The landlady produced a fat black quarto, in which, amidst much sportive commendation of her meat and drink, and many fictitious entries of Dukes and Marquises, famous politicians, and notorious criminals, and a good deal of doggerel verse, there appeared the following modest entry —
Lawrence Brown, 49, Parchment Place, Inner Temple.
Gerard copied the address into his pocket-book, presented the mistress of the Rose and Crown with a bank note, for distribution among those servants who had been helpful on the night of the catastrophe, wished her good day, and was seated in his fly before she had time to steal a glance at the denomination of the note, or to give speech to her gratitude on discovering that it was not five, but five-and-twenty.
“This Mr. Hanley must be uncommonly rich to be so free with his money,” she reflected, “but for all that I don’t believe that pretty young creature is his wife. She wouldn’t have took to wandering about with her baby if she had been. Perpetual fever says the doctor. Don’t tell me! Perpetual fever would never make a respectable married woman forget herself to that extent.” Two hours later Gerard Hillersdon was seated face to face with Lawrence Brown, barrister of no particular circuit, and of Parchment Place, Inner Temple.
The room was shabby almost to squalidness: the man was nearer forty than thirty, with roughly modelled features, keen eyes, intelligent brow, and dark hair already touched with grey about the temples.
He received Mr. Hillersdon’s thanks politely, but with obvious reserve. He made very light of what he had done — no man seeing a life at stake could have done less. He was sorry — and here his face grew pale and stern — he had not been able to save the other life, the poor little child.
“My friend and I heard a child’s faint cry,” he said, “and it was that which called our attention to the spot, before we heard the splash. The current runs strong at that point. The woman rose, and sank again, twice before I caught hold of her, but the child was swept away upon the current. The body was found caught among the rushes half a mile lower down the stream.”
There was a silence of some moments, during which Mr. Brown refilled his briarwood pipe, automatically, and looked at the little bit of fire burning dully in a rusty iron grate.
“Mr. Brown,” began Gerard abruptly, “I am a very rich man.”
“I am glad to hear it,” replied Brown. “There are consolations in wealth which we poor men can hardly realise.”
“You have called yourself a poor man,” said Gerard eagerly, “so you must not be angry with me if I presume to take that as a fact. I am rich, but my wealth is of very little use to me. I have had my death warrant. My time for spending money will soon be over, and my wealth must pass into other hands. I am here to beg your acceptance of a substantial reward for the act which has saved me from a burden that would have been unbearable — the thought that my absence from England bad caused the death of the person who is dearer to me than any one else upon earth. Will you oblige me with your inkstand?”
He stretched his hand towards a shabby china ink-pot in which half a dozen much-used quills kept guard over a thimbleful of ink.
“What are you going to do, Mr. Hanley?”
“I am going to write a cheque, if you will allow me — a cheque for five thousand pounds, payable to your order.”
“You are very good, but I am not a boatman, and I don’t save lives for hire. I have not the faintest claim upon your purse. What I did for your — for Mrs. Hanley, I would have done for any lovesick kitchen-wench along the river. I heard a woman fall into the water, and I fetched her out. Do you suppose that I want to take money for that?”
“You would take a big fee for doing everything short of perjuring yourself in order to save the neck of a ruffianly burglar,” said Gerard.
“I should do that in the way of business. It is my profession to defend burglars, and, short of perjury, to make believe that they are innocent and lamb-like.”
“And you will not accept this recompense from me — a trifling recompense as compared with my income? You will not allow me to think that for once in a way my wealth has been of some service to a good man?”
“I thank you for your kind opinion of me, and for your wish to do me a kindness, but I cannot take a gift of money from you.”
“Because you think badly of me?”
“I could not take a gift of money from any man who was not of my own blood, or so near and dear to me by friendship as to nullify all sense of obligation.”
“But you could feel no obligation in this case, while your refusal to accept any substantial expression of my gratitude leaves me under the burden of a heavy obligation. Do you think that is generous on your part?”
“I am only certain of one thing, Mr. Hanley — I cannot accept any gift from you.”
“Because you have a bad opinion of me. Come, Mr. Brown, between man and man, is not that your reason?”
“You force me to plain speech,” answered the barrister. “Yes, that is one of my reasons. I could not take a favour from a man I despise, and I can have no better feeling than contempt for the man who could abandon a friendless and highly strung girl in the day of trial — leave her to break her heart, and to try to make an end of herself in her despair.”
“You are very ready with your summing up of my conduct. I was absent — granted; but I had left Mrs. Hanley surrounded with all proper care —— — —”
“You mean you had left her with a full purse and three or four servants. Do you think that means the care due from a husband to a wife who is about to become a mother? You must not be surprised if I have formed my own opinion about you, Mr. Hanley. I have been up and down the river a good many times, and have lived for a good many days here and there at riverside inns within a few miles of the Rosary, and have heard a good deal of talk about you and your lovely wife — or not wife, as the case may be. The village gossips would have it that she was not your wife.”
“The village gossips were right. I was bound by an earlier claim, and I dared not marry her; but if she and I live, and if I can release myself from that other claim with honour, she shall be my wife.”
