Only a clod

She was so soon to be his wife! Yes, October was near at hand. Already the woods and hills beyond the Star and Garter were bright with autumnal tints of vivid orange and glowing crimson. The milliners and dressmakers, the outfitters and bootmakers, were perpetually appearing in the hall and on the staircases at the Cedars. Wicker baskets covered with oilskin seemed continually passing in and put of Mr. Hillary’s abode, and Maude could rarely enjoy a quiet half-hour undisturbed by a mysterious summons, entreating her to inspect or try on some garment newly brought home by a “young person” from town. Harcourt Lowther made himself quite at home both at the Cedars and at Francis Tredethlyn’s chambers during this period of preparation. Francis took very kindly to his old master in his new capacity of friend and mentor. The habits of the past made a link between them. The old half-friendly, half-supercilious familiarity which had characterized Harcourt Lowther’s treatment of his servant melted now into a playful and almost caressing friendliness. Mr. Lowther was a thoroughly selfish man, and he found himself called upon in this instance to sacrifice his pride in the cause of his interest. He affected a hearty interest in Francis Tredethlyn’s affairs, and contrived somehow, by a series of manœuvres, so subtle as to be imperceptible, to install himself in the post of chief adviser to the inexperienced young Cornishman. Mr. Lowther was an idle man, a very clever man, too versatile for greatness, or even for any celebrity beyond that species of drawing-room reputation, which women are able to bestow on the men who are not too noble to waste a lifetime in small accomplishments and shallow courtesies. He was very clever, very idle, very much inclined to quarrel with the decrees of Providence; and in Francis Tredethlyn he saw the possessor of the two things he himself most ardently desired—a great fortune, and Maude Hillary for a wife. But he was true to his resolution to take matters quietly; and he assisted in the preparations for the wedding with as much outward show of pleasure as if he had been a match-making mother rejoicing in the happy disposal of a whole brood of daughters. The big mansion in the new district of palatial streets and squares lying between Kensington and Brompton was fitted and furnished under Mr. Lowther’s superintendence. He had meetings with architects, gilders, decorators, and upholsterers; and, with only an occasional reference to Francis, gave his orders as freely as if the house had been his own. Sometimes, walking up and down the whole length of the three drawing-rooms, a strange smile flickered over his face,—a contemplative smile, which faded away in the next moment, giving place to that perfection of fashionable indifference to all things in heaven and earth which was his ordinary expression.

The appointed day came at last, and poor Francis drove down to Twickenham, looking as pale as his light waistcoat, but supported by his friend Harcourt Lowther as best man. Once, and once only, Maude Hillary looked at her discarded lover while she remained Maude Hillary; but there was a world of mingled scorn and reproach in that one look. Ah, how different his love must have been from hers! she thought. Had he forsaken her for a wealthier bride, she would have gone far away from the sound of his wedding bells, and the sight of his wedding finery. In that one look she had seen that he was almost as pale as the bridegroom; but she could not forgive him for being there.

There was all the usual business. Autumnal flowers scattered under the feet of the bride and bridegroom; charity children in clean pinafores cheering in shrill treble voices as the bridal carriage drove away; and then a breakfast, and the popping of champagne corks, and the creaming of delicately perfumed Moselle, and a little speech-making of the mildest character; and then a departure amidst all the confusion of a crowded hall and portico—young-lady intimates pressing forward to caress the bride; loud-voiced young men congratulating the bridegroom; servants with white favours standing on tip-toe to get a peep at the show: and then the postilions crack their whips, and the carriage rolls away through the chill autumn evening; and Maude sees Twickenham town spin by her in a dim glimmer of comfortable firelight, twinkling redly in cottage windows.

The wedding tour had been amongst the many things which Harcourt Lowther had kindly undertaken to plan for his friend; and after a great deal of deliberation, that gentleman had pitched upon one of the dullest and quietest watering-places in Devonshire, as the one spot upon all this earth best suited for Mr. Tredethlyn and his bride.

“You don’t want the stereotyped Continental tour;—the Rhine steamers are crowded with cockneys, who find it easier to spout ‘Childe Harold’ than to regulate the administration of their h’s. What do you know about the castled crag of Drachenfels, dear boy? and what do you care for all the hackneyed sentimentality about beery old knights and battered old castles? You don’t speak any language but your honest native tongue, and you would be bothered out of your life before your travels were over unless you took a courier—and then imagine seeing nature through the eyes of a courier! No, my dear Tredethlyn! the sort of thing for you is some quiet little watering-place,—‘an humble cot, in a tranquil spot, with a distant view of the changing sea,’ and all that sort of thing; in other words, a tranquil little retreat where you and Mrs. Tredethlyn may have time to get acquainted with one another.”

Francis was only too glad to take such pleasant advice. To be alone with Maude, alone beside the still grey sea in the quiet autumn evenings, seemed to him the highest bliss that earth could hold for any human being: and poor Francis blessed his generous friend for the sound judgment which was to secure him such happiness.

“I dare say I should have gone scampering all over the Continent but for you, Lowther,” he said, innocently. “Those other fellows at the Cedars advised a tour through half Europe: ‘See plenty of life,’ they said; ‘freshen yourself up with change of scene, and pick up all the jargon you can out of Murray, so as to be able to hold your own in society. Everybody travels nowadays, and it doesn’t do for a fellow with lots of tin to be behind the rest of the world.’ But I’ll take your advice, Lowther. I wanted Maude to choose the place for our bridal trip, but she wouldn’t; so we’ll go to the Devonshire village.”

