Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  Ida endured this morbid jealousy with a patience that was almost heroic. She saw that her husband was ill, and that this mysterious malady of his, which had at first seemed to her sheer hypochondriasis, was only too real. It was a malady which affected the mind more than the body. Brian’s character had undergone a complete change since his illness. He who had been of old so easy-tempered, so lively, was now melancholy and irritable, at times garrulous to a degree that was painful to his hearers, keenly resentful of trifles, always fancying himself neglected or slighted.

  In vain did Lady Palliser and Ida urge the necessity of medical advice. Brian obstinately refused to see the local apothecary; and, as there was nothing tangible in his illness and he was able to be about all day, to go out of doors, and do pretty much as he pleased, there was no excuse for calling in the doctor without his permission.

  ‘If I felt that I wanted advice, I would go up to town and see Mallison,’ he said; ‘but there is nothing amiss with me, except a disappointed life. I begin to feel that I am a failure. Other fellows of my age have passed me in the race; and it is hard at nine-and-twenty to feel oneself beaten.’

  ‘But, Brian,’ his wife answered gently, ‘don’t you think if your contemporaries have outstripped you, it is because they have tried harder than you? Remember what St. Paul says about the one who obtaineth the prize.’

  ‘For Heaven’s sake, don’t preach!’ cried Brian, irritably. I tell you I tried hard enough; tried — yes, slaved night after night; scribbling articles for those infernal magazines, to get my manuscript returned with thanks after nearly a twelve-month’s detention; spelling over dry-as-dust briefs for a guinea fee, in order to post up some bloated Queen’s Counsel, who treated me as if I were dirt, and pretended not to know my name. I tell you, Ida, the Bar is a sickening profession; literature is worse; all the professions are played out, Europe is overcrowded with educated men; they swarm like aphides in a hot summer — your single fly the progenitor of a quintillion of living creatures. When I see the men in their wigs and gowns, hurrying up and down the Temple courts, swarming on all the staircases, choking up the doors of the law-courts, they remind me of the busy, hungry creatures on an ant-heap.

  “Every door is barred with gold, and opens but to golden keys, Every gate is thronged with suitors, all the markets overflow.”

  He was walking up and down the room in an agitated way, angry, excited beyond the occasion.

  ‘But in your case, Brian, it seems to me that the path has been made so smooth. With such an independence as ours, it must be so easy to get on.’

  ‘I thank you for reminding me how much I owe your father,’ sneered her husband.

  ‘I was not thinking especially of my father. You owe as much to your cousin.’

  ‘Yes, my cousin has been vastly generous — damnably generous; but if I had married any other woman, do you suppose he would have done as much? Of course, I know it was for your sake he gave me that income. Was he ever so liberal before, do you think? No, he dribbled out an occasional hundred or two when I was up a tree, but nothing more. It was for your sake his purse-strings relaxed.’

  ‘You have no right to say that,’ Ida answered indignantly. ‘I have a right to say what I think to my wife. I have not forgotten what you said to me at the hotel that day. You told me to my face that you loved another man. Do you think I was such a dullard as not to guess that man’s name? You fell in love with Wendover of the Abbey, before you saw him; and your innocent love for the shadow grew into guilty love for the man, after you were my wife. I knew all about it; but I was not going to let you give me the slip. I have known all along that I am nothing to you, that you despise me, detest me, perhaps; and that knowledge has made me what I am — a broken, blighted man, a wreck, at nine-and-twenty.’

  ‘Oh, Brian, this is too cruel! Have I ever failed in my duty to you?’

  ‘Damn duty!’ cried Brian, savagely. ‘I wanted your love, not your duty — love such as I thought you gave me in those autumn days by the river. Great God, how happy I was in those days! I hadn’t a sixpence; I was up to my eyes in debt; but I thought you loved me, and that we were going to be happy in our garret till good fortune tumbled down the chimney.’

  ‘I don’t think a garret would have suited you long, Brian, had I been ever so devoted. You are too much of a sybarite.’

