A HASTY RECKONING.
Harcourt Lowther had never played so bad a rubber as that with which he
beguiled the evening while waiting Francis Tredethlyn’s appearance at
the little bachelor-party assembled in his rooms. There was the usual
blending of the hawk and pigeon tribe at Mr. Lowther’s reunion: the
birds of prey distinguishable by the purple blackness of their dyed
moustaches and the crow’s-feet round their faded eyes; the innocent
fledglings fresh-coloured and tawny, with a profound belief in their own
wisdom and a supreme contempt for everything outside the narrow circle
in which they condescended to exist.
Mr. Lowther suffered his partner to knock under ignominiously to
antagonistic sevens and nines, while the big cards lurked idle in his
own hand, to fall at the close into the ravenous jaws of the eleventh,
twelfth, and thirteenth trumps; nor was he to be roused into decent play
by the unqualified remonstrances of his victim. He was thinking of
Maude. It was not the face of the queen of spades which he saw as he sat
hopelessly staring at the card in a vain endeavour to concentrate his
attention; it was Maude’s speaking, passionate countenance which looked
at him, all aglow with angry feeling. He saw her in all her beauty as he
had seen her that afternoon,--the tremulous lips, the flashing blue
eyes,--for there are blue eyes which in anger have more fire than the
starriest orbs that ever veiled their lightnings under the cloudy lace
of an Andalusian marchesa. His love for her--which was one of the most
selfish passions of a selfish nature--had grown and strengthened day by
day since the hour of his return, and had kindled into an all-absorbing
flame now that he seemed so near his triumph.
_Was_ he near his triumph? That question occurred to him several times
as he sat opposite his friend Captain Harrison of the Spanish Legion,
playing the unluckiest rubber that the Captain had been engaged in for
weeks,--“And the beggar had such first-rate cards too,” as the Captain
said afterwards, politely criticising his friend’s play; “if he hadn’t
kep’ his trumps so jolly dark we could have carried everything before
us.”
Was he near his triumph? He had been playing for two stakes--the woman
he loved and the fortune he envied. He knew Maude Tredethlyn well enough
to know that so long as her husband lived, she was as far beyond his
reach as the stars which shone down upon him as he walked home from
Stuccoville, and of whose light he thought so little. Maude, as the
daughter of an insolvent trader, was a lovely being whom he had felt no
reluctance to resign; for he had looked forward with a horrible
foresight to the day when the girl he loved should be again within his
reach; no longer as a penniless spinster, but a wealthy widow. _This_
had been the goal which Harcourt had seen at the end of that weary road
along which he conducted the young man who trusted him. No physician
ever watched a patient more intently than Mr. Lowther watched the slow
undermining of the Cornishman’s glorious constitution under the
influence of late hours and hard drinking. The bloodshot eyes, the
unsteady hand, the failing appetite, the uncertain spirits, the feverish
unrest, were all diagnostics that marked the progress of the schemer’s
work. Mr. Lowther had seen so many young men drop down in the poisoned
atmosphere to which he introduced Maude’s husband. He hoped that the end
which had come to so many would come to this ignorant, blundering
rustic, into whose lap blind Plutus had cast the wealth that should have
fallen to better men. The end must come; for the stupid Crœsus tumbled
so helplessly into the snare, and abandoned himself so completely to his
captor’s mercy. It was only a question of patience. The end would come
in due time: and then there was the woman he loved, and the richest
widow in London, to reward the plotter’s patience, to crown his efforts
with happiness and success. To-day’s business, Harcourt Lowther argued,
as he played that unfortunate rubber, could not be otherwise than a
lucky stroke, likely to hurry matters to a crisis. Francis had slipped
out of his hands so often of late, had kept better hours and drunk less.
But a serious quarrel with Maude would inevitably fling Mr. Tredethlyn
back upon the spurious Lethe of the brandy-bottle, and would hasten the
schemer’s work to its fatal close. “I think I have shut the door of his
home upon him,” thought Harcourt; “it will be strange if he is not glad
to drop completely into the groove in which I want to see him.”
