Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea

  Hath drops too few to wash her clean again,”

  GRACE PERIVALE could hardly live through the day, while she was waiting for the appearance of the family solicitor. Since Lady Morning-side’s visit she had been on fire with impatience to do something, wise or foolish, futile or useful, towards clearing her character. She had been all the more eager, perhaps, because in her morning ride she had seen a man whose scorn — or that grave distance which she took for scorn — pained her more than the apostasy of all her other friends.

  She had ridden in the park with “the liver brigade” three or four mornings a week, since her return from Italy, and she had found some trouble in keeping the men she knew at a distance. They all wanted to be talkative and friendly, praised her mount, hung at her side till she froze them by her brief answers, warned them that her horse hated company, that her mare was inclined to kick other horses, and then, with a light touch of her whip, cantered sharply off, and left the officious acquaintance planted.

  “One can’t expect her to be amiable when our wives and daughters are so d —— d uncivil to her,” mused one of her admirers.

  Some among the husbands and brothers of her friends had taken sides for her, and argued that the story of her intrigue with Rannock was not proven; but the women had heard it too often and from too many quarters to doubt. They sighed, and shook their heads, and deplored that it was impossible to go on knowing a woman of whom such a story was told.

  They might not have believed it, they argued, had she not obviously been head over ears in love with Rannock last season. They had always been about together — at Ascot, Goodwood, at all the classical concerts, at the opera. True, she had seldom been alone with him. There had generally been other women and other men of the party; but Rannock had undoubtedly been the man.

  That one man whose opinion Grace cared for, whose good word might have been balm in Gilead, was not a man of fashion. Arthur Haldane was a student, and he only appeared occasionally in the haunts of the frivolous, where he was not above taking his recreation, now and then, after the busy solitude of his working days and nights. He was a Balliol man, had known and been cherished by Jowett in his undergraduate days, and had taken a first in classics. He might have had a fellowship had he desired it, but he wanted a more stirring part in life than the learned leisure of a college. He was a barrister by profession, but he had not loved the law, nor the law him; and, having an income that allowed him not to work for daily bread, after about a dozen briefs spaced over a year and a half, he had taken to literature, which had been always his natural bent, and the realm of letters had received him with acclaim. His rivals ascribed his success to luck, and to a certain lofty aloofness which kept his work original. He never wrote with an eye to the market, never followed another man’s lead, nor tried to repeat his own successes, and never considered whether the thing he wrote was wanted or not, would or would not pay.

  He was a prodigious reader, but a reader who dwelt in the past, and who read the books he loved again and again, till all that was finest in the master-minds of old was woven into the fabric of his brain. He seldom looked at a new book, except when he was asked to review one for a certain Quarterly to which he had contributed since the beginning of his career. He was the most conscientious of reviewers; if he loved the book, the most sympathetic; if he hated it, the most unmerciful.

  One only work of fiction, published before he was thirty, had marked him as a writer of original power. It was a love story, supposed to be told by the man who had lived it, the story of a man who had found a creature of perfect loveliness and absolute purity in one of the darkest spots on earth, had snatched her unstained from the midst of pollution, had placed her in the fairest environment, watched the growth of her mind with the tenderest interest, looked forward to the blissful day when he could make her his wife, and then, when she had ripened into a perfect woman, had seen her ruin and untimely death, the innocent victim of a relentless seducer.

  The tragic story — which involved a close study of two strongly contrasted characters, the deep-thinking and ambitious man, and the child of nature whose every thought was poetry, whose every word was music — had stirred the hearts of novel-readers, and had placed Arthur Haldane in the front rank of contemporary novelists; but he had produced no second novel, and many of his feminine admirers declared that the story was the tragedy of his own life, and that, although he dined out two or three times a week in the season, he was a broken-hearted man.

  Perhaps it was this idea that had first interested Lady Perivale. She saw in Arthur Haldane the man of one book and one fatal love. She longed to question him about his Egeria of the slums, the girl of fourteen, exquisitely beautiful, whom he had torn from the clutches of a profligate mother, while her father was in a convict prison. She was quite ready to accept the fiction as sober truth, beguiled by that stern realism from which the writer had never departed, but through which there ran a vein of deep poetic feeling.

  She was surprised to find no trace of melancholy in his conversation. He did not wear his broken heart upon his sleeve. His manner was grave, and he liked talking of serious things — books, politics, the agitated theology of the day — but he had a keen sense of humour, and could see the mockery of life. He was not as handsome as Rannock was, even in his decadence, but his strongly marked features had the stamp of intellectual power, and his rare smile lightened the thoughtful face like sudden sunshine. He was tall and well set up, had thrown the hammer in his Oxford days, and had rowed in the Balliol boat.

  Lady Perivale had liked to talk to him, and had invited him to her best dinners, the smaller parties of chosen spirits, so difficult to bring together, as they were mostly the busiest people, so delightful when caught. It was at one of these little dinners, a party of six, that she beguiled Haldine into talking of the origin of his novel. The company was sympathetic, including a well-known cosmopolitan novelist, painter of manners and phases of feeling, and all the intricacies of modern life, the fine-drawn, the hypercivilized life that creates its perplexities and cultivates its sorrows.

