Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “She shall have anything she likes for her poor; but she must have something which she can look at by-and-by as her brother’s gift. Cheques are the most fashionable offerings from rich relatives, so I shall give her a cheque; but there must be something else — a service of plate, I think, will be best. She and Cumberland would never have the heart to buy silver for themselves. He would say, ‘It should be melted down and given to the poor;’ but Lilian will not have my gifts melted down. I will go up to town tomorrow and choose the service — fine old Georgian plate such as will not seem an anachronism in their old Georgian house. I know even Cumberland has one small vanity. He wants everything in his house to be of the same period as the building itself.”

  Gerard went to London on the following morning, and for the first time since he had lived at the Rosary, told Hester not to expect his return that evening.

  “I may be in London for two or three days,” he said. “I have a good deal to do there.”

  She made no murmur. She saw him off at the gate with a smile, standing waving her hand to him in the winter sunlight, and then she went slowly back to the house with an aching heart.

  “‘Alas for me, then, my good days are done!’” she sighed, quoting her favourite Elaine.

  CHAPTER XXV. “HOW COULD IT END IN ANY OTHER WAY?”

  THE winter was mild, one of those moist and gentle seasons which delight the heart of the sportsman, but which all the sanitarians and ultra sensible people declare to be unhealthy, preaching their little sermon about want of aeration, and so on. Gerard was not one of these. He hated frost and snow, London snow most of all; and he was glad of a winter which did not oblige him to leave Hester for any length of time. He did not want to spend all his days at the Rosary. She had made that once delightful retreat in somewise a horror to him; but he loved her still, and he shrank from any act that might seem like desertion. When the year of Mrs. Champion’s widowhood was over he would have to face his difficulty, and settle with himself and with his first and second love as to what his life was to be. By that time Nicholas Davenport might be peacefully at rest, and the chief impediment to his marriage with Hester removed. In the meantime Hester was to him in all things as dear and as honoured as if she had been bound to him by the strongest tie the law can forge — not a very strong tie, it must be admitted, nowadays. He stayed in town for about ten days, choosing his sister’s wedding present, and seeing all the town had to show him in the way of dramatic talent. He gave a couple of his famous breakfasts during those ten days, and Hillersdon House was put in working order, his staff of servants revised and corrected, and every detail of his luxurious surroundings carefully supervised. Valet and butler were told that their master would winter in England, mostly in London. Valet and butler were fully aware that their master had another establishment; but he had so far been cleverer than the average master in keeping the secret of the second home. No one knew where he went when he left Hillersdon House. He who was so amply furnished with carriages always went to the station in a hansom.

  He spent Christmas at the Rosary, three days of quietness and contentment, which were a relief after the breakfasts, the copious talk, the picture galleries and theatres, the scandals, and perpetual movement of London. He would have been quite happy but for the uncomfortable consciousness of Nicholas Davenport’s presence in the room above — an existence which he could never contemplate without vague pangs of remorse, lest this death in life were indeed his work, lest it had been that blow of his which shattered the feeble intellect. Hester told him what Mr. Mivor had said about the inevitableness of the attack; but this one opinion was not enough for comfort. Another doctor and a better doctor might have told a different story.

  Hester tried to be happy in those brief days of holiday; but the old unquestioning happiness, the joy that looked neither before nor after, was gone. The perfect union was broken. The ring which symbolises eternity was snapped into mere segments of life which she must accept with thankfulness. It was much that her lover had not deserted her. All the stories that she had ever read went to prove that desertion was the inevitable end of forbidden bliss such as she had tasted. He had shown her that he could live happily for more than a week apart from her, but there was yet no hint of desertion; and he had done much in deferring his journey to Devonshire till after Christmas.

  He left her on a mild and sunny morning, looking far better than on his arrival at the cottage. Those few quiet days had rested him after the high living and keen contest of malicious wit which constituted London society, or that section of it in which he moved.

