The Golden Calf

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

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Brian knew that she was good and loyal; but although he admired and
respected her, he could not forgive her for that innate superiority which
made him all the more conscious of his own shortcomings, for that growing
strength of character which accentuated his own weakness. When the charm
of novelty had departed, when the triumph of having won her in spite of
herself was over, Brian Walford's love for his beautiful wife wore to a
very thin thread. The tie was not broken, but it was sorely attenuated.
He had never ceased to be jealous of the brother whom she loved so much
more fondly than she had ever loved, or even pretended to love, her
husband; but he had left off expressing that jealousy in open unbraiding.
Once he had been in the habit of saying, 'You will have a boy of your own
some day, and then Master Vernie will be nowhere;' but that hoped-for son
had never come, and Vernon was still all in all to his sister. Brian knew
that it was so, and submitted to his lot in sullen acquiescence. After
all, his marriage had brought him much that was good--had smoothed his
pathway in life; and if--if, by-and-by, some such fatality as that which
had cleared the way for Reginald Palliser, should clear the way for Ida,
his wife would be the owner of one of the finest estates in Sussex. He
wished no evil to the young baronet, he bore no grudge against him for
Ida's idiotic fondness; but the fact remained that the boy's death would
make Brian Walford Wendover's wife a rich woman. It is not in the nature
of a man living among sharp-witted lawyers and men about town to ignore a
fact of this kind. His friends had talked to him about it after the
publication of Sir Reginald Palliser's will.

'A fine thing for you if that young gentleman were to go off the hooks,'
said they; but Brian protested that he had no desire for such promotion.
He was fond of the boy, and was very well satisfied with his own
position.

'I daresay you do like the little beggar,' answered his particular
friend, who was loafing away the earlier half of the afternoon in Mr.
Wendover's chambers, smoking Mr. Wendover's cigarette, and sipping Mr.
Wendover's Apollinaris slightly coloured with brandy--a very modest form
of entertainment surely, and yet the cigarettes and the superfine cognac,
which were always on tap in Elm Court, made no small appearance in the
accounts of tobacconist and wine merchant. 'You would be sorry if
anything were to happen to him, no doubt; just as I shall be sorry when
the governor bursts up--poor old fellow! But I know I want his money very
badly; and I think you could spend a good deal more than your present
income.'

Brian admitted with a light laugh that his capacity for expenditure was
considerably in excess of his resources,

'You know how quietly I live,' he began.

_'Comme ci, comme ca,'_ muttered his friend.

'And yet even now I am in debt.'

'And have been ever since I first knew you, and would be if you had fifty
thousand a year!'

'Oh, that's inevitable,' said Brian. 'A man with an income of that kind
must always be in debt. He never can know when he comes to the boundary
line. When a man starts in life by believing he is enormously rich, and
can have everything he wants, he is pretty sure to go to the dogs. That's
the way the sons of millionaires so often drift towards the gutter.'

CHAPTER XXIV.

'FRUITS FAIL AND LOVE DIES AND TIME RANGES.'

Brian found Wimperfield duller as a place of residence after Sir
Reginald's death; or it may be that he found London gayer, and his
professional duties more absorbing. It was not often that his wife and
mother-in-law were gratified by any public notification of his
engagements; but now and then the name of Mr. Wendover appeared as junior
counsel in some insignificant case, and Lady Palliser, who read the
_Times_ and _Post_, diligently apprised Ida of the fact.

'You see Brian is getting on quite nicely,' she said approvingly, 'and
by-and-by when he has plenty of work, you will have a small house in
town, I suppose--somewhere about Belgravia--and only come to Wimperfield
for your holidays.'

Fanny Palliser had never left off compassionating Ida for her frequent
separation from her husband. She had never divined that Ida was happier
in Brian's absence than when he was with her. The wife had so borne
herself that her husband should not be put to shame by her indifference.
She lived the larger half of her life apart from him; but Lady Palliser
and her gossips believed that in so doing the young couple sacrificed
inclination to prudence. So soon as they could afford to maintain a town
house they would have one.

