It is strange what virtues we are apt to discover in the thing we have lost. After recovering from her fainting-fit, Maude Tredethlyn wept as bitterly for the loss of her husband as if he had been the first choice of her maiden heart. A young lady told Mr. de Quincey that, being on the point of drowning, she saw in one instant her whole life exhibited before her in its minutest details, like a vast picture;—and so the young wife, reading her husband’s solemn farewell, beheld in a moment the picture of her courtship and married life, and saw how good he had been to her. Yes, in that one moment a thousand instances—such trifling instances, some of them—of his goodness and devotion, his enduring love, his patient self-abnegation, flashed upon her, and her heart smote her with a bitter anguish as she perceived her own unworthiness.
“I had no right to take his love as I take the love of my dogs,” she thought; “giving him nothing in return for his devotion.” At first, as she read her husband’s epistle, she smiled at his talk of leaving her, and thought how easy a thing it would be to lay her hand upon his shoulder and draw him down to his old place at her feet. She forgot all about the cottage at Petersham when she thought this. And then, as she read farther and farther, she recognized the solemn meaning of the letter, and felt that it was indeed a farewell. Then a sudden mist came between her and the page; all the machinery in London seemed buzzing and booming in her ears; and she fell back amongst the downy cushion, whiter than the pure ground of the rosebud chintz which Harcourt Lowther had selected for the upholstery of her nest.
She recovered very quickly under the influence of half a bottle of toilet-vinegar; and then there were more confidences to be poured into Julia’s ear, when the maid, who was so sympathetic, and so ravenously eager to know why her mistress had fainted, was fairly out of the room.
Maude read Julia little bits of the letter, leaving off every now and then to demand pathetically what she was to do.
“He surely c-c-couldn’t write like that, Julia, if he were what Harcourt Lowther says he is,” sobbed Mrs. Tredethlyn. “He says I spoke to him coldly and deliberately. Oh, if he could only know what a passion I was in! There must be some horrible mistake; and if there is, what a wretch I must have seemed to him last night! Julia, advise me! give me some help! My husband must not go to America. There is a whole week for me to act in. What am I to do?”
“How can I advise you?” asked Julia. “I am so entirely in the dark—and you too. If Mr. Tredethlyn had given you any explanation of his presence at that strange house, domiciled so familiarly with that strange woman, you might accept it—if you could—and believe him. But he does not even attempt to explain or to justify his conduct. He passes it over in a manner which, I must confess, seems very ominous. To me, Maude, his silence is a tacit confession of his guilt.”
Poor Maude turned the leaves of her husband’s letter, and looked wistfully at the blotted pages. If she could have only found some brief explanation of that Petersham business anywhere—in a postscript—a parenthesis! But there was none; and Mrs. Tredethlyn put the epistle into her pocket, and looked at Julia with a very rueful countenance. Unluckily, she forgot that she had brought no specific charge against her husband, but had only attacked him in that vaguely denunciatory manner which is so essentially feminine.
“What a child she is!” thought Miss Desmond, as she watched her friend’s tear-blotted face and quivering lip. “If I had a pair of high-stepping ponies to drive in the Park, and a couple of grooms to sit behind me, I would demand no explanation of my husband’s absences, though he were to stay away from me for ten years at a stretch.”
But it was the very reverse of this convenient code of morality to which Julia gave utterance presently, when she spoke to Maude.
“You ask me for my advice,” she said. “If I am to give it frankly, I must own that in your place I would not touch Mr. Tredethlyn’s hand in friendship until he had accounted fully and conclusively for his presence in that garden yesterday. I would permit no reservations on the part of my husband; and I should be inclined to think that a secret kept from me was only another name for a wrong done to me.”
Maude was silent for some minutes, wiping the tears from her face, and trying to escape from the demonstrative sympathy of a Skye terrier, who had been frantic at the sight of his mistress’s distress; and then she exclaimed, with sudden energy that almost startled Miss Desmond,—
“Yes, I will take your advice, Julia; and Francis shall explain himself—as—as I’m sure he can.”
This was a challenge which Julia was too wise to take up; for she saw that the wind had set violently in Francis Tredethlyn’s favour since Maude’s perusal of his letter.
“I will insist upon an explanation from my husband; but before seeing him I will do what I should have done yesterday. I will go to that cottage at Petersham, and see the lady who was sitting in the garden with Francis yesterday afternoon. It is my right as a wife to know my husband’s friends.”
“You will see the—person,” exclaimed Julia, on the tips of her lips, as the French say.
“I will.”
“Well, perhaps, after all, it is not a bad plan,” answered Miss Desmond, after a pause. “And if you do see that person, I dare say you will hear something unpleasant,” she thought: “it is only fair there should be some counterbalance to your grooms and ponies, even beyond Pickford’s vans, and the sharp corner in Dean Street, Park Lane.”
“Julia, you will go with me?” asked Maude, putting down her Skye terrier. “No, Floss, not to-day. Oh, I wonder whether you were ever married, and had this sort of thing to go through!—You’ll go to Petersham with me, won’t you, Julia dear?”
“Of course I will,” answered Miss Desmond promptly; “it is a part of my métier. But how do you mean to go?”
“Oh, we’ll drive.”
“Your ponies?” asked Julia, spitefully.
