Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “Valentine, it is so cruel of you to talk like that.”

  “Cruel to whom?”

  “To — those — who care for you.”

  It was quite dark now; but even in the darkness Diana Paget’s head drooped a little as she said this. Mr. Hawkehurst laughed aloud.

  “Those who care for me!” he cried; “no such people ever lived. My father was a drunken scoundrel, who suffered his children to grow up about him as he would have suffered a litter of puppies to sprawl upon his hearth, only because there was less trouble in letting them lie there than in kicking them out. My mother was a good woman in the beginning, I know; but she must have been something more than a mortal woman if she had not lost some of her goodness in twelve years of such a life as she led with my father. I believe she was fond of me, poor soul; but she died six months before I ran away from a lodging in the Rules, which it is the bitterest irony to speak of as my home. Since then I have been Robert Macaire, and have about as many friends as such a man usually has.”

  “You can scarcely wonder if you have few friends,” said Miss Paget, “since there is no one in the world whom you love.”

  She watched him through the darkness after saying this, watched him closely, though it was too dark for her to see the expression of his face, and any emotion to which her words might have given rise could be betrayed only by some gesture or change of attitude. She watched him in vain, for he did not stir. But after a pause of some minutes he said slowly, —

  “Such a man as I cannot afford to love any one. What have I to offer to the woman I might pretend to love? Truth, or honour, or honesty, or constancy? Those are commodities I have never dealt in. If I know what they are, and that I have never possessed them, it is about as much as I do know of them. If I have any redeeming grace, Diana Paget, it lies in the fact that I know what a worthless wretch I am. Your father thinks he is a great man, a noble suffering creature, and that the world has ill-used him. I know that I am a scoundrel, and that let my fellow-men treat me as badly as they please, they can never give me worse usage than I deserve. And am I a man to talk about love, or to ask a woman to share my life? Good God, what a noble partner I should offer her! what a happy existence I could assure her!”

  “But if the woman loved you, she would only love you better for being unfortunate.”

  “Yes, if she was very young and foolish and romantic. But don’t you think I should be a villain if I traded on her girlish folly? She would love me for a year or two perhaps, and bear all the changes of my temper; but the day would come when she would awake from her delusion, and know that she had been cheated. She would see other women — less gifted than herself, probably — and would see the market they had made of their charms; would see them rich and honoured and happy, and would stand aside in the muddy streets to be splashed by the dirt from their carriage-wheels. And then she would consider the price for which she had bartered her youth and her beauty, and would hate the man who had cheated her. No, Diana, I am not such a villain as the world may think me. I am down in the dirt myself, and I’m used to it. I won’t drag a woman into the gutter just because I may happen to love her.”

  There was a long silence after this — a silence during which Diana Paget sat looking down at the twinkling lights of the Kursaal. Valentine lighted a second cigar and smoked it out, still in silence. The clocks struck eleven as he threw the end of his cigar away; a tiny, luminous speck, which shot through the misty atmosphere below the balcony like a falling star.

  “I may as well go and see how your father is getting on yonder,” he said, as the spark of light vanished in the darkness below. “Good night, Diana. Don’t sit too long in the cold night air; and don’t sit up for your father — there’s no knowing when he may be home.”

  The girl did not answer him. She listened to the shutting of the door as it closed behind him, and then folded her arms upon the iron rail of the balcony, laid her head upon them, and wept silently. Her life was very dreary, and it seemed to her as if the last hope which had sustained her against an unnatural despair had been taken away from her to-night.

  Twelve o’clock sounded with a feeble little carillon from one of the steeples, and still she sat with her head resting upon her folded arms. Her eyes were quite dry by this time, for with her tears were very rare, and the passion which occasioned them must needs be intense. The night air grew chill and damp; but although she shivered now and then beneath that creeping, penetrating cold which is peculiar to night air, she did not stir from her place in the balcony till she was startled by the opening of the door in the room behind her.

  All was dark within, but Diana Paget was very familiar with the footstep that sounded on the carpetless floor. It was Valentine Hawkehurst, and not her father, whose step her quick ear distinguished.

  “Diana,” he called; and then he muttered in a tone of surprise, “all dark still. Ah! she has gone to bed, I suppose. That’s a pity!” The figure in the balcony caught his eye at this moment.

  “What in goodness’ name has kept you out there all this time?” he asked; “do you want to catch your death of cold?”

  He was standing by the mantelpiece lighting a candle as he asked this unceremonious question. The light of the candle shone full upon his face when Diana came into the room, and she could see that he was paler than usual.

  “Is there anything the matter?” she asked anxiously.

  “Yes; there is a great deal the matter. You will have to leave Forêtdechêne by the earliest train to-morrow morning, on the first stage of your journey to England. Look here, my girl! I can give you just about the money that will carry you safely to London; and when you are once there, Providence must do the rest.”

  “Valentine, what do you mean?”

  “I mean, that you cannot get away from this place — you cannot dissever yourself from the people you have been living with, too soon. Come, come, don’t shiver, child. Take a few drops of this cognac, and let me see the colour come back to your face before I say any more.”

