Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  The bell rings; the friends of the passengers drop down the side of the vessel into the little Liverpool steamer. There are Mr. Peters and Gus Darley waving their hats in the distance. Farewell, old and faithful friends, farewell; but surely not for ever. Isabella sinks sobbing on her husband’s shoulder. Valerie looks with those deed unfathomable eyes out towards the blue horizon-line that bounds the far-away to which they go.

  “There, Gaston, we shall forget—”

  “Never your long sufferings, my Valerie,” he murmurs, as he presses the little hand resting on his arm; “those shall never be forgotten.”

  “And the horror of that dreadful night, Gaston—”

  “Was the madness of a love which thought itself wronged, Valerie: we can forgive every wrong which springs from the depth of such a love.”

  Spread thy white wings, oh, ship! The shadows melt away into that purple distance. I see in that far South two happy homes; glistening white-walled villas, half buried in the luxuriant verdure of that lovely climate. I hear the voices of the children in the dark orange-groves, where the scented blossoms fall into the marble basin of the fountain. I see Richard reclining in an easy-chair, under the veranda, half hidden by the trailing jasmines that shroud it from the evening sunshine, smoking the long cherry-stemmed pipe which his wife has filled for him. Gaston paces, with his sharp military step, up and down the terrace at their feet, stopping as he passes by to lay a caressing hand on the dark curls of the son he loves. And Valerie — she leans against the slender pillar of the porch, round which the scented yellow roses are twined, and watches, with earnest eyes, the husband of her earliest choice. Oh, happy shadows! Few in this work-a-day world so fortunate as you who win in your prime of life the fulfilment of the dear dream of your youth!

  THE END

  CAPTAIN OF THE VULTURE

  Set in the eighteenth century, The Captain of the Vulture (1863) is a historical twist on the sensation fiction for which Braddon is most celebrated and contains many of the perennial elements of that genre. The eponymous captain, George, is a smuggler and a blackguard that mistreats his wife. When George dies, his wife is free to marry her beloved Darrell Markham – but is George really dead?

  Title page of the first edition

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I. THE WAY TO MARLEY WATER.

  CHAPTER II. MILLICENT.

  CHAPTER III. LOOKING BACK.

  CHAPTER IV. CAPTAIN DUKE PROVES AN ALIBI.

  CHAPTER V. MILLICENT MEETS HER HUSBAND’S SHADOW.

  CHAPTER VI. SALLY PECKER LIFTS THE CURTAIN OF THE PAST.

  CHAPTER VII. HOW DARRELL MARKHAM FOUND HIS HORSE.

  CHAPTER VIII. HOW A STRANGE PEDLAR WORKED A GREAT CHANGE IN THE MIND AND MANNERS OF SALLY PECKER.

  CHAPTER IX. SIR LOVEL MORTIMER’S DRUNKEN SERVANT.

  CHAPTER X. THE HOUSE AT CHELSEA.

  CHAPTER XI. AFTER SEVEN YEARS.

  CHAPTER XII. CAPTAIN FANNY.

  CHAPTER XIII. THE END OF JANUARY.

  CHAPTER XIV. RINGWOOD’S LEGACY.

  CHAPTER XV. MILLICENT’S WEDDING.

  CHAPTER XVI. THE THIRD APPEARANCE OF THE CAPTAIN’S DOUBLE.

  CHAPTER XVII. CAPTAIN DUKE AT HOME.

  CHAPTER XVIII. WHAT WAS DONE IN THE GARDEN ROOM.

  CHAPTER XIX. AFTER THE MURDER.

  CHAPTER XX. COMMITTED FOR TRIAL.

  CHAPTER XXI. THE FOREIGN-LOOKING PEDLAR PAYS A SECOND VISIT TO THE BLACK BEAR.

  CHAPTER XXII. MOTHER AND SON.

  CHAPTER XXIII. THE FINDING OF THE BODY.

  CHAPTER XXIV. THE TRIAL OF MILLICENT DUKE.

  EPILOGUE.

  Braddon as a young woman

  CHAPTER I. THE WAY TO MARLEY WATER.

  “No one by the Highflier to-night?” asked the black-smith of Compton-on-the-Moor of the weak-eyed landlord of the Black Bear, first and greatest hostelry in that parish.

  “No one but Captain Duke.”

