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Title: Only a clod
Author: M. E. Braddon
Release date: September 25, 2025 [eBook #76927]
Language: English
Original publication: London: J. and R. Maxwell, 1881
Credits: Peter Becker and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ONLY A CLOD ***
ONLY A CLOD
A Novel
BY THE AUTHOR OF
“LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET,” “AURORA FLOYD”
ETC. ETC. ETC.
Stereotyped Edition
LONDON
JOHN AND ROBERT MAXWELL
MILTON HOUSE, SHOE LANE, FLEET STREET
[_All rights reserved_]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO
OCTAVE DELEPIERRE, F.S.A., LL.D.
AND
HIS CHARMING WIFE, CHARLOTTE
This Story is Inscribed
IN REMEMBRANCE OF MANY PLEASANT HOURS
PASSED WITH THEM.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE MASTER 5
II. THE MAN 11
III. TIDINGS OF HOME 14
IV. TREDETHLYN’S LUCK 17
V. COMING HOME 26
VI. THE END OF THE WORLD 32
VII. MAUDE HILLARY’S ADORERS 42
VIII. AT THE CHATEAU DE BOURBON 50
IX. JULIA DESMOND MAKES HERSELF AGREEABLE 53
X. COLTONSLOUGH 62
XI. A VERY OLD STORY 69
XII. A MODERN GENTLEMAN’S DIARY 80
XIII. CAUGHT IN THE TOILS 94
XIV. VERY PRIVATE THEATRICALS 100
XV. A COMMERCIAL CRISIS 108
XVI. A DRAMA THAT WAS ACTED BEHIND THE SCENES 123
XVII. SOMETHING LIKE FRIENDSHIP 139
XVIII. POOR FRANCIS 143
XIX. MR. HILLARY SPEAKS HIS MIND 151
XX. AN EXPLANATION 156
XXI. HARCOURT LOWTHER’S WELCOME 161
XXII. TAKING IT QUIETLY 167
XXIII. TIDINGS OF SUSAN 176
XXIV. FRANCIS TREDETHLYN’S DISINTERESTED ADVISER 190
XXV. THE ROAD TO RUIN 196
XXVI. A CHILLING RECONCILIATION 203
XXVII. SEEING A GHOST 211
XXVIII. “OH, MY AMY! MINE NO MORE!” 219
XXIX. ENTANGLEMENTS IN THE WEB 232
XXX. THE TWO ANTIPHOLI 238
XXXI. THE DIPLOMATIST’S POLICY 243
XXXII. HARCOURT GATHERS HIS FIRST FRUITS 253
XXXIII. ROSA’S REVELATIONS 266
XXXIV. THE LADY AT PETERSHAM 279
XXXV. A HASTY RECKONING 287
XXXVI. POOR FRANK’S LETTER 296
XXXVII. ELEANOR DROPS IN UPON ROSAMOND 302
XXXVIII. GONE 310
XXXIX. TOO LATE 317
XL. AN IGNOMINIOUS FAILURE 322
XLI. SUSAN’S GOOD NEWS 331
XLII. A PERFECT UNION 341
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ONLY A CLOD
CHAPTER I.
THE MASTER.
Ensign Harcourt Lowther, of her Majesty’s 51st Light Infantry, sat
staring out into his garden at Port Arthur, watching a couple of convict
gardeners--who were going about their work with a monotonous and
exasperating deliberation of movement--and lamenting the evil fortune
that had stationed him in his present quarters. He had a great many
troubles, this elegant young ensign, who was, for the time being,
destined to bloom unseen, and waste the graces that ought to have
adorned Belgravia upon the desert air of the island of Tasmania. He had,
as he himself elegantly expressed it, no end of troubles. First and
foremost, his cigar would not draw; and as it was the last of a case of
choice cabanas, the calamity was not a small one. Secondly, there had
been a drought in fair Van Diemen’s Land for the last month or so. The
verdure was growing brown and leathery; the feathery masses of the tall
fern shrivelled at the edges like scorched paper; the stiff foliage of
the cedars seemed to rattle as it shook in the dry, dust-laden wind, and
the thermometer stood at a hundred and ten in the shade; true, it might
drop forty degrees or so at any moment, with the uprising of a moist
breeze from the sea, but, pending the arrival of that auspicious moment,
Mr Lowther was in a very bad temper. What had he done that he should be
stationed in a convict settlement, with no chance of any gain or glory
as compensation for his trials; with no one to speak to except a prosy
old police-magistrate or a puritanical chaplain; with nothing better to
look at than the eternal blue of the ocean, or a whaling vessel anchored
in the bay; with nothing to listen to except the clanking of hammers and
banging of timber and jingling of iron in the busy dockyard; with no
better enjoyment to hope for than a couple of days’ quail-shooting or
kangaroo-hunting in the interior?
“If I’d been Desperate Bill the Burglar, or Slippery Steeve the Smasher,
I couldn’t be _much_ worse off,” he muttered, as he gave up the
unmanageable cigar, and went across the room to a table, upon which
there were some tobacco-jars and meerschaum pipes. “Now, then,
Tredethlyn, are those boots ready?”
This question was addressed to an invisible some one, whose low
whistling of a jovial Irish air was audible from the adjoining room.
“Yes, captain,” answered a cheery voice--the whistler had broken off in
the middle of the “wild sweet briery fence that around the flowers of
Erin dwells,”--“yes, captain, quite ready.”
“That’s another aggravation,” exclaimed Mr. Lowther,--“the fellow will
call me captain; as if it wasn’t an underhand way of reminding me that
for a poor devil like me there’s no chance of promotion.”
“But you see you _are_ captain here, Mr. Lowther,” said the whistler,
emerging from the adjoining chamber with a pair of newly-blacked
Wellingtons in his hand; “you’re captain, major, colonel, general, and
field-marshal, all in one here, with seventy men under your control, and
any amount of convicts to look after.”
“If there’s one thing in the world that’s more excruciating than
another, it’s that fellow’s cheerfulness,” cried Mr. Lowther. I can
fancy the feelings of an elegant young French marquis of the _vieille
roche_, a scion of the Mortemars or Birons, buried alive in an
underground cell in the Bastille, with a lively commoner for his
companion--a cheerful _bourgeois_, who pretended to make light of his
situation, and eat his mouldy bread with a relish. “Now, then,
Tredethlyn, where are the boot-hooks? That fellow always forgets
something.”
“That fellow,” otherwise Francis Tredethlyn, was a tall, stalwart
private soldier, of some seven-and-twenty years of age, who had been
honoured by an appointment to the post of valet and butler to Ensign
Harcourt Lowther.
If the stalwart soldier had not been blest with one of those
imperturbable Mark-Tapley-like tempers, which resemble the patent
elliptic springs of a crack coachbuilder’s carriage, and can convey the
traveller unjolted and uninjured over the roughest roads in the journey
of life, he might have found his position as valet, major-domo, and
occasional confidant to Harcourt Lowther, far from the pleasantest berth
to be had in this great tempest-tossed vessel which we call the world.
But Francis Tredethlyn’s serenity of disposition was proof against the
most wearisome burden a man is ever called upon to bear--the
companionship of a discontented fellow-creature, and all the variable
moods, from a feverish cynical kind of gaiety to a dreary and
ill-tempered gravity, which were engendered out of that perpetual
discontent.
But Frank Tredethlyn bore it all cheerfully; with a manly, open-hearted
cheerfulness that had no taint of sycophancy. If the young ensign wanted
to talk to him, well and good--he was ready and willing to talk about
any thing or every thing; but he had his own sentiments upon most
subjects, which sentiments were of a very fast colour, and did not take
any reflected hue from Mr. Lowther’s aristocratic opinions.
It is not to be supposed that Francis Tredethlyn, private soldier and
valet, had any claims to intellectual equality with his master. The
private wrote a fair commercial hand, very bold and big and
resolute-looking; could read aloud without stumbling ignominiously over
the long words; could cast up accounts; and, looking back at the history
of the universal past, saw glimmering faintly over a sea of darkness and
oblivion such beacon-lights as a Norman invasion; a solemn meeting on
the flat turf of Runnymede; a Reformation, with a good deal of
martyr-burning and head-chopping attendant thereupon; a fiery hook-nosed
Dutch liberator, a Jacobite rebellion, and a Reform Bill. Beyond these
limits the attainments of Mr. Tredethlyn did not extend; and the ensign,
when grumbling at the general discomfort of his life, was apt to say
that it was a hard thing to be flung for companionship on a fellow who
was nothing but a boor and a clod.
Mr. Lowther treated his valet very much as a spoiled child treats her
doll; sometimes it pleased him to be monstrously cordial and familiar
with his attendant, while at another time he held Francis aloof by a
haughty reserve of manner, beyond which barrier the other made no effort
to penetrate.
“The fellow does possess that merit,” Harcourt Lowther said sometimes,
“he knows how to keep his place.”
The fact of the matter is, the valet was infinitely less dependent upon
his master’s companionship than his master upon his. There were a
hundred ways in which Francis Tredethlyn could amuse himself; and there
was not a cloud in the sky, a wave of the sea, a leaf in the garden, out
of which he could not take some scrap of pleasure, and which had not a
deeper and truer meaning for him than for the idle young officer who lay
yawning upon his narrow couch with his feet in the air, and nothing
better to do than to admire the shape of his boots, obtained on credit
from a confiding West-end tradesman. Francis had that wide sympathy with
his fellow-creatures which is a special attribute of some men; and was
on the friendliest possible terms with the two convict gardeners, both
of whom had achieved some renown as the most incorrigible and execrable
specimens of the criminal class. Every dog in the little settlement
fawned upon Frank Tredethlyn, and ran to rub his head against his knees,
and slaver his hand with its flapping tongue. He had made a kennel for
two or three of these canine acquaintances in a shady corner of the big
garden, much to the disgust and annoyance of the ensign, who only cared
for such dogs as are calculated to assist the sports of their lord and
master. Staghounds and beagles, foxhounds and terriers, setters,
pointers, and retrievers, clever ratting Scotch terriers, well-bred and
savage bulls, even little short-eared toy terriers, or fawn-coloured and
black-muzzled pugs, were all very well placed in the scheme of creation:
but Mr. Lowther could find no explanation for the existence of those
mongrel creatures who seem to have nothing to do in the world but to
attach themselves with slavish devotion to some brutal master, or to lie
in the most disreputable courts and alleys of a city in hot weather and
catch flies.
But, somehow or other, Francis Tredethlyn seemed generally to do pretty
much as he liked, in spite of military despotism and Mr. Harcourt
Lowther. The dogs were unmolested in their shady corner; and the ensign
was so good as to say that a little aviary of wicker-work and wire,
which Tredethlyn constructed in his leisure hours, and duly filled with
tiny feathered inhabitants, that kept up a faint twittering in the
sunshine, was an improvement to the cottage. Francis was very handy, and
could do wonders with a hammer and a handful of tin tacks; and was,
indeed, altogether a great acquisition to his master, as Mr. Corbett,
the police-magistrate, sometimes remarked to Harcourt Lowther.
“Yes,” Harcourt answered, indifferently, “the fellow is a cut above most
of his class. He is a Cornishman, it seems, and the son of a small
farmer in that land of Tre, Pol, and Pen; and he tells me that he has an
old miser uncle who is supposed to be preternaturally rich. Egad! I wish
I had such an uncle! All my uncles are misers for the matter of that;
but then, unluckily, the poor devils are misers because they’re
preternaturally poor.”
Mr. Lowther stood before the little looking-glass, in the sunny window,
admiring himself, while Francis Tredethlyn helped him on with his coat.
He was going to dine with Mr. Corbett the magistrate, and to spend the
evening in the society of Miss Corbett, who had come out to the colony
with the idea that general officers and wealthy judges would be waiting
on the shore ready to conduct her from the place of debarcation to the
hymeneal altar, and had been a little soured by the disenchantment which
had too surely followed her arrival. She was a gushing damsel of
thirty-five, very tall and square, and of a prevailing drab colour; and
she played tremendous variations of shrill Scottish melodies on a piano
which had been warranted to preserve its purity of tone in any climate,
but upon which the nearest thing to an harmonious octave was a wild
stretch of thirteen notes. Mr. Lowther must have been very low in the
world when he had nothing better to do than to sit by Miss Corbett’s
piano while she banged and rattled at the numerous disguises under which
“Kinloch of Kinloch” appeared in a fantasia of twelve pages, now
prancing jauntily in triplets, now rushing up and down the piano in
chromatic scales, now scampering wildly in double arpeggios, now banging
himself out of all knowledge in common chords, or wailing dismally in a
hideous minor. Fate had done its worst for Ensign Lowther, when he had
no better amusement than to lounge by the side of that ill-used old
instrument, staring reflectively at the thin places on the top of Miss
Corbett’s drab-coloured head.
Harcourt Lowther stood before the glass admiring his handsome face,
while his valet brushed the collar of his coat. Well, he had a right to
admire himself! If Providence had treated him badly, capricious Mother
Nature, who, like any other frivolous-minded parent, elects her prime
favourites without rhyme or reason, had been very bountiful to him in
the matter of an aquiline nose, a finely-modelled mouth and chin, and
deep womanish blue eyes, with a shimmer of gold on their lashes. No one
could deny Mr. Lowther’s claim to be considered a remarkably handsome
man, an elegant young man, a very agreeable and accomplished gentleman.
The world, of course, had nothing to do with that rougher edge of the
ensign’s character which he turned to his valet Francis Tredethlyn in
his cottage at Port Arthur.
He went out presently, swinging his thin cane, and whistling all the
triplets and cadences of an elaborate _scena_; he was an amateur
musician and an amateur artist, playing more or less upon two or three
different instruments, and painting more or less in half-a-dozen
different styles. He could ride across country to the astonishment of
burly Leicestershire squires, who were inclined to think contemptuously
of his small waist and pretty blue eyes, his amber-tinted, jockey-club
perfumed whiskers, trim tops, and unstained “pink.” He was a good shot,
and long ago at Harrow had been renowned as a cricketer. He spoke three
or four modern languages, and had that dim recollection of his classic
studies which is sufficient for a man of the world who knows how to make
much out of little. He was altogether a very accomplished gentleman; but
with him intellectual pursuits were a means rather than an end, and he
took very little pleasure in the society of books or bookmen. He wanted
to be in the world, foremost in the perpetual strife, amid the crash of
drums and trumpets, the roaring of cannon, and glitter of emblazoned
standards flaunting gallantly in the wind. He wanted to be one of the
conquerors in the universal tournament, and to ride up to the Queen of
Beauty flushed and triumphant after the strife, to be admired and
caressed. This is why the inaction of his present existence was so
utterly intolerable to him. He had a supreme belief in himself, and in
the indisputable nature of his right to the best and brightest amongst
earth’s prizes. The time must be indeed out of joint in which there was
nothing better for such as he than a dreary convict settlement in the
island of Tasmania.
Unluckily, the time _was_ out of joint. Robert Lowther, of Lowther Hall,
Hampshire, had given his younger son an aristocratic name and a
gentlemanly education; and then, having nothing more to bestow upon him,
had been forced to leave the lad to fish for himself in the troubled
waters of life. The prospects of the junior had always been more or less
sacrificed to those of the senior of Robert Lowther’s two sons, and
Harcourt bore a hearty grudge against his father and his brother on this
account. Plainly told that he was to expect no more assistance from the
parent purse, the young man had elected to become a barrister; but after
a three years’ course of reading, in which the cultivation of light
literature and modern languages was diversified by a slight sprinkling
of legal study, he had grown heartily sick of his shabbily-furnished
third floor in Hare Court, Temple, and had gladly accepted the price of
a commission in one of Her Majesty’s light infantry regiments from an
affectionate maiden aunt, believing that the regiment would be speedily
under orders for India, where glory and loot no doubt awaited a dashing
young soldier with a very high opinion of his own merits.
Unhappily for Mr. Lowther the regiment did not go to India; but he and
his captain, with a detachment of seventy rank and file, embarked at
Deptford on a misty morning in October, in charge of 450 convicts bound
for Hobart Town. At the time of which I write the ensign had been nearly
a twelvemonth in Van Diemen’s Land, and before him lay the prospect of
another dreary year which must elapse before there was much chance of
his seeing a change of quarters. There are some people who take their
troubles with a cheerful countenance and make the best of a bad bargain;
but Mr. Lowther was not one of them. He had begun to grumble before the
convict ship left Deptford; and he had gone on complaining, with very
little intermission, until to-day, and was likely so to continue until
the end of the chapter. Napoleon at St. Helena could scarcely have felt
his exile more keenly; nor could that fallen hero have more bitterly
resented the injustice of his fate than Harcourt Osborne Lowther, who
believed that there must be something radically wrong in a universe in
which there was no provision of 40,000_l._ or so a year for an elegant
young man with a perfect aquiline nose, a clear ringing touch upon the
piano, a trumpet tone on the flute, a talent for taking pen-and-ink
portraits that were equal to anything of Count D’Orsay’s, and an
irreproachable taste in waistcoats.
He went out now in very tolerable spirits; first, because he had worked
himself into a good temper by grumbling to himself and Tredethlyn all
day; secondly, because he was going to have a good dinner and some rare
old tawny port, which was the boast of Mr. Corbett the magistrate; and
thirdly, because he was going to be admired; and in a Tasmanian
settlement even the worship of a young lady with bony fingers and
drab-coloured eyes and hair is not altogether a despicable tribute.
“When I hear ‘Kinloch of Kinloch’ tortured out of all semblance of
himself upon that wretched piano, I let myself go somehow or other,”
thought the ensign, “and I fancy myself standing behind Maude Hillary’s
Broadwood in the long drawing-room at Twickenham. Twickenham! Shall I
ever see Twickenham again, and Maude Hillary, and the twinkling light
upon the river, and the low branches of the chestnuts, the sedgy banks,
the lazy boats, the lights up at the ‘Star and Garter’ glimmering across
the dusky valley? Shall I ever see that fair civilised land again? or
shall I die in this condemned and accursed hole?--die, forgotten and
unlamented, before I have made any mark in the world?”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER II.
THE MAN.
While Mr. Lowther went to eat his dinner with the hospitable magistrate,
Francis Tredethlyn did his work briskly; folding his master’s coats and
waistcoats, brushing boots, clearing away little heaps of cigar-ash, and
picking up torn scraps of paper and open books cast recklessly upon the
floor by a reader who was too badly disposed towards a world that had
ill-treated him to find the opinions of any author entirely to his
taste.
The soldier whistled that lively melody in praise of Erin’s daughters
all the time, and achieved his task with the rapid neatness of a male
Cinderella specially endowed by some fairy godmother; and when Mr.
Lowther’s humble sitting-room and bed-room were restored to perfect
order, his valet retired to his own little apartment, which was a
shed-like chamber at the back of the cottage, and a kind of compromise
between a dressing-room and a wash-house. Here Mr. Tredethlyn made his
toilet, which consisted of a rapid plunge of his head and throat into a
tub of cold water, some brisk operations with a cake of yellow soap,
accompanied by sputtering and whizzing noises of an alarming character,
a little fierce rubbing down with a coarse towel, and the smart
application of a stiff and implacable-looking hair-brush. When this was
done, Francis Tredethlyn put on his jacket, and went out into the garden
to smoke his pipe and converse with the convicts.
Now that the gifts of nature had been enhanced by the adornments of art,
the ensign’s valet was by no means a bad-looking fellow. He was tall,
broad-shouldered, and muscular in build as a modern Hercules. His
closely cut black hair revealed the outline of a well-shaped head well
placed upon his shoulders. Under his dark, almost gipsy-brown, skin was
a rich crimson glow, which deepened or faded under the influence of any
powerful emotion. His nose was straight, but rather short, and of no
particular type; but a sculptor would have told you there was a special
beauty about the curve of his full open nostrils, and Honoré de Balzac
would have informed you that a man with that kind of nostril is
generally good for something in this world. His forehead was low,
stronger in the perceptive than in the reflective organs; his eyes were
of a clear grey, darkened by the shadow of thick black lashes. He was a
handsome soldier; he would have made a handsome gladiator in the old
Roman days; a noble-looking brigand, in the days when brigands were
chivalrous; a dashing highwayman, in the age when Claude Duval rode
gaily to his death on Tyburn tree; a glorious sporting farmer down in
Leicestershire to-day; but no power upon this earth could have
transformed him into an elegant West-end lounger, an accomplished
dawdler in fashionable drawing-rooms, or a “gentleman” in the modern
acceptation of the word.
He went out into the garden now, to smoke his pipe of bird’s-eye and
talk to the convict gardeners, who brightened at his approach, and
deliberately planted themselves in a convenient position upon their
spades, in order to converse with him. I am sorry to say that he was as
much at home in their society as if they had been the most estimable of
mankind, and that he encouraged them to talk freely of their burglarious
experiences in the Old World. Was there not a smack of brigandage and
adventure in these experiences, and even a dash of chivalry, according
to the two men’s own showing? for they told stories of encounters in
which they shone out quite with heroic lustre from their rooted
objection to cut an elderly lady’s throat, and their gallant bearing
towards a high-minded young damsel who had led them from room to room in
her father’s mansion, and had pointed with her own fair hands to the
whereabouts of the family valuables. Francis Tredethlyn sat upon the
trunk of a fallen acacia, watching the lazy clouds in the still evening
sky, and smoking his pipe, long after the two convicts had struck work
and retired to their own quarters. He sat smoking and musing; thinking,
as I suppose a man so banished must think, of that other far-away world
which he had left behind him; and which it seemed to him sometimes, in
such still moments as these, that he should never see again.
“So far away, so very far away!” he mused. “I wonder how the little
village street upon the hill is looking now? It’s winter time now there,
or getting towards winter time anyhow. I can fancy it of an evening,
with the lights twinkling in the low shop windows, the big castle-gate
frowning down upon the poor little street; the churchyard, where Susy
and I have played, all dark and lonesome in the winter night; and Susy
herself--pretty little dark-eyed Susy--sitting by the hearth in the big
kitchen at Tredethlyn, stitch, stitch, stitch, while the old man nods
and snores over his newspaper. Poor little Susy, what a hard life it is
for her; and the old man as rich as that king of somewhere--Crœsus,
don’t they call him?--if his neighbours are to be believed. Poor little
Susy! is she fond of me, I wonder? and will she be pleased to marry me,
if ever I’m able to go back, and say, ‘Susy, the best I could do, after
running away and ’listing, was to save up money to buy my discharge, so
that I might come home again to claim the old promise--for better for
worse, for richer or poorer’? We couldn’t well be poorer than we should
be just at first; for, of course, the old chap would turn rusty, and cut
Susy off with a shilling; but who cares for that?” thought Francis
Tredethlyn, snapping his fingers in the independence of his spirit. “If
Susy loves me, and I love Susy, and we’re both young and strong and
industrious, what’s to prevent us getting on in the world, without
anybody’s money to help us?”
The soldier smoked another pipe in a dreamy reverie, in which his
thoughts still hovered about one familiar spot in his native country--a
long, low, stone-built farmhouse, standing alone upon a broad plateau of
bare moorland, very dreary of aspect in winter,--a dismal,
ghastly-looking homestead, in which the ornamental had been sacrificed
to the useful,--a gaunt, naked-looking dwelling-place, upon whose
decoration or improvement a ten-pound note had not been expended within
the memory of man,--a house which had gone down through three
generations of close-fisted, cross-grained owners, and which had grown
uglier and drearier under the rule of each generation.
This was the habitation which stood as clearly out against the vague
background of Francis Tredethlyn’s dreams as if it had been palpably
present upon the rising ground on the other side of the bay. This was
the house; and in the low narrow doorway, fronting the desolate expanse
of stunted brown grass, the soldier saw the slender figure of a girl--a
girl with dark, gentle eyes, and a quaker-like dress of coarse brown
stuff,--a girl who stood with her hand shading her eyes, looking at the
distant figure of an old man plodding homeward in the winter twilight.
He had so often seen her thus, that it was only natural the picture of
her should present itself to his mind to-night, as his thoughts wandered
homeward. He was so far away from this girl and the familiar place in
which she lived, that it seemed almost impossible to him that he could
ever see her again, or tread the well-known pathways along which he had
so often walked by her side. He thought of her almost as the dead may
think of the living--if they do think of us.
“Poor little Susy! I wonder whether she loved me--whether she loves me
still? I wasn’t like some of your lovers,--I wasn’t one of your
desperate fellows. I had no hot fits, or cold fits, or jealous fits, or
such like, and there are some folks that might say I was never in love
at all. But I was very fond of Susy--poor little tender-hearted Susy! I
used to think of her, somehow, as if she had been my little sister. I
think of her like that now.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER III.
TIDINGS OF HOME.
It was late when Mr. Lowther came home from his friend the magistrate’s.
The faint flush that lighted up his face, and the unwonted lustre of his
eyes, bore testimony to the merits of Mr. Corbett’s tawny port. All
Sandemann’s choicest vintages would not have tempted Harcourt Lowther to
sit listening to a prosy old magistrate’s civil-service experiences, in
Europe; but on this side of the world a bottle of good wine and a
tolerably civilised companion were not entirely to be despised. The
ensign was in a very good temper when he came into the little parlour,
where a swinging lamp burned brightly, and where a tobacco-jar, a
meerschaum, a case-bottle of Schiedam, a tumbler, and a jug of water,
were set upon the table ready for the master of the domain. Mr. Lowther
was in excellent temper, and inclined to be especially civil to his
valet.
“No Schiedam to-night, Tredethlyn,” he said, throwing himself into the
wicker easy-chair, and stretching his feet upon a smaller chair that
stood opposite to him; “I’ve had a little too much of that old fellow’s
port. Devilish good stuff it is too, if it hadn’t a tendency to spoil a
man’s complexion, and concentrate itself in his nose. I’ll take a pipe,
though. Just give me a light, will you, Tredethlyn?”
He sat in a lazy attitude, with his head thrown back against the rail of
the chair, and daintily arranged the stray shreds of tobacco in the bowl
of his pipe with the delicate tip of his little finger; while the
private lighted a long strip of folded paper and handed it to his
master.
“Oh, by the bye,” muttered Mr. Lowther, speaking with his mouth shut
upon the amber mouthpiece of his pipe, “I’ve got some news for you,
Tredethlyn. Just put your hand in my coat-pocket, and take out the paper
you’ll find there. Goodness knows what it means,--a legacy of fifty
pounds or so, I suppose. Anyhow, you’re a lucky devil. I should be glad
enough to get even such a windfall as that; but I never hear of anything
to my advantage.”
Francis Tredethlyn had taken the paper from his master’s pocket by this
time; it was an old copy of the “Times;” and he presented it to the
ensign, but the other pushed it away impatiently.
“_I_ don’t want it,” he said; “I think I read every line of it while old
Corbett was snoring after dinner. Look at the third advertisement in the
second column of the Supplement.”
The soldier did as he was directed, and read the advertisement aloud
very slowly and in a tone of unmitigated wonder.
“Francis Tredethlyn, nephew of the late Oliver Tredethlyn, of Tredethlyn
Grange, near Landresdale, Cornwall. If the above-mentioned will apply to
Messrs. Krusdale and Scardon, solicitors, 29, Verulam Buildings, Gray’s
Inn, he will hear of something to his advantage.”
“The late Oliver Tredethlyn!” cried Francis, staring blankly at the
paper; “my uncle’s dead, then!”
“Was he alive when you left England?” asked the ensign.
“He was alive when I left Cornwall. Dead! my uncle Oliver?” the young
man said, in a dreamy voice; “and I pictured him to-night in my fancy,
plodding home from the outlying lands, as hale and stern and sturdy as
ever. Dead! and he may have been dead ever so long, for all this tells
me,” added Francis Tredethlyn, pointing to the advertisement.
“You were uncommonly fond of your uncle, I suppose, from the way you
talk of him,” Mr. Lowther remarked, carelessly. He was in good humour
to-night, and ready to talk about anything,--inclined to take almost an
interest in the affairs of another man, and that man his valet!
“Fond of him!” exclaimed Francis Tredethlyn, “fond of my uncle Oliver! I
don’t think the creature ever lived that was fond of him, or whose love
he’d have cared to have. He liked folks to obey him, and cut things as
close as he wanted ’em cut; but beyond that, he didn’t care what they
thought or what they did. I suppose he did love his daughter though,
after a fashion, but it was a very hard fashion. No, sir, I wasn’t
particularly fond of my uncle Oliver Tredethlyn, but I’m struck all of a
heap by the news of his death coming upon me so sudden; and I’m thinking
of the effect that it will have on my cousin Susy,--she’s all alone in
the world now,--poor little Susy!”
The ensign looked up quickly. “Susy!” he said, “who the deuce is your
cousin Susy?”
“She’s my uncle Oliver’s only daughter, sir; his only child, too, for
the matter of that. We were engaged to be married, sir; but things went
wrong with me at home, and I ran away and enlisted.”
“Ah! How long ago did all that happen?”
“Nearly five years, sir.”
“And you’ve kept up some sort of a correspondence with your cousin since
then, I suppose?”
“Not I, sir; her father wasn’t the man to let her write a letter that
would cost a lump of money for postage, or to write any letter to such a
scamp as me, either; and poor Susy was too close watched, and too
obedient into the bargain, to write without his leave. _I’ve_ written to
her now and then, but I’ve had no news from home since the day I left
it, except this that you’ve brought me to-night.”
“And I suppose your uncle has left you a legacy?”
“I suppose so, sir; it isn’t likely to be much anyhow, for I never was
any great favourite of his.”
“You’d better write to these lawyers, though. There’s a mail to-morrow;
bring out your desk, and write at once.”
“Here, sir?”
“Yes, here.”
Francis Tredethlyn hesitated for a moment, but seeing that his master
was resolute, he brought a clumsy old-fashioned mahogany desk from his
chamber at the back of the cottage, and seated himself at a corner of
the table with the desk before him. He had placed himself at a very
respectful distance from Mr. Harcourt Lowther; but that gentleman,
having finished his pipe, got up, and began to walk slowly up and down
the room, while his valet squared his elbows and commenced a laborious
inscription of his address at the top of the page.
“Tell them that you are Francis Tredethlyn, nephew of Oliver Tredethlyn,
and that you can bring forward plenty of witnesses to prove your
identity, and so on, as soon as you can get back to England. I don’t
suppose they’ll let you have your legacy till they see you. Ask them to
tell you what the amount is, at any rate.”
Mr. Lowther did not confine himself to giving his valet these hints upon
the composition of his letter; he was good enough to stand behind the
young man’s chair, and look over his shoulder as he wrote; but as
Francis Tredethlyn’s penmanship was not of a very rapid order, the
ensign’s eyes soon wandered from the page, and straying to an open
division of the desk, lighted on something that looked like a
water-coloured sketch, covered with silver paper.
“Why, you sly dog,” he cried with a laugh, “you’ve got a woman’s picture
in your desk!”
Francis Tredethlyn blushed and looked very sheepish as he took the
little water-coloured sketch out of its silver-paper envelope and handed
it submissively to his master.
“It’s my cousin Susan’s portrait, sir,” he said; “it was taken by a
travelling artist, who came down our way one summer. It isn’t much of a
likeness, but it pleases me to look at it sometimes, for I can fill up
all that’s wanting in the face out of my own mind, and see my cousin
smiling at me, as if I was at home again.”
Mr. Lowther stood behind his servant’s chair looking at the portrait,
while the soldier went on writing. It was not the work of a very
brilliant artist; there was none of those deliciously careless touches,
none of that transparent lightness, which a clever painter’s
manipulation would have displayed. It was a stiff, laborious little
portrait of a girl with hazel brown eyes and smooth banded brown hair,
and an innocent childish mouth, rosy and fresh and smiling as a summer’s
morning in the country. It was only the picture of a country girl, who
seemed to have looked shyly at the artist as he painted her.
“So that’s your cousin Susy,” said Mr. Lowther, laying the picture down
upon the table by Tredethlyn’s elbow. “I shan’t stop while you address
your letter, and I don’t want any thing more, so you can go to bed at
once if you like. Good night.”
The ensign took a candle from a little side-table as he spoke, lighted
it at the lamp above Tredethlyn’s head, and went out of the room.
Francis finished his letter, and placed it on the mantelpiece, where
some letters of his master’s were lying ready for the next day’s mail.
He did not go to bed at once, though it was late, and he was free to do
so, but sat for some time with his cousin Susan Tredethlyn’s portrait in
his hand, looking at the girlish face, and thinking of the changes that
had come to pass in his old home.
“The old chap was hard and stern with her, and her life was a dull one,
poor little girl,” thought the soldier; “and she’ll have a fine fortune,
I suppose, now he’s gone; but somehow I don’t like to think of her left
lonely in the world; she’s too young and too pretty, and too innocent
for that. Innocent! why, bless her poor tender little heart, I don’t
think she knows there’s such a thing as wickedness upon this earth.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IV.
TREDETHLYN’S LUCK.
Francis Tredethlyn had to wait a very long time before there could be
any possibility of a letter from the Gray’s Inn solicitors, but he
endured the delay with perfect tranquillity of mind; and if either of
the two men seemed anxious for the arrival of the letter, that man was
Harcourt Lowther, and not Francis Tredethlyn. The ensign had a trick of
alluding to his servant’s good fortune whenever things went especially
ill with himself.
“Here am I without a friend in the world to lend me a five-pound note,”
he would remark, impatiently, “and there are you with a chance of a nice
little legacy from that old uncle of yours. I shouldn’t wonder if you
stand in for four or five hundred at the least.”
“I don’t think it, sir,” the valet always answered, coolly. “I’ve heard
our neighbours say, that what with farming, what with mining, and
dabbling a good bit with funds and railway shares, and such-like, my
uncle must be as rich as a Jew; but for all that, I don’t look to be
much better off for any thing that he’ll have left me. I suppose he’s
left every thing to my cousin Susan, seeing that he had neither kith nor
kin except her and me. But somehow or other I can’t imagine his parting
with his money to any one, even after his death. I almost fancy that
he’d rather have tied it up, if he could, so that the interest upon it
would go on accumulating for ever and ever, thinking as he might
perhaps, being old and eccentric, that he’d have a kind of satisfaction,
even in his grave, from knowing that the money was going on getting more
and more, instead of being spent or squandered.”
Francis Tredethlyn did not make this remark in any spirit of ill-nature;
he spoke like a man who states a plain fact.
“I dare say he was a regular old curmudgeon,” Mr. Lowther answered, “but
he must leave his money to some one, and the fact of these lawyers
advertising for you is ample proof that he must have left some of it to
you.”
Such a conversation as this occurred pretty frequently during the long
interval in which Francis Tredethlyn waited for the answer to his
letter. Sometimes, when Harcourt Lowther was in a very bad temper, he
would accuse his attendant of having grown proud and insolent and lazy,
since the advent of that _Times_ newspaper, which the ensign had
borrowed from Mr. Corbett; but every one of the accusations was as
groundless as many other of the officer’s complaints against people and
things in general. There was no change in Francis Tredethlyn: he did his
work cheerfully and well, obeyed orders in a frank, manly spirit, and
behaved himself altogether in a most exemplary manner.
The time when a letter from England might be expected came round at
last; but Francis Tredethlyn evinced no anxiety for the arrival of the
solicitors’ epistle. A long season of drought had given way before a
sudden downfall of rain, and Harcourt Lowther, who had planned a couple
of days’ kangaroo hunting, and had made all necessary arrangements for
the performance of his duties by a good-natured and efficient
colour-sergeant, found himself a prisoner in his cottage at Port Arthur,
with nothing to do but wait for a change in the weather.
It was very tiresome. The accomplished, light-hearted Harcourt Lowther,
who could take life so pleasantly in the drawing-rooms of Tyburnia or
Belgravia, to whom a summer afternoon amongst a group of fashionable
gossips in the smoking-room of his favourite club was only too short,
found this terrible Tasmanian day intolerably long. He had tried every
available way of getting rid of his time. He had sketched a little, and
read a little, and played the flute a little, and smoked a great deal,
and had relieved the oppression of his spirits by an incalculable number
of yawns, and a little occasional bad language. And now, having
exhausted all these resources, he stood with his head leaning listlessly
against the roughly finished sash of the window, watching the convict
labourers at work under the heavy rain. He derived some faint ray of
comfort from the signs of those two men. At any rate, there were some
people in the world worse off than himself,--unlucky wretches who were
obliged to work in wet weather, and wear a hideous dress, and eat coarse
unpalatable food, or food that appeared abominably coarse and
unpalatable in the eyes of Mr. Harcourt Lowther, who had been known upon
occasion to turn up his nose at the culinary masterpieces of Soyer and
Francatelli.
“Why don’t they kill themselves?” muttered the ensign; “they could drive
rusty nails into their veins, and make an end of themselves somehow.
There are plenty of poisonous things in my garden that they might eat,
and make a finish of their lives that way; but they don’t. They go on
day after day drudging and toiling, and enduring their lives, somehow or
other. I suppose they hope to get away some day. How ever should I bear
my life if I didn’t hope to get away--if I didn’t hope it would come to
an end pretty soon?”
Mr. Lowther, having exhausted the pleasure to be derived from a
contemplation of the convicts, took to pacing up and down the two rooms;
in the inner of which Francis Tredethlyn was busy cleaning his master’s
guns.
Walking backwards and forwards, and backwards and forwards, and passing
the valet every time, Harcourt Lowther was fain to talk to him; rather
for the pleasure and relief of hearing his own voice, than from any
desire to be friendly towards his vassal.
“No letter yet, Tredethlyn?” he said.
“No, sir; but it may come any day.”
“And you wait for it as quietly as if a legacy, more or less, was
nothing to you. I suppose if they send you a remittance, you’ll be
wanting to buy your discharge, and leave this place; and I shall have to
get another servant,--some awkward, ignorant boor, perhaps?”
“I don’t know about that, sir. There’s plenty as good as me, I dare say,
among our fellows. Other folks may have been brought up respectably, and
taken to soldiering, like me. And as for buying my discharge, I don’t
say but I should be glad to do that, if those lawyer people gave me the
chance. I should be glad to get back to England and see my little cousin
Susy. I always call her little Susy, because I can’t help thinking of
her as she was when I remember her first, when she and I were boy and
girl sweethearts together. I’ve thought of her a deal since I got the
news of her father’s death, and I feel anxious about her, somehow or
other, when I fancy her left alone among strangers.”
Harcourt Lowther, always walking backwards and forwards between the two
rooms, was in the sitting-room when his servant said this. He stopped to
look out of the window again, and there seemed to be a kind of dismal
fascination for him in the convicts, towards whom his eyes wandered in a
moody, absent-minded stare.
“And where do you expect to find her--your cousin, I mean--when you do
go back to England?” he asked presently.
“At the old farm, sir, to be sure. Where should I find her but there?
Poor little soul! she’s never known any other home but that, and isn’t
likely to leave it in a hurry of her own free will.”
“Humph!” muttered the officer, “there’s no calculating upon the changes
that take place in this world. I never expect to find any thing as I
left it when I return to a place or people that I’ve been absent from
for any length of time. I expect to find plenty of changes when I get
back to the civilised world again. Do you suppose the people _there_ can
afford to waste their time thinking of wretched exiles _here_? Life with
them is utterly different from what it is with us. When I left England,
I was engaged to a beautiful girl with fifty thousand pounds or so for
her fortune,--a girl who would have married me, and given me a grand
start in life, if it hadn’t been for her father; but do you think I
expect to find her in the same mind when I go back? Do you think two
years’ absence won’t act as a sponge, and wipe _my_ image out of her
thoughts? What has a beautiful, frivolous creature like that to do with
constancy? Every man who looks at her falls over head and ears in love
with her. She is fed upon flattery and adulation. Is it probable, or
natural, or even possible that she will remember _me_?”
It was not likely that Mr. Lowther would ask this question of his valet.
He asked it of himself, rather, in a peevish and complaining spirit, and
seemed to find a dismal comfort in harping on his wrongs and his
miseries.
“I was a fool to think that Maude Hillary could be constant to me!” he
muttered, angrily. In his anger against a world that had treated him so
badly, he was angry with himself for having been so much a fool as to
expect better treatment. He walked to a little looking-glass hanging
over the mantelpiece, and looked at his handsome face. Was it the face
of a man who was to have no place in the world? Were his many graces of
person, his charm of manner, his versatility of mind, to serve for
nothing after all?
“When I think of the fellows who get on in the world, I feel inclined to
make an end of all this by cutting my throat,” he said, as he frowned at
the image in the glass.
He felt the region of the jugular vein softly with the ends of his
fingers as he spoke, and wondered whether death by the severance of that
important artery was a very painful finish for a man to make. He thought
of how he might look if Francis Tredethlyn, finding him late to rise one
morning, broke into his room and saw him lying in the sunny little
chamber deluged with blood and stone dead. He had been very religiously
brought up, amongst gentle, true-hearted women; but there was no more
pious compunction in his mind as he thought of suicide than there might
have been in the mind of an aboriginal inhabitant of the Solomon
Islands. He had a mother at home--a mother who believed in him and
idolized him, to the disparagement of all other creatures; but no image
of her grief and despair arose between him and the scheme of a desperate
death. His thoughts travelled in a narrow circle, of which self was the
unchanging centre.
“I have heard of men making away with themselves on the very eve of some
event which would have made a complete change in their fortunes,” he
thought presently. “I never read the story of a suicide that did not
seem more or less the story of a fool. No, my death shall never make a
paragraph for a newspaper. I must be very hard pushed when I come to
that. This place gives me the blue-devils, and everything looks black to
me out here. I wish Abel Janz Tasman and Captain Cook had perished
before ever they sighted this dismal land. I wish all the lot of petty
Dutch traders and navigators had come to an untimely end before ever
they discovered any one of these miserable islands, which have been a
paradise for convicts and scoundrels, and a hell for gentlemen, during
the last half-century. How was I to know, when I bought a commission in
her Majesty’s service, that the first stage on the road to martial glory
was to be the post of head-gaoler at a settlement in the Antipodes? The
papers talk of a change in the transportation system, a change that will
rid Van Diemen’s Land of its present delightful inhabitants; but no
change is likely to come about in my time. I shall have to drag my chain
out to the last link, I dare say. It’s better to be born lucky than
rich, says the proverb; but how about the poor devils who are neither
rich nor lucky?”
A rap on the little door, that opened out of the sitting-room on to a
patch of garden which lay between the house and the high road, startled
Mr. Lowther out of his long reverie.
“It’s the fellow with the letters,” he cried; and before Francis
Tredethlyn could emerge from the inner room, his master had opened the
door, and had taken a little packet of letters, newspapers, and
magazines from the man who brought them. “One from my mother; one
from--yes--from Maude, at last; the _Times_, _Punch_, _Blackwood’s_,
_United Service_, and the lawyer’s letter!--‘Francis Tredethlyn, Esq.!’
eh? The legacy must be something more than five hundred, my man, or
they’d hardly dub you Esquire.”
He tossed the letter over to his servant as he spoke, and looked at the
Cornishman furtively, with something like envy expressed in his look.
Francis Tredethlyn received the lawyers’ epistle very coolly, and
retired into the adjoining room to read it, while his master sat at the
table in the parlour, tearing off the flimsy envelope of a letter with a
hasty nervous hand.
“From Maude!” he muttered. “At last, my lady: at last, at last!”
The letter was a very long one, written in a clear and bold yet
sufficiently feminine hand, on slippery pink paper scented with a
perfume that had survived an Australian voyage. The contents of the
letter must have been tolerably pleasing to Harcourt Lowther, for he
smiled as he read, and seemed to forget all about Francis Tredethlyn’s
legacy.
“I miss you very much, though papa surrounds us with gaiety; indeed, I
think we have been gayer than ever lately; and he never seems so happy
as when our dear old lawn is crowded with visitors. But I miss you,
Harcourt, in spite of all the cruel insinuations in your last letter.
The summer evenings seem long and dreary when I think of you, so far
away, so unhappy, as your letters tell me you are, Harcourt, though you
are too unselfish to admit the truth in plain words. I scarcely open the
piano once in a month, now that I have no one to play concertante duets.
I scarcely care for a new opera; for the men who come into our box bore
me to death with their vapid talk, and I know that not one of them
understands what he talks about. I am not happy, Harcourt, though you
taunt me with my wealth and my position, and the difference between our
lives. I am not happy, for our future seems to grow darker and darker
every day. I have mentioned you to my father several times, and every
time he seems more angry than the last; so now I feel that your name is
tacitly tabooed; and any chance allusion to you from the lips of
strangers makes me tremble and turn cold. I have tried in vain to
comprehend the reason of my father’s aversion to any thought of a
marriage between you and me. I have been so much a spoiled child, that
to be thwarted or opposed on any subject seems strange to me, most of
all when that subject is so near my heart. I can scarcely think that my
dear father would allow any consideration of fortune to stand in the way
of happiness, and yet that is the only consideration that can influence
him, for I know that he always liked and admired you. You must awhile be
patient: what I can do I will. And you must trust me, dear Harcourt, and
not pain me again as you have pained me by those unkind doubts of my
constancy. You know that money has never been any consideration with me;
and you ought to know that I would willingly lose every penny of my
fortune rather than sacrifice my promise to you.”
“O yes; that’s all very well!” muttered Mr. Lowther peevishly, after
having read this part of Miss Hillary’s epistle twice over; “but Lionel
Hillary’s daughter with fifty thousand pounds or so, and without a
penny, are two very different people. Not but what she’s always a
beautiful girl and a charming girl; but a man can have his pick of
charming and beautiful girls, if _that’s_ all he wants to set him up in
life. I love her, Heaven knows; and the sight of her writing sends a
thrill through my veins like the touch of her hand, or the fluttering of
her breath upon my cheek. But poverty makes a man practical, and I think
I never read a letter that had less of the practical in it than this
letter. It’s a woman’s epistle all over. We must be patient, and wait
till we’re worn out by waiting, and the engagement between us becomes a
chain that binds us both from better things, and the sound of each
other’s name becomes a nuisance to us from its associations of trouble
and responsibility. That’s what a long engagement generally comes to. If
I’d distinguished myself in India, led a desperate charge against
orders, or taken the gate of an Affghan fortress, or done something
reckless and mad-headed and lucky, and could have gone back with a
captaincy, and a dash of newspaper celebrity about my name, I might have
hoped that old Hillary, in a moment of maudlin after-dinner generosity,
would have given his consent to my marriage with Maude. But how am I to
present myself at Twickenham, and say, ‘I have been taking care of
convicts for the last two years,--not particularly well, for more
convicts have escaped into the bush in my time than in any other man’s
time, according to the reports,--and I have come back to England with
the same rank that I had when I left, and with less money than I took
away with me’? Can I go to Lionel Hillary and say that? Is that the sort
of argument which will induce a man to give me his daughter and her
fortune?”
He went back to Miss Hillary’s letter. It was only a frivolous letter,
after all; and it contained more intelligence about a morning concert in
Hanover Square, a regatta at Ryde, and a preternaturally sagacious
Skye-terrier, than was likely to be gratifying to a discontented exile
at Port Arthur. But Mr. Lowther was fain to content himself as he might
with the pretty girlish gossip. It was something, after all his
grumbling, to receive the assurance that he was not entirely forgotten
by the only daughter and sole heiress of one of the richest merchants in
the city of London.
He looked up presently from his letter, to see Francis Tredethlyn
standing in the doorway between the two rooms, pale to the lips, and
clutching at his throat as if he had some difficulty in breathing.
“What’s the matter, man?” asked the ensign; “hasn’t the old chap left
you any money, after all?”
“It isn’t that, sir,” gasped the soldier; “there’s money enough and to
spare. It’s my cousin Susy; that poor little innocent creature, that was
as pure as the apple-blossoms on the gnarled old trees in the orchard
when I left home. She’s done something, sir--something that turned her
father against her. She’s gone away, sir, and no one knows where she’s
gone, or what’s come of her, or whether she’s dead or alive. And her
father disinherited her, poor lost lamb; and--that’ll tell you all about
the fortune, sir, if you want to know about it.” Francis Tredethlyn
threw the lawyer’s letter upon the table before his master, and walked
away to the window--the same window at which the ensign had stood
looking out at the convicts half an hour before.
Harcourt Lowther read the lawyer’s letter, at first with a listless,
indifferent air, and then as eagerly as if he had been reading his own
death-warrant. It was a long letter, worded in a very formal manner, but
it set forth the fact that the fortune left by Oliver Tredethlyn to his
nephew Francis amounted to something over thirty thousand a year.
For some minutes after this fact had been made clear to him Harcourt
Lowther sat with the open letter before him, staring at the lines. Then
suddenly the blank stupor upon his face gave way to a look of despair.
The ensign flung his head and arms upon the table, and burst into tears.
“I have been eating my own heart in this place for nearly two years,” he
sobbed, “and not one ray of light--no, by the heaven above me! not
one--has dawned upon my life; and a valet, a private soldier, the fellow
who scours my rooms and blacks my boots, has thirty thousand a year left
him!”
There was something so terrible in this hysterical outburst of rage and
envy, something so utterly piteous in this unmanly revolt against
another man’s good fortune, that Francis Tredethlyn forgot his own
trouble before the aspect of his master’s degradation.
“Don’t, sir,” he cried, “for God’s sake, don’t do that! All the riches
in the world wouldn’t pay a man for taking on like that. If you want
money, you’re welcome to borrow some of mine as soon as ever I get the
power to lend it. There’s more than I care to have, or could ever spend.
You’ll be welcome to what you want, Mr. Lowther. I don’t set much
account upon money, and I don’t think I ever shall; and the thoughts of
this fortune don’t give me half the pleasure I’ve felt in the gift of a
crown-piece long ago, when I was a little lad. I suppose it was because
I thought then there was nothing in all the world that five shillings
wouldn’t buy, and because I’m wiser now, and know there are some things
a million of money can’t purchase. The news of this money has brought
the thoughts of my father and my mother back to me, Mr. Lowther. I’d
give every sixpence of it, if it could bring back the past, and pay out
the bailiff’s man that was sitting by our kitchen-fire at home when my
mother lay ill up-stairs. But it can’t do that. My father and mother
both died poor, and all this money can’t buy back one of the sorrowful
days they spent in the old farm, when things went from bad to worse, and
debt and ruin came down upon us. I don’t seem to care for the money, Mr.
Lowther; I am dazed and bewildered, somehow, by the greatness of the
sum, but I don’t seem to care.”
The ensign had calmed himself by this time. He got up and brushed the
tears from his eyes, real tears of rage, envy, mortification, and
despair. There was a faint blush upon his face, the one evidence of his
shame which he could not suppress in a moment, but all other evidences
of feeling had passed away.
“You’re a good fellow, Tredethlyn,” he said, “an excellent
simple-hearted fellow; as simple-hearted as a baby,--for who but a baby
ever talked as you talk about this money? and I congratulate you upon
your good luck. I see these lawyer fellows send you a bill for a couple
of hundred; that’ll buy you off here pleasantly, and get you back to
England. My advice to you is to get back as fast as ever you can, and
enter into possession of your property. It seems a complicated kind of
estate from what I can make out--mining property, and agricultural
property, and shares in half the speculations of modern times,--but it’s
a great estate, and that’s all you want to know. Go back; and as soon as
ever I can get away from this accursed hole, I’ll look you up in London;
and I--I _will_ borrow a little of that money you generously offer, and
I’ll turn bear leader, and show you what life is in the upper circle, to
which thirty thousand a year is the universal ‘open sesame.’”
The ensign slapped his hand upon his servant’s shoulder with a jovial
air, and spoke almost as gaily as if Oliver Tredethlyn’s fortune was to
be in some way or other a stroke of good luck for himself.
“Thank you, sir,” Francis answered, thoughtfully, “you’re very good; but
I don’t care to force myself in among grand folks because I’m rich
enough to do as they do. I’ve got a task before me, and it may be a long
one.”
“A task!”
“Yes; I’ve got to look for my cousin.”
“Your cousin, Susan Tredethlyn!--the girl whose portrait you showed me?”
“Yes, sir. All this money would have been hers, most likely, if she
hadn’t done something to turn my uncle against her. I can’t forget that,
you see, sir; and the first use I make of the money will be to spend
some of it in looking after her.”
“Susan Tredethlyn,” muttered Harcourt Lowther,--“Susan Tredethlyn. That
portrait you showed me was a very bad one, for I haven’t the least
notion of what your cousin is like.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER V.
COMING HOME.
When the jaded horses of the “Electric” coach from Falmouth stopped
before the Crown Inn at Landresdale, in the county of Cornwall, on the
13th of July, 1852, the landlord of the little hostelry was somewhat
startled by an event which was of very rare occurrence in those parts. A
passenger alighted from the back of the coach, and demanded his
portmanteau from the guard,--a passenger who, carrying his portmanteau
as easily as if it had been a parcel of flimsy milliner’s ware, walked
straight to the little private parlour opposite the bar, and ensconced
himself therein.
“I shall want my dinner, and a bed, Joseph Penruffin,” he said to the
proprietor of the Crown. “You’d better see the coach off, and then you
can come and talk to me.”
Mr. Penruffin retired aghast and staring.
“I don’t know who he _is_, Sarah,” he remarked to a comely-looking
woman, who was sitting amongst a noble array of shelves and bottles in a
shady little bar that seemed a good deal too small for such a portly
presence. “His name’s as clean gone out of my mind as if I’d never set
eyes upon him; but I know him, and he knows me, Sarah, for he called me
by my name as glib as you please, and his face--Lord bless us and save
us!--his face is as familiar to me as yourn.”
The passenger who had surprised the Crown Inn from its lazy tranquillity
stood at the little window looking out at the coach. The passenger was
Francis Tredethlyn, lately a foot-soldier in her Majesty’s service, now
a gentleman of landed estate and funded property; but very little
changed by the change in his fortune. As he had been independent and
fearless in the days when he ruled his life by the orders of other men,
so was he simple and unpretending now in the hour of his sudden
prosperity. What he had said to his master in the cottage at Port Arthur
in the first flush of his new fortunes appeared to be equally true of
him now. He did not seem to care about his wealth. He was in no way
elated by a change of fortune which would have sent some men into a
madhouse.
“It seems to me, somehow, as if there was a kind of balance kept up in
this world between good and evil, like the debtor and creditor sides of
a ledger. I put down my uncle Oliver’s fortune on one side, and it looks
as if I was the luckiest fellow in Christendom. But there’s the loss of
poor little Susy must go down on the other side, and then the book looks
altogether different. The loss of her--yes, the loss--that’s the word!
If the earth had opened and swallowed her up, she couldn’t seem more
lost to me than she is.”
The passengers of the “Electric” had recruited themselves by this time,
and a fresh pair of horses had replaced the tired animals who now stood
steaming in the great stable-yard. The coach rolled slowly off, along a
road that lay straight before the windows of the Crown--a road that
crept under the steep slope of a thickly wooded hill, defended by an old
crumbling wall, which, even in its decay, was grander and stronger than
any modern wall that ever girdled a modern gentleman’s estate. The
dark-red brick wall, and all the sombre woods above it, belonged to the
Marquis of Landresdale, upon whose mansion and estate the little town or
village of Landresdale was a kind of dependant, the inhabitants being
almost all of them supported indirectly or directly by the patronage of
the great man and his household. By these simple people the Cornish
nobleman was spoken of with awe and reverence as the “Marquis;” and that
the world held any other creature with a claim to that title was a fact
utterly ignored--it may be, even discredited--by the ratepayers of
Landresdale. Under the shadow of Landresdale House they were born and
lived; and in a church which was only a kind of mausoleum for the
departed nobles and dames of the house of Landresdale they worshipped
every sabbath-day, until in the minds of some hero-worshippers, the
figure of the Marquis grew into a giant shape that blotted out all the
world beyond Landresdale.
“How familiar the old place seems to me, and yet how strange!” thought
Francis Tredethlyn, as he stood at the window. “There’s Jim Teascott the
cobbler over the way, sitting in the very same attitude he was in when I
stopped at the corner below to take my last look at Landresdale. But the
street seems as if it had dwindled and shrunk away into half the size it
used to be; and I feel as strange--as strange as if I’d been dead and
buried, and had come to life again after folks had forgotten all about
me; even the very seasons are all wrong, somehow, to my mind, as they
might seem to a man that had been lying dead ever so long.”
Francis Tredethlyn rubbed his broad palm across his forehead, as if to
clear some kind of cloud away from his intellect. It was scarcely
strange that he should be confused and mystified by the seasons. He had
left autumnal clouds and winds in the Antipodes; and after a hundred
days or so at sea, he found a blazing July sky above his native land,
and he felt as if he had, somehow or other, been cheated out of a
winter. He looked at a little pocket-book, in which he had written some
names and addresses and other memoranda, and in which the initials “S.
T.” occurred very often. Those initials meant Susan Tredethlyn, and the
memoranda in the pocket-book chiefly related to inquiries which Francis
had made about his lost cousin.
Those inquiries had resulted in very little information. The lawyers had
only been able to tell Francis the bare facts relating to his uncle’s
death; how one day, when they least expected to see the old man, he had
suddenly presented himself at their offices, very pale, very feeble, and
with an awful something, which even they recognized as the sign-manual
of the King of Terrors himself, imprinted on his haggard features: how
he had seated himself quietly in his accustomed place, and had dictated
to them, deliberately and unflinchingly, the terms of a will, by which
he bequeathed every shilling he possessed to his nephew, Francis
Tredethlyn; how, when they, as in duty bound, remonstrated with him
about the injustice that such a will would inflict upon his only
daughter, a hideous frown had distorted his face, and he had struck his
clenched fist upon the office-table, crying, with the most horrible
imprecation ever uttered in that place, that no penny of his getting
should ever go to save his daughter from rotting in a workhouse or
starving to death on the king’s highway;--he had said this, and in such
a manner as most effectually to put an end to all remonstrance on the
part of his solicitors. This was all that the lawyers could tell Francis
Tredethlyn about his cousin Susan; but they had gone on to tell him how
his uncle had insisted on leaving the office alone and on foot; how he
had walked the best part of the way from Gray’s Inn to an old-fashioned
commercial inn in the Borough, and how he had broken down at last, only
a hundred yards from his destination, and had fainted away on the
threshold of a chemist’s shop, whence he had been carried to his
death-bed. This had happened on the 30th of June in the preceding year;
and this was all that the lawyers had to tell Francis Tredethlyn, over
and above such intelligence as related only to the extent and nature of
the property bequeathed to him by his late uncle.
But in Landresdale the name of Oliver Tredethlyn was almost as well
known as that of the Marquis himself; and in Landresdale Francis hoped
to learn the true story of his cousin’s fate. He stood now looking out
of the window into the rustic highway, as quiet in the summer evening
calm as if it had been a street in one of the buried cities of Italy, as
peaceful in its drowsy aspect as if no palpitating human heart had ever
carried its daily burden of care and sorrow along the narrow footways,
beneath the shadow of the peaked roofs and quaint abutting upper
stories. He stood looking out, and remembering himself a boy in that old
hill-side street; he stood there now, wondering alike at the past and
the present, which by contrast seemed both equally strange and
unnatural; he stood there in all the flush and vigour of his youth, a
tall, broad-shouldered, simple-hearted soldier, with a fortune far
exceeding the narrow limits of his arithmetical powers, as ignorant of
all the real world that lay before him as a little country lad who rides
to town upon the top of a load of hay and expects to find the streets
paved with gold, and the Queen dressed in her crown and robes, and
sitting on her throne with the ball and sceptre in her hands for ever
and ever.
The landlord of the Crown came bustling in presently with a wooden tray
of knives and forks, and glasses and cruets, that would have amply
served for a dinner-party of half-a-dozen. He laid the cloth with great
ceremony, although with a certain air of briskness inseparable from
innkeeping, even in the laziest and dullest village in all England; and
he kept a furtive watch upon his guest throughout all his operations,
from the preparatory polishing down of the mahogany table, to the final
flourish with which he removed a very large cover from a very small
rumpsteak.
“I think I ought to know you, sir,” he said, courteously, as Francis
Tredethlyn seated himself at the table.
“I think you ought, Joseph Penruffin; I think you ought to remember
Francis Tredethlyn, son of your old friend John Tredethlyn, of Pen
Gorbold, who was a little bit too friendly in this house, perhaps, for
his own prosperity.”
“Francis Tredethlyn!” cried the landlord, clapping his hand upon his
knee, “Francis Tredethlyn! To be sure it is! To think that I should
forget a face that was once as familiar to me as my own son’s! Francis
Tredethlyn! Why, I remember you a lad playing cricket on the green
yonder with my own boys. And you’ve come into a very fine fortune, sir,
I understand; and I hope you will excuse the liberty, if I make so bold
as to wish you every happiness with it, Francis Tredethlyn. Lord bless
us and save us! why, I can remember you a little bit of a toddling child
coming into Landresdale Church with your mother on a summer Sunday
morning, as if it was yesterday! I ask pardon for being so bold and
free-like, but the sight of your face takes me back to old times, and
I’m apt to forget myself.”
Mr. Penruffin’s mind was curiously divided between the memories of the
past and his desire to be duly reverential to Francis Tredethlyn’s new
fortunes. The young man smiled as he recognized the influence of his
newly acquired wealth at war with the associations of his boyhood. He
had seen pretty much the same thing in the office of Messrs. Krusdale
and Scardon. He was beginning already to perceive that an income of
thirty thousand a year made a kind of barrier between himself and poorer
men, and that they regarded him with the same feeling of mingled
reverence and familiarity with which they would have looked at a very
ordinary statue seen across a wonderful screen of virgin gold.
“And the sight of _your_ face takes _me_ back to old times, Mr.
Penruffin,” he said, with rather a mournful accent, “and I’d freely give
half this great fortune of mine if I could bring back one of those
summer Sunday mornings in the old church, and see myself a little fellow
again, trudging by my mother’s side, with a green-baize bag of
prayer-books on my arm. I’d give five thousand pounds for a silk-dress I
saw in a Plymouth draper’s fifteen years ago, when I was too poor to do
any thing but wish for it, if my mother were alive to wear it. I used to
think, when I was a lad, of what I’d buy for my mother out of the first
five-pound note I ever earned; and now I’ve got thirty thousand a year,
and there’s nothing upon all this earth that I can buy for her, except a
gravestone to mark the spot where she lies.”
“Thirty thousand a year!” muttered the landlord, in an undertone, which
had just a tinge of disappointment in it. The Landresdale people had
given their imaginations free play since the death of Oliver Tredethlyn,
and the old man’s fortune had swelled into almost fabulous proportions
with the lapse of time; so thirty thousand didn’t seem so very much,
after all. There had been an idea in Landresdale that Francis Tredethlyn
would most likely buy up the Marquis’s estate off-hand, and if
practicable make a handsome offer for the purchase of the title.
“I am sure, sir, your feelings do you credit,” said Mr. Penruffin, after
that brief sense of disappointment; “I may say very great credit,” he
added, with emphasis,--as if any display of feeling from the possessor
of thirty thousand a year were specially meritorious. “I suppose you
have come down this way to survey your property, sir; to look about you
a little, eh?” inquired the landlord of the Crown, when Francis had
finished his frugal dinner.
“Not I,” the young man answered; “I scarcely know what my property is
yet, though the lawyers told me a long rigmarole about it. No, I’ve come
on a very different errand,” he added gravely. “You remember my cousin,
Susan Tredethlyn, I dare say? I have come to look for her.”
Joseph Penruffin shook his head solemnly, and breathed a long sigh that
was almost a groan.
“If that’s your errand here, sir, I’m afraid it isn’t likely to be a
very fortunate one. Folks in Landresdale never expect to see Susan
Tredethlyn again; she went away from the farm four years ago; no one
knows exactly where she went; no one knows why she went. There’s your
uncle’s old servants, Mr. Tredethlyn, of course they _might_ have said
something, if they’d liked to it. But you may as well go and question
the tombstones in Landresdale churchyard as question _them_. All I know,
or all anybody knows in this place is, that your cousin Susan went away
and never came back again; and it stands to reason that she must have
done something very bad indeed, and made her father very desperate
against her, before the old man would have gone and left all his money
away from her--meaning no disrespect to you, sir, but only looking at it
in the light of human nature in general,” added the landlord,
apologetically.
“I’ll never believe that Susan Tredethlyn did any thing wicked or
unwomanly till her own lips tell me so,” cried Francis, bringing his
hand heavily down on the table. “She may have made my uncle desperate
against her, _that’s_ likely enough, for he was always hard with her;
and when I think of his having hoarded all this money, and remember the
life my cousin Susan used to lead, I can scarcely bring myself to
believe that she was his own flesh and blood. I’ll never believe that
she did any thing wrong. I’ll never believe that she could grow to be
any thing different from what she was when I left home,--an innocent,
modest little creature, who was almost frightened of her own pretty
looks when she caught a sight of herself in a glass. But I’m going up to
the old house; and if Martha Dryscoll or her husband know any thing of
my lost cousin, I’ll get the knowledge from them, though I have to wring
it out of their wizened old throats.”
The young man rose as he said this, and took his hat and stick from a
chair near the window. Joseph Penruffin watched him with something like
alarm upon his countenance.
“You’ll sleep here to-night, sir?” he asked.
“Yes; I’m going straight up to the Grange, and I don’t know how long I
may be gone; but I’ll come back here to sleep. I should scarcely fancy
lying down in one of those dreary old rooms; I should expect to see the
wandering spirit of my lost cousin come and look in at me from the
darkness outside my window. No; however late I may be, I’ll come back
here to sleep.”
“And perhaps you’d like some little trifle for supper, sir, having made
such an uncommon poor dinner,” suggested the landlord,--“a chicken and a
little bit of grass, or a tender young duck and a dish of peas?”
But Francis Tredethlyn was walking up the little village street out of
earshot of these savoury suggestions before the landlord had finished
his sentence.
“I don’t call that manners,” muttered Mr. Penruffin; “but I shall cook
the chicken for ten o’clock, and chance it; he can afford to pay for it,
whether he eats it or not. And I think, taking into consideration old
acquaintance and thirty thousand a year, it would only have been
friendly in Francis Tredethlyn if he’d ordered a bottle of wine with his
dinner.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VI.
THE END OF THE WORLD.
The sun was low when Francis Tredethlyn left the Crown Inn, and walked
slowly up the village street. The sun was low, and already a crimson
glory flickered here and there upon the quaint old casements. The young
man walked slowly, looking about him with a half-doubtful,
half-bewildered gaze, like a man who sees his native village in a dream.
And indeed no village in the vision of a sleeper could be more tranquil
in its rustic repose than this Cornish street, steep and stony, mounting
to the summit of a hill, upon whose top the great gates of Landresdale
loomed grim and stately, like the entrance to an ogre’s castle in
fairyland. You climbed the steep little street; and you came to the big
gates of Landresdale; and that was all. The village ended here; and
there was nothing for you to do but to go back again. It was like coming
to the end of the world, and finding a great Elizabethan door of
ponderous oak and iron barred against any chaotic realm that might lie
beyond our every-day earth. There may have been occasions--indeed, the
inhabitants of Landresdale would have testified to many such--on which
those ponderous doors swung open on their mighty hinges: but the
ignorant traveller, looking at them shut, found it difficult to realize
the possibility of their ever being opened. They looked like the doors
of a mausoleum: which may open once in half a century to admit the
coffined dead, but can never be unclosed for any meaner purpose. Grim
towers flanked the stony arch on either side, and two old rusty cannon
displayed their iron noses within the shadow of the towers, ready to
fire a volley down the hilly street whenever the simple folks of
Landresdale should evince any revolutionary tendencies.
To the right of the great gates there was a handsome wing of solid
masonry, whose Tudor windows opened upon a square courtyard, where there
were more cannon, and upon a prim, old-fashioned garden, shut in by a
high wall, and only visible to the wanderer through the iron rails and
arabesques of a lofty gate, amidst whose scrollwork the arms of the
Landresdales and Treverbyns, the Courtenays and Polwheles, were
interlaced and entangled.
The garden wall bounded the estate of Rashleigh Vyvyan Trevannence,
Marquis of Landresdale; and beneath the shelter of that old ivy-covered
red brick wall lay the churchyard, quiet and shadowy, dark with the
dense foliage of great yew-trees, thick with long tangled grass, that
grew high amongst the slanting headstones. Francis Tredethlyn stopped by
the low wooden gate, and leaning against the moss-grown pillar that
supported it, looked up at the square towers which seemed like stony
sentinels for ever keeping guard over the entrance to Landresdale. The
light was red upon the corner window that faced the western sky, but all
the other casements stared blankly and darkly out upon the graves in the
churchyard, and the empty village street, in which one woman, toiling
slowly upwards with a pitcher of water that slopped and trickled at
intervals upon the pavement, was the only living presence.
“The great gates look just the same as they used to look,” thought
Francis Tredethlyn. “When I was a boy, and read fairy-tales, I always
fancied that the enchanted castle the wandering prince came to in the
middle of a wood, or on the summit of a great mountain, was like
Landresdale, a castle standing all alone in the middle of the way, with
no road to the right nor to the left, so that the prince _must_ go in
and ask shelter, though he knew that harm would come of it, or else go
back and lose all the trouble of his journey. How I used to long to pull
that bell when I was a lad!” thought Francis, looking at the iron ring
which swung from a massive chain on one side of the archway.
“But I’ve no need to dawdle here,” he thought, as he pushed the gate
open and went into the churchyard. “It seems as if the nearer I get to
the place where I am certain to hear the truth about Susan, the more I
dread hearing it.”
The ignorant traveller who might turn away from the great gates of
Landresdale to descend the hill under the impression that the county of
Cornwall came to an abrupt termination upon the threshold of the
Marquis’s domain, would have been mistaken. There were other and higher
lands, broad stretches of hill and moorland, lying beyond the
churchyard, to the right of the quaint old garden and the Gothic towers
and casements: and it was thitherward that Francis Tredethlyn directed
his steps. He crossed the churchyard, only pausing briefly before one
tombstone, upon which the names of Sarah and John Tredethlyn were cut,
low down on the stone, at the bottom of a long list of Tredethlyns, who
lay buried in that churchyard. The young man let himself out of the
solemn precinct by a little rusty iron gate that opened on a broad
expanse of common land sloping upward towards the western sky, and only
broken here and there by a quarry or a patch of water.
“It looks bleak and barren enough,” thought Francis, with a shudder;
“but it’s hereabouts that my uncle Oliver picked up a good bit of his
money. The tin mines lie out yonder; and the stone quarry in the hollow
there brought him in plenty, if folks tell the truth.”
Francis Tredethlyn might have echoed the boast of Helen Macgregor had he
chosen, and with stronger justification than that lady, for the earth
upon which he trod was not only his native land but his own peculiar
property, by virtue of certain yellow-looking parchments under the
sign-manual of an Earl and Baron of Landresdale who flourished in the
reign of James I. and by payment of an eccentric annual tribute in the
shape of a young doe and a hundredweight of virgin tin. It was all his
own, this bleak waste land which Francis Tredethlyn, late private
soldier in her Majesty’s service, late valet to a capricious master, now
trod under his feet. Nor was it the less to be considered for its
barrenness of aspect, for rich metals lay deep below the heathery
surface, in mines that were amongst the oldest and most valuable in
Cornwall.
But Francis Tredethlyn was in no wise elated or disturbed by the
importance of his possession. He had never felt any ardent desire for
wealth, and as yet he had not begun to realize its manifold advantages.
He saw the effect of his fortune upon other men, and smiled at their
weakness; but what had been true of him in the first hour of his altered
position was true of him now,--he had no power either to realize or
rejoice in the extent of his riches.
He walked slowly across the barren moorland, always upward, always
mounting towards a long ridge of western hill, behind which two streaks
of yellow light stretched low against the darkening sky,--a bleak,
bare-looking hill, that seemed the very end of the world. It was upon
this hillside that Tredethlyn Grange had been built four centuries ago,
in the days when men built their houses with a view to endurance; and it
stood there still, a long gray tenement of moss-grown stone, with narrow
casement windows, looking darkly out upon the twilight moor. The larger
portion of the old house had been uninhabited during the tenantship of
the Tredethlyns, who, in a spirit of economy, had located themselves in
the interior rooms lying at one end of the rambling mansion. It was in
one of these rooms that a light now twinkled faintly; and it was towards
this end of the house that Francis Tredethlyn directed his steps. There
had been a moat once on two sides of the house, but cabbages now grew
upon the sloping earth. There had been a garden once before the Grange,
and an old stone sun-dial still marked the spot; but of all the trim
flower-beds and angular paths there remained no vestige now. A field of
trefoil, bounded by a low stone wall, lay beyond two broken pillars that
had once supported a pair of handsome gates; and the sheep browsed close
beneath the dim latticed windows.
“It seems like the end of the world to me to-night,” thought Mr.
Tredethlyn; “and yet once it was comfortable and home-like enough, when
I sat with Susy of a night by the fire in the kitchen, while she darned
the old man’s gray worsted stockings. And to think that he had such
oceans of money all that time, and yet seemed almost to grudge his only
child every gown she wore, and every bit of bread she put into her
mouth.” The young man was close to the familiar threshold by this time.
He knocked at a low, narrow door in the neighbourhood of the one dimly
lighted window, and then drew back a few paces, looking up at the
old-fashioned casements.
“This is the window of Susy’s room,” he thought. “How black and dark it
looks to-night! I remember coming up here the night before I ran away to
Falmouth to enlist. I remember standing by the low wall yonder, in the
cold autumn night, looking up at that very window. There was a light
burning then, and I thought of how I should see it burning just the same
when I came back, and how I’d throw a handful of earth up at the old
window, and Susy would look out, startled and wondering, to find her
faithful sweetheart come back to her from the end of the world. And now
it’s this place that seems like the end of the world somehow, and I’m
every bit as far from Susy now as ever I was out yonder.”
The door was opened only a very little way, and a woman’s face, so hard
and angular that it seemed almost to cut into the dusky atmosphere,
peered out at the traveller.
“What do you please to want, sir?” she asked, suspiciously.
“I want to ask you a few questions, Martha Dryscoll. I’ve come from the
Antipodes to ask them.”
“Mr. Tredethlyn!” cried the woman, opening the door to its widest
extent; “Mr. Francis Tredethlyn come home to his own like a ghost in the
night! I make so bold as to bid you welcome, sir. Your uncle’s empty
chair stands ready for you. The house seems strange and lonesome without
him.”
It was not everybody who would have ascribed to Mr. Oliver Tredethlyn
the power to enliven any house with the smallest ray of cheerfulness, or
brighten any fireside with so much as the faintest glimmer of light. But
Martha Dryscoll spoke in all good faith. She had believed in her master,
and had worked for him, and pinched for him, and half-starved herself
and other people for his sake, throughout five-and-thirty years of the
dreariest and hardest life that woman ever endured. He had picked her
up, starved and almost dying, upon a high road near one of his outlying
farms, and had taken her from field-labour and all its attendant pains,
to be his housekeeper and--slave; and she had repaid this favour a
thousandfold by a devotion that knew no weariness, and a rigid economy
that extended itself to the saving of a grain of salt in the old
spindle-legged leaden saltcellars.
Oliver Tredethlyn had not been actuated by any Quixotic motive in this
eccentric choice of a servant. He took his housekeeper from the wayside
because he saw in her a stuff he had vainly sought in the pampered
menials who had hitherto presented themselves to his notice. He had been
attracted to Martha in the first instance by her gaunt face and gaunter
figure, which would have been sufficiently alarming in one of King
Frederick William’s chosen grenadiers. He had been attracted still more
by her curt answers to his curt questions, in which she told him that
she had walked thirty miles that day before lying down, as she believed,
to die; that she had walked twenty miles the day before, and
five-and-twenty the day before that; that she had not tasted food for
the last eight-and-forty hours; and that she had worked in the fields
and lived upon an average of two-pence a day ever since she could
remember.
It was upon this that a bargain was struck between Oliver Tredethlyn, of
Tredethlyn Grange, of the one part, and Martha Blank, Martha Anybody, of
the other part, for the poor creature had no knowledge of any special
surname to which she might lay claim. She had been called Carroty Jane
in one place because her hair was red and her name was not Jane. She had
been called Gawky Bet, and Lanky Poll, at other places, on account of
her abnormal height; but the name she had received in the Union, where
her earlier years had been passed, was Martha, and it was this name
which she herself recognised as her legitimate appellation. She went
home with Oliver Tredethlyn in one of his empty waggons, and ate her
first spare meal in the Grange kitchen before nightfall; and from that
hour until the old man’s death she served him well and faithfully. She
lived with him all the days of his bachelorhood, and resignedly united
herself to his bailiff when he commanded her so to do. This faithful
creature welcomed Mr. Tredethlyn’s wife when he took it into his head to
bring home a small tenant-farmer’s pretty daughter, who had been forced
into a marriage with a man whom she detested; and, faithful and untiring
to the last, this rough-handed, brawny-armed servant watched by the
young wife’s sick bed during those dull years in which she slowly
withered and faded, from a fresh, blooming girl, into a prematurely old
woman, and so sank by lingering stages into an early grave, leaving
behind her one only child, whose infancy and girlhood were brightened by
no softer light than such as might be shed from the grim, grenadier-like
affection of Martha Dryscoll.
Jonathan Dryscoll, the farm-bailiff whom Oliver Tredethlyn had desired
his housekeeper to marry, was ten years younger than his wife, and was
so poor and weak a creature morally and physically in her hands, that he
seemed at least half a century her junior. If she told him to do
anything, he did it. If she told him to think anything, he thought it;
or would have done so, if the mental exercise had not been generally
beyond the scope of his faculties. He was as honest and faithful as
Martha herself; but if Martha had told him to go and fire all the ricks
on Oliver Tredethlyn’s property, he would have done it with the blind
trustfulness of a princess in a child’s story-book, who obeys the
eccentric behests of a fairy godmother. That Martha Dryscoll could do
anything wrong, or think anything wrong, was an hypothesis which
Jonathan her husband had never contemplated. Perhaps the pleasantest
thing about this couple was that there was no disagreeable evidence of
Martha’s authority. Indeed, that worthy woman was most punctilious in
respect to her liege lord and husband, whom she always spoke of as “the
master.” Jonathan obeyed and trembled, but the sceptre which his wife
wielded was an invisible one, and the chains that bound her slave were
as impalpable as if they had been fashioned of cobwebs.
Martha Dryscoll was not renowned for her capacity of expressing any
species of emotion; but some faint ray of pleasure kindled in her grim
face as she conducted Francis Tredethlyn through the kitchen to an
apartment that had served as a kind of state chamber for three
generations of his race. She set the candle on the polished mahogany
table, and, folding her arms, contemplated the new master of the Grange
at her leisure. In that dim light, in her quaint, scanty dress, with a
brown background of oaken wainscot behind her, she looked like a quaint
figure in one of Jan Steen’s pictures, a hard-faced, angular housewife,
honest, laborious, and economical, with her ear perpetually open to the
leaking of beer-barrels, or the boiling-over of soup-kettles; her eye
ever on the alert to perceive waste or destruction.
“I wish you welcome, Mr. Tredethlyn,” she said; and then, with something
like sadness in her tone, “If the money _was_ to go away from her,
better that it should go to you than to strangers. I don’t think that
you’d turn your back upon her, if she was to need your help; would you
now, Mr. Francis?”
“Turn my back upon her!” cried the young man,--“turn my back upon my
cousin Susy! Do you think I want the money that ought to have been hers?
With God’s blessing, I will go to the end of the world to find my poor
little girl. But tell me--tell me all about it, Martha. I know you are a
good creature. I know you were fond of Susan, though you seemed hard and
stern, like the old man. Tell me all you know about my lost cousin, and
don’t fear but I’ll make good use of my knowledge.”
“It isn’t much I have to tell, sir,” answered the housekeeper, very
gravely. “You remember old Mr. Restwick, of Pen Gorbold. Folks say that
he’s almost as rich as our master was. However it is, he and master were
always fast friends; and when Mrs. Restwick had been dead a little over
a twelvemonth, he and master seemed to get friendlier than ever, and was
always laying their heads together about something, old Restwick hanging
about this place, and sitting in our kitchen, and in this very room--for
master made quite a fuss with the old man, and would sit in the parlour
on his account--all the summer time. Miss Susan usen’t to like the old
man, but she daredn’t say as much, seeing as he was her father’s friend.
Heaven, as looks down upon me, knows, Mr. Francis, than the real reason
of old Restwick pottering about our place night after night never came
into my head, no more than if it had been so much Greek or Latin. But
one night--one quiet summer evening, after such a day as to-day--the
truth came out all at once; and it came upon Susan Tredethlyn as it came
upon me--like a thunderbolt. Can you guess what it was, Mr. Francis?”
“No!” exclaimed the young man, staring at Martha Dryscoll with a
bewildered expression on his face.
“Nor any one else, Mr. Francis, that wasn’t so wrapped up in the love of
his money that the very heart inside of him had turned to stuff as hard
as big golden guineas, or harder; for there’s some kind of furnace as
will melt _them_, isn’t there, Mr. Francis? On the night I am telling
you of, my master told Susan the meaning of old Restwick’s visits. She
was to marry him--poor, pretty young thing. He’d promise to make such
and such--settlements--I think master called ’em, and she’d be mistress
of Pen Gorbold farm, and one of the richest women in this part of the
country. The poor dear only gave one shriek, Mr. Francis, and fell down
upon the floor at her father’s feet as white and as quiet as a corpse.”
“The hard-hearted villain!” cried Francis, pacing up and down the room;
“the infernal villain!”
“She didn’t lie there long; she wasn’t let to do that. Mr. Tredethlyn
lifted her up by the arm, and set her on her feet, fierce and
savage-like; and when she opened her eyes, and looked about her, all
stupefied and bewildered, he began to talk to her. It was cruel talk to
hear from a father to his child; it was a cruel sight to see her
trembling and shivering, and only held from falling by his hard hand
clenched upon her arm. I tried to interfere between them, Mr. Francis;
but my master let his daughter drop into a chair, and pushed me out of
the room. Me and Jonathan was sleeping in the room over the stables
then, and Mr. Tredethlyn took me by the shoulders, and put me out of the
door that opens from the kitchen into the stone-yard at back. I heard
the door bolted against me, and I knew I could be no help or comfort to
that poor child all night. The door’s thick, but I could just hear Susan
Tredethlyn’s sobs now and then, like as if they’d been blown towards me
on the winds, and her father’s voice speaking loud and stern; I listened
till all seemed quiet, and I was in hopes his heart was softened towards
her. But when I got up at four o’clock next morning--for it was
harvest-time, and we were very busy--Susan Tredethlyn’s room was empty,
and the front door was unlocked and unbolted. She’d run away, Mr.
Francis; she’d let herself out some time in the night, and run away.
There was a little scrap of a shawl she used to wear hanging to the
latch of the door. That was bad news for me to tell my master, Mr.
Francis; but I had to tell it. He turned white, and glared at me for a
minute just like a wild beast, and there was a choking, gurgling kind of
noise in his throat. But he was as quiet after that one minute as if he
had been made of iron. ‘So much the better, Mrs. Dryscoll,’ he said, ‘an
undutiful daughter isn’t worth the meat she eats.’”
“But he went after her,” said Francis; “surely he made some attempt to
bring her back? He didn’t let a poor ignorant girl go out into the world
without a friend--without a sixpence?”
“She had a little money, Mr. Francis. Her father had given her a
sovereign on her birthday every year for the last ten years, making her
promise to save the money. She had saved the money, for she had no
chance to spend it, poor child; and she took that money with her, for
when I looked about her room I missed the little box she used to keep it
in. As to looking for her, Mr. Tredethlyn never stirred hand or foot to
do it, though I went on my bended knees to him, begging and praying of
him to bring her back. As to me, Mr. Francis, I’m but a poor ignorant
countrywoman, that never learned to read and write till I was getting on
for thirty; but I got my husband to go to Falmouth with an advertisement
for the county paper, saying as ‘S. T. was to remember she had a true
friend in M. D., and was to be sure and write to her whenever she wanted
help.’ I daredn’t say more, sir; and I think when master saw that
advertisement he knew what it meant, for he glared at me across the
paper, just as he glared at me when I told him his daughter was gone.”
“And he never relented--he never softened towards that poor unhappy
girl?”
“For three years, sir, he never mentioned her name. Night after night
he’d sit and write, and make out his accounts, and calculate his
profits, and such-like, and he’d talk to me fast enough about the
business of the farm; but he never spoke his daughter’s name. One day he
got a letter directed in her hand. I took it from the postman at
Landresdale myself one afternoon when I was down there marketing, and I
wrote down the post-mark that was on it, and that was all I ever knew of
that letter. When my master saw the hand, he came over all of a tremble
like, and there was something awful in the sight of that stern old man
trembling and shivering like as if he had been stricken by the palsy;
but he got over it in a minute, and read the letter, me watching him all
the time. If his face had been stone, it couldn’t have told less. He
crumpled up the letter and put it in his pocket, and for three months he
never spoke of that nor of his daughter. Yet I knew somehow that he
thought of her; for a kind of change came over him, and he seemed always
brooding, brooding, brooding; and he’d start up all of a sudden when we
was all sitting of a night quiet in this kitchen--he’d start up as if he
was going right away, and then heave a long sigh, and sit down again.
But he never said anything about what was in his thoughts, till one
morning he came to me, and said very quietly, ‘Pack me some clothes in a
carpet-bag, Mrs. Dryscoll. I’m going to London to look for my daughter.’
My husband and him went on foot down to Landresdale to catch the
Falmouth coach; but our master never came back. The next news as we
heard of him, Mr. Francis, came to us a month after he’d left. It was a
letter from the lawyers, to say that Mr. Oliver Tredethlyn was dead.”
“And is that all?”
“Yes, Mr. Francis; I can tell you no more. My master was a good master
to me, and I served him faithfully, and worked hard to save his money.
But things have all seemed to come before me in a new light since that
night when I saw Susan Tredethlyn fall white and cold at her father’s
feet, and him without pity for her. It seems as if I’d been stone-blind
up to that time, Mr. Francis; and my eyes was opened all of a sudden;
and I saw that we’d been all wicked heathens, making an idol out of
money that had never brought happiness or comfort to any living
creature; least of all to ourselves. I saw it all at once that night,
Mr. Francis, and I knew that our lives had been wrong somehow.”
Martha Dryscoll spoke very earnestly. She was a good woman, after her
own manner; eager to do her duty to the uttermost, grateful for small
favours, faithful and affectionate. A noble heart beat in that
grenadier-like form, a gentle spirit looked out of those hard gray eyes.
She told the story of her young mistress’s flight with a sorrowful
solemnity, undisturbed by tears. Perhaps her hard childhood, her bitter
youth, her joyless middle life had dried up the source of that tender
womanly emotion; for Martha Dryscoll had never been seen by living
witnesses to shed a tear. She unlocked a grim-looking workbox, and took
from it a little pocket-book, out of which she tore a leaf.
“That’s the name that was on the post-mark, Mr. Francis,” she said,
handing the paper to Mr. Tredethlyn.
The young man read the word Coltonslough.
“Coltonslough,” he repeated, “I never heard of a place of that name. But
I’ll find it, if it’s the most obscure spot upon the earth. God bless
you, Martha Dryscoll, for I believe you’re a good woman.”
He held out his hand, and grasped the housekeeper’s bony fingers as he
spoke.
“We’ve been awaiting--me and the master--for orders from you as to what
we was to do, sir. We’re ready to serve you faithful, if you want our
service; but we’re ready to leave the old place, if we’re any burden
upon you. You’ll be coming to settle here, maybe?”
“No,” answered Francis Tredethlyn, with something of a shudder. “If I’d
found Susan here, as I once thought to find her, I should have been glad
enough to settle somewhere in these parts. As it is, there’s something
in the place that gives me the heartache, and I doubt if I shall ever
come near it again. Whatever wages you and your husband had in my
uncle’s time shall be doubled from to-night, Mrs. Dryscoll; and if my
cousin Susan is still alive, and should ever find her way back to this
place, I should like her to see a light burning in the old window, and
to find a faithful friend ready to bid her welcome home.”
Francis Tredethlyn did not linger very long in the house where a great
part of his boyhood had been spent. Martha’s husband came in presently,
smelling very strongly of cowhouse and stable, and the two would fain
have given Mr. Tredethlyn a detailed account of their stewardship: but
the young man had no heart to listen to them. What did it matter to him
that he was the poorer by the death of an Alderney cow on the
pasture-farm down in the valley, or the richer by a great sheep-shearing
season on the hill? He came home to find no creature of his kith or kin.
He stood as much alone in the world as Adam before Eve was created to
bear him company; and he felt very desolate in spite of his thirty
thousand a year.
He walked back to Landresdale across the bleak moorland under the still
summer night. Away in the distance he saw the dark expanse of purple
ocean melting imperceptibly into purple sky: and vague and dim as that
shadowy distance seemed the unknown future that lay before him. He slept
at the Crown, and left Landresdale early the next morning by the
Falmouth coach, journeying Londonward: but he had by no means abandoned
his search for Susan Tredethlyn.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VII.
MAUDE HILLARY’S ADORERS.
From the bleak moorland on the Cornish hills, where no tree can
flourish, and where the sweeping breath of the salt sea-breeze nips the
tender verdure, and makes the quiet sheep wink again as they look
oceanward; from the hilly district beyond Landresdale, which seems like
the end of the world, and is at any rate the finishing-point of this
British Isle, to the valley of the Thames, the sheltered and lovely
hollow nestling under the wooded heights about the Star-and-Garter, is
about as great a change of scene as all England can afford. It is like
the pushing away of some battered front scene which has done duty for
the blasted heath near Forres, whereon Macbeth met the witches, since
the days when Garrick himself represented the ambitious Thane, to reveal
a glimpse of fairyland fresh from the pencil of Mr. Beverley, with
sunlit cascades glimmering here and there amongst the verdant valleys,
and forest-trees reflected in the calm bosom of a lake.
Mr. Hillary’s place lay in a sheltered bend of the river, nearer to
Isleworth than to Twickenham--a spot where the trees grew thicker and
the shadows fell darker on the quiet water, and the plash of oars was
less often heard, than higher up the river, Mr. Hillary’s house and Mr.
Hillary’s garden seemed to have nestled into the shadiest and most
verdant nook along the river-bank. It was called the Cedars, and it was
a very old place, as any place so called should be. It was called the
Cedars by virtue of the great trees whose spreading branches made
patches of dense shadow on the lawn; and not by the caprice of a cockney
builder, who christens his shelterless houses indifferently after the
noblest trees of the forest. The house was an old red-brick mansion,
long and low and irregular; and there is no kind of window invented for
the admission of the light of heaven, and there is no species of blind
devised by ingenious artisan for the exclusion of that light when it
becomes obnoxious, which did not adorn and diversify the glowing crimson
of the façade. Oriel windows and Tudor windows; long French windows of
violet-stained glass, tiny diamond-paned casements, and noble
jutting-out bays; windows with balconies, and windows with verandahs;
striped linen blinds of crimson and white, and Venetian shutters of
dazzling green; windows leading into conservatories, and windows opening
into aviaries,--all combined to bewilder the eye of the stranger who
stood upon the lawn by the river looking up at Mr. Hillary’s mansion.
Perhaps there never had been any where else so many flowers, and birds,
and gold-fish, and pet dogs, collected together in an area of two acres
and a half. Banks of particoloured blossoms blazed in the sunshine on
the lawn tier above tier, like the bonnets on the grand stand at Ascot
on a Cup day; marble basins of limpid water and tiny trickling fountains
twinkled and glittered in every direction; fragile colonnades of
delicate ironwork, overhung with jasmine and clematis, honeysuckle and
myrtle-blossom, led away to bowery nooks upon the broad terrace by the
river; and what with the perfume of a million flowers, the gurgling of
blackbirds and thrushes, the carolling of skylarks, the shrill whistling
of a grove of canaries, the cooing of tropical love-birds, the screaming
of paroquets, and the barking of half-a-dozen excited lapdogs, the
stranger, suddenly let loose in Mr. Hillary’s river-side Eden, was apt
to yield himself up for the moment to a state of confusion and
bewilderment.
The place was in itself bewildering enough for the ordinary mind;
without Miss Hillary--without Miss Hillary! But when Miss Hillary came
sailing out of a drawing-room window, with diaphanous draperies of white
and blue fluttering and spreading round her, and with all manner of
yellow, gold, and purple enamel absurdities dangling at her wrists, and
depending from the loveliest throat and the pinkest ears in
Christendom,--the stranger who was not provided with forty thousand a
year and a coronet, the which to lay at the feet of that adorable
creature, was the weakest of fools if he did not take to his heels there
and then, and fly from the Cedars, never to return thither. If he
stayed, he fully deserved his fate. If, looking at Maude Hillary, and
knowing that he could never hope to win her for his own, he did not
straightway flee from that flowery paradise beside the sunlit river, all
after-agonies endured by his luckless heart were only the natural
consequence of his mad temerity. But then, unhappily, there are so many
mad men in the world. Homburg and Baden-Baden are dangerous places, but
there are crowds of deluded creatures who will haunt the dazzling halls
of the Kursaal, and the elegant saloons of M. Benazet, so long as the
fatal wheel revolves, and the croupier cries, “Make your game,
gentlemen; the game is made.” What can be a more absurd spectacle than a
big blundering moth whirling and fluttering about the flame of a candle?
Yet the incineration of moth A will not be accepted as a warning by moth
B, though he may be a witness of the sacrifice. Younger sons and
briefless barristers, earning a fluctuating income by the exercise of
their talents in light literature; artists; curates, hopeless of rich
preferment,--came, and saw, and were conquered. The man who, being a
bachelor and under thirty years of age, beheld Maude Hillary, and did
_not_ fall in love with her, was made of sterner stuff than the rest of
his race, and must have had in him the material for a Cromwell or a
Robespierre. He must have been a stony, incorruptible, bilious creature,
intended to hold iron sway over his fellow-men; he had no business in
the paradise between Isleworth and Twickenham.
Shall I describe Maude Hillary as she sails across the lawn this July
morning? I use the word ‘sail,’ as applied to this young lady’s
movements, advisedly; for there was a swimming, undulating motion in her
walk, which was apt to remind one of a lovely white-sailed yacht gliding
far out across an expanse of serene blue water on a summer’s day. Shall
I describe her? No; if I do, stern critics will tell me that she is a
very commonplace young person after all, when it is only my description
that will be commonplace. Her complexion was specially fair and bright;
but it was not because of her fair skin that she was beautiful. Her
features were delicate and harmonious; but those who admired her most
could scarcely have told you whether her nose was nearer to the Grecian
or the Roman type; whether her forehead was low or high, her chin round
or pointed. She was bewitching, rather than beautiful. For if Paris
awarded the apple on purely technical grounds, a thousand lovely English
women might have disputed the prize with Maude Hillary. But I think
Paris would have wished to give her the apple, if only for the pleasure
of seeing her bright face light up into new radiance with the joy of her
triumph; though in strict justice he might feel himself obliged to
bestow the fruit elsewhere. Miss Hillary was bewitching; and people saw
her, and fell in love with her, and bowed themselves down at her feet,
long before they had time to find out that she was not so very beautiful
after all.
She came winding in and out among the flower-beds now, and betook
herself towards an open temple at one end of the terrace by the river--a
temple of slender marble columns, entwined with ivy and beautiful
ephemeral parasites, whose gaudy blossoms relieved the sombre green. Two
gentlemen, who were disporting themselves with lawn billiards, deserted
that amusement and strolled over to the temple. They went slowly enough,
because they held it vulgar to be in a hurry, and they were very young,
and very much used up as to all the joys and sorrows and excitements of
this earth; but they were over head and ears in love with Miss Hillary
notwithstanding.
She was not alone. She never was alone. She had for her constant
associates from four to half-a-dozen pet dogs, and Miss Julia Desmond,
her companion. Miss Desmond was by no means the despised companion so
popular in three-volume novels. She was a very dignified young lady,
whose father had been a colonel in ever so many different armies. She
was one of the Desmonds of Castle Desmond, near Limerick, and there were
three peerages in her family, to say nothing of one extinct earldom,
forfeited by reason of high treason on the part of its possessor, the
revival of which, for his own benefit, had been the lifelong dream of
Patrick Macnamara Ryan O’Brien Desmond, until death let fall a curtain
on that and many other fond delusions which had survived unchanged and
changeless to the last in the eternal boyhood of an Irishman’s nature.
Julia was a very dignified young lady, and had been highly educated in a
Parisian convent, whence she had returned to the south of Ireland to
find the impress of decay upon every object around her, from the
grass-grown roofs of the cottages in the lane below the castle-boundary
to the shattered figure of the brave old colonel. She returned in time
to attend her father’s death-bed, to which Lionel Hillary, his oldest
friend and largest creditor, was summoned by an imploring letter from
the old colonel. To Mr. Hillary the old man confided his penniless
daughter. He had nothing to leave her but a set of old-fashioned garnet
ornaments which had belonged to her mother, and to which he fondly
alluded as the “fam’ly jools;” he had nothing to leave her except this
antique trumpery and his blessing; but he confided her to his largest
creditor, having a vague impression that the largeness of the debt and
the heavy interest he _would_ have given upon all the money lent him by
his friend, had he ever lived to return the principal, laid Mr. Hillary
under a kind of obligation to him. However it was, the London merchant
promised to be a friend and protector to Julia Desmond; and as soon as
the colonel’s funeral was over carried her back to London with him, and
established her in his own house, as the companion of his daughter. A
young lady more or less was of little consequence in such an
establishment as the Cedars; so the merchant thought very lightly of
what he did for Miss Desmond, and Maude Hillary was delighted to have a
friend who was to be her perpetual companion; a friend who could sing a
good second to any duet, and was never out of time in “Blow, gentle
gales,” whensoever a masculine visitor with a good bass organ was to be
procured for the third in that delicious glee. The two girls drove
together, and walked together, and rode together, and played duets on
one piano and on two pianos, or a harp and piano; and went out together
to make water-colour sketches of their favourite bends in the river,
with very blue water and very green willows, and a man in a scarlet
jacket lazily pushing a ferry-boat away from the shore, and a
Newfoundland dog, very black and white and spotty, lying on the bank.
