Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “The meddling, officious fool! I was happy enough. I had got over the wrench that I felt when that shameless girl disobeyed me. My life was barren, but it was peaceful. What more did I want?”

  What did he want now? Only the little clinging arms round his neck, the soft little cheek pressed against his own, the silvery little voice prattling gaily to him — inquiring, philosophizing, laying down the law, as if the four-year life were full to the brim of wisdom and experience. He wanted Moppet. He cared nothing for the tall young woman whom he had seen pass hurriedly under that dignified portal which she was never to have passed again. His affection had concentrated itself upon this morsel of humanity, brought into his house by a trick — a ridiculous trick of this interfering wretch Danby.

  Moppet’s mother was sitting by her bedside. Moppet was better already. Only the sight of the familiar face, only the touch of the motherly hands, had done her good. This was the account which Adela gave Sir John when he went back to the house after dark.

  “The mother seems quite a nice person,” said Adela. “She has very sweet manners, and must have been very pretty, but of course her every thought is devoted to that dear little thing. There has been no time for talk of any kind. She won’t come down to dinner. Mr. Danby has arranged that she shall have the dressing-room opening out of Moppet’s room to sit in, and the bedroom next to Moppet’s to sleep in. We shan’t see her down here yet awhile.”

  “So much the better,” said her uncle, curtly.

  “Oh, I can quite understand what a bore it must be to you to have a perfect stranger brought into your house,” said Adela, with a sympathetic air.

  The days wore on, and Sir John saw nothing of the stranger. Nor did he see Moppet. Mr. Nicholls advised that the child should be kept as quiet as possible. There should be no one in her room but her mother and the nurse. The sensitive brain needed repose, after the long nights of fever and delirium. Moppet was improving; that was the grand point. “We have turned the corner,” Mr. Nicholls announced delightedly on the third day after the mother’s arrival. “We have fought a hard fight, and we are going to win.”

  The upstair maidservants were almost hysterical with gladness when the news was passed along the corridor and in and out of the rooms where neat housemaids in pink cotton frocks were sweeping and bed-making. Mr. Danby went about the house with a step as light as Mercury’s; and everybody began to be kind to Laddie and Lassie, who had suffered a season of snubbing, and had been made to feel that nobody wanted them; except just in that ten minutes at bedtime, when their mother came to their room, and heard them say their prayers, and hung over their beds, with innumerable good-night kisses.

  “May we go and see Moppet? May we play with her again?” asked Lassie.

  “Not quite yet. Lassie. She will have to eat a few more dinners first.”

  “She won’t mind that,” said Laddie; “she is very fond of dinner.”

  “She doesn’t love it as you do,” remonstrated Lassie.

  Sir John Penlyon left for Plymouth directly after the doctor’s cheering announcement. He had business in Plymouth, he told Mr. Danby.

  “Is the mother to leave Place now that the child is out of danger?” asked Danby, while his friend was waiting for the carriage.

  “You and the mother can please yourselves about that,” Sir John answered coldly. “I shall be away for some days. I have to see Barton,” his Plymouth solicitor.

  “And I may go on to town.”

  “Then she had better stay till the child is well enough for them all to go home together,” Danby said quietly.

  Sir John winced as if something had hurt him. Yes, the child would vanish out of his life — just as she had entered it — unless — unless he should bring his mind to forget the wrong done him by the daughter he had loved; forget his stern resolve never to forgive her or to hold communion with her after that one rebellious act, His daughter had taken her own course without regard for his wishes. She had chosen the degradation of what to his mind was a low marriage — a marriage with a man whose father kept a small, shabby shop in a small, shabby street: a self-made young man, who had climbed out of the petty tradesman’s sphere by the rugged, narrow path of patronage and help from his superiors — helped to eke out the scholarship upon which he tried to maintain himself at one of the least-distinguished colleges in Oxford — a dependent at the beginning of his career, a pauper when he married.

