The Golden Calf

M >> M. E. Braddon >> The Golden Calf

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He was happily placed in life for a lover, since a lover should always be
an orphan. Fathers and mothers are sore clogs upon the fiery wheel of
love. He was rich; in every way his own master. His kindred were kindly,
simple-minded people, who would give gracious welcome to any virtuous
woman whom he might choose for his wife. There was no impediment to his
happiness, provided always that Ida Palliser loved him; and he believed
that she did love him. This sense of security had made him less eager to
declare himself. He was content to wait for his opportunity.

And now summer was waning, though it was summer still. The days were no
less lovely; not a leaf had fallen in the woods; red roses flushed the
gardens with bloom, yellow roses hung in luxuriant clusters on arches and
walls; but the days were shortening, the sunsets were earlier, coming
inconveniently before dinner was over at The Knoll; and the Wykehamists
began to be weighed down by a sense of impending doom, in the direful
necessity of going back to school.

Bessie's birthday had come round again--that date so fatal to Ida
Palliser--and there was much cheerfulness at The Knoll in honour of the
occasion. This year the event was not to be signalised by a picnic. They
had been picnicking all the summer, and it was felt that the zest of
novelty would be wanting to that form of entertainment; so it was decided
in family counsel that a friendly dinner at home, with a little impromptu
dancing, and perhaps a charade or two afterwards, would be an agreeable
substitute for the usual outdoor feast. Brian, Mr. Jardine Dr. and Miss
Rylance, Aunt Betsy, and Ida Palliser were to be the only guests; but
these with the family made a good sized party. Blanche undertook to play
as many waltzes as might be required of her, and also took upon herself
the arrangement and decoration of the dessert, which was to be something
gorgeous. More boxes of peaches and grapes had been sent over from
Wimperfield in the absence of Sir Vernon and his brother, who were still
in Scotland.

Bessie's anniversary was heralded somewhat inauspiciously by a tremendous
gale which swept across the Hampshire Downs, after doing no small
mischief in the Channel, and wrecking a good many fine old oaks and
beeches in the New Forest. It was only the tail of a storm which had been
blowing furiously in Scotland and the north of England, and no one as yet
knew the extent of its destructive force.

The morning after that night of howling winds was dull and blustery, with
frequent gusts of rain.

'How lucky we didn't go in for a picnic!' said Horatio, as the slanting
drops lashed the windows at breakfast time. 'It may rain and blow as hard
as it likes between now and six o'clock, for all we need care. A wet day
will give us time to get up our charades, and for Blanche to thump at her
waltzes. Be sure you give us the Blue Danube.'

'The Blue Danube is out,' said Blanche, tossing up her pointed chin.

'Out of what? Out of time?'

'Out of fashion.'

'Hang fashion! What do I care for fashion?' cried the Wykehamist.
'Fashion means other people's whims and fancies. People who are led by
fashion have no ideas of their own. Byron is out of fashion, but he's
_my_ poet,' added Horatio, as who should say, 'and that ought to be a
sufficient set-off against any lessening of his European renown.'

'Think of the poor creatures at sea!' murmured kind-hearted Mrs.
Wendover, as a sharp gust shook the casement nearest to her.

'Very sad for them, poor beggars!' said Reginald; 'but it would have been
sadder for us if we'd been starting for a picnic. Travellers by sea must
expect bad weather; it's an important factor in the sum of their risk,
and their minds are prepared for the contingency; but when one has
planned a picnic party on the downs a wet day throws out all one's
calculations.'

The rain came and went in fitful showers, the wind blustered a little,
and then died away in sobs, while the young Wendovers spent their morning
noisily and excitedly, in laborious industries of the most frivolous
kind, the end and aim of which was to make a gorgeous display in the
evening.

Before luncheon the wind was at rest, and the gardens were smiling in the
sunlight under the hot blue sky of summer, and after luncheon the
Wendover girls and boys were rushing all over the garden cutting flowers.

'I only wish Dr. Rylance were not coming,' said Blanche, stopping to pant
and wipe her crimson countenance, when her two baskets were nearly full.
'He'll impart his own peculiar starchiness to the whole business.'

'Oh, hang it, he'll give the thing a grown-up flavour, anyhow,' replied
Reginald. 'Besides, the man _can_ talk--though he's deuced shallow--and
that is more than anyone else can in these parts.'

'Brian will be the hero of this evening's festivity, just as Brian
Walford was of the last. Don't you remember how nice he looked?' said
Blanche, as they went back to the house loaded with roses, heliotrope,
geranium, and ferns.

