“Let me go with you.”
“I had rather you went to Scotland Yard, as you promised.”
“I will go to Scotland Yard. I will do anything to prove my love and loyalty.”
“Loyalty! Oh, Mr. Hillersdon, do not play with words. I am an ignorant, inexperienced girl, but I know what truth and loyalty mean — and that you have violated both to me.”
They left the house together, in opposite directions. Gerard walked towards Oakley Street, hailed the first cab he met, which took him to Scotland Yard, where he saw the officials, and gave a careful description of the missing Nicholas Davenport, age, personal characteristics, manners, and habits. When asked if the missing man had any money about him at the time of his disappearance, he professed ignorance, but added that it was possible that he had money. It was late in the evening when he left Scotland Yard, and he went into the Park, and roamed about for some time in a purposeless manner, his brain fevered, his nerves horribly shaken. This horror of Nicholas Davenport’s fate absorbed his mind at one moment, and in the next he was thinking of Hester and his rejected love, troubled, irresolute, full of pity for the woman he loved, full of tenderest compassion for scruples which seemed to him futile and foolish in the world as he knew it, where illicit liaisons were open secrets, and where no man or woman refused praise and honour to sin in high places. He pitied the simplicity which clung to virtue for its own sake, a strange spectacle in that great guilty city, a penniless girl sacrificing love and gladness for the sake of honour.
He went from the Park to the Small Hours, a club where he knew he was likely to find Jermyn, who rarely went to bed before the summer dawn. “It is bad enough to be obliged to go to bed by candle-light from October to March,” said Jermyn, who declared that any man who took more than three or four hours’ sleep in the twenty-four shamefully wasted his existence.
“We are men, not dormice,” he said, “and we are sent into this world to live — not to sleep.”
Gerard found Jermyn the ruling spirit of a choice little supper-party, where the manners of the ladies — although they were not strictly “in society,” and would not have been received at the Heptachord, or at the Sensorium — were irreproachable, so irreproachable, indeed, that the party would have been dull but for Justin Jermyn. His ringing laugh and easy vivacity raised the spirits of his convives, and made the champagne more exhilarating than the champagne of these latter days is wont to be.
“A capital wine, ain’t it?” he asked gaily. “It’s a new brand, ‘Fin de Siècle,’ the only wine I care for.”
Gerard drank deep of the new wine, would have drunk it had it been vitriol, in the hope of drowning Nicholas Davenport’s ghost; and when the little banquet was over, and youth and folly were waltzing to the strains of Strauss in an adjoining room, he linked his arm through Jermyn’s and led him out of the club, and into the stillness of St. James’s Park.
Here he told his mentor all that had happened, denounced himself as a traitor, and perhaps a murderer. “It was your scheme,” he said; “you suggested the snare, and you have made me the wretch I am.”
Jermyn’s frank laughter had a sound of mockery as he greeted this accusation.
“That is always the way,” he said, “a man asks for advice, and turns upon his counsellor. You wanted to get that officious old father out of the way. I suggested a manner of doing it. And now you call me Mephisto and yourself murderer.”
And then with airiest banter he laughed away Gerard’s lingering scruples, scoffed at man’s honour and at woman’s virtue, and Gerard, who had long ago abandoned all old creeds for a dreary agnosticism, heard and assented to that mocking sermon, whose text was self, and whose argument was self-indulgence.
“I shudder when I think of the myriads of fanatics who have sacrificed happiness here for the sake of an imaginary paradise — wretches who have starved body and soul upon earth to feast and rejoice in the New Jerusalem,” said Jermyn, finally, as they parted at Buckingham Gate in the faint flush of dawn.
Less than half an hour afterwards Gerard was in the Rosamond Road, and at the little iron gate that opened into the scrap of garden, where a cluster of sunflowers rose superior to the dust, pale in the steel-blue light of dawn.
