Phantom Fortune, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [free e novels .txt] 📗

have learnt to love me.'

'And will you be content to stay with me when your husband has gone to London?'

'Yes, but I shall try to prevent his going very often, or staying very long. I shall try to wind myself into his heart, so that there will be an aching void there when we are parted.'

Lady Maulevrier proceeded to tell Mary all her arrangements. Three handsome rooms in the east wing, a bedroom, dressing-room, and boudoir, were to be made ready for the newly-married, couple. Fräulein Müller was to be dismissed with a retiring pension, in order that Lady Mary and her husband might feel themselves master and mistress in the lower part of the house.

'And if your husband really means to devote himself to literature, he can have no better workshop than the library I have put together,' said Lady Maulevrier.

'And no better adviser and guide than you, dear grandmother, you who have read everything that has been written worth reading during the last half century.'

'I have read a great deal, Mary, but I hardly know if I am any wiser on that account,' answered Lady Maulevrier. 'After all, however much of other people's wisdom we may devour, it is in ourselves that we are thus, or thus. Our past follies rise up against us at the end of life; and we see how little our book-learning has helped us to stand against foolish impulses, against evil passions. "Be good," Mary, "and let who will be wise," as the poet says. A faithful heart is your only anchor in the stormy seas of life. My dear, I am so glad you are going to be married.'

'It is very sudden,' said Mary.

'Very sudden; yet in your case that does not much matter. You have quite made up your mind about Mr. Hammond, I believe.'

'Made up my mind! I began to worship him the first night he came here.'

'Foolish child. Well, there is no deed to wait for settlements. You have only your allowance as Lord Maulevrier's daughter--a first charge on the estate, which cannot be made away with or anticipated, and of which no husband can deprive you.'

'He shall have every sixpence of it,' murmured Mary.

'And Mr. Hammond, though he tells me he is better off than I supposed, can have nothing to settle. So there will be nothing forfeited by a marriage without settlements.'

Mary could not enter upon the question. It was even of less importance than the wedding gown.

The gong sounded for luncheon.

'Steadman's dogcart is to take Mr. Hammond to the station at half-past two,' said Lady Maulevrier, 'so you had better go and give him his luncheon.'

Mary needed no second bidding. She flew downstairs, and met her lover in the hall.

What a happy luncheon it was! Fräulein 'mounched, and mounched, and mounched,' like the sailor's wife eating chestnuts: but those two lovers lunched upon moonshine, upon each other's little words and little looks, upon their own ineffable bliss. They sat side by side, and helped each other to the nicest thing's on the table, but neither could eat, and they got considerably mixed in their way of eating, taking chutnee with strawberry cream, and currant jelly with asparagus. What did it matter? Everything tasted of bliss.

'You have had absolutely nothing to eat,' said Mary, piteously, as the dogcart came grinding round upon the dry gravel.

'Oh, I have done splendidly--thanks. I have just had a macaroon and some of that capital gorgonzola. God bless you, dearest, and _à revoir, à revoir_ to-morrow.'

'And to-morrow I shall be Mary Hammond,' cried Mary, clasping her hands. 'Isn't it capital fun?'

They were in the porch alone. The servants were all at dinner, save the groom with the cart, Miss Müller was still munching at the well-spread table in the dining-room.

John Hammond folded his sweetheart in his arms for one brief embrace; there was no time for loitering. In another moment he was springing into the cart. A shake of the reins, and he was driving slowly down the steep avenue.

'Life is full of partings,' Mary said to herself, as she watched the last glimpse of the dogcart between the trees down in the road below, 'but this one is to be very short, thank God.'

She wondered what she should do with herself for the rest of the afternoon, and finally, finding that she was not wanted by her grandmother until afternoon tea, she set out upon a round of visits to her favourite cottagers, to bid them a long farewell as a spinster.

'You'll be away a long time, I suppose, Lady Mary?' said one of her humble friends; 'you'll be going to Switzerland or Italy, or some of those foreign parts where great ladies and gentlemen travel for their honeymoons?'

But Mary declared that she would be absent a week at longest She was coming back to take care of her invalid grandmother; and she was not going to marry a great gentleman, but a man who would have to work for his living.

She went back to Fellside, and read the _Times_, and poured out Lady Maulevrier's tea, and sat on her low stool by the sofa, and the old and the young woman were as happy and confidential together as if they had been always the nearest and dearest to each other. Her ladyship had seen Miss Müller, and had informed that excellent person that her services at Fellside would no longer be required after Lady Mary's marriage; but that her devotion to her duties during the last fourteen years should be rewarded by a pension which, together with her savings, would enable her to spend the rest of her days in repose. Miss Müller was duly grateful, and owned to a tender longing for the _Heimath_, and declared herself ready to retire from her post whenever her ladyship pleased.

