The Golden Calf - Mary Elizabeth Braddon (best books to read ever TXT) 📗

inheritance. Sir Vernon had left no will. Everything went to the heir-at-law--pictures, plate, horses and carriages, and those wonderful cellars of old wine which had been slowly accumulated by Sir Reginald's father and grandfather.

Reginald Palliser passed from the pittance of a half-pay captain, eked out by the desultory donations of his open-handed nephew, to the possession of a fine income and a perfectly-appointed establishment. There was nothing for him to do, no trouble of furnishing, or finding servants. He came into his kingdom, and everything was ready for him. Yet in this house where he was born, in which every stone was familiar to him, how little that was mortal was left of those vanished days of his youth! Among all these old servants there was only one who remembered the new master's boyhood; and that was a deaf old helper in the garden, a man who seemed past all labour except the sweeping up of dead leaves, being himself little better than a withered leaf. This man remembered wheeling the present baronet about the gardens in his barrow, forty years ago--his function even then being to collect the fallen leaves--and was a little offended with Sir Reginald for having forgotten the man and the fact.

At the Grosvenor Hotel, calm even in the dawn of his altered fortunes, Brian Walford found his father-in-law, and told, with the pleasantest, most plausible air, the story of Ida's clandestine marriage, slurring over every detail that reflected on himself, and making very light of Ida's revulsion of feeling, which he represented as a girlish whim, rather than a woman's bitter anger against the husband who had allowed her to marry him under a delusion as to his social status.

Sir Reginald was at first inclined to be angry. The whole thing was a mystification--absurd, discreditable. His daughter had grossly deceived him. It needed all the stepmother's gentle influence to soften the outraged father's feelings. But Lady Palliser said all that was kindly about Ida's youth and inexperience, her impulsive nature; and a man who has just dropped into £7,000 a year is hardly disposed to be inflexible. Sir Reginald was too generous even to question Brian closely as to his capability of supporting a wife. The man was a gentleman--young, good-looking, with winning manners, and a member of a family in which his daughter had found warm and generous friends. Ida's father could not be uncivil to a Wendover.

'Well, my good fellow, it is altogether a foolish business,' he said; 'but what's done cannot be undone. I am sorry my daughter did not ask my leave before she plunged into matrimony; but I suppose I must forgive her, and her husband into the bargain. You have both acted like a pair of children, falling in love and marrying, and quarrelling, and making friends again, without rhyme or reason; but the best thing you can do is to bring your wife--your wife? my little Ida a wife?--Good God, how old I am getting!--yes, you had better bring her to Wimperfield next week, and then we can get better acquainted with you, and I shall see what I can do for you both.'

This no doubt meant a handsome allowance. Brian Walford felt, for the first time in his life, that he had fallen on his feet. He hated the country, and Wimperfield would be only a shade better than Kingthorpe; but it was essential that he should please his easy-tempered father-in-law.

'If he wanted me to live in the moon I should have to go there!' he said to himself. And then Lady Palliser went into an adjoining chamber and brought forth little Vernon, to exhibit him, as a particular favour and privilege, to Ida's husband; and Brian, who detested children, had to appear grateful, and to address himself to the irksome task of making friends with the little man. This was not easy, for the boy, though frank and bright enough in a general way, did not take to his new connexion: and it was only when Brian spoke of Ida that his young brother-in-law became friendly. 'Where is she? why haven't you brought her? Take me to her directly-minute,' said the child, whose English savoured rather of the lower than the upper strata of society.

Brian snapped at the opportunity, and carried the boy off instanter in a Hansom cab to that hotel near Fleet Street where his young wife was pining in her second-floor sitting-room, like a wild woodland bird behind the bars of a cage. The young man thought the little fellow might be a harbinger of peace--nor was he mistaken, for Ida melted at sight of him, and seemed quite happy when they three sat down to a dainty little luncheon, she waiting upon and petting her young brother all the while.

'This is partridge, isn't it?' asked Vernie. 'I like partridge. We always have nice dinners now--jellies, and creams, and wine that goes fizz; and we all have the same as pa. We didn't in France, you know,' explained the boy, unconscious of any reason for suppressing facts in the presence of the waiter.

'Mamma and I used to have any little bits--it didn't matter for us, you know--we could pinch. Mamma was used to it, and it was good for me, you know, because I'm often bilious--and it's better to go without rich things than to take Gregory's powder, isn't it?'

'Decidedly,' said Brian, who was not too old to remember that bugbear of the Edinburgh pharmacopoeia.

'And now we have dessert every day,' continued Vernie; 'lovely dessert--almonds and raisins, and pears, and nuts, and things, just like Christmas Day. I thought that kind of dessert was only meant for Christmas Day. And we have men to wait upon us, dressed like clergymen, just like him,' added the child, pointing to the waiter.