  ‘I should have been happy with you. I should have thought myself in Eden. Well, fate never meant me to be happy. I am a wretch, judged before I was born, foredoomed to misery in this world and the next. Yes, I begin to think Calvin was right — there are some creatures predestined to damnation. Before ever the stars spun into their places, when all the suns and moons and planets were rings of fiery gas revolving in space, my doom was already written in the book of fate.’

  It had been a common thing of late for Brian to ramble on in such despondent strains as these, half angry, half despairing. Ida was supremely patient with him, sometimes soothing him, sometimes arguing with him; yet hardly knowing how much of his talk arose from real gloom of mind, or how much was sheer rhodomontade. The hours which she spent with him were intensely painful, and as the days went by he became more and more exacting, more and more resentful of her absence, and grudgingly jealous of Vernon.

  Another cause for pain was Ida’s growing conviction that her husband’s frequent doses of soda and brandy, and the champagne which he drank at dinner, and the port or Burgundy which he took after dinner, had a great deal to do with his altered mental condition. Painful as it was to speak of such a thing, she took courage one morning, and told him plainly that she believed he was suffering from, the effect of habitual — almost unconscious — intemperance.

  ‘You are taking soda and brandy all day long. You have brandy in your bedroom at night, Brian,’ she said. ‘I am sure you can have no idea how much you take in the course of the twenty-four hours.’

  ‘I have no idea that I am a drunkard, if that’s what you mean,’ he answered, white with rage; and then he burst into a torrent of abuse — such language as she had never heard from mortal lips until that hour, and his wife fled, shuddering and terror-stricken, from the room.

  When next they met he cowed before her with a craven air, and made no allusion to this scene. But after this she observed that he pretended to drink less, and had a crafty way of getting his glass refilled at dinner. He no longer kept a brandy bottle on the table beside his bed, as he had done heretofore, on the pretence that a little weak brandy and water helped him to sleep, nor did the soda-water bottles and spirit decanter adorn one of the tables in his study; but more than once his wife met him creeping to the dining-room with a stealthy air to supply himself at the sideboard, and when she went into his room at night to see if he slept, his fevered breath reeked of brandy. It seemed to her later, as time went on, that even his garments exhaled spirituous odours.

  It was not long after this that he began to talk mysteriously of some trouble which menaced him, which gradually took the shape of a criminal prosecution overhanging him. He had been falsely accused of some awful crime — some nameless, unspeakable offence — hateful as the gates of hell. He was innocent, but his enemies were legion; and at any moment a detective might be sent to Wimperfield to arrest him. One evening, in the summer twilight after dinner, he took it into his head that one of the footmen — a man whose face ought to have been thoroughly familiar to him — was a detective in disguise. He flew at the worthy young fellow in a furious rage, and the butler had hard work to prevent his doing poor John Thomas a mischief. But when the lamps were brought in, Brian perceived his mistake, and apologised to the footman for his violence.

  ‘You don’t know what devils those detectives are,’ he said, deprecatingly; ‘they can make themselves look like anybody. And if they once get hold of me, the case will be tried at Westminster Hall. It will take weeks to try, and all the Bar will be engaged; and then it will have to go to the House of Lords. There has not been such a case within the last century. All Europe wi
ll ring with it.’

  ‘Dear Brian, I am sure this is a delusion of yours,’ said Ida, trying to soothe him; ‘you cannot have done anything so wicked.’

  ‘Done! no, I am as innocent as a baby; but the whole Bar — the Bench too — is in league against me. They’ll make out their case, depend upon it. “It’s a case for a jury;” that’s what the Lord Chancellor said when I told him about it.’

  After this there could be no doubt that there was actual mental disturbance. Lady Palliser sent for the local medical man, who had very little difficulty in diagnosing the case. Sleeplessness, restless nights, tossing from side to side, an utter inability to keep still, horrible dreams, impaired vision, clouds floating before the eyes, — these symptoms Mr. Fosbroke heard from the wife. The patient himself was obstinately silent about his sensations, declared that there was nothing the matter with him, and let the doctor know he considered his visit an impertinent intrusion.

