Only a clod

Harcourt Lowther, calling at the stuccoed mansion in time for Mrs. Tredethlyn’s afternoon tea, found a dark and dashing young lady comfortably established in a luxurious amber damask nest against a background of amber curtain, whose glowing tints were extremely becoming to the young lady’s clear complexion. The two ladies were quite alone, though Maude declared gaily that she had had crowds of people that afternoon.

“You generally come so late, Mr. Lowther,” she said. “Those were the Dudley Boltons whom you met going out—nice people, fresh from the wolds of Yorkshire, quite new to town, people who come once in ten years or so, when there’s an International Exhibition, or something of that kind. Isn’t it strange that people can be so civilized living in the depths of the country—read the last novel—see the last great picture—because you see, nowadays, great pictures jog about the country like popular prime ministers, and if Mahomet can’t go to the mountain in Trafalgar Square, the mountain goes to meet Mahomet in his provincial town. But I want to introduce you to Miss Desmond, the daughter of the late Colonel Desmond, papa’s oldest friend. Julia dear, Mr. Lowther has heard me talk of you perpetually, and you have heard a good deal of him,”—Mrs. Tredethlyn blushed a little as she said this,—“so I expect you to be intensely intimate immediately.”

This introduction took place towards the close of June, nearly a month after the Oaks day; and during the time that had elapsed since that event, Harcourt Lowther, in his character of Mephistopheles, had found Faust what is popularly called a very troublesome customer. Francis Tredethlyn had a secret, and so far it had been a secret which Mr. Lowther could neither penetrate nor turn to his own use.

Yes, this simple-minded Cornishman, whose confiding candour had revealed every feeling, and every shade of feeling, to his baneful companion, had his secret now, and seemed to know very well how to keep it.

There were days on which he had business which took him a little way out of town; and Harcourt Lowther, pumping never so wisely, could pump no further information out of the secret depths of his friend’s mind. He had even proposed to accompany Francis on these mysterious excursions, but his friendly offers had been met by a point-blank refusal. He had ventured a little playful badinage; he had gone so far as to make an occasional insinuation; but Francis Tredethlyn had repelled his hints with the fiery indignation of a man whose tenderest and noblest feelings are involved in the subject of his friend’s persiflage.

“I know you get plenty of pleasant little witticisms of that kind out of those flimsy-covered books Mr. Jeffs supplies you with; but hadn’t you better keep them for Mrs. de Rothsay’s next evening party? They tell so much better amongst people who understand the French phrases you’re so fond of using. Some of your best things might as well be Greek, so far as I am concerned,” Mr. Tredethlyn said, coolly.

Mephistopheles shrugged his shoulders in mild deprecation of his pupil’s impertinence. Faust was positively beginning to acquire the tone of good society. He was learning to be insolent.

Harcourt Lowther left no stone unturned in his endeavours to discover the Cornishman’s secret, but unluckily there were not many stones to turn: and when Mr. Lowther had pumped Francis, and pumped Francis’s valet, who could give no clue whatever to his master’s conduct, there remained nothing more to be done; unless, indeed, Mr. Lowther had cared to resort to the private-inquiry system, and employ a shabby-genteel person at three or four guineas a week to track the footsteps of Mr. Tredethlyn. But this was a plan to which Harcourt Lowther could only have resorted in the most desperate extremity. If possible, he wanted to do dirty work without soiling his fingers. The private-inquiry system would have been a dangerous kind of machinery to put into motion—dangerous even if successful—utterly fatal in the case of failure; and it was just possible that the shabby-genteel person might do his spiriting awkwardly, and make his watchfulness sufficiently intrusive to arouse suspicion, and bring impetuous Francis Tredethlyn down upon him in an avalanche of manly rage.

“Pshaw!” thought Mr. Lowther, after a meditative and leisurely review of his position. “It’s only a matter of so much time. ‘Point de zèle,’ said Talleyrand; but he only meant, don’t be in a hurry. Your zealous diplomatist may be a very valuable person, provided he knows now to keep the secret of his earnestness; but your impatient diplomatist is a certain failure. Yet there are people who will gather their fruit before it is ripe. When your true diplomatist comes to an awkward knot in the airy network of his scheme, the best thing he can do is to sit down quietly before the web until some accidental hand unravels the entanglement. Chance is the unfailing friend of the schemer; but the goddess is very capricious in her visiting routine, and there are stupid creatures who won’t wait for a morning call. Luckily, I am not one of them. I can afford to be patient. Maude is an angel; the Stuccoville dinners are excellent, and the Stuccoville wines are my own selection; and for the rest I do pretty well. Ecarté is a most agreeable game; especially when one plays with a man who is half his time so absent-minded as to forget to mark the king. Yes, dear Francis, I can afford to wait for the lucky accident which is to put me in possession of the clue to those little trips of yours, in hansom cabs, which you prefer to pick up for yourself; thereby depriving your valet of any help to be derived by an examination of the number of the vehicle, and a subsequent chat with the driver.”

Harcourt Lowther came very frequently to Mrs. Tredethlyn’s drawing-rooms, now that she was to be found always accompanied by her darling Julia, and entirely unembarrassed by his visits. He did not always come at the orthodox hour, but would make his appearance between eleven and twelve o’clock on a hopelessly rainy morning, with a new book, or a roll of music, or something delightfully hideous in the way of jelly-fish for Maude’s aquarium, or the last fashion in ferns or orchids for Maude’s conservatories; and the back of Mrs. Tredethlyn’s house broke out into ferneries and conservatories wherever the ingenuity of a fashionable builder could find an excuse for carrying out Mrs. Tredethlyn’s graceful ideas, and swelling Mr. Tredethlyn’s little account.

