JULIA DESMOND MAKES HERSELF AGREEABLE.
Captain Masters drove Lionel Hillary’s phaeton to the Cedars, when the
crowd in the sunny gardens before the Château de Bourbon had dispersed,
and only a few scattered groups still lingered about the pleasant home
of exiled royalty. Amongst which loiterers might be observed some lively
gentlemen of the occasional-reporter species, who wanted to ascertain
whether there would not be something in the champagne and lobster-salad
way before the _fête_ was finished. Captain Masters drove his friend Mr.
Somerset back to the Cedars in the mail-phaeton, while Lionel Hillary
and Francis Tredethlyn went home with the ladies in the landau.
The man who had been a private soldier only a few months before that
day, and who had not yet been able to realize the change made in his
position by the inheritance of thirty thousand a year, found himself
oppressed by a strange feeling as he sat in Miss Hillary’s open carriage
with his back to the horses, surrounded by billows of silk and lace and
muslin, a surging sea of feminine draperies, from which a faint perfume
was wafted towards him as the summer wind blew in his face. It was not
so much that he was ill at ease in that feminine presence, or in any way
daunted by the fire of two pairs of handsome eyes. The feeling which
oppressed him was rather a sense of unreality. He was like a child at a
pantomime, who sees a stage-fairy for the first time, and cannot believe
that the resplendent creature is only flesh and blood. He looked at
Maude Hillary, and thought of his cousin Susan’s rosy cheeks and brown
hair shaded by the familiar dimity sun-bonnet. There were men in the
world who might aspire to marry such a creature as this Miss Hillary. He
tried to imagine the sort of man who might lift his eyes to that
divinity; and there arose in his mind the picture of a grandiose
creature with yellow whiskers and a geranium in his button-hole. The
æsthetic element in Mr. Tredethlyn’s mind was as yet very imperfectly
developed; and his idea of a lover befitting Maude Hillary leaned rather
to the gaudy king’s-pattern order of mankind.
The Australian merchant sat with his head leaning back against the
cushions of the carriage and his eyes closed. His headache was, if
anything, worse, he confessed, in answer to Maude’s anxious inquiries.
He did not speak three times during the homeward drive, and his daughter
rarely took her eyes from his face. She was very fond of him, and
displayed her affection for him now as frankly as she had done when she
had been a little girl in a white frock, sitting on his knee after
dinner, and eating unwholesome fruits and confections out of his plate.
She watched him now with a tender anxiety in her face, and seemed almost
unconscious of the presence of the big soldier-like individual with a
bronzed countenance and close-cropped black hair. But Francis Tredethlyn
was not entirely neglected, for Miss Desmond appeared determined to
atone for Maude’s want of courtesy. She had heard the Cornishman’s story
from Mr. Somerset, who had heard it from a gentleman whom he described
as “a fellow in the 11th Hussars;” and the handsome Julia felt some
little interest in the hero of the narrative. An ignorant young man, a
farmer’s son, who has suddenly come into a fortune of thirty thousand a
year, is not the sort of person to be met with every day. Julia
remembered that dreary ruin, that tall stone gaol on the bare hill
beyond Limerick, which sounded so well when casually alluded to as
Castle Desmond; but whose image chilled her as it rose, dismal and
stony, before her mind’s eye. She remembered the muddy roads, the
murderous ruts, the broad acres of irredeemable bog, the long rank grass
waving on the roofs of tumbledown stone cabins, the gaunt pigs and
gaunter peasantry; and a feeling that was not altogether ignoble kindled
a sudden flush upon her handsome face. What could not be done for Castle
Desmond and those ill-used peasantry by a chieftainess who should have
thirty thousand a year at her command! She fancied herself a kind of
fairy queen, beneath whose wand pleasant homesteads might arise on those
desolate hills, and yellow cornfields spread a golden mantle over the
valleys now so bare and empty. Miss Desmond’s lot in life was altogether
exceptional, and the sentimental dreams which come to some young women
had no lodgment in her brain. She looked her fate straight in the face,
and was eager to make the best of any opportunity that might fall in her
way. For the present she was very well off where she was; though the
worship of the golden calf, as represented by Maude Hillary, was a
perpetual abomination to her. But she was tolerably resigned to her
present position at the Cedars. It was only in the future that her life
looked dark and threatening. She must marry before Miss Hillary,--that
was essential,--or else she must resign herself to the miserable
position of a companion on sufferance, necessary to Maude, perhaps, but
very disagreeable to Maude’s husband.
