Only a clod

Under the perpetual influence of his friend and master, Harcourt Lowther, Mr. Tredethlyn’s days and nights were so fully occupied that he had very little leisure for serious thought. Day by day the patient master taught his deadly lesson; day by day the luckless pupil took his teacher’s precepts more deeply to heart. The simple, credulous nature was as malleable as clay under the practised hand of the modeller, and took any shape Mr. Lowther chose to give it.

Francis was fully impressed with the idea that his money had purchased a lovely wife whose heart could never be given to him. All that fair fabric of hopes and dreams which had been his when he married Maude Hillary had been slowly but surely undermined, and there was nothing left of its brightness but the memory that it once had been. He thought of those foolish hopes now with anger and bitterness. Could he at any time have been so mad, so blind, so besotted, as to believe that this beautiful creature, perpetually floating in an atmosphere of frivolity and adulation, would ever fold her wings to nestle tenderly in his rude breast? Othello, recalled to the sense of his declining years and grimy visage by the friendly bluntness of Iago, could scarcely have thought more bitterly of his lovely Venetian bride than Francis thought of Maude after six months’ daily association with his old master. But if the poison was quick to do its deadly work, the antidote was always at hand. With thirty thousand a year and a fine constitution, what need has a young man for reflection? It is all very well for Mr. Young the poet, having failed to obtain wealth or preferment, to retire from a world which has treated him ill, and meditate upon the transitory nature of earthly blessings that he has been unable to obtain; but with youth and thirty thousand per annum, surely no man need be bored by such a darksome guest as dull care. Harcourt Lowther did his best to shield his friend from the gloomy intruder by contriving that Francis Tredethlyn’s existence should be one perpetual fever of hurry and excitement. But though you may carry a man from racecourse to racecourse, by shrieking expresses tearing through the darkness of the night; though you may steep him to the lips in theatres and dancing-halls; though you may drag him from one scene of mad unrest to another, till his tired eyeballs have lost their power to see anything but one wearisome confusion of gas light and colour,—you cannot prevent him from thinking. The involuntary process goes on in spite of him. He will think in a hansom cab tearing over the stones of the Haymarket, in an express train rushing towards Newmarket at sixty miles an hour, on the box-seat of a guardsman’s drag, on the rattling fire-engine of an aristocratic amateur Braidwood, on the downs at Epsom—yes, even at the final rush, when every eye is strained to concentrate its power of sight upon one speck of colour, the man’s mind, for ever the veriest slave to follow that will-o’-the-wisp called association, will wander away in spite of him,—to mourn above a baby’s grave, to sit amidst the perfume of honeysuckle and roses in a still summer twilight trifling with the rings on a woman’s hand.

There were times when thought would come to Francis Tredethlyn, in spite of all his friend’s watchful care. He would sit at the head of a dinner-table at the Crown and Sceptre, staring vacantly at the frisky wine-bubbles in his shallow glass, and thinking how happy he might have been if Maude had only loved him. Ah, this poor substitute of noise instead of mirth,—this pitiful tinsel of dissipation in place of the pure gold of happiness,—how miserable a mockery it was even at the best!

Mr. Lowther generally broke in upon such gloomy reveries as these by calling to the waiter to exchange his friend’s shallow glass for a tumbler. But there are pangs of regret not to be lulled to slumber by all the sparkling wines that were ever grown in the fair champagne country, and Harcourt Lowther sometimes found his work very difficult.

But amidst such perpetual hurry and excitement it was only natural that some things should be almost entirely forgotten by Francis Tredethlyn, and amongst these forgotten things were the sorrows of his missing cousin. The Gray’s-Inn lawyers had carte blanche, and could have employed all the detective machinery in London in a search for Susan Tredethlyn, alias Susan Lesley, had they so chosen; but your intensely respectable family solicitor is the slowest of slow coaches, and Messrs. Kursdale and Scardon contented themselves with the insertion of an occasional advertisement in the second column of the “Times” supplement, informing Susan Lesley that she might hear of something to her advantage on applying at their office; and further offering a liberal reward for any information respecting the above-mentioned lady.

The advertisement did not entirely escape notice. A good many Susan Lesleys presented themselves:—one a fat old woman of seventy, who kept a tobacconist’s shop in the neighbourhood of Seven Dials; another a bony and pugnacious-looking person, with fiery red hair, and a fine South-of-Ireland brogue, who threatened dire vengeance on the quiet lawyer when he refused to recognize her pretensions to hear of something to her advantage. All the Susan Lesleys were ready to swear anything in order to establish their claims to that unknown advantage—which might be anything from a five-pound note to a million of money, or a dormant peerage,—but they all broke down lamentably under Mr. Kursdale’s cross-questioning, and he did not even trouble Francis Tredethlyn to confront the false syrens.

So, amid Newmarket meetings and Greenwich dinners, chicken-hazard, billiards, and unlimited loo, poor Susan’s rustic image melted quite away; and Francis forgot the solemn promise he had made, and the sacred duty he had set himself to do when his Uncle Oliver’s heritage first fell into his hands. And Francis Tredethlyn’s forgetfulness might have lasted very long, if an accident had not awakened him to a most vivid recollection of the past.

