Blanche was disappointed. Lawn-tennis among relations was all very well, but she had plenty of that at the Knoll. She felt sorry she had put on her best hat and Indian silk frock, elaborately frilled with twine-coloured lace. A cotton gown, and the oldest thing in garden hats, would have been good enough for such an assembly.
The Colonel and Mrs. Wendover had driven over with their children. It was quite a family party — Bessie’s babies, a girl able to toddle, and a boy in the nurse’s arms, were the great features of the entertainment, the grandmother openly worshipping them, the grandfather condescending to occasional patronage of this third generation, but evidently anxious to dissemble his pride.
‘Bessie makes such a preposterous fuss about her babies,’ said Blanche, after declining lawn-tennis with Eva and her two brothers. ‘I hope if ever I am deluded into marrying, I shall not degenerate into an upper nurse.’
The Abbey had been swept and garnished in honour of the occasion, every room brightened with flowers — even that sacred apartment, Brian’s study, thrown open to the public. After luncheon it happened somehow — Ida could hardly have explained how — that she and Brian were alone together in this very room, the afternoon sunlight shining on them — for in spite of Lady Palliser’s prophecy the day had been lovely — the scent of stocks and mignonette and sweet-peas blowing in upon them from the old-fashioned garden at the back of the Abbey. They had strayed to this spot with the others; and the others had strayed off and left them, Ida looking absently at the backs of the Greek dramatists, Brian looking intently at her.
‘I don’t think you have been in this house since the day we first met in the hall below?’ he said, interrogatively.
‘No, I have never been here since.’
‘And yet you were once fond of the Abbey. You used to like wandering about the old house and gardens. You would sit reading in the library. The housekeeper has often talked to me about you.’
She stood before him with lowered eyelids, pale and dumb, shrinking from him almost as she had shrunk from him seven years ago by the old sundial in the moonlit garden, when it was a sin to listen to his ardent avowal.
‘Ida, why are you silent? Why will you not speak of the past?’
‘The past is past!’ she said, falteringly. ‘It was full of grief and shame for me. I want to forget it if I can.’
‘Forget all that is bitter, remember all that is sweet!’ he pleaded, drawing nearer to her. ‘There is much of that old time which is unspeakably dear to me — the happy time in which I first loved you, deeming you were free to be loved and won. You are free now, Ida, sole mistress of your fate and mine; and I love you as dearly now as I loved you seven years ago. More I could not love you, for I loved you then with all my heart and mind. Ida, you once talked of being mistress of Wendover Abbey. Its master is at your feet, your faithful slave to the end of his life. Will you have this old house for your own, Ida, and thus, and thus only, make it home for me?
His arm was round her, gently, experimentally, the answer not being quite certain, even yet.
She slowly lifted the dark-fringed lids, looked at him with adoring eyes — eyes which never before had looked thus upon the face of man.
‘Can you be in earnest?’ she asked, in a low sweet voice. ‘Can you lift me so high — I, that had fallen so low?’
He clasped her to his heart, and sealed the promise of their unclouded future with a passionate kiss.
‘At last, at last, I hold you in my arms!’ he said, fondly; ‘but not for the first time, my angel!’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Who was it carried you out of the burning house last year?’ he asked, smiling at her.
‘Cheap Jack.’
‘I was Cheap Jack.’
‘You!’
‘Yes. I lived far from the sight of this dear face, as long as I could bear my life, and then after five years of exile in far lands, where my soul sickened for the sight of you, I came back to England, heard in London that your husband was an idler and a drunkard, and foresaw evil days for my darling. I could be nothing to her; but at least I could watch over her, near at hand, yet unknown. So I took up my abode on the Hanger within a mile or so of her dwelling. Don’t pity me, dearest. It was not a hard life after all. I had my books and Nature for my companions, all the joy I could have, not having you.’
‘However shall I repay you?’
‘Only look up to me as you looked just now, and let me feel you are my own for ever.’
THE END
MOHAWKS
This novel appeared in 1886. Less sensational than some of Braddon’s more celebrated works, it relates the challenges faced by two central couples, each tied in some way to the gentleman’s club that gives the novel its title.
Title page of the first edition
CONTENTS
VOLUME I.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
VOLUME II.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
VOLUME III.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
VOLUME I.
CHAPTER I.
“ONE THAT DOTH WEAR HIMSELF AWAY IN LONENESS.”
“Nothing?” asked the farmer, standing upon a heathery knoll, with his gun under his arm, and his two clever spaniels, Nell and Beauty, crouched dutifully at his feet.
“Nothing but this,” answered the farmer’s man, holding up a bundle of papers — pamphlets and manuscripts — dirty, crumpled, worn as if with much carrying to and fro over the face of the earth. They were tied up in a ragged old cotton handkerchief, and they had been carried in the breast-pocket of yonder wayfarer who lay stark and stiff, with his dead face staring up at the bright blue sky of early morning. A little child, a mere baby, lay asleep beside him, nestling against the arm that would never again shelter or defend her.
