ROSA’S REVELATIONS.
After this there was no more said between Harcourt Lowther and Mrs.
Tredethlyn upon the subject of her husband’s delinquencies. They walked
slowly back to the stile, where Julia was sitting as quietly as if she
had been that monumental Patience of whom the poet has told us. There is
something wonderfully expressive in natural pantomime; and Miss Desmond,
sitting on that rustic stile tracing figures from Euclid on the dusty
pathway under her feet with the ivory point of her parasol, had yet
contrived to keep a sharp watch upon those two people on the other side
of the meadow, and to form a tolerably clear idea as to the gist of
their conversation.
“Julia dear,” Maude said, wearily, as they walked to the river-side,
“would you mind going back to town as soon as we can get to the
carriage? I have such an intolerable headache, that I’m sure I shall be
quite unfit to dine with papa.”
Of course Julia declared that dining in London or at the Cedars was
equally indifferent to her. It was very often her humour to affect the
dull characterless manner of a paid dependant; and it was her humour to
do so just now.
“I am afraid Mr. Lowther and I have kept you waiting an unconscionable
time,” said Maude, looking at her watch.
“Not at all,” replied Miss Desmond; “I rather like waiting.”
Roderick Lowther and Miss Grunderson were loitering at the little
landing-stage; the young lady’s showy draperies pre-Raffaelite in the
sharp edges which she exhibited against the hot blue sky.
“Oh, you darling Mrs. Tredethlyn!” exclaimed Rosa; “I thought you _never
were_ coming. If your pa is half as particular about his dinner as mine
is, won’t he be cross with us all! It’s close upon seven o’clock!”
Maude looked piteously at Harcourt Lowther. He understood that appealing
glance.
“I have given Mrs. Tredethlyn a violent headache by putting her in an
awningless boat under a broiling sun,” he said, “and then beguiling her
into a fatiguing walk; and I deserve to be horsewhipped for my
stupidity. If you have any regard for your friend’s health, Miss
Grunderson, you will forego the pleasure of dining with Mr. Hillary, and
get her home as quietly as you can.”
Rosa Grunderson might be silly, but she was by no means stupid; and,
looking at Maude’s ashen face, she saw that something more than a
headache had caused the change in her friend. She saw this; and that
vague distrust which she felt about the brother of the man she adored
shaped itself into a positive dislike.
“That Mr. Lowther has been saying something to annoy her,” thought Miss
Grunderson; “and I hate him. What business has he to be always dancing
attendance upon her instead of her husband? And now he’s not content
with getting her talked about, so he must needs go and make her unhappy,
poor darling.”
Thus mused the meditative Rosa, while Roderick Lowther rowed her
homeward over the placid water. The diplomatist’s fascinations were
almost thrown away upon her during this brief journey from Richmond to
the Cedars, although he had progressed so far in Miss Grunderson’s
affections during a leisurely promenade on the terrace, that he had
serious thoughts of calling on Grunderson _père_ within the week to make
a formal offer for the young lady’s hand and fortune.
“I have no idea of wasting my time and trouble upon the girl, to find
myself thrown out at the last moment by the impracticable parent,”
thought Roderick, as he shot through the water with that long deliberate
stroke for which the Oxonians are celebrated. “I must know exactly where
I am, before I devote myself to the plump Rosa. There must be no
nonsense about settlements and so forth. I won’t have any legal brick
wall and _chevaux de frise_ between me and my wife’s fortune. A man
doesn’t quarter a cabbage with the arms of the oldest untitled family in
Hampshire without getting well paid for the humiliation. I must
understand what I’m going in for, when I propose to my charming Rosa.”
Lionel Hillary was in the drawing-room when the water-party returned to
the Cedars; but he accepted his daughter’s assurance that she was too
tired and too ill to dine with him, and escorted her to her carriage as
soon as it was ready for her. Maude was quite composed now, and there
was no suspicion of the truth aroused in the merchant’s mind when he
kissed her and bade her good-bye.
“It was foolish of you to go on the water in the hottest part of the
day, darling,” he said; “and I’m afraid you are going out a little too
much in town; but the season will soon be over, and I suppose you will
be leaving London.”
