THE DIPLOMATIST’S POLICY.
That ponderous Mr. Grunderson, who plunged heavily down upon Maude’s
central ottoman, a miraculous combination of upholstery and
floriculture--that shining bald-headed Mr. Grunderson, who sat placidly
grinning at the company, and addressed his hostess as “Mum”--had begun
life as a market-gardener; and, had Mrs. Tredethlyn been born some
twenty years earlier, would have been proud to supply her with azaleas
and camellias for the decoration of the ottoman upon which he was now
sitting. The march of progress, and the accompanying march of bricks and
mortar, had driven before them the cabbages and strawberry-beds, the
cucumber-frames and young plantations of evergreens, by the cultivation
of which Mr. Grunderson and his forefathers had lived comfortably upon
one-o’clock dinners of fat bacon and indigestible dumplings, with
occasional varieties of butcher’s meat, thinking themselves passing rich
when their ledgers showed a profit of two or three hundred pounds at the
end of the year.
The march of civilization, or rather the march of the myrmidons of that
unreasoning despot, that implacable ruler, whom women call Fashion,
always pushing westward, had contrived to push Mr. Grunderson’s gardens
off the face of the earth, and in so doing had set a Pactolus flowing
steadily into Mr. Grunderson’s pocket. The wealth poured in upon him
with a rapidity which was like nothing but a fairy tale. That heroic
Jack of the nursery story--who, by the bye, seems to have had no
surname--never looked in more amazement on the bean-stalk that shot into
the very skies in a single night, than did the honest market-gardener at
the stuccoed district which had arisen, seven or eight stories and a
campanello tower high, on the fields where he remembered execrating the
slugs on dewy mornings a few years before. Where a prairie of bright red
stocks had perfumed all the summer air with spicy odours, a square of
stately mansions stared grimly at each other, and prime ministers’
carriages rolled with meteor lamps through the midnight darkness. Where
ragged children, and gaunt sunburnt women, in blucher-boots and with
indescribable bonnets balanced on their freckled noses, had weeded
strawberry-beds for a pitiful sixpence a day, duchesses trailed their
silken trains and wearied of the rolling hours after the approved manner
of their kind in the pages of the poets and romancers. The
transformation was as perfect as it had been rapid; and instead of the
cabbages and cabbage-roses, the cucumber-frames and hothouse flowers of
his youth and early manhood, Mr. Grunderson found himself, at fifty
years of age, proprietor of ground-rents that made him a millionaire. He
had only one child, a daughter, who had been educated for some fifty
pounds a year at a seminary for young ladies, in which she had been
cruelly snubbed on account of her father’s cabbages, and who was now
determined to revenge herself on the companions of her blighted youth by
the splendour of her womanhood. Led by this young lady, who was blessed
with an energetic temperament and imperturbable good humour, Mr.
Grunderson found himself, always more or less independently of his own
agency, going through the complete formula of fashionable life according
to his daughter Rosa’s notion of that formula; which notion was
extremely variable, and took its colour from the last acquaintance to
whom the lively heiress was pleased to attach herself.
The very last just now happened to be Maude Tredethlyn, about whom Rosa
was ready to go off into raptures at any moment, and whom she always
spoke of as “a dear,” “a love,” or “a darling.” But there was a warm
womanly heart beating under Rosa’s fine dresses, and her raptures had
more meaning in them than the raptures of enthusiastic young ladies are
apt to have. She attached herself so effectually to Maude that Mrs.
Tredethlyn was fain to forget, or at any rate to forgive, the occasional
lapses in her grammar, the unpleasant warmth of her fat little hands,
which always came flopping down on the hands of her companion when she
was enthusiastic, and the shadow of vulgarity which is so apt to
accompany the sunshine of low-born liveliness.
Harcourt Lowther took an early opportunity to inform his elder brother
that the young lady in pink areophane was an heiress, and an heiress
well worthy the cultivation of any enterprising young diplomatist.