It was a bright clear morning late in September, just one hundred and seventy-seven years ago, the year of the battle of Malplaquet, and the earth was so much the younger and fairer by all those years — innocent of railroads, speculating builders, gasworks, dust-destructors, sewage-farms, and telephones — a primitive world, almost in the infancy of civilisation as it seems to us, looking back upon those slow-pacing days from this age of improvement, invention, transmutation, and general enlightenment.
It was a year for ever memorable in history. The bloody battle of Malplaquet had but just been fought: a deluge of blood had been spilt, and another great victory scored by the allies, at a cost of twenty thousand slain. Brilliant as that victory had been, there were some who felt that Marlborough’s glory was waning. He was no longer in the flush and floodtide of popularity. There were those who grudged him his well-won honours, his ducal coronet, and palace at Woodstock. There were those who feared his ambition, lest he should make himself a military dictator, a second Cromwell, or even aspire to the crown. If ever England seemed ripe for an elective monarchy or a republic, it was surely just at this critical period: when widowed, childless Anne was wavering in the choice of her successor, and when poor young Perkin, the sole representative of legitimate royalty, was the chosen subject for every libellous ba
llad and every obscene caricature of the day.
Very fair to look upon was Flamestead Common upon that September morning, purple with heather, flecked here and there with golden patches of the dwarf furze that flowers in the late summer, and with here and there a glistening water-pool. The place where the dead man lay, stretched on a bank of sunburnt moss and short tawny turf, was at the junction of four roads. First, the broad high-road from London to Portsmouth, stretching on like a silvery ribbon over hill and valley, right and left of the little group yonder — the dead man and the sleeping child, and the two living men looking down at them both, burly farmer in stout gray homespun, and his hind in smock-frock and leather gaiters, a costume that has changed but little within the last two hundred years.
The labourer had left his bush-harrow in a field hard by the common at the call of his master, shouting from the little knoll above the road. Matthew Bowman, the farmer, trudging across the common in the dewy morning-tide, bent on a little partridge-shooting in the turnips on the other side of this heathery waste, had lighted on this piteous group — a tramp, lying dead by the wayside, and an infant, unconscious of its desolation, lying asleep beside him.
What was to be done? Who was to take care of the dead, or the living? Neither could very well be left by the wayside. Something must be done, assuredly; but Matthew Bowman had no clear idea of what to do with father or child. He had made up his mind that the baby owned that dead man as father.
“You’d best take the little one home to my missus,” he said at last, “and I’ll go on to Flamestead and send the constable to look after this.”
He pointed to the gaunt, ghastly figure, with bony limbs sharply defined beneath scantiest covering. A vagrant wayfarer, whose life for a long time past must have been little better than starvation, and at last the boundary-line between existence and non-existence had been passed, and the hapless wretch had sunk, wasted and famished, on the king’s highway.
“What are you going to do with that baby, Bowman?” demanded an authoritative voice on the higher ground above that little knoll where the farmer was standing.
Bowman looked up, and recognised one who was a power in that part of the world; all the more powerful, perhaps, because his influence rarely took a benignant form, because it was the way of his life to hold his fellow-men aloof, to exact all and to grant nothing.
This was Squire Bosworth, Lord of the Manor of Flamestead and Fairmile, owner of the greater part of the land within ten miles of this hillocky wilderness, and a notorious misanthrope and miser; shunned by the gentlefolks of the neighbourhood as half-eccentric and half-savage, feared and hated by the peasantry, distrusted and scrupulously obeyed by his tenants.
His horse’s hoofs had made no sound upon the sward and heather, and he had come upon the little group unawares. He was a man of about forty, with long limbs, broad slouching shoulders, strongly-marked features of a rugged cast, reddish-brown eyes under bushy brows, a determined chin, and a cruel mouth.
His voice awakened the child, who opened wide wondering eyes of heavenliest blue, looked about with a scared expression, and anon began to cry.
Mr. Bowman explained his intentions. He would have taken charge of the child for a day or so at his own homestead, while the authorities made up their minds what to do with it. The father would find a resting-place in the nearest churchyard, which was in the village of Flamestead, half a mile Londonwards.
“Let me look at the little one,” said Bosworth, stretching out his hand, and taking the infant in his strong grasp as easily as if it had been a bird.
“A pretty baby,” he said, soothing it with uncouth unaccustomed hand as he held it against his horse’s neck. “About the size of my motherless girl yonder, and not unlike her — the same blue eyes and flaxen hair — but I suppose all babies are pretty much alike. Take it to Fairmile Court, fellow, and tell my housekeeper to look after it.”
He handed the little bundle of humanity to the farm-labourer, who stared up at him in amazement. Kindness to nameless infancy was a new and altogether unexpected development in Squire Bosworth’s character.
“Don’t stand gaping there, man!” cried the Squire. “Off with you, and tell Mistress Layburne to take care of the child till further orders. And now, Bowman, what kind of a man is this, d’ye think, who has taken his last night’s gratis lodging on Flamestead Common?”
“He looks like a beggar-man,” said the farmer.
