From the second day of the New Year things went pleasantly enough in the Twickenham household. How could Maude do otherwise than rejoice in the salvation of her father’s honour—to say nothing of his commercial prosperity—even though that salvation had been obtained by a great humiliation on her own part? She would have borne that humiliation very willingly, and would have freely acknowledged her obligation to Francis Tredethlyn, could she have seen Julia Desmond reconciled to her lover. But the separation between these two, which had arisen out of the scene on New Year’s night, was a perpetual reproach to Maude Hillary.
She was not able to be quite happy, therefore, even though such a terrible burden had been lifted from her,—even though she saw the dark cloud swept away from her father’s face. Her girlish frivolity had departed from her for ever on that terrible night in her father’s study at Brighton; and there was a womanly softness, a pensive tenderness in her manner now, that made her even more bewitching than of old. Her affection for her father—always the ruling passion of her simple mind—had been intensified by that fiery ordeal through which she had so lately passed; and there was something very beautiful in the union which now existed between the father and daughter. Mr. Hillary had been surprised into confidences that made a new tie between himself and his child. He could never again entirely withheld his secrets from that tender friend and consoler. He could never again think of her as a beautiful, frivolous creature, only intended to wear expensive dresses and float about in graceful attitudes amongst the costly bric-à-brac of a fashionable drawing-room. He had learned to trust his child; and poor Maude applied herself diligently to the study of the customs and dealings common in that mysterious region known to her as the City. She tried to understand her father’s position—for she was tormented by a feverish anxiety as to the repayment of Francis Tredethlyn’s twenty thousand pounds; but the complications of an Australian merchant’s trade, as affected by wars, and rumours of wars, by alterations in the rate of discount and the price of Consols, were a little beyond Miss Hillary’s comprehension, and she was fain to give up the attempt in despair, and to accept any statement which her father cared to make to her respecting the altered aspect of his affairs.
There was less company at the Cedars than usual during the bleak early months of the year. Mr. Hillary worked very sedulously in the City during this time, and did not care to fill his house with frivolous young idlers or ponderous City-bred matrons and their fashionably-educated daughters. The recklessness engendered by the contemplation of inevitable ruin had given place to the careful dealing of a man who has a difficult but not impossible task allotted to him. You can scarcely expect the daughters of King Danäus to labour very arduously in the filling of those buckets which they know will not hold water; but if the buckets are only thin at the bottom, and may possibly carry their contents safely to the well, it is worth while to work conscientiously.
Francis Tredethlyn’s twenty thousand pounds had done wonders for Lionel Hillary; but the dry-rot had been for a long time at work in that stately ship of which the merchant was captain, and the successful navigation of the vessel, amidst all the rocks and shoals and tempests of the commercial ocean, was by no means an easy duty.
But Mr. Hillary was sanguine, and his daughter saw the new hopefulness and brightness of his face, and was very nearly happy. She was not quite happy, for Harcourt Lowther’s letters grew more despondent and complaining by every mail. He reproached Maude Hillary for her prosperity and her indifference; she must be indifferent, he argued, or she would have succeeded ere this in obtaining her father’s consent to her marriage with the penniless officer. “There are girls who will go through fire and water for the man they love,” he wrote in an epistle that was half filled with fierce reproaches. “I have seen the power of a woman’s devotion; but then that woman was only a poor simple creature, and not the daughter of a millionaire. I cannot believe that you could fail to influence your father, if you really cared to do so. If you loved me, Maude, this business would have been settled long ago.”
Did she love him? That was a question which she had never set herself to answer. Had they not engaged themselves to each other in the prettiest and most sentimental fashion, like a modern Master of Ravenswood and Lucy Ashton? Maude took the fact of her love for granted. All the sweetest and tenderest dreams of her life were mingled with the memory of Harcourt Lowther. He was so superior to all the other men who had paid her their homage; and it may be that his contemptuous bearing towards those other men had been a part of the fascination of his manner. He had affected that modern Edgar Ravenswood tone—that elegant Timon of Athens-ism—which is so intensely charming in the eyes of a very young woman, however spurious it may be. And with all this, he had been so devoted, so delightfully exacting, so deliciously jealous! Maude looked back to the one sentimental period of her life, and saw Harcourt Lowther’s image radiant in all the light of her own youthful fancies. So the worshipper in a village chapel sees some poor painted wooden figure of a saint glorified by the glitter of tapers, the brightness of flowers and draperies and decorations. How was she to separate the lamps and the flowers about the shrine from the image which they adorned? How was she to discover the paltry nature of that clay out of which the graceful figure was fashioned? Harcourt Lowther represented to her all that was brightest and best in her early girlhood; and sitting alone, through long and thoughtful hours, in the empty rooms at the Cedars, Maude Hillary brooded very sadly upon the only love-story of her life.
