TREDETHLYN’S LUCK.
Francis Tredethlyn had to wait a very long time before there could be
any possibility of a letter from the Gray’s Inn solicitors, but he
endured the delay with perfect tranquillity of mind; and if either of
the two men seemed anxious for the arrival of the letter, that man was
Harcourt Lowther, and not Francis Tredethlyn. The ensign had a trick of
alluding to his servant’s good fortune whenever things went especially
ill with himself.
“Here am I without a friend in the world to lend me a five-pound note,”
he would remark, impatiently, “and there are you with a chance of a nice
little legacy from that old uncle of yours. I shouldn’t wonder if you
stand in for four or five hundred at the least.”
“I don’t think it, sir,” the valet always answered, coolly. “I’ve heard
our neighbours say, that what with farming, what with mining, and
dabbling a good bit with funds and railway shares, and such-like, my
uncle must be as rich as a Jew; but for all that, I don’t look to be
much better off for any thing that he’ll have left me. I suppose he’s
left every thing to my cousin Susan, seeing that he had neither kith nor
kin except her and me. But somehow or other I can’t imagine his parting
with his money to any one, even after his death. I almost fancy that
he’d rather have tied it up, if he could, so that the interest upon it
would go on accumulating for ever and ever, thinking as he might
perhaps, being old and eccentric, that he’d have a kind of satisfaction,
even in his grave, from knowing that the money was going on getting more
and more, instead of being spent or squandered.”
Francis Tredethlyn did not make this remark in any spirit of ill-nature;
he spoke like a man who states a plain fact.
“I dare say he was a regular old curmudgeon,” Mr. Lowther answered, “but
he must leave his money to some one, and the fact of these lawyers
advertising for you is ample proof that he must have left some of it to
you.”
Such a conversation as this occurred pretty frequently during the long
interval in which Francis Tredethlyn waited for the answer to his
letter. Sometimes, when Harcourt Lowther was in a very bad temper, he
would accuse his attendant of having grown proud and insolent and lazy,
since the advent of that _Times_ newspaper, which the ensign had
borrowed from Mr. Corbett; but every one of the accusations was as
groundless as many other of the officer’s complaints against people and
things in general. There was no change in Francis Tredethlyn: he did his
work cheerfully and well, obeyed orders in a frank, manly spirit, and
behaved himself altogether in a most exemplary manner.
The time when a letter from England might be expected came round at
last; but Francis Tredethlyn evinced no anxiety for the arrival of the
solicitors’ epistle. A long season of drought had given way before a
sudden downfall of rain, and Harcourt Lowther, who had planned a couple
of days’ kangaroo hunting, and had made all necessary arrangements for
the performance of his duties by a good-natured and efficient
colour-sergeant, found himself a prisoner in his cottage at Port Arthur,
with nothing to do but wait for a change in the weather.
It was very tiresome. The accomplished, light-hearted Harcourt Lowther,
who could take life so pleasantly in the drawing-rooms of Tyburnia or
Belgravia, to whom a summer afternoon amongst a group of fashionable
gossips in the smoking-room of his favourite club was only too short,
found this terrible Tasmanian day intolerably long. He had tried every
available way of getting rid of his time. He had sketched a little, and
read a little, and played the flute a little, and smoked a great deal,
and had relieved the oppression of his spirits by an incalculable number
of yawns, and a little occasional bad language. And now, having
exhausted all these resources, he stood with his head leaning listlessly
against the roughly finished sash of the window, watching the convict
labourers at work under the heavy rain. He derived some faint ray of
comfort from the signs of those two men. At any rate, there were some
people in the world worse off than himself,--unlucky wretches who were
obliged to work in wet weather, and wear a hideous dress, and eat coarse
unpalatable food, or food that appeared abominably coarse and
unpalatable in the eyes of Mr. Harcourt Lowther, who had been known upon
occasion to turn up his nose at the culinary masterpieces of Soyer and
Francatelli.
“Why don’t they kill themselves?” muttered the ensign; “they could drive
rusty nails into their veins, and make an end of themselves somehow.
