WYVIS BRAND.
On the evening of the day on which Lady Caroline drove with Janetta
Colwyn to Beaminster, the lady who had fainted by the wayside was
sitting in a rather gloomy-looking room at Brand Hall--a room known in
the household as the Blue Drawing-room. It had not the look of a
drawing-room exactly: it was paneled in oak, which had grown black with
age, as had also the great oak beams that crossed the ceiling and the
polished floor. The furniture also was of oak, and the hangings of dark
but faded blue, while the blue velvet of the chairs and the square of
Oriental carpet, in which blue tints also preponderated, did not add
cheerfulness to the scene. One or two great blue vases set on the carved
oak mantel-piece, and some smaller blue ornaments on a sideboard,
matched the furniture in tint; but it was remarkable that on a day when
country gardens were overflowing with blossom, there was not a single
flower or green leaf in any of the vases. No smaller and lighter
ornaments, no scrap of woman's handiwork--lace or embroidery--enlivened
the place: no books were set upon the table. A fire would not have been
out of season, for the evenings were chilly, and it would have had a
cheery look; but there was no attempt at cheeriness. The woman who sat
in one of the high-backed chairs was pale and sad: her folded hands lay
listlessly clasped together on her lap, and the sombre garb that she
wore was as unrelieved by any gleam of brightness as the room itself. In
the gathering gloom of a chilly summer evening, even the rings upon her
fingers could not flash. Her white face, in its setting of rough, wavy
grey hair, over which she wore a covering of black lace, looked almost
statuesque in its profound tranquillity. But it was not the tranquillity
of comfort and prosperity that had settled on that pale, worn,
high-featured face--it was rather the tranquillity that comes of
accepted sorrow and inextinguishable despair.
She had sat thus for fully half an hour when the door was roughly
opened, and the young man whom Mr. Colwyn had named as Wyvis Brand came
lounging into the room. He had been dining, but he was not in evening
dress, and there was something unrestful and reckless in his way of
moving round the room and throwing himself in the chair nearest his
mother's, which roused Mrs. Brand's attention. She turned slightly
towards him, and became conscious at once of the fumes of wine and
strong tobacco with which her son had made her only too familiar. She
looked at him for a moment, then clasped her hands tightly together and
resumed her former position, with her sad face turned to the window. She
may have breathed a sigh as she did so, but Wyvis Brand did not hear it,
and if he had heard it, would not perhaps have very greatly cared.
"Why do you sit in the dark?" he said at last, in a vexed tone.
"I will ring for lights," Mrs. Brand answered quietly.
"Do as you like: I am not going to stay: I am going out," said the young
man.
The hand that his mother had stretched out towards the bell fell to her
side: she was a submissive woman, used to taking her son at his word.
"You are lonely here," she ventured to remark, after a short silence:
"you will be glad when Cuthbert comes down."
"It's a beastly hole," said her son, gloomily. "I would advise Cuthbert
to stay in Paris. What he will do with himself here, I can't imagine."
"He is happy anywhere," said the mother, with a stifled sigh.
Wyvis uttered a short, harsh laugh.
"That can't be said of us, can it?" he exclaimed, putting his hand on
his mother's knee in a rough sort of caress. "We are generally in the
shadow while Cuthbert is in the sunshine, eh? The influence of this old
place makes me poetical, you see."
"_You_ need not be in the shadow," said Mrs. Brand. But she said it with
an effort.
"Needn't I?" said Wyvis. He thrust his hands into his pockets and leaned
back in his chair with another laugh. "I have such a lot to make me
cheerful, haven't I?"
His mother turned her eyes upon him with a look of yearning tenderness
which, even if the room had been less dimly lighted, he would not have
seen. He was not much in the habit of looking for sympathy in other
people's faces.
"Is the place worse than you expected?" she asked, with a tremor in her
voice.
"It is mouldier--and smaller," he replied, curtly. "One's childish
impressions don't go for much. And it is in a miserable state--roof out
of repair--fences falling down--drainage imperfect. It has been allowed
to go to rack and ruin while we were away."
"Wyvis, Wyvis," said his mother, in a tone of pain, "I kept you away for
your own sake. I thought you would be happier abroad."
"Oh--happier!" said the young man, rather scornfully. "Happiness isn't
meant for me: it isn't in my line. It makes no difference to me whether
I am here or in Paris. I should have been here long ago if I had had
any idea that things were going wrong in this way."
"I suppose," said Mrs. Brand, carefully controlling her voice, "that you
will not have the visitors you spoke of if the house is in so bad a
state."
"Not have visitors? Of course I shall have visitors. What else is there
for me to do with myself? We shall get the house put pretty straight by
the 12th. Not that there will be any shooting worth speaking of on _my_
place."