The lamp was still burning in the parlour, and he saw Hester’s shadow upon the blind. She was sitting with her elbows on the table, her face buried in her hands, and he knew that she must be weeping or praying. She had let her lamp burn on, unconscious of the growing daylight. The window was open at the top, but the lower half was shut. He tapped on the pane, and the shadow of a woman’s form rose up suddenly, and broadened over the blind.
“Hester, Hester,” he called. He raised the sash, as she drew up the blind, and they stood face to face, both pale, breathless, and agitated.
“You have heard of him, you have seen him,” she cried excitedly. “Is it good news?”
“Yes, Hester, yes,” he answered, and sprang into the room.
CHAPTER XIX. ALL ALONG THE RIVER.
BETWEEN Reading and Oxford there is a riverside village, of which the fashionable world has yet taken scant notice. It lies beyond the scene of the great river carnivals, and the houseboat is even yet a strange apparition beside those willowy shores. There is an old church with its square tower and picturesque graveyard placed at a bend of the river, where the stream broadens into a shallow bay. The church; a straggling row of old-world cottages, with overhanging thatch and low cob walls, half hidden under roses, honeysuckle, and Virginia creeper, cottages whose gardens are gorgeous with the vivid colouring of old-fashioned flowers; a general shop, which is also the post-office; and a rustic butcher’s, with verandah and garden, constitute the village. The Rectory nestles close beside the church, and the Rectory garden brims over into the churchyard, long trails of banksia roses straggling across the low stone wall which divides the garden of the living from the garden of the dead. The churchyard is one of the prettiest in England, for the old Rector has cared for it and loved it during his five and thirty years’ incumbency, and nowhere are the roses lovelier or the veronicas finer than in that quiet resting-place by the river.
The land round about belongs to a man of old family, who is rich enough to keep his estate unspoiled by the speculating builder, and who would as soon think of cutting off his right hand as of cutting up the meadows he scampered over on his sheltie, sixty years ago, into eligible building plots, or of breaking through the tangled hedges of hawthorn and honeysuckle to make new roads for the erection of semi-detached villas. In a word Lowcombe is still the country pure and simple, undefiled by the suburban early English or the shoddy Queen Anne schools of architecture.
On the brink of the Thames, and about twenty minutes’ walk from Lowcombe Church, there is an old-fashioned cottage, humble as to size and elevation, but set in so exquisite a garden that the owner of a palace might envy its possessor a retreat so fair in its rustic seclusion.
Here, while the second crop of roses were in their fullest beauty, a young couple whose antecedents and belongings were unknown to the inhabitants of Lowcombe set up their modest menage of a man and two maids, a gardener, a dinghy, and a skiff.
The village folks troubled themselves very little about these young people, who paid their bills weekly; but the few gentilities in the parish of Lowcombe were much exercised in mind about a couple who brought no letters of introduction, and who might, or might not, be an acquisition to the neighbourhood. The fact that Mr. Hanley was alleged to have bought the house he lived in and forty acres of meadow land attached thereto, gave him a certain status in the parish, and made the question as to whether Mr and Mrs. Hanley should or should not be called upon a far more serious problem than it would have been in the case of an annual tenant, or even a leaseholder.
“Nobody seems to have heard of these Hanleys,” said Miss Malcolm, a Scottish spinster, who prided herself upon race and respectability, to Mrs. Donovan, an Irish widow, who was swollen with the importance that goes with income ra
ther than with blue blood. “If the man was of good family surely some of us must have heard of him before now. Lady Isabel, who goes about immensely in the London season, thinks it very curious that she should never have met this Mr. Hanley in society.”
“Old Banks was asking an extortionate price for the Rosary and the laud about it,” said Mrs. Donovan, “so the man must have money.”
“Made in trade, I dare say,” speculated Miss Malcolm, whereat the widow, whose husband had made his fortune as a manufacturer and exporter of Irish brogues, reddened angrily. It was painful to remember in the aristocratic dolce far niente of her declining years that the name of Donovan was stamped upon millions of boots in the old world and the new, and that the famous name was still being stamped by the present proprietor.
