Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

‘Do you know I had an impression that we were being ruined,’ she said; ‘but I could not tell Geoffrey so. It would have seemed ungenerous.’

  ‘You are a wonderful woman,’ said Mr. Dane, looking at her gravely. ‘A wonderful wife, and Geoffrey ought to be the happiest fellow in creation.’

  ‘Well, I hope he is moderately happy. I only live to please him. Why do we not see more of you, Mr. Dane?’ she went on in a little gush of kindliness, forgetting how anxious she had been to keep him out of the sanctuary of domestic life.

  Happily Jasper Dane was too modest or too fond of solitude to take undue advantage of her kindness — but on those rare evenings which he spent with them, his society proved so agreeable to both husband and wife, that before he had been a year at the Abbey, his presence became a natural element in their lives, and he was seldom out of their company. They had both a high opinion of his capacity, and an unlimited belief in his faithfulness, and they appealed to his superior wisdom and experience continually. He was a link between Geoffrey and his happy-go-lucky youth — that youth which a man is apt faintly to regret amidst the calmer blessings of mature life. He was companionable to the wife in many things in which her husband could not be her companion. She had studied French and Italian literature, and he was the first person whom she had ever met able to talk to her of Corneille and Racine, Dante and Tasso. She was fond of music, and here was the very first listener who seemed thoroughly to understand and appreciate Bach. She had a taste for art, which went beyond painting on velvet, and the beautification of fire-screens, and Mr. Dane was able to assist her with his superior technical skill and knowledge. He taught her chess, and they played many a long thoughtful game together beside the winter fire, while Geoffrey sprawled in his armchair, and slept the sleep of the tired sportsman, his only consciousness of existence a dim sense of ineffable content, mixed with the sputter and sparkle of the wide wood fire.

  By the time Jasper Dane had been three years at the Abbey, Mr. and Mrs. Trevannion had come to regard him as a necessary part of their existence. It would be impossible for either to get on without him. They both owed him so much, that each would have been ashamed to confess the extent of the debt, and could only cancel it by silent gratitude. For it was not only that he had set their house in order, and introduced golden rules of thrift and method into a disorderly household, but he had brought the element of domestic peace into their lives. The horse-racing being put aside, Geoffrey’s absences from home rarely went beyond a long day’s hunting or shooting; and when he was away, Mr. Dane’s company went far to enliven the monotony of the tranquil hours. It was not that he intruded upon the wife’s solitude; but he was in his rooms — or in the gardens — somewhere on the premises, to be appealed to if he were wanted. He was always ready to be consulted about small details — a dinner, or a hunting breakfast, an archery meeting, or any entertainment which the lady of the Abbey considered it her duty to provide for her neighbours. He took a genuine interest in these things, which always bored Geoffrey. Altogether life was harmonized into smoothness by his presence; and yet he was one of the most unobtrusive of men.

  Geoffrey behaved wondrously well about the racing stable. He sighed in secret over its surrender; but he never told his wife how much the sacrifice cost him, or how sorely he missed the excitement of the turf, the intercourse with the outer world, with men of keener wit than his familiar friends of the hunt. Dane was always reminding him, in a friendly way, that he owed everything to his wife and had no right to squander her money — so when the old master if the staghounds died, and the neighbourhood wanted Captain Wyatt Trevannion to take the hounds, Geoffrey resolutely refused that honour, congenial as the office would have been to him. He told himself that Dane had spoken the truth. He had no right to waste his wife’s money.

  ‘I’m afraid if I go on in this way I shall dwindle into a stay-at-home husband, tied to my wife’s apron-strings,’ he thought; ‘but it is something to know that Belle is happier than she used to be.’

  Belle was, indeed, completely happy in these days. She hung about her husband as tenderly as she had done in the first year of her married life; and there were now few flashes of jealousy, or little gusts of bitter speech. Geoffrey was getting older. He did not admire pretty women so much as of old — was content to sun himself in that one beautiful face which he had a legal right to worship. Perhaps the placid monotony of prosperous idleness was slowly sapping his energies. He had lost much of his old fire and impetuosity; but he was better tempered than when his wits were kept on the rack by the hazards of horse-racing, and he was more devoted to his wife than ever. The worthy inhabitants of Boscobel began to forgive him for his audacity in marrying Miss Trevannion, and readily acknowledged that he made a very good husband, and was a pleasant, hospitable kind of man to have at the Abbey, a very fair substitute for the extinct male line of the Trevannions.

