POOR FRANK’S LETTER.
Maude shut herself in her own rooms after her interview with Francis,
and refused to see any one except Julia. She wanted some one to cling to
in her sudden distress, and was fain to throw herself upon the Irish
girl’s bosom for consolation.
Then Julia Desmond had her revenge. It was very sweet to see the woman
who had usurped the cup of prosperity once held to her own lips brought
down so low; more wretched in the midst of her wealth and grandeur than
Julia had been in her lonely attic at Bayswater, with a July sun glaring
in upon her through a curtainless window, and the drowsy voices of her
pupils droning in her ears. The pleasure that thrilled through her
breast as she held Maude Tredethlyn in her arms, and heard her declare,
amidst passionate sobs, that Francis had been false and base and wicked,
and that she was the most miserable woman in the world, was a sensation
more exquisite than Miss Desmond had ever known before. For the honour
of humanity, that wicked pleasure did not last very long. The daughter
of Patrick Macnamara Ryan O’Brien Desmond was not altogether base. Maude
was at her feet, and she was avenged. It was her rival’s insolent
happiness--happiness always _does_ seem insolent to the unhappy--that
had galled her to the quick. The two women were on a level now, and
Julia forgave her old companion.
“I told you he was a villain,” she said; and that was the only unkind
speech she uttered. After that, she was comforter, confidante, friend,
and she was almost sorry to see the endurance of Maude’s grief. “You
have your fine house and your carriages still,” she said, as the young
wife sat on the ground at her feet in the abandonment of her sorrow;
“you could never have married Francis Tredethlyn for any other reason
than the wealth he could give you. What does it matter to you whether he
is true or false? You never loved him.”
“No,” answered Maude, naïvely, “I suppose not. But it is so shameful of
him to care for anybody else. And from what Harcourt Lowther says, he
does care for that horrible person; and to leave me, Julia, day after
day, and to be--there--all the time--in a garden--smoking--looking as
much at home as if he had lived there all his life--I never can forgive
him, Julia!”
“Of course not,” Miss Desmond replied promptly; “but I don’t see that
you need make yourself so very unhappy about his conduct. You will have
a formal separation, I suppose. Your papa, or your papa’s solicitors,
will manage that, no doubt; and you will live quietly in a smaller house
than this. You will not be able to go so much into society, you know;
for it is so difficult for a woman who is separated from her husband to
escape scandal, however careful she may be,” Julia added, with
considerable satisfaction. It is so nice to sit in the dust and mingle
our sympathetic tears with those of the fallen powers who have lately
queened it over us.
Maude’s sobs redoubled.
“Society!” she exclaimed. “I hate society! Yes, it’s no use talking,
Julia. I know what you’re going to say about my going out to three
parties a night, and so on; but I don’t like it--nobody likes it. They
get into the whirlpool, and there they are. If you go to Mrs. A.’s
Thursday, you must go to Lady B.’s Friday, or you offend her; and if you
go once, you must go on going, or it seems as if you didn’t like the
people you met; and then, if you don’t ask people, you are accused of
dropping them; and if you ask strange people, you are accused of picking
them up; and if you always ask the same people, your parties are called
slow; and if you ask different people, you are called capricious. I am
so tired of the world, Julia,” sighed Mrs. Tredethlyn. “When I drive any
distance to dinner on an autumn evening, I always envy the people who
live in little villas, and drink tea at seven o’clock in pretty parlours
that I can see in the firelight. They seem _so_ happy. I never hear a
muffin-bell--don’t laugh, Julia; but there _is_ something peculiar in a
muffin-bell--without thinking how hollow my life is, compared to the
lives of the people who eat the muffins. And then I fancy that I should
have been so much happier in a pretty little cottage in St. John’s Wood,
with a tiny, tiny back-garden sloping down to the canal, and a still
tinier garden in front for Floss to bark in. I used to think sometimes,”
continued Maude dropping her voice and speaking with some slight
embarrassment, “that Francis and I would get to understand each other
better by-and-by, and that we should lead quite a Darby-and-Joan sort of
life, doing a great deal of good, and going out much less. But, of
course, that hope is quite gone now. I can never endure his society
again. I could never trust him. And oh, Julia, I did trust him so
implicitly! I had such a belief in his goodness that I despised myself
for not being better worthy of him. And to think that he should deceive
me so cruelly; that he should have been deceiving me all along, leading
a wicked life amongst wicked people for his own pleasure; when I fancied
that he was driven from his home by my indifference, and reproached
myself so bitterly for being wanting in my duty to him.”
In this strain poor Maude discoursed at intervals for some hours. Julia
was very patient, sympathetic even, in a hard kind of way; but she bore
with all her weight upon the evidence of Francis Tredethlyn’s perfidy,
and she drained the cup of her triumph to the very dregs.
It was not till the next morning that the letter which Francis had left
in the library was delivered to his wife. She was sitting in her
boudoir, with an untasted breakfast before her, and the sympathetic
Julia on the other side of the table, when her maid brought the missive,
which a housemaid had discovered at daybreak on her master’s table, two
or three hours before Mr. Tredethlyn’s valet found the little bedroom
behind the library untenanted, and perceived that his master had not
slept at home.