It is not to be supposed, of course, that Mr. Lowther had any other than the most friendly intention when he selected Combe Western as the scene of Francis Tredethlyn’s honeymoon; but, on the other hand, it must be confessed that had Harcourt wished to inspire Maude with a weariness of her husband’s society, he could have scarcely selected any place better calculated to assist him in the carrying out of his design. At Combe Western, the misty autumn days were unbroken by any change, save the slow changes of the hours and the gradual darkening of the sky. There were pleasant drives and romantic scenery to be found in the neighbourhood of Combe Western; but Devonshire is a rainy county, and as it rained with little intermission during the whole of that honeymoon period, Francis Tredethlyn’s bride was compelled to find her chief amusement in the prim lodging-house drawing-room and the society of her husband.

And this society was not congenial to her. He was handsome, and pleasant to look at; manly, good-tempered, generous. No mean or unworthy sentiment ever dropped from his lips. She respected him, and was grateful to him; nay, even beyond this, there was a certain latent affection for him lurking in some corner of her heart; but she was very tired of him nevertheless. To be truly attached to a person, and desperately weary of them, is not altogether an impossibility. Are we not sometimes weary of ourselves, whom we yet love so dearly? When you get tired of a book, you have nothing to do but close the volume and restore it to its shelf. But you cannot shut up your friend when he becomes tedious; you must needs go on, wading through page after page of his conversation, till you yawn in his face, and arouse him to the unpleasant conviction that he is a nuisance.

Maude was very gratefully and affectionately disposed towards her father’s benefactor; but she grew terribly tired of his sole companionship during that rainy six weeks in the quiet Devonian watering-place. If the bride and bridegroom had gone on that stereotyped foreign tour so strongly protested against by Harcourt Lowther, Maude’s sunny nature would speedily have asserted itself. She would have found in the rapid changes of scene, in all the pleasant excitement of quick travelling, plenty of subject-matter for conversation with her new companion; there would have been always some common ground on which they could have met, some little incident, among the hundred incidents of a traveller’s day, which would have aroused a sympathy between them. But thrown on their own resources at Combe Western, a Horace Walpole and a Madame du Deffand might have exhausted their conversational powers, and yawned drearily in each other’s faces. Maude found herself wishing for the end of her honeymoon before the first week had drawn to its close; and Francis, always timidly watchful of his wife’s beautiful face, felt a chill anguish at his heart as he perceived her weariness of spirit.

Thus it was that, when they returned to London, the husband and wife were little nearer to each other than on their wedding-day. No pleasant familiarity with each other’s thoughts and feelings had arisen during that dull residence in a dull watering-place. That subtle process of assimilation by which—except in some dismal examples—husband and wife grow like each other in mind and feeling, had not yet begun. They were strangers still; in spite of Maude’s esteem for her husband’s character, in spite of Francis Tredethlyn’s blind idolatry of his wife’s perfections; and Harcourt Lowther, who was one of the guests at their first dinner-party, was not slow to recognize the state of the case.

“You’ll get on admirably together by-and-by, dear boy,” he said to Francis, as they smoked their cigars together in a luxurious little study behind the big library, some days after the great dinner. “You’ll get on superbly with your lovely wife, if you only play your cards cleverly. There must be no Darby and Joan business, you know—no sentimentalism. Lionel Hillary’s daughter is just the woman to be disgusted by that sort of thing. It was all very well, of course, to do the romantic during the honeymoon; but that’s all over now; your wife will go her way, and you’ll go yours. Her friends will absorb a great deal of her time and attention; your friends will absorb you. You’ll have your club, your horses, your men’s parties, and perhaps the House,—for you ought decidedly to get into Parliament,—and it will be utterly impossible for you to spend all your mornings hanging about your wife’s rooms, or nursing her Skye terriers, as you seem to have done hitherto.”

“But I like so much to be with her,” Francis remonstrated, piteously. “It’s very friendly of you to give me these hints, and I dare say you’re right, to some degree. I know Maude used to seem very tired at Combe Western, and we both got into the habit of looking at our watches in a dispiriting kind of way every quarter of an hour; but since we’ve come to London she has quite recovered her spirits, and we are so happy together;—you should have heard her laugh the other morning, when I taught one of the Skyes to shoulder arms with a lead-pencil.”

Mr. Tredethlyn laughed aloud himself at the recollection of this feat. Harcourt Lowther shrugged his shoulders, and a frown, or the passing shadow of a frown, darkened his handsome face.

There are some natures in which there is a certain element of childishness, and between such natures no desperate antagonism is ever likely to arise.

“We were rather dull at Combe Western,” said Mr. Tredethlyn, presently; “but since we’ve been in London we’ve got on capitally. I’ve been everywhere with Maude—shopping even; and I’ve written out the lists for her parties, and been on a round of calls; and, in short, I’ve been the happiest fellow in all creation.”

“No doubt, my dear boy; that sort of thing’s delightful for a fortnight; but look out for the day when the twin demons of satiety and disgust will arise to wither all these Arcadian delights.”

Francis pondered gravely. He had been happy since his return to London, for he had seen Maude bright and lively, pleased with the novelty of her position, happy in her father’s affectionate welcome, serene in the consciousness of pure intentions, and grateful for the devotion, of which some new evidence met her at every turn. Poor Francis had been entirely happy; but it needed only a whisper from an elegant Mephistopheles in modern costume to render this simple Cornishman doubtful even of his own happiness. It might be only a sham and delusion, after all; and Maude’s sunniest smile might be the smile of a victim resigned to the sacrifice.

“If you think that Maude is likely to grow tired—” Francis began, in a very melancholy tone; but Mr. Lowther interrupted him.