  There was only one cloud upon Isabel Trevannion’s happiness at this period of her life, and that arose from a suspicion which she tried to dismiss from her thoughts as a foolish fancy, perhaps even an unworthy inspiration of feminine vanity.

  ‘I hope I am not that kind of women,’ she had said to herself more than once; ‘a woman who believes that no man can escape falling in love with her.’

  Yet, reason with herself as she might, the vague uncomfortable suspicion would flit across her mind now and again, that her husband’s devoted friend and faithful steward cared for her more than was well for his peace. He had never by word or look offended her modesty. She was not a woman to live an hour under the same roof with a man who could so offend. He had been her faithful servant, her frequent companion for three placid, monotonous years: and he had never failed in the most profound respect that man can pay to woman. Custom had not lessened his reverence for her. Had she been a queen she could not have received a more unvarying homage. Yet, by some subtle power of expression, by something so undefinable and mysterious that it seemed a kind of magnetism, he had revealed a feeling which she needs must pity, even while she tried to shut her mind against the fact of its existence.

  She did pity him. There were traces of pain sometimes in that pale spiritual face which touched her heart with divine compassion. There was a mute fidelity of affection which she could neither mistake nor resent. Was she not indebted to Jasper Dane for the happiness which had made her domestic life perfect? His thoughtful wisdom, his outspoken fidelity, had given her back her husband.

  As that vague suspicion of hers grew into something very near akin to certainty, Isabel contrived to spend less of her life in Mr. Dane’s society. Music, art, literature, had made a meeting point for their sympathies. The lady seemed all at once to have grown weary of her books, her easel, her harpsichord. She had a sudden passion for the out-of-door life of which her husband was so fond. She rode with him, accompanied him on his trout fishing expeditions in the woody combes, following each lovely wind and reach of the romantic river.

  ‘I hope I don’t plague you with my company, Geoffrey,’ she said. ‘It makes me very happy to be with you.’

  ‘Plague me, love! Do you suppose I am not glad of such a companion? You used to be such a stay-at-home, with your nose always in a book, like Dane, or studying tweedledum and tweedle dee on that harpsichord of yours.’

  ‘Do you think the change is for the better, dearest? ‘she asked with that vein of coquetry which is in the grain of a woman’s love.

  ‘I should be a curmudgeon if I did not,’ he answered, laying down his rod, in order to throw his arm round the matron’s slim waist, and to administer a sounding kiss on the blushing cheek. ‘I shall mount you on the best hunter that was ever backed, and you shall follow the stag-hounds with me next winter.’

  ‘I should like it of all things, Geoffrey; but don’t you think it would set people talking?’

  There were very few hunting ladies in those days. ‘Let them talk! They shall say how handsome my wife looks when she’s flushed with a quick run.’

  All thr
ough the decline of summer and the slow decay of autumn, Geoffrey Trevannion and his wife were close companions; the lady spending very little of her life apart from her husband, and Jasper Dane thrown back upon a severely business-like existence. He had a great deal to do in his character of land steward, rode far and wide upon the steady old brown hack which Trevannion had allotted to him, and spent all his leisure in the seclusion of his own rooms.

  ‘I believe Dane is writing a book,’ said Geoffrey, laughing heartily at what he considered a prodigious joke; ‘I see his light burning every night when we go to bed. I wonder whether it is a tragedy, or a treatise on metaphysics. He looks capable of either. I used to accuse him of writing verses when we were in India.’

  One day in the beginning of November, Geoffrey and his friend went for a long ride together. The master of the Abbey was required to inspect some farm buildings which wanted important repairs; an improvement so costly that Mr. Dane refused to order it upon his own responsibility. The farm was between eleven and twelve miles from the Abbey, and the two gentlemen were away a long time upon their errand, and came back looking fagged by their ride.

