TOO LATE.
A long miserable week wore itself slowly out after the night in which
Francis Tredethlyn had turned his back upon a house which he had never
been allowed to find a home. Through all the week there were no tidings
of Maude’s departed husband; but when the week was over, a formal letter
from Mr. Kursdale acquainted her with Mr. Tredethlyn’s arrangements for
her welfare, and with the fact that he had embarked the day before on
board the steam-vessel _Kingfisher_, bound for Buenos Ayres. The news
inflicted as great a shock upon Maude as if her husband’s letter
announcing his intended departure had never been written. To the last
she had believed, that when the time for action came, his resolution
would fail him all at once, and he would hurry back to her, faithful and
devoted as in the earliest days of their brief married life, when he had
nursed her Skye terriers, and sat patiently for an hour at a stretch in
a haberdasher’s shop while she selected ribands and laces. She had
written him a penitent letter, and had enclosed it to Mr. Kursdale,
entreating that gentleman to deliver it to his client whenever he saw
him. She had not thought it possible that, even if Francis persisted in
his intention of leaving England, he would leave without an interview
with his solicitor. But when Maude drove post-haste to Gray’s Inn, and
presented herself in the lawyer’s office, she found that there had been
no interview. Francis had communicated with his solicitor by letter
only, and his clear and concise epistle bore the date of the very day on
which he was to start for Plymouth, whence the _Kingfisher_ was to sail.
The letter thus dated had arrived at the lawyer’s office after business
hours; and when Mr. Kursdale opened it next morning, there was little
doubt that the _Kingfisher_ was outward bound with Francis Tredethlyn on
board her. Maude made a confidant of her husband’s solicitor. A family
lawyer is a kind of father confessor in the matter of secrets, and has
generally outlived the capacity of surprise as completely as those
imperturbable disciples of St. Ignatius Loyola who are irreverently
entitled “crows.” The despondent wife told Mr. Kursdale that Francis had
left home in consequence of a slight misunderstanding--(was any conjugal
quarrel ever yet described by the belligerents as anything _more_ than a
slight misunderstanding?)--and she implored him to assist her in
bringing about her husband’s speedy return.
“But do you think he has really sailed?” she asked; “do you think he can
have been so cruel as to leave England without even giving me the
opportunity of imploring him to remain?”
Mr. Kursdale shook his head gravely.
“There is nothing in his letter to me which indicates indifference to
your wishes,” he said; “it is only a business letter; but in a practical
way it is the strongest evidence of a husband’s devotion that ever came
to my knowledge. We lawyers are a matter-of-fact set of men, and we are
apt to form our conclusions in a matter-of-fact way. What other people
would treat as an affair of sentiment, we look at as an affair of
figures; and I must say, Mrs. Tredethlyn, that gauged by that standard,
your husband comes out nobly.”
“But I want him to come back to me,” Maude exclaimed, simply; “I don’t
want to be rich--or to live like a woman of fashion. He wrongs me most
cruelly when he thinks that I married him for his money. I married him
because he was good to my father. Do you think I could accept the income
which that letter places at my disposal, knowing that my husband has
left his native country because of me? Tell me what I am to do, Mr.
Kursdale. I know that Mr. Tredethlyn is unhappy, and that a few words
from me would set all right. What am I to do?”
“We must try to send him the few words, my dear Mrs. Tredethlyn,”
answered the lawyer, cheerfully. “South America is not so very far off
nowadays; and you know that even in Alexander Pope’s time a sigh might
be wafted from Indus to the Pole, by means of ocean postage. We’ll get
your letter delivered to Mr. Tredethlyn as quickly as the improvements
of modern science will allow, you may depend upon it. Shall I send the
letter you enclosed to me the other day? Perhaps you would like to add
something to it--another postscript, eh? Ladies have such a _penchant_
for postscripts,” said the lawyer, lapsing into mild facetiousness,
which he imagined to be of an eminently consolatory character. There are
people who believe that a feeble joke is an infallible specific for a
deeply rooted grief.
“I will send a clerk off to Plymouth by the next train,” said Mr.
Kursdale, with his hand upon the spring of a little bell beside him. He
spoke as coolly as if he had been talking of sending a clerk over the
way. “If by any chance the _Kingfisher_ has not sailed when the young
man arrives, your husband will have the letter before dark. If the
_Kingfisher_ has sailed, the letter must be sent on by the next mail. At
the worst, Mr. Tredethlyn may be back in six or seven weeks.”
In six or seven weeks! It seemed a very long time; but on receiving the
lawyer’s letter announcing her husband’s departure, Maude had fancied
that he was lost to her for ever. With what wonderful intelligence we
can perceive the value of anything we have lost! In your daily walks, O
modest collector of household treasures! you will see a little bit of
china, a picture, an apostle spoon, a quaint old volume in a
shop-window,--and, intending to look in and bargain for it some day when
you have leisure, you will pass it a hundred times, indifferent as to
its merits, half uncertain whether it is worth buying; but you discover
some day that it is gone, and then in a moment the doubtful shepherdess
becomes the rarest old Chelsea, the dirty-looking little bit of
landscape an undeniable Crome, the battered silver spoon of
unquestionable antiquity, the quaintly bound book a choice Elzevir. The
thing is lost; and we regret it for all that it might have been, as well
as for all that it was, and there are no bounds to the extravagance we
would commit to regain the chance of possessing it.
