Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “Don’t grieve over that, Mary. You have a fine brain, and you will learn to face your responsibilities, and you will make a wise use of your income. And by and by, when Time brings its consolations, you will be glad to have the things that he has given you: the library, where so many hours of your life were spent with him, and Madingley — you will be glad, by and by, to be mistress of Madingley.”

  “It is very beautiful — too beautiful for one solitary woman.”

  She bent over her dog, who had never left her in these days of mourning, bent down till her forehead rested upon Zanders black head, the faithful Zamiel who knew that his mistress was unhappy.

  “You ought to leave this house, Mary. You are looking very ill. You must have change of some kind.”

  “Why?”

  She did not want to leave the house where she had been happy. There was something that jarred upon her in the idea of avoiding the rooms where he had lived through the long trial of his mature years, where, in spite of his physical limitations, the mind of the man, the powerful brain that was Conway Field, had grown and developed silently with the days and nights, the months and years. To the last the mind had been growing — new fancies, new ideas, new opinions of the great minds that had gone before him, the great dead men whose thoughts were his companions, had crossed and recrossed the tablet of his brain. His conversation with the girl who always understood or always sympathized was never trivial and never dull. His thoughts were a web of many colours across which wit or humour was always shooting sudden shafts of light. Austin and George had both said of him that he was equal in variety and interest to the best of the men whose profession it was to excel night after night across the dinner-table.

  Mary sickened at the thought of leaving a house where his image seemed a living thing, the shadowy companion of her days. But Austin was insistent. Her vitality had sunk to the lowest ebb, she could neither eat nor sleep.

  And Mrs. Tredgold, who had developed an extraordinary anxiety about the young person whom she had once tried to snub, came to her sitting-room one morning followed by a strange doctor.

  “I ventured to send for Dr. O’Reilly, for I felt it would be really sinful to allow you to go on neglecting your own health as you have neglected it since my beloved master’s death.”

  Dr. O’Reilly was an Irishman of good repute in his profession — a nerve specialist who had most of the indoor duchesses in his care. He could do nothing for the outdoor aristocracy, the riding, golf-playing, swimming and rowing members of the peerage. He shook his head with a slow, sad smile when these were spoken of, and opined that they would break down some day, and snuff out like a candle; and so they did occasionally, just often enough to maintain the O’Reilly reputation for subtle prognosis, only the other doctors argued that it was not hard riding or too much golf that finished them, but hard drinking and too much food.

  Mary allowed her pulse to be felt, and her lungs to be listened to, and when the doctor, having found nothing alarming, recommended change of air and scene, that old, old remedy for wasted frames or broken hearts, she told him that she would go to the north coast of Cornwall, a district she knew and where the air suited her.

  “Perhaps it is your native air?”

  Mary assented, and the gentleman from Harley Street retired pleased with himself at having found out one small fact about this mysterious young lady who had been the subject of conversation at a good many dinner-parties.

  XXII

  MARY was roaming solitary and unafraid upon those wide spaces of wind-swept turf where she had roamed as a child with stray dogs for her companions, where she had wandered as a girl with a book under her arm, wandered till she was tired, and glad to nestle in some grassy hollow sheltered and hidden by the furze bushes that turned the cliffs to gold when the spring sunshine called them into bloom.

  Again she looked down from those tremendous cliffs, down on to the more tremendous sea, and told herself that in all of this world’s beauty that she had looked upon, there had been nothing so wonderful as this wild stretch of cliff, and this wild waste of waters. Venice was lovelier, a more dazzling world for memory to carry away with her, when she saw the city no more. But Venice was not as grand as this magnificent sea! She went down by winding paths she had known as a girl and had so often trodden with fearless footsteps, she went down to the sands in the February sunshine and watched the great waves rolling over the beach, rolling towards her as if they were hurrying to sweep over her in their relentless might. What power, what beauty in those Atlantic breakers! What a dazzle of colour and light, now the deep blue of sapphires, now the vivid green of emeralds, now with splashes of crimson staining the opalescent water, darkly brilliant like hidden jewels, the treasures of some wrecked argosy.

  There was nothing changed. The day was just such a day as she remembered in many a year of childhood, a day when the dull greys of winter seemed to have gone from the world for another year, and earth was happy again and full of splendour and joy. Spring had come, and there was only the short, kind February to be lived through, and then the cliffs would be rosy with the sea pink, and the first primroses would be peeping out on the banks, and the tender green pennywort would be crawling over the low stone walls in the lane, and the first gold of the furze bushes would have begun to light the hills. Alas, what an abyss of time since she had been standing in that familiar spot, looking around with eager eyes — what a bottomless gulf between Mary Smith and Paul Tremayne’s little girl wandering alone along the shore, unconscious of evil and of sorrow, ignorant of sin!