  ‘What is the matter, Geoffrey?’ Mrs. Trevannion asked anxiously, as her husband stretched himself in his arm-chair before the drawing-room fire, while he waited for the dinner bell; ‘I never saw you look so pale.’

  ‘It was a chilly, wearisome ride, and Dane plagued my soul out with his talk about business. I am sorry to tell you that he is going to leave us.’

  She gave a little start, and the colour faded from her cheek, as if with the apprehension of evil. The fear which startled her was vague and far off, but it was fear.

  ‘I am sorry for your sake,” she said quietly. ‘I’m afraid you will miss him.’

  ‘Yes, I shall have to take to business habits, to manage the property myself. I never could trust a stranger as I have trusted Dane. I knew he was incorruptible — rectitude itself in money matters. He is a man of few wants and no extravagances. Yes, he is a loss — but he must go. It is best so.’

  ‘He is not happy with us?’

  ‘Evidently not, since he wishes to go.’

  ‘It was his wish to leave us?’

  ‘Yes, his and mine too. He gave me reasons which I could not gainsay. I have no right to consider my own interest before everything; useful as he has been to me I must school myself to do without him. I am afraid your estate will have a bad manager, Belle, but I shall do my best. I think, perhaps, if you were to help me a little — you have a clearer head than I have, and you know something of Dane’s system—’

  ‘Yes, he has told me a good deal,’ answered Isabel eagerly.’ Why should we not manage our estate? When is Mr. Dane to go?’

  ‘Early next week. He is going to put everything in order — to explain all his papers — and to give me all the help he can for carrying on everything upon his own plan. He has been very useful to us. We were getting poor before he came. We have been getting rich since he took our affairs in hand.’

  ‘And I have been ever so much happier, Geoffrey,’ answered Isabel, with her hand on her husband’s shoulder.

  She was secretly rejoiced at Dane’s decision, now that the first faint thrill of fear was over. It was as if a tremendous weight had been lifted off her mind. Of late she had dreaded every meeting with the pale, earnest-eyed steward. The chief study of her life had been to avoid him without seeming to do so.

  Mr. Dane did not appear that evening; he dined in his own room, and worked late after dinner. Four o’clock was the aristocratic dinner-hour in those days, and winter evenings were long. Isabel opened her harpsichord for the first time for some, months, and began a light, airy Gigue of Handel’s. Jasper Dane heard the gay bright music from his room above, and his face flushed angrily at the sound. It seemed to him like a little gush of joy at his announced departure. As if her heart were rejoicing in a sense of recovered freedom.

  ‘No doubt I have been an incubus. She has seen and understood,’ he said to himself.

  On the next day and the next Mr. Dane was hard at work, arranging papers and going over accounts, setting his house in order before leaving it. Geoffrey spent some hours of each day in his friend’s room, receiving his instructions, learning how he had managed household expenses, repairs, out-of-door servants, stable, and garden. Nothing had been too insignificant for his stewardship. Rectitude and plain-dealing were shown in every detail of his management.

  The third day was Sunday, Jasper Dane’s last day at Boscobel Abbey. He was to leave by the London coach, at seven o’clock next morning.

  Boscobel, never remarkable for stir or haste in its streets, a place indeed which always seemed half asleep, save when mildly revived by market-day, wore its Sabbath solemnity with a difference. There were more people in the streets; people in Sunday clothes, going to or coming from the old Gothic church; boys in sleek broad-cloth, without the least idea of what to do with their Sabbath leisure, and yawningly longing for dinner or supper time. Bells clashed out at intervals upon the dim autumn stillness, with unnecessary vehemence; perhaps in remonstrance with the dissenters, who preferred chapter even without bells.

  Unless a man had a full mind, or a love of nature deep enough to find enchantment in the calm beauty of woodland, hill, and river, Sunday at Boscobel was passing dreary. Geoffrey Trevannion was apt to feel the Sabbath hours hang heavily, even in the company of a beloved wife. He went to church once at least, as in duty bound, and he, Isabel, and Mr. Dane made a triangle of worshippers in the large square pew, where the green baize cushions had been slowly fading for the last half century, to a dull gray.

