Only a clod

The letter which Francis Tredethlyn wrote in his study was a long one; a very painful one to write, as it seemed, from the face of the writer, and the weary sigh which every now and then escaped from his lips, as his hurrying pen paused for a moment. It was close upon ten o’clock when he began the letter. The clock chimed the half-hour after eleven while he was sealing it. He addressed the envelope, and then threw himself back in his chair to think. He had so much to think of. Maude’s extraordinary conduct, Rosa Grunderson’s revelation, had overthrown the whole fabric of his life; and he found himself surrounded by ruins whose utter chaos he could not contemplate without bewilderment.

For the last few weeks his thoughts had been almost exclusively devoted to his cousin Susan, and her wrongs. Found at last, after so many failures and disappointments, so much delay, the lonely girl had been welcomed as tenderly as any wanderer who ever returned to the lost friends of his youth. But Susan Lesley had a sad story to tell her cousin. The missing link in the chain that Francis Tredethlyn had put together piece by piece was the letter which had been written from St. Petersburg by the man whom Susan had loved and trusted—the man whose diary had revealed to Francis the utter worthlessness of his character.

Robert Lesley’s letter was only a worthy companion to Robert Lesley’s diary. In it he coldly and deliberately told the girl who loved him, that she was not his wife; that the Marylebone marriage was no marriage; the registrar no recognized official, but a scoundrel hired for a twenty-pound note to play the part of that functionary; that the registrar’s office had been no office, but a lodging-house parlour hired for the occasion, and half-a-dozen doors from the real office. This statement was, of course, accompanied by the usual heartless sophistries which run so glibly from the pen, or fall so smoothly from the lips, of an utterly heartless man. The self-confessed betrayer pleaded the madness of an all-absorbing love; the stern necessities of well-bred poverty; the pressure of family circumstances; the fear of a father’s rage; and then, in conclusion, the writer stated the pitiful stipend which he was prepared to offer to the woman he had abandoned, and the child he had disowned.

Susan showed her cousin this letter, and told him how, after receiving it, her mind had almost given way under the burden of her great agony. Then it was that she had gone to Mrs. Burfield, and had written to her father a long letter, telling him something of her story, but not all; appealing piteously to the only friend to whom she could appeal; for faithful Frank was far away in some unknown country. She told her cousin how she had waited, at first with a faint sickly hope, then with a blank despair, for some answer from the father to whom she had appealed. But none came; and when her little stock of money had sunk to its lowest ebb, she left the dull quiet of Coltonslough to begin a weary, lonely struggle for bread, which had endured, without one ray of sunlight to illumine its blank misery, until the summer Sunday afternoon on which Francis Tredethlyn found her sitting in the nurse’s cottage with her boy in her arms.

It was so sad a story, and so sadly common, that there is little need to dwell upon the unvarnished record of a woman’s battle with poverty in the heart of a great city.

“Disgrace!” cried the Cornishman; “no, Susan, there is no shadow of disgrace upon you except the disgrace of being united to a scoundrel and a liar. The marriage before the registrar was a bonâ fide marriage, as binding as if it had been performed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.”

And then Francis told Susan of his visit to the registrar’s office. This was the balm which he was able to pour into the deepest wound that ever tortured a woman’s heart. But the identity of the husband who had lied in denouncing himself a liar was entirely unknown to Susan. In all the familiar intercourse of the brief period in which the trusting girl had been a petted and happy wife, Robert Lesley had not let fall one careless word relating in the remotest way to his position in life, his family, or his prospects. When first consulted by Francis upon the contents of the diary, Messrs. Kursdale and Scardon had instituted an inquiry as to whether a Mr. Robert Lesley had been inscribed on the books of St. Boniface any time between 1845 and 1852; and the answer had been in the negative. No person of the name had been a member of that college within the last ten years. Francis could only conclude, therefore, that Mrs. Burfield had been right in her supposition that the man calling himself Robert Lesley had shielded his identity under a false name.

“But your husband was visited by his brother, was he not, Susan?” said Mr. Tredethlyn, when this subject was discussed between the cousins.

“Yes; but I knew no more of Robert’s brother than of Robert himself. He did not come to us often. I heard that he was a lawyer,—a barrister, I think,—and that he lived in the Temple. I heard even that by accident, and Robert seemed almost vexed that I should know so much.”

All these trifling circumstances seemed to point inevitably to one conclusion; Robert Lesley had intended from the first to abandon his wife, whenever his own interests rendered it advisable that he should throw off the tie that bound him to her. Love and selfishness go very badly hand-in-hand together; and love had soon left selfishness sole master of the field.

“But this man shall be made to acknowledge his wife,—to give a name to his child,” cried Francis, “if he can be found.”

If he could be found: that was the grand question. But Mr. Tredethlyn was quite at a loss with regard to the means by which his cousin’s husband was to be found. In this case even the grand medium by which the lost are restored to the arms of their friends—the second column of the “Times”—could be of no avail; for what is the use of advertising for a man who does not want to reveal himself?

“If my husband is alive, Providence may throw him across my path some day,” Susan said, resignedly. “He could not be more dead to me than he is now if he were buried in the deepest grave that ever held the ashes of the lost; but if he gave my boy the name that is his right, I think I could forgive him all the wrong he has done me.”

It was quite in vain that Francis Tredethlyn sought to carry his cousin and her son home to his own house. The sorrowful young mother shrank with absolute terror from the idea of encountering strangers, of finding herself in a splendid house amongst happy people.

“I am used to my poverty, Francis,” she said;—“let me be poor still. Nobody is inquisitive about me, because I am beneath people’s curiosity. No one questions me about the husband who has deserted me, or extorts my story from me only to doubt it when it is told. My father would not believe me; can I expect strangers to be more trusting than he was? No, Francis; leave me alone in my obscurity. I have a lodging near here, and I can see my darling every day. I will freely accept from you a little income which will enable me to live as I have lived, without working as hard as I have worked; but I will accept no more. I am delighted to think that my father left his fortune to you, Frank; and I thank and bless you for having taken so much trouble to find me out.”

