Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  The thought of her was in his mind to-night. He had enjoyed his week of folly; the sound of the jester’s bells had been sweet in his ear; but he was weary of that silvery jingle, and he looked forward with pleasure to the sober luxuries and splendours of his life with Edith.

  He was in treaty, through Justin Jermyn, for the Jersey Lily, one of the finest yachts at Nice, and with this yacht he and his wife would make a tour of all the fairest ports of the Mediterranean — lingering or hastening as caprice prompted.

  The shabby little woman was at her post as usual, and one furtive glance at her face told Gerard that luck had been against her. She had the rigid, death-like look he knew so well. He stood on the opposite side of the table watching her — across the burly shoulders of an English bookmaker, returning from a race-meeting in the Roman Campagna, and loud in his denunciation of the pari-mutuel system. Her bad luck continued. Stake after stake — ventures which had dwindled to the minimum morsel of gold — were swept away by the inexorable rake, until she sat with clasped hands, watching and not playing; too well known an habituée to be asked to make way for the players. The officials knew her ways, and that after sitting statue-like during two or three deals she would rise slowly, as one awakening from a painful dream, and walk quietly away — to reappear the following night with money obtained none knew how.

  Gerard felt in his breast pocket for a bundle of notes, and went round the table towards the back of the lady’s chair, intending to push the money quietly into her hand, and to vanish before she had recovered from her surprise at his action; but his intention was frustrated, for as his hand brushed against her shoulder she started up suddenly as if she had been stung, and turned upon him with eyes that burnt like coals of fire in her pallid face. The rapidity of her movement and that burning gaze disconcerted him. He drew back in confusion.

  The lady advanced upon him as he retreated, until they were at some distance from the tables, away from the glare of the lamps. Then she stopped, fixing him with her fiery eyes.

  “You do not appear to be an ardent gambler, monsieur,” she said. “No, madame, I am not a gambler. Trente et quarante is utterly without interest for me.”

  “Why then do you haunt these rooms?”

  “I come to observe others, and to be amused.”

  “Amused by evil passions which you do not share, amused as devils are amused with the vices and passions of humanity. Do you not know that your presence here is odious, that your glances bring misfortune wherever they rest?”

  “I do not know why that should be. I have no malicious intention. I am only a looker-on.”

  “So is death a looker-on at the game of life, knowing that sooner or later he must win. Your presence here is fatal, for there is death in your face; and since this room was not built for idle observers, but for business-like players, you will be doing everybody a favour by absenting yourself in future. I am assured that I have expressed the desire of the whole assembly.”

  She made him a sweeping curtsey, drew her ragged shawl about her shoulders, and passed him on her way to the door. He stood with his packet of notes still in his hand, looking after her dumbly.

  Yet one more voice to remind him of approaching doom.

  CHAPTER XXVII. “SOME LITTLE SOUND OF UNREGARDED TEARS.”

  THE farewell festival had been arranged by Justin Jermyn with especial care. He had secured the Jersey Lily, the yacht for which Gerard hankered. Her owner, a rich commercial man, was tired of his plaything, and was glad to sell her to a purchaser who did not drive a hard bargain. The yacht, a fine sailor, with auxiliary steam, was in full working order, and Gerard’s first cruise was to be this water picnic. For music Mr. Jermyn was no longer content with itinerant Neapolitans. He had engaged some of the best performers at the famous concerts in the Casino. But his greatest success was with the floral decorations. In these he had surpassed himself, while he had ransacked the Algerian shops on the hill for Oriental fabrics, gay with gold and colour, and glittering with morsels of looking-glass, to drape cabins and poop.

  March was drawing to an end, and the weather was delicious, the April summer of the South, weather that would make even the dull flats of Essex or Norfolk enchanting, but which over that lovely land breathes an intoxicating influence, giving to age the gladness of youth, to weakness the pride of strength.

