Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  But he could not believe. There is a vulgar proverb which says, “You cannot have your loaf and eat it;” or if proverbs would only be grammatical, it might be better worded, “You cannot eat your loaf, and have it to eat on some future occasion.” Neither can you indulge in rationalistic discussions or epigrammatic pleasantry about the Great Creator who made you, and then turn and cry aloud to Him in the dreadful hour of your despair: “O my God, whom I have insulted and offended, help the miserable wretch who for twenty years has obstinately shut his heart against Thee!” It may be that God would forgive and hear even at that last supreme moment, as He heard the penitent thief upon the cross; but the penitent thief had been a sinner, not an unbeliever, and he could pray. The hard heart of the atheist freezes in his breast when he would repent and put away his iniquities. When he would fain turn to his offended Maker, the words that he tries to speak die away upon his lips; for the habit of blasphemy is too strong upon him; he can blague upon all the mighty mysteries of heaven and hell, but he cannot pray.

  Paul Marchmont could not fashion a prayer. Horrible witticisms arose up between him and the words he would have spoken––ghastly bon mots, that had seemed so brilliant at a lamp–lit dinner–table, spoken to a joyous accompaniment of champagne–corks and laughter. Ah, me! the world was behind this man now, with all its pleasures; and he looked back upon it, and thought that, even when it seemed gayest and brightest, it was only like a great roaring fair, with flaring lights, and noisy showmen clamoring for ever to a struggling crowd.

  How should he die? Should he go upstairs and cut his throat?

  He stood before one of his pictures––a pet picture; a girl’s face by Millais, looking through the moonlight, fantastically beautiful. He stood before this picture, and he felt one small separate pang amid all his misery as he remembered that Edward and Mary Arundel were now possessors of this particular gem.

  “They sha’n’t have it,” he muttered to himself; “they sha’n’t have this, at any rate.”

  He took a penknife from his pocket, and hacked and ripped the canvas savagely, till it hung in ribbons from the deep gilded frame.

  Then he smiled to himself, for the first time since he had entered that house, and his eyes flashed with a sudden light.

  “I have lived like Sardanapalus for the last year,” he cried aloud; “and I will die like Sardanapalus!”

  There was a fragile piece of furniture near him,––an étagère of marqueterie work, loaded with costly bric à brac, Oriental porcelain, Sèvres and Dresden, old Chelsea and crown Derby cups and saucers, and quaint teapots, crawling vermin in Pallissy ware, Indian monstrosities, and all manner of expensive absurdities, heaped together in artistic confusion. Paul Marchmont struck the slim leg of the étagère with his foot, and laughed aloud as the fragile toys fell into a ruined heap upon the carpet. He stamped upon the broken china; and the frail cups and saucers crackled like eggshells under his savage feet.

  “I will die like Sardanapalus!” he cried; “the King Arbaces shall never rest in the palace I have beautified.

  ‘Now order here

  Fagots, pine–nuts, and wither’d leaves, and such

  Things as catch fire with one sole spark;

  Bring cedar, too, and precious drugs, and spices,

  And mighty planks, to nourish a tall pile;

  Bring frankincense and myrrh, too; for it is

  For a great sacrifice I build the pyre.’

  I don’t think much of your blank verse, George Gordon Noel Byron. Your lines end on lame syllables; your ten–syllable blank verse lacks the fiery ring of your rhymes. I wonder whether Marchmont Towers is insured? Yes, I remember paying a premium last Christmas. They may have a sharp tussle with the insurance companies though. Yes, I will die like Sardanapalus––no, not like him, for I have no Myrrha to mount the pile and cling about me to the last. Pshaw! a modern Myrrha would leave Sardanapalus to perish alone, and be off to make herself safe with the new king.”

  Paul snatched up the candle, and went out into the hall. He laughed discordantly, and spoke in loud ringing tones. His manner had that feverish excitement which the French call exaltation. He ran up the broad stairs leading to the long corridor, out of which his own rooms, and his mother’s and sister’s rooms, opened.