Finally, after a good deal of argument, it was decided at a tea-party which included the élite of the parish, with the exception of the Rector, that until Mr. Muschatt, of Muschatt’s Court, had called upon the new people at the Rosary no one else should call. Whatever was good in the eyes of Muschatt, whose pedigree could be traced without a break from the reign of Edward the Confessor, must be good for the rest of the parish.
And while the village Agora debated their social fate, what of this young couple? Were they languishing for the coming of afternoon callers, pining for the sight of strange faces and unfamiliar names upon a cluster of visiting cards? Were they nervously awaiting the village verdict as to whether they were or were not to be visited? Not they! Perhaps they hardly knew that there was any world outside that garden by the river, and that undulating stretch of pasture where the fine old timber gave to meadow land almost the dignity of a park. Here they could wander for hours meeting no one, hearing no voices but their own, isolated by the intensity of an affection that took no heed of yesterday or to-morrow.
“I never knew what happiness meant till I loved you, Hester,” said the young man whom Lowcombe talked of as “This Mr. Hanley.”
“And I am happy because you are happy,” Hester answered softly. “And you will not talk any more about having only a year or two to live, will you, Gerard? That was all nonsense — only said to frighten me — wasn’t it?”
He could not tell her that it was sober, serious truth, and that he had in no wise darkened the doctor’s dark verdict Those imploring eyes urged him to utter words of hope and comfort, “I believe doctors are often mistaken in a case, because they underrate the influence of the mind upon the body,” he said. “I was so miserable when I went to Dr. South that I can hardly wonder he thought me marked for death.”
“And you are happy, now, Gerard — really, really happy; not for a day only?” she asked pleadingly.
“Not for a day, but for ever, so long as I have you, sweet wife.”
He called her by that sacred name often in their talk, not being sensitive enough to divine that at every repetition of the name to which she had no right, her heart thrilled with a strange sudden pain. She troubled him with no lamentings over the sacrifice he had exacted from her. She had never reproached him with the treachery that had made her his. Generous, devoted, and self-forgetful, she gave him her heart as she would have given him her life, and her tears and her remorse were scrupulously hidden from him. To make him happy was now the sole desire and purpose of her life. Of her father’s fate she was still uncertain, but she was not without hope that he lived. A detective had traced a man, whose description tallied with that of Nicholas Davenport, to Liverpool, where he had embarked on a steamer bound for Melbourne within two days of Davenport’s disappearance from Chelsea. The passage had been taken in the name of Danvers, and the passenger had described himself as a clergyman of the Church of England. Hester was the more inclined to believe that the man so described might be her father as he had often talked of going back to Australia and trying his luck again in that wider world. It was not because he had failed once that he must needs fail again, he had told her.
“But how could he have got the money for his passage?” asked Hester. “He had exhausted all his old friends. It seems impossible that he could have had money enough to pay for the voyage to Melbourne.”
And then on his knees at her feet in the silence of the night, with tears and kisses and protestations of remorse, Gerard Hillersdon confessed his sin.
“It was base beyond all common baseness,” he said. “You can never think worse of me for that act than I think of myself. But your father stood between us. I would have committed murder to win you!”
“It might have been murder,” she said dejectedly.
“I have told you my crime, and you hate me for it. I was a fool to tell you.”
“Hate you! No, Gerard, no; I can never hate you. I should go on loving you if you were the greatest sinner upon this earth. Do you think I should be here if I could help loving you?”
His head sank forward upon her knees, and he sobbed out his passion of remorse and self-abasement, and received absolution. He tried to persuade her that all would be well, that her father’s health might be benefited by a long sea voyage, and that he might not fall back into the old evil ways. He might not! That was the utmost that could be said; a faint hope at best. Yet this faint hope comforted her; and in that summer dream of happiness, in the long days on the river, the long tête-à-tête with a companion who was never weary of pouring out his thoughts, his feelings, his unbeliefs to that never-wearying listener, all sense of trouble vanished out of her mind. She only knew that she was beloved, and that to be thus beloved was to be happy. Her burden of tears would have to be borne, perhaps, some day far away in the dim future, when he should weary of her and she should see his love waning. There must be a penalty for such a sin as hers; but the time of penance was still afar off, and she might die before the fatal hour of disillusion. She thrust aside all thought of dark days to come, and devoted herself to the duty of the present — the duty of making her lover happy. All his sins against her were forgiven; and she was his without one thought of self.
