Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “If I lose half my work it will be your fault,” he told her; “but if you think the two letters after my name are worth half my present income—”

  To Enid’s mind they were. A clever lawyer meant very little for her and her girl friends, but a distinguished K.C. was at least respectable. He had some substantial victories before the gloss was off the silk, and at forty he was making ten thousand a year, which increased by leaps and bounds to thirty thousand.

  He knew that it was the experience of those barren years — his work in America — his work in a stockbroker’s office — before he went to the Bar — that had made him the man he was, and he knew that his only son could never be such a man.

  While he was at Eton the boy had set his heart on soldiering — in the Engineers. But here his mother interfered, and told him in a flood of tears that he would break her heart if he went into the Army.

  “I should never know an instant’s peace,” she said. “My nights would be one long misery, haunted with horrors. Wait till I am dead. Oh, my best beloved, wait till I am dead!” she wailed. “Wait till I am dead!” Which from a parent of nine-and-thirty was a large order.

  His mother had been in some wise his evil genius, loving him not wisely but too well. She was not the heroic mother who could tell the son she adored: “Come back to me with your shield or on it.” George was very young in those days — young and tender-hearted — and he had given her his promise. He had not said: “I will never be a soldier.” But he had said: “I will try never to make you unhappy.”

  Then after Eton had come Magdalen, and a brief interval of religious enthusiasm, when he had tramped about Oxford thinking of Newman and the hot days of Tract Ninety. He had thought then of reading for the Church — a fitful enthusiasm — a flame that flashed and flickered and soon went out.

  His facility in painting the creeks and crannies along the Upper Thames, and the pleasure he felt in doing it, inspired him with the idea of taking up art seriously, strenuously, as soon as he had got his degree.

  He showed his latest sketches to Conway Field in his last Long Vacation, and talked about Art.

  “My mother told me how clever you were, and how you studied in Paris,” he said, sitting by his uncle’s sofa in the library, where the Venetian shutters kept the room in shadow. “Will you tell me about your experience in the art schools there?”

  And then, even in that half-light, he saw a sudden change in his uncle’s face, a look of infinite pain.

  “All art schools are alike,” Conway answered slowly, after a perceptible pause; “their value depends upon the pupil.”

  “Yes, yes, of course, and I’m afraid I am not of the right stuff. I get tired of work if I can’t look down a vista that ends in success. I am not like my father. I can’t row hard against stream.”

  “You didn’t go to the right school.”

  “What is the matter with Eton?”

  Conway Field dismissed the question with a wave of his hand.

  “You didn’t graduate in the school of poverty. That’s where small boys learn to be great men. There’s no harm done, my dear fellow. It isn’t your fault that you are an only son, with a rich father, and a mother who worships you. A fig for law, and a fig for art. Enjoy the golden days, for they are short. Have your fling.”

  George had his fling. He had his golden days — those days of youth that are so sweet, though they sometimes leave a bitter taste in the mouth and are sad in the thoughts of age — the days when pleasure is new and has a flavour it can never have again, and love is the whole wide world, the sea, and the overarching heaven — the days when nothing else matters while the one inevitable woman fills the foreground of life.

  In that half-world where the pulse of life beats fast, George met the inevitable woman, and loved and believed, where love and faith are wasted. He shut his ears against the facts of the case; would accept no warning; listen to no friendly counsel. “My love and I against the world,” he said. “If there has been anything in the past, that is ancient history. I can trust the future.” He went to his doom with his eyes open. The banns had been read twice in the new suburban church when the lady left the bijou house in the little street where Guizot had lived in his days of exile, and vanished into thin air.

  Her farewell letter was brief, but to the point:

  “I could not stick it, old dear. The thought of having to be ultra-respectable all the rest of my days got on my nerves. I want movement, change, a crowd of admirers, the rush of life. I am ten years too young and ten times too handsome to sit down in a flat in Cromwell Road, with servants I should have to look after, and order your dinner every day, and walk in the Park with you, among people I don’t know, and cut all my old friends. Apperley has been after me for the last six months, though you haven’t run against him — the celebrated Fred Apperley. They know all about him in New York — not a Pierpont Morgan or a Rockefeller — but just one of their common or garden millionaires, with a yacht like a liner. Think of it — a yacht with half a dozen stewards, a floating palace. It makes your second-floor flat look mean. Fred’s going to take me round the world, a two years’ trip, and he will marry me before we come back, if he can get shut of the girl he married last year at Chicago, and if I like. Good-bye, George. What I am doing is best for you and best for me.

  “Your true friend,

  “MIRIAM STANHOPE.

  “P.S. — I am keeping all the pretty little things you gave me for old sake’s sake.”

  The “pretty little things” included a pearl necklace that had cost him seven hundred and fifty pounds, and some diamonds whereof the pawnable value was fifteen hundred.

  The first snap of cold was in the air, and she was on board the Enchantress on the farther side of the Bay when he got her letter. She was to winter in Ceylon. He knew all about her movements, later, and knew that he had been her dupe from the hour of their first meeting, just a year before, to the day he lost her. His love for her had been the passion of a lifetime, her liking for him had been an interlude, an “extra” in the programme of her existence.

