Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  She put her arms round my neck, and hid her face upon my shoulder.

  ‘Can you guess what Angus Egerton said to me to-day?’ she asked, in a low tremulous voice.

  ‘Was it something very wonderful, dear — or something as old as the world we live in?’

  ‘Not old to me, Mary — new and wonderful beyond all measure. I did not think he cared for me — I had never dared to hope; for I have liked him a little for a long time, dear, though I don’t suppose you ever thought so.’

  ‘My dear girl, I have known it from the very beginning. There is nothing in the world more transparent than your thoughts about Angus Egerton have been to me.’

  ‘O Mary, how could you! And I have been so careful to say nothing!’ she cried reproachfully. ‘But he loves me, dear. He has loved me for a long time, he says; and he has asked me to be his wife.’

  ‘What, after all those protestations about never asking a woman to share his poverty?’

  ‘Yes, Mary; and he meant what he said. He told me that if I had been a penniless girl, he should have proposed to me ever so long ago. And he is to see papa to-morrow.’

  ‘Do you think Mr. Darrell will ever consent to such a marriage, Milly?’

  I asked gravely.

  ‘Why should he not? He cannot go on thinking badly of Angus when every one else thinks so well of him. You must have seen how he has softened towards him since they met. Mr. Egerton’s old family and position are quite an equivalent for my money, whatever that may be. O Mary, I don’t think papa can refuse his consent.’

  ‘I am rather doubtful about that, Milly. It’s one thing to like Mr. Egerton very well as a visitor — quite another to accept him as a son-in-law. Frankly, my dearest, I fear your father will be against the match.’

  ‘Mary,’ cried Milly reproachfully, ‘I can see what it is — you are prejudiced against Mr. Egerton.’

  ‘I am only anxious for your welfare, darling. I like Mr. Egerton very much. It is difficult for any one to avoid liking him. But I confess that I cannot bring myself to put entire trust in him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  I did not like to tell her the chief reason for my distrust — that mysterious relation between Angus Egerton and Mrs. Darrell. The subject was a serious — almost a dangerous — one; and I had no positive evidence to bring forward in proof of my fancy. It was a question of looks and words that had been full of significance to me, but which might seem to Milly to mean very little.

  ‘We cannot help our instinctive doubts, dear. But if you can trust Mr. Egerton, and if your father can trust him, my fancies can matter very little. I cannot stand between you and your love, dear — I know that.’

  ‘But you can make me very unhappy by your doubts, Mary,’ she answered.

  I kissed her, and did my best to console her; but she was not easily to be comforted, and left me in a half-sorrowful, half-angry mood. I had disappointed her, she told me — she had felt so sure of my sympathy; and instead of sharing her happiness, I had made her miserable by my fanciful doubts and gloomy forebodings. After she had gone, I sat by the window for a long time, thinking of her disconsolately, and feeling myself very guilty. But I had a fixed conviction that Mr. Darrell would refuse to receive Angus Egerton as his daughter’s suitor, and that the course of this love-affair was not destined to be a smooth one.

  The result proved that I had been right. Mr. Egerton had a long interview with Mr. Darrell in the library next morning, during which his proposal was most firmly rejected. Milly and I knew that he was in the house, and my poor girl walked up and down our sitting-room with nervously clasped hands and an ashy pale face all the time those two were together down-stairs.

  She turned to me with a little piteous look when she heard Angus

  Egerton ride away from the front of the house.

  ‘O Mary, what is my fate to be?’ she asked. ‘I think he has been rejected. I do not think he would have gone away without seeing me if the interview had ended happily.’

  A servant came to summon us both to the library. We went down together,

  Milly’s cold hand clasped in mine.

  Mr. Darrell was not alone. His wife was sitting with her back to the window, very pale, and with an angry brightness in her eyes.

  ‘Sit down, Miss Crofton,’ Mr. Darrell said very coldly; ‘and you,

  Milly, come here.’

