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

is the darkness of summer. The new moon hung like a silver lamp in mid-heaven, and all the multitude of stars were shining around and above her, while far away in unfathomable space, shone the mysterious light which started on its earthward journey in the years that are gone for ever.

Lady Palliser was not calmly slumbering in front of the tea-table, in the mellow light of a duplex lamp, after her wont. She was standing at the open window, watching for Ida's return.

'Oh, my dear, I have been so frightened,' she exclaimed, as Ida and Vernon appeared.

'About what, dear mamma?'

'About Brian. He has been going on so. Rogers came to tell me, and I went up to the corridor, and asked him to unlock his door and let me in, but he wouldn't. Perhaps it was providential that he didn't unlock the door, for he might have killed me.'

'Oh, mamma, what nonsense!' exclaimed Ida. She hurried Vernon off to bed before his mother could say another word, and then went back to the widow, who was walking about the drawing-room in much perturbation.

'Now tell me everything,' said Ida; 'I did not want Vernon to be frightened.'

'No, indeed, poor pet. But oh! Ida, if he should try to kill Vernon!'

'Dear mother, he has no idea of killing anyone. What can have put such dreadful notions in your head?'

'The way he went on, Ida. I stopped outside his door ever so long listening to him. He walked up and down like a mad-man, throwing things about, talking and muttering to himself all the time. I think he was packing his portmanteau.'

'There is nothing so dreadful in that--nothing to alarm you.'

'Oh! Ida, when a person is once out of their mind, there is no knowing what they may do.'

Ida did all in her power to soothe and reassure the frightened little woman, and, having done this, she went straight to her husband's room.

She knocked two or three times without receiving any answer; then came a sullen refusal: 'I don't want to be worried by anyone. You can go to your own room, and leave me alone.'

But, upon her assuming a tone of authority, he opened the door, grumbling all the while.

The room was in frightful confusion--a couple of portmanteaux lay open on the floor; books, papers, clothes, were scattered in every direction. There was nothing packed. Brian was in shirt-sleeves and slippers, and had been smoking furiously, for the room was full of tobacco.

'Why don't you open your windows, Brian?' said his wife; 'the atmosphere is horrible.'

She went over to one of the windows, and flung open the sash. 'That's a comfortable thing to do,' he said, coming over to her, 'to open my window on a snowy night.'

'Snowy, Brian! Why, it's summer--a lovely night!'

'Summer! nonsense. Don't you see the snow? Why, it's falling thickly. Look at the flakes--like feathers. Look, look!' He pointed out of the window into the clear moonlit air, and tried to catch imaginary snowflakes with his long, nervous fingers.

'Brian, you must know that it is summer-time,' Ida said, firmly. 'Look at the woods--those deep masses of shadow from the oaks and beeches--in all the beauty of their summer foliage.

'Yes; it's odd, isn't it?--midsummer, and a snow-storm!'

'What have you been doing with all those things?'

'Packing. I must go to London early to-morrow. I have an appointment with the architect.'

'What architect?'

'The man who is to plan the alterations for this house. I shall make great alterations, you know, now that the place is yours. I am going to build an underground riding school, like that at Welbeck.'

'The place mine? What are you dreaming of?'

'Of course it is yours, now Vernon is dead. You were to inherit everything at his death. You cannot have forgotten that.'

'Vernon dead! Why, Brian, he is snug and safe in his room a little way off. I have seen him within this half-hour.'

'You are a fool,' he said; 'he died nearly three months ago. You are the sole owner of this place, and I am going to make it the finest mansion in the county.'

He rambled on, talking rapidly, wildly, of all the improvements and alterations he intended making, with an assumption of a business-like air amidst all this lunacy, which made his distracted state so much the more painful to contemplate. He talked of builders, specifications, estimates, and quantities--was full of self-importance--described picture galleries, music rooms, high-art decorations which would have cost a hundred thousand pounds, and all with absolute belief in his own power to realise these splendid visions. Yet every now and then in the very rush of his projects there came a sudden cloud of fear--his jaw fell--he looked apprehensively behind him--became darkly brooding--muttered something about that hideous charge hanging over him--a conspiracy hatched by men who should have been his friends--the probability of a great trial in Westminster Hall; and then he ran on again about builders and architects--Whistler, Burne Jones--and the marvellous mansion he was going to erect on the site of this present Wimperfield.

He rambled on with this horrible garrulity for a time that seemed almost an eternity to his agonised wife, and only ceased at last from positive exhaustion. But when Ida talked to him with gentle firmness, reminding him that Vernon was still the owner of Wimperfield, and that she was never likely to be its mistress, he changed his tone, and appeared to be in some measure recalled to his right senses.

