Birds of Prey by M.E. Braddon

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All was dark within, but Diana Paget was very familiar with the
footstep that sounded on the carpetless floor. It was Valentine
Hawkehurst, and not her father, whose step her quick ear distinguished.

"Diana," he called; and then he muttered in a tone of surprise, "all
dark still. Ah! she has gone to bed, I suppose. That's a pity!" The
figure in the balcony caught his eye at this moment.

"What in goodness' name has kept you out there all this time?" he
asked; "do you want to catch your death of cold?"

He was standing by the mantelpiece lighting a candle as he asked this
unceremonious question. The light of the candle shone full upon his
face when Diana came into the room, and she could see that he was paler
than usual.

"Is there anything the matter?" she asked anxiously.

"Yes; there is a great deal the matter. You will have to leave
Foretdechene by the earliest train to-morrow morning, on the first
stage of your journey to England. Look here, my girl! I can give you
just about the money that will carry you safely to London; and when you
are once there, Providence must do the rest."

"Valentine, what do you mean?"

"I mean, that you cannot get away from this place--you cannot dissever
yourself from the people you have been living with, too soon. Come,
come, don't shiver, child. Take a few drops of this cognac, and let me
see the colour come back to your face before I say any more."

He poured the dregs of a bottle of brandy into a glass, and made her
drink the spirit. He was obliged to force the rim of the glass between
her set teeth before he could succeed in this.

"Come, Diana," he said, after she had drunk, "you have been a pupil in
the school of adversity so long, that you ought to be able to take
misfortunes pretty quietly. There's a balance struck, somehow or other,
depend upon it, my girl; and the prosperous people who pay their debts
have to suffer, as well as the Macaire family. I'm a scamp and a
scoundrel, but I'm your true friend nevertheless, Diana; and you must
promise to take my advice. Tell me that you will trust me."

"I have no one else to trust."

"No one else in this place. But in England you have your old friend,--
the woman with whom you were at school. Do you think she would refuse
to give you a temporary home if you sued to her _in forma pauperis?_"

"No, I don't think she would refuse. She was very good to me. But why
am I to go back to London?"

"Because to stay here would be ruin and disgrace to you; because the
tie that links you to Horatio Paget must be cut at any hazard." "But
why?"

"For the best or worst of reasons. Your father has been trying a trick
to-night which has been hitherto so infallible, that I suppose he had
grown careless as to his execution of it. Or perhaps he took a false
measure of the man he was playing with. In any case, he has been found
out, and has been arrested by the police."

"Arrested, for cheating at cards!" exclaimed the girl, with a look of
unspeakable disgust and horror. Valentine's arm was ready to support
her, if she had shown any symptom of fainting; but she did not. She
stood erect before him, very pale but firm as a rock.

"And you want me to go away?" she said.

"Yes, I want you to disappear from this place before you become
notorious as your father's daughter. That would be about the worst
reputation which you could carry through life. Believe me that I wish
you well, Diana, and be ruled by me."

"I will," she answered, with a kind of despairing resignation. "It
seems very dreary to go back to England to face the world all alone.
But I will do as you tell me."

She did not express any sympathy for her father, then languishing under
arrest, whereby she proved herself very wicked and unwomanly, no doubt.
But neither womanly virtues nor Christian graces are wont to flourish
in the school in which Diana Paget had been reared. She obeyed
Valentine Hawkehurst to the letter, without any sentimental
lamentations whatever. Her scanty possessions were collected, and
neatly packed, in little more than an hour. At three o'clock she lay
down in her tawdry little bed-chamber to take what rest she might in
the space of two hours. At six she stood by Valentine Hawkehurst on the
platform of the railway station, with her face hidden by a brown gauze
veil, waiting till the train was wade ready to start.

It was after she was seated in the carriage that she spoke for the
first time of her father.

"Is it likely to go very hard with him?" she asked.

"I hope not. We must try to pull him through it as well as we can. The
charge may break down at the first examination. Good bye."

"Good bye, Valentine."

They had just time to shake hands before the train moved off. Another
moment and Miss Paget and her fellow-passengers were speeding towards
Liege.

Mr. Hawkehurst drew his hat over his eyes as he walked away from the
station.

"The world will seem very dull and empty to me without her," he said to
himself. "I have done an unselfish thing for once in my life. I wonder
whether the recording angel will carry that up to my credit, and
whether the other fellow will blot out any of the old score in
consideration of this one little bit of self-sacrifice."

