The gift vouched for his kindly thought of her, and was welcome on that account, but she felt that any addition to her luxuries only accentuated the dubiousness of her position.
She went out to look at the brougham, a delightful carnage, small, neat, with dark, subdued colouring, and a perfection of comfort and elegance which in no way appealed to the eye of the casual observer; such a brougham as a leading light of the House of Commons might choose to convey him quickly and quietly to and from the scene of his triumphs, every detail sober, simple, costly only because of its perfection. The horse was a fine up-standing brown, a patrician among horses, carrying his head as if he were proud of it, doing his work as if hardly conscious of doing it, in the fullness of his power; an amiable horse, too, for he stooped his lordly head and gave his velvet nose freely to the caressing touch of Hester’s hand.
The coachman was middle-aged, and, to all appearance, the pink of respectability.
“I have only driven from the station, ma’am,” he said. “If you’d like to drive this afternoon the horse won’t hurt.”
“No, no. I’ll let him rest to-day, if you please.”
“Quite the lady,” thought the coachman, as he drove round to his unexplored stables, pleased with a mistress who showed no impatience to be sitting in her new carriage and running her new horse off his legs; evidently a lady to whom a brougham was no novelty.
He had been pleased with his master, who had told him to order whatever was required in the way of stable gear, and to engage a helper, all in the easy way which marks a master who docs not look too closely into details.
Hester was comforted by this mark of Gerard’s regard. For a millionaire to give such gifts might have but little significance, yet the gift implied thoughtfulness, and it made her happier to know that he had thought of her.
She drove in her new carriage on the following day, drove to Reading and made her little purchases, all as modestly chosen as if she had been the wife of a curate. Gerard had given her a pocket-book stuffed with bank-notes before he left for Devonshire, but no plethora of money could induce her to extravagant expenditure. Her winter gowns, made by a Reading tailor, were of a Quaker-like plainness; her dinner-gown of soft grey silk was the simplest thing in home dinner-gowns. The long seal-skin coat which Gerard had insisted upon ordering for her at the beginning of the winter was the only expensive garment she possessed. Just at this season she had to make purchases which were not for her own use, purchases of finest lawn and softest cambric, and pattern garments of daintiest form, which gave employment to her skilful fingers in the long lonely evenings of that first week in the New Year.
Gerard wrote to her of his sister’s wedding in briefest phrases. Must he not also have remembered that had all been well she should have had her place, and an honoured place, at that family gathering, and that there must be a sting in anything he might write of the ceremony and of his people?
“They left for the Land’s End, to spend a fortnight in a little inn on the edge of the Atlantic — a curious fancy for a winter honeymoon. I wanted them to go to Naples and Sorrento — of course at my expense — but John Cumberland would not hear of a journey that would keep him away from his parish for more than a fortnight, and my sister’s mind is his mind, so they are clambering about upon the rocks, watching the shags and the gulls, and listening to the roaring of the breakers — utterly happy, I believe, in each other’s society, as you and I have been beside the dripping fringes of the willows. For my own part, I can hardly imagine a January honeymoon. Love needs sunshine and long summer days.”
That last sentence haunted Hester all through the evening, as she bent over her work at her little table in the nook by the fire. Was love ended with a single summer? Could she and Gerard ever renew the happiness of last summer? Alas, no; for last summer he could hardly bear to be absent from her for an hour; and of late he had shown her only too plainly that he could live without her. It was only natural, perhaps. Who but a romantic girl could ever think that any union love ever made could be one long honeymoon? There was no word of returning to the Rosary in Gerard’s last letter. His mother insisted on his staying for another week at the Rectory, and he had been unable to refuse her. He hoped that Hester was taking long drives, getting herself plenty of new books at Miss Langley’s delightful library, and keeping in good health and spirits. It is so easy for the absent to entertain these hopes.