  She went towards him with a slow faltering step, and sank down into the chair to which he pointed, looking at him all the time in an eager beseeching way that I think must have gone to his heart. He was standing with his back to the empty fireplace, and remained standing throughout the interview.

  ‘I think you know that I love you, Milly,’ he began, ‘and that your happiness is the chief desire of my mind.’

  ‘I’m sure of that, papa.’

  ‘And yet you have deceived me.’

  ‘Deceived you? O papa, in what way?’

  ‘By encouraging the hopes of a man whom you must have known I would never receive as your husband; by suffering your feelings to become engaged, without one word of warning to me, and in a manner that you must have known could not fail to be most obnoxious to me.’

  ‘O papa, I did not know; it was only yesterday that Mr. Egerton spoke for the first time. There has been nothing hidden from you.’

  ‘Nothing? Do you call your intimate acquaintance with this man nothing? He may have delayed any actual declaration until my return — with an artful appearance of consideration for me; but some kind of love-affair must have been going on between you all the time.’

  ‘No, indeed, papa; until yesterday there was never anything but the most ordinary acquaintance. Mary knows—’

  ‘Pray don’t appeal to Miss Crofton,’ her father interrupted sternly.

  ‘Miss Crofton has done very wrong in encouraging this affair. Miss

  Crofton heard my opinion of Angus Egerton a long time ago.’

  ‘Mary has done nothing to encourage our acquaintance. It has been altogether a matter of accident from first to last. What have you said to Mr. Egerton, papa? Tell me at once, please.’

  She said this with a quiet firmness, looking bravely up at him all the while.

  ‘I have told him that nothing would induce me to consent to such a marriage. I have forbidden him ever to see you again.’

  ‘That seems very hard, papa.’

  ‘I thought you knew my opinion of Mr. Egerton.’

  ‘It would change if you knew more of him.’

  ‘Never. I might like him very well as a member of society; I could never approve of him as a son-in-law. Besides, I have other views for you — long-cherished views — which I hope you will not disappoint.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean by that, papa; but I know that I can never marry any one except Mr. Egerton. I may never marry at all, if you refuse to change your decision upon this subject; but I am quite sure I shall never be the wife of any one else.’

  Her father looked at her angrily. That hard expression about the lower part of the face, which I had noticed in his portrait and in himself from the very first, was intensified to-day. He looked a stern resolute man, whose will was not to be moved by a daughter’s pleading.

  ‘We shall see about that by and by,’ he said. ‘I am not going to have my plans defeated by a girl’s folly. I have been a very indulgent father, but I am not a weak or yielding one. You will have to obey me, Milly, or you will find yourself a substantial sufferer by and by.’

  ‘If you mean that you will disinherit me, papa, I am quite willing that you should do that,’ Milly answered resolutely. ‘Perhaps you think Mr. Egerton cares for my fortune. Put him to the test, papa. Tell him that you will give me nothing, and that he may take me on that condition.’

  Augusta Darrell turned upon her stepdaughter with a sudden look in her face that was almost like a flame.

  ‘Do you think him so disinterested?’ she asked. ‘Have you such supreme confidence in his affection?’

  �
��Perfect confidence.’

  ‘And you do not believe that mercenary considerations have any weight with him? You do not think that he is eager to repair his shattered fortunes? You think him all truth and devotion? He, a blasé man of the world, of three-and-thirty; a man who has outlived the possibility of anything like a real attachment; a man who lavished his whole stock of feeling upon the one attachment of his youth.’

  She said all this very quietly, but with a suppressed bitterness. I think it needed all her powers of restraint to keep her from some passionate outburst that would have betrayed the secret of her life. I was now more than ever convinced that she had known Angus Egerton in the past, and that she had loved him.

  ‘You see, I am not afraid of his being put to the test,’ Milly said proudly. ‘I know he loved some one very dearly, a long time ago. He spoke of that yesterday. He told me that his old love had died out of his heart years ago.’

  ‘He told you a lie,’ cried Mrs. Darrell. ‘Such things never die. They sleep, perhaps — like the creatures that hide themselves in the ground and lie torpid all the winter — but with one breath of the past they flame into life again.’

