He had made up his mind that he would go no more to the little street in Chelsea. He had gone in the first place as an intruder, and had imposed himself upon the father’s weakness, and traversed the daughter’s wish, so plainly expressed to him on their first meeting. He hated himself for an act which he felt to be mean and unworthy, and he determined that after his formal visit as his sister’s escort he would go there no more; yet two days after Lilian’s departure an irresistible desire impelled him to try to see Hester again. He wanted to see if there were any justification for Lilian’s optimistic view of the case — whether there were indeed peace and contentment in their humble home.
He went in the evening, at an hour when he knew Hester was to be found at home. However frugally she and her father might dine they always dined at seven, so that the old man should not suffer that uncomfortable reversal of all old habits which is one of the petty stings of poverty. The mutton chop or the little bit of fish which constituted his evening meal made a dinner as easily as it would have made a supper, and Hester took a pleasure in seeing that it was served with perfect cleanliness and propriety, a result only attained by some watchfulness over the landlady and the small servant. The modest meal was despatched in less than half-an-hour, and at half-past seven Hester and her father were to be found enjoying their evening leisure — he with his pipe, she with a book, which she sometimes read aloud.
So Gerard found them upon a delicious summer evening, which made the contrast between Queen’s Gate and the poorer district westward of Chelsea seem all the more cruel. There all coolness and space and beauty, tall white houses, classic porticos, balconies brimming over with flowers, gaily-coloured blinds and picturesque awnings, the wide expanse of park and gardens, the cool glinting of water in the umbrageous distance; here long rows of shabby houses, where every attempt at architectural ornament seemed only to accentuate the prevailing squalor. And Hester Davenport lived here, and was to go on living here, and he with all his wealth could not buy her brighter surroundings.
He stopped at a bookseller’s in the King’s Road and bought the best copy of Shelley’s poems which he could find, and at a florist’s on his way he bought a large bunch of Marechal Niel roses, and with these gifts in his hand he appeared in the small parlour.
“As my sister is far away, I have ventured to come in her stead,” he said, after he had shaken hands with father and daughter.
“And you are more than welcome, Mr. Hillersdon,” answered the old man. “We shall miss your sister sadly. Her little visits have cheered us more than anything has done since the beginning of our troubles. I hardly know what we shall do without her.”
“I am looking forward to next year, when Miss Hillersdon will be Mrs. Cumberland,” said Hester, softly, “and when I am to help her with her parish work.”
“Can you find time to help other people; you who work so hard already?”
“Oh, I shall be able to spare an afternoon now and then, and I shall be interested and taken out of myself by that kind of work. What lovely roses!” she exclaimed, as he placed the bunch upon the little table where her open book was lying.
“I am very glad you like them. You have other flowers, I see,” glancing at a cluster of white and red poppies in a brown vase, “but I hope you will find room for these.”
“Indeed, I will, and with delight. My poor poppies are put to shame by so much beauty.”
“And I have brought — my sister asked me to bring you Shelley,” he faltered, curiously embarrassed in the presence of this one woman, and laying down the prettily bound volume with conscious awkwardness.
“Did she really?” asked Hester, wonderingly; “I did not think Shelley was one of her poets. Indeed, I remember her telling me that the Rector had forbidden her to read anything of Shelley’s beyond a selection of short poems. I dare say she mentioned some other poet, and your memory has been a little vague. Lilian has given me a library of her favourite poets and essayists.”
She pointed to a row of volumes on one of the dwarf cupboards, and Gerard went over to look at them.
Yes, there were the poets women love — Wordsworth, Hood, Longfellow, Adelaide Proctor, Jean Ingelow, Elizabeth Barrett Browning — the poets within whose pages there is security from every evil image, from every rending of the curtain that shrouds life’s darkest pictures, poets whose key-note is purity. No Keats, with his subtle sensuousness and heavy hot-house atmosphere. No Shelley, with his gospel of revolt against law, human and divine; no Rossetti, no Swinburne; not even Byron, whose muse, measured by the wider scope of latter-day poets, might wear a pinafore and feed upon the schoolgirl’s bread and butter. The only giant among them all was the Laureate, and he was handsomely represented in a complete edition.
