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
gloomylooking room at Brand Hall—a room known in the household as the Blue
Drawingroom. 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 highbacked 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
needlework; 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

halfbewildered 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.