Transcriber’s Note: Italicized text is surrounded by underscores:
_italics_.
DEAD MEN’S SHOES.
DEAD MEN’S SHOES
A Novel
BY THE AUTHOR OF
‘LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET’
ETC. ETC. ETC.
IN THREE VOLUMES
VOL. I.
[Illustration: (Colophon)]
LONDON
JOHN MAXWELL AND CO.
4, SHOE LANE, FLEET STREET
1876
[_All rights reserved._]
To SIR J. CORDY BURROWS, J.P.,
BRIGHTON.
DEAR SIR CORDY BURROWS,
If anything can justify the dedication of a book to any one, it
surely must be a friendship that has lasted nearly twenty years;
marked on your side by many acts of care and kindness, and on mine
by a most sincere appreciation of your genial and generous nature.
I have therefore great pleasure in recording this fact, and I have
still greater pleasure in dedicating this story to you.
Believe me,
Dear SIR CORDY BURROWS,
Very sincerely yours,
THE AUTHOR.
RICHMOND, _February, 1876_.
CONTENTS TO VOL. I.
CHAP. PAGE
I. ‘PLUNGED IN THE DEPTH OF HELPLESS POVERTY’ 1
II. ‘O WORLD, THY SLIPPERY TURNS!’ 24
III. THE TRUE METAL 39
IV. ‘HAD THE CHANCE BEEN WITH US THAT HAS NOT BEEN’ 47
V. SIBYL FAUNTHORPE’S DIARY 60
VI. THE ÉLITE OF REDCASTLE 94
VII. DRIFTING INTO HAVEN 104
VIII. THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL 117
IX. UNCLE TRENCHARD 131
X. SIBYL TAKES THE LEAD 140
XI. HOW STEPHEN TRENCHARD FORGIVES 152
XII. LOVE, THEN, HAD HOPE OF RICHER STORE 171
XIII. THE SWEETS OF LIFE 195
XIV. MAKING READY FOR VICTORY 208
XV. TOWN AND COUNTY 221
XVI. A MYSTERIOUS VISITOR 246
XVII. THE WANDERER’S RETURN 273
XVIII. AT ARM’S LENGTH 287
DEAD MEN’S SHOES.
CHAPTER I.
‘PLUNGED IN THE DEPTH OF HELPLESS POVERTY.’
A girl-woman alone on Battersea Bridge, reading a letter in the
December sunset--one of those mild autumnal afternoons which hang
upon the skirts of winter. A girl in years--a woman in cares. Dark
brown eyes set in a pale, sharply set face; mouth rosy and beautiful
in form, but too firm in its lines to be altogether lovely in a
woman. A girl whom the passers by look at interrogatively, wondering
that so much beauty should go alone, and so poorly clad. Her clothes
are not common, but shabby--a black silk dress that has once been
handsome and fashionable; a black felt hat trimmed with threadbare
velvet; a sealskin jacket worn bald at the edges, and dull with
exposure to hard weather; gloves which indicate that to be gloved
at all has cost the wearer a struggle; boots whose decay is no less
evident than the symmetry of the slender feet they cover. She walks
listlessly up and down the pavement of the bridge--just the one quiet
promenade to be found in this neighbourhood--reading a letter from
home, or the place which was her home two years ago. She has seen
much of the world during these two years,--in her own opinion too
much, for she has seen not the fair and shining fabric in life’s
loom, but the ragged sleave thereof.
This is the letter which she reads, not once, but three times over,
with deepest attention, as she paces up and down the quiet old
bridge, while the sunset fades from the cold gray river, and from
that Dutch picture of old red roofs and water-side shanties on the
Middlesex shore, which painters have loved, and which the Thames
Embankment may perchance have blotted out by this time:--
‘_Redcastle, December 11th, 186-._
‘MY DEAR SIBYL,
‘An event has happened which I think likely to exercise a
wonderful influence for good upon all our lives. Stephen
Trenchard, your mother’s brother, the uncle Stephen you have all
talked about as children, and whose wealth was your poor mother’s
boast, has returned to England, after nearly thirty years’
absence, yellow, wrinkled, withered, and eccentric in manners and
habits, but I think not unkindly disposed to any of us. He has
taken a house at Redcastle, and is anxious to have his nieces
about him, as he calls it. Marion has already exchanged the
discomforts and deprivations of a parish doctor’s household for
the Oriental luxuries of Lancaster Lodge. I dare say you remember
the house, a square stone building with two tall iron gates, and
two lodges within thirty yards of the hall door. Some people
will have grandeur at the sacrifice of consistency. He seems--I
mean your uncle Stephen--to have taken a great fancy to Marion.