There are plenty of poisonous things in my garden that they might eat,
and make a finish of their lives that way; but they don’t. They go on
day after day drudging and toiling, and enduring their lives, somehow or
other. I suppose they hope to get away some day. How ever should I bear
my life if I didn’t hope to get away--if I didn’t hope it would come to
an end pretty soon?”
Mr. Lowther, having exhausted the pleasure to be derived from a
contemplation of the convicts, took to pacing up and down the two rooms;
in the inner of which Francis Tredethlyn was busy cleaning his master’s
guns.
Walking backwards and forwards, and backwards and forwards, and passing
the valet every time, Harcourt Lowther was fain to talk to him; rather
for the pleasure and relief of hearing his own voice, than from any
desire to be friendly towards his vassal.
“No letter yet, Tredethlyn?” he said.
“No, sir; but it may come any day.”
“And you wait for it as quietly as if a legacy, more or less, was
nothing to you. I suppose if they send you a remittance, you’ll be
wanting to buy your discharge, and leave this place; and I shall have to
get another servant,--some awkward, ignorant boor, perhaps?”
“I don’t know about that, sir. There’s plenty as good as me, I dare say,
among our fellows. Other folks may have been brought up respectably, and
taken to soldiering, like me. And as for buying my discharge, I don’t
say but I should be glad to do that, if those lawyer people gave me the
chance. I should be glad to get back to England and see my little cousin
Susy. I always call her little Susy, because I can’t help thinking of
her as she was when I remember her first, when she and I were boy and
girl sweethearts together. I’ve thought of her a deal since I got the
news of her father’s death, and I feel anxious about her, somehow or
other, when I fancy her left alone among strangers.”
Harcourt Lowther, always walking backwards and forwards between the two
rooms, was in the sitting-room when his servant said this. He stopped to
look out of the window again, and there seemed to be a kind of dismal
fascination for him in the convicts, towards whom his eyes wandered in a
moody, absent-minded stare.
“And where do you expect to find her--your cousin, I mean--when you do
go back to England?” he asked presently.
“At the old farm, sir, to be sure. Where should I find her but there?
Poor little soul! she’s never known any other home but that, and isn’t
likely to leave it in a hurry of her own free will.”
“Humph!” muttered the officer, “there’s no calculating upon the changes
that take place in this world. I never expect to find any thing as I
left it when I return to a place or people that I’ve been absent from
for any length of time. I expect to find plenty of changes when I get
back to the civilised world again. Do you suppose the people _there_ can
afford to waste their time thinking of wretched exiles _here_? Life with
them is utterly different from what it is with us. When I left England,
I was engaged to a beautiful girl with fifty thousand pounds or so for
her fortune,--a girl who would have married me, and given me a grand
start in life, if it hadn’t been for her father; but do you think I
expect to find her in the same mind when I go back? Do you think two
years’ absence won’t act as a sponge, and wipe _my_ image out of her
thoughts? What has a beautiful, frivolous creature like that to do with
constancy? Every man who looks at her falls over head and ears in love
with her. She is fed upon flattery and adulation. Is it probable, or
natural, or even possible that she will remember _me_?”
It was not likely that Mr. Lowther would ask this question of his valet.
He asked it of himself, rather, in a peevish and complaining spirit, and
seemed to find a dismal comfort in harping on his wrongs and his
miseries.
“I was a fool to think that Maude Hillary could be constant to me!” he
muttered, angrily. In his anger against a world that had treated him so
badly, he was angry with himself for having been so much a fool as to
expect better treatment. He walked to a little looking-glass hanging
over the mantelpiece, and looked at his handsome face. Was it the face
of a man who was to have no place in the world? Were his many graces of
person, his charm of manner, his versatility of mind, to serve for
nothing after all?
“When I think of the fellows who get on in the world, I feel inclined to
make an end of all this by cutting my throat,” he said, as he frowned at
the image in the glass.
