Charlotte's Inheritance by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (best beach reads .txt) 📖

He was yet at the beginning of the long dusty road that leads to the temple of Fame. It is enough to state that he found the dusty high-road rather difficult walking, and that he was pelted with more mud, flung by nameless assailants hidden behind the hedges, than he had anticipated when he set out upon the first stage of his journey. Happily, he found pleasant fellow-travellers and kindly encouragement from an indulgent public, and was thus able to accept the mud which bespattered his garments in a very placid spirit, and to make light of all obstacles in the great highway.

The cottage at Wimbledon was no longer a dream. It was a pleasant reality, the pride and delight of Mrs. Sheldon and Ann Woolper. It was a picturesque dwelling-place, half cottage, half villa, situated on the broad high-road from London to Kingston, with all the woodland of Richmond Park to be seen from the windows at the back. Only a wall divided Mr. Hawkehurst's gardens from the coverts of the Queen. It was like a royal demesne, Charlotte said; whereupon her husband insisted that it should be christened by the name of a royal dwelling, and so called it Charlottenburgh.

Mr. Hawkehurst had secured this delightful abode for a considerable term of years, and upon the furnishing and decoration of the pretty rustic rooms Charlotte and he lavished unmeasured care. The delicious excitement of "picking up," or, in more elegant parlance, "collecting," was to these two happy people an inexhaustible source of pleasure. Every eccentric little table, every luxurious chair, had its special history, and had been the subject of negotiation and diplomacy that might have sufficed a Burleigh in the reorganization of Western Europe. The little Dresden and Vienna cups and saucers in the maple cabinet had been every one bought from a different dealer. The figures on the mantelpiece were Old Chelsea, of a quality that would have excited the envy of a Bernal or a Bonn, and had only fallen to the proud possessors by a sequence of fortuitous circumstances, the history of which was almost as thrilling as the story of Boehmer's diamond-necklace. The curtains in the drawing-room had draped the _portières_ of the lovely Lady Blessington, and had been bought for a song by Valentine Hawkehurst, after passing through the hands of brokers and dealers innumerable. The tapestry-covered Louis-Quatorze chairs had belonged to Madame de Sévigné, and had furnished that dull country house whence she wrote the liveliest letters extant to her disreputable cousin, Bussy, Count of Babutin. These inestimable treasures had been picked up by Mr. and Mrs. Hawkehurst from a bric-à-brac merchant in a little court at the back of the Rue Vivienne, whither the young couple had gone arm-in-arm to choose a bonnet on their first pleasure-trip to Paris. The clock in the modest dining-room had been secured from the repository of the same merchant, and was warranted to have sounded the last domestic hours of Maximilian Robespierre in his humble lodging _chez le Menuisier_. The inkstand into which Mr. Hawkehurst dipped his rapid pen had served the literary career of Voltaire; the blotting-book on which he wrote had been used by Balzac.

To the plausible fictions of the second-hand dealer Mr. and Mrs. Hawkehurst lent willing ears, and it seemed to them as if these associations, for which they had paid somewhat dearly, imparted a new grace to their home.

The arrangement and superintendence of all these treasures gave poor Georgy endless pleasure and employment; but in her heart of hearts she believed in the prim splendours of the dismantled Lawn as much superior to these second-hand objects of art and upholstery. Nor did Ann Woolper regard the Chelsea figures and Dresden teacups and old black Albert-Dürer engravings as anything better than an innocent eccentricity on the part of the master of the house, for the saving of whose purse she managed and economized as faithfully as she had done for that lost master whereof the memory was so bitter.

It will be seen, therefore, that Mr. Hawkehurst with a wife, a mother-in-law, and a faithful old servant, was likely to be well taken care of; a little spoiled perhaps by "much cherishing," but carefully guarded from all those temptations which are supposed to assail the bachelor man-of-letters, toiling alone and neglected in Temple chambers. For him the days passed in a pleasant monotony of constant labour, lightened always by the thought of those for whom he worked, cheered ever by the fond hope of future fame. He was no longer a bookmaker. He had written a book, the proceeds of which had enabled him to furnish the Wimbledon villa; and he was engaged in writing a second book, the fruits whereof would secure the needs of the immediate future. He had insured his life for a considerable amount, and had shown himself in all things prudent to a degree that verged upon Philistinism. But the policies taken out on Charlotte's life by Mr. Sheldon had been suffered to lapse. Valentine would have no money staked on that dear head.

The steed which Charlotte had desired for her husband's pleasure, the library which she had catalogued so often, were yet among the delights of the future; but life has lost half its brightness when there is no unfulfilled desire left to the dreamer; and the horse which Mr. Hawkehurst was to ride in time to come, and the noble library which he was to collect, were the pleasant themes of Charlotte's conversation very often, as she and her husband walked on the heights of Wimbledon in the twilight, when his day's work was done.