I meet her lolling in his barouche, trying to look as if she had
been accustomed to ride in a three hundred guinea carriage all
her life, and really doing it very well. Jenny has also been to
see her uncle, but he thought her rough and uncultivated, and I
fear that, with her present deficiency of manners, she has little
chance of pleasing him. I have sent her to Miss Mercer’s, as a
day scholar, since Michaelmas, but as she _will_ talk to the boys
going and returning, I really think the change is doing her more
harm than good. I have dined with Mr. Trenchard, and can assure
you that the splendour of his table is something to remember. I
don’t pretend to be a judge of wines, though I could give you
a lecture upon tannic acid, alcohol, and so on--experience, to
my mind, being better than theory, and my opportunities of the
rarest--but I know that after dining with Stephen Trenchard I
felt as if my veins ran quicksilver. Well, my dear, I want you
to have your chance as well as Marion, and I think the best and
wisest course for you will be to beg a month’s holiday from your
employer, Mrs. Hazleton, and come to spend Christmas with your
poor old uncle Robert. No doubt if you do, your rich old uncle
Stephen will ask you to transfer your society to Lancaster Lodge,
and then you and Marion will have equal chances. I dare say it
will end by his asking one or both of you to live with him and
keep his house. He has, I believe, something like a million to
leave behind him, and you three girls are his nearest relations,
and his natural heirs. He has spoken very kindly of your mother.
‘Let me know what Mrs. Hazleton says about a holiday. If a month
is too much you might ask for a fortnight. I should think it most
unlikely that you need ever return to her. With such a man as old
Trenchard for your uncle, and well disposed towards you, your
teaching days ought to be over.
‘Your affectionate Uncle,
‘ROBERT FAUNTHORPE.’
‘My teaching days,’ repeats the young woman, bitterly. ‘He little
knows that they were the height of luxury compared to what has come
after them.’
The letter is addressed to--
MISS FAUNTHORPE,
AT MRS. HAZLETON’S, 19, LOWTHER STREET,
ECCLESTON SQUARE.
It has been re-addressed by an humble friend of Miss Faunthorpe’s, in
the person of Mrs. Hazleton’s housemaid, who has enclosed the letter
in an envelope directed to--
MRS. STANMORE,
AT MRS. BONNY’S, 11, DIXON STREET,
CHELSEA.
An address which indicates a descent in the social scale from the
semi-Belgravian gentility of Lowther Street, Eccleston Square. And
how comes Miss Faunthorpe to be Mrs. Stanmore, while her affectionate
uncle, Robert Faunthorpe, remains unaware of a transmutation which
must needs have some influence for good or evil on his niece’s future
career? Marriage is one of those inadvertences which can hardly go
for nothing even in the easiest life.
‘So Marion is exhibiting herself about Redcastle in a three hundred
guinea barouche,’ says Mrs. Stanmore, putting the letter in her
pocket, ‘while I have hardly shoes to my feet. I--who was supposed to
be the handsome sister, and the clever sister, and the lucky sister!
And I dare not show my face in Redcastle, not even if half a million
of money is to be lost by my absence. To think that uncle Stephen
should choose just this particular time for his return; to think that
he should return at all, when Marion and I made up our minds ever so
long ago that he was little better than a myth, and was sure to have
married a begum without telling anybody, and to die in India, leaving
all his money to horrid copper-coloured children. Lucky for Marion!’
