Mr. Hillary escorted his daughter and Julia Desmond back to Twickenham upon the day following that night-scene of anguish and terror. They left Brighton rather late in the day, and arrived at the Cedars when the early winter evening had closed in upon the leafless avenues and groves about the old house. Lights were burning cheerily in the long range of lower windows, and in the vestibule and inner hall; and rare groups of stainless marble gleamed white against a background of bright hothouse flowers. Deferential servants came hurrying out as the carriage drove up; and Miss Hillary, seeing her home in all its accustomed brightness and comfort, felt a painful sense of bewilderment. It was so difficult to realize the force of that calamity which had been so lately revealed to her: it was so difficult to believe that all this splendour was so much rottenness, from which there was only one step to poverty and disgrace.
Mr. Hillary had visited his daughter’s room very early upon the morning after the terrible confidence between them, and had impressed upon her the necessity of suppressing every evidence of the knowledge that had come to her.
“I have been compelled to trust you, Maude,” he said; “and you must prove yourself worthy of my confidence. Heaven only knows how difficult it has been for me to keep the secrets of my business during three years of reverses and misfortunes such as rarely fall to the lot of a speculator. My only chance of floating over this crisis lies in the meeting with some friend who will lend me the money I want, without looking too closely into the nature of the security I have to offer. But let the state of my affairs once get wind, and all hope of retrieval would be lost. Remember this, Maude: and, if you love me, show a bright face to the world; and above all, beware of Julia Desmond. That young lady is a dangerous person, my dear; and the day may come when we shall have reason to regret having given a shelter to old Desmond’s destitute child.”
“But Julia is a dear good girl, papa; she would be very sorry for us, I am sure,” Maude pleaded, innocently.
“Julia has contrived to feather her own nest so remarkably well, that she would be very indifferent to any calamity that could come to her friends,” answered the practical man of the world, who had been by no means pleased with Miss Desmond since that young lady’s conquest of Francis Tredethlyn.
Maude kissed her father,—ah, how passionately! She clung to him, as she remembered that long feverish dream of the previous night, and the glittering something lying in the drawer; she kissed him, and promised that his secrets should be guarded more carefully than her own life.
“And the miracle may be accomplished between this and the tenth of January, papa,” she said.
And then, as Lionel Hillary was about to leave his daughter’s room, she placed herself suddenly between him and the door, and turned the key in the lock. He looked at her, surprised and perplexed.
“Maude!”
“Dearest father, you have trusted me, and you have exacted a promise from me,” said Miss Hillary, with a quiet calmness that was more impressive than any vehemence of manner; “and now I want you to give me a promise, a very solemn promise, my own dear father.”
She put her hand upon his shoulder and kissed him once more, clinging to him fondly, looking tenderly upward to his pale careworn face. Then she took a bunch of keys from her pocket and held them out before him.
“You remember those keys, papa; I am going to return them to you; but I want you to kneel down with me here, now, when all that feverish excitement of last night has passed away; I want you to promise me, as you hope for mercy and happiness in a better world when this life is all gone by and done with,—I want you to promise me that you will never again under any circumstances, in any hour of trial or temptation, think of that dreadful alternative of which you thought last night. Oh, papa! remember it is such a terrible sin even to think of it; for we can never do so until we have ceased to trust in God.”
The simple words went straight to Lionel Hillary’s heart—that world-weary heart, in which there was but this one tender quality of paternal love still left. No subtle arguments of theologian or philosopher could have so deeply influenced him as his daughter’s gentle pleading. He knelt by her side, close to a little table, on which an open Testament was lying, and pressing his lips upon the sacred page swore that he would never again contemplate the sin which he had so nearly committed only a few hours before.
“It is a coward’s remedy at the best,” he said presently; and then he took his daughter in his arms and looked down at her tearful face with a mist before his own eyes, which made that bright young beauty seem blotted and dim. “My Maude, my darling, surely Heaven must have created you to be my guardian angel. I have not been a good man; I have been too much of a speculator for the last few years,—a reckless speculator, perhaps; but when the demon of commercial hazard had his grip strongest upon me, your image was always in my mind. I wanted to leave you rich, secure from all the troubles of this world. I was a poor man in my young days, Maude; and perhaps the bitterness of that early time may have taught me to set too high a value upon wealth. Fortune came to me afterwards, almost as wonderfully as it comes to a prince in a fairy tale; and some recklessness of spirit may have been engendered in me by my own successes and by the times in which I have lived.”
“But, dear papa, you need not fear poverty for my sake,” said Maude; “only trust in me, and when the time comes you shall find me ready to face it. My life has been very pleasant—too pleasant, I dare say,—I have always felt that it was so when the thought has come to me of all the people who suffer in this world. But you know how the princess in the fairy tale, who has never known a sorrow, goes out all at once into the great forest, more helpless and lonely than the poorest woodman’s daughter, and yet no harm ever comes to the princess, papa. If it will only please Heaven to spare your good name, poverty will have no sting for me; and if disgrace should come, I will bear it for your sake,—I will bear it without a murmur for your sake, papa.”
She broke down just a little as she said this; she could not speak quite calmly of that most terrible loss of all—the loss of her father’s commercial honour. She remembered, very dimly, long prosy discussions that she had heard at Mr. Hillary’s dinner-table, about men who had failed, and who had failed through some dishonesty or recklessness of their own, and whose downfall had involved the hard-won fortunes of others, making a vast circle of ruin, spreading as the watery circle spreads when you drop a pebble into a tideless lake.
