CHAPTER XXXIII.
A COMMERCIAL EARTHQUAKE.
The autumn wore away, and the Pevenshall coverts afforded sport for a succession of visitors. This second autumn of Mr. Lobyer's married life was very much like the first. The only change worthy of record was the fact that day by day Flo saw less of her husband, and more of Sir Nugent Evershed. Howden Park was so near the millionaire's handsome dwelling-place, and Sir Nugent was such a popular person, that it was scarcely strange if the young mistress of Pevenshall deferred to him in all her arrangements, and considered no dinner-party complete without his presence. If Mrs. Lobyer had elected the elegant young baronet as her chief friend and adviser, there was no one to gainsay her election. Vague murmurs and piquant little whispers might circulate freely within a given radius of Pevenshall; but Florence was, of course, the last person likely to hear the little whispers, and not by any means a person to be warned or affrighted by the first breath of scandal if it had reached her.
Cecil was ill in London; Mr. Crawford was loitering on a sweet honeymoon ramble in the fairest pathways of Italy; and Mr. Lobyer was absorbed in gloomy watchfulness of the money-market and the cotton trade, on the horizon of which prosaic world a great cloud had been gathering during the last few months. There had been awful crashes in the commercial world: thunderbolts falling suddenly in the fairest places. Mr. Lobyer and his Manchester friends held solemn conclave in the millionaire's snuggery, and discoursed of the failures amongst the mighty with grave ominous faces, but with a certain unction and relish nevertheless.
Florence did not even pretend to be interested in the commercial crisis or the commercial earthquakes. "Every body in our way is being ruined, I understand," she said gaily to her intimates at the breakfast-table. "Grey shirtings are obstinately bent on being dull, and those foolish people in America are putting us to all sorts of inconvenience; and every body who sells cotton is going to be ruined—at least, that's what I gather from the gloomy tenor of Mr. Lobyer's conversation. But that sort of thing is a monomania with very rich people, is it not? The more billions a man possesses, the more obstinately he broods upon the idea that he must ultimately die in a workhouse. I have heard of men with billions cutting their throats under the influence of that idea about the workhouse. But seriously I do hope that we shall not be ruined. It would be so dreadful to have one's carpets hung out of the up stair windows, and dirty men making inventories of one's china."
Thus discoursed Mrs. Lobyer in her gayest and most delightful manner, to the extreme amusement of her chosen friends, to whom the cabala of the cotton-trade was as dark a mystery as to herself. But there were one or two grave business men seated at that sumptuous breakfast-table to whom Mrs. Lobyer's frivolous talk seemed like the twittering of some innocent bird, which is premonitory of a tempest.
The painter's daughter went her own way, and there was no friendly hand to stay her progress on that dangerous path which a woman is apt to take when she wanders at her own sweet will. She was not happy. Already the glories and splendours of her life were beginning to grow flat and stale. She had sold herself for a price, and the price had been freely paid to her; but of late she had begun to wonder whether the barter of womanly pride and maidenly purity had been made on the most profitable terms within the possibilities of the matrimonial market. Pevenshall Place was a most lordly mansion; but it seemed a poor thing to be mistress of a parvenu's dwelling-place, when in the remote depths of her inner consciousness lurked the conviction that she might have reigned in the quaint old tapestried chambers of Howden, and held her place among the magnates of the land, by the indisputable right of rank, instead of the half-contemptuous sufferance accorded to money. She was not happy; that faculty for womanly tenderness and devotion which constitutes woman's highest charm and most perilous weakness had not yet been awakened in this young wife's heart. Sir Nugent Evershed's companionship was very agreeable to her; his devotion was the most delicious food supplied to that all-devouring monster, feminine vanity. But no pulse in Florence Lobyer's heart beat the quicker for the baronet's coming; no blank place in her life bore witness to his absence when he left her. She liked him; and she bitterly regretted not having met him in the days when she was Florence Crawford. But if there was indeed one tender spot in her heart, one remnant of girlish romance still lingering in her breast, it was not this elegant baronet, but a dark-eyed, bearded young painter, whose image was enshrined in that one sacred corner of the worldly soul. Sitting alone in her room, Mrs. Lobyer was apt to look pensively at Philip Foley's little chef-d'œuvre, and to wonder about the painter as she looked.