She had ventured to speak of Harcourt to her father once since the beginning of the year; but her timid pleading had been met by a cruel repulse.
“Understand me at once and for ever, Maude,” Lionel Hillary said, sternly; “such a marriage as that can never be. If you were the great heiress people think you, I might gratify this whim, as I have gratified other fancies, foolish and extravagant in their way. But the road I am now treading is by no means too secure under my feet, and I cannot afford to see my only child the wife of a penniless adventurer. I want to see you happy, Maude, but not after a sentimental girl’s notion of happiness. I know what all those pretty theories about a suburban cottage and poverty come to when they are put into practice. I have seen the slipshod maid-of-all-work, and the miserable dinners, and the Kidderminster carpets, and stale bread and rank butter, that belong to love in a cottage. And more than this, Maude, I know that Harcourt Lowther is the very last man to ally himself to a dowerless wife.”
“Ah, how little you know him!” Maude murmured, softly. She thought she knew her lover so well herself, and fancied him the most generous and devoted of men because he had given her a few half-guinea bouquets, purchased on credit from a confiding florist. “Ah, dear papa, how little you know him! He is always reproaching me with my fortune, and lamenting the gulf it has made between us. Let me tell him of your difficulties; let me tell him that I am no longer a millionaire’s daughter, that I am free to marry the man I love. Ah, let me tell him—”
“Not a word, Maude,” answered Lionel Hillary—“not a word to that man, if you have any love or respect for your father. Remember that I have trusted you with secrets that a man seldom confides to his daughter.”
“And your confidence shall be sacred, papa,” Miss Hillary replied, submissively. And thus ended her intercession in favour of Harcourt Lowther.
She was fain to be contented, however, remembering the great trouble which had been so near her, and which a merciful hand had lifted away. She was fain to remember, shudderingly, the feverish horror of that night at Brighton, and to think gratefully of Francis Tredethlyn, to whom she owed her father’s rescue. She was grateful to him; but she could not put entirely away from her the sense of shame left by that scene in the study, and Julia Desmond’s passionate reproaches. She could not forget that it was for her sake Francis Tredethlyn had helped her father, and that the burden of a great obligation must rest upon her shoulders until that loan of twenty thousand pounds was repaid. Poor Maude’s unbusiness-like mind entirely ignored any such thing as interest for Mr. Tredethlyn’s money. She only thought of the loan itself, and the question of its repayment was perpetually in her mind. Had she not been the suppliant, at whose suit the money had been lent? and was she not in a manner the actual debtor?
Things were much better in the City, her father told her; but upon two or three occasions when she had ventured to hint her anxiety respecting the early repayment of Francis Tredethlyn’s money, the merchant’s answers had filled her mind with vague disquietude. There was an indifference in Mr. Hillary’s manner that alarmed Maude’s keen sense of right and honour.
“Tredethlyn is too well off to want his money in any desperate hurry, my dear,” he said; “he is not likely to become a very pressing creditor.”
The hedgerows about Isleworth and Twickenham were green, with their earliest buds before Francis Tredethlyn came again to the Cedars. Mr. Hillary had called upon the young man at his hotel several times before he succeeded in seeing him, and had only with great difficulty wrung from him an admission of the fact that he was the anonymous lender of the twenty thousand pounds that had saved the merchant from ruin and disgrace.
“My dear Tredethlyn, why should you insist upon any disguise?” Mr. Hillary said, with a pleasant ease that not every man could have maintained in such a position as that in which the merchant found himself with regard to this simple-minded, country-bred Crœsus. “Is it not enough to have been the most generous of men, without trying to carry generosity to the verge of Quixotism? How can I doubt the identity of my preserver? I know that Maude betrayed my necessities to you, under the excitement of those unfortunate theatricals, and I know that loans of twenty thousand pounds do not drop from the skies. My dear fellow, I am most heartily thankful to you for what you have done. It was a very noble thing to do, an action that any man might be proud of doing. If I had ever doubted your having good blood in your veins, your conduct in this one matter would have settled my doubts. But I never did doubt it, my dear Tredethlyn. I have recognized you from the first as a gentleman; not by the right of an accidental thirty thousand a year, scraped out of all manner of commercial gutters by a miserly uncle; but by virtue of some of the best blood in the West of England.”
And then Mr. Hillary stretched out both his hands, and shook those of Francis Tredethlyn in his vigorous grasp; and altogether the interview could scarcely have been more entirely satisfactory had the merchant written a cheque for the twenty thousand pounds on the spot. Indeed, to Francis any immediate repayment of that money would have been a grievous mortification. Was it not delightful to him to remember that he had been of service to her father? Was not the money advanced to the merchant a kind of link between Maude and the man who loved her so dearly and so hopelessly,—only a very sordid, earthy link; but better than none?