  “The average reader will give a story-spinner credit for anything in the world except imagination,” he said. “I am sure Mr. Williams knows that” — with a smiling glance across the table at the novelist of many countries. “They will have it that every story is a page torn out of a life, and the more improbable the story the more determined are they that it should be real flesh and blood. Yet there is often a central fact in the web of fancy, an infinitesimal point, but the point from which all the lines radiate.”

  “And there was such a germ in your story?” Lady Perivale asked eagerly.

  “Yes; there was one solid fact — a child — a poor little half-starved girl-child. I was passing through a wretched alley between the Temple and Holborn, when a dishevelled brat rushed out of a house and almost fell into my arms. A man had been beating her — a child of nine years old — beating her unmercifully with a leather strap. I went into the house, and caught him red-handed. He was her uncle. There was an aunt somewhere, out upon the drink, the man said, as if it was a profession. I didn’t want to go through tedious proceedings — call in the aid of this or that society. The man swore the child was a bad lot, a thief, a liar. I bought her of him for a sovereign, bought her as if she had been a terrier pup, and before night I had her comfortably lodged in a cottage at Slough, with a woman who promised to be king to her, and to bring her up respectably.”

  “Was she very pretty?” Lady Perivale asked, deeply interested.

  ‘Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately for herself — she was an ugly child, and has grown into a plain girl; but she is as frank and honest as the daylight, and she is doing well as scullery-maid in a good family. My Slough cottager did her duty. That, Lady Perivale, is the nucleus of my story. I imagined circumstance more romantic — dazzling beauty, a poetic temperament, a fatal love — and my child of the slums grew into a heroine.”

  “And
that is the way novels are manufactured,” said Mr. Williams; “but Haldane ought not to be so ready to tell the tricks of our trade.”

  Grace Perivale and Arthur Haldane had been friends, but nothing more. There had been no suggestion of any deeper feeling, though when their friendship began, two season ago, it had seemed to her as if there might to something more. She looked back at last year, and saw that Colonel Rannock and his ‘cello had kept this more valued friend at a distance. She remembered Haldane calling upon her one afternoon when she and Rannock were playing a duet, and how quickly he had gone, with apologies for having interrupted their music.

  She had met him three or four times of late among the morning riders, and he had neither courted nor avoided her recognition, which had been cold and formal. She did not take the initiative in cutting people, for that would have looked as if she had something to be ashamed of. She only made all salutations as distant as possible.

  She stayed at home all day playing, reading, walking about her room, looking at the flowers, sitting in the balcony, which she had shaded with a striped awning, trying to make it like Italy. She was too eager for the old lawyer’s visit to apply her mind seriously to anything.

  The poodle, who followed all her movements with a tepid interest, wondered at her restlessness, and was glad when the maid came to take him For his afternoon airing in the park, where he ran on the flower-beds, and was regarded as an enemy by the park-keepers.

  Half-past four came at last, and Mr. Harding was announced on the stoke of the half-hour. Lady Perivale received him in her largest drawing-room. She did not want him to see all the frivolities — jardinières, book-stands, easels, eccentric work-baskets, and fantastical china monsters — of her den, lest he should think lightly of her. The Louis Seize drawing-rooms, with their large buhl cabinets, holding treasures of old Sèvres and Dresden, were serious enough for the reception-rooms of a Lord Chief Justice or an Archbishop. Even her dress was severe, a blue cloth gown, with only a little bullion embroidery on the primrose satin waistcoat. Her dark auburn hair was brushed back from the broad brow, and her hazel eyes, with golden lights in them, looked grave and anxious, as she shook hands with the family counselor.

  “please choose a comfortable chair, Mr. Harding,” she said, “I have a long story to tell you. But perhaps you have heard it already?”

  Mr. Harding looked mystified. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man of about sixty, with a massive brow and a benevolent head, and a countenance that had acquired dignity since his sandy hair and foxy beard had turned to silver.

  “Indeed, Lady Perivale, I have heard nothing involving your interests.”

  “Well, then, I shall have to begin at the beginning. It is a horrid business, but so preposterous that one could almost laugh at it.”

  She proceeded to tell him how her friends had treated her, and the story that had been going about London. He listened gravely, and looked shocked and pained.

  “And you have really heard nothing?”

  “Not a syllable. My wife and I only visit among our country neighbours, and I suppose Beckenham people know very little of what is being talked about in London society. Our conversation is chiefly local, or about church matters. I never speak of my clients, so no one would know of my interest in your welfare.”

  “And my good name, which is more than my welfare. Now, Mr. Harding, advise me. What am I to do?”

  The lawyer looked deeply concerned, but with the air of a man who saw no light.

  “It is a very difficult case,” he said, after a pause. “Has there been anything in the newspapers, any insolent paragraph in those columns which are devoted to trivial personalities? I don’t mean to imply that this is trivial.”

  “No, I have heard of nothing in the newspapers — and I have a friend who is always out and about, and who would have been sure to hear of such a thing.”

  Mr. Harding was silent for some moments, pulling his beard with his large white hand in a meditative way.

