Only a clod

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?

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.

“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.”

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.