Only a clod
MAUDE HILLARY’S ADORERS.
From the bleak moorland on the Cornish hills, where no tree can
flourish, and where the sweeping breath of the salt sea-breeze nips the
tender verdure, and makes the quiet sheep wink again as they look
oceanward; from the hilly district beyond Landresdale, which seems like
the end of the world, and is at any rate the finishing-point of this
British Isle, to the valley of the Thames, the sheltered and lovely
hollow nestling under the wooded heights about the Star-and-Garter, is
about as great a change of scene as all England can afford. It is like
the pushing away of some battered front scene which has done duty for
the blasted heath near Forres, whereon Macbeth met the witches, since
the days when Garrick himself represented the ambitious Thane, to reveal
a glimpse of fairyland fresh from the pencil of Mr. Beverley, with
sunlit cascades glimmering here and there amongst the verdant valleys,
and forest-trees reflected in the calm bosom of a lake.
Mr. Hillary’s place lay in a sheltered bend of the river, nearer to
Isleworth than to Twickenham--a spot where the trees grew thicker and
the shadows fell darker on the quiet water, and the plash of oars was
less often heard, than higher up the river, Mr. Hillary’s house and Mr.
Hillary’s garden seemed to have nestled into the shadiest and most
verdant nook along the river-bank. It was called the Cedars, and it was
a very old place, as any place so called should be. It was called the
Cedars by virtue of the great trees whose spreading branches made
patches of dense shadow on the lawn; and not by the caprice of a cockney
builder, who christens his shelterless houses indifferently after the
noblest trees of the forest. The house was an old red-brick mansion,
long and low and irregular; and there is no kind of window invented for
the admission of the light of heaven, and there is no species of blind
devised by ingenious artisan for the exclusion of that light when it
becomes obnoxious, which did not adorn and diversify the glowing crimson
of the façade. Oriel windows and Tudor windows; long French windows of
violet-stained glass, tiny diamond-paned casements, and noble
jutting-out bays; windows with balconies, and windows with verandahs;
striped linen blinds of crimson and white, and Venetian shutters of
dazzling green; windows leading into conservatories, and windows opening
into aviaries,--all combined to bewilder the eye of the stranger who
stood upon the lawn by the river looking up at Mr. Hillary’s mansion.
Perhaps there never had been any where else so many flowers, and birds,
and gold-fish, and pet dogs, collected together in an area of two acres
and a half. Banks of particoloured blossoms blazed in the sunshine on
the lawn tier above tier, like the bonnets on the grand stand at Ascot
on a Cup day; marble basins of limpid water and tiny trickling fountains
twinkled and glittered in every direction; fragile colonnades of
delicate ironwork, overhung with jasmine and clematis, honeysuckle and
myrtle-blossom, led away to bowery nooks upon the broad terrace by the
river; and what with the perfume of a million flowers, the gurgling of
blackbirds and thrushes, the carolling of skylarks, the shrill whistling
of a grove of canaries, the cooing of tropical love-birds, the screaming
of paroquets, and the barking of half-a-dozen excited lapdogs, the
stranger, suddenly let loose in Mr. Hillary’s river-side Eden, was apt
to yield himself up for the moment to a state of confusion and
bewilderment.
The place was in itself bewildering enough for the ordinary mind;
without Miss Hillary--without Miss Hillary! But when Miss Hillary came
sailing out of a drawing-room window, with diaphanous draperies of white
and blue fluttering and spreading round her, and with all manner of
yellow, gold, and purple enamel absurdities dangling at her wrists, and
depending from the loveliest throat and the pinkest ears in
Christendom,--the stranger who was not provided with forty thousand a
year and a coronet, the which to lay at the feet of that adorable
creature, was the weakest of fools if he did not take to his heels there
and then, and fly from the Cedars, never to return thither. If he
stayed, he fully deserved his fate. If, looking at Maude Hillary, and
knowing that he could never hope to win her for his own, he did not
straightway flee from that flowery paradise beside the sunlit river, all
after-agonies endured by his luckless heart were only the natural
consequence of his mad temerity. But then, unhappily, there are so many
mad men in the world. Homburg and Baden-Baden are dangerous places, but
there are crowds of deluded creatures who will haunt the dazzling halls
of the Kursaal, and the elegant saloons of M. Benazet, so long as the
fatal wheel revolves, and the croupier cries, “Make your game,
gentlemen; the game is made.” What can be a more absurd spectacle than a
big blundering moth whirling and fluttering about the flame of a candle?
Yet the incineration of moth A will not be accepted as a warning by moth
B, though he may be a witness of the sacrifice. Younger sons and
briefless barristers, earning a fluctuating income by the exercise of
their talents in light literature; artists; curates, hopeless of rich
preferment,--came, and saw, and were conquered. The man who, being a
bachelor and under thirty years of age, beheld Maude Hillary, and did
_not_ fall in love with her, was made of sterner stuff than the rest of
his race, and must have had in him the material for a Cromwell or a
Robespierre. He must have been a stony, incorruptible, bilious creature,
intended to hold iron sway over his fellow-men; he had no business in
the paradise between Isleworth and Twickenham.