“I offended her very much that night,” Francis thought; “but perhaps she will forgive me, and remember me kindly, when she thinks that I have been useful to her father.” But when Mr. Hillary begged Francis to renew his visits to Twickenham, the young man resisted those friendly invitations as obstinately as if the Cedars had been the most obnoxious place upon earth. He could not muster up courage to encounter Maude Hillary after that scene in the little study. What if he had offended too deeply for forgiveness? What if she slew him with a frozen glance from her lovely eyes? Again and again in his lonely rides, emboldened by the dusky twilight of the early spring evenings, he had ventured to haunt the neighbourhood of the old brick-built mansion by the river; but he could not bring himself to go any nearer to the shrine of his divinity; and he made all manner of lame excuses in answer to Mr. Hillary’s cordial invitations.
He was only a clod; only an uneducated rustic, newly cast upon a strange world, open to all the pleasant snares which are laid for the simple-minded possessor of thirty thousand a year. Heaven only knows the perils and temptations into which some young men would have fallen under similar circumstances. It is something in Francis Tredethlyn’s favour that his worst mistake was to fall desperately in love with Maude Hillary, and wear his horse’s shoes out in disconsolate rides about the twilit lanes and roads in the neighbourhood of her dwelling-place.
And in the mean time Messrs. Kursdale and Scardon were supposed to be busily employed in their search for the missing girl, who might or might not have any right to another name than that of Susan Tredethlyn. Very little came of the lawyers’ endeavours. Several advertisements had been inserted in the “Times;” but it is to be feared that the lost and missing advertised for in those columns are too often wanderers in a weary region, far removed from that comfortable sphere of life in which the morning papers are punctually delivered to enliven the breakfast-table. No reply came to any of those mysteriously-worded appeals to Francis Tredethlyn’s cousin which were concocted by the young man and his legal advisers; and the image of the friendless girl grew paler and fainter day by day in the mind of Maude Hillary’s adorer.
At last Fortune—who will generally do anything in the world for us, if we have patience enough to wait her own time for doing it—brought about the result which Francis Tredethlyn had so obstinately avoided, yet so fondly desired. Lounging against the rails one brilliant April day at the corner opposite Apsley House, Francis saw Maude Hillary’s carriage drive into the Park.
Yes, there she was, with her sunny hair framed in spring blossoms and white areophane. The young man seemed to behold the vision of an angel in a Parisian bonnet, and half wondered if the folds of her white burnous were not a pair of downy pinions floating away from her divine shoulders. He grew very red and uncomfortable, and in another moment would have yielded to the impulse that prompted him to seek refuge in flight; but before he could do so, the carriage was close to the rails, Maude Hillary had recognized him, and had told the coachman to stop.
She was not offended with him, then; she forgave him, and thought of him kindly. His heart swelled with a rapture that was almost overpowering. Ah! this was love. How different from that placid sense of affection with which he had regarded his cousin, Susy! how much more delicious! how infinitely more painful!
“I have wanted so much to see you, Mr. Tredethlyn,” Maude said, after shaking hands with her bewildered adorer; “why have you never been to Twickenham?”
“I—I—don’t like—I thought you were angry with me,” stammered Francis, very awkwardly. Ah, how sad it is that the presence of those we love best, and in whose eyes we would most desire to appear at an advantage, should entail upon us the annihilation of anything like ease or grace of manner! Mr. Tredethlyn felt himself becoming purple and apoplectic, under the influence of that seraphic creature, whose image had filled his mind unceasingly for the last six months.
“Angry with you!” exclaimed Maude; “how should I be otherwise than grateful to you, when I remember how good you have been to papa? Believe me, Mr. Tredethlyn, I am not too proud to own the extent of our obligation. I thank you most sincerely. You can never know how grateful I am for the service you have rendered my dear father.”
She bent her head, and the spring-flowers in her bonnet were very near him as she said this in a low, earnest voice. But in the next moment the memory of that uncomfortable scene in the study flashed back upon her, and she felt that she must always be more or less in a false position with regard to Francis Tredethlyn. She made a little effort to set herself right before she parted from him.
“You have seen Julia; you and she are reconciled, I hope. Mr. Tredethlyn?”
“No; indeed, I have never heard from her since—since I left the Cedars. Your papa told me that she—Oh, Miss Hillary, I think it was better that we should part. I don’t think that we had either of us ever really cared for each other. It was better that it should end as it did.”
“But I would give so much to find Julia, to hear where she is.”
Francis Tredethlyn shook his head hopelessly. He had a vague idea that he had not done his very uttermost in his search for his cousin Susan, and he recoiled with terror from the idea of having to engage in a hunt for Miss Desmond.
“Good-bye, Mr. Tredethlyn; I hope that all will come right, after all; and I hope that you will believe I am grateful for your goodness to my father.”
