Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  After that burst of harmony, in which all the choirs sang together, there came other part-songs by separate choirs. One of these by the members of a club at Chelsea, which called itself somewhat ambitiously the St. Cecilia, struck Gerard as a marked advance upon the others. They sang Schubert’s “Wanderer,” arranged as a part-song, with English words, and among the many voices there were tones of purest quality which went to Gerard Hillersdon’s heart, and moved him more than the new tenors and much heralded sopranos from Italy, America, and Australia had been able to do of late. Indeed, there had been nights at the opera when he, who was passionately fond of music, had begun to fancy that he had left off caring for it; that one may get beyond music as one gets beyond so many other pleasures; that even to that pure and perfect enjoyment there may come a season of satiety.

  To-night those familiar notes thrilled him; those fresh young voices pealing out over the crowded hall awakened in him a rapture of humanity, a longing to be one with this world of humble toilers, this world of struggles and of cares, in which the pleasures were so simple and so few. This was a gala night, no doubt, for all these girls. To stand on yonder platform, to wear those bright-coloured sashes, and mingle their voices in tuneful harmonies, meant a festival. He thought of the girls he met in society, the girls steeped to the lips in worldliness and social intrigue; girls who calculated the cost of every entertainment, appraised its value, social and financial; sneered if the floral decorations at a ball were sparely done; sneered even more contemptuously when Transatlantic or newly-made wealth obtruded itself upon the eye in a too lavish magnificence; girls who were gourmets upon leaving the nursery, and who passed at once from the schoolroom bread and butter to a nice discrimination in quails, ortolans, and perigord pie; girls who went gaily flirting and dancing through the flowery groves of a London June, all freshness and infantine candour under the tempered incandescent lamps, yet having one eye always steadily directed to the main chance of an eligible husband and a handsome establishment.

  While he idly philosophised, gazing somewhat dreamily at the wall of faces, rising in a semicircle in front of him, till the topmost rank seemed to touch the roof of the hall, his eye suddenly fastened upon one face in the middle distance, a delicate and pensive face, far paler than the majority of those faces, though pallor is the predominant note in the complexions of London work girls. That one face, having once been perceived by him, shone out from the mass of faces, separate and distinct, and held his gaze. It was the face that had haunted his mind since that strange night in Justin Jermyn’s chambers, the face of the girl at the sewing-machine. Line for line it was the face he had seen in a vision, distinct in its identity as the living face he was looking at to-night.

  When the singing ceased he questioned Lady Jane, who sat next him’.

  “There is a girl in the Chelsea choir, a very lovely girl, but with” a look of care in her face,” he said. “Do you know who she is?”

  “I think I know whom you mean. Can you point her out to me?”

  He counted the rows and the heads, and indicated the exact position of the girl whose face attracted him.

  “Do tell me what you know about her,” he said earnestly.

  “Very little. She is not in my parish or in my club. I believe she is a good girl. She lives with her father—”

  “Who was once a gentleman and a scholar, but who is now nothing but a drunkard,” interrupted Gerard.

  “You know her, then?” exclaimed Lady Jane.

  “Is that her history?”

  “I fear it is. She came once to a social evening at our club, and I talked to her, but she was very reticent, and it is from other girls I have heard the little I know of her story. The father was in the Church, but disgraced himself by intemperate habits. The girl who told me this heard it from him, not from his daughter. Hester is a brave, good girl, and bears the burden of her father’s past follies, and works very hard to maintain him in comfort. She is a very clever hand at braiding upon cloth. You may have noticed the braided gowns and jackets that have been worn of late years. Hester Dale does that kind of work for the fashionable tailors.”

  “Is it hand work or done by the sewing-machine?”