'Poor fellow!' sighed Bessie, who was so sentimental that she could but
suppose her favourite cousin a martyr to blighted love.

'If Brian of the Abbey proposes to Ida, as I feel convinced he will, and
if she accepts him, as she is sure to do, it will simply break Brian
Walford's heart.'

'Not a little bit,' said Reginald. 'If he did spoon her last year, is
that any reason, do you think, that he should care for her now? If she be
not fair to me, what the deuce care I how fair she be? And do you suppose
_I_ am going to waste in despair, and all that kind of thing? Not if I
know it.'

'Say what you like, I believe Brian Walford was deeply in love with Ida,
and that he has never been here since that time, because he can't bear to
see her, knowing she doesn't care for him.'

'That's skittles!' exclaimed the youthful sceptic, using a favourite
expression of his father's to express incredulity. 'The reason Brian
doesn't come to Kingthorpe is, that he has other fish to fry elsewhere.
As if anybody would come to Kingthorpe who wasn't obliged!'

'Brian used to come.'

'Yes, when he was young and verdant; and I daresay my father used to tip
him. He knows better now: he is enjoying himself in Paris--under the
pretence of studying law and modern languages--dancing at the _jardin
Bullier_, and going on no end, I daresay. _I_ know what Paris is.'

'How can you?' exclaimed Bessie; 'you were never there!'

'I was never in the moon, but I'm pretty well acquainted with the
geography of that planet. We have fellows in the Upper Sixth who think no
more of going to Paris than you do of going to Winchester; and a nice
life they lead there. Why, a man who thoroughly knows Paris can steep
himself in dissipation for a five-pound note!'

Loud exclamations of horror concluded the conversation.

CHAPTER XIX.

AFTER A CALM A STORM.

The dinner-party was a success. Bessie beamed radiantly, with her plump
arms and shoulders set off by a white gown, and a good deal of rather
incongruous trinketry in the way of birthday presents, every item of
which she felt bound to wear, lest the givers should be wounded by her
neglect. Thus, dear mother's amber necklace did not exactly accord with
Mr. Jardine's neat gold and sapphire locket; while the family
subscription gift of pink coral earrings hardly harmonised with either.
Yet earrings, locket, and necklace were all displayed, and the round
white arms were coiled from wrist to elbow with various monstrosities of
the bangle breed.

There was a flavour of happiness in the whole feast which could not be
damped by any ceremonious stiffness on the part of Dr. Rylance and his
daughter. The physician was all sweetness, all geniality; yet a very
close observer might have perceived that his sentiments about Miss
Palliser were of no friendly nature He had tried that young lady, and had
found her wanting,--wanting in that first principle of admiration and
reverence for himself, the lack of which was an unpardonable fault.

He had been willing to pardon her for her first rejection of him; telling
himself that he had spoken too soon; that he had scared her by his unwise
suddenness; that she was wild and wilful, and wanted more gentling before
she was brought to the lure. But after a prolonged period of gentle
treatment, after such courtesies and flatteries as Dr. Rylance had never
before lavished upon anybody under a countess, it galled him to find Ida
Palliser growing always colder and more distant, and obviously anxious to
avoid his distinguished company. Then came the appearance of Brian
Wendover on the scene, and Dr. Rylance was keen enough to see that Mr.
Wendover of the Abbey had acquired more influence over Miss Palliser in a
week than he had been able to obtain in nearly a year's acquaintance. And
then Dr. Rylance decided that this girl was incorrigible: she was beyond
the pale: she was a kind of monster, a being of imperfect development, a
blunder of nature--like the sloth and his fellow tardigrades: a
psychological mystery: inasmuch as she did not care for him.

So having made up his mind to have done with her, Dr. Rylance found that
the end of love is the beginning of hate.

It happened, rather by lack of arrangement than by any special design,
that Brian sat next to Ida. Dr. Rylance had taken Mrs. Wendover in to
dinner, but Brian was on his aunt's left hand, and Ida was on Brian's
left. He talked to her all dinner time, leaving his aunt, who loved to
get hold of a medical man, to expatiate to her heart's content on all the
small ailings and accidents which had affected her children during the
last six months, down to that plague of warts which had lately afflicted
Reginald, and which she would be glad to get charmed away by an old man
in the village, who was a renowned wart-charmer, if Dr. Rylance did not
think the warts might strike inward.