Mr. Lowther had contrived to make himself the friend of the house, so there was always some very plausible excuse for visits at unorthodox hours, and pleasant dawdling in Maude’s pretty morning-room; and Stuccoville, furtively observant behind rose-coloured curtains in opposite houses, took note of Mr. Lowther’s morning calls, and kept a sharp account of the period that elapsed between his entrances and exits; and all this time nothing could be more delicately deferential, more tenderly respectful, than Harcourt Lowther’s manner to his friend’s wife. By not one hazardous phrase, by not so much as a furtive glance, a half-suppressed sigh, had he awakened Maude to a perception of possible danger in this pleasant intimacy with a man who had once been her affianced husband. No poisonous breath from the schemer’s false lips had tarnished the purity of this bright young soul; but Stuccoville had taken alarm already, and—in confidential converse in cosy comers of ottomans, under the shadow of a tall vase of exotics, or a Parian statuette—declared Mrs. Tredethlyn’s conduct to be “Positively appalling, my dear; and that absurd west-country dolt of a husband continues as blind as ever; and now she has taken a companion, my love. You remember the companion in ‘Vanity Fair;’ that delightful Becky calls her a sheep-dog; and you recollect Madame de Marneffe’s companion in that horrible novel of Balzac’s, which my tiresome Georgiana found the other morning at the bottom of a cupboard, in which her brother Charles keeps his cricketing shoes and fishing-tackle, and was discovered by the governess sitting on the ground positively devouring the book, and when questioned said it was ‘Télémaque;’ but as I was about to tell you, my dear, with regard to Mrs. T— and Mr. H. L—!” and so the little mole-hill gathered size, and gradually grew into a mountain.

Harcourt Lowther and Mrs. Tredethlyn’s darling Julia were not slow to arrive at a very friendly understanding. One morning spent in Miss Desmond’s society was quite sufficient to show so subtle an observer as Harcourt the real state of that young lady’s feelings with regard to her patroness. Indeed, Julia did not take much trouble to conceal her sentiments. Gay and animated one minute, darkly brooding the next, very often captious and contradictory, sharply ironical, or sternly defiant, she was in all things the very reverse of the paid companion who sets her employer’s caprices against the amount of her salary, and gratefully accepts any pleasures or advantages that fall in her way. Maude’s natural forbearance was exaggerated by a remorseful consciousness that all the luxuries and gaieties of her life were so many blessings which she had in a manner stolen from Julia, and her tenderness towards Miss Desmond was unbounded. But there were times when the Irish girl rebelled even against this tenderness.

“Do you think my poverty is an open wound, that you approach it so shrinkingly?” she exclaimed impatiently, one day when Maude had broken down in a delicate periphrasis, in which she tried to offer to pay her friend’s milliner’s bill without wounding her friend’s pride. “Why don’t you say at once, ‘My husband has thirty thousand a year, and a twenty-pound note more or less is ineffably unimportant to me—while you must go bareheaded if your pride revolts against dirty tulle and tumbled flowers?’ Pay me my salary, Mrs. Tredethlyn, when it becomes due, and do not force your favours upon me! for I come of a proud race, who are slow to perceive the difference between an unwelcome favour and an uncalled-for insult. As for the unmade silk dresses which you have tried so delicately to force upon me, under the pretence that the colours are unbecoming to your complexion, you can parade your wealth and your generosity by presenting them to your maid. I am voué au noir henceforward; and when you are tired of seeing my shabby-genteel black moiré and Limerick lace in some obscure corner of your rooms, you have only to give me a hint, and I will spend the evening in my own apartment.”

It was not often that Miss Desmond indulged in such a speech as this, or perhaps even remorseful Maude could scarcely have endured her companionship. She sometimes made herself very agreeable during those idle rainy mornings in which Maude and Harcourt practised the old concertante duets for flute and piano, or dawdled amongst the delicate ferns with the crackjaw names in the little fernery that opened out of the boudoir; or devised gorgeously incomprehensible illuminations for an obscure verse in Malachi. Julia could never be charming, for the power to charm is a gift sui generis, and does not necessarily go along with versatile accomplishments or intellectual superiority; but she could be an amusing and agreeable companion whenever she pleased to exhibit herself in that character, and she did so please very frequently; for it is so much less trouble to be agreeable than to be disagreeable, that the most persevering sulker is apt to give way under the weary burden of his own bad temper. But let Miss Desmond be ever so vivacious, or ever so delightful, Harcourt Lowther never lost sight of one fact,—and that was the fact of Julia’s unappeased and unappeasable hatred of Maude Tredethlyn. Stuccoville, which was omniscient of everything, knew that Mr. Tredethlyn had been engaged to Julia, and had jilted her in order to marry Maude; and from Stuccoville Mr. Lowther obtained the clue to the Irish girl’s feelings.

“A little genuine feminine malice might be rather a useful element, if I can set it working unconsciously for my benefit. Your amateur’s assistance is generally a dismal failure; but I really think this Miss Desmond might help me. She is so very clever—and so intensely spiteful.”

So one morning when Harcourt Lowther happened to find Julia alone in the morning-room, he took the opportunity of being quite confidential upon the subject of Mr. Tredethlyn’s dissipation.

“He dined from home yesterday? and the day before? Ah, to be sure, I dined with him the day before,” said Mr. Lowther, with a deprecating sigh. He did not attempt to conceal the fact of his own participation in Francis Tredethlyn’s pleasures; but he contrived in the most subtle manner to make it understood that he accompanied Francis in the character of a guardian angel, a protecting spirit in modern costume, with an arresting hand for ever extended to snatch the sinner from the verge of the precipice. Miss Desmond shrugged her shoulders disdainfully.