It was the May-time saturnalia of the turf, the Epsom week, and Mr. Tredethlyn’s drag had been to and fro upon the dusty roads carrying a heavy load of Bohemianism under convoy of the indefatigable Harcourt Lowther. Francis had been rather unlucky, and a good deal of money had changed hands after the Derby, the larger part of it finding its way into the pockets of Mr. Tredethlyn’s obliging friend. The Oaks day was to have redeemed his fortunes, but the day was over, and Francis drove home amongst the noisy ruck of landaus and waggonettes, ponderous double dog-carts, and heavily-laden sociables, tax-carts and costermongers’ barrows, with the outer leaves of an attenuated cheque-book peeping from his breast-pocket, and the dim consciousness that he had distributed hastily-scribbled cheques to the amount of some thousands, floating confusedly in his brain. He drove to town through the spring twilight, with Dutch dolls in his hat, and a heavy pain in his heart. The papier mâché noses of his companions were scarcely more false and hollow than their gaiety.

Of course it would be impossible to conclude such a day without a dinner. The sort of people amongst whom Francis Tredethlyn lived are perpetually dining and giving dinners; only the dinner-givers are as one to twenty of the diners; so, at some time between nine and ten o’clock, Maude’s husband found himself in his usual place at the head of a glittering table, in an odorous atmosphere of asparagus soup and fried mullet, and with a racking headache, that was intensified by every jingle of glasses and rattle of knives and forks.

He had lost heavily, and had drunk deeply under the warm May sunshine on the Downs. To lose cheerfully is given to many men, but how very few have the power to lose quietly! Francis had taken his disappointment in a rather uproarious spirit; slapping his companions on the shoulder, and making new engagements right and left; backing the same horses by whose shortcomings he had just lost his money; and huskily protesting the soundness of his own judgment in despite of the misfortunes of to-day.

There had been counsel taken with a waiter. A West-end waiter is no mean dramatic critic, though he never sees a play; the opinions of playgoers percolating perpetually through his ears must leave some residuum in the shape of knowledge. The waiter opined that the best entertainment in London was to be had at Drury Lane, where a melodramatic spectacle of some celebrity was being played that evening for the last time but one.

Inspired by the waiter, Mr. Tredethlyn’s party made their way to the theatre, bearing Mr. Tredethlyn along with them, indifferent where he went, and carrying his headache with him everywhere.

It was past ten o’clock, and the last scene of the great spectacle was on. The house was full, and the audience were chiefly of that restless and vociferous order who drop into a theatre at half-price on great race-nights. Mr. Tredethlyn and his party could only find standing-room at the back of the dress-circle, and from this position Francis beheld the grand final tableau.

The piece was an adaptation of some great Parisian success—some story of the Reign of Terror,—and in this last scene the stage was crowded by a clamorous populace. Upwards of three hundred men, women, and children were engaged in the scene. Blouses and uniforms, the picturesque head-dresses of the provincial peasantry, the scarlet cap of liberty, the cocked hats of the gendarmerie,—all blended in one grand mass of movement and colour, while the rapid action of the piece drew to its triumphant close.

Mr. Tredethlyn did not trouble himself to wonder what the piece had been about. He saw somebody killed—a villain it was to be supposed, since the crowd set up a well-organized yell of rejoicing; then there was a reconciliation, an embrace, a young lady in short-waisted white muslin clasped to the breast of a young man in a long-tailed blue coat and low top-boots, adorned with many-coloured bunches of riband. Then the band broke into the stately measure of the “Marseillaise Hymn,” the crowd clamoured a shrill chorus, and the curtain fell.

It was while the curtain was descending very slowly to that triumphant music that Francis Tredethlyn saw something which startled him like the sight of a ghost.

It was a face—a woman’s face in a high Normandy cap, looking out of the many faces in the crowd, a thin, worn, melancholy countenance, very sad to look upon, among all those other faces fronting the audience with a stereotyped smile.

“My God!” cried Mr. Tredethlyn, clasping his two hands upon his hot forehead, and pushing back the rumpled hair, “who is it? What’s the matter with me? I feel as if I’d seen a ghost!”

There was a little piece after the melodrama, a slender little production, popularly known as a “screaming” farce. It was not the most strikingly original dramatic invention, and its chief point consisted in one gentleman in tartan trousers being perpetually mistaken for another gentleman in tartan trousers, whole both gentlemen were alternately sitting upon bonnet-boxes and dropping trays of crockery.

There was certainly not very much in the farce, but the audience laughed uproariously, and Francis Tredethlyn’s party joined in the laughter. He found himself laughing, too, as loudly as the rest of them; but amidst all that confusion and clamour, the wan, sad face, with two inartistic patches of rouge upon its hollow cheeks, kept surging up ever and anon out of the chaos of his brain, and haunting him like the face of a ghost.

Who was it? What was it? Was it some accidental likeness? Was it a face that he had seen and known in the past? Alas for the steady, clear-headed soldier, who had been so prompt to obey military orders, so strict in the performance of duty! Francis Tredethlyn’s muddled senses refused to help him to-night. The author of “What will he do with it?” tells us that light wines are the most treacherous of liquors; “they inflame the brain like fire, while melting on the palate like ice.” Mr. Tredethlyn had been drinking a mixture of divers champagnes and Moselles all day long, and he tried in vain to fix the vague image which floated amidst the confusion of his brain.

He went home in the early grey of the May morning; but not to sleep. He lay tossing from side to side, tormented by that preternatural wakefulness which is apt to succeed a long period of riot and excitement. The course at Epsom, the gipsy fortune-tellers, the betting-men in white hats and green veils, the Dutch dolls and pink calico pincushions, the dust and clamour of the homeward drive, the jingling of broken glass, the popping of corks, the revolutionary crowd in the drama, the tartan trousers and broken bandboxes in the farce,—all mixed themselves in his brain, falling to pieces, and putting themselves together again like the images in a kaleidoscope.

