Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  It is not ghostly, this embrace, for it is palpable to the touch — it cannot be real, for it is invisible.

  He tries to throw off the cold caress. He clasps the hands in his own to tear them asunder, and to cast them off his neck. He can feel the long delicate fingers cold and wet beneath his touch, and on the third, finger of the left hand he can feel the ring which was his mother’s — the golden serpent — the ring which he has always said he would know among a thousand by the touch alone. He knows it now!

  His dead cousin’s cold arms are round his neck — his dead cousin’s wet hands are clasped upon his breast. He asks himself if he is mad. “Up, Leo!” he shouts. “Up, up, boy!” and the Newfoundland leaps to his shoulders — the dog’s paws are on the dead hands, and the animal utters a terrific howl, and springs away from his master.

  The student stands in the moonlight, the dead arms round his neck, and the dog at a little distance moaning piteously.

  Presently a watchman, alarmed by the howling of the dog, comes into the square to see what is wrong.

  In a breath the cold arms are gone.

  He takes the watchman home to the hotel with him and gives him money; in his gratitude he could have given that man half his little fortune.

  Will it ever come to him again, this embrace of the dead?

  He tries never to be alone; he makes a hundred acquaintances, and shares the chamber of another student. He starts up if he is left by himself in the public room at the inn where he is staying, and runs into the street. People notice his strange actions, and begin to think that he is mad.

  But, in spite of all, he is alone once more; for one night the public room being empty for a moment, when on some idle pretence he strolls into the street, the street is empty too, and for the second time he feels the cold arms round his neck, and for the second time, when he calls his dog, the animal slinks away from him with a piteous howl.

  After this he leaves Cologne, still travelling on foot — of necessity now, for his money is getting low. He joins travelling hawkers, he walks side by side with labourers, he talks to every foot-passenger he falls in with, and tries from morning till night to get company on the road.

  At night he sleeps by the fire in the kitchen of the inn at which he stops; but do what he will, he is often alone, and it is now a common thing for him to feel the cold arms around his neck.

  Many months have passed since his cousin’s death — autumn, winter, early spring. His money is nearly gone, his health is utterly broken, he is the shadow of his former self, and he is getting near Paris. He will reach that city at the time of the Carnival. To this he looks forward. In Paris, in Carnival time, he need never, surely, be alone, never feel that deadly caress; he may even recover his lost gaiety, his lost health, once more resume his profession, once more earn fame and money by his art.

  How hard he tries to get over the distance that divides him from Paris, while day by day he grows weaker, and his step slower and more heavy!

  But there is an end at last; the long dreary roads are passed. This is Paris, which he enters for the first time — Paris, of which he has dreamed so much — Paris, whose million voices are to exorcise his phantom.

  To him to-night Paris seems one vast chaos of lights, music, and confusion — lights which dance before his eyes and will not be still — music that rings in his ears and deafens him — confusion which makes his head whirl round and round.

  But, in spite of all, he finds the opera-house, where there is a masked ball. He has enough money left to buy a ticket of admission, and to hire a domino to throw over his shabby dress. It seems only a moment after his entering the gates of Paris that he is in the very midst of the wild gaiety of the opera-house ball.

  No more darkness, no more loneliness, but a mad crowd, shouting and dancing, and a lovely Débardeuse hanging on his arm.

  The boisterous gaiety he feels surely is his old light-heartedness come back. He hears the people round him talking of the outrageous conduct of some drunken student, and it is to him they point when they say this — to him, who has not moistened his lips since yesterday at noon, for even now he will not drink; though his lips are parched, and his throat burning, he cannot drink. His voice is thick and hoarse, and his utterance indistinct; but still this must be his old lightheartedness come back that makes him so wildly gay.

  The little Débardeuse is wearied out — her arm rests on his shoulder heavier than lead — the other dancers one by one drop off.

  The lights, in the chandeliers one by one die out.

  The decorations look pale and shadowy in that dim light which is neither night nor day.

  A faint glimmer from the dying lamps, a pale streak of cold gray light from the new-born day, creeping in through half-opened shutters.

  And by this light the bright-eyed Débardeuse fades sadly. He looks her in the face. How the brightness of her eyes dies out! Again he looks her in the face. How white that face has grown! Again — and now it is the shadow of a face alone that looks in his.