“I see you have no Shelley,” said Gerard, “so my mistake was fortunate.”
“But if Mr. Hillersdon would not let his daughter read Shelley—” began Hester.
“My worthy father belongs to a school that is almost obsolete — the school which pretends to believe that the human mind is utterly without individuality, or self-restraint, and that to read a lawless book is the first stage in a lawless career. You have too much mental power to be turned to the right or to the left by any poet, be he never so great a genius. Not to have read Shelley is not to have tasted some of the loftiest delights that poetry can give us. I am opening a gate for you into an untrodden paradise. I envy you the rapture of reading Shelley for the first time in the full vigour of your intellect.”
“You are laughing at me when you talk of the vigour of my intellect,” she said gaily. “And as for your Shelley, I know in advance that I shall not like him as well as Tennyson.”
“That depends upon the bent of your mind — whether you arc more influenced by form or colour. In Tennyson you have the calm beauty and harmonious lines of a Greek temple; in Shelley the unreal splendour and gorgeous colouring of the new Jerusalem as St. John pictured it in his ecstatic dreams.”
They discussed Hester’s poets freely, and went on to the novelists and essayists with whom she was most familiar. Dickens and Charles Lamb were first favourites, and for romance Bulwer.
Thackeray’s genius she acknowledged, but considered him at his best disheartening.
“I think for people with whom life has gone badly Carlyle’s is the best philosophy,” she said.
“But surely Carlyle is even more disheartening than Thackeray,” objected Gerard. “His gospel is the gospel of dreariness.”
“No, no, it is the gospel of work and noble effort. It teaches ‘ contempt for petty things.”
They talked for some time, Mr. Davenport joining in the conversation occasionally, but with a languid air, as of a man who was only half alive; and there was an undercurrent of complaining in all he said, which contrasted strongly with his daughter’s cheerful spirit. He spoke more than once of his wretched health; his neuralgic pains, which no medical man could understand or relieve.
Gerard stayed till past nine, would have lingered even later if Hester had not told him that she and her father were in the habit of walking for an hour in the coolness of the late evening. On this hint he took up his hat and accompanied father and daughter as far as Cheyne Walk, where he left them to walk up and down in the summer starlight, very lonely in the great busy city, as it seemed to him when he bade them a reluctant good night.
“How lovely she is, but how cold!” he thought, as he walked homeward. “She is more like a picture than a living, suffering woman. The old man’s reformation sits uneasily upon him. Poor wretch, I believe he is longing for an outbreak — would sell half his miserable remnant of life for a short spell of self-indulgence.”
Gerard pondered much upon Davenport’s so-called reformation, in the sincerity of which he had scanty faith.
It was only because he was penniless that he was sober — the longing for alcohol was perhaps as strong as it had ever been. If any stroke of luck were to fill his pockets he would break out again as badly as of old. It w
as on this account, doubtless, that his daughter was content to live upon a pittance. Poverty meant the absence of temptation.
After this Gerard Hillersdon spent many an evening hour in the Davenport menage. He supplied Hester with books and choicest flowers, he took newspapers and hot-house grapes to the old man, who ate the grapes with a greedy relish, as if he caught faint flavours of the vintages of Bordeaux and Burgundy in that English fruit. His visits and his gifts grew to be accepted as a matter of course. Books were Hester’s one pleasure, and she often sat reading late into the night, although she was generally at her sewing-machine before eight o’clock in the morning. She was not one of those people who require seven or eight hours’ sleep. Her rest and recreation were in those midnight hours when her father was sleeping, and she was alone with her books, sitting in a low wicker chair bought for a few shillings from an itinerant basket-maker, in the light of the paraffin reading lamp, which her own skilful hands prepared every morning.
