Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  ‘Never do that, my dear, while you have a skip left in you. No better exercise for your figure,’ said Mrs. Delraine sententiously.

  ‘Miss Antoinette is beginning to awaken to the serious meaning of life,’ growled the curate in his tremendous bass.

  ‘She has discovered that life is not all beer and skittles,’ said Blanche.

  ‘My dear,’ cried her mother, with a shocked look, ‘ what are you talking about?’

  A quotation of that kind is dangerous among humdrum people. They have never the faintest idea that it is a quotation, and take it for a sudden outbreak of vulgarity.

  ‘All I can say is that after the outrageous way in which you flirted with that unfortunate young man four years ago, you are disgustingly cool about him to-day,’ said Mrs. Skimpshaw, shaking her head at Antoinette.

  Tiny blushed and looked uncomfortable.

  ‘Poor Tiny,’ said her mother, laughing. ‘How can you talk such nonsense, Louie? Why, the child was in the nursery when Claude Tremayne was here.’

  She may have been nominally in the nursery, ‘answered Louie,’ but I know she was actually wherever Mr. Tremayne happened to be. Billiard-room, hall grounds, drawing-room, it was all the same to Tiny. I should be the last to say a word about it, for I was a sad flirt in my time; but now when this estimable young man comes back, crowned with glory, and an invalid too, so awfully interesting, Tiny has not a word to say about him.’

  ‘You are a very absurd person, Louie,’ said Antoinette, who had recovered herself by this time, ‘ and if you don’t take care I shall have a good many words to say about you.’

  It was not such a day as that 1st of September had been four years ago, when Tiny instituted the course of picnic luncheons. There was a drizzling rain, and Devonia maintained her character for all-pervading dampness. It was so damp that everybody felt cold, though the thermometer was at 60, and to please her feminine guests Mrs. Ferrier had a splendid wood fire lighted in the hall an hour or so before afternoon tea. The hall was the favourite place for afternoon tea, when there were a good many people in the house.

  ‘It will be cheery and bright for the men when they come in from shooting,’ said Mrs. Dalraine.

  ‘It will look like a welcome to him,’ said Louie, with a sentimental air.

  She was not going to be any less sentimental about Claude Tremayne because she had captured her little curate. Mr. Skimpshaw was well enough, and she was honestly attached to him in her way; but a little man who had to be more than half supported by her papa could not expect to put a veto upon her innocent flirtations.

  They were all in the hall — quite the most comfortable room in the house for an unceremonious gathering — furnished with low wicker-work chairs and old-fashioned ottomans, a pair of five-leaved Japanese screens to keep off the draught, and half a dozen five o’clock tea-tables.

  It was close upon the hour for the arrival of the train at Loxley station; they would hear the shriek of the engine across the park. Blanche felt curiously nervous. Every word, every look of Claude Tremayne’s upon that unforgotten October evening was present to her mind now. It was as if they had parted only yesterday. His voice was still sounding in her ears. How true he had been to that hopeless attachment! Four years had come and gone, and he was still unmarried, his heart had been impervious to all the fascinations of a more familiar intercourse with pretty women, in a society more unrestrained than that of home. She remembered all the stories she had heard of Indian life. A man must be a Bayard to pass unscathed through such an ordeal. And he had so passed. People had talked about him a good deal. She had heard his character and his deeds discussed by those who were very familiar with both; yet scandal had never breathed upon his name. She had been watching his career with a strange interest during the last four years; wondering whether he had forgotten her; wondering whether it was indeed a pearl of price which she had so ruthlessly thrown away. Often looking down the first column of the Times she had expected to see the advertisement of his marriage. Sometimes a name that at the first glance looked like his had startled her with a vague pain. But he had not married; and vanity whispered that he was still true to the old hopeless love.

  This time she did not say to herself that he ought not to come to Loxley. She was prepared to welcome him — nay, with a good deal of persuasion she might be brought to reward him. Such constancy and devotion were indeed worthy a reward.

  She had drained the cup of pleasure till the wine in the cup waxed insipid to loathing. She had cut open the drum of fashionable life, and found that all was hollow within. To be the wife of a distinguished soldier — a good, brave man, whom she perhaps, after all, could love — no longer seemed to her an unworthy fate.