Mrs. Tredethlyn murmured something unintelligible, and the barouche
rolled away. She saw her father and the two Lowthers standing on the
wide stone steps dimly through a mist, athwart which the group seemed
only a confusion of familiar faces and dark garments; and then she found
herself driving Londonwards through the still evening, with Julia by her
side, and Rosa’s anxious face opposite to her.
She accepted unquestioningly all that Harcourt Lowther had told her. Her
husband was false to her. There was so much in Francis Tredethlyn’s life
since his marriage which seemed an evidence of his accuser’s truth. And
then Harcourt had not wished to accuse. The cruel revelation had been
extorted from him. No trouble that Maude had ever yet endured had been
so bitter as that which had come upon her to-day,--the shame, the
humiliation, the unutterable horror of that discovery made in the summer
sunshine, amidst the perfume of flowers, the joyous carolling of a
skylark high up in the warm blue sky. She did not love her husband; and
the agony which gnawed her breast during this homeward journey was the
sharp pang which belongs to wounded pride rather than to betrayed
affection. At least this was what she said to herself, as she
remembered, with an angry flush upon her brow, those sneering remarks of
Mr. Lowther’s about her love for such a man as Francis Tredethlyn.
“I do believe he loved me once, let Harcourt Lowther say what he will;
and he was nobly generous to my father; and now he deserts me
altogether, and devotes himself to some horrible woman!” thought Mrs.
Tredethlyn, whose ideas were not particularly sequential this evening.
She meditated upon so much as she knew of the life that Francis had led
since the close of his honeymoon. His late hours, his frequent absences,
all seemed to confirm Harcourt’s account of dissipated habits and
degraded tastes.
Yes, everything combined to prove the miserable truth. She was a
neglected wife; abandoned by the man who had once seemed the veriest
slave that ever bowed beneath the supreme dominion of Love. She
remembered what he had been, or what she had believed him to be, and was
all the more indignant with him for the discoveries of to-day. Rosa
Grunderson, anxiously watching Mrs. Tredethlyn in the twilight, wondered
that so dark a cloud could overshadow the fair face of her friend.
“It must be something very dreadful,” thought Rosa; “but whatever it is,
that Mr. Lowther is at the bottom of it. If Roderick does
propose,--which I’ve every reason to think he will, from the way he
conducted himself on the terrace,--and he and pa can come to any
arrangement about me, I won’t have much to do with my brother-in-law,
that’s certain, for I hate him. But I dare say those horrid ground-rents
will always stand in the way of my being married to anybody but a
Rothschild; and Rothschilds don’t trouble _themselves_ about
ground-rents.”
The drive from Twickenham to Stuccoville is not a very long one; and
Mrs. Tredethlyn’s bays got over the ground at a pace that did credit to
the judgment of Mr. Lowther, who had chosen the horses for his friend.
It was nearly nine o’clock when the barouche drew up before the Doric
colonnade which imparted a funereal darkness to Maude’s dining-room; and
before the three ladies could alight, a hansom cab dashed up to the
kerbstone, a pair of slamming doors were flung open, and Francis
Tredethlyn sprang out upon the pavement.
His wife’s face flushed crimson, and then grew deadly pale. She turned
to Rosa Grunderson, and murmured in faint, broken accents: “Will you
dine with us, Rosa? or shall Martin drive you home?”
“Thank you, darling,” Miss Grunderson answered promptly; “I think I’ll
come in for just a few moments. Pa will have gone to the Bell and--to
his club by this time,” added Rosa, whose parent was wont to spend his
evenings in the parlour of a very respectable tavern in the Brompton
Road, where he and several other worthies assembled nightly to discuss
the affairs of the nation amidst the fumes of their cigars, the
primitive clay being strictly tabooed in that select little coterie.
Maude alighted and entered the hall. Francis had handed her from the
carriage, and followed her into the house. He threw away his cigar as he
stepped into the hall, and approached his wife radiant with good spirits
and perfumed with tobacco.
“I’m so glad you’ve come home,” he said. “I thought you were going to
dine with the governor, and that I should have to sit in that dreary
room all by myself, with only Landseer’s staghounds to keep me company;
though if half the people one calls company were as much alive as _they_
are, a dinner-party wouldn’t be such a dismal business as it is. Of
course you haven’t dined; no more have I; and unfortunately there
doesn’t seem to be any dinner,” added Mr. Tredethlyn, as he opened the
door and looked into the dining-room, where the table was blank and
ghastly under a faint glimmer of gas. “No one was expected, I suppose?
