HARCOURT LOWTHER’S WELCOME.
Within a month from that night on which the merchant’s daughter and
Francis Tredethlyn had lingered so long together on the terrace up the
river, Maude Hillary sat at her desk in the little study, trying to
begin the most difficult letter she had ever had occasion to write.
The letter was to be addressed to Harcourt Lowther, and the three words,
“My dear Harcourt,” were already written on the rose-tinted foreign
note-paper; but beyond those preliminary words Maude found it very
difficult to proceed.
That which she had to tell the distant soldier, sorely tried by
inglorious idleness in a penal settlement, and inclined to resent every
stroke of ill-fortune, was by no means a pleasant thing to tell. She had
to announce to him that the promise she had made long ago in the
twilight by the river had been deliberately broken. She had to tell him
that she was the plighted wife of another man; and she was not free to
reveal to him any one of the strange circumstances that had pressed so
cruelly upon her, pushing her, little by little, into this renunciation
of her first and only love.
It was only a very commonplace letter that Miss Hillary could write to
her discarded lover. She could only tell the old, common story, and put
in the hackneyed pleas so often heard in the court of Cupid;--her
father’s wishes: her desire to secure his happiness rather than her own;
and then a wild womanly prayer for pity: an entreaty that her lover
would believe in the existence of stronger reasons--higher motives--the
nature of which she was not free to reveal. And last of all, after many
pages of passionate supplication for pardon, with not a little violation
of the nicer laws propounded by Lindley Murray and his successors,--at
the very last there came one page blotted with tears, earnest yet
incoherent, in which Miss Hillary implored Mr. Lowther to forget her,
and to seek happiness with a happier woman. Never had she loved him so
dearly as while she wrote that last page, in which she resigned him for
ever. Surely Queen Guinevere’s diamonds must have sparkled their very
brightest just in that one angry moment in which she flung them into the
river.
Yes, it had come to this. Maude Hillary, like a modern Iphigenia, had
sacrificed herself for the benefit of her father. The burden of that
debt which had been incurred by her agency had weighed too heavily upon
her girlish breast. Somehow or other Francis Tredethlyn must be paid;
and since he loved her so devotedly, so foolishly--since he held her as
the brightest treasure to be won by aspiring man--it was surely better
that he should take this poor recompense than go altogether unrewarded.
It may be that Maude Hillary would under no circumstances deliberately
have broken faith with her betrothed lover. But these grand crises, upon
which the fate of a lifetime may depend, are apt to come very suddenly
upon us. The great flood-tide of fate arises, and carries away the weak
creatures afloat on its resistless waters. A moment of hesitation--a few
faltering words--half doubtful, half imploring, and the thing is done.
It had all happened on the day on which Francis Tredethlyn accepted Mr.
Hillary’s magnanimous offer, and allowed himself to be created a
sleeping partner in the Australian house. It was only natural that on
such a day Francis should dine at the Cedars; and it was only natural
that Lionel Hillary should make a little speech about the young man,
telling his daughter of the generosity of this noble-minded Cornishman,
who had been something more than a son to him--a friend, a benefactor, a
preserver. What praise could be loud enough for a man who would lend
thirty thousand pounds without security? And then this noble-minded
Cornishman, whose heart was like a great lump of tinder--only wanting
the feeblest spark to kindle it into a blaze--burst out into a
passionate declaration of his love. What was his fortune but so much
dirt, which he was only too glad to fling under the feet of Miss
Hillary? Would he not go out into the world to-morrow penniless,
barefoot, a beggar, if by so doing he could add to her happiness? He
asked a few such questions as these: and then cried out suddenly that he
was a despicable wretch, and that he was ashamed of himself for saying
all this, when he knew that Miss Hillary’s heart was given to another
man. He would go, he said; she should never again be tormented by him.
She should not be annoyed by so much as the mention of his name. After
which passionate speech Mr. Tredethlyn grasped the merchants hand, and
then made a rush towards the door. He would fain have suited the action
to the word; he wanted to go away that moment, and hide himself for ever
from Maude Hillary. But before he could reach the door Maude was by his
side, with her hands clasped about his arm her face looking upward at
his, and drowned with tears.
“How good you are!” she cried. “Don’t go away; we cannot part from you
like this. You have been so good to my father. Ah, how can we ever
recompense so much devotion! If my esteem--my gratitude--can make you
happy, they are yours,--they have long been yours. I renounce every
other thought, every other duty. I can have no duty higher than this.”
The last words were almost stifled on her lips, for Francis Tredethlyn
caught her to his breast as passionately as in that last scene of the
“Lady of Lyons.”