"I dare say he is married by this time," she thought, "and has set up a house for himself somewhere in that dreadful Islington. I can fancy his wife one of those gigantic creatures whom vulgar men call fine women," mused Flo, as she lifted her eyes to the duchesse glass in which her slender little figure was reflected.
But if the one green spot in the arid waste of a worldly nature was given to the landscape-painter, it was no less certain that Sir Nugent Evershed's presence was eminently calculated to endanger the domestic peace of Pevenshall. If his delicate consideration, his quiet homage, his apparently unselfish devotion did not imperil Flo's position as a wife, they had at least the effect of rendering her husband day by day more hateful in her eyes. She had never liked him, but she had married him with the honest intention of trying to like him; just as some people go through their lives with the intention of learning the German language or thorough bass. She had tried perhaps a little, but had speedily given up the attempt in despair. And from the hour of her rencontre with Miss de Raymond she had considered herself privileged to dislike and despise the man whom she had married.
She had quarrelled with him for the first time in her life during the last few weeks; and though the dispute had arisen out of some trifle scarcely worthy of remembrance, it had not been the less bitter. Hard words had been uttered on both sides; the hardest perhaps by the impetuous Flo, who was apt to say even more than she meant when she felt herself aggrieved and injured.
"Thank you very much for all the civil things you've said to me, Mrs. Lobyer. I think I know you pretty well after the charming candour with which you have favoured me to-day but I don't think you quite know me yet. You are very young and very inexperienced, and you have a lesson or two to learn before you are much older. I hope I may have the satisfaction of teaching you one of those lessons."
This was Mr. Lobyer's parting-speech as he left his wife's apartment. The vague threat occasioned Florence neither alarm nor anxiety. She would have been ready to apologise to her husband, if he had given her the opportunity of doing so; but any thing in the nature of a threat was eminently calculated to steel her heart against the lord and master whom at the best she had only tolerated.
After this domestic storm there came a deadly calm, during which the husband and wife treated each other with frigid politeness; but little by little the storm-cloud passed away from Flo's sunshiny nature, and she drifted back into the good-humoured nonchalance of manner with which she had been wont to accept Mr. Lobyer, and all other necessary evils.
Of late Mr. Lobyer had been, if possible, even less agreeable than usual. A dense gloom had come down upon him; and systematically as his guests were wont to ignore his presence, there were times when he brought a chilling influence into the brilliantly-lighted drawing-room, as of a man newly arrived from some frozen region, and bearing the icy blasts of that region in the folds of his garments. Flo made one or two feeble attempts to penetrate this gloom—merely as a matter of duty—but found herself rudely repulsed. So she concluded that the monomania which is the peculiar chastisement of millionaires had attacked her husband, and that his gloomy musings were darkened by the shadow of a workhouse. After having come to this conclusion, she troubled herself with no further anxiety on a subject which was foreign to the usual current of her thoughts. Mr. Lobyer went his way, and his wife went hers; and that delightful calm which generally reigns in households where husband and wife are utterly indifferent to each other reigned for a while at Pevenshall, and might have continued, if a most insignificant event had not occurred to cloud the serene horizon. The insignificant event was the resignation of one of those superb creatures the matched footmen. How the calamity arose Mrs. Lobyer was unable fully to ascertain; but it appeared that the master of Pevenshall had expressed himself to the superb creature in language which such a creature, knowing his own value, could not and would not brook from any master living. The footman had immediately tendered his resignation, had received his salary and departed, leaving his brother lackey in lonely grandeur, and as much deteriorated in value as a Sèvres vase which has lost its companion vase.