BOOK THE THIRD.

HEAPING UP RICHES.

CHAPTER I.

A FORTUNATE MARRIAGE.

Eleven years had passed lightly enough over the glossy raven locks of
Mr. Philip Sheldon. There are some men with whom Time deals gently, and
he was one of them. The hard black eyes had lost none of their fierce
brightness; the white teeth flashed with all their old brilliancy; the
complexion, which had always been dusky of hue, was perhaps a shade or
two darker; and the fierce black eyes seemed all the blacker by reason
of the purple tinge beneath them. But the Philip Sheldon of to-day was,
taken altogether, a handsomer man than the Philip Sheldon of eleven
years ago.

Within those eleven years the Bloomsbury dentist had acquired a higher
style of dress and bearing, and a certain improvement of tone and
manner. He was still an eminently respectable man, and a man whose
chief claim to the esteem of his fellows lay in the fact of his
unimpeachable respectability; but his respectability of to-day, as
compared with that of eleven years before, was as the respectability of
Tyburnia when contrasted with that of St. Pancras. He was not an
aristocratic-looking man, or an elegant man; but you felt, as you
contemplated him, that the bulwarks of the citadel of English
respectability are defended by such as he.

Mr. Sheldon no longer experimentalised with lumps of beeswax and
plaster-of-paris. All the appalling paraphernalia of his cruel art had
long since been handed over to an aspiring young dentist, together
with the respectable house in Fitzgeorge-street, the furniture,
and--the connexion. And thus had ended Philip Sheldon's career as a
surgeon-dentist. Within a year of Tom Halliday's death his disconsolate
widow had given her hand to her first sweetheart, not forgetful of her
dead husband or ungrateful for much kindness and affection experienced
at his hands, but yielding rather to Philip's suit because she was
unable to advance any fair show of reason whereby she might reject him.

"I told you, she'd be afraid to refuse you," said George Sheldon, when
the dentist came home from Barlingford, where Tom Halliday's widow was
living with her mother.

Philip had answered his brother's questions rather ambiguously at
first, but in the end had been fain to confess that he had asked Mrs.
Halliday to marry him, and that his suit had prospered.

"That way of putting it is not very complimentary to me," he said,
drawing himself up rather stiffly. "Georgy and I were attached to each
other long ago, and it is scarcely strange if----"

"If you should make a match of it, Tom being gone. Poor old Tom! He and
I were such cronies. I've always had an idea that neither you nor the
other fellow quite understood that low fever of his. You did your best,
no doubt; but I think you ought to have pulled him through somehow.
However, that's not a pleasant subject to talk of just now; so I'll
drop it, and wish you joy, Phil. It'll be rather a good match for you,
I fancy," added George, contemplating his brother with a nervous
twitching of his lips, which suggested that his mouth watered as he
thought of Philip's good fortune.

"It's a very nice thing you drop into, old fellow, isn't it?" he asked
presently, seeing that his brother was rather disinclined to discuss
the subject.

"You know the state of my affairs well enough to be sure that I
couldn't afford to marry a poor woman," answered Philip.

"And that it has been for a long time a vital necessity with you to
marry a rich one," interjected his brother.

"Georgy will have a few hundreds, and----"

"A few thousands, you mean, Phil," cried Sheldon the younger with
agreeable briskness; "shall I tot it up for you?"

He was always eager to "tot" things up, and would scarcely have shrunk
from setting down the stars of heaven in trim double columns of
figures, had it seemed to his profit to do so.

"Let us put it in figures, Phil," he said, getting his finger-tips in
order for the fray. "There's the money for Hyley Farm--twelve thousand
three hundred and fifty, I had it from poor Tom's own lips. Then
there's that little property on Sheepfield Common--say seven-fifty,
eh?--well, say seven hundred, if you like to leave a margin; and then
there are the insurances--three thou' in the Alliance, fifteen hundred
in the Phoenix, five hundred in the Suffolk Friendly; the total of
which, my dear boy, is eighteen thousand five hundred pounds; and a
very nice thing for you to drop into, just as affairs were looking
about as black as they could look." "Yes," answered Mr. Sheldon the
elder, who appeared by on means to relish this "totting-up" of his
future wife's fortune; "I have no doubt I ought to consider myself a
very lucky man."

"So Barlingford folks will say when they hear of the business. And now
I hope you're not going to forget your promise to me."

"What promise?"

"That if you ever did get a stroke of luck, I should have a share of
it--eh, Phil?"

