Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “Naturally,” exclaimed Mrs. Sedgwick, “but I doubt if Elaine could be induced to leave her garden for the London season, much less for all the year. However, as you seem to like to live in a retired way you might not want her at Madingley.”

  “Leave it all to me, Selina,” commanded Mrs. Bertram, who had always treated her sister in Eaton Square as a person of very little importance since the great reputation of John Bertram, K.C., brought people to the drawingrooms in Portman Square who were never to be met with at the Sedgwicks’.

  Mrs. Sedgwick and her daughters had worked sedulously at the business of entertaining, but had not been particularly successful in that line. The dinner-parties in Eaton Square had been voted dull, and their evening parties impossible, and while they struggled bravely to give one dance in a season in their own house, neither the profusion of roses on the staircase nor Gunter’s last word in ball suppers could make up for the paucity of partners.

  It was, of course, all the fault of their own men. Mr. Sedgwick hated society almost as much as he hated spending money — and Austin’s friends having been admitted once or twice into the family circle, had mostly exhibited the same peculiarity of being always engaged on the date of Mrs. Sedgwick’s parties.

  “Leave everything to me,” Mrs. Bertram said. “Elaine is coming to me next week, for the show in Vincent Square, and if Miss Tremayne will dine with us in a quiet way they can talk to each other in the evening and find out if they like each other, before I broach the subject to Elaine.”

  “You can do anything with Elaine,” her sister said, with a slightly offended air.

  Mrs. Sedgwick went through life with the feeling that she was “put upon” by her family and the world in general, but most of all by her family. Clementina said her mother was a poor creature, which was the natural result of having been trampled on by her husband from the first week of her honeymoon.

  “I wasn’t there,” Clementina said, “but I know mother had a miserable honeymoon and was taken to places she didn’t like, and bullied because her luggage cost too much in Italy.”

  Julia was no longer in the schoolroom. She had had her coming-out ball, which was always alluded to as “ghastly” because it had been in Eaton Square when it ought to have been at the one possible hotel, but even Julia’s new blood and untiring energy had not succeeded in saving the Sedgwicks’ parties.

  “I think it must be owing to the Square,” Julia told people. “If father had let us move into one of those bright new houses in Pont Street — a house with an eccentric staircase and a surprising hall, people might think better of us. You have to astonish them if you want them to come to you; now that there is a millionaire keeping house in every other street people expect originality — they must be amused from the moment they come in at the door. The house must be astonishing, the furniture like nothing they have seen anywhere else.”

  “Mother might be as vulgar as she liked, and might call a duchess ‘my dear’ if she were only startling. It may be undutiful de ma part,” Clementina said, “but I would rather people should think her ‘good fun’ than call her dull.”

  Mary dined quietly in Portman Square, to meet Conway Field’s youngest sister, whom she had seen only once, on the day of the funeral; and after spending a seemingly endless evening in this lady’s society she was fain to admit that Elaine was simpatica. She had an almost childlike simplicity, and from the persistent snubbing of her three sisters, who treated her as the fool of the family, she had fallen into an apologetic attitude to the rest of the world. Her simplicity appealed to Mary Tremayne, who told herself that if one must have a Dame de Compagnie, Elaine might fill the post as well as anybody else.

  Before half-past ten, when Miss Tremayne’s carriage was announced, Elaine had recited the story of her married life. It had been a love match, and her father had opposed the marriage almost up to her wedding day. “While the only thing he could say against poor Walter was that he had nothing to settle upon me. As if a rich man ought to want anything settled on his daughter.”

