The Golden Calf by M. E. Braddon

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'I want Jack to come and see me, and sit with me,' said the boy; 'he
could come to tea couldn't he, mother? You wouldn't mind, would you?'

'My dear, he is not a proper person for you to associate with,' replied
Lady Palliser. 'You oughtn't to bemean yourself by associating with your
inferiors.'

'Bemean fiddlesticks!' cried Vernie; 'I don't believe there is such a
word. Jack is the cleverest man I know--cleverer than Mr. Jardine, and
that's saying a great deal.'

Vainly did the widow endeavour to awaken her son's mind to the great gulf
which divides a baronet from a hawker--a gulf not to be bridged over by
the genius of a Dalton or a Whewell--and to those nice distinctions which
obtain between a casual out-of-door intercourse with a man of this class,
and a deliberate invitation to tea.

'When I'm well enough to go out I can go to him,' answered Vernon,
doggedly; 'but now I'm ill he must come to me; and it's very unkind of
you not to let him come. Blow his station in life! If he was a duke I
shouldn't want him.'

'I can't think what you can want with this low person, when Ida and I are
always doing everything to amuse you,' moaned Lady Palliser.

'Ida's a darling, and you too, mother,' said the boy, putting his thin
little arms round his mother's neck. He was now just able to move those
poor arms, which had been so racked with pain a little while ago. 'But I
get tired of everything--Shakespeare, Dickens, even. It's so long to stay
in bed; and I think Jack would amuse me more than anyone, if you'd let
him come.'

'He shall come, darling. Is there anything I could refuse you?' said the
mother, eagerly, moved by the sight of tears in Vernon's innocent blue
eyes.

'Ask him to come to tea this afternoon.'

'Yes, love; I'll go and see about it this minute.'

Lady Palliser went in quest of Ida, who was sitting in Brian's study
reading, while her husband wrote, or made believe to write, at a table in
the window piled with books of reference, which he consulted every now
and then, lolling back in his chair and reading listlessly--altogether a
mere show and pretence of study, never likely to result in anything--a
weary dawdling away of the long summer morning.

To Ida, Lady Palliser explained her difficulty. A note of some kind must
be written to this Cheap Jack; and the little woman did not know how to
word that note.

'If I say, "Lady Palliser presents her compliments to Mr. Cheap Jack, and
requests the pleasure of his company," it seems like patting myself on a
level with him, don't you know. I wish you'd write for me, Ida.'

'Willingly, dear mother; but I'm afraid the man won't come. He is such a
very rough diamond.'

'Oh! but surely he will be gratified at an invitation to tea!'

'I'm afraid not. But I'll write at once. Anything to please Vernon.' Ida
wrote as follows:--

'Sir Vernon Palliser, who is slowly recovering from a serious illness,
will be very pleased if his friend Jack will spend an hour or two with
him this afternoon. Any hour convenient to Jack will be agreeable to Sir
Vernon, but he would much like Jack to drink tea with him between four
and five. The other members of the family will not intrude upon the sick
room while Jack is there.'

'I think that will do,' said Ida; and Lady Palliser carried off the note,
wondering at her stepdaughter's cleverness, yet inclined to fear that the
hermit of Blackman's Hanger might be offended at being addressed as Jack,
_tout court;_ and yet how could one deal ceremoniously with a man who
acknowledged no surname, and was known to all the neighbourhood only as
'Cheap Jack'?

Mr. Fosbroke came for his noontide visit just after this business of the
letter, and found Ida and her stepmother both with the invalid. He was
told what they had done.

'Do you think he'll come?' Vernon asked, eagerly.

'I should think he would. Sir Vernon,' answered the doctor; 'for I know
he takes a keen interest in your recovery. All the time you were really
bad he used to hang about the Park gate every day as I went out, and
stopped me to ask how you were. And he asked after you, too, Mrs.
Wendover,--seemed to be afraid your anxiety about this little man would
be too much for you.'

'Remarkably polite of him,' said Ida, laughing; 'yet he treated me in the
most bearish manner when I went to his cottage.'

'If he is a bear, he is a bear with gentlemanly instincts,' replied the
doctor. 'Nothing could be more respectful, more delicate, than his
inquiries about you; and I could see by the expression of his eyes that
he really felt for you. He has very fine eyes.'

'One of the tokens of his gipsy blood, I suppose,' said Ida.

'Yes; I believe he is a gipsy. They are a keen-witted race.'