She held out her hand, and the Cornishman took it in his own with almost as reverential a touch as if it had been some relic handed to him from an altar. The carriage drove off immediately after this, and Francis saw that seraphic bonnet with the spring-blossoms melt away and lose itself among mundane bonnets. He lingered at the rails till the carriage came back again, and still lingered after that, thinking that Miss Hillary’s equipage would again return to Hyde-Park Corner; but after out-watching all the loungers by the rails, and seeing the last of the carriages leaving the Ladies’ Mile, he was fain to go home, resigned to the obvious fact that Maude Hillary had left the Park by the Kensington gates on her homeward route.
He went home, but not disconsolate. Had he not seen and spoken with that divinity before whom he was the simplest worshipper who ever bowed before any earthly shrine? Was he not assured of her forgiveness? nay, even of her gratitude? Her gratitude—Maude Hillary’s gratitude, in exchange for that vile dross which he had ever held so lightly. Money was indeed good for something, if it could buy the rapture of that little interview across the park-rail, in which Francis had played so very poor a part. He went home, and carried Maude Hillary’s image with him, and walked up and down his big sitting-room in the Covent Garden Hotel, smoking a cigar and thinking of the woman he loved: he thought of her quite as hopelessly as ever Claude Melnotte could have thought of Pauline before Beauseant’s diabolical suggestions had prompted him to his treacherous wooing. He thought of her as innocently as a schoolboy thinks of the stage fairy-queen in a Christmas pantomime, and no ambitious or selfish dream had any abode in his mind; only when a brief note reached him from Lionel Hillary, renewing the old unceremonious invitation to the Cedars, poor Francis could no longer resist the voice of the charmer, but was fain to pack his portmanteau and drive down to the merchant’s office, whence Mr. Hillary was to convey him in the mail phaeton to Twickenham. She was not angry with him, and he might bask in the sunshine of her presence! For a little while he might enjoy the dangerous delight, and then the officer to whom she was betrothed would come back to claim her, and there would be a wedding at the old church by the Thames; and he, Francis, would see his divinity radiant in bridal robes and crowned with orange-flowers before he departed for ever into the outer darkness where she was not.
After that meeting in Hyde Park, Francis Tredethlyn came very often to the Cedars; so often, as to engender a vague uneasiness in Miss Hillary’s mind. She knew that he loved her. If that sudden declaration in the study had never occurred to reveal the fact, Maude must have been something less than a woman had she been blind to a devotion that was made manifest by every look and tone of her adorer. She knew that he loved her, and that he had done battle with his love in order that she might be happily ignorant of the pangs that tormented his simple heart. The highly educated girl was able to read the innermost secrets of that honest uncultivated mind, and was fain to pity Francis Tredethlyn’s wasted suffering. Alas! had she not indeed traded upon his devotion, and obtained her father’s safety at the expense of her own honour?
Such thoughts as these tormented Miss Hillary perpetually now that Francis spent so much of his life at Twickenham. She perceived with inexpressible pain that her father encouraged the young man’s visits,—her father, who could not surely shut his eyes to the real state of the Cornishman’s feelings; yet who knew of her engagement to Harcourt Lowther. She did not know that Julia Desmond had taken good care to inform Francis of that engagement, and that the young man came knowingly to his delicious torture. She did not know this; and all that womanly compassion which was natural to her, that pitying tenderness which showed itself in the injudicious relief of barefaced tramps and vagabonds about the Twickenham lanes, and the pampering of troublesome pet dogs and canary birds—all her womanly pity, I say, was aroused by the thought that she was loved, and loved in vain, by an honest and generous heart.
Thus it came to pass that she could no longer endure the course which events were taking, and she determined upon speaking to her father. They had dined alone one bright June evening: they were not often thus together now, for Mr. Hillary had fallen into his old habit of bringing visitors from London, and the ponderous matrons and croquet-playing young ladies inflicted a good deal of their company upon Maude. They had dined alone, and Miss Hillary seized the opportunity of speaking to her father upon that one subject which had so long occupied her thoughts.
“Mr. Tredethlyn comes here very often, papa,” she said, breaking ground very gently.
Lionel Hillary filled his glass, retiring an it were behind the claret-jug, from which comfortable shelter he replied to his daughter’s remark,—
“Often?—yes—I suppose he does spend a good deal of his time here. I am glad that he should do so; he is an excellent young man, a noble-hearted young fellow—the best friend I have in the world.”
Mr. Hillary was a long time filling that one glass of claret, and his face was quite hidden by the crystal jug.
“Yes, papa, he is very good; but do you think it is quite right—quite wise to invite him so often?”
“Right—wise?” cried Mr. Hillary; “what, in the name of all that’s absurd, can you mean by talking of the right or wisdom of an invitation to dinner? The young man likes to come here, and I like the young man, and like to see him here. That is about all that can be said upon the subject.”