“Maude, my love--my angel--you will renounce, for my sake--you--you--will
be my own--my wife!” he gasped, incoherently. “No--no, I cannot accept
such a sacrifice--I am not so mean, so selfish, as to----”
But Mr. Hillary, hovering over his daughter and the generous-minded
young Cornishman, would not allow Francis to finish this sentence.
“My dear boy!” he exclaimed,--“my darling Maude! nothing upon earth
could give me greater pleasure than this, because I know that it is for
your mutual happiness. What joy can be deeper or purer than that of a
father who knows that his child has won for herself the devoted
affection of a good man?”
“And the thirty thousand pounds will be sunk for ever and ever in the
firm of Hillary and Co.,” the merchant may have thought at the close of
that enthusiastic address.
Thus it was that Maude Hillary arrived at the very point towards which
fate and her father had been pushing her for the last twelve months.
After that passionate impulse of self-sacrifice had passed away, a dull
dead feeling of pain took possession of her breast. Alone in the quiet
of her own pretty rooms; alone through the long sunny July mornings with
her books, and Berlin-wool work, and piano, she had only too much time
to consider the step she had taken; she had only too much time to think
of her broken vows, her scattered hopes. And she did think of these
things,--with cruel remorse and self-upbraiding, with bitter and
unavailing regret.
And now Francis Tredethlyn appeared to her all at once in a new light.
Alas! he was no longer the noble-hearted friend to whom she could appeal
for help in the day of trouble. He was no longer the humble adorer,
kneeling on the lowest step of the altar, remote and submissive. He was
her affianced husband, and he had a right to her society. He had a right
to attend her in her walks and rides, to linger near the piano when she
sang, to hold perpetual skeins of Berlin-wool during those tedious
morning visits which he made now and again to the Cedars. All these
privileges were his by right; and other people gave place when he
approached Miss Hillary, and watched to see her face brighten as he drew
near her. It was not that Francis himself was in any way altered. His
adoration of his bright divinity was no less humble than of old--even
now when he knew that the goddess was to descend from her pedestal and
exchange her starry crown for the orange-blossoms of an earthly bride.
He was in no way changed; the distance between himself and Maude Hillary
was as wide as ever. He could set it before him--a palpable gulf, across
which he beheld her, a strange creature, in a strange land,--a creature
who might hold out her hand to him once in a way across the impassable
abyss, but who could never draw him near her. Alas for Francis
Tredethlyn’s loveless betrothal! that dreary distance was growing wider
every day, now that Iphigenia knew the hour of sacrifice was drawing
near.
It had been one thing to think of Mr. Tredethlyn as a friend--a dear and
devoted friend, worthy to be regarded with an almost sisterly affection.
It was another thing to contemplate him as a future husband. All his
ignorance, his homely ways of speaking and thinking, his little
awkwardnesses and stupidities, his vacillating temperament in the matter
of spoons and forks at those elaborate Russian dinners,--all these
things pained Maude Hillary now as cruelly as they had galled Miss
Desmond’s proud spirit some six months before. And then to the faint
shivering pain of disgust was joined all the bitterness of contrast.
Never had Harcourt Lowther’s image seemed so near to this wayward girl
as it seemed now, when she was the promised wife of another man, and
tried most honestly to shut the memory of her old lover completely out
of her mind. Never had he been so near to her. His graces of manner, his
accomplishments, the light touch of his pointed fingers on the piano,
the deep organ-tone that he alone amongst amateurs could draw out of a
flute, the free outlines of his pencil, the transparency of his
water-colour sketches, the graphic humour of his pen-and-ink
caricatures; the airy wit, which never verged upon vulgarity; the fervid
eloquence, which never degenerated into rant; the trenchant satire,
which never sank to the vile level of personal spite: she thought of her
discarded lover: and all the showy attributes that had won her girlish
love arose before her in cruel contrast with the deficiencies of Francis
Tredethlyn.
Yet all this time she was very kind to her betrothed husband. It was not
in her to be scornfully indifferent to the man whom she regarded as her
father’s friend and benefactor. She was not a woman to sacrifice herself
with an ill grace. The silent warfare went on within her breast. She
struggled and suffered, but she had always the same kind, cold smile,
the same gentle words for the man whom she had promised to marry.
And in the meantime the hands went steadily round upon all the
clock-dials, and the inevitable hour drew very near. Busy milliners and
dressmakers, bootmakers and outfitters, came backwards and forwards from
Wigmore Street to the Cedars, and were busy and glad. Mr. Hillary’s
credit was unlimited, and it was almost as if a princess of the blood
royal had been about to marry. Francis Tredethlyn bought the lease of a
big black-looking house in a new neighbourhood near Hyde Park: and there
were negotiations pending for the purchase of an estate within a few
miles of Windsor.
