“We can smoke the dear old man’s cigars in quiet on these stones,” he said. “Come, we can talk freely here — not a soul who understands our tongue within earshot. Now, you have got to tell me all you know about that woman.”
“Meaning Mary Smith?”
“Meaning the woman who calls herself Mary Smith.
You will have to tell me—”
“Just as much as I think I have the right to tell, and not a syllable more. Why do you want to know? You see her here happy and useful. What else matters? She is nothing to you — never can be anything more to you than your uncle’s reading girl. He has had several reading girls whom you must have seen from time to time — failures, all of them. Why should you rage furiously about this one?”
“Because she interests me — because she is a mystery. Becky Sharp in excelsis, and you know how interesting Becky is even now, when she is more than half a century old.”
“Mary belongs to another type. Why trouble yourself about her?”
“Because if she is not an adventuress she is a witch, and she has cast her spell. You see I am frank. I ought to have gone away after that first day in the gondola — Venice — the languid water — the long hours in air that is like a caress — I ought to have gone away. Be kind, Austin. You know what my life has been, and how badly I was treated. I began to be old and hard at three-and-twenty. You know what a woman did for me — I believed in her — would have sold my soul for her — afterwards I swore that I would never believe again, and that if I ever gave a piece of my heart to a woman she should be pure and spotless — conventional — Philistine, if you like, but impeccable — the kind of woman who can’t go wrong, who doesn’t know what sin means.”
“Wait till you meet her. There are plenty of such perfect women in the world, and leave Mary untroubled by your caprice. She is happy — leave her alone.”
“Not till I know what she has been — whether she is a bit of soulless propriety, or a woman who has been down into the depths and is acting a part.”
“She is not acting. I will tell you as much as that. She has been through deep waters. She has suffered and grieved.”
“I don’t want a woman who has been rescued.”
“Then you don’t want Mary Smith.”
“She has been rescued? God, how I hate the word!’ “Yes. She has been rescued — from starvation — or perhaps the river — but not from the way of sinners.”
“Tell me that she is pure, that no man lives who can say she has belonged to him.”
“I will not tell you that.”
“Then she is no wife for me. I won’t try that experiment a second time.”
“You are wise, George. It was an unlucky experiment for you. But this at least I will tell you, that Mary is as wide as the poles asunder from the woman who tricked you. There is not a thought in common between them.”
“But she is somebody’s leavings. She has belonged to a man who was not her husband.”
“She has belonged to a man who lied to her — who stole her from her home before she was eighteen.”
“They all say that.”
“I know it is true.”
“On what evidence?”
“On the evidence of character. I know Mary.”
“Well, say it’s true — say I believe your character-reading. The girl who could be lured by a seducer is not for me. She may have bewitched me, but I can break the spell.”
“I don’t think she has troubled herself, or is likely to trouble herself about you. She has suffered greatly through trusting one man, and I don’t believe she will ever trust, much less care for, another. She is a woman who can be happy without admirers and without a lover.”
“And some day the man will come back and want her again. Do you know where he is and what he is doing?”
“Neither she nor I know anything about him.”
“Did he leave her to marry someone else?”
“No. He was married when he found her. If not he would have married her, or at least he told her so.”
“And you believe in sweet simplicity that knows nothing of the world’s ways, and takes her lover’s hand and walks away from home with him — without waiting for banns or bridesmaids? I don’t.”
“Nobody asks you to believe. All Mary wants is to be let alone.”
George flung away his half-smoked cigar in a rage, and the little spark of red fire skimmed over the moonlit pavement below them like a lost glow-worm.
“Look here, Austin,” he said with sudden fierceness, “you might as well show your cards. You are in love with this girl. Every word you have said this night is a plain avowal. You are passionately in love with her, and will end by taking her to church with my uncle’s blessing and half his fortune, and you’ll have your sisters as bridesmaids, and the congratulations of the whole family — except my mother.”
“If you choose to talk nonsense I can’t prevent you,” Austin answered with a splendid carelessness. “Hark! there’s the first of the clocks striking twelve. They’ll have shut us out if we don’t make haste back.”
He went down the steps and George had no choice but to follow him in the solemn striking of many clocks.
They were both to leave Venice next morning.
XV
IT was a quarter of a year later and Conway Field and the reading girl were in Hampshire in the drowsy heat of a fine August. The splash of the fountain was a welcome sound in the long sultry afternoons when Mary sat reading to her employer in the shade of a pollarded Spanish chestnut that made a tent of foliage under which twenty people had sometimes sat at luncheon in the good days before Conway’s accident.
There were no luncheon parties, or domestic gatherings now, and the country people who had called upon the invalid had been received so coldly that they were not likely to come again. Only the Vicar of the parish had been welcomed with any semblance of cordiality. But he was a man in a thousand — a fine scholar, who never obtruded his scholarship, a humorist, and a man in whom the humdrum duties of parochial life in a small agricultural community had not extinguished the joy of life. As parsons go he was a rich man, and could afford to live the kind of life he liked, far from the madding crowd, with the wife he loved, who was in perfect sympathy with all his tastes and inclinations. Like him, she had a keen intellect and a strong sense of humour, and, like him, she loved her garden and her horses, her old-English china, and all the charm and comeliness of an ideal vicarage.