Francis Tredethlyn found it hard work to win Susan away from this determination, so quietly expressed. But he did at last persuade her to agree to his own plans for her life, on condition that he should tell Maude nothing, nor ask Susan to meet her until the missing husband was found, and compelled to acknowledge his wife and son. Francis consented to promise this; but he cherished a hope that Susan would relent by-and-by, when she heard more of Maude’s tender and amiable nature, and that he would be able to win his wife’s friendship for the simple country girl who had played with him amongst the daisies in Landresdale churchyard.

“You must accept the home I shall prepare for you, Susy,” said Francis, “or I will have a deed of gift drawn up to-morrow, transferring half my fortune to you. I am ready to divide your father’s wealth with you as soon as ever I understand your legal position. In the meantime let me have the sweetest pleasure my money has ever given me yet—the pleasure of making a happy home for you and my little kinsman. If you knew how I have wasted that hoarded money, Susy, on racecourses, and all kinds of worthless places,” added Mr. Tredethlyn, with a remorseful recollection of one particular brand of Moselle, for which he had been wont to pay fourteen shillings a bottle in the purlieus of the Haymarket.

Susan consented to let her cousin do what he liked with regard to the place in which she was to live henceforward. What mother could refuse a bright home for the child she loves? A few words from Francis conjured up the vision of a garden, where the boy could play under the shadow of lilacs and laburnums; where the summer breeze would waft the petals of overblown roses around that golden head. From the happy moment in which he urged the child’s welfare as an argument against the mother, Francis Tredethlyn’s triumph was secured. Susan pondered. She thought of the sweet country air, the bright rooms, with the fresh breath of morning blowing in at the open windows, the garden, the cow, the chickens, and all the joys of that sweet rustic paradise which town-bred children hear of from their mother’s lips, and see only in their dreams. Susan hesitated. Francis had made friends with the boy by this time, and had enlisted the child on his side of the argument. When the woman’s sorrowful pride began to hold out weakly, when the mother’s heart showed symptoms of relenting, the child’s little chubby arms crept round her neck, and the child’s tiny voice pleaded in her ear:

“Peese, mammy, do live in the pooty house, and let Wobert have pooty flowers.”

It was the triumph of infantine oratory. Susan turned to her kinsman, half laughing, half crying, and gave him her hand.

“You must do as you like, cousin Frank,” she said. “Whatever is best for Robert must be best for me.”

Thus it was that Francis Tredethlyn had withdrawn himself in a great measure from the society of Mr. Lowther, while he scoured the prettiest suburbs in search of a home for his cousin, and superintended the necessary improvements and decoration, the selection of the simple furniture, the arrangement of a garden, in which Robert Lesley’s son might play happily, his life undarkened by the baseness of an unknown father. There had been unspeakable pleasure for the Cornishman in the doing of this work. It was so long since he had been of use to any one; it was so long since his supremest benevolence to his fellow-men had taken any higher form than the payment of a dinner-bill, and a handsome bonus to the waiter. He seemed to breathe a new atmosphere, a fresher, purer air, when he shook himself clear of Harcourt Lowther’s society, and spent a summer’s day pottering amongst carpenters and house-painters in the Petersham cottage. The odour of turpentine and lead did not give him a headache; it was almost invigorating after the stifling fumes of musk and mock-turtle, patchouli, and devilled whitebait that had pervaded the hotel dining-rooms in which he had so often acted as host. Energetic though Mr. Tredethlyn was in the carrying out of his arrangements, Susan had been established little more than a week at the cottage, and the paint on the Venetian shutters was still rather sticky, when Harcourt Lowther found the upholsterer’s bill, which gave him the clue to his pupil’s mysterious conduct. To hasten down to Petersham, find the cottage, refresh himself with dry sherry and soda-water at the nearest tavern, and to make himself agreeably familiar with the landlord of the tavern, was all incomparably easy to Mr. Lowther. From the landlord he heard all about Brook Cottage. How it had been to let for nearly a twelvemonth; how it had been taken all in a hurry at the end of May by a dashing-looking gentleman from town, who had been reported scouring the neighbourhood in hansom cabs, inquiring for houses to let, for three days at a stretch; how painters and glaziers, carpenters and gardeners, had set to work in hot haste to renew and revivify everything in-doors and out; how waggon-loads of the finest gravel from Wimbledon, and cartloads of the softest turf from Ham, had been laid down in the garden; how furniture, that was every bit of it new, had been brought down from London; how the tall, dashing, energetic gentleman in the hansom cab had been perpetually on the ground with his officious finger for ever in the pie; and how larger cans of half-and-half had been consumed by the workmen at the cost of the dashing gentleman than the landlord of the Prince’s Feathers remembers to have chalked up against any one customer since he had traded as a licensed victualler.

All this Mr. Lowther was told; and beyond this, he heard how a lady, very pretty and quite young, but a little pale and worn-looking, had arrived at last to take possession of “the prettiest little box that was ever put together, without regard to expense;” how she was attended by an elderly female in black, who had evidently seen better days, and who acted as nurse to a little boy; how two respectable young women had been hired in the neighbourhood, to act as cook and housemaid; and how, coming regularly to the Feathers in quest of the kitchen-beer, they had already reported their mistress as the sweetest and pleasantest of ladies, and first-cousin to the dashing gentleman in the hansom cab. The landlord tried to look as if he had no uncharitable thoughts about this cousinship; but Harcourt Lowther saw that Francis Tredethlyn and the lady had been subjects of grave scandal in that quiet country place. He heard that the dashing gentleman had been at Petersham almost every day for the last week; and that he and the lady passed the greater part of their time in the garden, where they might be seen at any time from the high-road,—the gentleman smoking and playing with a little boy, and the lady working, at a rustic table, under a mulberry-tree. A pot-boy, coming in from his rounds, as Harcourt lounged at the bar, confirmed the landlord’s statement when appealed to. He had passed Brook Cottage not five minutes before, and had seen the lady and gentleman talking to a gardener, who was doing something to a rose-tree.