  Poor Walter had possessed every virtue except the capacity for making his way in the world. He had wanted to be a poet and to write blank-verse tragedies that people would be anxious to act, and he had written many tragedies. Year in year out he had sat in his study, and written. He had written scenes that were so powerful that they lifted him out of his chair and obliged him to march about the room in an ecstasy. He could realize the effect, he could hear the hurricane of applause, could see the pit rising as one man. But neither managers nor actors could be induced to read his plays, or if they did read, they declined to see that there was a fortune in a classic tragedy modelled upon Coleridge and the Elizabethans. One legitimate actor had been more enlightened than all the others, and, being generously subsidized by Elaine, had taken a theatre on purpose to give Walter a chance. But the great play and the great player had failed to attract — though the first night had been a triumph, and one of the critics had compared the author with Milton. And this disappointment had broken Walter Halling’s heart, his widow told Mary. The spring of his mind snapped under the sense of failure. He left off writing, and told his wife he would like to live in the country, in the heart of rural England, where he need never have to rub shoulders with Philistines, his idea of Philistines being the people who read nothing but the newspapers — and hated blank verse.

  “Poor Walter hadn’t much money of his own,” pursued Elaine, “ and I hadn’t enough to buy a big place like Madingley, but we put all we could muster together, and we bought Thorpe Corner — acres and acres of beautiful meadowland, with a roomy old farm-house, and adorable orchards. So we turned the rough old homestead into a Jacobean Manor House, and then we made our garden — and from that time we lived for our garden. He found plenty of occupation and plenty of interest in our garden. There was always something new. We read piles of florists’ catalogues — we went to all the county shows — never to Westminster or Chelsea, for Walter had shaken the dust of London off his feet after the failure of his Joanna of Naples. Walter recovered his health, and began to grow stout. We lived out of doors, and saw very few people, except the Rector, who was an old bachelor, and by way of being literary, and who quite liked to hear Walter read a scene from one of his plays, and thought they ought all to have been acted.”

  After this the simple lady gave Mary some particulars of her husband’s gradually falling away in health, how after growing very stout he became very thin, and finally was taken from her.

  “He had a sweet nature, and our married life had been like a long honeymoon,” Elaine said, “and I don’t think I could have survived his loss if it hadn’t been for my garden. That has been my only consolation. For the last five years I have lived for my garden.”

  “You mean you have vegetated,” Mrs. Bertram said severely. “It is high time you came out of your garden.” In less than a week after this strictly feminine dinner, everything had been arranged by the two elder sisters. Mrs. Hailing had consented to abandon her garden for all the nicest months of the year, and to live with Mary at Warburton House during the London season. The sisters harped upon “the season” as if the house could not be habitable at any other time, although Mary had lived there for long spaces of time that had not been season. Slow months in the depth of winter. Sultry Augusts and Septembers when there was no one in London.

  Mary had allowed this arrangement to be made for her with a curious aloofness, as if the thing were being done for someone else, and did not matter.

  “She behaves as if she were a princess, and other people just her ladies-in-waiting,” Clementina said. “She must have a wonderful brain to stand such a change of fortune without turning a hair. It exasperates me to see mother and Aunt Bertram making a fuss about her, and she taking it all as coolly as if they were her servants. I think Aunt Guinevere is wise in having absolutely nothing to do with her.”

  Julia seldom agreed with her elder sister about anything, and this time she took a decided attitu
de.

  “Old Guinny was a fool,” she said. “She ought to have taken Mary under her wing from the day of the funeral, and run her and Warburton House for all they were worth. Think what a splash she might have made with such a base of operations and such an interesting figure as Mary Tremayne. Think what she might have done in an age when people only want to be entertained. She was a fool, and she was a silly fool,” continued Julia indignantly. “She might have twisted Mary round her finger, and been practically mistress of everything as long as there was no husband in the offing. And instead of that the old fool sulks in her flat, and goes about disparaging Mary, whose only crime has been to make poor old uncle happy.”

  “I think Aunt G. has shown a proper pride. She is a detestable person, but in this case I think she has shown self-respect.”

  “Envy and malice! She is as rich as she can stick; but the greedy old thing expected to get more.”

  Julia had placed herself unreservedly on Mary’s side in all those family discussions of which Mary herself knew nothing. Indeed, Mary had an air of polite indifference to the opinions and feelings of the family which was rather crushing. When they insisted upon being interested in her, and in trying to help her, as in the affair of a chaperon, she submitted somewhat wearily, and did not even pretend to be grateful. She liked Mrs. Sedgwick because she was Austin’s mother, but for no other reason; and she liked Julia better than Clementina, for a frank good-nature which atoned for her vulgarity, to say nothing of those animal spirits that sometimes made Julia amusing. She never beat about the bush.