“If I think! dear boy. How can I do otherwise than think what is obvious to the dullest apprehension? Take life as other people take it, my dear, simple-minded Tredethlyn, and you’ll find it go smoothly enough with you. Try to live on a plan of your own, and—the rest is chaos.

You had better stick to the vulgar highway, Frank, and not attempt to set up an exceptional ménage. No woman will long tolerate a man tied to her apron string. She may be flattered by his devotion in the beginning, but she ends by despising his folly.”

So it was that Francis Tredethlyn began life under the advice of his friend Harcourt Lowther. After that conversation in the study the young husband no longer intruded himself upon his wife’s leisure, or attempted to identify himself with her pursuits. He found plenty to occupy his own time; for Harcourt Lowther always had some new scheme for his friend’s employment or amusement. A race, that no man living in the world could exist without seeing; a horse to be sold at Tattersall’s; a celebrated collection of pictures at Christie and Manson’s; a bachelor’s dinner at a club; a review at Wimbledon;—somehow or other there was always something to be seen, or something to be done, of a nature in which Mrs. Tredethlyn could neither have any part nor feel any interest; and when Francis and his friend dined alone with her, as they did very often, it happened somehow that the conversation was always of a horsy and masculine character, painfully wearisome to the ordinary female mind. If Mr. Lowther had been intent on widening the natural gulf which circumstances had set between these two people, he could scarcely have gone to work more skilfully than he did: though it is of course to be presumed that he was only an unconscious instrument, an involuntary agent of mischief and ruin.

Maude Tredethlyn took her new life very pleasantly. Her father was happy. There had been a reaction in the City; things were going very well for the Australian merchant; and Francis Tredethlyn was receiving handsome interest for his thirty thousand pounds.

He brought these tidings to his wife’s boudoir one morning early in the new year.

“I knew you’d be glad to hear it, Maude,” he said; “and now you see that it was a very fine thing for me to get into your father’s business. So you need not have been uneasy about the matter, my darling.”

Mrs. Tredethlyn lifted herself upon tiptoe, and pursed up the rosiest lips in Christendom. A kiss, transient as the passing flutter of a butterfly’s wing, alighted somewhere amid the thickets of the Cornishman’s beard.

“You dear, good old Francis! That is the pleasantest news I ever heard, except—”

“Except what, darling?”

“The news that papa brought me home a year ago, when a generous friend stepped in between him and ruin.”

Francis Tredethlyn blushed like a schoolgirl.

“Oh, Frank, if I should ever forget that day!” said Maude, in a low voice, that had something of sadness in its tone.

Was she thinking that there had been occasions since her marriage when she had almost forgotten how much she owed to the devotion of her lover,—occasions on which some little social failure—some small omission or commission—some petty sin against the laws of the Belgravians and Tyburnians, had been large enough to blot out all memory of her husband’s goodness? How can you remember that a man has a noble heart, when, for want of the ordinary tact by which the well-bred navigators steer their barks amid the troubled waters of society, he blurts out some unlucky allusion which paralyzes the conversational powers of an entire dinner-table, and brings blight and ruin down upon an assemblage which has fairly promised to be a success? Or how can you be expected to appreciate the generous spirit of a being whose ungainly elbow has just tilted half-a-dozen petites timbales de gibier into the ruby-velvet lap of your most important guest?

There were times when Maude was forgetful of everything except her husband’s genial good-nature and unfailing devotion. There were other times when her heart sank within her as she saw his candid face beaming at her from the remote end of a long dinner-table, and heard his sonorous laugh pealing loud and long above the hushed accents of Belgravia.

He was her slave. If she loved him—and surely it was impossible that she could accept so much idolatry, and render no small tribute of affection in return—her love for him was pretty much of the same quality as that which she bestowed on her favourite Skye terrier.

He was such a dear, devoted creature—so sensible, so obedient; and if he did not quite stand up in a corner to beg, with a bit of bread upon his nose, it was only because he was not required to do so. He was the best of creatures—a big, amiable Newfoundland, ready to lie down in the dirt to be trodden upon by his mistress’s pretty slipper, or to fly at the throat of the foe who dared to assail her. He was a faithful slave and defender, and it was very pleasant to know that he was always at hand—to be patted on the head now and then when he was specially good—to be a little neglected when his mistress was absorbed by the agreeable distractions of society—to be blushed for, and even disowned now and then, when his big awkward paws went ruthlessly trampling upon some of the choicest flowers in the conventional flower-garden.

He was her slave—her own. He loved her with an idolatrous devotion which she could rarely think of without smiling at his exaggerated estimate of her charms and graces. He was hers—so entirely that no possibility of losing him ever entered into her mind. He was hers, and we are apt to be just a little indifferent about the possessions we hold most securely. It had become a matter of course that her husband should scatter all the treasures of his affection at her feet, and hold himself richly repaid by any waif or stray of tenderness she might choose to bestow upon him. She had no uneasiness about him,—none of those sharp twinges of jealousy—those chilling pangs of doubt—those foolish and morbid fears, which are apt to disturb the peace of even the happiest wife. She knew that he had loved her from the very hour of their first meeting, against his will, in despite of his better reason. She knew that he had been content to stand afar and worship her in utter hopelessness; and having now rewarded his fidelity, she fancied that she had no more to do, except to receive his idolatry, and smile upon him now and then when it pleased her to be gracious.

There was neither pride nor presumption in her nature; but she had lived all her life in one narrow circle, and she could not help being unconsciously patronizing in her treatment of the man who had taken her Majesty’s shilling, and blacked Harcourt Lowther’s boots.