  “What? the Captain has been up in London, then, maybe?”

  “He has been there three weeks and over,” replied the landlord, who seemed rather of a desponding nature, and not conversationally inclined.

  “Ah! um!” said the blacksmith; “three weeks and more up in London; three weeks and more away from that pretty-spoken lady of his; three weeks gambling, and roystering, and fighting, and beating of the watch, and dancing at that fine roundabout place at Chelsea, and suppers in Covent Garden; three weeks spending of the king’s money; three weeks—”

  “Going to the devil; three weeks going to the devil!” said a voice behind him; “why not say it in plain English, John Homerton, while you’re about it?”

  “Bless us and save us, if it isn’t Mr. Darrell Markham!”

  “Himself, and nobody else,” said the speaker, a tall man in a riding-dress and high boots, wearing a three-cornered hat, drawn very much over his eyes; “but keep it dark, Homerton; nobody in Compton knows I’m here; it’s only a business visit and a flying visit. I’m off in a couple of hours. What was that you were saying about Captain George Duke, of his Majesty’s ship the Vulture?”

  “Why, I was saying, Master Darrell, that if I had such a pretty wife as Mistress Duke, and could only be with her two months out of the twelve, I wouldn’t spend half of those two months roystering and gallivanting up in London. I think your cousin might have made a better match of it, Master Darrell Markham, with her pretty face.”

  “I think she might, John Homerton,” said the young man, sadly; “I think she might.”

  The three men had been standing at the door of the inn during this little dialogue. The blacksmith had the bridle of his sturdy little white pony — five-and-twenty years of age, if a day — in his hand, ready to mount him and ride home to his forge at the furthest end of the straggling country town; but he had been unable to resist the fascination of the weak-eyed landlord’s conversational powers. Darrell Markham turned away from the two, and walked out into the dusty high road. He stood for some moments looking thoughtfully along a narrow winding track that crossed the bare black moor land, stretching away for miles before him. The Black Bear stood at the entrance to the town, and on the very edge of the bleak open country.

  “We shall have a dark night,” said Markham, “and I shan’t have a very pleasant ride to Marley Water.”

  “You’ll never go to-night, sir?” said the landlord.

  “I tell you I must go to-night, Samuel Pecker. Foul or fair weather, I must sleep at Marley Water this night.”

  “You always was such a daring one, Mr. Darrell,” said the blacksmith admiringly.

  “It doesn’t need so very much courage for a lonely ride over Compton Moor as all that comes to, John Homerton. I’ve a pair of pistols that never missed fire yet; my horse is sound, wind and limb; I’ve a full purse, and I know how to take care of it; I’ve met a highwayman before to-night, and I’ve been a match for one before to-night; and what’s more to the purpose than all, honest John, I must do it.”

  “Must be at Marley Water to-night, Mr. Markham?”

  “I must sleep at the Golden Lion, in the village of Marley Water, this night, Mr. Pecker,” replied the young man.

  “Landlord, show me the road from here to Marley Water,” said a stranger.

  The three men looked up: a man on horseback, who had drawn his rein before the door, was looking down at the little group with a sharp scrutinizing gaze. He had ridden up to the inn so softly that they had never heard the sound of his horse’s hoofs. How long the horse might have been standing there, or when the horseman had stopped, or where he had come from, not one of the three could guess; but there he was, with the fading light of the autumn evening full upon his face, the last yellow brightness of the low sun glimmering amidst his auburn air.

  This face, lit up by the setting sun, was a very handsome one. Regular features, massively cut; a ruddy colour in the cheeks, something bronzed by a foreign sun; brown eyes, with dark clearly defined eyebrows, and waving auburn hair, which the October breeze lifte
d from the low broad forehead. The horseman was of the average height, stalwart, well proportioned; a model, in short, of manly English beauty. The horse was like its master, broad chested and strong limbed.

  “I want to know the nearest road to Marley Water,” he said for the second time; for there had been something so sudden in the manner of his appearance that none of the three men had answered his inquiry.

  The landlord, Mr. Samuel Pecker, was the first to recover his surprise.

  “Yon winding road across the moor will take you straight as an arrow, Captain,” he answered civilly, but paradoxically.

  The horseman nodded. “Thank you, and good night,” he said, and cantered away along the moorland bridle-path, for the road was little better.