Hester did not take many drives, though the roads were in good condition, and the coachman came every morning for orders. She preferred her quiet walks beside her father’s Bath chair; for these at least left the satisfaction of duty done, and the brougham, with all its elegant luxuriousness, only oppressed her with a keener sense of her position. She felt ashamed of driving past the Lowcombe people in their shabbier carriages, felt almost as if she could hear the hard things they said of her.
She thought often of kindly Mr. Gilstone and his vain endeavour to set things right for her, and she longed for the sound of his friendly voice in her solitude. But she had no hope that he would ever enter the Rosary again. She would have gladly gone to his church on the first Sunday of her solitude, had she been brave enough to face the curious eyes of his congregation; but on the second Sunday she felt so utterly desolate that her heart yearned to the church as the one shelter outside her lonely home where she could enter and feel herself unforbidden, so in the evening she ordered her brougham and drove to Lowcombe, telling her coachman to stop at the entrance to the village, and to wait for her at the same spot when the service was over. She did not want to make herself conspicuous at the lych gate by the flaming lamps of her carriage, or the beauty of her horse. She hoped to creep quietly to a seat in one of the aisles; but it happened that the pew opener was the son of the butcher who served the Rosary, and was eager to pay all possible honour to a good customer. With this intent he conducted her to a seat near the pulpit, the seat of the august Mr. Muschatt himself, a seat cushioned and foot-stooled in purple cloth, where the local landowner sat like Dives, and was reported never to drop more than sixpence into the bag, and only to drop sixpence when he had failed in obtaining a threepenny piece. Here, in the sight of the evening congregation, which included most of the gentilities of Liwcombe, where the evening service was popular, Hester sat in her sealskin coat and neat little sealskin toque and heard the evening lessons, and here she knelt with meekly bent head and joined in the prayers which had once been interwoven with her daily life, but which now had a doubly impressive sound after a silence of half a year; while the old hymn tunes, and most of all the words of that evening hymn she had loved so well —
“Abide with me, fast falls the eventide,” moved her almost to tears. Indeed, it was only the consciousness of the lamplight on her face, and perhaps, too, the apprehension of furtive glances from unkind eyes, that nerved her to the effort which restrained her tears.
The Rector’s evening sermon was simple and practical, one of those plain-speaking, homely addresses which he loved to give of an evening — sermons in which he spoke to his flock as to a little family with whose needs and sorrows and failings he was familiar. Hester met his glance more than once as she looked up at him, and there were words, comforting words, in his sermon which she fancied were meant especially for her, words to lighten the sinner’s despair and to promise the dawn of hope.
She went home happier for that village service, and having once confronted the curious looks of the congregation she determined to go to church regularly. The church was open to sinners as well as saints, to Magdalen as well as to Martha and Mary, to the doubter as well as to the believer; and now that Gerard was no longer by to assail the creed in which she had been reared, with all the pessimist’s latest arguments, her heart went back into the old paths, and the Rock of Ages was once again a shelter and a support.
There was a daily service at Lowcombe, and to this service Hester went every morning during Gerard’s absence. It was the one break in her life, an hour of quiet prayer and cont
emplation which tranquillised her mind, and sustained her through the monotonous duties of the day.
Gerard reappeared after more than a fortnight’s absence. His native air had not improved his health. He looked haggard and weary, and owned that he had been bored in the family circle.
“My father and mother are model people of their kind,” he said, “and everything in their house goes by clockwork; but so does life in a gaol, and I confess that I found the Rectory about as lively as Portland. There was nothing to do, and nothing to think about. If I had been a sportsman I should have been out with the hounds. Rural life provides nothing for men who are not sportsmen. Such malshapen beings are hardly believed in by the rural mind.”
Hester saw with poignant grief that after a few days at the Rosary Gerard was as bored as he had been in Devonshire. He did not hint at this weariness, but the signs of ennui were too obvious. He suggested inviting Justin Jermyn, but Hester had grown keenly sensitive of late, and she was so evidently distressed at the mention of Mr. Jermyn, that Gerard did not press the question.
