ONLY A CLOD
A Novel
BY THE AUTHOR OF
“LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET,” “AURORA FLOYD”
ETC. ETC. ETC.
Stereotyped Edition
LONDON
JOHN AND ROBERT MAXWELL
MILTON HOUSE, SHOE LANE, FLEET STREET
[_All rights reserved_]
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TO
OCTAVE DELEPIERRE, F.S.A., LL.D.
AND
HIS CHARMING WIFE, CHARLOTTE
This Story is Inscribed
IN REMEMBRANCE OF MANY PLEASANT HOURS
PASSED WITH THEM.
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CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE MASTER 5
II. THE MAN 11
III. TIDINGS OF HOME 14
IV. TREDETHLYN’S LUCK 17
V. COMING HOME 26
VI. THE END OF THE WORLD 32
VII. MAUDE HILLARY’S ADORERS 42
VIII. AT THE CHATEAU DE BOURBON 50
IX. JULIA DESMOND MAKES HERSELF AGREEABLE 53
X. COLTONSLOUGH 62
XI. A VERY OLD STORY 69
XII. A MODERN GENTLEMAN’S DIARY 80
XIII. CAUGHT IN THE TOILS 94
XIV. VERY PRIVATE THEATRICALS 100
XV. A COMMERCIAL CRISIS 108
XVI. A DRAMA THAT WAS ACTED BEHIND THE SCENES 123
XVII. SOMETHING LIKE FRIENDSHIP 139
XVIII. POOR FRANCIS 143
XIX. MR. HILLARY SPEAKS HIS MIND 151
XX. AN EXPLANATION 156
XXI. HARCOURT LOWTHER’S WELCOME 161
XXII. TAKING IT QUIETLY 167
XXIII. TIDINGS OF SUSAN 176
XXIV. FRANCIS TREDETHLYN’S DISINTERESTED ADVISER 190
XXV. THE ROAD TO RUIN 196
XXVI. A CHILLING RECONCILIATION 203
XXVII. SEEING A GHOST 211
XXVIII. “OH, MY AMY! MINE NO MORE!” 219
XXIX. ENTANGLEMENTS IN THE WEB 232
XXX. THE TWO ANTIPHOLI 238
XXXI. THE DIPLOMATIST’S POLICY 243
XXXII. HARCOURT GATHERS HIS FIRST FRUITS 253
XXXIII. ROSA’S REVELATIONS 266
XXXIV. THE LADY AT PETERSHAM 279
XXXV. A HASTY RECKONING 287
XXXVI. POOR FRANK’S LETTER 296
XXXVII. ELEANOR DROPS IN UPON ROSAMOND 302
XXXVIII. GONE 310
XXXIX. TOO LATE 317
XL. AN IGNOMINIOUS FAILURE 322
XLI. SUSAN’S GOOD NEWS 331
XLII. A PERFECT UNION 341
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ONLY A CLOD
CHAPTER I.
THE MASTER.
Ensign Harcourt Lowther, of her Majesty’s 51st Light Infantry, sat
staring out into his garden at Port Arthur, watching a couple of convict
gardeners--who were going about their work with a monotonous and
exasperating deliberation of movement--and lamenting the evil fortune
that had stationed him in his present quarters. He had a great many
troubles, this elegant young ensign, who was, for the time being,
destined to bloom unseen, and waste the graces that ought to have
adorned Belgravia upon the desert air of the island of Tasmania. He had,
as he himself elegantly expressed it, no end of troubles. First and
foremost, his cigar would not draw; and as it was the last of a case of
choice cabanas, the calamity was not a small one. Secondly, there had
been a drought in fair Van Diemen’s Land for the last month or so. The
verdure was growing brown and leathery; the feathery masses of the tall
fern shrivelled at the edges like scorched paper; the stiff foliage of
the cedars seemed to rattle as it shook in the dry, dust-laden wind, and
the thermometer stood at a hundred and ten in the shade; true, it might
drop forty degrees or so at any moment, with the uprising of a moist
breeze from the sea, but, pending the arrival of that auspicious moment,
Mr Lowther was in a very bad temper. What had he done that he should be
stationed in a convict settlement, with no chance of any gain or glory
as compensation for his trials; with no one to speak to except a prosy
old police-magistrate or a puritanical chaplain; with nothing better to
look at than the eternal blue of the ocean, or a whaling vessel anchored
in the bay; with nothing to listen to except the clanking of hammers and
banging of timber and jingling of iron in the busy dockyard; with no
better enjoyment to hope for than a couple of days’ quail-shooting or
kangaroo-hunting in the interior?
