Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  Having done this, he hurried off to a printing-office in Avondale market-place, where he set the printers to work to strike off a hundred handbills containing the same announcement as that in the advertisement.

  Before evening these handbills were ready, and without stopping to rest or refresh himself Mr. Hurst drove back to the railway station, with the bills in a brown-paper parcel. He took a ticket for London, and left Avondale by the evening express.

  He alighted at the Euston terminus at ten o’clock, and drove at once to a police-station, whence he saw men sent right and left to distribute his hundred handbills, while a thousand fresh ones were being printed in an office near at hand.

  Then, and then only, did Mr. Hurst take breath; and at breakfast next morning he had the pleasure of reading his own advertisement at the top of the second column in the Times supplement.

  The doctors reigned supreme at Palgrave Chase. They came backwards and forwards between Avondale and London, and between Avondale and Birmingham, and contrived to keep Gervoise Palgrave alive by the exercise of their skill and science. Between them, and with infinite care and trouble, they kept the feeble lamp of life faintly flickering, while the Earl of Haughton waited, Heaven only knows how anxiously, for the coming of his son.

  Sometimes he lay for hours together in a dull stupor that was scarcely sleep; at other times he was delirious, and rambled wildly in his talk, as he had done upon the night of his farewell interview with Humphrey. But every now and then he started up suddenly from his pillow, and asked one question, the form of which rarely varied, often as he repeated it: “Is there any news of my boy?”

  The slow days dragged themselves out, and as yet there were no tidings of the missing child. The feeble flicker of the lamp grew fainter and fainter, and Ethel trembled as she watched her husband’s fitful slumbers, fearing that every awakening would be the last.

  One day the invalid seemed better, and even stronger: a brighter light burned in his eyes, and a flash relieved the ghastly whiteness of his careworn face. At first poor Ethel was deceived by that seeming improvement; but when she spoke to Doctor Wilmington of her newborn hopes, he shook his head sadly.

  “Dear Lady Haughton,” he said, “I only wish I dared give you hope. But I must not deceive you. You have sometimes watched a candle burn itself out, have you not? If you have, you must have seen how brightly the flame burns — at the last.”

  Ethel bowed her head upon her hands, and wept bitterly. All through that bright June day she sat by the dying man’s bedside, reading to him, and praying with him.

  Stephen Hurst had paid several visits to the earl in his capacity of priest and consoler. Gervoise had received him cordially, and had listened to him with reverential attention; but after these serious interviews, the sick man sometimes said to his wife,

  “The good words do me more good when you read them to me, Ethel; my prayers seem most earnest when you pray with me.”

  The low sunlight shone upon those two young heads. Gervoise lay very quietly with his wasted hand clasped in that of his wife, with his eyes fixed lovingly on her face.

  “My own one!” he murmured; “my own one, how good you have been to me! My sin has been bitterly punished, Ethel. It seems very, very hard to leave you, my lovely and loving one, dear redeeming angel of my life!”

  He lay silent, exhausted by emotion. The golden light about the two young heads changed to a deeper gold, and then melted into a faint crimson glow that trembled like the reflection of a distant fire upon the dark oak walls.

  “Ethel,” said the earl suddenly, “I feel so much better to-night; I almost feel as if a change had come to me — a change for the better. I shall live, perhaps; I shall live, Ethel, and we shall be happy in spite of all.”

  He looked in his wife’s face; but something — something indefinable in that pale earnest face — told him the falsehood of his hopes.

  “O Ethel, yon know something,” he said; “the doctors have told you there is no hope.”

  “No hope upon earth, Gervoise,” the wife cried in a broken voice, “but a better hope than that, dear — the hope that we may be happy together in heaven.”

  She drew her arm round her husband’s neck as she spoke, and in the next moment his head rested on her shoulder.

  “O my angel,” he murmured, “my angel of mercy and consolation, it is not bitter to die thus.”

  But presently the earl’s head was lifted suddenly; his eyes flashed with a new light.

