Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “Nothing can be more foolish than to discuss the past, Mr. Fairfax,” replied Clarissa, in a low voice that trembled a little. “You have made me do wrong more than once in my life. There must be an end of this. What would my husband think, if he could hear you? what would he think of me for listening to you? Let me pass, if you please; and God grant that we may never meet again after to-night!”

  “God grant that we may never part, Clarissa! O, my love, my love, for pity’s sake be reasonable! We are not children to play fast and loose with our lives. You love me, Clary. No sweet-spoken pretences, no stereotyped denials, will convince me. You love me, my darling, and the world is all before us. I have mapped-out our future; no sorrow or discredit shall ever come nigh you — trust a lover’s foresight for that. Whatever difficulties may lie in our pathway are difficulties that I will face and conquer — alone. You have only to forget that you have ever been Daniel Granger’s wife, and leave Paris with me to-night.”

  “Mr. Fairfax! are you mad?”

  “Never more reasonable — never so much in earnest. Come with me, Clarissa. It is not a sacrifice that I ask from you: I offer you a release. Do you think there is any virtue or beauty in your present life, or any merit in continuing it? From first to last, your existence is a lie. Do you think a wedding-ring redeems the honour of a woman who sells herself for money? There is no slavery more degrading than the bondage of such an alliance.”

  “Open the door, Mr. Fairfax, and let me go!”

  His reproaches stung her to the quick; they were so bitterly true.

  “Not till you have heard me, my darling — not till you have heard me out.”

  His tone changed all at once, softening into ineffable tenderness. He told her of his love with words of deeper passion than he had ever spoken yet — words that went home to the heart that loved him. For a moment, listening to that impassioned pleading, it seemed to Clarissa that this verily was life indeed — that to be so loved was in itself alone the perfect joy and fulness of existence, leaving nothing more to be desired, making shame as nothing in the balance. In that one moment the guilty heart was well-nigh yielding; the bewildered brain could scarcely maintain the conflict of thought and feeling. Then suddenly this mental agony changed to a strange dulness, a mist rose between Clarissa and the eager face of her lover. She was nearer fainting than she had ever been in her life before.

  George Fairfax saw her face whiten, and the slender figure totter ever so slightly. In a moment a strong arm was round her. The weary head sank on his shoulder.

  “My darling,” he whispered, “why not leave Paris to-night? It cannot be too soon. Your husband is away. We shall have a start of two or three days, and avoid all risk of pursuit.”

  “Not quite,” said a voice close behind him; and looking round, George Fairfax saw one of the folding-doors open, and Daniel Granger standing on the threshold. The locked outer door had availed the traitor nothing. Mr. Granger had come upstairs with the porter, who carried a bunch of duplicate keys in his pocket.

  Clarissa gave a sudden cry, which rose in the next instant to a shrill scream. Two men were struggling in the doorway, grappling each other savagely for one dreadful minute of confusion and agony. Then one fell heavily, his head crashing against the angle of the doorway, and lay at full length, with his white face looking up to the ceiling.

  This was George Fairfax.

  Clarissa threw herself upon her knees beside the prostrate figure.

  “George! George!” she cried piteously.

  It was the first time she had ever uttered his Christian name, except in her dreams; and yet it came to her lips as naturally in that moment of supreme agony as if it had been their every-day utterance.

  “George! George!” she cried again, bending down to gaze at the white blank face dimly visible in the firelight; and then, with a still sharper anguish, “He is dead!”

  The sight of that kneeling figure, the sound of that piteous imploring voice, was well-nigh maddening to Daniel Granger. He caught his wife by the arm, and dragged her up from her knees with no tender hand.

  “You have killed him,” she said.

  “I hope I have.”

  Whatever latent passion there was in this man’s nature was at white heat now. An awful fury possessed him. He seemed transformed by the intensity of his anger. His bulky figure rose taller; his full gray eyes shone with a pitiless light under the straight stern brows.