From this time it almost seemed as if a new life began for Maude Hillary. No more careless idling over new music, no more eager commencements of expensive fancy-work that was never to be finished! After Miss Hillary’s return to the Cedars, anyone taking the trouble to watch her closely might have perceived a wonderful alteration in her conduct—a change that was almost a transformation in her very nature. When she opened her piano now, it was for no idle trifling with fashionable difficulties, no coquetting with shakes, and skipping of arpeggios. She practised steadily, and for hours together. Might not the time be very near at hand in which she would be called upon to gird on her armour, and join the ranks of the bread-winners? She thought of herself in a dingy London street, somewhere in the dreary region between Holborn and the New Road—the region which was once a fair expanse of pleasant meadow-land. She thought of herself toiling as so many women toiled, leading the same dull life from day to day; and her courage did not fail her even before that dismal picture. It was not likely that this change in Maude Hillary could escape the notice of so observant a young lady as Miss Desmond. Julia saw and wondered, but she was far from guessing the real cause of Maude’s unusual gravity.
“I suppose she is making herself unhappy about Harcourt Lowther,” thought Miss Desmond. “These fortunate people always contrive to find one crumpled leaf in their beds of roses. She is making herself miserable about that handsome, worthless soldier, and she thinks herself hardly used because she cannot play at love in a cottage, with a rich mercantile father to pay the expenses of the idyllic ménage.”
This was how Julia Desmond accounted for Maude’s long intervals of absent brooding, and that melancholy shadow which settled on her face whenever she fancied herself unnoticed, and for a while relaxed the heroic effort with which she tried to keep her promise, and guard her father’s secret. It was a very hard struggle. All the young idlers, the government clerks, the briefless but literary barristers, the rising artists who had narrowly escaped making palpable hits at the Royal Academy, or at a temple of art which they irreverently alluded to as the “British Inst,” all the accustomed Twickenham loungers flocked down to the Cedars to keep their Christmas holidays in the house of a gentleman whom they regarded as a sort of commercial Midas—a Moorgate Street Fortunatus, from whose inexhaustible coffers flowed the golden waters of perpetual prosperity: and Maude received all the old incense, and was fain to smile something like the old smiles upon her worshippers; while her heart ached with an unceasing pain, and a hidden dread that was like a palpable burden weighed for ever on her breast.
“Oh, if they knew—if they only knew!” she thought. “They court me because they think I am rich, perhaps; but if they only knew what an imposture all this splendour is—these lights and flowers, and grapes and pines, and Sèvres china and Venetian glass, and all this long parade of dinner! if they knew that poverty and disgrace may come to us before the new year has well begun!” Sometimes, in her utter weariness of spirit, sometimes when the social comedy seemed almost too hard to act, Miss Hillary felt suddenly tempted to turn round upon her admirers, and cry to them,—
“Why do you torment me with your hackneyed compliments? I am not the daughter of a millionaire; my father is only an imprudent speculator, who is hovering on the verge of a black abyss of bankruptcy and ruin. Go and offer your worship in some solvent temple, and leave me alone with my father and his sorrows.”
This, or something akin to this, Miss Hillary was at times sorely tempted to utter. But she kept her promise. She had promised that no word or action of hers should betray the rottenness of her father’s position, and she kept a close watch upon herself. Her adorers—who were by no means so mercenary as she thought them—perceived that something was amiss with their goddess; but were far from associating anything so vulgar as the state of the money-market with the lessened lustre of her smiles.
“She’s engaged to some fellow in the army, and her father won’t let her marry him, and the fellow writes her worrying letters; Miss Desmond told me as much,” the loungers said one to another, when confiding in each other about Miss Hillary.
The brilliant Julia had taken care to let Maude’s admirers know that her heart had long been bestowed upon a remote object; but she did not go so far as to reveal the name of Miss Hillary’s chosen lover; and Francis Tredethlyn had no suspicion that Maude Hillary and the beautiful heiress of whom his master had so often spoken were one and the same person. He knew nothing of this; he only knew that Maude seemed as remote from his sphere as the distant stars that shone coldly upon him out of a steel-blue winter sky when he looked from his window at the Cedars. He spent his Christmas at the Cedars; for Mr. Hillary had been specially cordial and hospitable to him of late, and had resumed all his old graciousness of manner to Julia.
And the private theatricals, the elegant drawing-room exhibition of amateur histrionics, which Maude had planned so merrily in the autumn, were to take place on the first night of the new year—now, when the poor girl’s heart was sinking under the dull pain of that perpetual burden, that dreary terror of the disgrace which might be so near.
She had told her father that a miracle might be wrought before the 10th of January. Of what had she thought or dreamed when she held out that hope? What daring fancy had been engendered out of the excitement of the moment? There are times when a woman feels capable of becoming a social Joan of Arc, a bloodless Charlotte Corday; but then the enthusiasm, the exaltation of the moment is so apt to pass with the moment. There had been a vague but desperate intention lurking in Maude Hillary’s mind when she had encouraged her father by those hopeful speeches; but the days were creeping past, the new year was close at hand, and nothing had been done. Nothing had been done; and now Miss Hillary was tormented all day long about these wonderful private theatricals, which were to surpass every drawing-room performance since the days when the unhappy daughter of the Caesars played a soubrette for the delight of that taciturn king and grandfather-in-law who did not like to laugh.