  Ah, how pretty they were! How elegant he had made them in his reckless disregard of expense, his artistic delight in the task of beautification! There were no shutters here, and the summer breeze blew in through the broken windows, and stirred the gauzy muslin curtains, the gay chintz draperies, the cloudlike festoons of silk and lace. Paul Marchmont went from room to room with the flaring candle in his hand; and wherever there were curtains or draperies about the windows, the beds, the dressing–tables, the low lounging–chairs, and cosy little sofas, he set alight to them. He did this with wonderful rapidity, leaving flames behind him as he traversed the long corridor, and coming back thus to the stairs. He went downstairs again, and returned to the western drawing–room. Then he blew out his candle, turned out the gas, and waited.

  “How soon will it come?” he thought.

  The shutters were shut, and the room was quite dark.

  “Shall I ever have courage to stop till it comes?”

  Paul Marchmont groped his way to the door, double–locked it, and then took the key from the lock.

  He went to one of the windows, clambered upon a chair, opened the top shutter, and flung the key out through the broken window. He heard it strike jingling upon the stone terrace and then bound away, Heaven knows where.

  “I shan’t be able to go out by the door, at any rate,” he thought.

  It was quite dark in the room, but the reflection of the spreading flames was growing crimson in the sky outside. Mr. Marchmont went away from the window, feeling his way amongst the chairs and tables. He could see the red light through the crevices of the shutters, and a lurid patch of sky through that one window, the upper half of which he had left open. He sat down, somewhere near the centre of the room, and waited.

  “The smoke will kill me,” he thought. “I shall know nothing of the fire.”

  He sat quite still. He had trembled violently while he had gone from room to room doing his horrible work; but his nerves seemed steadier now. Steadier! why, he was transformed to stone! His heart seemed to have stopped beating; and he only knew by a sick anguish, a dull aching pain, that it was still in his breast.

  He sat waiting and thinking. In that time all the long story of the past was acted before him, and he saw what a wretch he had been. I do not know whether this was penitence; but looking at that enacted story, Paul Marchmont thought that his own part in the play was a mistake, and that it was a foolish thing to be a villain.

  * * * * *

  When a great flock of frightened people, with a fire–engine out of order, and drawn by whooping men and boys, came hurrying up to the Towers, they found a blazing edifice, which looked like an enchanted castle––great stone–framed windows vomiting flame; tall chimneys toppling down upon a fiery roof; molten lead, like water turned to fire, streaming in flaming cataracts upon the terrace; and all the sky lit up by that vast pile of blazing ruin. Only salamanders, or poor Mr. Braidwood’s own chosen band, could have approached Marchmont Towers that night. The Kemberling firemen and the Swampington firemen, who came by–and–by, were neither salamanders nor Braidwoods. They stood aloof and squirted water at the flames, and recoiled aghast by–and–by when the roof came down like an avalanche of blazing timber, leaving only a gaunt gigantic skeleton of red–hot stone where Marchmont Towers once had been.

  When it was safe to venture in amongst the ruins––and this was not for many hours after the fire had burnt itself out––people looked for Paul Marchmont; but amidst all that vast chaos of smouldering ashes, there was nothing found that could be identified as the remains of a human being. No one knew where the artist had been at the time of the fire, or indeed whether he had been in the house at all; and the popular opinion was,
that Paul had set fire to the mansion, and had fled away before the flames began to spread.

  But Lavinia Weston knew better than this. She knew now why her brother had sent her every scrap of valuable property belonging to him. She understood now why he had come back to her to bid her good–night for the second time, and press his cold lips to hers.

  CHAPTER THE LAST. “DEAR IS THE MEMORY OF OUR WEDDED LIVES.”

  Mary and Edward Arundel saw the awful light in the sky, and heard the voices of the people shouting in the street below, and calling to one another that Marchmont Towers was on fire.

  The young mistress of the burning pile had very little concern for her property. She only kept saying, again and again, “O Edward! I hope there is no one in the house. God grant there may be no one in the house!”

  And when the flames were highest, and it seemed by the light in the sky as if all Lincolnshire had been blazing, Edward Arundel’s wife flung herself upon her knees, and prayed aloud for any unhappy creature that might be in peril.

  Oh, if we could dare to think that this innocent girl’s prayer was heard before the throne of an Awful Judge, pleading for the soul of a wicked man!