Julia Desmond led a very pleasant life, and there were people who said
that the colonel’s daughter was a most fortunate person; but for Julia
herself there was just one drop in the cup which was bitter enough to
change the flavour of the entire draught. She was _not_ Maude Hillary.
That was Miss Desmond’s grand grievance. She brooded over it sometimes
when she brushed her hair of a night before the big looking-glass in her
pretty chintz-curtained chamber at the Cedars. Maude had two cheval
glasses that swung upon hinges at each side of her dressing-table, and
Maude had her own maid to brush her hair; but Julia was fain to smooth
her own dark tresses. Miss Desmond thought of her grievance very often
of a night, when she contemplated her face by the light of a pair of wax
candles, and pondered upon the events of the day. She was not Maude
Hillary. She was not sole heiress to one of the largest fortunes--so ran
the common rumour--ever won by City merchant. She had not received half
the attention that had been bestowed upon Miss Hillary during that day.
And if not, why not? Was it because she was less good-looking? Certainly
not. Miss Desmond was a handsome girl, with bold, striking features, and
her black eyes flashed indignation upon the other eyes in the glass at
the mere thought of any personal superiority on the part of Maude
Hillary. Was it because she was less accomplished? No, indeed. Whose
thumbs were the strongest and did most execution in a fantasia by
Thalberg? Whose right little finger was clearest and steadiest in a
prolonged shake? Whose figures in a water-colour sketch stood firmest on
their legs? Miss Desmond’s, of course. But Maude was rich, and Julia was
poor; and the meanness of mankind was testified by the absurd devotion
which they all exhibited for the heiress. Julia was really fond of
Maude, and thought her tolerably pretty; but she did not comprehend the
grand fact that Miss Hillary was one of the most fascinating of women,
and that she herself was not. She was handsome and stylish, and
accomplished and well-bred; but she was not bewitching. When Maude spoke
in a friendly manner to any masculine acquaintance he was apt to be
seized with a mad impulse that prompted him to kiss her there and then,
though eternal banishment from her divine presence would be his
immediate doom. Even women had something of the same feeling when Miss
Hillary talked to them; and perhaps this may be attributed to the fact
that her mouth was the best and most expressive feature in her face.
Such heavenly smiles, such innocently and unconsciously bewitching
variations of expression played perpetually about those lovely rosy
lips, that the harshest woman-hater might have been betrayed into the
admission that amongst nature’s numerous mistakes Maude Hillary’s
creation was an excusable one. Fortune-hunters, who came with mercenary
aspirations, remained to be sincere. Rich young stockbrokers, who
speculated amongst themselves upon the extent of Lionel Hillary’s
wealth, would have gladly taken Maude to wife, “ex everything.” But
Julia Desmond could not understand all this, and she regarded her
benefactor’s daughter as a feminine image of the golden calf, before
which mercenary mankind bowed down in servile worship.
The two girls seated themselves in the little temple, and the two
worshippers came round and performed their homage. But Miss Hillary had
more to say to her dogs than to the loungers on the lawn.
“Good morning, Captain Masters.--Floss, you are the naughtiest
darling.--Haven’t I told you once before, Scrub, that Honiton lace is
_not_ good to eat?--Papa has not come home yet, I suppose, Mr.
Somerset?--That tiresome City makes a kind of orphan of me, doesn’t it,
Julia? We never have papa to go with us anywhere now, do we, Julia?--No,
Peasblossom, anything but a locket with papa’s hair in it. _That_ must
not be worried.--When are we to go to the _fête_, Captain Masters?”
The captain shrugged his shoulders. He was very young, and held every
thing upon earth, except Maude, in supreme detestation and contempt.
“As from four to five is about the hottest period in the entire day, I
believe the _fête_ is supposed to be at its best somewhere between four
and five,” he said; “we manage these things so remarkably well in
England.”
“But as the Duke and Duchess are both French, I suppose the management
of the _fête_ at the Château de Bourbon is French too, isn’t it?” asked
Miss Desmond.
Maude was occupied with a Scotch terrier, who was making ferocious snaps
at the jasmine trailing from the roof above her. She would have made a
charming subject for a modern Greuze, with the dog held up in her hands,
and the loose white muslin sleeves falling back from those fair rounded
arms in soft cloudy folds.
“The Duke and Duchess are very charming,” said Mr. Somerset; “and when
one thinks that if they had lived in seventeen ninety-three, instead of
eighteen forty-eight, they’d have been inevitably guillotined on the
Place Louis Quinze, instead of being comfortably settled in the
neighbourhood of Isleworth, one feels an extraordinary kind of interest
in them as living illustrations of improvement of the times. But, apart
from that, Miss Hillary, don’t you think the _fête_ a bore? Don’t you
think any charity _fête_ more or less a bore? I can understand people
sending you a subscription list, and telling their man to wait in your
hall till you write a cheque for them; but I can’t understand people
choosing the hottest day in a hot summer to parade about a garden,
grinning and smirking at one another, and giving exorbitant prices for
things they don’t want.”
“But you mean to go to the _fête_, Mr. Somerset?”
“Most decidedly, if I am to have the honour of going with you--and Miss
Desmond.”
Miss Desmond, with one flash of her black eyes, expressed her
appreciation of the little pause that had preceded Mr. Somerset’s
mention of her name.
“Yes, I suppose we are to take you with us,” Maude answered, with cruel
carelessness. “Papa said that if he were not home at three, we were to
go without him, and he would meet us at the château,--and it’s past
three now, I declare, Julia, and we’re not dressed,” added Miss Hillary,
looking at her watch; “and papa is always so particular about
punctuality. Wasn’t it Lord Nelson who won the battle of Trafalgar
through always being a quarter of an hour beforehand? I almost wish the
French had beaten him, for then people couldn’t have quoted him against
one perpetually. Will you order the carriage, Julia, dear?--or will you
tell them about it, Mr. Somerset? The landau, with the bays; papa said
the bays were to be used to-day.--Now Julia, dear.”
The two girls ran away to dress, and reappeared in about twenty minutes;
Julia very splendid in a golden-brown silk dress, and a pale pink
bonnet; Miss Hillary in cloud-like garments of lace, or tulle, or
areophane, that were especially becoming to her tall slender figure and
the fragile style of her beauty. Maude Hillary was a very extravagant
young lady, and had _carte blanche_ at Messrs. Howell and James’s, on
whose account her father was wont to write heavy cheques at long
intervals, without any investigation of the items; but Miss Hillary very
seldom wore silk dresses, which are, after all, about the most
economical thing a lady can wear. She affected gauzy fabrics, all
festoons, and puffings and flounces, which were thrown aside for the
profit of her maid after the third time of wearing, and ultimately
figured in second-hand wardrobe repositories in the dreariest outskirts
of Pimliconia. Indeed, one devoted admirer of Miss Hillary, penetrating
Vauxhall bridgewards from Eccleston Square, had been startled by the
apparition of his lovely partner at a recent ball dangling limply,
rosebuds and all, from a peg in a dingy shop-window.
Maude was very extravagant; but then how could she well be otherwise?
Her appreciation of “pounds” was very little above that of Mr. Harold
Skimpole. She very rarely had any money; if she wanted shillings, she
borrowed them--by the handful--of the housekeeper at the Cedars. But, on
the other hand, she had unlimited credit almost everywhere. A beggar, or
one of the churchwardens of Isleworth, armed with a plate after a
charity-sermon, were about the only persons who ever demanded ready
money from her. She had a vague idea that there was no limit to her
father’s wealth, and that she was to have as much of it as she required
for her own uses whenever she married, if he approved of her marriage;
and if he did not approve, she would not have the money, and would be
poor, and live in a pretty cottage somewhere in the neighbourhood of St.
John’s Wood, without so much as a pair of ponies to drive in the Park.
She looked forward very vaguely to this sort of thing, always believing
that the most indulgent of fathers would come by-and-by to smile upon
the penniless Harcourt Lowther, and that everything would end happily,
as it does in a comedy. She sighed now and then, and told her
confidante, Julia, that she was the most miserable of creatures when she
thought of poor dear Harcourt slaving himself to death in that dreadful
Van Diemen’s Land; but, on the whole, she bore her separation from her
affianced lover with considerable resignation. Was she not by nature a
bright and hopeful creature? and had she not from babyhood inhabited a
kind of fairy circle, separated from all the common outer world by a
golden boundary, sheltered from every rude breath of heaven by a
limitless canopy of banknotes?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VIII.
AT THE CHÂTEAU DE BOURBON.
The château in which some of the banished descendants of Louis the Great
had set up their household gods, in the shape of a most exquisite
collection of artistic treasures, was only a mile or so distant from Mr.
Hillary’s house. It was an old red-brick mansion like the Cedars; and,
indeed, the banks of the Thames seem specially rich in red-brick
mansions of the Georgian period. It was a noble old house, and had
extended itself of late years on either side, until it was almost
palatial of aspect. It was a very pretty house, filled to overflowing
with art-treasures, about almost every one of which there hung a history
as interesting as the object itself. Royalty, the banished royalty of
France, inhabited that simple suburban mansion; and on the smooth lawn,
where the pennants were flying and the band playing, a quiet-looking
gentleman moved about among the visitors, whose grave and noble face was
the exact reproduction of another face, to be seen in stained marble
under a glass case within the mansion; the face of a gentleman who, in
the course of an adventurous career, won some little distinction under
the style and title of Henry IV., King of France and Navarre.
It was almost like going back into the past for an hour or so to lounge
on that sunny lawn at Twickenham, so strange yet so familiar were some
of the names that were heard on the lips of the crowd. There was a
mournful kind of interest in those historic titles; and the aspect of
the pretty flower-festooned marquees, where elegant women were charging
fabulous prices for all manner of absurdities in the way of Berlin wool,
recalled the image of tented plains and fields of cloth-of-gold, in the
days when the sons of St. Louis had other and more high-sounding
business in this world than such gentle works of charity as occupied
them pleasantly enough to-day.
Maude Hillary was in her glory in the gardens of the Château de Bourbon.
She had plenty of ready money, for once in a way; a crisp little bundle
of five-pound notes, which her father had brought from the City on the
previous evening; and she distributed her wealth freely among the
fashionable stall-keepers, loading herself and her attendant cavaliers
with wax dolls and Berlin-wool work, reticules, antimacassars, painted
fire-screens, bottles of toilet vinegar, and feather flowers. She knew a
great many people, and she was so bright and animated, and
happy-looking, that people who were utter strangers to her watched her
with a feeling of interest, and asked one another who she was. She was
standing amidst a group of aristocratic acquaintance upon the terrace
overlooking the river, when she cried out that her papa had arrived, and
ran away to meet him, leaving Julia Desmond and the two young men behind
her.
“An hour after your time, papa,” she said, putting both her hands into
his; “and I’ve spent all my money, and I’ve bought these for you.” She
flourished a pair of gorgeously-embroidered slippers before his eyes,
and then put her arm through his with an air of proprietorship that was
as charming as--every thing else she did.
Lionel Hillary, Australian merchant, of Moorgate Street, London, was a
handsome-looking man, tall, and stout, and dark, with iron-grey hair and
whiskers, and very unlike his daughter in every respect; for the happy
brightness which was the chief element of her beauty found no reflection
in his face. He looked very grave, and a little careworn; and Maude,
watching him closely, said presently,
“I’m afraid you have one of your headaches again to-day, papa?”
“Yes, my dear; I’ve been working rather hard this morning. Let me
introduce you to this gentleman, whom I have induced to come and spend a
little of his money for the benefit of the Duchess’s poor people.”
This gentleman was Mr. Francis Tredethlyn, who had been loitering a
little in the rear of Lionel Hillary while the merchant talked to his
daughter. The two men had become acquainted with each other in the
simplest possible manner. Amongst the property Francis Tredethlyn had
inherited from his uncle was a bundle of shares in a certain Australian
insurance company of which Mr. Hillary was a director. Francis, wanting
to make some inquiry about the shares, had been advised to go to Mr.
Hillary, and had done so. He found the merchant very cordial and
friendly,--he had found a great many people in these dispositions
towards him lately,--and with the frankness natural to him had told a
good deal of his story to that gentleman; always avoiding any allusion
to his cousin Susan. Lionel Hillary, being much pleased with his manner,
and being generally very kind and hospitable to any young men who came
in his way, had offered to drive his new acquaintance down to
Twickenham.
“You must find London miserably dull at this time of year,” he said.
“There’s a _fête_, or a fancy fair, or something of that kind, our way.
I’ll drive you down, and you shall dine at my place afterwards.”
Thus it was that Francis Tredethlyn found himself upon the lawn before
the Château de Bourbon, making what he felt to be a very awkward bow,
and most heartily wishing that some convulsion of nature might open a
ready-made grave in the smooth turf on which he stood, wherein he might
hide himself from the bright eyes of Miss Hillary.
She spoke to him in the easiest, friendliest manner; asked him if he had
ever been to the château before; if he liked a fancy fair; hoped he
meant to spend EVER so much money. She opened her eyes very wide as she
said this, and he saw how blue they were, and then felt an actual blush
kindling under his brown skin. Such a woman as this had never before
walked by his side, talking to him, and smiling at him. He answered her
animated inquiries as best he might, and found himself thinking of all
manner of incongruous things,--of Maude Hillary’s blue eyes and
point-lace parasol, of his own awkwardness and ignorance, of the narrow
points of her dove-coloured boots, as they peeped from under her dress
now and then, like anything in the world you like _except_ Sir John
Suckling’s mice, of the old farmhouse on the Cornish moorland, of little
Susy in a white dimity sun-bonnet.
He had never been in such a place before, mixing on equal terms with
well-dressed men and women, about most of whom even he, in despite of
his ignorance, recognized a nameless something that stamped them as
superior to the common run of well-dressed people. That in itself was
enough to bewilder him. He had never before seen such a woman as Maude
Hillary; and even experienced young men from Government offices found
Maude Hillary bewildering. He felt terribly embarrassed and out of
place; and after undergoing a sharp ordeal on the terrace, where he was
introduced to Miss Desmond, and the two young men staying at the Cedars,
he was not a little rejoiced to find himself free for a few minutes,
while Mr. Hillary and his daughter talked to a group of new arrivals. He
strolled away to the end of the terrace, and lounged upon the marble
balustrade, looking down at a lane below--a kind of gorge cut through
two separate gardens, in which some of the common folks of the
neighbourhood were gathered, listening to the music of the band, and
staring at the splendid line of carriages waiting for the guests in the
gardens above.
“I didn’t think I was such a fool as to let my brains be muddled like
this by a lot of fine dresses and parasols, and flower-beds, and the
playing of a brass band,” he thought; “they’re flesh and blood, those
people, I suppose, like the rest of us. _She’s_ flesh and blood, just as
much as my mother that’s dead and gone, or poor little Susy. But when I
looked at her just now, it seemed as if there was a light shining all
about her somehow, that almost blinded me. She spoke to me as prettily
and as kindly as she spoke to her father; and yet I felt more afraid of
her than if she had been my uncle Oliver, and I a little boy again,
tumbling down his corn in the valley farm.”
He moved a little way from the balustrade, and stood looking rather
sheepishly towards the group he had left, doubtful whether he was
expected to rejoin them, or to stroll about by himself, amusing himself
as he pleased. He would have given a great deal of money for the poorest
treatise on etiquette which would have told him as much as this; and in
the mean time he lingered where he was, twirling a very big pair of
lavender gloves which he had bought--through the agency of Mr. Hillary’s
groom, and with no reference to their adaptability to his own hands--on
the way down.
Lingering thus, doubtful of himself, and painfully conscious of being
very much out of keeping with the scene around him, he still thought of
all manner of incongruous things; and among other fancies one special
thought, which could have had no possible connection with the events of
the day, kept surging upwards on the troubled sea of his reflections.
“I never loved my cousin Susan,” he thought; “I know now that I never
really loved my cousin Susan.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IX.
JULIA DESMOND MAKES HERSELF AGREEABLE.
Captain Masters drove Lionel Hillary’s phaeton to the Cedars, when the
crowd in the sunny gardens before the Château de Bourbon had dispersed,
and only a few scattered groups still lingered about the pleasant home
of exiled royalty. Amongst which loiterers might be observed some lively
gentlemen of the occasional-reporter species, who wanted to ascertain
whether there would not be something in the champagne and lobster-salad
way before the _fête_ was finished. Captain Masters drove his friend Mr.
Somerset back to the Cedars in the mail-phaeton, while Lionel Hillary
and Francis Tredethlyn went home with the ladies in the landau.
The man who had been a private soldier only a few months before that
day, and who had not yet been able to realize the change made in his
position by the inheritance of thirty thousand a year, found himself
oppressed by a strange feeling as he sat in Miss Hillary’s open carriage
with his back to the horses, surrounded by billows of silk and lace and
muslin, a surging sea of feminine draperies, from which a faint perfume
was wafted towards him as the summer wind blew in his face. It was not
so much that he was ill at ease in that feminine presence, or in any way
daunted by the fire of two pairs of handsome eyes. The feeling which
oppressed him was rather a sense of unreality. He was like a child at a
pantomime, who sees a stage-fairy for the first time, and cannot believe
that the resplendent creature is only flesh and blood. He looked at
Maude Hillary, and thought of his cousin Susan’s rosy cheeks and brown
hair shaded by the familiar dimity sun-bonnet. There were men in the
world who might aspire to marry such a creature as this Miss Hillary. He
tried to imagine the sort of man who might lift his eyes to that
divinity; and there arose in his mind the picture of a grandiose
creature with yellow whiskers and a geranium in his button-hole. The
æsthetic element in Mr. Tredethlyn’s mind was as yet very imperfectly
developed; and his idea of a lover befitting Maude Hillary leaned rather
to the gaudy king’s-pattern order of mankind.
The Australian merchant sat with his head leaning back against the
cushions of the carriage and his eyes closed. His headache was, if
anything, worse, he confessed, in answer to Maude’s anxious inquiries.
He did not speak three times during the homeward drive, and his daughter
rarely took her eyes from his face. She was very fond of him, and
displayed her affection for him now as frankly as she had done when she
had been a little girl in a white frock, sitting on his knee after
dinner, and eating unwholesome fruits and confections out of his plate.
She watched him now with a tender anxiety in her face, and seemed almost
unconscious of the presence of the big soldier-like individual with a
bronzed countenance and close-cropped black hair. But Francis Tredethlyn
was not entirely neglected, for Miss Desmond appeared determined to
atone for Maude’s want of courtesy. She had heard the Cornishman’s story
from Mr. Somerset, who had heard it from a gentleman whom he described
as “a fellow in the 11th Hussars;” and the handsome Julia felt some
little interest in the hero of the narrative. An ignorant young man, a
farmer’s son, who has suddenly come into a fortune of thirty thousand a
year, is not the sort of person to be met with every day. Julia
remembered that dreary ruin, that tall stone gaol on the bare hill
beyond Limerick, which sounded so well when casually alluded to as
Castle Desmond; but whose image chilled her as it rose, dismal and
stony, before her mind’s eye. She remembered the muddy roads, the
murderous ruts, the broad acres of irredeemable bog, the long rank grass
waving on the roofs of tumbledown stone cabins, the gaunt pigs and
gaunter peasantry; and a feeling that was not altogether ignoble kindled
a sudden flush upon her handsome face. What could not be done for Castle
Desmond and those ill-used peasantry by a chieftainess who should have
thirty thousand a year at her command! She fancied herself a kind of
fairy queen, beneath whose wand pleasant homesteads might arise on those
desolate hills, and yellow cornfields spread a golden mantle over the
valleys now so bare and empty. Miss Desmond’s lot in life was altogether
exceptional, and the sentimental dreams which come to some young women
had no lodgment in her brain. She looked her fate straight in the face,
and was eager to make the best of any opportunity that might fall in her
way. For the present she was very well off where she was; though the
worship of the golden calf, as represented by Maude Hillary, was a
perpetual abomination to her. But she was tolerably resigned to her
present position at the Cedars. It was only in the future that her life
looked dark and threatening. She must marry before Miss Hillary,--that
was essential,--or else she must resign herself to the miserable
position of a companion on sufferance, necessary to Maude, perhaps, but
very disagreeable to Maude’s husband.
Under these circumstances, a chance visitor at the Cedars with thirty
thousand a year for his fortune was not a person to be disdainfully
entreated even by the daughter of all the Desmonds: so Julia was very
kind to Francis Tredethlyn during that brief homeward drive, asked him
all manner of questions respecting his sentiments upon things in general
and the charity _fête_ in particular, and flashed her handsome eyes and
white teeth upon him until he was almost dazzled by their brightness.
Miss Desmond had very dark eyes--eyes that seemed of a greenish hazel
when you saw them in repose, but which looked almost black when they
sparkled athwart a fringe of dusky lashes. She had dark eyes and very
white teeth; and the distinguishing characteristic of her face was the
contrast between the darkness of one and the white glitter of the other.
Mr. Tredethlyn knew that the young lady was very handsome, and that
there was some condescension involved in her friendly notice of him; but
his eyes wandered away to Maude’s fair face and earnest blue eyes, and
there was a suspicion of irrelevance in some of his replies to Miss
Desmond’s animated questions. If he had been less absent-minded, he
might have seen that young lady’s white teeth close vengefully upon her
lower lip as she turned from him after one of those doubtful answers.
The dinner at the Cedars went off very quietly. Mr. Hillary was silent,
but hospitable, or at least as much so as a man can be in these days of
Russian dinners and vicarious hospitality. Francis had lodged at a
comfortable hotel in the regions of Covent Garden since his return from
Cornwall, and had in no way altered his simple habits of life; so he was
not a little puzzled by the array of glasses by the side of his plate,
the lumps of ice which an obsequious attendant dropped ever and anon
into his Moselle, the mysterious compounds in silver dishes which he
discovered suddenly at his elbow whenever he was most abstracted by the
novelty of the scene about him, and the vision of Maude Hillary, sitting
on the other side of the round table in a cloud of white and blue. The
dishes at that wonderful feast seemed so many culinary conundrums to Mr.
Tredethlyn, and I fear that he made some very obvious mistakes in the
management of the spoons and forks perpetually thrust upon him by the
stealthy-footed retainers. But the dinner was over at last, and Captain
Masters opened the dining-room door for the departure of the ladies,
while poor Francis could only sit blankly staring like a countryman at a
play. Lionel Hillary did not linger long over his wine; he had some
papers to look at in his study, he said, and excused himself on that
ground, as well as on account of that obstinate headache of his. The
young men seemed very glad to be released from the atmosphere of
hothouse flowers and pine-apple, faintly mingled with that odour of the
bygone dinner which will hang round the most elegant dining-room,
ventilate it as you will. Was not Maude Hillary in the drawing-room,
whence already might be heard the sparkling ripple of arpeggio passages
upon the piano? The two young loungers followed Mr. Hillary out into the
hall, and Francis went with them, uncomfortably conscious of
disadvantages not to be outbalanced by the possession of half a million
or so in all manner of seven-per-cent-paying investments. The young
soldier blacking his master’s boots had been the easiest-mannered of
mankind; but Oliver Tredethlyn’s heir felt terribly embarrassed in Maude
Hillary’s presence--only in her presence; he was not at all abashed by
Miss Desmond’s eyes and teeth, though all their contrastive brightness
was brought to bear upon him. Maude was at the piano, and Julia was
bending over a stand of engravings. It may be that she had not very long
fallen into that graceful attitude. When the three young men entered the
room she looked up, and Mr. Tredethlyn meeting her friendly glance, and
being considerably at a loss what to do with himself, went over to her,
and found a comfortable haven in a low easy-chair near the couch on
which she was sitting.
“Do you care much for Leech, Mr. Tredethlyn?” she asked, as she turned
over the leaves of a portfolio reprinted from _Punch_.
The young man looked rather puzzled by this question.
“I don’t care much for them,” he answered, frankly. “I never had any but
once, and that was in Van Diemen’s Land, when I had the fever,--fifteen
of them on my temples, and that was no joke, you know, Miss Desmond.”
He was quite at his ease with Julia; but he would not for the world have
been so confidential to Maude Hillary. Miss Desmond laughed
good-naturedly.
“I don’t mean those horrible creatures that they put on one’s temples,”
she exclaimed, “but Mr. John Leech, the caricaturist. You must have seen
_Punch_, even in Van Diemen’s Land?”
“Oh, yes! my mas--superior officer used to get it from his mother every
mail.”
He took the portfolio from Miss Desmond, and turned over the leaves: but
he only stared absently at Mr. Leech’s most brilliant performances, and
his eyes wandered away every now and then to the piano, where Maude
Hillary was skimming through the gems of a new opera and dallying with
her two adorers, deliciously unconscious of their adoration. Had she not
inhabited an atmosphere of universal admiration and affection ever since
she had exhibited her pink cheeks and infantile ringlets in company with
the seven-shilling March peaches and five-guinea pine-apples, after her
father’s pompous dinners, to be admired by ponderous old City magnates
in the pauses of solemn discussions upon the rate of discount and the
last grand crash on the Stock Exchange?
Julia Desmond, always observant--cursed, perhaps, with an especial
faculty for penetrating all unpleasant secrets lying hidden under the
many masks which society has invented for the convenience of
mankind--Miss Desmond, I say, was not slow to perceive the Cornishman’s
preoccupation, nor slow to credit Miss Hillary with another item in that
heavy account so long standing between them.
“Even this country boor, with a great fortune of his own, must pay his
meed of homage to the millionaire’s daughter,” thought Julia. “Is there
some magical power in the possession of money which imparts a kind of
fascination to the possessor?” Colonel Desmond’s daughter had felt some
of the keenest stings of poverty, and it may be that she had grown to
entertain an exaggerated estimation of that golden dross which is so
paltry a thing when considered in a philosophical spirit. She looked at
the young man sitting by her side; and as she looked, a mystic golden
halo seemed to arise about him and surround him, until he appeared
almost like an old picture of a saint, painted upon a shadowless
background of gold. Thirty thousand a year! and he was young, handsome,
manly, good-tempered-looking, or even something more than this; for
there was a dash of nobility in his simple bearing which scarcely seemed
to belong to the runaway son of a small farmer. The good old blood of
the Tredethlyns, once squires and landowners of some degree, was not
dishonoured by the young man who had blacked Harcourt Lowther’s boots in
Van Diemen’s Land. He was not a gentleman after the manner of the
nineteenth century; he seemed rather like a stalwart soldier of the
past, simple and daring, frank and generous. Julia, contemplating him
always enframed in the golden halo, saw that, with the advantage of a
clever woman’s training, he might be made a very presentable creature;
in spite of that private-soldier story, which, after all, was spiced
with a certain flavour of romance.
“People would say I married him for his money,” thought Miss Desmond;
“but then they would say that if I married a provincial banker with
fifteen hundred a year. Thirty thousand! thirty thousand a year!--and he
is not a man who would act meanly in the matter of a settlement--and he
could buy the Irish estate for a mere song--and he might call himself
Tredethlyn Desmond.”
Maude Hillary’s companion and friend had employed herself for a very
long time in the consideration of one grand subject--her own destiny.
For a long time she had estimated every creature who came in her way by
one unvarying gauge. Had he, or had he not, any bearing on that supreme
question? If the answer were in the negative, Miss Desmond wasted no
further thought upon the useless creature. But if she saw in the shadowy
distance some possible combination of circumstances in which the
individual might become a thread, however slightly interwoven, in the
fabric of her destiny, Julia expended her brightest smiles and sweetest
words for his gratification.
It was in no way strange, therefore, that the young lady who had given a
good deal of attention to hare-brained young ensigns and penniless young
curates with nothing better than remote expectations, should consider
Mr. Tredethlyn worthy of her most serious deliberation. The present,
however, was no time for thought,--for were not the young man’s eyes
perpetually wandering towards the slender figure under the light of the
moderator lamp? Miss Desmond felt there was no time to be lost. Already
the rich man had made his election--already he had enrolled himself in
the list of Maude Hillary’s victims. Another woman, perceiving the state
of affairs, might have resigned herself to the loss of this grand chance
of winning a rich husband; but Julia’s courage was not so easily dashed.
It rose, rather, with the thought of contest. Had not her father been a
grand old freebooter, boasting of kingly blood in his battered old body,
and spilling it under the colours of every rebel army in modern Europe?
The Desmond spirit rose in Julia’s breast as she saw Francis
Tredethlyn’s wandering glances, half sheepish, half unconscious.
“I can set myself against her this time,” she thought; “and the battle
between us will be a fair one. _This_ man cannot be a fortune-hunter. We
meet on tolerably equal terms for once in a way, Miss Hillary, and let
us see who will win.”
Julia’s dark eyes flashed their brightest as she looked across all the
width of the room to the radiant-looking girl at the piano; and then she
turned them suddenly upon Francis Tredethlyn, and began to talk to him.
She began to talk to him, and, more than this, she made him listen to
her. Miss Desmond was a brilliant talker. She possessed that wondrous
faculty vulgarly called the gift of the gab,--the power of talking about
everything and anything, or even about nothing, for the matter of that;
the power of enchaining a listener in spite of himself, holding him
prisoner when he had rather be away, and yet not detaining him an
altogether unwilling prisoner;--the power of talking ignorantly, without
seeming to be ignorant; speculating ideas and allusions at a venture,
and never betraying the shallowness of their nature; assuming an
interest in the most uninteresting subject, and never revealing the
hollowness of the assumption,--a power, in short, which in its
fascination seems like a modern form of those classic philtres which
Roman maidens were wont to administer to eligible bachelors in the days
when Rome was young. It may be said that Miss Desmond owed this faculty
in some degree to her Hibernian ancestry; but no suspicion of their
native accent vulgarized her discourse. Only a softer and richer depth
in her low voice betrayed her Celtic origin.
Julia began to talk to Francis Tredethlyn, and, in spite of himself, he
listened, and was fain to withdraw his gaze from the distant figure at
the piano. She talked to him of a soldier’s life, jumping recklessly at
conclusions, and taking it for granted that he must needs possess some
latent spark of military ardour, which would blaze up into a flame under
the fire of her enthusiasm. She talked to him of her father, and all
those guerrilla warfares in which he had won distinction. She talked of
Don Carlos, and Abd-el-Kader, and Garibaldi, whose name had not then the
glorious significance which it carries with it to-day. She talked to him
like a young Joan of Arc or an embryo maid of Saragosa;--and all that
was brightest in Mr. Tredethlyn’s nature kindled beneath her influence.
Had Francis been a stockbroker, Miss Desmond would have discoursed to
him of Lionel Rothschild, or Lafitte, or Mirès; and she would have
glowed with just the same enthusiasm, though her theme had been the
Stock Exchange or the Bourse.
But in spite of himself Mr. Tredethlyn was pleased and interested. His
boyish yearning for a military career had been very nearly trampled out
of him during dreary years of marchings and counter-marchings, and
sword-exercise, and barrack-tyranny, with never the glimpse of a
battle-field, or so much as a brief skirmish with some chance enemy. But
those fresh young feelings all came back to him when Julia discoursed in
low eloquent accents of her father’s foreign experiences. “Ah, that was
something like a military career!” thought the young man. “It was such a
life that I hoped to lead when I ran away from Landresdale; and I
thought I should come back a general, with a cocked-hat and a great
plume of feathers, as the gardener’s son does in the play I saw once at
Falmouth.”
And then Francis Tredethlyn, being by nature candid as a schoolboy newly
come home for his holidays, opened his heart to Miss Desmond, and told
her a good deal about his life. That dark chamber of his memory in which
Susan’s image loomed through the sombre shadows he kept religiously
sealed from every curious eye. But on all other subjects he was very
communicative. He did not tell Julia that he had been Mr. Lowther’s
body-servant; for there was something in that estate of servitude which
had never been entirely pleasant to him, gallantly as he had borne
himself under its serious ordeals. He had known poverty, he told Miss
Desmond, in all its worst bitterness, and had seen his mother and father
die broken-hearted, borne down by a load of petty debt and difficulty,
when the loan of a couple of hundred pounds would have saved them.
“I felt altogether desperate one night, Miss Desmond,” he said, “when my
poor mother was at her worst, and my father sitting in the kitchen as
helpless as a child,--almost daft, as they say in the north. I felt
desperate somehow, and I went out of the house and ran all the way to
Tredethlyn Grange, and asked my uncle Oliver to lend me the money. He
laughed in my face, Miss Desmond, and told me he hadn’t a five-pound
note in the house; and I dare say he spoke the truth, for I think he’d
have gone half crazy at the thought of a sovereign lying idle. I went
back to the farm, and--my mother died the next day.”
He stopped, and sat for some minutes looking at Mr. Hillary’s Axminster
carpet. Julia did not say anything. She was too perfect a tactician not
to know that anything she could say must appear commonplace at such a
moment. She only drew a long breath, a kind of fluttering sigh,
expressive of the deepest sympathy.
“My mother died, Miss Desmond,” the young man went on; “and my father
was not slow to follow her. So, having no one in the world to care for,
except--except a cousin, who had been like a sister to me, I ran away to
Falmouth, and enlisted in a foot regiment, thinking that I had but to
pin a bunch of colours in my hat and march straight off to some field of
battle. I left Cornwall, Miss Desmond; but I never forgot that night
before my mother’s death. I’ve tried to feel grateful to my uncle Oliver
for leaving me this fortune, but I can’t. I ought to feel grateful, I
suppose; but I can’t. The memory of that night sours me, somehow. Money
seems such paltry stuff, after all, when you think that all the golden
coin in this world can’t bring back one human creature from the grave.”
“Ah, yes, indeed,” Miss Desmond murmured, in her tenderest voice.
And then, being blest with a very lively imagination, she found herself
wondering whether, if wealth had been potent to restore the dead, and
she had been possessed with wealth, she would have very much cared to
awaken Patrick Macnamara Ryan O’Brien Desmond from his quiet slumber in
a little churchyard beside the winding Shannon. The old soldier of
fortune was better in his grave perhaps, Julia thought, philosophically.
She had begun to fight the battle of life on her own tactics, and had no
very great opinion of her late father’s strategy.
“He was very clever,” she thought, with a tender remembrance of the
Major’s best manœuvres; “but then one so often saw through him. He
always started with wrong premises, and fancied everyone but himself was
a fool: as if there could be any merit in deceiving only stupid people.”
Miss Desmond was always wise enough to remember that the larger art of
talking well comprehends the smaller art of listening gracefully. She
was not one of those obnoxious people who talk for the sake of talking;
and who, after rattling on without a full-stop for half an hour at a
stretch, will stare vacantly at you while you recite to them some
interesting adventure, evidently thinking of what they mean to say next,
and waiting for the chance of cutting in. Julia Desmond talked with a
purpose,--not because she wanted to talk, but because she wished to
please: and now she listened to Francis Tredethlyn with an unfailing
show of sympathy and interest, that beguiled him on to tell her more and
more. She wound and insinuated herself into his confidence as a
beautiful serpentine creature winds itself into the heart of an
apparently impenetrable forest; and before the evening was finished Mr.
Tredethlyn found himself almost as intimate with this splendid southern
Irishwoman as if she had been his sister. She had set him completely at
his ease; so that he no longer felt out of place in Mr. Hillary’s
gorgeous rooms: and when the merchant, coming into the drawing-room at
eleven o’clock, very pale and worn-looking, asked him to dine at the
Cedars on the following Sunday, Francis unhesitatingly accepted the
invitation. He stole just one glance at Maude as he did so; but she was
in the act of exhibiting one of the newest accomplishments of a
mouse-coloured Skye terrier for the edification of the two young
loungers, and she was quite unconscious of that shy look from Mr.
Tredethlyn’s eyes. He went to her presently to wish her good-night, and
the spell of her gracious presence dazed and bewildered him, to the cost
of the mouse-coloured terrier, upon whose silky paws he trampled in his
embarrassment; and then, essaying to shake hands in a gentlemanly
manner, he forgot what a stalwart giant he was, and squeezed the little
hand that rested so lightly in his, until Maude’s fingers were wounded
by the hoops, and clusters, and hearts, and crescents of diamonds and
opals which twinkled and flashed upon them;--for Miss Hillary had seen
the Marchioness of Londonderry’s famous rings, and never wore any vulgar
mixture of many-coloured jewels upon her pretty white hands. Francis
lingered a little after saying good-night, helpless under the spell of
the enchantress, and then made his way somehow or other out of the room.
Ah! surely uncle Oliver’s money was not such sordid dross, after all,
when it was the golden key which admitted him to that paradise on the
banks of the Thames.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER X.
COLTONSLOUGH.
Francis Tredethlyn went back to his hotel in Covent Garden after that
quiet dinner at the Cedars, and his mind was full of the new images
suggested by that brief glimpse of a life that was strange to him. He
had been very much interested by Miss Desmond, and he tried to believe
that he preferred her to Maude Hillary. Had she not been kinder to him,
more friendly and familiar? and was it not reasonable that he should
like her the better of the two? He was naturally of a grateful
disposition, disposed to think meanly of his own merits; and he
attributed all Miss Desmond’s kindness to the purest promptings of a
benevolent disposition. The idea that the young lady had regarded him
from a speculative point of view, that she had entertained any notion of
possible marriage contracts and settlements, by which she might acquire
the use of his thirty thousand per annum, never for a moment entered Mr.
Tredethlyn’s mind. He knew, in a general way, that he was admitted to
Mr. Hillary’s drawing-room because his money gave him a kind of right to
such society as that of the merchant’s household; but he never for a
moment imagined that any one of these delightful and high-bred creatures
could contemplate any contingency by which his money might become of
service to them. Wealth and beauty, elegance and refinement, seemed to
find their natural home at the Cedars. Miss Desmond of course was rich,
like Miss Hillary.
Francis counted the days which must elapse before that delightful
Sabbath to be spent by him at the Cedars. Only three days, and during
those three days stern duty called him away from London. Had he not
declared himself ready to go to the end of the world in search of his
cousin Susan Tredethlyn? He felt ashamed even of that one wasted day on
the banks of the Thames. He had left his hotel in the morning, intending
to despatch his City business with all possible speed, and start
immediately afterwards for Coltonslough. He had found out all about
Coltonslough by means of all manner of inquiries; for it seemed rather
an out-of-the-way place, known to very few people as yet. Indeed,
Coltonslough turned out to be a recently discovered watering-place on
the Essex coast, a place whose shores were supposed to be washed by the
salt waves of the ocean; but the waste of waters that rolled along the
muddy shores of Coltonslough was only an ocean in its hobbledehoyhood,
and savoured too much of the Thames and Medway to be considered a
full-grown sea.
To the traveller who has grown familiar with the centre of Africa; to
that bold explorer who has spent lonely days and nights amidst those
darksome forests in which the forgotten cities of America lie buried; to
the prisoner newly released from solitary confinement in the great
prison-house of New York, so pleasantly entitled the Tombs--to one of
these a newly discovered watering-place may not appear dull. He who has
been used to hear no more familiar voice than the distant cry of the
bittern, far away amongst the swampy wildernesses, may endure Herne Bay
and live. The criminal who has undergone a decade of solitary
confinement in the Tombs may possibly survive a month at Southend: but
to the ordinary mind there is a modern abomination of desolation lurking
in the unfinished terraces of a budding watering-place, or in a
watering-place which has put forth its tender blossoms in the way of
bow-windowed receptacles for the concentrated bleakness of perpetual
east winds, and has been blighted in the bud.
Coltonslough was very young; it was in the most infantine stage of
watering-place existence. Speculative builders had bought half-a-dozen
plots of swamp and mud, and had erected dismal rows of houses, which
turned their backs upon one another, and started off at right angles
from one another, in utter contempt for all uniformity. If the
melancholy sojourner at Coltonslough was of an active turn of mind, he
was apt to be tormented by a wild desire to pull down and re-arrange
those straggling terraces, between which stretched hideous deserts of
waste ground, with here and there a lurking pitfall, whence gravel, or
sand, or clay, or chalk, had been dug by unknown persons, who seemed
always digging something or other out of Coltonslough, whereby an
appearance of volcanic disruption was imparted to a place whose chief
merit had been its agreeable flatness.
It was very young. A few straggling excursionists came on the blazing
summer Sundays, and prowled about the shore with countenances expressive
of supreme disappointment and disgust. Half-a-dozen families of cockney
children were wont to congregate by the dismal waters every summer,
provided with baskets for the collection of shells--and there were no
shells at Coltonslough,--and further provided with wooden spades for the
undermining of sand--and there was no sand at that baby watering-place.
Families did certainly come, beguiled by representations of impossibly
cheap provisions, though the place was in reality very expensive, for
every tradesman was a monopolist on a small scale. Families came, but no
family ever came a second time to Coltonslough; and it may be that, in
the wonderful scheme of the universe, this new-born watering-place was
not without its special use; inasmuch as it made people contented with
London. The inhabitant of Bermondsey, returning to that locality after a
sojourn at Coltonslough, found beauties in some dismal street which
until that hour had appeared to his prosaic mind a street, and nothing
more. The denizen of Ratcliff Highway sat down amongst his household
gods well pleased with a neighbourhood which, although not
unobjectionable, was a paradise as compared with Coltonslough.
It was to this place of desolation that a newly-finished offshoot of the
railway then known as the Eastern Counties conveyed Francis Tredethlyn.
He went to look for his cousin with no better clue to help him in his
search than that one word, “Coltonslough,” copied from the post-mark of
Susan’s letter.
“But I won’t be baffled,” the young man thought, as he sat in the
railway carriage thinking of the task that lay before him. “Coltonslough
may be a big place, but I’ll question every living creature in it before
I’ll give up the chance of finding out something about my cousin.”
Luckily for Mr. Tredethlyn’s chances, Coltonslough was a very small
place, and after walking backwards and forwards for some quarter of an
hour, before the emporium of the one butcher; the solitary baker, who
dabbled a little in the fruit and confectionery line; and the single
grocer, who was also a linendraper, and beyond that a stationer, who had
a side of bacon hanging on one side of his door, and a piece of showy
cotton stuff upon the other, and who moreover was sole master of the
Coltonslough post-office,--Francis determined upon his plan of action.
He had thought of his cousin very constantly in the few days before his
visit to Mr. Hillary’s mansion; he had thought of her a great deal since
then, though he had not found it quite so easy to concentrate his ideas,
by reason of a certain bright face and slender figure all in a flutter
of white and blue, that would sometimes intrude themselves upon his
meditations.
Francis knew that his uncle’s daughter had left Tredethlyn Grange with
only a few sovereigns in her pocket, perhaps not much more than enough
to defray her journey to London. Without money, without friends, she had
fled from her home, and had not perished; but had lived to write to her
father from this dismal watering-place of Coltonslough some years after
her flight. It was clear, therefore, that in the interim she must have
either been supported by the benevolence of strangers, or she must have
earned her own living. The last hypothesis was the more likely to be
correct. Susan Tredethlyn had been educated to habits of industry, and
had no doubt confronted the battle of life as fearlessly as any
Tredethlyn should confront any battle.
“Poor little girl! she went out as a servant, I dare say,” thought the
young man. “She drudged and slaved for some hard mistress, perhaps,
while her father was adding every day to the money that has come to
me--to me--and he refused me a couple of hundred pounds the night my
mother was dying.”
Mr. Tredethlyn went in at the grocer’s doorway. There was scarcely room
enough for him to pass between the bacon and the cotton stuff, which
some aboriginal of Coltonslough would some day transform into wearing
apparel. The postmaster was chopping some very sallow-hued lump-sugar in
the dusky inner-regions of the shop; but he left off chopping, and
advanced to meet the stranger.
Francis Tredethlyn was no diplomatist; he was quite unskilled in that
peculiar science known as beating about the bush; so he began to make
inquiries respecting his cousin with as little preface as he would have
employed had he been asking for a pound of sugar.
“I’m a stranger to this place,” he said, “and I want to ask a few
questions; and I fancy, as you’re postmaster, you must be about the
likeliest person to answer them.”
The grocer rubbed his hands and smirked, in a manner that was expressive
of a general desire to do anything obliging--of course with an eye to
ultimate profit.
“A young woman--a relation of mine--left her home four years ago this
month. For nearly three years no one belonging to her could discover
where she was. At the end of that time a letter was received from her,
bearing the post-mark of this place. I want to find out whether she is
still here; or, if not, when she left. I have only just come back from
Van Diemen’s Land, to find things changed in the place that was once my
home. So I’m groping in the dark, you see, and shall be very thankful to
any one that’ll lend me a helping hand.”
Something in the frankness of his manner, the earnestness of his face,
went straight home to the heart of the Coltonslough postmaster, who
became less a tradesman, and more a man.
“It’s rather puzzling, you see, in the way you put it,” he said,
scratching his nose meditatively. “You want a young woman who wrote a
letter--or leastways had a letter posted at this place. But, lor’ bless
you, not being under Government y’rself, you see, you’ve no notion of
the dodges they’re up to when they want to throw any one off the scent
like with a post-mark. You mustn’t fancy a person’s in this place or in
that place, because you happen to get a letter from them with such and
such a post-mark. Why, I dessay I could get a letter posted from Jericho
to-morrow morning, if I only gave my mind to it. What might be the name
of the young woman as you’re anxious to find?”
“Her name is Tredethlyn,” Francis answered, hopelessly; “but as she ran
away from home, and most likely wanted to hide herself from her
relations, she may have changed her name.”
The postmaster mused for a few moments, and then shook his head gravely.
“I never heard of no Tredevillings in Coltonslough,” he said. “The young
person was independent in her circumstances, I suppose?”
“Oh no, indeed! she had very little money when she left home. She must
have worked for her living. I should think it likely that she went out
for a servant; for she was a country-bred girl, and had been used to a
hard life, though her father was a very rich man.”
A very rich man! That part of the business sounded interesting, and the
grocer pricked up his ears.
“A country-bred young person,” he repeated, “by the name of
Tredevillane. And what might be the date of the letter with the
Coltonslough post-mark?”
Francis did not know the exact date. He could only inform the postmaster
that the letter must have reached Cornwall about eighteen months, or it
might be rather less than eighteen months, before the present time.
“Cornwall!” cried the postmaster; “then the country-bred young woman was
a Cornwall young woman?”
“Yes, my cousin, Susan Tredethlyn, was a Cornish woman.”
“A Cornish woman, and by the name of Susan! Why, if you’d put the date
of the letter a good three years back instead of a year and a half, I
should have been able to lay my hand upon y’r cousin there and then, in
a manner of speaking.”
“How so?”
“Because I did know a young person that lived with Mrs. Burfield, in
Trafalgar Terrace. But that young person left Coltonslough full three
years ago, and I’ve never set eyes on her since.”
“But tell me all you know about her!” exclaimed Francis, almost
breathless in his eagerness. “What was she like? Why do you fancy that
she was the girl I’m looking for?”
“Because, in the first place, she was Cornish. I’d noticed that her talk
was different somehow from that of the folks about here--though she was
as soft-spoken as any lady bred and born; but one day she was standing
in my shop, with the children as she had care of, taking shelter from a
storm--and a regular pelter it was too--and she stood looking out to sea
through yonder half-glass door, which it were shut for the time being,
and I made some remark about the unpleasantness of the weather, out of
politeness like--for the young woman came very often to my shop for
groceries, and with lodgers’ letters,--Mrs. Burfield takes lodgers, and
so forth;--but she looked at me in a kind of absent way, and said ‘Oh, I
like it! I like it!’ ‘You like the storm, Miss?’ I exclaimed; and then
she answered all of a sudden, ‘Yes, I like to see it. This place doesn’t
seem so strange to me to-day as it generally does. I have seen just such
a storm as this from the moor on which my father’s house stands, and I
could almost fancy I was at home in Cornwall.’”
“And that’s how you found out she was a Cornish woman? I think you’ve
about hit it, Mr. Sanders. I think the girl who talked to you about the
storm must have been my cousin, Susan Tredethlyn.”
“Her name _was_ Susan,” answered Mr. Sanders; “I’ve heard Mrs.
Burfield’s children call her so in this very shop. She came to
Coltonslough as governess to Mrs. Burfield’s young family.”
“A governess!” said Francis, with some slight sense of relief. “She was
a governess, then, and not a servant?”
“Oh dear no! Though Coltonslough being a very small place, you see, sir,
and most of the inhabitants being a good deal dependent upon lodgers,
which gives a kind of fluctuating character to life, as you may say,
sir, a governess in Coltonslough might not be looked upon exactly in the
same light as elsewhere. Or, to put it plainer, sir, a governess in
Coltonslough would _not_ be expected to be proud.”
“Oh, I understand,” Mr. Tredethlyn answered, rather bitterly. “Yes, my
cousin was a genteel drudge,--not so well paid, perhaps, as vulgar
drudges, and rather harder worked.”
“The young person was always genteel, sir, even to the extent of wearing
gloves, which is not looked upon as indispensable in Coltonslough; but
in the matter of going errands and opening the door, or carrying in a
lodger’s tea-tray, at a push, she would _not_ be expected to be proud.”
“And she left three years ago?”
“She did, sir.”
The postmaster looked very grave as he said this,--so grave that Francis
Tredethlyn could not fail to perceive that something worse than he had
yet heard remained to be told. He was not a man to diplomatize, nor yet
to make any display of his emotion; but his breath came a little faster
for a few moments, and then he asked abruptly,--
“How did she leave?”
Mr. Sanders hesitated a little, and then said, with some
embarrassment,--
“Why, Coltonslough bein’ a gossiping kind of a place, sir, you’re apt to
hear ever so many different versions of the same thing, and it isn’t for
me to say which is right and which is wrong. I think, as it’s a long
story, sir, you’d better hear the rights of it from Mrs. Burfield.”
“A long story!” repeated Francis Tredethlyn, in an undertone,--“a long
story! Ah, my poor little cousin--my poor ill-used girl! And it seems
only a little while ago when we played together in the churchyard at
Landresdale, in the sunny hour when they let us out of school.”
It did seem to him but a very little while since he and his cousin had
sat side by side, under one of the big yew-trees in Landresdale
churchyard, dining upon some simple repast of home-made bread and fat
bacon, with a dessert of unripe apples, in the drowsy sultriness of
summer noontide. He sat for some few minutes silently thinking of that
departed time. The memory of it seemed almost like a sharp physical
pain, now that he knew that some great sorrow, some bitter woman’s
trial, had come to his cousin. A story about her--a long story! What
story should gossiping tongues have to tell of any woman, except a
history of suffering and wrong?
He did not press the postmaster to tell him anything further: but he
said presently, in an altered voice--a voice that had lost something of
its power and ringing vibration,--
“I can get to see this Mrs. Burfield, I suppose?”
“Yes, sir; I make no doubt you can. She is a very genteel person, is
Mrs. Burfield, which she have known better days, and finds herself often
a little drove like with her lodgers. Her house is Number 2, sir, in the
Terrace, Trafalgar Square, fronting sideways, and rather slantin’ like,
to the sea. You can see it, sir, from where you stand.”
Following the direction of the postmaster’s extended forefinger, Francis
Tredethlyn did see a row of unfinished-looking houses, with the
inevitable seaside bow-windows, staring out of a patch of waste ground.
Why these houses, and almost all the other houses at Coltonslough,
should have slanted away from the sea, obliging their occupants to look
out upon the expanse of waters in a sideways and sinister manner, when
they might have been built directly facing that single feature of
attraction, was a problem far beyond the comprehension of any visitor to
the infantine watering-place.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XI.
A VERY OLD STORY.
Mrs. Burfield was a pale-faced and pinched-looking person,
hollow-cheeked and spare of figure, who in these latter days would have
inspired a stranger with the idea that she was a rigid disciplinarian of
the school founded by Mr. Banting. She looked as if all saccharine and
fatty elements had been carefully excluded from her food; and yet, on
the other hand, she had none of the muscular energy which might be
supposed to result from a carnivorous habit. She was a depressing kind
of woman, with thin locks of whity-brown hair dangling upon each side of
her thin face, and thin garments hanging limply upon her scanty figure,
and a thin voice. There was something in Mrs. Burfield’s appearance
which called up vague images of drizzly days, and pattens, and washing
done at home, and a man in the passage clamorous for a water-rate, and
all the most unpleasant associations of poverty.
She was a woman who prefaced every sentence she uttered with a sigh. She
sighed as she admitted to Mr. Tredethlyn that her name was Burfield, as
if even that fact were in some manner an affliction. She sighed as she
told him, apologetically, that the house was full of lodgers, so she
must ask him to step down into the little sitting-room below stairs. And
yet, as she subsisted by the letting of lodgings, the crowded state of
her house should have been a cause for rejoicing.
Francis had some slight difficulty in conveying his long legs down the
narrow little staircase, in which there was a breakneck corner, whence
awkward maid-servants were wont to precipitate themselves headlong in
company with an avalanche of tea-things; but he managed to find his way
down somehow or other, and was ushered into a little faded-looking
underground parlour, where all the furniture seemed to have undergone a
prolonged course of Banting, and where the evidence of children’s
habitation was untidily visible in every direction. The children were
all at school, however, Mrs. Burfield told Francis with another sigh;
though, as she added directly afterwards that they drove her next door
to raving madness when they were at home, _that_ fact need scarcely have
depressed her.
“I had a governess for them some time back,” she said, unconsciously
approaching the subject of Mr. Tredethlyn’s business with her, “and the
young person was very useful to me in many ways; but things have been so
dull, and lodgers so uncertain, and so close as to rent and kitchen
fire, and such like, that I couldn’t afford to engage another young
person, if I could have found anyone as reasonable and as willing as
her, which wasn’t likely.”
Here Mrs. Burfield sighed again, and to her surprise found herself
echoed by her visitor.
“It is about that person, the governess, that I have come to inquire,”
said Francis. “I have reason to believe--I may say that I am almost
sure--she is my cousin; very near and very dear to me. Pray tell me all
you can about her. I am a rich man, and I am looking for my cousin, who
has a better claim than I have to the money that has lately come to me.
Pray tell me everything; you shall not find me ungrateful. I will make
it well worth your while to help me in this matter.”
It might be supposed that Mrs. Burfield, being ground into the very dust
by the iron heel of poverty, would brighten a little on hearing this
promising speech: but she did nothing of the kind; she only sighed
rather more plaintively than usual, and remarked somewhat irrelevantly
that her boys were beginning to grow up now, and the boots they knocked
out, and the way they wore their things at the knees and elbows, were
something awful.
“Tell me all you can about my cousin,” urged Mr. Tredethlyn. “Ah, you
don’t know how long I have been away from England, and how eager I am to
find that poor desolate girl. Pray tell me all you know, and quickly.”
“It’s a long story,” said Mrs. Burfield, in the very words used by the
grocer--“it’s a long story, and goodness knows the rights or the wrongs
of it; but if you are her cousin,--and you are, I suppose----”
“I do not think there can be any doubt of it,” Francis Tredethlyn
answered eagerly; “I do not think there can be any doubt that the person
of whom I have heard this morning was my cousin, Susan Tredethlyn.”
“The young person to whom _I_ allude called herself Susan Turner.”
“Yes, yes. It is only natural she should change her name. She left her
home because she had been very much persecuted there. She was no doubt
afraid of being taken back, and was anxious to hide herself under a
false name.”
“If I had known that she had come to me under a false name, never would
she have slept a night in this house,” exclaimed Mrs. Burfield, with
something between a sigh and a shudder.
“She was a good and honest girl, under whatever name she came to you,”
answered Francis Tredethlyn; “but pray tell me the story.”
But Mrs. Burfield could not immediately comply with this request; she
had to go into the kitchen first, to see that “the girl” was basting
some mutton that was being roasted for a very fastidious “front
parlour,” who had a rooted objection to baked meats; and then she had to
go out into a little area, in which the window looked out, and to hold
parley with some person above, who dropped her down divers loaves, and
disputed with her as to a certain “twopenny German” which had been had,
or had not been had, on the previous Tuesday. At last, however, she was
able to seat herself opposite poor Francis, and to begin her story, from
the narration of which she seemed to derive a dismal kind of enjoyment.
“It’s close upon seven years since my poor dear husband died,” Mrs.
Burfield began; and for some little time Francis Tredethlyn was afraid
that she was going to favour him with a sketch of her own personal
history rather than that story which he was so eager to know. “It’s
close upon seven years, seven years of toil and trouble for me, and up
to that time I’d never known what it was to want for anything in a
moderate way. He was managing clerk in an insurance office, sir, and was
as fine a looking man as you need wish to see; but he was
taken--sudden--and I was left alone to provide for four young children.
Well, sir, I tried one thing and another, but being genteelly brought
up, things seemed to go harder with me than they go with some people;
and at last an uncle, on my mother’s side, who is very wealthy, and
lately retired from the patent chimney-pot business, gave me enough to
buy a little furniture and start fresh down here. It’s been a hard life,
sir, but I shouldn’t have so much minded that if it hadn’t been for the
children. I couldn’t bear to see them running wild upon the shore, or
playing with vulgar, dirty children on the waste ground; so, a little
better than four years ago, I thought I’d try if I couldn’t get a person
to take care of them, who’d be a kind of governess to them, and would
give me a helping hand with the house when my lodgings were full, and
wouldn’t want above a few pounds a year, just to get herself a new gown
once in a way, and so on. Well, sir, I inquired for such a person, but
lor’! you might just as well inquire for anything you wanted on Robinson
Crusoe’s island as at Coltonslough, unless it’s queen’s-taxes and
poor-rates; and you can have plenty of them without asking. So at last
someone says to me--I think it was Mr. Sanders at the post-office--‘Why
don’t you advertise in the “Times,” Mrs. Burfield? it’ll cost you a
trifle, but you are sure to get what you want.’ So the long and the
short of it was, I did advertise for a genteel person who would
undertake to teach young children, and make herself generally useful, in
consideration of a comfortable home and a honorarium of ten pounds per
annum. Mr. Sanders advised me to put it in the light of a honorarium, as
he said it looked more that way. A young person from the country
preferred, I stated in the advertisement; for _the things_ that lodgers
from London bring down with their luggage, and then turn round upon you
and object to the bedding, had quite set me against Londoners. Well,
sir, I got a good many answers, but the best-written letter was signed
Susan Turner. So I wrote to Miss Turner--the address was at a little
coffee-house near the Great Western terminus--and I told her that if she
liked to come down to Coltonslough for an interview, I would be her
expenses one way. Well, she came, and I found her a very
pleasant-spoken, respectable-looking young person, and I took to her at
first sight to that degree that I allowed her to come to me without
reference, she being at variance, as she told me, with her relations in
the country.”
“She came to you at once, then?”
“Yes, she stayed with me there and then, not caring to go back to
London, the strangeness of which frightened her, she said; and she had
no luggage, except a little bit of a carpet-bag, full of things, which
she sent for next day; and then by-and-by the truth came out, that she’d
run away from home. But she had a couple of sovereigns, and she went out
and bought herself a few more things, and made herself as neat and
comfortable as she could. She didn’t make much secret of how she’d left
her home, poor girl. Her father had wanted her to marry against her own
wishes, she said, and, in her fear of him, she had run away.”
“Poor girl! poor girl!”
“Well, sir,” sighed Mrs. Burfield, “we got on very comfortable for some
months. I never met a young person more kind or more willing. The
children took to her as if she’d been their own sister, and she was
altogether the steadiest, most industrious young person. Things had gone
pretty comfortable with me that season; and in the autumn, quite late,
going on for November, when people don’t expect to see a single lodger
in all Coltonslough, what should I hear, one afternoon, but the wheels
of a fly, and a tremendous double knock at my door; and who should I see
when I opened it, but a tall, handsome-looking gentleman, who walked
straight into my parlour, and took the rooms off-hand, and without so
much as inquiring what the terms would be, which, considering the
haggling and beating down I’d been accustomed to in the very best part
of the season, seemed almost like a dream.”
Mrs. Burfield had warmed with her subject, and had refrained for some
time from the relief of a sigh; but she paused now to indulge herself in
a very heavy one, and then, after a general disquisition upon the
sorrows of a lodging-house keeper, went on,--
“He really was one of the handsomest, easiest-spoken gentlemen I ever
met with, and he seemed to take away one’s breath almost; he had such a
dashing kind of way with him that, if you’d have shut your eyes, you’d
almost have fancied him on horseback, galloping away for dear life. He
seemed all upon the prance, as it were, if I may use the observation.
‘Now I dare say you’ll want references,’ he said, ‘and if so I can’t
jive you any without putting myself to more trouble than I care about.
But you can have some rent in advance if that’ll do; and I’ve no end of
luggage, if that’ll do.’ And then he flung himself into one of the
arm-chairs, and burst out laughing when it creaked and groaned, as it
were, under him; for lodgers have no more feeling for an unprotected
female’s furniture than if they was so many Ojibbeway Indians--and I
can’t deny that the parlour chairs were uncertain. But I didn’t mind the
strange gentleman making game of them, somehow, for he had such a
pleasant way with him, and showed his white teeth, and looked so
handsome, that he seemed quite to brighten up the place.
“‘Well,’ he said presently, ‘can you guess why I came to Coltonslough in
the month of November?’ And of course I told him no, I couldn’t, not
having the pleasure of being acquainted with him. Upon which he burst
out laughing, again. ‘I came here,’ he said, ‘because I was told
Coltonslough was about the dullest place upon the surface of the earth;
and I mean to stay here till after Christmas. So you may tell the man
outside to bring in my luggage, and look sharp about it.’ Upon which the
flyman brought in a couple of big portmanteaus, and a gun-case, and a
hat-box, and two of the heaviest trunks that ever came into my passage.
‘Books, ma’am, books, every one of them, and all as heavy as lead,’ said
the young gentleman, as the corners of the boxes went scratching and
bumping upon the paper,--and the way lodgers’ boxes do scratch and bump
an unprotected female’s paper is something awful. But for all that I
wasn’t sorry to see plenty of luggage, though the books might have been
brickbats neatly packed in hay, as has been known to happen in this very
terrace. ‘Well, ma’am,’ says the gentleman, when his luggage had all
been brought in and the flyman paid, ‘now I can settle down comfortably.
Do I look as if I’d been plucked, do you think, ma’am?’ he asked,
looking at me very hard, and sticking his hands deep down in his
pockets, which was one of those ways of his that I venture to call
prancing. I didn’t quite catch his meaning, but I thought he alluded to
something unpleasant; so I said, ‘No, indeed, I should think not.’ ‘But
I have, ma’am,’ he answered, looking at me in a measuring sort of way,
as if I’d been a five-barred gate, and he was just going to fly clean
over me; and that measuring look of his was another of his galloping
ways. ‘But I _have_ been plucked, ma’am,’ he said, ‘as clean as any fowl
that they ever send you home from the poulterer’s. I’m a featherless
biped, ma’am. So I’ve come down to Coltonslough, being, as I understand,
the dullest hole upon the earth’s crust, and I mean to go in a
perisher.’ A ‘perisher’ was his expression. ‘And I mean to read like old
boots; so you may let your servant light me a fire, ma’am, and get me
some chops; for I suppose I must resign myself to an existence sustained
upon chops so long as I’m at Coltonslough.’”
Once more Mrs. Burfield stopped to take breath. Francis Tredethlyn
listened in silence, with a moody frown upon his face. Already he hated
this man, of whose share in his cousin’s history he was yet ignorant. He
felt as we feel sometimes at a play, when we see the villain first
appear upon the stage, and know he is a villain, yet do not know what
his special crime is to be.
“Well, sir, of all the pleasant lodgers that ever darkened a widow’s
door, the plucked young gentleman was the pleasantest. He got up early,
and went to his books and papers as soon as he was dressed, and had
chops and strong green tea for breakfast; and he sat at his books all
day, till it was too dark for him to sit any longer, and then he went
and strolled up and down the Esplanade, smoking for an hour or so; and
then he came in and had more chops and cold brandy-and-water for his
dinner, except when I took the liberty of roasting him a fowl, or
getting some other little nicety, just by way of variety; and then,
after dinner, he went to his books and papers again, and sat up till
very late, reading and writing and drinking strong green tea.”
“But my cousin Susan,” cried Francis. He was getting impatient under
this minute description of the lodger’s habits. “What has all this to do
with my cousin?”
“I’m coming to that,” Mrs. Burfield answered, with a sigh that was more
profound than usual. “You see, sir, it happened at this time, being the
end of the season, and Coltonslough as empty as it could be; it happened
that we were without a servant; so myself and Susan Turner took it in
turns to wait upon the young gentleman. Not that I ever asked her to do
anything that you can call menial; but she’d take him up his tea, and
clear away his dinner things, and light his candles for him, and such
like; and knowing her to be a respectable young woman, I didn’t keep
that sharp watch over her that some folks might have done. If she
stopped ten minutes or so in his room, talking to him, I usen’t to think
anything about it--you can hear almost every sound in these houses, and
it was quite pleasant to hear her soft voice and his laugh ringing out
every now and then. He wasn’t the sort of gentleman you could suspect of
any harm, he had such a happy kind of way with him, as if he was good
friends with himself and all the world. He lent Susan books--books of
poetry, with all sorts of pencil-writing upon the edges of them; and I
used sometimes to fancy Susan cared more for the pencil-writing than she
did for the poetry itself; she’d sit and pore over it so when the
children were gone to bed and we were alone in this room. Sometimes the
plucked young gentleman would come down here of an evening to fetch
himself another candle, or to tell us that he’d let his fire out, or
something of that kind; for he wasn’t a bit proud; and then, instead of
going back directly, he’d sit down and make himself as much at home as
if he had lived among us all his life; and Oh, dear me, sir, how he
would talk!--all about books and poetry, and the foreign places he’d
seen, and plays, and music, and writers, and actors, and singers. He
seemed to know everything in the world. So, you see, one way and
another, he saw a good deal of Susan; for I found out afterwards from
the children that when he went out in the dusk to smoke his cigar he
generally contrived to meet Susan, and then he’d walk with her and the
children till it was time for them to go indoors. She was a good girl,
and she wasn’t the girl to throw herself in his way. If they were much
together, it was because he followed her. I might have known the meaning
of his sitting in this room for hours together of a night; but he had
such a natural way of doing everything that it threw one off one’s
guard, somehow.”
“The scoundrel!” muttered Francis Tredethlyn, between his clenched
teeth. “But you haven’t told me his name. I want to know his name.”
“He’d been with us more than a fortnight before ever I asked him what
his name was, and then somehow or other the question came up, and he
said his name was Lesley--Robert Lesley; but somehow, looking back upon
it afterwards, it seemed to me as if he hesitated a little before he
said the name. Well, things went on as comfortable as possible for more
than two months, and then he went away, taking all his luggage with him,
and paying me very liberal for everything he’d had, besides half-a-crown
apiece to the children, which at that time of year came very welcome;
and of course I took it from them immediately to go towards their new
boots. He went away; and as I thought, somehow, he’d had a kind of a
liking for Susan, and Susan for him, I half expected the poor girl would
fret a little when he was gone; but she didn’t, and looking at her
sometimes as she sat at work opposite to me, I used to fancy there was a
kind of happy smile like upon her face. She’d been with me six months by
this time, and I paid her the little trifle that was due; and what did
she do next day but go out and spend ever so much in toys and such-like
for the children, which, as I told her, was very wrong, considering how
badly off she was for clothes. But she made no answer, except to look at
me with the same smile I’d seen so often on her face since Mr. Lesley
had gone.”
“Poor girl--poor, helpless, innocent girl!”
The dark frown melted into a softer expression as Francis Tredethlyn
muttered these few broken words. He was no longer thinking of the
stranger--the nameless villain of this common story. He was thinking of
his cousin Susy’s innocent face, with the smile of girlish trustfulness
upon it.
“One day, when Mr. Lesley had been gone a little better than three
weeks, a letter came for Susan--I’d need to notice it, for it was the
first she’d had since she’d been with me. She ran upstairs directly she
heard the postman’s knock, and took the letter from him with her own
hands, and stopped to read it in the passage. She was putting it in her
pocket as she came back into this room, and her cheeks were flushed as
bright as two red roses; but she didn’t say a word about the letter. All
that afternoon she seemed in a kind of flutter, and every now and then
she would come all over in a tremble, and drop her work in her lap. She
was making some pinafores for the boys, and I said to her, ‘Susan, what
ever is the matter?’ but she turned it off somehow, and nothing more was
said until after tea, when the children were safe out of the way, and we
were sitting alone together. Then I never did see anybody so restless as
she was, laying her work down and taking it up again, and fetching a
book--one of the books he’d left with her,--and opening and shutting it,
and then pretending to read, but all in the same restless way; till at
last she came suddenly behind my chair, and flung her arms round my
neck, and began to sob fit to break her poor loving heart. And it was
ever so long before she could get calm enough to say anything; but at
last she cried out, ‘Oh, Mrs. Burfield, I’m afraid I’m very ungrateful;
you’ve been so good to me, and we’ve been so happy together.’ And so we
had; though I do think, poor tender-hearted dear, she’d gone through as
much on account of the taxes as if she’d been the householder instead of
me. ‘I’m going to leave you, Mrs. Burfield,’ she said; ‘I’m going to
leave you, and the children that love me so dearly. I’m going away to be
married to Mr. Lesley. I’m to go by the first train to-morrow morning,
and he’s to meet me at the station, and at eleven o’clock we’re to be
married.’
“You may guess how she took my breath away when she told me this. But I
said, ‘Oh, my dear, you can’t mean to do anything so mad as go alone to
meet Mr. Lesley, which is little better than a stranger to you?’ ‘A
stranger!’ she cried out, ‘my darling Robert a stranger! Oh, if you only
knew how noble he is, and how much he is going to give up to marry a
poor girl like me!’ And then she went on about him as if he’d been
something better than a human creature; and having always found him so
much the gentleman myself, and so open-hearted and frank in all his
ways, I could scarcely do otherwise than believe her. But still I urged
her all I could against trusting him. ‘Don’t go, my dear,’ I said; ‘or,
if you must go, let me go with you.’ But she blushed very red, and said,
‘Oh, Mrs. Burfield, the marriage is to be a secret, and I promised
Robert again and again that I wouldn’t say a word about it to you or any
living creature. Only you’ve been so good to me, and I couldn’t bear to
go away without telling you the whole truth.’ And upon this I begged her
still harder not to go away; I told her no good ever came out of secret
marriages, and that there was generally something underhand and false at
the bottom of them, that brought about all kinds of trouble and
suffering afterwards. And I told her how my Burfield married me publicly
in St. Pancras’ Church, and would have his two sisters--one in pink and
one in blue--besides the Miss Parkinses, his first cousins, who were
sweetly dressed in green and salmon, to walk after me to the altar. But
it was no more use talking to Susan than if she’d been a stone statue,
though she sat herself on the little hassock at my feet, and kept crying
one minute and smiling the next, and talking about her darling Robert,
and kissing me, till I almost thought her brain was turned. It was no
use talking. ‘I love him so dearly,’ she said, ‘and I know how noble and
generous he is.’ And that was her only argument; and long before
daylight the next morning she went away by the early train; and though
my heart seemed bleeding for her, I couldn’t kiss her when she said
good-bye, and I couldn’t go to the station to see her off. ‘No, Susan,’
I said, ‘if you must go, you must, and I’ve no power to keep you back;
but I’ll be neither act nor part in your going.’ But I stood at my
window to see her go away, and I shall never forget the dark, drizzly
morning, with streaks of gray like on one side of the sky, and white
sickly-looking stars on the other, and Susan walking across the waste
ground all alone, with the rain driving at her, and the wind beating at
her, and a bit of a shabby carpet-bag in her hand. It seemed so dreadful
to think she was going to be married like that.”
“But she _did_ go away?” cried Francis. “She must have come back to you,
then; for the letter with the Coltonslough post-mark reached her father
less than eighteen months ago.”
“I’m coming to that,” answered Mrs. Burfield. “It’s about eighteen
months ago that she came back to me, looking, Oh! so changed, so broken
down, that I hadn’t the heart to ask her any questions. I could see that
all had gone wrong, and I could guess pretty well what kind of wrong it
was. She never mentioned Mr. Lesley’s name; and there was something in
her face that seemed to make me afraid to mention it myself. She wanted
to lodge with me, she said, and would pay me for her lodgings. I could
see that she wore a wedding-ring on her finger, but she had no other
jewellery whatever. She was dressed in black,--black silk that had once
been very handsome, but which was rusty and shabby then. The first night
she came to me she sat up very late writing, and in the morning she went
out with a letter in her hand. She was with me more than two months; but
that was the last time I ever saw her write. She used to be fond of
reading; but now she never took up a book, though Mr. Lesley had left a
good many of his books in the little chiffonier in the parlour, thinking
to come back, as he told me. She used to be fond of the children; but
now she never noticed them, and after a little while they seemed to
shrink away from her, as if she was strange to them somehow. For hours
and days together she used to sit in the bow-window, watching the road
from the station, as if she expected some one. At dusk she would go out
and walk upon the Esplanade, just at the time that he used to walk with
his cigar. It was the dull season, and there was no one to notice her.
At last, about the middle of May, when the visitors began to come to
Coltonslough, she told me one day that she must leave me. I said, ‘Was
it on account of the lodgings?’ because she knew I used to raise the
rent at that time of year, and I thought that might be the cause of her
wanting to go. But she said, ‘Oh! no, no.’ She had only had one purpose
in stopping so long, and that was in the hope of seeing some one, or
getting an answer to a letter she had written; and now there was no
longer any hope of that. So I couldn’t persuade her to stay any longer,
do what I would, and she went away. She had friends in London, she told
me, who had promised to put her in the way of getting her own living
somehow or other. I kissed her this time, willing enough, poor child,
and I went with her to the station; and I thought her pale face looked
almost like a ghost’s as she waved her hand to me from the carriage
window.”
“You’re a good woman!” cried Mr. Tredethlyn, half crushing Mrs.
Burfield’s skinny hands in his strong fingers,--“you’re a good woman,
and you did your best to befriend that poor girl.”
Mrs. Burfield sighed, and wiped her eyes with the corner of a rusty
black-silk apron. The world had been very hard for her; but there was a
gentle, womanly haven somewhere in her breast, and Susan Tredethlyn had
taken shelter there.
“She’d been gone a little over six weeks, when an old gentleman came one
morning, and asked to see a girl called Susan. That’s how he put it. He
was very stern looking, and he threw me all in a tremble, somehow, with
his ways; but I asked him down here, and then, little by little, he made
me tell him pretty nearly all I’ve told you. I couldn’t keep anything
back from him; he put his questions so fierce and sudden; and every time
I hesitated ever so little, he accused me of prevaricating with him, and
trying to deceive him. I could see his eyes glaring at me like coals of
fire, and his face turned of a bluish white, so that I was almost
frightened he’d drop down in a fit. But when he’d got all the story out
of me, he stood up as straight and stern as if he’d been only twenty
years old, and said, ‘No man of my name ever knew what disgrace was
until to-day; and may the heaviest curse that ever fell upon a woman’s
head come down upon my shameful daughter!’ He stretched up his two
hands,--and I shall never forget him as he stood there with his white
hair, and the bluish white of his face, and the dreadful glare in his
eyes. Then he put on his hat and walked out of the house, taking no more
notice of me than if I’d been a stock or a stone. I heard the front door
bang to after him; and I ran upstairs to the parlour window, and saw him
walking away towards the station; and that’s the last I saw of him.”
“Can you remember upon what day this occurred?”
“Yes, I can; for I’d had the parlour lodgers leave me the day before. It
was the 29th of June.”
The 29th of June! and on the 30th Oliver Tredethlyn had executed that
will which made Francis master of thirty thousand a year. The young man
knew now why his uncle had left him a great fortune, and found it still
more difficult to feel very grateful to his benefactor.
There was a long pause, during which vengeful thoughts had their full
way in the breast of Francis Tredethlyn.
“Can you tell me nothing more of this man,” he said presently,--“this
scoundrel, who called himself Robert Lesley?”
Mrs. Burfield only answered by a hopeless shake of her head.
“He left some books, you say. Was there none among them that would give
any clue to who or what he was?”
Again Mrs. Burfield shook her head.
“You’re welcome to look at the books,” she said; “there’s plenty of
pencil-writing in them, but no name or address,--only initials.”
She knelt down before a little chiffonier in a corner by the fireplace,
and took out a few volumes, some handsomely, some shabbily bound, and
placed them before Francis Tredethlyn.
Upon the handsomely-bound books the initials “R. L.” appeared in a
gilded monogram. Four of the volumes were German translations of some
recondite classics; but there was a fifth upon which Mr. Tredethlyn
fastened eagerly. It was a small flat volume, bound in sheepskin, and
fastened with a brass lock--a very superior kind of lock. On the cover
was written the one word “Journal.”
“Let me have this book,” he said; “I’ll give you a hundred pounds for
it.”
Mrs. Burfield’s mouth opened with a spasmodic action, and for once in
her life she forgot to sigh.
“A hundred pounds!”
“A hundred--two, if you like. Haven’t I told you that I’m a rich man?
and you’ve been kind to my cousin. I’ll give you the money as a free
gift, for the matter of that; but I must have this book. It’s a
journal--a book in which a man writes a history of his own life. An
officer I knew in Van Diemen’s Land used to write such a history by fits
and starts. How do I know what this may tell me about my cousin? Let me
have it. I know the book isn’t yours; but there can be no such thing as
honour or faith to be kept with a man like that. Let me have the book.”
There was a good deal more said upon the matter; but the end of it was
that Francis Tredethlyn went back to London with the sheepskin-covered
volume in his pocket; and Mrs. Burfield, retiring to rest after a heavy
supper of cold meat and cucumber, dreamt that she had inherited a
million of money from one of the Coltonslough tax-collectors.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XII.
A MODERN GENTLEMAN’S DIARY.
Francis Tredethlyn went back to the hotel in Covent Garden with the
little sheepskin-covered volume appertaining to the gentleman who called
himself Robert Lesley, safely stowed in his pocket. He went straight
back to the hotel, ate his simple dinner, drew the candles near him, and
then, taking up a poker from the hearth, made short work of the lock
under which the stranger had kept his secrets. All thought of those
sunny gardens and drawing-rooms at Twickenham, the glancing river, the
woody background, faded out of his mind for a time, and gave place to
one settled purpose--the discovery of his missing cousin’s destroyer.
Yes, her destroyer! He had only been able to read Mrs. Burfield’s story
in one fashion. The solitary departure in the chill light of a winter’s
morning, the haste and secrecy, the lonely return long afterwards; these
things seemed to the young man to point only to one conclusion;--the
simple Cornish girl’s faith had been betrayed by the man she had so
implicitly trusted.
In the little volume before him Francis Tredethlyn hoped to find some
further clue to that sad history. He seemed to take a savage pleasure in
punishing the neat brazen lock, which he shattered with a couple of
vigorous blows from the handle of the poker.
“I wonder whether, when a man’s a villain, he writes _that_ down?”
thought Mr. Tredethlyn. “I can’t fancy a scoundrel putting the truth
about himself even on paper; and if the truth isn’t here, I can’t see
how the book will help me. And yet there must be secrets in it, too, or
he’d never have had such a lock as this. Mr. Lowther used to throw his
journal about any where, and I don’t think _he_ ever did anything that
was particularly worth writing down.”
The Cornishman began to turn over the volume very slowly, looking at the
pages cautiously, almost as if he expected to see some venomous creature
crawl out from between the leaves. The first twenty pages of the book
were filled with the records of a college life, in which brief memoranda
of study were interspersed with boating slang and turf calculations. The
name of a certain Rosa, of the King’s Head, appeared very often in these
earlier pages; and there were little epigrams about Rosa, bespeaking the
easy-going morality of a Rochester or a Sedley, rather than the pure
sentiments of a Tennyson or a Longfellow. Altogether there was a
reckless, swaggering manner about the book, which very well corresponded
with Mrs. Burfield’s description of the prancing stranger.
But the volume had no interest for Francis Tredethlyn until he came to
the twentieth page, where the name of Coltonslough figured for the first
time.
“_November 8._--The abomination of desolation, and just the place for a
fellow that wants to read hard and be delivered from the society of his
fellow-creatures! Arrived yesterday afternoon; found civil landlady,
stereotyped sea-side accommodation; decrepit easy-chair, slippery
horsehair cushions; no window-curtains to speak of, and a great deal of
unnecessary drapery festooned about a rickety tent-bedstead;
wash-hand-stand one size too large for a doll, and fifty sizes too small
for any civilized being; shells and shepherdesses on the mantelpieces,
and any amount of blown-glass decanters on the sideboard. Dined on
chops, which were fried, soddened in their own grease. Must speak to the
landlady to-morrow, and insist on gridiron. The woman who would fry
chops would think nothing of human sacrifices. A girl waited upon me, a
good deal younger than Rosa, and I think prettier--but we have changed
all that, so I didn’t take particular notice of her. Read hard till
after one, and write this before retiring to my couch,--flock, and
lumpy, for I dug my knuckles into the counterpane while examining the
apartment.
“_November 9._--The girl, who is infinitely superior to Rosa, brought me
my breakfast. More chops, not fried, but soddened in relic of the dark
ages entitled Dutch oven, for I inquired; and underdone French rolls.
Why, O provincial taker, always underdone? What grudge dost thou bear
against thy fellow-man that thou seekest insidiously to undermine his
constitution with thy clammy bread-stuffs? Girl, infinitely prettier
than Rosa, cleared away breakfast. Very shy, and only answers polite
inquiries in monosyllables. Asked if she was relation of woman of house.
No, no relation; nursery governess to children. Comes from some remote
district in the west of England; evidently objects to be precise as to
locality. Heard her go down kitchen stairs with tea-things, and did
_not_ hear her reascend them. Conclude that the nursery is somewhere in
the cellarage. Read hard all day. Smoke and stroll in the evening.
Landlady waited on me at dinner. Dismal change, after monosyllabic girl,
recalling Death’s-head at Egyptian banquets, but _not_ crowned with
flowers. More reading after dinner, brandy-and-water cold, and now to
bed. Have ordered mattress to be put over flock. Sleeping on knobby
surface all very well now and then, but not for a permanence. Mem: To
keep my eye upon Lord Paisley’s ‘Blazing Tom,’ for the Craven meeting.
“_November 12._--No diary yesterday or the day before. Read with German
crib: wonderful fellows those Germans for first-class translations of
classic fogies. Wrote to H. C. to put a pony on ‘Blazing Tom.’ Walked on
the Esplanade in the afternoon, and made the acquaintance of
monosyllabic Cornish girl, infinitely prettier than Rosa. Yes, I
succeeded in breaking the ice, with considerable trouble; for I never
_did_ see anything feminine so shy and frightened as this brown-eyed
Cornish girl. ‘Her eye’s dark charm,’ &c. Well, there _is_ something of
the gazelle in her eyes, something shrinking and fawn-like. I could
fancy the white doe of what’s-its-name looking as she looked at me
yesterday.
“I went out for my smoke and stroll rather earlier than I had intended.
I saw the Cornish girl and three uncouth children in rusty leather boots
wending their way across the piece of waste ground which forms the
delicious prospect before my window. A nice, cool, gray afternoon, with
a low yellow streak on the western horizon; a gray sea, melting into a
gray sky, with only just that one golden streak glimmering along the
edge of the waters; the sort of afternoon that reminds one of Tennyson’s
poetry. So I lighted my cigar, and went out for a stroll. Perhaps I
followed the monosyllabic girl. What do I know? as that amiable French
nuisance, who is perpetually quoted in newspaper leaders, remarked.
Enough that I went, found the Cornish girl, very shabbily dressed, but
unutterably pretty, strolling listlessly up and down the paved walk
beside the sea. They _call_ it the sea; but, Oh for the roaring breakers
of the Atlantic, or the long hoarse roar of the waves as the German
Ocean surges on broad yellow sands yonder, far away in the North!
“And so, having lighted my cigar, I strolled up and down the Esplanade.
Of course I began to talk to the children. If children have any use in
this world--which I have been frequently inclined to doubt--surely it
must be in this matter of serving as a means of introduction to pretty
nursemaids. The children and I were intimate in no time; the presuming
little imps became, of course, obnoxiously familiar; and, like all
go-betweens, were very difficult to shake off when done with. But I got
the Cornish girl to talk at last. She is not stupid, only shy; and she
told me a good deal, in a pretty, simple, girlish way, about her native
county, always keeping clear of all precise allusion to locality, by the
bye. She is very pretty,--I had almost written lovely, but that
adjective can only be applied to a high-bred beauty. She is extremely
pretty, and that white doe of Rhylston (isn’t it?) look in her eyes
haunted me all last night while I was reading. Yes, it was very
pleasant, that stroll upon the Esplanade. I threw away my first cigar,
and forgot to light another, though she would have allowed me to smoke,
I dare say. It was very pleasant, that cool gray sea, and the yellow
streak fading in the west, and the flat gray shore, and the generally
Tennysonian aspect of everything. It was very much better than the
King’s Arms, and a lot of fellows drinking no end of Bass, and chaffing
Rosa. I don’t suppose this Cornish girl knows what chaff means. I almost
shudder when I think of Rosa, with her big, round, black eyes, and the
sticky little curls upon her forehead, and the tartan neck-ribbons, and
great yellow earrings. And Oxonians have married Rosas before my time,
and have deservedly gone to the dogs thereupon. But fifty thousand is
your figure, my dear Robert,--fifty thousand, well sounded, and no
separate-use-and-maintenance humbug either. Something in the
commercial-widow line, I suppose you will have to put up with, my poor
Bob; but no greedy old parent to interfere with the disposal of the
money. The widow, or the orphan, if a fifty thousand pounder, is the
sort of article for you, dear child.
“_November 13._--She brought me my breakfast this morning--(what, is she
_she_ already? Alas, poor Rosa!)--and I got her to pour out my tea. I
couldn’t detain her long: she was so _very_ busy, she said, and seemed
painfully anxious to get away. I made her talk a little. She has a nice
low voice,--‘an excellent thing,’ &c.! Now Rosa had a vixenish way of
speaking, that always jarred upon me, even when I was deepest down that
pit into which the fair barmaid’s admirers cast themselves. She--the
Cornish girl--is what people call a genteel young person, with white
hands and a slim waist, and a nice way of doing her hair, and putting on
her collars and cuffs. Her name is Susan Turner, by the bye; and the
children call her Susy. Could anything sound more pastoral? Susy. The
name of Rosa was always so painfully suggestive of nigger melodies.
Another cool gray afternoon, and another low yellow line across the sky;
so I went out for my smoke at the same time as yesterday. She was on the
Esplanade with the children. She instructs them in arithmetic, writing,
and elementary smatterings of history, geography, and grammar, after
dinner, and then brings them out for a walk till tea-time, after which
they ‘retire to rest,’ as the novelists have it, not without
considerable rebellious scuffling in the passage and on the stairs. That
is the order of the day. In the morning, I suspect, she is housemaid,
parlour-maid, needlewoman, or anything else that my landlady’s
necessities oblige her to be. But she is always equally neat and pretty;
and if she were only provided with that trifling little matter of fifty
thousand or so in the elegant simplicity of the three per cents, I
should be decidedly inclined to fall in love with her. Does one ever
fall in love with a fifty-thousand pounder, by the bye? I rather think
not. She--Susy--was not quite so shy this afternoon, and we talked a
good deal. I offered to lend her some books. I offered to lend Rosa
books once, when I was in the lowest depths of spooneyism, and was
unhappy about her grammar--those dreadful superfluous ‘whiches,’ and
intolerable ‘as hows’!--but Rosa rejected my literature, as dry rubbish
that gave her the horrors. I had lent her the ‘Bride of Lammermoor.’ My
little Susy won’t turn up that innocent nose of hers at any sentimental
story, I’ll be bound. I’ve found an odd volume of Byron, containing
‘Parisina,’ and the ‘Prisoner of Chillon,’ and a lot of the ‘To Thirza’
business.
“N.B.--I find that I’ve called her my little Susy! Pretty well, as I’ve
been only a week in the place. Am I going down into another pit, I
wonder--a deeper abyss than that into which Rosa casts her victims?
Poor, pretty, fawn-eyed little darling! Take care of yourself, my dear
Robert. Poor, friendless Susy! She couldn’t well be _worse off_ under
any circumstances than she is in this place, that’s one blessing: the
drudge of a mistress who is herself a slave in the bondage of poverty. I
went down to the kitchen yesterday to get a fresh supply of coals--these
people are ready to fall down and worship me because I’m not proud, as
they put it; but there are numerous orders of pride, I think,--and I saw
their dinner. Such a poor bone of mutton! Poor little Susy! how she
would open her eyes at sight of the Richmond and Greenwich banquets that
I have seen given to persons as inferior to herself as--Hyperion to the
other person. What a frightful hindrance to original composition is that
abominable habit of hackneyed quotation!--the great newspaper-mill going
round three-hundred-and-thirteen times a year, and only one little
limited stock of quotations for all the leader-writers.
“_November 16._--Sunday, and a wet day: saw Susan start for church in
the morning with prayer-books and children. Strolled out with umbrella a
little after twelve; found church; unpleasant new building, smelling of
damp stucco, and looking like an edifice of soddened brown paper; waited
in the porch, patient as that young idiot in Arthur Pendennis’s poem,
until my lady came out, and conducted her home in triumph under my
umbrella, while the awkward squad of children brought up the rear under
cover of the maternal gingham. She was obliged to take my arm; and as
the walk from the church is rather a long one, we got alarmingly
intimate--when I say alarmingly intimate, I mean that she has taken to
blushing when I speak to her. That’s the worst of these fawn-like girls;
they will blush! And when they’re pretty, the blushes are so bewitching.
And when they don’t happen to have fifty thousand or so, what is a
fellow to do? Take to his heels, replies the stern moralist, who has
sown his own wild oats twenty years ago, and is envious of the young
scatterers of to-day. I came to Coltonslough to read; and come what may,
I shall stay there till it’s time to go back to St. B. In the meantime,
Susan is a brown-eyed angel--an angel who leads the life of a low-bred
drudge, and for whom any possible change of circumstances _must_ be a
change for the better.
“Of course I questioned her about the sermon as we walked home. Take an
interest in sermons, and women will believe in you, though you were the
veriest scoundrel that ever admired Voltaire and considered the
‘Pucelle’ his _chef-d’œuvre_. What a little Puritan she is! She has been
to church twice every Sunday ever since she can remember, she told me,
and to Sunday-school, and to all kinds of examinations and
cross-examinations in the vicar’s parlour. I don’t suppose _she_ would
have floundered as I did, and come to grief over some of the questions
those old fogies at Oxford asked me about Biblical history. She knows
all about Saul, and David, and Jonathan, and those everlasting wars with
the Philistines, I dare say. She is very pretty, lovely--yes, lovely,
though _not_ high-bred. I sometimes fancy, though, that she must have
decent blood in her veins. I never saw a prettier little hand upon my
arm than that which rested there to-day, as I brought her home from
church. If I were--something utterly different from what I am, I would
get my degree, go in for a country curacy, and little Susy should be my
wife. But _noblesse oblige_: which very elastic aphorism means, in my
case, that I must marry a rich woman, and hold my own in my native
county whenever the reigning potentate is polite enough to retire to the
dusky shades whither all earthly sovereigns must go.
“Poor little Susan! pretty little Susan! When I am a county magnate,
laying down the law at the head of my table in the great dining-room at
the hall, shall I look back and think of these days, and smile at
myself, remembering that I could be so foolish as to go out on a wet
Sunday to escort a little nursemaid along a damp clay road?
“Read hard all the afternoon: dined on an elderly fowl flavoured with
Dutch oven--a bird that must have known Coltonslough when the first
bow-windowed house was a damp brickwork skeleton, grim and open to the
howling of the winds. Read for some time after dinner, and let my fire
out. Went downstairs to hunt up matches and firewood, and found my
landlady and Susan sitting opposite to each other at a little table with
one tallow-candle, reading pious compositions of an evangelical
tendency. They both seemed glad to see me; so I stopped and talked to
them. Susan had read the ‘Prisoner of Chillon;’ she read it last night,
and cried over it ‘fearful,’ my landlady informed me; so we were able to
talk about the poem, and I read two or three of the fugitive pieces
aloud. I used to be rather great at the debating-club at O., and I gave
them the ‘Thyrzas’ and ‘Day of my Destinys’ very strong. I could see the
tears shining in Susan’s eyes before I’d finished. I used to recite
poetry to Rosa sometimes, when I’d been taking too much Bass, and we
stood in the moonlit porch at the King’s Arms, with the river, and the
willows, and the towing-path all of a shimmer in the silvery light; but
one is apt to get tired of reciting sentimental poetry to a young person
who cries, ‘Lor’, how funny!’ at the close of some passionate verse. I
remember thundering out that grand anathema of Tom Moore’s against the
Prince Regent, ‘Go, deceiver, go!’ and my Rosa asked me naïvely what the
gentleman had done that the other gentleman should use such bad language
to him. No, Rosa, your strong point was not intellect. In the matter of
sticky curls and large black eyes you are unsurpassed, but the
sentimental element in your nature may be represented by zero.
“_November 30th._--More blanks in my journal. I said we were growing
alarmingly intimate; such an intimacy is alarming to a fellow who came
to Coltonslough bent on devoting himself to Aristotle and Aristophanes,
Æschylus and Euripides, and all that sort of people. Have been reading
‘The Clouds’ all this morning, but found a strange undercurrent of Susan
Turner pervading that classic satire; and I mean to go in and win this
time: those fellows at St. Boniface sha’n’t be able to laugh at my
discomfiture a second time. Why were women created for the trouble and
confusion of the superior sex? I thought I should be so safe at
Coltonslough, remote from Rosa, the Delilah of my youth; and lo! here is
another Delilah, a thousand times more dangerous--a shy, brown-eyed
Omphale, for whose sake any intellectual Hercules on this earth would
meekly hold the distaff. She is _so_ pretty; and all those modest,
shrinking ways have such an unspeakable fascination after a long course
of Rosa’s sharp repartees, all redolent of the bar and the beer-engines.
I can never dissociate Rosa from the smell of malt liquors and ardent
spirits, with just a faint suspicion of lemons and stale pork-pie. But
there must be something extraordinary about _this_ girl, for her vulgar
surroundings do not seem to vulgarize her. I don’t mean that she is one
of nature’s duchesses, or any humbug of that sort. I have no belief in
nature’s nobility, and to my mind a duchess is a person who has been
cradled in Belgravia, whose long-clothes were flounced with _point
d’Alençon_, and to whom the wrong side of Temple Bar would be as strange
as the centre of Africa. I should by no means care to see my little Susy
in a London drawing-room; but I can fancy her domiciled in some rustic
cottage in the lake district, a patient Wordsworthian little handmaiden,
waiting upon and worshipping her husband, and getting him cosy
breakfasts, with silvery trout broiled to perfection, and mushrooms
newly-gathered from the neighbouring plains. If I were only an embryo
curate, with neither expectations nor ambitious desires, I scarcely
think that I could find a better wife than this simple gazelle-eyed
maiden; but---- Oh, that terrible monosyllable! The history of all the
world seems made up of buts and ifs.
“My afternoon stroll upon the Esplanade has grown into an established
thing. Sixpence judiciously bestowed upon the children despatches those
young abominations scurrying over the waste ground to an emporium which
they call ‘the shop,’ whence they return after an interval, embrowned
and sticky with the traces of ginger-bread and barley-sugar. In the
meanwhile Susan and I are alone on that dreary Esplanade. What is it
Byron says about youth, and solitude, and the sea? Well, that sort of
thing _is_ rather a dangerous combination; and I begin to think that if
I want to redeem my character at St. B., I shall be obliged to take
myself and my books away from Coltonslough. ‘Breathes there the wretch
with soul so dead,’ who could sit in that dingy parlour, coaching
himself in the classics, while one of the prettiest girls in all the
British dominions is walking up and down the Esplanade opposite his
window, and thinking of him? Yes, she thinks of me, and expects me, when
that yellow streak begins to glimmer in the west. I have seen her head
turned towards my window; and then I pitch my friend Sophocles into the
remotest corner, and go out for my afternoon stroll.
“_December 10._--Yes, the dismal confession must be written, or the
account between R. L. and self closed for ever. I am in love--seriously,
desperately, unreasonably in love--with a young person whose social
status is something between that of a parlour-maid and a
nursery-governess. Could she be worse off than she is now? Could any
turn in the wheel of fortune leave her in a lower place than that she
now occupies? Scarcely! I don’t believe in those dismal histories which
the Minerva Press was wont to disseminate. Susan is just the sort of
girl to fall on her feet. Those shy, sensitive creatures always know how
to take care of themselves, and often do remarkably well in life. It’s
your dashing, high-spirited, strong-minded girl who goes to the bad.
Goodness knows I’m not a bad-hearted fellow. I can’t look at such a girl
as Susan without worrying myself about her future career. There’s
scarcely any sacrifice I wouldn’t make--short of the sacrifice of my own
prospects--in order to insure her welfare. Yes, the little stranger, let
into my dwelling unawares, has strung his bow and twanged his arrow home
to my heart. I am really in love this time. I used to feel savage with
those St. B. fellows when they talked nonsense to Rosa: but I think I
should annihilate the man who so much as looked at this girl. Yes; I am
prepared to make any sacrifice--short of the destruction of my own
prospects. Your really rich man, or your penniless beggar, can afford to
make a fool of himself; but I stand just in that middle distance between
the golden lands of plenty and the sterile plains of poverty, in which a
man must needs be peculiarly circumspect.
“_17th._--I have broken the ice at last. What a little Puritan she is!
And yet I know that she loves me, with the regular Haidee or Zuleika
sort of devotion: would like to kneel at my feet and offer me tiresome
flowers, when I was absorbed in the classic fogies, and all that sort of
thing. A long interview on the Esplanade this afternoon. I beat the
ground with the greatest discretion; for it would have been the easiest
thing in the world to frighten her. It must be a marriage--a _bonâ fide_
marriage, secret, of course. She won’t object to that. But upon the
other point I can see she would be inflexible. Those quiet people are
always obstinate. Ay di me, my pretty Susy, I fear that you and I must
say Good-bye. And I am really over head and ears in that dismal pit. I
am most absurdly fond of her; that’s the worst of it. Yes, we must say
Good-bye. The catechisms in the rector’s parlour and the Sunday-school
have done their work, and Susan Turner will be a drudge all her life
rather than surrender those ridiculous prejudices which it is the
fashion to implant in the minds of rustic youth. _Addio_, my pretty
Susan. I cannot imagine anything more delightful than our quiet walks in
the cold gray twilight; I cannot conceive any eyes--out of a Murillo--so
beautiful as those brown orbs of yours--orbs is the proper phrase, I
think, when a fellow is sentimental;--but the price demanded is too
heavy. One may buy gold in too dear a market; and ten years hence, with
blighted prospects, and half-a-dozen children, I might grow tired of my
white doe of what’s-its-name, and fancy a blue-eyed Greuze--how
wonderful that man was in his manipulations of violet-hued pupils
swimming in enamelled whiteness!--instead of my Murillo.
