POOR FRANCIS.
From the second day of the New Year things went pleasantly enough in the
Twickenham household. How could Maude do otherwise than rejoice in the
salvation of her father’s honour--to say nothing of his commercial
prosperity--even though that salvation had been obtained by a great
humiliation on her own part? She would have borne that humiliation very
willingly, and would have freely acknowledged her obligation to Francis
Tredethlyn, could she have seen Julia Desmond reconciled to her lover.
But the separation between these two, which had arisen out of the scene
on New Year’s night, was a perpetual reproach to Maude Hillary.
She was not able to be quite happy, therefore, even though such a
terrible burden had been lifted from her,--even though she saw the dark
cloud swept away from her father’s face. Her girlish frivolity had
departed from her for ever on that terrible night in her father’s study
at Brighton; and there was a womanly softness, a pensive tenderness in
her manner now, that made her even more bewitching than of old. Her
affection for her father--always the ruling passion of her simple
mind--had been intensified by that fiery ordeal through which she had so
lately passed; and there was something very beautiful in the union which
now existed between the father and daughter. Mr. Hillary had been
surprised into confidences that made a new tie between himself and his
child. He could never again entirely withheld his secrets from that
tender friend and consoler. He could never again think of her as a
beautiful, frivolous creature, only intended to wear expensive dresses
and float about in graceful attitudes amongst the costly _bric-à-brac_
of a fashionable drawing-room. He had learned to trust his child; and
poor Maude applied herself diligently to the study of the customs and
dealings common in that mysterious region known to her as the City. She
tried to understand her father’s position--for she was tormented by a
feverish anxiety as to the repayment of Francis Tredethlyn’s twenty
thousand pounds; but the complications of an Australian merchant’s
trade, as affected by wars, and rumours of wars, by alterations in the
rate of discount and the price of Consols, were a little beyond Miss
Hillary’s comprehension, and she was fain to give up the attempt in
despair, and to accept any statement which her father cared to make to
her respecting the altered aspect of his affairs.
There was less company at the Cedars than usual during the bleak
early months of the year. Mr. Hillary worked very sedulously in the
City during this time, and did not care to fill his house with
frivolous young idlers or ponderous City-bred matrons and their
fashionably-educated daughters. The recklessness engendered by the
contemplation of inevitable ruin had given place to the careful
dealing of a man who has a difficult but not impossible task
allotted to him. You can scarcely expect the daughters of King
Danäus to labour very arduously in the filling of those buckets
which they _know_ will not hold water; but if the buckets are only
thin at the bottom, and _may_ possibly carry their contents safely
to the well, it is worth while to work conscientiously.
Francis Tredethlyn’s twenty thousand pounds had done wonders for Lionel
Hillary; but the dry-rot had been for a long time at work in that
stately ship of which the merchant was captain, and the successful
navigation of the vessel, amidst all the rocks and shoals and tempests
of the commercial ocean, was by no means an easy duty.
But Mr. Hillary was sanguine, and his daughter saw the new hopefulness
and brightness of his face, and was very nearly happy. She was not quite
happy, for Harcourt Lowther’s letters grew more despondent and
complaining by every mail. He reproached Maude Hillary for her
prosperity and her indifference; she must be indifferent, he argued, or
she would have succeeded ere this in obtaining her father’s consent to
her marriage with the penniless officer. “There are girls who will go
through fire and water for the man they love,” he wrote in an epistle
that was half filled with fierce reproaches. “I have seen the power of a
woman’s devotion; but then _that_ woman was only a poor simple creature,
and not the daughter of a millionaire. I cannot believe that you could
fail to influence your father, if you really cared to do so. If you
loved me, Maude, this business would have been settled long ago.”
