titles of those thirty or forty books. Goethe’s Faust, Heine’s poetry and prose, Alfred de Musset, Owen Meredith, Villon, Gautier, Balzac, Baudelaire, Richepin; the literature of despair.
He read how when the lawyer brought Raphael the news of his fortune, his first thought was to take the “Peau de Chagrin” from his pocket and measure it against the tracing he had made upon a table-napkin the night before.
The skin had shrunk perceptibly. So much had gone from his life in the emotions of a single night of riot, in the shock of a sudden change in his fortunes.
“An allegory,” mused Hillersdon. “My life has been wasting rapidly since the night before last. I have been living faster, two heart-throbs for one.”
He breakfasted early after two or three hours of broken sleep, and dawdled over his breakfast, taking up one volume after another with a painful inability to fix his mind upon any subject, until the inexorable church bells began their clangour close at hand, and made all thought impossible.
Then only did be remember that it was Sunday morning. He changed his coat hurriedly, brushed his hat, and set out for that fashionable temple in which Edith Champion was wont to hear the eloquent sermons of a “delicate, dilettante, white-handed priest,” in an atmosphere heavy with Ess bouquet, and the warm breath of closely-packed humanity.
The choir was chanting the “Te Deum” when he went in, and secured one of the last rush-bottomed chairs available in the crowded nave. His night wanderings bad fatigue
d him more than he knew, and he slept profoundly through one of the choicest discourses of the season, and was not a little embarrassed when Mrs. Champion and Mrs. Gresham insisted upon discussing every point the preacher had made. Happily, both ladies were too eager to state their own opinions to discover his ignorance, or to guess that for him that thrilling sermon had been as the booming of a bumble bee in the heart of an over-blown rose — a sound of soothing and pleasantness.
“He goes to the Riviera every winter,” said Mrs. Champion, slipping from the sermon to the preacher; “he is more popular there than in London. You should hear his thrilling denunciation of Monte Carlo, and his awful warnings to the people who go there. There is hardly standing room in any church where he preaches.”
Hillersdon walked in the Park with the two ladies, patiently enduring that customary church parade which always bored him, even in Edith Champion’s company, and even although his pride was stimulated by being seen in attendance upon one of the handsomest women in London.
The Park looked lovely in the summer noontide, the people were smart, well-dressed, admirable; but the park and the people were the same as last year, and they would be the same next year — the same and always the same.
“It is the constant revolution stale
And tasteless, of the same repeated joys,
That palls and satiates, and makes languid life
A pedlar’s pack, that bows the bearer down.”
He dined with Mrs. Champion, and went to a musical party with her, and that Sunday seemed to him one of the longest he had ever spent, longer even than the Sabbath days of his boyhood, when he was allowed to read only good books, and forbidden all transactions with rat-catchers and ferrets.
He was glad when he had handed Mrs. Champion to her carriage under an awning in Grosvenor Place, glad to go back to his bachelor loneliness, and impatient of Monday morning. He was up betimes, and hurried off to Lincoln’s Inn Fields as soon as it was reasonable to expect Mr. Crafton at his office. He wanted again to assure himself that Ebenezer Milford’s fortune was a reality, and not a dream.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 896
