Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  By the time Mr. Prodder arrived at this stage of his narrative his listeners had dropped off gradually, the gentlemen returning to their newspapers, and the young lady to her book, until the merchant-captain found himself reduced to communicate his adventures to one good-natured looking young fellow, who seemed interested in the brown-faced sailor, and encouraged him every now and then with an assenting nod or a friendly “Ay, ay, to be sure.”

  “The only chance I can see, ses I,” continued Mr. Prodder, “is to find Aunt Sarah. I found Aunt Sarah. She’d been keepin’ a shop in the general line when I went away forty years ago, and she was keepin’ the same shop in the general line when I came back last Saturday week; and there was the same fly-blown handbills of ships that was to sail immediate, and that had sailed two years ago, accordin’ to the date upon the bills; and the same wooden sugar-loaves wrapped up in white paper; and the same lattice-work gate, with a bell that rang as loud as if it was meant to give the alarm to all Liverpool as well as to my Aunt Sarah in the parlor behind the shop. The poor old soul was standing behind the counter, serving two ounces of tea to a customer when I went in. Forty years had made so much change in her that I should n’t have known her if I had n’t known the shop. She wore black curls upon her forehead, and a brooch like a brass butterfly in the middle of the curls, where the parting ought to have been; and she wore a beard; and the curls were false, but the beard was n’t; and her voice was very deep, and rather manly, and she seemed to me to have grown manly altogether in the forty years that I’d been away. She tied up the two ounces of tea, and then asked me what I pleased to want. I told her that I was little Sam, and that I wanted my sister Eliza.”

  The merchant-captain paused and looked out of the window for upward of five minutes before he resumed his story. When he did resume it, he spoke in a very low voice, and in short, detached sentences, as if he could n’t trust himself with long ones, for fear he should break down in the middle of them.

  “Eliza had been dead one-and-twenty years. Aunt Sarah told me all about it. She’d tried the artificial flower-makin’, and she had n’t liked it. And she turned play-actress. And when she was nine-and-twenty she’d married — she’d married a gentleman that had no end of money, and she’d gone to live at a fine place somewhere in Kent. I’ve got the name of it wrote down in my memorandum-book. But she’d been a good and generous friend to Aunt Sarah; and Aunt Sarah was to have gone to Kent to see her, and to stop all the summer with her. But while aunt was getting ready to go for that very visit, my sister Eliza died, leaving a daughter behind her, which is the niece that I’m going to see. I sat down upon the three-legged wooden stool against the counter, and hid my face in my hands; and I thought of the little girl that I’d seen playin’ at hopscotch forty years before, until I thought my heart would burst; but I did n’t shed a tear. Aunt Sarah took a big brooch out of her collar, and showed me a ring of black hair behind a bit of glass, with a gold frame round it. ‘Mr. Floyd had this brooch made a purpose for me,’ she said; ‘he has always been a liberal gentleman to me, and he comes down to Liverpool once in two or three years, and takes tea with me in yon back parlor; and I’ve no call to keep a shop, for he allows me a handsome income; but I should die of the mopes if it was n’t for the business.’ There was Eliza’s name and the date of her death engraved upon the back of the brooch. I tried to remember where I’d been, and what I’d been doing that year. But I could n’t, sir. All the life that I looked back upon seemed muddled and mixed up, like a dream; and I could only think of the little sister I’d said good-by to aboard the Ventur’some forty years before. I got round by little and little, and I was able half an hour afterward to listen to Aunt Sarah’s talk. She was nigh upon seventy, poor old soul, and she’d always been a good one to talk. She asked me if it was n’t a great thing for the family that Eliza had made such a match; and if I was n’t proud to think that my niece was a young heiress, that spoke all manner of languages, and rode in her own carriage; and if that ought n’t to be a consolation to me? But I told her that I’d rather have found my sister married to the poorest man iu Liverpool, and alive and well, to bid me welcome back to my native town. Aunt Sarah said if those were my religious opinions, she did n’t know what to say to me. And she showed me a picture of Eliza’s tomb in Beckenham church-yard, that had been painted expressly for her by Mr. Floyd’s orders. Floyd was the name of Eliza’s husband. And then she showed me a picture of Miss Floyd, the heiress, at the age of ten, which was the image of Eliza, all but the pinafore; and it’s that very Miss Floyd that I’m going to see.”