  Lunch was over, and the yacht was lying to in the roadstead of Antibes. Some of the more enterprising of the party had been rowed ashore, and had set out on a pilgrimage to the church on the height — the church with its curious votive pictures, showing the Madonna’s merciful interposition in all the perils of life, from a headlong fall out of a garret window to the overturning of a bicycle. Less active and exploring spirits were content to loll upon the deck, where low chairs and luxurious cushions invited slumberous ease. Fans were waving languidly in the golden light of afternoon, as if in time to the languid movement of the water fanned by the western wind. On one side stretched the long level seafront of Nice, with its line of white villas flashing in the sunlight, far off to the rock crowned with the lighthouse, and that jutting point which shuts off the eastern sky towards Villefranche and St. Jean.

  Gerard was in high spirits. He wanted to drain this cup of casual pleasures to the dregs. He wanted to steep himself in the loveliness of a coast which he might never look upon again. It was bliss only to stand upon the deck as the yacht lay at anchor and gaze upon that noble range of hills, with varied lights and shadows flitting across them, and that fair subtropical Eden in the middle distance, where the sapphire sea kissed the low, level shore — a smiling land of aloes and palms, orange groves, and grey-green olive woods, with here and there white walls and pinnacles gleaming amidst the green. It was enough of bliss only to breathe such an atmosphere and feel the inexpressible beauty of earth.

  “How happy you look to-day!” said Lottchen, watching the giver of the feast, as he leaned against the gunwale, and looked dreamily across the harbour to the rugged hill, along whose crest straggles the old-world city of Vence.

  They two were alone in the bows, while the rest of the party were congregated in a joyous group in the stem, whence there came at intervals the deep, grave music of a ‘cello, and the plaintive singing sound of violins in a serenade by Schubert. Pensive music, light laughter, floated towards these two on the summer wind. The German girl had followed Gerard when he withdrew from the noisy herd, leaving the inexhaustible Jermyn as its central figure, inspiring and sustaining the general mirth with that joyous laugh of his. Lottchen had stolen after Gerard, uninvited; but he was not so ungallant as to let her suppose that she was unwelcome.

  “Yes,” he said, “happy, but with only a sensuous happiness — the happiness of a well-cared-for cat basking and blinking in the sun; happiness which vanishes at the first touch of thought. I am basking in the beauty of my Mother Earth, and if I think at all my only thought is that it would be sweet to live for ever — soulless, mindless, immortal — amidst such scenes as these; to live as the olives live on the slope of yonder hill, breathing the sweetness of this balmy air, feeling the glad warmth of this bounteous sun.”

  “It would be very dull after a week or two,” said Lottchen, “and then what is life without love?”

  “Life is much more than love. See how utterly happy children are in the enjoyment of the universe, and they know nothing of love — or at least of the passion to which you and I attach that name. To my fancy, this world would be perfect if we could be immortal and always children. That is the world of the elder gods. The deities of the rivers and the mountains, water-nymphs and wood-nymphs, what were they all but grown-up children, drunken with the sweetness and glory of life? But for us poor worms, whose every breath brings us nearer to the inevitable grave, what can this exquisite earth, with its infinite variety of loveliness, be but a passing show? We look, and long for its beauty; and even as we look it fades and melts into the dark. It is lovely still, but we are gone. Some one else will be watching those hills
next year, some one as young as I am, and, like me, doomed to die in his youth.” Lottchen was silent. Tears were streaming down the fair cheek when Gerard turned to look at her.

  She was lovely, engaging, sentimental — all that might charm a lover: but she left his heart cold as marble. Simply dressed in some soft fabric of purest white, and with a little white sailor hat perched on the artistic fluffiness of her flaxen hair, she looked the image of innocent girlhood, unspotted by the world. A man might easily forget all her history in such a moment as this, seeing the tears streaming from the large lucid eyes, the tender lips tremulous with emotion.

  “Do not waste your tears or your sympathy upon me, Fräulein,” Gerard said gently. “Weep only for the dying who do not grieve for themselves. I am utterly selfish, and am consumed by regret for my own doom.”

  “You might live longer, perhaps, if you were more careful of yourself,” she said.

