Part 8

It had been a trying winter. Mrs. Pyzer, who had long been feeble, had now what is called “broken up.” The backgammon board and the big knitting-pins were put away in a cupboard--they were not likely ever to be wanted again. Owing to her aunt’s condition, Annie was more mistress of her own time; she ordered the meals, altered the hours, and the old servants offered no resistance. A will had been made, and they had reason to believe that they had both been “well remembered.”

“It won’t be long now,” they remarked to one another, as they discussed plans over their tea-pot; “the house and furniture and a small income will go to Miss Fleude; well, she deserves something--she has had a poor time, and is getting on.”

Meanwhile Cecil Brandon’s letters increased in number and interest; lately he seemed to have done a great deal of racing; he described his successes, the club dinners, the compliments paid him, and how he had been riding for a native prince who had overwhelmed him with thanks, and presented him with a magnificent pin. Of his own particular business there was little information, but a great deal respecting the Lucknow “week.”

One day a letter arrived; it was short, a mere scrawl, written in a shaky hand. It said:

“DARLING OLD MUM,

“Don’t be frightened, but I have been very seedy; I have had a bad go of fever, which I can’t shake off, and the doctors say I must go home, so I start in a week.”

“In a week!” repeated Mrs. Brandon. “Why, then he will be here in a few days! Oh, oh, to think of it, and he will find me nearly stone-blind! Who is to get the house ready, and his room, and order things?--I am so helpless that I must leave this to strangers, my poor darling sick boy.”

It is scarcely necessary to mention that Annie worked _con amore_; fresh white curtains were hung up, new rugs were laid down, the garden was robbed of flowers, and the old house seemed quite gay and festive. As for Annie herself, she had become years younger, and did not look a day more than five and twenty. She invested in a neat tailor-made and an expensive hat, took lessons in dressing and waving her hair, and presented an unusually smart appearance. As the critical time drew nearer she could scarcely sleep with excitement; for once in her life, when she did wake up in the morning, there was something to look forward to! At last the great day dawned, and the traveller arrived from Idleford in a station cab, which rocked and tottered under piles of shabby baggage.

As Cecil Brandon descended at his mother’s gate, Annie with beating pulses inspected him over her window-blind. Oh, such a little shrivelled, sallow man! He looked fifty, and terribly ill! In spite of her severe disappointment, Miss Fleude’s kind heart went out to him on the spot, with a sort of almost maternal affection.

The following morning, with her hair beautifully waved, and wearing the new tailor-made, she went next door to resume her duties, and make the acquaintance of Mrs. Brandon’s celebrated son. She found him delighted to see her, most agreeable and charming. His mother, however, had one of her bad days, and was coldly patronising, and distant. No one would suppose for a moment that all the successful preparations and clever arrangements were entirely due to the exertions of her visitor.

It was really surprising the number of matrons with unmarried daughters who now came to call on Mrs. Brandon, and make tender enquiries about her eyesight.

Little Cecil was undoubtedly a ladies’ man, and enjoyed tea-parties and luncheons, dinners and bridge; but Annie was his first, his _home_ friend. Many a day he stole in to see her, or they conferred together in his mother’s summer-house--he having assured his parent that he was about to walk into Idleford, or starting for an afternoon’s fishing, or golf.

“The mater is deadly jealous of _you_,” he explained, “but you must not mind her--she knows I am awfully gone on you, and that’s the reason she has got her frills up.”

And indeed, in these latter days, Mrs. Brandon allowed herself to be offensively rude to her secretary and companion. If she could have dispensed with her services she would have done so; but who was to write her letters? Who was to read her the morning paper? Certainly _not_ Cecil, who rarely got out of his bed before eleven o’clock. Her increasing blindness made her frantic; she had an instinctive feeling that something hateful was going on around her, a something that she could not see, or divine. After all, Cecil might flirt with Annie as much as he pleased--a woman a head over him, thirty years of age, and a nobody! Her name was really Flood, but some of her insignificant relations had changed it into Fleude. They might change the spelling of the name, but they could not change their status in life. Cecil must marry well, a somebody, and an heiress, and as soon as her eyes had been operated upon she was determined to look about her in good earnest.

