Harcourt Lowther had his copy of the great journal on the day when Maude read that horrible paragraph. Roderick had called at Stuccoville during Mrs. Tredethlyn’s seclusion, and had heard of the Cornishman’s departure, and the name of the vessel he had gone in, from Julia Desmond. The schemer turned deadly pale when his brother read him the brief account of one of those terrible catastrophes which come upon mortal travellers now and then, to teach them how frail is man’s hold of that wondrous power by which modern science has learnt to rule the elements. The coolest villain who ever planned a comrade’s destruction must surely suffer one sharp pang of remorse when he knows that the hand which has so often clasped his own is really cold. To Harcourt Lowther the wealthy Cornishman had never been anything worse than an impediment. He was gone now; there was little doubt of that. Midway between her starting place and her destination, the Kingfisher, sailing gaily on a placid sea, had succumbed to a worse foe than tempest or hurricane, and all on board her had perished. A fragment of charred timber, branded with the name of the steamer, had been picked up by a homeward-bound vessel; and in the calm moonlit night the blazing ship had been seen by distant voyagers a lurid speck upon the silvery horizon. By these and many other tokens the fact of the catastrophe had been made known; and in a hundred British households there was mourning for lost friends and kinsmen.
After the first shock that came upon him with these sudden tidings, Harcourt Lowther gave a long sigh of relief.
“It was the fellow’s own doing,” he muttered. “If he had not made a quarrel with me, this would never have happened. And he’s gone! Poor lad! He was not such a bad fellow, after all. Better to die that way than of delirium tremens,” added Mr. Lowther, with a furtive glance towards a tall smoke-coloured bottle which was apt to adorn his table very often nowadays. “And so my Maude is free—at last! Do you know, Roderick, it seems to me as if I had lived twenty years or so since my return from Van Diemen’s Land? and now that the luck turns, and the winning colour comes up for the first time, I feel as if I had almost outlived the power to care much about it. Roderick!” cried the invalid, with a sharp suddenness that startled his brother, “did Folson tell you there was any serious damage done to my head by that ugly fall the other night? I know he has talked to you about me. I heard you and him muttering together yesterday, when I was lying half asleep in the next room.”
Mr. Folson was the medical man who had attended Harcourt Lowther after the scuffle with Francis, and who had brought all his science to bear for the preservation of the handsome face without which his patient would have been so small a creature.
“Folson said very little about the damage you got in the row,” the attaché answered, very coolly; “but he told me you must drop your liberal consumption of that sort of thing, or you’d find yourself very speedily in Queer Street.” Mr. Lowther pointed to the smoke-coloured bottle as he thus addressed himself to his invalid brother. “While you were teaching that fellow Tredethlyn to drink himself to death, you ought to have learnt how to keep yourself alive by not drinking,” he said presently. “However, I don’t want to say anything unpleasant, but you really must cut your very intimate acquaintance with the brandy-bottle, if you want to improve your opportunity, now that Mrs. Tredethlyn is a rich widow. If you don’t look sharp I shall throw over the Grunderson, and go in against you.”
Harcourt smiled superciliously.
“I am not afraid of you, for more reasons than one,” he said. “Maude is a curious girl. I sometimes fancy my own chance is not quite so good as it once was. Goethe says that a man wins in his age the prize he sighs for in his youth. Perhaps, when I am a pottering old fellow of seventy, I shall have a great fortune and a handsome wife; only the capability of caring much for either will be gone. How fond we were of toffee at Harrow! But all the toffee that was ever manufactured in Doncaster during the Sellenger week wouldn’t give me a ray of pleasure now. Madame de Maintenon began to enjoy herself when she was eighty; rather late in the day, wasn’t it? My soul is weary, Roderick; and now the chance has come, I’m not the man I was. Perhaps, after all, the simple truth of the matter is that I am suffering from an attack of blue devils, engendered of solitary confinement in this detestable crib. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, old fellow. As the ugly scar across my forehead has dwindled into a romantic-looking badge of bygone prowess, and the variegated hues of my countenance are rapidly fading into an interesting pallor, I’ll get you to send me round a hack from Parsons’s, and I’ll take a spin in the Park; there won’t be many people about at this time of year, and the fresh air will blow my old self back again, I dare say. I’ll meet you at the Metropolitan afterwards, if you like,” added Harcourt, naming an adjacent restaurant at which the brothers had been wont to dine occasionally.
“No, thanks. I dine at the Grundersons’.”
“Déjà! We go fast, my friend!”
“If your military experience had extended farther than the superintendence of penitent burglars, you might have known that where the assailing party is weak, a fortress must be taken quickly, or not at all. I declared myself to Rosa this morning. She is delighted with the idea of flourishing at foreign courts in écrasant pink dresses. How I shall tone her down, poor child! and what a hard time we shall both have of it before the scent of the market-garden ceases to cling to her still! I am to speak to papa Grunderson this evening, over his wine. He consumes the best part of a bottle of old port every night, and finishes off at a neighbouring tavern with the gin-and-water of his early manhood. Rosa tells me that he is an indulgent old party, and that I shall not have any difficulty in bringing him to book.”
