Only a clod
Had Francis been a stockbroker, Miss Desmond would have discoursed to
him of Lionel Rothschild, or Lafitte, or Mirès; and she would have
glowed with just the same enthusiasm, though her theme had been the
Stock Exchange or the Bourse.
But in spite of himself Mr. Tredethlyn was pleased and interested. His
boyish yearning for a military career had been very nearly trampled out
of him during dreary years of marchings and counter-marchings, and
sword-exercise, and barrack-tyranny, with never the glimpse of a
battle-field, or so much as a brief skirmish with some chance enemy. But
those fresh young feelings all came back to him when Julia discoursed in
low eloquent accents of her father’s foreign experiences. “Ah, that was
something like a military career!” thought the young man. “It was such a
life that I hoped to lead when I ran away from Landresdale; and I
thought I should come back a general, with a cocked-hat and a great
plume of feathers, as the gardener’s son does in the play I saw once at
Falmouth.”
And then Francis Tredethlyn, being by nature candid as a schoolboy newly
come home for his holidays, opened his heart to Miss Desmond, and told
her a good deal about his life. That dark chamber of his memory in which
Susan’s image loomed through the sombre shadows he kept religiously
sealed from every curious eye. But on all other subjects he was very
communicative. He did not tell Julia that he had been Mr. Lowther’s
body-servant; for there was something in that estate of servitude which
had never been entirely pleasant to him, gallantly as he had borne
himself under its serious ordeals. He had known poverty, he told Miss
Desmond, in all its worst bitterness, and had seen his mother and father
die broken-hearted, borne down by a load of petty debt and difficulty,
when the loan of a couple of hundred pounds would have saved them.
“I felt altogether desperate one night, Miss Desmond,” he said, “when my
poor mother was at her worst, and my father sitting in the kitchen as
helpless as a child,--almost daft, as they say in the north. I felt
desperate somehow, and I went out of the house and ran all the way to
Tredethlyn Grange, and asked my uncle Oliver to lend me the money. He
laughed in my face, Miss Desmond, and told me he hadn’t a five-pound
note in the house; and I dare say he spoke the truth, for I think he’d
have gone half crazy at the thought of a sovereign lying idle. I went
back to the farm, and--my mother died the next day.”
He stopped, and sat for some minutes looking at Mr. Hillary’s Axminster
carpet. Julia did not say anything. She was too perfect a tactician not
to know that anything she could say must appear commonplace at such a
moment. She only drew a long breath, a kind of fluttering sigh,
expressive of the deepest sympathy.
“My mother died, Miss Desmond,” the young man went on; “and my father
was not slow to follow her. So, having no one in the world to care for,
except--except a cousin, who had been like a sister to me, I ran away to
Falmouth, and enlisted in a foot regiment, thinking that I had but to
pin a bunch of colours in my hat and march straight off to some field of
battle. I left Cornwall, Miss Desmond; but I never forgot that night
before my mother’s death. I’ve tried to feel grateful to my uncle Oliver
for leaving me this fortune, but I can’t. I ought to feel grateful, I
suppose; but I can’t. The memory of that night sours me, somehow. Money
seems such paltry stuff, after all, when you think that all the golden
coin in this world can’t bring back one human creature from the grave.”
“Ah, yes, indeed,” Miss Desmond murmured, in her tenderest voice.
And then, being blest with a very lively imagination, she found herself
wondering whether, if wealth had been potent to restore the dead, and
she had been possessed with wealth, she would have very much cared to
awaken Patrick Macnamara Ryan O’Brien Desmond from his quiet slumber in
a little churchyard beside the winding Shannon. The old soldier of
fortune was better in his grave perhaps, Julia thought, philosophically.
She had begun to fight the battle of life on her own tactics, and had no
very great opinion of her late father’s strategy.
“He was very clever,” she thought, with a tender remembrance of the
Major’s best manœuvres; “but then one so often saw through him. He
always started with wrong premises, and fancied everyone but himself was
a fool: as if there could be any merit in deceiving only stupid people.”
Miss Desmond was always wise enough to remember that the larger art of
talking well comprehends the smaller art of listening gracefully. She
was not one of those obnoxious people who talk for the sake of talking;
and who, after rattling on without a full-stop for half an hour at a
stretch, will stare vacantly at you while you recite to them some
interesting adventure, evidently thinking of what they mean to say next,
and waiting for the chance of cutting in. Julia Desmond talked with a
purpose,--not because she wanted to talk, but because she wished to
please: and now she listened to Francis Tredethlyn with an unfailing
show of sympathy and interest, that beguiled him on to tell her more and
more. She wound and insinuated herself into his confidence as a
beautiful serpentine creature winds itself into the heart of an
apparently impenetrable forest; and before the evening was finished Mr.
Tredethlyn found himself almost as intimate with this splendid southern
Irishwoman as if she had been his sister. She had set him completely at
his ease; so that he no longer felt out of place in Mr. Hillary’s
gorgeous rooms: and when the merchant, coming into the drawing-room at
eleven o’clock, very pale and worn-looking, asked him to dine at the
Cedars on the following Sunday, Francis unhesitatingly accepted the
invitation. He stole just one glance at Maude as he did so; but she was
in the act of exhibiting one of the newest accomplishments of a
mouse-coloured Skye terrier for the edification of the two young
loungers, and she was quite unconscious of that shy look from Mr.