Mr. Lowther, coming to see his friend at the correct visiting hour, found Francis still in bed, in a little room behind the library, which he had fitted up for himself at Harcourt’s instigation, as a bedroom and dressing-room, a kind of refuge to which he might betake himself when he was unfit to encounter the calm gaze of Maude’s clear blue eyes fixed upon him in sorrowful wonder. Her manner to him had never quite recovered its old kindness since that unlucky encounter on the stairs. She was still kind to him; but he could see that it was by an effort only that she retained anything of her old friendliness. He could see this, and the knowledge of it galled him to the quick. Harcourt Lowther’s work was more than half done by this time. He had no longer any difficulty in beguiling Francis abroad, for the Cornishman no longer cared to remain at home.

Mr. Tredethlyn had not very long fallen into a feverish slumber after long hours of wakeful weariness, when his friend called upon him. Harcourt seated himself by the side of the narrow brass bedstead, and stared contemplatively at the sleeper, while he spoke to the valet who had admitted him to the darkened chamber.

“You can let your master sleep till four o’clock, Jervois,” he said. “At four give him some soda and brandy. He has an appointment with me at half-past five. Take care that he doesn’t oversleep himself. I’ll write him a line by way of reminder.”

He drew a little writing-table towards him, and wrote a few lines on a sheet of note-paper:

“Dear Tredethlyn,—Remember your engagement at my quarters; 5.30 sharp. You had better bring the mail phaeton, and can give me a lift to the S. and G.

He slipped his note into an envelope, and dipped his pen into the ink; but before writing the address, he stopped suddenly, and tore the note into fragments.

“She might see it!” he muttered, thoughtfully, “and that might show her the nature of my cards. The only wise man is the one who can do his work without that most dangerous of all machinery—pen and paper. Poor Francis! he looks a little worn.”

Mr. Lowther looked down upon the sleeper with the most benign expression. He had no dislike whatever to the simple Cornishman; he had only—his own plans.

“These fellows who come suddenly into a large fortune are sure to kill themselves before they have done spending it,” he murmured, complacently. “Jervois,” he said, as he went out, “you won’t forget your master’s engagement. He’d better drive up to my place in the mail phaeton.”

Mr. Lowther’s “place” was the same lodging which he had taken for himself when he first returned to England. He was an adventurer; but he was not a vulgar adventurer, and in all his dealings with Francis Tredethlyn he had not sponged upon that gentleman’s purse for so much as a five-pound note. He had his plans; but they were not the plans of a man who lives from hand to mouth. He won a good deal of his friend’s money; but he never cheated Francis out of a sixpence. His sole advantage was that which must always accompany skill and experience as opposed to ignorance and inexperience. In the meanwhile, Harcourt Lowther lived as best he might on his winnings and a small allowance made him by his mother.

The Lowthers were great people in their way, and Harcourt had admission to some of the best houses in London. He was very well received in that circle in which Maude Tredethlyn had taken her place, and contrived somehow or other to be present for an hour or so at almost all of the parties in which she appeared; though to break away from the haunts of Bohemianism to drop into politer life, and then return to Bohemia in the same evening, was almost as difficult as a harlequin’s jump in a pantomime. Harcourt Lowther did this, however, and did it very often; and Maude Tredethlyn, enjoying all the privileges of a matron, found herself sometimes standing amongst the statues and exotics on a crowded staircase in Tyburnia, talking with Harcourt Lowther almost as familiarly as they had talked in the old summer evenings by the quiet river.

Sometimes, looking back upon such a meeting, Maude felt inclined to be angry with Mr. Lowther for having taken something of the old tone; but could she blame him for the lowered accents of his voice, the subdued light in his eyes, the unconscious tenderness into which he was betrayed in those public meetings, when she remembered how nobly he kept aloof from her in her home? Never yet had he presumed upon his intimacy with the husband in order to intrude himself on the presence of the wife. What harm or danger, then, if, in crowded assemblages, he surmounted all manner of small difficulties in order to make his way to her side? What could it matter if he lingered just a little longer than others, contriving all sorts of excuses for delay? It is rather a pleasant thing for a frivolous young married woman, serene in the consciousness of her own integrity, to know that a man’s heart is breaking for her in a gentlemanly way. A word too much, a tone, a look, and Maude would have taken alarm, and fled from her old admirer as from the venomous fangs of some deadly reptile; but Harcourt Lowther knew better than to speak that word. He had his own plans, and he was carrying them out in his own way: neither by word nor look had he ever yet offended Maude Tredethlyn; but now, when he tried to cut a path for himself through the crowd about her, he found less difficulty in the progress. People began to make way for him, and it was considered a settled thing that he should be found somewhere near her. He had not offended her; he had only—compromised her.

Francis awoke before the hour at which his servant had been told to call him. The valet’s place was almost a sinecure, for the Cornishman still retained, of his old nature, the simple independent habits of a man who can wait upon himself. He got up at four o’clock, and had nearly completed his toilet, when the servant brought the soda and brandy prescribed by Harcourt Lowther.

“And if you please, sir, you were to be so good as to remember an appointment with Mr. Lowther at half-past five, and was to please to drive the mail phaeton,” said the valet, while his master drank the revivifying beverage.

“Very good,” muttered Mr. Tredethlyn, with something like a groan; “you may go and order the phaeton for five o’clock. Is Mrs. Tredethlyn at home?”

“No, sir.”

The man departed, and Francis finished dressing. He had ten minutes to spare after putting on his outer coat, and he sat down to look at the newspaper which lay ready cut on his writing-table. He took up the “Times,” but only stared vacantly at the advertisement sheet. His head still ached, in spite of a shower-bath and a vigorous application of hard hair-brushes; but his intellect was a good deal clearer than it had been before he dressed.

Suddenly, out of the advertisement sheet, vivid as the figure of Banquo at Macbeth’s uncomfortable supper-party, there arose before him a face—a wan, faded face—in a white muslin-cap.