“I am glad to hear that. But I doubt if your tardy reparation can ever efface the past.”
The man was obviously so thoroughly in earnest that even in the face of those shabby chambers, that well-worn shooting-jacket and those much-kneed trousers, Gerard could push his offer no further. He might have been as rich as Rothschild, and this man would have accepted not so much as a single piece of gold out of his treasury. There are men of strong feelings and prejudices to whom money is not all in all; men who are content to wear shabby tweed and trousers that are bulging at the knees and frayed at the edge, and to sit beside a sparse fire in a rusty grate, and smoke coarse tobacco in an eighteen-penny pipe, so long as that inward fire of conscience burns bright and clear, and the silvering head can hold itself high in the face of mankind.
CHAPTER XXXI. “THE LOVE THAT CAUGHT STRANGE LIGHT FROM DEATH’S OWN EYES.”
Gerard Hillersdon had no mind to occupy the cottage in which he had dreamed his brief love-dream, but he went to Lowcombe daily, and sat in the Rector’s study, and heard the doctor’s opinion, and the report of the nurses, and once on each day was admitted for a short time to the pretty sitting-room where Hester flitted from object to object with a feverish restlessness, or else sat statue-like by the open window gazing dreamily at churchyard or river.
The doctor and the nurses told him that there was a gradual improvement. The patient’s nights were less wakeful, and she was able to take a little more nourishment. Altogether the case seemed hopeful, and even the violence of the earlier stages was said to predicate a rapid recovery.
“If she were always as you see her just now,” said Mr. Mivor, glancing towards the motionless figure by the window, “I should consider her case almost hopeless — but that hyper-activity of brain which alarms you is an encouraging symptom.”
The Rector was kind and sympathetic, but Gerard
observed that Miss Gilstone avoided him. He was never shown into the drawingroom, but always into the Rector’s study, where he felt himself shut out from social intercourse, as if he had been a leper. On his third visit he told the Rector that he was anxious to thank Miss Gilstone for her goodness to Hester; but the Rector shook his head dubiously.
“Better not think about it yet awhile,” he said. “My sister is full of prejudices. She doesn’t want to be thanked. She is very fond of this poor girl, and she thinks you have cruelly wronged her.”
“People seem to have made up their minds about that,” said Gerard. “I am not to have the benefit of the doubt.”
“People have made up their minds that when a lovely and innocent girl makes the sacrifice that this poor girl has made for you, a man’s conscience should constrain him to repair the wrong he has done — even though social circumstances make reparation a hard thing to do. But in this case difference of caste could have made no barrier. Your victim is a lady, and no man need desire more than that.”
“There was a barrier,” said Gerard. “I was bound by a promise to a woman who had been constant to me for years.”
“But who had not sacrificed herself for you — as this poor girl has done. And it was because she was a clever, hard-headed woman of the world, perhaps, and had kept her name unstained, that you wanted to keep your promise to her, rather than that other promise — at least implied — which you gave to the girl who loved you.”
Gerard was silent. What had he not promised in those impassioned hours when love was supreme? What pledges, what vows had he not given his fond victim, in that conflict between love and honour? She had been too generous ever to remind him of those passionate vows. He had chosen to cheat her, and she had submitted to be cheated, resigned even to his abandonment of her if his happiness were to be found elsewhere.
The London season had begun, and there were plenty of people in town who knew Gerard Hillersdon, people who would have been delighted to welcome him back to society after his ‘prolonged disappearance from a world which he — or at any rate his breakfasts and dinners — had adorned. But Gerard was careful to let no one know of his return to London. The carriage gates of Hillersdon House were as closely shut as when the master of the house was in Italy, and Mr. Hillersdon’s only visitor entered by an insignificant garden door which opened into a shabby street at the back of the premises. This visitor was Justin Jermyn, the confidant and companion whose society was in some wise a necessity to Gerard since his shattered nerves had made solitude impossible. They dined together every night, talked, smoked, and idled in a dreamy silence, and played piquet for an hour or two after midnight. The money he won at cards was the only money that Jermyn had ever taken from his millionaire friend; but he was an exceptionally fine player, Gerard a careless one, and the stakes were high, whereby his winnings made a respectable revenue.
Gerard found Jermyn waiting for him when he returned, saddened and disheartened, from Lowcombe Rectory. Jermyn was sprawling on a sofa in the winter-garden, with his head deep in a leviathan pillow, and his legs in the air.
“There is a letter for you,” he said, between two lazy puffs at a large cigar, “a letter from Florence — after Ovid, no doubt. Dido to Aeneas!”
“Why didn’t you open it if you were curious?” sneered Gerard. “It would be no worse form than to pry into the address and postmark.”
“There was no necessity; you are sure to tell me all about it,”
The letter was from Mrs. Champion, and a thick letter, that lady scorning such small economy as the lessening of postage by the use of foreign paper.
