It was known to be a marriage of convenience, and not of affection. He was a very lucky fellow, and she was very much to be pitied. This was the general opinion, which Ellinor’s palpable indifference to her husband went strongly to confirm.
Mr and Mrs. Dalton had been staying for a week at Baldwin Court, when the young barrister was compelled, by his professional pursuits, to leave his wife for a few days under the protection of his old friends, Sir Lionel and Lady Baldwin.
“You will be very happy here, my dear Ellinor,” he said; “the house is fall of pleasant people, and you know what a favourite you are with the Baldwins. You will not miss me,” he added, with a sigh, as he looked at her indifferent face.
“Miss you! O, pray do not alarm yourself, Mr. Dalton! I am not so used to usurp your time or attention. I know, when your professional duties are concerned, how small a consideration I am to you.”
“I should not work hard were I not compelled to do so, Ellinor,” he said, with a shade of reproach in his voice.
“My dear Mr. Dalton,” she answered coldly, “I have no taste for mysteries. You are perfectly free to pursue your own course.”
So they parted. She bade him adieu with as much well-bred indifference as if he had been her jeweller or her haberdasher. As the light little phaeton drove him off to the railway station, he looked up to the chintz-curtained windows of his wife’s apartments, and said to himself, “How long is this to endure, I wonder? — this unmerited wretchedness, this cruel misconception.”
The morning after Henry Dalton’s departure, as Sir Lionel Baldwin, seated at breakfast, opened the letter-bag, he exclaimed, with a tone of mingled surprise and pleasure, “So the wanderer has returned! At the very bottom of the bag I can see Horace Margrave’s dashing superscription. He has returned to England.”
He handed his visitors their letters, and then opened his own, reserving the lawyer’s epistle to the last.
“This is delightful! Horace will be down here to-night.” Ellinor Dalton’s cheek grew pale at the announcement; for the mysterious fend between her guardian and her husband flashed upon her mind. She would meet him here, then, alone. Now, or never, might she learn this secret — this secret which, no doubt, involved some meanness on the part of Henry Dalton, the apothecary’s son.
“Margrave will be an immense acquisition to our party — will he not, gentlemen?” asked Sir Lionel.
“An acquisition! Well, really now, I don’t know about that,” drawled a young government clerk from Whitehall. “Do you know, Sir Lionel, it’s my opinion that Horace Margrave is used up? I met him at — at what-you-may-call-it — Rousseau and Gibbon, Childe Harold and the Nouvelle Hèloise: you know the place,” he said vaguely; “somewhere in Switzerland, in short, — last July, and I never saw a man so altered in my life.”
“Altered!” exclaimed the Baronet.
Ellinor Dalton’s face grew paler still.
“Yes, ‘pon my honour, very much altered indeed. You don’t think he ever committed a murder, or anything of that kind, do you?” said the young man reflectively, as he drew over a basin and deliberately dropped four or five lumps of sugar into his coffee. “Because, upon my honour, he looked like that sort of thing.”
“My dear Fred, don’t be a fool. Looked like what sort of thing?”
“You know; a guilty conscience — Lara, Manfred. You understand. Upon my word,” added the youthful official, looking round with a languid laugh, “he had such a Wandering-Jew-ish and ultra-Byronic appearance, when I met him suddenly among some very uncomfortable kind of chromolithographie mountain scenery, that I asked him if he had an appointment with the Witch of the Alps, or any of that sort of people?”
One or two country visitors laughed faintly, seeing the young man meant to be jocose; and the guests from town only stared, as the government official looked round the table. Ellinor Dalton never took her eyes from his face, but seemed to wait anxiously for anything he might say next.
“Perhaps Margrave has been ill,” said the Baronet; “he told me, when he went to Switzerland, that he was leaving England for change of air and scene.”