“Great Heaven!” he cried; “I didn’t know her!”

The ghost that he had seen upon the previous night was the ghost of the woman he had so long been looking for—his cousin Susan.

Francis Tredethlyn drove his friend down to Richmond at a rattling pace, but he scarcely spoke half-a-dozen words throughout the journey; and Harcourt Lowther, keeping the watchful eye of the master upon his pupil, saw that something was amiss.

Now although the Cornishman’s guide and Mentor had his plans, very definite plans, as clearly drawn out as the great Duke’s arrangements for Waterloo,—which wondrous victory was not quite the lucky accident our neighbours imagine it to have been; yet he was far too wise a diplomatist to ignore the sublime opportunities which chance sometimes throws in the way of a schemer, shattering the complicated machinery so dexterously and patiently put together, and opening a new and easy way to success over the ruins of the old road.

Mr. Lowther was quite prepared to make good use of any accident which seemed likely to help him. He was like a chess-player who takes his place before the board with a perfect plan of action mapped out in his mind, and who may see his entire scheme overthrown, his most brilliant arrangements stultified by the first move of his adversary, but who will win the game nevertheless, after his enemy’s fashion, if not after his own, being no enthusiastic advocate of pet theories, but only a man of the world, resolutely bent on success. Upon this particular afternoon Harcourt saw that something had gone amiss with his friend, and he was bent on discovering what the something was. With this view he had resort to that imaginary instrument which his companions of Bohemia called the “pump-handle;” but on letting down a moral plummet into the depths of Mr. Tredethlyn’s mind, he found himself in much deeper water than usual, and quite unable to reach the bottom.

“If he has secrets from me, he’ll throw all my machinery out of gear,” mused Mr. Lowther; “and yet I don’t quite know that—a secret might be worked into something with her. What a wonderful creature that Iago was, by the bye! especially when one considers that he took all that trouble for no better motive than jealous twinges about a wife whom he treated like a dog, and an envious grudge of Cassio’s advancement. Aha, my divine Williams, that’s the only flaw in your magnum opus; your motive power isn’t equal to your ponderous machinery! Now if Othello had been the owner of thirty thousand a year and a beautiful wife whom Iago loved, there might have been some reason for the exhibition of a little Italian diplomacy. But revenge! Bah! The luxury of a maniac. The pet wickedness of a woman. Your novelist cannot write a story, your playwright cannot devise a drama, but he must have recourse to revenge to keep the action going. Yet, in the history of men how small and pitiful a part the heroic passion plays! A Cromwell condemns a Charles Stuart to the scaffold. For revenge? No; simply because Charles is in his way. A Robespierre drowns his country in the blood of her sons; and yet I doubt if he bore a hearty grudge against one of his victims—a little political jealousy, perhaps, at the worst. A Richelieu extinguishes the haughty noblesse of France—out of revenge? No; but the noblesse interfere with the schemes of my Lord Cardinal. A Countess of Essex connives at the poisoning of her husband: revenge? not a bit of it, but because she wants to marry some one else; and poor Sir Thomas Overbury must die, not that any one hates the man, but the creature is so tiresome. And Arabella Stuart pines in prison; and the heads of the regicides rot on Temple Bar; and Charles, the merry monarch, the pet of the painters and romancers, the man whose sins have been dealt with so lightly that we are apt to mistake them for virtues—can be as hard as a Nero when it suits him that the patriots Russell and Sidney shall perish in their prime; and James II. sends young Monmouth to the block. Why? Is revenge the impulse that stirs these men’s hearts? Not at all. Not man’s passionate hatred of his neighbour, but man’s devoted love of himself is the motive power that moves the headsman’s arms, and bids the swooping axe descend upon fair young necks from which the lovelocks have been newly shorn. Revenge? Pshaw! Has it a feather’s weight in the balance of history? In all the story of our land, what has revenge to answer for? A semi-mythical Rosamond poisoned in her bower—an Essex condemned in passionate haste, and lamented in dreary leisure by the Queen who loved him—a Konigsmark’s handsome face trampled upon by a German tigress.”

With such random reflections as these Mr. Lowther beguiled the silence of the drive to Richmond. During dinner and throughout the evening he watched his friend closely; but all the fascinations of Bohemia were powerless to arouse Francis Tredethlyn from the thoughtful mood. Indeed, the Bohemians had a charming faculty for enjoying themselves amongst themselves without any reference to the host and paymaster, who was generally looked at rather in the light of a bore and an intruder—the death’s head at the banquet. Some of Mr. Tredethlyn’s new friends had christened him the Necessary Evil; and to-night, while he sat moodily brooding over the story of his cousin, pretty lips made faces at the company over his shoulder; and one lovely Bohemian, more playful than the rest, amused herself and her acquaintances by filling the pockets of his dress-coat with the empty shells of the lobsters, and the corks of the champagne.

For the rest, what did it matter in what dreary regions his mind wandered, so long as he was there to write a cheque for the bill? Only one pair of eyes looked at him with any show of interest; and those eyes watched him as the serpent watches the bird; with as deadly a purpose, with as quiet a gaze. But, watch him as closely as he would to-night, there was something in Francis Tredethlyn’s mind which Harcourt Lowther could not read quite as easily as a page in an open book, and as it was his habit to read most things relating to the Cornishman.

“What does it matter?” thought Mr. Lowther, abandoning himself to reflection again during the homeward drive; “let him keep his secret from me if he likes, and I’ll use it for my own benefit when he plays against me. He is my dummy, and he plays my game. When he leads a suit of his own choosing, I am ready on his right hand with a cluster of small trumps. Play as he will, he can scarcely throw me out. What does it matter how the game is won, so long as one scores the odd trick?”