  All these thoughts passed through her mind between the shriek of the engine as the train left Loxley station, and the arrival of Major Tremayne at the house. She sat in a low basket chair beside the log fire, sheltered and half hidden by one of the Japanese screens, while Tiny made tea at a table in front of the blaze.

  There was a loud ring, the door of the vestibule opened, and a servant announced Major Tremayne. His luggage had gone round by the stables; there was none of that fuss about portmanteaus, rugs, and guns, which sometimes makes the arival of a guest so overpowering.

  He came into the middle of the hall, shook hands heartily with Mrs. Ferrier, then with Louie, who pressed forward, eager to be remembered, and then he turned and looked with wondering admiration at Antoinette, who stood beside the tea-table waiting for him to shake hands with her.

  ‘Why, Tiny,’ he exclaimed. ‘Can this possibly be Tiny? Why, what a woman you have grown!’

  ‘Did you expect me to be a child for ever? asked Antoinette shyly.

  ‘For ever? no, but it seems only yesterday since you bade me good-bye.’

  ‘Only yesterday! That sounds as if the time has not been long or weary to him,’ thought Blanche.

  She rose slowly from her low seat, and went quietly towards him, holding out her hand. It was time that she should inflict upon him the electric shock of her presence. The shock must come, and the sooner it was over the better for him. His heart was doubtless throbbing fast in anticipation of that thrilling moment.

  He took her hand ever so quietly, and shook it with just the same heartiness he had shown to her mother. He did not appear electrified, or embarrassed in the slightest degree.

  ‘You have not changed, Miss Ferrier,’ he said. ‘Time has made no difference in you.’

  ‘Has it not?’ asked Blanche languidly. ‘I feel quite an old woman;’ and she did at that moment feel older than ever she had felt in her life; for she knew all in one flash of thought, that in the four years that were gone she had been falling in love with Claude Tremayne, and he had been falling out of love with her.

  Yes, that sudden revelation had shown Blanche the truth, the bitter, unpalatable, humiliating truth. She had rejected Claude Tremayne twice; and there was to be no third opportunity. She who now so inclined to relenting was not to be asked to relent. He had been at Loxley a week; he was as friendly and easy with Blanche as if she had been his sister and he was over head and ears in love with Antoinette — with Tin, that innocent Tiny who had worshipped him four years ago in her chrysalis stage, and who had never left off’ thinking of him since; so much and so deeply was she smitten that she had during the last week persistently avoided him, overcome with shyness and mute as a mouse whenever she found herself in his company. But Claude Tremayne remembered the vivacious Tiny of old, full of original fancies and pretty thoughts, and he knew that in her case silence did not mean stupidity. And then when her lips kept silence her lovely violet eyes spoke to him, and told him in sweetest language that he was beloved.

  Blanche accepted her defeat nobly, like a Roman maiden. Not by one sign or token did she betray her disappointment; and yet the disappointment was bitter. Long ago she had found out — from her own heart, from the opinions of other people — that the one sovereign mistake of her life — comp
ared with which all her other follies had been as nothing — was her rejection of Claude Tremayne. She had considered his remaining unmarried an evidence of his fidelity to her; and she had looked forward to a day when, by stooping a little from the imperial height occupied by an acknowledged beauty, she might bring him once again to her feet, and reward him richly for his truth.

  He had come back with name and fame, handsomer, more distinguished, with all that ease of manner which comes of a successful and active career; and behold! he did not want to be so rewarded by her. He sought his reward elsewhere. He was at the feet of that young sister to whom society had given no cachet; a girl who had never been photographed, had never worn a gown made in Regent Street, had never been written about in the society journals.

  Major Tremayne had come home on sick leave, having been seriously wounded in his last battle, and he was not strong enough to go out shooting with the men. But he was quite strong enough for dawdling about the gardens and picnicing in the wood, and before he had been three weeks at Loxley he came home from this wood one evening at sun-set Tiny’s promised husband.

  ‘Then I am not to come out next year after all,’ she said, laughing, when all the serious part of their talk was over, and some natural tears of hers had been shed and dried upon her lover’s shoulder. ‘Isn’t that dreadful?’

