Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  But in these latter days such glimpses of sunshine very rarely illumined the dull stream of the Captain’s life. Failure and disappointment had become the rule of his existence — success the rare exception. Crossing the river now on his way westward, he was wont to loiter a little on Waterloo Bridge, and to look dreamily down at the water, wondering whether the time was near at hand when, under cover of the evening dusk, he would pay his last halfpenny to the toll-keeper, and never again know the need of an earthly coin.

  “I saw a fellow in the Morgue one day, — a poor wretch who had drowned himself a week or two before. Great God, how horrible he looked! If there was any certainty they would find one immediately, and bury one decently, there’d be no particular horror in that kind of death. But to be found like that, and to lie in some riverside deadhouse down by Wapping, with a ghastly placard rotting on the rotting door, and nothing but ooze and slime and rottenness round about one — waiting to be identified! And who knows, after all, whether a dead man doesn’t feel that sort of thing?”

  It was after such musings as these had begun to be very common with Horatio Paget that he caught the chill which resulted in a very dangerous illness of many weeks. The late autumn was wet and cold and dreary; but Captain Paget, although remarkably clever after a certain fashion, had never been a lover of intellectual pursuits, and imprisonment in Mrs. Kepp’s shabby parlour was odious to him. When he had read every page of the borrowed newspaper, and pished and pshawed over the leaders, and groaned aloud at the announcement of some wealthy marriage made by one of his quondam friends, or chuckled at the record of another quondam friend’s insolvency — when he had poked the fire savagely half a dozen times in an hour, cursing the pinched grate and the bad coals during every repetition of the operation — when he had smoked his last cigar, and varnished his favourite boots, and looked out of the window, and contemplated himself gloomily in the wretched little glass over the narrow chimney-piece, — Captain Paget’s intellectual resources were exhausted, and an angry impatience took possession of him. Then, in defiance of the pelting rain or the lowering sky, he flung his slippers into the farthest corner — and the farthest corner of Mrs. Kepp’s parlour was not very remote from the Captain’s arm-chair — he drew on the stoutest of his varnished boots — and there were none of them very stout now — buttoned his perfect overcoat, adjusted his hat before the looking-glass, and sallied forth, umbrella in hand, to make his way westward. Westward always, through storm and shower, back to the haunts of his youth, went the wanderer and outcast, to see the red glow of cheery fires reflected on the plate-glass windows of his favourite clubs; to see the lamps in spacious reading-rooms lit early in the autumn dusk, and to watch the soft light glimmering on the rich bindings of the books, and losing itself in the sombre depths of crimson draperies. To this poor worldly creature the agony of banishment from those palaces of Pall Mall or St. James’s-street was as bitter as the pain of a fallen angel. It was the dullest, deadest time of the year, and there were not many loungers in those sumptuous reading-rooms, where the shaded lamps shed their subdued light on the chaste splendour of the sanctuary; so Captain Paget could haunt the scene of his departed youth without much fear of recognition: but his wanderings in the West grew more hopeless and purposeless every day. He began to understand how it was that people were never at home when he assailed their doors with his fashionable knock. He could no longer endure the humiliation of such repulses, for he began to understand that the servants knew his errand as well as their masters, and had their answers ready, let him present himself before them when he would: so he besieged the doors of St. James’s and Mayfair, Kensington Gore and Netting Hill, no longer. He knew that the bubble of his poor foolish life had burst, and that there was nothing left for him but to die.

  It seemed about this time as if the end of all was very near. Captain Paget caught a chill one miserable evening on which he returned to his lodging with his garments dripping, and his beautiful varnished boots reduced to a kind of pulp; and the chill resulted in a violent inflammation of the lungs. Then it was that a woman’s hand was held out to save him, and a woman’s divine tenderness cared for him in his dire extremity.