All arrangements for the grand entertainment had been made before Mr. Hillary’s household removed to Brighton. The play had been selected, the characters allotted to the individuals who were supposed, or who supposed themselves, to be most fitted to play them; but not without as much shuffling and changing as the kings and queens undergo in a game of cards. The drama finally chosen was the “Lady of Lyons,” selected, no doubt, on that grand principle in accordance with which all amateurs go to work, i. e. because it is a play which specially requires accomplished actors in every one of its characters. Of course Maude was to be the Pauline. Was she not sole daughter and heiress of the master of the house, at whose expense all the business was to take place? If she had been red-haired, or hump-backed, or lame, the amateurs could scarcely have done otherwise than choose her as the representative of the lovely Mademoiselle Deschappelles. But as she was one of the fairest daughters ever spoiled by a wealthy merchant, she was really created for the part, as it seemed; and she had only to order her dresses and let down her sunny hair in the classic disorder of the period, and she would be the loveliest Pauline that ever won the simple heart of an aspiring young gardener. But how about Claude? At first every one of the amateurs had desired to play Claude, and nothing but Claude. To wear that impossible velvet coat, with its lavish embroidery of gold and spangles; to snub Beauseant, and to patronize Damas; to flourish diamond snuff-boxes and rings, and filmy ruffles of point d’Alençon, which are so becoming to the unhappy amateur, whose hands are apt to assume the rich purple hues of raw beef under the influence of extreme terror; to hold Miss Hillary in their arms, and cry, “Oh, rapture!” in a ponderous bass voice apparently situated somewhere in those martial jackboots, without which Claude would be less than Claude,—to do all this seemed to the young men at the Cedars a glory and delight which would be cheaply won by the cutting of one another’s throats in a champ clos.
And then to what base hypocrisies these amateur actors descended! declaring to one another that, after all, Claude was not such a great part! Nay, indeed, was not the heroic gardener something of a spoon, liable to provoke laughter if his velvet coat failed to fit, or his humble blouse looked too much like a little boy’s pinafore? Claude might be a very fine part, the amateurs argued to each other, in a regular theatre, where there were the gallery fellows to applaud the long speeches, and to stamp their hob-nailed boots in the great situations, and all that sort of thing, you know; but your drawing-room audiences are apt to laugh at strong sentiment; and, in short, for a private performance, Damas, or Beauseant, or Glavis were the great parts.
So there was a good deal of chopping and changing, with vengeful feelings attendant thereupon; and at last, after almost all the privileged guests at the Cedars had made themselves hoarse in the endeavour to cultivate that bass voice and peculiar melodious gurgle so often heard on the stage, and so rarely heard off it; after innumerable tryings-on of velvet coats and cocked hats before cheval-glasses,—it transpired all at once that nobody wanted to play Claude Melnotte. The noblest hearts sank with a sickly terror before the thought of all Twickenham assembled in solemn conclave to listen to those long speeches with which the peasant husband endeavours to appease the natural anger of his bride. One by one the amateurs had made the awful discovery, that after all there is some touch of art, not to be learned in a day, even in the actor’s trade. One by one they had discovered that they lacked physique for the leading character; and that, after three acts or so of blank verse, they were apt to become hoarse and roopy, and to break ignominiously from that melodious bass gurgle into a treble squeak. So it came about that there was no one to play Claude, and Miss Hillary clasped her hands in anguish, and demanded what was to become of her. All Twickenham and Hampton Court, Richmond and Ham, and all sorts of people from town invited to witness the “Lady of Lyons,” and no Claude Melnotte! One of the government clerks, who fancied himself an embryo Buckstone, timidly suggested “Box and Cox” as a fitting substitute for the drama; but Miss Hillary turned from him with disdain. “Box and Cox!” she exclaimed, contemptuously; “why, my dresses are all ordered, and the white satin for the wedding-dress is to be five-and-twenty shillings a yard. I must have some one for Claude.”
And then at last it was discovered that Francis Tredethlyn, who had volunteered to carry a tea-tray or a coal-scuttle, or to announce a carriage, or to perform any ignominious part in the drama for Miss Hillary’s pleasure,—it was discovered all at once that this young man was able to act. He was no untaught Macready, no ready-made Kean; but he was able to do what the best of the government clerks and literary barristers failed in doing; he was able to roll out the melodious blank verse in a big, deep voice, that never failed him to the end of the chapter. The stage is almost as great a leveller as death himself, and on that little platform at Twickenham uneducated Francis Tredethlyn was quite as much at his ease as the well-bred young men about him: more at his ease, for he was not so bent upon distinguishing himself, and was indeed only eager to oblige Miss Hillary. All this had happened before the autumn visit to Brighton; and now when Maude returned to the Cedars she found busy workmen making a perpetual hammering in the apartment which had been chosen for the scene of the entertainment. Mr. Hillary did everything in a superb manner; there was to be no pitiful contrivance of folding-doors festooned by suburban carpenters, but accomplished people from town had come down to the Cedars, and a magnificent archway of white and gold spanned the lofty billiard-room which the merchant had built at one end of his house. All the arrangements were to be perfection; the lighting of the small stage was to be a miracle of art; the grouping of the furniture had been studied by genre painters of no mean pretensions. Poor Maude grew sick at heart as she heard all these details discussed. She looked back, and wondered, as she remembered what a frivolous creature she had been only a few months ago, and how this amateur dramatic performance had seemed a matter of supreme importance to her; and now she repeated the words mechanically during those long rehearsals, in the course of which the amateurs had so many angry disputations, and so cruelly victimized Mr. Hillary’s pale sherry.