“Then you really think of marrying?” asked Harcourt, thoughtfully.
“Really think of marrying? Of course I do. What else should I think of whereby to improve my fortunes? And Rosa will not be so very disagreeable after a good deal of toning down.”
“I thought perhaps you might have some lingering regard for—that other person.”
The diplomatist turned upon his brother with a frown.
“I thought I told you that I didn’t care to discuss that subject,” he said, haughtily. “Drop it, if you please. There are plenty of disagreeable things in your life, I dare say, that I might remember, if I wanted to make myself obnoxious. However, as you have been existing upon a limited supply of oxygen for the last six weeks, I suppose you’re privileged to be cantankerous. I’ll look in at the stables and send you the hack; and if I find you here when I come home to dress, I dare say we shall hit it better. A bientôt!”
Harcourt Lowther had his gallop in the Park, and punished the livery-stable hack rather severely. It was dusk before he went back to town, and he left the Park by the Prince’s Gate, and rode slowly through the gorgeous dismality of Stuccoville. He walked his horse down the street in which Francis Tredethlyn’s household had been established. Glimmering lights burned feebly in the windows on the second floor, but the gaslit dining-room was blank and empty.
Looking up at the dimly lighted windows, Harcourt Lowther wondered if Maude Tredethlyn’s heart, set free all at once from its mercenary bondage, had fluttered back to the lover of her youth. He was strangely tormented by conflicting fancies, and found it hard to strike the balance between his low estimate of woman’s constancy and his very high opinion of his own merits.
“She loved me once,” he thought, “and my hold upon her ought to be stronger now than ever it was. I have quires of schoolgirl letters filled with protestations of eternal constancy and reliance in a bright future waiting for us somewhere in the cloudy distance of our lives. And now the happy future is ours, my Maude; you are free and you are rich; so we can afford to build the castle of our dreams, and live in it very respectably.”
Riding slowly homeward through the crowded streets, Mr. Lowther found it very difficult to shut out of his mind the picture of a burning ship, and the image of the man whom he had called his friend, prominent amidst a wild night-scene of death and horror.
“I’m glad I had nothing to do with the fellow’s going in that vessel,” thought Mr. Lowther, as he tried to shake off the uncomfortable feeling which oppressed him. “I had no hand in his mad freak of bolting off to Buenos Ayres; so I needn’t worry myself about the business. If he had lived to get there safely, I dare say he’d have been finished off by fever or small-pox.”
Nearly a week elapsed before Harcourt Lowther approached the woman who had once been his plighted wife, and who was now free to renew her broken vows as speedily as common decency would allow her to accept the addresses of a second husband. The schemer wanted to be sure of his triumph. One interview with Maude, one look in her face, would be enough to tell him whether his hold on her was undiminished, whether his future happiness was secure. Assured of this, he would be contented to stand apart until the usages of society would permit him to take his place by her side as her acknowledged suitor. But he was eager to be quite sure of his position. A nervous restlessness that was foreign to his temperament had come upon him since the tidings of the Kingfisher’s destruction had reached his ears; and he could not endure anything like uncertainty or suspense.
He called at Stuccoville one morning. He was told that Mrs. Tredethlyn would see no one; but that Miss Desmond was at home, and would receive him, if he pleased.
He did please; and was ushered into the morning-room, where Julia sat writing at a little table near the window. There was a door opening from Mrs. Tredethlyn’s dressing-room into this morning-room; and as Harcourt entered at one door, a pale wan creature in black appeared at the other.
It was Maude—so changed that a sudden pang shot through the schemer’s heart as he looked at her; a sudden pang that must have been remorse, but which gave place immediately to a feeling of jealous anger.
Was the loss of her husband so deep a sorrow that it should change her like this?
She had seen the visitor, and was drawing back, when he ran to her and seized her hand.
“Maude!” he cried, passionately, “I must speak to you. Surely you are not going to treat me like a stranger.”
She tried to take her hand from his, but he held it firmly and drew her into the room; as he did so, Julia, who had risen on his entrance, went quietly out at the other door. Maude and Harcourt were alone.
“What can you have to say to me?” asked Mrs. Tredethlyn. “It is cruel of you to force yourself upon me at such a time as this. I have grief enough and trouble enough without being tortured by the sight of you.”
Harcourt Lowther looked at her aghast.
“Tortured by the sight of me!” he repeated.
“Yes,” answered Maude, indignantly. “It was your fault that my husband left me. It was you who planted base suspicions in my mind when there was no need for suspicion. If I had gone back to the cottage at Petersham—as I would have done, but for you—I should have discovered the folly of my jealous fancies—inspired by you—yes, by you alone. For when I saw Francis and his cousin, my first impulse was to call him by his name. It was your exclamation that frightened me; it was your manner that filled me with absurd alarm. Why did you poison my mind against the best husband a woman ever had? How could you be so base as to repay his trusting friendship with such malicious treachery?”
“Because I loved you, Mrs. Tredethlyn, and I believed that your husband had wronged you. Was I likely to be a very lenient judge of his conduct towards you, when I had loved you so passionately, and had been jilted by you so cruelly for him? You questioned me, and I spoke. Can you forget or deny that I spoke reluctantly? You hang your head, Mrs. Tredethlyn; ah, I see that you remember.”
