Birds of Prey by M.E. Braddon

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Horatio Paget had determined upon making a sacrifice. The doctor had
told him that he owed his life to this devoted girl; and he would have
been something less than man if he had not been moved with some
grateful emotion. He was grateful; and in the dreary hours of his slow
recovery he had ample leisure for the contemplation of the woman to
whom he owed so much, if his poor worthless life could indeed be much.
He saw that she was devoted to him; that she loved him more truly than
he had ever been conscious of being loved before. He saw too that she
was beautiful. To an ugly woman Captain Paget might have felt extremely
grateful; but he could never have thought of an ugly woman as he
thought of Mary Anne Kepp. The end of his contemplation and his
deliberation came to this: She was beautiful, and she loved him, and
his life was utterly wretched and lonely; so he determined on proving
his gratitude by a sublime sacrifice. Before the girl had lifted her
face from the needlework over which she had bent to hide her blushes,
Horatio Paget had asked her to be his wife. Her emotion almost
overpowered her as she tried to answer him; but she struggled against
it bravely, and came to the sofa on which he lay and dropped upon her
knees by his side. The beggar-maid who was wooed by a king could have
felt no deeper sense of her lover's condescension than that which
filled the heart of this poor simple girl as she knelt by her mother's
gentleman lodger.

"I--to be your wife!" she exclaimed. "O, surely, sir, you cannot mean
it?"

"But I do mean it, with all my heart and soul, my dear," answered the
Captain. "I'm not offering you any grand chance, Mary Anne; for I'm
about as low down in the world as a man can be. But I don't mean to be
poor all my life. Come, my dear, don't cry," he exclaimed, just a
little impatiently--for the girl had covered her face with her hands,
and tears were dropping between the poor hard-working fingers--"but
lift up your head and tell me whether you will take a faded old
bachelor for your husband or not."

Horatio Paget had admired many women in the bright years of his youth,
and had fancied himself desperately in love more than once in his life;
but it is doubtful whether the mighty passion had ever really possessed
the Captain's heart, which was naturally cold and sluggish, rarely
fluttered by any emotion that was not engendered of selfishness.
Horatio had set up an idol and had invented a religion for himself very
early in life; and that idol was fashioned after his own image, and
that religion had its beginning and end in his own pleasure. He might
have been flattered and pleased by Miss Kepp's agitation; but he was
ill and peevish; and having all his life been subject to a profound
antipathy to feminine tearfulness, the girl's display of emotion
annoyed him.

"Is it to be yes, or no, my dear?" he asked, with, some vexation in his
tone.

Mary Anne looked up at him with tearful, frightened eyes.

"O, yes, sir, if I can be of any use to you, and nurse you when you are
ill, and work for you till I work my fingers to the bone."

She clenched her hands spasmodically as she spoke. In imagination she
was already toiling and striving for the god of her idolatry--the
GENTLEMAN whose varnished boots had been to her as a glimpse of another
and a fairer world than that represented by Tulliver's-terrace, Old
Kent-road. But Captain Paget checked her enthusiasm by a gentle gesture
of his attenuated hands.

"That will do, my dear," he murmured languidly; "I'm not very strong
yet, and anything in the way of fuss is inexpressibly painful to me.
Ah, my poor child," he exclaimed, pityingly, "if you could have seen a
dinner at the Marquis of Hertford's, you would have understood how much
can be achieved without fuss. But I am talking of things you don't
understand. You will be my wife; and a very good, kind, obedient little
wife, I have no doubt. That is all settled. As for working for me, my
love, it would be about as much as these poor little hands could do to
earn me a cigar a day--and I seldom smoke less than half a dozen
cigars; so, you see, that is all so much affectionate nonsense. And now
you may wake your mother, my dear; for I want to take a little nap, and
I can't close my eyes while that good soul is snoring so intolerably;
but not a word about our little arrangement, Mary Anne, till you and
your mother are alone."

And hereupon the Captain spread a handkerchief over his face and
subsided into a gentle slumber. The little scene had fatigued him;
though it had been so quietly enacted, that Mrs. Kepp had slept on
undisturbed by the brief fragment of domestic drama performed within a
few yards of her uneasy arm-chair. Her daughter awoke her presently,
and she resumed her needlework, while Mary Anne made some tea for the
beloved sleeper. The cups and saucers made more noise to-night than
they were wont to make in the girl's careful hands. The fluttering of
her heart seemed to communicate itself to the tips of her fingers, and
the jingling of the crockery-ware betrayed the intensity of her
emotion. He was to be her husband! She was to have a gentleman for a
husband; and such a gentleman! Out of such base trifles as a West-end
tailor's coat and a West-end workman's boots may be engendered the
purest blossom of womanly love and devotion. Wisely may the modern
philosopher cry that the history of the world is only a story of old
clothes. Mary Anne had begun by admiring the graces of Stultz and Hoby,
and now she was ready to lay down her life for the man who wore the
perishing garments.