  “Tiny expects you to do wonders for us,” she said, “and I expect you to do everything except find a husband for Tiny. Hers is a quite hopeless case. She was passée before I was presented and that was three years ago; and she doesn’t know it, poor dear. She says a girl is as old as she looks, in which case she would be ninety. A girl! And she spends half her allowance on beauty doctors — and lets her dress-maker’s bill run till they wake her up with an impudent letter.”

  Only Zamiel — a well dog now — had the run of Warburton House. But Julia came when she liked, which was generally every day, and did not go till Mary said: “Now I want to be alone,” having given this impetuous young person to understand that a good deal of solitude was essential to her well-being.

  “I have always lived a solitary life,” she explained.

  “What, even in your girlhood?” asked Julia, thinking that she was going to find out something about Mary Tremayne’s mysterious past. That past was always a mystery to the Sedgwicks — and remained one because Austin had shown himself doggedly determined not to tell them what he knew about it. And he must have known a good deal, or how did he come to be so interested in her, how did he dare to foist her upon his uncle? That particular verb was still used in Eaton Square when the Sedgwicks talked of Mary.

  “And were you lonely even as a girl?” Julia questioned. “Surely you must have had a good many relations and troops of friends!”

  “I had neither. I was an only child, and my father was a student, and lived a solitary life in a fishing village in Cornwall. If you ever happen to go to Port Jacob for the sake of the scenery—”

  “I am longing to see the dear place!” cried Julia.

  “You will understand why my life was solitary.” However friendly Mary might be, and however much she took Julia about with her, in that swift, silent car which offended Miss Field almost as much as the poodle, Julia never got any deeper into that unknown past. Mary would talk of herself, and the things she remembered up to a certain point, but at the slightest indication of prying on her companion’s part Miss Tremayne froze and became as a wall of ice; and Julia, who wanted to “run” the mistress of Warburton House, found that she must be careful. After all, the great thing was not to know what she wanted, but to get what she wanted.

  XXV

  THERE was nothing in the social line to be done for Miss Tremayne. She was not going to be run by a lady in Eaton Square or a lady in Portman Square. All the best people and some of the worst were dying to know her, and managed somehow to get an innings. One great lady, whose husband had known Tremayne at Oxford, wrote to Mary on the strength of this long dead-and-gone friendship, and followed her letter with a visit which Mary received with that ease of manner which everybody pronounced inimitable. They did not know that the source of that ease of manner was profound indifference. Mary did not care whether people liked her — she did not want to be admired. The spiral ascent by which the newly-rich rise gradually to that lofty pinnacle, the entertainment of royal personages, had no attraction for Miss Tremayne. She loved to meet the distinguished people, the men and women who stood out from the ruck, by the things they had done or the spirit that was in them — wit, genius, music — anything really precious. And of all these new friends who, following each other like sheep, had contrived to make her the fashion, the one new friend whose parties she appreciated was a lady whom everybody loved and admired and who always brought to her table the people who were worth knowing — not the richest — not the noblest by ancient lineage — but the interesting people. At that hospitable board Mary met the people she wanted to know — and her few close friendships were begun there.

  Julia wondered much at the rapidity of Miss Tremayne’s conquest of society. She was accepted at once at her face value. If she had a past no one wanted to sift it to the dregs. The people who cannot enjoy conversation that is not highly spiced invented stories about her and satisfied themselves in that way.

  Mary had to give parties in spite of herself: dinnerparties that were really distinguished, for about these she herself took trouble, evening parties that blazed with jewels, and were as noisy as the parrot house at the Zoo. There was no possibility of selection in these parties. Mary asked all the people who had called upon her, and whom Julia passed as “correct.” Julia was allowed to fill in the cards. If there was to be music, Mary took care that it should be of the best, and that it should be heard by everybody who wanted to hear it. She had made the large dining-room into a music-room, with double doors, and this ground-floor room was a long way from the picture-gallery, where the people who came to talk to each other could chatter to their hearts’ content. The supper-tables were in the great square hall, where the placid marble faces looked coldly down through groves of azaleas and camellias upon the fair women and brave men eating quails and peaches, and drinking an amount of champagne that was only known to the servants who filled the glasses, and not to the guests who emptied them.