The day after this Richmond dinner was Sunday; but even that circumstance did not prevent Francis Tredethlyn from taking preliminary steps towards finding the missing girl whom he fancied quite within his reach now; since it seemed certain that the face he had seen on the stage of Drury Lane was the face of his uncle Oliver’s daughter, and no other. It had been his habit until very lately to accompany Maude every Sunday morning to a certain fashionable place of worship not very far from Sloane Street, where miserable sinners lamented their iniquities and their wretchedness amid the subdued rustling of silk at a guinea a yard, and in an atmosphere that was odorous with Jockey Club and Ess Bouquet. But Star-and-Garter dinners, and evenings “finished” in mysterious localities at the West-end, are by no means conducive to early rising; and now the Sabbath bells that Mr. Tredethlyn had been wont to hear ringing blithely in the morning air while he breakfasted with his wife, were apt to mingle with his feverish morning dreams, and to transform themselves into the shrill peal of an alarm-bell summoning the fireman’s succour for perishing wretches in some blazing habitation, or the bell on board a boat leaving a pier—a boat which the dreamer was—oh, so eagerly—striving to reach, but never, never could; for just as his foot was going to step upon the deck, the plank on which he trod would give way and tilt him into the waking world; with a raging headache, perhaps, and a dull ceaseless pain in his breast, which he scarcely cared to acknowledge by its ugly name of Remorse.

So now Mr. Tredethlyn was apt to spend the earlier part of his Sunday morning in fitful slumbers, and the later portion of his day in the society of his devoted friends. Unhappily Mephistopheles has such a knack of making himself useful, that after once enjoying his society, Faust is apt to find life very dreary without that fatal companionship. Drifted away from the simple life that was natural to him, Francis was only a helpless creature, with all the dismal blank of existence to be filled up somehow or other.

But upon this particular Sunday he had a purpose of his own, and the honest energy with which he set about the achievement of that purpose transformed him into a new being.

Harcourt Lowther might have felt a little twinge of alarm had he seen his pupil, as he walked away from the stuccoed district, with the old light in his eyes, the old lightness in his firm tread. Francis forgot that he had an empty life to drag out, and an idolized wife who did not love him. He forgot everything, except that he had to redeem his half-forgotten vow, to fulfil a long-neglected duty.

“My uncle Oliver’s money brought her peace of mind, and prosperity for the father she loves so dearly,” thought Mr. Tredethlyn. “Let me remember that, when I think of his disinherited daughter.”

Crumpled in one of the pockets of his overcoat, Francis had found the programme of the performances at Drury Lane, and in the long list of names crowded together at the bottom of the programme, he discovered half hidden amongst Percies and Vavasours, Vane Tempests and Leveson Gowers, and such appellations as the corps de ballet modestly chooses for its own—the vulgar name of Turner. He concluded, therefore, that his cousin had called herself Turner at the Drury Lane Theatre, as well as at Coltonslough, and he did not anticipate much difficulty in finding her. The search after any information upon theatrical matters might have seemed rather a hopeless thing on a Sunday, but Francis Tredethlyn’s energy was not to be damped by small difficulties.

“I have wasted too many hours already,” he thought; “where my poor lost girl is concerned, every moment of delay seems a new wrong.”

He took a hansom and drove straight to the theatre; but Drury Lane on a Sunday seems an utterly hopeless and impracticable place. The stage-door was closed. The box-office might have been the tomb of the Pharaohs for any appearance of life within its portals. Happily Francis was not to be disheartened. He walked up and down the street until the clocks struck one, and a dense crowd began to pour out of a chapel in Crown Court, and disgorge itself into Little Russell Street. Then, when the doors of the public-houses were opened, he entered a tavern nearly opposite the stage-door, and made his inquiries.

The barmaid at the tavern was able to tell him where the stage-doorkeeper lived, but she was not able to give him any information as to the habitations of the ladies of the ballet.

“Most of them live out at Camberwell, or up Islington way; though how they manage it, poor things, walking backwards and forwards through all sorts of weather, is more than I can tell. They send over here when there’s a long rehearsal for their half pint of porter and their sandwich, and that’s about all the dinner they get on such days, I dare say.”

Thus, discursively, the barmaid. Francis left her, and made his way to the adjacent court in which the doorkeeper was to be found in his private capacity. That gentleman was in the midst of a very greasy dinner and in the bosom of his family when Mr. Tredethlyn intruded on him, and was at first inclined to resent the interruption.

“I don’t carry two hundred and forty-nine addresses in my blessed head,” he remarked, in an injured tone; “which our company at the beginning of this season was over two hundred and forty-nine; and I don’t care to be hunted upon Sundays when I’m eating of my dinner, for a pack of ballet-girls. I don’t get paid for that when I take my salary. If any young swell wants to find out one of our ladies’ address, to leave ’em a bokay, or to take a ticket for their benefit or such-like, I should think they could find it out of a week-day, and not come chivying of a man over his Sunday wittles.”

But a judiciously-administered half-sovereign had a very soothing effect upon the mind and manners of the doorkeeper. There are so few things in a small way which cannot be done with half-a-sovereign. The man laid down his knife and fork, and applied himself to serious reflection, while his wife and family suspended their operations to stare admiringly at the fashionably-dressed intruder.

“Over the way” was Drury Lane Theatre. The doorkeeper took some ponderous keys from a nail over the mantel-piece, and put on his hat. Francis Tredethlyn went with him.

“Turner,” said the man; “Turner? A pale-faced young woman, ain’t she? looks as if she’d gone through no end of trouble. She’s only an extra, took on for this here great piece that’s just done with.”

