All was silent in his house when he went in, but through an open window in the lofty hall a chilling wind crept in and stirred the palm leaves, and awakened weird harmonies in an Æolian harp that hung near the casement. His favourite reading-lamp was burning on the table in his study, that room which owed its existence to Justin Jermyn’s taste rather than his own, and was yet in all things as his own taste would have chosen.
The valet who was waiting up for him received his orders and retired, and as his footsteps slowly died away in the corridor, Gerard Hillersdon felt the oppression of an intolerable solitude.
There were letters on a side table. Of all the numerous deliveries in the district none ever failed to bring a heap of letters for the millionaire — invitations, letters of introduction, begging letters, circulars, prospectuses of every imaginable mode and manner of scheme engendered in the wild dreams of the speculator. He only glanced at these things, and then flung them into a basket which his secretary cleared every morning. His secretary replied to the invitations; he had neatly engraved cards expressive of every phase of circumstances — the pleasure in accepting — the honour of dining — the regret in declining — and all the rest. The chief thing which money had done for Gerard Hillersdon was to lessen the labour of life — to shunt all his burdens upon other shoulders.
This is what wealth can do. If it cannot always buy happiness, it can generally buy ease. It seems a hard thing to the millionaire that he must endure his own gout, and that he cannot hire some one to get up early in the morning for him.
Among all the letters which had accumulated since six o’clock, there was only one that interested him, a long letter from Edith Champion, who had the feminine passion for writing lengthily to the man she loved, albeit of late he had rarely replied in any more impassioned form than a telegram.
“It is so much nicer to talk,” he told her when she reproached him, “and there is nothing to prevent our meeting.”
“But there is. There are whole days on which we don’t meet — my Finchley days.”
“True. But then we are so fresh to each other the day after. Why discount our emotions by writing about them? I love to get your letters, all the same,” he added kindly. “Your pen is so eloquent.”
“I can say more with my pen than I ever dare to say with my lips,” she answered.
Her letter to-night was graver than usual.
“I have been at Finchley all day — such a trying day. I think the end is coming — at least, the doctors have told me they do not give him much longer. I cannot say I fear he is dying, since you know that his death will mean the beginning of a new existence for me, with all the hope and gladness of my girlhood; and yet my mind is full of fear when I think of him and of you, and of what my life has been for the last three years. I do not think I have failed in any duty to him. I know that I have never thwarted him, that I have studied his wishes in the arrangement of our lives, have never complained of the dull people he brought about me, or refused to send a card to any of his city friends. If he had objected to your visits I should have given up your acquaintance. I have never disobeyed him. But he liked to see you in his house; he never felt the faintest pang of jealousy, though he must have known that you were more to me than any common friend. I have done my duty, Gerard; and yet I feel myself disgraced somehow by those three years of my married life. I was sold like a slave in the market-place, and though such bargains are the fashion nowadays, and everybody approves of the market and the barter, yet a woman who has consented to be bought by the highest bidder cannot feel very proud of herself in after life. It is nearly over, Gerard, and by-and-by you must teach me to forget. You must give me back my girlhood. You can, and you only. There is no one else who can — no one — no one.”
He sat brooding, with that letter open before him. Yes, he was bound as fast as ever man was bound — bound by every obligation that could constrain an honest man. Conscience, feeling, honour alike constrained him. This was the woman to whom he gave his heart four years ago, in the fresh morning of a young man’s life — in that one bright year of youth when all pleasures, hopes, and fancies are new and vivid, and when the feet that tread this workaday earth move as lightly as if they wore Mercury’s pinions. What a happy year it had been! What a bright, laughing love! Though he might look back now and sneer at his first love as commonplace and conventional, he could but remember how sunny the world had been, how light his heart, how keen his enjoyment of life in those thoughtless days — before he had learnt to think! Yes; that had been the charm of existence — he had lived in the present. He must try to live in the present now — to look neither backward nor forward — to enjoy, as the butterflies enjoy — without memory, without forecast.