However, they can get us something. Geoffreys, just see about dinner,
will you? How do you do, Miss Grunderson? I dare say you’re hungry after
your drive. Are you going up-stairs, Maude?”
“Yes,” answered Mrs. Tredethlyn. The syllable had a startling effect as
it fell from her lips, like one solitary drop of hail falling suddenly
on a summer day.
“I am going up-stairs,” said Miss Desmond confidentially to Rosa; “will
you come with me, and take off your things?”
“No, thanks, dear,” answered Miss Grunderson, who would have endured
tortures rather than say “thank you,” when fashion required that she
should say “thanks.” “I don’t think I _will_ take off my things. Mrs.
Tredethlyn doesn’t seem very well; and it’s almost too late for dinner;
so I think I’ll just go up to the morning-room, and rest for a few
minutes before I go home. The carriage needn’t be kept, you know,
please,” added Miss Grunderson, to a male domestic hovering in the
shadowy depths of the hall; “for I can have a cab fetched when I want to
go.”
Mr. Tredethlyn had followed his wife to the drawing-room; and the two
girls standing at the foot of the staircase heard one of the doors close
with a sonorous bang.
Miss Desmond went up-stairs, and Miss Grunderson followed slowly. The
morning-room of which Rosa had spoken was on the second floor; but the
young lady did not go any farther than the first landing-place. The door
of the front drawing-room was closed, but the doors of the back
drawing-room stood wide open; and peering into the lighted apartment,
Rosa saw that it was quite empty. She paused for a moment, looked about
her; and then went quietly into the back drawing-room, and closed the
door very softly behind her.
Francis Tredethlyn followed his wife to the drawing-room because that
one frozen syllable, together with the strange expression of her face,
had been quite enough to tell him that something was wrong. This husband
and this wife had never quarrelled. There had been between them none of
those little stormy passages which are apt to interrupt the serenity of
the best-regulated households; and the Cornishman’s heart turned cold
with the thought that anything like ill-feeling could arise between
himself and Maude. The altered expression of her face boded so much; and
yet what could arise to displease her, when he was nothing but her
devoted slave, ready to obey her commands, willing to lay down his very
life for her pleasure?
“Maude,” he said, as he closed the drawing-room door, “you speak to me
and look at me as if you were offended. And yet I have no consciousness
of having done anything to displease you.”
Mrs. Tredethlyn looked at her husband with supreme contempt; not the
cool scorn which is akin to indifference, but rather a passionate
disdainfulness. Taking into consideration the fact that Maude did not
care for her husband, all this feminine rage seemed a sad waste of
feeling.
“Do not add hypocrisy to the wrong you have done me,” said Mrs.
Tredethlyn. “I have been most cruelly awakened this day to a knowledge
of the life you have been leading--ever since our marriage. I cannot
speak of this subject; it is too horrible; I think the words would choke
me. I thought that I should have been able to write what I had to tell
you; but since I have been so unfortunate as to meet you, I may as well
say with my own lips what I meant to have said in a letter. It is very
little. I have only to tell you that from this moment we must be
strangers to each other. After my discoveries of to-day, I should
consider myself a base and degraded creature if I ever suffered your
hand to touch mine in friendship again. The obligation of my father’s
debt to you must rest upon him henceforward, and not upon me.”
“But, Maude, explain yourself!--your discovery of to-day, you say! What
discovery?”
“Your affectation of unconsciousness is a deeper insult than your----No,
I will _not_ discuss this subject with you!” cried Maude, passionately.
“It is shameful--it is cruel--that I should have been wronged so basely,
when I trusted you so completely. Do not speak to me; do not touch me!”
she exclaimed, shrinking away from him with a shudder; “your presence
inspires me with disgust and abhorrence. Why do you make any poor
pretence of inhabiting this house, which has only afforded you an
ostensible shelter, while your amusements and your friends have been
found elsewhere? I set you free from this hour, Mr. Tredethlyn. Seek for
happiness after your own fashion; where you please. I have nothing more
to say to you.”
She swept from the room before her husband could arrest her. Unspeakably
bewildered by her passionate words, which were almost meaningless to
him, Francis Tredethlyn stood motionless as a statue a few paces from
the doorway by which his wife had just left him. He was standing thus
when the voluminous curtains which were drawn across the archway between
the drawing-rooms were cautiously divided, and a plump little figure in
blue muslin appeared among the amber drapery. The Cornishman heard the
rustling, and turned abruptly towards the _portière_.