Did she love him? That was a question which she had never set herself to
answer. Had they not engaged themselves to each other in the prettiest
and most sentimental fashion, like a modern Master of Ravenswood and
Lucy Ashton? Maude took the fact of her love for granted. All the
sweetest and tenderest dreams of her life were mingled with the memory
of Harcourt Lowther. He was so superior to all the other men who had
paid her their homage; and it may be that his contemptuous bearing
towards those other men had been a part of the fascination of his
manner. He had affected that modern Edgar Ravenswood tone--that elegant
Timon of Athens-ism--which is so intensely charming in the eyes of a
very young woman, however spurious it may be. And with all this, he had
been so devoted, so delightfully exacting, so deliciously jealous! Maude
looked back to the one sentimental period of her life, and saw Harcourt
Lowther’s image radiant in all the light of her own youthful fancies. So
the worshipper in a village chapel sees some poor painted wooden figure
of a saint glorified by the glitter of tapers, the brightness of flowers
and draperies and decorations. How was she to separate the lamps and the
flowers about the shrine from the image which they adorned? How was she
to discover the paltry nature of that clay out of which the graceful
figure was fashioned? Harcourt Lowther represented to her all that was
brightest and best in her early girlhood; and sitting alone, through
long and thoughtful hours, in the empty rooms at the Cedars, Maude
Hillary brooded very sadly upon the only love-story of her life.
She had ventured to speak of Harcourt to her father once since the
beginning of the year; but her timid pleading had been met by a cruel
repulse.
“Understand me at once and for ever, Maude,” Lionel Hillary said,
sternly; “such a marriage as that can never be. If you were the great
heiress people think you, I might gratify this whim, as I have gratified
other fancies, foolish and extravagant in their way. But the road I am
now treading is by no means too secure under my feet, and I cannot
afford to see my only child the wife of a penniless adventurer. I want
to see you happy, Maude, but not after a sentimental girl’s notion of
happiness. I know what all those pretty theories about a suburban
cottage and poverty come to when they are put into practice. I have seen
the slipshod maid-of-all-work, and the miserable dinners, and the
Kidderminster carpets, and stale bread and rank butter, that belong to
love in a cottage. And more than this, Maude, I know that Harcourt
Lowther is the very last man to ally himself to a dowerless wife.”
“Ah, how little you know him!” Maude murmured, softly. She thought she
knew her lover so well herself, and fancied him the most generous and
devoted of men because he had given her a few half-guinea bouquets,
purchased on credit from a confiding florist. “Ah, dear papa, how little
you know him! He is always reproaching me with my fortune, and lamenting
the gulf it has made between us. Let me tell him of your difficulties;
let me tell him that I am no longer a millionaire’s daughter, that I am
free to marry the man I love. Ah, let me tell him----”
“Not a word, Maude,” answered Lionel Hillary--“not a word to that man,
if you have any love or respect for your father. Remember that I have
trusted you with secrets that a man seldom confides to his daughter.”
“And your confidence shall be sacred, papa,” Miss Hillary replied,
submissively. And thus ended her intercession in favour of Harcourt
Lowther.
She was fain to be contented, however, remembering the great trouble
which had been so near her, and which a merciful hand had lifted away.
She was fain to remember, shudderingly, the feverish horror of that
night at Brighton, and to think gratefully of Francis Tredethlyn, to
whom she owed her father’s rescue. She was grateful to him; but she
could not put entirely away from her the sense of shame left by that
scene in the study, and Julia Desmond’s passionate reproaches. She could
not forget that it was for her sake Francis Tredethlyn had helped her
father, and that the burden of a great obligation must rest upon her
shoulders until that loan of twenty thousand pounds was repaid. Poor
Maude’s unbusiness-like mind entirely ignored any such thing as interest
for Mr. Tredethlyn’s money. She only thought of the loan itself, and the
question of its repayment was perpetually in her mind. Had she not been
the suppliant, at whose suit the money had been lent? and was she not in
a manner the actual debtor?
Things were much better in the City, her father told her; but upon two
or three occasions when she had ventured to hint her anxiety respecting
the early repayment of Francis Tredethlyn’s money, the merchant’s
answers had filled her mind with vague disquietude. There was an
indifference in Mr. Hillary’s manner that alarmed Maude’s keen sense of
right and honour.
“Tredethlyn is too well off to want his money in any desperate hurry, my
dear,” he said; “he is not likely to become a very pressing creditor.”
The hedgerows about Isleworth and Twickenham were green, with their
earliest buds before Francis Tredethlyn came again to the Cedars. Mr.
Hillary had called upon the young man at his hotel several times before
he succeeded in seeing him, and had only with great difficulty wrung
from him an admission of the fact that he was the anonymous lender of
the twenty thousand pounds that had saved the merchant from ruin and
disgrace.
“My dear Tredethlyn, why should you insist upon any disguise?” Mr.