Gerard wondered at her placid acceptance of this life of toil and monotony. Again and again as he walked slowly up and down the shadowy promenade by the river he had sought by insidious questionings to discover the lurking spirit of revolt against that Fate which had doomed her to life-long deprivations. No word of complaint was ever spoken by those beautiful lips, pale in the moonlight. The London season had passed her by, with all its pleasures, its smart raiment, and bustle of coaching meets and throng of carriages and riders in that meeting of the ways by Albert Gate whither her footsteps had so often taken her. She had seen women, infinitely inferior to herself in all womanly graces, set off and glorified by all the arts of costume and enamel, dyed hair and painted eyebrows, into a semblance of beauty, and queening it upon the strength of factitious charms: and yet no sense of this world’s injustice had embittered her gentle spirit. Patience was the key-note of her character. If every now and then upon her lonely walks a man stopped as if spell-bound at a vision of unexpected beauty, or even turned to follow her, she thought only of his unmannerliness, not of her own attractions; and evil as are the ways of men few ever ventured to follow or to address her, for the earnest face, and the resolute walk, told all but the incorrigible snob that she was a woman to be respected. No, she had never rebelled against Fate. All that she asked from life was the power to maintain her father in comfort, and to prevent his return to those degrading habits which had made the misery of her girlhood.
August was half over, West End London was a desert, and still Gerard lingered, Gerard the double millionaire, whom all the loveliest spots upon this earth invited to take his pleasure at this holiday season. His friends had bored him insufferably with their questions and suggestions before they set out upon their own summer pilgrimages. Those mysterious diseases of which one only hears at the end of the season had driven their victims in various directions, sympathetically crowding to the same springs, and sunning themselves in the same gardens. The army of martyrs to eczema and gout were boring themselves insufferably in Auvergne — the rheumatics were in Germany — the weak chests and shattered nerves were playing tennis at Maloja or St. Moritz — the shooting men were in Scotland, the fishermen were in Norway — the idlers, who want only to wear fine clothes, do a little baccarat, and dabble in summer wavelets, were at Trouville, Etretat, Paramé, Dinard, or Dieppe. For any man deliberately to stay in London after the twelfth, was an act so perverse and monstrous that he must needs find some excuse for it in his own mind. Gerard’s excuse was that he was not a sportsman, had shot all the grouse he ever wanted to shoot, that he had seen all of the Continent that he cared to see, and that he felt himself hardly strong enough for travelling. The quiet of his own house, uninvaded by visitors, pleased him better than the finest hotel in Europe, the marble staircases and flower gardens of the Grand Bretagne at Bellaggio, or the feverish va-et-vient of the comfortable Schweitzerhof at Lucerne. He wanted rest, and he got it in his own rooms, where his every caprice and idiosyncrasy found its expression in his surroundings.
Why should he leave London? He had invitations enough to have made a small octavo volume, if he had cared to bind and perpetuate that evidence of the worship which Society offers to Mammon, invitations worded in every form and phrase that can tempt man’s vanity or minister to his self-esteem. Invitations to castles in Scotland, to moated granges in Warwickshire, to manor houses and shooting-boxes in Yorkshire — to the wolds and moors of the north, to Dartmoor and Exmoor, to Connemara and Kerry, to every point of the compass in the British Isles, and even to chateaux in France, and hunting-lodges in Servia, Bohemia, Hungary, and heaven knows where. And every one of these invitations, many of them backed with playful allusions to daughters who for this or the other of his various accomplishments — tennis, chess, music, sketching — were especially eager for his society, every one of these invitations he knew was addressed not to himself but to his millions. This adulation filled him with unspeakable scorn; nor if the invitations had been prompted by the most genuine friendliness would he have accepted one of them. Why should he fall in with other people’s habits, or share in pleasures not originated by himself, he who could live his own life — carry his own retinue with him wherever he cared to go — charter the finest yacht that had ever been launched — hire the most luxurious of shooting-boxes, castles, or chateaux — and take existence at his own measure, knowing no ruler but the caprice of the hour?