The “steppers” were a late acquisition. Maude’s childish cry of rapture at the sight of the Countess of Zarborough’s equipage had sent Francis off to Tattersall’s to bid for a pair of black ponies that Harcourt Lowther and his set had pronounced “clippers.” You see an ignorant man’s love is such a vulgar passion that it will express itself in this sordid way.
“Oh, Julia,” cried Maude, “how could you? As if I would drive those frivolous ponies with a frivolous parasol fastened to my whip, and those two listening grooms behind me, when my heart is almost broken by Frank’s conduct.”
“Then you will go in the barouche?”
“Yes, and I can leave the carriage some distance from the house,” Maude answered, with her hand upon the bell; “and we’ll go at once, Julia dear,—if you’re sure you’ve finished breakfast,” added Mrs. Tredethlyn, looking piteously at the cup of stagnant chocolate and unbroken roll, which bore witness to her own incapacity to eat or drink.
Of course Julia declared that she had breakfasted—as completely as a companion had any right to breakfast, she inferred by her manner; so the two ladies adjourned to their apartments. Mrs. Tredethlyn found her maid in her dressing-room, oppressed by such tender anxieties with regard to the adjustment of Maude’s bonnet and shawl, that she was not to be shaken off till her mistress stepped into the barouche, and even then contrived to be the medium of communication with the coachman, to the setting aside of a stolid Jeames, who was so utterly weary of life in general as not even to be often interested in other people’s business.
The confidante in white muslin is apt to have a hard time of it when Tilburina’s affairs go badly; but Julia endured her burden with sublime patience. Maude, bewailing the inconstancy of her husband one moment, and lauding his devotion in the next, might now and then degenerate into an inconsistent bore; but, at the worst, she was more endurable than Maude insolently happy,—a radiant floating creature, all lace flounces and gauzy sleeves, like one of Mr. Buckner’s portraits. Julia enacted her part of confidante very creditably during the drive from Stuccoville to Petersham, and submitted graciously to be left in the carriage, in a shady curve of the winding road, with the Skye terriers and the last new novel to keep her company, while Mrs. Tredethlyn went alone to face her rival.
Perhaps Maude’s heart sank just a little with something akin to fear, as she tripped along the dusty road in dainty high-heeled boots and flounced petticoats, whose embroideries flickered to and fro in shadowy arabesques upon the sunlit ground. She was not at all strong-minded. Imagine Waller’s Sacharissa stepping out of her coach in Eastchepe, with a negro page behind her, and one of the Duchess of Portsmouth’s favourite spaniels nestling in the perfumed lining of her muff, bent upon a visit to a money-lender; or Pope’s Belinda alighting from her sedan to attend a meeting of creditors. Imagine anything that is incongruous, or absurd, or impossible, and it will be scarcely more out of keeping than this picture of Maude Tredethlyn going alone to meet her rival, under the shelter of a point-lace parasol. And yet this injured young wife was as sincerely miserable as if she had worn sackcloth and ashes, or the sombre draperies which Miss Bateman has made so familiar to us in her impersonation of the jilted Leah.
Mrs. Tredethlyn went straight to the cottage with the old-fashioned iron gate and the ivy-bordered wall. A womanly instinct guided her, as by a kind of inspiration, to the spot where she had seen her husband so much at home with a nameless and unknown creature. An air of prim respectability pervaded the place, which Maude inspected as she waited for admission, and peered inquisitively through the iron scroll-work. There were none of the rose-coloured curtains and china flower-stands, the yelping lap-dogs and twittering birds, which Mrs. Tredethlyn had been taught to associate with those inhabitants of an outer world, in whom she perceived only overdone imitations of herself. Everything here had a prim countrified prettiness of its own; and looking across the smooth lawn, Maude saw a slender girlish figure in a cotton dress bending over a flower-bed, while a little boy stood by with a tiny watering-pot, whose contents he dribbled industriously over his own toes.
Maude’s summons was responded to by an elderly woman in black. She was very grim and stern, as people who dote upon small children usually are; and she was no other than the eminently respectable person at Chelsea, who wore rusty bombazine in mourning for the better days which lay far back in some remote period beyond the memory of her oldest acquaintance. This person carried Maude’s card to the lady in the cotton dress, and then swooped down upon the little boy with the watering-pot, and carried him away struggling.
Maude, still without the citadel, watched the girlish face as it bent over her card. She expected astonishment, confusion, defiance,—anything except what she saw, which was a half-pleased smile, a look of hesitation, and then a little glance towards the gate, and a cry of remonstrance to the elderly person now invisible.
“Oh, Mrs. Clinnock, how could you leave that lady outside? The key! ah, I see it’s in the gate.” Maude’s fancied rival had crossed the little lawn by this time, and Rosamond was only separated from Eleanor by the iron scroll-work. “Dear Mrs. Tredethlyn, how very rude you must think my nurse! But so many people have called, out of mere curiosity I am sure, and I am so afraid of strangers—Francis knows that—for he knows how often he has begged me to see you; and it was only yesterday that I gave way, and said he might tell you all about me. But I didn’t think you would come so soon,” said Rosamond, with sudden tears welling up to her innocent brown eyes. She had opened the gate and admitted Maude while she talked, and the two women were now standing face to face.
Mrs. Tredethlyn’s mystification was depicted upon her countenance, which at first expressed only her complete bewilderment; then a chilling expression came over her face, a scornful smile curved her lip, and she looked at her rival with her head poised as haughtily as ever Eleanor’s could have been when she offered Lord Clifford’s daughter that agreeable choice between the bowl and the dagger.