Under these circumstances, a chance visitor at the Cedars with thirty
thousand a year for his fortune was not a person to be disdainfully
entreated even by the daughter of all the Desmonds: so Julia was very
kind to Francis Tredethlyn during that brief homeward drive, asked him
all manner of questions respecting his sentiments upon things in general
and the charity _fête_ in particular, and flashed her handsome eyes and
white teeth upon him until he was almost dazzled by their brightness.
Miss Desmond had very dark eyes--eyes that seemed of a greenish hazel
when you saw them in repose, but which looked almost black when they
sparkled athwart a fringe of dusky lashes. She had dark eyes and very
white teeth; and the distinguishing characteristic of her face was the
contrast between the darkness of one and the white glitter of the other.
Mr. Tredethlyn knew that the young lady was very handsome, and that
there was some condescension involved in her friendly notice of him; but
his eyes wandered away to Maude’s fair face and earnest blue eyes, and
there was a suspicion of irrelevance in some of his replies to Miss
Desmond’s animated questions. If he had been less absent-minded, he
might have seen that young lady’s white teeth close vengefully upon her
lower lip as she turned from him after one of those doubtful answers.
The dinner at the Cedars went off very quietly. Mr. Hillary was silent,
but hospitable, or at least as much so as a man can be in these days of
Russian dinners and vicarious hospitality. Francis had lodged at a
comfortable hotel in the regions of Covent Garden since his return from
Cornwall, and had in no way altered his simple habits of life; so he was
not a little puzzled by the array of glasses by the side of his plate,
the lumps of ice which an obsequious attendant dropped ever and anon
into his Moselle, the mysterious compounds in silver dishes which he
discovered suddenly at his elbow whenever he was most abstracted by the
novelty of the scene about him, and the vision of Maude Hillary, sitting
on the other side of the round table in a cloud of white and blue. The
dishes at that wonderful feast seemed so many culinary conundrums to Mr.
Tredethlyn, and I fear that he made some very obvious mistakes in the
management of the spoons and forks perpetually thrust upon him by the
stealthy-footed retainers. But the dinner was over at last, and Captain
Masters opened the dining-room door for the departure of the ladies,
while poor Francis could only sit blankly staring like a countryman at a
play. Lionel Hillary did not linger long over his wine; he had some
papers to look at in his study, he said, and excused himself on that
ground, as well as on account of that obstinate headache of his. The
young men seemed very glad to be released from the atmosphere of
hothouse flowers and pine-apple, faintly mingled with that odour of the
bygone dinner which will hang round the most elegant dining-room,
ventilate it as you will. Was not Maude Hillary in the drawing-room,
whence already might be heard the sparkling ripple of arpeggio passages
upon the piano? The two young loungers followed Mr. Hillary out into the
hall, and Francis went with them, uncomfortably conscious of
disadvantages not to be outbalanced by the possession of half a million
or so in all manner of seven-per-cent-paying investments. The young
soldier blacking his master’s boots had been the easiest-mannered of
mankind; but Oliver Tredethlyn’s heir felt terribly embarrassed in Maude
Hillary’s presence--only in her presence; he was not at all abashed by
Miss Desmond’s eyes and teeth, though all their contrastive brightness
was brought to bear upon him. Maude was at the piano, and Julia was
bending over a stand of engravings. It may be that she had not very long
fallen into that graceful attitude. When the three young men entered the
room she looked up, and Mr. Tredethlyn meeting her friendly glance, and
being considerably at a loss what to do with himself, went over to her,
and found a comfortable haven in a low easy-chair near the couch on
which she was sitting.
“Do you care much for Leech, Mr. Tredethlyn?” she asked, as she turned
over the leaves of a portfolio reprinted from _Punch_.
The young man looked rather puzzled by this question.
“I don’t care much for them,” he answered, frankly. “I never had any but
once, and that was in Van Diemen’s Land, when I had the fever,--fifteen
of them on my temples, and that was no joke, you know, Miss Desmond.”
He was quite at his ease with Julia; but he would not for the world have
been so confidential to Maude Hillary. Miss Desmond laughed
good-naturedly.
