Wyllard's Weird: A Novel

by M. E. Braddon

O, those fatal days at Simla, the long idle afternoons! The music and singing—the dances late in the night when cool winds were blowing over the hills—the garden lit with lamps like glowworms—the billiards and laughter, the light jests, the heavy sighs. There came a time when Bothwell Grahame found himself bound by an iniquitous tie to the wife of his most generous friend.

Their love was to be guiltless always—that is to say, not the kind of love which would bring Lady Valeria Harborough within the jurisdiction of the Divorce Court: not the kind of love which would make her name a scandal and a hissing in the ears of all her English friends, a theme for scorn and scoffing throughout the length and breadth of Bengal. But, short of such guilt as this—short of stolen meetings and base allies, the connivance of servants, the venal blindness of hotel-keepers—short of actual dishonour—they were to be lovers. He was to be at her beck and call—to devote all the leisure of his days to her society—to give not one thought to any other woman—to wait patiently, were it ten or twenty years, for the good old man's death: and then, after her ceremonial year of widowhood, all deference to the world's opinion having been paid, he was to claim Lady Valeria for his wife. This was the scheme of existence to which Bothwell Grahame had pledged himself. For all the best years of his manhood he was to be a hypocrite and an ingrate—the slave of a woman whose ascendency he dared not acknowledge, waiting for a good man's death. That was the worst degradation of all to a man of warm heart and generous feeling. All that was best and noblest in Bothwell Grahame's nature revolted against the baseness of his position. To grasp General Harborough's hand, and to remember how deliberately he and Valeria had calculated the years which the good old man had yet to live, had speculated upon the end drawing near, coming suddenly perhaps; to know that all their hopes of happiness were based upon the husband's speedy death. There were times, even in the first red dawn of passion, while he was proudest of this woman's love, when he almost hated her for her disloyalty as a wife. Could there be happiness or peace in a bond so made? And then the woman's fascination, the absolute power of a passionate, resolute character over a weak and yielding one, vanquished all his scruples, stifled the voice of conscience and honour. Not Samson at the feet of Delilah was a more abject slave than Bothwell in that luxurious idleness of the Indian hills, when the only purpose life held seemed to be the desire to get the maximum of frivolous amusement out of every day. There was no pastime too childish for Lady Valeria and her admirers, no sport too inane. Yet the lady contrived to maintain her womanly dignity even in the most infantine amusements, and was honoured as a queen by all her little court of worshippers, from the bearded major, or the portly lawyer, to the callow subaltern.

Bothwell's conduct towards her, and the lady's manner to him, were irreproachable. If there were any difference, she was a shade colder and more reserved in her treatment of him than of her other slaves: but there were moments, briefest opportunities—a tête-à-tête of five minutes in a moonlit verandah, a little walk down to the fountain, a ride in which they two were ahead of the rest just for a few yards; moments when Valeria's impassioned soul poured forth its treasures of love at this man's feet, with the reckless unreserve of a woman who risks all upon one cast of the die. She, who had been deemed the coldest and proudest of women—Diana not more chaste, an iceberg not more cold—she, Valeria Harborough, had chosen to fall madly in love with a man who was her social inferior, and who had tried his uttermost to escape from the net she had spread for him. Weak as he was, he had not yielded willingly. He had fought the good fight, had tried his hardest to be loyal and true. And then, in one moment, the spell had been too strong for his manhood. One never-to-be-forgotten night, they two standing beside the fountain, steeped in the golden light of the southern stars, he had yielded himself up to the enchantment of the hour, to the witchery of luminous violet eyes, brighter for a veil of tears. He had drawn her suddenly to his heart, asked her passionately why she had made him adore her, in spite of himself, against reason and honour; and she, with tearful eyes looking up at him, had answered softly, "Because it was my fate to love you;" and then she told him, in short, disjointed sentences, broken by sobs, that she was not a wicked woman, that he must not scorn or loathe her, even if he could not give her love for love. Never, till she knew him, had she swerved by one hair's breadth from the line of strictest duty; never had she known a thought which she need wish to hide from her husband. And then, in an evil hour, he had become almost domesticated in her house, and his influence had gradually enfolded her, like a cloud spread by a magician, and she had awakened to a new life. She had learnt the meaning of that mystic word love.

From that night Bothwell was her slave. Touched, flattered, possessed by this fatal love—too glad weakly to echo the woman's favourite excuse, Fatality—he struggled no longer against this mutual madness, which was half bliss and half pain. He belonged henceforth to Lady Valeria—more completely enslaved than if she had been free to claim him before the world as her affianced husband. Her lightest word, her lightest look ruled him. He went where she told him, spent his days as she ordered. He had been one of the hardest working officers in India up to this time, and his branch of the service, the Engineers, was one which offered splendid chances of promotion.

General Harborough had promised to do all that his very considerable influence could do to push his young friend to the front; and it seemed to the men who knew him best that Bothwell Grahame's fortune was made.

"There are men whose heads are turned by the first stroke of luck, and who never do anything after," said a canny old Scotch major; "but Grahame is thorough, and is not afraid of hard work. Take my word for it, he'll get on just as young Robert Napier did forty years ago."

But, with the ball at his feet, Bothwell Grahame suddenly dropped out of the game. He left off working altogether. He was the slave of a woman who preferred her own pleasure in his society to his chances of distinction: who said, "Why should you work? There will be enough for both of us by and by."

By and by meant when the good old General should be lying in his grave. He was an old man: it was not possible to ignore that fact, though he was erect as a dart, active, full of dignity and intellect—a man of men. He was nearing the scriptural limit of threescore and ten, and the inevitable end that comes to us all must come to him before the world was many years older.

Nothing was further from Bothwell's thoughts than the idea of being maintained by a wife; but he let Lady Valeria tempt him away from his books or his laboratory, and suffered himself to become indifferent to his profession, to care for nothing but the life he led in her boudoir or her drawing-room.

And then there came new difficulties. Lady Valeria was at heart a gamester. The excitement of cards or betting had become a necessity to her in her Indian life. Soon after her arrival at Calcutta she had won a thousand pounds in the Umballa Sweep, and that one stroke of luck had been her ruin. She became a professional gambler, played high whenever there was a possibility of so doing, and had her book for every great English race. She awaited the telegrams that brought her the tidings of victory or defeat with feverish impatience. The natural result followed: she was often in money difficulties. Generous as her husband was, she feared to appeal to him on these occasions. She knew that, of all types of womanhood, he most hated a gambling woman. She had her pin-money, which was ample for all the ordinary requirements and even extravagances of a woman of fashion. She dared not ask her husband for more money. But she was not afraid to call upon her slave, Bothwell Grahame; and Bothwell had to help her somehow, this wife of the future, who, in the days to come, was to provide for him.