Meanwhile the happy pair were privately engaged; they walked together, they bicycled boldly into Idleford, they sat in the summer-house, and Cecil talked of himself continually. One of Annie’s chief attractions was the fact that she was a most patient and appreciative listener. He really never tired of relating his wonderful exploits: the mad horses he had ridden, the snakes he had destroyed, and the tigers he had shot; in all these stories he filled the _rôle_ of a hero, brave to rashness; and it happened that one day Annie had an opportunity of judging of his courage for herself! A wild bullock, which was being led along the country road, had broken away from its drover, and, with tail up, and head down, came charging towards them.

“Look out, look out!” shrieked Cecil--it was almost the scream of a woman; without another word, he disappeared over a wall with the agility of a monkey, and Annie was left to face the coming adventure alone! She stood her ground bravely, and as the beast charged, she dashed at him with an open umbrella, which fortunately had the effect of scaring the animal; and the valiant lady found herself scathless and breathless. By and by, she saw two hands and a little head appearing above the wall, and a squeaky voice enquired:

“Is he gone? Is the coast clear?” On receiving an encouraging affirmative--and without blush, or shame--Cecil pulled himself up, and dropped into the road. “They don’t often attack a woman--at least, that is my experience in India,” he explained, “or of course I wouldn’t have left you; but the fact is--and I make no secret of it to you--since I have had this awful go of fever my nerves have completely gone to pieces! India has skinned them raw.”

After this episode, it is not improbable that Annie accepted her lover’s amazing experiences with more than a pinch of salt.

One evening, in the dusk in the summer-house, he confided to her that he had been in an infernal scrape in India. It was all about a race, or rather racing; of course he was as innocent as a new-born babe, but he had been obliged to chuck it, and bolt! The doctor’s certificate was a mere excuse. By degrees he would break this news to the Mum; she would be furious at first, but she would soon see that he had been a mere tool in the matter, the cat’s-paw of others; and she was so clever and influential that she would soon find him another and better billet.

Annie was not horrified by this confession; on the contrary she consoled him, comforted him with her assurance of his mother’s loyal belief in him, and herself swallowed every word of his plausible excuses.

These were Annie’s happy days; for if Cecil did play golf with the Miss Grants, or tennis with the Miss Thornhills, he spent his evenings with her, slipping in (after his mother and the servants had gone to bed) through an open back window, and they had chicken mayonnaise, and various other delicacies, prepared by Annie’s clever hands, washed down with Burgundy, or whisky and seltzer; and Cecil smoked--yes, actually a meerschaum in Mrs. Pyzer’s dining-room--a room in which a pipe had not been lit for half a century! It is scarcely necessary to mention that the two servants were fully aware of these secret orgies, but they held their tongues, assented to the preparations, and washed up the plates; for it would suit them, supposing, as they expressed it, “anything happened,” to remain on. Shortly after this, something did “happen.” Old Mrs. Pyzer died, and Annie Fleude, now mistress of the house, reigned in her stead.

* * * * *

The operation for cataract proved immediately afterwards successful; and Mrs. Brandon had her eyes opened in another direction, and an entirely different fashion, by a friend. Cecil, she was informed, “had got into a most shocking scrape about racing; it was really scandalous and notorious; the talk of all the sporting men in India”; but, after her first anger, the fond mother succumbed to her son’s plausible excuses and caresses, and endeavoured--since the East was closed to him--to find him another post. To this he was rather averse, and suggested living at home, and being her companion and comfort; but Charlotte Brandon was a Spartan mother, and determined that her boy should go forth once more into the world’s battle, and make himself a name. The benighted parent was ignorant of the fact that he had already made “a name” as the shadiest gentleman rider in India--and a thorough-paced little scamp.