  Sir John had remembered how, in the heyday of his youth, he had crushed down and conquered his love for a girl of humble origin — how, adoring her, he had yielded to his father’s sentence that for him such a marriage could never be — that the future head of the Penlyon family had duties and obligations, which must go before the romantic love of youth. He had bowed to that decree, and he had sacrificed the happiness of his early manhood. The landed gentry of Cornwall are a proud race. The roots of their family trees go down into the dark night of British history, when Mark was king and Tintagel was a place of royal revelry.

  Old as Sir John was, and in spite of the progress that Liberal opinion had made since Bossiny was disfranchised, he still believed in the obligations which his ancient race had imposed upon him; and when his daughter married the grocer’s son, he had told himself that he would never forgive her.

  During the five years that followed her marriage he held no communication with her, direct or indirect, knew nothing of her whereabouts. Letters, pleading passionately for pardon, came to him one after another in the first year of her married life; but they were torn and flung into the waste-paper basket, unread, and by and by they ceased to come.

  A paragraph in a Plymouth paper told him of her husband’s death in a remote province of Upper India, where he had been working as a missionary under the S.P.G. He had died of consumption, leaving a widow and two children.

  Sir John sent the paragraph to his family solicitor, and requested him to communicate with Mrs. Morland, and to arrange for the payment of an annuity of two hundred and fifty pounds, on the understanding that she was never to molest her father either by letter or otherwise. He was to hear nothing and know nothing about her, except that the quarterly allowance was paid.

  And this was all he had ever known until Danby’s folly had brought her children beside his hearth, and had betrayed him into loving his unforgiven daughter’s child. Gradually, slowly, the secret of the children’s identity had been revealed to him. Little looks and words of Danby’s, Moppet’s unmistakable likeness to the Reynolds picture, the fact of their Indian birth one thing after another had brought about the revelation, and he knew that the innocent little creature who had clambered on to his knee and clung about his neck was Sibyl Morland’s child. Well, the situation had been cleverly brought about by his friend Danby; but Danby’s treachery should make no difference. He might be tricked into loving his granddaughter; but he would not be tricked into forgiving, his daughter.

  So soon as Moppet should be well and strong again, mother and children would have to leave Penlyon Place; and in the mean time it was far better that he should be away. There must be no opportunity for surprises — no chance meetings between father and daughter.

  Sir John saw his Plymouth solicitor, signed a lease, spent a night at the Grand Hotel, smoked a morning cigar on the Hoe, and went to London by the afternoon express. He stayed at a sleepy family hotel in Albemarle Street which the Penlyons had patronized for over a century, and he bored himself exceedingly next day at the Old Masters, where every Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, or Hopner served to remind him of the Shrimp Girl at Place, and of the little convalescent who resembled that famous picture.

  In the evening he dined with two or three friends at the Carlton, and discussed the prospects of the approaching session, which were pronounced of the gloomiest. He walked back to his hotel through a wintry mist which just escaped being a fog, and he wished himself back in the clear brightness of the Cornish coast, where the Atlantic surges make solemn music all night long.

  He
had received no letter from Cornwall since he left; but he had no right to be surprised or offended at that. He had asked no one to write to him. He had not left Place till Moppet was pronounced out of danger; and he had given Danby full power to deal with the mother and her children. His plan was not to return to his house until after they had all left. He thought sometimes, almost with a shudder, how deadly quiet the rambling old house would seem when those young voices and those busy little feet should be heard in the corridors no more.

  He bored himself in London for another day, and went to a small dinner-party in Grosvenor Square, where the talk was all of the session and where its prospects were pronounced of the brightest. Somebody remarked upon the pleasantness of town at this after-Christmas season, before the opening of Parliament had brought many people back, the only time in the London year when small snug dinners and general conversation were possible. Sir John remained mute, and thought that there could be no place more dismal than London in January.

  It was nearly a week after he left Penlyon Place that he received the following telegram as he was dressing in the morning: —

  “Moppet has asked for you very often, and has fretted at your absence, not without danger to her health. Pray come back.