“Oh, I see,” she thought; “this person is trying to disarm my suspicions by her cool impertinence.”
“It was so kind of you to come,” murmured Rosamond, timidly. She was beginning to feel rather afraid of this haughty lady, who made no response to her warm greeting. “I did not think that I should see you so soon.”
“No, I dare say not,” answered Mrs. Tredethlyn; “I should scarcely imagine that you expected to see me at all.”
Rosamond, otherwise Susan, clasped her hands and flushed crimson to the roots of her hair.
“Ah, then, you too are unkind, like my father,” she cried piteously. “You do not believe what Francis told you.”
Maude was almost too indignant to remark that piteous accent. It was not a gentle creature in distress that she saw. Jealousy looks through a medium that distorts the simplest objects into evil and threatening shapes. Mrs. Tredethlyn imagined that she beheld a shameless adventuress, who sought to disarm her justifiable suspicions by social histrionics.
“By what right do you call my husband by his Christian name?” she asked, indignantly.
“By what right!” stammered Susan, alarmed by the angry tones in which the question had been asked. “What else should I call him? I have called him Francis all my life, except when we were children, and then I called him Frank. Oh, he has been so good to me, Mrs. Tredethlyn! and he knows that the marriage was a real one. Oh, pray, pray don’t look so coldly at me! don’t doubt my word and his. I am as true and pure a wife as you are, though I have no husband’s arm to lean upon, though even the name my husband gave me may be a false one.”
Maude stared at the earnest face in new bewilderment. Not even jealousy could distort the expression of that face into anything but innocence.
“What does it all mean?” she cried at last; “who and what are you?”
“Susan Turner, Oliver Tredethlyn’s daughter and Francis Tredethlyn’s cousin,” answered Susan, considerably puzzled in her turn; “who else could you suppose me to be, Mrs. Tredethlyn? Surely Francis told you all about me, or you could never have known where to find me.”
“No, he told me nothing,” exclaimed Maude; and then she pounced suddenly upon poor astonished Susy, and kissed her as she had never in all her life kissed any one before.
“Oh, you dear!” she cried; “oh, you darling! To think that you should be only his cousin after all, when I thought that—when I was wicked enough to think—”
Mrs. Tredethlyn did not say what she had thought, but bestowed another shower of kisses upon Susan.
“You pet!” she exclaimed; “and to think that I should never guess you were his cousin; and that he should never tell me, the silly fellow! And he let me go on at him too last night as if he had committed all sorts of crimes, and did not even deny them. And you are like him too. Yes, I’m sure you are; there’s an expression about the eyes. Yes, there really is. Oh, how dearly I shall love you! I remember Francis speaking of you once; but he was very reserved upon the subject, and I did not like to question him. And so you really are his uncle Oliver’s daughter! then we are cousins, you know, dear; almost sisters—and I never had a sister—or even a friend who was quite like a sister,” added Maude, with a remorseful recollection of Miss Desmond waiting in the carriage.
She could have run on for an hour at a stretch, in her delight at the discovery that her husband was not a villain. The two women walked up and down the lawn together, while Susan related all her sad little history, and received Maude’s tender assurances of sympathy and love.
Mrs. Tredethlyn was told how good her husband had been to his friendless cousin; and was pleased to dwell fondly on the story of Frank’s kindness, his selection of that pretty house, his purchase of the furniture, and, above all, his goodness to the little boy.
Maude wanted Susan to go straight home with her in the carriage; but the Cornish girl clung to her sheltered home, and the iron gate that screened her from intrusive strangers.
“I am not used to the people amongst whom you live,” she said; “it is very kind of you to wish to take me—but I could never be happy amongst strangers; and Robert and I are so happy here.”
“And I came to break in upon your happiness like a horrible jealous fury,” cried Maude; “but you see good has come out of evil; for now we have met, we shall love each other dearly always, shan’t we, Susan? Call me Maude, please. And oh, my dear Susan, I have all sorts of troubles still to go through; for Frank was so offended by what I said last night, that he has written me a dreadful letter, in which he says he means to sail for America directly. But of course he won’t. He never could leave me like that, could he, dear? And when I leave you, I shall drive straight home; and if he hasn’t been home, I shall go on to his solicitors, Messrs. Something and Something, Gray’s Inn,—I shall know their names when I see them in the Directory,—and of course they’ll know his address wherever he is; and I shall go to him, and ask him to forgive me for having behaved so badly, and to-morrow he and I will come together, Susan. And now kiss me once more, dear, and au revoir; for I have a friend waiting for me in the carriage a little way off; and if her book doesn’t happen to be interesting, I’m afraid she’ll be cross, for I am sure I must have been an unconscionable time.”
There was a little embrace, and then Susan opened the gate and Maude tripped away. The vulgar gravel seemed like empyreal air under her high-heeled boots this time; so changed were her feelings since she had discovered how deeply she had wronged her husband by the shapeless jealousies that Harcourt Lowther had inspired in her breast.
Julia looked with astonishment at her friend’s altered countenance as Maude apologized for the length of her absence, while the blasé footman let down the steps; she was still more astonished when the carriage drove townwards, and Maude gushed into French, to the discomfiture of the footman, who had a habit of looking behind him for imaginary vehicles when his mistress’s conversation happened to interest him.
