M. E. Braddon

“ There’s my poor sister Eliza, now, there’s a good deal of the vegetable about her. Her ideas run in such a narrow groove. I know before I go down to breakfast of a morning exactly what she’ll say to me, and I get to answer her mechanically. And at dinner again we sit opposite each other like a couple of talking automatons. It’s a dismal life, Miss Clare, for a man with any pretence to mind. If you only knew how I sometimes sigh for a more congenial companion!’
‘But I don’t know anything about it, Mr. Sampson,’ answered Celia tartly. ”

“ John Treverton stayed at the Manor-house till after dark, alone with his betrothed, and happier than he had ever been in his life. Yes, happy, though it was with a desperate happiness as of a child plucking wild flowers on the sunny edge of an abyss. He must have been something less or more than human if he had not been happy in Laura Malcolm’s company to-day, as they sat by the fire in the gloaming, side by side, her head leaning against his shoulder, his arm round her waist, her dark eyes hidden under drooping lids as they gazed dreamily downward at the smouldering logs ”

“ Time cures most wounds. Give me time, Laura, and do not judge me too hardly. I possess the poet’s curse, a mind more sensitive than the minds of ordinary men—dowered with the love of love, the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn.’
‘I hope you will leave your dowry outside when you come across this threshold,’ said Laura, with a smile that was more contemptuous than relenting. ‘I can accept friendship from no one who does not like my husband.’
‘Then I will struggle with the original man within me, and try to like John Treverton. ”

“ She gave her husband no thanks for his intervention, and went on railing at him for not having got her an engagement on the boulevard.
‘It is to bury myself to go to your dismal London,’ she exclaimed; ‘but anything is better than to dance to an assembly of idiots and cretins.’
‘London is not half a bad place,’ answered Jack Chicot, with his listless air, as of a man long wearied of life, and needing a stimulant as strong as aquafortis to rouse him to animation. ‘It is a big crowd in which one may lose one’s identity. Nobody knows one, one knows nobody. ”

“ Upon my soul, you ought not,’ said Desrolles with an air that was half-protection, half-patronage.
‘I know I ought not,’ replied La Chicot. ‘There is not an actress in Paris who would not call me stupid as an owl for my pains. Que diable, I sacrifice myself for the honour of a husband who mocks himself of me, who amuses himself elsewhere, and leaves me to fret and pine alone. It is too much. See then, Desrolles, it may be that you think I boast myself when I tell you that one of the richest men in London is over head and ears in love with me. ”

“ Laura, my love, my darling.’
‘Stop,’ she said suddenly, turning to him with earnest eyes, very pale in the dim light, now completely serious. ‘Is it me or your cousin’s estate you love? If it is the fortune you think of, let there be no stage-play of love-making between us. I am willing to obey your cousin—as I would have obeyed him living, honouring him and submitting to him as a father—but let us be true and loyal to each other. Let us face life honestly and earnestly, and accept it for what it is worth. ”

“ Well, really, Laura, don’t think me unkind for saying so, but I do call this an ill-omened wedding.’
‘Do you?’ said Laura, with a faint smile. ‘Do you really suppose that it will make any difference to my future life whether I am married on a rainy day or on a fine one? I rather like the idea of going out of the dulness into the sunshine, for I know our wedded life will be full of sunshine.’
‘How confident you are!’ exclaimed Celia, wonderingly.
‘What have I to fear? We love each other dearly. ”

“ I must always seem to him an obstacle to his freedom and his happiness. He is constrained to assume an affection for me, or to surrender a splendid fortune. If he is mercenary he will not hesitate. He will take the fortune and me, and I shall despise him for his readiness to accept a wife chosen for him by another. No, dear Mr. Clare, there is no possibility of happiness for John Treverton and me.’
‘My dear child, if you are convinced that you cannot be happy in this marriage, you are free on your part to refuse him,’ said the vicar.
Laura’s pale cheek crimsoned. ”

“ The husband of La Chicot, a being in himself so worthless, so aimless and obscure that no one ever took the trouble to inquire his real name. His wife’s name—the name made notorious by a ballet-dancer, the goddess of medical students and lawyers’ clerks—was good enough for him. In himself and by himself he was nothing. He was only the husband of La Chicot, a woman who drank like a fish and swore like a trooper.
It was a sorry pass for a man to have come to in whom the sense of shame was not utterly dead. ”

“ It was foolishness, no doubt, to feel so keen a pang; but girlhood is prone to foolishness, and Eliza Sampson had not yet owned to thirty. She had known from the first that John Treverton was to marry Laura Malcolm, and yet she had allowed herself to indulge in secret worship at his shrine. He was handsome and attractive, and Miss Sampson had seen so few young men who were either one or the other, that she may be forgiven for fixing her young unhackneyed affection on the first distinguished stranger who came within the narrow orbit of her colourless life. ”

“ You cannot be so cruel as to say no. My lawyer has drawn up the deed of settlement. I only wait your word to execute it.’
‘You are very generous,’ said La Chicot, scornfully, ‘or very obstinate. If I run away with you and my husband gets a divorce, will you marry me?’
‘Be faithful to me, and I will refuse you nothing.’ He went with her to the door of her lodgings for the first time, pleading his cause all the way, with such eloquence as he could command, which was not much. He was a man who had found money all powerful to obtain everything he wanted, and had seldom felt the need of words. ”