“If I’d been Desperate Bill the Burglar, or Slippery Steeve the Smasher,
I couldn’t be _much_ worse off,” he muttered, as he gave up the
unmanageable cigar, and went across the room to a table, upon which
there were some tobacco-jars and meerschaum pipes. “Now, then,
Tredethlyn, are those boots ready?”
This question was addressed to an invisible some one, whose low
whistling of a jovial Irish air was audible from the adjoining room.
“Yes, captain,” answered a cheery voice--the whistler had broken off in
the middle of the “wild sweet briery fence that around the flowers of
Erin dwells,”--“yes, captain, quite ready.”
“That’s another aggravation,” exclaimed Mr. Lowther,--“the fellow will
call me captain; as if it wasn’t an underhand way of reminding me that
for a poor devil like me there’s no chance of promotion.”
“But you see you _are_ captain here, Mr. Lowther,” said the whistler,
emerging from the adjoining chamber with a pair of newly-blacked
Wellingtons in his hand; “you’re captain, major, colonel, general, and
field-marshal, all in one here, with seventy men under your control, and
any amount of convicts to look after.”
“If there’s one thing in the world that’s more excruciating than
another, it’s that fellow’s cheerfulness,” cried Mr. Lowther. I can
fancy the feelings of an elegant young French marquis of the _vieille
roche_, a scion of the Mortemars or Birons, buried alive in an
underground cell in the Bastille, with a lively commoner for his
companion--a cheerful _bourgeois_, who pretended to make light of his
situation, and eat his mouldy bread with a relish. “Now, then,
Tredethlyn, where are the boot-hooks? That fellow always forgets
something.”
“That fellow,” otherwise Francis Tredethlyn, was a tall, stalwart
private soldier, of some seven-and-twenty years of age, who had been
honoured by an appointment to the post of valet and butler to Ensign
Harcourt Lowther.
If the stalwart soldier had not been blest with one of those
imperturbable Mark-Tapley-like tempers, which resemble the patent
elliptic springs of a crack coachbuilder’s carriage, and can convey the
traveller unjolted and uninjured over the roughest roads in the journey
of life, he might have found his position as valet, major-domo, and
occasional confidant to Harcourt Lowther, far from the pleasantest berth
to be had in this great tempest-tossed vessel which we call the world.
But Francis Tredethlyn’s serenity of disposition was proof against the
most wearisome burden a man is ever called upon to bear--the
companionship of a discontented fellow-creature, and all the variable
moods, from a feverish cynical kind of gaiety to a dreary and
ill-tempered gravity, which were engendered out of that perpetual
discontent.
But Frank Tredethlyn bore it all cheerfully; with a manly, open-hearted
cheerfulness that had no taint of sycophancy. If the young ensign wanted
to talk to him, well and good--he was ready and willing to talk about
any thing or every thing; but he had his own sentiments upon most
subjects, which sentiments were of a very fast colour, and did not take
any reflected hue from Mr. Lowther’s aristocratic opinions.
It is not to be supposed that Francis Tredethlyn, private soldier and
valet, had any claims to intellectual equality with his master. The
private wrote a fair commercial hand, very bold and big and
resolute-looking; could read aloud without stumbling ignominiously over
the long words; could cast up accounts; and, looking back at the history
of the universal past, saw glimmering faintly over a sea of darkness and
oblivion such beacon-lights as a Norman invasion; a solemn meeting on
the flat turf of Runnymede; a Reformation, with a good deal of
martyr-burning and head-chopping attendant thereupon; a fiery hook-nosed
Dutch liberator, a Jacobite rebellion, and a Reform Bill. Beyond these
limits the attainments of Mr. Tredethlyn did not extend; and the ensign,
when grumbling at the general discomfort of his life, was apt to say
that it was a hard thing to be flung for companionship on a fellow who
was nothing but a boor and a clod.
Mr. Lowther treated his valet very much as a spoiled child treats her
doll; sometimes it pleased him to be monstrously cordial and familiar
with his attendant, while at another time he held Francis aloof by a
haughty reserve of manner, beyond which barrier the other made no effort
to penetrate.
“The fellow does possess that merit,” Harcourt Lowther said sometimes,
“he knows how to keep his place.”