  ‘It is, love. Well, you shall not be deprived of the pleasure of wearing a Court mantle and a plume of feathers. You shall make your bow to our gracious lady the Queen some bright spring day—’ Mrs. Tremayne, on her marriage;’ and then you and I will pack up our traps and be off by the next P. and O. steamer — over the hills and far away.

  THE SHADOW IN THE CORNER.

  WILDHEATH GRANGE stood a little way back from the road, with a barren stretch of heath behind it, and a few tall fir-trees, with straggling wind-tossed heads, for its only shelter. It was a lonely house on a lonely road, little better than a lane, leading across a desolate waste of sandy fields to the sea-shore; and it was a house that bore a bad name among the natives of the village of Holcroft, which was the nearest place where humanity might be found.

  It was a good old house, nevertheless, substantially built in the days when there was no stint of stone and timber — a good old grey stone house, with many gables, deep window seats, and a wide staircase, long dark passages, hidden doors in queer corners, closets as large as some modern rooms, and cellars in which a company of soldiers might have lain perdu.

  This spacious old mansion was given over to rats and mice, loneliness, echoes, and the occupation of three elderly people; Michael Bascom, whose forbears had been landowners of importance in the neighbourhood, and his two servants, Daniel Skegg and his wife, who had served the owner of that grim old house ever since he left the university, where he had lived fifteen years of his life — live as student, and ten us professor of natural science.

  At three-and-thirty Michael Bascom had seemed a middle-aged man; at fifty-six he looked and moved and spoke like on old man. During that interval of twenty-three years he had lived alone in Wildheath Grange, and the country people told each other that the house had made him what he was. This was a fanciful and superstitious notion on their part, doubtless; yet it would not have been difficult to have traced a certain affinity between the dull grey building and the man who lived in it. Both seemed alike remote from the common cares and interests of humanity; both had an air of settled melancholy, engendered by perpetual solitude; both had the same faded complexion, the same look of slow decay.

  Yet lonely as Michael Bascom’s life was at Wildheath Grange, he would not for any consideration have altered its tenor. He had been glad to exchange the comparative seclusion of college rooms for the unbroken solitude of Wildheath. He was a fanatic in his love of scientific research, and his quiet days were filled to the brim with labours that seldom failed to interest and satisfy him. There were periods of depression, occasional hours of doubt, when the goal towards which he strove seemed unattainable, and his spirit fainted within him. Happily such times were rare with him. He had a dogged power of continuity which ought to have carried him to the highest pinnacle of achievement, and which perhaps might ultimately have won for him a grand name and a world-wide renown, but for a catastrophe which burdened the declining years of his harmless life with an unconquerable remorse.

  One autumn morning — when he had lived just three-and-twenty years at Wildheath, and had only lately begun to perceive that his faithful butler and body servant, who was middle-aged when he first employed him, was actually getting old — Mr. Bascom’s breakfast meditations over the latest treatise on the atomic theory were interrupted by an abrupt demand from that very Daniel Skegg. The man was accustomed to wait upon his master in the most absolute silence, and his sudden breaking out into speech was almost as startling as if the bust of Socrates above the bookcase had burst into human language.

  ‘It’s no use,’ said Daniel; ‘my missus must have a girl!’

  ‘A what?’ demanded Mr. Bascom, without taking his eyes from the line he had been reading.

  ‘A girl — a girl to trot about and wash up, and help the old lady. She’s getting weak on her legs, poor soul. We’ve none of us grown younger in the last twenty years.’

  ‘Twenty years!’ echoed Michael Bascom scornfully. ‘What is twenty years in the formation of a stratum — what even in the growth of an oak — the cooling of a volcano!’

  ‘Not much, perhaps, but it’s apt to tell upon the bones of a human being.’

  ‘The manganese staining to be seen upon some skulls would certainly indicate-’’ began the scientist dreamily.

  ‘I wish my bones were only as free from rheumatics as they were twenty years ago,’ pursued Daniel testily; ‘ and then perhaps I should make light of twenty years. Howsoever, the long and the short of it is, my missus must have a girl. She can’t go on trotting up and down these everlasting passages, and standing in that stony scullery year after year, just as if she was a young woman. She must have a girl to help.’