Flo did not hear of her loss till the man had left Pevenshall. On receiving the dismal tidings she abandoned herself for the moment to despair.
"They were so exactly the same height," she cried piteously, "and the same breadth across the shoulders. One might get two men the same height easily enough, I dare say; but what is the use of that, if one man is a lifeguardsman and the other a thread paper? And now Jones is gone Tomkins is positively useless, unless I can match him. Oh Sir Nugent, you really must assist me to find a decent match for Tomkins."
"Nonsense!" said Mr. Lobyer; "I'll have no more of your matched footmen; fellows who are as insolent on the strength of their legs as your primi tenori on the strength of their voices. I know a man who can take Jones's place at a minute's notice."
"But will he match?" exclaimed the despairing Flo; "that is the question—will he match Tomkins?"
"I don't know, and I don't care," answered Mr. Lobyer coolly. "He'll suit me, and that's enough."
Florence opened her eyes to their widest extent, and remained for some moments staring fixedly at her husband, as in a trance. Brutal though the man was by nature, he had chosen heretofore to let his wife exercise unquestioned authority in all household arrangements; and that he should interfere with her now, that he should come between her and those sacred symbols of her state, the matched footmen, was something more than she could understand.
For a moment her breath seemed to fail her; but she recovered herself presently, and replied with fitting dignity.
"You may engage what servants you please, Mr. Lobyer; but I decline to be waited upon by any one who does not match Tomkins."
After which Mrs. Lobyer summoned the housekeeper, and requested that functionary to make arrangements for the earliest possible filling-up of the hiatus in the servants'-hall; and having so far asserted her position, Flo resumed the occupation of the moment, and dismissed the subject of the twin lackeys from her thoughts.
At dinner, however, she was reminded of her bereavement by the appearance of a stumpy, pale-faced man, in a livery which was a great deal too large for him; but who moved about amongst the other servants with a quiet self-possession and a noiseless footfall which spoke well for his past training.
She saw no more of this man till the following day, when he came into the morning-room, where she happened to be for a few minutes alone with Sir Nugent, trying a new song which he had brought her. The strange footman came into the room to remove some flowers from a jardinière in one of the windows. Flo turned round from the piano to see what he was doing.
"Who told you to move those geraniums?" she asked.
"One of the gardeners sent for them, Ma'am."
The man performed his duty noiselessly, and retired.
"I don't like that man!" exclaimed the baronet, as the door closed on Mr. Lobyer's protégé.
"He seems a very good servant; but he doesn't match Tomkins," sighed Flo.
"He does his work quietly enough," answered Sir Nugent; "but he is not like a servant."
"How do you mean?"
"There's something in his manner that I don't like; a watchfulness—a stealthy, underhand kind of manner."
"Is there? I haven't noticed it. He might be as stealthy as an assassin in an Italian opera—so far as I am concerned—if he only matched Tomkins."
After this Mrs. Lobyer took no further notice of the servant who had been hired by her husband in place of the splendid Jones. She submitted to his presence very patiently, relying on the ultimate success of her housekeeper's researches amongst magnificent creatures of the Tomkins stamp. But Sir Nugent Evershed—who had no right to take objection to any arrangement in the house at which he was so constant a visitor—could not refrain from expressing his dislike to the strange footman; while that individual, by some fatality, seemed always to be on duty during the baronet's visits.
"I think you must have a mystical attraction for the man, as strong in its way as your antipathy to him," said Flo; "for I very seldom see him except when you are here. Really the prejudice is so absurd on your part that I can't help laughing at you."
"I never could endure a sneak," answered Sir Nugent; "and that man is a sneak. I will tell you something more than that, Mrs. Lobyer—he is not a footman."
"Not a footman! What is he then? Surely not a gentleman in disguise!"
"Decidedly not; but he is no footman. There is an unmistakable stamp upon a footman—a servants'-hall mark—which is not on that man."
