The Golden Calf by M. E. Braddon

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'My two cousins, sir,' she said, 'they have both been drowned. Such fine,
honest young fellows. It is too dreadful.'

'That wreck in the Hebrides? Yes, it is a sad thing; and Sir Vernon
Palliser and his brother were your cousins?' I am so sorry I showed you
the paper. But I wonder you had not heard of this sooner; it was in the
evening papers yesterday.'

'Then you must have known that my cousins were dead when you came to
Kingthorpe last night?' said Ida, looking up at her husband.

Suddenly, in a flash of memory, came back those thoughtless words of hers
spoke at Les Fontaines, when her father talked of the possibility of
inheriting a fortune and a baronetcy. She remembered how she had said, in
bitterness of spirit, 'Of course they will live to the age of Methuselah.
Whoever heard of luck coming our way?' And now this kind of luck, which
meant sudden death for two amiable, open-handed young men, had come her
way. How lightly she had spoken of those two young lives! how bitter had
been her thoughts about the rich and happy!

This thing had been known in London yesterday afternoon. It was this
knowledge which had sent Brian Walford to Kingthorpe to claim his wife.
She had suddenly become a wife worth claiming--the daughter of Sir
Reginald Palliser of Wimperfield.

'You knew this,' she repeated, looking at her husband, with infinite
scorn expressed in eye and lip.

'No, upon my soul,' he answered; 'I left town early. It flashed upon
me that it was Bessie's birthday--you would be all assembled at The
Knoll--there was just time for me to get there before the fun was
over--don't you know--'

'And you had not seen the papers? you did _not_ know this?' added Ida,
fixing him with her eyes.

'No, upon my word. I had no idea!'

She knew that he was lying.

'Then it was a very curious coincidence,' she said freezingly.

'How a coincidence?'

'That after so long an absence you should happen to come to Kingthorpe on
the day that made such a change in my father's fortunes.'

'I came because of Bessie's birthday--as I told you before. Does this sad
event make any difference to your father?' he asked innocently. 'Are
there not----nearer relatives?'

'None that I know of.'

The elderly gentleman, a little hard of hearing, as he called it, looked
on and wondered at this somewhat eccentric young couple, who seemed, from
those snatches of speech which reached him, to be on the verge of a
quarrel. He felt very sorry for the lady, who was so handsome, and so
interesting. The young man was gentlemanlike and good looking, but had
not that frank bright outlook which is the glory of a young Englishman.
He was dressed a little too foppishly for the elder man's liking, and had
the air of being over-careful of his own person.

And now the train had passed Sandown, was rushing on to Wimbledon and the
London smoke. All the blue had gone out of the sky, all the beauty had
gone from the earth, Ida thought, as small suburban villas followed each
other in a monotonous sequence, some old and shabby, others new and
smart; and then all that is ugliest in the great city surrounded them as
they steamed slowly into Waterloo station.

A four-wheel cab took them to an hotel in the purlieus of Fleet Street, a
big new hotel, but so shut in and surrounded by other buildings that Ida
felt as if she could hardly breathe in it--she who had lived among
gardens and green fields, and with all the winds of heaven blowing on her
across the rolling downs, from the forest and the sea.

'What a hateful place London is!' she exclaimed. 'Can any one like to
live in it?'

'All sensible people like it better than any other bit of the world, bar
Paris,' answered Brian. 'But it is not particularly pretty to look at.
City life is an acquired taste.'

This was on the stairs, while they were following the waiter to the
private sitting-room for which Mr. Walford had asked It was a neat little
room on the first floor, looking into a stony city square, surrounded by
business premises.

The waiter, after the manner of his kind, was loth to leave without an
order. Ida declined anything in the way of luncheon; so Brian ordered tea
and toast, and the man departed with an air of resignation rather than
alacrity, considering the order a poor one.

When they were quite alone Ida went up to her husband, laid her hand upon
his arm, and looked up at him with earnest, imploring eyes.

'Brian,' she said, 'I have come with you because I was told it was my
duty to come--told so by people who are wiser than I.'

'Of course it was your duty,' Brian answered impatiently. 'Nobody could
doubt that. We have been fools to live asunder so long.'

'Do you think we may not be more foolish for trying our lives
together--if we do not love each other--or trust each other.'

'I love you--that's all I know about it. As for trusting--well, I think I
have been too easy, have trusted you too far.'