In French, Maude informed Julia that the mythic rival had melted into a “little cousin,” who was “all that there is of the most charming,” “an all young girl,” “a candid angel,” whom Mrs. Tredethlyn was ready to take to her heart forthwith. Julia found it a great deal harder to sympathize with Maude’s happiness than with her misery.
But the happiness did not last very long; for on inquiry at Stuccoville, Maude found that her husband had not been home; and on penetrating Holborn-wards to Gray’s Inn, to the disgust of the languid footman, she met with a second disappointment in the offices of Messrs. Kursdale and Scardon, who had heard nothing of the absent Mr. Tredethlyn. After this Maude drove homewards with a very sad countenance, and was glad to shrink from even Julia’s sympathy, and to hide herself in her own rooms, where she paced disconsolately to and fro, listening for the crunching wheels, and banging door of a hansom cab, and stopping every now and then to look hopelessly out into the monotonous street.
All through the dreary day, and far into the still more dreary night, Maude Tredethlyn waited and listened for her husband’s coming. She could not believe that he would hold to the purpose so earnestly expressed in his letter. His resolution had no doubt been fixed as the Monument itself while he wrote, for he had written immediately after his wife’s unjustifiable denunciation of him; but surely long before the time came for action Francis Tredethlyn’s purpose would waver, and the faithful slave would come back to his place at the feet of his mistress. In any case he would surely seek some explanation of Maude’s anger.
“He never could be so cruel as to leave me because of a few foolish words,” thought Mrs. Tredethlyn; “he could not be so unjust as not to give me the opportunity of explaining myself.”
But on reading Francis Tredethlyn’s letter for the third or fourth time, Maude discovered how complete the estrangement was that had divided her from her husband. The indignant reproaches inspired by unreasoning jealousy had been received by Francis as the deliberate utterance of a contemptuous dislike that had reached a point at which it could no longer be hidden under the mask of fashionable indifference. Mrs. Tredethlyn perceived, as she read that mournful letter, that, in her conduct of the previous night, her husband had only seen the miserable climax of his married life. He beheld, as he fancied, his wife’s silent scorn transformed all at once into passionate reproach; and the proud spirit which breathes in all simple natures had asserted itself in the farewell letter which Maude read through a mist of tears.
“He thinks I married him for his money, and that I have disliked and despised him,” she thought sadly. “Ah, if he could know how often I have reproached myself for being unworthy of his devotion,—if he could know how my heart has sunk day by day as I have seen the breach grow wider between us! I fancied that I had lost his love, and yet this letter is full of the old devotion.”
Maude awoke from the brief morning slumber that generally succeeds a sleepless night to a second day of suspense. She did not talk to Julia of her troubles now. They were growing too serious for feminine discussion or friendly sympathy. Mrs. Tredethlyn shut herself in her own rooms, and would see no one. She pleaded a headache, and the plea was no empty excuse; for when her all-absorbing anxieties permitted her to remember the existence of her head, she knew that it ached with a dull heavy pain which all the eau-de-Cologne in her dressing-case could not assuage. She roamed hopelessly to and fro between her bedroom and dressing-room, and failed most utterly in her attempt to hide her distress from the omniscient eye of her maid.
The second day passed, and there was no Francis. In the evening Maude despatched a messenger to Mr. Kursdale with a note of inquiry about Francis: had his solicitors heard or seen anything of him; and so on. The messenger was to wait an answer. But as old-established solicitors do not usually reside in Gray’s Inn, the messenger found only darkness and stout oaken doors when he obeyed his mistress’s behest. Maude wrote another letter that evening, addressed to Harcourt Lowther, and containing only these few lines, hurriedly written and with all the important words underlined:
“Dear Mr. Lowther,—Have you seen my husband since the day before yesterday? He left home on Tuesday night, and I have not seen him since. I am terribly anxious about him. I have been to Petersham, and have seen the lady. We were quite wrong about her, and I am ashamed of myself for having been so foolish. She is a near relation of Frank’s; and his conduct to her has been most noble. Pray find him immediately, if possible, and show him this letter.
“Thursday night.”
A pleasant letter this for Harcourt Lowther to receive the next day, as he lay helpless on the lodging-house sofa, with his head and face sadly dilapidated by the effects of his fall under a shower of broken wine-glasses and cruets.
He groaned aloud as he read Maude’s missive.
“Is there any possibility of comprehending a woman’s tactics?” he muttered. “She writes as if this boor were an idolized husband. Is it all hypocrisy—or what? So the bubble of jealousy has burst, and the young person at the Petersham cottage is a cousin, after all; and Francis has kicked up his heels; and I lie here as miserably bruised and battered as if I had just been beaten in a fight for the championship, at the very time when I most want to be up and astir.”
Yes, Mr. Lowther was a prisoner. He had been seriously shaken by the scuffle with Francis, and had been in the doctor’s hands since the unpleasant termination of his supper-party. But this was not the worst. It was the disfigurement of his handsome face which Harcourt took most deeply to heart. A black eye or a scarred forehead will keep a man as close a captive as a warrant of committal to the Tower. At the very moment when the sudden entanglement of his web threatened to render all past efforts useless, when the schemer had most need of his dexterity, Harcourt Lowther found himself an unpresentable object, and knew that he must spend dreary weeks of seclusion before he dared emerge into the world once more, and take up the disordered threads which he still hoped to weave into a harmonious network. Imagine Paris, with all his plans laid for the abduction of Helen, brought suddenly to a standstill by a score of vulgar cuts and bruises, the sight of any one of which might have restored the lady to a sense of her duty. Harcourt Lowther, with his face bandaged, felt himself a contemptible creature, a modern Samson without the glorious remnant of a Samson’s strength. For the first time in his life the fine gentleman discovered how much he depended on his handsome face, and what a lost wretch he would be without it.