  Hester and he had walked in the wintry woods together, and enjoyed the balmy air of pine thickets, and the soft carpet of fallen leaves, with all the winter charm of chastened colouring under grey skies. He told her at parting that he had been very happy.

  “If you could only have given me a little more of your time it would have been better,” he said. “You are so severe in your recognition of a divided duty. Forgive me, love,” he added hastily, seeing her look of distress. “You are all goodness, and I am a wretch to murmur. I will write to you after the wedding.”

  “Oh, sooner than that, Gerard; that would mean quite a week to wait!”

  “Well, then, sooner. But you know what a bad correspondent I am. I think volumes about her I love, but my lazy pen refuses to write a single page.”

  He was gone, and she went back to the cottage, which had taken a different look since the change in its master’s habits. It no longer looked like Gerard’s home. It had the air of a house to which a man comes occasionally, and where things hardly bear the stamp of his individuality. The despatch-box was shut; the writing-table showed no litter of scattered papers. The books he read oftenest — Swinburne, Baudelaire, Richepin, Verlaine, Comte, Hartmann, Darwin, Schopenhauer, were all in their places; for these were books which Hester loved not, and she had not disturbed them in his absence. The rooms looked to her like the rooms in a widow’s house. There was the absence of litter which marks the absence of man.

  She sat by the fire in the study for an hour or more while the invalid was being dressed and got ready for his morning airing, sat thinking of her own life and what she had made of it; a melancholy review, for her conversation with Mr. Gilstone had swept away all sophistry as to her position. She no longer compared herself to Shelley’s Mary, no longer believed in the rightfulness of her conduct. She stood convicted in her own eyes as a woman who had sinned. Whether the universe were or were not directed by a thinking mind, she had lost her place among good women. She sat there alone at this Christmas season, when other women were surrounded by friends, and told herself that she had forfeited the right to womanly friendship.

  She walked beside her father’s chair in the lanes for an hour before the brief winter day began to fade, walked at his side, and talked to him, and pointed out the features of interest in the landscape, the moving life of beast and bird, as she would have done for a child. She listened to his feeble, disconnected talk. She made him understand — as much as it was in his power to understand anything — that he was cherished and cared for.

  They did not meet many people in the lanes, but those whom they met took a great deal more notice of the old man in the Bath chair and the pensive face and girlish figure of his companion than Hester supposed. Gentle and simple were interested — the simple with an unalloyed friendliness towards helpless old age and filial duty; the gentle with a touch of pity for the old man, mixed with conflicting opinions about his daughter.

  The Curate in his soft felt hat, slouched over his brows as if he had been a brigand, the Misses Glendower, bent on district visiting, Mrs. Donovan driving her self-willed ponies, and crimson with the effort of keeping them under control — all these were keenly observant of Hester, and talked of her with a new zest at afternoon-tea.

  This appearance of an invalid father, who, although physically and mentally a wreck, looked liked a gentleman, was calculated to modify the village ideal of Mrs. Hanley’
s position. That she should have her father to live with her, clad in purple and fine linen, sedulously waited upon, and enthroned in a Bath chair that must have cost as much as the family landau which Lady Isabel had just obtained from the Repository in Baker Street, certainly supplied an element of respectability which the world of Lowcombe had not looked for from Mrs. Hanley. After all, people are not kites, and though they may tear and maul a reputation, they are not altogether without tenderness for the sorrows of life.

  “I must say that young woman’s attention to her father is one of the most touching things I have seen for a long time,” said Mrs. Donovan, “and if I could have stopped my ponies yesterday morning I really think I should have pulled up and introduced myself to her. But there, you all know what my ponies are.”

  Yes, Mrs. Donovan, and we all know what your driving is,” answered Lady Isabel, who had been a famous whip in her youth, and who, belonging to a house that had always been poor liked to show her contempt for the newly rich.

  “I really think some of us ought to call,” pursued Mrs. Donovan, ignoring the venomed shaft. “I hear that Mr. Hanley has been a good deal away from home lately.”