  “Yes,” he said, “I hope I have killed your lover.”

  “My lover!”

  “Your lover — the man with whom you were to have left Paris to-night. Your lover — the man you have met in this convenient rendezvous, day after day for the last two months. Your lover — the man you loved before you did me the honour to accept the use of my fortune, and whom you have loved ever since.”

  “Yes,” cried Clarissa, with a wild hysterical laugh, “my lover! You are right. I am the most miserable woman upon earth, for I love him.”

  “I am glad you do not deny it. Stand out of the way, if you please, and let me see if I have killed him.”

  There were a pair of half-burned wax candles on the mantelpiece. Mr. Granger lighted one of them, and then knelt down beside the prostrate figure with the candle in his hand. George Fairfax had given no sign of life as yet. There had not been so much as a groan.

  He opened his enemy’s waistcoat, and laid his hand above the region of the heart. Yes, there was life still — a dull beating. The wretch was not dead.

  While he knelt thus, with his hand upon George Fairfax’s heart, a massive chain, loosened from its moorings, fell across his wrist. Attached to the chain there was a locket — a large gold locket with a diamond cross — one of the ornaments that Daniel Granger had given to his wife.

  He remembered it well. It was a very trifle among the gifts he had showered upon her; but he remembered it well. If this had been the one solitary gem he had given to his wife, he could not have been quicker to recognise it, or more certain of its identity.

  He took it in the palm of his hand and touched the spring, holding the candle still in the other hand. The locket flew open, and he saw the ring of silky brown hair and the inscription, “From Clarissa.”

  He looked up at his wife with a smile — such a smile! “You might have afforded your lover something better than a secondhand souvenir,” he said.

  Clarissa’s eyes wandered from the still white face, with its awful closed eyes, only to rest for a moment on the unlucky locket.

  “I gave that to my sister-in-law,” she said indifferently. “Heaven only knows how he came by it.” And then, in a different tone, she asked, “Why don’t you do something for him? Why don’t you fetch some one? Do you want him to die?”

  “Yes. Do you think anything less than his death would satisfy me? Don’t alarm yourself; I am not going to kill him. I was quite ready to do it just now in hot blood. But he is safe enough now. What good would there be in making an end of him? There are two of you in it.”

  “You can kill me, if you like,” said Clarissa “Except for my child’s sake,

  I have little wish to live.”

  “For your child’s sake!” echoed her husband scornfully. “Do you think there is anything in common between my son and you, after to-night?”

  He dropped the locket on George Fairfax’s breast with a contemptuous gesture, as if he had been throwing away a handful of dirt. That folly had cost dearly enough.

  “I’ll go and fetch some one,” he said. “Don’t let your distraction make you forget that the man wants all the air he can get. You had better stand away from him.”

  Clarissa obeyed mechanically. She stood a little way off, staring at that lifeless figure, while Daniel Granger went to fetch the porter. The house was large, and at this time in the evening for the most part untenanted, and Austin’s painting-room was over the arched carriage-way. Thus it happened that no one had heard that fall of George Fairfax’s.

  Mr. Granger explained briefly th
at the gentleman had had a fall, and was stunned — would the porter fetch the nearest doctor? The man looked a him rather suspiciously. The lovely lady’s arrival in the gloaming; a locked door; this middle-aged Englishman’s eagerness to get into the rooms; and now a fall and the young Englishman is disabled. The leaf out of a romance began to assume a darker aspect. There had been murder done, perhaps, up yonder. The porter’s comprehensive vision surveyed the things that might be — the house fallen into evil repute by reason of this crime, and bereft of lodgers. The porter was an elderly man, and did not care to shift his household gods.

  “What have they come to do up there?” he asked. “I think I had better fetch the sergent de ville.”

  “You are quite at liberty to do that, provided you bring a doctor along with him,” replied Daniel Granger coolly, and then turned on his heel and walked upstairs again.

