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

blushing at the question.

'No, ma'am; I'm too careful for that. I've searched his trunks even, and every cupboard in his rooms; and I've looked behind the registers of the stoves, which are very handy places for patients hiding bottles in summer time; but there's not so much as an ounce phial. And Mr. Wendover's hardly out of my sight, except when he takes his bath, or just going in and out of his bath-room, where he keeps his pipes, as you know, ma'am. Besides, even if he had any hiding-place for the drink, who is likely to supply him with it?'

'No; I hope there is no one,' said Ida, thoughtfully. 'I hope no one in this house would so betray my confidence.'

'I've taken stock of all the servants, ma'am, and I don't think there's one that would do it.'

Ida was of the same opinion. The servants were old servants, as loyal to the heads of the house as a highland clan to their chief.

Sunday came--a peaceful summer Sabbath--a day of sunshine and azure sky, and Ida, whose anxiety about Vernon had kept her away from her parish church for the last three Sundays, was able to set out upon her walk to the village with a heart quite at rest on the boy's account. Even the mother could find no excuse for staying at home with her boy, and felt that conscience and society alike required that she should assist at the service of her parish church. Vernie was convalescent, able to sit up in his bed, propped with pillows, and eat hot-house grapes, and turn over the leaves of endless volumes of _Punch_, laughing with his hearty childish laugh at Leech's jokes and the curious garments of a departed era.

'How could men wear such trousers? and how could women wear such bonnets?' he asked his mother, wonderingly contemplating fashionable youth as represented by the great pen-and-ink humourist.

'I don't know why we shouldn't wear them, Vernie,' said his mother, with rather an offended air; 'those spoon bonnets were very becoming. I wore one the day your pa first saw me.'

'And hoops under your gown like that?' said Vernie, pointing; 'and those funny little boots? What a guy you must have looked!'

When a boy has come to this pass he may fairly be left with servants for a couple of hours; so Lady Palliser put on her stateliest mourning--her thick corded silk, flounced with crape and her Mary Stuart bonnet, and went across the park, and up hill and down hill, for it was a country of hills and hollows--to the parish church of Wimperfield, a very ancient edifice, with massive columnar piers, Norman groined roof, and walls enriched by a grand array of memorial tablets, setting forth the honours and virtues of those dead and gone landowners whose bones were mouldering in the vaults below the square oaken pews in which the living worshipped. In the chancel there was the usual stately monument to some magnate of the middle ages, who was represented kneeling by his wife's side, with a graduated row of sons and daughters kneeling behind them, as if the whole family had died and petrified simultaneously, in the act of pious worship.

Ida did not invite her husband to join her in her Sabbath devotions, assured that he would claim an invalid's privilege to stay at home. He had very rarely attended the parish church with his wife, affecting to despise such humdrum and conventional worship. He had just that thin smattering of modern science which enables shallow youth to make a merit of disbelief in all things beyond the limit of mathematical demonstration. He had skimmed Darwin, and spoke lightly of mankind as the latest development of time and matter, and no higher a being, from a spiritual point of view, than the first worm that wriggled in its primeval slime. He had dipped into Herbert Spencer, and talked largely of God as the Unknowable; and how could the Unknowable be supposed to take pleasure in the automatic prayers of a handful of bumpkins and clodhoppers met together in a mouldy old church, time out of mind the temple of superstitions and ceremonies. The vast temple of the universe was Brian Walford's idea of a church; and a very fine church it is, if a man will only worship faithfully therein; but the man who abandons formal prayers and set seasons of devotion with a vague idea of worshipping in the woodland or on the hill top, very rarely troubles himself to realise his ideal.

Brian's broadly-declared agnosticism had long been a cause of pain and grief to his wife. She had felt that this alone would have made sympathy impossible between them, had there been no other ground for difference. She thought with a bitter sense of contrast of his cousin, who was a student and a thinker, and who yet was not ashamed to believe and to worship as a little child. Surely it was not a sign of a weak intelligence for a man to believe in something better and higher than himself, when Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Homer, and Virgil could so believe. Brian Walford's idea of cleverness was to consider himself the ultimate product of incalculable antecedent time, the full-stop of creation.

Here were all the pious parishioners, the county families, and the country bumpkins, meekly kneeling on their knees, and uplifting their voices in perfect faithfulness--not thinking very deeply of any element in the service perhaps, but honest in their reverence and their love. The old church was a pretty sight on such a summer morning--the white robes of the choristers touched with supernal radiance, the light tempered by the deep rubies and purples and ambers in windows old and new--the very irregularities and architectural anomalies of the building producing a quaintness which was more pleasing than absolute beauty.