Maude was silent for some moments. It was very difficult to discuss this question with her father, but she had grown familiar with difficulties within the past few months, and was no longer the frivolous girl who had known no loftier cause of anxiety than the uncertain health of her Skye terrier. She returned to the charge presently.
“Dear papa, I am sorry to worry you about this business,” she said, gently, “but there are such peculiar circumstances in our acquaintance with Mr. Tredethlyn—we are under so deep an obligation to him, and—”
“And on that account we ought to shut our doors in his face, I suppose!” exclaimed Mr. Hillary, with some show of impatience. “My dear Maude, what mare’s-nest have you lighted upon?”
“It is so difficult for me to explain myself, papa: you can never imagine how difficult. But I think you ought to understand what I mean. When Julia was here, Mr. Tredethlyn’s visits were quite natural, and I was always glad to see him; but it was my application to him for the loan of that money which resulted in the breaking of Julia’s engagement. I cannot forget that night, papa; nothing but desperation would have prompted me to appeal to Francis Tredethlyn; and now that we are under this great obligation to him, I feel that we are bound to him by a kind of duty. We have, at least, no right to deceive him.”
“Deceive him! Who does deceive him?”
“Willingly, no one. But he may deceive himself, papa. You force me to speak very plainly. Upon the night on which I appealed to him for that loan, he told me that he loved me, even though he was then engaged to Julia. There was something in his manner that convinced me of his sincerity, though I was shocked at the want of honour involved in such a declaration. But now that his engagement to Julia has been broken off, indirectly through my agency, he may think it likely that—”
“He may think it likely that you would be wise enough to accept one of the best fellows that ever lived for your husband. Is that what you mean, Maude?”
“Papa!”
“Oh, my dear, I have no doubt you think me a cruel father, because I venture to make such a suggestion. But surely, Maude, you cannot have been blind to this young man’s devotion. From the very first it has been obvious to anyone gifted with the smallest power of perception. Julia Desmond contrived, by her consummate artifice, to inveigle the poor fellow into a false position; but in spite even of that foolish engagement, he has been devoted to you, Maude, from the first. I have seen it, and have counted, Heaven knows how fully, upon a marriage between you and him.”
“You have done this, papa, and yet you knew all about Harcourt,” exclaimed Maude, reproachfully.
“I knew that you were a foolishly sentimental girl, ready to believe in any yellow-whiskered young Admirable Crichton, who could make pretty speeches, and criticise the newest Italian opera, or Tennyson’s last poem. But I knew something more than this, Maude; I knew the state of my own affairs, and that my only hope for you lay in a wealthy marriage.”
“And you thought that I would marry for money—you could think so meanly of me, papa!”
“I thought that you were a sensible, high-spirited girl, and that when you came to know the desperation of the case, you would show yourself of the true metal—as you did that night at Brighton; as you did when you asked Tredethlyn for the loan which saved me from ruin.”
Lionel Hillary stretched out his hand as he spoke, and grasped that of his daughter. In the next minute she was by his side, bending over him and caressing him. Only lately it had begun to dawn dimly upon Maude Hillary, that perhaps this father, whom she loved so dearly, was not the noblest and most honourable of men: but if any such knowledge had come to her, it had only intensified the tenderness with which, from her earliest childhood, she had regarded that indulgent father. The experience of sorrow had transformed and exalted her nature; and she was able to look upon Lionel Hillary’s weaknesses with pitying regret, rather than with any feeling of contempt or indignation.
“Dear papa,” she said, very gravely, “you and I love each other so dearly, that there should be no possibility of any misunderstanding between us. I can never marry Mr. Tredethlyn; I know that he is good and generous-minded and simple-hearted; I feel the extent of our obligation to him, but I can never be his wife. It is for this reason that I am fearful lest any false impression may arise in his mind. Pray, dear papa, take this into consideration, and do not let him come here so often—at any rate, not until you have been able to repay him his money, not until the burden of this great obligation has been removed from us.”
Lionel Hillary laughed aloud.
“Not until the money has been paid! I’m afraid, in that case, Tredethlyn will stop away from this house for a long time to come.”
“A long time, papa! But you told me you would be able to repay the twenty thousand pounds,” said Maude, turning very pale.
“And I dare say I shall be able to pay the money some day. Such a loan as that is not repaid in a few months, Maude. How should you understand these matters? The twenty thousand pounds went to fill a yawning gulf in my business, and it would be about as easy for me to get the same amount of money back out of that gulf as it would for a single diver to bring up the treasures of a sunken argosy.”
Maude sighed wearily. It seemed as if a kind of net had been woven round her, and that she suddenly found herself in the centre of it, unable to move.
“Papa,” she cried, “you don’t mean that Mr. Tredethlyn’s money is lost?”