  He roamed through the empty rooms with a candle in his hand until he found a bottle of water, some portion of which he dashed into his enemy’s face, kneeling by his side to do it, but with a cool off-hand air, as if he were reviving a dog, and that a dog upon which he set no value.

  George Fairfax opened his eyes, very slowly, and groaned aloud.

  “O God, my head!” he said. “What a blow!”

  He had a sensation of lying at the bottom of a steep hill — on a sharp inclined plane, as it were, with his feet uppermost — a sense of suffocation, too, as if his throat had been full of blood. There seemed to him to be blood in his eyes also; and he could only see things in a dim cloudy way — a room — what room he could not remember — one candle flaring on the mantelpiece, and the light of an expiring fire.

  Of the things that had happened to him immediately before that struggle and that fall, he had, for the time being, no memory. But by slow degrees it dawned upon him that this was Austin Lovel’s painting-room.

  “Where the devil are you, Austin?” he asked impatiently.

  “Can’t you pick a fellow up?”

  A grasp stronger than ever Austin Lovel’s had been, dragged him to his feet, and half led, half pushed him into the nearest chair. He sat there, staring blankly before him. Clarissa had moved away from him, and stood amid the deep shadows at the other end of the studio, waiting for her doom. It seemed to her to matter very little what that doom should be. Perfect ruin had come upon her. The porter came in presently with a doctor — a little old grey-headed man, who wore spectacles, and had an ancient doddering manner not calculated to inspire beholders with any great belief in his capacity.

  He bowed to Mr. Granger in an old-fashioned ceremonious way, and went over to the patient.

  “A fall, I believe you say, monsieur!” he said.

  “Yes, a fall. He struck his head against the angle of that doorway.”

  Mr. Granger omitted to state that it was a blow between the eyes from his clenched fist which had felled George Fairfax — a blow sent straight out from the powerful shoulder.

  “There was no seizure — no fit of any kind, I hope?”

  “No.”

  The patient had recovered himself considerably by this time, and twitched his wrist rather impatiently from the little doctor’s timid grasp.

  “I am well enough now,” he said in a thick voice. “There was no occasion to send for a medical man. I stumbled at the doorway yonder, and knocked my head in falling — that’s all.”

  The Frenchman was manipulating Mr. Fairfax’s cranium with cautious fingers.

  “There is a considerable swelling at the back of the skull,” he said. “But there appears to have been another blow on the forehead. There is a puffiness, and a slight abrasion of the skin.”

  Mr. Fairfax extricated his head from this investigation by standing up suddenly out of reach of the small doctor. He staggered a little as he rose to his feet, but recovered himself after a moment or so, and stood firmly enough, with his hand resting on the back of the chair.

  “If you will be good enough to accept this by way of fee,” he said, slipping a napoleon into the doctor’s hand, “I need give you no farther trouble.”

  The old man looked rather suspiciously from Mr. Fairfax to Mr. Granger and then back again. There was something queer in the business evidently, but a napoleon was a napoleon, and his fees were neither large nor numerous. He coughed feebly behind his hand, hesitated a little, and then with a sliding bow slipped from the room.

  The porter lingered, determined to see the end of the romance, at any rate.

  It was not long.

  “Are you ready to come away?” Daniel Granger asked his wife, in a cold stern voice. And then, turning to George Fairfax, he said, “You know where to find me, sir, when you wish to settle the score between us.”

  “I shall call upon you to-morrow morning, Mr. Granger.”

  Clarissa looked at George Fairfax piteously for a moment, wondering if he had been much hurt — if there were any danger to be feared from the effects or that crushing fall. Never for an instant of her life had she meant to be false to her husband; but she loved this man; and her secret being discovered now, she deemed that the bond between her and Daniel Granger was broken. She looked at George Fairfax with that brief yearning look, just long enough to see that he was deadly pale; and then left the room with her husband, obeying him mechanically They went down the darksome staircase, which had grown so familiar to Clarissa, out into the empty street. There was a hackney carriage waiting near the archway — the carriage that had brought Mr. Granger. He put his wife into it without a word, and took his seat opposite to her; and so they drove home in profound silence.