'But I do not either love you--or trust you,' she said, lifting up her
head, and looking at him with kindling eyes and burning cheeks--ashamed
for him and for herself. 'I thought once that I could love you. I know
now that I never can; and what is still worse that I never can trust you.
No, Brian, never. You told me a lie to-day.'

'How dare you say that?'

'I dare say what I know to be the truth--the bitter, shameful truth. You
lied to me to-day in the railway-carriage, when you told me that you did
not know of my cousin's death last night--that you did not know of the
change in my fathers position.'

'You are a nice young lady to accuse your husband of lying,' he answered,
scowling at her. 'I tell you I saw no evening papers: I left London at
half-past five o'clock. But even if I had known, what does that matter?
It makes no difference to my right over your life. You are my wife and
you belong to me. I was fool enough to let you go last October: you were
in such a fury that you took me off my guard; I had no time to assert my
rights: and then _vogue la galére_ has always been my motto. But the time
came when I felt that I had been an ass to allow myself to be so treated;
and I made up my mind to claim you, and to stand no denial of my rights.
This determination was some time ripening in my mind; and then came
Bessie's birthday, the anniversary of our first meeting, the birthday of
my love, and I said to myself that I would claim you on that day, and no
other.'

'And that day and no other made my father a rich man. Poor Vernon! poor
Peter! so brave, so frank, so true! to think that _you_ should profit by
their death!' this she said with ineffable contempt, looking at him from
head to foot, as if he were a creature of inferior mould. 'But perhaps
you mistook the case. I am not an heiress, remember, even now. I have a
little brother who will inherit everything.'

'I have not forgotten your brother. I don't want you to be an heiress. I
want you--and your love.'

'That you never will have,' she cried passionately; and then she fell on
her knees at his feet--she to whom he had knelt on their wedding-day--and
lifted her clasped hands with piteous entreaty, 'Brian Walford, be
merciful to me. I do not love you, I never loved you, can never love you.
In an evil hour I took the fatal step which gives you power over me. But,
for God's sake, be generous, and forbear to use that power. No good can
ever come of our union--no good, but unspeakable evil; nothing but misery
for me--nothing but bitterness for you. We shall quarrel--we shall hate
each other.'

'I'll risk that,' he said; 'you are mine, and nothing shall make me give
you up.'

'Nothing?' she cried, rising suddenly, and flaming out at him like a
sibyl--'nothing? Not even the knowledge that I love another man?'

'Not even that. Let the other man beware, whoever he is. And you beware
how you keep to your duty as my wife. No, Ida, I will not let you go. I
was a fool last year--and I was taken unawares. I am a wiser man now, and
my decision is irrevocable. You are my wife, my goods, my chattels--God
help you if you deny my claim.'

CHAPTER XXI.

TAKING LIFE QUIETLY.

It was the second week in October, and the woods were changing their
green liveries of summer for tawny and amber tints, so various and so
harmonious in their delicate gradations that the eye of the artist was
gladdened by their decay. The hawthorns in Wimperfield Park glowed in
the distance like patches of crimson flame, and the undulating sweeps
of bracken showed golden-brown against the green-sward; while the
oaks-symbolic of all that is solid, ponderous, and constant in woodland
nature, slow to bloom and slow to die--had hardly a faded leaf to murk
the coming of winter.

A fine domain, this Wimperfield Park, with its hill and vale, its oaks
and beeches, and avenue of immemorial elms, to be owned by the man who
six weeks ago had no better shelter than a lath and plaster villa in a
French village, and who had found it a hard thing to pay the rent of that
trumpery tenement; and yet Sir Reginald Palliser accepted the change in
his circumstances as tranquilly as if it had been but a migration from
the red room to the blue. He took good fortune with the same easy
indolent air with which he had endured evil fortune. He had the Horatian
temperament, uneager to anticipate the future, content if the present
were fairly comfortable, sighing for no palatial halls over-arched with
gold and ivory, no porphyry columns, or marble terraces encroaching upon
the sea. He was a man to whom it had been but a slight affliction to live
in a small house, and to be deprived of all pomp and state, nay, even of
the normal surroundings of gentle birth, so long as he had those things
which were absolutely necessary to his own personal comfort. He was
honestly sorry for the untimely fate of his young kinsmen; but he slipped
into his nephew's vacant place with an ease which filled his wife and
daughter with wonder.