It was midsummer weather, and the rose garden at Wimperfield, that garden
which had been Ida's own peculiar care for the last four years, the
garden which she had improved and beautified with every art learned from
that ardent rose-worshipper Aunt Betsy, was glorious with its first
blooms. Sir Reginald Palliser had been dead a year and a half, but Ida
still wore black gowns, and the widow had in no wise mitigated the
severity of her weeds. The two women had lived peaceably and
affectionately together ever since the baronet's death, leading a quiet
but not unhappy life, the placid monotony of their existence agreeably
varied by frequent intercourse with the family at Kingthorpe.

The only changes at The Knoll were of a gentle domestic character. No
cloud of trouble had darkened that happy household. Bessie had become a
brisk, business-like little matron, dividing her cares between her
yearling baby and her husband's parish; troubled, like Martha, about many
things, but only in such a manner as women of her temperament like to be
troubled. Reginald had begun his University career as an undergraduate of
Balliol, and talked largely about Professor Jowett, and Greek. Horatio
was still a Wintonian. The Colonel had grown a little stouter, and his
wife was too polite to cultivate a slimness which might have seemed a
reproach to her husband's comfortable figure. Blanche was 'out,' a
development of her being which meant that she was occasionally invited to
a friendly dinner-party with her father and mother, that her clothes cost
three times as much as they had cost while she was 'in,' that she had
ideas about blue china and sunflowers, lamented the shabbiness of The
Knoll drawing-room and the general untidiness of the household, and that
she abandoned herself to despondency whenever there was a long interval
between one garden party and another. The child Eva had become exactly
what Blanche had been four years ago. Urania was still Urania Rylance,
just a shade more self-opinionated, and more conscious of the inferiority
of her fellow-creatures. These innate instincts had been ripened and
developed by several London seasons, and were now accompanied by a
flavour of sourness which was meant for wit. She had not been without
offers, but there had been no offer tempting enough to induce her to
abandon her privileges as Dr. Rylance's daughter. She had an idea that
her marriage would be the signal for Dr. Rylance to take unto himself a
second wife; and she was disinclined to give that signal. The more
anxious her father seemed to dispose of her in the marriage market, the
more tenaciously she clung to the privileges of spinsterhood.

'I hope you are not in a hurry to get rid of me, father,' she said at
breakfast one morning, when Dr. Rylance urged the claims of a cultured
youth in the War Office.

'No, my dear; I don't think I have shown any undue haste. This is your
fifth London season.'

I hope you do not call my intermittent glimpses of town a season,'
sneered Urania.

'I have you here as often and as long as I can,' answered her father,
becoming suddenly stony of countenance, 'and I take you out as much as I
can. Mr. Fitz Wilson has seven hundred a year. I could give you--say
three; and surely with a thousand a year two young people might live in
very good style--even in these pretentious days.'

'No doubt. But I don't care for Mr. Fitz Wilson, and I care still less
for the kind of style which can be maintained upon a thousand a year,'
replied Urania, with the air of a duchess. 'That would mean a small house
011 the skirts of Regent's Park, or a flat in the Marylebone Road, I
suppose--and no carriage.'

'Marry whom you please, my love, and when you please,' said her father;
'but remember that time is not standing still with any of us.'

There had been no change at the Abbey in the years which were gone since
Brian Walford claimed his bride, except that the new schools had been
built under Colonel Wendover's superintendence. The old house still
resembled the palace of the sleeping beauty; except that trustworthy
servants took care of it, and kept moths, spiders, mice, and all such
small deer at a distance. The owner of the mansion was still absent,
roaming about somewhere in Northern India, as it was supposed; but his
letters were few and far between. His kindred at Kingthorpe were
accustomed to think of him as a wanderer in far-away places, and gave
themselves very little anxiety about him. To have been anxious once would
be to be anxious always, since a traveller's risks are manifold, and
there is never a year when the eager spirit of some valiant explorer is
not quenched in sudden death. Brian Wendover had been away so long that
people had left off talking about him; and it seemed a natural condition
for the Abbey to be tenantless--a capital place for picnics and afternoon
teas. The Wendovers of The Knoll took all their visitors there as a
matter of course--played tennis on the lawn between the goodly old
cedars; and Blanche, who was of a much more enterprising disposition than
her sister Bessie, had tried her hardest to induce Mrs. Wendover to give
a ball in the old refectory.