They had begun their new life almost as casually as the babes in the wood, and after wandering about for a few days in the lovely Thames Valley, stopping at quiet out-of-the-way villages, they had come to Lowcombe, the least sophisticated of all the spots they had seen. Here they found the Rosary, a thatched cottage set in a delicious garden, with lawn and shrubberies sloping to the river. Successive tenants had added to the original building, and there were two or three fairly good rooms under the steep gabled roof, one a drawing-room open to the rafters, and with three windows opening into a thatched verandah. The Rosary had long been for sale, not because people had not admired it, but because the owner, an Oxford tradesman, had asked an extravagant price for his property.
Gerard gave him his price without question, having seen that Hester was enamoured of the riverside garden, and in three days the cottage was furnished, paint cleaned, walls repapered, and everything swept and garnished, and Hester installed as mistress of the house, with a man and two maids, engaged at Reading.
The furniture was of the simplest, such furniture as a young clergyman might have chosen for his first vicarage. Hester had entreated that there might be nothing costly in her surroundings, no splendour or luxury which should remind her of her lover’s wealth.
“I want to forget that you are a rich man,” she said. “If you made the house splendid I should feel as if you had bought me.”
Seeing her painfully earnest upon this point, Gerard obeyed her to the letter. Except for the elegance of art muslins and Indian draperies, and for the profusion of choice flowers in rooms and landings and staircase, except for the valuable books scattered on the tables and piled in the window-seats, the cottage might have been the home of modest competence rather than of boundless wealth.
Hester’s touch lent an additional grace even to things that were in themselves beautiful. She had the home genius which is one of the choicest of feminine gifts — the genius which pervades every circumstance of home life, from the adornment of a drawing-room to
the arrangement of a dinner-table. Before he had lived at Lowcombe for a week Gerard had come to see Hester’s touch upon everything. He had never before seen flowers so boldly and picturesquely grouped; nor in all the country houses he had visited and admired had he ever seen anything so pretty as the cottage vestibule, the deep embrasure of the long latticed window filled with roses, and in each angle of the room a tall glass vase of lilies reaching up towards the low timbered ceiling. No hand but Hester’s was allowed to touch the books which he had brought to this retreat — a costly selection from his library at Hillersdon House. He had seen to the packing of the two large cases that conveyed these books, and he had so arranged their conveyance that none of his servants should know where they went after the railway van had carried them away. No one was to know of this retreat by the river — not even Justin Jermyn, his confidant and alter ego. He wanted this new life of his — this union of two souls that were as one — to remain for ever a thing apart from his everyday existence; he wanted this home to be a secret haven, where he might creep to die when his hour should come; and it seemed to him that even the inevitable end would lose its worst terrors here, in Hester’s arms, with her sweet voice to soothe the laborious passage to the unknown land.
And if death would be less awful here than elsewhere, how sweet was life in this rural hermitage! How blissful the long summer days upon the river, with this gentle, pensive girl, who seemed so utterly in sympathy with him; who, after one week of union thought as he thought, believed as he believed; had surrendered life, mind, heart, and being to the man she loved, merging her intellectual identity into his, until nothing was left of the creed learnt in childhood and faithfully followed through girlhood, except a tender memory of something which had been dear and sacred, and which for her had ceased to be.
For her Christ was no longer the Saviour and Redeemer she had worshipped. He was only the “Man of Nazareth” — a beautiful and admirable character, standing out from the tumultuous background of the world’s history, radiant with the calm, clear light of perfect goodness, the gifted originator of life’s simplest and purest ethics, a teacher whose wise counsels had been darkened and warped by long centuries of superstition, and who was only now emerging from the spectre-haunted midnight of ignorance into the clear light of reason.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 915