“_20th._--I began to pack my books the day before yesterday, and yet I
linger. ‘Tell me, my heart, if this be love!’ Not much doubt about it, I
fear. But only a day or two more, and then--and then good-bye, pretty
puritanical Susan, with your Sunday-school morality, and all that innate
obstinacy peculiar to quiet women. I shall have forgotten her in six
weeks, I dare say. But then that consolatory idea of the future oblivion
won’t lessen the present anguish of parting. We may forget all about a
gigantic triple-pronged carious tooth when we turn our back upon the
dentist’s torture-chamber, but the pang of extraction is none the less.
I shall forget her, and some other eyes will haunt me in my sleep; but
there must be a long blank interval of weariness before the Lethean
waters can wash away that artless face. I have plumbed her simple mind
to its uttermost depths, and have found nothing like deception or
pretence. So we must part. I to go forth and do my best at opening the
great oyster; she to remain here as my landlady’s drudge and companion.
Poor little thing! I hope she’ll miss me when I go. I shouldn’t like to
think of her enjoying a flirtation with some new lodger--a city clerk,
who would wear ready-made clothes bought somewhere in Shoreditch, and
smoke cheap Manillas. No, I shouldn’t like to fancy her happy when I am
gone. It wouldn’t have been pleasant to the Corsair to imagine Medora
flirting with mercantile mariners in his absence.
“_21st._--I have packed all my books, except a few German cribs. Perhaps
it was as well, for my studies had grown very desultory. How can a
fellow read hard when there is a pretty girl in the case, and he has
been so profound an idiot as to fall in love with her? But ‘it is
written’, as the followers of the prophet observe, and I must go. I have
told Susan. We had a very affecting interview yesterday. How the poor
little girl cried! And I hate to see a woman cry; it’s so excruciating
to the feelings of a good-hearted fellow; and the prettiest woman’s nose
is apt to get just a _leetle_ red when ‘the tears come trickling down,
down, down.’ O Susan, that I should quote that familiar ballad of Lord
Lovell when I write of your sorrow! But I suppose there is something of
the _persifleur_ in my nature, for I don’t often find myself very
earnest about anything. And so we walked up and down the Esplanade; she
crying, and I talking. I flatter myself I talked rather well. There was
just that dash of excitement about the business which makes a fellow
talk well. But my eloquence was all of no avail; Alfred de Musset,
Byron, George Sand, Rousseau, and Thomas Moore, all combined, cannot
prevail against the tenets of the Sunday-school; and so we are to part,
‘in silence and tears, half broken-hearted, to sever,’ &c., unless I
were prepared to sacrifice my prospects and put the fatal noose about my
neck.
“Bah! it would be too absurd, too utterly preposterous. Such things have
been, and have always resulted in pretty much the same way. Your poet
Shelley gets expelled from the University because he can’t keep his
convictions to himself, marries a simple rustic maiden, grows tired of
her, and falls in love with someone else, whereon rustic maiden drowns
herself, whence unspeakable _esclandre_ and confusion.
“_January 2nd._--No, the thing cannot be done; the sacrifice would be
too great. The days of the Minerva Press are past. The yellow
post-chaise, the lonely country inn, the college friend who is
introduced in a surplice, and acts as clergyman--alas! are not these
exploded with the dark ages? Were there ever any such marriages, I
wonder? or were they only figments of the romancer’s brain? At any rate,
anything of that kind must be impossible nowadays. And then a man must
be a consummate scoundrel who could devise such a plot. I don’t pretend
to the Sunday-school species of morality; but _nemo repente fuit
turpissimus_, as Juvenal has it. I am not so bad as that.
“_5th._--She is very unhappy; and how hard it seems to leave her to this
drudgery and desolation--Coltonslough, and my landlady, and my
landlady’s children, all the year round! And she is just the ‘creature
not too bright or good,’ &c.; the very woman of all others for a cottage
in the lake districts, or a Devonshire fishing-village, or any pretty
out-of-the-way haven, where a man might take his rest. And yet I must
leave her here, baffled entirely by the Sunday-school precepts with
which her shallow mind has been imbued. I have no time to play the
Lovelace, and I don’t want such a victory as his. I have had tiresome
letters from home. They will expect me to get my degree; and I am free
to confess that my reading since I have been at Coltonslough has been
the merest moonshine. Decidedly I must leave this place by to-night’s
express. ‘Better to die by sudden shock,’ &c.: and as for Susan, it is
only a natural chapter in such a girl’s history. She will break her
heart, and then marry a small tradesman, who will give her a Paisley
shawl and a black-silk gown to wear on Sundays.
“_6th._ Another day, and I am still here. I was awake all last night,
thinking of all manner of possibilities, or perhaps impossibilities. The
yellow post-chaise and the college friend in a surplice are obsolete
absurdities; but how about a marriage before the Registrar? Is there
anything so very impossible in a marriage before the Registrar, which
shall not be, say, _too_ binding? Why not a marriage before the
Registrar, between eight and twelve in the forenoon, with open doors, in
the presence of two witnesses, &c.? You walk into an office, very much
like any other office, and you see an official very much like any other
official, and there is a trifling formula, and a little signing and
countersigning, and so on, and the business is done. But even about this
there would be a good deal of trouble, and the college friend would
still be necessary, though not in a surplice--and the witnesses--and the
office. _Is_ the game worth the candle? Am I really so desperately in
love? And then, again, supposing the game worth the cost of
illumination, these sort of games are so apt to be dangerous; and
awkward stories crop up against one in after-life; with perhaps Chancery
suits, and so forth. No, it is too much trouble. It will be better for
Susan and I to shake hands, like sensible people, and say Good-bye.
“_7th._--A very long talk with Susan. I told her that we must part; our
roads in life lying separate, and so on. Poor child! her grief was
something very terrible. We had wandered out to some lonely ground
beyond the Esplanade, leaving those abominable children to disport
themselves as they pleased. We sat down upon a little bank at the edge
of a great ploughed field, with the grey sea before us. The poor child
sobbed as if her heart would have broken. I am no deliberate Lovelace,
but I suppose I have in this instance pursued the prey with something of
a Mexican trapper’s intensity. I never meant to be in earnest; but have
been drifted, as it were, by the chances of the situation; and people
who let lodgings at dull watering-places really should not employ such
pretty parlour-maids. Poor, tender-hearted little Susy! I never thought
she could have grown so fond of me, or that a little sentimental
spouting, and a few pretty speeches, could have gone so far. I should
have been a callous wretch if I had not been touched by her grief; and I
was inexpressibly touched; so much so that I flung all good resolutions
to swell the general heap of paving material for the halls of Pluto, and
told my Susy that there was an alternative for this miserable parting if
she would--trust me--and consent to a marriage before the Registrar.
“She will trust me. I explained to her the nature of the ceremonial I
proposed, and how all unnecessary publicity and the ruin of my prospects
might be avoided thereby. And then the poor little thing burst out with
a whole string of romantic protestations.
“Did she want me to sacrifice my prospects? Oh no, no! Did she want to
be acknowledged before the world as my wife? No, a thousand times. She
knew very well that she was too ignorant and humbly educated to support
such an honour. She only wanted to know herself that she was my wife, my
own lawful wife, united to me by the laws of heaven and earth.
“The laws of heaven and earth as administered in a Registrar’s office. I
have cast prudence to the winds, and am now committed to the step which
I only dreamed of as a possibility last night. I have a sort of
foreboding that the business will bring me into trouble; but having gone
so far now, am I to recede? And then I am really desperately in love
with this Cornish girl.
“How is it to be done? These things seem so simple when one contemplates
them in a dreamy reverie engendered by tobacco-smoke. It will be rather
a complicated business, I fear; and the college friend, that is the
grand question. Who is to be the convenient college friend? Perhaps I
had better sleep upon it.
“_8th._--After a world of serious consideration, I can think of no one
but my brother. He’s a selfish beggar, who’d scarcely wet the tips of
his fingers to save an entire ship’s crew from drowning; but he owes me
money, and ought to go through fire and water to serve me. At any rate
he is not troubled by any scruples or compunctions of the Sunday-school
order; and then he’s a clever fellow, and on the spot. I’ll go up to
town to-morrow and sound him about it.”
There was no more. The journal ended here; and Francis Tredethlyn sat
staring at the last half-page, sorely puzzled as to how he was to read
that broken history.
That the lines before him had been written by a heartless profligate he
could scarcely doubt, little as he had been accustomed to sit in
judgment on his fellow-men. But he was slow to understand the full
measure of the writer’s depravity. A more subtle mind than his was
required to read the hidden meaning of that carelessly-written diary.
Francis Tredethlyn only understood that his cousin had fallen into the
hands of a selfish worldling, who had been fascinated by her pretty
face, but who set his own welfare and his own happiness before all
thought of her love or sorrow.
“He meant to marry her,” thought the young man; “thank heaven for that.
No matter how secret or clandestine the marriage may have been, it shall
be my task to find Susan, and to make that marriage public.”
Mr. Tredethlyn went early the next day to Gray’s Inn, there to hold a
solemn consultation with the chief of that firm which had transacted all
Oliver Tredethlyn’s legal affairs during a period of some forty years.
To Mr. Kursdale, Francis told all that he had been able to discover of
his cousin Susan’s history; and to the lawyer’s hands he confided the
manuscript volume surrendered to him by Mrs. Burfield.
“You’ll be able to make more out of it than I can, Mr. Kursdale,” he
said. “Heaven knows I read it carefully; but I can only understand that
the man is a scoundrel, and that it was my cousin’s evil fortune to love
him. I wonder how it is that a simple innocent country girl always does
fall in love with a scoundrel, if he has only got a handsome face and a
smooth tongue?”
The next day was Saturday, and Francis Tredethlyn’s thoughts were
strangely divided between the contemplation of his cousin’s unknown
wrongs, and the expectation of a day in the sunny gardens and
drawing-rooms at the Cedars. Late in the evening there came a letter
from Mr. Kursdale, the solicitor,--
“_Yourself and Another._
“DEAR SIR,--After a very careful perusal of the MS. volume
intrusted to me by you yesterday, I regret to say that I can
only come to one conclusion respecting the intentions of the
writer.
“I believe that it was this person’s design to involve Miss
Susan Tredethlyn in a fictitious marriage, which should be, in
fact, no marriage at all.
“A marriage before the Registrar would have been as entirely
valid, if duly performed, as any religious solemnization.
“I conclude, therefore, that the writer of the MS. diary
contemplated a sham ceremony, in the presence of some person,
falsely representing himself to be the Superintendent Registrar.
“I much fear that your cousin’s simplicity would render her
likely to be the dupe of any such plot.
“Should you wish to communicate with me further on this subject,
I shall be glad to wait upon you at any time you may appoint.
“I am, dear Sir, yours very obediently,
“JAMES KURSDALE.”
“A mock marriage!” thought Francis Tredethlyn. “Yes; I understand it all
now. There was an insolence in his manner of writing of my pretty Susy
that stung me to the very heart. No honest man ever wrote like that of
any woman; _no_ man would write like that of a woman whom he meant to
make his wife.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XIII.
CAUGHT IN THE TOILS.
Francis Tredethlyn spent the bright summer Sunday afternoon and evening
at the Cedars. Mr. Hillary generally filled his house with company on
the day of rest; and hard-working commercial magnates, and lazy West-end
loungers, were alike glad to spend their Sabbath amongst the flower-beds
and trellised walks, under the shadow of black spreading cedars, or on
the terrace by the river. The merchant’s house was only another
Star-and-Garter, where the _menu_ was always irreproachable, and where
one escaped that little bugbear so common to the close of all social
entertainments, and known by the vulgar name of “Bill.” Mr. Tredethlyn
found the house full of strangers, and Miss Hillary very difficult of
approach. He was not allowed to feel embarrassed, however; for Julia
Desmond always happened to be in his neighbourhood, and he found her
society as charming as on the previous occasion. She was so very
handsome, and there was really something so bewildering about her dark
eyes, and white teeth, and fluent talk upon every possible subject, that
the young man--who had never been accustomed to the society of
well-educated women--may be forgiven if he admired her. He admired her,
but not as he admired Maude Hillary. No thrill of half-fearful rapture
stirred his pulses as he stood by Julia’s side upon the moonlit terrace,
looking down at the rippling water, darkened by the tremulous shadows of
the trees; but the faintest flutter of Maude’s airy flounces stirred his
soul like a burst of music.
But she was only a beautiful, far-away creature, who never could have
any part in his destiny. He acknowledged this in a half-despairing way;
and then resigned himself to look at her only now and then from a
distance, and to behold her always surrounded by those elegant
amber-whiskered loungers, whose admiration of her loveliness never made
them awkward in her presence; who could approach her without suffering
from a sudden determination of blood to the head; who could hover near
her without trampling half-a-yard of her lace flounce to destruction
under the savage tread of a clumsy foot.
“Those fellows are fit to talk to her,” he thought; “they’ve been
brought up to it, I suppose: but I’m better out of her way; for even if
she speaks to me, I make a fool of myself somehow, and feel as if I
couldn’t answer her. I get on better with Miss Desmond; she’s so kind,
and she doesn’t seem to mind my being awkward and stupid.”
Yes, Miss Desmond was very kind to the simple-hearted Cornishman. So
kind is Madame Arachne to a big blundering blue-bottle fly that hovers
ignorantly about the net she has spread for him. Julia had angled very
patiently for the last two years in the great matrimonial fisheries, and
had brought several fish to land, only to lose her hook and leave them
to gasp and perish on the bank when she discovered their quality. But
now, for the first time, she knew she had a prey worthy her skill and
patience. She had taken good care to ascertain that Francis Tredethlyn’s
thirty thousand a year was no mere figment of a gossip’s brain, and she
set herself deliberately to work to win this prize so newly offered for
competition in the matrimonial market. Mr. Hillary interested himself in
the young man’s fortunes, and gave him some advice about the management
of some of his Uncle Oliver’s numerous investments. This, of course,
necessitated interviews at the merchant’s offices in Moorgate Street;
and no interview ever came to a close until Francis had received
hospitable Mr. Hillary’s invitation to “run down” to Twickenham.
The young man seemed always running down to the Cedars. He slept there
sometimes, in a pretty chintz-curtained chamber, all rosebuds and
maplewood, and from whose jasmine-festooned windows he looked out upon
the river--the perpetual river, now shimmering in the moonlight, now
twinkling and glancing in the sunshine, but always “a thing of beauty
and a joy” for the people who dwell upon its banks.
Yes, he was always riding down to the Cedars. He had departed very
little from his simple habits; but he had bought a couple of horses at
Tattersall’s--such horses as a man who has been used to ride across wild
moorland districts without saddle or stirrups from his earliest boyhood
knows how to choose. He kept the horses at livery near his hotel, and he
hired a smart young groom to attend to them, and even to ride behind him
on occasions.
Miss Hillary grew accustomed to the young man’s presence, and greeted
him kindly when he came; but then she had so many friends, such
enthusiastic female adorers in crisp muslins, who found the
millionaire’s daughter the dearest darling in the world, and were always
eager to pour some new confidence into her willing ears. She had so many
friends, so many admirers, that Francis Tredethlyn always found her more
or less difficult of approach. And in the meanwhile there was Miss
Desmond perpetually smiling upon him, and talking to him, and listening
to him.
So things went on very pleasantly for Mr. Tredethlyn, until one day his
eyes were very suddenly opened to a fact that well-nigh overpowered him.
He was lounging on the terrace one sunny afternoon, and, for a wonder,
Julia Desmond was not by his side. She had been summoned into the midst
of a conclave of pretty girls holding solemn discussion with Maude
Hillary on the lawn. Francis was looking down at the water, as it was
his habit to do, and thinking. He was leaning against the balustrade of
the terrace, all amongst the foliage which had been so bright when he
had first come to the Cedars, but which was brown and withered now: he
was watching the dead leaves slowly drifting in the wind, and dropping
one by one into the water; and he was thinking of his cousin Susan.
Nothing had yet come of his search for her. Perhaps he had left the
matter too much in the hands of his lawyers, trusting to their legal
acumen for the unravelment of the tangled skein. It may be that he had
been a little too much at the Cedars, absorbed in the delights of a new
existence. This afternoon, watching the drifting leaves upon the river,
the gold and crimson tints of autumn on the woodland and on the
hill-side, Francis Tredethlyn remembered how the time had slipped by
him, and how little nearer he was to the discovery of Susan Tredethlyn’s
fate than when he had listened to Martha’s story in the dreary Cornish
grange, and had sworn to go to the end of the world in search of his
cousin. There was some feeling of remorse in his mind as he thought of
the past three months, the idle days in that luxurious river-side
retreat, the billiard-playing and cigar-smoking, the pleasant rides to
and fro in the dewy evenings, with genial gentlemanlike companions, who
thought him a good fellow, and very rarely laughed at his ignorant
simplicity.
He was roused from his reverie now by one of these young men, Mr.
Montagu Somerset, of the War-Office, the scion of a noble house, the
presumptive heir to nothing a-year, and one of the most hopelessly
devoted of Maude Hillary’s adorers.
“Why, Tredethlyn,” exclaimed the young man, without removing a gigantic
cigar from between his lips, “how dismally you’re staring at that water!
It looks as if you were contemplating _felo de se_, b’ Jove. What’s the
row, old boy? and how do you happen to be alone? Where’s the _fiancée_?”
“I--I was thinking of some family matters, not very pleasant ones,” Mr.
Tredethlyn answered, simply.
“But where’s the _future_?”
“The what?”
“The _future_--Mrs. Francis Tredethlyn that is to be--the Desmond. Why,
has the lovely Julia deserted her Frank? Why, you dear, simple old baby,
how you blush! Is it a crime to be in love with a handsome girl? I only
wish your young affections had fixed themselves on one of my five
sisters--all most amiable girls, but without so much as a spoonful of
what our lively neighbours call _potage_.”
Francis Tredethlyn stared aghast at the young official.
“Why, you don’t suppose--you don’t think that I--that Miss
Desmond--that----”
“You know those silversmiths on the Boulevards--no, you don’t know
Paris, by the bye. Well, dear boy, there are Parisian silversmiths who
make a great display in their shop windows by means of a concatenation
of table-spoons and a strong flare of gas; but I doubt if in all Paris
there was ever such a notorious case of spoons as the present; and I
don’t blame you, my dear Tredethlyn. If I were not Alexander, I would be
the other person. If I were not madly and hopelessly in love with
blue-eyed Maude, I should fling myself at the feet of dark-eyed Julia:
such teeth, and such a generally regal _tournure_, with thirty-thousand
a-year, ought to make a sensation. Frank, I congratulate you! Bless you,
my boy, and be happy!” Mr. Somerset wrung his friend’s hand with
effusion.
“But, my dear Somerset--but, upon my word and honour,” cried Mr.
Tredethlyn, in extreme terror and perplexity, “Miss Desmond has been
very kind to me; and feeling myself out of place here, I’ve been
grateful for her kindness; but, as I am an honest man, not one word has
ever passed between us upon any but the commonest subjects; and I am
sure that neither she nor I have the slightest idea of----”
“Oh, you haven’t, eh?” asked Montagu Somerset, taking his cigar from his
mouth, and staring at it in a contemplative manner, as he knocked away
the ash; “never mind about Miss Desmond; _you_ haven’t any idea of
making her mistress of yourself and your property, real and personal,
eh? You admire her very much, and are very grateful to her for being
civil to you, and so on, but you have no idea of making her an offer of
marriage?”
“No more than I have of making you such an offer.”
“Then in that case,” replied Mr. Somerset deliberately, “all I have to
say is to this effect: look out for squalls; when you are coasting on a
shore renowned for its quicksands, you’d better beware of any strange
light you may see ahead, for the illumination generally means danger.
When you meet with such a girl as the Desmond, don’t trifle with her. Of
course it’s very pleasant to ride, and drive, and play billiards, and
loiter through a summer month or so with a handsome girl, meaning
nothing serious all the time; and it _is_ to be done with impunity, if
you are careful in your selection of the young lady. But I don’t think
Julia Desmond is exactly the sort of girl you should try it on with.
There are men in our place, apoplectic old fogies in starched neckcloths
and no end of waistcoat, who knew the Desmond’s father; he was a
south-of-Ireland man and a notorious duellist. They say that Julia
inherits his eyes and teeth.”
“But you don’t mean to say that I’ve done Miss Desmond any wrong?” cried
Francis. “How should I be otherwise than grateful to her when she was
kind to me, and set me at my ease somehow, and made me feel a little
less like an Ojibbeway Indian suddenly let loose amongst fashionable
people? How should I imagine that she would think of me except as--as
Miss Hillary thinks of me?” His voice grew low, and an inexpressible
change came over his whole manner as he mentioned Maude Hillary’s name.
“They know my history, and that this time last year I was a private in a
foot regiment, with nothing higher to hope for than an extra stripe upon
my sleeve.”
“Miss Hillary is one person and Miss Desmond is another,” Mr. Somerset
replied, with just the least suspicion of _hauteur_. “The lovely Julia’s
face is her fortune, you know, dear boy. You ask me if you’ve been
wrong; and I tell you frankly, as a gentleman, that I think you have. A
man can’t be exclusive in his attentions to a woman without other people
perceiving the fact, and forming their own conclusions thereupon. I know
everyone who comes here regards the matter as settled, and I heard Maude
say the other day that she thought you a very good fellow--_she_ didn’t
say fellow,--and would be delighted to see her dear Julia so pleasantly
established.”
“Did she say that?” cried Francis, with a dusky blush kindling under his
dark skin; “did she speak well of me? And if--if she should think I have
done Miss Desmond some kind of wrong by usurping her society and setting
people talking about us--if _she_ should think me mean or base----”
Montagu Somerset interrupted Mr. Tredethlyn by a long whistle.
“Oh! the wind’s in that quarter, is it?” he exclaimed; “you’re down in
that list; then in that case I’ve nothing more to say. The river flows
at your feet, my dear friend; and I dare say there’s a rope for sale
somewhere in the villages of Twickenham or Isleworth.”
The young man sauntered away, leaving Francis with his arms folded on
the balustrade, and his face darker than it had been, even when he had
thought remorsefully of his missing cousin.
Miss Desmond had not made such very bad use of her time. With consummate
tact she had contrived to detain Francis Tredethlyn at her side in all
those pleasant walks, and drives, and boating excursions, which made up
a great part of life at the Cedars; and it had seemed that the young
man, of his own option, devoted himself to Colonel Desmond’s daughter.
Julia had been clever enough to set the simple Cornishman entirely at
his ease in her presence, and having done that, all the rest followed
naturally enough. It was to Miss Desmond that Francis Tredethlyn
confided his opinions upon every subject; it was to Miss Desmond that he
applied for enlightenment when his ignorance fenced him about with cloud
and darkness, and seemed to shut him out from the people round him. When
the visitors at the Cedars were busy in the animated discussion of some
new book whose name Francis had never heard, and whose contents would
have been utterly beyond his untrained understanding, Julia would
explain to him the nature of the volume, simplifying the subject with a
dexterity that was all her own, but never humiliating her companion by
any display of her own superiority. If art was the subject of
discussion, Julia insidiously demonstrated to the Cornishman the merits
and demerits of any given picture. So Francis Tredethlyn had been
considerably benefited by three months of intimacy with a handsome and
accomplished woman, and he began to feel something like a well-disposed
Maori who had been admitted into familiar intercourse with a family of
friendly settlers.
But all this time, in spite of handsome, dark-eyed Julia’s kindness, in
spite of all the benefits to be derived from intimate relations with
such agreeable people as the guests who were always to be found at
Twickenham, the one charm that had held the young man constant to the
Cedars,--like some spell-bound knight in a fairy story, who cannot leave
an enchanted castle, though he knows that peril and ruin lurk within its
walls,--the one supreme influence that had taken possession of Francis
Tredethlyn had been the presence of Maude Hillary. From first to last
his faith had never wavered, but his devotion had been the servile
worship of an idolater, who was prepared to find his divinity hard and
merciless. No thought of ever being anything nearer to Maude Hillary
than he now was entered the young man’s mind. She was beautiful,
amiable, loving,--for had he not seen her with her father? She was all
that is most lovely and adorable in womankind: but she was not for him.
In her presence his ignorance and awkwardness seemed to weigh him down
to the very dust; and yet she was never unkind to him, or supercilious,
or insolent. She was only indifferent: but Oh, the bitterness of her
indifference! the anguish of the slavish worshipper who prostrates
himself before his idol, and knows all the while that it is stone, and
cannot have pity upon him! Again and again Francis Tredethlyn had
determined that he would come no more to the Cedars. He would call on
Mr. Hillary in the City some morning, and thank him for his hospitable
kindness; and then he would buy a commission in a cavalry regiment newly
ordered for Indian service.
“Why should I be always coming here?” he thought. “They’re all very good
to me, the young swells. But I feel awkward amongst them still; and even
if I could fall into their ways, and make myself like them, which I
can’t, where would be the good? I don’t want to be a ‘swell;’ I should
like to be a soldier, with a regiment of glorious fellows to call me
captain; or a farmer, with half a county to ride over, and a thousand
sturdy labourers to take wages from me on a Saturday night; or a
merchant, like Mr. Hillary, with a small fleet of ships on the high
seas. That sort of thing would be life. But to dawdle in a
billiard-room; or lounge at Tattersall’s, and buy a horse one doesn’t
want, out of sheer idleness, and sell him at a loss three weeks
afterwards; or to go for a yachting excursion off the Isle of Wight,
with men to do all the work, and nothing to do one’s self except lie on
one’s back and smoke and drink pale ale all day long: I can’t fancy such
a life as that. So, why should I come here any more? I can’t fall
naturally into these people’s habits. I think sometimes that I was
happier out yonder, brushing the captain’s clothes and talking to the
convicts. What a fellow that Surly Bill was! By Jove, that man _had_
seen life!”
Mr. Tredethlyn, lounging perpetually in the gardens by the river,
conscious of his incapability of breaking the spell that bound him,
thought, with some touch of envy, of the brilliant career of his late
acquaintance, Surly Bill the burglar. But now the Cornishman had been
all at once aroused from the pleasant torpor which had crept upon him in
this modern Castle of Indolence. All that was most generous in the young
man’s nature arose in revolt against the thought that he had wronged
Julia Desmond. “It seems so hard that she should have set these people
talking about her by her kindness to an ignorant fellow like me. It must
do a girl harm to have her name bandied about by an idle young fellow
like Somerset. And she stands alone in the world, too, with no father or
brother to take her part. I ought to have told that fellow to hold his
tongue, and I will, too, before I leave this house to-night. But _this_
decides me, at any rate. I’ve been here too much; I’ll buy a commission
and go out to India, and the lawyers must look after poor little Susy.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XIV.
VERY PRIVATE THEATRICALS.
The river was gray and dim in the twilight by this time; for the first
half of October was gone, and the dusky shadows gathered early on Mr.
Hillary’s lawn. Francis Tredethlyn found the gardens deserted when he
left the terrace, and walked slowly towards the house, where lights were
gleaming in innumerable windows. The young man had only ridden down to
Twickenham that morning, and had no special engagement to dine at the
Cedars.
“I’ll go round to the stables at once,” he thought, “and I can call in
Moorgate Street to-morrow, and tell Mr. Hillary that I think of going
abroad. Why should I see _her_ again? The sight of her will only make me
foolish, and keep me here in spite of myself.”
The lady thus vaguely alluded to was not Miss Desmond; but when Francis
Tredethlyn entered Mr. Hillary’s house by the first open window that
presented itself on the upper terrace, he found himself in a little
study much affected by the ladies of the household, and came suddenly
upon a female figure sitting alone in the dark.
Something like a guilty pang shot through him as he recognized that
stately figure, even in the shadowy obscurity of the unlighted room. In
the next moment there was a rustling of silk, and Miss Desmond had risen
and was facing him in the twilight.
“Yes, it _is_ Mr. Tredethlyn,” she said, presently. “What have you been
doing with yourself all the afternoon? There has been a grand discussion
about some amateur theatricals, concerning which Maude Hillary is
absolutely bewitched, and we want you to act.”
“I think you’ve got plenty of fellows who’ll act better than I can, Miss
Desmond; though I did try my hand at the business once in Van Diemen’s
Land; and I’d be glad to make myself useful in any way that would please
Miss Hillary, if it was to dress myself as a footman and carry a
tea-tray or a scuttle of coals; but I think I shall be leaving England
before the theatricals come off; in point of fact, I think I shall be
leaving England directly.”
“Leaving England!”
The expression of those two words could scarcely have been more tragical
than it was; and yet for once in a way Miss Desmond was _not_ acting.
All in a moment she saw the fair edifice which she had schemed to build
for herself crumbling into ruin and chaos.
“Leaving England!” she repeated,--“you think of leaving England, Mr.
Tredethlyn?”
She put her hands to her forehead with a little tragic gesture: and
Francis Tredethlyn wished that he had entered the house by any other
door or window than that which he had chosen.
Julia’s dismay was entirely real; for the disappointment was very bitter
to this young lady; who had built up a fair future for herself on the
foundation of Francis Tredethlyn’s wealth. The grim walls of Castle
Desmond, the silver waters of the Shannon, the green hill sides and
lonely valleys, made themselves into a picture that shut out the dusky
room, and then melted into gray blankness. She had meant to do such
great things with Francis Tredethlyn’s thirty thousand a year!
The young man stood looking at her in as much embarrassment as if he had
been guilty of some wilful deception. He was so little of a coxcomb,
that it was very difficult for him to imagine that his sudden departure
could give pain to the brilliant Julia. He was so entirely simple and
true-hearted, that no suspicion of Miss Desmond’s mercenary views had
any place in his mind.
There was a very brief pause, and then Julia murmured, in low,
half-broken accents--
“You are really going away?--but why?”
“Oh, Miss Desmond, I scarcely like to tell you why; and yet it’s not
altogether on that account,” answered Francis, vaguely. “There are other
reasons. I am not in my right place amongst such people as I meet here.
I’m a rough, uneducated fellow, and idleness doesn’t suit me. I want to
be of some use in the world. Why, I felt myself a better man out yonder,
without sixpence in my pocket, than I am to-day, in spite of Oliver
Tredethlyn’s money. So I mean to buy a commission and go out to India,
where there’s some fighting to be done.”
“You are not telling me the truth, Mr. Tredethlyn. _This_ is not your
real reason for running away from the Cedars, as if the house were
infected.”
“My dear Miss Desmond, I--you have been so kind to me--you have made me
feel so much at home here, where, but for you, I must have felt myself
so miserably out of place.”
“Why should you be out of place amongst these people?” cried Julia,
drawing up her head with a proud gesture, “unless,” she murmured, in a
thoughtful undertone--“unless because these people are so much beneath
you.”
Miss Desmond had entirely recovered herself by this time. All at once,
after sitting a long time at the table, playing her cards with infinite
tact and patience,--all at once she found herself losing the game, and
saw that only the boldest play could help her. But Julia was equal to
the situation. The second of December had come upon her very suddenly;
but she did not despair of triumphing by a _coup d’état_.
“Tell me the truth, Mr. Tredethlyn,” she said, looking Francis full in
the face, with her eyes and teeth gleaming in the twilight; “why are you
going to leave this house? Why do you talk of hurrying away from
England?”
“Because--because--I have done you a wrong in absorbing so much of your
society, Miss Desmond, and the people here have begun to mix your name
with mine. I cannot bear that you, who are so superior to me, should be
humiliated by such an association; especially when there is no
foundation for their talk,” Francis Tredethlyn added, in considerable
embarrassment.
“Oh, I understand it all now,” answered Julia, with an unutterable
bitterness in her tone; “you have been warned against me, Mr.
Tredethlyn. I am only a fortune-huntress, and I have been spreading my
toils about your innocent footsteps, and it is only by flight that you
can save yourself. Oh, yes!” she cried, with an ironical laugh, which
seemed to express a keener anguish than another woman’s wildest sob, “I
know how these people talk!”
“Miss Desmond, on my honour----”
“Mr. Tredethlyn, on _my_ honour, I know the world better than you do. If
you had devoted yourself to any other woman in this house, to any
daughter of that mercantile aristocracy in which Mr. Hillary rules
supreme, no sneering comments would have greeted your ear. But what am
I--the daughter of the Desmonds of Desmond--amongst these people? What
am I but Maude Hillary’s dependant and companion? I am poor, and I
endure poverty in its most cruel bitterness; for I am poor amongst the
vulgar rich. Who can give me credit for sincerity? who dare trust in my
friendship? I am a well-bred pauper, a fortune-huntress, an adventuress,
a creature whose smiles are to be dreaded, whose society is to be
avoided. O Francis Tredethlyn,” cried Julia, with a sudden shiver of
agony, which would have done credit to a Rachel, “_I know so well_ what
has been said to you. Go--go at once. You are wise to accept the warning
conveyed in these people’s insolent insinuations. Go--there is a gulf
between you and me, for you are rich and I am poor. Beware of me even
when I seem most sincere. Remember that I am a pauper, and the
descendant of paupers--paupers who shed their blood and squandered their
fortunes in a losing cause; paupers who died for the love of honour and
loyalty, two words that would seem the emptiest sounds to merchants and
tradesmen. Oh, Mr. Tredethlyn, have pity upon me, and go.”
And then Miss Desmond broke down all at once into a burst of hysterical
sobbing, and stretching out her hand towards the back of a _prie-dieu_
chair standing near her, tottered as if she would have fallen. She did
not fall, however; for before her hand could reach the _prie-dieu_,
Francis Tredethlyn’s strong arm was round her.
“Miss Desmond,” he cried, “Julia! why do you talk like this? Do you
think that any base thought about you ever entered _my_ brain?
Fortune-huntress, adventuress--did I ever wrong you in my inmost
thoughts by such a name as that?”
“No,” answered Julia, softly. “_You_ are too noble; and yet you may have
been influenced by others. Why should you think better of me than others
think? Why should not you too despise me?”
Her voice was broken by sobs, and she was still supported by Mr.
Tredethlyn’s arm. He felt that she was trembling violently. He could
just distinguish her handsome profile in the dusk, and the tears
glittering upon her dark lashes.
“Despise you, Julia! you who are so superior to me! Do you forget what I
am? Have I not much greater reason to fear your contempt? And you talk
of poverty, as if that were so deep a suffering, while I am so rich, and
care so little for my money. Share it with me, Julia. I’m only a poor
waif and stray as it is; but with such a woman as you for my wife I
might be of some good in the world. Heaven knows you are welcome to my
fortune, Miss Desmond. If you were a man, and my comrade, I would say,
Share it with me as my brother and my friend. But you are a woman, and I
can only say, Be my wife.”
Julia withdrew herself from the supporting arm.
“Ah, Mr. Tredethlyn,” she said, in an icy kind of voice, “this is the
bitterest insult of all. The Desmonds do not marry for money; they only
marry where they are beloved, and can love again.”
“How can I expect that you can love me?” asked Francis. “Do you think I
can forget that I am an ignorant boor, suddenly thrown amongst people
whose habits of life, whose very thoughts, are strange to me?”
“And you would marry a woman without so much as asking for her love?”
“I would ask for her friendship and her fidelity. I shouldn’t care to
exact an uneven bargain, Miss Desmond; and I doubt if I could give much
more myself,” the young man answered, rather coldly. But at the sound of
a stifled sob from Julia he changed his tone all at once; a thousand
generous impulses were stirred in him by the aspect of her distress. He
was nothing more than a child in the hands of this brilliant young
Irishwoman.
“Dear Miss Desmond,” he cried, “I seem destined to offend and grieve
you. If you will share my fortune, if you will accept any best
friendship and fidelity, my whole life shall prove to you how much I
admire and respect you. If you reject my offer, I can only say----”
But Julia did not allow him to finish the sentence, which she foresaw
would be expressive of complete resignation to her adverse decision.
“Oh, Francis,” she exclaimed, “you offer me your _fortune_!” There was
something sublime in her contemptuous enunciation of this last word.
“You ask me to accept your friendship, when I have been weak and mad
enough to LOVE YOU.” She was not Rachel any longer; she was Madame
Dorval, all melting tenderness and womanly pathos. She covered her face
with her hands, and then, with something between a sob and a shudder,
rushed suddenly from the room, and hurried along the dusky staircase and
passages to her own apartment.
The candles were lighted on the dressing-table; but there was no
intrusive handmaiden to annoy Miss Desmond by her watchful glances, her
mute interrogation. Julia looked at her reflection in the glass, and saw
herself flushed and triumphant, with traces of tears upon her cheeks.
“And my eyes are really wet,” she thought; “but then the chance was such
a good one, and so nearly lost. What a good, simple-hearted fellow he
is! and how happy any reasonable woman might be with him--and thirty
thousand a year! Ah, Maude Hillary! it was very pretty and childish and
nice of you, coming to wake me out of my sleep on your last birthday, to
show me the set of diamonds and opals papa had bribed your maid to slip
under your pillow before you awoke; but _I_ will show you diamonds
before long that shall make you ashamed of that birthday trumpery.”
Miss Desmond rolled her black hair into a great smooth knot at the back
of her head; and she put on a dress of that fugitive golden yellow, in
which there is an artful intermingling of silvery sheen, and which
milliners call maize--a bewilderingly beautiful colour when seen in
conjunction with a handsome brunette. The loungers who dined at the
Cedars that evening declared that Julia Desmond had never looked so
splendid. Francis Tredethlyn sat by her at dinner, and was near her all
the evening: and at night, when he found himself alone in the pretty
chintz-curtain chamber that he had so often occupied of late, the young
man seated himself by one of the windows, and, pushing open the sash,
looked out at the quiet river rippling softly under the stars.
“And she is to be my wife,” he thought; “she is very handsome, and I
ought to be proud to think that she can care for such a fellow as I. And
yet----” His head sank forward on his folded arms, and the image of a
beautiful creature smiled before him in all the dazzling brightness of
an opium-eater’s dream. Francis Tredethlyn gave one long regretful sigh
as he raised his head, and looked moodily out at the distant woodland on
the other side of the river.
“What can it matter whom I marry?” he asked himself, bitterly; “would
_she_ ever think of me, if I were to come to this house every day for
ten years at a stretch? Why, her dogs are more to her and dearer to her
twenty times than I am. And Julia Desmond loves me, and thinks me better
than those fellows with the yellow whiskers, who are always talking of
new books and new music. They please _her_; but Julia despises them. Am
I such a wretch that I cannot be grateful for a sensible woman’s
affection? I _am_ grateful to her. I am proud to think that she will be
my wife. But I wish I was back in Van Diemen’s Land, blacking the
captain’s boots, and smoking shag tobacco with Surly Bill the burglar.”
After that dramatic little scene in the twilight study at the Cedars,
everything went on velvet. Julia was triumphant; Maude was delighted and
sympathetic. What could be more charming or more proper than that Julia
should marry a man with thirty thousand a year for his fortune? The only
hindrance to universal happiness in a very delightful world was the fact
that so many people had to do _without_ thirty thousand a year, Miss
Hillary thought, whenever she gave her mind to the study of political
economy.
“And you will be so rich, dear Julia,” Maude said, as she kissed her
friend; “and if Harcourt and I are very poor--as we must be, unless papa
gives his consent by-and-by--you’ll take us for a drive in the Park
sometimes, won’t you? And if you give many parties in the season, I
shan’t be able to come to them; for you wouldn’t like to see me always
in the same dress--like those poor people at the Union--and I shall be
obliged to get a set of black-lace flounces, like Reder--you never saw
Reder, my last German governess but one--and put them on pink silk one
day, and blue the next, and so on; it’s very troublesome, and the
flounces don’t generally come straight; but then it looks as if one had
so many dresses. Of course you’ll have boxes at _both_ houses, Julia,
and on the grand tier? and you’ll buy a place in the country--and Oh,
where do you mean to live in town?”
Miss Desmond answered all these eager queries very demurely. Francis
would make all arrangements for their future life, she said; he _had_
certainly promised her the two opera-boxes; he had made inquiries about
the one house that was to be let in Park Lane; and he was anxious to
discover her favourite county before taking any steps towards the
purchase of an estate.
“But you know he is such a dear good fellow, and has such a knack of
guessing all my fancies, that really I never like to suggest anything,”
Miss Desmond concluded, modestly. But, somehow or other, without making
any very direct suggestions, Julia had so contrived matters, that in a
few weeks her affianced husband had gratified many of the desires that
had been smouldering in her breast ever since the earliest dawn of
girlhood.
Already the “family jools” of the Desmonds had been consigned to the
oblivion of one of Julia’s shabbiest trunks, and diamonds now twinkled
on Miss Desmond’s neck and arms, and gleamed here and there in her black
hair, when she came down to dinner in her maize silk dress. Her
toilette-table was all of a glitter with the rings she drew off her slim
fingers when she disrobed at night, before the looking-glass which had
so often reflected a gloomy, discontented face, but which now only gave
back triumphant smiles.
She was an adventuress perhaps, and her triumph was an ignoble one; but
she was not altogether base. She was prepared to be a good wife to the
man whom she had brought to her feet by force of feminine strategy. She
did not love Francis Tredethlyn; and indeed she seemed to be made of a
sterner stuff than that out of which the women who can love are
fashioned. She did not love her affianced husband; but she meant to be
as faithful and devoted as the most loving wife in Christendom. If she
intended to raise herself upon the platform of her husband’s wealth, she
meant that he should mount with her. Already she had lifted him several
stages on the social ladder. From the very first her watchful care had
saved him from a hundred small solecisms, and in the more intimate
relationship of the last few weeks her refining influence had been
almost magical in its effects. The good old blood of the Tredethlyns
asserted itself, and Julia found her task an easy one.
“I don’t want you to be like those Government clerks, and magazine
writers, and embryo Q.C.’s,” she said to him sometimes. “I like you to
be big and deep-voiced and--just a little clumsy. The Knights-Templars,
and Crusaders, and that sort of people, must have been clumsy on account
of their armour. I always fancy I hear the clank of spurs when you come
into a room: and when you sit in Parliament you must be the soldier’s
friend, you know, and make great speeches about rations, and
court-martial verdicts, and discipline, and all that sort of thing; and
I shall come into the ladies’ gallery, and strain my eyes by peering at
you through that horrible grating. You will look so handsome with your
head thrown a little back, and your hand in your waistcoat.”
Now this kind of talk from a handsome woman, whom he knows to be
infinitely his intellectual superior, can scarcely be displeasing to the
most strong-minded of men; and, unluckily, Francis Tredethlyn was not
very strong-minded. He looked down at his Julia with a sheepish smile,
and acknowledged her pretty flatteries in the lamest possible manner;
but when he came to the Cedars next morning, he brought with him the
biggest emerald-headed serpent that he had been able to find among the
jewellers of the West End, and coiled it about his Julia’s wrist. He was
grateful to her for all her tender smiles and pleasant speeches--all the
more grateful, perhaps, because of that uncomfortable knowledge of the
cold void in his own heart, where love for his promised wife should have
been. So he brought her all manner of costly tribute in the way of rings
and bracelets, and necklaces and head-gear; and he bought her a
three-hundred-guinea hunter at Tattersall’s, so that she should no
longer ride Maude Hillary’s horses in the Twickenham lanes. Sometimes,
in spite of himself, even when Julia was most agreeable, the thought
came upon him that he would only too gladly have given her the whole of
his fortune if by such a gift he might have freed himself from the
promise that bound him to her.
“But if I were free to-morrow, _she_ would not care for me,” he thought,
“and what would be the use of my liberty?”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XV.
A COMMERCIAL CRISIS.
The private theatricals at the Cedars were postponed till Christmas, and
in the middle of November Mr. Hillary removed his household to a big
bow-windowed habitation at the western end of Brighton. Francis
Tredethlyn followed, as in duty bound, and spent a great portion of his
life in hurrying to and fro between London and Brighton by express
trains. Never had a better adorer done suit and service to a mistress.
There were no lovers’ quarrels, no temporary estrangements between these
two people. A serene and cloudless sky heralded the coming splendour of
their union, and Maude declared again and again that she had never seen
such a model pair of lovers.
“Harcourt and I were always quarrelling, you know, Julia,” she said;
“but then we were both such horribly jealous creatures. I didn’t like
his turning over music for other girls; though I suppose he was right,
poor fellow, and a man must either turn over music or shut himself from
society altogether. And he didn’t like my going down to dinner with
people in crack cavalry regiments; but I’m afraid we rather enjoyed
ourselves when we quarrelled, and I used to feel as if it would be the
easiest thing in the world to part from him for ever, and go into a
convent, or marry somebody I hated, or something of that kind; and then
directly we _had_ parted, I used to get so silly and miserable, and used
to write him such penitent letters, taking all the blame upon myself,
and making an idiot of him. But it’s so nice to see you and Mr.
Tredethlyn, and I’m sure he’ll be the dearest husband in the world,
Julia, and you’ll be able to twist him round your little finger.”
It was not with a feeling of unalloyed pleasure that Miss Desmond
accepted her friend’s congratulations. She was quite ready to admit that
Francis Tredethlyn was a model lover, and promised to be the most
submissive husband that ever bowed himself before a clever wife’s
dominion. His presents were munificent, his attention was unfailing, his
temper serenely even; and yet there were times when Julia Desmond felt
that all was not quite as it should have been.
She had angled very successfully, and the fish she had landed was a
splendid prize, victoriously snatched from all other anglers; but Oh,
what a difference there is between that poor deluded fish, entrapped out
of the free waters by the cruel hook of the angler, and the willing bird
which flies, of its own loving impulse, to the breast where it fain
would shelter!
Julia Desmond knew that, in securing a husband, she had not won for
herself a lover; and the knowledge pained and humiliated her. It was a
small thing that she should not love Francis; but it seemed very hard
that Francis should not love her. Her womanly tact would have stood in
the place of affection, and she would have been lavish in the
expenditure of a spurious coin, in the way of pretty words and tender
looks, which should have had all the glitter and some of the vibration
of the real mintage. But with Francis it was altogether different. The
young man had no power to simulate; and there was a deadly coldness in
his wooing that chilled the proud Irish girl’s heart.
“Are they worth the humiliation?” she thought sometimes, when she
contemplated her diamonds before the lighted glass in her bedroom at
Brighton. “They are very big and brilliant and costly; but I’ve seen
myself look handsomer with a scrap of scarlet ribbon twisted in my hair,
than I look to-night with all these stars and crosses and serpents
flashing and twinkling about me. And then, when I go down stairs, I must
go through all the old stereotyped business; and when I thank him for
the flowers that he sent me this morning, he will look at me with his
cold eyes, and tell me he is pleased to have given me pleasure. What is
he but a clod--a mere clod, nothing but a clod? I ought to remember
that; and yet I am angry with him because he does not love me. Why can I
not be thankful for my good fortune, and accept my future husband for
what he is,--a respectable, well-behaved ploughman, whom an accident has
endowed with thirty thousand a year?”
Perhaps Miss Desmond did not particularly care to answer that question
which she put to herself in so impatient a spirit. And yet it was a
question that might have been answered, had she cared to fathom the
lower deeps of her own mind. But then there _are_ questions which are
better left unanswered. Why was she angry with Francis Tredethlyn for
that passionless serenity of manner which was so nearly akin to
indifference? Why? unless it was because in her own heart there lurked
the consciousness that the unpolished Cornishman _might_ have been a
very different kind of lover; and that beneath his cold exterior there
were slumbering embers which might have blazed into glory had one
special torch been applied to them.
Yes, Julia knew this, and the knowledge was a perpetual poison that
embittered the wine of success. The pride of the Desmonds had not been
entirely trodden out beneath the iron heel of poverty. This girl, who
had not been too proud to set herself to ensnare a rich husband, was yet
proud enough to feel the bitterness of her degradation.
“If he only loved me,” she thought, “I should feel that the bargain was
a fair one. But to know that, at best, he only submits to the force of
circumstances! He has been drifted into the position of a lover, and he
performs the duties exacted of him; just like some non-dancing man who
has been persuaded to dance in order to fill the last place in a
quadrille, and who dawdles listlessly through the figures, and almost
yawns in the face of his partner. And yet I have seen him look at _her_
until the dull clay of which he is made seemed to change into a thing of
life and fire.”
And then Miss Desmond was fain to turn to her new jewel-case for
consolation, and to beguile her mind from unpleasant thoughts by the
consideration of all those grand things that may be done with thirty
thousand a year.
If the young ladies of the household thought it a pleasant thing to
spend the brief November afternoons on that delightful esplanade beside
the sea, Mr. Hillary did not find a residence in Brighton so entirely
convenient. A great deal of his time was spent in journeyings to and fro
by the best and quickest express train in England: and there were days
when even the facilities of a Brighton railway would not enable the
merchant to take his dinner in the society of his beautiful daughter and
her companion. There were occasions on which the two girls sat for a
wearisome hour or so, trying vainly to amuse themselves by some feminine
occupation, or to beguile the time by some feminine discourse, while the
soup grew cold and the Brightonian cook grew angry; and then at last
were fain to sit down at nine o’clock, and make a dismal pretence of
dining without the head of the household.
“I sometimes think so much railway travelling must be bad for papa,”
Maude said. “I am afraid it must shake him a little; though riding in
the Brighton express is almost as good as sitting in one’s own room. I
fancy papa has not looked so well lately. I have begged him to see Mr.
Desborough, our Twickenham doctor, or some London physician; but it’s no
use, for he won’t listen to me. I can’t tell you how uneasy I am about
him, Julia. He has had so many of his bad headaches lately; and then he
says the business in Moorgate Street has been so heavy. Ah, Julia! what
is the good of being rich, if papa must work as he does?”
Miss Desmond shrugged her shoulders.
“Business men seem scarcely to exist out of their offices,” she said,
rather scornfully. She always took care to let Maude know that she
looked down upon the Twickenham splendour and its commercial sources. “I
dare say your papa will devote himself to money-making as long as he
lives.”
“I sometimes think we might have been happier if we had been poorer,”
Maude said, dreamily, by-and-by. “I can’t help fancying how we might
have lived in some quiet country place, in a low-roofed, old-fashioned
cottage, with a garden all round it and a churchyard close by, and the
smell of cows and the cooing of pigeons; and then I need not have been
separated from----.” She did not finish the sentence; she was talking to
herself rather than to Julia. Her face was beautified by an
inexpressible softness and tenderness as she murmured that broken
sentence. Her thoughts wandered back to the time in which she and
Harcourt Lowther had sworn eternal constancy, standing with their hands
locked together in the dim summer twilight, on the bank of the shadowy
river. She thought of that time, and all the freshness of feeling that
had gone down with it came back upon her suddenly, like a breath of air
from a distant ocean. How frivolous her life had been since then!--how
selfish and useless! What a round of dress and decoration, and hurry and
weariness! Harcourt Lowther’s last letter was in her pocket as she sat
musing despondently by the hired Brighton hearth;--his last letter, a
most melancholy epistle, full of despairing lamentations about the
bitterness of separation and the hardships of Van Diemen’s Land. And
over and above all these feminine perplexities which tormented poor
loving Maude, there seemed real cause for anxiety in the state of Mr.
Hillary’s health. It was not that the merchant himself complained; he
did not complain, and, indeed, appeared to resent any inquiries as to
his state, even when those inquiries came from such a privileged person
as his only child. But every morning at the breakfast-table, sitting
opposite to her father in the bright sunlight, Maude could see a darker
shade under Mr. Hillary’s eyes, a more weary look about his haggard
face. She defied his anger very often, and pleaded earnestly with him,
imploring him to consult a physician; but his answer was always very
much the same.
“I am subject to this sort of headache; my work in Moorgate Street is
peculiarly hard just now. Pray do not trouble yourself, Maude; there is
not the least occasion for any uneasiness about my health.”
With such assurances as these Miss Hillary was compelled to be
satisfied. There had been an air of coldness, or almost displeasure, in
her father’s manner to her lately, and Maude found to her surprise that
he was by no means pleased with the matrimonial engagement that had
arisen between Julia Desmond and Francis Tredethlyn.
“Engaged to _her_!” the merchant exclaimed, when his daughter carried
him the news of Julia’s conquest,--“engaged to Julia Desmond! Why, I
fully believed that he came to Twickenham on your account, Maude. I said
nothing to you about the matter, because girls have sometimes such
absurd notions, and I thought it better to let things take their course.
And so Julia has entrapped him, has she? I ought to have been on my
guard against Ryan O’Brien Desmond’s daughter.”
“How can you talk like that, papa?” cried Miss Hillary. “I’m sure Julia
and Mr. Tredethlyn are really in love with each other, and dear Julia is
perfectly disinterested. And then, if Mr. Tredethlyn had been ever so
much in love with me--and I’m sure he never cared the least bit about
me--how could you suppose that I could ever dream of marrying him; when
I--when he’s such a very common kind of person?”
Harcourt Lowther’s name had been almost trembling on Miss Hillary’s
lips, but she had remembered her father’s aversion to that name, and had
modified the conclusion of her sentence in deference to his prejudice.
“A very common kind of person!” repeated Lionel Hillary, in a thoughtful
tone; “yes, yes, my dear, I dare say he is, I dare say he is. But I’ve
seen women as beautiful as you married to commoner men than Francis
Tredethlyn.”
And then, after a brief silence, the merchant’s manner changed all of a
sudden; he took his daughter in his arms, and pressed his lips upon her
forehead with an almost passionate fondness.
“My darling! my darling!” he cried, “do you think it wouldn’t please me
to see you married to a man you could love?”
Maude looked up into his face with a sweet smile upon her own: her lips
parted, and in the next moment Harcourt Lowther’s name would have been
spoken and his cause pleaded by those innocent lips. But it seemed as if
her father in a manner anticipated what she would have said; for he put
her from him suddenly, and turned away with a faint shiver of pain.
“I am very sorry to hear of this engagement between Julia and that young
man,” he said, with his face averted from his daughter, and his hands
nervously shuffling among the papers on the table before him. “I am very
much vexed. There, go, Maude; you don’t understand, you can’t
understand. Go, my dear; I’m busy.”
No more than this had ever been said between the father and daughter
upon the subject of Miss Desmond’s matrimonial arrangements; but Maude
had been able to discover that her father’s vexation was not a matter of
the moment, to be forgotten and done with after the first surprise of
the announcement. Lionel Hillary was tolerably gracious to Mr.
Tredethlyn, but his manner towards Julia changed altogether. There were
times when he scarcely took the trouble to conceal his displeasure from
that young lady herself. He would sit watching her moodily when Francis
Tredethlyn was by her side, and would sometimes, when the conversation
gave him an opening, break out into some cynical generality upon the
husband-hunting propensities of modern young ladies. Francis was too
simple-minded to comprehend the drift of these covert sneers; but Julia
understood her benefactor, and defied him with her bold handsome eyes
and her flashing teeth.
“He wanted thirty thousand a year for his daughter, I suppose,” she
thought, when she pondered on Mr. Hillary’s discourtesy. “What grasping,
avaricious creatures these rich people are!”
Christmas was approaching, and that festival period was to be spent at
the Cedars, to which place Maude Hillary was tenderly attached, despite
her sentimental talk about poverty and a simple home deep down in the
heart of rustic England. The young ladies’ portmanteaus had been packed
ready for the departure from Brighton, and Maude and Julia only waited
for Mr. Hillary to escort them on their homeward journey. He had not
been so much with them during the last week or so of their sojourn: and
as Francis Tredethlyn only came backwards and forwards with Mr. Hillary,
the girls had been left by themselves, with no better occupation or
amusement than the reading of new books, the trying of new music, and a
contemplation of the blusterous gray waves beating eternally before
their windows: for the weather had been cold and stormy of late, and the
delicious esplanade had been deserted; only an occasional masculine
wanderer, out for a “constitutional,” buffeted the winds and strode in
dismal loneliness along the pavement beneath Mr. Hillary’s windows.
It was only natural, under these circumstances, that the young ladies
should have grown weary of Brighton. They had a close carriage at their
disposal; but then driving through perpetual tempest is not particularly
agreeable even in a close carriage. They went shopping in East Street
two or three times during the severe weather, and bought expensive
materials for impossible complications of Berlin-wool work and gold
beads; and, experimentalizing with the same on their return home,
discovered themselves at sea in a wide ocean of perplexity. Thus it was
that they grew very tired of Brighton, and wished most earnestly for Mr.
Hillary’s coming.
“Oh, for the silvery ring of my own Broadwood!” exclaimed Maude, as she
rose from a struggle with a German rendering of “Polly, put the kettle
on,” in seven flats, and ten pages of double arpeggios. “I wonder _who_
makes the pianos for houses that are let furnished? I’m sure they must
all be made by the same man; and I suppose it’s a theory of his own that
makes him always use damp wood, and put so much flannel into his
trebles.--I wish papa would come and take us home, Julia.”
Miss Hillary expressed this wish at least twenty times in a day; and
Julia echoed it, as if out of pure sympathy. But Miss Desmond was not a
very sympathetic person, and she was really anxious to get back to the
neighbourhood of London and Francis Tredethlyn. Nearly a fortnight had
passed since the Cornishman had been to Brighton, and Julia was terribly
conscious that the link which united him to her was very fragile, and
might be broken by any unlucky hazard--unless, indeed, his constancy
were sustained by a chivalrous sense of honour. She had as yet had no
opportunity of discovering his sentiments on this subject, and she had a
vague idea that a small farmer’s son, who had taken the Queen’s
shilling, would be unlikely to entertain the same splendid notions of
truth and loyalty that glowed in the breasts of his superiors.
“I know that he’s a very good fellow,” Julia thought; “and I don’t
suppose he would steal anything, or tell a deliberate falsehood; but I
dare say he would think it no sin to throw me over at the last moment
if----”
There was a point at which Miss Desmond’s reveries always stopped short.
She did not care to think about that which Francis Tredethlyn might like
to do, even if he were free to do as he liked.
Mr. Hillary came home very late upon the evening of an especially
disagreeable day. He came down to Brighton by the mail train, and
arrived at the hired mansion just as the two girls were gathering
together the gold beads and Berlin wools, preparatory to going to bed.
But though the merchant had been so much longer away than usual, he
seemed in no particular hurry to embrace his daughter; for instead of
coming up to the drawing-room, he walked straight to a dreary little
study at the back of the house, which had been set apart for his use.
Maude had heard the sonorous knock at the big street door, and flew out
of the drawing-room to greet the traveller.
“At last, dear papa!” she cried. “We have been as dull and dreary as a
pair of Marianas in a moated grange. Oh, you darling papa! I am so glad
you have come! Please take us home to Twickenham: we’ve had _such_
weather; we’re as helpless and miserable as those poor working people
who go about singing so dreadfully flat when there’s a hard frost. ‘We
are two lonely single girls, and we’ve got no work to do!’” sang Miss
Hillary, with the established nasal drawl, as she skipped down the
stairs.
“Kiss me, you wet, cold, melancholy-looking papa,” she said, planting
herself between Lionel Hillary and the door of his sanctum.
The merchant seemed in no very affectionate humour to-night. He put his
daughter aside without looking at her. His face was fixed and stern in
expression, and its gloomy rigidity was in no way relaxed as he spoke to
Maude.
“Why are you up so late?” he said. “I thought you would have gone to bed
an hour ago. I don’t want to be worried to-night, Maude. I’ve some
papers down here that want looking into, and I’ve brought other papers
with me. I may have to sit up half the night, perhaps; and, remember, I
am not to be disturbed.”
“But you will be ill, papa, if you work so hard.”
“I shall not be ill, and I know what is best for myself. I cannot and
must not be annoyed to-night, Maude.”
He went into his room, where the servant had already made an
illumination that would have been enough for a chapel or a factory, by
means of five flaring gas-burners; but Maude followed him, and was not
to be put off even by the harsh words that sounded so strangely in her
ears.
“Papa,” she remonstrated piteously, “I am sure that you are ill, or that
something has happened.”
Mr. Hillary laid his hand upon his daughter’s shoulder, and put her out
of the room,--very gently, but with a certain determination which was
quite a new thing in his treatment of this idolized and exacting Maude.
“I tell you, once more, that I am going to be--very busy, and must
not--be disturbed.” He seemed tired, for the words came slowly, as if
the mere utterance of them were a painful exertion. “Good night, my
dear; go to bed, and sleep peacefully. God bless you, and take you into
his keeping!”
His manner changed all in a moment as he said this, and he caught her
suddenly to his breast and kissed her passionately, as he had done on
that other day when they had talked of Francis Tredethlyn.
But in the next moment Maude found herself standing outside the closed
door of her father’s retreat, amazed and unhappy. That sudden little
gush of affection had been as perplexing to her as Mr. Hillary’s unusual
sternness of manner. It was all alike strange; and vague fears agitated
her as she went slowly up-stairs to the big barren drawing-room, which
looked very little more home-like than a first-class waiting-room at a
railway station.
Julia had disappeared, and the flaring gas-lamps illumined a great
barren desert of Brussels carpet and emptiness. Dear Julia always
remembered that her good looks were her only dower, and took care not to
waste them by late watching in the glare of many gas-burners. Maude
sighed as she looked round the empty room, and then seated herself at a
table adorned with a gaudy cover that looked like a small Turkey carpet.
She took up the impossible Berlin-wool work, and the gold beads, and set
herself to the task of counting tiny dots and squares on a coloured
paper pattern, with a view to discovering where the Berlin-wool left off
and the beads began. But she was tired and unhappy, and the bewildering
dots and squares made her head ache; so she pushed away the work
presently, and roamed restlessly up and down the room: now stopping by a
table, and taking up a book, only to open it haphazard and stare blankly
at the pages; now lingering by the piano, noiselessly fingering the
notes, and tormented with a wild desire to dash into some blusterous
march that should startle the slumbering household.
Her father had told her to go to bed. He was going to work very late,
and must on no account be disturbed. He had worked late sometimes at
Twickenham, but not often; and on those occasions Maude had gone to
sleep happily enough, only a little disturbed by the thought of “poor
papa” toiling over those cruel business documents. But to-night it was
altogether different. At the risk of incurring her father’s anger, Miss
Hillary paced wearily up and down the desert of Brussels carpet, waiting
till she should hear the merchant’s step on the stairs, and know that
his night’s work was over.
She waited, oppressed by a vague uneasiness, and wondering why she was
uneasy. Why was it that to-night the thought of her father’s toil
mingled with all manner of strange fears and misgivings? She was usually
so frivolous, so apt to look brightly put upon the sunnier aspects of
the world around her; but to-night her heart seemed like a leaden weight
in her breast. What was it? why was it? The cheap French clock upon the
chimney-piece struck some abnormal number between twelve and twenty, and
a distant church clock struck two; but still Miss Hillary waited in vain
for that expected step upon the stair. Her father had said that he would
be very late, but she had hoped that at the worst his work would be
finished in a couple of hours. The time seemed so intolerably long to
Maude Hillary, roaming in a purposeless manner about that big room, or
standing in the bay-window to listen to the hoarse roaring of the waves,
or sitting down to read for five minutes together, but never once
knowing what she was reading.
There had been so few troubles in her life, and looking back at the
smooth sunlit ways by which she had wandered from childhood to
womanhood, she was seized all at once with a fear that there must be
some great grief in store for her. It was quite impossible that she
could have altogether withheld herself from some contemplation of that
startling question as to her right to be happy in a world where so many
people were miserable; but the question had never intruded itself upon
her so awfully as to-night.
“I have never had sickness, or death, or sorrow near me,” she thought.
“My mother died before I was conscious of her existence--as I think--and
yet it seems strange that there can be any time when a child is
unconscious of a mother’s presence, or heedless of her loss. The worst
trouble that I can remember is my parting from Harcourt; and I have
always hoped that all would come right at last. But to-night--to-night I
feel as if there had been something sinful in my happiness. The sermons
I have heard at church never came home to me. I never felt that I was a
miserable, sinful creature, groping my way upon a thorny path. I’m
afraid I have been very wicked; selfish and idle, vain and frivolous.”
Looking back at her life, Miss Hillary saw an existence of Twickenham
pleasure, water-parties, and pic-nics, Star-and-Garter dinners,
perpetual Parisian bonnets, and turquoise bracelets, pet dogs, new
novels, opera-boxes, and concert-tickets. Perhaps she had never before
watched and waited alone at these still hours of the dead winter-night,
and these unusual thoughts may have been only the natural companions of
her loneliness.
She looked at her watch a dozen times in an hour, and at last, when it
was nearly three o’clock, her patience was exhausted all at once, and
she resolved on going down to her father’s room.
“He will be very angry with me for sitting up so late,” she thought,
“but I _cannot_ go to bed until I have seen him. It will be better to
see him ever so cross with me than not to see him at all.”
Having once arrived at this determination, Maude Hillary ran down stairs
and tapped lightly at her father’s door. There was no answer, and she
repeated that timid tapping. Again there was no answer, and she tried
the handle of the door, intending to steal softly in and surprise the
merchant at his work. But the door was locked, and her breath grew thick
with the sudden oppression caused by some vague terror. She lost all
command over herself, and knocked loudly, calling in a frightened voice,
“Papa! papa!”
It was not so strange that she should be frightened. How often she had
heard of hard-working City magnates suddenly stricken down in the prime
of life by some fell disease, unsuspected until that last fatal moment!
A heavy footstep inside the little room relieved her of these vaguely
terrible fears. The door was opened, and Mr. Hillary stood before her,
very pale, very angry. “Maude! how absurd this is! What have you been
doing? Why have you been sitting up?”
“Because somehow I _couldn’t_ go to bed while you were working down
here, papa darling. I couldn’t; I didn’t want to worry you or disobey
you; but I don’t know what’s the matter with me to-night. All manner of
ridiculous things came into my head, and I felt that I _must_ see you
before I went to sleep. Let me come in, papa.”
She pleaded so prettily, looking up in her father’s face with such
tender devotion beaming in her own, that Lionel Hillary must have been
something harder and sterner than the stoniest of mercantile men if he
had been deaf to her pleading.
“Come in if you like, Maude,” he said, with a weary sigh; “I am sorry
that you disturbed me. I had very nearly finished my work.”
The littered mass of papers that had been scattered on Mr. Hillary’s
desk when Maude had left him were gone now, and only a few neat little
packets remained in their stead. But, placed conspicuously upon the
desk, Maude perceived a big envelope with a great red seal, and lying
near it a smaller envelope also sealed.
The merchant had removed his neckcloth. He seemed to have been working
hard, for big drops of moisture stood upon his forehead. A great basket
near his chair was filled to overflowing with torn scraps of paper, and
the shower of waste had fallen far and wide, and lay like snow about the
chair in which Mr. Hillary had been sitting.
“Now, Maude,” he asked sternly, as his daughter followed him into the
room, “what is it that you want with me?”
“Why, to see you leave your work and go to bed, papa. You don’t know how
late it is.”
The merchant smiled a grim smile, and pointed to his watch, which lay
open on the desk.
“I’ve been working against time, and I’ve kept watch upon every quarter
of an hour,” he said.
“But you have finished now, papa.”
“Not quite. I have very nearly finished--but not quite.”
Miss Hillary shook her head with a pretty petulant gesture. She was not
in the least afraid of her father’s anger now. She had been so tortured
by dim and shadowy apprehensions, that her spirits rebounded suddenly
now that she was by her father’s side, and she was bold enough to defy
him.
“I shan’t leave you any more to-night, papa. If you had all the business
of the Stock Exchange to transact, I wouldn’t let you sit up any longer,
ruining your health by brooding over those tiresome papers. Besides,
your desk is quite clear; you seem to have done everything.”
“No, I have not done everything.”
Mr. Hillary had resumed his seat, and was staring absently at the desk
before him, where all things looked so neat and orderly that Maude
seemed justified in thinking that her father’s work was done. There was
a row of drawers on each side of the desk. One of them was open, and a
bunch of keys hung from the lock. A copy of the _Times_ newspaper lay
across the top of this open drawer; but as Miss Hillary hung about her
father, some portion of the silken flounces or furbelows of her dress
brushed against the paper, and it fell rustling to the ground. Lionel
Hillary turned suddenly with a look of alarm directed towards the open
drawer, and Maude, following his glance, saw something lying among the
neat packets of letters and papers,--something which had no business to
be there; something which seemed to realize a greater terror than any
that her fancy had shaped, however dimly, during those hours of weary
waiting in the room above.
The object which seemed so terrible to Maude Hillary was a pistol--a
small pistol, of very modern fashion, fresh and bright from the hands of
the gunmaker. Mr. Hillary was not a man who affected the gunsmith’s art,
and Maude had never seen such a weapon in her father’s possession until
to-night;--until _this_ night, when vague fears respecting him had been
so long busy in her brain, only wanting a form into which to shape
themselves.
It seemed as if her frivolous girlhood left her all at once. It seemed
as if that great terror, coming upon her with such ghastly suddenness,
transformed her into a woman--a woman possessed of woman’s highest
attributes, fortitude, and self-abnegation. She uttered no cry of alarm,
no exclamation of surprise; but she suddenly closed and locked the
drawer in which the pistol lay, and dropped the bunch of keys into her
pocket. Then kneeling down beside her father’s chair, she put her arms
tenderly about him, and laid her head upon his breast. Mr. Hillary had
grown very passive all at once, and sat idly staring at the table before
him.
“Papa,” Maude said presently, in a low, pleading voice, “what is it?
tell me, confide in me. In whom should you trust, if not in me? What is
it, papa? what does it mean?”
“It means--ruin!” the merchant answered, huskily. He did not turn
towards his daughter, but still sat staring blankly straight before him.
“It means failure and ruin, Maude; ruin in its worst shape, its most
hideous shape.”
“You mean that we shall be poor, very poor--that we shall have to leave
Twickenham--that you will be a clerk perhaps in some office, and I a
daily governess. I remember when the Gordons failed, and poor Constance
Gordon and her brothers had to begin the world afresh, without money,
and with very little help from their old friends. Do you think I could
not bear as much as that, and be happy still, if you were with me? Ah,
papa, papa, do I seem to you such a helpless, useless creature, that you
shrink from trusting me at such a time as this?” Hysterical sobs rose in
her throat, but she stifled them, and went on talking to him in the same
quiet tender voice, and caressing him as she talked. He submitted
passively enough to her caresses, but he seemed scarcely conscious of
them.
“Trust me, papa; tell me everything. Such troubles as these seem so much
less dreadful when once they have been freely spoken of. I remember how
Mr. Gordon kept everything hidden from his family as long as he could;
and Constance told me that it seemed as if a great cloud was hanging
over the house, and there was something in the atmosphere that stifled
them all. But when the crash came at last, they bore it bravely; and see
how well they have got on ever since, in a moderate way. Ah, papa, you
have brought me up like a spoiled child, or a princess in a fairy tale;
and now that trouble has come to us, you think I can’t bear it. But I
_can_, papa; if you will only be brave, your foolish, extravagant
daughter will learn to be wise and patient. I was getting very tired of
Twickenham, papa; and shall be as happy as the day is long in a nice
little cottage in some cheap suburb, where I can have pupils.”
Lionel Hillary ought no doubt to have been comforted by his daughter’s
tenderness; but unhappily there are some wounds so cruelly inflamed,
that the gentlest application the surgeon can devise is apt to chafe and
irritate them. The girl’s talk jarred upon the merchant’s mind, and it
was with a shiver of pain that he turned to her as she left off
speaking.
“Child, child!” he exclaimed, fretfully, “you don’t know what you’re
talking of. Do you think it is such an easy thing to pass from one of
the first positions in the City to a clerkship and a cottage in the
suburbs? Do you think there is nothing _between_ such opposite
conditions? Do you suppose I have only to shut up my books, and wish my
creditors good morning, before I walk out of my office! You talk and
think like a child, Maude. It is all very well for an old twaddler like
John Gordon, who suspends payment upon the first failure that affects
his stability, and who winds up his affairs with a dividend of fifteen
shillings in the pound, and the compliments and sympathy of all
Basinghall Street. No one will sympathize with _my_ fall, though more
than I can count will suffer with me. I am not a man to drop under the
first blow, Maude; for nearly three years I have been working a rotten
ship, with the knowledge that nothing short of a miracle could save me
from wreck. The wreck has come. The world will call me a dishonest man,
because I waited for that miracle. I waited as the gambler waits at the
green table, hoping that the last risk would bring me salvation. With me
ruin means disgrace. I tell you, Maude, before the month is out, there
will be a panic in the City, and men will cry out that Lionel Hillary is
a rogue and a swindler. There’s not a man who ever dined at Twickenham
that won’t use his knowledge of my home as a weapon against me. There’s
not a bottle of wine I ever gave a friend whose price and quality will
not be made a reproach against me. Oh! I know how people talk about
these things. Go away, child! Your presence only goads and irritates me.
It reminds me that I might have done better than I have done; I might
have been wiser, I might have saved something--my good name at least. I
have loved you so dearly, Maude,--Heaven only knows how dearly, for I am
no man of big words or sentimental phrases. And now I leave you utterly
destitute, the pauper child of a disgraced father.”
“But you shall not leave me,” cried Maude, with a sudden energy that
startled Lionel Hillary. “Papa, why do you insist upon treating me as a
child? Why do you judge me by what I have been, rather than by what I
can be? Why won’t you trust me? why won’t you talk to me as if I were a
son, and had a right to share your secrets? You have told me the worst,
and you see I can bear to know it. I can endure even disgrace; but I
cannot bear to lose you. Trust me, papa. I will be patient under any
calamity except----” She was seized with a sudden shivering, and clung
to him with a convulsive force in the small hands that entwined
themselves about his arm. “You know what I mean, papa,” she said.
“Believe that I can bear anything if you will be true and brave and
patient. And even yet the miracle may come. Something may happen at the
very last, surely it may, to save your good name.”
Mr. Hillary pressed his daughter’s hand in acknowledgment of so much
tenderness and devotion; but he shook his head moodily as he answered
her, “Nothing _can_ happen to save me, unless twenty thousand pounds
drop from the skies between this and the 10th of January.”
Twenty thousand pounds! Maude’s thoughts flew to her jewel-case, in
obedience to the most universal of feminine instincts. Twenty thousand
pounds! Alas for that birthday gift of opals and diamonds, the turquoise
rings and bracelets, the emerald cross, the delicate pink coral, and all
the fragile fantastic toys of gold and enamel, bought in the dearest
market of elegant West-end dealers, who give three years’ credit. Maude,
in all her ignorance, was wise enough to know that these things would
not realize one of the twenty thousands required by her father.
“But there is Twickenham, papa,” she said; “the Cedars must be worth
ever so many thousands.”
“And is mortgaged to the full extent of its value,” answered Mr.
Hillary. “Find me twenty thousand pounds, if you can, Maude; but don’t
worry me with frivolous suggestions. I tell you that it is quite
impossible for a woman to understand my position. God help me! I
scarcely understand it myself. I only know that everything round me is
so much rottenness, and that the crash _must_ come next month.”
“But you will not think--of that--again!” urged Maude, pointing to the
drawer.
“No; I’ll wait to the tenth.”
“For _my_ sake; Oh, papa, for my sake!”
“No, child; not for your sake, but from a selfish, cowardly clinging to
life,” cried Lionel Hillary, with sudden passion. “It would be better
for you, ten times better, if I were dead. The thought of that was in my
mind as I came down here to-night, until the noise of the engine almost
seemed to thump out the words, ‘Better for her, better for her.’ People
would have mercy upon you if I were dead, Maude; even those who suffered
by me would be less bitter in their reproaches if I were dead. A man can
only break his heart once; and when the man is dead, there is no mark
for the arrows of justifiable reproach, or the foul garden-stuff and
rotten eggs of malicious calumny.”
“Papa, the help may come; the twenty thousand pounds may be found.”
“No, child; there was only one hope of that, and the hope is gone.”
For the first time that night Mr. Hillary looked at his daughter; she
saw the look, an anxious scrutiny that sent a chill through her heart.
She did not ask him what that one hope had been.
“Papa, trust in me, only trust in me!” she cried; “you do not know of
what I am capable for your sake--for your sake. You don’t know what I
have suffered to-night, and how changed I am by that suffering. Hope for
a miracle even, papa: keep things as smooth as you can, and between this
and the tenth the twenty thousand pounds may be found. Only tell me one
thing. You don’t want anyone to _give_ you the money. If it were lent to
you, you could repay it by-and-by?”
“Yes; with sufficient time I could repay it.”
“Then hope for the miracle, papa. Ah! you think me such a child that you
are almost angry with me for telling you to hope; but the lion laughed
at the mouse, I dare say.”
Five minutes after this, Miss Hillary led her father to his room, and
wished him good night, cheerfully enough, upon the threshold. But under
that pretence of cheerfulness, cruel fears and perplexities were
torturing her innocent heart. Ruin, dishonour, disgrace; the misery of
many homes besides that one household on the bank of the river,--all
these terrors had come very suddenly upon the girl who only that morning
had been impatient of the December weather and the dull gray sky.
She went to her room; but only to sit with the door open, listening for
any sound in her father’s apartment, which was next her own. She sat for
nearly two hours shivering with cold, and then crept softly to her
father’s room and opened the door. The merchant was sleeping, peacefully
enough to all appearance, for his breathing was tranquil and regular; so
Maude went back to her room. It seemed the bitterest mockery to go to
bed; but then Miss Hillary’s maid would have been scandalized had she
come at eight o’clock and found her mistress still watching. Alas, poor
Maude; for the first time in her life she had to submit to that most
cruel social penance, entitled “keeping up appearances.” She went to
bed; and though she seemed to hear every hour, and half-hour, and
quarter of an hour chimed by the church clocks, she must have slept at
some time or other in that brief remainder of the night, or else how
should she have been tormented by those hideous dreams, in which she was
always wading through black morasses and turgid waters, carrying in her
arms a great bag of gold, which she vainly strove to convey to her
father?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XVI.
A DRAMA THAT WAS ACTED BEHIND THE SCENES.
Mr. Hillary escorted his daughter and Julia Desmond back to Twickenham
upon the day following that night-scene of anguish and terror. They left
Brighton rather late in the day, and arrived at the Cedars when the
early winter evening had closed in upon the leafless avenues and groves
about the old house. Lights were burning cheerily in the long range of
lower windows, and in the vestibule and inner hall; and rare groups of
stainless marble gleamed white against a background of bright hothouse
flowers. Deferential servants came hurrying out as the carriage drove
up; and Miss Hillary, seeing her home in all its accustomed brightness
and comfort, felt a painful sense of bewilderment. It was so difficult
to realize the force of that calamity which had been so lately revealed
to her: it was so difficult to believe that all this splendour was so
much rottenness, from which there was only one step to poverty and
disgrace.
Mr. Hillary had visited his daughter’s room very early upon the morning
after the terrible confidence between them, and had impressed upon her
the necessity of suppressing every evidence of the knowledge that had
come to her.
“I have been compelled to trust you, Maude,” he said; “and you must
prove yourself worthy of my confidence. Heaven only knows how difficult
it has been for me to keep the secrets of my business during three years
of reverses and misfortunes such as rarely fall to the lot of a
speculator. My only chance of floating over this crisis lies in the
meeting with some friend who will lend me the money I want, without
looking too closely into the nature of the security I have to offer. But
let the state of my affairs once get wind, and all hope of retrieval
would be lost. Remember this, Maude: and, if you love me, show a bright
face to the world; and above all, beware of Julia Desmond. That young
lady is a dangerous person, my dear; and the day may come when we shall
have reason to regret having given a shelter to old Desmond’s destitute
child.”
“But Julia is a dear good girl, papa; she would be very sorry for us, I
am sure,” Maude pleaded, innocently.
“Julia has contrived to feather her own nest so remarkably well, that
she would be very indifferent to any calamity that could come to her
friends,” answered the practical man of the world, who had been by no
means pleased with Miss Desmond since that young lady’s conquest of
Francis Tredethlyn.
Maude kissed her father,--ah, how passionately! She clung to him, as she
remembered that long feverish dream of the previous night, and the
glittering something lying in the drawer; she kissed him, and promised
that his secrets should be guarded more carefully than her own life.
“And the miracle _may_ be accomplished between this and the tenth of
January, papa,” she said.
And then, as Lionel Hillary was about to leave his daughter’s room, she
placed herself suddenly between him and the door, and turned the key in
the lock. He looked at her, surprised and perplexed.
“Maude!”
“Dearest father, you have trusted me, and you have exacted a promise
from me,” said Miss Hillary, with a quiet calmness that was more
impressive than any vehemence of manner; “and now I want you to give me
a promise, a very solemn promise, my own dear father.”
She put her hand upon his shoulder and kissed him once more, clinging to
him fondly, looking tenderly upward to his pale careworn face. Then she
took a bunch of keys from her pocket and held them out before him.
“You remember those keys, papa; I am going to return them to you; but I
want you to kneel down with me here, now, when all that feverish
excitement of last night has passed away; I want you to promise me, as
you hope for mercy and happiness in a better world when this life is all
gone by and done with,--I want you to promise me that you will never
again under any circumstances, in any hour of trial or temptation, think
of that dreadful alternative of which you thought last night. Oh, papa!
remember it is such a terrible sin even to think of it; for we can never
do so until we have ceased to trust in God.”
The simple words went straight to Lionel Hillary’s heart--that
world-weary heart, in which there was but this one tender quality of
paternal love still left. No subtle arguments of theologian or
philosopher could have so deeply influenced him as his daughter’s gentle
pleading. He knelt by her side, close to a little table, on which an
open Testament was lying, and pressing his lips upon the sacred page
swore that he would never again contemplate the sin which he had so
nearly committed only a few hours before.
“It is a coward’s remedy at the best,” he said presently; and then he
took his daughter in his arms and looked down at her tearful face with a
mist before his own eyes, which made that bright young beauty seem
blotted and dim. “My Maude, my darling, surely Heaven must have created
you to be my guardian angel. I have not been a good man; I have been too
much of a speculator for the last few years,--a reckless speculator,
perhaps; but when the demon of commercial hazard had his grip strongest
upon me, your image was always in my mind. I wanted to leave you rich,
secure from all the troubles of this world. I was a poor man in my young
days, Maude; and perhaps the bitterness of that early time may have
taught me to set too high a value upon wealth. Fortune came to me
afterwards, almost as wonderfully as it comes to a prince in a fairy
tale; and some recklessness of spirit may have been engendered in me by
my own successes and by the times in which I have lived.”
“But, dear papa, you need not fear poverty for my sake,” said Maude;
“only trust in me, and when the time comes you shall find me ready to
face it. My life has been very pleasant--too pleasant, I dare say,--I
have always felt that it was so when the thought has come to me of all
the people who suffer in this world. But you know how the princess in
the fairy tale, who has never known a sorrow, goes out all at once into
the great forest, more helpless and lonely than the poorest woodman’s
daughter, and yet no harm ever comes to the princess, papa. If it will
only please Heaven to spare your good name, poverty will have no sting
for me; and if disgrace _should_ come, I will bear it for your sake,--I
will bear it without a murmur for your sake, papa.”
She broke down just a little as she said this; she could not speak quite
calmly of that most terrible loss of all--the loss of her father’s
commercial honour. She remembered, very dimly, long prosy discussions
that she had heard at Mr. Hillary’s dinner-table, about men who had
failed, and who had failed through some dishonesty or recklessness of
their own, and whose downfall had involved the hard-won fortunes of
others, making a vast circle of ruin, spreading as the watery circle
spreads when you drop a pebble into a tideless lake.
From this time it almost seemed as if a new life began for Maude
Hillary. No more careless idling over new music, no more eager
commencements of expensive fancy-work that was never to be finished!
After Miss Hillary’s return to the Cedars, anyone taking the trouble to
watch her closely might have perceived a wonderful alteration in her
conduct--a change that was almost a transformation in her very nature.
When she opened her piano now, it was for no idle trifling with
fashionable difficulties, no coquetting with shakes, and skipping of
arpeggios. She practised steadily, and for hours together. Might not the
time be very near at hand in which she would be called upon to gird on
her armour, and join the ranks of the bread-winners? She thought of
herself in a dingy London street, somewhere in the dreary region between
Holborn and the New Road--the region which was once a fair expanse of
pleasant meadow-land. She thought of herself toiling as so many women
toiled, leading the same dull life from day to day; and her courage did
not fail her even before that dismal picture. It was not likely that
this change in Maude Hillary could escape the notice of so observant a
young lady as Miss Desmond. Julia saw and wondered, but she was far from
guessing the real cause of Maude’s unusual gravity.
“I suppose she is making herself unhappy about Harcourt Lowther,”
thought Miss Desmond. “These fortunate people always contrive to find
_one_ crumpled leaf in their beds of roses. She is making herself
miserable about that handsome, worthless soldier, and she thinks herself
hardly used because she cannot play at love in a cottage, with a rich
mercantile father to pay the expenses of the idyllic _ménage_.”
This was how Julia Desmond accounted for Maude’s long intervals of
absent brooding, and that melancholy shadow which settled on her face
whenever she fancied herself unnoticed, and for a while relaxed the
heroic effort with which she tried to keep her promise, and guard her
father’s secret. It was a very hard struggle. All the young idlers, the
government clerks, the briefless but literary barristers, the rising
artists who had narrowly escaped making palpable hits at the Royal
Academy, or at a temple of art which they irreverently alluded to as the
“British Inst,” all the accustomed Twickenham loungers flocked down to
the Cedars to keep their Christmas holidays in the house of a gentleman
whom they regarded as a sort of commercial Midas--a Moorgate Street
Fortunatus, from whose inexhaustible coffers flowed the golden waters of
perpetual prosperity: and Maude received all the old incense, and was
fain to smile something like the old smiles upon her worshippers; while
her heart ached with an unceasing pain, and a hidden dread that was like
a palpable burden weighed for ever on her breast.
“Oh, if they knew--if they only knew!” she thought. “They court me
because they think I am rich, perhaps; but if they only knew what an
imposture all this splendour is--these lights and flowers, and grapes
and pines, and Sèvres china and Venetian glass, and all this long parade
of dinner! if they knew that poverty and disgrace may come to us before
the new year has well begun!” Sometimes, in her utter weariness of
spirit, sometimes when the social comedy seemed almost too hard to act,
Miss Hillary felt suddenly tempted to turn round upon her admirers, and
cry to them,--
“Why do you torment me with your hackneyed compliments? I am _not_ the
daughter of a millionaire; my father is only an imprudent speculator,
who is hovering on the verge of a black abyss of bankruptcy and ruin. Go
and offer your worship in some solvent temple, and leave me alone with
my father and his sorrows.”
This, or something akin to this, Miss Hillary was at times sorely
tempted to utter. But she kept her promise. She had promised that no
word or action of hers should betray the rottenness of her father’s
position, and she kept a close watch upon herself. Her adorers--who were
by no means so mercenary as she thought them--perceived that something
was amiss with their goddess; but were far from associating anything so
vulgar as the state of the money-market with the lessened lustre of her
smiles.
“She’s engaged to some fellow in the army, and her father won’t let her
marry him, and the fellow writes her worrying letters; Miss Desmond told
me as much,” the loungers said one to another, when confiding in each
other about Miss Hillary.
The brilliant Julia had taken care to let Maude’s admirers know that her
heart had long been bestowed upon a remote object; but she did not go so
far as to reveal the name of Miss Hillary’s chosen lover; and Francis
Tredethlyn had no suspicion that Maude Hillary and the beautiful heiress
of whom his master had so often spoken were one and the same person. He
knew nothing of this; he only knew that Maude seemed as remote from his
sphere as the distant stars that shone coldly upon him out of a
steel-blue winter sky when he looked from his window at the Cedars. He
spent his Christmas at the Cedars; for Mr. Hillary had been specially
cordial and hospitable to him of late, and had resumed all his old
graciousness of manner to Julia.
And the private theatricals, the elegant drawing-room exhibition of
amateur histrionics, which Maude had planned so merrily in the autumn,
were to take place on the first night of the new year--now, when the
poor girl’s heart was sinking under the dull pain of that perpetual
burden, that dreary terror of the disgrace which might be so near.
She had told her father that a miracle might be wrought before the 10th
of January. Of what had she thought or dreamed when she held out that
hope? What daring fancy had been engendered out of the excitement of the
moment? There are times when a woman feels capable of becoming a social
Joan of Arc, a bloodless Charlotte Corday; but then the enthusiasm, the
exaltation of the moment is so apt to pass _with_ the moment. There had
been a vague but desperate intention lurking in Maude Hillary’s mind
when she had encouraged her father by those hopeful speeches; but the
days were creeping past, the new year was close at hand, and nothing had
been done. Nothing had been done; and now Miss Hillary was tormented all
day long about these wonderful private theatricals, which were to
surpass every drawing-room performance since the days when the unhappy
daughter of the Caesars played a _soubrette_ for the delight of that
taciturn king and grandfather-in-law who did not like to laugh.
All arrangements for the grand entertainment had been made before Mr.
Hillary’s household removed to Brighton. The play had been selected, the
characters allotted to the individuals who were supposed, or who
supposed themselves, to be most fitted to play them; but not without as
much shuffling and changing as the kings and queens undergo in a game of
cards. The drama finally chosen was the “Lady of Lyons,” selected, no
doubt, on that grand principle in accordance with which all amateurs go
to work, _i. e._ because it is a play which specially requires
accomplished actors in every one of its characters. Of course Maude was
to be the _Pauline_. Was she not sole daughter and heiress of the master
of the house, at whose expense all the business was to take place? If
she had been red-haired, or hump-backed, or lame, the amateurs could
scarcely have done otherwise than choose her as the representative of
the lovely _Mademoiselle Deschappelles_. But as she was one of the
fairest daughters ever spoiled by a wealthy merchant, she was really
created for the part, as it seemed; and she had only to order her
dresses and let down her sunny hair in the classic disorder of the
period, and she would be the loveliest _Pauline_ that ever won the
simple heart of an aspiring young gardener. But how about _Claude_? At
first every one of the amateurs had desired to play _Claude_, and
nothing but _Claude_. To wear that impossible velvet coat, with its
lavish embroidery of gold and spangles; to snub _Beauseant_, and to
patronize _Damas_; to flourish diamond snuff-boxes and rings, and filmy
ruffles of point d’Alençon, which are _so_ becoming to the unhappy
amateur, whose hands are apt to assume the rich purple hues of raw beef
under the influence of extreme terror; to hold Miss Hillary in their
arms, and cry, “Oh, rapture!” in a ponderous bass voice apparently
situated somewhere in those martial jackboots, without which _Claude_
would be less than _Claude_,--to do all this seemed to the young men at
the Cedars a glory and delight which would be cheaply won by the cutting
of one another’s throats in a _champ clos_.
And then to what base hypocrisies these amateur actors descended!
declaring to one another that, after all, _Claude_ was _not_ such a
great part! Nay, indeed, was not the heroic gardener something of a
spoon, liable to provoke laughter if his velvet coat failed to fit, or
his humble blouse looked too much like a little boy’s pinafore? _Claude_
might be a very fine part, the amateurs argued to each other, in a
regular theatre, where there were the gallery fellows to applaud the
long speeches, and to stamp their hob-nailed boots in the great
situations, and all that sort of thing, you know; but your drawing-room
audiences are apt to laugh at strong sentiment; and, in short, for a
private performance, _Damas_, or _Beauseant_, or _Glavis_ were the great
parts.
So there was a good deal of chopping and changing, with vengeful
feelings attendant thereupon; and at last, after almost all the
privileged guests at the Cedars had made themselves hoarse in the
endeavour to cultivate that bass voice and peculiar melodious gurgle so
often heard on the stage, and so rarely heard off it; after innumerable
tryings-on of velvet coats and cocked hats before cheval-glasses,--it
transpired all at once that nobody wanted to play _Claude Melnotte_. The
noblest hearts sank with a sickly terror before the thought of all
Twickenham assembled in solemn conclave to listen to those long speeches
with which the peasant husband endeavours to appease the natural anger
of his bride. One by one the amateurs had made the awful discovery, that
after all there is some touch of art, not to be learned in a day, even
in the actor’s trade. One by one they had discovered that they lacked
_physique_ for the leading character; and that, after three acts or so
of blank verse, they were apt to become hoarse and roopy, and to break
ignominiously from that melodious bass gurgle into a treble squeak. So
it came about that there was no one to play _Claude_, and Miss Hillary
clasped her hands in anguish, and demanded what was to become of her.
All Twickenham and Hampton Court, Richmond and Ham, and all sorts of
people from town invited to witness the “Lady of Lyons,” and no _Claude_
_Melnotte_! One of the government clerks, who fancied himself an embryo
Buckstone, timidly suggested “Box and Cox” as a fitting substitute for
the drama; but Miss Hillary turned from him with disdain. “Box and Cox!”
she exclaimed, contemptuously; “why, my dresses are all ordered, and the
white satin for the wedding-dress is to be five-and-twenty shillings a
yard. I _must_ have some one for _Claude_.”
And then at last it was discovered that Francis Tredethlyn, who had
volunteered to carry a tea-tray or a coal-scuttle, or to announce a
carriage, or to perform any ignominious part in the drama for Miss
Hillary’s pleasure,--it was discovered all at once that this young man
was able to act. He was no untaught Macready, no ready-made Kean; but he
was able to do what the best of the government clerks and literary
barristers failed in doing; he was able to roll out the melodious blank
verse in a big, deep voice, that never failed him to the end of the
chapter. The stage is almost as great a leveller as death himself, and
on that little platform at Twickenham uneducated Francis Tredethlyn was
quite as much at his ease as the well-bred young men about him: more at
his ease, for he was not so bent upon distinguishing himself, and was
indeed only eager to oblige Miss Hillary. All this had happened before
the autumn visit to Brighton; and now when Maude returned to the Cedars
she found busy workmen making a perpetual hammering in the apartment
which had been chosen for the scene of the entertainment. Mr. Hillary
did everything in a superb manner; there was to be no pitiful
contrivance of folding-doors festooned by suburban carpenters, but
accomplished people from town had come down to the Cedars, and a
magnificent archway of white and gold spanned the lofty billiard-room
which the merchant had built at one end of his house. All the
arrangements were to be perfection; the lighting of the small stage was
to be a miracle of art; the grouping of the furniture had been studied
by _genre_ painters of no mean pretensions. Poor Maude grew sick at
heart as she heard all these details discussed. She looked back, and
wondered, as she remembered what a frivolous creature she had been only
a few months ago, and how this amateur dramatic performance had seemed a
matter of supreme importance to her; and now she repeated the words
mechanically during those long rehearsals, in the course of which the
amateurs had so many angry disputations, and so cruelly victimized Mr.
Hillary’s pale sherry.
At last the new year began, and at ten o’clock upon the first night in
January long lines of carriages filled the avenue at the Cedars, and the
road outside the lodge-gates, until the neighbourhood was luminous with
flaring lamps that glared redly in the winter darkness. People came from
far and wide to see Miss Hillary play _Pauline_, and to devour Mr.
Gunter’s supper, though Miss Hillary’s heart might be breaking, and the
merchant’s head splitting with the weight of care that pressed just now
upon his overtaxed brain! But people _do_ get through, these things
somehow; and Lionel Hillary walked about his drawing-rooms, looking
supremely gentlemanly in a stiff cambric cravat, and uttering mild
commonplaces for the edification of new arrivals.
People get through these things. Poor Maude’s head ached with a dull
pain as her maid arrayed her in a dress of white silk, showered with
rosebuds, and flounced and looped with lace and ribbon. Would any of
this finery be paid for, Miss Hillary wondered, as she saw her splendour
reflected in the cheval-glass; or was it altogether dishonesty and
wickedness? She shuddered as she thought of this: but the entertainment
of to-night was only a part of the grand hypocrisy which might help to
float Mr. Hillary safely over the terrible crisis, and Maude determined
to be true to her promise. So she smiled at Julia Desmond, when that
young lady, who was to play _Madame Deschappelles_, came to exhibit
herself in powder and patches, and brocade and diamonds, and with half
the point-lace in South Audley Street bestowed upon her handsome person.
Miss Desmond had consented with amazing graciousness to perform the
matronly _rôle_ allotted to her; but she had determined to look like a
marquise of the time of Louis Quinze, and she had despatched Francis
Tredethlyn on half-a-dozen shopping expeditions, until that gentleman
was fain to wonder how a few ribbons, brocaded fabrics, and yellow old
lace flounces, could cost the big sums for which he wrote cheques in
favour of the West-end tradesmen to whom Julia sent him.
The two girls admired each other’s dresses, and the maid joined in a
perfect chorus of laudations with the young lady who _would_ play the
_Widow Melnotte_ in a nine-guinea black moire antique, and a point-lace
cap and apron, and who kept snatching a manuscript copy of her part from
her pocket, and furtively gabbling its contents in dark corners. The
girls admired each other, and sailed down the broad staircase together,
and then went straight to a little ante-room, where half-a-dozen
gentlemen, in attitudes expressive of supreme mental agony, were bending
over half-a-dozen copies of the “Lady of Lyons,” and gabbling
vehemently.
There is no occasion to describe this amateur performance at the Cedars,
inasmuch as it very closely resembled all other amateur performances.
Miss Hillary, stepping on to a stage for the first time, was, to say the
least, not _quite_ a Helen Faucit, and was on the point of breaking down
now and then in some of her grand speeches; but she looked so beautiful
in her perplexity and confusion, that the elegant audience encouraged
and supported her by the gentlest tappings of spangled fans and pattings
of tight kid gloves. There were no tiresome boys in the gallery to urge
her to speak up; no critical chimney-sweeps to murmur their disapproval,
or hint that she had better go home and learn her part. There was only
admiration for her timid loveliness, and the soft music of her tremulous
voice.