Presently the engagement was breathed into her ear. To this, however, she failed to show the same indulgence. The ungrateful old woman was beside herself with fury, heaped abuse on deceitful, scheming Ann, and forbade her her presence, and her house.

Her tongue became venomous, as she assured her dear Cecil that it was bad enough for him to disgrace himself in India, but to come home and marry and settle down beside her, with a vulgar old maid--never!

“Give her up!” she cried, “give her up at once, or I will never leave you a penny, and I shall alter my will.”

She looked, as she was, cold, cast-iron, and nothing he could do or say would melt her decision. So he was compelled to agree. He had one long and tearful interview with Annie; this took place in the musty old dining-room--from which his sobs and hers were audible in the kitchen--but on the following day, when walking with his mother and encountering his lady-love out of doors, he passed her without acknowledgment--and looked the other way.

Poor Miss Annie Fleude was broken-hearted; she wrote Cecil many piteous, passionate letters, all unavailing; for he was a weak little fellow, ever dominated by a stronger will, and hence his defection and silence.

The story of his racing had somehow reached England. How tiresome it is that in cases where one would like to keep matters _quiet_, almost every person one meets has relations out in India! Girls and their parents now suddenly cooled; invitations ceased, even although Cecil Brandon would have £1,200 a year on the death of his mother, and was undeniably well connected. However, Mrs. Brandon exerted herself amazingly. She wrote letters (with her own hand)--dozen of letters, and she carried Cecil away from Battsbridge to London, and at last found him a promising appointment in the Belgian Congo. It offered fine pay; her son could stand a warm climate, he had a knack of picking up languages, and he would return home in two years. In short, it was a first-rate opening! When all had been arranged, the little man wrote to Annie to inform her of his prospects, and to say good-bye. In reply to this letter, she immediately went up to London and sought an interview with him and his mother at their hotel. She was desperate, and determined not to lose her little lover without a life and death struggle. At first she was piteous and heartbroken--foolishly endeavouring to work upon Mrs. Brandon’s feelings.

“I served you for a whole year,” she declared brokenly. “Could a daughter have done more for you than I did? Your son loves me, and I love him; I will make him a good wife. I have enough to live on, since my aunt is dead. The house is mine, he will be close to you, and you will have his society, and the comfort of his being near you. I beg and implore you not to send him away to the Congo; it is an awful place; he is all you have, and he is all I have--let us live at Battsbridge, and be happy. If you insist on his going to Africa it will break my heart, for something tells me that I shall never, never--see him again.”

Suddenly she began to sob hysterically, and falling upon her knees, endeavoured to take Mrs. Brandon’s hand in hers; but Mrs. Brandon pushed her away with surprising violence, and rising from her chair, said:

“Cecil is going to Africa--I am sending him there on purpose to place him out of _your_ reach!”

“Oh, you are a hard, hard woman!” said Annie, struggling to her feet. “Will nothing I can do, or say, change you or soften your heart?”

“Nothing.”

Annie now turned and appealed to Cecil, and in vain. The battle between two strong women for a weak man raged, but in the end the mother won. Out on the lobby Cecil contrived to snatch a few moments with Annie, assuring her that it would be all right, and that they would be true to one another, and be married when he returned in two years’ time.

“Stand up for yourself now,” she answered fiercely, “stand up for yourself, and me; you are a man, you are five-and-thirty, and should know your own mind. We can be independent of your mother, and I am ready to marry you to-morrow!”

“No, no, no,” he replied, “the mater has so much in her power, I dare not risk it. Think of all she has to leave; and if she says that she will cut me off with a shilling, by Jove, she’ll do it! We will just bide our time--it will soon pass,” he declared, with cheerful optimism, “and you and I will be married when I come back.”

“If you allow your mother to drive you out of the country,” said Annie, and her face was white and rigid, “I tell you--that you will _never_ come back!”

At this he gave a funny little cackling laugh, and said:

“I bet you I will! I lay you fifty to one--eh?”