At last the new year began, and at ten o’clock upon the first night in January long lines of carriages filled the avenue at the Cedars, and the road outside the lodge-gates, until the neighbourhood was luminous with flaring lamps that glared redly in the winter darkness. People came from far and wide to see Miss Hillary play Pauline, and to devour Mr. Gunter’s supper, though Miss Hillary’s heart might be breaking, and the merchant’s head splitting with the weight of care that pressed just now upon his overtaxed brain! But people do get through, these things somehow; and Lionel Hillary walked about his drawing-rooms, looking supremely gentlemanly in a stiff cambric cravat, and uttering mild commonplaces for the edification of new arrivals.
People get through these things. Poor Maude’s head ached with a dull pain as her maid arrayed her in a dress of white silk, showered with rosebuds, and flounced and looped with lace and ribbon. Would any of this finery be paid for, Miss Hillary wondered, as she saw her splendour reflected in the cheval-glass; or was it altogether dishonesty and wickedness? She shuddered as she thought of this: but the entertainment of to-night was only a part of the grand hypocrisy which might help to float Mr. Hillary safely over the terrible crisis, and Maude determined to be true to her promise. So she smiled at Julia Desmond, when that young lady, who was to play Madame Deschappelles, came to exhibit herself in powder and patches, and brocade and diamonds, and with half the point-lace in South Audley Street bestowed upon her handsome person. Miss Desmond had consented with amazing graciousness to perform the matronly rôle allotted to her; but she had determined to look like a marquise of the time of Louis Quinze, and she had despatched Francis Tredethlyn on half-a-dozen shopping expeditions, until that gentleman was fain to wonder how a few ribbons, brocaded fabrics, and yellow old lace flounces, could cost the big sums for which he wrote cheques in favour of the West-end tradesmen to whom Julia sent him.
The two girls admired each other’s dresses, and the maid joined in a perfect chorus of laudations with the young lady who would play the Widow Melnotte in a nine-guinea black moire antique, and a point-lace cap and apron, and who kept snatching a manuscript copy of her part from her pocket, and furtively gabbling its contents in dark corners. The girls admired each other, and sailed down the broad staircase together, and then went straight to a little ante-room, where half-a-dozen gentlemen, in attitudes expressive of supreme mental agony, were bending over half-a-dozen copies of the “Lady of Lyons,” and gabbling vehemently.
There is no occasion to describe this amateur performance at the Cedars, inasmuch as it very closely resembled all other amateur performances. Miss Hillary, stepping on to a stage for the first time, was, to say the least, not quite a Helen Faucit, and was on the point of breaking down now and then in some of her grand speeches; but she looked so beautiful in her perplexity and confusion, that the elegant audience encouraged and supported her by the gentlest tappings of spangled fans and pattings of tight kid gloves. There were no tiresome boys in the gallery to urge her to speak up; no critical chimney-sweeps to murmur their disapproval, or hint that she had better go home and learn her part. There was only admiration for her timid loveliness, and the soft music of her tremulous voice.
Of course there were the usual number of dead pauses in the drama, technically known as “stage-waits,” the solemn silences in which the actors stood still and looked imploringly at one another, while the voices of amateur prompters—always inciting their victims to the utterance of long speeches—were painfully audible throughout the assemblage. Mr. Tredethlyn rolled out his blank verse with a sturdy courage that was worthy of all praise; and if his hands were a little red, and his blue-cotton blouse slightly suggestive of Newgate Market, he had acted with his brother soldiers in very rough amateur performances out in Van Diemen’s Land, and now and then some touch of natural fire, some little bit of tender pathos, startled the well-bred audience into applause. It may be that now and then Francis Tredethlyn found himself carried away by the spirit of the scene. Did not that romantic drama bear some likeness to his own story? This beautiful Pauline, this unapproachable being whose lovely image filled the peasant’s dreams, who was she but Maude Hillary herself? Perhaps if Miss Desmond had been the Pauline, Francis might have seemed as cold and tame as the rest of the Twickenham amateurs: but the eyes that looked at him tenderly or reproachfully to-night, were the only eyes in all the world that had the power to move him deeply. He acted well, therefore, as the dullest man will act sometimes under the influence of some factitious excitement: and when the curtain fell upon the final scene of happy and triumphant love, the audience were loud in their praise of “that handsome-looking Mr. Tredethlyn, who was just the very man for Claude Melnotte.”
Then there was a final parting of the curtains and a shower of bouquets, all in the orthodox style, and Maude felt perfumed petals fluttering about her as she curtseyed to her indulgent audience.
All through that last act she had surprised those well-bred spectators out of their natural languor. The Pauline who had been so tame and unimpassioned in the grand cottage scene, was carried away by a strong tide of passionate feeling in that last act, where the half broken-hearted daughter pleads for her insolvent father. Sobs almost choked Miss Hillary’s utterance more than once in this scene; and when at last her head lay for a few moments on Francis Tredethlyn’s breast, the young man’s martial decorations were wet with real tears. The sight of that emotion moved him strangely, though he beheld in it nothing more than the natural excitement of a highly sensitive organization. After the little ovation that came with the close of the drama, he followed Maude Hillary into the ante-room, where the rest of the amateurs were discussing the night’s business, and flirting with the splendid Julia, and thence to an inner room, less brilliantly lighted, and quite unoccupied. Beyond this inner room there was another apartment—the study in which Francis had fallen an easy victim to the wiles of the Hibernian enchantress—and it was to this room that Maude hurried, still followed by Mr. Tredethlyn.