  The ministering angel who comforted this helpless and broken-down wayfarer was only a low-born ignorant girl called Mary Anne Kepp — a girl who had waited upon the Captain during his residence in her mother’s house, but of whom he had taken about as much notice as he had been wont to take of the coloured servants who tended him when he was with his regiment in India. Horatio Paget had been a night-brawler and a gamester, a duellist and a reprobate, in the glorious days that were gone; but he had never been a profligate; and he did not know that the girl who brought him his breakfast and staggered under the weight of his coal-scuttle was one of the most beautiful women he had ever looked upon.

  The Captain was so essentially a creature of the West-end, that Beauty without her glitter of diamonds and splendour of apparel was scarcely Beauty for him. He waited for the groom of the chambers to announce her name, and the low hum of well-bred approval to accompany her entrance, before he bowed the knee and acknowledged her perfection. The Beauties whom he remembered had received their patent from the Prince Regent, and had graduated in the houses of Devonshire and Hertford. How should the faded bachelor know that this girl, in a shabby cotton gown, with unkempt hair dragged off her pale face, and with grimy smears from the handles of saucepans and fire-irons imprinted upon her cheeks — how should he know that she was beautiful? It was only during the slow monotonous hours of his convalescence, when he lay upon the poor faded little sofa in Mrs. Kepp’s parlour — the sofa that was scarcely less faded and feeble than himself — it was then, and then only, that he discovered the loveliness of the face which had been so often bent over him during his delirious wanderings.

  “I have mistaken you for all manner of people, my dear,” he said to his landlady’s daughter, who sat by the little Pembroke-table working, while her mother dozed in a corner with a worsted stocking drawn over her arm and a pair of spectacles resting upon her elderly nose. Mrs. Kepp and her daughter were wont to spend their evenings in the lodger’s apartment now; for the invalid complained bitterly of “the horrors” when they left him.

  “I have taken you for all sorts of people, Mary Anne,” pursued the Captain dreamily. “Sometimes I have fancied you were the Countess of Jersey, and I could see her smile as she looked at me when I was first presented to her. I was very young in the beautiful Jersey’s time; and then there was the other one — whom I used to drink tea with at Brighton. Ah me! what a dull world it seems nowadays! The King gone, and everything changed — everything — everything! I am a very old man, Mary Anne.”

  He was fifty-two years of age; he felt quite an old man. He had spent all his money, he had outlived the best friends of his youth; for it had been his fate to adorn a declining era, and he had been a youngster among elderly patrons and associates. His patrons were dead and gone, and the men he had patronised shut their doors upon him in the day of his poverty. As for his relations, he had turned his back upon them long ago, when first he followed in the shining wake of that gorgeous vessel, the Royal George. In this hour of his penniless decline there was none to help him. To have outlived every affection and every pleasure is the chief bitterness of old age; and this bitterness Horatio Paget suffered in all its fulness, though his years were but fifty-two.

  “I am a very old man, Mary Anne,” he repeated plaintively. But Mary Anne Kepp could not think him old. To her eyes he must for ever appear the incarnation of all that is elegant and distinguished. He was the first gentleman she had ever seen. Mrs. Kepp had given shelter to other lodgers who had called themselves gentlemen, and who had been pompous and grandiose of manner in their intercourse with the widow and her daughter; but O, what pitiful lacquered counterfeits, what Brummagem paste they had been, compared to the real gem! Mary Anne Kepp had seen varnished boots before the humble flooring of her mother’s dwelling was honoured by the
tread of Horatio Paget, but what clumsy vulgar boots, and what awkward plebeian feet had worn them! The lodger’s slim white hands and arched instep, the patrician curve of his aquiline nose, the perfect grace of his apparel, the high-bred modulation of his courteous accents, — all these had impressed Mary Anne’s tender little heart so much the more because of his poverty and loneliness. That such a man should be forgotten and deserted — that such a man should be poor and lonely, seemed so cruel a chance to the simple maiden: and then when illness overtook him, and invested him with a supreme claim upon her tenderness and pity, — then the innocent girl lavished all the treasures of a compassionate heart upon the ruined gentleman. She had no thought of fee or reward; she knew that her mother’s lodger was miserably poor, and that his payments had become more and more irregular week by week and month by month. She had no consciousness of the depth of feeling that rendered her so gentle a nurse; for her life was a busy one, and she had neither time nor inclination for any morbid brooding upon her own feelings.