But Annie made no reply. She turned abruptly away, walked slowly down the red carpeted stairs of the hotel, and never once looked back. It was done--it was all over! Useless to attempt to dissuade him--he was as wax in the hands of his parent.

Annie travelled to Battsbridge, a changed woman, and shut herself up in her dismal house for many weeks. From time to time--through the neighbours’ talk--she heard that Cecil Brandon was doing capitally in the Congo, had been promoted to a post in the rubber district, far up in the Interior, exerted a wonderful influence on the natives, and had achieved success at last!

Eight months had elapsed, when the district was electrified by the news of his death. A brief telegram announced that he had been suddenly carried off by a virulent fever, prevalent in the jungle. His mother was prostrate and inconsolable; but by and by she roused herself sufficiently to dispatch a beautiful white marble tombstone to be erected over Cecil’s grave. The common grief had not drawn her and her neighbour any closer together; on the contrary, Annie was now a hard, hopeless, embittered creature, who burnt with inextinguishable rage against a mother who had murdered her son. Oh, that she could punish her! Oh, that she might avenge him! Vainly and vainly did she cast about in search of a weapon. At last--she found it!

Miss Fleude, who was now comfortably off, expended a good deal of money on books, magazines, and journals; and, since Cecil had been in Africa, had subscribed to many African papers. By chance an ill-printed West Coast “rag” fell into her hands, and there she found, with other weird information, a terrible story of cannibalism--in which no ghastly detail was spared.

It appeared that a certain unpopular, tyrannical overseer had visited an outlying village; that in the jungle, on his return towards headquarters, he had become mysteriously separated from his escort, and some of the natives, finding him, seized and carried him off, a prisoner. These happened to be of the Lokele, a tribe of well-known river cannibals, who wore necklaces of the teeth of those whom they had eaten. Such had been unquestionably the fate of the unfortunate official, whose boots and pocket-book were found, and whose name it had been proved was “C. Brandon.”

When the agonised reader had come to the end of this description, she fainted dead away, and was subsequently confined to her bed for a whole week. At the end of the week Miss Fleude had recovered her strength, renewed her animosity, and rekindled her hatred; she marked the terrible paragraph with three crosses in ink, folded the paper neatly, and then addressed and posted it to her next-door neighbour.

It had even more than the desired effect!

Shortly after the postman’s arrival the following morning, a grating shriek rang through the house, and when the servants ran to see what had happened, they found Mrs. Brandon lying back in her chair, with staring open eyes, quite dead--with the fatal journal clenched in her hands.

Miss Fleude still continues to reside at Battsbridge; she is kind and charitable to the poor, but holds herself coldly aloof from her neighbours, who, to tell the truth, are secretly afraid of the lady, and no longer speak of her as “Gentle Annie.”

VII

THE SHIP’S CAT

Jack Truman, till recently the heir of a man of large property, but now a mere pauper without home or profession, sat in a big morocco-covered chair, with his hands in his pockets, listening to his future father-in-law, Boaz Pottinger, Esq., whilst he expounded his opinions, and more or less laid down the law.

Mr. Pottinger had acquired a fortune in chemical works, and it was his almost daily boast that he was “a self-made man.” His detractors declared that this was not much to be proud of, and that Boaz Pottinger, ugly, ungainly, uncouth, had omitted to supply himself with the letter “h.” However, he had a ladylike wife, a pretty daughter, and half a million, so when he bought a place in Kent the neighbours figuratively made room for him. No one was more friendly than the Squire of the parish, Hildebrande Truman, whose ancestors were Crusaders, and who had never earned a penny in his life. As times were bad for agriculturists, Mr. Truman attempted to make some money in speculation, but kept his endeavours to himself, intending to treat his wife and family to a delightful surprise! Unfortunately, the surprise was not of the nature he anticipated. On the collapse of a monstrous financial swindle he became liable, involved, ruined, and within a few months, Daines Place, its estates and messuages and heirlooms, were brought to the hammer, and sold. The shock, and the shame, had killed the Squire, and now here was the Squire’s son listening to Mr. Pottinger’s ideas on the subject of his future!