Ida and her husband were strolling about the rose-garden in the quiet
hour after luncheon, while Lady Palliser dozed over her knitting-needles
in her favourite chair by the long French window. Brian had come to
Wimperfield somewhat unexpectedly, while the London season was still at
its height, and all the law courts in full swing. He came home invalided,
and wanting rest and care: but he refused to consult the family doctor, a
general practitioner born and bred in the adjacent village,--clever,
sagacious, homely in dress and manners, and, in the opinion of Lady
Palliser, a tower of strength. She liked a fatherly doctor.

'What is the use of seeing old Fosbroke when I have had the best advice
in London?' Brian said, peevishly, when urged by his mother-in-law to
take advice from the family doctor. 'I know exactly what ails me--nervous
exhaustion, an over-worked brain, and that kind of thing. I suppose it is
a natural consequence of modern civilisation: men's brains have to go at
express speed in order to keep pace with the average intelligence of the
time.'

'If you had only a better appetite!' sighed Lady Palliser, who had been
distressed at seeing her son-in-law send away plate after plate, with its
contents hardly touched.

'I wouldn't mind having a bad appetite if I could sleep, said he; 'it's
insomnia that tells upon a fellow.'

Brian did not enter into the causes of this dire malady, which had begun
with long nights given to dissipation--not to gross pleasures or vulgar
companions, but to a semi-intellectual dissipation: wit, fun, copious
talk about all things between heaven and earth, in the society of
artists, actors, journalists, Bohemians of all the arts. To the man who
begins by doing without sleep there sometimes comes a day when sleep will
refuse to answer to his bidding. He has acquired the habit of perpetual
wakefulness. The sleep-mechanism of the brain is out of gear. It will go
for half-an-hour, perhaps, or for a few minutes, in spasmodic jerks: and
then it stops all at once, as if the machinery had gone wrong.

So it was with Brian. Those festive nights given over to the feast of
reason and the flow of soul--not to riot or drunkenness, but to the
half-unconscious consumption of much brandy and soda--nights in which
the atmosphere seemed charged with wit and wisdom as with mental
electricity--nights in which a young man, able to talk smartly upon any
given topic, was carried away by the consciousness of his power, and
thought himself a god.

Brian was a member of all those joyous clubs--the night flowers of the
club world, which unfold their petals in the small hours, when the
playhouses are shut, and the lights have been extinguished in all sober
households. There was no offence in any of these institutions, and they
offered a fine intellectual arena, afforded a splendid training for
literary youth: but to a man who loved them too well they meant a
shattered constitution.

Brian had come to Wimperfield in the hope that quiet and country air
would bring back sleep to his eyelids and steadiness to his nerves; but
he had been there a week, and his hand was no steadier, his nights were
no less wakeful. He fancied himself growing weaker day by day, and
although the great authority in Harley Street had strictly forbidden any
stimulant except one glass of stout with his mutton chop at luncheon,
Brian, who was quite unable to eat the chop, found it impossible to lunch
without plenty of dry sherry, or to dine without champagne, and after
dinner drank a good deal of that fine old port which had been laid down
by old Sir Vernon Palliser in forty-seven.

Ida was very kind and gentle to her husband at this time, seeing that he
was really in need of her tenderness. She devoted herself to his
amusement, walked with him, rode with him, drove with him; but although
he was grateful, he was not happy. A terrible depression of mind, broken
by flashes of hilarity, had taken possession of him. The London physician
had told him frankly that his nerves were shattered, but that all would
be well with him if he left off all stimulants, ate chops and steaks, and
lived in the open air; but as yet he had been unable to cope with the
most diminutive chop, or to exist for three hours without stimulants.
Even those rides and drives with Ida seemed a weariness to him, and he
would have escaped them if he could.

This afternoon he paced the rose-garden listlessly by Ida's side, smoking
a cigarette--that cigarette which was rarely absent from his lips.

'Are you sure your London doctor does not object to your smoking so
much?' Ida asked presently, noting the languid uncertainty of the fingers
which held the cigarette.

'I am not sure about anything. I told him I could not live without
tobacco, and he said I might smoke two or three cigarettes in the course
of the day--'

'Oh, Brian, and you smoke--'

'Two or three dozen! Not quite so bad as that, eh? But no doubt I do go
considerably outside the medico's mark. I could no more exist by line and
rule in that way than I could fly. No, if I am to die of tobacco and late
hours, I am doomed.'

'But there is no such thing as being doomed; every man is his own
master--he can mould his life as he likes.'