“An extra?” inquired Francis.

“Yes; a sort of supernume’ry; not a reg’lar ballet-girl,—can’t dance, or anything of that sort, only fit to go on in crowds, and so on. I remember her, a very quiet, civil-spoken young person.”

The address was soon found; it was at a house in Brydges Street. Francis left the doorkeeper with his heart beating tumultuously; his face pale with emotion that was half joy, half pain—joy at finding her at last, when hope had almost died out into forgetfulness—pain at finding her thus. Ah, yes! it was very painful to remember the innocent rosy face peeping out of a dimity bonnet, and to know that sorrow had set its undefaceable hand upon that rustic beauty, and that the face he remembered had no more a place upon this earth.

“Miss Turner and Miss Willoughby live together over an eating-house in Brydges Street,” the doorkeeper had told Francis, with the further information that he was to pull the top bell twice. Mr. Tredethlyn found the eating-house, which was ostensibly closed; but the door of the shop was ajar, and the atmosphere about and around it seemed greasy with the steam of suet-pudding and boiled meat. The bell which Francis rang was answered by a careworn-looking woman of doubtful age, who had an air of faded gentility, a flimsy smartness of apparel, which was more plainly demonstrative of poverty than the shabbiest garments that ever hung together loosely upon the figure of a slattern.

“Miss Turner lives here, I believe?” Francis said eagerly; “I wish to see her, if you please.”

“Miss Turner did live here,” the woman answered, “but she has left.”

“Left? Why I saw her at the theatre only the night before last, and the doorkeeper has just directed me here.”

“Miss Turner’s engagement expired last night, sir, and she left London this morning.”

“This morning, only this morning! But of course you can tell me where she has gone? I am her first-cousin, her only surviving relative. If I had known that there was the least chance of her leaving London, I should have tried to find her last night. Will you be good enough to direct me to her?”

The woman shook her head.

“I don’t know where Miss Turner has gone,” she said.

Francis Tredethlyn’s face whitened to the very lips.

“My God!” he exclaimed, “is there a fatality in this business? am I never to find her?”

Then addressing himself to the woman with sudden earnestness, he said,—

“For pity’s sake, if you can help me in my difficulty, do so with all your might. You do not know how much depends on my finding her. I scarcely think I should say too much, if I were to tell you that it is a matter of life and death; for I saw my cousin’s face the night before last, and it looked to me like a face that is fading away from this earth. You have been told, perhaps, to give no one her address; but she did not think her cousin Francis would come to ask for it. Pray trust me and believe in me; I am the only friend that poor girl has in all this world.”

“I have told you the truth, sir,” answered the woman, quietly; “I do not know where Miss Turner has gone. Anything I can tell you about her, I shall be happy to tell,” she added, as if answering the look of blank despair in Francis Tredethlyn’s face; “but it is very little. Will you step upstairs to my room? It is only a humble place, but it will be quieter there than here.”

This could scarcely fail to be true; for during the very brief interview which had just taken place, Francis had been brushed against and flouted some half-dozen times by young persons with jugs and door-keys, going to and from a neighbouring public-house. It was the popular dinner-hour in Drury Lane, and four separate floors, with their minor divisions of backs and fronts, were more or less engaged in the business of dining.

Francis followed his cousin’s late associate, Miss Willoughby, up three steps of rather dingy stairs, upon which little colonies of children had established themselves here and there with their toys. One young gentleman of tender years was trying to fly a kite in the well of the staircase, with a persevering disregard of atmospheric difficulties and the heads of the passers below; while a young lady, belonging to an adjacent tribe of settlers, took her doll for an airing in a lobster-shell, drawn by a string which wound itself about Mr. Tredethlyn’s legs, and had to be unwound like a bandage. Occasional skirmishers from distant settlements came sliding down the banisters—which, compared to the stairs, were as the modern railroad to the ancient highway—assailing peaceable families with the war-whoop of defiance: and the cries of “Shan’t,”—“Do it again, then, there!”—“Wouldn’t you just like to, now?”—“Won’t I tell my mother, that’s all?”—“Tell-tale-tit, yah!”—resounded in a delightful confusion of voices from the first floor to the attics.

Miss Willoughby conducted Francis to a back room upon the third floor—a dark gloomy little room, hung with chocolate-and-drab paper, but enlivened by a little gallery of theatrical photographs, and some engraved portraits cut out of Tallis’s “Shakespeare,” neatly arranged over the mantel-piece.

It was not very difficult to perceive that the anomalous piece of furniture, which was too vividly brown for mahogany, too elaborately grained for nature, and which was not quite a chest of drawers, nor altogether a wardrobe, was neither more nor less than a member of the mysterious family of press-bedsteads. It was not difficult to perceive that industrious poverty and simple independence reigned in that three-pair back, whose pitiful goods and chattels, and worthless scraps of ornament, were arranged with as exquisite a neatness as might pervade the chambers of a bachelor in the Albany, or a gandin of the Faubourg St. Honoré.

“I shall miss your cousin very much,” said Miss Willoughby; “we got on so nicely together.”

“She lived with you? Here?” asked Francis.

“Yes; we shared this apartment. It made the rent come lighter for both of us, and apartments are so dear in London; and of course it was the same advantage in coals—not that we wanted many for our little bit of cooking, but one can’t even boil a kettle without a fire; and saveloys and sandwiches are apt to pall upon one after a long continuance; so, having Miss Turner to live with me made it altogether come much pleasanter; besides which, we were always the best of friends.”