Mr. Sheldon caressed his chin, and looked thoughtfully at the fire.

"If my wife lets me have the handling of any of her money, you may
depend upon it I'll do what I can for you," he said, after a pause.

"Don't say that, Phil," remonstrated George. "When a man says he'll do
what he can for you, it's a sure sign he means to do nothing.
Friendship and brotherly feeling are at an end when it comes to a
question of 'ifs' and 'cans.' If your wife lets you have the handling
of any of her money!" cried the lawyer, with unspeakable derision;
"that's too good a joke for you to indulge in with me. Do you think I
believe you will let that poor little woman keep custody of her money a
day after she is your wife, or that you will let her friends tie it up
for her before she marries you?"

No, Phil, you didn't lay your plans for that."

"What do you mean by my laying plans?" asked the dentist.

"That's a point we won't discuss, Philip," answered the lawyer coolly.
"You and I understand each other very well without entering into
unpleasant details. You promised me a year ago--before Tom Halliday's
death--that if you ever came into a good thing, I should share in it.
You have come into an uncommonly good thing, and I shall expect you to
keep your promise."

"Who says I am going to break it?" demanded Philip Sheldon with an
injured air. "You shouldn't be in such a hurry to cry out, George. You
take the tone of a social Dick Turpin, and might as well hold a pistol
to my head while you're about it. Don't alarm yourself. I have told you
I will do what I can for you. I cannot, and I shall not, say more."

The two men looked at each other. They were in the habit of taking the
measure of all creation in their own eminently practical way, and each
took the other's measure now. After having done which, they parted with
all cordial expressions of good-will and brotherly feeling. George went
back to his dusty chambers in Gray's Inn, and Philip prepared for his
return to Barlingford and his marriage with Georgina Halliday.

For ten years Georgy had been Philip Sheldon's wife, and she had found
no reason to complain of her second choice. The current of her life had
flowed smoothly enough since her first lover had become her husband.
She still wore moire-antique dresses and gold chains; and if the
dresses were of more simple fashion, and the chains were less
obtrusively displayed, she had to thank Mr. Sheldon for the refinement
in her taste. Her views of life in general had expanded under Mr.
Sheldon's influence. She no longer thought a high-wheeled dog-cart and
a skittish mare the acme of earthly splendour; for she had a carriage
and pair at her service, and a smart little page-boy to leap off the
box in attendance on her when she paid visits or went shopping. Instead
of the big comfortable old-fashioned farmhouse at Hyley, with its
mysterious passages and impenetrable obscurities in the way of
cupboards, she occupied an intensely new detached villa in Bayswater,
in which the eye that might chance to grow weary of sunshine and
glitter would have sought in vain for a dark corner wherein to repose
itself.

Mr. Sheldon's fortunes had prospered since his marriage with his
friend's widow. For a man of his practical mind and energetic
temperament, eighteen thousand pounds was a strong starting-point. His
first step was to clear off all old engagements with Jews and Gentiles,
and to turn his back on the respectable house in Fitzgeorge-street. The
earlier months of his married life he devoted to a pleasant tour on the
Continent; not wasting time in picturesque by-ways, or dawdling among
inaccessible mountains, or mooning about drowsy old cathedrals, where
there were pictures with curtains hanging before them, and prowling
vergers who expected money for drawing aside the curtains; but rattling
at the highest continental speed from one big commercial city to
another, and rubbing off the rust of Bloomsbury in the exchanges and on
the quays of the busiest places in Europe. The time which Mr. Sheldon
forbore to squander in shadowy gothic aisles and under the shelter of
Alpine heights, he accounted well bestowed in crowded cafes, and at the
public tables of noted hotels, where commercial men were wont to
congregate; and as Georgy had no aspirings for the sublimity of Vandyke
and Raphael, or the gigantic splendours of Alpine scenery, she was very
well pleased to see continental life with the eyes of Philip Sheldon.
How could a half-educated little woman, whose worldly experience was
bounded by the suburbs of Barlingford, be otherwise than delighted by
the glare and glitter of foreign cities? Georgy was childishly
enraptured with everything she saw, from the sham diamonds and rubies
of the Palais Royal, to the fantastical bonbons of Berlin.