Tredethlyn’s eyes. He went to her presently to wish her good-night, and
the spell of her gracious presence dazed and bewildered him, to the cost
of the mouse-coloured terrier, upon whose silky paws he trampled in his
embarrassment; and then, essaying to shake hands in a gentlemanly
manner, he forgot what a stalwart giant he was, and squeezed the little
hand that rested so lightly in his, until Maude’s fingers were wounded
by the hoops, and clusters, and hearts, and crescents of diamonds and
opals which twinkled and flashed upon them;--for Miss Hillary had seen
the Marchioness of Londonderry’s famous rings, and never wore any vulgar
mixture of many-coloured jewels upon her pretty white hands. Francis
lingered a little after saying good-night, helpless under the spell of
the enchantress, and then made his way somehow or other out of the room.
Ah! surely uncle Oliver’s money was not such sordid dross, after all,
when it was the golden key which admitted him to that paradise on the
banks of the Thames.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER X.
COLTONSLOUGH.
Francis Tredethlyn went back to his hotel in Covent Garden after that
quiet dinner at the Cedars, and his mind was full of the new images
suggested by that brief glimpse of a life that was strange to him. He
had been very much interested by Miss Desmond, and he tried to believe
that he preferred her to Maude Hillary. Had she not been kinder to him,
more friendly and familiar? and was it not reasonable that he should
like her the better of the two? He was naturally of a grateful
disposition, disposed to think meanly of his own merits; and he
attributed all Miss Desmond’s kindness to the purest promptings of a
benevolent disposition. The idea that the young lady had regarded him
from a speculative point of view, that she had entertained any notion of
possible marriage contracts and settlements, by which she might acquire
the use of his thirty thousand per annum, never for a moment entered Mr.
Tredethlyn’s mind. He knew, in a general way, that he was admitted to
Mr. Hillary’s drawing-room because his money gave him a kind of right to
such society as that of the merchant’s household; but he never for a
moment imagined that any one of these delightful and high-bred creatures
could contemplate any contingency by which his money might become of
service to them. Wealth and beauty, elegance and refinement, seemed to
find their natural home at the Cedars. Miss Desmond of course was rich,
like Miss Hillary.
Francis counted the days which must elapse before that delightful
Sabbath to be spent by him at the Cedars. Only three days, and during
those three days stern duty called him away from London. Had he not
declared himself ready to go to the end of the world in search of his
cousin Susan Tredethlyn? He felt ashamed even of that one wasted day on
the banks of the Thames. He had left his hotel in the morning, intending
to despatch his City business with all possible speed, and start
immediately afterwards for Coltonslough. He had found out all about
Coltonslough by means of all manner of inquiries; for it seemed rather
an out-of-the-way place, known to very few people as yet. Indeed,
Coltonslough turned out to be a recently discovered watering-place on
the Essex coast, a place whose shores were supposed to be washed by the
salt waves of the ocean; but the waste of waters that rolled along the
muddy shores of Coltonslough was only an ocean in its hobbledehoyhood,
and savoured too much of the Thames and Medway to be considered a
full-grown sea.
To the traveller who has grown familiar with the centre of Africa; to
that bold explorer who has spent lonely days and nights amidst those
darksome forests in which the forgotten cities of America lie buried; to
the prisoner newly released from solitary confinement in the great
prison-house of New York, so pleasantly entitled the Tombs--to one of
these a newly discovered watering-place may not appear dull. He who has
been used to hear no more familiar voice than the distant cry of the
bittern, far away amongst the swampy wildernesses, may endure Herne Bay
and live. The criminal who has undergone a decade of solitary
confinement in the Tombs may possibly survive a month at Southend: but
to the ordinary mind there is a modern abomination of desolation lurking
in the unfinished terraces of a budding watering-place, or in a
watering-place which has put forth its tender blossoms in the way of
bow-windowed receptacles for the concentrated bleakness of perpetual
east winds, and has been blighted in the bud.
Coltonslough was very young; it was in the most infantine stage of
watering-place existence. Speculative builders had bought half-a-dozen
plots of swamp and mud, and had erected dismal rows of houses, which
turned their backs upon one another, and started off at right angles
from one another, in utter contempt for all uniformity. If the
melancholy sojourner at Coltonslough was of an active turn of mind, he
was apt to be tormented by a wild desire to pull down and re-arrange
those straggling terraces, between which stretched hideous deserts of
waste ground, with here and there a lurking pitfall, whence gravel, or
sand, or clay, or chalk, had been dug by unknown persons, who seemed
always digging something or other out of Coltonslough, whereby an
appearance of volcanic disruption was imparted to a place whose chief
merit had been its agreeable flatness.
It was very young. A few straggling excursionists came on the blazing
summer Sundays, and prowled about the shore with countenances expressive