  George had had his fling. The half-world is a harder school than poverty, and Conway Field’s nephew left it a changed man. All the joy in life had gone out of him. His golden days were over and all his hours were leaden — all of the same dismal colour — a dull grey.

  No one but his uncle ever heard the true history of this “fling.” George had no secrets from him. There was a curious sympathy between them, an understanding that had never failed. Conway understood the angry, soured young man, just as he had understood the arrogant, conceited boy. He had often advised but he had never preached. He told George that the kind of wound he had suffered was never mortal.

  “You have had a lucky escape. The woman would have been the ruin of your life, and you would have hated her worse after a year of marriage as a reformed character than you hate her now for jilting you. Those stars of the half-world don’t shine in the realm of virtue. They may be capable of becoming good women, but they are never the same after their reformation. The charm is gone. Your star, your creature of fire and flame is only a faded beauty, with a society manner that would be perfect if it were not just a little too precise and pedantic — a little too much prunes and prism. I have known two or three such ladies, ghostly wanderers from a world they glorified by their beauty and electrified by their wit.”

  “You don’t know how brilliant that woman is, and how adaptable. She had not graduated in the gutter. Her pedigree was just as good as mine. She had nothing to learn and would have shone in the best society.”

  “You think so — and as I never saw her I can’t contradict you.”

  Years had come and gone — more or less leaden — since the golden days; but although George had forgotten much and had learnt much, the tragedy of his youth had left him a cynic and an egoist. He still clung to Austin and believed in him, but he made no new friends, and although he kept in touch with a few of the companions of his undergraduate days
, the links that held him to them were of the lightest — a good-natured toleration rather than friendship.

  His mother could never feel quite happy about this adored son, because she knew that her selfish love had held him from a path in which he might have won distinction, and in her secret thoughts there was bitter regret that he should rank among the young men who had failed, while she had a shrewd suspicion that he was unhappy.

  It was much to have him living at home, in which blessed privilege she was more fortunate than her sister, Selina Sedgwick, who bemoaned herself about Austin.

  “My only son, and I hardly ever see him.”

  “Perhaps I don’t see much more of George,” Mrs. Bertram replied. “He spends more time with his books than with us. And though he doesn’t dine out half so often as most young men, he has always an engagement of some kind when we have a party.”

  There came a day which seemed to Mrs. Bertram like the beginning of a new life.

  George had made a sudden announcement to his father across the hearth in the smoking-room, where they sometimes sat late into the night, talking a little, and thinking a great deal, for they were both thinkers.

  “If it is not too late,” he said quietly, “I should like to go to the Bar. I am beginning to tire of playing the Prodigal Son to the most indulgent of fathers, and I find the husks dry in my throat.”

  “Too late! At eight-and-twenty? Not a bit, my dear chap. Why, you arc a lad compared with some of the men who are cramming for their exam. You have plenty of time and a fine career before you — provided you are in earnest.”

  “I am damnably in earnest. I want work of some kind — the harder the better.”

  After this all went on velvet. Seeing that this sudden fervour was not a flash in the pan, John Bertram did all that a man in his position could do to put his son in the right path. Everything was easy for the son of the famous Counsel. Solicitors beamed upon him, and it was in a solicitor’s office that he got his first experience of law and equity. He worked in that office steadily for nearly a year, and passed thence to the busy pupil room of the firm’s favourite junior — and at the end of two years spent over briefs and pleadings, listening in Court, and working up for the examination, was duly “called” and signed the roll of the Bar of England.

  He entered his father’s chambers, a fact proclaimed by the name of George Bertram in clean paint below his father’s, and started to devil for the K.C. After another year of work that interested him keenly, his successful career began. The man who had devilled for J. B. was worth having as a junior in difficult cases. Bertram’s only son could not help being clever. He looked older than his years, and he had what the solicitors called an imposing manner — a reserve that was almost severe, and impressed them with an idea of his value.

  “Not an agreeable chap to take papers to, but safe as houses,” said the common-law clerk of Colney, Colney & Carterton. “I don’t much like the fellow, but he’s a rising man, going to be a second J. B.”

  There could be no higher praise than this, and before George had been three years at the Bar, his gown was in rags, and he had established himself as one of the ablest juniors of his day — a sound lawyer, with a good address, and occasional flashes of brilliancy.

  In familiar talk he called himself his father’s understudy. But he was not another J. B. He did not bubble over with cleverness, like the popular K.C. He had neither the genial temperament nor the splendid vivacity of his father; but the solicitors found that he was deep. The more obscure the case, the keener the searchlight of his finely-trained intellect. He had read his law-books with a dogged determination in the first instance, and with a keen zest as time went on, and all that was splendid in the work of the great jurists gradually revealed itself to him. He drank at the fountain of legal knowledge as eagerly as a thirsty traveller in the desert. And for the first time since a woman fooled him so heartlessly, he was able to forget the days when he had his “fling.”