"If nobody comes before the 12th, I think we can make the house
habitable. I will do my best, Wyvis."
Wyvis laughed again, but in a softer key. "You!" he said. "You can't do
much, mother. It isn't the sort of thing you care about. You stay in
your own rooms and do your needle-work; I'll see to the house. Some men
are coming long before the 12th--the day after to-morrow, I believe."
"Who?"
"Oh, Dering and St. John and Ponsonby, I expect. I don't know whether
they will bring any one else."
"The worst men of the worst set you know!" sighed his mother, under her
breath. "Could not you have left them behind?"
She felt rather than saw how he frowned--how his hand twitched with
impatience.
"What sort of friends am I likely to have?" he said. "Why not those that
amuse me most?"
Then he rose and went over to the window, where he stood for some time
looking out. Turning round at last, he perceived from a slight familiar
movement of his mother's hand over her eyes that she was weeping, and it
seemed as if his heart smote him at the sight.
"Come, mother," he said, kindly, "don't take what I say and do so much
to heart. You know I'm no good, and never shall do anything in the
world. You have Cuthbert to comfort you--"
"Cuthbert is nothing to me--_nothing_--compared with you, Wyvis."
The young man came to her side and put his hand on her shoulder. The
passionate tone had touched him.
"Poor mother!" he said, softly. "You've suffered a good deal through me,
haven't you? I wish I could make you forget all the past--but perhaps
you wouldn't thank me if I could."
"No," she said, leaning forward so as to rest her forehead against his
arm. "No. For there has been brightness in the past, but I see little
brightness in the future either for you or for me."
"Well, that is my own fault," said Wyvis, lightly but bitterly. "If it
had not been for my own youthful folly I shouldn't be burdened as I am
now. I have no one but myself to thank."
"Yes, yes, it was my fault. I pressed you to do it--to tie yourself for
life to the woman who has made you miserable!" said Mrs. Brand, in a
tone of despairing self-accusation. "I fancied--then--that we were doing
right."
"I suppose we were doing right," said Wyvis Brand sternly, but not as if
the thought gave him any consolation. "It was better perhaps that I
should marry the woman whom I thought I loved--instead of leaving her or
wronging her--but I wish to God that I had never seen her face!"
"And to think that I persuaded you into marrying her," moaned the
mother, rocking herself backward and forward in the extremity of her
regretful anguish; "I--who ought to have been wiser--who might have
interfered----"
"You couldn't have interfered to much purpose. I was mad about her at
the time," said her son, beginning to walk about the room in a restless,
aimless manner. "I wish, mother, that you would cease to talk about the
past. It seems to me sometimes like a dream; if you would but let it lie
still, I think that I could fancy it was a dream. Remember that I do not
blame you. When I rage against the bond, I am perfectly well aware that
it was one of my own making. No remonstrance, no command would have
availed with me for a moment. I was determined to go my own way, and I
went."
It was curious to remark that the roughness and harshness of his first
manner had dropped away from him as it did drop now and then. He spoke
with the polished utterance of an educated man. It was almost as though
he at times put on a certain boorishness of demeanor, feeling it in some
way demanded of him by circumstances--but not natural to him after all.
"I will try not to vex you, Wyvis," said his mother, wistfully.
"You do not vex me exactly," he answered, "but you stir my old memories
too often. I want to forget the past. Why else did I come down here,
where I have never been since I was a child? where Juliet never set
foot, and where I have no association with that miserable passage in my
life?"
"Then why do you bring those men down, Wyvis? For _they_ know the past:
_they_ will recall old associations----"
"They amuse me. I cannot be without companions. I do not pretend to cut
myself off from the whole world."
As he spoke thus briefly and coldly, he stopped to strike a match, and
then lighted the wax candles that stood on the black sideboard. By this
act he meant perhaps to put a stop to the conversation of which he was
heartily tired. But Mrs. Brand, in the half-bewildered condition of mind
to which long anxiety and sorrow had reduced her, did not know the
virtue of silence, and did not possess the magic quality of tact.
"You might find companions down here," she said, pertinaciously, "people
suited to your position--old friends of your father's, perhaps----"
"Will they be so willing to make friends with my father's son?" Wyvis
burst out bitterly. Then, seeing from her white and stricken face that
he had hurt her, he came to her side and kissed her penitently. "Forgive
me, mother," he said, "if I say what you don't like. I've been hearing
about my father ever since I came to Beaminster two days ago. I have
heard nothing but what confirmed my previous idea about his character.
Even poor old Colwyn couldn't say any good of him. He went to the devil
as fast as ever he could go, and his son seems likely to follow in his
footsteps. That's the general opinion, and, by George, I think I shall
soon do something to justify it."