  “And I dare say,” said the kind listener, “that Miss Floyd will be very much pleased to see her sailor uncle.”

  “Well, sir, I think she will,” answered the captain. “I don’t say it from any pride I take in myself, Lord knows; for I know I’m a rough and ready sort of a chap, that ‘ud be no great ornament in a young lady’s drawing-room; but if Eliza’s daughter’s anything like Eliza, I know what she’ll say and what she’ll do as well as if I see her saying it and doing it. She’ll clap her pretty little hands together, and she’ll clasp her arms round my neck, and she’ll say, ‘Lor, uncle, I am so glad to see you.’ And when I tell her that I was her mother’s only brother, and that me and her mother was very fond of one another, she’ll burst out a cryin’, and she’ll hide her pretty face upon my shoulder, and she’ll sob as if her dear little heart was going to break for love of the mother that she never saw. That’s what she’ll do,” said Captain Prodder, “and I don’t think the truest born lady that ever was could do any better.”

  The good-natured traveller heard a good deal more from the captain of his plans for going to Beckenham to claim his niece’s affections, in spite of all the fathers in the world.

  “Mr. Floyd’s a good man, I dare say, sir,” he said; “but he’s kept his daughter apart from her aunt Sarah, and it’s but likely he’ll try to keep her from me. But if he does, he’ll find he’s got a toughish customer to deal with in Captain Samuel Prodder.”

  The merchant-captain reached Beckenham as the evening shadows were deepening among the Felden oaks and beeches, and the long rays of red sunshine fading slowly out in the low sky. He drove up to the old red-brick mansion in a hired fly, and presented himself at the hall-door just as Mr. Floyd was leaving the dining-room to finish the evening in his lonely study.

  The banker paused to glance with some slight surprise at the loosely-clad, weather-beaten looking figure of the sailor, and mechanically put his hand among the gold and silver in his pocket. He thought the seafaring man had come to present some petition for himself and his comrades. A life-boat was wanted somewhere on the Kentish coast, perhaps, and this good-tempered looking, bronze-colored man had come to collect funds for the charitable work.

  He was thinking this, when, in reply to the town-bred footman’s question, the sailor uttered the name of Prodder; and in the one moment of its utterance his thoughts flew back over one-and-twenty years, and he was madly in love with a beautiful actress, who owned blushingly to that plebeian cognomen. The banker’s voice was faint and husky as he turned to the captain and bade him welcome to Felden Woods.

  “Step this way, Mr. Prodder,” he said, pointing to the open door of the study. “I am very glad to see you. I — I — have often heard of you. You are my dead wife’s runaway brother.”

  Even amid his sorrowful recollection of that brief happiness of the past, some natural alloy of pride had its part, and he closed the study-door carefully before he said this.

  “God bless you, sir,” he said, holding out his hand to the sailor. “I see I am right. Your eyes are like Eliza’s. You and yours will always be welcome beneath my roof. Yes, Samuel Prodder — you see I know your Christian name — and when I die you will find that you have not been forgotten.”

  The captain thanked his brother-in-law heartily, and told him that he neither asked nor wished for anything except permission to see his niece, Aurora Floyd.

  As he made
this request, he looked toward the door of the little room, evidently expecting that the heiress might enter at any moment. He looked terribly disappointed when the banker told him that Aurora was married, and lived near Doncaster; but that, if he had happened to come ten hours earlier, he would have found her at Felden Woods.

  Ah! who has not heard those common words? Who has not been told that, if they had come sooner, or gone earlier, or hurried their pace, or slackened it, or done something that they have not done, the whole course of life would have been otherwise? Who has not looked back regretfully at the past, which, differently fashioned, would have made the present other than it is? We think it hard that we can not take the fabric of our life to pieces, as a mantua-maker unpicks her work, and make up the stuff another way. How much waste we might save in the cloth, how much better a shape we might make the garment, if we only had the right to use our scissors and needle again, and refashion the past by the experience of the present.

  “To think, now, that I should have been comin’ yesterday!” exclaimed the captain, “but put off my journey because it was a Friday! If I’d only knowed!”

