Birds of Prey, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [ebooks online reader txt] 📗

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.

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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 façon_, 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.

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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