August was melting into September. Already there were bright glimpses of
red and yellow here and there among the sombre green of the woodlands.
The wedding was to take place very early in October: the guests were
bidden, the dresses of the bridesmaids were chosen, and in the still
evening Iphigenia walked alone on the terrace. She was very seldom alone
at this hour; but to-night her father had taken Francis Tredethlyn to a
club-dinner, given by a bachelor stockbroker of some eminence in Mr.
Hillary’s circle. To-night Maude was alone; and leaning upon the broad
balustrade, with her elbow resting amongst the thick ivy that crept
along the stone, she looked down at the still water--the dark melancholy
water--and thought of her past life.
It seemed so far away from her now, left so entirely behind--all that
frivolous past. She seemed to have grown out of herself since the
knowledge of her father’s troubles had come upon her; and looking
backwards she saw a careless and happy creature, who bore no
relationship to this thoughtful woman, before whom all the future seemed
a blank and dreary country, unillumined by one glimpse of sunshine.
She turned away from the water presently, and walked slowly up and down
the long terrace. There seemed to be a melancholy influence in the
evening stillness, the dusky shadow lying upon every object, the distant
peal of bells floating across the river from some church where the
ringers were practising; even the voices of passing boatmen and the low
monotonous splash of oars took a pensive tone, in unison with the hour
and Maude Hillary’s sad remorseful thoughts.
She was near the end of the terrace, close to that ivy-grown old
summerhouse which had sheltered the patched and powdered beauties of
King George the Second’s Court, when she was startled by the sound of a
chain grating against stone-work, and rapid steps on the flight of
stairs leading from the terrace to the river. The young men who came to
the Cedars were very fond of making the journey by water: so there was
nothing strange in the sound of a step on the river stair. Maude turned
to meet the intruder with a sense of weariness and vexation. He would
not be likely to stay long, whoever he was; but the prospect of even ten
minutes’ idle conventional discourse jarred upon her present frame of
mind.
She turned to meet the unwelcome visitor with a languid sigh, and saw a
man hurrying towards her in the twilight; a man in whose figure and
dress there was a careless grace, an undefinable air of distinction,
which, in Maude Hillary’s eyes, stamped him as different from all the
rest of the world.
He came hurrying towards her. In a moment he was close to her, holding
out his arms, eager to take her to his breast. But she recoiled from
him, deadly white, and with her hands extended, motioning him back.
“Don’t touch me,” she cried; “don’t come near me. Ah, you don’t
know--you cannot have had my letter.”
“What letter?” cried Mr. Lowther, staring almost fiercely at the
shrinking girl. These sort of things so rapidly make themselves
understood. Harcourt Lowther saw at once that something was wrong. “What
letter?”
“My last; the letter in which I told you that----Ah, how you will hate
and despise me! But if you could know all, Harcourt, as you never can,
you might excuse--you might forgive----”
A torrent of sobs broke the sentence.
“Oh, I think I understand,” said Harcourt Lowther, very quietly. “You
have thrown me over, Miss Hillary.”
She held out her clasped hands towards him with an imploring gesture;
and then in broken sentences, in half-finished phrases, that were
rendered incoherent by her sobs, she recapitulated something of her
letter of explanation. Mr. Lowther’s face had blanched before this, and
his lower lip quivered now and then with a little spasmodic action; but
he listened very quietly to all Maude had to say.
“I ought never to have expected anything else,” he answered, when she
had finished her piteous attempt to explain and justify her conduct
without revealing her father’s commercial secrets. “I don’t know that I
ever _did_ expect anything else,” he went on very deliberately. “What
has a penniless younger son to do among the children of Mammon? How can
the earthen pot hope to sail down the stream with the big brazen
vessels, and escape wreck and ruin? Don’t let there be any scene between
us, Miss Hillary; I hate all domestic tragedy, and I think if my heart
were breaking--and men’s hearts _have_ been known to break--I could take
things quietly. You have grown tired of our long and apparently hopeless
engagement, and you have promised to marry somebody else. It is all
perfectly natural. May I know the name of my fortunate rival?”
“His name is Tredethlyn--Francis Tredethlyn.”
“A Cornishman,” added Harcourt Lowther,--“a fellow who has lately come
into a great fortune?”
“Yes. You know him, then?”
“Intimately. I congratulate you on your choice, Miss Hillary. Francis
Tredethlyn is a most excellent fellow. I have reason to speak well of
him, for he was my servant for a year and a half out yonder in Van
Diemen’s Land.”
“Your servant?”
“Yes. He was really the best of fellows; and in the art of brushing a
coat or cleaning a pair of riding-boots was positively unrivalled.”
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