“Yes,” exclaimed Miss Grunderson, “it’s me; no, it’s I!--but, goodness
gracious, what _does_ it matter about grammar, when there’s so much
trouble in the world?--yes, and I’ve been listening,” continued the
young lady, answering Mr. Tredethlyn’s inquiring stare; “and I know that
listening in a general way is considered mean; but I think the amount of
pa’s ground-rents ought to exempt me from any imputation of meanness. If
I didn’t love that sweet lamb so dearly; and if I hadn’t a very sincere
regard for you, Mr. Tredethlyn,--having come into money suddenly myself,
and knowing how trying it is to carry it off carelessly, and not look as
if one was always conscious of being richer than other people;--if I
didn’t--in short, I shouldn’t have stopped behind those curtains,--and
run the risk of being considered a sneak and a listener. But do say that
you forgive me, please, and believe that I meant it for the best?”
pleaded Rosa, whose diction was apt to become rather obscure under the
influence of excitement.
“What, in Heaven’s name, does it all mean, Miss Grunderson?” asked
Francis, piteously.
He was ready to cling to the frailest spar by which he might float on
the wide ocean of perplexity, whose billows had so suddenly encompassed
him.
“Goodness gracious knows--_I_ don’t any more than the dead though if
there _is_ anything in drawing-room tables balancing themselves on
tip-toe and great-coats flying about the room like awkward birds the
dead may know more than we give them credit for,” exclaimed the lively
Rosa, without a single stop; “but it’s very certain there is something
wrong, and whatever it is, that Mr. Lowther is at the bottom of it.”
“Harcourt Lowther?”
“Yes. My pa hears a great deal of gossip at the Bell and--at clubs, and
such places; and he always tells me everything he hears. And oh, Mr.
Tredethlyn, if you knew how long I have wished to speak my mind to you,
I am sure you would forgive me for listening just now.”
“My dear Miss Grunderson, what could you have to say to me?” asked the
bewildered Cornishman.
“Oh, lots of things. But then you know the grand maxim in society is
that you _mustn’t_ speak your mind. It’s like that Latin person’s rule
of nil thingamy; you mustn’t admire any thing, you know; and so on. And
one must unlearn all one’s Catechism, about loving one’s neighbour as
oneself, and doing unto others as one would they should--which always
reminds me of a winter Sunday afternoon at school and broken chilblains,
because one _did_ break once while I was saying it. And you see in
society the thing is to let your neighbour go his way and to go yours,
and to say, ‘Bless my soul! exactly as I anticipated; paw creatchaw!’ if
your neighbour tumbles over a precipice, from which it would be the very
worst of bad manners to hold him back; and in society, if you saw the
good Samaritan--no, the other person--lying wounded in the road, it
would be a dreadful _incon_--what it’s name?--to pick him up and take
him to an inn and pay for his lodging, because he might call you to
account for your impertinent officiousness as soon as he got well. So,
though I have been bursting to speak my mind almost ever since I’ve
known you, Mr. Tredethlyn, I’ve held my tongue until to-night. But
to-night the climax has come, and I _must_ speak. Oh, you poor dear
thing!” cried Rosa, in a sudden outburst of sympathy, “how you and your
wife have been talked about!”
“Talked about!--by whom, when, and where?”
“By everybody, always, everywhere. You don’t know--though you ought to
know, if you ever listened to what was going on around you--how people
_do_ talk. They’ve talked about your dissipation, the hours you have
kept, the places you have been seen at, the people you have been seen
with; about your coming home in hansom cabs in the middle of the night;
and I think if quieter vehicles could be invented for people who stay
out late, or at least the doors made to open differently, there wouldn’t
_be_ so much scandal. They’ve talked about your getting _tipsy_,”
exclaimed Rosa, shaking her head solemnly, and laying a tremendous
stress upon the obnoxious word; “and they’ve said you were drinking
yourself into an early grave, and that Harcourt Lowther was leading you
on to your death in order that he might marry your wife afterwards.”