He had no business to follow her. He knew that very well. His business was with Julia, who had acted Madame Deschappelles with wonderful spirit, and for whom the evening had been one long triumph, inasmuch as her lace, and diamonds, and brocade, and dark eyes, and white teeth, had been the subjects of universal admiration. Mr. Tredethlyn’s business lay in that brilliantly-lighted ante-chamber where Julia sat amongst the government clerks, and barristers, and grand military dandies, while an accompaniment of perpetually popping champagne-corks mingled pleasantly with the noise of their laughter. He knew this, and yet he followed Maude to the dimly-lighted study, where the red glow of the fire flickered on the bindings of the books and the frames of the pictures. He could not leave off being Claude Melnotte all in a moment. The exaltation of the mimic scene was still upon him. Just now he had been carried quite away by the influence of the poetic situation; and when he flung down the sham money, which was to release the merchant’s daughter from her hated suitor, a warmer thrill of triumph had stirred his breast than had ever been engendered by the possession of Oliver Tredethlyn’s thousands.
And now he could not fall back to his old position all at once. Only a minute or two ago Maude Hillary had been sobbing on his breast,—his bride, his wife; and he half fancied he had some kind of right to sympathize with her emotion. He stopped suddenly on the threshold of the study, quite unmanned by the sight of Mr. Hillary’s daughter, half kneeling, half lying on the ground, with her face buried in the cushions of a sofa, and her hands clasped in a despairing attitude above the fair tangled hair that had so lately lain upon his breast. Her whole frame was shaken by the vehemence of her sobs; and before such a picture as this it was scarcely strange if poor country-bred Francis Tredethlyn quite forgot that he was not Claude Melnotte. He bent over the prostrate girl, and laid his big fingers gently upon one of those little bejewelled hands clasped so convulsively above the fair head.
“Miss Hillary,” he exclaimed, “dear Miss Hillary, for pity’s sake, tell me what distresses you—what has happened—what is wrong—or—I—I beg your pardon—you have over-fatigued yourself, and you are hysterical; let me send for your maid.”
“Oh, no, no, no!” cried the girl, rising to her feet, and standing before him, but with her face still hidden from him, hidden by her outspread hands and her dishevelled hair.
“Shall I call Julia? she is in the room yonder.”
“Oh, no! I—I want to speak to you, Mr. Tredethlyn; stay just a little, please. Ah! it is so hard, so cruel, but the last chance! In all the world there is no one else who can save me—and my father—my poor, miserable, bankrupt father!”
Francis looked at Miss Hillary in complete bewilderment. Her father—her bankrupt father! Why, then she was still thinking of the scene that was just finished, and the commercial troubles of Monsieur Deschappelles; which character, by the way, had been enacted by a very young man of a sickly cast of countenance, and an inclination to hang his head dejectedly throughout the performance of the drama. It is a rule amongst amateurs to assign the elderly and ineligible characters to the youngest and meekest members of the company; whereby Monsieur Deschappelles is usually represented as a young person of some nineteen summers, with flour in his hair, dirty streaks, supposed to represent wrinkles, upon his face, and a tendency to squeakiness in his voice.
“I am sure you are over-fatigued, over-excited by the play,” urged Francis; “do let me call Julia.”
“No!” cried Miss Hillary, dropping her hands from before her face. “Oh, Mr. Tredethlyn,” she exclaimed, almost passionately, “can’t you understand—can’t you see that I am in earnest? Do you think that scene just now would have made me cry as it did, if it had not reminded me of my own sorrow? Mr. Tredethlyn—I—I know you are a good man, that you would not be slow to do a kindness for anyone who needed your help; I know that; and I—I thought I should have courage to speak to you, but now the words won’t come—I—”
Her dry lips moved, but made no sound. She clasped her hands once more before her face. Heaven knows how desperate was the effort that she made. It is not such an easy matter to borrow twenty thousand pounds; even though the borrower may be young and beautiful, and accustomed to perpetual adoration.
“Miss Hillary, you speak of help—needing help—from me. For mercy’s sake, tell me how I can help you. Do you think there is anything upon earth that would give me such pride and delight as to be of service to you?”
The enthusiasm of the moment lighted up Francis Tredethlyn’s countenance like a sudden glow of summer sunshine. Maude uncovered her face and looked at him, and saw at once that her cause was gained; her father’s preserver was found. She had not counted in vain upon Francis Tredethlyn.
“I want you to lend papa twenty thousand pounds,” she said; “I know that he will repay you honourably. He has some difficulties—terrible difficulties in his business,—but the loan of twenty thousand pounds would smooth them all away. I know that you are very, very rich, Mr. Tredethlyn, and that you can afford to lend such a sum of money, or I should never have dared—”
“You would not have dared, Miss Hillary? Oh, can you doubt that I would give the last sixpence I have in the world, the last drop of my heart’s-blood, to save you from one pang? Twenty thousand pounds! Take forty—fifty thousand—the utmost farthing of my fortune, if you will; squander it—throw it into the river yonder, if the waste of it can give you a moment’s pleasure. Oh, you don’t know, you don’t know how I love you!”
He had been acting Claude Melnotte, and the intoxication of the sweet sentimental poetry was strong upon him; beyond which it is just possible that he may have taken a little more sparkling Moselle in the course of his dramatic exertions than can safely be taken by a young man of sanguine temperament. All prudence, all power of reticence, left him in that moment, and he dropped on his knees at Miss Hillary’s feet, like a lover in a stage-play. She was so beautiful—she seemed so far away from him even now, when her distress had brought her a little nearer than of old,—that this attitude of adoration seemed quite natural to him, almost the only attitude in which he dared address her.