“MY dear Gerard, — I think my letter of last night may have prepared you in some degree for the letter I find myself constrained to write to-day. I might have hesitated longer, perhaps, ‘had you been still at my side, might have trifled with your fate and mine, might have allowed myself to drift into a marriage which I am now assured could result in happiness neither for you nor me. The days are past in which you and I were all in all to each other. We are good friends still, shall be good friends, I hope, as long as we live; but why should friends marry, when they are happy in unfettered friendship?
“You hurried departure makes my task easier; and should make the continuation of our friendship easier. When we meet again let us meet as friends, and forget that we have ever been more than friends. Day by day, and hour by hour, since you came to Florence it has been made clearer to my mind that we have both changed since last year. We are not to blame, Gerard, neither you nor I. The glamour has gone out of our lives somehow — we are ‘ the same and not the same.’ I have seen coldness and despondency in you where all was once warmth and hope, and I confess that a coldness in my own heart responds to the chill that has come over yours. If we were to marry we should be miserable, and should perhaps come to hate each other before very long. If we are frank and straightforward, and true to each other at this crisis of our lives we need never be lessened in each other’s esteem.
“I know that I have read your heart as truly as I have read my own; I do not, therefore, appeal to you for pardon. My release will be your release. Be as frank with me, my dear Gerard, as I have been with you, and send me a few friendly lines to assure me of kindly feeling towards your ever faithful friend, — Edith Champion.”
A deathlike chill crept through Gerard’s veins as he read this letter to the end. The release as a release was welcome, but the underlying meaning of the letter, the feeling which had prompted it, cut him to the quick.
“She saw death in my face that first day at Florence,” he told himself. “I could not mistake her look of horrified surprise, of repulsion almost, when I stood unexpectedly before her. She was able to hide her feelings afterwards, but in that moment love perished. She saw a change in me that changed her at once and for ever. I was not the Gerard Hillersdon of whom she had thought, and for whom she had waited. The man who stood before her was a stranger marked for death; a doomed wretch clinging to the hem of her garments to keep him from the grave — an embodied misery. Can I wonder that her heart changed to the man whom Death had changed?”
He read the letter a second time, slowly and thoughtfully. Yes, he could read between the lines. He had gone to his old love as an escape from death — a flight to sunnier skies, as the swallows fly to Africa. He had thought that somehow in that association with fresh and joyous life, he would escape out of the jaws of death, renew his boyish love, and with that renewal of youthful emotions renew youth itself. He had cheated himself with this hope when he turned his face towards Florence; but the woman he had loved, that embodiment of life and happiness, would have none of him.
Well, it was better so. He was free to pick up the broken thread of that nearer, dearer, far more enthralling love — if he could. If he could! Can broken threads be united? He thought of his child — his murdered child — murdered by his abandonment of the mother. No act of his — no tardy reparation — could bring back that lost life. Even if Fate were kind, and Hester’s health and reason were restored, that loss was a loss for ever, and would overshadow the mother’s life to the end.
He knew that he was dying, that for Hester and him there could be no second summer of happy, unreasoning love. The meadow flowers would blossom again; the river would go rippling past lawn and willowy bank under the September sun; but his feet would not tread the ripe grasses, his voice would not break the quiet of that lonely backwater where Hester and he had dreamt their dream of a ‘world in which there was neither past nor future, neither fear nor care, only ineffable love.
Jermyn watched him keenly as he walked up and down the open space between a bank of vivid tulips and a cluster of palms.
“Your letter seems to have troubled you,” he said, at last “Does she scold you for having run away just before your wedding? To-day was to have been the day, by-the-by.”
“No, she is very kind — and very patient. She will wait till it suits me to go back.”
“That will be nest
week, I suppose? You have done all you can do at Lowcombe. The Jersey Lily will suit you better than this house — delightful as it is — and Spezia or Sorrento will be a safer climate than London in May.”
I am in no hurry to go back — and I doubt if climate can make any difference to me.”
“There you are wrong. The air a man breathes is of paramount importance.”
“I will hear what my doctor says upon that point. In the meantime I can vegetate here.”
He dined with Justin Jermyn. No one else knew that he was in London. He had not announced his return even to his sister, shrinking with a sense of pain from any meeting with that happy young matron, who was so full of the earnest realities of life, and who on their last meeting had asked such searching questions about her missing friend Hester, whether there was anything that she or her husband could do to find out the secret of her disappearance. She had reminded her brother that Jack Cumberland was the servant of Him who came to seek and to save those that were lost, and that even if Hester’s footsteps had wandered from the right way, it was so much the more his duty to find her. Gerard had answered those eager questionings as best he might, or had left them unanswered; but he felt that in the present state of things he could scarcely endure to hear Hester’s name, and that the mask must drop if he were called upon to talk about his victim.
Hester’s attempted suicide, and the drowning of her child had not been made a local scandal, and bandied about in the newspapers. The fact was too unimportant to attract the attention of a metropolitan reporter, and Mr. Gilstone’s wishes had been law to the editors of the two or three papers which usually concerned themselves with the affairs of Lowcombe and other villages within twenty miles of Reading. Gerard’s domestic tragedy had therefore been unrecorded by the public Press.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 933