He felt a savage rage against Roderick, who strolled in and out of the room half the morning, dressing and breakfasting by instalments, smoking, and writing letters, and crackling the daily papers, as it seemed to Harcourt, more persistently than newspapers were ever crackled before. He was free to sally forth after his careful toilet, while his junior lay on that rickety sofa as furious in his wretched helplessness as some wounded hyena. Roderick had volunteered to call upon Francis at the Covent Garden hotel, to demand a reckoning for the scuffle at the supper-party; but Harcourt declined the friendly offer.
“As soon as I can leave the house, I will go to him myself,” he said. “The fellow’s talk about going abroad is all bombast, I dare say. He will be sneaking back to his wife’s apron-string now that I am laid by the heels.”
When Harcourt had read Maude’s letter, he tossed it over to his brother.
“Do you know how to reckon that up?” he asked. “What does it mean?”
Mr. Lowther the elder had by no means a high estimate of the female character. In his idea of the sex, the woman who was not a profound simpleton was only something very much worse than a simpleton.
“The fellow has not gone back to his wife; so that’s one point in your favour, at any rate,” said Roderick, after reading Maude’s epistle. “I dare say he’ll go altogether to the bad now, at a railroad pace, and finish himself off before the year is out. The lady’s anxious inquiries about her husband may be read in more ways than one. This letter may be only intended to put you au courant as to the state of affairs. Unluckily, that ugly scar about your nose will prevent your calling on Mrs. Tredethlyn for some weeks. But I don’t mind being brotherly for once in a way; and I’ll look in at the Stuccoville mansion this afternoon, if you like. Virtue is sometimes rewarded, and there is just a chance that I may see the lovely Grunderson, and improve the occasion.”
Harcourt, after a little deliberation, consented to this arrangement. His confidence in the honour of his brother was about as small as it could be; but as the interests of the two Antipholi were in this instance not antagonistic, he could scarcely have anything to fear from Roderick’s intervention.
“You can tell Mrs. Tredethlyn that I am seriously ill,” he said, when his brother was leaving him. “If you could drop a hint or two about a rapid decline—a secret sorrow undermining a constitution that was originally delicate—the sword and the scabbard, and so on, it would only be friendly to do so. Of course I have seen nothing of Francis since Tuesday, which is perfectly true; only you need say nothing of Tuesday night—curse him!” muttered Harcourt, with a lively recollection of the wounds inflicted by a broken vinegar-cruet, and the pernicious effects of the adulterated vinegar, as exhibited in his inflamed eyes. “You can take care to let Mrs. Tredethlyn understand that her husband has returned to his old haunts and his old companions; and that any anxiety she may be so absurd as to feel about him is wasted upon a person who would be the first to laugh at her folly.”
“Dear boy, I have not served my country for nothing,” answered the diplomatist. “You may trust in my discretion and in my power to make the best of an opportunity. The people who plan a conversation beforehand never are able to talk according to their programme. The other party doesn’t give the necessary cues. The man who trusts to the inspiration of the moment never makes a failure. The divine afflatus is always right; but you can’t pump the sacred wind into a man with vulgar bellows. It comes, dear boy; and it will come to your humble servant, I have no doubt. I shall dine at the St. James’s, and I’ve two or three places to go to in the evening; so I leave you to your reflections and the goulard-water. Adieu!”
The diplomatist had no opportunity of serving his brother by any sentimental hints about secret sorrows and mortal illness; for Maude sent Julia Desmond to receive her visitor, and to hear anything he might have to say about Francis. Mrs. Tredethlyn would see no one and would go nowhere. Julia had been busy all the morning writing excuses to people whose invitations had been accepted. Miss Grunderson had called, and had sent up pencilled supplications upon the backs of cards, imploring her dear Mrs. Tredethlyn to see her, if only for a few minutes; but Maude had been inexorable. There are sorrows which friendship is powerless to soothe; and in the time of such sorrow noisy friendship is above all things intolerable. Maude shuddered as she thought of Miss Grunderson’s warm paws and schoolgirl endearments; so Rosa was sent away disconsolate.
Roderick Lowther would have been very well contented to loiter in Mrs. Tredethlyn’s morning-room talking to Julia, whose half-haughty, half-defiant manner had a wonderful fascination for him; but that young lady gave him no opportunity of dawdling. She had seen his tactics with regard to Miss Grunderson, and took care to let him know that she understood his diplomacy; but she listened to all his insinuations against Francis, and he saw her eyes brighten as he uttered them.
“She will convey my hints to Mrs. Tredethlyn,” thought the diplomatist, “and they won’t lose by her interpretation; so I’ve done that fellow a service, and wasted my morning, since Miss Grunderson is not to be seen.”