“Oh, if you knew how I love you,” he cried, passionately,—“if you could only believe or understand! But I am so ignorant—so unworthy—so far beneath you!”
Miss Hillary drew herself away from him with a gesture of mingled surprise and disgust.
“You dare to talk to me like this, and you are the affianced husband of my friend!” she cried. “O, Mr. Tredethlyn, you take a very mean advantage of my father’s difficulties and my distress.”
“Yes!” answered Julia Desmond from the doorway. She had been standing on the threshold for the last few moments, watching this interview behind the scenes. “Yes! it is altogether mean and shameful, Maude Hillary. You have taken a noble course, I think, when you fling your father’s debts upon the man who was to be my husband, and coolly ask him for the trifling loan of twenty thousand pounds.” She laughed bitterly as she named the sum. “Twenty thousand pounds—and you ask your friend’s lover to turn money-lender; and you bring your tears and hysterical sobs, and a thousand pretty amateur dramatic devices to bear, in order to obtain what you want, and all in the most childish innocence, of course. And then you turn upon the man whom you have lured to your feet by a hundred tricks and artifices, and make a charming show of surprise and indignation. Ah! it is shameful, Maude Hillary—mean and cruel and false; and bitter shame shall come to you for this night’s work.”
The Irishwoman was superb in her indignation. Those flashing eyes and glittering teeth, hereditary in the race of the Desmonds, seemed to light her face with an infernal kind of splendour: such a splendour had many a fated victim seen upon the countenance of the duelling Irish colonel, just before he fell prone on some lonely field beside the Shannon. It was against Maude that the fuller fury of Julia Desmond’s rage was directed,—against Maude, of whom she had always been jealous, in whom she had continually found a triumphant rival. It was only after that outburst of jealous rage that Julia turned upon her recreant lover. Francis had risen from his knees, and stood a little way from the two girls, with a dogged moodiness upon his face: he was sobered by Maude’s indignation and Julia’s passion, and he was dimly aware that he had acted like a scoundrel.
“As for you, Mr. Francis Tredethlyn,” Miss Desmond said presently, “I suppose I have no need to tell you that all is over between us, and that I bitterly repent the humiliation my own folly has brought upon me. I should have known how much I risked when I stooped to regard a person whose code of honour belongs to a different world from that in which I have been reared. I suppose amongst your people it is the fashion for a man to pledge himself to one woman and then make love to another; but such is not the custom in the circles where the Desmonds have been used to be welcome. I should have known what I had to expect when I came into this house. I should have known what I had to anticipate when I trusted in the truth and loyalty of a man who is not a gentleman.”
Throughout this speech Julia’s hands had been moving rapidly, but with unfailing purpose, though they trembled a little all the while. One by one she had unfastened the diamond ornaments that had glittered upon her head and wrists, her throat and bosom; and now the jewels lay in a little heap at the feet of Francis Tredethlyn. One by one she had thrown them there during that passionate speech. She could not act her play out. She had been unable to support the character she had undertaken. The fiery blood of the Ryan O’Brien Desmond had asserted itself in spite of all the promptings of prudence, all the bitter schooling of experience. It was very dreadful to be poor and dependent; it would have been delightful to be mistress of thirty thousand a year: but Julia Desmond, coming to the threshold of the study, had heard Maude’s appeal for the twenty thousand pounds, and Francis Tredethlyn’s impassioned avowal; and patience and policy had alike deserted her. Carried away by the impulse of the moment, she renounced everything. At last Francis Tredethlyn spoke for himself.
“I know that I have acted very badly,” he said. “I had no right to speak; I never should have spoken but for that play. I think I must have almost fancied myself that poor gardener’s son, who dared to worship the brightest creature that ever crossed his pathway, and in an evil hour told her of his madness. Ah, forgive me, Miss Hillary; do not hate or despise me for what I said just now; let it pass like the play in which we acted to-night. And you, Julia—Miss Desmond, I am not too proud to ask your forgiveness for the wrong I have done you. I have been very guilty, and I accept your reproaches in all their bitterness. But when I promised to be your true and faithful husband, I only made a promise that I am still prepared to fulfil. You will at least do me the justice to remember that I did not profess any warmer feeling than admiration and esteem.”
“Your justification is only a new insult, Mr. Tredethlyn,” Julia answered, coldly. “I wish you good night.”
Her passion had been something terrible in its suppressed vehemence some moments before; but she was quite calm now. She swept towards the door leading out into the corridor; but as she passed the merchant’s daughter, she stopped, just long enough to utter one brief sentence close in the young lady’s ear.
“You shall suffer for this, Miss Hillary,” she said,—
She left the room; but Maude followed her, crying “Julia! Julia!”
She hurried along the corridor and up the staircase, following closely upon Miss Desmond; but when she reached that young lady’s room, the door was shut in her face, and only one answer came to her almost piteous pleadings for admission,—
“I have nothing to say to you, Miss Hillary. I only regret that I must pass one more night in this house.”
So Maude was obliged to go away in despair, and, meeting her maid at the door of her own room, was informed that Mr. Hillary had been inquiring for her, “ever so many times,” the maid said; “and I’ve been looking for you everywhere, Miss, to know when you’d have your dress changed.”
Yes, there was to be more changing of dresses before Maude’s work was done. She resigned herself with a sigh to the hands of the young person who waited upon her; and then went down-stairs, gorgeous in pink silk and crape puffings, and with a crown of dewy rosebuds on her head, to receive the compliments and congratulations of her father’s friends, and to act her part in that social drama which was quite as difficult a performance as the “Lady of Lyons.”