'Our own medical man is a dear good creature, but so very
matter-of-fact,' Mrs. Wendover explained; 'I don't like to ask him these
scientific questions.'

Brian and Ida talked to each other all through the dinner, and, although
their conversation was of indifferent things, they talked as lovers
talk--all unconsciously on Ida's part, who knew not how deeply she was
sinning. It was to be in all probability their last meeting. She let
herself be happy in spite of fate. What could it matter? In a few days
she would have left Kingthorpe for ever--never to see him again. For
ever, and never, are very real words to the heart of youth, which has no
faith in time and mutability.

After dinner the young people all went straying out into the garden, in
the lovely interval between day and darkness. There had been a glorious
sunset, and red and golden lights shone over the low western sky, while
above them was that tender opalescent green which heralds the mellow
splendour of the moon. The atmosphere was exquisitely tranquil after last
night's storm, not a breath stirring the shrubberies or the tall elms
which divided the garden from adjacent paddocks.

Ida scarcely could have told how it was that Brian and she found
themselves alone. The boys and girls had all left the house together. A
minute ago Bessie and Urania were close to them, Urania laying down the
law about some distinction between the old Oxford high-church party and
the modern ritualists, and Bessie very excited and angry, as became the
intended wife of an Anglican priest.

They were alone--alone at the end of the long, straight gravel walk--and
the garden around them lay wrapped in shadow and mystery; all the flowers
that go to sleep had folded their petals for the night, and the harvest
moon was rising over church-tower and churchyard yews, trees and tower
standing out black against the deep purple of that perfect sky. On this
same night last year Ida and the other Brian had been walking about this
same garden, talking, laughing, full of fun and good spirits, possibly
flirting; but in what a different mood and manner! To-night her heart was
overcharged with feeling, her mind weighed down by the consciousness that
all this sweet life, which she loved so well, was to come to a sudden
end, all this tender love, given her so freely, was to be forfeited by
her own act. Already, as she believed, she had forfeited Miss Wendover's
affection. Soon all the rest of the family would think of her as Aunt
Betsy thought--as a monster of ingratitude; and Urania Rylance would toss
up her sharp chin, and straighten her slim waist, and say, 'Did I not
tell you so?'

Close to where she was standing with Brian there was an old, old stone
sundial, supposed to be almost as ancient as the burial-places of the
long-headed men of the stone age; and against this granite pillar Brian
planted himself, as if prepared for a long conversation.

The voices of the others were dying away in the distance, and they were
evidently all hastening back to the house, which was something less
than a quarter of a mile off. Brian and Ida had been silent for some
moments--moments which seemed minutes to Ida, who felt silence much more
embarrassing than speech. She had nothing to say--she wanted to follow
the others, but felt almost without power or motion.

'I think we--I--ought to go back,' she faltered, looking helplessly
towards the lighted windows at the end of the long walk. 'There is going
to be dancing. They will want us.'

'They can do without us, Ida,' he said, laying his hand upon her arm;
'but I cannot do without telling you my mind any longer. Why have you
avoided me so? Why have you made it so difficult for me to speak to
you of anything but trivialities--when you must know--you must have
known--what I was longing to say?'

The passion in his lowered voice--that voice of deep and thrilling
tone--which had a power over her that no other voice had ever possessed,
the expression of his face as he looked at her in the moonlight, told her
much more than his words. She put up her hands entreatingly to stop him.

'For God's sake, not another word,' she cried,' if--if you are going to
say you care for me, ever so little, even. Not one more word. It is a
sin. I am the most miserable, most guilty, among women, even to be here,
even to have heard so much.'

'What do you mean? What else should I say? What can I say, except that I
love you devotedly, with all my heart and mind? that I will have no other
woman for my wife? You can't be surprised. Ida, don't pretend that you
are surprised. I have never hidden my love, I have let you see that I was
your slave all along. My darling, my beloved, why should you shrink from
me? What can part us for an instant, when I love you so dearly, and
know--yes, dearest, _I know_ that you love me? _That_ is a question upon
which no man ever deceived himself, unless he were a fool or a coxcomb.
Am _I_ a fool, Ida?'

'No, no, no. For pity's sake, say no more. You ought not to have spoken.
I am going away from Kingthorpe to-morrow, perhaps for ever. Yes, for
ever. How could I know, how could I think you would care for me? Let me
go!' she cried, struggling away from him as he clasped her hand, as he
tried to draw her towards him. 'It is hopeless, mad, wicked to talk to me
of love: some day you will know why, but not now. Be merciful to me;
forget that you have ever known me.'

