ENTANGLEMENTS IN THE WEB.
Harcourt Lowther, calling at the stuccoed mansion in time for Mrs.
Tredethlyn’s afternoon tea, found a dark and dashing young lady
comfortably established in a luxurious amber damask nest against a
background of amber curtain, whose glowing tints were extremely becoming
to the young lady’s clear complexion. The two ladies were quite alone,
though Maude declared gaily that she had had crowds of people that
afternoon.
“You generally come so late, Mr. Lowther,” she said. “Those were the
Dudley Boltons whom you met going out--nice people, fresh from the wolds
of Yorkshire, quite new to town, people who come once in ten years or
so, when there’s an International Exhibition, or something of that kind.
Isn’t it strange that people _can_ be so civilized living in the depths
of the country--read the last novel--see the last great picture--because
you see, nowadays, great pictures jog about the country like popular
prime ministers, and if Mahomet can’t go to the mountain in Trafalgar
Square, the mountain goes to meet Mahomet in his provincial town. But I
want to introduce you to Miss Desmond, the daughter of the late Colonel
Desmond, papa’s oldest friend. Julia dear, Mr. Lowther has heard me talk
of you perpetually, and you have heard a good deal of him,”--Mrs.
Tredethlyn blushed a little as she said this,--“so I expect you to be
intensely intimate immediately.”
This introduction took place towards the close of June, nearly a month
after the Oaks day; and during the time that had elapsed since that
event, Harcourt Lowther, in his character of Mephistopheles, had found
Faust what is popularly called a very troublesome customer. Francis
Tredethlyn had a secret, and so far it had been a secret which Mr.
Lowther could neither penetrate nor turn to his own use.
Yes, this simple-minded Cornishman, whose confiding candour had revealed
every feeling, and every shade of feeling, to his baneful companion, had
his secret now, and seemed to know very well how to keep it.
There were days on which he had business which took him a little way out
of town; and Harcourt Lowther, pumping never so wisely, could pump no
further information out of the secret depths of his friend’s mind. He
had even proposed to accompany Francis on these mysterious excursions,
but his friendly offers had been met by a point-blank refusal. He had
ventured a little playful _badinage_; he had gone so far as to make an
occasional insinuation; but Francis Tredethlyn had repelled his hints
with the fiery indignation of a man whose tenderest and noblest feelings
are involved in the subject of his friend’s _persiflage_.
“I know you get plenty of pleasant little witticisms of that kind out of
those flimsy-covered books Mr. Jeffs supplies you with; but hadn’t you
better keep them for Mrs. de Rothsay’s next evening party? They tell so
much better amongst people who understand the French phrases you’re so
fond of using. Some of your best things might as well be Greek, so far
as I am concerned,” Mr. Tredethlyn said, coolly.
Mephistopheles shrugged his shoulders in mild deprecation of his pupil’s
impertinence. Faust was positively beginning to acquire the tone of good
society. He was learning to be insolent.
Harcourt Lowther left no stone unturned in his endeavours to discover
the Cornishman’s secret, but unluckily there were not many stones to
turn: and when Mr. Lowther had pumped Francis, and pumped Francis’s
valet, who could give no clue whatever to his master’s conduct, there
remained nothing more to be done; unless, indeed, Mr. Lowther had cared
to resort to the private-inquiry system, and employ a shabby-genteel
person at three or four guineas a week to track the footsteps of Mr.
Tredethlyn. But this was a plan to which Harcourt Lowther could only
have resorted in the most desperate extremity. If possible, he wanted to
do dirty work _without_ soiling his fingers. The private-inquiry system
would have been a dangerous kind of machinery to put into
motion--dangerous even if successful--utterly fatal in the case of
failure; and it was just possible that the shabby-genteel person might
do his spiriting awkwardly, and make his watchfulness sufficiently
intrusive to arouse suspicion, and bring impetuous Francis Tredethlyn
down upon him in an avalanche of manly rage.
“Pshaw!” thought Mr. Lowther, after a meditative and leisurely review of
his position. “It’s only a matter of so much time. ‘_Point de zèle_,’
said Talleyrand; but he only meant, don’t be in a hurry. Your zealous
diplomatist may be a very valuable person, provided he knows now to keep
the secret of his earnestness; but your impatient diplomatist is a
certain failure. Yet there are people who _will_ gather their fruit
before it is ripe. When your true diplomatist comes to an awkward knot
in the airy network of his scheme, the best thing he can do is to sit
down quietly before the web until some accidental hand unravels the
entanglement. Chance is the unfailing friend of the schemer; but the
goddess is very capricious in her visiting routine, and there are stupid
creatures who won’t wait for a morning call. Luckily, I am not one of
them. I can afford to be patient. Maude is an angel; the Stuccoville
dinners are excellent, and the Stuccoville wines are my own selection;
and for the rest I do pretty well. Ecarté is a most agreeable game;
especially when one plays with a man who is half his time so
absent-minded as to forget to mark the king. Yes, dear Francis, I can
afford to wait for the lucky accident which is to put me in possession
of the clue to those little trips of yours, in hansom cabs, which you
prefer to pick up for yourself; thereby depriving your valet of any help
to be derived by an examination of the number of the vehicle, and a
subsequent chat with the driver.”