  “The greater part is machine work. Hester is very expert — a really exquisite worker by hand or machine — but it is a hard life at best. I wish we could do more to brighten it for her. We could give her many little treats, and pleasant excursions in the country, if she could only forget that she is a gentleman’s daughter, and mix with our girls upon an equal footing. She would find a good deal of natural refinement among them, common as their surroundings are. But she does not care to join in anything but the singing classes. Music is her only pleasure.”

  “Is not London a place of terrible temptations for so lovely a girl, under such adverse circumstances?” asked Gerard, in the pause that followed the next part-song, by an East End choir.

  “Oh, Hester is not that kind of girl,” answered Lady Jane, quickly; “she is too pure-minded to be approached by any evil influences.”

  Another choir burst into Mendelssohnic melody, “The Maybells and the Flowers,” a choral song that sounded gay and fresh as May itself — and Gerard was again constrained to silence, but he never took his eyes from the pure oval of that pale, pensive face, with its lovely violet eyes, full of a dreamy sweetness, gentle, trustful, innocent as the eyes of a child. Verily, this was a loveliness exempt from the snares and lures that lie in wait for vulgar beauty. A girl with such a face as that would not be easily tempted.

  His mind went back to those two occasions upon which he had met Hester Davenport. He remembered that autumn afternoon at the Rectory, when he went into the drawing-room to bid Lilian goodbye, and found a strange young lady sitting with her — a young lady in a plain alpaca gown and a neat straw hat, and with the loveliest face he had seen for many a long day. He remembered the few words interchanged with the curate’s daughter — the commonplace inquiries as to how she liked Hanover, and Hanover’s ways and manners, and whether she had studied music or painting — and then a hurried adieu, as he ran off to the station. He remembered that other meeting by the sea, and a somewhat longer conversation — a little talk about her favourite walks, and her favourite books. He recalled the sweet face in its youthful freshness — fair as the face of the holy bride in Raffaelle’s “Spozalizio” — and then he thought of the girls he had known in the smart world, girls who had made magnificent marriages on the strength of a beauty less exquisite — who were now queens of society, treading lightly upon pathways strewn with the roses of life — worshipped, feted, royal in their supremacy.

  And it was just the starting point, the entourage that made all the difference. This girl might sit at her sewing-machine till her loveliness faded to the pale shadow of the beauty that has been.

  He hardly heard the rest of the concert, though the voices were sufficiently loud. He was in a troubled dream of a life, which, after all, concerned him very little. What was Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba? Yet, in his eagerness to find out more about Hester Davenport he bade Lady Jane a hurried good night, and put his sister into her carriage to be driven home alone.

  “I am going for a stroll in the moonlight,” he said. “Don’t sit up for me. I may go to my club for half an hour afterwards.”

  It was early yet, not quite ten o’clock, and the young May moon was shining over the chimneys of Soho, a tempting night for a walk, and Gerard was given to nocturnal perambulations, so Lilian hardly wondered at being sent home alone.

  He watched the brougham till it disappeared round a corner, and then watched the doors of the hall till the audience had all passed out, and had melted away into the infinite space of London; and then he watched the girls who composed the different choirs as they departed, mostly in talkative clusters, full of gaiety after the evening’s amusement. Among so many girls, all dressed in much the same fashion, it was not an easy task to single out one — but his eye was keen to distinguish that one girl f
or whom he waited, as she crossed the street, separating herself from the herd, and walking rapidly westward, he following. She walked with the resolute pace of a woman accustomed to thread her way through the streets of a great city, uncaring for the faces that passed her by, unconscious of observers, intent on her own business, self-contained and self-reliant. Gerard Hillersdon followed on the opposite side of the way, waiting for some quieter spot in which he might address her. They walked in this fashion as far as St. James’s Park, and there, under the shelter of spring foliage, beneath Carlton House Terrace, he overtook and accosted her.

  “Good evening, Miss Davenport. I hope you have not forgotten me — Gerard Hillersdon, son of the Rector of Helmsleigh?”

  He stood bareheaded in the faint evening light — half dusk, half moonlight — holding out his hand to her; but she did not take the extended hand, and she was evidently anxious to pass on without any conversation with him.