  “Have you seen Colonel Rannock since this story got about?” he asked

  “No, Colonel Rannock is in the Rocky Mountains. Ought I to see him if he were in London?”

  “Certainly not, Lady Perivale; but I think if he were within reach you should send a friend — myself, for instance, as your legal adviser — to call upon him to contradict this story, and to assure your common friends in a quiet way, that you were not the companion of his travels. He could not refuse to do that, though, of course, it would be an unpleasant thing to do as involving the reputation of the person who was with him, and to whom,” added the lawyer, after a pause, “he might consider himself especially accountable.”

  “Oh, no doubt all his chivalry would be for her,” said Grace, bitterly. “I would give the world to know who the creature is — so like me that three or four different people declare they saw me — me — in three or four different places.”

  “You know of no one — you have no double in your own set?”

  “No, I can recall no one who was ever considered very like me.”

  The lawyer looked at her with a grave smile. No, there were not many women made in that mould. The splendid hazel eyes — les yeux d’or — the burnished gold in the dark-brown hair, the perfect eyelids and long auburn lashes the delicate aquiline nose and short upper lip with its little look of hauteur, the beautifully-modelled chin with a dimple in it, and the marble white of a throat such as sculptors love — no, that kind of woman is not to be matched as easily as a skein of silk.

  “I think, Lady Perivale, the first and most important step is to discover the identity of this person who has been mistaken for you,” Mr. Harding said gravely.

  “Yes, yes, of course!” she cried eagerly. “Will you — will your firm — do that for me?”

  “Well, no, it is hardly in our line. But in delicate matters of this kind I have occasionally — I may say frequently — employed a very clever man, whom I can conscientiously recommend to you; and if you will explain the circumstances to him, as you have to me, and tell him all you can about this Colonel Rannock, family surroundings, tastes, habits — —”

  “Yes, yes, if you are sure he is to be trusted. Is he a lawyer?”

  Lawyers do not do these things. Mr. Faunce is a detective, who retired from the Criminal Investigation Department some years ago, and who occasionally employs himself in private cases. I have known him give most valuable service in family matters of exceeding delicacy. I believe he would work your case con amore. It is the kind of thing that would appeal to him.”

  “Pray let me see him — this evening. There is not an hour to be lost.”

  “I will telegraph to him when I leave you. But he may be away from London. His business takes him to the Continent very often. You may have to wait some time before he is free to work for you.”

  “Not long, I hope. I am devoured with impatience. But can you — can the law of the land — do nothing for me? Can’t I bring an action against somebody?”

  “Not under the present aspect of affairs. If you were in a different walk of life — a governess, for instance, or a domestic servant, and you were refused a situation on account of something specific that had been said against you — an action might lie, you might claim damages. It would be a case for a jury. But in your position, the slander being unwritten, a floating rumour, it would hardly be possible to focus your wrongs, from a legal point of view.”

  “Then the law is very one-sided,” said Grace, pettishly, “if a housemaid can get redress and I can’t.”

  Mr. Harding did not argue the point.

  “When you have seen Faunce, and he has worked up the case, we may be able to hit upon something in Bedford Row, Lady Perivale,” he said blandly, as he rose and took up his highly respectable hat, whose shape had undergone no change for a quarter of a century.

  There was a new hat of the old shape always ready for him in the little shop in St. James’s Street, and the shopman could have put his hand upon the hatbox in the da
rk.

  CHAPTER VI.

  “Love is by fancy led about,

  From hope to fear, from joy to doubt.”

  IT was a week before John Faunce appeared upon the troubled scene of Grace Perivale’s life. He had been in Vienna, and he called in Grosvenor Square at half-past nine o’clock on the evening of his return, in answer to three urgent letters from her ladyship which he found on his office table in Essex Street.

  Susan Rodney had been dining with her friend, and they were taking their coffee in the morning-room when Faunce was announced.

  “Bring the gentleman here,” Lady Perivale told the servant, and then turned to Miss Rodney.

  “You don’t mind, do you, Sue? If you have never seen a detective, it may be rather interesting.”

  “Mind? No! I am as keen as you are about this business. What a fool I was not to suggest a detective at the beginning. I shall love to see and talk with a detective. I have been longing to meet one all my life. Unberufen,” added Miss Rodney, rapping the table.

  “Mr. Faunce,” said the butler; and a serious looking, middle-aged man, of medium height and strong frame, with broad, high forehead, kindly black eyes, and short, close-cut black whiskers, came into the room.

  There was a pleasant shrewdness in his

  countenance, and his manner was easy without being familiar.

  “Pray be seated, Mr. Faunce,” said Lady. Perivale. “I am very glad to see you. This lady is Miss Rodney, my particular friend, from whom I have no secrets.”

  Faunce bowed to Miss Rodney, before seating himself very composedly outside the circle of light under the big lamp-shade.

  “I must apologize for coming so late in the evening, madam; but I only arrived at my office, from Dover, an hour ago; and, as your letters seemed somewhat urgent — —”

  “It is not a moment too late. I would have seen you at midnight. But — perhaps you have not had time to dine. We have only just left the dining-room. Will you let them get you some dinner there before we begin our business?”