He had not forgotten the opening chapter of the “Peau de Chagrin” — the dismal centenarian in the bric-à-brac shop, the man with a face like a death’s head, the dreary stoic who had existed for a hundred years, and yet had never lived. He had the novel on the table before him — an edition de luxe, richly illustrated, with duplicate engravings on India paper. The story had a curious fascination for him, and he could not rid himself of the idea that the consumptive Valentin was his own prototype. In a curious, fanciful indulgence of this grim notion, he had nailed a large sheet of drawing-paper on the panelled wall that faced his writing-table. He had no enchanted skin to hang on the white paper, to indicate by its gradual contraction the wasting of his own life — the hurrying feet of Death; but he had invented for himself a gauge of his strength and nervine vitality. Upon the elephantine sheet he had drawn with a bold and rapid pen the irregular outline of an imaginary chagrin skin, and from time to time he had drawn other lines within this outline, always following the original form. In the steadiness and force of the line his pen made he saw an indication of the steadiness of his nerves, the soundness of his physical health. Of the five lines upon the white paper the innermost showed weakest and most uncertain. There had been a gradual deterioration from the first line to the fifth.
To-night, after a long interval of melancholy thought, he rose suddenly, dipped a broad-nibbed pen into a capacious ink-pot, and with slow, uncertain hand traced the sixth line — traced it with a hand so tremulous that this last line differed more markedly from the line immediately before it than that fifth line differed from the first bold outline. Yet between the first and the fifth lines there had been an interval of nearly six months, while between the fifth and the sixth the interval was but three days.
The element of passion, with its fever of hope and expectancy, had newly entered into his life.
CHAPTER XIII. “OUT WENT MY HEART’S NEW FIRE, AND LEFT IT COLD.”
GERARD HILLERSDON and Mrs. Champion met but rarely dining the month of May. Doomed men are apt to linger beyond the anticipations of their medical attendants, and the famous physician from Cavendish Square continued his bi-weekly visits through all the bright long sunny days which society’s calendar has devoted to the pursuit of pleasure — a chase from which Mrs. Champion’s handsome face and form were missing. Other figures there were as perfect, other faces as famous for beauty; and it was only once in a way that one of the butterflies noted the absence of that Queen butterfly; it was only once in a way that friendship murmured with a sigh, “Poor Mrs. Champion, mewed up with an invalid husband all through this lovely season!”
Edith Champion gave the fading life her uttermost devotion. She had a keen sense of honour, after all — this wife who had gone on loving her first lover all through her married life. She had a more sensitive conscience than her world would have readily believed. She wanted to do her duty to the dying husband, so that she might surrender herself heart and mind to a new life of gladness when he should be at peace, and yet feel no sting of remorse, and yet have no dark memory to fling its shadow across her sunlight.
With this laudable desire, she spent the greater part of her life at Finchley, where she had taken a villa near the doctor’s house, so as to be within call by day or night. She
withdrew herself from all friends and acquaintances except Gerard Hillersdon, and even him she saw only two or three times a week, driving into London and taking tea in the cool Hertford Street drawing-room, with her nerves always strained by the dread of some urgent telegram that should call her back to her duties.
“The end may come at any moment,” she said. “It would be dreadful if I were absent at the last.”
“Do you think it would really matter — to him?” asked Gerard.
“I think it would. He rarely addresses me by name, but I think he always knows me. He will take things from my hand — food or medicine — which he will not take from his nurses. They tell me he is much more restless when I am not there. I can do very little for him; but if I can make him just a shade easier and calmer by sitting at his bedside it is my duty to be there. I feel that it is wrong even to be away for a couple of hours this afternoon — but if I did not leave him and that dreary house once in a way I think my brain would go as his has gone.”
“Is the house so very dreadful?”