Her husband was very kind to her--after his own particular fashion,
which was very different from blustering Tom Halliday's weak
indulgence. He allotted and regulated her life to suit his own
convenience, it is true; but he bought her handsome dresses, and took
her with him in hired carriages when he drove about the strange cities.
He was apt to leave Georgy and the hired carriage at the corner of some
street, or before the door of some cafe, for an hour at a time, in the
course of his peregrinations; but she speedily became accustomed to
this, and provided herself with the Tauchnitz edition of a novel,
wherewith to beguile the tedium of these intervals in the day's
amusement. If Tom Halliday had left her for an hour at a street-corner,
or before the door of a cafe, she would have tortured herself and him
by all manner of jealous suspicions and vague imaginings. But there was
a stern gravity in Mr. Sheldon's character which precluded the
possibility of any such shadowy fancies. Every action of his life
seemed to involve such serious motives, the whole tenor of his
existence was so orderly and business-like, that his wife was fain to
submit to him, as she would have submitted to some ponderous infallible
machine, some monster of modern ingenuity and steam power, which cut
asunder so many bars of iron, or punched holes in so many paving-stones
in a given number of seconds, and was likely to go on dividing iron or
piercing paving-stones for ever and ever.

She obeyed him, and was content to fashion her life according to his
will, chiefly because she had a vague consciousness that to argue with
him, or to seek to influence him, would be to attempt the impossible.
Perhaps there was something more than this in her mind--some
half-consciousness that there was a shapeless and invertebrate
skeleton lurking in the shadowy background of her new life, a dusky
and impalpable creature which it would not be well for her to examine
or understand. She was a cowardly little woman, and finding herself
tolerably happy in the present, she did not care to pierce the veil of
the future, or to cast anxious glances backward to the past. She
thought it just possible that there might be people in the world base
enough to hint that Philip Sheldon had married her for love of her
eighteen thousand pounds, rather than from pure devotion to herself.
She knew that certain prudent friends and kindred in Barlingford had
elevated their hands and eyebrows in speechless horror when they
discovered that she had married her second husband without a
settlement; while one grim and elderly uncle had asked her whether she
did not expect her father to turn in his grave by reason of her folly.

Georgy had shrugged her shoulders peevishly when her Barlingford
friends remonstrated with her, and had declared that people were very
cruel to her, and that it was a hard thing she could not choose for
herself for once in her life. As to the settlements that people talked
of, she protested indignantly that she was not so mean as to fancy her
future husband a thief, and that to tie up her money in all sorts of
ways would be to imply as much. And then, as it was only a year since
poor dear Tom's death, she had been anxious to marry without fuss or
parade. In fact, there were a hundred reasons against legal
interference, and legal tying-up of the money, with all that dreadful
jargon about "whereas," and "hereinafter," and "provided always," and
"nothing herein contained," which seems to hedge round a sum of money
so closely, that it is doubtful whether the actual owner will ever be
free to spend a sixpence of it after the execution of that formidable
document intended to protect it from possible marauders.

George Sheldon had said something very near the truth when he had told
Philip that Mrs. Halliday would be afraid to refuse him. The
fair-haired, fair-faced little woman did in some manner fear the first
lover of her girlhood. She had become his wife, and so far all things
had gone well with her; but if misery and despair had been the necessary
consequences of her union with him, she must have married him all the
same, so dominant was the influence by which he ruled her. Of course
Georgy was not herself aware of her own dependence. She accepted all
things as they were presented to her by a stronger mind than her own.
She wore her handsome silk dresses, and was especially particular as to
the adjustment of her bonnet-strings, knowing that the smallest
impropriety of attire was obnoxious to the well-ordered mind of her
second husband. She obeyed him very much as a child obeys a strict but
not unkind schoolmaster. When he took her to a theatre or a racecourse,
she sat by his side meekly, and felt like a child who has been good and
is reaping the reward of goodness. And this state of things was in
nowise disagreeable to her. She was perhaps quite as happy as it was in
her nature to be; for she had no exalted capacity for happiness or
misery. She felt that it was pleasant to have a handsome man, whose
costume was always irreproachable, for her husband. Her only notion of
a bad husband was a man who stayed out late, and came home under the
influence of strong liquors consumed in unknown localities and amongst
unknown people. So, as Mr. Sheldon rarely went out after dinner, and
was on all occasions the most temperate of men, she naturally
considered her second husband the very model of conjugal perfection.
Thus it was that domestic life had passed smoothly enough for Mr.
Sheldon and his wife during the ten years which had elapsed since their
marriage.