'I shall go back to Germany directly I leave you, and I shall live and die there, unless I am wanted by one of my old pupils. But should Lady Lesbia or Lady Mary need my services for their daughters, in days to come, they can command me. For no one else will I abandon the Fatherland.'

The Fräulein thus easily disposed of, Lady Mary felt that matrimony would verily mean independence. And yet she was prepared to regard her husband as her master. She meant to obey him in all meekness and reverence of spirit.

She spent the rest of the afternoon and the whole of the evening in her grandmother's sitting-room, dining _tête-à-tête_ with the invalid for the first time since her illness. Lady Maulevrier talked much of Mary's future, and of Lesbia's; but it was evident that she was full of uneasiness upon the latter subject.

'I don't know what Lesbia is going to do with her life,' she said, with a sigh. 'Her letters tell me of nothing but gowns and parties; and Georgina Kirkbank can only expatiate upon Mr. Smithson's wealth, and the grand position he is going to occupy by-and-by. I should like to see both my granddaughters married before I die--yes, I should like to see Lesbia's fate secure, if she were to be only Lady Lesbia Smithson.'

'She cannot fail to make a good match, grandmother,' said Mary.

'I am beginning to lose faith in her future,' answered Lady Maulevrier. 'There seems to be a fatality about the career of particularly attractive girls. They are too confident of their power to succeed in life. They trifle with fortune, fascinate the wrong people, and keep the right people at arm's length. I think if I had been Lesbia's guide in society her first season would have counted for more than it is likely to count for under Lady Kirkbank's management. I should have awakened Lesbia from the dream of dress and dancing--the mere butterfly life of a girl who never looks beyond the present moment. But now go and give orders about your packing, Mary. It is past ten, and Clara had better pack your trunks early to-morrow morning.'

Clara was a modest Easedale damsel, who had been promoted to be Lady Mary's personal attendant, when the more mature Kibble had gone away with Lady Lesbia. Mary required very little waiting upon, but she was not the less glad to have a neat little smiling maiden devoted to her service, ready to keep her rooms neat and trim, to go on errands to the cottagers, to arrange the flowers in the old china bowls, and to make herself generally useful.

It seemed a strange thing to have to furnish a trousseau from the wardrobe of everyday life--a trousseau in which nothing, except half-a-dozen pairs of gloves, a pair of boots, and a few odds and ends of lace and ribbons would be actually new. Mary thought very little of the matter, but the position of things struck her maid as altogether extraordinary and unnatural.

'You should have seen the things Miss Freeman had, Lady Mary,' exclaimed the damsel, 'the daughter of that cotton-spinning gentleman from Manchester, who lives at The Gables--you should have seen her new gowns and things when she was married. Mrs. Freeman's maid keeps company with my brother James--he's in the stables at Freeman's, you know, Lady Mary--and she asked me in to look at the trousseau two days before the wedding. I never saw such beautiful dresses--such hats--such bonnets--such jackets and mantles. It was like going into one of those grand shops at York, and having all the things in the shop pulled out for one to look at--such silks and satins--and trimmed--ah! how those dresses was trimmed. The mystery was how the young lady could ever get herself into them, or sit down when she'd got one of them on.'

'Instruments of torture, Clara. I should hate such gowns, even if I were going to marry a rich man, as I suppose Miss Freeman was.'

'Not a bit of it, Lady Mary. She was only going to marry a Bolton doctor with a small practice; but her maid told me she was determined she'd get all she could out of her pa, in case he should lose all his money and go bankrupt. They said that trousseau cost two thousand pounds.'

'Well, Clara, I'd rather have my tailor gowns, in which I can scramble about the ghylls and crags just as I like.' There was a pale yellow Indian silk, smothered with soft yellow lace, which would serve for a wedding gown; for indifferent as Mary was to the great clothes question, she wanted to look in some wise as a bride. A neat chocolate-coloured cloth, almost new from the tailor's hands, with a little cloth toque to match, would do for the wedding journey. All the details of Mary's wardrobe were the perfection of neatness. She had grown very neat and careful in her habits since her engagement, anxious to be industrious and frugal in all things--a really handy housewife for a hard-worked bread-winner. And now she was told that Mr. Hammond was not so poor as she had thought. She would not be obliged to stint herself, and manage, as she had supposed when she went about among the cottagers, taking lessons in household economy. It was almost a disappointment.

She and Clara finished the packing that night, Mary being much too excited for the possibility of sleep. There was not much to pack, only one roomy American trunk--a trunk which held everything--a Gladstone bag for things that might possibly be wanted in a hurry, and a handsome dressing-bag, Maulevrier's last birthday gift to his sister.

Mary had received no