  Mary Tremayne of Warburton House had the world and all that it could give — could go where she liked, do what she liked. But she could not mend the Past; there would always be the memory of disgrace, of bitter experiences, and of one abiding sorrow. She was not elated by her good fortune. Nothing that Austin had said to her of the potentialities of her position, and the wide outlook before her, could cure the despondency that had come upon her after Conway Field’s death; she had been interested in him from the beginning of her service, and as time went by and he came to open his mind and heart, her interest had become an affection that filled her life. Each day brought its pleasant duties. She was never tired of serving him — she was happy in the assurance that she was always helping to lighten the burden of his days. He was gone and her mission in life was over. Like a mother who has lost an only child, or a childless wife who has lost her husband, she felt that her business in the world was done. Nobody wanted her; if she were to die tomorrow, she would not be missed.

  Sometimes in her meditations the thought of the man who had offered her love — passionate, reckless love — would come back, and she knew that in that wonderful August, in that exquisite wood, she had been dangerously happy, and that her fortitude had been put to a hard test when she refused George Bertram. But the ordeal being past, she knew that she had done well. Some day, if she had yielded, the shipwreck would have come — the fatal past would have risen up to destroy her. She knew that she had done well; and even in her loneliness, in the depths of her despondency, she did not repent. She had no thought of luring her rejected lover back to her.

  Nor had he made any attempt to communicate with her since his uncle’s death. He had sent her no letter of consolation, no assurance of his sympathy, though his position as one of her business advisers and partners might have justified such a letter. He had made no sign.

  Austin had told her that he and George would be always ready to help and advise her, and that she could refer to them in every difficulty, wherever a man’s help could be of use in a woman’s life. But she thought that he included George in this assurance only from the desire not to put himself forward obtrusively, and her reply had told him that it was to him she would look, now and always.

  “Money is a great responsibility,” she said. “You must teach me to make good use of mine.”

  “It shall not turn to withered leaves in your hands,” he said simply. And she, who knew something of his l
ife, knew what this meant.

  That early spring was delicious on the Cornish cliffs, and Mary Tremayne’s health and spirits improved day by day in her open-air life, in the old familiar places. She took Garland about with her, more to avoid any appearance of singularity than from any fear of being alone. Garland was happy to walk or to sit on those wild heights in sight of the sea, and if she did not think Cornwall as curious as Venice or as gay as Rome, she was sure that it was less relaxing than either city — indeed, almost as healthy as Margate. She was content to sit and entertain herself with endless crochet while her mistress read. She never spoke unless she was spoken to, and she was a good walker and liked walking — so Mary had every reason to be satisfied with her.

  But Garland was not with her mistress when she went over the house by the sea, the house that had been empty for a long time, and of which the garden had been abandoned to the riotous fertility of thistles, docks and groundsel. Mary found a useful little person in the village street, a jack of all trades, who eked out the profits of cabinetmaker and upholsterer by the commission paid him for looking after empty houses, and occasionally letting one. This obliging person, who perceived nothing in the tall, slim lady, whose height and slenderness were accentuated by her black gown and flowing cloak, that recalled the growing girl whose lithe figure had flitted along the street with three or four vagabond curs at her heels, treated her with the respect due to a well-to-do stranger who had chosen to come to the Old Ship Inn with her maid, at a time of year when very little money from the outside world was brought into Port Jacob.

  Visitors in the summer were plenty, visitors who painted, and visitors who just loafed and pretended to do things, or who went out with the natives and spent long healthful days in deep-sea fishing, or put their lives in danger by attempting to sail craft of which they knew nothing. A month’s notice was necessary if you wanted good rooms at the “Ship” between July and October, when every fisherman’s wife, however small her cottage, could have a lodger if she could accommodate one.

  “If people knew what beautiful weather we often get; in March and April, Londoners would come here sooner,” the agent told Mary, as he escorted her across the pebbly beach to the house where she was born.

  “It has been empty for nearly three years,” he said, “which is a pity, for it’s a spacious house, and a convenient house, quite the gentleman’s residence; but it’s in an awful state, and the old pincher who owns it won’t spend a matter of twenty or thirty pounds to make it habitable. They’re all alike. They grumble if you can’t; let their houses, and they’d sooner see their property rot than spend a bit of money on it.”

  They were standing in the porch where Jack Rayner had taken shelter on that day of wind and rain. The agent unlocked the half-glass door, and Mary followed him into the room where the greater part of her life had been spent; the long slow years of childhood, and those swifter years when the child was changing into the woman. She had learnt to read at her father’s knees in front of yonder hearth — such a dark and fireless chasm now, like an empty tomb that some explorer had opened — so bright and warm when the child stood by the student’s large leather chair and tried to follow his pointing pencil over the page where almost all the words were strange.

  She had been quicker to learn than the average child, but, looking back, it seemed that the process had been intolerably slow, and recalling her father’s irritable temper of later years, she wondered at a patience that must have been almost sublime. That he, the scholar of Balliol, should have taken upon himself such a task!

