Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

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Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1110

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon


  But although she was relegated to the position of a servant, her education still went on. Miss Marjorum had very little to occupy her now that Lady Carlyon was established at the Castle, and was glad to employ her superfluous energies in urging Elizabeth May along the thorny path of culture. She gave three hours a day to the task of tuition, delighted to have so docile a pupil, entranced by the sound of her own voice as she pronounced those Johnsonian sentences which had gone over the heads of so many young scions of patrician tress, but which had never been so meekly and reverently listened to as they were by Elizabeth. The field which had so long been left fallow, this virgin soil of a young untutored mind, now gave the promise of a splendid harvest.

  Miss Marjoram entered heartily into the notion of. ‘A creature rescued from the gutter, who has never been taught hairdressing, and cannot have a notion of altering a gown — a chit utterly without experience! What could she do for your figure or your complexion, if either were to give way suddenly?’

  Lucille did not enter upon these details. She hoped that it would be very long before her toilet became a work of art, like her aunt’s.

  ‘I have changed my mind about Elizabeth,’ she said.’ She is so intellectual, so quick at learning, so superior in all her ideas, that I think she would do better as a governess. She might begin in a very humble way — teaching young children, and carrying on her own education all the while; and by and by she would be fit for a superior situation.’

  ‘O, as a nursery governess — to trudge about country lanes with troublesome children — she might do very well. But that is a way of being buried alive which a young woman with her good looks will not endure long, I’m afraid,’ added Lady Carlyon.

  The return to Ingleshaw had ended the daily, and almost hourly, association between Lady Lucille and her protégée. Lord Ingleshaw’s presence at the Castle altered the manner of his daughter’s life. It was no longer possible for her, had she been so inclined, to have Elizabeth May about her as a companion. Elizabeth fell back naturally into the place which had been at first given to her. She occupied a little room communicating with Tompion’s large and airy chamber. She worked industriously at plain sewing, and did any light housework which Tompion could find for her to do. She attended to the flowers in Lady Lucille’s rooms, and this, of all tasks, seemed her favourite occupation.

  But although she was relegated to the position of a servant, her education still went on. Miss Marjorum had very little to occupy her now that Lady Carlyon was established at the Castle, and was glad to employ her superfluous energies in urging Elizabeth May along the thorny path of culture. She gave three hours a day to the task of tuition, delighted to have so docile a pupil, entranced by the sound of her own voice as she pronounced those Johnsonian sentences which had gone over the heads of so many young scions of patrician tress, but which had never been so meekly and reverently listened to as they were by Elizabeth. The field which had so long been left fallow, this virgin soil of a young untutored mind, now gave the promise of a splendid harvest.

  Miss Marjoram entered heartily into the notion of Elizabeth’s beginning a life of usefulness as a nursery governess.

  ‘It is the most honourable career open to a woman,’ she said.’ It is the one profession which a lady can enter without a blush. The governess can pass through life without overstepping the bounds of maidenly modesty. She need never come in contact with the ruder sex. She is a nun without the restraint of the convent. And under her fostering care are developed the minds of the future. She is the intellectual mother of great men and accomplished women. Many a distinguished savant can trace his success in life to the care with which his governess prepared him for Eton. Many a woman of rank owes her greatest social triumphs to the thoroughness with which she was taught her French verbs.’

  Elizabeth listened with a faint sigh, and a silence which Miss Marjorum took for assent. She was very eager to learn: yet it did not seem to her that an earthly paradise opened before the footsteps of a nursery governess. To walk about the Kentish lanes with little children dragging at her skirts, to sit in a rectory parlour teaching the alphabet or cutting bread-and-butter — well, it would be an honourable drudgery among fair and cleanly surroundings; but it would be no less a drudgery than the old life of the muddy streets and the flower-basket. And in this new life there would be no one to care for her; while in the old life there had been some one who loved her passionately — some one of whom she now thought with a shudder — but whoso love had been sweet to her once.

