Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  Not business-like! No, of course not — and nobody had seen her money yet, thought Brownlow, who could hardly bring himself to believe that this splendid opening for a young architect was not a dream and delusion — the dream of a mad woman, the delusion of youth that thirsted for fame.

  A chance in a thousand if it were real!

  He thought better of his chance after the evening when he had spent an hour in the old-fashioned parlour at the “Ship,” sitting at the table with Mary Tremayne, showing her rough sketches and hastily pencilled plans — the measurement of rooms and stairs — the space allotted to the little garden which each goody was to have in the rear of her cottage, while the quadrangle was to be one beautiful and spacious garden, with classic stone benches for tired limbs, and old-world Dutch flower-beds.

  There were only rough sketches for Mary to look at this evening, but the design and the idea pleased her, and she begged Mr. Brownlow to go on with his work and to make his plans ready for the builders.

  He told her that in her interest plans and specifications should be communicated to the best builders between Launceston and Port Jacob, and she was surprised to discover how many such people there were in so narrow a range. Mr. Brownlow suggested one of the best firms in Plymouth, but said they would be longer about the work than the Launceston firm whose work he knew and could recommend. She at once decided for Launceston, and that only the two firms in that town which had built a good many houses under Brownlow’s supervision should be asked to compete for the job.

  “Either of them will give you honest work and honest material,” he told her, and the thing was settled.

  She was as eager to see the work begun as a child for a new toy. She for the first time realized that it is good to be rich — and that money, like knowledge, is power Her lodgings at the inn were of the homeliest, but they were clean, and the old house was restful at this time of year when strangers had not begun to come that way.

  It was only after the almshouses had been planned that Mary went to see her old friends in the house that had seemed to them their last home. —

  “We’re pretty comfortable, you know, miss, one of the old women told her. “We haven’t much to complain of. The master isn’t unkind, and though the matron is just a bit strict, she means well — and the place is clean. The food is enough if it ain’t always nice, but I can’t forget my own cottage where Bill and I lived together nearly thirty years, and the morning of the storm when they came to tell me that him and six of his mates had gone down, and I should never see him again — not even lying in his coffin, for there was no hope of any more bodies being washed ashore, and his body wasn’t among them as was. He was over sixty, but as hale and active as a young man, and he loved the sea that killed him the cruel sea that wives and mothers hate.

  And then she rambled on about the cottage and her bits of sticks, some of them that had belonged to her grandmother, and that strangers had noticed because they were so old — and some had wanted to buy, and she wouldn’t part with them — and they all had to be sold before Bill had been gone a year — and there wasn’t enough charing work to be got in Port Jacob for her to keep a roof over her head, and here she was to end her days on charity. There were other old friends of Mary in the House, and Mary sat beside each of them, so humbled and downcast in their Union clothes, with only small grievances to complain of, yet all with the one regret for the home they had cherished — their own little bits of furniture the things that had a history and were interwoven with their lives — and the liberty, the sense of being their own mistress, free to come and go.

  “It seems as if we were children again, Miss Mary. We go to bed when we’re told and we get up when we’re told; and there’s days when we may go out, and more days when we mustn’t. Folks mean to be kind to us, but it feels like prison, and then we do quarrel sorely among ourselves. I don’t know whose fault it is, miss, but there’s a good many sour tempers among us.”

  And then, before she went away, Mary told them how she had been left a fortune, and how she was going to build houses for thirty widows whose husbands had been lost at sea, so that each of those she had known, and some whom she had never known, would have her own home again — a cottage with plenty of room in it, comfortably furnished with things that would remind them of the homes they had lost.

  “Almshouses,” one of the women said, by no means rapturously. “I suppose it will be like the ‘House’ pretty much.”

  Mary could not kindle any enthusiasm. The dull monotony of their days seemed to have killed their capability of gladness. They were overcome, but not elated, and they seemed more startled and puzzled by the new idea than hopeful of a new happiness; so Mary left them with a sense of disappointment. She had thought it would be so easy to make these poor old things happy. She went about day after day searching out the women she remembered as the friends of her childhood, and took infinite pains to discover their whereabouts.

  Some she found who had succeeded in keeping their “own bit of a place,” and who were still earning a livelihood — still holding their own among the toilers for a day’s wage — and in these she found much more delight at the idea of her houses, and the income that was to provide for their comfort. Ten shillings a week, and coals, and nice comfortable clothes, and light, and no more work to do.

  These received her good tidings with moving demonstrations of joy, for in these the spring of life was not broken,

  XXIII

  THE spring of the year went by. March, April, the first weeks of May, and the gorse was golden on the hills — golden as Mary had known it in the long days when her life was divided between indoor work for her father, and long rambles by the sea, or over the moor — careless of weather — revelling in the sunshine but not afraid of wind or rain. She faced the wind and the rain now just as recklessly as in her fifteenth year, and it was only Susan Garland’s dumb distress that made her hurry back to the “Ship,” when the black storm clouds came rolling up over the cliff, and night seemed all around them.

  “Oh, ma’am, it’s too awful!” Garland said. “It looks like the beginning of an earthquake.” There was a distant rumbling of thunder as she spoke. Garland burst into tears.

