Birds of Prey by M.E. Braddon

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The interior of Mr. Sheldon's dwelling bore no trace of that solid
old-fashioned clumsiness which had distinguished his house in
Fitzgeorge-street. Having surrendered his ancestral chairs and tables
in liquidation of his liabilities, Philip Sheldon was free to go with
the times, and had furnished his gothic villa in the most approved
modern style, but without any attempt at artistic grace or adornment.
All was bright, and handsome, and neat, and trim; but the brightness and
the neatness savoured just a little of furnished apartments at the
seaside, and the eye sought in vain for the graceful disorder of an
elegant home. The dining-room was gorgeous with all the splendour of new
mahogany and crimson morocco; the drawing-room was glorified by big
looking-glasses, and the virginal freshness of gilt frames on which the
feet of agile house-fly or clumsy blue-bottle had never rested. The
crimsons, and blues, and greens, and drabs of the Brussels carpets
retained the vivid brightness of the loom. The drops of the chandeliers
twinkled like little stars in the sunshine; the brass birdcages were
undimmed by any shadow of dulness. To Georgy's mind the gothic villa
was the very perfection of a dwelling-place. The Barlingford
housekeepers were wont to render their homes intolerable by extreme
neatness. Georgy still believed in the infallibility of her native
town, and the primness of Barlingford reigned supreme in the gothic
villa. There were no books scattered on the polished walnut-wood tables
in the drawing-room, no cabinets crammed with scraps of old china, no
pictures, no queer old Indian feather-screens, no marvels of Chinese
carving in discoloured ivory; none of those traces which the footsteps
of the "collector" leave behind him. Mr. Sheldon had no leisure for
collecting; and Georgy preferred the gaudy pink-and-blue vases of a
Regent-street china-shop to all the dingy _chefs-d'oeuvre_ of a
Wedgwood, or the quaint shepherds and shepherdesses of Chelsea. As for
books, were there not four or five resplendent volumes primly disposed
on one of the tables; an illustrated edition of Cowper's lively and
thrilling poems; a volume of Rambles in Scotland, with copper-plate
engravings of "Melrose by night," and Glasgow Cathedral, and Ben Nevis,
and other scenic and architectural glories of North Britain; a couple
of volumes of _Punch_, and an illustrated "Vicar of Wakefield;" and
what more could elevated taste demand in the way of literature? Nobody
ever read the books; but Mrs. Sheldon's visitors were sometimes glad to
take refuge in the Scottish scenery and the pictorial Vicar during that
interval of dulness and indigestion which succeeds a middle-class
dinner. Georgy read a great many books; but they were all novels,
procured from the Bayswater branch of a fashionable circulating
library, and were condemned unread by Mr. Sheldon, who considered all
works of fiction perfectly equal in demerit, and stigmatised them, in a
general way, as "senseless trash." He had tried to read novels in the
dreary days of his Bloomsbury probation; but he had found that the
heroes of them were impracticable beings, who were always talking of
honour and chivalry, and always sacrificing their own interests in an
utterly preposterous manner; and he had thrown aside story after story
in disgust.

"Give me a book that is something like life, and I'll read it," he
exclaimed impatiently; "but I can't swallow the high-flown prosings of
impossibly virtuous inanities."

One day, indeed, he had been struck by the power of a book, a book
written by a certain Frenchman called Balzac. He had been riveted by
the hideous cynicism, the supreme power of penetration into the vilest
corners of wicked hearts; and he flung the book from him at last with
an expression of unmitigated admiration.

"That man knows his fellows," he cried, "and is not hypocrite enough
to conceal his knowledge, or to trick out his puppets in the tinsel and
rags of false sentiment in order that critics and public may cry, 'See,
what noble instincts, what generous impulses, what unbounded sympathy
for his fellow-creatures this man has!' This Frenchman is an artist,
and is not afraid to face the difficulties of his art. What a scoundrel
this Philippe Bridau is! And after wallowing in the gutter, he lives to
bespatter his virtuous brother with the mire from his carriage wheels.
That is _real_ life. Tour English novelist would have made his villain
hang himself with the string of his waistcoat in a condemned cell,
while his amiable hero was declared heir to a dukedom and forty
thousand a year. But this fellow Balzac knows better than that."