  She saw very little of Lady Lucille now, and when they did meet it seemed as if there were a gulf between them. Lucille was kind, but her manner was statelier than it had been. She expressed an interest in Elizabeth’s studies; but the old friendly warmth, the girlish playfulness which had made Elizabeth forget that they were not equals, had altogether vanished. One day the girl took courage to ask if she had offended her patroness.

  ‘No, Elizabeth,’ Lucille answered gravely; ‘but you have disappointed me a little. You remember what Mr. Challoner said that last night on the yacht.’

  ‘Yes,’ faltered Elizabeth, with downcast eyes.

  ‘He told me that you were not happy; and then I saw that my first plan for your life was a mistake. You could not be as I had fancied, my maid, and almost my companion Your jealous temper would not allow that.’

  ‘Only jealous because I love too well,’ said Elizabeth, still looking downward, and with a hectic flush upon, her cheeks.

  ‘I do not think that is the best kind of love. I saw then that I had been mistaken, and that it would be better that your new life should be independent of mine. You take so kindly to education, and you are so young, that it is only fair your mind should be allowed to develop itself. As a lady’s-maid you could have very little opportunity for improvement; as a governess your education need never stop.’

  ‘And when I am old I shall be a kind of learned machine, like Miss Marjorum,’ said Elizabeth.

  “Surely that will be better than selling flowers in the streets,’ answered Lucille coldly.

  ‘Yes, that was a dreadful life,’ said the girl, with a faint shudder. ‘I sometimes look back and wonder how I ever bore it; but when I look forward there seems nothing much worth living for. Life seems all blank, somehow.’

  She set down the vase of flowers which she had been arranging, and left the room. Her step was slow and heavy. She had a listless air which struck Lucille, whose eyes followed her to the door.

  ‘She is changed in some way,’ thought Lucille. ‘I can’t understand her.’

  Now that it was fully understood that Elizabeth May was to be educated, and was to earn her living by-and-by as a governess, she was no longer obliged to associate with the servants; and this was an infinite relief to her. They were much more respectable, much better mannered, than the disreputable companions of her girlhood; but she had found it harder to get on with them. Their world was not her world. They despised her on account of her antecedents; they disliked her as an interloper, and were utterly unable to recognize that inborn superiority which raised her above them. She had now escaped from all association with the servants, except Tompion, who was more kindly disposed towards her now that she was no longer intended for Lady Lucille’s own service. Elizabeth took her meals in the little sitting-room where Tompion worked, in company with a sewing-machine and a bloated spaniel of affectionate temper, which Tompion had reared from puppyhood to asthmatic age. It was a lonely life which she was now leading at Ingleshaw Castle, a life which gave her ample leisure for thought, and for the contemplation of that future which, as she had said, seemed blank and empty.

  Sometimes of an afternoon, when she had finished her task of needlework, she would go for a lonely ramble in the park. Lady Lucille had given her leave to go where she liked within the boundary of the fence, which enclosed a space of between six and seven miles in circumference.

  It was drawing towards the end of October, and those warm sunshiny days on the bl
ue water seemed to belong to a remote past, when Elizabeth started upon one of these lonely rambles. The sky was a dull gray, and there was a stormy feeling in the air; but Elizabeth was not afraid of bad weather. She had grown very weary of the silence of the corridor outside her lonely room, and even the endearments of the obese spaniel, which insisted upon clambering into her lap, had not been sufficient to beguile her mind of its sadness.

  Her step grew lighter when she was out in the air, under the dull autumn sky. She paused on her way down stairs to look out of a window from which she could see Lucille, Bruno, and two girls from the parsonage, playing tennis on the wide level lawn. How bright and gay those figures in pink and blue gowns looked under the gray sky, against the velvety green sward, the warm red wall! What an air of happiness in those quick movements, that light laughter!

  ‘I suppose God meant them to be always happy,’ she thought; ‘ but I was born different. When I came here I thought I was going to be happy; yes, I was quite happy — as happy as I could be in heaven; and then —

  She ended with a long sigh, and turned impatiently from the window. Her last look at the lawn showed her Bruno talking confidentially to Lucille, as they stood aside in a pause of the game.