Mr. Tredethlyn was slow to answer. He was looking round the room, and out at the leaden ball floating on the surface of a dingy leaden cistern visible athwart some scarecrow geraniums, which seemed as if they had been put upon a short allowance of mould. Everything in the place, from the scrimped morsel of worn carpet, which only made an oasis of Kidderminster in a dreary desert of boards, to the handful of red coals that burned brightly between massive embankments of brick, bore mute evidence to the poverty which struggles and endures. An open cupboard stared Francis in the face, and he saw, oh, such a pitiful morsel of sickly-complexioned ham lying cheek by jowl with the fag-end of a stale half-quartern loaf. He looked at these things, and remembered the house in which he lived, the reckless extravagance that pervaded all his life.

“Does a curse cling to the gold of a miser?” he thought; “and is my uncle Oliver’s child never to derive any advantage from the wealth her father scraped and pinched together, at the cost of everything that makes life endurable?”

He roused himself from his brief reverie to appeal once more to the elderly ballet-girl, who had seated herself by the little Pembroke table, on which lay a newspaper evidently borrowed from the establishment below, and transformed into a kind of parchment by the action of grease.

“Give me what information you can about my cousin,” he said, imploringly; “and if you will accept any little present from me in acknowledgment of your kindness, I will send you a cheque to-morrow morning, and you shall purchase what you please as a memorial of your friendship for my poor little Susy.”

A faint flush kindled in Miss Willoughby’s pale cheeks. A cheque! Oh, bright representative of an El Dorado, only to be thought of in some happy dream. Clara Willoughby—otherwise Mary Anne Jones—had not seen such a thing as a cheque since the happy time in which she had been columbine at the tumble-down little theatre in a garrison town, and the colonel himself had taken five pounds’ worth of tickets for her benefit.

“I think I understand her,” said Francis. “I think the place she means is her old home. If she goes there, I shall hear of her immediately; but if—if she should not be wise enough to return to the friends who would be so glad to shelter her—. Did she ever speak of her home, or of her cousin Francis Tredethlyn?”

“Never! She seemed to have some settled grief upon her mind; and having known trouble myself, I know how hard it is to be worried by strangers’ questions and strangers’ pity, even when it’s meant ever so kindly; so I never asked her to tell me so much as one word about her former life.”

“But how did she come to be at the theatre with you? I should think of all ways of earning a living, that must be the very last that would occur to my cousin Susan.”

“That’s very true,” answered Miss Willoughby; “but it doesn’t take a woman long to come to the last way by which she can earn her bread—the ways are not so many. I can tell you how your cousin came to be at Drury Lane, for I was the means of getting her engaged; and it all came about, as one may say, quite promiscuously. I suppose you know that Susan Turner is a married woman?”

“Yes, I do know of her unhappy marriage.”

“She called herself Miss Turner in the bills, because, you see, in the theatrical profession a single female is always considered more attractive; though why it should be so,—unless with regard to boys in jackets, in the Christmas holidays, who, being apt to fall in love with the columbine, might find it damping to their spirits to know she was the mother of a family,—I really can’t imagine. However, Susan was Miss Turner in the bills, and I am Miss Willoughby for the same reason, although I’ve been thirteen years a widow come next boxing-night. Perhaps you may remember the sprite who was killed by a fall off a flying bridge in ‘Harlequin Buttercup, or the Maiden all Forlorn; the Fairy Queen of the Daisies, and the Cow with the Crumpled Horn,’ twelve years ago last Christmas? Not being professional yourself, you mayn’t happen to remember the circumstance; but Signor Wilsonio was my husband. He was not an Italian, and his name in private life was Wilson. We had been married two years, and he left me with a little boy just six months old.”

Francis listened very respectfully to this fragment of family history, but he chafed under its infliction nevertheless.

“If you will tell me how you came to—” he began.

“I am just coming to that,” answered Miss Willoughby, with dignity. “My poor husband, not having anything to leave me except a complimentary benefit, which the manager of the theatre allowed me on account of my bereavement, I was obliged, of course, to continue in the profession; and oh, sir! nobody that hasn’t gone through it can tell the pain of having to change your widow’s weeds for white muslin and spangles, and put away your baby from your breast to go and slap cheesemongers’ shops into furnished lodgings with a harlequin’s wand. As soon as I got over the dreadful kind of numbness that came upon me in the first of my troubles, I looked out for some one who would take care of the child; for I need not tell you that you can’t leave an infant-in-arms in unfurnished lodgings without attendance, when you get black looks from your landlady if you so much as ask for your fire to be poked once in an evening in a friendly way, and much less to look after a child, which is apt to be trying to the best of tempers. Well, sir, inquiring of one and another, I heard of a very respectable elderly person who had seen better days—and it does seem odd, but people connected with bringing up children by hand always have seen better days. The elderly person lived down Chelsea way, close to the water, which was considered healthy, and next door but one to a cowkeeper—also considered healthy, especially if predisposed to consumption.”

“If you would only—” murmured Francis, despondently.

“Which I am just coming to,” answered the ci-devant columbine, again with dignity. “The long and short of it is, I took my baby to the respectable elderly person at Chelsea, and there he’s been ever since, at seven shillings a week, which is a hard struggle sometimes now, though light enough when I was engaged as columbine; but dancing has made such progress, and unless you can take flying leaps from one side of the stage to the other, a manager won’t look at you.”