  Of course, Captain Prodder, if you had only known what it was not given you to know, you would, no doubt, have acted more prudently; and so would many other people. If Mr. William Palmer had known that detection was to dog the footsteps of crime, and the gallows to follow at the heels of detection, he would most likely have hesitated long before he mixed the strychnine pills for the friend whom, with cordial voice, he was entreating to be of good cheer. If the speculators upon this year’s Derby had known that Caractacus was to be the winner, they would scarcely have hazarded their money upon Buckstone and the Marquis. We spend the best part of our lives in making mistakes, and the poor remainder in reflecting how very easily we might have avoided them.

  Mr. Floyd explained, rather lamely perhaps, how it was that the Liverpool spinster had never been informed of her grand-niece’s marriage with Mr. John Mellish; and the merchant-captain announced his intention of starting for Doncaster early the next morning.

  “Don’t think that I want to intrude upon your daughter, sir,” he said, as if perfectly acquainted with the banker’s nervous dread of such a visit. “I know her station’s high above me, though she’s my own sister’s only child; and I make no doubt that those about her would be ready enough to turn up their noses at a poor old salt that has been tossed and tumbled about in every variety of weather for this forty year. I only want to see her once in a way, and to hear her say, perhaps, ‘Lor, uncle, what a rum old chap you are!’ There!” exclaimed Samuel Prodder, suddenly, “I think, if I could only once hear her call me uncle, I could go back to sea and die happy, though I never came ashore again.”

  CHAPTER 21

  “He Only Said I Am a-Weary.”

  Mr. James Conyers found the long summer’s day hang rather heavily upon his hands at Mellish Park, in the society of the rheumatic ex-trainer, the stable-boys, and Steeve Hargraves, the softy, and with no literary resources except the last Saturday’s Bell’s Life, and sundry flimsy sheets of shiny, slippery tissue-paper, forwarded him by post from King Charles’ Croft, in the busy town of Leeds.

  He might have found plenty of work to do in the stables, perhaps, if he had had a mind to do it; but after the night of the storm there was a perceptible change in his manner, and the showy pretence of being very busy, which he had made on his first arrival at the Park, was now exchanged for a listless and undisguised dawdling and an unconcerned indifference, which caused the old trainer to shake his gray head, and mutter to his hangers-on that the new chap warn’t up to mooch, and was evidently too grand for his business.

  Mr. James cared very little for the opinion of these simple Yorkshiremen; and he yawned in their faces, and stifled them with his cigar-smoke, with a dashing indifference that harmonized well with the gorgeous tints of his complexion and the lustrous splendor of his lazy eyes. He had taken the trouble to make himself very agreeable on the day succeeding his arrival, and had distributed his hearty slaps on the shoulder and friendly digs in the ribs right and left, until he had slapped and dug himself into considerable popularity among the friendly rustics, who were ready to be bewitched by his handsome face and flashy manner. But after his interview with Mrs. Mellish in the cottage by the north gates, he seemed to abandon all desire to please, and to grow suddenly restless and discontented — so restless and so discontented that he felt inclined even to quarrel with the unhappy softy, and led his red-haired retainer a sufficiently uncomfortable life with his whims and vagaries.

  Stephen Hargraves bore this change in his new master’s manner with wonderful patience. Rather too patiently, perhaps; with that slow, dogged, uncomplaining patience of those who keep something in reserve as a set-off against present forbearance, and who invite rather than avoid injury, rejoicing in anything which swells the great account, to be squared in future storm and fury. The softy was a man who could hoard his hatred and vengeance, hiding the bad passions away in the dark corners of his poor shattered mind, and bringing them out in the dead of the night to “kiss and talk to,” as the Moor’s wife kissed and conversed with the strawberry-embroidered cambric. There must surely have been very little “society” at Cyprus, or Mrs. Othello could scarcely have been reduced to such insipid company.