'Ida, Ida,' shrieked shrill voices in the distance. White figures came
flying down the broad gravel-walk, ghost-like in the moonlight.

It was a blessed relief. Ida broke from Brian, and ran to meet Blanche
and Bessie.

'Ida, Ida, such fun, such a surprise!' shrieked Blanche, as the flying
white figures came nearer, wavered, and stopped.

'Only think of his coming on my birthday again!' exclaimed Bessie, 'and
at this late hour--just as if he had dropped from the moon!'

'Who,--who has come?' cried Ida, looking from one to the other, with a
scared white face.

It seemed to her as if the moonlit garden was moving away in a thick
white cloud, spots of fire floated before her eyes, and then all the
world went round like a fiery wheel.

'Brian--the other Brian--Brian Walford! Isn't it sweet of him to come
to-night?' said Bessie.

Ida reeled forward, and would have fallen but for the strong arm that
caught her as she sank earthwards, the grip which would have held her and
sustained her through all life's journey had fate so willed it.

She had not quite lost consciousness, but all was hazy and dim. She felt
herself supported in those strong arms, caressed and borne up on the
other side by Bessie, and thus upheld she half walked, and was half
carried along the smooth gravel-path to the house, whence sounds of music
came faintly on her ear. She had almost recovered by the time they came
to the threshold of the lighted drawing-room; but she had a curious
sensation of having been away somewhere for ages, as if her soul had
taken flight to some strange dim world and dwelt there for a space, and
were slowly coming back to this work-a-day life.

The drawing-room was cleared ready for dancing. Urania was sitting at the
piano playing the Swing Song, with dainty mincing touch, ambling and
tripping over the keys with the points of her carefully trained fingers.
She had given up Beethoven and all the men of might, and had cultivated
the niminy-piminy school, which is to music as sunflowers and blue china
are to art.

Brian Walford was standing in the middle of the big empty room, talking
to his uncle the Colonel. Mrs. Wendover and her sister-in-law were
sitting on a capacious old sofa in conversation with Dr. Rylance.

'Oh, you have come at last,' said Brian Walford, as Ida came slowly
through the open window, pale as death, and moving feebly.

He went to meet her, and took her by the hand; then turning to the
Colonel he said quietly and seriously,

'Uncle Wendover, it is just a year to-night since this young lady and I
met for the first time. From the hour I first saw her I loved her, and I
had reason to hope that she returned my love. We were married at a little
church near Mauleverer Manor, on the ninth of October last. After our
marriage my wife--finding that I was not quite so rich as she supposed me
to be--fearful, I suppose, for the chances of our future--refused to live
with me--told me that our marriage was to be as if it had never been--and
left me, within three hours of our wedding, for ever, as she intended.'

Ida was standing in the midst of them all--alone. She had taken her hand
from her husband's--she stood before them, pale as a corpse, but erect,
ready to face the worst.

Brian of the Abbey, that Brian who would have given his life to save her
this agony of humiliation, stood on the threshold of the window watching
her. Could it be that she was false as fair--she whom he had so trusted
and honoured?

Urania had left off playing, and was watching the scene with a triumphant
smile. She looked at Mr. Wendover of the Abbey with a look that meant,
'Perhaps now you can believe what _I_ told you about this girl?'

Aunt Betsy was the first to speak,

'Ida,' she said, standing up, 'is there any truth in this statement?'

'That question is not very complimentary to your nephew!' said Brian
Walford.

'I am not thinking of my nephew--I am thinking of this girl, whom I have
loved and trusted.'

'I was unworthy of your love and your trust,' answered Ida, looking at
Miss Wendover with wide, despairing eyes. 'It is quite true--I am his
wife--but he has no right to claim me. It was agreed between us that we
should part--for ever--that our marriage was to be as if it had never
been. It was our secret--nobody was ever to know.'

'And pray, after having married him, why did you wish to cancel your
marriage?' asked Colonel Wendover, in a freezing voice. 'You married him
of your own free will I suppose?'

'Of my own free will--yes.'

'Then why repent all of a sudden?'

She stood for a few moments silent, enduring such an agony of shame as
all her sad experiences of life had not yet given her. The bitter,
galling truth must be told--and in _his_ hearing. _He_ must be suffered
to know how sordid and vile she had been.

'Because I had been deceived,' she faltered at last, her eyelids drooping
over those piteous eyes.