Roderick was not slow to take the hint, but he was a great deal too much
of a diplomatist to attempt any obvious angling for this rich prize. He
exerted all his powers of fascination in order to make himself agreeable
to Mrs. Tredethlyn, and he did not address so much as one syllable of
the most commonplace civility to the market-gardener’s daughter; the
consequence of which little manœuvre was, that as Rosa was sitting next
to Maude all the evening, she listened open-mouthed to every word he
uttered, and when she departed in her papa’s three-hundred-guinea
chariot--the market-gardener had insisted on possessing the traditional
lemon-coloured chariot with hammer-cloth, and powdered retainers, which
he had beheld and admired in his boyhood--she carried Roderick Lowther’s
image away with her.
It must be acknowledged, however, that it was no uncommon occurrence for
Miss Grunderson to carry the image of some tolerably good-looking and
passably well-mannered young man away from any festal gathering at which
she happened to find herself. The good-humoured Rosa had a habit of
falling desperately in love with any eligible person whom she
encountered either in public or private life, who did anything to make
himself notorious, or wore his hair long enough to be entitled a Being.
A long list of Beings had occupied that sentimental caravansary which
Miss Grunderson called her heart. She had been in love with all the
poets, from the Laureate to Mr. Tupper; with all the novelists, from the
great Sir Edward to the newest fledged of Mr. Mudie’s popularities; and
I fear she often fell in love with angels unawares in the shape of
feminine romancers who were pleased to hide their gentle sex under
masculine nomenclature. She had been in love--fathoms deep--with Lord
Palmerston, Signor Mario, Sir Edwin Landseer, and Mr. Charles Mathews.
She was wont to keep the three-hundred-guinea chariot waiting in Pall
Mall for an hour at a stretch while she hunted Mr. Graves and his
assistants for the last new portrait of her last new idol; and her room
was like a good Catholic’s chapel,--hung with the engraved effigies of
an army of saints.
It was a very pure flame which burnt before so many shrines, and a very
harmless one; and perhaps if Mr. Lowther the elder had known Rosa
Grunderson’s little idiosyncrasies, he would not have felt quite so
complacently triumphant in the consciousness that her round grey eyes
had been fixed upon him all the evening with the fond gaze of
hero-worship. Harcourt contrived to swell this triumph by artful little
brotherly compliments, as the two young men walked Londonwards under the
starlit summer sky, smoking their regalias, and talking as men about
town do talk under those sublime stars. Sentimental Rosa was gazing at
those luminous unknown worlds from the covert of the pinkest curtains in
Stuccoville, and thinking about _Him_! Rosa’s last adoration was always
mysteriously alluded to under cover of a personal pronoun. Her
admiration for Roderick Lowther was multiplied a hundredfold by the
young diplomatist’s disregard of her. Poor Rosa had been accustomed to
be made the object of what, in the argotic parlance of her age, she
called “a dead set,” on account of her papa’s ground-rents; and she was
inclined to imagine Mr. Lowther the noblest and most disinterested of
mankind because he did not commence this “dead set” immediately after
being introduced to her.
“I wonder whether he knows that I’m _the_ Miss Grunderson?” she thought,
as she looked up at those romantic stars so familiar to her in her
Byron. “Of course he does, though, ’Pa is _so_ different from the rest
of society, that people always know there’s some reason for his being
where he is, and they’re not very long guessing that the reason is
money. Will anybody ever want to marry me for my own sake, I wonder? Ah,
how I wish the Marquis of Westminster would fall in love with me! _He_
couldn’t want pa’s ground-rents.”
Thus the maiden mused in her bower, while Roderick Lowther, encouraged
by his junior, talked complacently of his conquest.
