Only a clod
white teeth upon him until he was almost dazzled by their brightness.
Miss Desmond had very dark eyes--eyes that seemed of a greenish hazel
when you saw them in repose, but which looked almost black when they
sparkled athwart a fringe of dusky lashes. She had dark eyes and very
white teeth; and the distinguishing characteristic of her face was the
contrast between the darkness of one and the white glitter of the other.
Mr. Tredethlyn knew that the young lady was very handsome, and that
there was some condescension involved in her friendly notice of him; but
his eyes wandered away to Maude’s fair face and earnest blue eyes, and
there was a suspicion of irrelevance in some of his replies to Miss
Desmond’s animated questions. If he had been less absent-minded, he
might have seen that young lady’s white teeth close vengefully upon her
lower lip as she turned from him after one of those doubtful answers.
The dinner at the Cedars went off very quietly. Mr. Hillary was silent,
but hospitable, or at least as much so as a man can be in these days of
Russian dinners and vicarious hospitality. Francis had lodged at a
comfortable hotel in the regions of Covent Garden since his return from
Cornwall, and had in no way altered his simple habits of life; so he was
not a little puzzled by the array of glasses by the side of his plate,
the lumps of ice which an obsequious attendant dropped ever and anon
into his Moselle, the mysterious compounds in silver dishes which he
discovered suddenly at his elbow whenever he was most abstracted by the
novelty of the scene about him, and the vision of Maude Hillary, sitting
on the other side of the round table in a cloud of white and blue. The
dishes at that wonderful feast seemed so many culinary conundrums to Mr.
Tredethlyn, and I fear that he made some very obvious mistakes in the
management of the spoons and forks perpetually thrust upon him by the
stealthy-footed retainers. But the dinner was over at last, and Captain
Masters opened the dining-room door for the departure of the ladies,
while poor Francis could only sit blankly staring like a countryman at a
play. Lionel Hillary did not linger long over his wine; he had some
papers to look at in his study, he said, and excused himself on that
ground, as well as on account of that obstinate headache of his. The
young men seemed very glad to be released from the atmosphere of
hothouse flowers and pine-apple, faintly mingled with that odour of the
bygone dinner which will hang round the most elegant dining-room,
ventilate it as you will. Was not Maude Hillary in the drawing-room,
whence already might be heard the sparkling ripple of arpeggio passages
upon the piano? The two young loungers followed Mr. Hillary out into the
hall, and Francis went with them, uncomfortably conscious of
disadvantages not to be outbalanced by the possession of half a million
or so in all manner of seven-per-cent-paying investments. The young
soldier blacking his master’s boots had been the easiest-mannered of
mankind; but Oliver Tredethlyn’s heir felt terribly embarrassed in Maude
Hillary’s presence--only in her presence; he was not at all abashed by
Miss Desmond’s eyes and teeth, though all their contrastive brightness
was brought to bear upon him. Maude was at the piano, and Julia was
bending over a stand of engravings. It may be that she had not very long
fallen into that graceful attitude. When the three young men entered the
room she looked up, and Mr. Tredethlyn meeting her friendly glance, and
being considerably at a loss what to do with himself, went over to her,
and found a comfortable haven in a low easy-chair near the couch on
which she was sitting.
“Do you care much for Leech, Mr. Tredethlyn?” she asked, as she turned
over the leaves of a portfolio reprinted from _Punch_.
The young man looked rather puzzled by this question.
“I don’t care much for them,” he answered, frankly. “I never had any but
once, and that was in Van Diemen’s Land, when I had the fever,--fifteen
of them on my temples, and that was no joke, you know, Miss Desmond.”
He was quite at his ease with Julia; but he would not for the world have
been so confidential to Maude Hillary. Miss Desmond laughed
good-naturedly.
“I don’t mean those horrible creatures that they put on one’s temples,”
she exclaimed, “but Mr. John Leech, the caricaturist. You must have seen
_Punch_, even in Van Diemen’s Land?”
“Oh, yes! my mas--superior officer used to get it from his mother every
mail.”
He took the portfolio from Miss Desmond, and turned over the leaves: but
he only stared absently at Mr. Leech’s most brilliant performances, and
his eyes wandered away every now and then to the piano, where Maude
Hillary was skimming through the gems of a new opera and dallying with
her two adorers, deliciously unconscious of their adoration. Had she not
inhabited an atmosphere of universal admiration and affection ever since
she had exhibited her pink cheeks and infantile ringlets in company with
the seven-shilling March peaches and five-guinea pine-apples, after her
father’s pompous dinners, to be admired by ponderous old City magnates
in the pauses of solemn discussions upon the rate of discount and the
last grand crash on the Stock Exchange?
Julia Desmond, always observant--cursed, perhaps, with an especial
faculty for penetrating all unpleasant secrets lying hidden under the
many masks which society has invented for the convenience of
mankind--Miss Desmond, I say, was not slow to perceive the Cornishman’s
preoccupation, nor slow to credit Miss Hillary with another item in that
heavy account so long standing between them.