“Mr. Ullathorn may come as often as he likes,” Conway told Mary. “He never bores me. And, though he has a capacity for taking legends and mysteries on trust that I never had, I believe he is sincere, and I know he is benevolent, and a power for good in the village community.”
For Mary the Ullathorns were always a cheerful presence that lifted her a little way out of the abiding sadness of her surroundings. Perhaps Conway Field understood this, for he would often suggest a visit to the vicarage, where she had been begged to run in and out as her fancy suggested.
“I love to have young pretty creatures about me, my dear,” Mrs. Ullathorn said. “I love to talk of their frocks and their hats, and all the frivolities Marmaduke laughs at. And they let me talk of my servants and the village twaddle — the scandals and pettinesses that make one almost hate one’s fellow-creatures.”
“Almost hating” was the farthest Elizabeth Ullathorn could go in that line. For the most part she could only wonder at other people’s ill-nature.
They had not been very long at Madingley when Mr. Field received a letter from George Bertram.
“Cool!” he said, passing the letter over to Mary after reading it.
“MY DEAR UNCLE, — The courts are up and I have the dreary desert of the Vacation yawning in front of me. I shan’t go far afield this year. I am heartily sick of abroad. Luckily I have work to get through that wouldn’t fit in with through trains to Rome or Vienna, and nothing calls me out of England. May I come to you at Madingley and stay just as long as I can wi
thout being a bore? The first morning you feel you have had enough of me you will tell me so with the candour of a blood relation, and I will disappear before the afternoon; but in the meantime, so long as I am not matter in the wrong place, Madingley will suit me down to the ground for two or three toughish jobs I have on hand. I worked pretty hard in my sky parlour at Danieli’s, but the very atmosphere of Venice is a distraction, and I know I could work better at Madingley.”
“Shall we let him come, Mary?”
“Why not? — if you are sure he won’t bore you.”
“How can we ever be sure of that? I dare say he will get on my nerves now and then, as the flies do in the garden, but after all he is a good fellow, and I was always fond of him. He has suffered and I hope he is strong. Let him come, Mary. Perhaps he will amuse us both, though there has not been much gaiety about him since that Stanhope woman jilted him. Let him come. There are rooms enough and to spare in the corridor.”
Mr. Field had told her the story of George’s discomfiture before he came to Venice.
“For a proud young man to have brought himself to marry a damaged lady, and for the damaged lady to chuck him, is a bit of a shock,” he said. “George has never got over it. He looks on all your sex with a jaundiced eye. But except in the matter of ordering dinner you need not give him a thought.”
Drayson the butler was at Madingley, but not Mrs. Tredgold. That superior person being left in charge of Warburton House, where she received curates at afternoon tea with all the air and authority of mistress, not forgetting to tell them in confidence of her master’s absurd infatuation for a young person picked out of the gutter.
XVI
GEORGE BERTRAM had spent three months of his life in trying not to think of Mary Smith. He had worked like a tiger at his cases, and astonished even the solicitors who believed in him. He had been to all the big music-halls where strange women who danced amazing dances or sang amazing songs were to be seen and heard. He had listened and looked and had come away thinking the show hateful, and wishing that all the strange women had one neck that he could wring. He had gone to parties among his father and mother’s friends, which he hated even worse, though his parents assured him they were of a superior quality. He had done all these things — and at the end of Term he had to confess to himself that his passion for a nameless and possibly disreputable woman was a disease past cure.
Little as he knew of her, he knew at least that she was a woman he could not marry, as much outside the pale as the woman who lived in St. Patrick’s Grove, and danced at the “Gilded Lily.” He could not marry her, but he could not do without her. His folly must go on to the bitter end. He could not marry her, but he was sick for love of her, and he would give himself to her body and soul if she would have him. He would give her all his years to come, all his prospects, all his hopes, and swear eternal fidelity to her — order his life as she pleased — go to the other end of the world with her — chuck the Bar — break his mother’s heart — offend his uncle beyond the possibility of pardon by wilfully taking from him the creature who ministered to his comfort, and almost made him happy All this he would do for Mary Smith: act idiotically — wickedly — but he would not marry her. There, he told himself, he was adamant.
Would she on her part insist on marriage — stand out for the letter of that law which the modern woman treats so lightly? He thought not.
“If I can make her love me, I can make her come to me,” he told himself. “She gave herself in the freshness of her youth — God! how lovely she must have been — to a scoundrel who deserted her. Surely she will give herself to me!”
“If I can make her love me!” That was what the thud of the labouring engine kept saying as he sat alone in a first-class compartment of the Southampton express on his way to Madingley, alone through bribery and corruption — briefs scattered on the seat in front of him. “If I can make her, if I can make her love me!” said the engine.