Hillary said, with a pleasant ease that not every man could have
maintained in such a position as that in which the merchant found
himself with regard to this simple-minded, country-bred Crœsus. “Is it
not enough to have been the most generous of men, without trying to
carry generosity to the verge of Quixotism? How can I doubt the identity
of my preserver? I know that Maude betrayed my necessities to you, under
the excitement of those unfortunate theatricals, and I know that loans
of twenty thousand pounds do _not_ drop from the skies. My dear fellow,
I am most heartily thankful to you for what you have done. It was a very
noble thing to do, an action that any man might be proud of doing. If I
had ever doubted your having good blood in your veins, your conduct in
this one matter would have settled my doubts. But I never did doubt it,
my dear Tredethlyn. I have recognized you from the first as a gentleman;
not by the right of an accidental thirty thousand a year, scraped out of
all manner of commercial gutters by a miserly uncle; but by virtue of
some of the best blood in the West of England.”
And then Mr. Hillary stretched out both his hands, and shook those of
Francis Tredethlyn in his vigorous grasp; and altogether the interview
could scarcely have been more entirely satisfactory had the merchant
written a cheque for the twenty thousand pounds on the spot. Indeed, to
Francis any immediate repayment of that money would have been a grievous
mortification. Was it not delightful to him to remember that he had been
of service to _her_ father? Was not the money advanced to the merchant a
kind of link between Maude and the man who loved her so dearly and so
hopelessly,--only a very sordid, earthy link; but better than none?
“I offended her very much that night,” Francis thought; “but perhaps she
will forgive me, and remember me kindly, when she thinks that I have
been useful to her father.” But when Mr. Hillary begged Francis to renew
his visits to Twickenham, the young man resisted those friendly
invitations as obstinately as if the Cedars had been the most obnoxious
place upon earth. He could not muster up courage to encounter Maude
Hillary after that scene in the little study. What if he had offended
too deeply for forgiveness? What if she slew him with a frozen glance
from her lovely eyes? Again and again in his lonely rides, emboldened by
the dusky twilight of the early spring evenings, he had ventured to
haunt the neighbourhood of the old brick-built mansion by the river; but
he could not bring himself to go any nearer to the shrine of his
divinity; and he made all manner of lame excuses in answer to Mr.
Hillary’s cordial invitations.
He was only a clod; only an uneducated rustic, newly cast upon a strange
world, open to all the pleasant snares which are laid for the
simple-minded possessor of thirty thousand a year. Heaven only knows the
perils and temptations into which some young men would have fallen under
similar circumstances. It is something in Francis Tredethlyn’s favour
that his worst mistake was to fall desperately in love with Maude
Hillary, and wear his horse’s shoes out in disconsolate rides about the
twilit lanes and roads in the neighbourhood of her dwelling-place.
And in the mean time Messrs. Kursdale and Scardon were supposed to be
busily employed in their search for the missing girl, who might or might
not have any right to another name than that of Susan Tredethlyn. Very
little came of the lawyers’ endeavours. Several advertisements had been
inserted in the “Times;” but it is to be feared that the lost and
missing advertised for in those columns are too often wanderers in a
weary region, far removed from that comfortable sphere of life in which
the morning papers are punctually delivered to enliven the
breakfast-table. No reply came to any of those mysteriously-worded
appeals to Francis Tredethlyn’s cousin which were concocted by the young
man and his legal advisers; and the image of the friendless girl grew
paler and fainter day by day in the mind of Maude Hillary’s adorer.
At last Fortune--who will generally do anything in the world for us, if
we have patience enough to wait her own time for doing it--brought about
the result which Francis Tredethlyn had so obstinately avoided, yet so
fondly desired. Lounging against the rails one brilliant April day at
the corner opposite Apsley House, Francis saw Maude Hillary’s carriage
drive into the Park.
Yes, there she was, with her sunny hair framed in spring blossoms and
white areophane. The young man seemed to behold the vision of an angel
in a Parisian bonnet, and half wondered if the folds of her white
burnous were not a pair of downy pinions floating away from her divine
shoulders. He grew very red and uncomfortable, and in another moment
would have yielded to the impulse that prompted him to seek refuge in
flight; but before he could do so, the carriage was close to the rails,
Maude Hillary had recognized him, and had told the coachman to stop.
She was not offended with him, then; she forgave him, and thought of him
kindly. His heart swelled with a rapture that was almost overpowering.
