“It is always a pleasure to handle flowers. I’m afraid that is the only useful work I do at Madingley.”
“Except making a crusty old man happy,” muttered Mr. Field.
Mary was at his side pouring out his tea in the next minute, George watching her intently, as she attended to every detail that made for the invalid’s comfort. It was not till all was done that she turned to the visitor. There was no uncivil neglect or indifference, only a manner that seemed to say: “There is one person to be considered here, and his claims are paramount.”
“Is this all acting, or is she really fond of him?” George asked himself. Why should she not be fond of so kind a friend? Any womanly woman would be touched by so sad a fate, so calmly endured. Affection would be the natural result of pity. Only from affection could come the delicate attention, the watchful yet unobtrusive care which this reading girl gave her master.
Conway had been lying half asleep among his pillows when George arrived, but now Mary and the footman had manipulated his wonderful couch, which was as adaptable as a living thing, and he was sitting up with a table in front of him, ready for a long talk with the new arrival.
“Well, George, you come from the heart of things, from the central point and focus of this earth, as every Englishman considers London, and I expect you to amuse me.”
“I’m afraid I am rather an unamusing person. If you read the papers every day they will have told you all that is worth knowing.”
“The papers are very good in their way and they help to keep me alive. But a young man who goes about London knows a good deal more than one finds in a newspaper. If you are not witty yourself you can tell me the good things you have heard at great men’s tables — the new ideas — the paradoxes — the stinging criticisms — the bitter speeches from good haters — the new nickname for our political opponents — the little malignant touches — the shrewd prophecies — the bows drawn at a venture. You can be amusing if you are not too conceited to give me the skimming of other men’s brains.”
George laughed and obeyed. Mary thought that only a clever man could have talked to order as well as he did. She listened with evident interest, and always laughed in the right place. But after she had given George his second cup of tea, and done all that the invalid wanted for his comfort, she went quietly away with Zamiel, whose forepaw had been pulling her arm for most of the time, first for a biscuit and next even more persistently for a walk.
George watched girl and dog as they went quickly through sunshine and shadow — watched them till they vanished in the leafy distance.
“Miss Smith seems to enjoy your villeggiatura,” George said when they were gone.
“Yes, she loves the garden and the wood, and even the village and the school-children, and my vicar and his amiable wife.”
“You have made her very happy.”
“Yes, I believe she is happy. And in a life so useless as mine it is something to have made one woman and one dog happy. Mary had not a very happy girlhood, though she made the best of it, and contrived to take pleasure in rather gloomy surroundings.”
George flushed, and his eyes brightened. “Now I shall hear something,” he thought.
“Were her people unkind, or poor, or disreputable?”
“She had no people. Her mother died when she was a child, and her father’s sorrow for his wife made him hard to the motherless girl. He educated her in a casual, haphazard way, and, being a fine scholar, brought her up in a little world of books. She spent hours reading to him just as she has read to me. She grew up with no companions but fishermen’s wives and dogs, and no friend but the parson’s wife. But she loved the village children and the village dogs and the moor and the sea. And so she got through her young years somehow’.”
“Then her father was a gentleman?”
“Could you doubt it, seeing what she is?”
George was silent. “Women are so clever,” he muttered at last.
“Not clever enough to take the stamp of refinement upon common clay. Mary’s father was a scholar — dry-as-dust, perhaps — a quarterly reviewer, grinding out exhaustive articles on dull books to make his bread. I doubt if he was kind to Mary, but he gave her the love of books, and that is something precious for a woman to carry through this barren life. It helps her to forget what life is.”
George went for a long walk after waiting some time in the hope that his uncle would go on talking about Mary, but the poodle came bounding across the grass with his neck ribbon all awry, looking almost disreputable after his run in the wood, and Mary came quietly after him, to resume her post beside her master’s chair, while his valet and the strongest of the footmen conveyed him back to the house.
“You’ll have to dine alone here, George, unless you would like me to invite the vicar and his wife. They are the only people I foregather with.”
“I would much rather be alone, and think over my work.”
He dared not ask where Mary was to dine. His mother had told him that in Warburton House she was supposed to dine with the housekeeper, but for the most part had eaten her light evening meal in one of Mr. Field’s rooms. A fact that Mrs. Tredgold expatiated upon to dear Mrs. Bertram as at once an insult to herself as a lady, and an offence to her sense of propriety as a vicar’s widow. He had seen enough of his uncle’s relations with the reading girl in Venice and at Madingley, to be sure that she was safe from the slightest suggestion of servitude. The petty slights and negligences that a lady-help might have to bear in a semi-detached suburban villa would never touch Mary Smith.
“Come into the wood, Mary,” George said, after standing patiently in the afternoon sun to admire wonderful flower-beds. “I am fed up with your garden. It is perfect — a banquet table of colour — your pyramids of roses, your rich carpets of violas, your tall heliotropes. But I don’t want to stand in the sun and feast upon roses and lilies. Zamiel and I have quicksilver in our veins as well as blood, and we want the freedom of mossy glades between beeches and oaks. The poodle is pining to run and leap and scratch and dig and make believe he is hunting. Come along, Mary. My uncle has given you an hour’s leave.”