Mr. Lobyer heard nothing of the baronet's objection to his protégé; for Mr. Lobyer had absented himself from Pevenshall of late, and was heard of now in Manchester, now in London, anon in Paris. There were vacant chambers now in the luxurious mansion; for as her guests of August and September dropped off, Mrs. Lobyer did not care to invite fresh visitors without the concurrence of her husband. Even while going her own way, she had always made some shadowy pretence of deferring to his wishes; and he was in a manner necessary to her—a social lay figure without which her drawing-room was incomplete. His spasmodic departures to Manchester had not interfered with the arrangements of the mansion; but now that he was absent day after day and week after week, Mrs. Lobyer felt herself called upon to maintain a certain sobriety in the household over which she presided.
Visitors who had been staying in the house dropped off; and no other guests came to fill the vacant chambers. No invitations were issued for dinner-parties or hunting-breakfasts in the millionaire's absence. Major and Mrs. Henniker, and one inane young lady, were now the only guests; and Florence would have found the spacious rooms very dreary if it had not been for the perpetual droppings-in of Sir Nugent Evershed, whose horses spent the best part of their existence between Howden and Pevenshall.
He came perpetually. There was always some pretext for his coming—some reason for his loitering when he came. He had turned architect and philanthropist, and was intensely interested in these schools and cottages which Flo was going to build; and the plans, and specifications, and estimates for which were the subjects of interminable discussion. Sometimes deaf Mrs. Henniker, sometimes the inane young lady, played propriety during these long visits of the baronet. Sometimes, but very rarely, Sir Nugent and Mrs. Lobyer sat alone in the drawing-room or morning-room, or strolled up and down the terrace on some fine autumnal morning, discussing the schools and cottages.
It was upwards of a month since the new footman had replaced the splendid Jones; and during the best part of the man's service Mr. Lobyer had been absent from home. Flo's spirits drooped in the empty house. She suffered acutely from that dismal reaction which is the penalty that must be paid sooner or later by all who have tried to create for themselves a spurious kind of happiness from perpetual excitement. The long dreary evenings sorely tried Mrs. Lobyer's patience. Mrs. Henniker's Berlin-wool work, the inane young lady's performances on the piano, the Major's long stories of Indian warfare, were all alike vanity and vexation to her; and she must have perished for lack of some distraction, if it had not been for her schools and cottages and Sir Nugent Evershed.
He came to Pevenshall one cold October afternoon, when Major Henniker had driven his wife and the inane young lady to Chiverley on a shopping expedition, leaving Florence alone in the drawing-room with a very ponderous historical work newly arrived from the London librarian; a work which the young matron set herself to read with a desperate resolution.
"I really must improve my mind," she said; "my ideas of history have never soared above Pinnock, and I have all sorts of old-fashioned notions. I don't want any thing at Chiverley; so I shall stay at home this afternoon, dear Mrs. Henniker, and devote myself to the Tudors. I am going to read about that dear, good, high-principled Henry VIII., who has only been properly understood within the last few years."
When the pony-phaeton had started with her three guests, Mrs. Lobyer ensconced herself in one of the most luxurious of the easy chairs and opened her big volume in a very business-like manner. The day was cold and windy, and fires burned cheerily at both ends of the spacious apartment.
Perhaps no historical work has ever yet been written in which the first half-dozen pages were not just a little dry. The grave historian has of late years borrowed many hints from the novelist, but he has not yet been bold enough to make a dash at his subject in medias res, and to start his first chapter with "'Ventre St. Gris,' said the king, 'I have heard enough of this matter, and will brook no further parley; the man dies to-morrow!'" Nor has he yet deigned to wind himself insidiously into his theme under cover of two travellers riding side by side through the sunset.
Mrs. Lobyer was beginning to yawn piteously over a grave disquisition upon the merits and demerits of feudalism and villeinage, when a servant announced Sir Nugent Evershed.
"My dear Sir Nugent, this is kind of you," cried Flo, closing the big volume with a sigh of relief: "I didn't expect to see you again for an age after the dreary evening we gave you on Tuesday."