“Nay, Bowman, that is just what he does not look. A vagabond, if you like, a scapegrace, a spy, a rebel — but not a bred-and-born vagrant. There is the brand of Cain upon his forehead, friend; broken-down gentleman, the worst breed of scoundrel in all Britain.”
The farmer looked down at the dead face somewhat ruefully, as if it hurt him to hear evil spoken of that clay there, which those locked lips could not answer. It was, indeed, by no means the kind of face common on the roadside — not the sturdy bulldog visage of tramp or mendicant. Those attenuated features were as regular in their lines as Greek sculpture; those hands, cramped in the death throe, were slender and delicate. The rags upon that wasted body had once been the clothes of a gentleman — or had at least been made by a fashionable tailor. The man had perished in his youth — not a thread of silver in the rich chestnut of the abundant hair, long, silken, falling in loose waves about the thin throat and pallid ears.
“A well-looking fellow enough before want and sickness came upon him,” said the Squire. “Did you find anything about him to give a clue to his name or his belongings?”
“Nothing but this,” said Bowman, handing his landlord the papers in the cotton handkerchief.
Squire Bosworth sat with thoughtful brow, looking over pamphlets and manuscripts.
“Just as I thought,” he said at last: “the fellow was a plotter, a tool of the Muggite crew, a hack scribbler, sowing the seeds of civil war and revolution with big words and fine sentences, a little Latin and a little Greek. He found he could not live upon his trash — was on the tramp for Portsmouth, I dare swear, meaning to get out of the country, to make his way to America, perhaps, before the mast; as if his wasted carcass would be worth board and lodging where thews and sinews are wanted! Poor devil! a sorry end for his talents. I’ll ride to the village and tell the constable to send for the body.”
“And the baby, Squire?” urged Bowman. “Do you mean to adopt it?”
“Adopt! That’s a big word, farmer, and means a good deal. I’ll think about it, friend, I’ll think about it. If it’s a girl, perhaps yes. If it’s a boy, decidedly no.”
He rode off with the bundle of papers in his pocket, leaving his tenant full of wonder. What could the Squire, whose miserly habits and want of common humanity were the talk of the county, what could such as he mean by taking compassion upon a nameless brat picked up on the wayside? What magical change had come over his disposition which prompted Roland Bosworth to an act of charity?
Nothing was further than charity from the Squire’s thoughts as he rode to Flamestead; but he was a man of reflective temper, and he always looked far ahead into the future. Ten months ago his fair young wife had died, leaving him an only child — a daughter of half a year old — and now the child was sixteen months old, and her nurse had told him that she began to pine in the silence and seclusion of a house which was like a hermitage, and gardens which were gloomy and lonesome as a desert wilderness. He had poohpoohed the nurse’s complaint. “’Tis you, woman, who want more company, not that baby,” he had said; but after this he had been more observant of his daughter, and he had noticed that the baby’s large blue eyes shone out of a pale old-looking face, which was not what a baby’s face should be. The eyes themselves had a mournful yearning look, as if seeking something that was never found.
“Babies never thrive in a house where there are no children,” said the nurse; and the Squire began to believe her.
The child sickened soon after this with some slight infantile ailment, and Mr. Bosworth took occasion to question the do
ctor as to the nurse’s theory. The medico admitted that there was some reason in the woman’s view. Children always throve best who had the society of other children. Fairmile Court was one of the finest places within fifty miles of London, but it was doubtless somewhat secluded and silent — there was even an air of gloom. Mr. Bosworth had allowed the timber to grow to an extent which, looked at from the point of view of health and cheerfulness —
“I am not going to cut down my trees to gratify any doctor in Christendom!” cried the Squire savagely; “but if you say my little girl wants another little girl to play with her, one must be got.”
This had all happened about a fortnight before that September morning when the fatherless baby was found sleeping so peacefully beside the dead. The Squire had shrunk from introducing a stranger’s brat into that stately desolate home of his, which it had been the business of his later years to keep closed against all the world. In his solitary rides he had reconnoitred many a farmer’s homestead where children swarmed; he had looked in upon his gamekeeper’s and gardener’s cottages, where it seemed to him there was ever a plethora of babies; but he could not bring himself to invite one of these superfluous brats to take up its abode with him, to lie cheek by jowl with his dead wife’s fair young daughter — a child whose lineage was alike ancient and honourable on the side of mother and father. His soul revolted against the spawn of the day-labourer or even of the tenant-farmer; and he hated the idea of the link which such an adoption would make between him and a whole family of his inferiors.
Thus it happened that the finding of that friendless child upon the common seemed to Squire Bosworth as a stroke of luck. Here was a child who, judging from the dead father’s type, was of gentle blood. Here was a child whom none could ever claim from him, upon whose existence no greedy father or harpy mother could ever found a claim to favours from him. Here he would be safe. The child would be his goods, his chattel, to deal with as he pleased — to be flung out of doors by and by, when his own girl was grown up, should it so please him, or should she deserve no more generous treatment.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 837