Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  Gerard belonged to the school of sentimental agnostics. He was willing to speak well of Christ and of His prophets, was full of admiration for the grand personality of Elijah, and thought the Book of Job the loftiest expression of human imaginings. He loved to dwell upon the picturesque in the Bible, and Hester learnt from his conversation how familiar an infidel may be with Holy Writ. When she told him how great a consolation the Christian’s unquestioning belief had been to her in the darkest days of her poverty, he smiled at her sweet simplicity, and said how he too had been a believer till he began to think. And so, with many tears, as if she had been parting with some cherished human friend, she let the Divine Image of the Man-God go, and accepted the idea of the God-like Man, a being to be named in the same breath with Socrates and Plato, with Shakespeare and Milton — only a little higher than the highest modem intellect. Only a week, and a creed was destroyed, but in that week what a flood of talk about all things in heaven and on earth, what theories, and dreams, and philosophies sounded and explored! To this woman, whom ho loved more fondly than he had ever dreamed of loving, Gerard gave the intellectual experience of his manhood, from the hour he began to ponder upon the problem of man’s existence to his latest opinion upon the last book he had read. Had she not loved him, her own simple faith, the outcome of feeling unsustained by thought, might have been strong enough to stand fast against his arguments; but love took the part of the assailant, and the result was a foregone conclusion. Had he been a religious enthusiast, a fervid Papist, believing in saintly relics and miracle-working statues, she would have believed as he taught her to believe. Her faith, fortified by her love, would have removed mountains. With her, to love meant total self-abnegation. Even the sharp stings of remorse were deadened by the happiness of knowing that her lover was happy; and as she gradually grew to accept his idea of a universe governed only by the laws of human reason, she came to think that whether Church and State had assisted at her marriage was indeed, as Gerard urged, of infinitesimal significance. And this intellectual emancipation achieved, there remained but one cloud on her horizon. Her only fear or anxiety was for her father’s welfare — and even of him she tried to think as little as possible, knowing that she could do nothing for him except await the result of his misconduct. She had given him all the fairest years of her girlhood, and he had accepted her sacrifice, and at the first opportunity had chosen his darling vice in preference to his daughter. She had a new master now, a master at whose feet she laid all the treasures of her life, for whom no sacrifice could ever be too much.

  Time is measured by feeling. There are days in every life which mean epochs. One eventful week may stand for more in the sum of existence than half a dozen placid monotonous years. It seemed to Hester, while September was yet young, that her union with Gerard Hillersdon had lasted for half a lifetime. She could scarcely think of herself except as his wife. All the past years seemed dark and shadowy, like a dioramic picture that melts gradually into something strange and new. The name of wife no longer wounded her ear. The new philosophy taught her that she was no less a wife because she had no legal claim to the title. The new philosophy taught her that she had a right to do what she liked with her life, so long as she did not wrong her neighbour. One clause in that Church Catechism her childish lips had repeated so often, was blotted out for ever. Duty to God was done with, since there was no God. All moral obligations were comprised in duty to man — a reasonable regard for the happiness of the largest number.

  That renunciation of the creed of hope was not accomplished without moments of mental agony, even in the midst of that dream of love which filled the world with one adored presence. There were moments when the young heart would have gone up to the old Heaven in prayer — prayer for the endurance of this deep felicity, prayer for the creature she loved too well. But the new Heaven was a blank — an infinite system of worlds and distances, measureless, illimitable — but there was no one there — no one — no mind, no heart, no love, no pity; only systems and movement, perpetual movement, which included light, heat, evolution, everything — a mighty and complex universe of which her lover and herself were but unconsidered atoms, of whom no higher Existence had ever taken heed, since they two, poor sport of Life and Time, were the crowning glory of evolution. The progress of the species might achieve something loftier in infinite ages to come; but so far they two, Gerard and herself, were the highest outcome of immeasurable ages. For conduct, for happiness, for protection from the dangers that surrounded them, they had to look to themselves and to none other.

  Had she been less absorbed by her affection for the creature Hester would have more acutely suffered by this darkening over of the world beyond, which had once been her consolation and her hope; but in Gerard’s companionship there was no need of a better world.

  Those last weeks of summer were exceptionally beautiful. It seemed as if summer were lingering in the land even when September was drawing to its close. Trees and shrubberies, the flower-beds that made great masses of vivid colour on the lawn — scarlet, orange, golden yellow, deepest azure — were untouched by frost, unbeaten by rain. The broad, old-fashioned border which gave an old-world air to one end of the garden was glorious with tall gaudy flowers — tritoma, Japanese anemones, cactus dahlias, late-blooming lilies, and roses red and white. And beyond the garden and encircling shrubbery, in the hedgerows and meadows, in the copses and on the patches of hillocky common, heather, gorse, wild-flowers, there was everywhere the same rich luxuriance, the wealth of colour and perfume, that joyous exuberance of Nature which five or six weeks of old-fashioned summer weather can fling over the face of an English landscape.