* * * * *

Miss Kepp obeyed her lover's behest; and it was only on the following
day, when she and her mother were alone together in the dingy little
kitchen below Captain Paget's apartments, that she informed that worthy
woman of the honour which had been vouchsafed to her. And thereupon
Mary Anne endured the first of the long series of disappointments which
were to arise out of her affection for the penniless Captain. The widow
was a woman of the world, and was obstinately blind to the advantages
of a union with a ruined gentleman of fifty. "How's he to keep you, I
should like to know," Mrs. Kepp exclaimed, as the girl stood blushing
before her after having told her story; "if he can't pay me regular?--
and you know the difficulty I have had to get his money, Mary Anne. If
he can't keep hisself, how's he to keep you?"

"Don't talk like that, mother," cried the girl, wincing under her
parent's practical arguments; "you go on as if all I cared for was
being fed and clothed. Besides, Captain Paget is not going to be poor
always. He told me so last night, when he----"

"_He_ told you so!" echoed the honest widow with unmitigated scorn;
"hasn't he told me times and often that I should have my rent regular
after this week, and regular after that week, and have I _ever_ had it
regular? And ain't I keeping him out of charity now?--a poor
widow-woman like me--which I may be wanting charity myself before long:
and if it wasn't for your whimpering and going on he'd have been out of
the house three weeks ago, when the doctor said he was well enough to
be moved; for I ast him."

"And you'd have turned him out to die in the streets, mother!" cried
Mary; "I didn't think you was so 'artless."

From this time there was ill-feeling between Mrs. Kepp and her
daughter, who had been hitherto one of the most patient and obedient of
children. The fanatic can never forgive the wretch who disbelieves in
the divinity of his god; and women who love as blindly and foolishly as
Mary Anne Kepp are the most bigoted of worshippers. The girl could not
forgive her mother's disparagement of her idol,--the mother had no
mercy upon her daughter's folly; and after much wearisome contention
and domestic misery--carefully hidden from the penniless sybarite in
the parlour--after many tears and heart-burnings, and wakeful nights
and prayerful watches, Mary Anne Kepp consented to leave the house
quietly one morning with the gentleman lodger while the widow had gone
to market. Miss Kepp left a piteous little note for her mother, rather
ungrammatical, but very womanly and tender, imploring pardon for her
want of duty; and, "O, mother, if you knew how good and nobel he is,
you coudent be angery with me for luving him has I do, and we shall
come back to you after oure marige, wich you will be pade up honourabel
to the last farthin'."

After writing this epistle in the kitchen, with more deliberation and
more smudging than Captain Paget would have cared to behold in the
bride of his choice, Mary Anne attired herself in her Sabbath-day
raiment, and left Tulliver's-terrace with the Captain in a cab. She
would fain have taken a little lavender paper-covered box that
contained the remainder of her wardrobe, but after surveying it with a
shudder, Captain Paget told her that such a box would condemn them
_anywhere_.

"You may get on sometimes without luggage, my dear," he said
sententiously; "but with such luggage as _that_, never!"

The girl obeyed without comprehending. It was not often that she
understood her lover's meaning, nor did he particularly care that she
should understand him. He talked to her rather in the same spirit in
which one talks to a faithful canine companion--as Napoleon III. may
talk to his favourite Nero; "I have great plans yet unfulfilled, my
honest Nero, though you may not be wise enough to guess their nature.
And we must have another Boulevard, old fellow; and we must settle that
little dispute about Venetia; and we must do something for those
unfortunate Poles, eh--good dog?" and so on.