  “Captain! who is he then?” asked Darrell Markham, as soon as the stranger was gone.

  “Your cousin’s husband, sir; Captain George Duke.”

  “Is that George Duke? Why he spoke like a stranger.”

  “That’s his way, sir,” said the landlord; “that’s the worst of the Captain; hail fellow well met, and what would you like to drink? one day, and keep your distance another. There’s no knowing where to have him; but, after all, he’s a jolly chap, the Captain, though I can’t think what he wants at Marley Water to-night, when he hasn’t been back from London two hours.”

  “He’s a very handsome chap,” said Darrell Markham; “I don’t so much wonder that Millicent Markham fell in love with him.”

  “There’s some as says Miss Millicent had fell in love with some one else before ever she saw him,” said the landlord insinuatingly.

  “They should find something better to do than to talk of a young lady’s love-affairs, then,” answered Markham gravely. “I tell you what, Samuel Pecker, if I don’t set out at once I shan’t find Marley Water to-night; it will be as dark as pitch in another hour. Tell them to bring out Balmerino.”

  “Must you go to-night, Mr. Markham?”

  “I tell you I must, Samuel. Come, tell the ostler to bring the horse round. I shall be halfway there before ’tis dark, if I start at once.”

  “Good night, then, sir,” said the blacksmith; “I only wish you was going to stop in Compton. The place is dull enough now, with the old squire dead, and the Hall shut up, and the young squire ruining himself in London, as folks say, and you away. Compton isn’t what it was when you was a boy, Mr. Darrell, and the squire, your uncle, used to keep Christmas up at the Hall: those were times — and now—”

  “Egad, we must all get old, John Homerton,” said Darrell with a sigh.

  “But it’s hard to sigh, or to talk of growing old either, sir,” said the blacksmith, “at eight-and-twenty years of age. Good night, Master Darrell, and — asking pardon for the liberty — God bless you!”

  Darrell Markham held out his hand in response to this fervent benediction. The good man grasped it with a muscular heartiness, murmured another blessing, and then mounted the elderly white pony, and jogged off towards the twinkling lights of the narrow high street.

  Just as the blacksmith rode away, a female voice in the interior of the inn was heard crying, “Where is he? where is that foolish boy of mine, I say? He’s not a-going away to-night; he’s not a-going to have his throat cut or his brains blowed out on the king’s highway;” and with these words a ponderous female, of some fifty summers, emerged from the inn door, and flung two very red fat arms, ornamented with black mittens, round Darrell Markham’s neck. “You’re not a-going to-night, Master Darrell? O, I heard Pecker asking of you to stay; but in his niminy-piminy namby-pamby way, asking isn’t asking, somehow,” cried ponderous Mrs. Pecker, contemptuously. “O, I’ve no patience with him; as if you was a-going to stay for dying ducks!”

  This rather obscure observation was pointed derisively at Mr. Samuel Pecker, whose despondent manner drew upon him the contempt of his magnificent and energetic better half.

  As to the landlord of the Black Bear, it must be here set down that there was no such thing. Waiters there were, chambermaids there were, ostlers there were, but landlord there was not. That individual was so entirely absorbed in the splendour of his large and dominant spouse that he had much better not have been at all; for what there was of him was always in the way. If he gave an order, it was, of course, an insane and utterly impracticable order; and if by any evil chance some domestic, unused, perhaps, to the customs of the establishment, attempted to execute that order, why there was the whole internal machinery of the Black Bear thrown into confusion for an entire day. If he received a traveller, he generally gave that traveller such a dismal impression of life in general, and Compton-on-the-Moor in particular, that nine times out of ten the dispirited wanderer would depart as soon as his horse had had a mouthful of hay, and a drink of water out of the great trough under the oak tree before the door. There never were so many highwaymen on any road as on the roads he spoke of; there never were going to be such storms as when he discoursed of the weather; there never were such calamities coming down upon poor old England as when he talked politics; or such bad harvests about to paralyse the country as when he held forth on agriculture.

  Some people said he was gloomy by nature, and that (like that well-beloved king across the Channel, who used to tell Madame de Pompadour to stop in the middle of a funny story) it was pain to him to smile. Others, on the contrary, affirmed that he had been a much livelier man before his marriage, and that the weight of his happiness was too much for him — that he was sinking under the bliss of being allied to so magnificent a creature as Mrs. Samuel Pecker, and that his unlooked-for good fortune in the matrimonial line had undermined his health and spirits. Be this as it might, there he was, mildly despondent, and utterly powerless to combat with the contumely daily heaped upon his head by his lovely but gigantic partner, Sarah Pecker.