"You need not live as your father did, Wyvis," said his mother, whose
tears were flowing fast.
"If I don't, nobody will believe it," said the young man, moodily.
"There is no fighting against fate. The Brands are doomed, mother: we
shall die out and be forgotten--all the better for the world, too. It is
time we were done with: we are a bad lot."
"Cuthbert is not bad. And you--Wyvis, you have your child."
"Have I? A child that I have not seen since it was six months old!
Brought up by its mother--a woman without heart or principle or anything
that is good! Much comfort the child is likely to be to me when I get
hold of it."
"When will that be?" said Mrs. Brand, as if speaking to herself rather
than to him. But Wyvis replied:
"When she is tired of it--not before. I do not know where she is."
"Does she not draw her allowance?"
"Not regularly. And she refused her address when she last appeared at
Kirby's. I suppose she wants to keep the child away from me. She need
not trouble. The last thing I want is her brat to bring up."
"Wyvis!"
But to his mother's remonstrating exclamation Wyvis paid no attention in
the least: his mood was fitful, and he was glad to step out of the
ill-lighted room into the hall, and thence to the silence and solitude
of the grounds about the house.
Brand Hall had been practically deserted for the last few years. A
tenant or two had occupied it for a little time soon after its late
master's withdrawal from the country; but the house was inconvenient and
remote from towns, and it was said, moreover, to be damp and unhealthy.
A caretaker and his wife had, therefore, been its only inhabitants of
late, and a great deal of preparation had been required to make it fit
for its owner when he at last wrote to his agents in Beaminster to
intimate his intention of settling at the Hall.
The Brands had for many a long year been renowned as the most unlucky
family in the neighborhood. They had once possessed a great property in
the county; but gambling losses and speculation had greatly reduced
their wealth, and even in the time of Wyvis Brand's grandfather the
prestige of the family had sunk very low. In the days of Mark Brand, the
father of Wyvis, it sank lower still. Mark Brand was not only "wild,"
but weak: not only weak, but wicked. His career was one of riotous
dissipation, culminating in what was generally spoken of as "a low
marriage"--with the barmaid of a Beaminster public-house. Mary Wyvis had
never been at all like the typical barmaid of fiction or real life: she
was always pale, quiet, and refined-looking, and it was not difficult to
see how she had developed into the sorrowful, careworn woman whom Wyvis
Brand called mother; but she came of a thoroughly bad stock, and was not
untouched in reputation. The county people cut Mark Brand after his
marriage, and never took any notice of his wife; and they were horrified
when he insisted on naming his eldest son after his wife's family, as if
he gloried in the lowliness of her origin. But when Wyvis was a small
boy, his father resolved that neither he nor his children should be
flouted and jeered at by county magnates any longer. He went abroad, and
remained abroad until his death, when Wyvis was twenty years of age and
Cuthbert, the younger son, was barely twelve. Some people said that the
discovery of some particularly disgraceful deed was imminent when he
left his native shores, and that it was for this reason that he had
never returned to England; but Mark Brand himself always spoke as if his
health were too weak, his nerves too delicate, to bear the rough breezes
of his own country and the brusque manners of his compatriots. He had
brought up his son according to his own ideas; and the result did not
seem entirely satisfactory. Vague rumors occasionally reached Beaminster
of scrapes and scandals in which the young Brands figured; it was said
that Wyvis was a particularly black sheep, and that he did his best to
corrupt his younger brother Cuthbert. The news that he was coming back
to Brand Hall was not received with enthusiasm by those who heard it.
Wyvis' own story had been a sad one--perhaps more sad than scandalous;
but it was a story that the Beaminster people were never to hear aright.
Few knew it, and most of those who knew it had agreed to keep it secret.
That his wife and child were living, many persons in Paris were aware;
that they had separated was also known, but the reason of that
separation was to most persons a secret. And Wyvis, who had a great
dislike to chatterers, made up his mind when he came to Beaminster that
he would tell to nobody the history of the past few years. Had it not
been for his mother's sad face, he fancied that he could have put it out
of his mind altogether. He half resented the pertinacity with which she
seemed to brood upon it. The fact that she had forwarded--had almost
insisted upon--the unfortunate marriage, weighed heavily upon her mind.
There had been a point at which Wyvis would have given it up. But his
mother had espoused the side of the girl, persuaded the young man to
fulfill his promises to her--and repented it ever since. Mrs. Wyvis
Brand had developed an uncontrollable love for strong drink, as well as
a temper that made her at times more like a mad woman than an ordinary
human being; and when she one day disappeared from her husband's home,
carrying his child with her, and announcing in a subsequent letter that
she did not mean to return, it could hardly be wondered at if Wyvis drew
a long breath of relief, and hoped that she never would.