Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “My God, is this the way you treat me? Your lover, the father of your child?”

  “That is the only link between us,” she said, white to the lips.

  He had spoken the only words that could agitate her.

  He tried to clasp her to his breast, but she freed herself with one resolute movement.

  “How strong my lily has grown — a tiger lily. But I was never afraid of tigers. My darling, be reasonable, and be kind. I may have seemed a skunk when I let a whole year go by without sending you any money — but I was down on my luck — without a fiver, and I hoped what I left you would tide over the time till I was in funds again. Come, dear, I left Waterloo by an early train. Give me a bite and sup in your fine country house, and let us talk things over quietly. Tout comprendre est tout pardonner, and when you hear what I have gone through — devilish bad luck and rattling good luck — you will understand that your old friend is not a rotter, after all. I am on the crest of the wave now, dear. I have done what I always meant to do, and I want the reward. I have fought for fortune and for love — I am a free man — and I want my Mary — my wedded wife this time.”

  “Is your convenient wife dead — the wife who prevented you keeping your promise when we came to London?”

  He reddened, and looked more embarrassed than John Rayner often did.

  “Oh, I knew — when I came to understand your character — that the wife was a fiction,” Mary said with a bitter laugh. “And I know now that you never asked my father to let you marry me. It was not in your plan.”

  “My dearest, no woman can understand a man. I loved you passionately, I would have fought for you, toiled for you, died for you. But I had to be free, free to fight my big battle — and I have done it, dear, fought and won. Come, what was wanting in your life with me? What cause have you to reproach me — to meet me with angry eyes and scornful lips — the man who comes back to you with heart overflowing with love? What was the something wanting that made you unhappy, which makes you treat me to-day as if I had beaten you? What was there wanting in our lives as between a man and the girl he loved — what, except a service mumbled over in a mouldy old church, or the signing of forms in a registrar’s office? To me it would have been humbug in the church, and meaningless in the office. I loved you, Mary, and when I was in luck I showered my gifts upon you. When you were dangerously ill I was the most miserable wretch in London till the danger was past. I loved you and I loved your child — my son, my bonny little boy.”

  “No,” she cried passionately, “you never loved him. You were proud of him perhaps — proud of him as a bit of yourself — proud of him because he was so beautiful and so strong — but you did not love him — you never grieved for his death.”

  “Yes, I did! Men don’t take these things as women do. I was cut to the heart when he died — only the luck had been going against me for months, and I was playing a losing game just at that time. But years afterwards, when I made my great coup in Brazil — after my first thought of you — came the thought of him. If that poor little beggar were alive now — Eton and the Guards would not have been too good for him.”

  Mary had been crying silently, with her face hidden, from the first mention of her child. She no longer stood face to face with her enemy, defying him. She walked slowly by his side and let him talk. He was the same Jack Rayner who had taken possession of her when she was seventeen: masterful, insistent, believing in his right to conquer. He took her hand gently, tried once more to draw her to his heart; and in an instant she was again the indignant woman, resolute, repellent.

  “Mary darling, Mary my wife that has been, my wife that must be again. We’ll have the marriage service in fine style this time, a choral service in Westminster Abbey, mumbo-jumbo to the nth power, and the world and his wife to look on. Is that good enough?”

  “There is no power on this earth that would induce me to marry you,” she said. “I am glad that we can talk this business out, here in this wood; but we must not be too long about it. I have two girls living with me who may come home at any moment. The sooner you understand me the better.”

  “I am not going to understand, if you refuse to seal the bond. You are my wife, by the right of the past, by our three years of wedded life, by the child you bore me — nothing can cancel that bond.”

  “Perhaps not. So far as it makes it impossible for me to marry anyone else, I accept my bondage. I refused a man who loved me, and whom I almost loved, refused him here on this very spot. I saw his tears, but I was resolute, and let him go. You see I am not the girl you took away from her father. I have a will of my own, and I know what I am doing.”

  “You cannot have forgotten the old time — our honeymoon — the happy days at Fontainebleau — that smiling, lovely place — the forest, the little hotel garden — where we were so happy.”

  “Happy! While I was tortured by the thought of what had happened to me, the shame of it all. I look back upon it now as a horrible dream.”

  “My sweet innocent Mary — so young and so confiding. As if it mattered! — marriage lines or no marriage lines. The only question a woman of seven-and-twenty would have asked herself would have been if I had told her the truth about my means, and was able to keep her in comfort for the rest of her life. Come, dearest, be reasonable. You are to all intents and purposes my wife — and you must give me the right to call you so before all the world. Don’t be afraid that it is your fortune I am after. I am three times richer than you. People prate about your luck, the Field collection, your fifty thousand a year! Why, my dear girl, I have made fifty thousand in a morning by a prospectus. I have the potentiality of wealth — not so many thousands a year — but the power to make more and more and more money — the power to make other people rich, as well as myself. That is what has made the Rastac the most popular man in Mayfair for the last two seasons.”

  She turned from him with disgust. How vulgar he was — this boastful adventurer! What common clay compared with Austin Sedgwick and George Bertram! How infinitely inferior to her father and to Conway Field, in both of whom mind had been the ruling power!