  ‘I am not going to make any such foolish trial of your lover’s faith, Milly,’ said Mr. Darrell. ‘Whether your fortune is or is not a paramount consideration with him can make no possible difference in my decision. Nothing will ever induce me to consent to your marrying him. Of course, if you choose to defy me, you are of age and your own mistress; but on the day that makes you Angus Egerton’s wife you will cease to be my daughter.’

  ‘Papa,’ cried Milly, ‘you will break my heart.’

  ‘Nonsense, child; hearts are not easily broken. Let me hear no more of this unfortunate business. I have spoken to you very plainly, in order that there might be no chance of misunderstanding between us; and I rely upon your honour that there shall be no clandestine meeting between you and Angus Egerton in the future. I look to you, Miss Crofton, also, and shall hold you answerable for any accidental encounters out walking.’

  ‘You need not be afraid, papa,’ Milly answered disconsolately. ‘I daresay Mr. Egerton will leave Yorkshire, as he spoke of doing yesterday.’

  ‘I hope he may,’ said Mr. Darrell.

  Milly rose to leave the room. Half-way towards the door she stopped, and turned her white despairing face towards her father with a hopeless look.

  ‘I shall obey you, papa,’ she said. ‘I could not bear to forfeit your love, even for his sake. But I think you will break my heart.’

  Mr. Darrell went over to her and kissed her.

  ‘I am acting best for your ultimate happiness, Milly, be sure of that,’ he said in a kinder tone than he had used before. ‘There, my love, go and be happy with Miss Crofton, and let us all agree to forget this business as quickly as possible.’

  This was our dismissal. We went back to Milly’s pretty sitting-room, where the sun was shining and the warm summer air blowing on birds and flowers, and books and drawing materials, and all the airy trifles that had made our lives pleasant to us until that hour. Milly sat on a low stool at my feet, and buried her face in my lap, refusing all comfort. She sat like this for about an hour, weeping silently, and then rose suddenly and wiped the tears from her pale face.

  ‘I am not going to lead you a miserable life about this, Mary,’ she said. ‘We will never speak of it after to-day. And I will try to do my duty to papa, and bear my life without that new happiness, which made it seem so bright. Do you think Mr. Egerton will feel the disappointment very much, Mary?’

  ‘He cannot help feeling it, dear, if he loves you — as I believe he does.’

  ‘And we might have been so happy together! I was dreaming of Cumber Priory all last night. I thought it had been restored with some of my money, and that the old house was full of life and brightness. Will he go away, do you think, Mary?’

  ‘I should think it very likely.’

  ‘And I shall never see him any more. I could not forfeit papa’s love,

  Mary.’

  ‘It would be a hard thing if you were to do that for the sake of a stranger, dear.’

  ‘No, no, Mary; he is not a stranger to me; Angus Egerton is not a stranger. I know that he is noble and good. But my father was all the world to me a year ago. I could not do without his love. I must obey him.’

  ‘Believe me, dear, it will be wisest and best to do so. You cannot tell what changes may come to pass in the future. Obedience will make you very dear to your father; and the time may come in which he will think better of Mr. Egerton.’

  ‘O Mary, if I could hope that!’

  ‘Hope for everything, dear, if you do your duty.’

  She grew a little more cheerful after this, and met her father at dinner with quite a placid face, though it was still very pale. Mrs. Darrell looked at her wonderingly, and with a half-contemptuous expression, I thought, as if this passion of her step-daughter’s seemed to her a very poor thing, after all.

  Before the week was out, we heard that Mr. Egerton had left Yorkshire. We did not go to the Pensildon fête. Milly had a cold and kept her room, much to the regret of the Miss Collingwoods, who called every day to inquire about her. She made this cold — which was really a very slight affair — an excuse for a week’s solitude, and at the end of that time reappeared among us with no trace of her secret sorrow. It was only I, who was always with her, and knew her to the core of her heart, who could have told how hard a blow that disappointment had been, and how much it cost her to bear it so quietly.