“I don’t think Mrs. Tredethlyn values her husband’s society sufficiently to feel his neglect very keenly,” she said; “she seems perfectly happy.”

Yes, it was quite true; Maude seemed very happy, though her husband spent the best part of his time away from home, and was gloomy and ill at ease in her society. Harcourt Lowther’s hints had done their work, and the breach was very wide between husband and wife. Francis believed that his presence was odious to Maude. Maude imagined that home pleasures and simple domestic enjoyments were tame and insipid for Francis. And it had all been so easily done! Harcourt had only to make a few careless speeches about his friend.

“You see, my dear Mrs. Tredethlyn, a man of our dear Frank’s temperament requires out-door amusements—hunting, and shooting, and racing, and all their agreeable concomitants in the way of meet breakfasts and uproarious dinners. A man with Frank’s animal spirits must have more boisterous pleasures than can be procured in a drawing-room, however charming—or amongst women, however delightful. There are some men who do not care for the society of ladies; very excellent fellows in their way, but men in whose minds poetry and music, beautiful scenery, exquisite sentiments, grand ideas, are all classed under one head as ‘doosid bores.’ You know the style of man who calls everything except his horse and his dog a ‘doosid bore.’ I don’t say that Tredethlyn is quite that sort of man, but he is not a domestic animal.”

Mr. Lowther—sitting amongst a chaos of feminine litter, snipping out painted birds and flowers with a pair of fairy-like scissors for Maude’s potichomanie, looked the very incarnation of all that is domestic and devoted to the fair sex. Perhaps he fully estimated the advantage of the contrast between his own character and that of the men he had been describing.

Mrs. Tredethlyn gave a little sigh.

“And Frank used to be so very domestic; and so dotingly fond of Floss,” she said, looking pensively at a mouse-coloured Skye terrier, whose cold nose reposed in the pink palm of her pretty hand. “However, we contrive to do very well without him, don’t we, Flossy Possy? and we shouldn’t care if he went to all the races in that dreadful calendar, and never, never came near his own house at all, should we, Flossy Possy?”

Harcourt Lowther, looking up furtively from the covert of his auburn eyelashes, snipped a bird into mincemeat, and tightened his mouth until the thin lips were scarcely visible.

“That nonsense sounds rather like pique,” he thought.

“Can she care for the fellow? A handsome boor, who would scarcely know the difference between Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ and ‘Rule, Britannia!’—can she have the faintest sentiment of affection for such a man as that, when—”

Mr. Lowther’s self-esteem finished the sentence,—

“When she knows me, and can contrast my infinite graces and accomplishments with the boor’s defects?”

But Mr. Lowther, looking at his position in all its aspects, could not do otherwise than perceive that the provincial rust was gradually wearing off the farmer’s son, and that Francis Tredethlyn was learning to hold his own amongst men who had played cricket in the Eton meads, and paced the grand old cloisters and quadrangles of Oxford and Cambridge. Association is the best schoolmaster; and even in Bohemia, a man who is blessed with a fair amount of intelligence must learn something.

There were times when Harcourt Lowther frowned darkly as he brooded over his cards, and began to think that the game was not such an easy one to win, after all. But he played patiently, notwithstanding; and, true to his faith in the saving help of Chance, he waited for the goddess to look over his shoulder, and point with her inspired finger to the trump which should win him the final trick.

It was while the schemer was waiting that an event occurred which had some influence upon the current of his life.

His elder brother, heir to all that Robert Lowther, of Lowther Hall, Hampshire, had to leave, and expectant heir to the more important possessions of a very wealthy maiden aunt, returned unexpectedly from Belgium, where he had been established for some time as a member of the Corps Diplomatique, and dropped unannounced into Mr. Lowther’s lodging while that gentleman was lounging over his breakfast.

The meeting between the two brothers was not remarkable for its enthusiasm. Roderick Lowther strolled lazily into the room, dropped into an easy-chair, and indulged in a long leisurely stretch and a loud yawn before he addressed his astonished relative.

“Didn’t expect to see me yet awhile, did you, old boy? Been travelling all night, and feel as if my bones were not so much bones as rheumatism,—some fellow says something like that in a book, doesn’t he? Came over in the Baron Osy; very bad passage, jolting and tumbling about all night, waves mountains high, as people say in books. So you’ve cut the line, dear boy, and are living on the proceeds of your commission, I suppose? The warrior blood of the Lowthers who fought at Bosworth and Flodden seems to have lost a little of its fiery quality in filtering through three centuries of country gentlemen. There was a Lowther who distinguished himself at bloody Malplaquet, by the bye, and another who was with young General Wolfe on the heights of Quebec. But we’ve done with all that nowadays. We are peacefully disposed, and sell out on the earliest opportunity; and we steal a march on our beloved brother, and come home on the quiet to cultivate our maiden aunt.”

“That’s a lie,” replied Harcourt, very coolly. “I haven’t been near her since I came home.”

“What did you come home for then?” asked the other. “You came for something.”

The two men looked at each other. They were very much alike. There was the same steelly light in the blue eyes, the same tight contraction of the thin lips. The elder looked at the younger with a glance of shrewd inquiry; the younger looked back sulky defiance.

“Come,” said the traveller, after a second leisurely stretch and a second prolonged yawn, “what is it, then, the little game? Say, my friend. You didn’t sell out of her Majesty’s service without a motive, and you didn’t come home without a motive. By Jove! you never did anything in your life without a motive. You are a schemer, my dear Harcourt. The schemer is born, and not made, and he must obey his instincts. Dear boy, I know your organization, and in these days of physiological science no man can keep himself quite dark. Iago would have been a failure if Othello had studied his Lavater. Be candid, Harcourt, and tell me what noble vessel, laden with the spoils of a new Peru, flaunts her white sails upon the wind, and invites the attention of the pirate.”