The fact of the matter is, the valet was infinitely less dependent upon
his master’s companionship than his master upon his. There were a
hundred ways in which Francis Tredethlyn could amuse himself; and there
was not a cloud in the sky, a wave of the sea, a leaf in the garden, out
of which he could not take some scrap of pleasure, and which had not a
deeper and truer meaning for him than for the idle young officer who lay
yawning upon his narrow couch with his feet in the air, and nothing
better to do than to admire the shape of his boots, obtained on credit
from a confiding West-end tradesman. Francis had that wide sympathy with
his fellow-creatures which is a special attribute of some men; and was
on the friendliest possible terms with the two convict gardeners, both
of whom had achieved some renown as the most incorrigible and execrable
specimens of the criminal class. Every dog in the little settlement
fawned upon Frank Tredethlyn, and ran to rub his head against his knees,
and slaver his hand with its flapping tongue. He had made a kennel for
two or three of these canine acquaintances in a shady corner of the big
garden, much to the disgust and annoyance of the ensign, who only cared
for such dogs as are calculated to assist the sports of their lord and
master. Staghounds and beagles, foxhounds and terriers, setters,
pointers, and retrievers, clever ratting Scotch terriers, well-bred and
savage bulls, even little short-eared toy terriers, or fawn-coloured and
black-muzzled pugs, were all very well placed in the scheme of creation:
but Mr. Lowther could find no explanation for the existence of those
mongrel creatures who seem to have nothing to do in the world but to
attach themselves with slavish devotion to some brutal master, or to lie
in the most disreputable courts and alleys of a city in hot weather and
catch flies.
But, somehow or other, Francis Tredethlyn seemed generally to do pretty
much as he liked, in spite of military despotism and Mr. Harcourt
Lowther. The dogs were unmolested in their shady corner; and the ensign
was so good as to say that a little aviary of wicker-work and wire,
which Tredethlyn constructed in his leisure hours, and duly filled with
tiny feathered inhabitants, that kept up a faint twittering in the
sunshine, was an improvement to the cottage. Francis was very handy, and
could do wonders with a hammer and a handful of tin tacks; and was,
indeed, altogether a great acquisition to his master, as Mr. Corbett,
the police-magistrate, sometimes remarked to Harcourt Lowther.
“Yes,” Harcourt answered, indifferently, “the fellow is a cut above most
of his class. He is a Cornishman, it seems, and the son of a small
farmer in that land of Tre, Pol, and Pen; and he tells me that he has an
old miser uncle who is supposed to be preternaturally rich. Egad! I wish
I had such an uncle! All my uncles are misers for the matter of that;
but then, unluckily, the poor devils are misers because they’re
preternaturally poor.”
Mr. Lowther stood before the little looking-glass, in the sunny window,
admiring himself, while Francis Tredethlyn helped him on with his coat.
He was going to dine with Mr. Corbett the magistrate, and to spend the
evening in the society of Miss Corbett, who had come out to the colony
with the idea that general officers and wealthy judges would be waiting
on the shore ready to conduct her from the place of debarcation to the
hymeneal altar, and had been a little soured by the disenchantment which
had too surely followed her arrival. She was a gushing damsel of
thirty-five, very tall and square, and of a prevailing drab colour; and
she played tremendous variations of shrill Scottish melodies on a piano
which had been warranted to preserve its purity of tone in any climate,
but upon which the nearest thing to an harmonious octave was a wild
stretch of thirteen notes. Mr. Lowther must have been very low in the
world when he had nothing better to do than to sit by Miss Corbett’s
piano while she banged and rattled at the numerous disguises under which
“Kinloch of Kinloch” appeared in a fantasia of twelve pages, now
prancing jauntily in triplets, now rushing up and down the piano in
chromatic scales, now scampering wildly in double arpeggios, now banging
himself out of all knowledge in common chords, or wailing dismally in a
hideous minor. Fate had done its worst for Ensign Lowther, when he had
no better amusement than to lounge by the side of that ill-used old
instrument, staring reflectively at the thin places on the top of Miss
Corbett’s drab-coloured head.
Harcourt Lowther stood before the glass admiring his handsome face,
while his valet brushed the collar of his coat. Well, he had a right to
admire himself! If Providence had treated him badly, capricious Mother
Nature, who, like any other frivolous-minded parent, elects her prime
favourites without rhyme or reason, had been very bountiful to him in
the matter of an aquiline nose, a finely-modelled mouth and chin, and
deep womanish blue eyes, with a shimmer of gold on their lashes. No one
could deny Mr. Lowther’s claim to be considered a remarkably handsome
man, an elegant young man, a very agreeable and accomplished gentleman.
The world, of course, had nothing to do with that rougher edge of the
ensign’s character which he turned to his valet Francis Tredethlyn in
his cottage at Port Arthur.