These twilight walks were the happy holidays of his life, and a part of his liberal education. He told his wife everything, every literary scheme, every fancy, every shadowy outline of future work, every new discovery in the boundless realms of Bookland. His enthusiasm; his hero-worship; his setting-up of one favourite and knocking-down of another; his unchristian pleasure in that awful slating of poor Jones in this week's _Saturday_, or the flaying alive of Robinson in the _Bond Street Backbiter_;--in a word, his "shop" never became wearisome to Charlotte. She listened always with a like rapture and sympathy; she worshipped his favourites of Bookland; she welcomed his friends and fellow-workers with unvarying sweetness she devised and superintended the fitting-up of a smoking-room that was perfectly paradisaical, a glimpse of the Alhambra in miniature; and that obnoxious dish, the cold shoulder, was never served in Mr. Hawkehurst's dwelling. So sweet a wife, so pleasant a home, popularized the institution of matrimony among the young writer's bachelor friends; and that much-abused and cruelly maligned member of the human race, the mother-in-law, was almost rehabilitated by Mrs. Sheldon's easy good-nature and evident regard for the interests of her daughter's husband.

And after all the groping among dry as dust records of a bygone century, after all the patient following of those faint traces on the sands of time left by the feet of Matthew Haygarth, _this_ was Charlotte's Inheritance,--a heart whose innocence and affection made home a kind of earthly paradise, and gave to life's commonest things a charm that all the gold ever found in California could not have imparted to them. This was Charlotte's Inheritance,--the tender, unselfish nature of the Haygarths and Hallidays; and thus dowered, her husband would not have exchanged her for the wealthiest heiress whose marriage was ever chronicled in _Court Circular_ or _Court Journal_.


CHAPTER VIII.


LOST SIGHT OF.

A year and a half had passed since the disappearance of Philip Sheldon from the circle in which he had been considered a person of some importance. The repudiation of those bills by which he had sustained his exhausted credit, or rather the discovery that the companies upon which the bills pretended to be drawn were of all shadows the most shadowy, had brought consternation upon many, and ruin upon some. Bitter and unmeasured were the terms in which City men spoke of that Phil Sheldon with whom they had eaten the sacred bait and quaffed the social moselle in the taverns of Greenwich and Blackwall.

There is a saying current on the Stock Exchange to the effect that the man who fails, and disappears from among his fellows behind a curtain of commercial cloud, is sure to return sooner or later to his old circle, with a moustache and a brougham. For Philip Sheldon there was, however, no coming back. The moustache and the brougham of the chastened and penitent defaulter were not for him. By his deliberate and notorious dishonour he had shut the door against the possibility of return. It may be supposed that the defaulter knew this, for he did not come back; and since he had no lack of moral courage, he would scarcely have refrained from showing himself once more in his old haunts, if it had been possible for him to face the difficulties of his position.

Time passed, and there came no tidings of the missing man, though a detective was despatched to America in search of him by one vengeful sufferer among the many victims of the fictitious bills-of-exchange. It was supposed that he must inevitably go to America, and thither went his pursuer, but with no result except the expenditure of money and the further exasperation of the vengeful sufferer.

"What will you do with him, if you get him?" asked a philosophical friend of the sufferer. "He has nothing to surrender. Zabulon had a bill-of-sale on his furniture."

"Furniture!" cried the infuriated victim; "I don't want his furniture. I want his flesh and bones. I want to shut him up in Dartmoor Prison, or to get him twenty years' hard labour at Portland Island."

"That sort of man would get a ticket-of-leave in less than twelve months," replied the philosophic friend. "I'm afraid you are only throwing good money after bad."

The event proved this gentleman but too able a seer. In the monster city of New York Philip Sheldon had disappeared like a single drop of water flung upon the Atlantic Ocean. There was no trace of him: too intangible for the grasp of international law, he melted into the mass of humanity, only one struggler the more in the great army perpetually fighting life's desperate battle.

From among all those who had known him this man had utterly vanished, and not one sigh of regret followed him in his unknown wanderings--not one creature amongst all those who had taken his hand and given him friendly greeting thought of him kindly, or cared to know whither he went or how he prospered. He had not left in the house that had sheltered him for years so much as a dog to whine at his door or listen for his returning footstep.

This fact, if he had known it or considered it, would have troubled him very little. He had played his game for a certain stake, and had lost it. This he felt, and cursed his own too cautious play as the cause of his defeat. That there were higher stakes for which he might have played an easier game, was a fact that never occurred to him. In his philosophy there was indeed nothing higher given to the hopes of man than worldly success, and a dull, cold, prosperous life spent among prosperous acquaintance.

He was gone, and those who remembered him most keenly--Valentine Hawkehurst, Diana Paget, Ann Woolper--remembered him with a shudder. The old Yorkshirewoman thought of him sometimes as she bent over the little muslin-bedecked cradle where the hope of the Hawkehursts slumbered, and looked round fearfully in the gloaming, half expecting to see his dreaded face glower upon her, dark and threatening, from between the curtains of the window.

It was a