“Lost! No, child; but it may be a very long time before I shall be able to pay him. If you were not so foolish as to throw away one of the noblest hearts in Christendom—to say nothing of the fortune that goes along with it—there would be very little need for me to worry myself about this money.”
“Oh, I understand, papa. If I were Mr. Tredethlyn’s wife, you would not be obliged to pay the twenty thousand pounds,” said Maude, very slowly.
“I should not be tormented about it as I am now. Say no more, my dear; you don’t understand these things, and you drive me very nearly mad with your questions about my affairs.”
“Forgive me, papa. No, I don’t understand—I can’t understand all at once; it seems so strange to me.”
She bent her head and kissed her father on the forehead, and then went quietly out of the room; leaving him alone in the still summer twilight, with a belated wasp buzzing feebly amongst the fruit and flowers on the table. Maude went to her own room, and sitting there in the dusk, shed some of the bitterest tears that had ever fallen from her eyes. The discovery of her father’s views with regard to her had humiliated her to the very dust. The idea that Francis Tredethlyn’s loan would never be repaid was torture to her keen sense of honour; torture which was rendered still more poignant by the recollection of her own part in the transaction. Would he ever be paid? Would that money, for the loan of which—and never more than the loan—she had supplicated her friend’s betrothed husband, would that money ever be returned to the generous young man who had so freely lent it? Her father had said that it would in due course; but there was something in his manner that had neutralized the effect of his words. To Maude Hillary’s mind this debt was a very sacred one, a debt which must be repaid, and for which she herself was responsible. Twenty thousand pounds;—all the faculties of her brain seemed to swim in a great sea of confusion as she thought of that terrible sum—twenty thousand pounds, which she was bound to see duly paid; and she was no longer an heiress, to whom money was dross. She was a penniless, helpless girl: worse off than other penniless girls by reason of her inexperience of poverty.
She thought of Harcourt Lowther; and his image seemed to shine upon her across a wilderness of troubles; a bright and pleasant thing to look at, but with no promise of help, no inspiration of hope, no pledge of comfort in its brightness.
“Perhaps papa is right, after all,” she thought, “and Harcourt would scarcely care to burden himself with a penniless wife.”
She was ashamed of this brief treason against her lover, almost as soon as the thought had shaped itself; only in her despair it seemed to her as if there could be no security of any happiness upon this earth.
“I will tell Francis Tredethlyn the truth about myself,” she thought; “he shall not be deceived as to anything in which I am concerned. He shall know of my engagement to Harcourt.”
Maude did not go downstairs again that night, nor did Mr. Hillary send for her, as it was his wont to do when she was long away from him. It may be that he scarcely cared to encounter his daughter after that conversation in the dining-room, which had been far from pleasant to him. He was not a father of Mr. Capulet’s class, who could order his daughter to marry the County Paris at a few days’ notice; or in the event of her refusal, bid her rot in the streets of Verona. But from the very first he had been bent upon bringing about a union between Francis and Maude, and he brooded moodily over the girl’s resolute rejection of any such alliance.
“What would become of her if I were to die to-morrow?” he thought; “and what is to become of my business if I fail to secure a rich partner?”
Francis Tredethlyn, now so frequent a visitor at the Cedars, happened to present himself there upon the day after that on which Maude had come to an understanding with her father. The young man rode down to Twickenham in the afternoon, and found Miss Hillary occupied with two croquet-playing young ladies and a croquet-playing young gentleman, whose manners and opinions were of the same insipidly flaxen hue as their hair and eyebrows.
There was a tired look in Maude’s face that afternoon, which was very perceptible to Francis Tredethlyn, although quite invisible to the neutral-tinted croquet-players. Her eyes wandered away sometimes from the balls and mallets, and fixed themselves, with a sad, dreamy look, upon the sunlit river or the distant woodland. Francis saw this, and that faithful Cornish heart grew heavy in sympathy with Miss Hillary’s unknown trouble. There must be a little of the Newfoundland dog in the nature of a man who can love hopelessly; a little of that superhuman fidelity, a little of that canine endurance which has inspired so many odious comparisons to the disparagement of the inferior animal called man. Francis Tredethlyn’s eyes followed Miss Hillary with a dog-like patience all this afternoon, during which he established himself in the estimation of the flaxen-haired droppers-in as one of the vilest of croquet-players and worst-mannered of men. But the croquet-players departed, after taking tea out of a very ugly Queen-Anne teapot and some old Sèvres cups and saucers, which had been bought for Miss Hillary at the sale of a defunct collector’s goods and chattels, at Messrs. Christie and Manson’s. Francis stayed to dinner, and dined alone with Maude and her father, and found very little to say for himself. He was distracted by the sight of Maude’s pale face and sadly thoughtful eyes. How changed she was from the bright and sparkling creature whom he remembered a few months ago in that house! How changed! What was the secret trouble which had worked that transformation? What could it be except Miss Hillary’s sorrow for the circumstances that divided her from her distant lover? There could be no other cause for her unhappiness, since her father’s commercial difficulties had been smoothed by that twenty thousand pounds so freely advanced to him; and it never occurred to Francis that Maude Hillary could possibly give herself any uneasiness about that money, so lightly parted with by him; nor could he think that any new trouble threatened the merchant’s peace, for Mr. Hillary was specially gay and pleasant this evening.