But on leaving Julia Mr. Lowther decided on speculating a call upon Rosa’s papa. There was always the chance of seeing the young lady; and as Mrs. Tredethlyn’s house could no longer afford a platform for the carrying out of Roderick’s matrimonial schemes, it was absolutely necessary that he should try a bold stroke and advance matters. He had ascertained Rosa’s address, and had no difficulty in finding the Grunderson mansion, which was close at hand. He was not very certain about the number of the house, but selected it unhesitatingly from its fellows for the vivid greenness of its blinds, and the intense newness which pervaded every object that was visible through unshrouded windows of plate-glass. The Grunderson mansion bared its inner splendours unflinchingly to the eyes of the passer-by; and Mr. Grunderson’s dining-room, superb in pollard oak, and with the Grunderson arms blazing on the scarlet morocco backs of the chairs, revealed itself to the very core of its heart to every butterman’s apprentice or butcher’s boy who brought his wares to the area-gate. Thus Roderick Lowther found it very difficult not to make his perception of Mr. Grunderson, seated at the head of his table with a substantial luncheon before him, unpleasantly palpable while he rang the visitors’ bell. Fortune favoured the diplomatist, for the hospitable millionaire insisted on his being ushered into the dining-room; very much to the discomfiture of Rosa, who was partaking of an unfashionable plate of underdone beef from the sirloin before her papa, and who had a big bottle containing some yellow compound in the way of pickle, and ornamented by a blazing label, on her right hand, and an imperial pint of Guinness’s stout on her left. The stout and the embarrassment produced by Mr. Lowther’s appearance combined to dye Rosa’s cheeks with a very vivid carnation; but the diplomatist would have been less than a diplomatist if he had not appeared supremely unconscious of the two bottles and the underdone beef.
“Sit ye down, Mr. Lowther, and make yourself at home,” exclaimed the hospitable Mr. Grunderson. “A knife and fork for this gentleman, Thomas; and look sharp about it. You’ll find this here as fine a bit of beef as ever was cut from an Aberdeen bullock; and there ain’t no bullocks equal to a Scotch short-horn, go where you will. Let me give you a slice out of the alderman’s walk, which was a name my father always gave to the undercut; and a very good father he was too, though he never thought of my sittin’ down to table upon the very spot where he built hisself a tool-house forty year ago, when you couldn’t have got six pound an acre per annum for any ground about here. There’s a pigeon-pie at the other end of the table, and there’s some of your foreign kickshaws,—cutlets a la curlpapers, and mutton-chops a la smashed potato, I call ’em; for I’m not a young man, Mr. Lowther, and I can’t remember your soubeeses, and your maintenongs, and your jardineers, and so on, as my daughter can. We don’t have the men to wait at lunch, for my daughter says it isn’t manners; and I’m very glad it ain’t, for I can’t say I enjoy my meals when I have to take ’em with a couple of fellows shoving vegetable-dishes and sauce-boats at me every two minutes, and never shoving the right ones; for I’m blest if I ever knew ’em yet to shove me the cucumber before I’d half finished my salmon, though they do call themselves experienced servants. Howsomedever, if we must dine ally Rousse, and wrap our mutton-chops in greasy paper and call ’em maintennong, we must, and there’s an end of it; but I don’t mind confessing to you, Mr. Lowther, that this is the time I make my dinner, and it’s no use frowning at me, Rosa, for I don’t care who knows it.”
Mr. Lowther, whose luncheon generally consisted of a glass of seltzer-and-sherry and one small biscuit, escaped the infliction of one of Mr. Grunderson’s plates of beef by a judicious manœuvre, and helped himself to a morsel of pigeon-pie. But before doing so, he allowed his eyes to wander about the walls in contemplation of some impossible conglomerations of brown rockery and soapsud sky, which Mr. Grunderson called his Sallivaters; and thus gave Rosa time to dismiss her bottles and her plate, and to recover from her embarrassment.
After this everything went very smoothly. Mr. Grunderson expanded under the influence of bottled stout and Madeira, and was very loquacious; but sinking presently into a rather stertorous slumber, which he called forty winks, and which generally lasted about an hour and a half, the ci-devant market-gardener left Rosa and Roderick to their own resources. On this Mr. Lowther would have departed, but the candid Rosa begged him to remain. She had kept up a visiting acquaintance with most of her old school-fellows, and as she was perpetually making new acquaintances, she was positively besieged by callers, and had a tea-drinking institution, which she called a kettle-drum, almost every afternoon. The idea of exhibiting the elegant diplomatist to her feminine circle was eminently delightful to Miss Grunderson; and as soon as her papa had begun to snore with undisguised vehemence, she conducted Roderick to the drawing-room, where there were as many albums, and perfume-caskets, and ormolu workboxes, and enamelled book-slides, and solitaire boards, as would have stocked one of Messrs. Parkins and Gotto’s show-rooms, and where a grand piano, scattered with all the easiest polkas in the gaudiest covers, testified to Rosa’s taste for music.
Miss Grunderson’s kettle-drum visitors began to assemble almost immediately; and before long Rosa’s drawing-room was full of young ladies in overpowering bonnets and transparent cloaks of every imaginable tissue. The male element was very much in the minority at Miss Grunderson’s gatherings, and was chiefly represented by speechless younger brothers, who came in sulky submission to overbearing sisters, and who lounged in uncomfortable attitudes upon Rosa’s most fragile chairs, spilt their tea upon the velvet table-covers, rarely moved without knocking something down, and left dingy thumb-marks in all Rosa’s albums. Amongst such as these Roderick shone like a star of the first magnitude, and Miss Grunderson exhibited him with unspeakable pride. The kettle-drum lasted for two mortal hours, and Mr. Lowther was one of the last to depart, bored to death, as he told his brother afterwards.
