Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  He was too agitated for the first few moments to see the portion of the letter which referred to his own’ evil fortune. He saw only words about the house Muller was building — abuse of architect and builder — the mistakes of one, the dilatoriness of the other. It was only when Jermyn put a hand over his shoulder and pointed to the bottom of a closely written page that he saw where the bad news began.

  “You are interested I know in that pretty young woman at the Rosary, though I could never persuade you to introduce me to her. You will be sorry to hear that she is in sad trouble, poor girl, trouble which is all the sadder because the man who called himself her husband seems to have deserted her. There was a baby born at the Rosary — a baby that came upon this mortal scene before he was expected, poor little beggar. The old father’s sudden death, I believe, was the cause of this premature event — and ten days or a fortnight after the baby’s birth the young mother went clean off her head, and only last night she escaped from the two nurses who had care of her, and wandered away by the river, with, I believe, the intention of drowning herself. The baby was drowned, and the mother only escaped by the happy chance of a couple of Cockneys who were rowing down from Oxford, one of whom swam to the poor girl’s rescue very pluckily. There is to be an inquest on the infant this afternoon, and I don’t know in whose custody the mother now is, but I suppose some one is looking after her. My builder’s foreman lives at Lowcombe, and he tells me there has been a great deal of excitement about the affair, for this Mr. Hanley is supposed to be a man of large means, and he is thought to have acted cruelly to this poor young woman, wife or no wife, in leaving her at such a time.”

  “Cruelly,” muttered Gerard, “yes, with the cruelty of devils. But she would not come with me — it was her choice to stay. How could I tell? Is it true, Jermyn? Is this some trick of yours to frighten me?”

  “It is no trick. I thought it best to show you the letter, that you should know the worst at once.”

  “The worst, yes. Hester, perhaps, a prisoner — accused of murdering her child! The worst! Oh, what a wretch I have been! When can I get away from here? How soon can I get to London?”

  “You can leave Florence to-night; I will go with you. The Mont Cenis, I think, is the quickest way. I’ll arrange everything with your servant. Shall you see Mrs. Champion before you go?”

  “See her, no. What good would that do?”

  “We were to have dined with her this evening. Shall I write an r apology in your name?”

  “Yes, you can do that. Tell her I am called away upon a matter of life and death; that I don’t know how long it may be before I can return to Florence. You may make my apology as abject as you like. I doubt if she and I will ever meet again.”

  “You are agitating yourself too much, Hillersdon,” remonstrated Jermyn.

  “Can there be too much in the matter? Can anything be too much? Oh, how nobly that girl loved me — how generous, how uncomplaining she was! And I have murdered her! First I slew her good name, and now her child is murdered — murdered by me, not by her, and she has to bear the brand of infamy, as if she were a common felon.”

  “She will not be considered guilty. It will be known that she was irresponsible. People will be good to her, be sure of that.”

  “Will the law be good to her? The law which takes no account of circumstances, the law which settles everything by hard and fast lines. To-morrow! It will be the day after to-morrow before we are at Lowcombe, travel how we may. What ages to wait! Get me some telegraph forms. I’ll telegraph to the Rector. He is a good man, and may be able to help us.”

  “To help us,” he said, making himself one with Hester in her trouble, re-united to her by calamity. He forgot in his agony how false he had been to her, forgot that he had planned to spend the rest of his days far away from her. The thought of her sorrow made her newly dear to him.

  He made his appeal to the Rector in the most urgent form that occurred to him. He implored that good man for Christian charity to be kind to the ill-used girl whom he knew as Mrs. Hanley. He urged him to spare no outlay in providing legal help, if legal help were needed. If she was able to understand anything she was to be assured that her husband would be with her without the loss of an hour.

  He used that word husband, careless of consequences, albeit in three days he was to have become the husband of another woman.

  While he wrote the telegram Jermyn looked at the time-table. The train for Turin left in an hour. The order was given to the valet, everything was to be ready, and a fly was to be at the door in three quarters of an hour.

  “You’ll have some dinner served here, I suppose?” suggested Jermyn.

