THE LADY AT PETERSHAM.
The letter which Francis Tredethlyn wrote in his study was a long one; a
very painful one to write, as it seemed, from the face of the writer,
and the weary sigh which every now and then escaped from his lips, as
his hurrying pen paused for a moment. It was close upon ten o’clock when
he began the letter. The clock chimed the half-hour after eleven while
he was sealing it. He addressed the envelope, and then threw himself
back in his chair to think. He had so much to think of. Maude’s
extraordinary conduct, Rosa Grunderson’s revelation, had overthrown the
whole fabric of his life; and he found himself surrounded by ruins whose
utter chaos he could not contemplate without bewilderment.
For the last few weeks his thoughts had been almost exclusively devoted
to his cousin Susan, and her wrongs. Found at last, after so many
failures and disappointments, so much delay, the lonely girl had been
welcomed as tenderly as any wanderer who ever returned to the lost
friends of his youth. But Susan Lesley had a sad story to tell her
cousin. The missing link in the chain that Francis Tredethlyn had put
together piece by piece was the letter which had been written from St.
Petersburg by the man whom Susan had loved and trusted--the man whose
diary had revealed to Francis the utter worthlessness of his character.
Robert Lesley’s letter was only a worthy companion to Robert Lesley’s
diary. In it he coldly and deliberately told the girl who loved him,
that she was not his wife; that the Marylebone marriage was no marriage;
the registrar no recognized official, but a scoundrel hired for a
twenty-pound note to play the part of that functionary; that the
registrar’s office had been no office, but a lodging-house parlour hired
for the occasion, and half-a-dozen doors from the real office. This
statement was, of course, accompanied by the usual heartless sophistries
which run so glibly from the pen, or fall so smoothly from the lips, of
an utterly heartless man. The self-confessed betrayer pleaded the
madness of an all-absorbing love; the stern necessities of well-bred
poverty; the pressure of family circumstances; the fear of a father’s
rage; and then, in conclusion, the writer stated the pitiful stipend
which he was prepared to offer to the woman he had abandoned, and the
child he had disowned.
Susan showed her cousin this letter, and told him how, after receiving
it, her mind had almost given way under the burden of her great agony.
Then it was that she had gone to Mrs. Burfield, and had written to her
father a long letter, telling him something of her story, but not all;
appealing piteously to the only friend to whom she could appeal; for
faithful Frank was far away in some unknown country. She told her cousin
how she had waited, at first with a faint sickly hope, then with a blank
despair, for some answer from the father to whom she had appealed. But
none came; and when her little stock of money had sunk to its lowest
ebb, she left the dull quiet of Coltonslough to begin a weary, lonely
struggle for bread, which had endured, without one ray of sunlight to
illumine its blank misery, until the summer Sunday afternoon on which
Francis Tredethlyn found her sitting in the nurse’s cottage with her boy
in her arms.
It was so sad a story, and so sadly common, that there is little need to
dwell upon the unvarnished record of a woman’s battle with poverty in
the heart of a great city.
“Perhaps I ought to think myself very happy, Francis,” Susan said when
she had told her story; “for I was always able to pay the nurse somehow
for her care of my darling; and the deadly fear of not being able to do
_that_ was the worst trouble I knew in all that dreary time. I have been
face to face with starvation, Frank, very often within the last two
years; but it is not so terrible, when one is used to it. The help
always came at last, and some friendly hand, so unexpected that it might
have dropped down from heaven, has often come between me and despair. I
have sometimes thought that bitter struggle for my daily bread was only
a blessing in disguise, for it kept me from brooding upon my great
sorrow; it sometimes shut from me the thought of Robert’s cruelty and my
own disgrace.”
“Disgrace!” cried the Cornishman; “no, Susan, there is no shadow of
disgrace upon you except the disgrace of being united to a scoundrel and
a liar. The marriage before the registrar was a _bonâ fide_ marriage, as
binding as if it had been performed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
And then Francis told Susan of his visit to the registrar’s office. This
was the balm which he was able to pour into the deepest wound that ever
tortured a woman’s heart. But the identity of the husband who had lied
in denouncing himself a liar was entirely unknown to Susan. In all the
familiar intercourse of the brief period in which the trusting girl had
been a petted and happy wife, Robert Lesley had not let fall one
careless word relating in the remotest way to his position in life, his
family, or his prospects. When first consulted by Francis upon the
contents of the diary, Messrs. Kursdale and Scardon had instituted an
inquiry as to whether a Mr. Robert Lesley had been inscribed on the
books of St. Boniface any time between 1845 and 1852; and the answer had
been in the negative. No person of the name had been a member of that
college within the last ten years. Francis could only conclude,
therefore, that Mrs. Burfield had been right in her supposition that the
man calling himself Robert Lesley had shielded his identity under a
false name.