Captain Paget drove straight to a registrar's office, where the new
Marriage Act enabled him to unite himself to Miss Kepp _sans facon_, in
presence of the cabman and a woman who had been cleaning the door-step.
The Captain went through the brief ceremonial as coolly as if it had
been the settlement of a water-rate, and was angered by the tears that
poor Mary Anne shed under her cheap black veil. He had forgotten the
poetic superstition in favour of a wedding-ring, but he slipped a
little onyx ring off his own finger, and put it on the clumsier finger
of his bride. It was the last of his jewels--the rejected of the
pawnbrokers, who, not being learned in antique intaglios, had condemned
the ring as trumpery. There is always something a little ominous in the
bridegroom's forgetfulness of that simple golden circle which typifies
an eternal union; and a superstitious person might have drawn a
sinister augury from the subject of Captain Paget's intaglio, which was
a head of Nero--an emperor whose wife was by no means the happiest of
women. But as neither Mary Anne nor the registrar, neither the cabman
nor the charwoman who had been cleaning the door-step, had ever heard
of Nero, and as Horatio Paget was much too indifferent to be
superstitious, there was no one to draw evil inferences: and Mary Anne
went away with her gentleman husband, proud and happy, with a happiness
that was only disturbed now and then by the image of an infuriated
mother.

Captain Paget took his bride to some charming apartments in
Halfmoon-street, Mayfair; and she was surprised to hear him tell the
landlady that he and his wife had just arrived from Devonshire, and
that they meant to stay a week or so in London, _en passant_, before
starting for the Continent.

"My wife has spent the best part of her life in the country," said the
Captain, "so I suppose I must show her some of the sights of London in
spite of the abominable weather. But the deuce of it is, that my
servant has misunderstood my directions, and gone on to Paris with the
luggage. However, we can set that all straight to-morrow."

Nothing could be more courteously acquiescent than the manner of the
landlady; for Captain Paget had offered her references, and the people
to whom he referred were among the magnates of the land. The Captain
knew enough of human nature to know that if references are only
sufficiently imposing, they are very unlikely to be verified. The
swindler who refers his dupe to the Duke of Sutherland and Baring
Brothers has a very good chance of getting his respectability accepted
without inquiry, on the mere strength of those sacred names.

* * * * *

From this time until the day of her death Mary Anne Paget very seldom
heard her husband make any statement which she did not know to be
false. He had joined the ranks of the vultures. He had lain down upon
his bed of sickness a gentlemanly beggar; he arose from that couch of
pain and weariness a swindler.

Now began those petty shifts and miserable falsifications whereby the
birds of prey thrive on the flesh and blood of hapless pigeons. Now the
dovecotes were fluttered by a new destroyer--a gentlemanly vulture,
whose suave accents and perfect manners were fatal to the unwary.
Henceforth Horatio Cromie Nugent Paget flourished and fattened upon the
folly of his fellow-men. As promoter of joint-stock companies that
never saw the light; as treasurer of loan-offices where money was never
lent; as a gentleman with capital about to introduce a novel article of
manufacture from the sale of which a profit of five thousand a year
would infallibly be realized, and desirous to meet with another
gentleman of equal capital; as the mysterious X.Y.Z. who will--for so
small a recompense as thirty postage-stamps--impart the secret of an
elegant and pleasing employment, whereby seven-pound-ten a-week may be
made by any individual, male or female;--under every flimsy disguise
with which the swindler hides his execrable form, Captain Paget plied
his cruel trade, and still contrived to find fresh dupes. Of course
there were occasions when the pigeons were slow to flutter into the
fascinating snare, and when the vulture had a bad time of it; and it
was a common thing for the Captain to sink from the splendour of
Mayfair or St. James's-street into some dingy transpontine
hiding-place. But he never went back to Tulliver's-terrace, though
Mary Anne pleaded piteously for the payment of her poor mother's debt.
When her husband was in funds, he patted her head affectionately, and
told her that he would see about it--i.e. the payment of Mrs. Kepp's
bill; while, if she ventured to mention the subject to him when his
purse was scantily furnished, he would ask her fiercely how he was to
satisfy her mother's extortionate claims when he had not so much as a
sixpence for his own use.

Mrs. Kepp's bill was never paid, and Mary Anne never saw her mother's
face again. Mrs. Paget was one of those meek loving creatures who are
essentially cowardly. She could not bring herself to encounter her
mother without the money owed by the Captain; she could not bring
herself to endure the widow's reproaches, the questioning that would be
so horribly painful to answer, the taunts that would torture her poor
sorrowful heart.