Francis Tredethlyn might perhaps have been entirely satisfied by brightly patronizing smiles, and gentle pattings on the head, if he had not been blessed with a friend and adviser, always at his elbow, always ready to step in with an intellectual lantern held gracefully aloft, and a mocking finger pointed, when the simple Cornishman’s perception failed to show him the uncomfortable side of the subject.

“What a darling she is!” exclaimed Mr. Tredethlyn, as he left the house with Harcourt Lowther, after Maude had parted from him on the staircase all in a flutter of silk and lace, and with a feathery bush of golden hair framed in the last Parisian absurdity in the way of bonnets.

“Mrs. Tredethlyn is just the sort of wife for a man of the world,” Harcourt answered, with a slight shrug of his well-shaped shoulders. “But I can’t help fancying sometimes that you’re too good a fellow to be thrown away upon the loveliest creature who ever isolated herself from the rest of the human race in the remote centre of a continent of moiré antique. Of course I can’t for a moment deny that you are the most fortunate of created beings—but—there is always a ‘but,’ you know, even if one has a beautiful wife and thirty thousand a year. I suppose it is the habit of my mind to quarrel with perfection. I think if I were a fresh-hearted, simple-minded fellow like you, Tredethlyn, I should yearn for something nearer and dearer to me than a fashionable wife.”

The finger of Mephistopheles, always pointing, generally contrived to touch a sore place. Francis Tredethlyn, even when he had been happiest in the sunlight of Maude’s smiles, had felt a vague sense of that one bitter truth. She was no nearer to him than of old. The impassable gulf still yawned between them, not to be bridged over by pretty little courtesies or patronizing smiles.

But in spite of all inward misgivings, Mr. Tredethlyn turned upon his friend, and hotly denied the truth of that gentleman’s observations.

Harcourt Lowther was quite resigned to a little fiery contradiction of this kind. The arrow went home to the mark it had been shot at, and rankled there. Such discussions were very frequent between the two men; and however firmly Francis might argue with his friend in the daytime, he was apt to lie awake in the dead of the night, like false cousin Amy in the poem, when the rain was pattering on the roofs of the palatial district, and wonder, with a dull, aching pain in his heart, whether Harcourt Lowther was right after all; and Maude—sunny-haired, beautiful, frivolous Maude—would never be any nearer and dearer to him than she was now.

In the meantime, Mr. Lowther, who sowed the seeds of the disease, was always ready with the remedy; and the remedy was—dissipation.

Harcourt Lowther, in whose few years of legal study had been crammed the vicious experiences of a lifetime, was eager to perform the promise he had made to Francis Tredethlyn some two years before, when the young man first received the tidings of his uncle Oliver’s bequest.

“I told you I’d show you life, dear boy,” he said; “and I mean to keep my word. While Mrs. Tredethlyn amuses herself with the usual social treadmill business—perpetually moving on, and never getting any farther—you and I will see a world in which life is worth living.”

Thus it was that Francis Tredethlyn was lured away from a home in which he was taught to believe himself unappreciated, and introduced for the first time within the unholy precincts of the kingdom of Bohemia.

He entered the mysterious regions at first very reluctantly. He had the ignorant rustic’s notion of Vice, and fancied that she would show herself in naked hideousness; but he found her with her natural face hidden under a plaster mask modelled from the fair countenance of Virtue. It was something of a caricature, perhaps; for all imitations are so apt to become exaggerations. He found that Bohemia was a kind of Belgravia in electro-plate. There were the same dresses and properties, only a little tarnished and faded; the same effects, always considerably overdone; the same jargon, but louder and coarser. Life in Bohemia seemed like a Transpontine version of a West-end drama, with cheaper scenery and actors, and a more uproarious audience.

This was the kingdom with whose inner mysteries Harcourt Lowther affected a fashionable familiarity. He presented his wealthy friend to the potentates of the kingdom, and carried him hither and thither to worship at numerous temples, whose distinguishing features were the flare of gas-lamps, and the popping of champagne corks, branded with the obscurest names in the catalogue of wine-growers, and paid for at the highest rate known in the London market.

Perhaps in all his wanderings in the darksome wilderness which his Mentor called London life, Francis Tredethlyn’s worst sin was the perpetual “standing” of spurious sparkling wines, and the waste of a good deal of money lost at unlimited loo, or blind hookey, as the case might be. He had high animal spirits and thirty thousand a year, which common report exaggerated into sixty thousand, and which the more imaginative denizens of Bohemia multiplied into fabulous and incalculable riches; so that he met with a very cordial welcome from the magnates of the land. But the descent of Avernus, however easy it may be, is a gradual slope, and not a precipitous mountain-side, down which a man can be flung headlong by one push from a friendly hand. Francis Tredethlyn yawned in the faces of the brightest stars in the Bohemian hemisphere. His frank nature revolted against the shallow falsehoods around and about him. The glare of the gas seemed to have no brilliancy: the bloom upon the women’s faces was only so much vermilion and crimson-lake bought at the perfumer’s shop, and ghastly to look at in a sidelight. The laughter had the false ring of spurious coin; the music was out of tune. In all this little world there was no element of spontaneity; except perhaps in the uproarious gaiety of some boyish country squire making a railroad journey through some fine old property that had been kept sacred and unbroken for half-a-dozen centuries, to be squandered on a handful of pearls to melt in Cleopatra’s wine, or expended on the soaps and perfumeries of a modern Lamia.