“But your husband was visited by his brother, was he not, Susan?” said
Mr. Tredethlyn, when this subject was discussed between the cousins.
“Yes; but I knew no more of Robert’s brother than of Robert himself. He
did not come to us often. I heard that he was a lawyer,--a barrister, I
think,--and that he lived in the Temple. I heard even that by accident,
and Robert seemed almost vexed that I should know so much.”
All these trifling circumstances seemed to point inevitably to one
conclusion; Robert Lesley had intended from the first to abandon his
wife, whenever his own interests rendered it advisable that he should
throw off the tie that bound him to her. Love and selfishness go very
badly hand-in-hand together; and love had soon left selfishness sole
master of the field.
“But this man shall be made to acknowledge his wife,--to give a name to
his child,” cried Francis, “if he can be found.”
If he could be found: that was the grand question. But Mr. Tredethlyn
was quite at a loss with regard to the means by which his cousin’s
husband was to be found. In this case even the grand medium by which the
lost are restored to the arms of their friends--the second column of the
“Times”--could be of no avail; for what is the use of advertising for a
man who does not want to reveal himself?
“If my husband is alive, Providence may throw him across my path some
day,” Susan said, resignedly. “He could not be more dead to me than he
is now if he were buried in the deepest grave that ever held the ashes
of the lost; but if he gave my boy the name that is his right, I think I
could forgive him all the wrong he has done me.”
It was quite in vain that Francis Tredethlyn sought to carry his cousin
and her son home to his own house. The sorrowful young mother shrank
with absolute terror from the idea of encountering strangers, of finding
herself in a splendid house amongst happy people.
“I am used to my poverty, Francis,” she said;--“let me be poor still.
Nobody is inquisitive about me, because I am beneath people’s curiosity.
No one questions me about the husband who has deserted me, or extorts my
story from me only to doubt it when it is told. My father would not
believe me; can I expect strangers to be more trusting than he was? No,
Francis; leave me alone in my obscurity. I have a lodging near here, and
I can see my darling every day. I will freely accept from you a little
income which will enable me to live as I have lived, without working as
hard as I have worked; but I will accept no more. I am delighted to
think that my father left his fortune to you, Frank; and I thank and
bless you for having taken so much trouble to find me out.”
Francis Tredethlyn found it hard work to win Susan away from this
determination, so quietly expressed. But he did at last persuade her to
agree to his own plans for her life, on condition that he should tell
Maude nothing, nor ask Susan to meet her until the missing husband was
found, and compelled to acknowledge his wife and son. Francis consented
to promise this; but he cherished a hope that Susan would relent
by-and-by, when she heard more of Maude’s tender and amiable nature, and
that he would be able to win his wife’s friendship for the simple
country girl who had played with him amongst the daisies in Landresdale
churchyard.
“You must accept the home I shall prepare for you, Susy,” said Francis,
“or I will have a deed of gift drawn up to-morrow, transferring half my
fortune to you. I am ready to divide your father’s wealth with you as
soon as ever I understand your legal position. In the meantime let me
have the sweetest pleasure my money has ever given me yet--the pleasure
of making a happy home for you and my little kinsman. If you knew how I
have wasted that hoarded money, Susy, on racecourses, and all kinds of
worthless places,” added Mr. Tredethlyn, with a remorseful recollection
of one particular brand of Moselle, for which he had been wont to pay
fourteen shillings a bottle in the purlieus of the Haymarket.
Susan consented to let her cousin do what he liked with regard to the
place in which she was to live henceforward. What mother could refuse a
bright home for the child she loves? A few words from Francis conjured
up the vision of a garden, where the boy could play under the shadow of
lilacs and laburnums; where the summer breeze would waft the petals of
overblown roses around that golden head. From the happy moment in which
he urged the child’s welfare as an argument against the mother, Francis
Tredethlyn’s triumph was secured. Susan pondered. She thought of the
sweet country air, the bright rooms, with the fresh breath of morning
blowing in at the open windows, the garden, the cow, the chickens, and
all the joys of that sweet rustic paradise which town-bred children hear
of from their mother’s lips, and see only in their dreams. Susan
hesitated. Francis had made friends with the boy by this time, and had
enlisted the child on his side of the argument. When the woman’s
sorrowful pride began to hold out weakly, when the mother’s heart showed
symptoms of relenting, the child’s little chubby arms crept round her
neck, and the child’s tiny voice pleaded in her ear:
“Peese, mammy, do live in the pooty house, and let Wobert have pooty
flowers.”