The Cornishman’s letter was very simply worded. Maude opened it hastily
in the hope that it might contain some justification of her husband’s
conduct. But he did not even allude to his delinquencies, and confined
himself to bidding an earnest and friendly farewell to the wife who had
never loved him. Tears of disappointment, humiliation, regret, poured
slowly down Maude’s cheeks as she read the letter. It was the first time
Francis had written to her since her marriage; and there was something
almost strange to her in the sight of his bold commercial hand, whose
accustomed regularity had been a little disturbed by the writer’s
agitation.
“MY VERY DEAR WIFE,--I write to you for the first time since it
has been my privilege to address you by that sacred name. If I
could tell you the pride and happiness I once felt in that
privilege, when first you laid your hand in mine, when first I
heard you called by my name, I should be a very different person
from what I am; and then it is possible this letter need never
have been written. I write to bid you good-bye, Maude; and I
think the best proof I can give you of my love is the proof I
give you now, when I bring my mind to the necessity of our
separation, and resign myself to the knowledge that I may never
see your face again upon this earth.
“I will not tell you how soon I discovered your
indifference--how soon another person demonstrated to me that
your feeling towards me was even something worse than
indifference; that it was dislike and contempt which I inspired
in your mind. My dense ignorance of the world, and your amiable
nature, would have prevented my making this discovery of my own
accord. But there are always plenty of those ‘good-natured
friends’ the man in the play talks about. _I found such a
friend._ If you have any curiosity upon the subject, Rosa
Grunderson, who is a good honest-hearted little girl, will tell
you the name of the man who opened my eyes to the full misery of
my position. In writing this, Maude, I have no thought of
reproach against _you_. To me you have been and always will be
something so bright and lovely as to be amenable to none of the
common laws which govern common natures. When you offered to be
my wife, you yielded to a generous impulse; and it is I who
deserve reproach for having been so base in my blind selfishness
as to accept the sacrifice you were willing to offer in
repayment of a fancied obligation. I cannot undo the past; but I
can at least set you in some manner free from the fetters you
forged for yourself under the influence of that brief
enthusiasm. So long as I live, one of the miseries of my life
will be the knowledge that I shut you out of a brighter fate;
that I deprive you of a more worthy companion; that the greatest
sacrifice I can make in atonement of the past will only make you
the lonely widow of a living husband. But I can at least rid you
of the society of a man whose presence inspires you with disgust
and loathing. O Maude, I am quoting your own words; spoken so
deliberately, so coldly, that I should be indeed mad and
cowardly, were I to shrink from accepting them in their fullest
import. I might have doubted until to-night; I might have hugged
myself with the notion that a liar and a scoundrel, for his own
base purposes, had taught me to think myself despised and
disliked; but your own lips have spoken, and I can doubt no
longer. Oh, my darling, my pet, my beloved, this seems so like a
reproach; but it is not, it is _not_.
“I am going to South America. When you read this, my
preparations will no doubt have begun. If possible, I shall sail
immediately. Of all the men who ever left England for that fiery
young world out yonder, there was never, perhaps, any one better
adapted to be happy and successful there than I am. I bid
good-bye for ever to the idle dissipations, the drunken orgies
in which I have sometimes found distraction, but never
happiness. And I begin a new life in a new field of labour. My
uncle’s money has been the root of all my misery, and I shall
take very little of that useless gold to the other shore. I
don’t think I was ever guilty of any great folly while I was a
poor man; but since I have been a rich one, my life has seemed
one long mistake.
“I write so much about myself and my own plans because I do not
want the memory of me, or of any sorrow which I may feel in this
parting, to cloud the brightness of your future; and I
understand your generous nature well enough to know that you
will be happier if you can believe that I am happy. O Maude, if
you could know how anxious I am that the life before you should
be a bright and happy one, you might almost forgive me for the
pain my selfish folly has inflicted upon you! My poor,
generous-hearted girl! my innocent darling! you thought it was
so light a thing to link your life to the life of a man whom you
could not love; and you have borne your burden so quietly. I
cannot release you from the chain that binds you to me, but I
will do my best to make that chain a light one. And, for the
rest, I go to a country in which life and death walk hand in
hand together. I take with me all an ignorant man’s love of
adventure, a soldier’s indifference to danger. Wear your chain
patiently, darling,--you may not have to wear it long. But one
word of warning from the man who has loved you so foolishly,
and, until this night, so selfishly. You have married hastily
once. Weigh well what you do if ever you marry again. If you
accepted for your husband an ignorant West-country boor when you
married me, I was at least an honest man. If I die, Maude, and
you are free to make a second marriage, be sure that the husband
of your choice has something of your own noble character; as
well as some smattering of the accomplishments that please you,
and the tricky jargon about art and literature which passes for
cleverness. I was anxious once to make myself a gentleman for
your sake, Maude; and when we have been visiting together, I
have listened to the men’s talk, for I wanted to find out how it
was done; and you could never guess how spurious some of that
brilliant conversation sounds to a man who _only_ listens. I
used to read some of your Mudie books in my own room sometimes
of a morning,--Froude, and Carlyle, Burton, Barth, and so on;
and I’ve heard men laying down the law about them at night, and
I have known from their talk that they hadn’t read a page of the
book itself, and were only airing the second-hand opinions
picked up out of a review.