“Ill!” said the government clerk. “Ah, to be sure; I never thought of that. He might have been ill. It’s difficult, sometimes, to draw the line between a guilty conscience and the liver-complaint. Perhaps it was only his liver, after all. But you don’t think,” he said appealingly, returning to his original idea, “you don’t think that he has committed a murder, and buried the body in Verulam-buildings — do you? That would account for his going to Switzerland, you know; for he couldn’t possibly stop with the body — could he?”
“You’d better ask him the question yourself, Fred,” said Sir Lionel, laughing; “if everybody had as good a conscience as Horace Margrave, the world would be better stocked than it is with honest men. Horace is a noble-hearted fellow; I’ve known him from a boy. He’s a glorious fellow.”
“And a crack shot,” said a young military man with his mouth full of buttered toast and anchovy paste.
“And a first-rate billiard-player,” added his next neighbour, who was occupied in carving a ham.
“And one of the longest-headed fellows in the Law-List” said a grave old gentleman sententiously.
“Extremely handsome,” faltered one young lady.
“And then, how accomplished!” ventured another.
“Then you don’t think, really now, that he has committed a murder, and buried the body in his chambers?” asked the Whitehall employé, putting the question to the company generally.
In the dusk of that autumnal evening, Ellinor Dalton sat alone in a tiny drawing-room leading out of the great saloon, which was a long room, with six windows and two fireplaces, and with a great many indifferent pictures in handsome frames.
This tiny drawing-room was a favourite retreat of Ellinor’s. It was deliciously furnished, and it communicated, by a half-glass door shrouded by cream-coloured damask curtains, with a large conservatory, which opened on to the terrace-walk that ran along one side of the house. Here she sat in the dusky light, pensive and thoughtful, on the evening after her husband’s departure. The gentlemen were all in the billiard-room, hard at work with balls and cues, trying to settle some disputed wager before the half-hour bell rang to summon them to their dressing-rooms. The ladies were already at their toilettes; and Ellinor, who had dressed earlier than usual, was quite alone. It was too dark for her to read or work, and she was too weary and listless to ring for lamps; so she sat with her hands lying idly in her lap, pondering upon the morning’s conversation about Horace Margrave.
Suddenly a footstep behind her, falling softly on the thick carpet, roused her from her reverie, and she looked up with a startled glance at the glass over the low chimneypiece.
In the dim firelight she saw, reflected in the shadowy depths of the mirror, the haggard and altered face of her sometime guardian, Horace Margrave.
He wore a loose overcoat, and had his hat in his hand. He had evidently only just arrived.
He drew back on seeing Ellinor, but as she turned to speak to him, the firelight behind her left her face in the shadow, and he did not recognise her.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, “for disturbing you. I have been looking everywhere for Sir Lionel.”
“Mr. Margrave! Don’t you know me? It is I — Ellinor!” The hat fell from Horace Margrave’s slender hand, and he leaned against a high-backed easy-chair for support.
“Ellinor — Mrs. Dalton — you here! I — I — heard you were in Paris, or I should never — that is to say — I”
For the first time in her life Ellinor Dalton saw Horace Margrave so agitated that the stony mask of gentlemanly sang-froid, which he ordinarily wore, dropped away, and revealed — himself.
“Mr. Margrave,” she said anxiously, “you are annoyed at seeing me here. O, how altered you are! They were right in what they said this morning. You are indeed altered; you must have been very ill!”
Horace Margrave was hi
mself again. He picked up his hat, and sinking lazily into the easy-chair upon which he had been leaning, said:
“Yes; I have had rather a severe attack — fever — exhaustion — the doctors, in fact, were so puzzled as to what they should call my illness, that they actually tried to persuade me that I had nerves — like a young lady who has been jilted by a life-guardsman, or forbidden by her parents to marry a country curate with seventy pounds per annum, and three duties every Sunday. A nervous lawyer! My dear Mrs. Dalton, can you imagine anything so absurd? Sir James Clarke, however, insisted on my packing my portmanteau, and setting off for Mont Blanc, or something of that kind; and I, being heartily tired of the Courts of Probate and Chancery, and Verulam-buildings, Gray’s-Inn, was only too glad to follow his advice, and take my railway-ticket for Geneva.”