It was the triumph of infantine oratory. Susan turned to her kinsman,
half laughing, half crying, and gave him her hand.
“You must do as you like, cousin Frank,” she said. “Whatever is best for
Robert must be best for me.”
Thus it was that Francis Tredethlyn had withdrawn himself in a great
measure from the society of Mr. Lowther, while he scoured the prettiest
suburbs in search of a home for his cousin, and superintended the
necessary improvements and decoration, the selection of the simple
furniture, the arrangement of a garden, in which Robert Lesley’s son
might play happily, his life undarkened by the baseness of an unknown
father. There had been unspeakable pleasure for the Cornishman in the
doing of this work. It was so long since he had been of use to any one;
it was so long since his supremest benevolence to his fellow-men had
taken any higher form than the payment of a dinner-bill, and a handsome
bonus to the waiter. He seemed to breathe a new atmosphere, a fresher,
purer air, when he shook himself clear of Harcourt Lowther’s society,
and spent a summer’s day pottering amongst carpenters and house-painters
in the Petersham cottage. The odour of turpentine and lead did not give
him a headache; it was almost invigorating after the stifling fumes of
musk and mock-turtle, patchouli, and devilled whitebait that had
pervaded the hotel dining-rooms in which he had so often acted as host.
Energetic though Mr. Tredethlyn was in the carrying out of his
arrangements, Susan had been established little more than a week at the
cottage, and the paint on the Venetian shutters was still rather sticky,
when Harcourt Lowther found the upholsterer’s bill, which gave him the
clue to his pupil’s mysterious conduct. To hasten down to Petersham,
find the cottage, refresh himself with dry sherry and soda-water at the
nearest tavern, and to make himself agreeably familiar with the landlord
of the tavern, was all incomparably easy to Mr. Lowther. From the
landlord he heard all about Brook Cottage. How it had been to let for
nearly a twelvemonth; how it had been taken all in a hurry at the end of
May by a dashing-looking gentleman from town, who had been reported
scouring the neighbourhood in hansom cabs, inquiring for houses to let,
for three days at a stretch; how painters and glaziers, carpenters and
gardeners, had set to work in hot haste to renew and revivify everything
in-doors and out; how waggon-loads of the finest gravel from Wimbledon,
and cartloads of the softest turf from Ham, had been laid down in the
garden; how furniture, that was every bit of it new, had been brought
down from London; how the tall, dashing, energetic gentleman in the
hansom cab had been perpetually on the ground with his officious finger
for ever in the pie; and how larger cans of half-and-half had been
consumed by the workmen at the cost of the dashing gentleman than the
landlord of the Prince’s Feathers remembers to have chalked up against
any one customer since he had traded as a licensed victualler.
All this Mr. Lowther was told; and beyond this, he heard how a lady,
very pretty and quite young, but a little pale and worn-looking, had
arrived at last to take possession of “the prettiest little box that was
ever put together, without regard to expense;” how she was attended by
an elderly female in black, who had evidently seen better days, and who
acted as nurse to a little boy; how two respectable young women had been
hired in the neighbourhood, to act as cook and housemaid; and how,
coming regularly to the Feathers in quest of the kitchen-beer, they had
already reported their mistress as the sweetest and pleasantest of
ladies, and first-cousin to the dashing gentleman in the hansom cab. The
landlord tried to look as if he had no uncharitable thoughts about this
cousinship; but Harcourt Lowther saw that Francis Tredethlyn and the
lady had been subjects of grave scandal in that quiet country place. He
heard that the dashing gentleman had been at Petersham almost every day
for the last week; and that he and the lady passed the greater part of
their time in the garden, where they might be seen at any time from the
high-road,--the gentleman smoking and playing with a little boy, and the
lady working, at a rustic table, under a mulberry-tree. A pot-boy,
coming in from his rounds, as Harcourt lounged at the bar, confirmed the
landlord’s statement when appealed to. He had passed Brook Cottage not
five minutes before, and had seen the lady and gentleman talking to a
gardener, who was doing something to a rose-tree.