  CHAPTER X.

  CHANGES AT THORNLEIGH.

  The autumn and the early winter passed monotonously enough. There was a good deal of company at Thornleigh Manor at first, for Mrs. Darrell hated solitude; but after a little time she grew tired of the people her husband knew, and the dinners and garden parties became less frequent. I had found out, very soon after her return, that she was not happy — that this easy prosperous life was in some manner a burden to her. It was only in her husband’s presence that she made any pretence of being pleased or interested in things. With him she was always the same — always deferential, affectionate, and attentive; while he, on his side, was the devoted slave of her every whim and wish.

  She was not unkind to Milly, but those two seemed instinctively to avoid each other.

  The winter brought trouble to Thornleigh Manor. It was well for Milly that she had tried to do her duty to her father, and had submitted herself patiently to his will. About a fortnight before Christmas Mr. Darrell went to North Shields to make his annual investigation of the wharves and warehouses, and to take a kind of review of the year’s business. He never returned alive. He was seized with an apoplectic fit in the office, and carried to his hotel speechless. His wife and Milly were summoned by a telegraphic message, and started for Shields by the first train that could convey them there; but they were too late. He expired an hour before their arrival.

  I need not dwell upon the details of that sad time. Milly felt the blow severely; and it was long before I saw her smile, after that dark December day on which the fatal summons came. She had lost much of her joyousness and brightness after the disappointment about Angus Egerton, and this new sorrow quite crushed her.

  They brought Mr. Darrell’s remains to Thornleigh, and he was buried in the family vault under the noble old church, where his father and mother, his first wife, and a son who died in infancy had been buried before him. He had been very popular in the neighbourhood, and was sincerely regretted by all who had known him.

  Julian Stormont was chief-mourner at the unpretentious funeral. He seemed much affected by his uncle’s death; and his manner towards his cousin had an unusual gentleness.

  I was present at the reading of the will, which took place in the dining-room immediately after the funeral. Mrs. Darrell, Milly, Mr. Stormont, myself, and the family lawyer were the only persons assembled in the spacious room, which had a dreary look without the chief of the household.

  The will
had been made a few months after Mr. Darrell’s second marriage. It was very simple in its wording. To Julian Stormont he left a sum of five thousand pounds, to be paid out his funded property; all the rest of this property, with the sum to be realised by the sale of the business at North Shields and its belongings — an amount likely to be very large — was to be divided equally between Mrs. Darrell and her stepdaughter. Thornleigh Manor was left to Mrs. Darrell for her life, but was to revert to Milly, or Milly’s heirs, at her death; and Milly was to be entitled to occupy her old home until her marriage.

  In the event of Milly’s dying unmarried, her share of the funded property was to be divided equally between Mrs. Darrell and Julian Stormont, and in this case the Thornleigh estate was to revert to Julian Stormont after the death of Mrs. Darrell. The executors to the will were Mr. Foreman the lawyer and Mrs. Darrell.

  Milly’s position was now one of complete independence. Mr. Foreman told her that after the sale of the iron-works she would have an income of something like four thousand a year. She had been of age for more than six months, and there was no one to come between her and perfect independence.

  Knowing this, I felt that it was more than probable Mr. Egerton would speedily return to renew his suit; and I had little doubt that it would be successful. I knew how well Milly loved him; and now that her father was gone she could have no motive for refusing him.

  ‘You will stay with me, won’t you, Mary?’ she said to me as we sat by the fire in mournful silence that afternoon. ‘You are my only comfort now, dear. I suppose I shall remain here — for some time, at any rate. Augusta spoke to me very graciously, and begged that I would make this my home, according to my father’s wish. We should not interfere with each other in any way, she said, and it was indeed more than probable she would go on the Continent with her maid early in the spring, and leave me sole mistress of Thornleigh. She doubted if she could ever endure the place now, she said. She is not like me, Mary. I shall always have a melancholy love for the house in which I have lived so happily with my father.’