“She’s the simplest little thing in Christendom,” he said; “simpler
than--anybody I ever met in my life. The disinterested game is the dodge
in that quarter, dear boy. Do you remember how Frederic Soulié’s _Lion_
treats the little shopkeeper’s daughter? First with the elegant devotion
of a fashionable Romeo, then with the _brusquerie_ of a Benedick or a
Petruchio. _Lise Laloine_ died under the treatment; but I don’t think
the plump Rosa is made of quite such ethereal stuff. _La Petite_ is
sentimental, and wants to be loved for herself alone; ‘O, wert thou in
the cauld blast!’ ‘And long he mourned, the Lord of Burleigh;’ and that
sort of thing. She shall have it, the darling innocent! Tennyson and
Owen Meredith by the _kilo_, disinterested devotion by the bushel. But
oh, my Harcourt, do not lure your loving brother into the quagmire of
delusive wealth! Make sure that our simple-looking Grunderson does not
hide the cloven hoof of insolvency under the golden fleece in which he
drapes himself: those simple-looking men generally fail for half a
million. I like your Mrs. Tredethlyn, by the bye; she is very pretty and
very elegant; but, to be candid, my dear Harcourt--a brother ought to be
candid, you know, even at the risk of being unpleasant--I fancy there is
more in the husband than you imagine. A man with such a chest must have
some solidity in his composition. If I am anything of a physiologist, it
is not in that man’s organization to be made a fool of. Ah, I see you
don’t care to talk about it; you like to keep your own secrets, and play
your own game without backers or advisers. So be it. For myself, I am of
an open disposition; I like to talk of my own affairs when they go
smoothly, and to drop them when they take the crooked course. I don’t
suppose Napoleon the First was very fond of talking about Waterloo. He
forgot _that_ little skirmish, you may depend; and talked of Arcola and
Lodi, the Pyramids, Austerlitz, Wagram, and Auerstadt. I dare say Mr.
Merry holds his tongue about those two-thousand-guinea colts that
_didn’t_ win the Derby. People are _not_ eloquent about their failures.
I shall look up my old aunt early to-morrow morning; and after that, if
you have any excuse for calling on Mrs. Tredethlyn, I shall be glad to
accompany you. Unless I am very much at fault in feminine psychology,
Miss Grunderson will drop in upon her friend, to discuss my bearish
behaviour, on the earliest opportunity. Nothing impresses a sentimental
young person so favourably as downright rudeness. The heroine in a
lady’s novel always adores the man who snubs her.”
Thus argued the diplomatist by profession, strolling Strand-wards in the
starlight; while the diplomatist by organization listened quietly, and
thought his own thoughts as regarded this grand conquest, of which his
kinsman was so proud. Harcourt Lowther was not apt to resent the
insolent _insouciance_, the calm assurance of superiority, with which
his senior treated him, and indeed had treated him from that early
boyhood in which the lads had played together at Eton. But the wrongs
that rankle deeply in a man’s breast are sometimes those which he
endures silently. Harcourt believed that his own prospects had been
sacrificed to the advancement of Roderick; and he was not sorry when the
elder son went wild, and turned his back as coolly upon his father as if
he had never been the pampered favourite of weak love, the all-absorbing
drain upon a limited income. In every way Roderick had fared better than
his brother. Lowther Hall, surrounded by park and farm-lands that
constituted an estate of some three hundred acres, might not be worth
very much to a man of large ideas and lofty inspirations; but whatever
it was worth, it was tightly entailed upon the heir of the Lowthers, and
not so much as a game-keeper’s cottage or a scrap of meadow-land was
reserved for the luckless junior. Mrs. Lowther had been mistress of a
small fortune, but that had been spent on the education of the two young
men,--Harcourt in this matter, as in all others, going to the wall; for
his University career had been cut short in order that his brother’s
debts might be paid, and that extravagant gentleman be enabled to face
the big-wigs of his college without fear of clamorous creditors, and
read at leisure for a degree which he was too lazy to succeed in
getting. After this Harcourt’s prospects had again been sacrificed, and
the young barrister, unable to live at the bar, had been fain to accept
an ensign’s commission; while Roderick, pushed into the diplomatic world
by a desperate effort of family interest, exhibited his handsome face at
the Prussian Court, and squandered every farthing that he could screw
out of his father’s slender purse. When the purse had become as empty as
it well could, there had been the usual remonstrances, the usual bad
feeling which is likely to arise between an utterly selfish and
unprincipled young man and the father who is no longer able to be of any
use to him, and who takes the liberty of resenting the extravagance
which has involved his later life in difficulties.
