“And yet I know for certain that she was a martyr to podagra all last summer, and could hardly hobble from the Rooms to her chair when she was at the Bath,” whispered Lady Bolingbroke to Mrs. Asterley.
They all trooped out into the great oak-panelled hall, and a country dance was arranged in a trice, Durnford and Irene leading, as married lovers, who might be forgiven if they were still silly enough to like dancing with each other. Lavendale and Judith sat in the chimney-corner and looked on. The tall eight-day clock was opposite to them, and he looked up now and then at the hands.
Twenty minutes past twelve.
“We’ve jockeyed the ghost, I think,” whispered Bolingbroke to Durnford, in a pause of the dance. “See how much better and brighter Lavendale looks. He was ready to expire of his own sick fancy. To cure that was to cure him.”
Never had Lavendale felt happier. Yes, he told himself, he had been deceived by his own imagination. Remorse or unquiet love had conjured up the vision, had evoked the warning. ’Twas well if it had won him to repent the past, to think more seriously of the future. The solemn thoughts engendered of that strange experience had confirmed him in his desire to lead a better life. It was well, altogether well with him, as he sat by Judith’s side in the ruddy fire-glow, and watched the moving figures in the dance, the long line of undulating forms, the lifted arms and bended necks, the graceful play of curving throats and slender waists, light talk and laughter blending with the music in sotto voce accompaniment. Even Lady Polwhele looked to advantage in a country dance. She had been taught by a famous French master at a time when dancing was a fine art, and she had all the stately graces and graceful freedoms of the highest school.
Yes, it was a pretty sight, Lavendale thought, a prodigiously pleasant sight; but it all had a dream-like air, as everything seemed to have to-night. Even Judith’s face as he gazed at it had the look of a face in a dream. There was an unreality about all things that he looked upon. Indeed, nothing in his life had seemed real since that vision and that mystic voice in the winter dusk last night.
Suddenly those tripping figures reeled and rocked as he gazed at them, and then the perspective of the hall seemed to lengthen out into infinite distance, and then a veil of semi-darkness swept over all things, and he staggered to his feet.
“Air, air! I am choking!” he cried hoarsely.
That hoarse strange cry stopped the dance as by the stroke of an enchanter’s wand. Bolingbroke ran to the hall-door, and threw it wide open. A rush of cold air streamed into the hall, and blew that darkening veil off the picture.
“Thank God,” said Lavendale, “I can breathe again! Pray pardon me, ladies, and go on with your dance,” he added courteously; and then, half-leaning upon Bolingbroke, he walked slowly out to the terrace in front of the porch, Judith accompanying him.
Here he sat upon a stone bench, and the cool still night restored all his senses.
“I am well now, my dear friend,” he said to Bolingbroke; “’twas only a passing faintness. The fumes of the log fire stupefied me.”
“And here you will catch a consumption, if you sit in this cold air,” returned his friend, while Judith hung over him with a white scared face, full of keenest anxiety.
“It is not cold, but if you are afraid of your gout—”
“I am, my dear Lavendale, so I will leave Lady Judith to take care of you for a few minutes — I urgently advise you to stay no longer than that. Are you sure you are quite recovered?”
“Quite recovered. Infinitely happy,” murmured Lavendale, in a dreamy voice, with his hand in Judith’s, looking up at her as she stood by his side.
Bolingbroke left them discreetly. To the old intriguer it seemed the most natural thing in the world to leave those two alone together.
“How fond they are of each other!” he said to himself; “’tis a pity poor Lavendale is so marked for death. And yet perhaps he may live long enough for them to get tired of each other; so short a time is sometimes long enough for satiety.”
“My beloved, a few minutes ago I thought I was dying,” said Lavendale, in a low voice. “Had that deadly swooning come about an hour earlier, I should have said to myself, ‘This is the stroke of death.’”
“Why, dearest love?”
“Because it has been prophesied to me that I should die at midnight.”
“Idle prophecy. Midnight is past, and we are here, you and I together, happy in each other’s love,” said Judith.
“You are trembling in every limb!”
“It is the cold.”
“No, it is not the cold, Judith: your face is full of fear. Do you see death in mine?”
“I see only love, infinite love, the promise of our new life in the glad new year.”