“Harcourt lead me--to my death--and--marry Maude! Oh, no, no, no; it is
too horrible!” gasped Francis, staring at Miss Grunderson, with his head
clasped in his hands, and big beads of perspiration upon his brow.
“I know it is,” answered Rosa; “but they say it; and you must own it was
not a wise thing for you to be so very intimate with a man who was
engaged to your wife before you married her.”
“Engaged to my wife! _Who_ was engaged to my wife?”
“Why, Harcourt Lowther, of course! Didn’t you know all about it?”
“No, so help me Heaven!”
Miss Grunderson looked very grave. All that she had said had been spoken
in perfect good faith; but, all at once, she began to see that mischief
might come of this free utterance of her thoughts.
“I thought that you knew it,” she stammered in considerable confusion,
“or I’m sure I should never have said one word about----”
“How did _you_ come to know it?” asked Francis, turning fiercely upon
the terrified Rosa.
“Miss Desmond told me.”
“It is a lie, a malicious lie, invented by Julia Desmond!”
“I dare say it _is_ something in the way of a story,” responded Miss
Grunderson, who was very anxious to extinguish the sudden conflagration
which her unconscious hand had fired; “people _do_ tell such stories,
you know; not that I think Miss Desmond would speak so positively
unless--but I’m sure if Mrs. Tredethlyn _was_ ever engaged to Mr.
Lowther, she had quite forgotten him when she married you; only _if_ it
was so, I don’t think it was quite honourable of him to be so friendly
with you without telling you all about it.”
Thus Miss Grunderson--floundering helplessly in a conversational
quagmire--endeavoured to undo any mischief which her indiscretion might
have made. But Francis was not listening to her; he was thinking of all
his life during the last year, and a host of trifling circumstances
recurred to his mind, in evidence against the wife he had loved, and the
friend he had trusted.
“Yes,” he thought, as he sank moodily down into the nearest chair, and
covered his face with his hands, as heedless of Miss Grunderson’s
presence as if that young lady had been one of her father’s
cabbages,--“yes, it is no lie of Julia Desmond’s. A hundred
recollections arise in my mind to bear witness to its truth. Maude’s
confession about the some one whom she had loved, but whose poverty was
a hindrance to a marriage with her. Harcourt Lowther’s letters from that
beautiful heiress, whose father’s wealth stood between him and
happiness. I knew that they had known each other before he sailed for
Van Diemen’s Land; but I believed him implicitly when he told me
casually one day that they had never been more than the most indifferent
acquaintances. He had a careless, half-contemptuous way of talking of my
wife that galled me to the quick, and that I have sometimes resented.
Fool and dupe that I was! That affected cynicism, that pretended
indifference, was only a part of his scheme. He loved her all the time;
and while with one hand he pushed me away from her into the drunken
orgies that only kill a little more slowly than the secret doses of the
assassin, with the other he held fast the chain that bound him to her;
waiting till he should be able to say, ‘You are free, and I claim the
fulfilment of your broken promise. You are enriched by the death of the
poor dupe who loved you, and poverty need separate us no longer.’ Oh,
God of Heaven, what a fool I have been! and how clearly I can see my
folly, now when it is too late! False wife, false friend! so deeply,
fondly loved, so blindly trusted. I can remember my wife’s face the day
she spoke to me of Harcourt Lowther. Has she been in the base plot
against me? No, I will not believe it. If I have been this man’s blind
dupe, his helpless tool, she may have been as blind, as helpless as
myself. O God, give me strength to trust her still, for my heart must
break if she is base and cruel.”
A man’s ideas are not apt to arrange themselves very consecutively at
such a time; but it was something after this fashion that Francis
Tredethlyn reflected upon his friend’s treachery, while Rosa stood by
watching him very anxiously, with that fiery eagerness which had
prompted her to speak her mind considerably cooled down by the aspect of
her companion’s distress.
“Miss Grunderson,” said Francis presently, “whatever the world may have
said against Harcourt Lowther, it is a false and lying world if it ever
slandered the goodness and purity of my wife.”
“I know that,” answered Rosa, becoming energetic once more; “for of all
the sweet darlings that ever were, she’s the sweetest and the dearest.
And how should _she_ know that people made nasty disagreeable remarks
about Mr. Lowther’s always happening to go to the parties she went to
and calling here oftener than other people, and so on----”
“He went to parties!” cried Francis. “He told me that he hated parties;
that he scarcely went anywhere.”