“She’s a rare one for flowers, the lady is,” the potman said, in conclusion.

A rare one for flowers: Harcourt Lowther mused gravely upon this remark.

The fair denizens of Bohemia, to whom he had introduced Francis, were not generally devoted to floriculture in cottage-gardens, though they were greedy of gigantic bouquets, to rest on the velvet cushions of their opera-boxes, or the front seats of their carriages, when they drove to race meetings. Who was this pale, worn-looking young woman, who called Francis cousin? Was she really his cousin, that Cornish girl of whom the soldier had told his master in Van Diemen’s Land, and whose miserably-executed likeness had reminded Harcourt of another face, whose owner had played some part in the experience of his life? Was this inhabitant of the newly-furnished cottage really the Cornish cousin? Mr. Lowther could scarcely imagine that it was so; for, in that case, why should Francis have kept her existence a secret from his fidus Achates in the person of Harcourt himself?

“Secrecy is only another name for guilt,” thought Mr. Lowther. “Our friend has gone to the bad in real earnest this time, and I can make a coup. I was getting very tired of the slow game.”

Armed with this information, the schemer went back to town, to take his place in Maude’s opera-box, and to lead up to that idea of a morning at the Cedars, which seemed to originate in Mrs. Tredethlyn’s own brain. Chance, which had been against him so long, had gone with him unfailingly in this business. The lucky moment had come; he had got his lead at last, and had only to play his winning cards. Chance had been constant to the schemer even in that interview between Francis and Rosa; for it had happened that, in all Miss Grunderson’s candid outpourings, she had not dropped a word about Mrs. Tredethlyn’s stroll in the Petersham meadows; though, even if she had done so, the Cornishman might have been very slow to perceive that an accidental glimpse of himself and gentle Susy, in friendly companionship, could have been the primary cause of that stormy greeting which he had received at the hands of his wife. Francis accepted his wife’s passionate outburst as only the climax of the disgust and weariness with which he had inspired her.

“She reproaches me for the life I have been leading lately,” he said bitterly; “but she does not understand her own feelings. It is not my life, but me she hates. It is myself that inspires the loathing and contempt which she talked of, and not my late hours or my gambling and horse-racing.”

After sitting for some time plunged in a gloomy reverie, in the dreary library, where the backs of the books he never opened seemed to frown upon him in their sombre Russia leather brownness, Francis stirred as the little black marble clock on the mantel-piece chimed the quarter after twelve, and felt in his waistcoat-pocket for a note which he had found waiting for him on his table the previous night. It was a tiny twisted poulet from Harcourt Lowther:—

“Dear Frank,—A line to remind you of to-morrow night. You will be expected any time after nine.—Yours always,

“There couldn’t be a better opportunity,” he muttered, “for saying what I want to say to him.”

Harcourt Lowther had never played so bad a rubber as that with which he beguiled the evening while waiting Francis Tredethlyn’s appearance at the little bachelor-party assembled in his rooms. There was the usual blending of the hawk and pigeon tribe at Mr. Lowther’s reunion: the birds of prey distinguishable by the purple blackness of their dyed moustaches and the crow’s-feet round their faded eyes; the innocent fledglings fresh-coloured and tawny, with a profound belief in their own wisdom and a supreme contempt for everything outside the narrow circle in which they condescended to exist.

Mr. Lowther suffered his partner to knock under ignominiously to antagonistic sevens and nines, while the big cards lurked idle in his own hand, to fall at the close into the ravenous jaws of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth trumps; nor was he to be roused into decent play by the unqualified remonstrances of his victim. He was thinking of Maude. It was not the face of the queen of spades which he saw as he sat hopelessly staring at the card in a vain endeavour to concentrate his attention; it was Maude’s speaking, passionate countenance which looked at him, all aglow with angry feeling. He saw her in all her beauty as he had seen her that afternoon,—the tremulous lips, the flashing blue eyes,—for there are blue eyes which in anger have more fire than the starriest orbs that ever veiled their lightnings under the cloudy lace of an Andalusian marchesa. His love for her—which was one of the most selfish passions of a selfish nature—had grown and strengthened day by day since the hour of his return, and had kindled into an all-absorbing flame now that he seemed so near his triumph.

Was he near his triumph? That question occurred to him several times as he sat opposite his friend Captain Harrison of the Spanish Legion, playing the unluckiest rubber that the Captain had been engaged in for weeks,—“And the beggar had such first-rate cards too,” as the Captain said afterwards, politely criticising his friend’s play; “if he hadn’t kep’ his trumps so jolly dark we could have carried everything before us.”

Was he near his triumph? He had been playing for two stakes—the woman he loved and the fortune he envied. He knew Maude Tredethlyn well enough to know that so long as her husband lived, she was as far beyond his reach as the stars which shone down upon him as he walked home from Stuccoville, and of whose light he thought so little. Maude, as the daughter of an insolvent trader, was a lovely being whom he had felt no reluctance to resign; for he had looked forward with a horrible foresight to the day when the girl he loved should be again within his reach; no longer as a penniless spinster, but a wealthy widow. This had been the goal which Harcourt had seen at the end of that weary road along which he conducted the young man who trusted him. No physician ever watched a patient more intently than Mr. Lowther watched the slow undermining of the Cornishman’s glorious constitution under the influence of late hours and hard drinking. The bloodshot eyes, the unsteady hand, the failing appetite, the uncertain spirits, the feverish unrest, were all diagnostics that marked the progress of the schemer’s work. Mr. Lowther had seen so many young men drop down in the poisoned atmosphere to which he introduced Maude’s husband. He hoped that the end which had come to so many would come to this ignorant, blundering rustic, into whose lap blind Plutus had cast the wealth that should have fallen to better men. The end must come; for the stupid Crœsus tumbled so helplessly into the snare, and abandoned himself so completely to his captor’s mercy. It was only a question of patience. The end would come in due time: and then there was the woman he loved, and the richest widow in London, to reward the plotter’s patience, to crown his efforts with happiness and success. To-day’s business, Harcourt Lowther argued, as he played that unfortunate rubber, could not be otherwise than a lucky stroke, likely to hurry matters to a crisis. Francis had slipped out of his hands so often of late, had kept better hours and drunk less. But a serious quarrel with Maude would inevitably fling Mr. Tredethlyn back upon the spurious Lethe of the brandy-bottle, and would hasten the schemer’s work to its fatal close. “I think I have shut the door of his home upon him,” thought Harcourt; “it will be strange if he is not glad to drop completely into the groove in which I want to see him.”