“ Did you see him lapse into dreamy thought, Laura?’
Miss Malcolm blushed indignantly; vexed, no doubt, at such foolishness.
‘Really, Celia, you are too ridiculous. I can’t think how you can indulge in such absurd raptures about a strange man.’
‘Why not about a strange man?’ asked Celia, with her philosophical air. ‘Why should the perfections of a strange man be a forbidden subject? One may rave about a landscape; one may be as enthusiastic as one likes about the stars or the moon, the sea, or a sunset, or even the last popular novel? Why must not one admire a man? ”

“ I shall not touch a sixpence of my cousin’s fortune till I can come back to you, a free man, and receive wealth and happiness from you. Till then you will be sole mistress of Hazlehurst Manor, and all that goes with it. Mr. Sampson will tell you what settlement I have made—a settlement that will be duly executed by me upon the day on which I become the ostensible owner of my cousin Jasper’s estate.
‘My beloved, I can say no more; I dare reveal no more. If you deign to think at all of one who has so deceived you, think of me pityingly as the most deeply wretched of men. ”

“ That movement, expressive of disgust with life in general, did not escape the sharp eyes of his sister.
‘Ted, dear, I’m afraid you have not left off being unhappy about Laura,’ she murmured, sympathetically.
‘I am only unhappy about her when I think she is married to a scoundrel.’
‘Oh, Ted, how can you say such a thing?’
‘Celia, a man who can give no account of seven years of his life must be a scoundrel,’ Edward Clare said decisively. ‘Say nothing to alarm Laura, I beg you. I am talking to you to-day as if you were a man, and to be trusted. Wait and watch. ”

“ They returned to the garden by a different arch; they visited the hot-houses, where the rose-hued azaleas and camellias made pyramids of vivid colour; they glanced at the kitchen garden with its asparagus-beds and narrow box-edged borders, its all-pervading odour of sweet herbs and wallflowers.
‘I am positively expiring for want of a cup of tea,’ cried Celia. ‘Didn’t you hear the church clock strike five, Laura?’
John remembered the six o’clock dinner at The Laurels. ”

“ And this hatred wore such a noble aspect in the man’s own mind. It was no base envy of another’s prosperity; it was not even jealous anger against a rival, Edward told himself. No, it was a chivalrous ardour in the defence of the woman he had loved; it was a generous desire to serve her which urged him to pluck the mask from this smooth hypocrite’s face. If this man was indeed, as Edward believed, the husband of Zaïre Chicot, the dancer, then his marriage with Laura was no marriage, and the conditions of the will had not been fulfilled. ”

“ Come, now, Celia, be sisterly for once in your life. What has Laura told you about John Treverton?’
‘Nothing. She is particularly reserved upon the subject. I know that it is a painful one for her, and I rarely approach it.’
‘Well, he is a lucky dog. I never hated a fellow so much. I have an instinctive idea that he is a scoundrel.’
‘Are not instinctive ideas convictions that jump with our own inclinations?’ speculated Celia, philosophically. ‘I am heartily sorry for you, Ned dear, for I know you are fond of Laura, and it does seem hard to have her willed away from you like this. ”

“ Laura was utterly happy in the brief interval between her betrothal and her wedding. She had given her love and trust unreservedly, feeling that duty and love went hand in hand. In following the inclination of her heart she was obeying the behest of her benefactor. She had been very fond of Jasper Treverton, had loved him as truly as ever daughter loved a father. It seemed the most natural process to transfer her love from the adopted father to his young kinsman. The old man in his grave was the bond of union between the girl and her lover. ”

“ That convenience reconciled Jack to the shabby finery of the sitting-room, the doubtful purity of the bedroom, the woe-begone air of the street, with its half-dozen dingy shops sprinkled among the private houses, like an eruption.
‘How it is ugly, your London!’ exclaimed La Chicot. ‘Is it that all the city resembles this, by example?’
‘No,’ answered Jack, with his cynical air. ‘There are brighter-looking streets, where the respectable people live.’
‘What do you call respectable people?’
‘The people who pay income-tax on two or three thousand a year.’
Jack inquired as to the other lodgers. ”

“ They were no longer the adoring young couple who had walked away arm-in-arm from the Mairie, smiling and happy, to share their wedding dinner with the chosen companions of the moment. The wife was now only affectionate by fits and starts, the husband had a settled air of despondency which nothing but wine could banish, and which, like the seven other spirits, returned with greater power after a temporary banishment. The wife loved the husband just well enough to be desperately jealous of his least civility to another woman. The husband had long ceased to be jealous, except of his own honour. ”

“ She loved the young Englishman, and she married him, knowing that he had not a napoleon beyond the coin that was to pay for their wedding dinner, utterly reckless as to the consequences of their marriage, and as ignorant and unreasoning in her happiness as a child. To have a handsome man—a gentleman by birth and education—for her lover and slave,—to have the one man who had ensnared her fancy tied to her apron-string for ever,—this was La Chicot’s notion of happiness. ”