Alas for her brief dream of love and happiness! Alas for her foolish
worship of the gentleman lodger! She knew now that her mother had been
wiser than herself, and that it would have been better for her if she
had renounced the shadowy glory of an alliance with Horatio Cromie
Nugent Paget, whose string of high-sounding names, written on the cover
of an old wine-book, had not been without its influence on the ignorant
girl. The widow's daughter knew very little happiness during the few
years of her wedded life. To be hurried from place to place; to dine in
Mayfair to-day, and to eat your dinner at a shilling ordinary in
Whitecross-street to-morrow; to wear fine clothes that have not been
paid for, and to take them off your back at a moment's notice when they
are required for the security of the friendly pawnbroker; to know that
your life is a falsehood and a snare, and that to leave a place is to
leave contempt and execration behind you,--these things constitute the
burden of a woman whose husband lives by his wits. And over and above
these miseries, Mrs. Paget had to endure all the variations of temper
to which the schemer is subject. If the pigeons dropped readily into
the snare, and if their plumage proved well worth the picking, the
Captain was very kind to his wife, after his own fashion; that is to
say, he took her out with him, and after lecturing her angrily because
of the shabbiness of her bonnet, bought her a new one, and gave her a
dinner that made her ill, and then sent her home in a cab, while he
finished the evening in more congenial society. But if the times were
bad for the vulture tribe--O, then, what a gloomy companion for the
domestic hearth was the elegant Horatio! After smiling his false smile
all day, while rage and disappointment were gnawing at his heart, it
was a kind of relief to the Captain to be moody and savage by his own
fireside. The human vulture has something of the ferocity of his
feathered prototype. The man who lives upon his fellow-men has need to
harden his heart; for one sentiment of compassion, one touch of human
pity, would shatter his finest scheme in the hour of its fruition.
Horatio Paget and compassion parted fellowship very early in the course
of his unscrupulous career. What if the pigeon has a widowed mother
dependent on his prosperity, or half a dozen children who will be
involved in his ruin? Is the hawk to forego his natural prey for any
such paltry consideration as a vulgar old woman or a brood of squalling
brats?

Captain Paget was not guilty of any persistent unkindness towards the
woman whose fate he had deigned to link with his own. The consciousness
that he had conferred a supreme honour oh Mary Anne Kepp by offering
her his hand, and a share of his difficulties, never deserted him. He
made no attempt to elevate the ignorant girl into companionship with
himself. He shuddered when she misplaced her h's and turned from her
peevishly, with a muttered oath, when she was more than usually
ungrammatical: but though he found it disagreeable to hear her, he
would have found it troublesome to set her right; and trouble was a
thing which Horatio Paget held in gentlemanly aversion. The idea that
the mode of his existence could be repulsive to his wife--that this
low-born and low-bred girl could have scruples that he never felt, and
might suffer agonies of remorse and shame of which his coarser nature
was incapable--never entered the Captain's mind. It would have been too
great an absurdity for the daughter of plebeian Kepps to affect a
tenderness of conscience unknown to the scion of Pagets and Cromies and
Nugents. Mary Anne was afraid of her elegant husband; and she
worshipped and waited upon him in meek silence, keeping the secret of
her own sorrows, and keeping it so well that he never guessed the
manifold sources of that pallor of countenance and hollow brightness of
eye which had of late annoyed him when he looked at his wife. She had
borne him a child--a sweet girl baby, with those great black eyes that
always have rather a weird look in the face of infancy; and she would
fain have clung to the infant as the hope and consolation of her
joyless life. But the vulture is not a domestic bird, and a baby would
have been an impediment in the rapid hegiras which Captain Paget and
his wife were wont to make. The Captain put an advertisement in a daily
paper before the child was a week old; and in less than a fortnight
after Mary Anne had looked at the baby face for the first time, she was
called upon to surrender her treasure to an elderly woman of fat and
greasy aspect, who had agreed to bring the infant up "by hand" in a
miserable little street in a remote and dreary district lying between
Vauxhall and Battersea.

Mary Anne gave up the child uncomplainingly, as meekly as she would
have surrendered herself if the Captain had brought a masked
executioner to her bedside, and had told her a block was prepared for
her in the adjoining chamber. She had no idea of resistance to the will
of her husband. She endured her existence for nearly five years after
the birth of her child, and during those miserable years the one effort
of her life was to secure the miserable stipend paid for the little
girl's maintenance; but before the child's fifth birthday the mother
faded off the face of the earth. She died in a miserable lodging not
very far from Tulliver's-terrace, expiring in the arms of a landlady
who had comforted her in her hour of need, as she had comforted the
ruined gentleman. Captain Paget was a prisoner in Whitecross-street at
the time of his wife's death, and was much surprised when he missed her
morning visits, and the little luxuries she had been wont to bring him.

