Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  ‘I am a poet, or I am nothing,’ he told his friend, ‘Aut Cæsar aut nullus.’

  ‘That was a first-rate motto —— for Cæsar,’ said the journalist, ‘but I think it’s rather misleading for fellows of average talent. The result is so often nullus.’

  Mr. Clare was on the point of asking his friend to take another brandy and soda, but at this remark he coiled up, as the Yankees say. Average talent, indeed. Imagine one of Mr. Swinburne’s most facile plagiarists hearing himself called a fellow of average talent.

  Edward Clare would not yoke his noble mind to the newspaper plough, nor would he stoop even so low as to write prose. A wretched publisher had told hint that if he would write children’s books there was a field open for him; but Edward left that publisher’s office bursting with offended pride.

  ‘Children’s books, forsooth,’ he muttered. ‘I suppose if Catnach had been alive he would have asked me to write halfpenny ballads.’

  So having failed to carve his way to fame, or to make a regular income, and having wasted the money he had earned on kid gloves and stalls at fashionable theatres, Mr. Clare conceived an intense disgust for the metropolis, which had treated him so scurvily, and turned his thoughts homewards to woodland and moor, to trout stream and meadow. He found that the poetic temperament required rural scenery, blue skies, and pure air. Heine had contrived to live and write in Paris, and so had De Musset: but Paris is not London. Edward made up his mind that the streets and squares of Bloomsbury were antagonistic to poetry. No bird could sing in such a cage. True that Milton had composed ‘Paradise Lost’ within close city lanes, under the clamorous bells of St. Bride’s, but then Milton was blind, and Edward Clare was like a popular lady novelist of the present day, who begged that she might not be compared with Dickens. He would have protested against being put on a level with such a passionless bard as Milton.

  ‘I shall never achieve any great work in London,’ he told himself. ‘For my magnum opus I must have the tranquillity of wood and moor.’

  He had quite made up his mind that he was to write a, treat poem, though he had settled neither the subject nor the form. He was waiting for the divine breath to inspire him. The poem was to be as popular as the ‘Idylls of the Ding,’ but as passionate as ‘Chastelard.’ He was not going to write in a goody-goody strain to please anybody.

  Edward Clare felt himself a, little like the prodigal son, when he came home to the Vicarage after this abortive campaign in the field of literature. If he had not wasted his substance, it was only because he had little substance to waste. He had spent all that his father had sent him, and had received small additions to this allowance out of his mother’s scantily-supplied purse. He came home penniless and dispirited: and he felt rather offended that no fatted calf was slain to do him honour, and that his parents received him with an air of unmistakable despondency.

  ‘Really, my dear Edward, you ought to begin to think of some definite course,’ said the father It may be too late for a profession, but the Government offices — —’

  ‘Red tape and drudgery, with a salary that would scarcely afford dry bread and a garret,’ interrupted Edward contemptuously. ‘No, my dear father, as a poet I will stand or fall.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ sighed the Vicar, ‘for at present it looks like falling.’

  What Edward really meant was that he would depend upon his father until the public and the critics, or the critics and the public, could be brought to acknowledge him as one of the new lights in the starry world of imagination. Mr. Clare understood this, and felt that it was rather hard upon him as a man of limited means.

  Edward arrived at Hazlehurst only the night before Mrs. Treverton’s dinner-party.

  ‘Oh, yes, I’m going,’ he told Celia, when she asked him if he had accepted Laura’s invitation. I want to see how this Treverton fellow plays the country squire.’

  ‘As if to the manner born,’ answered Celia. ‘The part suits him admirably. I don’t want to wound your feelings, Ted, dear, but Mr. Treverton and Laura are the happiest couple I ever saw.’

  ‘“These violent delights have violent ends,

  And in their triumph die,”’

  quoted Edward, with a diabolical sneer. ‘I am not going to envy them their happiness, my dear. Whatever feeling I once entertained for Laura is dead and buried. A woman who could sell herself, as she has done—’

  ‘Sell herself! Oh, Ted, how can you say anything so dreadful? I tell you she is devotedly attached to John Treverton.’