“Judith,” he murmured, leaning his head against her bosom as she leant over him, “I know not if I am happy or miserable; I know only that I am with you: past and future are lost in darkness. But indeed you are shivering. You are not cold, are you, love? It is such a lovely night, so still, so calm.”
It was one of those exquisite nights which come sometimes in mid-winter. Not a breath of wind stirred the light leafage of the shrubs, or waved the pine-tops yonder. A light fall of snow had whitened the garden-walks, but left the shrubberies untouched. The moon was at the full, and every line and every leaf showed clear in that silver light. The distant landscape glimmered in a luminous haze, deepening to purple as it touched the horizon; while here and there in the valley a glint of brighter silver showed where the river wound among low hills and dusky islets towards the busier world beyond.
Suddenly, silver sweet in the moonlight and the silence, came the musical fall of a peal of bells — joy-bells from the distant tower of Flamestead Church — joy-bells ringing in the new year.
“My God!” cried Lavendale, “the clocks were wrong!”
He gazed at Judith with wide distended eyes, and the ghastly pallor on his face took a more livid hue.
“Beloved, my mother’s ghost spoke truth,” he said: “death calls me with the stroke of midnight. Beloved, beloved, never, never, never to be mine! But O, ’tis more blessed than all I have known of life to die here — thus.”
His head was on her breast, her arms were wreathed round him, supporting that heavy brow, on which the death-dews were gathering. Yes, it was death. The cord, worn to attenuation long ago, had snapped at last; the last sands of that wasted life had run out; and just when life seemed worth living, death called the repentant sinner from the arms of love.
From the earthly love to love beyond, from the known to the unknown. In that swift, sudden passage from life to death, he had been less of an infidel than in the active life behind him. It had seemed to him that a gate opened into the dim distance of eternity; that he stretched out his arms to some one or to something that called and beckoned; that he went not to outer darkness and extinction, but to a new existence. Yet the wrench was scarce less bitter, since it parted him from the woman he loved.
Friendly hands carried that lifeless form into the old house, and laid the dead Lord Lavendale upon the bed where his father had lain before him in the same funeral solemnity. Curtains and blinds were drawn in all the windows; the guests, who had been so merry at the feast on New Year’s Eve, hurried off on New Year’s morning as fast as coach-horses could be got to carry them away; and the year began at Lavendale Manor in the shadow of mourning. Only Herrick and Irene stayed in the darkened house, and watched and prayed in the death-chamber.
And so the house of Lavendale expired with its last representative. Name and race vanished suddenly from the eyes of men like a ship that founders at sea.
Deeper yet drew the death shadows on Lavendale Manor House, for on the morning of Lord Lavendale’s funeral the old Venetian chemist was found cold and stark beside his furnace, the elixir of life, the universal panacea, simmering in the crucible beside him, and his attenuated fingers clasping one of those antique guides to immortality, fraught with the wisdom of old Arabia, which had
been his solace and delight. The shock of his friend and patron’s death had accelerated the inevitable end. The lamp of life, nursed in solitude, economised by habits of exceptional temperance, had burned to the last drop of oil, and the discoverer, baulked in all his searching after the supernatural, had yet succeeded in living to his hundred and eleventh year.
Three years afterwards, and Herrick and Irene were living with their two children at Lavendale Manor, and the fences that parted manor and court had been thrown down, and the two estates were as one, the old squire having settled Fairmile Court and all its belongings upon his adopted daughter, whose husband was to assume the name of Bosworth in addition to his own, and to sign himself Durnford-Bosworth henceforward. Time is the best of all peace-makers, and after nursing his wrath for a year or two Roland Bosworth had discovered that the orphan he had picked up on Flamestead Common was dearer to him than resentment or wounded pride. Perhaps he was all the better pleased to endow the changeling since Mr. Topsparkle’s magnificent bequest had made her independent of his bounty.
To Lavendale Manor every New Year’s Eve comes a pensive lady to pass sad hours in solitude and silence and pious prayers and meditations in those rooms which were once so full of mirth. Alone she paces the terrace in moonlight or in darkness: alone she keeps her midnight vigil, and prays and weeps upon that stone bench where her lover died.
