Only a clod

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?”

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 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?