Of course there were the usual number of dead pauses in the drama,
technically known as “stage-waits,” the solemn silences in which the
actors stood still and looked imploringly at one another, while the
voices of amateur prompters--always inciting their victims to the
utterance of long speeches--were painfully audible throughout the
assemblage. Mr. Tredethlyn rolled out his blank verse with a sturdy
courage that was worthy of all praise; and if his hands were a little
red, and his blue-cotton blouse slightly suggestive of Newgate Market,
he had acted with his brother soldiers in very rough amateur
performances out in Van Diemen’s Land, and now and then some touch of
natural fire, some little bit of tender pathos, startled the well-bred
audience into applause. It may be that now and then Francis Tredethlyn
found himself carried away by the spirit of the scene. Did not that
romantic drama bear some likeness to his own story? This beautiful
_Pauline_, this unapproachable being whose lovely image filled the
peasant’s dreams, who was she but Maude Hillary herself? Perhaps if Miss
Desmond had been the _Pauline_, Francis might have seemed as cold and
tame as the rest of the Twickenham amateurs: but the eyes that looked at
him tenderly or reproachfully to-night, were the only eyes in all the
world that had the power to move him deeply. He acted well, therefore,
as the dullest man will act sometimes under the influence of some
factitious excitement: and when the curtain fell upon the final scene of
happy and triumphant love, the audience were loud in their praise of
“that handsome-looking Mr. Tredethlyn, who was just the very man for
_Claude Melnotte_.”
Then there was a final parting of the curtains and a shower of bouquets,
all in the orthodox style, and Maude felt perfumed petals fluttering
about her as she curtseyed to her indulgent audience.
All through that last act she had surprised those well-bred spectators
out of their natural languor. The _Pauline_ who had been so tame and
unimpassioned in the grand cottage scene, was carried away by a strong
tide of passionate feeling in that last act, where the half
broken-hearted daughter pleads for her insolvent father. Sobs almost
choked Miss Hillary’s utterance more than once in this scene; and when
at last her head lay for a few moments on Francis Tredethlyn’s breast,
the young man’s martial decorations were wet with real tears. The sight
of that emotion moved him strangely, though he beheld in it nothing more
than the natural excitement of a highly sensitive organization. After
the little ovation that came with the close of the drama, he followed
Maude Hillary into the ante-room, where the rest of the amateurs were
discussing the night’s business, and flirting with the splendid Julia,
and thence to an inner room, less brilliantly lighted, and quite
unoccupied. Beyond this inner room there was another apartment--the
study in which Francis had fallen an easy victim to the wiles of the
Hibernian enchantress--and it was to this room that Maude hurried, still
followed by Mr. Tredethlyn.
He had no business to follow her. He knew that very well. His business
was with Julia, who had acted _Madame Deschappelles_ with wonderful
spirit, and for whom the evening had been one long triumph, inasmuch as
her lace, and diamonds, and brocade, and dark eyes, and white teeth, had
been the subjects of universal admiration. Mr. Tredethlyn’s business lay
in that brilliantly-lighted ante-chamber where Julia sat amongst the
government clerks, and barristers, and grand military dandies, while an
accompaniment of perpetually popping champagne-corks mingled pleasantly
with the noise of their laughter. He knew this, and yet he followed
Maude to the dimly-lighted study, where the red glow of the fire
flickered on the bindings of the books and the frames of the pictures.
He could not leave off being _Claude Melnotte_ all in a moment. The
exaltation of the mimic scene was still upon him. Just now he had been
carried quite away by the influence of the poetic situation; and when he
flung down the sham money, which was to release the merchant’s daughter
from her hated suitor, a warmer thrill of triumph had stirred his breast
than had ever been engendered by the possession of Oliver Tredethlyn’s
thousands.
And now he could not fall back to his old position all at once. Only a
minute or two ago Maude Hillary had been sobbing on his breast,--his
bride, his wife; and he half fancied he had some kind of right to
sympathize with her emotion. He stopped suddenly on the threshold of the
study, quite unmanned by the sight of Mr. Hillary’s daughter, half
kneeling, half lying on the ground, with her face buried in the cushions
of a sofa, and her hands clasped in a despairing attitude above the fair
tangled hair that had so lately lain upon his breast. Her whole frame
was shaken by the vehemence of her sobs; and before such a picture as
this it was scarcely strange if poor country-bred Francis Tredethlyn
quite forgot that he was _not_ Claude Melnotte. He bent over the
prostrate girl, and laid his big fingers gently upon one of those little
bejewelled hands clasped so convulsively above the fair head.
“Miss Hillary,” he exclaimed, “dear Miss Hillary, for pity’s sake, tell
me what distresses you--what has happened--what is wrong--or--I--I beg
your pardon--you have over-fatigued yourself, and you are hysterical;
let me send for your maid.”
“Oh, no, no, no!” cried the girl, rising to her feet, and standing
before him, but with her face still hidden from him, hidden by her
outspread hands and her dishevelled hair.
“Shall I call Julia? she is in the room yonder.”
“Oh, no! I--I want to speak to you, Mr. Tredethlyn; stay just a little,
please. Ah! it is so hard, so cruel, but the last chance! In all the
world there is no one else who can save me--and my father--my poor,
miserable, bankrupt father!”
Francis looked at Miss Hillary in complete bewilderment. Her father--her
bankrupt father! Why, then she was still thinking of the scene that was
just finished, and the commercial troubles of Monsieur Deschappelles;
which character, by the way, had been enacted by a very young man of a
sickly cast of countenance, and an inclination to hang his head
dejectedly throughout the performance of the drama. It is a rule amongst
amateurs to assign the elderly and ineligible characters to the youngest
and meekest members of the company; whereby Monsieur Deschappelles is
usually represented as a young person of some nineteen summers, with
flour in his hair, dirty streaks, supposed to represent wrinkles, upon
his face, and a tendency to squeakiness in his voice.
“I am sure you are over-fatigued, over-excited by the play,” urged
Francis; “do let me call Julia.”
“No!” cried Miss Hillary, dropping her hands from before her face. “Oh,
Mr. Tredethlyn,” she exclaimed, almost passionately, “can’t you
understand--can’t you see that I am in earnest? Do you think that scene
just now would have made me cry as it did, if it had not reminded me of
my own sorrow? Mr. Tredethlyn--I--I know you are a good man, that you
would not be slow to do a kindness for anyone who needed your help; I
know that; and I--I thought I should have courage to speak to you, but
now the words won’t come--I----”
Her dry lips moved, but made no sound. She clasped her hands once more
before her face. Heaven knows how desperate was the effort that she
made. It is not such an easy matter to borrow twenty thousand pounds;
even though the borrower may be young and beautiful, and accustomed to
perpetual adoration.
“Miss Hillary, you speak of help--needing help--from _me_. For mercy’s
sake, tell me how I can help you. Do you think there is anything upon
earth that would give me such pride and delight as to be of service to
you?”
The enthusiasm of the moment lighted up Francis Tredethlyn’s countenance
like a sudden glow of summer sunshine. Maude uncovered her face and
looked at him, and saw at once that her cause was gained; her father’s
preserver was found. She had not counted in vain upon Francis
Tredethlyn.
“I want you to lend papa twenty thousand pounds,” she said; “I know that
he will repay you honourably. He has some difficulties--terrible
difficulties in his business,--but the loan of twenty thousand pounds
would smooth them all away. I know that you are very, very rich, Mr.
Tredethlyn, and that you can afford to lend such a sum of money, or I
should never have dared----”
“You would not have dared, Miss Hillary? Oh, can you doubt that I would
give the last sixpence I have in the world, the last drop of my
heart’s-blood, to save you from one pang? Twenty thousand pounds! Take
forty--fifty thousand--the utmost farthing of my fortune, if you will;
squander it--throw it into the river yonder, if the waste of it can give
you a moment’s pleasure. Oh, you don’t know, you don’t know how I love
you!”
He had been acting _Claude Melnotte_, and the intoxication of the sweet
sentimental poetry was strong upon him; beyond which it is just possible
that he may have taken a little more sparkling Moselle in the course of
his dramatic exertions than can safely be taken by a young man of
sanguine temperament. All prudence, all power of reticence, left him in
that moment, and he dropped on his knees at Miss Hillary’s feet, like a
lover in a stage-play. She was so beautiful--she seemed so far away from
him even now, when her distress had brought her a little nearer than of
old,--that this attitude of adoration seemed quite natural to him,
almost the only attitude in which he dared address her.
“Oh, if you knew how I love you,” he cried, passionately,--“if you could
only believe or understand! But I am so ignorant--so unworthy--so far
beneath you!”
Miss Hillary drew herself away from him with a gesture of mingled
surprise and disgust.
“You dare to talk to me like this, and you are the affianced husband of
my friend!” she cried. “O, Mr. Tredethlyn, you take a very mean
advantage of my father’s difficulties and my distress.”
“Yes!” answered Julia Desmond from the doorway. She had been standing on
the threshold for the last few moments, watching this interview behind
the scenes. “Yes! it is altogether mean and shameful, Maude Hillary. You
have taken a noble course, I think, when you fling your father’s debts
upon the man who was to be my husband, and coolly ask him for the
trifling loan of twenty thousand pounds.” She laughed bitterly as she
named the sum. “Twenty thousand pounds--and you ask your friend’s lover
to turn money-lender; and you bring your tears and hysterical sobs, and
a thousand pretty amateur dramatic devices to bear, in order to obtain
what you want, and all in the most childish innocence, of course. And
then you turn upon the man whom you have lured to your feet by a hundred
tricks and artifices, and make a charming show of surprise and
indignation. Ah! it is shameful, Maude Hillary--mean and cruel and
false; and bitter shame shall come to you for this night’s work.”
The Irishwoman was superb in her indignation. Those flashing eyes and
glittering teeth, hereditary in the race of the Desmonds, seemed to
light her face with an infernal kind of splendour: such a splendour had
many a fated victim seen upon the countenance of the duelling Irish
colonel, just before he fell prone on some lonely field beside the
Shannon. It was against Maude that the fuller fury of Julia Desmond’s
rage was directed,--against Maude, of whom she had always been jealous,
in whom she had continually found a triumphant rival. It was only after
that outburst of jealous rage that Julia turned upon her recreant lover.
Francis had risen from his knees, and stood a little way from the two
girls, with a dogged moodiness upon his face: he was sobered by Maude’s
indignation and Julia’s passion, and he was dimly aware that he had
acted like a scoundrel.
“As for you, Mr. Francis Tredethlyn,” Miss Desmond said presently, “I
suppose I have no need to tell you that all is over between us, and that
I bitterly repent the humiliation my own folly has brought upon me. I
should have known how much I risked when I stooped to regard a person
whose code of honour belongs to a different world from that in which I
have been reared. I suppose amongst _your_ people it is the fashion for
a man to pledge himself to one woman and then make love to another; but
such is _not_ the custom in the circles where the Desmonds have been
used to be welcome. I should have known what I had to expect when I came
into this house. I should have known what I had to anticipate when I
trusted in the truth and loyalty of a man who is not a gentleman.”
Throughout this speech Julia’s hands had been moving rapidly, but with
unfailing purpose, though they trembled a little all the while. One by
one she had unfastened the diamond ornaments that had glittered upon her
head and wrists, her throat and bosom; and now the jewels lay in a
little heap at the feet of Francis Tredethlyn. One by one she had thrown
them there during that passionate speech. She _could_ not act her play
out. She had been unable to support the character she had undertaken.
The fiery blood of the Ryan O’Brien Desmond had asserted itself in spite
of all the promptings of prudence, all the bitter schooling of
experience. It was very dreadful to be poor and dependent; it would have
been delightful to be mistress of thirty thousand a year: but Julia
Desmond, coming to the threshold of the study, had heard Maude’s appeal
for the twenty thousand pounds, and Francis Tredethlyn’s impassioned
avowal; and patience and policy had alike deserted her. Carried away by
the impulse of the moment, she renounced everything. At last Francis
Tredethlyn spoke for himself.
“I know that I have acted very badly,” he said. “I had no right to
speak; I never should have spoken but for that play. I think I must have
almost fancied myself that poor gardener’s son, who dared to worship the
brightest creature that ever crossed his pathway, and in an evil hour
told her of his madness. Ah, forgive me, Miss Hillary; do not hate or
despise me for what I said just now; let it pass like the play in which
we acted to-night. And you, Julia--Miss Desmond, I am not too proud to
ask your forgiveness for the wrong I have done you. I have been very
guilty, and I accept your reproaches in all their bitterness. But when I
promised to be your true and faithful husband, I only made a promise
that I am still prepared to fulfil. You will at least do me the justice
to remember that I did not profess any warmer feeling than admiration
and esteem.”
“Your justification is only a new insult, Mr. Tredethlyn,” Julia
answered, coldly. “I wish you good night.”
Her passion had been something terrible in its suppressed vehemence some
moments before; but she was quite calm now. She swept towards the door
leading out into the corridor; but as she passed the merchant’s
daughter, she stopped, just long enough to utter one brief sentence
close in the young lady’s ear.
“You shall suffer for this, Miss Hillary,” she said,--
She left the room; but Maude followed her, crying “Julia! Julia!”
She hurried along the corridor and up the staircase, following closely
upon Miss Desmond; but when she reached that young lady’s room, the door
was shut in her face, and only one answer came to her almost piteous
pleadings for admission,--
“I have nothing to say to you, Miss Hillary. I only regret that I must
pass one more night in this house.”
So Maude was obliged to go away in despair, and, meeting her maid at the
door of her own room, was informed that Mr. Hillary had been inquiring
for her, “ever so many times,” the maid said; “and I’ve been looking for
you everywhere, Miss, to know when you’d have your dress changed.”
Yes, there was to be more changing of dresses before Maude’s work was
done. She resigned herself with a sigh to the hands of the young person
who waited upon her; and then went down-stairs, gorgeous in pink silk
and crape puffings, and with a crown of dewy rosebuds on her head, to
receive the compliments and congratulations of her father’s friends, and
to act her part in that social drama which was quite as difficult a
performance as the “Lady of Lyons.”
Francis Tredethlyn sat quite alone in the little dimly-lighted study at
the end of the long, rambling mansion, while Mr. Hillary’s guests
finished the evening with a little dancing, a great deal of flirting,
and a perpetual sipping of sparkling wines, in out-of-the-way corridors
and lobbies, where there were hothouse flowers and low chintz-covered
ottomans, and an air of loneliness conducive to flirtation. Francis
Tredethlyn sat alone, with Julia’s diamonds still lying at his feet, and
brooded over his position. He had outraged Maude, whom he adored. He had
injured Julia, to whom he was bound by every sentiment of honour and
good faith. No words can express the bitterness of his remorse as he sat
pondering upon what he had done. “False to my cousin Susan, false to
Julia Desmond,” he thought; “nothing but mischief has come to me since I
inherited that miserable money. I have no right to be amongst these
people. I never should have come to this house, where _her_ presence has
always seemed to turn my brain.”
He looked down at the diamonds lying on the carpet, and smiled bitterly
as he remembered how much money they represented,--more than had been
spent on Susan Tredethlyn in all the girl’s joyless life--ten times more
than would have restored the young man’s father to solvency and comfort,
that time when his uncle refused him the loan of two hundred pounds.
He stopped and gathered together the fallen jewels. There was a
writing-table near him, with pens, and paper, and sealing-wax, and all
necessary implements. He selected a large sheet of paper, and packed the
diamonds into a parcel. But before sealing the packet he wrote a few
lines on the margin of the paper,--
“DEAR MISS DESMOND,
“I beg you to retain the enclosed. They were given to you as an
evidence of my esteem and admiration, as well as of my gratitude
for your indulgent kindness to one so much beneath you as
myself. I implore you to forget and pardon what has happened
to-night. I am too ignorant of the world in which you live to
know what I ought to do; and I can only assure you that I am
ready to submit myself entirely to your discretion, and still
hold myself bound by every word I said in this room on the day
when you promised to be my wife.
“Yours sincerely,
“FRANCIS TREDETHLYN.”
No one but the servants knew when or how Mr. Tredethlyn left the Cedars
on that first night of the New Year; but a little before one o’clock the
next day a letter was delivered to Mr. Hillary--a letter from the
assistant-manager of a certain bank in the City, informing the merchant
that a sum of twenty thousand pounds had that morning been placed to his
credit.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XVII.
SOMETHING LIKE FRIENDSHIP.
Maude Hillary did not rise very early after that New Year’s
entertainment at the Cedars; painful emotions, troubles, doubts, and
perplexities, that had been unknown to her through all her previous
lifetime, had crowded suddenly upon her within the last few weeks, and
it was scarcely strange if she well-nigh fainted under the burden. She
slept for some hours on that first night of the year,--slept the
feverish, heavy slumber that waits upon trouble of mind and exhaustion
of body. The winter sun shone with a chill brightness between the
rose-coloured draperies of her window when she awoke from a painful
dream to a dim sense of actual trouble that was still more painful. She
remembered the scene of the previous night, her own desperate appeal for
help, Francis Tredethlyn’s avowal, and Julia’s indignation. She
remembered all this with a burning sense of shame, and with a tender and
pitying regret for Julia’s wrongs.
“And he did not love her!” she thought, “when I fancied they were so
happy and united, so much what lovers ought to be; it was all false,
after all, and he had deceived her. But why? What motive could he have
for doing her so great a wrong?”
Miss Hillary pondered upon this mystery while she dressed,--unaided this
morning, for she did not care to endure her maid’s sympathetic remarks
upon her pale face and heavy eyes; unaided, for how soon that pretty
Twickenham paradise, with all its dependencies, might pass away from
her, unsubstantial as the fairy palace in which Princess Balroubadour
floated away to Africa! Maude put on her plainest morning dress, and
went straight to Julia’s room, intending to make her peace with that
young lady, at any cost of self-humiliation. No base thought of Julia’s
obligations, no remembrance of the favours that had been heaped upon the
Irish girl in that hospitable habitation, had any place in Maude
Hillary’s mind. She thought of her friend as tenderly as she might have
thought of an only sister, and she remembered nothing except the great
wrong that had been done to Julia by the defection of her lover. The
breach between them was not to be narrowed. When Maude entered her
friend’s bedroom, she only found an empty and desolate-looking
apartment, in which open wardrobes and drawers, and a dressing-table,
cleared of all its pretty frivolities, bore witness to the angry Julia’s
departure.
Miss Hillary’s maid came running along the corridor, while her mistress
stood amazed in Miss Desmond’s deserted chamber.
“Oh, Miss,” cried the girl, “to think as you should get up and dress
yourself without a bit of help, while I’ve been waiting and listening
for the bell these last two hours! Miss Desmond, she have gone, Miss,
above an hour ago, and have took all her boxes in a fly to the station,
but wouldn’t have none of the servants to go with her; and Oh, Miss, she
looked as white as that toilet-cover.”
That was all Maude could hear of her sometime friend’s abrupt departure
from that pleasant dwelling-place, in which she had enjoyed such a
luxurious home. This was all that the servants could tell their young
mistress about the splendid Julia; but in the study, where the scene of
the previous night had been enacted, Maude found a letter directed to
herself, in Miss Desmond’s handwriting. It was a very brief missive;
almost such a one as an English Elizabeth, or a Russian Catherine, might
have written.
“For your father’s hospitality,” wrote Miss Desmond, “I shall always
remain grateful, and shall be sorry to hear of any evil that may befall
him. The debt I owe to _you_ I shall also know how to remember, and
shall wait the time and opportunity for its repayment.--J. D.”
Maude sat for some time musing sorrowfully upon this oracular epistle.
She was not in any wise terrified by her friend’s threats; she was only
sorry for Julia’s disappointment.
“She must have loved Francis Tredethlyn very dearly,” Miss Hillary
thought, sorrowfully, “or she would never feel his conduct so deeply.
And yet I have often fancied that she spoke of him coldly, almost
contemptuously.”
Poor Maude Hillary’s lessons in the mysteries of every-day life had only
just begun; she had yet to learn that there are other disappointments
than those which wait upon true love, other pains and sorrows than those
which have their root in the heart; and that there are such things as
marrying and giving in marriage for the love of thirty thousand a year.
She spent a weary day in the pleasant drawing-room, where the red glow
of a great fire illuminated as much prettiness in the way of china, and
Parian, and bronze, and ormolu, and enamel, as would have stocked a
_bric-à-brac_ shop in Wardour Street. She spent a tiresome day, that
seemed interminably long, lying on a low sofa near the fire, thinking of
her father’s troubles and Julia’s desertion. She thought also of that
cruel scene, in which she had seemed to play so contemptible a part.
What bitter humiliation it was to look back upon, now that the mad
impulse of the moment, the desperate courage that had made her snatch at
_any_ chance of help for her father, had altogether passed away! How
mean and pitiful the whole business seemed now to her calmer judgment,
looked upon in the cold light of common, sense! A borrower, a beggar
almost, a miserable suppliant to her friend’s affianced husband. What
wonder that Francis Tredethlyn had basely taken advantage of that false
position, to avow a passion whose least expression was an insult to her
on the lips of Julia Desmond’s lover? And then what wasted humiliation,
what unnecessary shame; for had not she turned upon him and upbraided
him in the next moment, forgetful of her father’s desperate need!
Such thoughts as these were scarcely pleasant company all through that
brief January day, which seemed so long to Maude Hillary. The slow hours
crept on, and she still lay tossing restlessly on the sofa, which
offered all that upholstery can offer for the consolation of a troubled
mind. A servant brought lamps, and crept from window to window, drawing
the curtains as stealthily as a burglar would have cut a square out of
the iron door of Mr. Hillary’s plate-room. The first dinner-bell rang
out in the old-fashioned cupola upon the roof, and informed all
Twickenham that it was time for the people at the Cedars to array
themselves for the evening meal: but Maude still lay upon the sofa,
hiding her flushed face in the pillows, and trying to quiet the
throbbing in her burning head. What did it matter? The poor
inexperienced girl broke down all at once in her social comedy. She
could act the wearisome play no longer; she wanted to give up all her
share in this world, and to go to bed and lie there quietly until she
died. All the common business of life seemed unutterably loathsome to
her,--the dressing and dining, the simpering small-talk, the finery of a
grand house no longer honestly maintained. Oh, that it could all be
swept away like the vision engendered out of some troubled slumber;
giving place to a suburban cottage and a life of decent toil!
“I have seen girls--well-bred, good-looking girls, trudging in the muddy
London streets, with music portfolios in their arms, while I have been
out shopping in my carriage,” she thought. “Oh, if I could only be like
one of these, and work for papa, and see him happy, smiling at me across
our little table, as I gave him his dinner, and not brooding as he does
now, hour after hour, hour after hour, in this grand drawing-room, with
the same settled look of trouble on his face!”
It was not only of late that Maude had watched her father anxiously and
sadly. Very often during the year just passed, and even in the year
preceding that, the girl had been alarmed by Lionel Hillary’s moody
looks and long gloomy reveries, out of which it was his wont to rouse
himself in a mechanical kind of way when strangers were present. But the
merchant always gave the same explanation of his sombre looks. Those
headaches, those constitutional headaches, which came upon him
constantly through the fatigue and worry of business--those terrible
headaches made an excuse for everything, and Maude’s fears about her
father related solely to his health. How should she understand the
dismal diagnosis of commercial disease? How should she imagine that
there was any limit to the fairy purse of Fortunatus--any chance of a
blight in Aladdin’s orchard of jewelled fruits?
The second dinner-bell rang, and there was no sign of the merchant’s
return. It had been a common thing lately for Lionel Hillary to keep his
cook in a fever of vexation over the hot plates and furnaces where the
viands for the diurnal banquet simmered and frizzled in their copper
receptacles. Maude felt no special alarm about her father. Why should he
hurry home to lengthen the long evening of brooding thought and care?
Why should she wish him home, when, out of all the depth of her love and
devotion, she could not conjure one word of comfort wherewith to greet
him?
She was thinking this when the door was opened suddenly by an eager
hand, and Mr. Hillary came into the room.
His daughter rose from the sofa, startled by the suddenness of his
entrance. It is a small action, that of opening a door, and entering a
room; but there was as great a change in Mr. Hillary’s performance of
it, as if twenty years had suddenly been lifted from his life.
“My darling!” he cried, taking his daughter in his arms, “it is you whom
I have to thank. It was your doing, was it not?”
“What, papa?”
“The money--the twenty thousand pounds.”
“Twenty thousand pounds!”
She thought the burning pain in her head had engendered some sudden
delirium. She could not believe that this was her father’s face, lighted
by a hopeful smile, such as she had not seen upon it during the last
three years.
“What twenty thousand pounds, papa?”
“The sum that has been placed to my credit to-day anonymously. The bank
people refused to tell me the name of my benefactor. I look to you,
Maude, to solve the mystery. There is only one man whom I know of, rich
enough to advance such a sum of money--young enough to do it in so
Utopian a manner. There is only one man, Maude, and his name is Francis
Tredethlyn. Tell me, my dear, have I guessed rightly?”
“You have, papa. Yes, I am sure you have. Poor fellow! and I was so
angry with him last night. It was very good of him to do this, papa.”
“Good of him!” cried the merchant--“good of him to lend twenty thousand
pounds, without a halfpennyworth of security! Upon my word, Maude, it
_is_ good; and I can assure you it’s a kind of goodness that is very
uncommon in the City.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XVIII.
POOR FRANCIS.
From the second day of the New Year things went pleasantly enough in the
Twickenham household. How could Maude do otherwise than rejoice in the
salvation of her father’s honour--to say nothing of his commercial
prosperity--even though that salvation had been obtained by a great
humiliation on her own part? She would have borne that humiliation very
willingly, and would have freely acknowledged her obligation to Francis
Tredethlyn, could she have seen Julia Desmond reconciled to her lover.
But the separation between these two, which had arisen out of the scene
on New Year’s night, was a perpetual reproach to Maude Hillary.
She was not able to be quite happy, therefore, even though such a
terrible burden had been lifted from her,--even though she saw the dark
cloud swept away from her father’s face. Her girlish frivolity had
departed from her for ever on that terrible night in her father’s study
at Brighton; and there was a womanly softness, a pensive tenderness in
her manner now, that made her even more bewitching than of old. Her
affection for her father--always the ruling passion of her simple
mind--had been intensified by that fiery ordeal through which she had so
lately passed; and there was something very beautiful in the union which
now existed between the father and daughter. Mr. Hillary had been
surprised into confidences that made a new tie between himself and his
child. He could never again entirely withheld his secrets from that
tender friend and consoler. He could never again think of her as a
beautiful, frivolous creature, only intended to wear expensive dresses
and float about in graceful attitudes amongst the costly _bric-à-brac_
of a fashionable drawing-room. He had learned to trust his child; and
poor Maude applied herself diligently to the study of the customs and
dealings common in that mysterious region known to her as the City. She
tried to understand her father’s position--for she was tormented by a
feverish anxiety as to the repayment of Francis Tredethlyn’s twenty
thousand pounds; but the complications of an Australian merchant’s
trade, as affected by wars, and rumours of wars, by alterations in the
rate of discount and the price of Consols, were a little beyond Miss
Hillary’s comprehension, and she was fain to give up the attempt in
despair, and to accept any statement which her father cared to make to
her respecting the altered aspect of his affairs.
There was less company at the Cedars than usual during the bleak
early months of the year. Mr. Hillary worked very sedulously in the
City during this time, and did not care to fill his house with
frivolous young idlers or ponderous City-bred matrons and their
fashionably-educated daughters. The recklessness engendered by the
contemplation of inevitable ruin had given place to the careful
dealing of a man who has a difficult but not impossible task
allotted to him. You can scarcely expect the daughters of King
Danäus to labour very arduously in the filling of those buckets
which they _know_ will not hold water; but if the buckets are only
thin at the bottom, and _may_ possibly carry their contents safely
to the well, it is worth while to work conscientiously.
Francis Tredethlyn’s twenty thousand pounds had done wonders for Lionel
Hillary; but the dry-rot had been for a long time at work in that
stately ship of which the merchant was captain, and the successful
navigation of the vessel, amidst all the rocks and shoals and tempests
of the commercial ocean, was by no means an easy duty.
But Mr. Hillary was sanguine, and his daughter saw the new hopefulness
and brightness of his face, and was very nearly happy. She was not quite
happy, for Harcourt Lowther’s letters grew more despondent and
complaining by every mail. He reproached Maude Hillary for her
prosperity and her indifference; she must be indifferent, he argued, or
she would have succeeded ere this in obtaining her father’s consent to
her marriage with the penniless officer. “There are girls who will go
through fire and water for the man they love,” he wrote in an epistle
that was half filled with fierce reproaches. “I have seen the power of a
woman’s devotion; but then _that_ woman was only a poor simple creature,
and not the daughter of a millionaire. I cannot believe that you could
fail to influence your father, if you really cared to do so. If you
loved me, Maude, this business would have been settled long ago.”
Did she love him? That was a question which she had never set herself to
answer. Had they not engaged themselves to each other in the prettiest
and most sentimental fashion, like a modern Master of Ravenswood and
Lucy Ashton? Maude took the fact of her love for granted. All the
sweetest and tenderest dreams of her life were mingled with the memory
of Harcourt Lowther. He was so superior to all the other men who had
paid her their homage; and it may be that his contemptuous bearing
towards those other men had been a part of the fascination of his
manner. He had affected that modern Edgar Ravenswood tone--that elegant
Timon of Athens-ism--which is so intensely charming in the eyes of a
very young woman, however spurious it may be. And with all this, he had
been so devoted, so delightfully exacting, so deliciously jealous! Maude
looked back to the one sentimental period of her life, and saw Harcourt
Lowther’s image radiant in all the light of her own youthful fancies. So
the worshipper in a village chapel sees some poor painted wooden figure
of a saint glorified by the glitter of tapers, the brightness of flowers
and draperies and decorations. How was she to separate the lamps and the
flowers about the shrine from the image which they adorned? How was she
to discover the paltry nature of that clay out of which the graceful
figure was fashioned? Harcourt Lowther represented to her all that was
brightest and best in her early girlhood; and sitting alone, through
long and thoughtful hours, in the empty rooms at the Cedars, Maude
Hillary brooded very sadly upon the only love-story of her life.
She had ventured to speak of Harcourt to her father once since the
beginning of the year; but her timid pleading had been met by a cruel
repulse.
“Understand me at once and for ever, Maude,” Lionel Hillary said,
sternly; “such a marriage as that can never be. If you were the great
heiress people think you, I might gratify this whim, as I have gratified
other fancies, foolish and extravagant in their way. But the road I am
now treading is by no means too secure under my feet, and I cannot
afford to see my only child the wife of a penniless adventurer. I want
to see you happy, Maude, but not after a sentimental girl’s notion of
happiness. I know what all those pretty theories about a suburban
cottage and poverty come to when they are put into practice. I have seen
the slipshod maid-of-all-work, and the miserable dinners, and the
Kidderminster carpets, and stale bread and rank butter, that belong to
love in a cottage. And more than this, Maude, I know that Harcourt
Lowther is the very last man to ally himself to a dowerless wife.”
“Ah, how little you know him!” Maude murmured, softly. She thought she
knew her lover so well herself, and fancied him the most generous and
devoted of men because he had given her a few half-guinea bouquets,
purchased on credit from a confiding florist. “Ah, dear papa, how little
you know him! He is always reproaching me with my fortune, and lamenting
the gulf it has made between us. Let me tell him of your difficulties;
let me tell him that I am no longer a millionaire’s daughter, that I am
free to marry the man I love. Ah, let me tell him----”
“Not a word, Maude,” answered Lionel Hillary--“not a word to that man,
if you have any love or respect for your father. Remember that I have
trusted you with secrets that a man seldom confides to his daughter.”
“And your confidence shall be sacred, papa,” Miss Hillary replied,
submissively. And thus ended her intercession in favour of Harcourt
Lowther.
She was fain to be contented, however, remembering the great trouble
which had been so near her, and which a merciful hand had lifted away.
She was fain to remember, shudderingly, the feverish horror of that
night at Brighton, and to think gratefully of Francis Tredethlyn, to
whom she owed her father’s rescue. She was grateful to him; but she
could not put entirely away from her the sense of shame left by that
scene in the study, and Julia Desmond’s passionate reproaches. She could
not forget that it was for her sake Francis Tredethlyn had helped her
father, and that the burden of a great obligation must rest upon her
shoulders until that loan of twenty thousand pounds was repaid. Poor
Maude’s unbusiness-like mind entirely ignored any such thing as interest
for Mr. Tredethlyn’s money. She only thought of the loan itself, and the
question of its repayment was perpetually in her mind. Had she not been
the suppliant, at whose suit the money had been lent? and was she not in
a manner the actual debtor?
Things were much better in the City, her father told her; but upon two
or three occasions when she had ventured to hint her anxiety respecting
the early repayment of Francis Tredethlyn’s money, the merchant’s
answers had filled her mind with vague disquietude. There was an
indifference in Mr. Hillary’s manner that alarmed Maude’s keen sense of
right and honour.
“Tredethlyn is too well off to want his money in any desperate hurry, my
dear,” he said; “he is not likely to become a very pressing creditor.”
The hedgerows about Isleworth and Twickenham were green, with their
earliest buds before Francis Tredethlyn came again to the Cedars. Mr.
Hillary had called upon the young man at his hotel several times before
he succeeded in seeing him, and had only with great difficulty wrung
from him an admission of the fact that he was the anonymous lender of
the twenty thousand pounds that had saved the merchant from ruin and
disgrace.
“My dear Tredethlyn, why should you insist upon any disguise?” Mr.
Hillary said, with a pleasant ease that not every man could have
maintained in such a position as that in which the merchant found
himself with regard to this simple-minded, country-bred Crœsus. “Is it
not enough to have been the most generous of men, without trying to
carry generosity to the verge of Quixotism? How can I doubt the identity
of my preserver? I know that Maude betrayed my necessities to you, under
the excitement of those unfortunate theatricals, and I know that loans
of twenty thousand pounds do _not_ drop from the skies. My dear fellow,
I am most heartily thankful to you for what you have done. It was a very
noble thing to do, an action that any man might be proud of doing. If I
had ever doubted your having good blood in your veins, your conduct in
this one matter would have settled my doubts. But I never did doubt it,
my dear Tredethlyn. I have recognized you from the first as a gentleman;
not by the right of an accidental thirty thousand a year, scraped out of
all manner of commercial gutters by a miserly uncle; but by virtue of
some of the best blood in the West of England.”
And then Mr. Hillary stretched out both his hands, and shook those of
Francis Tredethlyn in his vigorous grasp; and altogether the interview
could scarcely have been more entirely satisfactory had the merchant
written a cheque for the twenty thousand pounds on the spot. Indeed, to
Francis any immediate repayment of that money would have been a grievous
mortification. Was it not delightful to him to remember that he had been
of service to _her_ father? Was not the money advanced to the merchant a
kind of link between Maude and the man who loved her so dearly and so
hopelessly,--only a very sordid, earthy link; but better than none?
“I offended her very much that night,” Francis thought; “but perhaps she
will forgive me, and remember me kindly, when she thinks that I have
been useful to her father.” But when Mr. Hillary begged Francis to renew
his visits to Twickenham, the young man resisted those friendly
invitations as obstinately as if the Cedars had been the most obnoxious
place upon earth. He could not muster up courage to encounter Maude
Hillary after that scene in the little study. What if he had offended
too deeply for forgiveness? What if she slew him with a frozen glance
from her lovely eyes? Again and again in his lonely rides, emboldened by
the dusky twilight of the early spring evenings, he had ventured to
haunt the neighbourhood of the old brick-built mansion by the river; but
he could not bring himself to go any nearer to the shrine of his
divinity; and he made all manner of lame excuses in answer to Mr.
Hillary’s cordial invitations.
He was only a clod; only an uneducated rustic, newly cast upon a strange
world, open to all the pleasant snares which are laid for the
simple-minded possessor of thirty thousand a year. Heaven only knows the
perils and temptations into which some young men would have fallen under
similar circumstances. It is something in Francis Tredethlyn’s favour
that his worst mistake was to fall desperately in love with Maude
Hillary, and wear his horse’s shoes out in disconsolate rides about the
twilit lanes and roads in the neighbourhood of her dwelling-place.
And in the mean time Messrs. Kursdale and Scardon were supposed to be
busily employed in their search for the missing girl, who might or might
not have any right to another name than that of Susan Tredethlyn. Very
little came of the lawyers’ endeavours. Several advertisements had been
inserted in the “Times;” but it is to be feared that the lost and
missing advertised for in those columns are too often wanderers in a
weary region, far removed from that comfortable sphere of life in which
the morning papers are punctually delivered to enliven the
breakfast-table. No reply came to any of those mysteriously-worded
appeals to Francis Tredethlyn’s cousin which were concocted by the young
man and his legal advisers; and the image of the friendless girl grew
paler and fainter day by day in the mind of Maude Hillary’s adorer.
At last Fortune--who will generally do anything in the world for us, if
we have patience enough to wait her own time for doing it--brought about
the result which Francis Tredethlyn had so obstinately avoided, yet so
fondly desired. Lounging against the rails one brilliant April day at
the corner opposite Apsley House, Francis saw Maude Hillary’s carriage
drive into the Park.
Yes, there she was, with her sunny hair framed in spring blossoms and
white areophane. The young man seemed to behold the vision of an angel
in a Parisian bonnet, and half wondered if the folds of her white
burnous were not a pair of downy pinions floating away from her divine
shoulders. He grew very red and uncomfortable, and in another moment
would have yielded to the impulse that prompted him to seek refuge in
flight; but before he could do so, the carriage was close to the rails,
Maude Hillary had recognized him, and had told the coachman to stop.
She was not offended with him, then; she forgave him, and thought of him
kindly. His heart swelled with a rapture that was almost overpowering.
Ah! _this_ was love. How different from that placid sense of affection
with which he had regarded his cousin, Susy! how much more delicious!
how infinitely more painful!
“I have wanted so much to see you, Mr. Tredethlyn,” Maude said, after
shaking hands with her bewildered adorer; “why have you never been to
Twickenham?”
“I--I--don’t like--I thought you were angry with me,” stammered Francis,
very awkwardly. Ah, how sad it is that the presence of those we love
best, and in whose eyes we would most desire to appear at an advantage,
should entail upon us the annihilation of anything like ease or grace of
manner! Mr. Tredethlyn felt himself becoming purple and apoplectic,
under the influence of that seraphic creature, whose image had filled
his mind unceasingly for the last six months.
“Angry with you!” exclaimed Maude; “how should I be otherwise than
grateful to you, when I remember how good you have been to papa? Believe
me, Mr. Tredethlyn, I am not too proud to own the extent of our
obligation. I thank you most sincerely. You can never know how grateful
I am for the service you have rendered my dear father.”
She bent her head, and the spring-flowers in her bonnet were very near
him as she said this in a low, earnest voice. But in the next moment the
memory of that uncomfortable scene in the study flashed back upon her,
and she felt that she must always be more or less in a false position
with regard to Francis Tredethlyn. She made a little effort to set
herself right before she parted from him.
“You have seen Julia; you and she are reconciled, I hope. Mr.
Tredethlyn?”
“No; indeed, I have never heard from her since--since I left the Cedars.
Your papa told me that she----Oh, Miss Hillary, I think it was better
that we should part. I don’t think that we had either of us ever really
cared for each other. It was better that it should end as it did.”
“But I would give so much to find Julia, to hear where she is.”
Francis Tredethlyn shook his head hopelessly. He had a vague idea that
he had not done his very uttermost in his search for his cousin Susan,
and he recoiled with terror from the idea of having to engage in a hunt
for Miss Desmond.
“Good-bye, Mr. Tredethlyn; I hope that all will come right, after all;
and I hope that you will believe I am grateful for your goodness to my
father.”
She held out her hand, and the Cornishman took it in his own with almost
as reverential a touch as if it had been some relic handed to him from
an altar. The carriage drove off immediately after this, and Francis saw
that seraphic bonnet with the spring-blossoms melt away and lose itself
among mundane bonnets. He lingered at the rails till the carriage came
back again, and still lingered after that, thinking that Miss Hillary’s
equipage would again return to Hyde-Park Corner; but after out-watching
all the loungers by the rails, and seeing the last of the carriages
leaving the Ladies’ Mile, he was fain to go home, resigned to the
obvious fact that Maude Hillary had left the Park by the Kensington
gates on her homeward route.
He went home, but not disconsolate. Had he not seen and spoken with that
divinity before whom he was the simplest worshipper who ever bowed
before any earthly shrine? Was he not assured of her forgiveness? nay,
even of her gratitude? Her gratitude--Maude Hillary’s gratitude, in
exchange for that vile dross which he had ever held so lightly. Money
was indeed good for something, if it could buy the rapture of that
little interview across the park-rail, in which Francis had played so
very poor a part. He went home, and carried Maude Hillary’s image with
him, and walked up and down his big sitting-room in the Covent Garden
Hotel, smoking a cigar and thinking of the woman he loved: he thought of
her quite as hopelessly as ever _Claude Melnotte_ could have thought of
_Pauline_ before _Beauseant’s_ diabolical suggestions had prompted him
to his treacherous wooing. He thought of her as innocently as a
schoolboy thinks of the stage fairy-queen in a Christmas pantomime, and
no ambitious or selfish dream had any abode in his mind; only when a
brief note reached him from Lionel Hillary, renewing the old
unceremonious invitation to the Cedars, poor Francis could no longer
resist the voice of the charmer, but was fain to pack his portmanteau
and drive down to the merchant’s office, whence Mr. Hillary was to
convey him in the mail phaeton to Twickenham. She was not angry with
him, and he might bask in the sunshine of her presence! For a little
while he might enjoy the dangerous delight, and then the officer to whom
she was betrothed would come back to claim her, and there would be a
wedding at the old church by the Thames; and he, Francis, would see his
divinity radiant in bridal robes and crowned with orange-flowers before
he departed for ever into the outer darkness where she was not.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XIX.
MR. HILLARY SPEAKS HIS MIND.
After that meeting in Hyde Park, Francis Tredethlyn came very often to
the Cedars; so often, as to engender a vague uneasiness in Miss
Hillary’s mind. She knew that he loved her. If that sudden declaration
in the study had never occurred to reveal the fact, Maude must have been
something less than a woman had she been blind to a devotion that was
made manifest by every look and tone of her adorer. She knew that he
loved her, and that he had done battle with his love in order that she
might be happily ignorant of the pangs that tormented his simple heart.
The highly educated girl was able to read the innermost secrets of that
honest uncultivated mind, and was fain to pity Francis Tredethlyn’s
wasted suffering. Alas! had she not indeed traded upon his devotion, and
obtained her father’s safety at the expense of her own honour?
Such thoughts as these tormented Miss Hillary perpetually now that
Francis spent so much of his life at Twickenham. She perceived with
inexpressible pain that her father encouraged the young man’s
visits,--her father, who could not surely shut his eyes to the real
state of the Cornishman’s feelings; yet who knew of her engagement to
Harcourt Lowther. She did not know that Julia Desmond had taken good
care to inform Francis of that engagement, and that the young man came
knowingly to his delicious torture. She did not know this; and all that
womanly compassion which was natural to her, that pitying tenderness
which showed itself in the injudicious relief of barefaced tramps and
vagabonds about the Twickenham lanes, and the pampering of troublesome
pet dogs and canary birds--all her womanly pity, I say, was aroused by
the thought that she was loved, and loved in vain, by an honest and
generous heart.
Thus it came to pass that she could no longer endure the course which
events were taking, and she determined upon speaking to her father. They
had dined alone one bright June evening: they were not often thus
together now, for Mr. Hillary had fallen into his old habit of bringing
visitors from London, and the ponderous matrons and croquet-playing
young ladies inflicted a good deal of their company upon Maude. They had
dined alone, and Miss Hillary seized the opportunity of speaking to her
father upon that one subject which had so long occupied her thoughts.
“Mr. Tredethlyn comes here very often, papa,” she said, breaking ground
very gently.
Lionel Hillary filled his glass, retiring an it were behind the
claret-jug, from which comfortable shelter he replied to his daughter’s
remark,--
“Often?--yes--I suppose he does spend a good deal of his time here. I am
glad that he should do so; he is an excellent young man, a noble-hearted
young fellow--the best friend I have in the world.”
Mr. Hillary was a long time filling that one glass of claret, and his
face was quite hidden by the crystal jug.
“Yes, papa, he is very good; but do you think it is quite right--quite
wise to invite him so often?”
“Right--wise?” cried Mr. Hillary; “what, in the name of all that’s
absurd, can you mean by talking of the right or wisdom of an invitation
to dinner? The young man likes to come here, and I like the young man,
and like to see him here. That is about all that can be said upon the
subject.”
Maude was silent for some moments. It was very difficult to discuss this
question with her father, but she had grown familiar with difficulties
within the past few months, and was no longer the frivolous girl who had
known no loftier cause of anxiety than the uncertain health of her Skye
terrier. She returned to the charge presently.
“Dear papa, I am sorry to worry you about this business,” she said,
gently, “but there are such peculiar circumstances in our acquaintance
with Mr. Tredethlyn--we are under so deep an obligation to him, and----”
“And on that account we ought to shut our doors in his face, I suppose!”
exclaimed Mr. Hillary, with some show of impatience. “My dear Maude,
what mare’s-nest have you lighted upon?”
“It is so difficult for me to explain myself, papa: you can never
imagine how difficult. But I think you ought to understand what I mean.
When Julia was here, Mr. Tredethlyn’s visits were quite natural, and I
was always glad to see him; but it was my application to him for the
loan of that money which resulted in the breaking of Julia’s engagement.
I cannot forget that night, papa; nothing but desperation would have
prompted me to appeal to Francis Tredethlyn; and now that we are under
this great obligation to him, I feel that we are bound to him by a kind
of duty. We have, at least, no right to deceive him.”
“Deceive him! Who does deceive him?”
“Willingly, no one. But he may deceive himself, papa. You force me to
speak very plainly. Upon the night on which I appealed to him for that
loan, he told me that he loved me, even though he was then engaged to
Julia. There was something in his manner that convinced me of his
sincerity, though I was shocked at the want of honour involved in such a
declaration. But now that his engagement to Julia has been broken off,
indirectly through my agency, he may think it likely that----”
“He may think it likely that you would be wise enough to accept one of
the best fellows that ever lived for your husband. Is that what you
mean, Maude?”
“Papa!”
“Oh, my dear, I have no doubt you think me a cruel father, because I
venture to make such a suggestion. But surely, Maude, you cannot have
been blind to this young man’s devotion. From the very first it has been
obvious to anyone gifted with the smallest power of perception. Julia
Desmond contrived, by her consummate artifice, to inveigle the poor
fellow into a false position; but in spite even of that foolish
engagement, he has been devoted to you, Maude, from the first. I have
seen it, and have counted, Heaven knows how fully, upon a marriage
between you and him.”
“You have done this, papa, and yet you knew all about Harcourt,”
exclaimed Maude, reproachfully.
“I knew that you were a foolishly sentimental girl, ready to believe in
any yellow-whiskered young Admirable Crichton, who could make pretty
speeches, and criticise the newest Italian opera, or Tennyson’s last
poem. But I knew something more than this, Maude; I knew the state of my
own affairs, and that my only hope for you lay in a wealthy marriage.”
“And you thought that I would marry for money--you could think so meanly
of me, papa!”
“I thought that you were a sensible, high-spirited girl, and that when
you came to know the desperation of the case, you would show yourself of
the true metal--as you did that night at Brighton; as you did when you
asked Tredethlyn for the loan which saved me from ruin.”
Lionel Hillary stretched out his hand as he spoke, and grasped that of
his daughter. In the next minute she was by his side, bending over him
and caressing him. Only lately it had begun to dawn dimly upon Maude
Hillary, that perhaps this father, whom she loved so dearly, was not the
noblest and most honourable of men: but if any such knowledge had come
to her, it had only intensified the tenderness with which, from her
earliest childhood, she had regarded that indulgent father. The
experience of sorrow had transformed and exalted her nature; and she was
able to look upon Lionel Hillary’s weaknesses with pitying regret,
rather than with any feeling of contempt or indignation.
“Dear papa,” she said, very gravely, “you and I love each other so
dearly, that there should be no possibility of any misunderstanding
between us. I can never marry Mr. Tredethlyn; I know that he is good and
generous-minded and simple-hearted; I feel the extent of our obligation
to him, but I can never be his wife. It is for this reason that I am
fearful lest any false impression may arise in his mind. Pray, dear
papa, take this into consideration, and do not let him come here so
often--at any rate, not until you have been able to repay him his money,
not until the burden of this great obligation has been removed from us.”
Lionel Hillary laughed aloud.
“Not until the money has been paid! I’m afraid, in that case, Tredethlyn
will stop away from this house for a long time to come.”
“A long time, papa! But you told me you would be able to repay the
twenty thousand pounds,” said Maude, turning very pale.
“And I dare say I shall be able to pay the money some day. Such a loan
as that is not repaid in a few months, Maude. How should you understand
these matters? The twenty thousand pounds went to fill a yawning gulf in
my business, and it would be about as easy for me to get the same amount
of money back out of that gulf as it would for a single diver to bring
up the treasures of a sunken argosy.”
Maude sighed wearily. It seemed as if a kind of net had been woven round
her, and that she suddenly found herself in the centre of it, unable to
move.
“Papa,” she cried, “you don’t mean that Mr. Tredethlyn’s money is lost?”
“Lost! No, child; but it may be a very long time before I shall be able
to pay him. If you were not so foolish as to throw away one of the
noblest hearts in Christendom--to say nothing of the fortune that goes
along with it--there would be very little need for me to worry myself
about this money.”
“Oh, I understand, papa. If I were Mr. Tredethlyn’s wife, you would not
be obliged to pay the twenty thousand pounds,” said Maude, very slowly.
“I should not be tormented about it as I am now. Say no more, my dear;
you don’t understand these things, and you drive me very nearly mad with
your questions about my affairs.”
“Forgive me, papa. No, I don’t understand--I can’t understand all at
once; it seems so strange to me.”
She bent her head and kissed her father on the forehead, and then went
quietly out of the room; leaving him alone in the still summer twilight,
with a belated wasp buzzing feebly amongst the fruit and flowers on the
table. Maude went to her own room, and sitting there in the dusk, shed
some of the bitterest tears that had ever fallen from her eyes. The
discovery of her father’s views with regard to her had humiliated her to
the very dust. The idea that Francis Tredethlyn’s loan would never be
repaid was torture to her keen sense of honour; torture which was
rendered still more poignant by the recollection of her own part in the
transaction. Would he ever be paid? Would that money, for the loan of
which--and never more than the loan--she had supplicated her friend’s
betrothed husband, would that money ever be returned to the generous
young man who had so freely lent it? Her father had said that it would
in due course; but there was something in his manner that had
neutralized the effect of his words. To Maude Hillary’s mind this debt
was a very sacred one, a debt which _must_ be repaid, and for which she
herself was responsible. Twenty thousand pounds;--all the faculties of
her brain seemed to swim in a great sea of confusion as she thought of
that terrible sum--twenty thousand pounds, which she was bound to see
duly paid; and she was no longer an heiress, to whom money was dross.
She was a penniless, helpless girl: worse off than other penniless girls
by reason of her inexperience of poverty.
She thought of Harcourt Lowther; and his image seemed to shine upon her
across a wilderness of troubles; a bright and pleasant thing to look at,
but with no promise of help, no inspiration of hope, no pledge of
comfort in its brightness.
“Perhaps papa is right, after all,” she thought, “and Harcourt would
scarcely care to burden himself with a penniless wife.”
She was ashamed of this brief treason against her lover, almost as soon
as the thought had shaped itself; only in her despair it seemed to her
as if there could be no security of any happiness upon this earth.
“I will tell Francis Tredethlyn the truth about myself,” she thought;
“he shall not be deceived as to anything in which I am concerned. He
shall know of my engagement to Harcourt.”
Maude did not go downstairs again that night, nor did Mr. Hillary send
for her, as it was his wont to do when she was long away from him. It
may be that he scarcely cared to encounter his daughter after that
conversation in the dining-room, which had been far from pleasant to
him. He was not a father of Mr. Capulet’s class, who could order his
daughter to marry the County Paris at a few days’ notice; or in the
event of her refusal, bid her rot in the streets of Verona. But from the
very first he had been bent upon bringing about a union between Francis
and Maude, and he brooded moodily over the girl’s resolute rejection of
any such alliance.
“What would become of her if I were to die to-morrow?” he thought; “and
what is to become of my business if I fail to secure a rich partner?”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XX.
AN EXPLANATION.
Francis Tredethlyn, now so frequent a visitor at the Cedars, happened to
present himself there upon the day after that on which Maude had come to
an understanding with her father. The young man rode down to Twickenham
in the afternoon, and found Miss Hillary occupied with two
croquet-playing young ladies and a croquet-playing young gentleman,
whose manners and opinions were of the same insipidly flaxen hue as
their hair and eyebrows.
There was a tired look in Maude’s face that afternoon, which was very
perceptible to Francis Tredethlyn, although quite invisible to the
neutral-tinted croquet-players. Her eyes wandered away sometimes from
the balls and mallets, and fixed themselves, with a sad, dreamy look,
upon the sunlit river or the distant woodland. Francis saw this, and
that faithful Cornish heart grew heavy in sympathy with Miss Hillary’s
unknown trouble. There must be a little of the Newfoundland dog in the
nature of a man who can love hopelessly; a little of that superhuman
fidelity, a little of that canine endurance which has inspired so many
odious comparisons to the disparagement of the inferior animal called
man. Francis Tredethlyn’s eyes followed Miss Hillary with a dog-like
patience all this afternoon, during which he established himself in the
estimation of the flaxen-haired droppers-in as one of the vilest of
croquet-players and worst-mannered of men. But the croquet-players
departed, after taking tea out of a very ugly Queen-Anne teapot and some
old Sèvres cups and saucers, which had been bought for Miss Hillary at
the sale of a defunct collector’s goods and chattels, at Messrs.
Christie and Manson’s. Francis stayed to dinner, and dined alone with
Maude and her father, and found very little to say for himself. He was
distracted by the sight of Maude’s pale face and sadly thoughtful eyes.
How changed she was from the bright and sparkling creature whom he
remembered a few months ago in that house! How changed! What was the
secret trouble which had worked that transformation? What could it be
except Miss Hillary’s sorrow for the circumstances that divided her from
her distant lover? There could be no other cause for her unhappiness,
since her father’s commercial difficulties had been smoothed by that
twenty thousand pounds so freely advanced to him; and it never occurred
to Francis that Maude Hillary could possibly give herself any uneasiness
about that money, so lightly parted with by him; nor could he think that
any new trouble threatened the merchant’s peace, for Mr. Hillary was
specially gay and pleasant this evening.
After dinner Maude strolled out into the garden, and down to that
delicious terrace by the river, where the big stone vases of geraniums
looked dark and grim in the twilight. She walked slowly up and down the
long esplanade with a filmy lace handkerchief tied coquettishly over her
head, and her long muslin dress sweeping and rustling after her like the
draperies of a fashionably-attired ghost. Francis Tredethlyn furtively
watched that white-robed figure in the shadowy distance as he sat at the
dinner-table with Mr. Hillary, and would fain have left his glass,
filled with the merchant’s rarest Burgundy, for a stroll by the quiet
river. Perhaps Mr. Hillary perceived this, for he presently gave the
young man his release.
“Since you don’t drink your wine, you may as well go for a stroll in the
garden, Tredethlyn,” he said, good-naturedly. “I see Maude yonder; and
she’ll be better company for you than I am.”
Francis was by no means slow to take this hint. But once outside the
dining-room windows, he went very slowly to the terrace on which Maude
was walking. He walked in and out among the flower-beds, making a faint
pretence of admiring nature in this twilight aspect. He stopped to
caress one of Maude’s Skye terriers. The animals were very fond of him
now that he had learned to avoid that trampling on their toes which had
been one of the earlier manifestations of his devotion to Miss Hillary.
He loitered here and there on every possible pretext, and at last
approached the fair deity in the muslin dress with very much the air of
a schoolboy, who presents himself in that awful audience-chamber wherein
a grim pedagogue is wont to pronounce terrible judgments upon youthful
offenders.
He did not know that Miss Hillary had been expecting him all this time;
and that her special purpose was to bring him to her side upon that
solitary terrace-walk, where she could talk to him freely without fear
of eavesdroppers. He did not know that he was quite as much expected as
the schoolboy who has been summoned to the parlour, and was to receive a
sentence as terrible.
Maude welcomed him very graciously, and for a little while they strolled
side by side, talking of the summer’s night, and the flowers, and Skye
terriers, and canary-birds, and other subjects equally commonplace and
harmless. Then they came to a stop, mechanically, as it is in the nature
of people to do when they walk by the side of a river, and looked over
the stone balustrade into the still water. And then a death-like silence
came down upon them; and Maude Hillary felt that the time had come in
which she must utter whatever she had it in her mind to say. It was
difficult to begin; but then all her duties of late had been difficult;
and upon her knees the night before, in the midst of tearful prayers and
meditations, she had resolved that there should be no more sailing under
false colours as regarded this young man.
“Dear Mr. Tredethlyn,” she began at last, “you have been so good to my
father, so good to me--for to serve him is to render a double service to
me--you have been so kind and generous a friend, that I have grown to
think of you and trust you almost as I might if you had been my
brother.”
Poor Francis listened to this exordium with a very despondent air.
Inexperienced as he was in the ways of the world, he was wise enough to
know that there was nothing hopeful in such an address as this. When a
young lady tells a gentleman that she can regard him as a brother, it is
the plainest possible declaration that he can never be anything else. In
this case it seemed an uncalled-for act of cruelty, for the Cornishman
had never deluded himself by any false hope.
“I think of you almost as if you were my brother,” Maude went on, with
heartless repetition of the obnoxious word; “and I cannot help thinking,
dear Mr. Tredethlyn, that you are scarcely employing your life as wisely
or as well as you might. I don’t think you were ever intended to be an
idle man; and again, with such a fortune as yours, a man has scarcely
the right to be idle. There are so many people who may be benefited by a
rich man’s active life. Oh, forgive me if I seem to lecture you. You
will laugh at me, perhaps, and think I want to set myself up as a
strong-minded woman, a political economist, or something of that kind.
But I only venture to speak to you because I think you waste so much of
your time down here, playing billiards with the empty-headed young men
who haunt this place, and lounging in the drawing-room to hear the
frivolous talk of half-a-dozen idle women, myself among the number.”
She spoke lightly, but she was not the less earnest in her intention;
she was only travelling gradually round to the point she wanted to
reach.
“But I am so happy here,” cried Francis Tredethlyn. “Ah, if you knew how
I have tried to stop away--if you could only know what happiness it is
to me to come----”
Maude Hillary interrupted him hastily.
“Yes, I know it is a pleasant life in its way,” she said; “very pleasant
and very useless. It is a little new to you perhaps, and seems
pleasanter to you on that account. But if you knew what dreary work it
is to look back at a long summer season of operas, and concerts, and
horticultural meetings, and boat-races, and not to be able to remember
one action worthy of being recorded in all that time! I am getting very
tired of my present life, Mr. Tredethlyn. It has ceased to be pleasant
to me ever since I have known of papa’s difficulties. It is altogether
unsuited to me; for I am engaged to marry a poor man, who would bitterly
feel the burden of an expensive wife.”
The bolt was launched, and Miss Hillary expected to see some evidence
that it had gone home to its mark. But Francis Tredethlyn made no sign.
There was just a little pause, and then he said very quietly,--
“Yes, I know that you are to marry a poor man; but with such a wife a
man could scarcely remain poor. I suppose it’s only an ignorant foolish
notion, but I can’t help thinking that for the sake of the woman he
loves, any man could cut his way to fortune. I can always believe in
those knights of the olden time, who used to put a badge in their
helmets, and then ride off to the wars to do all sorts of miraculous
things; and I fancy it must be the same now-a-days, somehow; and that a
man who loves truly, and is truly loved again, can achieve anything.”
Maude was inexpressibly relieved by this speech.
“You know of my engagement, then?” she said.
“Yes, I have known it for a very long time.”
“Ah, of course, Julia told you?”
“Yes, it was Miss Desmond who told me.”
“She had a perfect right to do so; there was no reason for any secrecy
in the matter. I am very glad that you have known of it. You are so kind
a friend that I should not like you to be ignorant of anything nearly
relating to my father or myself.”
“It is very good of you to call me a friend,” Francis answered. It
seemed to him as if some angelic creature was stooping from her own
proper sphere to place herself for a brief interval by his side. “It is
very good of you to take any interest in my welfare; and I feel that you
are right. The life I lead is utterly idle and useless; but it shall be
so no longer. Your father has very generously offered me a grand
opportunity of turning both my time and money to account.”
“My father? But how?”
“He has offered me a partnership in his own house.”
“A partnership?--a partnership in his difficulties--his liabilities?”
cried Maude, in a tone of horror.
“Those difficulties were only temporary. The thirty thousand I advanced
have wiped out all liabilities, and your father’s business stands on a
firmer basis than ever.”
“_Thirty_ thousand! You have lent papa thirty thousand pounds?”
“I have not lent it, my dear Miss Hillary. I have only invested it in
your father’s business. There is no obligation in the matter, believe
me; or if there is, it is all on my side. I get a higher rate of
interest for my money than I should get elsewhere.”
He stopped suddenly, for Maude had burst into a passion of sobs.
“Oh, how could he do it? How could he?” she cried. “How could papa take
so mean an advantage of your generosity? I love him so dearly, that it
almost kills me to think he should be base or dishonourable. I thought
the twenty thousand pounds would soon be paid, and instead of that he
has borrowed more money of you.”
“My dear Miss Hillary, pray, pray do not distress yourself. Believe me
you misunderstand this business altogether. It is not a loan. It is only
an equitable and friendly arrangement, quite as advantageous to me as to
your father. Upon my word of honour you do Mr. Hillary a cruel wrong
when you imagine otherwise.”
Maude dried her tears, and listened to the voice of her consoler. She
was so anxious to think well of her father, that she must have been
something more than an ignorant, inexperienced girl, if she shut her
ears to Francis Tredethlyn’s arguments.
Those arguments were very convincing, very specious. Maude ought,
perhaps, to have perceived that they were not the original ideas of Mr.
Tredethlyn. She ought, perhaps, to have discovered the parrot-like
nature of his discourse respecting all the grand prospects of the house
of Hillary and Co.; but she wanted to think well of her father, and
Francis Tredethlyn urged her to that conclusion. She listened to his
discourse as eagerly as if he had been the most eloquent of living
creatures. She felt a kind of tender friendship for him as he talked to
her; never before had he seemed so nearly on a level with herself. She
wanted to believe in his wisdom; she wanted to respect his sense and
judgment, because he was the defender of her father--that beloved father
against whom her own conscience had so lately arisen, a stern and
pitiless judge.
The quiet river rippled under the summer moonlight before Maude and her
companion left the terrace; so much had Francis found to say about the
house of Hillary and Co., and the wonderful advantages that must come to
him from a partnership in that great firm. Surely his enthusiasm must
have arisen from some vague idea that even that commercial alliance
would be some kind of link between Miss Hillary and himself. He talked
very freely to-night, for Maude’s confidence had set him at his ease;
and in almost every word he uttered he naïvely revealed some new depth
in his devoted love.
Late that night, when the Cornishman had gone away, Maude stood at her
open window, looking out at the river, and thinking of all that Francis
Tredethlyn had said to her.
“Harcourt Lowther never loved me as this man loves me,” she thought,
sadly. “Ah, what a pity that there should be so much wasted love and
devotion in the world!”
And then the thought of Francis Tredethlyn’s thirty thousand pounds
arose in her mind,--a terrible obligation, a heavy burden of debt; a
debt that was perhaps never to be cancelled.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXI.
HARCOURT LOWTHER’S WELCOME.
Within a month from that night on which the merchant’s daughter and
Francis Tredethlyn had lingered so long together on the terrace up the
river, Maude Hillary sat at her desk in the little study, trying to
begin the most difficult letter she had ever had occasion to write.
The letter was to be addressed to Harcourt Lowther, and the three words,
“My dear Harcourt,” were already written on the rose-tinted foreign
note-paper; but beyond those preliminary words Maude found it very
difficult to proceed.
That which she had to tell the distant soldier, sorely tried by
inglorious idleness in a penal settlement, and inclined to resent every
stroke of ill-fortune, was by no means a pleasant thing to tell. She had
to announce to him that the promise she had made long ago in the
twilight by the river had been deliberately broken. She had to tell him
that she was the plighted wife of another man; and she was not free to
reveal to him any one of the strange circumstances that had pressed so
cruelly upon her, pushing her, little by little, into this renunciation
of her first and only love.
It was only a very commonplace letter that Miss Hillary could write to
her discarded lover. She could only tell the old, common story, and put
in the hackneyed pleas so often heard in the court of Cupid;--her
father’s wishes: her desire to secure his happiness rather than her own;
and then a wild womanly prayer for pity: an entreaty that her lover
would believe in the existence of stronger reasons--higher motives--the
nature of which she was not free to reveal. And last of all, after many
pages of passionate supplication for pardon, with not a little violation
of the nicer laws propounded by Lindley Murray and his successors,--at
the very last there came one page blotted with tears, earnest yet
incoherent, in which Miss Hillary implored Mr. Lowther to forget her,
and to seek happiness with a happier woman. Never had she loved him so
dearly as while she wrote that last page, in which she resigned him for
ever. Surely Queen Guinevere’s diamonds must have sparkled their very
brightest just in that one angry moment in which she flung them into the
river.
Yes, it had come to this. Maude Hillary, like a modern Iphigenia, had
sacrificed herself for the benefit of her father. The burden of that
debt which had been incurred by her agency had weighed too heavily upon
her girlish breast. Somehow or other Francis Tredethlyn must be paid;
and since he loved her so devotedly, so foolishly--since he held her as
the brightest treasure to be won by aspiring man--it was surely better
that he should take this poor recompense than go altogether unrewarded.
It may be that Maude Hillary would under no circumstances deliberately
have broken faith with her betrothed lover. But these grand crises, upon
which the fate of a lifetime may depend, are apt to come very suddenly
upon us. The great flood-tide of fate arises, and carries away the weak
creatures afloat on its resistless waters. A moment of hesitation--a few
faltering words--half doubtful, half imploring, and the thing is done.
It had all happened on the day on which Francis Tredethlyn accepted Mr.
Hillary’s magnanimous offer, and allowed himself to be created a
sleeping partner in the Australian house. It was only natural that on
such a day Francis should dine at the Cedars; and it was only natural
that Lionel Hillary should make a little speech about the young man,
telling his daughter of the generosity of this noble-minded Cornishman,
who had been something more than a son to him--a friend, a benefactor, a
preserver. What praise could be loud enough for a man who would lend
thirty thousand pounds without security? And then this noble-minded
Cornishman, whose heart was like a great lump of tinder--only wanting
the feeblest spark to kindle it into a blaze--burst out into a
passionate declaration of his love. What was his fortune but so much
dirt, which he was only too glad to fling under the feet of Miss
Hillary? Would he not go out into the world to-morrow penniless,
barefoot, a beggar, if by so doing he could add to her happiness? He
asked a few such questions as these: and then cried out suddenly that he
was a despicable wretch, and that he was ashamed of himself for saying
all this, when he knew that Miss Hillary’s heart was given to another
man. He would go, he said; she should never again be tormented by him.
She should not be annoyed by so much as the mention of his name. After
which passionate speech Mr. Tredethlyn grasped the merchants hand, and
then made a rush towards the door. He would fain have suited the action
to the word; he wanted to go away that moment, and hide himself for ever
from Maude Hillary. But before he could reach the door Maude was by his
side, with her hands clasped about his arm her face looking upward at
his, and drowned with tears.
“How good you are!” she cried. “Don’t go away; we cannot part from you
like this. You have been so good to my father. Ah, how can we ever
recompense so much devotion! If my esteem--my gratitude--can make you
happy, they are yours,--they have long been yours. I renounce every
other thought, every other duty. I can have no duty higher than this.”
The last words were almost stifled on her lips, for Francis Tredethlyn
caught her to his breast as passionately as in that last scene of the
“Lady of Lyons.”
“Maude, my love--my angel--you will renounce, for my sake--you--you--will
be my own--my wife!” he gasped, incoherently. “No--no, I cannot accept
such a sacrifice--I am not so mean, so selfish, as to----”
But Mr. Hillary, hovering over his daughter and the generous-minded
young Cornishman, would not allow Francis to finish this sentence.
“My dear boy!” he exclaimed,--“my darling Maude! nothing upon earth
could give me greater pleasure than this, because I know that it is for
your mutual happiness. What joy can be deeper or purer than that of a
father who knows that his child has won for herself the devoted
affection of a good man?”
“And the thirty thousand pounds will be sunk for ever and ever in the
firm of Hillary and Co.,” the merchant may have thought at the close of
that enthusiastic address.
Thus it was that Maude Hillary arrived at the very point towards which
fate and her father had been pushing her for the last twelve months.
After that passionate impulse of self-sacrifice had passed away, a dull
dead feeling of pain took possession of her breast. Alone in the quiet
of her own pretty rooms; alone through the long sunny July mornings with
her books, and Berlin-wool work, and piano, she had only too much time
to consider the step she had taken; she had only too much time to think
of her broken vows, her scattered hopes. And she did think of these
things,--with cruel remorse and self-upbraiding, with bitter and
unavailing regret.
And now Francis Tredethlyn appeared to her all at once in a new light.
Alas! he was no longer the noble-hearted friend to whom she could appeal
for help in the day of trouble. He was no longer the humble adorer,
kneeling on the lowest step of the altar, remote and submissive. He was
her affianced husband, and he had a right to her society. He had a right
to attend her in her walks and rides, to linger near the piano when she
sang, to hold perpetual skeins of Berlin-wool during those tedious
morning visits which he made now and again to the Cedars. All these
privileges were his by right; and other people gave place when he
approached Miss Hillary, and watched to see her face brighten as he drew
near her. It was not that Francis himself was in any way altered. His
adoration of his bright divinity was no less humble than of old--even
now when he knew that the goddess was to descend from her pedestal and
exchange her starry crown for the orange-blossoms of an earthly bride.
He was in no way changed; the distance between himself and Maude Hillary
was as wide as ever. He could set it before him--a palpable gulf, across
which he beheld her, a strange creature, in a strange land,--a creature
who might hold out her hand to him once in a way across the impassable
abyss, but who could never draw him near her. Alas for Francis
Tredethlyn’s loveless betrothal! that dreary distance was growing wider
every day, now that Iphigenia knew the hour of sacrifice was drawing
near.
It had been one thing to think of Mr. Tredethlyn as a friend--a dear and
devoted friend, worthy to be regarded with an almost sisterly affection.
It was another thing to contemplate him as a future husband. All his
ignorance, his homely ways of speaking and thinking, his little
awkwardnesses and stupidities, his vacillating temperament in the matter
of spoons and forks at those elaborate Russian dinners,--all these
things pained Maude Hillary now as cruelly as they had galled Miss
Desmond’s proud spirit some six months before. And then to the faint
shivering pain of disgust was joined all the bitterness of contrast.
Never had Harcourt Lowther’s image seemed so near to this wayward girl
as it seemed now, when she was the promised wife of another man, and
tried most honestly to shut the memory of her old lover completely out
of her mind. Never had he been so near to her. His graces of manner, his
accomplishments, the light touch of his pointed fingers on the piano,
the deep organ-tone that he alone amongst amateurs could draw out of a
flute, the free outlines of his pencil, the transparency of his
water-colour sketches, the graphic humour of his pen-and-ink
caricatures; the airy wit, which never verged upon vulgarity; the fervid
eloquence, which never degenerated into rant; the trenchant satire,
which never sank to the vile level of personal spite: she thought of her
discarded lover: and all the showy attributes that had won her girlish
love arose before her in cruel contrast with the deficiencies of Francis
Tredethlyn.
Yet all this time she was very kind to her betrothed husband. It was not
in her to be scornfully indifferent to the man whom she regarded as her
father’s friend and benefactor. She was not a woman to sacrifice herself
with an ill grace. The silent warfare went on within her breast. She
struggled and suffered, but she had always the same kind, cold smile,
the same gentle words for the man whom she had promised to marry.
And in the meantime the hands went steadily round upon all the
clock-dials, and the inevitable hour drew very near. Busy milliners and
dressmakers, bootmakers and outfitters, came backwards and forwards from
Wigmore Street to the Cedars, and were busy and glad. Mr. Hillary’s
credit was unlimited, and it was almost as if a princess of the blood
royal had been about to marry. Francis Tredethlyn bought the lease of a
big black-looking house in a new neighbourhood near Hyde Park: and there
were negotiations pending for the purchase of an estate within a few
miles of Windsor.
August was melting into September. Already there were bright glimpses of
red and yellow here and there among the sombre green of the woodlands.
The wedding was to take place very early in October: the guests were
bidden, the dresses of the bridesmaids were chosen, and in the still
evening Iphigenia walked alone on the terrace. She was very seldom alone
at this hour; but to-night her father had taken Francis Tredethlyn to a
club-dinner, given by a bachelor stockbroker of some eminence in Mr.
Hillary’s circle. To-night Maude was alone; and leaning upon the broad
balustrade, with her elbow resting amongst the thick ivy that crept
along the stone, she looked down at the still water--the dark melancholy
water--and thought of her past life.
It seemed so far away from her now, left so entirely behind--all that
frivolous past. She seemed to have grown out of herself since the
knowledge of her father’s troubles had come upon her; and looking
backwards she saw a careless and happy creature, who bore no
relationship to this thoughtful woman, before whom all the future seemed
a blank and dreary country, unillumined by one glimpse of sunshine.
She turned away from the water presently, and walked slowly up and down
the long terrace. There seemed to be a melancholy influence in the
evening stillness, the dusky shadow lying upon every object, the distant
peal of bells floating across the river from some church where the
ringers were practising; even the voices of passing boatmen and the low
monotonous splash of oars took a pensive tone, in unison with the hour
and Maude Hillary’s sad remorseful thoughts.
She was near the end of the terrace, close to that ivy-grown old
summerhouse which had sheltered the patched and powdered beauties of
King George the Second’s Court, when she was startled by the sound of a
chain grating against stone-work, and rapid steps on the flight of
stairs leading from the terrace to the river. The young men who came to
the Cedars were very fond of making the journey by water: so there was
nothing strange in the sound of a step on the river stair. Maude turned
to meet the intruder with a sense of weariness and vexation. He would
not be likely to stay long, whoever he was; but the prospect of even ten
minutes’ idle conventional discourse jarred upon her present frame of
mind.
She turned to meet the unwelcome visitor with a languid sigh, and saw a
man hurrying towards her in the twilight; a man in whose figure and
dress there was a careless grace, an undefinable air of distinction,
which, in Maude Hillary’s eyes, stamped him as different from all the
rest of the world.
He came hurrying towards her. In a moment he was close to her, holding
out his arms, eager to take her to his breast. But she recoiled from
him, deadly white, and with her hands extended, motioning him back.
“Don’t touch me,” she cried; “don’t come near me. Ah, you don’t
know--you cannot have had my letter.”
“What letter?” cried Mr. Lowther, staring almost fiercely at the
shrinking girl. These sort of things so rapidly make themselves
understood. Harcourt Lowther saw at once that something was wrong. “What
letter?”
“My last; the letter in which I told you that----Ah, how you will hate
and despise me! But if you could know all, Harcourt, as you never can,
you might excuse--you might forgive----”
A torrent of sobs broke the sentence.
“Oh, I think I understand,” said Harcourt Lowther, very quietly. “You
have thrown me over, Miss Hillary.”
She held out her clasped hands towards him with an imploring gesture;
and then in broken sentences, in half-finished phrases, that were
rendered incoherent by her sobs, she recapitulated something of her
letter of explanation. Mr. Lowther’s face had blanched before this, and
his lower lip quivered now and then with a little spasmodic action; but
he listened very quietly to all Maude had to say.
“I ought never to have expected anything else,” he answered, when she
had finished her piteous attempt to explain and justify her conduct
without revealing her father’s commercial secrets. “I don’t know that I
ever _did_ expect anything else,” he went on very deliberately. “What
has a penniless younger son to do among the children of Mammon? How can
the earthen pot hope to sail down the stream with the big brazen
vessels, and escape wreck and ruin? Don’t let there be any scene between
us, Miss Hillary; I hate all domestic tragedy, and I think if my heart
were breaking--and men’s hearts _have_ been known to break--I could take
things quietly. You have grown tired of our long and apparently hopeless
engagement, and you have promised to marry somebody else. It is all
perfectly natural. May I know the name of my fortunate rival?”
“His name is Tredethlyn--Francis Tredethlyn.”
“A Cornishman,” added Harcourt Lowther,--“a fellow who has lately come
into a great fortune?”
“Yes. You know him, then?”
“Intimately. I congratulate you on your choice, Miss Hillary. Francis
Tredethlyn is a most excellent fellow. I have reason to speak well of
him, for he was my servant for a year and a half out yonder in Van
Diemen’s Land.”
“Your servant?”
“Yes. He was really the best of fellows; and in the art of brushing a
coat or cleaning a pair of riding-boots was positively unrivalled.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXII.
TAKING IT QUIETLY.
“If you could know all, Harcourt, as you never can, you might
excuse--you might forgive----”
Harcourt Lowther, very quick of apprehension always, especially so where
his own interests were concerned, had taken careful note of these broken
sentences uttered by Maude Hillary, and, rowing Londonwards in the
summer darkness, pondered on them long and deliberately, only arousing
himself now and then from his sombre reverie, in order to express his
profound contempt for some amateur waterman who was just saved from a
foul by the superior skill of the young officer.
What did it mean? That was the question which Mr. Lowther set himself to
answer.
“It means something more than the caprice of a shallow-hearted jilt,” he
thought, as he rested on his oars and lighted his cigar. “How pale she
grew at sight of me! That white, agonized look in her face was real
despair. ‘If I could know all!’ she said. All _what_? There’s a mystery
somewhere. Maude Hillary is the last woman in the world to throw over a
poor lover for the sake of a rich one. The sentimental girl, who was
ready to keep her engagement with me at the sacrifice of her father’s
fortune, would scarcely marry a clownish rustic for the sake of his
thirty thousand a year. Besides, these heiresses, who have never known
what it is to have a wish denied them, are the most romantic creatures
in creation, and cherish sublimely absurd ideas upon the sordid dross
question. No, I cannot think that Maude would be influenced by any
mercenary considerations--and yet how else----?”
The villas and villages on the river-banks flitted past him like phantom
habitations in the dim light. The flat shores of Battersea; the dingy
roofs and chimneys of crowded Chelsea and manufacturing Lambeth; the
bridges and barges; the low-lying prison, lurking like some crouching
beast upon the swampy ground, shifted by as the oars dipped in the quiet
water, while Harcourt Lowther’s light wherry sped homeward with the
tide. But all the length of his water-journey he could find no
satisfactory answer to that question about Maude Hillary; and when he
relinquished his boat to its rightful owner at a certain landing-place
in Westminster, he was still undecided as to the meaning of those broken
phrases which had dropped from the lips of the merchant’s daughter in
the first moment of surprise and emotion.
“I dare say it is only the old story after all,” he thought, as he
walked towards the Strand, in the purlieus of which he had taken up his
quarters. “Lionel Hillary, being as rich as Crœsus, is determined that
no poor man shall profit by his daughter’s fortune. Water runs to the
river, and Maude’s dowry will go to swell that old Cornish miser’s
savings. It’s only my usual luck. I am engaged to a beautiful woman with
a hundred thousand or so for a fortune, and I find a victorious rival in
the man who cleans my boots.”
But Mr. Lowther had not settled the question even yet. Lying awake and
feverishly restless in his lodging in Norfolk Street, Miss Hillary’s
pale face was still before him, the sound of her imploring tones was
perpetually in his ear.
“‘If I knew all, I might forgive, I might excuse!’ There must have been
some meaning in those words, some secret involved in them. Surely, if
her father had forced this marriage upon her, after the manner of some
tyrannical old parent in a stage-play,--surely, if that had been the
case, she would have candidly told me the truth; she would have pleaded
the best excuse a woman can have. There must be some secret reason for
this marriage, and I must be a consummate fool if I fail in getting to
the bottom of the mystery.”
Mr. Lowther breakfasted early the next morning, and dressed himself with
his accustomed neatness before going out. He had no body-servant now
whom he could badger and worry when the world went ill with him; or that
individual would most assuredly have paid the penalty of Miss Hillary’s
broken faith. Harcourt Lowther, the younger son, was too poor to keep or
pay a valet. He had grown weary of waiting for promotion in the army, as
he had sickened of hoping for advancement at the bar, and had sold his
commission. The world was all before him now, as it had been seven years
ago, when he had first looked about him for a profession. The world was
all before him, and his one chance of fortune, the possibility of a
marriage with Maude Hillary, seemed entirely lost to him. It was
scarcely strange if his spirits sank before the dismal blankness of the
prospect which he contemplated that morning, as he loitered over his
breakfast of London eggs and lodging-house toast and coffee.
He went out a little after twelve o’clock, hailed the first prowling
hansom he encountered in the Strand, and ordered the man to drive to a
certain street in the City, sacred to the stockbroking and money-making
interests. Here he alighted, dismissed the cab, turned into a narrow
court, still more entirely sacred to stockbroking, and entered a little
office, where there was a desk, two or three horsehair chairs, a great
many bills hanging against the wall, all relating to the stockbroking
interests, and a six-foot screen of wooden panelling, dividing the small
outer office from a larger inner office.
Mr. Lowther walked straight to this screen, and standing on tip-toe,
looked over into the second office.
A gentleman with sandy whiskers, a light overcoat, and a white hat, was
standing at a desk, and jotting some pencil memoranda upon the margins
of a file of documents, which he was turning over with a certain
rapidity and precision of touch peculiar to a man of business.
“Can you spare a quarter of an hour of your valuable time from the
calculation of last year’s prices for the Fiji Island Grand Junction
Stock in order to devote it to the claims of friendship?” asked Mr.
Lowther.
The clerks smiled as they looked up from their desks; and the gentleman
in the white hat dropped his pencil, and ran to a little wooden door in
the partition, over which Harcourt Lowther’s hat made itself visible.
“My dear Lowther!” he exclaimed, presenting himself in the smaller
office, and stretching out both his hands towards the intruder; “this
_is_ a surprise; I thought you were at the Antipodes.”
“Yes, that’s the way of the world,” answered Mr. Lowther, rather
peevishly; “a man is banished to some outlandish hole at the remotest
end of the universe, _ergo_ he’s never to return to the civilized half
of the globe.”
“But it seems only yesterday when----”
“And that’s another cruel thing a man’s friends say to him when he does
turn up in the civilized hemisphere,” interrupted Mr. Lowther. “‘It
seems only yesterday when you left us;’ that is to say, life has been so
pleasant and rapid for us, amidst all the gaieties and luxuries and
successes of the most wonderful city in the world, that we are utterly
unable to believe in the dreary months and years that you’ve had to drag
out, poor devil, in your hole on the other side of the line. That’s what
a fellow’s friends _mean_ when they talk their confounded humbug about
it’s only seeming yesterday.”
Harcourt Lowther’s City friend was not the most brilliant or original of
men when you took him away from the stockbroking interests. He stared
blankly during Mr. Lowther’s discontented remarks upon the selfishness
of mankind.
“Haw! that’s good. Meant no offence by allusion to yesterday; only meant
that I was jolly glad to see you, you know, and so on. But, you see, a
fellow turning up in the City when you’ve been given to understand that
he’s in Van Diemen’s Land is rather a surprise, you know. Can I do
anything for you? I’ll tell you what, old fellow; I can put you up to a
good thing in the Etruscan Loan,--panic prices,--nine percent, and
certain to turn up trumps in the long run.”
Mr. Lowther smiled bitterly.
“Do you suppose that I’ve any money to invest; or that if I had money,
I’m the sort of man to sink the glorious principal for the sake of some
miserable dribblings in the way of interest? No, my dear Wilderson, you
_can_ do me a good turn, but it’s in quite another direction. Just step
this way.”
He put his hand on his friend’s shoulder, and led him to the door
leading into the court. Here, safely out of the hearing of the clerks at
work in the inner office, Mr. Lowther lowered his voice to a
confidential tone.
“Wilderson,” he said, “I think you know Lionel Hillary, the Australian
merchant?”
“Hillary and Co.?” exclaimed Mr. Wilderson,--“I should flatter myself I
did.”
“I want you to tell me all about him--how he stands--how he has stood
for some time past; in short, all you know about him.”
The stockbroker pulled his hay-coloured whiskers thoughtfully, and shook
his head.
“These sort of things are rather difficult to _know_,” he said, “but a
man may have his thoughts about ’em.”
“And what are your thoughts? Hang it, man, speak out. You talked just
now of being ready to serve me. You can serve me in this matter, if you
choose.”
Mr. Wilderson shrugged his shoulders, and again pulled his whiskers in a
reflective mood.
“Dear boy,” he said presently, “come out into the court.”
Evidently in Mr. Wilderson’s mind the court was as some primeval forest,
wherein no listener’s ears could penetrate.
Out in the court the stockbroker hitched his arm through that of
Harcourt Lowther, and began to discourse upon Lionel Hillary, or Hillary
and Co., as Mr. Wilderson preferred to designate him. He said a great
deal in a low, confidential voice, and Harcourt Lowther’s lower jaw fell
a little as he listened. One thing was made clear to the ex-officer, and
that was, that Lionel Hillary’s affairs had been hinted at by the
knowing ones as rather shaky; that there had been even whispers of that
awful word, “suspension:” but that somehow or other Hillary and Co. had
contrived to right themselves; and that it was supposed by the aforesaid
knowing ones that the Australian merchant had found a wealthy backer.
“There’s fresh blood been let into his business, you may rely upon it,
dear boy,” said Mr. Wilderson. “I know that he was in Queer Street last
Christmas. Bills referred to drawer, and that sort of thing. The bankers
were beginning to get shy of his paper. I held a little of it myself,
and a deuced deal of trouble I had to plant it.”
This and much more to hear did Harcourt Lowther seriously incline. Then
he asked Mr. Wilderson to dine with him at a certain noted establishment
in the Strand, and left the court very grave of aspect and slow of step.
“So my lovely Maude is not a millionaire’s daughter after all,” he
thought. “And my friend Hillary has been dipping his capacious paw into
Francis Tredethlyn’s purse. I ought to have known that half these
reputed rich men are as rotten as a pear. So this is the explanation of
my simple Maude’s heroics. Poor little girl, _she_ has been the pretty
fly with which that accomplished angler, Mr. Hillary, has whipped the
stream for his big gudgeon! Any little card I may have arranged to play
for myself has been very neatly taken out of my hands; and I find my
friend provided with a needy father-in-law and an extravagant wife.
However, I dare say there’s some small part left for me to play: and
perhaps the best thing I can do is to take it quietly.”
Harcourt Lowther’s servant!
The man to whom Maude Hillary was now engaged had once been the valet of
her discarded lover. This could scarcely be a pleasant thought to any
young lady early imbued with all the ordinary prejudices of society.
Miss Hillary was not a strong-minded woman; she could not console
herself with a neat aphorism from Burns to the effect that “a man’s a
man for a’ that;” and to her Harcourt Lowther’s revelation seemed
cruelly humiliating. She had heard of young women in her own position
marrying grooms, or perhaps even footmen, for love, and she had
shuddered at the very idea of their iniquity. But was it not quite as
degrading to marry a valet for money, as to elope with a groom for love?
“He blacked Harcourt’s boots!” thought poor Maude; and it is impossible
to describe the utter despair expressed in that brief sentence. She met
her lover with a very pale face the next day, and, seating himself in
his accustomed place by her embroidery frame, Francis Tredethlyn saw
that there was something wrong. Alas! poor--Francis, he had already
learned to watch every change upon that beautiful face; already, before
the marriage vows had been spoken, all the miserable tortures of doubt
had begun to prey upon his devoted heart. She had promised to marry him,
but she had not promised to love him. He remembered that. She had given
herself to him in payment of her father’s debt. She had sacrificed
herself in accordance with the loyal instincts of her noble nature.
Francis, generous and loyal himself, could understand this, much better
than it was understood by Lionel Hillary, for whose sake the sacrifice
was made.
There were times when the young man reproached himself for his
selfishness in accepting the supreme desire of his soul. Ought he not
rather to have wrestled with himself and let this bright young creature
go? But there were other times when Francis Tredethlyn suffered himself
to be beguiled by delicious hopes. Had not true and honest love
sometimes triumphed over circumstance? Might not the day come when Maude
Hillary would be able to return his affection, to reward his patience?
“I can afford to be so patient,” he thought; “for it will be such
happiness to be her slave.” To-day, watching her pale face in pensive
contemplation, Francis puzzled himself vainly to guess what was amiss
with his promised wife. It was not only that she was paler than
usual,--and the brightness of her colour had faded very much of
late,--but to-day, there was a shade of coldness in her manner which was
quite new to her affianced husband, and which sent a chill to his heart,
always ready to sink under some vague apprehension where Maude Hillary
was concerned. We hold these supreme joys of life by so slender a
thread, that half our delight in them is poisoned by the dread of their
possible loss.
“Maude,” he said by-and-by, after a few commonplace phrases, and after
he had watched her for some minutes in silence, “I am sure there is
something amiss with you to-day. You are ill--you----”
“Oh, no, not ill. Only a little worried.”
“Worried--but about what?”
“I heard something about you last night, Mr. Tredethlyn,” said Miss
Hillary,--it was the first time she had called him Mr. Tredethlyn since
their engagement,--“something which you never told me yourself. Mr.
Lowther,--a friend of papa’s, who has just come home from Van Diemen’s
Land, told me--that--that--you had been----”
“His servant! Yes, Maude, it is quite true. I was a soldier, and I was
obliged to obey orders. I was ordered to attend upon Ensign Lowther, and
I did my best to serve him well. When I enlisted in her Majesty’s
service, I had all sorts of foolish fancies about fighting and glory,
but they all dwindled down to the usual routine. No fighting, no glory,
no desperate attacks upon Indian fortresses, no scaling walls to plant
the British flag upon the enemy’s ramparts; but any amount of drill and
hard work, and a discontented fine gentleman to wait upon.”
A flood of crimson rushed into Maude’s face as Francis said this; but
the young man’s head was drooping over the embroidery frame, and he was
trifling mechanically with the loose Berlin wool lying on Miss Hillary’s
canvas.
“I am afraid you think it a kind of degradation to you, that _I_ should
have been a servant, Maude?” he said presently.
“You never told me----”
“No--I told you I had been a private in the 51st. The other business was
only a part of my duty.”
Maude was silent for some moments after this. She sat looking dreamily
out of the window, while Francis still twisted the Berlin wools in his
strong fingers. Maude was the first to speak.
“Was it Mr. Lowther you meant just now, when you spoke of a discontented
fine gentleman?” she asked, with some slight hesitation.
“Yes; I never served any other master. Ensign Lowther was horribly
discontented. He was one of those men who can’t take things easily; but
I can understand a good deal of his peevish restlessness now. I can
sympathize with him now, Maude.”
His voice grew low and tender as he said this.
“Why?” asked Miss Hillary, rather coldly.
“He was in love, Maude,--an unhappy attachment, as I understood, to some
lady--an heiress, I think--whose money was a hindrance to a marriage
between them.”
From the beginning to the end of this conversation Maude Hillary’s
thoughts had been employed in debating one question--should she, or
should she not, tell her future husband that Harcourt Lowther was the
man to whom she had been previously engaged? He knew of that broken
engagement, but he did not know the name of her lover. Was it her duty
to tell him? It would be very unpleasant to do so; but then duty is so
often unpleasant. She was still silently debating this subject; the
words which she should speak were forming themselves in her mind; when
the drawing-room door was opened, and a servant announced Mr. Lowther.
Maude’s heart beat violently. Would there be a scene? Why had Harcourt
come, when he knew----? But Mr. Lowther very speedily relieved her fears
upon this subject. Nothing could be more delightful than his manner. He
was cordial to his old servant, without attempting any airs of
patronage. He could not have been more entirely at his ease with Maude,
had he been the most indifferent of first-cousins.
Mr. Lowther was only acting up to his determination to take things
quietly. He had met Lionel Hillary in the City that morning, and had
surprised the merchant by speaking of Maude’s engagement to Francis
Tredethlyn.
“But don’t alarm yourself, my dear Hillary,” he said with a frank smile.
“To say that I adored, and do adore, your daughter, is only to admit a
fact to which, I dare say, every male visitor at the Cedars would be
happy to testify in a round-robin. Miss Hillary is made to be
worshipped. I have only been one among a score of worshippers. If ever I
hoped to overcome your very natural prejudice against my disgusting
poverty, I have long ceased to hope it; so it was scarcely such a
death-blow to me to discover what had happened during my exile. Will you
let me renew my old relations with your household? Will you let me be
one of the moths again? I know now that the candle will burn, and that
its dangerous glare alone, and not its tender warmth, is reserved for
me, so I shall have only myself to blame if I come away with a scorched
wing.”
Mr. Hillary’s only reply to this rather sentimental speech was a hearty
invitation to dinner.
“I can give you your favourite Rüdesheimer with the oysters. Chablis is
a mistake, when you can get good hock. Sharp seven, remember; but you
may go earlier if you care for croquet. I dare say you’ll find
Tredethlyn there.”
“The poor fellow is very hard hit, I suppose?”
Mr. Hillary smiled and shrugged his shoulders.
“I never saw such a devoted creature. Good day.”
The merchant hurried off, and Harcourt walked slowly away, pondering as
he went.
“A devoted creature. Yes, and there has been new blood let into the
commercial anatomy of Hillary and Co. I dare say that poor devil
Tredethlyn has been bled to a hideous extent.”
The dinner at the Cedars went off very pleasantly. What dinner could
fail to go off tolerably well, enlivened by Harcourt Lowther, when that
gentleman cared to exercise his genius for making conversation? There
were other guests at the merchant’s round table; and after dinner people
showed an inclination to stroll out of the lamplit drawing-room on to
the dusky lawn, and down to the terrace, drawn perhaps by the magnetic
influence of the river, which _will_ be looked at.
It happened somehow--I suppose Mr. Lowther himself managed it--that he
and Maude were left a little way behind the rest of the loiterers upon
the twilit terrace. Ah! how vividly in the memory of both arose the
picture of a time long ago, when they had stood there side by side, by
the same river, in a twilight calm like this, with the same star
glimmering faintly in a low rose-tinted western sky! In Maude’s breast
that memory awakened cruel pangs of shame and remorse! In Harcourt
Lowther’s breast there was a strangely mingled feeling of bitterness and
regret;--bitterness against the Destiny which had given him so few of
life’s brightest possessions; regret for the vanished time in which some
natural earnestness, some touch of fresh and manly feeling, had yet
lingered in his heart.
“Poor, simple, unworldly Maude,” he thought, as he contemplated the
girl’s pale face, “what a penitent look she has! and yet if she
knew----”
He smiled, and left the thought unfinished. Then, turning to Maude, he
said, with a little touch of melancholy solemnity, worthy of Edgar
Ravenswood himself, “Miss Hillary, let us be friends. If you can bury
the past, so can I. We may yet strew sweet flowers of friendship on the
grave of our dead love.”
“And I really don’t want to let Francis Tredethlyn slip through my
fingers altogether,” Mr. Lowther added, mentally, as a sort of rider to
that pretty little speech.
Maude looked at him with rather a puzzled expression.
“You are very generous,” she faltered, embarrassed, and at a loss how to
express herself, “but--don’t you think it would be better for us--to--to
say good-bye to each other--for ever? I--I--hope you will marry some
one--worthy of you--some one who is less the slave of circumstances than
I am. I want to do my duty to Mr. Tredethlyn--and I think it is a part
of my duty to tell him of our broken engagement.”
“My dear Miss Hillary, you would surely never do anything so foolish.
Poor Francis is the best fellow in the world, but he is just the man to
be ferociously jealous if he once got any foolish crotchet into his
head. I have lived in the same house with him, remember, and must
therefore know him better than you do. As for saying farewell for ever,
and all that kind of thing, your eternal parting reads remarkably well
in a novel, but it isn’t practicable between civilized people who belong
to the same rank of society. Georgina bids Algernon an irrevocable adieu
on Tuesday morning, and there is burning of letters and love-locks, and
weeping and wailing in Brompton Crescent; and on Wednesday evening the
same Algernon takes her down to dinner in Westbourne Terrace. We can
bury the past in as deep a grave as you like, and lay the ghost of
memory with any exorcism you please, but we can’t pledge ourselves not
to meet any day in the week in the houses of our common friends.”
Maude was quite unable to argue with so specious a reasoner as Mr.
Lowther. She did her best to defend her position, and urged the
necessity of telling Francis Tredethlyn the whole truth. But Harcourt
overruled her objections, and in the end obtained from her a promise
that she would still remain silent as to the name of her discarded
lover.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXIII.
TIDINGS OF SUSAN.
Absorbed in the conflicting tortures and delights of his bondage,
Francis Tredethlyn had thought very little of that missing cousin who
had once been so near and dear to him. Now and then, when he had been
most entirely under the spell of Maude Hillary’s fascinating presence,
the vision of a rosy rustic face, framed in a little dimity bonnet, had
arisen suddenly before him, mutely reproachful of his forgetfulness and
neglect, and he had resolved that on the very next day some new steps
should be taken in the search for Susan Tredethlyn. But then, on that
next day, there was generally some flower-show or _matinée musicale_,
some boat-race at Putney or appointment to play croquet at Twickenham;
in short, some excuse or other for devoting himself to Maude Hillary;
and poor Susan’s rustic image melted away into chaos. But Mr. Tredethlyn
was suddenly startled into recollection of his neglected duty by the
receipt of a letter from his solicitors, Messrs. Kursdale and Scardon,
asking for an early interview, and announcing that they had an important
communication to make respecting Miss Susan Tredethlyn, otherwise Miss
Susan Turner.
An important communication. The Cornishman felt his face grow hot as he
read the letter. Susan was found, perhaps, he thought. He had never
mentioned her name to Maude Hillary, and now it might be that she would
need all the devotion of a loving protector, perhaps even the strong arm
of an avenger, at a time when his every thought was absorbed by his
approaching marriage. The young man did not wait for any ceremonious
appointment, but hurried off at once to Gray’s Inn, and presented
himself before Mr. Kursdale, the senior partner.