  Again — and they are gone — the bright eyes, the face, the shadow of the face. He is alone; alone in that vast saloon.

  Alone, and, in the terrible silence, he hears the echoes of his own footsteps in that dismal dance which has no music.

  No music but the beating of his heart against his breast. For the cold arms are round his neck — they whirl him round, they will not be flung off, or cast away; he can no more escape from their icy grasp than he can escape from death. He looks behind him — there is nothing but himself in the great empty salle; but he can feel — cold, deathlike, but O, how palpable! — the long slender fingers, and the ring which was his mother’s.

  He tries to shout, but he has no power in his burning throat. The silence of the place is only broken by the echoes of his own footsteps in the dance from which he cannot extricate himself. Who says he has no partner? The cold hands are clasped on his breast, and now he does not shun their caress. No! One more polka, if he drops down dead.

  The lights are all out, and half an hour after, the gendarmes come in with a lantern to see that the house is empty; they are followed by a great dog that they have found seated howling on the steps of the theatre. Near the principal entrance they stumble over —

  The body of a student, who has died from want of food, exhaustion, and the breaking of a blood-vessel.

  MY DAUGHTERS

  I HAVE grown-up daughters. Perhaps after having written that sentence there is not, in reality, the least occasion for me to write any more. To the initiated (i.e. parties having grown-up daughters themselves) I am sure there is not. They can guess what I have suffered; for the very simple reason that they have most likely suffered the same themselves. But to the uninitiated, this brief record of misery may prove a warning.

  I repeat, I have grown-up daughters, and I suffer. Mind, I lay a peculiar emphasis on the compound adjective “grownup.” My daughters, while in the nursery, were merely associated with such minor evils as measles, juvenile parties, dancing-lessons, red sashes half-a-yard wide, and refractory governesses. They came down to dessert, and made themselves ill with unripe fruits, or smeared their infantine faces with preserved ginger, and were sticky and unpleasant to the touch; beyond this, they were harmless; and when I saw them encircling the shining mahogany after dinner, with round faces and white frocks, after the manner of that Titan among the caricaturists, the late John Leech, I used to think it, on the whole, rather a nice thing to have daughters. Ah, I little knew! They are now grown up. They are of a sentimental and poetical temperament. I don’t find that fact to make any difference whatever in my butcher’s bill. My baker’s account is not to be sneezed at (indeed, I wish the bread purveyor would accept such a mode of remuneration). If I am so weak-minded as to allow myself to be led by Juliana, Augustina, and Frederica (their mamma chose their names) into a pastrycook’s shop, I emerge therefrom a wiser and a poorer man; but, for all this, they are romantic — very romantic. They would like to break blood-vess
els; or to go mad, and let their back-hair down. They would deny this, but I know better. Now I am a plain man, morally a very plain man; there is a fine oil-painting of me by Tomkins over my diningroom mantelpiece; — personally, perhaps, I am not plain; there is a double-chin in that picture that T never had, which I attribute to personal enmity on the part of Tomkins.

  I am not romantic; I am not sentimental. If I saw a dead ass I should not cry; on the contrary, I should think it rather a good job. Nobody will cry when I die, I daresay. Mrs. Blankstars will get the 3000l for which I am insured, and will be glad. The girls have fair complexions, and will look well in mourning. I do not expect to be regretted.

  I am, I repeat, not sentimental; if I met a young person with a goat, I should do my best to avoid her, lest she should ask me for alms. I cannot see why “a primose on a river’s brim” should be of any more value than a primrose anywhere else — less valuable, I should think, if anything, as being in an inconvenient position. I am a practical man, and I look at things in a practical light; if I put half-a-sovereign on the drawing-room table, or if I take the same coin to Italy and place it on the banks of the Lake of Como, it would only be ten shillings. Why, then, should a mere difference of position alter the value of a primrose? And what is the value of a primrose? You can buy them in Covent Garden for twopence a bunch, and if you happen to live at Brompton, as I do, you will find them apt to grow warm and collapse unpleasantly before you have conveyed them to your abode. I was once persuaded to walk half through one of the Ridings of Yorkshire with a great bundle of hyacinths in my arms; of course they were flabby and faded when I got home. Hyacinths are very well in the abstract, “the heavens upbreaking through the earth,” and all that sort of thing; but in the concrete, especially if you have to carry them, they’re a decided nuisance. But my three girls, Juliana, Augustina, and Frederica, are so many embodied and perambulatory Sentimental Journeys.