  “Has he? The beginning of the end, I should think. Why don’t you call, Mrs. Donovan? You are broader-minded than I am, and you have no daughters. It can’t do you any harm to take notice of Mrs. Hanley; and as she doesn’t know a soul in the place, she may be glad to make your acquaintance.”

  “I don’t think she could do your daughters any harm, Lady Isabel. She is so much younger than your girls; and she looks title picture of innocence.”

  “Yes, and I have seen just such pictures in the Burlington Arcade, when I have been to my glover’s rather too late in the afternoon,” retorted Lady Isabel. “You can please yourself, Mrs. Donovan; but I never visit people whose antecedents I don’t know. The fact that this young person behaves nicely to her imbecile father is no evidence of her respectability. Young persons of that class have their feelings as well as we have, and I dare say they are fonder of their own people than we are, knowing themselves shut out of society.”

  After this Mrs. Donovan gave up all idea of patronising Mrs. Hanley. However she might hug herself with the thought of her investments and dividends, and the power which unlimited cash can give, she knew that she was not strong enough to fly in the face of Lowcombe society. It was for her to follow, and not to lead, if she wanted to be admitted to that inner circle, where the society was not suburban and rich, but county and arrogantly poor. These county people boasted of their dearth in these latter days, as if it were a distinction; since poverty, for the most part, meant land, while wealth not unfrequently meant trade. Mrs. Donovan wanted to stand well with that choice circle which had its ramifications in the Peerage, and talked of Dukes and Duchesses as if they were men and women: so she did not call upon Mrs. Hanley; and thus Hester was spared that favour which would have been the last worst drop in her cup of bitterness.

  New Year’s Eve is apt to be a saddening season, even in the family circle, for however cheerily we may pretend to take it with carpet dances and hand-shaking, or Pickwickian jovialities in the way of innocent games and strong drinks, there lurks deep in every heart the consciousness of another stage passed in the journey that leads down hill to that inn we all wot of, where there is always room for everybody: and deep in every heart there is the memory of some one whom the year has taken away, and not all Time’s years can bring back. But what of New Year’s Eve to the lonely girl who sat beside the fire through the long evening, surrounded with the books she loved, but finding scanty solace even in their company!

  Such lonely evenings are by no means rare in the lives of wedded wives, at those seasons when the indisputable rights of gun or rod keep the sportsman far away from the home fireside, or when the sacred demands of business constrain the mercantile man to overeat himself in a city hall: but Hester could not forget that she was sitting alone to listen for the ringing of the midnight joy-bells, only because she was an unwedded wife. Had the bond been sanctified her natural place would have been with her husband at Helmsleigh Rectory on this vigil, which was a memorable one for the Rector’s household, since it was the eve of his only daughter’s wedding. How natural that she, Lilian’s friend, should have been by Lilian’s side tonight! How indispensable her presence had she been Lilian’s sister-in-law! Tears sprang to her aching eyelids at the humiliating thought that she could now be no more counted worthy to enter that home where she had once been treated almost as a daughter of the house.

  She remembered a New Year’s Eve spent in that house, ever so many years ago, as it seemed to-night, looking back from a life in which all things were changed, across a dreary interval of misfortune and poverty. She remembered how kind every one had been to her, full of tenderest compassion for her motherless youth, her burden of household cares. How bright and happy the rambling old Rectory had looked, all the sitting-rooms gaily lighted with a miscellaneous collection of lamps and candles; the old-fashioned Christmas decorations of holly and evergreen in hall and dining-room; the friendly evening party, with a good deal of music and a little waltzing, started in an impromptu fashion by the youthful master of the neighbouring hounds; the inevitable recitation from the curate of an adjoining parish — long, dismal, intended to make people’s flesh creep, but only making the aged yawn and the young laugh. She and Lilian had sat together in a corner by the piano, struggling against the tendency to girlish giggling, full of their own small jokes and depreciation of the youth of the neighbourhood, both of them heart-whole and happy — happy as children are, without thought of the morrow.