  “Listen!” he cried, holding up his hand, and looking towards the door of the apartment; “listen, Ethel!”

  The sound which had startled the dying man was the sound of a child’s voice, an innocent childish voice, that cried, “Papa, papa! where are you, papa?”

  “My son is found!” cried the earl. “Bing the bell, Ethel; ring, dearest, and let every creature in the house come to witness my recognition of my boy.”

  Ethel obeyed, and as she pulled the handle of the bell, the door was opened, and Georgey ran into the room, and sprang into his father’s arms. Close behind him came Stephen Hurst.

  “Papa, papa,” he cried, “they told me you had gone away from me, and this gentleman says you were looking for me all the time. But O, papa dear, how white your face is! — how ill you look!”

  The room was presently filled with eager witnesses. Two of the medical men who attended upon the earl, and all the upper servants of the household, were assembled there to witness Lord Haughton’s recognition of his son. And then, when this had been done, the father clasped the boy in his arms in one fond last embrace.

  “Georgey,” he said, in a low tender voice, “I am going away on a long journey. I may never see you again upon this earth. I want you to love this lady when I am gone. She will be a mother to you, my pet; for she knows the sad story of your childhood, and she will pity you and love yon for my sake, Georgey; and because it is her nature to be tender and pitiful to everything that has need of her sweet tenderness and pity. You will be very happy with her, Georgey; much happier than you have ever been with me. And now send him away, Ethel,” said Lord Haughton to his wife; “send the child away. There is very little more time left for me on earth, and it belongs to you, my darling wife; to you and to God.”

  * * * * * *

  When the clocks of Avondale chimed midnight little Georgey Palgrave was Earl of Haughton.

  Stephen Hurst’s search had been rewarded at last. The boy had been discovered by means of one of the bills, which the good-natured Irish wife of the organ-grinder had spelt out upon a dead wall in the back slums of Westminster.

  She hurried home to her husband and told him of her wonderful discovery, and the two washed and dressed the boy in his tidiest raiment, and carried him off to the police-office to claim the reward.

  Gervoise Palgrave was buried in a niche next that which held the coffins of his luckless cousin and the fair young countess. He was buried on a stormy day, under a sky that looked dark against the windows of St. Gwendoline’s Church; and mingled with the howling of the wind that shook the doors and windows of the edifice, and fluttered the clergyman’s white robes as he stood above the open vault, there was the sound of hoarse and passionate sobs, the voice of a strong man’s ungovernable anguish. That mourner, whose violent grief would not be repressed, was Humphrey Melwood.

  After the funeral ceremony he wandered out into the meadows through which the winding river took its course. He wandered on indifferent to the beating of the rain, the howling of the wind, that seemed to shriek as it swept across the flat meadows; and it was not until nightfall that he went into a low, tumble-down-looking village inn — the same place where he had gone for a shelter upon the morning of Ethel’s wedding-day.

  Here he sat, drinking deeply, but silently and moodily, heedless of the rustic talk of a little group of villagers who dropped one by one into the low-roofed tap-room, wrapped in a gloomy silence, and with a dark and settled shadow on his face.

  The villagers left as the
y had come, one by one, and the last who went away left Humphrey Melwood still ordering fresh drink.

  He did not leave the place till he was sent away by the landlord, who wanted to shut up his house, and did not care to stop up any longer, even for the sake of a customer who drank a bottle of brandy at a sitting.

  Humphrey flung the man a sovereign, and told him, in a hoarse thick voice, not to trouble himself about the change. Then, with slow, heavy footsteps, he staggered out of the house, out into the dark, stormy night, never again to be seen alive by any mortal eyes; never again to be seen till, in the dismal early light of morning, his dead body was found washed on shore not half a mile from the spot where the corpse of his victim had been found on the bridal morning of Ethel Hurst.

  Whether he had drowned himself, or whether he had lost his way and stumbled into the water, under the inky darkness of that stormy night, there was no one to say. The coroner’s jury returned an open verdict, and Humphrey Melwood was buried in a little gloomy graveyard behind St. Gwendoline’s Church, and only half-a-dozen paces from the vault of the Palgraves.