  ‘Let her have twenty girls,’ said Mr. Bascom, going back to his book.

  ‘What’s the use of talking like that, sir? Twenty girls, indeed! We shall have rare work to get one.”

  ‘Because the neighbourhood is sparsely populated?’ interrogated Mr. Bascom, still reading.

  ‘No, sir. Because this house is known to be haunted.’

  Michael Bascom laid down his book, and turned a look of grave reproach upon his servant.

  ‘Skegg,’ he said in a severe voice, ‘I thought you had lived long enough with me to be superior to any folly of that kind.’

  ‘I don’t say that I believe in ghosts,’ answered Daniel with a semi-apologetic air; ‘but the country people do. There’s not a mortal among ’em that will venture across our threshold after nightfall.’

  ‘Merely because Anthony Bascom, who led a wild life in London, and lost his money and land, came home here broken-hearted, and is supposed to have destroyed himself in this house — the only remnant of property that was left him out of a fine estate.’

  ‘Supposed to have destroyed himself!’ cried Skegg; ‘why the fact is as well known as the death of Queen Elizabeth, or the great fire of London. Why, wasn’t he buried at the cross-roads between here and Holcroft?’

  ‘An idle tradition, for which you could produce no substantial proof,’ retorted Mr. Bascom.

  ‘I don’t know about proof; but the country people believe it as firmly as they believe their Gospel.’

  ‘If their faith in the Gospel was a little stronger they need not trouble themselves about Anthony Bascom.’

  ‘Well,’ grumbled Daniel, as he began to clear the table, ‘a girl of some kind we must get, but she’ll have to be a foreigner, or a girl that’s hard driven for a place.’

  When Daniel Skegg said a foreigner, he did not mean the native of some distant land, but a girl who had not been born and bred at Holcroft. Daniel had been raised and reared in that insignificant hamlet, and, small and
dull as the spot was, he considered it the centre of the earth, and the world beyond it only margin.

  Michael Bascom was too deep in the atomic theory to give a second thought to the necessities of an old servant. Mrs. Skegg was an individual with whom he rarely came in contact. She lived for the most part in a gloomy region at the north end of the house, where she ruled over the solitude of a kitchen, that looked almost as big as a cathedral, and numerous offices of the scullery, larder, and pantry class, where she carried on a perpetual warfare with spiders and beetles, and wore her old life out in the labour of sweeping and scrubbing. She was a woman of severe aspect, dogmatic piety, and a bitter tongue. She was a good plain cook, and ministered diligently to her master’s wants. He was not an epicure, but liked his life to be smooth and easy, and the equilibrium of his mental power would have been disturbed by a bad dinner.

  He heard no more about the proposed addition to his household for a space of ten days, when Daniel Skegg again startled him amidst his studious repose by the abrupt announcement —

  ‘I’ve got a girl!’

  ‘Oh,’ said Michael Bascom; ‘have you?’ and he went on with his book?

  This time he was reading an essay on phosphorus and its functions in relation to the human brain.

  ‘Yes,’ pursued Daniel in his usual grumbling tone; ‘she was a waif and stray, or I shouldn’t have got her. If she’d been a native she’d never have come to us.’

  ‘I hope she’s respectable,’ said Michael.

  ‘Respectable! That’s the only fault she has, poor thing. She’s too good for the place. She’s never been in service before, but she says she’s willing to work, and I daresay my old woman will be able to break her in. Her father was a small tradesman at Yarmouth. He died a month ago, and left this poor thing homeless. Mrs. Midge, at Holcroft, is her aunt, and she said to the girl, Come and stay with me till you get a place; and the girl has been staying with Mrs. Midge for the last three weeks, trying to hear of a place. When Mrs. Midge heard that my missus wanted a girl to help, she thought it would be the very thing for her niece Maria. Luckily Maria had heard nothing about this house, so the poor innocent dropped me a curtsey, and said she’d be thankful to come, and would do her best to learn her duty. She’d had an easy time of it with her father, who had educated her above her station, like a fool as he was,’ growled Daniel.