“Yes,” answered Maude, piteously, as she sank into a chair; “you are right. I made you speak. It was my own jealous folly from first to last. If others doubted and suspected, I ought to have trusted him. What a pitiful return I made him for so much devotion, when I could not even give him my confidence!” She was silent for some moments, lost in thought. It was of her husband, and not of the man standing before her, that she was thinking. Harcourt Lowther could see that.
She looked up at him presently, as if she suddenly remembered his presence. “Have you anything more to say to me?” she asked, coldly.
“Have I anything more to say! Are you mad, Mrs. Tredethlyn, that you ask me such a question? I have outraged propriety perhaps in coming to see you so soon, you will tell me; but a man who has suffered as much as I have at the hands of the woman he loves is not very likely to be held back by ceremonial constraints when the hour comes in which he may claim atonement for the wrong that has been done him. I respect your natural sorrow for the terrible fate of your husband; but I should despise you if you were so false-hearted a prude as to affect forgetfulness of what is due to me.”
Maude looked at him as she had never looked at him before. Wonder, indignation, disgust—all mingled in the expression of her countenance. He had woven his network to ensnare a frivolous shallow-hearted girl, and behold, on the completion of the schemer’s web, a woman arose in the strength of her truth and purity, and shook herself free from the toils as easily as if they had been so much gossamer. “There is something due from me to you?” she asked, haughtily. “What is it?”
“The fulfilment of your broken promise. I have waited, Maude, and waited patiently. Another man would have revenged himself on your inconstancy by proving to you that he too could be inconstant. Hopeless but patient, I have given you a disinterested devotion which is without a parallel in the history of man’s sacrifice for the woman of his choice. Now that you are free, I ask some atonement for the past, some reward for my patience. Tell me that the past is not quite forgotten—that the tender protestations which consoled me in my miserable exile were not utterly meaningless and false. Why do you look at me like that? Have I been the dupe of a coquette from first to last, Mrs. Tredethlyn, and does your husband’s death only leave you free to jilt me again? Have I been fooled to the top of my bent by a woman who has never loved me?”
“No, Mr. Lowther,” Maude answered, very quietly; “I did love you once. I look back now, and wonder at myself as I remember how dearly. But my love died—a very sudden death.”
“When you discovered the advantages of a wealthy marriage for the penniless daughter of a commercial defaulter,” cried Harcourt.
“No; my love for you was a girlish fancy, if you like; though Heaven only knows how deeply I felt for you in your exile—how willing I would have been to resign my imaginary wealth for love of you, if you had asked me to do so. But you never did ask that. You did not want the wife without the fortune. When you came home and found me engaged to another man—about to sacrifice myself in a mercenary marriage, as you thought—there was yet time to have exacted the fulfilment of my promise. I loved you then, Harcourt Lowther. A word from you, and I would have told Francis Tredethlyn the truth, and demanded my release. He was far too generous to have withheld it. But in doing that I should have offended my father, and I should have come to you penniless. You did not want me on those terms, Harcourt. The honest indignation of a disinterested lover never found an utterance on your lips. You were contented to assume the position of friend and confidant to your unconscious rival; and it is only since I have been left alone to think of my past life, that I have fully understood the dishonour involved in keeping our broken engagement a secret from my husband. I loved you when you came back to England, Harcourt. It was a hard battle which duty had to fight against the unaltered affection of my girlhood. I prayed to God night and day for strength to do my duty, and to keep my promise to the man who had a claim upon me, which you have never known. I prayed for power to blot your image from my mind; and my prayer was heard. My first foolish love died on my wedding-day, Harcourt, when you stood by to see me married to Francis Tredethlyn. From that hour to this you have been no more to me than any other man who has paid me the conventional attentions which I imagined I had a right to receive. If I had ever seen more than this in your conduct, Mr. Lowther, you would have found me quite capable of asserting my position.”
“The world has chosen to see a good deal more than conventional courtesy in my attendance upon you, Mrs. Tredethlyn,” answered Harcourt. He had lost the game. Utterly defeated in the moment of his expected triumph, he was careless as to the rest of his play. How can the whist-player, who knows that he is beaten, be expected to pay any great attention to the order in which he plays the two or three insignificant cards that he holds at the close of the rubber? “People have been good enough to make us the subject of considerable discussion, Mrs. Tredethlyn,” continued Harcourt. “A man is apt to hear these things, though they rarely reach the ears of the lady most interested in hearing them. The people amongst whom we live have made up their minds about us, I know, and will be considerably astonished if you throw me over now that you are free to reward the patient devotion which, has endured so much in the hope of this hour.”
He saw Maude’s look of unutterable scorn; a look which revealed her to him in a new and higher light, and inspired him with a more passionate love than he had ever felt for her yet—and at his worst he had loved her.
