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.
THE EPILOGUE.
After the terrible crash which ended her brief married life, Florence
Lobyer took shelter with her Aunt Bushby until such time as her
father should return to England and be able to receive her at the
Fountains. Tender letters, dictated by that generous father, and
written in Georgina's elegant Italian hand, came to comfort the poor
terror-stricken young widow.
No Aladdin palace floating skyward through the thin air ever vanished
more completely from its sometime possessor than the splendours of
Pevenshall vanished from her who had once been the queen of that
gorgeous mansion. Of all the grandeurs of her married life Mrs.
Lobyer did not carry away with her so much as a trinket. Iron-hearted
functionaries swooped down upon the noble dwelling which honest,
hard-working Thomas Lobyer the elder had created to be an abiding
monument of an industrious and honourable career, and the widow was
given to understand that the gown upon her back and the wedding-ring on
her finger were about the only possessions she had any right to carry
away with her.
Poor Florence was glad to part with the costly frivolities for which
she had sold herself; she was glad to separate herself from every
evidence of that ill-omened bargain. She looked back upon her past life
with unspeakable horror. The letters found in her husband's desk had
confirmed Sir Nugent Evershed's suspicions of that husband's baseness.
They contained ample proof that Thomas Lobyer had been engaged in the
attempt to get up evidence against his wife's honour at the moment when
commercial ruin overtook him, and that he had plotted a vengeance that
should involve the enemy of his boyhood and the wife of whom he had
grown weary in the same destruction.
It was scarcely strange, therefore, if Florence was glad to escape from
Pevenshall, and from every thing associated with her married life. She
secluded herself in one of the remoter chambers of her aunt's house,
and would see no one except Lady Cecil, who had early tidings of her
friend's affliction, and who came to see her, looking very pale and
weak after that tedious illness through which Mr. O'Boyneville had
nursed her so patiently.
The two women embraced each other tenderly. For some minutes Cecil sat
in silence with Flo's slender black-robed figure folded in her arms.
Then they talked a little in low suppressed voices of the dreadful
event which had occasioned the wearing of that dismal black raiment.
"You must come to Chudleigh Combe with Laurence and me," Cecil said
by-and-by. "Mr. O'Boyneville has bought the dear old place where I
spent my childhood, Flo. It was the negotiation about the purchase
which took him away from Pevenshall that time. Oh Florence, I can never
tell you how good he has been to me. I shall never dare to tell you how
unworthy I have been of his goodness. But we are very happy now--thank
God, we are completely happy now. He nursed me all through my long
illness; and I used to wake and see him watching me in the dead of the
night, when I was too languid to speak, and powerless to tell him that
I was conscious of his goodness. It was in those long night-watches
that I learnt to understand him; and now I think there is nothing in
the world that could come between us."
This was all that Cecil said about herself. She stopped with her old
friend for some hours; and in the course of their conversation it
transpired that Major Gordon had gone to Spanish America with a party
of savans and explorers, on a mission which involved as much peril as
could be found on any battle-field.
Flo accepted her friend's invitation, and spent some weeks in the
old-fashioned house surrounded by Devonian woodland, and within sound
of the low murmur of the sea. She stayed with Cecil till she was
summoned to the Fountains, where her stepmother received her with quiet
tenderness that was infinitely soothing, and where she found her father
just beginning to hope that he might live to paint his Andromeda.
"I am equal to either fortune," he said, turning his face towards his
wife, illumined by a more beautiful smile than even his pencil had ever
transferred to canvas; "for in Georgey I have something better than
mortal eyesight. I have been so happy as the poor blind slave of my
Delilah, that I am almost afraid I may lose something by regaining my
sight."
In that bright peaceful home, with all fair and pleasant images around
her, Florence found it easy to forget the past. Sometimes when she
lingered before the glass, arranging the bright rippling tresses under
her widow's-cap, the image of Sir Nugent Evershed flitted through her
brain.
"I was weak enough to think that he really loved me, and that if I had
been free, he would have been at my feet," she thought with a blush;
"and though I have been a widow nearly a twelvemonth he has never come
near me, or made the faintest sign of any interest in my fate. It was
very pleasant to flirt with the foolish mistress of Pevenshall Place,
but Sir Nugent is too wise to marry a bankrupt cotton-spinner's widow.
I begin to think there is only one person in the world who ever truly
loved me."
That one person is an individual who is rising gradually in the
estimation of his fellow-men as a landscape-painter, and who comes
to the Fountains now and then on a Sunday evening, and seems always
glad to find his way to the quiet corner where Florence sits in
her widow's-weeds. If the sombre dress--invested with a grace by
the artistic hands of Mrs. Crawford's milliner--happens to be very
becoming, it is no fault of the young widow, who owes her present charm
to no coquetry of manner, but rather to a pensive gravity, which the
dismal close of her married life has left upon her. She is so young and
so pretty that no one looking at her can doubt for a moment that the
hour must come sooner or later when a new life will begin for her, and
a bright future open itself before her thoughtful eyes like a sunshiny
vista in one of Philip Foley's landscapes. There are people who venture
to prophesy that the landscape-painter will be the happy individual for
whose enchantment those dismal draperies of black will be transformed
into the white robes of a bride.
Meanwhile life glides smoothly by at the Fountains. Never was
ministering slave more devoted to an idolised master than the elegant
Georgina to her husband. The bronzes, and cabinet-pictures, and Persian
carpets, and Angora cats have been removed from the Hermitage to Mr.
Crawford's dwelling; and the little retreat in the lane near Hyde Park
is again in the market, at the moderate rent of 700l. per annum. It
is scarcely necessary to say that Mrs. Champernowne's admirers were
surprised and indignant when the tidings of her marriage fell like a
thunderbolt amongst the ranks of her victims: but Time, which brings
resignation to all earthly mourners, has consoled the idolaters of
the widow, and they flock to the Fountains, as they flocked to the
Hermitage, to burn incense at the shrine of the most charming woman in
London.
The one trouble of Mr. Crawford's married life has been but of brief
duration, for the painter has regained the use of his eyes in time to
see his daughter in her widow's-cap, and in time to begin his Andromeda
before the success of his Dido has been forgotten by the most fickle of
his admirers.
Amongst the Sunday-evening visitors at the Fountains appear very often
Mr. and Lady Cecil O'Boyneville. The barrister has fought his way into
the House of Commons; and there is some talk of his speedy elevation to
the bench. He has removed his household goods from Bloomsbury to sunnier
regions within sight of the verdant vistas of Kensington Gardens; and
Mrs. MacClaverhouse tells her niece that she has reason to be thankful
to the Providence that has given her so good a husband and so handsome
an income.
* * * * *
Cecil lives to look once more upon Hector Gordon's wedding-cards; but
this time the sight brings her no pang of regret. She hands the little
packet to her husband with a smile and says:
"I am so glad he has married again; and I hope he will be as happy--as
we are."
The barrister looks up from his _Times_ to reply with a vague murmur;
and then resumes his reading. But presently he looks up again with his
face radiant.
"I knew Valentine would make a mess of his defence in Peter _versus_
Piper!" he exclaims; "that's a case I should like to have had the
handling of myself!"
THE END.
* * * * *
[Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphenation left as printed.]