In the quiet office Francis Tredethlyn’s hot eagerness tamed down a
little before the matter-of-fact manner of the solicitor. There was a
sober tranquillity in the aspect of the man and of the place, which
seemed to have a singularly soothing effect upon all human emotion. The
sober little clock ticking on the grey stone mantel-piece--a skeleton
clock, exhibiting its entire anatomy to the public eye, and superior to
all meretricious adornment--seemed to be perpetually ticking out in the
stillness:
“Let me advise you to take it easily; let me recommend you to take it
quietly: whatever the Law can do for you will be done for you here; but
it must be done in the Law’s own way, which is very slow, and very
complicated, and rather trying to human patience.”
Mr. Kursdale received Francis with calm cordiality, and after a few
stately compliments proceeded at once to business.
“You will remember that my opinion, and that of my partner--for I
availed myself of his judgment in the matter,--you will, no doubt,
recollect, that after considerable study of the manuscript or journal
which you confided to me, I came to the conclusion that the writer of
that journal had contemplated imposing upon your cousin’s simplicity by
a mock marriage, a sham ceremonial, performed before some person falsely
representing himself to be a district registrar. This opinion was really
forced upon me by the wording of the diary. Look at the diary in what
light I would,--and I assure you I weighed the matter most carefully,--I
could not see my way to any other conclusion.”
“I understand,” answered Francis. “I knew the man was a scoundrel. I
made that out, somehow or other, from his journal. I knew he meant
mischief and treachery upon little Susy; but I couldn’t make out _what_
treachery till you opened my eyes to the truth.”
“But suppose that, after all my care, I was too hasty in forming a
conclusion. Suppose that we have been mistaken, Mr. Tredethlyn?”
“How do you mean, sir?”
“Some days since, I happened to open a drawer which had been unopened
for a long time, and hidden under a lot of other documents I found the
diary which you entrusted to me. The sight of the manuscript reminded me
of you and your missing cousin; so I suppose it was only natural that I
should turn over the pages,--not in the hope of finding any new meaning
in them, however, for I had studied them too carefully for that. I
turned them over, and while debating the question of a mock marriage,
the thought suddenly flashed upon me that it would be at least very easy
to ascertain if any genuine ceremonial had taken place in London.
Remember, Mr. Tredethlyn, I did not for one moment imagine that there
_had_ been a real marriage, and I fully believed that the trouble I was
about to take would be wasted trouble. If I had not from the first been
firmly convinced that the writer of the diary contemplated a sham
marriage, and nothing but a sham marriage, I should, at the outset, have
done that which I only did the other day.”
Francis Tredethlyn’s impatience was so very evident, that the lawyer,
slow as he generally was, quickened his pace a little as he went on.
“I was determined to institute an investigation of the books of every
registrar’s office in the metropolis during the months of January,
February, and March, 1849. I entrusted a confidential clerk with this
task, and three days afterwards he brought me the result of his
investigation. On the 27th February, 1849, Robert Lesley was married to
Susan Turner, in the office of the district registrar for Marylebone.
The registrar’s name was Joseph Pepper; the names of the witnesses were
Mary Banks and Jemima Banks, of No. 7, Woolcote Villas, St. John’s
Wood.”
“Thank God!” ejaculated Francis Tredethlyn, reverently. “Thank God, for
my little Susan’s sake, that this man was not the scoundrel we took him
for.”
“Whether such a marriage, contracted under a false name on your cousin’s
part, and it is very possible, also under a false name on the part of
the writer of the diary,--whether such a marriage might not be open to
dispute, is another question. However, the ceremonial, so far as it
went, was genuine, and in any case there would be some little difficulty
in setting it aside.”
“It shall not be set aside!” cried Francis, “if I have the power to
enforce it. Thank God for this, Mr. Kursdale, and thank you for the
thought, late as it came, that led to the discovery of the truth.”
“You must remember, though, my dear Mr. Tredethlyn,” remonstrated the
solicitor, who was almost alarmed by the young man’s eagerness, “you
must bear in mind that it is just possible there may have been some
other Susan Turner and some other Robert Lesley married in the month of
February, 1849, and that this registration may refer to them.”
“I am not afraid of that,” Francis answered, decisively. “No, the man
meant to be a scoundrel, I dare say; but my little Susy’s artless
confidence touched his heart at the very last, perhaps, and he _could_
not be such a villain as to deceive her. Rely upon it, Mr. Kursdale, the
marriage was a genuine marriage, and I shall live to see my cousin
righted, and to divide my uncle Oliver’s money with her.”
Mr. Kursdale stared at his client in blank amazement.
“You would--do that?” he asked, after a pause.
“Of course I would. Poor little ill-used darling! The money was hers,
every penny of it, by right. I--I meant at first to have restored it all
to her; but new claims have arisen for me, and I can only give her half
the fortune that should have been her own.”
The solicitor stifled a groan.
“And now how am I to find Susy?” asked Francis. “This registration
business gives us a new clue, doesn’t it?”
“Unquestionably. We can, at any rate, hope to find the two witnesses,
Mary and Jemima Banks, and from them we may discover your cousin’s
present whereabouts. I’ll send a clerk to these Banks people to-morrow.”
“Do you know I think I’d rather go and look for them myself, and at
once,” said Francis. “I’ve been very neglectful of Susy’s interests
lately, and I feel as if I ought to do something to make up for my
neglect. I’ll go myself, Mr. Kursdale, and try to find out these people.
If I fail, you must help me to find them. If I succeed, I’ll come here
to-morrow morning and tell you the result.”
The young man wrote the address of the people in St. John’s Wood in his
pocket-book, shook hands with his legal adviser, and hurried away; he
was so eager to atone for the neglect of the past by the activity of the
present. He hailed a hansom in Holborn, and was on his way to St. John’s
Wood five minutes after he had left the lawyer’s office. He sat with his
watch open in his hand, while he made abstruse calculations as to the
time it would take him to find the females, Mary and Jemima Banks,
extort from them all the information they had to give, drive back to his
hotel, reorganize his toilet, and then make his way to Twickenham. Mr.
Tredethlyn had grown something of a dandy of late; he employed a
West-end tailor, belaboured his honest head with big ivory-backed
brushes, and bedewed his cambric handkerchief with the odorous invention
of that necromancer of the flower-garden, Monsieur Eugene Rimmel. The
big Cornishman smiled at his reflection in the glass sometimes,
wondering at his own frivolity. But it was for Maude Hillary’s sake that
he brushed his hair laboriously every day, and grew critical in the
choice of a waistcoat. He had even hired a man to wait upon him, and had
a little regiment of boot-trees in his dressing-room.
St. John’s Wood proper is perhaps one of the most delightful suburban
retreats in which the man can make a pleasant temple for his _lares_ and
_penates_, who, yearning for the waving of green trees about his abode,
is yet obliged to live within an easy cab-drive from the City. Dear
little villas, embosomed in foliage; stately mansions, towering proudly
out of half an acre of trimly-kept garden, invite the wealthy citizen to
retirement and repose. The young lilacs and laburnums of to-day may
represent but poorly the bosky verdures of the past, but still the Wood
of St. John is a cool and pleasant oasis in the great arid desert of
London.
But there are outskirts and dependencies of St. John that are not quite
so pleasant,--ragged wastes and shabby little terraces, that hang like
tattered edges disgracing a costly garment. These dismal streets and
dreary terraces may not belong of right to St. John, but they hang about
him, and cling to him, and shelter themselves under the grandeur of his
name, nevertheless.
Woolcote Villas, St. John’s Wood, were very pretentious little
dwelling-places, fronted with damp stucco, and with a tendency to a
mossy greenness of aspect that was eminently dispiriting. Woolcote
Villas were of the Elizabethan order of architecture, and went off
abruptly into peaks and angles wherever a peak or an angle was possible.
How such small houses could require the massive stacks of Elizabethan
chimneys which made Woolcote Villas appear top-heavy and incongruous to
the eye of the stranger, was an enigma only to be solved by the
architect who designed those habitations; and why Woolcote Villas should
each be finished off with a stuccoed mustard-pot, popularly known as a
campanello tower, which was not Elizabethan, and not practicable for
habitation, being open to the four winds of heaven, was another problem
perpetually awaiting the same individual’s solution.
The hansom cabman, after driving through all the intricacies of St.
John’s Wood on different false scents, came at last upon Woolcote
Villas, through the friendly offices of a milkman, and pulled up his
horse before the door of No. 7.
Francis alighted and rang a bell,--a bell with a slack wire, which
required to be pulled a great many times before any effect was produced.
At last, however, the bell rang; and then, after a pause and another
peal, the door was opened, and a slipshod servant-maid, with a flapping
circle of dirty net hanging from the back of her disorderly head,
emerged from No. 7, Woolcote Villas, and presented herself at the little
gate before which Francis Tredethlyn was waiting.
The young man asked if Mrs. Banks was at home. Yes, she was at home, and
Miss Banks also. Did he please to want the apartments?
Mr. Tredethlyn told her that he had particular business with Mrs. Banks,
and that it was that lady whom he wished to see. The girl looked
disappointed. There were a good many bills in the Elizabethan windows of
Woolcote Villas, and the demands of lodgers were not equal to the supply
of furnished apartments.
The sound of a tinkling piano, played very badly, greeted Mr. Tredethlyn
as he entered the narrow passage. The dirty maidservant opened the door
of the apartment whence the sound came, and Francis found himself in a
shabby parlour, tenanted by a young lady, who rose from the piano as he
entered, and who was very fine and yet very shabby, and a trifle dirty,
like the parlour, and like Woolcote Villas generally. The young lady
wore a greasy-looking black silk, relieved by a coquettish little apron
of Stuart plaid, and adorned by all manner of ribands and narrow
velvets, with a good deal of Mosaic jewelry in the way of hearts and
crosses, and anchors and lockets; and her hair was turned back from her
forehead, and flowed in graceful ringlets of the corkscrew order upon
her stately shoulders. She was altogether a very extensively adorned
young lady; and she gave a little start expressive of surprise and
timidity, with just a slight admixture of pleasure, as Mr. Tredethlyn
presented himself before her. Many single gentlemen had inspected the
long-vacant lodgings; but there had been no one among them so
good-looking, or so splendid of aspect, as this tall, broad-shouldered
Cornishman, revised and corrected by his West-end tailor.
“The apartments, I suppose,” the young lady said, curtseying and
simpering. “My ma being busy, perhaps you will allow me to show them to
you? _This_ is the parlour. If the use of a sitting-room only is
required, _with_ partial board, including dinner on Sundays, the terms
would be seventeen and sixpence. Private apartments, without board,
fifteen shillings, or with full board----”
The young lady would have proceeded further, but Francis Tredethlyn
interrupted her.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, “I don’t require apartments; my business
is quite of a different nature. Your name is Banks, I believe?”
The lady inclined her head graciously. Life was very dreary in Woolcote
Villas, and the advent of a good-looking stranger could scarcely be
otherwise than agreeable, even if he was not a prospective tenant.
“Mary--or Jemima--Banks?” asked Francis.
“I am Miss Jemima Banks,” the young lady replied, with considerable
dignity. She began to think the good-looking stranger inclined to be
presumptuous; but Francis was too preoccupied to be aware of the
intended reproof.
“I am very glad that I have been so fortunate as to find you,” he said,
“for I believe you can give me the information I want. You were present
at a marriage before the registrar, at an office in Folthorpe Street,
Marylebone, on the 27th of February, 1849. Can you tell me where the
young lady who was married went after the ceremony? I have some right to
ask this question, for Susan Tre--Susan Turner is my first-cousin.”
“Well, I never did!” exclaimed Miss Banks, surprised out of her
stateliness. “Poor Susan was your cousin, was she? Why, she came home
here a fortnight after her marriage.”
“She came here?”
“Yes, she was lodging here before that; and she and her husband went off
to Paris after the ceremony; and there was no breakfast and no nothing;
and Mr. Lesley, he was always very high and mighty-like in his ways--he
flung down a twenty-pound note upon the desk before the registrar, and
when the man said something about change, he threw up his head
scornful-like--it was a way he had if anything vexed him,--‘There’s your
money,’ he said, ‘and don’t let’s have any humbug;’ and then he dragged
his poor little wife’s hand through his arm, just nodded to me and
mother, and walked off to the cab without a word, leaving me and mother
in the registrar’s office. The registrar was full of praises of the
gentleman’s generosity, and said he’d like to tie up a half-a-dozen such
couples every week; but mother was regularly cross about that
twenty-pound note, and went on about it all the way home, saying that
Mr. Lesley had ground her down close enough about the rent for these
rooms, and needn’t go showing off his generosity to strange registers.”
“And my cousin Susan went to Paris?”
“Yes, but only for a fortnight, and we was to keep the apartments for
her, which we did; and at the end of a fortnight she came back, dressed
beautiful, and with all sorts of lovely things in her boxes, and she was
looking so well and so happy, and anybody would have thought she was the
luckiest woman in the world. But mother, she used to shake her head
about it, and say she never knew those secret sort of marriages to come
to any good, because when a gentleman begins by not wanting to own his
wife, he’s very apt to end by wishing he hadn’t married her. But mother
always looks at the black side of things, whether it’s taxes, or whether
it’s lodgers, or whatever it is; so I didn’t take much notice. Mrs.
Lesley seemed very happy; and Mr. Lesley, for the first week or so, he
stopped at home a great deal, and scarcely ever went out, except to take
his wife out to dine, or to a theatre, or something of that kind; and
they really seemed the happiest couple that ever was; but by-and-by Mr.
Lesley went away,--to college, his wife told me; and I shall never
forget how she cried, poor thing, the night he left her, and how lonely
she looked sitting in this room, where they’d been so happy together,
with their little oyster-suppers after the theatre, and everything that
heart could wish. She’d got some books that he’d left behind him spread
out before her on the table, and she was turning one of them over when I
went in to see her.
“‘They’re very hard to understand, Miss Banks,’ she said; ‘but I try to
read them, because I want to be clever, and able to talk to Robert when
he comes home.’
“After this she was almost always reading, poor little thing, and she’d
sit in this room for days and days together; for she didn’t like to go
out alone, and mother does drive and worry so, that it wasn’t often I
could get out with her. Mr. Lesley was to be away three months, she told
me; and I’m sure that poor thing used to count the hours and minutes
almost, wishing the time to go: but when the three months was up, there
was no Mr. Lesley; he was going fishing, somewhere in Wales, with some
grand friends she told me, and wouldn’t be home till the next vacation.
I never saw any one so cut up as she was by the disappointment, though
she wouldn’t talk about it; only I could see every morning by her face,
that she’d been lying awake half the night, crying her poor eyes out.”
“Poor girl, poor girl!” murmured Francis Tredethlyn.
This all-absorbing passion called love was a sorrowful thing, then, he
thought, let it come to whom it would--a one-sided frenzy, a perpetual
sacrifice, a self-imposed immolation.
“Pray tell me all you can about my cousin,” he said to Miss Banks. “You
cannot imagine how anxious I am to hear of her.”
“I’m sure she and me was always the best of friends,” answered the fair
Jemima, with a touch of diplomacy; “and if you _did_ think of taking the
apartments, me and mother would do all in our power to make you
comfortable, if it was only on Mrs. Lesley’s account; for she was one of
the sweetest young creatures I ever knew. She stayed with us three weeks
before she was married; and I never shall forget her pretty face the day
she first came up from the country after the lodgings had been took for
her.”
“Mr. Lesley engaged the lodgings, I suppose?”
“No, it was Mr. Lesley’s brother.”
“Oh, he had a brother, then?”
“Yes, his brother was something in the law, I think--a very nice
gentleman, and almost the living image of Mr. Lesley himself.”
“Can you give me a description of Mr. Lesley? I never saw him, and I
want very much to know what kind of man he is.”
Miss Banks hesitated for some moments.
“It’s so difficult to give an exact description of any one,” she said.
“Mr. Lesley was a tall, handsome-looking man, with fair hair and blue
eyes. I don’t think I could describe him any nearer than that.”
Francis Tredethlyn sighed. There are so many tall, handsome-looking men
with fair hair and blue eyes! and it is chiefly in melodrama that people
go about the world conveniently marked with a strawberry or a coronet.
“Answer me one question,” said Francis, eagerly, “before you tell me the
rest of my cousin’s history. Do you know where she is now?”
Miss Banks shook her head, and sighed despondently.
“No more than you do, sir,” she exclaimed. “It’s two years and a half
ago since I set eyes upon Mrs. Lesley, and I don’t know no more than the
dead what’s become of her since.”
“Then she’s as much lost to me to-day as she was yesterday,” said
Francis, sadly. “But you can at least tell me all you know of my poor
cousin. It may help me to some clue by which to find her.”
Jemima was evidently a good-natured girl. She begged Mr. Tredethlyn to
be seated, and placed herself opposite to him.
“I’ll call mother if you like,” she said; “but I think I can tell you
more about Mrs. Lesley; mother is such a one to wander, and when one’s
anxious to know anything quick, it don’t do to have to deal with a
person whose mind’s always harping upon lodgers and their ways. Of
course everybody knows lodgers are tiresome, and nobody lets apartments
for pleasure, and nobody would pay taxes if they could help it, and
poor-rates are not expected to raise people’s spirits; but if facts are
disagreeable, that’s no reason you should have them cropping up
promiscuous in every style of conversation. Till now it used to be a
relief to me to come and sit with Mrs. Lesley of an evening, and hear
_her_ troubles, if it was only for the sake of a change.”
“I thank you heartily for having been good to my cousin,” Francis said,
earnestly. He was thinking that he would drop into a jeweller’s shop on
his way homeward, and choose the handsomest diamond ring in the man’s
stock for Miss Jemima Banks.
“I don’t know as I deserve any thanks, sir,” answered the girl. “I
couldn’t help taking to Mrs. Lesley, and I couldn’t help feeling for her
when I saw her so solitary and so sad. Months and months went by before
her husband came back to her; and when he did come her baby was born,
and there was the cradle in the corner just by where you’re sitting, and
she seemed as if she couldn’t make enough of the child.”
“A child!” murmured Francis. “Mrs. Burfield never told me of the child.”
“But Mr. Lesley, he didn’t seem so wrapped up in the baby as she did,”
continued Miss Banks; “and I used to fancy she saw it, and fretted about
it. He couldn’t take her out to dinner anywhere this time, nor yet to
the theatre, on account of the child. She asked him once to take her for
a drive somewhere in the country, and to take the child with them; but
he laughed at her, and said, ‘I don’t think there’s a pleasanter sight
in creation than an estimable mechanic in his Sunday clothes, with three
children in a wicker chaise, and a fourth in arms; but don’t you think
we may as well leave that sort of thing to the mechanic, Susy? the poor
fellow has so few chances of distinguishing himself.’ That was just the
sort of speech Mr. Lesley was always making, half laughing, half
scornful; he was always going on in a sneering way about the baby, and
her being so fond of it, and devoting herself so much to it; and
sometimes one of those nasty speeches of his would set his wife off
crying, for her health wasn’t very strong just then, and any little
thing would upset her. And then he’d look at her with a hard, cruel look
that he’d got sometimes, and throw his book into a corner, and get up
and walk out of the house, banging the door to that degree that mother
would be unnerved for the rest of the evening. Mr. Lesley took to
stopping out very late this time, and used to let himself in with a
latch-key, long after me and mother had gone to bed; but I know that
Susan used to sit up for him, and I know that he used to be angry with
her for doing it; for Woolcote Villas are slight-built, and I’ve heard
him talking to her as I lay awake overhead. He was at home for some
months this time off and on,--but he’d be away for days together,--and
when he was at home he had a tired way like, that made me feel
uncomfortable somehow to see him. He was always yawning, and smoking,
and sitting over his books, or lying asleep upon the sofa; and I’m sure
if I’d been Mrs. Lesley, I should have been very glad when he took
himself off. But, Lor’ bless your heart! poor little thing, she fretted
about his going away, just as if he’d been the kindest of husbands. He
wasn’t going back to college any more; he was going to Germany this
time. I know she wanted to go with him, poor, tender-hearted thing; and
I heard her say to him, so pitiful like, once, ‘Oh, Robert, what will
become of me when you are gone! If you would only take me!’ But he only
laughed at her, and cried out, ‘What! abandon the baby?’ So at last the
time came for him to go, and his poor wife got paler and paler every
day, till I’m sure she looked like a living corpse walking about the
house,” said Miss Banks, unconsciously paraphrasing Shelley.
“And this man left her?”
“Lor’, yes, what did he care for her looking white and sorrowful? He was
more wrapped up in his new portmanteaus, and travelling-bags, and
dressing-cases, and such-like, than in his wife or his child. He went
off as gay as could be, though he left Mrs. Lesley almost
broken-hearted. And he didn’t leave her too well off either, I know,
though she always paid mother to the moment; but all her pretty dresses
and bonnets that Mr. Lesley had bought her in Paris had grown shabby,
and he hadn’t bought her any new ones. He had so many expenses, she told
me; for she was always making excuses for him like, and pretending that
he was very good to her. Poor dear thing! after he was gone away the
baby was her only comfort; and I’m sure if it hadn’t been for that child
she’d have fretted herself away into the grave. Well, sir, the baby was
four months old when Mr. Lesley went away to Germany, and he was only to
be away three months at the longest, Susan told me: she was very
friendly with me, and I always called her Susan. And she used to count
the days just as she did before; and she’d say to me often how the time
was going, and her husband would soon be back. She used to write him
letters,--such long letters, all full of her talk about the baby, and
his taking notice, and growing, and such-like; but she didn’t have many
letters from him. ‘You see, Jemima, he’s always going from place to
place,’ she said; ‘and then my letters lie at the post-offices where I
direct them, and half the time he doesn’t receive them at all; so I
can’t wonder at not hearing very often from him.’ She used to be so
pleased, poor dear, when a letter did come, though I’m sure they were
short enough, for I’ve seen her open them; but, ah! when the three
months went by, and Mr. Lesley didn’t come back, how dreadfully she did
fret!--always secretly, though; for she didn’t seem to like that anybody
should know her troubles, for fear they should blame him, the brute!
‘He’s going farther north,’ she told me; ‘Germany’s such a big country,
you know, Jemima; and I’m afraid, from what Robert says, he thinks of
going beyond Germany, to St. Petersburg, perhaps. You see, it’s
necessary for him to travel in order to complete his education.’ I
couldn’t help laughing outright at this; for I thought if Mr. Lesley
wasn’t educated enough with all his books, and colleges, and crackjaw
languages, and such-like, he never would be educated. However, that was
no business of mine, and I kept my thoughts to myself. The time went by,
and still there was no news of Mr. Lesley coming home. He was always
going farther and farther north, Susan told me, when she spoke of him;
but she’d got to talk of him very little now, though I know she was
thinking of him and fretting about him all day and all night too: for
I’ve slept with her sometimes, and heard her moan in her sleep, and
speak his name, oh, so pitiful!”
“Poor girl! poor child! she was little more than a child!” murmured
Francis Tredethlyn.
“No more she was,” answered Miss Banks, with energy; “and him as
ill-treated her was a brute. I’m sure _I_ never thought much of him,
with his scornful, sneering ways, treating me and mother as if we were
so much dirt under his feet. As for that poor young thing, it was a
sorrowful day for her when she first set eyes upon him, fine gentleman
though he was, and above her in station, which she was always telling me
as a kind of excuse for his bad conduct. Well, sir, his letters got
fewer and fewer, and still Susan kept her troubles to herself, and only
said he was going farther north, and that he would he back before the
year was out. But the year passed, and he didn’t come back, and he’d
been away nearly ten months, and the baby was fourteen months old, when
a letter came for Susan, with St. Petersburg on the post-mark. I never
shall forget that day. It was dull, cold, March weather, with the wind
howling and moaning enough to give the liveliest person the dismals, and
Mrs. Lesley had been sitting by the window all the afternoon watching
for the postman. She was beginning to be nervous about her husband’s
health, she told me, as it was so long since she had heard from him. The
postman came at last, and I was down-stairs with mother when he came.
Mrs. Lesley ran into the passage, and took the letter herself. We heard
the parlour door shut, and then five minutes afterwards we heard a
scream and a heavy fall. Me and mother rushed up-stairs, and there was
poor Susan lying on the floor, with a letter clutched in her hand, and
the fingers clenched upon it so that neither me nor mother could loosen
them. We lifted her up and laid her on the sofa. She didn’t seem to have
fainted dead away, for she opened her eyes directly, and said, ‘Oh, why
didn’t you let me lie there till I died?’ And it was enough to pierce
the hardest heart to hear her. Mother began talking about the troubles
of the world, and asked her if there was bad news in the letter. ‘Oh,
yes!’ she cried; ‘cruel news--dreadful news!’ And then mother asked her,
Was Mr. Lesley dead? ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘dead to me! dead to me!’ Mother
fancied she meant he was really dead, and said she hoped Mrs. Lesley was
left comfortably provided for. You see, having seen a deal of trouble
herself, mother will look at things in that light. And then Susan cried
out that her trouble was one that we could never understand. I couldn’t
bear to leave her; but I got mother out of the way,--for her ways are
apt to be wearing to any one that’s in trouble,--and I stopped with
Susan all the evening. But she never spoke once; she only lay quite
quiet on the sofa, with her face turned to the wall; but I knew that she
was crying all the time; and when I took her the baby, thinking the
sight of him might comfort her, she only waved him away like with her
hand. I didn’t leave her till twelve o’clock that night; but she was
still lying on the sofa with her face turned to the wall. But just as I
was going away she stretched out her hand and said, ‘God bless you,
Jemima! it is very good of you to stop with me, but there is nothing
upon this wide earth that can give me any comfort now.’ I didn’t see her
the next morning, for she went out very early, and took the baby with
her, and she didn’t come back till late at night, and then she came back
without the baby. You might have knocked me down with a feather when I
opened the door to her and saw her come in without the child. ‘Oh,
Susan,’ I said, ‘what have you done with Robert?’--he’d been christened
Robert after his ’pa, and I’d stood godmother for him. Susan was as pale
as death, but she said very quietly, ‘I’ve put him out to nurse in the
country, Jemima. I was obliged to part from him, for I’m going away.’ I
thought all in a moment that she was going abroad to her husband, and
that her grief had been about parting with her child; but then I
remembered what she’d said the night before, about Mr. Lesley being dead
to her, and do what I would I couldn’t make it out. I’m sure I was as
much cut up at the thought of her going away as if she had been my own
sister.”
“I wish to Heaven she had stopped with you!” exclaimed Francis
Tredethlyn. “She had few friends, poor girl, and had no need to leave
any one who felt kindly towards her.”
“But she did leave us,” replied Miss Banks; “she paid mother every
farthing she owed her, and packed up her few little things. She would
make me take some of her pretty ribands and collars that had been bought
in Paris, and never worn out, for she didn’t care to dress herself smart
when Mr. Lesley was not at home; and then she sent for a cab, and went
away. I heard her tell the driver Shoreditch railway station, for I ran
out to the cab and kissed her the last thing, and begged her to come and
see us whenever she came back to London; and she promised that if she
lived, and things went well with her, she would. But from that day to
this we’ve never set eyes upon her.”
And this was the end of what Miss Banks had to tell. Francis
Tredethlyn’s thoughts wandered back to Mrs. Burfield; it was to her that
Susan Tredethlyn had gone in the March of 1851. So far the girl’s
history was complete; but the grand question still remained, Where was
she now to be found? A deserted wife, a friendless and perhaps penniless
mother; what had become of this lonely, inexperienced girl between the
March of 1851 and this present autumn of 1853?
“But surely you can give me some clue by which I may trace my cousin?”
said Francis, after a pause; “you can give me the address of some
friend, some intimate acquaintance of Mr. Lesley’s: he must have had
visitors while he lived here.”
Jemima shook her head decisively.
“Not one,” she answered: “except for bringing his brother home to dinner
once or twice, when he was first married, no mortal belonging to Mr.
Lesley ever darkened mother’s doors. Mother and me used to think it odd;
and of course there always are advantages in lodgers keeping much
company, which makes up for extra trouble; and the most audacious
lockers-up that ever were can’t go and lock-up under visitors’ very
noses. But we supposed, as Mr. Lesley’s marriage was a secret one, he
didn’t care to bring his friends home.”
“But his brother came?”
“Yes, only when they were first married; he never came after.”
“Did you hear the brother’s address?”
“Well, I have heard that it was in some of those law-places, the Temple,
or Gray’s Inn; but I never heard any nearer than that.”
Mr. Tredethlyn gave a despairing sigh; he thought of Mrs. Burfield’s
description of his cousin, pale and wan, waving her little hand out of
the carriage-window as she left Coltonslough, friendless and poor. Was
it not more than likely that she had only gone away to die, and that his
search for her would end at last in the discovery of a grave?
But might not the man, the husband who had deserted his innocent and
confiding wife, might not he be found and made to pay a heavy penalty
for his sins? Vengeance seems but a poor thing at the best, but it is at
least something; and Francis Tredethlyn felt a fierce desire for revenge
against the coldblooded destroyer of his cousin Susan’s happiness.
He asked Miss Banks many more questions; but she could tell him no more
than she had already told him. She had never heard anything of Mr.
Lesley’s family or antecedents, directly or indirectly. She knew he went
to college, but she never remembered hearing what college. She had
fancied sometimes that Mr. Lesley’s name was an assumed one; indeed, she
was sure it was; for when his brother had come to dine at Woolcote
Villas the first time, he had inquired for Mr. Robert by some other
name. Unfortunately, that other name had entirely escaped Miss Jemima’s
recollection.
“He caught himself up short,” she said, “as if he was vexed with himself
for having let slip that other name, and I never heard it again the
whole time Mr. and Mrs. Lesley were with us. I don’t think Susan knew
much more about her husband’s affairs than I did, for he always treated
her like a child; and even when he was kindest to her, he seemed to have
a high and mighty way with her, that would have kept any timid person
from asking questions.”
Francis thanked Miss Banks very heartily for the trouble she had taken
to enlighten him to the extent of her power, and then bade her good
afternoon.
“If you should meet with any one wanting apartments and board, either
partial or entire, you’ll perhaps be kind enough to bear mother in
mind,” the young lady said, as she escorted him to the door. He murmured
some polite assurance that he would neglect no opportunity of promoting
Mrs. Banks’s interest, and returned to the hansom, which had been
waiting for him during his prolonged interview with the good-natured
Jemima.
From Woolcote Villas he drove to the office of the Marylebone registrar,
and from that official he obtained an assurance that the marriage
between Robert Lesley and Susan Turner, on the 27th of February, 1849,
was, so far as his part of the business went, as legally binding as if
the ceremony had been performed by the Archbishop of Canterbury within
the solemn precincts of Westminster Abbey.
“If they chose to be married in false names, that was their business,”
said the registrar, “and they might find themselves bothered about it
by-and-by. But, except where there’s property, it isn’t often that a
person’s called upon to prove his marriage. I suppose, by your making
the inquiry, there _is_ property in this case?”
Francis Tredethlyn shook his head.
“I know no more about that than you do,” he said.
“Well, I shan’t forget that business in a hurry,” said the registrar,
who was inclined to be communicative. “In the first place, the man was
one of your regular tip-top swells, and that’s a kind of party we don’t
often see here; and in the next place, he gave me a twenty-pound note,
which was the first windfall of that kind that ever dropped into my
pocket, and is more than likely to be the last.”
“Can you tell me what the man was like?”
“Tall and fair, with blue eyes and light hair; your regular swell: not
the heavy military swell,--more of a delicate womanish way with him; but
such as you may see by the dozen any afternoon in St. James’s Street or
Pall Mall.”
This description was no clearer than that given by Jemima Banks. Francis
could scarcely walk through a London street without meeting with some
man who might be described in the same words. He left the registrar’s
office, and went back to his hotel; and, absorbed in the arduous duties
of his toilet, thought alternately of lost Susan Tredethlyn, _alias_
Susan Lesley, and of beautiful Maude Hillary, who was so soon to be his
wife.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXIV.
FRANCIS TREDETHLYN’S DISINTERESTED ADVISER.
She was so soon to be his wife! Yes, October was near at hand. Already
the woods and hills beyond the Star and Garter were bright with autumnal
tints of vivid orange and glowing crimson. The milliners and
dressmakers, the outfitters and bootmakers, were perpetually appearing
in the hall and on the staircases at the Cedars. Wicker baskets covered
with oilskin seemed continually passing in and put of Mr. Hillary’s
abode, and Maude could rarely enjoy a quiet half-hour undisturbed by a
mysterious summons, entreating her to inspect or try on some garment
newly brought home by a “young person” from town. Harcourt Lowther made
himself quite at home both at the Cedars and at Francis Tredethlyn’s
chambers during this period of preparation. Francis took very kindly to
his old master in his new capacity of friend and mentor. The habits of
the past made a link between them. The old half-friendly,
half-supercilious familiarity which had characterized Harcourt Lowther’s
treatment of his servant melted now into a playful and almost caressing
friendliness. Mr. Lowther was a thoroughly selfish man, and he found
himself called upon in this instance to sacrifice his pride in the cause
of his interest. He affected a hearty interest in Francis Tredethlyn’s
affairs, and contrived somehow, by a series of manœuvres, so subtle as
to be imperceptible, to install himself in the post of chief adviser to
the inexperienced young Cornishman. Mr. Lowther was an idle man, a very
clever man, too versatile for greatness, or even for any celebrity
beyond that species of drawing-room reputation, which women are able to
bestow on the men who are not too noble to waste a lifetime in small
accomplishments and shallow courtesies. He was very clever, very idle,
very much inclined to quarrel with the decrees of Providence; and in
Francis Tredethlyn he saw the possessor of the two things he himself
most ardently desired--a great fortune, and Maude Hillary for a wife.
But he was true to his resolution to take matters quietly; and he
assisted in the preparations for the wedding with as much outward show
of pleasure as if he had been a match-making mother rejoicing in the
happy disposal of a whole brood of daughters. The big mansion in the new
district of palatial streets and squares lying between Kensington and
Brompton was fitted and furnished under Mr. Lowther’s superintendence.
He had meetings with architects, gilders, decorators, and upholsterers;
and, with only an occasional reference to Francis, gave his orders as
freely as if the house had been his own. Sometimes, walking up and down
the whole length of the three drawing-rooms, a strange smile flickered
over his face,--a contemplative smile, which faded away in the next
moment, giving place to that perfection of fashionable indifference to
all things in heaven and earth which was his ordinary expression.
The appointed day came at last, and poor Francis drove down to
Twickenham, looking as pale as his light waistcoat, but supported by his
friend Harcourt Lowther as best man. Once, and once only, Maude Hillary
looked at her discarded lover while she remained Maude Hillary; but
there was a world of mingled scorn and reproach in that one look. Ah,
how different his love must have been from hers! she thought. Had he
forsaken her for a wealthier bride, she would have gone far away from
the sound of his wedding bells, and the sight of his wedding finery. In
that one look she had seen that he was almost as pale as the bridegroom;
but she could not forgive him for being there.
There was all the usual business. Autumnal flowers scattered under the
feet of the bride and bridegroom; charity children in clean pinafores
cheering in shrill treble voices as the bridal carriage drove away; and
then a breakfast, and the popping of champagne corks, and the creaming
of delicately perfumed Moselle, and a little speech-making of the
mildest character; and then a departure amidst all the confusion of a
crowded hall and portico--young-lady intimates pressing forward to
caress the bride; loud-voiced young men congratulating the bridegroom;
servants with white favours standing on tip-toe to get a peep at the
show: and then the postilions crack their whips, and the carriage rolls
away through the chill autumn evening; and Maude sees Twickenham town
spin by her in a dim glimmer of comfortable firelight, twinkling redly
in cottage windows.
The wedding tour had been amongst the many things which Harcourt Lowther
had kindly undertaken to plan for his friend; and after a great deal of
deliberation, that gentleman had pitched upon one of the dullest and
quietest watering-places in Devonshire, as the one spot upon all this
earth best suited for Mr. Tredethlyn and his bride.
“You don’t want the stereotyped Continental tour;--the Rhine steamers
are crowded with cockneys, who find it easier to spout ‘Childe Harold’
than to regulate the administration of their h’s. What do you know about
the castled crag of Drachenfels, dear boy? and what do you care for all
the hackneyed sentimentality about beery old knights and battered old
castles? You don’t speak any language but your honest native tongue, and
you would be bothered out of your life before your travels were over
unless you took a courier--and then imagine seeing nature through the
eyes of a courier! No, my dear Tredethlyn! the sort of thing for you is
some quiet little watering-place,--‘an humble cot, in a tranquil spot,
with a distant view of the changing sea,’ and all that sort of thing; in
other words, a tranquil little retreat where you and Mrs. Tredethlyn may
have time to get acquainted with one another.”
Francis was only too glad to take such pleasant advice. To be alone with
Maude, alone beside the still grey sea in the quiet autumn evenings,
seemed to him the highest bliss that earth could hold for any human
being: and poor Francis blessed his generous friend for the sound
judgment which was to secure him such happiness.
“I dare say I should have gone scampering all over the Continent but for
you, Lowther,” he said, innocently. “Those other fellows at the Cedars
advised a tour through half Europe: ‘See plenty of life,’ they said;
‘freshen yourself up with change of scene, and pick up all the jargon
you can out of Murray, so as to be able to hold your own in society.
Everybody travels nowadays, and it doesn’t do for a fellow with lots of
tin to be behind the rest of the world.’ But I’ll take your advice,
Lowther. I wanted Maude to choose the place for our bridal trip, but she
wouldn’t; so we’ll go to the Devonshire village.”
It is not to be supposed, of course, that Mr. Lowther had any other than
the most friendly intention when he selected Combe Western as the scene
of Francis Tredethlyn’s honeymoon; but, on the other hand, it must be
confessed that had Harcourt wished to inspire Maude with a weariness of
her husband’s society, he could have scarcely selected any place better
calculated to assist him in the carrying out of his design. At Combe
Western, the misty autumn days were unbroken by any change, save the
slow changes of the hours and the gradual darkening of the sky. There
were pleasant drives and romantic scenery to be found in the
neighbourhood of Combe Western; but Devonshire is a rainy county, and as
it rained with little intermission during the whole of that honeymoon
period, Francis Tredethlyn’s bride was compelled to find her chief
amusement in the prim lodging-house drawing-room and the society of her
husband.
And this society was not congenial to her. He was handsome, and pleasant
to look at; manly, good-tempered, generous. No mean or unworthy
sentiment ever dropped from his lips. She respected him, and was
grateful to him; nay, even beyond this, there was a certain latent
affection for him lurking in some corner of her heart; but she was very
tired of him nevertheless. To be truly attached to a person, and
desperately weary of them, is not altogether an impossibility. Are we
not sometimes weary of ourselves, whom we yet love so dearly? When you
get tired of a book, you have nothing to do but close the volume and
restore it to its shelf. But you cannot shut up your friend when he
becomes tedious; you must needs go on, wading through page after page of
his conversation, till you yawn in his face, and arouse him to the
unpleasant conviction that he is a nuisance.
Maude was very gratefully and affectionately disposed towards her
father’s benefactor; but she grew terribly tired of his sole
companionship during that rainy six weeks in the quiet Devonian
watering-place. If the bride and bridegroom had gone on that stereotyped
foreign tour so strongly protested against by Harcourt Lowther, Maude’s
sunny nature would speedily have asserted itself. She would have found
in the rapid changes of scene, in all the pleasant excitement of quick
travelling, plenty of subject-matter for conversation with her new
companion; there would have been always some common ground on which they
could have met, some little incident, among the hundred incidents of a
traveller’s day, which would have aroused a sympathy between them. But
thrown on their own resources at Combe Western, a Horace Walpole and a
Madame du Deffand might have exhausted their conversational powers, and
yawned drearily in each other’s faces. Maude found herself wishing for
the end of her honeymoon before the first week had drawn to its close;
and Francis, always timidly watchful of his wife’s beautiful face, felt
a chill anguish at his heart as he perceived her weariness of spirit.
Thus it was that, when they returned to London, the husband and wife
were little nearer to each other than on their wedding-day. No pleasant
familiarity with each other’s thoughts and feelings had arisen during
that dull residence in a dull watering-place. That subtle process of
assimilation by which--except in some dismal examples--husband and wife
grow like each other in mind and feeling, had not yet begun. They were
strangers still; in spite of Maude’s esteem for her husband’s character,
in spite of Francis Tredethlyn’s blind idolatry of his wife’s
perfections; and Harcourt Lowther, who was one of the guests at their
first dinner-party, was not slow to recognize the state of the case.
“You’ll get on admirably together by-and-by, dear boy,” he said to
Francis, as they smoked their cigars together in a luxurious little
study behind the big library, some days after the great dinner. “You’ll
get on superbly with your lovely wife, if you only play your cards
cleverly. There must be no Darby and Joan business, you know--no
sentimentalism. Lionel Hillary’s daughter is just the woman to be
disgusted by that sort of thing. It was all very well, of course, to do
the romantic during the honeymoon; but that’s all over now; your wife
will go her way, and you’ll go yours. Her friends will absorb a great
deal of her time and attention; your friends will absorb you. You’ll
have your club, your horses, your men’s parties, and perhaps the
House,--for you ought decidedly to get into Parliament,--and it will be
utterly impossible for you to spend all your mornings hanging about your
wife’s rooms, or nursing her Skye terriers, as you seem to have done
hitherto.”
“But I like so much to be with her,” Francis remonstrated, piteously.
“It’s very friendly of you to give me these hints, and I dare say you’re
right, to some degree. I know Maude used to seem very tired at Combe
Western, and we both got into the habit of looking at our watches in a
dispiriting kind of way every quarter of an hour; but since we’ve come
to London she has quite recovered her spirits, and we are so happy
together;--you should have heard her laugh the other morning, when I
taught one of the Skyes to shoulder arms with a lead-pencil.”
Mr. Tredethlyn laughed aloud himself at the recollection of this feat.
Harcourt Lowther shrugged his shoulders, and a frown, or the passing
shadow of a frown, darkened his handsome face.
There are some natures in which there is a certain element of
childishness, and between such natures no desperate antagonism is ever
likely to arise.
“We were rather dull at Combe Western,” said Mr. Tredethlyn, presently;
“but since we’ve been in London we’ve got on capitally. I’ve been
everywhere with Maude--shopping even; and I’ve written out the lists for
her parties, and been on a round of calls; and, in short, I’ve been the
happiest fellow in all creation.”
“No doubt, my dear boy; that sort of thing’s delightful for a fortnight;
but look out for the day when the twin demons of satiety and disgust
will arise to wither all these Arcadian delights.”
Francis pondered gravely. He had been happy since his return to London,
for he had seen Maude bright and lively, pleased with the novelty of her
position, happy in her father’s affectionate welcome, serene in the
consciousness of pure intentions, and grateful for the devotion, of
which some new evidence met her at every turn. Poor Francis had been
entirely happy; but it needed only a whisper from an elegant
Mephistopheles in modern costume to render this simple Cornishman
doubtful even of his own happiness. It might be only a sham and
delusion, after all; and Maude’s sunniest smile might be the smile of a
victim resigned to the sacrifice.
“If you think that Maude is likely to grow tired----” Francis began, in
a very melancholy tone; but Mr. Lowther interrupted him.
“_If_ I think! dear boy. How can I do otherwise than think what is
obvious to the dullest apprehension? Take life as other people take it,
my dear, simple-minded Tredethlyn, and you’ll find it go smoothly enough
with you. Try to live on a plan of your own, and--the rest is chaos.
‘_Il n’est pas de bonheur hors des routes communes:
Qui vit à travers champs ne trouve qu’infortunes._’
You had better stick to the vulgar highway, Frank, and not attempt to
set up an exceptional _ménage_. No woman will long tolerate a man tied
to her apron string. She may be flattered by his devotion in the
beginning, but she ends by despising his folly.”
So it was that Francis Tredethlyn began life under the advice of his
friend Harcourt Lowther. After that conversation in the study the young
husband no longer intruded himself upon his wife’s leisure, or attempted
to identify himself with her pursuits. He found plenty to occupy his own
time; for Harcourt Lowther always had some new scheme for his friend’s
employment or amusement. A race, that no man living in the world could
exist without seeing; a horse to be sold at Tattersall’s; a celebrated
collection of pictures at Christie and Manson’s; a bachelor’s dinner at
a club; a review at Wimbledon;--somehow or other there was always
something to be seen, or something to be done, of a nature in which Mrs.
Tredethlyn could neither have any part nor feel any interest; and when
Francis and his friend dined alone with her, as they did very often, it
happened somehow that the conversation was always of a horsy and
masculine character, painfully wearisome to the ordinary female mind. If
Mr. Lowther had been intent on widening the natural gulf which
circumstances had set between these two people, he could scarcely have
gone to work more skilfully than he did: though it is of course to be
presumed that he was only an unconscious instrument, an involuntary
agent of mischief and ruin.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXV.
THE ROAD TO RUIN.
Maude Tredethlyn took her new life very pleasantly. Her father was
happy. There had been a reaction in the City; things were going very
well for the Australian merchant; and Francis Tredethlyn was receiving
handsome interest for his thirty thousand pounds.
He brought these tidings to his wife’s boudoir one morning early in the
new year.
“I knew you’d be glad to hear it, Maude,” he said; “and now you see that
it _was_ a very fine thing for me to get into your father’s business. So
you need not have been uneasy about the matter, my darling.”
Mrs. Tredethlyn lifted herself upon tiptoe, and pursed up the rosiest
lips in Christendom. A kiss, transient as the passing flutter of a
butterfly’s wing, alighted somewhere amid the thickets of the
Cornishman’s beard.
“You dear, good old Francis! That is the pleasantest news I ever heard,
except----”
“Except what, darling?”
“The news that papa brought me home a year ago, when a generous friend
stepped in between him and ruin.”
Francis Tredethlyn blushed like a schoolgirl.
“Oh, Frank, if I should ever forget that day!” said Maude, in a low
voice, that had something of sadness in its tone.
Was she thinking that there had been occasions since her marriage when
she _had_ almost forgotten how much she owed to the devotion of her
lover,--occasions on which some little social failure--some small
omission or commission--some petty sin against the laws of the
Belgravians and Tyburnians, had been large enough to blot out all memory
of her husband’s goodness? How can you remember that a man has a noble
heart, when, for want of the ordinary tact by which the well-bred
navigators steer their barks amid the troubled waters of society, he
blurts out some unlucky allusion which paralyzes the conversational
powers of an entire dinner-table, and brings blight and ruin down upon
an assemblage which has fairly promised to be a success? Or how can you
be expected to appreciate the generous spirit of a being whose ungainly
elbow has just tilted half-a-dozen _petites timbales de gibier_ into the
ruby-velvet lap of your most important guest?
There were times when Maude was forgetful of everything except her
husband’s genial good-nature and unfailing devotion. There were other
times when her heart sank within her as she saw his candid face beaming
at her from the remote end of a long dinner-table, and heard his
sonorous laugh pealing loud and long above the hushed accents of
Belgravia.
He was her slave. If she loved him--and surely it was impossible that
she could accept so much idolatry, and render no small tribute of
affection in return--her love for him was pretty much of the same
quality as that which she bestowed on her favourite Skye terrier.
He was such a dear, devoted creature--so sensible, so obedient; and if
he did not quite stand up in a corner to beg, with a bit of bread upon
his nose, it was only because he was not required to do so. He was the
best of creatures--a big, amiable Newfoundland, ready to lie down in the
dirt to be trodden upon by his mistress’s pretty slipper, or to fly at
the throat of the foe who dared to assail her. He was a faithful slave
and defender, and it was very pleasant to know that he was always at
hand--to be patted on the head now and then when he was specially
good--to be a little neglected when his mistress was absorbed by the
agreeable distractions of society--to be blushed for, and even disowned
now and then, when his big awkward paws went ruthlessly trampling upon
some of the choicest flowers in the conventional flower-garden.
He was her slave--her own. He loved her with an idolatrous devotion
which she could rarely think of without smiling at his exaggerated
estimate of her charms and graces. He was hers--so entirely that no
possibility of losing him ever entered into her mind. He was hers, and
we are apt to be just a little indifferent about the possessions we hold
most securely. It had become a matter of course that her husband should
scatter all the treasures of his affection at her feet, and hold himself
richly repaid by any waif or stray of tenderness she might choose to
bestow upon him. She had no uneasiness about him,--none of those sharp
twinges of jealousy--those chilling pangs of doubt--those foolish and
morbid fears, which are apt to disturb the peace of even the happiest
wife. She knew that he had loved her from the very hour of their first
meeting, against his will, in despite of his better reason. She knew
that he had been content to stand afar and worship her in utter
hopelessness; and having now rewarded his fidelity, she fancied that she
had no more to do, except to receive his idolatry, and smile upon him
now and then when it pleased her to be gracious.
There was neither pride nor presumption in her nature; but she had lived
all her life in one narrow circle, and she could not help being
unconsciously patronizing in her treatment of the man who had taken her
Majesty’s shilling, and blacked Harcourt Lowther’s boots.
Francis Tredethlyn might perhaps have been entirely satisfied by
brightly patronizing smiles, and gentle pattings on the head, if he had
not been blessed with a friend and adviser, always at his elbow, always
ready to step in with an intellectual lantern held gracefully aloft, and
a mocking finger pointed, when the simple Cornishman’s perception failed
to show him the uncomfortable side of the subject.
“What a darling she is!” exclaimed Mr. Tredethlyn, as he left the house
with Harcourt Lowther, after Maude had parted from him on the staircase
all in a flutter of silk and lace, and with a feathery bush of golden
hair framed in the last Parisian absurdity in the way of bonnets.
“Mrs. Tredethlyn is just the sort of wife for a man of the world,”
Harcourt answered, with a slight shrug of his well-shaped shoulders.
“But I can’t help fancying sometimes that you’re too good a fellow to be
thrown away upon the loveliest creature who ever isolated herself from
the rest of the human race in the remote centre of a continent of moiré
antique. Of course I can’t for a moment deny that you are the most
fortunate of created beings--but--there is always a ‘but,’ you know,
even if one has a beautiful wife and thirty thousand a year. I suppose
it is the habit of my mind to quarrel with perfection. I think if I were
a fresh-hearted, simple-minded fellow like you, Tredethlyn, I should
yearn for something nearer and dearer to me than a fashionable wife.”
The finger of Mephistopheles, always pointing, generally contrived to
touch a sore place. Francis Tredethlyn, even when he had been happiest
in the sunlight of Maude’s smiles, had felt a vague sense of that one
bitter truth. She was no nearer to him than of old. The impassable gulf
still yawned between them, not to be bridged over by pretty little
courtesies or patronizing smiles.
But in spite of all inward misgivings, Mr. Tredethlyn turned upon his
friend, and hotly denied the truth of that gentleman’s observations.
Harcourt Lowther was quite resigned to a little fiery contradiction of
this kind. The arrow went home to the mark it had been shot at, and
rankled there. Such discussions were very frequent between the two men;
and however firmly Francis might argue with his friend in the daytime,
he was apt to lie awake in the dead of the night, like false cousin Amy
in the poem, when the rain was pattering on the roofs of the palatial
district, and wonder, with a dull, aching pain in his heart, whether
Harcourt Lowther was right after all; and Maude--sunny-haired,
beautiful, frivolous Maude--would never be any nearer and dearer to him
than she was now.
In the meantime, Mr. Lowther, who sowed the seeds of the disease, was
always ready with the remedy; and the remedy was--dissipation.
Harcourt Lowther, in whose few years of legal study had been crammed the
vicious experiences of a lifetime, was eager to perform the promise he
had made to Francis Tredethlyn some two years before, when the young man
first received the tidings of his uncle Oliver’s bequest.
“I told you I’d show you life, dear boy,” he said; “and I mean to keep
my word. While Mrs. Tredethlyn amuses herself with the usual social
treadmill business--perpetually moving on, and never getting any
farther--you and I will see a world in which life is worth living.”
Thus it was that Francis Tredethlyn was lured away from a home in which
he was taught to believe himself unappreciated, and introduced for the
first time within the unholy precincts of the kingdom of Bohemia.
He entered the mysterious regions at first very reluctantly. He had the
ignorant rustic’s notion of Vice, and fancied that she would show
herself in naked hideousness; but he found her with her natural face
hidden under a plaster mask modelled from the fair countenance of
Virtue. It was something of a caricature, perhaps; for all imitations
are so apt to become exaggerations. He found that Bohemia was a kind of
Belgravia in electro-plate. There were the same dresses and properties,
only a little tarnished and faded; the same effects, always considerably
overdone; the same jargon, but louder and coarser. Life in Bohemia
seemed like a Transpontine version of a West-end drama, with cheaper
scenery and actors, and a more uproarious audience.
This was the kingdom with whose inner mysteries Harcourt Lowther
affected a fashionable familiarity. He presented his wealthy friend to
the potentates of the kingdom, and carried him hither and thither to
worship at numerous temples, whose distinguishing features were the
flare of gas-lamps, and the popping of champagne corks, branded with the
obscurest names in the catalogue of wine-growers, and paid for at the
highest rate known in the London market.
Perhaps in all his wanderings in the darksome wilderness which his
Mentor called London life, Francis Tredethlyn’s worst sin was the
perpetual “standing” of spurious sparkling wines, and the waste of a
good deal of money lost at unlimited loo, or blind hookey, as the case
might be. He had high animal spirits and thirty thousand a year, which
common report exaggerated into sixty thousand, and which the more
imaginative denizens of Bohemia multiplied into fabulous and
incalculable riches; so that he met with a very cordial welcome from the
magnates of the land. But the descent of Avernus, however easy it may
be, is a gradual slope, and not a precipitous mountain-side, down which
a man can be flung headlong by one push from a friendly hand. Francis
Tredethlyn yawned in the faces of the brightest stars in the Bohemian
hemisphere. His frank nature revolted against the shallow falsehoods
around and about him. The glare of the gas seemed to have no brilliancy:
the bloom upon the women’s faces was only so much vermilion and
crimson-lake bought at the perfumer’s shop, and ghastly to look at in a
sidelight. The laughter had the false ring of spurious coin; the music
was out of tune. In all this little world there was no element of
spontaneity; except perhaps in the uproarious gaiety of some boyish
country squire making a railroad journey through some fine old property
that had been kept sacred and unbroken for half-a-dozen centuries, to be
squandered on a handful of pearls to melt in Cleopatra’s wine, or
expended on the soaps and perfumeries of a modern Lamia.
There was neither bloom nor freshness on anything except on the wings of
a few pigeons newly lured into the haunts of the vulture tribe.
Everything else was false, and withered, and faded. The smiles of the
women, the friendship of the men, were as spurious as the rhubarb
champagnes and gooseberry Moselles, and were bought and sold like them.
Mephistopheles may lead his pupil to the Brocken, but he cannot compel
the young man to enjoy himself amongst the wicked revellers; nor can he
altogether prevent the neophyte from perceiving such small
_inconvenances_ as occasional red mice hopping out of the mouths of
otherwise charming young damsels.
Harcourt Lowther found it very hard work to keep Francis Tredethlyn
amused, night after night, in remote and unapproachable regions, whose
very names were only to be spoken in hushed accents over the fourth
bottle of Chambertin or Clos Vougeot at a bachelor’s dessert. Poor Frank
would rather have been dancing attendance upon his wife, and trampling
on the silken trains of stern matrons and dowagers at the dullest
“Wednesday,” or “Tuesday,” or “Saturday,” in all the stuccoed mansions
in which Maude’s pretty face and pleasant manners, and his own good old
Cornish name and comfortable income, had secured his footing. He was
very good-natured, and did not care how much bad wine he was called upon
to pay for. He could lose a heavy sum at blind hookey without the
faintest contraction of his black eyebrows, or the smallest depression
of his lower jaw. But he did not enjoy himself.
He did not enjoy himself--and yet somehow or other he went again and
again to the same temples, always under convoy of his friend Harcourt,
and generally very firmly resolved that each visit should be the last.
But there was always some special reason for another visit--an
appointment with some elegant acquaintance of the vulture tribe, who
wanted his revenge at blind hookey; or a little dinner to be given at
the Star and Garter, in honour of some beautiful Free-Lance, whose chief
fascinations were the smoking of tissue-paper cigarettes and a vivacious
disregard of Lindley Murray. There was always some engagement of this
kind; and as it happened somehow that Francis Tredethlyn generally found
himself pledged to act as paymaster, it would of course have been very
unmanly to draw back. If he could have sent his friend Lowther and a
blank cheque as a substitute for his own presence, he would gladly have
done so; but his friend Lowther took care to make that impossible. So
the matter always ended by Mr. Tredethlyn finding himself, at some time
on the wrong side of midnight seated at the head of a glittering
dinner-table; with the ruins of an expensive dessert and the faces of
his guests only dimly visible athwart a thick and stifling vapour of
cigar smoke; while the clamour of strident laughter mingled with the
occasional chinking and clattering of glass, as some applauding hand
thumped its owner’s approval of the florid sentiments in an eloquent
postprandial oration.
It is impossible to be perpetually paying for sparkling wines without
occasionally drinking a little too freely of their bubbling vintage.
Francis Tredethlyn, under the influence of unlimited Moet or Clicquot,
found the Bohemians a much pleasanter kind of people than when he
contemplated them in the cold grey morning light of sobriety. Harcourt
Lowther took care that his friend should pretty generally look at things
through a rose-tinted medium engendered of the juice of the grape; for
he found that it was by this means alone that he could retain his hold
upon his pupil.
Go where he might, the Cornishman carried his wife’s image in his heart,
and he would have left the most brilliant assemblage in Bohemia for a
quiet _tête-à-tête_ in Maude’s boudoir; if his friend Harcourt had not
carefully impressed upon him that his entrance into that pretty little
chamber was an intrusion only tolerated by Mrs. Tredethlyn’s good
nature.
There is no need to enter very minutely upon the details of the work
which Harcourt Lowther was doing. The art of ruining a well-disposed
young man is not a very difficult one; but Mr. Lowther had reduced the
art into a science. His great effects were not the sublime hazards of
genius, but the calculated results of a carefully studied process. So
many nights in a tainted atmosphere; so many Richmond and Greenwich
dinners; so many subtle insinuations of Maude’s indifference, must
produce such and such an effect. Mr. Lowther displayed none of that
impolitic and vulgar haste with which a meaner man might ruin his
friend. He never hurried his work by so much as a single step taken
before its time. But he never wavered, or relented, or turned aside even
for one moment from the course which he had mapped out for himself. So,
in the course of that London season, it became quite a common thing for
a street hansom to bring Mr. Tredethlyn to the gigantic stuccoed mansion
which he called his own in the early sunlight of a spring morning. There
were even times when the returning wanderer found it no easy matter to
open a door with a patent latch-key, which _would_ go meandering
hopelessly over the panel of the door, scratching all manner of
eccentric circles and parabolas on the varnish, instead of finding its
way into the key-hole. There was one awful night, on which Maude, coming
home from some very late assembly, was stumbled against by a tipsy man
who was groping his way up the great stone staircase, and found, to her
unutterable horror, that the tipsy man--who apologized profusely for
tearing half-a-dozen yards of Mechlin from the hem of her skirt,
declaring that he was “ver’ sorr’, ’pon m’ wor’; b’t y’ see, m’ dea’
Maurr, if y’ w’ll wear dress s’ long, mussn’ be s’prise get torr t’
piecess”--was her husband.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXVI.
A CHILLING RECONCILIATION.
That unfortunate meeting on the stairs made a very deep impression upon
Maude Tredethlyn. She had never before encountered drunkenness; and it
was one of those sins which seemed to her to belong to a region of outer
darkness, in which decent people had no place. Her father had always
been as sober as an anchorite; her father’s guests were gentlemen. She
had heard, now and then, in the course of her life at the Cedars, of a
drunken gardener dismissed with ignominy from the gardens--a drunken
groom degraded from has rank in the stables. But Francis, her
husband,--that _he_ should be thick of speech and unsteady of foot under
the influence of strong drink!--it seemed almost too horrible for
belief. She lay awake in the morning sunlight, thinking of Francis
Tredethlyn’s misdemeanour.
“And just as I fancied that I was beginning to love him!” she thought,
regretfully. Would they meet at breakfast? she wondered. And if they did
meet, what would Francis say to her? A sickly dread of that meeting took
possession of her mind. If he apologized, how was she to answer him?
Would it be possible for her to conceal her disgust?
“Let me remember his goodness to my father,” she murmured. “Oh, can I
ever be so base as to forget that?”
The possible meeting at the breakfast-table was very easily avoided.
Mrs. Tredethlyn had a headache, and took her strong green tea and dry
toast in the pretty little boudoir, with the pink draperies and Parian
statuettes, the satin-wood cabinets and bookcases, the Persian carpets
and polar-bear-skin rugs, the marqueterie _jardinières_, and toy
Swiss-cottage birdcages, selected by Harcourt Lowther. It was rather an
enervating little boudoir, eminently adapted for the perusal of French
novels, and the neglect of all the duties of life. Mrs. Tredethlyn
breakfasted in this room; so there was no uncomfortable meeting between
the husband and wife. Francis left the house before noon, in order to
keep an appointment with his friend Mr. Lowther. They were going
together to the Doncaster spring meeting, where Bohemianism would be
rampant, and were to be away for some days. Poor Francis ran into the
library, while his friend waited for him, and scribbled a hasty note to
his wife, full of penitence and self-humiliation. He gave the missive to
Mrs. Tredethlyn’s maid at the foot of the stairs, while Harcourt was
standing in a little room opening out of the hall, arranging the strap
of a race-glass across his light overcoat. Mr. Tredethlyn went back to
the library in search of a railway rug which he had flung off his arm
when he sat down to write the letter; and during his brief absence there
was a flutter of silk in the hall, and a little conference between Mr.
Lowther and the Abigail.
Half an hour afterwards, when the two men were walking up and down the
platform at the King’s Cross station, with cigars in their mouths, Mr.
Lowther handed his friend the identical letter which Francis had
entrusted to his wife’s maid.
“You can post that to its address if you like, dear boy; but I think _I_
should light my cigar with it. The seal is unbroken, you see; but I
fancy I can make a tolerable guess at the contents of the epistle. Dear
old Frank, if you want to preserve the merest semblance of manhood, the
poorest remnant of independence, never beg your wife’s pardon.”
Of course Mr. Tredethlyn was very angry. Harcourt Lowther was prepared
to encounter a given amount of resistance. The wave may lash and beat
itself against the quiet breast of the rock; and the rock, secure in its
supremacy, has only to stand still until that poor worn-out wave crawls
meekly to the stony bosom, a conquered and a placid thing. Mr. Lowther
had his work to do, and he took his own time about doing it. The
apologetic little epistle was _not_ sent to Mrs. Tredethlyn; and at an
uproarious after-dinner assemblage at the Reindeer, Francis abandoned
such frivolous stuff as sparkling Moselles and Burgundies for fierce
libations of brandy punch. He made a tremendous book for all manner of
events, always under the advice of his friend; indeed, its pages
contained many rather heavy engagements with Mr. Lowther himself, who
affected extreme simplicity amongst the magnates of the turf, but who
was nevertheless eminently respected by those gentlemen, as being of the
deep and dangerous class--a dark horse, secretly exercised on lonely
commons at weird hours of the early morning, and winning with a rush
when he was least expected to do so.
While Francis was seeing life through the medium provided for him by his
experienced adviser, Maude enjoyed herself after her own fashion. She
had been very happy at Twickenham; but she had never until now been
entirely her own mistress, with unlimited credit and unlimited ready
money, and all the privileges of a matron. At the Cedars she had been
always more or less under her father’s direction. She had acted very
much as she pleased upon all occasions; but she had made a point of
consulting him about the smallest step in her simple life; a round of
calls, a day’s shopping, a little musical gathering after a
dinner-party, the amount of a subscription to a charity,--even the
colour of a dress.
But now the young matron shook off even the gentle fetters which had
held the girl, and spread her pinions for a bolder flight. A much wider
world had opened itself to the merchant’s daughter since her marriage.
The story of Mr. Tredethlyn’s fortune--always multiplied by the liberal
tongue of rumour--was one of the most popular topics amongst the
denizens of the new district in which Mr. Tredethlyn’s house was
situated. None of these West-end people knew that Lionel Hillary’s
position had ever endured a dreadful crisis of uncertainty and terror.
The marriage between Maude and Francis was supposed to be one of those
sublime unions in which wealth is united to wealth--the alliance of a
Miss Rothschild with a Master Lafitte--a grand commercial combination
for the consolidation of capital.
So Maude took her place as one of the most important novelties of the
current year. She gave great receptions in her three drawing-rooms,
whose gorgeous decorations were just a little too much like the velvet
and ormolu magnificence of a public room at a gigantic hotel. She
organized dinner-parties, and revised and corrected a _menu_, with the
_savoir faire_ of a Brillat Savarin in petticoats. Always accustomed to
a reckless expenditure, she had no idea of the necessity for some
regulation in the expenses of a large household. Left a great deal to
herself, and frequently at a loss for occupation, she often spent her
husband’s money from sheer desire for amusement. After that unlucky
encounter on the stairs, she resigned herself entirely to her position
as a fashionable wife. Her husband went his way unmolested, and she went
hers. She was tolerably happy, for the life was a very pleasant one to
live; but oh, what a vain, empty, profitless existence to look back
upon!--the success of a dinner, the triumph of an audacious toilette,
the only landmarks on a great flat of frivolity. But Mrs. Tredethlyn was
not at the age in which people are given to looking back; she was rich,
beautiful, accomplished, agreeable, with that dash of recklessness in
her gaiety which makes a woman such an acquisition in a drawing-room,
and the fumes of the incense which her admirers burned before her were
just a little intoxicating. The Twickenham loungers, who had worshipped
her mutely and reverently from afar off, found themselves distanced now
by bolder adorers, and, conversing amongst themselves upon the
staircases and on the outer edges of crowded drawing-rooms in the
stuccoed district, shook their heads and pulled their whiskers, gravely
opining that Mrs. Tredethlyn was “going the pace.”
Maude had been Francis Tredethlyn’s wife more than six months, and the
London season was at its fullest height, when an accidental meeting with
Julia Desmond brought about that young lady’s restoration to her old
position of confidante and companion to the pampered daughter of her
dead father’s friend. The two women met in the Pantheon; and it was a
terrible shock to Maude to see her old companion dawdling listlessly
before a stall of toys, dressed in a shabby black silk and a doubtful
bonnet, and attended by two ungainly girls in short petticoats and
scarlet stockings.
The proud spirit of the Desmonds had been crushed by the iron hand of
necessity. In these perpetual duels between pride and poverty, the
result seems only a question of time. Poverty must have the best of it,
unless, indeed, death steps between the combatants to give poor pride a
doubtful victory. Julia Desmond had carried her pride and anger away
from the luxurious idleness of the Cedars, to nurse them in a London
lodging. The only money she had in the world was a ten-pound note, left
out of a sum which the liberal merchant had given her for the payment of
a dressmaker’s bill. She had the jewels given her by Francis
Tredethlyn--the diamonds which she had thrown at his feet in the little
study at the Cedars, on the night of the amateur theatricals--but which
the sober reflections of the following morning had prompted her to
retain amongst her possessions. She had these, and upon these she might
have raised a very considerable sum of money. But the angry Julia had no
desire to raise money. A life of idleness in a London lodging was the
very last existence to suit her energetic nature. She inserted an
advertisement in the “Times” upon the very day after her departure from
Twickenham, and she went on advertising until she succeeded in getting a
situation as governess in a gentleman’s family. But ah! then came the
bitterest of all her trials. She fancied that her life, wherever she
went, would be more or less like her life at the Cedars. There would be
a great deal more work, perhaps, there might be less luxury, less
gaiety, but it would be the same kind of life: while on any day the
lucky chance might arise, and the beauty of the Desmonds might win her
some great prize in the matrimonial lottery.
Alas for Julia’s inexperienced notions of a governess’s existence! She
found herself the drudge of an exacting mistress, with every hour of her
dreary life mapped out and allotted for her, with less share in the
social pleasures of the house she lived in than if she had been the
kitchen-maid, and with two small tyrants in crinkled hair and holland
pinafores always on the watch to detect her shortcomings, and to twist
them into excuses for their own. The dreadful monotony of her life would
alone have made it odious; but Julia had “a sorrow’s crown of sorrow”
perpetually pressing on her tortured brow. She had the recollection of
happier things--the pleasant idleness at the Cedars, the position of
Francis Tredethlyn’s affianced wife. And she had given up this position
in one moment of ungovernable rage and jealousy. She had suffered one
mad impulse of her proud nature to undo the slow work of months. Miss
Desmond had ample leisure for the contemplation of her folly during the
long winter evenings which she spent in a third-floor sitting-room at
Bayswater, hearing unwilling children grind hopelessly at a German
grammar by the light of two guttering tallow-candles. She _did_
contemplate her folly, while the guttural verbs and declensions fell
with a droning noise on her unlistening ears; but the rage which swelled
her bosom was against Maude Hillary, and Maude alone.
She saw Maude’s carriage in the Park sometimes, while she took her
allotted walk with the unwilling children, who might have been pleasant
children enough, perhaps, if they had not been weighed down by
intellectual exercises compared to which the enforced physical labours
of Toulon would have seemed light and agreeable. Julia saw her old
companion, and her mind went back to the sunny afternoons on the lawn at
Twickenham; and the sight of the pretty face and golden hair, the Skye
terriers and neatly appointed equipage, stirred the fire of hatred
always burning in her breast, until she could almost have shaken her
small fist at the merchant’s daughter.
She saw the announcement of Maude’s marriage in the “Times,” and hated
her still more. She saw Maude in the Park, after her marriage, in a more
splendid equipage than the landau from the Cedars, and she hated her
even more and more. She set her teeth together, and drew back under the
shadow of the trees to watch Francis Tredethlyn’s wife drive by.
“She has cheated me out of it all,” she thought; “it would all have been
mine but for her treachery.”
Then one bright and sunny afternoon in early May the two women
met,--Julia a wan shadow of her former self, worn out with hard work,
depressed by the monotony of her life, indifferent as to her dress and
appearance; Maude a beaming creature in gauzy mauve muslin, with a
Watteau skirt, all a-flutter with ribands, and a voluminous train
sweeping the dust behind her.
“Dear Julia----”
“Maude--Mrs. Tredethlyn!”
Miss Desmond turned as pale as death. The encounter had come upon her
very suddenly, and she was neither physically nor mentally able to bear
it. She set her teeth and tried to flash the old defiance from her dark
eyes. But the light of that once fiery glance died out like the flame of
a candle which burns feebly in the glare of the morning sun. Julia was
quite worn out by the life she had been leading for the last year and a
half. The pride of a Somerset might give way beneath a long course of
overwork and indifferent diet.
After that first exclamation of surprise she drew herself to her fullest
height, and tried to pass Mrs. Tredethlyn with a bow, and a faint, cold
smile of recognition, but Maude stopped her.
“Dearest Julia, if you knew how anxious and unhappy I have been about
you, I’m sure you would not want to pass me by. Do let us be friends.
The past is forgotten, isn’t it? Yes, I’m sure it is. Will you come
up-stairs to the picture-gallery? that’s always a nice solitary place
where one can talk. Are those young ladies with you? What very nice
little girls! Miss Desmond and I are going up-stairs, dear, to have a
chat. Will you come with us?”
The elder of Julia’s pupils, to whom this question was addressed,
replied only by a stony glare. She was petrified by the audacity of this
smiling creature in mauve who dared to take possession of her governess.
The youthful mind, soured by a long course of German declensions, is apt
to contemplate everything in a gloomy aspect.
Maude and Julia went past poor Haydon’s big cold picture, and made their
way to a small room which was quite empty. Julia’s face had a stern
darkness upon it, which might have frightened any one less hopeful than
Maude; but that young lady had been surrounded by an atmosphere of love
from her cradle upwards, and was entirely unacquainted with the
diagnosis of hatred. She despatched the children to look at the pictures
in the larger rooms, and then laying her hand caressingly upon Miss
Desmond’s arm, she said, very earnestly,--
“Dearest Julia, I hope you have forgiven me?”
Miss Desmond locked her lips, and stood for some moments with her face
quite fixed, staring at vacancy. There were hollow rings round the dark
eyes now, and the oval cheeks had lost their smooth outline. Perpetual
drudgery and friendless solitude had brought Julia very low; but the
Desmond pride still struggled for the mastery over its grim
assailant--necessity.
“I don’t know that I have anything to forgive,” said she, after an
ominous pause; “Mr. Tredethlyn was free to transfer his affections as
often as he chose. I was very glad to read of your marriage, for it was
at least satisfactory to find that he had not changed his mind a second
time. I do not blame any one but myself, Mrs. Tredethlyn. I should have
been wiser than to entrust my happiness to a man who----”
Miss Desmond stopped abruptly. She made a long pause, during which she
contemplated Maude, almost as if she had been looking for some tender
spot in which to plant her dagger.
“I must not forget that he is your husband, and I do not wish to say
anything humiliating to you; but I _cannot_ forget that he is not a
gentleman. No gentleman would have treated any woman as Mr. Tredethlyn
treated me.”
If Julia’s conscience had had a voice, it might perhaps have chimed in
with an awkward question here: “And would any lady have spread a net to
catch a rich husband, Julia, trading on the generosity of his simple
nature, and angling for the fortune of a man whose heart was obviously
given to another?”
Mrs. Tredethlyn’s bright face crimsoned, and her lower lip fell a
little. It is not to be supposed that she could be very fond of her
husband; but she felt any allusion to his shortcomings almost as keenly
as if he had been the incarnation of her girlish dreams. Whatever he
was, he was hers, and she was responsible for him.
“If generosity of heart could make a gentleman, Julia,” she said, almost
entreatingly, “I think Francis would be the first of gentlemen.”
Miss Desmond did not condescend to reply to this observation.
“Oh, Julia,” Mrs. Tredethlyn said, after another little pause, “how can
you be so unkind and unforgiving? Have you forgotten how happy we used
to be together long ago at the Cedars? If--if I thought you were
pleasantly circumstanced now, I would not worry you with any proffers of
friendship; but somehow I cannot think that you are happy. Dear Julia,
forgive me for the past, and trust me once more.”
The stony look in Miss Desmond’s face did not melt away under the
influence of Maude’s tenderness; but presently, with an almost awful
suddenness, she sank upon the nearest chair, dropped her face upon her
clasped hands, and burst into a passion of tears--convulsive sobs that
shook her with their hysterical force. The strong will of the Desmonds
asserted itself to the very last, for this passionate outburst was
almost noiseless. The slender frame writhed and trembled, the chest
heaved, the small hands were clenched convulsively, but there was no
vulgar outcry. Miss Desmond recovered herself almost as suddenly as she
had given way to her emotion, and drew up her head proudly, though her
face was blotted with tears.
“Heaven help me!” she exclaimed; “what a poor weak wretch I am!”
“You will let me be your friend again, won’t you, Julia? You’ll come and
live with me once more? You need see very little of Mr. Tredethlyn, if
you dislike him. He and I are quite fashionable people, I assure you,
and he is very seldom at home. I shall be so glad to have you with me. I
go a great deal into society, and I know you like society, Julia. Come,
dear, let us be friends again, just as we used to be in the dear old
times.”
Maude gave a little sigh--she was apt now and then to think
sentimentally of that remote period of her existence, some four or five
years back, when she had believed that the happiest fate Heaven could
award her would be a union with Harcourt Lowther. Even now, though she
had schooled herself to think of him coldly, though she tried very hard
not to think of him at all, the memory of the old time would come back;
the picture of the home that might have been--the little cottage in St.
John’s Wood--the long quiet evenings, made delightful by genial
companionship--the pleasant hours devoted to art--the dear old
concertante duets by Mozart and Beethoven--the “two souls with but a
single thought, two hearts that beat as one,”--the images of these
things were apt to arise suddenly before her, in the midst of her
frivolous pleasure in her fine dresses, and gorgeous house, and admiring
friends.
“Dear Julia,” she said, winding one arm caressingly about the Irish
girl, “you will come, won’t you?”
“Yes,” Miss Desmond answered, “I will come if you want me. But I must
come upon a new footing. This time I must work for my wages. I have been
a hired slave ever since I left your father’s house. I will be your
servant, Mrs. Tredethlyn, if you choose to hire me.”
“Julia, you will be my friend, just as you used to be.”
“No,” cried Miss Desmond, with a resolute gesture of her hand, “no; if
you want a companion to keep your keys and attend to your lapdogs, to
finish fancy-work that you have begun and grown tired of, to read French
novels to you when you want to be read to sleep, to write your letters
of invitation, to take the bass in your duets, or carry an occasional
message to your milliner,--if you want a person of this kind, I am quite
willing to be that person.”
“Julia!”
“I will come to you on those terms, or not at all.”
“You shall come to me on any terms you please, so long as you come.”
“Very well, then, I will come. My present employer gives me sixty
guineas a year, and makes me work harder than a pack-horse. You can give
me the same money, if you think my services worth so much. I will make
arrangements for leaving my present situation. A housemaid left the
other day, and I believe she gave her mistress a month’s notice--I
suppose the same rule will hold good with me: I will come to you at the
end of that time, unless you change your mind in the meanwhile.”
“I shall not change my mind; I only wish you could come to me to-day.
Take my card, dear, and give me yours.”
“I have no cards,” answered Miss Desmond. “I have neither name nor place
in the world, and have no need of visiting-cards.”
She wrote her address upon the back of an envelope, and gave it to Mrs.
Tredethlyn. To the last her manner was cold and ungracious: but Maude
parted from her happy in the idea that she had rescued her old companion
from a life of drudgery.
“Why should I not be her hired slave? I shall still have the right to
hate her,” thought Miss Desmond, as she went back to Bayswater with her
gloomy charges.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXVII.
SEEING A GHOST.
Under the perpetual influence of his friend and master, Harcourt
Lowther, Mr. Tredethlyn’s days and nights were so fully occupied that he
had very little leisure for serious thought. Day by day the patient
master taught his deadly lesson; day by day the luckless pupil took his
teacher’s precepts more deeply to heart. The simple, credulous nature
was as malleable as clay under the practised hand of the modeller, and
took any shape Mr. Lowther chose to give it.
Francis was fully impressed with the idea that his money had purchased a
lovely wife whose heart could never be given to him. All that fair
fabric of hopes and dreams which had been his when he married Maude
Hillary had been slowly but surely undermined, and there was nothing
left of its brightness but the memory that it once had been. He thought
of those foolish hopes now with anger and bitterness. Could he at any
time have been so mad, so blind, so besotted, as to believe that this
beautiful creature, perpetually floating in an atmosphere of frivolity
and adulation, would ever fold her wings to nestle tenderly in his rude
breast? Othello, recalled to the sense of his declining years and grimy
visage by the friendly bluntness of Iago, could scarcely have thought
more bitterly of his lovely Venetian bride than Francis thought of Maude
after six months’ daily association with his old master. But if the
poison was quick to do its deadly work, the antidote was always at hand.
With thirty thousand a year and a fine constitution, what need has a
young man for reflection? It is all very well for Mr. Young the poet,
having failed to obtain wealth or preferment, to retire from a world
which has treated him ill, and meditate upon the transitory nature of
earthly blessings that he has been unable to obtain; but with youth and
thirty thousand per annum, surely no man need be bored by such a
darksome guest as dull care. Harcourt Lowther did his best to shield his
friend from the gloomy intruder by contriving that Francis Tredethlyn’s
existence should be one perpetual fever of hurry and excitement. But
though you may carry a man from racecourse to racecourse, by shrieking
expresses tearing through the darkness of the night; though you may
steep him to the lips in theatres and dancing-halls; though you may drag
him from one scene of mad unrest to another, till his tired eyeballs
have lost their power to see anything but one wearisome confusion of gas
light and colour,--you _cannot_ prevent him from thinking. The
involuntary process goes on in spite of him. He will think in a hansom
cab tearing over the stones of the Haymarket, in an express train
rushing towards Newmarket at sixty miles an hour, on the box-seat of a
guardsman’s drag, on the rattling fire-engine of an aristocratic amateur
Braidwood, on the downs at Epsom--yes, even at the final rush, when
every eye is strained to concentrate its power of sight upon one speck
of colour, the man’s mind, for ever the veriest slave to follow that
will-o’-the-wisp called association, will wander away in spite of
him,--to mourn above a baby’s grave, to sit amidst the perfume of
honeysuckle and roses in a still summer twilight trifling with the rings
on a woman’s hand.
There were times when thought would come to Francis Tredethlyn, in spite
of all his friend’s watchful care. He would sit at the head of a
dinner-table at the Crown and Sceptre, staring vacantly at the frisky
wine-bubbles in his shallow glass, and thinking how happy he might have
been if Maude had only loved him. Ah, this poor substitute of noise
instead of mirth,--this pitiful tinsel of dissipation in place of the
pure gold of happiness,--how miserable a mockery it was even at the
best!
Mr. Lowther generally broke in upon such gloomy reveries as these by
calling to the waiter to exchange his friend’s shallow glass for a
tumbler. But there are pangs of regret not to be lulled to slumber by
all the sparkling wines that were ever grown in the fair champagne
country, and Harcourt Lowther sometimes found his work very difficult.
But amidst such perpetual hurry and excitement it was only natural that
some things should be almost entirely forgotten by Francis Tredethlyn,
and amongst these forgotten things were the sorrows of his missing
cousin. The Gray’s-Inn lawyers had _carte blanche_, and could have
employed all the detective machinery in London in a search for Susan
Tredethlyn, _alias_ Susan Lesley, had they so chosen; but your intensely
respectable family solicitor is the slowest of slow coaches, and Messrs.
Kursdale and Scardon contented themselves with the insertion of an
occasional advertisement in the second column of the “Times” supplement,
informing Susan Lesley that she might hear of something to her advantage
on applying at their office; and further offering a liberal reward for
any information respecting the above-mentioned lady.
The advertisement did not entirely escape notice. A good many Susan
Lesleys presented themselves:--one a fat old woman of seventy, who kept
a tobacconist’s shop in the neighbourhood of Seven Dials; another a bony
and pugnacious-looking person, with fiery red hair, and a fine
South-of-Ireland brogue, who threatened dire vengeance on the quiet
lawyer when he refused to recognize her pretensions to hear of something
to her advantage. All the Susan Lesleys were ready to swear anything in
order to establish their claims to that unknown advantage--which might
be anything from a five-pound note to a million of money, or a dormant
peerage,--but they all broke down lamentably under Mr. Kursdale’s
cross-questioning, and he did not even trouble Francis Tredethlyn to
confront the false syrens.
So, amid Newmarket meetings and Greenwich dinners, chicken-hazard,
billiards, and unlimited loo, poor Susan’s rustic image melted quite
away; and Francis forgot the solemn promise he had made, and the sacred
duty he had set himself to do when his Uncle Oliver’s heritage first
fell into his hands. And Francis Tredethlyn’s forgetfulness might have
lasted very long, if an accident had not awakened him to a most vivid
recollection of the past.
It was the May-time saturnalia of the turf, the Epsom week, and Mr.
Tredethlyn’s drag had been to and fro upon the dusty roads carrying a
heavy load of Bohemianism under convoy of the indefatigable Harcourt
Lowther. Francis had been rather unlucky, and a good deal of money had
changed hands after the Derby, the larger part of it finding its way
into the pockets of Mr. Tredethlyn’s obliging friend. The Oaks day was
to have redeemed his fortunes, but the day was over, and Francis drove
home amongst the noisy ruck of landaus and waggonettes, ponderous double
dog-carts, and heavily-laden sociables, tax-carts and costermongers’
barrows, with the outer leaves of an attenuated cheque-book peeping from
his breast-pocket, and the dim consciousness that he had distributed
hastily-scribbled cheques to the amount of some thousands, floating
confusedly in his brain. He drove to town through the spring twilight,
with Dutch dolls in his hat, and a heavy pain in his heart. The _papier
mâché_ noses of his companions were scarcely more false and hollow than
their gaiety.
Of course it would be impossible to conclude such a day without a
dinner. The sort of people amongst whom Francis Tredethlyn lived are
perpetually dining and giving dinners; only the dinner-givers are as one
to twenty of the diners; so, at some time between nine and ten o’clock,
Maude’s husband found himself in his usual place at the head of a
glittering table, in an odorous atmosphere of asparagus soup and fried
mullet, and with a racking headache, that was intensified by every
jingle of glasses and rattle of knives and forks.
He had lost heavily, and had drunk deeply under the warm May sunshine on
the Downs. To lose cheerfully is given to many men, but how very few
have the power to lose quietly! Francis had taken his disappointment in
a rather uproarious spirit; slapping his companions on the shoulder, and
making new engagements right and left; backing the same horses by whose
shortcomings he had just lost his money; and huskily protesting the
soundness of his own judgment in despite of the misfortunes of to-day.
He went on talking now at the head of the dinner-table, though the sound
of his own voice by no means improved the splitting pain in his head. He
went on talking amidst a clamour of many voices, through which one sober
and silent toady, sitting next Mr. Tredethlyn, made a vain effort to
understand his discourse. He poured forth misty vaticinations on coming
events, gave general invitations for a great dinner at Virginia Water on
the Ascot cup day, and galloped noisily along the road to ruin in which
Harcourt Lowther had set him going. That splitting headache of his was
getting worse every minute, when some one proposed an adjournment to an
adjacent theatre.
There had been counsel taken with a waiter. A West-end waiter is no mean
dramatic critic, though he never sees a play; the opinions of playgoers
percolating perpetually through his ears must leave some residuum in the
shape of knowledge. The waiter opined that the best entertainment in
London was to be had at Drury Lane, where a melodramatic spectacle of
some celebrity was being played that evening for the last time but one.
Inspired by the waiter, Mr. Tredethlyn’s party made their way to the
theatre, bearing Mr. Tredethlyn along with them, indifferent where he
went, and carrying his headache with him everywhere.
It was past ten o’clock, and the last scene of the great spectacle was
on. The house was full, and the audience were chiefly of that restless
and vociferous order who drop into a theatre at half-price on great
race-nights. Mr. Tredethlyn and his party could only find standing-room
at the back of the dress-circle, and from this position Francis beheld
the grand final _tableau_.
The piece was an adaptation of some great Parisian success--some story
of the Reign of Terror,--and in this last scene the stage was crowded by
a clamorous populace. Upwards of three hundred men, women, and children
were engaged in the scene. Blouses and uniforms, the picturesque
head-dresses of the provincial peasantry, the scarlet cap of liberty,
the cocked hats of the gendarmerie,--all blended in one grand mass of
movement and colour, while the rapid action of the piece drew to its
triumphant close.
Mr. Tredethlyn did not trouble himself to wonder what the piece had been
about. He saw somebody killed--a villain it was to be supposed, since
the crowd set up a well-organized yell of rejoicing; then there was a
reconciliation, an embrace, a young lady in short-waisted white muslin
clasped to the breast of a young man in a long-tailed blue coat and low
top-boots, adorned with many-coloured bunches of riband. Then the band
broke into the stately measure of the “Marseillaise Hymn,” the crowd
clamoured a shrill chorus, and the curtain fell.
It was while the curtain was descending very slowly to that triumphant
music that Francis Tredethlyn saw something which startled him like the
sight of a ghost.
It was a face--a woman’s face in a high Normandy cap, looking out of the
many faces in the crowd, a thin, worn, melancholy countenance, very sad
to look upon, among all those other faces fronting the audience with a
stereotyped smile.
“My God!” cried Mr. Tredethlyn, clasping his two hands upon his hot
forehead, and pushing back the rumpled hair, “who is it? What’s the
matter with me? I feel as if I’d seen a ghost!”
There was a little piece after the melodrama, a slender little
production, popularly known as a “screaming” farce. It was not the most
strikingly original dramatic invention, and its chief point consisted in
one gentleman in tartan trousers being perpetually mistaken for another
gentleman in tartan trousers, whole both gentlemen were alternately
sitting upon bonnet-boxes and dropping trays of crockery.
There was certainly not very much in the farce, but the audience laughed
uproariously, and Francis Tredethlyn’s party joined in the laughter. He
found himself laughing, too, as loudly as the rest of them; but amidst
all that confusion and clamour, the wan, sad face, with two inartistic
patches of rouge upon its hollow cheeks, kept surging up ever and anon
out of the chaos of his brain, and haunting him like the face of a
ghost.
Who was it? What was it? Was it some accidental likeness? Was it a face
that he had seen and known in the past? Alas for the steady,
clear-headed soldier, who had been so prompt to obey military orders, so
strict in the performance of duty! Francis Tredethlyn’s muddled senses
refused to help him to-night. The author of “What will he do with it?”
tells us that light wines are the most treacherous of liquors; “they
inflame the brain like fire, while melting on the palate like ice.” Mr.
Tredethlyn had been drinking a mixture of divers champagnes and Moselles
all day long, and he tried in vain to fix the vague image which floated
amidst the confusion of his brain.
He went home in the early grey of the May morning; but not to sleep. He
lay tossing from side to side, tormented by that preternatural
wakefulness which is apt to succeed a long period of riot and
excitement. The course at Epsom, the gipsy fortune-tellers, the
betting-men in white hats and green veils, the Dutch dolls and pink
calico pincushions, the dust and clamour of the homeward drive, the
jingling of broken glass, the popping of corks, the revolutionary crowd
in the drama, the tartan trousers and broken bandboxes in the
farce,--all mixed themselves in his brain, falling to pieces, and
putting themselves together again like the images in a kaleidoscope.
Mr. Lowther, coming to see his friend at the correct visiting hour,
found Francis still in bed, in a little room behind the library, which
he had fitted up for himself at Harcourt’s instigation, as a bedroom and
dressing-room, a kind of refuge to which he might betake himself when he
was unfit to encounter the calm gaze of Maude’s clear blue eyes fixed
upon him in sorrowful wonder. Her manner to him had never quite
recovered its old kindness since that unlucky encounter on the stairs.
She was still kind to him; but he could see that it was by an effort
only that she retained anything of her old friendliness. He could see
this, and the knowledge of it galled him to the quick. Harcourt
Lowther’s work was more than half done by this time. He had no longer
any difficulty in beguiling Francis abroad, for the Cornishman no longer
cared to remain at home.
Mr. Tredethlyn had not very long fallen into a feverish slumber after
long hours of wakeful weariness, when his friend called upon him.
Harcourt seated himself by the side of the narrow brass bedstead, and
stared contemplatively at the sleeper, while he spoke to the valet who
had admitted him to the darkened chamber.
“You can let your master sleep till four o’clock, Jervois,” he said. “At
four give him some soda and brandy. He has an appointment with me at
half-past five. Take care that he doesn’t oversleep himself. I’ll write
him a line by way of reminder.”
He drew a little writing-table towards him, and wrote a few lines on a
sheet of note-paper:
“DEAR TREDETHLYN,--Remember your engagement at my quarters; 5.30
sharp. You had better bring the mail phaeton, and can give me a
lift to the S. and G.
“Yours faithfully,
“H. L.”
He slipped his note into an envelope, and dipped his pen into the ink;
but before writing the address, he stopped suddenly, and tore the note
into fragments.
“_She_ might see it!” he muttered, thoughtfully, “and that might show
her the nature of my cards. The only wise man is the one who can do his
work without that most dangerous of all machinery--pen and paper. Poor
Francis! he looks a little worn.”
Mr. Lowther looked down upon the sleeper with the most benign
expression. He had no dislike whatever to the simple Cornishman; he had
only--his own plans.
“These fellows who come suddenly into a large fortune are sure to kill
themselves before they have done spending it,” he murmured,
complacently. “Jervois,” he said, as he went out, “you won’t forget your
master’s engagement. He’d better drive up to my place in the mail
phaeton.”
Mr. Lowther’s “place” was the same lodging which he had taken for
himself when he first returned to England. He was an adventurer; but he
was not a vulgar adventurer, and in all his dealings with Francis
Tredethlyn he had not sponged upon that gentleman’s purse for so much as
a five-pound note. He had his plans; but they were not the plans of a
man who lives from hand to mouth. He won a good deal of his friend’s
money; but he never cheated Francis out of a sixpence. His sole
advantage was that which must always accompany skill and experience as
opposed to ignorance and inexperience. In the meanwhile, Harcourt
Lowther lived as best he might on his winnings and a small allowance
made him by his mother.
The Lowthers were great people in their way, and Harcourt had admission
to some of the best houses in London. He was very well received in that
circle in which Maude Tredethlyn had taken her place, and contrived
somehow or other to be present for an hour or so at almost all of the
parties in which she appeared; though to break away from the haunts of
Bohemianism to drop into politer life, and then return to Bohemia in the
same evening, was almost as difficult as a harlequin’s jump in a
pantomime. Harcourt Lowther did this, however, and did it very often;
and Maude Tredethlyn, enjoying all the privileges of a matron, found
herself sometimes standing amongst the statues and exotics on a crowded
staircase in Tyburnia, talking with Harcourt Lowther almost as
familiarly as they had talked in the old summer evenings by the quiet
river.
Sometimes, looking back upon such a meeting, Maude felt inclined to be
angry with Mr. Lowther for having taken something of the old tone; but
could she blame him for the lowered accents of his voice, the subdued
light in his eyes, the unconscious tenderness into which he was betrayed
in those public meetings, when she remembered how nobly he kept aloof
from her in her home? Never yet had he presumed upon his intimacy with
the husband in order to intrude himself on the presence of the wife.
What harm or danger, then, if, in crowded assemblages, he surmounted all
manner of small difficulties in order to make his way to her side? What
could it matter if he lingered just a little longer than others,
contriving all sorts of excuses for delay? It is rather a pleasant thing
for a frivolous young married woman, serene in the consciousness of her
own integrity, to know that a man’s heart is breaking for her in a
gentlemanly way. A word too much, a tone, a look, and Maude would have
taken alarm, and fled from her old admirer as from the venomous fangs of
some deadly reptile; but Harcourt Lowther knew better than to speak that
word. He had his own plans, and he was carrying them out in his own way:
neither by word nor look had he ever yet offended Maude Tredethlyn; but
now, when he tried to cut a path for himself through the crowd about
her, he found less difficulty in the progress. People began to make way
for him, and it was considered a settled thing that he should be found
somewhere near her. He had not offended her; he had only--compromised
her.
Francis awoke before the hour at which his servant had been told to call
him. The valet’s place was almost a sinecure, for the Cornishman still
retained, of his old nature, the simple independent habits of a man who
can wait upon himself. He got up at four o’clock, and had nearly
completed his toilet, when the servant brought the soda and brandy
prescribed by Harcourt Lowther.
“And if you please, sir, you were to be so good as to remember an
appointment with Mr. Lowther at half-past five, and was to please to
drive the mail phaeton,” said the valet, while his master drank the
revivifying beverage.
“Very good,” muttered Mr. Tredethlyn, with something like a groan; “you
may go and order the phaeton for five o’clock. Is Mrs. Tredethlyn at
home?”
“No, sir.”
The man departed, and Francis finished dressing. He had ten minutes to
spare after putting on his outer coat, and he sat down to look at the
newspaper which lay ready cut on his writing-table. He took up the
“Times,” but only stared vacantly at the advertisement sheet. His head
still ached, in spite of a shower-bath and a vigorous application of
hard hair-brushes; but his intellect was a good deal clearer than it had
been before he dressed.
Suddenly, out of the advertisement sheet, vivid as the figure of Banquo
at Macbeth’s uncomfortable supper-party, there arose before him a
face--a wan, faded face--in a white muslin-cap.
“Great Heaven!” he cried; “I didn’t know her!”
The ghost that he had seen upon the previous night was the ghost of the
woman he had so long been looking for--his cousin Susan.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXVIII.
“OH, MY AMY! MINE NO MORE!”
Francis Tredethlyn drove his friend down to Richmond at a rattling pace,
but he scarcely spoke half-a-dozen words throughout the journey; and
Harcourt Lowther, keeping the watchful eye of the master upon his pupil,
saw that something was amiss.
Now although the Cornishman’s guide and Mentor had his plans, very
definite plans, as clearly drawn out as the great Duke’s arrangements
for Waterloo,--which wondrous victory was _not_ quite the lucky accident
our neighbours imagine it to have been; yet he was far too wise a
diplomatist to ignore the sublime opportunities which chance sometimes
throws in the way of a schemer, shattering the complicated machinery so
dexterously and patiently put together, and opening a new and easy way
to success over the ruins of the old road.
Mr. Lowther was quite prepared to make good use of any accident which
seemed likely to help him. He was like a chess-player who takes his
place before the board with a perfect plan of action mapped out in his
mind, and who may see his entire scheme overthrown, his most brilliant
arrangements stultified by the first move of his adversary, but who will
win the game nevertheless, after his enemy’s fashion, if not after his
own, being no enthusiastic advocate of pet theories, but only a man of
the world, resolutely bent on success. Upon this particular afternoon
Harcourt saw that something had gone amiss with his friend, and he was
bent on discovering what the something was. With this view he had resort
to that imaginary instrument which his companions of Bohemia called the
“pump-handle;” but on letting down a moral plummet into the depths of
Mr. Tredethlyn’s mind, he found himself in much deeper water than usual,
and quite unable to reach the bottom.