After dinner Maude strolled out into the garden, and down to that delicious terrace by the river, where the big stone vases of geraniums looked dark and grim in the twilight. She walked slowly up and down the long esplanade with a filmy lace handkerchief tied coquettishly over her head, and her long muslin dress sweeping and rustling after her like the draperies of a fashionably-attired ghost. Francis Tredethlyn furtively watched that white-robed figure in the shadowy distance as he sat at the dinner-table with Mr. Hillary, and would fain have left his glass, filled with the merchant’s rarest Burgundy, for a stroll by the quiet river. Perhaps Mr. Hillary perceived this, for he presently gave the young man his release.
“Since you don’t drink your wine, you may as well go for a stroll in the garden, Tredethlyn,” he said, good-naturedly. “I see Maude yonder; and she’ll be better company for you than I am.”
Francis was by no means slow to take this hint. But once outside the dining-room windows, he went very slowly to the terrace on which Maude was walking. He walked in and out among the flower-beds, making a faint pretence of admiring nature in this twilight aspect. He stopped to caress one of Maude’s Skye terriers. The animals were very fond of him now that he had learned to avoid that trampling on their toes which had been one of the earlier manifestations of his devotion to Miss Hillary. He loitered here and there on every possible pretext, and at last approached the fair deity in the muslin dress with very much the air of a schoolboy, who presents himself in that awful audience-chamber wherein a grim pedagogue is wont to pronounce terrible judgments upon youthful offenders.
He did not know that Miss Hillary had been expecting him all this time; and that her special purpose was to bring him to her side upon that solitary terrace-walk, where she could talk to him freely without fear of eavesdroppers. He did not know that he was quite as much expected as the schoolboy who has been summoned to the parlour, and was to receive a sentence as terrible.
Maude welcomed him very graciously, and for a little while they strolled side by side, talking of the summer’s night, and the flowers, and Skye terriers, and canary-birds, and other subjects equally commonplace and harmless. Then they came to a stop, mechanically, as it is in the nature of people to do when they walk by the side of a river, and looked over the stone balustrade into the still water. And then a death-like silence came down upon them; and Maude Hillary felt that the time had come in which she must utter whatever she had it in her mind to say. It was difficult to begin; but then all her duties of late had been difficult; and upon her knees the night before, in the midst of tearful prayers and meditations, she had resolved that there should be no more sailing under false colours as regarded this young man.
“Dear Mr. Tredethlyn,” she began at last, “you have been so good to my father, so good to me—for to serve him is to render a double service to me—you have been so kind and generous a friend, that I have grown to think of you and trust you almost as I might if you had been my brother.”
Poor Francis listened to this exordium with a very despondent air. Inexperienced as he was in the ways of the world, he was wise enough to know that there was nothing hopeful in such an address as this. When a young lady tells a gentleman that she can regard him as a brother, it is the plainest possible declaration that he can never be anything else. In this case it seemed an uncalled-for act of cruelty, for the Cornishman had never deluded himself by any false hope.
“I think of you almost as if you were my brother,” Maude went on, with heartless repetition of the obnoxious word; “and I cannot help thinking, dear Mr. Tredethlyn, that you are scarcely employing your life as wisely or as well as you might. I don’t think you were ever intended to be an idle man; and again, with such a fortune as yours, a man has scarcely the right to be idle. There are so many people who may be benefited by a rich man’s active life. Oh, forgive me if I seem to lecture you. You will laugh at me, perhaps, and think I want to set myself up as a strong-minded woman, a political economist, or something of that kind. But I only venture to speak to you because I think you waste so much of your time down here, playing billiards with the empty-headed young men who haunt this place, and lounging in the drawing-room to hear the frivolous talk of half-a-dozen idle women, myself among the number.”
She spoke lightly, but she was not the less earnest in her intention; she was only travelling gradually round to the point she wanted to reach.
“But I am so happy here,” cried Francis Tredethlyn. “Ah, if you knew how I have tried to stop away—if you could only know what happiness it is to me to come—”
Maude Hillary interrupted him hastily.