Harcourt Lowther came very frequently to Mrs. Tredethlyn’s
drawing-rooms, now that she was to be found always accompanied by her
darling Julia, and entirely unembarrassed by his visits. He did not
always come at the orthodox hour, but would make his appearance between
eleven and twelve o’clock on a hopelessly rainy morning, with a new
book, or a roll of music, or something delightfully hideous in the way
of jelly-fish for Maude’s aquarium, or the last fashion in ferns or
orchids for Maude’s conservatories; and the back of Mrs. Tredethlyn’s
house broke out into ferneries and conservatories wherever the ingenuity
of a fashionable builder could find an excuse for carrying out Mrs.
Tredethlyn’s graceful ideas, and swelling Mr. Tredethlyn’s little
account.
Mr. Lowther had contrived to make himself the friend of the house, so
there was always some very plausible excuse for visits at unorthodox
hours, and pleasant dawdling in Maude’s pretty morning-room; and
Stuccoville, furtively observant behind rose-coloured curtains in
opposite houses, took note of Mr. Lowther’s morning calls, and kept a
sharp account of the period that elapsed between his entrances and
exits; and all this time nothing could be more delicately deferential,
more tenderly respectful, than Harcourt Lowther’s manner to his friend’s
wife. By not one hazardous phrase, by not so much as a furtive glance, a
half-suppressed sigh, had he awakened Maude to a perception of possible
danger in this pleasant intimacy with a man who had once been her
affianced husband. No poisonous breath from the schemer’s false lips had
tarnished the purity of this bright young soul; but Stuccoville had
taken alarm already, and--in confidential converse in cosy comers of
ottomans, under the shadow of a tall vase of exotics, or a Parian
statuette--declared Mrs. Tredethlyn’s conduct to be “Positively
appalling, my dear; and that absurd west-country dolt of a husband
continues as blind as ever; and now she has taken a companion, my love.
You remember the companion in ‘Vanity Fair;’ that delightful Becky calls
her a sheep-dog; and you recollect Madame de Marneffe’s companion in
that horrible novel of Balzac’s, which my tiresome Georgiana found the
other morning at the bottom of a cupboard, in which her brother Charles
keeps his cricketing shoes and fishing-tackle, and was discovered by the
governess sitting on the ground positively devouring the book, and when
questioned said it was ‘Télémaque;’ but as I was about to tell you, my
dear, with regard to Mrs. T---- and Mr. H. L----!” and so the little
mole-hill gathered size, and gradually grew into a mountain.
Harcourt Lowther and Mrs. Tredethlyn’s darling Julia were not slow to
arrive at a very friendly understanding. One morning spent in Miss
Desmond’s society was quite sufficient to show so subtle an observer as
Harcourt the real state of that young lady’s feelings with regard to her
patroness. Indeed, Julia did not take much trouble to conceal her
sentiments. Gay and animated one minute, darkly brooding the next, very
often captious and contradictory, sharply ironical, or sternly defiant,
she was in all things the very reverse of the paid companion who sets
her employer’s caprices against the amount of her salary, and gratefully
accepts any pleasures or advantages that fall in her way. Maude’s
natural forbearance was exaggerated by a remorseful consciousness that
all the luxuries and gaieties of her life were so many blessings which
she had in a manner stolen from Julia, and her tenderness towards Miss
Desmond was unbounded. But there were times when the Irish girl rebelled
even against this tenderness.
“Do you think my poverty is an open wound, that you approach it so
shrinkingly?” she exclaimed impatiently, one day when Maude had broken
down in a delicate periphrasis, in which she tried to offer to pay her
friend’s milliner’s bill without wounding her friend’s pride. “Why don’t
you say at once, ‘My husband has thirty thousand a year, and a
twenty-pound note more or less is ineffably unimportant to me--while
_you_ must go bareheaded if your pride revolts against dirty tulle and
tumbled flowers?’ Pay me my salary, Mrs. Tredethlyn, when it becomes
due, and do not force your favours upon me! for I come of a proud race,
who are slow to perceive the difference between an unwelcome favour and
an uncalled-for insult. As for the unmade silk dresses which you have
tried so delicately to force upon me, under the pretence that the
colours are unbecoming to your complexion, you can parade your wealth
and your generosity by presenting them to your maid. I am _voué au noir_
henceforward; and when you are tired of seeing my shabby-genteel black
moiré and Limerick lace in some obscure corner of your rooms, you have
only to give me a hint, and I will spend the evening in my own
apartment.”