It was something after this fashion, perhaps, that Mrs. Tredethlyn
regretted her husband, as she drove home disconsolately after her
interview with the lawyer, to await the result of his clerk’s journey.
She would have gone herself to Plymouth if she could have done any more
than the clerk; but she had a dim belief that if there was infallibility
anywhere on earth, it was to be found in the office of an
old-established solicitor, and she thought that Mr. Kursdale’s
accredited agent could not fail to effect some good.
Her disappointment was very bitter the next day when she received a note
from the solicitor, informing her that the _Kingfisher_ had sailed
twelve hours before the clerk arrived at Plymouth.
After this Maude could only await the result of her letter. Six or seven
weeks seemed such a weary time as she looked forward to it; and it might
be as long as that, or even longer, before any tidings from Francis
could reach her. She went to her father, to pour her sorrows into his
ear; but though he received her very affectionately, she could see that
he blamed her severely for the folly which had driven Francis Tredethlyn
from his home.
She would have gone to stay at the Cedars during this dreary period; but
she had a nervous dread of not being on the spot to receive any possible
communication from her husband, so she remained amid the grand
hotel-like splendour of the Stuccoville mansion; though her neighbours
were daily departing for distant British watering-places, or on the
first stage of continental wanderings, to toil amidst Alpine glaciers,
or to lounge at German gaming-tables.
Mrs. Tredethlyn was very glad to see London growing empty; but before
her acquaintance departed for their autumnal relaxations they had ample
time to discuss her husband’s disappearance and her own sudden
withdrawal from society. The fact of that slight misunderstanding, which
Maude had been obliged to confess to the solicitor, had become patent to
all Stuccoville through the agency of loquacious maids and languid
footmen, and had assumed every possible and impossible complexion in
feminine debates. So Maude stood listlessly at one of the windows in her
spacious bedchamber, sheltered by the voluminous curtains and the
flowers in the balcony, and looked despondently at happy family parties
driving away to railway stations with cargoes of parasols and umbrellas,
and deliciously fluffy carriage-rugs and foot-muffs. Other people always
seem so happy. The lives of those smiling Stuccovillians might not have
been unclouded in their serenity; but Maude watched them very sadly,
remembering how she and her husband might have been starting in the
twilight for the Dover mail, like that merry young couple from the house
over the way.
Surely she must have loved him very dearly, or she scarcely could have
regretted him so much. If she had been questioned as to the real state
of her feelings on this point, she could not have given any very clear
reply to the question. She only knew that her husband had been very good
to her, and that she had repaid his devotion with neglect and
indifference. Maude had been a spoiled child, it must be remembered, and
there may have been something of a spoiled child’s useless remorse in
her penitence; but she was very penitent. All her life for the last year
had been crowded with proofs of Francis Tredethlyn’s unbounded love;
and, looking back upon them, she could not remember one instance in
which she had been sufficiently grateful for his affection.
“Those silly young men at the Cedars used to make a fool of me with
their empty flatteries,” she thought, remorsefully; “and I treated Frank
as I had learned to treat them, accepting his generous devotion as
indifferently as I had accepted their unmeaning compliments.”
There was one thing that Maude did not remember as she looked back at
her past life, and that was Harcourt Lowther’s influence. She did not
know how much of her indifference to her husband had been engendered by
the subtle sarcasms of her jilted lover; nor did she know how the
schemer had practised upon her girlish love of society, in order to
widen the gulf that divided her from Francis Tredethlyn. Her errors as a
wife had chiefly arisen from want of leisure. She had found no time to
adapt herself to her husband’s tastes--no time to elevate and refine him
by association--no time to give him any return for those practical
proofs of his affection in the way of jewels and carriages,
thorough-bred steppers, and hundred-guinea shawls, which he was
constantly lavishing upon her; and, worse than all, she had found no
time to inquire how he passed his life, or in what circles he sought the
happiness she had never tried to provide for him in his home.
“I will ask him to complete the purchase of the Berkshire estate when he
comes back to me,” she thought; “and then we shall be able to begin a
new life away from this perpetual whirlpool of society; and I can drive
to the meet when Frank hunts, and even take an interest in the stables.
Country stables are so pretty; and it’s so nice to see a favourite horse
looking over the door of his loose-box, with a big tabby cat sitting on
the wooden ledge beside him, and honeysuckle blowing about his head. But
one’s horses might as well be at the North Pole for all one can see of
them in a London mews, where there are always dreadful men in
shirt-sleeves, and cross-looking women hanging up clothes,” mused Mrs.
Tredethlyn, with a vivid recollection of the prospect which all the
ground glass in her fernery could not quite shut out.
While she was thinking very penitently of the past, and weaving pleasant
schemes for the future; while she was perpetually counting the days
which must elapse before Francis returned to her, always supposing that
the remorseful words of her letter found their way straight to his
heart, as she implicitly believed they would; while she was praying
daily and nightly for his safe preservation in tempest and danger, Maude
Tredethlyn took up the “Times” newspaper one morning as she loitered
listlessly over a lonely breakfast-table, and the first paragraph that
met her eyes was the announcement of the _Kingfisher’s_ total
destruction by fire, and the entire loss of passengers and crew.
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