“She’s a rare one for flowers, the lady is,” the potman said, in
conclusion.
A rare one for flowers: Harcourt Lowther mused gravely upon this remark.
The fair denizens of Bohemia, to whom he had introduced Francis, were
not generally devoted to floriculture in cottage-gardens, though they
were greedy of gigantic bouquets, to rest on the velvet cushions of
their opera-boxes, or the front seats of their carriages, when they
drove to race meetings. Who was this pale, worn-looking young woman, who
called Francis cousin? Was she really his cousin, that Cornish girl of
whom the soldier had told his master in Van Diemen’s Land, and whose
miserably-executed likeness had reminded Harcourt of another face, whose
owner had played some part in the experience of his life? Was this
inhabitant of the newly-furnished cottage really the Cornish cousin? Mr.
Lowther could scarcely imagine that it was so; for, in that case, why
should Francis have kept her existence a secret from his _fidus Achates_
in the person of Harcourt himself?
“Secrecy is only another name for guilt,” thought Mr. Lowther. “Our
friend has gone to the bad in real earnest this time, and I can make a
_coup_. I was getting very tired of the slow game.”
Armed with this information, the schemer went back to town, to take his
place in Maude’s opera-box, and to lead up to that idea of a morning at
the Cedars, which seemed to originate in Mrs. Tredethlyn’s own brain.
Chance, which had been against him so long, had gone with him
unfailingly in this business. The lucky moment had come; he had got his
lead at last, and had only to play his winning cards. Chance had been
constant to the schemer even in that interview between Francis and Rosa;
for it had happened that, in all Miss Grunderson’s candid outpourings,
she had not dropped a word about Mrs. Tredethlyn’s stroll in the
Petersham meadows; though, even if she had done so, the Cornishman might
have been very slow to perceive that an accidental glimpse of himself
and gentle Susy, in friendly companionship, could have been the primary
cause of that stormy greeting which he had received at the hands of his
wife. Francis accepted his wife’s passionate outburst as only the climax
of the disgust and weariness with which he had inspired her.
“She reproaches me for the life I have been leading lately,” he said
bitterly; “but she does not understand her own feelings. It is not my
life, but me she hates. It is myself that inspires the loathing and
contempt which she talked of, and not my late hours or my gambling and
horse-racing.”
After sitting for some time plunged in a gloomy reverie, in the dreary
library, where the backs of the books he never opened seemed to frown
upon him in their sombre Russia leather brownness, Francis stirred as
the little black marble clock on the mantel-piece chimed the quarter
after twelve, and felt in his waistcoat-pocket for a note which he had
found waiting for him on his table the previous night. It was a tiny
twisted _poulet_ from Harcourt Lowther:--
“DEAR FRANK,--A line to remind you of to-morrow night. You will
be expected any time after nine.--Yours always,
“H. L.”
This reminder referred to a bachelor’s supper which Mr. Lowther had
arranged at his lodgings; a party at which there was to be what the host
called a quiet rubber. A rubber played with that deadly quiet which
attends the science of whist when heavy amounts tremble in the balance,
and a sum that a poor man would call a fortune may depend on the
player’s judicious choice between a five and a seven. Such a rubber as
that which the well-known Sir Robert was once concluding, when, just as
he pondered over his two last cards, a thoughtless looker-on happened to
break the solemn silence by one luckless word, and lo, the chain of
scientific reasoning dropped to pieces,--the popular statesman played
the wrong card, and lost a thousand pounds. It was not often that
Harcourt Lowther entertained his friends; but when Francis lapsed into a
temporary stagnation, the master was apt to keep his pupil going on the
road to ruin by such an entertainment as this. The quiet rubber at Mr.
Lowther’s lodgings generally led to other rubbers elsewhere, or cursory
appointments for Liverpool or Newmarket, or Chester or Northampton, or a
dinner at Richmond, gaily cut for at blind hookey while the men were
rising from the whist-table. It was a quarter-past twelve now. It would
be nearly one o’clock before the fastest hansom could carry Mr.
Tredethlyn to the Strand. Francis looked from the clock on the
chimney-piece to the scrap of paper in his hand; hesitated for a few
moments, with a black frown upon his face, and then started hastily from
his lounging attitude, and looked about him for his hat.
“There couldn’t be a better opportunity,” he muttered, “for saying what
I want to say to him.”
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