An hour’s holiday! George had fallen into the way of counting the minutes in that too brief space of time. He would look furtively at his watch as they strolled side by side in the wood, or dawdled in the garden. It was the only time they were ever alone together. For the greater part of the day she was in close companionship with Mr. Field, or, if not, she was secluded in her own room from which he could never tempt her.
“What do you do in your den?” he asked impatiently one day, when she refused to go for a walk with him in the morning hours that the invalid was in the hands of Ridley. “Are you like the common run of women? Do you scribble everlasting letters?”
“I have only one correspondent — your cousin Austin — and he is too busy to be plagued with long letters from me.”
“Then are you burying your nose in some preposterous fancy work, bent double over an embroidery frame?”
“No. I like making extracts from any book I have been reading to your uncle. Passages that are worth thinking over.”
He called her Mary. It had come about so naturally that she hardly knew when it had happened. He had not asked her permission or even remarked on the ugliness of “Miss Smith,” but had just called her Mary, and in his fine voice that name had a melodious sound.
“I take it, you have been fed upon books till they are your natural pabulum.”
“I began early. I had nothing but books when I was a child.”
“Your father was a student — a reviewer. My uncle told me.”
“Yes.”
He thought to lead her on to talk of those young days, but she disappointed him.
She called Zamiel, and that always meant a change in the conversation. The poodle was a full stop.
“I think I shall call that beast Punctum,” George said. “It is his proper name.”
He was fond of the poodle, fond with a
foolish fondness, whereof he was ashamed. All dogs were dear to him; even the abject cur in the street was an object of heart-aching pity, if not of love. But this dog was more precious than any other four-legged beast that walked the earth. This dog was an animal of another species — not a dog, but her dog, and Zamiel knew he was beloved, and in less than a week had attached himself to the strange strong man with a fervour of affection that his doting mistress had hardly won from him.
Those half-hour strolls in the wood were walks in Paradise. Do what he would, they had never more than half an hour, for the first thirty minutes had been wasted somehow before they started — looking for a book, or losing and finding Zamiel, or answering a little note from the rector’s wife. George complained of this dawdling.
“We have never got to the end of the wood,” he grumbled, “and you have never shown me that pool which you said I ought to sketch. Why can’t you beg a two-hours’ holiday some day when Uncle Conway is in a sweet temper, and take me to your pretty spot, and sit beside me and help me with your ideas, while I do a lightning sketch.”
“Pas possible! I have one thing to do at Madingley, and that is to make your uncle as happy as I can.”
“And you make Zamiel happy. You make a slave of yourself for those two, and I am left out in the cold.”
She never noticed speeches of this kind, though there were many such in a day. She never reproved or protested. She ignored everything that she did not want to hear.
“She treats me shamefully,” he said to himself often, in his long thoughts of her. “She is a prude and a prig. She has fed upon books, and a bookworm’s company, till she has not one drop of warm blood in her veins. A man with a heart that can beat hard has no right to think of her, and yet here am I, the most abject ass in Christendom, thinking and fretting about her all the summer day — and sometimes all a sleepless night.”
And yet — and yet — oh, strange anomaly, he was happy. Fretting and fuming, fretting and fuming, wondering and tormenting himself all day long, and yet happier than he had ever been before, happier than in the golden days, when he was moving through some of the loveliest scenes upon this earth with the loveliest woman he had ever met, happier than in those golden nights beside the Lake at Cadenabbia, or face to face with the Jungfrau range upon the hill above Lake Thun, when the atmosphere was made of moonlight and impassioned love.
He knew that this was love of a better quality — calmer, sweeter, wiser — love that meant happiness — love that he might talk of with his mother and not be ashamed.
He had been at Madingley less than a month — and yet the time in which he had vowed to himself that he would win this woman and at his own price seemed as far away as if he had been spending his days with her for a year.
Mary Smith — so grave, so placid, so unemotional — had worked a miracle. He was happy — that was all; but it seemed to him in somewise miraculous. He was happier than he had ever been since Mrs. Stanhope jilted him. He was happier than he had been when she was his; so beautiful a creature that wherever she appeared men worshipped and wondered. Waiters, boatmen, road-sweepers, fly-drivers, custodians of old grey churches, surprised by that vision of warm beauty in the dim light — beauty as perfect as the Madonna over the Altar; they had all bowed down, and she had been full of joyous life — the wine that bubbled in the glass set her babbling. Such a companion when she was in the humour: not caring much about old churches, unless they were “funny,” like the church where the dead monks sat round, as if in solemn conclave — not caring about scenery, lakes or mountains; much preferring jewellers’ shops, or windows in which there were hats for her to choose from. No, he had not been as happy with Miriam in the loveliest scenes of Europe, pouring out his money like water, as he was sauntering day after day in the same little bit of woodland, sitting at tea in the same garden, talking with his uncle and Mary, or listening and pretending to sketch while the girl went on with the poem with which she had read the old man to sleep after luncheon. It might be something he knew by heart, like “Maud” or “In Memoriam,” or it might be something more obscure of Browning’s “Balaustion’s Adventure,” or “The Ring and the Book,” or graver prose —
Jowett’s translation of Plato, the Apology, or the Phaedo. Whatever she read, the voice was sweet and sympathetic, and there was just enough expression, and never a touch of the theatrical; nothing to call attention to the reader rather than to the thing she read.