“But a fellow must bring his mind to go through a good deal if he wants to marry a millionaire’s only daughter in these hard times,” thought the attaché, despondently, as he went yawning to bed. “If my lovely Rosa does become Mrs. Lowther, she will have to renounce her penchant for bad French and violent pink dresses; but she may cram her drawing-room with acquaintance of quasi-gentility, and drink tea all day, so far as I shall be concerned in the matter.”
A long miserable week wore itself slowly out after the night in which Francis Tredethlyn had turned his back upon a house which he had never been allowed to find a home. Through all the week there were no tidings of Maude’s departed husband; but when the week was over, a formal letter from Mr. Kursdale acquainted her with Mr. Tredethlyn’s arrangements for her welfare, and with the fact that he had embarked the day before on board the steam-vessel Kingfisher, bound for Buenos Ayres. The news inflicted as great a shock upon Maude as if her husband’s letter announcing his intended departure had never been written. To the last she had believed, that when the time for action came, his resolution would fail him all at once, and he would hurry back to her, faithful and devoted as in the earliest days of their brief married life, when he had nursed her Skye terriers, and sat patiently for an hour at a stretch in a haberdasher’s shop while she selected ribands and laces. She had written him a penitent letter, and had enclosed it to Mr. Kursdale, entreating that gentleman to deliver it to his client whenever he saw him. She had not thought it possible that, even if Francis persisted in his intention of leaving England, he would leave without an interview with his solicitor. But when Maude drove post-haste to Gray’s Inn, and presented herself in the lawyer’s office, she found that there had been no interview. Francis had communicated with his solicitor by letter only, and his clear and concise epistle bore the date of the very day on which he was to start for Plymouth, whence the Kingfisher was to sail.
The letter thus dated had arrived at the lawyer’s office after business hours; and when Mr. Kursdale opened it next morning, there was little doubt that the Kingfisher was outward bound with Francis Tredethlyn on board her. Maude made a confidant of her husband’s solicitor. A family lawyer is a kind of father confessor in the matter of secrets, and has generally outlived the capacity of surprise as completely as those imperturbable disciples of St. Ignatius Loyola who are irreverently entitled “crows.” The despondent wife told Mr. Kursdale that Francis had left home in consequence of a slight misunderstanding—(was any conjugal quarrel ever yet described by the belligerents as anything more than a slight misunderstanding?)—and she implored him to assist her in bringing about her husband’s speedy return.
“But do you think he has really sailed?” she asked; “do you think he can have been so cruel as to leave England without even giving me the opportunity of imploring him to remain?”
Mr. Kursdale shook his head gravely.
“There is nothing in his letter to me which indicates indifference to your wishes,” he said; “it is only a business letter; but in a practical way it is the strongest evidence of a husband’s devotion that ever came to my knowledge. We lawyers are a matter-of-fact set of men, and we are apt to form our conclusions in a matter-of-fact way. What other people would treat as an affair of sentiment, we look at as an affair of figures; and I must say, Mrs. Tredethlyn, that gauged by that standard, your husband comes out nobly.”
“But I want him to come back to me,” Maude exclaimed, simply; “I don’t want to be rich—or to live like a woman of fashion. He wrongs me most cruelly when he thinks that I married him for his money. I married him because he was good to my father. Do you think I could accept the income which that letter places at my disposal, knowing that my husband has left his native country because of me? Tell me what I am to do, Mr. Kursdale. I know that Mr. Tredethlyn is unhappy, and that a few words from me would set all right. What am I to do?”
“We must try to send him the few words, my dear Mrs. Tredethlyn,” answered the lawyer, cheerfully. “South America is not so very far off nowadays; and you know that even in Alexander Pope’s time a sigh might be wafted from Indus to the Pole, by means of ocean postage. We’ll get your letter delivered to Mr. Tredethlyn as quickly as the improvements of modern science will allow, you may depend upon it. Shall I send the letter you enclosed to me the other day? Perhaps you would like to add something to it—another postscript, eh? Ladies have such a penchant for postscripts,” said the lawyer, lapsing into mild facetiousness, which he imagined to be of an eminently consolatory character. There are people who believe that a feeble joke is an infallible specific for a deeply rooted grief.
“I will send a clerk off to Plymouth by the next train,” said Mr. Kursdale, with his hand upon the spring of a little bell beside him. He spoke as coolly as if he had been talking of sending a clerk over the way. “If by any chance the Kingfisher has not sailed when the young man arrives, your husband will have the letter before dark. If the Kingfisher has sailed, the letter must be sent on by the next mail. At the worst, Mr. Tredethlyn may be back in six or seven weeks.”
In six or seven weeks! It seemed a very long time; but on receiving the lawyer’s letter announcing her husband’s departure, Maude had fancied that he was lost to her for ever. With what wonderful intelligence we can perceive the value of anything we have lost! In your daily walks, O modest collector of household treasures! you will see a little bit of china, a picture, an apostle spoon, a quaint old volume in a shop-window,—and, intending to look in and bargain for it some day when you have leisure, you will pass it a hundred times, indifferent as to its merits, half uncertain whether it is worth buying; but you discover some day that it is gone, and then in a moment the doubtful shepherdess becomes the rarest old Chelsea, the dirty-looking little bit of landscape an undeniable Crome, the battered silver spoon of unquestionable antiquity, the quaintly bound book a choice Elzevir. The thing is lost; and we regret it for all that it might have been, as well as for all that it was, and there are no bounds to the extravagance we would commit to regain the chance of possessing it.