  For nearly four years Lady Haughton remained a widow, leading a solitary life, whose chief occupation was the performance of good works. To the poor around Palgrave Chase she was a ministering angel, to her dead husband’s son the most tender and devoted of mothers. The boy was her comfort and happiness; and she told herself that it was for his sake she consented to a second marriage, when, after those quiet years of widowhood, she became the wife of his guardian, tutor, and friend, and her own first cousin, Stephen Hurst, much to the delight of Sir Langley, and with the hearty approval of that self-appointed Areopagus of modem civilisation, Society, as represented by the county families.

  And what of Herr von Volterchoker? The end of his career it is not given this chronicler to record. Foiled of his hoped-for prize, he fell back into the ranks of vagabondism, to sink lower and lower in the social scale, until he descended to that last depth to which none need care to follow him. Few among the dangerous classes are better known or more closely watched by the police, who hopefully await the hour when Herr von Volterchoker, alias Yokes, alias Slippery Valker, and a few other names of dubious import, shall become amenable to penal servitude for life.

  EVELINE’S VISITANT

  A GHOST STORY

  IT was at a masked ball at the Palais Royal that my fatal quarrel with my first cousin André de Brissac began. The quarrel was about a woman. The women who followed the footsteps of Philip of Orleans were the causes of many such disputes; and there was scarcely one fair head in all that glittering throng which, to a man versed in social histories and mysteries, might not have seemed bedabbled with blood.

  I shall not record the name of her for love of whom André de Brissac and I crossed one of the bridges, in the dim August dawn, on our way to the waste ground beyond the church of Saint-Germain des Près.

  There were many beautiful vipers in those days, and she was one of them. I can feel the chill breath of that August morning blowing in my face, as I sit in my dismal chamber at my château of Puy Verdun to-night, alone in the stillness, writing the strange story of my life. I can see the white mist rising from the river, the grim outline of the Châtelet, and the square towers of Notre Dame black against the pale-gray sky. Even more vividly can I recall André’s fair young face, as he stood opposite to me with his two friends — scoundrels both, and alike eager for that unnatural fray. We were a strange group to be seen in a summer sunrise, all of us fresh from the heat and clamour of the Regent’s saloons — André in a quaint hunting-dress copied from a family portrait at Puy Verdun, I costumed as one of Law’s Mississippi Indians; the other men in like garish frippery, adorned with broideries and jewels that looked wan in the pale light of dawn.

  Our quarrel had been a fierce one — a quarrel which could have but one result, and that the direst. I had struck him; and the welt raised by my open hand was crimson upon his fair womanish face as he stood opposite to me. The eastern sun shone on the face presently, and dyed the cruel mark with a deeper red; but the sting of my own wrongs was fresh, and I had not yet learned to despise myself for that brutal outrage.

  To André de Brissac such an insult was most terrible. He was the favourite of Fortune, the favourite of women; and I was nothing, — a rough soldier who had done my country good service, but in the boudoir of a Parabère a mannerless boor.

  We fought, and I wounded him mortally. Life had been very sweet for him; and I think that a frenzy of despair took possession of him when he felt the life-blood ebbing away. He beckoned me to him as he lay on the ground. I went, and knelt at his side.

  “Forgive me, André!” I murmured.

  He took no more heed of my words than if that piteous entreaty had been the idle ripple of the river near at hand.

  “Listen to me, Hector de Brissac,” he said. “I am not one who believes that a man has done with earth because his eyes glaze and his jaw stiffens. They will bury me in the old vault at Puy Verdun; and you will be master of the château. Ah, I know how lightly they take things in these days, and how Dubois will laugh when he hears that Ça has been killed in a duel. They will bury me, and sing masses for my soul; but you and I have not finished our affair yet, my cousin.

  I will be with you when you least look to see me, — I, with this ugly scar upon the face that women have praised and loved. I will come to you when your life seems brightest.