To poor little Fanny Palliser, who had never known the sensation of a
spare five-pound note, nay, of even a sovereign which she might
squander on the whim of the moment, this sudden possession of ample
means was strange even to bewilderment. Not to have to cut and contrive
any more, not to have to cook her husband's dinners, or to run about
from morning till twilight, supplementing the labours of an incompetent
maid-of-all-work, was to enter upon a new phase of life almost as
surprising as if she, Fanny Palliser, had died and been buried, and
been resolved back into the elements, to be born again as a princess of
the blood royal. She kept on repeating feebly that it was all like a
dream--she had not been able to realise the change yet.

To Reginald Palliser the inheritance of Wimperfield was only a return to
the home of his childhood. To his lowly-born little helpmeet it was the
beginning of a new life. It was a new sensation to Fanny Palliser to live
in large rooms, to walk about a house in which the long corridors, the
wide staircase, the echoing stone hall, the plenitude of light and space,
seemed to her to belong to a public institution rather than to a domestic
dwelling--a new sensation, and not altogether a pleasant one. She was
awe-stricken by the grandeur--the largeness and airiness of her new
surroundings.

There was not one of the sitting-rooms at Wimperfield in which, even
after a month's residence, she could feel thoroughly at home. She envied
Mrs. Moggs, the housekeeper, her parlour looking into the stable-yard,
which seemed to Sir Reginald's wife the only really snug room within the
four walls of that respectable mansion. Mrs. Moggs' old-fashioned grate
and brass fender, little round table, tea-tray, and kettle singing on the
hob, reminded Fanny Palliser of her own girlhood, when her mother's
sitting room had worn just such an air of humble comfort. Those white
and gold drawing-rooms, with their amber satin curtains and Georgian
furniture, had a scenic and altogether artificial appearance to the
unaccustomed eyes of one born and reared amidst the narrow surroundings
of poverty.

And then, again, how terrible was that highly respectable old butler, who
knew the ways of gentle folks so much better than his new mistress did;
and who put her to shame, in a quiet unconscious way, a hundred times a
day by his superior knowledge and experience. How often she asked for
things that were altogether wrong; how continually she exposed her
ignorance, both to Rogers the butler, and to Moggs, the housekeeper; and
what a feeble creature she felt herself in the presence of Jane Dyson,
her own maid, who had come to her fresh from the sainted presence of an
archbishop's wife, and who was inclined to be slightly dictatorial in
consequence, always quoting and referring to that paragon of women, her
late mistress, whose only error in life had been the leaving it before
Jane Dyson had saved enough to justify her retirement from service. Those
highly-educated retainers were a terror to poor little Fanny Palliser.
There were times when she would have been glad to be impecunious again,
and running after her faithful Lizette, who had every possible failing
except that of being superior to her mistress. These Wimperfield servants
were models; but they did not disguise their quiet contempt for a lady
who was evidently a stranger in that sphere where powdered footmen and
elaborate dinners are among the indispensables of existence.

Only six weeks, and Sir Reginald and his family were established in the
place that had been Sir Vernon's, and the old servants waited on their
new lord, and all the mechanical routine of life went on as smoothly as
if there had been no change of masters. Ida found herself wondering which
was the reality and which the dream--the past or the present. There had
been a few days of excitement, hurry, and confusion at Les Fontaines
after the awful news of the wreck: and then Sir Reginald had come to
London with his wife and boy, and had put up at the Grosvenor Hotel while
the lawyers settled the details of his inheritance. Sir Vernon had left
no will. Everything went to the heir-at-law--pictures, plate, horses and
carriages, and those wonderful cellars of old wine which had been slowly
accumulated by Sir Reginald's father and grandfather.

Reginald Palliser passed from the pittance of a half-pay captain, eked
out by the desultory donations of his open-handed nephew, to the
possession of a fine income and a perfectly-appointed establishment.
There was nothing for him to do, no trouble of furnishing, or finding
servants. He came into his kingdom, and everything was ready for him. Yet
in this house where he was born, in which every stone was familiar to
him, how little that was mortal was left of those vanished days of his
youth! Among all these old servants there was only one who remembered the
new master's boyhood; and that was a deaf old helper in the garden, a man
who seemed past all labour except the sweeping up of dead leaves, being
himself little better than a withered leaf. This man remembered wheeling
the present baronet about the gardens in his barrow, forty years ago--his
function even then being to collect the fallen leaves--and was a little
offended with Sir Reginald for having forgotten the man and the fact.