The days had passed when Mr. Sheldon had leisure to read Balzac. He
read nothing but the newspapers now, and in the newspapers he read very
little more than the money articles and such political news as seemed
likely to affect the money-market. There is no such soul-absorbing
pursuit as the race which men run whose goal is the glittering Temple
of Plutus. The golden apples which tempted Atalanta to slacken her pace
are always rolling _before_ the modern runner, and the greed of gain
lends the wings of Hermes to his feet. Mr. Sheldon had sighed for
pleasures sometimes in the days of his Bloomsbury martyrdom. He had sat
by his open window on sultry summer evenings, smoking his solitary
cigar, and thinking moodily of all the pleasant resting-places from
which other men were looking out at that golden western sky, deepening
into crimson and melting into purples which even the London smoke could
not obscure. He had sat alone, thinking of jovial parties lounging in
the bow-windows of Greenwich taverns, with cool green hock-glasses and
pale amber wine, and a litter of fruit and flowers on the table before
them, while the broad river flowed past them with all the glory of the
sunset on the rippling water, and one black brig standing sharply out
against the yellow sky. He had thought of Richmond, and the dashing
young men who drive there every summer in drags, with steel chain and
bar clanking and glittering in front of the team, and two solemn grooms
with folded arms seated stiff and statue-like behind. He had thought of
Epsom, and the great Derby mob; and all of those golden goblets of
pleasure which prosperous manhood drains to the very dregs. He had
fancied the enjoyments which would be his if ever he were rich enough
to pay for them. And now he was able to afford all such pleasures he
cared nothing for them; for the ecstasy of making money seemed better
than any masculine dissipation or delight. He did sometimes dine at
Greenwich. He knew the _menus_ of the different taverns by heart, and
had discovered that they were all alike vanity and indigestion; but he
never seated himself at one of those glistening little tables, or
deliberated with an obsequious waiter over the mysteries of the wine
_carte_, without a settled purpose to be served by the eating of the
dinner, and a definite good to be achieved by the wine he ordered. He
gave many such entertainments at home and abroad; but they were all
given to men who were likely to be useful to him--to rich men, or the
toadies and hangers-on of rich men, the grand viziers of the sultans of
the money-market. Such a thing as pleasure or hospitality pure and
simple had no place in the plan of Mr. Sheldon's life. The race in
which he was running was not to be won by a loiterer. The golden apples
were always rolling on before the runner; and woe be to him who turned
away from the course to dally with the flowers or loiter by the cool
streams that beautified the wayside.

Thus it was that Mr. Sheldon's existence grew day by day more
completely absorbed by business pursuits and business interests. Poor
Georgy complained peevishly of her husband's neglect; but she did not
dare to pour her lamentations into the ear of the offender. It was a
kind of relief to grumble about his busy life to servants and humble
female friends and confidantes; but what could she say to Philip
Sheldon himself? What ground had she for complaint? He very seldom
stayed out late; he never came home tipsy. He was quite as cool and
clear-headed and business-like, and as well able to "tot up" any given
figures upon the back of an envelope after one of those diplomatic
little Greenwich dinners as he was the first thing after breakfast. It
had been an easy thing to tyrannise over poor Tom Halliday; but this
man was a grave inscrutable creature, a domestic enigma which Georgy
was always giving up in despair. But so completely did Mr. Sheldon rule
his wife, that when he informed her inferentially that she was a very
happy woman, she accepted his view of the subject, and was content to
believe herself blest.

In spite of those occasional grumblings to servants and female friends,
Mrs. Sheldon did think herself happy. Those occasional complaints were
the minor notes in the harmony of her life, and only served to make the
harmony complete. She read her novels, and fed a colony of little
feeble twittering birds that occupied a big wire cage in the
breakfast-parlour. She executed a good deal of fancy-work with beads
and Berlin-wool; she dusted and arranged the splendours of the
drawing-room with her own hands; and she took occasional walks in
Kensington Gardens.

This was the ordinary course of her existence, now and then interrupted
by such thrilling events as a dinner given to some important
acquaintance of Mr. Sheldon's, or a visit to the school at which
Charlotte Halliday was completing her education.