  She protested warmly against the Captain’s lamentation respecting his age.

  “The idear of any gentleman calling hisself old at fifty!” she said — and Horatio shuddered at the supererogatory “r” and the “hisself,” though they proceeded from the lips of his consoler;—”you’ve got many, many years before you yet, sir, please God,” she added piously; “and there’s good friends will come forward yet to help you, I make no doubt.”

  Captain Paget shook his head peevishly.

  “You talk as if you were telling my fortune with a pack of cards,” he said. “No, my girl, I shall have only one friend to rely upon, if ever I am well enough to go outside this house; and that friend is myself. I have spent the fortune my father left me; I have spent the price of my commission; and I have parted with every object of any value that I ever possessed — in vulgar parlance, I am cleaned out, Mary Anne. But other men have spent every sixpence belonging to them, and have contrived to live pleasantly enough for half a century afterwards; and I daresay I can do as they have done. If the wind is tempered to the shorn lamb, I suppose the hawks and vultures take care of themselves. I have tried my luck as a shorn lamb, and the tempest has been very bitter for me; so I have no alternative but to join the vultures.”

  Mary Anne Kepp stared wonderingly at her mother’s lodger. She had some notion that he had been saying something wicked and blasphemous; but she was too ignorant and too innocent to follow his meaning.

  “O, pray don’t talk in that wild way, sir,” she entreated. “It makes me so unhappy to hear you go on like that.”

  “And why should anything that I say make you unhappy, Mary Anne?” asked the lodger earnestly.

  There was something in his tone that set her pale face on fire with unwonted crimson, and she bent very low over her work to hide those painful blushes. She did not know that the Captain’s tone presaged a serious address; she did not know that the grand crisis of her life was close upon her.

  Horatio Paget had determined upon making a sacrifice. The doctor had told him that he owed his life to this devoted girl; and he would have been something less than man if he had not been moved with some grateful emotion. He was grateful; and in the dreary hours of his slow recovery he had ample leisure for the contemplation of the woman to whom he owed so much, if his poor worthless life could indeed be much. He saw that she was devoted to him; that she loved him more truly than he had ever been conscious of being loved before. He saw too that she was beautiful. To an ugly woman Captain Paget might have felt extremely grateful; but he could never have thought of an ugly woman as he thought of Mary Anne Kepp. The end of his contemplation and his deliberation came to this: She was beautiful, and she loved him, and his life was utterly wretched and lonely; so he determined on proving his gratitude by a sublime sacrifice. Before the girl had lifted her face from the needlework over which she had bent to hide her blushes, Horatio Paget had asked her to be his wife. Her emotion almost overpowered her as she tried to answer him; but she struggled against it bravely, and came to the sofa on which he lay and dropped upon her knees by his side. The beggar-maid who was wooed by a king could have felt no deeper sense of her lover’s condescension than that which filled the heart of this poor simple girl as she knelt by her mother’s gentleman lodger.

  “I — to be your wife!” she exclaimed. “O, surely, sir, you cannot mean it?”

  “But I do mean it, with all my heart and soul, my dear,” answered the Captain. “I’m not offering you any grand chance, Mary Anne; for I’m about as low down in the world as a man can be. But I don’t mean to be poor all my life. Come, my dear, don’t cry,” he exclaimed, just a little impatiently — for the girl had covered her face with her hands, and tears were dropping between the poor hard-working fingers—”but lift up your head and tell me whether you will take a faded old bachelor for your husband or not.”

  Horatio Paget had admired many women in the bright years of his youth, and had fancied himself desperately in love more than once in his life; but it is doubtful whether the mighty passion had ever really possessed the Captain’s heart, which was naturally cold and sluggish, rarely fluttered by any emotion that was not engendered of selfishness. Horatio had set up an idol and had invented a religion for himself very early in life; and that idol was fashioned after his own image, and that religion had its beginning and end in his own pleasure. He might have been flattered and pleased by Miss Kepp’s agitation; but he was ill and peevish; and having all his life been subject to a profound antipathy to feminine tearfulness, the girl’s display of emotion annoyed him.