“You are so deuced confiding yourself, that you’ve a right to demand another fellow’s confidence,” Harcourt responded, moodily. “When I want your help, I’ll tell you my secrets. That has been your way of managing matters, I believe.”

“My Harcourt bears malice!” exclaimed Roderick. “Antipholus of Ephesus reproaches Antipholus of Syracuse. Dear boy, I suppose it’s our misfortune to be too much alike. Perhaps, if you won’t give me your confidence, you will at least oblige me with a chop. There was an atmosphere of smoky chimneys and warm train-oil on board the Baron which incapacitated me for breakfast.”

Mr. Lowther the elder possessed himself of the teapot, and appropriated his brother’s breakfast-cup, while Harcourt rang the bell and gave an order for additional rolls and chops.

“I didn’t know you were coming to England,” Mr. Lowther the younger said, after a pause, in which he had stared moodily at his brother.

“I suppose not,” answered the other; “and I can’t say that the heartiness of your welcome is very encouraging to the returning prodigal. However, as I have not been in these dominions for the last three years or more, and as my father and I are not the best friends,—there’s nothing so economical for a parent as a long-standing quarrel with all his children, by the way,—I shall look to you, my dear Harcourt, for any friendly offices I may require. I have three months’ leave of absence, and I have not—le sou. I come to England to recuperate, as brother Jonathan has it. I want to get on the blind side of my beloved aunt to the tune of a few hundreds; and I want to marry an heiress.”

“Oh,” said Harcourt, thoughtfully, “you want to marry an heiress?”

“Yes; can you help me to do it?”

“I think not.”

“Humph! perhaps if I could make it worth your while to assist me you’d tell another story. However, you can introduce me to some nice people, I suppose?”

Harcourt nodded moodily.

“And I must look up my own old set. Not that I know many people, for I lived such a hide-and-seek sort of life when I was in England. Can you get me rooms in this house? We can commonize, you know. I left my portmanteaus on board the Baron. I suppose there’s a boots, or a somebody of the scout species appertaining to this establishment, who can take a cab, and fetch them for me?”

Thus unceremoniously did Antipholus of Syracuse establish himself in the abode of his ungracious brother. Frankenstein, pursued by the monster of his creation, could scarcely have seemed more ill at ease than Harcourt Lowther under the infliction of his brother’s society. Was it that these men were too much alike? Did Harcourt think that the keen eyes of his brother would follow every thread in the intricate network of his scheme, and the subtle brain of his brother would apply itself to plotting against him?

But the coolness so apparent in Harcourt’s reception of the returning wanderer made no impression whatever on that gentleman. Roderick Lowther stretched his long legs upon his brother’s hearth-rug, and smoked his brother’s cigars, with a serene indifference as to his brother’s feelings.

“No.”

“Ah, you’ll hit upon something in that way presently, I dare say, if you run your mind’s eye over your visiting list. I’m in no hurry. Three months is a small eternity in these days of railroads and photography.”

“And you really would marry?” said Harcourt again, very thoughtfully.

“Really would? Of course I would, if I could get the chance of making an advantageous match, and propitiate my aunt Dorothea by the sacrifice. You know how bent the prudent old lady has always been on my making a great marriage, and restoring the forgotten glories of the Lowthers. Yes, Harcourt, I come prepared for victory, and I trust to your brotherly friendship to help me to see and conquer.”

“Humph! By the bye, I suppose you have heard nothing of—”

“Not a word,” answered Roderick, rather hastily; “I know what you’re going to talk about, and as that’s rather an unpleasant subject to me, we may as well agree to avoid it. I wrote a letter, candid, explanatory, and so forth; promising to do what I considered my duty. I don’t profess to be a generous man, and I freely acknowledge that I’m a very poor one; so the modest annual sum, which I considered my duty, was—well, very modest! However, the letter was unanswered. People drop through, you see,” concluded Mr. Lowther the elder, blowing away a slender puff of blue vapour, as if he had been blowing away a troublesome subject; “and when people do, of their own election, drop through, I can’t see that it’s any fellow’s duty to dig them up again. You haven’t heard anything, I suppose?”

“Not a word.”

“Fortunate for you! Sometimes that sort of person fastens on to one’s relations. However, as I observed before, we’ll agree to avoid the subject. Suppose we discuss your affairs?”

“I had much rather we did not.”

“Of course, dear boy; but as I am candidly disposed myself, I don’t mean to be kept in the dark by the most saturnine of brothers who ever sulked in the face of an amiable relative. You used to be engaged to an heiress—something in the Moorgate-Street line—Australian merchandise, wasn’t it? a Miss Hillersdon, or Hillary, eh, dear boy? There used to be something of that sort on the cards, I believe?”

“There used to be, but there has ceased to be for the last twelve months. Will that do for you?”

“Ah, Miss Hillersdon—or Hillary—has jilted you, I suppose?”

“She has.”

“And the man she has married—”

“Is my very good friend, the happy possessor of a charming wife and a large fortune, and the man at whose house I dine to-day.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Roderick Lowther, lengthening the ejaculation to its extremest capacity of extension—“Oh, I think I begin to understand your policy. Miss Hillary has married a rich man, and you are intimate with the husband and au mieux with the wife. The husband is a sickly fellow—consumptive—apoplectic, eh, dear boy?”

“The husband is something over six feet high, and has the shoulders of a lifeguardsman; and, if it were not for his dissipated habits, might live to be ninety.”