'A gipsy!--and with so much plate as there is in this house!' exclaimed
Lady Palliser. 'Oh, Vernie, you ought not to have asked me to ask him!'

'Don't be afraid, mother,' said Ida; 'he shall be sharply looked after,
if he does come.'

'Looked after, indeed! Why, you might give him the run of a silver mine.
What does he care for your trumpery silver spoons?' cried Vernon,
contemptuously.

The invalid was doomed to disappointment. About two hours after Ida's
letter had been despatched, a small boy brought Cheap Jack's reply, to
the following effect:--'Jack is very sorry he cannot drink tea with his
little friend--'

'Little friend, indeed! What vulgar familiarity!' exclaimed Lady
Palliser.

'But he belongs to the dwellers in tents, and would be out of place in a
fine house--'

'Then he _is_ a gipsy,' said Lady Palliser. 'What a luck; escape!'

'He looks forward to the pleasure of seeing Sir Vernon on the Hanger
before long. Meanwhile he can only send his duty and best wishes for Sir
Vernon's speedy recovery.'

'The end is a little better than the commencement,' said Lady Palliser;
'but I call it a great liberty for a Cheap Jack to talk of my son as his
little friend.'

'He might have left out "little," considering that I shall be twelve next
birthday,' said Vernon, with dignity. 'But I am his friend, mother; and I
mean to be his friend always. And when I am grown up I shall take him to
the Rocky Mountains, and we will hunt moose and things.'

Lady Palliser sighed, and hoped that this passion for low company would
pass with the other follies of childhood.

Now that all danger was past, and that Vernon was on the high-road to
health, Ida spent the greater part of her time in attendance upon her
husband. It was her duty, she told herself; and she who had so failed in
love must needs fulfil every duty. But the performance of this simple,
wifely duty of attendance on an invalid husband was fraught with pain:
his temper was so irritable, his mind was so weak, his whole being so
degraded and sunk by his infirmity, that the progress of his decay was,
of all forms of dissolution, the most painful for the looker-on. That he
was sinking into a lower depth of degradation, rather than recovering,
was sadly obvious to Ida, in spite of occasional intervals of better
feeling and rare flashes of his old brightness.

The case was altogether perplexing. Towler admitted that he was more
puzzled than he had ever been about any patient whom he had enjoyed the
honour of attending. Mr. Wendover, under his present conditions of
absolute sobriety, and with youth on his side, ought to have shown a
decided improvement by this time; and yet there was no substantial
amelioration of his state, and his latest fit of the horrors, which
occurred only a night ago, had been quite as bad as the first which
Towler had witnessed.

'You do not think that he gets brandy without your knowledge?' inquired
Ida, blushing at the question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'If we believe! If! The whole future is an "if!" The future! What future
can there be for us? We came from nothing, we go back to nothing--we are
resolved into the elements which renew the earth for new comers. The
wheel of progress is always revolving--for the mass there is eternity,
infinity--no beginning, no end; but for the individual, his little span
of life begins and ends in corruption.'

The sound of the organ and the fresh rustic voices singing a familiar
hymn told Ida that the sermon was over. Lady Palliser was in an agony of
anxiety to get Brian away before the congregation came out. She and Ida
contrived to beguile him out of the churchyard and away towards
Wimperfield Park by a meadow path which was but little frequented. He
grew more rational as they walked home, but talked and argued all the way
with that semi-hysterical garrulity which was so painful to his hearers.

They found Vernon sitting up in bed, reading 'Grimm's Goblins,' and in
very high spirits. A most wonderful event had happened. Cheap Jack had
been to see him. He came with Mr. Fosbroke at twelve o'clock. He had
overtaken Mr. Fosbroke in the park, and had asked leave to go up to the
house with him, just for a peep at his patient.

'He only stayed a quarter of an hour,' said Vernie, 'for old Fos was in a
hurry; but it was such fun! He made me laugh all the time, and Fos
laughed, too,--he couldn't help it; and he said Jack's funny talk was
better for me now than all the medicine in his surgery; and I am to get
up for an hour or two this afternoon; and I am to have some chicken, and
as much asparagus as ever I can eat--and in less than a week I shall be
able to go up to the hanger and see Jack.'

'My darling, you will have to be much stronger first,' said Ida.

'Oh, but I am very strong now, Ah, there's Brian,' as his brother-in-law
looked in at the door. 'What a time since you're been to see me! You've
been ill, too, mother said. Come in, Brian. Don't mind about giving me a
bad cold that day. It wasn't your fault.'