Francis Tredethlyn sat quite alone in the little dimly-lighted study at the end of the long, rambling mansion, while Mr. Hillary’s guests finished the evening with a little dancing, a great deal of flirting, and a perpetual sipping of sparkling wines, in out-of-the-way corridors and lobbies, where there were hothouse flowers and low chintz-covered ottomans, and an air of loneliness conducive to flirtation. Francis Tredethlyn sat alone, with Julia’s diamonds still lying at his feet, and brooded over his position. He had outraged Maude, whom he adored. He had injured Julia, to whom he was bound by every sentiment of honour and good faith. No words can express the bitterness of his remorse as he sat pondering upon what he had done. “False to my cousin Susan, false to Julia Desmond,” he thought; “nothing but mischief has come to me since I inherited that miserable money. I have no right to be amongst these people. I never should have come to this house, where her presence has always seemed to turn my brain.”
He looked down at the diamonds lying on the carpet, and smiled bitterly as he remembered how much money they represented,—more than had been spent on Susan Tredethlyn in all the girl’s joyless life—ten times more than would have restored the young man’s father to solvency and comfort, that time when his uncle refused him the loan of two hundred pounds.
He stopped and gathered together the fallen jewels. There was a writing-table near him, with pens, and paper, and sealing-wax, and all necessary implements. He selected a large sheet of paper, and packed the diamonds into a parcel. But before sealing the packet he wrote a few lines on the margin of the paper,—
“Dear Miss Desmond,
“I beg you to retain the enclosed. They were given to you as an evidence of my esteem and admiration, as well as of my gratitude for your indulgent kindness to one so much beneath you as myself. I implore you to forget and pardon what has happened to-night. I am too ignorant of the world in which you live to know what I ought to do; and I can only assure you that I am ready to submit myself entirely to your discretion, and still hold myself bound by every word I said in this room on the day when you promised to be my wife.
No one but the servants knew when or how Mr. Tredethlyn left the Cedars on that first night of the New Year; but a little before one o’clock the next day a letter was delivered to Mr. Hillary—a letter from the assistant-manager of a certain bank in the City, informing the merchant that a sum of twenty thousand pounds had that morning been placed to his credit.
Maude Hillary did not rise very early after that New Year’s entertainment at the Cedars; painful emotions, troubles, doubts, and perplexities, that had been unknown to her through all her previous lifetime, had crowded suddenly upon her within the last few weeks, and it was scarcely strange if she well-nigh fainted under the burden. She slept for some hours on that first night of the year,—slept the feverish, heavy slumber that waits upon trouble of mind and exhaustion of body. The winter sun shone with a chill brightness between the rose-coloured draperies of her window when she awoke from a painful dream to a dim sense of actual trouble that was still more painful. She remembered the scene of the previous night, her own desperate appeal for help, Francis Tredethlyn’s avowal, and Julia’s indignation. She remembered all this with a burning sense of shame, and with a tender and pitying regret for Julia’s wrongs.
“And he did not love her!” she thought, “when I fancied they were so happy and united, so much what lovers ought to be; it was all false, after all, and he had deceived her. But why? What motive could he have for doing her so great a wrong?”
Miss Hillary pondered upon this mystery while she dressed,—unaided this morning, for she did not care to endure her maid’s sympathetic remarks upon her pale face and heavy eyes; unaided, for how soon that pretty Twickenham paradise, with all its dependencies, might pass away from her, unsubstantial as the fairy palace in which Princess Balroubadour floated away to Africa! Maude put on her plainest morning dress, and went straight to Julia’s room, intending to make her peace with that young lady, at any cost of self-humiliation. No base thought of Julia’s obligations, no remembrance of the favours that had been heaped upon the Irish girl in that hospitable habitation, had any place in Maude Hillary’s mind. She thought of her friend as tenderly as she might have thought of an only sister, and she remembered nothing except the great wrong that had been done to Julia by the defection of her lover. The breach between them was not to be narrowed. When Maude entered her friend’s bedroom, she only found an empty and desolate-looking apartment, in which open wardrobes and drawers, and a dressing-table, cleared of all its pretty frivolities, bore witness to the angry Julia’s departure.
Miss Hillary’s maid came running along the corridor, while her mistress stood amazed in Miss Desmond’s deserted chamber.
“Oh, Miss,” cried the girl, “to think as you should get up and dress yourself without a bit of help, while I’ve been waiting and listening for the bell these last two hours! Miss Desmond, she have gone, Miss, above an hour ago, and have took all her boxes in a fly to the station, but wouldn’t have none of the servants to go with her; and Oh, Miss, she looked as white as that toilet-cover.”
That was all Maude could hear of her sometime friend’s abrupt departure from that pleasant dwelling-place, in which she had enjoyed such a luxurious home. This was all that the servants could tell their young mistress about the splendid Julia; but in the study, where the scene of the previous night had been enacted, Maude found a letter directed to herself, in Miss Desmond’s handwriting. It was a very brief missive; almost such a one as an English Elizabeth, or a Russian Catherine, might have written.
“For your father’s hospitality,” wrote Miss Desmond, “I shall always remain grateful, and shall be sorry to hear of any evil that may befall him. The debt I owe to you I shall also know how to remember, and shall wait the time and opportunity for its repayment.—J. D.”
Maude sat for some time musing sorrowfully upon this oracular epistle. She was not in any wise terrified by her friend’s threats; she was only sorry for Julia’s disappointment.