“Ah, if it were not for his dissipated habits. And you are his intimate friend? My dear Harcourt, what a very transparent game you are playing! and what a consummate fool you must be if you supposed that I shouldn’t see through it! Why not a bond of union between us—all for one, and one for all, like Dumas’s musketeers? Help me to find an heiress, and I’ll help you auprès de Mrs. —, what’s the lady’s name, by the bye?”

Harcourt Lowther allowed this last piece of information to be screwed out of him, and parted with it as grudgingly as he had parted with the rest. It is not a pleasant thing when you are playing a very difficult game with the odds against you, to have an inconvenient brother swooping down upon you and insisting on looking over your hand.

There was no affection between these two brothers; the likeness which they bore to each other, morally as well as physically, seemed to have a blighting influence upon their relations. They knew each other, and they distrusted each other. Perhaps it would have been scarcely too much to say they hated each other.

But they went out to dinner together nevertheless, and Harcourt smilingly introduced his brother to Mrs. Tredethlyn and Miss Desmond. They had plenty of time to grow quite intimate in the drawing-room while they were waiting for Francis, who came in, flushed with a hurried toilet, at ten minutes to eight. He had been absent upon one of his mysterious excursions a little way out of town.

Roderick Lowther was received very graciously by the two ladies, and cordially welcomed by Mr. Tredethlyn. Harcourt, watching his brother ensconced in a nook of Maude’s favourite ottoman, and discoursing at his ease upon Belgian notabilities, was troubled by dark misgivings of danger.

“I must find the fellow a quarry for himself,” he thought, “or he’ll be trying to stalk my game. He asks me to introduce him to an eligible parti as coolly as if life were a five-act comedy, with the traditional heiress always waiting to fall a prey to the traditional adventurer. An heiress! in these days of marvellous commercial successes there must be such things as heiresses. But the question is where to look for them.”

One of Mr. Tredethlyn’s pompous retainers opened the drawing-room door at this moment and announced—

“Mr. and Miss Grunderson.”

“Egad!” thought Harcourt Lowther, “there’s the solution of my difficulty. Why not Miss Grunderson? Miss Grunderson is an heiress, or ought to be, if there is stability in any part of the commercial universe.”

A young lady with a very rosy face, a young lady decidedly inclined to that quality which in the fair sex is elegantly entitled embonpoint, a young lady who was surrounded by surging flounces of pink areophane, dotted about with more pink rosebuds and larger full-blown roses than were ever worn by any young lady with a judicious recollection of the sweeps on Mayday, bounced into the room, and bounced up to Mrs. Tredethlyn; while an elderly gentleman, who was evidently the young lady’s papa, beamed mildly at the company across an enormous expanse of embroidered shirt-front and black waistcoat.

But in the network that Harcourt Lowther has woven Miss Grunderson is destined to be considerably entangled, and deserves to be introduced more ceremoniously in a fresh chapter.

That ponderous Mr. Grunderson, who plunged heavily down upon Maude’s central ottoman, a miraculous combination of upholstery and floriculture—that shining bald-headed Mr. Grunderson, who sat placidly grinning at the company, and addressed his hostess as “Mum”—had begun life as a market-gardener; and, had Mrs. Tredethlyn been born some twenty years earlier, would have been proud to supply her with azaleas and camellias for the decoration of the ottoman upon which he was now sitting. The march of progress, and the accompanying march of bricks and mortar, had driven before them the cabbages and strawberry-beds, the cucumber-frames and young plantations of evergreens, by the cultivation of which Mr. Grunderson and his forefathers had lived comfortably upon one-o’clock dinners of fat bacon and indigestible dumplings, with occasional varieties of butcher’s meat, thinking themselves passing rich when their ledgers showed a profit of two or three hundred pounds at the end of the year.

The march of civilization, or rather the march of the myrmidons of that unreasoning despot, that implacable ruler, whom women call Fashion, always pushing westward, had contrived to push Mr. Grunderson’s gardens off the face of the earth, and in so doing had set a Pactolus flowing steadily into Mr. Grunderson’s pocket. The wealth poured in upon him with a rapidity which was like nothing but a fairy tale. That heroic Jack of the nursery story—who, by the bye, seems to have had no surname—never looked in more amazement on the bean-stalk that shot into the very skies in a single night, than did the honest market-gardener at the stuccoed district which had arisen, seven or eight stories and a campanello tower high, on the fields where he remembered execrating the slugs on dewy mornings a few years before. Where a prairie of bright red stocks had perfumed all the summer air with spicy odours, a square of stately mansions stared grimly at each other, and prime ministers’ carriages rolled with meteor lamps through the midnight darkness. Where ragged children, and gaunt sunburnt women, in blucher-boots and with indescribable bonnets balanced on their freckled noses, had weeded strawberry-beds for a pitiful sixpence a day, duchesses trailed their silken trains and wearied of the rolling hours after the approved manner of their kind in the pages of the poets and romancers. The transformation was as perfect as it had been rapid; and instead of the cabbages and cabbage-roses, the cucumber-frames and hothouse flowers of his youth and early manhood, Mr. Grunderson found himself, at fifty years of age, proprietor of ground-rents that made him a millionaire. He had only one child, a daughter, who had been educated for some fifty pounds a year at a seminary for young ladies, in which she had been cruelly snubbed on account of her father’s cabbages, and who was now determined to revenge herself on the companions of her blighted youth by the splendour of her womanhood. Led by this young lady, who was blessed with an energetic temperament and imperturbable good humour, Mr. Grunderson found himself, always more or less independently of his own agency, going through the complete formula of fashionable life according to his daughter Rosa’s notion of that formula; which notion was extremely variable, and took its colour from the last acquaintance to whom the lively heiress was pleased to attach herself.