'Oh, Vernie, it's so rude to point,' murmured Ida.

'Not for me; I can't be rude,' replied the boy, with conviction. 'I'm a baronet's son. I shall be a baronet myself some day. Mamma told me. I may do what I like.'

'No, pet, you must be a gentleman. If you were a king's son you would have to be that.'

'Then I wouldn't. What's the use of being rich if you can't do what you like?' demanded Vernie, who already began to have ideas, and who was as sharp for his age as the chicken which begins to catch flies directly its head is out of the shell.

'What's the good of being somebody if you have to behave just as well as if you were nobody?' said Brian. 'Little Vernon has the feudal idea strongly developed; no doubt; in evolution from some long-departed ancestor, who lived in the days when there were different laws for the knight and the villain. Now, how are we going to amuse this young gentleman? I have leave to keep him till half-past seven, when we are all three to dine with Sir Reginald and Lady Palliser at the Grosvenor.'

Vernie, who was half way through his second glass of sparkling moselle, burst out laughing.

'Lady Palliser!' he exclaimed, 'it's so funny to hear mamma called Lady: because she isn't a lady, you know. She used to run about the house all day with her sleeves tucked up, and she used to cook; and Jane, our English servant, said no lady ever did that. Jane and mamma used to quarrel,' explained the infant, calmly.

'Jane knew very little about what makes a lady or not a lady,' said Ida, grieved to find a want of elevation in the little man's ideas. 'Some of the truest and noblest ladies have worked hard all their lives.'

'But not with their sleeves tucked up,' argued the boy; 'no lady would do that. Papa told mamma so one day, and _he_ must know. He told her she was cook, slush, and bottle-washer. Wasn't that funny? You worked hard too, didn't you, Ida?' interrogated Vernon. 'Papa paid you were a regular drudge at Miss Pew's. He said it was a hard thing that such a handsome girl as you should be a drudge, but his poverty and not his will consented.'

'Vernie quotes Shakespeare,' exclaimed Brian, trying to take the thing lightly, but painfully conscious of the head waiter, who was deliberately removing crumbs with a silver scraper. It could not matter to any one what the waiter--a waif from Whitechapel or the Dials most likely--knew or did not know of Mr. and Mrs. Wendover's family affairs; but there is an instinctive feeling that any humiliating details of life should be kept from these menials. They should be maintained in the delusion that the superior class which employs them has never known want or difficulty. Perhaps the maintenance of this great sham is not without its evil, as it is apt to make the waiter class rapacious and exacting, and ready to impute meanness to that superior order which has wallowed in wealth from the cradle.

'Suppose we go to the Tower?' inquired Brian. 'Perhaps Vernie has never seen the Tower?'

Neither Vernon nor Ida had seen that stony page of feudal history, and Vernon had to be informed what manner of building it was, his sole idea of a tower being Babel, which he had often tried to reproduce with his wooden bricks, with no happier result than was obtained in the original attempt. So another Hansom was chartered, and they all went off to the Tower, Vernon sitting between them, perky and loquacious, and intensely curious about every object they passed on their way.

Interested in the associations of the grim old citadel, amused and pleaded by little Vernon's prattle as he trotted about holding his sister's hand, Ida forgot to be unhappy upon that particular afternoon. The whole history of her marriage was a misery to her; the marriage itself was a mistake; but there are hours of respite in the saddest life, and she was brave enough to try and make the best of hers. Above all, she was too generous to wish her husband to be painfully conscious of the change in their relative positions, that he was now in a manner dependent upon her father. Her own proud nature, which would have profoundly felt the humiliation of such a position as that which Brian Walford now occupied, was moved to pity for those feelings of shame and degradation which he might or might not experience, and she was kinder to him on this account than she would have been otherwise.

The dinner at the Grosvenor went off with as much appearance of goodwill and proper family feeling as if there had been no flaw in Ida's matrimonial bliss. Sir Reginald was full of kindness for his new son-in-law: as he would have been for any other human creature whom he had asked to dinner. Hospitality was a natural instinct of his being, and he invited Brian Wendover to take up his abode at Wimperfield as easily as he would have offered him a cigar.

'There are no end of rooms. It is a regular barrack,' he said. 'You and Ida can be very comfortable without putting my little woman or me out of the way.'

This had happened just six weeks ago, and now Ida and her half-brother were wandering about among the ferny hollows and breezy heights of the park, or roving off to adjacent heaths and hills, and it seemed almost as if they had lived there all their lives. Vernon had been quick to make himself at home in the stately old house, rummaging and foraging in every room, routing out all manner of forgotten treasures, riding his father's old rocking-horse, exploring stables and lofts, saddle-rooms, and long-disused holes and corners, going up ladders,