“I don’t mean those horrible creatures that they put on one’s temples,”
she exclaimed, “but Mr. John Leech, the caricaturist. You must have seen
_Punch_, even in Van Diemen’s Land?”
“Oh, yes! my mas--superior officer used to get it from his mother every
mail.”
He took the portfolio from Miss Desmond, and turned over the leaves: but
he only stared absently at Mr. Leech’s most brilliant performances, and
his eyes wandered away every now and then to the piano, where Maude
Hillary was skimming through the gems of a new opera and dallying with
her two adorers, deliciously unconscious of their adoration. Had she not
inhabited an atmosphere of universal admiration and affection ever since
she had exhibited her pink cheeks and infantile ringlets in company with
the seven-shilling March peaches and five-guinea pine-apples, after her
father’s pompous dinners, to be admired by ponderous old City magnates
in the pauses of solemn discussions upon the rate of discount and the
last grand crash on the Stock Exchange?
Julia Desmond, always observant--cursed, perhaps, with an especial
faculty for penetrating all unpleasant secrets lying hidden under the
many masks which society has invented for the convenience of
mankind--Miss Desmond, I say, was not slow to perceive the Cornishman’s
preoccupation, nor slow to credit Miss Hillary with another item in that
heavy account so long standing between them.
“Even this country boor, with a great fortune of his own, must pay his
meed of homage to the millionaire’s daughter,” thought Julia. “Is there
some magical power in the possession of money which imparts a kind of
fascination to the possessor?” Colonel Desmond’s daughter had felt some
of the keenest stings of poverty, and it may be that she had grown to
entertain an exaggerated estimation of that golden dross which is so
paltry a thing when considered in a philosophical spirit. She looked at
the young man sitting by her side; and as she looked, a mystic golden
halo seemed to arise about him and surround him, until he appeared
almost like an old picture of a saint, painted upon a shadowless
background of gold. Thirty thousand a year! and he was young, handsome,
manly, good-tempered-looking, or even something more than this; for
there was a dash of nobility in his simple bearing which scarcely seemed
to belong to the runaway son of a small farmer. The good old blood of
the Tredethlyns, once squires and landowners of some degree, was not
dishonoured by the young man who had blacked Harcourt Lowther’s boots in
Van Diemen’s Land. He was not a gentleman after the manner of the
nineteenth century; he seemed rather like a stalwart soldier of the
past, simple and daring, frank and generous. Julia, contemplating him
always enframed in the golden halo, saw that, with the advantage of a
clever woman’s training, he might be made a very presentable creature;
in spite of that private-soldier story, which, after all, was spiced
with a certain flavour of romance.
“People would say I married him for his money,” thought Miss Desmond;
“but then they would say that if I married a provincial banker with
fifteen hundred a year. Thirty thousand! thirty thousand a year!--and he
is not a man who would act meanly in the matter of a settlement--and he
could buy the Irish estate for a mere song--and he might call himself
Tredethlyn Desmond.”
Maude Hillary’s companion and friend had employed herself for a very
long time in the consideration of one grand subject--her own destiny.
For a long time she had estimated every creature who came in her way by
one unvarying gauge. Had he, or had he not, any bearing on that supreme
question? If the answer were in the negative, Miss Desmond wasted no
further thought upon the useless creature. But if she saw in the shadowy
distance some possible combination of circumstances in which the
individual might become a thread, however slightly interwoven, in the
fabric of her destiny, Julia expended her brightest smiles and sweetest
words for his gratification.
It was in no way strange, therefore, that the young lady who had given a
good deal of attention to hare-brained young ensigns and penniless young
curates with nothing better than remote expectations, should consider
Mr. Tredethlyn worthy of her most serious deliberation. The present,
however, was no time for thought,--for were not the young man’s eyes
perpetually wandering towards the slender figure under the light of the
moderator lamp? Miss Desmond felt there was no time to be lost. Already
the rich man had made his election--already he had enrolled himself in
the list of Maude Hillary’s victims. Another woman, perceiving the state
of affairs, might have resigned herself to the loss of this grand chance
of winning a rich husband; but Julia’s courage was not so easily dashed.
It rose, rather, with the thought of contest. Had not her father been a
grand old freebooter, boasting of kingly blood in his battered old body,
and spilling it under the colours of every rebel army in modern Europe?