  She did not see the black emptiness of the open fireplace, or the blotches of damp upon the panelled wall. She was looking back, looking at the room as it had been on the afternoon when rain and wind had wrought the fatal change in her life. Till that day, when for the first time within her memory a stranger’s foot had crossed their threshold, all had been peace. Her life had been for the most part joyless, but it had not been unhappy. All that was tragic had begun in that eventful hour when the wind tore at the casements, and the rain lashed the glass, and Jack Rayner had come into the room, tall, strong, a king of men, shaking the rain off his loose coat, like a retriever dog that had just sprung out of a stream. She remembered the deep, strong tone of the voice that had thanked her father for his courtesy; the bright laugh that finished the apology for his intrusion — something cordial and conciliatory about the man that even Paul Tremayne, who hated strangers, found irresistible. From that day he had seemed a familiar friend, and his company had been accepted. Her father, who had kept himself obstinately aloof from his neighbours, receiving attentions meant for civility with undisguised distaste and shrinking especially from any intrusion from the summer visitors at the “Ship,” had welcomed this man, and enjoyed his vivid talk of a life that had been adventurous and full of colour.

  The little agent, alert and inquisitive, had watched the strange lady in black while she stood with her back to the empty hearth, and looked across the room to the latticed windows with dreaming eyes. Such deep thought was not the usual attitude of strangers to whom he showed the house — disgust, rather, and immediate departure, or else a volley of futile questions, and an eagerness to tramp through all the rooms and explore the offices and garden.

  “Might you be thinking that the house would suit you, madam?” he asked at length. “It is large and commodious, and for any tenant of means who liked to take it on a repairing lease, seven, fourteen or twenty-one years, it might be a cheap and dignified residence. The house has great capabilities and there is a garden that would repay care. While perhaps you are aware that we have a climate which so far as flowers and flowering shrubs go might be called sub-tropical. Then the meadows — —”

  “No,” Mary said, “I have no intention of taking the house. I only wanted to see it.”

  “A pity, madam, that such a house should stand empty,” and again he repeated his pet phrase. “The house has great capabilities, large reception rooms and many bedrooms, wide passages, plenty of light and air. As a convalescent home, or a cottage hospital it would be perfect. But, unhappily, we have very few wealthy people in the parish; and as to the visitors — well,” with a shrug, “what do visitors ever do for a place except raise the price of provisions and demoralize servant girls?” Mary went through the rooms — all the rooms and the long corridor on the first floor — her father’s bedroom and dressing-room, her own nursery and bedroom, and even the servants’ rooms upon the top floor, where the gabled roof gave a picturesque flavour to the irregular spaces and varying levels — two or three unexpected steps here and there, and massive banisters and heavy doors that marked the liberal use of timber when there were fewer people in the world, and a more conscientious race of builders. “It is a nice old house,” Mary said, “and it is just possible that I might find you a tenant.”

  Upon this the little man became effusive, but Mary did not encourage his volubility.

  “I will ask you to come to me at the hotel,” she said, “before I leave Port Jacob, if I should have any use for the house. In the meantime, perhaps you can tell me some thing about people I knew in this place some years ago. The vicar, Mr. Holditch, and his wife, are they still here?”

  “The Reverend Holditch is still among us, madam, but somewhat failing, suffers sometimes from loss of memory, and is more dependent on his curate than he used to be. Mrs. Holditch passed away two years ago after a long illness. She was twenty years younger than the vicar, and nobody expected her to go first. You knew them, madam?”

  “Yes, I knew them. They were kind to me.”

  The agent looked at her curiously, open-eyed and wondering.

  She called upon the vicar that afternoon. She had not come to Port Jacob to hide herself from the people who had known her. However badly they had thought of her, whatever scandal her disappearance might have caused, that was something she had to bear, part of her atonement for sin. She had often thought of the place, and had yearned to look upon the old familiar sce
nes, though she knew that there would be pain, the gnawing pain of remorse for wrong done to the dead, the bitter memory of the shame that had overshadowed all that was fresh and lovely in the morning of her life, the innocent years that ought not to have known shame. She looked back now upon those years of quiet service and serious thought which seemed to have changed her whole nature, and wondered how it had been possible for her to be caught so easily — magnetized, spell-bound by a fierce and sudden lover, as if the strong hand that gripped her arm when she walked beside John Rayner over the dying heather was only the physical expression of the strong brain that had dominated her from their first chance meeting on the cliff, the morning after his long conversation with her father in the firelit room, where he had burst in upon them like a creature from another world — the wide world of perils and adventures, of lives risked and fortunes made and unmade.

  Had she ever loved him — this first lover? She thought not. He had taken her life into his hands and had made himself her master. But of all that is sweet and joyous in a first love Mary Tremayne had known nothing. Shame had been her portion from the moment of her surrender. Each day had shown her the deepening darkness of the gulf into which she had fallen.

  She remembered the love that had been offered her in the Madingley woods, and of the ineffable sweetness of the long days when love had been hiding under the mask of friendship, and passion had called itself sympathy. She measured the lover she had rejected against the lover who had blighted her life, and she hated herself for having taken tinsel for gold.