  “No, I have not forgotten — but I am hurrying home to my father. Good night, Mr. Hillersdon.”

  He would not let her go.

  “Spare me a few minutes — only a few minutes,” he pleaded. “I won’t delay your return. Let me walk by your side. My sister, your old friend Lilian, is living in London with me. She would like to call upon you if you will let her.”

  She was always kind — but it is impossible. My father and I have done with the world in which your sister lives. We are living very humbly, but not unhappily — at least, I have only one anxiety, and that would be worse if we were living in a palace.”

  “Do you think my sister would value or love you less because you are working to maintain your father? Oh, Miss Davenport, you cannot think so meanly of an old friend!”

  “No, no; I am sure she would be as kind as ever — but I would rather not see her. It would recall past miseries. I have tried to blot out all memory of my past life — to exist only in the present. I get on very well” — with a sad little smile—” while I can do that. Please don’t make it more difficult for me. Good night.”

  She stopped, and this time it was she who held out her hand in friendly farewell.

  He took the poor little hand, so small, so delicately fashioned, in its shabby cotton glove — a grey cotton glove that had been washed and neatly darned. Ho took her hand, and held it gently, but with no intention of accepting his dismissal.

  “Let me walk home with you,” he said. “I have so much to say to you.”

  “I would rather not. I am used to being alone.”

  “A part of the way — at least, just a little way. I want to tell you of all the changes that have happened since you left Helmsleigh.”

  “They cannot concern me. I tell you again I have done with all that life. I have no interest in it.”

  “Not even in my sister’s fate? She was your friend.”

  “She was, and a very dear friend, but all that is past and gone. I want to know nothing about her, except that she is well and happy.”

  “She is both — happier than when you knew her. She is in that exalted condition of happiness which seems common to girls who are engaged to be married — curious when one considers their opportunities of appraising the joys of domestic life in the persons of their fathers and mothers.”

  “She is engaged?” mused Hester, forgetful at once of her resolve not to be interested, and all a woman in her quick sympathies. “Is her fiancé any one I knew at Helmsleigh?”

  “No; he did not come to Helmsleigh until after you left. Ho succeeded your father as curate; but he is now in London. He is the Vicar of St. Lawrence’s. You may have seen him at Lady Jane’s club.”

  “No; I very seldom go to the club. I give most of my leisure to my father.”

  “Mr. Davenport is pretty well, I hope?” inquired Gerard, hardly knowing how to avoid giving her pain in any allusion to her father.

  “Yes, thank you. He has tolerable health; only — there is no use in hiding it from you — there is always the old trouble to fear. It does not come often, but it is a constant fear.”

  “He is not cured? He still gives way to the old temptation?”

  “Sometimes. He is very good. He struggles against that dreadful inclination; but there are times when it is stronger than himself. He fought a hard battle with himself when we were in Australia — tried to gain his self-respect and the respect of his fellow-men. He succeeded in getting profitable employment as a clerk. We were doing quite well; but the evil hour came. He was tempted by foolish friendly people, who laughed at my anxieties about him — and — the end was madness. He was dismissed from the office where he was a gentleman and a person of importance, with a good salary, and he was glad to drop into a lower form of employment; and he sank and sank to almost the lowest in the city of Melbourne. His friends ceased to care for him. They called him irretrievable. So then I took the care of his life upon my own shoulders. I was able to earn a little money by giving lessons in a depot for sewing-machines, where I learnt a good many improvements in machine-work — improvements that are not yet common in England — and I saved just enough to pay our passage home — a steerage passage. I brought him home, a sad wreck, hopeless, broken in body and mind, and we found lodgings in Chelsea — very cheap and very humble, but clean and wholesome. A distant relation of my father’s pays the rent. We have lived there ever since. I thought at first that I should be able to find pupils for the pianoforte or singing, and that my German education would help me in that way; but I found very soon how hopeless that is, especially when one is living in a poor neighbourhood and wearing a threadbare gown. And then I was lucky enough to discover a mantle-maker in Knightsbridge who wanted what is called a braiding hand, and as my knowledge of the latest sewing-machine enabled me to do this kind of work better than most girls, I soon got regular employment, and I have been able to make my living ever since.”