  “There is no care that I would not take to live. It is only because I know the case is hopeless that I have given myself up. There is nothing left for me but concentrated pleasures. There ought to be a melted pearl in every glass of wine I drink. And you have given me your pity — and pity from you has been sweet.”

  “Pity!” she echoed, with a deep sigh. “Well, call it pity, if you like.”

  He took a little velvet case from his pocket, and opened it in the sunlight. It seemed in that first flash of vivid light as if he had opened a box of sunshine more brilliant than those rays that danced upon the waves and turned the mountain clay to gold. The sunlight flashed back from the diamond circlet with rainbow glory, rose and emerald, violet, orange, blue.

  These diamonds are for your tears, Fräulein. Will you wear them sometimes as a souvenir of a dying man?”

  She held out her arm as he unclasped the diamond circlet. It was a lovely arm, fair as alabaster, exquisitely modelled, dazzling to look upon as the soft white fabric fell away from it, and arm and wrist and tapering hand lay there, beautiful in the sunshine. There were those among Mdlle. Charlotte’s admirers who declared that her arm and hand were her crowning beauty, and nearer the perfection of Greek sculpture than any other hand and arm in Paris.

  Gerard clasped the diamond hoop upon the slender wrist, as it lay in languid grace upon the gunwale — clasped it without a word, and waited with calm indifference for the gush of gratitude which usually greets such gifts; but Lottehen’s lips were speechless. She let her wrist lie for a minute or so where his fingers had lightly touched it as he clasped the bracelet, and then, with an inarticulate cry of grief or rage, she tore the snap asunder, and flung the flashing circlet into the sea.

  “Do you think I care anything for your diamonds, when you care nothing for me?” she cried, and then ran away to the cabin, which had been made into a miniature zenaua for Jermyn’s bevy of sultanas, and emerged therefrom no more till the boat returned to Monte Carlo in the moonlight, minus Gerard Hillersdon, who landed at Antibes, in order to be in time for the express for Genoa, which left Nice before sundown.

  That little outbreak of Lottchen’s touched him more than her beauty or her tears. “Queen Guinevere in little,” he said to himself, as he looked after the retreating figure. “I suppose women are alike all the world over. Dick Steele best described the sex when he called woman ‘a beautiful romantic animal.’ There is a spice of romance in them all — even in the most experienced demimondaine in Paris. Poor Lüttchen!”

  He saw her no more, for she was not among those who crowded to the side of the yacht to see him drop into the dinghy. Her fair hand was not among those which waved him farewell as the rowboat moved swiftly towards the shore.

  “A riverdervi next week at Florence,” cried Jermyn; and from the quay where he landed Gerard looked back and saw the Fate-reader’s lissom figure sharply defined against the sky as he stood on a raised portion of the deck, with the syrens grouped about him.

  It was in the sunset that Gerard bade farewell to the western Riviera, and set his face towards Genoa. Never can that lovely shore look lovelier than just at that season of the year — than just at that hour of dying day. Over all the hills there lay the reflected flush from that crimson glory lingering yonder above the dark ridge of the Esterelles; over all the gardens, with their purple-red bloom of Bougainvilliers, their luxury of roses white and yellow, there hung the glamour of sunset; and over all the eastern sky spread an opaline splendour flecked with little rosy cloudlets, which looked like winged creatures full of exultant life, high up in that enchanted heaven. By every form of bay and inlet; by every delicate and gracious curve that the seashore can make, by rosy rock and shadowy olive wood, by every entrancing change from light to colour and from colour to light, the train sped onwards to the darkness of fortress-crowned Ventimiglia, where there was nearly half an hour’s weariness and confusion, while Mr. Hillersdon’s servant did battle with the Custom House officers, and transferred his master and his master’s baggage to the Italian train. Then came a restless endeavour to slumber, more fatiguing than absolute wakefulness, and finally midnight and Genoa, where the traveller rested for a night.

  He was in Florence on the following afternoon, and the first idea with which that city inspired him was that he had left summer behind him. Some there are to whom the western Riviera is the supreme perfection of Italian landscape, and to whom all other spots seem cold and sombre as compared with that rich loveliness. Some there are who think that the chief glory of Italy is wanting when they have turned their back upon the Mediterranean, and that all that history, legend, and the fine arts can yield of interest and beauty is tame and dull compared with the magic of that sapphire sea, and the romantic variety of those rugged hills which look down upon it.