"I have never spent a dreary evening in this house," answered the baronet, as he laid his hat and riding whip on a little table, and seated himself in a low chair very near Flo's; "you ought to know that, Mrs. Lobyer."
There was some shade of intention in his tone; but Florence Lobyer was accustomed to that tone, and knew how to parry all such impalpable attacks.
"Indeed, I do not know any thing of the kind," she said in her liveliest manner; "I thought you might possibly be a little tired of Major Henniker's Indian stories. You must have heard some of them several times. But he certainly tells them well."
"I confess to being heartily tired of them notwithstanding. But the attraction which brings me to Pevenshall, in spite of myself sometimes, is not Major Henniker."
Flo gave that little look of innocent surprise which is always at the command of a thorough-paced coquette.
"You have brought me some new idea for my cottages," she said, pointing to a roll of paper in the baronet's hand.
"Yes; I have a friend in Oxfordshire who has built schools for his poor, and I've brought you a sketch of his buildings."
After this there was a good deal of discussion about the merits of Tudor architecture as opposed to the Swiss-cottage or Norman-tower style of building. And then the baronet and Mrs. Lobyer began to talk of other things; and by some subtle transition the conversation assumed a more interesting and a more personal character; and Flo found herself talking to Sir Nugent more confidentially than she had ever talked to him before, in spite of their intimate acquaintance. They had been so much together, and yet had been so rarely alone, that there had been little opportunity for confidential converse between them. This October afternoon, with the early dusk gathering in the room, and the fires burning red and low, seemed the very occasion for friendly confidence. Flo talked with her usual candour of her father, herself, her husband, the empty frivolity of her life; and all at once she found that the conversation had assumed a tone which every experienced coquette knows to be dangerous. Sir Nugent was beginning to tell his companion how terrible a sacrifice she had made in marrying Thomas Lobyer, and how bitterly he above all other men mourned and deplored that sacrifice.
Even at this point Flo's liveliness did not desert her.
"Please don't call it a sacrifice, Sir Nugent; nothing annoys me so much as for my friends to take that tone about me," she said. "I married Mr. Lobyer with my eyes open, and I have no right to complain of the bargain. He has given me every thing he ever promised to give me."
"But can he give you the love you were created to inspire? No, Florence; you know he cannot give you that. There is not a field-labourer on this estate less able to comprehend you or less worthy of your love than the man you call your husband."
Before Florence could reprimand her admirer's audacity he had pounced on the little hand lying loosely on the cushion of her chair, and had lifted it to his lips. As she drew it indignantly away from him, and as he raised his head after bending over the little hand, he uttered a sudden exclamation and started to his feet, looking across Mrs. Lobyer's head at the great glass-doors of the palm-house, which opened out of the drawing-room.
"I knew that man was a spy," he exclaimed, snatching his riding-whip from the table.
"What man?" cried Flo, alarmed by the unwonted fierceness in Sir Nugent's face.
"Mr. Lobyer's footman. He has been amusing himself by listening to our conversation. I recognised his agreeable face flattened against one of those glass-doors just this moment. Don't be frightened: there is not the least occasion for alarm; but I must ascertain the meaning of this man's insolence."
The baronet went into the palm-house, and closed the doors after him. Flo followed him to the doors, but could follow him no farther; for she found that he had bolted as well as closed them.
"Why did he do that?" she thought. "I hope he is not going to make any esclandre. What does it matter if the man did listen? I dare say many servants are fond of listening."
She looked through the doors, but it was very dark in the palm-house; and if Sir Nugent and the footman were there she could not see them. There were other glass-doors opening on to the terrace, and in all probability the man had made his escape by that way.
"I hope Sir Nugent won't be so absurd as to follow him," thought Flo. "He is getting very tiresome. I suppose he has been allowed to come here too often. I shall have to be dignified and make a quarrel with him."
She stood peering into the darkness for some time, but she could neither hear nor see any thing in the palm-house. She went to one of the windows and looked out upon the terrace, but she could see nothing there; so she seated herself by the fire and waited very impatiently for Sir Nugent's return.