The litany was nearly over when Ida heard a familiar step on the stone pavement of the nave. It was Brian's step; and presently he stopped at the door of the high oaken pew, opened it, and came in and seated himself-on the bench, opposite to the spot where she knelt by her step-mother's side. It was a capacious old pew, and would have held ten people. Brian kicked about the hassocks, and made himself comfortable; but he did not kneel, or take any part in the service. He sat with his elbows on his knees, and his chin in his hands, staring at the floor. His presence filled Ida with anxiety. He had not risen from his bed when she left home, and Towler had given her to understand that he would not get up for some time, as he had had a very bad night. He must have risen and dressed hurriedly in order to follow her to church. His eyes had the wild look in them which she had noticed on the night when he saw visions.

It was in vain that Ida tried after this to fix her mind upon the service--every movement, every look of Brian's, alarmed her. She was thankful for the high pew which sheltered him from the gaze of the congregation; and presently when they stood up to sing a hymn, she was glad that Brian remained seated, albeit their was irreverence in the attitude.

But when the last verse was being sung, he rose suddenly and looked all round the church with those wild eyes of his, took up a book and turned the leaves abstractedly, and remained standing like a sleep-walker for a minute or so, after the congregation had gone down on their knees for the communion service.

When the gospel was read he rose again, and lolled with his back against the plastered wall, his head just under a winged cherub head in marble, which adorned the base of a memorial tablet. This time he stood till all the service was over, so obviously apart from all the rest of the congregation, so evidently uninterested in anything that was going on, that Ida felt as if every eye must be watching him, every creature in the church conscious of his infirmity. He was carelessly dressed, his collar awry, his necktie loose, his hair unbrushed. His very appearance was a disgrace, which Lady Palliser, whose great object in life was to maintain her dignity before the eyes of the county families, felt could hardly be lived down in the future.

That pale haggard countenance, those bloodshot, wandering eyes,--surely every creature in the church must know that they meant brandy!

The sermon began--one of those orthodox, old-fashioned, dry-as-dust sermons often heard in village churches, a discourse which sets out with a small point in Bible history, not having any obvious bearing upon modern thought or modern life, and discusses, and explains, and enlarges upon it with deliberate scholarship for about half-an-hour, and then, in a brisk five minutes, endeavours to show how the conduct of Ahab, or Jehoram, or Ahaziah, in this little matter, was an exact counter-part or paradigm of our conduct, my dear brethren, when we, etc., etc.

The Vicar had not arrived at this point, but was still expatiating upon the unbridled wickedness of Jehoram, when Brian, who after a period of alarming restlessness had been sitting like a statue for the last few minutes, suddenly started up, and exclaimed wildly, 'I can't endure it a moment longer--the stench of corruption--the dead rotting in their graves--the horrid, nauseous odour of grave-clothes--the foul stink of earth-worms! How can you bear it! You must have no feeling! you must be made of stone!'

Ida and her stepmother had both risen, each in her way was trying to soothe, to quiet him, to induce him to sit down again. The Vicar had stopped in his discourse, scared by that other voice, but as Brian's loud accents sank into mutterings he took up the thread of his argument, and went on denouncing Jehoram.

'Brian, indeed there is nothing--no bad odour here.'

'Yes, there is the stench of death,' he protested, staring at the ground, and then pointing with a convulsive movement of his wasted hand he cried, 'Don't you see, under that seat there, the worms crawling up through the rotten flooring, there? there!--fifty--a hundred--legion. For God's sake get me out of this charnel house! I can hear the dry bones rattle as the worms swarm out of the mouldering coffins.'

His deadly pallor, his countenance convulsed with disgust, showed how real this horror was to him. Ida put her hand through his arm, and led him quietly away, out of the stony church into the glow of the summer noontide.

He sank exhausted upon a grassy mound in the churchyard--a village child's grave, with the rose wreath which loving hands had woven fading above the sod.

'How can you sit in such a vault?' he asked; 'how can you live in such foul air?'

'Indeed, dear Brian, it is only fancy. There is nothing amiss.'

'There is everything amiss. Death is everywhere--we begin to die directly we are born--life is a descending scale of decay--we rot and rot and rot as we walk about the world, pretending to be alive. First a man loses his teeth, and then his hair, and then he looks in the glass and sees himself withered, and haggard, and wrinkled, and knows that the skeleton's clutch is upon him. I tell you we are always dying. Why go to that vault yonder,' pointing to the church, 'to breathe the concentrated essence of mortality?'

'It is good for us to remember the dead when we worship God, Brian. He is the God of the dead as well as the living. There is nothing terrible in death, if we believe.'

'If