“Ah, but he did, though; and it has been his flirting way--not the
things he has said, you know, but his way or saying them--his
_ompressmong_, you know, that has caused those ill-natured remarks about
Mrs. Tredethlyn. Nothing sets people talking like _ompressmong_.”
Francis did not answer. Little by little the mists cleared away from his
mental vision; and he saw that Harcourt Lowther had been from first to
last the subtlest schemer who ever plotted the ruin of an honest
blockhead. It had needed only Miss Grunderson’s feminine guesswork to
let sudden light into the cavernous depths of the foulest pitfall that
ever treachery dug under the ignorant footsteps of its victim. Francis
remembered all the bitter ridicule, the sneering compassion, that
Harcourt Lowther had heaped upon the respectable world, from which he
held his dupe aloof, while he plunged him to the very lips in the
dissipations of Bohemia. By this means he had effected as complete a
separation between the husband and wife as if the same roof had ceased
to shelter them.
“I have thought--when my tempter gave me time to think--that it was
Maude’s coldness alone which separated us; but I know now that it was
the schemer’s work from first to last. She did not love me,--O Heaven,
have pity upon my poor tortured heart!--she loved him, perhaps: but I
might have had some little chance of winning her love if I had remained
at her feet--her slave, her worshipper; but he has held me away from
her, and now she abhors me. She has no feeling but disgust and disdain
for the wretch who has abandoned her to waste his days on a racecourse,
his nights in the drunken orgies of a gaming-house.”
Francis Tredethlyn sat with his face hidden in his hands, thinking of
his folly, and hating himself for it. Why had he given himself up body
and soul into the power of Harcourt Lowther? why had he been so poor a
dupe in the toils of this man? It was not that he had entertained any
special regard for the gentleman who had pretended to be his friend. In
Van Diemen’s Land he had often had good reason to despise the peevish
grumbler, the selfish Sybarite; and yet for the last year he had taken
the man’s dictum upon every subject, even upon that one vital question
on which the happiness of his life depended. Why had he trusted so
blindly; why had he submitted so slavishly to follow the guiding-strings
that led him into places where he found no pleasure, amongst people who
inspired him with disgust?
Little by little the answers to these questions shaped themselves in
Francis Tredethlyn’s mind; and he saw that his uncle Oliver’s hoarded
wealth had been at the root of all his misery. The wealth which had
lifted him suddenly into a world that was strange to him; the wealth
which had made him the mark for every schemer; the wealth which had won
him the hand of the woman whose heart could never have been won by his
true and honest love. Adrift in that strange world, the man who had kept
his name unsullied, his soul untainted, his head erect before the faces
of his fellow-men, while his pockets were empty, and his very existence
dependent upon the day’s work that earned him a day’s food, found
himself all at once the most helpless creature that had ever floated at
the mercy of the winds and waves upon a trackless ocean; and he had been
very glad to grasp the first rope that was thrown out to him in all
friendly seeming to guide him safely to the shore. His ignorance had
flung him, unarmed and powerless, into Harcourt Lowther’s arms; and the
man to whom he had felt himself superior while blacking his boots and
obeying his orders out in Van Diemen’s Land became all at once, indeed,
the master, free to work his own will with that most helpless of all
creatures, an uneducated millionaire.
“If I had a son,” thought Francis Tredethlyn,--and a faint thrill was
stirred in his breast by the mere hypothesis,--“I should send him to
school before I turned him out into the world. Yet I, who am as ignorant
as a baby of the world in which I live, have plunged recklessly into its
vortex, expecting to emerge unhurt. My own folly is the cause of my
destruction. And yet I might have met with an honest friend; I might
have had a loving wife.”
“A loving wife!” Ah, how the poor faithful heart ached as Francis
thought this! A man’s fireside is the same peaceful sanctuary, whether
the hearth is gorgeous with encaustic tiles and an Axminster rug, or
poorly covered with a scrap of faded Kidderminster, in some humble
chamber where the firelight glimmers on the delf platters that adorn a
cottage-dresser.