“Even this country boor, with a great fortune of his own, must pay his
meed of homage to the millionaire’s daughter,” thought Julia. “Is there
some magical power in the possession of money which imparts a kind of
fascination to the possessor?” Colonel Desmond’s daughter had felt some
of the keenest stings of poverty, and it may be that she had grown to
entertain an exaggerated estimation of that golden dross which is so
paltry a thing when considered in a philosophical spirit. She looked at
the young man sitting by her side; and as she looked, a mystic golden
halo seemed to arise about him and surround him, until he appeared
almost like an old picture of a saint, painted upon a shadowless
background of gold. Thirty thousand a year! and he was young, handsome,
manly, good-tempered-looking, or even something more than this; for
there was a dash of nobility in his simple bearing which scarcely seemed
to belong to the runaway son of a small farmer. The good old blood of
the Tredethlyns, once squires and landowners of some degree, was not
dishonoured by the young man who had blacked Harcourt Lowther’s boots in
Van Diemen’s Land. He was not a gentleman after the manner of the
nineteenth century; he seemed rather like a stalwart soldier of the
past, simple and daring, frank and generous. Julia, contemplating him
always enframed in the golden halo, saw that, with the advantage of a
clever woman’s training, he might be made a very presentable creature;
in spite of that private-soldier story, which, after all, was spiced
with a certain flavour of romance.
“People would say I married him for his money,” thought Miss Desmond;
“but then they would say that if I married a provincial banker with
fifteen hundred a year. Thirty thousand! thirty thousand a year!--and he
is not a man who would act meanly in the matter of a settlement--and he
could buy the Irish estate for a mere song--and he might call himself
Tredethlyn Desmond.”
Maude Hillary’s companion and friend had employed herself for a very
long time in the consideration of one grand subject--her own destiny.
For a long time she had estimated every creature who came in her way by
one unvarying gauge. Had he, or had he not, any bearing on that supreme
question? If the answer were in the negative, Miss Desmond wasted no
further thought upon the useless creature. But if she saw in the shadowy
distance some possible combination of circumstances in which the
individual might become a thread, however slightly interwoven, in the
fabric of her destiny, Julia expended her brightest smiles and sweetest
words for his gratification.
It was in no way strange, therefore, that the young lady who had given a
good deal of attention to hare-brained young ensigns and penniless young
curates with nothing better than remote expectations, should consider
Mr. Tredethlyn worthy of her most serious deliberation. The present,
however, was no time for thought,--for were not the young man’s eyes
perpetually wandering towards the slender figure under the light of the
moderator lamp? Miss Desmond felt there was no time to be lost. Already
the rich man had made his election--already he had enrolled himself in
the list of Maude Hillary’s victims. Another woman, perceiving the state
of affairs, might have resigned herself to the loss of this grand chance
of winning a rich husband; but Julia’s courage was not so easily dashed.
It rose, rather, with the thought of contest. Had not her father been a
grand old freebooter, boasting of kingly blood in his battered old body,
and spilling it under the colours of every rebel army in modern Europe?
The Desmond spirit rose in Julia’s breast as she saw Francis
Tredethlyn’s wandering glances, half sheepish, half unconscious.
“I can set myself against her this time,” she thought; “and the battle
between us will be a fair one. _This_ man cannot be a fortune-hunter. We
meet on tolerably equal terms for once in a way, Miss Hillary, and let
us see who will win.”
Julia’s dark eyes flashed their brightest as she looked across all the
width of the room to the radiant-looking girl at the piano; and then she
turned them suddenly upon Francis Tredethlyn, and began to talk to him.
She began to talk to him, and, more than this, she made him listen to
her. Miss Desmond was a brilliant talker. She possessed that wondrous
faculty vulgarly called the gift of the gab,--the power of talking about
everything and anything, or even about nothing, for the matter of that;
the power of enchaining a listener in spite of himself, holding him
prisoner when he had rather be away, and yet not detaining him an
altogether unwilling prisoner;--the power of talking ignorantly, without
seeming to be ignorant; speculating ideas and allusions at a venture,
and never betraying the shallowness of their nature; assuming an
interest in the most uninteresting subject, and never revealing the
hollowness of the assumption,--a power, in short, which in its
fascination seems like a modern form of those classic philtres which
Roman maidens were wont to administer to eligible bachelors in the days
when Rome was young. It may be said that Miss Desmond owed this faculty
in some degree to her Hibernian ancestry; but no suspicion of their
native accent vulgarized her discourse. Only a softer and richer depth
in her low voice betrayed her Celtic origin.
Julia began to talk to Francis Tredethlyn, and, in spite of himself, he
listened, and was fain to withdraw his gaze from the distant figure at
the piano. She talked to him of a soldier’s life, jumping recklessly at
conclusions, and taking it for granted that he must needs possess some
latent spark of military ardour, which would blaze up into a flame under
the fire of her enthusiasm. She talked to him of her father, and all
those guerrilla warfares in which he had won distinction. She talked of
Don Carlos, and Abd-el-Kader, and Garibaldi, whose name had not then the
glorious significance which it carries with it to-day. She talked to him
like a young Joan of Arc or an embryo maid of Saragosa;--and all that
was brightest in Mr. Tredethlyn’s nature kindled beneath her influence.