“If he has secrets from me, he’ll throw all my machinery out of gear,”
mused Mr. Lowther; “and yet I don’t quite know that--a secret might be
worked into something _with her_. What a wonderful creature that Iago
was, by the bye! especially when one considers that he took all that
trouble for no better motive than jealous twinges about a wife whom he
treated like a dog, and an envious grudge of Cassio’s advancement. Aha,
my divine Williams, that’s the only flaw in your _magnum opus_; your
motive power isn’t equal to your ponderous machinery! Now if Othello had
been the owner of thirty thousand a year and a beautiful wife whom Iago
loved, there might have been some reason for the exhibition of a little
Italian diplomacy. But revenge! Bah! The luxury of a maniac. The pet
wickedness of a woman. Your novelist cannot write a story, your
playwright cannot devise a drama, but he must have recourse to revenge
to keep the action going. Yet, in the history of men how small and
pitiful a part the heroic passion plays! A Cromwell condemns a Charles
Stuart to the scaffold. For revenge? No; simply because Charles is in
his way. A Robespierre drowns his country in the blood of her sons; and
yet I doubt if he bore a hearty grudge against one of his victims--a
little political jealousy, perhaps, at the worst. A Richelieu
extinguishes the haughty _noblesse_ of France--out of revenge? No; but
the _noblesse_ interfere with the schemes of my Lord Cardinal. A
Countess of Essex connives at the poisoning of her husband: revenge? not
a bit of it, but because she wants to marry some one else; and poor Sir
Thomas Overbury must die, not that any one hates the man, but the
creature is so tiresome. And Arabella Stuart pines in prison; and the
heads of the regicides rot on Temple Bar; and Charles, the merry
monarch, the pet of the painters and romancers, the man whose sins have
been dealt with so lightly that we are apt to mistake them for
virtues--can be as hard as a Nero when it suits him that the patriots
Russell and Sidney shall perish in their prime; and James II. sends
young Monmouth to the block. Why? Is revenge the impulse that stirs
these men’s hearts? Not at all. Not man’s passionate hatred of his
neighbour, but man’s devoted love of himself is the motive power that
moves the headsman’s arms, and bids the swooping axe descend upon fair
young necks from which the lovelocks have been newly shorn. Revenge?
Pshaw! Has it a feather’s weight in the balance of history? In all the
story of our land, what has revenge to answer for? A semi-mythical
Rosamond poisoned in her bower--an Essex condemned in passionate haste,
and lamented in dreary leisure by the Queen who loved him--a
Konigsmark’s handsome face trampled upon by a German tigress.”
With such random reflections as these Mr. Lowther beguiled the silence
of the drive to Richmond. During dinner and throughout the evening he
watched his friend closely; but all the fascinations of Bohemia were
powerless to arouse Francis Tredethlyn from the thoughtful mood. Indeed,
the Bohemians had a charming faculty for enjoying themselves amongst
themselves without any reference to the host and paymaster, who was
generally looked at rather in the light of a bore and an intruder--the
death’s head at the banquet. Some of Mr. Tredethlyn’s new friends had
christened him the Necessary Evil; and to-night, while he sat moodily
brooding over the story of his cousin, pretty lips made faces at the
company over his shoulder; and one lovely Bohemian, more playful than
the rest, amused herself and her acquaintances by filling the pockets of
his dress-coat with the empty shells of the lobsters, and the corks of
the champagne.
For the rest, what did it matter in what dreary regions his mind
wandered, so long as he was there to write a cheque for the bill? Only
one pair of eyes looked at him with any show of interest; and those eyes
watched him as the serpent watches the bird; with as deadly a purpose,
with as quiet a gaze. But, watch him as closely as he would to-night,
there was something in Francis Tredethlyn’s mind which Harcourt Lowther
could not read quite as easily as a page in an open book, and as it was
his habit to read most things relating to the Cornishman.
“What does it matter?” thought Mr. Lowther, abandoning himself to
reflection again during the homeward drive; “let him keep his secret
from me if he likes, and I’ll use it for my own benefit when he plays
against me. He is my dummy, and he plays _my_ game. When he leads a suit
of his own choosing, I am ready on his right hand with a cluster of
small trumps. Play as he will, he can scarcely throw me out. What does
it matter _how_ the game is won, so long as one scores the odd trick?”
The day after this Richmond dinner was Sunday; but even that
circumstance did not prevent Francis Tredethlyn from taking preliminary
steps towards finding the missing girl whom he fancied quite within his
reach now; since it seemed certain that the face he had seen on the
stage of Drury Lane was the face of his uncle Oliver’s daughter, and no
other. It had been his habit until very lately to accompany Maude every
Sunday morning to a certain fashionable place of worship not very far
from Sloane Street, where miserable sinners lamented their iniquities
and their wretchedness amid the subdued rustling of silk at a guinea a
yard, and in an atmosphere that was odorous with Jockey Club and Ess
Bouquet. But Star-and-Garter dinners, and evenings “finished” in
mysterious localities at the West-end, are by no means conducive to
early rising; and now the Sabbath bells that Mr. Tredethlyn had been
wont to hear ringing blithely in the morning air while he breakfasted
with his wife, were apt to mingle with his feverish morning dreams, and
to transform themselves into the shrill peal of an alarm-bell summoning
the fireman’s succour for perishing wretches in some blazing habitation,
or the bell on board a boat leaving a pier--a boat which the dreamer
was--oh, so eagerly--striving to reach, but never, never could; for just
as his foot was going to step upon the deck, the plank on which he trod
would give way and tilt him into the waking world; with a raging
headache, perhaps, and a dull ceaseless pain in his breast, which he
scarcely cared to acknowledge by its ugly name of Remorse.
So now Mr. Tredethlyn was apt to spend the earlier part of his Sunday
morning in fitful slumbers, and the later portion of his day in the
society of his devoted friends. Unhappily Mephistopheles has such a
knack of making himself useful, that after once enjoying his society,
Faust is apt to find life very dreary without that fatal companionship.
Drifted away from the simple life that was natural to him, Francis was
only a helpless creature, with all the dismal blank of existence to be
filled up somehow or other.
But upon this particular Sunday he had a purpose of his own, and the
honest energy with which he set about the achievement of that purpose
transformed him into a new being.
Harcourt Lowther might have felt a little twinge of alarm had he seen
his pupil, as he walked away from the stuccoed district, with the old
light in his eyes, the old lightness in his firm tread. Francis forgot
that he had an empty life to drag out, and an idolized wife who did
_not_ love him. He forgot everything, except that he had to redeem his
half-forgotten vow, to fulfil a long-neglected duty.
“My uncle Oliver’s money brought _her_ peace of mind, and prosperity for
the father she loves so dearly,” thought Mr. Tredethlyn. “Let me
remember that, when I think of his disinherited daughter.”
Crumpled in one of the pockets of his overcoat, Francis had found the
programme of the performances at Drury Lane, and in the long list of
names crowded together at the bottom of the programme, he discovered
half hidden amongst Percies and Vavasours, Vane Tempests and Leveson
Gowers, and such appellations as the _corps de ballet_ modestly chooses
for its own--the vulgar name of Turner. He concluded, therefore, that
his cousin had called herself Turner at the Drury Lane Theatre, as well
as at Coltonslough, and he did not anticipate much difficulty in finding
her. The search after any information upon theatrical matters might have
seemed rather a hopeless thing on a Sunday, but Francis Tredethlyn’s
energy was not to be damped by small difficulties.
“I have wasted too many hours already,” he thought; “where my poor lost
girl is concerned, every moment of delay seems a new wrong.”
He took a hansom and drove straight to the theatre; but Drury Lane on a
Sunday seems an utterly hopeless and impracticable place. The stage-door
was closed. The box-office might have been the tomb of the Pharaohs for
any appearance of life within its portals. Happily Francis was not to be
disheartened. He walked up and down the street until the clocks struck
one, and a dense crowd began to pour out of a chapel in Crown Court, and
disgorge itself into Little Russell Street. Then, when the doors of the
public-houses were opened, he entered a tavern nearly opposite the
stage-door, and made his inquiries.
The barmaid at the tavern was able to tell him where the
stage-doorkeeper lived, but she was not able to give him any information
as to the habitations of the ladies of the _ballet_.
“Most of them live out at Camberwell, or up Islington way; though how
they manage it, poor things, walking backwards and forwards through all
sorts of weather, is more than I can tell. They send over here when
there’s a long rehearsal for their half pint of porter and their
sandwich, and that’s about all the dinner they get on such days, I dare
say.”
Thus, discursively, the barmaid. Francis left her, and made his way to
the adjacent court in which the doorkeeper was to be found in his
private capacity. That gentleman was in the midst of a very greasy
dinner and in the bosom of his family when Mr. Tredethlyn intruded on
him, and was at first inclined to resent the interruption.
“I don’t carry two hundred and forty-nine addresses in my blessed head,”
he remarked, in an injured tone; “which our company at the beginning of
this season was over two hundred and forty-nine; and I don’t care to be
hunted upon Sundays when I’m eating of my dinner, for a pack of
ballet-girls. I don’t get paid for _that_ when I take my salary. If any
young swell wants to find out one of our ladies’ address, to leave ’em a
bokay, or to take a ticket for their benefit or such-like, I should
think they could find it out of a week-day, and not come chivying of a
man over his Sunday wittles.”
But a judiciously-administered half-sovereign had a very soothing effect
upon the mind and manners of the doorkeeper. There are so few things in
a small way which cannot be done with half-a-sovereign. The man laid
down his knife and fork, and applied himself to serious reflection,
while his wife and family suspended their operations to stare admiringly
at the fashionably-dressed intruder.
“Let me see,” said the doorkeeper, scraping his stubbly chin as he
mused, “there’s such a many of ’em, that I may sit here trying to
remember where this here Miss Turner lives till doomsday, and not be no
wiser. I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you, sir; I’ve got the addresses
of every member of the company in my book over the way. I’ll slip over
and get Miss Turner’s direction, while you wait here if you like.”
“Over the way” was Drury Lane Theatre. The doorkeeper took some
ponderous keys from a nail over the mantel-piece, and put on his hat.
Francis Tredethlyn went with him.
“Turner,” said the man; “Turner? A pale-faced young woman, ain’t she?
looks as if she’d gone through no end of trouble. She’s only an extra,
took on for this here great piece that’s just done with.”
“An extra?” inquired Francis.
“Yes; a sort of supernume’ry; not a reg’lar ballet-girl,--can’t dance,
or anything of that sort, only fit to go on in crowds, and so on. I
remember her, a very quiet, civil-spoken young person.”
The address was soon found; it was at a house in Brydges Street. Francis
left the doorkeeper with his heart beating tumultuously; his face pale
with emotion that was half joy, half pain--joy at finding her at last,
when hope had almost died out into forgetfulness--pain at finding her
thus. Ah, yes! it was very painful to remember the innocent rosy face
peeping out of a dimity bonnet, and to know that sorrow had set its
undefaceable hand upon that rustic beauty, and that the face he
remembered had no more a place upon this earth.
“Miss Turner and Miss Willoughby live together over an eating-house in
Brydges Street,” the doorkeeper had told Francis, with the further
information that he was to pull the top bell twice. Mr. Tredethlyn found
the eating-house, which was ostensibly closed; but the door of the shop
was ajar, and the atmosphere about and around it seemed greasy with the
steam of suet-pudding and boiled meat. The bell which Francis rang was
answered by a careworn-looking woman of doubtful age, who had an air of
faded gentility, a flimsy smartness of apparel, which was more plainly
demonstrative of poverty than the shabbiest garments that ever hung
together loosely upon the figure of a slattern.
“Miss Turner lives here, I believe?” Francis said eagerly; “I wish to
see her, if you please.”
“Miss Turner _did_ live here,” the woman answered, “but she has left.”
“Left? Why I saw her at the theatre only the night before last, and the
doorkeeper has just directed me here.”
“Miss Turner’s engagement expired last night, sir, and she left London
this morning.”
“This morning, only this morning! But of course you can tell me where
she has gone? I am her first-cousin, her only surviving relative. If I
had known that there was the least chance of her leaving London, I
should have tried to find her last night. Will you be good enough to
direct me to her?”
The woman shook her head.
“I don’t know where Miss Turner has gone,” she said.
Francis Tredethlyn’s face whitened to the very lips.
“My God!” he exclaimed, “is there a fatality in this business? am I
never to find her?”
Then addressing himself to the woman with sudden earnestness, he said,--
“For pity’s sake, if you can help me in my difficulty, do so with all
your might. You do not know how much depends on my finding her. I
scarcely think I should say too much, if I were to tell you that it is a
matter of life and death; for I saw my cousin’s face the night before
last, and it looked to me like a face that is fading away from this
earth. You have been told, perhaps, to give no one her address; but she
did not think her cousin Francis would come to ask for it. Pray trust me
and believe in me; I am the only friend that poor girl has in all this
world.”
“I have told you the truth, sir,” answered the woman, quietly; “I do not
know where Miss Turner has gone. Anything I can tell you about her, I
shall be happy to tell,” she added, as if answering the look of blank
despair in Francis Tredethlyn’s face; “but it is very little. Will you
step upstairs to my room? It is only a humble place, but it will be
quieter there than here.”
This could scarcely fail to be true; for during the very brief interview
which had just taken place, Francis had been brushed against and flouted
some half-dozen times by young persons with jugs and door-keys, going to
and from a neighbouring public-house. It was the popular dinner-hour in
Drury Lane, and four separate floors, with their minor divisions of
backs and fronts, were more or less engaged in the business of dining.
Francis followed his cousin’s late associate, Miss Willoughby, up three
steps of rather dingy stairs, upon which little colonies of children had
established themselves here and there with their toys. One young
gentleman of tender years was trying to fly a kite in the well of the
staircase, with a persevering disregard of atmospheric difficulties and
the heads of the passers below; while a young lady, belonging to an
adjacent tribe of settlers, took her doll for an airing in a
lobster-shell, drawn by a string which wound itself about Mr.
Tredethlyn’s legs, and had to be unwound like a bandage. Occasional
skirmishers from distant settlements came sliding down the
banisters--which, compared to the stairs, were as the modern railroad to
the ancient highway--assailing peaceable families with the war-whoop of
defiance: and the cries of “Shan’t,”--“Do it again, then,
there!”--“Wouldn’t you just like to, now?”--“Won’t I tell my mother,
that’s all?”--“Tell-tale-tit, yah!”--resounded in a delightful confusion
of voices from the first floor to the attics.
Miss Willoughby conducted Francis to a back room upon the third floor--a
dark gloomy little room, hung with chocolate-and-drab paper, but
enlivened by a little gallery of theatrical photographs, and some
engraved portraits cut out of Tallis’s “Shakespeare,” neatly arranged
over the mantel-piece.
It was not very difficult to perceive that the anomalous piece of
furniture, which was too vividly brown for mahogany, too elaborately
grained for nature, and which was not quite a chest of drawers, nor
altogether a wardrobe, was neither more nor less than a member of the
mysterious family of press-bedsteads. It was not difficult to perceive
that industrious poverty and simple independence reigned in that
three-pair back, whose pitiful goods and chattels, and worthless scraps
of ornament, were arranged with as exquisite a neatness as might pervade
the chambers of a bachelor in the Albany, or a gandin of the Faubourg
St. Honoré.
“I shall miss your cousin very much,” said Miss Willoughby; “we got on
so nicely together.”
“She lived with you? Here?” asked Francis.
“Yes; we shared this apartment. It made the rent come lighter for both
of us, and apartments are so dear in London; and of course it was the
same advantage in coals--not that we wanted many for our little bit of
cooking, but one can’t even boil a kettle without a fire; and saveloys
and sandwiches are apt to pall upon one after a long continuance; so,
having Miss Turner to live with me made it altogether come much
pleasanter; besides which, we were always the best of friends.”
Mr. Tredethlyn was slow to answer. He was looking round the room, and
out at the leaden ball floating on the surface of a dingy leaden cistern
visible athwart some scarecrow geraniums, which seemed as if they had
been put upon a short allowance of mould. Everything in the place, from
the scrimped morsel of worn carpet, which only made an oasis of
Kidderminster in a dreary desert of boards, to the handful of red coals
that burned brightly between massive embankments of brick, bore mute
evidence to the poverty which struggles and endures. An open cupboard
stared Francis in the face, and he saw, oh, such a pitiful morsel of
sickly-complexioned ham lying cheek by jowl with the fag-end of a stale
half-quartern loaf. He looked at these things, and remembered the house
in which he lived, the reckless extravagance that pervaded all his life.
“Does a curse cling to the gold of a miser?” he thought; “and is my
uncle Oliver’s child never to derive any advantage from the wealth her
father scraped and pinched together, at the cost of everything that
makes life endurable?”
He roused himself from his brief reverie to appeal once more to the
elderly ballet-girl, who had seated herself by the little Pembroke
table, on which lay a newspaper evidently borrowed from the
establishment below, and transformed into a kind of parchment by the
action of grease.
“Give me what information you can about my cousin,” he said,
imploringly; “and if you will accept any little present from me in
acknowledgment of your kindness, I will send you a cheque to-morrow
morning, and you shall purchase what you please as a memorial of your
friendship for my poor little Susy.”
A faint flush kindled in Miss Willoughby’s pale cheeks. A cheque! Oh,
bright representative of an El Dorado, only to be thought of in some
happy dream. Clara Willoughby--otherwise Mary Anne Jones--had not seen
such a thing as a cheque since the happy time in which she had been
columbine at the tumble-down little theatre in a garrison town, and the
colonel himself had taken five pounds’ worth of tickets for her benefit.
“You are very kind,” she said; “but I don’t want any payment for the
little help I can give you. Miss Turner is a very quiet young person;
and, though we were so friendly together, she never told me anything of
her history; and when she went away this morning, having only been taken
on as an extra, and her engagement expiring last night, she said,
‘You’ve been very good to me, Clara, and I shall always remember you
kindly; and if things go well with me, I’ll write and tell you where I
am. You mustn’t be offended because I don’t tell you where I am going. I
don’t quite know myself. I have not made up my mind yet; there’s a place
I want to go to, and friends I want to see; but I don’t think I shall
ever bring my mind to go there, or to see them.’”
“I think I understand her,” said Francis. “I think the place she means
is her old home. If she goes there, I shall hear of her immediately; but
if--if she should not be wise enough to return to the friends who would
be so glad to shelter her----. Did she ever speak of her home, or of her
cousin Francis Tredethlyn?”
“Never! She seemed to have some settled grief upon her mind; and having
known trouble myself, I know how hard it is to be worried by strangers’
questions and strangers’ pity, even when it’s meant ever so kindly; so I
never asked her to tell me so much as one word about her former life.”
“But how did she come to be at the theatre with you? I should think of
all ways of earning a living, that must be the very last that would
occur to my cousin Susan.”
“That’s very true,” answered Miss Willoughby; “but it doesn’t take a
woman long to come to the last way by which she can earn her bread--the
ways are not so many. I can tell you how your cousin came to be at Drury
Lane, for I was the means of getting her engaged; and it all came about,
as one may say, quite promiscuously. I suppose you know that Susan
Turner is a married woman?”
“Yes, I do know of her unhappy marriage.”
“She called herself Miss Turner in the bills, because, you see, in the
theatrical profession a single female is always considered more
attractive; though why it should be so,--unless with regard to boys in
jackets, in the Christmas holidays, who, being apt to fall in love with
the columbine, might find it damping to their spirits to know she was
the mother of a family,--I really can’t imagine. However, Susan was Miss
Turner in the bills, and I am Miss Willoughby for the same reason,
although I’ve been thirteen years a widow come next boxing-night.
Perhaps you may remember the sprite who was killed by a fall off a
flying bridge in ‘Harlequin Buttercup, or the Maiden all Forlorn; the
Fairy Queen of the Daisies, and the Cow with the Crumpled Horn,’ twelve
years ago last Christmas? Not being professional yourself, you mayn’t
happen to remember the circumstance; but Signor Wilsonio was my husband.
He was _not_ an Italian, and his name in private life was Wilson. We had
been married two years, and he left me with a little boy just six months
old.”
Francis listened very respectfully to this fragment of family history,
but he chafed under its infliction nevertheless.
“If you will tell me how you came to----” he began.
“I am just coming to that,” answered Miss Willoughby, with dignity. “My
poor husband, not having anything to leave me except a complimentary
benefit, which the manager of the theatre allowed me on account of my
bereavement, I was obliged, of course, to continue in the profession;
and oh, sir! nobody that hasn’t gone through it can tell the pain of
having to change your widow’s weeds for white muslin and spangles, and
put away your baby from your breast to go and slap cheesemongers’ shops
into furnished lodgings with a harlequin’s wand. As soon as I got over
the dreadful kind of numbness that came upon me in the first of my
troubles, I looked out for some one who would take care of the child;
for I need not tell you that you can’t leave an infant-in-arms in
unfurnished lodgings _without_ attendance, when you get black looks from
your landlady if you so much as ask for your fire to be poked once in an
evening in a friendly way, and much less to look after a child, which is
apt to be trying to the best of tempers. Well, sir, inquiring of one and
another, I heard of a very respectable elderly person who had seen
better days--and it does seem odd, but people connected with bringing up
children by hand always have seen better days. The elderly person lived
down Chelsea way, close to the water, which was considered healthy, and
next door but one to a cowkeeper--also considered healthy, especially if
predisposed to consumption.”
“If you would only----” murmured Francis, despondently.
“Which I am just coming to,” answered the _ci-devant_ columbine, again
with dignity. “The long and short of it is, I took my baby to the
respectable elderly person at Chelsea, and there he’s been ever since,
at seven shillings a week, which is a hard struggle sometimes now,
though light enough when I was engaged as columbine; but dancing has
made such progress, and unless you can take flying leaps from one side
of the stage to the other, a manager won’t look at you.”
“But with regard to----”
“Which I am about to explain,” continued Miss Willoughby, with unshaken
calmness. “It was at the respectable elderly person’s that I first met
Miss Turner; for my darling baby having learnt to call his nurse Nungey,
and taking so to her, and not taking to anybody else, and she so
attached to him, that she froze my very blood by talking of Battersea
Bridge in quite a meaning way, when I spoke of taking him away. Owing to
this and one circumstance and another, Harry has stopped at Chelsea till
he’s quite a big boy. So, of course, I very often go to see him--not
that he takes to me so much as he ought to do, being so wrapped up in
his Nungey. And one day, about three years ago, I went there quite
promiscuous, and found Harry walking up and down before the door with a
baby in his arms; and the nurse told me that she’d put an advertisement
in the paper, and the very day it was inserted a lady came to her--a
sweet-looking young creature, she said--and left this baby, which might
be going on for twelve months old. Well, the long and the short of it
is, that this was your cousin Susan’s baby; and going there off and on,
I saw a good deal of your cousin. But see her as much as you would, she
was so quiet and so reserved, that you never got anything like intimate
with her. At first she was dressed like a lady, and she had a pretty
little gold watch and chain, and many things that had cost money; but,
little by little, all these disappeared, and she seemed to get very
poor. One day, when I was there, it came out somehow that she was doing
plain needlework for one of the great cheap outfitters’ houses in the
City, and what a hard life it was, and, worse than hard--uncertain; so
then, knowing there were ‘extras’ wanted for the new piece, I proposed
to her that with my help she should try and get engaged. It would be
much lighter work than the plain sewing, and better pay. Well, at first
she was very much against it, but after a deal of persuasion she gave
way, and I got her the engagement. That was full five months ago; for
the piece had a long run. She had been lodging in one room at Chelsea
until then, for the sake of being near her boy, and she left that
lodging to come and share mine.”
“And do you think she will go back to the old lodging?”
“I doubt it. She seemed so uncertain, that I really don’t think she’d
made up her mind where to go.”
“But she is likely to have gone straight to her child!” cried Francis.
“Will you give me the address of the old woman at Chelsea? Oh, I thank
you so much for giving me this clue. I _must_ find my poor girl now!”
The sprite’s widow opened a little portfolio and wrote an address on a
scrap of paper, while Francis stood by eager to take it from her.
“Do you know that there has been an advertisement appealing to my
cousin, in the columns of the “Times” newspaper, a hundred times within
the last two years?”
“Dear! dear!” murmured the ballet-dancer; “and she going through so
much, with rich friends looking for her all the time. But, you see, poor
people can’t afford to take in a newspaper; and there might be only a
threepenny paper standing between a man and a million of money, and he
none the wiser.”
She handed Francis the address, which was a very long one. And then she
gave him divers verbal directions, the gist of which was, that he was to
find a certain public-house called “The Man in the Moon,” and was then
to inquire of anybody for a certain street, and was to go a little way
farther and inquire again, thus accomplishing his journey by easy stages
and frequent inquiries.
But Francis was much too full of hope to be dashed by any small
difficulties. He grasped the dancer’s hand in his heartiest way, and
left Brydges Street in impetuous haste. The hansom cabman, who met him
at the corner of Russell Street, and drove him thence to “The Man in the
Moon,” was a lucky individual, and went home rejoicing to the bosom of
his family. But after dismissing the cabman, Francis had to thread his
way through intricacies which would have been maddening in a hansom cab,
and were only to be overcome by repeated inquiries and frequent
reference to Miss Willoughby’s written direction.
At last, however, while the bells were still ringing for afternoon
service, Francis Tredethlyn found the place, which was a damp little
street without any thoroughfare, called Pollard’s Row. Pollard’s Row,
with the summer sunlight on it, and given up entirely to the occupation
of one mongrel dog, which was lying with his head upon his forepaws,
snapping at imaginary flies, was a dreary place to contemplate; Francis
Tredethlyn troubled himself very little about the aspect of the
neighbourhood. He walked rapidly past the little row of houses until he
came to No. 17, which was occupied by the respectable elderly person,
otherwise Mrs. Clinnock.
The elderly person made some faint show of a commercial character in the
shape of three very green pickle-bottles containing confectionery, all
more or less melted out of its normal mould by long exposure to the sun,
and a few gingerbread figures of weird and ghastly outline, supposed to
represent the human form. A tattered chintz curtain hung upon a limp
string, and made a background to these wares. Looking across this
curtain Francis Tredethlyn saw a woman sitting in the ruddy glow of the
fire, with a child in her lap, and knew by the beating of his heart that
he had found his cousin Susan.
The door of No. 17 stood ajar. Francis pushed it open and went into the
passage. Three steps brought him to the door of the little room, which
was a compound of shop and parlour, with a slight flavour of bedroom. A
woman--a girlish creature still, but pale and worn-looking--was sitting
in a low nursing chair, with a child of four years old in her arms. Alas
for the handiwork of Sorrow, the destroyer! The soft brown hair, the
tender hazel eyes, alone remained of the rustic beauty which Francis
Tredethlyn remembered smiling at him upon the moorlands of his native
county.
Ah, how much of his youth came suddenly back upon the Cornishman in that
moment of recognition! His mother’s face watching him as he left the
dear old homestead in the early summer morning to go to the dame-school;
happy haymakings on his father’s farm in the days when haymaking and
harvest time were two Arcadian festivals, and not nervous crises in the
life of a hardworking farmer, who may or may not be able to pay his
rent. His childhood came back to him with all its unconscious happiness,
and he fell on his knees by his cousin’s chair in a tumult of emotion.
“Susy, my darling, my pet! at last, at last I have found you!”
The boy slid from his mother’s arms, frightened by this tumultuous
stranger. Susan rose pale and trembling, and shrank away with her hands
spread before her face, as if even now she would have hidden herself
from her cousin.
“Oh, Francis,” she cried, “don’t come near me--don’t look at me! Oh,
Heaven have pity on me! I have so prayed that none who ever knew me in
my childhood should see me now.”
“But, my darling, why, why should you hide yourself from those who love
you so fondly?”
She made him no direct answer, but covered her face with her hands and
sobbed aloud--
“Oh, my shame--my shame! Who will believe me when my father would not?”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXIX.
ENTANGLEMENTS IN THE WEB.
Harcourt Lowther, calling at the stuccoed mansion in time for Mrs.
Tredethlyn’s afternoon tea, found a dark and dashing young lady
comfortably established in a luxurious amber damask nest against a
background of amber curtain, whose glowing tints were extremely becoming
to the young lady’s clear complexion. The two ladies were quite alone,
though Maude declared gaily that she had had crowds of people that
afternoon.
“You generally come so late, Mr. Lowther,” she said. “Those were the
Dudley Boltons whom you met going out--nice people, fresh from the wolds
of Yorkshire, quite new to town, people who come once in ten years or
so, when there’s an International Exhibition, or something of that kind.
Isn’t it strange that people _can_ be so civilized living in the depths
of the country--read the last novel--see the last great picture--because
you see, nowadays, great pictures jog about the country like popular
prime ministers, and if Mahomet can’t go to the mountain in Trafalgar
Square, the mountain goes to meet Mahomet in his provincial town. But I
want to introduce you to Miss Desmond, the daughter of the late Colonel
Desmond, papa’s oldest friend. Julia dear, Mr. Lowther has heard me talk
of you perpetually, and you have heard a good deal of him,”--Mrs.
Tredethlyn blushed a little as she said this,--“so I expect you to be
intensely intimate immediately.”
This introduction took place towards the close of June, nearly a month
after the Oaks day; and during the time that had elapsed since that
event, Harcourt Lowther, in his character of Mephistopheles, had found
Faust what is popularly called a very troublesome customer. Francis
Tredethlyn had a secret, and so far it had been a secret which Mr.
Lowther could neither penetrate nor turn to his own use.
Yes, this simple-minded Cornishman, whose confiding candour had revealed
every feeling, and every shade of feeling, to his baneful companion, had
his secret now, and seemed to know very well how to keep it.
There were days on which he had business which took him a little way out
of town; and Harcourt Lowther, pumping never so wisely, could pump no
further information out of the secret depths of his friend’s mind. He
had even proposed to accompany Francis on these mysterious excursions,
but his friendly offers had been met by a point-blank refusal. He had
ventured a little playful _badinage_; he had gone so far as to make an
occasional insinuation; but Francis Tredethlyn had repelled his hints
with the fiery indignation of a man whose tenderest and noblest feelings
are involved in the subject of his friend’s _persiflage_.
“I know you get plenty of pleasant little witticisms of that kind out of
those flimsy-covered books Mr. Jeffs supplies you with; but hadn’t you
better keep them for Mrs. de Rothsay’s next evening party? They tell so
much better amongst people who understand the French phrases you’re so
fond of using. Some of your best things might as well be Greek, so far
as I am concerned,” Mr. Tredethlyn said, coolly.
Mephistopheles shrugged his shoulders in mild deprecation of his pupil’s
impertinence. Faust was positively beginning to acquire the tone of good
society. He was learning to be insolent.
Harcourt Lowther left no stone unturned in his endeavours to discover
the Cornishman’s secret, but unluckily there were not many stones to
turn: and when Mr. Lowther had pumped Francis, and pumped Francis’s
valet, who could give no clue whatever to his master’s conduct, there
remained nothing more to be done; unless, indeed, Mr. Lowther had cared
to resort to the private-inquiry system, and employ a shabby-genteel
person at three or four guineas a week to track the footsteps of Mr.
Tredethlyn. But this was a plan to which Harcourt Lowther could only
have resorted in the most desperate extremity. If possible, he wanted to
do dirty work _without_ soiling his fingers. The private-inquiry system
would have been a dangerous kind of machinery to put into
motion--dangerous even if successful--utterly fatal in the case of
failure; and it was just possible that the shabby-genteel person might
do his spiriting awkwardly, and make his watchfulness sufficiently
intrusive to arouse suspicion, and bring impetuous Francis Tredethlyn
down upon him in an avalanche of manly rage.
“Pshaw!” thought Mr. Lowther, after a meditative and leisurely review of
his position. “It’s only a matter of so much time. ‘_Point de zèle_,’
said Talleyrand; but he only meant, don’t be in a hurry. Your zealous
diplomatist may be a very valuable person, provided he knows now to keep
the secret of his earnestness; but your impatient diplomatist is a
certain failure. Yet there are people who _will_ gather their fruit
before it is ripe. When your true diplomatist comes to an awkward knot
in the airy network of his scheme, the best thing he can do is to sit
down quietly before the web until some accidental hand unravels the
entanglement. Chance is the unfailing friend of the schemer; but the
goddess is very capricious in her visiting routine, and there are stupid
creatures who won’t wait for a morning call. Luckily, I am not one of
them. I can afford to be patient. Maude is an angel; the Stuccoville
dinners are excellent, and the Stuccoville wines are my own selection;
and for the rest I do pretty well. Ecarté is a most agreeable game;
especially when one plays with a man who is half his time so
absent-minded as to forget to mark the king. Yes, dear Francis, I can
afford to wait for the lucky accident which is to put me in possession
of the clue to those little trips of yours, in hansom cabs, which you
prefer to pick up for yourself; thereby depriving your valet of any help
to be derived by an examination of the number of the vehicle, and a
subsequent chat with the driver.”
Harcourt Lowther came very frequently to Mrs. Tredethlyn’s
drawing-rooms, now that she was to be found always accompanied by her
darling Julia, and entirely unembarrassed by his visits. He did not
always come at the orthodox hour, but would make his appearance between
eleven and twelve o’clock on a hopelessly rainy morning, with a new
book, or a roll of music, or something delightfully hideous in the way
of jelly-fish for Maude’s aquarium, or the last fashion in ferns or
orchids for Maude’s conservatories; and the back of Mrs. Tredethlyn’s
house broke out into ferneries and conservatories wherever the ingenuity
of a fashionable builder could find an excuse for carrying out Mrs.
Tredethlyn’s graceful ideas, and swelling Mr. Tredethlyn’s little
account.
Mr. Lowther had contrived to make himself the friend of the house, so
there was always some very plausible excuse for visits at unorthodox
hours, and pleasant dawdling in Maude’s pretty morning-room; and
Stuccoville, furtively observant behind rose-coloured curtains in
opposite houses, took note of Mr. Lowther’s morning calls, and kept a
sharp account of the period that elapsed between his entrances and
exits; and all this time nothing could be more delicately deferential,
more tenderly respectful, than Harcourt Lowther’s manner to his friend’s
wife. By not one hazardous phrase, by not so much as a furtive glance, a
half-suppressed sigh, had he awakened Maude to a perception of possible
danger in this pleasant intimacy with a man who had once been her
affianced husband. No poisonous breath from the schemer’s false lips had
tarnished the purity of this bright young soul; but Stuccoville had
taken alarm already, and--in confidential converse in cosy comers of
ottomans, under the shadow of a tall vase of exotics, or a Parian
statuette--declared Mrs. Tredethlyn’s conduct to be “Positively
appalling, my dear; and that absurd west-country dolt of a husband
continues as blind as ever; and now she has taken a companion, my love.
You remember the companion in ‘Vanity Fair;’ that delightful Becky calls
her a sheep-dog; and you recollect Madame de Marneffe’s companion in
that horrible novel of Balzac’s, which my tiresome Georgiana found the
other morning at the bottom of a cupboard, in which her brother Charles
keeps his cricketing shoes and fishing-tackle, and was discovered by the
governess sitting on the ground positively devouring the book, and when
questioned said it was ‘Télémaque;’ but as I was about to tell you, my
dear, with regard to Mrs. T---- and Mr. H. L----!” and so the little
mole-hill gathered size, and gradually grew into a mountain.
Harcourt Lowther and Mrs. Tredethlyn’s darling Julia were not slow to
arrive at a very friendly understanding. One morning spent in Miss
Desmond’s society was quite sufficient to show so subtle an observer as
Harcourt the real state of that young lady’s feelings with regard to her
patroness. Indeed, Julia did not take much trouble to conceal her
sentiments. Gay and animated one minute, darkly brooding the next, very
often captious and contradictory, sharply ironical, or sternly defiant,
she was in all things the very reverse of the paid companion who sets
her employer’s caprices against the amount of her salary, and gratefully
accepts any pleasures or advantages that fall in her way. Maude’s
natural forbearance was exaggerated by a remorseful consciousness that
all the luxuries and gaieties of her life were so many blessings which
she had in a manner stolen from Julia, and her tenderness towards Miss
Desmond was unbounded. But there were times when the Irish girl rebelled
even against this tenderness.
“Do you think my poverty is an open wound, that you approach it so
shrinkingly?” she exclaimed impatiently, one day when Maude had broken
down in a delicate periphrasis, in which she tried to offer to pay her
friend’s milliner’s bill without wounding her friend’s pride. “Why don’t
you say at once, ‘My husband has thirty thousand a year, and a
twenty-pound note more or less is ineffably unimportant to me--while
_you_ must go bareheaded if your pride revolts against dirty tulle and
tumbled flowers?’ Pay me my salary, Mrs. Tredethlyn, when it becomes
due, and do not force your favours upon me! for I come of a proud race,
who are slow to perceive the difference between an unwelcome favour and
an uncalled-for insult. As for the unmade silk dresses which you have
tried so delicately to force upon me, under the pretence that the
colours are unbecoming to your complexion, you can parade your wealth
and your generosity by presenting them to your maid. I am _voué au noir_
henceforward; and when you are tired of seeing my shabby-genteel black
moiré and Limerick lace in some obscure corner of your rooms, you have
only to give me a hint, and I will spend the evening in my own
apartment.”
It was not often that Miss Desmond indulged in such a speech as this, or
perhaps even remorseful Maude could scarcely have endured her
companionship. She sometimes made herself very agreeable during those
idle rainy mornings in which Maude and Harcourt practised the old
concertante duets for flute and piano, or dawdled amongst the delicate
ferns with the crackjaw names in the little fernery that opened out of
the boudoir; or devised gorgeously incomprehensible illuminations for an
obscure verse in Malachi. Julia could never be charming, for the power
to charm is a gift _sui generis_, and does not necessarily go along with
versatile accomplishments or intellectual superiority; but she could be
an amusing and agreeable companion whenever she pleased to exhibit
herself in that character, and she did so please very frequently; for it
is so much less trouble to be agreeable than to be disagreeable, that
the most persevering sulker is apt to give way under the weary burden of
his own bad temper. But let Miss Desmond be ever so vivacious, or ever
so delightful, Harcourt Lowther never lost sight of one fact,--and that
was the fact of Julia’s unappeased and unappeasable hatred of Maude
Tredethlyn. Stuccoville, which was omniscient of everything, knew that
Mr. Tredethlyn had been engaged to Julia, and had jilted her in order to
marry Maude; and from Stuccoville Mr. Lowther obtained the clue to the
Irish girl’s feelings.
“A little genuine feminine malice might be rather a useful element, if I
can set it working unconsciously for my benefit. Your amateur’s
assistance is generally a dismal failure; but I really think this Miss
Desmond might help me. She is so very clever--and so intensely
spiteful.”
So one morning when Harcourt Lowther happened to find Julia alone in the
morning-room, he took the opportunity of being quite confidential upon
the subject of Mr. Tredethlyn’s dissipation.
“He dined from home yesterday? and the day before? Ah, to be sure, I
dined with him the day before,” said Mr. Lowther, with a deprecating
sigh. He did not attempt to conceal the fact of his own participation in
Francis Tredethlyn’s pleasures; but he contrived in the most subtle
manner to make it understood that he accompanied Francis in the
character of a guardian angel, a protecting spirit in modern costume,
with an arresting hand for ever extended to snatch the sinner from the
verge of the precipice. Miss Desmond shrugged her shoulders
disdainfully.
“I don’t think Mrs. Tredethlyn values her husband’s society sufficiently
to feel his neglect very keenly,” she said; “she seems perfectly happy.”
Yes, it was quite true; Maude seemed very happy, though her husband
spent the best part of his time away from home, and was gloomy and ill
at ease in her society. Harcourt Lowther’s hints had done their work,
and the breach was very wide between husband and wife. Francis believed
that his presence was odious to Maude. Maude imagined that home
pleasures and simple domestic enjoyments were tame and insipid for
Francis. And it had all been so easily done! Harcourt had only to make a
few careless speeches about his friend.
“You see, my dear Mrs. Tredethlyn, a man of our dear Frank’s temperament
requires out-door amusements--hunting, and shooting, and racing, and all
their agreeable concomitants in the way of meet breakfasts and
uproarious dinners. A man with Frank’s animal spirits must have more
boisterous pleasures than can be procured in a drawing-room, however
charming--or amongst women, however delightful. There are some men who
do _not_ care for the society of ladies; very excellent fellows in their
way, but men in whose minds poetry and music, beautiful scenery,
exquisite sentiments, grand ideas, are all classed under one head as
‘doosid bores.’ You know the style of man who calls everything except
his horse and his dog a ‘doosid bore.’ I don’t say that Tredethlyn is
_quite_ that sort of man, but he is not a domestic animal.”
Mr. Lowther--sitting amongst a chaos of feminine litter, snipping out
painted birds and flowers with a pair of fairy-like scissors for Maude’s
_potichomanie_, looked the very incarnation of all that is domestic and
devoted to the fair sex. Perhaps he fully estimated the advantage of the
contrast between his own character and that of the men he had been
describing.
Mrs. Tredethlyn gave a little sigh.
“And Frank _used_ to be so very domestic; and so dotingly fond of
Floss,” she said, looking pensively at a mouse-coloured Skye terrier,
whose cold nose reposed in the pink palm of her pretty hand. “However,
we contrive to do very well without him, don’t we, Flossy Possy? and we
shouldn’t care if he went to all the races in that dreadful calendar,
and never, never came near his own house at all, should we, Flossy
Possy?”
Harcourt Lowther, looking up furtively from the covert of his auburn
eyelashes, snipped a bird into mincemeat, and tightened his mouth until
the thin lips were scarcely visible.
“That nonsense sounds rather like pique,” he thought.
“Can she care for the fellow? A handsome boor, who would scarcely know
the difference between Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ and ‘Rule,
Britannia!’--can she have the faintest sentiment of affection for such a
man as that, when----”
Mr. Lowther’s self-esteem finished the sentence,--
“When she knows me, and can contrast my infinite graces and
accomplishments with the boor’s defects?”
But Mr. Lowther, looking at his position in all its aspects, could not
do otherwise than perceive that the provincial rust was gradually
wearing off the farmer’s son, and that Francis Tredethlyn was learning
to hold his own amongst men who had played cricket in the Eton meads,
and paced the grand old cloisters and quadrangles of Oxford and
Cambridge. Association is the best schoolmaster; and even in Bohemia, a
man who is blessed with a fair amount of intelligence must learn
something.
There were times when Harcourt Lowther frowned darkly as he brooded over
his cards, and began to think that the game was not such an easy one to
win, after all. But he played patiently, notwithstanding; and, true to
his faith in the saving help of Chance, he waited for the goddess to
look over his shoulder, and point with her inspired finger to the trump
which should win him the final trick.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXX.
THE TWO ANTIPHOLI.
It was while the schemer was waiting that an event occurred which had
some influence upon the current of his life.
His elder brother, heir to all that Robert Lowther, of Lowther Hall,
Hampshire, had to leave, and expectant heir to the more important
possessions of a very wealthy maiden aunt, returned unexpectedly from
Belgium, where he had been established for some time as a member of the
_Corps Diplomatique_, and dropped unannounced into Mr. Lowther’s lodging
while that gentleman was lounging over his breakfast.
The meeting between the two brothers was not remarkable for its
enthusiasm. Roderick Lowther strolled lazily into the room, dropped into
an easy-chair, and indulged in a long leisurely stretch and a loud yawn
before he addressed his astonished relative.
“Didn’t expect to see me yet awhile, did you, old boy? Been travelling
all night, and feel as if my bones were not so much bones as
rheumatism,--some fellow says something like that in a book, doesn’t he?
Came over in the _Baron Osy_; very bad passage, jolting and tumbling
about all night, waves mountains high, as people say in books. So you’ve
cut the line, dear boy, and are living on the proceeds of your
commission, I suppose? The warrior blood of the Lowthers who fought at
Bosworth and Flodden seems to have lost a little of its fiery quality in
filtering through three centuries of country gentlemen. There was a
Lowther who distinguished himself at bloody Malplaquet, by the bye, and
another who was with young General Wolfe on the heights of Quebec. But
we’ve done with all that nowadays. We are peacefully disposed, and sell
out on the earliest opportunity; and we steal a march on our beloved
brother, and come home on the quiet to cultivate our maiden aunt.”
“That’s a lie,” replied Harcourt, very coolly. “I haven’t been near her
since I came home.”
“What did you come home for then?” asked the other. _“You came for
something.”_
The two men looked at each other. They were very much alike. There was
the same steelly light in the blue eyes, the same tight contraction of
the thin lips. The elder looked at the younger with a glance of shrewd
inquiry; the younger looked back sulky defiance.
“Come,” said the traveller, after a second leisurely stretch and a
second prolonged yawn, “what is it, then, the little game? Say, my
friend. You didn’t sell out of her Majesty’s service without a motive,
and you didn’t come home without a motive. By Jove! you never did
anything in your life without a motive. You are a schemer, my dear
Harcourt. The schemer is born, and not made, and he must obey his
instincts. Dear boy, I know your organization, and in these days of
physiological science no man can keep himself quite dark. Iago would
have been a failure if Othello had studied his Lavater. Be candid,
Harcourt, and tell me what noble vessel, laden with the spoils of a new
Peru, flaunts her white sails upon the wind, and invites the attention
of the pirate.”
“You are so deuced confiding yourself, that you’ve a right to demand
another fellow’s confidence,” Harcourt responded, moodily. “When I want
your help, I’ll tell you my secrets. That has been _your_ way of
managing matters, I believe.”
“My Harcourt bears malice!” exclaimed Roderick. “Antipholus of Ephesus
reproaches Antipholus of Syracuse. Dear boy, I suppose it’s our
misfortune to be too much alike. Perhaps, if you won’t give me your
confidence, you will at least oblige me with a chop. There was an
atmosphere of smoky chimneys and warm train-oil on board the _Baron_
which incapacitated me for breakfast.”
Mr. Lowther the elder possessed himself of the teapot, and appropriated
his brother’s breakfast-cup, while Harcourt rang the bell and gave an
order for additional rolls and chops.
“I didn’t know you were coming to England,” Mr. Lowther the younger
said, after a pause, in which he had stared moodily at his brother.
“I suppose not,” answered the other; “and I can’t say that the
heartiness of your welcome is very encouraging to the returning
prodigal. However, as I have not been in these dominions for the last
three years or more, and as my father and I are not the best
friends,--there’s nothing so economical for a parent as a long-standing
quarrel with all his children, by the way,--I shall look to you, my dear
Harcourt, for any friendly offices I may require. I have three months’
leave of absence, and I have not--_le sou_. I come to England to
recuperate, as brother Jonathan has it. I want to get on the blind side
of my beloved aunt to the tune of a few hundreds; and I want to marry an
heiress.”
“Oh,” said Harcourt, thoughtfully, “you want to marry an heiress?”
“Yes; can you help me to do it?”
“I think not.”
“Humph! perhaps if I could make it worth your while to assist me you’d
tell another story. However, you can introduce me to some nice people, I
suppose?”
Harcourt nodded moodily.
“And I must look up my own old set. Not that I know many people, for I
lived such a hide-and-seek sort of life when I was in England. Can you
get me rooms in this house? We can commonize, you know. I left my
portmanteaus on board the _Baron_. I suppose there’s a boots, or a
somebody of the scout species appertaining to this establishment, who
can take a cab, and fetch them for me?”
Thus unceremoniously did Antipholus of Syracuse establish himself in the
abode of his ungracious brother. Frankenstein, pursued by the monster of
his creation, could scarcely have seemed more ill at ease than Harcourt
Lowther under the infliction of his brother’s society. Was it that these
men were too much alike? Did Harcourt think that the keen eyes of his
brother would follow every thread in the intricate network of his
scheme, and the subtle brain of his brother would apply itself to
plotting against him?
But the coolness so apparent in Harcourt’s reception of the returning
wanderer made no impression whatever on that gentleman. Roderick Lowther
stretched his long legs upon his brother’s hearth-rug, and smoked his
brother’s cigars, with a serene indifference as to his brother’s
feelings.
“If you dine anywhere to-day you can take me with you,” he said,
blandly; “and to-morrow I’ll introduce you to a splendid set of fellows
at the ‘Travellers’.’ You haven’t thought of an heiress yet, I suppose?”
“No.”
“Ah, you’ll hit upon something in that way presently, I dare say, if you
run your mind’s eye over your visiting list. I’m in no hurry. Three
months is a small eternity in these days of railroads and photography.”
“And you really would marry?” said Harcourt again, very thoughtfully.
“Really would? Of course I would, if I could get the chance of making an
advantageous match, and propitiate my aunt Dorothea by the sacrifice.
You know how bent the prudent old lady has always been on my making a
great marriage, and restoring the forgotten glories of the Lowthers.
Yes, Harcourt, I come prepared for victory, and I trust to your
brotherly friendship to help me to see and conquer.”
“Humph! By the bye, I suppose you have heard nothing of----”
“Not a word,” answered Roderick, rather hastily; “I know what you’re
going to talk about, and as that’s rather an unpleasant subject to me,
we may as well agree to avoid it. I wrote a letter, candid, explanatory,
and so forth; promising to do what I considered my duty. I don’t profess
to be a generous man, and I freely acknowledge that I’m a very poor one;
so the modest annual sum, which I considered my duty, was----well, _very
modest_! However, the letter was unanswered. People drop through, you
see,” concluded Mr. Lowther the elder, blowing away a slender puff of
blue vapour, as if he had been blowing away a troublesome subject; “and
when people do, of their own election, drop through, I can’t see that
it’s any fellow’s duty to dig them up again. _You_ haven’t heard
anything, I suppose?”
“Not a word.”
“Fortunate for you! Sometimes that sort of person fastens on to one’s
relations. However, as I observed before, we’ll agree to avoid the
subject. Suppose we discuss your affairs?”
“I had much rather we did not.”
“Of course, dear boy; but as I am candidly disposed myself, I don’t mean
to be kept in the dark by the most saturnine of brothers who ever sulked
in the face of an amiable relative. _You_ used to be engaged to an
heiress--something in the Moorgate-Street line--Australian merchandise,
wasn’t it? a Miss Hillersdon, or Hillary, eh, dear boy? There used to be
something of that sort on the cards, I believe?”
“There used to be, but there has ceased to be for the last twelve
months. Will that do for you?”
“Ah, Miss Hillersdon--or Hillary--has jilted you, I suppose?”
“She has.”
“And the man she has married----”
“Is my very good friend, the happy possessor of a charming wife and a
large fortune, and the man at whose house I dine to-day.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Roderick Lowther, lengthening the ejaculation to its
extremest capacity of extension--“Oh, I think I begin to understand your
policy. Miss Hillary has married a rich man, and you are intimate with
the husband and _au mieux_ with the wife. The husband is a sickly
fellow--consumptive--apoplectic, eh, dear boy?”
“The husband is something over six feet high, and has the shoulders of a
lifeguardsman; and, if it were not for his dissipated habits, might live
to be ninety.”
“Ah, if it were not for his dissipated habits. And you are his intimate
friend? My dear Harcourt, what a very transparent game you are playing!
and what a consummate fool you must be if you supposed that I shouldn’t
see through it! Why not a bond of union between us--all for one, and one
for all, like Dumas’s musketeers? Help me to find an heiress, and I’ll
help you _auprès de_ Mrs. ----, what’s the lady’s name, by the bye?”
Harcourt Lowther allowed this last piece of information to be screwed
out of him, and parted with it as grudgingly as he had parted with the
rest. It is not a pleasant thing when you are playing a very difficult
game with the odds against you, to have an inconvenient brother swooping
down upon you and insisting on looking over your hand.
There was no affection between these two brothers; the likeness which
they bore to each other, morally as well as physically, seemed to have a
blighting influence upon their relations. They knew each other, and they
distrusted each other. Perhaps it would have been scarcely too much to
say they hated each other.
But they went out to dinner together nevertheless, and Harcourt
smilingly introduced his brother to Mrs. Tredethlyn and Miss Desmond.
They had plenty of time to grow quite intimate in the drawing-room while
they were waiting for Francis, who came in, flushed with a hurried
toilet, at ten minutes to eight. He had been absent upon one of his
mysterious excursions a little way out of town.
Roderick Lowther was received very graciously by the two ladies, and
cordially welcomed by Mr. Tredethlyn. Harcourt, watching his brother
ensconced in a nook of Maude’s favourite ottoman, and discoursing at his
ease upon Belgian notabilities, was troubled by dark misgivings of
danger.
“I must find the fellow a quarry for himself,” he thought, “or he’ll be
trying to stalk my game. He asks me to introduce him to an eligible
_parti_ as coolly as if life were a five-act comedy, with the
traditional heiress always waiting to fall a prey to the traditional
adventurer. An heiress! in these days of marvellous commercial successes
there must be such things as heiresses. But the question is where to
look for them.”
One of Mr. Tredethlyn’s pompous retainers opened the drawing-room door
at this moment and announced--
“Mr. and Miss Grunderson.”
“Egad!” thought Harcourt Lowther, “there’s the solution of my
difficulty. Why not Miss Grunderson? Miss Grunderson is an heiress, or
ought to be, if there is stability in any part of the commercial
universe.”
A young lady with a very rosy face, a young lady decidedly inclined to
that quality which in the fair sex is elegantly entitled _embonpoint_, a
young lady who was surrounded by surging flounces of pink areophane,
dotted about with more pink rosebuds and larger full-blown roses than
were ever worn by any young lady with a judicious recollection of the
sweeps on Mayday, bounced into the room, and bounced up to Mrs.
Tredethlyn; while an elderly gentleman, who was evidently the young
lady’s papa, beamed mildly at the company across an enormous expanse of
embroidered shirt-front and black waistcoat.
But in the network that Harcourt Lowther has woven Miss Grunderson is
destined to be considerably entangled, and deserves to be introduced
more ceremoniously in a fresh chapter.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXXI.
THE DIPLOMATIST’S POLICY.
That ponderous Mr. Grunderson, who plunged heavily down upon Maude’s
central ottoman, a miraculous combination of upholstery and
floriculture--that shining bald-headed Mr. Grunderson, who sat placidly
grinning at the company, and addressed his hostess as “Mum”--had begun
life as a market-gardener; and, had Mrs. Tredethlyn been born some
twenty years earlier, would have been proud to supply her with azaleas
and camellias for the decoration of the ottoman upon which he was now
sitting. The march of progress, and the accompanying march of bricks and
mortar, had driven before them the cabbages and strawberry-beds, the
cucumber-frames and young plantations of evergreens, by the cultivation
of which Mr. Grunderson and his forefathers had lived comfortably upon
one-o’clock dinners of fat bacon and indigestible dumplings, with
occasional varieties of butcher’s meat, thinking themselves passing rich
when their ledgers showed a profit of two or three hundred pounds at the
end of the year.
The march of civilization, or rather the march of the myrmidons of that
unreasoning despot, that implacable ruler, whom women call Fashion,
always pushing westward, had contrived to push Mr. Grunderson’s gardens
off the face of the earth, and in so doing had set a Pactolus flowing
steadily into Mr. Grunderson’s pocket. The wealth poured in upon him
with a rapidity which was like nothing but a fairy tale. That heroic
Jack of the nursery story--who, by the bye, seems to have had no
surname--never looked in more amazement on the bean-stalk that shot into
the very skies in a single night, than did the honest market-gardener at
the stuccoed district which had arisen, seven or eight stories and a
campanello tower high, on the fields where he remembered execrating the
slugs on dewy mornings a few years before. Where a prairie of bright red
stocks had perfumed all the summer air with spicy odours, a square of
stately mansions stared grimly at each other, and prime ministers’
carriages rolled with meteor lamps through the midnight darkness. Where
ragged children, and gaunt sunburnt women, in blucher-boots and with
indescribable bonnets balanced on their freckled noses, had weeded
strawberry-beds for a pitiful sixpence a day, duchesses trailed their
silken trains and wearied of the rolling hours after the approved manner
of their kind in the pages of the poets and romancers. The
transformation was as perfect as it had been rapid; and instead of the
cabbages and cabbage-roses, the cucumber-frames and hothouse flowers of
his youth and early manhood, Mr. Grunderson found himself, at fifty
years of age, proprietor of ground-rents that made him a millionaire. He
had only one child, a daughter, who had been educated for some fifty
pounds a year at a seminary for young ladies, in which she had been
cruelly snubbed on account of her father’s cabbages, and who was now
determined to revenge herself on the companions of her blighted youth by
the splendour of her womanhood. Led by this young lady, who was blessed
with an energetic temperament and imperturbable good humour, Mr.
Grunderson found himself, always more or less independently of his own
agency, going through the complete formula of fashionable life according
to his daughter Rosa’s notion of that formula; which notion was
extremely variable, and took its colour from the last acquaintance to
whom the lively heiress was pleased to attach herself.
The very last just now happened to be Maude Tredethlyn, about whom Rosa
was ready to go off into raptures at any moment, and whom she always
spoke of as “a dear,” “a love,” or “a darling.” But there was a warm
womanly heart beating under Rosa’s fine dresses, and her raptures had
more meaning in them than the raptures of enthusiastic young ladies are
apt to have. She attached herself so effectually to Maude that Mrs.
Tredethlyn was fain to forget, or at any rate to forgive, the occasional
lapses in her grammar, the unpleasant warmth of her fat little hands,
which always came flopping down on the hands of her companion when she
was enthusiastic, and the shadow of vulgarity which is so apt to
accompany the sunshine of low-born liveliness.
Harcourt Lowther took an early opportunity to inform his elder brother
that the young lady in pink areophane was an heiress, and an heiress
well worthy the cultivation of any enterprising young diplomatist.
Roderick was not slow to take the hint, but he was a great deal too much
of a diplomatist to attempt any obvious angling for this rich prize. He
exerted all his powers of fascination in order to make himself agreeable
to Mrs. Tredethlyn, and he did not address so much as one syllable of
the most commonplace civility to the market-gardener’s daughter; the
consequence of which little manœuvre was, that as Rosa was sitting next
to Maude all the evening, she listened open-mouthed to every word he
uttered, and when she departed in her papa’s three-hundred-guinea
chariot--the market-gardener had insisted on possessing the traditional
lemon-coloured chariot with hammer-cloth, and powdered retainers, which
he had beheld and admired in his boyhood--she carried Roderick Lowther’s
image away with her.
It must be acknowledged, however, that it was no uncommon occurrence for
Miss Grunderson to carry the image of some tolerably good-looking and
passably well-mannered young man away from any festal gathering at which
she happened to find herself. The good-humoured Rosa had a habit of
falling desperately in love with any eligible person whom she
encountered either in public or private life, who did anything to make
himself notorious, or wore his hair long enough to be entitled a Being.
A long list of Beings had occupied that sentimental caravansary which
Miss Grunderson called her heart. She had been in love with all the
poets, from the Laureate to Mr. Tupper; with all the novelists, from the
great Sir Edward to the newest fledged of Mr. Mudie’s popularities; and
I fear she often fell in love with angels unawares in the shape of
feminine romancers who were pleased to hide their gentle sex under
masculine nomenclature. She had been in love--fathoms deep--with Lord
Palmerston, Signor Mario, Sir Edwin Landseer, and Mr. Charles Mathews.
She was wont to keep the three-hundred-guinea chariot waiting in Pall
Mall for an hour at a stretch while she hunted Mr. Graves and his
assistants for the last new portrait of her last new idol; and her room
was like a good Catholic’s chapel,--hung with the engraved effigies of
an army of saints.
It was a very pure flame which burnt before so many shrines, and a very
harmless one; and perhaps if Mr. Lowther the elder had known Rosa
Grunderson’s little idiosyncrasies, he would not have felt quite so
complacently triumphant in the consciousness that her round grey eyes
had been fixed upon him all the evening with the fond gaze of
hero-worship. Harcourt contrived to swell this triumph by artful little
brotherly compliments, as the two young men walked Londonwards under the
starlit summer sky, smoking their regalias, and talking as men about
town do talk under those sublime stars. Sentimental Rosa was gazing at
those luminous unknown worlds from the covert of the pinkest curtains in
Stuccoville, and thinking about _Him_! Rosa’s last adoration was always
mysteriously alluded to under cover of a personal pronoun. Her
admiration for Roderick Lowther was multiplied a hundredfold by the
young diplomatist’s disregard of her. Poor Rosa had been accustomed to
be made the object of what, in the argotic parlance of her age, she
called “a dead set,” on account of her papa’s ground-rents; and she was
inclined to imagine Mr. Lowther the noblest and most disinterested of
mankind because he did not commence this “dead set” immediately after
being introduced to her.
“I wonder whether he knows that I’m _the_ Miss Grunderson?” she thought,
as she looked up at those romantic stars so familiar to her in her
Byron. “Of course he does, though, ’Pa is _so_ different from the rest
of society, that people always know there’s some reason for his being
where he is, and they’re not very long guessing that the reason is
money. Will anybody ever want to marry me for my own sake, I wonder? Ah,
how I wish the Marquis of Westminster would fall in love with me! _He_
couldn’t want pa’s ground-rents.”
Thus the maiden mused in her bower, while Roderick Lowther, encouraged
by his junior, talked complacently of his conquest.
“She’s the simplest little thing in Christendom,” he said; “simpler
than--anybody I ever met in my life. The disinterested game is the dodge
in that quarter, dear boy. Do you remember how Frederic Soulié’s _Lion_
treats the little shopkeeper’s daughter? First with the elegant devotion
of a fashionable Romeo, then with the _brusquerie_ of a Benedick or a
Petruchio. _Lise Laloine_ died under the treatment; but I don’t think
the plump Rosa is made of quite such ethereal stuff. _La Petite_ is
sentimental, and wants to be loved for herself alone; ‘O, wert thou in
the cauld blast!’ ‘And long he mourned, the Lord of Burleigh;’ and that
sort of thing. She shall have it, the darling innocent! Tennyson and
Owen Meredith by the _kilo_, disinterested devotion by the bushel. But
oh, my Harcourt, do not lure your loving brother into the quagmire of
delusive wealth! Make sure that our simple-looking Grunderson does not
hide the cloven hoof of insolvency under the golden fleece in which he
drapes himself: those simple-looking men generally fail for half a
million. I like your Mrs. Tredethlyn, by the bye; she is very pretty and
very elegant; but, to be candid, my dear Harcourt--a brother ought to be
candid, you know, even at the risk of being unpleasant--I fancy there is
more in the husband than you imagine. A man with such a chest must have
some solidity in his composition. If I am anything of a physiologist, it
is not in that man’s organization to be made a fool of. Ah, I see you
don’t care to talk about it; you like to keep your own secrets, and play
your own game without backers or advisers. So be it. For myself, I am of
an open disposition; I like to talk of my own affairs when they go
smoothly, and to drop them when they take the crooked course. I don’t
suppose Napoleon the First was very fond of talking about Waterloo. He
forgot _that_ little skirmish, you may depend; and talked of Arcola and
Lodi, the Pyramids, Austerlitz, Wagram, and Auerstadt. I dare say Mr.
Merry holds his tongue about those two-thousand-guinea colts that
_didn’t_ win the Derby. People are _not_ eloquent about their failures.
I shall look up my old aunt early to-morrow morning; and after that, if
you have any excuse for calling on Mrs. Tredethlyn, I shall be glad to
accompany you. Unless I am very much at fault in feminine psychology,
Miss Grunderson will drop in upon her friend, to discuss my bearish
behaviour, on the earliest opportunity. Nothing impresses a sentimental
young person so favourably as downright rudeness. The heroine in a
lady’s novel always adores the man who snubs her.”
Thus argued the diplomatist by profession, strolling Strand-wards in the
starlight; while the diplomatist by organization listened quietly, and
thought his own thoughts as regarded this grand conquest, of which his
kinsman was so proud. Harcourt Lowther was not apt to resent the
insolent _insouciance_, the calm assurance of superiority, with which
his senior treated him, and indeed had treated him from that early
boyhood in which the lads had played together at Eton. But the wrongs
that rankle deeply in a man’s breast are sometimes those which he
endures silently. Harcourt believed that his own prospects had been
sacrificed to the advancement of Roderick; and he was not sorry when the
elder son went wild, and turned his back as coolly upon his father as if
he had never been the pampered favourite of weak love, the all-absorbing
drain upon a limited income. In every way Roderick had fared better than
his brother. Lowther Hall, surrounded by park and farm-lands that
constituted an estate of some three hundred acres, might not be worth
very much to a man of large ideas and lofty inspirations; but whatever
it was worth, it was tightly entailed upon the heir of the Lowthers, and
not so much as a game-keeper’s cottage or a scrap of meadow-land was
reserved for the luckless junior. Mrs. Lowther had been mistress of a
small fortune, but that had been spent on the education of the two young
men,--Harcourt in this matter, as in all others, going to the wall; for
his University career had been cut short in order that his brother’s
debts might be paid, and that extravagant gentleman be enabled to face
the big-wigs of his college without fear of clamorous creditors, and
read at leisure for a degree which he was too lazy to succeed in
getting. After this Harcourt’s prospects had again been sacrificed, and
the young barrister, unable to live at the bar, had been fain to accept
an ensign’s commission; while Roderick, pushed into the diplomatic world
by a desperate effort of family interest, exhibited his handsome face at
the Prussian Court, and squandered every farthing that he could screw
out of his father’s slender purse. When the purse had become as empty as
it well could, there had been the usual remonstrances, the usual bad
feeling which is likely to arise between an utterly selfish and
unprincipled young man and the father who is no longer able to be of any
use to him, and who takes the liberty of resenting the extravagance
which has involved his later life in difficulties.
Besides the advantages obtained from his father’s partiality, Roderick
Lowther had been the favourite of a maiden aunt of miserly habits and
independent fortune, who had condescended to give him her name at the
baptismal font, and who had never bestowed on him anything else--except,
indeed, a neat cloth-bound copy of “The Dairyman’s Daughter,” presented
to the lad one birthday, and promptly disposed of at a rag-and-bone shop
in the High Street of Harrow for the small sum of fourpence. But
although Miss Dorothea Burnett had not been very liberal in her
donations to her favourite nephew during her lifetime, it was supposed
that, after her departure from this world, the young man would reap the
reward of occasional dutifully-worded letters and affected deference to
her wishes, and that the reward would be a very substantial one; for
Miss Burnett had contrived to swell her own little fortune by many stray
windfalls in the way of legacies from relatives, whose regard her busy
married sister Mrs. Lowther had neglected to cultivate. Beyond this, the
maiden lady had bought small but profitable tenements, and had dabbled a
little in shares; and she had watched her small investments with an
intelligence, and nursed them with a tenderness, which her stockbroker
had admiringly declared to be a credit to the sex she adorned by her
commercial acumen.
So Roderick Lowther, finding his younger brother on the field, was
alarmed by the idea that he might have been undermined in this
direction, and was by no means inclined to lose any time before
presenting himself to his spinster aunt. He brushed and curled his amber
whiskers with more than usual circumspection, therefore, on the morning
after the dinner at Mrs. Tredethlyn’s; and walking through Covent
Garden, on his way to Miss Burnett’s Bloomsbury hermitage, he expended
sixpence on a hothouse flower to put in the button-hole of the dark-blue
coat which he wore under a flimsy outer garment of pale grey. He had
dressed himself very carefully, for he knew that, in spite of the maiden
lady’s lectures on the subject of prudence, her feminine eye was
fascinated by the elegant frivolities which she affected to disapprove.
Miss Burnett occupied a very big house in the dullest street in
Bloomsbury--a dismal _cul de sac_, in which there was almost always an
elderly organ-grinder playing “Home, sweet home,” or the “Old
Hundredth,” with a little group of squalid children gathered round him.
The big house smelt like a tomb, and was almost as rarely opened as if
it had been one; for the butcher-boy who brought Miss Burnett’s
mutton-chop, or the half-pound of steak or three-quarters of liver, upon
which Miss Burnett’s servant was wont to make her repast, handed his
wares across the area-gate, and exchanged no word of comment with the
grim damsel who received them, knowing very well that the lady of the
house sat at her favourite window in the front parlour, with her open
Bible before her, and a watchful eye upon the outer world, which some
sentimental Christians might have thought scarcely consistent with so
much piety.
The grim damsel who admitted Roderick Lowther to Miss Burnett’s darksome
abode relaxed her ordinary sternness of visage into something faintly
resembling a smile as she recognized her mistress’s nephew.
“Your aunt has been very ill since you were last here, Mr. Lowther,” the
woman said, in answer to Roderick’s inquiry. “She was very bad with her
asthma all the winter; but the warm spring weather brought her round
again.”
“Yes,” thought the young man, “the spring weather always does bring her
round,--and always will, I suppose, till I am dead and in my grave.”
He was ushered into the dining-room while this irreverent idea was in
his mind; and the next minute he was seated opposite to his aunt,
inquiring tenderly about her asthma. The dining-room was very dismal.
There was more mahogany furniture and brown damask than is compatible
with the smallest ray of cheerfulness, and the walls were rendered
ghastly by some hideous preparations painted in asphaltum, and
exhibiting gigantic cracks that looked like gory, yawning
wounds,--preparations which, on account of their smoky nature and
revolting choice of subject, were supposed to be the work of the old
masters.
“I am very glad to see you, my dear Roderick,” said Miss Burnett,
gravely; “as glad as I can be about anything in this carnal life,” added
the old lady, whose spirits had been revived that morning by a rise of
one and a quarter per cent. in the value of her pet investment. “But we
are taught not to rejoice, Roderick, except in that which----Is that a
hothouse flower, my dear?” inquired Miss Burnett, looking sharply at the
myosotis in her nephew’s button-hole. “Dear, dear! what an extravagant
age it is! You are looking very well, my dear Roderick. I dare say you
are what a worldly-minded person would call very handsome; but we must
try to remember that we are all worms,” murmured the old lady with a
doleful sigh; for she took the gloomy view of things which is so common
to some people who read that Gospel which is all life and colour and
brightness, full of the happy faces of merry-makers at a bridal
festival, and little children gathering round a favourite Teacher’s
knees, radiant with sudden rejoicings in mourning households, the dead
restored to smile upon the living. There is something strange in the
dull grey tint which some worshippers are able to infuse into a story
that a painter can hardly read without feeling the tropical heat of a
meridian sun, the perfume of a thousand lilies, the spicy odours of the
feathery palms, and the free dash of Galilee’s blue waves about the prow
of a fisherman’s frail bark sailing gaily under an Eastern sky. Surely
the richness of colour with which the Catholic Church invests the
Christian faith is, after all, only the natural attribute of a religion
which arose amid the splendour and beauty of the Holy Land!
“I hope, my dear Roderick,” said the maiden lady, very solemnly, “that
while absent in those idolatrous foreign lands, you kept the promise
which you gave me before leaving England.”
“My dear aunt,” murmured the young man, who had quite forgotten having
made any promise whatever to his pious relative, and was painfully
mystified by this address, “I assure you that I----”
He would have broken down here, but the lady came to his rescue.
“Don’t prevaricate, Roderick!” she exclaimed, sternly. “Did you, or did
you not, enter a Roman Catholic place of worship during your sojourn
among the high priests of Baal? Did you, or did you not, sit under one
of those idolatrous worshippers of stocks and stones? And oh, that I
should live to see candlesticks on the altar of a church in this very
neighbourhood!” cried Miss Burnett, with a sudden burst of indignation;
“and to hear snuffling, which I at first attributed to a cold in the
head, but afterwards ascertained to be the wicked workings of ROME!”
The stanch Dorothea paused for a few moments to recover her indignation,
and then tackled her nephew once more.
“You promised me, before going to Belgium, that you would not, however
tempted, enter a Roman Catholic place of worship,” she said.
“And I did _not_, my dear aunt,” answered Roderick, promptly; “I give
you my word of honour as a gentleman.” “Nor any other place of worship,”
thought the heir, as his aunt nodded approvingly.
And then there was a little more talk, chiefly taking the form of a
catechism, which Mr. Lowther went through triumphantly, since his
answers to the old lady’s inquiries were shaped in accordance with his
knowledge of what was likely to please his aunt, rather than with any
reference to actual fact. But a man must do a good many mean things when
he devotes himself to the cultivation of a narrow-minded maiden aunt,
for the chance of inheriting small tenements and first-preference bonds
in flourishing railway companies. Roderick Lowther breathed a long sigh
of relief when he left the house that smelt like a tomb behind him,
after drinking a glass of his aunt’s dry sherry, which act of devotion
was in itself no small penance.
He hailed a hansom as soon as he was safely beyond ken of the observant
spinster, and was rattled back to his brother’s lodgings, where he found
Harcourt pondering moodily over the “Times” newspaper, and whence the
same hansom drove the two Antipholi to Stuccoville.
Mr. Tredethlyn was out, but Mrs. Tredethlyn was at home. Harcourt went
into his friend’s study to write a note; while Roderick followed a
servant to the drawing-rooms, in the smallest and cosiest of which three
gorgeous apartments the diplomatist found Maude and Rosa seated side by
side on a low sofa, while proud Julia meditated apart at the window.
“You’re the lady I should like to marry,” thought Roderick, as he looked
at Julia’s dark face, which lighted up for a moment with her flashing
smile, as she bowed to him, and then relapsed into gloom; “there’d be
some pleasure in taming _you_. Who would care to cage a robin? but there
would be some glory in subduing the spirit of an eagle.”
Thus mused Mr. Lowther, while he murmured some commonplace remark upon
the beauty of the summer day, and dropped himself lazily into a seat
near Maude Tredethlyn. He was true to his tactics of the night before,
and addressed his remarks almost entirely to Maude and Julia. When he
did condescend to address the vivacious Rosa, he did so in a manner that
was a delicate admixture of the intellectual bearishness of one of poor
Miss Brontés heroes with the lively banter of a Benedick. The result of
this policy was triumphant, and the market-gardener’s daughter plunged
deeper and deeper still into her five-and-twentieth hopeless attachment.
While Mr. Lowther the elder was cultivating his own interests in the
drawing-room, Mr. Lowther the younger was pacing up and down Francis
Tredethlyn’s study in no happy frame of mind. Imagine the feelings of a
Mephistopheles who begins to suspect that his victim has slipped away
from him. Harcourt was beginning to feel very doubtful as to the
firmness of his hold on his pupil and companion.
Francis Tredethlyn’s conduct for the last few weeks had quite baffled
his friend’s penetration. The Cornishman had grown suddenly preoccupied
and reserved. He might still be seen in the haunts of the Bohemians--for
Mr. Lowther took care that he should not easily extricate himself from
the bonds that he had allowed to be coiled about him; but Francis,
always unwilling to be led into the scenes where he had no pleasure, was
now more unwilling than ever, and Harcourt found it very difficult to
play the game he wanted to play without showing his cards. If it had
been a mere question of plucking so many feathers from an innocent
pigeon, the thing might have been done easily enough, perhaps; but Mr.
Lowther evidently wanted something more than his friend’s golden
plumage. It seemed, indeed, as if he would be satisfied with nothing
less than the utter ruin and degradation of Maude Tredethlyn’s husband.
To-day, walking up and down the study, whose broad plate-glass window
commanded an agreeable view of a stony quadrangle and the roofs and
chimneys of a mews, Harcourt thought very despondently of that grand
scheme to which he had devoted himself so patiently since his return to
England.
“What secret is the fellow hiding from me?” he thought, resentfully; “he
refused to dine with me to-day, and he threw over the party I made for
Greenwich the day before yesterday. He has made no book for the York
summer, and yet he is less at home than ever. What does it all mean? Can
he have gone to the bad in real earnest at last, and without any help
from me? There must be something in it; but what is the something?”
Tired at last of such meditations as these, Harcourt Lowther flung
himself into a chair to compose the letter he had talked about writing
when he entered the study.
He wrote his note, which was very brief, and the gist of which was to
remind Francis of some engagement that would entail the usual champagne
drinking, the usual squandering of money for the gratification of the
worthless society in which a few innocent pigeons abandoned themselves
to be plucked without mercy by every species of predatory fowl. After
having written this little note, so carefully worded that no print of
the fiend’s hoof could have been deciphered therein by uninitiated eyes,
Harcourt Lowther sat with his elbow on the table, biting the feather of
his pen, and ruminating moodily. There were open letters and tradesmen’s
bills lying about upon Francis Tredethlyn’s disorderly writing-table.
Mr. Lowther flung aside his pen presently, and amused himself by a
careless examination of these documents. Some of the bills were heavy
ones, but not so heavy as to make any very serious inroad upon the
Cornishman’s fortune, and Harcourt tossed them away from him one after
the other, uninterested in their details, unconcerned by their
sum-totals, until he came to a dead stop all at once at the first line
of a document which seemed to him to bear an extraordinary significance.
This document was the bill of a fashionable upholsterer, and the line
below the tradesman’s name and address ran thus:
“For goods supplied to Francis Tredethlyn, Esq., at Brook Cottage,
Petersham, June 20th, 185-;” and then followed a list of the furniture
for a cottage, the sum-total of which came to little more than three
hundred pounds.
“So,” muttered Mr. Lowther, “I think I have fallen upon the clue to the
mystery. We will go and look at Mr. Tredethlyn’s furnished cottage.”
He wrote the address on a tablet in his _portemonnaie_, and went
up-stairs to the drawing-room, where he found Roderick intolerably at
his ease in the society of the three ladies. There was an arrangement
made for a meeting in Maude’s roomy box at Covent Garden, to which Mrs.
Tredethlyn was fain to invite the affectionate Rosa, who clung to her
with peculiar fondness to-day: and then the two gentlemen took their
departure; Roderick to look in at the “Travellers’” and the “St.
James’s;” Harcourt to hurry post-haste--or rather hansom-cab haste--to
the Waterloo terminus, whence he took the train for Richmond.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXXII.
HARCOURT GATHERS HIS FIRST FRUITS.
The party in Mrs. Tredethlyn’s opera-box that evening was a very
pleasant one. Whatever business had taken Harcourt Lowther to Richmond
must have been tolerably satisfactory in its result, for that
gentleman’s spirits were gayer than usual as he stood behind Maude’s
chair in the shadow of the crimson curtain, talking to her under cover
of all those crashing choruses and grand orchestral effects which
Meyerbeer must surely have composed with a view to comfortable
conversation. Miss Grunderson was gorgeous in thirty guineas worth of
blue moiré antique _à la Watteau_, and exhibited a small fortune in the
way of lace and artificial flowers upon her plump little person. Her
diamond earrings were the biggest in the opera-house; though it must be
confessed that a straw-coloured tint, which the connoisseur repudiates,
pervaded the gems that the market-gardener had bought for his
daughter--size, rather than purity of water, being the quality for which
Mr. Grunderson selected his diamonds. Nothing could be more striking
than the contrast between Maude’s simple toilet of white silk and Rosa’s
gaudy splendour.
But Miss Grunderson was very happy this evening, for the delightful
Roderick condescended to talk to her, while his brother was engrossed by
Mrs. Tredethlyn. He was not very polite, but Rosa thought him positively
charming. She had learnt to understand the emptiness of the attentions
that had been paid to her by enterprising young bachelors, who thought
that an alliance with the great Grunderson’s daughter would be a very
pleasant starting-point on the high-road of life; but she did not
understand that there might come a man wise enough to eschew vain
flatteries and all the ordinary allurements of the vulgar
fortune-hunter, and yet designing enough to spread his nets for any
heiress worthy of his ambition.
In his conversation with the simple-minded Rosa he affected the
sentiments of a confirmed misogynist.
“If there were such a possibility as a sensible woman,” he said, “I
might perhaps hope to end my days in the bosom of a family; but since
the age of miracles is past, I resign myself to the idea of remaining a
lonely wanderer until the day of my death.”
Thus, half in despondency, half in bitterness, Roderick Lowther replied
to some leading remark of Miss Grunderson’s. She called him a horrid man
and a dreadful creature: but she admired him amazingly notwithstanding,
and she felt a seraphic happiness in listening to this delightful
cynical being, to the utter neglect of Meyerbeer.
“With the exception of public characters,” mused the market-gardener’s
daughter, “I don’t think I was ever _really_ in love until now.”
And thus it fell out that, when Mrs. Tredethlyn said, in the course of
the evening, that she was going to spend the following day at
Twickenham, Rosa gave such broad hints about the loveliness of the
weather, and the delights of suburban scenery, that good-natured Maude
promised to take her down for a long afternoon among the roses in the
dear old garden where so much of her own happy youth had been idled
away.
“Are droppers-in to be permitted in your Arcadia, ladies?” demanded
Harcourt; “and will the balls and mallets be considered out of place
upon the lawn by the river?”
This was quite enough for Miss Grunderson, who cried out directly that
of all things in the world she admired croquet, and that “Par” had
bought her a set of Cremer’s most exquisite walnut-wood balls and
mallets. There were times when the vivacious Rosa called her indulgent
parent “Par,” in spite of those half-dozen annual accounts which he had
paid for the young lady’s education.
“I shall so enjoy a game of croquet in a real garden!” cried Rosa. “We
play it in the square sometimes; but the little boys and the bakers’ and
butchers’ young men outside the rails are so dreadfully trying,
especially when the balls won’t go where one wants them, owing to
nervousness; and I’m sure it’s enough to make anybody nervous to have a
strange chimney-sweep calling out, ‘Well done, butter-fingers!’ if one
drops a mallet; and _that_ square-keeper is never within sight when
wanted.”
“Does Tredethlyn go with you to-morrow?” asked Harcourt Lowther
presently; he had been very thoughtful for the last few minutes.
“No,” Maude answered, rather sadly. “I asked Frank to drive me down in
the mail-phaeton; but he told me he was going a little way out of town
on business.”
She was thinking how very great a change had come to pass since her
husband had been her adoring slave, only too happy to follow wherever
she pleased to lead him. Now there was no quarrel, no actual
misunderstanding between them; but there was quite a wide breach, as if
they had agreed to separate after a long series of domestic battles.
“Roderick and I will come down to the Cedars to-morrow,” said Harcourt,
bending over Maude’s chair, “unless you forbid us to do so. The river is
delightful just now, and you may want the services of a couple of
boatmen.”
“We shall be very glad to see you, if you like to come,” Mrs. Tredethlyn
answered, carelessly. Looking up just then, she saw Miss Grunderson’s
round eyes fixed upon her with a very earnest expression. Rosa had heard
all sorts of insinuations respecting Mr. Lowther’s constant attendance
upon Mrs. Tredethlyn, and the young lady was wondering whether her
darling Maude did really deserve any of the reprobation that had been
showered upon her as a flirting matron.
“There’s a way of saying ‘How do you do?’ or ‘Pretty well, thanks,’ that
seems like flirting,” mused Miss Grunderson; “and Mr. Lowther always has
that way when he talks to Mrs. Tredethlyn. I _know_ she is too good to
be a flirt, in spite of all those malicious people may say about her;
and I don’t like Harcourt Lowther a bit, for _he_ must know how his
flirting manner is talked about, though she doesn’t. I’ve seen
half-a-dozen opera-glasses turned this way to-night, just because he’s
been bending over her chair in that whispering way of his. And yet he
has only been talking of croquet.”
Rosa’s friendship was quite as ardent as her love, and much more
lasting. Mrs. Tredethlyn’s gentleness had quite subdued that
affectionate little heart, and the market-gardener’s daughter would have
been willing to make any effort in her friend’s service. She was a very
energetic little girl, with a good deal of that moral courage which is
sometimes wanting in more delicate natures. To put the fact in her own
words, Rosa was able to speak her mind, and to speak it very freely too,
whenever the occasion called for candour.
The next day was one of the brightest in a brilliant July, and Mrs.
Tredethlyn’s shell-shaped barouche was waiting before the ponderous
stuccoed portico at eleven o’clock. Francis had left the house half an
hour before on foot, bent on that mysterious expedition a little way out
of town which he took so frequently now. Maude and Julia came
down-stairs at a quarter after eleven; and Miss Grunderson skipped up
the stone steps two minutes afterwards, with the bluest bonnet and the
pinkest parasol in London.
“How do you like the new contrast?” she inquired, twirling the pink
parasol triumphantly, when she had adjusted her flounces and furbelows
to the best of her ability on the front seat of Mrs. Tredethlyn’s
carriage. “I remember, when I was at school, pink and blue together were
thought bad taste, but now they’re quite _de rigger_. Ness pas ker say
joli dong? s’p’tite ombrelle?” demanded Miss Grunderson, bursting into
French. “Vingt-huit shillings, ma chère! Ness pas trèscher, chère? Et le
boutiquier ne voudrait pas prendre un six-sous là dessous, quoique je
l’ai marchandé comme un juif,” she added, with a slap-dash rendering of
the language which was peculiar to her.
The summer day was delightful, and Maude’s spirits, which had been
rather depressed of late, rose with the sunshine and the pure air, as
the high-stepping bays left Stuccoville behind them for the pleasant
country road, and the rustic odours of suburban gardens. And then, when
she found herself amongst her own birds and flower-beds, it was hard to
believe that she was no longer a girl, with a girl’s careless happiness
in beautiful things. She sat under a great drooping willow, whose lowest
branches dipped into the water, and watched her dogs gambolling with
Rosa on the grass.
“I was like that, once,” she thought, “before I knew of papa’s
difficulties--before I sold myself for money. I fancied that it was a
heroic thing to marry the man I did not love, in the hope that my esteem
might be some poor repayment of his generous devotion--his noble trust
in my father. But I know now that I could do him no baser wrong than
become his wife. I know it now, when he himself has learnt to despise
and to avoid me, even when I am anxious to win back his regard.”
Yes, it had come to this. Maude Tredethlyn deeply felt her husband’s
palpable avoidance of her. So long as he had been slavishly devoted, she
had been just a little inclined to despise him; but now that the
treasure of an honest man’s love seemed to have slipped away from her,
she awoke to the consciousness that it was a treasure, and that she had
need to be unhappy in the loss of a jewel that is not given to every
woman to possess. She sickened at the thought of the wealth which her
marriage had given her, now that it was unsanctified by the love of the
giver. Was it gone, that devoted affection which she had held so lightly
while it was hers to throw away? She began to understand now how
delicate a thing a heart is, even when it beats beneath the rudest
breast, and how soon it withers under the blighting influence of
disdain. Yes, she had been faithfully loved by an honest man who would
have given his very life for her happiness, and she had trifled with his
love until it was lost. Queen Guinivere has only one set of diamonds to
throw into the river; and when the passion has passed in whose hot
impulse she flung them away, the lady is apt to regret her lost jewels.
Miss Desmond and Miss Grunderson trifled with the balls and mallets,
while Maude wandered listlessly on the terrace thinking of the breach
between herself and her husband. She was still lingering there alone,
when Harcourt and Roderick Lowther strolled from the drawing-room on to
the lawn. The eldest set about instructing Julia Desmond and Miss
Grunderson with regard to the latest and most intricate by-laws of
croquet; and the younger made his way at once to the terrace where Maude
was walking listlessly and slowly under a coquettish white umbrella.
Harcourt Lowther took care that Mrs. Tredethlyn had no more time for
solitary musing. He brought all his talents to bear to keep her amused,
and by the aid of fashionable small-talk, sharp little criticisms on new
books, croquet, luncheon, and an incursion among Mr. Hillary’s
hothouses, he contrived to chase the shadow of care quite away from the
young wife’s girlish brow. It was about four o’clock, and the afternoon
had lapsed into a sultry sleepy brightness that was almost oppressive
even in that green retreat beside the river, when the two gentlemen
suggested the water.
“Of all things in the world the most delightful!” screamed Miss
Grunderson. “Oh, do please take us out in one of those darling little
dangerous-looking boats I saw in the Swiss boat-house down there. And
oh, what a pity I didn’t wear a hat instead of this odious blue bonnet,
which is beginning to fly already!” said Rosa, looking despondently at
the expansive ribands fluttering below her double chin, which had lost
some little of their azure intensity under the influence of the July
sun. To Miss Grunderson’s great delight, the two gentlemen proceeded
forthwith to the boat-house, and lowered a couple of wherries, as
perfect in their way as any craft that ever came out of the hands of
Messrs. Messenger. Harcourt placed Mrs. Tredethlyn and Julia Desmond in
one of these boats, and to the other descended Miss Grunderson, with
more small shrieks of terror and feminine skirmishing, and a greater
display of Balmoral boots and embroidered flounces than was absolutely
necessary to the embarkation.
“I never get into a boat without thinking I shall be drowned,” said
Rosa, plumping down upon the cushions, and all but upsetting herself at
the first start; “the water does give way so. But if one _was_ drowned,
it would be rather nice to have a paragraph all to one’s self in the
daily newspapers, or perhaps what pa calls a social leader, beginning
with something about the Moloch Pleasure having swallowed another
victim, and Youth at the prow and Pleasure at the helm, and the Pale
Horse, and so on.”
And then Miss Grunderson, finding herself quite alone with the latest
object of her adoration, exerted all her small fascinations to beguile
the woman-hater from his stern aversion to her sex. She chattered as
gaily as some talking-bird; and Roderick Lowther, who imagined that he
had by this time established himself firmly as a disinterested
individual, condescended to make himself agreeable, and to drift into
that pleasant current of meaningless small-talk which malicious people
call flirtation.
While Roderick rowed his fair companion swiftly past the verdant bank,
Harcourt let his boat drift slowly down with the current, only dipping
his oars now and then in the intervals of his discourse. Maude had
forgotten her troubled reverie upon the terrace, and gave herself up to
the enjoyment of all the old talk about books and music, poetry and
painting, which had been so delicious to her in those departed days when
she and Harcourt had drifted down that same river plighted husband and
wife. There is no monitor so sharp as rural nature when we have need to
be reminded of our inconstancy. Looking at those reedy banks, those
tranquil gardens sloping to a tranquil tide, Maude found it almost
difficult to believe in the changes of her life since she had first
floated down that stream, a child, with wild-flowers in her lap, and her
little bare arm hanging across the edge of the boat, for the infantile
pleasure of splashing.
Harcourt Lowther found his brother’s boat moored to a little quay in a
shady corner of the river below the Star and Garter, and the splendid
colouring of Miss Grunderson’s toilet made that young lady conspicuous
as she ascended a little pathway sloping upwards to the terrace,
attended by her cavalier. Harcourt shipped his oars, and proposed a
stroll in the Petersham meadows. Maude looked at her watch; it was a
quarter to five, and Mr. Hillary’s dinner-hour was half-past seven.
There was plenty of time for a stroll across those verdant meadows, and
Mrs. Tredethlyn, having the interval to dispose of somehow, had only to
choose in wasting it in this way or in some other fashion. Harcourt had
his wish therefore. He assisted the two ladies to disembark, gave his
coat into the custody of one of the lounging watermen at the rustic
landing-stage, and then strolled with his two companions into the
meadows leading towards Petersham.
There is little need to tell the English reader what Petersham is like.
Almost everybody knows that rural cluster of modern villas and grand old
red brick mansions nestling so comfortably under the shadow of Richmond
Hill. Surely the next best thing to inhabiting Earl Russell’s house in
Richmond Park, or that magic château of Monsieur Fould’s, hidden deep in
the woody heart of grand old St. Germain’s, would be to own one of those
Georgian mansions at Petersham, with cool fishponds and shady gardens,
long ranges of narrow windows, and a marble-paved vestibule, with a
ceiling by Thornhill, and old family portraits by polite Sir Joshua
himself. It was the afternoon of afternoons for listless dawdling about
such a place as Petersham, and Mr. Lowther and the two ladies were alike
enthusiastic in their admiration of the Georgian mansions.
“I wish Francis would buy a nice old house down here,” said Maude. “I am
so tired of London; it is all the same thing over, and over, and over
again; the same flock of sheep jumping through the same gap in the same
hedge, and not one of them--no, not even the leader--knowing why they do
it. I should be near papa here, and all my old friends. In town I seem
to know everybody, and yet not to have a single friend.”
There was a rustic bench in the lane through which they were walking as
Maude said this. The two ladies sat down to rest for a few minutes, and
Harcourt Lowther took out his cigar-case.
“I shall leave you just long enough to smoke a cigarette,” he said, “and
then I will take you back to the water-side by a still prettier road, if
you like.”
He went away at a leisurely pace, lighting his cigar as he went; but he
walked a good deal faster when he was out of Maude Tredethlyn’s ken, and
he was flushed with heat when he returned after a quarter of an hour’s
absence.
“Now, ladies,” he said, “if we are not to keep Mr. Hillary waiting for
his dinner, it is high time for us to go back to the boat.”
Maude and Julia rose, and the little party strolled into the road at the
end of the lane in the straggling order usual to people who walk for
their own pleasure in a country village. Mrs. Tredethlyn’s white
umbrella was a little way ahead of her companions, when Harcourt Lowther
laid his gloved hand lightly upon Julia’s shoulder.
She looked up at him, startled by the gesture.
“You have had some reason to complain of your friend Miss Hillary and
Francis Tredethlyn,” he said. “I am going to give you your revenge.”
Julia stared in amazement at the speaker; but he did not wait to be
interrogated.
“Come, Mrs. Tredethlyn,” he said, “your papa will have to wait for his
dinner, unless you walk a little faster.”
He had not much reason to complain of Maude, who had been ahead of him
until this moment, but he hurried her along the dusty road until, at a
spot where it curved round to the river, he stopped suddenly, pointing
to a cottage-garden, seen through the iron rails of a high old-fashioned
gate set in a framework of clematis.
“Look at that, Mrs. Tredethlyn! Isn’t it a pretty picture?”
It was a little rustic _tableau_ composed of two figures grouped under a
mulberry-tree,--a delicate-looking woman, with soft brown hair, touched
here and there with a glimmer of gold, seated on a rustic bench. Her
face was turned away from the road, and she was looking up at a man who
leaned against the trunk of a tree. It was only a glimpse of this
picture which Maude caught between the iron scroll-work of the gate, but
she saw quite enough.
The man was Francis Tredethlyn.
“Great Heaven!” exclaimed Harcourt Lowther, in an audible whisper; “it
_is_ Francis!”
Maude looked at him with a vague alarm in her face, which had grown
almost as white as the umbrella that sheltered it. Harcourt’s whisper
had frightened her a hundredfold more than the sight of her husband, at
home in that unknown garden with a woman she had never seen or heard of.
“Who is that lady?” she asked, when they had passed the gate. “Do you
know her, Mr. Lowther? You know all my husband’s associates much better
than I do.”
She tried to speak quite calmly, but failed miserably in the effort.
Harcourt’s whisper had expressed so much.
“No, I do not know the lady,” he answered, gravely. “I think you had
better make no inquiries about her. Mr. Tredethlyn did not tell you that
he was to spend the day at Petersham?”
“No. He only said that he was going a little way out of town.”
“Then in that case it will be better for you to leave him to finish his
day as he pleases, since you have made no arrangement for meeting him
here, and do not know the lady.”
Maude did not answer him just then. She walked on a little faster than
before; and Harcourt kept by her side, looking furtively every now and
then at the pale profile, the tremulous lower lip. He could see that
Mrs. Tredethlyn was profoundly agitated, and that she was trying to
conceal her agitation. He could see this; and he was determined to make
her speak, and speak freely.
“She is not the sort of woman to suffer in silence,” he thought. “This
kind of trouble is new to her, and she will cry out presently.”
Mr. Lowther was not very much at fault in his estimate of Maude’s
heroism. She spoke to him when they were a few paces from Julia, whose
face was lighted by a look of triumph under her gauzy veil.
“You say you do not know that lady. You must at least know who she is?”
This was said in a tone of almost piteous entreaty.
“Upon my honour, no,” Harcourt answered, gravely.
There was a pause for some moments. They were in one of the meadows by
this time, nearing the water’s edge, Julia still in the rear, and Maude
still walking very fast, as it is the habit of most people to walk under
the influence of agitation. Perhaps in that unreasoning, unnecessary
haste, there lurks a vague fancy that we can hurry _away_ from our
trouble.
All at once Maude turned to Harcourt Lowther and laid her hand upon his
arm.
“Tell me what it all means,” she cried,--“tell me the worst, however bad
it is. I know that you are hiding something from me. I know by your
manner just now that there is some horrible meaning in Frank’s presence
in that garden with that woman.”
“My dear Mrs. Tredethlyn, you ask me to interfere in a matter which I
have no right to approach. It may be everything to you where your
husband goes,--whom he associates with. I have been his friend,--for
your sake; and I have done my best to steer him clear of dangerous
acquaintance and dangerous amusements--still for your sake. I may have
found it a hard matter to keep him out of mischief, and may have
regretted the natural tendencies of his character--always for your sake.
Beyond this I can have nothing to do with him. I had good reason for
being sorry when you married him--on my own account. Of late I have been
even more sorry--on yours.”
Maude looked at him, white and trembling. The schemer was pleased to see
what deadly mischief had been done, and yet stung to the very heart to
find that any falsehood of his victim’s could wound so deeply. There are
triumphs which have a shadow of humiliation upon their brightness, and
this was one of them. Julia, seeing that her companions were loitering,
seated herself on the lower step of a stile. She had no desire to
interrupt this conversation.
“Speak to me plainly,” Mrs. Tredethlyn cried, passionately, “or I will
go back to that cottage and ask my husband himself for an explanation.
Perhaps that would be best. He has a better right to explain his conduct
than any one else.”
She walked a few paces from her companion; but Harcourt Lowther followed
her, and caught her gently by the arm.
“Will Francis Tredethlyn tell you the truth if you question him?” he
asked. “My dear Mrs. Tredethlyn, how could you endure the _esclandre_ of
such a scene as _must_ ensue if you go back to that house, and confront
your husband in the presence of that woman?”
“Why should there be a scene, or any _esclandre_? The lady may be the
wife or daughter of some friend of my husband’s. Have I any right to
imagine something horrible because I see Frank with a person who is a
stranger to me? It was only your manner that frightened me.”
“I am very sorry my manner was so foolish. Let us drop the subject.
Only--take my advice--don’t go back to that house.”
“Why should I not, if my husband is innocent? as I am sure he is.”
Mr. Lowther shrugged his shoulders.
“Because it is an unpleasant thing to intrude where one is not invited,”
he answered. “Whatever questions you wish to ask your husband can be
reserved until you are both at home; and in the meantime pray let the
matter drop. Believe me, it is not a fit subject for discussion between
you and me.”
There are lawyers who generally inaugurate a consultation by advising
their clients not to go to law. They know it is a very safe display of
magnanimity. It is only the old story of standing on the shore to reason
with a tempestuous ocean, or interfering with the appetite of a famished
wolf in favour of the lamb on which he means to dine. To try to restrain
a woman whose jealousy has once been aroused from any investigation of
her fancied wrongs, is no less wasted labour; and Harcourt Lowther knew
quite enough of human nature to be very sure of this.
Mrs. Tredethlyn turned upon him fiercely. He had never seen the woman he
loved in a passion until this moment; and though he had so much else to
employ his thoughts just now, he could not help pausing for a moment to
think now beautiful she looked with that new light in her eyes, that
feverish glow so suddenly kindled in the cheeks that had been deadly
pale.
“I will not let the matter drop,” she cried. “You are keeping some
hideous secret hidden from me. I know you are. I could not be mistaken
in your tone just now when you saw Francis in that garden. If there were
no harm in his being there, why should you express such amazement?
Harcourt Lowther, we were friends once, and you affect to be my friend
now. If you are what you pretend to be, tell me the meaning of my
husband’s conduct?”