“Maude,” he cried, in a sudden access of mingled rage and despair, “why do you goad me to say these things? I know how detestable I seem to you. And yet, as there is a heaven above me, I have loved you truly from first to last. Pity me if, while I prayed for no better fate than to face the enemy’s guns on an Indian battle-field, I was a coward in social life and dared not brave genteel poverty even for your sake. Pity me if I shrank from thrusting myself between you and a wealthy marriage. I had been poor all my life; and I knew what you have never learnt—the horrors of a gentleman’s poverty. I have smiled at your girlish talk of pretty cottages and tiny suburban gardens; an elegant little drawing-room, in which you and I might spend the winter evenings together with our books and music. The poor gentleman’s cottage is never pretty; the poor gentleman’s drawing-room is never elegant. His wife’s tastes may be ever so simple, his own aspirations may be ever so pure; but poverty countenances no taste, permits no aspiration. His wife is fond of music, perhaps. Heaven help her! she cannot be sure of an hour in which her piano may not be seized by the broker. She delights in flowers; but the nosegays she arranges so gaily to-day may entail a writ for the florist’s account to-morrow. You would have thought me a model of all that is noble and disinterested if I had exposed you to such miseries as these: you think me a scoundrel because I was not selfish enough to say to you, ‘Reject Francis Tredethlyn and a life of elegant ease, and accept my devotion and an existence of penury and trouble.’”
“And you ask me now to fulfil my broken promise? Have you inherited a fortune? or how is it that your ideas upon matrimony have altered?”
The schemer flushed crimson to the roots of his hair, and then grew deadly pale. For the life of him he could not answer that question. He could not say, “My position is unchanged, but you are rich. Give me your fortune and the heart I did not choose to claim when it was unaccompanied by fortune.”
“Had we not better wish each other good morning, Mr. Lowther?” Maude said, after a little pause. “Your visit is ill-timed and most unwelcome. Your presence reminds me of a cruel wrong done to a noble friend, a devoted husband, whose worth I have learned only too late; whom I have loved unconsciously, only to discover the depth of my affection when its object is lost to me for ever.”
“You loved your husband!” cried Harcourt, with a cynical laugh; “you seem determined to astonish me to-day. You loved your husband?”
“Yes—dearly and truly; and love his memory better than ever I loved you. I have learned to think, since I have been released from your influence; for it was your influence that regulated my life as well as my husband’s; it was your influence that kept us asunder, and plunged both of us into a whirlpool of dissipation. I have had time to think during the long miserable days and nights in which I have watched for the coming of him who was never to return to me; and if I had not discovered the shallowness of your love before my marriage, I should have made that discovery since. You are base enough to tell me that the world has linked my name with yours. I can afford to despise a world in which I have never found real happiness, and in which I no longer wish to hold a place. I shall go back to my father’s house, and my life will be one long atonement for the past. I tell you this, Mr. Lowther, in order that you may understand that we must be strangers to each other henceforward.”
She laid her hand upon the bell as she spoke. Harcourt Lowther stood for some moments looking at her. A strange compound of passionate admiration and vengeful fury flamed in his eyes.
“I have sometimes wondered at the madmen who murder the women they have loved; but God help you, Maude Tredethlyn, if I had a loaded pistol in my pocket to-day!”
He folded his arms, locking them together with a convulsive suddenness, as if he could only thus restrain the impulse by which he would have struck her down where she stood defying him; and then he turned, and slowly left the room.
He had left his hired horse in the quiet street, in charge of a boy; but the boy’s back was turned when his employer left the house, and Harcourt Lowther drove back to town in a hansom. It was only when his brother reminded him of the horse, that he remembered how he had gone to Stuccoville; and sent a man to recover the missing steed. After that he left the noisy regions of the Strand, and wandered across one of the bridges out to some dismal waste ground in the neighbourhood of Battersea; a remote and forgotten tract, that was almost as lonely as an African desert: there he laid himself down amongst the rubbish of a deserted brickfield, and cried like a child.
Maude Tredethlyn sat alone in her spacious chamber: oh, so spacious, so splendid, so dreary, so ghastly, with a tall carved walnut-wood bedstead that was like one of the tombs in Père la Chaise, only not so lively, and with long panels of looking-glass shimmering ghost-like in dark walnut-wood wardrobes and armoires, and duchesse dressing-tables. She might have endured her troubles better, perhaps, if her room had been furnished with white and gold rather than so much funereal walnut-wood and ghastly looking-glass. She sat alone, thinking of the husband whom she had lost, and whose worth she had only discovered when it was too late. She would accept sympathy from no one. Julia wrote her letters, and saw people who must be seen, and was very good; but the wayward heart shrank away from her in its sudden desolation. She had loved him—she had loved him—and had been ashamed to confess her real feelings either to herself or to the people who had smiled upon a mercenary marriage as if it was the most natural thing under heaven; but who would have lifted their eyebrows in scornful surprise had they known that she could care for a person whose boyhood had been spent in a humble old homestead among the Cornish moorlands. Gliding gracefully through her frivolous life, tolerably happy in a shallow kind of way, with more shopping, and driving, and riding, and calling, and kettle-drumming, and dinner-giving, and horticultural-fête attending, always to be done than it was in the power of any one woman to do, except by a perpetual scramble, she had found no time to consider her position, no time to be aware how entirely even her most frivolous pleasures depended on the faithful minister whom no influence could entirely divide from her.