It was something after this fashion, perhaps, that Mrs. Tredethlyn regretted her husband, as she drove home disconsolately after her interview with the lawyer, to await the result of his clerk’s journey. She would have gone herself to Plymouth if she could have done any more than the clerk; but she had a dim belief that if there was infallibility anywhere on earth, it was to be found in the office of an old-established solicitor, and she thought that Mr. Kursdale’s accredited agent could not fail to effect some good.
Her disappointment was very bitter the next day when she received a note from the solicitor, informing her that the Kingfisher had sailed twelve hours before the clerk arrived at Plymouth.
After this Maude could only await the result of her letter. Six or seven weeks seemed such a weary time as she looked forward to it; and it might be as long as that, or even longer, before any tidings from Francis could reach her. She went to her father, to pour her sorrows into his ear; but though he received her very affectionately, she could see that he blamed her severely for the folly which had driven Francis Tredethlyn from his home.
She would have gone to stay at the Cedars during this dreary period; but she had a nervous dread of not being on the spot to receive any possible communication from her husband, so she remained amid the grand hotel-like splendour of the Stuccoville mansion; though her neighbours were daily departing for distant British watering-places, or on the first stage of continental wanderings, to toil amidst Alpine glaciers, or to lounge at German gaming-tables.
Mrs. Tredethlyn was very glad to see London growing empty; but before her acquaintance departed for their autumnal relaxations they had ample time to discuss her husband’s disappearance and her own sudden withdrawal from society. The fact of that slight misunderstanding, which Maude had been obliged to confess to the solicitor, had become patent to all Stuccoville through the agency of loquacious maids and languid footmen, and had assumed every possible and impossible complexion in feminine debates. So Maude stood listlessly at one of the windows in her spacious bedchamber, sheltered by the voluminous curtains and the flowers in the balcony, and looked despondently at happy family parties driving away to railway stations with cargoes of parasols and umbrellas, and deliciously fluffy carriage-rugs and foot-muffs. Other people always seem so happy. The lives of those smiling Stuccovillians might not have been unclouded in their serenity; but Maude watched them very sadly, remembering how she and her husband might have been starting in the twilight for the Dover mail, like that merry young couple from the house over the way.
Surely she must have loved him very dearly, or she scarcely could have regretted him so much. If she had been questioned as to the real state of her feelings on this point, she could not have given any very clear reply to the question. She only knew that her husband had been very good to her, and that she had repaid his devotion with neglect and indifference. Maude had been a spoiled child, it must be remembered, and there may have been something of a spoiled child’s useless remorse in her penitence; but she was very penitent. All her life for the last year had been crowded with proofs of Francis Tredethlyn’s unbounded love; and, looking back upon them, she could not remember one instance in which she had been sufficiently grateful for his affection.
“Those silly young men at the Cedars used to make a fool of me with their empty flatteries,” she thought, remorsefully; “and I treated Frank as I had learned to treat them, accepting his generous devotion as indifferently as I had accepted their unmeaning compliments.”
There was one thing that Maude did not remember as she looked back at her past life, and that was Harcourt Lowther’s influence. She did not know how much of her indifference to her husband had been engendered by the subtle sarcasms of her jilted lover; nor did she know how the schemer had practised upon her girlish love of society, in order to widen the gulf that divided her from Francis Tredethlyn. Her errors as a wife had chiefly arisen from want of leisure. She had found no time to adapt herself to her husband’s tastes—no time to elevate and refine him by association—no time to give him any return for those practical proofs of his affection in the way of jewels and carriages, thorough-bred steppers, and hundred-guinea shawls, which he was constantly lavishing upon her; and, worse than all, she had found no time to inquire how he passed his life, or in what circles he sought the happiness she had never tried to provide for him in his home.
“I will ask him to complete the purchase of the Berkshire estate when he comes back to me,” she thought; “and then we shall be able to begin a new life away from this perpetual whirlpool of society; and I can drive to the meet when Frank hunts, and even take an interest in the stables. Country stables are so pretty; and it’s so nice to see a favourite horse looking over the door of his loose-box, with a big tabby cat sitting on the wooden ledge beside him, and honeysuckle blowing about his head. But one’s horses might as well be at the North Pole for all one can see of them in a London mews, where there are always dreadful men in shirt-sleeves, and cross-looking women hanging up clothes,” mused Mrs. Tredethlyn, with a vivid recollection of the prospect which all the ground glass in her fernery could not quite shut out.
While she was thinking very penitently of the past, and weaving pleasant schemes for the future; while she was perpetually counting the days which must elapse before Francis returned to her, always supposing that the remorseful words of her letter found their way straight to his heart, as she implicitly believed they would; while she was praying daily and nightly for his safe preservation in tempest and danger, Maude Tredethlyn took up the “Times” newspaper one morning as she loitered listlessly over a lonely breakfast-table, and the first paragraph that met her eyes was the announcement of the Kingfisher’s total destruction by fire, and the entire loss of passengers and crew.