The Desmond spirit rose in Julia’s breast as she saw Francis
Tredethlyn’s wandering glances, half sheepish, half unconscious.
“I can set myself against her this time,” she thought; “and the battle
between us will be a fair one. _This_ man cannot be a fortune-hunter. We
meet on tolerably equal terms for once in a way, Miss Hillary, and let
us see who will win.”
Julia’s dark eyes flashed their brightest as she looked across all the
width of the room to the radiant-looking girl at the piano; and then she
turned them suddenly upon Francis Tredethlyn, and began to talk to him.
She began to talk to him, and, more than this, she made him listen to
her. Miss Desmond was a brilliant talker. She possessed that wondrous
faculty vulgarly called the gift of the gab,--the power of talking about
everything and anything, or even about nothing, for the matter of that;
the power of enchaining a listener in spite of himself, holding him
prisoner when he had rather be away, and yet not detaining him an
altogether unwilling prisoner;--the power of talking ignorantly, without
seeming to be ignorant; speculating ideas and allusions at a venture,
and never betraying the shallowness of their nature; assuming an
interest in the most uninteresting subject, and never revealing the
hollowness of the assumption,--a power, in short, which in its
fascination seems like a modern form of those classic philtres which
Roman maidens were wont to administer to eligible bachelors in the days
when Rome was young. It may be said that Miss Desmond owed this faculty
in some degree to her Hibernian ancestry; but no suspicion of their
native accent vulgarized her discourse. Only a softer and richer depth
in her low voice betrayed her Celtic origin.
Julia began to talk to Francis Tredethlyn, and, in spite of himself, he
listened, and was fain to withdraw his gaze from the distant figure at
the piano. She talked to him of a soldier’s life, jumping recklessly at
conclusions, and taking it for granted that he must needs possess some
latent spark of military ardour, which would blaze up into a flame under
the fire of her enthusiasm. She talked to him of her father, and all
those guerrilla warfares in which he had won distinction. She talked of
Don Carlos, and Abd-el-Kader, and Garibaldi, whose name had not then the
glorious significance which it carries with it to-day. She talked to him
like a young Joan of Arc or an embryo maid of Saragosa;--and all that
was brightest in Mr. Tredethlyn’s nature kindled beneath her influence.
Had Francis been a stockbroker, Miss Desmond would have discoursed to
him of Lionel Rothschild, or Lafitte, or Mirès; and she would have
glowed with just the same enthusiasm, though her theme had been the
Stock Exchange or the Bourse.
But in spite of himself Mr. Tredethlyn was pleased and interested. His
boyish yearning for a military career had been very nearly trampled out
of him during dreary years of marchings and counter-marchings, and
sword-exercise, and barrack-tyranny, with never the glimpse of a
battle-field, or so much as a brief skirmish with some chance enemy. But
those fresh young feelings all came back to him when Julia discoursed in
low eloquent accents of her father’s foreign experiences. “Ah, that was
something like a military career!” thought the young man. “It was such a
life that I hoped to lead when I ran away from Landresdale; and I
thought I should come back a general, with a cocked-hat and a great
plume of feathers, as the gardener’s son does in the play I saw once at
Falmouth.”
And then Francis Tredethlyn, being by nature candid as a schoolboy newly
come home for his holidays, opened his heart to Miss Desmond, and told
her a good deal about his life. That dark chamber of his memory in which
Susan’s image loomed through the sombre shadows he kept religiously
sealed from every curious eye. But on all other subjects he was very
communicative. He did not tell Julia that he had been Mr. Lowther’s
body-servant; for there was something in that estate of servitude which
had never been entirely pleasant to him, gallantly as he had borne
himself under its serious ordeals. He had known poverty, he told Miss
Desmond, in all its worst bitterness, and had seen his mother and father
die broken-hearted, borne down by a load of petty debt and difficulty,
when the loan of a couple of hundred pounds would have saved them.
“I felt altogether desperate one night, Miss Desmond,” he said, “when my
poor mother was at her worst, and my father sitting in the kitchen as
helpless as a child,--almost daft, as they say in the north. I felt
desperate somehow, and I went out of the house and ran all the way to
Tredethlyn Grange, and asked my uncle Oliver to lend me the money. He
laughed in my face, Miss Desmond, and told me he hadn’t a five-pound
note in the house; and I dare say he spoke the truth, for I think he’d
have gone half crazy at the thought of a sovereign lying idle. I went
back to the farm, and--my mother died the next day.”
