Only a clod · OmniClassics

ONLY A CLOD A Novel BY THE AUTHOR OF “LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET,” “AURORA FLOYD” ETC. ETC. ETC. Stereotyped Edition LONDON JOHN AND ROBERT MAXWELL MILTON HOUSE, SHOE LANE, FLEET STREET [_All rights reserved_] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TO OCTAVE DELEPIERRE, F.S.A., LL.D. AND HIS CHARMING WIFE, CHARLOTTE This Story is Inscribed IN REMEMBRANCE OF MANY PLEASANT HOURS PASSED WITH THEM. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE I. THE MASTER 5 II. THE MAN 11 III. TIDINGS OF HOME 14 IV. TREDETHLYN’S LUCK 17 V. COMING HOME 26 VI. THE END OF THE WORLD 32 VII. MAUDE HILLARY’S ADORERS 42 VIII. AT THE CHATEAU DE BOURBON 50 IX. JULIA DESMOND MAKES HERSELF AGREEABLE 53 X. COLTONSLOUGH 62 XI. A VERY OLD STORY 69 XII. A MODERN GENTLEMAN’S DIARY 80 XIII. CAUGHT IN THE TOILS 94 XIV. VERY PRIVATE THEATRICALS 100 XV. A COMMERCIAL CRISIS 108 XVI. A DRAMA THAT WAS ACTED BEHIND THE SCENES 123 XVII. SOMETHING LIKE FRIENDSHIP 139 XVIII. POOR FRANCIS 143 XIX. MR. HILLARY SPEAKS HIS MIND 151 XX. AN EXPLANATION 156 XXI. HARCOURT LOWTHER’S WELCOME 161 XXII. TAKING IT QUIETLY 167 XXIII. TIDINGS OF SUSAN 176 XXIV. FRANCIS TREDETHLYN’S DISINTERESTED ADVISER 190 XXV. THE ROAD TO RUIN 196 XXVI. A CHILLING RECONCILIATION 203 XXVII. SEEING A GHOST 211 XXVIII. “OH, MY AMY! MINE NO MORE!” 219 XXIX. ENTANGLEMENTS IN THE WEB 232 XXX. THE TWO ANTIPHOLI 238 XXXI. THE DIPLOMATIST’S POLICY 243 XXXII. HARCOURT GATHERS HIS FIRST FRUITS 253 XXXIII. ROSA’S REVELATIONS 266 XXXIV. THE LADY AT PETERSHAM 279 XXXV. A HASTY RECKONING 287 XXXVI. POOR FRANK’S LETTER 296 XXXVII. ELEANOR DROPS IN UPON ROSAMOND 302 XXXVIII. GONE 310 XXXIX. TOO LATE 317 XL. AN IGNOMINIOUS FAILURE 322 XLI. SUSAN’S GOOD NEWS 331 XLII. A PERFECT UNION 341 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ONLY A CLOD CHAPTER I. THE MASTER. Ensign Harcourt Lowther, of her Majesty’s 51st Light Infantry, sat staring out into his garden at Port Arthur, watching a couple of convict gardeners--who were going about their work with a monotonous and exasperating deliberation of movement--and lamenting the evil fortune that had stationed him in his present quarters. He had a great many troubles, this elegant young ensign, who was, for the time being, destined to bloom unseen, and waste the graces that ought to have adorned Belgravia upon the desert air of the island of Tasmania. He had, as he himself elegantly expressed it, no end of troubles. First and foremost, his cigar would not draw; and as it was the last of a case of choice cabanas, the calamity was not a small one. Secondly, there had been a drought in fair Van Diemen’s Land for the last month or so. The verdure was growing brown and leathery; the feathery masses of the tall fern shrivelled at the edges like scorched paper; the stiff foliage of the cedars seemed to rattle as it shook in the dry, dust-laden wind, and the thermometer stood at a hundred and ten in the shade; true, it might drop forty degrees or so at any moment, with the uprising of a moist breeze from the sea, but, pending the arrival of that auspicious moment, Mr Lowther was in a very bad temper. What had he done that he should be stationed in a convict settlement, with no chance of any gain or glory as compensation for his trials; with no one to speak to except a prosy old police-magistrate or a puritanical chaplain; with nothing better to look at than the eternal blue of the ocean, or a whaling vessel anchored in the bay; with nothing to listen to except the clanking of hammers and banging of timber and jingling of iron in the busy dockyard; with no better enjoyment to hope for than a couple of days’ quail-shooting or kangaroo-hunting in the interior? “If I’d been Desperate Bill the Burglar, or Slippery Steeve the Smasher, I couldn’t be _much_ worse off,” he muttered, as he gave up the unmanageable cigar, and went across the room to a table, upon which there were some tobacco-jars and meerschaum pipes. “Now, then, Tredethlyn, are those boots ready?” This question was addressed to an invisible some one, whose low whistling of a jovial Irish air was audible from the adjoining room. “Yes, captain,” answered a cheery voice--the whistler had broken off in the middle of the “wild sweet briery fence that around the flowers of Erin dwells,”--“yes, captain, quite ready.” “That’s another aggravation,” exclaimed Mr. Lowther,--“the fellow will call me captain; as if it wasn’t an underhand way of reminding me that for a poor devil like me there’s no chance of promotion.” “But you see you _are_ captain here, Mr. Lowther,” said the whistler, emerging from the adjoining chamber with a pair of newly-blacked Wellingtons in his hand; “you’re captain, major, colonel, general, and