That young lady had been removed from the Scarborough boarding-school
to a highly respectable establishment at Brompton, within a few months
of her mother's marriage with Mr. Sheldon. She had been a rosy-cheeked
young damsel in pinafores at the time of that event, too young to
express any strong feeling upon the subject of her mother's second
choice; but not too young to feel the loss of her father very deeply.
Tom Halliday had been fondly attached to that bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked
damsel of nine years' growth, and the girl had fully reciprocated his
affection. How often they had talked together of the future, which was
to be so delightful for them both; the new farm, which was to be such a
paradise in comparison to Hyley; the pony that Charlotte was to ride
when she should be old enough to wear a habit like a lady, and to go
about with her father to market-towns and corn-exchanges! The little
girl had remembered all this, and had most bitterly lamented the loss
of that dear and loving father.

She remembered it all to this day; she regretted her loss to this day,
though she was nearly of age, and on the point of leaving school for
ever, after having prolonged her school-days considerably beyond the
usual period, at the express wish of her stepfather. To say that she
disliked Mr. Sheldon is only to admit that she was subject to the
natural prejudices of humanity. He had usurped the place of a beloved
father, and he was in every way the opposite of that father. He had
come between Charlotte Halliday and her mother, and had so absorbed the
weak little woman into himself, as to leave Charlotte quite alone in
the world. And yet he did his duty as few stepfathers do it. Charlotte
admitted that he was very kind to her, that he was an excellent
husband, and altogether the most conscientious and respectable of
mankind; but she admitted with equal candour that she had never been
able to like him. "I daresay it is very wicked of me not to be fond of
him, when he is so good and generous to me," she said to her chosen
friend and companion; "but I never can feel quite at home with him. I
try to think of him as a father sometimes, but I never can get over the
'step.' Do you know I have dreamed of him sometimes? and though he is
so kind to me in reality, I always fancy him cruel to me in my dreams.
I suppose it is on account of his black eyes and black whiskers," added
Miss Halliday, in a meditative tone. "It is certainly a misfortune for
a person to have blacker eyes and whiskers than the rest of the world;
for there seems something stern and hard, and almost murderous, in such
excessive blackness."

Charlotte Halliday was a very different creature from the mother whom
Mr. Sheldon had absorbed into himself. Georgy was one of the women who
have "no characters at all," but Georgy's daughter was open to the
charge of eccentricity rather than of inanity. She was a creature of
fancies and impulses She had written wild verses in the secrecy of her
own chamber at midnight, and had torn her poetic effusions into a
thousand fragments the morning after their composition. She played and
sang very sweetly, and danced admirably, and did everything in a wild
way of her own, which was infinitely more charming than the commonplace
perfection of other women. She was not a beauty according to those
established rules which everybody believes in until they meet a woman
who sins against them all and yet is beautiful. Miss Halliday had thick
black eyebrows, and large gray eyes which people were apt to mistake
for black. She had a composite nose, and one of the sweetest mouths
that ever smiled upon enraptured mankind. Nature had given her just a
little more chin than a Greek sculptor would have allowed her; but, by
way of make-weight, the same careless Nature had bestowed upon her a
throat which Phidias himself might have sought in vain to improve upon.
And Nature had planted this young lady's head upon her shoulders with a
grace so rare that it must needs be a happy accident in the workmanship
of that immortal artist. Indeed it seemed as if Charlotte Halliday owed
her charms to a series of happy accidents. The black eyebrows which
made her face so piquant might have been destruction to another woman.
The round column-like throat needed a fine frank face to surmount it,
and the fine frank face was rendered gracious and womanly by the wealth
of waving dark hair which framed it. The girl was one of those bright
happy creatures whom men worship and women love, and whom envy can
scarcely dislike. She was so infinitely superior to both father and
mother, that a believer in hereditary attributes was fain to invent
some mythical great-grandmother from whom the girl's graces might have
been derived. But she had something of her father's easy good-nature
and imprudent generosity; and was altogether one of those impulsive
creatures whose lives are perpetual difficulties and dilemmas. More
lectures had been delivered for her edification than for any other
young lady in the Brompton boarding-school, and yet she had been the
favourite and delight of everybody in the establishment, from the
mistress of the mansion down to the iniquitous boy who cleaned the
boots, and who was hounded and hunted, and abused and execrated, from
dewy morn to dusky eve.

"I allus puts plenty of elbow-grease on your boots, Miss 'Allundale,
though cook does heave saucepan-lids at my 'ed and call me a lazy
wiper," this incorrigible imp protested to Charlotte one morning, when
she had surprised him in tears and had consoled his woes by a donation
of pence.