  “DANBY.”

  Danby again! A trick of Danby’s to lure him back to his house and force on a reconciliation. He was vexed and angry with Danby; but he read that telegram twenty times over, making now very much, now very little of it; and he left London by the morning express from Waterloo, after telegraphing for his carriage to meet him at Launceston. In those days Launceston was the nearest station for Boscastle and Tintagel.

  A long journey, throughout which — in spite of the mental occupation afforded by every newspaper that could be bought — his thoughts were haunted by the image of that sick child at Place, and could concentrate themselves on nothing else. The news of this wide busy world was nothing to him — foreign or domestic, rumours of war, earthquakes, cataclysms, a general upheaval, weighed as thistledown compared with the existence of one small child. She had asked for him, loving little creature; and he had not been there to respond to her tender yearning. Those little arms had been stretched out in vain. And she had been sorry — sorry even to sickness — a creature so delicate — so frail. He hated himself for the iron pride that had made him leave his house rather than brook the presence of his disobedient daughter.

  It was after dark when he arrived at Place. Mr. Danby and Adela were in the hall to receive him when he alighted from his carriage. It was too late for any reasonable man to expect to see children about; yet he felt a pang of disappointment because there was no sound or sign of a child’s presence.

  “Well,” he said fretfully, addressing himself to Danby, after bestowing an automatic kiss upon Adela, “your telegram has brought me back, you see. It the child wants to see me I am here to be seen; but no doubt she is fast asleep and happy — dreaming of her doll.”

  “I don’t know that. It is the want of happy sleep that has told upon her. She was doing wonderfully well, the lungs getting quite sound again, and her strength picking up, when she began to fret at not seeing you. She was always asking to see you. Where was Sir John? Where was the kind old gentleman? Why wouldn’t he come to see her? Was he angry with her for being ill? We explained that you were in London, would be back soon — but it was no use. However, I attached little importance to the matter. She was well cared for; she had her nearest and dearest. She would soon be strong enough to travel. We all talked to her cheerily of the return home. Children are so fond of change of any kind. It was only yesterday that I began to get anxious, and that Nicholls began to fear a brain attack. She had slept badly for two or three nights — had awakened, frightened and crying bitterly. Yesterday evening she became very feverish, and in the night she was delirious, and we were all uneasy about her. Hence my telegram. I hope I did not do wrong.”

  “You should have telegraphed sooner,” said Sir John, warming his feet at the hall fire, with his back to Danby, “that’s where you did wrong. I should like to see the child at once, if she is awake.”

  “I’ll run and see,” said Adela. “Mr. Nicholls went up to her room ten minutes ago, so I dare say she is awake.”

  “Is she so bad that Nicholls thinks it needful to see her in the evening?” asked Sir John, gloomily.

  “One cannot be too careful in such a case; and Nicholls is always careful. That child’s brain is like touch-paper.” Adela came running downstairs. Moppet was wide awake and dying to see him, she told Sir John.

  He waited for no further imitation, but hastened to that stately room where so many notable men and women of the West country had been entertained, and which was now occupied by a little figure which seemed absurdly small in the great carved four-post bed, an antique piece of furniture that looked like a Buddhist temple enshrining a very small idol under a tall and splendid canopy. The satin curtains of that ponderous four-poster had been embroidered by the women of the Penlyon family when homely Anne was queen.

  There was a young woman sitting on the further side of Moppet’s pillows, almost hidden by the curtain, and Mr. Nicholls was leaning against the tall, carved column at the foot of the bed, looking down at the little creature with the flushed face and over-bright eyes.

  She turned her head at the opening of the door as quickly as a bird.

  “Sir John! Sir John! Sir John!” she cried, clapping her feverish hands.

  He was beside her in a moment. He leant over the bed — not even looking at the face on the other side — and clasped the tiny form to his breast.

  “My darling!” he murmured, “my darling child!”