  “Do you think I can eat at such a time?”

  “Well, no, perhaps not. You’ve been hard hit; but it would be better if you could fortify yourself for a long journey.”

  “Take care of yourself,” answered Gerard curtly.

  “Thanks. I always do that,” said Jermyn. “I’ll go down to the table d’hote when I’ve written to Mrs. Champion.”

  He seated himself to write, but before he began a waiter brought in a letter for Mr. Hillersdon. Gerard knew the hand, the thick vellum paper with its narrow black border and massive black monogram; he knew the delicate perfume which always accompanied such letters, a faint suggestion of violets or lilies.

  The letter was brief: —

  “Dear Gerard,—” I have a wretched headache, and am almost depressed and miserable this evening, so I must ask you and your friend to postpone your visit. I am not fit company for any one. I will write again to-morrow. I have much to say to you — that must be said somehow. It may be easier to write than to speak. — Ever yours.

  “EDITH.”

  A curious letter to be written by a woman from whom he had parted only a few hours earlier. What could she have to say to him that could not have been said by the fountain when they two sat silent, as if spellbound in the languid air? He wondered at the wording of her letter, but with faintest interest in the question. Everything that affected his life at Florence had grown dim and blurred, like a faded photograph. The image of Edith Champion had receded into the background of his thoughts.

  “Here is a letter that will save you the trouble of an elaborate apology,” he said to Jermyn, “a letter which I can answer myself.” He scrawled a hurried line announcing his departure from Florence. “You have deferred our wedding-day twice,” he wrote. “Fate constrains me to defer it for the third time. I will write to you from London.”

  CHAPTER XXX. “FROM THE WARM WILD KISS TO THE COLD.”

  Gerard travelled as fast as trains and boat would take him, but it was noon on the second day after he had left Florence before he arrived at the nearest station to Lowcombe, with the prospect of over an hour’s drive behind an indifferent horse before he could reach the Rosary and know the worst. He was alone. He had sent his valet to Hillersdon House, and had resolutely refused Jermyn’s company, although Jermyn had urged that he was hardly in a state of health to risk a solitary journey, or the consequences of further ill news.

  “If there is anything worse to be told, you could not help me to bear the blow,” Gerard answered gloomily. “Nor would she care to see you with me. You were no favourite of hers; and perhaps if it had not been for you I should never have left her.”

  They had searched all the morning papers they could obtain during the journey from Dover to Charing Cross, to discover any paragraph that might record the calamity at Lowcombe — for any report of the inquest on the infant, or the rescue of the mother. It was at least some relief to find no such record. Whatever had happened, the report had, by happy chance or kindly influence, been kept out of the papers. Hester’s name and Hester’s sorrows were not bandied about in a social leader, or even made the subject of a paragraph.

  Gerard reached Lowcombe, therefore, in absolute ignorance of anything that might have happened since Mr. Muller’s letter was written. He drove straight to the Rosary, where garden and shrubberies
looked dull and dreary under a sunless sky. It seemed as if he had left summer on the other side of the Alps — as if he had come into a laud where there was no summer, only a neutral season, which meant gloom and smoke in London, and dim greyness in the country.

  His heart grew cold at sight of the windows. The blinds were down. The house was either uninhabited, or inhabited by Death.

  He rang violently, and rang again, but had to wait nearly five minutes, an interval of torturing suspense, before a housemaid opened the door, her countenance only just composing itself after the broad grin that had rewarded the baker’s last sally. The baker’s cart rattled away from the back door while the housemaid stood at the front door answering her master’s eager questions.

  “Where is your mistress? She — she is not—”

  He could not utter the word that would have given shape to his fear. Happily the girl was sympathetic, although frivolous-minded as to bakers and butcher-boys. She did not prolong his agony.

  “She is not any worse, sir. She’s very bad, but not worse.”

  “Can I see her at once — would it do her any harm to see me?” he asked, going towards the staircase.