A harder task, perhaps, than that difficult case of Prior and others versus Withacomb, on which a quarter of a million depended.
What battles — silent battles between brain and heart — this man had been fighting since that night in Venice — since he sat upon the steps of the church bathed in moonlight, and extorted Mary’s piteous secret from his reluctant cousin. In how many aspects he had pictured her. Now as a spotless victim, fallen from woman’s high estate — fallen, but still pure. As he visualized her thus it seemed to him that he might make her his wife and be proud to have won her, proud to show her to his world. This calm perfection, this exquisite refinement might challenge society, none should find a flaw in the gem with which he had crowned his life.
The crown of his life! Viewed in this aspect, it was thus he thought of her. But this transcendental fit did not last long. He had but to remember what that other woman had been to him — in his hot youth — the dupe of a beautiful face. He looked back and knew that she was worthless, trivial, mercenary, selfish to the core of her heart. And was he to be tricked again just because this woman had better manners, a finer mind, and the indications of better birth and breeding? When he believed in Miriam Stanhope he had thought her a lady. Steeped in the magic of a passionate love, he had believed whatever the enchantress chose to tell him, and it was not until a year after she jilted him, a year of brooding and embittered thoughts, that he remembered how little those various details of her romantic past fitted into the broad lines of her story, and how impossible most of them were.
He would have sacrificed his name and prospects in life to Miriam. Fate had been kind and saved him, in spite of himself. And now at thirty-two he was almost as weak as he had been at twenty-one, and ready to fall at the feet of an adventuress whom his mother’s family hated.
“I will win her at my own price, or cut her out of my heart,” he told himself, as the car shot along the rural road between hedgerows where the ragged robin was rosy red against the dark-green splendour of beech boughs.
Most men have the defects of their qualities. One of George Bertram’s finest qualities, the quality that might lead him to distinction, was concentration. But there are times when a virtue becomes a vice. And, when passion rules the man with the faculty of concentration, heaven knows where it may lead him. Be the purpose that absorbs him for good or for evil, he cannot let it go. All the strength of his mind is fixed upon a point, waking or sleeping, in company or in solitude, his thoughts are driving him upon a single line, a single desire rules his mind. He broods upon his purpose with a bulldog tenacity. He can find neither comfort nor rest, but in the assurance that long or late he will win the thing he wants.
George Bertram had never run after women. Love with him had never taken the loose Horatian aspect: Lydia of the many flames to-day, the tempestive Chloë to-morrow. He had never been trivial or fickle in his ideas of the sex. He was a man whom a disreputable marriage would have ruined for life. Having escaped that danger, and having, as he believed, protected himself with triple armour against the possibility of being ever again caught in the toils, the knowledge that he had been caught exasperated him to madness. He raged with a sullen fury against this new Delilah, whose thoughtful eyes and tranquil lips and far-off manner had attracted him by their aloofness rather than by a superior beauty. No, she was not as handsome as Miriam Stanhope — not as handsome as many women he had seen and passed by, since Miriam jilted him, but she was wonderful somehow. The charm by which she had caught him was her mystery.
The poodle came to meet him half an hour after his arrival, when he strolled across the grass to the leafy tent where Conway Field and his reader were having tea. The magnificent black beast came sauntering towards the new arrival, sniffed curiously at his legs, and trotted away in disgust. Here was a man who liked dogs, perhaps, but who didn’t keep a dog, a man, therefore, with whom no dog could at once be in sympathy, for however they may be disposed to fight each other, no proper-minded dog can take to the dogless man.
Mr. Field gave his nephew a cordial gr
eeting.
“I’m afraid you must have thought me a trifle cheeky for inviting myself to your country retreat, but I really was at a loose end, and it was no good going to any of my father’s friends, for they would have done anything for me except let me work. I knew there was plenty of room here and that I need not bore you.”
“My dear fellow, I am delighted to have you. You will bring me a little of the dark and bright from the world I have done with. We will talk of famous probate cases, which always interest me, and at which I know you are a dab. I suppose we shall have you a judge in the divorce court before your hair is grey, and you will be loosening the intolerable chains, and setting husbands and wives free from an initial mistake to take still heavier fetters. I don’t find that either the divorced wives or the divorced husbands seem to do much better with their second ventures.”
“C’est selon,” George said with a shrug.
He had been looking at Mary while his uncle was talking. She had received him with no more animation than if he had been the village mechanic come to wind the clocks. She would have been much more interested in the head-gardener.
Her thin white hands were moving gently over Zamiel’s head and ears, caressing the softness of the curly black hair. Her eyelids had drooped under George’s earnest gaze, but there was not the faintest blush — only the natural avoidance of a too persistent look.
“I hope you like your sitting-room,” she said at last. “It is utterly delightful. Were you kind enough to choose it for me?”
“No. Mrs. Moffatt arranged everything. She knows what is wanted by instinct.”
“Admirable woman! But I think you put those roses on the writing-table.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1017