Irene and her husband respect the mourner’s solitude, and in their pity for an inconsolable grief they scarce lament the change in that beautiful face which is but too prophetic of doom. Not again will that widowed heart ache at the sound of New Year joy-bells, for their merry peal will ring above her grave.
THE END
GERARD, OR THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL
First published in 1891, this is one of Braddon’s rare novels of the supernatural, in which the title character may well be the very devil incarnate. Despite the supernatural elements, the novel is more of a moral tragedy than a sensational horror story, and has a strong theological underpinning — as indicated by the novel’s title, which lists the three traditional ‘enemies of the soul’ in Christian theology.
Cover of the ‘yellowback’ edition
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. “I LOOK DOWN TO HIS FEET, BUT THAT’S A FABLE.”
CHAPTER II. “OH, PITIFUL YOUNG MAN, STRUCK BLIND WITH BEAUTY.”
CHAPTER III. “THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY.”
CHAPTER IV. “WE ARE SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE OF.”
CHAPTER V. LIFE UPON NEW LINES.
CHAPTER VI. THE FACE IN THE VISION.
CHAPTER VII. “IT IS AN OATH,” SHE SAID.
CHAPTER VIII. A SHADOW ACROSS THE PATH.
CHAPTER IX. “I BUILT MY SOUL A LORDLY PLEASURE-HOUSE.”
CHAPTER X. “STILL ONE MUST LEAD SOME LIFE BEYOND.”
CHAPTER XI. “EARTH BEING SO GOOD, WOULD HEAVEN SEEM BEST?”
CHAPTER XII. “FOR SUCH THINGS MUST BEGIN SOME DAY.”
CHAPTER XIII. “OUT WENT MY HEART’S NEW FIRE, AND LEFT IT COLD.”
CHAPTER XIV. “FOR SOME MUST STAND, AND SOME MUST FALL OR FLEE.”
CHAPTER XV. “A MAN CAN HAVE BUT ONE LIFE AND ONE DEATH.”
CHAPTER XVI. “HE IS THE VERY SOUL OF BOUNTY.”
CHAPTER XVII. “SO, QUIET AS DESPAIR, I TURNED FROM HIM.”
CHAPTER XVIII. “LOST, LOST! ONE MOMENT KNELLED THE WOE OF YEARS.”
CHAPTER XIX. ALL ALONG THE RIVER.
CHAPTER XX. “SOME DIM DERISION OF MYSTERIOUS LAUGHTER.”
CHAPTER XXI. “AS GENTLE AND AS JOCUND AS A JEST.”
CHAPTER XXII. “COMPARE DEAD HAPPINESS WITH LIVING WOE.”
CHAPTER XXIII. “ALAS, WHY CAM’ST THOU HITHER?”
CHAPTER XXIV. “ALAS FOR ME, THEN, MY GOOD DAYS ARE DONE.”
CHAPTER XXV. “HOW COULD IT END IN ANY OTHER WAY?”
CHAPTER XXVI. “SING WHILE HE MAY, MAN HATH NO LONG DELIGHT.”
CHAPTER XXVII. “SOME LITTLE SOUND OF UNREGARDED TEARS.”
CHAPTER XXVIII. “COULD TWO DAYS LIVE AGAIN OF THAT DEAD YEAR.”
CHAPTER XXIX. “AND ALL SHALL PASSE, AND THUS TAKE I MY LEAVE.”
CHAPTER XXX. “FROM THE WARM WILD KISS TO THE COLD.”
CHAPTER XXXI. “THE LOVE THAT CAUGHT STRANGE LIGHT FROM DEATH’S OWN EYES.”
EPILOGUE.
CHAPTER I. “I LOOK DOWN TO HIS FEET, BUT THAT’S A FABLE.”
There were low brooding clouds and a feeling of thunder in the air as Gerard Hillersdon’s cab rattled along the King’s Road, past squalid slums and shabby gentilities, towards quiet rural Parson’s Green. Only a few years ago Parson’s Green had still some pretension to rusticity. Where now the speculating builders’ streets and terraces stretch right and left in hollow squares and close battalions, there were fine old Georgian and pre-Georgian mansions, and stately sweeps of lawn and shrubbery, and avenues of old-world growth, shutting out the hum and hubbub of the great city.