There was neither bloom nor freshness on anything except on the wings of a few pigeons newly lured into the haunts of the vulture tribe. Everything else was false, and withered, and faded. The smiles of the women, the friendship of the men, were as spurious as the rhubarb champagnes and gooseberry Moselles, and were bought and sold like them. Mephistopheles may lead his pupil to the Brocken, but he cannot compel the young man to enjoy himself amongst the wicked revellers; nor can he altogether prevent the neophyte from perceiving such small inconvenances as occasional red mice hopping out of the mouths of otherwise charming young damsels.

Harcourt Lowther found it very hard work to keep Francis Tredethlyn amused, night after night, in remote and unapproachable regions, whose very names were only to be spoken in hushed accents over the fourth bottle of Chambertin or Clos Vougeot at a bachelor’s dessert. Poor Frank would rather have been dancing attendance upon his wife, and trampling on the silken trains of stern matrons and dowagers at the dullest “Wednesday,” or “Tuesday,” or “Saturday,” in all the stuccoed mansions in which Maude’s pretty face and pleasant manners, and his own good old Cornish name and comfortable income, had secured his footing. He was very good-natured, and did not care how much bad wine he was called upon to pay for. He could lose a heavy sum at blind hookey without the faintest contraction of his black eyebrows, or the smallest depression of his lower jaw. But he did not enjoy himself.

He did not enjoy himself—and yet somehow or other he went again and again to the same temples, always under convoy of his friend Harcourt, and generally very firmly resolved that each visit should be the last. But there was always some special reason for another visit—an appointment with some elegant acquaintance of the vulture tribe, who wanted his revenge at blind hookey; or a little dinner to be given at the Star and Garter, in honour of some beautiful Free-Lance, whose chief fascinations were the smoking of tissue-paper cigarettes and a vivacious disregard of Lindley Murray. There was always some engagement of this kind; and as it happened somehow that Francis Tredethlyn generally found himself pledged to act as paymaster, it would of course have been very unmanly to draw back. If he could have sent his friend Lowther and a blank cheque as a substitute for his own presence, he would gladly have done so; but his friend Lowther took care to make that impossible. So the matter always ended by Mr. Tredethlyn finding himself, at some time on the wrong side of midnight seated at the head of a glittering dinner-table; with the ruins of an expensive dessert and the faces of his guests only dimly visible athwart a thick and stifling vapour of cigar smoke; while the clamour of strident laughter mingled with the occasional chinking and clattering of glass, as some applauding hand thumped its owner’s approval of the florid sentiments in an eloquent postprandial oration.

Go where he might, the Cornishman carried his wife’s image in his heart, and he would have left the most brilliant assemblage in Bohemia for a quiet tête-à-tête in Maude’s boudoir; if his friend Harcourt had not carefully impressed upon him that his entrance into that pretty little chamber was an intrusion only tolerated by Mrs. Tredethlyn’s good nature.

There is no need to enter very minutely upon the details of the work which Harcourt Lowther was doing. The art of ruining a well-disposed young man is not a very difficult one; but Mr. Lowther had reduced the art into a science. His great effects were not the sublime hazards of genius, but the calculated results of a carefully studied process. So many nights in a tainted atmosphere; so many Richmond and Greenwich dinners; so many subtle insinuations of Maude’s indifference, must produce such and such an effect. Mr. Lowther displayed none of that impolitic and vulgar haste with which a meaner man might ruin his friend. He never hurried his work by so much as a single step taken before its time. But he never wavered, or relented, or turned aside even for one moment from the course which he had mapped out for himself. So, in the course of that London season, it became quite a common thing for a street hansom to bring Mr. Tredethlyn to the gigantic stuccoed mansion which he called his own in the early sunlight of a spring morning. There were even times when the returning wanderer found it no easy matter to open a door with a patent latch-key, which would go meandering hopelessly over the panel of the door, scratching all manner of eccentric circles and parabolas on the varnish, instead of finding its way into the key-hole. There was one awful night, on which Maude, coming home from some very late assembly, was stumbled against by a tipsy man who was groping his way up the great stone staircase, and found, to her unutterable horror, that the tipsy man—who apologized profusely for tearing half-a-dozen yards of Mechlin from the hem of her skirt, declaring that he was “ver’ sorr’, ’pon m’ wor’; b’t y’ see, m’ dea’ Maurr, if y’ w’ll wear dress s’ long, mussn’ be s’prise get torr t’ piecess”—was her husband.

That unfortunate meeting on the stairs made a very deep impression upon Maude Tredethlyn. She had never before encountered drunkenness; and it was one of those sins which seemed to her to belong to a region of outer darkness, in which decent people had no place. Her father had always been as sober as an anchorite; her father’s guests were gentlemen. She had heard, now and then, in the course of her life at the Cedars, of a drunken gardener dismissed with ignominy from the gardens—a drunken groom degraded from has rank in the stables. But Francis, her husband,—that he should be thick of speech and unsteady of foot under the influence of strong drink!—it seemed almost too horrible for belief. She lay awake in the morning sunlight, thinking of Francis Tredethlyn’s misdemeanour.

“And just as I fancied that I was beginning to love him!” she thought, regretfully. Would they meet at breakfast? she wondered. And if they did meet, what would Francis say to her? A sickly dread of that meeting took possession of her mind. If he apologized, how was she to answer him? Would it be possible for her to conceal her disgust?

“Let me remember his goodness to my father,” she murmured. “Oh, can I ever be so base as to forget that?”