"All things love thee, so do I," says the lover to his mistress; and it
is almost impossible not to adore a young lady who is universally
beloved, for the simple reason that this general affection is very
rarely accorded to any but a loving nature. There is an instinct in
these things. From all the ruck of Cheapside a vagrant dog will select
the man who has most toleration for the canine species, and is most
likely to give him shelter. A little child coming suddenly into a
circle of strangers knows in which lap it may find a haven, on which
bosom it may discover safety and comfort. If mistress and
schoolfellows, servants and shoeblack, dogs and cats, were fond of
Charlotte Halliday, their affection had been engendered by her own
sweet smiles and loving words, and helping hands always ready to give
substantial succour or to aid by active service.

She had been at the Brompton gynaeceum nearly eleven years--only leaving
it for her holidays--and now her education was finished, and Mr.
Sheldon could find no excuse for leaving her at school any longer, so
her departure had been finally agreed upon.

To most damsels of twenty-one this would have been a subject for
rejoicing; but it was not so with Charlotte. She did not like her
stepfather; and her mother, though very affectionate and gentle, was a
person whose society was apt to become wearisome any time after the
first half-hour of social intercourse. At Hyde Lodge Charlotte had a
great deal more of Lingard and condensed and expurgated Gibbon than was
quite agreeable; she had to get up at a preternatural hour in the
morning and to devote herself to "studies of velocity," whose monotony
became wearing as the drip, drip, drip of water on the skull of the
tortured criminal. She was very tired of all the Hyde-Lodge lessons and
accomplishments, the irregular French verbs--the "braires" and
"traires" which were so difficult to remember, and which nobody ever
could want to use in polite conversation; the ruined castles and
dilapidated windmills, the perpetual stumpy pieces of fallen timber and
jagged posts, executed with a BBB pencil; the chalky expanse of sky,
with that inevitable flight of crows scudding across it:--why must
there be always crows scudding across a drawing-master's sky, and why
so many jagged posts in a drawing-master's ideal of rural beauty?
Charlotte was inexpressibly weary of all the stereotyped studies; but
she liked Hyde Lodge better than the gothic villa. She liked the
friendly schoolfellows with their loud talk and boisterous manners,
the girls who called her "Halliday," and who were always borrowing
her reels of crochet-cotton and her pencils, her collars and
pocket-handkerchiefs. She liked the free-and-easy schoolgirl talk
better than her mother's tame discourse; she preferred the homely
litter of the spacious schoolroom to the prim splendours of Georgy's
state chambers; and the cool lawn and shrubberies of Hyde Lodge were a
hundred-fold more pleasant to her than the stiff little parterre at
Bayswater, wherein scarlet geraniums and calceolarias flourished with
an excruciating luxuriance of growth and an aggravating brilliancy of
colour. She liked any place better than the hearth by which Philip
Sheldon brooded with a dark thoughtful face, and a mind absorbed by the
mysteries and complications of the Stock Exchange.

On this bright June afternoon other girls were chattering gaily about
the fun of the breaking-up ball and the coming delights of the
holidays, but Charlotte sighed when they reminded her that the end of
her last half was close at hand.

She sat under a group of trees on the lawn, with a crochet antimacassar
lying in her lap, and with her friend and favourite, Diana Paget,
sitting by her side.

Hyde Lodge was that very establishment over which Priscilla Paget had
reigned supreme for the last seventeen years of her life, and among all
the pupils in a school of some forty or fifty girls, Diana was the one
whom Charlotte Halliday had chosen for her dearest companion and
confidante, clinging to her with a constancy not to be shaken by
ill-fortune or absence. The girl knew very well that Diana Paget was a
poor relation and dependant; that her bills had never been paid; that
all those incalculable and mysterious "extras," which are the martyrdom
of parents and the delight of schoolmistresses, were a dead letter so
far as Diana was concerned. She knew that "poor Di" had been taken home
suddenly one day, not in compliance with any behest of her father's,
but for the simple reason that her kinswoman's patience had been worn
out by the Captain's dishonesty. It is doubtful whether Priscilla Paget
had ever communicated these facts in any set phrase, but in a
boarding-school such things make themselves known, and the girls had
discussed the delinquencies of that dreadful creature, Captain Paget,
very freely in the security of their dormitories.

Charlotte knew that her dearest friend was not a person whom it was
advantageous to know. She had seen Diana depart ignominiously, and
return mysteriously after an absence of some years, very shabby, very
poor, very sombre and melancholy, and with no inclination to talk of
those years of absence. Miss Halliday had known all this, and had asked
no questions. She took the returned wanderer to her heart, and
cherished her with an affection which was far beyond the average
measure of sisterly love.

