Only a clod
candles, and pondered upon the events of the day. She was not Maude
Hillary. She was not sole heiress to one of the largest fortunes--so ran
the common rumour--ever won by City merchant. She had not received half
the attention that had been bestowed upon Miss Hillary during that day.
And if not, why not? Was it because she was less good-looking? Certainly
not. Miss Desmond was a handsome girl, with bold, striking features, and
her black eyes flashed indignation upon the other eyes in the glass at
the mere thought of any personal superiority on the part of Maude
Hillary. Was it because she was less accomplished? No, indeed. Whose
thumbs were the strongest and did most execution in a fantasia by
Thalberg? Whose right little finger was clearest and steadiest in a
prolonged shake? Whose figures in a water-colour sketch stood firmest on
their legs? Miss Desmond’s, of course. But Maude was rich, and Julia was
poor; and the meanness of mankind was testified by the absurd devotion
which they all exhibited for the heiress. Julia was really fond of
Maude, and thought her tolerably pretty; but she did not comprehend the
grand fact that Miss Hillary was one of the most fascinating of women,
and that she herself was not. She was handsome and stylish, and
accomplished and well-bred; but she was not bewitching. When Maude spoke
in a friendly manner to any masculine acquaintance he was apt to be
seized with a mad impulse that prompted him to kiss her there and then,
though eternal banishment from her divine presence would be his
immediate doom. Even women had something of the same feeling when Miss
Hillary talked to them; and perhaps this may be attributed to the fact
that her mouth was the best and most expressive feature in her face.
Such heavenly smiles, such innocently and unconsciously bewitching
variations of expression played perpetually about those lovely rosy
lips, that the harshest woman-hater might have been betrayed into the
admission that amongst nature’s numerous mistakes Maude Hillary’s
creation was an excusable one. Fortune-hunters, who came with mercenary
aspirations, remained to be sincere. Rich young stockbrokers, who
speculated amongst themselves upon the extent of Lionel Hillary’s
wealth, would have gladly taken Maude to wife, “ex everything.” But
Julia Desmond could not understand all this, and she regarded her
benefactor’s daughter as a feminine image of the golden calf, before
which mercenary mankind bowed down in servile worship.
The two girls seated themselves in the little temple, and the two
worshippers came round and performed their homage. But Miss Hillary had
more to say to her dogs than to the loungers on the lawn.
“Good morning, Captain Masters.--Floss, you are the naughtiest
darling.--Haven’t I told you once before, Scrub, that Honiton lace is
_not_ good to eat?--Papa has not come home yet, I suppose, Mr.
Somerset?--That tiresome City makes a kind of orphan of me, doesn’t it,
Julia? We never have papa to go with us anywhere now, do we, Julia?--No,
Peasblossom, anything but a locket with papa’s hair in it. _That_ must
not be worried.--When are we to go to the _fête_, Captain Masters?”
The captain shrugged his shoulders. He was very young, and held every
thing upon earth, except Maude, in supreme detestation and contempt.
“As from four to five is about the hottest period in the entire day, I
believe the _fête_ is supposed to be at its best somewhere between four
and five,” he said; “we manage these things so remarkably well in
England.”
“But as the Duke and Duchess are both French, I suppose the management
of the _fête_ at the Château de Bourbon is French too, isn’t it?” asked
Miss Desmond.
Maude was occupied with a Scotch terrier, who was making ferocious snaps
at the jasmine trailing from the roof above her. She would have made a
charming subject for a modern Greuze, with the dog held up in her hands,
and the loose white muslin sleeves falling back from those fair rounded
arms in soft cloudy folds.
“The Duke and Duchess are very charming,” said Mr. Somerset; “and when
one thinks that if they had lived in seventeen ninety-three, instead of
eighteen forty-eight, they’d have been inevitably guillotined on the
Place Louis Quinze, instead of being comfortably settled in the
neighbourhood of Isleworth, one feels an extraordinary kind of interest
in them as living illustrations of improvement of the times. But, apart
from that, Miss Hillary, don’t you think the _fête_ a bore? Don’t you
think any charity _fête_ more or less a bore? I can understand people
sending you a subscription list, and telling their man to wait in your
hall till you write a cheque for them; but I can’t understand people
choosing the hottest day in a hot summer to parade about a garden,
grinning and smirking at one another, and giving exorbitant prices for
things they don’t want.”
“But you mean to go to the _fête_, Mr. Somerset?”
“Most decidedly, if I am to have the honour of going with you--and Miss
Desmond.”
Miss Desmond, with one flash of her black eyes, expressed her
appreciation of the little pause that had preceded Mr. Somerset’s
mention of her name.
“Yes, I suppose we are to take you with us,” Maude answered, with cruel
carelessness. “Papa said that if he were not home at three, we were to
go without him, and he would meet us at the château,--and it’s past
three now, I declare, Julia, and we’re not dressed,” added Miss Hillary,
looking at her watch; “and papa is always so particular about
punctuality. Wasn’t it Lord Nelson who won the battle of Trafalgar
through always being a quarter of an hour beforehand? I almost wish the
French had beaten him, for then people couldn’t have quoted him against
one perpetually. Will you order the carriage, Julia, dear?--or will you
tell them about it, Mr. Somerset? The landau, with the bays; papa said
the bays were to be used to-day.--Now Julia, dear.”