  He poured the dregs of a bottle of brandy into a glass, and made her drink the spirit. He was obliged to force the rim of the glass between her set teeth before he could succeed in this.

  “Come, Diana,” he said, after she had drunk, “you have been a pupil in the school of adversity so long, that you ought to be able to take misfortunes pretty quietly. There’s a balance struck, somehow or other, depend upon it, my girl; and the prosperous people who pay their debts have to suffer, as well as the Macaire family. I’m a scamp and a scoundrel, but I’m your true friend nevertheless, Diana; and you must promise to take my advice. Tell me that you will trust me.”

  “I have no one else to trust.”

  “No one else in this place. But in England you have your old friend, — the woman with whom you were at school. Do you think she would refuse to give you a temporary home if you sued to her in formâ pauperis?”

  “No, I don’t think she would refuse. She was very good to me. But why am I to go back to London?”

  “Because to stay here would be ruin and disgrace to you; because the tie that links you to Horatio Paget must be cut at any hazard.”

  “But why?”

  “For the best or worst of reasons. Your father has been trying a trick to-night which has been hitherto so infallible, that I suppose he had grown careless as to his execution of it. Or perhaps he took a false measure of the man he was playing with. In any case, he has been found out, and has been arrested by the police.”

  “Arrested, for cheating at cards!” exclaimed the girl, with a look of unspeakable disgust and horror. Valentine’s arm was ready to support her, if she had shown any symptom of fainting; but she did not. She stood erect before him, very pale but firm as a rock.

  “And you want me to go away?” she said.

  “Yes, I want you to disappear from this place before you become notorious as your father’s daughter. That would be about the worst reputation which you could carry through life. Believe me th
at I wish you well, Diana, and be ruled by me.”

  “I will,” she answered, with a kind of despairing resignation. “It seems very dreary to go back to England to face the world all alone. But I will do as you tell me.”

  She did not express any sympathy for her father, then languishing under arrest, whereby she proved herself very wicked and unwomanly, no doubt. But neither womanly virtues nor Christian graces are wont to flourish in the school in which Diana Paget had been reared. She obeyed Valentine Hawkehurst to the letter, without any sentimental lamentations whatever. Her scanty possessions were collected, and neatly packed, in little more than an hour. At three o’clock she lay down in her tawdry little bed-chamber to take what rest she might in the space of two hours. At six she stood by Valentine Hawkehurst on the platform of the railway station, with her face hidden by a brown gauze veil, waiting till the train was made ready to start.

  It was after she was seated in the carriage that she spoke for the first time of her father.

  “Is it likely to go very hard with him?” she asked.

  “I hope not. We must try to pull him through it as well as we can. The charge may break down at the first examination. Good bye.”

  “Good bye, Valentine.”

  They had just time to shake hands before the train moved off. Another moment and Miss Paget and her fellow-passengers were speeding towards Liége.

  Mr. Hawkehurst drew his hat over his eyes as he walked away from the station.

  “The world will seem very dull and empty to me without her,” he said to himself. “I have done an unselfish thing for once in my life. I wonder whether the recording angel will carry that up to my credit, and whether the other fellow will blot out any of the old score in consideration of this one little bit of self-sacrifice.”

  BOOK THE THIRD. HEAPING UP RICHES.

  CHAPTER I.

  A FORTUNATE MARRIAGE.

  Eleven years had passed lightly enough over the glossy raven locks of Mr. Philip Sheldon. There are some men with whom Time deals gently, and he was one of them. The hard black eyes had lost none of their fierce brightness; the white teeth flashed with all their old brilliancy; the complexion, which had always been dusky of hue, was perhaps a shade or two darker; and the fierce black eyes seemed all the blacker by reason of the purple tinge beneath them. But the Philip Sheldon of to-day was, taken altogether, a handsomer man than the Philip Sheldon of eleven years ago.

  Within those eleven years the Bloomsbury dentist had acquired a higher style of dress and bearing, and a certain improvement of tone and manner. He was still an eminently respectable man, and a man whose chief claim to the esteem of his fellows lay in the fact of his unimpeachable respectability; but his respectability of to-day, as compared with that of eleven years before, was as the respectability of Tyburnia when contrasted with that of St. Pancras. He was not an aristocratic-looking man, or an elegant man; but you felt, as you contemplated him, that the bulwarks of the citadel of English respectability are defended by such as he.

  Mr. Sheldon no longer experimentalised with lumps of beeswax and plaster-of-paris. All the appalling paraphernalia of his cruel art had long since been handed over to an aspiring young dentist, together with the respectable house in Fitzgeorge-street, the furniture, and — the connexion. And thus had ended Philip Sheldon’s career as a surgeon-dentist. Within a year of Tom Halliday’s death his disconsolate widow had given her hand to her first sweetheart, not forgetful of her dead husband or ungrateful for much kindness and affection experienced at his hands, but yielding rather to Philip’s suit because she was unable to advance any fair show of reason whereby she might reject him.

  “I told you, she’d be afraid to refuse you,” said George Sheldon, when the dentist came home from Barlingford, where Tom Halliday’s widow was living with her mother.