As to the eighteen thousand pounds which she had brought Philip
Sheldon, Georgy asked no questions. She knew that she enjoyed luxuries
and splendours which had never been hers in Tom Halliday's lifetime,
and she was content to accept the goods which her second husband
provided. Mr. Sheldon had become a stockbroker, and occupied an office
in some dusky court within a few hundred yards of the Stock Exchange.
He had, according to his own account, trebled Georgy's thousands since
they had been in his hands. How the unsuccessful surgeon-dentist had
blossomed all at once into a fortunate speculator was a problem too
profound for Georgy's consideration. She knew that her husband had
allied himself to a certain established firm of stockbrokers, and that
the alliance had cost him some thousands of Tom Halliday's money. She
had heard of preliminary steps to be taken to secure his admission as a
member of some mysterious confraternity vaguely spoken of as "the
House;" and she knew that Tom Halliday's thousands had been the seed
from which had sprung other thousands, and that her husband had been
altogether triumphant and successful.

It may be that it is easier to rig the market than to induce a given
number of people to resort to a certain dull street in Bloomsbury for
the purpose of having teeth extracted by an unknown practitioner. It is
possible that the stockbroker is like the poet, a creature who is born,
and not made; a gifted and inspired being, not to be perfected by any
specific education; a child of spontaneous instincts and untutored
faculties. Certain it is that the divine afflatus from the nostrils of
the god Plutus seemed to have descended upon Philip Sheldon; for he had
entered the Stock Exchange an inexperienced stranger, and he held his
place there amongst men whose boyhood had been spent in the offices of
Capel-court, and whose youthful strength had been nourished in the
chop-houses of Pinch-lane and Thread-needle-street.

Mrs. Sheldon was satisfied with the general knowledge that Mr. Sheldon
had been fortunate, and had never sought any more precise knowledge of
her husband's affairs. Nor did she seek such knowledge even now, when
her daughter was approaching womanhood, and might ere long need some
dower out of her mother's fortune. Poor Tom, trusting implicitly in the
wife he loved, and making his will only as a precautionary measure, at
a time when he seemed good for fifty years of life and strength, had
not troubled himself about remote contingencies, and had in no wise
foreseen the probability of a second husband for Georgy and-a
stepfather for his child.

Two children had been born to Mr. Sheldon since his marriage, and both
had died in infancy. The loss of these children had fallen very heavily
on the strong hard man, though he had never shed a tear or uttered a
lamentation, or wasted an hour of his business-like existence by reason
of his sorrow. Georgy had just sufficient penetration to perceive that
her husband was bitterly disappointed when no more baby-strangers came
to replace those poor frail little lives which had withered away and
vanished in spite of his anxiety to hold them.

"It seems as if there was a blight upon _my_ children," he once said
bitterly; and this was the only occasion on which his wife heard him
complain of his evil fortune.

But one day, when he had been particularly lucky in some speculation,
when he had succeeded in achieving what his brother George spoke of as
the "biggest line he had ever done," Philip Sheldon came home to the
Bayswater villa in a particularly bad humour, and for the first time
since her marriage Georgy heard him quote a line of Scripture.

"Heaping up riches," he muttered, as he paced up and down the room;
"heaping up riches, and ye cannot tell who shall gather them."

His wife knew then that he was thinking of his children During the
brief lives of those two fragile boy-babies the stockbroker had been
wont to talk much of future successes in the way of money-making to be
achieved by him for the enrichment and exaltation of these children.
They were gone now, and no more came to replace them. And though Philip
Sheldon still devoted himself to the sublime art of money-making, and
still took delight in successful time-bargains and all the scientific
combinations of the money-market, the salt of life had lost something
of its savour, and the chink of gold had lost somewhat of its music.

CHAPTER II.

CHARLOTTE.

The little villa at Bayswater was looking its brightest on a
resplendent midsummer afternoon, one year after Diana Paget's hurried
hegira from Foretdechene. If the poor dentist's house in dingy
Bloomsbury had been fresh and brilliant of aspect, how much more
brilliant was the western home of the rich stockbroker, whose gate was
within five minutes' walk of that aristocratic Eden, Kensington
Gardens! Mr. Sheldon's small domain was called The Lawn, and consisted
of something over half an acre of flower-garden and shrubbery, a
two-stall stable and coach-house, a conservatory and fernery, and a
moderate-sized house in the gothic or mediaeval style, with mullioned
windows in the dining-room and oriels in the best bedroom, and with a
great deal of unnecessary stone-work and wooden excrescence in every
direction.

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