  Society highly approved of Mary’s parties, and wondered how in her quiet life with Conway Field, reading dull books, she could have acquired the art of “entertaining.” The explanation was easy. Mary’s parties were a success because she let other people work for her and never interfered with their work. Everything was done as if by specialists. Drayson, whose talents for the management of a fine house had lain dormant during Mr. Field’s life, came to his own in the new régime, and gave himself to the task with the vigour of a strong man who had been fretting himself in unemployment. It was he who planned the supper-room and ordered the supper, and no one but Gunter was admitted to his confidence. It was he who ordered the extra liveries to be worn by hirelings, whereby the Warburton House footmen seemed legion; and it was he who contracted with the florist who decorated hall and staircase and rooms and balconies, so that from the flinging open of the double doors till they were closed again, society lived in a world of flowers.

  Mr. Drayson, with supreme power — the foremen of the great firms calling him “Sir” — felt that he was rewarded for having stood up for Miss Smith.

  “Of course I always suspected that Smith was a nong de gair,” he told Mrs. Tredgold. “There was never anything middle-class about the young mistress. She looked as thoroughbred as the poodle.”

  Mary stood at the top of the staircase with Mrs. Hailing by her side, like her lady-in-waiting, to receive the herd, some of whom she had never seen before: the people to whom she gave t
he same placid smile, invited or not, the people who were “brought” and who were sometimes more attractive than those who brought them.

  “I knew I might bring Mr. Rayner,” one of the splendid dowagers said on the night of Mary’s last party, “for of course you have heard of him.”

  Yes, Mary had heard of him, and had foreseen that they must meet sooner or later in the maelstrom — and now they had met, and in her own house, and she received him as calmly as if her eyes had never looked on him till that moment.

  She had known that they must meet. She had heard of him early in the season when people were beginning to rave about him. He had only to appear in West-end London to become famous; but it was in the city that his celebrity began. He had the successful speculator’s “flair.” The things he touched turned to gold. He came from South America with the reputation of being one of the richest men in that Continent. He came from the Argentine, but he had been fortunate in almost every city and every state, and now after having been in London less than a year his name had become a synonym for fortune, and people were pouring their money into enterprises of which they hardly knew the object, dazzled by a name and a history.

  His personal influence was tremendous. He steadfastly refrained from giving information or advice about any of those companies of which he was the originator. “I am too deeply interested in the Transcontinental to advise my friends to stake their cash,” he would say, in his easy jovial manner. “The most brilliant scheme has its dark side. There is always a zero — everybody knows that. Big profits were never made without big risks.”

  The louder he sounded the note of warning, the more anxious people were to become shareholders. Most of the men and women he talked to, and especially the women, were gamblers at heart, and grew keener at the hint of danger.

  When he sent one of his glittering balloons up into blue space, the crowd rushed eagerly to throw their gold into the basket. And so far — after six months or so of daring adventure all his balloons were sailing in the highest empyrean, and people were never tired of talking about the “Rastac.” He had imposed himself upon a certain section of society, and that particular set had imposed him upon the world at large. Everybody wanted to know Jack Rayner. His friends and even distant acquaintances talked of him as “Jack.” They liked his name. It seemed as if no other name would have suited him as well. The frank outspoken manner, the clear direct outlook of the well-opened steel-grey eyes suited the name. As he stood up and faced the world, tall, broadshouldered, strong and straight as a stone pillar, he was the typical John Bull — Bull in his youth before he began to be bulky. Rastac some people had called him! No, there was nothing of the foreigner, still less of the South American about him, nothing tropical, feverish, or fitful. Strong and calm, British to the marrow of his bones; who could be afraid of trusting such a man? His personality counted for more than any of his boards of directors, studded with imposing names.