  The wind was tossing the fir-tree tops when Elizabeth entered the plantation where Lucille found her asleep in the fair May morning. Everything wore a different aspect now. There were hardly any flowers left — a tuft of harebells here and there on a grassy knoll, a belated orchis, a few autumn violets. The firs looked dark and wintry, and every gust swept a shower of yellow leaves from the young oaks. Elizabeth had rambled a long way round the chase before she entered the plantation, and now she sat down to rest almost on the spot where Lucille found her.

  ‘I wonder what would have happened to me if she had not come this way that day? Should I have lain here till I died, or should I have found strength to crawl a little further along the dusty road that leads to the Union? Even then I don’t know if they would have taken me in. I should have been only a casual.’

  She spoke these last words aloud, in a low quiet voice, as she sat listless and meditative, with one ungloved hand straying idly among the bracken on the bank by her side.

  ‘Not much comfort for casuals anywhere, eh, Bess?’ said a voice close at hand; and a man, slender, lithe, sinewy, rose with a sudden undulating movement, like a snake, from the deep rank fern.

  The girl looked at him with wide bewildered eyes; and, as she looked, every vestige of colour faded out of her face; even the parted lips whitened as her breath came and went flutteringly.

  ‘Tom! Is it you?’ she faltered faintly.

  ‘Who should it be? Did you expect Jack — or Joe — or Bill — or Jim?’ he asked, with a harsh laugh, gathering himself into a sitting position upon the bank, and stretching out a sinuous arm with the evident intention of encircling the girl’s waist; but she drew herself suddenly away, with an angry look in her dark eyes.

  ‘What’s the matter, my lass? Sure to goodness, you’re not going to turn your back upon me because you’re up in the world, and I’m down!’

  ‘You left me to starve,’ answered Bess, with lowered eyelids, sitting as far from him as the bank allowed, her attitude and countenance distinctly expressive of abhorrence; ‘I don’t quarrel with you for that. Perhaps you couldn’t help it; perhaps you didn’t care. But when you left me once, you left me for ever. You and I had done with each other.’

  ‘No, we hadn’t, lady fair,’ said the man, looking up at her from his lower place, with a cunning grin. ‘It might have been so if I’d had my way. But you and your pal, the city missionary, worked it out different. You wanted all things correct and reg’lar. Church and parson; love, honour, and obey, and all the usual patter; and, by the living Jingo, you shall obey!’

  ‘I should have died in this wood, if it hadn’t been for the young lady who found me, and took me to her beautiful home, and brought me back to life by her kindness,’ said Elizabeth, still looking downward, staring sullenly at the grass, with its infinite variety of hue, from green to russet.

  ‘Yes, and pampered you, and made a fool of you, and had you taught to play the lady,’ sneered the man, ‘ I know all about it.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I’m not a fool, and am used to keep my eyes and my ears open. I’ve been on the tramp for the last three weeks, and it was only yesterday as I dropped into this blooming bit of country, and stopped for a meal of victuals at the and Fiddle — a neat little old fashioned sort of a pub at the end of the village. The rum cull of the casa happens to be a friendly sort of a chap — very free with the patter; so I let him jaw. I asked him a few leading questions about that blooming Castle over there, which I could see the tops of the towers over the trees, like a scene at the poor old Vic; and he jawed no end about the Hurl, and the young lady, and how she was the most charitable young lady as never was, and how she’d picked up a beautiful young creetur in the wood, at death’s door, and had took her home, and kind of ‘dopted her like — a pore young thing as was on the tramp to jine her sweetheart at Dover. Now I can’t say if it was the mention of Dover, or whether it was the old Cat and Fiddle’s patter about your good looks, and your black eyes, and your name o’ Bess, which he dropped promiscuous, that put me up to trap; but it corned into my blessed noddle that this young ‘ooman was my gal, and none other.’

  The landlord of the Cat and Fiddle was Tompion’s maternal uncle, and Tompion’s evenings out were sometimes spent in the private parlour of that rustic inn; so Bess was not surprised at the publican’s readiness to talk about Ingleshaw Castle and its inhabitants.