This, in plain English, is the plan which Harcourt Lowther had made for
himself; though he would scarcely have put his scheme into such very
plain words, even in his own thoughts. Iago, in a play or a novel, is
obliged to give utterance to his schemes with tolerable clearness; but
the real Iago is reticent, even in commune with himself, and huddles his
blackest thoughts into some dark corner of his mind, where they lie
conveniently hidden from the eye of conscience.
Before twelve o’clock Mr. Lowther had abandoned his place at the
whist-table to his brother; and after lounging behind the chair of a
young man who was playing _écarté_, and making a random bet now and
then, the host proposed supper,--a proposition which was received very
warmly by the men who were losing money, and very coolly by the winners.
Harcourt Lowther’s supper was almost as unceremonious an affair as that
memorable entertainment in Lant Street, Borough, at which Mr. Robert
Sawyer played the part of host. A young man, hired for the occasion from
a neighbouring tavern, laid the cloth very rapidly, while the guests
lounged against the corners of the mantel-pieces, and grouped themselves
in little knots, to discuss coming events in the racing world, or to
criticise current pictures and current theatricals, with an occasional
spice of current scandal.
The supper was very simple. There were unlimited supplies of those
delicate little oysters which seem created with a special view to
bachelors’ supper-parties, and the refreshment of exhausted playgoers;
and whose native beds the ignorant foreigner might not unnaturally
imagine to lie somewhere at the back of the Strand. And to wash these
down, Mr. Lowther had provided Chablis, white Hermitage, and
Rüdesheimer. There were spatch-cocks and devilled kidneys, fried
potatoes, monster lobsters, marvellous cheeses from the remotest cantons
of Switzerland, and the most delicate varieties of green-stuff from a
French fruiterer’s in the purlieus of Leicester Square. There was no
pretence of an elaborate entertainment; but there was an open case of
sparkling Moselle by the side of Mr. Lowther’s chair, into which he
dipped about once in five minutes; and the young man from the tavern had
been initiated into the mysteries of a claret-cup, which he compounded
at a rickety little sideboard in the inner room.
So far as the guests went, the supper was a success. There was just the
amount of confusion which gives a picnic flavour to a meal, and which
seems an infallible stimulant of animal spirits. Mr. Lowther’s visitors
enjoyed themselves immensely, and the party was becoming boisterous in
its gaiety, when the door was opened, and Francis Tredethlyn walked in.
Harcourt Lowther pushed away the Moselle case, which was now only filled
with tumbled straw and empty bottles, and called for a chair, which was
edged into the corner at the host’s right hand.
“You’ll have some supper, Tredethlyn?” he said, while Francis was
shaking hands with some of the men. They were all known to him, and all
knew his story, and had a pretty clear idea that Harcourt was what they
called “cleaning him out,” in the most approved style by which the
process can be performed. “These things are all cold, I’m afraid. Jones,
run across and get some fresh oysters, and you can order another
spatch-cock--to be ready in a quarter of an hour at the latest. Sit
down, dear boy. What the deuce have you been doing with yourself all
night? Give him elbow-room, Harding, that’s a good fellow, and don’t
knock your ashes on to this corner of the table-cloth just yet. Now,
then, Philcote, the ‘Last Rose of Summer’ as soon as you like; but you
may as well make up your mind what key you’ll sing it in _before_ you
begin.”
Francis called back the man as he was hurrying from the room.
“Stop!” he cried; “you needn’t order anything more--for me. I shan’t eat
supper to-night.”
Something in his tone arrested every other voice; and there was a
silence as sudden and as complete as if some magician had waved his wand
and changed Harcourt Lowther’s guests into stone. Something in his look
attracted every eye, and held it fixed in a wondering stare upon his
face. Mr. Philcote, who fancied himself an amateur Sims Reeves, was
disturbed in his calculation of that vocal bullfinch to be cleared
between the third and fourth notes of the “Last Rose of Summer,” and
abandoned all thoughts of singing his favourite ballad.
The Cornishman’s colourless face and disordered hair and dress might
have suggested the idea that he had been drinking; but there was an
inscrutable something in that white face which was not compatible with
drunkenness. Harcourt Lowther looked at him nervously. The marital
quarrel had come off, evidently, and Francis took matters very
seriously.