  ‘And he rewards her devotion by running away from her before the end of their honey-moon; and when he turns up again, after an interval of six months or so, during which nobody knows what he has been doing, she receives him with open arms. A curious couple assuredly. But an estate worth fourteen thousand pounds a year excuses a good deal of eccentricity; and I can quite understand that Mr. and Mrs. Treverton are immensely popular in the neighbourhood.’

  ‘They are,’ said Celia, warmly; ‘and they deserve to be. If you knew how good they are to their tenants, their servants, and the poor.’

  ‘Goodness of that kind is a very sagacious investment, my unsophisticated child. It may coat a man five per cent. of his income, and it buys him respectability.’

  ‘Don’t be bitter, Edward.’

  ‘I am a man of the world, Celia, and not to be hoodwinked by shams and appearances.’

  ‘Then you’ll never be a poet,’ protested his sister. ‘A man who doesn’t believe that good deeds come from the hearts of men — a man who looks for an unworthy motive behind every generous action — such a man as that will never be a great poet. It is quite too dreadful to hear you talk, Edward. That odious London has corrupted you.’

  Edward went to the dinner next day, but not with his family. He came alone, and rather late, in order to observe the effect of his entrance upon Laura Treverton. Alas, for his wounded vanity! She welcomed him with a frank smile and a friendly grasp of the hand.

  ‘I am so glad you have come back in time to be with us to-night,’ she said.

  ‘I came back on purpose for to-night,’ he answered, throwing as much tenderness as he could into a common-place remark.

  ‘I think you know every one here. I need not introduce you.’

  ‘I know the local magnates, of course. But I daresay there are some of your husband’s swell friends who are strangers to me.’

  ‘There are none of my husband’s friends,’ answered Laura, ‘we are strictly local.’

  ‘Then I’m afraid you’ll find the evening rather uphill work.’

  ‘I expect you to help me through it by the brilliancy of your conversation,’ Laura answered, lightly, as Edward moved aside to make way for a new arrival.

  He had contrived to make her uncomfortable for a minute or so, for that speech of his had set her wondering why her husband had no friends worth summoning to his side now that fortune smiled upon him.

  The dinner party was not a very joyous festivity, but everybody felt, nevertheless, that it was a great social success. Lady Parker, in ruby velvet and diamonds, and Lady Barker in black satin and rubies, made two central lights round which the lesser planets revolved. There was the usual county and local talk; reprobation against the farming parson of a neighbouring parish for having treacherously trapped and slain four cub foxes since last season; cordial approval of a magistrate who had sent a lad of nine to jail for stealing three turnips, and who had been maligned and held up to ridicule by the radical newspapers for that necessary assertion of the rights of property; a good deal of discussion as to the prospects of the hunting season; a good deal of talk about horses and dogs, and a little about the outside world, and its chances of peace or war, famine or plenty. The party was too large for general conversation, but now and then the subdued Babel of tongues became concentrated here and there into a focus, and a gentle hush descended on a select few listening eagerly to a single talker. This happened oftenest at that part of the table near which Edward Clar
e was sitting, next but one to John Treverton. Mr. and Mrs. Treverton were seated opposite each other in the middle of the long table, with all the more important guests clustered about them in a constellation of local splendour, leaving the two ends of the table for youth and obscurity. Edward Clare had got himself into the constellation by a fluke; a portly justice of the peace having suddenly succumbed to gout, and sent an apology at the last moment; whereupon Laura had despatched Celia with a message to the butler, and had contrived that there should be a shuffling of cards, and that Edward Clare should be put into this place of honour.

  She did this from a benevolent desire to soothe his wounded feeling, suspecting that there might be some soreness in his mind at this first meeting with her in her new character, and knowing that vanity made the larger half of this young man’s sensibility.

  Edward had rewarded her by talking remarkably well. He was fresh from London, and well posted in all that is most interesting in the butterfly life of a London season. He told them all about the pictures of the year, let fly some sharp arrows of ridicule against the new school of painting, described the belle of the season, and let his hearers into the secret of her popularity.