  “A poor living and a hard life, I fear,’’ said Gerard.

  “Oh, we have enough. We are just comfortable, father and I; and he is so fond of me and so good to me that I ought to be thankful and happy.”

  “And have you no recreation, no variety in your existence? Is it all hard work?”

  “I have the choir practice. That makes a little change now and then, only I don’t like to leave my father too often.”

  “Does he do nothing?”

  “He reads the papers at the free library, and in fine weather he does a little gardening.”

  “But he does nothing to help you — he earns nothing?”

  “No, he is past all that. If he could earn money evil would come of it. As it is his pockets are always empty, poor dear, and he cannot pay for the dreadful stuff that would madden his brain. Brandy and chloral cost money, luckily for him and for me.”

  “Will you let Lilian help you?” asked Gerard. “We are rich now, ridiculously rich. We hold our wealth in trust for all who need it. Let my sister do something to make your life lighter. She shall put a sum of money into the Knightsbridge Bank to your credit, open an account for you, and you can draw the money as you want it. She shall do that to-morrow. Consider the thing done.”

  “Do not dream of it, Mr. Hillersdon,” she answered indignantly. “I would never touch a sixpence of any such money. Do you suppose I would take alms from you or any one else while I am young and strong, and am able to get regular work? I wonder you can think so poorly of me.”

  “I wonder you can be so cruel as to refuse my friendship — for in refusing my help you deny me the privilege of a friend. It is mere stubbornness to reject a small share in Lilian’s good fortune. I tell you again we are absurdly rich.”

  “If you were twice as rich as the richest of the Rothschilds I would not sacrifice my independence. If I were penniless and my father ill the case might be different. I might ask your sister to help me.”

  “And must I do nothing to lighten your burden, to soften your hard life?”

  “It is not a hard life. It is the life of thousands of girls in this great city — girls
who are contented with their lot, and are bright and happy. I am luckier than many of them, for my work is better paid.”

  “But you were not born to this lot!”

  “Perhaps not; but I hardly think that makes it any worse to bear. I have lived the life long enough to be accustomed to it.”

  They were in Eaton Square by this time, the long and rather dreary square, with its tall, barn-like church, which even Fashion cannot make beautiful. When they were about half-way between the church and the western end of the square Hester stopped abruptly.

  “I must beg you to come no further,” she said, and there was a resolute look in the pale proud face under the light of the street lamp that commanded obedience.

  “Good night, then,” he said moodily. “You will at least tell me where you live?”

  “No, there would be nothing gained. My father and I wish to be forgotten.”

  She hurried away from him, and he stood there in moonlight and gaslight, in the dull level square, thinking how strange life is.

  Should he follow her and find out where she lived? No; that would he a base and vulgar act, and he might obtain her address without that sacrifice of self-respect and risk of her contempt. He could find out at the club, of whose choir she was a member. She fancied herself safely hidden under her assumed name, no doubt; but he had heard that alias from Lady Jane, and it would be easy enough to discover the dwelling-place of Hester Dale.

  He walked home melancholy, and yet elated. He was so glad to have found her. It seemed as if a new life were beginning for him that night.

  He did not go to any of the haunts which invite the footsteps of youth betwixt midnight and morning. Dancing tempted him not, neither music nor cards. He was out of tune with all such common amusements, and the commonplace emotions which they produce. He felt as Endymion felt after the mystery of the cavern; felt as if in that walk in the dim evening shadows and in the bright moonlight he had been in another world, and now was back in the old world again, and found it passing dull.