This, in plain English, is the plan which Harcourt Lowther had made for himself; though he would scarcely have put his scheme into such very plain words, even in his own thoughts. Iago, in a play or a novel, is obliged to give utterance to his schemes with tolerable clearness; but the real Iago is reticent, even in commune with himself, and huddles his blackest thoughts into some dark corner of his mind, where they lie conveniently hidden from the eye of conscience.

Before twelve o’clock Mr. Lowther had abandoned his place at the whist-table to his brother; and after lounging behind the chair of a young man who was playing écarté, and making a random bet now and then, the host proposed supper,—a proposition which was received very warmly by the men who were losing money, and very coolly by the winners. Harcourt Lowther’s supper was almost as unceremonious an affair as that memorable entertainment in Lant Street, Borough, at which Mr. Robert Sawyer played the part of host. A young man, hired for the occasion from a neighbouring tavern, laid the cloth very rapidly, while the guests lounged against the corners of the mantel-pieces, and grouped themselves in little knots, to discuss coming events in the racing world, or to criticise current pictures and current theatricals, with an occasional spice of current scandal.

The supper was very simple. There were unlimited supplies of those delicate little oysters which seem created with a special view to bachelors’ supper-parties, and the refreshment of exhausted playgoers; and whose native beds the ignorant foreigner might not unnaturally imagine to lie somewhere at the back of the Strand. And to wash these down, Mr. Lowther had provided Chablis, white Hermitage, and Rüdesheimer. There were spatch-cocks and devilled kidneys, fried potatoes, monster lobsters, marvellous cheeses from the remotest cantons of Switzerland, and the most delicate varieties of green-stuff from a French fruiterer’s in the purlieus of Leicester Square. There was no pretence of an elaborate entertainment; but there was an open case of sparkling Moselle by the side of Mr. Lowther’s chair, into which he dipped about once in five minutes; and the young man from the tavern had been initiated into the mysteries of a claret-cup, which he compounded at a rickety little sideboard in the inner room.

So far as the guests went, the supper was a success. There was just the amount of confusion which gives a picnic flavour to a meal, and which seems an infallible stimulant of animal spirits. Mr. Lowther’s visitors enjoyed themselves immensely, and the party was becoming boisterous in its gaiety, when the door was opened, and Francis Tredethlyn walked in.

Harcourt Lowther pushed away the Moselle case, which was now only filled with tumbled straw and empty bottles, and called for a chair, which was edged into the corner at the host’s right hand.

Francis called back the man as he was hurrying from the room.

“Stop!” he cried; “you needn’t order anything more—for me. I shan’t eat supper to-night.”

Something in his tone arrested every other voice; and there was a silence as sudden and as complete as if some magician had waved his wand and changed Harcourt Lowther’s guests into stone. Something in his look attracted every eye, and held it fixed in a wondering stare upon his face. Mr. Philcote, who fancied himself an amateur Sims Reeves, was disturbed in his calculation of that vocal bullfinch to be cleared between the third and fourth notes of the “Last Rose of Summer,” and abandoned all thoughts of singing his favourite ballad.

The Cornishman’s colourless face and disordered hair and dress might have suggested the idea that he had been drinking; but there was an inscrutable something in that white face which was not compatible with drunkenness. Harcourt Lowther looked at him nervously. The marital quarrel had come off, evidently, and Francis took matters very seriously.

“Come, Mr. Troublefeast,” cried the host, “we’re not going to stand this sort of thing, you know. We’ll have no statue of the Commander stalking in upon us in the midst of our fun—without Mozart. What the deuce is the matter with you, dear boy? Roderick, pass that tankard this way, will you? You fellows down there contrive to keep everything to yourself. Let the rosy vintage circulate. There’s another half-dozen of the claret in the next room, and no end of lemons. So the moment for the selfishness of the savage to overpower the civilization of the gentleman has not arrived. Come, Frank, take down the shutters, and light up; you’ve made us all as quiet as the frozen crew described by that pertinacious old bore, the Ancient Mariner. Take a long dip into that tankard, old fellow, and come up bright again.”

Mr. Lowther struck his small white hand lightly upon his friend’s shoulder as he concluded. Francis had dropped into the place offered to him, and sat there, looking like nothing but the Commander, in his stony rigidity of face and figure. As Harcourt Lowther’s hand alighted on his shoulder, he startled every one by throwing it deliberately away from him.

“I have had enough of your friendship, thank you,” he said; “henceforward, if we are to be anything at all to each other, I had rather we should be foes—I may have better luck perhaps that way.”

“Tredethlyn! are you drunk? or mad?”

“Neither, but I have been both; for I have trusted you. You needn’t ask me what I mean,” said Francis, interrupting Harcourt Lowther’s exclamation by a rapid gesture of his uplifted hand; “I am going to tell you, and very plainly. Gentlemen, you were going to listen to a song just now; have you any objection to hearing a story instead? There will be time for your ballad afterwards, you know, Philcote. My story is not a long one.”