Shall I describe Maude Hillary as she sails across the lawn this July
morning? I use the word ‘sail,’ as applied to this young lady’s
movements, advisedly; for there was a swimming, undulating motion in her
walk, which was apt to remind one of a lovely white-sailed yacht gliding
far out across an expanse of serene blue water on a summer’s day. Shall
I describe her? No; if I do, stern critics will tell me that she is a
very commonplace young person after all, when it is only my description
that will be commonplace. Her complexion was specially fair and bright;
but it was not because of her fair skin that she was beautiful. Her
features were delicate and harmonious; but those who admired her most
could scarcely have told you whether her nose was nearer to the Grecian
or the Roman type; whether her forehead was low or high, her chin round
or pointed. She was bewitching, rather than beautiful. For if Paris
awarded the apple on purely technical grounds, a thousand lovely English
women might have disputed the prize with Maude Hillary. But I think
Paris would have wished to give her the apple, if only for the pleasure
of seeing her bright face light up into new radiance with the joy of her
triumph; though in strict justice he might feel himself obliged to
bestow the fruit elsewhere. Miss Hillary was bewitching; and people saw
her, and fell in love with her, and bowed themselves down at her feet,
long before they had time to find out that she was not so very beautiful
after all.
She came winding in and out among the flower-beds now, and betook
herself towards an open temple at one end of the terrace by the river--a
temple of slender marble columns, entwined with ivy and beautiful
ephemeral parasites, whose gaudy blossoms relieved the sombre green. Two
gentlemen, who were disporting themselves with lawn billiards, deserted
that amusement and strolled over to the temple. They went slowly enough,
because they held it vulgar to be in a hurry, and they were very young,
and very much used up as to all the joys and sorrows and excitements of
this earth; but they were over head and ears in love with Miss Hillary
notwithstanding.
She was not alone. She never was alone. She had for her constant
associates from four to half-a-dozen pet dogs, and Miss Julia Desmond,
her companion. Miss Desmond was by no means the despised companion so
popular in three-volume novels. She was a very dignified young lady,
whose father had been a colonel in ever so many different armies. She
was one of the Desmonds of Castle Desmond, near Limerick, and there were
three peerages in her family, to say nothing of one extinct earldom,
forfeited by reason of high treason on the part of its possessor, the
revival of which, for his own benefit, had been the lifelong dream of
Patrick Macnamara Ryan O’Brien Desmond, until death let fall a curtain
on that and many other fond delusions which had survived unchanged and
changeless to the last in the eternal boyhood of an Irishman’s nature.
Julia was a very dignified young lady, and had been highly educated in a
Parisian convent, whence she had returned to the south of Ireland to
find the impress of decay upon every object around her, from the
grass-grown roofs of the cottages in the lane below the castle-boundary
to the shattered figure of the brave old colonel. She returned in time
to attend her father’s death-bed, to which Lionel Hillary, his oldest
friend and largest creditor, was summoned by an imploring letter from
the old colonel. To Mr. Hillary the old man confided his penniless
daughter. He had nothing to leave her but a set of old-fashioned garnet
ornaments which had belonged to her mother, and to which he fondly
alluded as the “fam’ly jools;” he had nothing to leave her except this
antique trumpery and his blessing; but he confided her to his largest
creditor, having a vague impression that the largeness of the debt and
the heavy interest he _would_ have given upon all the money lent him by
his friend, had he ever lived to return the principal, laid Mr. Hillary
under a kind of obligation to him. However it was, the London merchant
promised to be a friend and protector to Julia Desmond; and as soon as
the colonel’s funeral was over carried her back to London with him, and
established her in his own house, as the companion of his daughter. A
young lady more or less was of little consequence in such an
establishment as the Cedars; so the merchant thought very lightly of
what he did for Miss Desmond, and Maude Hillary was delighted to have a
friend who was to be her perpetual companion; a friend who could sing a
good second to any duet, and was never out of time in “Blow, gentle
gales,” whensoever a masculine visitor with a good bass organ was to be
procured for the third in that delicious glee. The two girls drove
together, and walked together, and rode together, and played duets on
one piano and on two pianos, or a harp and piano; and went out together
to make water-colour sketches of their favourite bends in the river,
with very blue water and very green willows, and a man in a scarlet
jacket lazily pushing a ferry-boat away from the shore, and a
Newfoundland dog, very black and white and spotty, lying on the bank.
Julia Desmond led a very pleasant life, and there were people who said
that the colonel’s daughter was a most fortunate person; but for Julia
herself there was just one drop in the cup which was bitter enough to
change the flavour of the entire draught. She was _not_ Maude Hillary.
That was Miss Desmond’s grand grievance. She brooded over it sometimes
when she brushed her hair of a night before the big looking-glass in her
pretty chintz-curtained chamber at the Cedars. Maude had two cheval
glasses that swung upon hinges at each side of her dressing-table, and
Maude had her own maid to brush her hair; but Julia was fain to smooth
her own dark tresses. Miss Desmond thought of her grievance very often
of a night, when she contemplated her face by the light of a pair of wax