'Can he? That depends upon the man. I am not going into the mystery of
fate and free will. There is the question of temperament--hereditary
instinct. If I cannot have intellectual society--new ideas--variety--I
must die. I could not lead the life you live here--not life, but
stagnation.'

'I have the books I love, this dear park, and all the lovely country
round us--horses--dogs--and some very pleasant neighbours: and I try to
do a little good in my generation.'

'All very well; but you are as much out of the world as if you were in
the centre of Africa. I could not exist under such conditions. Better
fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. This to me would be as bad
as Cathay. But now I suppose you are going to be perfectly happy, now
that your brother is coming home.'

'Yes. I am always happy, when I have him--he is more and more
companionable every day of his life.'

Vernon was expected that afternoon. He was coming home for a summer
holiday, just when summer was at her loveliest He was not bound by public
school rules, or obliged to wait for the stereotyped watering-place
season. The Jardines were to bring him over this afternoon, and were to
stay at Wimperfield for a couple of days. Ida glanced towards the avenue
every now and then, expecting to catch a glimpse of the approaching
carriage between the leafy elms.

Brian strolled by her side with a listless air, smoking, and murmuring a
few words now and then for courtesy's sake. He had very little to say to
his wife. She did not care for the things he cared for, or understand the
kind of life he lived. She loved books, the books which are for all time;
he was a mere skimmer of books and reviews--mostly reviews; and he cared
only for new books, new ideas, new theories, new paradoxes. His
cleverness was the cleverness of the daily press--the floating froth upon
the sea of knowledge. He liked to talk to a man of his own stamp, with
whom he could argue upon equal terms; but not to a woman who had steeped
her mind in the wisdom and poetry of the past.

He stifled a yawn every now and then, in that half-hour of waiting,
longing to go back to the dining-room and refresh his parched lips with
the contents of a syphon dashed with brandy. He had given his own orders
to the butler, and the spirit stand was always on the sideboard ready for
his use. The butler had made a note of the brandy which was dribbled away
in this desultory form of refreshment, and had made up his own mind as to
Mr. Wendover's habits; but it is a servant's duty to hold his peace upon
such matters.

At last there came the sound of wheels, and Ida flew round to the portico
to receive her guests, Brian following at his leisure. The slender figure
in the black gown reminded Brian of those old days by the river--the
tranquil October afternoons--the clear light--the placid water--a gray
river under a gray sky, with a lovely line of yellow light behind the
tufted willows. How happy he had been in those days!--caring nothing for
the future--bent on winning this girl at any price--laughing within
himself at her delusion--trusting to his own merits as an ample set-off
against his empty purse when he should stand revealed as the wrong Brian.

Things had gone fairly enough with him since then. He had had plenty of
pleasure; a good deal of money, though not half enough; and very little
work. And yet he felt that his life was a failure--and he was languid and
old before his time. An idle life had exhausted him sooner than other men
are exhausted by a hard-working career. He knew of men at the Bar who had
lived hard and worked like galley slaves, and who yet retained all the
fire and freshness of youth.

The guests had alighted by the time Brian reached the portico, and Vernon
was in his sister's arms. She held him away from her, to show him to her
husband--a thin fair-haired boy of eleven, in a gray highland kilt and
jacket, like a gillie--fresh rosy cheeks, bright blue eyes.

'Hasn't he grown, Brian I and isn't he a darling?' she asked, hugging him
again.

'He is a jolly little fellow, and he shall go out shooting with me as
soon as there is anything to shoot.'

'We can fish,' said Vernon; 'there's plenty of trout; but you don't look
strong enough to throw a fly. My rod's ever so heavy,' he added, with a
flourish of his arm.

That weakness and languor which was obvious even to the boy, was still
more apparent to Mr. and Mrs. Jardine. Bessie had not seen her cousin
since Christmas, when he and Ida had spent a couple of days at
Kingthorpe.

'Oh, Brian,' she exclaimed, 'have you been ill? Nobody told me anything.'

'I have had no illness worth telling about; but I have not been in
vigorous health. London life takes too much out of a man.'

'Then you should not live in London. You ought to be out all day, roaming
about on those pine-clad hills yonder--"hangers," I think you call them
in these parts.'

'Yes,' answered Ida, 'we are very proud of our hangers; but Brian is not
able to walk much just yet.'