She had been waiting more than half an hour when he came back through the palm-house.
"Well;" she cried; "what does it all mean?"
"It means that the man is a private detective set to watch you by your husband," answered Sir Nugent quietly. "I dare say a person in that line of life gets a good many thrashings; but I don't think he can ever have received a sounder drubbing than the one I have just given him."
"A detective, set to watch me!" echoed Flo, with an air of stupefaction.
"Yes, Florence. I made the man acknowledge his calling, and name his employer. If you doubt me, he shall repeat his confession for your satisfaction. These sort of fellows think nothing of going over to the enemy. I have made him anxious to serve me by the promise of handsome payment; and I have made him afraid to disoblige me by the threat of another thrashing. The proceeding is worthy of your husband, is it not?"
"But what does it mean?" cried Flo; "what in Heaven's name does it all mean?"
"I am ashamed to tell you."
"But I insist on knowing."
"You insist?"
"I do."
"And you will not reproach me for any pain my revelation may cause you?"
"No, no."
"Then if you ask me what I really think of this detestable business, I will tell you my thoughts in the plainest words. I think your husband is a scoundrel, and that he has placed that wretched sneak in this house in the hope that he might be able to trump up some flimsy evidence against your truth and honour as his wife; evidence that would serve Mr. Lobyer in the divorce-court."
"Evidence against me!—the divorce-court! Are you mad, Sir Nugent?"
"No, Florence; I am only telling you the naked truth in all its hideousness. Forgive me if the truth is horrible to you. I wrung the worst part of that truth out of the spy's throat just now, when I caught him and grappled with him yonder. He spoke pretty plainly; for I think he knew he had never had a nearer chance of being strangled than he had at that moment. Mrs. Lobyer, your husband's conduct has been an enigma to me from the first day in which we met in Switzerland; but in the happiness I found in your society I was content to leave that enigma unsolved. To-day, for the first time, I read the riddle. Thomas Lobyer hated me as a boy; Thomas Lobyer hates me as a man. He has chosen to cultivate my acquaintance down here because my acquaintance happened to be useful to him amongst people with whom wealth does not stand for every thing. He has made use of me, hating me while he did so, and holding himself in readiness for the first chance of vengeance. And now he thinks the chance is in his hand; and you are to be sacrificed to the meanest spite that ever festered in the heart of a villain."
"I don't understand," murmured Florence helplessly; "I don't understand."
"It is difficult for a woman to understand such baseness. Your husband has set his spy to watch you. He knows that you are good, and true, and pure; but he knows something else besides that."
"What does he know?"
"He knows that I love you, Florence. Yes, the time has come in which I must speak plainly: the time has come in which you must leave this house, which is no longer a fitting shelter for you. Mr. Lobyer knows that I love you,—has known as much, in all likelihood, for some time past; but he has waited very patiently for his opportunity, and the opportunity, as he thinks, has arrived. He has set his spy to watch us, and no doubt the spy is by this time well up in his lesson."
"What lesson? What has the man to discover?" cried Flo indignantly. "You must know, Sir Nugent Evershed, that if you had dared to speak to me before to-day as you have spoken now, you would have been forbidden this house."
The fragile little figure seemed to grow taller by two or three inches as Mrs. Lobyer reproved her admirer. She felt as much outraged by his audacity as if no spice of coquetry had ever tainted the purity of her nature. She was just one of those women who may balance themselves for ever upon the narrow boundary-wall between propriety and disgrace and never run the smallest risk of toppling over on the wrong side.
"If this man is a spy, I have no fear of him," she exclaimed resolutely. "Let him go back to his employer to tell of his wasted labour."
"Such a man as that will not allow his labour to be wasted. Your husband does not want to hear the truth: he is ready to accept any falsehood that will serve his purpose; and that man is a less-accomplished rogue than I take him for, if he cannot get enough out of the tittle-tattle of the servants' hall to make a case for some pettifogging lawyer; a case that will break down ignominiously perhaps, but which will be strong enough to tarnish your name for ever and ever."