To one of those respectable old mansions, that one which was second only to Peterborough House in the extent and dignity of its surroundings, Gerard Hillersdon was driving under the heavy sky of a July afternoon, the lowering close of a sunless and oppressive day. Never, not even in mid-winter, had the smoke-curtain hung lower over London than it hung to-day, and if the idea of fog seemed impossible in July there at least prevailed that mysterious condition of the atmosphere, commonly known as “blight,” a thick yellow haze, unpierced by a single sun-ray.
To Gerard Hillersdon, ordinarily the most sensitive of men, the atmosphere on this particular afternoon made no difference. He had got beyond that point in which atmosphere can raise a man’s spirits or depress them. He had made up his mind upon the great question of life or death; and this kind of day seemed as good to him as any other, since he meant it to be his last day upon earth. He had made up his mind that life and he must part company; that for him at least life was not worth living: thus the grey and yellow of the atmosphere, and the threatening thunderclouds to windward suited his temper far better than the blue sky and west wind which Lady Fridoline would have desired for her garden-party.
Incongruous as the thing may seem the young man was going to spend his last earthly afternoon at Lady Fridoline’s garden-party; but for a man utterly without religious feeling or hope in the Hereafter such a finish to existence seemed as good as any other. He could not devote his last hours in preparing for the world that was to come after death, as he had no belief in any such world. To him the deed that was to be done before midnight meant swift, sudden extinction, the end of all things for him, Gerard Hillersdon. The curtain which was to fall upon the tragedy of his life to-night would rise upon no afterpiece. The only question which he had taken into serious consideration was the mode and manner of his death. He had made up his mind about that. His revolver was lying in its case in his lodging-house bedroom, under the shadow of St. James’s Church, ready loaded — a six-shooter. He had made no will, for he had nothing to leave behind him, except a heavy burden of debt. He had not yet made up his mind whether to write an explanatory letter to the father he had sorely tried, and a brief farewell to the mother who fondly loved him, and whom he loved almost as fondly; or whether it were not better to leave only silence.
Not in sheer frivolity was he rattling along the road to Parson’s Green. He had a stronger motive in going to Fridoline House than the desire to get rid of his last afternoon in the bustle and excitement of a herd of idle people. There would be some one there most likely whom he ardently desired to meet, were it but to touch her hand and say good night — good night for ever — as she stepped into her carriage, or were it but for one little smile across the crowd.
She had told him only the night before, sitting out a waltz in the tropical heat of a staircase in Grosvenor Square, that she meant to be at Lady Fridoline’s omnium gatherum.
“One meets such queer people,” she said, with the regulation insolence, “I would not miss Lady Fridoline’s Zoological Varieties for world
s.”
A feather blown across her pathway might be enough to divert her fancy into another channel. He knew her well enough to know that there was no such thing as certainty where she was concerned; but on the off chance he went to Parson’s Green, and his eye ran eagerly along the double line of carriages, looking for Mrs. Champion’s liveries.
Yes, it was there, the barouche with its sober colouring, and the men in their dark brown coats, black velvet breeches, and silk stockings, and the fine upstanding Cleveland bays, strong enough to pull a Carter-Patterson van, yet with enough breeding for beauty. Wealth expressed itself here in that chastened form which education has imposed even upon the cit. The money that had bought that perfect equipage had all been made amidst the steam and din of the Stock Exchange, but the carriage and its appointments were every whit as perfect as those of her Grace of Uplandshire, which stood next in the rank.
She was there — the woman he wanted to see and speak with on this his last day.
“I am coming, my love, my sweet,” he muttered to himself, as he wrote his name in the big book in the hall, the record by which Lady Fridoline was able to find out how many strangers and outsiders had been imposed upon her hospitality in the shape of friends’ friends.
The crowd was tremendous; the house and grounds buzzed with voices, through which from the bosquet yonder cut the sharp twanging notes of a Tyrolese Volkslied, accompanied on the Streichzither; while from an inner drawing-room sounded the long-drawn chords of a violin attacking a sonata by De Beriot. On the left of the great square hall was the dining-room filled with a gormandising crowd; and on the lawn outside there was a subsidiary buffet under a pollarded Spanish chestnut which spread its rugged venerable limbs over a wide circle of turf, and made a low-roofed tent of leaves that fluttered and shivered in the sultry atmosphere.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 890