“Yes, I know it is a pleasant life in its way,” she said; “very pleasant and very useless. It is a little new to you perhaps, and seems pleasanter to you on that account. But if you knew what dreary work it is to look back at a long summer season of operas, and concerts, and horticultural meetings, and boat-races, and not to be able to remember one action worthy of being recorded in all that time! I am getting very tired of my present life, Mr. Tredethlyn. It has ceased to be pleasant to me ever since I have known of papa’s difficulties. It is altogether unsuited to me; for I am engaged to marry a poor man, who would bitterly feel the burden of an expensive wife.”
The bolt was launched, and Miss Hillary expected to see some evidence that it had gone home to its mark. But Francis Tredethlyn made no sign. There was just a little pause, and then he said very quietly,—
“Yes, I know that you are to marry a poor man; but with such a wife a man could scarcely remain poor. I suppose it’s only an ignorant foolish notion, but I can’t help thinking that for the sake of the woman he loves, any man could cut his way to fortune. I can always believe in those knights of the olden time, who used to put a badge in their helmets, and then ride off to the wars to do all sorts of miraculous things; and I fancy it must be the same now-a-days, somehow; and that a man who loves truly, and is truly loved again, can achieve anything.”
Maude was inexpressibly relieved by this speech.
“You know of my engagement, then?” she said.
“Yes, I have known it for a very long time.”
“Ah, of course, Julia told you?”
“Yes, it was Miss Desmond who told me.”
“She had a perfect right to do so; there was no reason for any secrecy in the matter. I am very glad that you have known of it. You are so kind a friend that I should not like you to be ignorant of anything nearly relating to my father or myself.”
“It is very good of you to call me a friend,” Francis answered. It seemed to him as if some angelic creature was stooping from her own proper sphere to place herself for a brief interval by his side. “It is very good of you to take any interest in my welfare; and I feel that you are right. The life I lead is utterly idle and useless; but it shall be so no longer. Your father has very generously offered me a grand opportunity of turning both my time and money to account.”
“My father? But how?”
“He has offered me a partnership in his own house.”
“A partnership?—a partnership in his difficulties—his liabilities?” cried Maude, in a tone of horror.
“Those difficulties were only temporary. The thirty thousand I advanced have wiped out all liabilities, and your father’s business stands on a firmer basis than ever.”
“Thirty thousand! You have lent papa thirty thousand pounds?”
“I have not lent it, my dear Miss Hillary. I have only invested it in your father’s business. There is no obligation in the matter, believe me; or if there is, it is all on my side. I get a higher rate of interest for my money than I should get elsewhere.”
He stopped suddenly, for Maude had burst into a passion of sobs.
“Oh, how could he do it? How could he?” she cried. “How could papa take so mean an advantage of your generosity? I love him so dearly, that it almost kills me to think he should be base or dishonourable. I thought the twenty thousand pounds would soon be paid, and instead of that he has borrowed more money of you.”
“My dear Miss Hillary, pray, pray do not distress yourself. Believe me you misunderstand this business altogether. It is not a loan. It is only an equitable and friendly arrangement, quite as advantageous to me as to your father. Upon my word of honour you do Mr. Hillary a cruel wrong when you imagine otherwise.”
Maude dried her tears, and listened to the voice of her consoler. She was so anxious to think well of her father, that she must have been something more than an ignorant, inexperienced girl, if she shut her ears to Francis Tredethlyn’s arguments.
Those arguments were very convincing, very specious. Maude ought, perhaps, to have perceived that they were not the original ideas of Mr. Tredethlyn. She ought, perhaps, to have discovered the parrot-like nature of his discourse respecting all the grand prospects of the house of Hillary and Co.; but she wanted to think well of her father, and Francis Tredethlyn urged her to that conclusion. She listened to his discourse as eagerly as if he had been the most eloquent of living creatures. She felt a kind of tender friendship for him as he talked to her; never before had he seemed so nearly on a level with herself. She wanted to believe in his wisdom; she wanted to respect his sense and judgment, because he was the defender of her father—that beloved father against whom her own conscience had so lately arisen, a stern and pitiless judge.
The quiet river rippled under the summer moonlight before Maude and her companion left the terrace; so much had Francis found to say about the house of Hillary and Co., and the wonderful advantages that must come to him from a partnership in that great firm. Surely his enthusiasm must have arisen from some vague idea that even that commercial alliance would be some kind of link between Miss Hillary and himself. He talked very freely to-night, for Maude’s confidence had set him at his ease; and in almost every word he uttered he naïvely revealed some new depth in his devoted love.
Late that night, when the Cornishman had gone away, Maude stood at her open window, looking out at the river, and thinking of all that Francis Tredethlyn had said to her.
“Harcourt Lowther never loved me as this man loves me,” she thought, sadly. “Ah, what a pity that there should be so much wasted love and devotion in the world!”
And then the thought of Francis Tredethlyn’s thirty thousand pounds arose in her mind,—a terrible obligation, a heavy burden of debt; a debt that was perhaps never to be cancelled.