His answer to all these hospitable offers was a polite refusal. His health was too precarious to permit his enjoyment of visits which would otherwise be most agreeable. These refusals were written by his secretary and elicited much comment upon the insolence of the newly rich, and from the masculine recipients various unfriendly allusions to beggars on horseback.
Thus August drew towards a sultry close and the newspaper, no longer absorbed by Parliamentary reports, dressed themselves in the feathers of the screech owl and devoted a daily column to cholera, while the livelier and more discursive papers took up some topic of the hour, social or domestic, and opened their pages to a procession of letters upon the thrilling question of what we shall do with our empty sardine tins, or is the stage a safe profession for clergymen’s daughters, or how to enjoy three weeks’ holiday for a five-pound note. If Gerard Hillersdon had no longing for change from arid and overbaked streets he was perhaps the only person in town whose thoughts did not turn with fond longing towards shadowy vales and running streams, towards mountain or sea. Even Hester’s resigned temper was stirred by this natural longing. “How lovely it must be up the river in this weather!” she said one evening when Gerard was strolling by her side under the trees of Cheyne Walk. Her father was with them. In all Gerard’s visits he had never found her alone — not once had they two talked together without a listener, not once had their eyes met without the witness of other eyes. A passionate longing sometimes seized him as they paced soberly up and down in the summer moonlight, a longing to be alone with her, to hold her hands, to look into her eyes, and search the secrets of her heart with ruthless questioning — but never yet had that desire been gratified. Once on a sudden impulse he called at the Chelsea lodging-house in the afternoon, knowing that her father often spent an hour or two before dinner at the Free Library, but the landlady who opened the door told him that Miss Davenport was at her work, and must on no account be disturbed.
“You can at least tell her that I am here, and would be glad to see her, if only for a few minutes,” said Gerard, and as he had given the woman more than one handsome douceur, she went into the parlour and gave his message.
She returned almost immediately to say that Miss Davenport was engaged upon work that had to be finished that afternoon, and she could not leave her sewing-machine.
The click, click of the hated wheel was audible while the woman delivered her message, and Gerard left the threshold, angry with Fate and life — angry even with the girl who had denied herself to him.
“It is pride, obstinacy, heartlessness,” he told himself, in his disappointment. “She
knows that I adore her — that I can make her life one summer holiday; that I hold the master-key to all the world contains of beauty or of pleasure; and yet she goes on grinding that odious wheel. She would rather be the drudge of a German tailor than the ruler of my life.”
It was while he was in this embittered state of mind that he found himself face to face with Justin Jermyn, only a few paces from Mr. Davenport’s door.
“I thought you were in the Hartz Mountains,” he said, annoyed at the encounter.
“I have been there — have tramped with my knapsack on my back, like a student from Heidelberg or Gottingen, have drunk the cup of pleasure at roadside inns, dozed through a long summer day on the Brocken, and dreamt of Mephisto and the witches. But one day a fancy seized me to come back to London and hunt you up. I heard from Roger Larose that you had turned hermit, and were living secluded in the house he built for you — and I, who am something of the hermit myself, felt drawn to you by sympathy. Was that Gretchen’s wheel I heard just now, as I passed the house where you were calling?”
“I have no idea what you may have heard; but I should like to know what brings you to this particular neighbourhood.”
“Curiosity, and a fast hansom. I saw you driving this way as I stood waiting to cross the road at Albert Gate, with the intention of calling upon you. Useless to go to your house when you were driving away from it, so I hailed a hansom, and told the driver to keep yours in view — and so the man drove me to the corner of this street, where I alighted from my hansom just as you dismissed yours. I passed the house yonder on the opposite side of the way while you were talking to the landlady, who took her own time in opening the door. You were too much absorbed to notice me as I went by, and through the open window I saw a girl working at a sewing-machine — a pale, proud face, which flushed crimson when the woman announced your visit.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 910