Amongst the papers she had looked over on the library shelves and tables, where the dust lay thick, she had sometimes found a sheet of perfumed note-paper, and a list of items in her own writing—commissions she had given Francis to execute, troublesome ones sometimes, involving loss of time, and patient inquiry amongst West-end emporiums—orders for new books, drawing materials, ferns, music, all the frivolities of her life. She remembered with a cruel pang of remorse how faithfully the smallest details had been remembered, how patiently the most tiresome researches had been conducted, and how very lightly all this untiring service had been accepted. Circumstances which she had been too thoughtless to notice at the time flashed back upon her now, and she remembered how Harcourt Lowther had stepped between her and her husband even in this commonplace communion—how Francis had been pushed aside, politely taught to remember what an ignorant and awkward creature he was when compared to the fine gentleman.
As she sat alone, upon the evening after her interview with Harcourt Lowther, her husband’s image was more vividly present with her than it had been at any moment since his departure. The bright honest face—the faithful loving face—shone out upon her in the ghastly twilight of her ghastly chamber, and she thought how pleasant it would have been to be sitting opposite her husband in the firelight glow of a cosy parlour, far away from splendid loneliness and carved walnut-wood. She thought of him with her face hidden in her hands, and her aching head lying wearily on the sofa-cushion. She thought of him until a nervous restlessness came upon her, and she sprang suddenly to her feet, unable to bear the oppression of that dreary room, or any room in that dreary house.
“I must go away somewhere, or I shall die,” she thought; “this place seems haunted. I will go to papa. He is very good to me, but he does not understand what I feel about Francis. People speak so lightly of him, and seem to have known him so little. If I could talk to any one who really loved him; if I could talk to any one who knew his goodness as I ought to have known it—as I do know it, now that he is dead!”
She crossed the room hurriedly, and rang the bell. She had told her maid to bring lights only when she rang for them, much to the dismay of that sympathetic young person, who believed that candle-light and company were eminently consolatory in all earthly sorrows. When the candles came, Maude went to a writing-table, and wrote a few hasty lines to her husband’s simple little cousin. She had written to Susan once before, to tell her of Francis Tredethlyn’s departure; but the two women had not seen each other since their first meeting.
“My dear Susan,—There is terrible news of your cousin: it may have reached you before this, perhaps. Will you come to me? I am so utterly miserable! and I believe that you are the only person in the world who can understand my sorrow. Come, dear, I implore you. Ever your affectionate
Mrs. Tredethlyn was a great deal too impatient to wait for any such commonplace means of communication as the post. She summoned her maid, and entrusted her letter to that faithful attendant, with directions that a groom should mount one of the Park hacks immediately, and ride straight to Petersham with the missive. The maid obeyed; and the groom, who had made an engagement to go half-price to a West-end theatre, departed, grumbling sulkily, and determined on punishing the Park hack for the unwarrantable caprice of his mistress.
Maude slept soundly that night for the first time since the tidings of the Kingfisher’s fate had reached her, and woke in the morning to see Susan looking down at her with a smile upon her face.
“Ah, you don’t know,” cried Maude, waking out of a happy dream to an instant consciousness of her sorrow,—“you don’t know what has happened: you haven’t heard?”
“Of what, dear?” Susan asked, gently, as Maude started up from amongst her pillows feverish and excited.
“The loss of the Kingfisher—the fire—the dreadful fire! Oh, Susan, you cannot have heard!”
Mrs. Tredethlyn said this, because the girl’s face, though it was grave and sad, expressed none of that acute anguish which Susan ought to have felt for her cousin’s untimely fate. She only looked at Maude with a wondering earnestness.
“Yes, it was very dreadful,” she said. “Mrs. Clinnock read it in the paper, and told me. I am so sorry for all the sufferers. But oh, Maude, dear cousin, how grateful we ought to be for the accident that saved Francis from such a fate! If he had gone by that vessel, dear—”
She stopped suddenly, for Maude looked at her with an unnatural stare, and then fell back unconscious.
No, he had not perished with the ill-fated passengers of the Kingfisher. Lives as noble, friends as dear, husbands and fathers, brothers and sons, worth and genius, some tribute from all that is brightest upon earth,—had gone down to the deep waters; but Francis Tredethlyn had not made a part in the mighty sacrifice. When Maude recovered from the deadly faintness that had come upon her, Susan showed her a letter which she had received from her cousin,—a letter that had been written in an hotel at Plymouth after the sailing of the Kingfisher. It was a kind kinsmanlike letter, stating the arrangements which the writer had made for the comfort and welfare of his cousin and her child; and, in conclusion, Francis told Susan that he had reached Plymouth too late to leave by the Kingfisher, a steamer which he had intended to go by, and in which he had taken his berth. Thus left with his time on his hands for some days, he had resolved on going to have a look at the old neighbourhood once more.
“It might seem a foolish fancy to many people, but I don’t think it will to you, Susy,” he wrote. “I want to gather a handful of daisies from my mother’s grave before I leave the soil that holds her for ever. I want to stand by the old hearth once more, though God knows what a pain it will be to me to see strangers in the old home. God bless you, dear, and good-bye! I shall not write again till I write from the New World.”