Florence looked at her lover with a colourless, bewildered face, in which there was a brave expression of defiance nevertheless. Sir Nugent Evershed was not a good man; and if Thomas Lobyer the parvenu had basely plotted the disgrace and ruin of his young wife, Sir Nugent the country gentleman was not above profiting by the roturier's baseness. He did not think there was any infamy in his conduct. He admired Florence very much. He loved her as much as it was natural to him to love any body except himself, and he felt most genuine indignation against her husband. But he felt at the same time that this shameful business came to pass very conveniently for him, as it was eminently calculated to bring matters to a crisis; just as he was beginning to be rather tired of a flirtation which had pursed its even tenor for the last twelve months without giving him any firmer hold upon the heart of the woman he loved.
The crisis had come; and he discovered all at once that he, the accomplished courtier, the experienced Lovelace, had been very much mistaken in his estimate of this pretty, frivolous, coquettish young matron. He had expected to find Florence Lobyer utterly weak and helpless in the hour of trial; and lo! to his surprise and confusion, she turned upon him resolute and defiant as a heroine, and he felt his eyelids droop under her fearless gaze.
"Why do you tell me this?" she asked. "If the tittle-tattle of the servants'-hall can injure my good name, it is you who have brought that injury upon me. If your visits here in my husband's absence have been too frequent, the blame lies with you, who have had twice my experience of the world, and should have protected me against my own imprudence. I have trusted you as a gentleman and a man of honour, Sir Nugent Evershed. Am I to think that you are neither?"
"Think nothing of me, except that I love you, Florence, and that I am only anxious to protect you from a scoundrel. The presence of a hired spy in this house, and the confession I wrung from the spy, are sufficient evidence of a deep laid scheme. You must leave this house, Florence."
"I must, must I?" Mrs. Lobyer repeated innocently; "but when, and how?"
"To-night," whispered the baronet; "and with me."
Flo made her lover a low curtsey. "I ought to be very much flattered by your desire to burden yourself with me at the very moment when it seems my husband is trying to get rid of me," she said; "but I have no intention of leaving Pevenshall, Sir Nugent. If my husband has been pleased to set a spy over my actions, it shall be my business to show him that I am not afraid of spies. But it is a quarter to seven, and I must run away to dress. Good-afternoon, and good-bye, Sir Nugent. Perhaps, so long as the detective remains, and Mr. Lobyer stays away, it will be just as well for you to discontinue your visits."
"As you please, Mrs. Lobyer," answered the baronet with a stately sulkiness.
He retired from the apartment, and waited in the portico while his horse was being brought round to him. He had known what it was to fail in his character of a Lovelace before to-day; but he had never before experienced a failure so ignominious and unexpected.
Flo tripped off to her room, smiling defiance upon insolent admirers and private detectives; but when the door of her dressing-room was closed behind her, and she found herself alone in that sacred chamber, she buried her face in the pillows of a low sofa and burst into tears.
"What a miserable, empty, frivolous life it is!" she cried; "and what a despicable creature I am!"
The private detective disappeared from Pevenshall after his encounter with Sir Nugent Evershed. Flo made some inquiries about the man next day, and was informed by her housekeeper that he had left in a most mysterious manner without a word of warning.
"But I never liked the man, Ma'am," said the housekeeper; "there was something underhand in his manner, and I always used to feel a cold shivery sensation when he came near me."
Sir Nugent Evershed came no more to the splendid mansion on the hill; and Mrs. Lobyer waited very quietly for whatever Fate had in store for her. There was no sign of Mr. Lobyer; neither letter nor message to announce his coming. The inane young lady returned to her relatives; and Flo was fain to entreat her dear Major and Mrs. Henniker to remain with her, lest she should be left quite alone in that spacious dwelling.