The possible meeting at the breakfast-table was very easily avoided. Mrs. Tredethlyn had a headache, and took her strong green tea and dry toast in the pretty little boudoir, with the pink draperies and Parian statuettes, the satin-wood cabinets and bookcases, the Persian carpets and polar-bear-skin rugs, the marqueterie jardinières, and toy Swiss-cottage birdcages, selected by Harcourt Lowther. It was rather an enervating little boudoir, eminently adapted for the perusal of French novels, and the neglect of all the duties of life. Mrs. Tredethlyn breakfasted in this room; so there was no uncomfortable meeting between the husband and wife. Francis left the house before noon, in order to keep an appointment with his friend Mr. Lowther. They were going together to the Doncaster spring meeting, where Bohemianism would be rampant, and were to be away for some days. Poor Francis ran into the library, while his friend waited for him, and scribbled a hasty note to his wife, full of penitence and self-humiliation. He gave the missive to Mrs. Tredethlyn’s maid at the foot of the stairs, while Harcourt was standing in a little room opening out of the hall, arranging the strap of a race-glass across his light overcoat. Mr. Tredethlyn went back to the library in search of a railway rug which he had flung off his arm when he sat down to write the letter; and during his brief absence there was a flutter of silk in the hall, and a little conference between Mr. Lowther and the Abigail.

Half an hour afterwards, when the two men were walking up and down the platform at the King’s Cross station, with cigars in their mouths, Mr. Lowther handed his friend the identical letter which Francis had entrusted to his wife’s maid.

“You can post that to its address if you like, dear boy; but I think I should light my cigar with it. The seal is unbroken, you see; but I fancy I can make a tolerable guess at the contents of the epistle. Dear old Frank, if you want to preserve the merest semblance of manhood, the poorest remnant of independence, never beg your wife’s pardon.”

Of course Mr. Tredethlyn was very angry. Harcourt Lowther was prepared to encounter a given amount of resistance. The wave may lash and beat itself against the quiet breast of the rock; and the rock, secure in its supremacy, has only to stand still until that poor worn-out wave crawls meekly to the stony bosom, a conquered and a placid thing. Mr. Lowther had his work to do, and he took his own time about doing it. The apologetic little epistle was not sent to Mrs. Tredethlyn; and at an uproarious after-dinner assemblage at the Reindeer, Francis abandoned such frivolous stuff as sparkling Moselles and Burgundies for fierce libations of brandy punch. He made a tremendous book for all manner of events, always under the advice of his friend; indeed, its pages contained many rather heavy engagements with Mr. Lowther himself, who affected extreme simplicity amongst the magnates of the turf, but who was nevertheless eminently respected by those gentlemen, as being of the deep and dangerous class—a dark horse, secretly exercised on lonely commons at weird hours of the early morning, and winning with a rush when he was least expected to do so.

While Francis was seeing life through the medium provided for him by his experienced adviser, Maude enjoyed herself after her own fashion. She had been very happy at Twickenham; but she had never until now been entirely her own mistress, with unlimited credit and unlimited ready money, and all the privileges of a matron. At the Cedars she had been always more or less under her father’s direction. She had acted very much as she pleased upon all occasions; but she had made a point of consulting him about the smallest step in her simple life; a round of calls, a day’s shopping, a little musical gathering after a dinner-party, the amount of a subscription to a charity,—even the colour of a dress.

But now the young matron shook off even the gentle fetters which had held the girl, and spread her pinions for a bolder flight. A much wider world had opened itself to the merchant’s daughter since her marriage. The story of Mr. Tredethlyn’s fortune—always multiplied by the liberal tongue of rumour—was one of the most popular topics amongst the denizens of the new district in which Mr. Tredethlyn’s house was situated. None of these West-end people knew that Lionel Hillary’s position had ever endured a dreadful crisis of uncertainty and terror. The marriage between Maude and Francis was supposed to be one of those sublime unions in which wealth is united to wealth—the alliance of a Miss Rothschild with a Master Lafitte—a grand commercial combination for the consolidation of capital.

So Maude took her place as one of the most important novelties of the current year. She gave great receptions in her three drawing-rooms, whose gorgeous decorations were just a little too much like the velvet and ormolu magnificence of a public room at a gigantic hotel. She organized dinner-parties, and revised and corrected a menu, with the savoir faire of a Brillat Savarin in petticoats. Always accustomed to a reckless expenditure, she had no idea of the necessity for some regulation in the expenses of a large household. Left a great deal to herself, and frequently at a loss for occupation, she often spent her husband’s money from sheer desire for amusement. After that unlucky encounter on the stairs, she resigned herself entirely to her position as a fashionable wife. Her husband went his way unmolested, and she went hers. She was tolerably happy, for the life was a very pleasant one to live; but oh, what a vain, empty, profitless existence to look back upon!—the success of a dinner, the triumph of an audacious toilette, the only landmarks on a great flat of frivolity. But Mrs. Tredethlyn was not at the age in which people are given to looking back; she was rich, beautiful, accomplished, agreeable, with that dash of recklessness in her gaiety which makes a woman such an acquisition in a drawing-room, and the fumes of the incense which her admirers burned before her were just a little intoxicating. The Twickenham loungers, who had worshipped her mutely and reverently from afar off, found themselves distanced now by bolder adorers, and, conversing amongst themselves upon the staircases and on the outer edges of crowded drawing-rooms in the stuccoed district, shook their heads and pulled their whiskers, gravely opining that Mrs. Tredethlyn was “going the pace.”

Maude had been Francis Tredethlyn’s wife more than six months, and the London season was at its fullest height, when an accidental meeting with Julia Desmond brought about that young lady’s restoration to her old position of confidante and companion to the pampered daughter of her dead father’s friend. The two women met in the Pantheon; and it was a terrible shock to Maude to see her old companion dawdling listlessly before a stall of toys, dressed in a shabby black silk and a doubtful bonnet, and attended by two ungainly girls in short petticoats and scarlet stockings.