  “Don’t be frightened, you poor thing,” Mary said gaily. “This is just one of our April storms. It won’t last, and the sun will be shining again before we get back to the inn. I can see the rim of a great ball of fire, behind the edge of the cloud.”

  Garland was dumb, but walked as fast as she could, making the pace for her mistress, which she knew afterwards, when she was not too frightened to think, was an act of insubordination.

  “I hope you’ll forgive me, ma’am, for hustling you along like that,” she apologized, when they were inside the door of the “Ship.”

  Mary had found out by this time that Garland hated the country. Those vast spaces of moorland with never so much as a single stone cottage to suggest human habitations “got on her nerves,” which serviceable expression she had picked up from Mrs. Tredgold. A great many things got on that lady’s nerves, but Garland had not suffered in so genteel a manner till she came to Cornwall. She had not minded Venice — those water-ways and curious gondolas were only queer. She had not minded Rome, though that was also queer; but she had found Hampshire dull, and she found Cornwall deadly — so few towns or even villages worth speaking of, an absence of shops and people. Far-stretching moors, and tremendous cliffs overhung the sea, from which a grey fog sometimes came up without notice, and one found oneself in the dark. Garland had no taste for the life that her mistress loved.

  Mary spent long days in a fishing boat that had been fitted up and made comfortable for her — not quite an open boat since there was a little cabin, in which the skipper could make tea for Miss Tremayne and her maid. And Mary loved these coasting expeditions between Port Jacob and Padstow, or northward to Bude Haven.

  The builders were at work in their fullest strength, but the work seemed to make slow progress, and Mary, goin
g to look at the buildings every day, could hardly help expressing her disappointment, though Mr. Brownlow, who came once a week, generally on a Saturday afternoon, and spent two or three hours walking about and peering into things, in close consultation with the foreman, told her that he would not like the work to go on any faster.

  “They are giving us their best,” he told her, “and we mustn’t drive them. After all, you want the work to last, like those old almshouses at Bodmin that Queen Elizabeth saw begun and King James saw finished, and that are as solid to-day as when he looked at them.”

  Mary was in no hurry to go back to Warburton House. She had not left off grieving for the loss of the friend of those three years to whose comfort and solace she had devoted herself with thought and care that had never lessened, and had never seemed too much. She missed him every day of her life, and that life seemed purposeless now that she had no one to serve — no one dependent on her. She had been obliged to invent a task, something to be begun and carried through to a successful finish — something that for this year of mourning would keep her interested and employed.

  She went often to see her old women, and she found even those dull souls in the House were growing brighter. Waking as from a long dreamless sleep, they were becoming keenly interested in the homes that were being built for them. And one bright day in June Mary devised a treat for her old people — an alfresco tea-drinking on the grass plot in front of the old house, that open space which was to be the prettiest garden within twenty miles of Port Jacob.

  The roofs were on the houses and the old people could have some notion of the homes that were being prepared for them. Mary and Garland waited upon them at tea, and Garland enjoyed the little festival, which was the first scrap of gaiety that had come her way since she left Warburton House, where, in her own words, there was always something doing. Mary plied the old people with third and fourth cups of tea, and pressed the local baker’s saffron cake, inexhaustible supplies of shrimps and watercress, brown bread and butter and white bread and butter; and the old people ate and drank and prattled of the beautiful place that had risen up out of the ground as if life had all at once become a fairy-tale.

  “To think that you should be rich enough to build such a place, miss,” one of them exclaimed. “Nobody ever took your father for a rich man, though he always kept two servants and lived like a gentleman. But I suppose he left you all your money?”

  “No, Mrs. Gregson, my money came from a friend, who was rich enough to provide for his family and leave me a large income — large enough for me to spend what I like upon my Cornish friends.”

  “Well, it will be a fine place,” the woman answered, looking up at the clustered chimneys, the gabled roofs with their grey-green slates from the quarries over yonder at Delabole, large massive slates that would not blow off in wild weather. Then she added thoughtfully: “But it will cost a heap of money. Wouldn’t it have come much cheaper and easier for you, miss, if you’d made your kindness in the form of little pensions — say, a pound a week for each of us, and live where we like?”

  This was disappointing, but the women were not all like Mrs. Gregson, who was a born grumbler, a creature who must have grumbled in her cradle, and quarrelled with her mother’s milk.

  “You will have your pound a week in meal or in malt, Mrs. Gregson, and a house to live in,” Mary said, and she left this doleful person to mumble her shrimps and bread and butter, and appeal piteously to Garland for a fifth cup of tea.

  “I’ve no patience with those old women,” Garland said, as she and her mistress walked home. “They don’t seem to realize what you’re doing for them, and for all that will come after them, hundreds of years after they are gone.”

  “They are tired,” Mary said gently. “Life has been hard for them, and they are tired.”

  The builders went on merrily, singing at their work, and now Mr. Brownlow was busy with the old house that was to be a happy and a healthy home for fatherless children. He thought of his own year-old baby as he walked about the rooms planning and measuring, and rearranging spaces and artful partitions, presses, and shelves of all dimensions, contrivances that would help to make the children’s home a model of neatness — a place for everything and everything in its place, as he repeated gaily, while he jotted down measurements.