Brian of the Abbey had advanced into the room by this time. He was
standing by his uncle's side, his hand upon his uncle's arm. He wanted,
if it were possible, to save Ida from further questioning, to restrain
his uncle's wrath.

'I married your nephew under a delusion,' she said. 'I believed that I
was marrying wealth and station. I had been told that the Brian Wendover
I knew--the man who asked me to be his wife--was the owner of Wendover
Abbey.'

'I see,' said the Colonel; 'you wanted to marry Wendover Abbey.'

Miss Rylance gave a little silvery laugh--the most highly cultivated
thing in laughs--but the scowl she got from Brian of the Abbey checked
her vivacity in a breath.

'Oh, I know what a wretch I must seem to you all,' said Ida, looking up
at the Colonel with pleading eyes. 'But you have never known what it is
to be poor--a genteel pauper--to have your poverty flung into you face
like a handful of mud at every hour of your life; to have the instincts,
the needs of a lady, but to be poorer and lower in status than any
servant; to see your schoolfellows grinning at your shabby boots, making
witty speeches about your threadbare gown; to patch, and mend, and
struggle, yet never to be decently clad; to have the desire to help
others, but nothing to give. If any of you--if you, Miss Rylance, with
that exquisite sneer of yours, _you_ who invented the plot that wrecked
me--if you had ever endured what I have borne, you would have been as
ready as I was to thank Providence for having sent me a rich lover, and
to accept him gratefully as my husband.'

'Brian Walford,' interrogated the Colonel, looking severely at his
nephew, 'am I to understand that you married this girl without
undeceiving her as to the children's, or rather Miss Rylance's, most
ill-judged practical joke--that you stood before the altar in God's
House, the temple of truth and holiness, and won her by a lie?'

'I never lied to her,' answered Brian Walford, sulkily. 'My cousins chose
to have their joke, but there was no joke in my love for Ida. I loved
her, and was ready to marry her, and take my chance of the future, as
another young man in my position would have done. I never bragged about
the Abbey, or told her that it belonged to me. She never asked me who I
was.'

'Because she had been told a wicked, shameful falsehood, and believed it,
poor darling,' cried Bessie, running to her friend and embracing her.
'Oh, forgive me, dear--pray, pray do. It was all my fault. But as you
have married him, darling, and it can't be helped, do try and be happy
with him, for indeed, dear, he is very nice.'

Ida stood silent, with lowered eyelids.

'My daughter is right, Miss Palliser--Mrs. Brian Walford,' said the
Colonel, in a less severe tone than he had employed before. 'It is quite
true that you have been hardly used. Any deception is bad, worst of all a
cheat that is maintained as far as the steps of the altar. But after all,
in spite of your natural disappointment at finding you had married a poor
man instead of a rich one, my nephew is the same man after marriage as he
was before, the man you were willing to marry. And I cannot think so
badly of you as to believe that you would marry a man you did not love,
for the sake of his wealth and position. No, I cannot think that of you.
I take it, therefore, that you liked my nephew for his own sake; and that
it was only pique and natural indignation at having been duped which made
you cast him off and agree to cancel your marriage. And I say that there
is only one course open to you, as a good and honourable young woman, and
that is to take your husband by the hand, as you took him in the house of
God, for better for worse, and face the difficulties of life honestly and
fearlessly. Heaven is always on the side of true-hearted young couples.'

Ida lifted her drooping eyelids and looked, not at the Colonel, not at
her husband, not at her staunch friend Aunt Betsy, but at that other
Brian--at him who this night only had declared his love. She looked at
him with despair in her eyes, humbly beseeching him to stand between her
and this loathed wedlock. But there was no sign in his sad countenance,
no indication except of deepest sorrow, no ray of light to guide her on
her path. The Colonel had spoken with such perfect common sense and
justice, he had so clearly right on his side, that Brian Wendover, as a
man of principle, could say nothing. Here was this woman he loved, and
she was another man's wife, and that other man claimed her. If the King
of Terrors himself had stretched forth his bony hand and clasped her, she
could not be more utterly lost to the man who loved her than she was by
this pre-existing tie. Brian of the Abbey was not the man to woo his
cousin's wife.

'Do, dearest, be happy,' pleaded Bessie. 'I'm sure father is right. And
you are our cousin, our own flesh and blood now, as it were. And you know
I always wanted you to belong to us. And we shall all be fonder of you
than ever. And you and Mr. Jardine will be cousins, later on,' she
whispered, as a conclusive argument, as if for the sake of so high a
privilege a girl might fairly make some sacrifice of inclination.

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