  The three knelt together this day for the last time, and it seemed as if the thought that it was so made them paler and graver than usual. They dined together after church, and spent the evening together in the spacious panelled drawing-room, with its lofty open fire-place and glorious pile of logs, burning out the dampness and dullness of those creeping November mists which wrapped all the outside world in a dim veil.

  Mrs. Trevannion had been brought up in habits of simple piety, and to her Sunday evening was not as other evenings. She liked to read some religious book aloud to her husband — a sermon of Jeremy Taylor’s, a chapter of Law’s “Serious Call” to which Geoffrey listened with sleepy submissiveness. Then, by way of reward, she would play Handel’s sacred airs, with tender, delicate touch, on her harpsichord.

  This was the first Sunday evening which Dane had spent in the drawing-room for a long time. He listened to the sermon with his earnest eyes fixed on the reader in gravest contemplation, as if he were hearing something more than the sermon — as if he were listening to the Book of Fate, He hung over the harpsichord like a man entranced.

  ‘When shall I ever hear such melody again?’ he said, with a half-cynical air; ‘not unless I get to Heaven, I suppose.”

  ‘You are going to London,’ said Isabel,’ where you will have the Oratorios and the King’s Theatre.’

  ‘It will not be such music as this. Besides, I am not going to stay in London. I shall volunteer to join the army in America.’

  Neither Mr. Trevannion nor his wife questioned the wisdom of such an act. Geoffrey sat staring idly at the lire. Isabel touched the keys of her harpsichord silently, deep in thought.

  Presently the Abbey clock chimed the half-hour after nine, and the servants came filing in to family prayer. It was Isabel’s duty to read the prayers as well as the sermon. She read them to-night in a firm, clear voice, and there was a fervour in her tone as of one relieved from trouble. The short Psalm which she read after prayers was one of thanksgiving.

  ‘She has a heart of stone!’ Jasper Dane said to himself ‘ ‘If it were flesh and blood it would bleed for me.’

  When these devotions were finished, he came over to her, and held out his hand.

  ‘Good-night and good-bye, Mrs. Trevannion; I shall have left before you come down to breakfast.’

  ‘Good-night and good-bye’ she answered, looking str
aight before her, and letting her cold white fingers lie in his hand for an instant.

  ‘Marble!a mere piece of human marble’ he said to himself, as he turned away from her.

  ‘I suppose I shall see you, Geoffrey?’

  ‘Yes, I shall be astir before seven.’

  And then all the house went to bed, and there was darkness throughout the Abbey, save for a night-lamp burning dimly in Mrs. Trevannion’s bedchamber, a large tapestried room looking towards the Abbey church and the green hills behind.

  The Abbey lay wrapped in its veil of river and meadow fog, and even that small light was hidden.

  PART II.

  THERE was horror in Boscobel, such, as had not been known within the memory of living man, when the alarm-bell of the Abbey rung shrill in the early gray of the November morning, and men were told that Squire Trevannion had been found stabbed through the heart at the foot of his own staircase. The Abbey, guarded as few houses are guarded, by barred shutters and massive bolts, had been broken into by thieves; a pane of glass had been smashed in a narrow window in the hall, a piece cut out of the heavy shutter inside, and the bar removed. It was so narrow a window that the person entering by it must have been of slim figure — a mere slip of a boy, the constable conjectured; but a boy old enough and skilful enough to unlock and unbar the great house door without alarming the household, and to admit his confederates.

  The glass cupboard in the hall had been emptied of its racing cups and jewelled-hilted swords. It was with one of these dainty court rapiers that Geoffrey Trevannion had been stabbed to death. The slim triangular blade was snapped short, near the hilt, and the chased silver hilt was missing. The thieves had begun their attack upon the plate-room. That was clear enough from the traces of their chisels on the iron-lined door; but before they could get the door open — it was in a passage behind the hall — they had been interrupted in their work by Geoffrey Trevannion, who had heard footsteps below, and had come downstairs to investigate.