Bessie was full of concern for Brian after this. She devoted herself to
him in the interval before dinner, and left Ida free to roam about the
garden with Vernie. She remembered how he had always been her favourite
cousin. She had been angry with him for allowing that foolish practical
joke of hers to take so fixed and fatal a form; but now she saw him wan
and broken-looking she was prepared to forgive him everything.

'You must take care of yourself, Brian,' she said, when they were sitting
side by side in one of the drawing-room windows, while Lady Palliser
dispensed afternoon tea.

'I am taking care of myself; I am here for that purpose; but it is dreary
work.'

'What! dreary work to live in this lovely place, and with such a sweet
wife! But I know you never liked the country.'

'I frankly detest it.'

'And you miss the intellectual society to which you are accustomed in
London--literary men--poets--playwrights. How delightful it must be to
know the men who write books!'

'They are not always the pleasantest people in the world. I never cared
much for your deep-thinker--the man who believes he is sent into the
world to promulgate his own particular gospel. But the men who write for
newspapers--critics, humourists--they are jolly fellows enough.'

'And you have glorious nights at your clubs, don't you? We had a friend
of John's with us the other day who had met you at some literary club
near the Strand. Do you ever sing comic songs now?'

'Sometimes, after midnight. One does not feel moved to that kind of thing
till the small hours.'

'Ah!' sighed Bessie, 'our only idea of the small hours is getting up at
four, to be ready for a five o'clock service. But I don't think the small
hours agree with you, Brian. You are looking ten years older than when
you were at Kingthorpe last summer.'

'Better wear out than rust out,' said Brian.

After dinner Vernie was eager for an exploration of the village, and
Blackman's Hanger, the wild, pine-clad hill which sheltered the village
from north-east winds and the salt breath of a distant sea.

Ida was ready to go with him, and the Jardines, always tremendous
walkers, were equally anxious for a ramble; but Brian was much too
languid for evening walks.

'I'll stay and smoke my smoke and talk to the Mater,' he said, always
contriving to keep on pleasant terms with Lady Palliser; 'I hate bats,
owls, twilight, and all the Gray's Elegy business.'

'But you stop such a time over your cigar,' said the widow. 'Last night I
sat for an hour waiting tea for you. I like company over my cup of tea.'

'To-night you shall have the advantage of intellectual society,' said
Brian. 'I will come and dribble out my impressions of the last
_Contemporary Review,_ which I dozed over between breakfast and
luncheon.'

Brian stayed in the dining-room, dimly lighted by two hanging moderator
lamps, while the soft shades of evening were just beginning to steal over
the landscape outside. He had his favourite pointer for company--the
last Sir Vernon's favourite, a magnificent beast, and of almost human
intelligence, and he had plenty of wine in the decanters before
him--choice port and claret, which had been set on the table in honour of
the Jardines, who had hardly touched it. He had his cigarette case and
his own thoughts, which were idle as the smoke-wreaths which went curling
up to the ceiling, light as the ashes of his tobacco.

Out of doors the evening was divine. Vernon was delighted to be frisking
about upon his patrimonial soil. The five years he had lived at
Wimperfield seemed the greater half of his life--seemed, indeed, almost
to have absorbed and blotted out his former history. He remembered very
little of the shabbier circumstances of his babyhood, and had all the
feelings of a boy born in the purple, to whom it was natural to be
proprietor of the landscape, and to patronise the humbler dwellers on the
soil.

Blackman's Hanger was a rugged ridge of hill above the village of
Wimpertield. They lingered here to listen to the nightingales, and to
admire the sunset; and then, when the glow above the western horizon was
changing from golden to deepest crimson, they all went down into the
village, where lights were beginning to glimmer faintly in some of the
cottages.

Wimperfield was a snug primitive settlement, consisting of about
five-and-twenty habitations, not one of which had been built within the
last century, a general shop, a bakery, and three public-houses, a fact
which shows that the brewing interests were well protected in this part
of the world. One of village taverns, a dingy old low-browed cottage,
with a pile of out-buildings which served for stable, piggery, or
anything else, and about half an acre of garden, stood a little way aloof
from the village, and on the skirt of the copse that clothed the sloping
steep below Blackman's Hanger. There was a piece of waste land in front
of this inn which served as the theatre for such itinerary exhibitors,
Cheap Jacks, and Bohemians of all kinds who took quiet little Wimperfield
in the course of their perambulations.

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