Mr. Pottinger enjoyed the sound of his own voice as he lay back in his chair, with his thick white fingers meeting at the tips, his eyes fixed on a corner of a bookcase. He said:

“You see, Jack, my boy, everything is altered now the poor Squire has gone, and scarcely left a penny piece--or anyway not more than will keep your mother and sisters in a small way. If he had only given _me_ a hint of what he was after, I’d have warned him. I know all about the smiling scoundrels, that rob honest folks, not of shillings, but of ’undreds of thousands of pounds, and call themselves honourable men. Well, if I’d ’ad a ’int, you would not be sitting there--without an acre to your name!”

“No,” sighed the young man, “but there is no use in going over that now, and the governor meant it all for the best. The question is, what am I to do to make a living for Nancy and myself?”

“Talk of making your own living, my son.--We will leave Nancy out of the business.”

“But Nancy is engaged to me, with your consent, and she intends to stick to me--and I to her.”

“Circumstances have changed since this time last year. Then you were heir to a fine property, and would ’ave ’ad a suitable allowance. Now what ’ave you got? What are you and Nancy going to live on--tell me that? ’Ow are you going to put a ’ouse over ’er ’ead?”

“That is just the crucial question,” replied young Truman, rising to his feet. He was slight and well made, with a square chin, and fine head--the typical young Britisher who has been to Eton and Oxford; his clothes and boots were the perfection of cut--in short, he appeared what he was, a good-looking man of fashion, who had never earned, or lacked, a sovereign in his life.

“You have no profession,” resumed Mr. Pottinger.

“No, that’s the worst of it. I did not care about the Army--I wanted to be a sailor, and my mother struck; and here I am--at twenty-four--an incapable idiot!”

“But you can turn your hand to something.”

“I can ride to hounds, and manage a boat, I’m a bit of a carpenter, I can photograph, and I know something of machinery.”

“There’s not a penny in any of them for you,” declared the old man brusquely; “you’re a _hamateur_.”

“I was thinking if I took up a small farm, sir, I might----”

“Put it out of your ’ead,” brusquely interrupted Mr. Pottinger; “and now I’ve been thinking, and it comes to this. Of course I _could_ say you and Nancy was never to see one another again.”

“Yes, you could say it,” rejoined the other significantly.

“Nancy will never go against me; if she did----” Here he nodded his head with alarming significance.

“Have you any suggestion to make, sir? You seemed to have some proposition.”

“I ’ave--it’s this. Suppose you go off for three years wherever you like--it must be out of Great Britain--and you will not correspond with Nancy more than every six months. You will go into the world like a man, not like a dressed-up young nincompoop, and make ten thousand pounds. When you bring me that, I will put forty thousand to it and give you Nancy.”

“My good sir!” gasped Jack Truman, standing squarely before him. “You might as well ask me to bring you back the moon! Ten thousand pounds--ten _thousand_ pounds!”

“Some men pick it up in Wall Street in one afternoon--some make it by a stroke of the pen. Why! I’ve even been told--but I don’t believe it--that women get as much as that for a novel!”

“All these are clever people--they have capital, or brains, or both. I have neither one nor the other.”

“Oh ho! so you are going to cry off--and not take up my challenge, eh?”

“If I thought I had the very smallest chance--of--winning, you know I’d jump at it like a shot.”

“Well, take my advice, and jump,” said Mr. Pottinger, rising with a mighty effort--he was a seventeen-stone man. “I’ll give you two days to consider it, and now you may be off, and talk it over with Nancy. I like you, Jack, always did, you know; but I’m not going to give my little girl to a fellow that has not some stuff in him--that is not worth ’is salt. Why, look at _me_! I made myself what I ham! No, you just go and see if you can’t do something on the same pattern,” and he blundered heavily out of the library.

Nancy Pottinger was twenty, a pretty little dark-eyed girl, animated and energetic, clever, resourceful, and plucky.