He felt the region of the jugular vein softly with the ends of his
fingers as he spoke, and wondered whether death by the severance of that
important artery was a very painful finish for a man to make. He thought
of how he might look if Francis Tredethlyn, finding him late to rise one
morning, broke into his room and saw him lying in the sunny little
chamber deluged with blood and stone dead. He had been very religiously
brought up, amongst gentle, true-hearted women; but there was no more
pious compunction in his mind as he thought of suicide than there might
have been in the mind of an aboriginal inhabitant of the Solomon
Islands. He had a mother at home--a mother who believed in him and
idolized him, to the disparagement of all other creatures; but no image
of her grief and despair arose between him and the scheme of a desperate
death. His thoughts travelled in a narrow circle, of which self was the
unchanging centre.
“I have heard of men making away with themselves on the very eve of some
event which would have made a complete change in their fortunes,” he
thought presently. “I never read the story of a suicide that did not
seem more or less the story of a fool. No, my death shall never make a
paragraph for a newspaper. I must be very hard pushed when I come to
that. This place gives me the blue-devils, and everything looks black to
me out here. I wish Abel Janz Tasman and Captain Cook had perished
before ever they sighted this dismal land. I wish all the lot of petty
Dutch traders and navigators had come to an untimely end before ever
they discovered any one of these miserable islands, which have been a
paradise for convicts and scoundrels, and a hell for gentlemen, during
the last half-century. How was I to know, when I bought a commission in
her Majesty’s service, that the first stage on the road to martial glory
was to be the post of head-gaoler at a settlement in the Antipodes? The
papers talk of a change in the transportation system, a change that will
rid Van Diemen’s Land of its present delightful inhabitants; but no
change is likely to come about in my time. I shall have to drag my chain
out to the last link, I dare say. It’s better to be born lucky than
rich, says the proverb; but how about the poor devils who are neither
rich nor lucky?”
A rap on the little door, that opened out of the sitting-room on to a
patch of garden which lay between the house and the high road, startled
Mr. Lowther out of his long reverie.
“It’s the fellow with the letters,” he cried; and before Francis
Tredethlyn could emerge from the inner room, his master had opened the
door, and had taken a little packet of letters, newspapers, and
magazines from the man who brought them. “One from my mother; one
from--yes--from Maude, at last; the _Times_, _Punch_, _Blackwood’s_,
_United Service_, and the lawyer’s letter!--‘Francis Tredethlyn, Esq.!’
eh? The legacy must be something more than five hundred, my man, or
they’d hardly dub you Esquire.”
He tossed the letter over to his servant as he spoke, and looked at the
Cornishman furtively, with something like envy expressed in his look.
Francis Tredethlyn received the lawyers’ epistle very coolly, and
retired into the adjoining room to read it, while his master sat at the
table in the parlour, tearing off the flimsy envelope of a letter with a
hasty nervous hand.
“From Maude!” he muttered. “At last, my lady: at last, at last!”
The letter was a very long one, written in a clear and bold yet
sufficiently feminine hand, on slippery pink paper scented with a
perfume that had survived an Australian voyage. The contents of the
letter must have been tolerably pleasing to Harcourt Lowther, for he
smiled as he read, and seemed to forget all about Francis Tredethlyn’s
legacy.
“I miss you very much, though papa surrounds us with gaiety; indeed, I
think we have been gayer than ever lately; and he never seems so happy
as when our dear old lawn is crowded with visitors. But I miss you,
Harcourt, in spite of all the cruel insinuations in your last letter.
The summer evenings seem long and dreary when I think of you, so far
away, so unhappy, as your letters tell me you are, Harcourt, though you
are too unselfish to admit the truth in plain words. I scarcely open the
piano once in a month, now that I have no one to play concertante duets.