“She must have loved Francis Tredethlyn very dearly,” Miss Hillary thought, sorrowfully, “or she would never feel his conduct so deeply. And yet I have often fancied that she spoke of him coldly, almost contemptuously.”
Poor Maude Hillary’s lessons in the mysteries of every-day life had only just begun; she had yet to learn that there are other disappointments than those which wait upon true love, other pains and sorrows than those which have their root in the heart; and that there are such things as marrying and giving in marriage for the love of thirty thousand a year.
She spent a weary day in the pleasant drawing-room, where the red glow of a great fire illuminated as much prettiness in the way of china, and Parian, and bronze, and ormolu, and enamel, as would have stocked a bric-à-brac shop in Wardour Street. She spent a tiresome day, that seemed interminably long, lying on a low sofa near the fire, thinking of her father’s troubles and Julia’s desertion. She thought also of that cruel scene, in which she had seemed to play so contemptible a part. What bitter humiliation it was to look back upon, now that the mad impulse of the moment, the desperate courage that had made her snatch at any chance of help for her father, had altogether passed away! How mean and pitiful the whole business seemed now to her calmer judgment, looked upon in the cold light of common, sense! A borrower, a beggar almost, a miserable suppliant to her friend’s affianced husband. What wonder that Francis Tredethlyn had basely taken advantage of that false position, to avow a passion whose least expression was an insult to her on the lips of Julia Desmond’s lover? And then what wasted humiliation, what unnecessary shame; for had not she turned upon him and upbraided him in the next moment, forgetful of her father’s desperate need!
Such thoughts as these were scarcely pleasant company all through that brief January day, which seemed so long to Maude Hillary. The slow hours crept on, and she still lay tossing restlessly on the sofa, which offered all that upholstery can offer for the consolation of a troubled mind. A servant brought lamps, and crept from window to window, drawing the curtains as stealthily as a burglar would have cut a square out of the iron door of Mr. Hillary’s plate-room. The first dinner-bell rang out in the old-fashioned cupola upon the roof, and informed all Twickenham that it was time for the people at the Cedars to array themselves for the evening meal: but Maude still lay upon the sofa, hiding her flushed face in the pillows, and trying to quiet the throbbing in her burning head. What did it matter? The poor inexperienced girl broke down all at once in her social comedy. She could act the wearisome play no longer; she wanted to give up all her share in this world, and to go to bed and lie there quietly until she died. All the common business of life seemed unutterably loathsome to her,—the dressing and dining, the simpering small-talk, the finery of a grand house no longer honestly maintained. Oh, that it could all be swept away like the vision engendered out of some troubled slumber; giving place to a suburban cottage and a life of decent toil!
“I have seen girls—well-bred, good-looking girls, trudging in the muddy London streets, with music portfolios in their arms, while I have been out shopping in my carriage,” she thought. “Oh, if I could only be like one of these, and work for papa, and see him happy, smiling at me across our little table, as I gave him his dinner, and not brooding as he does now, hour after hour, hour after hour, in this grand drawing-room, with the same settled look of trouble on his face!”
It was not only of late that Maude had watched her father anxiously and sadly. Very often during the year just passed, and even in the year preceding that, the girl had been alarmed by Lionel Hillary’s moody looks and long gloomy reveries, out of which it was his wont to rouse himself in a mechanical kind of way when strangers were present. But the merchant always gave the same explanation of his sombre looks. Those headaches, those constitutional headaches, which came upon him constantly through the fatigue and worry of business—those terrible headaches made an excuse for everything, and Maude’s fears about her father related solely to his health. How should she understand the dismal diagnosis of commercial disease? How should she imagine that there was any limit to the fairy purse of Fortunatus—any chance of a blight in Aladdin’s orchard of jewelled fruits?
The second dinner-bell rang, and there was no sign of the merchant’s return. It had been a common thing lately for Lionel Hillary to keep his cook in a fever of vexation over the hot plates and furnaces where the viands for the diurnal banquet simmered and frizzled in their copper receptacles. Maude felt no special alarm about her father. Why should he hurry home to lengthen the long evening of brooding thought and care? Why should she wish him home, when, out of all the depth of her love and devotion, she could not conjure one word of comfort wherewith to greet him?
She was thinking this when the door was opened suddenly by an eager hand, and Mr. Hillary came into the room.
His daughter rose from the sofa, startled by the suddenness of his entrance. It is a small action, that of opening a door, and entering a room; but there was as great a change in Mr. Hillary’s performance of it, as if twenty years had suddenly been lifted from his life.
“My darling!” he cried, taking his daughter in his arms, “it is you whom I have to thank. It was your doing, was it not?”
“What, papa?”
“The money—the twenty thousand pounds.”
“Twenty thousand pounds!”
She thought the burning pain in her head had engendered some sudden delirium. She could not believe that this was her father’s face, lighted by a hopeful smile, such as she had not seen upon it during the last three years.
“What twenty thousand pounds, papa?”
“The sum that has been placed to my credit to-day anonymously. The bank people refused to tell me the name of my benefactor. I look to you, Maude, to solve the mystery. There is only one man whom I know of, rich enough to advance such a sum of money—young enough to do it in so Utopian a manner. There is only one man, Maude, and his name is Francis Tredethlyn. Tell me, my dear, have I guessed rightly?”
“You have, papa. Yes, I am sure you have. Poor fellow! and I was so angry with him last night. It was very good of him to do this, papa.”
“Good of him!” cried the merchant—“good of him to lend twenty thousand pounds, without a halfpennyworth of security! Upon my word, Maude, it is good; and I can assure you it’s a kind of goodness that is very uncommon in the City.”