  ‘So I makes up my mind to hang out at the Cat and Fiddle for a night,’ pursued Tom, sprawling at ease upon the bank,’ and I loafs about to-day till I falls in with you. I’ve been up at the Castle, and had a look about me, and I heerd there as you was fond of walking alone in the woods; so I prowled about here till I seed you; and an uncommon chilly welcome I’ve got for my pains.’

  ‘What do you want with me?’ asked the girl sullenly flashing one angry glance at him and letting her eyelids fall again, as if she had looked at something hateful. ‘You beat me.’

  ‘Only when I was mad with the drink, my lass.’

  ‘Mad with drink? yes. You spent the money upon which we might have lived a decent life — like Christians, or at any rate like human beings — on drink that changed you into a savage. You made me work for you as well as for myself. You let me starve, and you left me.’

  ‘Only when I’d got into trouble, and London was too hot to hold me.’

  ‘You told me you’d enlisted, and that your regiment was going to India.’

  “There was a touch of romance in. that, Bess. I thought you was hard on me, and I wanted to melt your stubborn heart. I had some thoughts of taking the Queen’s shilling when I left London, but I thought better of it on reflection. Liberty’s worth more than a bob, and I had no fancy for the guard-room or the cat.’

  ‘You told me nothing but lies, then? You. never went to Dover?’

  ‘Not any nearer than Rochester. I’ve been working in a circle within thirty or forty mile of London.’

  ‘What kind of work have you been doing?’

  The man looked meditative, felt in his pockets for a short pipe, found it, filled it, lighted it, and then replied carelessly,

  ‘Odd jobs — any think. You know I’m pretty handy

  ‘Stable work?’ interrogated Elizabeth.

  ‘Partly stables. A fellow that’s down on his luck can’t afford to be particklar. And now tell me what kind of a berth you’ve got up yonder. It was like your luck to drop into such quarters. And, O scissors, ain’t we smart! A brand-new black gound as fits us like the skin of a eel, and sech ladylike boots! Blest if ever I know’d you’d such a pretty foot, Bess!’ he added, looking admiringly at the slender foot with its well-developed instep, which Bess tucked under her gown with an angry movement as he spoke.

  ‘Well,
I’m bio wed! That’s the first time I knowed it was high treason for a husband to admire his wife’s trotters,’ exclaimed Tom Brook, with an injured air. ‘All I can say is, as I said afore, it was like your luck to get free quarters at Ingleshaw Castle.’

  ‘It was the first good luck that ever came my way; and now I suppose you’ve come to spoil it all.’

  ‘No, I ain’t. I’m not such a selfish beggar as that. I’m not agoing to say, “Bess, you’re my wife, and if I have to tramp the country, you must pad the hoof alongside o’ me.” No, you’ve got a good home, and you’d better stick to it as long as ever you can. But I want you to bear in mind all the same as I’m your husband, and to be civil and pleasant spoken when you and me meet promiscuous, as we have this afternoon.’

  ‘You mean that you are to hang about this place, and that I am to meet you — secretly?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean by hanging about. If I find I can get a job of work in the village, I shall stay; if I can’t—’

  A knowledge of certain dark antecedents in Mr. Brook’s early life — escapades which in his class of life had counted only as the wild oats of youthful indiscretion, and of which Bess herself had thought lightly enough when she married him — now inclined her to suspect his motives.

  ‘What work can there be for you in such a place as Ingleshaw village?’ she asked.

  ‘There’s always work for me where there’s horses,’ answered Tom Brook. ‘I’ll get somethin’ to do, don’t you be afeard; and I won’t spile your little game. Yon shall play the lady Tip at the Castle for the next six months, if yer like, till I’ve made a potful of money, and can come and claim yer, with a good coat on my back and atop ‘at on my ‘ed, like a born swell. But you’ll have to bear in mind you’re my wife, and be civil and obedient in the mean time, my lady. I’m not going to stand any gammon.’

 

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