Ah! _this_ was love. How different from that placid sense of affection
with which he had regarded his cousin, Susy! how much more delicious!
how infinitely more painful!
“I have wanted so much to see you, Mr. Tredethlyn,” Maude said, after
shaking hands with her bewildered adorer; “why have you never been to
Twickenham?”
“I--I--don’t like--I thought you were angry with me,” stammered Francis,
very awkwardly. Ah, how sad it is that the presence of those we love
best, and in whose eyes we would most desire to appear at an advantage,
should entail upon us the annihilation of anything like ease or grace of
manner! Mr. Tredethlyn felt himself becoming purple and apoplectic,
under the influence of that seraphic creature, whose image had filled
his mind unceasingly for the last six months.
“Angry with you!” exclaimed Maude; “how should I be otherwise than
grateful to you, when I remember how good you have been to papa? Believe
me, Mr. Tredethlyn, I am not too proud to own the extent of our
obligation. I thank you most sincerely. You can never know how grateful
I am for the service you have rendered my dear father.”
She bent her head, and the spring-flowers in her bonnet were very near
him as she said this in a low, earnest voice. But in the next moment the
memory of that uncomfortable scene in the study flashed back upon her,
and she felt that she must always be more or less in a false position
with regard to Francis Tredethlyn. She made a little effort to set
herself right before she parted from him.
“You have seen Julia; you and she are reconciled, I hope. Mr.
Tredethlyn?”
“No; indeed, I have never heard from her since--since I left the Cedars.
Your papa told me that she----Oh, Miss Hillary, I think it was better
that we should part. I don’t think that we had either of us ever really
cared for each other. It was better that it should end as it did.”
“But I would give so much to find Julia, to hear where she is.”
Francis Tredethlyn shook his head hopelessly. He had a vague idea that
he had not done his very uttermost in his search for his cousin Susan,
and he recoiled with terror from the idea of having to engage in a hunt
for Miss Desmond.
“Good-bye, Mr. Tredethlyn; I hope that all will come right, after all;
and I hope that you will believe I am grateful for your goodness to my
father.”
She held out her hand, and the Cornishman took it in his own with almost
as reverential a touch as if it had been some relic handed to him from
an altar. The carriage drove off immediately after this, and Francis saw
that seraphic bonnet with the spring-blossoms melt away and lose itself
among mundane bonnets. He lingered at the rails till the carriage came
back again, and still lingered after that, thinking that Miss Hillary’s
equipage would again return to Hyde-Park Corner; but after out-watching
all the loungers by the rails, and seeing the last of the carriages
leaving the Ladies’ Mile, he was fain to go home, resigned to the
obvious fact that Maude Hillary had left the Park by the Kensington
gates on her homeward route.
He went home, but not disconsolate. Had he not seen and spoken with that
divinity before whom he was the simplest worshipper who ever bowed
before any earthly shrine? Was he not assured of her forgiveness? nay,
even of her gratitude? Her gratitude--Maude Hillary’s gratitude, in
exchange for that vile dross which he had ever held so lightly. Money
was indeed good for something, if it could buy the rapture of that
little interview across the park-rail, in which Francis had played so
very poor a part. He went home, and carried Maude Hillary’s image with
him, and walked up and down his big sitting-room in the Covent Garden
Hotel, smoking a cigar and thinking of the woman he loved: he thought of
her quite as hopelessly as ever _Claude Melnotte_ could have thought of
_Pauline_ before _Beauseant’s_ diabolical suggestions had prompted him
to his treacherous wooing. He thought of her as innocently as a
schoolboy thinks of the stage fairy-queen in a Christmas pantomime, and
no ambitious or selfish dream had any abode in his mind; only when a
brief note reached him from Lionel Hillary, renewing the old
unceremonious invitation to the Cedars, poor Francis could no longer
resist the voice of the charmer, but was fain to pack his portmanteau
and drive down to the merchant’s office, whence Mr. Hillary was to
convey him in the mail phaeton to Twickenham. She was not angry with
him, and he might bask in the sunshine of her presence! For a little
while he might enjoy the dangerous delight, and then the officer to whom
she was betrothed would come back to claim her, and there would be a
wedding at the old church by the Thames; and he, Francis, would see his
divinity radiant in bridal robes and crowned with orange-flowers before
he departed for ever into the outer darkness where she was not.
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