  Philip had answered his brother’s questions rather ambiguously at first, but in the end had been fain to confess that he had asked Mrs. Halliday to marry him, and that his suit had prospered.

  “That way of putting it is not very complimentary to me,” he said, drawing himself up rather stiffly. “Georgy and I were attached to each other long ago, and it is scarcely strange if — —”

  “If you should make a match of it, Tom being gone. Poor old Tom! He and I were such cronies. I’ve always had an idea that neither you nor the other fellow quite understood that low fever of his. You did your best, no doubt; but I think you ought to have pulled him through somehow. However, that’s not a pleasant subject to talk of just now; so I’ll drop it, and wish you joy, Phil. It’ll be rather a good match for you, I fancy,” added George, contemplating his brother with a nervous twitching of his lips, which suggested that his mouth watered as he thought of Philip’s good fortune.

  “It’s a very nice thing you drop into, old fellow, isn’t it?” he asked presently, seeing that his brother was rather disinclined to discuss the subject.

  “You know the state of my affairs well enough to be sure that I couldn’t afford to marry a poor woman,” answered Philip.

  “And that it has been for a long time a vital necessity with you to marry a rich one,” interjected his brother.

  “Georgy will have a few hundreds, and — —”

  “A few thousands, you mean, Phil,” cried Sheldon the younger with agreeable briskness; “shall I tot it up for you?”

  He was always eager to “tot” things up, and would scarcely have shrunk from setting down the stars of heaven in trim double columns of figures, had it seemed to his profit to do so.

  “Let us put it in figures, Phil,” he said, getting his finger-tips in order for the fray. “There’s the money for Hyley Farm — twelve thousand three hundred and fifty, I had it from poor Tom’s own lips. Then there’s that little property on Sheepfield Common — say seven-fifty, eh? — well, say seven hundred, if you like to leave a margin; and then there are the insurances — three thou’ in the Alliance, fifteen hundred in the Phoenix, five hundred in the Suffolk Friendly; the total of which, my dear boy, is eighteen thousand five hundred pounds; and a very nice thing for you to drop into, just as affairs were looking about as black as they could look.”

  “Yes,” answered Mr. Sheldon the elder, who appeared by no means to relish this “totting-up” of his future wife’s fortune; “I have no doubt I ought to consider myself a very lucky man.”

  “So Barlingford folks will say when they hear of the business. And now

  I hope you’re not going to forget your promise to me.”

  “What promise?”

  “That if you ever did get a stroke of luck, I should have a share of it — eh, Phil?”

  Mr. Sheldon caressed his chin, and looked thoughtfully at the fire.

  “If my wife lets me have the handling of any of her money, you may depend upon it I’ll do what I can for you,” he said, after a pause.

  “Don’t say that, Phil,” remonstrated George. “When a man says he’ll do what he can for you, it’s a sure sign he means to do nothing. Friendship and brotherly feeling are at an end when it comes to a question of ‘ifs’ and ‘cans.’ If your wife lets you have the handling of any of her money!” cried the lawyer, with unspeakable derision; “that’s too good a joke for you to indulge in with me. Do you think I believe you will let that poor little woman keep custody of her money a day after she is your wife, or that you will let her friends tie it up for her before she marries you? No, Phil, you didn’t lay your plans for that.”

  “What do you mean by my laying plans?” asked the dentist.

  “That’s a point we won’t discuss, Philip,” answered the lawyer coolly. “You and I understand each other very well without entering into unpleasant details. You promised me a year ago — before Tom Halliday’s death — that if you ever came into a good thing, I should share in it. You have come into an uncommonly good thing, and I shall expect you to keep your promise.”

  “Who says I am going to break it?” demanded Philip Sheldon with an injured air. “You shouldn’
t be in such a hurry to cry out, George. You take the tone of a social Dick Turpin, and might as well hold a pistol to my head while you’re about it. Don’t alarm yourself. I have told you I will do what I can for you. I cannot, and I shall not, say more.”

  The two men looked at each other. They were in the habit of taking the measure of all creation in their own eminently practical way, and each took the other’s measure now. After having done which, they parted with all cordial expressions of good-will and brotherly feeling. George went back to his dusty chambers in Gray’s Inn, and Philip prepared for his return to Barlingford and his marriage with Georgina Halliday.

  For ten years Georgy had been Philip Sheldon’s wife, and she had found no reason to complain of her second choice. The current of her life had flowed smoothly enough since her first lover had become her husband. She still wore moire-antique dresses and gold chains; and if the dresses were of more simple fashion, and the chains were less obtrusively displayed, she had to thank Mr. Sheldon for the refinement in her taste. Her views of life in general had expanded under Mr. Sheldon’s influence. She no longer thought a high-wheeled dog-cart and a skittish mare the acme of earthly splendour; for she had a carriage and pair at her service, and a smart little page-boy to leap off the box in attendance on her when she paid visits or went shopping. Instead of the big comfortable old-fashioned farmhouse at Hyley, with its mysterious passages and impenetrable obscurities in the way of cupboards, she occupied an intensely new detached villa in Bayswater, in which the eye that might chance to grow weary of sunshine and glitter would have sought in vain for a dark corner wherein to repose itself.