“Come, Mr. Troublefeast,” cried the host, “we’re not going to stand this
sort of thing, you know. We’ll have no statue of the Commander stalking
in upon us in the midst of our fun--without Mozart. What the deuce is
the matter with you, dear boy? Roderick, pass that tankard this way,
will you? You fellows down there contrive to keep everything to
yourself. Let the rosy vintage circulate. There’s another half-dozen of
the claret in the next room, and no end of lemons. So the moment for the
selfishness of the savage to overpower the civilization of the gentleman
has not arrived. Come, Frank, take down the shutters, and light up;
you’ve made us all as quiet as the frozen crew described by that
pertinacious old bore, the Ancient Mariner. Take a long dip into that
tankard, old fellow, and come up bright again.”
Mr. Lowther struck his small white hand lightly upon his friend’s
shoulder as he concluded. Francis had dropped into the place offered to
him, and sat there, looking like nothing _but_ the Commander, in his
stony rigidity of face and figure. As Harcourt Lowther’s hand alighted
on his shoulder, he startled every one by throwing it deliberately away
from him.
“I have had enough of your friendship, thank you,” he said;
“henceforward, if we are to be anything at all to each other, I had
rather we should be foes--I may have better luck perhaps that way.”
“Tredethlyn! are you drunk? or mad?”
“Neither, but I _have_ been both; for I have trusted you. You needn’t
ask me what I mean,” said Francis, interrupting Harcourt Lowther’s
exclamation by a rapid gesture of his uplifted hand; “I am going to tell
you, and very plainly. Gentlemen, you were going to listen to a song
just now; have you any objection to hearing a story instead? There will
be time for your ballad afterwards, you know, Philcote. My story is not
a long one.”
Harcourt Lowther had turned very pale. His light blue eyes glittered,
and the slim white fingers of his right hand closed involuntarily on the
knife that had been lying near them. He looked as a man might look, who
marching proudly upon the road to victory, saw the earth yawn asunder
beneath his feet, and knew all at once that his next step must hurl him
to a dreadful death. He was very quiet; but the quivering of his thin
nostrils, the quickening of his breath, and his faded colour, betrayed a
degree of hesitation which set his guests wondering, and infused a dash
of excitement into the wind-up of the little banquet. The highest
development of Christianity cannot quite extinguish the natural savage.
Cromwell’s Ironsides did murderous work with the gospel in their wallets
and pious exclamations upon their lips; and it seems the attribute of
human nature to delight in a row. The guests at Harcourt Lowther’s
supper-table pricked up their ears with one accord, and it was with
considerable difficulty that they managed to keep up a faint attempt at
that kind of conversation which had engaged them, in twos and threes,
before Francis Tredethlyn’s entrance. When they spoke to one another
now, it was only in undertones, and their disjointed sentences revealed
the fact that they were listening to the speaker at the end of the
table. But when Francis spoke of telling a story, the company dropped
all pretence of indifference to him; and listened with a polite
appearance of perfect unconsciousness as to any unfriendly intention on
the part of the late visitor.
“Sing your song, Philcote,” said Harcourt Lowther, resolutely; “we want
no stories--we’ve no time for twaddle of that sort. Let’s have a good
song or two, and then we’ll go into the next room for a rubber.”
Mr. Philcote, whose nerves were fluttered by the ominous gloom that had
so suddenly fallen upon the assembly, gave a despairing cough, and made
a husky plunge at the A flat on which he should have begun the sweetest
song-writer’s sweetest song; but before he had articulated his
initiatory “’Tis,” a big man with a black moustache, who owed Harcourt
Lowther a grudge, and had been consuming the best bits of the lobsters,
and the lion’s share of the Moselle, under a mental protest, interrupted
the timid singer:
“Let’s have the story first, and the ‘Last Rose’ afterwards,” he said.
“Fire away, Tredethlyn; your audience have supped luxuriously, and are
in good humour.”
“I dare say it’s a common story enough in your set, Boystock,” answered
Francis; “but it isn’t a long one. It is the story of a man who was
lifted one day from poverty to wealth, and found himself all at once
alone in a world as strange to him as if he had been transported out of
this planet into another inhabited by a different species.”
“Egad,” muttered Mr. Boystock, “I wish somebody would transport me!”
“Ah, it isn’t likely, old fellow, in _that_ way,” murmured his
neighbour.