  The stranger, on first becoming a witness of the domestic felicity within the Black Bear, was apt to imagine that Mr. Samuel Pecker was in a manner an intruder there; landlord on sufferance, and nominal proprietor; or, as one might say, host-consort, only reigning by right of the actual sovereign, his wife. But it was no such thing; the august line of Pecker time out of mind had been regnant at the Black Bear. The late Samuel Pecker, father of Samuel husband of Sarah, had been a burly stalwart fellow, six feet high if an inch, and as unlike his mild and feeble son as it is possible for one Englishman to be unlike another Englishman. From this father Samuel had inherited all those premises, dwelling-house, out-buildings, gardens, farmyard, stables, cowhouses, and pigsties, known as the Black Bear. But Samuel had not long enjoyed his dominions. Six months after ascending the throne, or rather installing himself in the great oaken arm-chair in the bar-parlour of the Black Bear, he had taken to wife Sarah, housekeeper to Squire Ringwood Markham, of the Hall, and widow of Thomas Masterson, mariner.

  Thus it is that Sarah Pecker’s two fat mottled arms are at this present moment clasped round Darrel Markham’s neck. She had known Darrell from his childhood, and had worshipped him after the manner of honest impulsive womankind, when they set up an idol of the masculine gender. No mother ever loved her first-born better than Sarah Pecker loved the bright haired boy who seemed a boy still to her at eight-and-twenty years of age. She believed in him as the supreme type of all that is noble in manhood, and was firmly convinced that not amongst all the beaux who frequent Ranelagh and the coffee-houses, not in either of the King’s services, not in Leicester-fields or Kensington; not at the Cocoa Tree, White’s, nor Bellamy’s; in the Mall or in Change Alley; at Bath or at Tunbridge Wells; not, in short, in any quarter of civilized and fashionable England was there to be met with so handsome, so distinguished, so clever, so elegant, so brave generous fascinating noble and honest a scapegrace as Darrell Markham, gentleman at large, and, what is worse, in difficulties.

  “You won’t go to-night, Master Darrell,” she said. “You won’t let it be said that you went away from the Black Bear to be murdered on Compton Moor. Jenny’s basting a capon for your supper at this
very minute, and you shall have a bottle of your poor uncle’s own Burgundy, that Pecker bought at the Hall sale.”

  “It’s no use, Mrs. Pecker; I tell you I mustn’t stay. I know how well Jenny can roast a capon, and I know how comfortable you can make your guests, and there’s nothing I should like better than to stop, but I mustn’t. I want to catch the coach that leaves Marley Water at five o’clock to-morrow morning for York. I had no right to come to Compton at all; but I couldn’t resist riding across to shake hands with you, Mrs. Sarah, for the sake of the old times that are dead and gone, and to ask the news of Nat Halloway the miller, and Lucas Jordan the doctor, and Selgood the lawyer, and a few more of my old companions, and — and—”

  “And of Miss Millicent? Eh, Master Darrell? For? all London’s such a wide city, and there’s so many or these line painted madams flaunting along the Mall, full sail, in their pannier-hoops and French furbelows and rainbow-coloured hoods, you haven’t quite forgotten Miss Millicent, eh, Darrell Markham?”

  She had nursed him on her ample knees when he was but a tiny swaddled baby, and she sometimes called him Darrell Markham tout court.

  “There was something wrong in that, Master Darrell,” she said reproachfully. “There was a gay wedding a year ago at Compton church, and very grand and very handsome everything was; and sure the bride looked very lovely; but one thing was wrong, and that was the bridegroom.”

  “If you don’t want me to be benighted, or to have these very indifferent brains of mine blown out by some valiant knight of the road upon Compton Moor, you’d better let me be off, Mistress Pecker. Mistress Pecker! O, the good old days, the dear old days! when I used to call you Mistress Sally Masterson, in the housekeeper’s room at the Hall.” He turned away from her with a sigh, and began to whistle a plaintive old English ditty, as he stood looking out over the wide expanse of gloomy moorland.