  Early the next morning Mrs. Arundel came from Lawford Grange with her confidential maid, and carried off her daughter–in–law and the baby, on the first stage of the journey into Devonshire. Before she left Kemberling, Mary was told that no dead body had been found amongst the ruins of the Towers; and this assertion deluded her into the belief that no unhappy creature had perished. So she went to Dangerfield happier than she had ever been since the sunny days of her honeymoon, to wait there for the coming of Edward Arundel, who was to stay behind to see Richard Paulette and Mr. Gormby, and to secure the testimony of Mr. Weston and Betsy Murrel with a view to the identification of Mary’s little son, who had been neither registered nor christened.

  I have no need to dwell upon this process of identification, registration, and christening, through which Master Edward Arundel had to pass in the course of the next month. I had rather skip this dry–as–dust business, and go on to that happy time which Edward and his young wife spent together under the oaks at Dangerfield––that bright second honeymoon season, while they were as yet houseless; for a pretty villa–like mansion was being built on the Marchmont property, far away from the dank wood and the dismal river, in a pretty pastoral little nook, which was a fair oasis amidst the general dreariness of Lincolnshire.

  I need scarcely say that the grand feature of this happy time was THE BABY. It will be of course easily understood that this child stood alone amongst babies. There never had been another such infant; it was more than probable there would never again be such a one. In every attribute of babyhood he was a twelvemonth in advance of the rest of his race. Prospective greatness was stamped upon his brow. He would be a Clive or a Wellington, unless indeed he should have a fancy for the Bar and the Woolsack, in which case he would be a little more erudite than Lyndhurst, a trifle more eloquent than Brougham. All this was palpable to the meanest capacity in the very manner in which this child crowed in his nurse’s arms, or choked himself with farinaceous food, or smiled recognition at his young father, or performed the simplest act common to infancy.

  I think Mr. Sant would have been pleased to paint one of those summer scenes at Dangerfield––the proud soldier–father; the pale young wife; the handsome, matronly grandmother; and, as the mystic centre of that magic circle, the toddling flaxen–haired baby, held up by his father’s hands, and taking caricature strides in imitation of papa’s big steps.

  To my mind, it is a great pity that children are not children for ever––that the pretty baby–boy by Sant, all rosy and flaxen and blue–eyed, should ever grow into a great angular pre–Raphaelite hobadahoy, horribly big and out of drawing. But neither Edward nor Mary nor, above all, Mrs. Arundel were of this opinion. They were as eager for the child to grow up and enter for the great races of this life, as some speculative turf magnate who has given a fancy price for a yearling, and is pining to see the animal a far–famed three–year–old, and winner of the double event.

  Before the child had cut a double–tooth Mrs. Arundel senior had decided in favour of Eton as opposed to Harrow, and was balancing the conflicting advantages of classical Oxford and mathematical Cambridge; while Edward could not see the baby–boy rolling on the grass, with blue ribbons and sashes fluttering in the breeze, without thinking of his son’s future appearance in the uniform of his own regiment, gorgeous in the splendid crush of a levee at St. James’s.

  How many airy castles were erected in that happy time, with the baby for the foundation–stone of all of them! The BABY! Why, that definite article alone expresses an infinity of foolish love and admiration. Nobody says the father, the husband, the mother; it is “my” father, my husband, as the case may be. But every baby, from St. Giles’s to Belgravia, from Tyburnia to St. Luke’s, is “the” baby. The infant’s reign is short, but his royalty is supreme, and no one presumes to question his despotic rule.

  Edward Arundel almost worshipped the little child whose feeble cry he had heard in the October twilight, and had not recognised. He was never tired of reproaching himself for this omission. That baby–voice ought to have awakened a strange thrill in the young father’s breast.

  That time at Dangerfield was the happiest period of Mary’s life. All her sorrows had melted away. They did not tell her of Paul Marchmont’s suspected fate; they only told her that her enemy had disappeared, and that no one knew whither he had gone. Mary asked once, and once only, about her stepmother; and she was told that Olivia was at Swampington Rectory, living with her father, and that people said she was mad. George Weston had emigrated to Australia, with his wife, and his wife’s mother and sister. There had been no prosecution for conspiracy; the disappearance of the principal criminal had rendered that unnecessary.