  “She’s not here, sir. She’s at the Rectory. Mr. Gilstone had her taken there after she was saved from drowning by those two London gentlemen. She was took to the Rose and Crown, as that was the nearest house to the river; the two gentlemen earned her there, quite unconscious, and they had hard work to bring her round. And they sent here for the two nurses, and they kep’ her there, at the Rose, till next morning; and then the Rector he had her taken to the Rectory, and his sister is helping to nurse her.”

  “They are good souls,” cried Gerard, “true Christians. What shall we do in our troubles when there are no more Christians in the world?” he thought, deeply touched by kindness from the man whose sympathy he had repulsed.

  “Is your mistress dangerously ill?” he asked.

  “She has been in great danger, sir; and I don’t think she’s out of danger yet. I was at the Rectory last night to inquire, and one of the nurses told me it was a very critical case. But she’s well nursed, and well cared for, sir. You can make yourself happy about that.”

  “Happy! I can never know happiness again!”

  “Oh, yes, but you will, sir, when Mrs. Hanley gets well. I make no doubt they’ll pull her through.”

  “And her baby—”

  “Oh the poor little thing! He was such a weakly little mite — I’m sure he’s better off in heaven; if his poor mother could only think so, when she comes round and has to be told about it.”

  “There was an inquest, wasn’t there?”

  “Well, yes, sir, there was an inquest at the Rose and Crown; but it wasn’t much of an inquest,” Mary Jane added, in a comforting tone. “The baker told me the coroner and the other gentlemen weren’t in the room above ten minutes. ‘Death by misadventure,’ that was the verdict. Everybody was so sorry for the poor young lady. And it was a misadventure, for if the night-nurse hadn’t left the door unfastened, and fallen asleep in her easy-chair, nothing need have gone wrong. It was all along of her carelessness. My poor young mistress got up and put on her morning gown and slippers, and took the baby out of his bassinette, and went downstairs and out of the drawing-room widow, and she must have gone across the lawn down to the towing-path, and wandered and wandered for nearly two miles before she threw herself in just by the little backwater where she and you used to be so fond of sitting in the punt, where we used to send your lunch out to you.”

  “Yes, yes, I know. It was there, was it?”

  He thought of the hours they had spent there, hours of blissful tranquillity, steeped in the summer warmth, the golden light, sweet odours of field flowers, soothing ripple of water, and rustle of willow branches. What happy hours of delight in all that is most exquisite in literature, Milton, Keats, Tennyson, Rossetti, in that music of words which is second only to the music of sweet concords and exquisite harmonies! Oh, happy hours, happy days, bliss which he had dreamed might last out all his life, and lengthen life by its reposeful sweetness. And now he had to think of his dear love, the fair Egeria of those peaceful hours, wandering distraught along that river bank, choosing by some dim instinct of the dreaming mind that spot above all other spots in which to seek death and oblivion.

  “Tell me how it all happened,” he said to the girl. “Mr. Davenport’s death — was it very sudden?”

  “Dreadfully sudden, sir. It was the shock of her father’s death which made my mistress so bad. She was very down-hearted after you went abroad. We could all see that, though none of us ever see her cry. She was too much the lady to give way before servants; but we could tell by her face in the morning that she’d been awake most of the night, and that she’d been crying a good deal. And then she’d pull herself together, as you may say, and be bright and cheerful with the old gentleman, and sit with him, and talk to him, and walk beside his chair, and give all her thoughts and all her time to making him as happy as he could be made. And it wasn’t easy work, for after you was gone he took a sort of restless fit, and he was always asking about you, the nurse said, and he seemed uneasy at not seeing you. And he used to talk to poor Mrs. Hanley in a disagreeable way, and he was quite nasty to her, his man told me, and was always blaming her, as if she hadn’t done her best for him. He was very cruel to her, I think; but I suppose it must have been because he was worse in himself. And one day he was particularly unkind, and she left him in tears, and went out into the garden and sat there alone by the river, and didn’t go to her father’s room to sit with him while he took his lunch, as she generally did, and his man found her sitting in the garden very low-spirited, when he went to tell her that he and the nurse were going to dinner. Missus always used to sit with the old gentleman while those two had their dinner. And she went up to his room, and found him lying quietly on the sofa, and she sat there over an hour, for those two used to take their time over their dinner, no doubt thinking he was asleep all the time, and then, just as the nurse was going upstairs, we all heard a dreadful shriek and a fall, and we found her lying insensible on the floor near the sofa, where her father lay dead. She had gone to him, and spoken to him, and touched him, and found him dead.”