“I feel as if there is a covert sneer in almost every word Mr. Jermyn speaks to me,” she said.
“Indeed, my dear child, you wrong him. Jermyn is a laughing philosopher, and holds all things lightly. I envy him that lightness as the happiest gift Nature can bestow. For him, to exist means to be amused. He lives only for the present hour, has a happy knack of utilising his friends, and does not know the meaning of thought or sorrow.”
Gerard went to London soon after this little discussion about Jermyn, and was away till the end of the week, and from thenceforward he appeared at the Rosary only for two or three days at a time, coming at shorter or longer intervals, his periods of absence lengthening as London began to fill. In London Jermyn was much with him, his umbra, his second self. Hester discovered this fact from his conversation, in which Jermyn’s name continually recurred. He spoke of the man always with the same scornful lightness, as of a man for whom he had no real affection, but the man’s society had become a necessity to him.
“Does he live upon me?” he said once, when Hester gently suggested that Mr. Jermyn must be something of a sponge, “well, yes, I suppose he does — upon me among other friends — upon me perhaps more than any other friend. You remember how Lord Bacon used to let servants and followers help themselves to his money, while he sat at his desk and wrote, seemingly unobservant. Bacon could not afford to do that kind of thing — his income wouldn’t stand it — but Jermyn is my only follower, and I can afford to let him profit by my existence. He does not sponge or borrow my money. He only wins it. I am fond of piquet, and when we are alone he and I play every night. He is by far the better player, an exceptional player indeed, and I dare say his winnings are good enough to keep him in pocket money — while I hardly feel myself any poorer by what I lose. If you would spend a little more, Hettie, I should be all the better satisfied.”
“You are only too generous,” she said, with a sigh. “I have everything in the world that I want — and I have been more extravagant lately. Your bank notes seem to slip through my fingers.”
“That is what they were meant for. I’ll send you another parcel from London to-morrow.”
“No, no, please do not. I have plenty of money, nearly three hundred pounds. But are you really going back to town to-morrow?”
“Really, dear. It is a case of necessity. My lungs won’t stand this river-side atmosphere. Why don’t you think better of my suggestion, Hester, and let me find another home for your father. He could be well provided for, and you would be free to travel with me. Dr. South would think me mad if I were to spend February and March in the valley of the Thames — and even you would hardly wish me to run so great a risk.”
“Even I. Oh, Gerard, as if your life were more precious to any one in this world than it is to me.”
“Prove your regard for me, then. Let me arrange at once about your father — there are plenty of respectable households in which he could be placed under medical care — and come to Italy with me.”
“No,” she sighed, “that is what I should love to do, but I have made up my mind. While my father lives I will do my best to make his life happy. It is the only atonement I can make—”
Her tears finished the sentence. Gerard rose impatiently, and began to walk about the room.
“You can hardly expect me to sacrifice my life to your exaggerated ideas of duty,” he said. “The best part of the world is untrodden ground for me, and I live in an age which has minimised the fatigue and difficulty of travelling. A man may go round the world now more easily than he went from London to Paris a hundred years ago, and I have means to make the uttermost expenditure a legitimate outlay. And you would have me wither under such a sky as that” — he pointed to the grey fog that veiled garden and river, and blotted out the opposite shore—” and restrict my movements to jogging backwards and forwards between London and this house.”
“I would have you do nothing, Gerard, that you do not like, nothing that can possibly injure your health. If it is best for you to go to the South, go there without an hour’s needless delay. I will try to make the best of life while you are away, and you will come back to me in the summer, won’t you, Gerard, if you are not tired of me?”
“Tired of you. You know that I am not. Don’t I entreat you to go with me? It is only your whims and exaggerated notions I am tired of.”