Then, after a pause, leaving the bridge and entering the shabby
street leading to Cheyne Walk, she continues her self-communing
thus:--
‘What shall I say to uncle Robert? Suppose he were to come to town
and call at Mrs. Hazleton’s. He may have money now to pay for the
journey. It was safe enough before. Poor uncle Robert never had a
spare pound, or ever wasted a shilling, except the shillings he had
to pay for summonses because of being behindhand with the taxes. If
he should come up to London? Or if uncle Stephen should be in town
and call in Lowther Street? More likely that. Anglo-Indians are such
active creatures. What am I to do?’
Thus disjointedly run her thoughts, as she walks--very quickly
now--along the narrow, shabby street, past the fried-fish shop, and
the pork butcher’s, and the emporium for second-hand goods--from a
picture of the Holy Family, after Raffaelle, very much framed, to
a flat iron, or a pair of bluchers--the greengrocer’s, also coal
merchant, the cook-shop, with its steam-tarnished windows and reeking
odour of boiled beef and stick-jaw pudding.
‘That reminds me,’ Mrs. Stanmore says to herself, as the reek of
cooked provisions salutes her nostrils, ‘there’s nothing for dinner.’
She pauses and takes counsel with herself. Her eye wanders from the
cook-shop to the fishmonger’s, thence ranges to the pork butcher’s.
Her election lies among these. Cambridge sausages are savoury, but
dear; and Mrs. Bonny, the landlady, has a trick of overdoing all
things entrusted to her culinary art. A pound of Cambridge sausages,
reduced to grounds and grease, are hardly worth the shilling they
cost. Boiled beef is expensive and weighs heavy. For a cheap relish,
a zest which shall make bread and butter supply the place of dinner,
your fishmonger is your best friend. Mrs. Stanmore patronizes the
finny tribe. She selects an eight-penny haddock, dried and salted,
from the merchant’s store, and carries it home with her, rolled up in
brown paper. She stops at the cheap baker’s for a half-quartern loaf,
with which the bit over is not unacceptable. ‘I wonder what Marion
would think if she could see me now?’ she asks herself; ‘Marion who
always complained of my pride, and called herself the Cinderella of
the family. Her Cinderella-ship never brought her so low as this.’
Home! bitter mockery of a sweet word. She turns out of the shabby
street into a street still shabbier, narrow, dirty, and out at
elbows. Yet at its worst not quite so bad as a modern street under
the same conditions, for the red brick houses are substantial and
roomy, and the worm-eaten oaken window-frames shut out the wind
better than the speculative builder’s warped and shrunken deal.
The house which Mrs. Stanmore enters is dark and gloomy. The wail
of a fretful child sounds from the basement as she lets herself in
at the street door with a convenient latch-key. A glimmer from the
kitchen stairs is the only light visible, and to this glimmer Mrs.
Stanmore seems to address herself.
‘I’ve brought home a haddock, Mrs. Bonny. Will you be kind enough to
broil it at six o’clock?’
‘Oh, very well,’ answers a querulous voice from unseen depths below.
‘You can put the ’addock on the window-sill. I’ll come and fetch it
when I’ve got time; but I can’t say nothink about its being done by
six, for my fire’s got low after ironin’. The parlour has gone out to
tea.’
This last remark has a reproachful sound, as who should say, ‘You
never spare me trouble by going out visiting.’
Mrs. Stanmore deposits the dried fish, and ascends the dark,
old-fashioned staircase, smelling of mice, whose hurried scamper is
audible behind the mouldering wainscot. One room, the first-floor
front, comprises Mr. and Mrs. Stanmore’s share of number eleven,
Dixon Street. It is happily a rather large room, with three windows,
provided with old-fashioned window-seats. The furniture is old
like the house, worn and dingy, but solid furniture that has
served several generations of housekeepers and a ragged regiment of
lodgers. In the glow of a cheery little fire the dim old room has a
homely, not unfriendly look. The old tent bedstead has been pushed
into the most obscure corner. There are two arm-chairs, with faded
chintz covers, a sofa, large and ponderous. There is a round table
opposite the wide old fireplace, and another table against the wall,
surmounted by a japanned iron tea-tray of a bright red ground with a
landscape in the middle, a rosewood tea-caddy, a pair of blown glass
decanters, empty, a family Bible--the landlady’s--a ragged copy of
Byron’s ‘Don Juan,’ and two odd duodecimo volumes of ‘Tom Jones,’ in
brown calf--the lodger’s.