“But with regard to—”

“Which I am about to explain,” continued Miss Willoughby, with unshaken calmness. “It was at the respectable elderly person’s that I first met Miss Turner; for my darling baby having learnt to call his nurse Nungey, and taking so to her, and not taking to anybody else, and she so attached to him, that she froze my very blood by talking of Battersea Bridge in quite a meaning way, when I spoke of taking him away. Owing to this and one circumstance and another, Harry has stopped at Chelsea till he’s quite a big boy. So, of course, I very often go to see him—not that he takes to me so much as he ought to do, being so wrapped up in his Nungey. And one day, about three years ago, I went there quite promiscuous, and found Harry walking up and down before the door with a baby in his arms; and the nurse told me that she’d put an advertisement in the paper, and the very day it was inserted a lady came to her—a sweet-looking young creature, she said—and left this baby, which might be going on for twelve months old. Well, the long and the short of it is, that this was your cousin Susan’s baby; and going there off and on, I saw a good deal of your cousin. But see her as much as you would, she was so quiet and so reserved, that you never got anything like intimate with her. At first she was dressed like a lady, and she had a pretty little gold watch and chain, and many things that had cost money; but, little by little, all these disappeared, and she seemed to get very poor. One day, when I was there, it came out somehow that she was doing plain needlework for one of the great cheap outfitters’ houses in the City, and what a hard life it was, and, worse than hard—uncertain; so then, knowing there were ‘extras’ wanted for the new piece, I proposed to her that with my help she should try and get engaged. It would be much lighter work than the plain sewing, and better pay. Well, at first she was very much against it, but after a deal of persuasion she gave way, and I got her the engagement. That was full five months ago; for the piece had a long run. She had been lodging in one room at Chelsea until then, for the sake of being near her boy, and she left that lodging to come and share mine.”

“And do you think she will go back to the old lodging?”

“I doubt it. She seemed so uncertain, that I really don’t think she’d made up her mind where to go.”

“But she is likely to have gone straight to her child!” cried Francis. “Will you give me the address of the old woman at Chelsea? Oh, I thank you so much for giving me this clue. I must find my poor girl now!”

The sprite’s widow opened a little portfolio and wrote an address on a scrap of paper, while Francis stood by eager to take it from her.

“Do you know that there has been an advertisement appealing to my cousin, in the columns of the “Times” newspaper, a hundred times within the last two years?”

“Dear! dear!” murmured the ballet-dancer; “and she going through so much, with rich friends looking for her all the time. But, you see, poor people can’t afford to take in a newspaper; and there might be only a threepenny paper standing between a man and a million of money, and he none the wiser.”

She handed Francis the address, which was a very long one. And then she gave him divers verbal directions, the gist of which was, that he was to find a certain public-house called “The Man in the Moon,” and was then to inquire of anybody for a certain street, and was to go a little way farther and inquire again, thus accomplishing his journey by easy stages and frequent inquiries.

But Francis was much too full of hope to be dashed by any small difficulties. He grasped the dancer’s hand in his heartiest way, and left Brydges Street in impetuous haste. The hansom cabman, who met him at the corner of Russell Street, and drove him thence to “The Man in the Moon,” was a lucky individual, and went home rejoicing to the bosom of his family. But after dismissing the cabman, Francis had to thread his way through intricacies which would have been maddening in a hansom cab, and were only to be overcome by repeated inquiries and frequent reference to Miss Willoughby’s written direction.

At last, however, while the bells were still ringing for afternoon service, Francis Tredethlyn found the place, which was a damp little street without any thoroughfare, called Pollard’s Row. Pollard’s Row, with the summer sunlight on it, and given up entirely to the occupation of one mongrel dog, which was lying with his head upon his forepaws, snapping at imaginary flies, was a dreary place to contemplate; Francis Tredethlyn troubled himself very little about the aspect of the neighbourhood. He walked rapidly past the little row of houses until he came to No. 17, which was occupied by the respectable elderly person, otherwise Mrs. Clinnock.

The elderly person made some faint show of a commercial character in the shape of three very green pickle-bottles containing confectionery, all more or less melted out of its normal mould by long exposure to the sun, and a few gingerbread figures of weird and ghastly outline, supposed to represent the human form. A tattered chintz curtain hung upon a limp string, and made a background to these wares. Looking across this curtain Francis Tredethlyn saw a woman sitting in the ruddy glow of the fire, with a child in her lap, and knew by the beating of his heart that he had found his cousin Susan.

The door of No. 17 stood ajar. Francis pushed it open and went into the passage. Three steps brought him to the door of the little room, which was a compound of shop and parlour, with a slight flavour of bedroom. A woman—a girlish creature still, but pale and worn-looking—was sitting in a low nursing chair, with a child of four years old in her arms. Alas for the handiwork of Sorrow, the destroyer! The soft brown hair, the tender hazel eyes, alone remained of the rustic beauty which Francis Tredethlyn remembered smiling at him upon the moorlands of his native county.

Ah, how much of his youth came suddenly back upon the Cornishman in that moment of recognition! His mother’s face watching him as he left the dear old homestead in the early summer morning to go to the dame-school; happy haymakings on his father’s farm in the days when haymaking and harvest time were two Arcadian festivals, and not nervous crises in the life of a hardworking farmer, who may or may not be able to pay his rent. His childhood came back to him with all its unconscious happiness, and he fell on his knees by his cousin’s chair in a tumult of emotion.

“Susy, my darling, my pet! at last, at last I have found you!”

The boy slid from his mother’s arms, frightened by this tumultuous stranger. Susan rose pale and trembling, and shrank away with her hands spread before her face, as if even now she would have hidden herself from her cousin.

“Oh, Francis,” she cried, “don’t come near me—don’t look at me! Oh, Heaven have pity on me! I have so prayed that none who ever knew me in my childhood should see me now.”

“But, my darling, why, why should you hide yourself from those who love you so fondly?”

She made him no direct answer, but covered her face with her hands and sobbed aloud—

“Oh, my shame—my shame! Who will believe me when my father would not?”