The proud spirit of the Desmonds had been crushed by the iron hand of necessity. In these perpetual duels between pride and poverty, the result seems only a question of time. Poverty must have the best of it, unless, indeed, death steps between the combatants to give poor pride a doubtful victory. Julia Desmond had carried her pride and anger away from the luxurious idleness of the Cedars, to nurse them in a London lodging. The only money she had in the world was a ten-pound note, left out of a sum which the liberal merchant had given her for the payment of a dressmaker’s bill. She had the jewels given her by Francis Tredethlyn—the diamonds which she had thrown at his feet in the little study at the Cedars, on the night of the amateur theatricals—but which the sober reflections of the following morning had prompted her to retain amongst her possessions. She had these, and upon these she might have raised a very considerable sum of money. But the angry Julia had no desire to raise money. A life of idleness in a London lodging was the very last existence to suit her energetic nature. She inserted an advertisement in the “Times” upon the very day after her departure from Twickenham, and she went on advertising until she succeeded in getting a situation as governess in a gentleman’s family. But ah! then came the bitterest of all her trials. She fancied that her life, wherever she went, would be more or less like her life at the Cedars. There would be a great deal more work, perhaps, there might be less luxury, less gaiety, but it would be the same kind of life: while on any day the lucky chance might arise, and the beauty of the Desmonds might win her some great prize in the matrimonial lottery.

Alas for Julia’s inexperienced notions of a governess’s existence! She found herself the drudge of an exacting mistress, with every hour of her dreary life mapped out and allotted for her, with less share in the social pleasures of the house she lived in than if she had been the kitchen-maid, and with two small tyrants in crinkled hair and holland pinafores always on the watch to detect her shortcomings, and to twist them into excuses for their own. The dreadful monotony of her life would alone have made it odious; but Julia had “a sorrow’s crown of sorrow” perpetually pressing on her tortured brow. She had the recollection of happier things—the pleasant idleness at the Cedars, the position of Francis Tredethlyn’s affianced wife. And she had given up this position in one moment of ungovernable rage and jealousy. She had suffered one mad impulse of her proud nature to undo the slow work of months. Miss Desmond had ample leisure for the contemplation of her folly during the long winter evenings which she spent in a third-floor sitting-room at Bayswater, hearing unwilling children grind hopelessly at a German grammar by the light of two guttering tallow-candles. She did contemplate her folly, while the guttural verbs and declensions fell with a droning noise on her unlistening ears; but the rage which swelled her bosom was against Maude Hillary, and Maude alone.

She saw Maude’s carriage in the Park sometimes, while she took her allotted walk with the unwilling children, who might have been pleasant children enough, perhaps, if they had not been weighed down by intellectual exercises compared to which the enforced physical labours of Toulon would have seemed light and agreeable. Julia saw her old companion, and her mind went back to the sunny afternoons on the lawn at Twickenham; and the sight of the pretty face and golden hair, the Skye terriers and neatly appointed equipage, stirred the fire of hatred always burning in her breast, until she could almost have shaken her small fist at the merchant’s daughter.

She saw the announcement of Maude’s marriage in the “Times,” and hated her still more. She saw Maude in the Park, after her marriage, in a more splendid equipage than the landau from the Cedars, and she hated her even more and more. She set her teeth together, and drew back under the shadow of the trees to watch Francis Tredethlyn’s wife drive by.

“She has cheated me out of it all,” she thought; “it would all have been mine but for her treachery.”

Then one bright and sunny afternoon in early May the two women met,—Julia a wan shadow of her former self, worn out with hard work, depressed by the monotony of her life, indifferent as to her dress and appearance; Maude a beaming creature in gauzy mauve muslin, with a Watteau skirt, all a-flutter with ribands, and a voluminous train sweeping the dust behind her.

“Dear Julia—”

“Maude—Mrs. Tredethlyn!”

Miss Desmond turned as pale as death. The encounter had come upon her very suddenly, and she was neither physically nor mentally able to bear it. She set her teeth and tried to flash the old defiance from her dark eyes. But the light of that once fiery glance died out like the flame of a candle which burns feebly in the glare of the morning sun. Julia was quite worn out by the life she had been leading for the last year and a half. The pride of a Somerset might give way beneath a long course of overwork and indifferent diet.

After that first exclamation of surprise she drew herself to her fullest height, and tried to pass Mrs. Tredethlyn with a bow, and a faint, cold smile of recognition, but Maude stopped her.

“Dearest Julia, if you knew how anxious and unhappy I have been about you, I’m sure you would not want to pass me by. Do let us be friends. The past is forgotten, isn’t it? Yes, I’m sure it is. Will you come up-stairs to the picture-gallery? that’s always a nice solitary place where one can talk. Are those young ladies with you? What very nice little girls! Miss Desmond and I are going up-stairs, dear, to have a chat. Will you come with us?”

The elder of Julia’s pupils, to whom this question was addressed, replied only by a stony glare. She was petrified by the audacity of this smiling creature in mauve who dared to take possession of her governess. The youthful mind, soured by a long course of German declensions, is apt to contemplate everything in a gloomy aspect.

Maude and Julia went past poor Haydon’s big cold picture, and made their way to a small room which was quite empty. Julia’s face had a stern darkness upon it, which might have frightened any one less hopeful than Maude; but that young lady had been surrounded by an atmosphere of love from her cradle upwards, and was entirely unacquainted with the diagnosis of hatred. She despatched the children to look at the pictures in the larger rooms, and then laying her hand caressingly upon Miss Desmond’s arm, she said, very earnestly,—

“Dearest Julia, I hope you have forgiven me?”