The two girls ran away to dress, and reappeared in about twenty minutes;
Julia very splendid in a golden-brown silk dress, and a pale pink
bonnet; Miss Hillary in cloud-like garments of lace, or tulle, or
areophane, that were especially becoming to her tall slender figure and
the fragile style of her beauty. Maude Hillary was a very extravagant
young lady, and had _carte blanche_ at Messrs. Howell and James’s, on
whose account her father was wont to write heavy cheques at long
intervals, without any investigation of the items; but Miss Hillary very
seldom wore silk dresses, which are, after all, about the most
economical thing a lady can wear. She affected gauzy fabrics, all
festoons, and puffings and flounces, which were thrown aside for the
profit of her maid after the third time of wearing, and ultimately
figured in second-hand wardrobe repositories in the dreariest outskirts
of Pimliconia. Indeed, one devoted admirer of Miss Hillary, penetrating
Vauxhall bridgewards from Eccleston Square, had been startled by the
apparition of his lovely partner at a recent ball dangling limply,
rosebuds and all, from a peg in a dingy shop-window.
Maude was very extravagant; but then how could she well be otherwise?
Her appreciation of “pounds” was very little above that of Mr. Harold
Skimpole. She very rarely had any money; if she wanted shillings, she
borrowed them--by the handful--of the housekeeper at the Cedars. But, on
the other hand, she had unlimited credit almost everywhere. A beggar, or
one of the churchwardens of Isleworth, armed with a plate after a
charity-sermon, were about the only persons who ever demanded ready
money from her. She had a vague idea that there was no limit to her
father’s wealth, and that she was to have as much of it as she required
for her own uses whenever she married, if he approved of her marriage;
and if he did not approve, she would not have the money, and would be
poor, and live in a pretty cottage somewhere in the neighbourhood of St.
John’s Wood, without so much as a pair of ponies to drive in the Park.
She looked forward very vaguely to this sort of thing, always believing
that the most indulgent of fathers would come by-and-by to smile upon
the penniless Harcourt Lowther, and that everything would end happily,
as it does in a comedy. She sighed now and then, and told her
confidante, Julia, that she was the most miserable of creatures when she
thought of poor dear Harcourt slaving himself to death in that dreadful
Van Diemen’s Land; but, on the whole, she bore her separation from her
affianced lover with considerable resignation. Was she not by nature a
bright and hopeful creature? and had she not from babyhood inhabited a
kind of fairy circle, separated from all the common outer world by a
golden boundary, sheltered from every rude breath of heaven by a
limitless canopy of banknotes?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VIII.
AT THE CHÂTEAU DE BOURBON.
The château in which some of the banished descendants of Louis the Great
had set up their household gods, in the shape of a most exquisite
collection of artistic treasures, was only a mile or so distant from Mr.
Hillary’s house. It was an old red-brick mansion like the Cedars; and,
indeed, the banks of the Thames seem specially rich in red-brick
mansions of the Georgian period. It was a noble old house, and had
extended itself of late years on either side, until it was almost
palatial of aspect. It was a very pretty house, filled to overflowing
with art-treasures, about almost every one of which there hung a history
as interesting as the object itself. Royalty, the banished royalty of
France, inhabited that simple suburban mansion; and on the smooth lawn,
where the pennants were flying and the band playing, a quiet-looking
gentleman moved about among the visitors, whose grave and noble face was
the exact reproduction of another face, to be seen in stained marble
under a glass case within the mansion; the face of a gentleman who, in
the course of an adventurous career, won some little distinction under
the style and title of Henry IV., King of France and Navarre.
It was almost like going back into the past for an hour or so to lounge
on that sunny lawn at Twickenham, so strange yet so familiar were some
of the names that were heard on the lips of the crowd. There was a
mournful kind of interest in those historic titles; and the aspect of
the pretty flower-festooned marquees, where elegant women were charging
fabulous prices for all manner of absurdities in the way of Berlin wool,
recalled the image of tented plains and fields of cloth-of-gold, in the
days when the sons of St. Louis had other and more high-sounding
business in this world than such gentle works of charity as occupied
them pleasantly enough to-day.
Maude Hillary was in her glory in the gardens of the Château de Bourbon.
She had plenty of ready money, for once in a way; a crisp little bundle
of five-pound notes, which her father had brought from the City on the
previous evening; and she distributed her wealth freely among the
fashionable stall-keepers, loading herself and her attendant cavaliers
with wax dolls and Berlin-wool work, reticules, antimacassars, painted
fire-screens, bottles of toilet vinegar, and feather flowers. She knew a
great many people, and she was so bright and animated, and
happy-looking, that people who were utter strangers to her watched her
with a feeling of interest, and asked one another who she was. She was
standing amidst a group of aristocratic acquaintance upon the terrace
overlooking the river, when she cried out that her papa had arrived, and
ran away to meet him, leaving Julia Desmond and the two young men behind
her.
“An hour after your time, papa,” she said, putting both her hands into