  It was one of those old houses in which there are unexpected corners, and queer little flights of stairs.

  Mr. Brownlow made good use of all the corners, and did away with some of the stairs, which struck him as pitfalls for small children to tumble down.

  So the work went on till after Midsummer, and Mary had been content to spend idle days lying in her cushioned nest in the stern of the Mayflower, that craft of three tons which had been chosen for her as the best of the fishing fleet. She had her books — those old companions of which she could never tire — the books she had read to Conway Field, in the long slow hours in Venice, between the Quay of Slaves and the Lido.

  This buoyant and never-resting ocean was very different from the Adriatic, which to look back upon from the movement and the freshness of the Atlantic seemed like a dream sea, just as Venice seemed a dream city. Each was lovely after its kind, and she hardly knew which she loved most. Health was coming back to her in these monotonous days, in which she had felt the blissfulness of rest, without knowing that she was tired.

  Her life with Conway Field had been an exacting life — a time of constant care and anxiety, and, towards the last, a time of distress and apprehension. To see the life ebbing, day by day, and to live in fear of the end had tried her severely, and the reaction after the fall of the curtain had been terrible.

  But strength was coming back to her now, and the pulse of life was beating stronger and more evenly. She was never tired of watching the lights and shadows on the cliffs, the changing colour of the sea, the gulls and shags, and the glimpses of village life suddenly seen across some narrow opening in the cliff — an inlet that could hardly be called a bay.

  The two sturdy fishermen, joint owners of the boat, were men who remembered her as a child, and who looked a little more weather-beaten, but hardly a day older for the lapse of years. Their honest brown faces and west-country voices were a joy to her, and even Garland, who confessed to being “timid” when the sea was a trifle rough, had implicit faith in these mariners.

  She had suffered slightly from the sea in their first excursions, but now pronounced herself a good sailor, and could sit happily hour after hour in her corner of the Mayflower, performing wonders in the way of crochet.

  Garland adored crochet, and did not care for the picturesque. She seldom looked at sea or shore; she was not interested in King Arthur nor even in the gulls and shags. She was faintly excited when the skipper told her of seals to be seen playing about in caverns under the cliff, but as no seal would condescend to show himself when she had the telescope at her eye, Garland would go back to her crochet. She had been in the middle of a pattern when the skipper gave her his glass, and she felt that she had wasted good time in looking for things that she could see ever so much better at the Zoo.

  It was mid-July and the houses were so nearly complete that Mary felt her task was done, and that she could leave Port Jacob before the “Ship” began to be overrun by the usual visitors, the people who came to fish, and the people who came to sketch. The wide grassy spaces over which the gorse flung its mantle of gold had not yet been trodden by the foot of the golfer, but links would come in good time, her host told Mary, and the popularity of Port Jacob would grow with every season.

  Austin Sedgwick arrived unexpectedly one afternoon, and Mary received him with unaffected pleasure.

  “How kind of you to come? I was going to write to ask you to look at my houses. I hope you will like them, and not think that I have spent money foolishly on my first little enterprise.”

  “I don’t think I shall. You say your first enterprise. Have you others in view?”

  “Yes, a good many, but they are no more than dr
eams at present. You must help me to realize them.”

  “With all my heart.”

  He was breathless, and seemed curiously moved, as they stood face to face for the first time since she had left Warburton House.

  “Your native air has given you back the freshness of your youth. You look ten years younger since I saw you last — so young and so lovely!” —

  The words came in a broken voice, and were not meant for her to hear, but she heard, and wondered that he should seem so moved by their meeting.

  It was tea-time when he arrived in a fly from the hotel at Tintagel, and they went to look at the almshouses after tea, in the westering sunshine.

  Austin had nothing but praise for Mr. Brownlow’s work, and for Mary’s idea of making thirty old women comfortable for the remnant of their lives.

  Mary sighed.

  “I can make them comfortable,” she said, “but I can’t make them happy.” And then she told him her disappointments.

  “You must harden your heart against that kind of thing,” he told her. “Philanthropists have to do without gratitude. You know the value of your work, and you must know how often your poor slow-witted old souls will bless you for it dumbly when you are far away.”

  And then he asked her when she was coming back to Warburton House.

  “All has been done as you wished,” he told her, “the old servants retained — nothing changed — except that my uncle’s bedroom and dressing-room and the valet’s room have been kept with locked doors, no one being allowed to enter them but the servant who kept them in order. That was what you wished, I think.”

  “Yes, that is what we all wish, I think. You and Mr. Bertram, as well as I myself.”

  “When are you coming back?”

  “Not for a long time. I want to live in the rooms where I lived during those quiet years — but I could not bear them yet. By and by I shall like to be there, and to touch the books he loved, and to think that he is near me; but I can’t go there yet, nor to Madingley. I am going over to Brittany, where I shall spend the rest of the year, just sauntering about from one old town to another, looking at things, and I want you to do me a favour.”