Harcourt Lowther had turned very pale. His light blue eyes glittered, and the slim white fingers of his right hand closed involuntarily on the knife that had been lying near them. He looked as a man might look, who marching proudly upon the road to victory, saw the earth yawn asunder beneath his feet, and knew all at once that his next step must hurl him to a dreadful death. He was very quiet; but the quivering of his thin nostrils, the quickening of his breath, and his faded colour, betrayed a degree of hesitation which set his guests wondering, and infused a dash of excitement into the wind-up of the little banquet. The highest development of Christianity cannot quite extinguish the natural savage. Cromwell’s Ironsides did murderous work with the gospel in their wallets and pious exclamations upon their lips; and it seems the attribute of human nature to delight in a row. The guests at Harcourt Lowther’s supper-table pricked up their ears with one accord, and it was with considerable difficulty that they managed to keep up a faint attempt at that kind of conversation which had engaged them, in twos and threes, before Francis Tredethlyn’s entrance. When they spoke to one another now, it was only in undertones, and their disjointed sentences revealed the fact that they were listening to the speaker at the end of the table. But when Francis spoke of telling a story, the company dropped all pretence of indifference to him; and listened with a polite appearance of perfect unconsciousness as to any unfriendly intention on the part of the late visitor.

“Sing your song, Philcote,” said Harcourt Lowther, resolutely; “we want no stories—we’ve no time for twaddle of that sort. Let’s have a good song or two, and then we’ll go into the next room for a rubber.”

“Let’s have the story first, and the ‘Last Rose’ afterwards,” he said. “Fire away, Tredethlyn; your audience have supped luxuriously, and are in good humour.”

“I dare say it’s a common story enough in your set, Boystock,” answered Francis; “but it isn’t a long one. It is the story of a man who was lifted one day from poverty to wealth, and found himself all at once alone in a world as strange to him as if he had been transported out of this planet into another inhabited by a different species.”

“Egad,” muttered Mr. Boystock, “I wish somebody would transport me!”

“Ah, it isn’t likely, old fellow, in that way,” murmured his neighbour.

“For some time the country-bred cub—he was country-bred, and what you would call a cub—got on well enough. He floundered into a few mistakes, and he floundered out of them, after his own ignorant fashion. I think there is a providence for such men, as there is for drunkards, and so long as they stagger along alone, they come to very little grief. He did a great many silly things with his money, I dare say; but I think he once did a generous thing—though, God knows, in doing it, he only followed the blind impulse of his undisciplined heart as ignorantly as if he had been some blundering Newfoundland dog that pulls the mistress he loves out of the water where he sees her drowning. His wealth prospered with him, though he had cared little enough for it when it fell into his hands. By means of it he was able to save the woman he loved from a great trouble; and in her boundless gratitude for the service which he valued so lightly, she abandoned herself to the purest impulse that ever stirred a noble breast, and offered him her hand. If he had been generous or wise, he would have refused the hand which could not give him a heart. He was only—in love. Selfishly, stupidly, he seized the proffered sacrifice; too besotted in his blind passion to perceive that it was a sacrifice.”

Mr. Lowther’s guests stared blankly at one another. They had not dropped their own talk to hear such stuff as this. Harcourt sat very still, with his hand always upon the knife. At the other end of the table lounged Roderick, the very picture of well-bred indifference. He felt that his brother had dropped in for it; but he had no idea of interrupting the action of the little drama by any fraternal championship.

“Let them fight it out their own way,” he thought; “I like to see the white man suffer.”

“The country-bred cub was still fresh to the intoxication of his fancied happiness, when a man who had been familiar with him in his poverty came from the distant part of the world where they had met and known each other, and offered to be his friend. The cub’s ignorance of life was so complete, that he did not know it was possible for a man who bore her Majesty’s commission, and called himself a gentleman, to be a liar and a villain. He trusted his old acquaintance implicitly, and accepted him as a friend—believing, still in his boorish ignorance, that there was such a thing as friendship, or, at the worst, an honourable good fellowship between honest men. His friend did not tell him that he had been the engaged lover of the woman the boor was going to marry; and when the young couple began their new life, he planted himself in their house; and his first act was to shut the husband from the home whose dingiest room was a paradise, so long as it was sanctified by the presence of an idolized wife. Will any one at this table guess the plot which the boor’s friend hatched against him in the hour when their hands first met in friendship? I think not. The gentleman—polished, well-born, highly educated—allowed the country cub to marry the woman he loved; reserving to himself the hope of marrying her, enriched by the cub’s money, when the cub was dead. This once arranged, there was only one thing more to be settled; and that was the cub’s life. Unluckily he was a brawny six-foot fellow, with the constitution of a prize-fighter. But then prize-fighters are not always long-lived; their habits are so apt to be against them. Well, gentlemen, there have been men who have undermined a victim’s strength with small doses of antimony, while they smiled in his face, and called him brother. We manage these things better nowadays. The gentleman resolved that the boor should drink himself to death.”

“Is this the plot of a French novel?” asked Roderick, superciliously, after a brief silence, in which Francis Tredethlyn had paused to take breath; “if it is, you had better tell us the title of the book, and let us read it in the original. There may be some chance of our thinking it interesting then.”

“There are shameful things done out of novels as well as in them, Mr. Lowther,” answered Francis. “What I am telling you is the truth. The gentleman took the wealthy boor under his protection, and from that hour the cub’s mind and the cub’s body began to wither under the influence of a vice which of himself he held in abhorrence, but which in the dull indifference of a man who has no hope to elevate him, no aim to strive for, he was weak enough to accept as the cure for all his troubles. What did it matter how many glasses of brandy he drank, or how often he staggered across his dreary threshold in the early morning, stupefied by foul gaslit atmospheres and bad wines? His friend took care to remind him that there was no one to be sorry for his misdeeds, or to rejoice in his repentance if he repented. He could not sink so low that his wife would be affected by his degradation; he could not rise so high that she would be proud of his elevation. His friend dinned the bitter truth into the wretch’s ear. The beautiful young wife despised him; the wealth that other men envied was useless to him, except in its power to buy the oblivion of the brandy-bottle. From the hour in which his well-born friend took him under his protection, the boor never did a generous action, or heard a noble sentiment; and he very rarely went home sober. He was drinking himself to death as fast as a strong man can, when Providence took compassion on him, and gave him a duty to fulfil. A helpless girl, his kinswoman, was thrown across his path, and all at once he found himself of use in the world. From that moment his friend’s scheme was overthrown. Good-bye to the brandy-bottle and the bad wines! The boor had a friendless woman dependent on his protection, and he had something to live for. He determined to sink the past; bid farewell to the wife whose affection he was unable to win; turn his back upon the circle he had lived in and the people who had known him; and finish his days honestly among honest men.”