“You love him very much, Maude, to feel his conduct so deeply.”
She was too agitated to notice that her old lover had called her by her
Christian name. He had perhaps been scarcely aware of it himself. He
loved her better at this moment than he had ever loved her in his life,
now that she stood before him a beautiful, angry, passionate creature,
appealing to him against the husband for whose sake he had been jilted.
“You must be very much in love with your husband,” he repeated,
bitterly; “and yet I should have scarcely thought it possible you could
care for that sort of person.”
“He _is_ my husband,” answered Maude, “and I have a right to be angry if
he does any wrong.”
“I acknowledge your right to be as angry as you please, but I am sorry
to see you so agitated. I am very sorry we happened to walk this way.”
“Will you tell me the truth? I have appealed to you by our old
friendship. I shall never again believe in you as a friend unless you
speak plainly to-day.”
“If you say _that_, you oblige me to speak. Will you take my arm, and
walk up and down by the hedge yonder? I see people coming into the
meadow, and we look rather conspicuous standing just here.”
Mrs. Tredethlyn accepted the proffered arm. Harcourt Lowther was silent
for some moments, while they strolled slowly under the shadow of a tall
hawthorn hedge. He was waiting until Maude should have recovered some
little calmness, and be in a condition to appreciate the full value of
what he was going to say.
“It would be going over very old ground, and awakening very bitter
recollections--on my part, at least,” he began at last, in a subdued and
pensive tone, “were I to tell you what I thought of your marriage with
Francis Tredethlyn. When I thought of it most mildly, I believed it the
maddest sacrifice that was ever made to the Moloch Wealth since this
world began. You had your reasons, you told me, and they were very
powerful reasons, but they were to be kept a secret. I had no more to
say. All I could do was to hope that you might not be utterly miserable
with the man you married--to my mind, the man of all others least
adapted to make you a happy wife. I should have done well had I been
wise enough to keep aloof from you and your husband after that unhappy
marriage. I was so mad as to hang about your house, and accept the
friendship of my rival, in the belief that I might save the vessel
wherein you had embarked from some of those rocks which I saw a little
ahead of the calm bay whence you sailed, with all the stereotyped
paraphernalia of pennants flying and guns firing. I _have_ saved you
from a good deal; but I have not been able to change your husband’s
nature, and he has taken his own way in spite of me.”
“What do you mean?” Maude demanded, breathlessly.
“I cannot, and will not, enter into the details of Francis Tredethlyn’s
life for the last twelve months. No, Maude, not even your entreaties
shall wring from me more than I have a right to tell, or you to hear.
And if I spoke the plainest words that ever sullied a woman’s ear, I
should only be talking a strange language which would convey no meaning
to your innocent mind. There are places in London whose names you have
never heard in your life--places whose very existence might never be
known to honest people, if men did not write about them in the
newspapers; and amongst the _habitués_ of those places your husband has
been conspicuous since the first week of his return from the village
where you and he spent your honeymoon. There are dinners given, up at
that hotel yonder, to women whose costume is an extravagant copy of
yours, but who in everything except their dress differ from you as
entirely as darkness differs from light; and Francis Tredethlyn has been
foremost amongst the dinner-givers ever since he has had a fortune to
squander. So long as he was amused by open follies and dissipations I
cherished a lingering hope that custom would bring weariness, and that
the very monotony of these poisonous pleasures would render them their
own antidote. I made excuses for the man who had so newly succeeded to a
fortune large enough to intoxicate a weak brain; and I fancied when the
novelty of his wealth had ceased to bewilder him, he would awake to a
bitter sense of the degrading path in which he was treading. I thought
this, Maude, and I believed also that your loveliness, your purity,
rendered all the more obvious by contrast with the people among whom he
wasted his life, must lure him back to your side. How could I think
otherwise than this?--_I_, who had loved and lost you!”
It never occurred to Mrs. Tredethlyn that these were the very last words
that Harcourt Lowther should have spoken to her, at this moment above
all other moments. It seemed as if she scarcely heard this allusion to
the past, any more than she had heard her old lover’s frequent utterance
of her Christian name.
“I think my husband loved me--once,” she murmured in a low sorrowful
voice. “He was so noble in his conduct--so generous to my father.”
“My poor girl,” exclaimed Harcourt, with supreme compassion, “how should
_you_ know the difference between a good man’s generosity and a
profligate’s lavish bid for the fair young bride who happens to be the
fancy of a moment? There are men who will give as exaggerated a price
for a picture as ever Francis Tredethlyn offered when he won you for his
wife; but you would scarcely call a man ‘generous’ because he bid
extravagantly for a Raffaelle or a Murillo at Christie’s. There is no
creature in this world so selfish as a profligate.”
Maude turned sick and cold to the very heart as Mr. Lowther said this.
A profligate! The horrible word wounded her like the stroke of a knife.
In a moment this innocent girl, who until now had only known the
existence of “profligacy” as an unspeakable noun substantive hidden away
somewhere in the close columns of unexpurgated dictionaries, felt the
veil rudely torn from the purity of her mind; and was told that her
husband--the other part of herself, united to her by the solemn service
of the Church--was the obnoxious thing which until this hour no one had
ever dared to name in her presence. The generosity she had believed in
was a sham. The noble nature which had commanded her regard and esteem,
even when it could not win her love, had never existed out of her own
imagination. She had been wronged, betrayed, humiliated; while in her
schoolgirl simplicity she had been lamenting her unworthiness of a
devoted husband’s love. She had been bought for money like a slave in
some Oriental market-place, when she had imagined herself a free
sacrifice offered as the recompense of a sacred debt.
She did not speak; but looking at her face Harcourt Lowther saw that his
words had gone home. The breach between husband and wife yawned wide
enough now. The undermining of the ground had been slow, laborious work,
but the result repaid this social engineer for all his trouble. With
what a crash the earth fell in when it was time for the convulsion! So
some huge mass of Kentish chalk, which sappers and miners have been
manipulating for a month or so, and at which a crowd of tired spectators
have been straining hopelessly for two hours at a stretch, breaks away
all at once from the bosom of the cliff with a thunderous noise, and
crumbles into powder.
But Mr. Lowther had not finished yet.
“I thought I could win you back to your husband, Maude, and restore him
to you a better man,” he said; “but I soon discovered how futile such a
hope was. I have been by his side in scenes that were horribly repugnant
to my own nature, in order that I might hold him back from the verge of
deeper gulfs than those into which he had already fallen. Within the
last few months I have known that he kept a secret from me, and I knew
that it must be a disgraceful one. Only a few days ago it came to my
knowledge that he had lately furnished a house somewhere in the suburbs.
This gave me a clue to those mysterious absences, those journeys on
business a little way out of town, about which your husband had been so
reticent. Men of Francis Tredethlyn’s calibre do not furnish houses from
benevolent motives. I had no means of knowing where the house was,--how
little could I imagine that it was in this neighbourhood, or that
accident would lead our footsteps to its very threshold! Mrs.
Tredethlyn, you shall not wring another word from me. I am sorry that
you have tempted me to tell you so much,” exclaimed Mr. Harcourt, who
had said all he wanted to say.
It was a long time before Maude answered him; and then she said, very
slowly, and with a painful effort--
“I thank you--for having told me the truth. It is always best to know
the truth.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXXIII.
ROSA’S REVELATIONS.
After this there was no more said between Harcourt Lowther and Mrs.
Tredethlyn upon the subject of her husband’s delinquencies. They walked
slowly back to the stile, where Julia was sitting as quietly as if she
had been that monumental Patience of whom the poet has told us. There is
something wonderfully expressive in natural pantomime; and Miss Desmond,
sitting on that rustic stile tracing figures from Euclid on the dusty
pathway under her feet with the ivory point of her parasol, had yet
contrived to keep a sharp watch upon those two people on the other side
of the meadow, and to form a tolerably clear idea as to the gist of
their conversation.
“Julia dear,” Maude said, wearily, as they walked to the river-side,
“would you mind going back to town as soon as we can get to the
carriage? I have such an intolerable headache, that I’m sure I shall be
quite unfit to dine with papa.”
Of course Julia declared that dining in London or at the Cedars was
equally indifferent to her. It was very often her humour to affect the
dull characterless manner of a paid dependant; and it was her humour to
do so just now.
“I am afraid Mr. Lowther and I have kept you waiting an unconscionable
time,” said Maude, looking at her watch.
“Not at all,” replied Miss Desmond; “I rather like waiting.”
Roderick Lowther and Miss Grunderson were loitering at the little
landing-stage; the young lady’s showy draperies pre-Raffaelite in the
sharp edges which she exhibited against the hot blue sky.
“Oh, you darling Mrs. Tredethlyn!” exclaimed Rosa; “I thought you _never
were_ coming. If your pa is half as particular about his dinner as mine
is, won’t he be cross with us all! It’s close upon seven o’clock!”
Maude looked piteously at Harcourt Lowther. He understood that appealing
glance.
“I have given Mrs. Tredethlyn a violent headache by putting her in an
awningless boat under a broiling sun,” he said, “and then beguiling her
into a fatiguing walk; and I deserve to be horsewhipped for my
stupidity. If you have any regard for your friend’s health, Miss
Grunderson, you will forego the pleasure of dining with Mr. Hillary, and
get her home as quietly as you can.”
Rosa Grunderson might be silly, but she was by no means stupid; and,
looking at Maude’s ashen face, she saw that something more than a
headache had caused the change in her friend. She saw this; and that
vague distrust which she felt about the brother of the man she adored
shaped itself into a positive dislike.
“That Mr. Lowther has been saying something to annoy her,” thought Miss
Grunderson; “and I hate him. What business has he to be always dancing
attendance upon her instead of her husband? And now he’s not content
with getting her talked about, so he must needs go and make her unhappy,
poor darling.”
Thus mused the meditative Rosa, while Roderick Lowther rowed her
homeward over the placid water. The diplomatist’s fascinations were
almost thrown away upon her during this brief journey from Richmond to
the Cedars, although he had progressed so far in Miss Grunderson’s
affections during a leisurely promenade on the terrace, that he had
serious thoughts of calling on Grunderson _père_ within the week to make
a formal offer for the young lady’s hand and fortune.
“I have no idea of wasting my time and trouble upon the girl, to find
myself thrown out at the last moment by the impracticable parent,”
thought Roderick, as he shot through the water with that long deliberate
stroke for which the Oxonians are celebrated. “I must know exactly where
I am, before I devote myself to the plump Rosa. There must be no
nonsense about settlements and so forth. I won’t have any legal brick
wall and _chevaux de frise_ between me and my wife’s fortune. A man
doesn’t quarter a cabbage with the arms of the oldest untitled family in
Hampshire without getting well paid for the humiliation. I must
understand what I’m going in for, when I propose to my charming Rosa.”
Lionel Hillary was in the drawing-room when the water-party returned to
the Cedars; but he accepted his daughter’s assurance that she was too
tired and too ill to dine with him, and escorted her to her carriage as
soon as it was ready for her. Maude was quite composed now, and there
was no suspicion of the truth aroused in the merchant’s mind when he
kissed her and bade her good-bye.
“It was foolish of you to go on the water in the hottest part of the
day, darling,” he said; “and I’m afraid you are going out a little too
much in town; but the season will soon be over, and I suppose you will
be leaving London.”
Mrs. Tredethlyn murmured something unintelligible, and the barouche
rolled away. She saw her father and the two Lowthers standing on the
wide stone steps dimly through a mist, athwart which the group seemed
only a confusion of familiar faces and dark garments; and then she found
herself driving Londonwards through the still evening, with Julia by her
side, and Rosa’s anxious face opposite to her.
She accepted unquestioningly all that Harcourt Lowther had told her. Her
husband was false to her. There was so much in Francis Tredethlyn’s life
since his marriage which seemed an evidence of his accuser’s truth. And
then Harcourt had not wished to accuse. The cruel revelation had been
extorted from him. No trouble that Maude had ever yet endured had been
so bitter as that which had come upon her to-day,--the shame, the
humiliation, the unutterable horror of that discovery made in the summer
sunshine, amidst the perfume of flowers, the joyous carolling of a
skylark high up in the warm blue sky. She did not love her husband; and
the agony which gnawed her breast during this homeward journey was the
sharp pang which belongs to wounded pride rather than to betrayed
affection. At least this was what she said to herself, as she
remembered, with an angry flush upon her brow, those sneering remarks of
Mr. Lowther’s about her love for such a man as Francis Tredethlyn.
“I do believe he loved me once, let Harcourt Lowther say what he will;
and he was nobly generous to my father; and now he deserts me
altogether, and devotes himself to some horrible woman!” thought Mrs.
Tredethlyn, whose ideas were not particularly sequential this evening.
She meditated upon so much as she knew of the life that Francis had led
since the close of his honeymoon. His late hours, his frequent absences,
all seemed to confirm Harcourt’s account of dissipated habits and
degraded tastes.
Yes, everything combined to prove the miserable truth. She was a
neglected wife; abandoned by the man who had once seemed the veriest
slave that ever bowed beneath the supreme dominion of Love. She
remembered what he had been, or what she had believed him to be, and was
all the more indignant with him for the discoveries of to-day. Rosa
Grunderson, anxiously watching Mrs. Tredethlyn in the twilight, wondered
that so dark a cloud could overshadow the fair face of her friend.
“It must be something very dreadful,” thought Rosa; “but whatever it is,
that Mr. Lowther is at the bottom of it. If Roderick does
propose,--which I’ve every reason to think he will, from the way he
conducted himself on the terrace,--and he and pa can come to any
arrangement about me, I won’t have much to do with my brother-in-law,
that’s certain, for I hate him. But I dare say those horrid ground-rents
will always stand in the way of my being married to anybody but a
Rothschild; and Rothschilds don’t trouble _themselves_ about
ground-rents.”
The drive from Twickenham to Stuccoville is not a very long one; and
Mrs. Tredethlyn’s bays got over the ground at a pace that did credit to
the judgment of Mr. Lowther, who had chosen the horses for his friend.
It was nearly nine o’clock when the barouche drew up before the Doric
colonnade which imparted a funereal darkness to Maude’s dining-room; and
before the three ladies could alight, a hansom cab dashed up to the
kerbstone, a pair of slamming doors were flung open, and Francis
Tredethlyn sprang out upon the pavement.
His wife’s face flushed crimson, and then grew deadly pale. She turned
to Rosa Grunderson, and murmured in faint, broken accents: “Will you
dine with us, Rosa? or shall Martin drive you home?”
“Thank you, darling,” Miss Grunderson answered promptly; “I think I’ll
come in for just a few moments. Pa will have gone to the Bell and--to
his club by this time,” added Rosa, whose parent was wont to spend his
evenings in the parlour of a very respectable tavern in the Brompton
Road, where he and several other worthies assembled nightly to discuss
the affairs of the nation amidst the fumes of their cigars, the
primitive clay being strictly tabooed in that select little coterie.
Maude alighted and entered the hall. Francis had handed her from the
carriage, and followed her into the house. He threw away his cigar as he
stepped into the hall, and approached his wife radiant with good spirits
and perfumed with tobacco.
“I’m so glad you’ve come home,” he said. “I thought you were going to
dine with the governor, and that I should have to sit in that dreary
room all by myself, with only Landseer’s staghounds to keep me company;
though if half the people one calls company were as much alive as _they_
are, a dinner-party wouldn’t be such a dismal business as it is. Of
course you haven’t dined; no more have I; and unfortunately there
doesn’t seem to be any dinner,” added Mr. Tredethlyn, as he opened the
door and looked into the dining-room, where the table was blank and
ghastly under a faint glimmer of gas. “No one was expected, I suppose?
However, they can get us something. Geoffreys, just see about dinner,
will you? How do you do, Miss Grunderson? I dare say you’re hungry after
your drive. Are you going up-stairs, Maude?”
“Yes,” answered Mrs. Tredethlyn. The syllable had a startling effect as
it fell from her lips, like one solitary drop of hail falling suddenly
on a summer day.
“I am going up-stairs,” said Miss Desmond confidentially to Rosa; “will
you come with me, and take off your things?”
“No, thanks, dear,” answered Miss Grunderson, who would have endured
tortures rather than say “thank you,” when fashion required that she
should say “thanks.” “I don’t think I _will_ take off my things. Mrs.
Tredethlyn doesn’t seem very well; and it’s almost too late for dinner;
so I think I’ll just go up to the morning-room, and rest for a few
minutes before I go home. The carriage needn’t be kept, you know,
please,” added Miss Grunderson, to a male domestic hovering in the
shadowy depths of the hall; “for I can have a cab fetched when I want to
go.”
Mr. Tredethlyn had followed his wife to the drawing-room; and the two
girls standing at the foot of the staircase heard one of the doors close
with a sonorous bang.
Miss Desmond went up-stairs, and Miss Grunderson followed slowly. The
morning-room of which Rosa had spoken was on the second floor; but the
young lady did not go any farther than the first landing-place. The door
of the front drawing-room was closed, but the doors of the back
drawing-room stood wide open; and peering into the lighted apartment,
Rosa saw that it was quite empty. She paused for a moment, looked about
her; and then went quietly into the back drawing-room, and closed the
door very softly behind her.
Francis Tredethlyn followed his wife to the drawing-room because that
one frozen syllable, together with the strange expression of her face,
had been quite enough to tell him that something was wrong. This husband
and this wife had never quarrelled. There had been between them none of
those little stormy passages which are apt to interrupt the serenity of
the best-regulated households; and the Cornishman’s heart turned cold
with the thought that anything like ill-feeling could arise between
himself and Maude. The altered expression of her face boded so much; and
yet what could arise to displease her, when he was nothing but her
devoted slave, ready to obey her commands, willing to lay down his very
life for her pleasure?
“Maude,” he said, as he closed the drawing-room door, “you speak to me
and look at me as if you were offended. And yet I have no consciousness
of having done anything to displease you.”
Mrs. Tredethlyn looked at her husband with supreme contempt; not the
cool scorn which is akin to indifference, but rather a passionate
disdainfulness. Taking into consideration the fact that Maude did not
care for her husband, all this feminine rage seemed a sad waste of
feeling.
“Do not add hypocrisy to the wrong you have done me,” said Mrs.
Tredethlyn. “I have been most cruelly awakened this day to a knowledge
of the life you have been leading--ever since our marriage. I cannot
speak of this subject; it is too horrible; I think the words would choke
me. I thought that I should have been able to write what I had to tell
you; but since I have been so unfortunate as to meet you, I may as well
say with my own lips what I meant to have said in a letter. It is very
little. I have only to tell you that from this moment we must be
strangers to each other. After my discoveries of to-day, I should
consider myself a base and degraded creature if I ever suffered your
hand to touch mine in friendship again. The obligation of my father’s
debt to you must rest upon him henceforward, and not upon me.”
“But, Maude, explain yourself!--your discovery of to-day, you say! What
discovery?”
“Your affectation of unconsciousness is a deeper insult than your----No,
I will _not_ discuss this subject with you!” cried Maude, passionately.
“It is shameful--it is cruel--that I should have been wronged so basely,
when I trusted you so completely. Do not speak to me; do not touch me!”
she exclaimed, shrinking away from him with a shudder; “your presence
inspires me with disgust and abhorrence. Why do you make any poor
pretence of inhabiting this house, which has only afforded you an
ostensible shelter, while your amusements and your friends have been
found elsewhere? I set you free from this hour, Mr. Tredethlyn. Seek for
happiness after your own fashion; where you please. I have nothing more
to say to you.”
She swept from the room before her husband could arrest her. Unspeakably
bewildered by her passionate words, which were almost meaningless to
him, Francis Tredethlyn stood motionless as a statue a few paces from
the doorway by which his wife had just left him. He was standing thus
when the voluminous curtains which were drawn across the archway between
the drawing-rooms were cautiously divided, and a plump little figure in
blue muslin appeared among the amber drapery. The Cornishman heard the
rustling, and turned abruptly towards the _portière_.
“Yes,” exclaimed Miss Grunderson, “it’s me; no, it’s I!--but, goodness
gracious, what _does_ it matter about grammar, when there’s so much
trouble in the world?--yes, and I’ve been listening,” continued the
young lady, answering Mr. Tredethlyn’s inquiring stare; “and I know that
listening in a general way is considered mean; but I think the amount of
pa’s ground-rents ought to exempt me from any imputation of meanness. If
I didn’t love that sweet lamb so dearly; and if I hadn’t a very sincere
regard for you, Mr. Tredethlyn,--having come into money suddenly myself,
and knowing how trying it is to carry it off carelessly, and not look as
if one was always conscious of being richer than other people;--if I
didn’t--in short, I shouldn’t have stopped behind those curtains,--and
run the risk of being considered a sneak and a listener. But do say that
you forgive me, please, and believe that I meant it for the best?”
pleaded Rosa, whose diction was apt to become rather obscure under the
influence of excitement.
“What, in Heaven’s name, does it all mean, Miss Grunderson?” asked
Francis, piteously.
He was ready to cling to the frailest spar by which he might float on
the wide ocean of perplexity, whose billows had so suddenly encompassed
him.
“Goodness gracious knows--_I_ don’t any more than the dead though if
there _is_ anything in drawing-room tables balancing themselves on
tip-toe and great-coats flying about the room like awkward birds the
dead may know more than we give them credit for,” exclaimed the lively
Rosa, without a single stop; “but it’s very certain there is something
wrong, and whatever it is, that Mr. Lowther is at the bottom of it.”
“Harcourt Lowther?”
“Yes. My pa hears a great deal of gossip at the Bell and--at clubs, and
such places; and he always tells me everything he hears. And oh, Mr.
Tredethlyn, if you knew how long I have wished to speak my mind to you,
I am sure you would forgive me for listening just now.”
“My dear Miss Grunderson, what could you have to say to me?” asked the
bewildered Cornishman.
“Oh, lots of things. But then you know the grand maxim in society is
that you _mustn’t_ speak your mind. It’s like that Latin person’s rule
of nil thingamy; you mustn’t admire any thing, you know; and so on. And
one must unlearn all one’s Catechism, about loving one’s neighbour as
oneself, and doing unto others as one would they should--which always
reminds me of a winter Sunday afternoon at school and broken chilblains,
because one _did_ break once while I was saying it. And you see in
society the thing is to let your neighbour go his way and to go yours,
and to say, ‘Bless my soul! exactly as I anticipated; paw creatchaw!’ if
your neighbour tumbles over a precipice, from which it would be the very
worst of bad manners to hold him back; and in society, if you saw the
good Samaritan--no, the other person--lying wounded in the road, it
would be a dreadful _incon_--what it’s name?--to pick him up and take
him to an inn and pay for his lodging, because he might call you to
account for your impertinent officiousness as soon as he got well. So,
though I have been bursting to speak my mind almost ever since I’ve
known you, Mr. Tredethlyn, I’ve held my tongue until to-night. But
to-night the climax has come, and I _must_ speak. Oh, you poor dear
thing!” cried Rosa, in a sudden outburst of sympathy, “how you and your
wife have been talked about!”
“Talked about!--by whom, when, and where?”
“By everybody, always, everywhere. You don’t know--though you ought to
know, if you ever listened to what was going on around you--how people
_do_ talk. They’ve talked about your dissipation, the hours you have
kept, the places you have been seen at, the people you have been seen
with; about your coming home in hansom cabs in the middle of the night;
and I think if quieter vehicles could be invented for people who stay
out late, or at least the doors made to open differently, there wouldn’t
_be_ so much scandal. They’ve talked about your getting _tipsy_,”
exclaimed Rosa, shaking her head solemnly, and laying a tremendous
stress upon the obnoxious word; “and they’ve said you were drinking
yourself into an early grave, and that Harcourt Lowther was leading you
on to your death in order that he might marry your wife afterwards.”
“Harcourt lead me--to my death--and--marry Maude! Oh, no, no, no; it is
too horrible!” gasped Francis, staring at Miss Grunderson, with his head
clasped in his hands, and big beads of perspiration upon his brow.
“I know it is,” answered Rosa; “but they say it; and you must own it was
not a wise thing for you to be so very intimate with a man who was
engaged to your wife before you married her.”
“Engaged to my wife! _Who_ was engaged to my wife?”
“Why, Harcourt Lowther, of course! Didn’t you know all about it?”
“No, so help me Heaven!”
Miss Grunderson looked very grave. All that she had said had been spoken
in perfect good faith; but, all at once, she began to see that mischief
might come of this free utterance of her thoughts.
“I thought that you knew it,” she stammered in considerable confusion,
“or I’m sure I should never have said one word about----”
“How did _you_ come to know it?” asked Francis, turning fiercely upon
the terrified Rosa.
“Miss Desmond told me.”
“It is a lie, a malicious lie, invented by Julia Desmond!”
“I dare say it _is_ something in the way of a story,” responded Miss
Grunderson, who was very anxious to extinguish the sudden conflagration
which her unconscious hand had fired; “people _do_ tell such stories,
you know; not that I think Miss Desmond would speak so positively
unless--but I’m sure if Mrs. Tredethlyn _was_ ever engaged to Mr.
Lowther, she had quite forgotten him when she married you; only _if_ it
was so, I don’t think it was quite honourable of him to be so friendly
with you without telling you all about it.”
Thus Miss Grunderson--floundering helplessly in a conversational
quagmire--endeavoured to undo any mischief which her indiscretion might
have made. But Francis was not listening to her; he was thinking of all
his life during the last year, and a host of trifling circumstances
recurred to his mind, in evidence against the wife he had loved, and the
friend he had trusted.
“Yes,” he thought, as he sank moodily down into the nearest chair, and
covered his face with his hands, as heedless of Miss Grunderson’s
presence as if that young lady had been one of her father’s
cabbages,--“yes, it is no lie of Julia Desmond’s. A hundred
recollections arise in my mind to bear witness to its truth. Maude’s
confession about the some one whom she had loved, but whose poverty was
a hindrance to a marriage with her. Harcourt Lowther’s letters from that
beautiful heiress, whose father’s wealth stood between him and
happiness. I knew that they had known each other before he sailed for
Van Diemen’s Land; but I believed him implicitly when he told me
casually one day that they had never been more than the most indifferent
acquaintances. He had a careless, half-contemptuous way of talking of my
wife that galled me to the quick, and that I have sometimes resented.
Fool and dupe that I was! That affected cynicism, that pretended
indifference, was only a part of his scheme. He loved her all the time;
and while with one hand he pushed me away from her into the drunken
orgies that only kill a little more slowly than the secret doses of the
assassin, with the other he held fast the chain that bound him to her;
waiting till he should be able to say, ‘You are free, and I claim the
fulfilment of your broken promise. You are enriched by the death of the
poor dupe who loved you, and poverty need separate us no longer.’ Oh,
God of Heaven, what a fool I have been! and how clearly I can see my
folly, now when it is too late! False wife, false friend! so deeply,
fondly loved, so blindly trusted. I can remember my wife’s face the day
she spoke to me of Harcourt Lowther. Has she been in the base plot
against me? No, I will not believe it. If I have been this man’s blind
dupe, his helpless tool, she may have been as blind, as helpless as
myself. O God, give me strength to trust her still, for my heart must
break if she is base and cruel.”
A man’s ideas are not apt to arrange themselves very consecutively at
such a time; but it was something after this fashion that Francis
Tredethlyn reflected upon his friend’s treachery, while Rosa stood by
watching him very anxiously, with that fiery eagerness which had
prompted her to speak her mind considerably cooled down by the aspect of
her companion’s distress.
“Miss Grunderson,” said Francis presently, “whatever the world may have
said against Harcourt Lowther, it is a false and lying world if it ever
slandered the goodness and purity of my wife.”
“I know that,” answered Rosa, becoming energetic once more; “for of all
the sweet darlings that ever were, she’s the sweetest and the dearest.
And how should _she_ know that people made nasty disagreeable remarks
about Mr. Lowther’s always happening to go to the parties she went to
and calling here oftener than other people, and so on----”
“He went to parties!” cried Francis. “He told me that he hated parties;
that he scarcely went anywhere.”
“Ah, but he did, though; and it has been his flirting way--not the
things he has said, you know, but his way or saying them--his
_ompressmong_, you know, that has caused those ill-natured remarks about
Mrs. Tredethlyn. Nothing sets people talking like _ompressmong_.”
Francis did not answer. Little by little the mists cleared away from his
mental vision; and he saw that Harcourt Lowther had been from first to
last the subtlest schemer who ever plotted the ruin of an honest
blockhead. It had needed only Miss Grunderson’s feminine guesswork to
let sudden light into the cavernous depths of the foulest pitfall that
ever treachery dug under the ignorant footsteps of its victim. Francis
remembered all the bitter ridicule, the sneering compassion, that
Harcourt Lowther had heaped upon the respectable world, from which he
held his dupe aloof, while he plunged him to the very lips in the
dissipations of Bohemia. By this means he had effected as complete a
separation between the husband and wife as if the same roof had ceased
to shelter them.
“I have thought--when my tempter gave me time to think--that it was
Maude’s coldness alone which separated us; but I know now that it was
the schemer’s work from first to last. She did not love me,--O Heaven,
have pity upon my poor tortured heart!--she loved him, perhaps: but I
might have had some little chance of winning her love if I had remained
at her feet--her slave, her worshipper; but he has held me away from
her, and now she abhors me. She has no feeling but disgust and disdain
for the wretch who has abandoned her to waste his days on a racecourse,
his nights in the drunken orgies of a gaming-house.”
Francis Tredethlyn sat with his face hidden in his hands, thinking of
his folly, and hating himself for it. Why had he given himself up body
and soul into the power of Harcourt Lowther? why had he been so poor a
dupe in the toils of this man? It was not that he had entertained any
special regard for the gentleman who had pretended to be his friend. In
Van Diemen’s Land he had often had good reason to despise the peevish
grumbler, the selfish Sybarite; and yet for the last year he had taken
the man’s dictum upon every subject, even upon that one vital question
on which the happiness of his life depended. Why had he trusted so
blindly; why had he submitted so slavishly to follow the guiding-strings
that led him into places where he found no pleasure, amongst people who
inspired him with disgust?
Little by little the answers to these questions shaped themselves in
Francis Tredethlyn’s mind; and he saw that his uncle Oliver’s hoarded
wealth had been at the root of all his misery. The wealth which had
lifted him suddenly into a world that was strange to him; the wealth
which had made him the mark for every schemer; the wealth which had won
him the hand of the woman whose heart could never have been won by his
true and honest love. Adrift in that strange world, the man who had kept
his name unsullied, his soul untainted, his head erect before the faces
of his fellow-men, while his pockets were empty, and his very existence
dependent upon the day’s work that earned him a day’s food, found
himself all at once the most helpless creature that had ever floated at
the mercy of the winds and waves upon a trackless ocean; and he had been
very glad to grasp the first rope that was thrown out to him in all
friendly seeming to guide him safely to the shore. His ignorance had
flung him, unarmed and powerless, into Harcourt Lowther’s arms; and the
man to whom he had felt himself superior while blacking his boots and
obeying his orders out in Van Diemen’s Land became all at once, indeed,
the master, free to work his own will with that most helpless of all
creatures, an uneducated millionaire.
“If I had a son,” thought Francis Tredethlyn,--and a faint thrill was
stirred in his breast by the mere hypothesis,--“I should send him to
school before I turned him out into the world. Yet I, who am as ignorant
as a baby of the world in which I live, have plunged recklessly into its
vortex, expecting to emerge unhurt. My own folly is the cause of my
destruction. And yet I might have met with an honest friend; I might
have had a loving wife.”
“A loving wife!” Ah, how the poor faithful heart ached as Francis
thought this! A man’s fireside is the same peaceful sanctuary, whether
the hearth is gorgeous with encaustic tiles and an Axminster rug, or
poorly covered with a scrap of faded Kidderminster, in some humble
chamber where the firelight glimmers on the delf platters that adorn a
cottage-dresser.
“If Maude had loved me,” Francis argued, brooding moodily upon his
wrongs, “my money need have brought me no misery; my ignorance would
have beguiled me into no danger. Her voice would have regulated my life;
her counsel would have prompted every action. Her smallest wish would
have been my law. And it would have been very hard if the companionship
of a lady had not in time transformed me into a gentleman. But _what_
are the people with whom I have herded since my marriage--the
acquaintances whom Harcourt Lowther has chosen for me? What! pshaw! why
do I stop to think of all this? She never loved me. I should have tried
to win her love if _he_ had left me to do so. I might have failed even
then as miserably as I have failed now.”
He groaned aloud as he thought this, and startled Miss Grunderson, who
was sitting at a respectful distance from him folding and unfolding her
parasol, and wondering why she had got into this _galère_, and how she
was to get out of it; and registering a mental vow that she would never
again be tempted by her recollection of her duty to her neighbour to
depart from the manners and customs of polite society. But to her relief
Francis looked up presently, and addressed her.
“I thank you heartily for having spoken so frankly to me,” he said; “it
is only right that I should be acquainted with the common talk about the
man whose hand I have clasped in friendship almost every day for the
last twelve months. But I hope you will believe that, whatever Mr.
Lowther may or may not be, my wife is good and pure, and worthy of the
warmest affection you can feel for her. Your warmth of feeling has
touched me deeply, Miss Grunderson. I have been living in so false an
atmosphere lately, that I must be dull indeed if I were not affected by
your friendly candour. If--if anything should happen to separate Maude
and me, I should be very glad to think she had such a friend as you.
And--if ever you saw her trusting, as I have trusted, in the truth and
honour of Harcourt Lowther, you would stand between her and that
dangerous adviser, that false friend--would you not, Miss Grunderson?”
“I would,” answered Rosa, valiantly; “I should speak my mind to her and
to Mr. Lowther into the bargain, as candidly as I have spoken it to you
to-night.”
“I believe you would,” said Francis. “And now, my dear, God bless you,
and good night!”
He held out both his hands and clasped Rosa’s pudgy little paws in a
brief grasp, and then strode past her on his way towards the door.
“You’re not going out to-night, are you, Mr. Tredethlyn?” she asked
anxiously; “it is so _very_ late.”
Poor little Rosa was rather alarmed by that resolute stride towards the
door, which might only be the first step in some ghastly vengeance to be
taken upon Harcourt Lowther by the stalwart Cornishman.
“I shouldn’t like to have his blood upon my head, though I _do_ hate and
detest him,” thought Miss Grunderson; “for in these days of
spirit-rapping there’s no knowing how he might spite himself upon me. I
might have him tilting and tip-toeing every table I ever sat down to.”
“I’m only going to my room to write a letter,” answered Mr. Tredethlyn;
“shall I order my wife’s carriage for you?”
“No, thank you; as our house is so near, I think I’ll ask one of your
servants to see me home,” replied Rosa, who had no idea of leaving the
ground just yet. “I’ll run up to Mrs. Tredethlyn’s room and say
good-bye. Shall I take her any message from you?”
“None, thank you; good night.”
“Good night.”
Rosa left him still standing in the drawing-room. The spacious and
grandiose apartment, in all of whose costly adornment--from the pictures
on the walls to the Louis-Seize snuff-boxes and lapis-lazuli
_bonbonnières_, and all the expensive frivolities so lavishly scattered
on the tables--there was no single object which had been chosen with any
reference to his taste, with any thought of his comfort or pleasure. No
exquisite toys of “picking-up;” no delicious bargaining with dirty
brokers in the purlieus of Holborn; no evening excursions,
treasure-hunting, among dingy by-ways, where remnants of choice old
china lurk sometimes, unrecognized and unvalued, amongst the rubbish in
a dimly-lighted shop-window; none of the pleasant struggles, the proud
triumphs, which attend the collection of Poverty’s art and _virtu_, had
attended the decoration of this splendid chamber. The Cornishman had
given _carte blanche_ to his friend, and had written cheques--whose
figures he had not remembered five minutes after writing them--in favour
of a celebrated dealer in Bond Street, and an upholsterer in Oxford
Street; and that was all. He smiled bitterly now as he paused to look
round the room before he left it--perhaps for ever.
“And this has been my home,” he thought. “Home! Better to sit by my
uncle Oliver’s miserly fire, in the dreary house on the Cornish moors,
than to loll in one of those yellow-satin chairs, playing at ball with a
gold snuff-box, and watching the traitor whom I have trusted talking to
my wife.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE LADY AT PETERSHAM.
The letter which Francis Tredethlyn wrote in his study was a long one; a
very painful one to write, as it seemed, from the face of the writer,
and the weary sigh which every now and then escaped from his lips, as
his hurrying pen paused for a moment. It was close upon ten o’clock when
he began the letter. The clock chimed the half-hour after eleven while
he was sealing it. He addressed the envelope, and then threw himself
back in his chair to think. He had so much to think of. Maude’s
extraordinary conduct, Rosa Grunderson’s revelation, had overthrown the
whole fabric of his life; and he found himself surrounded by ruins whose
utter chaos he could not contemplate without bewilderment.
For the last few weeks his thoughts had been almost exclusively devoted
to his cousin Susan, and her wrongs. Found at last, after so many
failures and disappointments, so much delay, the lonely girl had been
welcomed as tenderly as any wanderer who ever returned to the lost
friends of his youth. But Susan Lesley had a sad story to tell her
cousin. The missing link in the chain that Francis Tredethlyn had put
together piece by piece was the letter which had been written from St.
Petersburg by the man whom Susan had loved and trusted--the man whose
diary had revealed to Francis the utter worthlessness of his character.
Robert Lesley’s letter was only a worthy companion to Robert Lesley’s
diary. In it he coldly and deliberately told the girl who loved him,
that she was not his wife; that the Marylebone marriage was no marriage;
the registrar no recognized official, but a scoundrel hired for a
twenty-pound note to play the part of that functionary; that the
registrar’s office had been no office, but a lodging-house parlour hired
for the occasion, and half-a-dozen doors from the real office. This
statement was, of course, accompanied by the usual heartless sophistries
which run so glibly from the pen, or fall so smoothly from the lips, of
an utterly heartless man. The self-confessed betrayer pleaded the
madness of an all-absorbing love; the stern necessities of well-bred
poverty; the pressure of family circumstances; the fear of a father’s
rage; and then, in conclusion, the writer stated the pitiful stipend
which he was prepared to offer to the woman he had abandoned, and the
child he had disowned.
Susan showed her cousin this letter, and told him how, after receiving
it, her mind had almost given way under the burden of her great agony.
Then it was that she had gone to Mrs. Burfield, and had written to her
father a long letter, telling him something of her story, but not all;
appealing piteously to the only friend to whom she could appeal; for
faithful Frank was far away in some unknown country. She told her cousin
how she had waited, at first with a faint sickly hope, then with a blank
despair, for some answer from the father to whom she had appealed. But
none came; and when her little stock of money had sunk to its lowest
ebb, she left the dull quiet of Coltonslough to begin a weary, lonely
struggle for bread, which had endured, without one ray of sunlight to
illumine its blank misery, until the summer Sunday afternoon on which
Francis Tredethlyn found her sitting in the nurse’s cottage with her boy
in her arms.
It was so sad a story, and so sadly common, that there is little need to
dwell upon the unvarnished record of a woman’s battle with poverty in
the heart of a great city.
“Perhaps I ought to think myself very happy, Francis,” Susan said when
she had told her story; “for I was always able to pay the nurse somehow
for her care of my darling; and the deadly fear of not being able to do
_that_ was the worst trouble I knew in all that dreary time. I have been
face to face with starvation, Frank, very often within the last two
years; but it is not so terrible, when one is used to it. The help
always came at last, and some friendly hand, so unexpected that it might
have dropped down from heaven, has often come between me and despair. I
have sometimes thought that bitter struggle for my daily bread was only
a blessing in disguise, for it kept me from brooding upon my great
sorrow; it sometimes shut from me the thought of Robert’s cruelty and my
own disgrace.”
“Disgrace!” cried the Cornishman; “no, Susan, there is no shadow of
disgrace upon you except the disgrace of being united to a scoundrel and
a liar. The marriage before the registrar was a _bonâ fide_ marriage, as
binding as if it had been performed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
And then Francis told Susan of his visit to the registrar’s office. This
was the balm which he was able to pour into the deepest wound that ever
tortured a woman’s heart. But the identity of the husband who had lied
in denouncing himself a liar was entirely unknown to Susan. In all the
familiar intercourse of the brief period in which the trusting girl had
been a petted and happy wife, Robert Lesley had not let fall one
careless word relating in the remotest way to his position in life, his
family, or his prospects. When first consulted by Francis upon the
contents of the diary, Messrs. Kursdale and Scardon had instituted an
inquiry as to whether a Mr. Robert Lesley had been inscribed on the
books of St. Boniface any time between 1845 and 1852; and the answer had
been in the negative. No person of the name had been a member of that
college within the last ten years. Francis could only conclude,
therefore, that Mrs. Burfield had been right in her supposition that the
man calling himself Robert Lesley had shielded his identity under a
false name.
“But your husband was visited by his brother, was he not, Susan?” said
Mr. Tredethlyn, when this subject was discussed between the cousins.
“Yes; but I knew no more of Robert’s brother than of Robert himself. He
did not come to us often. I heard that he was a lawyer,--a barrister, I
think,--and that he lived in the Temple. I heard even that by accident,
and Robert seemed almost vexed that I should know so much.”
All these trifling circumstances seemed to point inevitably to one
conclusion; Robert Lesley had intended from the first to abandon his
wife, whenever his own interests rendered it advisable that he should
throw off the tie that bound him to her. Love and selfishness go very
badly hand-in-hand together; and love had soon left selfishness sole
master of the field.
“But this man shall be made to acknowledge his wife,--to give a name to
his child,” cried Francis, “if he can be found.”
If he could be found: that was the grand question. But Mr. Tredethlyn
was quite at a loss with regard to the means by which his cousin’s
husband was to be found. In this case even the grand medium by which the
lost are restored to the arms of their friends--the second column of the
“Times”--could be of no avail; for what is the use of advertising for a
man who does not want to reveal himself?
“If my husband is alive, Providence may throw him across my path some
day,” Susan said, resignedly. “He could not be more dead to me than he
is now if he were buried in the deepest grave that ever held the ashes
of the lost; but if he gave my boy the name that is his right, I think I
could forgive him all the wrong he has done me.”
It was quite in vain that Francis Tredethlyn sought to carry his cousin
and her son home to his own house. The sorrowful young mother shrank
with absolute terror from the idea of encountering strangers, of finding
herself in a splendid house amongst happy people.
“I am used to my poverty, Francis,” she said;--“let me be poor still.
Nobody is inquisitive about me, because I am beneath people’s curiosity.
No one questions me about the husband who has deserted me, or extorts my
story from me only to doubt it when it is told. My father would not
believe me; can I expect strangers to be more trusting than he was? No,
Francis; leave me alone in my obscurity. I have a lodging near here, and
I can see my darling every day. I will freely accept from you a little
income which will enable me to live as I have lived, without working as
hard as I have worked; but I will accept no more. I am delighted to
think that my father left his fortune to you, Frank; and I thank and
bless you for having taken so much trouble to find me out.”
Francis Tredethlyn found it hard work to win Susan away from this
determination, so quietly expressed. But he did at last persuade her to
agree to his own plans for her life, on condition that he should tell
Maude nothing, nor ask Susan to meet her until the missing husband was
found, and compelled to acknowledge his wife and son. Francis consented
to promise this; but he cherished a hope that Susan would relent
by-and-by, when she heard more of Maude’s tender and amiable nature, and
that he would be able to win his wife’s friendship for the simple
country girl who had played with him amongst the daisies in Landresdale
churchyard.
“You must accept the home I shall prepare for you, Susy,” said Francis,
“or I will have a deed of gift drawn up to-morrow, transferring half my
fortune to you. I am ready to divide your father’s wealth with you as
soon as ever I understand your legal position. In the meantime let me
have the sweetest pleasure my money has ever given me yet--the pleasure
of making a happy home for you and my little kinsman. If you knew how I
have wasted that hoarded money, Susy, on racecourses, and all kinds of
worthless places,” added Mr. Tredethlyn, with a remorseful recollection
of one particular brand of Moselle, for which he had been wont to pay
fourteen shillings a bottle in the purlieus of the Haymarket.
Susan consented to let her cousin do what he liked with regard to the
place in which she was to live henceforward. What mother could refuse a
bright home for the child she loves? A few words from Francis conjured
up the vision of a garden, where the boy could play under the shadow of
lilacs and laburnums; where the summer breeze would waft the petals of
overblown roses around that golden head. From the happy moment in which
he urged the child’s welfare as an argument against the mother, Francis
Tredethlyn’s triumph was secured. Susan pondered. She thought of the
sweet country air, the bright rooms, with the fresh breath of morning
blowing in at the open windows, the garden, the cow, the chickens, and
all the joys of that sweet rustic paradise which town-bred children hear
of from their mother’s lips, and see only in their dreams. Susan
hesitated. Francis had made friends with the boy by this time, and had
enlisted the child on his side of the argument. When the woman’s
sorrowful pride began to hold out weakly, when the mother’s heart showed
symptoms of relenting, the child’s little chubby arms crept round her
neck, and the child’s tiny voice pleaded in her ear:
“Peese, mammy, do live in the pooty house, and let Wobert have pooty
flowers.”
It was the triumph of infantine oratory. Susan turned to her kinsman,
half laughing, half crying, and gave him her hand.
“You must do as you like, cousin Frank,” she said. “Whatever is best for
Robert must be best for me.”
Thus it was that Francis Tredethlyn had withdrawn himself in a great
measure from the society of Mr. Lowther, while he scoured the prettiest
suburbs in search of a home for his cousin, and superintended the
necessary improvements and decoration, the selection of the simple
furniture, the arrangement of a garden, in which Robert Lesley’s son
might play happily, his life undarkened by the baseness of an unknown
father. There had been unspeakable pleasure for the Cornishman in the
doing of this work. It was so long since he had been of use to any one;
it was so long since his supremest benevolence to his fellow-men had
taken any higher form than the payment of a dinner-bill, and a handsome
bonus to the waiter. He seemed to breathe a new atmosphere, a fresher,
purer air, when he shook himself clear of Harcourt Lowther’s society,
and spent a summer’s day pottering amongst carpenters and house-painters
in the Petersham cottage. The odour of turpentine and lead did not give
him a headache; it was almost invigorating after the stifling fumes of
musk and mock-turtle, patchouli, and devilled whitebait that had
pervaded the hotel dining-rooms in which he had so often acted as host.
Energetic though Mr. Tredethlyn was in the carrying out of his
arrangements, Susan had been established little more than a week at the
cottage, and the paint on the Venetian shutters was still rather sticky,
when Harcourt Lowther found the upholsterer’s bill, which gave him the
clue to his pupil’s mysterious conduct. To hasten down to Petersham,
find the cottage, refresh himself with dry sherry and soda-water at the
nearest tavern, and to make himself agreeably familiar with the landlord
of the tavern, was all incomparably easy to Mr. Lowther. From the
landlord he heard all about Brook Cottage. How it had been to let for
nearly a twelvemonth; how it had been taken all in a hurry at the end of
May by a dashing-looking gentleman from town, who had been reported
scouring the neighbourhood in hansom cabs, inquiring for houses to let,
for three days at a stretch; how painters and glaziers, carpenters and
gardeners, had set to work in hot haste to renew and revivify everything
in-doors and out; how waggon-loads of the finest gravel from Wimbledon,
and cartloads of the softest turf from Ham, had been laid down in the
garden; how furniture, that was every bit of it new, had been brought
down from London; how the tall, dashing, energetic gentleman in the
hansom cab had been perpetually on the ground with his officious finger
for ever in the pie; and how larger cans of half-and-half had been
consumed by the workmen at the cost of the dashing gentleman than the
landlord of the Prince’s Feathers remembers to have chalked up against
any one customer since he had traded as a licensed victualler.
All this Mr. Lowther was told; and beyond this, he heard how a lady,
very pretty and quite young, but a little pale and worn-looking, had
arrived at last to take possession of “the prettiest little box that was
ever put together, without regard to expense;” how she was attended by
an elderly female in black, who had evidently seen better days, and who
acted as nurse to a little boy; how two respectable young women had been
hired in the neighbourhood, to act as cook and housemaid; and how,
coming regularly to the Feathers in quest of the kitchen-beer, they had
already reported their mistress as the sweetest and pleasantest of
ladies, and first-cousin to the dashing gentleman in the hansom cab. The
landlord tried to look as if he had no uncharitable thoughts about this
cousinship; but Harcourt Lowther saw that Francis Tredethlyn and the
lady had been subjects of grave scandal in that quiet country place. He
heard that the dashing gentleman had been at Petersham almost every day
for the last week; and that he and the lady passed the greater part of
their time in the garden, where they might be seen at any time from the
high-road,--the gentleman smoking and playing with a little boy, and the
lady working, at a rustic table, under a mulberry-tree. A pot-boy,
coming in from his rounds, as Harcourt lounged at the bar, confirmed the
landlord’s statement when appealed to. He had passed Brook Cottage not
five minutes before, and had seen the lady and gentleman talking to a
gardener, who was doing something to a rose-tree.
“She’s a rare one for flowers, the lady is,” the potman said, in
conclusion.
A rare one for flowers: Harcourt Lowther mused gravely upon this remark.
The fair denizens of Bohemia, to whom he had introduced Francis, were
not generally devoted to floriculture in cottage-gardens, though they
were greedy of gigantic bouquets, to rest on the velvet cushions of
their opera-boxes, or the front seats of their carriages, when they
drove to race meetings. Who was this pale, worn-looking young woman, who
called Francis cousin? Was she really his cousin, that Cornish girl of
whom the soldier had told his master in Van Diemen’s Land, and whose
miserably-executed likeness had reminded Harcourt of another face, whose
owner had played some part in the experience of his life? Was this
inhabitant of the newly-furnished cottage really the Cornish cousin? Mr.
Lowther could scarcely imagine that it was so; for, in that case, why
should Francis have kept her existence a secret from his _fidus Achates_
in the person of Harcourt himself?
“Secrecy is only another name for guilt,” thought Mr. Lowther. “Our
friend has gone to the bad in real earnest this time, and I can make a
_coup_. I was getting very tired of the slow game.”
Armed with this information, the schemer went back to town, to take his
place in Maude’s opera-box, and to lead up to that idea of a morning at
the Cedars, which seemed to originate in Mrs. Tredethlyn’s own brain.
Chance, which had been against him so long, had gone with him
unfailingly in this business. The lucky moment had come; he had got his
lead at last, and had only to play his winning cards. Chance had been
constant to the schemer even in that interview between Francis and Rosa;
for it had happened that, in all Miss Grunderson’s candid outpourings,
she had not dropped a word about Mrs. Tredethlyn’s stroll in the
Petersham meadows; though, even if she had done so, the Cornishman might
have been very slow to perceive that an accidental glimpse of himself
and gentle Susy, in friendly companionship, could have been the primary
cause of that stormy greeting which he had received at the hands of his
wife. Francis accepted his wife’s passionate outburst as only the climax
of the disgust and weariness with which he had inspired her.
“She reproaches me for the life I have been leading lately,” he said
bitterly; “but she does not understand her own feelings. It is not my
life, but me she hates. It is myself that inspires the loathing and
contempt which she talked of, and not my late hours or my gambling and
horse-racing.”
After sitting for some time plunged in a gloomy reverie, in the dreary
library, where the backs of the books he never opened seemed to frown
upon him in their sombre Russia leather brownness, Francis stirred as
the little black marble clock on the mantel-piece chimed the quarter
after twelve, and felt in his waistcoat-pocket for a note which he had
found waiting for him on his table the previous night. It was a tiny
twisted _poulet_ from Harcourt Lowther:--
“DEAR FRANK,--A line to remind you of to-morrow night. You will
be expected any time after nine.--Yours always,
“H. L.”
This reminder referred to a bachelor’s supper which Mr. Lowther had
arranged at his lodgings; a party at which there was to be what the host
called a quiet rubber. A rubber played with that deadly quiet which
attends the science of whist when heavy amounts tremble in the balance,
and a sum that a poor man would call a fortune may depend on the
player’s judicious choice between a five and a seven. Such a rubber as
that which the well-known Sir Robert was once concluding, when, just as
he pondered over his two last cards, a thoughtless looker-on happened to
break the solemn silence by one luckless word, and lo, the chain of
scientific reasoning dropped to pieces,--the popular statesman played
the wrong card, and lost a thousand pounds. It was not often that
Harcourt Lowther entertained his friends; but when Francis lapsed into a
temporary stagnation, the master was apt to keep his pupil going on the
road to ruin by such an entertainment as this. The quiet rubber at Mr.
Lowther’s lodgings generally led to other rubbers elsewhere, or cursory
appointments for Liverpool or Newmarket, or Chester or Northampton, or a
dinner at Richmond, gaily cut for at blind hookey while the men were
rising from the whist-table. It was a quarter-past twelve now. It would
be nearly one o’clock before the fastest hansom could carry Mr.
Tredethlyn to the Strand. Francis looked from the clock on the
chimney-piece to the scrap of paper in his hand; hesitated for a few
moments, with a black frown upon his face, and then started hastily from
his lounging attitude, and looked about him for his hat.
“There couldn’t be a better opportunity,” he muttered, “for saying what
I want to say to him.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXXV.
A HASTY RECKONING.
Harcourt Lowther had never played so bad a rubber as that with which he
beguiled the evening while waiting Francis Tredethlyn’s appearance at
the little bachelor-party assembled in his rooms. There was the usual
blending of the hawk and pigeon tribe at Mr. Lowther’s reunion: the
birds of prey distinguishable by the purple blackness of their dyed
moustaches and the crow’s-feet round their faded eyes; the innocent
fledglings fresh-coloured and tawny, with a profound belief in their own
wisdom and a supreme contempt for everything outside the narrow circle
in which they condescended to exist.
Mr. Lowther suffered his partner to knock under ignominiously to
antagonistic sevens and nines, while the big cards lurked idle in his
own hand, to fall at the close into the ravenous jaws of the eleventh,
twelfth, and thirteenth trumps; nor was he to be roused into decent play
by the unqualified remonstrances of his victim. He was thinking of
Maude. It was not the face of the queen of spades which he saw as he sat
hopelessly staring at the card in a vain endeavour to concentrate his
attention; it was Maude’s speaking, passionate countenance which looked
at him, all aglow with angry feeling. He saw her in all her beauty as he
had seen her that afternoon,--the tremulous lips, the flashing blue
eyes,--for there are blue eyes which in anger have more fire than the
starriest orbs that ever veiled their lightnings under the cloudy lace
of an Andalusian marchesa. His love for her--which was one of the most
selfish passions of a selfish nature--had grown and strengthened day by
day since the hour of his return, and had kindled into an all-absorbing
flame now that he seemed so near his triumph.
_Was_ he near his triumph? That question occurred to him several times
as he sat opposite his friend Captain Harrison of the Spanish Legion,
playing the unluckiest rubber that the Captain had been engaged in for
weeks,--“And the beggar had such first-rate cards too,” as the Captain
said afterwards, politely criticising his friend’s play; “if he hadn’t
kep’ his trumps so jolly dark we could have carried everything before
us.”
Was he near his triumph? He had been playing for two stakes--the woman
he loved and the fortune he envied. He knew Maude Tredethlyn well enough
to know that so long as her husband lived, she was as far beyond his
reach as the stars which shone down upon him as he walked home from
Stuccoville, and of whose light he thought so little. Maude, as the
daughter of an insolvent trader, was a lovely being whom he had felt no
reluctance to resign; for he had looked forward with a horrible
foresight to the day when the girl he loved should be again within his
reach; no longer as a penniless spinster, but a wealthy widow. _This_
had been the goal which Harcourt had seen at the end of that weary road
along which he conducted the young man who trusted him. No physician
ever watched a patient more intently than Mr. Lowther watched the slow
undermining of the Cornishman’s glorious constitution under the
influence of late hours and hard drinking. The bloodshot eyes, the
unsteady hand, the failing appetite, the uncertain spirits, the feverish
unrest, were all diagnostics that marked the progress of the schemer’s
work. Mr. Lowther had seen so many young men drop down in the poisoned
atmosphere to which he introduced Maude’s husband. He hoped that the end
which had come to so many would come to this ignorant, blundering
rustic, into whose lap blind Plutus had cast the wealth that should have
fallen to better men. The end must come; for the stupid Crœsus tumbled
so helplessly into the snare, and abandoned himself so completely to his
captor’s mercy. It was only a question of patience. The end would come
in due time: and then there was the woman he loved, and the richest
widow in London, to reward the plotter’s patience, to crown his efforts
with happiness and success. To-day’s business, Harcourt Lowther argued,
as he played that unfortunate rubber, could not be otherwise than a
lucky stroke, likely to hurry matters to a crisis. Francis had slipped
out of his hands so often of late, had kept better hours and drunk less.
But a serious quarrel with Maude would inevitably fling Mr. Tredethlyn
back upon the spurious Lethe of the brandy-bottle, and would hasten the
schemer’s work to its fatal close. “I think I have shut the door of his
home upon him,” thought Harcourt; “it will be strange if he is not glad
to drop completely into the groove in which I want to see him.”
This, in plain English, is the plan which Harcourt Lowther had made for
himself; though he would scarcely have put his scheme into such very
plain words, even in his own thoughts. Iago, in a play or a novel, is
obliged to give utterance to his schemes with tolerable clearness; but
the real Iago is reticent, even in commune with himself, and huddles his
blackest thoughts into some dark corner of his mind, where they lie
conveniently hidden from the eye of conscience.
Before twelve o’clock Mr. Lowther had abandoned his place at the
whist-table to his brother; and after lounging behind the chair of a
young man who was playing _écarté_, and making a random bet now and
then, the host proposed supper,--a proposition which was received very
warmly by the men who were losing money, and very coolly by the winners.
Harcourt Lowther’s supper was almost as unceremonious an affair as that
memorable entertainment in Lant Street, Borough, at which Mr. Robert
Sawyer played the part of host. A young man, hired for the occasion from
a neighbouring tavern, laid the cloth very rapidly, while the guests
lounged against the corners of the mantel-pieces, and grouped themselves
in little knots, to discuss coming events in the racing world, or to
criticise current pictures and current theatricals, with an occasional
spice of current scandal.
The supper was very simple. There were unlimited supplies of those
delicate little oysters which seem created with a special view to
bachelors’ supper-parties, and the refreshment of exhausted playgoers;
and whose native beds the ignorant foreigner might not unnaturally
imagine to lie somewhere at the back of the Strand. And to wash these
down, Mr. Lowther had provided Chablis, white Hermitage, and
Rüdesheimer. There were spatch-cocks and devilled kidneys, fried
potatoes, monster lobsters, marvellous cheeses from the remotest cantons
of Switzerland, and the most delicate varieties of green-stuff from a
French fruiterer’s in the purlieus of Leicester Square. There was no
pretence of an elaborate entertainment; but there was an open case of
sparkling Moselle by the side of Mr. Lowther’s chair, into which he
dipped about once in five minutes; and the young man from the tavern had
been initiated into the mysteries of a claret-cup, which he compounded
at a rickety little sideboard in the inner room.
So far as the guests went, the supper was a success. There was just the
amount of confusion which gives a picnic flavour to a meal, and which
seems an infallible stimulant of animal spirits. Mr. Lowther’s visitors
enjoyed themselves immensely, and the party was becoming boisterous in
its gaiety, when the door was opened, and Francis Tredethlyn walked in.
Harcourt Lowther pushed away the Moselle case, which was now only filled
with tumbled straw and empty bottles, and called for a chair, which was
edged into the corner at the host’s right hand.
“You’ll have some supper, Tredethlyn?” he said, while Francis was
shaking hands with some of the men. They were all known to him, and all
knew his story, and had a pretty clear idea that Harcourt was what they
called “cleaning him out,” in the most approved style by which the
process can be performed. “These things are all cold, I’m afraid. Jones,
run across and get some fresh oysters, and you can order another
spatch-cock--to be ready in a quarter of an hour at the latest. Sit
down, dear boy. What the deuce have you been doing with yourself all
night? Give him elbow-room, Harding, that’s a good fellow, and don’t
knock your ashes on to this corner of the table-cloth just yet. Now,
then, Philcote, the ‘Last Rose of Summer’ as soon as you like; but you
may as well make up your mind what key you’ll sing it in _before_ you
begin.”
Francis called back the man as he was hurrying from the room.
“Stop!” he cried; “you needn’t order anything more--for me. I shan’t eat
supper to-night.”
Something in his tone arrested every other voice; and there was a
silence as sudden and as complete as if some magician had waved his wand
and changed Harcourt Lowther’s guests into stone. Something in his look
attracted every eye, and held it fixed in a wondering stare upon his
face. Mr. Philcote, who fancied himself an amateur Sims Reeves, was
disturbed in his calculation of that vocal bullfinch to be cleared
between the third and fourth notes of the “Last Rose of Summer,” and
abandoned all thoughts of singing his favourite ballad.
The Cornishman’s colourless face and disordered hair and dress might
have suggested the idea that he had been drinking; but there was an
inscrutable something in that white face which was not compatible with
drunkenness. Harcourt Lowther looked at him nervously. The marital
quarrel had come off, evidently, and Francis took matters very
seriously.
“Come, Mr. Troublefeast,” cried the host, “we’re not going to stand this
sort of thing, you know. We’ll have no statue of the Commander stalking
in upon us in the midst of our fun--without Mozart. What the deuce is
the matter with you, dear boy? Roderick, pass that tankard this way,
will you? You fellows down there contrive to keep everything to
yourself. Let the rosy vintage circulate. There’s another half-dozen of
the claret in the next room, and no end of lemons. So the moment for the
selfishness of the savage to overpower the civilization of the gentleman
has not arrived. Come, Frank, take down the shutters, and light up;
you’ve made us all as quiet as the frozen crew described by that
pertinacious old bore, the Ancient Mariner. Take a long dip into that
tankard, old fellow, and come up bright again.”
Mr. Lowther struck his small white hand lightly upon his friend’s
shoulder as he concluded. Francis had dropped into the place offered to
him, and sat there, looking like nothing _but_ the Commander, in his
stony rigidity of face and figure. As Harcourt Lowther’s hand alighted
on his shoulder, he startled every one by throwing it deliberately away
from him.
“I have had enough of your friendship, thank you,” he said;
“henceforward, if we are to be anything at all to each other, I had
rather we should be foes--I may have better luck perhaps that way.”
“Tredethlyn! are you drunk? or mad?”
“Neither, but I _have_ been both; for I have trusted you. You needn’t
ask me what I mean,” said Francis, interrupting Harcourt Lowther’s
exclamation by a rapid gesture of his uplifted hand; “I am going to tell
you, and very plainly. Gentlemen, you were going to listen to a song
just now; have you any objection to hearing a story instead? There will
be time for your ballad afterwards, you know, Philcote. My story is not
a long one.”
Harcourt Lowther had turned very pale. His light blue eyes glittered,
and the slim white fingers of his right hand closed involuntarily on the
knife that had been lying near them. He looked as a man might look, who
marching proudly upon the road to victory, saw the earth yawn asunder
beneath his feet, and knew all at once that his next step must hurl him
to a dreadful death. He was very quiet; but the quivering of his thin
nostrils, the quickening of his breath, and his faded colour, betrayed a
degree of hesitation which set his guests wondering, and infused a dash
of excitement into the wind-up of the little banquet. The highest
development of Christianity cannot quite extinguish the natural savage.
Cromwell’s Ironsides did murderous work with the gospel in their wallets
and pious exclamations upon their lips; and it seems the attribute of
human nature to delight in a row. The guests at Harcourt Lowther’s
supper-table pricked up their ears with one accord, and it was with
considerable difficulty that they managed to keep up a faint attempt at
that kind of conversation which had engaged them, in twos and threes,
before Francis Tredethlyn’s entrance. When they spoke to one another
now, it was only in undertones, and their disjointed sentences revealed
the fact that they were listening to the speaker at the end of the
table. But when Francis spoke of telling a story, the company dropped
all pretence of indifference to him; and listened with a polite
appearance of perfect unconsciousness as to any unfriendly intention on
the part of the late visitor.
“Sing your song, Philcote,” said Harcourt Lowther, resolutely; “we want
no stories--we’ve no time for twaddle of that sort. Let’s have a good
song or two, and then we’ll go into the next room for a rubber.”
Mr. Philcote, whose nerves were fluttered by the ominous gloom that had
so suddenly fallen upon the assembly, gave a despairing cough, and made
a husky plunge at the A flat on which he should have begun the sweetest
song-writer’s sweetest song; but before he had articulated his
initiatory “’Tis,” a big man with a black moustache, who owed Harcourt
Lowther a grudge, and had been consuming the best bits of the lobsters,
and the lion’s share of the Moselle, under a mental protest, interrupted
the timid singer:
“Let’s have the story first, and the ‘Last Rose’ afterwards,” he said.
“Fire away, Tredethlyn; your audience have supped luxuriously, and are
in good humour.”
“I dare say it’s a common story enough in your set, Boystock,” answered
Francis; “but it isn’t a long one. It is the story of a man who was
lifted one day from poverty to wealth, and found himself all at once
alone in a world as strange to him as if he had been transported out of
this planet into another inhabited by a different species.”
“Egad,” muttered Mr. Boystock, “I wish somebody would transport me!”
“Ah, it isn’t likely, old fellow, in _that_ way,” murmured his
neighbour.
“For some time the country-bred cub--he was country-bred, and what you
would call a cub--got on well enough. He floundered into a few mistakes,
and he floundered out of them, after his own ignorant fashion. I think
there is a providence for such men, as there is for drunkards, and so
long as they stagger along _alone_, they come to very little grief. He
did a great many silly things with his money, I dare say; but I think he
_once_ did a generous thing--though, God knows, in doing it, he only
followed the blind impulse of his undisciplined heart as ignorantly as
if he had been some blundering Newfoundland dog that pulls the mistress
he loves out of the water where he sees her drowning. His wealth
prospered with him, though he had cared little enough for it when it
fell into his hands. By means of it he was able to save the woman he
loved from a great trouble; and in her boundless gratitude for the
service which he valued so lightly, she abandoned herself to the purest
impulse that ever stirred a noble breast, and offered him her hand. If
he had been generous or wise, he would have refused the hand which could
not give him a heart. He was only--in love. Selfishly, stupidly, he
seized the proffered sacrifice; too besotted in his blind passion to
perceive that it was a sacrifice.”
Mr. Lowther’s guests stared blankly at one another. They had not dropped
their own talk to hear such stuff as this. Harcourt sat very still, with
his hand always upon the knife. At the other end of the table lounged
Roderick, the very picture of well-bred indifference. He felt that his
brother had dropped in for it; but he had no idea of interrupting the
action of the little drama by any fraternal championship.
“Let them fight it out their own way,” he thought; “I like to see the
white man suffer.”
“The country-bred cub was still fresh to the intoxication of his fancied
happiness, when a man who had been familiar with him in his poverty came
from the distant part of the world where they had met and known each
other, and offered to be his friend. The cub’s ignorance of life was so
complete, that he did not know it was possible for a man who bore her
Majesty’s commission, and called himself a gentleman, to be a liar and a
villain. He trusted his old acquaintance implicitly, and accepted him as
a friend--believing, still in his boorish ignorance, that there was such
a thing as friendship, or, at the worst, an honourable good fellowship
between honest men. His friend did not tell him that he had been the
engaged lover of the woman the boor was going to marry; and when the
young couple began their new life, he planted himself in their house;
and his first act was to shut the husband from the home whose dingiest
room was a paradise, so long as it was sanctified by the presence of an
idolized wife. Will any one at this table guess the plot which the
boor’s friend hatched against him in the hour when their hands first met
in friendship? I think not. The gentleman--polished, well-born, highly
educated--allowed the country cub to marry the woman he loved; reserving
to himself the hope of marrying her, enriched by the cub’s money, when
the cub was dead. This once arranged, there was only one thing more to
be settled; and that was the cub’s life. Unluckily he was a brawny
six-foot fellow, with the constitution of a prize-fighter. But then
prize-fighters are not always long-lived; their habits are so apt to be
against them. Well, gentlemen, there have been men who have undermined a
victim’s strength with small doses of antimony, while they smiled in his
face, and called him brother. We manage these things better nowadays.
The gentleman resolved that the boor should drink himself to death.”
“Is this the plot of a French novel?” asked Roderick, superciliously,
after a brief silence, in which Francis Tredethlyn had paused to take
breath; “if it is, you had better tell us the title of the book, and let
us read it in the original. There may be some chance of our thinking it
interesting _then_.”
“There are shameful things done out of novels as well as in them, Mr.
Lowther,” answered Francis. “What I am telling you is the truth. The
gentleman took the wealthy boor under his protection, and from that hour
the cub’s mind and the cub’s body began to wither under the influence of
a vice which of himself he held in abhorrence, but which in the dull
indifference of a man who has no hope to elevate him, no aim to strive
for, he was weak enough to accept as the cure for all his troubles. What
did it matter how many glasses of brandy he drank, or how often he
staggered across his dreary threshold in the early morning, stupefied by
foul gaslit atmospheres and bad wines? His friend took care to remind
him that there was no one to be sorry for his misdeeds, or to rejoice in
his repentance if he repented. He could not sink so low that his wife
would be affected by his degradation; he could not rise so high that she
would be proud of his elevation. His friend dinned the bitter truth into
the wretch’s ear. The beautiful young wife despised him; the wealth that
other men envied was useless to him, except in its power to buy the
oblivion of the brandy-bottle. From the hour in which his well-born
friend took him under his protection, the boor never did a generous
action, or heard a noble sentiment; and he very rarely went home sober.
He was drinking himself to death as fast as a strong man can, when
Providence took compassion on him, and gave him a duty to fulfil. A
helpless girl, his kinswoman, was thrown across his path, and all at
once he found himself of use in the world. From that moment his friend’s
scheme was overthrown. Good-bye to the brandy-bottle and the bad wines!
The boor had a friendless woman dependent on his protection, and he had
something to live for. He determined to sink the past; bid farewell to
the wife whose affection he was unable to win; turn his back upon the
circle he had lived in and the people who had known him; and finish his
days honestly among honest men.”
“‘So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber,’” exclaimed
Mr. Boystock. “It’s a very good story, I dare say; but apropos to what?”
demanded the gentleman, looking at Harcourt Lowther with a malicious
twinkle in his little black eyes. “I don’t see the connection with the
proverbial _bottes_. What does it all mean?”
“It means, gentlemen, that I am the boor who has been the dupe of a
villain, and will be so no longer; and the name of the villain is
Harcourt Lowther.”
There was a moment’s silence, followed by a sudden smashing of glass. A
pair of small sinewy white hands fastened cat-like upon Francis
Tredethlyn’s throat, and he and Harcourt Lowther were grappling each
other in a fierce struggle. It was very long since the gentleman had
been weak enough to get in a passion. He had sat as still as a statue
while the Cornishman set forth his indictment, waiting to see how
completely he had failed; and now that he knew that his plot, so
deliberately laid, so patiently carried out, was only a bungling
business after all--for the man _must_ have bungled who fails so
utterly--Mr. Lowther lost his head all in a moment, and abandoned
himself to a sudden access of rage, that reduced him to the level of a
wounded tiger.
It was scarcely with Francis that he was angry. What did it matter how
this man spoke of him or thought of him? What did it matter that these
other men should hear him accused of a baseness, which was only an
intellectual improvement upon the vulgar process by which the
gentlemanly birds of prey plucked the tender plumage of their victims?
All this was nothing. It was against himself--against his own
failure--that Harcourt Lowther’s fury was raging; only like all fury of
that kind, it was ravenous for vengeance of some sort. It was only for
about twenty seconds that his claws were fastened on Francis
Tredethlyn’s throat. A Cornish heavy-weight is not exactly the kind of
person for a delicately-built Sybarite to wrestle with very
successfully.
“We are rather celebrated for this sort of thing in my county,” Mr.
Tredethlyn muttered between his set teeth, as he loosened Harcourt
Lowther’s grasp from his throat, and hurled him in a kind of bundle to a
corner of the room, where he fell crashing down amongst the ruins of a
dumb-waiter, half buried under a chaos of broken bottles and
lobster-shells.
Roderick Lowther would have sprung upon his brother’s foe in the next
minute, but the other men hustled round him and hemmed him in.
“Don’t you see the fellow’s a Hercules?” cried one of them; “let him
alone, Lowther.”
“Let me go!” roared the diplomatist; “I know my brother’s a
false-hearted rascal, but I won’t stand by and see a Lowther played at
ball with by any boor in Christendom. Let me get at him, Boystock, or I
shall hurt you.” But Francis had walked quietly to the door, and turning
with his hand upon the lock, waited for a moment’s pause in the
confusion before he spoke.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “you are witnesses that your friend attacked me. I
have no quarrel with Mr. Roderick Lowther; and as I am the bigger man of
the two, there would be no credit for either him or me in a scuffle
between us. If Harcourt Lowther wants to see me, he will be able to find
me any time this week at the Grand Hotel, Covent Garden; after this week
I shall sail for South America by the first packet that leaves
Liverpool.”
He paused a second time. There was no answer. The diplomatist had
thought better of his thirst for fraternal retribution.
“Why should I get myself into a mess about the beggar?” he thought; “he
wouldn’t see _me_ out of a scrape, I dare say.”
So Francis departed unquestioned: not to return to the Stuccoville
mansion, but to walk up Southampton Street, and across Covent Garden, to
seek a shelter in the old lodgings where he had lived so pleasantly in
his bachelor days.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXXVI.
POOR FRANK’S LETTER.
Maude shut herself in her own rooms after her interview with Francis,
and refused to see any one except Julia. She wanted some one to cling to
in her sudden distress, and was fain to throw herself upon the Irish
girl’s bosom for consolation.
Then Julia Desmond had her revenge. It was very sweet to see the woman
who had usurped the cup of prosperity once held to her own lips brought
down so low; more wretched in the midst of her wealth and grandeur than
Julia had been in her lonely attic at Bayswater, with a July sun glaring
in upon her through a curtainless window, and the drowsy voices of her
pupils droning in her ears. The pleasure that thrilled through her
breast as she held Maude Tredethlyn in her arms, and heard her declare,
amidst passionate sobs, that Francis had been false and base and wicked,
and that she was the most miserable woman in the world, was a sensation
more exquisite than Miss Desmond had ever known before. For the honour
of humanity, that wicked pleasure did not last very long. The daughter
of Patrick Macnamara Ryan O’Brien Desmond was not altogether base. Maude
was at her feet, and she was avenged. It was her rival’s insolent
happiness--happiness always _does_ seem insolent to the unhappy--that
had galled her to the quick. The two women were on a level now, and
Julia forgave her old companion.
“I told you he was a villain,” she said; and that was the only unkind
speech she uttered. After that, she was comforter, confidante, friend,
and she was almost sorry to see the endurance of Maude’s grief. “You
have your fine house and your carriages still,” she said, as the young
wife sat on the ground at her feet in the abandonment of her sorrow;
“you could never have married Francis Tredethlyn for any other reason
than the wealth he could give you. What does it matter to you whether he
is true or false? You never loved him.”
“No,” answered Maude, naïvely, “I suppose not. But it is so shameful of
him to care for anybody else. And from what Harcourt Lowther says, he
does care for that horrible person; and to leave me, Julia, day after
day, and to be--there--all the time--in a garden--smoking--looking as
much at home as if he had lived there all his life--I never can forgive
him, Julia!”
“Of course not,” Miss Desmond replied promptly; “but I don’t see that
you need make yourself so very unhappy about his conduct. You will have
a formal separation, I suppose. Your papa, or your papa’s solicitors,
will manage that, no doubt; and you will live quietly in a smaller house
than this. You will not be able to go so much into society, you know;
for it is so difficult for a woman who is separated from her husband to
escape scandal, however careful she may be,” Julia added, with
considerable satisfaction. It is so nice to sit in the dust and mingle
our sympathetic tears with those of the fallen powers who have lately
queened it over us.
Maude’s sobs redoubled.
“Society!” she exclaimed. “I hate society! Yes, it’s no use talking,
Julia. I know what you’re going to say about my going out to three
parties a night, and so on; but I don’t like it--nobody likes it. They
get into the whirlpool, and there they are. If you go to Mrs. A.’s
Thursday, you must go to Lady B.’s Friday, or you offend her; and if you
go once, you must go on going, or it seems as if you didn’t like the
people you met; and then, if you don’t ask people, you are accused of
dropping them; and if you ask strange people, you are accused of picking
them up; and if you always ask the same people, your parties are called
slow; and if you ask different people, you are called capricious. I am
so tired of the world, Julia,” sighed Mrs. Tredethlyn. “When I drive any
distance to dinner on an autumn evening, I always envy the people who
live in little villas, and drink tea at seven o’clock in pretty parlours
that I can see in the firelight. They seem _so_ happy. I never hear a
muffin-bell--don’t laugh, Julia; but there _is_ something peculiar in a
muffin-bell--without thinking how hollow my life is, compared to the
lives of the people who eat the muffins. And then I fancy that I should
have been so much happier in a pretty little cottage in St. John’s Wood,
with a tiny, tiny back-garden sloping down to the canal, and a still
tinier garden in front for Floss to bark in. I used to think sometimes,”
continued Maude dropping her voice and speaking with some slight
embarrassment, “that Francis and I would get to understand each other
better by-and-by, and that we should lead quite a Darby-and-Joan sort of
life, doing a great deal of good, and going out much less. But, of
course, that hope is quite gone now. I can never endure his society
again. I could never trust him. And oh, Julia, I did trust him so
implicitly! I had such a belief in his goodness that I despised myself
for not being better worthy of him. And to think that he should deceive
me so cruelly; that he should have been deceiving me all along, leading
a wicked life amongst wicked people for his own pleasure; when I fancied
that he was driven from his home by my indifference, and reproached
myself so bitterly for being wanting in my duty to him.”
In this strain poor Maude discoursed at intervals for some hours. Julia
was very patient, sympathetic even, in a hard kind of way; but she bore
with all her weight upon the evidence of Francis Tredethlyn’s perfidy,
and she drained the cup of her triumph to the very dregs.
It was not till the next morning that the letter which Francis had left
in the library was delivered to his wife. She was sitting in her
boudoir, with an untasted breakfast before her, and the sympathetic
Julia on the other side of the table, when her maid brought the missive,
which a housemaid had discovered at daybreak on her master’s table, two
or three hours before Mr. Tredethlyn’s valet found the little bedroom
behind the library untenanted, and perceived that his master had not
slept at home.
The Cornishman’s letter was very simply worded. Maude opened it hastily
in the hope that it might contain some justification of her husband’s
conduct. But he did not even allude to his delinquencies, and confined
himself to bidding an earnest and friendly farewell to the wife who had
never loved him. Tears of disappointment, humiliation, regret, poured
slowly down Maude’s cheeks as she read the letter. It was the first time
Francis had written to her since her marriage; and there was something
almost strange to her in the sight of his bold commercial hand, whose
accustomed regularity had been a little disturbed by the writer’s
agitation.
“MY VERY DEAR WIFE,--I write to you for the first time since it
has been my privilege to address you by that sacred name. If I
could tell you the pride and happiness I once felt in that
privilege, when first you laid your hand in mine, when first I
heard you called by my name, I should be a very different person
from what I am; and then it is possible this letter need never
have been written. I write to bid you good-bye, Maude; and I
think the best proof I can give you of my love is the proof I
give you now, when I bring my mind to the necessity of our
separation, and resign myself to the knowledge that I may never
see your face again upon this earth.
“I will not tell you how soon I discovered your
indifference--how soon another person demonstrated to me that
your feeling towards me was even something worse than
indifference; that it was dislike and contempt which I inspired
in your mind. My dense ignorance of the world, and your amiable
nature, would have prevented my making this discovery of my own
accord. But there are always plenty of those ‘good-natured
friends’ the man in the play talks about. _I found such a
friend._ If you have any curiosity upon the subject, Rosa
Grunderson, who is a good honest-hearted little girl, will tell
you the name of the man who opened my eyes to the full misery of
my position. In writing this, Maude, I have no thought of
reproach against _you_. To me you have been and always will be
something so bright and lovely as to be amenable to none of the
common laws which govern common natures. When you offered to be
my wife, you yielded to a generous impulse; and it is I who
deserve reproach for having been so base in my blind selfishness
as to accept the sacrifice you were willing to offer in
repayment of a fancied obligation. I cannot undo the past; but I
can at least set you in some manner free from the fetters you
forged for yourself under the influence of that brief
enthusiasm. So long as I live, one of the miseries of my life
will be the knowledge that I shut you out of a brighter fate;
that I deprive you of a more worthy companion; that the greatest
sacrifice I can make in atonement of the past will only make you
the lonely widow of a living husband. But I can at least rid you
of the society of a man whose presence inspires you with disgust
and loathing. O Maude, I am quoting your own words; spoken so
deliberately, so coldly, that I should be indeed mad and
cowardly, were I to shrink from accepting them in their fullest
import. I might have doubted until to-night; I might have hugged
myself with the notion that a liar and a scoundrel, for his own
base purposes, had taught me to think myself despised and
disliked; but your own lips have spoken, and I can doubt no
longer. Oh, my darling, my pet, my beloved, this seems so like a
reproach; but it is not, it is _not_.
“I am going to South America. When you read this, my
preparations will no doubt have begun. If possible, I shall sail
immediately. Of all the men who ever left England for that fiery
young world out yonder, there was never, perhaps, any one better
adapted to be happy and successful there than I am. I bid
good-bye for ever to the idle dissipations, the drunken orgies
in which I have sometimes found distraction, but never
happiness. And I begin a new life in a new field of labour. My
uncle’s money has been the root of all my misery, and I shall
take very little of that useless gold to the other shore. I
don’t think I was ever guilty of any great folly while I was a
poor man; but since I have been a rich one, my life has seemed
one long mistake.
“I write so much about myself and my own plans because I do not
want the memory of me, or of any sorrow which I may feel in this
parting, to cloud the brightness of your future; and I
understand your generous nature well enough to know that you
will be happier if you can believe that I am happy. O Maude, if
you could know how anxious I am that the life before you should
be a bright and happy one, you might almost forgive me for the
pain my selfish folly has inflicted upon you! My poor,
generous-hearted girl! my innocent darling! you thought it was
so light a thing to link your life to the life of a man whom you
could not love; and you have borne your burden so quietly. I
cannot release you from the chain that binds you to me, but I
will do my best to make that chain a light one. And, for the
rest, I go to a country in which life and death walk hand in
hand together. I take with me all an ignorant man’s love of
adventure, a soldier’s indifference to danger. Wear your chain
patiently, darling,--you may not have to wear it long. But one
word of warning from the man who has loved you so foolishly,
and, until this night, so selfishly. You have married hastily
once. Weigh well what you do if ever you marry again. If you
accepted for your husband an ignorant West-country boor when you
married me, I was at least an honest man. If I die, Maude, and
you are free to make a second marriage, be sure that the husband
of your choice has something of your own noble character; as
well as some smattering of the accomplishments that please you,
and the tricky jargon about art and literature which passes for
cleverness. I was anxious once to make myself a gentleman for
your sake, Maude; and when we have been visiting together, I
have listened to the men’s talk, for I wanted to find out how it
was done; and you could never guess how spurious some of that
brilliant conversation sounds to a man who _only_ listens. I
used to read some of your Mudie books in my own room sometimes
of a morning,--Froude, and Carlyle, Burton, Barth, and so on;
and I’ve heard men laying down the law about them at night, and
I have known from their talk that they hadn’t read a page of the
book itself, and were only airing the second-hand opinions
picked up out of a review.
“I saw you shudder once, Maude, because I didn’t know it was the
right thing to say ‘Barkley Square;’ and pronounced the word as
it is spelt. But oh, what bosh I’ve heard the Barkley-Squarers
talk sometimes about things I do understand! I’ve heard a man at
a dinner-party hold forth about our convict system sometimes,
and transportation, and Van Diemen’s Land, till I’ve been
inclined to get up and do something to him with a carving-knife;
and oh, the self-satisfied manner of the creature, and the way
he has lifted his eyebrows and looked at _me_, if I ventured to
express any opinion upon the subject! In South America there may
be fever and disease, perhaps--privation, danger; but there will
be no Barkley Square. I may meet with Aztecs, who may maltreat
or even assassinate me; but they won’t have little bits of glass
that they can’t see through to hitch into their eyes whenever I
speak to them. And they won’t lift their eyebrows and begin to
whisper about me the moment I enter a room. And I shall never
hear them say, ‘Oh, the _rich_ Tredethlyn, is it? Gad, what a
clodhopper!’
“Why do I write about these things, Maude, when I am writing to
bid you good-bye for ever? Only because I want you to believe
there is _something_ wanting even in the perfect world in which
you live. If my death should set you free in your youth, marry
again, dear, by all means; but marry a man whose truth and
loyalty have been proved by a life of unblemished honour; marry
a man who has set his mark upon the age--who has _done
something_; for such a man is scarcely likely to be a scoundrel.
Above all, darling, accept my warning against _one_ man: _do not
marry Harcourt Lowther_.
“All the privileges that you have enjoyed during your bondage
you shall retain in your freedom. Before sailing, I shall make
my will, in which you will be left residuary legatee, and
recipient of the bulk of my fortune. While I live, your income
will be large enough to support the style in which you have
lived during the past year; and there will be a wide margin left
for the indulgence of every impulse of your generous heart. I
shall place full directions as to the management of my fortune
in the hands of my solicitors, Messrs. Kursdale and Scardon; and
they will call on you by my direction to explain your position
immediately after receiving my instructions. You will find
yourself the mistress of the larger part of the income derived
from my late uncle’s investments and from the Cornish estate,
and you will have no further trouble than to sign your name now
and then, when the lawyers want you to do so. In the interim I
enclose a cheque for £500, so that you may not be without ready
money. Your father’s affairs are now, he tells me, in a very
easy state, and I do not leave him in troubled water. He may
consider you his creditor for the interest of the thirty
thousand sunk in his business; and I don’t suppose he will find
you a very importunate one.
“And now good-bye indeed. I leave you with all confidence in
your noble heart, your high principles. You are too good and
pure to be otherwise than happy. Far away on the Pampas, lying
under canvas, with the long silvery trail of the moonlight on
the grey expanse beyond my tent, the whisper of faint winds
among the long grasses sounding in my ears, I shall think of
you, and see you happy in the old English garden at Twickenham,
loitering on the terrace by your father’s side. In that
trackless loneliness, fever-parched perhaps, and far away from
the chance of water, I shall think of the blue English river,
but _never_ think of it without seeing your image standing by
the tide, your bright face reflected in the glassy stream. Oh,
Maude, I have loved you so dearly, so fondly! and now that it
comes to saying good-bye, it seems almost as difficult to tear
myself from this lifeless sheet of paper, as it would be to take
my lips away from yours in a last long kiss. My pet, my darling,
God bless you, and good-bye! Think of me sometimes; but never
with pain. Some midnight, when you are waltzing in a crowded
ball-room, with a brazen band braying in your ears, and the hum
of a hundred voices round about you, think that in some savage
wilderness a man is kneeling under God’s blue sky, praying for
you as few people are prayed for on this earth; think sometimes,
if a special peace comes down upon you, like the cool shadow we
have watched drop slowly upon the river when the sun was down,
think, darling, that I am saying, ‘God keep and guard her safely
through the night! God fill her heart with peace and gladness,
whether she sleeps or wakes!’
“And so, my own dear wife, for the first and last time in my
life, I sign myself your true and loyal husband,
“FRANCIS TREDETHLYN.”
Julia had fluttered out of the room and into the little conservatory,
where there were always faded leaves to be snipped off, or bird-cages to
be replenished with fresh water. Miss Desmond, in her darkest mood, was
too much a lady to sit by and stare while Maude possessed herself of the
contents of her husband’s letter. She lingered among the twittering
canary-birds and sprawling ferns so long as she considered that delicacy
demanded she should be absent, and then she strolled back to the
breakfast-table with a look of supreme unconsciousness. But she gave a
little scream as she glanced across the table at Mrs. Tredethlyn, and
flew to the bell. Maude had finished her letter, which lay in scattered
sheets at her feet, and she had fallen back upon the sofa-pillows in a
dead faint.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXXVII.
ELEANOR DROPS IN UPON ROSAMOND.
It is strange what virtues we are apt to discover in the thing we have
lost. After recovering from her fainting-fit, Maude Tredethlyn wept as
bitterly for the loss of her husband as if he had been the first choice
of her maiden heart. A young lady told Mr. de Quincey that, being on the
point of drowning, she saw in one instant her whole life exhibited
before her in its minutest details, like a vast picture;--and so the
young wife, reading her husband’s solemn farewell, beheld in a moment
the picture of her courtship and married life, and saw how good he had
been to her. Yes, in that one moment a thousand instances--such trifling
instances, some of them--of his goodness and devotion, his enduring
love, his patient self-abnegation, flashed upon her, and her heart smote
her with a bitter anguish as she perceived her own unworthiness.
“I had no right to take his love as I take the love of my dogs,” she
thought; “giving him nothing in return for his devotion.” At first, as
she read her husband’s epistle, she smiled at his talk of leaving her,
and thought how easy a thing it would be to lay her hand upon his
shoulder and draw him down to his old place at her feet. She forgot all
about the cottage at Petersham when she thought this. And then, as she
read farther and farther, she recognized the solemn meaning of the
letter, and felt that it was indeed a farewell. Then a sudden mist came
between her and the page; all the machinery in London seemed buzzing and
booming in her ears; and she fell back amongst the downy cushion, whiter
than the pure ground of the rosebud chintz which Harcourt Lowther had
selected for the upholstery of her nest.
She recovered very quickly under the influence of half a bottle of
toilet-vinegar; and then there were more confidences to be poured into
Julia’s ear, when the maid, who was so sympathetic, and so ravenously
eager to know why her mistress had fainted, was fairly out of the room.
Maude read Julia little bits of the letter, leaving off every now and
then to demand pathetically _what_ she was to do.
“He surely c-c-couldn’t write like that, Julia, if he were what Harcourt
Lowther says he is,” sobbed Mrs. Tredethlyn. “He says I spoke to him
coldly and deliberately. Oh, if he could only know what a passion I was
in! There must be some horrible mistake; and if there is, what a wretch
I must have seemed to him last night! Julia, advise me! give me some
help! My husband must not go to America. There is a whole week for me to
act in. What am I to do?”
“How _can_ I advise you?” asked Julia. “I am so entirely in the
dark--and you too. If Mr. Tredethlyn had given you _any_ explanation of
his presence at that strange house, domiciled so familiarly with that
strange woman, you might accept it--if you could--and believe him. But
he does not even attempt to explain or to justify his conduct. He passes
it over in a manner which, I must confess, seems very ominous. To me,
Maude, his silence is a tacit confession of his guilt.”
Poor Maude turned the leaves of her husband’s letter, and looked
wistfully at the blotted pages. If she could have only found some brief
explanation of that Petersham business anywhere--in a postscript--a
parenthesis! But there was none; and Mrs. Tredethlyn put the epistle
into her pocket, and looked at Julia with a very rueful countenance.
Unluckily, she forgot that she had brought no specific charge against
her husband, but had only attacked him in that vaguely denunciatory
manner which is so essentially feminine.
“What a child she is!” thought Miss Desmond, as she watched her friend’s
tear-blotted face and quivering lip. “If _I_ had a pair of high-stepping
ponies to drive in the Park, and a couple of grooms to sit behind me, I
would demand no explanation of my husband’s absences, though he were to
stay away from me for ten years at a stretch.”
But it was the very reverse of this convenient code of morality to which
Julia gave utterance presently, when she spoke to Maude.
“You ask me for my advice,” she said. “If I am to give it frankly, I
must own that in your place I would not touch Mr. Tredethlyn’s hand in
friendship until he had accounted fully and conclusively for his
presence in that garden yesterday. I would permit no reservations on the
part of my husband; and I should be inclined to think that a secret kept
from me was only another name for a wrong done to me.”
Maude was silent for some minutes, wiping the tears from her face, and
trying to escape from the demonstrative sympathy of a Skye terrier, who
had been frantic at the sight of his mistress’s distress; and then she
exclaimed, with sudden energy that almost startled Miss Desmond,--
“Yes, I will take your advice, Julia; and Francis _shall_ explain
himself--as--as I’m sure he can.”
This was a challenge which Julia was too wise to take up; for she saw
that the wind had set violently in Francis Tredethlyn’s favour since
Maude’s perusal of his letter.
“I will insist upon an explanation from my husband; but before seeing
him I will do what I should have done yesterday. I will go to that
cottage at Petersham, and _see_ the lady who was sitting in the garden
with Francis yesterday afternoon. It is my right as a wife to know my
husband’s friends.”
“You will see the--person,” exclaimed Julia, on the tips of her lips, as
the French say.
“I will.”
“Well, perhaps, after all, it is not a bad plan,” answered Miss Desmond,
after a pause. “And if you _do_ see that person, I dare say you will
hear something unpleasant,” she thought: “it is only fair there should
be some counterbalance to your grooms and ponies, even beyond Pickford’s
vans, and the sharp corner in Dean Street, Park Lane.”
“Julia, you will go with me?” asked Maude, putting down her Skye
terrier. “No, Floss, not to-day. Oh, I wonder whether _you_ were ever
married, and had this sort of thing to go through!--You’ll go to
Petersham with me, won’t you, Julia dear?”
“Of course I will,” answered Miss Desmond promptly; “it is a part of my
_métier_. But how do you mean to go?”
“Oh, we’ll drive.”
“Your ponies?” asked Julia, spitefully.
The “steppers” were a late acquisition. Maude’s childish cry of rapture
at the sight of the Countess of Zarborough’s equipage had sent Francis
off to Tattersall’s to bid for a pair of black ponies that Harcourt
Lowther and his set had pronounced “clippers.” You see an ignorant man’s
love is such a vulgar passion that it will express itself in this sordid
way.
“Oh, Julia,” cried Maude, “how _could_ you? As if I would drive those
frivolous ponies with a frivolous parasol fastened to my whip, and those
two listening grooms behind me, when my heart is almost broken by
Frank’s conduct.”
“Then you will go in the barouche?”
“Yes, and I can leave the carriage some distance from the house,” Maude
answered, with her hand upon the bell; “and we’ll go at once, Julia
dear,--if you’re sure you’ve finished breakfast,” added Mrs. Tredethlyn,
looking piteously at the cup of stagnant chocolate and unbroken roll,
which bore witness to her own incapacity to eat or drink.
Of course Julia declared that she had breakfasted--as completely as a
companion had any right to breakfast, she inferred by her manner; so the
two ladies adjourned to their apartments. Mrs. Tredethlyn found her maid
in her dressing-room, oppressed by such tender anxieties with regard to
the adjustment of Maude’s bonnet and shawl, that she was not to be
shaken off till her mistress stepped into the barouche, and even then
contrived to be the medium of communication with the coachman, to the
setting aside of a stolid Jeames, who was so utterly weary of life in
general as not even to be often interested in other people’s business.
The confidante in white muslin is apt to have a hard time of it when
Tilburina’s affairs go badly; but Julia endured her burden with sublime
patience. Maude, bewailing the inconstancy of her husband one moment,
and lauding his devotion in the next, might now and then degenerate into
an inconsistent bore; but, at the worst, she was more endurable than
Maude insolently happy,--a radiant floating creature, all lace flounces
and gauzy sleeves, like one of Mr. Buckner’s portraits. Julia enacted
her part of confidante very creditably during the drive from Stuccoville
to Petersham, and submitted graciously to be left in the carriage, in a
shady curve of the winding road, with the Skye terriers and the last new
novel to keep her company, while Mrs. Tredethlyn went alone to face her
rival.
Perhaps Maude’s heart sank just a little with something akin to fear, as
she tripped along the dusty road in dainty high-heeled boots and
flounced petticoats, whose embroideries flickered to and fro in shadowy
arabesques upon the sunlit ground. She was not at all strong-minded.
Imagine Waller’s Sacharissa stepping out of her coach in Eastchepe, with
a negro page behind her, and one of the Duchess of Portsmouth’s
favourite spaniels nestling in the perfumed lining of her muff, bent
upon a visit to a money-lender; or Pope’s Belinda alighting from her
sedan to attend a meeting of creditors. Imagine anything that is
incongruous, or absurd, or impossible, and it will be scarcely more out
of keeping than this picture of Maude Tredethlyn going alone to meet her
rival, under the shelter of a point-lace parasol. And yet this injured
young wife was as sincerely miserable as if she had worn sackcloth and
ashes, or the sombre draperies which Miss Bateman has made so familiar
to us in her impersonation of the jilted Leah.
Mrs. Tredethlyn went straight to the cottage with the old-fashioned iron
gate and the ivy-bordered wall. A womanly instinct guided her, as by a
kind of inspiration, to the spot where she had seen her husband so much
at home with a nameless and unknown creature. An air of prim
respectability pervaded the place, which Maude inspected as she waited
for admission, and peered inquisitively through the iron scroll-work.
There were none of the rose-coloured curtains and china flower-stands,
the yelping lap-dogs and twittering birds, which Mrs. Tredethlyn had
been taught to associate with those inhabitants of an outer world, in
whom she perceived only overdone imitations of herself. Everything here
had a prim countrified prettiness of its own; and looking across the
smooth lawn, Maude saw a slender girlish figure in a cotton dress
bending over a flower-bed, while a little boy stood by with a tiny
watering-pot, whose contents he dribbled industriously over his own
toes.
Maude’s summons was responded to by an elderly woman in black. She was
very grim and stern, as people who dote upon small children usually are;
and she was no other than the eminently respectable person at Chelsea,
who wore rusty bombazine in mourning for the better days which lay far
back in some remote period beyond the memory of her oldest acquaintance.
This person carried Maude’s card to the lady in the cotton dress, and
then swooped down upon the little boy with the watering-pot, and carried
him away struggling.
Maude, still without the citadel, watched the girlish face as it bent
over her card. She expected astonishment, confusion, defiance,--anything
except what she saw, which was a half-pleased smile, a look of
hesitation, and then a little glance towards the gate, and a cry of
remonstrance to the elderly person now invisible.