  It may be that this abundant beauty, this delicious interlude of sunshine and blue sky helped Hester Davenport to forget the shadows in her life — to forget all that was painful and dubious in her position, and to exist only in the happiness of the present. Morning after morning the same sunlit river rippled round the boat, which seemed to dance and twinkle in the vivid light, as if it were a living thing, longing to be free and afloat. Morning after morning Gerard and Hester sculled their skiff along the windings of romantic backwaters, halting under a roof of greenery to idle away the sultry hours in talk or reading. Under those slanting willows, whose green tresses dipped and trailed in the bright blue water, they would sit for a long summer day, Hester’s dexterous fingers employed upon some piece of artistic embroidery, while Gerard read aloud to her.

  In this way they went through all the devious windings and eloquent incomprehensibilities of the “Revolt of Islam” — in this way Hester heard for the first time of the “Ring and the Book” — and wept and suffered with the gentle heroine, and thrilled and trembled in those scenes of dramatic grandeur and fiery passion, unsurpassed in the literature of power. A new world opened before her as Gerard familiarised her with his favourite authors — the lawlessness of Shelley, the rude vehemence of the Elizabethan dramatists, the florid eloquence of Jeremy Taylor, the capricious brilliancy of De Quincey, the subtle wit of Lawrence Sterne. These and many other writers, long familiar to the man who had lived by literature, were all new to Hester.

  “What an ignoramus I have been!” she exclaimed; “I thought when I had read Shakespeare and Milton, and Byron and Tennyson I knew all the best treasures of English literature — but now the treasures seem inexhaustible.”

  There were other literatures too to be tasted. They read Eugenie Grandet together, and Hester wept over the heroine’s disappointed life. They read new books and old books, having nothing to do in those six weeks of perpetual summer but read and talk and ramble, and worship one another, each unto the other the beginning and end of life.

  “If it could last!” thought Gerard; but Hester, less experienced, and, therefore, more confiding in Fate, dreamt that this Elysium would last till the grim spectre, who tramples down all blisses, broke into their enchanted palace.

  She watched his face with fondest anxiety, and it was her delight to mark how the dark line
s and the pinched, wan look seemed to be vanishing day by day. Who knows whether it was really so, or whether in the face she worshipped she saw only what she so ardently longed to see, signs of improving health and youth renewed. His eyes had a new brightness, she thought, and if he looked pale in the daylight, she had always a bright colour in the evening as they sat side by side in the luminous circle of the reading-lamp. And again and again he assured her that happiness had given him a new lease of life, that all the old aches and wearinesses had been subjugated, and that Dr. South would tell a very different story next time he overhauled his patient.

  “He told me to seek happiness, and I have sought and found it,” he said, kissing the slender hands that had toiled so patiently in the past, and which now so often lay idly in his.

  Gerard thought of the Chart of Life behind the curtain at Hillersdon House, and fancied that when he should again trace a line upon that mystical chart the outline would be bold and free, the stroke of the pen broad and steady.

  In those six weeks of happiness he had severed himself almost entirely from his past life, and from that wrestling, striving world in which a bachelor under thirty, with two millions of money, is an important factor. The men of his set had left off wondering why he started neither racing stud nor mammoth yacht, why neither the blue ribbon of the turf nor the glories of the Royal Yacht Squadron had any attraction for him. The masculine portion of society had set him down finally as a poor creature, without manly aspirations or English pluck — an æsthete, a dilettante, a man good for nothing but to keep a free luncheon table, and to lose a hundred now and again at écarté or piquet. Women were far more indulgent. They talked of Gerard Hillersdon as “quite too interesting — so delightfully unlike any one else.”

  He had arranged that all his letters should be re-addressed to the Post Office at Reading, and twice a week he despatched the indispensable replies from Reading to the house-steward, to be posted in London. Thus even his own servants knew of no nearer address than Reading, which was seven miles from the Rosary. He answered only such letters as absolutely required replies, and to these his answers were brief and colourless. He had so concentrated all his thoughts upon Hester, and the placid, sunlit life which they were leading, that it was only by a painful effort he could bring his mind to bear upon the commonplace of friendship or the dry-as-dust of business. Certain letters there were which had to be written somehow, the writing of which was absolute mental agony. These were his weekly letters to the woman whom he was pledged to marry when the year of her widowhood should have ended. And of that year a quarter had already gone by — a quarter of a year which had drifted him so far away from his old love that he looked back at the dim past wonderingly, and asked himself, “Did I ever love her? Was not the whole story a concession to society ethics, which demand that every young man should have his goddess, de par le monde, every married woman her youthful adorer, every smart menage its open secret, not to know which is not to belong to the smart world?”

  Once a week at least he must write to the absent lady; for to neglect her might result in a catastrophe. Her nature, he told himself, was of the catastrophic order, a woman most dangerous to offend. He had never forgotten that moment in Hertford Street when, at the thought of his inconstancy, she had risen up in her fury, white to the lips, save where the hectic of anger burned upon her cheek in one red spot, like a flame. He might doubt — did doubt — if he had ever loved her; but he could not doubt that she loved him, with that love of woman which is “a fearful and a lovely thing.”