This was the close of the letter, which Susan gave Maude to read. Her first feeling on reading it was unbounded gratitude to the Providence that had saved Francis Tredethlyn. Her second feeling was considerable indignation against Francis himself. The mother of the comic song who bewails her missing child in such pathetic numbers, and slaps him soundly when she finds him, is not such a very impossible character.
“It was shameful of him to let me suffer so much,” she cried, “when a few lines from him would have made me so happy;” and then she was grateful to Providence again, and angry with herself for having been angry with Francis; and then she pounced upon Susan and kissed her.
“What am I to do, darling?” she asked. “I dare say he has gone off by some other horrible steamer. But wherever he is, I won’t stop idle in this dreary house. I won’t trust everything to that slow solemn lawyer. I’ll go to Cornwall myself, Susy, and find out all about my husband; how long he stayed there, and when he left. You’ll tell me where to go; won’t you, Susy?”
Of course Susan was ready to give her cousin’s wife all needful information about that forgotten corner of the earth, Landresdale. She would have volunteered to accompany Maude to the western moors, only there was the boy; and Susan had an idea that if she were to turn her back upon her son for twenty-four consecutive hours, he would inevitably be seized with measles or scarlatina in her absence. But Maude declared she wanted no one to accompany her.
“I suppose I must take my maid,” she said; “but I shall leave her at the inn at Falmouth, and go alone to that queer old house on the moor, and those queer old people Francis once told me about.”
Julia Desmond had to endure a good deal that morning, for Maude was radiant when she appeared with Susan at the breakfast-table. She was so grateful to Susan for hurrying to her in the early morning.
“Every night, when I have gone to sleep, I have thought the same thing,” she said: “if I could only wake and find it all a dream—if I could wake to find it only a dream! And this morning I did wake to find an angel standing by my bed with the best news I ever heard in all my life. But I am very sorry for those poor people who were really lost in the Kingfisher,” added Maude, mournfully; she felt that there was something almost incongruous in her own happiness when so many must be sorrowful for the destruction of that ill-fated vessel.
While she was making preparations for her departure, Mr. Kursdale, the solicitor, was announced. He came radiant and red-faced to tell her the result of inquiries which he had considered it expedient to have made at Plymouth before taking any legal steps with regard to the supposed demise of his respected client; and the result was that Francis had not sailed in the Kingfisher; and he was very proud and happy to announce to Mrs. Tredethlyn—
He would have gone on in a ponderous manner for some time longer, if Maude had not interrupted him by the assurance that she knew all about it.
“You did not ascertain that my husband had left Plymouth by any other vessel?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then we may hope he is still in England. I am going to Cornwall immediately to look for him. At the worst, I shall there hear all about him.”
Mr. Kursdale evidently thought this very unprofessional, and suggested the expediency of a clerk acting as Mrs. Tredethlyn’s proxy; but Maude shook her head.
“I will go myself,” she said. “If my husband is still in England, I will find him. There can be no further misunderstanding between us, if once we can meet face to face.”
Mr. Kursdale submitted, and departed. Maude ran away to superintend her maid’s packing of a small portmanteau, and Susan sat in the morning-room with Julia. It had been settled that Miss Desmond should drive her back to Petersham after luncheon.
They were talking rather ceremoniously, when the door was suddenly opened by an impetuous hand, and Miss Grunderson burst in upon them, more intensely pink than usual.
“They wanted me to go to the drawing-room, and they’d go and see if Mrs. Tredethlyn was at home!” exclaimed Rosa. “I know what their going and seeing is. Not at home always, and I do so want to see that poor darling; and I’m sure there’s no one in the world more truly sorry for her than I am; and if going into half-mourning would have been considered a tribute of sincere respect, and not an intrusion or uncalled for, I would have ordered a crape bonnet, trimmed with lilies of the valley and jet beads, directly I heard of it.”
Julia interrupted Miss Grunderson with a simple statement of the fact which had put an end to Maude’s brief time of mourning. Rosa’s delight was very genuine, and on being introduced to Mrs. Lesley, she expanded as it was her wont to expand on all occasions.
“You can’t think how glad I am!” she exclaimed; “for I assure you when I heard of that dreadful event, I felt as if it was quite hard-hearted of me to be happy, and I have been very happy for the last week or so. In point of fact,” added Miss Grunderson, dragging at the button of a very tight glove in evident embarrassment, “I’m engaged to be married.”
“Indeed!” said Julia, politely.
“Yes. You see as par has long objected to my running after public characters, which of course was tiresome to him,—for of all the people to tear about to all sorts of inaccessible places, and oblige one’s getting up unreasonably early in the morning to hear them or to see them, public characters are the worst,—so par was really glad for me to be seriously engaged to anybody that would keep me quiet, he said, even if the person was not rich; so when Mr. Lowther—Mr. Roderick Lowther, you know—proposed, par happening to be in a good temper, it was all settled immediately.”
“I am very glad to hear it,” answered Miss Desmond; “but I am not at all surprised. I quite expected as much.”