At the Grosvenor Hotel, calm even in the dawn of his altered fortunes,
Brian Walford found his father-in-law, and told, with the pleasantest,
most plausible air, the story of Ida's clandestine marriage, slurring
over every detail that reflected on himself, and making very light of
Ida's revulsion of feeling, which he represented as a girlish whim,
rather than a woman's bitter anger against the husband who had allowed
her to marry him under a delusion as to his social status.

Sir Reginald was at first inclined to be angry. The whole thing was a
mystification--absurd, discreditable. His daughter had grossly deceived
him. It needed all the stepmother's gentle influence to soften the
outraged father's feelings. But Lady Palliser said all that was kindly
about Ida's youth and inexperience, her impulsive nature; and a man
who has just dropped into £7,000 a year is hardly disposed to be
inflexible. Sir Reginald was too generous even to question Brian
closely as to his capability of supporting a wife. The man was a
gentleman--young, good-looking, with winning manners, and a member
of a family in which his daughter had found warm and generous friends.
Ida's father could not be uncivil to a Wendover.

'Well, my good fellow, it is altogether a foolish business,' he said;
'but what's done cannot be undone. I am sorry my daughter did not ask my
leave before she plunged into matrimony; but I suppose I must forgive
her, and her husband into the bargain. You have both acted like a pair of
children, falling in love and marrying, and quarrelling, and making
friends again, without rhyme or reason; but the best thing you can do is
to bring your wife--your wife? my little Ida a wife?--Good God, how old I
am getting!--yes, you had better bring her to Wimperfield next week, and
then we can get better acquainted with you, and I shall see what I can do
for you both.'

This no doubt meant a handsome allowance. Brian Walford felt, for
the first time in his life, that he had fallen on his feet. He hated
the country, and Wimperfield would be only a shade better than
Kingthorpe; but it was essential that he should please his easy-tempered
father-in-law.

'If he wanted me to live in the moon I should have to go there!' he said
to himself. And then Lady Palliser went into an adjoining chamber and
brought forth little Vernon, to exhibit him, as a particular favour and
privilege, to Ida's husband; and Brian, who detested children, had to
appear grateful, and to address himself to the irksome task of making
friends with the little man. This was not easy, for the boy, though frank
and bright enough in a general way, did not take to his new connexion:
and it was only when Brian spoke of Ida that his young brother-in-law
became friendly. 'Where is she? why haven't you brought her? Take me to
her directly-minute,' said the child, whose English savoured rather of
the lower than the upper strata of society.

Brian snapped at the opportunity, and carried the boy off instanter in a
Hansom cab to that hotel near Fleet Street where his young wife was
pining in her second-floor sitting-room, like a wild woodland bird behind
the bars of a cage. The young man thought the little fellow might be a
harbinger of peace--nor was he mistaken, for Ida melted at sight of him,
and seemed quite happy when they three sat down to a dainty little
luncheon, she waiting upon and petting her young brother all the while.

'This is partridge, isn't it?' asked Vernie. 'I like partridge. We always
have nice dinners now--jellies, and creams, and wine that goes fizz; and
we all have the same as pa. We didn't in France, you know,' explained the
boy, unconscious of any reason for suppressing facts in the presence of
the waiter.

'Mamma and I used to have any little bits--it didn't matter for us, you
know--we could pinch. Mamma was used to it, and it was good for me, you
know, because I'm often bilious--and it's better to go without rich
things than to take Gregory's powder, isn't it?'

'Decidedly,' said Brian, who was not too old to remember that bugbear of
the Edinburgh pharmacopoeia.

'And now we have dessert every day,' continued Vernie; 'lovely
dessert--almonds and raisins, and pears, and nuts, and things, just like
Christmas Day. I thought that kind of dessert was only meant for
Christmas Day. And we have men to wait upon us, dressed like clergymen,
just like him,' added the child, pointing to the waiter.

'Oh, Vernie, it's so rude to point,' murmured Ida.

'Not for me; I can't be rude,' replied the boy, with conviction. 'I'm a
baronet's son. I shall be a baronet myself some day. Mamma told me. I may
do what I like.'

'No, pet, you must be a gentleman. If you were a king's son you would
have to be that.'

'Then I wouldn't. What's the use of being rich if you can't do what you
like?' demanded Vernie, who already began to have ideas, and who was as
sharp for his age as the chicken which begins to catch flies directly its
head is out of the shell.