"I thought I should never see you again, dear," she cried when she and
Diana had retired to a corner of the schoolroom to talk confidentially
on the morning of Miss Paget's return; "and I missed you so cruelly.
Other girls are very nice and very kind to me. There is a new girl,
Miss Spencer--that girl with flaxen hair, standing by the big
Canterbury--whom I get on with delightfully; but there is no one in the
world like you, Di. And where have you been all this time? With your
papa, I suppose."

"Yes," answered Miss Paget gloomily; "I have been with my father. Don't
ask me anything about the last three years, Lotta. I have been utterly
wretched and miserable, and I can't bear to talk about my misery."

"And you shan't talk of it, darling," cried Charlotte, pursing up her
mouth for a kiss in a manner which might have been distraction to a
masculine mind of average susceptibility. "You shan't talk of anything
or think of anything the least, least, least bit unpleasant; and you
shall have my gold pencil-case," added Miss Halliday, wrenching that
trinket suddenly from the ribbon by which it hung at her side. Perhaps
there was just the least touch of Georgy's childishness in this
impulsive habit of giving away all her small possessions, for which
Lotta was distinguished. "Yes, you must, dear," she went on. "Mamma
gave it me last half; but I don't want it; I don't like it; in point of
fact, I have had it so long that I positively loathe it. And I know
it's a poor trumpery thing, though mamma gave two guineas for it; but
you know she is always imposed upon in shops. Do, do, do take it,
darling, just to oblige me. And now, tell me, dear,--you're going to
stop here for ever and ever, now you've come back" asked Charlotte,
after having thrust the gold pencil-case into Diana's unwilling hand.

"I don't know about for ever and ever, dear," Miss Paget replied
presently; "but I daresay I shall stay here till I'm tired of the place
and everybody about it. You won't be here very long, you know, Lotta;
for you'll be twenty next birthday, and I suppose you'll be leaving
school before you're twenty-one. Most of the girls leave at eighteen or
nineteen at latest; and you've been here so long, and are so much
farther advanced than others are. I am not going to be a pupil again--
that's out of the question; for I'm just twenty-two, as you know. But
Priscilla has been good enough to let me stay as a kind of second
teacher for the little ones. It will be dull work going through the
stupid abridgments of history and geography, and the scrappy bits of
botany and conchology, with those incorrigible little ones; but of
course I am very grateful to my cousin for giving me a home under any
conditions, after papa's dishonourable conduct. If it were not for her,
Lotta, I should have no home. What a happy girl you are, to have a
respectable man for your father!"

Charlotte's brow darkened a little as her friend said this.

"He is not my own father, you know," she said gravely, "and I should be
a great deal happier if mamma and I were alone in the world. We could
live in some dear little cottage on wide open downs near the sea, and I
could have a linsey habit, and a pony, and ride about all day, and read
and play to mamma at night. Of course Mr. Sheldon is very respectable,
and I daresay it's very wicked of me; but O, Diana, I think I should
like him better if he were not _quite_ so respectable. I saw your papa
once when he came to call, and I thought him nicer than my stepfather.
But then I'm such a frivolous creature, Di, and am always thinking what
I ought not to think."

* * * * *

Nearly a year had passed since Diana's return, and the girl's life had
been very monotonous during that time. She had stuck bravely to the
abridgments and the juvenile scraps of --ologies, and had been
altogether a model of propriety, sewing on such a number of strings and
buttons during the period as can only be compassed by the maternal
mind. Her existence had been by no means as joyless or desolate as such
an existence is generally represented by the writer of fiction. There
was plenty of life and bustle in the big prosperous boarding-school, if
there was not much variety. There were small scandals and small
intrigues; departures and arrivals; wonderful hampers of cake and wine
to be divided among the elect of a fashionable dormitory--for there is
as wide a difference between the tone and status of the bedrooms in a
ladies'-school as between the squares of Berkeley and Bedford. There
were breaking-up parties, and the free-and-easy idleness of the
holidays, when a few dark-complexioned girls from the colonies, a
yellow-haired damsel from the remote north of Scotland, and Miss Diana
Paget, were wont to cluster round the fire in the smaller of the
schoolrooms to tell ghost-stories or talk scandal in the gloaming.

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