Besides the advantages obtained from his father’s partiality, Roderick
Lowther had been the favourite of a maiden aunt of miserly habits and
independent fortune, who had condescended to give him her name at the
baptismal font, and who had never bestowed on him anything else--except,
indeed, a neat cloth-bound copy of “The Dairyman’s Daughter,” presented
to the lad one birthday, and promptly disposed of at a rag-and-bone shop
in the High Street of Harrow for the small sum of fourpence. But
although Miss Dorothea Burnett had not been very liberal in her
donations to her favourite nephew during her lifetime, it was supposed
that, after her departure from this world, the young man would reap the
reward of occasional dutifully-worded letters and affected deference to
her wishes, and that the reward would be a very substantial one; for
Miss Burnett had contrived to swell her own little fortune by many stray
windfalls in the way of legacies from relatives, whose regard her busy
married sister Mrs. Lowther had neglected to cultivate. Beyond this, the
maiden lady had bought small but profitable tenements, and had dabbled a
little in shares; and she had watched her small investments with an
intelligence, and nursed them with a tenderness, which her stockbroker
had admiringly declared to be a credit to the sex she adorned by her
commercial acumen.
So Roderick Lowther, finding his younger brother on the field, was
alarmed by the idea that he might have been undermined in this
direction, and was by no means inclined to lose any time before
presenting himself to his spinster aunt. He brushed and curled his amber
whiskers with more than usual circumspection, therefore, on the morning
after the dinner at Mrs. Tredethlyn’s; and walking through Covent
Garden, on his way to Miss Burnett’s Bloomsbury hermitage, he expended
sixpence on a hothouse flower to put in the button-hole of the dark-blue
coat which he wore under a flimsy outer garment of pale grey. He had
dressed himself very carefully, for he knew that, in spite of the maiden
lady’s lectures on the subject of prudence, her feminine eye was
fascinated by the elegant frivolities which she affected to disapprove.
Miss Burnett occupied a very big house in the dullest street in
Bloomsbury--a dismal _cul de sac_, in which there was almost always an
elderly organ-grinder playing “Home, sweet home,” or the “Old
Hundredth,” with a little group of squalid children gathered round him.
The big house smelt like a tomb, and was almost as rarely opened as if
it had been one; for the butcher-boy who brought Miss Burnett’s
mutton-chop, or the half-pound of steak or three-quarters of liver, upon
which Miss Burnett’s servant was wont to make her repast, handed his
wares across the area-gate, and exchanged no word of comment with the
grim damsel who received them, knowing very well that the lady of the
house sat at her favourite window in the front parlour, with her open
Bible before her, and a watchful eye upon the outer world, which some
sentimental Christians might have thought scarcely consistent with so
much piety.
The grim damsel who admitted Roderick Lowther to Miss Burnett’s darksome
abode relaxed her ordinary sternness of visage into something faintly
resembling a smile as she recognized her mistress’s nephew.
“Your aunt has been very ill since you were last here, Mr. Lowther,” the
woman said, in answer to Roderick’s inquiry. “She was very bad with her
asthma all the winter; but the warm spring weather brought her round
again.”
“Yes,” thought the young man, “the spring weather always does bring her
round,--and always will, I suppose, till I am dead and in my grave.”
He was ushered into the dining-room while this irreverent idea was in
his mind; and the next minute he was seated opposite to his aunt,
inquiring tenderly about her asthma. The dining-room was very dismal.
There was more mahogany furniture and brown damask than is compatible
with the smallest ray of cheerfulness, and the walls were rendered
ghastly by some hideous preparations painted in asphaltum, and
exhibiting gigantic cracks that looked like gory, yawning
wounds,--preparations which, on account of their smoky nature and
revolting choice of subject, were supposed to be the work of the old
masters.