  XIII

  THE Easter Vacation had scarcely begun when George Bertram turned his back on the dusty purlieus of the law, and set his face towards the dream city that he and his cousin loved. For Conway Field had invited his nephews to spend their holiday with him at the hotel on the Riva degli Schiavoni.

  “Come and cheer my lonely days. I have no acquaintances in Venice, not a man to speak to except my valet, a most estimable person, but whom I talk to as little as possible lest he should talk too much. He has been with me ten years and he has never initiated a conversation. Of course I have my reading girl who saves my sight and soothes my ear. She reads for one half the day, and far more of the night than I ought to allow. But there is no living creature so selfish as a pretty woman or a hopeles invalid. La belle des belles and the man with a bad spine think that all created things were made for their pleasure or their comfort. I let my gentle slave exhaust herself in my service. She is young, and she will have time to be idle and happy when I am gone.” —

  George gave his cousin this letter when they were in the Dover express, on their way to Calais for the train de luxe — that is to say, the train that would take them in the shortest time to Venice. Neither of them cared for the luxe, but the Easter Vacation is not long, and both of them had to be in London when Courts of Law and Government Offices reopened their doors.

  “Read that,” said George, pointing to the page that set forth Mary’s merits. “It looks like infatuation. I begin to think your people are right, and that you were not very wise when you introduced Miss Smith to the owner of Warburton House.”

  “Wise or not, I had to do it,” Austin answered gravely. “There were two people to be benefited. I had it in my power to get the best possible reader for my uncle, and the best possible situation for a friendless young woman, of fine character, good education and good manners.”

  “Well, she has been a stupendous success, my mother tells me. And you are blamed all round the family for having been blind to the risk of an old man’s infatuation for an attractive young woman — of unknown antecedents.”

  “Unknown to the family, who have no occasion to know them. I knew all about Miss Smith some time before I made her known to my uncle.”

  “And how much does he know of the young person’s past?”

  “As much as she has chosen to tell him. And before you see her I should like you to know that Mary Smith does not come into the category of young persons. She is a woman of strongly-marked character — and she is a lady.”

  “I will choose my words more carefully. For I see, if the enchantress has not cast her spell over my uncle, she is in a fair way of casting it over you.”

  Austin shrugged his shoulders and looked out of the window.

  George had a profound belief in his capacity for reading character, not unnatural in a man whose power in that line had served him well. But after sitting in Danieli’s salon on the first floor for nearly an hour at afternoon tea, while Mary Smith waited on his uncle, and joined occasionally in the general conversation, he had to confess himself baffled.

  He listened while she talked; he watched her when she was silent. The voice was low and grave, and there was music in it. The articulation was perfect, the accent refined — the accent of a woman who had been reared among gentlefolks. He had to own to himself that the voice was exquisite, and he could well understand the influence of such a woman in her capacity as reader over a lonely misanthrope like his uncle. The face? Ah, there he was at fault altogether. Was she beautiful? He remembered the Frenchman’s reply to that question: “Elle est pire.” And he was inclined to think that there was something in Mary Smith’s face that might prove more dangerous than beauty. Here, as in her voice, there was an exquisite refinement. The pale complexion and smooth dark hair, the sculptured eyelids half veiling the depth of grave grey eyes — thin lips and small round chin, long throat and shell-like ear. These were “points” if not beauty. There was nothing dazzling — no brilliancy of colour, not much light in the eyes — an expression of a
biding pensiveness that just stopped short of melancholy. No, Mary Smith was not beautiful. The little boys in the street would not turn to look at her, though here and there a thoughtful man might say to himself as he went slowly past her—” That is a haunting face!”

  “You fellows have been here before, I suppose,” Conway said, when his nephews were leaving him, “and I dare say you think you know all about Venice.”

  “Every stone,” answered George. “We are fed up with it.”

  “Very well. You shall stop at home and read to me, and Mary shall show Austin all the things you haven’t seen.”

  “I must bow to Miss Smith’s genius if she can find any unfamiliar charms, or anything new to tell us about the City of the Doges.”

  “She has steeped herself in the charm of Venice.”

  “I have read Ruskin,” Mary said quietly. “That’s all.”

  “And is his the last word? I think you have found something in Howells — in Browning — in Byron — in: d’Annunzio,” said Conway.

  Mary blushed at the last name.

  “By heaven, Becky Sharp can blush,” George thought.

  “I made her read some of the best bits of word-painting in ‘Il Fuoco.’ We skipped all the rest — only the Venetian rhapsodies, and the death of Wagner,” Conway said apologetically. Then he turned to Austin.

  “You will go about with Mary, and she shall teach you what you ought to admire — the churches, pictures, palaces,: out le tremblement, and the rising barrister shall find his amusement where he likes.”

  “No, no. If Miss Smith scorns me, I would rather stay at home and read to you. You must have a long arrear of political and legal news, for I don’t suppose Miss Smith tackles that.”