“‘So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber,’” exclaimed Mr. Boystock. “It’s a very good story, I dare say; but apropos to what?” demanded the gentleman, looking at Harcourt Lowther with a malicious twinkle in his little black eyes. “I don’t see the connection with the proverbial bottes. What does it all mean?”

“It means, gentlemen, that I am the boor who has been the dupe of a villain, and will be so no longer; and the name of the villain is Harcourt Lowther.”

There was a moment’s silence, followed by a sudden smashing of glass. A pair of small sinewy white hands fastened cat-like upon Francis Tredethlyn’s throat, and he and Harcourt Lowther were grappling each other in a fierce struggle. It was very long since the gentleman had been weak enough to get in a passion. He had sat as still as a statue while the Cornishman set forth his indictment, waiting to see how completely he had failed; and now that he knew that his plot, so deliberately laid, so patiently carried out, was only a bungling business after all—for the man must have bungled who fails so utterly—Mr. Lowther lost his head all in a moment, and abandoned himself to a sudden access of rage, that reduced him to the level of a wounded tiger.

It was scarcely with Francis that he was angry. What did it matter how this man spoke of him or thought of him? What did it matter that these other men should hear him accused of a baseness, which was only an intellectual improvement upon the vulgar process by which the gentlemanly birds of prey plucked the tender plumage of their victims? All this was nothing. It was against himself—against his own failure—that Harcourt Lowther’s fury was raging; only like all fury of that kind, it was ravenous for vengeance of some sort. It was only for about twenty seconds that his claws were fastened on Francis Tredethlyn’s throat. A Cornish heavy-weight is not exactly the kind of person for a delicately-built Sybarite to wrestle with very successfully.

“We are rather celebrated for this sort of thing in my county,” Mr. Tredethlyn muttered between his set teeth, as he loosened Harcourt Lowther’s grasp from his throat, and hurled him in a kind of bundle to a corner of the room, where he fell crashing down amongst the ruins of a dumb-waiter, half buried under a chaos of broken bottles and lobster-shells.

Roderick Lowther would have sprung upon his brother’s foe in the next minute, but the other men hustled round him and hemmed him in.

“Don’t you see the fellow’s a Hercules?” cried one of them; “let him alone, Lowther.”

“Let me go!” roared the diplomatist; “I know my brother’s a false-hearted rascal, but I won’t stand by and see a Lowther played at ball with by any boor in Christendom. Let me get at him, Boystock, or I shall hurt you.” But Francis had walked quietly to the door, and turning with his hand upon the lock, waited for a moment’s pause in the confusion before he spoke.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “you are witnesses that your friend attacked me. I have no quarrel with Mr. Roderick Lowther; and as I am the bigger man of the two, there would be no credit for either him or me in a scuffle between us. If Harcourt Lowther wants to see me, he will be able to find me any time this week at the Grand Hotel, Covent Garden; after this week I shall sail for South America by the first packet that leaves Liverpool.”

He paused a second time. There was no answer. The diplomatist had thought better of his thirst for fraternal retribution.

“Why should I get myself into a mess about the beggar?” he thought; “he wouldn’t see me out of a scrape, I dare say.”

So Francis departed unquestioned: not to return to the Stuccoville mansion, but to walk up Southampton Street, and across Covent Garden, to seek a shelter in the old lodgings where he had lived so pleasantly in his bachelor days.

Maude shut herself in her own rooms after her interview with Francis, and refused to see any one except Julia. She wanted some one to cling to in her sudden distress, and was fain to throw herself upon the Irish girl’s bosom for consolation.

Then Julia Desmond had her revenge. It was very sweet to see the woman who had usurped the cup of prosperity once held to her own lips brought down so low; more wretched in the midst of her wealth and grandeur than Julia had been in her lonely attic at Bayswater, with a July sun glaring in upon her through a curtainless window, and the drowsy voices of her pupils droning in her ears. The pleasure that thrilled through her breast as she held Maude Tredethlyn in her arms, and heard her declare, amidst passionate sobs, that Francis had been false and base and wicked, and that she was the most miserable woman in the world, was a sensation more exquisite than Miss Desmond had ever known before. For the honour of humanity, that wicked pleasure did not last very long. The daughter of Patrick Macnamara Ryan O’Brien Desmond was not altogether base. Maude was at her feet, and she was avenged. It was her rival’s insolent happiness—happiness always does seem insolent to the unhappy—that had galled her to the quick. The two women were on a level now, and Julia forgave her old companion.

“I told you he was a villain,” she said; and that was the only unkind speech she uttered. After that, she was comforter, confidante, friend, and she was almost sorry to see the endurance of Maude’s grief. “You have your fine house and your carriages still,” she said, as the young wife sat on the ground at her feet in the abandonment of her sorrow; “you could never have married Francis Tredethlyn for any other reason than the wealth he could give you. What does it matter to you whether he is true or false? You never loved him.”

“No,” answered Maude, naïvely, “I suppose not. But it is so shameful of him to care for anybody else. And from what Harcourt Lowther says, he does care for that horrible person; and to leave me, Julia, day after day, and to be—there—all the time—in a garden—smoking—looking as much at home as if he had lived there all his life—I never can forgive him, Julia!”

“Of course not,” Miss Desmond replied promptly; “but I don’t see that you need make yourself so very unhappy about his conduct. You will have a formal separation, I suppose. Your papa, or your papa’s solicitors, will manage that, no doubt; and you will live quietly in a smaller house than this. You will not be able to go so much into society, you know; for it is so difficult for a woman who is separated from her husband to escape scandal, however careful she may be,” Julia added, with considerable satisfaction. It is so nice to sit in the dust and mingle our sympathetic tears with those of the fallen powers who have lately queened it over us.