“I am very glad to see you, my dear Roderick,” said Miss Burnett,
gravely; “as glad as I can be about anything in this carnal life,” added
the old lady, whose spirits had been revived that morning by a rise of
one and a quarter per cent. in the value of her pet investment. “But we
are taught not to rejoice, Roderick, except in that which----Is that a
hothouse flower, my dear?” inquired Miss Burnett, looking sharply at the
myosotis in her nephew’s button-hole. “Dear, dear! what an extravagant
age it is! You are looking very well, my dear Roderick. I dare say you
are what a worldly-minded person would call very handsome; but we must
try to remember that we are all worms,” murmured the old lady with a
doleful sigh; for she took the gloomy view of things which is so common
to some people who read that Gospel which is all life and colour and
brightness, full of the happy faces of merry-makers at a bridal
festival, and little children gathering round a favourite Teacher’s
knees, radiant with sudden rejoicings in mourning households, the dead
restored to smile upon the living. There is something strange in the
dull grey tint which some worshippers are able to infuse into a story
that a painter can hardly read without feeling the tropical heat of a
meridian sun, the perfume of a thousand lilies, the spicy odours of the
feathery palms, and the free dash of Galilee’s blue waves about the prow
of a fisherman’s frail bark sailing gaily under an Eastern sky. Surely
the richness of colour with which the Catholic Church invests the
Christian faith is, after all, only the natural attribute of a religion
which arose amid the splendour and beauty of the Holy Land!
“I hope, my dear Roderick,” said the maiden lady, very solemnly, “that
while absent in those idolatrous foreign lands, you kept the promise
which you gave me before leaving England.”
“My dear aunt,” murmured the young man, who had quite forgotten having
made any promise whatever to his pious relative, and was painfully
mystified by this address, “I assure you that I----”
He would have broken down here, but the lady came to his rescue.
“Don’t prevaricate, Roderick!” she exclaimed, sternly. “Did you, or did
you not, enter a Roman Catholic place of worship during your sojourn
among the high priests of Baal? Did you, or did you not, sit under one
of those idolatrous worshippers of stocks and stones? And oh, that I
should live to see candlesticks on the altar of a church in this very
neighbourhood!” cried Miss Burnett, with a sudden burst of indignation;
“and to hear snuffling, which I at first attributed to a cold in the
head, but afterwards ascertained to be the wicked workings of ROME!”
The stanch Dorothea paused for a few moments to recover her indignation,
and then tackled her nephew once more.
“You promised me, before going to Belgium, that you would not, however
tempted, enter a Roman Catholic place of worship,” she said.
“And I did _not_, my dear aunt,” answered Roderick, promptly; “I give
you my word of honour as a gentleman.” “Nor any other place of worship,”
thought the heir, as his aunt nodded approvingly.
And then there was a little more talk, chiefly taking the form of a
catechism, which Mr. Lowther went through triumphantly, since his
answers to the old lady’s inquiries were shaped in accordance with his
knowledge of what was likely to please his aunt, rather than with any
reference to actual fact. But a man must do a good many mean things when
he devotes himself to the cultivation of a narrow-minded maiden aunt,
for the chance of inheriting small tenements and first-preference bonds
in flourishing railway companies. Roderick Lowther breathed a long sigh
of relief when he left the house that smelt like a tomb behind him,
after drinking a glass of his aunt’s dry sherry, which act of devotion
was in itself no small penance.
He hailed a hansom as soon as he was safely beyond ken of the observant
spinster, and was rattled back to his brother’s lodgings, where he found
Harcourt pondering moodily over the “Times” newspaper, and whence the
same hansom drove the two Antipholi to Stuccoville.
Mr. Tredethlyn was out, but Mrs. Tredethlyn was at home. Harcourt went
into his friend’s study to write a note; while Roderick followed a
servant to the drawing-rooms, in the smallest and cosiest of which three
gorgeous apartments the diplomatist found Maude and Rosa seated side by
side on a low sofa, while proud Julia meditated apart at the window.
“You’re the lady I should like to marry,” thought Roderick, as he looked
at Julia’s dark face, which lighted up for a moment with her flashing
smile, as she bowed to him, and then relapsed into gloom; “there’d be
some pleasure in taming _you_. Who would care to cage a robin? but there
would be some glory in subduing the spirit of an eagle.”
Thus mused Mr. Lowther, while he murmured some commonplace remark upon
the beauty of the summer day, and dropped himself lazily into a seat
near Maude Tredethlyn. He was true to his tactics of the night before,
and addressed his remarks almost entirely to Maude and Julia. When he
did condescend to address the vivacious Rosa, he did so in a manner that
was a delicate admixture of the intellectual bearishness of one of poor
Miss Brontés heroes with the lively banter of a Benedick. The result of
this policy was triumphant, and the market-gardener’s daughter plunged
deeper and deeper still into her five-and-twentieth hopeless attachment.