  ‘The curious part of the story,’ he said, in conclusion, ‘is that nobody ever considered the lady pretty till she burst all at once upon society as the one perfect creature that the world had seen since the Venus was dug up at Milo. She never was thought so in her own world. No one was more surprised than her own family when she was elected queen of beauty, unless it was herself. Her mother never suspected it. At school she was considered rather plain than otherwise. They say she was married off early because she was the dowdy of the family, and now she cannot take her drive in the park without all London craning its neck and straining its eyes to bet a look at her. When she goes into society the women stand upon chairs to stare at her over other people’s shoulders. I suppose they want to find out how it’s done. This kind of popularity may seem very pleasant in the abstract, but I think it’s rather hard upon the lady.’

  ‘Why hard upon her?’ Inquired John Treverton.

  ‘Because there’s no salary goes with the situation. The belle of the season ought to get something to lighten the expenses of her year of office, like the Lord Mayor. See what is expected of her! Every eye is upon her. Every woman in London looks to her as a model of taste and elegance, and eagerly strives to dress after her. How is she to put a limit upon her milliner’s bill, when she knows that all the society journals are lying in wait to describe her last gown, to eulogise her newest bonnet, to write all epigram upon, her parasol, to be ecstatic about her boots. Can She ride in a lured carriage? No. Can she be absent from Goodwood, or missing at cowes? No. She must die standing. I say that since she furnishes the public with interest and amusement — much better than the Lord Mayor does, by the way — she ought to bet a handsome allowance out of the public purse.’

  When he had exhausted pictures, and reigning beauties, and the winner of the Leger, Edward began to talk about crime.

  ‘People in London have a knack of wearing a subject to tatters,’ he said. ‘I thought neither the newspapers nor the public would ever get tired of talking about the Chicot murder.’

  ‘The Chicot murder. Ah, that was the ballet dancer, was it not?’ enquired Lady Barker, who was so interested in this vivacious young man on her right hand that she had hardly given due attention to Mr. Treverton, who was on her left. ‘I remember feeling rather interested in that mystery. A diabolical murder, certainly. And how stupid the police must have been not to find the murderer.’

  ‘Or how clever the murderer to sink his identity so completely as to give the police the slip,’ suggested Edward.

  ‘Oh, but he must have got away to the colonies, or somewhere, surely,’ cried Lady Barker. There are so many vessels leaving England now-a-days. You don’t imagine for a moment that the murderer of that wretched woman remained in England?’

  ‘I think it highly probable that he did, discreetly hidden under some outer shell of intense respectability.’

  ‘I suppose you think it was the husband?’ put in Sir Joshua Parker, from his place at Laura’s right hand.

  ‘I don’t see any ground for doubt,’ replied Edward. ‘If the husband was not guilty, why should be disappear the moment the crime was discovered?’

  ‘He may have had reasons of his own for wishing to get away, reasons unconnected with the mode and manner of his wife’s death,’ hazarded John Treverton.

  ‘What reasons could he have had strong enough to induce him to run the risk of being thought a murderer?’ asked Edward, incredulously. ‘No innocent man would place himself in such a position as that.’

  ‘Not knowingly,’ said John; ‘but this plan may have acted on impulse, without reckoning the consequences of his act.’

  ‘To admit that would be to consider him a fool,’ retorted Edward; ‘and from all I have heard of the fellow, he belonged to the other half of humanity.’

  ‘You mean that he was a knave?’

  ‘I mean that he was a fellow who knew the ropes. He was not the sort of man to find his wife’s throat cut, and to make a bolt, leaving every newspaper in London free to brand him as a coward and a murderer,’ said Edward, decisively.