“If Maude had loved me,” Francis argued, brooding moodily upon his
wrongs, “my money need have brought me no misery; my ignorance would
have beguiled me into no danger. Her voice would have regulated my life;
her counsel would have prompted every action. Her smallest wish would
have been my law. And it would have been very hard if the companionship
of a lady had not in time transformed me into a gentleman. But _what_
are the people with whom I have herded since my marriage--the
acquaintances whom Harcourt Lowther has chosen for me? What! pshaw! why
do I stop to think of all this? She never loved me. I should have tried
to win her love if _he_ had left me to do so. I might have failed even
then as miserably as I have failed now.”
He groaned aloud as he thought this, and startled Miss Grunderson, who
was sitting at a respectful distance from him folding and unfolding her
parasol, and wondering why she had got into this _galère_, and how she
was to get out of it; and registering a mental vow that she would never
again be tempted by her recollection of her duty to her neighbour to
depart from the manners and customs of polite society. But to her relief
Francis looked up presently, and addressed her.
“I thank you heartily for having spoken so frankly to me,” he said; “it
is only right that I should be acquainted with the common talk about the
man whose hand I have clasped in friendship almost every day for the
last twelve months. But I hope you will believe that, whatever Mr.
Lowther may or may not be, my wife is good and pure, and worthy of the
warmest affection you can feel for her. Your warmth of feeling has
touched me deeply, Miss Grunderson. I have been living in so false an
atmosphere lately, that I must be dull indeed if I were not affected by
your friendly candour. If--if anything should happen to separate Maude
and me, I should be very glad to think she had such a friend as you.
And--if ever you saw her trusting, as I have trusted, in the truth and
honour of Harcourt Lowther, you would stand between her and that
dangerous adviser, that false friend--would you not, Miss Grunderson?”
“I would,” answered Rosa, valiantly; “I should speak my mind to her and
to Mr. Lowther into the bargain, as candidly as I have spoken it to you
to-night.”
“I believe you would,” said Francis. “And now, my dear, God bless you,
and good night!”
He held out both his hands and clasped Rosa’s pudgy little paws in a
brief grasp, and then strode past her on his way towards the door.
“You’re not going out to-night, are you, Mr. Tredethlyn?” she asked
anxiously; “it is so _very_ late.”
Poor little Rosa was rather alarmed by that resolute stride towards the
door, which might only be the first step in some ghastly vengeance to be
taken upon Harcourt Lowther by the stalwart Cornishman.
“I shouldn’t like to have his blood upon my head, though I _do_ hate and
detest him,” thought Miss Grunderson; “for in these days of
spirit-rapping there’s no knowing how he might spite himself upon me. I
might have him tilting and tip-toeing every table I ever sat down to.”
“I’m only going to my room to write a letter,” answered Mr. Tredethlyn;
“shall I order my wife’s carriage for you?”
“No, thank you; as our house is so near, I think I’ll ask one of your
servants to see me home,” replied Rosa, who had no idea of leaving the
ground just yet. “I’ll run up to Mrs. Tredethlyn’s room and say
good-bye. Shall I take her any message from you?”
“None, thank you; good night.”
“Good night.”
Rosa left him still standing in the drawing-room. The spacious and
grandiose apartment, in all of whose costly adornment--from the pictures
on the walls to the Louis-Seize snuff-boxes and lapis-lazuli
_bonbonnières_, and all the expensive frivolities so lavishly scattered
on the tables--there was no single object which had been chosen with any
reference to his taste, with any thought of his comfort or pleasure. No
exquisite toys of “picking-up;” no delicious bargaining with dirty
brokers in the purlieus of Holborn; no evening excursions,
treasure-hunting, among dingy by-ways, where remnants of choice old
china lurk sometimes, unrecognized and unvalued, amongst the rubbish in
a dimly-lighted shop-window; none of the pleasant struggles, the proud
triumphs, which attend the collection of Poverty’s art and _virtu_, had
attended the decoration of this splendid chamber. The Cornishman had
given _carte blanche_ to his friend, and had written cheques--whose
figures he had not remembered five minutes after writing them--in favour
of a celebrated dealer in Bond Street, and an upholsterer in Oxford
Street; and that was all. He smiled bitterly now as he paused to look
round the room before he left it--perhaps for ever.
“And this has been my home,” he thought. “Home! Better to sit by my
uncle Oliver’s miserly fire, in the dreary house on the Cornish moors,
than to loll in one of those yellow-satin chairs, playing at ball with a
gold snuff-box, and watching the traitor whom I have trusted talking to
my wife.”
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