It was not often that Miss Desmond indulged in such a speech as this, or
perhaps even remorseful Maude could scarcely have endured her
companionship. She sometimes made herself very agreeable during those
idle rainy mornings in which Maude and Harcourt practised the old
concertante duets for flute and piano, or dawdled amongst the delicate
ferns with the crackjaw names in the little fernery that opened out of
the boudoir; or devised gorgeously incomprehensible illuminations for an
obscure verse in Malachi. Julia could never be charming, for the power
to charm is a gift _sui generis_, and does not necessarily go along with
versatile accomplishments or intellectual superiority; but she could be
an amusing and agreeable companion whenever she pleased to exhibit
herself in that character, and she did so please very frequently; for it
is so much less trouble to be agreeable than to be disagreeable, that
the most persevering sulker is apt to give way under the weary burden of
his own bad temper. But let Miss Desmond be ever so vivacious, or ever
so delightful, Harcourt Lowther never lost sight of one fact,--and that
was the fact of Julia’s unappeased and unappeasable hatred of Maude
Tredethlyn. Stuccoville, which was omniscient of everything, knew that
Mr. Tredethlyn had been engaged to Julia, and had jilted her in order to
marry Maude; and from Stuccoville Mr. Lowther obtained the clue to the
Irish girl’s feelings.
“A little genuine feminine malice might be rather a useful element, if I
can set it working unconsciously for my benefit. Your amateur’s
assistance is generally a dismal failure; but I really think this Miss
Desmond might help me. She is so very clever--and so intensely
spiteful.”
So one morning when Harcourt Lowther happened to find Julia alone in the
morning-room, he took the opportunity of being quite confidential upon
the subject of Mr. Tredethlyn’s dissipation.
“He dined from home yesterday? and the day before? Ah, to be sure, I
dined with him the day before,” said Mr. Lowther, with a deprecating
sigh. He did not attempt to conceal the fact of his own participation in
Francis Tredethlyn’s pleasures; but he contrived in the most subtle
manner to make it understood that he accompanied Francis in the
character of a guardian angel, a protecting spirit in modern costume,
with an arresting hand for ever extended to snatch the sinner from the
verge of the precipice. Miss Desmond shrugged her shoulders
disdainfully.
“I don’t think Mrs. Tredethlyn values her husband’s society sufficiently
to feel his neglect very keenly,” she said; “she seems perfectly happy.”
Yes, it was quite true; Maude seemed very happy, though her husband
spent the best part of his time away from home, and was gloomy and ill
at ease in her society. Harcourt Lowther’s hints had done their work,
and the breach was very wide between husband and wife. Francis believed
that his presence was odious to Maude. Maude imagined that home
pleasures and simple domestic enjoyments were tame and insipid for
Francis. And it had all been so easily done! Harcourt had only to make a
few careless speeches about his friend.
“You see, my dear Mrs. Tredethlyn, a man of our dear Frank’s temperament
requires out-door amusements--hunting, and shooting, and racing, and all
their agreeable concomitants in the way of meet breakfasts and
uproarious dinners. A man with Frank’s animal spirits must have more
boisterous pleasures than can be procured in a drawing-room, however
charming--or amongst women, however delightful. There are some men who
do _not_ care for the society of ladies; very excellent fellows in their
way, but men in whose minds poetry and music, beautiful scenery,
exquisite sentiments, grand ideas, are all classed under one head as
‘doosid bores.’ You know the style of man who calls everything except
his horse and his dog a ‘doosid bore.’ I don’t say that Tredethlyn is
_quite_ that sort of man, but he is not a domestic animal.”
Mr. Lowther--sitting amongst a chaos of feminine litter, snipping out
painted birds and flowers with a pair of fairy-like scissors for Maude’s
_potichomanie_, looked the very incarnation of all that is domestic and
devoted to the fair sex. Perhaps he fully estimated the advantage of the
contrast between his own character and that of the men he had been
describing.
Mrs. Tredethlyn gave a little sigh.
“And Frank _used_ to be so very domestic; and so dotingly fond of
Floss,” she said, looking pensively at a mouse-coloured Skye terrier,
whose cold nose reposed in the pink palm of her pretty hand. “However,
we contrive to do very well without him, don’t we, Flossy Possy? and we
shouldn’t care if he went to all the races in that dreadful calendar,
and never, never came near his own house at all, should we, Flossy
Possy?”
Harcourt Lowther, looking up furtively from the covert of his auburn
eyelashes, snipped a bird into mincemeat, and tightened his mouth until
the thin lips were scarcely visible.
“That nonsense sounds rather like pique,” he thought.
“Can she care for the fellow? A handsome boor, who would scarcely know
the difference between Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ and ‘Rule,
Britannia!’--can she have the faintest sentiment of affection for such a
man as that, when----”
Mr. Lowther’s self-esteem finished the sentence,--
“When she knows me, and can contrast my infinite graces and
accomplishments with the boor’s defects?”
But Mr. Lowther, looking at his position in all its aspects, could not
do otherwise than perceive that the provincial rust was gradually
wearing off the farmer’s son, and that Francis Tredethlyn was learning
to hold his own amongst men who had played cricket in the Eton meads,
and paced the grand old cloisters and quadrangles of Oxford and
Cambridge. Association is the best schoolmaster; and even in Bohemia, a
man who is blessed with a fair amount of intelligence must learn
something.
There were times when Harcourt Lowther frowned darkly as he brooded over
his cards, and began to think that the game was not such an easy one to
win, after all. But he played patiently, notwithstanding; and, true to
his faith in the saving help of Chance, he waited for the goddess to
look over his shoulder, and point with her inspired finger to the trump
which should win him the final trick.
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