Miss Desmond locked her lips, and stood for some moments with her face quite fixed, staring at vacancy. There were hollow rings round the dark eyes now, and the oval cheeks had lost their smooth outline. Perpetual drudgery and friendless solitude had brought Julia very low; but the Desmond pride still struggled for the mastery over its grim assailant—necessity.

“I don’t know that I have anything to forgive,” said she, after an ominous pause; “Mr. Tredethlyn was free to transfer his affections as often as he chose. I was very glad to read of your marriage, for it was at least satisfactory to find that he had not changed his mind a second time. I do not blame any one but myself, Mrs. Tredethlyn. I should have been wiser than to entrust my happiness to a man who—”

Miss Desmond stopped abruptly. She made a long pause, during which she contemplated Maude, almost as if she had been looking for some tender spot in which to plant her dagger.

“I must not forget that he is your husband, and I do not wish to say anything humiliating to you; but I cannot forget that he is not a gentleman. No gentleman would have treated any woman as Mr. Tredethlyn treated me.”

If Julia’s conscience had had a voice, it might perhaps have chimed in with an awkward question here: “And would any lady have spread a net to catch a rich husband, Julia, trading on the generosity of his simple nature, and angling for the fortune of a man whose heart was obviously given to another?”

Mrs. Tredethlyn’s bright face crimsoned, and her lower lip fell a little. It is not to be supposed that she could be very fond of her husband; but she felt any allusion to his shortcomings almost as keenly as if he had been the incarnation of her girlish dreams. Whatever he was, he was hers, and she was responsible for him.

“If generosity of heart could make a gentleman, Julia,” she said, almost entreatingly, “I think Francis would be the first of gentlemen.”

Miss Desmond did not condescend to reply to this observation.

“Oh, Julia,” Mrs. Tredethlyn said, after another little pause, “how can you be so unkind and unforgiving? Have you forgotten how happy we used to be together long ago at the Cedars? If—if I thought you were pleasantly circumstanced now, I would not worry you with any proffers of friendship; but somehow I cannot think that you are happy. Dear Julia, forgive me for the past, and trust me once more.”

The stony look in Miss Desmond’s face did not melt away under the influence of Maude’s tenderness; but presently, with an almost awful suddenness, she sank upon the nearest chair, dropped her face upon her clasped hands, and burst into a passion of tears—convulsive sobs that shook her with their hysterical force. The strong will of the Desmonds asserted itself to the very last, for this passionate outburst was almost noiseless. The slender frame writhed and trembled, the chest heaved, the small hands were clenched convulsively, but there was no vulgar outcry. Miss Desmond recovered herself almost as suddenly as she had given way to her emotion, and drew up her head proudly, though her face was blotted with tears.

“Heaven help me!” she exclaimed; “what a poor weak wretch I am!”

“You will let me be your friend again, won’t you, Julia? You’ll come and live with me once more? You need see very little of Mr. Tredethlyn, if you dislike him. He and I are quite fashionable people, I assure you, and he is very seldom at home. I shall be so glad to have you with me. I go a great deal into society, and I know you like society, Julia. Come, dear, let us be friends again, just as we used to be in the dear old times.”

Maude gave a little sigh—she was apt now and then to think sentimentally of that remote period of her existence, some four or five years back, when she had believed that the happiest fate Heaven could award her would be a union with Harcourt Lowther. Even now, though she had schooled herself to think of him coldly, though she tried very hard not to think of him at all, the memory of the old time would come back; the picture of the home that might have been—the little cottage in St. John’s Wood—the long quiet evenings, made delightful by genial companionship—the pleasant hours devoted to art—the dear old concertante duets by Mozart and Beethoven—the “two souls with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one,”—the images of these things were apt to arise suddenly before her, in the midst of her frivolous pleasure in her fine dresses, and gorgeous house, and admiring friends.

“Dear Julia,” she said, winding one arm caressingly about the Irish girl, “you will come, won’t you?”

“Yes,” Miss Desmond answered, “I will come if you want me. But I must come upon a new footing. This time I must work for my wages. I have been a hired slave ever since I left your father’s house. I will be your servant, Mrs. Tredethlyn, if you choose to hire me.”

“Julia, you will be my friend, just as you used to be.”

“No,” cried Miss Desmond, with a resolute gesture of her hand, “no; if you want a companion to keep your keys and attend to your lapdogs, to finish fancy-work that you have begun and grown tired of, to read French novels to you when you want to be read to sleep, to write your letters of invitation, to take the bass in your duets, or carry an occasional message to your milliner,—if you want a person of this kind, I am quite willing to be that person.”

“Julia!”

“I will come to you on those terms, or not at all.”

“You shall come to me on any terms you please, so long as you come.”

“Very well, then, I will come. My present employer gives me sixty guineas a year, and makes me work harder than a pack-horse. You can give me the same money, if you think my services worth so much. I will make arrangements for leaving my present situation. A housemaid left the other day, and I believe she gave her mistress a month’s notice—I suppose the same rule will hold good with me: I will come to you at the end of that time, unless you change your mind in the meanwhile.”

“I shall not change my mind; I only wish you could come to me to-day. Take my card, dear, and give me yours.”

“I have no cards,” answered Miss Desmond. “I have neither name nor place in the world, and have no need of visiting-cards.”

She wrote her address upon the back of an envelope, and gave it to Mrs. Tredethlyn. To the last her manner was cold and ungracious: but Maude parted from her happy in the idea that she had rescued her old companion from a life of drudgery.

“Why should I not be her hired slave? I shall still have the right to hate her,” thought Miss Desmond, as she went back to Bayswater with her gloomy charges.