“For some time the country-bred cub--he was country-bred, and what you
would call a cub--got on well enough. He floundered into a few mistakes,
and he floundered out of them, after his own ignorant fashion. I think
there is a providence for such men, as there is for drunkards, and so
long as they stagger along _alone_, they come to very little grief. He
did a great many silly things with his money, I dare say; but I think he
_once_ did a generous thing--though, God knows, in doing it, he only
followed the blind impulse of his undisciplined heart as ignorantly as
if he had been some blundering Newfoundland dog that pulls the mistress
he loves out of the water where he sees her drowning. His wealth
prospered with him, though he had cared little enough for it when it
fell into his hands. By means of it he was able to save the woman he
loved from a great trouble; and in her boundless gratitude for the
service which he valued so lightly, she abandoned herself to the purest
impulse that ever stirred a noble breast, and offered him her hand. If
he had been generous or wise, he would have refused the hand which could
not give him a heart. He was only--in love. Selfishly, stupidly, he
seized the proffered sacrifice; too besotted in his blind passion to
perceive that it was a sacrifice.”
Mr. Lowther’s guests stared blankly at one another. They had not dropped
their own talk to hear such stuff as this. Harcourt sat very still, with
his hand always upon the knife. At the other end of the table lounged
Roderick, the very picture of well-bred indifference. He felt that his
brother had dropped in for it; but he had no idea of interrupting the
action of the little drama by any fraternal championship.
“Let them fight it out their own way,” he thought; “I like to see the
white man suffer.”
“The country-bred cub was still fresh to the intoxication of his fancied
happiness, when a man who had been familiar with him in his poverty came
from the distant part of the world where they had met and known each
other, and offered to be his friend. The cub’s ignorance of life was so
complete, that he did not know it was possible for a man who bore her
Majesty’s commission, and called himself a gentleman, to be a liar and a
villain. He trusted his old acquaintance implicitly, and accepted him as
a friend--believing, still in his boorish ignorance, that there was such
a thing as friendship, or, at the worst, an honourable good fellowship
between honest men. His friend did not tell him that he had been the
engaged lover of the woman the boor was going to marry; and when the
young couple began their new life, he planted himself in their house;
and his first act was to shut the husband from the home whose dingiest
room was a paradise, so long as it was sanctified by the presence of an
idolized wife. Will any one at this table guess the plot which the
boor’s friend hatched against him in the hour when their hands first met
in friendship? I think not. The gentleman--polished, well-born, highly
educated--allowed the country cub to marry the woman he loved; reserving
to himself the hope of marrying her, enriched by the cub’s money, when
the cub was dead. This once arranged, there was only one thing more to
be settled; and that was the cub’s life. Unluckily he was a brawny
six-foot fellow, with the constitution of a prize-fighter. But then
prize-fighters are not always long-lived; their habits are so apt to be
against them. Well, gentlemen, there have been men who have undermined a
victim’s strength with small doses of antimony, while they smiled in his
face, and called him brother. We manage these things better nowadays.
The gentleman resolved that the boor should drink himself to death.”
“Is this the plot of a French novel?” asked Roderick, superciliously,
after a brief silence, in which Francis Tredethlyn had paused to take
breath; “if it is, you had better tell us the title of the book, and let
us read it in the original. There may be some chance of our thinking it
interesting _then_.”
“There are shameful things done out of novels as well as in them, Mr.
Lowther,” answered Francis. “What I am telling you is the truth. The
gentleman took the wealthy boor under his protection, and from that hour
the cub’s mind and the cub’s body began to wither under the influence of
a vice which of himself he held in abhorrence, but which in the dull
indifference of a man who has no hope to elevate him, no aim to strive
for, he was weak enough to accept as the cure for all his troubles. What
did it matter how many glasses of brandy he drank, or how often he
staggered across his dreary threshold in the early morning, stupefied by
foul gaslit atmospheres and bad wines? His friend took care to remind
him that there was no one to be sorry for his misdeeds, or to rejoice in
his repentance if he repented. He could not sink so low that his wife
would be affected by his degradation; he could not rise so high that she
would be proud of his elevation. His friend dinned the bitter truth into
the wretch’s ear. The beautiful young wife despised him; the wealth that
other men envied was useless to him, except in its power to buy the
oblivion of the brandy-bottle. From the hour in which his well-born
friend took him under his protection, the boor never did a generous
action, or heard a noble sentiment; and he very rarely went home sober.
