Only a clod
sternness of manner. It was all alike strange; and vague fears agitated
her as she went slowly up-stairs to the big barren drawing-room, which
looked very little more home-like than a first-class waiting-room at a
railway station.
Julia had disappeared, and the flaring gas-lamps illumined a great
barren desert of Brussels carpet and emptiness. Dear Julia always
remembered that her good looks were her only dower, and took care not to
waste them by late watching in the glare of many gas-burners. Maude
sighed as she looked round the empty room, and then seated herself at a
table adorned with a gaudy cover that looked like a small Turkey carpet.
She took up the impossible Berlin-wool work, and the gold beads, and set
herself to the task of counting tiny dots and squares on a coloured
paper pattern, with a view to discovering where the Berlin-wool left off
and the beads began. But she was tired and unhappy, and the bewildering
dots and squares made her head ache; so she pushed away the work
presently, and roamed restlessly up and down the room: now stopping by a
table, and taking up a book, only to open it haphazard and stare blankly
at the pages; now lingering by the piano, noiselessly fingering the
notes, and tormented with a wild desire to dash into some blusterous
march that should startle the slumbering household.
Her father had told her to go to bed. He was going to work very late,
and must on no account be disturbed. He had worked late sometimes at
Twickenham, but not often; and on those occasions Maude had gone to
sleep happily enough, only a little disturbed by the thought of “poor
papa” toiling over those cruel business documents. But to-night it was
altogether different. At the risk of incurring her father’s anger, Miss
Hillary paced wearily up and down the desert of Brussels carpet, waiting
till she should hear the merchant’s step on the stairs, and know that
his night’s work was over.
She waited, oppressed by a vague uneasiness, and wondering why she was
uneasy. Why was it that to-night the thought of her father’s toil
mingled with all manner of strange fears and misgivings? She was usually
so frivolous, so apt to look brightly put upon the sunnier aspects of
the world around her; but to-night her heart seemed like a leaden weight
in her breast. What was it? why was it? The cheap French clock upon the
chimney-piece struck some abnormal number between twelve and twenty, and
a distant church clock struck two; but still Miss Hillary waited in vain
for that expected step upon the stair. Her father had said that he would
be very late, but she had hoped that at the worst his work would be
finished in a couple of hours. The time seemed so intolerably long to
Maude Hillary, roaming in a purposeless manner about that big room, or
standing in the bay-window to listen to the hoarse roaring of the waves,
or sitting down to read for five minutes together, but never once
knowing what she was reading.
There had been so few troubles in her life, and looking back at the
smooth sunlit ways by which she had wandered from childhood to
womanhood, she was seized all at once with a fear that there must be
some great grief in store for her. It was quite impossible that she
could have altogether withheld herself from some contemplation of that
startling question as to her right to be happy in a world where so many
people were miserable; but the question had never intruded itself upon
her so awfully as to-night.
“I have never had sickness, or death, or sorrow near me,” she thought.
“My mother died before I was conscious of her existence--as I think--and
yet it seems strange that there can be any time when a child is
unconscious of a mother’s presence, or heedless of her loss. The worst
trouble that I can remember is my parting from Harcourt; and I have
always hoped that all would come right at last. But to-night--to-night I
feel as if there had been something sinful in my happiness. The sermons
I have heard at church never came home to me. I never felt that I was a
miserable, sinful creature, groping my way upon a thorny path. I’m
afraid I have been very wicked; selfish and idle, vain and frivolous.”
Looking back at her life, Miss Hillary saw an existence of Twickenham
pleasure, water-parties, and pic-nics, Star-and-Garter dinners,
perpetual Parisian bonnets, and turquoise bracelets, pet dogs, new
novels, opera-boxes, and concert-tickets. Perhaps she had never before
watched and waited alone at these still hours of the dead winter-night,
and these unusual thoughts may have been only the natural companions of
her loneliness.
She looked at her watch a dozen times in an hour, and at last, when it
was nearly three o’clock, her patience was exhausted all at once, and
she resolved on going down to her father’s room.
“He will be very angry with me for sitting up so late,” she thought,
“but I _cannot_ go to bed until I have seen him. It will be better to
see him ever so cross with me than not to see him at all.”
Having once arrived at this determination, Maude Hillary ran down stairs
and tapped lightly at her father’s door. There was no answer, and she
repeated that timid tapping. Again there was no answer, and she tried
the handle of the door, intending to steal softly in and surprise the
merchant at his work. But the door was locked, and her breath grew thick
with the sudden oppression caused by some vague terror. She lost all
command over herself, and knocked loudly, calling in a frightened voice,
“Papa! papa!”
It was not so strange that she should be frightened. How often she had
heard of hard-working City magnates suddenly stricken down in the prime
of life by some fell disease, unsuspected until that last fatal moment!
A heavy footstep inside the little room relieved her of these vaguely
terrible fears. The door was opened, and Mr. Hillary stood before her,
very pale, very angry. “Maude! how absurd this is! What have you been
doing? Why have you been sitting up?”