Mrs. Stanmore lights a small paraffine lamp, takes off jacket and
hat, and proceeds to prepare the evening meal. She has tea-things and
tea-kettle to her hand in the roomy and mousey old closet beside the
fireplace--such a closet as is only to be found in old houses, large
enough for half a dozen burglars to hide in, or a whole nursery of
children to play in, and with all manner of odd corners and shelves,
and perchance an inner cupboard lurking mysteriously in its paneled
recesses.
Mrs. Stanmore fills the kettle, and sets out the tea-things on the
red japanned tray, and cuts a plate of bread and butter, and makes
a round of toast deftly enough, though a year ago she was about the
least handy of her sex in such small domestic offices. That stern
schoolmistress, necessity, has taught her many things. How young
she looks in the ruddy light of the fire, as she kneels on the
hearth-rug toasting that round of bread for the poor meal that is to
be dinner, tea, and supper, all in one for Mrs. Bonny’s first-floor
lodgers!--how young and how pretty! every feature so daintily
fashioned, eyes so darkly lustrous, colouring so delicate; young, and
with much need of love and sympathy, of comfort and careful tendance.
‘And so uncle Stephen has really come home--richer than we ever made
him in our dreams when we were children--and Marion is tasting all
the pleasures his wealth can buy for her, Marion whom I pitied so
when I left her behind me at Redcastle. She might pity me now, from
the depth of her heart, if she could see me. She might have written
to tell me the change in her fortunes--selfish thing. I suppose it
is on account of my not answering her last two letters--such stupid
letters as they were too--full of “I hope you are free from cold,”
and “I trust you are enjoying the nice autumn weather”--and Uncle
Robert’s rheumatic gout.’
She lapses into deeper meditation, looking into a red cavern in the
heart of the fire, forgetful of the toast which hangs despondently
upon the twopenny tin toasting-fork, shaped like Neptune’s trident.
Meditation full of rue, for she has done the most foolish thing a
woman can do, except one, which is to repent too late of her folly;
and she is fast coming to that ultimate stage of foolishness, vain
regret for an irrevocable act.
She is still kneeling in front of the fire, absent-minded, absorbed,
when the door opens, and a young man comes in, slowly, heavily, like
one who brings no gladness with him, and has no hope of finding
comfort at home. He comes quietly to the hearth, lays his hand upon
Sibyl’s shoulder, and addresses her not unkindly, but with little
warmth in his tone.
‘Well, little old woman, brooding over the fire as usual? What’s the
matter now?’
‘Not much more than usual,’ his wife answers, without looking up.
‘You’ve had your customary luck, I suppose?’ she inquires, after a
pause, during which her husband has taken off his shabby overcoat,
and flung himself into one of the arm-chairs.
‘Yes, the wheel of fortune hasn’t turned the other way yet. It
revolves persistently, but always--like the planets--in the same
direction. The immutable laws of bad luck are not to be abrogated
in my favour. The fellows I wanted to see--butterfly friends of the
past, who might lend me a fiver if I could catch them in the right
humour--were all out. The situation I applied for has been given to
somebody else. They had a hundred and thirty-nine applicants, the
principal told me, and gave the berth to the applicant who dotted
his i’s with the nearest approach to mathematical precision. “We
take a man’s handwriting as the physical expression of his mental
bias,” said the principal, “and what we want is precision.” Now
you know I never dot my i’s at all, or if I do the dot is so far
from the letter as to make my meaning all the more unintelligible.
So much for the clerkship. The commission agency we saw advertised
turns out a “do.” Agent required to put down fifty pounds as a
guarantee of _bona fides_. I applied for an agency in the wine
trade, offered to a young gentleman moving in good society and able
to push a new brand of champagne; but when the wine merchant saw
me, he asked, rather pertinently, if I moved in good society in
this coat. I told him I was a gentleman by birth and education, and
knew some of the best people in London. “Very likely, my dear sir,”
replies the grape-doctor, “but you don’t visit them. We want young
men who dress well, and look as if they could afford to drink the
wine they recommend; men who have the appearance of wealth with the
unscrupulousness of poverty.” Rather neatly put by our friend the
gooseberry-fermenter, wasn’t it?’