He was drinking himself to death as fast as a strong man can, when
Providence took compassion on him, and gave him a duty to fulfil. A
helpless girl, his kinswoman, was thrown across his path, and all at
once he found himself of use in the world. From that moment his friend’s
scheme was overthrown. Good-bye to the brandy-bottle and the bad wines!
The boor had a friendless woman dependent on his protection, and he had
something to live for. He determined to sink the past; bid farewell to
the wife whose affection he was unable to win; turn his back upon the
circle he had lived in and the people who had known him; and finish his
days honestly among honest men.”
“‘So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber,’” exclaimed
Mr. Boystock. “It’s a very good story, I dare say; but apropos to what?”
demanded the gentleman, looking at Harcourt Lowther with a malicious
twinkle in his little black eyes. “I don’t see the connection with the
proverbial _bottes_. What does it all mean?”
“It means, gentlemen, that I am the boor who has been the dupe of a
villain, and will be so no longer; and the name of the villain is
Harcourt Lowther.”
There was a moment’s silence, followed by a sudden smashing of glass. A
pair of small sinewy white hands fastened cat-like upon Francis
Tredethlyn’s throat, and he and Harcourt Lowther were grappling each
other in a fierce struggle. It was very long since the gentleman had
been weak enough to get in a passion. He had sat as still as a statue
while the Cornishman set forth his indictment, waiting to see how
completely he had failed; and now that he knew that his plot, so
deliberately laid, so patiently carried out, was only a bungling
business after all--for the man _must_ have bungled who fails so
utterly--Mr. Lowther lost his head all in a moment, and abandoned
himself to a sudden access of rage, that reduced him to the level of a
wounded tiger.
It was scarcely with Francis that he was angry. What did it matter how
this man spoke of him or thought of him? What did it matter that these
other men should hear him accused of a baseness, which was only an
intellectual improvement upon the vulgar process by which the
gentlemanly birds of prey plucked the tender plumage of their victims?
All this was nothing. It was against himself--against his own
failure--that Harcourt Lowther’s fury was raging; only like all fury of
that kind, it was ravenous for vengeance of some sort. It was only for
about twenty seconds that his claws were fastened on Francis
Tredethlyn’s throat. A Cornish heavy-weight is not exactly the kind of
person for a delicately-built Sybarite to wrestle with very
successfully.
“We are rather celebrated for this sort of thing in my county,” Mr.
Tredethlyn muttered between his set teeth, as he loosened Harcourt
Lowther’s grasp from his throat, and hurled him in a kind of bundle to a
corner of the room, where he fell crashing down amongst the ruins of a
dumb-waiter, half buried under a chaos of broken bottles and
lobster-shells.
Roderick Lowther would have sprung upon his brother’s foe in the next
minute, but the other men hustled round him and hemmed him in.
“Don’t you see the fellow’s a Hercules?” cried one of them; “let him
alone, Lowther.”
“Let me go!” roared the diplomatist; “I know my brother’s a
false-hearted rascal, but I won’t stand by and see a Lowther played at
ball with by any boor in Christendom. Let me get at him, Boystock, or I
shall hurt you.” But Francis had walked quietly to the door, and turning
with his hand upon the lock, waited for a moment’s pause in the
confusion before he spoke.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “you are witnesses that your friend attacked me. I
have no quarrel with Mr. Roderick Lowther; and as I am the bigger man of
the two, there would be no credit for either him or me in a scuffle
between us. If Harcourt Lowther wants to see me, he will be able to find
me any time this week at the Grand Hotel, Covent Garden; after this week
I shall sail for South America by the first packet that leaves
Liverpool.”
He paused a second time. There was no answer. The diplomatist had
thought better of his thirst for fraternal retribution.
“Why should I get myself into a mess about the beggar?” he thought; “he
wouldn’t see _me_ out of a scrape, I dare say.”
So Francis departed unquestioned: not to return to the Stuccoville
mansion, but to walk up Southampton Street, and across Covent Garden, to
seek a shelter in the old lodgings where he had lived so pleasantly in
his bachelor days.
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