  “Is it to be yes, or no, my dear?” he asked, with, some vexation in his tone.

  Mary Anne looked up at him with tearful, frightened eyes.

  “O, yes, sir, if I can be of any use to you, and nurse you when you are ill, and work for you till I work my fingers to the bone.”

  She clenched her hands spasmodically as she spoke. In imagination she was already toiling and striving for the god of her idolatry — the GENTLEMAN whose varnished boots had been to her as a glimpse of another and a fairer world than that represented by Tulliver’s-terrace, Old Kent-road. But Captain Paget checked her enthusiasm by a gentle gesture of his attenuated hands.

  “That will do, my dear,” he murmured languidly; “I’m not very strong yet, and anything in the way of fuss is inexpressibly painful to me. Ah, my poor child,” he exclaimed, pityingly, “if you could have seen a dinner at the Marquis of Hertford’s, you would have understood how much can be achieved without fuss. But I am talking of things you don’t understand. You will be my wife; and a very good, kind, obedient little wife, I have no doubt. That is all settled. As for working for me, my love, it would be about as much as these poor little hands could do to earn me a cigar a day — and I seldom smoke less than half a dozen cigars; so, you see, that is all so much affectionate nonsense. And now you may wake your mother, my dear; for I want to take a little nap, and I can’t close my eyes while that good soul is snoring so intolerably; but not a word about our little arrangement, Mary Anne, till you and your mother are alone.”

  And hereupon the Captain spread a handkerchief over his face and subsided into a gentle slumber. The little scene had fatigued him; though it had been so quietly enacted, that Mrs. Kepp had slept on undisturbed by the brief fragment of domestic drama performed within a few yards of her uneasy arm-chair. Her daughter awoke her presently, and she resumed her needlework, while Mary Anne made some tea for the beloved sleeper. The cups and saucers made more noise to-night than they were wont to make in the girl’s careful hands. The fluttering of her heart seemed to communicate itself to the tips of her fingers, and the jingling of the crockery-ware betrayed the intensity of her emotion. He was to be her husband! She was to have a gentleman for a husband; and such a gentleman! Out of such base trifles as a West-end tailor’s coat and a West-end workman’s boots may be engendered the purest blossom of womanly love and devotion. Wisely may the modern philosopher cry that the histo
ry of the world is only a story of old clothes. Mary Anne had begun by admiring the graces of Stultz and Hoby, and now she was ready to lay down her life for the man who wore the perishing garments.

  * * * * *

  Miss Kepp obeyed her lover’s behest; and it was only on the following day, when she and her mother were alone together in the dingy little kitchen below Captain Paget’s apartments, that she informed that worthy woman of the honour which had been vouchsafed to her. And thereupon Mary Anne endured the first of the long series of disappointments which were to arise out of her affection for the penniless Captain. The widow was a woman of the world, and was obstinately blind to the advantages of a union with a ruined gentleman of fifty. “How’s he to keep you, I should like to know,” Mrs. Kepp exclaimed, as the girl stood blushing before her after having told her story; “if he can’t pay me regular? — and you know the difficulty I have had to get his money, Mary Anne. If he can’t keep hisself, how’s he to keep you?”

  “Don’t talk like that, mother,” cried the girl, wincing under her parent’s practical arguments; “you go on as if all I cared for was being fed and clothed. Besides, Captain Paget is not going to be poor always. He told me so last night, when he — —”

  “He told you so!” echoed the honest widow with unmitigated scorn; “hasn’t he told me times and often that I should have my rent regular after this week, and regular after that week, and have I ever had it regular? And ain’t I keeping him out of charity now? — a poor widow-woman like me — which I may be wanting charity myself before long: and if it wasn’t for your whimpering and going on he’d have been out of the house three weeks ago, when the doctor said he was well enough to be moved; for I ast him.”

  “And you’d have turned him out to die in the streets, mother!” cried