The very last just now happened to be Maude Tredethlyn, about whom Rosa was ready to go off into raptures at any moment, and whom she always spoke of as “a dear,” “a love,” or “a darling.” But there was a warm womanly heart beating under Rosa’s fine dresses, and her raptures had more meaning in them than the raptures of enthusiastic young ladies are apt to have. She attached herself so effectually to Maude that Mrs. Tredethlyn was fain to forget, or at any rate to forgive, the occasional lapses in her grammar, the unpleasant warmth of her fat little hands, which always came flopping down on the hands of her companion when she was enthusiastic, and the shadow of vulgarity which is so apt to accompany the sunshine of low-born liveliness.

Harcourt Lowther took an early opportunity to inform his elder brother that the young lady in pink areophane was an heiress, and an heiress well worthy the cultivation of any enterprising young diplomatist. Roderick was not slow to take the hint, but he was a great deal too much of a diplomatist to attempt any obvious angling for this rich prize. He exerted all his powers of fascination in order to make himself agreeable to Mrs. Tredethlyn, and he did not address so much as one syllable of the most commonplace civility to the market-gardener’s daughter; the consequence of which little manœuvre was, that as Rosa was sitting next to Maude all the evening, she listened open-mouthed to every word he uttered, and when she departed in her papa’s three-hundred-guinea chariot—the market-gardener had insisted on possessing the traditional lemon-coloured chariot with hammer-cloth, and powdered retainers, which he had beheld and admired in his boyhood—she carried Roderick Lowther’s image away with her.

It must be acknowledged, however, that it was no uncommon occurrence for Miss Grunderson to carry the image of some tolerably good-looking and passably well-mannered young man away from any festal gathering at which she happened to find herself. The good-humoured Rosa had a habit of falling desperately in love with any eligible person whom she encountered either in public or private life, who did anything to make himself notorious, or wore his hair long enough to be entitled a Being. A long list of Beings had occupied that sentimental caravansary which Miss Grunderson called her heart. She had been in love with all the poets, from the Laureate to Mr. Tupper; with all the novelists, from the great Sir Edward to the newest fledged of Mr. Mudie’s popularities; and I fear she often fell in love with angels unawares in the shape of feminine romancers who were pleased to hide their gentle sex under masculine nomenclature. She had been in love—fathoms deep—with Lord Palmerston, Signor Mario, Sir Edwin Landseer, and Mr. Charles Mathews. She was wont to keep the three-hundred-guinea chariot waiting in Pall Mall for an hour at a stretch while she hunted Mr. Graves and his assistants for the last new portrait of her last new idol; and her room was like a good Catholic’s chapel,—hung with the engraved effigies of an army of saints.

It was a very pure flame which burnt before so many shrines, and a very harmless one; and perhaps if Mr. Lowther the elder had known Rosa Grunderson’s little idiosyncrasies, he would not have felt quite so complacently triumphant in the consciousness that her round grey eyes had been fixed upon him all the evening with the fond gaze of hero-worship. Harcourt contrived to swell this triumph by artful little brotherly compliments, as the two young men walked Londonwards under the starlit summer sky, smoking their regalias, and talking as men about town do talk under those sublime stars. Sentimental Rosa was gazing at those luminous unknown worlds from the covert of the pinkest curtains in Stuccoville, and thinking about Him! Rosa’s last adoration was always mysteriously alluded to under cover of a personal pronoun. Her admiration for Roderick Lowther was multiplied a hundredfold by the young diplomatist’s disregard of her. Poor Rosa had been accustomed to be made the object of what, in the argotic parlance of her age, she called “a dead set,” on account of her papa’s ground-rents; and she was inclined to imagine Mr. Lowther the noblest and most disinterested of mankind because he did not commence this “dead set” immediately after being introduced to her.

“I wonder whether he knows that I’m the Miss Grunderson?” she thought, as she looked up at those romantic stars so familiar to her in her Byron. “Of course he does, though, ’Pa is so different from the rest of society, that people always know there’s some reason for his being where he is, and they’re not very long guessing that the reason is money. Will anybody ever want to marry me for my own sake, I wonder? Ah, how I wish the Marquis of Westminster would fall in love with me! He couldn’t want pa’s ground-rents.”

Thus the maiden mused in her bower, while Roderick Lowther, encouraged by his junior, talked complacently of his conquest.

Thus argued the diplomatist by profession, strolling Strand-wards in the starlight; while the diplomatist by organization listened quietly, and thought his own thoughts as regarded this grand conquest, of which his kinsman was so proud. Harcourt Lowther was not apt to resent the insolent insouciance, the calm assurance of superiority, with which his senior treated him, and indeed had treated him from that early boyhood in which the lads had played together at Eton. But the wrongs that rankle deeply in a man’s breast are sometimes those which he endures silently. Harcourt believed that his own prospects had been sacrificed to the advancement of Roderick; and he was not sorry when the elder son went wild, and turned his back as coolly upon his father as if he had never been the pampered favourite of weak love, the all-absorbing drain upon a limited income. In every way Roderick had fared better than his brother. Lowther Hall, surrounded by park and farm-lands that constituted an estate of some three hundred acres, might not be worth very much to a man of large ideas and lofty inspirations; but whatever it was worth, it was tightly entailed upon the heir of the Lowthers, and not so much as a game-keeper’s cottage or a scrap of meadow-land was reserved for the luckless junior. Mrs. Lowther had been mistress of a small fortune, but that had been spent on the education of the two young men,—Harcourt in this matter, as in all others, going to the wall; for his University career had been cut short in order that his brother’s debts might be paid, and that extravagant gentleman be enabled to face the big-wigs of his college without fear of clamorous creditors, and read at leisure for a degree which he was too lazy to succeed in getting. After this Harcourt’s prospects had again been sacrificed, and the young barrister, unable to live at the bar, had been fain to accept an ensign’s commission; while Roderick, pushed into the diplomatic world by a desperate effort of family interest, exhibited his handsome face at the Prussian Court, and squandered every farthing that he could screw out of his father’s slender purse. When the purse had become as empty as it well could, there had been the usual remonstrances, the usual bad feeling which is likely to arise between an utterly selfish and unprincipled young man and the father who is no longer able to be of any use to him, and who takes the liberty of resenting the extravagance which has involved his later life in difficulties.