  O, what I suffer! There was Adam Bede. Talk of the cholera, or the measles, or any of the prevailing epidemics a family man is subject to; what are they to a new novel breaking out in his household, and every member of that household taking it successively! Then there was the “Idyls of the King.” I’ve not got over that yet. I really think, if that respected individual the Laureate could only form any conception of the terrors he inflicts on the respectable fathers of families, he wouldn’t do it; I repeat, he wouldn’t do it. Good gracious me! what I have suffered through that man ever since my daughters entered their teens, or even before, would draw tears from the eyes of a Board of Works. O, the anguish I have endured! Let me only refuse those horrid girls a new silk gown, or a box at the opera, or a flower-show at Chiswick, and that moment I am assailed with the information that their lives are “weary,” and that, on the whole, they’d find it agreeable to be dead. That “he” (name unknown) “does not come,” ultimately “will not come,”

  “she” (name also unknown) “said.” This is a nice thing to have thrown in one’s face. Anything to avoid this! So I purchase the dress, or the box, or the tickets for the horticultural fête, and fondly hope for relief. Am I any better off? Not a bit of it. They dance round me, call me the best of papas, and immediately begin to request Mrs. Blankstars to “call” them “early,” for they’re “to be Queen of the May, mother dear,” and “to-morrow” (Chiswick Fête) “is the happiest day in all the livelong year.” Do I venture — as, being the head of the family, I have a right to do — to repel the attentions of my junior clerk, with a salary of fifty pounds per annum, who has presumed to fall in love with my youngest, I am informed immediately that “high hearts are more than coronets,” and am insulted at my own table under cover of “Lady Clara Vere de Vere,” and have rude remarks made to me about the “gardener Adam and his wife.” It is foreign to the purpose of this paper to state that I am pursued by the works of this dreadful man even at my office, where my clerks write quotations from “Locksley Hall” on my desk, thereby injuring those articles of furniture; where my articled clerk recites the “Charge of the Six Hundred,” while I am out of the room, and whittles the office-stools with a penknife in his excitement; or twists the sealing-wax into hot lumps with indignant perspiration, on the subject of “Lady Clara;” where my junior partner reads the “Idyls” under cover of a lease which he pretends to be perusing; and where I am sometimes greeted by parchments indorsed “In re Stubbs and Guinivere.”

  Well, we were scarcely out of Adam Bede, when the girls sickened for the “Idyls.” They had a great struggle, so tremendous was the demand, to get it from Mudie’s; and I’m sure for a week, our man-servant, Higgs, aged fourteen, almost lived upon the road between Brompton and Bloomsbury. At last, the modest green-covered volume arrived. O, little did I think what a viper that innocent-seeming book would prove! The girls had high words that very evening about the perusal thereof; they all wanted it at once, and their mamma only restored peace by persuading Egbert, my only son, to read the poems aloud. He is not a good reader, my son Egbert; at a very early age, when his “name was Norval,” I foresaw that oratory would not be his strong point. Indeed, I took an entirely erroneous idea of several Shakespearian characters from that child’s recitations; and can scarcely now dispossess myself of the conviction that the cholera was raging in Denmark during the reign of Hamlet’s uncle, and that the afflicted prince was the chief sufferer. There were great effects in “To be or not to be,” as rendered by my son, which no physiologist could attribute to any cause but that exhausting complaint. It was my firm opinion, too, that Othello was a victim to aggravated toothache; logo owns to having been troubled with it, and I’m sure my son hit off that phase of the Machiavellian Italian’s character to a nicety. There was a very interesting will-case in the Times of that day, and I had made up my mind for a pleasant evening, and there was that awful boy droning out the adventures of a young woman, who had, apparently, a very unpleasant husband, whose conduct would have come under 3 George, IV, cap. 17, and Victoria, 3 & 4 Vict cap. 30. Oh, what I endured! I assure you that during the first week of the “Idyll” attack I was positively afraid to bring home any gentleman of my acquaintance to dinner, for I felt convinced that should he inadvertently, on his taking leave, have said, “By the bye, Miss Blankstars, can I do anything for you in town to-morrow?” my daughter Frederica would have taken off her chenille net and pulled the hair-pins and the frizzy things out of her hair, and would have marched straight up to him, and said, “I have gone mad, I love you, let me die!” — and there’d have been a situation for the father of a family! I dined at the Crown and Sceptre, Greenwich, during this awful period, with Bangstaff, late of the late East India Company, and I had scarcely the courage to look out of the window of that hostelry, for fear I should behold my youngest floating down the river on a Chelsea coal-barge, steered by a young man from the Deaf and Dumb Asylum. They were always repeating passages from this fearful work. One in particular I remember, because I thought it was a conundrum; it ran thus:

  “His honour rooted in dishonour stood,

  And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.”