“Because somehow I _couldn’t_ go to bed while you were working down
here, papa darling. I couldn’t; I didn’t want to worry you or disobey
you; but I don’t know what’s the matter with me to-night. All manner of
ridiculous things came into my head, and I felt that I _must_ see you
before I went to sleep. Let me come in, papa.”
She pleaded so prettily, looking up in her father’s face with such
tender devotion beaming in her own, that Lionel Hillary must have been
something harder and sterner than the stoniest of mercantile men if he
had been deaf to her pleading.
“Come in if you like, Maude,” he said, with a weary sigh; “I am sorry
that you disturbed me. I had very nearly finished my work.”
The littered mass of papers that had been scattered on Mr. Hillary’s
desk when Maude had left him were gone now, and only a few neat little
packets remained in their stead. But, placed conspicuously upon the
desk, Maude perceived a big envelope with a great red seal, and lying
near it a smaller envelope also sealed.
The merchant had removed his neckcloth. He seemed to have been working
hard, for big drops of moisture stood upon his forehead. A great basket
near his chair was filled to overflowing with torn scraps of paper, and
the shower of waste had fallen far and wide, and lay like snow about the
chair in which Mr. Hillary had been sitting.
“Now, Maude,” he asked sternly, as his daughter followed him into the
room, “what is it that you want with me?”
“Why, to see you leave your work and go to bed, papa. You don’t know how
late it is.”
The merchant smiled a grim smile, and pointed to his watch, which lay
open on the desk.
“I’ve been working against time, and I’ve kept watch upon every quarter
of an hour,” he said.
“But you have finished now, papa.”
“Not quite. I have very nearly finished--but not quite.”
Miss Hillary shook her head with a pretty petulant gesture. She was not
in the least afraid of her father’s anger now. She had been so tortured
by dim and shadowy apprehensions, that her spirits rebounded suddenly
now that she was by her father’s side, and she was bold enough to defy
him.
“I shan’t leave you any more to-night, papa. If you had all the business
of the Stock Exchange to transact, I wouldn’t let you sit up any longer,
ruining your health by brooding over those tiresome papers. Besides,
your desk is quite clear; you seem to have done everything.”
“No, I have not done everything.”
Mr. Hillary had resumed his seat, and was staring absently at the desk
before him, where all things looked so neat and orderly that Maude
seemed justified in thinking that her father’s work was done. There was
a row of drawers on each side of the desk. One of them was open, and a
bunch of keys hung from the lock. A copy of the _Times_ newspaper lay
across the top of this open drawer; but as Miss Hillary hung about her
father, some portion of the silken flounces or furbelows of her dress
brushed against the paper, and it fell rustling to the ground. Lionel
Hillary turned suddenly with a look of alarm directed towards the open
drawer, and Maude, following his glance, saw something lying among the
neat packets of letters and papers,--something which had no business to
be there; something which seemed to realize a greater terror than any
that her fancy had shaped, however dimly, during those hours of weary
waiting in the room above.
The object which seemed so terrible to Maude Hillary was a pistol--a
small pistol, of very modern fashion, fresh and bright from the hands of
the gunmaker. Mr. Hillary was not a man who affected the gunsmith’s art,
and Maude had never seen such a weapon in her father’s possession until
to-night;--until _this_ night, when vague fears respecting him had been
so long busy in her brain, only wanting a form into which to shape
themselves.
It seemed as if her frivolous girlhood left her all at once. It seemed
as if that great terror, coming upon her with such ghastly suddenness,
transformed her into a woman--a woman possessed of woman’s highest
attributes, fortitude, and self-abnegation. She uttered no cry of alarm,
no exclamation of surprise; but she suddenly closed and locked the
drawer in which the pistol lay, and dropped the bunch of keys into her
pocket. Then kneeling down beside her father’s chair, she put her arms
tenderly about him, and laid her head upon his breast. Mr. Hillary had
grown very passive all at once, and sat idly staring at the table before
him.
“Papa,” Maude said presently, in a low, pleading voice, “what is it?
tell me, confide in me. In whom should you trust, if not in me? What is
it, papa? what does it mean?”
“It means--ruin!” the merchant answered, huskily. He did not turn
towards his daughter, but still sat staring blankly straight before him.
“It means failure and ruin, Maude; ruin in its worst shape, its most
hideous shape.”
“You mean that we shall be poor, very poor--that we shall have to leave
Twickenham--that you will be a clerk perhaps in some office, and I a
daily governess. I remember when the Gordons failed, and poor Constance
Gordon and her brothers had to begin the world afresh, without money,
and with very little help from their old friends. Do you think I could
not bear as much as that, and be happy still, if you were with me? Ah,
papa, papa, do I seem to you such a helpless, useless creature, that you
shrink from trusting me at such a time as this?” Hysterical sobs rose in
her throat, but she stifled them, and went on talking to him in the same
quiet tender voice, and caressing him as she talked. He submitted
passively enough to her caresses, but he seemed scarcely conscious of
them.
“Trust me, papa; tell me everything. Such troubles as these seem so much
less dreadful when once they have been freely spoken of. I remember how