Besides the advantages obtained from his father’s partiality, Roderick Lowther had been the favourite of a maiden aunt of miserly habits and independent fortune, who had condescended to give him her name at the baptismal font, and who had never bestowed on him anything else—except, indeed, a neat cloth-bound copy of “The Dairyman’s Daughter,” presented to the lad one birthday, and promptly disposed of at a rag-and-bone shop in the High Street of Harrow for the small sum of fourpence. But although Miss Dorothea Burnett had not been very liberal in her donations to her favourite nephew during her lifetime, it was supposed that, after her departure from this world, the young man would reap the reward of occasional dutifully-worded letters and affected deference to her wishes, and that the reward would be a very substantial one; for Miss Burnett had contrived to swell her own little fortune by many stray windfalls in the way of legacies from relatives, whose regard her busy married sister Mrs. Lowther had neglected to cultivate. Beyond this, the maiden lady had bought small but profitable tenements, and had dabbled a little in shares; and she had watched her small investments with an intelligence, and nursed them with a tenderness, which her stockbroker had admiringly declared to be a credit to the sex she adorned by her commercial acumen.

So Roderick Lowther, finding his younger brother on the field, was alarmed by the idea that he might have been undermined in this direction, and was by no means inclined to lose any time before presenting himself to his spinster aunt. He brushed and curled his amber whiskers with more than usual circumspection, therefore, on the morning after the dinner at Mrs. Tredethlyn’s; and walking through Covent Garden, on his way to Miss Burnett’s Bloomsbury hermitage, he expended sixpence on a hothouse flower to put in the button-hole of the dark-blue coat which he wore under a flimsy outer garment of pale grey. He had dressed himself very carefully, for he knew that, in spite of the maiden lady’s lectures on the subject of prudence, her feminine eye was fascinated by the elegant frivolities which she affected to disapprove.

Miss Burnett occupied a very big house in the dullest street in Bloomsbury—a dismal cul de sac, in which there was almost always an elderly organ-grinder playing “Home, sweet home,” or the “Old Hundredth,” with a little group of squalid children gathered round him. The big house smelt like a tomb, and was almost as rarely opened as if it had been one; for the butcher-boy who brought Miss Burnett’s mutton-chop, or the half-pound of steak or three-quarters of liver, upon which Miss Burnett’s servant was wont to make her repast, handed his wares across the area-gate, and exchanged no word of comment with the grim damsel who received them, knowing very well that the lady of the house sat at her favourite window in the front parlour, with her open Bible before her, and a watchful eye upon the outer world, which some sentimental Christians might have thought scarcely consistent with so much piety.

The grim damsel who admitted Roderick Lowther to Miss Burnett’s darksome abode relaxed her ordinary sternness of visage into something faintly resembling a smile as she recognized her mistress’s nephew.

“Your aunt has been very ill since you were last here, Mr. Lowther,” the woman said, in answer to Roderick’s inquiry. “She was very bad with her asthma all the winter; but the warm spring weather brought her round again.”

“Yes,” thought the young man, “the spring weather always does bring her round,—and always will, I suppose, till I am dead and in my grave.”

He was ushered into the dining-room while this irreverent idea was in his mind; and the next minute he was seated opposite to his aunt, inquiring tenderly about her asthma. The dining-room was very dismal. There was more mahogany furniture and brown damask than is compatible with the smallest ray of cheerfulness, and the walls were rendered ghastly by some hideous preparations painted in asphaltum, and exhibiting gigantic cracks that looked like gory, yawning wounds,—preparations which, on account of their smoky nature and revolting choice of subject, were supposed to be the work of the old masters.

“I hope, my dear Roderick,” said the maiden lady, very solemnly, “that while absent in those idolatrous foreign lands, you kept the promise which you gave me before leaving England.”

“My dear aunt,” murmured the young man, who had quite forgotten having made any promise whatever to his pious relative, and was painfully mystified by this address, “I assure you that I—”

He would have broken down here, but the lady came to his rescue.

“Don’t prevaricate, Roderick!” she exclaimed, sternly. “Did you, or did you not, enter a Roman Catholic place of worship during your sojourn among the high priests of Baal? Did you, or did you not, sit under one of those idolatrous worshippers of stocks and stones? And oh, that I should live to see candlesticks on the altar of a church in this very neighbourhood!” cried Miss Burnett, with a sudden burst of indignation; “and to hear snuffling, which I at first attributed to a cold in the head, but afterwards ascertained to be the wicked workings of Rome!”

The stanch Dorothea paused for a few moments to recover her indignation, and then tackled her nephew once more.

“You promised me, before going to Belgium, that you would not, however tempted, enter a Roman Catholic place of worship,” she said.

“And I did not, my dear aunt,” answered Roderick, promptly; “I give you my word of honour as a gentleman.” “Nor any other place of worship,” thought the heir, as his aunt nodded approvingly.