  I hazarded a guess, and said, “Because he was the Bishop of London.” My unnatural children laughed at me. This is a feeble description of my sufferings; we have not got over the “Idyls” yet, nor will anything eradicate the disease but a new poem by the same author.

  Then, again, Friedrich the Second; what have I not gone through in the cause of that potentate, to say nothing of three hundred and sixty-two pages of his ancestors! What’s-his-name with the arrow, and Thingemabob the Bear, and spectre-hunting Kaisers, with fathers in red stockings, fighting duels with Termagants, and apparently getting the worst of it. O, the abusive names I have been called, on venturing to remonstrate on the subject of milliners’ bills! Dryasdusts, phosphorescent blockheads, putrefied specialities, and all sorts of insulting epithets have rained down on this devoted head, Talk of rehabilitation, too; what have I not endured in that way! My opinions are positively not worth a day’s purchase
. To-day they have been reading that dear Mr. Froude, and tell me, when I come home to dinner, that Henry the Eighth was an exemplary husband, and cut off his wives’ heads for the good of the country. Yesterday they had been perusing that delightful Monsieur Capefigue, and I was informed that Louis the Fifteenth was an excellent family man, and Madame du Barry a most respectable young person. I am quite prepared to hear, in the course of next week, that Dr. Johnson was distinguished for his polished and conciliating manners, and that Lord Chesterfield was a warm-hearted bear. Let them come ©n!

  Then my daughters are perpetually taking up popular ideas. A twelvemonth ago they took up the Italian question; not that they knew anything about it, but they associated it with the opera, cheap ices, Mr. Turner’s pictures, Jerusalem delivered. Savoy biscuits, “I promessi sposi” and organ-boys; and they took it up, and for the period of three weeks were so many Miss Whites.

  Of course it is only natural that, being blest with three marriageable daughters, their settlement in life is a question of some importance to Mrs. Blankstars and myself. But, good gracious me! what are you to do with girls who form their idea of a husband from the last book they read, and whose standard of perfection alters every time John Thomas brings a fresh cargo from Mudie’s? When the “Idyl” fever was at its maximum, they would hear of nothing in the way of a husband but a stem, cold, impassible, and dignified person, whose voice was “hollow and monotonous like a ghost’s;” and I set my wits to work to find someone amongst my acquaintance answering to the description. I found the very thing — Stiggins, an Essex oyster-merchant, with two thousand a-year, and a splendid place outside Colchester; a solemn, elderly fogy, but a warm man. I invited him to dinner for the following Sunday. He would have been an excellent match for my daughter Juliana; Juliana is getting on, and has taken lately to geology; I heard her make some remarks the other day about the old red sandstone that made me rather anxious to see her settled. It’s a bad sign, old red sandstone, and always sounds like the wrong side of thirty. So I invited Stiggins to dinner. I might, have saved myself the trouble; before Sunday came they were attacked by the Tale of Two Cities, and wouldn’t have anything but a dissipated barrister, who tied wet towels round his head, and made himself supremely wretched about nothing particular. Now I was not going to indulge them in this, or else there is Montague Bluffers of Fig-tree-court, Temple, who never had a brief in his life, and whom I actually caught once, at ten o’clock in the morning, with his towel dripping wet rolled round his head like a turban, sitting up in bed drinking soda-water and strong green tea, and reading French novels. But this wasn’t the sort of thing for me, so I left them to get over Sidney Carton as best they might, and the following week nothing would do for them but John Halifax, Gentleman. I thought this sounded like the manufacturing towns, and I brought them home a Manchester man of my acquaintance; but he hadn’t read Tennyson, and he ate fish with his knife, so he didn’t meet their views.