“And Switzerland has restored you?”
“In a measure; but not entirely. You can see that I am not yet very strong, when even the pleasing emotion of meeting unexpectedly with my sometime ward is almost too much for my nerves. But you were saying that they had been talking of me here.”
“Yes, at the breakfast-table this morning. When your visit was announced, one of the gentlemen said he had met you in Switzerland, and that you were looking ill — unhappy!”
“Unhappy! Ah, my dear Mrs. Dalton, what a misfortune it is for a man to have a constitutional pallor and a weak digestion! The world will insist upon elevating him into a blighted being, with a chronic wolf hard at work under his waistcoat. I knock myself up by working too hard over a difficult will-case, in which some tiresome old man leaves his youngest son forty thousand pounds upon half a sheet of note-paper; and the world, meeting me in Switzerland, travelling to recruit myself, comes home and writes me down — unhappy. Now, isn’t it too bad? If I were blessed with a florid complexion I might break my heart once in three months without any of my sympathetic friends troubling themselves about the fracture.”
“My dear Mr. Margrave,” said Ellinor — her voice, in spite of herself, trembling a little—” I am really now quite an old married woman; and, presuming on that feet, may venture to speak to you with entire candour — may I not?”
“With entire candour, certainly.” There was the old shiver in the dark eyelashes, and the old droop of the eyelids, as Horace Margrave said this.
“Then, my dear guardian, for I will — I will call you by that old name, which I can remember speaking for the very first time on the day of my poor father’s funeral. O!” she added passionately, “how well I remember that dreary day! I can see you now, as I saw you then, standing in the deep bay-window of the library, in the dear, dear Scottish home, looking down at me so compassionately. I was such a child then. I can hear your low, deep voice, as I heard it on that day, saying to me—’Ellinor, your dead father has placed a solemn trust in my hands. I am young. I may not be so good a man as, to his confiding mind, I seemed to be; there may be something of constitutional weakness and irresolution in my character which he never suspected; but so deeply do I feel the trust implied in his dying words, that I swear, by my hope in Heaven, by my memory of the dead, by my honour as a gentleman, to discharge the responsibilities imposed upon me as an honest man should discharge them!’”
“Ellinor, Ellinor, for pity’s sake!” cried the lawyer in a broken voice, clasping one wasted hand convulsively over his averted face.
“I do wrong,” she said, “to recall that melancholy day; but I wanted to prove to you how your words were impressed upon my mind. You did, you did discharge every duty nobly, honestly, honourably; but now, now you abandon me entirely to the husband not of my choice, but imposed upon me by a cruel necessity, and you do all in your power to make us strangers. Yet, guardian — Horace, you are not happy!”
“Not happy!” he echoed, with a bitter laugh. “My dear Mrs. Dalton, this is such childish talk about happiness and unhappiness — two words which are only used in a lady’s novel, in which the heroine is unhappy through two volumes and three-quarters, and unutterably blest in the last chapter. In the practical world we don’t talk about happiness and unhappiness; our phrases are failure and success. A man gets the woolsack, and he is successful; or he tries to earn bread-and-cheese, and fails, and we shrug our shoulders and say that he is unfortunate. But a happy man, my dear Ellinor — did you ever see one?”
“You mystify me; but you do not answer me.”
“Because to answer you I must first question myself; and, believe me, a man must have considerable courage who can dare to ask himself whether, in this troublesome journey of life, he has taken the right or the wrong road. I confess myself a coward, and implore you not to compel me to be brave.” He rose, looked down at his dress, and exclaimed in his usual society tone, “The first dinner-bell rang a quarter of an hour ago, and behold me still in travelling costume; the sin is yours, Mrs. Dalton. Till dinner, adieu.”
