Charlotte's Inheritance

by M. E. Braddon

"This woman's help would be of inestimable service," he thought; "her age, her experience of sickness, her familiarity with the patient, especially adapt her for the office she will be required to fill. If Dr. Jedd should order a nurse to watch by the sick-bed, here is the nurse. If it should prove possible to remove the dear sufferer, here is the guardian best calculated to protect and attend her removal." That the desperate step of an immediate marriage would be a wise step Valentine could not doubt, since it would at once annihilate Mr. Sheldon's chances, and destroy his motive. But in contemplating this desperate step Valentine had to consider the reputation as well as the safety of his future wife. He was determined that there should be no opportunity for scandal in the circumstances of his stolen marriage, no scope for future mischief from the malignity of that baffled villain to whose schemes their marriage would give the death-blow. He, who from his cradle had been familiar with the darker side of life, knew how often the innocent carry a lifelong burden, and perform a perpetual pennance for the sins or the follies of others. And over his darling's life in the future, should it please God that he might save her, he would have no shadow cast by imprudence of his in the present.

"This sharp-witted, sharp-tongued Yorkshirewoman will be the woman of women to protect her," he thought, as he seated himself in Mr. Sheldon's study, whither the prim parlour-maid had ushered him.

"Mrs. Woolper have just gone upstairs to clean herself," she said; "which we are a-having the dining-room and droring-room carpets up, while the family are away. Would you please to wait?"

Valentine looked at his watch.

"I cannot wait very long," he said; "and I shall be obliged if you will tell Mrs. Woolper that I wish to see her on very important business."

The parlour-maid departed, and Valentine was left to endure the weariness of waiting until Mrs. Woolper should have "cleaned herself."

Mr. Sheldon's study at Bayswater did not offer much more to the eye of the investigator than Mr. Sheldon's office in the City. There were the handsomely bound books behind the inviolable plate-glass doors, and there was the neat writing-table with the machine for weighing letters, and the large business-like looking blotting-pad, and the ponderous brass-rimmed inkstand, with no nonsense about it; and yonder, on a clumsy little oak table with thick legs, appeared the copying machine, with a big black iron lever, and a massive screw with which to screw all the spontaneous feeling out of every letter that came beneath its crushing influence.

Up and down this joyless den Valentine Hawkehurst paced, with the demon of impatience raging in his breast. The July sunshine blazed hot upon the window, and the voices of croquêt-players in adjacent gardens rose shrill upon the summer air. And there were girls playing croquêt while she, his "rose of the garden, garden of girls," lay sick unto death! O, why could he not offer a hecatomb of these common creatures as a substitute for that one fair spirit?

He looked into the garden—the prim modern garden, but a few years reclaimed from that abomination of desolation, the "eligible lot of building land." Across the well-kept lawn there brooded no shadow of Old-World cedar; no century-old espaliers divided flower and kitchen ground; no box-edging of the early Hanoverian era bordered the beds of roses and mignonette. From one boundary-wall to the other there was not a bush old enough to hang an association upon. The stereotyped bed of flaming yellow calceolaria balanced the conventional bed of flaming crimson verbena; the lavender heliotrope faced the scarlet geranium, like the four corners in a quadrille. The garden was the modern nurserymen's ideal of suburban horticulture, and no more. But to Valentine this half-acre of smooth lawn and Wimbledon gravel pathway had seemed fair as those pleasure gardens of Semiramis, at the foot of the Bagistanos mountain, the fame whereof tempted Alexander to turn aside from the direct road, during his march from Chelone to the Nysaic horse pastures.

To-day the contemplation of that commonplace garden gave him direful pain. Should he ever walk there again with his dear love, or in any other garden upon earth?