And then there was a little more talk, chiefly taking the form of a catechism, which Mr. Lowther went through triumphantly, since his answers to the old lady’s inquiries were shaped in accordance with his knowledge of what was likely to please his aunt, rather than with any reference to actual fact. But a man must do a good many mean things when he devotes himself to the cultivation of a narrow-minded maiden aunt, for the chance of inheriting small tenements and first-preference bonds in flourishing railway companies. Roderick Lowther breathed a long sigh of relief when he left the house that smelt like a tomb behind him, after drinking a glass of his aunt’s dry sherry, which act of devotion was in itself no small penance.

He hailed a hansom as soon as he was safely beyond ken of the observant spinster, and was rattled back to his brother’s lodgings, where he found Harcourt pondering moodily over the “Times” newspaper, and whence the same hansom drove the two Antipholi to Stuccoville.

Mr. Tredethlyn was out, but Mrs. Tredethlyn was at home. Harcourt went into his friend’s study to write a note; while Roderick followed a servant to the drawing-rooms, in the smallest and cosiest of which three gorgeous apartments the diplomatist found Maude and Rosa seated side by side on a low sofa, while proud Julia meditated apart at the window.

“You’re the lady I should like to marry,” thought Roderick, as he looked at Julia’s dark face, which lighted up for a moment with her flashing smile, as she bowed to him, and then relapsed into gloom; “there’d be some pleasure in taming you. Who would care to cage a robin? but there would be some glory in subduing the spirit of an eagle.”

Thus mused Mr. Lowther, while he murmured some commonplace remark upon the beauty of the summer day, and dropped himself lazily into a seat near Maude Tredethlyn. He was true to his tactics of the night before, and addressed his remarks almost entirely to Maude and Julia. When he did condescend to address the vivacious Rosa, he did so in a manner that was a delicate admixture of the intellectual bearishness of one of poor Miss Brontés heroes with the lively banter of a Benedick. The result of this policy was triumphant, and the market-gardener’s daughter plunged deeper and deeper still into her five-and-twentieth hopeless attachment.

While Mr. Lowther the elder was cultivating his own interests in the drawing-room, Mr. Lowther the younger was pacing up and down Francis Tredethlyn’s study in no happy frame of mind. Imagine the feelings of a Mephistopheles who begins to suspect that his victim has slipped away from him. Harcourt was beginning to feel very doubtful as to the firmness of his hold on his pupil and companion.

Francis Tredethlyn’s conduct for the last few weeks had quite baffled his friend’s penetration. The Cornishman had grown suddenly preoccupied and reserved. He might still be seen in the haunts of the Bohemians—for Mr. Lowther took care that he should not easily extricate himself from the bonds that he had allowed to be coiled about him; but Francis, always unwilling to be led into the scenes where he had no pleasure, was now more unwilling than ever, and Harcourt found it very difficult to play the game he wanted to play without showing his cards. If it had been a mere question of plucking so many feathers from an innocent pigeon, the thing might have been done easily enough, perhaps; but Mr. Lowther evidently wanted something more than his friend’s golden plumage. It seemed, indeed, as if he would be satisfied with nothing less than the utter ruin and degradation of Maude Tredethlyn’s husband.

To-day, walking up and down the study, whose broad plate-glass window commanded an agreeable view of a stony quadrangle and the roofs and chimneys of a mews, Harcourt thought very despondently of that grand scheme to which he had devoted himself so patiently since his return to England.

“What secret is the fellow hiding from me?” he thought, resentfully; “he refused to dine with me to-day, and he threw over the party I made for Greenwich the day before yesterday. He has made no book for the York summer, and yet he is less at home than ever. What does it all mean? Can he have gone to the bad in real earnest at last, and without any help from me? There must be something in it; but what is the something?”

Tired at last of such meditations as these, Harcourt Lowther flung himself into a chair to compose the letter he had talked about writing when he entered the study.

He wrote his note, which was very brief, and the gist of which was to remind Francis of some engagement that would entail the usual champagne drinking, the usual squandering of money for the gratification of the worthless society in which a few innocent pigeons abandoned themselves to be plucked without mercy by every species of predatory fowl. After having written this little note, so carefully worded that no print of the fiend’s hoof could have been deciphered therein by uninitiated eyes, Harcourt Lowther sat with his elbow on the table, biting the feather of his pen, and ruminating moodily. There were open letters and tradesmen’s bills lying about upon Francis Tredethlyn’s disorderly writing-table. Mr. Lowther flung aside his pen presently, and amused himself by a careless examination of these documents. Some of the bills were heavy ones, but not so heavy as to make any very serious inroad upon the Cornishman’s fortune, and Harcourt tossed them away from him one after the other, uninterested in their details, unconcerned by their sum-totals, until he came to a dead stop all at once at the first line of a document which seemed to him to bear an extraordinary significance.

This document was the bill of a fashionable upholsterer, and the line below the tradesman’s name and address ran thus:

“For goods supplied to Francis Tredethlyn, Esq., at Brook Cottage, Petersham, June 20th, 185-;” and then followed a list of the furniture for a cottage, the sum-total of which came to little more than three hundred pounds.

“So,” muttered Mr. Lowther, “I think I have fallen upon the clue to the mystery. We will go and look at Mr. Tredethlyn’s furnished cottage.”

He wrote the address on a tablet in his portemonnaie, and went up-stairs to the drawing-room, where he found Roderick intolerably at his ease in the society of the three ladies. There was an arrangement made for a meeting in Maude’s roomy box at Covent Garden, to which Mrs. Tredethlyn was fain to invite the affectionate Rosa, who clung to her with peculiar fondness to-day: and then the two gentlemen took their departure; Roderick to look in at the “Travellers’” and the “St. James’s;” Harcourt to hurry post-haste—or rather hansom-cab haste—to the Waterloo terminus, whence he took the train for Richmond.