“Did you really, now? Well, upon my word, I thought at first he was almost as grumpy as Rochester in ‘Jane Eyre;’ but when those grumpy people do begin to pay one compliments, it is so nice. Of course, with regard to Mario, Lord Palmerston, Sir Edwin Landseer, and Charles Mathews, my feelings will be unchanged to my dying day. But the worship of public characters need not interfere with the happiness of domestic life; and as Roderick’s position in the corps diplomatique will take us abroad, his jealousy need never be aroused in the slightest degree.”
Miss Grunderson entertained the two ladies for some time with minute details of her own affairs, and she confessed presently that Roderick had promised to call for her.
“He doesn’t want to see Mrs. Tredethlyn, you know,” she said; “he was only anxious to express to you how sorry he is, and so on—though, of course, now he hasn’t any occasion to be sorry, thank goodness!—but you don’t mind his coming to fetch me, do you, dear? The carriage is waiting for me, and I’m going to take him on to the Haymarket, where we’re to see about the resetting of some old-fashioned diamond earrings that Roderick’s ma has sent me. They’re not nearly as handsome as my own, you know; but, of course, I feel grateful to her for the attention. And I’m to go down to Lowther Hall to stay before our marriage; and I’m to be introduced to a maiden aunt of Roderick’s, from whom he has expectations, this very afternoon—I mean I’m to be introduced to her this very afternoon,” added Rosa.
While she was chattering the door was opened, and a servant announced Mr. Lowther. He came out of the bright white daylight on the staircase into the room which was kept cool and shadowy by closed Venetian shutters. As he looked about him, unaccustomed to the obscurity, he heard a faint shriek, and a woman who had been sitting with her back to the window started suddenly from her chair.
“Robert!” she cried; “Robert, is it you?” And then she sank down again, pale and breathless.
“Robert!” exclaimed Miss Grunderson; “you must mistake Mr. Lowther for some one else, Mrs. Lesley. His name is not Robert.”
“Perhaps not,” Susan answered, sadly. “He kept his real name a secret from the poor girl who was once proud to call herself his wife; but whatever his name may be he is my husband nevertheless, and Providence has brought about our meeting to-day. Oh, don’t add a falsehood to the wrong you have done me!” she cried, appealing to Roderick Lowther, who stood pale and confounded, with the faces of the three women all turned towards him, and with the knowledge that those scrutinizing eyes were upon him. “I shall claim very little of you. I only want you to give me the name I have a right to bear; I only want you to acknowledge your son.”
Roderick Lowther did not reply to this appeal. After a moment’s pause he turned to Julia:
“Where do you pick up your acquaintance, Miss Desmond?” he said. “I should scarcely have expected to meet this lady here.”
“This lady is my husband’s cousin,” answered Maude, who had entered the room while he was speaking; “and I do not know any one who has a better right to be here. What is the matter, Susy darling?”
Roderick Lowther’s heart was stirred faintly by the sound of that familiar name—the name which he had whispered so often beside a grey wintry sea, under a wintry sky, in the desolate region which had been brightened for him by his discarded wife’s innocence and love.
“There is nothing that can be spoken of here,” Susan answered; “I have met some one whom I never expected to see again. I will wait till my cousin comes back. I will say no more till then.”
“But, good gracious me!” exclaimed Miss Grunderson, “I’m not going to be treated in this sort of way. What does it all mean, Roderick? That lady starts up all of a sudden, and calls you her husband, and then says she’ll wait till her cousin comes home. I can’t be expected to wait till her cousin comes home. I can’t take matters so coolly. With my trousseau ordered, and all! I must and will have an explanation!”
“You shall, Rosa; but, for mercy’s sake, hold your tongue. There is some infernal mistake. You had better go home; never mind about the earrings to-day. If this lady mistakes me for some one she knows, or has a claim upon, I have no doubt I shall be able to demonstrate her mistake, if I can talk to her for a few minutes quietly. And now let me take you to your carriage, Rosa.”
Miss Grunderson would have resisted such a summary way of disposing of her and her wrongs; but Roderick Lowther was firm. He led her down-stairs, and he put her into her carriage, and he sent her home as coolly as if she had been a packet of dry goods consigned to his temporary care, to be sent on to Mr. Grunderson.
“Awkward,” he muttered, as he went back to the house; “but things always do happen awkwardly just when a fellow fancies he’s swimming with the tide all in his favour.”
He looked very grave as he went to Mrs. Tredethlyn’s morning-room to demand an interview with Susan; but he looked a great deal more grave as he left the house after that interview and made his way back to his brother’s lodgings.
He found Harcourt sitting moodily by the empty fireplace, the slim foreign bottle on the table by his side, and a cigar in his mouth.
“What is the matter with you?” asked the younger brother, listlessly, as he perceived the scowl upon his senior’s face.
“There is this much the matter with me,” answered Roderick; “I trusted a fellow to help me in a delicate business, and I’ve reason to think that he took advantage of my confidence to get me into a dilemma that it will take me all my life to get out of. I have seen Susan Turner to-day.”
“Indeed!”
“And she has told me something about the Registrar—something that I can scarcely bring myself to believe. Do you remember what I asked you to do for me, Harcourt?”