'What, have I been talking rot again?' he muttered, with a sheepish look. 'Yes, of course, the boy is still owner of the place. The alterations must stand over. Get me some brandy and soda, Ida, my mouth is parched.'

Ida rose as if to obey him, and rang the bell; but when the servant came she ordered soda-water only.

'Brandy and soda,' Brian said; 'do you hear? Bring a bottle of brandy. I can't get through the night without a little now and then.'

Ida gave the man a look which he understood. He left the room in silence.

'Brian,' she said, when he was gone, 'you must not have any more brandy. It is brandy which has done you harm, which has filled your brain with these horrible delusions. Mr. Fosbroke told me so. You affect to despise him; but he is a sensible man who has had large experience.'

'Large experience! in an agricultural village--physicking a handful of rustics!' cried Brian, scornfully.

'I know that he is clever, and I believe him,' answered Ida; 'my own common sense tells me that he is right. I see you the wreck and ruin of what you have been; and I know there is only one reason for this dreadful change.

'It is your fault,' he said sullenly. 'I should be a different man if you had cared for me. I had nothing worth living for.'

Ida soothed him, and argued with him, with inexhaustible patience, full of pity for his fallen state. She was firm in her refusal to order brandy for him, in spite of his angry protest that he was being treated like a child, in spite of his assertion that the London physician had ordered him to take brandy. She stayed with him for hours, during which he alternated between rambling garrulity and sullen despondency; till at last, worn out with the endeavour to control or to soothe him, she withdrew to her own room, adjoining his, and left him, in the hope that, if left to himself, he would go to bed and sleep.

Rest of any kind for herself was impossible, weighed down with anxiety about her husband's condition, and stricken with remorse at the thought that it was perhaps his ill-starred marriage which had in some wise tended to bring about this ruin of a life. And yet things had gone well with him, existence had been made very easy for him, since his marriage; and only moral perversity would have so blighted a career which had lain open to all the possibilities of good fortune. The initial difficulty--poverty, which so many men have to overcome, had been conquered for Brian within the first year of his marriage. And now six years were gone, and he had done nothing except waste and ruin his mind and body.

Ida left the door ajar between the two rooms, and lay down in her clothes, ready to go to her husband's assistance if he should need help of any kind. She had taken the key out of the door opening from his room into the corridor, so that he would have to pass through her own room in going out. She had done this from a vague fear that he might go roaming about the house in the dead of the night, scaring her stepmother or the boy by some mad violence. She made up her mind to telegraph for the London physician early next morning, and to obtain some skilled attendant to watch and protect her husband. She had heard of a man in such a condition throwing himself out of a window, or cutting his throat: and she felt that every moment was a moment of fear, until proper means had been taken to protect Brian from his own madness.

She listened while he paced the adjoining room, muttering to himself; once she looked in, and saw him sitting on the floor, hunting for some imaginary objects which he saw scattered around him.

'How did I come to drop such a lot of silver?' he muttered; 'what a devil of a nuisance not to be able to pick it up properly?'

She watched him groping about the carpet, pursuing imaginary objects, with eager sensitive fingers, and muttering to himself angrily when they evaded him.

By-and-by he flung himself upon his bed, but not to sleep, only to turn restlessly from side to side, over and over again, with a weary monotony which was even more wearisome to the watcher than to himself.

Two or three times he got up and hunted behind the bed curtains, evidently with the idea of some lurking foe, and then lay down again, apparently but half convinced that he was alone. Once he started up suddenly, just as he was dropping off to sleep, and complained of a flash of light which had almost blinded him.

'Lightning,' he muttered; 'I believe I am struck blind. Come here, Ida.'

She went to him and soothed him, and told him there had been no lightning; it was only his fancy.

'Everything is my fancy,' he said, 'the world is built out of fancies, the universe is only an extension of the individual mind;' and then he began to ramble on upon every metaphysical theory he had ever read about, from Plato and Aristotle to Leibnitz and Kant, from Hegel to Bain--talking, talking, talking, through the slow hours of that terrible night.

At last, when the sun was high, he fell into what seemed a sound sleep; and then Ida, utterly worn with care and watching, changed her gown for a cashmere _peignoir_, and lay down on her bed.

She slept soundly for a blessed hour or more of respite and forgetfulness, then woke suddenly with an acute consciousness of trouble, yet vaguely remembering the nature of that trouble Memory came back only too soon. She rose hurriedly, and went to look at her patient.

His room was empty. He had passed through her room and gone out into the corridor, without