"I might send for my Aunt Jane," she thought, when she brooded upon her position; "but I think a very little of Aunt Jane would be the death of me just now."
A change came over the spirit of the young matron. She was no longer the airy volatile creature who had wasted her days in skipping from one amusement to another, in exchanging an extravagant toilette of the morning for a more extravagant toilette of the afternoon. She undertook a gigantic enterprise in the way of Berlin-wool work, and sat hour after hour by her dear Mrs. Henniker's side, counting stitches and picking up glittering beads on the point of her needle. She listened with sublime patience to the Major's Indian Stories; and yet all this time the traditionary fox was gnawing its way to her heart,—emblem of all hidden care courageously endured.
She knew that a crisis in her life had come. She knew that there was something ominous in Mr. Lobyer's long absence, his obstinate silence. She remembered the foolish recklessness with which she had provoked and defied scandal. Above all, she remembered Mr. Lobyer's vague threat on the occasion of her one serious misunderstanding with him; and connecting that threat with the spy's presence, and Sir Nugent Evershed's positive assertions, Florence Lobyer saw herself menaced by no small danger.
Her husband was a scoundrel; she had known that for a long time. False to her from first to last himself, he was yet quite capable of wreaking some terrible revenge upon her for the shadow of falsehood to him.
"I know that he can be pitiless," she thought; "I remember his face that day after our quarrel; and I know that I have no mercy to expect from him. I have not been a good wife, and I can scarcely wonder if he wishes to get rid of me; but if he had loved me when he married me, honestly and truly, as I believed that he did, I think I should have done my duty."
Mrs. Lobyer waited very patiently for the unknown danger which she dreaded from her husband's vengeance; but the days and weeks drifted by, and no prophetic cloud darkened the quiet horizon. This dull period of suspense was the most painful ordeal she had ever been called upon to endure in all her thoughtless life; and it is to be recorded to her credit that she endured it bravely.
The cloud appeared at last—a big black cloud, but not prophetic of that social tempest which Flo had dreaded. The cloud was the shadow of commercial failure. At first faint rumours came to Pevenshall; then more definite reports; at last the fatal tidings. The greatest of all the great crashes of the year was the crash with which the master of Pevenshall went to ruin. The pitiless Money Article recorded the great man's destruction very briefly: Mr. Lobyer, of the Lobyer Cotton-mills, and King Street, Manchester, of Mortimer Gardens, Hyde Park, and Pevenshall Place, Yorkshire, had failed for half-a-million.
The next tidings that came to Pevenshall were of even a darker nature; so dark and terrible indeed, that Major Henniker felt himself called upon to despatch two telegrams in Mrs. Lobyer's interest,—one to Rome, where Mr. Crawford and his wife had newly arrived; the other to Russell Square, summoning Mrs. Bushby post-haste to the succour of her niece.
Before Mrs. Bushby could arrive, Florence had discovered that some new calamity had befallen her, and had extorted the dismal tidings from the lips of the Major himself.
The commercial crash had only been the first act of the social tragedy. There had been a second and more terrible act. While the news in the Money Article was still fresh upon men's lips, Thomas Lobyer had shot himself through the head in his Manchester counting-house.
The details of his ruin are not worth recording here. By what false moves upon the chessboard of commerce, by what mad lust for gain, by what sudden impulses of caution at moments when rashness would have been prudence, by what reckless speculation in the hour when timidity would have been salvation, by what fatal steps upon the speculator's downward road he had hurried to his destruction, can have little interest here. It may be set down to his credit as a thoroughly practical and business-like person, that no act of generosity had ever made him the poorer by a sixpence, and that no honourable scruple had ever hindered him from enriching himself at the expense of other people. His iron hand had closed relentlessly upon every chance of profit, his iron heart had been adamant to every plea. If the end of all was failure, he had at least some title to the respect of the practical; and no man could insult his memory by that half-contemptuous pity which a money-making world bestows on the good-natured ne'er-do-weel, who has been no one's enemy but his own.