  John Treverton pursued the subject no further. Lady Parker, who sat at his left, had just begun to question him about a late importation of Jersey cows, in which she was deeply interested; where-upon he favoured her with a detailed account of their braces and merits. Laura happened to look up at Edward Clare as he finished speaking, and the expression of his countenance startled and shocked her. Never had she seen so keen a look of malice in any living, face. Only in the face of Judas in an old Italian picture had she ever beheld such craft and such venom. And that malignant look — brief as a flash of lightning — glanced at her unconscious husband, whose face was gravely courteous as he bent his handsome head a little to tell Lady Parker about the Jersey cows.

  ‘Good heavens!’ thought Laura, with a sense of absolute fear. ‘Is it possible that this young man can be so bitter against my husband because I loved him best? What could the love be like that could engender such malice!’

  Later in the evening when Edward came and hung over the ottoman where Laura was sitting, she turned from him with an involuntary movement of disgust.

  ‘Have I offended you?’ he asked, in a low voice.

  ‘Yes. I saw a look in your face at dinner that told me you dislike my husband.’

  ‘Do you expect me to love him — very dearly — at first? You must at least give me time to get accustomed to the idea that he is your husband. Time cures most wounds. Give me time, Laura, and do not judge me too hardly. I possess the poet’s curse, a mind more sensitive than the minds of ordinary men — dowered with the love of love, the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn.’

  ‘I hope you will leave your dowry outside when you come across this threshold,’ said Laura, with a smile that was more contemptuous than relenting. ‘I can accept friendship from no one who does not like my husband.’

  ‘Then I will struggle with the original man within me, and try to like John Treverton. Believe me, Laura, I want to be your friend — in honest and unequivocal friendship.’

  ‘That is the kind of friendship I expect from your father’s son,’ said Laura, in a gentler tone.

  She was too happy, too secure in her own happiness, to be unforgiving. She reasoned with herself — arguing against instinct and conviction — and told herself that Edward Clare’s malevolent look had meant less than it seemed to mean.

  Edward looked on, and saw John Treverton play his part as host and master in a manner that he was compelled to admit was irreproachable. The new squire showed none of the pride in him-self and his surroundings which might have been anticipated in a man unexpectedly raised to the possession of a large fortune. He did not brag of his wine, or his horses, his pictures, or his farm. He accepted his position as quietly, and filled it as naturally, as if h
e had been born heir to an entailed, unalienable estate.

  ‘Upon my word, they are a charming couple,’ said Sir Joshua Parker, in his fat voice, ‘and an acquisition to our county families.’

  Sir Joshua was very fond of talking about our county families, although his own establishment in that galaxy had been but recent, his father and grandfather having made their fortunes in the soap-boiling business, amidst the slums of Lambeth. Lady Barker, the dowager, was of the vieille riche, having been a Trefusis and an heiress when she married the late General Sir Rodney Barker, K.C.B.

  After that one little flash of anger on the night of the dinner party, Edward Clare was all friendliness. Celia spent a large portion of her life at the Manor House, where she was always welcome; and it seemed only natural that her brother Edward should drop in frequently, almost as he had done in the old days when Jasper Treverton was alive. There were so many reasons for his coming. The library at the Manor House was much larger and better than the Vicar’s modest collection of old-fashioned books. The gardens were a delight to the young man’s poetic soul. John Treverton showed no dislike to him. He appeared to consider the poet a poor creature, whose going or coming could make no difference.

  ‘I confess that I have a contempt for that kind of man,’ he told his wife, candidly. ‘An effeminate, white-handed mortal, who sets up as a wit and a poet on the most limited stock-in-trade — all his best goods in his windows, and nothing but empty shelves inside the shop. But of course, as long as you like him, Laura, he will be welcome here.’

  ‘I like him for the sake of his father and mother, who are my oldest and best friends,’ answered Laura.

  ‘Which means in plain English that you only tolerate hint?’ said John, carelessly. ‘Well, he is harmless, and sometimes amusing. Let him come.’

  Edward came, and seemed at home and happy in the small family circle. He lounged beside the fire in the snug book-room, and joined n the easy familiar talk, when the autumn dusk was deepening and Laura made tea at her pretty little table, with her husband by her side, while Celia, who had a fancy for eccentric positions and attitudes, sat on the hearth-rug.