  Clarissa went straight to her room — the dressing-room in which Daniel Granger had talked to her the night before ha went to England. How well she remembered his words, and her own inclination to tell him everything! If she had only obeyed that impulse — if she had only confessed the truth — the shame and ignominy of to-night would have been avoided. There would have been no chance of that fatal meeting with George Fairfax; her husband would have sheltered her from danger and temptation — would have saved her from herself.

  Vain regrets. The horror of that scene was still present with her — must remain so present with her till the end of her life, she thought. Those two men grappling each other, and then the fall — the tall figure crashing down with the force of a descending giant, as it had seemed to that terror-stricken spectator. For a long time she sat thinking of that awful moment — thinking of it with a concentration which left no capacity for any other thought in her mind. Her maid had come to her, and removed her out-of-door garments, and stirred the fire, and had set out a dainty little tea-tray on a table close at hand, hovering about her mistress with a sympathetic air, conscious that there was something amiss. But Clarissa had been hardly aware of the girl’s presence. She was living over again the agony of that moment in which she thought George Fairfax was dead.

  This could not last for ever. She awoke by and by to the thought of her child, with her husband’s bitter words ringing in her ears, —

  “Do you think there is anything in common between my son and you, after to-night?”

  “Perhaps they will shut me out of my nursery,” she thought.

  The rooms sacred to Lovel Granger were on the same floor as her own — she had stipulated that it should be so. She went out into the corridor from which all the rooms opened. All was silent. The boy had gone to bed, of course, by this time; very seldom had she been absent at the hour of his retirement. It had been her habit to spend a stolen half-hour in the nursery just before dressing for dinner, or to have her boy brought to her dressing-room — one of the happiest half-hours in her day. No one barred her entrance to the nursery. Mrs. Brobson was sitting by the fire, making-believe to be busy at needlework, with the under-nurse in attendance — a buxom damsel, whose elbows rested on the table as she conversed with her superior. Both looked up in some slight confusion at Clarissa’s entrance. They had been talking about her, she thought, but with a supreme indifference. No pe
tty household slander could trouble her in her great sorrow. She went on towards the inner room, where her darling slept, the head-nurse following obsequiously with a candle. In the night-nursery there was only the subdued light of a shaded lamp.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Brobson, but I don’t want any more light,” Clarissa said quietly. “I am going to sit with baby for a little while. Take the candle away, please; it may wake him.”

  It was the first time she had spoken since she had left the Rue du Chevalier Bayard. Her own voice sounded strange to her; and yet its tone could scarcely have betrayed less agitation.

  “The second dinner-bell has rung, ma’am,” Mrs. Brobson said, with a timorously-suggestive air; “I don’t know whether you are aware.”

  “Yes, I know, but I am not going down to dinner; I have a wretched headache. You can tell Target to say so, if they send for me.”

  “Yes, ma’am; but you’ll have something sent up, won’t you?”

  “Not yet; by and by, perhaps, I’ll take a cup of tea in my dressing-room. Go and tell Target, please, Mrs. Brobson; Mr. Granger may be waiting dinner.”

  She was so anxious to get rid of the woman, to be alone with her baby. She sat down by the cot. O, inestimable treasure! had she held him so lightly as to give any other a place in her heart? To harbour any guilty thought was to have sinned against this white-souled innocent. If those clear eyes, which looked up from her breast sometimes with such angelic tenderness, could have read the secrets of her sinful heart, how could she have dared to meet their steadfast gaze? To-night that sleeping baby seemed something more to her than her child; he was her judge.

  “O, my love, my love, I am not good enough to have you for my son!” she murmured, sobbing, as she knelt by his side, resting her tired head upon his pillow, thinking idly how sweet it would be to die thus, and make an end of all this evil.