  ‘I had a touch of brain fever early in the year,’ he said. ‘I had the best advice in London during my illness, and afterwards. I know exactly how to treat myself. The symptoms which alarm my wife are nothing but the natural reaction after a severe shock to the nervous system. The tonics I am taking will soon pull me up again; but as I am now under a special treatment by Dr. Mallison, of Harley Street, you will under, stand that I don’t care about further advice.’

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ replied the medical man, meekly. ‘But I believe it would be a satisfaction to Lady Palliser and to Mrs. Wendover both if you would do me the honour to consult me, and allow me to look after you while you are here, I could place myself under Dr. Mallison’s instructions, if you like.’

  ‘No, there is no necessity. I tell you I know exactly what is amiss, and how to manage my own health.’

  Mr. Fosbroke argued the point, but in vain. Brian would not even allow him to feel his pulse. But the doctor knew very well what was amiss, and told Mrs. Wendover, with delicate circumlocution, that her husband was suffering from an imprudent use of stimulants for some time past.

  ‘That is what I feared,’ said Ida; but it is too dreadful. It is the very last thing I expected. I thought nobody drank nowadays.’

  ‘Very few people get drunk, my dear Mrs. Wendover,’ replied the doctor; ‘but, unhappily, though there is very little drunkenness, there is a great deal of what is called “pegging” — an intermittent kind of tippling which goes on all day long, beginning very early and ending very late. A man, whose occupation in life is headwork, begins to think he wants a stimulant — begins by having his brandy and soda at twelve o’clock perhaps; then finds he can’t get on without it after eleven; then takes it before breakfast — in lieu of breakfast; and goes on with brandy and soda at intervals till dinner-time. At dinner he has no appetite, tries to create one with a bottle of dry champagne, eats very little, but dines on the champagne, feels an unaccountable depression of spirits later on in the evening, and takes more brandy, without soda this time; and so on, and so on; till, after a period of sleeplessness, he begins to have ugly dreams, then to see waking visions, hear imaginary voices, stumble upon the edge of an imaginary precipice. If he is an elderly man he gets shaky in the lower limbs, then his hands become habitually tremulous, especially in the early morning, when he is like a figure hung on wires — and so on, and so on; and unless he pulls himself up by a great moral effort, the chances are that he will have a sharp attack of delirium tremens.’

  ‘You do not fear such an attack for my husband?

  ‘Mr. Wendover is a young man, but he has evidently abused his constitution; there is no knowing what may happen if you don’t take care of him. Alcohol is a cumulative poison, and that “pegging” I have told you of is diabolical. Nature throws off an over-dose of alcohol, but the daily, hourly dose eats into the system.’

  ‘How am I to take care of him?’ asked Ida, despairingly.

  ‘You must keep wine and spirits away from him, except in extreme moderation.’

  ‘What! speak to the butler? Tell him that my husband is a drunkard?’

  ‘You need not go quite so far as that, but it will be necessary to cut off the supplies somehow, and to substitute a nourishing diet for stimulants.’

  ‘Yes, if he could eat: but he has no appetite — he eats hardly anything.’

  ‘Unhappily, that is one of the symptoms of his disease, and the most difficult to overcome. But you must do your utmost to make him eat, and to prevent his getting brandy. A little light claret or Rhine wine may be allowed; nothing more. I will send you a sedative which you can give him at bedtime.’

  ‘I do not think he will take anything of that kind. He has set his face against accepting your advice.’

  ‘I believe if you were to take a decided tone, he would succumb; if not, you had better ask Dr. Mallison to come down and see him. It will be a costly visit, and money thrown away, as the case is perfectly simple; but I dare say you will not mind that.’

  ‘I should mind nothing if he could be cured. It is horrible to see such ruin of body and mind in one so young,’ Ida answered sadly.

  ‘Well, you must see what influence you can exercise over him for his own good. I will call every other day, and hear how you are getting on with him; and if you fail, we must summon Dr. Mallison.’

  Ida spoke to the butler. It was a hard thing to do, and it seemed to her a kind of treachery against her husband — as if she were inflicting everlasting disgrace upon him in secret, like a midnight assassin, who stabs his victim in the back. Her voice trembled, and her face was deadly pale as she spoke to the butler, an old servant who had been in the household from his boyhood.