While Mr. Lowther the elder was cultivating his own interests in the
drawing-room, Mr. Lowther the younger was pacing up and down Francis
Tredethlyn’s study in no happy frame of mind. Imagine the feelings of a
Mephistopheles who begins to suspect that his victim has slipped away
from him. Harcourt was beginning to feel very doubtful as to the
firmness of his hold on his pupil and companion.
Francis Tredethlyn’s conduct for the last few weeks had quite baffled
his friend’s penetration. The Cornishman had grown suddenly preoccupied
and reserved. He might still be seen in the haunts of the Bohemians--for
Mr. Lowther took care that he should not easily extricate himself from
the bonds that he had allowed to be coiled about him; but Francis,
always unwilling to be led into the scenes where he had no pleasure, was
now more unwilling than ever, and Harcourt found it very difficult to
play the game he wanted to play without showing his cards. If it had
been a mere question of plucking so many feathers from an innocent
pigeon, the thing might have been done easily enough, perhaps; but Mr.
Lowther evidently wanted something more than his friend’s golden
plumage. It seemed, indeed, as if he would be satisfied with nothing
less than the utter ruin and degradation of Maude Tredethlyn’s husband.
To-day, walking up and down the study, whose broad plate-glass window
commanded an agreeable view of a stony quadrangle and the roofs and
chimneys of a mews, Harcourt thought very despondently of that grand
scheme to which he had devoted himself so patiently since his return to
England.
“What secret is the fellow hiding from me?” he thought, resentfully; “he
refused to dine with me to-day, and he threw over the party I made for
Greenwich the day before yesterday. He has made no book for the York
summer, and yet he is less at home than ever. What does it all mean? Can
he have gone to the bad in real earnest at last, and without any help
from me? There must be something in it; but what is the something?”
Tired at last of such meditations as these, Harcourt Lowther flung
himself into a chair to compose the letter he had talked about writing
when he entered the study.
He wrote his note, which was very brief, and the gist of which was to
remind Francis of some engagement that would entail the usual champagne
drinking, the usual squandering of money for the gratification of the
worthless society in which a few innocent pigeons abandoned themselves
to be plucked without mercy by every species of predatory fowl. After
having written this little note, so carefully worded that no print of
the fiend’s hoof could have been deciphered therein by uninitiated eyes,
Harcourt Lowther sat with his elbow on the table, biting the feather of
his pen, and ruminating moodily. There were open letters and tradesmen’s
bills lying about upon Francis Tredethlyn’s disorderly writing-table.
Mr. Lowther flung aside his pen presently, and amused himself by a
careless examination of these documents. Some of the bills were heavy
ones, but not so heavy as to make any very serious inroad upon the
Cornishman’s fortune, and Harcourt tossed them away from him one after
the other, uninterested in their details, unconcerned by their
sum-totals, until he came to a dead stop all at once at the first line
of a document which seemed to him to bear an extraordinary significance.
This document was the bill of a fashionable upholsterer, and the line
below the tradesman’s name and address ran thus:
“For goods supplied to Francis Tredethlyn, Esq., at Brook Cottage,
Petersham, June 20th, 185-;” and then followed a list of the furniture
for a cottage, the sum-total of which came to little more than three
hundred pounds.
“So,” muttered Mr. Lowther, “I think I have fallen upon the clue to the
mystery. We will go and look at Mr. Tredethlyn’s furnished cottage.”
He wrote the address on a tablet in his _portemonnaie_, and went
up-stairs to the drawing-room, where he found Roderick intolerably at
his ease in the society of the three ladies. There was an arrangement
made for a meeting in Maude’s roomy box at Covent Garden, to which Mrs.
Tredethlyn was fain to invite the affectionate Rosa, who clung to her
with peculiar fondness to-day: and then the two gentlemen took their
departure; Roderick to look in at the “Travellers’” and the “St.
James’s;” Harcourt to hurry post-haste--or rather hansom-cab haste--to
the Waterloo terminus, whence he took the train for Richmond.
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