Maude’s sobs redoubled.

“Society!” she exclaimed. “I hate society! Yes, it’s no use talking, Julia. I know what you’re going to say about my going out to three parties a night, and so on; but I don’t like it—nobody likes it. They get into the whirlpool, and there they are. If you go to Mrs. A.’s Thursday, you must go to Lady B.’s Friday, or you offend her; and if you go once, you must go on going, or it seems as if you didn’t like the people you met; and then, if you don’t ask people, you are accused of dropping them; and if you ask strange people, you are accused of picking them up; and if you always ask the same people, your parties are called slow; and if you ask different people, you are called capricious. I am so tired of the world, Julia,” sighed Mrs. Tredethlyn. “When I drive any distance to dinner on an autumn evening, I always envy the people who live in little villas, and drink tea at seven o’clock in pretty parlours that I can see in the firelight. They seem so happy. I never hear a muffin-bell—don’t laugh, Julia; but there is something peculiar in a muffin-bell—without thinking how hollow my life is, compared to the lives of the people who eat the muffins. And then I fancy that I should have been so much happier in a pretty little cottage in St. John’s Wood, with a tiny, tiny back-garden sloping down to the canal, and a still tinier garden in front for Floss to bark in. I used to think sometimes,” continued Maude dropping her voice and speaking with some slight embarrassment, “that Francis and I would get to understand each other better by-and-by, and that we should lead quite a Darby-and-Joan sort of life, doing a great deal of good, and going out much less. But, of course, that hope is quite gone now. I can never endure his society again. I could never trust him. And oh, Julia, I did trust him so implicitly! I had such a belief in his goodness that I despised myself for not being better worthy of him. And to think that he should deceive me so cruelly; that he should have been deceiving me all along, leading a wicked life amongst wicked people for his own pleasure; when I fancied that he was driven from his home by my indifference, and reproached myself so bitterly for being wanting in my duty to him.”

In this strain poor Maude discoursed at intervals for some hours. Julia was very patient, sympathetic even, in a hard kind of way; but she bore with all her weight upon the evidence of Francis Tredethlyn’s perfidy, and she drained the cup of her triumph to the very dregs.

It was not till the next morning that the letter which Francis had left in the library was delivered to his wife. She was sitting in her boudoir, with an untasted breakfast before her, and the sympathetic Julia on the other side of the table, when her maid brought the missive, which a housemaid had discovered at daybreak on her master’s table, two or three hours before Mr. Tredethlyn’s valet found the little bedroom behind the library untenanted, and perceived that his master had not slept at home.

The Cornishman’s letter was very simply worded. Maude opened it hastily in the hope that it might contain some justification of her husband’s conduct. But he did not even allude to his delinquencies, and confined himself to bidding an earnest and friendly farewell to the wife who had never loved him. Tears of disappointment, humiliation, regret, poured slowly down Maude’s cheeks as she read the letter. It was the first time Francis had written to her since her marriage; and there was something almost strange to her in the sight of his bold commercial hand, whose accustomed regularity had been a little disturbed by the writer’s agitation.

“My very dear Wife,—I write to you for the first time since it has been my privilege to address you by that sacred name. If I could tell you the pride and happiness I once felt in that privilege, when first you laid your hand in mine, when first I heard you called by my name, I should be a very different person from what I am; and then it is possible this letter need never have been written. I write to bid you good-bye, Maude; and I think the best proof I can give you of my love is the proof I give you now, when I bring my mind to the necessity of our separation, and resign myself to the knowledge that I may never see your face again upon this earth.

“I will not tell you how soon I discovered your indifference—how soon another person demonstrated to me that your feeling towards me was even something worse than indifference; that it was dislike and contempt which I inspired in your mind. My dense ignorance of the world, and your amiable nature, would have prevented my making this discovery of my own accord. But there are always plenty of those ‘good-natured friends’ the man in the play talks about. I found such a friend. If you have any curiosity upon the subject, Rosa Grunderson, who is a good honest-hearted little girl, will tell you the name of the man who opened my eyes to the full misery of my position. In writing this, Maude, I have no thought of reproach against you. To me you have been and always will be something so bright and lovely as to be amenable to none of the common laws which govern common natures. When you offered to be my wife, you yielded to a generous impulse; and it is I who deserve reproach for having been so base in my blind selfishness as to accept the sacrifice you were willing to offer in repayment of a fancied obligation. I cannot undo the past; but I can at least set you in some manner free from the fetters you forged for yourself under the influence of that brief enthusiasm. So long as I live, one of the miseries of my life will be the knowledge that I shut you out of a brighter fate; that I deprive you of a more worthy companion; that the greatest sacrifice I can make in atonement of the past will only make you the lonely widow of a living husband. But I can at least rid you of the society of a man whose presence inspires you with disgust and loathing. O Maude, I am quoting your own words; spoken so deliberately, so coldly, that I should be indeed mad and cowardly, were I to shrink from accepting them in their fullest import. I might have doubted until to-night; I might have hugged myself with the notion that a liar and a scoundrel, for his own base purposes, had taught me to think myself despised and disliked; but your own lips have spoken, and I can doubt no longer. Oh, my darling, my pet, my beloved, this seems so like a reproach; but it is not, it is not.

“I am going to South America. When you read this, my preparations will no doubt have begun. If possible, I shall sail immediately. Of all the men who ever left England for that fiery young world out yonder, there was never, perhaps, any one better adapted to be happy and successful there than I am. I bid good-bye for ever to the idle dissipations, the drunken orgies in which I have sometimes found distraction, but never happiness. And I begin a new life in a new field of labour. My uncle’s money has been the root of all my misery, and I shall take very little of that useless gold to the other shore. I don’t think I was ever guilty of any great folly while I was a poor man; but since I have been a rich one, my life has seemed one long mistake.