  There was a pause, a silence broken only by Gerard’s agonised sobbing, as he sat at the table where he had planned his new novel, in the happy morning of his love, sat with his head bent low upon his folded arms.

  “She was very bad all that day and night, and Dr. Mivor telegraphed for a second nurse, for he said we was in for a bad business. She was quite light-headed, poor young lady, and it was heartbreaking to hear her asking for you, and why you didn’t go to her, and talking about her father, and begging him to forgive her, as if she had any need of forgiveness, when she’d devoted herself to making him comfortable and happy from the first hour he was took. And three days after his death the poor little baby was born, and she was quite out of her mind all the time and didn’t seem to care about the baby, though he was a dear pretty little thing — but very tiny and weak, and I don’t think he’d have lived long, even with the best of care. A week after he was born the fever went down a bit, and she seemed to be coming more to herself. There was a great change in her, and she left off talking wildly, and she seemed to understand that her father was dead, and that you were far away; and everybody thought she was better. I suppose this made the night-nurse a little less watchful. Both nurses had been very careful of her while she was so bad with the fever, but they began to take things easier, and to drop asleep in the armchair. They’d both had a hard time of it for the first week. And I think that’s about all I can tell you, sir; except that Mr. Davenport was buried in Lowcombe churchyard nearly a fortnight ago.”

  “Thank you for telling me so much. You arc a good girl.”

  “Shall I get you a bit of lunch, sir? You are looking so tired and ill.”

  “No, thank you, Mary, I shall eat nothing till I get to the Rectory. Good day. Take care of
the house, and keep everything in good order till your mistress and I come back. By the way, who has been supplying you with money since your mistress fell ill? Have you had any difficulty in providing for expenses?”

  “No, sir; the cook knew where mistress kept her money, and she made bold to unlock the drawer and take out what was wanted. There was a fifty-pound note and some sovereigns in the drawer. There has been plenty to pay the nurses and gardeners, and to provide any ready money that was wanted. Cook has kept an account of everything. The undertaker has not been paid anything, nor the doctor, but they know their money’s safe.”

  The fly was waiting, and it took Gerard to the Rectory with very little loss of time, yet to his agonised mind the distance seemed long, the horse slower than such hirelings usually are. Fate had used him almost better than he had hoped. The coroner’s verdict freed Hester from all shadow of blame in the child’s death — his child; that child of whose existence he had taken so little thought, deeming that he had done enough when he had left ample funds at the mother’s disposal. He had cared but for one thing, to make the best and the most of his own waning days — and the thought of the child that was to be born to him had awakened no tender feeling, only an aching envy of that young fresh life in which doubtless his qualities and characteristics would live again under happier conditions, the life which would be tasting all the sweetest things that this world can give — love, ambition, pride, luxury, the mastery of men — while he was lying cold and dumb, cheated by inexorable Death out of the riches which Fortune had flung into his lap. Fate had given with one hand, and had taken away with the other. No, he had never felt as an expectant father should feel. The thought of his duty to the child had never urged him to repair the wrong he had done the mother — but now remorse weighed heavy on his heart, and he hated himself for the egotism which had governed him in all his relations with the woman he had pretended to love. He had glossed over all that was guilty in their union; he had kissed away her tears, and made light of her remorse; he had compared her to Shelley’s Mary, forgetting that Shelley was as eager to legalise his union as the most conforming Christian in the land. He looked back upon the happy days of their love, and knew that when he was happiest Hester’s life had been under the shadow of an ever-present regret, knew that while, she was generous and devoted he had been selfish and false, soothing her conscience with, shallowest sophistries.