  This was all that Mary ever heard of her persecutors. She did not wish to hear of them; she had forgiven them long ago. I think that in the inner depths of her innocent heart she had forgiven them from the moment she had fallen on her husband’s breast in Hester’s parlour at Kemberling, and had felt his strong arms clasped about her, sheltering her from all harm for evermore.

  She was very happy; and her nature, always gentle, seemed sublimated by the sufferings she had endured, and already akin to that of the angels. Alas, this was Edward Arundel’s chief sorrow! This young wife, so precious to him in her fading loveliness, was slipping away from him, even in the hour when they were happiest together––was separated from him even when they were most united. She was separated from him by that unconquerable sadness in his heart, which was prophetic of a great sorrow to come.

  Sometimes, when Mary saw her husband looking at her with a mournful tenderness, an almost despairing love in his eyes, she would throw herself into his arms, and say to him:

  “You must remember how happy I have been, Edward. O my darling! promise me always to remember how happy I have been.”

  When the first chill breezes of autumn blew among the Dangerfield oaks, Edward Arundel took his wife southwards, with his mother and the inevitable baby in her train. They went to Nice, and they were very quiet, very happy, in the pretty southern town, with snow–clad mountains behind them, and the purple Mediterranean before.

  The villa was building all this time in Lincolnshire. Edward’s agent sent him plans and sketches for Mrs. Arundel’s approval; and every evening there was some fresh talk about the arrangement of the rooms, and the laying–out of gardens. Mary was always pleased to see the plans and drawings, and to discuss the progress of the work with her husband. She would talk of the billiard–room, and the cosy little smoking–room, and the nurseries for the baby, which were to have a southern aspect, and every advantage calculated to assist the development of that rare and marvellous blossom; and she would plan the comfortable apartments that were to be specially kept for dear grandmamma, who would of course spend a great deal of her time at the Sycamores–�
�the new place was to be called the Sycamores. But Edward could never get his wife to talk of a certain boudoir opening into a tiny conservatory, which he himself had added on to the original architect’s plan. He could never get Mary to speak of this particular chamber; and once, when he asked her some question about the colour of the draperies, she said to him, very gently,––

  “I would rather you would not think of that room, darling.”

  “Why, my pet?”

  “Because it will make you sorry afterwards.”

  “Mary, my darling––––”

  “O Edward! you know,––you must know, dearest,––that I shall never see that place?”

  But her husband took her in his arms, and declared that this was only a morbid fancy, and that she was getting better and stronger every day, and would live to see her grandchildren playing under the maples that sheltered the northern side of the new villa. Edward told his wife this, and he believed in the truth of what he said. He could not believe that he was to lose this young wife, restored to him after so many trials. Mary did not contradict him just then; but that night, when he was sitting in her room reading by the light of a shaded lamp after she had gone to bed,––Mary went to bed very early, by order of the doctors, and indeed lived altogether according to medical régime,––she called her husband to her.

  “I want to speak to you, dear,” she said; “there is something that I must say to you.”

  The young man knelt down by his wife’s bed.

  “What is it, darling?” he asked.

  “You know what we said to–day, Edward?”

  “What, darling? We say so many things every day––we are so happy together, and have so much to talk about.”

  “But you remember, Edward,––you remember what I said about never seeing the Sycamores? Ah! don’t stop me, dear love,” Mary said reproachfully, for Edward put his lips to hers to stay the current of mournful words,––”don’t stop me, dear, for I must speak to you. I want you to know that it must be, Edward darling. I want you to remember how happy I have been, and how willing I am to part with you, dear, since it is God’s will that we should be parted. And there is something else that I want to say, Edward. Grandmamma told me something––all about Belinda. I want you to promise me that Belinda shall be happy by–and–by; for she has suffered so much, poor girl! And you will love her, and she will love the baby. But you won’t love her quite the same way that you loved me, will you, dear? because you never knew her when she was a little child, and very poor. She has never been an orphan, and quite lonely, as I have been. You have never been all the world to her.”