  No; he must maintain the falsehood of his position till he could find some way of issue from this net which he had made for himself in the morning of life. Now, with love at its zenith, he could conceive no phase of circumstances that could make him false to Hester. Her life must be intertwined with his to the end; albeit he might never parade his passion before the cold, cruel eyes of the world — eyes that stare down the poetry of life, and if a man married Undine would look at her with cold calculation through a tortoiseshell merveilleuse, and ask, “What are her people?”

  Once a week the lying letter had to be written — lying, for he dared not write too coldly lest the distant divinity should mark the change of temperature and come flying homeward to find out the reason for this falling-off. So he secluded himself in his study one morning in every week, telling Hester that he had troublesome business letters which must be answered, and he composed his laborious epistle, spicing his forced tenderness with flippancy that was meant for wit, elaborating society scandals from the faintest hints in Truth or the World, rhapsodising on summer time and the poets, and filling his tale of pages somehow.

  His conscience smote him when Edith Champion praised these artificial compositions, this Abelard done to order. Her perception of epistolary style was not keen enough to detect the falsehood of the writer.

  “What lovely letters you have written me lately!” she wrote, “only too far apart. I never knew you write so eloquently, for you must remember how you used to put me off with a couple of hurried pages. I am touched to the heart at the thought that absence seems only to bring us nearer together, more perfectly in sympathy with each other. I spent half the night — indeed the mountains were rosy in the sunlight when I closed my book — reading Shelley, after your last letter, in which you told me how you had been reading him lately. You are right. We are too apt to neglect him. Browning is so absorbing with his analytical power — his gift of turning men and women inside-out and dissecting every mental phase — he so thoroughly suits the temper of the age we live in, which seems to me an age of asking questions for which there are no answers. Write oftener, dearest. Your delightful letters have but one fault — there are too few of them.”

  “So much for the divining rod of a woman’s intelligence,” thought Gerard, as he tore up the letter.

  And then from the highly-cultivated lady, who was well abreast of the stream of modem literature, and who was full of the current ideas of the age, he turned to the fond girl whose delight was to listen to the expression of his ideas, who accepted his gospel as if there were no other teacher on this earth, as if all the wisdom of Buddha, Confucius, and Socrates were concentrated in this young journalist of nine-and-twenty. He turned to Hester, and found in her companionship a sweet reposeful influence he had never felt in the old days when all his leisure hours were spent with Edith Champion.

  In one of Edith’s later letters there was a remonstrance.

  “You tell me nothing of yourself,” she said. “Not even where you are or what you are doing. Your paper and the Knightsbridge post-mark indicate that you are at Hillersdon House, but what are you doing there, and what can be keeping you in London when all the civilised world is scattered over moor and mountain, or roving on the sea? I sometimes fear you are ill — perhaps too ill to travel. If I really thought that I should waive every other consideration and go to London to be near you. And yet your delightful letters could hardly be written by a sick man. There is no languor or depression in them. A whim, I suppose, this lingering in town when everybody else has fled. You were always a creature of whims, and now you have millions you are naturally all the more whimsical. Not to be like other people! was not that your ambition years ago when we used to discuss your career?”

  How could ho read such letters as these without a pang of remorse? He suffered many such pangs as he read; but in the next half-hour he was floating idly with the current along the lovely river, and Hester’s pale young loveliness was opposite him, the sweet face dimly seen in the deep shadow of a broad straw hat. Nothing that art can lend to beauty was needed to accentuate that delicate harmony of form and colouring. The simple cambric frock, the plain straw hat became her better than court robes and plumes and jewels could have done. She was just at the age when beauty needs the least adornment.

  “I don’t wonder that you refused to be tempted by all my offers of finery from man-mantua-makers,” Gerard said to her one day. “You are lovelier in your cotton gow
ns than the handsomest woman in London in a hundred guinea confection by Raudnitz or Felix. But some day when we are in Paris I shall insist on dressing you up in their fine feathers, just to see how my gentle Hester will look as the Queen of Sheba. A woman of fashion, drest in the latest modish eccentricity, always recalls her Sheban majesty to my mind.”

  “Some day when we are in Paris!”

  He often spoke as if their lives were to be spent together, as if wherever he went she would go with him. Sometimes in the midst of her happiness Hester lost herself in a labyrinth of mingled hope and fear. He had told her of an insurmountable obstacle to their legal union, and yet he spoke as if there were to be no end to this blessed life in which they lived only for each other. Ah, that was the shadow on the dial, that was the one stupendous fear. To this marriage of true minds, marriage unsanctified by chinch or law, there would come the end — the falling off of love, sudden or gradual; the bitter hopeless day on which she should awaken from her dream, and pass out of Paradise into the bleak barren world. She tried to steep heart and mind in the bliss of the present, to shut her eyes against all possibilities of woe. Whatever the future might bring it would be something to remember she had once been completely happy. Even a single day of such perfect bliss would shine like a star in the night of years to come. She would not spoil the ineffable present by forebodings about the future. And thus it was that Gerard Hillersdon had to listen to no repinings, to kiss away no remorseful tears. She who had given him her heart and life had given with all a woman’s self-forgetfulness. What matter how fate might use her by-and-by? The triumph of her life was in her lover’s happiness.