  “I am going back to the house,” she said, “my young people may be there waiting for me. Good-bye.”

  “Is that my dismissal?”

  “Yes.”

  “So be it, my princess. I won’t stay to be shown the door by your butler. But I mean you to be my wife. I am not a man who can be easily turned from the purpose that is nearest his heart. I have never left off loving you. After I left you I had to go through a time so dark that I could not keep in touch with you or send you money. I was penniless — a wanderer from place to place, not much better than a tramp. As soon as the tide turned I wrote you not once but many times — cabled to you — implored you to send me the address where money could reach you. There was no answer, and the only friends I had in London failed to find any trace of you. I did not forget you, Mary. Again and again I advertised in the London papers, imploring you to reply. You did not answer. I suppose your luck had turned too by that time and you did not want me.”

  And then with lifted hat and a touch of that flamboyant manner which had stamped him as not quite-quite, John Rayner turned from her with a careless “Hasta la vista,” and was gone.

  She heard his rapid footsteps rustling through the bracken, and the wood was lovely and the world seemed at peace, as she went slowly homeward.

  XXVII

  THERE was an autumn season with promise of exciting debates, and the West End was full of people — interesting people who were in the movement, in the train de supplément. People who were only going through, from Continental cures to British shoots — in a word, London was alive, and there seemed to be almost as many parties, of sorts, as if it were June. Invitations were shorter and less ceremonious. There were no spectacular dances at the Albert Hall for the newspapers to write about. No rag-pickers’ ball, in aid of the fund for sweated sempstresses in the East End. But there were Cinderella dances for girls and boys —
to which the boys did not always come; and there were the theatres now so multitudinous that every night was a first night somewhere, and if the St. James’s had not a new comedy, the Criterion had a new farce — always something for which it was worth while to dine early.

  London was alive again, and Mary Tremayne was at Warburton House, with Elaine Hailing as chaperon and Clementina and Julia as rather noisy visitors.

  She had brought them from Madingley early in October, after having in their own phraseology, “done them well.” She had mounted them for the opening day of the South Hants Foxhounds, and she had given them all the gaiety that a rural district could offer, and now they were delighted to be in London, and not in Eaton Square.

  “I should have died of boredom if I had found myself back in the family mausoleum,” was Julia’s undutiful remark, as she and Clementina sat at breakfast with Aunt Elaine in the little dining-room.

  They had the ground floor all to themselves at this, as at most hours in the day, for Mary breakfasted alone in the room where the greater part of her life had been spent when she was Conway Field’s reading girl. She loved the room for associations that often made her sad, but with a soothing sadness — tender thoughts of a friend who had been kind and of hours that had been happy.

  After breakfast and the indispensable newspapers, she gave an hour to letters which she dictated to Frominger — who answered many others at his own discretion — and to her own private correspondence, which was not voluminous. It was not till noon that she was ready for Elaine, who was so placid and unexacting as to be practically non-existent, and the two girls who were full of suggestions and entreaties for something new.

  “It is too lovely staying with a friend who is the fashion,” said the candid Julia, as Peter Frominger carried off a basketful of cards and notes, which were to be answered immediately. Mary’s business-like way of answering invitations amused her new friends, who told each other that this Tremayne girl must have graduated in an office before she became Mr. Field’s reader.

  “Girls of old family often have to earn their living,” the fine ladies said, and expressed their admiration.

  She was the fashion; her story was romantic, everyone declared, though all they knew of her story was that she had been Mr. Field’s salaried reader, and that he had left her fifty thousand a year and one of the finest houses in London — a house that she was keeping up as such a house ought to be kept, and doing her duty as an entertainer.

  “Since Mrs. McGregor died there have been no such delightful parties,” said one.

  “But dear Mrs. Mac was frankly vulgar, and Mary is exquisite,” said another.

  Mary was the fashion. She had refused to be presented, although her presentation had been urged as a duty by more than one busybody.

  “Her father wrote political articles for the Edinboro’,” someone explained, “and I daresay she is at heart a socialist.”

  “She is too thick with Austin Sedgwick to be anything else,” said another. “I have heard they go slumming together. She has a little car painted invisible green that she keeps on purpose for Poplar and Ratcliff Highway, and she will refuse the smartest dinner-party to go and hear Sedgwick spout at a dinky little hall in Bethnal Green.”

  “I suppose it will end with her marrying him.”

  “I don’t know about that. The old man left his two nephews equally well off.”

  “So whichever it is, she’ll keep the money in the family.”

  Mary was the fashion, and people liked to talk about her, and make little jokes about her, pretending to be her most intimate friends. Women talked of her as “Mary” who had only been once in the same room with her. She went everywhere, no party was considered chic without her; and she was always gay and amused with nothings. The life was so utterly new to her, and perhaps she liked to escape thought. She had thought too much in long morning hours before Garland brought her tea — in that calm time when she was only Mr. Field’s reader. Mr. Field’s money had changed her into a person of distinction — change as wonderful as Cinderella’s when she brought the other glass slipper out of her kitchen wench’s pocket.