'What's the good of being somebody if you have to behave just as well as
if you were nobody?' said Brian. 'Little Vernon has the feudal idea
strongly developed; no doubt; in evolution from some long-departed
ancestor, who lived in the days when there were different laws for the
knight and the villain. Now, how are we going to amuse this young
gentleman? I have leave to keep him till half-past seven, when we are all
three to dine with Sir Reginald and Lady Palliser at the Grosvenor.'

Vernie, who was half way through his second glass of sparkling moselle,
burst out laughing.

'Lady Palliser!' he exclaimed, 'it's so funny to hear mamma called Lady:
because she isn't a lady, you know. She used to run about the house all
day with her sleeves tucked up, and she used to cook; and Jane, our
English servant, said no lady ever did that. Jane and mamma used to
quarrel,' explained the infant, calmly.

'Jane knew very little about what makes a lady or not a lady,' said Ida,
grieved to find a want of elevation in the little man's ideas. 'Some of
the truest and noblest ladies have worked hard all their lives.'

'But not with their sleeves tucked up,' argued the boy; 'no lady would do
that. Papa told mamma so one day, and _he_ must know. He told her she was
cook, slush, and bottle-washer. Wasn't that funny? You worked hard too,
didn't you, Ida?' interrogated Vernon. 'Papa paid you were a regular
drudge at Miss Pew's. He said it was a hard thing that such a handsome
girl as you should be a drudge, but his poverty and not his will
consented.'

'Vernie quotes Shakespeare,' exclaimed Brian, trying to take the thing
lightly, but painfully conscious of the head waiter, who was deliberately
removing crumbs with a silver scraper. It could not matter to any one
what the waiter--a waif from Whitechapel or the Dials most likely--knew
or did not know of Mr. and Mrs. Wendover's family affairs; but there is
an instinctive feeling that any humiliating details of life should be
kept from these menials. They should be maintained in the delusion that
the superior class which employs them has never known want or difficulty.
Perhaps the maintenance of this great sham is not without its evil, as it
is apt to make the waiter class rapacious and exacting, and ready to
impute meanness to that superior order which has wallowed in wealth from
the cradle.

'Suppose we go to the Tower?' inquired Brian. 'Perhaps Vernie has never
seen the Tower?'

Neither Vernon nor Ida had seen that stony page of feudal history, and
Vernon had to be informed what manner of building it was, his sole idea
of a tower being Babel, which he had often tried to reproduce with his
wooden bricks, with no happier result than was obtained in the original
attempt. So another Hansom was chartered, and they all went off to the
Tower, Vernon sitting between them, perky and loquacious, and intensely
curious about every object they passed on their way.

Interested in the associations of the grim old citadel, amused and
pleaded by little Vernon's prattle as he trotted about holding his
sister's hand, Ida forgot to be unhappy upon that particular afternoon.
The whole history of her marriage was a misery to her; the marriage
itself was a mistake; but there are hours of respite in the saddest life,
and she was brave enough to try and make the best of hers. Above all, she
was too generous to wish her husband to be painfully conscious of the
change in their relative positions, that he was now in a manner dependent
upon her father. Her own proud nature, which would have profoundly felt
the humiliation of such a position as that which Brian Walford now
occupied, was moved to pity for those feelings of shame and degradation
which he might or might not experience, and she was kinder to him on this
account than she would have been otherwise.

The dinner at the Grosvenor went off with as much appearance of goodwill
and proper family feeling as if there had been no flaw in Ida's
matrimonial bliss. Sir Reginald was full of kindness for his new
son-in-law: as he would have been for any other human creature whom he
had asked to dinner. Hospitality was a natural instinct of his being, and
he invited Brian Wendover to take up his abode at Wimperfield as easily
as he would have offered him a cigar.

'There are no end of rooms. It is a regular barrack,' he said. 'You and
Ida can be very comfortable without putting my little woman or me out of
the way.'

This had happened just six weeks ago, and now Ida and her half-brother
were wandering about among the ferny hollows and breezy heights of the
park, or roving off to adjacent heaths and hills, and it seemed almost
as if they had lived there all their lives. Vernon had been quick to
make himself at home in the stately old house, rummaging and foraging
in every room, routing out all manner of forgotten treasures, riding his
father's old rocking-horse, exploring stables and lofts, saddle-rooms,
and long-disused holes and corners, going up ladders, climbing walls,
and endangering life and limbs in every possible way which infantine
ingenuity could suggest.

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