  I will come between you and all that you hold fairest and dearest. My ghostly hand shall drop a poison in your cup of joy. My shadowy form shall shut the sunlight from your life. Men with such iron will as mine can do what they please, Hector de Brissac. It is my will to haunt you when I am dead.”

  All this in short broken sentences he whispered into my ear. I had need to bend my ear close to his dying lips; but the iron will of André de Brissac was strong enough to do battle with Death, and I believe he said all he wished to say before his head fell back upon the velvet cloak they had spread beneath him, never to be lifted again.

  As he lay there, you would have fancied him a fragile stripling, too fair and frail for the struggle called life; but there are those who remember the brief manhood of André de Brissac, and who can bear witness to the terrible force of that proud nature.

  I stood looking down at the young face with that foul mark upon it; and God knows I was sorry for what I had done.

  Of those blasphemous threats which he had whispered in my ear I took no heed. I was a soldier, and a believer. There was nothing absolutely dreadful to me in the thought that I had killed this man. I had killed many men on the battlefield; and this one had done me cruel wrong.

  My friends would have had me cross the frontier to escape the consequences of my act; but I was ready to face those consequences, and I remained in France. I kept aloof from the court, and received a hint that I had best confine myself to my own province. Many masses were chanted in the little chapel of Puy Verdun for the soul of my dead cousin, and his coffin filled a niche in the vault of our ancestors.

  His death had made me a rich man; and the thought that it was so made my newly-acquired wealth very hateful to me. I lived a lonely existence in the old château, where I rarely held converse with any but the servants of the household, all of whom had served my cousin, and none of whom liked me.

  It was a hard and bitter life. It galled me, when I rode through the village, to 6ee the peasant-children shrink away from me. I have seen old women cross themselves stealthily as I passed them by. Strange reports had gone forth about me; and there were those who whispered that I had given my soul to the Evil One as the price of my cousin’s heritage. From my boyhood I had been dark of visage and stem of manner; and hence, perhaps, no woman’s love had ever been mine. I remember my mother’s face in all its changes of expression; but I can remember no look of affection that ever shone on me. That other woman, beneath whose feet I laid my heart, was pleased to accept my homage, but she never loved me; and the end was treachery.

/>   I had grown hateful to myself and had well-nigh began to hate my fellow-creatures, when a feverish desire seized upon me, and I pined to be back in the press and throng of the busy world once again. I went back to Paris, where I kept myself aloof from the court, and where an angel took compassion upon me.

  She was the daughter of an old comrade, a man whose merits had been neglected, whose achievements had been ignored, and who sulked in his shabby lodging like a rat in a hole, while all Paris went mad with the Scotch Financier, and gentlemen and lacqueys were trampling one another to death in the Rue Quincampoix. The only child of this little cross-grained old captain of dragoons was an incarnate sunbeam, whose mortal name was Eveline Duchalet.

  She loved me. The richest blessings of our lives are often those which cost us least. I wasted the best years of my youth in the worship of a wicked woman, who jilted and cheated me at last. I gave this meek angel but a few courteous words — a little fraternal tenderness — and lo, she loved me. The life which had been so dark and desolate grew bright beneath her influence; and I went back to Puy Verdun with a fair young bride for my companion.

  Ah, how sweet a change there was in my life and in my home! The village children no longer shrank appalled as the dark horseman rode by, the village crones no longer crossed themselves; for a woman rode by his side — a woman whose charities had won the love of all those ignorant creatures, and whose companionship had transformed the gloomy lord of the château into a loving husband and a gentle master. The old retainers forgot the untimely fate of my cousin, and served me with cordial willingness, for love of their young mistress.

  There are no words which can tell the pure and perfect happiness of that time. I felt like a traveller who had traversed the frozen seas of an arctic region, remote from human love or human companionship, to find himself on a sudden in the bosom of a verdant valley, in the sweet atmosphere of home. The change seemed too bright to be real; and I strove in vain to put away from my mind the vague suspicion that my new life was but some fantastic dream.