He went out presently, swinging his thin cane, and whistling all the
triplets and cadences of an elaborate _scena_; he was an amateur
musician and an amateur artist, playing more or less upon two or three
different instruments, and painting more or less in half-a-dozen
different styles. He could ride across country to the astonishment of
burly Leicestershire squires, who were inclined to think contemptuously
of his small waist and pretty blue eyes, his amber-tinted, jockey-club
perfumed whiskers, trim tops, and unstained “pink.” He was a good shot,
and long ago at Harrow had been renowned as a cricketer. He spoke three
or four modern languages, and had that dim recollection of his classic
studies which is sufficient for a man of the world who knows how to make
much out of little. He was altogether a very accomplished gentleman; but
with him intellectual pursuits were a means rather than an end, and he
took very little pleasure in the society of books or bookmen. He wanted
to be in the world, foremost in the perpetual strife, amid the crash of
drums and trumpets, the roaring of cannon, and glitter of emblazoned
standards flaunting gallantly in the wind. He wanted to be one of the
conquerors in the universal tournament, and to ride up to the Queen of
Beauty flushed and triumphant after the strife, to be admired and
caressed. This is why the inaction of his present existence was so
utterly intolerable to him. He had a supreme belief in himself, and in
the indisputable nature of his right to the best and brightest amongst
earth’s prizes. The time must be indeed out of joint in which there was
nothing better for such as he than a dreary convict settlement in the
island of Tasmania.
Unluckily, the time _was_ out of joint. Robert Lowther, of Lowther Hall,
Hampshire, had given his younger son an aristocratic name and a
gentlemanly education; and then, having nothing more to bestow upon him,
had been forced to leave the lad to fish for himself in the troubled
waters of life. The prospects of the junior had always been more or less
sacrificed to those of the senior of Robert Lowther’s two sons, and
Harcourt bore a hearty grudge against his father and his brother on this
account. Plainly told that he was to expect no more assistance from the
parent purse, the young man had elected to become a barrister; but after
a three years’ course of reading, in which the cultivation of light
literature and modern languages was diversified by a slight sprinkling
of legal study, he had grown heartily sick of his shabbily-furnished
third floor in Hare Court, Temple, and had gladly accepted the price of
a commission in one of Her Majesty’s light infantry regiments from an
affectionate maiden aunt, believing that the regiment would be speedily
under orders for India, where glory and loot no doubt awaited a dashing
young soldier with a very high opinion of his own merits.
Unhappily for Mr. Lowther the regiment did not go to India; but he and
his captain, with a detachment of seventy rank and file, embarked at
Deptford on a misty morning in October, in charge of 450 convicts bound
for Hobart Town. At the time of which I write the ensign had been nearly
a twelvemonth in Van Diemen’s Land, and before him lay the prospect of
another dreary year which must elapse before there was much chance of
his seeing a change of quarters. There are some people who take their
troubles with a cheerful countenance and make the best of a bad bargain;
but Mr. Lowther was not one of them. He had begun to grumble before the
convict ship left Deptford; and he had gone on complaining, with very
little intermission, until to-day, and was likely so to continue until
the end of the chapter. Napoleon at St. Helena could scarcely have felt
his exile more keenly; nor could that fallen hero have more bitterly
resented the injustice of his fate than Harcourt Osborne Lowther, who
believed that there must be something radically wrong in a universe in
which there was no provision of 40,000_l._ or so a year for an elegant
young man with a perfect aquiline nose, a clear ringing touch upon the
piano, a trumpet tone on the flute, a talent for taking pen-and-ink
portraits that were equal to anything of Count D’Orsay’s, and an
irreproachable taste in waistcoats.
He went out now in very tolerable spirits; first, because he had worked
himself into a good temper by grumbling to himself and Tredethlyn all
day; secondly, because he was going to have a good dinner and some rare
old tawny port, which was the boast of Mr. Corbett the magistrate; and
thirdly, because he was going to be admired; and in a Tasmanian
settlement even the worship of a young lady with bony fingers and
drab-coloured eyes and hair is not altogether a despicable tribute.
“When I hear ‘Kinloch of Kinloch’ tortured out of all semblance of
himself upon that wretched piano, I let myself go somehow or other,”
thought the ensign, “and I fancy myself standing behind Maude Hillary’s
Broadwood in the long drawing-room at Twickenham. Twickenham! Shall I
ever see Twickenham again, and Maude Hillary, and the twinkling light
upon the river, and the low branches of the chestnuts, the sedgy banks,
the lazy boats, the lights up at the ‘Star and Garter’ glimmering across
the dusky valley? Shall I ever see that fair civilised land again? or
shall I die in this condemned and accursed hole?--die, forgotten and
unlamented, before I have made any mark in the world?”
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