I scarcely care for a new opera; for the men who come into our box bore
me to death with their vapid talk, and I know that not one of them
understands what he talks about. I am not happy, Harcourt, though you
taunt me with my wealth and my position, and the difference between our
lives. I am not happy, for our future seems to grow darker and darker
every day. I have mentioned you to my father several times, and every
time he seems more angry than the last; so now I feel that your name is
tacitly tabooed; and any chance allusion to you from the lips of
strangers makes me tremble and turn cold. I have tried in vain to
comprehend the reason of my father’s aversion to any thought of a
marriage between you and me. I have been so much a spoiled child, that
to be thwarted or opposed on any subject seems strange to me, most of
all when that subject is so near my heart. I can scarcely think that my
dear father would allow any consideration of fortune to stand in the way
of happiness, and yet that is the only consideration that can influence
him, for I know that he always liked and admired you. You must awhile be
patient: what I can do I will. And you must trust me, dear Harcourt, and
not pain me again as you have pained me by those unkind doubts of my
constancy. You know that money has never been any consideration with me;
and you ought to know that I would willingly lose every penny of my
fortune rather than sacrifice my promise to you.”
“O yes; that’s all very well!” muttered Mr. Lowther peevishly, after
having read this part of Miss Hillary’s epistle twice over; “but Lionel
Hillary’s daughter with fifty thousand pounds or so, and without a
penny, are two very different people. Not but what she’s always a
beautiful girl and a charming girl; but a man can have his pick of
charming and beautiful girls, if _that’s_ all he wants to set him up in
life. I love her, Heaven knows; and the sight of her writing sends a
thrill through my veins like the touch of her hand, or the fluttering of
her breath upon my cheek. But poverty makes a man practical, and I think
I never read a letter that had less of the practical in it than this
letter. It’s a woman’s epistle all over. We must be patient, and wait
till we’re worn out by waiting, and the engagement between us becomes a
chain that binds us both from better things, and the sound of each
other’s name becomes a nuisance to us from its associations of trouble
and responsibility. That’s what a long engagement generally comes to. If
I’d distinguished myself in India, led a desperate charge against
orders, or taken the gate of an Affghan fortress, or done something
reckless and mad-headed and lucky, and could have gone back with a
captaincy, and a dash of newspaper celebrity about my name, I might have
hoped that old Hillary, in a moment of maudlin after-dinner generosity,
would have given his consent to my marriage with Maude. But how am I to
present myself at Twickenham, and say, ‘I have been taking care of
convicts for the last two years,--not particularly well, for more
convicts have escaped into the bush in my time than in any other man’s
time, according to the reports,--and I have come back to England with
the same rank that I had when I left, and with less money than I took
away with me’? Can I go to Lionel Hillary and say that? Is that the sort
of argument which will induce a man to give me his daughter and her
fortune?”
He went back to Miss Hillary’s letter. It was only a frivolous letter,
after all; and it contained more intelligence about a morning concert in
Hanover Square, a regatta at Ryde, and a preternaturally sagacious
Skye-terrier, than was likely to be gratifying to a discontented exile
at Port Arthur. But Mr. Lowther was fain to content himself as he might
with the pretty girlish gossip. It was something, after all his
grumbling, to receive the assurance that he was not entirely forgotten
by the only daughter and sole heiress of one of the richest merchants in
the city of London.
He looked up presently from his letter, to see Francis Tredethlyn
standing in the doorway between the two rooms, pale to the lips, and
clutching at his throat as if he had some difficulty in breathing.
“What’s the matter, man?” asked the ensign; “hasn’t the old chap left
you any money, after all?”
“It isn’t that, sir,” gasped the soldier; “there’s money enough and to
spare. It’s my cousin Susy; that poor little innocent creature, that was
as pure as the apple-blossoms on the gnarled old trees in the orchard
when I left home. She’s done something, sir--something that turned her
father against her. She’s gone away, sir, and no one knows where she’s
gone, or what’s come of her, or whether she’s dead or alive. And her
father disinherited her, poor lost lamb; and--that’ll tell you all about
the fortune, sir, if you want to know about it.” Francis Tredethlyn
threw the lawyer’s letter upon the table before his master, and walked
away to the window--the same window at which the ensign had stood
looking out at the convicts half an hour before.
Harcourt Lowther read the lawyer’s letter, at first with a listless,
indifferent air, and then as eagerly as if he had been reading his own
death-warrant. It was a long letter, worded in a very formal manner, but
it set forth the fact that the fortune left by Oliver Tredethlyn to his
nephew Francis amounted to something over thirty thousand a year.