  ‘Rogers, I want you to be a little more careful in your arrangements about wine and spirits,’ she began, falteringly. ‘Mr. Wendover is in a low state of health — suffering from a nervous complaint, in fact; and we fear that he is taking too much brandy. Will you kindly try to prevent it?’

  ‘It will be very difficult, ma’am. Mr. Wendover gives his orders, and he expects to be obeyed.’

  ‘But upon this one point you must not obey him. You can say that you have Lady Palliser’s orders that no more brandy is to be brought up from the cellar. I shall tell her that I have told you this.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. I was afraid too much brandy was being drunk, but it was not my place to mention it,’ said Rogers, politely.

  He would have said the same, perhaps, had the house been on fire.

  Neither sherry nor champagne was served at dinner that day, and the claret which was offered Mr. Wendover was of a very thin quality.

  ‘I’ll take champagne,’ he said to the butler.

  ‘There is not any upstairs, sir.’

  Brian turned angrily upon the man, and Ida, pale but resolute, came to the rescue.

  ‘We do not drink champagne at dinner when we are alone, Brian,’ she said; ‘and I don’t think it is quite fair to Vernie’s cellars that Moët should be served every day because you are here.

  ‘Vernon’s cellars! Ah, I forgot that we are all here on sufferance, and, that I am drinking Vernon’s wine.’

  ‘You may have as much of my champagne as you like,’ said Vernie, getting very red; ‘but I don’t think it does you any good, for you are always so cross afterwards.’

  Brian looked at the boy with a savage gleam in his eyes, and muttered something, but made no audible reply.

  ‘I’ll go back to my chambers to-morrow,’ he said: ‘I can have a bottle of Moët there without being under an obligation to anybody. Give me some brandy and soda,’ he said to the butler; ‘I can’t drink this verjuice.’

  ‘There is no brandy, sir.’

  ‘Oh! Sir Vernon’s cognac is to be kept sacred, too. I congratulate you, Vernon, upon having two such economical guardians. Your minority will be a period of considerable saving.’

  He made no further remonstrance, drank neither claret nor hock, ate hardly anything, but sat through the dinner in sullen silence, and went off to his room directly Lady Palliser had sa
id grace, leaving the others to take their strawberries and cream alone. Vernon was what Rogers the butler called ‘a mark on’ strawberries and cream.

  When Vernie had finished his strawberries, Ida went to her husband’s study; but the door was locked, and when she asked to be admitted Brian refused.

  ‘I’d rather be alone, thank you,’ he answered, curtly. ‘I have an article to write for one of the legal papers. You can amuse yourself with the baronet. I know you are always glad to be free.’

  ‘Come for a stroll in the park, Brian,’ she pleaded gently, pitying him with all her heart, more tenderly inclined to him in his decay and degradation than she had been in his prime of manhood, before these fatal habits began. ‘Do come with us, dear. We won’t walk further than you like; it’s a lovely evening.’

  ‘I hate a summer twilight,’ returned Brian; ‘it always gives me the horrors — a creepy time, when all sorts of loathsome creatures are abroad — bats, and owls, and stag-beetles, cockchafers, and other abominations. Can’t you let me alone?’ he went on, angrily. ‘I tell you I have work to do.’

  Ida left him upon this, without a word. What was she to do? This was her first experience of a mind diseased, and it seemed to her worse than any trouble that had ever touched her before. She had stood beside her father’s death-bed, and the hair of her flesh had stood up at the awful moment of dissolution, when it was as if verily a spirit had passed before her face, calling her beloved from the known to the unknown. Yet in the awe and horror of death there had been holiness and comfort, a whisper of hope leading her thoughts to higher regions, a promise that this pitiful, inexplicable parting was not the end. This dissolution in the living man, this palpable progress of degradation, visible day by day and hour by hour, was worse than death. It meant the decay and ruin of a mind, the wreck of an immortal soul. What place could there be in heaven for the drunkard, who had dribbled away his reason, his power to discriminate between right and wrong, by perpetual doses of brandy? what could be pleaded in extenuation of this gradual and deliberate suicide?