  “Why did you go away just when I began to get well?” asked the innocent voice, so pure and true in its silver-sweet sound, that it seemed like the very spirit of truth itself, a something supersensuous and divine. “Why did you go away? I wanted you so badly.”

  “What, Moppet,” he asked hoarsely, “when you had your mother?”

  “Ah, but I wanted you too. I told you at Christmas I love you next to mother. And I wanted you very much, and it made me dream and cry in the night because you wasn’t here.”

  “Ah, Sir John, you can’t play any tune you like upon such fiddle-strings as those,” said Nicholls, gravely.

  “My darling! my darling!”

  That was almost as much as the old man could say. He sat down on the bed, and Moppet nestled into his waistcoat, as she used to do beside the library hearth, in the dusky hour before bedtime. She nestled there, and patted his strong hand with her tiny paw, and laughed and cried in a breath.

  “Why did you go away?” she asked.

  “God knows. Because I was a fool, perhaps.”

  “This is mother,” said Moppet, plucking the curtain aside, and revealing a pale sweet face, with timid questioning eyes. “You don’t know mother?”

  Sir John stretched his hand across the bed, and the mother’s hand clasped it, and the fair pale face bent down over it, and a daughter’s lips kissed it again and again, fondly.

  “Now you know mother,” said Moppet, “You wouldn’t have never known her if it hadn’t been for me, but I didn’t be ill on purpose, you know,” explained Moppet.

  No other word of peace or of forgiveness was ever spoken between Sir John Penlyon and his only surviving child; but from that hour Sibyl Morland assumed her rightful position in her father’s house. He was not a man who liked long speeches or fuss of any kind; and he took no pains to explain to his kindred or his friends how it was that the daughter who had been lost was found again; but assuredly that episode of the Christmas hirelings drew him and his old friend Danby nearer to each other than they had ever been yet, with a friendship that neither time nor circumstance could weaken.

  Mrs. Morland took her place as a daughter in her father’s house, but not the first place in her father’s heart. That was occupied. Moppet had crept into the citadel by a postern gate, as it were, and reigned supreme there. Sir
John’s affection seemed to have skipped a generation, and the grandfather’s love for his grandchild was warmer and deeper than ever the father’s love had been. Moppet was his Benjamin, the child of his old age, who had come to him when life was dull and barren for lack of love.

  Whoever might ostensibly govern at Penlyon Place, Moppet was the real master of the house, inasmuch as

  she governed Sir John. Happily she was a beneficent ruler, full of sweet carefulness and tender thought for others, which increased with every year of her life. In all his walks and rides Moppet was Sir John’s favourite companion, taking to her Shelty as a duckling to the farmyard pool, or trotting with little untiring feet by his side as he made his morning round of the gardens or the home farm. Before she had been three months at Place she knew the history, character, and capability of every horse in the stable; and she became a little wonder in her capacity for remembering and pronouncing the Greek or Latin names of tropical plants and flowers in the long range of hot-houses.

  Laddie was despatched to an excellent preparatory school at Truro till such time as he should be old enough to go to Eton; and a governess was engaged to help Mrs. Morland in the care of her two little girls, such a dear old governess, warranted not to teach too much, and to see that they changed their shoes, being no other than that very Miss Peterson summarily dismissed by Mrs.

  Hawberk, and whose dowdy figure moving quietly about the house and garden made Sir John Penlyon feel as if he were twenty years younger, by recalling the days when his motherless daughters were little children.

  Visitors at Penlyon Place said that Lassie grew prettier every day, and that young lady’s stately manners and graceful little airs were the subject of much admiration from casual observers, while Moppet’s personality was disposed of off-hand as “interesting.”

  “I heard Lady St. Kew tell her husband that I was a plain likeness of the Shrimp Girl,” she told her grandfather after an invasion of distinguished visitors. “You don’t mind my being plain, do you?” she asked Sir John, her deep-set eyes searching his countenance.