‘And you have done nothing, earned nothing, are no nearer earning
anything than you were yesterday?’ asks Sibyl, without lifting her
eyes to his face.
Yet the time was, not a year ago, when to gaze upon that countenance
seemed to her like reading a poem, when every turn of the handsome
head, every sparkle of the dark eyes--eyes ever of uncertain hue but
always dark--was a thing to remember and dream about;--when to watch
him across a crowded room was quiet happiness, all-sufficing for an
exacting love--when to hear his voice, gay or grave, was sweeter than
music.
And now he sits a few paces from her, worn out, weary, dispirited,
in sore need of comfort, and she cannot raise her eyes from moody
contemplation of the fire. The difference is marked, the reason
obvious. A year ago he was an undeclared lover--to-day he is an
actual husband. Then there was not a many-petalled flower which did
not suggest the question, ‘Loves me, loves me not?’ Now he has loved
her and won her, and they have essayed to sail along the river of
life together, and found the navigation difficult--ay, hard and
bitter as that weedy swamp through which Sir Samuel Baker’s craft was
toilfully dragged under Afric’s torrid sky.
‘You couldn’t give a neater definition of my position,’ replies Alex
Secretan, otherwise Stanmore. He has striven to hide his destitution
under an assumed name, just as his wife has kept the secret of an
imprudent marriage by retaining a false address. Either mystery may
be discovered at any moment, so various are the accidents of life.
‘Don’t consider me frivolous if I remind you that I haven’t eaten
anything since half-past eight this morning, and the perambulation of
stony-hearted London is conducive to an inward craving. I won’t call
the feeling by so healthy a name as hunger. It’s a compound sensation
of sickness and emptiness. Is there anything to eat except bread and
butter? It’s a very nice thing in its way, but one comes to object
to it on the same ground that Louis the Fourteenth’s confessor took
about partridges.’
‘Mrs. Bonny is broiling a haddock,’ replies Sibyl, listlessly.
‘What good Catholics we are! keeping Advent all the week through. We
had bloaters yesterday, and dried sprats the day before. All our days
are Ember days.’
‘Fish is the cheapest thing I can get, Alex.’
‘No doubt, but it generally entails after expense in the way of an
extra half-pint of beer. No matter. Let Mrs. Bonny bring forth the
haddock,’ exclaimed Alexis, applying himself diligently to the toast,
which Sibyl has just buttered.
She tinkles the bell gently, as a polite hint to Mrs. Bonny. She dare
not give a peremptory ring, as she might for a servant whose wages
she paid. Mrs. Bonny--when letting her lodgings--professes to give
attendance to her lodgers, but that attendance is scanty, and yielded
as a favour rather than a right. A lodger who wants extra luxuries,
such as onion sauce with a shoulder of mutton, or fried liver and
bacon for supper, must make things very sweet to Mrs. Bonny. An
order for the theatre, or even an occasional tumbler of grog, has a
mollifying effect on her disposition, the loan of a newspaper soothes
her sensitive mind. The Stanmores are too poor to offer even these
small attentions, and are sometimes backward in the payment of their
rent, and thus receive stinted service grudgingly given. Sibyl pours
out the tea languidly, and with the air of a person out of health.
She eats a little bread and butter, but without appetite, and when
the haddock appears at last, borne by a slipshod girl, Mr. Stanmore
has that fish all to himself, Sibyl refusing any portion thereof.
Alexis contemplates her pityingly--tenderly even;--that haggard,
sickly look in the delicate face touches him.
‘Poor girl, how pale and ill you look! No appetite too. That’s a bad
sign. I wish I could have brought you home something more tempting
than this old finnan. A bird, a sweetbread, or something of that
kind.’
‘I could not eat the most exquisite dinner that was ever cooked,
Alex, so you needn’t trouble yourself to regret that. But I do wish
for something, very much.’