“Dreadful, no. It is a charming house, nicely furnished, the very pink of neatness, in the midst of a delightful old garden. It is what one knows about it — the troubled minds that have worn themselves out in those prim, orderly rooms, the sleepless eyes that have stared at those bright, pretty wall-papers, the wild delusions, the attempted suicides, the lingering deaths! When I think of all those things, the silence of the house seems intolerable, the ticking of the clock a slow torture. But you will teach me to forget all this misery by-and-by, Gerard? You will teach me to forget, won’t you?”
That was the only allusion she had ever made of late to the near future. It was forgetfulness she yearned for, as the chief boon the future could bestow.
“You cannot think how long this summer has seemed to me,” she said. “I hope I am not impatient, that I would not hasten the end by a single day — but the days and the hours are terribly long.” An hour was the utmost respite that Mrs. Champion allowed herself in that cool perfumed room, tête-à-tête with her first lover, surrounded with ail the old frivolities, the tea-table, set out with tiny foie-gras sandwiches, and hot-house fruit, the automatic Japanese fan, mounted on a bamboo stand, set in motion with the lightest touch, the new books and magazines scattered about, to be carried off in her victoria presently, for the solace of wakeful nights. Only an hour of converse with the man she loved, broken into very often by some officious caller, who saw her carriage at the door, and insisted upon being let in.
It seemed to her now and then that Gerard was somewhat absent and restrained during these interviews, but she attributed his languid manner to the depressing nature of all she had to tell him. Her own low spirits communicated themselves to him.
“We are so thoroughly in sympathy,” she told herself.
He left her one afternoon late in June, and instead of going into the Park where the triple rank of carriages by the Achilles statue offered to the admiring lounger a bouquet of high-bred beauty, set off by the latest triumphs of court dressmakers, he walked past the Alexandra Hotel and dropped into Sloane Street, and thence to Chelsea. His feet ha d taken him in that direction very often of late.
He had found no difficulty in discovering Hester’s dwelling-place, for on his way to the St. Cecilia Club he had stumbled against old Davenport, bottle-nosed, shabby, but wearing clean linen, carefully brushed clothes, and with a certain survival of his old Oxford manner.
Neither drunken habits nor dark vicissitudes had impaired the old man’s memory. He recognised Hillersdon at a glance, and cordially returned his greeting.
“Wonderful changes have come about since we saw each other in Devonshire, Mr. Hillersdon,” he said. “I have gone very low down the ladder of Fortune, and you have gone very high up. I congratulate you upon your good luck — not undeserved, certainly not. You acted like a hero, my dear young friend, and such an act merited a handsome reward. I read the story in the newspapers.”
“A much exaggerated version of the truth, no doubt. I’ll walk your way, if you please, Mr. Davenport. I should like to know how the world has used you.”
“No better than it uses a homeless mongrel, sir; but perhaps no worse than I deserved. You remember what Hamlet says: ‘Use every man after his desert, and who shall ‘scape whipping?’ I don’t like to take you out of your way, Mr. Hillersdon.”
“My way is no way. I was only strolling — with no settled purpose.”
They were on the Chelsea embankment, where the old houses of Cheyne Walk still recall the old-world restfulness of a day that is dead, while the Suspension Bridge and Battersea Park tell of an age that means change and progress.
“You like old Chelsea and its associations,” said Davenport.
“Very much. I remember the place when I was a boy, and I recognise improvement everywhere; but I grieve over the lost landmarks, Don Saltero, the old narrow Cheyne Walk, the sober shabbiness—”
“There are older things that I remember — in the days when my people lived in Lowndes Square, and I used to come fresh from Balliol to take my fill of pleasure in the London season. My father was a prosperous Q.C., a man employed in all the great cases where intellect and oratory were wanted. He was earning a fine income — though not half as much as your famous silk-gowns earn nowadays — and he spent as fast as he earned. He had a large family and was very liberal to his children — and when he died, in the prime of life, he left his widow and orphans the fag-end of a lease, a suite of Louis Quatorze furniture, already out of fashion, a choice collection of Wedgwood, and a few Prouts, Tophams, Hunts, and Duncans. He had put away nothing out of the big fees that had been pouring in for the last fifteen years of his life. He used to talk about beginning to save nest year, but that nest year never came. The sale of the lease and furniture made a little fund for my mother and three unmarried daughters. For me and my brothers the world was our oyster — to be opened as best we might.”