The middle weeks of September had been as August, and although he saw the newspapers every morning and dated his letters properly, it was a shock to him when the tea-table was moved from the garden to the drawingroom at the first breath of autumn in the air, and he realized that October had begun. As long as he could write September at the top of a letter he had taken little heed of time — had lived in a Paradise where there was no such thing. But now he had written “ October the first” he began to count the days — only twelve — nay, only ten days. For he must be in London on the eleventh at latest.
Already his father had written a reminding letter — not a sermon by any means, for John Bertram knew the kind of man he had to deal with, but just a father’s friendly letter with casual allusions to the important cases which his son had before him.
“I think you have done wisely in taking a reposeful holiday, loafing in your uncle’s garden of Armida, rather than tearing about Central Europe, as you did last year. You will come to your work as fit as a fiddle, and I think you may go up a good many rungs in the ladder before the end of Term. The Cattermole case, if it doesn’t fizzle out in a compromise, is big enough to make a man’s reputation, especially a man who has got into your position already. You ought to be in chambers by the tenth at latest, for I know Colneys want a conference before the case comes on.”
And so on and so on — gentle reminders that life wasn’t all beer and skittles, or the dolce jar niente of a millionaire uncle’s luxurious country house.
Was there any thought of Mary Smith in the governor’s mind when he wrote that letter, George wondered? He must have heard enough about her from Mrs. Bertram and the aunts. Was there some such thought when “the Garden of Armida” ran off his pen?
Yes, it was the Garden of Armida, a place of enchantment; and George had to get himself out of it in less than six days.
There was only one way. He had told himself that very often of late, in happy day-dreams. He had to win Mary Smith before he left that garden, to be sure of her, and to go away serene and at ease in the blissful certainty that Mary Smith would soon be Mary Bertram. No fear of her jilting him. He knew that honour dwelt under that broad brow. Mary’s word once given would be immutable. And he told himself that she loved him. Even behind her sweet seriousness, as far from the coming-on young woman as light from dark, he had seen, or he believed that he had seen, signs and tokens of love. He told himself that she loved him, and that he had but to ask the crucial question, and go back to London with the measure of her third finger in his waistcoat pocket. What should her engagement ring be? Diamonds of the purest water — old Indian diamonds. He would hunt London for the whitest, just a half hoop of diamonds such as he had seen in the Crown jewels at the Tower.
And of that arrogant hour when he had vowed that he would win her — at his own price — at the price of a shameful surrender. At the price of a cottage on the Upper Thames, with a garden and a motor-house, at the price of infinite tenderness and lavish generosity. That was to be the price he would pay for slightly damaged beauty, for a woman with a flaw in her history, who might be his cherished mistress, bound to him till death even, but never his wife.
That arrogant vow was forgotten. Pacing their favourite pathway one delicious night when the harvest moon was flooding the wood with her divine light, after passing the greater part of the day in Mary’s company, he stamped his foot upon the ground in a sudden rage to emphasize a far different vow.
She should be his wife. He would never question her.
He would know nothing
of her past. Whatever had happened, calamity had left her pure. If she had been rescued, if she had been through deep waters, she was none the less a pearl of price, that a king might be proud to win. All of respect and appreciation that Austin had given to her was her due. She should be his wife — and never, if they lived to their golden wedding day, never would he lift the veil from anything that was tragic in her early life. He would never ask her to look back.
Confident in her love, he let the closing days glide by until the last — the last that was left to them. He had counted the hours from the beginning of that final week — counted them as a miser counts his gold — thinking how “this hour next week I shall be in Court, or in chambers, or in the big stupid house in Portman Square — and I shall be hearing prosy talk of politics, or of the case.” And then he would reckon the time till he could come back, or till his uncle and Mary would be at Warburton House, and he could run in there every afternoon. For his uncle would know by that time — he would know and he would approve. For if he had not meant them to fall in love with each other, if he had not meant Mary to be his wife, he would never have allowed them to be happy together under his eyes. He would have sent George away with some biting reproof.
George was sure that his uncle would smile upon his love. Opposition he would have to face — from his mother worst of all, from the large-minded father very little.
He sat by Mary’s side in the flickering October light, finishing one of the innumerable sketches he had made in that wood while Mary watched him, pretending to be absorbed in her needlework. After spoiling his work by a careless wash of cobalt, he dropped the paint-box and board. Then turning to her suddenly, he plucked the work out of her hands and grasped them both in his own.
“Mary, you know, you know how passionately I love you.”
She tried to release her hands, tried to stand up, but he held her with almost brutal strength, held her to him with an irresistible arm, that circled the slim form.
“Mary, you know, you know!”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1018