Brian came into the room with a hang-dog look, and sat by the boy's bed.

'Yes, it was my fault, Vernie. I am a wretched creature. Everything that
I do ends badly. I didn't mean to do you any harm.'

'Of course not. You thought it was fun, and so did I, till I got tired
and hungry. But those men who were chasing you! There were no men, were
there? _I_ didn't see any,' said the boy, with his clear blue eyes on
Brian's haggard face.

'Yes, they were there, dodging behind the trees. I saw them plain
enough,' answered Brian, moodily. 'It was about that business I told you
of. No, I couldn't tell you; it was not a thing to tell a child--a
shameful accusation; but I have given them the slip.'

'Brian,' said Ida, laying her hand on his shoulder, 'why do you say these
things? You know you are talking nonsense.'

'Am I?' he muttered, cowering as he looked up at her. 'Well, it's as
likely as not. Ta, ta, Vernie! You're as well as ever you were. It is I
who am booked for a coffin!'

He went away with his feeble shuffling steps, so unlike the step of
youth; Ida following him, thinking sadly of the autumn afternoons when he
used to come leaping out of his boat--young, bright, and seemingly full
of life and energy, and when she half believed she loved him.

CHAPTER XXVII.

JOHN JARDINE SOLVES THE MYSTERY.

The Jardines came the next day, self-invited guests. Ida had tried to
prevent any such visit, in her desire to keep her husband's degradation
from the knowledge of his kindred; but Bessie was not to be so put off.
She had heard that Brian was ill, and that Vernon had been dangerously
ill; and her heart overflowed with love and compassion for her friend. It
was not easy for Mr. Jardine to leave his parish, but he would have done
a more difficult thing rather than see his wife unhappy; so on the Monday
morning after that scene in the church, Ida received a telegram to say
that Mr. and Mrs. Jardine were going to drive over to see her, and that
they would claim her hospitality for a couple of days.

It was a drive of over thirty miles, only to be done by a merciful man
between sunrise and sunset. Mr. and Mrs. Jardine started at five o'clock,
breakfasted and lunched on the road, and brought their faithful steed,
Drummer Boy, up to the Wimperfield portico at seven in the evening, with
not a hair turned. Ida was waiting for them in the portico.

'You darling, how pale and worried you look!' exclaimed Bessie, as she
hugged her friend; 'and why didn't you let me come before?'

'You could have done me no good, dear, when my troubles were at the
worst. Thank God the worst is over now--Vernie is getting on splendidly.
He was downstairs to-day, and ate such a dinner. We were quite afraid he
would bring on a relapse from over-eating. He is delighted at the idea of
seeing you and Mr. Jardine.'

'Has he gone to bed? I'll go up to see him at once, if I may,' said John
Jardine.

'He is in his own room. He asked to stop up till seven on purpose to see
you.'

'Then I'll go to him this instant.'

The luggage had been brought out of the light T cart, and the Drummer Boy
had been led round to the stables. Ida took Bessie to a room at the end
of the house, remote from Brian's apartments.

'Why, this isn't our usual room!' said Bessie, astonished.

'No, I thought this would be a pleasanter room in such warm weather. It
looks east,' Ida answered, rather feebly.

'It's a very nice room; only I felt more at home in the other. I have
occupied it so often, you know, I felt almost as if it were my own. Oh,
you cruel girl! why didn't you let me come sooner? I wanted so to be with
you in your trouble; and I offered to come directly I heard Vernie was
ill!'

'I know, dear; but you could have done no good. We were in God's hands.
We could only pray and wait.'

'Love can always do good. I could have comforted you!

'Nothing could have comforted me if he had died.'

'And Brian--poor Brian has been ill, too. I thought him very much changed
when we were here--so thin, so nervous, so depressed.'

'Yes, he was ill then--he is very ill now. We take all the care we can of
him, but he doesn't get any better.'

'Poor dear Brian! and he was once the soul of fun and gaiety--used to
sing comic songs so capitally. I suppose it is a poor thing for a man to
do, but it was very nice, especially at Christmas time. There are so few
people who can do anything to help one over Christmas Eve and Christmas
Day. Brian was good at everything--charades, clumps, consequences, dumb
crambo. And to think that he should be ill so long! What is his
complaint, Ida?' asked Bessie, suddenly becoming earnest, after a lapse
into childishness.

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