‘What is it, darling? You ought to have every wish gratified just
now. You would, if you had married a rich cheesemonger, or a
wharfinger, or a packer, or a cotton-spinner, or a brass-founder,
anything except that lowest animal in the scale of creation, a
broken-down swell. What is it, Sibyl?’
‘I want ten pounds, Alex,’ she answers, intently, her elbow on the
table, her chin supported by her hand, her eyes upon his face,
attitude and expression alike earnest.
‘Ten pounds, my dearest! We have been wanting ten pounds ever since
our honeymoon.’
‘Don’t speak of our honeymoon,’ exclaimed Sibyl, fretfully. ‘It
maddens me when I think how you squandered money that might have kept
us in comfort for a year.’
‘My love, you are so easily maddened,’ remonstrates Alexis,
placidly--he has never been seen out of temper. ‘I dare say it was
foolish to go the pace quite as fast as we did, but you had never
seen Paris, and April in Paris with the woman one loves is the
nearest approach that I can imagine to paradise.’
‘You speak as if you had tried it often,’ says Sibyl, with a sneer.
‘Bah, child, a mere _façon de parler_. Do you remember our drives to
the Cascade, in the balmy spring nights, when the stars were shining
on the Bois, and how we used to sit in the lamplit gardens of the
_café_, eating ices and making love? If ever we grow rich, Sibyl,
we’ll go back to Paris and have another honeymoon. But how about
these ten pounds, little woman? What can you want with ten pounds?’
The young wife rises, glides behind her husband’s chair, and, leaning
on his shoulder, whispers something in his ear, a something at which
he smiles tenderly, sadly, and turning in his chair, draws the young
face--so wan and yet so fair--down to his lips.
‘By Jove!’ he exclaims, ‘poor little woman, I am a brute, never to
have thought of it. You want to buy clothes for the poor little
beggar who is to make his first appearance upon the stage of life,
before the innocent lambkins have begun to bleat in the meadows,
undisputed heir to his father’s impecuniosity. The lower animals have
the advantage of us in that respect, by the by. The lambkins come
into the world amply provided. You shall have the money, Sibyl. Yes,
if I have to borrow, beg, rob for it. You shall have it somehow,
even if I were driven to beg of my bitterest foe, ay, of Stephen
Trenchard himself.’
His arm is round her and he feels her start at the name.
‘Don’t be frightened, little woman. That’s only a figure of speech.
I never saw Stephen Trenchard in my life, and as to begging of
him, there’s nothing more unlikely, since he is, to the best of my
knowledge, an inhabitant of the city of palaces, otherwise Calcutta.’
‘He might have come back to England, Alex, without your knowing
anything about it,’ suggests Sibyl.
‘Ay, that might he have done easily, child, seeing that he is a very
insignificant person in this big busy world, and that I know nothing
whatever about him, except that he did me deadly wrong before I was
born.’
‘And you were taught to hate him?’
‘Yes verily, before I learned my catechism I learned to hate Stephen
Trenchard with a righteous and a godly hate, for was he not the
falsest and meanest of men? and the Scripture does not forbid us to
hate falsehood and meanness. If Eve had hated the serpent a little,
humanity in general would not have gone wrong. Trenchard was like the
serpent, a creature that crawled, a wriggling worm in the guise of a
man. He wriggled and wormed himself into the fortune that should have
been my father’s; he wriggled and wormed himself into the heart of my
father’s first love; and he did all this wrong,--deliberate wrong,
mark you, basely conceived, the study of his days and nights, with a
smiling face, clasping his victim’s hand in friendship all the while,
so that no thunderbolt falling from the skies could have surprised
my father more than the discovery that his arch enemy was _there_,
hiding under the mask of his humble friend.’
Alexis has risen, and paces the room, fired by this memory of a
lesson learned in earliest boyhood. As deeply as he loved his dead
father, so deeply does he hate his father’s enemy and betrayer. Sibyl
watches him, thoughtful and perplexed. Of all things difficult to
impossibility, nothing could seem more so than to reconcile her love
and duty to her husband, and her desire to win her uncle’s fortune.