  Austin sometimes wondered at the change in her, and hoped this new world of trivial interests and trivial aims would not spoil her.

  She was not even beginning to be spoilt so far, he told himself, when she went among his East End people with him. They had frequent excursions to that Greater London. For it was quite true that they often went slumming together in that modest little car people had heard of.

  He took care that she should not see horrible sights or hear horrible language. But he let her see what poverty really meant — not in the lowest depths where it changed men and women into beasts, and killed every instinct of purity, every upward-looking thought; not in the black abyss of despair, but in that dull drab world of narrow streets, where every house is of the same pattern, and where nothing bright or fair to look upon remains, since the pinch of penniless days must carry everything of value to the pawnbroker’s shop. Mary talked with lean spinsters and dejected widows and made friends with families of fatherless children. She took little notes in her pocket-book of the things that were wanting in the shabby house and the clothes that were needed for the starved bodies, so that a day or two afterwards the children thought a fairy had been there, and the weeping mother talked of one of God’s angels.

  Mary heard lectures, and attended “happy evenings” and tried to understand. She felt the pulses of that greater London, and went back to her splendour in better spirits than after the most successful party in Mayfair, the party where there were celebrated people whom she wanted to meet.

  “Such sad houses, and so little would brighten them.” That was the refrain of her song, as the car rushed back to the westward, while Austin saw her smile in the lamplight, and could guess the current of her thoughts.

  If Mary was the fashion, the Rastac was also the fashion during that gay autumn season, while the House was thrashing out questions which interested only politicians and journalists, and while the people who thought that to be amused was the first necessity of life were on the watch for new people and new things.

  The Rastac was the fashion just as Mary was, and money was the factor in both cases: in hers money to be looked at and enjoyed, jewels and smart clothes, exquisite dinners, and theatre parties of eight or ten, with little suppers after the play — not at an hotel where one had to bid good-bye in the middle of an animated sentence at the striking of a clock, but in the little dining-room at Warburton House, where one might stay till Mrs. Halling’s yawns became too much in evidence, and the silver-sweet bells of an Italian timepiece were chiming the third quarter after one. Then, of course, one was shocked with oneself, and went away in a burst of apologies. The play, the talk after supper, had been too delightful, dear Mary must forgive them — and dear Mrs. Hailing, who was looking half-dead with weariness.

  Elaine did not deny the deadness, but in the midst of a stifled yawn confessed that she was used to country hours.

  Jewels and laces to look at, nice things to eat, the most popular brand of champagne — stalls at one’s favourite theatre — such was the form Mary’s money took for her friends.

  Rayner had a form that came nearer home to one. He could do more than spend money upon his friends. He could help them to make money. John Law in his day of success, was not more popular in Paris than the Rastac in a certain not too exclusive set in London.

  It was the women who ran after him, the women who talked of his “magnetism,” and petted and flattered him, and believed in him, as a kind of stock-exchange conjuror, who could shake slips of paper in a hat and turn them to ingots. Shares bought for five pounds to-day, and sold for thirty this day week. That was Jack Rayner’s magnetism. The men were doubtful and shrugged their shoulders, some of them: but even among the wiser sex there were a great many who believed in the fellow’s clairvoyance, and who went banco on some of those promising enterprises in the great southern continent
— companies for electric lighting where there had been only gas — companies for incandescent gas where electric light had failed — companies for turning tea into rubber — or rubber into coffee — motor-bus companies — overhead railway companies in Bolivia — cattle-raising companies in the Argentine, and companies for producing beet-sugar in Ecuador.

  There was not a rood of that mighty continent, from the Pacific to the Atlantic, from Patagonia to Venezuela, with which John Rayner did not profess himself familiar.

  He knew the capabilities of every climate and every soil, the things that would grow and the things that wouldn’t, the things that were wanted or not wanted.

  He was wonderful! That was what people said of him, and having once made up their minds about that, they threw their cheques into the conjuror’s hat, and waited for the ingots to come out. He was a fine speaker of the flamboyant order, and could enliven dry statistics and analytical finance with rare bursts of eloquence that intoxicated the weaker brains among his hearers. As the chairman of a new-fledged company he was irresistible.

  And so far these companies of his, still in their infancy, had been doing well, because there were always people who believed in this new John Law. He wanted no advertisements, however startling the enterprise; it was enough for a few women who ran after him to make a few hundreds to set the ball rolling. Before Mrs. Brown’s sudden gains had gone to pay an importunate dressmaker, Mrs. Jones was expatiating upon the fortune that lady had made in the city, thanks to Rayner’s financial genius; and Mrs. Robinson had stories of friends, stone-broke a month ago, who were now living at the rate of ten thousand a year.

  This wonderful person followed the footsteps of Mary Tremayne. Wherever she appeared Jack Rayner was likely to be seen in her wake. He was a haunting presence, a shadow that might be looked for in any crowd where Miss Tremayne was to be found. People noticed this fact, and it was quite enough to establish the idea that these two exceptional persons were going to marry each other.