  She had played, fresh from her German master’s tuition, full of the Leipsic school and its traditions, had played and had been praised and made much of. Her playing was a thing of the past almost, for in the days of her poverty she had been without a piano, and in her new life she had given up all her hours to being Gerard’s companion, and he, who cared little for classical music, had given her no encouragement to regain lost ground by severe practice. The pretty little cottage-piano stood in its corner unopened, and now that it might have been to her as a companion and friend, she feared to play lest the sounds should disturb her father in his rooms on the upper floor.

  The night was clear and frosty, but not severely cold, and at midnight she wrapped a thick shawl about her and went out on the lawn, and walked slowly up and down by the starlit river, listening for the bells of Lowcombe Church. They broke out upon the stillness with a sudden burst of sound that thrilled her, like the spontaneous cry of some Titanic soul rejoicing in some great, nameless good to mankind. She could not divide herself from the gladness in that burst of music, as the sounds came pealing along the water. The starlight, the darkness of the opposite woods, the faint ripple of the quiet river, the universal hush of calmest winter night through which the joy-peal broke, were all too much for her sad, remorseful heart. She felt that somewhere beyond this narrow scene of life there must be a home and a refuge for lives such as hers, somewhere a friendship and a pity greater than human pity, which could understand, and pardon, and shelter. If it were not so, the story that church bells, and running rivers, and winds that blow over woodland and mountain, and cathedral organs had been telling was a lying message to mankind, civilised and uncivilised, in all the ages that were gone; and that fond hope deep in the heart of man, barbarian or civilised, bond or free, was the cruellest hallucination that was ever engendered in that automatic instrument which we call mind.

  She walked for nearly an hour in the wintry garden, and that quiet commune with Nature, that unconscious absorption of the beauty of the winter landscape gave her much more comfort than she had been able to find in Tennyson or Browning, since even “In Memoriam,” which was to her as a second gospel, bad failed to-night to wean her from the thought of her own sorrows.

  “I wonder if he has remembered me, once, just for one moment, in all this evening?” she asked herself, as she rose from her knees.


  Even when most shaken in her old faith by the new learning she had never altogether lost the old habit of prayer. Her prayers might be vague and indistinct, the outpouring of a sorrowful mind, to what God she knew not, but for her prayer was a necessity of life.

  She was sitting at her lonely breakfast next morning in Gerard’s study, when something happened which cheered her with the knowledge that she was not altogether forgotten.

  There came the sound of wheels on the crisp gravel drive, a loud ring at the door, and then the country-bred parlour-maid bounced into the room with an excited air, exclaiming, “If you please, ma’am, here’s a brougham!”

  “What do you mean, Pearson? It’s the doctor, I suppose!”

  “No, no, ma’am. It’s a new carriage, coachman, and all complete — for you! Here’s a letter the coachman brought. I forgot the salver, I was that taken aback;” and the damsel handed a letter.

  It was from Gerard.

  “Dearest,—” Since you are to spend the winter in the country you must have a carriage, so I send you a brougham by way of New Year’s gift. It has been built specially for country work, and will be none the worse for much service in the rustic lanes you are so fond of. The coachman has admirable testimonials from previous employers, so you may trust him fully as head of your stable. I have told him to engage a stable-help, and to put all things on a proper footing. The horse was bought for me by a man who is a far better judge of the species than I am.

  “Be happy, my love, in the beginning of the year, and in many a happy year to come. — Your ever faithful, G. H.

  “P.S. — Just starting for Devonshire.”

  The letter made her almost happy, almost, but not quite, for kind as his words were they gave her no assurance of his love; they did not tell her that his thoughts and his heart’s desire would be with her at the beginning of the year, the first year which had begun since they two had loved each other. For him it was much less of an epoch than it was for her, and he had easily reconciled himself to the idea of their separation.