“Perfectly. And I have got the letter containing your request in my possession—such a nice letter! You tell me in it that you have fallen over head and ears in love with an innocent little country girl, too poor and insignificant to be your wife, too virtuous to be your mistress. Another man might have accepted his fate, and either resigned the lady, or made some sacrifice of his own interests and married her. You were inclined to do neither, and you fell back upon a villanous expedient familiar to the readers of old-fashioned novels, and known as a mock marriage. You wrote to me about this in a half-playful tone, as if it were the simplest thing in the world—an elegant little comedy, out of which it would be your care, of course, to see that no harm should arise; and so on. The carrying out of the little conspiracy would be very easy. You suggested how it might be done. I had only to engage some clever scapegrace to enact the Registrar; hire a parlour in some obscure street near a District Registrar’s Office—in the same street, if practicable; the ceremony would only occupy about ten minutes, and could be got over as quietly as the most commonplace morning call, if the fellow engaged to personate the Registrar knew what he was about. The dear little girl was the last person in the world to suspect anything amiss. In short, it was the simplest possible business, and all our dear good Harcourt had to do was to find the handy scamp who would act the official, and get himself well up in the little professional formula of signing and counter-signing, and so on, in some big books that he would get for the purpose. The certificate business would have to be finessed of course. The dear little girl would ask for no certificate, and the dear little girl’s witnesses must be conveniently shut up if they made their noses unpleasantly prominent.”
“I begin to understand you,” said Roderick, with suppressed fury. “You have sold me; and you are going to defend yourself upon high grounds, conscientious scruples; and so on. Pray proceed. That sort of talk will sound so well from your lips.”
“I am not going to do anything of the kind. I am only going to remind you that, as you never in your life did a generous thing for me, or stepped aside from your own interest or your own pleasure by so much as a hair’s breadth to serve me, it wasn’t very likely that I should get myself into a legal hobble—that mock marriage would have been something like felony, I should imagine—and inflict a cruel wrong upon an innocent little girl to oblige you. I didn’t want to be too disobliging, so I arranged a marriage, but it was a real and not a sham one; and you are as tightly tied to your pretty little wife as if the business had been transacted at St. George’s, Hanover Square, by a popular bishop, assisted by an aristocratic uncle to the bride.”
“You are a remorseless scoundrel!” exclaimed Mr. Lowther, coolly. “And I am very happy to tell you that your own pretty little plans are knocked on the head. Francis Tredethlyn did not sail in the Kingfisher!”
Harcourt gave a little start of surprise; but his countenance did not express the profound vexation and disappointment that his brother had expected to see in it. The schemer had failed so completely, that it mattered very little to him now what course events took.
“Yes, Francis Tredethlyn is alive and well, I have no doubt,” resumed Roderick. “And my little Susy turns out to be Francis Tredethlyn’s first cousin. I have a recollection of her telling me, after our marriage, that her real name was something outlandish, of a Cornish character; but the name had slipped my memory completely before I met your wealthy Cornishman.”
“Then the likeness which I fancied I saw in that daub of a portrait and the similarity of name were not mere coincidences, after all,” muttered Harcourt. “And the lady at Petersham is my little sister-in-law. It’s a pity you didn’t treat her rather better,” he added; “for Francis Tredethlyn could afford to give her a handsome fortune, if he pleased. It is from her father he inherits his money; and if you had declared your marriage, and made things square with the old man, your wife need not have been disinherited, and would have been as rich a prize as any Miss Grunderson.”
“Hold your tongue!” cried Roderick; “I know what I have lost as well as you do. If you had been above-board with me, and told me that you had sold me about the marriage, I might have acted differently. Why did you get me into such a mess?”
“Because I didn’t choose to be your catspaw. I have been sacrificed to your interests all my life, and I was determined to keep my hold upon you when I had got it.”
“And you would have allowed me to marry Rosa Grunderson?”
“C’est selon! I think I should have spoken at the last moment—and yet it might have been very convenient to hold an awkward little secret about one’s wealthy brother. A man must be very hard up before he descends to that undignified mode of livelihood which the French galley-slaves call chantage; but when a fellow is hard up there’s no knowing how low he may descend.”
“You are a scoundrel!”
“And you are—I can’t finish the sentence without sinking to slang. We resemble each other in character as we do in person.”
In this fashion the brothers bandied civilities for some time; but they ended matters by dining together at the Metropolitan. Arabian traditions as to the sanctity of bread and salt cannot hold good against the exigencies of civilized life; and men may dine together in a friendly way, and reserve the right of hating each other nevertheless.
Warmed by a good dinner and a bottle of Moselle, Roderick grew hopeful as to the future. Susan would relent from her calm determination never to hold any communication with the husband she had loved so tenderly, by whom she had been so cruelly abandoned. Francis might act in a handsome manner about the fortune which ought to have been his cousin’s; and, after all, the turn which affairs had taken might not be altogether an unlucky one.
“Looking at it in any way, Rosa was a nuisance,” said Mr. Lowther, as he bedewed his moustache with the rose-water which the luxurious Metropolitan provides for its guests; “and perhaps it’s better as it is. We hadn’t come to close quarters about the settlements; and I dare say if the père Grunderson had been brought to the scratch, we should have had a scuffle.”