“I saw you shudder once, Maude, because I didn’t know it was the
right thing to say ‘Barkley Square;’ and pronounced the word as
it is spelt. But oh, what bosh I’ve heard the Barkley-Squarers
talk sometimes about things I do understand! I’ve heard a man at
a dinner-party hold forth about our convict system sometimes,
and transportation, and Van Diemen’s Land, till I’ve been
inclined to get up and do something to him with a carving-knife;
and oh, the self-satisfied manner of the creature, and the way
he has lifted his eyebrows and looked at _me_, if I ventured to
express any opinion upon the subject! In South America there may
be fever and disease, perhaps--privation, danger; but there will
be no Barkley Square. I may meet with Aztecs, who may maltreat
or even assassinate me; but they won’t have little bits of glass
that they can’t see through to hitch into their eyes whenever I
speak to them. And they won’t lift their eyebrows and begin to
whisper about me the moment I enter a room. And I shall never
hear them say, ‘Oh, the _rich_ Tredethlyn, is it? Gad, what a
clodhopper!’
“Why do I write about these things, Maude, when I am writing to
bid you good-bye for ever? Only because I want you to believe
there is _something_ wanting even in the perfect world in which
you live. If my death should set you free in your youth, marry
again, dear, by all means; but marry a man whose truth and
loyalty have been proved by a life of unblemished honour; marry
a man who has set his mark upon the age--who has _done
something_; for such a man is scarcely likely to be a scoundrel.
Above all, darling, accept my warning against _one_ man: _do not
marry Harcourt Lowther_.
“All the privileges that you have enjoyed during your bondage
you shall retain in your freedom. Before sailing, I shall make
my will, in which you will be left residuary legatee, and
recipient of the bulk of my fortune. While I live, your income
will be large enough to support the style in which you have
lived during the past year; and there will be a wide margin left
for the indulgence of every impulse of your generous heart. I
shall place full directions as to the management of my fortune
in the hands of my solicitors, Messrs. Kursdale and Scardon; and
they will call on you by my direction to explain your position
immediately after receiving my instructions. You will find
yourself the mistress of the larger part of the income derived
from my late uncle’s investments and from the Cornish estate,
and you will have no further trouble than to sign your name now
and then, when the lawyers want you to do so. In the interim I
enclose a cheque for £500, so that you may not be without ready
money. Your father’s affairs are now, he tells me, in a very
easy state, and I do not leave him in troubled water. He may
consider you his creditor for the interest of the thirty
thousand sunk in his business; and I don’t suppose he will find
you a very importunate one.
“And now good-bye indeed. I leave you with all confidence in
your noble heart, your high principles. You are too good and
pure to be otherwise than happy. Far away on the Pampas, lying
under canvas, with the long silvery trail of the moonlight on
the grey expanse beyond my tent, the whisper of faint winds
among the long grasses sounding in my ears, I shall think of
you, and see you happy in the old English garden at Twickenham,
loitering on the terrace by your father’s side. In that
trackless loneliness, fever-parched perhaps, and far away from
the chance of water, I shall think of the blue English river,
but _never_ think of it without seeing your image standing by
the tide, your bright face reflected in the glassy stream. Oh,
Maude, I have loved you so dearly, so fondly! and now that it
comes to saying good-bye, it seems almost as difficult to tear
myself from this lifeless sheet of paper, as it would be to take
my lips away from yours in a last long kiss. My pet, my darling,
God bless you, and good-bye! Think of me sometimes; but never
with pain. Some midnight, when you are waltzing in a crowded
ball-room, with a brazen band braying in your ears, and the hum
of a hundred voices round about you, think that in some savage
wilderness a man is kneeling under God’s blue sky, praying for
you as few people are prayed for on this earth; think sometimes,
if a special peace comes down upon you, like the cool shadow we
have watched drop slowly upon the river when the sun was down,
think, darling, that I am saying, ‘God keep and guard her safely
through the night! God fill her heart with peace and gladness,
whether she sleeps or wakes!’
“And so, my own dear wife, for the first and last time in my
life, I sign myself your true and loyal husband,
“FRANCIS TREDETHLYN.”
Julia had fluttered out of the room and into the little conservatory,
where there were always faded leaves to be snipped off, or bird-cages to
be replenished with fresh water. Miss Desmond, in her darkest mood, was
too much a lady to sit by and stare while Maude possessed herself of the
contents of her husband’s letter. She lingered among the twittering
canary-birds and sprawling ferns so long as she considered that delicacy
demanded she should be absent, and then she strolled back to the
breakfast-table with a look of supreme unconsciousness. But she gave a
little scream as she glanced across the table at Mrs. Tredethlyn, and
flew to the bell. Maude had finished her letter, which lay in scattered
sheets at her feet, and she had fallen back upon the sofa-pillows in a
dead faint.
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