“You had scholarship to help you.”
“Yes, Greek and Latin were my only stock in trade. A friend of my father’s gave me a small living within a couple of years of my taking priest’s orders, and on the strength of that I married, and took private pupils. I lost my wife when Hetty was only twelve years old, but things had begun to go wrong before then. My second living was in a low district, village and vicarage on clay soil, too many trees, and no drainage. The devil’s tooth of neuralgia fastened itself upon me, body and bones, and my life for some years was a perpetual fight with pain. Like Paul I fought with beasts — invisible beasts — that gnawed into my soul. Here is my poor little domicile. I hardly knew we had walked so far.”
He had taken his homeward way automatically, while Gerard walked beside him, through shabby streets of those small semidetached houses which the builder has devised for needy gentility and prosperous labour — here the healthy mechanic with five and thirty shillings a week, corduroy trousers and shirt sleeves, there the sickly clerk, with a weekly guinea and a threadbare alpaca coat. Here shining windows and gaily filled flower-boxes, there dirt and slatternliness, broken bottles and weeds in the tiny forecourt, misery and squalor in its most hideous aspect. Gerard had marked the shabbiness of the neighbourhood, and he felt that somewhere in the midst of this sordid labyrinth he should find his Ariadne, though her hand would never have furnished him with the clue.
The house before which Mr. Davenport stopped was no better than the other houses which they had passed, but the best had been made of its shabbiness, the forecourt was full of stocks and carnations, and a row of Mary lilies marked the boundary rail which divided this tiny enclosure from the adjacent patch. The window-panes shone bright and clear, and the window-box was a hanging garden of ivy-leafed geranium, yellow marguerites, and mignonette.
“What a pretty little garden!” exclaimed Gerard.
“Yes, there are a good many flowers for such a scrap of ground. Hettie and I are very fond of our garden — we’ve a goodish bit of ground at the back. It’s a
bout the only thing we can take any pride in with such surroundings as ours.”
And then, lingering at the gate, as Gerard lingered, the old man asked —
“Will you come in and rest after your walk? I can give you a lemon squash.”
“That’s a tempting offer upon one of the hottest afternoons we have had this year. Yes, I shall be pleased to sit down for half an hour, if you are sure I shan’t be in your way.”
“I shall be very glad of your company. I get plenty of solitude when Hettie is out on her long tramps to Knightsbridge. She often passes the house in which her grandfather used to entertain some of the best people in London — a work-girl, with a bundle under her arm. Hard lines, ain’t it?”
He opened the door and admitted his visitor into a passage fourteen feet by two feet six, out of which opened the front parlour and general living room, a small room, with a little stunted cupboard on each side of the fireplace. Gerard looked about him with greedy eyes, noting every detail.
The furniture was of the commonest, a pembroke table, half a dozen cane-seated chairs, a sofa such as can only be found in ‘ lodging-house parlours; but there were a few things which gave individuality to the room, and in somewise redeemed its shabbiness.
Fronting the window stood a capacious arm-chair, covered with apple-blossom chintz; the ugly sofa was draped with soft Japanese muslin; a cheap paper screen of cool colouring broke the ugly outline of the folding doors, and a few little bits of old china and a row of books gave meaning to the wooden slabs at the top of the dwarf cupboards.
There was a bowl of flowers on the table, vivid yellow corncockles, which brightened the room like a patch of sunlight.
“Try that easy chair,” said Davenport, “it’s uncommonly comfortable.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 907