He had missed her for more than a week, and had written to her twice--
rather angrily on the second occasion--when a rough unkempt boy in
corduroy waited upon him in the dreary ward, where he and half a dozen
other depressed and melancholy men sat at little tables writing
letters, or pretending to read newspapers, and looking at one another
furtively every now and then. There is no prisoner so distracted by his
own cares that he will not find time to wonder what his neighbour is
"in for."

The boy had received instructions to be careful how he imparted his
dismal tidings to the "poor dear gentleman;" but the lad grew nervous
and bewildered at sight of the Captain's fierce hook-nose and
scrutinising gray eyes, and blurted out his news without any dismal
note of warning.

"The lady died at two o'clock this morning, please, sir; and mother
said I was to come and tell you, please, sir."

Captain Paget staggered under the blow.

"Good God!" he cried, as he dropped upon a rickety Windsor chair, that
creaked under his weight; "and I did not even know that she was ill!"

Still less did he know that all her married life had been one long
heart-sickness--one monotonous agony of remorse and shame.

CHAPTER III.

"HEART BARE, HEART HUNGRY, VERY POOR."

Diana Paget left the Kursaal, and walked slowly along the pretty
rustic street; now dawdling before a little print-shop, whose contents
she knew by heart, now looking back at the great windows of that temple
of pleasure which she had just quitted.

"What do they care what becomes of me?" she thought, as she looked up
at the blank vacant windows for the last time before she left the main
street of Foretdechene, and turned into a straggling side-street, whose
rugged pavement sloped upward towards the pine-clad hills. The house in
which Captain Paget had taken up his abode was a tall white habitation,
situated in the narrowest of the narrow by-ways that intersect the main
street of the pretty Belgian watering-place; a lane in which the
inhabitants of opposite houses may shake hands with one another out of
the window, and where the odour of the cabbages and onions so liberally
employed in the _cuisine_ of the native offends the nose of the
foreigner from sunrise to sunset.

Diana paused for a moment at the entrance to this lane, but, after a
brief deliberation, walked onwards.

"What is the use of my going home?" she thought; "_they_ won't be home
for hours to come."

She walked slowly along the hilly street, and from the street into a
narrow pathway winding upward through the pine-wood. Here she was quite
alone, and the stillness of the place soothed her. She took off her
hat, and slung the faded ribbons across her arm; and the warm breeze
lifted the loose hair from her forehead as she wandered upwards. It was
a very beautiful face from which that loose dark hair was lifted by the
summer wind. Diana Paget inherited something of the soft loveliness of
Mary Anne Kepp, and a little of the patrician beauty of the Pagets. The
eyes were like those which had watched Horatio Paget on his bed of
sickness in Tulliver's-terrace. The resolute curve of the thin flexible
lips, and the fine modelling of the chin, were hereditary attributes of
the Nugent Pagets; and a resemblance to the lower part of Miss Paget's
face might have been traced in many a sombre portrait of dame and
cavalier at Thorpehaven Manor, where a Nugent Paget, who acknowledged
no kindred with the disreputable Captain, was now master.

The girl's reflections as she slowly climbed the hill were not
pleasant. The thoughts of youth should be very beautiful; but youth
that has been spent in the companionship of reprobates and tricksters
is something worse than age; for experience has taught it to be bitter,
while time has not taught it to be patient. For Diana Paget, childhood
had been joyless, and girlhood lonely. That blank and desolate region,
that dreary flat of fenny waste ground between Vauxhall and Battersea,
on which the child's eyes had first looked, had been typical of her
loveless childhood. With her mother's death faded the one ray of light
that had illumined her desolation. She was shifted from one nurse to
another; and bar nurses were not allowed to love her, for she remained
with them as an encumbrance and a burden. It was so difficult for the
Captain to pay the pitiful sum demanded for his daughter's support--or
rather it was so much easier for him not to pay it. So there always
came a time when Diana was delivered at her father's lodgings like a
parcel, by an indignant nurse, who proclaimed the story of her wrongs
in shrill feminine treble, and who was politely informed by the Captain
that her claim was a common debt, and that she had the remedy in her
own hands, but that the same code of laws which provided her with that
remedy, forbade any obnoxious demonstration of her anger in a
gentleman's apartment. And then Miss Paget, after hearing all the
tumult and discussion, would be left alone with her father, and would
speedily perceive that her presence was disagreeable to him.

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