He stopped, and sat for some minutes looking at Mr. Hillary’s Axminster
carpet. Julia did not say anything. She was too perfect a tactician not
to know that anything she could say must appear commonplace at such a
moment. She only drew a long breath, a kind of fluttering sigh,
expressive of the deepest sympathy.
“My mother died, Miss Desmond,” the young man went on; “and my father
was not slow to follow her. So, having no one in the world to care for,
except--except a cousin, who had been like a sister to me, I ran away to
Falmouth, and enlisted in a foot regiment, thinking that I had but to
pin a bunch of colours in my hat and march straight off to some field of
battle. I left Cornwall, Miss Desmond; but I never forgot that night
before my mother’s death. I’ve tried to feel grateful to my uncle Oliver
for leaving me this fortune, but I can’t. I ought to feel grateful, I
suppose; but I can’t. The memory of that night sours me, somehow. Money
seems such paltry stuff, after all, when you think that all the golden
coin in this world can’t bring back one human creature from the grave.”
“Ah, yes, indeed,” Miss Desmond murmured, in her tenderest voice.
And then, being blest with a very lively imagination, she found herself
wondering whether, if wealth had been potent to restore the dead, and
she had been possessed with wealth, she would have very much cared to
awaken Patrick Macnamara Ryan O’Brien Desmond from his quiet slumber in
a little churchyard beside the winding Shannon. The old soldier of
fortune was better in his grave perhaps, Julia thought, philosophically.
She had begun to fight the battle of life on her own tactics, and had no
very great opinion of her late father’s strategy.
“He was very clever,” she thought, with a tender remembrance of the
Major’s best manœuvres; “but then one so often saw through him. He
always started with wrong premises, and fancied everyone but himself was
a fool: as if there could be any merit in deceiving only stupid people.”
Miss Desmond was always wise enough to remember that the larger art of
talking well comprehends the smaller art of listening gracefully. She
was not one of those obnoxious people who talk for the sake of talking;
and who, after rattling on without a full-stop for half an hour at a
stretch, will stare vacantly at you while you recite to them some
interesting adventure, evidently thinking of what they mean to say next,
and waiting for the chance of cutting in. Julia Desmond talked with a
purpose,--not because she wanted to talk, but because she wished to
please: and now she listened to Francis Tredethlyn with an unfailing
show of sympathy and interest, that beguiled him on to tell her more and
more. She wound and insinuated herself into his confidence as a
beautiful serpentine creature winds itself into the heart of an
apparently impenetrable forest; and before the evening was finished Mr.
Tredethlyn found himself almost as intimate with this splendid southern
Irishwoman as if she had been his sister. She had set him completely at
his ease; so that he no longer felt out of place in Mr. Hillary’s
gorgeous rooms: and when the merchant, coming into the drawing-room at
eleven o’clock, very pale and worn-looking, asked him to dine at the
Cedars on the following Sunday, Francis unhesitatingly accepted the
invitation. He stole just one glance at Maude as he did so; but she was
in the act of exhibiting one of the newest accomplishments of a
mouse-coloured Skye terrier for the edification of the two young
loungers, and she was quite unconscious of that shy look from Mr.
Tredethlyn’s eyes. He went to her presently to wish her good-night, and
the spell of her gracious presence dazed and bewildered him, to the cost
of the mouse-coloured terrier, upon whose silky paws he trampled in his
embarrassment; and then, essaying to shake hands in a gentlemanly
manner, he forgot what a stalwart giant he was, and squeezed the little
hand that rested so lightly in his, until Maude’s fingers were wounded
by the hoops, and clusters, and hearts, and crescents of diamonds and
opals which twinkled and flashed upon them;--for Miss Hillary had seen
the Marchioness of Londonderry’s famous rings, and never wore any vulgar
mixture of many-coloured jewels upon her pretty white hands. Francis
lingered a little after saying good-night, helpless under the spell of
the enchantress, and then made his way somehow or other out of the room.
Ah! surely uncle Oliver’s money was not such sordid dross, after all,
when it was the golden key which admitted him to that paradise on the
banks of the Thames.
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