It was difficult to recognise the gloomy and bitter Horace Margrave of the previous half-hour in the brilliant guest who sat on Lady Baldwin’s right hand, and whose incessant flow of witty persiflage kept the crowded dinner-table in a roar of laughter. Ellinor, charmed in spite of herself, beguiled out of herself by the fascination of his animated conversation, wondered at the extraordinary power possessed by this man. “So brilliant, so accomplished!” she thought; “so admired and successful, and yet so unhappy!”
That evening’s post brought Ellinor a letter which had been sent to the house in Hertford - street, and forwarded thence to Sir Lionel’s.
She started on seeing the direction, and, taking her letter into the little inner drawing-room, which was still untenanted, she read it by the light of the wax-candles on the chimney-piece. She returned to the long saloon after refolding the letter, crossed over to a small table at which Horace Margrave sat bending over a portfolio of engravings, seated herself near him, and said, “Mr. Margrave, I have just received a letter from Scotland.”
“From Scotland!”
“Yes. From the dear old clergyman, James Stewart; you remember him?”
“Yes; a white-headed old man with a family of daughters, the shortest of whom was taller than I. Do you correspond with him?”
“O, no. It is so many years since I left Scotland, that my old friends seem one by one to have dropped off. I should like so much to have given them a new church at Achindore; but Mr, Dalton of course objected to the outlay of money, and as that is a point I never dispute with him, I abandoned the idea; but Mr. Stewart has written to me this time for a special purpose.”
“And that is?”
“To tell me that my old nurse, Margaret Mackay, has become blind and infirm, and has been obliged to leave her situation. Poor dear old soul — she went into a service in Edinburgh, after my poor father’s death, and I entirely lost sight of her. I should have provided for her long before this had I known where to find her; but now there is no question about this appeal, and I shall immediately settle a hundred a-year upon her, in spite of Mr. Dalton’s rigid and praiseworthy economy.”
“I fancy Dalton will think a hundred a-year too much. Fifty pounds for an old woman in the north of Aberdeenshire would be almost fabulous wealth. But you are so superb in your notions, my dear Ellinor. Hard-headed business men, like Dalton and myself, can scarcely stand against you.”
“Pray do not compare yourself with Mr. Dalton,” said Ellinor coldly.
“I am afraid, indeed, I must not,” he answered with gravity; “but you were saying—”
“That in this matter I will take no refusal; I will listen to no excuses or prevarications. I shall write to my husband by to-morrow’s post. I cannot have an answer till the next day. If that answer should be either a refusal or an excuse, I know what course to take.”
“And that course—”
“I will tell you what it is when I receive Mr. Dalton’s reply. But I am unjust to him,” she said; “he cannot refuse to comply with this request.”
Three days after this conversation, just as the half-hour b
ell had rung, and as Sir Lionel’s visitors were hurrying off to their dressing-rooms, Ellinor laid her hand lightly on Horace Margrave’s arm, and said, “Pray let me speak to you for a few minutes. I have received Mr. Dalton’s answer to my letter.”
“And that answer?” he asked as he followed her into the little room communicating with the conservatory.
“Is, as you suggested it might be, a refusal.”
“A refusal!” Mr. Margrave elevated his eyebrows slightly, but seemed by no means surprised at the intelligence.
“Yes; a refusal. He dares not even attempt an excuse, or invent a reason for his conduct. Forty pounds a-year, he says, will be a competence for an old woman in the north of Scotland, where very few ministers of the Presbyterian church have a larger income. That sum he will settle on her immediately, and he sends me a cheque for the first half-year; but he will settle no more, nor will he endeavour to explain motives which are always misconstrued. What do you think of his conduct?”
As she spoke, the glass door which separated the room from the conservatory swung backwards and forwards in the autumn breeze which blew in through the outer door of the conservatory. The day had been unusually warm for the time of year, and this outer door had been left open.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1063