For some minutes after this fact had been made clear to him Harcourt
Lowther sat with the open letter before him, staring at the lines. Then
suddenly the blank stupor upon his face gave way to a look of despair.
The ensign flung his head and arms upon the table, and burst into tears.
“I have been eating my own heart in this place for nearly two years,” he
sobbed, “and not one ray of light--no, by the heaven above me! not
one--has dawned upon my life; and a valet, a private soldier, the fellow
who scours my rooms and blacks my boots, has thirty thousand a year left
him!”
There was something so terrible in this hysterical outburst of rage and
envy, something so utterly piteous in this unmanly revolt against
another man’s good fortune, that Francis Tredethlyn forgot his own
trouble before the aspect of his master’s degradation.
“Don’t, sir,” he cried, “for God’s sake, don’t do that! All the riches
in the world wouldn’t pay a man for taking on like that. If you want
money, you’re welcome to borrow some of mine as soon as ever I get the
power to lend it. There’s more than I care to have, or could ever spend.
You’ll be welcome to what you want, Mr. Lowther. I don’t set much
account upon money, and I don’t think I ever shall; and the thoughts of
this fortune don’t give me half the pleasure I’ve felt in the gift of a
crown-piece long ago, when I was a little lad. I suppose it was because
I thought then there was nothing in all the world that five shillings
wouldn’t buy, and because I’m wiser now, and know there are some things
a million of money can’t purchase. The news of this money has brought
the thoughts of my father and my mother back to me, Mr. Lowther. I’d
give every sixpence of it, if it could bring back the past, and pay out
the bailiff’s man that was sitting by our kitchen-fire at home when my
mother lay ill up-stairs. But it can’t do that. My father and mother
both died poor, and all this money can’t buy back one of the sorrowful
days they spent in the old farm, when things went from bad to worse, and
debt and ruin came down upon us. I don’t seem to care for the money, Mr.
Lowther; I am dazed and bewildered, somehow, by the greatness of the
sum, but I don’t seem to care.”
The ensign had calmed himself by this time. He got up and brushed the
tears from his eyes, real tears of rage, envy, mortification, and
despair. There was a faint blush upon his face, the one evidence of his
shame which he could not suppress in a moment, but all other evidences
of feeling had passed away.
“You’re a good fellow, Tredethlyn,” he said, “an excellent
simple-hearted fellow; as simple-hearted as a baby,--for who but a baby
ever talked as you talk about this money? and I congratulate you upon
your good luck. I see these lawyer fellows send you a bill for a couple
of hundred; that’ll buy you off here pleasantly, and get you back to
England. My advice to you is to get back as fast as ever you can, and
enter into possession of your property. It seems a complicated kind of
estate from what I can make out--mining property, and agricultural
property, and shares in half the speculations of modern times,--but it’s
a great estate, and that’s all you want to know. Go back; and as soon as
ever I can get away from this accursed hole, I’ll look you up in London;
and I--I _will_ borrow a little of that money you generously offer, and
I’ll turn bear leader, and show you what life is in the upper circle, to
which thirty thousand a year is the universal ‘open sesame.’”
The ensign slapped his hand upon his servant’s shoulder with a jovial
air, and spoke almost as gaily as if Oliver Tredethlyn’s fortune was to
be in some way or other a stroke of good luck for himself.
“Thank you, sir,” Francis answered, thoughtfully, “you’re very good; but
I don’t care to force myself in among grand folks because I’m rich
enough to do as they do. I’ve got a task before me, and it may be a long
one.”
“A task!”
“Yes; I’ve got to look for my cousin.”
“Your cousin, Susan Tredethlyn!--the girl whose portrait you showed me?”
“Yes, sir. All this money would have been hers, most likely, if she
hadn’t done something to turn my uncle against her. I can’t forget that,
you see, sir; and the first use I make of the money will be to spend
some of it in looking after her.”
“Susan Tredethlyn,” muttered Harcourt Lowther,--“Susan Tredethlyn. That
portrait you showed me was a very bad one, for I haven’t the least
notion of what your cousin is like.”
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