“Oh, Mrs. Clinnock, how could you leave that lady outside? The key! ah,
I see it’s in the gate.” Maude’s fancied rival had crossed the little
lawn by this time, and Rosamond was only separated from Eleanor by the
iron scroll-work. “Dear Mrs. Tredethlyn, how very rude you must think my
nurse! But so many people have called, out of mere curiosity I am sure,
and I am so afraid of strangers--Francis knows that--for he knows how
often he has begged me to see you; and it was only yesterday that I gave
way, and said he might tell you all about me. But I didn’t think you
would come so soon,” said Rosamond, with sudden tears welling up to her
innocent brown eyes. She had opened the gate and admitted Maude while
she talked, and the two women were now standing face to face.
Mrs. Tredethlyn’s mystification was depicted upon her countenance, which
at first expressed only her complete bewilderment; then a chilling
expression came over her face, a scornful smile curved her lip, and she
looked at her rival with her head poised as haughtily as ever Eleanor’s
could have been when she offered Lord Clifford’s daughter that agreeable
choice between the bowl and the dagger.
“Oh, I see,” she thought; “this person is trying to disarm my suspicions
by her cool impertinence.”
“It was so kind of you to come,” murmured Rosamond, timidly. She was
beginning to feel rather afraid of this haughty lady, who made no
response to her warm greeting. “I did not think that I should see you so
soon.”
“No, I dare say not,” answered Mrs. Tredethlyn; “I should scarcely
imagine that you expected to see me at all.”
Rosamond, otherwise Susan, clasped her hands and flushed crimson to the
roots of her hair.
“Ah, then, you too are unkind, like my father,” she cried piteously.
“You do not believe what Francis told you.”
Maude was almost too indignant to remark that piteous accent. It was not
a gentle creature in distress that she saw. Jealousy looks through a
medium that distorts the simplest objects into evil and threatening
shapes. Mrs. Tredethlyn imagined that she beheld a shameless
adventuress, who sought to disarm her justifiable suspicions by social
histrionics.
“By what right do you call my husband by his Christian name?” she asked,
indignantly.
“By what right!” stammered Susan, alarmed by the angry tones in which
the question had been asked. “What else should I call him? I have called
him Francis all my life, except when we were children, and then I called
him Frank. Oh, he has been so good to me, Mrs. Tredethlyn! and he knows
that the marriage was a real one. Oh, pray, pray don’t look so coldly at
me! don’t doubt my word and his. I am as true and pure a wife as you
are, though I have no husband’s arm to lean upon, though even the name
my husband gave me may be a false one.”
Maude stared at the earnest face in new bewilderment. Not even jealousy
could distort the expression of that face into anything but innocence.
“What does it all mean?” she cried at last; “who and what are you?”
“Susan Turner, Oliver Tredethlyn’s daughter and Francis Tredethlyn’s
cousin,” answered Susan, considerably puzzled in her turn; “who else
could you suppose me to be, Mrs. Tredethlyn? Surely Francis told you all
about me, or you could never have known where to find me.”
“No, he told me nothing,” exclaimed Maude; and then she pounced suddenly
upon poor astonished Susy, and kissed her as she had never in all her
life kissed any one before.
“Oh, you dear!” she cried; “oh, you darling! To think that you should be
only his cousin after all, when I thought that--when I was wicked enough
to think----”
Mrs. Tredethlyn did not say what she had thought, but bestowed another
shower of kisses upon Susan.
“You pet!” she exclaimed; “and to think that I should never guess you
were his cousin; and that he should never tell me, the silly fellow! And
he let me go on at him too last night as if he had committed all sorts
of crimes, and did not even deny them. And you are like him too. Yes,
I’m sure you are; there’s an expression about the eyes. Yes, there
really is. Oh, how dearly I shall love you! I remember Francis speaking
of you once; but he was very reserved upon the subject, and I did not
like to question him. And so you really are his uncle Oliver’s daughter!
then we are cousins, you know, dear; almost sisters--and I never had a
sister--or even a friend who was _quite_ like a sister,” added Maude,
with a remorseful recollection of Miss Desmond waiting in the carriage.
She could have run on for an hour at a stretch, in her delight at the
discovery that her husband was not a villain. The two women walked up
and down the lawn together, while Susan related all her sad little
history, and received Maude’s tender assurances of sympathy and love.
Mrs. Tredethlyn was told how good her husband had been to his friendless
cousin; and was pleased to dwell fondly on the story of Frank’s
kindness, his selection of that pretty house, his purchase of the
furniture, and, above all, his goodness to the little boy.
Maude wanted Susan to go straight home with her in the carriage; but the
Cornish girl clung to her sheltered home, and the iron gate that
screened her from intrusive strangers.
“I am not used to the people amongst whom you live,” she said; “it is
very kind of you to wish to take me--but I could never be happy amongst
strangers; and Robert and I are _so_ happy here.”
“And I came to break in upon your happiness like a horrible jealous
fury,” cried Maude; “but you see good has come out of evil; for now we
have met, we shall love each other dearly always, shan’t we, Susan? Call
me Maude, please. And oh, my dear Susan, I have all sorts of troubles
still to go through; for Frank was so offended by what I said last
night, that he has written me a dreadful letter, in which he says he
means to sail for America directly. But of course he won’t. He never
could leave me like that, could he, dear? And when I leave you, I shall
drive straight home; and if he hasn’t been home, I shall go on to his
solicitors, Messrs. Something and Something, Gray’s Inn,--I shall know
their names when I see them in the Directory,--and of course they’ll
know his address wherever he is; and I shall go to him, and ask him to
forgive me for having behaved so badly, and to-morrow he and I will come
together, Susan. And now kiss me once more, dear, and _au revoir_; for I
have a friend waiting for me in the carriage a little way off; and if
her book doesn’t happen to be interesting, I’m afraid she’ll be cross,
for I am sure I must have been an unconscionable time.”
There was a little embrace, and then Susan opened the gate and Maude
tripped away. The vulgar gravel seemed like empyreal air under her
high-heeled boots this time; so changed were her feelings since she had
discovered how deeply she had wronged her husband by the shapeless
jealousies that Harcourt Lowther had inspired in her breast.
Julia looked with astonishment at her friend’s altered countenance as
Maude apologized for the length of her absence, while the _blasé_
footman let down the steps; she was still more astonished when the
carriage drove townwards, and Maude gushed into French, to the
discomfiture of the footman, who had a habit of looking behind him for
imaginary vehicles when his mistress’s conversation happened to interest
him.
In French, Maude informed Julia that the mythic rival had melted into a
“little cousin,” who was “all that there is of the most charming,” “an
all young girl,” “a candid angel,” whom Mrs. Tredethlyn was ready to
take to her heart forthwith. Julia found it a great deal harder to
sympathize with Maude’s happiness than with her misery.
But the happiness did not last very long; for on inquiry at Stuccoville,
Maude found that her husband had not been home; and on penetrating
Holborn-wards to Gray’s Inn, to the disgust of the languid footman, she
met with a second disappointment in the offices of Messrs. Kursdale and
Scardon, who had heard nothing of the absent Mr. Tredethlyn. After this
Maude drove homewards with a very sad countenance, and was glad to
shrink from even Julia’s sympathy, and to hide herself in her own rooms,
where she paced disconsolately to and fro, listening for the crunching
wheels, and banging door of a hansom cab, and stopping every now and
then to look hopelessly out into the monotonous street.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
GONE.
All through the dreary day, and far into the still more dreary night,
Maude Tredethlyn waited and listened for her husband’s coming. She could
not believe that he would hold to the purpose so earnestly expressed in
his letter. His resolution had no doubt been fixed as the Monument
itself while he wrote, for he had written immediately after his wife’s
unjustifiable denunciation of him; but surely long before the time came
for action Francis Tredethlyn’s purpose would waver, and the faithful
slave would come back to his place at the feet of his mistress. In any
case he would surely seek some explanation of Maude’s anger.
“He never could be so cruel as to leave me because of a few foolish
words,” thought Mrs. Tredethlyn; “he could not be so unjust as not to
give me the opportunity of explaining myself.”
But on reading Francis Tredethlyn’s letter for the third or fourth time,
Maude discovered how complete the estrangement was that had divided her
from her husband. The indignant reproaches inspired by unreasoning
jealousy had been received by Francis as the deliberate utterance of a
contemptuous dislike that had reached a point at which it could no
longer be hidden under the mask of fashionable indifference. Mrs.
Tredethlyn perceived, as she read that mournful letter, that, in her
conduct of the previous night, her husband had only seen the miserable
climax of his married life. He beheld, as he fancied, his wife’s silent
scorn transformed all at once into passionate reproach; and the proud
spirit which breathes in all simple natures had asserted itself in the
farewell letter which Maude read through a mist of tears.
“He thinks I married him for his money, and that I have disliked and
despised him,” she thought sadly. “Ah, if he could know how often I have
reproached myself for being unworthy of his devotion,--if he could know
how my heart has sunk day by day as I have seen the breach grow wider
between us! I fancied that I had lost his love, and yet this letter is
full of the old devotion.”
Maude awoke from the brief morning slumber that generally succeeds a
sleepless night to a second day of suspense. She did not talk to Julia
of her troubles now. They were growing too serious for feminine
discussion or friendly sympathy. Mrs. Tredethlyn shut herself in her own
rooms, and would see no one. She pleaded a headache, and the plea was no
empty excuse; for when her all-absorbing anxieties permitted her to
remember the existence of her head, she knew that it ached with a dull
heavy pain which all the eau-de-Cologne in her dressing-case could not
assuage. She roamed hopelessly to and fro between her bedroom and
dressing-room, and failed most utterly in her attempt to hide her
distress from the omniscient eye of her maid.
The second day passed, and there was no Francis. In the evening Maude
despatched a messenger to Mr. Kursdale with a note of inquiry about
Francis: had his solicitors heard or seen anything of him; and so on.
The messenger was to wait an answer. But as old-established solicitors
do not usually reside in Gray’s Inn, the messenger found only darkness
and stout oaken doors when he obeyed his mistress’s behest. Maude wrote
another letter that evening, addressed to Harcourt Lowther, and
containing only these few lines, hurriedly written and with all the
important words underlined:
“DEAR MR. LOWTHER,--Have you seen my husband since the day
before yesterday? He _left home_ on Tuesday night, and I have
_not seen him since_. I am _terribly_ anxious about him. I have
_been to Petersham_, and have _seen the lady_. We were _quite
wrong_ about her, and I am _ashamed_ of myself for having been
_so foolish_. She is a _near relation_ of Frank’s; and his
conduct to her has been _most noble_. Pray find him
_immediately_, if possible, and show him this letter.
“Yours sincerely,
“M.T.
“_Thursday night._”
A pleasant letter this for Harcourt Lowther to receive the next day, as
he lay helpless on the lodging-house sofa, with his head and face sadly
dilapidated by the effects of his fall under a shower of broken
wine-glasses and cruets.
He groaned aloud as he read Maude’s missive.
“Is there any possibility of comprehending a woman’s tactics?” he
muttered. “She writes as if this boor were an idolized husband. Is it
all hypocrisy--or what? So the bubble of jealousy has burst, and the
young person at the Petersham cottage _is_ a cousin, after all; and
Francis has kicked up his heels; and I lie here as miserably bruised and
battered as if I had just been beaten in a fight for the championship,
at the very time when I most want to be up and astir.”
Yes, Mr. Lowther was a prisoner. He had been seriously shaken by the
scuffle with Francis, and had been in the doctor’s hands since the
unpleasant termination of his supper-party. But this was not the worst.
It was the disfigurement of his handsome face which Harcourt took most
deeply to heart. A black eye or a scarred forehead will keep a man as
close a captive as a warrant of committal to the Tower. At the very
moment when the sudden entanglement of his web threatened to render all
past efforts useless, when the schemer had most need of his dexterity,
Harcourt Lowther found himself an unpresentable object, and knew that he
must spend dreary weeks of seclusion before he dared emerge into the
world once more, and take up the disordered threads which he still hoped
to weave into a harmonious network. Imagine Paris, with all his plans
laid for the abduction of Helen, brought suddenly to a standstill by a
score of vulgar cuts and bruises, the sight of any one of which might
have restored the lady to a sense of her duty. Harcourt Lowther, with
his face bandaged, felt himself a contemptible creature, a modern Samson
without the glorious remnant of a Samson’s strength. For the first time
in his life the fine gentleman discovered how much he depended on his
handsome face, and what a lost wretch he would be without it.
He felt a savage rage against Roderick, who strolled in and out of the
room half the morning, dressing and breakfasting by instalments,
smoking, and writing letters, and crackling the daily papers, as it
seemed to Harcourt, more persistently than newspapers were ever crackled
before. _He_ was free to sally forth after his careful toilet, while his
junior lay on that rickety sofa as furious in his wretched helplessness
as some wounded hyena. Roderick had volunteered to call upon Francis at
the Covent Garden hotel, to demand a reckoning for the scuffle at the
supper-party; but Harcourt declined the friendly offer.
“As soon as I can leave the house, I will go to him myself,” he said.
“The fellow’s talk about going abroad is all bombast, I dare say. He
will be sneaking back to his wife’s apron-string now that I am laid by
the heels.”
When Harcourt had read Maude’s letter, he tossed it over to his brother.
“Do you know how to reckon that up?” he asked. “What does it mean?”
Mr. Lowther the elder had by no means a high estimate of the female
character. In his idea of the sex, the woman who was not a profound
simpleton was only something very much worse than a simpleton.
“The fellow has _not_ gone back to his wife; so that’s one point in your
favour, at any rate,” said Roderick, after reading Maude’s epistle. “I
dare say he’ll go altogether to the bad now, at a railroad pace, and
finish himself off before the year is out. The lady’s anxious inquiries
about her husband may be read in more ways than one. This letter _may_
be only intended to put _you_ _au courant_ as to the state of affairs.
Unluckily, that ugly scar about your nose will prevent your calling on
Mrs. Tredethlyn for some weeks. But I don’t mind being brotherly for
once in a way; and I’ll look in at the Stuccoville mansion this
afternoon, if you like. Virtue is sometimes rewarded, and there is just
a chance that I may see the lovely Grunderson, and improve the
occasion.”
Harcourt, after a little deliberation, consented to this arrangement.
His confidence in the honour of his brother was about as small as it
could be; but as the interests of the two Antipholi were in this
instance not antagonistic, he could scarcely have anything to fear from
Roderick’s intervention.
“You can tell Mrs. Tredethlyn that I am seriously ill,” he said, when
his brother was leaving him. “If you could drop a hint or two about a
rapid decline--a secret sorrow undermining a constitution that was
originally delicate--the sword and the scabbard, and so on, it would
only be friendly to do so. Of course I have seen nothing of Francis
since Tuesday, which is perfectly true; only you need say nothing of
Tuesday night--curse him!” muttered Harcourt, with a lively recollection
of the wounds inflicted by a broken vinegar-cruet, and the pernicious
effects of the adulterated vinegar, as exhibited in his inflamed eyes.
“You can take care to let Mrs. Tredethlyn understand that her husband
has returned to his old haunts and his old companions; and that any
anxiety she may be so absurd as to feel about him is wasted upon a
person who would be the first to laugh at her folly.”
“Dear boy, I have not served my country for nothing,” answered the
diplomatist. “You may trust in my discretion and in my power to make the
best of an opportunity. The people who plan a conversation beforehand
never are able to talk according to their programme. The other party
doesn’t give the necessary cues. The man who trusts to the inspiration
of the moment never makes a failure. The divine _afflatus_ is always
right; but you can’t pump the sacred wind into a man with vulgar
bellows. It comes, dear boy; and it will come to your humble servant, I
have no doubt. I shall dine at the St. James’s, and I’ve two or three
places to go to in the evening; so I leave you to your reflections and
the goulard-water. Adieu!”
The diplomatist had no opportunity of serving his brother by any
sentimental hints about secret sorrows and mortal illness; for Maude
sent Julia Desmond to receive her visitor, and to hear anything he might
have to say about Francis. Mrs. Tredethlyn would see no one and would go
nowhere. Julia had been busy all the morning writing excuses to people
whose invitations had been accepted. Miss Grunderson had called, and had
sent up pencilled supplications upon the backs of cards, imploring her
dear Mrs. Tredethlyn to see her, if only for a few minutes; but Maude
had been inexorable. There are sorrows which friendship is powerless to
soothe; and in the time of such sorrow noisy friendship is above all
things intolerable. Maude shuddered as she thought of Miss Grunderson’s
warm paws and schoolgirl endearments; so Rosa was sent away
disconsolate.
Roderick Lowther would have been very well contented to loiter in Mrs.
Tredethlyn’s morning-room talking to Julia, whose half-haughty,
half-defiant manner had a wonderful fascination for him; but that young
lady gave him no opportunity of dawdling. She had seen his tactics with
regard to Miss Grunderson, and took care to let him know that she
understood his diplomacy; but she listened to all his insinuations
against Francis, and he saw her eyes brighten as he uttered them.
“She will convey my hints to Mrs. Tredethlyn,” thought the diplomatist,
“and they won’t lose by her interpretation; so I’ve done that fellow a
service, and wasted my morning, since Miss Grunderson is not to be
seen.”
But on leaving Julia Mr. Lowther decided on speculating a call upon
Rosa’s papa. There was always the chance of seeing the young lady; and
as Mrs. Tredethlyn’s house could no longer afford a platform for the
carrying out of Roderick’s matrimonial schemes, it was absolutely
necessary that he should try a bold stroke and advance matters. He had
ascertained Rosa’s address, and had no difficulty in finding the
Grunderson mansion, which was close at hand. He was not very certain
about the number of the house, but selected it unhesitatingly from its
fellows for the vivid greenness of its blinds, and the intense newness
which pervaded every object that was visible through unshrouded windows
of plate-glass. The Grunderson mansion bared its inner splendours
unflinchingly to the eyes of the passer-by; and Mr. Grunderson’s
dining-room, superb in pollard oak, and with the Grunderson arms blazing
on the scarlet morocco backs of the chairs, revealed itself to the very
core of its heart to every butterman’s apprentice or butcher’s boy who
brought his wares to the area-gate. Thus Roderick Lowther found it very
difficult not to make his perception of Mr. Grunderson, seated at the
head of his table with a substantial luncheon before him, unpleasantly
palpable while he rang the visitors’ bell. Fortune favoured the
diplomatist, for the hospitable millionaire insisted on his being
ushered into the dining-room; very much to the discomfiture of Rosa, who
was partaking of an unfashionable plate of underdone beef from the
sirloin before her papa, and who had a big bottle containing some yellow
compound in the way of pickle, and ornamented by a blazing label, on her
right hand, and an imperial pint of Guinness’s stout on her left. The
stout and the embarrassment produced by Mr. Lowther’s appearance
combined to dye Rosa’s cheeks with a very vivid carnation; but the
diplomatist would have been less than a diplomatist if he had not
appeared supremely unconscious of the two bottles and the underdone
beef.
“Sit ye down, Mr. Lowther, and make yourself at home,” exclaimed the
hospitable Mr. Grunderson. “A knife and fork for this gentleman, Thomas;
and look sharp about it. You’ll find this here as fine a bit of beef as
ever was cut from an Aberdeen bullock; and there ain’t no bullocks equal
to a Scotch short-horn, go where you will. Let me give you a slice out
of the alderman’s walk, which was a name my father always gave to the
undercut; and a very good father he was too, though he never thought of
my sittin’ down to table upon the very spot where he built hisself a
tool-house forty year ago, when you couldn’t have got six pound an acre
per annum for any ground about here. There’s a pigeon-pie at the other
end of the table, and there’s some of your foreign kickshaws,--cutlets a
la curlpapers, and mutton-chops a la smashed potato, _I_ call ’em; for
I’m not a young man, Mr. Lowther, and I can’t remember your _soubeeses_,
and your _maintenongs_, and your _jardineers_, and so on, as my daughter
can. We don’t have the men to wait at lunch, for my daughter says it
isn’t manners; and I’m very glad it ain’t, for I can’t say I enjoy my
meals when I have to take ’em with a couple of fellows shoving
vegetable-dishes and sauce-boats at me every two minutes, and never
shoving the right ones; for I’m blest if I ever knew ’em yet to shove me
the cucumber before I’d half finished my salmon, though they do call
themselves experienced servants. Howsomedever, if we must dine ally
Rousse, and wrap our mutton-chops in greasy paper and call ’em
maintennong, we must, and there’s an end of it; but I don’t mind
confessing to you, Mr. Lowther, that this is the time I make _my_
dinner, and it’s no use frowning at me, Rosa, for I don’t care who knows
it.”
Mr. Lowther, whose luncheon generally consisted of a glass of
seltzer-and-sherry and one small biscuit, escaped the infliction of one
of Mr. Grunderson’s plates of beef by a judicious manœuvre, and helped
himself to a morsel of pigeon-pie. But before doing so, he allowed his
eyes to wander about the walls in contemplation of some impossible
conglomerations of brown rockery and soapsud sky, which Mr. Grunderson
called his Sallivaters; and thus gave Rosa time to dismiss her bottles
and her plate, and to recover from her embarrassment.
After this everything went very smoothly. Mr. Grunderson expanded under
the influence of bottled stout and Madeira, and was very loquacious; but
sinking presently into a rather stertorous slumber, which he called
forty winks, and which generally lasted about an hour and a half, the
_ci-devant_ market-gardener left Rosa and Roderick to their own
resources. On this Mr. Lowther would have departed, but the candid Rosa
begged him to remain. She had kept up a visiting acquaintance with most
of her old school-fellows, and as she was perpetually making new
acquaintances, she was positively besieged by callers, and had a
tea-drinking institution, which she called a kettle-drum, almost every
afternoon. The idea of exhibiting the elegant diplomatist to her
feminine circle was eminently delightful to Miss Grunderson; and as soon
as her papa had begun to snore with undisguised vehemence, she conducted
Roderick to the drawing-room, where there were as many albums, and
perfume-caskets, and ormolu workboxes, and enamelled book-slides, and
_solitaire_ boards, as would have stocked one of Messrs. Parkins and
Gotto’s show-rooms, and where a grand piano, scattered with all the
easiest polkas in the gaudiest covers, testified to Rosa’s taste for
music.
Miss Grunderson’s kettle-drum visitors began to assemble almost
immediately; and before long Rosa’s drawing-room was full of young
ladies in overpowering bonnets and transparent cloaks of every
imaginable tissue. The male element was very much in the minority at
Miss Grunderson’s gatherings, and was chiefly represented by speechless
younger brothers, who came in sulky submission to overbearing sisters,
and who lounged in uncomfortable attitudes upon Rosa’s most fragile
chairs, spilt their tea upon the velvet table-covers, rarely moved
without knocking something down, and left dingy thumb-marks in all
Rosa’s albums. Amongst such as these Roderick shone like a star of the
first magnitude, and Miss Grunderson exhibited him with unspeakable
pride. The kettle-drum lasted for two mortal hours, and Mr. Lowther was
one of the last to depart, bored to death, as he told his brother
afterwards.
“But a fellow must bring his mind to go through a good deal if he wants
to marry a millionaire’s only daughter in these hard times,” thought the
_attaché_, despondently, as he went yawning to bed. “If my lovely Rosa
does become Mrs. Lowther, she will have to renounce her _penchant_ for
bad French and violent pink dresses; but she may cram her drawing-room
with acquaintance of _quasi_-gentility, and drink tea all day, so far as
I shall be concerned in the matter.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXXIX.
TOO LATE.
A long miserable week wore itself slowly out after the night in which
Francis Tredethlyn had turned his back upon a house which he had never
been allowed to find a home. Through all the week there were no tidings
of Maude’s departed husband; but when the week was over, a formal letter
from Mr. Kursdale acquainted her with Mr. Tredethlyn’s arrangements for
her welfare, and with the fact that he had embarked the day before on
board the steam-vessel _Kingfisher_, bound for Buenos Ayres. The news
inflicted as great a shock upon Maude as if her husband’s letter
announcing his intended departure had never been written. To the last
she had believed, that when the time for action came, his resolution
would fail him all at once, and he would hurry back to her, faithful and
devoted as in the earliest days of their brief married life, when he had
nursed her Skye terriers, and sat patiently for an hour at a stretch in
a haberdasher’s shop while she selected ribands and laces. She had
written him a penitent letter, and had enclosed it to Mr. Kursdale,
entreating that gentleman to deliver it to his client whenever he saw
him. She had not thought it possible that, even if Francis persisted in
his intention of leaving England, he would leave without an interview
with his solicitor. But when Maude drove post-haste to Gray’s Inn, and
presented herself in the lawyer’s office, she found that there had been
no interview. Francis had communicated with his solicitor by letter
only, and his clear and concise epistle bore the date of the very day on
which he was to start for Plymouth, whence the _Kingfisher_ was to sail.
The letter thus dated had arrived at the lawyer’s office after business
hours; and when Mr. Kursdale opened it next morning, there was little
doubt that the _Kingfisher_ was outward bound with Francis Tredethlyn on
board her. Maude made a confidant of her husband’s solicitor. A family
lawyer is a kind of father confessor in the matter of secrets, and has
generally outlived the capacity of surprise as completely as those
imperturbable disciples of St. Ignatius Loyola who are irreverently
entitled “crows.” The despondent wife told Mr. Kursdale that Francis had
left home in consequence of a slight misunderstanding--(was any conjugal
quarrel ever yet described by the belligerents as anything _more_ than a
slight misunderstanding?)--and she implored him to assist her in
bringing about her husband’s speedy return.
“But do you think he has really sailed?” she asked; “do you think he can
have been so cruel as to leave England without even giving me the
opportunity of imploring him to remain?”
Mr. Kursdale shook his head gravely.
“There is nothing in his letter to me which indicates indifference to
your wishes,” he said; “it is only a business letter; but in a practical
way it is the strongest evidence of a husband’s devotion that ever came
to my knowledge. We lawyers are a matter-of-fact set of men, and we are
apt to form our conclusions in a matter-of-fact way. What other people
would treat as an affair of sentiment, we look at as an affair of
figures; and I must say, Mrs. Tredethlyn, that gauged by that standard,
your husband comes out nobly.”
“But I want him to come back to me,” Maude exclaimed, simply; “I don’t
want to be rich--or to live like a woman of fashion. He wrongs me most
cruelly when he thinks that I married him for his money. I married him
because he was good to my father. Do you think I could accept the income
which that letter places at my disposal, knowing that my husband has
left his native country because of me? Tell me what I am to do, Mr.
Kursdale. I know that Mr. Tredethlyn is unhappy, and that a few words
from me would set all right. What am I to do?”
“We must try to send him the few words, my dear Mrs. Tredethlyn,”
answered the lawyer, cheerfully. “South America is not so very far off
nowadays; and you know that even in Alexander Pope’s time a sigh might
be wafted from Indus to the Pole, by means of ocean postage. We’ll get
your letter delivered to Mr. Tredethlyn as quickly as the improvements
of modern science will allow, you may depend upon it. Shall I send the
letter you enclosed to me the other day? Perhaps you would like to add
something to it--another postscript, eh? Ladies have such a _penchant_
for postscripts,” said the lawyer, lapsing into mild facetiousness,
which he imagined to be of an eminently consolatory character. There are
people who believe that a feeble joke is an infallible specific for a
deeply rooted grief.
“I will send a clerk off to Plymouth by the next train,” said Mr.
Kursdale, with his hand upon the spring of a little bell beside him. He
spoke as coolly as if he had been talking of sending a clerk over the
way. “If by any chance the _Kingfisher_ has not sailed when the young
man arrives, your husband will have the letter before dark. If the
_Kingfisher_ has sailed, the letter must be sent on by the next mail. At
the worst, Mr. Tredethlyn may be back in six or seven weeks.”
In six or seven weeks! It seemed a very long time; but on receiving the
lawyer’s letter announcing her husband’s departure, Maude had fancied
that he was lost to her for ever. With what wonderful intelligence we
can perceive the value of anything we have lost! In your daily walks, O
modest collector of household treasures! you will see a little bit of
china, a picture, an apostle spoon, a quaint old volume in a
shop-window,--and, intending to look in and bargain for it some day when
you have leisure, you will pass it a hundred times, indifferent as to
its merits, half uncertain whether it is worth buying; but you discover
some day that it is gone, and then in a moment the doubtful shepherdess
becomes the rarest old Chelsea, the dirty-looking little bit of
landscape an undeniable Crome, the battered silver spoon of
unquestionable antiquity, the quaintly bound book a choice Elzevir. The
thing is lost; and we regret it for all that it might have been, as well
as for all that it was, and there are no bounds to the extravagance we
would commit to regain the chance of possessing it.
It was something after this fashion, perhaps, that Mrs. Tredethlyn
regretted her husband, as she drove home disconsolately after her
interview with the lawyer, to await the result of his clerk’s journey.
She would have gone herself to Plymouth if she could have done any more
than the clerk; but she had a dim belief that if there was infallibility
anywhere on earth, it was to be found in the office of an
old-established solicitor, and she thought that Mr. Kursdale’s
accredited agent could not fail to effect some good.
Her disappointment was very bitter the next day when she received a note
from the solicitor, informing her that the _Kingfisher_ had sailed
twelve hours before the clerk arrived at Plymouth.
After this Maude could only await the result of her letter. Six or seven
weeks seemed such a weary time as she looked forward to it; and it might
be as long as that, or even longer, before any tidings from Francis
could reach her. She went to her father, to pour her sorrows into his
ear; but though he received her very affectionately, she could see that
he blamed her severely for the folly which had driven Francis Tredethlyn
from his home.
She would have gone to stay at the Cedars during this dreary period; but
she had a nervous dread of not being on the spot to receive any possible
communication from her husband, so she remained amid the grand
hotel-like splendour of the Stuccoville mansion; though her neighbours
were daily departing for distant British watering-places, or on the
first stage of continental wanderings, to toil amidst Alpine glaciers,
or to lounge at German gaming-tables.
Mrs. Tredethlyn was very glad to see London growing empty; but before
her acquaintance departed for their autumnal relaxations they had ample
time to discuss her husband’s disappearance and her own sudden
withdrawal from society. The fact of that slight misunderstanding, which
Maude had been obliged to confess to the solicitor, had become patent to
all Stuccoville through the agency of loquacious maids and languid
footmen, and had assumed every possible and impossible complexion in
feminine debates. So Maude stood listlessly at one of the windows in her
spacious bedchamber, sheltered by the voluminous curtains and the
flowers in the balcony, and looked despondently at happy family parties
driving away to railway stations with cargoes of parasols and umbrellas,
and deliciously fluffy carriage-rugs and foot-muffs. Other people always
seem so happy. The lives of those smiling Stuccovillians might not have
been unclouded in their serenity; but Maude watched them very sadly,
remembering how she and her husband might have been starting in the
twilight for the Dover mail, like that merry young couple from the house
over the way.
Surely she must have loved him very dearly, or she scarcely could have
regretted him so much. If she had been questioned as to the real state
of her feelings on this point, she could not have given any very clear
reply to the question. She only knew that her husband had been very good
to her, and that she had repaid his devotion with neglect and
indifference. Maude had been a spoiled child, it must be remembered, and
there may have been something of a spoiled child’s useless remorse in
her penitence; but she was very penitent. All her life for the last year
had been crowded with proofs of Francis Tredethlyn’s unbounded love;
and, looking back upon them, she could not remember one instance in
which she had been sufficiently grateful for his affection.
“Those silly young men at the Cedars used to make a fool of me with
their empty flatteries,” she thought, remorsefully; “and I treated Frank
as I had learned to treat them, accepting his generous devotion as
indifferently as I had accepted their unmeaning compliments.”
There was one thing that Maude did not remember as she looked back at
her past life, and that was Harcourt Lowther’s influence. She did not
know how much of her indifference to her husband had been engendered by
the subtle sarcasms of her jilted lover; nor did she know how the
schemer had practised upon her girlish love of society, in order to
widen the gulf that divided her from Francis Tredethlyn. Her errors as a
wife had chiefly arisen from want of leisure. She had found no time to
adapt herself to her husband’s tastes--no time to elevate and refine him
by association--no time to give him any return for those practical
proofs of his affection in the way of jewels and carriages,
thorough-bred steppers, and hundred-guinea shawls, which he was
constantly lavishing upon her; and, worse than all, she had found no
time to inquire how he passed his life, or in what circles he sought the
happiness she had never tried to provide for him in his home.
“I will ask him to complete the purchase of the Berkshire estate when he
comes back to me,” she thought; “and then we shall be able to begin a
new life away from this perpetual whirlpool of society; and I can drive
to the meet when Frank hunts, and even take an interest in the stables.
Country stables are so pretty; and it’s so nice to see a favourite horse
looking over the door of his loose-box, with a big tabby cat sitting on
the wooden ledge beside him, and honeysuckle blowing about his head. But
one’s horses might as well be at the North Pole for all one can see of
them in a London mews, where there are always dreadful men in
shirt-sleeves, and cross-looking women hanging up clothes,” mused Mrs.
Tredethlyn, with a vivid recollection of the prospect which all the
ground glass in her fernery could not quite shut out.
While she was thinking very penitently of the past, and weaving pleasant
schemes for the future; while she was perpetually counting the days
which must elapse before Francis returned to her, always supposing that
the remorseful words of her letter found their way straight to his
heart, as she implicitly believed they would; while she was praying
daily and nightly for his safe preservation in tempest and danger, Maude
Tredethlyn took up the “Times” newspaper one morning as she loitered
listlessly over a lonely breakfast-table, and the first paragraph that
met her eyes was the announcement of the _Kingfisher’s_ total
destruction by fire, and the entire loss of passengers and crew.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XL.
AN IGNOMINIOUS FAILURE.
Harcourt Lowther had his copy of the great journal on the day when Maude
read that horrible paragraph. Roderick had called at Stuccoville during
Mrs. Tredethlyn’s seclusion, and had heard of the Cornishman’s
departure, and the name of the vessel he had gone in, from Julia
Desmond. The schemer turned deadly pale when his brother read him the
brief account of one of those terrible catastrophes which come upon
mortal travellers now and then, to teach them how frail is man’s hold of
that wondrous power by which modern science has learnt to rule the
elements. The coolest villain who ever planned a comrade’s destruction
must surely suffer one sharp pang of remorse when he knows that the hand
which has so often clasped his own is really cold. To Harcourt Lowther
the wealthy Cornishman had never been anything worse than an impediment.
He was gone now; there was little doubt of that. Midway between her
starting place and her destination, the _Kingfisher_, sailing gaily on a
placid sea, had succumbed to a worse foe than tempest or hurricane, and
all on board her had perished. A fragment of charred timber, branded
with the name of the steamer, had been picked up by a homeward-bound
vessel; and in the calm moonlit night the blazing ship had been seen by
distant voyagers a lurid speck upon the silvery horizon. By these and
many other tokens the fact of the catastrophe had been made known; and
in a hundred British households there was mourning for lost friends and
kinsmen.
After the first shock that came upon him with these sudden tidings,
Harcourt Lowther gave a long sigh of relief.
“It was the fellow’s own doing,” he muttered. “If he had not made a
quarrel with me, this would never have happened. And he’s gone! Poor
lad! He was not such a bad fellow, after all. Better to die that way
than of delirium tremens,” added Mr. Lowther, with a furtive glance
towards a tall smoke-coloured bottle which was apt to adorn his table
very often nowadays. “And so my Maude is free--at last! Do you know,
Roderick, it seems to me as if I had lived twenty years or so since my
return from Van Diemen’s Land? and now that the luck turns, and the
winning colour comes up for the first time, I feel as if I had almost
outlived the power to care much about it. Roderick!” cried the invalid,
with a sharp suddenness that startled his brother, “did Folson tell you
there was any serious damage done to my head by that ugly fall the other
night? I know he has talked to you about me. I heard you and him
muttering together yesterday, when I was lying half asleep in the next
room.”
Mr. Folson was the medical man who had attended Harcourt Lowther after
the scuffle with Francis, and who had brought all his science to bear
for the preservation of the handsome face without which his patient
would have been so small a creature.
“Folson said very little about the damage you got in the row,” the
_attaché_ answered, very coolly; “but he told me you must drop your
liberal consumption of that sort of thing, or you’d find yourself very
speedily in Queer Street.” Mr. Lowther pointed to the smoke-coloured
bottle as he thus addressed himself to his invalid brother. “While you
were teaching that fellow Tredethlyn to drink himself to death, you
ought to have learnt how to keep yourself alive by not drinking,” he
said presently. “However, I don’t want to say anything unpleasant, but
you really must cut your very intimate acquaintance with the
brandy-bottle, if you want to improve your opportunity, now that Mrs.
Tredethlyn is a rich widow. If you don’t look sharp I shall throw over
the Grunderson, and go in against you.”
Harcourt smiled superciliously.
“I am not afraid of _you_, for more reasons than one,” he said. “Maude
is a curious girl. I sometimes fancy my own chance is not quite so good
as it once was. Goethe says that a man wins in his age the prize he
sighs for in his youth. Perhaps, when I am a pottering old fellow of
seventy, I shall have a great fortune and a handsome wife; only the
capability of caring much for either will be gone. How fond we were of
toffee at Harrow! But all the toffee that was ever manufactured in
Doncaster during the Sellenger week wouldn’t give me a ray of pleasure
now. Madame de Maintenon began to enjoy herself when she was eighty;
rather late in the day, wasn’t it? My soul is weary, Roderick; and now
the chance _has_ come, I’m not the man I was. Perhaps, after all, the
simple truth of the matter is that I am suffering from an attack of blue
devils, engendered of solitary confinement in this detestable crib. I’ll
tell you what I’ll do, old fellow. As the ugly scar across my forehead
has dwindled into a romantic-looking badge of bygone prowess, and the
variegated hues of my countenance are rapidly fading into an interesting
pallor, I’ll get you to send me round a hack from Parsons’s, and I’ll
take a spin in the Park; there won’t be many people about at this time
of year, and the fresh air will blow my old self back again, I dare say.
I’ll meet you at the Metropolitan afterwards, if you like,” added
Harcourt, naming an adjacent restaurant at which the brothers had been
wont to dine occasionally.
“No, thanks. I dine at the Grundersons’.”
“_Déjà!_ We go fast, my friend!”
“If your military experience had extended farther than the
superintendence of penitent burglars, you might have known that where
the assailing party is weak, a fortress must be taken quickly, or not at
all. I declared myself to Rosa this morning. She is delighted with the
idea of flourishing at foreign courts in _écrasant_ pink dresses. How I
shall tone her down, poor child! and what a hard time we shall both have
of it before the scent of the market-garden ceases to cling to her
still! I am to speak to papa Grunderson this evening, over his wine. He
consumes the best part of a bottle of old port every night, and finishes
off at a neighbouring tavern with the gin-and-water of his early
manhood. Rosa tells me that he is an indulgent old party, and that I
shall not have any difficulty in bringing him to book.”
“Then you really think of marrying?” asked Harcourt, thoughtfully.
“Really think of marrying? Of course I do. What else should I think of
whereby to improve my fortunes? And Rosa will not be so _very_
disagreeable after a good deal of toning down.”
“I thought perhaps you might have some lingering regard for----that
other person.”
The diplomatist turned upon his brother with a frown.
“I thought I told you that I didn’t care to discuss that subject,” he
said, haughtily. “Drop it, if you please. There are plenty of
disagreeable things in _your_ life, I dare say, that I might remember,
if I wanted to make myself obnoxious. However, as you have been existing
upon a limited supply of oxygen for the last six weeks, I suppose you’re
privileged to be cantankerous. I’ll look in at the stables and send you
the hack; and if I find you here when I come home to dress, I dare say
we shall hit it better. _A bientôt!_”
Harcourt Lowther had his gallop in the Park, and punished the
livery-stable hack rather severely. It was dusk before he went back to
town, and he left the Park by the Prince’s Gate, and rode slowly through
the gorgeous dismality of Stuccoville. He walked his horse down the
street in which Francis Tredethlyn’s household had been established.
Glimmering lights burned feebly in the windows on the second floor, but
the gaslit dining-room was blank and empty.
Looking up at the dimly lighted windows, Harcourt Lowther wondered if
Maude Tredethlyn’s heart, set free all at once from its mercenary
bondage, had fluttered back to the lover of her youth. He was strangely
tormented by conflicting fancies, and found it hard to strike the
balance between his low estimate of woman’s constancy and his very high
opinion of his own merits.
“She loved me once,” he thought, “and my hold upon her ought to be
stronger now than ever it was. I have quires of schoolgirl letters
filled with protestations of eternal constancy and reliance in a bright
future waiting for us somewhere in the cloudy distance of our lives. And
now the happy future is ours, my Maude; you are free and you are rich;
so we can afford to build the castle of our dreams, and live in it very
respectably.”
Riding slowly homeward through the crowded streets, Mr. Lowther found it
very difficult to shut out of his mind the picture of a burning ship,
and the image of the man whom he had called his friend, prominent amidst
a wild night-scene of death and horror.
“I’m glad I had nothing to do with the fellow’s going in that vessel,”
thought Mr. Lowther, as he tried to shake off the uncomfortable feeling
which oppressed him. “_I_ had no hand in his mad freak of bolting off to
Buenos Ayres; so I needn’t worry myself about the business. If he had
lived to get there safely, I dare say he’d have been finished off by
fever or small-pox.”
Nearly a week elapsed before Harcourt Lowther approached the woman who
had once been his plighted wife, and who was now free to renew her
broken vows as speedily as common decency would allow her to accept the
addresses of a second husband. The schemer wanted to be sure of his
triumph. One interview with Maude, one look in her face, would be enough
to tell him whether his hold on her was undiminished, whether his future
happiness was secure. Assured of this, he would be contented to stand
apart until the usages of society would permit him to take his place by
her side as her acknowledged suitor. But he was eager to be quite sure
of his position. A nervous restlessness that was foreign to his
temperament had come upon him since the tidings of the _Kingfisher’s_
destruction had reached his ears; and he could not endure anything like
uncertainty or suspense.
He called at Stuccoville one morning. He was told that Mrs. Tredethlyn
would see no one; but that Miss Desmond was at home, and would receive
him, if he pleased.
He did please; and was ushered into the morning-room, where Julia sat
writing at a little table near the window. There was a door opening from
Mrs. Tredethlyn’s dressing-room into this morning-room; and as Harcourt
entered at one door, a pale wan creature in black appeared at the other.
It was Maude--so changed that a sudden pang shot through the schemer’s
heart as he looked at her; a sudden pang that must have been remorse,
but which gave place immediately to a feeling of jealous anger.
Was the loss of her husband so deep a sorrow that it should change her
like this?
She had seen the visitor, and was drawing back, when he ran to her and
seized her hand.
“Maude!” he cried, passionately, “I must speak to you. Surely you are
not going to treat _me_ like a stranger.”
She tried to take her hand from his, but he held it firmly and drew her
into the room; as he did so, Julia, who had risen on his entrance, went
quietly out at the other door. Maude and Harcourt were alone.
“What can you have to say to me?” asked Mrs. Tredethlyn. “It is cruel of
you to force yourself upon me at such a time as this. I have grief
enough and trouble enough without being tortured by the sight of you.”
Harcourt Lowther looked at her aghast.
“Tortured by the sight of me!” he repeated.
“Yes,” answered Maude, indignantly. “It was your fault that my husband
left me. It was you who planted base suspicions in my mind when there
was no need for suspicion. If I had gone back to the cottage at
Petersham--as I would have done, but for you--I should have discovered
the folly of my jealous fancies--inspired by you--yes, by you alone. For
when I saw Francis and his cousin, my first impulse was to call him by
his name. It was your exclamation that frightened me; it was your manner
that filled me with absurd alarm. Why did you poison my mind against the
best husband a woman ever had? How could you be so base as to repay his
trusting friendship with such malicious treachery?”
“Because I loved you, Mrs. Tredethlyn, and I believed that your husband
had wronged you. Was _I_ likely to be a very lenient judge of his
conduct towards you, when I had loved you so passionately, and had been
jilted by you so cruelly for him? You questioned me, and I spoke. Can
you forget or deny that I spoke reluctantly? You hang your head, Mrs.
Tredethlyn; ah, I see that you remember.”
“Yes,” answered Maude, piteously, as she sank into a chair; “you are
right. I made you speak. It was my own jealous folly from first to last.
If others doubted and suspected, I ought to have trusted him. What a
pitiful return I made him for so much devotion, when I could not even
give him my confidence!” She was silent for some moments, lost in
thought. It was of her husband, and not of the man standing before her,
that she was thinking. Harcourt Lowther could see that.
She looked up at him presently, as if she suddenly remembered his
presence. “Have you anything more to say to me?” she asked, coldly.
“Have I anything more to say! Are you mad, Mrs. Tredethlyn, that you ask
me such a question? I have outraged propriety perhaps in coming to see
you so soon, you will tell me; but a man who has suffered as much as I
have at the hands of the woman he loves is not very likely to be held
back by ceremonial constraints when the hour comes in which he may claim
atonement for the wrong that has been done him. I respect your natural
sorrow for the terrible fate of your husband; but I should despise you
if you were so false-hearted a prude as to affect forgetfulness of what
is due to me.”
Maude looked at him as she had never looked at him before. Wonder,
indignation, disgust--all mingled in the expression of her countenance.
He had woven his network to ensnare a frivolous shallow-hearted girl,
and behold, on the completion of the schemer’s web, a woman arose in the
strength of her truth and purity, and shook herself free from the toils
as easily as if they had been so much gossamer. “There is something due
from me to you?” she asked, haughtily. “What is it?”
“The fulfilment of your broken promise. I have waited, Maude, and waited
patiently. Another man would have revenged himself on your inconstancy
by proving to you that he too could be inconstant. Hopeless but patient,
I have given you a disinterested devotion which is without a parallel in
the history of man’s sacrifice for the woman of his choice. Now that you
are free, I ask some atonement for the past, some reward for my
patience. Tell me that the past is not quite forgotten--that the tender
protestations which consoled me in my miserable exile were not utterly
meaningless and false. Why do you look at me like that? Have I been the
dupe of a coquette from first to last, Mrs. Tredethlyn, and does your
husband’s death only leave you free to jilt me again? Have I been fooled
to the top of my bent by a woman who has never loved me?”
“No, Mr. Lowther,” Maude answered, very quietly; “I did love you once. I
look back now, and wonder at myself as I remember how dearly. But my
love died--a very sudden death.”
“When you discovered the advantages of a wealthy marriage for the
penniless daughter of a commercial defaulter,” cried Harcourt.
“No; my love for you was a girlish fancy, if you like; though Heaven
only knows how deeply I felt for you in your exile--how willing I would
have been to resign my imaginary wealth for love of you, if you had
asked me to do so. But you never did ask that. You did not want the wife
without the fortune. When you came home and found me engaged to another
man--about to sacrifice myself in a mercenary marriage, as you
thought--there was yet time to have exacted the fulfilment of my
promise. I loved you then, Harcourt Lowther. A word from you, and I
would have told Francis Tredethlyn the truth, and demanded my release.
He was far too generous to have withheld it. But in doing that I should
have offended my father, and I should have come to you penniless. You
did not want me on those terms, Harcourt. The honest indignation of a
disinterested lover never found an utterance on your lips. You were
contented to assume the position of friend and confidant to your
unconscious rival; and it is only since I have been left alone to think
of my past life, that I have fully understood the dishonour involved in
keeping our broken engagement a secret from my husband. I loved you when
you came back to England, Harcourt. It was a hard battle which duty had
to fight against the unaltered affection of my girlhood. I prayed to God
night and day for strength to do my duty, and to keep my promise to the
man who had a claim upon me, which you have never known. I prayed for
power to blot your image from my mind; and my prayer was heard. My first
foolish love died on my wedding-day, Harcourt, when you stood by to see
me married to Francis Tredethlyn. From that hour to this you have been
no more to me than any other man who has paid me the conventional
attentions which I imagined I had a right to receive. If I had ever seen
more than this in your conduct, Mr. Lowther, you would have found me
quite capable of asserting my position.”
“The world has chosen to see a good deal more than conventional courtesy
in my attendance upon you, Mrs. Tredethlyn,” answered Harcourt. He had
lost the game. Utterly defeated in the moment of his expected triumph,
he was careless as to the rest of his play. How can the whist-player,
who knows that he is beaten, be expected to pay any great attention to
the order in which he plays the two or three insignificant cards that he
holds at the close of the rubber? “People have been good enough to make
us the subject of considerable discussion, Mrs. Tredethlyn,” continued
Harcourt. “A man is apt to hear these things, though they rarely reach
the ears of the lady most interested in hearing them. The people amongst
whom we live have made up their minds about us, I know, and will be
considerably astonished if you throw me over now that you are free to
reward the patient devotion which, has endured so much in the hope of
this hour.”
He saw Maude’s look of unutterable scorn; a look which revealed her to
him in a new and higher light, and inspired him with a more passionate
love than he had ever felt for her yet--and at his worst he had loved
her.
“Maude,” he cried, in a sudden access of mingled rage and despair, “why
do you goad me to say these things? I know how detestable I seem to you.
And yet, as there is a heaven above me, I have loved you truly from
first to last. Pity me if, while I prayed for no better fate than to
face the enemy’s guns on an Indian battle-field, I was a coward in
social life and dared not brave genteel poverty even for your sake. Pity
me if I shrank from thrusting myself between you and a wealthy marriage.
I had been poor all my life; and I knew what you have never learnt--the
horrors of a gentleman’s poverty. I have smiled at your girlish talk of
pretty cottages and tiny suburban gardens; an elegant little
drawing-room, in which you and I might spend the winter evenings
together with our books and music. The poor gentleman’s cottage is never
pretty; the poor gentleman’s drawing-room is never elegant. His wife’s
tastes may be ever so simple, his own aspirations may be ever so pure;
but poverty countenances no taste, permits no aspiration. His wife is
fond of music, perhaps. Heaven help her! she cannot be sure of an hour
in which her piano may not be seized by the broker. She delights in
flowers; but the nosegays she arranges so gaily to-day may entail a writ
for the florist’s account to-morrow. You would have thought me a model
of all that is noble and disinterested if I had exposed you to such
miseries as these: you think me a scoundrel because I was not selfish
enough to say to you, ‘Reject Francis Tredethlyn and a life of elegant
ease, and accept my devotion and an existence of penury and trouble.’”
“And you ask me now to fulfil my broken promise? Have you inherited a
fortune? or how is it that your ideas upon matrimony have altered?”
The schemer flushed crimson to the roots of his hair, and then grew
deadly pale. For the life of him he could not answer that question. He
could not say, “_My_ position is unchanged, but _you_ are rich. Give me
your fortune and the heart I did not choose to claim when it was
unaccompanied by fortune.”
“Had we not better wish each other good morning, Mr. Lowther?” Maude
said, after a little pause. “Your visit is ill-timed and most unwelcome.
Your presence reminds me of a cruel wrong done to a noble friend, a
devoted husband, whose worth I have learned only too late; whom I have
loved unconsciously, only to discover the depth of my affection when its
object is lost to me for ever.”
“You loved your husband!” cried Harcourt, with a cynical laugh; “you
seem determined to astonish me to-day. You loved your husband?”
“Yes--dearly and truly; and love his memory better than ever I loved
you. I have learned to think, since I have been released from your
influence; for it was your influence that regulated my life as well as
my husband’s; it was your influence that kept us asunder, and plunged
both of us into a whirlpool of dissipation. I have had time to think
during the long miserable days and nights in which I have watched for
the coming of him who was never to return to me; and if I had not
discovered the shallowness of your love before my marriage, I should
have made that discovery since. You are base enough to tell me that the
world has linked my name with yours. I can afford to despise a world in
which I have never found real happiness, and in which I no longer wish
to hold a place. I shall go back to my father’s house, and my life will
be one long atonement for the past. I tell you this, Mr. Lowther, in
order that you may understand that we must be strangers to each other
henceforward.”
She laid her hand upon the bell as she spoke. Harcourt Lowther stood for
some moments looking at her. A strange compound of passionate admiration
and vengeful fury flamed in his eyes.
“I have sometimes wondered at the madmen who murder the women they have
loved; but God help you, Maude Tredethlyn, if I had a loaded pistol in
my pocket to-day!”
He folded his arms, locking them together with a convulsive suddenness,
as if he could only thus restrain the impulse by which he would have
struck her down where she stood defying him; and then he turned, and
slowly left the room.
He had left his hired horse in the quiet street, in charge of a boy; but
the boy’s back was turned when his employer left the house, and Harcourt
Lowther drove back to town in a hansom. It was only when his brother
reminded him of the horse, that he remembered how he had gone to
Stuccoville; and sent a man to recover the missing steed. After that he
left the noisy regions of the Strand, and wandered across one of the
bridges out to some dismal waste ground in the neighbourhood of
Battersea; a remote and forgotten tract, that was almost as lonely as an
African desert: there he laid himself down amongst the rubbish of a
deserted brickfield, and cried like a child.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XLI.
SUSAN’S GOOD NEWS.
Maude Tredethlyn sat alone in her spacious chamber: oh, so spacious, so
splendid, so dreary, so ghastly, with a tall carved walnut-wood bedstead
that was like one of the tombs in Père la Chaise, only not so lively,
and with long panels of looking-glass shimmering ghost-like in dark
walnut-wood wardrobes and armoires, and _duchesse_ dressing-tables. She
might have endured her troubles better, perhaps, if her room had been
furnished with white and gold rather than so much funereal walnut-wood
and ghastly looking-glass. She sat alone, thinking of the husband whom
she had lost, and whose worth she had only discovered when it was too
late. She would accept sympathy from no one. Julia wrote her letters,
and saw people who must be seen, and was very good; but the wayward
heart shrank away from her in its sudden desolation. She had loved
him--she had loved him--and had been ashamed to confess her real
feelings either to herself or to the people who had smiled upon a
mercenary marriage as if it was the most natural thing under heaven; but
who would have lifted their eyebrows in scornful surprise had they known
that she could care for a person whose boyhood had been spent in a
humble old homestead among the Cornish moorlands. Gliding gracefully
through her frivolous life, tolerably happy in a shallow kind of way,
with more shopping, and driving, and riding, and calling, and
kettle-drumming, and dinner-giving, and horticultural-fête attending,
always to be done than it was in the power of any one woman to do,
except by a perpetual scramble, she had found no time to consider her
position, no time to be aware how entirely even her most frivolous
pleasures depended on the faithful minister whom no influence could
entirely divide from her.
Amongst the papers she had looked over on the library shelves and
tables, where the dust lay thick, she had sometimes found a sheet of
perfumed note-paper, and a list of items in her own writing--commissions
she had given Francis to execute, troublesome ones sometimes, involving
loss of time, and patient inquiry amongst West-end emporiums--orders for
new books, drawing materials, ferns, music, all the frivolities of her
life. She remembered with a cruel pang of remorse how faithfully the
smallest details had been remembered, how patiently the most tiresome
researches had been conducted, and how very lightly all this untiring
service had been accepted. Circumstances which she had been too
thoughtless to notice at the time flashed back upon her now, and she
remembered how Harcourt Lowther had stepped between her and her husband
even in this commonplace communion--how Francis had been pushed aside,
politely taught to remember what an ignorant and awkward creature he was
when compared to the fine gentleman.
As she sat alone, upon the evening after her interview with Harcourt
Lowther, her husband’s image was more vividly present with her than it
had been at any moment since his departure. The bright honest face--the
faithful loving face--shone out upon her in the ghastly twilight of her
ghastly chamber, and she thought how pleasant it would have been to be
sitting opposite her husband in the firelight glow of a cosy parlour,
far away from splendid loneliness and carved walnut-wood. She thought of
him with her face hidden in her hands, and her aching head lying wearily
on the sofa-cushion. She thought of him until a nervous restlessness
came upon her, and she sprang suddenly to her feet, unable to bear the
oppression of that dreary room, or any room in that dreary house.
“I must go away somewhere, or I shall die,” she thought; “this place
seems haunted. I will go to papa. He is very good to me, but he does not
understand what I feel about Francis. People speak so lightly of him,
and seem to have known him so little. If I could talk to any one who
really loved him; if I could talk to any one who knew his goodness as I
ought to have known it--as I do know it, now that he is dead!”
She crossed the room hurriedly, and rang the bell. She had told her maid
to bring lights only when she rang for them, much to the dismay of that
sympathetic young person, who believed that candle-light and company
were eminently consolatory in all earthly sorrows. When the candles
came, Maude went to a writing-table, and wrote a few hasty lines to her
husband’s simple little cousin. She had written to Susan once before, to
tell her of Francis Tredethlyn’s departure; but the two women had not
seen each other since their first meeting.
“MY DEAR SUSAN,--There is terrible news of your cousin: it may
have reached you before this, perhaps. Will you come to me? I am
so utterly miserable! and I believe that you are the only person
in the world who can understand my sorrow. Come, dear, I implore
you. Ever your affectionate
“MAUDE.”
Mrs. Tredethlyn was a great deal too impatient to wait for any such
commonplace means of communication as the post. She summoned her maid,
and entrusted her letter to that faithful attendant, with directions
that a groom should mount one of the Park hacks immediately, and ride
straight to Petersham with the missive. The maid obeyed; and the groom,
who had made an engagement to go half-price to a West-end theatre,
departed, grumbling sulkily, and determined on punishing the Park hack
for the unwarrantable caprice of his mistress.
Maude slept soundly that night for the first time since the tidings of
the _Kingfisher’s_ fate had reached her, and woke in the morning to see
Susan looking down at her with a smile upon her face.
“Ah, you don’t know,” cried Maude, waking out of a happy dream to an
instant consciousness of her sorrow,--“you don’t know what has happened:
you haven’t heard?”
“Of what, dear?” Susan asked, gently, as Maude started up from amongst
her pillows feverish and excited.
“The loss of the _Kingfisher_--the fire--the dreadful fire! Oh, Susan,
you _cannot_ have heard!”
Mrs. Tredethlyn said this, because the girl’s face, though it was grave
and sad, expressed none of that acute anguish which Susan ought to have
felt for her cousin’s untimely fate. She only looked at Maude with a
wondering earnestness.
“Yes, it was very dreadful,” she said. “Mrs. Clinnock read it in the
paper, and told me. I am so sorry for all the sufferers. But oh, Maude,
dear cousin, how grateful we ought to be for the accident that saved
Francis from such a fate! If he had gone by that vessel, dear----”
She stopped suddenly, for Maude looked at her with an unnatural stare,
and then fell back unconscious.
No, he had not perished with the ill-fated passengers of the
_Kingfisher_. Lives as noble, friends as dear, husbands and fathers,
brothers and sons, worth and genius, some tribute from all that is
brightest upon earth,--had gone down to the deep waters; but Francis
Tredethlyn had not made a part in the mighty sacrifice. When Maude
recovered from the deadly faintness that had come upon her, Susan showed
her a letter which she had received from her cousin,--a letter that had
been written in an hotel at Plymouth _after_ the sailing of the
_Kingfisher_. It was a kind kinsmanlike letter, stating the arrangements
which the writer had made for the comfort and welfare of his cousin and
her child; and, in conclusion, Francis told Susan that he had reached
Plymouth too late to leave by the _Kingfisher_, a steamer which he had
intended to go by, and in which he had taken his berth. Thus left with
his time on his hands for some days, he had resolved on going to have a
look at the old neighbourhood once more.
“It might seem a foolish fancy to many people, but I don’t think it will
to you, Susy,” he wrote. “I want to gather a handful of daisies from my
mother’s grave before I leave the soil that holds her for ever. I want
to stand by the old hearth once more, though God knows what a pain it
will be to me to see strangers in the old home. God bless you, dear, and
good-bye! I shall not write again till I write from the New World.”
This was the close of the letter, which Susan gave Maude to read. Her
first feeling on reading it was unbounded gratitude to the Providence
that had saved Francis Tredethlyn. Her second feeling was considerable
indignation against Francis himself. The mother of the comic song who
bewails her missing child in such pathetic numbers, and slaps him
soundly when she finds him, is not such a very impossible character.
“It was shameful of him to let me suffer so much,” she cried, “when a
few lines from him would have made me so happy;” and then she was
grateful to Providence again, and angry with herself for having been
angry with Francis; and then she pounced upon Susan and kissed her.
“What am I to do, darling?” she asked. “I dare say he has gone off by
some other horrible steamer. But wherever he is, I won’t stop idle in
this dreary house. I won’t trust everything to that slow solemn lawyer.
I’ll go to Cornwall myself, Susy, and find out all about my husband; how
long he stayed there, and when he left. You’ll tell me where to go;
won’t you, Susy?”
Of course Susan was ready to give her cousin’s wife all needful
information about that forgotten corner of the earth, Landresdale. She
would have volunteered to accompany Maude to the western moors, only
there was the boy; and Susan had an idea that if she were to turn her
back upon her son for twenty-four consecutive hours, he would inevitably
be seized with measles or scarlatina in her absence. But Maude declared
she wanted no one to accompany her.
“I suppose I must take my maid,” she said; “but I shall leave her at the
inn at Falmouth, and go alone to that queer old house on the moor, and
those queer old people Francis once told me about.”
Julia Desmond had to endure a good deal that morning, for Maude was
radiant when she appeared with Susan at the breakfast-table. She was so
grateful to Susan for hurrying to her in the early morning.
“Every night, when I have gone to sleep, I have thought the same thing,”
she said: “if I could only wake and find it all a dream--if I could wake
to find it only a dream! And this morning I did wake to find an angel
standing by my bed with the best news I ever heard in all my life. But I
am very sorry for those poor people who were really lost in the
_Kingfisher_,” added Maude, mournfully; she felt that there was
something almost incongruous in her own happiness when so many must be
sorrowful for the destruction of that ill-fated vessel.
While she was making preparations for her departure, Mr. Kursdale, the
solicitor, was announced. He came radiant and red-faced to tell her the
result of inquiries which he had considered it expedient to have made at
Plymouth before taking any legal steps with regard to the supposed
demise of his respected client; and the result was that Francis had not
sailed in the _Kingfisher_; and he was very proud and happy to announce
to Mrs. Tredethlyn----
He would have gone on in a ponderous manner for some time longer, if
Maude had not interrupted him by the assurance that she knew all about
it.
“You did not ascertain that my husband had left Plymouth by any other
vessel?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then we may hope he is still in England. I am going to Cornwall
immediately to look for him. At the worst, I shall there hear all about
him.”
Mr. Kursdale evidently thought this very unprofessional, and suggested
the expediency of a clerk acting as Mrs. Tredethlyn’s proxy; but Maude
shook her head.
“I will go myself,” she said. “If my husband is still in England, I will
find him. There can be no further misunderstanding between us, if once
we can meet face to face.”
Mr. Kursdale submitted, and departed. Maude ran away to superintend her
maid’s packing of a small portmanteau, and Susan sat in the morning-room
with Julia. It had been settled that Miss Desmond should drive her back
to Petersham after luncheon.
They were talking rather ceremoniously, when the door was suddenly
opened by an impetuous hand, and Miss Grunderson burst in upon them,
more intensely pink than usual.
“They wanted me to go to the drawing-room, and they’d go and see if Mrs.
Tredethlyn was at home!” exclaimed Rosa. “I know what their going and
seeing is. Not at home always, and I do so want to see that poor
darling; and I’m sure there’s no one in the world more truly sorry for
her than I am; and if going into half-mourning would have been
considered a tribute of sincere respect, and not an intrusion or
uncalled for, I would have ordered a crape bonnet, trimmed with lilies
of the valley and jet beads, directly I heard of it.”
Julia interrupted Miss Grunderson with a simple statement of the fact
which had put an end to Maude’s brief time of mourning. Rosa’s delight
was very genuine, and on being introduced to Mrs. Lesley, she expanded
as it was her wont to expand on all occasions.
“You can’t think how glad I am!” she exclaimed; “for I assure you when I
heard of that _dreadful_ event, I felt as if it was quite hard-hearted
of me to be happy, and I have been very happy for the last week or so.
In point of fact,” added Miss Grunderson, dragging at the button of a
very tight glove in evident embarrassment, “I’m engaged to be married.”
“Indeed!” said Julia, politely.
“Yes. You see as par has long objected to my running after public
characters, which of course was tiresome to him,--for of all the people
to tear about to all sorts of inaccessible places, and oblige one’s
getting up unreasonably early in the morning to hear them or to see
them, public characters are the worst,--so par was really glad for me to
be seriously engaged to anybody that would keep me quiet, he said, even
if the person was not rich; so when Mr. Lowther--Mr. Roderick Lowther,
you know--proposed, par happening to be in a good temper, it was all
settled immediately.”
“I am very glad to hear it,” answered Miss Desmond; “but I am not at all
surprised. I quite expected as much.”
“Did you really, now? Well, upon my word, I thought at first he was
almost as grumpy as Rochester in ‘Jane Eyre;’ but when those grumpy
people do begin to pay one compliments, it is so nice. Of course, with
regard to Mario, Lord Palmerston, Sir Edwin Landseer, and Charles
Mathews, my feelings will be unchanged to my dying day. But the worship
of public characters need not interfere with the happiness of domestic
life; and as Roderick’s position in the _corps diplomatique_ will take
us abroad, his jealousy need never be aroused in the slightest degree.”
Miss Grunderson entertained the two ladies for some time with minute
details of her own affairs, and she confessed presently that Roderick
had promised to call for her.
“He doesn’t want to see Mrs. Tredethlyn, you know,” she said; “he was
only anxious to express to you how sorry he is, and so on--though, of
course, now he hasn’t any occasion to be sorry, thank goodness!--but you
don’t mind his coming to fetch me, do you, dear? The carriage is waiting
for me, and I’m going to take him on to the Haymarket, where we’re to
see about the resetting of some old-fashioned diamond earrings that
Roderick’s ma has sent me. They’re not nearly as handsome as my own, you
know; but, of course, I feel grateful to her for the attention. And I’m
to go down to Lowther Hall to stay before our marriage; and I’m to be
introduced to a maiden aunt of Roderick’s, from whom he has
expectations, this very afternoon--I mean I’m to be introduced to her
this very afternoon,” added Rosa.
While she was chattering the door was opened, and a servant announced
Mr. Lowther. He came out of the bright white daylight on the staircase
into the room which was kept cool and shadowy by closed Venetian
shutters. As he looked about him, unaccustomed to the obscurity, he
heard a faint shriek, and a woman who had been sitting with her back to
the window started suddenly from her chair.
“Robert!” she cried; “Robert, is it you?” And then she sank down again,
pale and breathless.
“Robert!” exclaimed Miss Grunderson; “you must mistake Mr. Lowther for
some one else, Mrs. Lesley. His name is not Robert.”
“Perhaps not,” Susan answered, sadly. “He kept his real name a secret
from the poor girl who was once proud to call herself his wife; but
whatever his name may be he is my husband nevertheless, and Providence
has brought about our meeting to-day. Oh, don’t add a falsehood to the
wrong you have done me!” she cried, appealing to Roderick Lowther, who
stood pale and confounded, with the faces of the three women all turned
towards him, and with the knowledge that those scrutinizing eyes were
upon him. “I shall claim very little of you. I only want you to give me
the name I have a right to bear; I only want you to acknowledge your
son.”
Roderick Lowther did not reply to this appeal. After a moment’s pause he
turned to Julia:
“Where do you pick up your acquaintance, Miss Desmond?” he said. “I
should scarcely have expected to meet this lady here.”
“This lady is my husband’s cousin,” answered Maude, who had entered the
room while he was speaking; “and I do not know any one who has a better
right to be here. What is the matter, Susy darling?”
Roderick Lowther’s heart was stirred faintly by the sound of that
familiar name--the name which he had whispered so often beside a grey
wintry sea, under a wintry sky, in the desolate region which had been
brightened for him by his discarded wife’s innocence and love.
“There is nothing that can be spoken of here,” Susan answered; “I have
met some one whom I never expected to see again. I will wait till my
cousin comes back. I will say no more till then.”
“But, good gracious me!” exclaimed Miss Grunderson, “I’m not going to be
treated in this sort of way. What does it all mean, Roderick? That lady
starts up all of a sudden, and calls you her husband, and then says
she’ll wait till her cousin comes home. I can’t be expected to wait till
her cousin comes home. I can’t take matters so coolly. With my trousseau
ordered, and all! I must and will have an explanation!”
“You shall, Rosa; but, for mercy’s sake, hold your tongue. There is some
infernal mistake. You had better go home; never mind about the earrings
to-day. If this lady mistakes me for some one she knows, or has a claim
upon, I have no doubt I shall be able to demonstrate her mistake, if I
can talk to her for a few minutes quietly. And now let me take you to
your carriage, Rosa.”
Miss Grunderson would have resisted such a summary way of disposing of
her and her wrongs; but Roderick Lowther was firm. He led her
down-stairs, and he put her into her carriage, and he sent her home as
coolly as if she had been a packet of dry goods consigned to his
temporary care, to be sent on to Mr. Grunderson.
“Awkward,” he muttered, as he went back to the house; “but things always
do happen awkwardly just when a fellow fancies he’s swimming with the
tide all in his favour.”
He looked very grave as he went to Mrs. Tredethlyn’s morning-room to
demand an interview with Susan; but he looked a great deal more grave as
he left the house after that interview and made his way back to his
brother’s lodgings.
He found Harcourt sitting moodily by the empty fireplace, the slim
foreign bottle on the table by his side, and a cigar in his mouth.
“What is the matter with you?” asked the younger brother, listlessly, as
he perceived the scowl upon his senior’s face.
“There is this much the matter with me,” answered Roderick; “I trusted a
fellow to help me in a delicate business, and I’ve reason to think that
he took advantage of my confidence to get me into a dilemma that it will
take me all my life to get out of. I have seen Susan Turner to-day.”
“Indeed!”
“And she has told me something about the Registrar--something that I can
scarcely bring myself to believe. Do you remember what I asked you to do
for me, Harcourt?”
“Perfectly. And I have got the letter containing your request in my
possession--such a nice letter! You tell me in it that you have fallen
over head and ears in love with an innocent little country girl, too
poor and insignificant to be your wife, too virtuous to be your
mistress. Another man might have accepted his fate, and either resigned
the lady, or made some sacrifice of his own interests and married her.
You were inclined to do neither, and you fell back upon a villanous
expedient familiar to the readers of old-fashioned novels, and known as
a mock marriage. You wrote to me about this in a half-playful tone, as
if it were the simplest thing in the world--an elegant little comedy,
out of which it would be your care, of course, to see that no harm
should arise; and so on. The carrying out of the little conspiracy would
be very easy. You suggested how it might be done. I had only to engage
some clever scapegrace to enact the Registrar; hire a parlour in some
obscure street _near_ a District Registrar’s Office--in the same street,
if practicable; the ceremony would only occupy about ten minutes, and
could be got over as quietly as the most commonplace morning call, if
the fellow engaged to personate the Registrar knew what he was about.
The dear little girl was the last person in the world to suspect
anything amiss. In short, it was the simplest possible business, and all
our dear good Harcourt had to do was to find the handy scamp who would
act the official, and get himself well up in the little professional
formula of signing and counter-signing, and so on, in some big books
that he would get for the purpose. The certificate business would have
to be finessed of course. The dear little girl would ask for no
certificate, and the dear little girl’s witnesses must be conveniently
shut up if they made their noses unpleasantly prominent.”
“I begin to understand you,” said Roderick, with suppressed fury. “You
have sold me; and you are going to defend yourself upon high grounds,
conscientious scruples; and so on. Pray proceed. That sort of talk will
sound so well from your lips.”
“I am not going to do anything of the kind. I am only going to remind
you that, as you never in your life did a generous thing for me, or
stepped aside from your own interest or your own pleasure by so much as
a hair’s breadth to serve me, it wasn’t very likely that I should get
myself into a legal hobble--that mock marriage would have been something
like felony, I should imagine--and inflict a cruel wrong upon an
innocent little girl to oblige you. I didn’t want to be too disobliging,
so I arranged a marriage, but it was a real and not a sham one; and you
are as tightly tied to your pretty little wife as if the business had
been transacted at St. George’s, Hanover Square, by a popular bishop,
assisted by an aristocratic uncle to the bride.”
“You are a remorseless scoundrel!” exclaimed Mr. Lowther, coolly. “And I
am very happy to tell you that your own pretty little plans are knocked
on the head. Francis Tredethlyn did not sail in the _Kingfisher_!”
Harcourt gave a little start of surprise; but his countenance did not
express the profound vexation and disappointment that his brother had
expected to see in it. The schemer had failed so completely, that it
mattered very little to him now what course events took.
“Yes, Francis Tredethlyn is alive and well, I have no doubt,” resumed
Roderick. “And my little Susy turns out to be Francis Tredethlyn’s first
cousin. I have a recollection of her telling me, after our marriage,
that her real name was something outlandish, of a Cornish character; but
the name had slipped my memory completely before I met your wealthy
Cornishman.”
“Then the likeness which I fancied I saw in that daub of a portrait and
the similarity of name were not mere coincidences, after all,” muttered
Harcourt. “And the lady at Petersham is my little sister-in-law. It’s a
pity you didn’t treat her rather better,” he added; “for Francis
Tredethlyn could afford to give her a handsome fortune, if he pleased.
It is from her father he inherits his money; and if you had declared
your marriage, and made things square with the old man, your wife need
not have been disinherited, and would have been as rich a prize as any
Miss Grunderson.”
“Hold your tongue!” cried Roderick; “I know what I have lost as well as
you do. If you had been above-board with me, and told me that you had
sold me about the marriage, I might have acted differently. Why did you
get me into such a mess?”
“Because I didn’t choose to be your catspaw. I have been sacrificed to
your interests all my life, and I was determined to keep my hold upon
you when I had got it.”
“And you would have allowed me to marry Rosa Grunderson?”
“_C’est selon!_ I _think_ I should have spoken at the last moment--and
yet it might have been very convenient to hold an awkward little secret
about one’s wealthy brother. A man must be very hard up before he
descends to that undignified mode of livelihood which the French
galley-slaves call _chantage_; but when a fellow _is_ hard up there’s no
knowing how low he may descend.”
“You are a scoundrel!”
“And you are--I can’t finish the sentence without sinking to slang. We
resemble each other in character as we do in person.”
In this fashion the brothers bandied civilities for some time; but they
ended matters by dining together at the Metropolitan. Arabian traditions
as to the sanctity of bread and salt cannot hold good against the
exigencies of civilized life; and men may dine together in a friendly
way, and reserve the right of hating each other nevertheless.
Warmed by a good dinner and a bottle of Moselle, Roderick grew hopeful
as to the future. Susan would relent from her calm determination never
to hold any communication with the husband she had loved so tenderly, by
whom she had been so cruelly abandoned. Francis might act in a handsome
manner about the fortune which ought to have been his cousin’s; and,
after all, the turn which affairs had taken might not be altogether an
unlucky one.
“Looking at it in any way, Rosa was a nuisance,” said Mr. Lowther, as he
bedewed his moustache with the rose-water which the luxurious
Metropolitan provides for its guests; “and perhaps it’s better as it is.
We hadn’t come to close quarters about the settlements; and I dare say
if the _père_ Grunderson had been brought to the scratch, we should have
had a scuffle.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XLII.
A PERFECT UNION.
Maude left Paddington by an afternoon express, and reached Exeter after
a journey that was long and wearisome even to a modern traveller, for
whom the way has been smoothed so delightfully. It was late the next
evening when she reached Falmouth, after a day in a stage-coach, and put
up at the principal hotel with her maid, who was a good deal more tired
than her mistress, as it is in the nature of maids to be. The coach that
passed through Landresdale on its way to some still more remote and
savage district left Falmouth early in the morning; and Maude left with
it, this time unattended by her maid, whose curiosity had been
considerably stimulated by the erratic nature of her mistress’s
movements, and who thought it a hard thing to be left alone to look out
of the window of the hotel sitting-room, while Mrs. Tredethlyn pursued
her mysterious journey to its mysterious close.
How strange and new all the wild Cornish scenery seemed to Maude, as she
sat alone in the interior of the coach, which was not affected by the
sturdy agriculturists and miners who were generally the only passengers
on this route! How many conflicting hopes and fears found a place in her
mind as she looked out at the unknown country amidst which her husband’s
boyhood had been spent! Had he sailed for the New World by some later
vessel than the _Kingfisher_? Was he far away from the rustic homestead
towards which she was travelling with a faint hope of finding him at the
end of her journey?--an unreasoning hope, which she tried to shut out of
her mind in her dread of the cruel disappointment that might await her.
The coach put her down before the Crown Inn, and she stood alone in
Landresdale High Street, with the great gates of the marquis’s enchanted
castle frowning down upon her from the top of the hill. She inquired
about a conveyance to take her on to Tredethlyn Grange; and the landlord
of the Crown ordered the immediate preparation of a lumbering old
equipage of a tub-like character, lined with washed-out chintz, which
was brought forth on rare occasions, and charged for at a prodigious
rate. While the equipage was being prepared, the landlord contemplated
his bright young visitor with evident curiosity, and would fain have
beguiled her into conversation; but Maude had no inclination to be
communicative. If she was to receive a death-blow to all her hopes, she
did not want to take it from the hands of this coarse common man. She
wanted to go straight to the Grange and learn her fate there, and there
only. The road from Landresdale to the moorland farmhouse was longer
than the by-path through the churchyard by which Francis had gone; and
the clumsy old brown horse, and the lumbering vehicle in which Maude was
seated, progressed very slowly. The way seemed intolerably long to her;
but at last she saw a grey spot against the blue sky, and made out that
the vehicle was bearing towards it by a winding track along which heavy
waggons had left the impression of their broad wheels. The grey spot
grew bigger and bigger against the horizon, until it grew at last into a
dreary-looking habitation, with quaint old gables and moss-grown stone
walls. One slender thread of smoke curled upward, white against the
clear blue atmosphere; some sheep were grazing upon the patch of ground
that had once been a garden; and the perfume of the clover blew towards
the traveller as the fly lumbered nearer to the broken gate.
Maude looked hopelessly at the quiet house,--so little sign of
occupation, so little token of life.
“He can’t be there,” she thought; a sudden gush of tears shutting out
the grey stone walls, the clover-field and browsing sheep. “I am too
late!”
She brushed away her tears, drew down her veil, and alighted, telling
the driver to wait for her; whereupon the man took the bit out of his
horse’s mouth and abandoned himself to slumber, while the animal cropped
the stunted grass contentedly. Some sheep that had been lying in the
pathway skipped awkwardly away as Maude crossed the bare enclosure; and
as she approached the door, it was opened by a tall gaunt woman, who had
evidently been disturbed by the unwonted sound of wheels on the rough
moorland road.
“Mr. Tredethlyn has been staying here, has he not?” Maude asked,
eagerly.
“Yes, ma’am; and he’s here still. Excuse me for being a little put out
like, but you have taken me so aback. You don’t happen to be my master’s
wife, do you?”
“Yes, yes! Oh, thank Heaven, he is still here! Let me see him at once,
please!” exclaimed Maude, trying to pass the grim-looking woman who
barred her passage.
“Not yet! Oh, please, ma’am, not yet!” cried the woman, eagerly. “It
mightn’t be safe.”
“Not safe! What do you mean?”
“He has been so ill, ma’am; and the doctor’s special orders was that he
was to be kept from anything that might upset him. And he talked and
raved so about you, poor dear, when his senses were quite gone, as they
were for days together; and I’m sure nothing could upset him so much as
the sight of your coming upon him sudden. Let me see him first, and tell
him you are here. I make no doubt he’ll be overjoyed to see you; but it
mustn’t come like a shock upon him.”
“He has been ill!” cried Maude; “dangerously ill!”
“Yes, ma’am; very dangerously. We had two doctors with him at one time.
Brain fever it was; over-fatigue and trouble of the mind, and so on, the
doctors said. He came up here after being too late for the steamer by
which he was to have gone abroad; and he came to settle everything about
the farm and the quarries, and so on; and he worked at it night and day,
without rest nor sleep, though me and my husband told him how bad it was
for him; and everything was almost settled when he woke one morning bad
in his head, and after that got from bad to worse, until his life was
almost give up.”
“But he is out of danger now?”
“Yes, ma’am, thank God, quite out of danger now; but, oh, so weak; the
smallest child that ever I had to do with wasn’t weaker than my poor
master now.”
Maude burst out crying. Until this moment she had stood, pale and
breathless, waiting to hear that she was indeed too late--that Francis
Tredethlyn had escaped the destruction of the _Kingfisher_ only to find
death waiting for him in his own home.
“Don’t mind me,” she exclaimed, as the gaunt woman made a clumsy attempt
to comfort her; “I am crying for joy. Go and tell my husband that I am
here; but not at any hazard to him. I will be very patient. Thank God I
have found him! thank God I shall be able to fall on my knees by his
bed-side and beg his forgiveness for my neglect and ingratitude!”
Martha Dryscoll looked wonderingly at this butterfly creature, who
talked hysterically of falling at her husband’s feet and begging
forgiveness. Francis had made no confidants in that Cornish house; and
Mrs. Dryscoll began to fear that his marriage had been a very
unfortunate affair, and that this sudden arrival of an elegantly dressed
penitent was to be the last act of a domestic tragedy.
“If you’ll walk in there, ma’am,” Martha said, pointing to the parlour,
with a severe aspect of countenance, “I’ll go and see my master.”
She said no more, but departed; and Maude crept into the old-fashioned
room, fearful lest the rustling of her silk dress might disturb an
invalid’s slumber. It seemed a long time that she waited, and then Mrs.
Dryscoll returned, smiling grimly this time.
“He’ll see you directly minute,” she said; “and, oh, he does seem so
pleased, poor dear!”
She led Maude to the top of the staircase, and then pointed to a
half-open door at the end of a dusky corridor, after which she went
down-stairs again, and Maude heard her sobbing quietly to herself until
the sound subsided in the distance.
The young wife went on to the half-open door, and entered the room in
which her husband lay on a white-curtained bed, very pale, very wan, and
so weak that he could not raise his hand to offer it her in token of
loving reconciliation.
She fell on her knees by the bed, and laid her cheek upon the hand that
was too feeble to be lifted.
“Oh, forgive me!” she said; “my dear, my love, my true and cherished
husband! If you wanted to give me a lesson, you have given me a very
cruel one; but you have taught me that I cannot live without you.”
She sat by his pillow, with his weak head encircled by her caressing
arms, and told him the story of her penitence and remorse. It was a
sweet exchange of forgiveness for the past, and tender promises for the
future. No denizens of Stuccoville kept watch from behind pink curtains;
the driver of the fly slumbered as profoundly as one of the seven
sleepers; the rustic sound of the sheep cropping the clover was the only
sound that stirred the drowsy stillness. Martha kept herself discreetly
out of the way; and the husband and wife, truly united for the first
time in their lives in that Cornish solitude, were loath to break the
spell which held them in such loving union.
But such spells have to be broken for the common business of life.
Punctual to the appointed moment Mrs. Dryscoll appeared with her
master’s medicine; and then the lumbering fly was sent back empty to
Landresdale; and after that Mrs. Tredethlyn was banished from the sick
room, and made some faint show of taking a little of the refreshment
which had been provided for her by Martha.
After dinner she wrote two brief notes--one to her maid at Falmouth, who
was to follow her immediately with the portmanteau; the other to Julia,
who was to be so good as to send her such luggage as would be necessary
to her in a stay of some weeks.
After this Mrs. Tredethlyn had no more to do but to nurse her husband
through the slow stages of convalescence. It was very long before he was
strong enough to get up to a little Arcadian tea-drinking. It was very
long after that before he was able to take a few turns in the
clover-field, leaning on Maude’s arm. It was still longer before he was
well enough to think of turning his back upon Cornwall, to plunge into
busy commonplace life again.
If he could have been an invalid for the rest of his days, he would have
resigned himself uncomplainingly to his fate; for what period of his
chequered existence had been so sweet as this, in which he and Maude
were all in all to each other?--this perpetual _tête-à-tête_, unbroken
by the intrusion of morning callers, undisturbed by the conflicting
emotions which attend social intercourse in high latitudes. And they
were not idle either during these autumn months. Hidden among those wild
Cornish moors, the husband and wife were very busy together--_improving
their minds_; for Maude had confessed to her husband, with a good deal
of girlish giggling and blushing, that her own education had been very
nearly as defective as his, and that the wide fields of knowledge, which
were such strange and bewildering regions to him, were scarcely more
familiar to her.
“And you are so clever, Frank,” she exclaimed, in conclusion--she
always called him Frank now. “You remember what those American
phrenologists--Messrs. Somebody and Something--said about your
perceptive faculties? You could learn anything, they said. And we’ll
learn together, dear; for I’m ashamed to say I’ve forgotten everything
my governesses and masters taught me, except French and music, and a
smattering of German and Italian. And I’m sure if you’d seen how, as
soon as one master had beaten anything into my brains, another master
came and beat it out again with something else, you’d scarcely wonder
that I’m ignorant. So we’ll begin together, Frank dear, and learn
everything. Won’t it be fun?”
A young lady who looked upon the acquisition of universal knowledge as
an agreeable joke would scarcely be expected to drink very deeply of the
Pierian spring. Maude imbibed the classic water in little fitful sips,
and wasted a good deal of it in frolicsome splashing; but Francis had
read considerably, even in the midst of his London dissipation, and he
had a happy knack of remembering what he read. Mrs. Tredethlyn wrote to
a popular librarian for his catalogue; and in the pages of this pamphlet
she ticked off the solid works which she considered adapted to the
improvement of her own and her husband’s mind.
“Merivale’s ‘History of the Romans under the Empire!’” she exclaimed;
“_that_ of course we must read. I’m sure I haven’t the faintest idea of
Julius Cæsar, except that he always seemed to have a laurel-wreath on
his head and a kind of rolling-pin--if I remember right--in his hand,
and that he once passed something called the Rubicon, though _what_ it
was I haven’t the slightest notion. We’ll have the ‘Roman Empire;’ and
when we’ve got through that, we’ll have Gibbon in _one_ volume, you
know,” said Maude, triumphantly; “he’ll _seem_ shorter in one volume,
even if the small print is rather trying to one’s eyes. Newman’s ‘Phases
of Faith’--that sounds like theology, doesn’t it? and I don’t think we
need begin theology yet, because if we got into the early schisms of the
Church, and Gnostics, and Arians, and so on, our brains wouldn’t be
clear enough for Julius Cæsar. There’s a life of Madame de Maintenon, by
the Duc de Noailles; I think we’ll have that: she’ll be quite a relief
after the ‘Roman Empire,’ because one _has_ a kind of idea about her,
and that she was a nasty old frump, and said rude things about the king,
who was so kind to her, and so on.”
The selection of these and a great many more books was eminently
delightful; but when they came, Maude insisted on dipping into “Roman
Empires” and ponderous histories of different ages just as if they had
been so many novels; and she frisked among the records of the Reign of
Terror with a very confused idea as to the difference between the
“Mountain” and the “Gironde,” but a vivid notion of Charlotte Corday
having her portrait painted just before her death, and Citizen Roland’s
beautiful wife declaiming on the scaffold.
They were very happy together. If Francis read in real earnest, and his
wife only played at reading, they were not the less united in their
studies. The industrious honey-bee and the frivolous butterfly may hover
about the same flower, happy according to their different natures in the
same summer noon. Francis Tredethlyn and his wife were so happy in the
quiet old farmhouse that they let the autumn days drift by them in their
moorland retreat, even after the Cornishman had grown strong enough for
a new skirmish with Harcourt Lowther, had there been any need of a
physical contest between the two men.
“We have been so happy here, Francis,” Maude said one dim November
evening, as the husband and wife walked side by side upon the moorland
before the Grange; “but I think we have learnt to understand each other
so well now, that no one in the world will be able to divide us again.
And by-and-by, when you have read a great deal about Julius Cæsar and
political economy, and so on, and go into the HOUSE”--Maude opened her
eyes to the widest extent as she pronounced the high-sounding
substantive--“how proud I shall be of you; and I shall go to the Ladies’
Gallery when you are going to speak! And then, when you have settled all
about the Berkshire estate, how delightful it will be to arrange our
model farm, and model stables, and pineries, and vineries, and
conservatories, and orchid-houses, and a model dairy, and a model
poultry-yard, almost as pretty as the one at Frogmore! and then how much
we shall have to think of and talk about, shan’t we, Frank?”
“And you’ll never be ashamed of me again, Maude?”
“Ashamed of you!” cried Mrs. Tredethlyn, innocently; “was I ever ashamed
of you?” And then she looked at her husband archly, blushing and
laughing. “Well, perhaps once, when you knocked those _petits timbales
de gibier_ into the duchess’s lap,--half-a-dozen of them at the very
least, Frank; and the night you tore Lady Ophelia Fitzormond’s old
point: but you are so refined, Frank, so improved, if I may venture to
say as much without offending you.”
“I should be a churlish brute indeed, if I had not improved in the
society of the sweetest wife in Christendom, to say nothing of Julius
Cæsar. My great-grandfather was a gentleman, Maude; and there are few
names older than Tredethlyn, even in this land of ancient lineages. We
dropped down until we came to be represented by my grandfather, who
lived like a peasant for the sake of hoarding his money, and in whose
steps my uncle Oliver followed. I shall try to make myself a gentleman
for your sake, Maude--it would never do for people to say that the
lovely Mrs. Tredethlyn had allied herself to a man who was only a clod.”
After this, need it be said that all went very smoothly with Mr. and
Mrs. Tredethlyn?--so smoothly, that poor discontented Julia abandoned
the happy couple in disgust, and went abroad as travelling companion to
a rheumatic old countess, who leads her a dreadful life, and insists
upon being read to sleep out of German metaphysical works at weird hours
of the night. She has met with Roderick Lowther in the course of her
travels, lonely and cynical, looking at everything in life through the
medium of his own disappointments; for he has sought in vain for a
reconciliation with his young wife, and has found to his cost how very
firmly a gentlewoman can hold to her resolution, when her firmness is
justified by the sense of a deep and deadly wrong.
They are very happy, Francis and Maude. The Berkshire estate is just one
of those exceptionally delightful places which drop now and then into
the hands of rich commoners when the aristocratic proprietors go to the
dogs; and the Stuccoville mansion only sees its owners during the few
months in which they skim the cream of the London season, before
scudding off to the Continent to improve their minds among the monuments
of the past, or in the most fashionable watering-places of the present.
They are very happy. As time speeds on, there appears on the lawn in
Berkshire a little rolling bundle of white muslin and expensive lace,
which, inspected closely, turns out to be a baby, and which, if it could
speak at all, would answer to the name of Lionel Hillary Tredethlyn; and
by-and-by, when the young couple travel in the bright autumn weather, a
prim English nurse and a French _bonne_ follow in their rear, and there
is a little girl baby in a white hood; and papa and mamma are alike
concerned for the safe conveyance of these domestic treasures. The girl
baby is called Maude; but she owns a string of other names; and her two
godmothers are Susan Lowther, who lives happily with her boy in the
Petersham cottage, and Rosa Grunderson, who declares that, in
consequence of the distracting influence of public characters, and her
fatal experience of the perfidy of private individuals in the person of
Roderick Lowther, she will descend a spinster to the grave.
One day, at a German watering-place, Francis and his wife hear of a man
living in the same hotel with them, their countryman; a man who is
young, has been handsome, and who for the last few months has been
conspicuous in the gaming-saloons of the Kursaal as a desperate, and
sometimes a very lucky, player--a traveller who can scarcely be an
adventurer, for he has been admired and caressed by elegant women and
well-born men, but who has been a hard drinker from first to last, and
within the last fortnight has fallen a victim to the most hideous
disease which vice ever engendered as the scorpion-whip to work its own
retribution,--a disease called delirium tremens.
The landlord of the hotel tells Mr. Tredethlyn how this wretched
Englishman has his bad fits and his intervals of quiet; how he will lie
down calmly enough perhaps at night, to start up mad in the dim grey
morning, to walk far out into the country, hurrying wildly before the
fiend that pursues him; and to fall exhausted in some desolate spot, and
lie there till some passing peasant picks him up and conveys him back to
his lodging. The landlord describes, with considerable vivacity and
gesticulation, how this poor afflicted creature will sit for hours
together catching at imaginary insects that buzz about him and torment
him; how he will watch and point to falling snow, that never falls; how
with a power that is hideously graphic, he will describe the devils that
dance and gibber round his miserable bed. He tells how the shutting of a
door, the rustling of a newspaper, the flutter of a falling leaf, will
startle this unhappy sufferer more than an unexpected peal of thunder
would startle another man. He describes the sleeplessness which no
opiate is strong enough to conquer, the restlessness and depression with
which medical science struggles in vain. He tells Francis Tredethlyn, in
confidence, that the poor ailing wretch is all but penniless, and that
very scanty supplies of money come to him in reply to the letters he
writes to England now and then in his rational moments.
It scarcely needs Maude’s appealing look to inspire Francis with the
wish to help this unhappy countryman. He says nothing to his wife, but
he goes by-and-by to smoke his cigar in the lamplit quadrangle, where
there is a café, and a smoking-room, and a reading-room, and a
post-office, and a perpetual chatter of divers tongues, and clatter of
hurrying feet. He is a long time smoking that cigar; and yet Maude feels
no displeasure in his absence, as she sits alone in her balcony looking
out at the lamplit town and the solemn forest looming darkly in the
distance. She knows that whatever impulse stirs her own heart is almost
sure to find an answering impulse in her husband’s; and she can guess
what keeps him so long to-night.
He has spoken to the landlord, he tells her, when he comes back, and has
given him a cheque which is to keep things smooth for the present, and
has promised more money, if more should be needed; for in any case the
Englishman is not to be worried about money matters while he is ill; and
above all he is not to know that a stranger’s help has saved him from
annoyance.
“The landlord persuaded me to go into the--poor fellow’s room,
afterwards,” said Francis, slowly. “He thought it would cheer him up a
little to shake a countryman by the hand; and I did go in, Maude,--and I
saw him.”
“Yes, dear; and the interview has made you unhappy, I’m sure. You are
looking dreadfully pale!”
“The man is very ill, Maude, very ill. Yes, the sight of him did almost
knock me over, I assure you.”
It was a week after this when Mr. and Mrs. Tredethlyn left the German
watering-place. They were on the point of starting from the hotel when
Maude noticed the closed shutters of some windows on an upper story, and
on questioning one of the waiters, was told that the Englishman was
dead. She asked her husband to tell her more about the painful end of
this lonely Englishman, as they sat alone in the _coupé_ of a railway
carriage.
“Yes, he is dead, Maude,” Francis answered, sadly. “It was a very
melancholy fate. The doctors could not conquer the sleeplessness, and he
sank at last into a state of coma from which he never rallied. It was a
very miserable ending. He will he buried in the little Protestant
cemetery. I left all necessary directions, and I have written to his
friends in England. Perhaps some one who cared for him will come over to
stand beside his grave. He was no friend of mine; but there seems
something very shocking in this solitary death in a foreign country.”
“He was no friend of yours!” repeated Maude, wonderingly; “how strangely
you say that, Frank! You knew him, then?”
“Yes, Maude, and you knew him too. The man who died last night was
Harcourt Lowther!”
THE END.
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Transcriber’s Notes
This file uses _underscores_ to indicate italic text. New original cover
art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain. Itemized
changes from the original text:
• Table of Contents: Supplied missing period after chapter number IV.
• p. 10: Changed “Deptfort” to “Deptford” in phrase “embarked at
Deptford on a misty morning in October.”
• p. 16: Changed exclamation mark after “child” to comma in phrase “his
only child, too, for the matter of that.”
• p. 16: Supplied missing closing quotation mark after phrase “bring
out your desk, and write at once.”
• p. 22: Replaced double with single closing quotation mark in phrase
“the lawyer’s letter!--‘Francis Tredethlyn, Esq.!’ eh?”
• p. 35: Supplied missing closing quotation mark after phrase “I’m
every bit as far from Susy now as ever I was out yonder.”
• p. 51: Changed “Hilary” to “Hillary” in phrase “Lionel Hillary,
Australian merchant, of Moorgate Street.”
• p. 69: Supplied missing period after “Mr.” in phrase “She sighed as
she admitted to Mr. Tredethlyn that her name was Burfield.”
• p. 72: Supplied missing closing quotation mark after phrase “with her
relations in the country.”
• p. 80: Supplied missing period after “Mrs.” in phrase “He had only
been able to read Mrs. Burfield’s story in one fashion.”
• p. 111: Omitted repeated word “as” in phrase “appeared to resent any
inquiries as to his state.”
• p. 169: Changed “gaities” to “gaieties” in phrase “amidst all the
gaieties and luxuries and successes of the most wonderful city in the
world.”
• p. 188: Replaced double with single closing quotation mark after
phrase “what have you done with Robert?”
• p. 202: Changed “Cliquot” to “Clicquot” in phrase “under the
influence of unlimited Moet or Clicquot.”
• p. 214: Supplied missing period after phrase “some one proposed an
adjournment to an adjacent theatre.”
• p. 224: Supplied missing letter “s” in “Turner’s” in phrase “I’ll
slip over and get Miss Turner’s direction.”
• p. 227: Supplied missing single closing quotation mark after phrase
“I don’t think I shall ever bring my mind to go there, or to see
them.”
• p. 241: Several words at the top of this page were missing from the
images used to produce this eBook. The words “said,” “set,” and
“heiress” were confirmed from the original 1864-65 serial
publication.
• p. 246: Changed “Burlegh” to “Burleigh” in phrase “And long he
mourned, the Lord of Burleigh.”
• p. 250: Changed “looing” to “looking” in phrase “looking sharply at
the myosotis in her nephew’s button-hole.”
• p. 266: Changed dash to period after phrase “exclaimed Mr. Harcourt,
who had said all he wanted to say.”
• p. 268: Changed “reurned” to “returned” in phrase “when the
water-party returned to the Cedars.”
• p. 271: Omitted closing double quotation mark after phrase “willing
to lay down his very life for her pleasure.”
• p. 280: Added semicolon after phrase “I have been face to face with
starvation, Frank, very often within the last two years.”
• p. 286: Supplied missing period after “Mr.” in phrase “The quiet
rubber at Mr. Lowther’s lodgings generally led to other rubbers
elsewhere.”
• p. 289: Supplied missing period after phrase “while Francis was
shaking hands with some of the men.”
• p. 292: Supplied missing letter “n” in “man” in phrase “a big man
with a black moustache.”
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