This conversation occurred in February, and it may be that the dull, depressing February weather, the river fog, the Scotch mist, the sodden grass and dripping shrubs, and dark, leafless branches of beech and elm, counted for something in Gerard’s angry impatience. He went back to London on the following day, and he talked of starting for Italy, nay, indeed, made all his plans for departure, and then at the last altered his mind and stayed in town.
He reappeared at the Rosary at the end of the week, and it was a shock to him to find Nicholas Davenport installed by the drawingroom fire. There had been a gradual improvement in his condition since Christmas, and the doctor had suggested his being carried downstairs in his invalid chair of an afternoon, thinking that the change of surroundings might have a beneficial influence upon his mental state. His mind bad certainly been brighter. He had taken more heed of Hester’s presence, and had talked to her rationally, though without memory, frequently repeating the same speeches, and asking the same questions over and over again.
His presence beside the hearth made the house odious to Gerard, who saw in that bent and shrunken form the image of death. He retreated at once to the study, where Hester found him standing beside the fire in a gloomy reverie.
“I had no hope of your coming to-day,” she said deprecatingly, “or I would not have had my father brought down to the drawingroom. I’m afraid it hurts you to see him there.”
“It does, Hester. The very consciousness of his presence in the house has always been a horror to me. Perhaps it is because my own life hangs upon so thin a thread that I hate to see the image of death — and that living death of imbecility is death’s worst form. Sometimes I think I shall die that way myself.”
She soothed him, and argued away his fears about himself, and promised that her father’s presence should not again be inflicted upon him, come when he might to the Rosary. She would remember her divided duty, and she would take care that the home which he had created should be made happy for him.
“It is your house,” she said. “I ought to remember that.”
“There is no yours nor mine, Hettie,” he answered kindly. “All I possess of this world’s gear is at your service; but I am full of fancies, and your father’s presence chills my soul.”
He had come to the Rosary on Saturday afternoon, meaning to stay till Monday, and then go back to London and reconsider his migration to the South. He had been somewhat disheartened by being told at his club that there was snow in Naples, and that people were leaving Rome in disgust at the Arctic cold. These evil rumours, together with his yearning to see
Hester once more, had delayed his departure. He had been feeling very ill all the week, and he told himself he must lose no time in getting to a balmier climate, wherever it was to be found.
He did not return to town on Monday. He was shivering and depressed all through Sunday, to Hester’s extreme anxiety, and on Sunday night he yielded to her entreaties, and allowed her to send for Mr. Mivor, who found all the symptoms of lung trouble. The trouble declared itself before Monday night as acute inflammation of the lungs, complicated by a feeble heart; and for three weeks the patient hung between life and death, tenderly and devotedly nursed by Hester, who rested neither night nor day, and accepted only indispensable aid from the hospital nurse who had been sent for at the beginning of the attack. When Gerard was able to go down to the drawing-room as a convalescent, he was hardly whiter or more shadowy-looking than Hester herself. He was not ungrateful. He knew the devotion that had been given to him, knew that in those long nights of pain and semi-delirium one gentle face had always watched beside his bed; yet after the first few days of convalescence an eager desire for change of surroundings took possession of him. That illness, coming upon him suddenly, like the grip of demoniac claws fastening upon lungs and heart, had given him a terrible scare. He had been told that he had not a good life; but not since his childhood had he felt the paralysing power of acute disease. Never perhaps until now had he realised the frailty of the thread which held all he knew of or believed in — this little life and its pleasures. In his new terror he was feverishly eager to get to a better climate, to Italy, to Ceylon, to India, anywhere to escape the bitter treacheries of English weather.
Jermyn came down to see him, at his earnest desire. Jermyn played piquet with him in the long March evenings, and amused him with the news of the town; but even this did not lessen his horror of the house that held Nicholas Davenport, or his ever-present terror of a relapse. He arranged the details of his journey with Jermyn, who knew exactly what kind of weather they were having along the Western Riviera.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 924