field-marshal, all in one here, with seventy men under your control, and any amount of convicts to look after.” “If there’s one thing in the world that’s more excruciating than another, it’s that fellow’s cheerfulness,” cried Mr. Lowther. I can fancy the feelings of an elegant young French marquis of the _vieille roche_, a scion of the Mortemars or Birons, buried alive in an underground cell in the Bastille, with a lively commoner for his companion--a cheerful _bourgeois_, who pretended to make light of his situation, and eat his mouldy bread with a relish. “Now, then, Tredethlyn, where are the boot-hooks? That fellow always forgets something.” “That fellow,” otherwise Francis Tredethlyn, was a tall, stalwart private soldier, of some seven-and-twenty years of age, who had been honoured by an appointment to the post of valet and butler to Ensign Harcourt Lowther. If the stalwart soldier had not been blest with one of those imperturbable Mark-Tapley-like tempers, which resemble the patent elliptic springs of a crack coachbuilder’s carriage, and can convey the traveller unjolted and uninjured over the roughest roads in the journey of life, he might have found his position as valet, major-domo, and occasional confidant to Harcourt Lowther, far from the pleasantest berth to be had in this great tempest-tossed vessel which we call the world. But Francis Tredethlyn’s serenity of disposition was proof against the most wearisome burden a man is ever called upon to bear--the companionship of a discontented fellow-creature, and all the variable moods, from a feverish cynical kind of gaiety to a dreary and ill-tempered gravity, which were engendered out of that perpetual discontent. But Frank Tredethlyn bore it all cheerfully; with a manly, open-hearted cheerfulness that had no taint of sycophancy. If the young ensign wanted to talk to him, well and good--he was ready and willing to talk about any thing or every thing; but he had his own sentiments upon most subjects, which sentiments were of a very fast colour, and did not take any reflected hue from Mr. Lowther’s aristocratic opinions. It is not to be supposed that Francis Tredethlyn, private soldier and valet, had any claims to intellectual equality with his master. The private wrote a fair commercial hand, very bold and big and resolute-looking; could read aloud without stumbling ignominiously over the long words; could cast up accounts; and, looking back at the history of the universal past, saw glimmering faintly over a sea of darkness and oblivion such beacon-lights as a Norman invasion; a solemn meeting on the flat turf of Runnymede; a Reformation, with a good deal of martyr-burning and head-chopping attendant thereupon; a fiery hook-nosed Dutch liberator, a Jacobite rebellion, and a Reform Bill. Beyond these limits the attainments of Mr. Tredethlyn did not extend; and the ensign, when grumbling at the general discomfort of his life, was apt to say that it was a hard thing to be flung for companionship on a fellow who was nothing but a boor and a clod. Mr. Lowther treated his valet very much as a spoiled child treats her doll; sometimes it pleased him to be monstrously cordial and familiar with his attendant, while at another time he held Francis aloof by a haughty reserve of manner, beyond which barrier the other made no effort to penetrate. “The fellow does possess that merit,” Harcourt Lowther said sometimes, “he knows how to keep his place.” The fact of the matter is, the valet was infinitely less dependent upon his master’s companionship than his master upon his. There were a hundred ways in which Francis Tredethlyn could amuse himself; and there was not a cloud in the sky, a wave of the sea, a leaf in the garden, out of which he could not take some scrap of pleasure, and which had not a deeper and truer meaning for him than for the idle young officer who lay yawning upon his narrow couch with his feet in the air, and nothing better to do than to admire the shape of his boots, obtained on credit from a confiding West-end tradesman. Francis had that wide sympathy with his fellow-creatures which is a special attribute of some men; and was on the friendliest possible terms with the two convict gardeners, both of whom had achieved some renown as the most incorrigible and execrable specimens of the criminal class. Every dog in the little settlement fawned upon Frank Tredethlyn, and ran to rub his head against his knees, and slaver his hand with its flapping tongue. He had made a kennel for two or three of these canine acquaintances in a shady corner of the big garden, much to the disgust and annoyance of the ensign, who only cared for such dogs as are calculated to assist the sports of their lord and master. Staghounds and beagles, foxhounds and terriers, setters,