  Gerard, walking through the streets of Florence on a grey March afternoon — March as chill and windy as he had ever known in Piccadilly — felt that a glamour had gone out of his life, and a warmth had left his veins. How dull the houses looked on the Lung’arno, palatial no doubt, all that the soul of an architect could desire; but are there not palatial houses in Piccadilly and Kensington? How grey the river, rushing over its weirs; how cold the colouring of the stone bridge; how bleak the snow line of the Apennines! Tired as he was after the long journey from Genoa, he had preferred to walk to his destination, leaving servant and luggage to be driven to the Hotel de la Ville, where his rooms had been engaged for him.

  He had given Mrs. Champion no notice of his arrival. He wanted to take her by surprise, to see in her face that he had lost nothing of the love which was his a year ago. He had had his caprice — had given all that was warmest and best in his nature to another woman; and now he wanted to take up the thread of life where he had dropped it a year ago, when he followed Hester Davenport across St. James’ Park, and felt the swift, sudden influence of love at first sight. He wanted to love again, in the old, reasonable, sober fashion; he wanted again to feel the mild affection which had sustained his interest in Edith Champion during the three years of her wedded life.

  Her house was on the side of the hill leading to San Miniato — a villa in a delicious garden, where the magnolia buds shone silver-white amid the dark glossy leafage, and where broad beds of flame-coloured tulips relieved the velvet monotony of the lawn, while a tall hedge of pink peonies shivered in that scathing Florentine wind which has not been ill described as an east wind blowing from the west.

  It was a long walk from the station to that verdure-clothed hill on the southern side of the river, and Gerard was very weary when he arrived at the Villa Bel Visto, which overlooked the Boboli Gardens, and all the glory of Cupola and Campanile, far away to those fair hills northward of the city. On a sunny day the prospect would have cheered him with its beauty; but under this cold, grey British sky even dome and bell-tower lost something of their soothing influence, and Gerard regretted the sun-baked slopes above Monaco, where he seemed to have left summer behind him.

  The gates stood wide open, and there were a good many smart carriages waiting in the semi
circular drive. The hall door was also open, while a distinctly British footman aired his idleness on the broad flight of marble steps, and looked with supercilious gaze upon the opposite hills. Gerard passed into the house uninterrogated, and found himself in a vestibule, from which several doors opened. The light was dim, the atmosphere warm with the friendly glow of a wood fire, and beyond, through half open doors, he heard the subdued murmurings of voices, mostly feminine, which suddenly dropped into silence as he approached, silence broken by the flowing phrases of a symphony, and then by a fine baritone attacking the fashionable lament — Vorrei morir. A majordomo, tall, handsome, and Tuscan, stood near the lofty folding doors, ready to announce visitors, and looked interrogatively at Mr. Hillersdon, who waited in silence till the end of the song.

  Mrs. Champion was evidently receiving — it might be an afternoon party, or perhaps only her “day.” Her later letters had told him of a few Florentine acquaintances, who dropped in occasionally to cheer her solitude; but he was unprepared for the crowd of well-dressed women and distinguished-looking men amidst whom he found himself when Tosti’s pensive strain had died in a prolonged diminuendo, and he allowed the major-domo to announce him.

  The afternoon light shone full upon a window which occupied nearly one side of the spacious drawing-room, and in this light Gerard saw Edith Champion standing in a group of elegant women of various nationalities — herself the handsomest of all, like an empress among her ladies of honour. She wore deepest black, but the heavy folds of the rich corded silk suggested grandeur rather than gloom, and the tulle coif, d la Marie Stuart, only gave a piquancy to the coronet of plaited hair which rose above her low, broad brow.

  She started at the sound of her lover’s name, and hurried to meet him.

  “Welcome to Florence,” she cried gaily, though there is no one in the world whom I less expected to see. Have you only just come?”