  However it might be, Steeve bore Mr. Conyers’ careless insolence so very meekly that the trainer laughed at his attendant for a poor-spirited hound, whom a pair of flashing black eyes and a lady’s toy riding-whip could frighten out of the poor remnant of wit left in his muddled brain. He said something to this effect when Steeve displeased him once, in the course of the long, temper-trying summer’s day, and the softy turned away with something very like a chuckle of savage pleasure in acknowledgment of the compliment. He was more obsequious than ever after it, and was humbly thankful for the ends of cigars which the trainer liberally bestowed upon him, and went into Doncaster for more spirits and more cigars in the course of the day, and fetched and carried as submissively as that craven-spirited hound to which his employer had politely compared him.

  Mr. Conyers did not even make a pretence of going to look at the horses on this blazing 5th of July, but lolled on the window-sill, with his lame leg upon a chair, and his back against the frame-work of the little casement, smoking, drinking, and reading his price-lists all through the sunny day. The cold brandy and water which he poured, without half an hour’s intermission, down his handsome throat, seemed to have far less influence upon him than the same amount of liquid would have had upon a horse. It would have put the horse out of condition, perhaps, but it had no effect whatever upon the trainer.

  Mrs. Powell, walking for the benefit of her health, in the north shrubberies, and incurring imminent danger of a sun-stroke for the same praiseworthy reason, contrived to pass the lodge, and to see Mr. Conyers lounging, dark and splendid, on the window-sill, exhibiting a kitcat of his handsome person framed in the clustering foliage which hung about the cottage walls. She was rather embarrassed by the presence of the softy, who was sweeping the door-step, and who gave her a glance of recognition as she passed — a glance which might perhaps have said, “We know his secrets, you and I, handsome and insolent as he is; we know the paltry price at which he can be bought and sold. But we keep our counsel — we keep our counsel till time ripens the bitter fruit upon the tree, though our fingers itch to pluck it while it is still green.”

  Mrs. Powell stopped to give the trainer good-day, expressing as much surprise at seeing him at the north lodge as if she had been given to understand that he was travelling to Kamtchatka; but Mr. Conyers cut her civilities short with a yawn, and told her, with easy familiarity, that she would be conferring a favor upon him by sending him that morning’s Times as soon as the daily papers arrived at the Park. The ensign’s widow was too much under the influence of the graceful impertinence of his manner to resist it as she might have done, and returned to the house, bewildered and wondering, to comply with his requ
est. So through the oppressive heat of the summer’s day the trainer smoked, drank, and took his ease, while his dependent and follower watched him with a puzzled face, revolving vaguely and confusedly in his dull, muddled brain the events of the previous night.

  But Mr. James Conyers grew weary at last even of his own ease; and that inherent restlessness which caused Rasselas to tire of his happy valley, and sicken for the free breezes on the hill-tops and the clamor of the distant cities, arose in the bosom of the trainer, and grew so strong that he began to chafe at the rural quiet of the north lodge, and to shuffle his poor lame leg wearily from one position to another in sheer discontent of mind, which, by one of those many subtle links between spirit and matter that tell us we are mortal, communicated itself to his body, and gave him that chronic disorder which is popularly called “the fidgets” — an unquiet fever, generated amid the fibres of the brain, and finding its way by that physiological telegraph, the spinal marrow, to the remotest station on the human railway.

  Mr. James suffered from this common complaint to such a degree that, as the solemn strokes of the church clock vibrated in sonorous music above the tree-tops of Mellish Park in the sunny evening atmosphere, he threw down his pipe with an impatient shrug of the shoulders, and called to the softy to bring him his hat and walking-stick.

  “Seven o’clock,” he muttered; “only seven o’clock. I think there must have been twenty-four hours in this blessed summer’s day.”

  He stood looking from the little casement window with a discontented frown contracting his handsome eyebrows, and a peevish expression distorting his full, classically-moulded lips as he said this. He glanced through the little casement, made smaller by its clustering frame of roses and clematis, jessamine and myrtle, and looking like the port-hole of a ship that sailed upon a sea of summer verdure. He glanced through the circular opening left by that scented frame-work of leaves and blossoms into the long glades, where the low sunlight was flickering upon waving fringes of fern. He followed with his listless glance the wandering intricacies of the underwood, until they led his weary eyes away to distant patches of blue water, slowly changing to opal and rose-color in the declining light. He saw all these things with a lazy apathy, which had no power to recognize their beauty, or to inspire one latent thrill of gratitude to Him who had made them. He had better have been blind; surely he had better have been blind.