“I write so much about myself and my own plans because I do not want the memory of me, or of any sorrow which I may feel in this parting, to cloud the brightness of your future; and I understand your generous nature well enough to know that you will be happier if you can believe that I am happy. O Maude, if you could know how anxious I am that the life before you should be a bright and happy one, you might almost forgive me for the pain my selfish folly has inflicted upon you! My poor, generous-hearted girl! my innocent darling! you thought it was so light a thing to link your life to the life of a man whom you could not love; and you have borne your burden so quietly. I cannot release you from the chain that binds you to me, but I will do my best to make that chain a light one. And, for the rest, I go to a country in which life and death walk hand in hand together. I take with me all an ignorant man’s love of adventure, a soldier’s indifference to danger. Wear your chain patiently, darling,—you may not have to wear it long. But one word of warning from the man who has loved you so foolishly, and, until this night, so selfishly. You have married hastily once. Weigh well what you do if ever you marry again. If you accepted for your husband an ignorant West-country boor when you married me, I was at least an honest man. If I die, Maude, and you are free to make a second marriage, be sure that the husband of your choice has something of your own noble character; as well as some smattering of the accomplishments that please you, and the tricky jargon about art and literature which passes for cleverness. I was anxious once to make myself a gentleman for your sake, Maude; and when we have been visiting together, I have listened to the men’s talk, for I wanted to find out how it was done; and you could never guess how spurious some of that brilliant conversation sounds to a man who only listens. I used to read some of your Mudie books in my own room sometimes of a morning,—Froude, and Carlyle, Burton, Barth, and so on; and I’ve heard men laying down the law about them at night, and I have known from their talk that they hadn’t read a page of the book itself, and were only airing the second-hand opinions picked up out of a review.

“I saw you shudder once, Maude, because I didn’t know it was the right thing to say ‘Barkley Square;’ and pronounced the word as it is spelt. But oh, what bosh I’ve heard the Barkley-Squarers talk sometimes about things I do understand! I’ve heard a man at a dinner-party hold forth about our convict system sometimes, and transportation, and Van Diemen’s Land, till I’ve been inclined to get up and do something to him with a carving-knife; and oh, the self-satisfied manner of the creature, and the way he has lifted his eyebrows and looked at me, if I ventured to express any opinion upon the subject! In South America there may be fever and disease, perhaps—privation, danger; but there will be no Barkley Square. I may meet with Aztecs, who may maltreat or even assassinate me; but they won’t have little bits of glass that they can’t see through to hitch into their eyes whenever I speak to them. And they won’t lift their eyebrows and begin to whisper about me the moment I enter a room. And I shall never hear them say, ‘Oh, the rich Tredethlyn, is it? Gad, what a clodhopper!’

“Why do I write about these things, Maude, when I am writing to bid you good-bye for ever? Only because I want you to believe there is something wanting even in the perfect world in which you live. If my death should set you free in your youth, marry again, dear, by all means; but marry a man whose truth and loyalty have been proved by a life of unblemished honour; marry a man who has set his mark upon the age—who has done something; for such a man is scarcely likely to be a scoundrel. Above all, darling, accept my warning against one man: do not marry Harcourt Lowther.

“All the privileges that you have enjoyed during your bondage you shall retain in your freedom. Before sailing, I shall make my will, in which you will be left residuary legatee, and recipient of the bulk of my fortune. While I live, your income will be large enough to support the style in which you have lived during the past year; and there will be a wide margin left for the indulgence of every impulse of your generous heart. I shall place full directions as to the management of my fortune in the hands of my solicitors, Messrs. Kursdale and Scardon; and they will call on you by my direction to explain your position immediately after receiving my instructions. You will find yourself the mistress of the larger part of the income derived from my late uncle’s investments and from the Cornish estate, and you will have no further trouble than to sign your name now and then, when the lawyers want you to do so. In the interim I enclose a cheque for £500, so that you may not be without ready money. Your father’s affairs are now, he tells me, in a very easy state, and I do not leave him in troubled water. He may consider you his creditor for the interest of the thirty thousand sunk in his business; and I don’t suppose he will find you a very importunate one.

“And now good-bye indeed. I leave you with all confidence in your noble heart, your high principles. You are too good and pure to be otherwise than happy. Far away on the Pampas, lying under canvas, with the long silvery trail of the moonlight on the grey expanse beyond my tent, the whisper of faint winds among the long grasses sounding in my ears, I shall think of you, and see you happy in the old English garden at Twickenham, loitering on the terrace by your father’s side. In that trackless loneliness, fever-parched perhaps, and far away from the chance of water, I shall think of the blue English river, but never think of it without seeing your image standing by the tide, your bright face reflected in the glassy stream. Oh, Maude, I have loved you so dearly, so fondly! and now that it comes to saying good-bye, it seems almost as difficult to tear myself from this lifeless sheet of paper, as it would be to take my lips away from yours in a last long kiss. My pet, my darling, God bless you, and good-bye! Think of me sometimes; but never with pain. Some midnight, when you are waltzing in a crowded ball-room, with a brazen band braying in your ears, and the hum of a hundred voices round about you, think that in some savage wilderness a man is kneeling under God’s blue sky, praying for you as few people are prayed for on this earth; think sometimes, if a special peace comes down upon you, like the cool shadow we have watched drop slowly upon the river when the sun was down, think, darling, that I am saying, ‘God keep and guard her safely through the night! God fill her heart with peace and gladness, whether she sleeps or wakes!’

“And so, my own dear wife, for the first and last time in my life, I sign myself your true and loyal husband,

Julia had fluttered out of the room and into the little conservatory, where there were always faded leaves to be snipped off, or bird-cages to be replenished with fresh water. Miss Desmond, in her darkest mood, was too much a lady to sit by and stare while Maude possessed herself of the contents of her husband’s letter. She lingered among the twittering canary-birds and sprawling ferns so long as she considered that delicacy demanded she should be absent, and then she strolled back to the breakfast-table with a look of supreme unconsciousness. But she gave a little scream as she glanced across the table at Mrs. Tredethlyn, and flew to the bell. Maude had finished her letter, which lay in scattered sheets at her feet, and she had fallen back upon the sofa-pillows in a dead faint.